 Hello everyone. I'm Jim Garrison. I want to welcome you to this session of Humanity Rising as we begin day three of a five-day program on the conflict in Ukraine. We all know that the war is now escalating in very dramatic ways and not only between the United States and Russia but also between the United States and China which is increasingly getting involved in support of Russia as are many many countries in the global south. So the war in Ukraine has catalyzed a global conflict that the world has not seen since the first and second world wars. The major difference is that we're now dealing with a world of superpowers in the United States and Russia and China have nuclear weapons. Russia and the United States have made it clear that they will use them and yet we continue to escalate the war. It's a very stark reality that here we are in 2023 when the world is challenged as never before by runaway climate change that rather than cooperating together we are in a global conflict between superpowers that is escalating both in terms of rhetoric and in terms of military escalation day by day. So we're in the most dangerous moment in our lifetime and so humanity rising is convening a series of summits on this very grave matter that concerns us all. We started with a overview that was provided by Vladimir Posner on Monday. Yesterday we heard about the dangers of nuclear war although we had technical challenges that we were not able to overcome so Daniel Ellsberg could not be properly heard. So Dan is going to be joining us in a bit for this session and so today we're really going to look at the costs of war both at the conventional level and also at the nuclear level and we're privileged here at humanity rising that we're convening this summit and our subsequent summits with Code Pink one of the most dynamic peace organizations in the world who has been organizing peace protests and manifestations of all kinds around Ukraine as it has since the Iraq war and so we are convening this with Code Pink because as we do with all the issues that we address in humanity rising we want to look the crisis right in the eye with ruthless realism but always with a view of the opportunities that are inherent in the crises that we face and the opportunity buried in the war in Ukraine is the pathway to peace and that's what Code Pink and humanity rising are seeking to bring to public attention as we escalate day by day into deeper conflict. Before we dive in we always breathe together at humanity rising for those of you that are new so in a moment you'll hear the sound of a bell. When you hear the bell just breathe in slowly for about five and a half seconds so you'll hear another bell then breathe out slowly we're going to take 10 breaths together this is conscious coherent breathing that soothes the soul animates the mind and establishes a greater sense of heart full community so thank you everyone let us breathe together and then we'll commence our program thank you everyone it's always so good to breathe together and in the spirit of one breath I want to welcome Jody Evans the co-founder of Code Pink who is co-moderating these summits with me as we proceed Jody's had a very busy day yesterday as Code Pink was very active in Washington she's brought together three members of her team Dan Ellsberg is going to join at some point so we're going to have a very dynamic program today and we'll try to just keep up with the flow but Jody thank you for everything that you do and I turn the program over to you thank you Jim and thanks for everything you do and for us who are in the streets all the time education is the most important part of peace because we must be educated in a world that in a country for sure that does not want us to be educated about war so before we dive into the costs of war which is a pretty uh you know uh uninspiring conversation because it it brings us close to what those warmongers don't want us to know I want to give everyone a boost and see what the team did last night and I'm going to try to share my screen perhaps most important the company community can help determine the combinations of policies there will be or legislation necessary to counter ccp aggression and rebuild americas and the free worlds competitive advantages don't have answer why don't you pause for a second you'll be given a discount time and we'll take care of this so uh there we go um that was Olivia uh Danucci who's part of our code pink team she's our washington dc team member um who's whose task is actually to raise up the costs of war for those in congress and she probably visits um congress members every day except for the days when she's disrupting um way coached her yesterday on what message to bring to this first ever senate hearing that is literally a warmongering hearing it's a it's a literal hearing to create hate and distrust and fear of china and so it was very important that um you know the first time a senate hearing had been prime time created by the republicans um so it was very important for code pink to be there and disrupt this Olivia knew she was going to be arrested she was nervous all day um she was arrested she was taken to jail and she's out and um I can say that after you know ringing her hands with way and I it's I know as someone who disrupts a lot after a hundred arrests it's never an easy thing to do because you have no idea what the backlash is and what's going to happen and nobody wants to go to jail it's not a fun experience so um that's you know what it's been given to us the only thing we can do because the media has been told not to talk about peace because we do rallies and marches the media has been told not to cover it the only thing left for us to do is disrupt these warmongering hearings and we've done it um over the 20 years of code pink so I thought I'd give you a little shot in the arm of like oh and also um someone in the hearing said we live in the united states where we have free speech and not you know china where they don't and then they arrested the peace activist and the chairman of the committee said she would not be arrested and she was and ro canna the democratic congress member who was presiding also said that she should not be arrested but she was in charge and we have international women's day coming up in which she was leaving a big action for us of a lot of banner drops and with this arrest won't be able to we'll have to find someone else so just so we know what free speech looks actually looks like in the united states not so free so anyway welcome back um and thank you again so much for being here and caring about peace so you know as I said they warmongers don't want us to know about the cost of war and I want to remind everyone that um in the iraq war they hit the coffins coming home the media was not allowed to show them and a code pink activist was so upset because she was finding out about all the wounded coming home and actually meeting them in some in some of our marches and it was if it becomes something like 75 000 wounded were coming home to the fourth thousand killed and the wounds were horrific um the visible ones um you know another more soldiers have committed suicide twice as many soldiers have committed suicide than have died in action um patricia made oh actually that's a year um patricia made this film called the ground truth about the wounded and because battlefield medicine had improved but um they were saving lives and also destroying lives and um so I actually went to washington to try to stop the iraq war because I knew the costs of war in my own community which was watts I worked with game members and learned that all of their dads had been of vietnam and 10 to 20 000 people had been killed in watts a kind of inner city war zone and nobody talked about it in what it was and why it was the result of men coming home from wars so um we know the the costs of the iraq war and afghanistan more have been hidden uh they've even been hidden to the taxpayers because those two wars cost 21 trillion dollars if they're everything that we complain about all the proposals that bernie sanders has before senate and congress could be more than paid for by the 21 trillion dollars that was used to destroy iraq and afghanistan um at the beginning of the iraq war as the bombs were dropping we tore some clothes covered them in in red and carried what looked like dead babies in our arms as we wailed through the halls of congress and people were upset with us because we were showing them what really was going to be happening and we later put small shoes with little price tags on the outside of them that said the names of the children and where they were killed what day in the iraq war put them outside of the halls of doors of senators who were voting for more money to occupy iraq um you know i just want to bring up iraq a sovereign country that we occupied for 20 years and destroyed um that no one seems to bring up when they're talking about sovereignty around ukraine um so i i've invited three dear friends um and i want to start with just savina martin she's a longtime activist and an organizer from massachusetts she's an army veteran and over the years has mobilized around the war on drug that's affected homeless men and women in boston and san diego and she's helped and helped to um take over you know have homes where they could come to and be cared for which is what we call the peace economy and um she's a poverty scholar and is busy pursuing a doctoral and development psychology she's a member of the university of the pores homeless union and also eastern chair of massachusetts poor people campaign a national call for moral revival thank you so much for being with us vena and telling us about the cost of war in our own communities thank you so much jody my dear dear jody thank you for inviting me and thank you also jim for this framing um just one disclaimer i am a student at boston university school of theology no developmental psychology anymore i just wanted to say that i have to correct all that information the cost of war in our communities um what happens when we live in a community where there's a war on the poor constantly right here in the us um let me begin with a a stark image of um looking the crisis of war right in the eye right uh asking where is our humanity as we live in the midst of abundance but the image i want to start with right now uh is disturbing and it's an image of the screaming of a terrified child a terrified child in 1972 is a haunting image of the napalm girl let's breathe with that it had become a symbol for the anti-war protests all over the world and today i want to start with an image of something that i am going through in a community of wailing women i call are experiencing right now and it's the it's the image of a young 13 year old two weeks ago who was gunned down in the community as a result they're saying now mistaken identity and gang violence well the young 13 year old was visiting his grandmother from suburban boston on his way on an early sunday morning 11 30 a.m walking to burger king and was gunned down multiple times this little boy was my best friends my childhood friends grandson we went through the funeral we talked about the crisis the ongoing crisis in the community and the fact that how are we gonna you know be safe in the midst of not only chemical warfare drug overdose but gun violence random gun violence in the community this was my best friend's grandson he had his funeral now remember these are the conversations that we must have and continue to have that's why i'm so glad this platform is here so we can talk about the cost of war and the humanity behind it and how do we get to peace how do we get to peace how do we get to peace after the wounds how do we survive well unfortunately after the arraignment of the the perpetrator my dear friend goes home and she does the unthinkable and her funeral is tomorrow we are outraged all of us here should be outraged we are in a state of emergency and all hands must be on deck all hands must be on deck the other day i received a phone call talking about the boston emergency medical services responded to a series of presumed opioid overdose this most of the individuals who were impacted believe that they were using cocaine says the massachusetts department of public health identified and they identified that in 2010 to 2018 overdoses from stimulants like cocaine increasingly involved opioids so here they are trying to think this through right the bottom line is the community is being gentrified and i can remember back in 1968 although i was a child i still remember after the assassination of our dear dr king that the drugs were dumped in the community chemical warfare co entel pro spatial deconcentration pushing people out of the community a war on the poor and this continues to this this day their pattern of practice from the policies that they make to kill us in the community so that capitalism can come in and do what it always does with the greed of eating up and killing through their death dealing policies the least the left out and the so-called lost we came out of the movement of takeover houses and yes as jody mentioned the national union of the homeless we held a national campaign in 73 cities simultaneous actions across the country taken over abandoned buildings back in 1988 89 or 90 91 it's just so much right we're dealing we're still continuing to deal with the interlocking injustices of poverty racism ecological devastation and the denial of health care outright christian nationalism and militarism we can't do one without the other this is the cost of war the social and economic cost of war and i can go through so much we're all the experts right we could talk about the stats so and that's all i have to say right now in preparing for my dear friend's funeral this is the reality of where we're at today and what we're up against so i thank you for for inviting me here joe thank you so much sabina i hope that everybody can just take a few breaths because this is what the media doesn't want us to see why are we being distracted from the needs at home the care that is needed in our own country um and um when we think about this 21 trillion dollars that was spent on war it needed to go to the needs of the people so thank you sabina and i'm sorry for your loss so um next i want to um there are so many costs of war and i'm so we're just getting a taste of it but um it's also a day from feeling so i encourage everyone just to take a really deep breath um the place where this propaganda comes to us is a concerted um scientific effort to come into our compassion and our empathy and grab it and then be weaponized for war and so um um we hear when we're feeling actually what are the costs of war we're so used to being denied even the crack into what this actually is because they know if we knew what the costs of war were and if we were actually confronted with them that we would all be in the streets because we would not be allowing this to happen with our tax dollars or in our name so next i want to go to teddy augborn um teddy has joined us from the environmental movement he um is code pinks wars not green coordinator and um they are a climate activist and organizer based in new york city um he's originally from littleton colorado um he's educated in comparative literature um and but now he's working um at the intersection of climate and militarism he's bringing the costs of war to the planet into the climate movement and educating them and i'll let him tell you i'll let him educate you but he's also been a film festival director and a fencing coach and a film producer and a high school english teacher and he's in the streets almost every day organizing and building a movement so um please welcome teddy thank you so much jody for that kind introduction um and i just want to thank and uplift savina again for sharing her stories there i'm feeling deeply moved and holding that with me now um as jody mentioned you know i i have um a varied background like you said i'm educated in comparative literature i didn't study political science or environmental science in college i'm someone who at a certain point i read a certain just a certain number of articles and figures around climate change and how much time that we actually have to address it and i felt like i really needed to pivot i i realized at that moment that our governments certainly not our corporations are going to stop this crisis it doesn't stop until we stop it um and i was fortunate enough when i moved to new york a little over a year ago to begin working with some really powerful climate activists that were also peace activists and had associations and worked with code pink and from then from them i i began to learn about the intersections of of peace anti-militarism and the climate crisis and environmental justice and i was at the time it's it's funny to look back at it now at the time i was shocked to see sort of how intertwined these issues are and i was shocked because it's not spoken about that way um sometimes in within sort of both of those movements right i mean i have to talk about them as they're distinct and they certainly aren't but um at least within the climate movement i quickly realized that there is a huge need for this education which jody has really aptly identified you know education is the most important part of peace work and and as she just said again really aptly you know if if we did all have a true understanding of you know what our government is and isn't doing and we could feel that in its fullness every day we would be out in the streets constantly that's what's moving me to the streets it's moving that's what's moving me to do some of this educational work with everyone here today so i thank you for providing this space for me to share a little bit about that um so the wing campaign war is not green um i would say this the the way that this campaign often thinks about itself and messages is very broadly twofold one is we're talking about redistribution of money right so um and this is in tandem with things like the cut the pentagon campaign um but uh i'm sure most people on this call are familiar with the massive amount of money that our government and our taxpayers put into us militarism and us aggression abroad um the most recent budget for 2023 i think about 853 billion dollars has been approved for the pentagon um and almost half of that is earmarked for private military contractors like lockheed martin and rapion so that's one factor um and that's just for our military budget presently um and then the other factor that we're looking at is military emissions right so this is something that i was shocked about a year ago to learn and now i make sure everybody i meet knows it the u.s military is the planet's biggest institutional emitter of fossil fuels it is the biggest dirtiest polluter on the planet it is a greater polluter than about 50 countries combined on the planet and if you take all the sum of all global militaries um that attributes about six percent of all of the emissions all the greenhouse gas emissions that this planet is experiencing right now and warming because of so of course when you learn all this um you realize something that many scientists have you know have uttered themselves which is we actually cannot meaningfully address the climate crisis until we meaningfully address militarism domestically and abroad right these things are interlinked and if we do simply you know and put up more solar panels for example that's not going to stop the cycle of acquisition that's happening with oil abroad and u.s imperialism abroad the the scholar nita crawford puts it really well this this idea of a cycle of acquisitions he says that because of the u.s military we're locked in the cycle of acquisition because then you know and people have very short memories we are now at 20 years since iraq um and and this shouldn't surprise no one but it's continuing to happen now in ukraine and i can continue to explain that but we're locked in a cycle of acquisitions as crawford of fossil fuels and then the protection of that acquisition because now we have you know foreign assets that have become privatized and us controlled abroad um and all you need to do is to look at our over 750 almost 800 military bases that the united states has around the world to understand how intent we are on protecting our fossil fuels in our interests abroad and capitalism abroad it should be said um so zeroing a little bit more on the war in ukraine specifically um a lot of my focus with this campaign recently has been on how the war in ukraine has increased the production of dirty energy right so um a lot of people are familiar whether they're in the peace movement or not with what's happened with fuel prices this last year they shot through the roof um and the media and uh big oil was quick to simply point the finger and say it's because of the war in ukraine and disrupted supply chains and that was easy enough for them to get away with everybody was saying oh yeah the war in ukraine yeah i'm sure things are pretty shaken up out there if you look just a tiny bit further you can see that these same corporations made record profits off the backs of consumers this last year they were profiting off of the death and destruction in ukraine using this as an excuse to price gouge consumers and the issue here is twofold it's creating a greater dependence on fossil fuels and it's filling the coffers of these fossil fuel giants so they have the means the funds the political poll to exacerbate and to expand fossil fuel extraction globally i mean you see that now with uh conco phillips um beginning the willow project a a record-breaking size uh fossil fuel extraction project that's about to be approved by the u.s department of interior up in alaska right and um so you see companies uh corporate giants using the war in ukraine to justify increased fossil fuel um expansion you see that also with the expansion of the coal mine in leucerath where in january probably many of you are familiar gretta tunberg was arrested protesting the expansion of the leucerath coal mine um and that same company rwe said the same exact thing germany doesn't have enough fuel because we've sanctioned russia so we've got to be digging more coal now there are many studies that actually have shown the contrary but it's political opportunism pure and simple now speaking of germany and and russia something this campaign has also been really focused on is the north stream pipelines and this is a really interesting case study in the cost of war and also how um fossil fuel infrastructure is being spun within this narrative so for those of you that aren't familiar the north stream pipelines connect russia and germany by a fossil fuel their natural gas pipelines sending gas from russia to germany um and in september in september of last year they were sabotaged they were ruptured via what was clearly intentional bombings under sea and western countries were quick to point the finger at russia there was no evidence for months and uh there's still no official government report of who and government is the operative word there no official government report of who actually done it uh just yet but what actually happened in that moment was these pipelines were pressurized with methane gas miles and miles of methane gas in fact about 70 000 metric tons were released into our atmosphere because of the bombing of north stream so this is a wartime operation clandestine wartime operation that caused a single greatest release of methane gas into our atmosphere that's ever been recorded and that thing is about 80 times more potent than co2 as a greenhouse gas so you can see you know we could say for the moment you know whichever country did this doesn't care about the environment which doesn't quite narrow things down um but it's it's a it's a very literal and instant cost of the war on the climate let alone these longer term um effects that i've just mentioned um now i should say recently the journalist scy harsh published an article citing a source with inside knowledge of the operations in great detail showing how the biden administration biden himself covertly in june of last year planted c4 c4 explosives on the north stream pipelines and detonated them in september so this is scy harsh's account um and scy harsh is an incredibly reputable journalist i mean this is someone who broke the niline massacre back you know about half a century ago abu grabe as well during iraq and the invasions in the middle east um and of course the white house is denying calling it uh total fabrication right so this is this is one thing that the campaign for instance is doing is following this thread all the way through north stream all of its environmental effects through to saying well let's call on congress to investigate right if if if they're going to fully deny scy harsh's account they need to investigate um and then the other factor too is the opportunism right north stream was bombed um and right after north stream was bombed actually just a little bit before because russia had actually just turned off the tap they had the power to turn off the the tap on these pipelines so it's it's pretty clear to many people that they didn't have reason to blow it up um just before the sabotage us natural gas exports to europe surpassed russian natural gas exports europe for the first time ever right so there are many environmental activists that initially look at the explosion of a pipeline or sabotage or monkey wrenching and say this is yes like end fossil fuels and this is about the farthest you could come from that kind of direct action in fact the writer of the the book how to blow up a pipeline said as much right um because all it's done is restructure the fossil fuel economy and concentrate it further in the west and specifically with american corporate giants who like i said now have the means to continue expanding fossil fuels um and then just to expand a little bit on the environmental destruction um in in Ukraine because of the war uh itself i mean you are encountering a lot of what we call scope three emissions which is essentially the emissions that are directly uh caused by the products of war products of war right so um air pollution is off the charts in the ukraine in fact it's the air pollution of just this war in itself not counting the countries of ukraine or russia has matched the rate of emissions of the country the entire country of the netherlands throughout the war so it's created essentially an entire nation of emissions um while it's destroying people's lives and destroying um sovereignty so um and uh additionally you know arable farmland in eastern ukraine will not be they won't exist the farmland will not be arable for um potentially decades to come because of the forever chemicals that are leaking um into into waters and because of explosions it's estimated about 50 000 black sea dolphins have washed ashore on the on the shores of black sea as a result of the war um and explosions undersea um and i just really want to come back as as one of my last points to the question of funding right so we've approved this 858 billion dollars for the war uh for the us pentagon this year um and just in 2022 and i believe we've just now approved a good deal more it was a hundred billion dollars for weapons in ukraine right we're funding death and destruction ukraine snap it's not money for peace it's not money for you know aid or resolving the conflict and this is this is both leaving this is american taxpayer money that's leaving our system that could that could be used to actually address climate change here you know if you were to take half of our military budget in the united states about 150 000 green jobs could be made just from that alone and then we would still have with half of that amount a greater budget than china russia iran all of them combined um and pardon me so the the us has been intent for about 20 years um in making sure that its military missions wouldn't be counted and to make sure this is all swept under the rug so um i'll just close with this that the this educational that is is incredibly important i'm happy to be able to share this information with all of you um and i also hope that you all will help um continue the spread of this information i'm going to share a link in the chat shortly could pink has produced a video about the environmental effects of the war in ukraine um it's a really great 10-point video uh that we've shared with lots of environmental organizations so um i'll stop there but thank you all so much for having me and looking forward to the conversations thank you teddy so thorough bravo um so uh there you go that's another like take a deep breath especially i saw a note in the chat about our children who um hope that there's a future and um so you know take two breaths please this is our planet this is the mother that we love so um next i want to move to um wei you whose code pink's china's not our enemy campaign coordinator wei was born in china and has lived in the united states um to go to high school um in university she studied sociology and international studies and conducted independent research on neocolonial bias in the global north um academia um so we're very excited to have wei as part of our team she's a passionate anti-imperialist and um excited about her peace building work so wei if you could join us and talk about the effects of this war and china thank you so much jody uh i know um all of our friends from uh earlier this week and also earlier this morning just really amazing speaker and i'm really honored to be here with you all and um i know a lot of our speakers touched upon the ongoing war in ukraine and then i'm just here to talk about china but really the war in ukraine and the u.s aggression tour where china have a lot of um interactive interconnected part because as the u.s is realizing that is not winning this proxy war that's uh funded through means of sending weapons to ukraine it's starting to drum up aggression towards china and again bring us closer to another war with a nuclear power so as we see in the last year a lot of the um aggression towards china whether that's militarizing the asia pacific um or uh with this idea of competition quote-unquote competition with china they're actually using ukraine as an excuse to justify all of this aggression um for example um with with i'm sorry this is like really in our like really early in the morning for me so i just had a lot of coffee so with jody said i should remember to just breathe a little bit um with ukraine uh the us is see is viewing china as an enemy as our campaign name says and is using it as an excuse to arm and militarize the asia pacific as part of this quote-unquote deterrence policy but really weapons kill weapons don't deter war weapons escalate war and we see that with taiwan with the national defense authorization act for this year's promising 10 billion dollars of arm sale to taiwan and as um our speakers previously testified this amount of taxpayer money could have been spent to address the most urgent need of people be that housing or health care or education at home um outside of taiwan in other places in the asia pacific um the us is also building a military uh infrastructures and destroying people's lives and their home so uh for example in guam the us military is violating the sovereignty of the people of guam because they're constructing a new military base and they're doing this without the consent of the people and actually the construction is faced has faced opposition from indigenous activists because they're building a military facilities on ancestral burial ground and on habitats of endangered species they're killing people's past by destroying important cultural artifacts and they're destroying people's future by contaminating their drinking water similarly in red hill in hawaii the us military is also killing people with all the oil spills and similarly in okinawa the us military base there is also destroying their pristine environment and the most the most important thing to take from all of this is that the people in the asia pacific don't want war they don't want the to be dragged into a potential nuclear war and they don't want their home to be turned into battlefield um in taiwan the ruling party for the past two decades or so actually lost the election last year because the people of taiwan said we want our politicians to focus on local issues and not engage in geopolitics with the us um we talked about the protest uh in guam as well um so really this ongoing aggression with china that's resulted in militarization of the asia pacific is hurting people and destroying the pristine environment coming back to a continental us we're also seeing that this exploitation of anti-china political rhetoric is leaking into our social fabrics and fueling anti-asian hate um in a study uh in a study about uh from 2021 um anti-asian hate crime actually soared over 300 percent because of all the anti-china political rhetorics um under this uh thing called china initiative so a lot of academics scholars of chinese descent are persecuted um with false espionage charges so they're arrested they're detained and sometimes they're deported and their families are torn apart and also devastated by heavy legal fees we actually have an event coming up um on us foreign policy towards china and its effect on asian americans on uh wednesday so two weeks away from today on march 15th at apm eastern time and five p.m pacific time and we will talk more about this issue with uh some other great panelists so i look forward to seeing you all there um and in addition to um hurting the people and environment of the asia pacific and also asian americans at home we also see um going back to the interaction between the war in ukraine and this aggression towards china um with a peace plan that china proposed as the death and disruption in ukraine reached uh the one-year mark on friday um so this um 12 point proposal for a negotiated peace in ukraine um was first of all welcomed by ukraine with some reservations and um kazakhstan which is a country neighboring russia as well as the prime minister of you of hungary a country neighboring ukraine also supported the plan however the biden administration rejected it because it's just not okay to call for peace now and also it's just um bad for the biden administration that this peace plan is coming from china a country that is painting at its rival so the uh the warmongers in washington really as we can see is willing to reject a peace proposal just because they want to continue to feel this hate towards china um so uh with the cost of work on china already being borne by the people and environment of the asia pacific by asian americans and also by opportunities for collaboration between china and the us from negotiating peace in ukraine and also fighting the climate crises and also addressing poverty um that's um our message of our campaign is that china is our enemy and for people on the planet we need cooperation and not competition thank you wey thank you so much sorry to wake you up so really i'm i'm sorry if i might my brain's just like like working a little chunks just because the coffee is messing me up a little bit so thank you all for being here and also listening to me so um i'll just make sure that teddy and wey both post um in the chat ways that you can um learn more but as they both have tons more they write and um have actions that you can be engaged in so we were gonna hear from uh kimbali next and he just sent me a note i'm gonna try to share my screen um one more time there we go that's kimbali saying um i think the note says my son is sick and i'm the only one home taking care so um he's to uh to share with you because he's being a good dad and so i'm celebrating him for being a great dad and that's his three month old so the thing that he says most important that he wants you all to know is that africa wants dialogue they do not want war um especially because of the heavy price africa is paying for this war the grain shipments have been affected and um that they're um um there there there are places there are countries within africa that are starving he said that um the linsky wanted to um speak to the african union he invited everyone in the african union and four presidents attended um that he said that the af looking from africa the presidents of africa know that this is about us hegemony they all know that this is a us proxy war they are not inside of the propaganda at all um and many of these countries when they saw the sanctioning of russia was one of the most frightening things ever saw because if you know you you see the sanctioning of um well first we watched it with a rock which was horrifying and then we see it with cuba we see it with venezuela we see it with iran the sanctions are meant they say to affect the leadership but they only affect the people and when africa saw that us would be sold as to sanction russia it was like we're all next and what we we witnessed with this war like one of the costs of this war to be very clear um is that the world has turned against the united states in the west and we've seen leaders in the eu very concerned about this because they feel that they've been dragged on the coattails of the united states into the the mud of um how the west is being seen right now and now it's taken hundreds of years for the west to build up the the reputation for so many broken promises but in the last 20 years the number of broken promises and the the hypocrisy that the rest of the world can see as they're looking at the ukraine war the utter hypocrisy both as they're looking at the us's war on russia through ukraine and as they're looking at this drive to war in china the hypocrisy of the reasons the united states is using um are are all things the united states has like quadruply been horrific at let's just remember that since the world world war two they say between 20 to 30 million people have been killed by the united states so um when we talk about sovereignty leaders of latin america would like to know that the united states actually understands what sovereignty means because we now have most leaders in africa and most leaders in latin america who are saying no to the hegemony of the united states are saying no to having the boot on their necks in so many ways and are saying no to you know being in agreements where they're on the losing end all the time which is yet another cost of war so what kambali said he would like you to know is that africans are being are concerned about being treated like ukraine and no one wants to be the the the fodder inside of a war and we we look at afghanistan talk about the cost of war right now in afghanistan first of all we as all wars do we've left a very traumatized and partly destroyed country as we did with iraq the the fiber of the society the you know what held it together when there aren't systems in place to hold together a country then we have you know gangs are created and fascism is on the rise and control is what people turn to both they turn to it as a comfort in the in the space of chaos and it's in the space of a vacuum violence arises and what's arising right now in afghanistan is a total disrespect for the need of the education of women by those in power and um and a literally turning away global powers turning away from what should be an engaging with and this is like another piece of this need for diplomacy this need for global care instead of global violence and that global the the violence is in leaving a country to its own devices instead of you know giving it back the money that is being held in a bank in new york in ways through ways that could actually go to the people where do we start caring about the people on this planet and as we heard from teddy it's like we're not caring about the planet but we are people on a planet on an abundant planet and these wars all of them steal from all of us so that's my message from kambali and and a few minutes hopefully uh daniel is here yay so um thank you daniel for coming back today um i introduced you to everyone yesterday even though you need no introduction um thank you for coming back because the ultimate cost of war is a nuclear winter and you are the expert on this issue so if you can turn on your mic and turn on your camera we're excited to welcome you back can you oh we can't hear you i can see myself there we can hear you i'm not hearing anything there we go we can hear you okay my mom are we good i'll say some can you hear us not yet can you hear me now i can see okay it's all you can hear you can hear me it's all yours dan it's all yours yes i'm not hearing you well we went through this yesterday show d say just one more thing and see if i hear you we can hear you very well can you hear you dad oh we can hear you so uh please we can hear you well i'm not hearing you that's not important yes go forward i will we went through all this yesterday i thought and i will again ask my son you know but try pushing the button can you hear me can you hear me you just heard me for a minute there yeah you can just talk dan jody have somebody else for another five minutes let me get my son in and let's try this once more okay let's uh you you okay okay sorry all right um we had it earlier darn um so while we um isn't that a beautiful picture of dan and patricia just want to remind everyone as we talk about war and peace that you know i don't know if anyone's almost dangerous man in america as a producer i'm gonna be like shameless and encourage you to see it but i think one of the important parts of the story about dan is that it was love and that i think you know what we're talking about here especially today the costs of war they are painful and and hard to hold and it was love that um brought daniel to share his secrets um so may we all cultivate peace and love it is it is so important in this world and in this country where violence and it is invested in that um 60 of your tax dollars yes and as alivia said the hearing where are the hearings on peace hey dan can you hear us i can hear you now that's okay i welcome back i really have no is this pretty much the same audience that was here yesterday do you imagine or not yes yes well then i really don't know unfortunately how much they did say of what i said yesterday i'll try not to repeat myself uh too much the let me start with the thought that the threats we've been hearing from the first day or two of this war the use of nuclear weapons by russia with putin actually sitting in one of his deep underground bunkers to make the announcement that tests were being made which he was following of icbn that could reach the united states and that that was implicit in this war as a possibility we did not hear really a denunciation of that threat in the terms that it was a monstrous criminal vicious totally immoral an insane threat after all it was it was clearly a threat of an insane action for him to launch any of those weapons actually against the united states where they were intended would surely result in a nuclear winter because the war plans of both sides call for hitting military targets in many many cities and those cities even if they weren't aiming directly at cities as they used to do very explicitly leningrad as it then was odessa karkov all these names have have changed since then but the cities as such haven't changed that much and the targets still are pretty much the same because instead of aiming at leningrad now zing petersberg they aim at military targets in leningrad and with the kinds of thermonuclear weapons that they use the town would be destroyed by each of those attacks in most of the cities have many nuclear targets and many nuclear bombs aimed at them moskow in the past has had a tendency perhaps the most and of having as many as 158 nuclear warheads landing in moskow now that shocked even richard cheney when he was vice president how could that be so many well there's so many military targets there where their military commanders are many bunkers for them deep underground for them to go many air defenses including even anti ballistic missile defenses military industries and command posts and so forth so and frankly from the very beginning i've known every unit wants to get a warhead on moskow in the old days even planes that would have to fly one-way missions with tactical nuclear bombers would arrange to get one of their bombers on moskow as a matter of prestige practically this despite the fact that there are a attack on moskow would not paralyze their response both sides used to proclaim that only their leader could release those bombs that was never true because a leader can be shot several of our presidents have been shot or a high explosive bomb could take out a number of leaders from one bomb in any case a nuclear bomb from a cruise missile with essentially no warning from a submarine was capable of taking out either moskow or washington and the incentive to do that decapitation was always that it it had a non-zero chance of actually paralyzing the other side's retaliation without their central command but it was never true in either side that only the president or the secretary general could release those bombs for the very reason i've described they were not going to allow their forces to be paralyzed by a single attack on their capital or on their main command posts submarine posts plane posts and so forth because always on both sides perhaps a little later for the soviets but explicitly there too what they called the dead hand policy which meant which assured that a warning would go out from a moskow or another command headquarters under attack to all the other um missile sites and bomber bases and everything else not only releasing them from their control not to launch without an executive order but to actually in some cases give the order give the code for those to release so all you would get was an uncoordinator to somewhat uncoordinate attack and if they can change their actual targets which we could they would now aim to be almost exclusively in cities for retaliation so hitting Moscow had no effect except to start the war and um and striking first actually uh when there were submarines on both sides we had always had more of them more reliable ones but uh in both sides they had submarines that would not be destroyed by an enemy attack certainly not by ICBMs couldn't find them enough to destroy a society and it does not take a thousand weapons to destroy a society but beyond that our plans called our plans now in 1961 which I was aware of working on the plans for the secretary defense and indirectly for the president Kennedy and learned as a result of questions I drafted for the president to give that the uh our junctius of staff in the strategic air command planned in a u.s preemptive strike before other sides had launched the only kind that had any promise of reducing damage to the united states in the war getting the other missiles before they were launched uh they planned to hit in addition to the missiles which were very few in Soviet Union at that time all cities over a hundred thousand in population and 80 percent of cities had 20,000 25,000 population the smoke from these cities would be in the form would be would rise from what we're called fire storms a very intense fire which every nuclear weapon can cause by its huge thermonuclear fire ball that would incinerate everything in a large area simultaneously that gives you even with incendiary weapons an updraft which loft smoke far beyond its normal altitude in the atmosphere from which it eventually rains out instead it would be lofted into the stratosphere we achieved this only three times that we tried a hundred times in world war two uh on in incendiary attacks on Dresden Hamburg and Tokyo in Tokyo we killed about a hundred thousand people 80 to 120,000 people in one night dying very badly actually uh boiling to death in canals they sought for shelter from the fire which were boiling tens of thousands of people died like that others died by fire which is not a good way to die and as anyone who's been in combat as I have in Vietnam and any civilian uh facing death knows there are better and worse ways to die very very much so and uh death by fire is one of the very worst quick ones the certainly morally not really distinct from bringing uh bringing people to gas chambers this brings an end the bodies to the fire this brings the fire to the people the furnaces to the people now we've had them at the time the expectation of killing uh I'll go to the details now I just said yesterday it's in my book doomsday machine in the very first pages that they expected to kill 600 million people with are for strike not if straight out of the blue but what we called preemption a strike in anticipation that the other side would strike and the reason you're doing that in the face of what you think is the inevitability of war somebody is the delusion which had elements of reality long in the past when the flight when the war was mainly conducted by slope by flyers by planes which could take 10 and 12 hours to reach their targets after they've been set out and which could be defended against by in various forms at the aircraft fire surface air missiles it was a possible defense against that but into the age of missiles where there really is no defense uh we spent billions many billions on abm anti ballistic missile defenses but the possibility the easy possibility of accompanying every warhead with 50 to 100 decoys which sensors can't distinguish from the warhead means that the chance of actually destroying a warhead is almost nil so it's a total hoax the uh notion the money we've spent on that over the years and are still spending but we also spent trillions on a much more plausible and very profitable hoax which was that you could lower damage to the united states and even in general war if you went first and if you had weapons that could not only go very quickly on command and the communications to icbm permit that on the ground much more than two submarines that see where the communication can be had but it's not as fast not as reliable so the icbms offer themselves with large warheads not needed for destroying urban areas though they are often aimed at those but are essential at those days for destroying a hardened missile a hot missile in a concrete silo that had to be hit quite close by in order to be described in those days Polaris nuclear submarines couldn't do that they could basically only hit soft targets like cities and airfields but so the air force said we've got something now that keeps our strategic air command of bombers and missiles alive compared to the submarine which seems to be a more a better deterrent force you can't find it uh it's out of sea it's essentially invulnerable and the icbm on the contrary became more and more vulnerable as accuracy of missiles improved on both sides so it came down from a range of miles uh within the target miles from the target that you could have 50 percent of the missiles fall within to hundreds of yards and even less than that tens of yards so that even with a smaller charge that you could fit many of them on top of a missile and release them separately each one of those could land close enough to a missile to destroy it so you had the chance to take their eyes each side had the chance to take their missiles off the board whatever else they threw at you it wouldn't be those initially thousand or several thousand with multiple warheads uh it it would be only the submarines and the missiles you had missed which would be a significant fraction only a fraction of that will destroy your society but surely it's not as bad to be struck by their SLBMs not as bad for to be struck by a fraction of their icbm than all of it isn't that obvious well it's obvious but it's wrong in the first instance it doesn't take that many arriving warheads on cities to destroy a society it doesn't take a thousand cities or 500 cities it doesn't take a hundred cities 10 cities a major cities five 10 20 certainly the society is not a functioning society in any sense that it was before but more than that and that you couldn't you couldn't avoid in a war between the us and russia you can't get things down lower than that even though even though with those effects people outside the explosion area uh in in what herman kahn called area b uh which was outside the cities and where a lot of the population was could if they prepared very carefully with fallout shelters and shelter and food and everything which herman kahn proposed uh could perhaps lie last quite a while from the fallout so you'd have a lot of people left even without transportation hubs hospitals doctors transportation communication hubs any of that but you'd have let's say a rural society without left except that 20 years after i'd looked on the plans in 1961 in 1983 an international group of scientists including some russian is on stenchikov and american scientists like carl sagan others like brian tun and turko some of others discovered and calculated that burning the cities and jump and throwing what what is now proven to be pretty much to be 150 million tons of soot and black smoke into into the stratosphere would blot out the sunlight to the extent of 70 percent freeze rivers freeze ponds uh even in the summer certainly in the spring and kill all harvests worldwide before this discovery uh when you destroyed the northern hemisphere where almost all the targets exist uh eurasia and the us north america you have a southern hemisphere where the radioactive fission products don't generally penetrate in the stratosphere or even the atmosphere to the southern hemisphere because um equatorial winds blow away from the equator and with no warheads the southern hemisphere would be a spare hemisphere where you destroyed the northern hemisphere that's not true the smoke in the stratosphere is not stopped by equatorial winds it goes around the globe very quickly destroys harvests almost as much in the southern hemisphere there's a little difference than in the northern there would be people surviving it probably would not be extinction some have calculated 96 percent extinction 98 percent well one percent is 80 million people nowadays and then it was 30 million people two percent even more 10 percent might survive 800 million people quite comparable to the population of the world in 1800 which was a billion but they wouldn't be where they were before they wouldn't be in the northern hemisphere there would be ellen robach tells me people in argentina and parts of austria seacoast new zealand people living on mollusks and seafood and so we could do it all again there'd be enough people to inherit this technology and have wars and other civilized accomplishments but uh most people would be gone and they would be gone through starvation in the course of a year which like fire is not one of the better ways to die watching your children and older people starve before your eyes in the course of a year is uh is not as general growth set of radiation wrongly a pleasant way to die he was wrong it's that isn't either so um here we are then having a leader of a major state say not for the first time but one of the first against us actually that he would initiate a nuclear war presumably in the form of a small nuclear or tactical nuclear weapons many of which are the size of cheroshima 13 telekines kilotons uh some what are called tactical there was 10 even five kilotons half a heresy one or third of a heresy and we even have bombs that were sending to europe that can be dials down from hundreds of millitons a kiloton is a thousand tons of tnt equivalent so you can even have what was not conceivable uh 20 or 30 years ago a third of a kiloton 300 tons only which sounds either large or small to you it's very small compared to what destroyed cheroshima or nidus saki with nidus saki was 20 000 tons cheroshima 13 15 000 but uh on the other hand comparing it to blockbusters of world war two which could destroy a city block those were 5 10 and 15 at the most 20 tons so 300 tons is a big bang uh usable on a battlefield uh on a city it would it would make a hole a very distinct hole uh and would seem usable it's in the same realm as ordinary war the trouble being that the moment that one side or the other and in this case it would be almost certainly the russians who use the nuclear weapon and that is because a tactical nuclear weapon because nowadays where Putin is fighting the nato countries have an enormous conventional non-nuclear superiority to the russians that's a reversal of the situation when nato was conceived for started at that time the russians were imagined to have an enormous conventional superiority after world war two and that was a considerable myth but it had reality uh it was very greatly exaggerated by exaggerating the size by realizing that when we talked about 175 russian divisions which was the conventional attribution to the russians it took quite a while for people to absorb the fact that a russian that more than half of those divisions were paper divisions which didn't even exist other other were just command post decisions which were to be filled out with soldiers as they're mobilizing right now in time of war not not available for a blood screen and the size of the russian division was less than half of the size we of of america division in other words 75 divisions did not mean 75 u.s divisions more else there were also matters of manning and so forth so the the possibility of a conventional offense against russian was always there in terms of the economies of europe in fact little known fact and carefully concealed fact was the nato companies countries together had more manpower under arms than the war saw packed far from being this david facing the riot with a nuclear sling uh they were they were pretty evenly matched although the nato countries were distributed in their area they weren't based for best defense against a russian offensive but the time at that thought was we can only protect west berlin inside east europe inside east germany uh we can't defend it at all with a conventional offense they had 22 tank divisions in the vicinity of berlin and in east germany we could not have challenged that with our own tanks so we challenged it with a commitment that we would launch under eisenhower all out war vasco land and ground everything if they penetrated east germany which was held at that time and for power uh after the after world war two kennedy modified that when i was working for him and said we'll have a flexible response and the idea was at first you would launch one or two weapons to demonstrate brazil we're ready to use nuclear weapons which we've been threatening now for a decade under eisenhower but you'll see that it's not just a bluff we'll use one in hopes that the war will stay one-sided because of russian fear that if they joined it we might strike them first with our overwhelming superiority in preemptive capability and if they didn't if they responded we could escalate but at some point before long we would we would go first and that would keep them that was the defense of berlin for over half a century uh it meant it was not certain to succeed uh kennedy in particular and eisenhower before were more far from certain that these threats would keep russia from walking in to a city that they surrounded with east german and east german divisions but it was hoped that it would succeed and it did by the way it did hold berlin the price of that was though legitimizing the idea essentially of starting a conflict that would blow up eurasia in europe we didn't know about nuclear winter then the reality was that that conflict would have destroyed most life on earth and we would not be having this discussion now but that was regarded as legitimate the had a reason to save west berlin from being socialized it had capabilities that were adapted that to hit russian icb m's in great numbers this is very profitable hoax by the aerospace industry that it was possible to limit damage in an all out nuclear war depending what you targeted and what your vehicles or how accurate they were that was all false it was all false ever when it came to preserving a society uh in the course of a two-sided nuclear war as reagan and gobert scharf recognized nuclear war cannot be won they said it might be false well that's a little misleading the only nuclear war that was ever fought was one in 1945 we sent two weapons to a non-nuclear nation we had a monopoly there was no chance of response and whether or not they won the war and i would say absolutely not that's a myth but a widely accepted myth they didn't lose the war most of our threats our threats have been against non-nuclear powers that had a nuclear ally as in end of china which eventually china came to be a nuclear power and russia was all supported supported north vietnam about the way that we're supporting ukraine now but they didn't get directly into it and we didn't win that war but it didn't go nuclear even though we made nuclear threats the and but a nuclear threat directly against russia with the same by the way occurred in korea and actually uh iraq and co-aid places you haven't heard of in that connection problem a lot of these threats were secret even in afghanistan i'm sorry i meant to say iran secret threats but they were in a sense or they weren't necessary we haven't actually seen a nuclear war which is very reassuring given how many threats there have been like putans now except now let me go right to ukraine except there are some peculiar and ominous aspects of this confrontation both russia and the us which have each of them are the destroy the ability to destroy not just each other and not just their allies but both life in the world that is the threat they they render in fighting themselves no warheads outside their own territory but fall out and smoke does not respect territories and the smoke goes around the world so every person in the world every nation in the world has a stake and i would say a right to have a say and some influence in the occurrence or the plans to start a nuclear war between the us and russia above all which can not be one that's true and uh which will affect everybody with the smoke we're we're defending this barrier or that area indian pakistan funding each other in ways that could cause a billion to two billion deaths by famine if indian pakistan alone were to launch just a fraction of their existing small inventories a hundred weapons altogether fission weapons would cause death by starvation of a hundred to two hundred million because india either india or pakistan have the right in their own defense to cause that breath of death from the country but seem obviously not but almost no one has raised that and there is a reason no one has raised it for us does russia have a right to threaten something against what would quickly be almost surely be a us-natal war with nuclear war with to launch that almost surely guaranteeing the death of most people in the world 90 to 90 90 to 98 percent of people in the world what right do they have to do that is that not as i suggested at the beginning a monstrous threat immoral insane and we don't hear those words either against russia or against india or pakistan india says has it has a no first use case having a national uh non-national nuclear superiority to pakistan but pakistan is fairly explicit about using nuclear weapons first if they had to and they assumed that in a war with india they would have to okay so why haven't we heard this denunciation all we heard is you will regret it you'll you'll have consequences if you do this we don't spell them out it's not easy to define them uh compared to nuclear or explosions but we'll do something at first non-nuclear which will make you regret that you did this and stop it and negation what we haven't heard was the very idea of this happening and we're imposing consequences so is absolutely intolerable and wrong and there's a reason for that the reason is that the u.s as i've indicated already has been making comparable threats for 70 years and still does and rejects the notion brought up by some of their own congresspeople but by many allies of a no use no first use threat because there are situations no longer in europe for us but say in taiwan 100 miles from mainland china where china has a regional conventional parody at least maybe even superiority and i i'm sorry to say that i don't see biden who feels a responsibility for protecting taiwan and deterring an attack from giving up that deterrent we might initiate worldwide no clear war to defend taiwan now that threat should never have happened but on the other hand it almost was risking world destruction but on the other hand one could say it has worked and we haven't had it it's working right now the weapons are being used in the way you point them at somebody in a conflict and you get their way without pulling the trigger Putin made his threats clearly in february 20 late late february a year ago to keep nato which wasn't obliged to come to the defense of ukraine because it wasn't a member but to keep any uk nato member above all the us from participating directly in that war uh biden's unique time we will not send troops no matter how much they might help or be needed we will not send troops is a reflection of the use the successful use of Putin's nuclear threats because that would have too much of a threat of blowing the world up for his side Putin is not attacking bases in poland uh in nato territory or romania which would be very natural targets except for the threat that the nuclear that that could respect uh go to a nuclear war now each of the superpowers is us in russia with its doomsday capability has actually allowed itself to be defeated or stalemated and a compromise negotiated solution arrives in a number of wars and that wasn't predicted when we came into this when i was working on this in the 50s it was assumed that any war between uh involving a nuclear state any nuclear could not be lost without their going nuclear we found that they were willing us russia was willing to lose to afghanistan the u.s was willing to lose to afghanistan uh we had a stalemate in korea both sides we lost in vietnam without using nuclear weapons doesn't that tell us that there's really minimal risk the problem is as i see it that neither power has faced a prospect of losing a war to the other superpower it's one thing to draw out of a war where your adversary is obviously inferior can't threaten you it just costs too much it's not worth it it's not enough interest and you decide to get out of that war but when you're claiming that you are at parity or superiority with a nuclear superpower very dangerous politically and in running an empire to lose that war to another pure superpower and we we're not facing that yet at this moment we have a stalemated war but i'll be very specific now potent has made it clear over and over in the last year and before it that he regards like almost every russian primia as russian as part of russia and that loss of primia and the black sea base the base for the black sea fleet which they've had for a very long time the loss of that would be a loss of russia and a tremendous political challenge to potent at home and if he were replaced by another it would be someone who would be tougher on that issue it's entirely credible they will use every means they have including nuclear to keep from losing primia with slightly lesser extent that extends to the donbas which has been the eastern part of which has been occupied by russia and has now been proclaimed as russia that losing that would be russia uh actually they only controlled a third of it to begin with somewhat more now more like a half there's still parts of the donbas they don't actually occupy that though they've claimed the disquiet of russia what i'm saying is i think it's quite credible that if they're actually faced with the loss of primia which zolensky as head of the ukrainian state promises and is acting toward right now i think actually without the intervention of americans directly not just planes but american pilots and and even ground troops russia this is just a guess now does not will not have this fatal fate of either losing primia or using nuclear weapons but if the americans did what zolensky is called for from the beginning hillary clinton called for it in a nose fly zone that would involve directly hitting at russian troops with american troops something that has never happened except for the shootdown overtly of major anderson in the cuban missile crisis which brought it to a head but since 1919 russians and americans have at times been allies and then second world war but have never shot at each other and many people are calling for that to change now and to be shooting each other giving the possibility of each one losing to the other something i think neither side is going to be willing to do for domestic no president is going to be allow himself to be accused of losing awards to russia that he's been directly fighting there hasn't been one but there could be one now so right now i'm by saying can we people of the world all of us have a stake i would say in averting this a nuclear war and that is likely to arise in the first instance and it is possible to rise by an escalation of american involvement up to including actual us participation which lies i think a step or two beyond giving the f-16s which in a lot of in a lot of time which the planes biden is i think rightly still refraining from doing that but uh the pressure to do that will not be in the next month or two i don't think they will fight it but as each side realizes an inescapable stalemate after their offenses have failed this fall either they will negotiate on a compromise solution of the kind that they zelensky and putin had arrived at in turk in istanbul in a year ago in march and equal which essentially was a return to the pre-19 february 24 situation with autonomy for the Crimea and the donbas Ukraine definitely out of nato russian troops having returned to their earlier positions at least no long-range weapons aimed at the on the borders of the other it was then the florist johnson of britain and the president behind him said to zelensky we will not accept such a compromise or any compromise at this point the war must go on i think two things to weaken russia they said which is very questionable to define russia inefficably irrefacably as an enemy for the purposes of the unity of nato uh the us predominant role in nato avoiding a ua a german russian rapprochement uh trading gas which we have currently blocked when i suspect sat hirs was right by our deliberately blowing up parts of the Nord Stream 2 that hasn't been proven but it's plausible um we didn't want the european home that korbachev talked about from lisbon to vladivostok because in that role there was no protectorate role for the us no reason for nuclear threats which we supply no reason for us troops in europe no reason for nato at all what the mafia calls our thing kosenostra our thing nato is our kosenostra was about to go out of relevance that won't happen now that's been achieved what the world can say as one outside ukraine perhaps there must be any any threat to initiate nuclear war in the world by anyone in europe they could start with european powers but really anywhere in the world by anyone anywhere under any circumstances for any alleged reasons is immoral and insane not only yes it is also unprecedentedly imprudent what do you say we have no words to describe destroying most life on earth on the side killing most multi genocide uh imprudent this seems pretty weak but it's not only that there is a moral aspect to this that has just not been talked about and i would hope has the possibility in this situation of telling people uh we want this war ended uh your cranians may see it worth the risk even of nuclear war to get every russian out of crania and out of the donbass but that effort is against the interest of every other country on earth because it confronts them with an intolerable risk of dying themselves so they have the right in the in the obligation i would say to demand that this this war with its uh possibilities of leading to a nuclear war in this instance started by russia rather than to achieve or turn the aims that selensky has openly aimed at regaining the crania regaining the donbass totally uh is itself an obscene immoral insane objective and i think i would like the people of the world to force this recognition on their leaders who in their moral blindness and moral cowardice uh fear losing uh such a conflict or losing part of their own territory and assert our own human interest in keeping life going on earth this may be the time now that for once we're facing down the barrel of nuclear threats from a bad guy as we see it an aggressor definitely an aggressor putin uh rather than the good guys the u.s who are just as much of an aggressor in iraq but did not suffer sanctions uh or condemnation uh let alone actually armed resistance in our full-scale aggression of iraq as aggressive and immoral as what putin is doing in cuba some would argue even more so because we've never claimed that iraq is part of the us and russia and people unfortunately do accept uh the notion that uh they are entitled to do this even in ukraine well that's a terrible moral uh framework but uh we don't have to accept that and at the same time we can accept the fervor of their conviction in what may what may rest on it so we have a role to play and maybe for all time to make people realize that the use of nuclear weapons anywhere and the threat of it and preparation of it to carry it out and the risk of it is i say once again immoral and insane okay shall i leave it there thank you so much dan uh moral and insane is the only way to describe the dangers that we're in with nuclear war so i just want to thank you for your presentation and uh doubly so because uh you're uh now facing some serious health issues and yet despite that uh you've chosen to come on uh this program so i just want to acknowledge uh you as a world treasure and a real paragon of the kind of courage and integrity and truth telling that is required uh for genuine social movement uh to take place uh and so i just want to acknowledge uh how you've present yourself uh in the world since the pentagon papers uh and uh it's been such an extraordinary inspiration to so so many of us um um i know we're significantly over time but i want to just uh ask you just a couple of questions one is one of the factors in the situation in ukraine and also with china is that there are no more nuclear guardrails and uh i would love to have you comment on that because starting with the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty that the united states and the soviet union agreed on in the aftermath of the cuban missile crisis we built up a whole series of treaties and protocols that limited nuclear war weapons that eliminated medium range from europe etc etc uh and uh since uh george bush jr onwards they've been systematically dismantled largely by the united states uh leaving only the start uh a treaty uh that the two weeks ago putin indicated that they would no longer honor uh so that the dangers are actually doubled in the sense that it's not only the nuclear conflict between the superpowers as you're saying that's unique with ukraine but this is happening without any nuclear guardrails uh essentially that are left okay you're right about the supposed guardrails being killed i think very few people realize how unconfining those guardrails were and permitting 1500 and 50 uh alert warheads now either at sea or on here by each side with several thousand in reserve the effect that would have made on a nuclear war that happened actually at first it wouldn't affect the likelihood of the nuclear war i would say i'll just say that without arguing them second if the war occurred uh it was just as likely to occur and the effect would be indistinguishable from having 20 000 weapons on each side in 1550 they say with nuclear winter which the Pentagon refuses to organize to recognize because it means that their trillion-dollar efforts to pre-empt are meaningless will have no effect well i would say by the same token going down from 80 thousand 67 000 70 000 weapons in the world to 15 000 seems like a great achievement how how can it not be it isn't it didn't affect the likelihood of war the icbms are still there vulnerable pointed at each other and the effects of a thousand weapon war are indistinguishable from the effects of a 20 000 so on the first hand these were to a large extent mythical just to reassure people now they were reassuring to the point it meant we were talking to each other we were treating each other as somebody who could be affected by treaties someday we might have arrived at a treaty that would actually affect the likelihood of war and and the scale of war to do that you'd have to get weapons down to or below the levels of other countries not 15 not 3000 each but 100 each or even lower only north korea as we as far as we know does not have the power to cause a nuclear winter that would kill at least a billion we don't have a legitimate reason for having any less any more than north korea or england or france now there's something you could aim at a submarine at sea to submarine at sea perfectly adequate for defense against nuclear attack deterrence of nuclear attack uh you know one tries instead of 14 uh and so forth so the fact i don't think the past agreements have really done much to do it and the loss of them doesn't do much either we're on a freeway to hell where the guard rails are way off in the desert on each side they really don't have much effect and getting rid of them is a bad sign because it's part of not talking at all and not paying any attention even to pretend to lower nuclear war so the trend is indeed very ominous the actual effects are the situation remains is as dangerous as it was before can i come back in just a couple minutes i'd like to do that and if any of the other panelists are still with us teddie savina uh way uh jody please join uh we'll wrap it up uh uh soon i know some of them had some uh constraints oh there's teddie uh good teddie jody as we're waiting for dan teddie is there anything you want to add to what dan said or the general conversation sure i mean i mean i should almost go without saying that from the perspective of my campaign war is not green i mean the we're looking at two ultimate catastrophic consequences of of war on the environment one is climate change which is more protracted and harder to place our finger on the pulse of but we're we're trying our best and hoping to raise awareness of that and in many ways that that youth movement around climate change i think is is mirroring a lot of the anti-nuclear movement and the development of that during the cold war and then of course we have the continued threat of nuclear war which dan has which daniel has had done a really wonderful and troubling job of laying out for us it would take i i believe as as as he laid out for us it would take such a small i think maybe it's 0.5 percent of the global nuclear arsenal to displace uh about two billion people on the planet and that's just 0.5 percent i mean if we were to start an all-out nuclear war and even just a fraction more were to be engaged i mean we are looking at planetary extinction not just for ourselves but for more than human kin on this planet so i mean this this is you know one of those things that i i almost feel that you know maybe each generation has sort of their something that calls them to act in some ways and there's lots of overlap i mean you see that with the fight for future movement lots of youth activism around climate change and then with this campaign you know it's it's really important for for me and for people like me at the intersection of of peace and climate to say well we didn't deal with we haven't dealt with the threat of nuclear war in fact it continues to be uh greater than ever as you know as we're looking at the bulletin of atomic scientists and moving closer to midnight and so continuing to frame this as an environmental issue you know even if that fraction of nuclear weapons were to were to be dropped i mean it would be catastrophic on global environments if it didn't reach as dan laid out that total extinction level so i mean that that threat is ever present and making sure that it's present in our conversations around climate change i think is absolutely crucial thank you thank you i think we'll do the following way why don't we get a final statement from you and then dan and then jody why don't you wrap it up for today but this has been a marvelous conversation on the costs of war and in particular the nuclear danger so thank you all way you want to make any additional comments um i just want to thank everyone again for um all of your patience with me as i'm finally going down this caffeine high uh i we all know the feeling yeah and just um our campaign china's never enemy um is really to um disrupt um the ongoing aggression towards china and we want all of our messages to be um loving and really beautiful and really disarming and just to quickly add to uh the point of a nuclear war um we all want to act with a sense of urgency because we are currently uh at at like there is a war with with russia going on in Ukraine and then now with a driving hate towards china we are risking another war um i would say there is a distinction with china is that china is the only nuclear power that has an absolute no first use policy uh so china absolutely in no circumstances has promised to not use nuclear weapons uh not be the first to use nuclear weapons and will never use nuclear weapons on a non-nuclear power so although we want people to act with the urgency that we are getting closer to a nuclear war we also want to make sure that our message is disarming that we are focusing on the aggressor who is trying the u.s who is trying to maintain a hegemonic power by impending china is dangerous this might one thing yeah well that's a really important point about china it's the one major power that's been very clear that it won't go to first strike as a matter of policy who who knows what they'll actually do as a matter of practice but they have a very specific uh prohibition on first strike uh and i also want to say that because of this blending of of russia and china as enemies uh for the united states in our next summit uh on the 24th at the 28th of april we'll be talking a lot more about china but we wanted way to come in uh even though the focus overwhelmingly is on ukraine uh for this week uh china is looming as an increasingly uh critical issue and the fact that china and russia are aligning the way they are with the support of most of the global south as jody said at the beginning uh this is uh this is an unprecedented amalgamation of of nations in a coalition that are really finally taking on the united states in a systematic and coherent way uh so we'll be having way uh back and many of her colleagues in our next summit so dan um we're wrapping up why don't you just give us one final uh word that you would like to leave us with uh as we bring this particular session to a close for many decades i've been saying that of all the nuclear arms states in the world only china had a relatively sane policy you know the stevis movement called sane nuclear policy but i don't think they ever defined really what they saw as a sane policy well china had had and has a minimum deterrence the weapons are only for deterring nuclear attack on them uh not on other people uh which means that they do not had not built up the ability to deter i'm sorry to disarm any adversary like the west and uh without that objective uh or claim uh they felt always that a a dozen or a couple dozen icbms a good re experience were enough in compared to our thousands of warheads unfortunately they are moving away from that it remains to be seen how much but in a way that allows our hawks to say well they have more weapons than we do now or they will have it's a totally spurious argument it gives them something to say the i am saying that to focus on this issue of uh first use i think is very practical and has a chance actually of being achieved in this case with precisely with the fears that uh potent has focused our minds on at last and i would like to see countries outside the united states uh in nato at last withdrawing not necessarily from nato but withdrawing from the threat or the or legitimating the threat condemning the threat that nato has long based its policy on to initiate nuclear war if necessary and saying there is no necessary no necessity that justifies nuclear war and even if the us is very reluctant and will be to make that statement oddly vice president biden said he thought so no reason for first use and now as president he was campaigning on a promise to say no first use and as president totally backed off from that from his uh his obligations as he sees them to china well that this issue you'll be discussing is a serious one it does not justify preparing to blow up the world and that is also true for russia and china defending cramia and the donbas from being overrun which would probably involve or succeed a us direct involvement which must be avoided i believe uh we need to see people saying that threat has always been monstrous this problem here that the us has been making it all this time but that now no nation including the us or anybody else has the right and should be and they should be showing that in practice at last point by removing from europe weapons that are only for first use what are they weapons that could not survive a russian attack either conventional or nuclear and that means every f-35 in europe there are nothing but first use with their nuclear capability being acquired by others american weapons should not be in europe whether you're only for first use can be easily destroyed was drawn back to the us and nato should move in the direction of becoming a non-nuclear alliance which will improve its security not reduce thank you dan thank you so much again we salute your life and we salute your courage we salute everything that you've done for the cause of peace it's been one of the the pillars of our time so thank you by the way jim you you work so long for them and we so need the world so needs a gorbachev and uh and hardly they they don't come very often as you know better than anyone knowing gorbachev uh my dream by the way was that if he'd stayed in power a little longer uh which was a possibility it seemed like just my steps stopped that including the coup attempt but if he'd been in longer my dream was a practical dream was that gorbachev would extend his glasnost policy his openness to his nuclear planning and that if everybody throw open the safe the option he hadn't created these plans he didn't have responsibility for them initially and say these are insane which they are and then say i imagine that your plans uh not only the u.s but even in a small scale in britain and france and elsewhere are equally insane let's see them let's see them for the first time have horned and i could see gorbachev doing that oh but uh unfortunately he didn't keep the power to do it and we have seen no other gorbachev in the world since him it was a great privilege of my life uh to get to know him and uh actually be the last foreigner that he received in his kremlin office and then work with him for 10 years uh convening uh conversations that matter and transforming them into actions that made a difference so it was an extraordinary man uh and i would just add before turning it back over to you jody i would just add that his action was unprecedented in modern history and let's just take a moment to take in the grandeur of gorbachev here he comes in and a totalitarian system that had stood uh for 50 years the soviet union he's challenged by the united states and nato he understands intuitively as dan was just saying that this was insane he says to president reagan first and then the president bush senior maggie thatcher helmet call the leadership of the west we need to end this and somebody has to make the first move the soviet union is willing to make the first move and withdraw all its troops from eastern europe and allow germany to be reunited we all need to take in what that meant it's unprecedented there's no historical example that i know about where an empire voluntarily and peacefully and non violently withdrew from major territory all of eastern europe and then allowed the country that had attacked them in world war two leaving well over 20 million people dead to be reunited and the only thing that he asked for is for nato not to move to the east and he did it in good faith and in 1990 he withdrew the warsaw treaty organization was disbanded unfortunately he and the soviet union it fell away at the end of 1991 and the neocons felt that they could seize the moment and instead of creating the peace from lisbon to vladivostok that gorbachev had envisioned breakdown russia attack expand nato to the east and it was that violation of that agreement that has led now to what's happening in ukraine but dan is absolutely right for a brief shining moment like we did we had with kennedy in the generation before we had someone rise to the pinnacle of power that actually carried a passion for peace and it was my honor to work with him all those years and dan was part of those state of the world forum convenings that we had and many many others and that was a path unfortunately not taken and here we are in ukraine an escalating conflict with the possibility of nuclear exchange choices matter in history they really really do and so thank you dan now jody why don't you close us out with whatever statement you would like to make and then we'll meet all again tomorrow i didn't know if i could say anything more than thank you thank you dan thank you jim thank you way thank you teddy thank you for holding this space for us all to be deeply grounded in the love and the peace that we desire it's it's super important so thank you and we'll see you all tomorrow thank you jody thank you dan way savina teddy marvelous session today we've looked reality right in the eye and we did it with deep compassion uh with some very great souls so thank you all you're all welcome to the after session chat group you'll see the link in the chat and we'll see you all again tomorrow uh for our fourth of five days on the conflict in ukraine thank you everyone bye for now