The nuclear threat, explained

Are we on the brink of a nuclear war?   This is the nuclear threat, explained.

Transcript

00:00The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.

00:31The considered opinion at the moment is that there are about 13,000 nuclear warheads.

00:3790% of those are in the hands of the US and Russia.

00:40This, however, is actually a dramatic decline from the 1970s and 1980s

00:47when there were nearly 80,000 nuclear warheads.

01:01There are these very complex doctrines which have developed around nuclear weapons.

01:08And I think the most important one to recognize in them is what is known as mutually assured destruction.

01:16Which simply means that if you attack me with nuclear weapons,

01:21there is no way you will survive my retaliatory attack.

01:25So both of us are going to be annihilated.

01:28It's a matter of others knowing that starting a conflict would be more costly to them

01:33than anything they might hope to gain.

01:35So I order the Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff

01:54to transfer the forces of the Russian army's deterrence to a special mode of combat duty.

02:05There was an effort to try and reduce nuclear tensions in the post-Cold War era.

02:10And because of that, many of these weapons were de-targeted,

02:14not to go into the other side's territory.

02:17But this can be reprogrammed very, very quickly.

02:20When President Putin talks about, you know, stepping up, if you like, the alert status,

02:26I think that is perhaps what he might have indicated.

02:29This kind of a threat has never really been given in the post-Cold War world

02:33between the two largest holders of nuclear weapons.

02:49We may not come to that, I hope.

02:53But there is a possibility that this may happen inadvertently.

02:57If, for example, the conventional conflict in Ukraine gets bogged down,

03:02Russia feels cornered, it feels that it cannot lose Ukraine,

03:07but it needs to do something dramatic.

03:09I think there may be certain pressure, and especially if NATO does get involved.

03:14Because, as you know, NATO also has its own nuclear weapon.

03:18Do you understand or not that if Ukraine joins NATO and returns Crimea by military means,

03:25European countries will automatically be drawn into a military conflict with Russia?

03:48But I would like to draw your attention to the fact that nuclear war is constantly spinning in the heads of Western politicians,

03:55and not in the heads of Russians.

04:17The idea of this group very much is to try and manage nuclear relations and nuclear weapons,

04:28so that you do not come to this kind of a situation, right?

04:31The other school of thought, which is also, by the way, now gaining a lot of ground,

04:36what we need to do is get rid of these nuclear weapons entirely.

04:40Because they have served their purpose and they are just making life much, much more dangerous.

04:46I think there should be really a coming together of these two groups to try and reduce nuclear dangers.