Podcasts about nuclear non proliferation treaty

- Trump's Predicted Attack on Iran (0:11) - Fact-Based Statements and Initial Reactions (4:04) - Iran's Compliance with Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (6:03) - Legal and Moral Implications of Trump's Actions (9:47) - Scott Ritter's Analysis of Trump's Attack (12:21) - Best and Worst Case Scenarios (23:07) - Preparation for Potential Conflict (54:45) - Final Thoughts and Call to Action (58:10) For more updates, visit: http://www.brighteon.com/channel/hrreport NaturalNews videos would not be possible without you, as always we remain passionately dedicated to our mission of educating people all over the world on the subject of natural healing remedies and personal liberty (food freedom, medical freedom, the freedom of speech, etc.). Together, we're helping create a better world, with more honest food labeling, reduced chemical contamination, the avoidance of toxic heavy metals and vastly increased scientific transparency. ▶️ Every dollar you spend at the Health Ranger Store goes toward helping us achieve important science and content goals for humanity: https://www.healthrangerstore.com/ ▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: https://www.naturalnews.com/Readerregistration.html ▶️ Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/hrreport ▶️ Join Our Social Network: https://brighteon.social/@HealthRanger ▶️ Check In Stock Products at: https://PrepWithMike.com

Donald Trump has urged everyone to evacuate Tehran, warning “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” as conflict with Israel intensifies, Israeli strikes on Iran's state broadcaster and nuclear sites have left approximately 1,400 people dead since the beginning of the conflict, with Iran now threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iranian strikes against Israel since Friday have resulted in 24 deaths.

Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya on Monday urged all signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to collaborate to adopt outcome documents at the 2026 review conference.

【ニューヨーク時事】岩屋毅外相は２８日、米ニューヨークで始まった核拡散防止条約再検討会議第３回準備委員会で演説した。 Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya on Monday urged all signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to collaborate to adopt outcome documents at the 2026 review conference.

Experts from Japan and abroad kicked off two-day talks in Tokyo on Sunday for compiling proposals to realize a world without nuclear weapons in the run-up to next year's review conference for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Michael Elliott talks about the intricate process of nuclear planning and outlines the eight-step nuclear planning process, emphasizing the collaborative efforts required from various military and intelligence agencies. He addresses common misconceptions about nuclear launch protocols, highlighting the rigorous safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized or accidental launches. The conversation provides valuable insights into the complexities of nuclear strategy and the importance of informed policy-making in today's geopolitical landscape.Mr. Elliott is a retired member of the Senior Executive Service and current National Security Consultant. Mr. Elliott is an adviser to the Nuclear Deterrence External Advisory Board for Sandia National Laboratories.From September 2010 to November 2015 Mr. Elliott was Deputy Director for Strategic Stability, Plans and Policy Directorate, The Joint Staff. In this capacity he was a senior advisor to the Director, Plans and Policy and Chairman for shaping and implementation of national security plans and policy. He represented the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Interagency Policy Committee debate on such diverse topics as National Nuclear Technical Forensics, implementation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Chemical Weapons Convention, Biological Weapons Convention, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, CFE, Vienna Document, Open Skies Treaty and the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. In 2015 the President conferred upon Mr. Elliott the rank of Meritorious Executive in the Senior Executive Service.From April 2009 to August 2010, Mr. Elliott served as the Chairman's representative to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty negotiations with the Russian Federation.From June 2003 to April 2009 Mr. Elliott was a member of United States Strategic Command, culminating his tour as the Deputy Director for Plans and Policy, responsible for the shaping and implementation of national security plans and policy as it applied to the Command and the execution of its mission.Mr. Elliott returned to government service in June 2003, following 7 years in the private sector, where he was an Assistant Vice President with Science Applications International Corporation.Mr. Elliott retired from the United States Air Force, in January 1996, following 25 years of service. Mr. Elliott's duties included a distinguished flying career in the B-1B, FB-111, and B-52G.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Nuclear Planning and Michael Elliott15:03 The Eight-Step Nuclear Planning Process30:00 Collaborative Efforts in Nuclear Strategy30:35 Misconceptions About Nuclear Launch ProtocolsSocials:Follow on Twitter at @NucleCastFollow on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/nuclecastpodcastSubscribe RSS Feed: https://rss.com/podcasts/nuclecast-podcast/Rate: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nuclecast/id1644921278Email comments and topic/guest suggestions to NucleCast@anwadeter.org

Send us a textEpisode 172In June of 1994, with tensions escalating on the Korean Peninsula, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter undertook a bold mission to Pyongyang, North Korea. At the time, the world was teetering on the brink of crisis as North Korea threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, sparking fears of a potential war. Carter, acting as a private citizen, crossed the heavily fortified DMZ into uncharted diplomatic territory.Over three tense days, Carter met directly with North Korea's leader, Kim Il-sung, a figure long shrouded in mystery and mistrust. Against all odds, the meeting bore fruit. Carter secured a pledge from Kim to freeze North Korea's nuclear program in exchange for dialogue and aid—a breakthrough that paved the way for the Agreed Framework later that year.Carter's trip wasn't without controversy; critics saw it as undermining the Clinton administration's official stance. Yet, it was undeniably a moment of remarkable diplomacy, showcasing the power of dialogue to defuse even the gravest of threats. In the end, the trip not only prevented an imminent crisis but also highlighted the profound impact of one man's determination to pursue peace.Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States and a tireless champion for peace, passed away at the age of 99. Known for his humility, humanitarian efforts, and unwavering commitment to diplomacy, Carter's legacy extended far beyond his presidency. From his groundbreaking 1994 trip to North Korea to his work with Habitat for Humanity, Carter's life was a testament to the power of service and compassion.Support the showInsta@justpassingthroughpodcastContact:justpassingthroughpodcast@gmail.com

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.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New career review: Nuclear weapons safety and security, published by Benjamin Hilton on May 16, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note: this post is a (minorly) edited version of a new 80,000 Hours career review. In 1995, Jayantha Dhanapala chaired a pivotal conference that led to the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. This meant committing 185 nations to never possessing nuclear weapons[1] Dhanapala's path started at age 17, when - after winning a competition with an essay about his hopes for a more peaceful world - he was flown from Sri Lanka to the US to meet Senator John F. Kennedy. That meeting led to a career in diplomacy (he had previously wanted to be a journalist), during which he focused on keeping the world safe from nuclear threats. His story shows that with dedication, persistence, and a little luck, it's possible to contribute to reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons and making the world a safer place. Summary Nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity. Reducing the risk means getting nuclear countries to improve their actions and preventing proliferation to non-nuclear countries. We'd guess that the highest impact approaches here involve working in government (especially the US government), researching key questions, or working in communications to advocate for changes. Recommended If you are well suited to this career, it may be the best way for you to have a social impact. Thanks to Carl Robichaud and Matthew Gentzel for reviewing this article. Why working to prevent nuclear conflict is high-impact The risk of a nuclear conflict continues to haunt the world. We think that the chance of nuclear war per year is around 0.01-2% - large enough to be a substantial global concern. If a nuclear conflict were to break out, the total consequences are hard to predict, but at the very least, tens of millions of people would be killed. It's possible that a nuclear exchange could cause a nuclear winter, triggering crop failures and widespread food shortages that could potentially kill billions. Whether a nuclear war could become an existential catastrophe is highly uncertain - but it remains a possibility. What's more, we think it's unclear whether the world after a nuclear conflict would retain what resilience we currently have to other existential risks, such as potentially catastrophic pandemics or risks from currently unknown future technology. If we're hit with a pandemic in the middle of a nuclear winter, it might be the complete end of the human story. As a result, we think that the risk of nuclear war is one of the world's biggest problems. (Read more in our problem profile on nuclear war.) Despite this, many of the people with influence in this area, including politicians and national leaders, aren't currently paying much attention to the risks posed by nuclear weapons. So if you can become one of the several hundred people who actually contribute to decisions that affect the risk of nuclear war, you could have an enormous positive impact with your career. What goals should we be aiming towards? Ultimately, decisions around the deployment and use of nuclear weapons are in the hands of the nuclear-armed states: the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Most plausible paths to reducing nuclear risk involve changing the actions of these countries and their allies. So, which actions would be most beneficial to pursue? Note, we're focusing on the US (and NATO countries) here, because those are the countries most of our readers are well-placed to work in, but we'd expect many of these policies to be useful across the world. (We've written elsewhere about working on policy in an emerging power.) Overall, after talking to experts in the area, we think there's substantia...

Nuclear War, What is it good for?” is the second episode of “Ok Doomer!” the podcast series by The European Leadership Network's (ELN) New European Voices on Existential Risk (NEVER) network. Hosted by the ELN's Policy and Impact Director, Jane Kinninmont, and the ELN's Project and Communications Coordinator, Edan Simpson, this episode will look at the question of nuclear war - the original man-made existential threat to humanity. What would it mean for the world if a nuclear war broke? How close we are to one? And how worried should we be? As always, we set the episode up in “What's the Problem?” and in this episode, we hear from Dr Rishi Paul, Senior Policy Fellow at the ELN and Dr Oliver Meier, Policy and Research Director at the ELN, on the basics of how nuclear deterrence works and an introduction to nuclear arms control. Joining Edan on this episode's panel discussion are John Pope from the USA. John is the Chief Audience Officer at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organisation that has maintained the Doomsday Clock since 1947 in response to the advent of nuclear weapons. Valeriia Hesse, a NEVER member from Ukraine, is research coordinator at the Central European University in Vienna and a fellow at the Odesa Centre for Non-proliferation (OdCNP), where she focuses on nuclear policy and risk reduction. The final panel guest is ELN Policy Fellow Dr Olamide Samuel from Nigeria. Olamide leads the ELN's work on bolstering the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is also an honorary fellow at the University of Leicester. The panel discuss risk reduction, what it is and how it works in practice. They also discuss whether nuclear disarmament is still possible in today's environment, the role that ordinary people can play, and how they can use their voice. Jane is joined by Sahil Shah, Senior Fellow and Programme Manager at the Council on Strategic Risks for ‘Turn Back The Clock', where we explore an example from history when humanity avoided an existential risk. Finally, the episode is wrapped up in “The Debrief”, where Jane and Edan look back on the episode and all their guests to make sense of everything covered. Catch up on previous episodes, and make sure to subscribe to future episodes of ‘Ok Doomer!Risk Reduction Classification by Wilfred Wan at UNIDIRUNIDIR = United Nations Institute for Disarmament ResearchICAN = International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear WeaponsFollow the ELN on:X (formerly known as Twitter)LinkedInFacebookThe ELN's websiteThe NEVER webpage

The final Cheap Talk podcast of 2023: Thanks for visiting our store at cheaptalk.shop; Beast Train follow-up; EU regulation and the project of AI governance; the tension between domestic and international action; the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is a poor analogy for an international agreement on AI; an agreement at the Climate Summit; non-binding agreements and screening for national preferences; the role of nuclear energy in combatting climate change; and Marcus will see you next yearGet all your holiday gifts at the new Cheap Talk shop!We'll be back in January, 2024. Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast player of choice to be notified about new episodes.Send us your questions via email or voicemail.Further Reading:Oscar Martinez. 2013. The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. Verso.Pedro Ulteras. 2010. La Bestia. Ian W. Fieggen. 2023. “Granny Knot Info.” Ian's Shoelace Site.Ian W. Fieggen. 2023. “Granny Knot Analyser.” Ian's Shoelace Site.See all Cheap Talk episodes

It's widely seen as one of the Middle East's worst-kept secrets - Israel's nuclear programme. Believed to have originated in the 1950s, Israel possesses approximately 90 nuclear bombs, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.  Israel has never officially acknowledged the existence of its nuclear weapons, but they're believed to be aimed at rivals in the region like Iran. The country is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. So the statement by a cabinet minister saying Israel could opt to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza is raising alarm. More so, since hardliners like Ami-chai Eliyahu - such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich - are part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet.  So, as Israel continues its bloodbath in Gaza - should the world be worried about its nuclear arms programme?   Join Host James Bays Guests:  Rabia Akhtar - Director, Centre for Security, Strategy and Policy Research, the University of Lahore.  Ahmed Abofoul - International lawyer.  Patrick Bury - Defence and security expert, University of Bath.

Dr. Robert Floyd, Ph.D. is Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization ( CTBTO - https://www.ctbto.org/ ), the organization tasked with building up the verification regime of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, a multilateral treaty opened for signature in 1996 by which states agree to ban all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes. Prior to joining CTBTO, Dr. Floyd was the Director General of the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO), where he was responsible for Australia's implementation of and compliance with various international treaties and conventions including the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the Chemical Weapons Convention. During his time as Director General of ASNO, Dr. Floyd also chaired the advisory group to the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency on safeguards implementation (SAGSI), co-chaired the Preparatory Committee for the review of the amended CPPNM, co-chaired one of the working groups of the International Partnership for Nuclear Disarmament Verification, was the lead official for Australia in the Nuclear Security Summit process, and chaired the Asia-Pacific Safeguards Network. Prior to his appointment with ASNO, Dr. Floyd served for more than seven years in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet where he held a number of senior executive positions providing advice to the Prime Minister on policy issues covering counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, emergency management, and homeland and border security. Dr. Floyd was awarded a commemorative medal on the 30th anniversary of Kazakhstan's independence in recognition of the strong and enduring partnership between the CTBTO and Kazakhstan on nuclear non-proliferation, disarmament, peace, and security. Dr. Floyd also received the Australian Nuclear Association (ANA) award for 2021 in recognition of his outstanding leadership role as Director General of the ASNO. With a Ph.D. in population ecology, Dr. Floyd spent the first 20 years of his career as a research scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). As a long-time believer in the cause of gender equality and the empowerment of women, Dr. Floyd is an International Gender Champion (IGC) and joined the IGC network in 2021. Support the show

In this week's episode, CODEPINK Congress Coordinator Marcy Winograd interviews economist, publicpolicy analyst and prolific author Jeffrey Sachs on how the bloated military budget drives the debtcrisis. Sachs estimates US debt at $24-trillion dollars, much of it the result of US wars in Iraq, Afghanistanand Ukraine, as well the maintenance of 800 military bases abroad, development of new weapons systems and a nuclear rearmament program in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the USratified over 50 years ago. Sachs says no to NATO expansion and warns the US must seek a ceasefire in Ukraine and not start another proxy war with China over Taiwan. Peace is the path forward, according to Sachs.

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

Putin is threatening to deploy Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus. This could amount to a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. China and Japan have opposing attitudes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which shows a clear divide between the two major Asian powers. In a new episode of the series Around Ukraine, Volodymyr Yermolenko, UkraineWorld's chief editor, speaks to UkraineWorld analyst Maksym Panchenko. Explaining Ukraine is a podcast by UkraineWorld.org, a website in English about Ukraine, brought to you by Internews Ukraine. Support us at patreon.com/ukraineworld. Support our humanitarian trips to the frontline areas: Paypal - ukraine.resisting@gmail.com

Gabriela Maier Tolic, a program assistant at Youth Fusion, sits down with Dr. John Burroughs, who is a senior analyst for the New York City-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP). From February 1999 to September 2020 he was the Executive Director. Dr. Burroughs has represented LCNP in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty meetings and negotiations on the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons and was a member of the Marshall Islands' legal team in its nuclear disarmament cases in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Beyond this, he taught international law as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School. He has a J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. from Harvard University.

When Ukraine acceded to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1994, the country's leaders fulfilled a vow they had made as soon as Ukraine became an independent state in 1991. Ukraine would relinquish the thousands of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles on its territory – it's “nuclear inheritance” after the collapse of the USSR. Looking back at that decision through the lens of Russia's invasion one year ago, some observers now contend that Ukraine made a mistake by voluntarily ceding its potential nuclear deterrence, although Ukraine never had independent operational command and control over the weapons. Moreover, as political scientist and nuclear historian Mariana Budjeryn demonstrates in her new book, “Inheriting the Bomb,” the majority of Ukrainian political and military leaders in the early 1990s viewed holding onto the nukes as more dangerous than it might be worth. In this episode, Budjeryn discusses the momentous events and decisions that resulted in Ukraine transferring all its nuclear weapons to Russia to be dismantled. She illuminates an important chapter in international relations that left Ukraine in a diplomatic and political no man's land from which it could not completely extract itself over the next 30 years.

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/technology

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India's ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar's Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India's nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay's book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this interview, Jay and I talk about India's nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world's—or, at least, the U.S.'s–nuclear good graces in 2008. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Ms. Izumi Nakamatsu is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. The Office for Disarmament Affairs (ODA) was established to work with and support United Nations member states to negotiate the peaceful uses of weapons of mass destruction to small arms. Currently, nine countries have nuclear weapons.  The risk of accidental or purposeful use of nuclear weapons is the highest it has been since the Korean War. The UN is striving to provide incentives to reduce the nuclear stockpiles, especially since nuclear weapons could destroy life on the planet. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a cornerstone to encourage non-nuclear states to use technology for peaceful purposes and the nuclear powers to reduce their stockpiles. The policy of No First Use has been under discussion for years. In order to reduce the potential nuclear risks, it is critical to involve women and youth in the decision-making process to help solve these thorny problems.

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.

Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. (Isaiah 2:3-4) Followers of the Prince of Peace are called to be peacemakers, promoting harmony and order and restoring what is broken.  We call on our governments to work for peace and to restore just relationships.  We deplore the spread of weapons in our world… We pledge to walk in ways of peace, confessing that our world belongs to God; he is our sure defence. (OWBTG 54)   Followers of the Prayer Guide will notice that I've chosen Saturday's texts for today.  On Remembrance Day, it seemed more fitting to talk about our Prince of Peace. Here in Isaiah is a vision of the Kingdom of God where the nations no longer take up weapons against one another or train for war anymore. Conflict ceases.  The rein of the Prince of Peace comes.  Surely this is a vision of what the world will look like when Jesus comes again—but to what extent is it a vision that is or can be realized today?  Because the Kingdom of God has already broken into this world, has it not? It has.  And we as God's people are called to be peacemakers.  “Blessed are the peacemakers” Jesus says in his beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, “for they will be called children of God.”  We are given the power of forgiveness, love, and a Spirit-fired witness to the self-denying ways of God's Kingdom as our tools to implore people everywhere to be reconciled to God and one another.  We are also given power as citizens of a democratic government to speak into government.  In what ways do we advocate for peace in our city, province, nation, and world?  The churches in Canada have asked that question together and created Project Ploughshares based on that mandate from this very text from Isaiah 2:4.  This organization is “the peace research institute of The Canadian Council of Churches that works with churches, governments, and civil society, in Canada and abroad, to advance policies and actions to prevent war and armed violence and build peace.”  They regularly speak into the proceedings of the UN on our behalf (yes, the CRCNA is a member).  As you intercede for peace this Remembrance Day in your life, family, community, city, and world, perhaps check out the Autumn edition of Project Ploughshares quarterly publication, the “Ploughshares Monitor”.  There you can find articles that speak to the state of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Digital Surveillance, Outer Space Security, and one that details exactly how many weapons and armaments Canada exports, including to countries involved in conflict and human rights abuses.  Let it inform your prayers for peace.  

  His week that was – Kevin Healy The Taiwan lobby – historian and author Humphrey McQueen The wash up of the meeting in New York of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty members – Dr Margie Beavis representing ICAN and MAPW Environmentalist & permaculturist Wayne 'Wadzy' Wadsworth, planning to green the desert Lionel Bopage, former leader of resistance in Sri Lanka, assesses the situation there at this time

Fuel leaks during final liftoff preparations are threatening to delay the launch of NASA's mighty new moon rocket Monday on its shakedown flight with three test dummies aboard. As precious minutes ticked away, NASA repeatedly stopped and started the fueling of the Space Launch System rocket with nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen because of a leak. The rocket is set to lift off on a mission to put a crew capsule into orbit around the moon. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says that the U.N. nuclear watchdog's long-awaited expert mission to the Zaporizhzhia power plant in Ukraine “is now on its way.” The site is Ukraine's and Europe's biggest nuclear facility. The Russian military says it will launch sweeping military drills in the country's east that will involve forces from China. The maneuvers that start on Thursday reflect increasingly close military ties between Moscow and Beijing amid the tensions with the West over the Kremlin's action in Ukraine. International aid is reaching Pakistan, as the military and volunteers desperately tried to evacuate many thousands stranded by widespread flooding driven by “monster monsoons” that have claimed more than 1,000 lives this summer. Students in Ohio's largest school district were returning to classrooms after members of the union representing teachers and other employees approved a contract, ending a strike. For one day, movie tickets will be just $3 in the vast majority of American theaters as part of a newly launched “National Cinema Day” to lure moviegoers during a quiet spell at the box office. The Cinema Foundation, a non-profit arm of the National Association of Theater Owners, announced that Sept. 3 will be a nationwide discount day in more than 3,000 theaters and on more than 30,000 screens. The horror film “The Invitation” needed just $7 million to finish at the top of the weakest weekend of the summer at the North American box office. Sony also had the No. 2 movie with the Brad Pitt vehicle “Bullet Train,” which brought in an estimated $5.6 million in its fourth week, putting its domestic total past $78 million. The Washington Commanders say rookie running back Brian Robinson Jr. was shot during an attempted robbery or carjacking. The 23-year-old former Alabama player was taken to the hospital with what the team called non-life-threatening injuries. Taylor Swift took home the top prize at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards before she closed out the show with a surprisingly big announcement: Her new album. The pop star said Sunday night that her new album called "Midnights" will be released Oct. 21.  In sports highlights, Rory McIlroy won another FedEx Cup title, the Cardinals doubled up the Braves, the Astros saw their top hurler make an early exit, the Mets failed to sweep the Rockies, the Dodgers kept winning and Hawaii claimed Little League bragging rights. In a surprise salute at Citi Field, the Mets have retired Willie Mays' No. 24 as part of festivities for the organization's first Old-Timers' Day since 1994. Mets charter owner Joan Whitney Payson told Mays he would be the last player in franchise history to wear No. 24. But Payson died not long after Mays' retirement in 1973, and the Mets finally made good on her promise nearly 50 years later. A mint condition Mickey Mantle baseball card has sold for $12.6 million, blasting into the record books Sunday as the most expensive ever paid for a piece of sports memorabilia. The rare Mantle card eclipsed the record just posted a few months ago — $9.3 million for the jersey worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the controversial “Hand of God” goal in soccer's 1986 World Cup. A car driven by Princess Diana in the 1980s sold for $764,000 at auction Saturday, just days before the 25th anniversary of her death. Silverstone Auctions says there was “fierce bidding” for the black Ford Escort RS Turbo before the sale closed. The U.K. buyer, whose name was not disclosed, paid a 12.5% buyer's premium on top of the selling price, according to the classic car auction house. Russia has blocked agreement on the final document of a four-week review of the U.N. treaty considered the cornerstone of nuclear disarmament which criticized its takeover of Europe's largest nuclear plant soon after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Department told Friday's delayed final meeting of the conference reviewing the 50-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that “unfortunately there is no consensus on this document.” —The Associated PressSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After two years of delays, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's Tenth Review Conference is finally underway. Over these two years, the nuclear order has witnessed several changes. In this episode, Pranav R Satyanath and Aditya Ramanathan discuss how these changes affect the deliberations at the RevCon.Check out Takshashila's courses: https://school.takshashila.org.in/You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android: https://ivm.today/android or iOS: https://ivm.today/ios, or any other podcast app.You can check out our website at https://shows.ivmpodcasts.com/featuredDo follow IVM Podcasts on social media.We are @IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.https://twitter.com/IVMPodcastshttps://www.instagram.com/ivmpodcasts/?hl=enhttps://www.facebook.com/ivmpodcasts/Follow the show across platforms:Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Gaana, Amazon MusicDo share the word with you folks!

The warning from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came at a conference to review the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is one of the most remarkable achievements of the post-World War II era. Some 98% of the world's nations agreed to either give up their sovereign rights to acquire nuclear weapons - or if they already had them, to gradually get rid of their arsenals. The few holdouts deserve special treatment relative to their unique cases. But now, for the first time, there is simultaneously a two-front attack on the NPT regime which is administered by the IAEA: Russia's rhetoric as part of its campaign against Ukraine and its supporters in the West, and Iran's challenge to inspection and verification procedures threaten to undercut the very basis of the NPT. How do powers of various sizes and interests coping with this new reality? Is this a grave threat to world order, or just a short-term crisis? Panel: - Host: Amir Oren, TV7 Editor at Large, Host of TV7 Watchmen Talk. - Amb. Danny Ayalon, Co-Host TV7 Middle East Review, Powers in Play Panelist, former Israeli Ambassador to the US and DMoFA, Lecturer at NYU. - Col. (Ret.) Dr. Eran Lerman, Co-Host of TV7 Middle East Review, Powers in Play Panelist, JISS VP and Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune. - Col. (Res.) Miri Eisin, Co-Panelist of TV7 Powers in Play, Israeli Public Diplomacy, Security, Intelligence Expert at the ICT, the Reichman University. - Col. (Res.) Reuven Ben-Shalom, Co-Panelist of TV7 Powers-in-Play, Cross-Cultural Strategist and Associate at the ICT, Reichman University. You are welcome to join our audience and watch all of our programs - free of charge! TV7 Israel News: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/563/ Jerusalem Studio: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/18738/ TV7 Israel News Editor's Note: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/76269/ TV7 Israel: Watchmen Talk: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/76256/ Jerusalem Prays: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/135790/ TV7's Times Observer: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/97531/ TV7's Middle East Review: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/997755/ My Brother's Keeper: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/53719/ This week in 60 seconds: https://www.tv7israelnews.com/vod/series/123456/ Those who wish can send prayer requests to TV7 Israel News in the following ways: Facebook Messenger: https://www.facebook.com/tv7israelnews Email: israelnews@tv7.fi Please be sure to mention your first name and country of residence. Any attached videos should not exceed 20 seconds in duration. #IsraelNews #tv7israelnews #newsupdates Rally behind our vision - https://www.tv7israelnews.com/donate/ To purchase TV7 Israel News merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/tv7-israel-news-store Live view of Jerusalem - https://www.tv7israelnews.com/jerusalem-live-feed/ Visit our website - http://www.tv7israelnews.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/tv7israelnews Like TV7 Israel News on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/tv7israelnews Follow TV7 Israel News on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/tv7israelnews/ Follow TV7 Israel News on Twitter - https://twitter.com/tv7israelnews

NPT - Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty | International Treaties and Conventions --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/prostudyzone/message

Rose Gottemoeller, the Steven C. Házy lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation in Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, leads a conversation on international security and cooperation. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2022 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website at CFR.org/academic. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted and honored to have Rose Gottemoeller with us today to talk about international security and cooperation. Rose Gottemoeller is the Steve C. Házy lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. She is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2016 to 2019, she served as the deputy secretary-general (DSG) of NATO, where she advanced NATO's adaptation to the new security challenges in Europe and the fight against terrorism. And before that, she served as the undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department. In 2009 and 2010, she was the assistant secretary of state for arms control, verification, and compliance, during which time she served as chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Russian Federation. So, Rose Gottemoeller, thank you very much for being with us. I can't think of anybody better to have this conversation with us than you. When we planned this webinar, we knew it was the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but what we did not know was Russia would invade Ukraine and that there would be a war going on. So perhaps you can put this in context, talk about the lessons learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and where we are now, given what's going on in Ukraine. GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you so much, Irina. And it's wonderful to be with you, and with everyone who was able to join us today from across the country. I know there are many impressive institutions who are dialing in, and I really appreciate the chance to have a conversation with you and look forward to talking with the students and hearing what your questions are as well. Let me indeed begin talking today about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened sixty years ago this coming October. It was a time—I was a fourth grader at the time. And I remember, I was going to a Catholic school in Dearborn, Michigan. And the nuns said to us: You really must get home quickly tonight, children, there might be a nuclear war. You need to be with your parents. None of us knew exactly what was going on, but we knew that nuclear war was a really bad thing. We'd been through many drills, hiding under our desks or out in the hallway with our head between our knees. I have to tell you, even as a third grader, during one of those drills I thought to myself: If we get hit by a nuclear weapon, putting my head between my knees is not going to help one bit. So even as a third grader, I knew that nuclear weapons were weapons of mass destruction. So, we did manage to solve that crisis, with a secret deal, as it turned out. President Kennedy agreed quietly to withdraw intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Turkey. Never made public, until much later. And Khrushchev agreed to withdraw what were equivalent missiles from Cuba. And we got back to the negotiating table. In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis dealt not only the United States and the Soviet Union, but other countries around the world, what I call a short, sharp shock. We recognized how devastating would be the effect of nuclear war, and we decided we really did need to talk together about how we were going to control and limit those risks. So, it led to a blossoming of negotiations on all kinds of limitations and controls. First, the Limited Test Ban Treaty. It was a test ban on nuclear testing in the atmosphere that was very quickly agreed after the Cuban Missile Crisis. President Kennedy gave an important speech at American University in June of 1963, when he said we really must control this most dangerous of weapons. And he proposed at that time a test ban treaty limiting testing in the atmosphere. And that was agreed rather quickly. It's amazing to me, as an arms control negotiator, that that treaty was then agreed by August of that very year. So record time. The U.K. also joined in those negotiations. But one thing that's very interesting, the Limited Test Ban was the first, I would say also, environmental arms control treaty. It was inspired by the fact that countries around the world and publics around the world were recognizing that testing in the atmosphere was producing a lot of strontium-90 and other radioactive pollutants that were getting into the food supply. Again, I remember from that period my own mother saying, “We've got to be worried about the milk we're drinking because it's got strontium-90 in it from testing in the atmosphere.” So even then, there were some environmental pushes that led to, I think, in part the quick negotiation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty. After that, we went to the step of controlling tests also under the sea and underground, starting with the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, that did not enter into force until the early 1990s. It was a long negotiation, but it was negotiated through that period of the 1960s into the 1970s. We also negotiated what has been the foundational document of the nonproliferation regime: the [Nuclear] Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That was negotiated through the late 1960s and entered into force in 1972. It did basically designate five nuclear weapon states. These days they are U.S., U.K., France, China, and Russia. But at that time, those nuclear weapon states were the only states that would be permitted to possess nuclear weapons. All other states around the world would give up their right to nuclear weapons. But there was a grand bargain there. The nuclear weapon states agreed to proceed with total nuclear disarmament, under Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and in return for which the non-nuclear weapon states under the NPT would, again, not build their own weapons. They would prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons. And everyone would work to promote peaceful uses of the atom, whether in nuclear energy, or agriculture, manufacturing, mining industry, et cetera, promoting—or medical uses as well—promoting peaceful uses of the atom. So those are what are called the three pillars of the NPT: disarmament, nonproliferation, and peaceful uses. So that was agreed in 1972. And working in that multilateral way was important, but there was also an impetus given in this commitment to disarmament for the United States and the Soviet Union to get together and to begin to negotiate bilaterally the two together on limiting their nuclear weapons. We built up a tremendous nuclear arsenal during the Cold War years. At the time that we were beginning to talk to the Soviets about limiting nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon delivery systems, missiles and bombers, submarines—at that time, in the late 1960s, we had about 32,000 nuclear warheads, if you can imagine that. And the Soviets built up their stockpile to be about 40,000 nuclear warheads. So there were tremendous numbers of nuclear weapons being held in storage, but there were also tremendous numbers that were deployed. So we worked steadily from that period, the 1970s into the 1980s, to try to limit nuclear weapons. Didn't work so well. There are various reasons why. Most specifically, I think, we were just driving harder and harder with more effective missiles to deploy more warheads on those missiles. And so, by the time we got into the 1980s, we had about 12,000 warheads deployed on missiles and deployed or designated for deployment on bombers. The Soviets the same, about 12,000. Now, remember those numbers I gave you, 32,000 total, 40,000 total in the USSR. We held a lot of weapons in storage, not on top of missiles, not on top of delivery vehicles, as we called them. They were just held in storage. But we also then had 12,000 deployed on missiles and pointed at each other in a very high-readiness state. So we had got through the 1970s and 1980s not blowing each other up, but we also didn't have much success limiting those systems because there was this technological jump ahead, being able to put more warheads on individual missile systems. So, that's when Reagan and Gorbachev entered the scene. In the mid-1980s they got together. Reagan had not been very easy on the USSR when he came into office. He declared the USSR the “evil empire.” And he drove hard military modernization that included some nuclear modernization as well. The sclerotic Soviet leadership at that time, they were dying off one by one. First it was Brezhnev, then it was Andropov, then there was a third fellow. They all went very, very quickly. And Gorbachev took over in the mid-1980s. And he and Reagan actually then got together and began to talk about how they might reduce—not try to limit, because limit wasn't good enough. The technology was always pushing ahead. But how could we actually begin to reduce nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, and the missiles we put them on? So that was the negotiations that began in the 1980s for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and also the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which finally entered into force in 1994. And that treaty, once again, took the number of deployed warheads on both sides down from 12,000 deployed warheads on each side to 6,000 deployed warheads on each side. If you think about one of these warheads, a single warhead is enough to destroy a city. It's nothing like what we're seeing in Ukraine today. Sadly, such horrible destruction and the really barbaric attacks on civilian targets like this maternity hospital yesterday. I'm just heartbroken about this, as I'm sure many of you are. But that was a big bomb that was really directed at a single facility and was very destructive. But if you can imagine a nuclear weapon, that could really pulverize—pulverize—the center of a city. And that's what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when the United States was the only country to use nuclear weapons in wartime. And that is what has led to this nuclear taboo that has been pretty clear, because it was recognized these are weapons of mass destruction. They completely pulverize, and many, many lives lost. And those who are left living, as it was said at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would envy the dead because of the severity of their injuries. So, people were recognizing that we had too many deployed warheads. We had 12,000 pointed at each other on a high state of alert. So getting them down to 6,000 on each side was important. That was the goal of the START treaty. Then in the early 2000s, in 2002, President Bush and President—believe it or not—Putin at that time decided in the Moscow Treaty on a further reduction. That took us down to 2,200 deployed warheads on both sides. And then the treaty that I worked on negotiating, the New START treaty in 2009 and 2010, took us down to 1,550 deployed warheads on both the U.S. and Russian sides. So 12,000 down to 1,550. That's a pretty good disarmament record. And it all sprang from that short, sharp shock of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, sixty years later, it's a tragedy, but we seem to be facing another crisis on par with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vladimir Putin has been rattling the nuclear saber. We are very concerned, not necessarily about a big nuclear exchange between the United States and the Russian Federation, but about some smaller strike, perhaps use of a nuclear weapon on Ukrainian territory, perhaps a so-called demonstration strike, where Russia would launch a nuclear explosion over the Black Sea, for example, just to prove that they're willing to do it. And so, at the moment, we are facing these nuclear threats out of the Kremlin with a lot of concern, but also very serious attitude about how we sustain and maintain nuclear deterrence at this moment of supreme crisis in Ukraine, and ensure that we continue to deter Russia from taking these disastrous actions with weapons of mass destruction. But also think about ways—how can we go forward from here to preserve what we have achieved in these sixty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This great foundation of big nuclear international regimes that we have been able to put in place—such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, that means the only country that has tested nuclear weapons in this century is North Korea. There is a taboo against nuclear testing that is strongly held, the taboo against nuclear use has held since Hiroshima and Nagasaki over seventy-five years ago. And now, we are looking at ensuring that we sustain and maintain the Nonproliferation Treaty regime so that we do not see a lot of new nuclear weapon states emerging across the globe. Just one thing I forgot to mention—President Kennedy spoke quite a bit about these things. I think the Cuban Missile Crisis really for him personally was a big shock, and really provoked his thinking quite a bit—but he said, “We need this Nonproliferation Treaty because otherwise we're going to end up with twenty, twenty-five nuclear weapon states around the world. And that will be hugely destabilizing.” So the Nonproliferation Treaty regime, although we pay attention to the rogue states, the DPRKs [Democratic People's Republic of Koreas], the Irans, of course. It looks like we may be now returning to the Iran nuclear deal. I certainly hope so. We also need Iranian oil at this moment, which is another matter. But we have a couple of nuclear rogues out there. But, in general, we have prevented the proliferation of nuclear weapons, thanks to the Nonproliferation Treaty regime. We need to do everything we can at this moment to preserve and protect these important big regimes. And that goes not only for nuclear, but also the so-called other weapons of mass destruction. The Chemical Weapons Convention bans the use of chemicals in wartime. Not only chemical weapons, that is chemical designed to be used as weapons, but also what we've been seeing in Syria, the use of chlorine gas in wartime. That is forbidden by the Chemical Weapons Convention as well. So we need these big regimes to continue—the Biological Weapons Convention, the same. So I really wanted to stress this point as we get to our discussion period, because it's going to take a lot of attention and effort if Russia is now turning its back on playing a responsible role in the international community. If Russia is turning into a very big pariah state, as I argued yesterday in a piece in Foreign Affairs, we need to figure out what we are going to do, losing Russia as a partner. Because Russia has actually been a great player in negotiating all these treaties and agreements. But if Russia is turning its back on a responsible role in the international community, then the United States has to look for other partners. I would argue that we should be really approaching Beijing. They are, after all, a nuclear weapon state under the Nonproliferation Treaty. And historically they have been a rather responsible nuclear weapon state under the Nonproliferation Treaty, joining in efforts to advance the goals of nuclear disarmament. So it's hard, because at the moment, as you know, Beijing and Washington have been at great odds over any number of issues—Taiwan, trade and investment, human rights with the Uyghurs. So many issues we've been at odds over. But I think the moment has come where we need to think about how we are going to preserve these weapons of mass destruction regimes, the nuclear regimes, the testing—the ban against nuclear testing. How are we going to preserve it in the face of Russia as a pariah state? And that means, I think, we must partner with China. So those are my remarks to begin with. I see we have a few questions already. And I'm really looking forward to our discussion. Irina, back over to you. FASKIANOS: Rose, thank you very much. So let's start with a raised hand from Babak Salimitari. And please state your institution and unmute yourself. Q: Good morning. My name is Babak Salimitari. I'm a third-year economics major at University of California, Irvine. And my question really pertains with NATO as a force for international security. I was looking at the list of countries that were not paying the 2 percent of their necessary GDP for defense. And these are some rich countries, like Norway, and the Netherlands, and Germany. These aren't poor, third-world countries. I don't understand why they don't pay their fair share. So when you were in NATO, what did you tell these people? GOTTEMOELLER: That's a very good question, Babak. And, honestly, it's been great for me to watch now with this otherwise terrible crisis in Ukraine—it's been great for me to watch that countries who were very resistant of paying their 2 percent of GDP are now stepping forward and saying they are ready to do so. And Germany is the prime example. President Trump was very insistent on this matter, and very much threatening dire action by the United States, including that the United States would fail to honor its so-called Article 5 commitments to NATO, which that is—under the founding document of NATO, the so-called Washington Treaty of 1949, Article 5 states that if a single country in the NATO alliance is attacked, then all countries must—and it asks for help, there's that important point too—if it asks for help then other NATO countries are obliged to come to its assistance in defending it. So President Trump was threatening that the United States would not fulfill its Article 5 commitments. He was very tough on this matter. I was the deputy secretary-general at NATO during the years of the Trump presidency. My boss and I, Jens Stoltenberg and I, always welcomed President Trump's pressure on these matters, because every single U.S. president, again, since Jack Kennedy—I'll go back to him. There's a great—now in the public domain—a great report of a National Security Council meeting where John Kennedy says, “I am tired of these NATO European freeloaders. We spend all the money on defense; they take our defenses and don't build up their own. And they're freeloading, they're freeriding on us.” So every single U.S. president has raised this issue with the allies. But it was Donald Trump who got them to really sit up and take notice in the first instance. So President—I'm sorry—Secretary-General Stoltenberg and I always supported his efforts, although we were not supportive of his drawing any question about U.S. obligations with regard to Article 5. But we supported his efforts to push the allies on paying 2 percent of GDP. A number of them did step up during the Trump years, and so more were paying 2 percent of GDP now with this crisis. Unfortunately, again, it's taken a dire crisis in Ukraine. But we see even Germany stepping up. Just one final word on Germany. At the time, when I was DSG, they kept saying, well 2 percent of our GDP, we are the most enormous economy in Europe. And if we spend 2 percent of GDP, then other countries are going to start worrying about casting back to the past and remembering Nazi Germany, and thinking about the big military buildup in the 1930s. So we don't want that to happen. So that was very deeply ingrained in the political elites in Berlin. But now, we're seeing that 180-degree switch just in the last ten days. I think it's remarkable. But I welcome it, for one, that they are now willing to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take the next question, a written question, from Caleb Kahila, undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. One issue that I don't hear much about is the actions of individuals involved in nuclear weapons. An example is Abdul Qadeer Khan, who leads the Pakistani nuclear program but is also believed to have given nuclear information to Iran, North Korea, among others. With examples like Khan, should the international community take the issue of individual nuclear proliferation more seriously? GOTTEMOELLER: That is a great question. And indeed, certain individuals have had a profoundly malignant effect on nuclear nonproliferation. It is worthwhile to note that the Nonproliferation Treaty—the membership is very wide, but there are a few outliers. And India and Pakistan are both outliers. And I think for some weird reason, Khan felt justified in being an outlier to share nuclear weapons information with a number of countries, including also Libya, as I understand. So there was this notion I think that he had, almost an ideological notion—he's dead now—but an ideological notion of producing an Islamic bomb to counter both the Indians, their mortal enemies, but also to ensure that the rest of the world did not mess with Pakistan, and also did not mess with the rest of the Muslim world, the Islamic world. So it was, I think, very clear that this one malignant individual had an enormous deleterious effect on the nonproliferation regime. We have been able to, I think, place constraints and dial back in many ways from some of his export activities, including when the Libyans were willing to give up their weapons of mass destruction programs. But you're absolutely right that it necessary to pay attention to individuals—powerful individuals, they have to be—who have that kind of access. And luckily, they are fairly rare. But we have to pay attention to the individuals who could make a very big problem for the nonproliferation regime. I do worry nowadays about the North Koreans, about the DPRK. The trouble is, they are themselves bent on acquiring nuclear bombs. And if they give away their fissile material, for example. One of the big barriers to getting a bomb is you need a significant amount of either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And it's rather difficult to acquire. So if the DPRK were going to get into this business of giving away their expertise, the next question would be, well, how about some fissile material to back that up? And I dare say, they'd rather keep all their fissile material for themselves. But that's a very good question, Caleb. Thank you for that. FASKIANOS: I'm going to go next Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome at Brooklyn College. Q: Thank you very much. Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome. And I teach political science at Brooklyn College. And I have two issues that are kind of bothering me. One is, what are the chances that Russia will turn its back on the NPT in totality, and on other weapons regimes in this war? And then, besides an alliance with China, what are the other options for the U.S.? The second thing is, would Russia have been so bold to invade Ukraine if Ukraine hadn't destroyed its weapons—it's nuclear weapons and joined the NPT? I remember a Mearsheimer article in Foreign Affairs, I think, where he was giving a very unpopular view at that time that nuclear—destroying nuclear weapons in the Ukraine was a bad idea, because there was a need to kind of have a defense against Russia's potential invasion of the Ukraine. This was in the 1990s. And now it seems like he was right. So I'm just wondering what you think of these two issues. GOTTEMOELLER: Very good questions, Dr. Okome. And very difficult ones. But let me start on your first question. I argued yesterday in my Foreign Affairs article that I don't think it's so much that Russia would actually leave the regimes. I don't believe that they would turn their backs on the regimes by leaving them. What I believe, though, is that they will just prove to be not the good partner they have been historically. Historically they have really been, as I put it in the article, a giant of the nonproliferation regime, always looking for solutions for problems. Helping to drive forward top priorities, not only in the Nonproliferation Treaty but in what I call the wider regime, which includes these other treaties and agreements, including our bilateral treaties, the New START treaty is currently still in force, thank God. So I do worry that now they would instead turn to a more negative role, perhaps a wrecker role, in trying to stymie decision making in the regime implementation bodies, and trying to be mischievous in the way they interact with the rest of the regime members. And for that reason, I think we will need to have strong leadership. And the United States will need allies. And so that is why I have been emphasizing looking to China as a possible ally in what will be a very difficult, very difficult time going forward. But I do feel very sure that we must have as a top objective, a top priority preserving these regimes and agreements. Your second question, let me say a few words about the so-called Budapest Memorandum. I was involved in negotiating it. I worked for President Clinton in the 1990s. I was convinced at the time, I remain convinced, that what the Budapest Memorandum bought Ukraine was thirty years of peace and stability to build itself up as an independent and sovereign nation. We, in the Clinton administration, argued to Ukraine at the time that if they tried to hang on to the nuclear weapons that were left on their territory after the breakup of the Soviet Union, that they would end up in an immediate conflict with Russia that would be destabilizing and would not allow their fragile, young democracy to take root. And I still believe that very strongly. For those of you who don't remember those years, when the Soviet Union broke apart, over a thousand warheads were left on Ukrainian territory, over a thousand warheads were left on Kazakh territory, Kazakhstan, and approximately a hundred warheads were left in Belarus. So there—and there were strategic delivery vehicles. There were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) deployed in all three countries, and there were bombers deployed in Ukraine. So there were weapon systems that needed to be destroyed and eliminated. And in this case, we got the Ukrainians to agree to join the Nonproliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state. Their warheads were returned to Russia for down-blending to low-enriched uranium, which was then used in—(laughs)—it's ironic—but it was used for power plant fuel for the nuclear power plants in Ukraine. I do want to stress that at that time there was a very cooperative negotiation going on. And our assumption working—it was with the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Americans together. We were all working on this problem together in good faith. And it was a very, very positive effort overall. I still believe that Ukraine would have been caught immediately in the maelstrom of conflict with Russia if they had tried somehow to hang onto those weapons. And technically, it would not have been easy, because the command and control of all those missiles was in Moscow. It was not in Ukraine. They would have had to try to guillotine themselves from the command-and-control system in Moscow and build up a command-and-control system in Ukraine for these nuclear weapon systems. And it was our judgment, it remains my judgment, that it would have been very destructive for the young Ukrainian state, the young Ukrainian democracy to try to hang on to them. And I do think that they have taken shape as an independent power, not entirely healthy economically but, before this terrible crisis, their economy was growing. And so I do think that what we are seeing today, with the brave—very brave defense of Ukraine by the Ukrainian public, and its armed forces, and first and foremost its president—that was all born out of the thirty years that the Ukrainians got to build up their country as an independent and sovereign state. And, again, they would not have had that if they had insisted in the 1990s on holding onto nuclear weapons. FASKIANOS: Great. I'm going to take a written question from Michael Strmiska, who is associate professor of world history at Orange County Community College in New York State. I'm going to shorten it. In essence, the Biden administration has said they will not impose a no-fly zone, as have other nations. And then we recently saw the Polish fighter jets via the U.S. to Ukraine. They have declined on that. So at what point do you think—there's been a lot of talk that either one of those will trigger a nuclear war. And in his question he says: Putin says “nuke” and we run and hide. If the death toll in Ukraine approaches the levels of the Holocaust, do you think the calculus will change? And do you think that this—that would trigger nuclear war? GOTTEMOELLER: Well, it's a complex question, Dr. Strmiska. Let me—let me try to give you my point of view on it. I'll just say, first of all, that I don't think we're running and hiding at all. We have sustained—and when I say “we” I'm still talking as if I'm NATO DSG. (Laughs.) But what I mean is the United States and its NATO allies have been providing a steady stream of military assistance to Ukraine, and a steady stream of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, and also to the countries bordering Ukraine—Moldova, Hungary, Poland—that are—that are sheltering refugees from Ukraine. So we are really, I think, continuing to support them in, so far, pretty amazing ways. I have been talking to some military experts this morning, retired military officers here in the United States. And they think Putin and the Russians may be running out of ammo. We'll see to it that the Ukrainians do not run out of ammo. And so we are doing a lot to help them. And in terms of the deterrence messaging that's gone on, I've actually been rather admiring of the way that the administration has been clear about, and firm, about the dangers of rattling the nuclear saber, but also has been very clear that we are not taking steps ourselves to up the readiness of our nuclear forces, nor will we do so. They, the White House and the Department of Defense (DOD), basically postponed an ICBM test this week to ensure that there was no hint of a message that we, ourselves, are escalating. But we've been very firm and clear that nuclear use of any kind would be crossing, for us, a redline that is significant. So now let me get to your question about the no-fly zone, because I think this is—this is a complex question. It's turned into this kind of cause célèbre in the media, the press. You're watching the twenty-four-hour news cycle. All of us are, like, glued to our televisions right now, it's so horrible what is unfolding before us in Ukraine. So everybody's saying, no-fly zone, no-fly zone, no-fly zone. But when you look at it, the Russians aren't actually flying aircraft very much in Ukraine. These missiles are being delivered from Russian territory, from Belarusian territory, from ships in the Black Sea, and some now from Ukrainian territory in Donetsk and Luhansk in the eastern part of the country. But the vast majority—yesterday, the count was over 670 missiles. The vast majority of them have come from Russia. The Ukrainians don't need a no-fly zone right now. They need missile defenses. And so some of the actions that have been taken, for example, by the—by the U.K. government, for example, to get into their hands some handheld capability—now, these are not going to go after those big missiles, like the terrible explosion at the maternity hospital yesterday. That was caused by a very big missile. But some—they can be useful to defend their skies against some smaller—some smaller projectiles. And I think that's going to be important, those kinds of steps. I wish there were a way to get the Ukrainians the Israeli Iron Dome system. That's the best missile defense system around for short- to medium-range missiles. But I have my doubts that—(laughs)—the Israelis are going to want to get involved in this thing. But that's the point. This is not an air superiority problem at the moment. It is a problem of missile attacks. And so we need to do, I think, what we can to, again, get some help to the—to the Ukrainians. But we've got to be clear in our own mind what kind of help they really need. We'll see. This could change. And the Russians are upping their activity, so it may turn into more of an air battle than it has been up to this point. But I think it's really good to think harder about what the actual threat to Ukraine is today, rather than just being so fixated on a no-fly zone. FASKIANOS: Thank you. That's an important clarification. Let's go now to Kazi Sazid, who has raised his hand. Q: Hello. So I'm a political science student at CUNY Hunter College, just right next to CFR, actually. So my question is, we've seen in the past in how geopolitics and geopolitical biases obscures if not manipulates the reality of certain threats to international security and cooperation. One example is Nixon destabilizing the Allende government because there's a fear that socialism triumphed the narrative that socialism can only happen through dictatorships basically falls flat. So my question is, what avenues and mechanisms are available to ensure that security situations are not sensationalized to the point where people believe it is a bigger threat than it truly is? Sorry if that's a loaded question. GOTTEMOELLER: Well, it's a good question because it points to the information/misinformation space. And I think we've all been thinking about that a lot right now. And the United States and its NATO allies I think in the run up to the invasion actually were doing a pretty good job controlling the information space by, for example, undoing these false-flag operations that the Russians were trying to launch in the run-up to the invasion. They were actually apparently on the cusp of trying to replace the Zelenskyy government with their own puppet government. All of this was outed by some very astute use of intelligence by, again, the U.S. and the U.K., and getting it out into the information space. So in the run-up to the invasion, we were actually winning the misinformation war. Nowadays, I'm a little concerned about a couple of things. First, I'm concerned—well, there's so much to talk about here, but let me—let me just give it a shot, Kazi. We have to be concerned about the fact that Vladimir Putin is closed up in his bubble with his small cohort and is not getting sources of information that may cause him to think twice about what he's doing. And that is of concern when you're trying to deter the man, when you're trying to ensure that he knows that there will be a firm response. I don't think he had any idea—and maybe even today doesn't have any idea—at the strong pushback and the very capable pushback he's getting from the Ukrainian armed forces. They are defending their country well. And the Ukrainian public is joining in on that effort. Putin, in his bubble, just did not realize that. And now I'm not sure he's getting the information that would really help him to understand the situation that his armed forces are in right now. If, as my military experts conveyed this morning, they're beginning to run low on missiles, they're beginning to run low on ammunition, it's going to be a problem. They're going to start doing worse, rather than being able to pick up the pace, as we were talking about a moment ago, and as many people expect. So that's number one problem, is how is that deterrence messaging thing working with the Kremlin right now? The second thing I'd point to, though, is how do we reach the Russian people? Everybody takes note of the fact that all the—the internet backbone is closing down now in Ukraine. Harder and harder for Russians who are interested to get independent news that is not the product of state TV and state radio, state propaganda outlets. So how to get that message across is one that is really, really important. But I note at the same time, there was a poll that came out yesterday that was so interesting to me. It said, 58 percent of Russians support the war. And they say, well, that's pretty good. 58 percent of Russians support the war? But then when you think about it, there were a lot of “I don't knows” in that—in that poll as well. And when people don't want to say publicly what they really think they may say “I don't know,” or “I don't have an opinion on this matter.” Fifty-eight percent, when you juxtapose it against the support for the invasion of Crimea in 2014, is extraordinarily low. There was over 90 percent support for the invasion of Crimea in 2014. And now we're looking at 58 percent against the war—no, I'm sorry—it's 58 percent support the war. Sorry about that. And then a bunch of “I don't knows” in there, or “I don't want to comment” in there. So I think that there is an issue here about trying to talk directly to the Russian people. And the president has discussed that already in public. And I think we need to do better about figuring out how to reach the Russian people, especially now that social media's being shut down, other, I would say, more open forms of internet communications are being—are being shut down. We need to figure out how to message the Russian people as well. And finally, I'm not sure I'm actually answering your question, but I think—I think it's time that we start pivoting. We, the United States and NATO, to a more positive overall message of global leadership. That this is about our values and this is about what we want the world to be like in the years going forward. Let's talk about what we would need to support an independent Ukraine, no matter what. And let's talk about how we see the necessity of democratic principles and the rule of law being reenergized, restrengthened by this terrible crisis. I think we need to get a message out there about how we have a positive agenda, and we will push to pursue it, come what may. FASKIANOS: Thank you. Our next question is from Susie Risk, a first-year economics student at West Virginia University. Do you believe economic sanctions from the West on Russia is a viable way to slow Russia's advance on Ukraine? From my understanding they are mostly affecting civilians in the country, not those attacking Ukraine. And what are the other ways states like the U.S. could affect Russia in a nonviolent way? GOTTEMOELLER: I actually think the coherence of these sanctions across the board have turned them into a powerful instrument to both convey to the Kremlin, to the Russian government, and to the Russian people that they are on the wrong course. The coherence of them—there aren't any workarounds left. And in fact, even in the case of the Europeans, for example, saying that they can only cut back partially on their purchases of Russian oil because they cannot—they can't do without Russian oil and gas at the moment, but they say they're going to cut by 65 percent by the end of the year. OK, that's great, but what I'm hearing is, again, this status of the Russian Federation now as being the invader, being the country that has taken these wrong steps and is so deserving of these coherent sanctions across the board, that it is leading—like, the insurance industry—to think twice about insuring tankers that are picking up Russian oil. And so it's leading to ports messaging that they will not offload Russian oil. So despite the fact that they are still selling oil, the overall behavior of the Russian Federation and the way it is now wrapped in this coherent sanctions regime, is leading, I think, to a situation where, yeah, sure, they're going to continue to put some oil through—gas and oil through the pipelines into Europe. And they, I think, may be more likely to continue pushing that, rather than trying to turn the tap on and off, as they've done historically to try to pressure the Europeans. I think they'll be wanting to sell their gas and oil. But I think increasingly, on the stock market and in other settings, they are going to have a harder and harder time pushing oil sales, gas and oil sales. So you see this coherent sanctions regime as having knock-on effects that I think will have an even greater effect on the Russian economy, even on the Russian oil economy. FASKIANOS: It's been pretty amazing to watch the sanctions both from governments and from private—as you said—private companies and social media companies pulling out. Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and all of that, to try to—and the ruble has devalued. I think it is pretty much devalued to the very bottom. GOTTEMOELLER: Well, that's a great—that's a great point too, Irina. And particularly mentioning the sanctions against the central bank have had a profound effect. Russian rating has gone to junk—it's gone below junk bond status now, and so they're not rated anymore by the big rating companies. So it's had a profound effect on the Russian economy overall. And so, I'm wondering about—they've got very good technocrats running their banking system. That was always, I think, one of the things Putin was very proud about in coming out of the 2014 invasion of Crimea with a lot of sanctions slapped on him. He basically turned his country inward and said we are going to be more self-sufficient now and you, the bankers, you do what you can to ensure that we have lots of reserves, a rainy-day fund, that we are protected from shocks in future. Well, what happened in sanctioning the central bank is 70 percent of that rainy-day fund is held in Western financial institutions, and those now have placed blocks on the Russians getting their hands on their—on their financial reserves. So I think those steps have been coherent and very strong and have led to this really tanking of the Russian economy. FASKIANOS: Right. And with the sanctions now affecting the oligarchs and the well-to-do in Russia, that also could bring pressure on Putin—assuming they can get close enough to him—because, as you said, he is very much in a bubble that probably has been exacerbated by the two-year pandemic that we all have been living through. I'm going to go next to Nancy Gallagher, with a raised hand. Nancy, over to you. There we go. Q: I'd love to go back to the history that you started with briefly as a way of thinking about the future. And you've spent your entire career, basically, thinking about what mix of toughness and cooperation is appropriate for our relations with Russia or the Soviet Union at any given time. And even during the worst periods that you talked about, there was still some tacit cooperation that was going on to make sure—or to try to reduce the risks of a nuclear war that neither side really wanted. So it's never been 100 percent confrontation. And I'm just wondering, as you think about our relationship with Russia now, whether you've essentially written Russia off for the indefinite future or if you think that we should be continuing to think about ways of simultaneously being as tough as we need to right now, but also not completely closing the door on cooperation either to keep the risks of escalation under control now or to improve the prospects for reengagement with Russia in the future. GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you for that question, Nancy, and thank you so much for joining this call. The other half of my Foreign Affairs piece yesterday talked about this and really stressed, as strongly as I could, that we need to do everything we can to keep Russia at the nuclear, both arms control and also nonproliferation regime tables, that we need to do everything—for one thing, Russia, as I mentioned, has been a giant of these regimes. They are really very good diplomats and negotiators who work these issues, and they can help to find solutions. They have helped to find solutions throughout the fifty years since we began seriously negotiating bilaterally in the Strategic Arms Limitation agreement of the 1970s, agreed in 1972. From that time forward to the present day, fifty years we've had this great relationship at the negotiating table. We haven't agreed by any means at every step of the way, and sometimes we've been in negative territory, but we've always slowly and steadily driven forward on nuclear disarmament objectives. So I think we need to do everything we can to preserve that, and I am hopeful that we can do so. Even in the depths of this horrendous crisis, the Russians have been continuing—although with some issues coming up in recent days over sanctions—but they've been continuing to try to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. And I've got my fingers and toes crossed that, in fact, we will resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. Now, the Russians maybe were reluctant at the moment because I think the United States is seeing the potential for Iranian oil to start to flow again, which would help with this cutoff that we've embraced of our purchases of Russian oil and gas. So there's a whole bunch of issues there. But the point I wanted to make is, despite this severe disagreement and a really dire crisis over Ukraine, in this particular case we've been able to continue to work together more or less positively, and that has been the history of this. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to our survival and to the survival of Russia, clearly, but also to humankind. If we suddenly have a massive nuclear exchange, the effect on humankind overall is going to be dire. So for that reason, that existential threat has continued to place us together at the negotiating table to try to find solutions here. So I do hope that we can work our way through this and find ourselves back at the table with the Russians before too long to negotiate a replacement for the New START Treaty, which goes out of force in 2026, and to work on other issues, such as a replacement for the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which we withdrew from after Russian violations in 2019. But I think there are actually some good proposals on the table about how we return to constraints on intermediate-range ground-launched missiles. The Russians initiated some of those. Again, they are good diplomats and they are good policymakers in this realm, so I would hate to do without them. But what spurred my concern in the first place and what led to the article was this message that Dmitry Medvedev put out two weeks ago when he said, well, maybe we ought to, just withdraw from the New START Treaty and maybe we ought to just kick the embassies out of Moscow and hang—kick all the diplomats out and hang big padlocks on the embassies. Maybe we don't need the world was his message, and that's what alarmed me, so that's why I was talking about the worst case. But I do hope we can keep the Russians at the table. FASKIANOS: And just to pick up, Doru Tsaganea, an associate professor at the Metropolitan College of New York, has a question about China. And there have been reports that Xi asked Putin to hold off the invasion until after the Olympics in Beijing. There seems to be alliance between China and Russia, and now some—maybe China coming back can be—I mean, the way to bring—to give Putin an off ramp is via China. You just wrote this article in Foreign Affairs about—and you've mentioned how we can leverage—really get China in the mix to help give Putin an off ramp. Can you talk a little bit more about that dynamic? GOTTEMOELLER: Yes. Again, I started thinking about this—well, I was thinking about it during their appearance together at the Olympics—at the Olympics opening ceremony. Doesn't that seem like twenty years ago now? February 4, it was. FASKIANOS: It does. (Laughs.) GOTTEMOELLER: But, clearly, they have a joint agenda. They'll be working together on some things. But I was actually—at the time, I was actually quite positively impressed that what they did talk about—the one thing they talked about in the arms-control realm was beginning to put in place constraints on ground-launched intermediate-range missiles not only in Europe, but also in Asia. And I thought, wow, now that's interesting. If there's going to be, you know, generally Eurasian constraints on ground-launched intermediate range missiles, that's a really interesting development. And so I came away from February 4, rather positively impressed that we might be able to do something with both Russia and China in that regard. But fast forward to the 24 of February and the invasion of Ukraine, and here in—just a few days after that terrible day, the foreign minister of Ukraine, Mr. Kuleba, phoned his counterpart in Beijing and asked for facilitation again of diplomacy with Russia. And at least from the readouts of that meeting, slightly less forward-leaning on the Chinese side but not contradicting anything Kuleba said, the Chinese seemed to indicate a willingness to facilitate diplomacy. It does—I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. In diplomacy, it's always better if you don't know what's going on behind the scenes—(laughs)—if it is quiet diplomacy, if it's not out in public, if it's not this—one of the reasons why I was pretty—well, we all hoped against hope regarding no invasion. But, the Russians seemed to be in bad faith from December on because they kept playing at megaphone diplomacy—putting out their proposals to the public and the press, and even leaking U.S. answers in some cases. So they were clearly not playing a proper diplomatic game, which is quiet diplomacy behind the scenes trying to make quiet progress. So I hope that this Chinese facilitation has begun. I have no hint of it at the moment, but I certainly think that it could be—it could be a productive way to begin to develop some new off ramp. We've tried a lot off ramps with Putin and it hasn't worked, but maybe the Chinese can help us develop another way of approaching this matter. Finally, I will just take note of the fact that there are other facilitators in the game. For example, President Erdoğan of Turkey has been very active, and today there is a meeting between the foreign ministers of—again, Kuleba, foreign minister of Ukraine, and Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia in Turkey. I, for one, I haven't seen any reports of it. You may have seen reports of the outcome, Irina, but I think that that—that kind of facilitation is important, and I hope it will continue. We all want to see diplomacy taking precedence over the bombing of innocent civilians in Ukraine. FASKIANOS: Right. There are a lot more questions, and I—we can't get to them. I apologize. But I don't want to—and we are at the end of our time, but I just want to give you an opportunity and give the students to hear your thoughts on public service. You've devoted your—mostly your entire career to it. You're now teaching. You have a lecturer spot at Stanford, so you're clearly working with students. And what you would say about public service. GOTTEMOELLER: I was so privileged to have the opportunity to serve both President Clinton and President Obama. I think if you can in your career do a stint of public service it will be absolutely a wonderful experience for you. Now, sometimes bureaucracies can be pretty frustrating, but it's worth—it's worth the price of admission, I would say, to begin to operate inside that system, to begin to figure out how to make progress, and it is the way you put ideas into action. You know, from the outside I can write all the op-eds I want to, and, yeah, some of them may get picked up by somebody inside the government. But when you're working inside the government, you can really put ideas into action from the lowest levels, even if you have a chance to be an intern at the State Department or in one of the other agencies of government, you can begin to get a flavor for this. But you might be surprised that they're asking for your opinion because you all at the, I would say, less-old—(laughs)—end of the spectrum have a lot of good new ideas about how the world should work going forward. And particularly I think this problem I talked about, how to communicate now directly with the Russian people, for example, you've got the skills and savvy to help people inside government to understand how to—how to do that effectively. So you've got some special skills, I think, that are much needed at the present time. So I would not shy away from some time in government. People often ask me, well, won't I get trapped there? I think your generation will not get trapped there just because you already think about the world of work differently. You're not going to be a lifer in any organization. You don't want to start in the State Department and work there for forty years. You'll be working, in—maybe in Silicon Valley; and then you go work for Capitol Hill, the Congress; then you may go into government for a little while, the executive branch; and then back to—back to the corporate world. So I know that you'll be thinking quite differently about how to build your careers, but don't shy away from public service. It's a very good experience and it's where you can make a difference. FASKIANOS: Well, with that, Rose Gottemoeller, thank you very much for being with us today and for sharing your expertise and analysis. We really appreciate it. And giving us a historical context, which is so valuable to understanding where we are today. You can follow Rose on Twitter at @gottemoeller. Our next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, March 23, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Jody Freeman at Harvard University will talk about global climate policy. We will send out the link to this discussion—the video, transcript—as well as the link to Rose's Foreign Affairs article so you can read it if you didn't have a chance. It was in yesterday's background. And I encourage you to follow us on Twitter at @CFR_academic, and go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. So thank you all again and thank you, Rose. GOTTEMOELLER: Thank you. Thanks for a great discussion. (END)

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's 10th Review Conference has been postponed repeatedly due to the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps a symbol of the degree to which global efforts to curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons and reduce global stockpiles have stalled in recent years. North Korea continues to expand its nuclear capabilities, and the U.S., China and Russia are all investing heavily in modernizing their arsenals. And efforts to bring Iran back into compliance with the nonproliferation regime have been set back by the Trump administration's withdrawal from the multilateral deal known as the JCPOA, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that contained Tehran's nuclear program. But while the NPT Review Conference is sorely needed to resolve these and a host of other outstanding problems regarding the treaty and its implementation, some observers welcomed the postponement, as it gives state parties more time to bridge some of their stark disagreements over the best way forward.  To discuss these issues and more, Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, joins Peter Dörrie on Trend Lines. Relevant articles on WPR: NATO's Nuclear Deterrent Gets a Reprieve—for Now  The U.S. Should Rethink Its Approach to Reviving the Iran Nuclear Deal  China's Nuclear Build-Up Could Make for a More Dangerous Future  How the U.S. and Russia Can Go Beyond New START 

Global Abolition Movement for Peace. The host for this show is Joshua Cooper. The guests are Jackie Cabasso, Bill Kidd and Alyn Ware. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came into effect in 1970 with the promise of creating a nuclear weapons free world. Beginning January 4, diplomats will converge on the U.N. with the ostensible goal of holding governments accountable to fulfill the Treaty's promise. We cannot afford to fail. The ThinkTech YouTube Playlist for this show is https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQpkwcNJny6lBAcTYfWa3JsYGYjCulQFi

China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States have pledged to prevent nuclear war and avoid arms races. The leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states made the joint statement, reaffirming their commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligation.

Patrick Graham is joined by Dr Monique Cormier to talk about Australia's relationship with a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nuclear obligations and the USA's defence facility in Australia at Pine Gap. Monique is a Senior Law Lecturer in the UNE School of Law. Her research focuses on international crime, nuclear disarmament and extended nuclear deterrence. Monique also undertakes pro bono advisory projects for non-governmental organisations on contemporary issues of public international law. In this week's episode, Monique chats to Patrick about Australia's increasingly challenging defence environment and the unique issues for Australians as well as our Pacific neighbours. Tune into this week's Law in the Bush episode to learn more about Dr Monique Cormier's journey in Law and Australia's nuclear obligations and future. We've got some prizes to giveaway. Tell us your favourite episode and why. The best ten entries win a prize. Email us at bushlawyerpodcast@une.edu.au and include your postal address. We'll send your prize via snail mail to anywhere in the world. Remember to rate us, share, and subscribe as it helps us spread the word.* Like our podcast? We'd love to hear from you. Do our survey: https://unesurveys.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_24sXnmLvXUMJ8kS Join our podcast community, and follow us at: •Law in the Bush Facebook page •Law in the Bush Webpage For more information on our research centres visit: •Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law •First Peoples Rights and Law centre •International Journal of Regional, Rural and Remote Law and Policy For more information about the UNE Law School visit: •Website •Facebook Page •LinkedIn •Blog

RUSH: Here is the path, by the way, to October 8th. The Path to October 8th is the sequel to The Path to 9/11. The Path to October 8th — of course that's when Kim Jong ll tests his little nuke.  1993: North Korea shocks the world by saying it will quit the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and then layered suspends its withdrawal.  1994: North Korea and the United States sign an agreement in Geneva, North Korea pledging to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for help building two power producing nuclear reactors.  That was the sucker deal made with Madeleine Albright — Jimmy Carter did some advance work — and with the Clinton administration. So it was 1994, Clinton's second year in office that North Korea ran the sucker deal to perfection against the United States.  https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2006/10/09/the_path_to_october_8th_timeline/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

The United Nations is expected to hold the tenth Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in 2021, following its spring 2020 postponement. In this event, panelists discuss the status of the treaty, which has facilitated nonproliferation cooperation for more than fifty years, including the major accomplishments of its signatories and the challenges they face. The Paul C. Warnke Lecture on International Security was established in 2002 and is endowed by a number of Council members and the family and friends of Paul C. Warnke. The lecture commemorates his legacy of courageous service to the nation and international peace.

In this episode Dr Simon McKenzie talks with Dr Anna Hood and Dr Monique Cormier to discuss the attempt to ban the most destructive weapons in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty. They talk about how the treaty works, who has signed up, and the value of the treaty given that no nuclear weapon states have signed up. They also explore its history, and how it connects to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.Australia did not participate in the negotiations for the Nuclear Ban Treaty and has not become a State party. They discuss why the rationale that has been given for this refusal, and explain what is meant by the "nuclear umbrella" and "extended nuclear deterrence," and how it relates to the joint military facility at Pine Gap and the ANZUS treaty.Dr Anna Hood is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland. Anna is a public international lawyer. She has a BA/LLB (hons) from the University of Melbourne, an LLM (International Legal Studies) from NYU and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Anna's work focuses primarily on disarmament law, refugee law and issues concering New Zealand and international law. She also has a keen interest in legal education and the role of universities in the 21st century.Dr Monique Cormier is a Lecturer at the University of New England. Monique has Bachelor of International Studies and Bachelor of Laws (hons) from the University of Adelaide, an LLM from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Melbourne.  Monique's primary research interests are jurisdiction, defences and immunities in international criminal law and on legal issues relating to nuclear disarmament and extended nuclear deterrence.Suggested further reading:Anna Hood and Monique Cormier, 'Can Australia Join the Nuclear Ban Treaty Without Undermining ANZUS?' (2020) 44(1) Melbourne University Law Review.Monique Cormier and Anna Hood, ‘Australia's Reliance on US Extended Nuclear Deterrence under International Law' (2017) 13 Journal of International Law and International Relations 3The Pine Gap Project on the Nautilus InstituteStuart Casley-Maslen, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2019)Treasa Dunworth and Anna Hood (eds), Disarmament Law: Reviving the Field (Routledge, 2021).The research of Richard Tanter

This show continues our discussion of 8/6/2020, which marked the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. We pick up the thread of conversation about “organizing the world” for peace in the nuclear age through international institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the recent case brought by the Marshall Islands which sought to enforce provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We discuss the philosophical ideas and practices behind other proposed paths to “organize the world” for peace in the nuclear age such as the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and a new U.S. initiative known as “CEND” (“Creating the Environment for Nuclear Disarmament) which charts a different course.

This show continues our discussion of 8/6/2020, which marked the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. We pick up the thread of conversation about “organizing the world” for peace in the nuclear age through international institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the recent case brought by the Marshall Islands which sought to enforce provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We discuss the philosophical ideas and practices behind other proposed paths to “organize the world” for peace in the nuclear age such as the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and a new U.S. initiative known as “CEND” (“Creating the Environment for Nuclear Disarmament) which charts a different course.

In the summer of 1945 Keijiro Matsushima glanced up and saw two beautiful silver planes in the sky. Within a moment, an atomic bomb detonated, his Hiroshima was destroyed, killing family and classmates. Within a few days, Nagasaki too experienced civilians being vapourised, burned and irradiated in the tens of thousands. After these nuclear attacks, the world changed for ever. But as the US breaches its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and modernises its nuclear forces, it may surprise you that some Australian banks, superannuation companies, and our national Future Fund, are making profits from their investments in nuclear weapons companies, and don’t think the question is even "controversial." The Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPWA) and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) have set up Quit Nukes , to analyse and approach Australian financial institutions which are benefiting from nuclear weapons. MAPWA's Dr Margaret Beavis and Quit Nukes' national director Margaret Peril share what they are finding out, asking us all: does your super fund invest in nuclear weapons? Are you interested in divesting? Photo: Nagasaki, September 25, 1945 (Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr. at Wikimedia)

From authors William J. Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration, and Tom Z. Collina, the Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation in Washington, DC, The Buttonrecounts the terrifying history of nuclear launch authority, from the faulty 46-cent microchip that nearly caused World War III to President Trump’s tweet about his “much bigger & more powerful” button. Perry and Collina share their firsthand experience on the front lines of the nation’s nuclear history and provide illuminating interviews with former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Congressman Adam Smith, Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, senior Obama administration officials, and many others. Shermer, Perry and Collina also discuss: even if Trump loses the 2020 election and we have President Biden, real risks of nuclear catastrophe exist because of the system, not the person, why the Iran deal was a good one to keep that country from developing nukes, how to deal with North Korea and Perry’s experience with the Kim dynasty, why the Russians are rational actors who do not want nuclear war, terrorists and the possibility of them getting a nuke, why we must eliminate Launch on Warning and First Strikepolicies, what is in “the football” seen held by men constantly trailing the President? Stanislav Petrov: the man who saved the world, and what this story tells us about the precariousness of our current system, game theory, the logic of deterrence, and how to get around it, why nuclear weapons were not inevitable, and changing the taboo from not using nuclear weapons to not owning them. William J. Perry served as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration, and then as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, and has advised presidents all through the Obama administration. He oversaw the development of major nuclear weapons systems, such as the MX missile, the Trident submarine and the Stealth Bomber. His new “offset strategy” ushered in the age of stealth, smart weapons, GPS, and technologies that changed the face of modern warfare. His vision now, as founder of the William J. Perry Project, is a world free from nuclear weapons. Tom Z. Collina is the Director of Policy at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation in Washington, DC. He has 30 years of nuclear weapons policy experience and has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was closely involved with successful efforts to end U.S. nuclear testing in 1992, extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995, ratify the New START Treaty in 2010, and enact the Iran nuclear deal in 2015. Collina has published hundreds of articles, op-eds, and reports and appears frequently in major media. Listen to Science Salon via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.

On today's Global Exchange Podcast, we are joined by Paul Meyer, who recently published an International Journal paper, "Overcoming the NPT's 'institutional deficit': A Canadian saga," to discuss the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and Canada. The Global Exchange is part of the CGAI Podcast Network. Subscribe to the CGAI Podcast Network on SoundCloud, iTunes, or wherever else you can find Podcasts! Participant Bios:

 - Paul Meyer: Fellow in International Security and Adjunct Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, and Chair of the Canadian Pugwash Group. Host Bio: - Colin Robertson (host): Vice President of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Recommended Readings/Media: - "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" by Tony Judt (https://www.amazon.ca/Postwar-History-Europe-Since-1945-ebook/dp/B000SEGSB8) Recommended Links: - "Overcoming the NPT's “institutional deficit”: A Canadian saga" by Paul Meyer (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0020702020915634) - "Canadian Pugwash Group" (http://pugwashgroup.ca/) Recording Date: April 21, 2020 Give 'The Global Exchange' a review on iTunes! Follow the Canadian Global Affairs Institute on Facebook, Twitter (@CAGlobalAffairs), or on Linkedin. Head over to our website www.cgai.ca for more commentary. Produced by Jay Rankin. Music credits to Drew Phillips.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty turned 50 this year. But its landmark review conference this year has been postponed because of the global pandemic. Anirudh Kanisetti talks to Aditya Ramanathan and Pranav RS about treaty's contested past and uncertain future.Follow our host Anirudh on twitter: @AKanisetti (https://twitter.com/AKanisetti)Follow our host Aditya on twitter: @adityascripts (https://twitter.com/adityascripts)You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android: https://ivm.today/android or iOS: https://ivm.today/ios, or any other podcast app.

Liz looks at the consequences of the Cuban Missile Crisis for your GCSE History exam. In this episode, she will look at what happened after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She goes through the detente as well as the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Suitable for AQA, Edexcel, OCR and CIE exam boards. Ideal for preparing you for your GCSE History exam. Click here for the full course, or visit this link: http://bit.ly/2v73km3

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty turns 50 this year, but the celebrations may be short-lived. Also, the challenges facing Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as he tries to keep both China and America happy. And why the future of video-gaming may play out in the cloud. Tom Standage hosts. Music by Chris Zabriskie "Candlepower" (CC by 4.0) Please subscribe to The Economist for full access to print, digital and audio editions:www.economist.com/radiooffer or here for The World in 2020 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty turns 50 this year, but the celebrations may be short-lived. Also, the challenges facing Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as he tries to keep both China and America happy. And why the future of video-gaming may play out in the cloud. Tom Standage hosts. Music by Chris Zabriskie "Candlepower" (CC by 4.0) Please subscribe to The Economist for full access to print, digital and audio editions:www.economist.com/radiooffer or here for The World in 2020 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Iran's move to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty looks like an invitation to the U.S. to bomb them back to the stone age. But is it? Russian military strategy is predicated on creating cauldrons, encircling an over-confident enemy and cutting off their means of retreat.Is this move by Iran part of their larger gambit to get what it wants in the Middle East? Are the Neocons about to fall into the biggest geopolitical quagmire of all time? This week we explore all of these issues and what the Taliban downing an E11-a BACN Communications plane means knowing that the CIA's head of its Anti-Iran division, Mike D'angea was onboard.

Jason Ditz discusses the latest on Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities. Although Iran has talked about abandoning their obligations under both the JCPOA and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Ditz says they are still so far from having nukes that withdrawing from these agreements doesn’t mean they would actually get nukes. More importantly, Iran is well aware of how quickly the U.S. and its allies would come down on them if they really did try to start producing weapons. In fact the only conceivable way Iran would pursue nukes, says Scott, is if the U.S. had already declared war on them and they felt they needed a nuclear deterrent. Discussed on the show: “Friedman’s Hapless Fear-Mongering” (The American Conservative)“Obama to Iran and Israel: ‘As President of the United States, I Don’t Bluff'” (The Atlantic) Jason Ditz is the news editor of Antiwar.com. Read all of his work at news.antiwar.com and follow him on Twitter @jasonditz. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com. Donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin: 1Ct2FmcGrAGX56RnDtN9HncYghXfvF2GAh.Audio Player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHvi1ZQKZGU

Australia berates Iran and North Korea for ignoring multilateral treaties that guard against nuclear proliferation. Yet Australia makes a special exception for its ANZUS ally. The United States' has been modernising its huge nuclear arsenal, and President Trump has repudiated the INF and Iran nuclear deals. The requirement in Article VI of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (to negotiate towards complete and general disarmament) has been glossed over by both Australia and the United States, with the two ANZUS allies talking down the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would implement such a framework. Australia says our security lies instead under a "nuclear umbrella" provided by the US, but our neglect of a general international rule of law could prove tragic. Professor Tilman Ruff from ICAN shares why even a "limited" nuclear war in South Asia, distant from superpower tensions, could lead to a global nuclear winter, render the ANZUS treaty irrelevant, and prove a catastrophe for us all. (Image: Postcard Great White Fleet 1908, with US nuclear missile, Trident sub, inset)

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.

On today's episode: The U.S. withdraws from 1988 Nuclear Forces TreatyBBC Witness takes us inside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

This week the US announced the end of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. While all eyes are on the former Soviet Union, the US is aiming for China. Is the US headed for an arms race after thirty years in the treaty? We speak to resident missile defense expert Riki Ellison about why the US made the decision to leave. Then, we're headed to the Af-Pak region where the US is working on a peace deal with the Taliban. Countries in the region are preparing for the US departure. Pakistan has started constructing a barrier between themselves and Afghanistan. We'll speak to our voice in the region and see if he believes the wall will work. And finally, on Change Is Hard, we'll check your privilege with AOC. Then we'll dive into the controversy regarding the Virginia governor and his Michael Jackson impression.

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.

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: The civil rights movement shook American racial apartheid to its foundations, inflicting profound defeats on white supremacy, but the defenders of the old racial regime have turned that history into a feather in the cap of American exceptionalism; and, the Pennsylvania prison system is using a dubious alleged drug-induced health crisis to impose unprecedented restrictions on inmate mail and visitation. Israel is the only nuclear power on Earth that has not only refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, but enforces a vow of silence on U.S. presidents from both political parties. The Washington DC-based Institute for Research on Middle Eastern Policy has filed suit in federal court to make public letters that the New Yorker magazine says every president since Bill Clinton has signed, promising to never publicly discuss Israel’s arsenal of nuclear weapons or to pressure Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. We spoke with Grant Smith, director of the Institute, and asked him, How could it be that, for two generations, all discussion of Israeli nukes has been forbidden in official Washington? The same people who fought the civil rights movement tooth and nail, defending discrimination and segregation, now use the movement’s victories as proof that the United States is an inherently good country, a nation that means well even when it is wrong. As proof, they point to the successes of the U.S. civil rights movement, two generations ago. Jeanne Theoharis is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, and author of the new book, “A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.” Theoharis says the civil rights movement and its leaders have become props for American exceptionalism. Pennsylvania’s 25 state prisons all went on lockdown, last month, with no notification to inmates or the public. It eventually emerged that the state was claiming that prison guards and other employees had been poisoned by contraband drugs that were smuggled into prison. Medical experts and others questioned the state’s story. Among the most skeptical parties are the lawyers for the Abolitionist Law Center and the Amistad Law Project, who fight for prisoners’ rights in Pennsylvania. Kris Henderson is with the Amistad Law Project, in Philadelphia. Dr. Joseph Harris is a former member of the Black Panther Party, and currently the personal physician to Mumia Abu Jamal, the best known political prisoner in the Pennsylvania prison system. Dr. Harris has visited Mumia since the lockdown and shakeup of the state prison system. Harris played a key role in Mumia’s fight to be cured of hepatitis-C, for himself and thousands of other inmates.

In July 1968 one of the most significant international treaties of the 20th-century was signed. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, obliging signatories not to pass nuclear technology on to others, and was the result of rare cooperation between Cold War adversaries, the United States and the Soviet Union. Louise Hidalgo talks to former Soviet diplomat, Roland Timerbaev, who helped draft the treaty.Picture: the mushroom cloud created by the explosion of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6th August 1945 (credit: Press Association)

Why did Trump sign a nuclear deal with North Korea, while bailing out of a deal with Iran? Is it just Trump being Trump? Or is there more to the story? In Episode 51 of the Pragati Podcast, lawyer and analyst Ameya Naik(http://twitter.com/kianayema ) joins hosts Hamsini Hariharan(https://twitter.com/HamsiniH) and Pavan Srinath(https://twitter.com/zeusisdead) to discuss the nuts and bolts of nuclear sanctions and deals. Ameya talks about Iran in this episode, and will talk about North Korea and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in next week's episode. Send in your questions for Ameya and the hosts to podcast@thinkpragati.com and get them answered on a future episode.

In 1970, under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, most of the world’s countries entered a pact not to acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for a pledge by the existing nuclear powers to work towards disarming their formidable stockpile of nuclear weapons. This past year at the United Nations, frustrated by the long delay in fulfilling this commitment, a majority of non-nuclear states began to draft a new treaty designed to ban all nuclear weapons as illegal and a crime against humanity. Though the process has been initiated, its proceedings have from the beginning been opposed by the United States, Russia and most of the other nuclear powers as “impractical,” and these powers have refused to participate in the negotiations. A long-time advocate for nuclear disarmament, John Burroughs, Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy will address some of the reasons behind the present conflict and some possible options open to proceed towards a more hopeful solution.

As tension grows on the Korean peninsula, dissension simmers over the future of the Iran Deal, and conflict brews on the India-Pakistan border, the global nuclear landscape is more complicated than ever. In a special edition of the Carnegie Podcast, Toby Dalton of Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program hosts a recap of Carnegie's recent 2017 International Nuclear Policy Conference. Listen in as nuclear experts and world leaders debate the future of the Iran Deal, the Trump administration's nuclear posture, the future of North Korean proliferation, and prospects for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Toby Dalton is co-director of Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program. An expert on nonproliferation and nuclear energy, his work addresses regional security challenges and the evolution of the global nuclear order. From 2002 to 2010, Dalton served in a variety of high-level positions at the U.S. Department of Energy, including senior policy adviser to the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security. (More about the 2017 Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference: http://carnegieendowment.org/2017/03/21/2017-carnegie-international-nuclear-policy-conference-event-5209)

The global nuclear order is facing unprecedented challenges with Russia, North Korea and Iran all testing the limits of nuclear non-proliferation. The landmark Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty marks its 50th anniversary next year. Will it be able to survive in its present form? This month, as Carnegie brings together 800 experts for its nuclear policy conference in Washington, Tom Carver spoke with Carnegie's James Acton and Toby Dalton about the nuclear nonproliferation agenda. James Acton is co-director of Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program. A physicist by training, Acton was a winner of the competitive Carnegie Corporation of New York grant on New Technologies and the Nuclear Threat that funds his ongoing research into the escalation implications of advanced conventional weapons. Toby Dalton is co-director of Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Program. An expert on nonproliferation and nuclear energy, his work addresses regional security challenges and the evolution of the global nuclear order. From 2002 to 2010, Dalton served in a variety of high-level positions at the U.S. Department of Energy, including senior policy adviser to the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security. He also established and led the department's office at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan from 2008-2009.

John Burroughs is Executive Director, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy (www.lcnp.org), based in New York City. He represents LCNP in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review proceedings, the United Nations, and other international forums. He was a member of the Marshall Islands international legal team in its nuclear disarmament cases in the International Court of Justice. He's the author of numerous publications related to nuclear weapons including contributing to a report called The Climate-Nuclear Nexus, which we discuss. Burrough's publications include: contributor, Unspeakable suffering - the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons (2013) (available here); contributor, Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear Weapon Modernization Around the World (2012) (available here); author, The Legality of Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice (1998). He has also published articles and op-eds in journals and newspapers including Fordham International Law Journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, the World Policy Journal, and Newsday. He has taught international law as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School, Newark.

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of Political Science, Lipscomb University) analyzes China’s buildup and its diversification of increasingly mobile, precise, and sophisticated nuclear weapons in her new book Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization (Potomac Books, 2016) . Haynes provides context and clarity on this complex global issue through an analysis of extensive primary source research and lends insight into questions about why China is the only nuclear weapon state recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that continues to pursue qualitative and quantitative advancements to its nuclear force. As the gap between China’s nuclear force and the forces of the nuclear superpowers narrows against the expressed interest of many nuclear and non-nuclear states, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation offers policy prescriptions to curtail China’s nuclear growth and to assuage fears that the “American world order” presents a direct threat to China’s national security. Presenting technical concepts with minimal jargon in a straightforward style, this book will be of use to casual China watchers and military experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of Political Science, Lipscomb University) analyzes China’s buildup and its diversification of increasingly mobile, precise, and sophisticated nuclear weapons in her new book Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization (Potomac Books, 2016) . Haynes provides context and clarity on this complex global issue through an analysis of extensive primary source research and lends insight into questions about why China is the only nuclear weapon state recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that continues to pursue qualitative and quantitative advancements to its nuclear force. As the gap between China’s nuclear force and the forces of the nuclear superpowers narrows against the expressed interest of many nuclear and non-nuclear states, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation offers policy prescriptions to curtail China’s nuclear growth and to assuage fears that the “American world order” presents a direct threat to China’s national security. Presenting technical concepts with minimal jargon in a straightforward style, this book will be of use to casual China watchers and military experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of Political Science, Lipscomb University) analyzes China’s buildup and its diversification of increasingly mobile, precise, and sophisticated nuclear weapons in her new book Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization (Potomac Books, 2016) . Haynes provides context and clarity on this complex global issue through an analysis of extensive primary source research and lends insight into questions about why China is the only nuclear weapon state recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that continues to pursue qualitative and quantitative advancements to its nuclear force. As the gap between China’s nuclear force and the forces of the nuclear superpowers narrows against the expressed interest of many nuclear and non-nuclear states, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation offers policy prescriptions to curtail China’s nuclear growth and to assuage fears that the “American world order” presents a direct threat to China’s national security. Presenting technical concepts with minimal jargon in a straightforward style, this book will be of use to casual China watchers and military experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the world’s attention is focused on the nuclearization of North Korea and Iran and the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan, China is believed to have doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal, making it the forgotten nuclear power, as described in Foreign Affairs. Susan Turner Haynes (Professor of Political Science, Lipscomb University) analyzes China’s buildup and its diversification of increasingly mobile, precise, and sophisticated nuclear weapons in her new book Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics is Transforming China’s Weapons Buildup and Modernization (Potomac Books, 2016) . Haynes provides context and clarity on this complex global issue through an analysis of extensive primary source research and lends insight into questions about why China is the only nuclear weapon state recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that continues to pursue qualitative and quantitative advancements to its nuclear force. As the gap between China’s nuclear force and the forces of the nuclear superpowers narrows against the expressed interest of many nuclear and non-nuclear states, Chinese Nuclear Proliferation offers policy prescriptions to curtail China’s nuclear growth and to assuage fears that the “American world order” presents a direct threat to China’s national security. Presenting technical concepts with minimal jargon in a straightforward style, this book will be of use to casual China watchers and military experts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forty-five years since the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) took effect, and 70 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 16,000 nuclear weapons still exist-many on Cold War-era alert, ready to launch in 15 minutes. Over the past 45 years, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has put in place an indispensable yet imperfect set of rules for creating a safer world. Under the treaty, countries without nuclear weapons agree not to get them, and countries with nuclear weapons, (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US) agree to eventually get rid of them. India, Israel and Pakistan have nuclear weapons but have not joined the NPT; North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003, and then began testing nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, nuclear armed countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on modernising their arsenals.

Tonight we'll hear an eclectic line-up taking us all over the globe: First we'll cover the stunning Indiana verdict that sentenced Purvi Patel to decades in prison after she sought medical help after suffering a miscarriage. Then, we'll hear about action the Republic of the Marshall Island took today in United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, demanding that the U.S. adhere to its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This David and Goliath lawsuit calls on the U.S. to immediately take action to disarm. We'll then go to the Big Island in Hawaii, where native Hawaiians have been protesting and blockading the mountain of Mauna Kea, stalling plans to build a mammoth telescope. We'll round out the hour in conversation with the Rupert Estanislao and Josh Castro, founders of Filipino punk rock label Aklasan Records. Rupert will be playing with Bankrupt District at a KPFA fundraiser at 924 Gilman. With Host Tara Dorabji. The post APEX Express: Purvi Patel, Mauna Kea, and Marshall Islands – April 9, 2015 appeared first on KPFA.

How did the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1967 lay the groundwork for the age of terrorism? Dr. Mitton takes us right up to our own day in this episode.

In this episode, Kevin and Benari discuss Iran, its new leader Hassan Rouhani, and what this has to do with you. Listen as they manage to cover 4,000 years of Persian history in three minutes, tackle Rouhani’s budding bromance with President Obama, and talk about some things you may not know about, like Iran’s nuclear weapons capability. Benari shares some of his expertise from being attached to a nuclear weapons unit in the US Army and Kevin throws some of his legal mumbo jumbo at us about the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and sanctions. Also, Kevin reveals his true feelings about the film “Argo” & Batfleck.

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of agression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individual responsibility criminal responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity. This lecture, entitled 'Iran's Nuclear Programme and International Law', was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre on Friday 16th March 2012 by Professor Daniel Joyner, Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law and chaired by Professor Marc Weller, Director of the Lauterpacht Centre. For more information about the series, please see the LCIL website at www.lcil.cam.ac.uk

The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (LCIL), University of Cambridge hosts a regular Friday lunchtime lecture series on key areas of International Law. Previous subjects have included UN peacekeeping operations, the advisory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, the crime of agression, whaling, children and military tribunals, and theories and practices for proving individual responsibility criminal responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity. This lecture, entitled 'Iran's Nuclear Programme and International Law', was delivered at the Lauterpacht Centre on Friday 16th March 2012 by Professor Daniel Joyner, Professor of Law, University of Alabama School of Law and chaired by Professor Marc Weller, Director of the Lauterpacht Centre. For more information about the series, please see the LCIL website at www.lcil.cam.ac.uk

Dane Swango, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA, talks about the goals, design, implementation, and limitations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to students and staff of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at a luncheon seminar on January 27, 2009.

Dane Swango, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA, answers questions after his presentation about the goals, design, implementation, and limitations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) at a luncheon seminar at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies on January 27, 2009

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT ( don't ask me why they dont call it NNPT) is in the spotlight with Bush's upcoming visit to India. He's coming over to discuss some Indo-US nucleur deal for civilian use. So we just thought about giving you some gyan about what the hell NPT is about and why is this such a big deal.

Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT ( don't ask me why they dont call it NNPT) is in the spotlight with Bush's upcoming visit to India. He's coming over to discuss some Indo-US nucleur deal for civilian use. So we just thought about giving you some gyan about what the hell NPT is about and why is this such a big deal.

Kathleen Bailey, a straight talking organiser shakes up a world conference at Livermore, with the renewal of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty high on political agendas.