Sam Harris

Why do you think that, and I guess we could speculate that Ukraine, had they ever properly had their own nuclear arsenal and retained it,

They would not have been invaded by Russia.

So if we think that's actually true strategically, why don't you think that has just caused much more of the world to draw the lesson that if you want to maintain your sovereignty as a nation, you want to have at least some nuclear bombs that you can threaten to use?

Who else do you think is poised to go nuclear now beyond the obvious case of Iran?

Yeah, that's the most sobering part of it, the idea that we're rolling those dice year after year, and as a matter of probability, it's compounding, and it's all being maintained by an aging infrastructure.

Which I guess in some of the, we'll talk about the dangers of things like cyber attacks, etc.

But maybe there are some ways in which the antiquity of this system has a silver lining because presumably it's not as, maybe it's not as hackable as it would be if it was all being run on the latest operating system.

That's an additional terrifying variable here, which is that really we're at the mercy of the weakest link in that chain.

We might completely lock down our system in the United States and feel that it's really perfect.

The chance that we're going to do something by accident is zero.

Of course, we could

never achieve that.

But even if we did, the best possible case, we're at the mercy of whatever China and Russia and other possible adversaries.

And North Korea.

Yeah.

How good are their systems?

It's incredible that we're in this situation.

And then you read, I'm sure you've read Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control.

Yeah, it's a masterpiece.

You read about the preparations we have made for the continuity of government, and it is a dark comedy.