Welcome back to The Bullwork Goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny Bunch. I'm culture editor at the

bulwark. And I'm very pleased to be joined today by Tom Nichols, who is a staff writer at the Atlantic

and Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College. And we are here to discuss

nuclear apocalypse. Kind of, kind of, sort of. Tom, thanks for being on the show today. I really

appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Sunny. being on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Sonny.

Good to be with you. So I wanted to get you on so we could discuss a House of Dynamite, which is the new movie on Netflix from Catherine Bigelow, of course, who is the director of the Hurt Locker, Zero Dark 30, a bunch of other great movies, one of my favorites, The vampire movie Near Dark, but we're not going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about nuclear war today.

That's a more, more... a bunch of other great movies. One of my favorites, the vampire movie Near Dark, but we're not going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about nuclear war today.

That's a more pressing concern.

And you've written about this movie, you've written about, I mean, obviously, this is your kind of area of expertise, is the nuclear situation in the world.

I don't know how else to put it really. What do we call, how do we describe the state of things on a nuclear level? What's the strategic vantage? What's, what do you call it? I wish I had a, just a clever phrase for it, because, you know, in the old days we'd say, the Cold War, we'd sort of go all this, you know, but now we have, um, nine countries with nuclear weapons in various, you know, I, the way I always think of it since we're, we're here on a movie program, um, is like the ending of reservoir dogs,

with everybody standing around just pointing guns at each other.

And the first guy to pull the trigger is going to get everybody killed.

The former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry had a good line on this.

He thinks that global thermonuclear war is maybe a little less likely now, but he thinks that someone using a nuclear weapon somewhere is a lot more likely.

So that's kind of the weird change in the situation. During the Cold War, we were always about, you know, two inches from launching 20,000 weapons at each other and just melting the planet down.

We still have thousands of weapons pointed at each other.

I mean, you know, U.S. and China, excuse me, and Russia alone have 3,000 weapons pointed at each other.

And that's the end of the world, too.

But now this kind of two-player game is a nine-player game.

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