This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 30th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown. A presidential election, a looming Supreme Court confirmation, a global pandemic.

Why worry about something like nuclear weapons across the globe?

In the latest edition of Cato Unbound, Eric Gomez leads with an essay detailing

what we need to know now about nuclear weapons policy

in the US and around the world.

Cato Unbound is a monthly product of the Cato Institute in which many scholars get together and debate one

particular question for a month and this month you had the you took the lead on Cato's behalf.

And the question is about nuclear weapons,

like in the middle of a pandemic,

a presidential election, a nomination to the US Supreme Court, etc.

etc.

It, he almost forget that nuclear weapons are actually the thing that for the better part of the 20th century and into the 21st century

really ought to have more of our attention than it does.

So what was your take with respect to your essay

about what we should know today about nuclear weapons?

So the prompt for that essay was, what is the most important thing that American

citizens should know about this? And so with a prompt like that, and I have some pretty deep specialized knowledge in this, so it was kind of hard to figure out how to package it. But the way I ended up going is that there's this interesting moment in nuclear policy where you have some very big

Transformative things happening both within the United States and around the world regarding nuclear weapons and you also have the US making a lot of decisions about what is our

nuclear arsenal going to look like for the next 50-plus years and all of this is happening kind of at the same time and what I would hope is that given the sort of enormity of the changes and the longevity of US policy decisions that are going to be made in the

next few years, that this is a really good time to talk about first order questions instead of second order

and I think a lot of the debate in the United States is over the second order questions.

...