Ankit Panda

We have more than 190 countries signed up to that.

controls the spread of nuclear weapons.

The argument that I make in the book that I think is really important to revisit at this moment when a new start has just expired is that we are entering a new period of complexity and danger with nuclear weapons.

This is a world where arms control, as we've just seen, is on the decline and the relevance of nuclear weapons and fundamentally nuclear deterrence, which is what most countries ask of their nuclear weapons to primarily deter

attacks against them.

In the case of the United States, attacks against ourselves and our allies.

Everybody's becoming more interested in nuclear weapons.

And so for many of us, this is an unfamiliar world.

Really, after the Cold War ended, the nuclear issue didn't disappear, but it very much became relegated to the sidelines, at least for what really concerned us as Americans.

And so now I think we are back in a world where everybody's going to just have to pay a

to the ways in which nuclear weapons are shaping our world.

And in the book, I try to make some of those suggestions.

You know, you asked what should come next.

You know, I try to be realistic in terms of what is politically feasible.

Given the place we are right now in our relations with Russia,

with our own government really losing a substantial amount of expertise in many areas, it seems rather implausible to me that we will negotiate a new treaty.

And, you know, then there's Senate politics involved with getting new treaties through.

But what I would strongly suggest is that policymakers here in the United States and elsewhere do need to remember that the lesson we learned really almost the hard way during the early part of the Cold War was

was that relying on nuclear weapons for our security without supporting negotiated means of restraint is just far too dangerous.

And so be that arms control, be that other types of agreements, I do think there is still potential to put some guardrails on the worst types of risks that might otherwise just spiral out of control.