Are we on the brink of a nuclear war?
This is the nuclear threat, explained.
This is the nuclear threat, explained.
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00:00The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.
00:31The considered opinion at the moment is that there are about 13,000 nuclear warheads.
00:3790% of those are in the hands of the US and Russia.
00:40This, however, is actually a dramatic decline from the 1970s and 1980s
00:47when there were nearly 80,000 nuclear warheads.
01:01There are these very complex doctrines which have developed around nuclear weapons.
01:08And I think the most important one to recognize in them is what is known as mutually assured destruction.
01:16Which simply means that if you attack me with nuclear weapons,
01:21there is no way you will survive my retaliatory attack.
01:25So both of us are going to be annihilated.
01:28It's a matter of others knowing that starting a conflict would be more costly to them
01:33than anything they might hope to gain.
01:35So I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff
01:54to transfer the forces of the Russian army's deterrence to a special mode of combat duty.
02:05There was an effort to try and reduce nuclear tensions in the post-Cold War era.
02:10And because of that, many of these weapons were de-targeted,
02:14not to go into the other side's territory.
02:17But this can be reprogrammed very, very quickly.
02:20When President Putin talks about, you know, stepping up, if you like, the alert status,
02:26I think that is perhaps what he might have indicated.
02:29This kind of a threat has never really been given in the post-Cold War world
02:33between the two largest holders of nuclear weapons.
02:49We may not come to that, I hope.
02:53But there is a possibility that this may happen inadvertently.
02:57If, for example, the conventional conflict in Ukraine gets bogged down,
03:02Russia feels cornered, it feels that it cannot lose Ukraine,
03:07but it needs to do something dramatic.
03:09I think there may be certain pressure, and especially if NATO does get involved.
03:14Because, as you know, NATO also has its own nuclear weapon.
03:18Do you understand or not that if Ukraine joins NATO and returns Crimea by military means,
03:25European countries will automatically be drawn into a military conflict with Russia?
03:48But I would like to draw your attention to the fact that nuclear war is constantly spinning in the heads of Western politicians,
03:55and not in the heads of Russians.
04:17The idea of this group very much is to try and manage nuclear relations and nuclear weapons,
04:28so that you do not come to this kind of a situation, right?
04:31The other school of thought, which is also, by the way, now gaining a lot of ground,
04:36what we need to do is get rid of these nuclear weapons entirely.
04:40Because they have served their purpose and they are just making life much, much more dangerous.
04:46I think there should be really a coming together of these two groups to try and reduce nuclear dangers.