>> It's still almost unfathomable to me that the politicians would actually consider using nuclear weapons in any type of warfare or conflict.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

You knew that.

And today we're going nuclear full on.

I spend plenty of time on this show talking about nuclear threats from countries like Iran and North Korea, Pakistan, not Canada, even though I don't trust them.

But they don't have nukes.

But I've never asked the question do nuclear weapons keep us safe?

Of course they do not, really.

Arms control expert Kelsey Davenport joins the show to talk about that and the world's long fascination with these horrible weapons and how close we still remain to all-out nuclear war.

Then the rise and the fall of a Pakistani nuclear spy who one former CIA director once described as at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Is it true the U.K.'s got paid parental leave?

>> Look, Joe, the only leaving I know about myself is Brexit.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> Never forget these words -- to stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.

>> That's from Wayne LaPierre, somehow still head of the National Rifle Association and a rallying cry for America's most ardent gun-rights advocates.

Heck, you can get it on a T-shirt.

And while today's show isn't about gun control, there is a reason I'm bringing it up.

The nuclear arms race that the United States kicked off in August 1945 with two mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki has always been rooted in this good guy with a nuke mentality.

Every nation that has sought a nuclear weapon from the United States to even North Korea has claimed to be doing so in self-defense.

And as long as the good guys could amass enough nuclear warheads to keep the bad guys in check, we all got to keep on keeping on.

But the problem with the nuclear arms race has always been the absence of a finish line.

Not to mention the fact that we don't all agree on who the good guys are.

At its peak in the 1980s, the global inventory of nuclear warheads exceeded 70,000, with most coming from the U.S. and the Soviet Union, though Britain, France, China and Israel had amassed stockpiles of their own.

>> Duck and cover.

>> The Baby Boomer generation, who had grown up hiding under their school desks during nuclear attack drills, began to get fed up.

On June 12, 1982, upwards of a million demonstrators from every corner of the world gathered in New York City's Central Park to demand nuclear disarmament and an end to the Cold War arms race.

It was the largest political protest in American history, and as one attendee explained to The New York Times, "it's not just hippies and crazies anymore.

It's everybody."

World leaders finally got the hint, and following a series of nonproliferation treaties, as well as the end of the Cold War, the global nuclear stockpile shrank significantly in the 1990s to roughly 13,000 today, which honestly still sounds kind of insane to me.

And while nine countries now have nuclear weapons, the latest additions being Pakistan, India and North Korea, countries we really don't want to have nuclear weapons, the United States and Russia still own 91% of all nuclear warheads.

Today, Americans often cite climate change as a greater manmade threat to the planet than nuclear warfare, and indeed, in a 2019 list of American fears from Chapman University, North Korea using nuclear weapons ranked 27th on things that worry us behind oil spills.

19, high medical bills 12 and air pollution, 6.

Take that, Kim Jong-un.

But in recent years, as nuclear disarmament worldwide has slowed to a crawl, world powers are engaging in yet another arms race, this time a technological one.

The U.S., China, Russia and India are investing billions in research and development to develop smaller and smarter nuclear weapons from tactical nukes to hypersonic missiles that could evade traditional defense systems and deliver nuclear payloads with little to no warning.

And then there's Iran, what we call a nuclear threshold state inching ever closer to nuclear weapons of its own.

And while its government recently announced that it was ready to revive diplomatic talks over its nuclear program, experts are skeptical that they mean it.

And don't forget about the potential for a rogue terrorist group to get its hands on nuclear material, stuff not just for Hollywood.

So how scared should we be?

And that's what I'm asking arms control expert Kelsey Davenport.

She is Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association.

She's spent her career thinking about precisely this issue.

Here's our conversation.

Kelsey Davenport, thanks so much for joining us on "GZERO World."

>> Thanks so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

>> How does it make you feel that -- I mean, we watched the power of these weapons, these truly unusable weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then we proceed to build as many as we can and make them more and more powerful.

And arms-control efforts have at best been a marginal success.

>> It's still almost unfathomable to me that the politicians would actually consider using nuclear weapons in any type of warfare or conflict, given the indiscriminate nature, given the destruction of these weapons, given the widespread implications for climate, for environment, for health, for food, for security.

So the fact that we still characterize nuclear weapons as vital to national security, I think, is frustrating and fundamentally misunderstands the role that nuclear weapons would play in any type of destructive conflict.

When we talk about nuclear weapons, I think it's really critical to challenge the notions that nuclear weapons have kept peace, that they prevented conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and that nuclear weapons now are currently deterring conflict because that essentially, you know, rests on the premise, the idea that we would actually consider using these weapons in war.

When you think about the catastrophic consequences of such use, I mean, that option really should be off the table.

>> And despite the presence of those thousands and thousands of warheads, the two countries came to the brink of using them on several occasions.

>> They did, and some of the uses were because of accidents or misperceptions or miscalculations.

If we look back over the course of history, the number of times that the U.S. and the Soviet Union, now Russia have come close to nuclear exchanges, the number of times the United States has nearly detonated a nuclear weapon on its own soil because of an accident, it really is -- We've really been quite lucky to have avoided an intentional or accidental nuclear exchange at this point.

And my fear is that one day our luck is going to run out.

So I think we need more focus on pursuing, you know, creative options for arms control and disarmament.

This is an issue that needs more political attention, and we really need to ask difficult questions about the morality and ethics of pursuing nuclear weapons and continuing to make them so integral in defining national security.

>> We have some 5,000 warheads.

The Russians today have roughly the same.

I look at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and the Doomsday Clock, and we're just about as close to midnight as we were when the Soviet Union was still around.

And yet you don't hear very much about it.

It's not a headline issue.

We don't do our training in our classrooms of what we might do in the event of a nuclear strike.

Why is the population no longer concerned about this as a proximate existential threat?

>> I think there are a number of reasons that we don't see nuclear weapons making the headlines like they have in the past.

I mean, for one, I think nuclear weapons feel very abstract.

You know, they're not presenting the same risk that people experience in their everyday lives, where they may experience the effects of climate change, they may experience the effects of violent extremism.

So the abstract nature of nuclear weapons, the fact that they feel less salient and less present, I think contributes to that.

I also think that it's difficult for people to see agency in trying to confront the nuclear threats.

I mean, studies have shown that the public sometimes avoids even reading about nuclear weapons because they don't see where they have any agency in trying to prevent nuclear risk.

They support the abolition of nuclear weapons but don't actually feel like it's an achievable goal because of the complexity of the science, because the issue seems abstract, and because generally discussions about nuclear weapons are held in a certain kind of small echelons of D.C. society and not made more widely accessible to the general public.

So I think it's both the fact that the consequences don't seem as immediate as other threats, but also that people sometimes just feel powerless to know how to effect change and reduce the nuclear risk.

>> You said that you think that we need more creative arms-control methods going forward.

What do you mean by that?

>> From an arms-control perspective, there has been significant success in reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons around the world since the height of the Cold War.

During the height of the Cold War, there were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons deployed, primarily in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Now, the global nuclear inventory is about 13,000, but nuclear risk is still rising despite these reductions, because the nuclear-armed countries are investing in smaller nuclear weapons that are perceived as more likely to be used and investing in delivery systems for nuclear weapons that increase risk because they reduce decision time and they blur the lines between nuclear and conventional capabilities.

So risk is rising.

So if we think about how to pursue arms control from a risk reduction perspective, we have to be more creative than thinking just about the numbers.

In the United States and China, for instance, it doesn't make sense to pursue an arms-control agreement that cuts the number of nukes because the United States has about 1,350 deployed nuclear weapons, whereas China only has about 350.

But, you know, both countries are looking into new, more destabilizing missile systems like hypersonics.

Would it be possible to reach some sort of agreement, banning that type of missile?

That would add more stability, for instance, and perhaps help mitigate sort of this new nuclear arms race that we're seeing begin to play out amongst some of these countries.

>> What's the usual strategic purpose to create new weapons systems that actually make war more likely?

>> Well, I think there are a number of motivations.

And again, this comes back to the question of being more creative.

Some of the deployments and the investments that we're seeing in Russia and China, for instance, are a direct response to U.S. missile defenses and the perception that the United States is essentially trying to build an impenetrable shield that Russia and China cannot threaten, which would give the U.S. superiority in the event of any type of nuclear conflict.

So at times, it's the perception of defenses that drives some of these advances, and, you know, drive looking at some of these systems that are that are ultimately more destabilizing.

I mean, also for a country like China, it's going to look at the United States as this conventional military, and it's going to look at the size of the U.S. forces and, you know, could perceive developments in its nuclear arsenal as a way to counterbalance that asymmetry between conventional forces.

So there are a number of motivations that are sort of pushing these developments.

And once one country escalates, there's an impetus for others to follow.

And that's why across the board, you know, we're seeing all nine countries that possess nuclear weapons, developing and investing in these more destabilizing systems because there is that trickle-down and then escalatory effect.

>> Do you buy the traditional logic of mutually assured destruction?

>> Well, reportedly every president since Truman has faced a very real situation where they considered using nuclear weapons and ultimately decided not to do so.

And I think that is because of the destructive and indiscriminate nature of nuclear weapons, but also because how do you control that escalation?

I mean, how do you ensure that your own population isn't going to be subject to the same attack?

And how are you that sure from the onset that you may actually be subject to a nuclear strike yourself?

So, you know, I think that that comes back to, you know, this need to fundamentally question whether or not nuclear weapons actually make countries more secure and whether or not deterrence as a concept, you know, still holds water and it is something that we should be investing in and continuing to call to our national defense.

>> There are also, of course, big dangers of proliferation.

And maybe one of the greatest successes has not been arms control, but is that there aren't dozens and dozens of countries that have nuclear weapons around the world today, but there are some countries that have them that clearly are unlikely to be responsible with them, irrespective of how you count the Americans and the Russians on that camp -- Pakistan, India, North Korea.

What are the areas that you're most worried about?

>> Well, in general, the proliferation regime has been an outstanding success.

Prior to the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which essentially have capped the number of recognized nuclear-armed countries at five, studies in the United States demonstrated that we could see, you know, 15, 20, 25 nuclear-armed countries.

Right now, we only have nine largely because of diplomatic efforts to stem proliferation while ensuring that nuclear technology acquisition, you know, was still made available to the broader international community.

So I think we have seen some significant successes.

That being said, nonproliferation was a bargain.

Essentially, states agreed to join the nonproliferation treaty and forego nuclear weapons.

You know, if countries that possessed nuclear weapons were willing to give them up, they committed to disarmament.

And the very slow pace of disarmament, I think, is causing some states to begin to question that bargain.

And when you layer on top of that, some states that no longer feel that there's security assurances with the United States, for example, can be counted on and trusted, we're beginning to see kind of an uptick in states considering or exploring the idea of perhaps pursuing nuclear weapons down the road.

And there's a debate in South Korea, for instance, about pursuing nuclear weapons, that it has its own deterrent against North Korea.

So when we talk about the issues of proliferation, I think we're inclined to think about, you know, states that we would see as kind of outliers or pariahs in the international system.

We talk about North Korea and we talk about Iran, but there are risk of states that have generally been perceived as responsible actors thinking about nuclear weapons because they think that promise of nonproliferation and disarmament, that that bargain is broken and because they perceive nuclear weapons as the best way to protect against, you know, some of these other nuclear risks.

>> And even if, I mean, the South Koreans may be as responsible as hell and transparent with their program, but if they get nukes, the implications for an arms race on the Korean Peninsula go way up.

>> Oh, absolutely.

And we may see the same dynamic in the Middle East now if the nuclear deal with Iran collapses.

Saudi Arabia openly threatened to pursue nuclear weapons to match Iran's capabilities if Iran's nuclear program is unrestrained.

There have been similar threats by countries like Turkey.

So I think, you know, while it's unlikely that a number of these states will actually follow through on these threats and pursue nuclear weapons because it is timely, it is expensive, it does take up a lot of resources.

But the fact that states are kind of openly calling into question the global benefits of nonproliferation, openly threatening to pursue nuclear weapons, I mean, that's dangerous for nonproliferation norms, it's dangerous for the strength of the regime.

And it does create, you know, real risks that need to be monitored and mitigated.

>> So, of all of the countries that are potentially going to get nukes, the one that makes all the headlines, of course, and we increasingly call it a threshold nuclear state, is Iran.

Tell me a little bit about where you see Iran's program and how destabilizing it is right now.

>> Well, the first thing that I think is important to recall is that the nuclear deal that Iran reached with six world powers in 2015 was an effective, strong nonproliferation agreement.

And Iran was abiding by that deal when then-President Trump decided to pull the United States out and reimpose sanctions on Iran in violation of the accord in May of 2018.

And unsurprisingly, when the sanctions relief benefits dried up for Iran, Iran decided to violate the nuclear agreement and turn to try to leverage the U.S. back into the deal.

And I think right now, we're at a very critical moment where the United States is assessing whether or not the nonproliferation benefits of the accord can be restored because of the nature of Iran's violations.

I mean, at this point, I think a return to the nuclear deal is still the best possible option for both the United States and Iran.

I mean, it will put back in place more limits and intrusive monitoring on Iran's nuclear activity and provide Iran with the sanctions relief that it needs.

And more importantly, perhaps, there is no better option than diplomacy when it comes to addressing Iran's nuclear risk.

I mean, the United States and Israel, sometimes working in tandem, have, over the years, tried to stymie Iran's nuclear progress, using an array of tactics from cyber activities to the assassination of scientists.

And every time Iran has responded by ratcheting up its nuclear activities further.

So when the United States says that it might pursue, you know, a Plan B, that all options are on the table, it's like yes, those options are on the table, but they're not good options.

Military solutions, I think sanctions pressure, you know, all of these may have some successes in the short term, but in the long term, it's just more likely to push Iran in the wrong direction.

But the bottom line here is that diplomacy is the only way to address Iran's nuclear program in a verifiable manner that provides the strongest possible guarantees that Iran can't pursue nuclear weapons.

>> Kelsey Davenport, thanks so much for being on with us today at "GZERO World."

>> Thanks for having me.

♪♪ >> On Sunday, October 10th, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, A.Q.

Khan, a Pakistani national hero, died of complications from COVID at the age of 85.

>> Interpreter: A great man loyal to Pakistan has died.

And the prime minister instructed that he will be buried with all official respect and honor.

>> But the atomic scientist beloved in Pakistan for making his country the first Islamic nuclear power back in 1998 and in doing so, keeping pace with its nuclear rival in India, was viewed by Western spies as one of the world's most dangerous men.

Former CIA director George Tenet once described Khan as "at least as dangerous as Osama bin Laden."

In 1974, Khan was working at a company that enriched uranium in Amsterdam when India tested its first nuclear weapon.

"I felt that Pakistan's security is in danger," Khan later said.

"I left everything and came back here."

But he did not, in fact, leave everything in Amsterdam.

He returned to Pakistan with two sets of blueprints for building centrifuges to enrich uranium, a critical process in developing a nuclear weapon.

And it was not the last time that Dr. Khan would dabble in nuclear espionage.

In 2004, he was placed under house arrest for illegally sharing nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea.

His range of international contacts was "broad," Tenet would later write, in China, North Korea and throughout the Muslim world.

It's never been clear how much Khan acted alone versus on behalf of his government.

But shortly after his arrest, he made a shocking confession on national Pakistani television.

Khan was pardoned by Pakistan's then-President Pervez Musharraf, who many believe personally profited from Khan's dealings.

But he remained under a lenient house arrest until 2009.

Within Pakistan, he continued to be a hugely popular figure, even a national hero, right up until his death.

But did Khan ever have any regrets?

"Sometimes I think I should have focused elsewhere," Khan once reflected.

"I should have become a professor.

I had a lot of offers."

♪♪ And now to "Puppet Regime," where we pivot from nuclear weapons to the nuclear puppet family.

Now, that's what I call a transition.

Roll that tape.

[ Babies crying ] >> Why are there so many darn babies in the office?

Didn't we get rid of all those kinds of people in January?

God, we really got to get that paid parental leave passed.

I wonder how other countries deal with it.

[ Telephone rings ] >> Joe.

>> Hey there, Boris.

Is it true the U.K.'s got paid parental leave?

>> Look, Joe, the only leaving I know about myself is Brexit.

But yes, we've had parental leave here in the U.K. since 1975.

That's the year we joined the E.U.

It was a year of total codswallop.

>> Codswallop, ha!

I know him.

Good old fella from Scranton.

Okay, thanks.

[ Telephone rings ] >> Ja, ja, leave the boxes over there on the left, Danke.

>> Tell me now, Angela.

You Germans have paid parental leave?

>> Ja, Joe, here in Germany, we give three entire years of leave and frankly, I think that's the least I deserve after spending the last 16 years dealing with all of you man-children.

>> Alright.

Thanks.

Oh, my goodness.

I guess when it comes to this paid parental leave stuff, America really is back... back in the 19th century.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...