Ankit Panda

And so it should be concerning that you have two countries with nuclear forces that seem to have some confidence that they can essentially throw a few punches at each other every few years and walk away to live the tale.

The concern, of course, is that one time they are going to end up being wrong about that.

And the nature of war is a fundamentally unpredictable enterprise will take its course.

And I think last May, we couldn't have ruled that out.

And of course, that conflict did wrap up in just about 88 hours, despite being really remarkable by the historical standard of what we've seen between the two countries.

Well, the worst is easy.

The worst case scenario in my business is always that nuclear weapons are used, right?

As long as you have countries pouring lots of money into these things that they really do care about for their defense and their national security goals, there remains always the possibility that either deliberately or unintentionally or accidentally, we will get to a point where a nuclear weapon is detonated for the first time in a conflict since 1945.

And of course, we have a remarkable 81-year history of non-use that I think

really speaks to the flip side, which is the best case is that we continue as a species to fundamentally manage these things.

And that's an effort that requires, of course, those within the nuclear states that deal with these weapons day to day, making sure that they are dealing with these things with the care that they deserve.

It requires policymakers at the top to understand what nuclear weapons do and do not do for a country's security.

It requires, I think, leaders to remember the effects of nuclear conflict, right?

A lot of people will ask me about the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the most dangerous moment of the nuclear age, as many of us understand it.

Something that's important to remember about Cuba is that you had an American president, JFK, and a Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev.

that both had a living recollection of the second world war right uh and and just the devastation that that represents i mean today we don't have a generation of leaders that have seen the effects of large-scale indiscriminate warfare like that you know we're coming out of 30 odd years of relative peace after the end of the cold war

And then the final thing I'll say is that the best case scenario is that we prevent proliferation.

Right.

And this is the issue that I think I'm spending a lot of time thinking about as the United States in particular changes many of its longstanding foreign policy principles under this administration.

You are seeing more and more of our allies around the world, countries that for a very long time we have been allied with partly out of an interest in preventing them from building nuclear weapons of their own.