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Columbia University students participate in an ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment on their campus following last week’s arrest of more than 100 protesters, on April 25, 2024 in New York City. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images The crackdown on protesters at Columbia and elsewhere lays bare the challenge of balancing academic freedom with student safety. Student protests are heating up around the country, just as the school year is winding down. At Columbia University in New York, a deadline is nearing for the administration to clear the student encampment off the campus lawn. The NYPD chief of patrol defended his department’s actions earlier this week in arresting over 100 student protesters on campus, writing “Columbia decided to hold its students accountable to the laws of the school. They are seeing the consequences of their actions. Something these kids were most likely never taught,” in a post on X. But the root of all the arrests and protests at Columbia is, arguably, free speech. In testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington, DC, last week, Columbia President Minouche Shafik struggled to walk a line between ensuring student safety and protecting academic freedom. “We believe that Columbia’s role is not to shield individuals from positions that they find unwelcome,” she said, “but instead to create an environment where different viewpoints can be tested and challenged.” In light of the fierce debate over campus speech and student safety, Today, Explained reached out to the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Irene Mulvey to get her view on the state of free speech on college campuses. AAUP is a nonprofit organization comprising faculty and other professionals in academia whose stated mission is to protect academic freedom and support higher education as a public good. Mulvey shared her insights into whether Columbia and other institutions where crackdowns of protests are happening are living up to those ideals. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. —Miranda Kennedy Sean Rameswaram Has protecting academic freedom and supporting higher education become more difficult since October 7? Irene Mulvey Yes, it has become more difficult since October 7. Although I would say our job of protecting academic freedom and protecting higher education from outside interference has always been difficult. There’s always been political interference into higher education, and that’s why we were founded. In the past, the interference into higher education has been targeting individual professors, you know, a wealthy donor doesn’t like somebody’s research and they want to get them fired. Or somebody speaks up at a faculty meeting, criticizing the administration and the administration doesn’t want them to get tenure. What we’re seeing now is an escalation in that the entire enterprise of higher education as a public good in a democracy is being attacked. We’re seeing attacks at the state level with legislation that will censor content — we call these educational gag orders, where there’s legislation that says what can be taught in a college classroom. That’s just outright censorship and the kind of thing you see in an authoritarian society, not a democracy. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has dragged these presidents in front of the committee for a performative witch hunt of a hearing. And that is an escalation because those are private institutions. So it’s a remarkable escalation for the federal government to be intruding into what’s happening at private colleges. To think about how professors are feeling about these protests, we need to think about how professors feel about higher education. And what professors are thinking [is] that in higher education, we should have a robust exchange of ideas in which no idea is withheld from scrutiny or debate. Our students have very strong feelings about what’s happening in the Middle East. They are attempting to have that robust exchange of ideas about what’s happening. And I think as faculty members, we support that. Students on a campus, the students are learning from professors. They’re learning how to conduct research on their own. They’re learning how to analyze arguments. They’re learning how to think critically about complex matters. And they have thoughts about what’s happening in the world [and] on their campuses, with regard to what their campuses are doing to support what’s happening in the Middle East. Faculty members are supportive of this. This is what academic freedom means. Sean Rameswaram So it sounds like you don’t support the president of Columbia University calling in the NYPD to make arrests at a peaceful protest. Irene Mulvey That’s an understatement. I think what the Columbia president did was the most disproportionate reaction that I’ve ever seen. My understanding is these were peaceful protesters on an outdoor lawn on a campus where they pay a lot of money to attend, and she had them deemed as trespassers and invoked a statute where she has to argue that they are a clear and present danger to the functioning of the institution in order to allow the NYPD on campus. The most important thing is her response is doing the opposite of what’s supposed to happen on a campus. Her response silenced the voices of the students. Her response suppressed the speech and suppressed the debate. It’s the absolute opposite of what should happen on a college campus, and it was extremely disappointing. Sean Rameswaram If you had been in her position as the president of Columbia, and you were dealing with these protests and people [are] saying they feel unsafe, that there’s antisemitic slogans, that there was a protest outside where a Jewish student was told to go back to Poland, how would you have navigated these competing forces? Irene Mulvey Yeah, well, it’s not easy. Let’s be clear, there’s no easy answer to what’s going on here. But the principle behind anyone’s response should be education, should be speech, should be debate, should be ideas being put up for justification. And, you know, there could be some kind of forum for the students. Of course, they have to protect the safety of all students. But if the way you’re choosing to keep students safe is by suppressing somebody else’s speech, that’s a false choice. You don’t have to suppress speech to keep students safe. I agree that these are difficult situations. And I know all of these campuses where these things are happening — Columbia, NYU, Yale — these campuses and these presidents will espouse academic freedom and free speech at the drop of a hat. But if you’re not standing up for those principles at times like these, then those words are completely meaningless. Sean Rameswaram It’s interesting because I think what we’re seeing here is the clearest evidence that we haven’t quite figured out where the line is on protecting students versus free speech versus the open discussion of ideas. I think the president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, made that point in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, that universities haven’t figured this out. The Supreme Court hasn’t figured this out, and it shouldn’t be on universities to figure this out. Do you have some idea of where the line is between the open academic discussion of ideas and something that could be dangerous for students and thus not permitted? Irene Mulvey The way to think about it is in situations like this where there are polarized views, there are really strong feelings for very good reasons. Not all the speech is going to make you comfortable. Academic freedom and free speech can be messy. And so I think you have to err on the side of allowing the speech and allowing the debate and allowing the discussion. When it veers into something that doesn’t feel good, then someone should speak up and say that. But silencing voices because you don’t like what they’re saying is a very dangerous, slippery slope that we do not want to get onto. Sean Rameswaram One thing I’ve found heartening following these protests on college campuses for six months is that they’ve mostly been peaceful. Now, that being said, if I’m a Jewish student walking across campus and someone says, “Go back to Poland!” I might start to feel unsafe. If I’m a Muslim student and someone’s doxxing me because of my attending a protest, I might start to feel unsafe. How do college administrators navigate safety, which feels sort of amorphous sometimes, in a free-speech environment? Irene Mulvey Administrations — universities — have an obligation to address issues of harassment and hate speech through their policies that have been in place for decades. Because hate speech didn’t just arrive on campus since October 7. We’ve had to address issues like this for decades. So campuses have policies to address issues like that, and their obligation is to keep the campus safe. For the most part, I feel the protests that I’ve seen have been peaceful. But again, it’s a messy situation. The important way to handle it is to stand back on principles of academic freedom, free speech, and keeping the campus safe, and addressing issues of hate speech through policies that are developed with the faculty. Sean Rameswaram You were a professor of mathematics for 40 years — for four decades. I imagine before that, maybe you were a student at a college protest, trying to voice your opinion and embracing free speech. Do you think with all the perspective that you have that this is just a rough patch that we get over and we’re stronger because of it? Or do you think we’re really going to get bogged down here? Irene Mulvey Oh, that’s a good question. I did participate in protests as a student during the Vietnam War. I was in high school. But this is definitely a rough patch. And where we come out on the end of it is an open question. I think what’s happening is part of an agenda to control what happens on campus, not just about the history and policies of Israel. What’s happening now is part of a larger movement, the anti-DEI movement, the anti-CRT movement, which is intended to censor or control what can be learned in a college classroom and what can be taught on campus. I think that’s the real danger, that broader movement, which I think would really damage higher education and the role it’s supposed to play in a democracy — to be a check and balance on politics. Be sure to followToday, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Paige Vickers/Vox Years ago, scientists made a devastating prediction about the ocean. Now it’s unfolding. More than five years ago, the world’s top climate scientists made a frightening prediction: If the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius, relative to preindustrial times, 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs globally would die off. At 2°C, that number jumps to more than 99 percent. These researchers were essentially describing the global collapse of an entire ecosystem driven by climate change. Warm ocean water causes corals — large colonies of tiny animals — to “bleach,” meaning they lose a kind of beneficial algae that lives within their bodies. That algae gives coral its color and much of its food, so bleached corals are white and starving. Starved coral is more likely to die. In not so great news, the planet is now approaching that 1.5°C mark. In 2023, the hottest year ever measured, the average global temperature was 1.52°C above the preindustrial average, as my colleague Umair Irfan reported. That doesn’t mean Earth has officially blown past this important threshold — typically, scientists measure these sorts of averages over decades, not years — but it’s a sign that we’re getting close. David Gray/AFP via Getty Images Marine biologist Anne Hoggett swims above bleached and dead coral on the Great Barrier Reef in April 2024. David Gray/AFP via Getty Images Tourists snorkel above a section of the Great Barrier Reef full of bleached and dead coral on April 5, 2024. So, it’s no surprise that coral reefs are, indeed, collapsing. Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that the planet is experiencing its fourth global “bleaching” event on record. Since early 2023, an enormous amount of coral in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans has turned ghostly white, including in places like the Great Barrier Reef and the Florida Keys. In some regions, a lot of the coral has already died. “What we are seeing now is essentially what scientists have been predicting was going to happen for more than 25 years,” Derek Manzello, a marine scientist at NOAA who leads the agency’s coral bleaching project, told Vox. The recent extreme ocean warming can’t solely be attributed to climate change, Manzello added; El Niño and even a volcanic eruption have supercharged temperatures. But coral reefs were collapsing well before the current bleaching crisis. A study published in 2021 estimated that coral “has declined by half” since the mid-20th century. In some places, like the Florida Keys, nearly 90 percent of the live corals have been lost. Past bleaching events are one source of destruction, as are other threats linked to climate change, including ocean acidification. The past and current state of corals raises an important but challenging question: If the planet continues to warm, is there a future for these iconic ecosystems? What’s become increasingly clear is that climate change doesn’t just deal a temporary blow to these animals — it will bring about the end of reefs as we know them. Will there be coral reefs 100 years from now? In the next few decades, a lot of coral will die — that’s pretty much a given. And to be clear, this reality is absolutely devastating. Regardless of whether snorkeling is your thing, reefs are essential to human well-being: Coral reefs dampen waves that hit the shore, support commercial fisheries, and drive coastal tourism around the world. They’re also home to an incredible diversity of life that inspires wonder. “I’m pretty sure that we will not see the large surface area of current reefs surviving into the future,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, who was involved in the landmark 2018 report, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that predicted the downfall of tropical reefs at 1.5°C warming. “Every year is going to be worse.” NOAA A map of coral bleaching “alerts,” which indicate where the ocean is unusually warm and bleaching is likely to occur. Red areas have a risk of reef-wide bleaching; magenta and purple regions are at risk of coral death. But even as many corals die, reefs won’t exactly disappear. The 3D formation of a typical reef is made of hard corals that produce a skeleton-like structure. When the polyps die, they leave their skeletons behind. Animals that eat live coral, such as butterfly fish and certain marine snails, will likely vanish; plenty of other fish and crabs will stick around because they can hide among those skeletons. Algae will dominate on ailing reefs, as will “weedy” kinds of coral, like sea fans, that don’t typically build the reef’s structure. Simply put, dead reefs aren’t so much lifeless as they are home to a new community of less sensitive (and often more common) species. “Reefs in the future will look very different,” said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, a leading marine scientist who’s also involved with the IPCC. “Restoring coral reefs to what they were prior to mass bleaching events is impossible. That is a fact.” On the timescale of decades, even much of the reef rubble will fade away, as there will be no (or few) live corals to build new skeletons and plenty of forces to erode the ones that remain. Remarkably, about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans. When all that CO2 reacts with water, it makes the ocean more acidic, hastening the erosion of coral skeletons and other biological structures made of calcium carbonate. Jennifer Adler for Vox Bleached staghorn coral in a nursery run by the Coral Restoration Foundation off the coast of the Florida Keys in September 2023. Buying time For decades now, hard-working and passionate scientists have been trying to reverse this downward trend — in large part, by “planting” pieces of coral on damaged reefs. This practice is similar to planting saplings in a logged forest. In reef restoration, many scientists and environmental advocates see hope and a future for coral reefs. But these efforts come with one major limitation: If the oceans continue to grow hotter, many of those planted corals will die too. Last fall, I dived a handful of reefs in the Florida Keys where thousands of pieces of elkhorn and staghorn — iconic, reef-building corals — had been planted. Nearly all of them were bleached, dead, or dying. “When are [we] going to stop pretending that coral reefs can be restored when sea temperatures continue to rise and spike at lethal levels?” Terry Hughes, one of the world’s leading coral reef ecologists, wrote on X. Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” Manzello said. Echoing his concern, Pörtner said: “We really have no choice but to stop climate change.” Jennifer Adler for Vox A collection of bleached “planted” staghorn coral on a reef in Florida in September 2023. But in the meantime, other stuff can help. Planting pieces of coral can work if those corals are more tolerant to threats like extreme heat or disease. To that end, researchers are trying to breed more heat-resistant individuals or identify those that are naturally more tolerant to stress — not only heat, but disease. Even after extreme bleaching events, many corals survive, according to Jason Spadaro, a restoration expert at Florida’s Mote Marine Laboratory. (“Massive” corals, which look a bit like boulders, had high rates of survival following recent bleaching in Florida, Spadaro said.) Scientists also see an urgent need to curb other, non-climate related threats, like water pollution and intensive fishing. “To give corals the best possible chance, we need to reduce every other stressor impacting reefs that we can control,” Manzello told Vox. These efforts alone will not save reefs, but they’ll buy time, experts say, helping corals hold on until emissions fall. If those interventions work — and if countries step up their climate commitments — future generations will still get to experience at least some version of these majestic, life-sustaining ecosystems. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Ella Purnell as Lucy in Fallout. | JoJo Whilden/Prime Video What a post-nuclear aftermath could really look like. Between the crumbling of trust in our institutions and escalating global conflict, dystopia feels deeply familiar in today’s world. Though there are people and organizations who are working to keep the globe and our humanity intact, it’s normal for us to think of the worst-case scenarios. Fallout, a recently released show on Amazon Prime based on the popular video game franchise, is the latest exploration of one of these scenarios: survival after nuclear war. Fallout takes place in two different periods in the Los Angeles area: the moments before nuclear bombs are dropped across the US, and 200 years later. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the show’s protagonist, is a “vault-dweller” — the term for people who live underground in sealed bunkers created by a company called Vault-Tec. Despite their world’s dark past, Lucy and the community of Vault 33 remain optimistic that one day — when the radioactive levels are low enough on the surface — civilization can restart with their help. But when her father, the leader of their vault, gets kidnapped by people from the surface, Lucy leaves her bunker to bring him back. As she embarks on her quest to find her dad, Lucy finds that the surface is a hostile place. There’s little to no food or clean water, danger exists around every corner in the form of bandits and mutants, and the lone survivors are cynical and distrustful — especially toward Lucy, whose bunkered life seems easy by comparison. As one disgruntled shopkeeper tells Lucy, “The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned.” Indeed, in our real world, there are wealthy people investing in bunkers in case shit hits the fan, including some big names like Mark Zuckerberg. But what about everyone else? That’s a key message in Fallout: Survival isn’t equitable. And while Fallout is a fictional depiction of nuclear war that’s heavy on the sci-fi, nuclear warfare itself is not off the table in reality. There are also plenty of other existential risks that can shape how we live, like future pandemics, a changing climate causing extreme weather and disasters, and harmful artificial intelligence. What makes nuclear war particularly terrifying is the devastation it can cause in just seconds — the horrifying damage and loss of life from the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 80 years ago underscore why we should prevent this from ever happening again. Yet, nine countries are still armed with nuclear weapons, with the US and Russia possessing thousands of nuclear warheads. So I reached out to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a think tank that analyzes the greatest threats to civilization and develops strategies to reduce these risks. We talked about what the aftermath of a nuclear war could look like in our real world — and also what we should focus on now to prevent this scenario from happening, as well as how we could prepare for it if it does. “We do actually need to take this seriously, as dark and unpleasant as it is,” Baum said. “It is a very worthwhile thing to be doing because we could really need it. It could be the difference between life and death for a massive number of people.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. After watching Fallout for myself, it feels like an ominous warning. But, of course, it’s also describing an alternate history, and there’s a lot of science fiction in the story. What could an actual post-nuclear world look like for us? [It] probably would not involve mutants and monsters. Nuclear radiation can cause some mutations, but it probably wouldn’t actually happen like that. But that’s okay, it’s a video game and a TV show, it’s supposed to be entertaining — that’s fine. The most important thing we can do is to not have a nuclear war in the first place. And that should always be the first option to address the risk of nuclear war. In the event of an actual nuclear war, for people who are in the immediate vicinity of the explosion, there’s not much that can be done. The force of a nuclear explosion is too much. Buildings will be destroyed, people will be killed, that’s just how it’s going to be. Then for the rest of the world, this is where things get interesting. The plausible nuclear war scenarios would not have nuclear explosions across the whole world. First of all, we just don’t have that many nuclear weapons, which is a good thing. Second of all, much of the world is just not a likely target in any actual nuclear war scenario. You know, I live in New York City, it’s a good chance I would die, right? We are a likely target of nuclear explosions. But across much of the world, across Latin America, across Africa, large portions of Asia — these are countries that are not involved in any significant disputes with the nuclear-armed countries. There’s only a few nuclear-armed countries, and we tend to have our nuclear weapons pointed at each other and at our close allies, maybe. So unless you happen to live near [a nuclear missile silo], you’re probably not going to get hit, you’re probably going to survive the immediate attack. Then there are a few things that you’re going to want to look at. The two big global effects are one, nuclear winter, and two, damage to the global economy. If you start removing hubs from the economy, that’s going to have an effect on the rest of the economy. What would that effect be? Well, nobody really knows, we’ve never tried it before. That’s something that every country would have to deal with. At a minimum, there’s going to be some sort of supply chain shocks. Also, nobody’s really studied this in much detail — we could at least try studying it a little bit. There has been more research on nuclear winter — I’m using the term nuclear winter broadly to refer to all of the global, environmental effects of nuclear war that come from basically the ashes of burning cities and burning other places going up into the stratosphere, which is the second level of the atmosphere, and it stays up there for months, or even years. That can have a variety of effects. One of the biggest being plants don’t grow as much, because it’s colder, it’s darker, there may be less precipitation. So there are some projections and very severe agricultural shortfalls. It could take a lot of effort just to survive, even for countries that had nothing to do with a conflict that caused the war. How is the US prepared to preserve the lives of its civilians in the event of a nuclear war or other catastrophic events with similar impacts, if at all? My understanding from this is that we’re just not really prepared to handle this type of situation, that we have some emergency management capabilities, but we push past the reasonable limits of those capabilities pretty quickly in these very extreme scenarios. So would we be able to do some things to help out? Yeah, sure. Would we be able to keep society intact? Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. This is really just something that we are not currently set up to do. Frankly, this would be a good thing to invest more in for the United States government and other governments, to invest more in the capabilities of more successfully surviving these extreme catastrophe scenarios. Nuclear war is one of them, it’s not the only one. This is something that we could and, I think, should do better at. In the show, a select few of the population get to live safely in bunkers underground — those who have access to power and money, generally. In real life even, there’s a community of wealthy people who have invested in bunkers in case of emergencies. How do we ensure shelter and refuge for as many people as possible in these kinds of situations? Yes, there are wealthy people who are making these preparations. There are also the survivalists, the preppers, who are doing similar sorts of things, often with a much deeper commitment to actually surviving. Having a bunker in New Zealand doesn’t do you very much good if you’re in the United States during the time of the war. So for people living out in more strategic locations on a permanent basis, those people may be a lot more likely to survive something like a nuclear war, which targets the big cities in ways that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t survive the nuclear explosion. It just doesn’t work that way. What does bring benefits is having the resources in place to deal with the aftermath, which for nuclear war could include a combination of food stockpiles, and preparations to continue making food through any agricultural shortfalls with nuclear winter, could include the public health capabilities to manage the effects. If we see significant supply chain shocks, and just general disruption of how a civilization functions, that can create major public health challenges even away from where the attacks occurred. And also, the social and psychological and institutional preparedness. This is a really big challenge — getting people to wrap their minds around and make actual serious plans with institutional weight behind them, to be prepared to deal with this sort of thing. It’s not easy. This is not something that we like to think about, like to work on, this is not happy stuff, right? It’s tough because most of the time, you don’t need it. In fact, hopefully you never need it. And yet, if something like this happens, and it could happen, then this could be the difference between life and death for a large number of people. Why is there this ever-present fascination with stocking up on supplies? Whether it’s bunkers or emergency kits, it feels like people can buy their way to safety — I’m curious what you think is the underlying dynamic here? Well, first of all, it’s just interesting. I’m fascinated by it, even if I myself am a real failure of a prepper. Despite my line of work, I’m actually not personally very good at this, plus I live in Manhattan — my default expectation is that I would just die. I don’t know my way around this stuff. But some people do, and you know, more credit to them for taking on that sort of responsibility. And a lot of this is things that any of us would be well-served by doing even for a much more basic set of catastrophes. I remember, a few years ago, I went to a meeting of the New York City preppers group. And I was a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping to meet some really crazy, eccentric people. And it just wasn’t. The group was led by a police officer who was just doing this in his spare time, this little public service, and the people there were normal and they were just trying to learn some basics of what to do. And it turned out some of the basic preparations, it’s a lot of the stuff that FEMA recommends people do for basic disaster preparedness. Now, is that gonna be enough for a nuclear war? Maybe not. For that, you might need something more serious, and some people are trying to do that sort of serious thing. In the event of a nuclear war, that might be the difference between them surviving and then them not surviving. It’s entirely reasonable that there’s some people out there doing it. For the rest of us, we should, I think, broadly be supportive of this. I wouldn’t look at those people as eccentric crazies — I would look at them as people who are taking the responsibility of ensuring their own survival and their family’s survival across a wide range of scenarios. That’s commendable, and I wish that there was more of a public or communal attitude toward: Can we help all of us to do more along these lines? Because we could end up really needing it. While the US hasn’t faced any events as deeply catastrophic for our survival as nuclear warfare would be, are there past crises that we can look to and learn from in an effort to prepare for the worst in the future? This is a major challenge in the study of global catastrophic risk. We don’t really have a lot of data points. I mean, modern global civilization has never been destroyed before, which is a good thing. That’s, of course, a good thing. But for research purposes, it means a lack of data. What we have to do is make use of what information we do have. And events like the Covid-19 pandemic are one really important source of information. Another we can try to learn from [is] major catastrophes that have occurred across human history. Then also for the local scale disasters that occur on a relatively frequent basis: natural disasters, violent conflicts, and so on. All of this does provide some insight into how human societies respond to these sorts of situations. The best we can do is take what we do have experience with, what we do have data on, and extrapolate that as well as we can to these other scenarios that have never happened before, and use that as the basis for using our best judgment about how we can survive and cope with it. And along the way, we can perhaps use that as that much more motivation to prevent these scenarios from happening in the first place, which, again, is always the best option. Ideally, the world never finds itself in a situation as devastating to human life as global nuclear war would be. How do we reduce that risk as best as possible? There are a lot of small-picture things that can be done, and then there is that one big-picture thing that, in my opinion, is not getting the attention that it deserves. The small picture things — and in my experience, this is the primary focus of work on nuclear war risk reduction — are just the day-to-day management of nuclear weapons systems and relations between the countries that have them. This was all especially pronounced recently during the most tense moments of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and is probably still a day-to-day concern for the people who manage the nuclear weapons systems in Russia, in the United States, and France and the UK. There’s a lot to be done there to prevent things from escalating, and this is important work. In my opinion, none of this solves the underlying issue: which is that there are these countries that have nuclear weapons, some of them in rather large numbers. And so those nuclear weapons are pointed at each other and may at some point get used. My view is that the only real solution to this is to improve the relations between these countries, enough that they don’t feel that they need the nuclear weapons anymore. Now, that process can include attention to how terrible the aftermath of nuclear war would be that makes countries that much more eager to get rid of these terrible weapons. But I have a hard time seeing any significant nuclear disarmament without significant improvements in the relations between the countries that have them, the most important of which is Russia. This is not a quick-fix solution. This is something that, if it’s going to happen, it would probably happen over the decades.

Here are this week's Free for All letters.