Podcasts about non proliferation treaty

Support Palestine Deep Dive: https://www.palestinedeepdive.com/support Israel and the US's current war on Iran has been a long time in the making. Palestine Deep Dive's Ahmed Alnaouq and Matt Kennard discuss the history of regime change efforts and why Tehran has been such a problem for Washington and Tel Aviv. They discuss the history of Israel's secret nuclear weapons program which began in the 1950s, and the evolution of the Begin Doctrine after Israel's strike on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak in 1981. They also talk about the fact that no evidence exists that Iran has a nuclear weapons program while Israel's is widely-known documented - and the absurdity of the fact that Iran signed up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970, but Israel is one of only four countries which has always refused. This interview was conducted on Friday 20 June 2025.

Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at SUNY-Albany's PISCES and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She specializes in nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, strategic trade controls, sanctions, and financial crime prevention. Her current work focuses on countering proliferation financing. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds. From 2011 to 2015, she served on the UN secretary general's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. For this month's episode of Hypervelocity, I was joined by Dr. Togzhan Kassenova to discuss her book Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb⁠ (Stanford University Press, 2022). Togzhan's work powerfully recounts the impact of the Soviet nuclear programme on the people and nation of Kazakhstan, as well as the country's efforts to denuclearise after the collapse of the USSR—an experience that echoes the histories of other colonial nuclear testing grounds, such as Australia, the Pacific Islands, and Native American lands.What stands out in Togzhan's account are the deeply human stories of resistance, resilience, and at times, dark humour in the face of the devastating legacy of nuclear testing. Her work also challenges classic International Relations theories that treat states like ‘Kazakhstan', the ‘USSR', or the ‘United States' as black boxes of foreign policy. Instead, she highlights the agency of individuals—both among the general public, who organised anti-nuclear protest movements, and among diplomats, who built personal relationships and trust across borders to make denuclearisation possible. These efforts were crucial in helping Kazakhstan give up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union and chart a new path.Togzhan's writing also critiques the assumptions of game theory, demonstrating that it is possible for nations to enhance their security without resorting to the zero-sum logic of mutually assured destruction. In fact, following its decision to relinquish its nuclear arsenal, Kazakhstan emerged as a model state in upholding international law, swiftly joining agreements such as the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.Later in the episode, we explore whether—given Russia's invasion of Ukraine—Kazakhstan was right to give up its nuclear weapons. Finally, we catch up on what is happening today with the survivors of the Soviet-era nuclear tests.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Toghzan Kassenova and Her Work02:10 The Impact of Nuclear Testing in Kazakhstan08:57 Kazakhstan's Decision to Denuclearize16:07 The Infrastructure of Nuclear Testing20:25 Kazakhstan's Role in Global Nuclear Disarmament29:30 The Importance of International Treaties35:17 Human Connections in Nuclear Disarmament41:31 Kazakhstan as a Model for Disarmament45:37 Reflections on Security and Nuclear Deterrence50:05 The Legacy of Nuclear Testing on Survivors55:32 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Dr. Justin Quinn Olmstead is a historian for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  His most recent book “From Nuclear Weapons to Global Security: 75 Years of Research and Development at Sandia National Laboratories.”  Dr. Robert Oppenheimer helped launch the Sandia Labs, which is an engineering laboratory for the nation's nuclear deterrence. President Harry Truman was directly involved in setting up the Lab, whereas President Eisenhower initiated the Plowshare Program to explore the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and the Atoms for Peace program in 1957.  Sandia supports global security by working with US agencies, the UN's IAEA, and several of the United Nations treaties, such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty that focuses on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to avoid nuclear proliferation.   Sandia has been “ hands-on” in helping mitigate the BP Oil Spill, Fukushima Disaster, Challenger explosion, the rapidly devastating climate crisis and the 9-11 destruction.

This week's show features stories from NHK World Radio Japan, Radio Havana Cuba, France 24, and Radio Deutsche-Welle. http://youthspeaksout.net/swr240712.mp3 (29:00) From JAPAN- Indian PM Modi has been in Moscow meeting with Putin about boosting trade and a path to peace in Ukraine. Hungarian PM Orban, current president of the EU, has been meeting with Chinese President Xi, discussing ending the fighting in Ukraine- Orban also visited Putin which was heavily criticized by some EU leaders. Members of the Japanese group for the abolition of nuclear weapons pled with their government to take action to influence members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to implement their obligation under the treaty. From CUBA- The cost of the current US nuclear weapon development has increased to $160 billion. In NYC 46 climate campaigners were arrested at peaceful protests against increased investments in fossil fuel expansion. Keir Starmer, the new UK PM, is emphasizing the need for a ceasefire in the war on Palestine- Jeremy Corbyn won a seat in Parliamentary elections as an independent candidate. From FRANCE- A series of Press reviews- first the election in the UK which saw Starmer and the Labour Party sweep for the first time in 14 years. Then several press reviews on the defeat of the National Rally, far-right party in France, by combining the so-called far left coalition with the centrist party of President Macron. The National Rally however ended up winning 140 seats, up from 89, the most of any non coalition party. From GERMANY- After bombing Palestinian refugees sheltering in tents next to a UN school, killing dozens of civilians, Israel ordered everyone to leave Gaza City. Available in 3 forms- (new) HIGHEST QUALITY (160kb)(33MB), broadcast quality (13MB), and quickdownload or streaming form (6MB) (28:59) Links at outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml PODCAST!!!- https://feed.podbean.com/outFarpress/feed.xml (160kb Highest Quality) Website Page- < http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml ¡FurthuR! Dan Roberts "War is a place where young people who do not know each other and do not hate each other, kill each other, based on decisions made by old people who know each other and hate each other, but do not kill each other." -Paul Valery Dan Roberts Shortwave Report- www.outfarpress.com YouthSpeaksOut!- www.youthspeaksout.net

Charles Moxley is the principal of Moxley ADR, a law firm specializing in arbitration and mediation. He is an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. His recent treatise on “Nuclear Weapons and International Law” highlights the major challenges with nuclear weapons.   The UN's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has kept the numbers down somewhat; however, some countries are looking at upgrading their aging nuclear stockpiles that will cost trillions of dollars. Years ago the US spent $150 million per day on maintaining the aging nuclear stockpile. 90% of the 13,000 nukes today are held by Russia and the USA.  Media, educational system, and Members of Congress must be educated regarding the potential threat. Several Congresspeople and politicians put out misinformation that we could do a limited nuclear exchange. As an example, former president Donald Trump cavalierly said he would destroy North Korea with nuclear weapons, which displays his ignorance of the issue.

Tzeporah Berman is the co-founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. https://fossilfueltreaty.org

Ward Wilson, founder and executive director of RealistRevolt, is widely acknowledged as one of the leading sources of innovative pragmatic arguments against nuclear weapons.  The title of his recent book is “It Is Possible: A Future Without Nuclear Weapons.”  Nuclear weapons, of which there are about 13,000, are some of the most devastating threats on Earth.  The nine nuclear countries are: the USA, Russia, China, UK, France, North Korea, Israel, India and Pakistan.  The main thrust of his book is that while damage and destruction of nukes is real, their utility and importance have been exaggerated. The United Nations has been in the forefront in promoting treaties, such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to limit or eliminate nuclear weapons. Izumi Nakamitsu, Under-Secretary General of UN Disarmament Affairs, leads the effort to forestall a new nuclear arms race. In 2017, the UN began a process on a treaty for the prohibition of nukes.

The Pacific Conference of Churches has endorsed the fossil fuel Non Proliferation Treaty at COP 28.

Grace speaks with Em Readman, a writer from Boorloo, Australia. They are also an editor & ceramicist, and we're going to be discussing how story-telling & knowledge better help protect trans people. https://overland.org.au/2023/09/a-community-of-practice-how-storytelling-and-knowledge-transfer-protect-trans-people/  Sunehra Speaks with Dr Monique Cormier Senior Lecturer at Monash Faculty of Law to talk about AUKUS and how it could exploit a loophole in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as whether or not Australia should sign The Nuclear Ban Treaty to further prohibit nuclear weapons. You can also read  Dr Monique Cormier's article about this here: https://newmatilda.com/2023/09/02/an-alp-led-australia-should-sign-the-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty/  CONTENT WARNING: The following interview contains content that may be distressing and includes references to suicide and drugs. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners, please be aware that the segment mentions people who have died.If this does not feel right for you, you may wish to tune out for the next 15-20 minutes.If you wish to speak with someone about any of the issues mentioned in this interview, you can always call lifeline on 13 11 14, and for mob-only support, you can call 13 YARN 13 92 76. LGBTQIA+ listeners may also wish to contact QLIFE on 1800 184 527 between 3PM and midnight, or visit qlife.org.auRob from 3CR's Strong Spirit spoke with Keenan Mundine who is the Principal consultant and founder of Deadly Connections, an organisation that brings family and community together to better support individuals. Keenan after losing both his parents, and being separated from his brothers at the age of seven, he found himself living on the streets and commiting crime to survive. The talk shows why First Nation self-determination is important. Self-determination means different things to different people, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples describes self-determination as the ability for Indigenous people to freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Keenan Mundine can be contacted by email insideoutajc@outlook.comThis piece is an extract of the podcast which broadcasted on 11th of September 2023. If you want to listen to more, go to 3cr.org.au and search for Strong Spirit. You can list to Strong Spirit on Mondays from 1pm to 2pm.  Patrick speaks to the Mayor of Junee Neil Smith about a senate inquiry into regional bank closures in the area leading to the town being on the verge of losing their bank.  Music: We have survived by No Fixed AddressNative tongue by Mo JuNever Never Never by Shirley Bassey 

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https://www.youtube.com/live/ICw01SOOLqk?feature=share In this the eighth episode of A View from Afar for 2023, political scientist Dr Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning examine the risks of a 21st century nuclear war. The movie Oppenheimer has renewed interest in the dawn of the nuclear era. Almost 80 years later, are we safer from nuclear war than we were in the years immediately after 1945? The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock hand to 90 seconds before midnight, the highest threat level since the Cuban Missile Crisis.What does that say about contemporary international security affairs? No new nuclear arms limitation agreements have been signed in over a decade, several have lapsed and most nuclear armed countries are not signatories to them anyway. Countries like China are rapidly expanding their arsenals and others like North Korea and Iran are seeking to join the nuclear armed club. Has nuclear arms control failed? What is the future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty? Although conventions against the use of chemical and biological weapons are widely recognised, violations of the prohibitions have occurred regularly, most recently in Syria. Weapons like white phosphorus and cluster munitions continue to be used by many states. https://youtu.be/wki4hg9Om-k The Questions include: Has non-nuclear arms control failed as well? Russia's Putin Regime has threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and NATO. Is the nuclear genie about to come out of the bottle, even in a tactical use? Are we seeing the return of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? Are we on the brink of Oppenheimer's nightmare: nuclear Armageddon? And importantly, what are the solutions to this most serious and dangerous threat? INTERACTION: Paul and Selwyn encourage their live audience to interact while they are live with questions and comments. To interact during the live recording of this podcast, go to Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/ Remember to subscribe to the channel. For the on-demand audience, you can also keep the conversation going on this debate by clicking on one of the social media channels below: Youtube.com/c/EveningReport/ Facebook.com/selwyn.manning Twitter.com/Selwyn_Manning RECOGNITION: The MIL Network's podcast A View from Afar was Nominated as a Top Defence Security Podcast by Threat.Technology – a London-based cyber security news publication. Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators. ***

Photo: No known restrictions on publication. @Batchelorshow 1933 #NPT: #Belarus: The ambiguity of the 1968 Non-proliferation Treaty word, "control." and threats.  Henry Sokolski, NPEC. https://www.bits.de/public/researchnote/rn97-3.htm

It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic BombWe discuss* similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentially apocalyptic technology within an uncertain arms-race situation)* visiting starving former Soviet scientists during fall of Soviet Union* whether Oppenheimer was a spy, & consulting on the Nolan movie* living through WW2 as a child* odds of nuclear war in Ukraine, Taiwan, Pakistan, & North Korea* how the US pulled of such a massive secret wartime scientific & industrial projectWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movie(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?(0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombs(0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet program(1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, Taiwan(1:33:12) - Oppenheimer as lab director(1:53:40) - AI progress vs Manhattan Project(1:59:50) - Living through WW2(2:16:45) - Secrecy(2:26:34) - Wisdom & warTranscript(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movieDwarkesh Patel 0:00:51Today I have the great honor of interviewing Richard Rhodes, who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, the author of Energy, A Human History. I'm really excited about this one. Let's jump in at a current event, which is the fact that there's a new movie about Oppenheimer coming out, which I understand you've been consulted about. What did you think of the trailer? What are your impressions? Richard Rhodes 0:01:22They've really done a good job of things like the Trinity test device, which was the sphere covered with cables of various kinds. I had watched Peaky Blinders, where the actor who's playing Oppenheimer also appeared, and he looked so much like Oppenheimer to start with. Oppenheimer was about six feet tall, he was rail thin, not simply in terms of weight, but in terms of structure. Someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably. But he never weighed more than about 140 pounds and that quality is there in the actor. So who knows? It all depends on how the director decided to tell the story. There are so many aspects of the story that you could never possibly squeeze them into one 2-hour movie. I think that we're waiting for the multi-part series that would really tell a lot more of the story, if not the whole story. But it looks exciting. We'll see. There have been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer, there've been some terrible depictions of the bomb program. And maybe they'll get this one right. Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:42Yeah, hopefully. It is always great when you get an actor who resembles their role so well. For example, Bryan Cranston who played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the beady eyes, the big ears. Since we're talking about Oppenheimer, I had one question about him. I understand that there's evidence that's come out that he wasn't directly a communist spy. But is there any possibility that he was leaking information to the Soviets or in some way helping the Soviet program? He was a communist sympathizer, right? Richard Rhodes 0:03:15He had been during the 1930s. But less for the theory than for the practical business of helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany. One of the loves of his life, Jean Tatlock, was also busy working on extracting Jews from Europe during the 30. She was a member of the Communist Party and she, I think, encouraged him to come to meetings. But I don't think there's any possibility whatsoever that he shared information. In fact, he said he read Marx on a train trip between Berkeley and Washington one time and thought it was a bunch of hooey, just ridiculous. He was a very smart man, and he read the book with an eye to its logic, and he didn't think there was much there. He really didn't know anything about human beings and their struggles. He was born into considerable wealth. There were impressionist paintings all over his family apartments in New York City. His father had made a great deal of money cornering the markets on uniform linings for military uniforms during and before the First World War so there was a lot of wealth. I think his income during the war years and before was somewhere around $100,000 a month. And that's a lot of money in the 1930s. So he just lived in his head for most of his early years until he got to Berkeley and discovered that prime students of his were living on cans of god-awful cat food, because they couldn't afford anything else. And once he understood that there was great suffering in the world, he jumped in on it, as he always did when he became interested in something. So all of those things come together. His brother Frank was a member of the party, as was Frank's wife. I think the whole question of Oppenheimer lying to the security people during the Second World War about who approached him and who was trying to get him to sign on to some espionage was primarily an effort to cover up his brother's involvement. Not that his brothers gave away any secrets, I don't think they did. But if the army's security had really understood Frank Oppenheimer's involvement, he probably would have been shipped off to the Aleutians or some other distant place for the duration of the war. And Oppenheimer quite correctly wanted Frank around. He was someone he trusted.(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?Dwarkesh Patel 0:06:22Let's start talking about The Making of the Bomb. One question I have is — if World War II doesn't happen, is there any possibility that the bomb just never gets developed? Nobody bothers.Richard Rhodes 0:06:34That's really a good question and I've wondered over the years. But the more I look at the sequence of events, the more I think it would have been essentially inevitable, though perhaps not such an accelerated program. The bomb was pushed so hard during the Second World War because we thought the Germans had already started working on one. Nuclear fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany, in Berlin, in 1938, nine months before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. Technological surveillance was not available during the war. The only way you could find out something was to send in a spy or have a mole or something human. And we didn't have that. So we didn't know where the Germans were, but we knew that the basic physics reaction that could lead to a bomb had been discovered there a year or more before anybody else in the West got started thinking about it. There was that most of all to push the urgency. In your hypothetical there would not have been that urgency. However, as soon as good physicists thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fission — where a slow room temperature neutron, very little energy, bumps into the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom it would lead to a massive response. Isidore Rabi, one of the great physicists of this era, said it would have been like the moon struck the earth. The reaction was, as physicists say, fiercely exothermic. It puts out a lot more energy than you have to use to get it started. Once they did the numbers on that, and once they figured out how much uranium you would need to have in one place to make a bomb or to make fission get going, and once they were sure that there would be a chain reaction, meaning a couple of neutrons would come out of the reaction from one atom, and those two or three would go on and bump into other Uranium atoms, which would then fission them, and you'd get a geometric exponential. You'd get 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and off of there. For most of our bombs today the initial fission, in 80 generations, leads to a city-busting explosion. And then they had to figure out how much material they would need, and that's something the Germans never really figured out, fortunately for the rest of us. They were still working on the idea that somehow a reactor would be what you would build. When Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, escaped from Denmark in 1943 and came to England and then United States, he brought with him a rough sketch that Werner Heisenberg, the leading scientist in the German program, had handed him in the course of trying to find out what Bohr knew about what America was doing. And he showed it to the guys at Los Alamos and Hans Bethe, one of the great Nobel laureate physicists in the group, said — “Are the Germans trying to throw a reactor down on us?” You can make a reactor blow up, we saw that at Chernobyl, but it's not a nuclear explosion on the scale that we're talking about with the bomb. So when a couple of these emigres Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whiling away their time in England after they escaped, because they were still technically enemy aliens and therefore could not be introduced to top secret discussions, one of them asked the other — “How much would we need of pure uranium-235, this rare isotope of uranium that chain reacts? How much would we need to make a bomb?” And they did the numbers and they came up with one pound, which was startling to them. Of course, it is more than that. It's about 125 pounds, but that's just a softball. That's not that much material. And then they did the numbers about what it would cost to build a factory to pull this one rare isotope of uranium out of the natural metal, which has several isotopes mixed together. And they figured it wouldn't cost more than it would cost to build a battleship, which is not that much money for a country at war. Certainly the British had plenty of battleships at that point in time. So they put all this together and they wrote a report which they handed through their superior physicists at Manchester University where they were based, who quickly realized how important this was. The United States lagged behind because we were not yet at war, but the British were. London was being bombed in the blitz. So they saw the urgency, first of all, of eating Germany to the punch, second of all of the possibility of building a bomb. In this report, these two scientists wrote that no physical structure came to their minds which could offer protection against a bomb of such ferocious explosive power. This report was from 1940 long before the Manhattan Project even got started. They said in this report, the only way we could think of to protect you against a bomb would be to have a bomb of similar destructive force that could be threatened for use if the other side attacked you. That's deterrence. That's a concept that was developed even before the war began in the United States. You put all those pieces together and you have a situation where you have to build a bomb because whoever builds the first bomb theoretically could prevent you from building more or prevent another country from building any and could dominate the world. And the notion of Adolf Hitler dominating the world, the Third Reich with nuclear weapons, was horrifying. Put all that together and the answer is every country that had the technological infrastructure to even remotely have the possibility of building everything you'd have to build to get the material for a bomb started work on thinking about it as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world. France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, even Japan. So I think the bomb would have been developed but maybe not so quickly. Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:10In the book you talk that for some reason the Germans thought that the critical mass was something like 10 tons, they had done some miscalculation.Richard Rhodes 0:14:18A reactor. Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:19You also have some interesting stories in the book about how different countries found out the Americans were working on the bomb. For example, the Russians saw that all the top physicists, chemists, and metallurgists were no longer publishing. They had just gone offline and so they figured that something must be going on. I'm not sure if you're aware that while the subject of the Making of the Atomic Bomb in and of itself is incredibly fascinating, this book has become a cult classic in AI. Are you familiar with this? Richard Rhodes 0:14:52No. Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:53The people who are working on AI right now are huge fans of yours. They're the ones who initially recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field reminded them of this book. Because you start off with these initial scientific hints. With deep learning, for example, here's something that can teach itself any function is similar to Szilárd noticing the nuclear chain reaction. In AI there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much bigger, it gets much better at reasoning, at predicting text, and so on. And then you can extrapolate this curve. And you can see we get two more orders of magnitude, and we get to something that looks like human level intelligence. Anyway, a lot of the people who are working in AI have become huge fans of your book because of this reason. They see a lot of analogies in the next few years. They must be at page 400 in their minds of where the Manhattan Project was.Richard Rhodes 0:15:55We must later on talk about unintended consequences. I find the subject absolutely fascinating. I think my next book might be called Unintended Consequences. Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:10You mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists wanted to work on the bomb, especially the Jewish emigres, was because they're worried about Hitler getting it first. As you mentioned at some point, 1943, 1944, it was becoming obvious that Hitler, the Nazis were not close to the bomb. And I believe that almost none of the scientists quit after they found out that the Nazis weren't close. So why didn't more of them say — “Oh, I guess we were wrong. The Nazis aren't going to get it. We don't need to be working on it.”?Richard Rhodes 0:16:45There was only one who did that, Joseph Rotblat. In May of 1945 when he heard that Germany had been defeated, he packed up and left. General Groves, the imperious Army Corps of Engineers General who ran the entire Manhattan Project, was really upset. He was afraid he'd spill the beans. So he threatened to have him arrested and put in jail. But Rotblat was quite determined not to stay any longer. He was not interested in building bombs to aggrandize the national power of the United States of America, which is perfectly understandable. But why was no one else? Let me tell it in terms of Victor Weisskopf. He was an Austrian theoretical physicist, who, like the others, escaped when the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria and ended up at Los Alamos. Weisskopf wrote later — “There we were in Los Alamos in the midst of the darkest part of our science.” They were working on a weapon of mass destruction, that's pretty dark. He said “Before it had almost seemed like a spiritual quest.” And it's really interesting how different physics was considered before and after the Second World War. Before the war, one of the physicists in America named Louis Alvarez told me when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 and went to cocktail parties, people would ask, “What's your degree in?” He would tell them “Chemistry.” I said, “Louis, why?” He said, “because I don't really have to explain what physics was.” That's how little known this kind of science was at that time. There were only about 1,000 physicists in the whole world in 1900. By the mid-30s, there were a lot more, of course. There'd been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by them. But it was still arcane. And they didn't feel as if they were doing anything mean or dirty or warlike at all. They were just doing pure science. Then nuclear fission came along. It was publicized worldwide. People who've been born since after the Second World War don't realize that it was not a secret at first. The news was published first in a German chemistry journal, Die Naturwissenschaften, and then in the British journal Nature and then in American journals. And there were headlines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and all over the world. People had been reading about and thinking about how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus for a long time. It was clear there was a lot there. All you had to do was get a piece of radium and see that it glowed in the dark. This chunk of material just sat there, you didn't plug it into a wall. And if you held it in your hand, it would burn you. So where did that energy come from? The physicists realized it all came from the nucleus of the atom, which is a very small part of the whole thing. The nucleus is 1/100,000th the diameter of the whole atom. Someone in England described it as about the size of a fly in a cathedral. All of the energy that's involved in chemical reactions, comes from the electron cloud that's around the nucleus. But  it was clear that the nucleus was the center of powerful forces. But the question was, how do you get them out? The only way that the nucleus had been studied up to 1938 was by bombarding it with protons, which have the same electric charge as the nucleus, positive charge, which means they were repelled by it. So you had to accelerate them to high speeds with various versions of the big machines that we've all become aware of since then. The cyclotron most obviously built in the 30s, but there were others as well. And even then, at best, you could chip a little piece off. You could change an atom one step up or one step down the periodic table. This was the classic transmutation of medieval alchemy sure but it wasn't much, you didn't get much out. So everyone came to think of the nucleus of the atom like a little rock that you really had to hammer hard to get anything to happen with it because it was so small and dense. That's why nuclear fission, with this slow neutron drifting and then the whole thing just goes bang, was so startling to everybody. So startling that when it happened, most of the physicists who would later work on the bomb and others as well, realized that they had missed the reaction that was something they could have staged on a lab bench with the equipment on the shelf. Didn't have to invent anything new. And Louis Alvarez again, this physicist at Berkeley, he said — “I was getting my hair cut. When I read the newspaper, I pulled off the robe and half with my hair cut, ran to my lab, pulled some equipment off the shelf, set it up and there it was.” So he said, “I discovered nuclear fission, but it was two days too late.” And that happened all over. People were just hitting themselves on the head and saying, well, Niels Bohr said, “What fools we've all been.” So this is a good example of how in science, if your model you're working with is wrong it doesn't lead you down the right path. There was only one physicist who really was thinking the right way about the uranium atom and that was Niels Bohr. He wondered, sometime during the 30s, why uranium was the last natural element in the periodic table? What is different about the others that would come later? He visualized the nucleus as a liquid drop. I always like to visualize it as a water-filled balloon. It's wobbly, it's not very stable. The protons in the nucleus are held together by something called the strong force, but they still have the repellent positive electric charge that's trying to push them apart when you get enough of them into a nucleus. It's almost a standoff between the strong force and all the electrical charge. So it is like a wobbly balloon of water. And then you see why a neutron just falling into the nucleus would make it wobble around even more and in one of its configurations, it might take a dumbbell shape. And then you'd have basically two charged atoms just barely connected, trying to push each other apart. And often enough, they went the whole way. When they did that, these two new elements, half the weight of uranium, way down the periodic table, would reconfigure themselves into two separate nuclei. And in doing so, they would release some energy. And that was the energy that came out of the reaction and there was a lot of energy. So Bohr thought about the model in the right way. The chemists who actually discovered nuclear fusion didn't know what they were gonna get. They were just bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate with neutrons thinking, well, maybe we can make a new element, maybe a first man-made element will come out of our work. So when they analyzed the solution after they bombarded it, they found elements halfway down the periodic table. They shouldn't have been there. And they were totally baffled. What is this doing here? Do we contaminate our solution? No. They had been working with a physicist named Lisa Meitner who was a theoretical physicist, an Austrian Jew. She had gotten out of Nazi Germany not long before. But they were still in correspondence with her. So they wrote her a letter. I held that letter in my hand when I visited Berlin and I was in tears. You don't hold history of that scale in your hands very often. And it said in German — “We found this strange reaction in our solution. What are these elements doing there that don't belong there?” And she went for a walk in a little village in Western Sweden with her nephew, Otto Frisch, who was also a nuclear physicist. And they thought about it for a while and they remembered Bohr's model, the wobbly water-filled balloon. And they suddenly saw what could happen. And that's where the news came from, the physics news as opposed to the chemistry news from the guys in Germany that was published in all the Western journals and all the newspapers. And everybody had been talking about, for years, what you could do if you had that kind of energy. A glass of this material would drive the Queen Mary back and forth from New York to London 20 times and so forth, your automobile could run for months. People were thinking about what would be possible if you had that much available energy. And of course, people had thought about reactors. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor at Berkeley and within a week of the news reaching Berkeley, one of his students told me that he had a drawing on the blackboard, a rather bad drawing of both a reactor and a bomb. So again, because the energy was so great, the physics was pretty obvious. Whether it would actually happen depended on some other things like could you make it chain react? But fundamentally, the idea was all there at the very beginning and everybody jumped on it. Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:54The book is actually the best history of World War II I've ever read. It's about the atomic bomb, but it's interspersed with the events that are happening in World War II, which motivate the creation of the bomb or the release of it, why it had to be dropped on Japan given the Japanese response. The first third is about the scientific roots of the physics and it's also the best book I've read about the history of science in the early 20th century and the organization of it. There's some really interesting stuff in there. For example, there was a passage where you talk about how there's a real master apprentice model in early science where if you wanted to learn to do this kind of experimentation, you will go to Amsterdam where the master of it is residing. It's much more individual focused. Richard Rhodes 0:28:58Yeah, the whole European model of graduate study, which is basically the wandering scholar. You could go wherever you wanted to and sign up with whoever was willing to have you sign up. (0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombsDwarkesh Patel 0:29:10But the question I wanted to ask regarding the history you made of World War II in general is — there's one way you can think about the atom bomb which is that it is completely different from any sort of weaponry that has been developed before it. Another way you can think of it is there's a spectrum where on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb, in the middle you have the atom bomb, and on this end you have the firebombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo. Do you think of these as completely different categories or does it seem like an escalating gradient to you? Richard Rhodes 0:29:47I think until you get to the hydrogen bomb, it's really an escalating gradient. The hydrogen bomb can be made arbitrarily large. The biggest one ever tested was 56 megatons of TNT equivalent. The Soviet tested that. That had a fireball more than five miles in diameter, just the fireball. So that's really an order of magnitude change. But the other one's no and in fact, I think one of the real problems, this has not been much discussed and it should be, when American officials went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, one of them said later — “I got on a plane in Tokyo. We flew down the long green archipelago of the Japanese home island. When I left Tokyo, it was all gray broken roof tiles from the fire bombing and the other bombings. And then all this greenery. And then when we flew over Hiroshima, it was just gray broken roof tiles again.” So the scale of the bombing with one bomb, in the case of Hiroshima, was not that different from the scale of the fire bombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs. The difference was it was just one plane. In fact, the people in Hiroshima didn't even bother to go into their bomb shelters because one plane had always just been a weather plane. Coming over to check the weather before the bombers took off. So they didn't see any reason to hide or protect themselves, which was one of the reasons so many people were killed. The guys at Los Alamos had planned on the Japanese being in their bomb shelters. They did everything they could think of to make the bomb as much like ordinary bombing as they could. And for example, it was exploded high enough above ground, roughly 1,800 yards, so that the fireball that would form from this really very small nuclear weapon — by modern standards — 15 kilotons of TNT equivalent, wouldn't touch the ground and stir up dirt and irradiate it and cause massive radioactive fallout. It never did that. They weren't sure there would be any fallout. They thought the plutonium and the bomb over Nagasaki now would just kind of turn into a gas and blow away. That's not exactly what happened. But people don't seem to realize, and it's never been emphasized enough, these first bombs, like all nuclear weapons, were firebombs. Their job was to start mass fires, just exactly like all the six-pound incendiaries that had been destroying every major city in Japan by then. Every major city above 50,000 population had already been burned out. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around to be atomic bombed is because they'd been set aside from the target list, because General Groves wanted to know what the damage effects would be. The bomb that was tested in the desert didn't tell you anything. It killed a lot of rabbits, knocked down a lot of cactus, melted some sand, but you couldn't see its effect on buildings and on people. So the bomb was deliberately intended to be as much not like poison gas, for example, because we didn't want the reputation for being like people in the war in Europe during the First World War, where people were killing each other with horrible gasses. We just wanted people to think this was another bombing. So in that sense, it was. Of course, there was radioactivity. And of course, some people were killed by it. But they calculated that the people who would be killed by the irradiation, the neutron radiation from the original fireball, would be close enough to the epicenter of the explosion that they would be killed by the blast or the flash of light, which was 10,000 degrees. The world's worst sunburn. You've seen stories of people walking around with their skin hanging off their arms. I've had sunburns almost that bad, but not over my whole body, obviously, where the skin actually peeled blisters and peels off. That was a sunburn from a 10,000 degree artificial sun. Dwarkesh Patel 0:34:29So that's not the heat, that's just the light? Richard Rhodes 0:34:32Radiant light, radiant heat. 10,000 degrees. But the blast itself only extended out a certain distance, it was fire. And all the nuclear weapons that have ever been designed are basically firebombs. That's important because the military in the United States after the war was not able to figure out how to calculate the effects of this weapon in a reliable way that matched their previous experience. They would only calculate the blast effects of a nuclear weapon when they figured their targets. That's why we had what came to be called overkill. We wanted redundancy, of course, but 60 nuclear weapons on Moscow was way beyond what would be necessary to destroy even that big a city because they were only calculating the blast. But in fact, if you exploded a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead over the Pentagon at 3,000 feet, it would blast all the way out to the capital, which isn't all that far. But if you counted the fire, it would start a mass-fire and then it would reach all the way out to the Beltway and burn everything between the epicenter of the weapon and the Beltway. All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving nothing but mineral matter, basically. Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:08I want to emphasize two things you said because they really hit me in reading the book and I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them. The first is, in the book, the military planners and Groves, they talk about needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later, because they were running out of cities in Japan where there are enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place, which is insane. An entire country is almost already destroyed from fire bombing alone. And the second thing about the category difference between thermonuclear and atomic bombs. Daniel Ellsberg, the nuclear planner who wrote the Doomsday machine, he talks about, people don't understand that the atom bomb that resulted in the pictures we see of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that is simply the detonator of a modern nuclear bomb, which is an insane thing to think about. So for example, 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima Nagasaki and the Tsar Bomba, which was 50 megatons. So more than 1,000 times as much. And that wasn't even as big as they could make it. They kept the uranium tamper off, because they didn't want to destroy all of Siberia. So you could get more than 10,000 times as powerful. Richard Rhodes 0:37:31When Edward Teller, co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and one of the dark forces in the story, was consulting with our military, just for his own sake, he sat down and calculated, how big could you make a hydrogen bomb? He came up with 1,000 megatons. And then he looked at the effects. 1,000 megatons would be a fireball 10 miles in diameter. And the atmosphere is only 10 miles deep. He figured that it would just be a waste of energy, because it would all blow out into space. Some of it would go laterally, of course, but most of it would just go out into space. So a bomb more than 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time. Of course, a 100 megatons bomb is also a total waste, because there's no target on Earth big enough to justify that from a military point of view. Robert Oppenheimer, when he had his security clearance questioned and then lifted when he was being punished for having resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb, was asked by the interrogator at this security hearing — “Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, if you'd had a hydrogen bomb for Hiroshima, wouldn't you have used it?” And Oppenheimer said, “No.” The interrogator asked, “Why is that?” He said because the target was too small. I hope that scene is in the film, I'm sure it will be. So after the war, when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just about as soon as the surrender was signed, what they were interested in was the scale of destruction, of course. And those two cities didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary high explosives. They went home to Washington, the policy makers, with the thought that — “Oh, these bombs are not so destructive after all.” They had been touted as city busters, basically, and they weren't. They didn't completely burn out cities. They were not certainly more destructive than the firebombing campaign, when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed. That, in turn, influenced the judgment about what we needed to do vis-a-vis the Soviet Union when the Soviets got the bomb in 1949. There was a general sense that, when you could fight a war with nuclear weapons, deterrence or not, you would need quite a few of them to do it right. And the Air Force, once it realized that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget by cornering the market and delivering nuclear weapons, very quickly decided that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect. It's like tying one hand behind your back. Most of it was a fire effect. So that's where they came up with numbers like we need 60 of these to take out Moscow. And what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s is that the more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. And the other branches of services, which had not gone nuclear by then, woke up and said, we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. There was even one that was fired out of a shoulder mounted rifle. There was a satchel charge that two men could carry, weighed about 150 pounds, that could be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany. And of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security. No way anybody could trace those submarines once they were quiet enough. And a nuclear reactor is very quiet. It just sits there with neutrons running around, making heat. So the other services jumped in and this famous triad, we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons, baloney. We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines. And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.Dwarkesh Patel 0:42:50Because it has multiple nukes on it? Richard Rhodes 0:42:53Because they have 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles with MIRV warheads, at least three per missile. Dwarkesh Patel 0:43:02Wow. I had a former guest, Richard Hanania, who has a book about foreign policy where he points out that our model of thinking about why countries do the things they do, especially in foreign affairs, is wrong because we think of them as individual rational actors, when in fact it's these competing factions within the government. And in fact, you see this especially in the case of Japan in World War II, there was a great book of Japan leading up to World War II, where they talk about how a branch of the Japanese military, I forget which, needed more oil to continue their campaign in Manchuria so they forced these other branches to escalate. But it's so interesting that the reason we have so many nukes is that the different branches are competing for funding. Richard Rhodes 0:43:50Douhet, the theorist of air power, had been in the trenches in the First World War. Somebody (John Masefield) called the trenches of the First World War, the long grave already dug, because millions of men were killed and the trenches never moved, a foot this way, a foot that way, all this horror. And Douhet came up with the idea that if you could fly over the battlefield to the homeland of the enemy and destroy his capacity to make war, then the people of that country, he theorized, would rise up in rebellion and throw out their leaders and sue for peace. And this became the dream of all the Air Forces of the world, but particularly ours. Until around 1943, it was called the US Army Air Force. The dream of every officer in the Air Force was to get out from under the Army, not just be something that delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances, but a power that could actually win wars. And the missing piece had always been the scale of the weaponry they carried. So when the bomb came along, you can see why Curtis LeMay, who ran the strategic air command during the prime years of that force, was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs. Because if a plane got shot down, but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb, then it would be just almost as effective as the two planes together. So they wanted big bombs. And they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go, that there was really no military use for these huge weapons. Furthermore, the United States had more cities than Russia did, than the Soviet Union did. And we were making ourselves a better target by introducing a weapon that could destroy a whole state. I used to live in Connecticut and I saw a map that showed the air pollution that blew up from New York City to Boston. And I thought, well, now if that was fallout, we'd be dead up here in green, lovely Connecticut. That was the scale that it was going to be with these big new weapons. So on the one hand, you had some of the important leaders in the government thinking that these weapons were not the war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be. And on the other hand, you had the Air Force cornering the market on nuclear solutions to battles. All because some guy in a trench in World War I was sufficiently horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what was possible with air power. Remember, they were still flying biplanes. When H.G. Wells wrote his novel, The World Set Free in 1913, predicting an atomic war that would lead to world government, he had Air Forces delivering atomic bombs, but he forgot to update his planes. The guys in the back seat, the bombardiers, were sitting in a biplane, open cockpit. And when the pilots had dropped the bomb, they would reach down and pick up H.G. Wells' idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the side. Which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war. And it led us to a terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed, which in turn fermented the arms race with the Soviets and just chased off. In the Soviet Union, they had a practical perspective on factories. Every factory was supposed to produce 120% of its target every year. That was considered good Soviet realism. And they did that with their nuclear war weapons. So by the height of the Cold War, they had 75,000 nuclear weapons, and nobody had heard yet of nuclear winter. So if both sides had set off this string of mass traps that we had in our arsenals, it would have been the end of the human world without question. Dwarkesh Patel 0:48:27It raises an interesting question, if the military planners thought that the conventional nuclear weapon was like the fire bombing, would it have been the case that if there wasn't a thermonuclear weapon, that there actually would have been a nuclear war by now because people wouldn't have been thinking of it as this hard red line? Richard Rhodes 0:48:47I don't think so because we're talking about one bomb versus 400, and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands of bombs. That scale was clear. Deterrence was the more important business. Everyone seemed to understand even the spies that the Soviets had connected up to were wholesaling information back to the Soviet Union. There's this comic moment when Truman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at Potsdam, and he tells Stalin, we have a powerful new weapon. And that's as much as he's ready to say about it. And Stalin licks at him and says, “Good, I hope you put it to good use with the Japanese.” Stalin knows exactly what he's talking about. He's seen the design of the fat man type Nagasaki plutonium bomb. He has held it in his hands because they had spies all over the place. (0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet programDwarkesh Patel 0:49:44How much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies? Richard Rhodes 0:49:49Probably not any longer. Dwarkesh Patel 0:49:51Really? Richard Rhodes 0:49:51When the Soviet Union collapsed in the winter of ‘92, I ran over there as quickly as I could get over there. In this limbo between forming a new kind of government and some of the countries pulling out and becoming independent and so forth, their nuclear scientists, the ones who'd worked on their bombs were free to talk. And I found that out through Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, who was connected to people I knew. And she said, yeah, come on over. Her secretary, Sasha, who was a geologist about 35 years old became my guide around the country. We went to various apartments. They were retired guys from the bomb program and were living on, as far as I could tell, sac-and-potatoes and some salt. They had government pensions and the money was worth a salt, all of a sudden. I was buying photographs from them, partly because I needed the photographs and partly because 20 bucks was two months' income at that point. So it was easy for me and it helped them. They had first class physicists in the Soviet Union, they do in Russian today. They told me that by 1947, they had a design for a bomb that they said was half the weight and twice the yield of the Fat Man bomb. The Fat Man bomb was the plutonium implosion, right? And it weighed about 9,000 pounds. They had a much smaller and much more deliverable bomb with a yield of about 44 kilotons. Dwarkesh Patel 0:51:41Why was Soviet physics so good?Richard Rhodes 0:51:49The Russian mind? I don't know. They learned all their technology from the French in the 19th century, which is why there's so many French words in Russian. So they got good teachers, the French are superb technicians, they aren't so good at building things, but they're very good at designing things. There's something about Russia, I don't know if it's the language or the education. They do have good education, they did. But I remember asking them when they were working, I said — On the hydrogen bomb, you didn't have any computers yet. We only had really early primitive computers to do the complicated calculations of the hydrodynamics of that explosion. I said, “What did you do?” They said, “Oh, we just used nuclear. We just used theoretical physics.” Which is what we did at Los Alamos. We had guys come in who really knew their math and they would sit there and work it out by hand. And women with old Marchant calculators running numbers. So basically they were just good scientists and they had this new design. Kurchatov who ran the program took Lavrentiy Beria, who ran the NKVD who was put in charge of the program and said — “Look, we can build you a better bomb. You really wanna waste the time to make that much more uranium and plutonium?” And Beria said, “Comrade, I want the American bomb. Give me the American bomb or you and all your families will be camp dust.” I talked to one of the leading scientists in the group and he said, we valued our lives, we valued our families. So we gave them a copy of the plutonium implosion bomb. Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:37Now that you explain this, when the Soviet Union fell, why didn't North Korea, Iran or another country, send a few people to the fallen Soviet Union to recruit a few of the scientists to start their own program? Or buy off their stockpiles or something. Or did they?Richard Rhodes 0:53:59There was some effort by countries in the Middle East to get all the enriched uranium, which they wouldn't sell them. These were responsible scientists. They told me — we worked on the bomb because you had it and we didn't want there to be a monopoly on the part of any country in the world. So patriotically, even though Stalin was in charge of our country, he was a monster. We felt that it was our responsibility to work on these things, even Sakharov. There was a great rush at the end of the Second World War to get hold of German scientists. And about an equal number were grabbed by the Soviets. All of the leading German scientists, like Heisenberg and Hans and others, went west as fast as they could. They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets. But there were some who were. And they helped them work. People have the idea that Los Alamos was where the bomb happened. And it's true that at Los Alamos, we had the team that designed, developed, and built the first actual weapons. But the truth is, the important material for weapons is the uranium or plutonium. One of the scientists in the Manhattan Project told me years later, you can make a pretty high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium, putting one on the floor and dropping the other by hand from a height of about six feet. If that's true, then all this business about secret designs and so forth is hogwash. What you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of highly enriched uranium, 90% of uranium-235. If you've got that, there are lots of different ways to make the bomb. We had two totally different ways that we used. The gun on the one hand for uranium, and then because plutonium was so reactive that if you fired up the barrel of a cannon at 3,000 feet per second, it would still melt down before the two pieces made it up. So for that reason, they had to invent an entirely new technology, which was an amazing piece of work. From the Soviet point of view, and I think this is something people don't know either, but it puts the Russian experience into a better context. All the way back in the 30s, since the beginning of the Soviet Union after the First World War, they had been sending over espionage agents connected up to Americans who were willing to work for them to collect industrial technology. They didn't have it when they began their country. It was very much an agricultural country. And in that regard, people still talk about all those damn spies stealing our secrets, we did the same thing with the British back in colonial days. We didn't know how to make a canal that wouldn't drain out through the soil. The British had a certain kind of clay that they would line their canals with, and there were canals all over England, even in the 18th century, that were impervious to the flow of water. And we brought a British engineer at great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the Middle West and then the West. So they were doing the same thing. And one of those spies was a guy named Harry Gold, who was working all the time for them. He gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak filmmaking, for example. Harry Gold was the connection between David Greenglass and one of the American spies at Los Alamos and the Soviet Union. So it was not different. The model was — never give us something that someone dreamed of that hasn't been tested and you know works. So it would actually be blueprints for factories, not just a patent. And therefore when Beria after the war said, give us the bomb, he meant give me the American bomb because we know that works. I don't trust you guys. Who knows what you'll do. You're probably too stupid anyway. He was that kind of man. So for all of those reasons, they built the second bomb they tested was twice the yield and half the way to the first bomb. In other words, it was their new design. And so it was ours because the technology was something that we knew during the war, but it was too theoretical still to use. You just had to put the core and have a little air gap between the core and the explosives so that the blast wave would have a chance to accelerate through an open gap. And Alvarez couldn't tell me what it was but he said, you can get a lot more destructive force with a hammer if you hit something with it, rather than if you put the head on the hammer and push. And it took me several years before I figured out what he meant. I finally understood he was talking about what's called levitation.Dwarkesh Patel 0:59:41On the topic that the major difficulty in developing a bomb is either the refinement of uranium into U-235 or its transmutation into plutonium, I was actually talking to a physicist in preparation for this conversation. He explained the same thing that if you get two subcritical masses of uranium together, you wouldn't have the full bomb because it would start to tear itself apart without the tamper, but you would still have more than one megaton.Richard Rhodes 1:00:12It would be a few kilotons. Alvarez's model would be a few kilotons, but that's a lot. Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:20Yeah, sorry I meant kiloton. He claimed that one of the reasons why we talk so much about Los Alamos is that at the time the government didn't want other countries to know that if you refine uranium, you've got it. So they were like, oh, we did all this fancy physics work in Los Alamos that you're not gonna get to, so don't even worry about it. I don't know what you make of that theory. That basically it was sort of a way to convince people that Los Alamos was important. Richard Rhodes 1:00:49I think all the physics had been checked out by a lot of different countries by then. It was pretty clear to everybody what you needed to do to get to a bomb. That there was a fast fusion reaction, not a slow fusion reaction, like a reactor. They'd worked that out. So I don't think that's really the problem. But to this day, no one ever talks about the fact that the real problem isn't the design of the weapon. You could make one with wooden boxes if you wanted to. The problem is getting the material. And that's good because it's damned hard to make that stuff. And it's something you can protect. Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:30We also have gotten very lucky, if lucky is the word you want to use. I think you mentioned this in the book at some point, but the laws of physics could have been such that unrefined uranium ore was enough to build a nuclear weapon, right? In some sense, we got lucky that it takes a nation-state level actor to really refine and produce the raw substance. Richard Rhodes 1:01:56Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning on the way over. And all the uranium in the world would already have destroyed itself. Most people have never heard of the living reactors that developed on their own in a bed of uranium ore in Africa about two billion years ago, right? When there was more U-235 in a mass of uranium ore than there is today, because it decays like all radioactive elements. And the French discovered it when they were mining the ore and found this bed that had a totally different set of nuclear characteristics. They were like, what happened? But there were natural reactors in Gabon once upon a time. And they started up because some water, a moderator to make the neutrons slow down, washed its way down through a bed of much more highly enriched uranium ore than we still have today. Maybe 5-10% instead of 3.5 or 1.5, whatever it is now. And they ran for about 100,000 years and then shut themselves down because they had accumulated enough fusion products that the U-235 had been used up. Interestingly, this material never migrated out of the bed of ore. People today who are anti-nuclear say, well, what are we gonna do about the waste? Where are we gonna put all that waste? It's silly. Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:35Shove it in a hole. Richard Rhodes 1:03:36Yeah, basically. That's exactly what we're planning to do. Holes that are deep enough and in beds of material that will hold them long enough for everything to decay back to the original ore. It's not a big problem except politically because nobody wants it in their backyard.Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:53On the topic of the Soviets, one question I had while reading the book was — we negotiated with Stalin at Yalta and we surrendered a large part of Eastern Europe to him under his sphere of influence. And obviously we saw 50 years of immiseration there as a result. Given the fact that only we had the bomb, would it have been possible that we could have just knocked out the Soviet Union or at least prevented so much of the world from succumbing to communism in the aftermath of World War II? Is that a possibility? Richard Rhodes 1:04:30When we say we had the bomb, we had a few partly assembled handmade bombs. It took almost as long to assemble one as the battery life of the batteries that would drive the original charge that would set off the explosion. It was a big bluff. You know, when they closed Berlin in 1948 and we had to supply Berlin by air with coal and food for a whole winter, we moved some B-29s to England. The B-29 being the bomber that had carried the bombs. They were not outfitted for nuclear weapons. They didn't have the same kind of bomb-based structure. The weapons that were dropped in Japan had a single hook that held the entire bomb. So when the bay opened and the hook was released, the thing dropped. And that's very different from dropping whole rows of small bombs that you've seen in the photographs and the film footage. So it was a big bluff on our part. We took some time after the war inevitably to pull everything together. Here was a brand new technology. Here was a brand new weapon. Who was gonna be in charge of it? The military wanted control, Truman wasn't about to give the military control. He'd been an artillery officer in the First World War. He used to say — “No, damn artillery captain is gonna start World War III when I'm president.” I grew up in the same town he lived in so I know his accent. Independence, Missouri. Used to see him at his front steps taking pictures with tourists while he was still president. He used to step out on the porch and let the tourists take photographs. About a half a block from my Methodist church where I went to church. It was interesting. Interestingly, his wife was considered much more socially acceptable than he was. She was from an old family in independence, Missouri. And he was some farmer from way out in Grandview, Missouri, South of Kansas City. Values. Anyway, at the end of the war, there was a great rush from the Soviet side of what was already a zone. There was a Soviet zone, a French zone, British zone and an American zone. Germany was divided up into those zones to grab what's left of the uranium ore that the Germans had stockpiled. And there was evidence that there was a number of barrels of the stuff in a warehouse somewhere in the middle of all of this. And there's a very funny story about how the Russians ran in and grabbed off one site full of uranium ore, this yellow black stuff in what were basically wine barrels. And we at the same night, just before the wall came down between the zones, were running in from the other side, grabbing some other ore and then taking it back to our side. But there was also a good deal of requisitioning of German scientists. And the ones who had gotten away early came West, but there were others who didn't and ended up helping the Soviets. And they were told, look, you help us build the reactors and the uranium separation systems that we need. And we'll let you go home and back to your family, which they did. Early 50s by then, the German scientists who had helped the Russians went home. And I think our people stayed here and brought their families over, I don't know. (1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, TaiwanDwarkesh Patel 1:08:24Was there an opportunity after the end of World War II, before the Soviets developed the bomb, for the US to do something where either it somehow enforced a monopoly on having the bomb, or if that wasn't possible, make some sort of credible gesture that, we're eliminating this knowledge, you guys don't work on this, we're all just gonna step back from this. Richard Rhodes 1:08:50We tried both before the war. General Groves, who had the mistaken impression that there was a limited amount of high-grade uranium ore in the world, put together a company that tried to corner the market on all the available supply. For some reason, he didn't realize that a country the size of the Soviet Union is going to have some uranium ore somewhere. And of course it did, in Kazakhstan, rich uranium ore, enough for all the bombs they wanted to build. But he didn't know that, and I frankly don't know why he didn't know that, but I guess uranium's use before the Second World War was basically as a glazing agent for pottery, that famous yellow pottery and orange pottery that people owned in the 1930s, those colors came from uranium, and they're sufficiently radioactive, even to this day, that if you wave a Geiger counter over them, you get some clicks. In fact, there have been places where they've gone in with masks and suits on, grabbed the Mexican pottery and taken it out in a lead-lined case. People have been so worried about it but that was the only use for uranium, to make a particular kind of glass. So once it became clear that there was another use for uranium, a much more important one, Groves tried to corner the world market, and he thought he had. So that was one effort to limit what the Soviet Union could do. Another was to negotiate some kind of agreement between the parties. That was something that really never got off the ground, because the German Secretary of State was an old Southern politician and he didn't trust the Soviets. He went to the first meeting, in Geneva in ‘45 after the war was over, and strutted around and said, well, I got the bomb in my pocket, so let's sit down and talk here. And the Soviet basically said, screw you. We don't care. We're not worried about your bomb. Go home. So that didn't work. Then there was the effort to get the United Nations to start to develop some program of international control. And the program was proposed originally by a committee put together by our State Department that included Robert Oppenheimer, rightly so, because the other members of the committee were industrialists, engineers, government officials, people with various kinds of expertise around the very complicated problems of technology and the science and, of course, the politics, the diplomacy. In a couple of weeks, Oppenheimer taught them the basics of the nuclear physics involved and what he knew about bomb design, which was everything, actually, since he'd run Los Alamos. He was a scientist during the war. And they came up with a plan. People have scoffed ever since at what came to be called the Acheson-Lilienthal plan named after the State Department people. But it's the only plan I think anyone has ever devised that makes real sense as to how you could have international control without a world government. Every country would be open to inspection by any agency that was set up. And the inspections would not be at the convenience of the country. But whenever the inspectors felt they needed to inspect. So what Oppenheimer called an open world. And if you had that, and then if each country then developed its own nuclear industries, nuclear power, medical uses, whatever, then if one country tried clandestinely to begin to build bombs, you would know about it at the time of the next inspection. And then you could try diplomacy. If that didn't work, you could try conventional war. If that wasn't sufficient, then you could start building your bombs too. And at the end of this sequence, which would be long enough, assuming that there were no bombs existing in the world, and the ore was stored in a warehouse somewhere, six months maybe, maybe a year, it would be time for everyone to scale up to deterrence with weapons rather than deterrence without weapons, with only the knowledge. That to me is the answer to the whole thing. And it might have worked. But there were two big problems. One, no country is going to allow a monopoly on a nuclear weapon, at least no major power. So the Russians were not willing to sign on from the beginning. They just couldn't. How could they? We would not have. Two, Sherman assigned a kind of a loudmouth, a wise old Wall Street guy to present this program to the United Nations. And he sat down with Oppenheimer after he and his people had studied and said, where's your army? Somebody starts working on a bomb over there. You've got to go in and take that out, don't you? He said, what would happen if one country started building a bomb? Oppenheimer said, well, that would be an act of war. Meaning then the other countries could begin to escalate as they needed to to protect themselves against one power, trying to overwhelm the rest. Well, Bernard Baruch was the name of the man. He didn't get it. So when he presented his revised version of the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, which was called the Baruch Plan to the United Nations, he included his army. And he insisted that the United States would not give up its nuclear monopoly until everyone else had signed on. So of course, who's going to sign on to that deal? Dwarkesh Patel 1:15:24I feel he has a point in the sense that — World War II took five years or more. If we find that the Soviets are starting to develop a bomb, it's not like within the six months or a year or whatever, it would take them to start refining the ore. And to the point we found out that they've been refining ore to when we start a war and engage in it, and doing all the diplomacy. By that point, they might already have the bomb. And so we're behind because we dismantled our weapons. We are only starting to develop our weapons once we've exhausted these other avenues. Richard Rhodes 1:16:00Not to develop. Presumably we would have developed. And everybody would have developed anyway. Another way to think of this is as delayed delivery times. Takes about 30 minutes to get an ICBM from Central Missouri to Moscow. That's the time window for doing anything other than starting a nuclear war. So take the warhead off those missiles and move it down the road 10 miles. So then it takes three hours. You've got to put the warhead back on the missiles. If the other side is willing to do this too. And you both can watch and see. We require openness. A word Bohr introduced to this whole thing. In order to make this happen, you can't have secrets. And of course, as time passed on, we developed elaborate surveillance from space, surveillance from planes, and so forth. It would not have worked in 1946 for sure. The surveillance wasn't there. But that system is in place today. The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected systems in air, in space, underwater. They can detect 50 pounds of dynamite exploded in England from Australia with the systems that we have in place. It's technical rather than human resources. But it's there. So it's theoretically possible today to get started on such a program. Except, of course, now, in like 1950, the world is awash in nuclear weapons. Despite the reductions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, there's still 30,000-40,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Way too many. Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:01Yeah. That's really interesting. What percentage of warheads do you think are accounted for by this organization? If there's 30,000 warheads, what percentage are accounted for? Richard Rhodes 1:18:12All.Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:12Oh. Really?  North Korea doesn't have secrets? Richard Rhodes 1:18:13They're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission. Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:18But presumably not North Korea or something, right? Richard Rhodes 1:18:21North Korea is an exception. But we keep pretty good track of North Korea needless to say. Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:27Are you surprised with how successful non-proliferation has been? The number of countries with nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades. Given the fact, as you were talking about earlier, it's simply a matter of refining or transmuting uranium. Is it surprising that there aren't more countries that have it?Richard Rhodes 1:18:42That's really an interesting part. Again, a part of the story that most people have never really heard. In the 50s, before the development and signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was 1968 and it took effect in 1970, a lot of countries that you would never have imagined were working on nuclear weapons. Sweden, Norway, Japan, South Korea. They had the technology. They just didn't have the materials. It was kind of dicey about what you should do. But I interviewed some of the Swedish scientists who worked on their bomb and they said, well, we were just talking about making some tactical

David Davis has been a Conservative Member of Parliament since 1987. He joined the Government in 1990 and served in both the Cabinet Office and the Foreign Office, where he was responsible for government negotiations on Europe, NATO enlargement, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the updated Geneva Convention. He went on to serve as Conservative Party Chairman, then Shadow Deputy Prime Minister. David was Shadow Home Secretary from 2003 until he announced his resignation in 2008, forcing a by-election to raise awareness of New Labour's relentless erosion of civil liberties. Following the EU Referendum in which he campaigned to leave, David was appointed Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. Since leaving Government in 2018, David has campaigned on issues including Brexit, educational reform, tax fairness, social mobility matters and civil liberties. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | info@xentricapc.com | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: marketing@triggerpod.co.uk Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  02:03 David's Life Before Politics  09:07 Why David Became a Conservative  15:25 Does the Parliamentary Conservative Party Value Freedom? 17:57 Sponsor Message: Manscaped 19:20 Why Did So Many People Support the Government During Covid? 28:31 Is the Conservative Party Still Actually Conservative? 37:59 The Unwillingness of Current Leaders to Make Unpopular Decisions 46:49 Predicting the Next General Election 51:46 How Would Thatcher Have Handled the Ukraine Situation? 59:32 Are We in a Second Cold War? 1:01:39 Updates on the Brexit Situation 1:07:34 What's the One Thing We're Not Talking About?

During the Cold War, one of the few issues on which the United States and the Soviet Union agreed, was that other states should not have nuclear weapons. The likelihood that one of them would use those weapons – or transfer them to a regime or group that would was too great. This was called the principle of non-proliferation. It was regarded as an established norm of international behavior, expressed most explicitly in the 1979 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- better known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT. Is it still in force or relevant or even meaningful? What is being done to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons – as well as chemical and biological weapons – by regimes hostile to the United States and its allies? FDD has a new Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program attempting to answer such questions and provide policy options. Chairing the program is Ambassador Jackie Wolcott, former U.S. representative to the United Nations in Vienna and the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Charles Kupperman, who served in senior positions in both the Reagan and Trump administrations, is a member of the program's board of advisors. They join Foreign Podicy host Cliff May to talk about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. 

During the Cold War, one of the few issues on which the United States and the Soviet Union agreed, was that other states should not have nuclear weapons. The likelihood that one of them would use those weapons – or transfer them to a regime or group that would was too great. This was called the principle of non-proliferation. It was regarded as an established norm of international behavior, expressed most explicitly in the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- better known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT. Is it still in force or relevant or even meaningful? What is being done to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons – as well as chemical and biological weapons – by regimes hostile to the United States and its allies? FDD has a new Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program attempting to answer such questions and provide policy options. Chairing the program is Ambassador Jackie Wolcott, former U.S. representative to the United Nations in Vienna and the U.S. representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Charles Kupperman, who served in senior positions in both the Reagan and Trump administrations, is a member of the program's board of advisors. They join Foreign Podicy host Cliff May to talk about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. 

Have you been hearing people talking about a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and don't know what it is? Well, we have you covered. Joined by the incredible, Tzeporah Berman, who is the Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, we discuss what a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is (and what it would need), what a Just Transition means, the run up to COP28, and what you can do right now to help our world leave fossil fuels in the past.To support Tzeporah and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, please visit https://fossilfueltreaty.org/You can watch Tzeporah's TedTalk hereFollow the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty on Instagram @fossilfueltreatyFollow the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty on Twitter @fossiltreaty

Today we examine aspects of nuclear security. ASPI's Dr Alex Bristow is joined by the Nuclear Threat Initiative's Nuclear Materials Security Vice President Scott Roecker and Program Officer Jessica Bufford, alongside Australia's Ambassador for Arms Control and Counter-Proliferation Mr Ian Biggs, for a discussion on the status of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, gender inclusivity, nuclear disarmament and Australia's role in the global security context for nuclear arms control. Guests (in order of appearance): Dr Alex Bristow: www.aspi.org.au/bio/dr-alex-bristow Scott Roecker: www.nti.org/about/people/scott-roecker Jessica Bufford: www.nti.org/about/people/jessica-bufford Ian Biggs: www.dfat.gov.au/about-us/our-people/homs/ambassador-for-arms-control-and-counter-proliferation Music: "Long Walk" by Ketsa, licensed with permission from the Independent Music Licensing Collective - imlcollective.uk

We are delighted to share a few bonus episodes coming off the back of COP 27 in Egypt, Sharm El Sheikh. In this episode, Lily reflects on the COP27 outcomes - both positive and negative - with the pioneering activist Tzeporah Berman. Tzeporah co-founded Stand.Earth, led successful logging blockades in British Colombia; and more recently launched the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty in 2021 which gained significant momentum in COP27. Lily and Tzeporah also discuss carbon pricing in Canada; the emotional toll and work of climate activism; and visions of the future.Links Tzeporah Berman's  TED talk CreditsAudio Editor: Dizplay StudiosMusic by Cosmo SheldrakeWho Cares Wins intro: Kelsey BennettArtwork: Bethan Sherwood

On the 23rd of Novembre 2022, Iran announced it would be producing enriched uranium, expanding its nuclear program. Listen to our rerun episode which describes the Iranian nuclear program. It was launched in the 1950s by Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, with the help of the United States. Ensuring the peaceful use of nuclear power was a critical global issue for some time, with the International Atomic Energy Agency formed in 1957 and the UN's Non-Proliferation Treaty signed in 1968. Then in 1979, an Islamic revolution took place in Iran, with Ayatollah Khomeiny taking power. The country's nuclear program was put on standby. So when did the Iranian nuclear program actually begin? Were the suspicions founded then? What's gone wrong since the 2015 deal? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the latest episodes, click here: Why is there such a taboo over the prostate? How can I take part in Giving Tuesday? What can supermarkets do to reduce food waste? A Bababam Originals podcast, written and produced by Joseph Chance. In partnership with upday UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Granoff, President of the Global Security Institute, focuses on the threat of nuclear weapons in the world today.  The use of nuclear weapons is incompatible with the development and survivability of living organisms and the planet as a whole. Elimination of nuclear weapons should be at the heart of the debate.  Currently, over 13,000 nukes are maintained by 9 nuclear countries. Several suggestions were proffered as to how to reduce the likelihood of an accidental or purposeful exchange of nuclear weapons: the US should not move forward in spending over $1.3 trillion to modernize the aging nukes—stockpiles should be reduced; all countries at the UN should adopt a No Strike First policy; and international agreements, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to reduce the nuclear threat should be strengthened and countries should adhere to their commitments. The US and Russia have over 75% of the nuclear weapons; whereas, the UK, France, China, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel have the remainder.

Paul's guest in this episode is Tzeporah Berman. Tzeporah has been designing environmental campaigns and working on environmental policy in Canada and beyond for over thirty years. She is currently the International Program Director at Stand.earth and the Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. She is the Co-founder of the Global Gas & Oil Network, the former co-director of Greenpeace International's Global Climate and Energy Program, and the co-founder of ForestEthics (now Stand.earth). Tzeporah was one of the creators and lead negotiators of the Great Bear Rainforest agreement and the Canadian Boreal Forest Initiative. Her work has contributed to the protection of over 40 million hectares of old growth forests. In 2021, she was arrested for blockading the logging of thousand-year-old trees in Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island and she gave a widely-viewed TED Talk presenting the case for a global treaty to phase out fossil fuels. In this episode Paul and Tzeporah discuss how a Fossil Fuel Treaty could work and what a Fossil Fuel Exit Strategy might look like. 

Listen Now This summer the planet once again experienced record temperatures, droughts, wildfires and extreme weather events. Nevertheless, according to...

It's time to attack the “supply side” of fossil fuels, activists argue. And the best way to do that is by establishing a fuel non-proliferation treaty similar to the one used for nuclear weapons. But what would it entail and could it ever work? Also, the sticky relationship between online personalisation and consent; and a call for CEOs to become the next target of automation.

In this episode, we talk all about coal, oil, and gas. When it comes to keeping fossil fuels in the ground, COPs will only get us so far. Peter Newell outlines an alternative approach: A Fossil Fuel Non-Profileration Treaty. Written by Peter Newell.Read by Julia Lagoutte.Text version: https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-road-to-a-fossil-fuel-non-proliferation-treaty This article is from our latest edition: Moving Targets: Geopolitics in a Warming World which examines how we can navigate an increasingly fractured geopolitical landscape with the future of the planet in the balance. Exploring issues such as climate leadership, the future of energy geopolitics, and the role of democracy and human rights in international relations, this edition asks how Greens and progressives can pick up the scattered seeds of a more just and sustainable world? It's out and available to read online and order in print at www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/subscribe-order.Follow us on socials: @greeneujournal.Green Wave is produced by the Green European Journal.

Carbon Tracker Initiative's Mark Campanale provides fresh insights into the dangerous phenomenon of stranded assets –according to the IEA: “ investments which have already been made but which, at some time prior to the end of their economic life, are no longer able to earn an economic return.” Mark explains why it is taking so long for capital markets to reflect the real value of fossil fuel companies—and what's at stake here-- how we are funding climate chaos through our pension schemes and banking system.  Mark discusses the economics of investment in fossil fuel compared to renewables, the power and influence of the fossil fuel industry, and his latest work focus, including important work on the Fossil fuel Non Proliferation Treaty.  Mark Campanale is the Founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a non-profit think-tank launched to pin-point with clarity how global capital markets have failed to deal with climate risk. Mark developed the ‘unburnable carbon' capital markets thesis – the idea that there are substantial fossil fuel energy sources which cannot be burnt if the world is to adhere to the necessary carbon budgets to limit global warming. Campanale also  co-founded Planet Tracker, another think tank, which provides in-depth financial analysis around natural ecological barriers to growth faced by financial markets. His work seeks to raise awareness of ‘value-at-risk' to the financial community, and engages institutional investors and analysts to unlock and redirect the transformative power of capital markets to deliver on sustainable development objectives.

On this week's episode, co-host Tom Collina sits down with Jeremy Ben-Ami, President of J Street, to discuss the growing number former Israeli officials faulting the Israeli government for opposing the Iran nuclear deal. On Early Warning, Michelle Dover is joined by Nomsa Ndongwe, co-founder of WCAPS West coast chapter & staff member at the Global Security at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She identifies what to look out for at the upcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference.

The threat posed by nuclear weapons is changing and policy-makers are struggling to keep up. As the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference approaches, it is clear that the nuclear security field needs a new way of thinking. Nuclear-weapon states are expanding their arsenals and non-proliferation efforts have faltered: it is estimated that Tehran's nuclear breakout time is now less than a month away, following Donald Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the Iran deal in 2018 that had extended that timeline to 12 months.This week on War & Peace, Olga Oliker and Special guest-host Ali Vaez, Crisis Group's Iran Project Director, are joined by Dr Emma Belcher, President of Ploughshares Fund, to ask whether and how bold innovation can solve some of these intractable challenges. They discuss the ways in which policy debates have, or have not, evolved, the continued dominance of deterrence theory and the wave of new, diverse and creative thinkers challenging stale ideas. They also discuss the resumption of negotiations between Iran and the P5+1, prospects for other non-proliferation efforts and hopes for a nuclear-weapon-free future.Make sure to learn more about Dr Belcher's work at Ploughshares Fund by visiting ploughsares.org and listening to Ploughshares podcast Press the Button.This episode is part of our continuing War & Peace sub-series on nuclear weapons and strategy. Click on our special coverage page here to listen to more episodes and benefit from a range of perspectives about everything from deterrence to civil defense to nuclear-weapons-free zones. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Scott interviews Trita Parsi about Biden's bizarre approach to JCPOA negotiations.  When Biden came into office, the Iranians wanted to work out some mechanism to limit any future President's ability to pull out of the JCPOA in a similar fashion to Trump. The U.S. said no, so the Iranians said they would settle for a binding commitment for the rest of Biden's first term, but even that was rejected by the Americans. Parsi explains that stability is necessary for sanctions relief to work. He also says Iran's status as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is at risk if the U.S. keeps refusing to move forward.  Discussed on the show: “Revealed: Biden rejected way forward in Iran deal talks” (Responsible Statecraft)  Trita Parsi is the president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Parsi is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Follow him on Twitter @tparsi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG.

Scott interviews Trita Parsi about Biden's bizarre approach to JCPOA negotiations.  When Biden came into office, the Iranians wanted to work out some mechanism to limit any future President's ability to pull out of the JCPOA in a similar fashion to Trump. The U.S. said no, so the Iranians said they would settle for a binding commitment for the rest of Biden's first term, but even that was rejected by the Americans. Parsi explains that stability is necessary for sanctions relief to work. He also says Iran's status as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is at risk if the U.S. keeps refusing to move forward.  Discussed on the show: “Revealed: Biden rejected way forward in Iran deal talks” (Responsible Statecraft)  Trita Parsi is the president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Parsi is the recipient of the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Follow him on Twitter @tparsi. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Dröm; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG.

Rebecca Hamilton of American University comes on the podcast to discuss the recent events around “AUKUS,” the Australia/UK/US security arrangement and submarine deal, and its implications for the Non Proliferation Treaty, foreign relations in the Indo-Pacific, and everyone's relations with France.

Meet Climate champ and author, Twyla Dell, plus it's the Climate Pledge Collective. Now there's a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and one more Earthshot Prize finalist, Solbazaar!

It was inspired by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty negotiated in the 1960s. Learn more at https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/

Barcelona, Sidney, Los Angeles, along with Canada's largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver, have signed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This week guest's on Eaarth Feels is Lyn Adamson, co-chair of Climate Fast and Canadian Voice of Women for Peace. She discusses the proposed treaty, and shares what gives her hope in this time of climate emergency.

Barcelona, Sidney, Los Angeles, along with Canada's largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver, have signed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. This week guest's on Eaarth Feels is Lyn Adamson, co-chair of Climate Fast and Canadian Voice of Women for Peace. She discusses the proposed treaty, and shares what gives her hope in this time of climate emergency.

Scott interviews Grant Smith about his recent article, which makes the case that the $3.8 billion in foreign aid given to Israel is on questionable legal grounds. It all comes back to Israel's nuclear weapons, which the U.S. government has not officially acknowledged even exist. Because Israel is not a part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is illegal for the U.S. to give them aid without making a specific case for why it's necessary. Smith explains that to avoid this, Israel puts a lot of pressure on incoming Presidents to stay silent and not acknowledge the program. Smith also gives some background on how Israel acquired nuclear technology in the first place and how a tiny country in the middle-east has so effectively controlled American lawmakers.  Discussed on the show:  “Israel's Nukes Make US Aid Illegal” (Antiwar.com) “America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel's Nukes” (New York Times) “Joe Biden should end the US pretense over Israel's ‘secret' nuclear weapons” (The Guardian) Chuck Schumer acknowledging Israel's Nuclear Weapons Documents obtained about the Israeli agent who infiltrated the NUMEC facility Grant Smith's book about NUMEC Roger Mattson's book about NUMEC Roger Mattson on CSPAN with Grant Smith Grant Smith's book Big Israel “How Trump and Three Other U.S. Presidents Protected Israel's Worst-Kept Secret: Its Nuclear Arsenal” (New Yorker) Grant Smith's book about the fight to register the Israel Lobby as foreign agents Grant F. Smith is the author of a number of books including Big Israel: How Israel's Lobby Moves America, Divert!, and most recently The Israel Lobby Enters State Government: Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. He is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG.

Scott interviews Grant Smith about his recent article, which makes the case that the $3.8 billion in foreign aid given to Israel is on questionable legal grounds. It all comes back to Israel's nuclear weapons, which the U.S. government has not officially acknowledged even exist. Because Israel is not a part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it is illegal for the U.S. to give them aid without making a specific case for why it's necessary. Smith explains that to avoid this, Israel puts a lot of pressure on incoming Presidents to stay silent and not acknowledge the program. Smith also gives some background on how Israel acquired nuclear technology in the first place and how a tiny country in the middle-east has so effectively controlled American lawmakers.  Discussed on the show:  “Israel's Nukes Make US Aid Illegal” (Antiwar.com) “America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel's Nukes” (New York Times) “Joe Biden should end the US pretense over Israel's ‘secret' nuclear weapons” (The Guardian) Chuck Schumer acknowledging Israel's Nuclear Weapons Documents obtained about the Israeli agent who infiltrated the NUMEC facility Grant Smith's book about NUMEC Roger Mattson's book about NUMEC Roger Mattson on CSPAN with Grant Smith Grant Smith's book Big Israel “How Trump and Three Other U.S. Presidents Protected Israel's Worst-Kept Secret: Its Nuclear Arsenal” (New Yorker) Grant Smith's book about the fight to register the Israel Lobby as foreign agents Grant F. Smith is the author of a number of books including Big Israel: How Israel's Lobby Moves America, Divert!, and most recently The Israel Lobby Enters State Government: Rise of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board. He is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt; Lorenzotti Coffee and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG.

It's time to attack the “supply side” of fossil fuels, activists argue. And the best way to do that is by establishing a fuel non-proliferation treaty similar to the one used for nuclear weapons. But what would it entail and could it ever work? Also, the sticky relationship between online personalisation and consent; and a call for CEOs to become the next target of automation.

The British government has announced higher limits on nuclear weapons, with plans for weapons on the Trident submarines. This news will weaken the already vulnerable next review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. and violates existing agreements. You can watch this series (or listen to them as audio podcasts) on our website, then discuss them here: https://tosavetheworld.ca/videos'#comments.

Jonathan Granoff, who heads the Global Security Institute in the US, recounts the early history of the anti-nuclear weapons movement (especially the creation of the Pugwash Conferences), and notes the important role that Canada could play in promoting abolition now. He argues that the more promising way to influence Biden is not to say "get rid of nuclear weapons," but rather "live up to the promises that the US made in signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty."

What is the Iranian nuclear program? Thanks for asking! On November 27th, nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead a few miles away from Iranian capital city Tehran.Iran has accused Israel of being behind the assassination, using a remote-controlled weapon with the help of an exiled opposition group. Taking out Fakhrizadeh is seen as a direct attack on the Iranian nuclear program, which has been a subject of controversy for many years.So when did the Iranian nuclear program actually begin? It was launched in the 1950s by Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, with the help of the United States. Ensuring the peaceful use of nuclear power was a critical global issue for some time, with the International Atomic Energy Agency formed in 1957 and the UN’s Non-Proliferation Treaty signed in 1968. Then in 1979, an Islamic revolution took place in Iran, with Ayatollah Khomeiny taking power. The country’s nuclear program was put on standby and things weren’t helped by a war with neighbouring Iraq in the 1980s, which saw a nuclear reactor bombarded and destroyed.Fast forward to the 2000s and Iran began to advance in the development of its Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. Many international powers suspected the country of using the program as a cover for developing nuclear weapons. It was revealed that a uranium-enrichment site was under construction to the south of Tehran.Were the suspicions founded then? What’s gone wrong since the 2015 deal? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions!To listen the last episodes, you can click here: What is cultured meat?What is impostor syndrome? What are minks?A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode Jonathan chats with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tilman Ruff on his lifelong pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons.Tilman Ruff AO is an infectious diseases and public health physician, with particular focus on the urgent planetary health imperative to eradicate nuclear weapons. His work also addresses the broader public health dimensions of nuclear technology.He is Associate Professor in the Nossal Institute for Global Health in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Dr Ruff has since 2012 been a co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW, Nobel Peace Laureate 1985), and has previously served as Asia-Pacific Vice-President, Boston-based Consultant on Policy and Programs, and Board member. He is a co-founder and was founding international and Australian chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), and serves on the Committee of ICAN Australia. ICAN was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize “... for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons". ICAN is the first Australian-born Nobel Peace Laureate.Dr Ruff has been active in the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia) since 1982 and is a past national president. He was one of two civil society advisors to the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, the first civil society representative on Australian nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty delegations, and a civil society delegate to the landmark intergovernmental Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Norway, Mexico and Austria (2013-14). In 2017, he led the IPPNW delegation in New York through the negotiation of the historic United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.Dr Ruff has clinical interests in immunisation and travel medicine, and was the inaugural head of travel medicine at Fairfield Hospital and then Royal Melbourne Hospital. He served as Australian Red Cross international medical advisor from 1996 to 2019. Dr Ruff worked on hepatitis B control and maternal and child health in Indonesia and Pacific island countries with the Australian and NZ government aid programs, Burnet Institute, UNICEF and WHO. He spent five years as regional medical director for an international vaccine manufacturer.In June 2012, Dr Ruff was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia "for service to the promotion of peace as an advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and to public health through the promotion of immunisation programs in the South-East Asia - Pacific region". In 2019, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) “For distinguished service to the global community as an advocate for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, and to medicine.”

New #Podcast Episode!

Preston, Nick, and Robert sit down with Dr. Doyle, an Associate professor of Political Science at Texas State University who focuses on areas such as International Security Issues. This podcasts is about the Non Proliferation Treaty.

Angus Mitchell Oration: "The Humanitarian Imperative to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons" Tilman Ruff is a public health and infectious diseases physician; Co-President of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War since 2012 (Nobel Peace Prize 1985); and co-founder and founding international and Australian Chair of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons". Dr Ruff is Associate Professor in University of Melbourne's Nossal Institute for Global Health, which he helped establish. Tilman was the first civil society representative on Australian nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty delegations, civil society advisor to the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, and a delegate to the landmark Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Norway, Mexico and Austria (2013-4). In 2017, he led the IPPNW delegation in New York throughout the UN General Assembly negotiation and adoption of the historic Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In support of the treaty, he helped build a continuing collaboration between IPPNW and the largest international health federations - the World Medical Association, the World Federation of Public Health Associations and the International Council of Nurses. An IPPNW member since 1982, Dr Ruff has served as International Councillor for Australia, Boston-based consultant on policy and programs, and SE Asia-Pacific Vice-President. He is a past national president of IPPNW's Australian affiliate, the Medical Association for Prevention of War. Dr Ruff has clinical interests in immunisation and travel medicine, with over 22 years as Australian Red Cross international medical advisor. He was first to document links between outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning and nuclear testing in the Pacific. The inaugural head of travel medicine at Fairfield Hospital and then Royal Melbourne Hospital; Dr Ruff worked on hepatitis B control and maternal and child health in Indonesia and Pacific island countries with Burnet Institute, UNICEF and WHO; spent 5 years as regional medical director for an international vaccine manufacturer, and is a foundation member and serving his third term on the WHO Western Pacific Region Hepatitis B Immunisation Expert Resource Panel. Dr Ruff was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012 “for service to the promotion of peace as an advocate for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and to public health through the promotion of immunisation programs in the South-East Asia – Pacific region”.

From a Catholic perspective, let's first discuss the question of nuclear weapons. (See below a recent statement coming from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.) Then we'll take some time to update efforts by "solidarity minded" candidates for public office in California! USCCBAn ethics and a law based on the threat of mutual destruction – and possibly the destruction of all mankind – are contradictory to the very spirit of the United Nations. We must therefore commit ourselves to a world without nuclear weapons, by fully implementing the Non-Proliferation Treaty, both in letter and spirit. —Pope Francis to UN Conference to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, March 2017 In 1963 Saint John XXII wrote in Pacem in Terris: “Nuclear weapons must be banned. A general agreement must be reached on a suitable disarmament program, with an effective system of mutual control.” Support for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation has been emphasized by Blessed Paul VI, Saint John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. The U.S. Bishops have worked for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation for decades. Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the cornerstone of global efforts to curb and reverse the spread of nuclear weapons. One-hundred-and-ninety-eight countries have ratified the treaty, including the five acknowledged nuclear powers: United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China. Only four nations have not: India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. The NPT prohibits non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons (non-proliferation), requires nuclear states to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons (disarmament), and guarantees access to peaceful nuclear technology (nuclear power). Years ago, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev called for abolishing all nuclear weapons. Former Secretaries of State and Defense George Shultz, William Perry and Henry Kissinger and Senator Sam Nunn have promoted a nuclear-free world. Past presidents Barack Obama and Russian Dmitry Medvedev committed “our two countries to achieving a nuclear free world.” The Trump administration's plans for the U.S. nuclear stockpile will be articulated in a forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review. The administration will also have the opportunity to pursue an extension of New START beyond its 2021 expiration date, an extension supported by many experts and Russia as “fundamental to global security.” New START Treaty: In 1991, the United States and Soviet Union ratified the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). This treaty limited the number of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles (missiles and bombers) that each country could deploy. The treaty also incorporated a solid set of verification measures the two nations could use to monitor each other's nuclear arsenals and compliance with the treaty. Today the United States and Russia still hold about 90% of all nuclear weapons, large arsenals left over from the Cold War. START expired in 2009 and with it the verification protocols, but both nations agreed to keep its provisions in effect while they negotiated a START follow-on treaty. Implementation of a New START Treaty was critical because verification ensures transparency and even modest reductions in the number of weapons can set the stage for future reductions. The U.S. and Russia signed a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) on April 8, 2010, which was ratified by the Senate on a solid bipartisan vote of 71 to 26. The Holy See has “welcome[d] and recognize[d] the ongoing successful implementation of New START.” The New START Treaty: reduces deployed strategic warheads to 1550, 30 percent below the existing ceiling; limits both nations to no more than 700 delivery vehicles; and includes new verification requirements. Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: Despite U.S. involvement in initiating the negotiations, in 1999 the U.S. Senate failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that would stop nuclear testing. Some Senators who voted “no” expressed concerns about the ability of the United States to maintain its arsenal in the absence of testing and others were concerned about verifying compliance with the treaty. Prominent scientists have argued that the U.S. can safely maintain its nuclear arsenal without testing and that the ability of the international community to verify compliance is amply demonstrated by detections of tests in North Korea. One hundred and fifty-one other nations have ratified the CTBT, including UK, France, and Russia. The United States' failure to ratify the CTBT prevents the treaty's immediate entry into force. The Holy See declared, “There is no reason for procrastination.” It is not known when the CTBT may be submitted to the Senate for ratification. P5+1 Agreement with Iran: In recent years, serious questions were raised regarding Iran's nuclear program. In response, talk of military intervention increased, and crippling international sanctions were instituted to the detriment of Iran's economy and its citizens. Following the election of Iranian President Rouhani, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany and France (P5+1) entered into diplomatic negotiations with Iran regarding its nuclear program and international sanctions. In July 2015, after 20 months of concerted collaboration, the P5+1 reached an agreement with Iran that aims to curb Iran's development of nuclear weapons while allowing for the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. In September, a cloture vote in the Senate that would have allowed rejection of the P5+1 deal failed, so the agreement stands. Recent Iranian launches of ballistic missiles, inconsistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2231, but not in violation of the P5+1 Agreement, have raised concerns. In October 2017, President Trump announced he would not certify to Congress that Iran was in compliance, despite U.S. and international evidence that Iran is observing the agreement. To date, Congress has not acted to undermine the agreement. Nuclear Ban Treaty: In a major and encouraging development, a majority of the world's nations supported adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons with the goal of leading towards their total elimination in July 2017. The vote was 122 in favor (including the Holy See), 1 against, and 1 abstention. Unfortunately, 69 nations did not vote, including all nuclear weapon states and all but one NATO member. USCCB POSITION: The United States and other nuclear powers must move away from reliance on nuclear weapons for security. USCCB urges the Administration and Congress to view arms control treaties not as ends in themselves but as steps along the way to achieving a mutual, verifiable global ban on nuclear weapons. A global ban is more than a moral ideal; it should be a policy goal. USCCB advocated for ratification of the P5+1 Agreement with Iran in 2015. The USCCB Committee on International Justice and Peace, reflecting the longstanding position of the Holy See, urged our nation to pursue diplomacy to ensure Iran's compliance with its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Church did not weigh-in on the technical details of the agreement, but consulted with many experts on the broad outlines required for a credible and verifiable agreement. Led by Pope Francis, the U.S. bishops and Holy See continue to support the P5+1 Agreement with Iran as a “definitive step toward greater stability and security in the region.” The Holy See notes that the agreement “requires further efforts and commitment by all the parties involved in order for it to bear fruit.” During the negotiations on the Nuclear Ban Treaty, USCCB and the Conference of European Justice and Peace Commissions issued a joint call for a strategy to eliminate nuclear weapons globally USCCB plans to support Senate ratification of the CTBT if and when it is introduced. The Church opposes the use of nuclear weapons, especially against non-nuclear threats. The U.S. should commit to never use nuclear weapons first and to reject use of nuclear weapons to deter non-nuclear threats. The Church urges that nuclear deterrence be replaced with concrete measures of disarmament based on dialogue and multilateral negotiations. ACTION REQUESTED: 1. Urge bold and concrete commitments to accelerate verifiable nuclear disarmament, including taking weapons off “launch on warning” status to prevent a catastrophic accident and making deeper cuts in nuclear arsenals. 2. Oppose the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in modernizing nuclear weapons systems that ultimately we must work to dismantle. 3. Support serious negotiations on a fissile material cut-off treaty and other prudent measures. 4. If it is introduced, urge Senators to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to bring it into force. 5. Encourage Congress and the Administration not to take any actions that could undermine the agreement between the P5+1 and Iran. For further information: visit http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/war-andpeace/nuclear-weapons/index.cfm or contact Stephen Colecchi, Director, Office of International Justice and Peace, USCCB, 202-541-3196 (phone), 202-541-3339 (fax), scolecchi@usccb.org.

We discuss more theoretical elements of nuclear weapons, from the Non-Proliferation Treaty that binds countries through international law, to Nuclear Deterrence Theory, its pros and cons, and the level of influence that's had on political science/policy making. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nutshell-politics/support

Last October, the United Nations passed a historic resolution to begin negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Previous nuclear treaties have included the Test Ban Treaty, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But in the 70 plus years of the United Nations, the countries have yet to agree on a treaty to completely ban nuclear weapons. The negotiations will begin this March. To discuss the importance of this event, I interviewed Beatrice Fihn and Susi Snyder. Beatrice is the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, also known as ICAN, where she is leading a global campaign consisting of about 450 NGOs working together to prohibit nuclear weapons. Susi is the Nuclear Disarmament Program Manager for PAX in the Netherlands, and the principal author of the Don’t Bank on the Bomb series. She is an International Steering Group member of ICAN. (Edited by Tucker Davey.)

Since withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, North Korea successfully conducted three nuclear tests and officially declared in 2009 that it had developed a nuclear weapon. Beyond Pyongyang’s rhetorics and the rumors around its atomic program, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s true nuclear capabilities remain largely unknown. Does North Korea have the technology and the weapon systems to deliver a nuclear warhead on targets in South Korea or, even further, in America? What would be the actual destructive power of these payloads? What is the current American and South Korean doctrine regarding nuclear deterrence? And perhaps more importantly, is effective deterrence towards North Korea and its nuclear weapons even feasible? To answer these questions, there is probably no one more qualified than our guest for this episode: Dr. Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation and a Professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He specializes in “asymmetric threats” such as weapons of mass destruction, and Northeast Asian military issues. These include the future military force requirements in South Korea, the Korean military balance, counters to North Korean chemical and biological weapon threats in Korea and Japan, dealing with a North Korean collapse, changes in the Northeast Asia security environment, and deterrence of nuclear threats. Dr. Bennett has worked with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, U.S. Forces in Korea and Japan, the U.S. Pacific Command and Central Command, the ROK and Japanese militaries, and the ROK National Assembly. He received his Bachelor of Science in Economics from the California Institute of Technology and his PhD in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

John will look, in layman’s terms, at how modern nuclear reactors work, the prospects for a new generation of nuclear power stations, in Britain and worldwide, and how, if they are built, to make them as safe and secure as possible. Where are the catches in this ‘clean’ power generation, and how can the potential link of parts of the nuclear fuel cycle to the production of nuclear weapons be internationally policed and controlled. Why has the spread of nuclear power generation not led to the wider spread of nuclear weapons predicted in the 1960s? To a remarkable degree, so called ‘non proliferation’ has worked to date, but will the Non Proliferation Treaty be fit for purpose in the 21st Century, and what are the key indicators to look for to judge its success or failure?