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Ian Explains
On Ian Explains, host Ian Bremmer makes complex issues about global politics understandable. Ian Explains is a weekly segment on GZERO WORLD with Ian Bremmer, GZERO's weekly program about global news and current affairs.
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Does acquiring nuclear weapons make your country safer? It’s a difficult question. On Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer looks back to the 1990s and a tale of two radically different nuclear—Ukraine and North Korea.
Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal after the Soviet collapse. They gave them up in 1994 in exchange for security assurances from the US, UK and Russia. But assurances aren't guarantees, and a decade later, Russia illegally annexed Crimea before launching its full-scale invasion in 2022. Meanwhile, North Korea abandoned diplomacy, pursued nuclear weapons, and lied to the world all along. Now it’s a global pariah, but the uncomfortable truth is nobody’s thinking of invading North Korea. So did Kyiv get played? Did Pyongyang make a smarter move? The contrast between Ukraine’s vulnerability and North Korea’s impunity seems stark. But the story is more complicated. Building nuclear weapons is a gamble, not a strategy. Watch Ian Explains to understand why and what it means for the growing nuclear threat in 2025.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
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