uh Canada US relations during the Biden and the Trump Administration so you'll probably remember January 6 2021 when uh the uh Capitol Hill insurgents invaded the house of well actually the entire Washington almost house of Congress and so on and the the military deployed and the date is called January 6 2021 so the US Congress immediately resumed the election certification on that date and uh although there was this this prot Trump mob and there's President Joe elect Joe Biden he made a speech very stirring very lengthy about domestic terrorists and then later we heard many
assertions by President outgoing president Trump that the election had been stolen within a few hours Twitter uh locked Trump's account uh it has since been reopened uh they said that he was inciting violence and Trump would be banned obviously that did not happen and stunned North Americans then saw firsthand evidence that the US president could be perhaps uh unhinged meaning a little bit uh crazy irrational irresponsible so later he was impeached and then before he left office uh where this is a class in Canada abroad uh this guy who was very supportive of trump back
then and asked whether Trump could be trusted not to incite further Insurrection so that was a radio show everyone Canadians that her thought that the president's failure to condemn the supporters was a dereliction of his duty to to protect the US Constitution still uh president Trump's finger former president Trum Trump's finger remains on the nuclear trigger now and uh while literally thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles are poting at hundreds of Russian cities and vice versa so he's now at the Apex of power in 202 five and he could still um order a a nuclear strike
on Russia so the question is do you think president Trump could order a nuclear strike on Russia we do not know but guy Roberts seemed to think not as Roberts put it unless deterant failed and Russia or China strikes the United States then the US would retaliate because deterrence have failed but guy Roberts has always had a great deal of faith and you you can see that last week in the in the discussion he has a great deal of faith in deterrence working so we might expect uh threats from uh Kim Jong-un and we talked
about that last week if he thought his power would be usurped or lost and we have heard his threats to uh demolish the United States with missiles before but the opposite argument and Guy Robert remember he recommended that you read the day after and a lot of people will say oh you should watch the movie Doctor Strange Love and so on but really the nuclear command and control system claims that it has many many blocks and you'll hear Tariq Ralph uh say many processes and and procedures that would make sure that it was not made
by a single uh person a single de decision so it would somehow prevent a lunatic president nevertheless president Trump has actually undermined deterrence strategy because he presents himself as unreasonable and irrational and deterrence is based on uh rationality now other people argue it's based on irrationality you have to seem in insane Herman Khan made that argument for deterrence to succeed you have to you have to seem irrational um president Trump might have to appear irrational for it to work so what is deterrence I realize that um I haven't given you a definition uh I put
a picture here of of Henry kisson during he didn't actually have a definition either in his books about deterrence but just straight from the Oxford dictionary it's the action of discouraging something through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences and there's some sentences here uh where we use deterrence so guy Roberts believes in the tenants of deterrence he talks about extended deterrence uh last week and then he argues I think that nuclear deterrence I argue it has to be perfect or close to perfect and if it fails cat catastrophe will result whereas he would argue
that um we need more deterrence especially in the cyber warfare uh world that we're going into so moving quickly along you can study that at your own time deterrence cannot survive as a credible strategy if we perceive that its ex executors are irrational and incapable of weighing cost benefit R uh uh rationality uh choices so this was admirably pointed out by an author from Rand a famous Think Tank where he pointed out and there's so many books on deterrence this is just one of them that it's the perceptions that count it's those perceptions not the
actual objective conditions that are important so perceptions are the dominant variable as he put it so I want you to think about that in the context of President Trump because it does seem that often he is illogical and and more narcissistic and more self-focused and so the travesty of of democracy right now is that we're relying upon deterrence as a credible strategy and yet it's based on either rationality or irrationality and it's it's unclear moving on uh so we haven't talked a lot about the new Ban Treaty the prohibition treaty or What's called the tpnw
the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons and our guest speaker this week refers very quickly to the tpnw very strong advocate of the tpnw uh in Geneva and so I asked him to come in I'll explain who he is in in in the next uh two subl lessons slowly but the non-nuclear countries are resoundingly a majority of them at the UN General Assembly are supporting this treaty so they're asking themselves what could happen if to the globe to the Earth if there was a limited nuclear war so they bring up examp not just of
India and Pakistan but of nuclear winter if 100 tactical nuclear weapons were used and that is just a small small percentage of the global number of nuclear weapons that we learned about so the pandemic would be like as I put here romp in the park compared to the number of deaths so you heard guy Roberts talk about that and afterwards after we got off the taping he he actually said to me that he thought a nuclear winter would be good because it would cope with the effects of a nuclear uh sorry nuclear winter would would
help to cool down the Earth because of um climate change where the Earth is getting warmer so we talked about that there's no evidence um either way no one really knows what would happen but it was interesting idea that he didn't put forward on the tape so there're the leaders at NATO headquarters where guy was the head of the nuclear Planning Group and all the Diplomatic staff there for 10 years uh so the NATO allies reject any attempt to delegitimize nuclear deterr they are all strong Advocates of deterrence NATO has paned meaning criticized absolutely refuses
to join the tpnw and will not even send observers so only lately have they started to send NATO allies as uh observers there's Yen stoltenberg he is no longer the UN Secretary General he's the former Chief the former Secretary General he repeatedly warned uh that the tpnw would uh undermine Global disarming efforts because he argues that the npt is strong so Secretary General uh Antonio GES said in October 2021 that any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic humanitarian consequences so that's the vocabulary that we use now gueras uses and the UN uses catastrophe and
they argue that the new treaty that the tpnw is a meaningful commitment toward the elimination the abolition of nuclear weapons which they say is is the un's highest priority the number one priority so gutas calls the treaty a tribute to the survivors of nuclear explosions which who are called the hiusa and the hiusa who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there's hardly any of them left they're in their 80s they would have been around 2 years old or so the survivors and they are they just got the Nobel Peace Prize last year for their
for their um efforts now the fact of the matter is is that the treaty was rejected by the Democrats under Biden and also um under like vice president Harris also didn't argue for it during the um election so it's now time with the onset of the new bound treaty to reject Reliance on the US president we're seeing that even today in bulletin Atomic scientists articles that we need to make sure that it's not just the decision of one person like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or president Trump because it could lead to the end of
the world as we know it that was the UN General Assembly and I'll show you more pictures of that in weeks to come but here's a picture of the Korean Peninsula and you can see that um I asked guy Roberts whether there would be an attack on pongyang and he argued that uh it North Korea would be obliterated the peninsula here at the top um if they were to use nuclear weapons um or if they were to try in a rogue attack to like Pearl Harbor to attack the United States so the that's an important
fact for us to and that brings me into the US ballistic missile defense project so guy was very reluctant to go there I couldn't push him to go into that direction he wasn't going to move um and so even when we were talking about Kim Jong-un and so on and the threat from Kim Jong-un he wanted to se into South Korea being a threat which took me completely by surprise uh to argue that South Korea is a threat um and and he usually argues that China is a threat so he didn't even argue that so
you can see my face as we're going through it I'm going well what about the dprk and you know their army the biggest conventional army in the world approximately a million men um very undernourished but approximately 10,000 are fighting with Russia along Ukraine but he didn't go there nor did he go into chemical weapons even later although Sudan um is using chemical weapons now in fact he explained to me that the a new POS new under the president Trump Administration is that there will be a separate secretary of defense for biological um assistant secretary of
defense for biological and chemical weapons and nuclear will stand on its own because it's such a big portfolio Okay I'm getting into too much detail but remember I get excited about these things I'm passionate about I'm very interested and I hope that my interest will make you more passionate so we talked a little bit um in in guy Robert's interview about the the possibility of uh North Korea using it nuclear button and I always do like to draw attention to the January speech by Kim Jong-un he he tends every year to make this speech and
then argue that um they can strike the United States where would they strike around Seattle they they they might be getting as close as Seattle now so we don't know whether president Trump will renew their friendship but maybe that's something that they can push for okay what were the Tweets in reply to those threats that's interesting now because we look at that in mindsight and go well interesting that uh president Trump said that he had a bigger uh and larger and more powerful nuclear button um and that and his button Works meaning that the modernization
worked I have to move quickly so there that's some a picture of the um that incident and then more threats from Donald Trump so here he is making threats by by Twitter by by tweeting threats like this and that makes nuclear weapons more usable and that's what a guy talked about at length and when we stopped the taping he went on and on about usable nuclear weapons how that enhances deterrence and he talked about the the DAV Crockett and the supersonic cruise missiles and how all these nuclear weapons are more usable and that means deterrence
is more credible do you get it so the DAV Crockett is an old type of nuclear weapons then I start talking about nuclear weapons that Canada had the bow marks uh we had the lacrosse and the Hest John and so on you don't need to know about that right now but moving on so at all times the US president and the Russian president are accompanied at all times by one single soldier who carries the briefcase with the codes the nuclear codes the soldier never leaves the president's side we don't know about the Russian side so
that is kind of risky but that leads to the question going forward many many questions about whether Canada should join with the United States in building the ballistic missile defense project and there has been visits by different people um to Canada arguing that we have an obligation to be part of that North American what called Fortress America so should we continue to participate in NORAD we are in NORAD we've we've committed to it again we are in northcom and we are rebuilding the north warning system so those are the figurative walls of Fortress America and
then there's the roof so we have not built that yet it's not possible yet to build that and the problem is the the amount so we're going to engage in excessive militarization uh president Trump is talking about the NATO allies spending 5% of their GDP Canada doesn't even reach 2% so 5% would be a significant hike in defense spending for all the NATO allies and that tab which might be more than 2% uh could rapidly escalate because of the cost of building um a fortress America so if Canada did decide under the next um prime
minister which might be Pierre pev or it might be Christia Freeland or Mark Carney we don't know U might Canadian firms actually benefit from working on that sort of research it's an interesting question most of those firms are in Ottawa so what do high level officials say we at need answers and these are difficult questions I've invited quite a few people to my class classes that are from the United States I had um a visitor Dr John man Mano when he was uh NATO's assistant Secretary General in charge of all of NATO's operations visiting Detroit
and then visiting my class on the way there uh and he argued in the class in front of the in-person students that um Canada should definitely definitely participate in in the US space force and in the ballistic missile defense which should be spelled with an S there from the American perspective but from our perspective with a C problematically in future years the US missile defense system could establish uh what's called a preemptive or um first strike from space capability and that would lead to the Chinese and the uh Russians feeling insecure um and feeling like
our finger is on the nuclear Tri trigger and that will make them more insecure so Russia has been very vocal about being opposed to a ballistic missile defense system and the question is whether those interceptors would be up in Alaska or even in Canada's Arctic I'm moving fairly quickly but we have to remember that we have a lot to cover um and then we'll be ending on nuclear proliferation but I was very pleased that um guy Roberts came in my lectures twice you heard the second one if you were in my other classes you heard
the first one and now you could hear he is more focused on South Korea as a threat Saudi Arabia proliferation all the things that I was worried about before now he's worried about and he's not so much worried about China what does Tariq think I'm going to talk to you about who he is in a minute so guy Roberts strongly believed as the at the head of when he was in in charge of the project uh that the United States had to modernize I was interested because he did talk about the modernization but he wasn't
so worried about Russia modernizing and uh the global partnership program he was more worried about the United States and that brought me to bring in this quote from uh president Trump before uh topof the line best in the world so to me they always want to make a better product um and that's motivating it but joining in bmd ballistic missile defense could make Canada more insecure this is a cartoon there is no such thing that is operable right now but what would happen is they would somehow intercept incoming ballistic missiles which no one can intercept
right now and then they would these errant missiles would explode and the Fallout would mainly fall over Canada because they would be coming over the uh over the North Pole over the Arctic the Russians or the Iranians uh we don't know so Quebec Quebec has a huge amount of of land in the north and Quebec is solidly against ballistic missile defense that's very very interesting because they just do not want to participate in this at all I put a picture of Artis PP there and Pierre Jasmine and other artists who are um solidly against ballistic
missile defense and Steve Staples who spoke to my class A couple years ago I'm not using that lecture anymore so to end do you think that the Earth's orbit should remain a demilitarized zone I put the options here and the right answer is no right answer because this opinion question you cannot you can't ask these sorts of questions in multiple choice because it's your opinion it's your opinion so there's no right answer that's the right answer I wouldn't put that SRA of question in in it but just so you know okay I I think we're
ending there and now I want to go on to the next part okay
