Carl Robichaud on Reducing the Risks of Nuclear War

Carl Robichaud co-leads Longview Philanthropy’s programme on nuclear weapons. For more than a decade, Carl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund aimed at strengthening international peace and security.

Carl previously worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his extensive research spanned arms control, international security policy and nonproliferation.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Lessons from the Ukraine crisis
• How nuclear nonproliferation treaties are enforced
• China’s future as a nuclear power
• Nuclear near-misses
• How effective are missile defence and early warning systems?
• The future of nuclear weapons technology
• The Reykjavik Summit between Gorbachev and Reagan
• The Acheson–Lilienthal Report and Baruch Plan
• Lessons from nuclear risk for other emerging technological risks
• What’s happened to philanthropy aimed at reducing risks from nuclear weapons, and what philanthropy can support today

Carl’s recommendations

• Hiroshima by John Hersey
  • Available to read on the New Yorker website
• Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World by Lesley M.M. Blume
• The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan
• The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman
• A Most Terrible Weapon — podcast produced by War on the Rocks

Other resources

• Zero Days (2016) — documentary about the Stuxnet worm
  • Quora answer explaining how Student worked
• The Fog of War (2003) — Errol Morris directs this documentary charting the life of Robert Macnamara
• Defence Science Board report on ‘Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat’
  • Two articles with commentary
    Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
• Worldschoolers Facebook group

Corrections

A couple minor inaccuracies are par for the course on a nearly four hour podcast! Carl notes the following corrections, none of which change the substance of the interview:

• When naming nuclear states, Carl mentioned England rather than the United Kingdom
• When mentioning states which explored a nuclear weapons program, Carl mentioned Spain. While there is some anecdotal evidence that Spain considered nuclear weapons, they are not included in official datasets
• The editor at the New Yorker at the time of the publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima was called Harold Ross, not John Ross