Modernizing Doomsday

Lisa Perry
At 5:29 AM on Monday, July 16th, 1945, the human race entered the atomic age when a plutonium weapon was detonated in the New Mexico desert. The test, code-named Trinity, caused an explosion equivalent to 44 million pounds of TNT. The Trinity test was a scientific triumph. Over 130,000 people had spent six years and billions of dollars to design and deploy the world's first explosive device powered by atomic fission. This was the Manhattan Project, a top-secret government effort that was so hush-hush, that many of the people working on it had no idea what they were building. Just after the explosion, Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the Trinity test, famously exclaimed “We are all sons of bitches now.” The scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, would later recall the profound feelings felt by those who had witnessed the event. It was a moment suspended in time. A moment they knew would change the world forever. 

1. Robert Oppenheimer We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another 

Lisa Perry
This is At the Brink, a podcast about the dangers we face from nuclear weapons and the stories of those who are fighting to protect us. In today's episode, we are exploring the question of how we define progress. Throughout American history, we have always believed that newer and bigger is better. But just because we do something, does it mean we should? What if progress could mean developing new thinking to match new technology? The Manhattan project was driven by an urgent need to beat Nazi Germany in a race to the bomb. But Germany would surrender in early May 1945, before either nation would cross the atomic finish line. Yet the American effort pushed forward, culminating in the Trinity test two months later. And what had been theoretical was suddenly an inescapable new reality. After the success of Trinity, several scientists at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Lab, a key Manhattan project facility, began to consider the potential consequences of this new atomic bomb. Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian, studied how these scientists wrestled with their moral responsibility for this new doomsday weapon.

Alex Wellerstein
These are people who are envisioning this long term possibilities. They are really worried about a nuclear arms race. They're not worried about the end of World War II. They know that's happening no matter what, but they are worried about what's coming next. A lot of these people end up producing a number of reports on longterm policy or postwar policy. One of these is what's called the Franck report, and it was on the social and political problems of the atomic bomb. And it was a very wide-ranging. And it's very, in some sense far-thinking, because it's not easy to know what is the future going to be? How is it going to use it? Is this going to change everything, or is it going to just be like a new addition? So they're trying to think these big far-out thoughts. And so a lot of respect for people who try to do that before the technology is used. Usually, people say, well, it'll just sort itself out. And that it leads to a lot of problems.

Lisa Perry
The Franck report argued that Americans should not use the first atomic bomb on a city. Instead, they believed that a non-lethal demonstration of the bomb’s awesome power would be effective in frightening Japan into surrendering. 

Alex Wellerstein
This particular report was thinking about how should the atomic bomb be introduced to the world. Specifically, should the introduction of the atomic bomb be, we drop atomic bombs on cities without any warning. And their conclusion was that would be a really terrible way to introduce this new technology to the world. Why? We don't want World War Three to be fought using nuclear weapons. That would be disastrous. We don't want the Soviet Union to not trust us and build up their own weapons. We don't want Europe to not trust us and wonder what our intentions are. And so they argue that if we just drop a bomb on a city without any warning, that'll be sort of setting a norm. That'll be saying, this is what these weapons are for. And it’ll also be telling people, this is what Americans do. They blow up cities without warning. And they argued that that would be bad

Lisa Perry
To quote from the report: The best possible atmosphere for the achievement of an international agreement could be achieved if America would be able to say to the world, you see what weapon we had, but did not use. We are ready to renounce its use in the future and to join other nations in working out adequate supervision of the use of this nuclear weapon.

Alex Wellerstein
They actually have one sentence in that report that has been redacted from every version of it. Somebody crossed it out with like a pen. I was able to get a copy of the original and hold it up to the light and see where the typewriter had pressed in; it’s not easy to read. And the line was “we fear that people would other nations would regard us as a nascent Germany.”

Lisa Perry
The authors were afraid that using the bomb against cities could lead to a worldwide nuclear arms race in Wars of unprecedented destruction. The argued that the United States should give up its nuclear monopoly after the war and push for international control of nuclear energy. But as we know, their warnings went unheeded, the United States chose to use the first nuclear weapons to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hoping that this would bring a quick end to a long and terrible war. However, that did not stop the efforts of the nuclear scientists in Chicago. They couldn't remain indifferent to the consequences of their work.

Alex Wellerstein
These people have like no real political connections, no influence, nothing. And they're starting to think, well, how do we make this right? How do we, how do we use this for good? So this is a big, big deal for these people. They're really thinking it through. They are not simply saying let's sign it all over to the military and do whatever they say. They are not saying, Oh, well, it's just going to be whatever the government says about it.

Lisa Perry
They concluded they needed a platform that allowed the experts to educate the public about these new weapons and the dangers they posed to the world. Led by Eugene Rabinowitz, the principal author of the Franck report, a group of them formed a new publication called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The first issue came out in December 1945, just five months after the atomic bombing of Japan. Traditionally, the scientific community believed that they must remain impartial on how society used the products of their research. But the reality of the atomic bomb changed a lot of minds and convinced many scientists they could not afford to stay silent. Sharon Squassoni, head of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me about her experience of reading the Bulletin for the first time.

Sharon Squassoni
I opened up a copy and I was astounded. They had created these weapons of enormous destruction, and now they felt a need to come out from their labs and educate the public about these fundamental dilemmas. Should we have used the weapons? Should we continue to have the weapons? Should we control them? Should we reduce them? Should we keep other countries from getting these weapons? And that really impressed me. The fact that these scientists could put aside pretty much their day jobs and focus on issues that could affect humanity

Lisa Perry
In order to communicate the urgency of their message to the public, in 1947, the organization created their iconic design, the Doomsday Clock. You may have heard of the Doomsday 

Clock before—the bold graphic image of a clock with a minute hand ticking towards midnight, symbolizing the potential end of humanity. It has become a cultural touchstone, referenced everywhere from comic books to Doctor Who episodes to Lincoln Park albums. There's even an Iron Maiden song based on it. And while the rights are too expensive for us to play it for you, you can probably hear it in your head right now. You know the one, Two Minutes to Midnight. Every year, the Bulletin brings a team of experts together to determine the Doomsday Clock setting. That setting is based on their estimate of the current existential risk to humanity today. That estimate also factors in the risk of the climate crisis and disruptive technologies. As the estimate of the overall risk changes, the clock setting has moved forward or backward accordingly in the 75 years. Since the beginning of the atomic age, the closest to midnight the clock has ever been set was two minutes. This occurred after the Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1953, a terrifying leap forward in the destructive power of nuclear weapons. In 2018, the first time since the development of thermonuclear weapons, the clock was once again set at two minutes to midnight. It remained there the following year. in 2020, that changed.

Rachel Bronson
Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock. It is 100 seconds to midnight.

Lisa Perry
100 seconds to midnight. These experts are telling us that they believe the greatest threat to humanity's existence in modern history wasn't during the cold war—it is right now. So why is it that experts believe we are on the brink of disaster today? Sharon Squassoni, who would go on to join the panel of experts who determined the clock setting each year, explains that when it comes to nuclear risks, we are repeating the mistakes of the past.

Sharon Squassoni
The Doomsday Clock has been hovering within minutes of midnight for several years, and there are different sets of reasons for that. But overall, the risks that we thought had vanished with the end of the Cold War are still with us. And that is a U.S.-Russian nuclear competition. At the same time, we also happen to be at a place where most of the nuclear weapons states are engaged in modernizing their arsenals. And you have to say, does this mean that these risks will be with us for another 30 and 40 years? You have to ask that question.

Lisa Perry
In the last decade, both Russia and the U.S., as well as other nuclear-armed nations, have begun to return to the days of the Cold War arms race, rebuilding and expanding our nuclear arsenals under the guise of modernization. The American nuclear modernization program was first conceived under the Bush and Obama years as an effort to upgrade our aging nuclear infrastructure. Clearly, if we're going to have nuclear weapons, we must ensure that they are safe and reliable, but Jon Wolfsthal, who served as Senior Director for Arms Control and Non-proliferation in the Obama White House, explains that not enough effort has been made to question what we are replacing and why.

Jon Wolfsthal
Because we had submarines, because we had missiles, because we had bombers, because we had short-range fighter aircraft in Europe with nuclear weapons associated with them, as we modernize, we're basically going to replace all of those systems, whether or not in 2019 or 2025, we need a Cold War-style nuclear arsenal to deal with a Russia that we know is not the same type of threat that we thought we faced in the Soviet Union, to me is a debate that we need to have.

Lisa Perry
Someone who has been trying to have that debate is Adam Smith. He is the Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, which is directly responsible for funding any plans for modernization.

Adam Smith
Yes, we need to replace, we need to upgrade what we have, but do we need as much as what we had during the height of the Cold War? And you know, there's a bunch of different ways to calculate it, but we have the power to destroy the earth by most estimates, multiple times. That is a sufficient deterrent to my mind. 

Lisa Perry
Joe Cirincione was a staffer on the House Armed Services Committee in the eighties. And he's been paying close attention to nuclear issues ever since. Today, he is the President of Ploughshares Fund, a nonprofit working on nuclear issues. Joe takes issue with the terminology of nuclear modernization.

Joe Cirincione
Let's first take a look at that word, modernization. The Pentagon carefully chooses the words that you use to describe it's weapon systems. Modernization, who can be against modernization? We all want to be modern. We all want to have the most modern technology. I mean, like cars, nuclear missiles, nuclear bombers, eventually wear out and they need to be replaced. But what the proposal is to, is to replace every single one of them, to act as if the Cold War never really ended and to replace everyone with a brand new version of it. If we're going to modernize, I think we should modernize the mission first, modernize the posture first, adjust to the 21st-century realities. And then we can build the weapons we need for that strategic moment.

Lisa Perry
Our current modernization plan may be designed around our 20th-century mission, but it certainly comes with a 21st-century price tag 

President Trump
(news clip): We’re spending a tremendous amount of money on our nuclear arsenal. Nobody will have close.

Lisa Perry
And once big dollar signs got involved, motivations got complicated. John Wolfsthal recently co-authored a study with Jeffrey Lewis and Mark Quint called The Trillion Dollar Triad, exploring how the budget for this plan has ballooned out of control.

Jon Wolfsthal
By the time these decisions had to really be made in 2014 and 15, they had taken on a life of their own. The defense industrial complex, defense contractors, the services, all became invested in these systems and the costs were seen as largely irrelevant because they were seen as being a national defense priority. But by the time we got back and looked at these numbers in 2014, in 2015, we realized that the numbers were enormous. Current estimate is that over 30 years, the programs will cost 1.7 trillion U.S. dollars.

Lisa Perry
The push for certain contracts is not always based solely on security concerns.

Jon Wolfsthal
These programs sort of have their own inertia in each of the services, in the military, the Navy, the Air Force, they say, well, you know, look, we have commanders who are coming up through the ranks and they won't make Admiral unless they get to command a nuclear submarine. We have pilots who won't make general unless they get to fly a nuclear-capable bomber

Lisa Perry
For Joe Cirincione, the important question is who in the defense industry has the most to gain from these programs.

Joe Cirincione
I'm convinced that the main driver behind our nuclear posture is not ideology and it's not strategy. We don't need this number of weapons configured in the way they are to prevail, to keep our country safe, or to win in a war. I think the main driver is now contracts. We spend about $55 billion every year on nuclear weapons. We're now committed to a so-called modernization program that would spend about $2 trillion, $1.7 trillion over the next 25 years or so to rebuild every single missile, bomber, plane, warhead, in the arsenal. That's an enormous arsenal. That's an enormous amount of money. And so what that buys is a lot of contractors. It buys a lot of jobs in key states and key districts. It buys a lot of lobbyists in Washington.

Lisa Perry
Despite military research indicating that our mission does not require such a massive nuclear force, the distorted process of allocating money to the Pentagon means that military leaders have developed a habit of asking for the moon every budget cycle. 

Joe Cirincione
You will hear their three and four-star generals come up to the Hill and swear that we absolutely need every single one of these weapons. And we can't afford to cut a bit or else their Republic will be doomed. And they have testified thusly for over 70 years. Do the Chiefs actually care about having 6,000 nuclear weapons? No, I don't think they do.

Lisa Perry
The Defense Department is not solely to blame for the unrestrained modernization budget. Many members of Congress see modernization contracts as financially lucrative for their districts. Dr. Sharon Weiner is a nuclear scholar at American University. Her research leads her to believe that motivations for supporting the modernization plan are often not about increasing our security

Sharon Weiner
What are the political variables that have produced a nuclear modernization agenda after the Cold War that could cost trillions of dollars and establish the foundation for keeping nuclear weapons as part of the U S arsenal for your kids, your kids' kids, and way into the future? Our nuclear weapons programs can't become a jobs project for employment. That's not their role

Lisa Perry
Important issues in national security are often decided with little public debate. Without scrutiny, the decision-making process of defense spending can be distorted by those interests that benefit. Like Joe Cirincione, Dr. Weiner is concerned that there has been no room for critical thought about our nuclear posture. Somehow we have conflated support for our country with support for these devastating weapons.

Sharon Weiner
The debate that's missing is not about modernizing the nuclear forces. It's about modernizing the strategy and the discussion and the role of nuclear weapons play in national security. It's about modernizing nuclear weapons decision making. People sometimes equate patriotism with not questioning the United States and its policy. Instead, patriotism is about having an active, respectful debate that precisely questions those policies. Patriotism is about, do we need a nuclear arsenal of this size, of this complexity, of this particular character, and prove it to me.

Lisa Perry
Nuclear weapons do have a defined role in our defense strategy to deter nuclear attacks from other nations. But even the military agrees that the arsenal we have goes beyond fulfilling that mission.

Joe Cirincione
I've talked to a lot of experts, military experts, people who formally were in command of the nuclear forces, and a lot of them think as I do, that we could very easily go down to a few hundred nuclear weapons. United States and Russia are the only countries in the world of the nine nuclear-weapon states, the United States and Russia are the only countries that have thousands of these weapons. The other seven nations have a few hundred. China, for example, has 300, 300 weapons in all of China. About 60 of them can actually reach the United States. It turns out that 60 nuclear weapons is plenty to deter us.

Lisa Perry
Tom Collina, who also works for Ploughshares Fund, argues that politicians are preoccupied with parity, the idea that we must have at least as many weapons as our adversaries. But that math doesn't add up when it comes to nuclear weapons.

Tom Collina
Politicians have a really hard time defending any kind of an inferior position. I would argue that the United States with a much smaller nuclear arsenal could deter Russia. Even if Russia didn't reduce its arsenal. So if, let's say, we had 500 warheads on submarines at sea, that could not be attacked, even if Russia had a thousand warheads that it launched at us, they could not get after those 500 warheads at sea. So Russia would be deterred. So parity is a political dynamic that politicians find useful. It is not necessary for deterrence.

Lisa Perry
My grandfather, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, has witnessed this wrong-headed parity argument play out repeatedly throughout his long career in national security, both during the Cold War, and unfortunately, continuing into today, 

William Perry
1500 nuclear weapons deployed are far more than we need. My observation through the years is that the need for parity, the perceived need for parity, which is truly a political objective, not a military objective, has always driven our nuclear forces far more than any consideration of what you need for deterrence. And that's still true today

Lisa Perry
For Sharon Weiner, this simplistic keeping up with the Joneses mentality seems to be an almost pathological feedback loop.

Sharon Weiner
Once you start building something, the ability to get rid of it is hard. You want to keep doing it and keep doing it. So in this sense, we have an addiction to nuclear weapons. We don't necessarily need them except to satisfy our own addiction.

Lisa Perry
One particularly pernicious nuclear addiction is our ongoing love affair with land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs. These aging weapons are set to be retired in the next several years. And our current plan is to completely replace the entire stock to the tune of a cool $150 billion. Experts like my grandfather have argued that this is a mistake, since these weapons pose a unique risk of increasing the chance of an accidental nuclear war, as we detailed in our first episode. Representative Ted Lieu is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and he argues that ICBMs are an unnecessary expense.

Ted Lieu
We spend way too much money on nuclear weapons. We have so many weapons that we can destroy our adversaries many times over. In fact, just based on the nuclear weapons on our submarines, they can devastate our adversaries already. And so the notion that you have to spend all this money on land-based nuclear missiles, on nuclear bombers, in addition to nuclear submarines, just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. We could reduce a lot of that weaponry and still have the same deterrent effect.

Lisa Perry
The frantic compulsion to always be one step ahead of the Russians has not only led to sinking huge amounts of money into upgrading our existing nuclear weapons. It has also led to proposals for several brand new weapon systems, as Jon Wolfsthal explains.

Jon Wolfsthal
We're rebuilding an arsenal that's much larger and much more expensive than we actually need for our security. On top of that, the Trump administration came into office and took the previous modernization program and said, that's not enough. We need new types of nuclear weapons because we're threatened by Russia's new defense strategy. So we want to build a new, lower yield, more usable nuclear weapon

Lisa Perry
On the surface. It may seem like a lower-yield nuclear weapon, which has a smaller explosive capacity, would be a shift in the right direction, away from the megaton behemoths we developed in the sixties and seventies. But those words are misleading. The explosive power of even the smallest low yield nuclear warhead is still exponentially greater than any conventional bomb.

Ted Lieu
The DOD wants to have these smaller nuclear weapons, where they think they can explode one somewhere and still kill a lot of people, but not a lot a lot of people. It's still going to be a huge amount of people.

Lisa Perry
Tom Collina makes the critical point that nuclear weapons are not just bigger bombs, a distinction even President Truman recognized. Three years after he ordered the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman was quoted as saying, “This isn't a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people and not for military uses.”

Tom Collina
There was a huge debate that has been going on for years, about from the earliest days of the Truman administration, are nuclear weapons just larger conventional weapons, or are they in a class by themselves? This was one of the reasons why it was useful that the term weapon of mass destruction came about. And the reason that term was invoked was to say, these are indiscriminate weapons. You can't use these weapons in a military sense and try to limit the damage to soldiers and people that are legitimately fighting in a war. These are weapons that are indiscriminate and will kill innocent civilians. This new warhead that the Trump administration wants to deploy is only low compared to the extremely high destructive power of our other nuclear weapons. The ones we're talking about now are probably about half the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that's still hundreds of times larger than the largest conventional weapon we have in our arsenal.

Lisa Perry
Supporters of low yield nukes argue that they give the military more options to respond to threats and claim that an opponent hit with a small yield nuclear weapon would respond in a proportional way. But representatives Ted Lieu and Adam Smith are skeptical of that claim.

Ted Lieu
It is really stupid to make it easier to use nuclear weapons. The only reason you have nuclear weapons is to not use them. My view is we should not make nuclear weapons, easier to use. We should not be developing tactical nuclear weapons at all. So once one country explodes a nuclear weapon and military conflict, not clear how they can keep the adversary from then retaliating in a massive way.

Adam Smith
There is no containable nuclear war. Tick, tick, tick, it goes up. So once you get into a dialogue about how we have to deploy a low yield nuke so that we can potentially have a proportional response, then you are starting down the road of making nuclear war thinkable. And that's a red line for me.

Lisa Perry
But making these weapons more usable may be exactly the point.

Tom Collina
I think those people who make their livelihood and careers from the nuclear industry are very concerned that nuclear weapons are perceived to be unusable because they're so large and destructive. And that they're really trying to succeed in convincing politicians to deploy lower-yield weapons that are perceived to be more usable and therefore more relevant to U.S. military plans. Because if U.S. nuclear weapons are deemed unusable, then the next question is, why do we have them?

Lisa Perry
So why DO we have them? To defense contractors, nuclear weapons are moneymakers and our expanding nuclear modernization program is a cash cow, but are they good for the nation overall? Our country's budget is not limitless. And the money we spend on nuclear weapons is money that is not available for other programs.

Adam Smith
If you spend a trillion dollars on nuclear weapons, it is at some point a zero-sum game. That's a trillion dollars that you could have spent, you know, building up the infrastructure to make our country economically strong enough to protect itself. You know, it's a pie, all right. And you know, if you'd take a big chunk out of here, then you have less for research, you have less for healthcare, you have less for education, you have less for infrastructure, hell you have less, you know, to pay for veterans to make sure they get the healthcare they deserve, which is connected to the defense budget. When we're thinking about whether or not we need to spend 1.2 or 1.5 or $2 trillion on nuclear weapons, part of that equation has to be, how does that impact our ability to spend money on other things? And I just think that it's not worth the investment

Lisa Perry
To put the projected cost of modernization into perspective, it amounts to spending about a hundred thousand dollars per minute, just on nuclear weapons. By the time you've listened to this podcast, we will have spent over $4 million on these programs. Dedicating this much of our limited financial resources solely to nuclear weapons harms our ability to fund other important defense needs that better respond to today's threats. The coronavirus pandemic has starkly illustrated that modern threats to our nation can take many forms, few of which are deterred by nuclear weapons, and all of which are expensive to prepare for. As chair of the Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith is acutely aware of the high costs of maintaining our national security. 

Adam Smith
Our warfare is changing and shifting, and how are we going to deal with the more isolated threats as opposed to a big war against a big adversary? So if we're spending all this money on nuclear weapons, how are we going to make the investments in AI or hypersonic technology, the different technologies that are going to best be able to protect us? The more you take out of it to put in a nuclear weapon, the less is available for all other defense priorities,

Lisa Perry
Former Security Council member Jon Wolfsthal argues that the high cost of modernization also has an ironic side effect, limiting funding for command and control, the system set up to allow military and civilian leaders to communicate during a crisis and actually deploy nuclear weapons if needed.

Jon Wolfsthal
The United States has been saying we need to spend more to have a secure command and control system so that the president and his top commanders can talk when they need to, in the worst possible environments. We have still never spent enough to upgrade those systems. They're still vulnerable to hacking. And so just within the nuclear budget, the modernization of the actual platforms, submarines, bombers, missiles, is keeping us from spending the money on the command and control side. We do need to be able to deter nuclear use, but we can do that at a much lower level of weapons. And we can do that at a much lower price tag, and we can then use that time and attention and money and others that actually make us safer.

Lisa Perry
The debate over modernization is really a debate over priorities. Do we see a Cold War-style nuclear arsenal as a realistic priority in the 21st century, given our many other pressing needs? Sharon Weiner argues that even the military would not prioritize nuclear weapons over other defense needs if they were made to choose

Sharon Weiner
The conventional Air Force, certainly they, you know, they're pushing for nuclear modernization, but my guess is if you ask them to make a choice between a dollar for a new ICBM and a dollar for a new tactical fighter, they're going to fix a conventional weapon.

Lisa Perry
Yet the United States Congress continues to approve the largest defense budget in the world, outspending the next seven largest military budgets combined. Joe Cirincione says that our bloated Pentagon budget allows the military to avoid making hard choices that are based in actual strategy.

Joe Cirincione
You got to cut the budget and make the Joint Chiefs choose. Historically, when forced to choose, the Chiefs don't choose nuclear. These are the least important weapons to them. They're not going to cut them as long as the pie is growing, but if the pie shrinks, they are going to choose the ships, planes, and bombers that they actually need in conventional wars that we’re likely to fight, not the redundant nuclear forces that largely serve a symbolic role in the 21st century

Lisa Perry
Beyond the outside cost of these weapons, our modernization plan is having another unintended consequence, one that is scarily reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War.
J

on Wolfsthal
The reality is that the United States is pursuing all of these systems, or at least the Trump administration is pursuing all these systems. And Russia has decided that it too needs to, uh, develop a full suite of new nuclear capabilities. But we now find ourselves in a new action-reaction cycle with Russia, where everything they're doing looks like a threat, and we have to build a response and everything we do in response looks like a threat to Russia and they then have to counter respond. And that's how we ended up with 35,000 nuclear weapons in 1985, without making us any more secure.

Lisa Perry
The Cold War nuclear arms race led to insane numbers of nuclear weapons on both sides, but the U.S. and the Soviets were eventually able to step back from the brink by negotiating a series of arms control agreements, which kept our arsenals in check today. Tom Collina is worried that these critical agreements are under threat. 

Tom Collina
President Trump is tearing down the arms control structure that we've had for the last 50 years that has been supported on a bipartisan basis, and that has successfully reduced U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals by about 90%. President Trump has withdrawn from the INF treaty with Russia, and it would appear that President Trump will not renew the New START treaty with Russia, which expires in early 2021. So what you have is both sides modernizing their forces, but at the same time, the limits on those forces in terms of numbers may be going away

Lisa Perry
The return of the Doomsday Clock to a time not seen since the dark days of the Cold War reflects this grim reality. We are sleepwalking along the same dangerous path we have been down before, but there is still a chance to change our course.

Tom Collina
In terms of a new arms race, we see more attention on this from members of Congress, particularly those who have a longer memory of things back in the Cold war, and remember the value of arms control in terms of ending the Cold War and the arms race. So we're seeing legislation to, for example, encourage President Trump to extend the New START treaty. That's good. We're seeing legislation to prevent the Trump administration from building weapons that would have been prohibited by the INF treaty. That's good. But the problem here is that when it comes to nuclear policy, the president has very broad authority. As President Trump did on the INF treaty and the Iran nuclear deal, presidents can walk away from agreements without anybody's blessing. They can just do it. And so it's very hard for Congress to rein in the precedent on these fronts. But the one thing they can do is they can limit spending. They can use the power of the purse.

Lisa Perry
It is up to Congress to step up and rein in our exorbitant defense spending and re-engage with arms control. But the public has a vital role to play as well. Congressional members will not take up issues if they believe that there is no public support for them. And unfortunately, large and vocal opposition to nuclear weapons programs faded along with memories of the Iron Curtain. Having worked on these issues in the Obama administration, Jon Wolfsthal knows better than anyone that change will only happen when we speak up and hold our government accountable.

Jon Wolfsthal
The reality is a lot of people think nuclear weapons and nuclear dangers ended when the Cold war ended, in a lot of ways, these were things that are now in the history books. And, you know, we don't have to worry about those things. And the reality is that we are an accident away from the world being exposed to the horrors of nuclear use. The world could very quickly again, find out how horrible nuclear use is. And so we have to be involved. We have to spend the time and we have to make our voices heard so that our leaders understand that we will not accept anything less than the best possible stewardship of these risks.

Lisa Perry
We can shift our trajectory if we put enough pressure on our government to respond to our demands. Nuclear weapons don't have strong public support. We just need to make that disapproval visible.

Jon Wolfsthal
I think the public needs to make clear both locally and nationally, that they're concerned about the risks of nuclear use. We've seen concern about gun violence in the United States that's moving the needle. We've seen concern about climate change in the United States that's driving the debate. There is broad, broad support for ending the arms race, for reducing the nuclear threat to the United States. But it's not one that really drives a lot of activism in the United States yet. I think for most people, they think this issue is too complicated for them. They don't really know how to affect change. It can be as simple as calling your Congressman and calling your Senator and saying, don't fund more usable nuclear weapons

Lisa Perry
Tackling an issue this large and this entrenched can seem daunting. But Joe Cirincione is optimistic. He knows that the numbers are not on the side of nuclear weapons. 

Joe Cirincione
We did a poll last year on Pentagon spending, on nuclear weapons spending. We found that six in 10 Americans believe that we have more nuclear weapons than we need and that we should be leading the way to reducing these arsenals through diplomacy. We found that six in 10 Americans also believed that we should shift the Pentagon budget towards domestic spending. So if you feel that way you are in the majority. We found that even a majority of Trump voters felt that way. So that means you should feel very confident in going to your representative, emailing them, talking to them, going to town halls, doing an office visit and telling them that you want to reduce the Pentagon spending, keep the money that you really need for the kind of conventional weapons to deter the kind of conflicts we're likely to face, but shift all that money over into domestic spending, which has been starved in recent decades.

Lisa Perry
Looking at the scale of the problems we're facing, it can be easy to feel discouraged. Sometimes it can almost feel like David and Goliath. I imagine it must've felt like that to the scientists of the Manhattan Project who raised their voices against the very weapons they helped to create. But the scientists who chose to speak out recognized what is still true today, nuclear weapons are manmade problems and they have manmade solutions. Speaking at the 2020 Doomsday Clock announcement, Jerry Brown, former governor of California, argued that the fact that the clock is closer to midnight than ever before is not a cause to feel defeated, but it is instead a call to action.

Jerry Brown
So let us not let the moment pass. Each one of us can do something. The world is not over. We have an opportunity to reverse the nuclear arms race, carbon emissions, and the headlong rush to ever more dangerous technology. It's within human hands. This is the moment, if there ever was, to wake up, it’s now, and those who have to wake up are you.

Lisa Perry
I used to think that nuclear weapons were somebody else's responsibility, that officials were taking care to keep them and the American public safe. I've learned that isn't true. There are days that I wish I could unlearn what these experts have taught me because it's frightening, but I take inspiration from the hard work that so many people are doing to shift our path away from doomsday. And now we know that this work is not just for experts, but also for citizens. When I first started working with my grandfather, I felt out of place next to his 65 years of career experience, but now more than ever, we need new voices to take up the call. This is our future, and we will be the ones to decide what to make of it. We will be the ones who can redefine progress, if we can develop new ways of thinking, thinking that rejects destructive technology and embraces productive policy. Experts are sounding the alarm bells telling us enough is enough, but they can't succeed by themselves. Only if they are joined by many voices from across the country, voices demanding that our government take action, will we be able to turn back the clock. That's our show. We'd love to hear from you what your thoughts are about nuclear modernization and how you would spend $100,000 a minute—tweet your ideas to ATTHEBRINKPOD. You can also find all of our social media links as well as more resources and information about the topics we discuss in each episode on our website ATTHEBRINK.ORG. If you liked our show and want to help raise awareness about these issues, please subscribe, review, and share our show with your friends. Thank you to all our guests for their time and expertise. At the Brink is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. These organizations work tirelessly to combat the global threat of nuclear weapons. This podcast is a creation of the William J. Perry Project, led by director Robin Perry and education director David Perry. This episode was produced by Jeff Large and Maggie Fisher from Come Alive Creative, and Ryan Hobler is our composer and audio engineer. Thank you to our listeners. You're helping us try and save the world one podcast at a time. I'm Lisa Perry. Thanks for listening.