Philip Reiner joined Gus Docker, host of the Future of Life Institute podcast, to talk about how nuclear command and control systems work, how they might fail, and what can be done to improve them.
“There’s all sorts of different types of hotlines that historically have played a role in reducing conflict. But if you think about nuclear hotlines, you look back to what happened after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the US -Soviet hotline that was established after that. There were times when political actors attempted to use that hotline in a negative way, where they attempted to manipulate it and, manipulate their counterpart.
There’s an element of trust here that, that is really necessary for those communications channels to, to be effective. If you also, look at the current dynamics, say with China, they won’t pick up the phone. So even if you do have the system in place and it’s trusted, it’s reliable, it’s secure, folks on the other end need to be authorized to actually pick up and speak or communicate whatever, text-based or phone-based, whatever it might be. Without a doubt, the ability to communicate with one another reduces risk. The ability to actually understand where the other person is coming from reduces, reduces risk, I think.”
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