that would include me. congratulations and thank you for sharing your talk with us today. [applause]

welcome to the woodrow wilson center we are scholarship driven and nonpartisan and happy to welcome all of you here today and c-span which is also filming this further book talk so thank you all.

we power ourth discussions of te critical challenges facing us today. at the new book focuses on one of the most unique. challenges, a nuclear competition among the united states, russia and china you can find it online on our website. for this discussion i am very proud to be sharing the stage with the best of the best director for international security studies, his strategic vision has shaped the wilson center itself it's shaped how many of us understand nuclear

issues and nonproliferation. his previous books into the nuclear crisis have defined debates in washington and beyond and that's no surprise because goal observed on the d national security for proliferation and the consultant to the los alamos national laboratory. his latest book goes straight to the questions we are facing and i appreciate the opportunity to get yourgh insight. to help us ask the right questions we've asked david to singer to be part of this panel. he's been asking the right questions and the correspondent he is also a distinguished fellow.en his most recent book was the perfect weapon of war, sabotage and fear in the cyber age which

reads like a thriller for those thatan haven't read it yet and u should get started because the next book will be coming out. i am going to start with a little quote and that is in may of 2022, henry kissinger said that we were living in a totally new era. cold war dynamics are being reshaped. can we draw from the lessons we learned and apply them to risk management for the future? i leftto that open and many oths i'm going to turn it over to david. he's going to lead a discussion foren a few minutes and then we will open the floor to questions and questions from the online participants. if you are participating online please look for the submit a question box and then it will pop up. i will be able to see it and

asked the question as part of the discussion. so, david over to you. >> thank you very much for giving us not only this book but your whole series of books on this topic working on my third book at the wilson center the second one with robin down the hall. if it's late it's not my fault. >> a big thanks as well to rob who makes sure it's not only on the edge of scholarship but right onth the news that it's nt simply going off in directions that are of great academic

interest but also great practical purpose and that is truly the case may be even more so than those at the time you wrote them and remain so today national security officials in washington have been trying to figure out the change relationship between russia and china, the nature of cooperation and what that means with such expansion that of the public estimates the pentagon suggest will bring them from the minimum deterrent of 300 weapons currently to about a thousand by the end of this decade in 1500

by 2035 which would be coincidentally exactly around the limits they were facing now with new start that expires in number 1,000 days with no real prospect it looks like something being negotiated to replace it. a great article called the three body problem that rob is trying to address here today. barack obama talked about redesigning u.s. t strategy to diminish the role of nuclear

weapons in american foreign policy that we find ourselves in the situation where it's a risk of heading the other way. so talk us through the thesis of the instability which is to say why is it that introducing a third major strategic adversary is so complicated it's not immediately obvious to everyone why it undoes so much that we know about where that we think we know. let me address by the obvious starting point with my publication try polar instability. a china becamein a nuclear weapn

states but long had an arsenal that was small relative to that of the united states and soviet union. as you mentioned china is now under the modernization program which is comprehensive economic military new assertive political role encompasses the drive towards numerical parody in the united states. it's compounded by the developments first competition is extending into newly domains. there are no guardrails in the coldha war era that's been dismantled to the point of near collapse so the competition among the powers is essentially unconstrained now and third, as

we know from the headlines, the ongoing crises in taiwan. these developments, system-level change and drivers of potential escalation in the crisis are eroding the foundations strategic stability. during the cold war, the foundation of strategic stability was a stable balance of terror between the united states and the soviet union. after the cuban missile crisis they each deployed secure and vulnerable systems that created neutral vulnerability and the retaliatory capability on both sides which was the hallmark of the mutual vulnerability created a stable piece that was the

foundation. with the balance off terror tigard it isreflect competitione peripheral areas will and other crisis points during the cold war. my central argumentpm is the developments i mentioned in the system-level change was the new developments, cyber and outer space, the lack of constrained and ongoing crises the balance of terror is less stable as the incentives for preemptive action and the stakes are no longer peripheral or parts of the third world these are vital interests. ukraine for the future of europe, taiwan is central in northeast asia and a declared a vital interest of both sides so

the balance of tigard is less stable into the stakes are vital. that's great and that takes us to the central question. so the argument of the book is you can'tit expand that understanding of the mutual destruction which is the key to the contest with the soviet union and its and of course the successor state. but once you add in china and the easy relationship that they had with russia, you get what was said, a conceptual problem to sort of correlate this with your argument.

you've got to change the traditional approach of equalizing weapons or strategic delivery systems. but how to do that is still unclear.hi since the process has emerged, i've talked about it with a handful of members in the senate. the understanding of the instabilities being inserted is pretty weak right now so give a fairly concrete sense of why this is such a different deterrence problem and how it is we might think of some frameworks to address it.

>> numbers of strategic warheads and as i laid out in my initial comment, there are drivers of escalation and it's in the context there is no ongoing dialogue with either of the parties. we are in the middle of the war it's not the time to have that conversation. with china and a hat tip to my colleague wems don't have common terms oft reference or the shad history with them. the dates, 1914, 1962 don't have the same meaning to them. the concept of deterrence robert was telling me if you deconstruct theth characters tht go into their word for deterrence is not only what we think of as a threat to prevent him action but has a compelling aspect which could open the door to the coercive diplomacy so the frameworkg we are not operating

from the conceptual framework and then once if that isn't enough of a hurdle you have the dynamic. it'sth in the context there's these drivers i mentioned at the outset and we had a number of wholesale alerts. they may not think that it's

escalatory and the third is deliberate and i think this is the current constellation of factors. the nobel prize winner talked about the competition and risk-taking and most acutely it could lead china to shift its calculus and i'm sure that it will turn to it facing a simultaneous crisis that played out over the weekend but also the military front which is

undergoing a ukrainian counteroffensive which creates a decision point for putin on kind of escalation or not. >> that's what i want to turn to next. your mention of schelling who was the original sort of the theorist in the final exam and doesn't want to go revisit so let's dig in a little deeper on russia as you know we've had a lot of things that have been unraveling the nuclear balance just with russia alone, we've had with the demise of the series of treaties that was already happening before president trump took office but was accelerated during that time. i mentioned a new start which was extended for five years at the very beginning of the biden

administration has no provision for another renewal so you would have to start negotiating from the groundmi up. they started those preliminary discussions when the' war broke out. they haven't had any in 16 months. the threat to use tactical weapons by putin at various points led to president biden to say at a fundraiser in new york lastse october that we were the closest we had been to an armageddon moment at any time since the cuban missile crisis which i think kind of shocked the people standing around james murdoch's living room with a nice glass of white wine in their hands who hadn't really thought that they were coming for him armageddon speech. so, even if china wasn't revising its strategy, would you

argue that what held the balance of terror together during the cold war you refer to it would be falling apart anyway? >> that is a great question. we are in a situation where we are in the midst of essentially two cold war's, one with russia and one with china. the new cold war's are playing out in a time when the foundations of strategic stability that emerge in the old cold war are eroded and are with nothing to supplant it because there's no dialogue and i think one of the questions implicit in yours is this truly a triangular relationship and in the study by talk about i don't go for astrophysics i go for plane geometry and t it's more of an isosceles triangle it was never

trulyf equal you just think oft as a 20 trillion-dollar economy in this millennium it's not a major world power in terms of arsenals. china moved from the minimum deterrent. i think that in terms of framing the question is it truly do they face a russia problem and china program and i think that they

are not adversarial states at this time. they combine both capabilities and the united states has to dealer with them in those terms but there's no one like what does the problem mean for us because the prospect is removed at this point. there isn't agreement yet.

he said in the same piece this see russia and china getting together on nuclear strategies. ond the other hand we have rusa and china they see an advantage they put together a common nuclear strategy even if they both reserved all their authorities and f so forth to themselves.

>> currently their interests align. they pulled a reverse kissinger's words. the. for them the issue of american hyperpower, but the no limits sounds like hyperbole and at times contested border. it pivoted from natural gas to

europe to try to shift to china as a potential market. russia transferred early warning systems in 2018 this was in the press. china has a launch on the running doctrine and we have had a history that i eluded to the falls alerts, so that is a real concern and topic on the dialogue and this is where the numbers come in does that mean the united states should have the force equal that it would haveus to be equal to russia and china and their you get into the issue that goes back to the cold

warra era and the historical context how much is enough and i think while the united states has two thirds ofll the deterret and existing technologies and vulnerable submarines that could more than mount a devastating blow on russia and china putting both of them out of existence as functioning societies and we are under a threat, commence or get threat from them and that has been this mutual assured destruction and the balance of terror as a foundation that is hard to adjust i don't think the numbers per se make a huge difference. quantity becomes quality at

times, yes the numbers going up is a factor affecting strategic stability, but i think in the publication i look at these drivers of escalation i started out with slavery and outer space. no constraints, no common dialogue or common conceptual framework and an ongoing war and a potential crisis in china over taiwan and the conventional balance shifting at the same time the nuclear balance to work china and the question in terms of managing relations is could this be to increased chinese risk-taking. robert daly has a nice

formulation where if the united states does the necessary, prevent an erosion of the conventional balance in northeast asia and maintain the nuclear balance of terror that we are not going to change the long-term objective. they are all in as a part of china andki our kind of anxiousness to move forward on it but we can change the calculus of decision so that it will say not this year. and ifyi we push it, push it off and by endom time is important. that is the taiwan piece that we are happy to see more. >> you have this really fascinating section that discusses the basic principle document that came out under which russia would employ nuclear weapons. a lot of this i believe was done by the genital who's been in the

news just a little bit this weekend. you say it should be viewed in the context of these principles and one of them is an existential threat to the state. we haven't seen that some time but that is synonymous with his regime and its provoking western fears. is it your guesswork that we see a d paranoid vladimir putin whos within a good reason likely to turn back to his nuclear arsenal the way he has when things were going badly in ukraine?

>> it's an existential threat to the state that is synonymous with the putin regime being connected vessels and we try to parse that and say the united states said the regime change is not an objective but normal relations are not possible unless putin is in power. the director of central intelligence said in his word desperate putin might consider nuclear use and one of the conditions has been a collapse of the military friend in ukraine or it's a threat back in

the kremlin order crimea. i think this brings us to what happened over the weekend as they say on the law and order tv show ripped from today's headlines. and i don't have an answer to your question but let me just kind of analytically lay out lat where the debate is. priork to this weekend i think there was a, there was one view sort of driven by the view of the desperate putin might act is that if the government went for it and tried to reestablish the boundaries of ukraine that that could be a condition under which putin would consider the use of a tactical nuclear weapon as a shock to the system say western governments need to get control

over zelenskyy and ray and rain hemantand bring this confln end. the bideny, administration national security advisor jake sullivanho using the metaphor he said we are not going to slice nuclear use is nuclear use into the low weapon would be considered a nuclear weapon. down the deterrent model there needed to be care with the objectives because if they went in turn with status quo antebellum backnt to 2014 that could trigger that the nuclear use. since the weekend where he faced an existential threat apparently,g and it's opaque and playing out in real time that now there's been the view that look what happened he probably

made a compromise didn't immediately escalate. that assessment is what led to those calls for the geographic aspirations. that is the pole of the day right now and i don't have an answer to it. if ukraine goes for it it could trigger escalation and the other is he will accommodate and they should himself deter themselves by trying to rein in the counteroffensive but i don't haveve an answer. >> we are getting near the moment so let me ask you one or two more because it is fascinating. so imagine you've got the

americans on your case to start up some kind of discussion. the first thing you think is they've got 1515 deployed into several thousand stored we've got 200 to 300 deployed building silos it's going to be a decade before or may be more before we are up to their levels. what possible incentive does he have to enter that discussion until his arsenal is roughly the size of the u.s. arsenal or the russian arsenal or until it's vulnerable because the submarines into their capabilities as those are? >> minimal incentive to maintain

under conditions. chinese decision-making is opaque. we don't know why they decided. it mightat be one version of what's going on. this is a great superpower in the world but we also have to be, take into account what we do and how it's perceived that there were one line of strategic analysis and they could have the first district during a crisis and we would be able to dictate a pattern of stability. they read these journals and have the capabilities to build up. an irony is they have a very

robust program to build long-range missiles and it's not a heavy lift for them to ramp up. i think that weex have to be modestfu in our expectations it would be useful if we had the talks the chinese have which is a bit of a dialogue from the chinese perspective. the american rationale to login the superiority and it's their narrative and they can put together the history p and at te thedata points to support their view of history. what can wewe do from where we e at now i think a strategic

stability talk with russia, with chinasu should be on issues of concept, deterrence and drivers of escalation so there's a clarity of understanding. we are not going to probably enter an area where there will be a new arms control agreements per se. but we may be able to develop understandings about norms. china did an anti-satellite contest that generated thousands of pieces of space debris and low earth orbit in our own international space station,se t to dodge around some of these pieces of generated interest, science fiction movies as well. it is a known interest low earth orbit with antisatellite tests. that would be a constraint and would assist in moderating any temptation to start launching attacks on satelliteswo becausee would have tested the systems

to do that.llow you artificial intelligence is a topic that i know you are addressing and you've done your reporting on this in your new book. if you combined launch on warning with early warning systems that are known to have had. and as the line from dr. strangelove went after, there was the attack on the then soviet union. a general criticism said i wouldn't knock the whole program because of one failure. well. if we have one failure, there would issue it would be, you know, catastrophic. if you add to that and, this is for chapter you probably haven't even written yet.

a.i. artificial intelligence to automatic launch systems. i say no in terms of the potential, you know, threat for for escalation. that's why the biden administration in a smart move is laid out. norm of conduct to manage a artificial intelligence in the military sphere. and one of the norms was that i don't think anyone would take issue with is that a human being should be the chain of decision making on nuclear use. so let's go for norms as a vehicle. and the united states has to do its we have to play out our hand and and to reinforce deterrence and extended deterrence, which i know is of interest to. robin one variant of deterrence we must most of us recognize deterrence. deterrence by punishment, the threat of punishment if you do this then that. but another the other variant of of of deterrence is deterrence by denial, which is that are

taken to confound and to block the efforts of the adversary so that if we harden our infrastructure to protect against malware attacks, if we harden our satellites to make less vulnerable to probing by an adversary, toughen our our targets that could be a deterrent for saying you you're an attack wouldn't work. exactly. couldn't be sure that it would work. and and launching it would would would would you know start a process that might where they might lose control or rather a last point here you raised a i there is a lot of discussion about making that the first area that you walled off for this but the last thing i wanted to ask you about is the use by china and russia now of hypersonic delivery which is a way basically evade our protections add to the instability. absolutely i mean emerging technologies that and is where this picks up the comment i

think of former secretary about you know numbers and concepts and categories. hypersonics are a new category it can be used, you know, suborbital and deliver, you know, an ordinance at a distance, you know, in tens of minutes, which decreases time for decision makers to make decisions. and it's being tested in both convince and potentially nuclear mode. china and russia. the united states has said ours are only for conventional ordnance. it's unclear with china and russia. so if they see a hypersonic system coming in which can evade you defenses and strategic defense has been kind of the black hole of defense in terms of money to try to get the desired outcome. is it a nuclear system coming in or a conventional one and that blurring conventional and

nuclear which arises in a number of contexts like we the co-location of conventional and nuclear systems. so if you're talking a conventional system that's co-located with nuclear, you may be escalating it without. and barry posen from mit with wilson wrote a book and really didn't than the lead thinking on this inadvertent escalation from the co-mingling of conventional nuclear systems. so so the motto of the wilson center to peace might unofficial might an unofficial motto is to peace. long may it require study. we are. there are a lot of challenges there, analytical and otherwise. and the wilson center's role is to promote policy relevant scholarship, which is what i've tried to do in this publication and it very successfully. so robert, let me turn this back you for your own questions and those of our audience. thank you so for the audience in the room. your moment is coming. right? so think about this get your questions together.

got a bunch of them online so that you've got competition meanwhile while you're thinking i'm going to just ask one of my own questions to robert, drawing on my time. some of you know, i was our acting ambassador in berlin and i am especially attuned therefore to how our allies rely on the extended deterrence that couples our security, the ability to resist coercion. and you talk about this a bit in your book. can you tell us more about the hardware and software needed to keep that extended deterrence going. and my question is we doing enough? great question. and let me preface it with a historical point of reference. right now, there are nine nuclear weapons states. the five permanent members of the security council that were brought into the nuclear treaty as nuclear weapon states. there are three states, india, pakistan, israel, which their sovereign right and never joined the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. you had north korea became a

nuclear weapon state in 2006. if treated differently because it was in the npt and cheated within it. and then you have iran, which has a nuclear threshold state. we don't live in a world where there are 30 or 40 nuclear weapons states. and that wasn't over that assumption wasn't always the in the 1950s. there were studies by the rand corporation in 1962, president gave a speech at the u.n. general assembly. he talked about a world of 30 or 40 nuclear weapon states. that led to the negotiation as the culminated the nuclear inoperative nation treaty. we don't live in that world and one of the major reasons why we don't and there's an established literature on this is the us extended deterrence commitment why germany doesn't think it needs its own nuclear weapon. japan doesn't. south korea doesn't. the nuclear umbrella. the national security adviser, jake sullivan, talked about the hardware and, the software of extended deterrence. so the during the ukraine war the united states naito argument did its dual use nuclear capable

aircraft in in europe. there are questions about northeast asia where the united states, russia and the then-soviet union withdrew two tactical nuclear weapons from the korean peninsula. and there's a question now about whether how the united states should address the nuclear balance in northeast asia to address this competition, risk taking that i alluded to, these are the china and taiwan the nuclear piece of it. what what is necessary there to bolster japan and south korea? what can we do? we can do more. that's the hard work of it, so to speak. the software side, the consultations, which are institutionalized and the nuclear, you know, group within planning group in the naito which you were working in brussels as well, are conversant all about that they've it's about to go the natal summit meeting covering that we're i'm nuclear planning discussions are going to be point you know

important point on the agenda we don't have that type institutionalized framework with japan you know in south korea. but there are discussions with them to talk about, you know, nuclear contingencies, what can be done to bolster deterrence taking into account japan's constitution, which places limitations on their ability to develop systems and south korea, where there is a debate and certain disjunction actually now between popular opinion on developing an independent capability and the south korean governments commitment to kind of its relationship with the united states and the the extended deterrence, you know, commitment. so that's is are we doing enough? it just requires constant tending and adjustments as circumstances change. and i think those circumstances have emphatically changed in the last year. yeah. okay. all right. for those in the room, this is your moment right. we have a microphone.

so this will this will eventually be coming your way. and i'll take the question here. but dave ottaway here at the woodrow wilson center. rob, what is your assessment of putin moved tactical nuclear weapons belarus and is this something you think the naito or the u.s. should be responding to. well putin, who operates from his own, you know, historical network of grievance and the place of russia in, the world and he's made a number of assertions that russia has a special commitment to russians outside of the russian federation. russia does not have natural boundaries. there are 25 million or so russians in other parts in adjacent countries. and he's declared kind of an extraterritorial commitment to defend those. i remember from the cold war period when the russians, the

then soviets would say, we feel surrounded by nato and china, you know, the quip back was, if had 11 time zones, i'd feel surrounded to and why belarus? i mean, belarus a you know, let's call as it is, it's a vassal state of of of russia. lukashenko has kind of limited for autonomous action. it's sort of in if you want to go there in kind mafia kind of matter, you know, analogies, it's one of the five families he's out there, the belarus, you know, portfolio and the notion that that belarus would autonomous control over russian nuclear systems really kind of beggars belief they would remain under control of russians. they've been deployed. putin, of course, in his own kind of you know, this is on framework of of, you know,

grievance and russia's in the world basically said we are doing nothing different than what the united states has done by deploying tactical nuclear weapons in europe with dual use. you know, dual use system. you know, so, again, a bad point because it is, in fact, what exactly. yes. yeah. before i take another audience question, don't worry. i'm coming back to your i'm going to give you an online question. it it comes from from a colleague at king's college and and also because it is very specific in what it is proposing. so i thought i would i would give this to you with from clare whalen with china under an arms chasing mentality, do you believe that they could be persuaded to in arms control discussion and if the u.s. and russia were to agree on a middling number that the three pole poles could settle on and said let's say hard at 750, you talked a little bit about about the disparities in forces.

i'm going to give you her proposal, too. well, that's a great question. and in david kind alluded to it right now. there's the new start treaty, which had its lineage back to the cold war era through different iterations which limit the united states and to 1550 deploy both, you know, systems russia has under putin has suspended aspects the of compliance with that in terms of consultations and inspections. but russia significantly has not abrogated treaty as in know signaling a step of building up beyond 1550. the that's that's been posed you know online i think is really a central one as we move forward and look to 2026 and what will happen then in i heard one analyst say that arms is dead, dead, dead. you know, one dead.

what would have been enough? the others are redundant but to make the make the emphatic i think that you know back to you know countries have interests you know and even with the tortured history and china has been party to it and that they have numerically inferior so asking them join and lock in american superiority is a real concern for them but could just analytically and i would defer to the china watchers like robert daly you know on whether this is realistic or not. i could see a chinese interest in wanting to lock the united and russia into a lower number rather than having just unconstrained, you know, so that it's analytically possible to see how we could get there politically, i don't know. and i end the part of the study with. a nice quote from from from who was challenged like you crack the atom and you unravel the of the atom and yet you can't come

up with a system to manage the control of the of atom so that we don't destroy ourselves, to destroy humanity and. an einstein, you know, quipped back, that's because, you know, physics is easier than politics. and we're now in the realm of like what you can analytically out. and i really that that was i think the approach in the book here it's not a hard advocacy it's trying to lay out the analytical you know landscape and the fissures and the debates are and what would be the prerequisite it's for policy makers to make decisions such as the one reflected in the question which is a great i'm not sure the 750 number would be the one that locked into it might be a higher number but i think the concept of the concept is is analytically valid, whether politically we can get there or not, i think is the open question. okay. all right. so we are in the room and i'm going to take that right down here. yeah, that's you.

hi, robert. my name is yegor. until last month, i was a fellow, the wilson center, the kissinger institute. now u.s. corresponding for the south china morning post. my question is regarding the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in ukraine by russia many china experts, analysts. they say that if putting this size to deploy tactical nuclear weapons, ukraine, that would be the red line for beijing, because according to the core principle like foreign policy, quote principles, nuclear weapons should be for deterrence not to attack another country, but also like territorial integrity, it was supposed to be of the core principles for the chinese as we think that that's not the case since they've been aligning with russia since the invasion of ukraine. and i was wondering first, if you that china would indeed side with the west if russia deploys

nuclear weapons in ukraine. and secondly, if that would give a reason to get directly in the conflict, arguing the nuclear contamination would be sort of like a direct attack. sure. like me or allies. thank you. well, that contingency would really put the no limits formulation to the test. i think that there would be a limit. the chinese have already alluded to it. there have been meetings with the chinese and indian leaders with where they'd contact with putin, where i mean, they don't use our terminology red line, but where they made it clear that nuclear nuclear use would be a threshold that would be a create a whole new, you know, international reality. so i think that's been that's something that the russians, you know, have to take into account. but point about, you know, territorial integrity russia has

now annexed the provinces you know blossomed in the ukraine and of clara claim that they are part of the russian federation. so if and this is the nub russia says we'll use nuclear weapons if there's a threat to the state which they hold is synonymous with putin regime. and that state also now encompasses these this irredentist that russia had against against ukraine. and that's that creates the zone of uncertainty on an escalation. i tried you know, i characterized where the debate is now of whether of how the situation in the battlefield could affect, you know. putin's calculus of deterrence, having just been through, you know, weekend where there was a surprise existential threat to the survival of his regime. now, for those in the room, you're going to have a chance to talk to rob after this. so i'm going to take one last question from from our online

contributors, and that is from former ambassador laura kennedy, who asks, do you see, the ability of the p5 process to tackle some of these issues that you have eloquently laid out. after all, experts have now spent years developing a common glossary discussing doctrine maybe baby steps, but at this difficult time, it's the only game town. that's a great question. you know, the p5 plus one mechanism was championed by the wilson center own baroness catherine to bring about the iran nuclear deal and the the prior administration, u.s. administration from that deal. there had been hopes that that model could be built upon to address other issues. and even when ukraine after 2014, when and david spent a lot of time in eating chocolate covering these meetings as i recall. pulling late nights even during

that period, russia, china cooperated with the united in bringing about the nuclear the iran nuclear deal because they had a shared interest in constraining iran's nuclear ambitions. i think we're the middle of a war in ukraine. and there have been we're at a nadir point with with china. so i don't know what the immediate practical possibilities are of a p5 plus one right now, russia is as a pariah, so it would not be not be included, but think that on a pragmatic basis and as you put my cards on the table, people people talk about what your theory of international relations, which is really kind of a disguised question about ideology. i'm a card carrying kind of what works and what's in our interest. and we should we should try it. and that's what's kind of motivated the analysis here. we should look for opportunities to explore and how this mechanism could be used. but we're not. there were two nader point with which china need to do some

rehabilitative, rehabilitative military work to get to that point where we could even resume a conversation with china about other issues. just a footnote on. back in the cold war, china was in of proliferation was a more the more the better or more the heart. you know they of shrugged at increased numbers of nuclear weapon states and china transferred you know know how to to to pakistan which found its way to to to the libya. the chinese have really gotten religion, so to speak, nuclear issues and recognized, you know. they they've they've taken proliferation nonproliferation on board as a as an interest. they've always been as helpful as they could be on north korea. but i think that that there is some predicate there for engaging them certainly on on these issues. but it's going to be a steep

climb. thank you. so i want to thank both of our panelists rob writing this book and making the geometry for us. david for asking all the right questions and guiding us through the through the book and and posing some questions from your own experience as well. so for those of you who are here in person book is available outside in hardcopy. it is also available online, an e-book on the wilson center website. so do please go there. no excuses for not reading it right. and thanks again to c-span, also featuring us. thank you. we been.