I'm Warren Alney. Welcome to To the Point. We'll be talking today about one of humanity's worst nightmares, nuclear warfare. But I won't apologize for the subject. North Korea's reckless behavior and President Trump's response have made it impossible to ignore. So, ironically, has this year's Nobel Prize for Peace.

We'll touch on all those subjects with Bruce Blair, who says the argument for having nukes doesn't hold water.

If you accept the idea that you need nuclear weapons for your security to deter others from trying to demolish your regime, then why not everyone? We'll also hear from Matthew Kronig, who says

the U.S. has a special responsibility. There is a fundamental difference in my view between U.S.

nuclear weapons and other countries' nuclear weapons. It's been 72 years since the U.S.

destroyed two Japanese cities with atom bombs dropped from airplanes.

Now, a nuke could be launched from a plane or from a submarine or from an underground silo.

Bruce Blair is now at Princeton.

He served as a minute man in one of those silos.

He was a launch control officer in charge of carrying out the order to fire.

He became the co-founder of Global Zero. Good to have you with us.

Thanks for having me. Describe that process. From the beginning?

Sure, yeah. What would it take? How long would it take to launch a nuclear missile once you got the

home? Okay. At my level, at the lowest level of the chain of command,

it would take about one minute. We would receive a launch order from higher authority, jump out of

our seats, in astonishment, open a safe that is locked by padlocks, pull out codes and launch

keys, check the codes in our safe against the codes in the

launch order. And if they match, we would proceed to carry out a launch checklist that would

take about one minute to carry out. We weren't called minute man launch officers for nothing.

And this was a long time ago. It can be done a little faster today, but obviously

you can't do it much faster than one minute. But that's at the bottom of the chain of command. If

the president gave the order to fire, it would be about five minutes in total between issuing

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