Sam Harris

The threats we've heard from Putin and other spokespeople in Russia are

Have those all been with respect to the use of tactical weapons in the theater of conflict in Ukraine, or have there been... Usually it's not specified.

So when this war started and the obvious threat of nuclear escalation was first discussed, many people immediately drew the lesson

seemingly the wrong lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is that you just can't blink, right?

You can't give in to nuclear blackmail.

We don't want to set that, one, as a terrible precedent because it means that anyone who has nuclear weapons can basically do whatever they want conventionally, you know, as long as they purport to be suicidal.

And

I guess I'm just wondering what you think about what we've done so far and whether you think we have been, we, the U.S., I guess, and NATO, have been impeccable in how we have not caved in to...

What do you think we would do if Russia used tactical nukes on Ukraine?

But who knows?

There are not that many stages beyond that, right?

That seems completely sensible to me.

But then when you imagine what happens next, there's just not that many stops on the way to the end of everything.

Yeah, well, it's somewhat analogous to the taboos around chemical weapons and biological weapons.

And I'd heard recently, I don't know if this is common knowledge and I just missed it, but I'd heard that at one point we realized we could create...

laser weapons that would just permanently blind soldiers on the battlefield, and we just didn't go down that path at all because it just seemed so ghastly to ever put that into use, which is interesting because on some level it's not nearly as bad as the other things we have developed.

I don't know why it was so obviously unethical to the people who saw that this technology was in reach, but there is just something horrible about the idea of effortlessly blinding people en masse as a way of winning elections.

a war, yet we're willing to blow them up, riddle them with shrapnel, etc., and yet silently blinding everybody is just, we're not going to go there.

Do you have any intuitions about why that struck us as just totally untenable, ethically?

What do you think about the growing tensions between the US and China, specifically around our somewhat equivocal commitment to protecting Taiwan?