Why We Still Have 12,000 Nukes

Today, there are around 12,000 nuclear warheads somewhere on Earth. That's 12,000. That's enough firepower to level every sizeable city on the planet several times over. The world used to have way more, like more than triple that during the Cold War. Almost every one of these nuclear warheads today is in the hands of two countries, the US and Russia. But in total, there are nine countries that possess these destructive bombs. And one of these countries doesn't admit that they have nuclear weapons, but they do. And America's nukes aren't just in America. They're scattered all over the world, in allied countries, on land, in air, deep in the ocean, lurking in submarines, in a configuration that the US calls its nuclear posture. It's one of the most important parts of America's military strategy today. And we're about to see how it actually works in real life. Because these 12,000 nukes shape our entire world. Their threat is ever-present. And so it turns the chessboard of geopolitics into a different thing than it was before. So the central idea of all of this is pretty simple, pretty intuitive, kind of. But then it kind of messes with your brain in weird ways, and we'll see how that works. You've got these two big empires. They're rivals. They're competing with each other as big countries do and have always done, and maybe someday they won't, but they do for now. If there's no nukes in this equation, history has taught us that these two big empires will fight each other over land, over influence, over resources, over honor, over who knows. They will fight each other. That always has happened. Like that is the central threat of humanity is big powerful entities will fight each other. In recent centuries, it's gotten really destructive. Like think of Europe and Asia in the 1940s. Countries are fighting because there's a chance that one of them can win. Okay. Now, after 1945, put nukes on the board and watch what happens. This new weapon that could inflict damage of the kind that we just never before imagined in human history. Now, if these two empires get into a war with each other, they both know that it will escalate. They will keep using more and more extreme force until eventually one side will use nukes. To which the other will respond with their own nukes. And then it's game over for everyone. Nobody wins. Everybody loses. The world is on fire. The concept of victory becomes irrelevant because everyone's dead. This creates a calculus of fear, an understanding that you will inflict way more consequences on yourself if you go to war with your geopolitical rival. And this threat of total destruction is stronger than the urge to fight and dominate. After World War II, after we witnessed this destructive bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, something changed. We crossed a line of understanding that there really was something that could really sort of end it all.