Eastwest Podcast

Zia Mian - physicist, nuclear expert and co-director of Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security - evaluates today’s nuclear arms threat, in conversation with Ambassador Cameron Munter. Mian stresses the importance of focusing not just on long-term processes to shift the global narrative on nuclear weapons, but also to address the current circumstances that pose a discernible risk - such as India/Pakistan, and U.S. relations with Iran or South China Sea tensions. The discussion also delves into climate change prediction models, which indicate that a very limited regional nuclear conflict would have an incredibly destructive impact. “Even use of 50 nuclear weapons each between India and Pakistan, a third of their nuclear arsenals, could lead to catastrophic fires that would cloud the sky across most of the world, and produce a catastrophic failure of agriculture and ecosystems that would last for more than 20 years.” “As we begin to see these inadvertent and unexpected dangers of region