核伦理

KATHLEEN EGAN: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to those of you who are joining us in person and online. My name is Kathleen Egan, and I serve as senior program associate here at Carnegie Council. I am pleased to welcome you all to the latest gathering of our Values & Interests event series, which seeks to examine the interplay between morality and geopolitics.

Nowhere is the dynamic between power and morality more evident or important than in the issue of nuclear weapons. The debate over who should have these weapons and in what manner, if ever, they should be deployed, stockpiled, and tested, endures. But, as history has clearly shown, the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons are anything but hypothetical.

The recently released PBS documentary Bombshell captures the human, political, and ethical toll of the bomb. The film explores the narratives constructed by leaders and the media to justify its use. To unpack this film and geopolitical moment we are honored to have an expert group of panelists with us this evening.

Moderating tonight’s conversation we have award-winning journalist Ann Curry, who provides narration throughout the film. She is joined by Ben Louterman, who directed and produced Bombshell. Onstage we also have Emma Belcher, President of Ploughshares, a foundation singularly focused on reducing the threat of nuclear weapons, and finally we have Joel Rosenthal, president of Carnegie Council.

ANN CURRY: Ben, I want to start with you because the story is obviously much bigger than that in the documentary. First, what did you document about why—and there was a special reason for why—the U.S. government was so fiercely trying to keep the American people from knowing the true impact of the devastation?

BEN LOETERMAN: We didn’t know at the beginning. We knew that there had been films made, books written, talks given, and discussions had about the decision to use the bomb. What was new for us was the fact that there is a piece of scholarship now coming out about the planning not of the bomb but of telling the American people why they want to be so supportive of the bomb. That was a very calculated move. It was that publicity campaign that struck our interest as something we could contribute to the body of scholarship along with all that has been talked about regarding the secrets of building the bomb.

ANN CURRY: They knew they did not want people to know about the radiation specifically.

BEN LOETERMAN: Quite specifically. The Manhattan Project, headed by General Leslie Groves, invited, coerced, and contracted a New York Timesreporter to basically be embedded in the Manhattan Project, to have exclusive access, to go wherever he wanted to go, and to write whatever he wanted to write with no guarantee that what he wrote would be published. They gave him exclusive access in return for him putting out the line, the narrative, the story that they wanted people to believe about the bomb.

ANN CURRY: Predictably, he downplayed, misled, and in some cases out and out lied to the American people. To understand what this meant, because he had access the mainstream media really paid attention. You had Charles Loeb with the African American press. He was read by a small number of people. You also had Leslie Nakashima, who was limited in who was able to read him, but this reporter, William Lawrence from The New York Times, had the largest part.

The question is this: Why was he willing to be part of that coverup? In other words, access, yes, but access that did cause him to lie, mislead, and actually break every journalistic rule in the book; why was he willing to do that?

BEN LOETERMAN: That is a moral question.

ANN CURRY: And that’s why we are here.

BEN LOETERMAN: Which brings us here.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: You’re in the right place.

BEN LOETERMAN: While we were very careful and spoke to a lot of people and historians about the danger of applying our morals of today to then, actually what we learned from the people who studied it the most was, “Don’t give this guy, William Lawrence, a free pass. That was not standard operating procedure in the 1940s. That was not how the game was played, and that is not what a reporter should do.”

ANN CURRY: Before people fully understood what happened, that he was coopted as you said, embedded, and did these things purposefully and knowingly, he was actually awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

BEN LOETERMAN: That’s right.

ANN CURRY: And there have been efforts to try to take it away from him after his death.

In the last clip you saw, John Hersey, a reporter, more than a year later filed a story about these individuals and their experiences in the bomb. There is an interesting story about him. He came forward with a different perspective because of his own background.

BEN LOETERMAN: He was born in China. He was used to Asian culture, and people felt—even though he did not speak Japanese, only spent two-and-a-half weeks there gathering notes, and then came back and wrote his whole story in New York—that he had a kind of empathy and understanding, a humanism, and a very simple understanding of them as people.

ANN CURRY: He was the son of missionaries, we should note. It seems remarkable to me, and I wonder if you have a theory about this, why a man like that, who had a very different kind of perspective—he was in many ways a magazine writer, a reader/writer, not a day-in and day-out journalist—Charles Loeb with the African American press, and Leslie Nakashima, in real time, while censorship was intense, fighting to tell the truth. There must have been people in the mainstream media who were trying to find the truth, but why was it that these three people were willing to buck the official narrative and actually risk telling a very unpopular story? Have you been able to figure that part out?

BEN LOETERMAN: I think they had more gumption, I think they had more energy, and I think they had more curiosity. I think the mainstream press is very happy to publish what it has access to. If it has access to newsfeeds from the Associated Press or United Press International, they will print that, and that is the story that will carry the day.

If the government goes to the extent of becoming its own news agency and puts out a story—I don’t care whether it is about the atomic bomb or weapons of mass destruction, because we have been there and done that, or whether it is about what is happening in today’s war—as long as that is what is accessible, that is what editors want to share with their public, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it does not get you the kind of journalism that these outsiders with their individual and largely marginalized perspectives bring to it.

ANN CURRY: I might say that there is something wrong with that. Maybe we will quibble on that one little point, that the job of journalists is to be very careful about what they are being told, and we are living in a time, Emma, where government obfuscation is not just increasing but is a bit rampant. We are also living in a time many could argue of smooshing and decreasing journalism ethics. Certainly there is a lot of increasing mistrust in journalism.

You saw the documentary. Given what is happening now—you have an eye on the ground of understanding what nations are doing in terms of expanding their own nuclear capabilities—to what degree does a film like this or a conversation like this sound alarm bells for you?

EMMA BELCHER: First, I want to commend Ben for making the film because we far too often have a sort of abstract view of nuclear weapons. It is dehumanized, and it is very easy to think that someone else is taking care of that problem and I don’t need to worry about it. I think what the film did was bring that back to a focus on humans, the impact of these horrendous weapons, and the destruction that they can bring.

That is so important right now because we are in this era when nuclear risk is increasing for the first time in a number of decades since we reduced the risk from the height of the Cold War. We have got geopolitical tensions, arms control is eroding, and we have new technologies becoming entangled with nuclear weapons. We are also in an era where we see rhetoric that is quite frankly disgusting about eliminating civilizations, about seeing glows over Teheran, and we need to be reminded of the power of these weapons and what they really mean.

You raise a great point about journalists and ethics. I have been pretty disappointed, to put it mildly, with the way the media has not seemed to push back against Trump’s claims about how imminent the Iranian nuclear threat was because it wasn’t, but I don’t see that getting much air time.

ANN CURRY: Why don’t you take a few seconds and talk about that? I covered the Iran nuclear negotiations quite extensively, but from your perspective you probably understand them far better than I. I think many people are still wondering if Trump has done us all a favor. I am hearing it on the streets, anyway: “Maybe he has done us all a favor to take out what is possible in Iran.” When you make the statement that you are making what are you saying exactly?

EMMA BELCHER: What I am saying is that the attacks on Iran were not stopping an imminent threat. Iran was potentially several months, maybe three, some people think six to nine months, away from being able to reconstitute their program to have enough material to create the weapons. That to me does not suggest an imminent threat, and I think this is something about which we need to make sure we are actually holding people to account and asking, “What do you mean? Is this something that was going to happen tomorrow? Next week?”

The reality is that the bombings that the United States and Israel did in June of last year did damage the Iranian nuclear program and did set them back. I happen to believe that that was not the right way to go either. I think diplomacy is always the right way to go, and we have seen that repeated in history.

ANN CURRY: So you were a fan of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)?

EMMA BELCHER: Yes. What the JCPOA did was essentially get Iran to a point where it was a year away from having enough material for a weapon, for one bomb. It was not perfect, but it was working.

Then, when the Trump administration came in, withdrew from the JCPOA, and he had an idea that he would apply maximum pressure: “I will be harder on Iran, and I will get a better deal.” Well, that didn’t happen.

Interestingly, Iran actually still adhered to the deal for a year after the Trump administration withdrew, but then over time we saw that it started to ramp up its efforts. It created 60 percent enrichment, enough for around ten bombs, so what Trump was doing was actually taking military action to try to solve a problem he himself created.

ANN CURRY: One thing I have been wondering, and I don’t know if this is a smart question or a stupid one, but I am going to ask it anyway: Taking a broader view, to what degree do you think the war in Iran and the increasing destabilization that we are seeing in terms of relationships, is increasing the risk of proliferation? You talked about the expansion of nuclear capabilities. You are talking about Russia, China, and the United States, but what about those countries that do not have nuclear weapons and have been saying, “Oh, we don’t really need them, we don’t really want them.” What has happened to the risks in this climate you are describing?

EMMA BELCHER: That is not a stupid question at all. It is a terrific one. It is actually what I am most worried about right now because I think if we look at the case of Iran, Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon when it was attacked. The administration is not saying that it did. What we worry about is that the very act of bombing is going to convince Iran, “I do need a nuclear weapon in order to prevent the United States and Israel from attacking me.”

We have also seen that and this narrative that you need nuclear weapons in the case of Putin re-invading Ukraine. There is a lot more nuance to that. I do not think personally that Ukraine could have kept its nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War. That is a different story. Let’s put it aside.

But what we are seeing is countries that have nuclear weapons—Russia, the United States, and Israel—attacking countries that don’t. The North Koreans learned this lesson when they saw Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had given up weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein was trying to pretend they still had clear weapons but did not, and we saw what happened to them. So, from the North Korean perspective, they took the lesson, “We do need nuclear weapons,” and now, here we are, and they probably have around 50.

So what we worry about now with Iran is that if it goes nuclear, Saudia Arabia is on the record to say it would consider it, and you can imagine Egypt might, in a region that is very unstable.

The other place I worry about as well is Europe because some European countries are concerned about whether the United States would come to its aid if attacked and could be learning the lesson that maybe they need their own nuclear weapons. There is a different rationale for that, but we are entering a dangerous phase where we could see an increase in the number of nuclear weapon states.

ANN CURRY: Joel, you’re up.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: That is part of the reason we are here. About a year ago, we called a workshop on the topic of nuclear complacency.

ANN CURRY: Among the public or policymakers?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: It was a small workshop of experts here, but we then published a report to put out.

Part of the concern was what Emma was just talking about, which was that you could almost feel the end of extended deterrence, the idea of extended deterrence being that there is some kind of stability in the system. By the way, that stability is predicated on a moral proposition, which is deterrence is defensible ethically, only it is conditional. The condition is that we work toward the reduction if not elimination of nuclear weapons.

ANN CURRY: But the opposite has been happening.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: The opposite has been happening, and our concern here is that there have been no conversations at all, especially as the treaties have lapsed. There is no treaty now governing strategic nuclear weapons. There is no ceiling. China is building up, Russia is doing its thing, we are doing our modernization, and then there is all the political instability. It is a genuine concern.

ANN CURRY: Is the concern that more and more nations are getting weapons as a deterrent or is your genuine concern about the threats? For example, we heard Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov say during the war in Crimea, a while ago, that Putin and Russia “had a right to use nuclear weapons in its fight for Crimea.” The idea of having a “right” to use a nuclear weapon—

JOEL ROSENTHAL: There is a right and a lot of casual talk in the escalation ladder in Ukraine. These are not hypothetical problems right now.

ANN CURRY: You said that there is a defensible position one can take if you are working to remove nuclear weapons but you have them for deterrence. Is there ever a feasible idea in your mind where there is an ethical reason to justify using a nuclear weapon? This talk we are heaving from Lavrov and other people; is that ever a right? Is that ever an ethical decision?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: No, and I think that is part of the reason why this film is so important because it reminds us of the other side of what happens and the humanity. You have to be thinking in a dehumanized way to get to a yes answer on that.

What was so brilliant about this is that you are not making any judgments. These narratives were available at the time of what this weapon did. My concern now, 80 years on, is that the hibakusha are leaving us.

ANN CURRY: The hibakusha are the people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Not only are the hibakusha leaving us with a very strong message. We had one here a couple of weeks ago; it was a very powerful experience. That will not be possible much longer.

The other side of that coin is that the people in charge at that time and all the way through the Cold War—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, Sam Nunn—all the people who had authority over these weapons in this country, as they were leaving the stage all said the same thing as the hibakusha. They said, “We got us through this period.” They ended up at Global Zero. The hibakusha and the stewards of the nuclear arsenal in this country came to the same conclusion, and the reason is—and I want to come back to those moral voices—the empathy, the idea of what is on the other side of the use of these weapons.

ANN CURRY: There was this move to get rid of the number of nuclear weapons. We still had them but had fewer.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: As the Cold War comes down.

ANN CURRY: You are saying the reason for this was an increase in empathy. Was something else driving this, or was it simply an awakening? The hibakusha, by the way, by the way in 2024 won a Nobel Peace Prize for their ferocious fight against nuclear weapons ever being used again.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I will give some credit to President Obama. If you look at his speech at Hiroshima, I thought he reframed the narrative for us, and the way he reframed it was that in a simple way we think of Hiroshima as the “dawn of the Atomic Age.” That’s the story. His last line is something like, “This should be the dawn of our moral awakening.” He ends with that, that there is something distinct about this.

ANN CURRY: There is a beginning of something better and bigger for all of us.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: And will we have the moral power to control the technology? We have the human creation to destroy the planet; what will stop it? It has to be a moral argument, a moral proposition.

ANN CURRY: You have traveled extensively in Japan, so you know this—I am half-Japanese, by the way, for full transparency; my mother was in Japan during the bombing but was not affected. The impact afterward is that the people who survived these bombs developed oftentimes illnesses, some died of radiation sickness, and some did not, and leukemia and other kinds of things happened, but they were not welcomed by people who were not affected by the bombs.

There was this problem. People did not want to deal with it. They also were concerned about getting sick or if their family married a hibakusha the grandchildren would not be well. There was a moment, actually during the ceremony you described, with one of the hibakusha did a lot of this work to raise awareness and bridge toward some kind of peace between Americans and Japanese, when President Obama did what Japanese people don’t do—they step away, or they did; I am not sure they still do—from hibakusha—and put his arms around him. This was a very healing kind of moment.

If you say that the reason we move toward declining the number of weapons was an increase of awareness, understanding, and empathy, then is this increase in the number of weapons, adding to arsenals, and increasing proliferation risk because of a decrease of understanding and empathy, or is there something else driving it? Is it simply the chaos that we find ourselves in? We all feel that we are now living in a time of great chaos.

Emma, I want to ask you that question.

EMMA BELCHER: I agree with Joel about this recognition that we cannot let nuclear weapons destroy our world, and I think the way we got from between 60,000 to 70,000 at the height of the Cold War to around 12,000 today is also because leaders in the United States and Soviet Union understood that there was a shared fate that we would have or a shared danger, and even though they were adversaries they recognized that they needed to work together to reduce the number of weapons and to reduce the amount of risk. So it was actually diplomacy at a time when tensions were greatest, a real understanding of the risks, and an involvement of scientists, engineers, military officials, and political leaders to take the temperature down.

But they were also persuaded by a really aware and activated public that was deeply concerned about the effects of nuclear weapons, and I think this is where the empathy came from. I do think political leaders had empathy as well, but I think it was very much bolstered by a public that was deeply concerned about the time we were in.

Now we are at a point where we have about 12,000 nuclear weapons, and the trajectory is going back upward, the wrong way, for the first time in decades, and I think there is a lack of public awareness, a broad awareness, about what’s happening, the risks, and danger we are in.

There is probably a bit of detachment and lack of empathy. I would absolutely that is part of it, particularly when we have our political leaders talking about other people in dehumanizing ways. That is actually not setting the stage for a kind of empathetic and pragmatic way forward. I think it is a particular type of strongman leadership that we are seeing right now, which is about power, fear, and dominance, over diplomacy and dialogue, which have been shown to pave the way forward.

I don’t think it is hopeless, though. Nuclear risk is the result of decisions that we make, and that means we can start making better decisions and reduce the risk once again because we have done it before, but we are going to need quite frankly a change in the leadership we are seeing today, and we need the involvement and awareness of an engaged public.

ANN CURRY: So we have to have a lot of patience before we change the leadership we see today, but in terms of an engaged population, you said in a TED Talk at one point, “Citizens need to ask themselves, ‘What level of nuclear weapons will you tolerate in the world?’” I am not sure if I said that exactly right.

EMMA BELCHER: Nuclear risk.

ANN CURRY: When you asked that question, as I was watching your TED Talk, I realized I had not asked myself that question. That is a good question for people to ask themselves.

EMMA BELCHER: It is a great one. I was giving a talk the other day, and someone asked me, “What is one question that you are surprised no one ever asks you about nuclear weapons?”

People have asked me about everything on the policy front—every country, this, that, and the other—and I thought, You know what they don’t ask? They don’t ask, “What does this mean for me?” It is still so abstract and so far away that I think people find it hard to really think about what it means for them.

The one time I had people call me and be very concerned was I think in 2017 when President Trump and Kim Jong Un were exchanging rhetoric about “fire and fury,” the size of their arsenals, and this, that, and the other. I had American friends asking, “Am I safe? Can they reach us here? We have not seen this before. We have not felt this before.”

I do think that we are desensitized, which is why, coming full circle, I think it is a terrific service you have done in creating this.

BEN LOETERMAN: Which, for me, was part of making the film. There are a couple of things going on. We are trying to make a film for a generation that is not learning its history and certainly is not learning it from books, so media and films—

ANN CURRY: There is a problem with students actually reading in college.

BEN LOETERMAN: And high school and junior high school.

ANN CURRY: And because of technology that is letting them read notes.

BEN LOETERMAN: That is happening on one side. On another side, you have films like Oppenheimer, you have films like A House of Dynamite, which are tremendous, and from a filmic sense tremendously well-made and well-funded with terrific production values and all that, but they also can be reasserting a message that has been perpetuated.

If you are a filmmaker like me, you see that as a great opportunity: “Let’s jump in with something a little different.” But you are also talking to a generation of kids who are playing games on computers. When we showed the film to a group of people at Ohio State University, we had a high school teacher drive from the Southwest part of the state two hours to come, and she said, “I came here for one reason. I have kids, I have boys, in my class who are looking at the news in Iran and asking, ‘Why aren’t we just nuking them?’” So when you say “desensitized,” that is what I think about.

ANN CURRY: There is a body of evidence that I don’t know is highly disputed, and please stop me if I say something erroneous. We talked with an anthropologist last week who was investigating the fallout from radiation after Fukushima and the earthquake. He made this statement: “Every one of us carries markers in us from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl, any of these pollution streams.” You may not have all of them, you may only have some of them, and I don’t know to what degree it is a problem, but the earth is an ecosystem uniting a whole bunch of smaller ecosystems, and this stuff travels. It is not as if something blows up somewhere and does not show up in your water supply. That would certainly be an argument that gets my attention as a mother, that my children are safe, the idea that what could blow up in Chernobyl, what happens in China affects my family in Oregon and my sisters and brothers would be very alarming to me.

That brings up another question, which is this idea of globalization. We are in a world that has had a world order, and that world order is now changing. I wonder to what degree the disintegration of the world order is also fueling this nationalist view.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, I think that is true. You are seeing fragmentation. Just at the time when we have the ability to be more integrated and more connected what you are seeing is exactly fragmentation.

ANN CURRY: Is that fueling it or is that a result of it?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I wish I knew the answer to that. I don’t know if it is causal and you can draw it directionally.

One thing has been very much on my mind in terms of this desensitization and connection and how people are processing world events. I do worry about the violence, the casual use of force, that we are seeing on a serial basis, which is becoming normalized—events in Venezuela, events in Iran, Cuba is next, in this sort of serial fashion.

One thing I did want to share when I was preparing for this event today is that I was thinking about being in Hiroshima and reading the inscription on the cenotaph. For all these years, I thought I knew what it means, but I am thinking of it differently now after watching the film and thinking about all this.

On the cenotaph it says, “Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil.” For years I always thought that meant the “evil” was the use of the atomic weapon, but in speaking with the hibakusha and thinking about this, the evil is not just that. The evil is going to war. The bomb is the apotheosis of war, the logical conclusion. War is an extinction event for whoever is on the victim’s side, and the bomb takes that to the extreme.

Maybe I am projecting onto the film in some way, but to me that was one of the takeaways, that it was not the bomb but war itself. The literature that is coming out now, Alex Wellerstein’s book and other things, reveals that this process was put in place. One of his messages is that there was no real decision to use the bomb; the decision was the war and all of the things that were put in place and which ended with the bomb.

To get to now, I worry about that, how people are processing the news, events, and our global presence. It is very violent, and there is a casual resort to war. With all this instability I see a dark kind of picture and a need to be reminded of what war is.

ANN CURRY: To be desensitized but then also just yearning.

This film premiered in Hiroshima last year on the 80th anniversary to the month of the dropping of the bomb. You say you were surprised by the reaction.

BEN LOETERMAN: We were surprised that it happened at all. The film was supposed to air in America on PBS on The American Experience on August 6, the anniversary, and it did not. I cannot tell you exactly why it did not, except that we have asked questions and not gotten answers as to why it did not, which raises questions in our minds as filmmakers: “Why would anyone let a film that has some currency lie on the shelf?” It doesn’t match my experience.

Because of that and because our film was delayed for its broadcast in America, we were suddenly invited to Japan to premiere the film in Hiroshima in August, the month of the anniversary, in a cinema, which required us to do a bit of work. We had to completely subtitle the film in Japanese, so it could be understood by the audience.

On the other hand, I thought: This is not who I made this for. This is not the message. This is an American-centric, journalism-centric film. This is about self-reflection here. The last thing I wanted was barbs and arrows coming at me from a cinema in Hiroshima.

The amazing thing was that it was the opposite of that. There was both a hunger to understand in Japan: What were Americans thinking, why were they thinking that, and what were they being told? There was an inconceivable curiosity about how we understood events they were experiencing in a very different way.

ANN CURRY: You were preparing yourself for “barbs and arrows,” but you actually got curiosity.

BEN LOETERMAN: We got hugs and thanks.

ANN CURRY: That’s nice.

BEN LOETERMAN: We got an invitation to bring the film back this coming December to Japan and tour it to universities in about 15 different cities. That is not what we expected.

ANN CURRY: At major universities including one of the most prestigious in Japan, Waseda University, in Tokyo.

Not always, but often there are two sides to the coin, and, yes, there is this kind of darkness in terms of people becoming increasingly desensitized, but there seems to be an openness. You talked about it being in Japan, but you also have universities and places specifically on the West Coast, where there are many Asian Americans, and where a lot of people were interned. I am hoping you take it to Hawaii because that was also a placed where that happened.

BEN LOETERMAN: We plan to.

ANN CURRY: You are talking about universities and students, and opening them up. To what degree do you believe that exposing to “those who will inherit the earth”—I was raised Catholic, so I would say “the meek,” but actually it’s young people who will inherit the earth—and take over, so reaching as many as possible would be really good. But even those who say “Nuke them,” if they are exposed may rethink saying, “Nuke them.” Do you have any evidence that the movie is changing any minds or causing people to feel things they have not felt before about the bomb?

BEN LOETERMAN: Not hard evidence, and that is not our intent. We are not going into this to change hearts and minds. We are going into this to do some good, hard journalistic work, to go some good, hard history, and see if people like Emma and Joel find ways to share that with audiences that could cause people to rethink. We are not a film of advocacy; we are a film of journalism, and we take that very seriously.

ANN CURRY: You want people to make up their own minds, which is exactly right, and it sounds as though some minds are being impacted or we wouldn’t be here sitting in front of all of you.

I am going to take a minute and say that I would like to make this a conversation because I have been lording over this conversation. You are a smart group. I am going to give you a moment so you can think about what questions you would like to ask the panel, but before I do that Kathleen you have been culling some of the questions coming in from those watching online. Could you share some of those with us?

KATHLEEN EGAN: We have had a lot of great questions. A few questions have come in thinking about nuclear weapons and emerging risks as they relate to artificial intelligence (AI) autonomy and cybersecurity, maybe more a question for Joel and Emma.

There was a question specifically from the group the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy: “Can nuclear ethics meaningfully shape state behavior without stronger integration into international legal obligations and institutional accountability mechanisms?”

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Maybe I am a little skeptical of the legal mechanisms as being the place to go. It is certainly useful and helpful to have norms that are codified and so on, but I think we are in a position now that the great powers will need to show some leadership.

One of the challenges here is that it used to be bilateral in a sense and now it is multilateral. The short answer would be diplomacy now and I think those international legal mechanisms and institutions to follow.

ANN CURRY: There are people in this audience and in other countries as well who do work in policy, and it would seem to me that their knowing about this would be helpful. It may be hard to think about leadership given the leadership now changing the way things are going.

Emma, you are one who does not give up and continues on and on as the only sort of path. Is there a particular thing you can do besides elect better leaders, Joel? Or are we just waiting for change?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I think it is a leadership issue. I hate to be so doctrinaire about that, but, as Emma was saying, there needs to be public support and leaders respond to what publics want to do.

It is a leadership issue in the sense of emerging technology generally. I don’t want to muddy the water too much, but AI was mentioned. We have these issues of technology that are enormously powerful and are going to require governance. These are global-scale issues that cannot be solved—

ANN CURRY: And we need smarter leaders who know how to face them.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: It is a bit of a clichéd answer, but I hope some generational change and better leadership is what we are aiming for, but there need to be some ideas to rally to.

ANN CURRY: Emma, do you want to take these two questions?

EMMA BELCHER: On the legal side of things, I agree with Joel that there is a challenge right now with the leadership we have, not just here in the United States but globally, despite some leaders who are trying to take hold of the moment. Some of the most interesting work I am seeing now is in thinking about norms and legal frameworks and how you could start to borrow some developments in international law about the rights of future generations and the responsibilities we have now and what we do for the rights of future generations, like learning from the environmental field and kind of bringing it into the nuclear.

There is also consideration of whether or not it is time to go back to the International Court of Justice for another advisory opinion about nuclear weapons. I think even if some of these things are not legally successful, they raise awareness and help educate people about the issues, and I think we need to be building the groundwork now to be able to seize that moment when we potentially have a change because if we wait until there’s an opportunity and we have not done that prep work, we will be looking at each other and wishing we had started earlier. I am taking a lot of energy from that kind of effort.

On the AI side of things, it is so interesting. We can see in any issue area where there can be positive things about AI but also real challenges we need to be careful of. Nuclear is no different, although the stakes are particularly high for getting it wrong, so we want to be very careful there. We need the right governance frameworks.

One thing I have been concerned about and people have worried, “Well, what if we cede the authority to decide on nuclear weapons use to an AI, a robot, or a machine?” Thankfully, I think world leaders are recognizing that would be a terrible idea, and in fact the United States and China agreed in late 2024 that they would always have a human in the loop. So that is terrific.

What I worry about is a level below that: How are we using the AI to inform ourselves in order to take decisions about using nuclear weapons, and could we be over-relying and overconfident with AI’s ability to take in complexity and a lot of information? Could we be susceptible to AI hallucinations and make a decision based on that?

One of the alarming bits of early data, one study that probably needs further study, is that it seems that in some war-gaming exercises when AI is involved these war-gaming exercises are more likely than otherwise to escalate to nuclear use.

ANN CURRY: Oh, boy.

EMMA BELCHER: That tells me that perhaps there is something going on in the algorithms and data. To Joel’s point, and you raised this about empathy, if we are going to rely on AI, how might we design and build in empathy in these systems? Can we do that?

I think we should try, but to me that also means not just getting data and opinions from people who work on weapons and systems but getting advice from diplomats and people who understand the regions we are talking about so that as we try to use AI for good to help we can bake in some of those characteristics that we need to be successful. I don’t know that we will be able to do that, but I think it is so important to focus on what those guardrails and systems are.

QUESTION: Angel Angelov, consul general, Bulgaria. Thanks for hosting this fascinating discussion. You could argue that we survived the Cold War despite having great powers with nuclear weapons because of mutually assured destruction. It was recently reminded to us with A House of Dynamite and Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario that indeed there are no winners of this war, so hopefully this understanding stays.

I think the much more urgent issue mentioned from the podium was the asymmetric use of nuclear war, meaning a country that has it using it against one that does not have it. During the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s the big powers swallowed their defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan without using nukes, but what about now? Are we still confident that the great or former great powers could lose a war without looking for the bomb?

ANN CURRY: Good question. Do we have confidence that a great power can lose a war without looking at the bomb?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I will just invoke here the phrase, the “nuclear taboo.” There has been some currency to that idea. I know as much as you do in terms of what your perception is of the strength of that now.

ANN CURRY: No one has done it yet, have they?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I am here to say I am worried about for all the reasons that have been mentioned, and again I think part of it is time, that it has been 80 years since its use, generational knowledge, wisdom, and experience leaving the stage, these geopolitical issues, et cetera. I am here to say I am worried. I think the taboo may be in some jeopardy, but I would curious as to what Emma thinks about that.

EMMA BELCHER: I think there was a point after Putin re-invaded Ukraine when there was very high concern that Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon, which, despite how it sounds, is not a mini-nuclear weapon. Tactical nuclear weapons can be up to the size of the Hiroshima bomb.

I believe at a certain point the Biden administration thought there was a 50 percent chance that Putin might use it. That is an extraordinary statistic, and I think alarm bells were really going off in the White House about that. I think what happened then was probably a combination of some messages being conveyed to Putin and all the rest.

That is far too high, and that makes me concerned that we might actually see nuclear use. I think we have moved into this very challenging era where we are seeing countries not just using that threat of mutually assured destruction to defend against invasion but actually invading countries with that nuclear threat behind them in a more offensive way. That is a shift, and that is what I worry about.

I also worry that China might be looking at what has happened with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the United States’ and Israel’s attack and war on Iran to think, Well, there was a bit of moral outrage, but they weren’t held to account. Might China do the same when it comes to Taiwan? That is what I am really worried about now.

ANN CURRY: It feels like we are closer than ever to that.

QUESTION: Hi. I am Iman, a graduate student at Bard College. How should the United States respond if Russia uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine? I am not predicating the question on the likeliness of that happening but just as a hypothetical scenario because I am interested in your take on what would be the ethical and moral way to respond to limited nuclear weapon use.

EMMA BELCHER: I think the United States does not respond in kind. If you start doing that, you potentially escalate to nuclear war. I think also not responding in kind signals that these weapons are just—I hate to say this—unnecessary in those military terms.

What people have advocated for is using conventional weapons to then try to do a whole lot of damage inside of Russia. Obviously if this happens it is going to be a challenging, fragile situation because now you have two nuclear powers in direct conflict with each other, but I think there is no need to use another nuclear weapon tit-for-tat. It is more probable that conventional weapons, sanctions, and getting the rest of the world behind us would be the approach.

ANN CURRY: It would seem to me that the first nation to use a nuclear weapon in 80 years would be a pariah state and would be condemned by virtually every nation in the world and would suffer sanctions that would be extraordinary. Is that a dream or is that true?

EMMA BELCHER: I think so, but I was also a little bit surprised to see that when Putin first threatened to use a nuclear weapon or invaded Ukraine with this threat there was outrage from the West, but a number of other countries in the Global South did not necessarily rush to condemn, so I don’t know. I would like to think that would happen. We then later saw China and India apply some pressure and send the signal that they should absolutely not be doing that, but it did not happen immediately. It took a little while, so I am not sure.

QUESTION: Thank so much for doing this. I am Elliot Waldman with World Politics Review. Congratulations, Ben, on the film. I thought it was fascinating.

I was thinking a little bit while you all were talking about how the number of people killed in Hiroshima, horrific and devastating as it was, was a fraction of the number killed in the firebombing of Tokyo and how that preceded the bombing of Hiroshima. It made me think about how the heightened nuclear risk we are seeing is taking place in the context of the erosion of the norm against civilian harm, how those two things tie together with each other, and how restoring the latter may lead to some shoring up of the former.

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I think that is exactly right. What are we most concerned about, as we were saying, is erosion of that norm to protect civilians and also the lowering of the threshold to use deadly force. This is where we are. I think that is a brilliant observation. Step one is to restore that norm and build on that.

ANN CURRY: How do we do that?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: I keep coming back to the leadership issue. We have leaders who are resorting to the use of military force as a militarization of foreign policy.

ANN CURRY: But are they getting away with it because the rest of us in society are getting comfortable with the uncomfortable?

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Yes.

ANN CURRY: Can politicians, especially in a country like America, where, for all its flaws, politicians do care what people think because they get in trouble when they do something that we don’t love if enough of us hate it and get upset. You don’t think so? You are shaking your head no.

QUESTION: I don’t agree. I think with a lot of the controversial issues that have happened recently there has been a massive outcry from the public that has not moved politicians. The Iran war is still ongoing. People in my generation have been talking a lot about it, and I don’t feel like there has been any type of political movement from our leaders.

ANN CURRY: This may be something that has changed. This is very interesting because we were all saying, uh-huh, uh-huh, and then this young person said, that is not what I am seeing. That is a very astute comment. Maybe something else is happening.

EMMA BELCHER: It is an excellent point. When people talk about trying to recreate the Nuclear Freeze movement and a million people in Central Park, we are just not going to get that today. That is not how the advocacy of today works. When we think about nuclear weapons we have to connect it to other issues that people do care about and meet them where they are—climate, AI, public health, human rights, and those kinds of things.

I do think I am seeing a little bit of response of members of Congress to the Iran war. I think we are seeing some shifts. We are seeing some advocacy that is getting members of Congress one by one to actually sign on to try to curtail what President Trump is doing, but I think it has taken something this big for that to happen.

We know that most Americans don’t agree with this war of choice and I think we are finally now seeing groups that don’t like what they are seeing when it comes to an erosion of norms in all sorts of issue areas start to come together and form that kind of common cause.

The other thing though, is, is that going to then affect President Trump? What we have seen in the last decade is that the way of doing business to try to convince your political leaders to take action is not working the way it used to, so we need to find more effective ways of trying to get people to not just feel the pressure but also be influenced by people they respect.

ANN CURRY: But to some degree are you fighting a cult, the cult of believing in the president no matter what or the policies that he represents? In other words, there is not thinking about it but a knee-jerk response to it. To some degree that is what I am hearing is causing some of this, not wanting to talk about, think about, and maybe being misinformed about it also, the sources of misinformation, so this cult of admiration and adulation could be affecting our ability to pay attention to the truth.

EMMA BELCHER: You raise a good point because we have seen some in the v who have been upset by yet another war in the Middle East or another war that America is involved with, yet some MAGA supporters don’t seem to mind that because it is whatever Trump does.

ANN CURRY: That is happening. That is a factor. I have heard it enough to believe it.

EMMA BELCHER: That is where I think we need to get creative: Where is he influenced? How is he influenced? But that is a bigger discussion.

ANN CURRY: That is going to need a psychologist.

QUESTION: W.P. Sidhu. I teach a course in weapons of mass destruction, so thank you very much for the film. I completely agree that students are not reading, but they will watch films because we organize discussions around them, and I would love to do that in the course as well. A few of the films you mentioned, such as Command and Control, may be added to that as well. Thank you very much for that and thank you for all your insight.

My question comes back to the issue of journalistic ethics and values. There seems to be a sense that, “Well, that was then and it would never happen again now.” Is that really the case? You had embedded journalists in previous wars. You have this travesty of what happened in the Pentagon, and there was a split in the journalistic groups. You know now that you do not get news but opinions and values, and it depends on who you are listening to.

In that context, and I certainly want to tie it to looking at making the connections, Emma, as you did, with climate change or even with AI, how concerned should we be about the guardians in some ways, the Fourth Estate among others, to keep people on the straight and narrow and call out, or are they all compromised?

ANN CURRY: We should be extraordinarily concerned obviously. I think you are asking a very important question because we were not really talking about the journalism. The movie is a lot about the journalism.

I myself was an embedded journalist during the Iraq War, and the way we behaved was quite different. I was on the ship and I watched the planes take off. I knew the war was starting, but I couldn’t report it. That was the only thing I stopped myself from doing because that was the agreement that NBC made for us to be embedded because we were not going to cause Americans to die by reporting too soon something they were trying very hard to keep quiet. But in terms of what we reported, we would not allow them to tell us what to report.

You are really asking about the revolution that is occurring in journalism today because of the breaking down of funding mechanisms that supported journalism until now. There is extraordinarily good journalism being done today and there is stuff that is being called journalism that is not, and that stuff is increasing, so while we can blame a breaking down of the system—and this breaking down is causing newspapers to die all across this country, it has caused the wall between the financial side from the editorial side in newspapers and broadcast news to crumble, have holes through it, and in some places it is completely down—there is a lot of reason to be concerned.

The good news in the reality of where we are is that in my work, in teaching, talking about, and lecturing at universities and other places about journalism it is very clear to me that there are many people trying to find solutions in this revolution, trying to find sustainable models, trying to find different ways of going, and generally what it means is that people need to earn less and work harder because they are working purposefully. That generally seems to be the way it is working out, and small towns are developing test runs at local newspapers. I can already see it starting to grow.

Once these small-town newspapers and broadcast locations, radio, whatever, develop, they develop the net of trust that can spread out, but right now what we have is a justifiable decrease in trust in what you are hearing and watching. In this period of transition, this period of revolution, what I would say is read more, watch less, but curate what you pay attention to because your brain is not evolved to remember whether information you read from an erroneous or unbankable source is different when you remember it two months from now from the information you read from a bankable source. You have a limited attention span; spend it wisely. That would be my advice about it.

In terms of what is the future, I have no doubt in my mind that we are going to get to the other side because there is such a demand, and the demand comes from all sides of the aisle. They are all furious and all recognizing—if there is one thing that has come out of this that is positive—that there are people who never thought about the struggle to find truth, never thought about the constant pressure to control the narrative, as we see in the movie and even before then. Someone was always trying to control you by telling you that they knew more, and this whole branding and trying to get you to understand a narrative, all that stuff is propaganda. That is my position on it.

I think the way past this and all the new developments, Substack, all this kind of stuff, is trying to figure out what will work. What is working is when we get back to not exactly the same, because it was not perfect then, but we get to talking about and thinking about handling information with an ethical code, so it is down to ethics and some of the old ways of thinking: Being accountable for your information, being independent and not being a shill for a government, company, activist group, or an opinion by a group of people, even your own, and to fight with yourself to really listen to somebody because if you listen with all that other stuff in your head you are not listening, not hearing, and not reporting.

All of those kinds of things: Verifying information, check, check, and double-check, and all those bits. Also, I think there was a foundational ethic that people have forgotten that was part of the original ethics and started in the 1500s, then people forgot it, then it got worse, got better, and slowly cobbled together. There was a period of “yellow” journalism in America where people printed whatever made money, and I think we have just gone through a period of “green” journalism, where people were really focusing on not so much sensationalism but what would sell. We still see that, but we are seeing many people trying to build something else.

The revolution is on, and I think we will get to the other side because at Yale, where I am a Fellow, there are many students—I don’t have enough time to speak to them all—who want to make a difference. There is not even a journalism school there. Yale and many other colleges are sources of great journalists. Woodward came from Yale, Brooks, and other people. They want to be on the side of doing better.

I actually have hope, and I don’t think it is an imaginary hope. I think it is real. It is just a question of patience and if we have enough people carrying the baton, but we do have bold, brave journalists who are putting themselves at risk, and if you know where to look, you will find them: The Financial Times, The New York Times still, The Wall Street Journal, and a lot of times the financial newspapers and financial broadcasts tend to get it right because the watchers have money on the line, whereas some of the other people manipulate it.

QUESTION: I am William. As somebody who recently graduated from college, what does all of this look like for young people? What impact does it have on young people?

From my personal experience it is difficult to get people curious about things. Where does that fundamental curiosity and empathy come from for young people moving forward in life? How do we move forward into an age with that? We can write all we want about these things, but if people don’t read it, it won’t make a difference.

ANN CURRY: What do you think? It’s your group. It’s your people. Do you have an answer?

QUESTIONER: I don’t. I am curious about what your opinions are.

EMMA BELCHER: I see it, in young people in particular. It is what gives me hope actually because I think there is a lot of doom and gloom in our generations and other generations above.

This is very much anecdotal. I teach, so I don’t have access to a whole lot of students to know, but I feel like a lot of young people are just fed up and kind of disgusted with where the world is and actually want to do something different. I see so many people having curiosity but also trying to figure out how to do things differently and how to rewrite the rules in a way. That gives me hope.

I was speaking with a friend of mine who works in the development space, and she said that after the Department of Government Efficiency came and a lot of people were let go and the United States Agency for International Development became a shell people were upset, but she teaches, and she said to her students, “Hey! Everyone is telling you that this is depressing and what a terrible time to be graduating and trying to move into the aid space.”

She said, “I reject that. There is opportunity now to think how you want to rebuild something for the future. Yes, that is difficult, but I think we don’t need to just be complacent and say, ‘Well, here we are; what are we going to do?’” I do think it is a very interesting time to think more creatively and connect all of these issues because we are in a world now where we have nuclear risk increasing, challenges from AI, climate change, and public health, which we are reading about by the hour.

They are connected. They are not just increasing separately; they are entangling, and the impact is magnified, so we need younger people who understand these connections, understand how to communicate, and how to work in this digital age. That is what gives me hope. I think you guys can do it. Maybe I will go home and eat the cupcakes.

ANN CURRY: All of us need chocolate after this.

I gave a baccalaureate on Saturday at Colgate University. The topic was “Finding Consolation in Chaos.” It was interesting to see and hear the students engage with this idea of how you find consolation for yourself.

Let me start by saying that in the 1980s people your age were graduating to go work on Wall Street and make a ton of money. From my interaction with them, this generation wants to have an impactful life that does something good. Not everyone, but you are here in this room.

There is something different about this generation, and I think the crucible of this generation has arisen through the wars, the economic downturn, terrorism, and all kinds of things, and now we are in this situation where they are graduating and being told that the studies they have completed will not get them an entry-level job because of AI. They have had everything come at them.

The consolations I talked about were about the wisdoms, concepts, and ideas we get from those who came before, and if you have access to them how that can matter to you.

One thing I have said to students and it is interesting to their response, and I believe this myself: I am glad I am born now. I am made for this time, this time now that is hard. When I look at these students, I can see that they have been made for this time now. What will happen from here we don’t know, but to be born into a time when I cannot do anything because everything is done for me and is perfect and there is nothing to do but have a Mai Tai and sit on the beach is not what I am made for. I am made for something else.

There is a line from Edward Everett Hale. He counted Nathan Hale as an ancestor and was a cousin of Helen Keller, but the line may have actually originated in the 1700s because ideas move through time and come down to us. This quote may have originated from an English abolitionist: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something, and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

In this kind of idea and embracing it we can find strength in the words of those that come down to us and live these kinds of wisdoms. Choose the ones that matter to you.

I met a man the other day, a very wealthy, billionaire-type guy, and we were talking about D-Day. He had a picture on his phone of the Russian navy officer who decided, unlike the two other officers—three had to say yes—to say no during the Cuban Missile Crisis to firing a nuclear weapon at the United States. Because he decided not to do that, we did not engage again with nuclear war. It came down to one, and how many of us can remember his name? And yet, he was one.

We don’t know what life will present to us, but if we are open and prepared, and I think this generation has been on its knees emotionally because of all that has come, some will rise. Every generation has. As tough as it is, humanity has been through times as tough as this.

I am now on my soapbox, so I will shut up. Shall we say goodbye?

KATHLEEN EGAN: Please join me in thanking the panel, everyone.