 Is it imperative that the world eliminate all nuclear weapons? That was the topic of a live debate hosted by the SOHO Forum on September 19th, 2022. Ward Wilson is the author of five myths about nuclear weapons and president of Realist Revolt. He argued that nuclear weapons have almost no practical application and it's time to end world leaders' fascination with their awe-inspiring power. Peter Husey is director of strategic deterrent studies at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and president of his own defense consulting firm Geostrategic Analysis. He argued that we can't get to nuclear abolition without getting other nuclear powers on board, including Russia and China, both of whom see nuclear weapons as essential tools in their foreign policy agendas. The debate was held at the Sheen Center in downtown Manhattan and was moderated by SOHO Forum director Gene Epstein. Again, the resolution reads, it is imperative to abolish nuclear weapons. Ward Wilson for the affirmative. Ward, please come to the stage. Yes, she will. Let's just sit down for a moment. Yeah, yeah, okay. And taking the negative, Peter Husey, Peter, please come to the stage. Jane, please close the voting. Ward, you have 15 minutes to defend the resolution. Ward, take it away. Actually, this whole debate is moot because nuclear weapons will always exist. Here is NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for WMD Policy Guy Roberts. Unfortunately, the weapons we've invented cannot be uninvented. We must live with them. The bomb is with us to stay. So, there it is. Did you hear it? That's how advocates for nuclear weapons have been winning the debate for 70 years. They stack the deck. They frame the issue in such a way so as to make any other option impossible. I spent years asking myself, how can I possibly disinvent nuclear weapons? Maybe we could put the information in a special vault with five different locks and then limit the access. But in the end, I kicked myself for being so stupid. Disinvention is an imaginary process. It doesn't exist. Name one technology you know of that's been disinvented. So, that's how it's done. They're asking us to figure out how to eliminate nuclear weapons and the only tool they're giving us to do it with is an imaginary tool. Here, son, dig a hole with this imaginary shovel. The argument is so plausible because it's absolutely true. You can't disinvent nuclear weapons. But saying nuclear weapons will always exist because they can't be disinvented is like me saying I will always be alive because I can't be reverse-born. It's true that I can't be reverse-born, but sadly that doesn't mean that I'll always be alive. It turns out there's another way for me to stop living. And it turns out there's another way for nuclear weapons to go away. One that the advocates for nuclear weapons apparently don't want you to think about. Nuclear weapons will go away, of course, the same way any other type of technology goes away, which is to say they will be abandoned. We know from 6,000 years of human civilization that we constantly improve our tools. That technology, in other words, evolves. And technological evolution has a standard cycle with four phases. Invention, adoption, use, and abandonment. History shows that technology gets abandoned based on utility and danger. If something isn't useful and it's also dangerous, it goes. So nuclear weapons will go away when people agree that they are not very useful and they're very dangerous, which makes sense. I give you a pistol that's wildly inaccurate. You can't hit a thing except by accident. You might still keep it because, you know, what's the harm? But if I give you a pistol that's wildly inaccurate and also has a tendency to blow up in my hand and kill me, you'll throw that pistol away. Because nobody keeps technology that is both virtually useless and very dangerous. Nobody. So the outline of my argument today is straightforward. First, I'm going to show that nuclear weapons have very little military utility, not very useful. And second, I'm going to explain why nuclear deterrence will inevitably fail, very dangerous. Now, before you ask me, but won't we be vulnerable once we lay down all our weapons? Let me just say a word about how this will work. Of course, we're not going to lay down our weapons unilaterally. Let me say that again. We are never going to surrender our weapons until everyone else does at the same time. The problem isn't the weapons. The problem is their exaggerated reputation. We have exaggerated their influence and importance. Somehow we've come to think that they embody God-like power. But they're actually clumsy, blundering things that are virtually useless, dangerous as hell, but with hardly any practical application. The critical task, therefore, is to deflate their reputation. That's the crucial first step. Admit that the weapons are objectively not that useful and are dangerous, and a treaty to outlaw them becomes easier than we've ever dared to hope. So we don't have to trust our enemies. We don't need confidence-building measures. We don't have to lay down our weapons unilaterally. What we have to do is face the reality and get others to face the reality that nuclear weapons are not very good weapons that are enormously dangerous. So let's turn to military utility. Nuclear weapons have been called the ultimate weapon for so long, it's hard to think of them any other way, but viewed objectively, the reality doesn't match the reputation. The truth is, their size gets in the way. You can't use them against frontline troops because they're so close together. If you drop a bomb on the enemy, you'll kill some of your own soldiers. They're difficult to use against targets further behind the lines because of radiation. A nuclear explosion can spread lethal radiation up to 25 miles in an hour. The radioactive particles can stick on surfaces and remain for days, and if the wind is blowing, you can have dangerous fallout that travels hundreds or even thousands of miles downwind. Using nuclear weapons on the battlefield means radiation will probably kill some of your own soldiers. The reason nuclear weapons have been used for almost eight decades is not that there is some kind of moral taboo against their use. It's that they have very few sensible uses in war. Look at the history. The United States considered using nuclear weapons during the Korean War. Ike wanted to, but when he asked his military experts, they came back and said on military grounds that it wasn't a good idea. When the French soldiers were surrounded by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, there were discussions among the Eisenhower administration officials about giving three tactical nuclear weapons to the French, but eventually it was deemed to be impractical. When we were fighting in Vietnam and our troops were surrounded at Que Son, General Westmoreland asked for Washington to consider using nuclear weapons, but Washington said no. At one time, plans for defending Europe, our plans, were built around the use of thousands of battlefield nuclear weapons. But in 1991, George H. W. Bush, Bush Sr. scrapped that strategy, pulling all but a symbolic handful of those weapons out. And when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney suggested that the use of nuclear weapons be explored in the run-up to the Gulf War, the study produced by Colin Powell, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was so damning that the idea was unceremoniously dropped and all copies of the report collected and destroyed. 75-plus years of non-use are not an accident. Military leaders, when given the chance to save lives and win wars, have consistently decided against using nuclear weapons. We may feel attached to them as symbols, but as weapons, we seem to have already abandoned them. Which isn't surprising. If you stop and think about it, the whole trend in the evolution of weapons is away from large, clumsy weapons and toward smaller, smarter, more accurate, more discriminate weapons. In the story of weapons evolution, nuclear weapons increasingly look like dinosaurs, so deterrents. Some nuclear weapons advocates admit that there are a few military uses for nuclear weapons, but they say nuclear weapons are really only for deterrents, for convincing our adversaries not to attack us by threats of retaliation. There's no question that deterrents can work some of the time. The problem is that somewhere in the back of our minds, we all know that it is bound to eventually fail. Consider the Cuban Missile Crisis. Saturday, October 27, 1962, at the height of the crisis, both sides are on hair trigger alert, an American U-2 spy plane is collecting air samples over the North Pole. It's guidance system malfunctions and the pilot flies off course, 300 miles inside the Soviet Union. It's the height of the crisis. The Soviets immediately scramble MiGs to shoot it down. The U.S. scrambles F-102s to find it and protect it. But because it's the height of the crisis, U.S. forces are at DEF CON-2, which is one level below nuclear war. Air Force protocol at that time dictated that at DEF CON-2, all the fighters in that command had their normal missiles, air-to-air missiles removed, and nuclear air-to-air missiles installed. So the only weapons those American fighters had, as they roared towards the Soviet Union, were nuclear missiles. Those two sets of fighters had found each other and fought it out. There would have been a nuclear explosion over the Soviet Union and undoubtedly a nuclear war. They didn't find each other. But that wasn't the magic of nuclear deterrence that prevented war. Robert McNamara, Kennedy's Defense Secretary, when asked years later how we got through the Cuban Missile Crisis said, it was luck and he was right. That's a sobering thought. Nuclear deterrence failed during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But on that day, like the other days when nuclear deterrence has failed, we were lucky. The fate of civilization, your fate and my fate, was decided by chance. The problem with nuclear deterrence is that it has an element built into it that can fail catastrophically, a crucial component that has a history of failure. And that component is us, human beings. Human beings are fallible, not just frontline soldiers, but leaders as well. No one is perfect. Nuclear deterrence involves human beings. Human beings make the threats. Other human beings hear the threats and evaluate them and decide how to respond. Nuclear deterrence isn't a machine that runs by itself in a corner. We are involved at every step. So if human beings are prone to folly, and we are, and if nuclear deterrence involves human beings, and it does, then nuclear deterrence is inherently flawed. It will fail. One day our luck will run out and we'll end up in a devastating war. It's not a question of if. It's just a question of when. So there it is. The two criteria for abandoning nuclear weapons have been met. There is an objective, realist case for eliminating nuclear weapons. Because of the enormous danger that they pose, it is imperative to eliminate nuclear weapons. Thank you. Peter, who's he feeling negative? Take it away, Peter. I want to thank the Soho Forum for the honor of coming to talk with you. And I also want to thank Gene for his, said, write your speech, edit it, bring it down to 15 minutes, which I've done. So I apologize to you. I'm going to read my remarks, but I think you'll find them quite interesting. The subject today is, can you get to abolition from where we are today? Which is a world of multiple nuclear armed peer adversaries? No, for four reasons. First, the deterrence has risks, I understand that. But it demonstrably has prevented nuclear war for 70 years. Even as the number of conflicts over the past seven decades has risen appreciably. Second, nuclear deterrence has worked to such an extent that the average war deaths from 1911 to 1945 averaged 14,000 a day. But today, the number is 800. Third, and this is the most important, countries go to war commonly because folks fail to understand the extent to which nations will fight and why. And here, we are in danger of not understanding why China and Russia will fight. And in particular with nuclear weapons, let me quote Dr. Geith Payne, who recently wrote the following. The more significant new condition is that the leadership of Russia and China have world views that conflict sharply with that of the United States and its allies. Their quasi-alliance against the United States is designed to realize their goal of overturning the classical liberal world order. Both Russia and China show their willingness to exploit nuclear forces to pursue their expansionist goals and are challenging long-standing defensive U.S. deterrence red lines. What we now confront is the threatened use of nuclear weapons for preventionist purposes. Now remember, we are accustomed to thinking of deterrence as serving defensive purposes. But Russia and China's coercive nuclear first use threats are here and now. Any move toward abolition must factor this in. This is not Cold War deterrence, with which we are familiar. It is however unprecedented. This new deterrence dynamic is a real challenge because we have generally convinced ourselves that only irrational leaderships would consider the first use of nuclear weapons for expansionist purposes. References now to Putin as being unhinged follow the enduring U.S. tradition of labeling opponents who behave in shocking and disturbing ways as irrational. Such comments reflect only our lack of understanding of how differently opponents can define what is rational behavior. They do not buy into our enlightened interpretation of rationality. There is great comfort into projecting onto our opponents of what we think is rational. It means that Putin, nuclear bluffs must be just that, bluff. His threats must be bluff because actual nuclear employment would be irrational. Yet Russia and China's revanchious goals require not only violating U.S. red lines, their first use nuclear threats now demand that we rethink how best to deter in contemporary conditions. The priority deterrence question now follows from this discussion is new. Quote, how do you simultaneously deter two revanchious great powers that are driven by the common belief that their goals are of existential importance and that limited nuclear threats or use are the way to defeat defensive U.S. deterrent policies? And that brings me to a fourth point. While the nuclear firebreak has not been broken since 1945, war is certainly not going to disappear, which I agree with Ward about, but which makes stronger deterrence more, not less, imperative. Especially with the revanchious powers that are convinced nuclear weapons are the sole means to defeat U.S. conventional power. War is unfortunately the natural condition of humankind. But with the post-World War II architecture singularly achieved, the peace we have seen are the absence of great power war. Moscow and Peking want to wreck. The argument we have heard for the alternative abolition is that nuclear weapons are worthless because they have not only not stopped war, they cannot be tactically used in war. And thus there's no reason to hang on to them. And one has to be an idealist to think nuclear deterrence will always hold because if it doesn't hold, nuclear war could break out and we might all be dead. But if you can't get to abolition from where we are today, we have no choice in the interim but to keep deterrence because without nuclear deterrence, well, we might also be dead. Let's do some history. The U.S. deliberately took South Korea out of the scope of U.S. protection in 1949, in short, removing our nuclear umbrella from our rock allies. The Soviets and the DPRK thought we gave them a green light to invade. But still it isn't amazing. Stalin hid the Soviet role as he feared Truman would retaliate with nuclear weapons. In short, the U.S. took nuclear deterrence off the table in 1949, and the DPRK invaded in 1950. Conversely, and here I disagree with Ward, Eisenhower actually put deterrence back on the table, not only in the campaign of 1952, but in 1953 and six months later, the war ended. Now at the end of the Cold War in 1991, it was assumed liberal international rules would widely prevail. We were told it was the end of history. We were told war would be rare and certainly nuclear weapons were less than less, maybe not needed at all. It is true in 1991 and 1993, the U.S. and Russia agreed on a 90% reduction in our strategic nuclear weapons. But by 1997, the U.S. stopped production of the entire Reagan era nuclear modernization program. The high-class submarine was stopped, the peacekeeper missile was stopped, and the B-2 Marlin was stopped. And in the presidential nuclear initiative, George Bush 41 unilaterally eliminated almost all our tactical theater nuclear weapons from the world. The U.S. restraint was remarkable. Let me put it in context. The Reagan nuclear build was 502 what are called SNDVs, otherwise known as strategic nuclear delivery vehicles. We have 260 of them left, about half. Plus 41970s era minimum missiles and 401960s era B-52s. That's the 700 SNDVs we are allowed under new start. And when they're modernized at the end of 2042, our deterrent will have averaged 47 years old, a five-decade long holiday from nuclear modernization, which is triple the time of any previous modernizations. Now, despite this restraint, Putin in 1999 didn't get the message. He and Yeltsin put together an executive order calling for the deployment of 32 new long-range strategic nuclear systems from ICBMs, SLBMs, bombers, submarines, and cruise missiles to be fielded by 2020. He is now 89, in his words, 89.2% towards the goal. Our strategic commander thinks it's 89%. What is the Chinese comparative plan? 28 new long-range strategic nuclear weapons in the pipeline and being deployed. By comparison, the United States, when Barack Obama made a deal with Senator Kyle, we adopted five modernized systems in 2010, primarily because if we don't, we're going to go out of the nuclear business. Now, why after the end of the Cold War and numerous efforts that reset an assuming China's peaceful rise, do the Russia and Chinese build-up go forward as planned? The former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Hayden, has told us Putin and Yeltsin adopted a new Russian nuclear strategy called Escalate to Win. Throughout the early Cold War, deterrence strategy assumed Russia accepted mutual vulnerability, what we called mutual shared destruction or mad. The Kennedy administration moved to a more flexible response. And subsequent administrations moved to a counter-force strategy, which you don't blow up cities, but you destroy and retaliation the remaining military capability of the USSR so Moscow cannot achieve its hegemonic objectives. And we continue this modified counter-force strategy after the end of the Cold War, even as nuclear warheads declined through arms control. But then Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn in a Wall Street Journal editorial urged the nuclear powers to climb to what they called the abolition summit. But admitted no one could get there anytime soon, even our lifetime, but we should try. Now I know the gentlemen who put this idea before them, Max Campbellman, a lifelong Democrat who was a negotiator of President Reagan and a dear friend. The question is, what would be the first steps? One popular idea was for the U.S. to unilaterally eliminate its ICBMs. Here's the scenario. A colonel in the strategic rocket forces approaches his commander one bright morning and says, Comrade General, I have a great idea. And what is that to Varch? Well, we attacked the United States with about 1,000 warheads. We aimed at that their ICBM bases containing 450 silos and 45 launch controls centers so they can't hit us first. But don't worry, America will not feel compelled to retaliate because casualties will be minimal. Now, remember, the U.S. has allowed 700 SNDVs under new start that translates into about 500 discrete nuclear assets. But if you kill Miniman or Sentinel, you'd leave the United States, not with 500 assets, but 12, 12, two submarine bases, three bomber bases and somewhere between six and eight submarines at sea. Now, what would happen if you had an ASW breakthrough or the Russians could a treat our submarines over time? And as Senator John Warner told me that when he was Secretary of the Navy, his number one fear was that one of his boomers would not come home. And the question he asked himself, who the heck did it? We wouldn't know. That is why every administration since Miniman and ICBMs were first put in this hole in October 1962 have always rejected the idea of eliminating ICBMs and the House of Representatives affirmed this this summer by an overwhelming vote of 318 to 106. Well, then what would be the first step toward abolition? Well, the first step toward abolition is in fact, well, abolition, like the UN resolution this summer to declare all nuclear weapons illegal. Now, our nuclear armed adversaries, however, and this is where the key point is, they don't share the twin assumptions of abolition that nukes are too messy to actually use in combat. And since war is gonna happen eventually, keep nukes around, risk nuclear armageddon. Further reductions are possible and I'm in favor of them, but the Chinese and Russians have both said, forget it. China in fact has said, come down to our level and then we'll talk at the table, what's their level? We don't know, they're not transparent. Now, what's amazing is, war has pointed out nuclear weapons, the big ones are just not usable. Guess who agrees with them? The Russians, senior Russian officials in 1985 affirmed nuclear weapons that had were simply not usable. Marshal Lugankov rejected, quote, even the possibility of waging war at all with the use of nuclear weapons. The first minister of atomic energy, Mikulov, said, nuclear weapons are so terrible no one dares to use them. He described the nuclear shield that Russia had as, quote, useless, burdensome piles of metal. Well, you might think that all of a sudden, Gordon, I agree. But this is precisely why in 1999, Moscow designed a new nuclear strategy, what they call an escalate to win strategy, including building very new, low yield, high actually nuclear weapons, which avoids a potential Russian defeat on the conventional battlefield by threatening to use a limited number of nuclear weapons to force the US and its allies to withdraw from the fight. The degree by Mr. Yeltsin was dated April 29th, 1999, quote, develop qualitative new nuclear weapons capabilities that have political military utility, that make the threat realistic to provide a usable military force, and, quote, make nuclear weapons an instrument of policy. Now, let me be clear. My view of deterrence and that of our military leaders and our civilian leaders does not require the US to go up the nuclear escalation ladder and thus win a nuclear conflict. The goal is to deny any benefit to Moscow from the employment of a single nuclear weapon so we maintain what Michael Crapon calls the no use of nuclear weapons. Proposals to render a second tier status of our nuclear monetization, but instead go and strengthen our conventional weapons does not increase the chances the US would prevail in a conventional fight. In fact, Russia threats to use nuclear weapons early in a conventional conflict are precisely because Russia fears America's conventional superiority. You compound that Russian insecurity would make Russian use of nuclear weapons even more likely. And remember, every one of our military exercises, our military conventional strategy assumes we prevail but only if no use of nuclear weapons occurs whether by us or them. Putin knows this. His strategy is precisely to mess that up. And that's why he is so snakely beefed up as nuclear capability. Let me conclude. In October 1962, Kaster wanted to launch Soviet missiles at Washington from Cuba and urged Khrushchev to do so. Khrushchev told Kaster, are you out of your mind? He said such a long result in Cuba being destroyed. What did Kaster reply? Kaster said, Cuba might be incinerated but socialism wins because the center of capitalism the United States would be destroyed. The year previously at the 1961 Vienna summit, the Soviets threatened Kennedy to kick the US military out of Berlin. Kennedy told Khrushchev, that would mean nuclear war. Similarly, late in 1982, Kennedy visited the Los Alamos National Lab and declared the small warhead on top of the Polaris missile that came into the force in 1981. And the parallel development of minimum missiles allowed the US to stare down the Soviets over Berlin and Cuba. The Soviet military stayed in garrison during the Berlin crisis and their ships going towards Cuba turned back. What did Kennedy say about this? He said, Minuteman was my ace in the hole. 14 of such missiles went on alert for the very first time the very October 14th day that the US discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba. Minuteman was solid fuel ready to launch and invulnerable to Soviet missiles. And by the way, we had a 70 to one advantage over the Soviets during this period of time. So where are we today? The guts of the problem abolition is that China, Russia, North Korea and Iran all believe nuclear weapons are tools of suppression and aggression, not tools to deter war, but as instruments that make war possible. They are definitely not abolitionists. Thank you. You brought all, you wanna take the podium, Ward? I'll sit. You wanna sit? Okay, fine. And five minutes? Five minutes. Okay. So one of the problems with nuclear weapons as a field is that it started during the Cold War. People didn't have very many facts to use to build their ideas. So they made assumptions. And there've been no nuclear wars since then. There's been no nuclear wars since then. So we essentially don't have any reality in our discussions about the military value of nuclear weapons. So part of the problem with debating about nuclear weapons is there's this kind of ghost world of ideas and theories that have been discussed and gone over by nuclear scholars that basically seem unconnected to the real world to me. Part of what I wanna do is return the nuclear debate to a reality footing to say, okay, what's the bottom line here? Let's not talk about counter force, countervailing stuff. So that's first. Second, yes, maybe the Russians and Chinese think they can use nuclear weapons on the battlefield that they'll be decisive. But gosh, Ike had a bunch of very sophisticated, experienced military guys study the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Korea and they said, there's no way. You'd have to use so many nuclear weapons that you'd either appall the world or, and even then, you might not win. And then what would happen? So it's not clear to me that, okay, modern nuclear weapons can be smaller and so on. But what's the military advantage of having a plume of poison blowing down wind from wherever you use this modestly sized bomb? Why not use four big conventional bombs instead of a nuclear weapon? There's a fear factor with the weapons and I would guess that is what they're trying to exploit and have always because of nuclear debates exist in this kind of world where we don't have reality. We only have what Thomas Schelling tells us reality is. The Gulf War, so very sophisticated people did this study and what they said was, no, even just to destroy one Iranian guard armored division would take so many tactical nuclear weapons that it's not doable, it's not worth doing. So that's my first thing is, and then Peter's made a lot about the arms race that's starting right now. The thing about arms races is we know they can be disconnected from reality. 1911, 1906, the British built a new HMS dreadnought, a new battleship, bigger, faster, great guns. It was gonna be the most powerful thing on the face of the earth and the Germans built a bunch in response and everyone wanted to build battleships. The Austrians built battleships. They don't even have any shoreline. The Chileans, the Argentines built battleships. There was battleship fever and this kind of fever effect is especially common with nuclear weapons. I don't really know what I'm gonna do with them but they're important. Everyone says they're the most powerful weapons so I better build some. Think of a world in which the United States, president stands up and says we're not gonna take, we're not gonna get rid of any of our weapons but I'm just here to tell you, nuclear weapons are obsolete. We're putting our research dollars into small sophisticated weapons, really smart ones and we're gonna try and convince all the rest of the world. The beginning of abolition isn't to abolish weapons. The beginning of abolition is to tear down the false reputation that nuclear weapons have for being the be-all and end-all magic, revolution inducing, whatever. Think of some pejorative word and stick it in my sentence there that I didn't. And I yield back my last 30 seconds. I know there's no yielding back. I'm just. You get to revise and extend your remarks. Five minutes repuddle. You can take the podium if you want. Don't talk a little slower. Let me begin by making a couple points in Korea as someone who lived there for two years as a college student and have studied this in great detail is Ward is often talking about like in Kuwait where you have an American armored division coming with a hook into Iraq and from behind the Iraqi army that was stationed basically buried in sand. They were taking a Soviet tactic. Putin isn't talking and China is not talking about using tactical nuclear weapons in this business. If you look at the exercises they both do sometimes together and you look at their literature, you look at their technical manuals, you look at what their acquisition strategy is, these are weapons that are gonna have zero radiation. And if you don't believe me, I'm doing a conference this Friday with the Minot Task Force 21. It's the one I've done for the last 11 years. I've done 22 of them. Jim Howe, who is a 45 year expert on nuclear weapons coming up from Huntsville will detail exactly what the Russians and Chinese are up to with respect to this escalate to win strategy. Notice the escalate to win strategy is to win a conventional war, not a nuclear war. What the nuclear weapons would do is tell us that air base in Avano or that air base in England or whatever you're gonna use to bring your air power to bear on a battlefield in Eastern Europe, we can take out in a millisecond. And there won't be any radiation to go poison people elsewhere but the facility itself will be unusable. And all we have to do is use one weapon. That's what we're talking about. But let me re-emphasize the nine points that I made. I think you're really critical. War is real, it's not gonna be abolished. It's not the end of history. That requires you don't get reckless in going from where you are today to jettison nuclear deterrence and go somewhere else. Number two, some nuclear weapons states believe nuclear weapons are instruments of war fighting. I'm sorry, that happens to be the fact. Can you dissuade the Chinese and the Russians, the Iranians and the North Koreans from that? Yes, but please tell me how you're gonna do that. And then when they sign a piece of paper saying, we really agree with you, we're gonna be nice now. Tell me whether or not you agree with that. Do you feel worse that Israel has a nuclear weapon capability in the Middle East? Or would you feel bad that better if Israel had none and the Iranian mullahs did? Then ask yourself what you think about deterrence. Third, while the NPT, the National Nuclear Non-implementation Treaty calls for eventual disarmament, there's nothing imperative about eventual. To get to abolition, you have to have transparency. And you have to have verification. I can't verify how many weapons you have unless I know how many you have in vice versa. And therefore you can't get there from there because both Russia and China and especially North Korea and Iran don't have transparency. Deterrence indeed may break down. Here, Ward and I don't disagree. But the strongest deterrent is conventional, nuclear, missile, cyber, and space defenses combined, especially against the small, highly-acquitt, limited strike options that Mr. Putin is now threatening. If you assume nuclear deterrence cannot work for the long-term, because no nuclear weapon is usable and any exchange will create nuclear winter and billions of dead, then deterrence indeed is a bluff. But the logical thing there is to unilaterally get ready weapons, because you believe the other guy will never use them because he'll cause nuclear weapons. As we've seen a number of recent reports said, a war between Pakistan and India, I think they said, would cause something like two billion, two and a half billion people dead. Let me end with this. Assume it's July 1945. Assume it's a nuclear-free world. Abolition prevails. No atomic bomb has been tested. There's no Manhattan Project. The Nazis and the Russians, we don't think they're going after nukes. Now knowing what you now know between 1945 and 2022, would you back in 1945 forego our nuclear weapons and trust our enemies to do the same? That's the test that abolition has to meet because anybody getting a surreptitious weapon in an abolition world is the king of the rock. And I tell you what, there are bad people like North Korea and the Mullahs in Iran. If they had nuclear weapons and nobody else did, I will bet you a million dollars, they will use it. And that's the threat we face that we have to then work on how to deter this. It's not easy, but it's what has worked for 70 plus years and it needs to continue to work. Thank you to both. We now go to the Q and A portion of the evening. There is a microphone over there. You can line up with your questions. I want to start, you both, by the way, can ask each other a question at any time during the Q and A. I want to exercise a moderator's prerogative and ask a couple of questions of you both. Peter, are you guys quiet down, please? Yeah, you're the, no, no, excuse me. I'm asking moderator's questions. Moderator is asking questions. Oh, please, pause for a moment. Peter, are you saying that even if, you know, for example, we are told that Reagan and Gorbachev at one point seem to be thinking of abolishing nuclear weapons. Are you saying that nowhere between heaven and earth is it ever possible to do so even if, even if we had a Reagan and a Gorbachev resolving to do so because the Iranians and the North Koreans are gonna cheat that it's simply inconceivable to ever abolish nuclear weapons given the risks that somebody's gonna cheat. Is that your position? No, it's not my position. I've talked to every member of the delegation that was in Reykjavik except the president. Except for the president and Gorbachev. What all of them point out is what proposed to be banned was long-range fast flyers. It's a fancy name for sea-launched ballistic missiles and land-based ICBMs. Bombers were eventually taken off the table. All tactical nuclear weapons were taken off the table. Excuse me, that wasn't my question. My question wasn't what actually happened. I wanna make clear here. I'm not, I would be in favor of banning fast flyers that have multiple warheads. That would dramatically reduce the arsenal. It completely takes away your first strike capability which is the big problem we had during the Cold War. The thing is that what Reagan and Gorbachev said didn't apply to any of the other nuclear powers. So it's, they didn't propose to abolish nuclear weapons per se. Reagan was particularly insistent on abolishing what are called fast flyers. Those things can get here between 20 and 25 minutes which would be the, in a crisis, the thing you want not to have long. Okay, Peter. My question, I mentioned Reagan and Gorbachev and I'm sorry I did because I wasn't asking you about the facts of the matter about what they were actually doing. I'm only asking hypothetically, if the US, just say the US, the US launches a campaign to get all the countries in the world to agree to the abolition of nuclear weapons. I gathered, for example, poison gas has been abolished but of course sometimes they cheat. You seem to be suggesting that nothing like that can ever happen because even if Putin and Biden sat down and said, we're getting rid of all of our nuclear weapons from top to bottom, no, you'd say, don't do it because somebody's gonna cheat like the, like the Mullahs have been ran. Is that your position? No, it's not my position. My view is- So it's conceivable you can abolish nuclear weapons. If you have transparency and verification. Yeah. And the other thing is you gotta basically roll the dice and say, I trust the other guy who I'm making the deal with but if it's only with Russia, the question is we abolish our weapons and China keeps theirs. Well, that wasn't- Do you want a world like that? Well, yeah, yeah, well, yeah. So I would argue, yes, you could make a deal with Russia, China to get rid of nuclear weapons and it would have to be airtight but nothing's perfect. If you're willing to do that, then you have to ask yourself, what if the other guys don't agree, then you're in a world where you really are rolling the dice. Okay, my question, yeah, I assume the question that you would but I want to just phrase it this way. You seem to have said, almost conceded that China and Russia don't want to get rid of nuclear weapons so that it's a non-starter. You're talking about it's imperative to abolish nuclear weapons, imperative. So what's your scenario? What's one plausible scenario for abolishing nuclear weapons assuming the US government is resolved, assuming you and Biden are talking, Biden says, I buy your idea, I want to abolish it all. How does that gonna work? So the problem is that we've spent 60 years having this slow step-by-step technical, careful, cautious process because nuclear weapons are the most important weapons in the world. What I'm proposing is to face reality. They're clumsy, stupid weapons. The reason you don't have to talk, the reason you don't have to trust dictators is dictators are not stupid. They don't want lousy weapons. They want weapons they can use to kill people and conquer countries. And if it becomes the consensus that nuclear weapons are too large, too much radiation, and by the way, this is a news-making event because nuclear weapons without radiation, that's a big deal. We should have the New York Times here because I know that the US worked on this problem in the 50s and 60s but we were never able to do it but apparently the Russians and the Chinese are way ahead of us so that's exciting. I'll believe it when I see it. The problem with nuclear weapons is their reputation. The problem isn't the weapons. The weapons are lousy weapons. You've got this tremendous amount of awe and fear that we feel about them. And the other problem is that you have a whole collection of experts who rain down jargon and theory and all these facts from history on you and it's hard to know what they're talking about. You seem to have taken the position that Ronald Reagan wanted to abolish nuclear weapons. So you're now speaking once again, repeating your point about how we have to recognize what nuclear weapons are all about. The practical question is how would it work to abolish nuclear weapons imperative as it is? What you would do is you would develop a consensus worldwide, the US would take the leadership that says, look, here's the reality. We thought they were great. We know now they're not. Here are their limitations. These are practical limitations. We're gonna declassify them and then move on. Once there's consensus, when there was consensus that chemical weapons weren't very good weapons and we had all of World War I to try and make them be useful and they weren't, they didn't deliver a strategic advantage, it was easy to eliminate chemical weapons. Biological weapons have also been eliminated because it's really tough to take a thing that spreads on its own and deliver it in a useful way. It's hard to fight a war with biological weapons. You don't share the fear on the other side, Peter's fear, that a couple of rogue states are gonna cheat. No, I'm not afraid of rogue states cheating. Of course they might cheat and if they do, we'll bomb them with stealth bombers with conventional bombs or if they blow up a city, you know, in the history of civilization, a city or two has been destroyed. But the problem is if you have 70,000 nuclear weapons like we had at the height of the Cold War, we don't know how high this arms race is gonna go, then you can really do serious damage to civilization if you fight a nuclear war. All right, thank you. First question there. Don't state your name, state your question. As a question please and also who are you gonna address the question to if you have a particular person who wanna address it too. Questions for Mr. Wilson. For whom? Ward. Ward, Ward. So I'm very persuaded by your argument about its non-usability. I'm worried about the instability at Global Zero. So more precisely, a lot of states are going to be threshold states in that world where you are at Global Zero. As political relations deteriorate, let's say between Japan and China, you have this situation where there is a strong incentive to break out very, very quickly. And so break out times you might want to keep very narrow and that creates a crisis instability problem at Global Zero that does not exist under deterrence. Thank you. That's only true. I want him to answer this question. Could you summarize the question for us? The question is if you get rid of all the weapons, everyone still has an incentive to build them. And that's only if you deny the premise, which I stated, which is first you devalue the weapons. No one wants to build crappy weapons. No weapons director is going to go to his dictator and say, hey, I've got a great way to spend $2 billion. Of course, everyone else thinks they're obsolete, but you'll get respect. The problem is that we are so committed to believing that nuclear weapons are demigods, that it's hard to imagine that they might have a practical reality that might be different from the fear and the awe that we project out on them. There's a great cartoon by Herb Locke. There's a tiny little world with a round table on the top and tiny little people on it and a giant bomb man standing next to the earth. He's much bigger than the earth. He's got a tape measure and he's measuring the earth, supposedly before preparatory to blowing it up. And he says, don't mind me. Just go right on talking. And that is exactly the way we think about nuclear weapons. They are huge. They control the future. And we are tiny little figures who are just nattering away. I don't think that's the right way to approach this problem. I don't think we need to be that in awe of nuclear weapons. They're dangerous. And that's really important to keep in mind. But they're not impossible to do away with. What other problem do we face that we believe is impossible down to our bones? Like, we're trying to get rid of cancer. We're trying to cure cancer. We don't sit home and say, oh, that's impossible. But somehow nuclear weapons are so incredible we could never imagine a world without them. Why is that? Or did you want to comment on the question? Yeah, so I mean, come on. Since Ronald Reagan was president, we've reduced our nuclear stockpile by 92%. And we've done it over a period of about 36 years. This is an extraordinary achievement given the fact at the time the salt treaties allowed us to build up to basically nine states in Russia would both have 12,000 strategic long range ballistic missile and SLBM and bomber warheads deployed. Deployed. And we've gotten rid of that. That's an extraordinary achievement. We banned an entire class of nuclear weapons with the INF treaty, which everybody in the arms control community said we couldn't do. They said when we did reductions, the arms control community said it's laughable. You're just doing it because you know Russia will reject it. Well, the Russians did reject it at first, but we stuck to our guns, if you will. And we achieved something that had never been achieved before, a 92% reduction in strategic long range nuclear weapons. The problem is you can't verify theater weapons. The Russians have somewhere between 2 and 5,000 according to the Defense Intelligence Agency. We have 200 deployed in Europe. That's where the Russians are exploiting things. And I urge you to come and listen to Jim Howe. We're going to broadcast the conference on Friday. He will lay out the scenarios the Russians have done with respect to theater use of nuclear weapons, which I think is crazy, but the Russians happen to believe in this. And it is a sea change in the way as our strat commander, as our chief of staff, the Air Force, have all said this new fight between Russia and China, both peer competitors, both nuclear army, is unprecedented in American history. That's why they're saying we have to rethink deterrence, not get rid of it, but strengthen it. Question. Question is primarily for Peter. Sorry, Ward. So what I'm worried about is that in 50 to 100 years, the technology to build nuclear weapons, even small devices, will become really, really cheap, just as an inevitable side effect of technological development. And then terrorist organizations, maybe drug cartels, can afford to build very cheap nuclear weapons. And they would have a strong incentive to use nuclear weapons to terrorize large nation states. So what is to stop that scenario from coming about, even if all the nation states agreed to stop the weapons? Not nuclear weapons. You can't nuke a terrorist. You can't nuke a cartel. You've got to find them. You can only arrest a cartel. You can only send people and go get them. I mean, the problem with, yeah, someday people could build nuclear weapons, but keeping huge national arsenals of nuclear weapons isn't going to solve that problem either. And it carries with it the problem that you might blow everyone sky high because you'll end up in a nuclear war because people are idiots sometimes. Sorry, I'm not sure I understood how this would disincentivize terrorist organizations. It doesn't. You'd have to figure out some other way to disincentivize them. What this does is it reduces the national arsenals so that there isn't a nuclear war. That's my goal. If somebody builds a nuclear weapon in their closet and blows up Philadelphia, no more cheese steaks. But it's I apologize to Philadelphians everywhere. But that's not the problem we're trying to solve. The problem we're trying to solve is 100 million people dead and civilization devastated in an afternoon. You're not satisfied. You can argue later. Want to come into the question? What Ward's missing is that Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping have decided that all out nuclear war or even using 1,000 warheads is crazy. That's why they're talking about using a very limited number. I'm talking a dozen or half a dozen. That's what they've exercised. That's what they've written in their press. That's what they've written in their doctrine. That's what they're developing. And to me, you've got to understand, Admiral Richard, and now General Cotton is going to take his position, who's had a strike on. I've had them speak to my seminars in Washington DC, which I've been running for 42 years on this subject. They've all said, nuclear deterrence is required, but we need to change the way we think about it. And we've never had two peer competitors, both nuclear armed, ever in American history, going back, of course, to World War II. That's what we have to do. And if they were in favor of abolition and we could verify it, OK. I'm willing to give it a shot at the table and have the Senate look at it as a treaty, but they're not going there. In fact, they're going the opposite direction. They see nuclear weapons as their trump card in a conventional fight. And they have said so. I can't imagine 12 nuclear weapons making a difference. I can't imagine World War II having the tide turned by 12 explosions. That's a very good question. If you're invading Latvia or three of the Baltics or Romania and you want to take out the 12 air bases the United States has in Western Europe from which our fighter planes would bring tactical nuclear weapons of which we have only 200 deployed, you could take out every one of those bases with 12 small nuclear devices that would basically make the airfield unusable and would have very limited radiation. And then the question is, as a national leader of NATO, do you decide, no, we're going all in because 20,000 people have died or 30,000 people have died, but now we're willing to risk 90 million. That's what Putin and Xi Jinping are thinking. Again, I think their thinking is crazy. But on the problem problem is that's what they believe. Well, and I got to deal with that realistic view and how to change it over time. I still have to maintain deterrence while we're getting to the point where gentlemen, would you be willing to consider abolition? But we're not there yet. Remember, they're not in favor of abolition. In fact, they're going in the opposite direction, unfortunately. And as I pointed out, we're not in an arms race. We waited 50 years to modernize our nuclear deterrent. And as everybody will tell you, if you don't, you're out of the nuclear business. Everything we have deteriorates. You cannot maintain Minuteman or the high old boats. What we're learning in Ukraine is that you don't need aircraft in order to have to prevent the enemy from getting air superiority. Ukrainians don't have a large air force anymore, and yet they are fighting a war. They're going ahead. There's no reason why NATO couldn't simply go ahead and fight the war without the aircraft that they'd lost and replace them from supplies, from airplanes that were based in the US or in Asia, in the Europe. Well, I don't understand. Not a single NATO airplane has been used in this fight precisely because Mr. Putin said, if you do, you're crossing a red line. That's not what I'm saying. I'm going to come back and do it. I'm saying that you're saying, if you wipe out the American air power in Europe, you win the war. That's only if we decide not to fight the war. If we're a relatively large and robust country with the strongest conventional army and air force a navy on the face of the earth at the moment, and if we decide we're going to fight without 12 air bases worth of airplanes, I think we can do that. That's our entire, how are you going to get an airplane to Latvia from the United States? You got to refuel it and you've got to have basically a 17, 18 hour. So what you've done is created a specific scenario with one example of how 12 explosions might make a difference and then said, okay, that applies to everything. China could do the same thing with respect to three bases in Japan, three bases in Korea and Guam. And they would be, we would have no air power in the Pacific because you can't get to China from Honolulu and you can't get there from continental United States without an enormous backlog of tankers that are refueling and so forth. And the time it takes to get to target the battle's going to be over. So I just want to say a thing about expertise because what Peter is doing is reining statistics and names and jargon down on your heads. And some people argue that only experts can talk about nuclear weapons and that's nonsense. You don't have to understand how a car engine works in order to have a legitimate opinion about what the speed limit should be on the street in front of your house. I take experts seriously and you, I think we are obliged, but you don't have to believe everything experts say. There have been too many times in history when experts were wrong. Never let anyone tell you you don't have the knowledge or judgment to participate in the discussion about nuclear weapons. That's what we're here for. You have a right to an opinion about this that matters because your life is on the line. That's what we're here for, Ward. Next question. I'd first like to thank both gentlemen for the civil discussion on the question as addressed to Peter. A recurring theme of your speech is the irrationality of state actors or at least the difference in rationality of Russia and China compared to the United States. And then you qualified that with an example of Cuba and how they were almost about to new states. So keeping that in mind, it's almost inevitable for me that to have the idea of deterrence, mutually assured, destruction work, you need some sort of rationality. So my question is, do you not see that both of these are in contradiction with one another if you want one to hold? It's a very good, very, very good question and I think you were right to say it, but remember Khrushchev was reasonable and his KGB had to literally take the weapons away from the Cubans who had control of them. Dicey, to be honest with you, but if you assume everybody's irrational, why would they agree on abolition? And if you think some are rational and some are irrational, the question is within the leadership of a dictator whether Saddam Hussein or the Mullahs in Iran, you have more than one actor, okay? And you can demonstrate today's not the right day. They may be crazy enough to wanna, as Rothstein-Johnny said, why would you drop a bomb on Israel? Iran would be destroyed, you know what he said? He said, yes, but there would be no more Jews because Iran, Israel is a one bomb state. But the Iranians, you try to keep them away from doing what we're doing, which is the UN, God love them, the head of IAEA said, I'm not gonna agree to a deal where the Iranians have not come clean with what they did previously on nuclear weapons. You're right, they're always irrational actors out there. I can't help that, but if they're irrational, do you think you wanna sign a deal with them where they promise, quote unquote, to get rid of nuclear weapons? And if they're as transparent and allow for verification as you need, they're no longer in the irrational bag, okay? Once you can sign a deal, for example, if France, the United States, and England had nuclear weapons, would you sleep well at night? Yes, you would. If North Korea, Iran, and Cuba had nuclear weapons, but nobody else, how would you sleep at night? Yeah, God, you wanna comment on the question, Ward? You wanted to comment, Ward? Do you want to comment? No? No. Okay, next question. My question is for Ward Wilson. You made a comparison of nuclear weapons to a pistol that is both useless and dangerous. It's inaccurate and explodes in your hand. However, immediately after you declared, nuclear weapons would only be given up if everyone else did so simultaneously. Is this just a failure of analogy, or does this not undermine your argument? If nuclear weapons really were all risk and no reward, why would you need to pursue a treaty? Why wouldn't you just give them up unilaterally and like you would, an inaccurate pistol that explodes in your hand? It's a good question. And the answer is, people get ideas in their heads. What the analogy lacks is, I give you this pistol, it's inaccurate, it blows up in your hand, and I tell you, this is the greatest pistol there has ever been on the face of the earth. Now it's hard for you to throw it away because every time you think about throwing it away, Peter says, are you kidding? There are crazy people out there. You don't wanna keep that pistol. That pistol's the only thing keeping you safe. It stokes up your fear. And so, you know, part of the problem with changing people's minds is it takes time. And sometimes it goes fast and sometimes it goes slow. But the answer is, the analogy works, but you have to pre-qualify it by saying, you know, there's this almost religious belief in the value of nuclear weapons. So, yeah, I hope that's correct. You wanna comment? Yeah, very short comment is that in the interim, we need to maintain something called deterrence. It's not just nuclear weapons. It's conventional weapons, nuclear, cyber, space, and missile defense, all of which works. All of which can work, okay? And when you combine those, whether you're on a road toward abolition or reductions, every time we've done an arms control deal, what have we also said? We have to modernize our deterrent. That's been the quid pro. The problem now is Russia and China aren't at the table and don't wanna come to the table. And so, banning MIRV land-based ICBMs, which we did under start two, is not on the table, and it should be. The Chinese are building 350 new DF-41 silos. Each of those missiles carries 10 warheads. That's 3,500 warheads just with this new deployment, which would triple the number of American warheads currently deployed in our strategic forces. You wanna make a comment, Boyd? Just quickly, if the leaders of Russia and China and Iran and North Korea are irrational, are you happy with them having nuclear weapons? No, but they're not agreeing to give them up. Would you rather they have nuclear weapons, or would you rather they be able to build 10 on the sly and then, you know, I'm... But, Boyd, they have to agree to get rid of them. If I, we've done our, we haven't succeeded. North Korea has, pick a number, 10 to 40 or more nuclear weapons. They were part of the NPT, we tried. They told us to get lost. Russia and China, if they're willing to go to abolition, God love them, I'll sign them up. Okay, but they're not. In fact, they're going in the opposite direction. I'm perfectly happy to be with Ward that a lot of these weapons are simply not usable because they are so huge, 400 kiloton weapon. Crying out loud, I did a study with a Japanese group, a 400 kiloton weapon dropped in the middle of Manhattan. Okay, it's 750,000 people, immediately dead and about three and a half million people over the next three months are gonna die of radiation poisoning. I did it for the Sakawa Foundation and that was to illustrate the need for missile defense because if you shoot down one more head aim to Manhattan, look out what you've saved or Los Angeles or any other place. So I'm perfectly aware of the extraordinary, horrible nature of these weapons. Yeah, next question, lower the microphone for the young lady. Can you please tell us about the Allison Zellikov analysis and what is the difference to Jay as compared to the Cuban crisis of yesterday according to that analysis? According to yourselves, according to others. You asked by the Cuban crisis and what's the question? It has to do with the Allison Zellikov analysis. Don't know, I don't, I'm not familiar with it. Are you talking about the analysis that said that it was a Russian trawler that, excuse me, an American submarine found a Russian captain willing to surface rather than launching? Something like that, I guess. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff on the Cuban missile crisis that I find to be somewhere in the fantasy world but the person that I would recommend is, I work for the Hudson Institute as a consultant and Herman Kahn founded us. Years ago, he invited a young man named Keith Payne to do a study of deterrence, which I urge, I don't know Ward, whether you've seen it but it's, he studied 2,000 years of deterrence and the question Herman Kahn said, why did war happen? Why did it break out? And he concluded in the Cuban Missile Crisis and other things is, and Berlin and others is that it's usually because people totally misinterpret what the other guy's doing. So my view is transparency is critical. That's why we look at what the Russians do on their war games. We look at what they're doing in their industrial production and if they say they're building theater nuclear weapons that are small, very, the precision today is, Ward was talking previously about the Iraq war. We didn't start using JDAMs until Desert Storm. 10 years later in Afghanistan, for example, you're talking about weapons that can't hit within a mile. So this is a totally revolution in military affairs that's going on, which I wish to God we could put the genie back in the bottle but here's what I agree with Ward. If we could put nuke stuff back in the bottle, I'd do it. Okay, well that's good to know. You have a question? Yes, ask you a question and then we'll just have to go to the summit. What's your question? Sure, so this is for both of you actually. I didn't think, we've been talking a lot today about Cold War and the new access of people, right? China, Russia, and Iran. But I'm interested about regional conflicts as well. So an example that keeps popping up in my mind is Syria. And something that's a bit analogous is their usage of chemical weapons and it seems like there's no fear of how, the range of that, obviously far less dangerous than nuclear but questions of how do dictators hold on to power, willing to sacrifice their own civilians throughout that process, keep coming to mind. So I wanna explore a bit if you guys can talk to us about whether you think that people like Assad would be willing to use, same way that they use chemical weapons, perhaps nuclear power. For example, I think Syria even had a plutonium production facility and that was discovered in 2008. The Israelis bombed it, thank God, but who knows where that could have gone. Do you see that analogy with chemical weapons in that way the regional sort of cannibalizing itself as a country versus? I'm afraid, excuse me. Thank you for your question. I'm afraid if you guys wanna answer it, you're gonna have to do that in your summations because we're past our time with respect to the Q&A. So okay, we now go to the final summary portion of the evening. Ward, you have five minutes, summarize your position. You wanna take the podium, please do. We're here, where we are, because a small group of passionate advocates who call themselves realists convinced the United States government and other governments that nuclear weapons are essential. But keeping nuclear weapons is not realism and they are not realists. Listen to what they say. There's an extraordinary and revolutionary weapon that has been the source of peace and prosperity for over 75 years that guarantees our safety and that allows us to lead the world. It gives us unquestioned security and is essential for maintaining the world order. It's quite a set of claims. The reality, however, is this. There are no magic weapons that guarantee our safety, ensure our leadership and all the rest. Genuine realists know there are no guarantees in life. Genuine nuclear weapons do not ensure safety because weapons can't regulate human behavior. For good or ill, we are the ones who act. We put them in motion, not the other way around. And the fact is that human beings are often overwhelmed by passion and folly. And that means that one day, if we continue as we are, nuclear war will come. War is a savagery that only sleeps. The defenders of the status quo say that nothing can be done. We must live on death row, waiting patiently and passively until that final day. They shrug their shoulders and ask us to believe that that is the best that life in the United States can offer. I don't believe that. I think there is more to life than dark dreams of the apocalypse to come. Think of all the movies that portray a post-apocalyptic future. Think of the book plots that imagine a dystopian tomorrow. Think of the video games where shooters maneuver and kill across a landscape devastated by catastrophe. Is that what we, as a society, see as our future? Choosing to live with nuclear weapons is unacceptable because it saps our courage. It wears away the natural optimism and boldness that for so long were the hallmarks of the American people. It does all these things, but perhaps the worst of all, it stealthily forecloses our future. Theodore Roosevelt once said, "'We are not building this country of ours for a day, "'but the limits they put on our imaginations. "'If human beings could be perfect every day for all time, "'then nuclear weapons can keep us safe. "'But realism sees the world as it is, "'not as we would wish it to be.' "'If you want fairy tales and comforting fantasies, "'then by all means believe in nuclear weapons. "'But if you want the United States to lead again, "'to continue in safety and prosperity, "'to achieve new things, "'to accomplish what few other countries can, "'then you must face the fact "'that it is imperative to eliminate nuclear weapons.'" So, Mason? I want to thank Ward for a very interesting debate and thank your sponsors. Let me mention a few things. Biological weapons have not been eliminated. Syria and North Korea and China both have huge stocks of these things. In an experiment we did, called Nuclear of Dark Winter. Shortly after the anthrax attacks of 2001, we had smallpox released in Denver, Colorado. And we figured out in 90 days, there would be 90 million dead Americans. 90 million dead Americans. As many as most estimates have been about nuclear weapons. And we have not gotten rid of those. And that's a very tough deal. And the question is, nuclear weapons in my mind, as well as our conventional capability, nuclear weapons particularly give pause to anybody using the weapons because we don't have an offensive nuclear biological weapons. It's told about the revolution of military affairs that somehow we, supporters of nuclear deterrence in America, we believe these are super weapons that are solved probably, no, no, no. Our whole point was the bad guys think so. Okay? They think this changed in nuclear capability which they are now deploying will give them the ability to do things they haven't previously been able to do, which is defeat the United States in conventional conflict or to keep us more likely, keep us out of the fight altogether. The young lady asked a question to the very end and to me that's the guts of the issue, is that if you look at the black book of communism, it says that communist powers killed 125 million people. But there's a note. It's 125 million of their own people which they killed to remain in power. Mao Tse-Tung was asked one about nuclear war with the United States and he said, you know, we have a couple hundred million people we could sacrifice. Now I don't know about you, but we don't think that way in the West. I don't think we think that way in a lot of the world, but Mao apparently did. Castro felt that way. Khomeini felt that way. So you have to deal with these people. Now it's been said that those of us in favor of deterrence aren't in favor of doing anything. Well, I'll tell you what, since 1980, when I went to work for the Reagan administration as a consultant, I have pushed arms control every day of my waking life. I have had more arms control people come and talk at the Capitol Hill Club in over 1500 seminars that I've done since then from Max Kampelman to Henry Cooper to the chief of staff, the Air Force, you name it. And we have concluded a 90% reduction in strategic nuclear weapons, a 99% reduction in theater tactical nuclear weapons for the United States. And we've done so in a relatively short period of time historically, I'm all in favor of getting rid of multiple warheads on land-based ICBMs that would eliminate any first strike capability any country in the nuclear business has. With respect to missile defense, we should invest in our missile defenses because as the Israelis have pointed out, they have shot down thousands and thousands and thousands of missiles from Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, an over 90% shot down with David Slain's and Iron Dome, all of which the critics said couldn't be used to do this. They were over 95% successful. Of those systems they went after, and now Ted Postal from a very light Ted, but when you look at the demographics of Israel, we're fatter and older and we don't run as fast. What happened is the missile defense worked remarkably well. We should invest in that because that's another part of the insurance policy not just nuclear weapons. And so let me emphasize, the bad guys like Mr. Putin has threatened the United States with nuclear weapons 45 times since March 2022. China's leaders have said if Japan comes to the defense of Taiwan, they will nuke Japan. Japan is a defenseless country without nuclear weapons. And remember, I go back to my Korea life, my Korean two years there, and I think the DPRK invaded the Republic of Korea in 1950 because the U.S. announced to the South, the South would be on our defense perimeter. We had nuclear weapons. Can you imagine a world in which North Korea surreptitiously has nuclear weapons and they are in a world of abolition where the U.S. has none. Tell me that they wouldn't invade South Korea. I know what happened to South Korea during that period of time. The millions and millions of people that were killed and wounded. And I never want to see that again, let alone my Korean friends and family. And to me, deterrence is real. The world we live in is real. And I can get to abolition, but not today because I can't get there from here because the very guys that have signed this have to sign a piece of paper, have no interest in doing so, and not for the foreseeable future. Again, thank you, Gene, and thank you for all of you here. Okay, Jane, please open the final vote. Again, you vote yes, no, and decide on the resolution. It is imperative to eliminate nuclear weapons I have in my hand. The sole form to see roll that will go to the winner of this vote. More percentage points were picked up then by the no vote, so they took any roll as opposed to no vote.