This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 5th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Vladimir Putin's big announcement intended for a global audience, nuclear weapons that he

says cannot be intercepted. But does that announcement really change the calculus for nuclear-armed

countries? Cato's Emma Ashford and Eric Gomez comment.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia gave a speech before the Federal Assembly where he

unveiled several nuclear weapons.

One of them, the sort of most eye-catching one,

was a nuclear-powered intercontinental range

cruise missile rather than ballistic missile as well as several

missile types and what's known as a hypersonic glide vehicle that some of which the

US has known about before but others that were sort of more exotic and

less was known about them.

All right, so I mean, we've long thought or conventional wisdom has long been that nuclear

weapons you have them so you don't have to use them in a way and

the fact that Putin is claiming

this new weapon that we have is impossible to intercept. How much does that actually

matter for the purposes of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons?

Well I think that when it comes to nuclear weapons

perceptions are very important and in missile defense particularly there's

something that I call a perception reality gap and the reality of missile defense is that we

don't actually have that much and it's not that effective so Russia shouldn't feel so

worried about the development of our capabilities but I think their perceptions of what missile defense is capable of or they're worried about

...