4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 27 February 2018
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
This week we've got a blast from the past. Here's what we said back then:
This week Thomas Nichols helps us understand America’s current nuclear strategy … or lack thereof.
This August marked the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven decades later, Washington and the Kremlin control more than 7,000 nuclear warheads … each. Not all of those weapons are active. The two nations have deployed some, stockpiled more and disarmed far too few. And those numbers are down from where they were just a few years ago.
Which is good because nuclear arms are the most terrifying weapons ever created. But with Russia and the United States sitting on so many potential Armageddons — not to mention other nuclear states such as China, India and Pakistan — and so many warheads unused for decades, it begs the question: just what are nuclear weapons good for?
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0:22.8 | One of the things the Cold War was very good at was squeezing out the little guys off the big stage. The the Cold War were still on and there was still a Soviet Union, |
0:25.5 | I'm pretty sure that North Korea would never have developed a nuclear weapon |
0:28.2 | because no one would have let them. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. |
0:44.3 | Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt |
1:02.7 | Jason Fields will be here in just a moment speaking to you from the past. |
1:07.4 | We are airing a rerun this week and wanted to give you a little bit of context on it. |
1:12.1 | This one is from 2015 and what a difference a few years makes. |
1:18.0 | Back then we talked to Tom Nichols, who's a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension. |
1:25.4 | His most recent book is The Death of Expertise, but back then he had written a book called No Use, |
1:30.6 | which was about U.S. nuclear policy or at the time the lack thereof. |
1:37.0 | Now Tom argued then that the great superpowers, mostly Russia, China, and the United States lacked a coherent nuclear strategy in that this was |
1:49.0 | precipitating a slide towards North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons. Well it's 2018. North Korea's |
1:55.3 | nuclear program is continuing unabated and the White House's nuclear posture |
2:01.0 | review has called for a change in American nuclear policy that looks a lot |
2:06.2 | like it did during the Cold War. |
2:08.6 | With all that in mind, we thought it might be a good idea to go back to 2015 and see just what the world looked like back then. |
2:17.3 | So what is the current US nuclear strategy if we can just jump right into it? I mean, what role do they play nuclear weapons and what does US see them as being for? |
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