All right, y'all, welcome to the 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 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Colleen Moore.
She is the Digital Engagement Manager at Beyond the Bomb and Global Zero, and she has this very important article co-authored with our friend Ben Friedman running in the National Interest, nationalinterest.org, Nuclear Arms Nightmare, Don't Let New Start Die.
Welcome to the show, Colleen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks so much for doing the show and for writing this such an important piece here that you've got with Ben Friedman.
I said Friedman, didn't I?
It's Friedman.
About the START Treaty, this was New START.
This was signed in the Obama years, right, and is about to expire?
Yes.
So, New START was signed in April 2010, so 10 years ago, by Presidents Obama and Medvedev of Russia.
So, 10 years ago, and it followed on to the first original START Treaty, START I, and it continued this pattern of U.S.-Russia cooperation on arms control, caps both countries' strategically deployed weapons, and provides for inspections and data sharing, and it's such an important treaty, and it's basically the last guardrail on the nuclear arsenals of U.S. and Russia after the Trump administration withdrew from the INF Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, last year.
So, this is literally the only guardrail on a full-blown nuclear arms race, and there's only less than a year to extend this treaty, and Vladimir Putin of Russia has said that they're prepared to extend it, and they want to negotiate, and so it's kind of in Donald Trump's court right now to really commit to extending this key treaty.
Well, I guess on that point right there, is he under pressure from the Democrats to let the thing expire, because otherwise that proves that he's a pro-Putin traitor?
Yeah, so it's interesting, and that's kind of what we covered in the piece with Ben on the foreign influence, and I think there are some key pieces of legislation that Congress has put forth.
So Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts has his SAVE Act to preserve and extend New START.
Elliott Engel and Senator Van Hollen also have legislation that actually has some bipartisan support to encourage the U.S. to pursue negotiations to extend the treaty, but I do think, like we covered in our piece in the national interest, I think Congress is skeptical of just talking about the need to cooperate with Russia, because like you said, they don't want to come off as pro-Putin.
But, I mean, the facts are there.
The American people want to extend this treaty, 80%, according to a study by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, 80% of Americans want to extend this treaty, and so it's up to Congress to follow through on what their constituents want.
Well, and Donald Trump ought to be completely impervious to any of this pressure at this point, and he ought to be able to rally the Republicans against it, because it was a year ago that Mueller admitted that the whole thing was a hoax.
There was no truth to it at all.
Oh, I guess they tried to hang on to the troll factory, bought some Facebook ads, but they even admitted in the Mueller report they had no chain of custody from the Russians to WikiLeaks for the emails.
There was no, all of the different accusations about Papadopoulos and Page and all the rest, Mike Flynn and Senator Sessions, and every bit of the Russiagate story fell apart because it was all a lie that was drummed up by the CIA and the FBI in the first place to try to prevent Trump from taking office, and then secondly, as they put it, to CNN, to hem him in from moving forward with American relations with Russia, as he said he wanted to get along with Russia.
Well, now that that's all been dead and buried for a year, Trump ought to be dancing on Russiagate's hoax grave and celebrating, not only am I going to re-sign New START, but I want three more of them.
Why not?
The whole thing wasn't true.
He ought to be shoving that down the Democrats' throat and forcing them to publicly oppose him on a new arms deal, and see how that plays in an election year.
Yeah, and I think that you make a good point of he has this opportunity, and I think he also likes his name on things, and I think that's one of the reasons he hasn't extended New START, because it was an Obama-era agreement, and so I think that he just doesn't like Obama's name on it.
So, I mean, this isn't ...
I'm fine with him being like, this is a Trump agreement that we've done.
Go for it.
As long as you extend it, put your name on it, that's fine.
But we just want to keep this pivotal agreement here, because it has led to reductions in nuclear arsenals.
It has given us insight into each other's nuclear arsenals, and that's so important, and if that's what it takes, is for him to put his name on it, then I'm okay with that.
Yeah, and in fact, there are a couple of Democratic senators of import who are good on this stuff, like Dianne Feinstein, right, is for continuing this kind of diplomacy, all the hype about Vladimir Putin notwithstanding, correct?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I think there are some key champions in Congress right now.
Another avenue that we're focusing on is passing a no-first-use policy here in the United States, and we definitely have a lot of champions in Congress for that.
So, Representative Adam Smith, who's chairman of House Armed Services Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, they're definitely champions of no-first-use and nuclear disarmament efforts further.
So, there are people that we can really rely on to hone our issue.
And for the Republicans, if any Republican congressman is having any trouble with this, well, you just invoke Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
They were the ones who signed the INF Treaty, and I forget which all, but they were the ones who reduced America's nuclear stockpile from 40,000 to seven.
That's huge, and they're Republicans.
That's not Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that did that.
And so, just invoke the legacy of the great Ronald Reagan.
That's what every Republican wants to hear, and so go ahead and give them that.
Absolutely.
I mean, Ronald Reagan is the one that said a nuclear war can never be won, so it must never be fought.
And, yeah, I'm not really sure why that's not being invoked more often by Democrats, because, like you said, they do love the legacy of Ronald Reagan, and on nuclear weapons specifically, it was Reagan and Gorbachev that negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and it was 1987, and that's really what paved the way towards further agreements.
So, that was really the first agreement that eliminated a whole class of nuclear weapons and led to the original START Treaty, which was the first one to really hone in on deep reductions in our nuclear arsenal.
And that was under Bush I?
Yeah, that was in the 90s.
But not Clinton.
That was still under Bush Sr.?
I believe, yeah, that was in the early 90s, so that would have been under Bush Sr.
I remember reading that after he lost and was still just a lame duck, that in the winter in December of 1992, and then in January of 1993, he took two more trips to Russia to sign new and expanded deals, even just with days ticking away on his administration, which is funny to think about George H.W. Bush, in a sense, quantitatively, being the greatest man who ever lived.
He went and signed deals that eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons from our arsenal, and the Russian one as well, right?
As that government, I guess the Soviet Union had already fallen apart, but the rump state of the Russian Federation was willing to abide by the Soviet Union's treaties and to continue.
Yeltsin was willing to continue on his side too.
And that's actually, if you think about it, the greatest accomplishment of any two men in a room that ever happened, that they got rid of a grand total of something like 80,000 H-bombs, which is incredible to think that the American and Soviet arsenals were ever built up to those kinds of numbers in the first place.
But what a legacy.
And then what a legacy to invoke, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
Like you said, we've come such a long way.
I mean, during the Cold War in the 1980s, we had more than 70,000 nuclear weapons.
And now in 2020, we have just under 14,000.
So we've come a very long way.
And a lot of those leaders have been Republican.
They've been across the political spectrum.
And I think that that's the most important thing that I want to hone through is just that, you know, Trump is destroying this legacy.
And, you know, the US might not be able to call themselves a leader in nuclear disarmament after we have this history all the way from Eisenhower, you know, that all presidents have committed to some aspect of nuclear disarmament.
And we're kind of seeing that history kind of fall through before our eyes, starting with the INF Treaty.
And now with not a lot of movement towards extending New START yet.
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All right.
So on the INF there, explain that, what that treaty did and what it means that Trump has already gotten us out of that one.
Yeah.
So the INF treaty eliminated all ground launch missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.
So it was the first treaty that eliminated an entire class of weapons, and it led to the original START treaty.
So Trump withdrew from that last year in 2019, unfortunately.
And I think it really was because I think he had John Bolton, the former national security advisor, in his ear.
I mean, John Bolton had built his entire career on destroying really any kind of avenue of diplomacy, especially with arms control.
I mean, starting with the anti-ballistic missile treaty in the early 2000s, he was in his ear about the Iran deal right when Trump came into office, and now the INF treaty.
And even though John Bolton's out, I still kind of see his legacy in the Trump administration.
So yeah, without the INF treaty, and that was negotiated in the 80s between Reagan and Gorbachev.
And so without that, it's really only New START left that is containing this full-blown nuclear arms race.
Well, a couple of things about that INF, too, is that I'd learned this from, well, I'd read a couple of things, but then I had a conversation with Chas Freeman, who had been the ambassador to Kuwait and was almost the chair of the National Intelligence Council there in the Obama years, and very experienced diplomat.
Oh, he had gone with Kissinger and Nixon to China to shake hands with Mao to open up China in the early 1970s, so has vast experience over there.
And he said that the first thing was, the Russians may have technically violated the deal, but they were only making their medium-range missiles for their frontier with China.
They weren't trying to mess around in Europe at all, but they don't need three-stage rockets to hit China.
They need these medium-range missiles to deter China is all.
It's not an aggressive scheme against them.
But the Americans essentially took advantage of that and said, aha, see, they're developing these rockets that we think are technically in violation of the treaty.
And then they essentially used that as an excuse to get America out of the treaty in the name of Russia breaking it, but not because they really want to, and they may do this anyway, but not because their motive was that they wanted to re-implement a bunch of Pershing missiles and reintroduce them into Europe, medium-range missiles.
They want medium-range missiles for China, too.
And they want to put them in, I guess, in Korea or on Navy ships and in the Pacific, whatever bases in the Pacific, in order to hem in China.
And so, both Russia and America were willing to break this treaty that was keeping H-bombs out of Europe in order to threaten China.
And then, of course, we're going to end up with a buildup of medium-range missiles in Europe, too, and put all of those people at risk in our most close allied states in Europe.
Over the ability to threaten China, when we already have half our missiles pointed at them anyway.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Talking about the hundreds of nuclear weapons we have on hair-trigger alert, I mean, that's insane.
And the purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal right now is warfighting, and it should be deterrence, right?
And that should be how we're paving the way towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, right?
We have these nuclear weapons that are on hair-trigger alert, with the warning of a nuclear attack, these can be launched within minutes.
The president has, who has sole authority over these weapons, they have to decide in merely minutes if it's a credible threat and if they should respond.
And it's, like you said, it's crazy.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the other thing, right?
If you're talking about ICBMs coming over the pole, then you have maybe 15 or 20 minutes to decide whether it's a real attack and what to do in response, and pick up the red phone and try to do something.
But when you're talking about these medium-range missiles, then time is reduced for decision-making, and you get probably much more itchy trigger fingers and much more emotional responses.
And we've seen plenty of close calls already where, yeah, I guess most famously in 1993 when the Norwegians launched a rocket and they told the Russians, we're launching a satellite, but the word didn't get through the chain of command.
And so they assumed that it was an American first strike on Moscow and almost went to nuclear war.
And this is two years after the Cold War, after the Soviet Union was gone, three, four years after the Cold War was over.
We almost had a H-bomb exchange over just an accident.
And this is exactly the kind of thing that could lend to that sort of crisis.
And again, totally unnecessarily.
Absolutely.
And that's why Global Zero's view is that as long as these weapons exist, we're not safe.
And you pointed out one example of a possible nuclear attack that we came really close to.
There's been, like, it's really scary how many accidents there have been.
In the United States, this is detailed really well in the Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control, about the Damascus incident.
And that was just a technical problem where somebody dropped a wrench in the silo and it led to this awful disaster.
And there was another incident where a nuclear weapon was dropped on North Carolina.
That's crazy.
And just the existence of these weapons, you don't know what can happen.
And then as these weapons continue to exist, it's about the nuclear posture that we have right now and the fact that, like you pointed out, we have minutes to decide if it's a credible threat.
And it shouldn't be up to, I mean, in that example in the 90s with the one person, I think that was Petrov, who is the Russian, who kind of saw that it wasn't really a credible threat and he kind of paused.
And like, thank God for him.
But like, it shouldn't have to come down to that, right?
Right.
Yeah.
If it had been not him, but the guy on the night shift, we'd all be dead.
You know, it was just like a fluke.
And in fact, because he was disobeying orders, right?
His orders were that you're definitely supposed to turn the key and then call your boss or whatever.
And he just essentially refused to do what he was supposed to do because he knew what would happen.
In fact, I think he said he knew that his superiors, if he had told them, they would have gone ahead and launched.
And that was why he deliberately kept it from them, because he knew that they would have just gone ahead without thinking it through.
And by the way, I forgot what it's called, but there's a documentary on Netflix about that incident in, was it Alabama where they dropped the wrench?
Oh, that was Arkansas.
Oh, in Arkansas, right.
Where, yeah, a guy dropped the wrench down in the silo and it almost led to an H-bomb going off.
And then the one in North Carolina where the plane accidentally dropped the bomb when they found it, I think it was eight out of nine fail safes had failed.
And it was just one little switch that kept that thing from detonating.
And then it's pretty easy to imagine that.
What would they do if an H-bomb went off in North Carolina?
Unless the Air Force was already on the phone with the president telling him it was our mistake, sir.
Sorry.
Then they almost certainly would start bombing somebody.
They would assume we were under attack and go nuts.
And that could be the end of us all over just a fluke, right?
Exactly.
And I think there's a big argument right now over so-called low yield, smaller nuclear weapons.
And that's just a crazy argument.
I'm just like, there's no such thing as a small nuclear weapon or limited nuclear war, because even if it is one of these, quote unquote, low yield nuclear weapons, I mean, the detonation of any nuclear weapon will have global consequences.
I mean, the atomic bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered low yield by today's standards, you know, and those destroyed cities and caused long term effects for generations of the Japanese.
And so it's insane that we're even having this argument about new low yield nuclear weapons in the United States.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
So back to the START II treaty here.
What were the limits?
And just what do we face exactly if they're lifted here?
Just total free for all back to 40,000 nukes each?
I mean, it could be.
Yeah, this is really the only guardrail.
Yeah.
So it was specifically on strategically deployed nuclear weapons, and it limited them to a specific number that I can bring up here.
But I think that the other part of it is just the data sharing and the inspections.
And I think that's such a key part of giving each other insight to our nuclear arsenals.
And it's forcing us to cooperate and talk about it.
Right.
And so it's 1,500 deployed nuclear warheads, 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, 700 deployed ICBMs, deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and deployed nuclear-capable bombers, and then 800 total launchers, so deployed and non-deployed.
So yeah, like you said, without New START, there's really nothing to contain the nuclear arms race.
I mean, we don't have the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty anymore.
That limits the intermediate range.
And we don't have this on strategically deployed nuclear weapons.
I mean, we're already in the midst of a kind of building nuclear arms race, and it's pretty scary to think what could happen without this.
And I think that's why Senator Markey's legislation is really key, because it urges the U.S. to negotiate to extend the treaty.
But if it is not extended, then it would prohibit funding to increase the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal and forces above the New START limits through 2026.
So it's kind of using the power of the purse in Congress to prevent that.
But yeah, without this, I mean, that doesn't necessarily call on Russia to do anything.
And there is a provision in there that if Russia starts to build up their strategic nuclear arsenal, then that's a moot point from the U.S. perspective.
So it's so important.
And yeah, there would be no guardrail left on the nuclear arms race without New START.
And then when you talk about the numbers that we have even under the New START treaty, that's more than enough for the American military to kill every Russian and Chinese military base and city in one day.
If that can't deter you, nothing can.
There's no need, even if you believe that we absolutely must retain H-bombs in some numbers to deter Russia and China, which I think is a huge false assumption.
But even if you buy that, you don't need more than we already have.
There are more than enough to kill every last Russian and Chinese in the world.
Absolutely.
And I think so Global Zero also has, we released an alternative nuclear posture review a few years ago.
And one of the things that we advocate for is eliminating intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs.
We don't need ICBMs.
And it would save us so much money.
I mean, we spend so much money.
We spend billions of dollars on ICBMs every year.
So between 2017, I think it's 2046, we're going to be spending $149 billion on just ICBMs.
And we don't need them.
It's their first strike.
They would absorb that first strike.
That's why they're kind of known as the nuclear sponge.
And it just makes us more susceptible.
And I think especially when we're in a time of crisis right now, the COVID pandemic, and we don't even have enough money for ventilators, for masks, beds, nurses and doctors.
We're spending billions every year on ICBMs specifically, but just our nuclear weapons arsenal as a whole and modernization, modernizing our nuclear forces.
Yeah, boy.
And you know, Tom Colina has written a lot about this nuclear sponge thing.
And this is something that ought to be, I guess, probably not surprising, but still shocking to Americans, that our government's official policy is to keep Colorado and Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming stocked with these Minuteman missiles deep in their silos, not to use them, but to force the Russians to waste all their nukes, nuking Colorado and Nebraska and the Dakotas and Wyoming in order to spare the coasts where the important people live, I guess, which is a joke because they'd all be dead in a war with Russia too.
And it's not like they're going to use up, oh geez, we used up all our last nukes on Colorado and now we can't hit New York or DC.
That's preposterous.
And yet, but somehow we got to make sure that they waste as many nukes as possible, killing the good people of Nebraska.
That's just completely nuts.
I mean, who comes up with this stuff?
Yeah, that's a great question.
Yeah.
And yeah, so Global Zeroes, our alternative nuclear posture review, we advocate for eliminating ICBMs, taking those weapons off the air, trigger alert, no first use policy.
These are very common sense policies, like you said, like what crazy person came up with us.
And I don't think that advocating for disarmament is something that's crazy radical.
I think it's thought of as these hippies are advocating for disarmament, but to me it makes so much sense.
And something like no first use and restricting sole authority, I don't know why that's such a crazy idea of not having one person be able to launch a nuclear first strike.
It's pretty common sense to me.
Yeah, absolutely.
And by the way, speaking of hippies and all that, Global Zero, just like we were talking about Reagan and Bush, if on this issue you have to attack the right from the right, you've got an entire staff full of Republicans, including even Henry Kissinger, I think, who supports this group Global Zero, correct?
Yeah.
So we have hundreds, like over 300 political leaders, military commanders, national security experts from, like you said, all across the political spectrum, we have Republicans, we have Democrats, and from all over the world as well, and every nuclear armed region of the world advocating for our plan to eliminate nuclear weapons.
And yeah, like you said, it's people on the right that are advocating for this.
We have Ambassador Richard Burt who, yeah, he advocates for our mission.
And it's not a crazy, like far left movement.
You know, we have people from all across the spectrum.
And George Shultz, right?
Reagan's Secretary of State.
Is he still alive?
I'm not sure if he's alive.
I'm not sure if he's a Global Zero leader.
I'd have to check.
I know he was on the list back when anyway, but that should be enough, right, when you have, and you know, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, but is famously a nonpartisan wonk, you know, expert genius type, wrote a book about how we got to get rid of the nukes.
And I know supports what you guys are doing.
And that ought to be enough right there.
If William Perry says we can do without the H-bomb, we can do without the H-bomb.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
So there's another major treaty that is going up in smoke here, the Open Skies Treaty.
And it looks like Pompeo and Esper have convinced Trump to abandon that one too.
Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, that's admittedly not, I'm not an expert in Open Skies and Global Zero doesn't talk about that too much.
We did have our nuclear crisis director, John Walsall.
He's a Global Zero advisor and he was formerly an advisor to President Obama under the Obama administration on arms control.
So yeah, but from my understanding, I mean, that was such a key treaty that was, I mean, has been around since the early 90s and kind of permits those flights over each other's territories to collect data.
And yeah, I mean, the nuclear risk reduction community has spoken in favor of this treaty just because it opens up, you know, cooperation and data sharing.
And it's another one that, yep, like you said, the Trump administration just announced that they're going to withdraw from.
So definitely within this pattern of not wanting to cooperate with Russia and not valuing diplomacy, clearly not valuing our global security.
Yeah.
And even I think the nationalists have said that, you know, nevermind cooperation as an ideal or anything like that.
We get more out of this treaty than they do.
We get to all the different things that we get to discover about them by far, whatever their criteria are exactly in their mind outweighs whatever the Russians get to find out by flying over the USA.
So yeah, seems like a pretty easy one to stay in if they wanted to.
Right.
I mean, both of these treaties are definitely within the self-interest and national security interests of the US.
And so I think when we're talking about like that audience of, you know, nationalists, maybe people more on the right, Republican lawmakers, I mean, that's what we really have to hone in on is it's in our self-interest.
We're getting so much out of both of these treaties.
And like I pointed out with New START, like without New START, we don't have that data sharing on their nuclear arsenal.
Yep.
Well, and then like you say here, and it's in the piece, yeah, 80% of the American people are for this.
And so if ever there was a time for the right, you know, in America, I mean, the actual human people out here in the country to attack the right from the right, to go after your congressmen, go after your senators and make it clear that you support this stuff and that Ronald Reagan would want you to also and all this kind of thing.
And for the liberals to go after the members of the Senate and the House from the left as well and say, you know what, I don't care what you think about Trump and Russia.
This is far more important than that.
This is the future of humanity at stake here.
We absolutely, you know, first of all, need to shut up about criticizing Trump for wanting to negotiate with the Russians.
And secondly, need to get behind him and support him on this.
You know, I can't remember what it was I read that said, it might have been an editorial in the New York Times of all things, something that said that when Nixon came home from China, that the democratic leaders of the House and the Senate and the editorial page of the New York Times and all of them supported him.
That's a great job, Nixon.
And it wasn't because they leaned red.
It was just because this was the right thing to do.
And they weren't going to let their partisan hatred of Nixon get in the way of him opening up China and reducing, essentially almost eliminating the Cold War tension with them at that time.
And so that's the perfect example to invoke the, you know, go after the left from the left and the right from the right and just insist.
This is the consensus of the American people.
We demand that they stay within these treaties.
And for any political challengers out there in this campaign season who want an issue to beat your opponent over the head with, here you go.
The American people agree with you.
The swing voters agree with you on this.
So go ahead, right?
Yeah.
And that's really where the other organization that is a partner with Global Zero Beyond the Bomb, and that's what we're really focused on this election season.
So Beyond the Bomb is the U.S. grassroots movement to reduce the threat of nuclear violence.
So specifically, no first use.
But we're really just trying to insert our issues into the presidential election and other elections happening around the country all down the ballot this year.
And I mean, it's just not it's not a salient issue yet.
And I mean, it was I think Elizabeth Warren referenced no first use once during a debate last year.
New START was brought up briefly and seems like most of the Democrats that were in the race now that Biden's the one left.
But it was pretty much agreed across all of the Democratic primary candidates at the time that New START is pivotal to extend.
But still, you're not seeing national security, foreign policy, nuclear weapons policy specifically being brought up on the national stage as much as it should.
And I mean, Global Zero before Beyond the Bomb existed, we got Hillary Clinton to bring it up in a debate with Trump in 2016.
And that was really Global Zero's doing that got our message out there of eliminating nuclear weapons and other nuclear risk reduction policies.
So that's what Beyond the Bomb is really trying to do this year.
And like you said, I mean, voters support this.
It will be in their best interest.
Anyone that's running in any election, it will be in their best interest to talk about nuclear disarmament, to talk about nuclear risk reduction.
Yep, absolutely.
And you know what you say about it's not exactly a salient issue right now in terms of, you know, like media attention or this kind of thing.
Well, that still should just be seen as an opportunity for people to lead, just like with the war in Yemen.
You might not even know that we're at war in Yemen.
Well, we are and it's horrible and we got to stop it and go ahead and take a position of leadership on the issue.
Make it an issue.
And if you can succeed in that, then you must be a successful politician if you're able to get people to understand.
And so I don't know how many people running for office are ever going to hear this, but you know, people who have influence over them, voters, can make their voices known and suggest, you know what, here's a great issue that your idiot opponent has probably never heard of.
And it's one that you could really beat him over the head with and score some points and lead the people toward a better future on this.
And after all, as I like to say, sorry for quoting myself, but this is quantitatively speaking, opinions aside, this is the most important issue in the world.
America's relationship with Russia and specifically on our hydrogen bombs and what we're going to do with them.
This is the fate of our species hangs in the balance here and nothing else matters at all compared to this.
This is the first hundred most important things in the world and everything else is after that.
So it should be an opportunity for anybody who wants to follow your lead, Colleen, and lead people on this and try to make a positive difference.
Absolutely.
Yeah, 100% agree.
It's one of the most important issues of our time right now.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you work for Global Zero and beyond the bomb here and that you've made this, you know, your, you know, primary interest and made your career out of this.
It is the most important thing in the world.
And this article is a hell of an important article, too.
It's called Nuclear Arms Nightmare.
Don't Let New Start Die, co-written with our friend Ben Freeman over at The National Interest.
Thank you so much again, Colleen.
Great.
Thanks so much for having me.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
