The Button: The Threat From Nuclear Weapons and What We Can Do About It, with Tom Collina

Very excited to say we have a special guest on the show today.
Tom Collina has had a long and storied career in nuclear
disarmament for many years, in the Director of Policy at the
Plougshares Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to trying to
prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons. With former
Secretary of Defence Bill Perry, he has just written a book
called "The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential
Power from Truman To Trump", which is about the past, present,
and future of nuclear weapons. This is an area long-term
listeners will remember from our TEOTWAWKI series, and the
interviews with Martin Pfeiffer and Stephen Schwartz.



If you're interested in this, there are plenty of things you can
do. Ploughshares has their own podcast on nuclear issues, Press
The Button, which Tom co-hosts, as does Bill Perry, "At The
Brink", which both discuss incidents from nuclear history and
nuclear policy in more detail. You can of course obtain the book
The Button - there's also a great audiobook which I can
personally attest is well-done. There's so much fascinating
nuclear history and details of policy in there which we didn't
have time to get to in this interview, so it's well worth your
while to pick that book up. You can follow Tom Collina
@TomCollina on Twitter, and you can get involved with the
Ploughshares Foundation as well.


There are plenty of ways to stay engaged with these issues, but
ultimately I think it is a question of demanding the simple
changes that need to take place to make us all safer. We don't
need ICBMs, we don't need first strike authority, and we don't
need launch on warning: the world would be vastly better off
without these things, and you could still easily have a nuclear
deterrent that would be capable of retaliation.


 


 


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