Carl Robichaud

Russia, China, we haven't even talked about India or Pakistan or Israel's reliance on nuclear weapons, North Korea.

There are a lot of countries that possess these weapons and have a strong desire and incentive to keep them, right?

So I think it needs to be, if we ever move in this direction, it needs to be a joint project.

in which collectively we recognize that these weapons pose an unacceptable risk to humanity and to our nations, and that systematically, step by step, in a safe way, we're going to pull back from the brink.

Because there are certainly risks to moving too quickly and to leaving vulnerabilities, but

I think the first thing we need to do is to recognize that we've got a problem and that fundamentally, we've wired all our homes with dynamite, right?

We haven't even acknowledged that, right?

And once we acknowledge that there can be a better way to resolve our differences without resort to

nuclear threats, then we can start moving in the right direction.

You know, the Obama administration put forward this plan, a graduated approach towards a world free of nuclear weapons, and it was rejected by Russia, in part because they saw it as a ploy.

And so the world we live in now, you can't just take nuclear weapons out of that world and expect that to be a safe world.

It's naive and unrealistic.

But we need to work towards greater mechanisms of collective security in which we reach the point that there's no conflict that's worth fighting that we would consider annihilating each other's cities for.

It's interesting that you say mutually assured destruction because this phrase is often evoked.

This is not a deliberate strategy so much as a condition that people had to accept, right?

And there was always a desire, especially within the US, to escape from this condition of mutual assured destruction.

Because if deterrence is stable at the nuclear level, it allows for

potentially conventional aggression below the nuclear level, right?

This is that stability-instability paradox.

And so there was always a desire to maintain some nuclear superiority.