A new omes race well right certainly there are growing tensions between the worlds two keen euclid powers the United States and russia with both sides frightening to upgrade their nuclear capacities and china is also expanding its Nuclear Arsenal not 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 Miller 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 mosul naming an author and editor of the berlin based daily newspaper. He argues that none of the great powers profits from any kind of military installation the world is getting very unpredictable but not necessarily more dangerous. Found a warm welcome to to something whole from the german section of the Nobel Prize WinningInternational Campaign to abolish Nuclear Weapons widely known as i can she said hes 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 or very same long term note of optimism youre saying in your lifetime if 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 look to that 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 theres a totally unpredictable situation still you say that you believe that Nuclear Weapons could be abolished within your lifetime what 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 that they have to actually Start Talking about disarmament although theyre not at the moment prepared to do so. Stan 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 all gearing up the military ability as a not just Nuclear Weapons conventional weapons Cyber Capabilities hybrid warfare capability is 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 with your religion responds to the well i can understand that obviously even if 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 or 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 the to can chemical weapons that we cannot possibly accept their use or the threats of the use. Not a lemming eyed lots of unit two things in the focus of the show today the Munich Security Conference is the war 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 had the same discussion we were just talking about the eightys the eightys from mutually assured destruction is not enough when both powers have lets say ten intercontinental Nuclear Weapons and they could nearly eight 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 are 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 bunch 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 a 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 of. 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 war and insecurity 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 digitisation if you need just to hackers to to let one of these that are offered or is not not not fight anymore this is the next threat or the whole cities are reliant on energy on water supply and Everything Else you can sabotage them with cyber war so i think this is a very very big danger and im 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 they all said. 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 it has several Nuclear Weapon states involved in it and i mean only just last week they 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 when we work this out with this study did study what was happening fifty on both sides fifty Nuclear Weapons small Nuclear Weapons were used what have affects globally that we never seen before this plan just into a period of time where there was. Less sunlight and less rain and we would literally have minced millions of people dying from starvation because we couldnt grow enough food and there were those that there are things on the other hand i would say. I disagree a little because for example the Great Power Competition i think is not a real threat china has no. Not at all United States is in a way wharf or do you go after afghanistan after iraq after all spending all these billions of dollars and in a way its 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 you know in used ukraine losing. The soldiers wasting their money and for what gains they dont gain anything im going to have to is. 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 let you can have resources you can even colonize other parts of the city whove been be bigger and more powerful these bigger and more powerful with going to war its nothing should be the war where people come out bigger more powerful you just dont have. Yes it is true of the russians and end up with spectacularly bad real estate i mean north as. A puzzle actually quite nice but north assert 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 helpful that are. The russians are revisionist are the americans have been messaging to that allies and to the world that they are considering the ability 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 there just for a second by the conversation if we go to some pitches the key question were addressing on the show today is how great is the threat of Nuclear Conflict well that threat suddenly seemed very real very recently to the people of hawaii you know getting. Last month a false alarm about a Ballistic Missile attack caused panic in the u. S. 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 u. S. With Nuclear Weapons test. 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 modernizing 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 funded 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 this subject does now. Well is there a sense yes ne ne completely agreed nuclear arms are still something that cause people nightmares. Still and rightly so i mean every use of a Nuclear Weapon with the immoral because innocent people would die and in the mollusc a 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 in this you do you just have to have to this is the rest of Nuclear Deterrence so when when when ben 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