A Big Debate About a Little Nuke

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2018

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why are so many people at odds over low-yield nuclear weapons? Well, it turns out, this debate touches on a megaton of interesting questions, including how Russia sees its own nuclear arsenal, how it envisions nuclear strategy, how the Kremlin understands the deterrence, and how we might prevent a nuclear war. So if you care about any of those things, you might want to listen in on this fierce debate between Frank Miller - a long-suffering veteran of the Pentagon and nuclear strategy, Dr. Olga Oliker of CSIS and a longtime observer and scholar of Russian nuclear and military doctrine, and Vipin Narang - a professor at MIT and, most importantly, a War on the Rocks senior editor.

Co-hosts Ryan Evans and Usha Sahay did their best to moderate this high-yield debate about low-yield nukes. Get ready for the fallout.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense and Foreign Affairs.
0:14.0	My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the editor and chief of War on the Rocks.
0:16.2	I'm joined by Ushahai, our managing editor.
0:18.8	Hello?
0:19.8	And we got a pretty great group of guests to talk about low-yield nuclear weapons, which might not sound
0:25.4	exciting, but it's actually set off a pretty fierce debate.
0:28.0	So let's go around the table and you can all introduce yourselves.
0:31.0	Vip and Naring, an associate professor at MIT, I work primarily on nuclear strategy and proliferation.
0:36.1	Olka Ulaker, I direct the Russia and Eurasia program at CSIS and I spend a lot of time thinking about the Russian military, Russian weapons
0:45.3	development and that includes Russian nuclear weapons.
0:48.0	And I'm Franklin Miller. I'm at the Scrocroft Group, but I'm a retired
0:52.0	senior government civil servant and I spent most of my 28 years in the
0:58.0	Pentagon and the White House dealing with and running nuclear weapons policy.
1:02.8	So why is there a debate over low-yield nuclear weapons,
1:06.4	which, am I right, used to be just called tactical nuclear weapons
1:09.4	or is that a whole different thing?
1:11.0	It's a whole different thing.
1:12.0	It's a whole different thing. It's more complicated.
1:13.0	You want to walk us through the history and the terminology, Frank? I can do that. And they, in the
1:17.2	50s, the United States proliferated, bad word now, good word then,
1:20.9	proliferated short and medium range tactical nuclear weapons in in
1:25.8	Europe and at sea and these were supposed to be battlefield weapons in accordance with the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from War on the Rocks, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of War on the Rocks and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.