Today is the release of “The Next Nuclear Age” series on the Washington Post.
Q: Your team has a new series on the Washington Post. Can you tell us a bit about what you will be talking about in this series? A sneak peek, if you will.
Hans Kristensen: The world is changing, and it’s changing fast. And we have been working on nuclear security issues for 80 years. And I started working on this in the 1980s, I grew up in the Cold War in Europe. We had this period post-Cold War, of peace and getting together to solve problems. Now it’s changing. The world’s gotten more dangerous. And it’s happening fast. And we want with this series to draw attention to what some of those features are: what are some of the things that are driving this change? That comes an increase in nuclear risks, the risk that nuclear weapons could come into use. The risk that countries begin to build more of them, operate them more offensively, etc, etc. So there are lots of things at stake.
Q: How did this series come to be, and how has this process differed for your team compared to your previous experience in conducting research and reporting on it?
Hans Kristensen: We publish very detailed overviews of nuclear powers [in the Nuclear Notebook], what they do, and their programs. But this particular series in the Washington Post came to be because of the need to communicate to a broader audience. So you can’t get too lost in all the technical details. You have to be able to tell a story, and so we did that and picked a handful of key different aspects of the nuclear problem. And so we hope this comes across as a story about these immense challenges that are facing humanity right now.
Q: Hans, you have been working on the Nuclear Information Project for almost two decades. How has the work evolved since you’ve joined?
Hans Kristensen: FAS was a natural place to go with this project because it was founded by the people who developed the first nuclear weapon and have been in the nuclear business, limiting nuclear risks for all these decades. Later, I came in with the Nuclear Information Project 20 years ago, and for the longest time, it was just little me sitting here working on that, with a few grants. That sort of barely kept me going. As the world began to change, opportunities for funding increased, and we’re able to hire more staff. So now we’re fortunate enough to have six people who are working on this project. And these are people with a very broad range of skills. Everything from deep inside government experience to sort of activism, journalism types of experiences to academic or international organizations experience. It’s a really interesting spread of people that also goes really far in age. We go from early twenties, all the way up to the early sixties.
Q: How have public attitudes and policy frameworks on nuclear weapons shifted since you began working in this space?
Hans Kristensen: Back in the eighties, there was an upswelling of public opposition to nuclear weapons. And people today don’t really believe it, and certainly haven’t experienced it. Most people haven’t experienced it, but we had millions of people, ordinary people, in the streets of Central Park and massive demonstrations across Europe. All the time, people were afraid that our leaders were taking us down a dangerous path. And so they objected and demonstrated. Then the Soviet Union fell apart, and the Cold War ended, and for a period during the nineties, everything sort of got better, and we thought the issue of nuclear would sort of fade more and more into the background, and for sure, there were enormous changes. Since then, I mean, enormous amounts of nuclear weapons were just basically caught up and thrown away. But gradually, this picture started changing, and the political climate soured. We got into skirmishes with each other and and a sort of Cold War attitude returned. But today, most people are sort of still living in the past, meaning the 1990s. “Thinking that there’s this stuff going on doesn’t look good, and whatever. But it doesn’t really affect me personally.” So there’s much less public engagement on this today. It’s not necessarily something that’s going to stay that way. It could be that nuclear risks increase further, and it’s very likely that if they do, there will be much more pressure on politicians from the public
Q: During the freeze movement, there was a lot of public attention on nuclear weapons. Although the total number has decreased, weapon types have evolved. Is there awareness that, despite having fewer nuclear weapons than during the arms race, these weapons remain highly dangerous and are modernizing?
Hans Kristensen: Yes, this is one of the challenges of describing what is happening right now, because people tend to compare it with the Cold War. But the Cold War was particularly nasty. It was the intensity of a global Cold War that was happening all the time. Nukes were everywhere. I mean, they were deployed everywhere. It was extraordinary. That’s no longer the case. That’s the good news. And so the kind of challenge we are now facing is. Yes, there is an increase in nuclear weapons in some countries, but it’s not nearly at the pace of the Cold War. Today, the danger is that we get into these interactions where nuclear weapons are playing a bigger and bigger role. And there are more countries who have nuclear weapons, and more countries in the future will choose to get nuclear weapons. And so the pathways to the potential use of nuclear weapons have increased more than the number of nuclear weapons.
Q: Who do you most hope engages with this series, and what do you hope they take away?
Hans Kristensen: We want them to come out of it with a raised nuclear IQ, that gives them a broader picture, sort of in a concentrated framework, to be able to relate to this nuclear challenge we have today. And we certainly hope that people will be motivated to contact their congresspeople, write articles, and engage with other people. The whole shebang about how to influence public policy. But it’s also a debate for people who are in government, because many people who are in government today don’t have any Cold War experience. And so they were young people who came in. They don’t have that personal background. They need to be educated about this as well. So it’s really a series of articles that has to span widely and reach a very broad range of people from different backgrounds.
Q: What makes this series especially timely, given the growing disregard for information?
Hans Kristensen: It’s the importance of putting out information about these issues, to raise the nuclear IQ with people. Without information, without factual information, you can’t act. You can’t relate to the world you live in. And so it’s super important for us to be able to monitor what’s happening around the world, analyze the material, and translate it into something that different audiences can understand. So we’re fortunate enough that our material here on the project is being used around the world all the time. I mean, our factual pieces are used as the basis for newspaper articles, television shows, books, magazines, conversations, and briefings around the world. So it’s an extraordinarily privileged situation to be in, to be able to contribute and empower the public debate with facts.
Russia currently maintains nearly 5,460 nuclear warheads, with an estimated 1,718 deployed. This represents a slight decrease in total warheads from previous years but still positions Russia as the world’s largest nuclear power alongside the United States.
Nuclear weapons budgeting is like agreeing to buying a house without knowing the sales price, the mortgage rate, or the monthly payment.
The United States Air Force has forward deployed about one-third of its B-2 stealth bombers to Diego Garcia, or about half the B-2s considered fully operational at any given time.
China is NOT a nuclear “peer” of the United States, as some contend.
China’s total number of approximately 600 warheads constitutes only a small portion of the United States’ estimated stockpile of 3,700 warheads.