Carl Robichaud

Another is in 1991, where unilaterally, President H.W.

Bush...

just takes all of the US tactical nuclear weapons and he takes them off alert and off of the surface ships, et cetera.

And this is just a recognition of a change in the security environment after the fall of the Soviet Union.

And he didn't need to negotiate an extensive treaty, but I think rather courageously just said, we can move first and had this presidential nuclear initiative that was then reciprocated by Russia.

And so that's one of the cases where you have this ratchet going in the other direction.

There are things that we have done in the past to take a little pressure out of the system.

Unfortunately, where we are now is going in the wrong direction.

We've gotten spoiled.

The past 30 years or so has been a period of relatively low nuclear risk.

With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I feel like we've entered a new period of escalating nuclear risk.

This is something that people have been talking about for some time.

but you can see it really manifesting itself.

You're fighting a conventional war in the nuclear shadow in which Vladimir Putin has made references and threats with nuclear weapons.

And then he's occasionally walked them back, but some other spokespeople have gone forward and made those threats again.

So we have this period of heightened risk.

And in the background is a new relationship with China and their nuclear arsenal.

So China for many years has had a small recessed nuclear arsenal, and they are in the process of doubling or tripling that arsenal.

They could have as many as 1,500 nuclear weapons by the 2030s, and that is going to reshape

this competition because we've never had a three-way nuclear standoff in the way that we soon will.