Carl Robichaud

And then she went to work at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

And the expertise that she built up was really helpful when she was appointed as the chief negotiator for the New START Treaty.

And she describes in her book,

how that was a really important part of getting that treaty done and then the role of civil society in getting that treaty passed through Congress because you need a two-thirds majority for treaty ratification.

So providing political space for cooperation is essential because it's really hard these days to talk about cooperating with Russia and China.

And I get it, right?

These are countries...

In some cases, they're doing really awful things.

But we have a shared threat that we need to manage.

And I think that's one of the roles of civil society is opening doors for work in that area.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many important themes, yeah, like in terms of the way it deals with the role of scientists and society.

And we just see echoes of this today in the way scientific expertise is sidelined in the public sphere, from vaccines to climate change to AI.

And, you know, it's capturing this Prometheus moment.

And nuclear weapons were really the first time we confronted the fact that our power has outstripped our wisdom.

And we unleash these elemental forces, you know, the very forces that power the sun.

We bring them down to Earth.

And we had to grapple with that then.

But in some ways, we're doing it again with biotechnology and with artificial intelligence.

And so the story is about nuclear weapons, but this idea of creating something that you're not sure you can control, it has real resonance in this moment.

You know, there's this scene in the movie, without spoiling it, where Oppenheimer is talking to Einstein.