More Nukes? | Bob Peters

Correct.

So I think it's obvious to me and obvious to a lot of us that if Iran was in fact trying to develop a nuclear weapon, it is a major problem if they were to have that and to be successful in it.

Uh, it could be another kind of North Korea.

Uh, the amount of countries or nations that would be able to have nuclear weapons, the more not necessarily the merrier in this, in this case.

So then the other question kind of comes almost, I wouldn't necessarily say in a moral sense, but why should we or why should anybody have nuclear weapons?

Look, that's a great question, and, you know, President Trump has said that, that, you know, he wishes there were no nuclear weapons in the world.

They're incredibly destructive.

Um, you know, no one can argue with that sentiment.

Uh, and he's not alone.

President Obama famously tried to get to a world without nuclear weapons in 2009.

Uh, no one followed unfortunately.

Um, we have reduced the weapons stockpile between 80 and 95% since the height of the Cold War.

We have a small fraction of what we had at the Cold War.

And so we have been going down this route of reducing the numbers of nuclear weapons we have in the arsenal.

The problem is, is that how do you uninvent a nuclear weapon? How do you uninvent an idea? And so part of this gets to how do you verify that a country doesn't have nuclear weapons hidden in some cave or some underground bunker? And no one's been able to crack that code.

What we use nuclear weapons for is primarily to deter an attack on the United States homeland by an adversary.

It's also to assure our allies, make sure that they don't get nuclear weapons.

It's meant to achieve objectives if, if conventional munitions don't work.

But ultimately, it's meant to hedge against surprise.

Mm.

And those are the four primary missions of the American arsenal.

And so that's why we have them today, but y- you know, until someone comes up, in my mind, with an even more destructive weapon than a nuclear weapon, they're gonna be with us to stay.