Podcast: Do nuclear weapons keep us safe? An arms control expert weighs in

TRANSCRIPT: Do nuclear weapons keep us safe? An arms control expert weighs in

Kelsey Davenport:

If we look back over the course of history, the number of times that the US and the Soviet Union now Russia have come close to nuclear exchanges, the number of times the United States has nearly detonated a nuclear weapon on its own soil be because of an accident, we've really been quite lucky to have avoided an intentional or accidental nuclear exchange at this point.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we're going nuclear. And I mean it. I spend plenty of time on this show talking about nuclear threats from countries like Pakistan and Iran, but I've never asked the question, do nuclear weapons keep us safe? Arms control expert Kelsey Davenport joins the show to talk about the world's fascination with these horrible weapons and how close we still remain to all out nuclear war. Let's get to it.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. The Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran Nuclear deal. You rarely hear what happens behind the closed doors of the world's biggest agreements, until now. On the new podcast, The Negotiators, Foreign Policy is teaming up with Doha Debates to put listeners in the room. Listen to new episodes every week on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ian Bremmer:

Kelsey Davenport, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.

Kelsey Davenport:

Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Ian Bremmer:

How does it make you feel that, I mean, we watched the power of these weapons, these truly unusable weapons, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then we proceed to build as many as we can and make them more and more powerful. And arms control efforts have at best been a marginal success.

Kelsey Davenport:

It's still almost unfathomable to me that politicians would actually consider using nuclear weapons in any type of warfare or conflict. Given the indiscriminate nature, given the destruction of these weapons, and given the widespread implications for climate, for environment, for health, for food, for security, the fact that we still characterize nuclear weapons as vital to national security, I think, is frustrating and fundamentally misunderstands the role that nuclear weapons would play in any type of destructive conflict.

When we talk about nuclear weapons, I think it's really critical to challenge the notions that nuclear weapons have kept peace, that they prevented conflict between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And that nuclear weapons now are currently deterring conflict because that essentially rests on the premise, the idea, that we would actually consider using these weapons in war. And when you think about the catastrophic consequences of such use, I mean that option really should be off the table.

Ian Bremmer:

And despite the presence of those thousands and thousands of warheads, the two countries came to the brink of using them on several occasions

Kelsey Davenport:

They did. If we look back over the course of history, the number of times that the US and the Soviet Union, now Russia, have come close to nuclear exchanges, the number of times the United States has nearly detonated a nuclear weapon on its own soil because of an accident, it really is, we've really been quite lucky to have avoided an intentional or accidental nuclear exchange at this point. And my fear is that one day our luck is going to run out. So I think we need more focus on pursuing creative options for arms control and disarmament. This is an issue that needs more political attention and we really need to ask difficult questions about the morality and ethics of pursuing nuclear weapons and continuing to make them so integral in defining national security.

Ian Bremmer:

We have some 5,000 warheads. The Russians today have roughly the same. I look at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Doomsday Clock, and we're just about as close to midnight as we were when the Soviet Union was still around. And yet, you don't hear very much about it. It's not a headline issue. We don't do our training in our classrooms of what we might do in the event of a nuclear strike. Why is the population no longer concerned about this as a proximate existential threat?

Kelsey Davenport:

I think there are a number of reasons that we don't see nuclear weapons making the headlines like they have in the past. For one, I think nuclear weapons feel very abstract. They're not presenting the same risk that people experience in their everyday lives, where they may experience the effects of climate change, they may experience the effects of violent extremism. So the abstract nature of nuclear weapons, the fact that they feel less salient and less present, I think contributes to that.

I also think that it's difficult for people to see agency in trying to confront the nuclear threat. I mean, studies have shown that the public sometimes avoids even reading about nuclear weapons because they don't see where they have any agency in trying to prevent nuclear risk. They support the abolition of nuclear weapons, but don't actually feel like it's an achievable goal because of the complexity of the science, because the issue seems abstract and because generally discussions about nuclear weapons are held in certain kind of small echelons of DC society and not made more widely accessible to the general public.

So I think it's both the fact that the consequences don't seem as immediate as other threats, but also that people sometimes just feel powerless to know how to affect change in reducing nuclear risk.

Ian Bremmer:

You said that you think that we need more creative arms control methods going forward. What do you mean by that?

Kelsey Davenport:

From an arms control perspective, there has been significant success in reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons around the world since the height of the Cold War. During the height of the Cold War, there were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons deployed primarily in the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, the global nuclear inventory is about 13,000.

But nuclear risk is still rising despite these reductions because the nuclear armed countries are investing in smaller nuclear weapons that are perceived as more likely to be used, and investing in delivery systems for nuclear weapons that increase risk because they reduce decision time and they blur the lines between nuclear and conventional capabilities.

So risk is rising. So if we think about how to pursue arms control from a risk reduction perspective, we have to be more creative than thinking just about the numbers. In the United States and China, for instance, it doesn't make sense to pursue an arms control agreement that cuts the number of nukes because the United States has about 1,350 deployed nuclear weapons, whereas China only has about 350. But both countries are looking into new more destabilizing missile systems like hypersonics. Would it be possible to reach some sort of agreement banning that type of missile? That would add more stability, for instance, and perhaps help mitigate sort of this new nuclear arms race that we're seeing begin to play out amongst some of these countries.

Ian Bremmer:

What's the usual strategic purpose to create new weapon systems that actually make war more likely?

Kelsey Davenport:

Well, I think there are a number of motivations. And again, this comes back to the question of being more creative. And some of the deployments and the investments that we're seeing in Russia and China, for instance, are a direct response to US missile defenses and the perception that the United States is essentially trying to build an impenetrable shield that Russia and China cannot threaten, which would give the US superiority in the event of any type of nuclear conflict. So at times, it's the perception of defenses that drive some of these advances and drive looking at some of these systems that are ultimately more destabilizing.

I mean also for a country like China, it's going to look at the United States, this conventional military, and it's going to look at the size of the US forces, and it could perceive developments in its nuclear arsenal as a way to counterbalance that asymmetry between conventional forces.

So there are a number of motivations that are sort of pushing these developments, and once one country escalates, there's an impetus for others to follow. And that's why across the board, we're seeing all nine countries that possess nuclear weapons developing and investing in these more destabilizing systems because there is that trickle down and then escalatory effect.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you buy the traditional logic of mutually assured destruction? I mean in the sense that when you've got these two countries, and they've got these massive arsenals that point at each other, but if somebody launches, and if they launch with significant force, deterrence has failed. I mean, at that point, if you're a leader, your decision is not about protecting your country. Your decision is how many people are you going to kill or not? It seems to me that when people are faced with imminent death, they start becoming more moral. Do you think about that?

Kelsey Davenport:

Well, reportedly every President since Truman has faced a very real situation where they considered using nuclear weapons and ultimately decided not to do so. And I think that is because of the destructive and indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons. But also because how do you control that escalation? I mean, how do you ensure that your own population isn't going to be subject to the same attack? And how are you that sure from the onset that you may actually be subject to a nuclear strike yourself? So I think that that comes back to this need to fundamentally question whether or not nuclear weapons actually make countries more secure and whether or not deterrence as a concept still holds water and is something that we should be investing in and continuing to call to our national defense.

Ian Bremmer:

There are also, of course, big dangers of proliferation. And maybe one of the greatest successes has not been arms control, but it's that there aren't dozens and dozens of countries that have nuclear weapons around the world today. But there are some countries that have them that clearly are unlikely to be responsible with them. Irrespective of how you count the Americans and the Russians on that camp, I mean Pakistan, India North Korea. What are the areas that you are most worried about?

Kelsey Davenport:

Well, in general, the proliferation regime has been an outstanding success. I mean, prior to the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which essentially kind of capped the number of recognized nuclear armed countries at five, studies in the United States demonstrated that we could see 15, 20, 25 nuclear armed countries. Right now, we only have nine, largely because of diplomatic efforts to stem proliferation.

That being said, non-proliferation was a bargain. Essentially, states agreed to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty and forego nuclear weapons if countries that possessed nuclear weapons were willing to give them up, they committed to disarmament. And the very slow pace of disarmament, I think is causing some states to begin to question that bargain. And when you layer on top of that, some states that no longer feel that there's security assurances, with the United States, for example, can be counted on and trusted, we're beginning to see kind of an uptick in states considering or exploring the idea of perhaps pursuing nuclear weapons down the road. And there's a debate in South Korea, for instance, about pursuing nuclear weapons, that it has its own deterrent against North Korea.

So when we talk about the issues of proliferation, I think we're inclined to think about states that we would see as kind of outliers or pariahs in the international system. We talk about North Korea and we talk about Iran. But there are a risk of states that have generally been perceived as responsible actors thinking about nuclear weapons because they think that promise of non-proliferation and disarmament, that that bargain is broken, and because they perceive nuclear weapons as the best way to protect against some of these other nuclear risks.

Ian Bremmer:

And even if, I mean the South Koreans may be as responsible as hell and transparent with their program, but if they get nukes, the implications for an arms race on the Korean Peninsula go way up. The likelihood that China starts building a lot more because South Korea has American troops on its territory goes way up. So the second and third order implications even of countries that we would all say, "Oh, well, they'll be responsible with nuclear weapons," becomes much more destabilized.

Kelsey Davenport:

Oh, absolutely. And we may see the same dynamic in the Middle East now, as there's concerns about nuclear restrictions on Iran collapsing if the nuclear deal with Iran collapses. Saudi Arabia openly threatened to pursue nuclear weapons to match Iran's capabilities, if Iran's nuclear program is unrestrained. There have been similar threats by countries like Turkey. So I think while it's unlikely that a number of these states will actually follow through on these threats and pursue nuclear weapons, because it is expensive, it does take up a lot of resources. But the fact that states are kind of openly calling into question the global benefits of non-proliferation, openly threatening to pursue nuclear weapons, I mean that's dangerous for non-proliferation norms, it's dangerous for the strength of the regime, and it does create real risks that need to be monitored and mitigated.

Ian Bremmer:

So of all of the countries that are potentially going to get nukes, the one that makes all the headlines of course, and we increasingly call it a threshold nuclear state, is Iran. Tell me a little bit about where you see Iran's program and how destabilizing it is right now.

Kelsey Davenport:

Well, the first thing that I think is important to recall is that the nuclear deal that Iran reached with six world powers in 2015 was an effective, strong, non-proliferation agreement. And Iran was abiding by that deal when then President Trump decided to pull the United States out and re-impose sanctions on Iran in violation of the accord in May of 2018. And unsurprisingly, when the sanctions relief benefits dried up for Iran, Iran decided to violate the nuclear agreement in turn to try to leverage the US back into the deal.

And I think right now we're at a very critical moment where the United States is assessing whether or not the non-proliferation benefits of the accord can be restored because of the nature of Iran's violations. I mean, at this point, I think a return to the nuclear deal is still the best possible option for both the United States and Iran. I mean, it will put back in place more limits and intrusive monitoring on Iran's nuclear activity and provide Iran with the sanctions relief that it needs. And more importantly, perhaps, there is no better option than diplomacy when it comes to addressing Iran's nuclear risk. The United States, and Israel, sometimes working in tandem, have over the years, tried to stymie Iran's nuclear progress using an array of tactics from cyber activities to the assassination of scientists. And every time Iran has responded by ratcheting up its nuclear activities further.

So when the United States says that it might pursue a plan B, that all options are on the table, it's like, yes, those options are on the table, but they're not good options. I mean, if the United States or Israel or the two countries working together were to conduct a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, I mean, I'm concerned that we'd see kind of the adverse impact, that rather than abandon its nuclear program, Iran would be more incentivized to actually pursue nuclear weapons to prevent any sort of attack on its territorial integrity down the road.

So again, I think military solutions, I think sanctions pressure, all of these may have some successes in the short-term, but in the longterm, it's just more likely to push Iran in the wrong direction. So I think it's critical to right now try to pursue a return to the nuclear deal. And if that fails to consider other diplomatic options, perhaps a broader agreement that addresses some of Iran's concerns in other areas, likewise US concerns. Or perhaps at least an interim deal that stabilizes the current situation. But the bottom line here is that diplomacy is the only way to address Iran's nuclear program in a verifiable manner that provides the strongest possible guarantees that Iran can't pursue nuclear weapons.

Ian Bremmer:

Kelsey Davenport, thanks so much for being on with us today at GZERO World.

Kelsey Davenport:

Thanks for having me.

Announcer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. The Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran Nuclear deal. You rarely hear what happens behind the closed doors of the world's biggest agreements, until now. On the new podcast, The Negotiators, Foreign Policy is teaming up with Doha Debates to put listeners in the room. Listen to new episodes every week on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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