Carl Robichaud

This is the world that we are confronted with.

is a world of anxiety and fear.

And you can have nuclear stability for a while, but then something comes along to challenge that nuclear stability.

I think that if you look at the way leaders thought about nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War, it did play a dampening effect on their goals and aspirations and their willingness to engage in

in war, especially between the great powers, right?

But it pushed that conflict elsewhere.

So instead of fighting a conventional war in Europe, there were these proxy wars that were fought in Korea and in Vietnam and in Afghanistan.

And the Cold War, it was a relatively peaceful time if you lived in the United States.

But it was not a peaceful time for the populations that were affected by these proxy wars.

There were just some really awful, brutal conflicts that were a result of this rivalry.

And so I think nuclear deterrence has certainly had some benefits, but it has come at the cost of these various close calls and at the cost of pushing conflict elsewhere.

Yeah.

So I think from the start of the nuclear age, scientists and activists and non-governmental experts have played a really key role in auditing government activities and putting pressure and changing the incentives for what government actors wanted to do.

In general, these weapons are the domain of governments.

They're in the hands of government and military leaders.

And that is as it should be.

But the voices of citizens are really important too in setting the tone and the voices of experts as well.

So I think you could see that in the role of academic experts in understanding nuclear deterrence and shaping the field of arms control.

You can see that today.

in the work of many NGOs who work really hard to make information publicly accessible in the role of media organizations that report on these things.