Ankit Panda

Thanks for having me.

Really happy to be here.

Sure.

So the START treaty continued essentially something we started doing with first the Soviet Union and then Russia in the early 1970s.

In 1972, we begin a process of decades of essentially some type of numerical limits on the sizes of the Russian and American nuclear arsenals.

And that has a lot of effects.

It means that we have to spend less money, that we have to be less concerned about the types of unpredictability that might exist.

And so in 2010, the Obama administration and the Russian Federation agreed

It was a very different time.

We had very different relations with Russia.

We negotiated this treaty and this treaty continued that process.

It set a ceiling for the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons.

Strategic basically just means nuclear weapons that can be used against the other country's homeland.

These are the weapons that really go across the entire planet to the other side.

Those would be limited at 1,550 weapons with 700 launchers for those weapons, launchers being the submarines, the

the land-based missiles and the heavy bombers that might be able to deliver those weapons.

So that's what the treaty did.

So now with the treaty gone, the United States and Russia are actually for the first time since the early 1970s in a world where there are no quantitative limitations on their nuclear forces.

So the good news is we do still have a nonproliferation treaty, right?

There is the NPT, which is the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which is really important, right?