Carl Robichaud

Now, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, this could result in a new wave of interest from countries like Saudi Arabia, for example.

You could also imagine a world in which the US backs off of some of its alliance commitments and basically signals that it's not willing to defend Japan or South Korea.

And you could imagine governments in those countries proceeding with a nuclear weapons program.

They both have

access to the technology and the fissile material if they wanted to launch a crash program to acquire the bomb.

So in some ways, these US security assurances are a key part of the nonproliferation regime.

There's also Taiwan, right, which had a nuclear weapons program until the 1960s or in the 1960s and gave that program up under pressure from the United States.

So nuclear weapons are out there.

They're not that hard to build.

These are 1940s technology, right?

They entered the world at the same time as microwave ovens and jet engines and things that we take for granted as having spread everywhere, right?

So it's really...

this system of assurances and controls and norms that have kept these weapons from going everywhere.

But we're only 80 years into the nuclear story, right?

That's the crazy thing is there's still people who are alive who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki

And that's one human lifetime, and we don't know what's going to come next.

And what is the story that we're going to be writing 80 years from now, if we can survive that long, looking back at this period?

Will we say this was a period of relative safety, or this was a time where we turned the corner and went down a dark path?

Or is this the time when we decided

once and for all that these weapons are too dangerous to live with, and we push them to the side and stop relying on them as heavily.