Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is Confronting the Nuclear Threat.

With me to discuss the risk of confronting the nuclear threat.

With me to discuss the risk of nuclear weapons in an era of growing geopolitical competition is W.J. Hennigan.

Bill is a correspondent for the opinion section

at the New York Times,

where he writes about national security,

foreign policy, and conflict.

He was previously a senior correspondent at Time Magazine, where he received the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. At the Times, Bill is the lead writer

of the opinion section's new series at the Brink,

which looks at the threat of nuclear weapons in an unstable world.

So far, Bill has penned two pieces for the series.

One under the title, Nuclear War is called Unimaginable.

In fact, it's not imagined enough.

And the other, How America made nuclear war the president's

decision. Bill, thank you for coming on the president's inbox. Thank you, Jim. So let's begin

with the question of why this series? Why now, Bill? Well, we've decided to write this series

because we feel as though that the world has entered a new nuclear

age. After more than a quarter century of relative peace in the nuclear domain, we've

encountered a number of different troubling developments. Number one, all nine nuclear nations

are modernizing and enhancing their arsenals. Number two, the guardrails that

...