NucleCast Episode 140: Joe Buff

Joe Buff’s 1/25/24 NucleCast Interview with Dr. Adam Lowther. Copyright 2024, edited by Joe Buff and reprinted with permission from Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance (ANWA) Deterrence Center. The podcast is also available with the video on NucleCast's YouTube channel.

Audio file

NucleCast Joe Buff.mp3

Note: Use of a “….” notation in this transcript indicates a brief pause in the discussion. Words in brackets “[ ?]” indicate text added for clarity by Joe Buff afterward, when reviewing and editing this transcript.

Transcript

Voice Over

This is a production of the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance (ANWA) Information Center, a 501C3 that seeks to educate key decision makers, stakeholders, and the general public to ensure broader understanding of information about strategic nuclear deterrence. Our Host is Dr. Adam Lowther, Co-Founder and Vice President of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies (NIDS). Our executive producer is Kimberly Cherington, and this episode has been engineered and mixed by David Frankel…. Help us grow our followers by sharing it, and follow the show on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as we post each new episode-broadcast.

Adam Lowther

Welcome back to another exciting episode of NucleCast. Of course, as always, I'm Adam Lowther and today we have a great guest. Now some of you, many of you probably already know the name Joe Buff. But Joe is, I don't know if you knew this about him, but he's actually an MIT trained mathematician. And he spent much of his middle career in the actuary world. And then he wrote, probably about 20 years ago, a series of technothrillers, the Captain Jeffrey Fuller novels, about future submarines in a tactical nuclear war at sea. And then in the latest, I don't know, handful of years or so, he's written a number of non-fiction [strategy analysis] books on nuclear deterrence. When we were talking earlier, before this episode, maybe a few weeks back, he said, Hey, if I were to come on NucleCast, what I would want to do is talk about how America can apply actuarial sciences to nuclear deterrence. And I thought, wow, that is a topic that we've never talked about and it's an interesting way to think about deterrence. And so with that, Joe, welcome to NucleCast.

Joe Buff

And thank you for having me, Adam, and also Merry Christmas, Happy New Year to all of your listeners out there.

Adam Lowther

Well, well, thanks. Same to you.

Joe Buff

Yes, let me begin by explaining three things: What actuaries do, What they know, and How they work. But as I do that, I'd like people to think in terms of, boy, this sounds exactly like what people do when they're developing nuclear deterrence posture. So, firstly, what do actuaries do? They work in the financial services industry, pensions and insurance, addressing some of the major calamities that can befall people in life, particularly: death, or living too long and running out of money, or disease, disability, property damage and so on…. What they know is that the right answer to figuring out what the premium should be for a given insurance policy is neither zero nor Infinity, but something somewhere in between that is very challenging to figure out well enough…. Then what they do is use a combination of mathematical modeling, technical skills, as well as curbside knowledge of many disciplines such as economics, psychology, law, accounting, and on and on, and come up with the calculation that keeps the insurance company from going bankrupt, [which can happen] in either of two ways. Firstly, if the premiums are too high. Then the company will never sell anything, but it does have to still cover its overhead costs, including the salary of all its actuaries, so it will go bust…. It will also go bankrupt if the premium is too low. In that case the stuff will sell like hot cakes, and you'll go bust as soon as you start having to pay claims but don't have enough money…. That being the case, what actuaries do is they have a series of approaches, concepts, techniques that they've developed over the decades that they've learned, sometimes the hard way, really help to solve this twin-bankruptcy problem, working on the bigger management team in an insurance company or corporate pension plan. A team that includes people from all kinds of skills, such as salesforce, underwriters, the investment department, IT department, treasurer, the executive suite, various administrators, and so on. Now, before I say anything more about the four basic techniques that actuaries use, I will now, as you may have already done as you listen, draw some quick parallels to the problem of National Defense in a dangerous outside world…. What people who think about nuclear deterrence do is address some of life’s major calamities. The worst of all imaginable. Man-made calamities of nuclear war. Then try to figure out how to mitigate it, prevent it, and at least if it happens then limit it and alleviate its worst outcome, which is of course, sadly, the extinction of the human race. And just as in the establishing of the exact premiums for an insurance policy, the people who decide on America’s nuclear posture look at a parallel question: How many nuclear warheads are enough for us, to deter our adversaries and defend ourselves and our allies? And again there are two extremes, neither of which is survivable in the long run, one of which is Global Zero, or at least Unilateral 0, which let's not here go into how stupid that is. We've heard it, you know, covered over and over again already by many others. And the other solution is an arms race to Infinity. And that is as destructive in the other direction…. So sadly the cut and dried fact that we face, which is what makes it complicated and what people are arguing over between the different camps and factions, is: What is the right answer? It’s somewhere between Zero and Infinity mathematically speaking, but it's not at either pole, so how do you go about figuring out, OK, here's a good solid figure…. It's the same problem that actuaries face. And as I began to learn and then think about nuclear deterrence, I networked with established pros, like a key mentor of mine Peter Huessey. He's been a “mentor by editing,” as I think of it, by looking at everything I've written and marking it up for me and I've learned tons from him, and from many other people whose names I don't have permission to mention, but they've been helpful as well... It really is a comparable process, optimizing premium dollars and optimizing [arsenal] warhead counts. In fact, in my first self-published work, which was Volume One of On 21st Century Nuclear Deterrence [2021], I offer, amongst various other things, a simple model where I figured out using some basic rules of thumb about survivability [of our weapons to an enemy surprise attack, and on the way to their targets], warheads needed per target, how many targets [we need to hold under threat to effectively deter our adversaries], and all that stuff, rules of thumb that prevailed in [Western] deterrence thinking during the Cold War. Cold War One, I should say. Then I said now that we are in what I consider to be real Cold War Two, how many nuclear warheads do we need to effectively deter 1 major adversary at the time, which is Russia? And I came up with a number through some simple modeling that I was amazed to see was almost exactly the figure that's in the New START Treaty. Now I'm going to be updating this in Volume Two that I'm working on now, because as Admiral Richard said, with the breathtaking breakout by China with their nuclear arsenal zooming to the same level that Russia and the US were [each] allowed in New START, all bets are off. 1550 “counted” strategic warheads, that's almost certainly nowhere near enough for America and NATO to effectively deter all the permutations and combinations that are possible with all of the nuke-armed adversaries large, medium, and small that we face in the outside world now. And that's just one example of how the actuarial perspective and actuarial techniques can shed light. Hopefully some helpful, useful light on some of the key problems of modern nuclear deterrence posture and practice.

Adam Lowther

Now one of the sort of key elements, both for you as an actuary and then within the deterrence world is there's a huge psychological element to determining, with risk, who takes risky behavior, you know, how do you do that? Sort of, predict that kind of human behavior and, you know, that goes for actuaries too. And you know when thinking about the size of nuclear arsenals it’s critical. So how do you, an actuary, get your head around effectively trying to understand and then predict human behavior, because with humans, once they know they're being watched and they know that you're trying to predict their behavior, they purposefully try to change the behavior. Because they don't like being predicted.

Joe Buff

I would say I call that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of People. You observe the experiment and that itself changes it. Actually, that's an excellent leading question because within the world of insurance and pensions, individuals do what actuaries call anti-selection, which is to figure out what the insurance company is offering. And then behave in exactly the best way to serve their own interests at the insurance company’s expense. And hey, don't you think that foreign adversaries do the same thing to us and our friends? Now as to the question How do you learn about this and figure it out and address it? I'll just say very quickly what you do is really, what I did or I do is what everybody does, which is that you've got to read the literature [both of deterrence and of human psychology] very carefully and thoroughly, think hard and critically, use a lot of common sense, all of your worldly experience, which in my case, never mind what that is, it is not insubstantial. And whatever career [field or fields] you've been working in, for however long, you always have a great learning laboratory of human nature, of campus and corporate and government politics. Of the strengths and weaknesses of different people, you work with [your and their relative level of] cognitive skills, you’re aware of peoples’ selective misperception. That's one of my favorite of all the cognitive biases. Seeing exactly what you want to see and discounting or ignoring anything that contradicts your preconceived notions…. In fact, one of my favorite models in this whole area of psychology is Tetlock. He has done studies, very disciplined scientific studies of two polar opposite personalities, the Foxes and the Hedgehogs. The Foxes are generalists. They process new information well. They're the first people to admit they made mistakes, they love to learn and correct their mistakes. Hedgehogs have one theory or dogma that to them explains everything in the world. They refuse to acknowledge any new information or that they're ever wrong. And scientific studies and mathematically rigorous peer review studies that he's published and others have done, too, show that in fact, the people who correlate to the traits of a Fox are much better at forecasting than those that correlate to a Hedgehog in any field, from sports betting or political election outcomes to, in particular, Foreign Relations and matters of international affairs, and one can go on and on. And in fact, I have done that in internal seminars for clients and in articles and books I’ve published about actuarial science and about nuclear deterrence, stuff we don't time for, as alas we don’t have forever today.

Adam Lowther

So if we were to think about, you know, other aspects of actuarial sciences that we can apply to deterrence at large, you mentioned that by using simple models, you were able to come up with a similar number in terms of what was in New START, but what are some other aspects of the actuarial sciences that apply to nuclear deterrence to help us, you know, do it better, because it's one of those things, it's like with war. You know you can reflect on conflict and then you can learn from it. But with nuclear conflict, you know, we've never done it. So in many respects, there's a lot of bad thinking that folks can get away with because there's no experience or case studies from whence you can draw [any convincing examples or counterexamples].

Joe Buff

Absolutely. There are a few things that I would be more than happy to say now to answer that. Firstly, the thing about nuclear deterrence problems and nuclear war fighting in the imagination is it's got great analogies to what Albert Einstein had to do. With his famous thought experiments that worked out the theory of relativity, where he had to imagine things going on over distances of billions of light years and billions of years in time. And he proceeded from a few simple empirical observations and 1st principles by working in his mind and on paper. And the fact is, is that nuclear deterrence, I find through my own experience the last decade or two [of self-study and research writings], is that the field is for various very good reasons, as you articulate Adam, uniquely suited to being explored in detail and somewhat rigorously by thought experiments, because we simply can't fight a nuclear war for real out there in the world without getting killed, any more than Einstein could, you know, travel for billions of light years over billions of years of time without him getting killed somehow, like sucked into a black hole…. Say, OK, so having said that. There's basically a collection of four actuarial techniques. These are not just best practices. They've been by now established as actuarial standards of practice that if you don't follow, you know you're going to be answerable to the Disciplinary Committee of the Board of Directors of the Society of Actuaries. And these are all directly applicable in defense and deterrence. And in fact they are, right now, being applied by many people out there, it's just useful to consider how an actuary came to them from a different direction than if you worked in the military or the civilian government or think tanks or academia, the defense contractors, the more traditional prior backgrounds of your guests…. From the actuarial perspective, the first rule is to do a series of modeling all with the same basic model but across a whole bunch of different scenarios about what the rest of life, the world out there, will look like over the years to come, and 30 years is a commonly used ultimate timeframe. What defense people typically call world creation, except instead of just coming up with the best estimate of the world [in future], you recognize that nobody has a true best estimate of tomorrow’s world let alone the day after. Because nobody has any idea what's going to go on out there with all the volatility, black Swans, discontinuities and so on. So you've got to look across a whole bunch of different scenarios. The next thing that you do is you try to optimize your, well, in the case of defense, it's you’re forced to optimize your force structure and your defense posture. Optimize not to a best estimate scenario or to just the scenario you like best, but [you need to optimize the probabilistic or stochastic expectation of your outcome] across all of the possible scenarios. So you will need a very large number of very diversified, dispersed, flexible, adaptable military platforms and personnel with tons of resilience and readiness. A super strong industrial base and supply chain, lots of devoted loyal allies whom you're devoted and loyal to, and so on and so forth. Then the next thing that you do -- and the analogy I draw here is straight out of what actuarial and investment people do in insurance companies to deal with the need to match the assets to the liabilities, so that when you have to pay claims, your company’s cash outflow, you've got cash inflow from your investments that don't whipsaw you or make you go bankrupt because there's a big [cash flow] gap, or what can easily happen, you have to liquidate a bunch of your assets [held] on the books, stocks and bonds and real estate at a time when the markets have tanked. Tanked at the same time that the policyholders, all acting in their best interest and your worst interest, anti-select against you and demand all their money back, which by right in the contracts they've got that right, at the same time that you are wiped out when you've got to sell off your assets. So, you essentially liquidate the company… This insurance or pensions “immunization paradign” really has again a direct analogy to the question of National Defense and force structure. What, in a nutshell, matches the assets and the liabilities in the context of defense and deterrence? The assets now are your weapons systems inventories [deployed or stockpiled], your people and their training and their readiness and their morale and discipline and all that stuff. The liabilities are the threats out there in the world, the adversaries and potentially adversaries working together in various axes of evil, or otherwise [i.e., individually, and either simultaneously or one after another]. A great example of that is what's going on now between China and Russia. There's also what's been called chain ganging during the First Cold War, which is where one adversary or even an ally does something in their own best interest that is not in yours and you are tricked or forced or lured into getting involved in a conflict that you very much want to avoid. That conflict to absolutely avoid, in the future, can include nuclear war, so immunization requires you to have a very large and robust yet not excessive force structure where you've got different branches of the armed forces that are right-sized for purpose, well trained and ready, prepared, that are flexible, adaptable, resilient and that way, and this is the direct analogy, you can do what the actuaries and investment people do…. Coming back to the insurance world, you study what's going on in both your assets and your liabilities. Make sure that they start out being matched. And monitor for any changes or disruptions, and then make adjustments as you need to for the insurance company. It's to buy and sell different assets, different investments to better match the liabilities, and even sell more or less of different insurance products to blend together into a good strong company…. In the case of defense, again, the analogy applies pretty directly. You've got to come up with a future force structure, concept of operations, defense policy, strategy, and nuclear deterrence posture that are matched to the threats, not just right now, but going forward. And then you've got to study and monitor all the changes and make sure you keep up with them and get ahead of them. Because once you're playing catch up ball and you're behind the 8 ball in nuclear deterrence and nuclear coercion and even nuclear war fighting, you are in deep trouble…. The last thing that actuaries do, and this is the subject of a major project that Peter and I have been working on for about a year and a half now, we've got some drafts of a short and a long form of our article, which is the question of assumptions [used in recent foreign policy and defense], and assumptions that turn out to be badly wrong. Basically, the last of these four things, a key actuarial standard of practice, which is mandatory to observe, is to validate [in advance] the actuarial assumptions that are used to prepare any kind of an actuarial projection, or in developing a formal actuarial opinion…. Now what is assumption validation all about? It's really itself got several steps, none of them easy. The first one is you have got at the outset to eke out somehow all of the important and not so important assumptions that go behind the analysis, the plan, the strategy that you're developing. Firstly, the assumptions sometimes are overt, obvious. Sometimes they are unconscious. You don't even realize they're there, but they play a critical role, and sometimes some of the players on the team realize that they're there, but for small group suboptimal selfish reasons, such as internal competition, rivalries and blah blah blah, they will not be completely candid with everybody else that those assumptions are in play and are even vital. So you first of all have to grab all of the assumptions for yourself and articulate them all for everybody.

Adam Lowther

You gotta get those all out there. You've got to get, layout all those assumptions, so that they can be vetted, correct?

Joe Buff

Absolutely. ?And vetted, not just by you who came up with them. But you know, once you've set the specific parameters or values for each of the different assumptions -- like for actuaries it's interest rates, inflation rates, mortality rates and that kind of stuff. In the world of defense, there are direct analogies and indirect analogies. Also, once you've figured out what you have to assume, you then have to pick the particular things you do assume in each parameter, and then you have to validate it and vet and peer review it. I like the word peer review, by outsiders. Pull in a “jury” and an Inspector General, a red team, as Devil's advocates. And there are in fact, as I learned when I was reading lots of stuff for the assumptions failures study with Peter, there's an extensive literature of techniques from DoD, the CIA, and in academia and management consulting on methods to validate assumptions objectively and thoroughly and to avoid all of the misperceptions and cognitive biases that, like Shakespeare said, flesh is heir to…. End of statement.

Voice Over

The ANWA Deterrence Center and NucleCast team joins the Exchange Monitor in inviting you to the 16th annual Nuclear Deterrent Summit January 31st through February 2nd at the Weston, Washington, DC. ?Go to our website anwadeter.org to register and receive a 15% discount. We look forward to seeing you there.

Adam Lowther

So we're now at that part of the show where I like to bring out Bob the Genie. Now, if I rub my magic lamp, Bob grants you 3 wishes, but remember they’re wishes related to the topics we've been discussing. And so for you, Joe, what would be your wish #1?

Joe Buff

Well, I will tell you, Adam, as I mentioned, I try to be nothing if not prepared. I actually typed these up yesterday to make them be concise and edited them so that they're really exactly what I would have wished for…. The first wish is that all Americans be fully aware of the very dangerous state of today's world and be less divided and more engaged re our extensive National Defense requirements.

Adam Lowther

So, well, let me ask you a specific question. So you're a professional actuary, you're going about your career, you know, you're mid career, you're successful, you're doing your thing. How do you then switch and say you know what? I really wanna know about nuclear deterrence, how do you go about that big shift in focus? Cause you talk about Americans need to know and need to care, and you sort of made that switch and then you spent a number of years now, researching, writing. What was it that made you want to sort of shift direction and devote so much time to the deterrence topic?

Joe Buff

Ah, I'd be glad to tell you that, as a Freudian would say, it all began when I was a child. Well, literally it did, because I was in a way blessed from the get-go that my father and my 2 uncles both had a. background in the military or in something even worse than war, the Holocaust…. My father dropped out of high school at the end of World War 2, lied about his age. He was 16 and joined the Navy and served for five years as a Seabee on Guam. One of my uncles was a merchant mariner in World War 2. He worked the North Atlantic convoys going to the UK. He told me when I was like 5, that although his ship, the one he was on at the time, was never torpedoed, ships in the convoys he worked on were. My other uncle -- because you see there was my mother and her two sisters -- he had been born in Germany, came to the United States in the 1930s as a kid with his immediate family fleeing the Nazis. Most of their extended family stayed behind and died in the concentration camps. And what that does, it makes an impression on a kid. OK, so that was the horrible part of it. The good part of it was, from the time I was old enough to watch movies on TV, like The Million Dollar Movie, the old war movies that weren't so old in the mid 50s. And also to start reading, I had a passion, a hobby, an avocation for military defense stuff, military history, biography, the technology as it evolves, the strategy and tactics, and I especially enjoyed books about the psychological and tactical blunders of military leaders who overreach themselves, which, by the way, as you might know, and I'm sure you do, almost every major dictator throughout history, from Julius Caesar, through Napoleon, and all the bad guys of the 20th century, they always make the following mistakes: They badly overestimate how prepared they are to survive and win a war that they start, and they badly underestimate how well prepared we are to beat them and bury them…. Now that all gets to be very, very dangerous, nowadays, when you have sociopathic dictators galore in the world -- and they keep rising in every generation -- who possess large nuclear arsenals. That’s because when they make that pair of mistakes, overestimating their might and underestimating ours and calling us weak and decadent, and divided, you know, the whole 9 yards, this recipe can lead, again [i.e., as mentioned earlier] to human extinction. And that is basically what nuclear deterrence is meant to prevent…. So what happened was after 20 years working in financial services as a qualified actuary, almost like back when I was in ?a beginner in academia studying algebraic topology in the 1970s, I said this stuff is very interesting, but it's [i.e. pure math is] awfully useless in the real world and the limited lifestyle of what you are as a math professor working on campus didn't appeal to me. So I answered what I think of still as “the Call of the Wild,” and I decided to switch over into applied math and an ideal career at that time was as an actuary, they were hiring new actuaries like hotcakes. Then after 20 years of it, I began to think, OK, I've kind of done what there is to do in my specialty of asset liability management, which is exactly that matching of the assets and the liabilities to immunize the company against bankruptcy. I felt the Call of the Wild again, and the first thing I thought -- I hadn't really any great big plan, you know, this all looks great in hindsight. The first thing I thought is I would like to write books for a living, which my wife has been doing in nonfiction. [Sheila writes bestsellers co-authored with doctors about health and wellness.] She's been doing that for ages. I thought I'd like to write books too. So that's how I started to break in. I looked at what I knew, which was it's fun to think about military stuff, and it's fun to watch submarine movies and it's fun to read submarine novels. And I decided, hey, maybe I'm going to do that too. Almost immediately, you know, the nonfiction researcher in me kicked back in and before I even published my first novel, I made my first professional sale as a defense writer to the editor, Captain Jim Hay, of The Submarine Review. For a two-part article that then won a literary award from the Naval Submarine League, the first of five such awards I got from them over the years, and then I wrote six submarine novels and the last of them won a literary award from the Military Writers Society of America. It was the 2006 Admiral Nimitz Award for Outstanding Naval Fiction, and I thought to myself, Gee, guys, thanks for noticing. However, there was then a major life changing event in that my wife got ovarian cancer, which by some miracle she beat. But you know, for a couple of years I was totally busy with that and that led to a questioning again, and another Call of the Wild, and by a very twisting rabbit trail I said OK, I'm going to finally do what I really want to do, what I feel in my gut, in my heart is what's needed and important, and that is to switch solely to nonfiction, real world, National Defense and Modernized Nuclear Deterrence. And God, I said and I still say, I couldn't have picked a better and a worse time to do it. And here we are, busy as heck, all of us [in the deterrence community], and the rest is history. So that's the life story and something of an extended digression.

Adam Lowther

So now we've got through, you know, wish number one. And that leads us to wish #2.

Joe Buff

Yes it does: That our educational system and industrial base rapidly strengthen defense-related STEM education and craft training and also expand quickly our whole defense manufacturing infrastructure and supply chain, including the intellectual product necessary for effective deterrence.

Adam Lowther

Yeah, that's actually, you know, it's funny. It's a great wish because we recently spoke with Matt Sermon, who is you know, the executive director of the [U.S. Navy] PEO Office for Strategic Submarines. And one of their biggest challenges is, you know, the submarine industrial base. And workforce. And so this idea of having the right people who can do the right things because we, you know, we need more welders, more pipe fitters, more engineers, you know, more physicists, more of all of those things that the Chinese and the Russians are focused on. And we need more, you know, social influencers encouraging young people to get into defense work, and, you know, things of that nature. So that's a great wish #2. ?Now wish #3, your final wish.

Joe Buff

Oh, actually, let me throw in a quick post-amble to what you just said about wish #2. Again, what actuaries are forced to be good at. And I think that what we are generally good at is modulating exactly that awful whipsawing over the years and decades that can occur, in any real world business operation, like an insurance company or in the defense establishment of a country like the U.S. -- if you look at what went on between 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and over the years until now -- there's been this awful bathtub effect in terms of the need, if not the availability, the perceived need versus the real availability [and the actual need] of all of the defense resources that the country requires, and we have been behind the 8 ball, which I did warn people about before. That is exactly right, Adam, and I think, and I'm glad that in the last couple of years that at the conferences we go to and in the articles that people write we're starting to wake up to that need. But the real challenge is that we are still somewhat preaching to the choir, that we tell each other things that we all know. But I think we’re not reaching the 90 to 100% of the whole population of this country and that's really what was the seed of my wish #2…? Now wish #3 is very practical and essential. OK, that the vital modernization of all the weapons and platforms of all the legs of our Nuclear Triad and NC3 and supporting facilities proceed with no further delays.

Adam Lowther

Yeah, that's a good one. No, no more [Nunn-] McCurdy breaches. No expanded schedules because of, you know, infrastructure or human capital problems we ourselves as a country caused. You know, we're already 13 years into a Nuclear Deterrent modernization program that is still 10 years from completion. So. Amen to that one.

Joe Buff

Oh yes.

Adam Lowther

OK, well.

Joe Buff

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Adam Lowther

No, no. Go ahead, Joe.

Joe Buff

Well, I was going to say one other thing is that I tried to cover that and various related topics from the actuarial perspective in my first and major deterrence publication. And I'm now working on Volume Two, and from what's going on in the world and the notes that I've got already there are going to be at least 4 Volumes in this non-fiction reference series On 21st Century Nuclear Deterrence.

Adam Lowther

Yeah, that'll be a comprehensive look from Joe Buff at deterrence in the 21st century. Now, unfortunately, we are out of time for this episode. So Joe, thanks for joining us on NucleCast.

Joe Buff

Yes, it's been delightful. Thanks for having me.

Adam Lowther

And thanks to you the listeners, it's only possible with you. So thanks for listening to the show, and we'll see you on the next episode…. So that was interesting. I had never really thought about applying actuarial methods to better understanding nuclear deterrence. So when you know, folks said, hey, you got to have Joe, you got to have Joe Buff. And, you know, he came recommended and I said, hey, Joe, what would you want to talk about? And he said I want to talk about applying actuarial methods to nuclear deterrence, and I thought that's kind of interesting. I've never thought about it that way before, so it turned out to be pretty interesting, and it was in some respects for me, as somebody who's been doing this for about 20 years or so now, it kind of confirmed the approach I've taken over the years. You know, I was not off base in the way I thought about it and the way I sort of tried to understand it. Create rigor and empiricism. And so I thought it was really good, it was really good to see from a mathematician, right? Joe trained as a pure mathematician. Then trained and worked as an actuary. We saw how he looks at the problem. And then compare that to how we do things in nuclear deterrence policy and strategy now. So it was a great interview. Hopefully you all would agree.

Voice Over

This has been a production of the ANWA Deterrence Center, a 501C3 that seeks to educate three audiences -- decision makers, stakeholders, and the public -- to ensure broader understanding of America’s national strategic defense requirements. We want to thank our executive producer, Kimberly Cherington. This episode has been engineered and mixed by David Frankel. Help support us in growing our Follower base by sharing news about NucleCast and following the show on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.