Oh gosh Peter...age has been generous to you! Big fan 😅👊🏼

It was my good fortune to meet Sydney Drell during my freshman year at Stanford in 1968. Years later, I learned that he was probably the recipient of Andrey Sakharov’s smuggled letter describing the dangers of nuclear testing in the atmosphere, that led to the ban on such testing. A truly important historical figure.

Thank you for sharing this amazing conversation. Two superstar physicists on national security is more than I could expect. Drell's book on quantum field theory is translated in many languages and first I read. Regretfully his view on defense is not that convincing.

@harvardsmithdeangelo6905

4 ай бұрын

Quantum Fields, hahaha, there's toilet paper in many languages too

@Tomlovesgame

4 ай бұрын

G

@Tomlovesgame

4 ай бұрын

G

Love this look at the archives, more if you have them! Thanks for all.

I will never forget Edward Teller sitting in the middle of a giant stage at Air University speaking to the assembled Air Force War College students and faculty in the mid-1990s. He walked very slowly with an escort and using his cane to his seat at stage center. A seemingly frail, very elderly person. Then he sat down and without an introduction (which he rejected) his voice boomed out to the auditorium. He started with this insight: “The genius of the American political system is that it is based on the proposition that government is evil.” What followed was a phenomenal, energetic, well-structured lecture without notes or even a break. At one point he recalled detailed specifics of his advocacy for the thermonuclear bomb, a case study in Cold War bureaucratic and technocratic dynamics from almost 50 years prior. Phenomenal experience for a young officer. ☮️

Peter was so young! We all were, he's just aging better than many.

Edward Teller always got a bad Rep but he was a good one. In hindsight Reagan was right on his falcon stance in the Cold War and valuing deterrence not the Commie sympathizers and so was Teller over that media darling Oppenheimer. Does not matter that it was not technically possible to do a large scale SDI program deterrence still did the job and missile defense was and still is critical for examples in Ukraine today.

The production of this interview has it's own charm. You should shoot an interview in the retro style. With swag moments of entering the scene on the motorcycle (or in this one there was an episode with toy rockets) and noir-retrospective moments of over voicing of what's going on in the interview. And the music is just so outlandish and naughty.

Teller looked like Kissinger at the end

Wow - I had no idea UK had been going for so long! Please make these old episodes available on the podcast. Fascinating that they are talking about China being a threat back in 1996 _even Russia, which was still pre-Putun.

wow Peter has been in Hoover at least since 1996. Very long time. Hoover building and environment and all look very cozy and uplifting so good place to be.

Pursuing missile defense has always been a highly leveraged strategic enterprise because whether or not Sidney Drell or his fellow travelers believed they were either possible or affordable, both Russia and PRC authoritarians BELIEVED they were effective. Hard for Americans to understand, but their capacity for imagining that Americans could develop miraculous technology solutions was beyond engineering rationality. That was to our advantage. Knowing these adversaries as I did based on decades of studying what they said and did led me to advocate for missile defense development regardless of its engineering challenges. It’s called strategy and national security. Just my two cents! ☮️

Wow ❤

Wow!

Even today's missle defense systems are not nearly as effective in reducing risk as disarmament treaties had been before they were abandoned.

SDI in 1996!?! Who were they worried about?

@tommyrq180

4 ай бұрын

Russia and PRC. Easy answer. In particular, Russia’s entirely unstable “government” injected a lot of uncertainty into the nuclear balance. Although the Red Army, especially the forward-based units, atrophied badly after the end of the Cold War, Russia always retained a very large, capable intercontinental ballistic missile capability. All the triumphalists in the west preferred to ignore that, choosing instead during that era to unilaterally shrink US nuclear capabilities.

It seems that neither of these two eminent scientists recognized the magnitude of economic pressures that SDI and related weapons programs created for the Russians and the beneficial impact of such forces for the West. The Russians not only had to deal with the possibility that SDI might work but the costs that they would be forced to bear to respond.

@tommyrq180

4 ай бұрын

Yes, exactly. Strategy went out the window after winning the Cold War. Also we needed to include PRC in that calculation.

Hey, Youngster!

You had hair!

Drell died right?

Times goes by so fast. Thanks to SDI, North America is as safe as it used to be.

This was always just hocus pocus, friends.

Sid Drell happened to be wrong… really wrong…

Forty billion dollars was too much for the great minds of that time. Forty years later, trillions are our debt, and everyone is happy :-(

@Avi6703iva

4 ай бұрын

No great minds anymore. All of them are in climate change and inter-trans-screwed studies :-(

Relevant now that Israel has this technology

Dear Santa, Perhaps I'm alone in the sentiment, but I wish the words "republican" and "democrat" could be removed from discussions about serving team humanity. Also, please help us fix the defect that produces minds that use technology to cause harm to that team or its home.

I don't see the relevance of this discussion since the points discussed hinge on the political climate and technological capabilities that existed 28 years ago.

@jaybee9269

4 ай бұрын

You have no imagination.

@tommyrq180

4 ай бұрын

If you don’t see it, that’s interesting. Yet as someone who both lived and studied these issues throughout my career, this discussion was not only relevant throughout major power competition, but increasingly relevant as both Russia and PRC re-emerged as major power adversaries with increasingly modern, numerous nuclear forces. In truth, they were always there, but we used the term “re-emergence” as a way to get people to wake up. Those countries ALWAYS had these sorts of capabilities and their extreme allergy to missile defenses has always constituted a major aspect of strategic competition-one that advantaged the US.

About 5m in you can already see that Teller is right. Lets not waste money is just a ridiculous argument vs building a strategic capacity. One plus is that the tech never got built so it never got stolen.