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That's spycloud.com slash cyberwire and we thank spy cloud for sponsoring our show. Hello and welcome to SpyCast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

I'm Dr. Vince Hoat, the Museum's historian and curator.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks

with authors, scholars, and practitioners who live in the world of global espionage.

Join us as we take a closer look at the secret world of intelligence. I want to talk about your other books. My field of course is nuclear intelligence and I've read all of your other books as a

grad student actually went as an undergrad in the question that I constantly

whenever anyone finds out what I do they look at me like with this morbid

curiosity like why are you interested in nuclear weapons what got you on to nukes

what made you want to learn about and study nuclear policy? Well, I remember seeing a quotation from Joseph Conrad one time and he was asked about

what motivated his writing of the novels and he said it was the fascination of the abomination.

And in a sense that was the case here, that these weapons are so disproportionately destructive and it's hard to imagine that any rational being would choose to use them.

And yet they not only existed, but they proliferated during the Cold War to some incredible number. I think at one point the

estimate was there were 70,000 nuclear weapons, strategic and tactical and if you

added up all the arsenals of the nuclear powers. And having taught this subject, and maybe you found this as well, what I found

...