Sam Harris

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.

It could just blanket South Korea with artillery shells.

But the fact that it's nuclear seems to be part of the picture here.

And it's just a reason why it's unthinkable to respond to its provocations with force

I guess another example would be Pakistan.

Now, it's like as much as we might want to respond to something there, it might have been several moments over the last 20 years where it would have seemed warranted.

It's in a different category given the fact that it has nuclear weapons.

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.