The Coming Nuclear Hurricane

HUGH EAKIN

Vipin and Pranay, thanks for being here. I can’t think of a more timely piece in view of some of the events we’ve seen just over the, literally, past few weeks, and I could make a long list here aside from Israel-Iran, a skirmish between Pakistan and India, and Ukraine attacking strategic bombers deep inside Russia, just to name three. I want to jump into your fascinating piece, but before we do that, I was wondering if we could just start with Iran because I think a lot of listeners will want to know your take on that. Given that there’s a lot we still don’t know, how do you assess those attacks and what are the questions we should be asking now?

PRANAY VADDI

As you mentioned, we wrote a Foreign Affairs piece, so it felt very timely and literally, as we were waiting for it to get published, the 12-day war happens. Iran has pursued this sort of hedging proliferation strategy for decades, ever since the late 1980s, really, when they began their nuclear program. There’s been starts and stops to it. There’s obviously been negotiations in the context of [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] negotiations and what the Trump administration tried to do after withdrawal. But ultimately the purpose of that strategy was to build a nuclear program that allowed them to trade pieces of it away for economic relief; deter the United States and Israel from military action, because they were threatening that, “Hey, if you attack us, we will actually go pursue a bomb because we built up this technical capability”; and then, of course, actually develop the research and development needed to pursue a bomb if they decided to do it in the future.

And after the airstrikes by Israel and then with the American assistance that fateful Saturday evening, the strategy was shown to be completely useless. I mean, Iran now has to make a pretty tough decision, and they’re left with really bad options. My biggest concern is that now, after military attack, as we mentioned in our Foreign Affairs piece, Iran is essentially left with one real option that hardliners in Tehran may support, which is a covert nuclear weapons program. And they’ll have to be much more purposeful about it, try to hide it away, and do so in one of these tunnels that apparently the massive ordnance penetrator can’t reach, which is something that we’re reading about as everyone focuses on, “Did they get all the material? Did they get all the centrifuges,” et cetera.

So my worry is that we’ve essentially hit fast-forward and forced Iran to choose either capitulation, which is obviously what the Trump administration has put on a table—zero enrichment, civilian-only program, et cetera—or the pursuit of a bomb. And of course, Iran could negotiate—agree to something while covertly pursuing a bomb—but my biggest concern is that the next time we really hear about Iran’s nuclear program is going to be when they have a testable nuclear device, and that might be a problem that’s left to future administrations.

HUGH EAKIN

Holding out the possibility that there could actually be some kind of negotiation at this point, before the war, we were at a point of advancing negotiations and there was talk of different models; a golf consortium to do enrichment outside of Iran was one of the ideas in play. Do you see any points of basis for a negotiation at this point given where Iran is and given where the United States is?

PRANAY VADDI

Yeah, I mean, I think that the Iranians probably are at their weakest right now and have to try to string the United States along in a negotiation—potentially agree to some kind of framework of a deal. And honestly, I actually thought that the administration was getting close to that point before the Israeli airstrikes began. So, I don’t know if Israel timed these airstrikes to disrupt a deal that was coming together or if they just felt, based on the information they had available, that there was a closing window for them to damage Iran’s nuclear program irreparably. I just think that the ability for this sort of military action—airstrikes—to completely decimate Iran’s technical capabilities, the know-how they’ve built up over three decades is asking a lot, and it doesn’t seem like the Trump administration is ready to go any further than they’ve already gone as it relates to military action.

But yeah, I do think that there’s a potential, of course, that they could get a deal of some kind. I don’t know if it’ll look anything like JCPOA. I don’t know how strict it will be, how much Iran is willing to accept stringent verification that lets the [International Atomic Energy Agency] back in, that sort of thing. But for the Trump administration, if they want to preserve this idea that it was sort of “mission accomplished” and that there is a cease-fire that can be preserved between Israel and Iran, they might want to take some sort of political arrangement that at least buys more time.

VIPIN NARANG

I think Pranay hit the nail on the head. Before the Israeli strike and the 12-day war, I think there was a real chance of at least a deal that bought time for both sides, right? Because I think the Trump administration wanted this to go away, and I think the Iranians wanted to at least buy enough time, and maybe in good faith; I don’t know. Now, I don’t think there’s any good faith effort from the Iranians. The two options to stop Iran, I think, from getting a nuclear weapon down the road are, one, some sort of regime change effort, and I think we all think in the back of our heads that one of the aims of the Israeli strike was maybe to try and precipitate regime change because short of regime change, at least the intent for weaponization down the road will likely continue as the hardliners are emboldened with this attack.

The second is a mow-the-lawn kind of approach, where you keep having to go back. A lot of things have to align. I think the Israelis are probably more willing to do that than the Trump administration or the United States writ large, I think across any administration. And so, the sort of debate about whether the “MOP op,” as I call it, obliterated Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan is the wrong question. It’s how much time do we buy before you have to go back and mow the lawn again? And I think those estimates vary, but most of the public reporting is leaning towards the lower end—order of months rather than years, although there is this sort of outlier, I think, the Israeli assessment is like five years—but I think most assessments are several months because they still have the ability to produce centrifuges, and they probably have some enriched stockpile remaining once they dig it out.

And so the lesson for Iran, I think the big lesson is, as Pranay pointed out, their strategy since the late 1980s, but really 2003 onwards, was to sit on the precipice and trade away little bits to get economic relief. But if I were thinking like Iran, the lesson is you can’t sit on the precipice next time. You have to go, right? So, this idea of driving the program deeper underground—they have to be worried it’s really penetrated, though. I mean, I think Israeli intelligence really showed how penetrated the Iranian program was—but you’ll have to drive it underground, and you don’t wait. So, the big winner in all of this, the 12-day war and the Iran unfolding saga, I think, is [North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un], actually, who looks like a freaking genius because he just never waited, and he was not going to negotiate away things that he might have found useful for his program. And so, if I were to bet, it would be, short of regime change or a persistent mowing the lawn effort, at some point Iran gets back on the precipice and sort of follows the Kim Jong Un model and doesn’t wait, and we’re confronted with an Iran with at least a minimal nuclear capability at some point.

HUGH EAKIN

In essence, we’re at the end of the threshold strategy.

VIPIN NARANG

Yeah, and that’ll reverberate, I think, across, as we think about other proliferators down the road. The idea of hedging for long periods of time, I think, has just proven too risky if Libya, Syria, Iran: now you have three. Now, they all happen to be sort of in the Middle East and the Israeli crosshairs, but if you’re a U.S. ally thinking about nuclear weapons, and you’re close, why wait? Why face the prospect of future coercion or military attack either from the patron in this case or the common adversary, right?

So, if we get to the point where South Korea is thinking about its own nuclear weapons, which I hope we don’t, China and North Korea both might have an incentive to try and kill it. So, they can’t wait, and I think that’s the big lesson for all proliferators from the Iran case.

PRANAY VADDI

And Iran is not Iraq, but you might remember the Israelis set back Iraq’s nuclear program in the early 1980s by bombing the Osirak nuclear reactor. That also led [former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] to then take his weapons of mass destruction programs deeper underground and try to protect them, not just physically, but also from an intelligence perspective, and then obviously we know how that story ends with two Gulf Wars and tens of thousands of dead on the U.S. side and the coalition forces, but he halted a lot of work to try to comply with UN resolutions. There are a lot of open questions because Iraq was not answering those questions, and it led to military conflict. So, this kind of military counterproliferation approach, it’s hard to get final, and as Vipin has described, generally speaking, your hundred-percent confidence comes from a pretty extravagant military action such as an invasion, regime change, et cetera.And I think for the American people, at least in our country in this day and age, people don’t seem interested in that type of military campaign anymore.

And so this is where if the United States and the Iranians actually do meet soon—I know they’re supposed to meet in Oslo in the coming weeks or days—one of the priorities for the United States has to be establishing an agreement that includes a return of the IAEA to Iranian nuclear facilities, the most stringent verification measures possible—stronger than JCPOA if they can—because you can’t let the Iranians go underground for all of the risks that Vipin has highlighted. This has to be running through hardliners’ minds in Tehran right now that they can’t wait. They have to go. If they’re going to have a nuclear program, it’s got to be purposefully driven towards getting a testable weapon.

HUGH EAKIN

Thinking about the implications for proliferation, and, as you said now, the appeal of North Korea, this, I think, takes us nicely into your own piece, in which you take up this issue that we’re suddenly in an era where actually close allies of the United States could be contemplating nuclear weapons, and we have a short and a longer list of which countries those might be, but obviously South Korea, maybe Poland. And once this starts, it’s a kind of, it seems, a “genie-out-of-the-bottle” situation. I want to start with your piece, “How to Survive the New Nuclear Age.” You have this expression that I think has already been picked up by a number of commentators: “A Category 5 hurricane of nuclear threats” is on the way.

VIPIN NARANG

Pranay didn’t like it. I’m going to take credit for that one. Pranay was like, “Really?”

PRANAY VADDI

It seemed a little dramatic. It just seemed a little dramatic.

VIPIN NARANG

It’s evocative. It is dramatic. I mean, I think we’re nothing short of in a dramatic new—I mean, the convergence, what I like about the metaphor is, you know, you’ve got storm clouds over the horizon, and they strengthen when they converge suddenly into a massive storm, and if you’re unprepared, then it can do catastrophic damage. But if you prepare for it, you can at least sort of weather the storm, and I think that’s the concept behind the metaphor. Soundbite aside, I like it.

HUGH EAKIN

Well, if it seemed dramatic as we were going to press, I think events have since proven that in fact we are in a hurricane season.

VIPIN NARANG

That’s right.

HUGH EAKIN

And I want to talk about each of those threats because I think it’s really useful to walk through this and to understand why this is not just Iran or not just North Korea, but a part of a larger picture of a really large scale shift that has taken place really quickly over the last few years. You start the piece in the halcyon days of 2009, at least from a nuclear perspective, and I just think it might be helpful for listeners to hear, what was the context back then, because it turns out to be a fairly important contrast to setting up the shift that we’re dealing with today?

VIPIN NARANG

The post–Cold War nuclear environment was one where, I think, central to U.S. leaders’ beliefs was the idea that great-power nuclear competition was over and would not return. So, in 2009, [former U.S. President Barack Obama’s] famous Prague speech, we had weathered the reductions of the early 1990s, a lot of the focus was on securing Russian and global fissile material stockpiles, and then 9/11 happens and the focus on nuclear terrorism and “rogue states with nuclear weapons,” so that the problem was counterproliferation focused, not nuclear strategy. In fact, for almost, at that point, 20 years, the United States didn’t really have to think about nuclear strategy. We had four deployed nuclear weapons in Europe where the Europeans who hosted them didn’t really want them, and didn’t know what to do with them. There was a real question about the future of our stockpile and our force structure. There were calls about removing an entire leg of the triad, the triad composed of submarine based forces, the [intercontinental ballistic missiles] on land and our bombers.There was a significant push to get rid of an entire leg—the land leg, notably.

So, there was this assumption not only that nuclear weapons were reduced in salience, but that the central issues were nuclear terrorism, rogue state proliferation like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, and North Korea, and then you had India and Pakistan fighting amongst themselves. For example, [the New START Treaty], which was ratified in 2011, is the last remaining vestige of the bilateral arms control with Russia, and it capped our strategic deployments at 1,550, but the assumption was actually that we keep having stepwise reductions with Russia and that’s reflected as we point out in the piece in the modernization program, which was, sort of in exchange for ratification of New START, the Obama administration committed, along with Republicans, to replacing each leg of the triad. But it didn’t do it with urgency, and it didn’t do it on a one-for-one basis.

And so, and we point this out, the biggest gap in the modernization program is the submarine base leg, which has essentially a 43 percent reduction in capability and capacity, even sized as designed in 2010 and 2011, on the assumption, I think, that great-power nuclear competition was over. And the following decade, despite U.S. efforts to continue to promote arms control and risk reduction with Russia and also with China and North Korea, turned out to be a rude awakening, I think, for American leaders.

So, Russia in 2014 invades Crimea. I think Europe sort of wakes up to it, but there’s a little bit of sort of excusing away Crimea because it’s Russian-speaking populations. But in 2022, with the invasion of Ukraine, there’s no doubt anymore that revisionist Russia is back. So Russia, in the span of five to ten years, goes from being a “partner to NATO” to an adversary again.

So, Russia as I think both of us have characterized it in the past as a gas station with nuclear weapons—but it’s got a lot of nuclear weapons. And now we’re confronted with a Russia that has a lot of nuclear weapons and is using those nuclear weapons to achieve its ambitions in Europe. And we haven’t confronted that since the Cold War, and in different ways this time. And we never accounted for or anticipated the fact that [Chinese President Xi Jinping] would wake up sometime in the 2010, I don’t know when, and decide, “You know what? I’m going to be a nuclear superpower," because he also has global ambitions. And seeing what Russia is using nuclear weapons for and how they’re using them, it’s sort of not surprising that China would wake up one day and say, “These might be useful to achieve their regional and global ambitions,” using the threat of first use against U.S. forces to take Taiwan, deter us unwinding aggression.

And I think the surprise is that we just were lulled into complacency such that, for 60 years, China was content with a very small arsenal. But it decided that that was not sufficient and is developing—and we point out that this is the biggest shift—it is developing not just a size, but a composition of an arsenal that is really designed to break our foresizing principle, which was historically always sized and focused only on Russia and the Soviet Union. So, now we have to focus on two great powers, all the while you’ve got a North Korea that is threatening South Korea and U.S. allies, and you’ve got India-Pakistan, and you’ve got Israel-Iran, and you’ve got all these other threats still lurking that we had to deal with. But now the return of great-power nuclear competition, I think, is the biggest shift from the 2009, 2010 years.

PRANAY VADDI

Yeah, I want to unpack one portion of what Vipin said, because oftentimes nuclear experts like us, we end up having to try to talk about geostrategy and international politics because frankly, at least through the Cold War that Vipin and I have studied and written about and that is part of why we have the sort of takes we do on nuclear policy, nuclear weapons are really an important part of international politics. And so when Vipin refers to this sort of reemergence of major power nuclear competition, I think it’s really important for listeners and readers of Foreign Affairs to understand, we’re talking about a 2009 timeframe where essentially the relevance of a large and diverse nuclear weapons arsenal to major power relations had ebbed. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, then turned into Russia, they didn’t really compete anymore as it related to nuclear weapons. In fact, they were trying to find ways to get rid of their nuclear weapons, which were expensive, so they wouldn’t have to continue to pay tons and tons of money to replace them over decades.

So you had the stepwise strategic arms reduction process that began in the late 1980s with the START Treaty being signed by, first [U.S. President George H.W. Bush] in 1991, leading into the Moscow Treaty, and the New START Treaty, both countries looking for ways to slowly get rid of these excess nuclear weapons that they had. Now, we’re in an era where, obviously, nuclear weapons are extremely relevant to international politics again. As Vipin mentioned, Russia has invaded Ukraine under the shadow of its nuclear arsenal. A lot of the concerns we have about China’s timeline as it might relate to a reunification effort with Taiwan are related to its military modernization, including massive expansion in its nuclear arsenal. And so we see that these countries that are nuclear weapons possessors are trying to wield nuclear weapons behind the scenes to try to advance their own foreign policy objectives and in the case of Russia and China, as we highlight in the piece, it’s to advance revisionist objectives essentially.

So, United States is a status quo power, not just status quo in the sense that our arsenal is not really growing much in size over the next decade or two, but also status quo in the sense that we’re trying to hold together the international order and use our nuclear weapons to extend deterrence to our allies so they don’t proliferate and they feel like their security is taken care of as well. We have to figure out what we need to do with our strategy and our arsenal, potentially “more, different, and better,” as we refer to in the article, to ensure that we are able to preserve the rules-based international order. If you asked us 15 years ago, we probably would say, “I don’t really know if a new [ballistic missile submarine] or an ICBM matters that much for the United States to hold the UN system together or the rules-based international order together.”

Now, at least as nuclear strategists, we’re thinking, “Man, this is really one of the most important national tools,” and our national leaders, those in this administration and future administrations, have to think about the relevance of nuclear weapons to U.S. foreign policy, period.

VIPIN NARANG

Extended deterrence is central to U.S. nuclear strategy and foreign policy. It is what keeps our formal alliance structure—NATO and the Indo-Pacific—together, and it is the best non-proliferation tool we’ve had for 75 years. And the way to maintain the credibility of extended deterrence is not just capabilities, right? Capabilities do matter. Pranay and I are both spending time with allies, and they understand that in this new world, the United States can’t just sit still and does need to think about: does it have the right set and mix of capabilities? Not just more, but this is where the difference comes in. We’re trying to deter Russian non-strategic nuclear weapons use. Are we able to do that in a credible way?

And those are the nuclear wonky questions.The bigger geopolitical questions are: do we still care about the allies? And those are central questions, I think, in U.S. domestic politics right now and across the world. So, you need both what we call the hardware and the software. And in the Biden administration, Pranay led efforts at the White House, and I worked at [the Department of Defense] to install new extended deterrence software. But now the operating system in the United States is sort of questioning whether we should continue to actually extend deterrence, and do allies matter? I mean, this is also in the Foreign Affairs issue, right? Do allies matter? Kori Schake’s piece. And we strongly believe they do because they’re a force multiplier for U.S. security. They’re strengthening unity, presenting a unified front to our common adversaries. It keeps markets open for the United States in the Indo-Pacific and in Europe, and it gives us free access to exquisite geography to help better deter the adversaries. So we’re strongly of the view that extended deterrence not only needs to continue, but needs to be strengthened.

HUGH EAKIN

The question about China seems so central to this, and I wonder if you can connect that to strategy because I think this is something that maybe is insufficiently understood outside of the nuclear community. So China was always nuclear power with its very small force, but the larger point was that you had two superpowers, and you had a set of assumptions based on this equilibrium of two powers, and that continued even after the Cold War. You guys saw this upfront, when this shift happened, that suddenly around 2020 or so, China is building hundreds of ICBM missile silos and this is upsetting that equilibrium. What is the sort of strategic meaning of this, and why is that such a big challenge?

PRANAY VADDI

This is probably one of the denser parts of our article, and we tried—and thank you for bearing with us as we tried to make it presentable to the world—we were trying to explain exactly this point, right? Why are these two Biden administration officials who worked in nuclear policy coming out there and sort of flashing a blinking yellow light about these silos, and what does it mean? Why does it change anything? The United States has 3,700 nuclear weapons and has hundreds of silos. It’s got hundreds of launchers on SSBNs that are deep under the water. It’s got nearly a hundred bombers that can deliver nuclear weapons. What’s the big deal? So, with China’s silos, combined with the number of warheads they’re producing—so potentially 1000 in 2030, maybe up to 1,500 or more after 2035—they’re presenting a 300-plus new things that U.S. nuclear weapons need to hold at risk if we want to deter China in the way that we have deterred Russia, and let me unpack that a little bit.

The United States has historically predicated our ability to deter a major power adversary with a large and diverse nuclear arsenal—first it was the Soviet Union, and then Russia, now it’s Russia and China—by being able to both hold at risk the things that the country thinks are most important—so in autocratic regime, for example, regime stability, the centers of power, et cetera—as well as their nuclear weapons, which they can use to hurt the United States and hurt allies. Part of the reason we did this, as we touched on, is for extended deterrence. It was really hard to convince allies in the late 1950s that we’re willing to trade Washington for Berlin because we essentially promised, like, “Don’t worry. We’re not going to have a lot of conventional forces on your territory. We’re not going to have nuclear weapons forward deployed on your territory in West Germany. But if the Soviets come across the line, don’t worry. Our bombers will be in the air. We’re on our way to Moscow, and we’ll nuke them, and the Soviets know that, so they’re never going to try and test us.”

Well, multiple Berlin crises later, allies are nervous, and we need to come up with a better plan. One part of that plan is the United States deciding they’re going to both forward deploy nuclear weapons to assure allies. They can actually sort of see the representation of extended deterrence on their own territory, but also develop the types of nuclear weapons capabilities that are fast and accurate, that could actually destroy nuclear weapons that an adversary has on their territory or has on an allied territory like a Warsaw Pact country before they can ever get off the ground. Now, I think a lot of people think that when we talk about the damage limitation in our piece, we’re referring to the United States wanting to engage in nuclear preemption or things like that. But the fact of the matter is if the United States is expected to try to restore nuclear deterrence in a regional war, a limited war, let’s say, over Taiwan or over NATO territory against Russia, you want to be able to ensure that a president is able to potentially engage in an escalating conventional conflict, and potentially need to respond to limited nuclear use with our own limited nuclear use, while also having an option in the back of his mind that if this continues to get out of control, the United States is going to be able to try to destroy, defeat, and intercept—if you think about missile defense, as well, as part of the equation—all of these nuclear capabilities before they can do as much damage as possible.

Now, the reason that China becomes so significant in this is we’ve only ever had to do that with Russia. We’ve always treated China as a lesser included case. As we mentioned in the piece, historically, China’s had maybe a dozen silos or a couple dozen silos. Slow liquid-fueled ICBMs take hours to get ready, potentially. Now, they’re developing these silos where they can put solid fuel, large ICBMs, and put lots of warheads on each of those ICBMs, and it creates hundreds of new targets that the United States has to think about. The reason silo ICBMs are so significant, of course, is that given the hardness, given the fact that they’re underground, given the fact that they’re way in the hinterlands: these aren’t easy things for us to engage with conventional weapons. You traditionally need a hard-target kill ability to go after ICBM silos. And so China producing all of these silos, putting ICBMs in them and loading warheads on them, which I think they’re going to do progressively as they build their warhead stockpile, is going to create this challenge for the United States in the coming five and ten years, where we just may not have enough weapons available to both convince China that they shouldn’t engage in limited nuclear use or engage in a conflict with Taiwan that could escalate, while also being engaged with a Russia potentially in a European conflict as well. As Vipin mentioned, if China had chosen to put all these new warheads on submarines or at air bases, that’s a conventional problem. The United States probably doesn’t need to worry about those beyond what we already do today, but they specifically chose to do silos.

VIPIN NARANG

It creates unprecedented dilemmas for our force posture. You can’t treat Russia and China in isolation anymore, because if we are in a deep crisis or conflict with Russia, China has regional revisionist ambitions, and it may seize that opportunity to start the music, in which case you will have to be forced to deter both in theater and in terms of strategic escalation at the same time, and it’s not as if you have the luxury of saying, “Well, if I’m in a crisis with Russia, I can just ignore China,” or, “If I’m in a crisis with China, I can ignore Russia.” So, you have to think for the first time about what it means to have sufficient capability and to implement what is our enduring strategy. We go to some length to explain why we believe the enduring strategy, which prioritizes an option for damage limitation—just an option by the way; It’s not a requirement for damage, it’s an option for damage limitation—to preserve American and allied lives and to limit the damage to the U.S. homeland and allies is still the preferable strategy, as opposed to when you hear a shift in strategy to counterpopulation targeting, right? Just city-busters.

Well, that exposes the United States. If you don’t destroy Russian or Chinese capabilities or hold them at risk, then you’ve just exposed the U.S. homeland and allied territory to massive reprisal that could end society as we know it. So, we prioritize this concept of meaningful damage limitation, which has been enduring U.S. strategy. And our recommendations, I think, settle on: this doesn’t require having more nuclear weapons than Russia and China combined, because that’s not how that strategy works, right? It’s not a warhead count. It’s: do you have sufficient capability to induce, in both Moscow and Beijing’s minds, that they will not have enough capability to achieve their political-military objectives? And that isn’t a math that requires the combined total warheads, right? So, it’s a modest increase, we argue, to implement this strategy. It’s not an arms race.

And by the way, we’re not the ones racing. The Chinese and the Russians are already dead down the straightaway, and we’re stuck in the starting block. So, this criticism that we’re promoting an arms race, I think, is sort of misplaced. But I mean this is why China creates dilemmas for our strategy.

HUGH EAKIN

I think that’s a really key point and to be clear, the counterforce targeting, which is the existing model as you’re describing it, the arsenal is aimed at damage limitation by matching targets of the adversaries’ nuclear force. So you want to be able to eliminate the force. We’re not targeting Russian cities or Chinese cities, and that would be a shift in strategy that some argue, I take it, would allow the force not to have to grow. And the other assumption is—which you challenge—that if we stick to the existing strategy, we’re going to have to essentially double the force; we have to have enough to match China and Russia combined. Can you just walk us through why that isn’t actually accurate, and it’s a more complicated equation?

PRANAY VADDI

I think there’s a bit of a straw man that’s used. So, when Vipin and I, people like us, who are advocating for essentially retaining what the United States has done for the last six or seven decades, have this damage limitation objective, in addition to sufficient forces to be able to deter a second adversary, I think maybe we need to be a little more specific. We’re not talking about doubling the force. We’re not talking about Russia, China plus one. Really, what the United States needs to be able to do under this strategy is ensure that the prompt nuclear weapons of Russia and China are held at risk. Submarines, aircraft, the sort of tactical theater–range missiles, that sort of thing: a lot of those are things that can be targeted using different types of capabilities. They don’t necessarily need U.S. nuclear capabilities. Some of them do, some of them don’t. So the reason that we are suggesting that there might need to be more deployed U.S. nuclear weapons is because of China’s silos. Those are prompt nuclear weapons on ICBMs. They can get out of the ground quickly if China has adequate warning, and they can shower the United States or allied territory with warheads. Those are the types of things that you need to focus on in a strategy that’s based on damage limitation. But the fact that China has 1,500 warheads doesn’t mean we need to target every single one of those warheads with a U.S. nuclear weapon. Ten of those warheads might be on a single missile. Two hundred of those warheads might be on a single SSBM that an attack submarine could sink. So, I think that having to break down the math, it’s not just linear numbers. It is apples, oranges, and pears that you have to think about as well.

VIPIN NARANG

I think a lot of even nuclear experts are either willfully misleading or ignorant about their targeting strategy, which is the United States uses its strategic warheads to hold at risk a certain subset of delivery systems in the adversary—not adversary warheads. So, for example, if Russia were to upload onto its existing delivery system—so, Russia has 1,550 warheads approximately deployed on its existing delivery systems—it could double that to 3,000, and it wouldn’t change a single thing about our posture. We would not have to increase or deploy a number of warheads if Russia decided to go to 3,000 deployed warheads on its existing delivery systems. What does change our calculation is, as Pranay said, the Chinese ICBM silos: not the SSBMs, not the bomber force, but the ICBM silos. So, that’s driving the math here, and it’s not a warhead count, right? It’s not, “Oh, Russia has 3,000 deployed, so we need to have 3,000 deployed.” The strategy is, I think, more nuanced and sophisticated than that, and I think the response I have to those who are allergic to the idea of more deployed weapons—remember, we’re not even talking about growing the stockpile of our existing nuclear forces; we’re talking about moving some weapons from the stockpile to the deployed force to be able to strengthen deterrence to reduce the risks that nuclear weapons are used and to make extended deterrence more credible, to stop our allies from thinking about nuclear weapons and maintain alliance cohesion.

So, I think a lot of folks say they love the allies but then aren’t willing to do what it takes to actually assure the allies, particularly when it doesn’t require building more nuclear weapons or engaging in an arms race. And so I think a good faith debate on this is important and necessary, but it needs to be in good faith, right? I think some of the accusations made about how U.S. targeting policy works are misplaced and misguided.

PRANAY VADDI

Core to the United States retaining this position in the world is going to be the maintenance of this strategy. I’m not saying that the United States needs to have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, for all the reasons that Vipin mentioned, I think. We have a smaller arsenal overall than Russia right now, and that’s okay. We tend to try to compare ourselves. Sometimes, people see Russia developing a capability, and they argue the United States needs the exact same thing. That’s not what we’re doing in this article. We’re essentially saying that at a strategic level, the United States needs to retain these core components of its nuclear strategy. And frankly, it’s much more important now that they retain these core components, because underneath what undergirds U.S. nuclear strategy are these separate policies related to extended deterrence, modernizing nuclear arsenal, nonproliferation and arms control, and the ability to pursue arms reductions in the future. We have to retain our nuclear strategy in order to advance our policies in all of those areas still, in addition to, as I mentioned, trying to preserve the international order against revisionist powers that are huge, wealthy, have lots of nuclear weapons, and are willing to wield them to try to take over smaller countries next to them.

HUGH EAKIN

Another key point in your article, and you mentioned it here when you talk about Russia, is that the threat posed by Russia now is quite different, in a way, than China, and we’ve seen that in the case of Ukraine. Many people will have followed this, that Russia on the back foot, towards the end of 2022, is really threatening nuclear use in a way that is new or has not been seen in decades. And what is so alarming about that, as I think you point out in the article, is that this is a different conception of nuclear strategy. This is an offensive conception of shielding some kind of conventional action, with implications for other powers. Can you just talk about that and why is that it’s not just about Ukraine, this is a larger issue?

VIPIN NARANG

When I was a graduate student and everyone told me not to work on nuclear strategy because it was dead, I cut my teeth on India and Pakistan. And Pakistan has a very acute security dilemma from its perspective, which is a conventionally superior nuclear India. And it’s in the strategic competition it believes with India, and developed a nuclear strategy that over time has enabled subconventional aggression, terrorism against the Indian homeland—deep in the Indian homeland, right? Bombay in 2008, this latest attack in Pahalgam—and uses the threat of nuclear weapons to deter conventional retaliation. And so Pakistan was like the “OG” for showing the world how a reliance on nuclear weapons can enable an offensive strategy.

Now for Pakistan, it was really subconventional; it was terrorism. But Russia, with the tables now turned, being the conventionally inferior power, but having sort of localized advantages in its near abroad, I think realized that it could attempt territorial revision and then use the threat quickly, and then use the threat of nuclear use, of limited nuclear use. It has this inventory of up to 2,000, treaty-unrestricted, unaccounted for, non-strategic nuclear weapons—those are not accounted for by New START—and can use that huge inventory to deter NATO unwinding of its conventional aggression, and it’s sort of used that playbook in Crimea, but then to greater effect in 2022. And we sort of reference this in the article, but [former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan] and [former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl] have all talked about the October 2022 crisis—the fall 2022 crisis, because it actually spanned beyond just October. And that was this moment where there was a fear that Russian lines would collapse, particularly in the south of Ukraine, and it might resort credibly to non-strategic nuclear weapons use to stave off that collapse, or at least try to reverse it. It’s tempting to be complacent, or at least optimistic that nuclear weapon use didn’t occur then, and [Russian President Vladimir Putin] didn’t reach for non-strategic nuclear weapons use, but I would only point out that the conditions where he would use them weren’t met. So, it wasn’t a fair test about Putin’s risk tolerance to use nuclear weapons, and I would argue it didn’t dissipate through the course of the war and is not over. 

I would not put it beyond Putin to sort of violate the “taboo” if it suited his interests, or Russia more broadly. And so fast-forward to China, you’re thinking about a Taiwan invasion, and you look at what China is developing in terms of not just a strategic force, but also its theater nuclear forces, alongside this huge suite of conventional ballistic missiles.This is a China that is developing a forced posture to enable the same strategy against Taiwan or the South China Sea or anywhere else in its region, where they can attempt territorial revision or aggression and then use the threat of limited first use to deter the United States and its allies from unwinding that aggression.

So I think this is now a feature of the new nuclear age that we were not really accustomed to during the Cold War because we were the conventionally inferior power during the Cold War, so we were the ones threatening to go first. Now, it’s our adversaries, and that has huge implications. Oh, and by the way, don’t sleep on North Korea—same problem.

PRANAY VADDI

And I think as Vipin highlights, this really crystallized if you look at the fall 2022 crisis and you look at the media discussion about, “Is Ukraine’s security assistance going? Is it going to include [M1 Abrams tanks]? Is it going to include F-16s? Why is the United States being so slow?” Et cetera. It’s really hard to piece together something significant that has really happened here, which is that we saw a credible threat of Russian nuclear use. We saw that sort of crisis abate because conditions weren’t met, as Vipin described. And then you saw everyone just get back into the game. You saw the United States and European allies actually provide more and more—cross their own red lines, frankly—and provide more and more types of assistance to Ukraine that allowed Ukraine to strike deeper into Russia.

You saw Russia essentially shrug, suspend the New START Treaty, continue to issue nuclear threats and use nuclear rhetoric and raise the temperature on the kind of nuclear part of the conversation internationally, and also revise its nuclear doctrine, saying that it’s willing to attack nuclear-weapon states that are supporting non–nuclear-weapon states whom Russia is engaged in a conflict with, clearly a way to describe the United States, United Kingdom, and France, who are supporting Ukraine and its war against Russia. So, this is a harbinger of the age that we’re entering where we’re going to see nuclear weapons intermixed in these conflicts, perhaps proxy conflicts, perhaps direct conflicts between the United States and its adversaries, while everyone still tries to do what they need to do in terms of security assistance, conventional war fighting, et cetera, and the nuclear risk is going to always be a part of any confrontation now that involves one of these two adversaries.

HUGH EAKIN

As you look at the nuclear force and thinking about how to strategically align it with these kinds of current threats, are there options or ways of structuring the force that would have given the United States different options in 2022, had that crisis happened and had we already made certain changes? Or would there have been a way to stave off this kind of threat? What is the sort of approach for that, given that we’re likely to see this again?

VIPIN NARANG

I mean, one point is that decisions made now about capabilities don’t come to fruition for at least a decade, if not longer, even with regional capabilities, which can be fielded quicker. But the fall 2022 crisis crystallized, for me, this Congressional sort of push and requirement, then, that the Department of Defense, along with Department of Energy develop a dedicated regional capability, primarily for the maritime environment, in the Indo-Pacific. Because for me, the one lesson was: okay, you may not be able to develop a capability anytime soon that changes our flexibility in Europe, because we just consolidated down to the modernized [B61-12 nuclear bomb], [tactical B61-12], and [F-35 Lightning II fighter jets], and that is fit for purpose now.

It did suggest, look, we need to think about what comes next in Europe, and Pranay and I mentioned, both an air launch capability or ground launch capability to provide more flexibility as Russia develops more sophisticated integrated air and missile defense, especially, because the B61 has to be delivered to target; it’s a gravity bomb. But in the Indo-Pacific, our cabinet, as we say, was pretty bare, and you don’t want a fight in the Indo-Pacific where the president’s only choice, if we’re sort of losing a conventional conflict, or winning a conventional conflict, and China reaches for a theater nuclear capability. You don’t want any president to ever be in a position where the only choice is to go big or go home.

And so, it really galvanized, I think, in my mind, the idea that we needed a dedicated regional deterrence capability for the Indo-Pacific, which we’ve never really needed before, because we never faced this threat of regional employment by China or North Korea until the last five years. They’re different geographies. You can’t use the same capability in land Europe that works there, in the Indo-Pacific because the tyranny of geography makes an aircraft-delivered gravity bomb not all that credible in the Indo-Pacific. So, I think that was the real lesson from October 2022 for me, and the idea that you always want to be focused on: what are we trying to deter? Who are we trying to deter, and where? And because we are extending deterrence and facing adversaries across two vast oceans, nobody else does that. And so the mix of capabilities that we need to deter and assure is different from what China and Russia have. So we always want to be attuned to that, and that’s what Pranay and I worked on in the last couple of years in the administration.

PRANAY VADDI

And the relevance of regional nuclear capabilities paces this shift in foreign policy objectives of the adversaries. I think in the Obama administration, we didn’t really talk that much about the need for loyal nuclear capabilities beyond modernizing the gravity bomb in Europe that Vipin mentioned, the B61, because we weren’t really worried about conventional war being initiated under a nuclear shadow, say, for maybe North Korea—but even then, North Korea’s arsenal is very different 15 years ago than it is today. Now, that’s all we talk about, right? Especially in the nuclear community, we’re worried—and frankly in the defense community writ large—we’re worried about a China attempted military reunification with Taiwan; we’re worried about what Putin is going to do after Ukraine; or what more can Putin do in Ukraine; or what will he do against Moldova; or what could he do against the NATO ally?

And all of this is going to be predicated by these large, nuclear-armed adversaries reminding the world as they embark upon some sort of ambitious or aggressive military campaign or political and military campaign against a smaller neighbor, reminding the world frequently, “Hey, we have a lot of nuclear weapons, and we’re going to parade them in our capital cities, and we’re going to wield them as necessary to keep the United States out of our neck of the woods.” This is where regional nuclear capabilities have become more important, unfortunately, because we’re worried about these conflicts being initiated perhaps at the same time, perhaps sequentially, or perhaps one at a time in parts of the world that are far away.

We’re lucky in Europe to have a NATO alliance and a coordination body at NATO, something that Vipin led during his time at the Defense Department, to talk about nuclear weapons issues with 30-plus allies all at once. We do not have that in Asia. We don’t have any forward-deployed weapons. We’re extremely reliant on what will be attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines for nuclear deterrence in the theater, and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon because the United States is unlikely to deploy B61s and F-35s like we have in Europe on Taiwan or South Korea or Japan in the near future. We’re at a position right now in the next five to ten years where the United States is struggling to modernize the strategic nuclear arsenal and struggling even more to introduce new capabilities quickly.

And so something that can help with the regional nuclear deterrence question, we shouldn’t be too picky as to what that is. If we could get an air launch capability on an F-35, because we already have tons of F-35s, I think that would be better and faster. The question is can the United States do it? And we have a lot of doubts that our complex is able to support a quick change, though I do think that’s something that we worked on together in the last administration and certainly the new administration should work on as well: to figure out a way to get our complex to be a little bit more responsive to this rapidly changing geopolitical environment.

VIPIN NARANG

And I think one thing for listeners that is important to emphasize is that the modernization program was conceived at a time when none of these challenges were envisioned. And so the idea that the modernization program is going to be sufficient in terms of types and numbers, I think, on its face is litigable at the very least. So there was the launcher cliff, the consolidation of the B61-12. And so the idea that it’s sacrosanct, given challenges that we didn’t anticipate or account for, I think, needs to be reopened, and that’s one of the points of the article, too. We need to think about, very strategically, what do we need to deter and assure and not be just beholden to decisions that were made 15 years ago in a completely different environment?

HUGH EAKIN

One of the great things about your article is the final section where you kind of step back and say, “We’re in the world of the possible. What can we do?” and you lay out some really important solutions I want to talk about in a second. But before we do that, let’s talk about extended deterrence for a minute, because I think that here again, we have a new situation, and you’ve described two acute pressures on extended deterrence. One is that suddenly we’re in this world of regional threats that we haven’t really seen before, and the other, of course, is that the United States is in a new position in which there are questions about its ability to sustain that extended deterrence umbrella, which only the United States has done for 80 years, and can you just lay out that challenge and what are the key issues here?

VIPIN NARANG

I think there are two challenges for extended deterrence. We both argue that extended deterrence is not just good for allies; it’s good for the United States and it’s good for the world, right? It is our greatest nonproliferation tool. I would argue that of our 34 or 35 formal allies, the lone exception for the one that decided that it would not live under the U.S. extended deterrence umbrella was France. The United Kingdom got nuclear weapons before extended deterrence architecture really evolved, and it was sort of a legacy of the Manhattan Project. So France and [former French President Charles de Gaulle] is the only leader who decided, “You know what? I’m going to go on my own.” But otherwise it’s been remarkably successful.

And right now, I would say the question about our ability to maintain extended deterrence is actually easier. We know what we need to do to maintain the credibility of our extended deterrent to convince adversaries and our allies that we can successfully limit damage to them and to the homeland in two theaters. That’s actually conceptually a lot easier. I think the real questions are about our willingness. And we’re seeing a strain in U.S. domestic politics that, whether it’s prioritizers who focus on China—if you’re in NATO, there still a real question about your commitment to the extended deterrence in NATO. And then there’s the isolationist wing, which is just “come home America.”

For 75 years, we’ve had a bipartisan commitment to our extended deterrence commitments, and we’ve had questions of credibility in the past, but not of this flavor. It’s often been about specific systems, and Republicans and Democrats both agreed on the importance of extended deterrence, but disagreed sometimes about how to best obtain it. Now, there are real questions about whether we should even do it, and if we do it, should we prioritize one theater over the other? And that has huge implications, I think, for not just nuclear wonks. Really, our big takeaway from the article, I hope, is that this is important to American foreign policy writ large. This isn’t a debate for Pranay, myself, and you; our most senior leaders, our presidents, our secretaries, our national security advisors have skin in the game about the future of American foreign policy and grand strategy here. Do we think our commitments to Europe still matter? Does Europe still matter for American grand strategy? Can we walk and chew gum at the same time? I think we’re of the view that we can. We’ve done it in the past. And this idea of prioritizing is important, but it doesn’t mean abandoning—prioritization does not mean abandoning NATO. And I want to be clear: I’m not sure the Trump administration is going to do that. I think there’s still a debate as to what our grand strategic posture is going to be, but I think those are the fears in Europe. Having just come back from Europe, I think the fear is they hear the word prioritization, and for them, that is a code word for abandonment of Europe. And I think we both believe that that is not fit for a superpower and that we can maintain our credible extended deterrence agreements in both theaters at the same time.

PRANAY VADDI

The only point I’ll add is, and Vipin and I have been saying this a lot but, if setting aside the kind of unpredictability of the current administration, what allies think about Washington, if the difference between a U.S. ally proliferating and beginning their own nuclear program, and potentially getting into a conflict as a result of it, or staying under the extended deterrence umbrella, is the United States deploying 200 more warheads on its ICBMs or 300 more warheads on its submarines at sea—not growing the arsenal per se, but deploying more warheads, because we’re trying to deal with these two large nuclear armed adversaries at the same time, while convincing our allies that we’re able to deal with both of those adversaries at the same time—if that prevents an ally from going nuclear and keeps the number of states that possess nuclear weapons where it is today, you do that deal ten times out of ten.

VIPIN NARANG

I would take that deal any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

PRANAY VADDI

We fluctuated our nuclear arsenal over the course of the Cold War, in part because we were just pumping out warheads like crazy before we even knew what to do with them, but also eventually in furtherance of a pretty tight nuclear strategy that required us to do more and have a larger arsenal than we would if we were just worried about defending the U.S. homeland, but probably convinced these countries that, “You know what? The United States actually is interested in having our back, and based on their capabilities, can have our back.” That overall strategy comes under strain because of what China is doing, but it’s not out of reach, and what we’re advocating for is not a massive change to the U.S. nuclear posture.

I think there are some who’d think we need to do that, but what Vipin and I are most worried about is this ten-year timeframe before we have a new submarine come online, new ICBMs put in silos in the ground, a new bomber that hopefully will be deployed on time—I think out of the three, that’s the one that’s most time. But before you’re going to get all these modern capabilities to replace legacy systems, we’ve got to figure out what we’re able to do for the next decade when we think China is basically accelerating its warhead increase and its ability to deploy ICBMs in those silos while the United States is facing this kind of trough in our modernization program where we’re spending lots of money, but new capabilities aren’t coming out quite yet.

So uploading a few warheads from my perspective is a pretty easy thing for the United States to do. And you can also do that in the context of an arms control agreement, to where we ended up with our article. Vipin and I are not coming out against arms control; far from it. We think arms control will be extremely useful in helping manage the international environment that we’re entering.

HUGH EAKIN

Just finally, during your time in the Biden administration, you began some of these steps that you push for in the article, and call for others. What do you see sort of in the near term—the next five years—what are the key steps that could be made? I mean, given where we are now with budgets and what is possible with existing systems that could be deployed differently, or ones that are in the near term available, what does a sort of strategy for the immediate future look like?

PRANAY VADDI

I think the first thing that we need to see in the Trump administration is whether they’re going to maintain some continuity with the nuclear policy and strategy of the Biden administration. Are they focused on this two-peer problem, if you will? I don’t really think two-peer is a good way to describe it. Essentially, how are we managing deterrence against two large, powerful nuclear armed adversaries, major powers, in Russia and China? If the Trump administration agrees that we need to be able to deter Russia and China together, both with our nuclear arsenal, but as an overall defense strategy, as well, then they need to take some prudent steps. They need to make some decisions. How much risk are they willing to accept of this China silo problem while also retaining the ability to come to the aid of allies in Europe if Russia decides to aggress against a NATO ally? That might involve needing to put some more warheads on ICBMs, as well as more warheads on the Trident SLBMs, the submarine-launched ballistic missiles that are on our ballistic missile submarines at sea every day.

They also need to see if they can accelerate a regional nuclear capability like the sea-launched cruise missile that we’ve talked about previously. Maybe they can get a version of that out, as we mentioned in our article, in a few years, as opposed to ten years. I’ll believe it when I see it, but to me, those are the types of steps that they could take to try to shore up nuclear deterrence. And all of this is going to be kicked off by deciding on an approach to manage the end of the New START Treaty in February of next year. The president in January, upon entering office, raised some eyebrows when he said he wanted to pursue denuclearization talks with Russia and China. I think a lot of people who focus on arms control policy on the outside are wondering what that could look like.

I think that the United States and Russia will probably at some point have a conversation about what they should do about New START expiring. I don’t think that there’ll be a new treaty. I think obviously what we’re seeing today with Ukraine policy and the continuation of the conflict there means that it’s going to be really hard for the two sides to sit down and have a meaningful strategic stability discussion that could include an arms control treaty at the end of it. But the two sides may agree that they shouldn’t really upload a ton or that they should try to keep some sort of limit on the number of warheads they each deploy.

What the United States has to do is make sure it builds in some headroom so that if President Trump decides that the way he wants to manage this multiple deterrent environment is by having more warheads on ICBMs and SSBNs on a daily basis, he needs to make sure that any arm control agreement—and whether that’s a political agreement or a legally binding agreement—any new agreement with Russia allows for that headroom. And then as Vipin mentioned, if the Russians also deploy a few more warheads to match ours, that should be okay from our perspective because we’ve already got the Russia deterrence challenge more or less figured out. What we don’t have figured out yet is how to deal with those silos in China.

VIPIN NARANG

I think the actual options are for the administration to work out. I’d certainly think, in terms of priorities, managing the launcher cliff and the sea leg is the most important because those are the most important capability for holding at risk Chinese silos; we have to commit to the Sentinel program. All of that, I think, we largely all agree on. I think the most important thing is a commitment from the administration that while China and Russia are sprinting down the straightaway, we can’t stay in the starting block. We did and laid the foundation so that these options could be executed, but we didn’t execute any of the options because we left it and believed that the decision space should be left for the next administration. And now I think if you had asked me at the end of last year, 2024, whether the Trump administration had come in and actually moved faster than we did, I would’ve said yes, but they have not yet. And a lot of that is because I think people are still coming in, but the president himself—he and President Biden probably don’t agree on a lot of things, but I think they do agree that nuclear weapons are an existential threat to humanity. And so the most important thing to reduce the risk that Russia or China or North Korea use nuclear weapons, short of the denuclearization talks that I think he kept referring to in the campaign, is ensuring that the U.S. deterrent is not vulnerable and strengthening that is, I think, the most important thing now, until the time comes when Russia and China are willing to sit down and talk in good faith about arms control. And so I think the most important thing right now is a commitment from the administration to not stay in the starting block, because that’s where we still are.

HUGH EAKIN

Vipin, Pranay, this was a great discussion. I guess I can’t help but ask a final question from two nuclear experts. What keeps you up at night? What is the most urgent thing on your mind when you look at this landscape of rapidly shifting threats and our ability to respond to them?

PRANAY VADDI

Honestly, I’m still catching up on sleep, so nothing really keeps me up at night. But I will say, to answer your question, my biggest concern, of course, is that the administration, in this sort of ongoing debate internally between prioritizers and isolationists and status quo America Firsters, whatever you want to call to various factions, that there is increasing doubt over the next few years among allies that the United States is actually a security guarantor that is willing to use its nuclear weapons to defend them. Because I think a world in which friendly countries and frankly unfriendly countries or non-aligned countries all decide that the United States has withdrawn and is not going to be not just a superpower, but somebody who is interested in affairs around the world—which is not just about our nuclear arsenal by the way; it’s about the fundamental “what do you think the United States’ role should be in the world?” If those countries see the United States as withdrawing, my concern is that we’re really in that “Lord of the Flies,” might-makes-right world, and beyond the umbrella allies of the United States, you’ll have a lot of countries that decide maybe they need to pursue their own nuclear weapons just because they’re sick of having disadvantage against a country next to them where there’s been ethnocentric conflict, unresolved border disputes, you name it. These sort of sub-regional issues between countries that we thought had mostly been set to the side over the course of the post–Cold War period could end up spiking again, except with nuclear weapons involved. That’s really what I worry about the most. If we get this moment wrong, you’re going to see a lot more countries possessing nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons programs in the coming five and ten years than the decade preceding it.

VIPIN NARANG

Yeah, I fully agree with that, maybe unsurprisingly, mostly because it would be a self-inflicted wound. You don’t want to get in the mind of Putin or [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei], Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping. One thing we can control is the credibility of our own extended deterrence architecture, and if we let the nuclear umbrella get leaky or fall apart, it’ll be a self-inflicted wound. And I don’t know how anyone can look at the conflict between India and Pakistan, four days in May, the 12-day war, Israel-Iran, and say, “You know what would be a great idea? If Poland or South Korea got nuclear weapons next.”

I just fundamentally think that it undermines our freedom of maneuver. It creates more risk in the world. They’re at risk of getting killed by either North Korea or China or Russia, respectively, and it’s just more instability in the world. And we can avoid it through very easy and cost-effective measures, because we know how to do it, and the allies want it, and it’s good for American security. So, this would be a tragic self-inflicted wound, and it’s something we can control and right now, I agree with Pranay. That is the biggest concern, and I know that’s the concern, particularly in Europe and in South Korea. I think those allies are particularly nervous at the moment.

PRANAY VADDI

We have to get the easy stuff right.

HUGH EAKIN

Thanks again, Vipin and Pranay. What a great discussion. I urge all listeners to read their article in the new Foreign Affairs, “How to Survive the New Nuclear Age.” Great speaking to you.

VIPIN NARANG

Thanks, Hugh. Really appreciate it. Thanks to Foreign Affairs and to you for all your hard work, and really appreciate the time and the opportunity to do the podcast.

PRANAY VADDI

Hugh, thanks a lot. It was good talking to you. We’re happy to do this again sometime, and I hope everyone goes and reads our piece in Foreign Affairs.