The worlds two keen euclid powers the United States and russia with both sides frightening to upgrade their Nuclear Capacity and china is also expanding its Nuclear Arsenal well to mention other countries with Nuclear Ambitions such as of course north korea so our question here on quadriga this week is the new race a more dangerous world and to answer that question or to discuss that question im joined here in the studio by constance who is an expert on International Relations and Security Policy with the Brookings Institution in washington she says the world has become a lot more dangerous in the last twelve months problems with effective arms control oh only one of several reasons. Also with us is mother naming an author and editor of the berlin based daily newspaper to target. The argues that none of the great powers profits from any kind of military escalation the world is getting very unpredictable but not necessarily more dangerous. Found a warm welcome to to something old from the german section of the nobel prize. When into International Campaign to abolish Nuclear Weapons widely known as i can she say since the adoption by the United Nations of a nuclear bomb last july i am optimistic that Nuclear Weapons can be abolished in my lifetime something or thank you very much for that note of optimism of a yes a long term note of optimism youre saying in your lifetime this tell us about how safe or unsafe the world the we currently live it is its terrifically unsafe and some say its even less safe than it was during the cold war. Weve had several conferences on this subject and experts of looked at it including Chatham House the problem of risk and they say that we really have some big problems and its not just a question of large scale mon montanus year modernization of Nuclear Weapons but also theres more cyber problems than before despite problems Cyber Attacks and there are more Nuclear Weapon states this is a totally unpredictable situation still you say that you believe that Nuclear Weapons could be abolished within your lifetime what do i mean people would say thats a fine dream but youre a dreamer its simply not going to happen well my experience shows it to be different actually in the in the worst times in the cold war those were the times when the best treaties were written and in my view it sometimes has to get worse to get better and i think were now in that phase where its got so bad that people are waking up to the problem and certainly one hundred twenty two states did just that last year and when they decided to adopt a treaty banning Nuclear Weapons so we have a majority already in the u. N. For a ban on Nuclear Weapons and that means to me that the chances of actually putting pressure on the Nuclear Weapon states has gone up and not down but they have to actually Start Talking about disarmament although theyre not at the moment prepared to do so constance a similar youre nodding. Well i mean i was nodding out that last part i mean i have i have enormous respect for what you do and what i can does but i but i think that a majority in the u. N. Is in at a time when International Law seems to be under attack from all sides when. Large and small states are gearing up the military abilities and not just Nuclear Weapons conventional weapons Cyber Capabilities hybrid wolf ok privileges and are exhibiting the the will the intent to use them in all sorts of ways out of time when the russians are prepared to violate the principle of nonaggression in Eastern Europe are still in a proxy war in ukraine and have illegally annexed a whole province of ukraine. Im somewhat less than confident that the Nuclear States are going to bow to that prescription much as i would like that to happen something where your religion responds to the well i can understand that obviously when the question of whether youre up to mystical pessimistic is mostly a personal one but in this instance i think the only realistic option to deal with this is not to lie down and say ok i resign the only thing that we can do is use any little bit of optimism that we have to actually stand up to the Nuclear Weapons states all of them and i dont just mean the United States and i certainly dont mean just russia all to north korea i mean all of them as a group and say from the rest of the world as it were that dont have Nuclear Weapons its time to lay them down its absolutely against International Law to be threatening each other especially with annihilation its about time that we understood that Nuclear Weapons are like by thats a quote in chemical weapons that we cannot possibly accept their use or threats of the use. Lets eliminate lots of unity two things in the focus of the show today the Munich Security Conference is the war on and the other one is the is the the question is there a new Nuclear Arms Race emerging at this point in time the Munich Security Conference. Head of that one commentator said we live in an era we find ourselves suddenly in an era in which hard power increasingly trumps soft power is that a fair assessment. I would not say so i mean the the recent Nuclear Posture review from the United States which puts some billions and billions of money into modernizing the nuclear and low yield Nuclear Weapons. The question is we have the same discussion we were just talking about the ace the eightys from mutually assured destruction is not enough when both powers have lets say ten intercontinental Nuclear Weapons and they could nearly the whole world actually then they switched over to a flexible response no we have to be credible and credibility is the new currency in this in these things so what is happening now in the United States they think about you will mention ing cyber war cyber war i think is the next battle but when a country like russia or china or any other country is going to cyber war how to react to low yield Nuclear Weapons of deterrence against cyber war for example and all these questions are being asked in the surrounding so security is right now it is very hard to say how to how to be safe the next big thing is Nuclear Proliferation with terrorist organizations i think these two threats of the biggest cyber war and Nuclear Proliferation so the Nuclear Posture review just modernizing the whole nuclear tomic Weapon System is not dealing enough with these things they put one percent of the butts of the pentagon puts one percent of the budget to cyber war so this is definitely not enough lets also not leave out of the picture political warfare. Or as one of my of my brookings colleagues and in the book has called it measures short of war which interfere in our politics in our societies in our economy is it something that the russians are doing but by no means only them the chinese the iranians the turks propaganda buying people. This information all these things which have a toxic effect a destabilizing effect which undermine the kind of trust that you would need in societies to get to the kind of agreement that you would like to see and that are in arguably i mean happening every day and. You know we. Inflicting real time damage on our on our polity isnt on also szell cohesion as we speak and i think that is i think if we if we dont keep firmly in mind that that is where most of the aggression currently is happening were losing a big part of the picture as much as i agree but if were talking about both war and security two point four billion people already connected to the into that. Whole cities and even aircraft carriers costing ten billions and more than ten billions of dollars are heavily reliant on computerization and detours ations if you need just to hackers or to to let one of these that offertory is not not not fight anymore this is the next threat or the whole cities are reliant on energy on water supply of Everything Else you can sabotage them with cyber war so i think this is the very very big danger and are afraid that all of these waste of money for the Nuclear Armament thing is really nothing else than the waste of money. Concerns are just coming back to the security conference in the report that they issue in advance of this weekends gathering it says that in the last year the world got closer to the brink of significant conflict what does that mean closer to the brink of significant conflict i think it means we have seen a variety of actors who possess Nuclear Weapons but also significant conventional capability is threatening each other with actual warfare the North KoreansChinese Americans russians or actually under undertaking it. All of these things add to a climate of uncertainty and risk and increase the risk of strategic miscalculation by any of the other ones and that i think in taken together has made the world significantly less safe than it was say a decade ago or even two years ago something i absolutely agree with that and i was south. That we have to see that the Nuclear Weapon states all of them involved in one way or another in conflicts around the world and at the moment also syria has several Nuclear Weapon states involved in it and i mean you know need just last week we had israel involved in a strike by one of its jets was was was brought down and so we see that the the yeah the chances of escalation are just going up the whole time through the fact that theyre crossing each others paths with their militaries all the time and we still have the under south problem between india and pakistan which keeps going up and down the old time and its always. Had to us on the brink of a major i mean just that for instance take that for what would happen if india and pakistan had unlimited new nuclear war which we call limited but you say that when we worked this out with this study did study what was happening fifty on both sides fifty Nuclear Weapons small Nuclear Weapons we used what have affects globally that we never seen before just plunge us into a period of time where there was. Less sunlight and less rain and we would literally have millions and millions of people dying from starvation because we couldnt grow enough food and those are the things on the other hand i would say. I might disagree a little because for example the Great Power Competition i think is not a real threat china has no improve will and vision not at all United States is in a way you war fatigue after afghanistan after iraq after all spending all these billions of dollars and in waste this war so i mean the experience with going to war is not so good even for the russians conquering the Crimean Peninsula is is they are stuck no in used ukraine losing. The soldiers wasting their money and for what gains they dont gain anything im going to have to. Sew the experience going to war the experience in the Nineteenth Century or the beginning of the Twentieth Century with the First World War if you can conquer all that you can have resources you can even colonize other parts of the city who been be bigger and more powerful these bigger and more powerful with going to war is nothing should be the war where people come all bigger more powerful you just dont have that. Yes it is true of the russians and end up with spectacularly bad real estate i mean not to set. A positive actually quite nice but no for certain and crimea nobodys idea of sort of really Strategic Acquisitions and i think what what was what was done here i think was more done for political purposes than for anything else however it is not true to say that russia and china currently are status quo powers the chinese are building out islands in the pacific hell for leather. The russians are revisionist are the americans have been messaging to that allies and to the world that they are considering the ability of the socalled bloody nose strike against north korea most of their allies have been saying please dont do this there is no way of containing such a strike but it is being apparently very seriously considered in washington so we should not assume that while it is true that the american citizenry is tired of the wars in afghanistan and iraq there are still a lot of American Forces out in afghanistan and in iraq and are likely to remain there for a very long time and it is entirely possible that war will come to them even if they dont want to pursue it. And as we as we as we keep hearing in washington every day there are wars they. Willing to proceed ok ill break you off that just for a second by the comes and goes and pitch is the key question were addressing on the show today is how great is the threat of Nuclear Conflict well thats right suddenly seemed very real very recently to the people of hawaii in the killing. Last month a false alarm about a Ballistic Missile attack caused panic in the us state of hawaii for nearly forty minutes it seemed as though i want to attack was imminent the public response may have had something to do with concerns about the international Nuclear Arms Race. For several years now north Korean Leader kim jong un has been provoked in the us with Nuclear Weapons tests. China has also increased its Nuclear Force which. Russia has modernized its Nuclear Arsenal. And several other countries are trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Washington is taking these developments very seriously the u. S. Plans to spend one point two trillion dollars over the next three decades to maintain and modernize its Nuclear Arsenal are we now facing an increased threat of nuclear war. Something all of us episode in hawaii at the beginning of that report can you remember what went through your mind when you caught up with what was going what was happening that i remember very well how i reacted to that so i was thrown back into the eightys i was i remember personally a situation as a nineteen year old where i had to siren go off in birmingham where i was living at the time and i thought thats the end of the world its happening now and i have to find how can i get my loved ones and i knew i didnt have the time and i really really sympathized with people i know people in hawaii who got that message and wrote under that tweet so i was saying we dont know what to do we cant you know where should we go and it was just a horrible moment for me because it brought back actually the reason why i am working on the subject now. Well is there a sense yes ne ne completely agreed nuclear arms are still something they call the people nightmares. Still and vitally so i mean every use of a Nuclear Weapon would be immoral because innocent people would die and in the modern scale that we nobody of us can conceive but in the age of Nuclear Deterrence is you are threatening with the use of something in order not to use it this is this is the logic the rational of deterrence so the whole formula saying the more people are threatening each other with the use of something the more likely it is that they go to war is per se not true in itself it can be there threatening in order not to use it and this you do you just have to have to this is the rest a lot of Nuclear Deterrence so when when when been donald trump the president the United States is talking about using any kind of Nuclear Weapons in lets say north korea his aim is hes talking about in order not to use it and to to come up with surely his message is actually quite explicit weve got so weve got a relatively unsophisticated a very impetuous us president whose whose message it seems to me is much more to the iranians to the North Koreans we will use our nuclear capacities. And this is much his message but his message doesnt mean he will use it his message is i give you the message in order not to use it so this already i will have sorry i let the rest know off i dont want to be n. W. But i cant follow. That last forever not somebody with an immoral act in order not to fulfill the act this is the logic of the terms yes it is yes but it is what i think it is it is working i know not in florida it is working now since forty five but please sorry i mean and i think you are i think you are climbing up a pole that you will. Find it very difficult to come down from and i would like to prevent you from doing that. Right now weve got a situation that is completely different from the traditional logic of deterrence where you had essentially i. C. B. M. s intermediate range weapons and a small source file but as of tactical Nuclear Weapons that were carefully set up in such a way as to produce exactly the effect you suggest right now you have people talking about the actual battlefield use of Nuclear Weapons in ways that would have been considered outrageously irresponsible by their predecessors during the cold war and and i dont think i do it is very clear from the things that the president of america has said that he believes Nuclear Weapons can and should be used and hes not saying it just to threaten people in not saying that ho a little bit because of the way he said it because or because it is only because he looks so serious but because of the people who work for him there are tired of this part of it yes thats thats what thats the reason why theyre terrified is that they believe that he believes he would use they should they should exactly so its otherwise were going to know that no were going to contradict what youve just said no to terences not supposed to. Im sorry deterrents is not supposed to terrify the advisors of an american president its supposed to deter your opponents ok that there is a golden should believe that im serious yes thats what theyre doing because youre doing that so its working no have a few times of course im sorry look its this is just not true and i think you know better in fact and its and i dont want to keep harping on the current american president the two president s ago dortch w. Bush had his advisors work on new Nuclear Posture review which also considered the usability of tactical Nuclear Weapons in the form of socalled junk about busters and other and others and this was apt had no. Thing to do with deterrent as american specialists knew very well at the time so all problem i think is and this is where i think you and i are closer to each other is is that we are seeing a loosening up of the logic and undermining of the logic of to terence which undermines it even for those weapons which are supposed never to be used there were the situations that they recently different we dont we dont have an ideological confrontation as in the cold war we dont have confrontations right no fighting about resources or anything else so its not its not the Great Power Competition were used to face so its what is letting is the whole rational of going to war what the rationale of going to war but not today i mean there is a great color competition all around us. There is really no you know it is very clean very on the iranian Nuclear Weapon on north korea nothing else and so huge insecurity my problem is you know that my problem is not that trump will decide to use a Nuclear Weapon on north korea my problem is the to provoke possibly the use of Nuclear Weapons by if you are shown by the retarded this is been using and he putting is putting him in a corner also i feel the same way i have to say about russia even if one sees them as being just as aggressive one sees also these corners that theyre pushing each other into through particular kinds of retard but id like to go back to what you said before about its worked for forty five years the fact is that to terences not kept the the peace in four to five years because there are several instances where it failed and we can say at least one we know of with stand the stuff petrof way he saved the world not to terence because they actually so that. There was an end of that sorry essex thats absolutely true Stanislav Petroff saved the world in i can and cant remember the day in the late ninetys in the moment where he thought that there was a rocket attack coming in a missile attack coming in from the United States and he was absolutely sure that this could not be the case and so he didnt give that up the line of command to for them to make the decision to send them to the right i dont know to be a malfunction of the of those of the signal exactly but normally under the logic of your terran commercial i dont know we went against his training and said i will make a personal decision here and he decided not to do that and theres several instances where thats happened and we were just lucky. And i just want to take the conversation a little bit of a different direction you mentioned the countries that have signed up to the uns Nuclear Program mission treating what about the countries like the havent signed up like lets take a china for example lets take russia what kind of leverage does among the Nobel Prize Winning organizations like your own have with governments like russia and china well i can is not just looking at two the nine Nuclear Weapon states which are with many of these nations that have signed up this i mean the point the point of the treaty is not to single out Nuclear Weapon states but to say these are the states that dont have Nuclear Weapons and they feel threatened by those that do and so they want Nuclear Weapons ban starts thats whats happened with this treaty and the idea is to use this treaty for those states to put pressure on the states that do have Nuclear Weapons to start negotiations on disarmament and thats thats the whole the using the idea of building a norm of digits of my using Nuclear Weapons and includes a terrence in order to get us there because were stuck in a position at the moment where nothing is happening but modernization and an arms race is starting and so we have to do something very drastic and when you talk about legitimacy yes or no legitimacy or not germany has Nuclear Weapons on its territory is it right to do so i personally think that theres no reason to have those and even if you were following the logic of the terence i dont see a reason to have those Nuclear Weapons here if one could use them in fact to signal that no one wants to move away from destruction of Nuclear Deterrents and the German Government has been consistently saying that theyre in favor of a Nuclear Free World but i havent yet seen any concrete i mean look at the that the Coalition Agreement i havent seen any concrete ideas in this for how were going to actually arrive at. Any kind of meekly. Musics come up with an obsolete or theyre all. The new arms race a more dangerous world were giving you plenty of food for thought for joining us until next time but i. Move for. Example. The boat. He takes place personally i already with all the wonderful people in stories that make the game so special. They are all true families. Because more than some online. One my name is made. As million. Words each to challenge. Sports events stories. Based on them and its time to go along with this you can tell us about this better check it out yourself. We make up over a week watches of office that conduct education we ought to some of some of the such stuff they want to schieffer continence future speech part of it and join us youngsters as they share their stories their dreams and their challenges the seventy seven percent platform for africas charge. Elephants need this. How does a plastic model turn into a painting stone why do algae make it clear. Good idea kill working anywhere and there are people developing Smart Solutions everywhere. Lets inspire others to go enough for god nothing will make it easy on t w. Odd. Good. Fun. This is d. W. Newsline from lately its been a roller coaster ride but today south africa has the new president and thank you all for this great opportunity that i didnt invent and i will try to work very hard not to disappoint the people of south africa thank you very much so what can south africa