Carl Robichaud

But when you step back and look at the system, it's insane that we continue to live with this.

I remember on one of your podcasts, you mentioned it was as if we had all wired our homes with dynamite and that that system just existed in the background.

And then we just all forgot about it, right?

And we just go about our lives forgetting that we're under the veil of this nuclear threat.

And there has been this collective amnesia, I would say, about nuclear weapons.

And we've just assumed that they've pretty much gone away.

And if they haven't gone away, they're probably in safe hands.

And I think that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has woken some of us from that slumber and to realize that these weapons are very much still a tool of statecraft and can be used for threat making and coercion.

and that nuclear weapons remain a part of the world and this collective challenge that we need to find a way to manage.

Yeah.

So I think, I mean, this kind of takes us back to the film as well, because when Oppenheimer leaves the stage, the sense of most technical experts and political experts and military experts is that these weapons will almost inevitably spread.

The scientists understand that it's not hard science, it's an engineering problem.

and that any country that can mobilize enough resources can acquire these weapons.

During the early 1960s, Kennedy famously said there are 15 to 25 countries that might acquire nuclear weapons.

It's an interesting list when you go back and look at it.

Here we are now,

with only nine countries that have nuclear weapons.

And I think this is a success story.

And it's a story that we should be telling more often because it shows that when there's sufficient will, you can do hard things and we can make ourselves safer.

So I think there are really four reasons why you don't see the unfettered spread of nuclear weapons.