And if you look at it now, vast majority of it is degraded, half of it is abandoned.

Yeah, it's a really interesting point.

So the revival of legacy Soviet Arctic infrastructure is growing every year.

Some of the bases you mentioned are almost beyond repair because of the environmental systems and it takes such a long time to understandably regenerate and even generate force from scratch in the Arctic that a lot of those are just not going to be sustainable you know going forwards but Russia don't really need to do that in great numbers if we look at it sort of more temporary and secondary sort of level of military activity in the Arctic away from those traditional you know bases You know, it has over 40 icebreakers, eight of which are nuclear-powered, and they're all operational.

To put that into context, the EU and NATO Arctic members have around 30, only half of which are operational.

China has a further five.

Britain had, or has still, one icebreaker HMS Protector, which was unceremoniously towed back into Portsmouth last week, barely a few days into its operations in the High North.

What does the future look like? Do we see a return of Arctic warfare, or is it going to be more confined to subterfuge hybrid attacks, economic dominance rather than all-out conflict?

Why is this such a big deal for the leaders in Iraq?

Well, I mean, look, this comes after a six- or seven-month campaign where the Iranian leadership has been absolutely decimated, in particular its military leadership.

In the last 18 months, two years, we've seen their proxies Hezbollah almost completely dismantled and decapitated in Lebanon and Syria.

We've seen Hamas reduced to an absolute military shell of its former self, again another regional proxy.

The Houthis are really only the last remaining group Iranian proxy military force in the region, and they have their complete own agenda, different to the Iranians.

So there's often conflict there between the two.

That leaves the Iranian controlled militias, particularly the Popular Mobilisation Forces, which is, you know, a collection of militia groups and tribal identities aligned to the Iranian leadership more closely than they are to the Iraqi government, and always have been, and likely always will be.

So again, I just find myself struggling to see the logic in an American withdrawal at a time when, you know, some of these groups said we are holding on to our weapons because the Americans are here.

[music] Robert eventually traded the warships for the Clarendon Lab at Oxford University, doing experimental physics.

In particular in rare earth compounds, and of course we were just looking at how the quantum world worked in these structures.

But people were starting to ask a very different question, and that was, okay, so they have all of these unique new properties.

How do we use these properties to build a machine?

Bruce said, "No thanks, not interested." But clearly the suggestion had an impact because later...

Bruce came to me with three hardback notebooks and said, "Bob, I have been working away on an idea and I'd like you to look at this idea.

I've set it out in these notebooks."