Full Episode
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, today's episode is a PSA, so no paywall. As always, if you want to support the podcast, you can subscribe at samharris.org. Today I'm speaking with Carl Robichaux. Carl co-leads Longview Philanthropy's program on nuclear weapons policy. and he co-manages their Nuclear Weapons Policy Fund.
This is a fund to which the Waking Up Foundation will soon be giving a fair amount of money. If you'd like to support it along with us, you can find the relevant link in the show notes in your podcast player. For more than a decade, Carl led grant-making in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
He also previously worked with the Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where he focused on arms control, international security policy, and non-proliferation. And the topic of this conversation is the ongoing threat of nuclear war. We discussed the new film Oppenheimer, which I must say really is a masterpiece.
If you haven't seen it in a theater and it's still playing in a theater near you, I highly recommend that you see it. This really is a film that benefits from the big screen.
We discuss the ethics of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some of the false lessons we learn there, the history and the future of nuclear proliferation, the logic of deterrence, our vulnerabilities to cyber attack, the history of de-escalation, the war in Ukraine, war games, the taboo around using nuclear weapons, growing tensions between the U.S.
and China, artificial intelligence, getting to nuclear zero, the role of private citizens in mitigating nuclear risk, and finally Longview Philanthropy's Nuclear Risk Policy Fund, which again I encourage everyone to support. Unfortunately, this remains one of the biggest problems of our time, one which we do not talk about or think about nearly enough. So I hope you find this conversation useful.
I now bring you Karl Robichaux. I am here with Karl Robichaux. Karl, thanks for joining me.
Yeah, my pleasure. I'm a big fan of the work you're doing.
Nice. Well, I'm a big fan of the work you're doing, although I've only just encountered it. But you are an expert on, it seems, much that ails us with respect to nuclear weapons and proliferation and failures of containment and all of that. So we're having this conversation 24 hours after I watched Oppenheimer in an IMAX theater, which I highly recommend to people.
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