Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations, and I'm very pleased to be joined today. I guess for the third time on this conversation, but for many, many, many, many times through our long friendship Steve Rosen, Professor of International Relations, and then the government department.

I did Harvard, served in federal governments, served in many advisory roles, other parts of the U.S. government, and also, of course, author of many books and articles. But I won't try to elaborate the introduction, but for the purposes of today's conversation, I just ran a couple of excellent articles recently in the bulwark on the nuclear weapons issue that has now been raised by the Putin's threats and by this moment. So Steve, thanks for joining me. My pleasure, Bill. It's always good to get together with you. Yeah, so this would be good. I think.

I think our last conversation was in January of 2019, so three years ago, and I think if I remember correctly, during the end of it, we were both sort of laughing almost. We were discussing nuclear weapons briefly, and something you've studied and kept an eye on through the years, and another history of very well in the Cold War, and the threats and so forth. And you're saying we have to take those seriously again and think about the relationship to other weapons and to foreign policy, and we both laughed at it. I mean, it seems so distant, so distant from the post-1991 world,

and a little scare in 2002, I guess, with India and Pakistan, but since then, who's really thought about Nuke's apart from trying to stop other countries from getting them a little bit, I guess. But I guess they're back in the news, right? Yeah, I mean, this is March 30th of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington both have front-page stories about what is Putin doing with this tactical nuclear weapon stuff? Nuclear threats, is this real, or how should we think about it?

And there's this general air of what, isn't this kind of, you know, to use John Kerry's phrasing, isn't this kind of old school stuff? That's not 21st century, really, you know? Yeah, and the last conversation we had, we were talking about changing character warfare and precision weapons and cyber warfare, all this kind of stuff. And then we noted that a lot of countries around the world take nuclear weapons seriously, so maybe we should too.

And then you asked me, Steve, do you think you can get Americans to take nuclear weapons seriously? I just remember vividly, we looked at each other, we were like, nah, it's never gonna happen. But the reality is an ally. I mean, it forces at least intermittently to focus on what's really going on in the world.

And the fact that we're surprised that Putin is engaging in this kind of nuclear coercion or saber-addling or whatever you want, the fact that we're surprised shows you how powerful is our impulse not to think about this, or to think about it in a way which makes it politically irrelevant.

So if you want to, I mean, if you have to say where I mean, you could say that's a health, it's an understandable impulse, maybe not a healthy one, maybe a healthy one, you just want to think, those weapons will never be used, let's just bracket them and put them aside, and maybe we can deter each other from using them, and that's we have to keep them, some people want to get rid of them, but you know, and we don't need to think about them in a sort of strategic or foreign policy way, that's the impulse, I guess, and Putin has given us a wake-up call, right?

I mean, it's Putin, and what you begin, you know, looking at what you prefer not to look at, you see it's not only Putin, it's the Chinese, it's probably the Iranians, it's North Koreans, in other words, we've deliberately blinded ourselves to a major element of reality, which is generally not a healthy thing to do, to ignore what's actually going on in the world, particularly what's going on in the world is at the disposal of people who are now well inclined towards you.

But I think part of the problem is a deliberate educational effort in the academy, in all the respectable centers of foreign policy, to teach people that, to teach people a certain version of the nuclear history, which makes nuclear weapons irrelevant, I mean, you know what the school, the basic line was, well, the United States got nuclear weapons, we got it because we were worried about Nazi Germany, but we wound up with them, they were horrible, hundreds of thousands of people, radiation deaths,

maybe we shouldn't have used it against Japan, maybe we should, who knows, but we should never use it again. And then the Russians got it, and then we freaked out, they got the Russians were scary, we didn't know what they were doing because it was a total hell.

So what is this they explode there, if we discover that they have the weapon in 49, is that right?

August of 49, we're running an active intelligence program, they didn't publicize it, we knew about it. And then this again, this is the standard academic line, we didn't know what was going on, we worst case, we just assumed the worst because we didn't know.

And we did all kinds of things that in retrospect, it wasted a lot of money, didn't need to do bomber gaps, missile gaps.

And then the Cuban Missile Crisis happens, and the Cuban Missile Crisis shows through the brilliance and leadership of John F. Kennedy that everybody wants to avoid nuclear war.

So we don't want it, we don't want it, we have a mutual interest in getting arms control, we have a mutual interest in denuclear rising, pulling back.

And that's sort of what we are now, and it culminates in what was the dominant element in the political discourse of the United States before this war,

which is to push for nuclear weapons to be used solely, the sole purpose of nuclear weapons should be to deter the use of other nuclear weapons.

That was the language that Joe Biden endorsed in his administration, but he was not the only one, it was him kissing to endorse these kinds of things.

And now we see Vladimir Putin using nuclear weapons in which are rather different from using them as the sole purpose being to deter other nuclear weapons attacks.

Well, you know, if there's an existential threat, if we're really under pressure, and we're surprised because this whole story we've told ourselves is that nuclear weapons are horrible, indiscriminate, which is true.

And therefore the only use that they should have is to deter other people from using nuclear weapons.

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