Carl Robichaud

I think the most likely scenario is the status quo where these things continue to hum along in the background and we all pretend that they don't really exist, but every year we're running some non-zero risk.

You keep rolling those dice year after year, and the chance for human miscalculation, for technical accident, for deliberate use, every year you're taking a risk.

Yeah, they've upgraded it now.

So we're now on digital systems with nuclear command and control.

And I think that enhances reliability.

But as you mentioned, it creates certain cyber vulnerabilities.

And nobody knows what those cyber vulnerabilities are in every country.

There are some people who believe they know a lot about their own country's vulnerabilities.

But as you say, there are nine nuclear weapon states, and they all have different systems for managing nuclear weapons.

And there's the possibility that one side will attack a nuclear arsenal in a way that leads to nuclear escalation.

I don't want to be at the mercy of North Korea's systems.

I think that it's worth looking at a few of the moments where we actually released tension from that ratchet because it hasn't always been inevitably increasing.

One of them is in 1986 when Reagan and Gorbachev meet and they agree that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.

And they fell short of some of the deep cuts that were discussed at the Reykjavik summit, but they left with a shared understanding.

And Gorbachev went back believing that the U.S.

would not launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

They'd previously been very afraid that the U.S.

was preparing to do that.

So that sense of shared understanding allowed for the intermediate range nuclear forces agreement, which limited some of the most destabilizing weapons in Europe.

So that's one example.