Carl Robichaud

Right, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

But you have, at various times, an effort to make war more humane and to limit the types of activities you would engage in.

Even in World War I, there was an effort before the war started to limit the use of poison gas.

But then once one side used poison gas, and initially it wasn't the type that killed you, it was a less deadly form of gas, all of a sudden that line was crossed and it became commonplace to do this horrible thing.

And so these norms, I think, can be really valuable, but they can be fragile as well.

And I don't know exactly what to make sense of it.

you see an effort to ban landmines and cluster munitions and these other devices that are disproportionate in their humanitarian consequence, right?

They're just really awful weapons that harm civilians.

And then

We have these weapons, nuclear weapons, that are inherently inhumane.

In just about every circumstance, you can imagine them being used, right?

We plan to conduct mass murder on this scale that is hard to comprehend.

in the service of national security.

So even as you're preventing blinding lasers and landmines, you still have plans on the book to incinerate cities or incinerate military bases that are adjacent to cities, which would have resulted in massive...

fallout and death.

It's one of the great contradictions.

And I think to go back to the film Oppenheimer, this is part of what's captured is the decision to develop the H-bomb

is about what is the role of these weapons going to be in society and in warfare going forward.

And there were a group of people who felt nuclear weapons were like any other weapon.