Uh,

it, it, it sounds sort of fanciful, but, um, you know, most of your listeners have probably heard, uh, if, if, if there was like a kitchen table idea in nuclear strategy that most people know it's mutually assured destruction, right? This idea that you have secure, you know, you have secure second strike forces.

I have secure second strike forces.

Neither of us can destroy the others, uh, in, um, in a first strike.

And therefore rationally, neither of us has an incentive to get into nuclear war because it would just be mutual suicide at that point.

This is not how the U.S. thinks about nuclear strategy.

Right.

Mr. Panda, if American allies begin to doubt that Washington would risk Los Angeles and New York to defend Seoul and Tokyo, how long before extended deterrence loses credibility? And once when American ally decided to build its own bomb, how many others will follow?

What are our biggest worries there, and how might we address them?

You know, Iran, of course, uh, has not yet crossed the key decision point to build a nuclear weapon.

They are the world's closest non-nuclear country to procuring the bomb, and the attacks that took place last year, uh, did not have the effect of completely destroying their program.

Uh, they do appear to have set things back by a little bit, but the Iranians still have many of the key ingredients, uh, to which I'll just point out, you know, they are sitting still on about four hundred kilograms of highly enriched uranium that is not being verified by international inspectors, which, by the way, was being verified before the attacks took place, and they still have the capability and capacity to reconstitute their program.

So this is still a big problem, and as you indicated, there are new talks underway, but we're very much back, uh, in a place where I don't think the United States and Iran are, are closer to making a breakthrough on many of the key issues that have held up talks, particularly under the first and second Trump administration, right? Questions like, will the Iranians have any right to enrich uranium on their own territory? They've really made this a, a sort of a non-negotiable issue in the past because they claim, uh, it is their right, uh, and, and, you know, they're right about that.

Uh, there is no actual prohibition on enrichment.

Uh, it's just that in the case of Iran, knowing what they've done in the past, knowing their potential interest in nuclear weapons, the United States is concerned, uh, about the levels to which they enrich, about the places in which they enrich.

Taking a step back and looking at the prospect of another era of nuclear proliferation, Ankit, tell me, what's the best-case scenario here, and what's the worst?

Mm.

... uh, last month in early May.

But when you add missile defense into this picture, things start looking really strange because that ability to throw punches at each other, nuclear punches, uh, for one guy starts to look very different if the other guy has missile defense systems.

The last thing I'll say on Golden Dome is that what's really different about the missile defense conversation now compared to the last 30 years-... is, it's not just us in the United States that are leading on missile defense, which really was the case in the '90s and the 2000s.

The Russians and the Chinese were, you know, the Russians were recovering from the collapse of the Soviet Union and in a very bad economic and social position in many ways.

China was still developing.

Today, Russia and China actually have some pretty capable missile defense capabilities that we are worried about, right? And I just raise this because I think listeners need to understand that if tomorrow, you know, Xi Jinping gives a speech where he says, "I'm gonna build a," I don't know, "jade dome for China," right?

Why is that? Why isn't there the sort of, you know, associated fear of nuclear war that you may have seen in the 1970s or '80s?