Scott Horton

And it wasn't magic, and there was no trust in evil bad guys.

This is, by the way, two years before the wall came down.

This is when everybody still thought the USSR was going to last.

And Reagan had the plan was that America and the Soviet Union would dismantle our nuclear weapons until we were right around with parity with the other nuclear weapons states who all have right around two or three hundred nukes.

France, Britain at that time, Israel and China, India and Pakistan came later.

South Africa only had a few then, but gave up whatever they had.

And the idea was we would get down to two or three hundred and then America and the Soviet Union both together would lean hard on Britain, France and China.

Let's all get down to one hundred.

Let's all see if we can get down to 50, et cetera, like that in stages.

Again, Ronald Reagan we're talking about here.

Trust but verify means do not trust at all.

It means be polite while you verify.

And in fact, America did help dismantle upwards of 60-something thousand Soviet nuclear missiles after the end of the Cold War.

And so it is possible to live in a world where at the very least we have a situation where the major powers have a few nukes.

and potentially can even come to an arrangement to get rid of the rest.

Underlying so much of what we're talking about here is all this enmity, right?

But if America could just work, remember when China cut that pseudo sort of peace deal between Saudi and Iran a couple of years ago or last year, was it?

We could try to double up on that.

We could try to come up with ways for Saudi and Iran to exchange as much as possible.

You know, I know you don't like all the going back too far in history, but it's important.