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The Political Orphanage

How Nuclear Deterrence Works

The Political Orphanage

Andrew Heaton

Comedy, Moderate, Politics, Independent, News, Nonpartisan, Libertarian

5951 Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2023

⏱️ 63 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How many nuclear bombs do we actually need to sufficiently scare an enemy? How many is too many? If we agree to reduce our stockpiles… how can we trust that the other guy really did? Travis Halleman is an expert on nuclear deterrence, and joins to discuss.

Links:

Who Actually Survives a Nuclear War: https://www.patreon.com/posts/who-actually-war-71978682?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=postshare_creator

Ward Wilson: Everything You Know About Nukes is Wrong

https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/ep-133-everything-you-know-about-nukes-is-wrong-guest/id1439837349?i=1000440171975

Political Orphanage Primer on Foreign Policy: https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/liberals-realists-and-the-real-cause-of-war

Mark Galeotti - https://warontherocks.com/author/mark-galeotti/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for problem solvers, people that don't fit on the political spectrum, and folks who generally don't want to die in a radioactive

0:19.5

apocalypse falling from the skies like the wrath of an angry God. I'm your host Andrew Heaton.

0:28.0

There is an argument to be made that nuclear weapons prevented World War III. Were it not for cracking the atom and the incredibly

0:36.7

high cost of thermonuclear war, Europe would have gone on doing what Europe always does, which is go to war with itself every 15 to 30 years.

0:47.0

But, post World War II, it would have yet again dragged in its buddy America and Russia.

0:53.0

And World War III would have been,

0:55.3

I guess, in the 1960s or 1980s or maybe both.

0:59.2

And it would have been a conventional but utterly horrific conflict with superior weapons every bit as destructive

1:08.4

and bloody and horrible as World War I and World War II were perhaps combined.

1:14.0

But that didn't happen.

1:16.0

Because the leaders who would otherwise have inevitably careened into that conflict were deterred by the threat

1:26.1

of mutually assured destruction.

1:29.3

Which is kind of weird.

1:31.3

If you think about it because it means that nuclear bombs are the hero of the last 50 years,

1:38.0

that peace has been paid for with uranium and rockets and threat of death.

1:46.0

But on the flip side, that is a high stakes deterrent, ain't it?

1:52.6

I mean, it works until it doesn't, right?

1:55.8

What if Nikita Khrushchev falls asleep on the big red button drunk

1:59.3

or President Kanye West starts mixing Nyquil with theyquil and really goes off the rails.

2:07.0

When the nukes fly, the range of outcomes goes from very, very bad to merely the end of Western civilization to potentially

2:19.9

the annihilation of the human race.

2:22.8

Begging the question, how many nukes do we really want to have, how many nukes do we need

...

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