Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Sarah Skulls. She is a contributing writer at Popular Science. And the author of the new book, the rather disquieting new book, I will say,

Countdown the Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons Available from Bold Type Books, Sarah Schools.

Thank you for joining us on Current Affairs today.

Yeah, happy to be here and sorry to disturb you with it all.

Well, it's important.

I mean, you dive in in this book to, I mean, you essentially, you uncover, you peel back

the lid on a whole world that is kind of lurking in the background of American life all the

time, but a lot of us don't think about, because we

don't like to think about it, because it is frightening. And that is the world of nuclear weapons.

And I think we all know that the United States has a lot of nuclear weapons. But what you

dive into in this book is you start with, okay,

well, but where are they? Who are the people who run these things? What is the system that

maintains these things? So perhaps you could begin by kind of sketching out, you know,

take us down to the ground level and sketch out what is America's nuclear weapons system? Where is it? What are the

parts of it? Sure. So to get to the ground, I might start at the top with the Department of Energy,

which has this agency underneath it called the National Nuclear Security Administration,

which is in charge of both maintaining the

nuclear weapons that we have and also right now modernizing them. And they run three big

national labs that are nuclear weapons labs. One of them, the most famous, obviously, is Los Alamos

in New Mexico. There's also Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque a couple hours away, and then

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, kind of east of the Bay Area. And then

there's other sites kind of scattered around the country, but in terms of the actual, you know,

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