# What stops countries from using nukes?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Johnny Harris
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWg2bI2PFeY
- **Дата:** 08.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 3:00
- **Просмотры:** 615,768
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/51312

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 03:00) []

What stops countries from nuking each other? Deterrence. That is the key concept. This grim logic, this balance created by very destructive bombs that split atoms. But in order for deterrence to work, it can't just be the bombs. It has to have some other important ingredients. First up, your enemy has to believe that you will actually, credibly, fire back a nuke. What that means is you got to have these things ready to go at all times. Like in the United States, the president is the sole authority who can authorize a nuclear strike. And legally, no one can veto his decision. He could launch a nuke within 5 minutes using some special authorization codes and relying on this football. I know it's not a football. It's a briefcase, but it's called the nuclear football. And inside of this, there's a phone and a scary black book that lists out all of the potential targets that the president could authorize a strike on. How many people would die, what the effect would be. It's all right there, by his side all the time. The next ingredient to deterrence is the ability to hit back. Meaning, if one nuclear country is able to destroy all of your nukes in a surprise attack, then the whole thing falls apart. So you got to have more than one nuke, and you kind of got to spread them out and hide them. The US does this by spreading its nukes out all throughout the world and dividing them up by delivery methods. Some are sitting in these big underground silos that are spread all across the middle of the country. Others are sitting on airplanes positioned all around the globe. And then of course, we've got nukes lurking in the depths of the ocean, sitting on submarines. They can carry up to 20 missiles, each of them with multiple warheads. Like the amount of destruction capability designed into these weapons is kind of unfathomable, and that's kind of the point. It has to be so bad, so easy to launch, that your enemy's like, "Not messing with that. " Anyway, these different delivery systems are called the nuclear triad. Russia has something like it, too. China's kind of developing their own triad. But where the rubber meets the road is the last ingredient, and this is where the mind games begin. Red lines. You have to signal to your enemy what they would have to do to warrant an attack. The cleanest and safest way to do this is to just say, "Hey, we will not attack anyone with our nukes unless they attack us with their nukes first. " Most countries operate with this as their kind of de facto policy. But for the two big dogs, Russia and the United States, red lines are a way for them to kind of play mind games with each other because they believe that it would incentivize their enemy to do everything short of a nuclear attack. Chemical weapons, conventional attacks, all these other things that we also want to deter. So, both of them keep their red lines intentionally vague and fuzzy, forcing each other to constantly be questioning, "Where's the red line? Like, am I going too far? Am I going to trigger a nuclear strike if I do this or that? " This keeps both sides very far away from provoking each other. And this is the mind game at the heart of modern nuclear politics. It's a very dangerous mind game, but it's nonetheless the one we have.