Ep 129: Frank Gavin on Nuclear Strategy and Ukraine (War in Ukraine #2)

Frank Gavin, the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and contributor to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, joins the show to talk about nuclear strategy and the war in Ukraine.
Times
• 01:36 Introduction
• 01:53 What are nuclear weapons for?
• 04:15 Pervasive but not used
• 09:53 Invasion insurance
• 17:58 Better to be near-nuclear
• 22:26 How might Putin use nuclear weapons?
• 26:04 Learning by doing
• 33:48 “It’s all happening at once”
• 41:31 Rattling the saber works
• 48:04 “We will get them back”
• 50:07 History and Strategy