 So what is this about nuclear war? Why do people feel that they need to develop nuclear missiles? And what can this arsenal do to us? What are the effects of this arsenal? So the reason that countries are stuck in a situation where they feel that they need to have these huge arsenals is because of deterrence. This is a war that you might hear a lot if you are interested in this area. Deterrence means, in Russian, this is definitely true. So it's something that prevents an attack on yourself. So Americans need nuclear weapons to prevent the Russians from attacking. Russians need their nuclear weapons because they are afraid that the Americans will attack them. Chinese are worried that both of those will attack them. Indians are worried that Pakistan will attack them. Pakistan, they are worried that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what can happen in case there is a nuclear war? Just to give you one example of what I'm going to tell you. Remember, I mentioned about submarines, that some of these rockets can be launched also from submarines. Well, how much does power destruct the power of a submarine that? So this is a photo of an actual launch from underwater. So a submarine doesn't even need to sort of shoot the rocket from underwater and then the rocket can fly something like 6,000 kilometers to its final destination. So this thing over here, this is not very big, like 10 meters deep, okay? Has three warheads inside, absolutely, sort of 12 warheads inside. Each one, together with it, adds up to six million tons of TNT approval. So remember this number, six million. Now how much exposes were used in World War II? Three million. This guy over here cares twice more destructive power than World War II, which killed 15 million people. This is one missile. How many missiles are there on this submarine? It depends on the submarine. The Ohio class, if you have a submarine, it carries 24 missiles, okay? So an Ohio class submarine, of which there's like 20, carries 48 times more destructive power than World War II brought upon ourselves. Numbers, they actually deployed, what's on something like 3,000? So the main ways in which nuclear weapons kill people, it's not so much about the original initial blast, which kills people. It's nuclear fallout that follows that. There's an enormous amount of nuclear radiation, which includes, which gets dumped on civilian areas and people simply die from radiation. And that's not all. Like you might ask ourselves, okay, but why do we care about this here? I'm telling you the same, this is about Russians and Americans. Why would we in Armenia or anywhere else care about these problems that Americans, Russians might kill each other all? The thing is that there's a third part of this thing. It's called nuclear winter. When, if the weapons are used against the city, that will cause so much smoke that the smoke will go up into the upper atmosphere and cover the pilot to do it. And will result in the reduction of sunlight by 90 to 99% for as much as 10 years. That means that the temperatures on Earth will drop to something like from five to 20 degrees. And essentially what it means is that no summer for 10 years. What does that mean? It means that agriculture will drop, crops will not grow, livestock will die. As soon as it will result in starvation, there will be food that will stop growing for, depending on what happens from one to 10 years. And the estimated number of people that will die from this is billions. So it doesn't just affect Russians, and Americans, and Chinese, and Indians, and Pakistanis, and Israelis, and North Koreans, not. It affects everyone, okay? This winter is gonna kill everyone, not just the countries that are fighting each other. So I know what you're thinking. I'm probably thinking like, did you really come from America to tell us all the scary stories and give all these bad news, you know? In case there's something good about this? Of course there is, right? Otherwise I wouldn't be telling you this story. I'll give you one more bad news before, after that I'll give you lots of good news. Okay, I promise. So the term that I mentioned is basically that it comes with a mutually assured structure where two countries, they start a nuclear war, nobody wins. Everyone dies. So how many nuclear warheads are there? How many nuclear weapons are there? So this is the history of the number of the nuclear warheads versus time. This is, you know, we start off with the first US bomb that I mentioned there. There's USSR developing some nuclear weapons. Human-cruel missile crisis happens, which really brings war very close to nuclear war. So at this maximum, which was in 1985, there were 70,000 nuclear warheads, okay? Remember what I told you about the submarine? That submarine has 48 times what has only something like, what's it, maybe 200 warheads. And that's only 50 times more than what we suffered during World War II, okay? This is 70,000. If this stuff would get unleashed on humanity, I mean, people talk about the fact that only sex could survive. Not just humans, other species would go extinct as well. Okay, so clearly people were extremely worried about this. As things were going so bad, everyone in the world was, you know, people of older generation probably remember how much, you know, there was anxiety about what this is gonna cost, okay? If things are stable, okay, but if what, if this, you know, unstable equilibrium or metastable equilibrium goes really unstable, I think things will do well. So there have been lots of effort to specifically fight against this and convince all the countries to cut down their arsenal. Just as one analogy that I'll use is, it was an example that I liked a lot was the guy who was explaining that the situation when we were here, right? Say, there's a room, there's two enemies inside the room. And the room is a washroom, gasoline, that was gasoline and all over on themselves on the floor. One of them has 20,000 matches, the other one has 30,000 matches, and they are both worried that they have enough matches. That was essentially the state of the lodging during the Cold War, because you had so many weapons that we enough to kill each other off completely while making war weapons. So this is what happened afterwards. There was a significant drop off because everyone understood that this is, first of all, unnecessary, but also it makes life extremely negative. And there were a couple of things that happened, this story that happened, when Kvachev and Reagan finally agreed to cut down things, USSR collapsed in 1991, okay? And then there were a series of treaties that took place that specifically targeted ourselves. The Americans and Russians mutually agreed to really reduce their stockpiles to much for those small quantities. And currently, this is about a combined, deployed arsenal is something like 3,000. So what does deployed mean? Because I use this term a lot. Deployed means weapons that you can fire at your enemy. So number of weapons is a lot more than the number of weapons that you can actually deliver against your enemy. So who has all these weapons? Who are the countries that have most of these weapons? This is like number of weapons for a variety of countries, but this is a Russian, in the United States it's completely dominated, not Russian. In the United States and Russia have 90% of the weapons in the world. And then there's France, China, UK. And it's a very interesting question, you might ask yourself, why do the Russians and Americans feel they need so many weapons? And why do French and Chinese and British feel that they don't do that so many weapons? It has a lot to do with various kinds of things, various intricacies as to how they feel they would defend themselves in case of nuclear war. I won't go into that tonight. A few words about our Iraq and treaties, but I mean a number of important treaties that were signed, one of them was non-proliferation treaties, where all these countries agreed that they're not going to spread nuclear weapons. Because the idea was that if they give nuclear weapons to another country, there might be short term benefit, but the long term dangers are enormous. They're just not worth it. There's this intermediate range nuclear forces treaty which was quite important to reduce the danger of accidental war that I talked about. And then most importantly comprehensive test ban treaty was signed in 1991, which essentially banned testing of nuclear weapons. The idea was essentially to stop this growth of the nuclear weapons. There have been a number of U.S. and Russia have come down their arsenals from 70,000 to about 13,000. There have been lots of efforts, civilian efforts to really put pressure on governments to really come down all these enormous risks. Now the things that I use the most, treaty. What does it take to sign a treaty? Treaties are a lot about politics, but unfortunately there's also a significant amount of technological barriers that prevent from treaties being more ambitious that they could. And then let's do with verification. If you wanna sign a treaty with somebody, you want to verify that they are doing what they agreed to do. If you are gonna, you know, if the Americans signed a treaty with Russia, Russia are gonna cut, reduce their stockpiles by 50%, you wanna make sure that Russia's are doing that, if you are doing that as well. And Russia should feel the same way, right? But how do you do that? Apparently it's a fairly tricky technology question. So the idea of the treaty is that you want to have this concept of trust but verify, right? The every day and the per every day, right? The agreement is the... So, okay, so what are the problems with treaty verification? Just a couple of words about our group where I'm working and then I'll essentially switch to the technical part of the talks, you know, we have this laboratory for nuclear security policy, which is in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. There's a number of faculty that work together. We have very different backgrounds. I come from physics. Scott comes from policy. Richard Blansa comes from high energy physics. Zaya comes from nuclear engineering. I have a bunch of students from extremely diverse areas who are all working on a series of problems. And this is one of them that we're working on. So a couple of, right? I'll probably skip this. I'll come to this one. Okay, so how do you verify treaties? Now, most treaties, there's two parts to your nuclear capability, your ability to strike. One thing is the weapon itself. Second one is the delivery. Delivery, the Russian is Nysitsyn, which is somewhat does not really say what it is, but basically it's the missile that carries the warhead or the airplane that carries the warhead or the submarine that carries the missile that carries the warhead or something like that. Those are delivery systems. So past treaties have really been focusing on verifying not the reduction of the warheads themselves, that I'll say in the second one. That mean, primarily focusing on the number of the delivery systems. The idea being is that if you have only 1,000 delivery systems, if you have 10,000 warheads, all that matter are the first 1,000 warheads. The remaining 9,000 warheads, you cannot use that because you don't have a delivery system. It's like having a million cartridges and two rifles. There's that many cartridges you can shoot through those things, right? So it was fairly logical thing to do. The most of verification focused on the delivery systems. And the main reason why they did this is because it is easier to verify that the opposite side is, in fact, destroying their delivery systems. Why? Because these missiles and these airplanes are fairly large, okay? It's very hard to cheat the other side. So here's an example of a KGB Soviet operative inspecting American Griffin intermediate range missile. It's a cruise missile. So he checks that it's a real thing. It's not made out of wood. So they watch it being broken pieces of plastic. This is a member of the U.S. Congress checking the Soviet ICBM, seeing that the ice of wood's ICBM chopped it down, and you count it against the Soviet Union's or America's duties under the treaty. And this is exactly in 91 where as part of the treaty, America's agreed to destroy 356 B-52 bombers. The B-52 is equivalent of the 295s, the strategic bomber which would drop the nuclear bomb on Soviet Union. So they agreed on that. How did they verify this? The Americans took these airplanes. They took them to the desert. They chopped them down with these giant unicorns and let them sit in the desert for three months. Soviet satellites, or at this point most Russian satellites, flew above. They took pictures. They said, yes, airplanes have been chopped down. Fantastic. So it is possible to do with this. So why not do this with nuclear warheads themselves? There's one problem with this. You're cutting down on nuclear systems, which is great. But you still are not going after the warheads themselves. You end up having this very large surplus. Yes, you cannot launch the enemy, but you have still have all these extra warheads sitting which can get stolen, which can lead to nuclear terrorism. They can be taken to another country, which can cause proliferation with nuclear weapons. That's such a big danger, even though there's no delivery system associated with that. The trouble with that is that authenticating an airplane is fairly simple.