Future Outlook and Global Cooperation

For as long as I can remember, I've been hearing that World War threeI is about to happen. I feel like a lot of people have felt this way. Apparently people said it during the Cuban missile crisis and the Korean War. And again, in more recent moments that have involved conflicts like between India and Pakistan, or Russia's invasion of Ukraine I was starting to suspect that despite all of the concern, in reality, World War III was about as imminent as the release of the next Game of Thrones book, orr maybe World War II was really just the friends we made along the way And then on february twenty eighth, twenty twenty six The U. S and Israel launched Operation Fury, which might just as easily be the title of like somethingomething as un serious as a S shark NATo sequel But unfortunately, it is deeply serious because It's a war, which we're apparently not calling a war, and it's resulted in the deaths of thousands and thousands of civilians. And obviously the deaths of Iran's supreme leader and a number of Iranian government officials Suddenly, World War three and the risk of nuclear warfare became the focus of every news show Is it actually a real threat this time I think when we talk about dread, it's really vibes It's about us and where we are this moment more so than it is the risk because Weapons have been there the whole time Today I'm speaking with Jeffrey Lewis. He's one of the country's leading experts on nuclear weapons policy He's also a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and the guy behind the blog arms control wonk. He's spent his career studying how nuclear crises unfold, sometimes using satellite imagery, sometimes using history, and sometimes even using fiction to imagine how things could go wrong We're going to talk about the cyclical feeling of nuclear dread. How the hell did we get here And is there any chance we'll ever escape so long as the nukes are around? Here, we go Again Again. Again. Hey, I'm Kalpen and this is Here We Go Again, a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks Why does history keep repeating itself Here, we go This is an IiHart podcast Guaranteed human Hello Hey, how are you Good, how are you I mean, the world sucks, but I don't know what you're talking about. I am Dr. Jeffrey Lewis. I'm a distinguished scholar of global security at Middlebury College. We're trying to figure out the best place to start the conversation. We're like, you know, obviously this is not all current you know, since February, late February, but It seems like an interesting place thematically to start. U. S and Israel decided to start a war with Iran, which has or had Aarently a nuclear program People are uneasy, there's this low grade anxiety and dread as someone who's studies this, how would you kind of define what we're actually feeling in terms of whether all of this could lead to or prevent a nuclear war That is an interesting place to start As somebody who studies this a little surprising to me that the dread has returned because The risk never really went away. I mean, the weapons have been there the whole time. And so it's like living in California where We live in a place where there are earthquakes and wildfires and yet we somehow act shocked when there's a fire. or an earthquake But that risk was always there. And so All the things we're living through right now are the product of choices we have consistently made for the past fifty years And so again, as somebody who studies it This does not seem strange or different. this was always going to happen But I guess For normal people, for people who have lives and are doing other things I think there was this enormous sense of relief with the end of the Cold War and the improvement of relations with Russia and China, where people thought even if the policies are the same and the weapons are still there Well, we get along now, so somehow it's all fine. you know, it's like having a loaded gun in the house. You know, you just, you're waiting for that crisis to come along. and I suppose we're in it now Right. Now now that we're in it, we're looking at those weapons again and we're like, ah shit this sus And were I mean, America is a country that's perpetually at war. and I'm curious like if we Like you said for maybe some of our listeners who don't follow it as closely as you do You're the expert. What's the very beginning of this feeling of dread when nuclear weapons are first invented and used starts probably really with The Soviets in nineteen forty nine following suit. The United States goes first in nineteen forty five, and we have a period of nuclear monopoly in which nuclear weapons are the greatest thing ever. We imagine that they end the war with Japan, which I don't think they do, but that doesn't matter. That's what we imagine And we think that we are in this incredibly dominant position over the rest of the world m And Immediately, scientists are like, oh, no, that's not true Other countries will be able to do this. People being people, no one listens. And so when the Soviets surprised the United States in nineteen forty nine by testing their own nuclear weapon That sense of dread starts to seep in because it's awesome when we do it to the Japanese and it's awesome that we can threaten the Soviets with that. But when that Threat now exists for Us We get a little more high minded Was it from the beginning that you know, I know in the culture of how we're as kids at least taught to think about nuclear weapons, but really even in college in a couple of grad school courses This idea that certain countries can't have nuclear weapons because they're not rational, right? The US is a moral rational actor aside from the fact that we're the only ones who actually use this thing against civilians God forbid the Soviets or Japan or North Korea got it. they're in a much more desperate dire situation. So they're not allowed to have it. But then we know we're fine with Israel, France, you know countountries like that having it India and Pakistan is sort of up for discussion, I guess. but What's the cultural component of this? and has it always been there and has it evolved or devolved in any way? or is it remained constant? I mean, I think it's a pretty steady diet of racism. L We're happy to use this thing on Japan and very few people felt bad about that at all. If you actually go back and look at the debates about whether we should use the weapon against Japan Those debates are never about the wellbeing of Japanese civilians. Those debates are about the few number of people who understand that By bringing this capability into the world, it will eventually be turned on us. And so it's really always about us and our well beinging. You know, the Soviets are threatening and so they're a little bit hard to take, but then you know, they're followed by the British and the French. And we're basically still spread of nuclear weapons if it's to our friends at this point And we don't really in the United States start to get anxious about This idea until the Chinese do it And yeah, I think we're not great at strategic empathy We imagine that we're rational, which is weird because you know, we're the ones talking about invading Greenland, right? Like Like we have our own absolute moments of madness. just like everyone else. But I think we create this idea that these other leaders aren't rational. I spend a lot of time studying both the history of the Chinese nuclear program and North Korea's nuclear program Today And so that maybe causes me to over index on the racism thing because it is so latant both in the past about the Chinese and the North Koreans today But it's weird because you know They've actually been incredibly rational And at least For the first fifty years of the Chinese program much more rational and restrained than we were Can you walk us through the Chinese doing at moment? Like what year was that and A that. It's a great question what year that was because They're so calm about how they go about it. I mean, their statements aren't calm. The statements are insane, like like Mao era insane, but the actual choices are prettyretty chill. They test a nuclear weapon in nineteen sixty four And so that gets them in the club But they don't. really Loy any of those weapons in any kind of number reallyally until the early nineteen eighties. So it's basically a giant research and development program, which by the way, not unlike what India would do later. It's very important for them to be in the club It's not super important for the first, you know, again forty fifty years of their program. for them to have big, big numbers. That's the opposite of what we do in the U.S. You know, we test And then we use two against Japan and then we are like, we are going to build thousandousands of these things So when the Soviet Union created their own bomb in nineteen forty nine, how does that change the US's position What I would say is we immediately become afraid that the The Soviets have a lots lots more than they do And so we have this series of crises. First we have the so called bomber gap where we believe that they must have huge numbers of bombers. They don't And then as late as nineteen sixty, when Kennedy and Nixon are running for the presidency, Kennedy accuses the Eisenhower administration of having created a so called missile gap where the Soviets have more missiles than we do. And the Kennedy people are shocked And they get the classified numbers when they go into the administration and it turns out that there is a gap, but it's like substantially in our favor I keep reading about just cultural impact on this I always think about Godzilla because there's a there's like a nuclear reference there? When did when did the psyche of Oh my gosh, nuclear weapons are a real thing really start entering our culture There are two really big entry points One is John Herssey, who is at that time a writer for the New Yorker, goes to Hiroshima. writes a series of articles that show up in the New Yorker and then are compiled in the book Hiroshima that everybody reads That's really the first time an outsider is able to look at the destructiveness of one of these weapons and convey to the American public that this is somehow different I think Because we live in the era of nuclear dread, we know nuclear weapons are incredibly destructive. We know that they are somehow different than weapons that have come before. We actually had to learn that. We did not know that immediately People didn't get it. They thought, oh, well, we dropped this bomb and we won. so it must be fine And so it really takes some reporting of like what these weapons do for that dread to start to build. Meaning what they do to a person What they do to a person to a city? I mean, those things are deeply intertwined because Part of the reason that The nuclear uses are so horrific. is individuals are suffering these incredible health challenges from radiation poisoning You've also simultaneously destroyed the entire health carere system, right? Hospitals are destroyed So I think one of the things when I talk about nuclear risk to people is It's one thing to say, oh, well, if you're this far from the blast, you'll be this sick But then you have to think. And so what hospital do you think you're going to? right becausecause that hospital is almost certainly going to have been either destroyed or severely damaged And so there is this complex interaction. I mean, this is just a incredibly. destructive way to target a civilian population Yeah at least all our other wars, we take out the hospitals first with traditional bombs and then we kill everybody. It's like I mean, war is really awful. It is a great moral evil. and I think the ways in which we kill people, you know, in World War Io and this is not even nuclear weapons, When the US would firebomb a city There would be timed explosives to kill the firefighters who would show up later Shez You know, because you wanted to make sure the place burned. And so yeah, I think once you start a war, you are at some real risk of been profound moral I don't know what the word is Anyway, the second thing is thermonuclear weapons.. The bomb that goes off in Nagasaki is equivalent of twenty thousand tons of Tienti is supposed to make it easier to understand, but like Nobody knows what five hundred tons of TNT looks like. I only think of Bugs bunny cartoons. Right. So you know the explosion in Beirut? Yes That was F hundred tons of TNT equipment. Oh wow. So This would have been twenty Thousand tons Whoa, okay. And That's a small nuclear weapon today The prrimary U. S. nuclear weapon, which is still pretty small is a hundred kilot tons, a hundred thousand tons And the biggest in the US. arrsenal is a megaton, a million tons And the biggest weapon deployed is a Chinese warhead for their ICBMs intercontinental range ballistic missiles, missiles that could hit the United States. The largest Chinese warhead is between three and four megatons, three and four million tons So the development of thermonuclear weapons immediately results in this shift where the nuclear weapons themselves start getting smaller and smaller physically So you can put more of them on a missile and they become Vastly bigger. That's my Loy. These things are stupid big You know, history always points to the Cuban missile crisis as kind of the first time that Americans really thought nuclear war could actually happen Do you find that to be correct? And can you walk me through that sort of blip because like you were saying, if Americans credited nuclear warfare for ending World War II, whether that was accurate or not but didn't fully understand how those weapons worked until much later. there Was the fear better placed around the Cuban missile crisis Or that even the wrong way of looking at it No, I I The Cuban missile crisis is enormously important Like all things in human life It's a process. So I think you see pretty clear evidence that there is this growing nuclear dread throughout the nineteen fifties. But likeike any social process. you know, it's the beatnicks and the intellectuals and, you know, weirdos like me who are like, hey, this is a problem. and those are the people who worry first I think the important thing about the Cuban missile crisis is or The very first time even people who would have thought themselves as being pretty in favor of nuclear deterrence, you know, it scared the shit out of the. I think it is hard for us to today understand how frightened people were and the best I can do I struggle to tell my students frightened and angry and grief stricken we all were after nine eleven. They don't they don't get it. It doesn't seem Re to them And I think people in the Cuban missile crisis were're really traumatized in again, a way that's very hard to explain I appreciate that analogy. also I also would imagine that there are tons of there's tons of nuance too in what people were feeling around the Cuban missile crisis. During this time, the Cuban missile crisis time, there were There were a lot of cllose calls, right? Can you describe Well, I think then like now, the world was just so unsettled. So The Cuban crisis isn't really just a crisis about Cuba follows the crisis about Berlin I'm old. I have to remind people now. Germany was divided. Berlin was in the heart of East Germany, but it was divided. So the Soviets would periodically pressure on the status of West Berlin And that became kind of the flashpoint where we imagined a nuclear war would start And so the Cuban missile crisis is preceded by a crisis over the status of Berlin You know, that's when the Soviets build the wall. I guess technically the East German authorities build the wall. So There's that kind of thing happening very regularly. So I really think it makes sense to think of Cuba as part of just a complex series of crises in the US Soviet relationship At the same time You know, we've lived through the Korean War whichich runs, you know into the early very early nineteen fifties. there are a series of crises involving Taiwan where the Chinese might not have nuclear weapons, but we don't understand how closely they're coordinating with the Soviets. The whole world just I think, feels very unsettled. and Cuba is the worst most Scary moment But partart of this, I think, just bigger sense of that there were so many paths that we could find ourselves in a war with the Soviets, which you know almost inevitably would become a nuclear one caused people ultimately to then forget about a potential nuclear war The Soviet Union collapsed. When that happened People genuinely believed that the weapons that had been the kind of emblem of that confrontation had been disposed of in the same way that the Soviet Union had. and It became incredibly hard in the nineteen nineties to persuade people that nuclear weapons still existed. It's just normal people, just they never thought about them You know, they didn't think about them deeply during the Cold War. During the Cold War, people were afraid of nuclear weapons. They knew that these things existed But the weapons and the danger they posed were kind of all mixed together in their head. And so when the danger seemed to go away They just imagine that the weapons had to. Oh, I see. I mean, It's nuts. I mean, we did some polling at the beginning in the Obama administration. I was working for an outside group and we were trying to work out, you know, should President Obama give the speech she gave in which she said he'd seek a world without nuclear weapons. And so that was That involves some polling in some focus groups and people have crazy ideas about nuclear weapons Like just regular people who don't think about this stuff get the craziest ideas and it is So tough. likeike what My favorite was that people thought disarmament might be bad because they believed that The Soviet Union had gotten rid of all of its nuclear weapons and that those weapons had then therefore gone to terrorists Oh, okay. There was a point at which I lost it and I insisted not in front of the focus group I insisted that we at least try to explain and see what the reaction would be to the reality of the fact, which is that the United States And the Soviet Union, then Russia had cooperatively dismantled a lot of these both the military systems like the submarines and the missiles, but then the warheads had been dismantled and the material from those warheads, which was in many cases significant amounts of highly enriched uranium, had been blended down and turned into reactor fuel to the point where at some point one in ten light bulbs, basically, ten percent of our electricity was from nuclear plants using fuel that was from ex Soviet nuclear weapons. Oh wow. This was called Megatones to meegawatts The idea that you wouldd take this material and you would repurpose it as fuel which was a huge success simimply refuse to believe it I mean, they like laughed out loud. Like that's ridiculous And I'm like, wait, you have to tell them it's true. And the focus group people were like, no, no, you can't argue with them. you're here to learn what they think But what they think is dumb. Yeah, yeah, yeah And again, is that really their fault? No. I mean, one should probably point the finger at the leadership of the country and those of us who are experts because we Larly failed miserably in conveying to people the truth. And so I think when we talk about dread, it's really vibes Yeah. It's about us and where we are at this moment, more so than it is the risk because Weapons have been there the whole time. Yeah Well what was the dread? And kind of that feelar like in the eighties, and I'm mostly just thinking about Reagan and bringing nuclear war back into focus eight in nineteen eighty three. which was scariest, most terrifying moment of the Reagan administration Nuclear war was a thing that even an eight year old was worried about in nineteen eighty three. There was the made for television movie the day after There was constant reporting on it. It was in the air. Yeah It's this enormous thing that's happening that's so out of scale to any individual that you feel helpless and powerless, you only dimly understand it and there's certainly nothing you can do about it. And it just makes you interact with it, I think in a weird way. and maybe that's why it's Dread Yeah rather than anger to demand we make different choices What was the war scare of nineteen eighty three and the de escalation? of that. Can you walk us through what that was and how it happened Things got weird in nineteen eighty three, and they got weird in such a way that To this day, we don't agree what happens I guess you can take two attitudes toward nineteen eighty three. Maybe nothing at all happened and It was a panic O maybe we can have crises that are very serious and not realize them What happened in nineteen eighty three was a combination of factors that Soviet Union was going through a wrenching series of leadership changes. The head of the Soviet Union Yan Dropov was dying And he would be replaced later by another aging apparatic die very quickly and then be replaced by Gorbachev. This is the kind of Last gasp of a certain generation of men The Soviet economy is reallyally sluggish and for the first time, the Soviets really think that they are falling hopelessly behind the United States. They Being engineers Do the bigiggest engineer brain thing you could possibly imagine. which is they set up over the past few years computer that they are feeding data into tells them what the balance of forces is like in the world And therefore, how likely the United States is to attack And they they believe their computer and seems that in part because The balance of forces is trending against them, but also because The KGB is feeding fake data into the system because the KGB just wants to sort of match the expectations of the leaders. The leadership seems to become incredibly concerned about a nuclear war in nineteen eighty three the US is about to deploy a new generation of missiles in Europe. that are very threatening to the Soviets And so arms control is collapsing Ronald Reagan is adopting this incredibly Belligerent posture, calling them the evil Empire The Soviets in this period of anxiety. where the U.S. is testing their air defenses by sending aircraft right up to the edge and turning around and coming back. They shoot down a civilian airliner. that was on its way to Korea, which Free take Huge crisis. And at the end of this just terrible year in which The leader is dying. They've shot down the civilian airliner. theirir own systems are telling them that a nuclear war is much more likely. Reagan is leaning into that The U.S does this exercise, which it does every year but it does the Biggest and most realistic exercise The Soviets Wry is a cover for an attack because this is what the Soviets do. It is actually what the Russians do. You know, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, they started with a big long military exercise so they could move everything into place and deny what they were doing. We really to this day don't know how the Soviets fundamentally take this They put some of their nuclear forces on alert and they Express extreme Ccern. And then The crisis passes And so It's not until afterwards that a defector from the Soviet Union tellells the United States how serious this is And the CIA denies it says no, there was no crisis You know, the Soviets were just manipulating us You know, defectors will tell you what you want to hear. It's fine. And we have a long multiye debate that is still going on today about whether the Soviet paranoia of nineteen eighty three which did lead to changes in their posture whether they were genuinely afraid we were going to strike them. because you know, if they were, One or two more things break the wrong way it could have been really ugly. Yeah. I remember You know, I was I was a little kid too, but, you know, Rocky and movies like this that came out in the eighties that were very much the like us versus them Soviet kind of story. I mean, they were they were they were the Hollywood bad guy for fifteen years Are there other places that showed up in movies or or TV. I think You see it in a lot of different ways There is a ton of science fiction That is fundamentally about nuclear danger You mentioned Godzilla, the one I really like, which is old and forgotten but is very on point about these issues is the original, the day the Earth stood still, not not the remake, but the nineteen fifties version where An alien spaceship shows up. a human looking alien pops out and he basically says You settle your disputes with violence, which is basically a you problem Now you have space travel, which means you can export your problems off world and you have nuclear weapons. And so The rest of us in the galaxy have made a considered decision that you have forty eight hours to get your shit together We're just going to eliminate the planet. And like that's a metaphor Alien is a metaphor for the weapons themselves that we have basically created this risk that is for our existing forms of governance and for our existing patterns of behavior. We've gotten too big for our britches I mean, there's this thing when I was a kid I used to see these old movies and maybe encounter people in interviews and they'd say this thing I never understood like How can I bring a child into this world And I just didn't understand like that was nuclear dread. They were like, how can I have a child who I think is going to perish in this you know, inevitable nuclear Holocaust I think it wass just there. It's once you start looking for it, you see it all the time. I mean, that's the kind of dread I think a lot of people can relate to now, at least my friends who don't have kids, like in this world, what's the point? It's less about nuclear weapons, but it's more Dredan, actually, maybe it's more vibes too, which is the thing I want to go back to too. You mentioned that vibes kind of contributed to nuclear dread I know in the case of like modern day friends who don't want to have kids, I understand their vibes and where they're sort of getting that feeling from, but In terms of nuclear dread, who or what determined those vibes? Was it people in power? Was it events unfolding? pop culture or something else entirely I think L the crises that unfold are frightening to people One thing that is really different about this moment than has been in the past, but is like the nineteen fifties We're only starting to get there very slowly We've been involved in forever wars. Those forever wars Don't our daily life haven't had a significant terrorist attack in twenty five years. And so we can be engaged in huge amounts of violence abroad and it has no consequence for us. Yeah evenven what we're doing in Iran. People are like, oh, my gas prices are a little higher. Like That's not a serious inconvenience relative to the amount violence' occring. Think about nuclear weapons is The US had had that kind of same sense of security because of the oceans You know, World War twowo was terrible, but that's a thing that happened over in Europe or Asia Mhm No matter how badly World War two went closest it got to us was Hawaii which, you know is a part of the United States, but for most Americans is very, very far away Nuclear weapons force people to confront the fact that Actually we might have skin in the game and that our choices might have consequences that would affect us directly So I think that's a huge change I think our leaders W frightened and did not do a great job of hiding it The two examples I think of about that One been claimed and, you know, the people who claim it were the people who did it that lots of the RAnd analysts refused to take retirement in the nineteen sixties. and didn't want retirement contors. They were, they didn' think they'd be alive. Well. Give us the money now. Wow And you know, there's that famous instance where George Schultz, Ronald Reagan's seecretary of state, goes on TV after the television movie the day after in order to assure the public that this movie is Greatly exaggerated and that things are really fine But he is also living through a classified military crisis He just does not do a convincing job And so I think people are smart. I mean, I mean, I mean we they think dumb things. We all think dumb things When a leader goes up and is a little bit shaky I think that really filters down. So I think it's that combination of like crises Yeah and then maybe an elite recognition that this is not going the way we'd like that then seeps into popular culture april seventh, twenty twenty six President Trump posts A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change, where different smarter and less radical minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen Who knows? We'll find out tonight one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world Fty seven years of extortion corruption and death will finally end, God bless the great people of Iran. aside from the fact that President is a very talented Emmi nominated reality TV star who really, to his credit, knows how to manipulate the media and succeeds at it every step. And it is impressive just objectively What went through your mind as the expert on these things when you saw or heard that I was actually pretty calm because First as you say Everything he says is calibrated for factects. And it reads as absolute insanity But it shapes the narrative in exactly the way he wants and his base loves both what he says and how people like me react to it. So you know, I've learned to stop taking that bait. He also has a strategy of negotiation, which is, I think, wildly ineffective on the world stage Probably is not all that effective in business either, but he started with a lot of money and just hasn't hasn't lost it? Yeah And so I think he imagined that he was Haggling h. I mean, nuclear deterrence it's not a great word actually. What we really do is coercion. You know, You're trying to deter someone from doing something or you maybe compel them to do something, but this is bargaining It's it's bargaining with and doing that and so I think in his head he knows he's doing that And the white Almost nothing good to say about the man. He is terrified of nuclear weapons. In fact, the other day, he was asked, wouldould you use a nuclear weapon against Iran? And he viscerally reacted. You know, why why would I do that? Why would anyone do that? Nuclear weapons should never be used. He has some Like somewhere in there am midst All that insanity is some healthy nuclear drag. Oh good. It might be the only part about him that I find interesting Yeah M maybe it's the same doesn't consume alcohol. Like, oh, that's good. That's healthy for you So he poses as a nuclear expert because of his uncle, who I think was a nuclear engineer at MIT. Okay But even in the nineteen eighties He was representing himself as wanting to do arms control negotiations for the Reagan administration So he has some bizarre weird interests, but I understand why that. alarm the hell out of people because the words mean what they mean Yeah, yeah. and he said it and policy wise, he does tend to be quite successful at following through on promises that he makes, whether it's Roe v Wade or any of the other number of things that he's figured out a way to do in a way that other Republican administrations have not been able to. So I think at least even the more informed friends that I had were not necessarily, you know, it wasn't that panic baiting that he was obviously also looking to do, but it was the wait what does wait, wait, wait what is what is this Hold on, is this because he is He does do what he says So I want to look quick to the future with a few minutes that we have left and kind of ask you about how realistic potential of a stateless nuclear attack is and whether we should feel uneasy about that. I mean H stories of smuggled facile material. Oh all it takes is a little bit. Somebody could get it from countries that are falling apart or whatever. It makes its way into the US into the wrong hands Is that something that people really should worry about and what actions are being taken by governments to prevent that I would say No we should not worry about nonstate actors partly My answer is that's one of the great successes of the Obama administration. There was an enormous emphasis placed on securing material So I think the bar for a nonstate group to get the material they would need, and that's really the bar for them. A non state group isn't going to be able to make plutonium or highly enriched uranium. If they stole it, they might be able to fashion it into a device So simply making sure that material is locked down solves that problem But at a deeper level, what I would say is that got very obsessed about the idea of non state actors getting nuclear weapons terrorists For the same reason that science fiction writers in the nineteen fifties used aliens Which is there a metaphor for nuclear danger? because We have this idea that like, o, the Russians are our enemy. The Chinese are our enemy. They have nuclear weapons. We have to have our nuclear weapons And so we're kind of in a standoff But that's what nuclear weapons are We can't Build enough to be safe If we both build and build and build, we get less safe So we actually we have to cooperate. with the Russians and the Chinese which we don't want to do We have to And That's why Robert Oppenheimer compared the US and Soviet Union to scorpions trapped in a bottle And so whether it's the alien or whether it's the terrorist, it forces you to think that there is a danger requires you to work with your enemy It's the hardest part of the nuclear age is the fundamental lesson of the nuclear age, which by the way, it's true with climate change. It's true with threats from pandemics You can't solve these problems alone. You have to cooperate with the people you don't like Are there any positive indications that that's happening like what what for people who are terrified? Okay, I was gonna say for people who are terrified what we detail Well, okay, I will tell them what I always tell people. If you look at the two moments of peak nuclear dread in the Cold War, the Cuban missile C crisis and the warcare of nineteen eighty three That's the moment at which you would have thought This situation is hopeless. No one is interested in solving these problems, and our leaders are fools In both cases, it would only be a few years before we found ourselves at the table talking seriously about trying to reduce that danger And so Yes, this is a low point may even get worse In my lifetime and in the period of history that I have studied These things simply do not last forever. And you know, the reality of this is that We have this generation of leaders who are just A Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump You know, the good news is None of these people will be here in a decade Maybe. Maybe They'll be still at this, but they're old. So the potential of new leadership. You know, I'm not saying that new leaders will necessarily be better, but Change is inevitable And That doesn't always mean change for the better, but We will have the opportunity to make different choices. Things will turn. and you know I think you just have to be patient. To be fair, hard when people are attempting to burn down the world Sure, sure, Yes. Thank you so much That was my guest, Jeffrey Lewis. He's a leading expert on nuclear weapons policy, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and the guy behind the well respected arms control Wonk. Here we go again is a production of IiHart podcasts and SnaFu media in association with new metric media Our executive producers are me, Kalpen, Ed Helms, Mike Falbo, Alyssa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly, and Dylan Faggin Meghgan Tan is our producer and writer, Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Our consulting producer is Raman Borceolino Torory Smith is our associate producer Thee music by Chris Kelly, logo by Matt Gosin Legal review from Daniel Welh, Caroline Johnson, and Meghan Hallson Special thanks to Glen Basner, Isaac Dunham, Adam Horne, Lane Klein, and everyone at IHart Podcasts, but especially Will Pearson, Carri Lieberman, and Niki Etor.