welcome everyone to lesson two nuclear nightmares which are part of every person dreams uh which is that there would be a nuclear war I just read a book called rusan uh which described in painful detail it's a new new new book um death in New York City the Dead Hand the day after books like that so that's what we're going to start talking about but let me just mention that there are a few reminders first of all please don't write me asking me if we use Proctor track it's not used it does tell me a
lot that um if you're worried about that and you have anxiety about that it reinforces the fact that I can't use Proctor track I have to offer an alternative which would mean half the class would need an alternative so I don't use it um but that means that they're going to be looking there is a new committee that I'm on looking at new ways to detect cheating and Albright space you probably don't know this can detect how long you've been on each lesson how long you've opened each lesson that's a hint there uh the class
is full there's 1500 students in it and you cannot skip the queue I know I'm getting so many dozens of painful emails explaining why you absolutely need to take the course and you I cannot allow you in I'm not don't even control the wait list I'm also receiving uh myriads of letters asking me to do reference ref letters I cannot do them for you it would do you a disservice students you need to have a professor who has interacted with you seen you present uh presentations online or in person and also in person and you
also need someone who will go through all of your transcripts and write you an excellent reference letter I cannot write a reference letter for you not even for law school law school they ask you 50 questions about your integrity and on and on it goes you have to know so much about the students a new ta will start soon but every term I don't know until until quite a while and that means that most of the emails um they don't start processing them until the 15th which is tomorrow where are the exams and quiz dates
they're on your course calendar it's not in the course outline because that's said in stone so if I have to change the dates then I can't put it in the course outline so the all of the dates are on your course calendar which is a tool in Albright space please don't write to me on Monday morning asking me when the um lectures are going to be available I am doing my darness to do it but owl bright space takes hours it literally I am processing right now for probably 3 or 4 hours the lectures that
I'm going to be recording today albr space is incredibly slow it's like driving a Honda Civic instead of a Royals Royce I really regret that we went to it it's extremely timec consuming and very frustrating plus I'm recording new um guests and obviously they have their own schedules so please be patient we're all doing our best I am trying okay and the other thing is you're not going to see me in the corner anymore going and shaking my head and being frustrated it takes up too much space you'll see on this lecture it takes up
too much space so on this lecture you see me but you won't in future here's the XCOM the executive committee of the Cuban Missile during of President Kennedy meeting with President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and why is that important because a lot of people think that we are still in we're in a worse situation than we were during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis uh we have to learn how to extricate ourselves from the situation that we're in I'm trying to figure out why my highlighter is not working oh well there we are so
here's uh president zalinski and as you can see he's been wearing a t-shirt not a suit to show that he is in in Army he's in military uh role and he is doing his best he's uh been around for nearly 3 years uh in terms of in a war mode uh and there's President Putin who has and is still trying to topple Ukraine including the capital keev so war is falling war is a waste of resources and Canon fod already we we don't know for sure but both sides have lost up to 500,000 men each
we don't know the exact figures cuz Ukraine is not releasing it neither are Russians so what's their goal they say their goal is to liberate the donbass region but it looked like they wanted to take over a sovereign country by attacking first K keev and then Putin put what he called a referenda in these different areas and of course they had 99% in favor of joining Russia but the reality is that no matter who WS wins their their whole over these War torn regions will be just tenuous for decades to come because of the hundreds
of thousands of deaths so here's a picture and you are expected to know the pictures um and you are expected to know things that I say so here's the four regions that right now the donbass region and this is the Crimean Peninsula right here and there's ke the capital of Ukraine and in future uh weeks we'll go through the surrounding countries including mova which is a neutral State okay so let's just talk a little bit more about the Crimean Peninsula pictured here and also it see how it's in this little box here the Crimean Peninsula
so the Crimean Peninsula was annexed in 2014 by the Russians NATO did not react very strongly um but now this is is under constant threat indeed Russian submarines may not be able to safely Harbor there that's where the Russians used to keep their Naval force and they may have to be deployed to the Arctic and to the Baltic Sea we're going to talk to Arctic explorers who saw underground underwater nuclear uh submarines I'm going to interview I interviewed them on Sunday exciting but that's not for a few more weeks anyway it's not known for for
certain yet whether Russian submarine sabotage the north stream which carries um energy pipelines but right now as of today NATO is putting together a force that's a naval force that will protect the underwater um pipelines NATO is also conducting exercises here to to uh protect ships as each day passes uh the nuclear threats that uh President Putin has made veiled in in essentially self-pity if you listen to them and grandiosity have weakened Russia's deterrence posture we will talk at length about deterrence and what that means but right now it seems like the threat of an
above ground demonstration shot of a tactical nuclear weapon a smaller nuclear weapon in Russia's Far East seems less credible the likelihood of nuclear use seems less than it was back in February 2022 nearly 3 years ago but but unlikely events happen all the time nuclear threats are always a bluff until the day they are not so President Putin's aggressive threats lower the threshold for nuclear use he seems to be more willing to use nuclear weapons and that increases the risk of of finger on the trigger the risk of nuclear conflict the risk of global catastrophe
and a nuclear winter so some people will refer to a ladder of escalation that we we uh would escalate from tactical to strategic nuclear use and others will just say um escalation winter is always coming and we are right now um looking at uh President Putin has put a hold on uh Russian exports uh to Easter to the former Eastern European countries like Poland and he is also uh talking about winning the war using more conventional forces deploying more soldiers more North Korean soldiers and an increased mobilization effort um lost my pointer again anyway the
ukrainians have received more sophisticated weapons including fighter air Jets and they are making their own drones they're manufacturing their own drones the horror that we are seeing on television of mass Graves and torture dead bodies the that the Russians are are undertaking removes the Western relance to ratch it up and to help Ukraine although Ukraine is not a NATO Ally so we'll talk about that in future weeks will uh the Europeans Canadians and Americans continue to fill the Ukrainian War chest once president Trump president-elect trump becomes president so outgoing uh uh president uh Joe Biden
picture here um has been talking about uh making it clear at the UN General Assembly very clear that the United States will use all available means to protect Russia and it will cooperate uh so here you can see the problem with my picture and this is why I get annoyed I can't even read my own writing anyway there's his his threat or his not his threat but his challenge uh it's a war of attrition and the Russian military Doctrine known as escalating to deescalate is a worry for everyone here we have President Biden's US Secretary
of State Anthony blinkin and he said in an interview that they have warned Russia behind the scenes they've issued these threats they that they know the consequences of nuclear weapons which would be horrific it's a threat he says that any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic effects they're making it very clear that the use of even smaller tactical nuclear weapons would en uh ensue with a horrible catastrophe look there's my picture again destroying the US uh and is it on the exam well no you don't have to know this whole organization chart I'm just
putting here the secretary of state so that's the top official and then there in the in the United States Department of State which is different from the US Department of Defense so here you can see the new possibly new secretary of state will be Senator Marco Rubio who is a republican from Florida who ran against President Trump and he slated to become the new secretary of state we will be talking today to guy Roberts who is the former under President Trump during the first Administration the former assistant Secretary of Defense you do not need to
know this organization chart he's very worried about nuclear war as well I put a book there the day after which he recommends that you read it is not a required reading it's just a recommended reading so we're going to talk to Guy Roberts but before we do that we need to have a bit of vocabulary and that's what I need to to help you with first he refers to President Putin's speech everyone refers to this speech in 2022 where he first ordered mobilization and also he threatened that Russia would use which was interpreted as nuclear
weapons use all the means at our disposal it's an interesting speech and I would like you to take a a look at it if you can can but I'm not saying that you need to to read it if if the text is not on the PowerPoint then you do not need to read it but it's helpful for you to read it so take a look because you'll see there's a lot of references to neo-nazis and to the Nazis in Ukraine it's almost like he's gone back to World War II he he talks about the motherland
he he talks about Western pseudo values and it looks like he's thinking about the siege of Leningrad way back back uh way back where he in in what's now called Peter uh Leningrad but now called St Petersburg anyway he was born in Leningrad and a million people died mainly of starvation so this is a man who is paranoid he and very violent and is willing to use the levers of power he is not subject to votes or to democracy he's not subject to an election and he's not even beholden to any in his inner cabal
so we're dealing with a a new type of leader and you'll hear guy Roberts talk about that history you'll hear me talk about is replete with evidence that knives can come out from within inner circles and stab the strongest in the back we learned about that in Game Theory we learned about that from Thomas Hobbs he warned some are stronger than others but the weakest through cunning can still kill the strongest the account in the King James Bible the the St James uh King James Bible the older version of The Last Supper highlights judas's betrayal
one of the Disciples of Jesus so are there other betrayals in history is this common well yes Donald Trump was betrayed by his closest AIDS Steven ban Bannon who's written a lot on it and testified and so on and even his own daughter ianka testified that she did not believe her father's claims that the 2020 election was stolen yet today we're hearing the news that uh Donald Trump would have been indicted for that if he had not won so it's a very complicated world that we in there are Legions of legendary stories about betrayal lots
of betrayal Christa Freeland and so on You could argue betrayed prime minister Trudeau so I want you to learn this word sycophants these are people who can become secret marginalized enemies or even in the inner cabal cabal a sycophant is a person who acts obsequious to towards someone important in order to gain an advantage for themsel because that important person is high ranking so you can be surrounded by sycophants who will not tell you the truth you have to be careful about that if you become very powerful okay only and here guy Roberts and I
differ because the uh I I think that only vengeful irrational people would support a decision decision to use nuclear weapons however you'll hear a guy Roberts talk about the nuclear taboo and how it's weakening it's weakening he'll say I I write here that it has become stronger because so much more is known about the effects of nuclear winter about the use of even even 0.3% of the world's Arsenal 50 tactical nuclear weapons what would happen so we'll talk about that in my other lectures but uh just to be brief Global famine would a a result
and that would because of the collaps of the entire world's economy because of the destruction of 45 to 70% of the ozone later in our conversation guy Roberts kind of joked about how climate change could be solved by tactical Nuclear uh use we we continued to speak for about 30 minutes I have to remember what he said off the tape and what he said on the tape but anyway he did mention um he doesn't know a lot about nuclear winter but these are facts that should have been explained to Vladimir Putin and and so on
so that may be why we don't know why um China's leader president XI Shen Pang pictured here and India's Prime Minister naranda Modi are preaching caution to to uh President Putin directly they're not mincing their words it's it's being known that they're saying you know be very careful step back okay so the nuclear taboo and the fear that Putin's Legacy would be of human history's most deranged and Despicable man using nuclear weapons could prent resistance in Russia but it is forbidden to try to protest the government there you cannot March there seems to be opposition
in the cities and the remote villages to mobilizing more men they're losing more men in The Villages and in in Siberia and in the in the far flung regions uh and they're becoming Clon fathers so mothers and others are saying well maybe this is this is not correct but also they're worried about Nazism so the leadership wants to win a conventional ground war with Conventional Weapons like that like has been fought in World War II and in Europe and in Vietnam and so on but there's also the Spectre the fear of a demonstration shot like
the United States hurled on Nagasaki in order to show the world that its military power um is is strong as well so it is possible that right-wingers supportive of Putin may see nuclear war as necessary and perhaps inevitable utter retaliation will ensue and everyone is very clear about that including guy Roberts that within the the Inner Circle uh knives might be sharpened and so on as they worry about a nuclear war as the old adage goes He Who lives by the sword dies by the sword it's very true and President Kennedy himself spoke at the
UN General Assembly back in 1961 before the Cuban Missile Crisis talking about how everyone lives under the Sword of Damocles well there's way more nuclear weapons now so all of us are hanging by the slenderest of threads our life lives so and he Kennedy said the weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us H moving quickly the nuclear Genie what that means is the knowledge how to build nuclear weapons is on the internet you can you can find it it's not easy but it is possible to to obtain uh plutonium and and H
uranium uh enough the size of a grapefruit in order to build your own nuclear W bombs so it's going to take generations to abolish nuclear weapons it's not going to happen within our lifetime but what we're hoping for is the norm of nonuse the norm of nonuse that a country will not use nuclear weapons as us did during uh World War II and maybe that will restrain leaders just as it did during the xcom's decision making process in the United States more than 60 years ago so the United States XCOM decided not to use nuclear
weapons okay the nuclear Genie is out of the bottle and by that we often referred to um aqan Dr Khan he's he has died now but he um able was able to manufacture nuclear weapons for Pakistan and the fears that he taught North Korea and other countries how to make nuclear weapons uh because he was extolled in Pakistan and he was uh admired for doing that so the argument that you'll hear guy Roberts make is that perhaps Iran will show that it has nuclear weapons and that will lead Saudi Arabia to have nuclear weapons he
refers very quickly to this but I'm just explaining to you more that it might become an arms race and proliferation might happen so he refers even to South Korea might develop its own nuclear Arsenal leading Japan to counter as well Japan is the closest among between North between South and Korea and Japan could more quickly uh test its own nuclear weapons so the arms race would um proliferate okay so the problem is um I think that it's reprehensible that when countries have nuclear arsenals they prepare and they plan to use them so it's not just
a deterrent anymore it's it's it's considered to be usable nuclear weapons are usable they're smaller they're more precise they're more targetable after the recording ended uh guy Roberts and I talked for long long time about the dve Crockett uh from the 1950s the lacrosse the Honest John weapons and so on and what he argued is that U making nuclear weapons smaller and more usable makes some nuclear uh deterrents more credible you see how he's making that argument so it's it's more credible to develop usable nuclear weapons um so I'm writing here sure arguably it will
not be until all the nine countries with declared nuclear weapons participate in the United Nations new new treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons the tpnw I'll talk at length about that in future lectures so I think we need to get back on a diplomatic track and we need to talk about nuclear risk reduction nuclear risk reduction toward a safer World okay I think that's it for this lecture and we'll move on to the next one quickly if you have the patience I'm not the patients you might want to listen to this another time
