Tech

It's 2020 And We Need To Talk About Nuclear Warheads

Though there’s a pandemic, economic collapse and environmental chaos, nukes are still the top threat to humanity.
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Some people consider them a vestige of a bygone era. Something that went away with the collapse of the Soviet Union or the introduction of total American, geopolitcal hegemony. But they haven’t gone anywhere and in some ways, may have become even more terrifying.

Because nuclear weapons remain the everlasting threat they were when humanity first introduced them to the planet in 1945: An existential nightmare. Though the current world stockpile of nukes has reduced from roughly 70,000 at the end of the Cold War to approximately 14,000 presently, we still, as a species, possess the ability to obliterate our own planet, many times over, with the push of a button.

In the chilling words of Robert Oppenheimer (one of the heads of the Manhattan Project) who forecasted this terrifying weapon’s effects on humans: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

This week we have a friend of the show and Motherboard contributor Matthew Gault to talk nukes. We breakdown modernization plans for America’s nuclear arsenal, the race to update new missile technology, and why since the Cold War we have, basically, decided to forget about nuclear warheads.