I'm Arthur Snell. A major war is taking place on the European continent with Russia's

invasion of Ukraine, bringing you a series of special episodes to help you understand

the crisis as it unfolds. This is Doomsday Watch.

Welcome back to another Doomsday Watch war bulletin. We want to start off by saying thank

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in the showrooms. Hello and welcome back to Doomsday Watch. I'm delighted to be joined today

by Professor Laura Considine of the School of Politics and International Studies at the University

of Leeds. Laura is an expert on global nuclear politics, nuclear disarmament and the history

of arms control. Laura, welcome. Thank you. Laura, it is perhaps unfortunate that your area of

expertise has a shot back up the agenda in recent weeks, particularly after a parent saber

rattling by Russia, indicating that they were putting their nuclear forces on a state of

higher readiness. So that's the context in which we're speaking, but I wanted to start with the

kind of the big picture. So perhaps you could start by just describing to listeners which are

the current nuclear arms states and to what extent are they under overarching international

agreements that govern the ways in which they use and manage those weapons? Sure. So at the moment

there are nine nuclear arms states in the world, the US, Russia, the UK, France, China and then

also North Korea, India, Pakistan and Israel. Israel maintains a position of opacity on its nuclear

weapons, whether it doesn't confirm nor deny that it has them, but we do take Israel as a nuclear

arms state. So since these weapons have come into existence, there has developed a kind of a web

...