Sam Harris

The idea is that given that information and given the 15 or 30 minutes you have left to respond, that it's the policy of the United States and it's actually possible that someone's going to follow this policy.

to just unleash our own genocidal retaliation, just get the missiles out of the silos before they get destroyed, so that we can kill 100 or 200 million people on the other side, quite pointlessly, right?

Nothing is accomplished.

You have not protected anyone on your side by doing this.

And yet it's imagined that a U.S.

president is going to feel that that is what he or she wants to do in their last minutes of life.

It really is out of Dr. Strangelove that we got into this situation.

So let's talk about proliferation and why it hasn't proceeded further than it has.

We've got nine countries now that have nuclear weapons.

If I'm not mistaken, that's the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

But many others have toyed with developing them.

And South Africa even had a stockpile at one point and then dismantled it in 89.

And then obviously Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan had weapons that were Soviet weapons that they...

gave back when the Soviet system collapsed.

How do you interpret the fact that, I mean, this is not a successful story of total non-proliferation, but at one point it was imagined that many more countries were going to go nuclear very quickly.

So what happened?

Then-

What do you think about the logic of deterrence here?

Because when you look at a country that really has become a global malefactor like North Korea, the reason why North Korea has been immune to retribution or outside meddling

apart from its quasi-alliance with China, is the fact that it now can... I guess in part, there's a conventional answer here.