PREVIEW: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dave Sweeney
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.6 • 863 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do nuclear weapons protect Western civilisation? Or are they an insane error that humanity should undo? Is nuclear power worth the cost and risk?
Dave Sweeney co-founded the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
Dave and Josh debate the risks and rewards of nuclear weapons and nuclear power in an unstable world, and discuss whether environmentalism is antithetical to progress.
To hear every bit of this fascinating, two-hour-plus conversation with no ads, subscribe here. And follow Dave's work at the Australian Conservation Foundation here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Giday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and the least dangerous of dangerous |
| 0:09.8 | ideas, but one of the most audacious, is the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, |
| 0:16.1 | regarding them as a technology that humankind should never really have stumbled upon, |
| 0:20.7 | and that it is |
| 0:21.5 | time to reverse because they can only end in a total annihilation and conflagration. |
| 0:28.4 | That's the attitude of today's guest, Dave Sweeney, who co-founded the international campaign |
| 0:32.2 | to abolish nuclear weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. He is this show's first Nobel Peace Prize winner. |
| 0:40.7 | I was recently in Hiroshima and took a dawn stroll around the Atomic Dome, the building that |
| 0:48.3 | has been preserved and has become a World Heritage listed site because it was pretty much |
| 0:52.7 | directly underneath the bomb |
| 0:54.8 | when it went off. And as a strange result of physics that I do not understand, it was left standing |
| 1:01.5 | because there was no lateral blast force since the explosion came down on top of it. And it's now this |
| 1:07.6 | kind of eerie monument with this shattered skeletal dome. And as the sun rose over it |
| 1:15.1 | and rose over the river next to the Peace Park, which is now an area for contemplation and |
| 1:21.8 | commemoration and museums, I went down a rabbit hole with ChatGPT about the current power, the current payload of modern |
| 1:30.1 | hydrogen bombs in comparison to the world's tiniest first foray into nuclear devastation. |
| 1:38.8 | And I won't bore you with statistics, but suffice it to say, it's orders of magnitude more devastating, |
| 1:49.8 | the arsenals that Russia and the United States and a handful of other nations are now sitting on. |
| 2:04.4 | Are these a useful backstop to protect us against violence, to protect us against war, and to ensure the survival, the existential ongoing existence of states that might otherwise be threatened with conventional warfare? Or is it just a sort of Damocles hanging over |
| 2:10.9 | human civilization that as the clock ticks by and the days turn into weeks, turn into months, |
| 2:16.9 | turn into years, turn into decades, turn into years, turn into |
| 2:17.9 | decades, it is just inevitable that something is going to happen either by mistake or by |
... |
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