The Future of Nuclear Weapons and the Next Great War
A Q&A with Elbridge Colby about how the U.S. prepares for the global conflicts of 2070 and beyond.
What’s old is new again.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
I spend a great deal of my life thinking about nuclear weapons. You can imagine I'm murder at a cocktail party. As the Cold War faded, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust with it, people like me were considered yesterday’s news. Now, as the world enters a renewed era of great-power competition, I like to think we were simply prescient.
If so, there was a whole lot of prescience on display at the Council on Foreign Relations last month at an event aptly titled “Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?” It featured a lively and intelligent debate between Nina Tannenwald of Brown University and Elbridge Colby, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. She took the “no” side and he took the “yes.” While I like to maintain a journalistic objectivity, there may be a clue to my bias in that I decided to interview him.