Welcome to the New Nuclear Nightmare

9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super-secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of SNARK in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to Deep State Radio. I'm David Rothkopf, your host, and we're joined today by two of our friends to talk about a subject that nobody wants to talk about, but I think we really need to. Joe Cirincione and John Wolfstall are two of the country's leading experts on nuclear arms and arms control, something we used to do. We look back on that a little nostalgically. And, of course, their regulars with us. And welcome, both of you gentlemen. Hey, David. Great to be here. Thank you very much, David. Yeah. John, you did moments ago before we went on the air, said that pitchers and catchers report today. So I do want to start on an up note, which suggests spring is around the corner. And that's positive, right? So for those of you keeping score at home, we've had something positive on this podcast, okay? Now, let me change the subject. I want to get into the bigger issue of arms control. But first, I want to start with a headline issue. Apparently, you know, Trump seems to be flirting with the idea of sending another carrier battle group. towards the Persian Gulf, or as some of our friends in the Arabian Peninsula like to refer to it, the Arabian Gulf. But, you know, and as we speak, Benjamin Netanyahu is at the White House rather than where he belongs, which is the Hague. And he is talking to Trump and for sure is saying, we got to strike those Iranians because nukes. Now, you guys are experts, and I'm just, you know, kind of a foreign policy dilettante. So help me out here. Didn't we destroy the Iranian nuclear program? Wasn't that supposed to be gone forever, Joe? President Trump claims he obliterated the program. And in fact, in his letter introducing the National Defense Strategy of the United States just a couple of weeks ago was letter says, we obliterated it. The Department of Defense, however, in the report says, well, you know, we set it back substantially. And that is the case. No question serious damage. As Bill Clinton would say, it all depends on your definition of the word obliterated. That's exactly right. So we've seen satellite evidence indicate that they're rebuilding the ballistic missile sites. And that seems to be where most of the attention is going. and they're cleaning up and they're doing some kind of activity at the nuclear sites. We have no idea because inspections have ended. We have no idea how far they've gotten. We do know that they continue to possess a substantial amount of uranium enriched to about the 60 percent level and a sufficient number of centrifuges that they could, if they wanted to, put that uranium gas into those centrifuges and spin it up to produce the core of at least one bomb, perhaps several more, within a matter of weeks, I would say. But there's no indication that they're doing that. They just have the capability to do it. So that remains, and that ain't nothing. Okay, so in these cases, I like to go... Yeah, no, no, I'm just saying I'd like to go to a second opinion here. As we talk about obliteration, what Joe just described there doesn't sound like obliterated to me. John, I mean, how about you? Do you think we're out of the woods with the Iranians here? David, far be it for me to call the president of the United States a liar. But he's lying. He knows he's lying. But I think we should just dispense with the notion that this has anything to do with Iran's nuclear program. Benjamin Netanyahu is not coming to the White House. He didn't get Donald Trump involved in the 12-day war out of an acute concern over the Iranian nuclear program. He believes that there's an opportunity to depose the Iranian regime and that Donald Trump has an opportunity to do what multiple presidents dating back to Ronald Reagan have wanted to do, but unable to do, which is to undo the revolution and to herald in something new and maybe better. but you know, Donald Trump doesn't care about the better part. And so I think the nuclear program remains a concern. I don't think they're anywhere near building a bomb, but we don't know because the inspectors aren't there and our intelligence community is divided and I think not very focused or well organized at this moment. The ballistic missile program is coming back and they've rejuvenated their ability to build motors and fuel. And so that is a growing capability, but it's not a strategic threat at this point to Israel. But BBC is a chance to have, having gotten rid of Saddam Hussein under W, now to get rid of the Ayatollah under T, and he will then be forever cemented as the Israeli prime minister that solved the Middle East. Hmm. Well, that's an interesting theory, and I believe it because, you know, not only would Trump like to have that on his record, but he doesn't know anything, and so Bibi can lead him wherever he wants to go. One small problem with this theory, Joe, and I know you're not here as in Iran, expert, more as a nuclear expert, it seems really hard to do. This is not Venezuela. By the way, for those of you who are listening at home, I do want to remind you we invaded Venezuela in order to do something. I haven't heard anything about it since. So I don't know if actually is anything happening in Venezuela. But whatever was going to happen in Venezuela is a heck of a lot easier than Iran, which is actually a country that has a very big army, a very big government infrastructure, and even though it's going through economic doldrums, has some considerable resources and the support of people like the Russians. Right. That's exactly right. So as you and your guests have discussed in numerous episodes here, Donald Trump has a gangster foreign policy. And with Venezuela, he demonstrated that. He just broke into the shop. He kidnapped the leader of the country, brought him over, and then started to extort the country to get, I think it was $500 million worth of oil that he then sold and deposited in a bank account somewhere, but not in a U.S. government bank account. And he's continuing that kind of bullying. He deposited in a bank account in Qatar, but not in the name of the U.S. government. Right. That's just like one of the small little things that happened over here. We're too busy to follow up. What? Don't worry about that. Look at this thing over here. Look at war with Iran. But you cannot do that with Iran. There's not going to be an elite squad that's going to go in and kidnap the Ayatollah. It's not going to happen logistically. It's too big. It's too far away, as you say. It's a formidable military power, even though it's weaker now than it's ever been before. So I interpret all this as Trump's gang tactics, pressure. I got one aircraft carrier. I'm going to make a deal with me or else I'm going to blow your head off. Oh, you don't believe me? I'm going to send another one. So in addition to the USS Abraham Lincoln that's now off the coast of Iran, we're warming up the USS George H.W. Bush, which is off in Norfolk and may steam to the Persian or Arabian Gulf shortly. pressure, pressure, pressure to cut a deal. What kind of deal? Well, originally it was supposed to be this big all-encompassing deal, but now it looks like his ace negotiators, Witkoff and Kushner, are going to strike a deal that's like an Iranian deal light, the kind of deal we had that he rejected in 2018 to destroy. Wait, wait, wait, wait a second. We had a deal? We had a deal that shut down Iran's nuclear program, put it in a box, I shrank it to a fraction of its original size, surrounded it with cameras, inspectors. It worked. He blew it up. Who did that? Who did that? When was that? When did that happen? Donald Trump in 2018. And so now he's trying to do something else. And that's why Beebe's in the White House. He's going to say, no, no, no. If you're going to, you know, I don't want it just to be about nuclear. It's got to be about the missiles. It's got to be about his aid to the militia forces in the region. He has to get rid of this, that and the other thing, all for the purpose, I think, of what John pointed out. This is really a regime change move by Netanyahu. He wants to bring Trump on board. He thought he had him on board during the 12-day war and then Trump stopped the war. I mean, it was it was another weird episode that we've already forgotten about. But here we are. We're trying for Iran war. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR Network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR Network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on signup at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at thedsrnetwork.com slash buy. Thank you and enjoy the show. Part two. If you haven't got the message yet, we are living in the weirdest of times, right? We have the weirdest of kings and he is doing weird stuff every single day and pooping his pants as he does it. Now John you have had to live with the heavy burden of being involved in cutting the first deal with the Iranians back in Obama times And you know there was a lot of criticism back then Well your deal didn go far enough this way or that way, or it only extended this far out into time. But Joe is suggesting that people may look back on that deal and think of it as more comprehensive, long lasting, and better than whatever Trump is going to end up with. Do you expect that's the outcome? So we should be so lucky that the administration is able to actually negotiate something. But, you know, we now have five years of Donald Trump presidencies. And, you know, we were going to get a better deal on North Korea, didn't get it. Going to get a better deal with the Russians and the Chinese, didn't get it. Was going to get a better deal with the Iranians, didn't get it. Was going to get a better NAFTA, didn't get it. So he doesn't negotiate anything. He gets some little tiny deals that he can slap a big gold T on and say, you know, the Trump was better. But when you look at the details, there's literally nothing. Is that a T on your sweatshirt? It's a T and a J. Oh, sorry. I'm very bipartisan. So, you know, we should encourage the United States and Marco Rubio and Wyckoff and Kushner and Trump to actually negotiate a deal which locks in anything close to what the Obama administration was able to achieve with Iran. They were a year away from being able to build a bomb. We had comprehensive monitoring and transparency. We had limits on how fast it could grow. And we had the opportunity to actually leverage that country into something different. And Trump said, oh, I didn't negotiate that deal, so it must be terrible, and we're out. And Bolton, his good friend, who I can't remember, is he under indictment? Is he not under indictment? I guess it's okay to indict Kelly, but not Bolton. I don't understand. But he's good at blowing stuff up, but he doesn't build anything. And so I'm not optimistic. Yeah, by the way, we try to help bring people up to speed on Washington and the insider perspectives on D.C. here. And if I may be allowed a brief sidebar, the fact that John Wollstall is wearing a TJ sweatshirt is the biggest kind of D.C. area flex that you can imagine. OK, because there is a high school in Virginia that's harder to get into than Harvard. And he has a kid there, obviously. And he wants us all to know that. and this is how DC works. It's like, yeah, okay, whatever, TJ. And I just want you all to appreciate that. But you've got to feel good, John, because I know where you came from, which is the mean streets of Manhattan. And I noticed today that there was a story that all the private schools of the types that you went to in the mean streets of Manhattan have raised their annual fee to 70,000 bucks a year. $70,000. So well done. That TJ shows your wisdom as well as a flex. The only wisdom involved is that I married a woman much smarter than me, and so my son is much smarter than me. Well, I'll leave it to Joe to dispute that. Okay, look, let me switch things up here a little bit. because, you know, you guys both have spent your careers in arms control, trying to make the world safer, because when all of us grew up, you know, we were scared as shit that somebody was going to get their hands on nuclear weapons and blow up the planet. We thought, oh, my God, they're going to blow up the planet. That's terrible. And there were movies, as John likes to point out, you know, Godzilla is a nuclear movie. There are other kinds of nuclear movies out there on the beach and, you know, various Armageddon scenarios. It's all we thought about. And so this became the central role of the government. And then people like you work for decades and decades in order to get things under control. Arms control agreements were struck. Arsenals were shrunk. It looked like even though the Russians and the Americans both had, you know, five, six thousand nuclear warheads, that things were a little bit more under control. And you could both go and retire. Joe travels the world on a bicycle covered in Lycra. John, whatever he does, goes to spring training games. But the point is, as of a week ago, the one last arms control agreement of significance that we had was allowed to expire. And Trump wants to invest billions and billions in new nukes. The Chinese are building nukes, although not as fast as the Defense Department would like you to believe they're building nukes. And all sorts of other countries now, because this is happening, are saying maybe we should have nukes. The Poles want to have nukes. And there's obviously a Polish joke in there, which I will leave to you. The Scandinavians want to have nukes. All of a sudden, we're back in an arms control race, and I'm worried you guys are going to be out of retirement. it. Well, you're right. If I may just take the first brief crack at this, John, you're absolutely right. I mean, what we're seeing is the mass extinction of arms control. It is happening. It is a process. It's been going on for about 25 years ever since George W. Bush pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2001. And there's been a series of agreements that administrations have mostly Republicans have pulled out of the agreed framework with North Korea, the Iran deal. Trump and Putin together pulled out of a number of agreements during Trump's first administration, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that Ronald Reagan negotiated, the Open Skies Agreement, the conventional forces in Europe. All these treaties have been coming apart. And arms control, the strength of the regime is that it's an interlocking system of agreements and treaties and security assurances. But when you start pulling out the pegs like a Jenga tower, well, you're going to pull one of these things out and the whole thing is going to collapse. And that might be the New START treaty that was just allowed to expire last week. It is, as you say, the last remaining strategic arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, the two countries that hold 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. It had been part of a decades-long process began with Richard Nixon in 1972 with the Strategic Arms Limitation talks, and it continued through Reagan, Republican presidents, Democratic presidents, together, understanding that as long as you had nuclear weapons, you had to at least have some guardrail, some limits, some visibility, some inspections on each other's arsenal, reduce the uncertainty, et cetera, et cetera, right? And here's the thing. It worked. It worked. We have not had a nuclear explosion. We have not had a nuclear war. We've had a bright red line between conventional conflicts where there have been a lot of and nuclear use, which there has been zero nuclear use since 1945. And now we're taking it down. And it's part of the destruction of the international rules-based order, the liberal international economic order that we've seen collapse. Bob Kagan has a wonderful article in The Atlantic just last month talking about what this means, that we're going back to the pre-1945 world. And that's true. Everything he says in there is terrifying. It is a dangerous new period. But add nukes to that. And most people don't. They think about nukes as over here someplace. Well, it's not over there someplace. It is one of the key tools of authoritarian power. And we now live in a world where seven of the nine nuclear armed states have authoritarian leaders, not just Russia and China and North Korea. We got used to them. But now we have India, Pakistan, Israel and the United States. Authoritarian leaders, not necessarily consolidated regimes, but people who are reckless, who seek territorial acquisition, who don't want predictability and who reject restraints of any kind, including arms control agreements. I'm glad we got our optimism in in the beginning of this episode, because I don't see any optimism on this front for quite some time. John, tell me if I'm wrong. No, John, John. OK, I know I know where John comes out of this, but I want to ask a slightly different question. OK, because when I was a kid, you know, there was there were magazines back then. OK, for those of you who are listening and don't know what that is, ask ask your parents. But there were magazines. We would get Life magazine. And I remember an issue of Life magazine. And in the issue, it was here is what the impact of a nuclear weapon on Manhattan would be, because I lived in New Jersey. Right. And so there was a little map. And then there are these concentric circles. And I was a little kid and I was like, well, you know, what would happen to us out here? And are we going to survive this first hit on Manhattan? And I was terrified my whole childhood. These things haunted. I couldn't go to sleep at night. They haunted me. We had to go and do nuclear drills and put our coats over our head for reasons. As far as I know, coats don't protect you against nuclear weapons. But we had to do this. And we went through all of this. So it made a lot of sense for people to want to have arms control agreements. Even warring sides in a great Cold War, even enemies knew that to use nuclear weapons was madness. now what joe is saying john is that over a period of two decades the republican party in the u.s and other parties around the world have decided to let this lapse and my first question before we get into where we are going from here is why who benefits um it's a really hard question to answer David. And the only response I can give you is that this taps into this Republican bent of American exceptionalism, married with this far right, MAGA, isolationist American first mentality. We in the middle of the Olympics right What the only country that doesn dip its flag when it goes by the central stands in the Olympics It the United States right We special We were the world superpower from 1945 We defeated the Soviet Union. And so those rules don't apply to us. That's part of the mentality that has killed the ability to negotiate and implement treaties. We rejected the treaties on protecting disabled people around the world, International treaties on protecting the rights of handicapped and people with mental challenges. So the Senate, under Republican rule and under Republican control and the filibuster, said, no, we don't do that. America unbound. And that taps into Venezuela. It taps into Iran. It taps into Iraq. First and second wars. It makes no sense because the only thing that's been said so far that I would slightly disagree with is your characterization. David, like, you know, we did arms control. We didn't do arms control. The people who invented nuclear weapons and the generals that fought World War II and Vietnam and Korea said, holy crap, we need to have some limits on this. Because if we're behind the Soviet Union and something bad happens, we're going to have to go first. And the Soviets said, oh my God, if we're behind and something bad happens, we're going to have to go first. And nobody wanted to live in that world. So it's not the, you know, the, I mean, I was one of the people on the streets in New York in 1982 we didn't negotiate the treaties. It was Reagan and Cap Weinberger and Al Haig who actually got these treaties done because they knew how horrible war was and they knew how horrible these weapons were. And now we're in an environment where, you know, I didn't invent these terms, but we have these chicken hawks like Donald Trump, who didn't even, you know, got three deferments for Vietnam, who wants to act tough. Oh yeah, I can, I can use a nuclear weapon. What's the point of having weapons if we don't use them, was his quote from the first term. And the people beneath them are inexperienced. I mean, we just shut down the El Paso airport because FAA and the Defense Department weren't talking to each other for a day. So these are the people that we will trust to navigate the next world nuclear crisis and responsibly manage our nuclear arsenal. And it should worry people and they should lose sleep over it. Yeah. I mean, you know, Joe, as I look forward, none of the prevailing trends at the moment are terribly comforting. Let me give you a few of them and then you can pick up on all of them. One, the Chinese are romping up their nuclear program. Now, Americans love to say, oh, my God, they're going to try to get equal to us. And there were some very misleading charts in The New York Times in an article about this. China has gone from 300 nuclear warheads to 600. They may go to 1,000. They're nowhere near and wouldn't for a long, long time be equivalent to the U.S. or Russia. At their current rate of production, it'll take China 30 years to catch up to the United States if we do nothing. If we do nothing, right? But there is some movement there. The Russians are testing new kinds of weapons. Trump likes the idea of testing new kinds of weapons. Trump kind of, for the weirdest possible reasons, of course, thinks he's a nuclear expert because he had an uncle who taught at MIT. It's a long story. But he has been fascinated with nuclear weapons for a while. And also, Trump has this project, which I know is your favorite project, Joe. It's one of the reasons we love to have you here. The Golden Dome, which he thinks can protect us all, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. The Russians are run by a nutcase who's coming into his last years who has been deemed for a long time the person most likely to use tactical nuclear weapons. Other countries in the world have seen that if you have nukes people won't invade or attack you. They see an advantage strategically to having nukes versus not having nukes. They give the example of Libya, which gave up its nukes and immediately had problems. Ukraine gave up its nukes, immediately had problems and so forth. So there's this pressure for more countries to get into this space. And then there are countries that are, you know, we've long known were just under the radar. You know, Japan was, you know, a decision away from becoming a nuclear power and so forth. So everywhere I look, the situation gets more dangerous. And my final point is that as we look back on the past 80 years, the times we came closest to nuclear catastrophe were essentially all accidents. In other words, you know, you can have systems and you can have people in place and you can have rational actors or so-called rational actors. And that doesn't matter, which means that the most, you know, that the more nuclear weapons there are, the greater the risk is of an unintended catastrophe. But a catastrophe on a scale greater than that of any other human created catastrophe that we can think of. So that's pretty bleak to me, Joe. Talk me off the ledge. No, I'm on the ledge with you. That's right. All the trends are going in the wrong direction. As, you know, we got used to the arms control regime. We sort of took it for granted. It's been around most of our adult lives. And a lot of it was born by, well, by people like you, David, who are reading and realizing the terrifying impact of these weapons. And we got to do something about it. And we did do something about it. We built a nonproliferation regime that worked, not perfectly. Lots of problems, but there are only nine nuclear countries in the world right now, not the 15, 20, or 25 that John F. Kennedy worried about in 1960 because we acted, because we put these policies in place. We went down from 70,000 nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War, the 1980s, when I started working on the House Armed Services Committee and was watching the arsenals go up and up. We've come down from that to about 12,000 now because the arms control nonproliferation agreements worked. Those are the instruments we're now dismantling. And why? Because, as John said, there's been this current in the conservative movement for many, many years who saw arms control as the ropes that the global Lilliputians would use to tie down the American gulliver. These were restraint mechanisms. We don't depend on these. As Steve Miller recently said, we live in a world ruled by force. We live in a world ruled by strength, ruled by power. And they think American military power, including nuclear weapons, should be unrestrained. Well, that is a road to disaster. And that's where we are. And then we have a Trump presidency who just doesn't know this stuff, doesn't care about this stuff, can be reckless. And I should remind you that it wasn't just accidents over these years that brought us close, you know, a computer failure, mistaking a rising moon for a Soviet ballistic missile launch. There were real crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis during the 1950s, the Chinese Islands crisis. There were repeated efforts in the 50s where military officers, including during the Korean War, urged the president to use nuclear weapons. Fortunately, they declined. But we're getting back to that period now. And defense policy has been changing over the last five years, and it's accelerating under this administration to erase the line between conventional force and nuclear force, to start talking about using new nuclear weapons. Some of the justification for the new nuclear weapons they want to build is precisely to use them in conventional battles to give us the winning edge. So this is extremely dangerous territory. We're entering a world where there are more weapons, potentially more actors, more technology, and fewer restraints, fewer guardrails. The risks keep rising, which is why the Bolton of the Atomic Scientists moved their doomsday clock a few seconds closer to midnight a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, which I followed John Wolfstall on the social medias, and he immediately wrote to the highest authority on that, Jimmy Kimmel, and said, because he thought that that is comedy. You want to explain that there, Mr. Wolfstock? As you all know, I am one of the people that sets the clock every year for the Bulletin Atomic Scientists. And as you know, I'm one of the funniest guys you've ever met. And Jimmy Kimmel took our announcement, which we're very straight-laced and very straight-faced because it's very serious, and said if I was in a room with all these people, I'd want the end of the world to come pretty soon. So I took that as a challenge and I used the social media to go after him and he didn't take the bait. So I guess he's got other better things to do as well. Let me give you a piece of good news and a piece of bad news. Okay. Which do you want first? good yeah you want the good news um we didn't start thinking arms control when we developed nuclear weapons the people who invented the weapons knew that this was dangerous but the politicians like great i can use this right truman didn't have any compunction about using these weapons the generals are like great i need as many of these as possible curtis lemay the head of strategic air command was not a bastion of restraint right it was the reality of what was going to happen a world filled with nuclear states this stuff spread the soviet union got it four years after we did, after Truman said it'll never happen because they're incapable of understanding science and technology. And we came to arms control out of necessity. And over the years, whether it was the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, sane voices and sane people came and said, we have to do this. We have to talk to our adversaries. We need crisis management tools. We need hotlines. We need ways for our ships to avoid slamming into each other and when they do to sort of de-escalate. So the belief is, and I actually believe this, that should things politically begin to shift in the United States, and there are reasons to believe that Donald Trump's unpopularity is beginning to weigh on the Republican Party, that this fever will start to break. And the Defense Department, led by Pete Hegseth, is not a monolith. There are people in the Defense Department, there are people in the State Department that know how to do arms control, recognize it as value And even if they don want to do it with the Chinese and the Russians really worry about our allies building nuclear weapons as we did with South Korea in the 70s which led to our extended deterrent So I think there is a hope that some rationality is going to seep back into the system Then comes the bad news. I was just about to breathe a sigh of relief. I, you know, glasses half full. The sanity and the rationality is not going to seep up to the president. And regardless of what happens in the midterm elections, I think that 2027 is going to be the most dangerous year that we've experienced since the Berlin crisis. Because Donald Trump in office, backed into a corner politically, separating himself from our allies, Russia and China are going to see that as a golden opportunity. Putin and Xi will never have a better chance to break NATO and seize Taiwan. And unless the Europeans and our Asian allies can get organized and work together, and we can find something in the United States that will give some credibility to our defense commitments, I really worry that those countries are going to overreach because they know Donald Trump will back down. In a crisis, Donald Trump is not going to order the United States to protect Taiwan, and he is not going to order the United States to protect Europe, and Putin and Xi are going to see 27 as their last chance to do something about it. Wait, that was the bad news? That's the bad news. Joe, that sounds fine. We're not going to have a nuclear war over Taiwan. Great. The question is, I'm being facetious, all of our listeners in Taipei, China, as we like to refer to it. I'm kidding. Little joke. Where do we see the emerging flashpoints? Where do we see the first evidence that the absence of these treaties is making the world more dangerous? What should people be looking for? States getting serious about developing their own nuclear weapons. We hear the rumbles about that. It's a combination of the collapse of the treaties, and it's also the collapse of confidence in the United States. I mean, this is what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was talking about at Davos. There's been a rupture. And he's talking about how the middle powers have to now organize for their own defense. And at first, you think that's a good thing. But then as you start to go through that, you realize from the European point of view, they're looking at expansionist power on their east, Russia, and now an unknown, perhaps territorial expansionist power on their west, the United States. I mean, he's threatening Denmark over Greenland. And seriously, so they have to then start doing what? Not just grow their political power, they have to start rearming. They have to build up their militaries, and that could very well include nuclear weapons. Japan and South Korea and maybe Taiwan are making similar calculations. If you can't depend on the United States, how are you going to stand up to these nuclear-armed bullies, China, Russia, who are threatening you, or the nuclear-armed bully of the United States who's threatening you? Well, the answer is you have to develop your own nuclear. So that's the first one I would look at. The second one is more us, and it's about Donald Trump's instability. And despite ample opportunity to do so, we have never corrected the Cold War doctrine we had that gives the president of the United States the sole unfettered authority to launch a nuclear weapon. Trump doesn't need to check with anybody. He doesn't need to call a cabinet meeting. There's no joint meeting of Congress, there's no Supreme Court. He can just pick up the phone and order a nuclear strike, and the missiles would launch four minutes after he gave the order. We've got to watch out for Donald Trump in this danger period that John warns about of starting to rattle the nuclear saber again. And we have to be prepared the next time we have power to finally correct that. Let's change that. It's in the power of the president to change it. Stop that from ever happening again, because I don't believe Donald Trump is the last crazy person who's going to occupy the Oval Office. Let's fix that while we can. Yeah, it's really important because, you know, we talk in the past, theoretically, what if a lunatic takes over? It's not a theoretical issue anymore, folks. It's reality. There is an unstable person in the presidency who's a narcissist at the end of the line for him. So he doesn't care what's going to happen next about the rest of the world. P.S. I just want to have a footnote. I'm not in favor of the Chinese taking over Taiwan. We would lose all of our chip production capability and a bunch of other things. I was just focused on the avoidance of nuclear war as an objective. John, yeah, just one. Go ahead. Yeah, I do want to. We've got only four minutes left here. I do want to. Frame the last question for both of you, and that is the Cold War was bad. The nuclear arms race was bad. Living with the specter of nuclear apocalypse was bad. But as I look ahead with more potential nuclear weapon states, with bigger investments in nuclear weapons, with a lunatic-led United States that may at some point in the not-too-distant future think, oh, well, we have a defense. We could actually enter a war like this and protect ourselves. And we haven't talked about this for one bloody second yet. You know, AI and other things complicating the mix. It sure looks like the next nuclear arms race, the one that's already started, is a lot more dangerous and worrisome and the nuclear nightmares of a new generation of people growing up with this are going to be a lot worse. Is there a question there, David? Yes. Let me rephrase it. The nuclear nightmares of the new generation growing up with this are going to be a lot worse. You see how I raised the... Yeah, very, very, very nicely done. Thank you. You know, I feel like, you know, we need to, I forget the name of the quarterback who was like, you know, 42 years old and they brought him back to play for the Colts last, you know, the last couple of games of the season. So Joe's going to get pulled out of retirement because it turns out we actually need people to understand this stuff. Because yes, you know, for those people that thought this was all over and the weapons didn't go away and people like myself and others toiling away on these issues or trying to make sure people understood that, are going to be needed more than ever. And we did a series in the Washington Post before it also went crazy last summer, a five-part series on the next nuclear age that talked about nuclear accidents and nuclear proliferation and the new arms race and how bad it would get. So I encourage people to look at it for free if you can, because you don't want to pay Bezos any more money. But the reality is that we're going to have to navigate this world. We're not where we were in the late 1980s or early 1990s, where we talked about we think we could get rid of nuclear weapons in this generation. This is now a new generational challenge. Me and the generation that is coming after me is going to have to wrestle with this for the entirety of their lives. And unless we get organized to think that way, this is not a problem that gets solved tomorrow. We are dealing with multiple nuclear crises all at the same time. We have a three-way nuclear arms race that we just had the starting gun go off. We have a broader cascade of new nuclear weapon states that are likely to manifest in the next 10 years unless the United States and its allies can have some kind of reproachment and agreement that this is bad for everybody. And even then, you're going to see more countries and more subnational groups gain the ability to produce either biological capabilities or, God forbid, nuclear capabilities because of what AI uplift is going to give them. So we are we are now in a new nuclear age. And the fact that our politicians don't recognize it, the fact that the public isn't demanding action on it is, for me, the biggest concern. Yeah, I mean, we have 60 seconds left. We have a hard stop. So we have 60 seconds left, Joe. And there's a lot to deal with there. And we'll have you guys back to talk about this in the future. I think him comparing you to Philip Rivers was unkind. Okay, as as as as quarterback. Joe looks better than Phil Rivers? Well, Joe is Tom Brady, right? Joe is a whole different level. But what is your last 60-second wrap-up? First, I'm going to come on the show more often if you keep talking like that. And second, you're absolutely right, David, about the dangerous world we're entering. This is, you know, Kagan, I keep going back to this article, so I thought it was so pointed. He says, Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child's play. And I think that's right. That is what's happening here. And it's one where not only are the problems multiplying, but we're one of the biggest problems. We got nuclear weapons to stop Hitler from using them. And the idea behind deterrence is that we, the democracies, would be responsible stewards of nuclear weapons to prevent these authoritarians from using them as authoritarians who want to do and be reckless and irresponsible and not care about human life. What happens when we're one of the authoritarians? What happens when we're one of the bad guys? How do we address these problems then? This is one of the things that makes this world much more dangerous than the nightmarish Cold War world we just escaped. Holy shit. You know, I have to say I anticipated a lot of things, but I hadn't really thought about it in that perspective, which is that in the last Cold War, there were at least good guys. In the current Cold War scenario, there may not be any good guys. The United Kingdom and France are the last two liberal democracies left with nuclear weapons. And how long will they last? Yeah, no question about that. All right, look, you guys are the best. I think you've done a big public service by this. We'll try to spread it as widely as possible. And we'll get you back real soon because this is real important. For now, thank you, Joe. Thank you, John. And thank you, everybody, for listening. Bye-bye. Thank you.