The Tucker Carlson Show - Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity

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Oct. 17, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show

01:49:47

Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity

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ivana hughes

01:31:50

tucker carlson

16:37

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Speaker	Time	Text
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Professor, for doing this.
		Let me start with the most simple of all questions.
		How are nuclear weapons different from conventional weapons?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Nuclear weapons are different from conventional weapons in many ways.
		One of the things that I like to say is that they really defy the kind of concept of both space and time.
		And let me explain what I mean by that.
		If you have a conventional weapon and you exploded over a city or wherever, that explosion is going to have an impact in that local place, and it's going to have that impact in time.
		And then you could come back and clean up the area and rebuild and so on.
		Nuclear weapons are not like that.
		A nuclear explosion in one place in one location, uh, and in one split moment of time can have both global effects, um, and it can have impacts over actually even thousands of years through uh the effects of radiation and the kind of radioactive isotopes that get deposited in the environment.
unidentified		Thank you.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		But there are there are sort of a number of ways in which even a single nuclear um weapon explosion can be incredibly dangerous and devastating.
		And then there's there are a number of impacts in which a nuclear war, in which many nuclear weapons are used, uh, can be obviously quite clearly much more devastating.
		So the the thing that people know about nuclear weapons is that one nuclear weapon can be much more powerful than any kind of chemical explosion.
		So, for example, the the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
		80 years ago, almost exactly, um, had uh what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT.
		Now, um, these bombs were made out of uranium and plutonium, uranium for the Hiroshima bomb and and plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.
		But when we describe their energy yield, we describe it in terms of the equivalent um amount of chemical explosive that you would need.
		So that's where the 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNTs, how much you would have needed of chemical explosives to produce the energy of equivalent to that explosion.
		And um the that in and of itself is huge.
		And just to give you one kind of point of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing, which I'm sure you remember, it was actually um the first year that I was living in the United States.
		It was in April of 1995.
		Um, and it was a devastating event.
		Um, it was um the equivalent of two and a half tons of TNT.
		Uh so Timothy McVay had filled the rider truck with uh chemical explosives, um, lit it up outside of a federal building, killed um 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare center, and there was damage in a um radius of up to I think 16 blocks, something of that order.
		So absolutely an incredible um and and devastating event uh uh at the same time, that explosion was 6,000 times uh less energetic than the bombing of Hiroshima.
		So 15,000 tons of of TNT versus two and a half tons of TNT.
		So that just begins to give you a scale um for just how powerful a single nuclear weapon can be.
		And then on top of it is that uh we now have weapons that are far more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
		In fact, in 1945, the US had three nuclear weapons.
		One was uh used as a quote-unquote test, um, the Trinity test in the desert of of New Mexico, and then two were used on on attacks on on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
		Today, we actually have 12 on the order of 12 and a half thousand nuclear warheads, many of which are far more powerful.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		How much more powerful?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		So we know that both um US and Russia have uh nuclear bombs currently that are on the order of one megaton.
		Uh that's um about um that's about um 70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
		Uh at the height of the cold war when we were first testing uh nuclear weapons and actually first testing hydrogen bombs, which are different from the atomic bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I can explain that as well.
		We were even testing uh the largest test that the U.S. had ever conducted took place in the Marshall Islands.
		It's called the Bravo Test, Castle Bravo test, and that was a thousand Hiroshima bomb equivalents.
		And yet, the Soviets actually tested um uh something even more powerful.
		They they did so um up in the uh North Sea uh region called Novayazemya.
		Uh, and they tested some accounts say 50 megatons.
		So that's um more than 3,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.
		I've even seen uh accounts to say 58 megatons.
		So that would be uh basically, you know, 4,000 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.
		Uh the Castle Bravo test, which took place on March 1 of 1954.
		Um, that test, that mushroom cloud.
		So we all sort of you know have this vision of a nuclear explosion that produces the mushroom cloud.
		That mushroom cloud was 25 miles or 40 kilometers high and at the widest, about 60 miles wide.
		So I think 60 miles miles wide, the mushroom clouds.
		It's a it's it's quite simply something that's unimaginable.
		Um, and that test actually had truly devastating consequences for people living in the Marshall Islands, about a hundred miles from where the test was conducted.
		A population was living um in a place called Rangala Patol.
		Um, and those people were very, very sickened uh and and um uh impacted by the test.
		They it's a long story.
		They stayed there for three days, they were moved away.
		Um, but to kind of cut to the present day, and this is actually from some of the research that I've um done with um colleagues and students at Columbia University.
		Uh, the uh currently there's still parts of the Marshall Islands where radiological contamination is very high.
		And that testing ended in 1958.
		Uh so it's now nearly seven years later, and there's still contamination that quite simply is not safe.
		Um, the way I like to put it is it's not safe for a multi-generational community to live um in and to live there full time.
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		So what would happen if a nuclear weapon, modern nuclear weapon detonated over Times Square?
unidentified		Yes.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Over Times Square, a my one megaton bomb is going to have.
		So there are two, there's something that makes the um the simple the numbers a little more complicated.
		You can have two different kinds of explosions.
		One can be an airburst and one can be a surface explosion.
		What you actually do is you cause a lot more damage, a lot more the shock wave is sort of stronger, and um the destruction of the city is much more um effective.
		A surface burst produces more radiation and kind of more of those long-term effects.
		So between the two, um, let's just say that the basically the radius of this fireball is about two uh about a mile.
		Um, and so you now have, depending on where it explodes, you have a radius um that, and the fireball is quite literally the temperature of the sun.
		Uh, and so you have a fireball where everything is evaporated, absolutely evaporated.
		And then again, depending on if it's an airburst or uh or a surface explosion, you kind of have these different concentric circles of heavy blast damage where just everything is absolutely destroyed.
		The shock wave is such that it just everything collapses, buildings collapse, everything collapses.
		Then you might have a kind of uh lethal radiation dose, um, concentric circles.
		Then you might have moderate damage where you still have buildings collapsing, um, injuries are widespread, and so on.
		And and and you kind of keep going, um, but you start out with quite literally evaporating everything in this fireball, and and you kind of keep going um out of that.
		And in New York City, um for an um for an airburst, you're looking at something like on the order of one and a half million um uh people dying, and um about two million people being very severely injured.
		There's also a concentric circle where the temperature is so high that everybody gets third degree burns.
		Um, and this is something that happened, of course, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
		It's um it's where it just, you know, people's skin quite literally melts.
		Um, there are kind of descriptions from survivors of the bombing of seeing people with their you know, skin looking like it was it was clothing just sort of hanging um over them.
		Um this is quite simply uh a site of total and absolute horror and devastation.
		Um, and it would destroy, it would destroy a U.S. city.
		The thing that we never render it uninhabitable, render and and render it potentially uninhabitable, you know, for decades, hundreds of years, potentially even thousands of years.
		Again, it all depends on how you do it, how much um, you know, how uh large the weapon is, how it's detonated.
		Um, but the the really scary thing that we do know, uh, and this comes from the kinds of war games that take place in Washington all the time is that because we now live in a world with 12 and a half thousand nuclear uh warheads, uh it doesn't just end with one nuclear warhead being used on one city.
		Um we not only have all of those warheads, we also have um things like intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can actually carry multiple warheads at once, deliver them all to the same target.
		So you might, if you wanted to attack New York City, you might explode one in Times Square, but you might explode one, you know, on the upper west side and another in Brooklyn and another, you know, so you could have a uh a kind of a constellation of explosions um and uh the war games in Washington suggest that a hundred percent of the time one nuclear weapons explosion
		regardless of how it starts an accident, a miscalculation, a deliberate uh use um it all ends in a full-blown nuclear war.
		And part of the reason why it all ends in a full-blown nuclear war is that the kind of kinds of structures we've built, the kinds of policies that we have on this are such that you just you you pretty much follow the protocol and the protocol is that that you attack if you uh the United States has something called launch on warning uh and that means that if we think we're being attacked even though we haven't absorbed an attack even though
		We haven't actually seen that a warhead has exploded in one of our cities.
		We launch an attack.
		And these decisions are made in a matter of minutes.
		This is described really kind of with amazing clarity in the book by Annie Jacobson, Nuclear War Scenario, where she describes exactly minute by minute how nuclear...
		uh war starts um and can start and then what happens for the next 72 minutes and then sort of these long-term consequences of nuclear war and I can talk about some of them.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So 72 minutes, the entire war, that's the duration of the war.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		That's the duration of a war between the United States and Russia.
		In Annie's book, the scenario is that basically the U.S. gets attacked by a kind of lone warhead coming from North Korea attacking Washington, D.C. That's an intercontinental ballistic missile, which we detect within seconds of the launch.
		And then there's a second, in her scenario, there's a second warhead being exploded, launched from a submarine in the Pacific and exploding in Diablo Canyon, which is a nuclear power plant in Southern California.
		And in that, you know, in that scenario, the U.S. then responds to the nose that's being attacked by North Korea.
		Korea um in a matter of minutes makes a decision to attack North Korea I think the response is something like 82 uh nuclear warheads but the route that the warheads take from our ICBM silos in the in the Midwest in the Dakotas and so on, The route goes over Russia.
		And in Annie's book, the scenario is such that the U.S. can't communicate fast enough with the Russian leadership.
		And Russians now think they're under attack because they're detecting these warheads coming their way.
		And so they launch an attack, a thousand nuclear warheads, and then the U.S. responds in Russia.
		turn um and attacks the the United States and these kinds of um in sort of estimates of what would happen um the number of casualties people who would die and so on um in um a US Russia full blown nuclear war.
		The current estimate, and this is based on slightly more than a thousand uh warheads from each direction, um, and it's equivalent to about one-third of the current arsenals.
		The number of casualties from the moment of the explosions is on the order of 360 million people.
		Um, and that's nothing but the deaths from, you know, you you were either incinerated or you know, you were your body was um broken into uh who knows how many pieces by the shock wave.
		Uh, that's not even including deaths from radiation, which would occur over um some period of time, of course, very intensely in the in the immediate aftermath, but then also over time.
		And then there is the business of what such a nuclear war would actually do to the environment of the planet.
		And there it's not just about local effects.
		Now we get into the global effect.
		So back to my initial assertion, the nuclear weapons sort of defy rules of time and space.
		The time aspect is these radiation impacts that can um uh really the the radiation contamination that can last for decades, hundreds, even thousands of years for certain radioactive isotopes.
		The spatial aspect is that of course there is a local um impact of the nuclear explosion, but in the case of a nuclear war, the impact becomes global.
		And there are at least two different ways in which this happens.
		One way is called nuclear winter, and I can explain what that is, and the other is ozone layer destruction.
		And these are actually things that we've known about both of them for a long time, although I will say that more recently we've had much better simulations, um, just much more computer power, much more sort of ability to really figure out what that would look like.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So let's start in order.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		What's nuclear winter?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		So nuclear winter is the idea that following a nuclear war, there would be such widespread fires everywhere um that would um burn things like everything that's in the city and produce so much soot that would go up into the atmosphere and block incoming sunlight.
		Uh, and that as a consequence of this, for a period of about again, depends on how many warheads, what energy yields, and so on, but for a period of up to about 10 years, temperatures would drop so significantly.
		Um, some estimates for the war that I keep um citing of one-third of US and Russian arsenals are used up.
		Um, the um estimate is 10 to 15 degrees Celsius.
		That's about 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
		This is a completely different planet.
		And those temperature uh drops occur very, very quickly.
		Uh, and so the temperature drop, what it does is it actually um makes it impossible for for food to grow, in particular in you know, in the northern hemisphere in kind of our bread um breadbasket latitudes, um, and uh it food just begins to to stop stops growing.
		Um, agriculture begins to fail, and people begin to starve.
		And the estimates there, there's a paper that was published in Nature Food by Alan Roebock and Lily Gia Um and their colleagues at Rutgers University.
		Um, according to that paper, this particular scenario where I said 360 million people would die from the attacks, um, they estimate over five billion people would die of starvation.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Billion?
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ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Over 5 billion within two years of a nuclear war from starvation all around the planet.
		And here's a kicker, actually.
		The number is actually really more than 6 billion because when they wrote the paper, they based all of their calculations, simulations, modeling on a worldwide population of 7 billion.
		We now have more than 8 billion people on the planet.
		So that just quite simply means that you're going to have an extra 1 billion people dying of starvation.
		So it's really, I mean, this is quite simply this is not, this is the end of human civilization.
		This is the end of humanity as we know it.
		although it's quite possible.
		I don't think it means all of life on the planet would be extinguished, although even that's possible.
		But this is quite simply not the planet we'll live on today.
		And then on top of it, there's the radiation effects.
		And I can talk more about radiation.
		And then there's this business of ozone layer destruction.
		And that's somebody at Columbia whom I actually knew quite well.
		He passed away recently in his 90s.
		His name was Miles Ruderman.
		He was one of the uh first people who they wrote about in the 1970s about um nitric oxide production is a consequence of nuclear war and the impact that this would have on ozone layer on the ozone layer.
		And those um that kind of research has been done also more recently with the new models, simulations and so on.
		Those estimates uh suggest that the war scenario I keep mentioning between US and Russia uh would uh result in 70% ozone layered destruction.
		This is again, this is not a place where you go out to sunbathe.
		Um this is a place in which uh UV radiation is incredibly dangerous, not just to people, uh, but it would also be um it would also impact agricultural production because it would impact plants.
		Uh so again, this would be another hit on sort of food supplies.
		Um, but you know, uh this is all of this is just so horrific.
		This idea that we would ever um conduct something like nuclear war.
		I mean, Reagan and Gorbachev said in 1986, nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
		Um Khrushchev said in the 1960s that the survivors would envy the dead, and yet here we are, you know, um, 80 years into the nuclear age, still in I would say in many ways, Playing nuclear roulette with uh not ever more recklessly, especially in the last three years.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Let me ask you uh a couple of questions just to tie up what you just said.
		Um you said in the simulation, the theoretical account that Amy Jacobson wrote about in her book, very influential book.
		Diablo Canyon nuclear site in California is uh hit with a nuclear weapon.
		What is the effect of a nuclear power plant getting hit by a nuclear weapon?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		That's just that one is really, really devastating.
		I hadn't actually, I mean, I think with the war in Ukraine, um, we had sort of gone a sense, right, that a nuclear power plant presents this very kind of special type of threat in war zones.
		And this was the war in Ukraine, was actually quite simply the the first war where we had active fighting in a country, active military conflict, violent conflict in a country that had nuclear power plants that just had not been the case previously.
		And you know, there are a whole lot of things you could say about nuclear power and potential dangers, threats and so on.
		But in the uh uh in the case of a conflict, a nuclear power plant can become a weapon in and of itself.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um, so I read the book a while back.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So I I but is it possible you could get an exponential effect for absolutely no, no, no.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		This is this is now a radiation, you know.
		So now people are dying all over the western United States from the absolutely enormous amount of radioactivity that is spread, right?
		So you hit the nuclear power plant.
		It's not the blast and the fireball.
		I mean, yes, it is there locally, but that's not what's gonna kill the people in LA.
		What's gonna kill the people in LA is the radiation that's gonna spread.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So what does that look like?
		That was my second question.
		Uh you said you would flesh out the concept of the danger of radiation.
		Like what does that look like?
		We know something about that because of the bombings 80 years ago, but we know something about that because of the bombings from 80 years ago, absolutely.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		And um I can say a little more about those, but we also know a whole lot um about the impact of nuclear um explosions on the environment, the impact of radiation on the environment, because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the only two um or even count Trinity three times.
		It's not that we've exploded nuclear weapons three times.
		We've exploded nuclear weapons more than 2,000 times on this planet.
		And that was as called nuclear weapons?
		Full nuclear weapons explosions as part of what it's referred to as nuclear weapons testing programs.
		Um, I was in March at the United Nations actually at the third meeting of states parties of a treaty called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and I was speaking to um uh uh a woman from French Polynesia where the French tested nuclear weapons.
		Um she's actually a member of the French Polynesian parliament now.
		Her name is Hinemorera Cross.
		Um, she's a relatively young woman, I think in her 30s.
		Um, she's a mother.
		She has she's had leukemia for many years.
		Um as and and and many people in French Polynesia have been impacted by the testing that took place there.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Leukemia can be a result of exposure radiation.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		And I can I I can explain that um as well.
		But Hina Morera said to me something really interesting.
		She said, you know, when we call it testing, when I was young and people would talk about, oh, we had the testing.
		I just imagined scientists kind of playing in the laboratory and you know, doing some kind of a test.
		Um, these were full-blown nuclear explosions.
		They described Bravo, described the Soviet um so-called test, uh, the Tsar bomba.
		Uh, there were over 2,000 such explosions.
		Um, many of them atmospheric tests.
		Um the majority still underground tests, but even underground tests have had devastating consequences.
		In 1963, there was um really a kind of seminal agreement that was made initially just by the US, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom of stopping atmospheric testing.
		And that was a real, that was a real victory for the people of the world because it helped to some atmospheric testing continued.
		China and France actually can both continued to test in the atmosphere post-1963.
		France tested in the atmosphere until 1974, and China tested in the atmosphere until 1980.
		So both both of those continued.
		Everybody else has conducted to our knowledge underground tests, to my knowledge, only underground tests.
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		So but tell us what the effects of radiation.
		How long does the pollution last?
		How bad is it?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So there are so depending on what kind of a bomb you have.
		So there's we can go back to a kind of uh key key distinction here.
		We have two types of nuclear weapons.
		One we refer to as atomic bombs.
		Those are again 1945 weapons.
		Um those are based on a process of fission.
		Uh fission is when a nucleus of an atom splits, and basically one element, we all know elements like hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and so on, but an element like uranium or plutonium splits and produces two other elements.
		Um, and energy is produced in such a reaction, and you know, a tiny amount of energy is produced in one reaction, but when you have many, many, many reactions, you can have a lot of energy.
		Another process is called the process of fusion, and that's when actually nuclei of two elements come together and produce energy that way.
		So, for example, two hydrogen nuclei come together to form helium and energy is produced that way.
		That process actually takes place in the sun.
		That's how the sun produces its energy.
		So fusion is a good thing.
		We wouldn't, we quite simply wouldn't have life on this planet if it weren't for fusion.
		But again, using fusion for the purpose of weapons is is a whole other thing.
		So depending on, you know, sort of what you do.
		And uh here's the interesting thing about fusion or hydrogen bombs.
		In order to actually um bring so you know that so if I have hydrogen nuclei, so this is let's just step one second um to just remember what an atom is, what elements are.
		So we have different elements on the planet.
		Um the atoms are sort of the smallest units of the of the element, But those atoms are made up of different kinds of particles.
		So the nucleus is at the center of the atom, it might have just a single proton, like in hydrogen, or it might also have more protons and also neutrons and so on.
		And then there are electrons around it.
		In chemical reactions, everything basically happens with, not basically, everything happens with the electrons.
		So the nuclei just stayed the same.
		With nuclear reactions, everything is about what happens in the nucleus.
		The nucleus either splits or the nuclei in fission or nuclei come together in fusion.
		In uh fusion, if you have a nucleus that is positively charged, electrons are negatively charged.
		That's what keeps the atoms stable.
		If you have one nucleus that's positively charged, trying to come together with another nucleus that's positively charged, they repel each other, right?
		So we know you know so they repel each other.
		So you actually need to invest energy to overcome that electrostatic repulsion.
		Um, and the amount of energy that's needed can only be supplied by something like a fission bomb.
		So even for fusion for hydrogen weapons, right?
		We actually need to have fission um as the fuel that kind of sets up the conditions for the fusion to actually take place.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		How much more powerful is a hydrogen bomb than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima Nagasaki?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		So the Brava one was a thousand times more powerful um than a Hiroshima bomb.
		The currently, like if we have a one megaton bomb, that's about 70 um Hiroshima bombs.
		But hydrogen bombs actually, there's kind of no limit, like you could keep making them bigger and bigger and bigger.
		Somehow we've stopped making the really big ones.
		I think China has um probably the most powerful, the most uh high-energy um hydrogen bombs currently in their arsenals.
		I think they have five megaton um uh uh bombs, hydrogen bombs in their arsenals.
		That's more than 300 Hiroshima bomb equivalents.
		Um, but then again, if you have a um a missile that can carry 10 warheads, it almost doesn't matter, you know, how much a single one um is.
		But just back to radiation.
		So basically, you what you're doing is you're producing this chain reaction of splitting atoms or fusing them, and in so doing, you produce some radioactive isotopes,
		radioactive elements that are going to basically um be in the environment both locally, they're gonna get you know, kind of blown up, you know, things get blown up, evaporated, going into the mushroom cloud.
		You produce these radioactive isotopes, they're mixed with everything.
		Some of that will um kind of fall back onto the planet locally.
		Some of it will be carried up into the um atmosphere, high uh level of stratosphere and so on, and actually become you know part of um sort of a global deposition where you um it goes so high up in the atmosphere,
		it stays, you know, stays up there, and then you could also end up having, depending on exactly how far up it goes, you could have it come down with weather events.
		Um, and so when the unit So it's raining nuclear isotopes.
		Um, the US, I mentioned the the testing in the Marshall Islands.
		We also tested in um another Pacific island state called Republic of Kiribas, and we tested on our own soil, um, both in Nevada where there were a hundred atmospheric tests um and some 828 underground um tests, As well as in Alaska where there were just underground tests.
		But the testing in Nevada actually produced fallout that went all around the United States.
		And it quite simply depended on whether or not there was rain in uh locals.
		So the fallout was carried across towards the east, given the um easterly winds.
		And then if there was a rain, uh a weather event in some place, uh the fallout would get deposited there.
		And their maps of the United States, um, they quite simply looked like look like you sort of gave an empty map to a child and they played with paint and kind of you know um uh sprayed you know blotches of paint onto Jackson Pollock painting, yeah.
		Yeah, exactly.
		And it's and it's where um radiation had been deposited from these.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Do we know the health effects of that?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		The health effects are very severe and very serious.
		So let me just name a few of the top radioactive isotopes that are um problematic.
		There's something called iodine-131, there's something called caesium-137, something called strontium-90, and there are um a number of different isotopes of plutonium.
		And the thing about these is that they quite simply last in the environment for different amounts of time.
		So some of them, there's a concept called half-life.
		So a radioactive isotope will have a specific half-life.
		And what that means is if you have, if you start out with say a thousand atoms of this isotope, after its half-life, you will have 500, and after another half-life, you'll have 250, and so on.
		And so after six, seven, call it even 10 half-lives, it's gonna be gone from the from the environment.
		Iodine-131 has a very short half-life.
		It's eight days.
		And so within a matter of weeks, it's gone from the environment.
		But if you were there at the time of the explosion, and if you got exposed to iodine-131, that's that actually went um into your body mostly because the iodine um actually went into the grass, and then the cows ate the grass, and you know, people drank the milk and so on.
		But it goes right to your thyroid, and it's it has caused who knows, numerous, numerous cancers in this country, but actually in in many other parts of the world.
		Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years each.
		That means they stick in the environment for a few a couple hundred years at least.
		Um, and what's interesting about both of these isotopes, strontium 90 is chemically similar to calcium.
		And you know that when you drink milk or eat cheese or whatever, you take in calcium, that calcium goes into your bones, goes into it's it's building up your bone marrow, and strontium-90 will go to those exact places.
		So the reason we mentioned leukemia earlier, the reason that um people got in, especially they called um uh leukemia, the atomic bomb disease in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings, the reason for that was the exposure to strontium-90.
		Um also importantly, because it acts like calcium, it also gets incorporated by plants will take it up from the environment and you can you can um ingest it.
		Uh cesium-137 is the same half-life, you know, around for a long time, is chemically similar to potassium.
		And you also know that if you eat banana or if you drink some kind of uh electrolyte drink or something, you take in potassium.
		Well, the same thing happens.
		If cesium is in the soil, plants will take it up, thinking Um because it behaves like potassium.
		They take it up, it gets incorporated.
		And now when you eat that food, that cesium is now getting incorporated into your cells, the kinds of soft tissues that use potassium, your brain actually needs a lot of potassium.
		And so when instead of taking up potassium, you've now brought cesium-137 into your body.
		Now this cesium is this radioactive isotope that's gonna basically after a certain amount of time, it's going to split and it's going to give off gamma radiation.
		And now that gamma radiation is inside your body, it's attacking your cells, it's attacking your DNA, it's making you sick.
		And a lot of um kind of soft tissue cancers, including um brain cancer, come from that um cesium-1200.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Did you see markedly higher rates of those cancers after Hiroshima Nagasaki?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Uh yes, oh, absolutely.
		I mean, the estimates for the casualties of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, um, it's often cited what people think it was like 70.
		The the ideas is maybe 70,000 people died on the day of the attack, and then another 70,000 by the end of 1945 from um both kind of acute radiation sickness as well as cancer, but the cancers um continued to happen.
		There's a particularly um touching story of uh of a young girl who was two years old in Hiroshima, the day of the bombings.
		Her name was Sadekusaki.
		Um when she was 12, so 10 years after the bombing, she developed leukemia.
		Um, she had been, you know, growing well and was very athletic and very active.
		Um, and she developed leukemia, and she is the one who she learned the story of the paper crane, the folding of the origami.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Uh, and she learned the story that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true.
		There are now some um differences in kind of details of what happened, how many paper cranes she folded and and so on.
		Um, but needless to say, she died.
		And after she died, it was actually her friends who wanted to do something in her honor.
		And essentially, over you know, the decades, the paper crane that she was the paper cranes that she was folding really became uh a kind of uh symbol of peace.
		Um this sort of message, you know, she when she was wishing folding the paper cranes, she was wishing not just to get better, but she was wishing for world peace.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Uh, and that's kind of what got taken up by so if you had the US and Russia fire one-third of their nuclear arsenals, you're saying that every study uh projection has shown like an elimination of like life on Earth, basically, certainly human life on Earth, human civilization.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I would say it's absolutely certainly end of the world as we know it.
		Uh whether we all you know perish or or some people survive, um the latter is certainly possible.
		Um, there's actually the UN is now advancing a study on the consequences of nuclear war, something that really hasn't been studied, I would say, um, in terms of uh the current the world that we currently live in, right?
		So we live in a very globalized world.
		Um, you know, we often might eat food from other places in the world, right?
		Like, what is that in the current context that wasn't necessarily true to the same degree in the 1980s?
		People, for example, ate food that was more local and so on.
		Um, so what does that look like today?
		Um, the sat the science of nuclear winter um and for example ozone layered destruction that's very very solid science it gets attacked all the time but it is very solid and old you said this has been something that people have been studying for 80 years.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Uh how many nuclear weapons are there in in the world globally?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Today we have uh 12 and a half nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine uh 12 and a half thousand.
		Sorry, twelve and a half and a half thousand nuclear warheads in the world in possession of nine nuclear armed states.
		US and Russia have the vast majority, over 90% of the nuclear warheads are in the possession of US and Russia.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Are we pretty sure of that?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we know where these warheads are.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, we actually know.
		Uh the uh the good news about nuclear weapons is they're not a garage project.
		There are other things you could do in your garage that could be very dangerous.
		Uh you can't do that with nuclear weapons.
		You really um it it it takes a tremendous amount of um not just resources um and kind of human ingenuity, but infrastructure, you know.
		Part of the reason they did that in the you know, the Manhattan Project in the Los Alamos, it was all that um uh isolation and so on.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Do we know where they are?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um we do.
		For the most part, we know where they are.
		Not probably not all of them.
		Um I think it's kind of known where, for example, you Russia's military bases are, but perhaps not exactly how many where and how.
		The other piece is that we do have a lot of nuclear warheads on submarines, which could be pretty much anywhere in the in the world's oceans.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well it's interesting.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So submarines keep moving most of the time.
unidentified		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Isn't it dangerous to have a nuclear warhead continuously on a boat desk?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, some of these nuclear um uh uh submarines are carrying so many warheads, they're carrying so many missiles, and each missile is carrying warheads.
		Um I think they called them handmaidens of the apocalypse.
		There were incidents uh um in like the 1950s where a US and the Soviet submarine like you know, crashed into one another.
		They're also they're nuclear armed.
		Nuclear armed.
		Um and and nothing happened.
		Like we've actually been, I mean, this is the one way of looking at the history of the entire nuclear age.
		So 80 years of the nuclear age, is that we've been very, very lucky that the scenarios I'm describing, the scenario Andrew Jacobson is describing, the scenario I'm describing, nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction is a whole other thing, which you probably also know about, because I know you spoke with Dennis Quaid.
		Um, the electromagnetic pulse, that's another thing you could do.
		You could shut down the electricity over entire countries.
		Like you need like three nuclear warheads to shut down the electricity over the entire United States.
		And this isn't a case where you, you know, it's a blackout and we're all in convenience for a week.
		This is like the electricity is not coming back.
		So you wouldn't even need to like explode nuclear weapons on cities.
		You'd just need to shut down our electrical grid, and then you know, good luck.
unidentified		The country starts to luck to all of us.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So a during the Cold War, a Russian sub Soviet sub and a US sub collided.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Um luckily, you know, the bombs didn't go off, but there were also examples of warheads being lost, right?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, warheads being lost, warheads being dropped to the bottom of the ocean.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		There are about 50 nuclear warheads at the bottom of the ocean.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So there are 50 nuclear warheads right now at the bottom of the ocean?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um, fell off of submarine, fell off a plane, fell, you know, um, all kinds of accidents.
		Um it wasn't just two sub uh two submarines colliding.
		It was also there was also uh airplanes carrying nuclear warheads colliding.
		Um There was once, yeah.
		There was once a um uh a nuclear warhead that was dropped quite literally into someone's backyard in South Carolina.
		It didn't go off.
		It had like multiple security kind of systems, and the last one held.
		Everything else um, you know, had had given way.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Wait, the US military dropped a nuclear bomb in someone's backyard in South Carolina.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		Um, I forget the exact year.
		This was most of these incidents were in the 1950s.
		But the kind that was kind of a period of really stupid accidents, and then the the, you know, the what is often referred to in the field as close calls, you know, sort of got more um more sophisticated.
		Uh in 1962, of course, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis.
		That's the whole famously a whole um set of things.
		And and really what we understand from that is that could have led to a nuclear war.
		Um, you know, from from deliberate kind of, you know, US Kennedy was under a tremendous amount of pressure to actually invade Cuba.
		By that point, the Soviets actually had nuclear warheads and missiles in Cuba, you know, had that invasion or they're gone, um, it, you know, we quite simply would have had a nuclear war.
		But it wasn't just that.
		There were there were incidents during that 13-day period, three of them on the same day, October 27th.
		It was a Saturday.
		It's um often referred to as the Black Saturday.
		There were three things that happened that day.
		One was a US plane that was doing some kind of um monitoring in the near the North Pole and had accidentally gone off, lost radar, lost uh kind of uh the ability to navigate where they were and gone deep into the Soviet Union and was actually too high up for uh the Soviet,
		you know, defense to air defense to to, and they really tried to shoot it down, but um the guy escaped.
		Then there was an airplane that was shut down over Cuba.
		Um and the American captain was killed on that day, and Kennedy um did not decide to move towards an invasion uh and so on.
		And then perhaps the most serious one was where the US was trying to enforce a blockade of kind of, you know, the the Soviets weren't supposed to be coming to Cuba to you know bring any sort of military equipment and to enforce this blockade, they were using something called um depth charges, but they were using kind of simulating depth charges.
		Um that and depth charges like a weapon to attack a submarine.
		And so they were using ones that would sort of simulate an attack but not really attack.
		And one um Soviet submarine um uh had uh sort of three um uh officers on board uh was being attacked by these depth charges.
		They interpreted it as a real attack.
		They actually thought that maybe there was a war going on, and they were nuclear armed, they had a nuclear torpedo um on board.
		Um, and what they needed, they this wasn't, you know, like they needed um uh permission from some higher author authority.
		They needed all three of them needed to agree to employ the nuclear warhead.
		Uh one of them, his name was um Captain Arkipov, uh, decided that he did not want to approve the use of the nuclear um torpedo and um basically uh saved the world um in that moment.
		The very next day, October 28th was actually the end of uh the Cuban Missile Crisis where the Soviets you know agreed to withdraw their nuclear um missiles um from Cuba.
		President Kennedy had in turn agreed that the US would withdraw its nuclear missiles from Turkey.
		This wasn't known until relatively recently, um, because at the time Kennedy asked Khrushchev, you know, we you have my word, we'll do this, but I just need a little time and um and I'm not gonna make it public.
		Um, and that was the agreement.
		It ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.
		Um, and that was a very, very, very dangerous um moment.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Seems to have changed President Kennedy's views of nuclear weapons or hardened his views, and he became entirely committed to to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		He became committed to preventing new nations from acquiring nuclear weapons that was absolutely really important to him.
		But he was also he was very um he was looking towards disarmament.
		And it was even before the the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961, he gave a very famous speech at the United Nations General Assembly, in which he stated something to the effect of we must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.
		So this is quite simply something we've known for a long time.
		And this was Kennedy understood this before we understood nuclear winter, before we understood those on layer destruction, and maybe around the time we were figuring out electromagnetic pulse and and and so on.
		Um so he understood this at a very deep level.
		The part where he um really put in his energy uh was the atmospheric test ban treaty.
		Um, and that was negotiated with Khrushchev um the following year in 1963.
		That was a tremendous achievement and a really, really important achievement.
		Going back to our discussion of radiation, um, you know, I often sometimes when I sit in a room full of people um or stand or whatever and speak about this, I sometimes say, you know, there are people in this room who are alive today because of that atmospheric test ban treaty.
		Because had we continued to test to the degree and the levels that we were doing, we would have just sickened more and more and more people in our own country and and around the world.
		One thing I'll just add is that I didn't say earlier because I was talking about the isotopes.
		I never told you about plutonium.
		There are actually different isotopes of plutonium, and some of them have half-lives of thousands of years.
		There's an isotope of plutonium with a 24 and a half thousand-year half-lifetime.
		That means that thing's gonna be in the environment for you know, a couple of hundred thousand years.
		So this is this is again back to that issue of transcending time and space.
		This is not something that just has an immediate effect.
		We clean it up and we we move on.
		The plutonium, in fact, the plutonium has been deposited globally, and we have we actually have an understanding that hundreds of years from now, hopefully there will be scientists who studied the planet who will say, oh, look, this is when they um tested nuclear weapons.
		Here's the plutonium line in the in the geologic record.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Um can I ask you uh about President Kennedy's efforts to to prevent nuclear war.
		One of the things he did has been written about to some extent is try to prevent David Ben Gurian, then Prime Minister of Israel from developing a nuclear weapon at the Demona site.
		I think we have a lot of correspondence now that shows the president demanding inspections of the Demona site.
		Ben Gurion resigned as prime minister, I think, as a result of this of this controversy.
		Um what happened there?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think Israel was really avoiding any sort of um oversight by the President Kennedy um thought that proliferation of nuclear weapons was incredibly dangerous.
		He was definitely concerned And didn't want other countries acquiring nuclear weapons.
		This eventually led even after his death to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, whose goal was that, but there are other goals, and I can talk about them as well.
		In the case of Israel, he felt very strongly that if this was our ally, you know, we and we were gonna tell the rest of the world not to uh acquire nuclear weapons, we also had to actually uh, you know, do what we were preaching and sort of uh be consistent in our approach to Israeli nuclear weapons.
		But they went ahead and um, I mean, the I think the it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966.
		Um this was actually interestingly before the nuclear uh non-proliferation treaty um came together, it was negotiated over uh a long period of time, but um finally kind of signed um uh in 1968, um, and then um it entered into force in 1970.
		Um it's still currently one of the largest international agreements amongst uh states uh in in the United States nuclear armed states have signed it.
		So the that treaty it recognizes five nuclear armed states, uh nuclear weapons states, uh they're US, Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China.
		Those are the five that had nuclear weapons up to that point, declared nuclear weapons arsenals.
		Again, Israel um had actually begun its program.
		At this point, Israel has um is thought to have 90 nuclear warheads.
		Um the other five, what's interesting is they were from the very beginning of the treaty, all five were recognized as nuclear weapons states, but China and France didn't join the treaty until 1992.
		So it sometimes takes time for for um uh these treaties to actually be India, Pakistan, North Korea.
		So there's yes, so there are four others, so nine nuclear armed states, five recognized by the United Nations, um, also all five members of the UN Security Council with veto uh power.
		Um, and then the four that are outside of the treaty, Israel um, which has this unique policy of ambiguity of an undeclared nuclear arsenal, but again, we think it's a 90 nuclear warhead arsenal.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And we're sure pretty sure that there is.
unidentified		Yeah.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Oh, absolutely.
		I think there's no no doubt um about whether or not they have them.
		Um India and Pakistan never joined the nuclear um non-proliferation treaty, um, both um essentially, you know, tested nuclear weapons uh underground.
		They each have on the order of 150 nuclear warheads today.
		Uh, and then North Korea was actually a part of the treaty until um they left the treaty in the early 2000s uh and have um since uh you know pursued uh a nuclear weapons program.
		We think that North Korea actually currently has 50, 60, maybe 70 uh uh nuclear warheads.
		What North Korea has done is it has also um actually developed the delivery systems.
		Um we think that today North Korea um actually has the kind of delivery systems that could uh deliver a nuclear warhead to any part of the United States.
		Um, and this to me is actually really for you know, the many reasons why we have to eliminate nuclear weapons.
		I can make a case about that um uh very strongly.
		But in the case of North Korea, um it seems utterly crazy to me that you have a country like the United States, which let's for just a moment imagine that we live in a world free of nuclear weapons.
		Who's gonna attack the United States?
		You know, we've got the oceans, we've got the conventional military.
		Um, I've actually heard uh our mutual friend uh Professor Jeffrey Sachs say that the United States could be the safest country in the history of humanity.
		Um, you know, but in a world with nuclear weapons, we are so vulnerable, and we're not just vulnerable with however you want to classify Russia and China, but let's call them adversary, you know, peer adversaries or near-peer adversaries.
		We're vulnerable to them, but we're also vulnerable to a country like North Korea, which is relatively small, relatively poor.
		Uh, this is not a world superpower.
		Um, and yet North Korea could destroy the United States as we know it.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		What where is Iran?
		This is such a heavily politicized question, but there's got to be a science-based answer.
		Where is Iran on the continuum toward getting nuclear weapons?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um Iran uh has been enriching uranium to 60%, which is you don't need that for nuclear power.
		Um, it is not quite a weapons grade, although if you wanted to make a weapon, you actually could make a weapon even out of the highly enriched uranium they currently have.
		Now, my understanding is that they they and I actually listened to their statements in in venues like the nuclear non-proliferation treaty meetings at the UN.
		They always say they're not interested in in um building nuclear weapons.
		They do emphasize that their religion um, you know, doesn't uh, you know, requires them not to pursue um nuclear weapons.
		Um I I actually think that they're not pursuing nuclear weapons.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		How hard would it be for I mean, they have every incentive to any country that you know has its capital city bombed, yeah, probably wants a nuclear deterrent, I would think.
		I mean, it's just common sense.
		How hard is it given where they are right now technologically?
		How hard would it be for them to build a nuclear weapon?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I don't think it would be very hard.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I think if they wanted a nuclear weapon, they could have had it a long time ago.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Um how hard in general is it to build one?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		It is hard.
		It is an it is it is a huge investment of you know, resources, both human and and financial resources.
		It is a hard thing to do.
		Um, it's not a garage project, it's not something that's gonna evade, especially if you um if we were to pursue um nuclear disarmament, especially in uh the world of today's technologies, it would be very relatively easy to track activity, to set up inspections to do the kinds of things um that would rid the world of this threat.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Right after 9-11, we heard a lot about the potential for a dirty bomb, nuclear material um with conventional explosives attached that would pollute an area.
		What what would that look like?
		Is that uh an actual threat?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		That I think that's still that remains a threat.
		I think that woke up some people um in the early 2000s to kind of think a little bit about the threat of nuclear weapons.
		Interestingly, it was in 2007.
		I think this sort of terrorist threat was a big part of why they did this.
		Um brought uh Kissinger and George Schultz, um, both of whom were former secretaries of state under Republican presidents, as well as Bill Perry, um, Department of Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton and Sam Nunn,
		a longtime Democratic senator from Georgia, brought the four of them together in 2007, they wrote the first of a series of articles uh in the Wall Street Journal um titled Something Like Tower the World Free of Nuclear Weapons, in which they actually make the case for both why we need a world free of nuclear weapons and why the United States um should lead that effort.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Can I ask a dumb question?
		I should have asked before.
		So you've said it's been long-standing policy for over 70 years that if the United States believes their incoming nuclear missiles.
		That it will strike the country of origin.
		What's the thinking there?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um I've never questioned that, but if you think about it, I mean, if there's nothing you can do to stop, I think so much of this is actually I I love there's a quote from Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon papers and is best known for that.
		He he passed away um a little over a year ago or so.
		Um Daniel Ellsberg, uh after that kind of uh um effort to end the Vietnam War, really ended up spending decades speaking about nuclear disarmament and nuclear weapons issues.
		And in his um book, The Doomsday Machine, uh, he there's a uh a quote I really, really love.
		Um he says that nuclear weapons policies, current past and current, are dizzingly insane and immoral.
		And that's really all I have to say in response to why would we, you know, why would we if if if we think we're being attacked by one or two nuclear warheads, why would we send 82 to North Korea?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Uh, you know, I I I think Well, I mean, it you it, you know, if you can't, if there's some way to stop the nuclear attack, then of course.
		I mean, uh, you know, if it's if it's them or us, I'm for, you know, I'm for us, always.
		However, if there's no way to stop the missiles from coming, if there really is no technology that allows that, then what is the point of killing a hundred million other people?
		Yeah, if you're gonna die.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		It's a really it's a really good question.
unidentified		I think one has this been debated.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		So nuclear deterrence, um, which I understand has kind of become a sort of mantra.
		So let me just step back for a second.
		I think one of the problems we have um currently in this country is number one, most people are not aware of this threat, don't understand nuclear weapons, don't understand what they could do.
		Sometimes when I speak or write, or you know, people will respond, oh, I remember duck and cover when I was in school.
		And you know, people of a certain generation still sort of have a sense for for what is going on.
		Um, but um many young people are just utterly unaware.
		There is a section of society, however, that is aware and understands what nuclear weapons are and you know, understands some of the basic facts that we've been talking about and so on, but has been convinced by this idea that nuclear deterrence works and uh nuclear weapons keep us safe, and that's just all there is to it, and there's just no way to, you know, undo or put the genie back in the bottle or or any of that.
		And the the truth is that there are many problems with nuclear deterrence.
		The first, um, and kind of to me most fundamental is that there is quite simply no plan B for what happens if nuclear deterrence fails.
		It's just kind of like an autopilot, you know, we're under attack, we're gonna attack them.
		And even if you think about a scenario in which we somehow actually manage whoever the enemies are, um, we manage to disarm them or disable or or even if we somehow magically had a dome over the country, which by the way, we're not going to, it's never gonna work.
		We've tried this, and there's just no way to actually do that.
		But even if we did, to destroy such an enemy, right?
		We would need to use so many hundreds or or thousands of warheads that we would create, we would create nuclear winter, we'd create ozone layered destruction.
		It would be in the cold war, we called it mutually assured destruction or mad.
		It is actually always sad.
		It's always self-assured destruction.
		If you're gonna go into nuclear war, whether or not you end up getting attacked, you're going to create conditions that are going to actually destroy your own nation.
		I just want to tell you a story about um the United States.
		So this, you know, the claim that I made uh a little earlier um about the United States actually having in my mind having the most to gain from pursuing a world free of nuclear weapons.
		I was at a place called Woolton Park.
		It's in the United Kingdom.
		It was like being in a Jane Austen novel.
		And it's a place where the UK's foreign ministry basically brings experts, diplomats, academics, and so on to discuss various issues all year long.
		And one week a year, they devote to this nuclear non-proliferation treaty diplomacy.
		And I was invited there last December.
		And these meetings are held.
		It was about 30 of us actually spoke.
		But it's a large room.
		It's about 80 people.
		And it was all very, very interactive.
		And in one such exchange, I actually made this case that the United States has the most to gain from a world free of nuclear weapons.
		And these meetings are held under what's called Chatham House rules.
		So I can talk about what happened, but I can't talk about who said it.
		So I'm not going to say who said it.
		But a person responded to me and I had made a comment to their remarks and then made this comment about the US.
		And this person responded to me after which I wasn't allowed according to the rules to respond.
		So I'll tell you what the response was.
		The response was, you're right.
		And I was shocked that they accepted this.
		You're right that the United States would be safer in a world free of nuclear weapons.
		But our allies would not be.
		And so because I wasn't allowed to respond in the room, I waited until it was after, you know, that session had ended.
		And in the lunch line, I approached this person and I said, how would the American people feel if you told them that we're not pursuing nuclear disarmament because of our allies?
		And take a guess what he responded to me.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I don't think he cares what the American people think.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		No.
		He said, now you sound like Trump.
		And I said, that's not an answer.
		He goes, you, a person goes, you want an answer?
		There would be no Europe.
		It would all be mother Russia.
unidentified		So, you know, there's this, the idea.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, they're deranged.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		But I mean, seriously, like.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		They'd be better off anyway.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		How are we, how are we accepting to be.
		be under mortal threat as a nation, as a people, as humanity all the time.
		JFK had another, he had so many brilliant statements and quotes and so on.
		Another one was like, humanity was not meant to live in a prison awaiting its final destruction.
		I mean, that was, his view was like, we're all just sitting in this prison awaiting, you know, the nuclear war destroying our world.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		It does seem like we're, and there's been this thing, the doomsday clock and.
		I don't know how I don't take that very seriously because like how would you measure that but just watching the rhetoric carefully it has changed since the Ukraine war started.
		And you're seeing I read a piece by some lunatic at the Atlantic council recently suggesting that we you know engage in a limited nuclear strike.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely insanity.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And so the taboo around using nuclear weapons at least in this country has um has kind of almost evaporated like what is that?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah I mean I think the taboo is still there but I think some people are definitely pushing pushing the envelope and pretending as if we really can fight and win a nuclear war.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So may I ask what is the win what I of course I agree.
		What is a What does it mean though?
		Technically, a limited nuclear strike.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I think people think that you could have exchanges on, say, um, say that we gave Ukraine um a few, you know, kind of uh low energy yield and low energy yield means Hiroshima bombs or you know, that that that kind of um size um and and near range that you could use on a battlefield.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Nuclear weapons.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, nuclear weapons.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And people have called for that.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, uh I I think that's I think that's in discussion.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think the you know anyone who discusses that should be imprisoned for treason.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Um I agree.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, any policymaker who advocates for that is imperiling our entire nation and world, and uh that's a crime.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, in the fall of 2022, after the start of the Ukraine war, there were serious discussions in the White House and and an estimate from the Biden administration that there was a 50% chance of nuclear weapons use over the So you must know you're a co you teach at Columbia.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you must know some of the people in the Biden White House.
		I mean, like what I actually did, okay.
		They don't want to talk to you.
		I actually but I mean, these are supposedly adults, Jake Sullivan and you know, Tony Blinken, like what are they thinking?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the closest they come to is when I when I try to speak to diplomats, these are people mostly from the State Department and for or from the um US mission to the United Nations, um, or examples like the one I gave from Wilton Park.
		Um, I've also spoken to diplomats from other nuclear weapons states, um, including like a UK uh diplomat, where I was making this case that, you know, nuclear deterrence could fail.
		And he goes, Yeah, yeah, you're right.
		And I said, and then what?
		You know, we destroyed the entire uh human civilization, we destroyed the planet, we'd make it inhospitable to not just human life, all and he goes, that's not gonna happen.
		Yeah, like so they they not only um don't have a plan B for if nuclear deterrence fails, they also really don't want to think about it, right?
		Like the this to them, the solution is just you just keep going.
		Um, and to me, it's just unfathomable.
		To me, the idea that we're kind of putting all of our eggs in this nuclear deterrence basket when we actually recognize that things could go wrong, not just deliberately, not just because someone decided um to implement the strike, but because accidents could happen, because a miscalculation could happen.
		Um besides the Cuban missile crisis, besides these absolutely ridiculous, stupid accidents in the in the 50s and even the 60s.
		In the 1980s, we had two incidents in 1983.
		Um, the first one in September, the second one in November, where we quite literally um, you know, could have had uh uh the start of a nuclear war.
		One was called Abel Archer, that was in November.
		That was a NATO exercise that had become they had um actually um added some new kind of elements of realism uh that were interpreted them by the Soviets for the real thing.
		And they thought they were under attack, they started um quite literally, you know, putting nuclear warheads onto missiles and were ready to um to attack.
		And thankfully that was uh it it didn't go um all the way.
		In September, there was an incident where a um an officer in the Soviet army in some um military base that was monitoring whether the Soviet Union was under attack, received uh literally like a computer glitch, uh five signals in a row that warheads were coming towards the Soviet Union from the United States.
		And it turns out Those glitches came from an alignment between high altitude clouds and satellites.
		So something they had not been predicted or accounted for.
		And according to the computers, the Soviet Union was under attack.
		This person, his name was Captain Stanislav Petrov had decided this was a false alarm and actually, you know, didn't pass the information on to his superiors, thus averting um nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis Um incident that I was describing with the submarine.
		That's often referred to the man who saved the world, and then Petrov is also sometimes referred to as the man who saved the world.
		We've quite simply been uh have had so many incidences where uh uh we just actually got lucky.
		Um, and um there's scholars who really kind of study all of these examples who say, no, no, no, it's not the nuclear deterrence has worked.
		It's that we have really been very lucky.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Not all countries that have nuclear weapons are the same, though.
		Some are clearly a greater threat, not because they're more evil necessarily, but because they're more unstable.
		And the UK, I would say is a perfectly authoritarian country, a failed state in a lot of ways that's got rioting in the streets.
		It's clearly in a very steep downward uh trajectory.
		Why should we sit back and allow like the UK to have nuclear weapons?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		It actually gets much better than that.
		The UK has nuclear warheads, they're their own nuclear warheads, but the only way they can launch them is using um US delivery systems.
		Um and so it's not just that they have them, it's that it actually we helped them to have a viable, you know, quote unquote nuclear deterrent.
		Uh so it's uh it's it's it's that one's actually in our corner uh squarely.
		And we just recently um transferred or began transferring some nuclear warheads onto um UK soil.
		It was something we used to do, um, and then we removed them and now we brought them back.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Why would we do that?
unidentified		I don't know.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		In a country that's collapsing, um, that will not be there in current form in 20 years.
		It's it's that seems very reckless.
		I mean, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 91, they moved nuclear warheads out of a bunch of different satellite states, including Ukraine.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Ukraine and Belarus and Kazakhstan.
unidentified		Right.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And when South Africa, you know, ended apartheid in 1994, they moved the move the nuclear weapons out.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So but we're moving nuclear weapons in to an increasingly volatile country.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		And we actually have, so it's we of course have our own nuclear um weapons, and then we have on our territory as well as in these submarines that that um travel all around the planet.
		And we also have nuclear warheads in five other Europe, now six, because it's clear we've we brought some back to the United Kingdom.
		We have them in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Turkey.
		Um, to me.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Do we have any in Romania?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um, not to my knowledge.
		Um not to my knowledge.
		To me, if you look at a globe and you look at how small Europe is, nuclear weapons in Europe are just about the craziest thing that that you could be doing.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And they're all aimed at Russia.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Uh they are, yeah, aimed at uh many of them would need kind of bombers, planes to be delivered.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I meant figuratively aimed.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		They're there to deter Russia.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		They're there to deter Russia.
		I mean, what some a country like Belgium is doing with nuclear weapons, because really all you would need is like Belgium is so small, you'd need like 10 nuclear warheads to destroy all of Belgium.
		So there's never Belgium ever again.
		Um, you know, it just it's it's really insanity.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, Belgium can't even settle its own ethnic disputes internally.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Uh uh, yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So uh wow, this it doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		And we're not moving in the right direction, although there are some developments on the international scene.
		Um, So let me just uh uh make this case for you know for the US, just to underscore this point that the US has a lot to gain from this.
		Um so in 2007, Kishinger Schultz Perry, none, they write this article, they say the US should be leading the world um uh towards a world free of nuclear weapons, the US has a lot to gain from this.
		Um and then it was I think that whole in 2010, there was actually a review conference of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that actually had um come up with a a kind of action plan um that was very promising.
		Um it was a 13 steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons kind of um uh uh action plan um with sort of very specific uh both a kind of set of goals and and timelines and so on.
		And then by 2015, all of that had collapsed and i i it's large part because of what happened in Ukraine um in 2014.
		Now we start to see this, you know, distrust between the United States and Russia.
		It's again, it's no longer, you know, maybe we're working together to rid the world of the threat, which was really the goal of both Reagan and Gorbachev.
		Instead, now we're adversaries again.
		Um, in some sense, the international community is um sort of um uh locked in on um uh kind of living in a world which could end at any point.
		Um and it was really a group, uh, a large group of states.
		Um this was an effort that was uh beginning right around that time, uh, that focused on what um people refer to as humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons.
		So this is again going back to what have nuclear weapons done to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what have they done through these nuclear so-called nuclear testing programs, the 2000 explosion uh explosions around the planet, and what is the research, the kind of stuff that I've been describing, nuclear winter, ozone layer destruction, so on, that um tells us about what is at stake in a world with nuclear weapons.
		So these states started um you know negotiating eventually um an agreement which is called the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that was negotiated in 2017,
		um, and it's an um international treaty that um entered into force in 2021 and that currently has 73 states parties, um though uh and and another 25 signatories.
		So in uh in uh in an international agreement, there's sort of um two levels.
		One is a signatory ahead of state or someone like a foreign minister signs, and that signals the country is um sort of ready to you know uh commit to these things in principle, and then a ratification follows often through national legislative bodies,
		um, whatever the the rules of a particular country are, and after ratification, the country is actually committed to everything outlined in the agreement.
		So the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons or TPNW basically arose um now almost um you know 10 years ago um and has been active uh since entering into force in 2021.
		And the goals of this treaty are quite simply to prohibit any and all activities having to do with nuclear weapons.
		And the idea here is that um the countries that are part of it, so clearly none of the nuclear armed states are part of it, and and I would say not yet.
		Um, but the idea here is that Because of things like nuclear wick winter, because of things like radiation that spreads all around the planet.
		These countries are saying that, you know, your nuclear arsenals are not just a threat to your enemies or to your own populations.
		They're actually a threat to all of us as well.
		And we want a say in the fact that you currently hold the ability to destroy the world as well.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		But they do want to say, but they're not getting one.
		Because nobody cares.
		So if you're North Korea, it's like, why do we care what you think?
		If you're the United States, why do we care what you think?
		I mean, it does seem like the way that states deal with each other encourages everybody to get a nuclear weapon.
		We don't boss North Korea around anymore because they have nuclear weapons.
		We just killed a bunch of people, including civilians in Tehran, and there's nothing they can do about it because they don't have nuclear weapons.
		So that's those are law of the jungle rules, which I object to as a Christian, but I'm but they seem in force.
		Like I don't know what you do about that.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		So I think the idea that I think to me it is nuclear deterrence that is the problem in and of itself.
		Because if we're going to continue to claim that we have nuclear weapons because they keep us safe, then absolutely everything you just said follows from that, right?
		Then every country that can should acquire nuclear weapons for itself to keep itself safe.
		That is, of course, preposterous.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I totally agree.
		But I I would flip it around.
		I mean, by the way, I just wanted to say I'm arguing with you because I don't think any of this will work, but I share your views on the goals.
		I mean, I would I think nuclear weapons are evil.
		I think they're actually probably inspired by supernatural forces.
		That's my view.
		And um, and I think they've wrecked the world already.
		However, I just know the way people are.
		And I don't think that people have nuclear weapons in order to secure their own safety.
		I think they have nuclear weapons to ensure their own power.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		I I have at times described it as uh a license to be bad.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, of course.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		And this license to get to do it every yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		What are you gonna do about it?
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I got nuclear weapons.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		I I mean, I think from my perspective, kind of looking through the history, it's been actually really interesting to study.
		You mentioned the doomsday clock.
		So let me just say, say something for for a minute or two about that for people who don't know.
		So the doomsday clock is something that the bulletin of the atomic scientists, which was founded by the likes of Einstein and Oppenheimer, so on, who were very worried about the threat of nuclear weapons um in the uh in the mid-1940s.
		Um, they found the founded this organization in 1947.
		Um, they were publishing their first like issue of the bulletin.
		Uh, and they asked an artist, um, Mardell Langdorf, Langstorff or something, uh, to draw a cover.
		And she just she drew a cover with a clock with the time showing seven minutes to midnight, because she thought we would sort of, you know, that was a kind of good representation of how dangerous things were, with midnight representing this sort of nuclear Armageddon end of the world um type of scenario.
		And over time, the clock uh sort of became something that they would annually sort of adjust and became a kind of indicator of where we are in terms of the dangers.
		Also over time, they added other existential threats uh to their considerations of the time of the clock.
		Currently, the clock is 89 seconds to midnight.
		And we can totally talk about, oh, is this, you know, like how do you make sense of these numbers and so on?
		I don't really see them as um, I don't see them literally as, oh, it's 89 seconds to midnight, and that somehow means something.
		I see them as relative numbers.
		So are we, for example, one way you can think about it is at the beginning versus at the end of a presidency, right?
		Are is the is The doomsday clock um further or closer to midnight.
		And I did this little analysis.
		Um since 1947, we've had 14 presidents.
		Interestingly, seven Republicans and seven Democrats.
		And very interestingly, only under five presidents has the clock actually moved away from midnight.
		Um, and those five were four Republicans, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr.
		And only one Democrat, John you can probably guess, John F. Kennedy.
unidentified		Yeah.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Uh those are the ones paid for it.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		And um, so under Republican administrations, there has been a move of uh a cumulative move away from midnight of something like 19 minutes and 10 seconds um over time.
		Uh the the farthest we've ever been from midnight um uh was in 1991.
		It was 17 minutes to midnight.
		Um so we've really done a lot of damage since.
		And Democrats have actually brought the clock closer to midnight uh by actually I I I got those numbers.
		Democrats 19 minutes and 10 seconds, staggering 19 minutes and 10 seconds towards midnight, and Republicans uh 13 minutes and 39 seconds away from midnight.
		So on the whole, um, the Republicans have been much better than Democrats.
		And um I I think we have to I think for for this country, first and foremost, the general public needs to be aware of what's at stake um and needs to hold its leaders responsible.
		Um, I think President Trump is probably since John F. Kennedy and then um uh uh uh arguably Reagan as well, who was very committed to this after a certain point in his presidency.
		Um President Trump is the only one who said who has said things like we have so many nuclear weapons, we could destroy the world with them.
		He has um questioned our plans to modernize the nuclear arsenals and spend actually a tremendous amount of money on them.
		Um so I think the the US public can I ask you to stop for a second.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		What would be the thinking behind quote modernizing the nuclear arsenal?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's those are plans that have been set in place for uh more than 10 years.
		Those are plans that have been made under President Obama.
		So President Obama got up in in Prague and talked about a world, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons in 2008, and then more or less turned around and made plans for modernizing the US nuclear arsenal.
		The logic is that our weapons are going to get too old and we need new ones.
		Um, but the price tag is currently estimated up to two trillion dollars, but given the overruns and all kinds of you know, ways in which these um uh types of programs can go over budget.
		Who knows?
		We're literally talking about um spending trillions of dollars to, you know, perfect a way of destroying the world.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		It is all in so I mean, is anyone saying that our current nuclear arsenal just wouldn't work?
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Um I don't think that's I think it's uh I think it's a plan, you know, over a decade or two uh of kind of replacing.
		I do think that they've in some sense consistently been updating, but this is a whole other, this is like a whole sort of new way of you know building them, making them.
		I mean, this is a lot of this is um payoff to defense contractors, driven by the military-industrial complex, no doubt about it.
		They, you know, this is a a very important um, you know, stream of uh income for them.
		The US um not only spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, we also spend More on nuclear weapons than all countries that have them combined.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		So I think here's my conclusion to everything that you said.
		I mean, I agree with your goals vehemently.
		I think the, and I, but I don't know how to achieve them.
		I'm skeptical of treaties because people just ignore them or won't sign them or whatever.
		I do think the first step toward any change begins with articulating the truth.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And stigmatizing, re-stigmatizing the use of nuclear weapons.
		Anyone who is even suggesting or thinking about or opening the possibility of using nuclear weapons is a threat to the world.
		And that's certainly worse than cigarette smoking or drunk driving or any other crime that we heavily stigmatized in this country.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And that person should be like disinvited from every dinner party.
		And like you should look at that person and scream criminal at him because that's what he is.
		And let's just start there.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		If I light a cigarette in an elevator, I am a criminal.
		And I'm treated like one.
		Man, if you did that and someone caught you on video, like you'd lose your job.
		Light a cigarette in an elevator.
		But if you get up at the Atlantic Council, you're like, we may need to use like, you know, low-yield nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine or lob them into Russia to win the Eastern Provinces back, it's like, well, we'll debate it.
		No, no, no.
		You're evil and you're a threat to the world.
		Like maybe we just start there with social sanction.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		I think we also have to, in some sense, stigmatize the very idea that somehow nuclear weapons are a symbol of progress, of advancement, of you know, success.
		I I think, I really do think that the ability to destroy humanity should be seen as a symbol of shame.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Um, fireballs are not progress, actually.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't think so.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		They're a symbol of hell.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		Um Pope Francis was actually a strong supporter of the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, and he um uh he wrote, declared, stated um more than once that the mere possession of nuclear weapons was immoral.
		Um, in you know, in in my mind, this is quite simply the uh really the most important issue in the world because everything else um is you know not gonna get solved if we destroy the the world in the nuclear.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Most mistakes are fixable, this one isn't.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		And I, you know, I I mentioned um Jeffrey Sachs uh before as well.
		We were at the Vatican together um last November, and he said something like we can fix all these other things unless we blow ourselves up.
		And that's quite simply what we're facing.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		I totally agree.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		And and without the general public really waking up to the realities of what we're facing, people who were very engaged in the 1960s.
		Some of that general public engagement was really key to um Kennedy actually getting the atmospheric test ban treaty passed because it needed to be ratified by the Senate.
		And the senators were absolutely not interested in passing this.
		He um just he galvanized the general public.
		Um, he went on a kind of two-month tour speaking to people about the issue.
		And by the time the Senate voted, it was an 81 to 18 senator vote.
		I mean, it was an absolute wipeout.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Well, again, I would refer you to the end of that story.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And he was replaced by maybe the worst president in American history who f who embraced not just the Vietnam War, but nuclear prolifer proliferation.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Yeah.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		And yeah.
		Professor, I really appreciate this.
		I hope every member of the U.S. Senate sees it, and I hope you keep trying to stigmatize the most obvious evil I can think of, which is nuclear war.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much.
ivana hughes ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for having the gosh.
unidentified		Thank you.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		We've got a new website we hope you will visit.
		It's called New Commission Now.com, and it refers to a new 9-11 commission.
		So we spent months putting together our 9-11 documentary series.
		And if there's one thing we learned, it's that in fact there was foreknowledge of the attacks.
		People knew.
unidentified		The American public deserves to know.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		We're shocked, actually, to learn that, to have that confirmed, but it's true.
		The evidence is overwhelming.
		The CIA, for example, knew the hijackers were here in the United States.
		They knew they were planning an act of terror.
unidentified		In his passport is a visa to go to the United States of America.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		A foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event.
		How do you know there would be an event to document in the first place?
		Because he had foreknowledge.
		And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks.
		They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming.
		Who did that?
unidentified		You have to look at the evidence.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		The US government learned the name of that investor, but never released it.
		Maybe there's an instant explanation for all this, but there isn't actually.
		And by the way, it doesn't matter whether there is or not.
		The public deserve to know what the hell that was.
		How did people know ahead of time?
		Oh, why was no one ever punished for it?
		9-11 Commission, the original one, was a fraud.
		It was fake.
		Its conclusions were written before the investigation.
		That's true.
		And it's outrageous.
		This country needs a new 9/11 Commission, one that actually tells the truth, that tries to get to the bottom of the story.
		We can't just move on like nothing happened.
unidentified		9/11 Commission is a cover-up.
tucker carlson ▲ ● ▼		Something did happen.
		We need to force a new investigation into 9-11 almost 25 years later.
		Sorry, justice demands it.
		And if you want that, go to New Commission Now dot com to add your name to our petition.
		We're not getting paid for this.

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