The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hey, this is Maddie Glacias and I'm really excited to bring you another

weed special interview at Vox.com's foreign editor Max Fisher did an interview

with Ash Carter who is the Secretary of Defense of the United States right now.

He's previously held a variety of defense departments sort of senior official

jobs under both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They've got a really fascinating

conversation which Secretary Carter lays out his view that great power conflict

is likely to come back and he gets really deep into the weeds so to speak about

how he sees nuclear weapons playing a role in this sort of new era of great

power rivalry in deterrence and how deterrence works in an era of cyber threats

and unconventional security and sort of ties things back together in a way

that's really interesting and I think not something that we have heard a lot

about from the Obama administration or other senior government officials

until this interview. So if I can take you back to when you first started at the

Pentagon in 1993 you were starting your career in government just as the US

was also coming into this new post-cold war world and trying to figure out

what that was going to look like and if I could get you to kind of put yourself

back in that early 90s flannel mindset what kind of a role did you expect the

US and American military power we're going to play in the world. Well Max I'm

embarrassed when you say the early 90s a long time ago I actually first worked

in the Pentagon late in 1980 and then in the early 80s but the point is that

that was the height of the Cold War. So I knew the Cold War very well I

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