Ivana Hughes

So let me just step back for a second.

I think one of the problems we have currently in this country is number one, most people are not aware of this threat, don't understand nuclear weapons, don't understand what they could do.

Sometimes when I speak or write or, you know, people will respond, oh, I remember Duck and Cover when I was in school.

And, you know, people of a certain generation still sort of have a sense for what is going on.

But many young people are just utterly unaware.

There is a section of society, however, that is aware and understands what nuclear weapons are and, you know, understands some of the basic facts that we've been talking about and so on, but has been convinced by this idea that nuclear deterrence works and nuclear weapons keep us safe and that's just all there is to it and there's just no way to, you know, undo or put the genie back in the bottle or any of that.

And the

The truth is that there are many problems with nuclear deterrence.

The first and kind of to me most fundamental is that there is quite simply no plan B for what happens if nuclear deterrence fails.

It's just kind of like...

on autopilot, you know, we're under attack, we're gonna attack them.

And even if you think about a scenario in which we somehow actually managed whoever the enemies are, we managed to disarm them or disable, or even if we somehow magically had a dome over the country, which by the way, we're not going to, it's never gonna work.

We've tried this and there's just no way to actually do that.

But even if we did, to destroy such an enemy, right, we would need to use so many hundreds or thousands of warheads that we would create nuclear winter, we would create ozone layer destruction.

It would be in the Cold War, we called it mutually assured destruction or MAD.

It is actually always sad.

It's always self-assured destruction.

If you're going to go into nuclear war,

Whether or not you end up getting attacked, you're going to create conditions that are going to actually destroy your own nation.

I just want to tell you a story about the United States.