The issue of U.S. nuclear weapons entered the public discourse in the last weeks

with the release and popularity of a major three-hour-length movie entitled Oppenheimer.

As U.S. military strategy prioritizes major power conflict with other major nuclear powers, including Russia

and China, the question of nuclear weapons urgently needs a major debate inside the United

States.

We need a new system.

We need a new society.

We need to demand that which may have sounded impossible even a few weeks ago,

but is not only realizable, but an imperative necessity. Welcome to the Socialist Program. I'm your host, Brian Becker.

Today we're talking with Greg Mello. Greg is co-founder and executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.

Greg Mello, welcome back.

Nice to be here. Thank you, Brian.

You are in New Mexico. You are the Los Alamos Study Group.

That's where Robert Oppenheimer set up the Manhattan Project along with the Pentagon in that whole array of scientists and engineers that ultimately led to the dropping, the creation and then the dropping of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beginning of a new world, even as Oppenheimer clearly remarked,

wasn't just a new weapon, it was a new era.

And certainly it was a new era.

I don't really want to talk to you so much about the movie.

I want to encourage people to go see the movie.

It's a serious movie. It's three hours long.

What I want to talk to you about is the program itself, the nuclear weapons issue itself,

because, you know, it's just missing inside the U.S. public discourse. And even this movie,

as interesting as it is, it's just a movie. You know, when I came out of the movie theater, Greg,

...