So how do you respond to that? Not only Alexander's contention that the Grand Bargain is broken, but that the blame for that lies pretty squarely on the door of the five nuclear weapon states.

I think that I would not use the word broken quite as readily as Alex did, although we don't fundamentally disagree on the problem.

The fact is that none of the five recognized nuclear weapon states are meeting the central commitment of Article 6 of the treaty, to engage in good faith negotiations towards disarmament.

On that, I think there is no question.

Each of the five has a different excuse, a different finger to point at another to explain why it's not their fault that there are no negotiations at this point.

But none of the five are making a serious effort at this moment.

The failure to reach a consensus at the last review conference is not in itself a cause or a contribution to this failure by the nuclear weapon states.

So I guess the million dollar question is, how can it be fixed? And can the grand bargain be fixed? And I might come to you, Tom, for your reflections first.

When it came to US foreign policy, he was viewed as an all-rounder with a keen eye for detail.

But then from 2011 to 2017, I was the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Non-Proliferation.

In short, the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation has a job that we described as keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most dangerous leaders.

[rocket roaring] And in that job, one of my important tasks was to constantly raise with the Chinese government our concern about the illegal exports of high-tech material that Mr. Lee was organizing from China to Iran.

When Countryman took up his post, Carl Lee had already been doing business with Iran for a decade.

The problem was that he had become, in essence, the most valuable member of the Iranian ballistic missile team.

So you can't say that his arrest would have ended the Iranian ballistic missile program, but we're convinced that it would've slowed it down significantly.

[rocket roaring] I spoke about him in every conversation that I had with Chinese counterparts.

For listeners who may not be familiar with that office, how would you describe its real influence inside the State Department? And what did that role teach you about the gap between how arms control is discussed publicly and how it is actually negotiated inside the government?

Thank you very much, Dori, for the kind introduction and for having me with you here today.

I've had the honor to speak to UC Riverside students in Washington a couple of times, and I've always found that they have fantastic questions and deep interests, so my respect to the School of Public Policy.

You gave a very short summary of my 36 years as a foreign service officer with the Department of State.

And so the first point I would make about the position I held for the last five and a half years of my tenure at the State Department is that it built upon all the other things I had done as a diplomat.

That's what made the foreign service career ideal for me.

that I changed topics and assignments many times during my career, but always building upon previous experience, being given ever greater responsibility.

is dealing with adversaries or strategic competitors, how do officials balance ideal goals such as preventing proliferation entirely with a more realistic goal of reducing the risk through like imperfect but enforceable agreements?

...having a very dictatorial government that suppresses its people in Iran.

Sure.

Well, there's a lot of points there I could comment on.

I'll skip over commenting on the expertise of Pete Hegseth.

The, um, uh...

From the Iranian point of view, one of the things the president has said is that this is an opportunity for the Iranian people to rise up and rid themselves of this regime.

Now, this ignores the fact that the Iranian people are not armed, that there are more than a million security people loyal to the regime who just proved their ability to contain protest on the streets of Iran.

... uh, do, do our actions in, in, in, in Iran have on, uh, the Russia-Ukraine war and, and China-Taiwan?

What was the threat that nuclear weapons posed in the 1980s and beyond?

Well, the same threat that they pose today, that is an all-out thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia would not only end civilization, it could potentially end the existence of humans as a species.

What happened between the 1960s and today is that the Cuban Missile Crisis caused both Kennedy and Khrushchev to begin a s- 60-year-long process of trying to reduce that risk.

No matter what else Washington and Moscow were arguing about, we could reduce the risk of nuclear weapons use, and for more than 50 years, they succeeded.

As you noted, we reduced the number of weapons in the world from, uh, 70, more than 70,000, down to about 12,000 today, and that's success of diplomatic negotiations.

But today, the risk that these weapons could be used for the first time since 1945 is, in my opinion and that of many other people in the field, the highest risk it's been since 1962 for a number of reasons, and that's why we watch with alarm as this treaty expires.

We'll do a better agreement."

Yeah.