Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 4, Episode 6: Jon Wolfsthal; Federation of American Scientists, Doomsday Clock

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Season 4, Episode 6: Jon Wolfsthal; Federation of American Scientists, Doomsday Clock · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, I'm Jeff Sachs, and welcome to Book Club.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking about a topic that is a little bit frightening, somewhat grim, and I think the most important topic on the planet, and that is uh survival.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about the doomsday clock.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: The doomsday clock, uh, we're going to learn from one of the great experts, is a way that a group of scientists for decades has been helping uh humanity understand the risks of nuclear war and now many other uh major risks alongside nuclear war.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: On January 28th, 2025, uh the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the keeper of the doomsday clock, presented an update of the clock, saying that we are very, very close to disaster.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get to the specifics of that in just a moment.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thrilled that we have with us to help us understand the message of the doomsday clock, the message of the announcement on January 28th, and what we can do to uh avoid disaster.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: A great expert uh in global security and global risks, uh, John uh Wolfstall.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh John is a member of the scientific board, it's called the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that deliberates and sets the doomsday clock and informs the public about the risks.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's also the director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists and adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: John, thank you so much for joining.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was mentioning just as uh we were getting started that I refer to the Doomsday Clock myself, I think every single day, uh, and have done so for a long time because it scares the wits out of me.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it's just per se frightening, it's it's a clock hand, but because I think it's completely uh accurate and the message that the doomsday clock is uh telling us is something that everybody needs to understand.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for being here.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: What is the doomsday clock and what did you unveil on January 28th?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, Jeffrey, thank you so much for having me on and giving me from uh my perch at the clock a chance to explain exactly that.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: What is it?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: What is the message we're trying to convey?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: What goes into the process?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because from us, um, the goal is not to scare anybody, it's to educate and to motivate the public and leaders to understand the risks that we face and to try to do something about them.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not uh uh it's not designed to be a countdown clock.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we joke every once in a while that we need to put an alarm on the clock so people understand it's designed to wake them up.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but uh, you know, we we'll go through all the clock metaphors, I'm sure, in the time we have.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: The clock was invented by the Bulletin the Atomic Scientists, an organization and a magazine that was founded by the people that invented the atomic bomb.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Many of the scientists who came out of the Manhattan Project during World War II, the secret program, which many people will know through the movie Oppenheimer and through other public accounts, um, were concerned that the politicians and elected officials didn't truly understand the nature of the technology that they had been given.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and actually, the Federation of American Scientists, my day job, and the bulletin were founded by some of the same people with the same mission, which was to inform leaders and the public about this new nuclear age and the risks of it, and to ensure that science and policy had equal seats at the table.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so the clock was um created in 1947 as a metaphor.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: It was a way for the public to understand the risks that we faced and to recognize that while many people thought that the nuclear weapon had enabled the United States to end World War II, and that debate has gone on for 80 years, that this was a double-edged sword, that it had the ability to give the United States great power, but it also gave humanity the means to destroy itself.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And Einstein talked about this extensively, uh, that, you know, we have given mankind the tools to destroy itself, but not necessarily the intellectual or moral capacity to manage it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we recognize that that would be a constant problem.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: So when the clock was invented in 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: And we felt that that was, we they felt that that was an appropriate amount of time for the public to understand that we didn't have unlimited time and that we needed to take these threats seriously.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And over the last 78 years, the clock has moved closer to midnight and away from midnight based on different um geostrategic political developments.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and we can talk about some of those shifts.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do want to go over some of that because I think the history is really important to understand.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: So the the clock is reviewed every year, is that right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's correct.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: So we get together pretty much every fall, early winter, November.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um we the board itself meets twice a year.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so we talk about a number of things and we exchange papers and developments.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we vote and set the clock in November, and then we work on a negotiated statement among the board members with a lot of smart people with different views.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: That negotiation often takes longer than the vote.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then we release the clock in January.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: And then this past January, um, or just last month, we announced that we had moved the clock one second closer to midnight, leaving us at 89 seconds to midnight.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Midnight, uh we we need to appreciate midnight means nuclear Armageddon or collapse of humanity.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, midnight is not just that the minute hand uh sweeps uh past into a new day.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's the end.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, and and we actually talk about this a lot because over time, with an organization this long, uh, what did they mean when they set up the clock?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Has that changed over time?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: And we should talk a little bit later.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: The clock no longer just represents nuclear risk.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we actually expanded the clock about 15 years ago to also include other um catastrophic risks, including climate change, biological weaponry, and what we are now referring to as disruptive technology.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: It's all part of the complex discussions that we get into.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but yes, if we get to midnight, then um we won't be around to debate whether or not we got the time right.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, after we're done and have a couple of drinks, we joke that the great thing about midnight is that we'll never reach it because we won't be around to move the clock to that final point.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: You better set the clock beforehand because there's no time afterwards.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I want to go back to uh Einstein because uh Einstein was uh quite a mind uh and one of the geniuses of uh all of uh human history.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that he was uh one of, of course, the visionaries uh both that uh such a weapon could be created and also uh what it might mean reminded me of an exchange that I had with a wonderful colleague last year in the context of Oppenheimer, uh the movie uh being shown.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And uh she's a great campaigner for ending nuclear weapons, including for the treaty to prohibit uh nuclear weapons, uh, which is a UN treaty that we'll discuss.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, none of the uh nuclear states has yet signed on to it, but uh the idea is to end nuclear weapons.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Ivana Hughes, who is the leader of a foundation to prohibit uh or end nuclear weapons, said, I think, with great uh passion and insight, that humanity invented nuclear weapons, uh, so humanity can solve the problem of uh nuclear weapons.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: But it immediately struck me when she said that, and I heard that for the first time, that great geniuses invented nuclear weapons, but then uh it went to, let's say, some average people all over the world, uh, not the greatest geniuses in the world, and suddenly nuclear weapons that could destroy us uh are in the hands of, well, they're in the hands of the military, they're in the hands of people with axes to grind, they're in the hands of some very neurotic people, they're in the hands of Cold Warriors, hot warriors, uh first strike uh advocates, and so forth.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we have this unbelievably unprecedentedly dangerous technology that only expanded over time from atomic bombs to uh thermonuclear bombs, so-called uh hydrogen bombs uh in the early 1950s.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we're still trying to grapple with how to get these under some kind of safe control.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the movie Oppenheimer helped a lot of people to understand this is a most remarkable scientific breakthrough, of course, the genius involved.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: But then as the scientists were coming close to that moment, asking already, maybe we should stop.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should stop.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is going to take us someplace so unknown, so unprecedented, so dangerous that many wanted to stop the project before even the testing at Los Alamos uh in the summer of 1945.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: You've put your finger on a number of the problems we wrestle with regularly, Jeffrey.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's important to point out that we make clear every year in our statement, and for those of you interested, you can go to our website at the Bulletin Atomic Scientist and read the statement.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's a couple of pages long, it's not a treatise that explains human beings invented these problems.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_02: We invented nuclear weapons, we are the cause of climate change, we invented biological weaponry, we are inventing and using disruptive technology, but we have the means to actually manage, control, and eliminate these threats.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and as the expression goes, it's easier to destroy than to create.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to invent a nuclear weapon.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: Taking it apart is actually pretty straightforward.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: You want to do it slowly, of course, but you know, that's a question of political will.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's a question of organization and people demanding that their elected officials change the course of action, and also officials who understand the gravity of the threats that we face.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: So whether you're a neurotic, a hot warrior, or a cold warrior, nobody's around after a nuclear war, right?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Nuclear weapons don't kill Republicans or Democrats, they kill people.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so we talk about that quite often.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: People look at climate change, right?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Wildfires are destroying conservative houses and progressive houses and millionaires' houses and billionaires' houses, everybody's.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: They don't discriminate.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: But but it is worth pointing out that as challenging as this problem is, we have had successes.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, there are nine countries that have nuclear weapons: United States, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we were worried, Kennedy was worried in the 60s, that you might have dozens of countries by the 70s.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason that we don't have that many countries, because 40, 50 are technically capable of building them, is that the United States and others have worked together.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: The United States and Soviet Union used to work together to prevent countries from acquiring nuclear weapons because it made the world more dangerous.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Those regional wars can escalate to global wars, and we wanted to keep a lid on things.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: Now the worry is that all of that is unraveling.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: As the world really is sort of going to more extremist positions, as territorial integrity is called into question, as wars of aggression are seen as acceptable, do countries begin to reevaluate whether they should rely on nuclear weapons?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Same thing with climate.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, we were making some progress through the Paris Treaty, which committed states to restrict their carbon dioxide emissions and greenhouse gas emissions.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: The United States has walked away from that.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: China's not really been living up to it.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: And at a time when uh renewable energy is becoming more useful and more economical, you see the oil and gas industry doubling down and demanding more incentives and getting rid of it.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, this is a struggle.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: We are trying to save humanity.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: We're not saying that that's going to be easy, but it is eminently doable.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: It is really a question of focus and will.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't agree more.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you you mentioned one of the real watersheds of getting uh the nuclear weapons under control.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: I happened to uh write a book about uh that uh about a dozen years ago: the adoption of the partial nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, which was uh essentially the first nuclear arms agreement between the U.S.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: and the Soviet Union, and it paved the way a few years later, uh, precisely as President Kennedy had hoped, for a non-proliferation treaty.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the the reason I wrote a book about it, incidentally, was not because I planned to uh be an expert in the partial nuclear test ban treaty, but because I read a speech by President Kennedy, uh which is uh, to my mind the the finest speech by an American president, at least in the modern era, his so-called peace speech given on uh June 10, 1963.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that speech.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I fell in love with it, made my family listen to it, because it's uh, of course, on video probably a hundred times till I was driving them crazy.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then I wrote a book about the speech and and uh and and uh how it came about and so forth.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea of the speech was that at the height of the Cold War, in fact, of course, just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis had brought us within literally a second of a nuclear war, because uh Soviet submarine was on the verge of actually launching a nuclear-tipped torpedo till that launch order was countermanded by a Soviet official on that submarine.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Just a few months after the near end of the world, Kennedy and Khrushchev, uh the Soviet chairman of the Communist Party and the chairman of the Soviet Union, were able to reach an agreement to pull back from the brink.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what I loved about Kennedy's speech in June 1963 was he said, we can reach agreements with the other side because they're in our mutual interest.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: They want to live, we want to live, and that's the basis why you can actually reach an agreement.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the kind of news for people at the height of the Cold War who said, Oh, you can't trust those people.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Kennedy humanized them.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And Khrushchev, when he heard Kennedy's speech, loved that humanization and said, Oh, he called the U.S.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: uh uh envoy April Harriman to see him and said, I want to make peace with your president.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's the finest speech by an American president since FDR, is what uh Nikita Khrushchev said.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it demonstrated Kennedy's proposition that a rational, humane, empathetic approach could actually lead both sides of the Cold War, at the height of the Cold War, to pull back from the brink.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And um we did at that time, but it didn't last.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I do want us to go through, if we can, kind of the the swings of of the minute hand uh just briefly so that people understand how the ebb and flow and how did we ever get to a mere less than one and a half minutes now?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is the meaning of 89 seconds, less than one and a half minutes to disaster at this point.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh the the clock was unveiled in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why why don't you walk us through very briefly uh just uh the basics of what happened uh from then?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I will be brief because it's moved 17 times over that period.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I won't go through each one.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean, you've called out one of the biggest moves is that um from uh uh 1960 to 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we moved from seven minutes to midnight to 12 minutes to midnight.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So we moved the clock five minutes back.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um that was one of the largest moves, not the largest, but that showed that when the countries, the two countries that possess nuclear weapons that were standing off against each other, negotiated and pulled back from the brink, that we were doing better.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Humanity recognized these risks and was taking the actions necessary to reduce an accidental war or a war of aggression.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And can I underscore that, John, just for everybody to listen?
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is not some propaganda device just saying we're at risk, we're at danger.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: The hand sometimes goes away from midnight because the scientists and the science and security board says, look, the politicians have done well.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they pulled back from the brink, they've signed an agreement.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a very acute measure.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a thermometer of where we stand.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the fever goes down, and sometimes the fever is very high.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we use the term fever all the time because I think a lot of what we are experiencing is this sort of energy to compete, right?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, people often are asking us, well, you know, who's to blame here?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, I have a brother, and my mother said, I don't care who started it, it takes two.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: In this case, it takes nine on nuclear issues.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, on climate, it takes everybody.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: But we have moved the clock back and forth in reaction.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: And another big move was obviously when the Soviet Union collapsed.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Here was the superpower facing off against the United States.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_02: And many of your listeners, I'll assume, are younger than you and younger than me, Jeffrey, weren't around during that period.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, you know, I I look young, but the radiation uh is a preservative.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm older than I look.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, it most of the people that are engaged in politics today don't remember the Cold War.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: For the last 30 years, they haven't had to think about the risk that a country would rain down thousands of nuclear weapons and destroy every American city and military base in 30 minutes or less.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: And many Russians and Chinese haven't had to worry about that either.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: Now we're having to live through this again because we're not only in a competition uh with one country, but multiple countries.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_02: And small wars can become big wars.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: You and I may or may not agree on Ukraine and what's happening, but I think everybody recognizes that the risk of that war spreading is one that all countries should be worried about and focused on because escalation can happen without leaders being able to control it.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: And that I think is a key lesson.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: So when 1991 came around, the Soviet Union fell apart, we no longer had a Cold War.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: So we moved back to 17 minutes to midnight.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's farthest.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the farthest, yes.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's the farthest we've ever been.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: But today, it is our estimation that we are as close to midnight as we have ever been, worse than the height of the Cold War.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: Not just because people are thinking that nuclear weapons are usable again, that you could have a limited nuclear war and survive and it wouldn't escalate, but because we're also looking at more countries with them.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_02: You're also looking at climate change, which we are steadily moving away from the solutions, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Every year is more CO2 pumped into the atmosphere and more countries growing and expanding their reliance on greenhouse gas emitting um energy.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're also seeing the rise of disruptive technologies.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not just AI.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: People ask, you know, do we move it 89 seconds to midnight because of uh the Chinese AI company that can do it faster, cheaper, you know, for less?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, no, we don't react to minute-to-minute.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the idea that artificial intelligence is spreading, that we don't understand it, and it's being rapidly applied to conventional and even nuclear communications and command and control, is something we should be worried about and makes the challenge of preventing disaster harder.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you know that another of these uh dangerous technologies is uh is the biological manipulation, biowarfare, biodefense, biomanipulation uh of pathogens uh for perhaps other reasons, vaccine research or or other reasons.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is we actually this is one of the issues we debated very intently um in November, because um, as you know, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Alpha Fold, which is an automated AI-enhanced large language model that was able to catalog all the potential protein combinations, um, and to do it in a short amount of time when it would have taken human beings hundreds of years.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_02: Why did they do it?
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can develop vaccines, you can develop cures diseases that kill millions of people a year, but at the same time in the wrong hands, it can be used to design boutique biological weapons that can go after specific segments of the population.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: You can design specific pathogens to go after individuals based on their genetic signature.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why we talk about these as dual use technologies.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: They can be used for good, they can be used for harm.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we're not going to stop the application of automation into the biological sciences.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: That's been around for a long time.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: But what norms are in place?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: What accountability are in place?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, power.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Are we going to have either laws or norms or the enforcement mechanism to go after laboratories or countries or individuals that violate those norms?
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: Those are big questions that we haven't even begun to really wrestle with.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know if you uh you know, but I headed a commission for the Lancet Medical Journal about COVID.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: I reached the conclusion that the virus that uh caused the pandemic was uh out of a lab uh with a very high probability, in my own view, although I don't want to digress, uh, out of a out of a US lab.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that these are not uh simply risks, but we probably, in my opinion, live through a pandemic that claimed perhaps 20 million lives out of uh an experiment that went wrong.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: But but what we do know whether that's true or not, it certainly could be true because the technologies are now so powerful.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: You can take a pathogen, you can amp it up, you can make it more transmissible, you can do all sorts of unbelievable things.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so little control over any of this right now.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: You and I will not agree on this.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I've done obviously not as much research, but I work very closely with some of the world's leading pathogen scientists, and there's a debate over this.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, it's one of those things we may not know and ever be able to prove.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the answer, in my opinion, and this is my personal opinion, not the bulletin's opinion, um, the last thing we should be doing is stopping research into pathogens.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: We should be trying to understand the benefits and the risks of how these things are applied.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_02: But for where every country under the sun to be developing very high-class, very highly capable pathogen laboratories where they can do this type of research doesn't make any sense economically or from a security point of view.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_02: How you convince a country not to pursue this when it is cutting-edge technology is a problem and a challenge.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: But we have been successful in nuclear by developing the tools to make sure countries can benefit from nuclear energy and nuclear medicine without having to build it themselves.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so, how do you guarantee countries in the developing world that are facing pandemics today, right?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are horribly disfiguring, debilitating diseases that are endemic in populations and don't have the means to attack it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: You need to make sure that they have ready access to vaccines, that they have uh easy, cheap, ready uh response teams that are available to them.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh again, we didn't talk about this in the bulletin, but front and center today is the United States cutting off uh assistance to U.S.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: uh Agency for National Development.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: Who do you think is providing vaccines to those states?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Who do you think is providing medical capability and training to those states?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's AID.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: If that goes away, they go independent.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm sure the Russians and Chinese and others will be happy to help them build category three biolabs where they can do all kinds of things that are not in our interest.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: You know, cutting off uh life-saving vaccines or or drugs is obviously uh unthinkable and a huge blunder of any government.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: But one one of the things uh during uh the uh COVID pandemic that was almost a caricature, but a kind of uh exhibit A for you guys uh at the doomsday clock, it was uh that Boston University at some moment announced that they had genetically manipulated the pathogen, which is called SARS-CoV-2, by taking the original Wuhan strain, so-called, and then amping it up with a later mutation, which made it more transmissible.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, look, we've been able to reconstruct a more lethal, more transmissible virus.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is so-called gain-of-function research, which has uh become a notorious phrase, rightly so.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: When BU announced that, NIH said, wait a minute, you didn't have permission to do that.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And Boston University said, um, we don't need permission.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: This wasn't on your money, uh, this is on our money.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it was stunning in my mind.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know who was right legally, but the fact of the matter is there was no agreed framework in the United States for who could do what under what conditions and with what safety.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, but this is not a new issue.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you remember, and you probably do quite well, this was true when we talked about genetic manipulation and CRISPR technology.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: And could you actually prevent scientists or engineers from using this to actually genetically engineer uh or clone sheep or help uh a fetus that might be prone to AIDS to prevent from developing them disease?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: And when the United States said, no, we're not gonna go that far, the Chinese, the French, the Russians, the Germans went and did it anyway.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: So information spread, science spreads.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's one immutable truth.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um nobody has the ability to control this per se unless governments agree that there are risks and we want to prevent it from happening.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: So another issue we talk about a lot is this question of whether AI is going to spread to nuclear decision making.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it matters to the United States whether China is relying on AI for managing their nuclear affairs, and it matters to China whether we are.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: So the United States has been involved in leading an effort on a political declaration on responsible uses of AI in the military.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: And there's some uses that are actually totally reasonable.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, General Cotton, who's the chairman of U.S.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: Strategic Command, has said we want to look at AI for improving the reliability of our communications so that in a crisis, if a satellite gets taken out or a relay dish gets taken out, we can reroute quickly instead of having a person try to figure out how that all makes sense and actually gives presidents decision time.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're using it to decide when to launch a nuclear weapon or how to target, that is problematic, to put it very mildly.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so none of these are easy questions, but our estimation at the bulletin is that the leaders in the United States and elsewhere are not paying anywhere near the right amount of attention to solve these problems.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: And we worry that the public is continuously disengaged because of the huge amount of information to which they're being exposed, and quite frankly, to the amount of disinformation to which they're being exposed.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why we've included uh disruptive technologies and mis and disinformation as one of the elements that goes into our calculation of the clock.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: If you can't trust the president's voice or face on television because it's been created by an AI agent, that has real implications for our ability to manage the population, to inform uh and affect international discourse.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, if Vladimir Putin comes on the TV tomorrow and says, I'm launching nuclear weapons, whether you like it or not, and he didn't really do it, but it's an AI video, that that has major implications.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the capacity of malicious forces to stir up a war are unprecedented at this point.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely unprecedented.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: It'll take more than just Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney in a uh in an office to gin up the justification for war these days.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you could do it with a couple of good computers and uh and access to Chat GPT.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: I had the experience of uh giving a speech recently, and somebody kindly turned it into all the major UN languages with AI, and there I was on the new video presenting the speech in perfect Mandarin, and uh Chinese assistant of mine saw it and was horrified because she thought, I've been faking it all along, that I understand Mandarin and that uh this is completely unfair, and I must have been listening in on her conversations and so on.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right the whole time.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and it was so convincing.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: She had not an idea that this was uh an artificial creation.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: I have kids that are just getting ready to figure out what they want to do for their careers and lives, and one of the things we tell them is you got to think about what AI will replace.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I used to work at the Monterey Institute of International Studies that trains interpreters and translators.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um they're not gonna be doing that in five years.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: Why would they?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: There's nuances, but eventually it'll it'll be replaced.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of these come to play.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't claim to be able to solve the world's problems or even to define them for everybody.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the sense is now that there are more challenges and people feel less in control of technology and how it affects their lives.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: And uh part of our message is we do have control through political action, but even then it's it still takes leadership and wise, smart, dedicated leadership to get this right, or we really will continue to creep closer to midnight.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to help us understand uh how we got to uh 89 seconds uh to midnight by starting uh back in 1991, uh, when the doomsday clock was the farthest away.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: There was a a sense worldwide uh that while the Cold War had ended and an era of peace was uh going to start, and the bulletin put the doomsday clock at 17 minutes to midnight, the farthest away from uh danger that it had ever been.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I happened to have been around those days uh playing some role on the economic side because I sat in the Kremlin on December 1991, sitting directly across from Boris Yeltsin, as he explained to me uh that the Soviet Union was ending the following week and that Russia would be a friendly, normal, democratic, peace-loving, market-based society.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the concepts that Boris Yeltsin said.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I am sure America will give you all the support that you need to accomplish that.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was 17 minutes to midnight.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: I have observed, to my own chagrin, that uh every presidential administration from that time, the president inherited the clock farther away from midnight than they left it.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, however one wants to apportion the blame, Clinton inherited the clock at 17 minutes from midnight and uh left it at nine minutes to midnight.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh George Bush Jr., nine minutes to midnight, left it at five minutes uh to midnight.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Obama, five minutes to midnight, is his inheritance and left it at three minutes to midnight.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Trump at 100 seconds to midnight by the end of his term.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Joe Biden inherited 100 seconds from midnight and left us at 89 seconds to midnight.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: Something is not making us safer.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh of course, it's many things, but you're an expert on the nuclear arms control framework.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: If we could stick with that for a moment, you you mentioned that it's basically almost fallen apart.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: What has happened to nuclear arms control?
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: And for most of us, even for me, I've written a book about these things.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: I study it every day.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm part of the diplomacy.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: I can't keep track of all of the alphabet soup of the arms control agreements.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it's painfully obvious that we don't have an arms control framework now of the kind that we did in the past.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's terrifying.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: I agree with you.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: You've characterized, I think, correctly, that um the good news is you don't have to memorize all those acronyms anymore because most of them have ceased to exist.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm not in the blame business, I'm in the analysis business.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, there's a concern that agreements, treaties that are verified, have ceased to be an effective way to control arms racing and worst-case analysis of what the other side is doing and can do to you.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_02: Arms control agreements codify understandings among governments, right?
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: Arms control has never ended an arms race.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: What they've done is they've sealed up an agreement that allows you to gain confidence that that arms race or that particular competition is under control.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: So in 1987, when Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated the INF agreement, they got rid of intermediate range missiles everywhere.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: They agreed that those weapons were dangerous because they shortened the amount of time leaders had to make decisions about launching nuclear weapons.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: If we could get a missile onto the Kremlin in five or eight minutes, that is not enough time for them to make an informed decision, and vice versa.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so we agreed, let's get rid of those things.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: Russia violated that agreement under Putin, and then Trump withdrew from it because we were abiding and they weren't, and we wanted to make sure that they couldn't benefit militarily.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: Same thing with a number of other agreements, whether it's conventional forces in Europe, open skies treaty, Russian violations that were driven in many people's minds by the sense the United States was gaining advantage in other areas and that Russia needed to compensate because of that, led to the breakdown of these agreements.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, there's only one major agreement that's left in place.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: That is the new strategic arms reduction treaty that was negotiated by Obama, and I was part of that team in 2010, that expires in a year.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point, the United States and Russia will have no legal restrictions for the number of nuclear weapons that they can deploy in any way, shape, or form.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: And that is a really dangerous time because we will then assume that Russia has expanded its nuclear arsenal.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: They will assume that we have expanded our nuclear arsenal and we're all off to the races at a time when China is building up, when North Korea, India, and Pakistan continue to build up.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_02: So this is what we saw, in fact, during the period that you talked about from 91 until today.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_02: The clock has moved forward not only because the United States and Russia weren't getting it right, but because other things were happening that we didn't control.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: So 1998, the clock moved up by three minutes because India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in a series of tests.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, 2002, the clock moved closer to midnight because North Korea conducted a nuclear test after we had tried to freeze their nuclear program and did for about a decade.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the George W.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Bush administration came in and said, no, regime change is our non-proliferation strategy.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's how we're gonna do that.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I see.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: I that one I would put on the US.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_02: Right, but but it but again, you know, I we can argue.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I agree.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but my main point is that was a North Korean breakthrough.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: So these these events lead us to change the clock so that people understand two things.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: One, we are in greater danger as a result of these actions, and countries need to wake up and pull back.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: And two, this idea that any one person or any one country controls risk is nonsensical.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: History has shown that the the world always has leaders that think they're in charge and can control everything, and they're all wrong.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: One thing, John, that strikes me, uh actually, as I'm thinking about it and also listening and thinking about news in the last couple of days about I think the Trump administration is talking about some super biffed up space-based uh anti-ballistic missile.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: Iron dome, iron dome.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just just an iron dome of just a few hundred billion dollars more and we'll be there and so forth.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that seems to fuel this is the belief we'll stay ahead or we have a choke point.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: We can trump that.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: No pun intended, obviously.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: We can beat them.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: We can outcompete anybody.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: When the atomic bomb was made, I think it was the U.S.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: intelligence belief that uh it would take the Russians 20 years or so to uh get the bomb.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it was four years, of course, also with spying and all sorts of other things, but it was four years.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_02: This is a great quote from uh Truman in the conversation with Oppenheimer when he went in and met with him, and uh he said, Truman said, You know how long, how long do you think it's gonna take the Russians to catch up?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: And before Oppenheimer could answer, he said, I'll tell you when never, because he had a view that they were unsophisticated, that they weren't intelligent, right?
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: When the Soviets and Russians had some of the best mathematicians in the world, helped by a lot of espionage, they were able to do it in four years.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think it's true, you could tell me if it's true, that Reagan and Gorbachev actually really almost came close to a definitive breakthrough to move towards two zero or toward zero, but Star Wars stood in the way and Reagan wouldn't give it up.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: I've sat in the library in Reykjavik where they agreed to this, where they started with, well, can we limit nuclear weapons?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, why don't we reduce them?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then why don't we get rid of them?
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: And Gorbachev said, yes, let's get rid of these horrible weapons, but you also have to agree to not build this missile defense program, Star Wars.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_02: And Reagan said, no, no, no, this is we have to have this.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_02: This is the this is the guarantee.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: And at that point it all fell apart.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: John, for me, again, uh you're the expert, so I'm so happy to be able to test my thinking.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, one of the most destabilizing choices like the Star Wars, but uh something very practical was the U.S.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: unilateral withdrawal from ABM, the anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've uh been involved with the Russians for 35 years, and I know, I deeply believe that NATO enlargement and many other things are tremendously unnecessary aggravants, but it seems to me that it is understated.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think the 2002 withdrawal from ABM was the single most destabilizing action the United States has taken in the last quarter century vis-a-vis Russia, followed by the placement of the Aegis missile systems.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you see that they don't highlight it, this is number one, but you see it how deeply neuralgic it was.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: So we won't agree on Aegis, and we can unpack that another podcast.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_02: But it's worth explaining this just for a minute, Jeffrey, because it gets to the point I made before, and I agree with you.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: During the Cold War in the 1970s, the United States and Russia began to understand that neither side could outcompete the other with nuclear weapons.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: If we raced and kept racing, neither side would achieve nuclear superiority, and therefore we had to agree that we would remain vulnerable to each other.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_02: That was the unfortunate but the only sustainable way to avoid war.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: At that point, the United States and Russia decided we're also going to invest in ballistic missile technology that would defend against incoming strikes.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: At which point the side said, Well, look, if you're going to invest in defenses, we're going to need more offenses.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then we just get into a race.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: So let's limit the number of defenses that we will build.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_02: And we agreed in a treaty.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_02: Richard Nixon agreed with Brezhnev and said, each country can build two sites with defenses around your capital, if you want to defend your capital, and around an ICBM base if you want to protect your missiles.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_02: And that way you can be sure we can't kill you and you can always kill us.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that treaty remained in place from 1972 until 2002.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_02: At which point, George Smart Treaty.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_02: And because it said, let's understand the nature of this competition.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_02: Neither side can win.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, just as in 2002, people think they can fight and win a nuclear war inside the United States, inside Russia, inside China, inside North Korea.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so in 2002, George W.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_02: Bush and John Bolton and Dick Cheney said, Why should America be restricted from defending ourselves?
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: We can do this better than anybody else.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: And George Bush said, Vladimir Putin's not our enemy.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_02: Don Rumsfeld said he's not our enemy.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: I've looked into his eyes and seen his soul.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: We can trust this guy.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_02: And the reality is that it's not about one person or one individual or trust, it's about the technology and what it can do.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_02: And when we withdrew from that treaty, the Vladimir Putin went to Munich, to the Munich Security Conference, and said, We respect your right to withdraw from this treaty, but I'm going to tell you what's going to happen.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to build more nuclear weapons.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to expand our sphere of influence in Europe because we worry that with this capability, you will be able to blackmail us.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: And we have seen Putin's.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly right.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: So it was predictable.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_02: And there are people, I worked when I was very young, I worked for some of the people that not only uh invented nuclear weapons, but negotiated the ABM treaty.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, uh, John Rhinlander and George Bunn and people that were involved from Eisenhower through Kennedy into Nixon.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and they predicted this.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: They said if we don't have this, we are in a world with uh uncontrolled nuclear competition.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where we're going to find ourselves unless we reverse corpse.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_02: And isn't this new Iron Dome uh thing the same?
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the good news is Donald Trump doesn't know what he's talking about.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_02: This is the ultimate bucket with no bottom.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_02: The United States could pour every dollar we produce through GDP from now until the end of Trump's term, and we still would not have an effective defense against ballistic missiles.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: But even look, let's say for a minute that the United States could spend half a trillion dollars over the next four years and build an effective means to prevent missiles from impacting the United States.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: What's to prevent Russia from putting a nuclear weapon in a shipping container?
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: They have an under underwater torpedo that they're building, the Poseidon system that can um uh defeat any defenses we put up against it.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: So even if you built this, it's an imperfect defense.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_02: So the only way to win this kind Competition is not to compete.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's to recognize that we are vulnerable and they are vulnerable and to understand that if we get into a conflict, no one can control it and we have to take steps to pull back.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: John, we are ourselves seven minutes, not to midnight, but to the top of the hour.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask you during the seven minutes, can you sketch out what we should do to move the hands back?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is the bottom line and the the question to save humanity.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I really appreciate you turning to that, Jeffrey, because it's, you know, I am not the life of the cocktail party, because people, when they hear what I do, want to walk away.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: And like, you know, thanks for scaring the crap out of me.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um we're listening.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're listening to every word, believe me.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: So um right now there are two avenues that I think um we need to pursue.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_02: The first is that the leaders need to get this right.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, we we can disagree or agree, you and I probably would, on whether Donald Trump is up to the task.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_02: But interestingly, even he, uh to his message to Davos, said he wants to negotiate with Russia and China to reduce nuclear weapons.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um he actually offered the Reagan administration back in the 80s his services as a negotiator because he feels he's always been a great negotiator, even though he hasn't proven it.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, we should applaud his interest and we should encourage him to actually engage with Russia and China to see whether we can cap this nuclear competition.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right now, the United States and Russia are not committed to a competition.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: We have the potential to grow, but we could cap it.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: And China still has only 600 nuclear weapons compared to our 3,700 nuclear weapons.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_02: So we're far and ahead where the Chinese are.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: This argument that, well, we need a race to keep up, I think people need to look at the numbers.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_02: So on nuclear alone, we just need to encourage that dynamic.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_02: But we also have to have effective enforcement of sanctions against countries that are moving in the opposite direction.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: North Korea's nuclear program continues to grow without restriction.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_02: Iran remains far too close to a nuclear capability.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, the world needs to take that seriously.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_02: On climate, um, even if the United States is not a party to the Paris Treaty, states, uh, companies need to continue to commit to develop and deploy these technologies that reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we need to encourage other countries to live up to these commitments because this is one of the threats that no one country can control by itself.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then lastly, I think we've been very discouraged by early action by the Trump administration to essentially turn over to private companies artificial intelligence and avoid regulating them in any way, shape, or form.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think Congress and publics need to be engaged to ensure that companies aren't able to just sell their wares to any defense contractor and deploy lethal technologies with automation.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_02: There need to be legal protections and accountability in place.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_02: If you build something and it runs amok, the people that build it should be accountable.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Not all of these are things that the science and security board agree to, though some of them are just my personal views, but we do list in our statement, again at our website, some of the things we think should happen on climate, on nuclear, on advanced technology, and on bio.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_02: And these, as I said before, are all eminently doable.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's a question of political will uh and follow-through.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: John, on the new start which expires next year, does it make sense that the US, Russia, and China the three sit down?
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is that enough?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Must India be at the table, Pakistan, if you could uh in closing, specifically on the nuclear arms framework, what would you do as the urgent next step to restore some kind of framework?
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you you're the book writer, Jeffrey.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: I only write articles, but I have one out last week uh in the Bulletin Atomic Scientists that lays exactly this out.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: It will take China roughly 20 years to produce the number of nuclear weapons needed to match the United States or Russia.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_02: So while it would be great if we could get China in a nuclear arms agreement, they are not going to come to the table until they reach some form of parity.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: The United States and Russia need to understand that that's where they're headed because that's what we've done.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_02: Why should they restrict themselves when the United States and Russia have chosen not to?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_02: So I believe that we should negotiate a new bilateral treaty with Russia, that we should look to either lock in current numbers or maybe even go down a little bit lower.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then at that point, we could have rolling five-year agreements that would then eventually bring in the Chinese.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes a problem gets easier if you expand it.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is not one of those times.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: The United States and Russia have decades of experience in verification and transparency in data exchanges.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_02: China and the United States have none of that.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we need to engage them and work to build up that capacity.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_02: But politically, we can't expect China to agree to inferiority where they lock in a thousand nuclear weapons and we have 5,000, because we would never accept that.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's silly to expect that they would do that either.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: Could we get uh the US and Russia to cut down to China's size so they don't have to expand and we get closer to where we need to go?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: So not only would that be a very smart thing to do, but it would save hundreds of billions of dollars of the U.S.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_02: budget.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: So the United States is engaged.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_02: I like that.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_02: I know you're an economist, so I know you would appeal that would appeal to.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: I've actually pitched uh administrations on this.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: The United States is going to spend$1.7 trillion over the next 30 years on its nuclear modernization program.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: When instead we could cut that by two-thirds and maintain a much smaller arsenal that would still deter adversaries and protect allies without having to rebuild a Cold War nuclear arsenal.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but right now the argument and the political conventional wisdom is on the side of more nuclear weapons make us safer.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that's part of the mentality that we have to try to influence and change.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say we reached a plan.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so we'll we'll go with the Wolfstahl plan.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: We'll save uh a trillion dollars uh plus and uh it will make the world a lot safer.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: If two people can agree, then everybody can agree.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: It just it's now it's just a question of levers.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go tell the rest of them.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've got the answer.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds good.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: John, thank you.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your work on the science and security board in letting the world know that we are 89 seconds to midnight.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for this crucial tool of uh public awareness and understanding.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you for the wisdom of uh how we should proceed.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I really want to appreciate, I really want to thank you for joining us.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: And um on behalf of all the listeners uh around the world, we've been listening to uh John Wolfstall, Director of Global Risk at the Federation of American Scientists, and his wisdom and the wisdom of the science and security board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Doomsday Clock.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's uh push that clock away from midnight in the coming months and years.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: John, thank you for being with us.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: You have been listening to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 51:15
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