From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of My Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called me Ben, and we're joined as always with our super producer Paul Michian. Controlled deconds. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Well, good news as we start the show today, there is currently not a nuclear war, believe it or not, folks. Yeah, right, this is actually a thing that we check on right before we record these days. Uh. And Matt, no, you can verify because right before we rolled I I had almost forgotten. I said, oh wait one second, let's check. Yeah, I have a Google notification set for armageddon, uh, nuclear holocaust, apocalypse, uh, nukes, duck and cover, you know, the Big five, just to make sure at all times that things are hunky dorry, which of course they're not. But we're at least not there yet, you know, a little bit like a modern Cold War era with that level of fear kind of returning doesn't it. Yeah, rest assured though you would get a notification on your phone of some kind of national alert moments before you're vaporized. So just like just like what happen in Hawaii, right, can you imagine getting that while you're on the can? And what do you do at that point? I guess like why herds own it? You just enjoy it? Just scroll on Reddit in the end from the toilet. Sure, there we go. And then at that point you hope the bomb hits because you don't want that stay it on. In an earlier Listener Male segment, we ran into something interesting. We looked a bit into the dangers of nuclear war, the struggle for disarmament. We've also explored the nuclear black market r I P to a Q Khan. We looked at the concept of mutually assured destruction or MAD and we even back in the day, looked at an ancient non man made nuclear reactor over there in Gabon. But we didn't ask this question. We've never asked this question yet, how many nukes are actually out there? This this sounds like a little bit of a policy podcast, but there really is some stuff they don't want you to know. So here are the facts. The world as we know it fundamentally changed. On July six, nineteen was something called the Trinity nuclear test out in the Alma Gordo Test Range in New Mexico. They used plutonium to create a nineteen kiloton blast. This was the first ever official nuclear bomb. There's a fantastic graphic novel about this that Matt you introduced us to UH, called Trinity. It's wonderful. Is very much worth your time if you want to, if you want a fact based exploration of both the science, the subterfuge and UH and the problems with nuclear weapons. That's not a hot take, but we've got quotes that can give you a little bit of a of a sense of just what it was like to be there at that moment in history. Maybe we start with a T. F. Farrell. Yes, this is a Brigadier general on the staff of the Manhattan Projects Military Command. And here's the quote. No man made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before the lighting effects beggar description beggared. That's a great word. We'll talk about it. After the whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. So beggard beggar to belief is how I've heard that used before, And I guess it just means unable to come up with or unable to fathom, unable to fully describe. Yeah, like you have to be confused with buggard, which it just means, you know, yeah, beggar just in this in this case means that, like you said that, it was almost impossible to articulate the full experience. Einstein warned about this, even wrote letters to political leaders. It caused Oppenheimer, who was running point on the science part and the occult part, to contemplate religion, where he famously said the line from I believe the Bahagavadgita. Now I have become death, the destroy of worlds. Not long after Uncle Sam dropped the first two nukes ever used in wartime in Japan, wreaking immense chaos in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, stuff that reverberates in the modern day. And you mentioned like a good sort of more documentary style, uh, nonfiction graphic novel and Trinity, right? Is that what it's called? Just Trinity. I can't wait to check that one out. There's a absurdly stylized sci fi ified version of a similar story called The Manhattan Projects that I believe you've been read as well. Ben. That's quite good. Yes, yeah, yeah, those are Those are both hits, and they're they're important. You know. I would love for those graphic novels to be read in schools and classrooms because I think it's an excellent way to learn um. But you know, people are back to banning books. So get your copy of Mouse while you can. Uh. Other countries, Yeah right, other countries saw this. They wanted in the game, and they got in. Today's official nuclear powers are nine countries. We got China, India, Israel, Pakistan, France, the UK, North Korea, Russia, and of course the good old US of A. We should put an asterix by Israel. We'll tell you what we mean by that in a second. Uh. Like we mentioned in our earlier segment, the two big dogs of the Cold War are the countries that had and continue to have the largest nuclear stockpiles. There are other countries that have pursued nuclear weapons. Iraq had a secret program, Iran is such a is continually accused of pursuing nuclear weapons. And then there were other countries that actually got to a nuclear state, like Libya and later d nuclearized UM for a few years there as we as we found out earlier, Ukraine was technically a nuclear power UM. But the thing is, when you ask how many nukes are actually out there, the question gets tricky because nuclear weapons need systems to get them to, you know, their desired target, and those systems as well as those weapons are not always created equally. Fellow in North Korean, I don't know what you would call us Boffin's observers. I don't want to call us enthusiasts. You probably caught the news that DPRK and South Korea were in a bit of a ball swinging Paul swinging missile testing interchange. North Korea just demonstrated its newest i CBM, the WAA Song seventeen. South Korea also almost instantly responded with missile test of their own. So what we're seeing is people signaling to the world we don't just have the nukes, we have the way to get them to you in a matter of minutes. So it's it's scary times, scary time. Yeah, and we'll hit on Russia's newest form of deployment probably towards the end of this because in my mind, that's the scariest thing about this entire story. Absolutely. I mean it also seems to me to be a bit of an issue of strategy, right, I mean, certainly there's maybe someone that knows, you know, at least in the countries that have agreements, you know, in terms of like how many nukes they have to kind of know, But it doesn't seem like it would make sense to be super public knowledge. But somebody knows, right how many? Uh well, Uh, it'd be nice, it'd be nice if there was someone at the will, right. Uh. Luckily, one of the big reasons that you are listening to this podcast today and then everybody in the audience with us today is alive is due to uh, I hate to say it, paperwork, very fancy paperwork. Treaties. Bureaucracy has kind of kept the human race going for a minute. Uh. These there's so many treaties about how nuclear weapons can be tested, how nuclear energy can be used, how it can be deployed, and there are a lot of treaties aimed at what we call d nuclearization, getting people to step back from having the world's most dangerous toy uh. The ultimate goal is a world without any nuclear weapons at all. That is a pipe drink. I'm just gonna say it's not it's not gonna happen. And I called it a fat chance, but it's not even that. So the earliest example is something called the Antarctic Treaty of nineteen fifty nine. So this was specific to that part of the world. It was just twelve countries said we're going to protect the peaceful status of Antarctica. That's why nobody. No country can own Antarctica. You can occupy it, you can research there, you can send people there. Um, but they're they're kind of treating it the way they're supposed to be treating space. But it's kind of like a continent that's so far removed from most of the nuclear powers, Like, we're gonna protect that place in case anybody decides they want to drop nukes on land and test them somewhere, don't do it on the only well mostly almost fully unoccupied continent. M Oh yeah, yeah. And check out Operation High Jump. That's something we might want to revisit. That's still such an interesting story. But maybe we talked a little bit about the most famous Nuclear Treaty in history MPT Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons UH entered force. Proponents will tell you overall it's been quite successful. It was extended indefinitely in so it's still in effect, and a hundred and ninety one countries nuclear and non nuclear have signed on. So like, if you're talking about how widely this applies, it's probably better just to list the countries who didn't side on, and that would be India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and South Sudan. UM. And this agreement has several main components. Non proliferation, which means not making any more nuclear weapons. Where where does the term proliferation come from that automatically associates it with nukes? Or does it proliferation just mean not to to continue doing a thing? Yeah, proliferation is just rapid reproduction or rapid increase. UH. And you know these are these agreements are made to apply across multiple languages, so sometimes the words they have to use are very very specific. That's why you'll hear that's what That's why you'll hear sometimes uh L, SAD or s A T g r E kind of words like accusing someone of being belicoas. These bellicost actions are blah blah blah. When's the last time you were hanging out somewhere and you call it a person bellicost it's I think it's a translation thing. Yeah, bellicos just means like aggressive kind of right, or yeah, bellicoast means you're being a jerk, like you dick. Yeah, Bellicost is like why are you bucking at me? You know, it's like come at me, bro energy. But in this context, it is very like you said, ben, very clearly defined as a pledge not to transfer nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices to any recipient or in any way assist, encourage, or induce any non nuclear weapons state in the manufacture acquisition of nukes. So essentially it's like where the club, we're the only ones that get the toys. If you give any toys to you know, little Johnny or a little Susie or whatever, then you're out. You Then you're like out in the cold. Guys. I have to do the so fast. I'm so sorry to all the magic the gathering listeners out there. You know the word proliferate because there's a there's an action in magine the gathering where if you proliferate, you add one more, You add an additional counter to any perman on the battlefield. It has a counter currently on it. It's a great one. It's a scaling that's it's like a biological charm. Really, I mean it's hard. It's the idea of like um self replicating almost right, So like that makes sense. It's a scalable action where it adds one to like all of the things. Right, Yeah, question is yeah, just so I understand because this will be important for me later this weekend. Does proliferate what does that give a counter to every permanent or just one? You as whoever is causing the proliferation gets to decide, like I think, oh god, that may be wrong. I think you get to decide, but I may I may be incorrect there. It may just happen, maybe just something that happens while we're While we're on magic, let's give a big shout out to Kelsey who sent us a delightful the delightful care package from Hawaii including also some magic some MTG conspiracy packs, which was thank you, and I actually actually texted I texted man. It was like, hey, can you send a picture of that card and the texting galsy so thank you man. We're so glad World War three didn't happen before that package got here. Uh. So, as we're recording trying to get this episode out before the bombs drop, let's talk a little bit more about the MPT because you you nailed one of the big problems with it. Nol so, non nuclear states on their end, they're promising not to get nuclear weapons, not to control nuclear weapons or any nuclear explosive device, and not to ask people, not to ask the haves for help. In that regard, I like to call they're they're called the nuclear weapons states or in WS, but I like to call them the nukey boys. Uh. The nukey boys have this agreement that they're not going to use they're big guns against any non nuclear party. It's not necessarily a country. But also like terrorists accept in response to a preceding nuclear attack or an attack that takes place in concert with a nuclear weapon state with another nuki boy, this isn't hard in effects. This is kind of like a gentleman's agreement, and it can change over time. So that's a really dangerous one. That's like, for example, the language is confusing, right, But for example, that means like, um, the US won't deploy nuclear weapons in you know, Nicaragua, right, because Nicaragua is not a nuclear weapon state. But if there is a conventional attack on the US that is for some reason sponsored by France, that's another nuki boy, And so the US could say, hey, for ants, what's up, let's have some grown folk talk. Do you think Tolkien was thinking about nukes when he when he envisioned the Rings of Power? I feel like that's true, because it's like everyone gets one, All the different races get a piece, you know, and it makes them sort of on an even playing feel. But then the big bad guy forges the really scary one that will counteract all the other ones. He doesn't played by the rules, you know, Like that's sort of the deal, you know what I should say though, because I'm thinking back, Noll, I think it makes sense as an analogy. But I'm pretty sure Tolkien started writing um, writing Lord, but yeah, before the Manhattan Project. But he couldn't have made a more perfect comparison. That's absolutely true. So so then there's let's talk about the other thing, disarmament. This is the big one. It's meant to stop the nuclear arms race. It's been a clearer path towards a nuke free world. Not gonna happened, definitely, not anytime soon. Uh. And it's a subject of great debate. But to be fair, both Russia and the US have actually stepped down a lot of their total stockpile over the course of the Cold War. Uh. That's good news, but it's maybe not as fantastic news as we think because the well you'll see in a second, the amount of deployed weapons has increased. So you've got less guns in the garage, but you're carrying more every time you walk outside. That's that's what we're deployed doesn't mean launched at you. It just means out and ready, right yep. Yet it's like Little Caesar's has a hundred pizzas in the store, but thirty or hot and ready. I should probably be breakfast before we recorded. Anyway. There's the third one. This is the other. There's this is the other one. This is the sticky one. So the peaceful use of nuclear energy, this says, okay, every body has the right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and as long as they're not using this nuclear tech to make nuclear weapons. Jolly good, we're all copacetic. As a matter of fact, the new key boys can help you build things like light water reactors. There's a problem with this because we've talked about before this dual use technology. The same stuff you would use to build a peaceful nuclear power plant is the same stuff you would use to build a very dangerous weapon of mass destruction. So like you have to use your enrichment, right, is about levels of enrichment. It's about the cycle of enrichment. Uh. For instance, you have to have uranium to power light water reactor, which means you have to be able to buy the stuff, which means someone has to sell it to you. Uh. There's a whole regime of international monitoring. But we'll see mixed results. So anyway, at first glance, those are a few loopholes, imperfections, maybe purposeful imperfections in these agreements. And that leads us to the most troubling question about nuclear weapons. How many are out there? In a very real way, this is the stuff they don't want you to know. To pause for worth from our sponsor, check to see if the nukes have dropped and hopefully we'll be back. Here's where it gets crazy. Can I get out from here to my desk? Now? All right? We did? We just did? Did the nuclear drill? Uh? Some of some of our fellow nineties eighties babies and older may remember that one. It was great fun. I guess those desks were more sturdy back then. But when we ask how many nukes are out there? The problem is we can guess, and experts can make some very smart guesses, but we can't know. There's not a way too. There might be intelligence agents sees that know, but they're not going to tell you because then they would have to implicitly reveal that they have access to something. So we don't know. The public won't. So it's not a condition of these treaties to disclose this. It's more of a general overarching agreement to like, not make more than you have, but you don't have to give us an inventory of what you've got. Uh. Due to another tree, A couple like the US, depending on the administration, will sporadically disclose. Russia has disclosed at different times, but it's it's sticky. We'll see why. Yeah, and again you're you're strategically disclosing a number of weapons, you know, I mean, come on, and that was back in and then when the NPT was like put into in perpetuity mode. So it's just I don't know whatever it. I don't think anybody is saying exactly how many nukes they've got, even with the numbers were about to give you, because this is our this is the humanity's best guess. Yeah, that's it. It's humanity's collective best guess. It's a game show thing. So if you want to answer the question and get into the kind of the secrecy and the cover up and sort of the conspiracy regarding nuclear weapons, it really depends on how you frame what you're asking. It may amuse some of us, may scare some of us to understand that the new game is way way sloppier than the evening news may make it appear. Humanity has repeatedly come close to fumbling the ball in the like the most dangerous game. Yes, first off, right, we all know nuclear weapons or potential world enders, but humanity has managed to lose a few, not not as some like maca Velli in for d chess move, but just because people are great losing stuff all the time, where your keys? Do you know where your keys are? Right now? That happened like six times. With nuclear weapons, they're called broken arrows. No one knows where they are. There's one that's actually uh off the coast of Savannah here in our home, stated Georgia. You guys heard about that one, right, Remember that nineties movie with John Travolta and maybe Christians later. I think it's called broken Arrow. Yes, it was about Yeah, there was no yes, don't let him take your girlfriend out on a date while you're out of town because she will overdose on Heroin's gonna happen. And uh, then Battlefield Earth, so there was there was that checkered career that man has had fast and they yeah. Uh. But like you said, Matt, you nailed the other problem with the question. Their countries don't pays tell the truth about their nukes like Emily Dickinson style. They're very nuanced at times about the truths they do tell. And then third, different nuclear weapons sometimes get excluded and or included in the official tally. It's like going to I get to stop with the food examples, It's like going to a car dealership and saying, how many cars do you have or better yet, it's like saying, how many vehicles do you have at this dealership and they say, well, we have thirty five trucks from and you know that there are Sedans there there in the lot. And you're like, no, no, no, dude, how many vehicles And they're like, well, we have a pretty hefty collection of Sedan's. You're like, okay, so that plus the trucks, and they're like, well, it's time for us to close shop for the day if you're not going to buy anything. So nuclear weaponry is not the same, and that's actually a fairly okay analogy. The two big determining factors are the yield, the amount of damage that can be done by a successful detonation, and the distance how far this thing can go. Is it launching on like a more conventional missile system, or is it on an I, C, B N and pretty much able to hit anywhere in the world. So we've really got to just quickly talk about the the actual nuclear explosion or the atomic explosion or the thermonuclear explosion that can occur within a nuclear weapon, and then the delivery system, because that's really what we're talking about here. If you go back and you look at the first two nuclear weapons that where ever used, the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States. You're talking about uranium two thirty five that we've discussed before. That's the that's why the center fugures are so important. You spin up uranium until it gets to what they what would be called uranium two thirty five, and you actually shoot your ranium into itself to make a nuclear explosion. But that occurs just inside the bomb itself. How do you actually get that bomb to the place that you want to drop it? Uh, that's what we're talking about right here. Yeah. Yeah, So the two big flavors that get brought up the most are tactical nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear weapons. And you nail the definition, matt. Uh. Let's talk about the tactical ones first. They're sometimes called t nws tactical nuclear weapons. They're gonna be they can be launched from land, are cy If they're launched from the air, we're talking range of about three miles and if they're launched from air, c think about it like four hundred miles or uh five kilometers for land and six hundred kilometers for air and c So these are easier to build first off because they have to do less work, right, But they're also the least regulated category of nuclear weapons. That's that's one of the UH, that's one of the big problems. And then long range stuff, like the strategic stuff, is meant to target bigger things cities, military installations, points of infrastructure. It makes a big, big difference because again, when you hear someone estivating the number of nukes out there, you have to be very careful. Are they are they separating these two groups. Are they talking about weapons that are deployed, hot and fresh, ready to go. Are they talking about stuff that's in storage or has been mothballed? And well, we'll see. Those are just some of the problems. But here's the number. Here's the official number. According to some of the best guesses out there, the world currently has somewhere between twelve thousand, seven hundred nuclear warheads to just north of thirteen thousand and eight all in. That's that's the guess UH, and that is as of two So that's as of this year. So the Arms Control Association UM just a couple of months back in January twenty two, released a list citing US and Russia as the big boys. US has, according to their estimates, five thousand, five hundred and fifty warheads, while Russia has six thousand, two hundred fifty seven, which is of the unofficial overall global tally. UM. But as we talked about in the previous episode or in our previous discussion of this, at some point recently, UM, just having them doesn't mean they're ready to go. Your little Caesar's analogy holds true. Ben, You've got a freezer full of these, you know, frozen rectangular nuclear pizza pies. Uh. And then you've got the ones that are like already hot, ready in the box, ready to ship out, you know, and feed the masses or you know, blow them up. Um. Same deal. So the US currently has deployed as in hot and ready seven and Russia has fourteen hundred and fifty six UH strategic warheads on several hundred bombers UM and held within missiles UM and are modernizing their nuclear delivery systems. And both are are trying their damned as to modernize their nuclear delivery systems. But again, another thing that we talked about recently is we don't know what state of repair some of these devices are, and especially when it comes to Russia, because they're known for being you know, technologically savvy, but also that a lot has to do with sometimes they're not exactly known for being like precision engineers. They're definitely a little fast and loose with how quickly they push out tech. Uh, and sometimes that can lead to you know, disastrous results like with US you know what was that the based dog? Oh yeah, yeah, or with a Challenger space program in the US. What I'm trying to say is every country is like pushing the edge of technology as far as it can possibly go to the point where it breaks. Right. Um. It's just I don't want to push back too hard on that, No, I because I agree with you. It's just I think the US is probably in the same boat when it comes to a lot of the older nukes that we had around, since you know, they think probably I'm not meaning to unfairly malign Russia's technical sal They're very technologically savvy, we know, in terms of their ability to you know, do um you know wage information wars and do you know a very high level hacking attacks. I just have a feeling, you know, there is sort of like like you know, if I mentioned even like synthesizers and certain Russian uh technology is cutting edge but also notoriously cantankerous in terms of like being able to air or you know, going on the fritz periodically. Sure, sorry you guys, I didn't mean to interrupt it. Just the only thing is, like, how many nukes do you actually need to start a full on nuclear war? And just the one, you know, the one that does, the one that goes boom. Yeah, that's the tricky part. It's a great question, Matt, just the one really. Uh So, the there's also something we should talk about here, which is there's a difference in policy, or you can even say a difference in philosophy. And it all comes from a rational standpoint, if you know, the perspective of the actors involved. But these differences often lead to ambiguity, and this ambiguity is a huge monkey wrench when we're trying to suss out nuclear weapon counts. I mean, here's the deal. Let's say let's say we're playing, uh, you know, we're all playing, you know, and one of us knows that we have a couple of like kick ass draw fours, we have three in our hand, but we know the other people in the game they are playing with us also may have some draw force, you know, the good kind that go for any color, right the and uh we if possible, we want to save our supercard for the best moment and wanted to be a surprise. Like the inventor of unos son Zoo once said, keep them guessing, right, and don't fact check that. So it's but it's the same with military capability. It's kind of like a game of you know. That's why the DPRK or North Korea doesn't disclose how many nuclear weapons it has. Analysts have to guess instead based on how much fissile material they think that government has created. The actual size of their stockpile. People have no idea. Maybe forty, maybe fifty, who knows. Uh. And then Israel has for many years been the been the cheerful keeper of the world's worst open secret in in nuclear technology. They've never officially acknowledged that they have a nuclear weapons program, but everybody knows, and they're fine with everybody knowing. They just don't talk about it, which is a pretty um It's a pretty interesting stance, this nuclear ambiguity, and it's something that a lot of other countries seem to have accepted been it's so weird. I was, We've talked about that for so long, like the just best kept open secret Israel has here And you posted a an article from Scientific American, but I think it's from Life Science. It was kind a little weird in some of those articles where it's like cross posted. But there are just there are experts who just say it now, yeah, Israel definitely has nukes. They just don't talk about it. They don't acknowledge it. And I remember before when we were researching this stuff, it was kind of like it was felt more hush hush to me. Now it's just like, yeah, and Israel's got nukes whatever. Yeah. I think a lot of academics and other politicians have been more open about it because politicians in Israel itself were more open about it. You know, they're not making official statements or necessarily uh propagating a lot of documentation about it, but there are plenty of interviews where they are very much acknology at least tacitly this stuff. And you know, the world at least in terms of the public sphere may never have known about that program. If it worked for the whistleblower, Mordechai Venu nu Uh. He's a former nuclear tech working in Israel. He is still alive today. He spent like more than a decade in solitary confinement. He definitely he was, He definitely met with consequences for going public. Um. But but in this case, you know, especially for this show, that transparency is important. Even we can understand the logic of ambiguity, the one that a lot of people are worried about right now, surprisingly is not not just Russia. The nation of China is also a black box. Experts have estimated the country might have around fifty warheads in total. But that's still kind of a guess. Uh, you know, I think what we do here is maybe we pause for word from our sponsor and then we return with some bad news. Is that too soon? No, let's let's get let's get the bad news going man, and we returned. So there's one thing for sure, it's kind of the bad news for a lot of observers. Without knowing exactly how many nuclear weapons China has and its stockpile, we do know that there are going to be a lot more in the near to mid future. Arms can roll had a great quote on this quote in the U. S Department of Defense estimated that China had an operational nuclear warhead stockpile in the low two hundreds, but projected that number could double over the next decade. China has since accelerated its nuclear development, and the Defense Department estimates as of one that China may have up to seven hundred deliverable nuclear warheads and a thousand by zoichs. And that doesn't necessarily qualify as proliferation because they're not giving them to other countries. These are these are homemade toys, but it's true. And then the other complicating fact we mentioned this just second ago. We might be overestimating the nuclear capabilities of some states. Right. People may, for instance, student ambiguity overestimate the size of Israel's nuclear stockpile, and with Russia, the world maybe overestimating how much of that stuff is actually usable because the invasion of Ukraine showed that Russia has some serious infrastructure, hardware maintenance problems. So they may have a lot of nuclear weapons on paper, but we have to ask how many have the infrastructure to deploy successfully at range. While that's an important point to bring up, it's even more important to say that they'll definitely have some that work. You know, they'll they'll definitely still have more than the vast majority of countries, including the other Nuki boys. I gotta let go of the phrase Nuki boys. I think it reminds me Duke it beautif were those prank callers remember Duke Nukem the video game. I'm also there was like some prank callers that they like had albums where they prank called people. They were like the Dukie the Jerky Boys. Okay, that was in the era of like the first Adam Sandler comedy records. It was a golden time for raunchy comedy CDs. It really was. Hang on, I have to look, is dookie boys a thing? Boys is not a thing? Okay, but doky dookie boys is a thing? Yeah? Okay, So all right, so we've solved that we'll get the we'll get the Jerky Dookey treaty out next week. But this this means O do so this uh, this means that it's not difficult for us to understand why some nations will want to play their mass destruction cards so close to the chest. It also means it's almost certain that intelligence agencies may have a closer guess, like we talked about a more sophisticated picture, but they can't. They can't go public with that one. It removes an advantage they have right in terms of visibility to it uh opens them to the risk of having their collection methods compromise. And three, it might just be the unexpected feather that that breaks the camel, you know, the rock that sinks the boat. Maybe maybe just like when people's parents pretend they don't know their kid is smoking weed, it's just better to like have a practice sort of blindness about it. At least that's see. Just so now we have to talk about the future. We've given you some of the best guesses on how many nuclear weapons exist. We've talked about the problems with that question and how you have to you know, the dealership vehicle truck cark thing. But now we have to talk about the future. So, despite the good faith efforts of people around the planet for decades, nuclear relations remain incredibly tense. And that treaty we mentioned itself, the MPT, the most famous of its kind, has some big flaws. Non nuclear powers see it as the haves the Nukie boys keeping the have nots down. They're saying, look, you are, you are benefiting from this right You are hegemons in many cases your former colonial powers. Why do you get to control the world this way? And for this reason? Because of this kind of rationale, you can see how a lot of non nuclear states may think the path to becoming a superpower is to have the same guns as the superpowers. And now more than ever, it's possible to do so, because that the technology has spread, the scientific discoveries have spread. People can enrich rate countries, I should say, can enrich uranium while dodging those inspection regimes. You can also step out of the MPT. You can use that UM. You can use that third platform we were talking about assistance with nuclear power, peaceful nuclear research, and you can get right to the brink of developing nuclear weapons. And then once you get to that line, the treaty no longer serves your purposes. You can withdraw, just start building some bombs. You can pull a psych just like as if you were in the nineteen nineties or early two thousand's, and there's nothing much that the rest of the treaty signatories can do to wash over me. Ben, what's a psych like you're in the early two thousands when I just remember it's not it's not only uranium, it's plutonium. It's several other facile materials that can be spun up and used to make these kinds of weapons, and the most powerful ones that have ever been exploded used a combination of different uh materials to actually cause a fusion reaction. Uh like it. Nuclear energy really does scare me in that way, because it seems as though the scenario you're describing, Ben is very much possible and probably rational. Oh yeah, it's Uh, it's like I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you, and then slap. Uh. But there's there's gonna be a big problem down the road, quite likely. I mean not many people can successfully predict the future, but if you look at the signs, you know there's something in the wind. Nowadays, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran have all already laid out the terms under which they would leave the treaty and pursue nuclear weapons, so they like, it's already something countries are planning on. And this is a glasshouse situation. The big dogs, the nukie boys get a loophole too. There's a great article on Slate from Fred Kaplan which notes the problems with um disarmament. It's it's an article six of the MPT and it means that countries that have nukes have to start stepping down their stockpile. And it's like a it's like a show of good faith, right, But it doesn't work. It doesn't work because it is written back to the language here. It is written in a kind of a weasily way, sort of like, um, the founding fathers wanted all the people in the US to have the right to the pursuit of happiness, you know what I mean. We're not saying it's gonna work out, but go nuts. We got we we got your back. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the So I think it's maybe let's quote directly from Kaplan here, because I think we all quite like the way he puts quote. It states that the five nuclear countries will uh internal quote undertake to pursue negotiations and good faith on effective means relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date. Let's try this one more time. Um, that's not a cessation to the arms race. But the intention literally quote means relating to sensation. Uh, you know, you hear about cessation in terms of like quitting smokings. I expressed my intention to quit smoking and all the things adjacent to that except the act itself. Right, right, It's like when you quit smoking by bumming off of everybody else all the time. That's not actually quitting smoking, but it's an intention by not buying cigarettes and just you know, impinging on the kindness of your friends. Um, but you're still not doing the thing that you're actually you know, that's sort of at the heart of of the conversation. Yeah, or like, okay, I'm going to stop carrying a cigarette lighter around with me. I'll still have smokes, but I'll only carry it, or you know, I'll rely on the kindness of strangers. And then also like not saying to actually not committing to actually hold negotiations, but to undertake to pursue negotiations, which is the same thing as saying, you know what, we should hang out, or or even worse, it's like saying, you know what, one day I should think about asking that person to hang out and then we can work out the details. You know um at an early date, you know, and anyway, so that that's the problem. That's why, that's why a lot of non nuclear states have a have a valid concern when they say, we don't think these countries trees are holding up their into the bargain. And the US also has made like bilateral agreements that critics say are weakening these treaties. It's just a mess of spaghetti, man, It's a whole bag of badgers. So that's that's where it leaves us. But there's still there's still more out there. There's more that you need to know about this. Well you're saying that in a matter of minutes. So this is what I just want to harp on this for just a little big guys, how long it would take, how a nuke would get to you or to a place on the world, and where it would explode. I want to jump to that article how many nuclear weapons exist and who has them? From Live Science written by Joe Felon. Oh that's a great name, Joe Felon determinism going on that. I think it's pronounced phelan. Alright, fine, that'd be cool. It was DJ Joe Fellon, all right, So, um, there's there's a person that Joe consulted for this story named Matt Corda, who's a senior research associate and project manager from the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. I just want to read you some of what Matt said when it comes to deployment, how nukes would actually get to you. UM. He says, the US and Russia keep a portion of their nuclear weapons on prompt alert, meaning they could be ready to launch in quote under fifteen minutes, So launching nukes in under fifteen minutes. And there's a twenty paper that was created by the Union of Concerned Scientists UH, and they're saying that US and Russia have around nine d weapons of such capacity ready at any time, so fifteen minute launch and it's out. UH. And that includes stuff that's like ballistic missiles inside silos. That includes UH missiles that could be launched from the air from like a MiG UH fighter jet if it, you know, if it was able to deploy at a certain range. It also has to do with submarines, and I think it's corvette class UH naval ships they can also shoot these ballistic style missiles. UH. So that's one thing, right, about nine hundred each that exists. But the scariest thing to me is the hypersonic missile system that Russia has been testing and recently deployed. As of last week when we're recording this, Russia claims to have deployed one of their hypersonic missiles. These things travel at mock six, which is six times the speed of sound like up to right, so might be around mack five actually traveling. They allegedly have a range of a thousand kilometers or six and twenty one miles. Before we were talking about generally ballistic missiles being able to travel I think four around four hundred miles been. Uh, these things can travel two miles more than that. And the scariest thing about them is that when they're flying through the air so quickly, they generate a plasma. What is it I'm gonna read from this? Uh? This is from military dot Com in an article titled why Russia's hypersonic missiles can't be seen on radar. When these missiles are traveling through the air, it creates a plasma shield at the front of it because the air gets superheated, and you can't see them on radar. And they travel at mock six. So we've got these like. Um, if you imagine the AGIS missile interceptor system, which the United States uses and several other countries used, we deploy it in other places. If this hypersonic missile is traveling at you, Uh, there's there's eight to ten seconds that that missile interceptor system needs to be able to track a thing and then send a missile out and catch it and destroy it. In that eight to ten seconds, these hypersonic missiles will have traveled twenty kilometers and the missile itself that the AGIS system would deploy cannot catch up to that hypersonic missile. It can't, so you can't stop it. By the way, what happens when a nuclear weapon is detonated like over the ocean. I mean, it's obviously better than hitting its direct target, but still probably not great, right. I mean, we got an episode on the Marshall Islands if anybody wants to be depressed. Yeah, yeah. The Vela incident is another example. UM. Water water is a okay way to buffer stuff, but it still has enormous consequences. It's still very nasty business. There's not really a good place to drop a nuke, is what we're saying. And now that the delivery systems are so good, I would only add that hypersonic missiles have the ability to change direction once they're launched, which ballistic usually doesn't. So yeah they can, yeah, ballistic like launch it and then it goes. But these hypersonic missiles, just in my mind, are terrifying. I don't know and I cannot confirm if there are any nuclear warheads attached to any hypersonic missiles that are like currently deployed and ready to use. But Russian naval ships can that specific class of buoy on class naval ship can carry around twenty five of these hypersonic missiles, and their MiG thirty one K fighter jets can carry these things. Uh, And you know, to me, that's my nightmare. Fuel is a hypersonic nuclear missile that nobody can stop. We know what's happening, and then somebody on either the U S side, the Israel side, the UK somewhere has to decide while that thing is flying through the area in only a couple of minutes to counterattack. Right, It's like the person who has to make the decision do I launch a nuke? I see that one coming. I can't stop it. Do I launch nukes? That is terrifying to me. Yeah, especially considering China is superactive in research on this. They've got a hypersonic live vehicle. They also created something called the Starry Sky to UH just to go ahead and make sure further ruin entertainment. It's called the translates like the Sein Kong to it in. This was a nuclear capable hypersonic vehicle and it was successfully tested. UH. US is also messed with this obviously. UH. India, France, Germany, Australia and Japan are also developing hypersonic weapons. UH. And you know it would be naive for US to assume that none of those would be nuclear capable, and hypersonic missiles like you mentioned that as of just a few days ago, have been used in combat. Russia deployed them there are I was seeing a suggestions that the reason Russia deployed these weapons they were not nuclear, they were just hypersonic. But I'm seeing the people saying that they launched them because they ran out of their other stuff, that the stockpile was low. But we need more information on that. In the meantime, stay safe, everyone, we can make a kind of good guess about how many nuclear weapons are out there. And for a little while there was a healcy on optimistic era wherein we could try to predict paths toward partial disarmament. But now it looks like at least some countries are going to actively create more nukes and definitely create more ways to get them to you in a matter of minutes. So how many exactly are on the way that for now is the stuff they don't want you to know. But I don't know how to end these episodes, you know, when we're like, well, here's the future, no one knows, no one's in charge, and if things launch, there's not much you can do. It's like what like you know, like a nuclear a nuclear bunker, a nuclear shelter. I'm sure a lot of are like preppers in the audience have thought of this, but I don't know if most people have. If you have a nuclear bunker, you have to always be close to it for it to be useful, right, especially with hypersonic stuff. You hear hypersonic missiles are launching and you go to book a flight to Montana or wherever your bunker is. It's too late, right, yeah. I mean by then you've already gotten the ding ding on your phone and you're on the toilet, and you know, it's like, okay, well, I guess this is me now. And then next thing you know, you're like pomp paid, you know, but on the toilet. It's gonna be my last my last stage in uh angry Best Fiends. It's gonna be my last Best Fiends game. And I'm sorry not to get in on a super bummer no, but it's like we've seen dramatizations of what it would look like if a nuke hit everything from Terminator two. When you see Sarah Connor shaking the playground, you know, um chain length fence and then getting vaporized into a screaming skeleton. You know that then it turns to dust and blows away. If you've seen the very depress saying yeah beautiful um anime, Barefoot gin Um or the Grade of the Fireflies, you see some of the consequences of more like radiation poisoning um. Barefoot gin in particular has some really gnarly eviscerating kind of like images of what would happen, What would really happen though, would you just get kind of vaporized. If it was a direct hit, you would write. If it was a direct hit, you would just get turned to ash and blow away. Yeah, I feel like ground zero. It would depend on the yield. Um. But without sounding two morbid, I think many people, when they look into the reality of what happens in the aftermath, many people might make the choice to just go for a quick death rather than try to navigate fallout and radiation and chaos and collapse of government. Um, but you know what, there we go, We got there. No thank you. Now we have a question to ask our fellow conspiracy realist. What would you do in in the event of an imminent nuclear attack? Depending on how much time you had, how would you prepare? Are you one of the people who if you learned about it while it was occurring, like literally an alert on your phone, would you want to survive knowing that that survival could quite possibly lead to a terrifying existence? Let us know or you know, also, just send memes. Who can't use a good meme in these trying times, So we love to recommend our Facebook group Here's where it gets Crazy, where you can check out some good memes. 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