Join me for a conversation with four fantastic panelists about nuclear safety and security issues brought on by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and more broadly on the state of nuclear security globally during this era of dramatic change.
This program was made possible by the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Nickolas Roth is Senior Director for Nuclear Materials Security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Nickolas works at the intersection of arms control, risk reduction, and institutional resilience, and previously directed nuclear security work at the Stimson Center and contributed to Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom.
Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate with Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Belfer Center and author of Inheriting the Bomb, a definitive study of Ukraine’s post-Soviet disarmament and the limits of the Budapest Memorandum. Her scholarship grounds today’s debates about guarantees, coercion, and nuclear restraint.
Pan Yanliang is a Research Associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS). He studies the Russian and Chinese nuclear industries and the nuclear fuel cycle, and works on CNS engagement with Chinese counterparts—giving him a distinctive cross-regional vantage.
Lily Wojtowicz is a Research Fellow at the Hertie School (Berlin) and a USIP–Minerva Peace & Security Scholar, whose work focuses on extended deterrence credibility, European security, and alliance adaptation under great-power rivalry.
Transcript Below:
Kaiser Kuo: All right, let's go ahead and get started. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are joining from. I am Kaiser Kuo, I am the host of the Sinica podcast, and I'm joining you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the US. It is my privilege to moderate today's discussion, Nuclear Weapons, Ukraine, and Great Power Competition.
As Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine grinds on, the nuclear dimension has become both more prominent and more complex. Moscow's persistent nuclear signaling and the forward deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus moving warheads closer to NATO's eastern flank has narrowed the margin for miscalculation and has injected new uncertainty into European deterrence debates. At the same time, Washington's push for a sweeping space-centric missile defense architecture, Golden Dome, is reshaping strategic calculations for several nuclear powers, including, of course, Russia and China.
By raising questions about future force structure choices, about crisis stability, and survivability of second strike capabilities. These dynamics are unfolding against the near collapse of the arms control framework that helped stabilize great power relations for decades, from Russia's suspension of the New Start, to its de-ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also raised the stakes in nuclear energy safety. As many of you will know, Russia has seized the Zaporizhzha nuclear power plant, only the latest additional risk for nuclear safety and security brought on because of the invasion.
China's role is pivotal. Beijing still proclaims no first use, yet it is modernizing very rapidly and expanding its arsenal. Credible open source assessments now estimate something like 600 warheads as of early 2025, growth that interacts in complicated ways with the U.S. Theater Force, with missile defense and allied consultations in both Europe and in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the war has become entangled with broader network effects. North Korean missiles and munitions are flowing to Russia, European debates about nuclear sharing and autonomy, and tentative U.S.-China contacts on nuclear issues after years of silence. The question before us is not simply whether deterrence still works, but how to reduce nuclear risk in a world where guardrails are frayed, are really bending and breaking, where regional and global deterrence problems increasingly bleed into one another. So to explore this issue, we are joined by some superb panelists. So far, three, we will be adding a fourth very soon, we hope, whose expertise maps onto the core dilemmas we'll examine.
First up is Nickolas Roth. He's Senior Director for Nuclear Material Security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, NTI. Nickolas works at the intersection of arms control, risk reduction, and institutional resilience, and previously directed nuclear security at the Stimson Center, and contributed to Harvard's project on managing the atom.
We are still waiting for Mariana Budjeryn, who should be joining us shortly. She just gave a book talk and is on her way across town in Kyiv. Wishing her luck here. She is, I will introduce her here, a Senior Research Associate with Managing the Atom, which I just mentioned, at Harvard's Belfer Center, and she's the author of Inheriting the Bomb, a definitive study of Ukraine's post-Soviet Disarmament and the Limits of the Budapest Memorandum. Her scholarship grounds today's debates about guarantees, coercion, and nuclear restraint. She's also working specifically on Zaporizhzha, which we will talk about at some length.
Pan Yanliang is a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, CNS. He studies… oh, Mariana's here, fantastic. You know, we just got started, we had a late arrival, so I just introduced you, and I'm in the middle of introducing Pan Yanliang. So, he studies the Russian and Chinese nuclear industries and the nuclear fuel cycle, and works on CNS engagement with Chinese counterparts, giving him a distinctive cross-regional vantage point.
And finally, Lily Wojtowicz is a research fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin, and a USIP Minerva peace and security scholar, whose work focuses on extended deterrence credibility, European security, and alliance adaptation under great power rivalry.
Before we begin, I want to give my warm thanks to Vita Golod, the visiting scholar here at UNC Chapel Hill, for organizing today's webinar, as she has done this whole series. It's been fantastic. I've been very privileged to be asked to moderate all of these sessions.
And I'd also like to thank UNC's Center for Slavic and East European Studies for their generous support of this program.
All right, let's get started. Mariana, I know you just arrived, but I'm going to throw my first question to you. Russia's nuclear signaling since 2022 has really aimed to constrain Western decision-making. You know, threats about using tactical nuclear weapons, for example. Based on your work on Ukraine's disarmament and the Budapest memorandum.
How should we parse this gap between, on the one hand, coercive rhetoric of the sort that we've heard from Putin, and actual first-use thresholds? Are there plausible battlefield scenarios, battlefield developments, say, a rapid Russian setback in Crimea, or maybe deep strike disruptions, like we've seen with the drone strikes on Russian bombers deep in Siberia, that could meaningfully raise the probability of nuclear use versus simply amplifying the deterrent messaging?
Mariana: Great, well, thank you, thank you so much, Kaiser, for your introduction, and for this… it's actually a couple of questions rolled into one, that, that you, that you asked there. Let me start by saying that this war did not have to be, I mean, the…this war did not have to happen, but as it happened, it did not have to turn into a nuclear crisis, right? It was a specific choice, a deliberate choice, by one of the belligerents that is the possessor of nuclear weapons by the Russian Federation, to mobilize, to manipulate these nuclear risks, as you say, to resort to nuclear signaling. I think it is helpful to parse out the various categories of nuclear risks that exist in this conflict, right? Again, not every conventional war, even the one in which a nuclear power is a belligerent, has to be a nuclear crisis. It's really upon that nuclear possessor to turn it into such, and Russia has taken that decision.
So, there's the general nuclear deterrence, right, that exists whether… whatever Mr. Putin and his, you know, representatives of the Russian government say or don't say, and I think it does certain amount of work in this, conflict, certainly between the United States and NATO on the one hand, and then Russia on the other hand.
I think, you know, even if Russia were not to resort to all this nuclear signaling, this nuclear rhetoric, I think the likelihood of, say, a direct intervention on the Ukrainian side by Western partners would have been very low, right? The likelihood would have been very low, and that would have been due to kind of the inherent structural nuclear deterrence that exists.
And the understanding that the two nuclear powers can't get embroiled, or shouldn't really, should avoid trying to get embroiled directly in a conventional conflict. Now you know, knowing that, the reason why Putin has piled on all these additional and constant nuclear threats is really to achieve aims beyond the actual doctrine, the actual scenarios for which nuclear weapons exist in the Russian national security. And that is, as you suggest, to sway decision-making in the West, to stop Western support of Ukraine, right, the arms that have been supplied, but also to intimidate Ukrainians, possibly, right? To constantly keep the specter of nuclear war. And in that, you know, on the one hand, when it comes to Western audiences, I think Putin has been partly successful. There have been fears of escalation, there have been, kind of trying to read his red lines, will he or will he not use nuclear weapons if we provide Ukraine ATACMs, and then if we just allow Ukrainians to use these ATACMs on the Russian, sovereign territory? So, these decisions have been you know, considered, they've been… they've been… they take time, and there have been limitations on end use of some of these weapons systems. So they're partly successful, not entirely, not as much as probably Mr. Putin would like them to be, but they've failed to intimidate the Ukrainians, right? So the one party that's not swayed here by these nuclear threats are the Ukrainians, because for them, the fight is existential, right? Like, they have to do this no matter what.
And then another category of nuclear risks, and maybe something we can talk before, is weaponizing civilian nuclear facilities in this war in Ukraine. But before I go, you know, I'll leave that maybe for a later discussion.
Kaiser Kuo: Yeah, I do have a question for you about that, and I'll get to that.
Budjeryn, Mariana: Yeah, but let me just conclude by saying that the general, kind of, second-order effects on something we call the global nuclear order, so the set of rules and understandings of how responsible nuclear powers behave, what are… if not real legitimate, then justifiable uses of nuclear threats and weapons. All of that is… has been upended. And Ukraine's own nuclear history, something that you mentioned with the Budapest Memorandum, the Ukraine's relinquishing, if not, you know, the world's third largest nuclear arsenal, that's certainly a nuclear option, right? The option to leverage to develop its inheritance from the Soviet Union into a fully-fledged nuclear deterrent. Ukraine has made a decision not to go that route. It's done everything by the book, so here you have the country that is a good international citizen. It's done what was expected of it, and it, you know, there's a perception, certainly in Ukraine, that it's suffering for it now.
So the optics and the kind of credibility of the international non-proliferation regime, of the guarantees or respon- you know, expectations of responsible behavior by nuclear power, all of that has been undermined, and I think we haven't really seen the full extent of these consequences of these second and third order effects of Russia's nuclear signaling and nuclear behavior in Ukraine.
Kaiser: Mariana, as you say, the Ukrainians themselves, the primary party in this, remain undeterred. They've continued to fight. But it strikes me, just as really a very outside observer, that NATO, that the EU, that the United States, Ukraine's allies, however unreliable, have, to quite an extent, been deterred. That this is probably the main constraint on providing longer-range weapons, on not giving, giving, you know, the Ukrainian horse its head and allowing it to strike deep into Russia, the nervousness that overtakes us every time we do read about a strike deep into Russian territory. So, to some extent, Russia's, you know, scaremongering with the threat of tactical nuclear weapons has maybe been effective, which is not a particularly good lesson to be giving Putin. I mean, he's… am I wrong in reading it that way? And once you've weighed in, I'd love Nick to also give us his perspective on this.
Mariana: I think it has been partly successful, as I said. So, it has impacted the timing, it has impacted, you know, the deliberations, it has resulted in the fact that it was more costly for Ukraine, right? They lost opportunities on the battlefield. And this is not to say the Ukrainian, you know, the state of affairs in the battlefield is only the result of these decisions. But I think, you know, that there was quite a bit of caution on the western part, specifically because of these explicit threats that, again, go beyond what we understood Russia's use scenarios to be. And again, you know, nuclear doctrine, you know, Russia made changes to the nuclear doctrine, lowering somewhat the nuclear threshold, although, in my opinion, not as much as some other analysts might have concluded. It has kind of adapted it to what it learned from this war.
But I think there remains an actual threat of the use of, say, a tactical battlefield nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, or against a Ukrainian city. That's an ever-present risk and danger. Now, that would not fit into any kind of deterrence theories. That would be a battlefield use, not unlike, say, the United States using a nuclear weapon in war against two Japanese cities. We've marked, you know, the 80th anniversary of those events just this month. And let's remember that in that one use of nuclear weapons in war, it was a nuclear power, using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear power, in order to terminate a war and dictate its own war-terminating conditions. So I think we should not dismiss the risk or the potential of that kind of scenario playing itself out in Ukraine. We've been… we always fear about, you know, oh, if Russia is on the back foot, and it's facing imminent defeat, and then it might resort to nuclear use, possibly, you know, that's certainly one of the scenarios. But I think when Russia is winning, and it wants to terminate the war quickly, and dictate its own conditions of surrender for Ukrainians, it could also resort to nuclear use.
Kaiser Kuo: Nick Roth, I'd love you to weigh in on this. The same question first, and I've got… I'd like to turn then to talk a little bit about the Golden Dome, once you've weighed in on this.
Nick: Yeah, and I think it's worth pointing out, maybe this goes without saying, that we're at really a profoundly dangerous moment for nuclear risks around the world. Obviously, Ukraine and the conflict there, Russia's invasion is a major element of that, but we've seen the guardrails around nuclear restraint eroding for at least a decade now, and the moment we're in is comparable to any of the most dangerous moments during the Cold War. And I agree that, you know, Russia's nuclear threats certainly, it appears, emboldened Russia to act more freely in Ukraine. I think there's a good question of, you know, what does… what is a good… what is a good idea in this context? You know, it's hard to imagine, looking at the effects of the war on Russia itself, that that emboldenment was ultimately… and the invasion was a positive, decision for the Russian government. It clearly will, you know, has domestic, political, and long-term, international political ramifications that will not be good for, for the Russians.
I'd also like just to footstomp a little bit Mariana's point that this is not the only Russian threat in Ukraine. The civilian threats to… threats to civilian nuclear facilities are often treated as, a separate, risk, unrelated to the kind of deterrent calculations that we see, you know, regarding strategic nuclear weapons, but they very much are on the same plane. It's very easy to see how radiological threats would be on the same spectrum, although to a lesser extent, than the kind of, sort of overt, new, sort of more, better understood nuclear threats that we've seen in Ukraine. With regard to… you mentioned Golden Dome.
Kaiser: Let me quickly frame that up for listeners. I mean, so that refers to this proposed heavily space-enabled missile defense architecture, essentially meant to defeat everything from ICBMs to hypersonics. Couched as defensive, you know, such systems can still pressure adversaries to expand their arsenals or adopt more dangerous postures. So, what I wanted to ask you are about, you know, specific guardrails, transparency, testing limits, doctrinal statements, what kinds of guardrails might be, you know, resurrected or put into place to preserve crisis stability if Golden Dome actually does move ahead? And I'm not sure that it will, I don't know if it's just a Star Wars-esque pipe dream, just sort of meant to produce a similar effect. Or, or what, but….
Nick: It's a great question, and I guess I would make 3 points on… in response to what we're seeing in the United States. One, and I think you just pointed to it, there are profound questions about technical feasibility and cost and practicality of such a system, but those are the kinds of debates, not just with this type of system, but with, national missile defense that we've been having for 25 years, and one of my frustrations with the conversations we've had about missile defense is, we very much, in the last quarter century, went from a debate of the strategic merits and the potential dangers of mass deployment of missile defense to technical feasibility. And I think once you cede the argument of the strategic wisdom, you've almost lost… you've lost more than half of the debate. I mean, there was a time at the end of the Cold War, and certainly during the Cold War itself, where the debate was very much more about the strategic wisdom of missile defense. That's why we had an ABM treaty, and that was, you know, part of the enormous risk in abandoning the ABM Treaty at the beginning of the Bush administration in the early 2000s. But this is also all part of a broader context in which the United States very much has forgotten the lessons of restraint, and we mentioned this already. And not just the United States, I should say, that the structures that we built up over time, you mentioned the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, that is about to expire, we hopefully can learn these lessons without a disaster or near disaster. But, my hope is that even if both Russia and the United States can't get back to the table and negotiate a follow-on to New START, that they would be able to continue some type of treaty limits, observing at least the, the intent of New START, and…
And maybe begin a conversation back to how you could potentially have a verifiable, legally binding set of limits on nuclear weapons on both sides.
Kaiser: Thank you very much. I want to bring China into the conversation, and in so doing, bring Yanliang into the conversation. Yanliang, I noted with great interest how the first few times that tactical nuclear weapons, you know, became an issue, that they were brought up by the Russian side, the Chinese position was quite firm.
They really hinted, and if you, if you sort of are able to parse Chinese messaging especially, that, you know, the use of that would be a non-start. It would simply change China's position. They were, very upset. They were quite firm about, you know, their displeasure with Russia for even bringing this into the conversation. Has that position changed over the years? This happened as early as, you know, the fall of 2022. Has this changed over the years since the beginning of the war?
Yanliang: Well, thanks for that. So I think, China's position has been very clear, I think, not only since the beginning of the war, but it's been fairly consistent since China first tested its nuclear weapon. Basically, China has been very hesitant to embrace even the doctrine of strategic deterrence, not to mention, you know, some sort of tactical warfighting scenario. Basically, since 1964, right, the Chinese government has said, we acquired nuclear weapons not for deterrence purposes, not to make threats, but rather in order to break the Soviet and Western nuclear monopoly, to put pressure on countries to disarm, etc, etc.
Now, it, you know, you may interpret that as just rhetoric, as posturing, but then China has indeed, you know, followed up with statements and working papers in international diplomatic forums in terms of no first use, in terms of negative security assurances.
And, China's position has actually been more categorical even than, let's say, the United States, because even the United States, right, has to think about its allies, has to think about extended deterrence, but then China just comes out and says, we're not going to be the first ones to use a nuclear weapon in any, you know, scenario, basically. Same with, right, negative security assurances, you might hear the United States say, we pledge, you know, not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are part of the MPT, part of the, you know, international non-proliferation regime, and in compliance with their nonproliferation obligations which is kind of a qualified position, right? And China's position is stronger in that regard. So, yeah, I think, in principle, China would really have a problem with countries being the first ones to use either tactical or strategic nuclear weapons.
Kaiser: Yeah, I understand that. So, I mean, as you say, you know, Beijing still maintains its no-first-use policy, but we've seen very credible estimates that now put China's stockpile at over 600 warheads, up from 200 only 20 years ago. I spoke recently to Zhao Tong at Carnegie, who I'm sure you know. We had an hour or so conversation about this.
You know, there are now silo fields proliferating, a maturing triad, pointing to a larger peacetime ready force in the 2030s, for sure.
From your vantage, what is Beijing's theory now of sufficiency as U.S. missile defenses scale up, and where do you think U.S.-China risk reduction talks should focus? On hotlines, on test pre-notifications, on… You know, non-targeting, Where would they make headway?
Yanliang: Yeah. I certainly am not able to match, you know, Zhao Tong's expertise in terms of parsing the Chinese doctrine, right? And I think one of his points is that Chinese doctrine is fairly, you know, apart from the very clear no-first use, it's fairly opaque where the threshold sort of is, but then, … I think US missile defense does have something to do with it. I think, you know, you need a number of nuclear weapons to sort of… if the US does develop a missile defense system, even to maintain your minimum deterrence, you need, sort of more weapons to penetrate that shield, and then we can talk about more, right, complicated issues, like how, you know, stealthy are your submarines, do you have a credible second strike capability, etc.
And in terms of risk reduction, I think, you know, there are conversations going on regarding, fail-safe, regarding guardrails, because nuclear war doesn't happen only when people want it to happen, right? As a result of deliberate choice, it can also happen by accident. So you have countries that have done this for a very long time, had a mature, albeit accident-prone, you know, command, control, and communication system, right, like the United States, like the Soviet Union or Russia, and we know a fair bit from open sources about, kind of the most gen… in the most general terms, how those systems work. But then with China, right, you may have a less developed command control system, or one that is… that is simpler and tailored to this smaller, kind of minimal deterrence force. But then, as we move into this larger force, do you need to put in certain guardrails. And, you know, the United States and the Soviet Union actually, you know, during the Cold War, at the height of the Cold War, they talked about, or exchanged information regarding nuclear weapon safety.
And, you know, that is a concrete risk reduction measure. It's not to say, increasing the geopolitical trust, it's more on the technical level. Can we make sure that at least when we don't want a nuclear war, we don't accidentally have one?
Kaiser: That's excellent. That's a very good place to start. Lily has sat very patiently for free interventions now, and I'd love to turn to you. Before I ask you the question that I had cooked for you, I'd love to hear you respond to any of the comments that Mariana or Nick or Yanliang have made. I'm sure that you've been digesting all of this and are eager to say something, so….
Lily: Yeah, thanks. I have… I've been furiously taking notes while all of you have been speaking. They've been very fascinating remarks. I would, … I'm very curious by Mariana's comment, and I wonder if maybe we could explore it more, this idea that the United States used nuclear weapons to end, right, the Japanese campaign in World War II. It's interesting, although I don't know if it's the most appropriate to apply to the case of Ukraine, right? So…at the end of World War II, the United States was the only nuclear weapons possessor, so it had more kind of freedom of movement. There was also, and there's always this debate among historians about what we knew about the bomb, right, when. But it was often the…sickeningly referred to, right, as nuclear tests, not just nuclear use by the Americans, at the time. That implied, right, that there wasn't really an understanding of what the impact of those bombs would be.
So, …Yeah, I just… I find it really interesting. Maybe a more apt comparison would be the kind of debate among Americans over whether or not to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War to solidify a kind of more beneficial position before China got involved.
And there, in the end, we, you know, we decided not to, but it was a really heated debate. Essentially, it cost MacArthur his career, right, as a military official in the U.S, so… and he was a hugely prominent figure in American foreign policy circles, so for someone of his stature to advocate using nuclear weapons under those circumstances, I could absolutely see how that would become a conversation in Russia, but I found that really fascinating.
Kaiser: Hmm. Yeah, it's an interesting remark. I mean, I think, you know, part of me bristled when Mariana made that comparison, just because of you know, our resistance to that kind of moral equivalence. There is no moral equivalence here. I mean, Ukraine was not the aggressor. Ukraine did not, you know, unilaterally attack a Russian military base in the middle of the Pacific and begin a war, and …Right, so… Yeah, there's a moral element in it as well. But, but Lily…the question that I wanted to ask you is about Belarus. You know, listeners hear now that Belarus may serve as a kind of nuclear platform, concretely meaning, you know, that Russia would forward-stage nuclear warheads and delivery systems closer in fact, to NATO territory. It would compress warning times, it would complicate alliance consultations. How has this altered European nuclear debates on sharing, on burden sharing, on strategic autonomy, and the political limits for, you know, for EU publics?
Lily: Hmm, interesting. So, you know, the Belarus component. I mean, if you're sitting in Berlin like I am, right? If you're sitting in Warsaw, it doesn't really put these systems that much closer. It almost seems kind of like a petty tit-for-tat, we can forward-deploy systems to another country, too. There's always…Well, in the early years of these kinds of extended nuclear deterrence arrangements, there was always the kind of potential risk, right, that, an actor could go rogue in one of these countries, and in the debates within NATO on nuclear sharing, there was a lot of concern in the 1960s that we were kind of…Or that some of the proposals were a backdoor into nuclear acquisition for some NATO members, but… and I think Mariana, with her work on Ukraine, inheriting the Soviet, nuclear weapons, could probably tell you there's not a snowball's chance in hell, right, that Russia's forward-deploying systems to Belarus, and that anyone else will be calling the shots. Yeah.
Kaiser Kuo: Yeah, yeah. I want to turn now to Mariana, and, you know, it's come up a couple of times already, but we wanted to talk about civilian nuclear power, and how that is very… it should be very much a part of this conversation. We're not just talking about nuclear weapons; we're also talking about, yeah, nuclear power facilities, including in Zaporizhia. You have been working on that talk about the risks that come with Russia's seizure of the nuclear power plants there, and what Russian strategy is, how this is sort of landing on the ears of… of… of… you know, regulatory authorities in the UN and elsewhere.
Mariana: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that question. It is a work in progress still, as I'm trying to document and reconstruct the Russian seizure and occupation of the Zaporizhian nuclear power plant, and what emerges is a rather complex picture of, you know, a very rapidly developing situation there on the southern front early in the war.
I don't think… it doesn't seem at this point that Russia had sort of specific plans or programs or, you know, intents for these particular nuclear facilities, they were just on the territory that they were walking through and occupying. And, in fact, you know, some of the troops that found themselves either in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the decommissioned reactors there, that was occupied on the first day of the war, and then, you know, by March fourth, the taking over of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest one in Europe, six…you know, operating reactors. You know, the military didn't quite understand what they were taking over. They, and therefore they, you know, there was a battle right on the site of the nuclear power plant, there were equipment that was damaged, there was fire in the training building, then the fire brigades that were rushed there were turned by the Russian military back twice or three times, were not allowed to access the burning building until the battle was over, and the power plant was occupied. There was unexploded ordnance all over the territory. I mean, there was a fully-fledged battle on the side of that nuclear facility, and I think all of us watched this with a certain, you know, disbelief, because we didn't think that was possible, and suddenly it was, and suddenly we had it. And, you know, for the people that I talked to who were at the plant on that night, the Ukrainian staff.
They, too, didn't think it was something like that was possible. They, too, were gobsmacked. They thought, you know, war is between military and military, and, you know, go fight the Ukrainian military. Why are you taking over a nuclear power plant? But I think once this kind of chaotic, you know, initial phase was over, I think there was a strategic intent that then was developed.
Because the power plant is on the front lines, right, the Russians did use it as a military base and as a shield, knowing from which they stage attacks across the river onto the Ukrainian positions, knowing full well that Ukrainians would be reluctant to retaliate directly, you know, for the fear of causing an accident. But there has been a kind of a drone warfare on both sides, the disconnection of the lines. This power plant lost off-site power, which is really super important, as we all know, for a nuclear power plant. Your cooling systems and other critical systems rely on off-site power. 8 times, I think design basis is around a 3 or 4 for much of the equipment, so that's what the equipment is designed to withstand, so a lot of a lot of the equipment might be out of order at this point, just… or needs to be, very well checked before any idea… any, thought of restarting this plant. And, you know, the basing of the military there, military equipment parked in the machine hall. So that we are, I think, still coping with kind of trying to grapple with what it needs, and how can we protect such facilities in armed conflict going forward. Now, clearly, the IEA has done an amazing job, and it's stretched to the limit. You kind of… mandate that it has under the circumstances, but it is also very clear that you know, even with all that, its mandate is, and this proactive stance by the DG Grossi, and so forth, is limited, and is not up to the task in these kind of really drastic situations. And, you know, my… my research has been focusing on the human dimensions of all this, because you have people who found themselves, you know, on the one hand, they're nuclear engineers with really highly responsible jobs. They can't just abandon a reactor, and yet, if they stay, they put themselves and their families at risk, and these are the moral dilemmas that played themselves out. You know, certainly, you know, for a while the plant was still operating for the first 6 months. There certainly needs to be the rethinking of what nuclear safety and security means in the time of war, these concepts shift, the paradigms shift in the time of war, the human dimension becomes very important. But also, how we treat international prohibition, you know, under the Geneva Convention and Protocol 1 of 1977, an additional protocol that prohibits attacks against nuclear facilities.
If it, you know, releases dangerous forces.
So that has to be strengthened, rethought. The United States should possibly rethink its own approach to, you know, so own manual for the rules of war, and show the way, you know, set a good example. But also, you know, the resilience and vulnerability of critical infrastructure and the whole energy ecosystem, because if you do have, you know, a country which generates… a large part of electricity generation comes from nuclear, you know, South Korea comes to mind, for instance, other states that are also looking to develop nuclear weapons. Poland is building, is thinking of building nuclear power plants. How do you make them secure and resilient in kind of this kind of contingency planning? So I think there's more questions at this point than there are answers, but there's certainly a lot we can learn from the Ukrainian case.
Kaiser: Thank you, Mariana. You just mentioned South Korea. I want to ask Nicholas about North Korea, which has, of course, made transfers to Russia that now include short-range ballistic missiles, large volumes of munitions, even some soldiery. What are the nuclear risk externalities when a third nuclear state materially enables Moscow's aggressive campaign. How should Washington then, or European capital, signal deterrence, maybe even to Pyongyang, without hard-linking the European and the Asia-Pacific problems in a way that could backfire? It's a very complicated question, but….
Nick: Yeah, you saved the easy question for me. Yeah, I did. No, that's… it's a really interesting question, and I think North Korea is probably, you know, is not the only country to whom that it could apply. I…it's… it's, it's really… honestly, it's… it's really hard, hard to see, how deterrents, could potentially play a role in, in, in impacting, what are often, you know, illicit transfers of technology. I think that probably goes more in the… to the realm of, you know, tools for trade enforcement, which I will confess is not an area that I spend, much time focusing on.
Kaiser: And it's also largely meaningless when it comes to North Korea. I mean, the Chinese have a wonderful expression that says, a dead pig does not fear boiling water, right? It's already… there is no trade, right?
Nick: I, I think, I think many… oh, sorry, I meant sort of, sort of interdicting, transports and, and whatnot. I think this is one of these cases where, nuclear deterrence is not probably a useful tool, but it reminds me of the phrase that, you know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I think in this case, this is not… the hammer is not appropriate for the nail we're talking about.
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, listeners hear extended deterrence, and they think only of U.S. commitments to Europe, probably, but these decisions in Europe very much reverberate in Asia. Japanese and South Korean debates, PLA planning, crisis signaling over Taiwan, of course. How does Beijing interpret European nuclear adjustments as stabilizing precedents, or as indicators of, you know, wider coalition hardening? How does Beijing see the nuclear debates happening in Europe right now?
Yanliang: I think, you know, first of all, there is a difference between what the United States does in the nuclear weapons domain in Europe and what it does in Asia, right? Because within NATO, which is, basically the European architecture, there is nuclear sharing. You know, there is actually… there are pilots of allied countries that are, you know, given permission, could be given permission to deliver nuclear weapons. And the security architecture, you know, in general is also different, right? There's Article 5, whereas in Asia, it's kind of a more bilateral U.S.-Japan, U.S.-South Korea kind of security alliance, and there is no, you know, equivalent kind of nuclear sharing. So extended deterrence is kind of the only mechanism at work there. And I think Beijing is, you know, that kind of extended deterrence has existed for a long time. I think that's basically a fact of life. But then Beijing would be really concerned about this rhetoric that we've heard from Donald Trump before, you know, basically before his two presidencies regarding the desirability of having allies, U.S. allies, in Asia acquire their own independent nuclear deterrent. That coupled with sort of recent pronouncements coming from these countries, coupled with popular support for an independent nuclear deterrent, coupled with this, in the Ukraine context, this, breach of negative security assurances, and, kind of countries possibly perceiving an independent deterrent as being desirable. So that, I think, is really the central concern.
Kaiser: I want to go back to Lily. What does public opinion data in EU states suggest about reactions to Russia's nuclear threats? I mean, to include both, you know, nuclear energy security threats and, you know, nuclear weapons threats. Are publics in Europe becoming inured?Do they experience the same sort of fear that maybe they ought to, or do recent escalatory notes still mobilize any kind of support among publics for long-term Ukraine assistance? I'm wondering… How this is landing with the European public. I mean, I wonder about it in America as well, but, Europe is more… you're there, you're in Berlin, so….
Lily: Yeah, well, so it's… it's interesting, I don't know if funny is the right word, but Europe was kind of sleepwalking out of collective defense before Russia invaded Ukraine, right? And that was a real shock to the system. And generated a lot of support, for increase in defense cooperation, spending, right, maintaining that infrastructure. And then as the war kind of went on, I think you started to see a drop-off in that investment. And then Trump came along, right? And he's doubly shocked the system. So, you know, I can't speak to polling across Europe, or recently across Europe, but in… I mean, in Germany, there's majority support for 5% defense spending. Germany is… has traditionally been very, very anti-conventional warfare, right? Anti-nuclear deterrence. It's… it's been always kind of an awkward conversation between German elites, who are really strong proponents of NATO, and the German public, who really hate nuclear deterrence, right, and really don't want to be investing in defense spending, and really don't want to serve in the Bundeswehr. And that's… at the moment, right, that's not holding. Those kind of two threats combined has really incentivized, a greater commitment to defense that we haven't seen, right, since the end of World War II.
Kaiser: Mariana, I'm curious, if… I asked you this version of this before, but I don't think we really quite got to it directly. So, if Kyiv does intensify its long-range conventional strikes deep inside Russia. How is that shifting Moscow's nuclear risk calculus? Is the red line more political or geographic? Is it more directly a security calculus, or is it about sort of… Politics, for lack of a better way to describe it.
Mariana: Well, the very short answer to your question is that we don't know, right? Going into Putin's mind is… it's a very dark place that nobody really wants to dwell in there for too, too long. I mean, we can only make the best educated guesses, right? And one way, one kind of guiding document is the doctrine, right? And as we mentioned, the doctrine has been amended last October, to include kind of yet another scenario in which Russia might be justified, justified in responding, with nuclear weapons, and that's kind of this massive air space, strike with drones and kind of this barrage of all sorts of, you know, all sorts of missiles and drones and cruise missiles, not necessarily nuclear, right? That didn't say that, so that we've taken that as… you know, somewhat lowering the threshold, recognizing that, you know, drone technology is a major kind of newcomer, and plays a big role in the Russo-Ukrainian war today. But I think they're really, you know, per the letter of that doctrine. You know, nuclear weapons are still reserved for very extreme circumstances, when, possibly not the surviv… you know, used to be the very… the survival of the Russian state, now it's kind of, I think, extreme, circumstances, or supreme national interests, something like that. I mean, you know, it's anyone's guess where even a Ukrainian drone attack, you know, by a bunch of PvE drones hidden in a truck parked by a strategic bomber base, whether that, you know, even taking out, you know, a score of strategic aircraft, whether that qualifies as an extreme circumstance that undermines supreme interests of the state or the survival of the Russian state. Probably not. I mean, Russia doesn't like it… This time it didn't.
But, you know, plus, there is, you know, there's such a thing as entanglement, right? So, dual-use systems. Russia has been using the strategic bombers for as theater of war weapons, so it's kind of asked for it. I mean, I think we are… when you have a belligerent that's a nuclear weapon state that has been kind of brandishing its nuclear weapons, at least rhetorically. There's, you know, we should be vigilant, and Ukraine should be vigilant, and the West should be vigilant, but we should not take these threats at their face value. Clearly, they're there to… for political reasons, for certain coercive purposes that, as we said, partly worked, but I really… you know, I don't see kind of a knee-jerk nuclear response, from Russia. I think even… even that regime understands that it's a… it's a… it's a rather… it's a… it's a rather significant red line to cross.
Kaiser: Did we understand it as part of this oft-invoked doctrine of escalate to de-escalate? Is that what we're.
Budjeryn: So, again, the escalate to de-escalate is envisioned in a war between nuclear-armed NATO and nuclear-armed Russia. So that's where that doctrine is applied to, to re-establish deterrence. Between Ukraine per se and the Russian Federation, there is no strategic deterrence. Ukraine is not a nuclear state, it's not covered by extended deterrence of a nuclear patron, right? It's literally, I mean, it's supported by nuclear-armed countries, it's armed. But they're not parties to this war. They're not belligerent, so it's a bit of a different situation. Again, I don't see this escalate to de-escalate kind of being copy-pasted to the Ukrainian context. I do believe that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons, not just to pun… you know, to do some kind of signaling, a punishment, or… but to get something big, right? They're making… they're going to go and to cross that line, to make that step, they better get some big win, a big gain for it. And that's why I'm more skeptical to kind of loop all the way back to something Lily also mentioned. You know, I've raised a bunch of waves with this kind of scenario of Russia's nuclear win, and the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons when it's about, sort of, to win, and drawing analogies of World War II. Full disclaimer, I'm a historian myself. I'm fully aware of the… of how fraught it is to take historical, you know, precedents and, like, pace them onto today. But if we think of what Russia could get for crossing this really, really important line. It better be the whole of Ukraine. It better be what it came after to Ukraine. It can't be just, oh, let's stabilize the front line near Pokrovsk.
Kaiser: Yeah.
Mariana: I mean, that doesn't seem that they're getting enough for crossing that really important line. And we've also seen kind of this kind of good cop, bad cup, playing out in the Ukrainian public… in the Russian public space, where you have kind of a more restrained official discourse, and then you have these, what they call the nuclear fire worshippers, such as Medvedev, and Karaganov and Trenian, these sort of pundits who are, you know, every day nuking either Ukraine or NATO, both. And this is not to discount, I think that's also rather detrimental, this kind of nuclear loose stock. It erodes these understandings that we've internalize of nuclear weapons as really, you know, horrible weapons, as there being a nuclear taboo of sorts on their use. It kind of erodes and softens it. I don't think it's a good situation for the Russian public. But we've seen, kind of, Putin strategically using that and saying, see, you could have someone like that. You know, these guys are really crazy, they're, you know, loose cannons, but we are sort of responsible, but you never know, we could go that way as well. So I, you know, I don't think in the Russian public space you can very much say something out loud and on that level of Putin, if it doesn't play some kind of a role, political role, for, for the, for the Kremlin.
Kaiser: Speaking of loose cannons, horrible people, and loose talk, let's talk about Donald Trump and his apparent change of heart recently. You know, he, he went from that horrifyingly just sickening browbeating in the Oval Office of Volodymyr Zelensky, to now, you know, writing these all-caps, PLEASE to Vladimir Putin, to, you know, to, to, and the war. They're, of course, going to be meeting in Alaska, very soon. Nick, and then maybe Lily, you can also weigh in on this, or anyone who wants to. I'm curious… How this has, if it has at all, changed nuclear thinking in The Kremlin.
How…What Trump’s… Apparent switch, from being kind of a… A de facto supporter of…of Russia to being now, apparently, willing to continue to arm Ukraine and to push for a settlement.
Nick: So, I think probably the best way… place to start is something that occurred to me during the first Trump administration, is that, when Thomas Schelling first wrote about deterrence, you know, one of the sort of famous phrases that came from his work was the threat that leaves something to chance. And the problem with what we've seen from President Trump in both terms is the… what we've seen is a threat that leaves everything to chance. And, that makes any commitment he gives unpredictable. It makes the threats he provides unreliable. So it's really hard to tell what, you know, the long-term calculation is, if there is a long-term calculation, or he's just sort of going on instinct. I said it earlier in the session, but, you know, ideally, what I… if this talk occurs, and it's happening at a incredibly fast pace for reasons that are hard to understand, other than this appears to be much of how the Trump administration does its work. But like I said earlier, if there is good to come of this, of this negotiation, it would be some type of resuming discussions of strategic arms control. Whether that'll happen or not, I've not seen any signals that that is even on the table. I haven't looked, in the last 24 hours, or the last minute, you know, as I said, things happen relatively fast, but, …
Kaiser Kuo: Well, let's say you get his ear for 5 minutes. Treaties are at low tide right now, you know, INF is gone, New Start is suspended, CTBT is de-ratified. What confidence-building measures do you think give the best sort of ROI on risk reduction, that you would, you would have Trump's team raised in Alaska. I mean, is it test moratory reaffirmations? Is it limits on nuclear exercises that are, you know, near borders? Is it… you know, Some kind of protocol, hot washing or whatever on, on, on… after close calls. What, what, what…
Nick: It's a great question, and my guess is all of the panelists have their own, take on.
Kaiser: Their own pet one.
Nick: But I, I think it's all of the… all of the things and more that you described. I mean, certainly pulling back on missile defense plans, the U.S. modernization program, that, you know, by all accounts is going to exceed, new start levels. Yeah, certainly discussion on strengthening the moratorium on nuclear testing, if not ratifying the CTBT, which I realize in the United States is politically difficult, if not possible. Some type of verifiable, legally-based treaty. And then, certainly, nuclear exercises, but having very, very, very clear systems for communication, and preventing the types of miscalculation that we've… that… that's been discussed. I'd say longer term, there's a lot of discussions around emerging technology that need to take place. There was discussion earlier of fail-safe. That becomes even more complicated when you think about, to what extent human beings will actually even be in the system when these decisions are made.
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lily, did you want to weigh in on this before I… I mean, you know.
Lily: Yeah.
Kaiser: to you about Trump and Alaska, and what….
Lily Wojtowicz: Yeah, yeah, and I'll… I'll start with what Nick finished with, right, on… on keeping open channels of… or generating channels of communication to reduce risk. I mean, unfortunately, the problem is, is that those channels have just atrophied, right? For almost 10 years now. It used to be through these network of treaties, et cetera, that you had across all levels of government, channels of communication between Russians and Americans, or Soviets and Americans, dating back to the Soviet Union. So that's gone. I don't have a ton of hope for that being established under Trump. And then, in terms of an outcome, I mean, Mariana said, right, no one wants to live in Putin's head. I don't think anyone wants to be in Trump's head either. No, I don't. But he's… What's that? I certainly don't. Oh, no, but you know, he's such a, … I mean, he's a chaos machine, right? But he's also a chaos machine who really likes tough men, or his view, his definition of tough men, and we saw with the, you know, the strikes on Iran, how his thinking was really anti… like, in the beginning, he was very opposed to the U.S. getting involved, right? He wanted a peaceful settlement, etc. And then as time went on, and he had more conversations with Bibi, and, you know, all of a sudden, like, he decides that he's going to finish the Iran nuclear program. I think similarly, right, he just doesn't… he wants this headache to go away, and I don't think he cares what the outcome is, right? I mean, I don't think he really cares much for human life in general. So he doesn't care about the outcome in Ukraine. He did not invite the Ukrainians to this conversation. And so anything… any kind of agreement that they reach, it means nothing. Like we put in… we invested so much capital in getting to draw parallel to China, right, and Taiwan, and the U.S. has this great fear about this 2027 invasion of Taiwan, and we invested so much capital in the Trump administration and the Biden administration, to get our allies to kind of see China on the same, you know, through our eyes, or be at least on, if not on the same page, but in the same chapter, right, of the book, on our thinking on China as a threat. And… And Trump has kind of tanked a lot of that progress by targeting these allies and partners with, you know, with tariffs and, opening up kind of this potential for greater, sales of chips to China. I mean, it's like, none of these things….
Kaiser: The silver lining, is what you're saying.
Lily: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, none of it matters, nothing matters. We're in a universe where nothing the U.S. president says matters, except it absolutely matters, right? Right. And he's so inconsistent that you can't take any comfort from anything that goes on when he meets with these people. Again, think about the first admin… the first Trump administration and his talks, with Kim Jong-un, like… They came pretty shortly after he was threatening, you know, nuclear use against North Korea over Twitter.
Kaiser: Fire and… fire and… what was it?
Lily: Fire and fury, and who has the bigger red button, and yeah, exactly. And then they came out with, you know, a statement that essentially meant nothing, and changed nothing, and… Yeah, and I think if that happens, Ukraine pays the cost for that, pays the price of that.
Kaiser: Horrifying. Yanliang, you know, Lily was just lamenting the demise of the, the…
Lily: I wouldn't say lamenting.
Kaiser: Well, no, no, you were lamenting the demise of a lot of the, the, the consultative channels that we used to have under these old treaty frameworks. I mean, the US and China have had really quite fitful nuclear contacts after a very long hiatus. What kinds of realistic Track 1, Track 1.5 sequence could put some low-hanging fruit, you know, launch notifications, test pre-announcements, incident rules, could put some of that low-hanging fruit on the table this year? Do you think that's possible?
Yanliang: Well, I think the, two leaders, I mean, during the Biden administration, Biden and Xi, they kind of reached this preliminary, verbal agreement on, you know, human control of nuclear weapons.
Kaiser: AI, that was… that was a very, very good… yeah, that's part of the, you know, the fitful nuclear contact that I was talking about, but that was, yeah, very positive, absolutely.
Yanliang: Yeah, but I don't think we're gonna see launch notification anytime soon. China has an agreement with Russia in terms of launch notification, but, you know, with the United States, don't think that's gonna happen soon. Don't think China is going to do arms reduction until it has reached quantitative parity. And then there are all sorts of, complications like missile defense on the table, right? But I want to sort of highlight this point, because we're sort of getting to the end here, that, you know, even though from the United States' perspective, kind of China is as dangerous as Russia, if not more so in the long term. From China's perspective, the United States and Russia, in terms of their principles in the nuclear arena, are in almost the exact same place. Right? Because, you know, as we've said, the United States also makes nuclear threats, albeit not in the context of an invasion of a foreign country. You know, in terms of attacking nuclear facilities, the United States has not categorically come out against attacking nuclear facilities, right, in terms of counterproliferation strikes, in terms of supporting Israel in Operation Midnight Hammer, right?
Kaiser: Right.
Yanliang: bombing of Iran… And, from the, you know, disarmament community's perspective, and the perspective of many non-nuclear weapon states, right, there is no such thing as a responsible nuclear power, right? Both countries are doing nuclear sharing now, right? NATO nuclear sharing, Russian nuclear sharing with Belarus. So, you know, in fact, you know, unless these problems are resolved, I think China will see both countries as being sort of problematic in the nuclear domain. And I think I can understand, you know, that perspective, and actually a lot of non-nuclear weapon states share that perspective.
Kaiser: Oh, God. I mean, that's… you're very… I'm really… all of you, I'm thinking about how I'm going to invite each of you separately onto Sinica for long conversations, because you guys are, have just been so terrific. Mariana, I want to ask you, I mean, you've chronicled Ukraine's choices made during the 1990s. Which lessons from 91 to 96, just arbitrarily, are maybe most misused today, especially those that muddy how Kyiv weighed sovereignty, security, integration against the burdens and risks of retaining nuclear weapons? In other words, the run-up to Budapest. What are we… What do the Ukrainians today lament about the decisions made?
Mariana: Well, to begin with, Kaiser, Ukrainians do lament, whether they're well-informed or most…often poorly informed about that process and that history. I mean, I can't emphasize enough, I'm currently in Ukraine, I'm in Odessa right now. And anyone from, you know, a cab driver to, you know, people on Facebook that comment on, you know, my book on Ukraine's nuclear disarmament is just being translated into Ukrainian, and I'll have my book talk, on Friday, and I'm, frankly, a little apprehensive, because I know people have very strong opinions about that, and they're reduced to very simplistic, very simple. We had the world's third largest nuclear arsenal, and under pressure from the United States and Russia, we gave them up for nothing. And, you know, my hope is that maybe a more nuanced work of history might, you know, introduce a bit more complexity into that story. But I think it is also… What's also not helpful is some of the narratives I've encountered on the American side, specifically, to say, well, Ukraine had no choice. This outcome was over-determined. Those weren't even Ukrainian weapons to give up, and Ukrainians could have done nothing with them. Like, you know, both of these extremes, and both of these very simplified narratives. They… there's a parcel of truth there, but not the whole truth. The truth is more complex than somewhere in the middle. And I think, you know, what is… you know, you ask about the lessons. The lessons is, you know, these kind of decisions are multi-causal. They happen in a certain zeitgeist internationally, right?
For Ukraine, it was the zeitgeist of the end of the Cold War, and these weapons becoming obsolete and unnecessary. There were dinosaurs, and we're looking to cooperate with Russia, you know, in the West, and we were traveling to each other's nuclear labs, and suddenly there was this openness, and there was this optimism about where all of this is going, and so, you know, in that international atmosphere, any kind of talk of retaining nuclear weapons would have gone against the grain. You know, and Ukraine would have had to invest and do a whole bunch of things still to… in order to transform this inheritance into an actually fully-fledged deterrence, but it had options. Ukraine is not, you know, and Ukrainians know it now, and they show to the world as well. They're not just a bunch of peasants, you know, with their sunflowers. They have a military, industrial, and scientific capacity. They were a big part of the Soviet military defense complex. There were, you know, a lot of the industry and research on the Ukrainian territory in Ukraine was a big loss for Russia, even in strategic, in strategic terms, in terms of what delivers their strategic deterrent. I think they, you know, another lesson is that it's too hopeful to think that decisions of the past might be judged by contemporaries, by people today, based on the merits that obtained in that historical moment. I think people constantly go back, and the… again, the optics of Ukraine are just horrible. The optics are bad. You know, again, here's the country that, for whatever else, you know, is dysfunction. By the international community, it has done everything right. It has surrendered these nuclear weapons, it has reduced the conventional arms, it has, you know, transformed and… or, you know, converted, like, millions of anti-personnel mines, because those are terrible, into plastic pelicans, or some… in some NATO, you know, program.
And now we're going around… we… you know, Ukrainians are going around the world with an outstretched arm, and relying, basically, on the mercy of partners and, you know, well-wishers and the coalition of the willing, without any formal guarantee to that. So I think it shows… it casts a rather unfavorable light onto how this international system works. Right, and it is going to take some rethinking and restructuring and rethinking how European security should be reconfigured, not just after this war in Ukraine, but as this war progresses in order to stop it. In order to halt it, and in order to provide rail security for the continent, right? It's not a club, unfortunately, it spills over the borders.
Kaiser: You know, I think that this is actually a very, very good place for us to wrap up today. I would, again, I just want to extend the invitation for you to each reach out to me personally, because I think I would value one-on-one conversations with each of you about your own areas of expertise. For the show, or for just my own personal edification. But, it's just been, it's been wonderful. Thank you so much to our outstanding panelists, Nicholas, Mariana, Yen Liang, and Lily for sharing their deep expertise, and for engaging with such challenging questions. I hope they weren't too random and too deeply uninformed. Thanks also to you all for tuning in, and for caring about these issues, which are, I think, too often left to a small community of specialists, but really, they absolutely affect the security of every one of us. Once more, my heartfelt thanks to Vita Golod and to UNC's Center for Slavic and East European Studies for making this conversation possible. We have one more in this series that's coming up later this week. That will deal with artificial intelligence, and … I better get to preparing for that one. So, let's continue to think about these issues critically, to listen to each other very, very closely, and to work toward concrete steps to make our nuclear future much safer. Once again, Lily, thank you so much. Yanliang, thanks. Nick, wonderful to have you, and Mariana, safe travels, and good luck on your book launch, and I look forward to reading it.
