The Plans To END The World Are REAL | Prof. Ivana Nikolić Hughes

## The burden of scientific discovery Science has always carried a double edge: it expands human understanding and capacity while sometimes handing us tools that can destroy what we cherish. The conversation with Prof. Ivana Nikolić Hughes frames that tension sharply. A chemist by training who found her way into nuclear policy through teaching, she articulates a fundamental ethical knot for scientists: the awe of discovery intertwined with the responsibility to steward its consequences. That paradox is not merely historical romanticism; it is the organizing fact of the nuclear age. The technology that revealed the atom’s inner life also unlocked a power capable of ending complex life on Earth. Recognizing that reality is the first step toward any serious policy response. This moral disquiet is not unique to nuclear physics. Prof. Nikolić Hughes underscores how scientists trained to illuminate the universe can feel compelled to prevent its obliteration. Her classroom experience—introducing undergraduates to scientific method while simultaneously confronting them with the historical and contemporary realities of nuclear violence—illustrates a key pedagogical lesson: scientific literacy must include ethical literacy. When the makers of knowledge also become its critics and regulators, the possibility of more responsible governance opens up. That personal trajectory from lab science to disarmament advocacy exemplifies how intellectual habits of evidence and skepticism can be redirected toward global security. ## The persistence of knowledge and the myth of irreversibility A recurring theme in the discussion is the idea that once a technology is known, it cannot be unlearned. Nuclear knowledge, now approaching a century in scholarly and technical development, feels like an irreversible fact of modernity. Yet Prof. Nikolić Hughes invites a more nuanced view. She reminds us that societies have lost capacities before—Apollo-era moonflight techniques, early computer architectures, and other technologies have not simply persisted unchanged. The claim is not that anything can be made to disappear at will, but rather that social and political choices determine how technical capacities are managed, regulated, and, in some cases, constrained. This distinction reframes the “knowledge problem” away from fatalism and toward governance. The obstacles to abolition are as much political as technical. Nuclear weapons are large, complex systems that require industrial-scale infrastructure and state-level commitment to build, maintain, and deploy. That physical reality creates opportunities for inspection, verification, and international regimes. The challenge, then, is crafting and enforcing the legal and institutional frameworks that make proliferation and clandestine rearmament costly and detectable. In short, the irreversibility of knowledge is a constraint—but not an absolute bar to prohibition and elimination. ## Near-misses, systemic fragility, and the illusion of control The conversation catalogues a litany of incidents that reveal the precariousness of our nuclear posture. From a wrench falling into a missile silo to false alarms triggered by radar or early-warning systems, history is punctuated by episodes where small errors could have cascaded into catastrophe. These are not merely anecdotal curiosities; they reveal systemic fragility. High-stakes command-and-control arrangements, human fallibility, mechanical failure, and ambiguous communications all conspire to make the threshold for nuclear use alarmingly low. Prof. Nikolić Hughes draws out an essential implication: the institutional design of nuclear decision-making matters profoundly. In the United States, the formal doctrine vests the president with sole authority to authorize a nuclear strike. That legal clarity does not immunize the system against accidents, miscalculation, or the pressures of crisis. Equally worrying are doctrines, postures, and forward deployments that compress decision time, incentivize hair-trigger alerts, or create incentives for preemption. The repeated near-misses of the Cold War and beyond are not reassuring evidence of control but cautionary tales of luck—luck that could run out at any time. Reducing that risk requires rethinking command authorities, de-alerting postures, and embedding multiple layers of deliberation and verification into crisis protocols. ## Arsenal geography and contemporary flashpoints Numbers matter. The global inventory—roughly 12,500 warheads concentrated primarily in the United States and Russia, with a growing Chinese stockpile and smaller arsenals held by India, Pakistan, the UK, France, Israel, and others—shapes the strategic landscape. While the Cold War-era peak of roughly 70,000 warheads has receded, current arsenals remain sufficient for global catastrophe. Prof. Nikolić Hughes stresses that dangers do not depend solely on count but on doctrine, readiness, and regional tensions. Several contemporary fault lines underscore this risk. The war in Ukraine, entanglements in the Middle East, and great-power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific all involve nuclear-armed actors or partners. South Asia is a particularly perilous case: India and Pakistan possess hundreds of warheads and a history of crises that could produce rapid escalation. Importantly, even a so-called “regional” conflict between them would not remain regional in consequence. The interplay between tactical doctrines, command-and-control arrangements, and the political logic of crisis decision-making means that even limited use could cascade. The key takeaway is that disarmament is not only a matter of morality; it is a pragmatic response to a multi-layered and geographically dispersed set of risks. ## Nuclear winter and the planetary dimensions of nuclear war Arguably the most decisive argument against any use of nuclear weapons is their global environmental aftermath. The concept of “nuclear winter” emerged from interdisciplinary research linking atmospheric science, climate modeling, and studies of historical mass extinctions. The basic mechanism is simple and savage: massive fires following widespread urban and industrial destruction inject soot and aerosols into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and plunging global temperatures. Prof. Nikolić Hughes highlights the devastating cascade that follows—crop failures, famine, ozone depletion, and billions of deaths in some modeled scenarios. These effects overthrow the comforting territorial logic that views nuclear war as a localized catastrophe. A conflict limited to South Asia could, in scientific estimates, produce enough atmospheric perturbation to drastically reduce food production worldwide, imperiling billions. Larger exchanges between major powers drive the system toward near-total collapse of modern agrarian and industrial civilization. The nuclear winter argument transforms nuclear weapons from instruments of national defense into planetary hazards. That shift in scale is essential for policy: it demands internationalist solutions, because no state, however powerful, can insulate itself from the global atmospheric and ecological consequences of large-scale nuclear exchange. ## The false allure of “limited” nuclear war The conversation also addresses a persistent strategic rationale: the idea that nuclear weapons can be used in controlled, tactical ways without slipping into strategic annihilation. This thesis—invoked by some advocates of “flexible deterrence”—is systematically contradicted by war-game simulations and historical analysis. Model after model shows that the introduction of any nuclear weapon into a battlefield has high probabilities of rapid escalation to full strategic exchange. Tactical warheads have destructive yields that dwarf conventional munitions; their use alters perceptions, raises the stakes of retaliation, and complicates crisis management in ways that are poorly understood and highly danger

The Plans To END The World Are REAL Today I’m talking to Dr. Ivana Nikolic Hughes, the Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. Dr. Hughes is also the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and has been working with her students for many years on issues of nonproliferation and disarmament. Links: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: www. WagingPeace.Org Find more info at ICAN: https://www.icanw.org/ Neutrality Studies Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #F1 One of my favorite quotes about the UN actually comes from the first Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, who said that the UN was not created to bring us to heaven, but to prevent us from going to hell. And that's precisely what we need here. We need to recognize that nuclear weapons can take us to hell. As Khrushchev said, the survivors would envy the dead. That was the other thing that Kennedy said: if these idiots get their way, no one will be around to tell them they were wrong afterwards, when they were pushing him on war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So the point is, we have to get to a better place where we're actually earnestly negotiating this. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to Dr. Ivana Nikolić Hughes, the director of Frontiers of Science and a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. Ivana is also the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and has been working with her students for many years on issues of non-proliferation and disarmament. Oh, and she's also a colleague and associate of our common friend, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Ivana, welcome. #F1 Thank you so much, Pascal. It's a pleasure to be with you. #M2 It's great having you. You have been working for so long on this issue of disarmament, and you've been working on the nuclear question. Maybe let's start with how you got there, because you're a chemist. Why chemistry? It's usually considered a physicist's issue. #F1 -- 1 of 15 -- Yeah, no, my path into this is a little bit unusual. Actually, in my studies, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, my degrees were in chemical engineering. And for my PhD, I worked on something utterly unrelated to this—actually, on evolution, specifically how proteins evolved. So, evolution on the smallest of scales. But I became interested in the nuclear weapons question through teaching, and that ended up leading to some research efforts. One step after another, I now find myself thinking more about policy and advocacy for a nuclear weapons-free world. But just to connect how that thought process developed: I was beginning my teaching career about 15 years ago at Columbia. And through the course that I was teaching—you mentioned Frontiers of Science, which is a required core course at Columbia. That means it's a course that all undergraduates in Columbia College have to take, typically in their first year. We teach them about a number of topics across a span of disciplines, but even more importantly, we teach them how to think scientifically: how to analyze data and evidence, how to read scientific papers, how to conduct quantitative analyses, and so on. At the time, I was already a mother as well. One of the topics we were covering in the course was modern physics, and the professor who also happens to be my husband—so I'll make that disclaimer—my husband Emlyn, decided that he would teach one of the lectures on nuclear weapons. And I remember sitting there for the first time—he was doing a practice lecture for all of us who are faculty in the course—and just being absolutely astounded by what I was learning. And just sort of feeling a kind of, I think, a sort of burden as a scientist, that this is what scientists brought into the world: something that quite literally could end the world. And at the very same time, what I really wanted my students to think about and learn and get from the course was science as an inspiration. Science is a way of not just progressing in the world as humanity, but also learning about who we are, what our world is all about, what the universe is, what we can learn, you know, by looking up at the stars. And the amount of information, of knowledge that we have gathered through this thing we call science—of course, there are many ways to learn about the world—but focusing on the scientific discoveries and achievements, it's astounding. It's phenomenal. It's wonderful. It's inspiring. And yet that very same science gave us nuclear weapons, which, as I said, could quite literally destroy the world. And so I think—and I don't think I'm alone—I think there are other scientists who, you know, both over the eight decades of the nuclear age and more recently, have been worried about this question and really feel like they want to do something about it. But for me, it's really become a very important part of my work. #M2 This is a very good segue into a primary problem that we have when it comes to not just nuclear weapons—it's all forms of weapons—which is, once they are developed, once you've got the knowledge of how to make those goddamn things, you cannot really unlearn it, can you? So the -- 2 of 15 -- knowledge of how to make these things is with us. And it's actually quite old. Nuclear weapons are now an 80-year-old technology—it's nearly a century. The research on it is now a century old, or even older, to get there. What is your take on what we've done in this one century of nuclear knowledge? #F1 Well, I mean, on the one hand, it's amazing what we've been able to learn about our universe. I mean, these were quite simply experiments that people were doing, you know, trying to understand atoms and different elements at the most fundamental level. And then figuring out that there's something called radioactivity, meaning that one atom—that is, this building block of all matter that we have—one type of atom, or some types of atoms, can split. And so, you know, we know, for example, that an atom consists of a nucleus and then it has electrons all around it. The splitting occurs in the nucleus, which is a tiny, tiny part of the atom itself, and you make two other atoms in that way, and that process gives off energy. It just so happens that we live in a world where this process is called fission, and we live in a universe in which fission is possible. Some atoms or elements undergo fission naturally—they decay naturally; we call that radioactivity—and some can be induced to split and therefore release that energy. For some scientists, that initial discovery—of this tiny amount of energy from one reaction— was remarkable. But when you add many, many, many reactions, actually in a tiny amount of material, you can get a lot of energy. That realization made some scientists recognize immediately that this was, in some sense, going to change the world. Now, I want to address the idea that just because we've done this, we're now stuck with them. We're actually not stuck with them. There have been other things that we've, in a sense, unlearned. We may be going to the moon—hopefully soon—but we did go in the '60s, and that technology was actually lost over time. You know, computers changed, the way in which we were doing things changed. And it isn't like today we could just go to the moon in the very same way we did in the '60s. So that part, I think, is okay. The other thing is that what we actually need is a commitment to both prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. And if we can get there, the good news is that these are really, really difficult projects. These are not, you know, garage-type projects that you can hide. These are the sorts of projects where, with appropriate inspections, with appropriate international safeguards, and so on, you can absolutely ensure that people—or countries, states—are not making nuclear weapons. So there's one thing—you could, you might lose it. The other thing is you would have to enforce it. Of course, you actually need the political will to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. And the thing that I think—well, I'll make two points. One is just understanding the kind of risk these weapons put us at. And I'll set that aside and we can discuss that in a moment. But the other thing is recognizing that we have actually, in the 80 years of the nuclear age, in fact, been lucky in that we have not had—after there was the Trinity explosion, then Hiroshima and Nagasaki—there were -- 3 of 15 -- actually over 2,000 other nuclear explosions all around the world. This was what we call the nuclear testing era, but the term "testing" is almost unfair because they were real nuclear explosions. It wasn't like we were testing a mini explosion. We were blowing up things with enormous energy yields, enormous fallout that has impacted populations all around the planet. So that's another piece. But even beyond that, the reason I say we've been lucky is that we have had numerous times when nuclear weapons could have been used in a kind of adversarial, war-type situation. And it was only in 1945 that we had three weapons. Since then, in the early years, we had more and more and more. We got into the many thousands by the '60s, and of course, in 1986, we had 70,000 nuclear warheads. Today, we have twelve and a half thousand. That's obviously much better than 70,000, but it's still enough to destroy the planet. And over those many decades, there have been so many incidents. The Cuban Missile Crisis is, of course, the most famous one, where there could have been both, in a sense, deliberate as well as miscalculated use of nuclear weapons over those 12 days. But there have been other incidents—utterly accidental—computer glitches, the Soviets receiving signals that looked like they were under attack, and then a captain deciding that it wasn't a real attack and he wasn't going to press the button and initiate a counterattack. Nuclear weapons dropping out of planes, submarines hitting one another—I mean, the number of incidents is absolutely mind- boggling. And so that's why many people in the field say we've been lucky. None of these things actually happened. And so that luck is, you know, going to run out unless we actually do something about these weapons. #M2 I completely agree. But it's also a question of policy, isn't it? Of how you technically secure these weapons and how you create the protocols so that not just any kind of nut job who happens to work in one of those silos can actually push the button and start Armageddon. Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit about what is currently in place—let's say, at least for the United States—to make sure that this is the decision of a policy process and not of a nut job? #F1 Well, the U.S. president famously has the sole authority. So the idea is that the U.S. president has the sole authority to authorize a nuclear strike. Now, historically, the extent to which that may or may not have actually been true in cases where there were potential conflicts, or whether there are situations under which some people who are under the president—some commanders who are high up in the chain of command—would have the ability to initiate a strike, that's a different question. You almost don't even need a nut job; you just need something to go wrong. One time, a wrench fell in a nuclear missile silo that could have caused that warhead, you know, to launch. -- 4 of 15 -- And it was a completely simple, accidental thing. And luckily, the safety mechanism worked, but it could have not worked, right? So they, you know... U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in 2022—this was at the beginning of the review conference for the NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, on August 1st, so nearly three years since then—he sort of famously said, and it's been quoted many times, "We're one accident, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation." Right. And of cou