6/26/20 Hans Kristensen on the Bleak Outlook for Nuclear Arms Control - a podcast by Scott Horton

Scott talks to Hans Kristensen about the state of the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals. Immediately after the Cold War, says Kristensen, the U.S. and Russia drastically reduced their nuclear stockpiles, making the world significantly safer. Since then, however, this trend toward disarmament has begun to slow and even to reverse. At the same time, more countries have developed their own nuclear weapons programs. Scott thinks this has more to do with the financial incentives of the military-industrial complex than it does with the possibility for real global hostilities—but that doesn’t make the situation any less dangerous.



Discussed on the show:



“SIPRI Yearbook 2020” (SIPRI)

“Nuclear weapon modernization continues but the outlook for arms control is bleak” (SIPRI)



Hans M. Kristensen is an Associate Senior Fellow with the SIPRI Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme and Director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Follow him on Twitter @nukestrat.



This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.



Donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal, or Bitcoin: 1KGye7S3pk7XXJT6TzrbFephGDbdhYznTa.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htvZgC4tD5M









The following is an automatically generated transcript.



Show TranscriptScott Horton 0:00

For Pacifica radio June 28 2020. I'm Scott Horton. This is anti war radio.



All right, y'all welcome it's Scott Horton Show. I am the director of the Libertarian Institute editorial director of antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. And I've recorded more than 5000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at ScottHorton.org. You can also sign up to the podcast feed. The full archive is also available at youtube.com/ScottHortonShow. All right, you guys introducing Hans Kristensen from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And he is also at the Federation of American Scientists as well and SIPRI that's sipri.org. have just put out their latest study the sipper yearbook 2020. And part of that, of course, focuses on nuclear weapons, and they have a story here at sipri.org nuclear weapon modernization continues, but the outlook for arms control is bleak. Welcome to show Hans. How are you, sir?



Hans Kristensen 1:25

Thanks for having me.



Scott Horton 1:26

Very happy to have you here. So I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to read the whole PDF file and everything here. It's been a very busy time. But I did read the introductory article here. And there's so many important points brought up here. But I guess if we could just start with reminding the audience which all countries are armed with nuclear weapons, and approximately how many of them etc, like that, if you could?



Hans Kristensen 1:51

Yeah, so they're about they're now nine countries today that have nuclear weapons. And that's the United States and Russia, France, Britain, China. India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. And all together, they possess something in the order of 13,400 nuclear warheads. Most of those are in what you can sort of call military stockpiles that are ready to use on relatively short notice. But there's also a chunk of them some something in the order of 1800 to 2000 that are on high alert, they're ready to fire within just minutes.



Scott Horton 2:28

And then, and those are mostly America and Russia's,



Hans Kristensen 2:32

the alert weapons are American, Russian, French and British. Yes.

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