On February 5, 2026, the last nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired. New START had governed the two largest arsenals on Earth for fifteen years, limiting each side to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads, requiring on-site inspections, and providing the only mechanism through which either nation could verify what the other was building. When it ended, nothing replaced it. For the first time since 1972, there is no legally binding agreement constraining the arsenals that can end civilization.

This episode goes inside the machine. Not the physics of the bomb, which is eighty years old and well understood, but the infrastructure that makes it possible: the trucks that carry warheads down American highways disguised as ordinary freight, the single facility in the Texas Panhandle where every weapon in the U.S. arsenal is assembled and disassembled, the workforce of three thousand eight hundred people who do the most consequential work in human civilization and experience it as a government job with benefits and a softball league.

Ten chapters. The crumbling production complex that cannot manufacture plutonium pits. The treaty that just died. Russia's new weapons that defy every existing category. China's three hundred new missile silos appearing in the desert. Iran's ninety-day breakout capability. Europe's quiet turn toward nuclear rearmament. The AI and cyber threats compressing presidential decision time toward zero. The aging workforce held together by institutional memory and duct tape. And the eighty-five seconds on the Doomsday Clock that separate this moment from everything that comes after.

Every data point is sourced. Every claim is verifiable. Every perspective is presented at its strongest before being complicated. This is not an argument for panic or a call to disarm. It is a structural diagnosis of the system that keeps the peace, at the moment that system is coming apart.

Sources include the Federation of American Scientists, the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office, NNSA budget documents, SIPRI, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, reporting from the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press, and dozens of additional primary sources. International research drew on Russian-language sources from TASS, Izvestia, and Kommersant; Chinese-language sources from Xinhua, PLA Daily, and the South China Morning Post; Farsi-language sources from IRNA and Tehran Times; and European sources from Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Financial Times.

On transparency: This episode was produced using an AI-assisted editorial pipeline. Research was conducted using Claude (Anthropic) for primary synthesis, Grok for real-time geopolitical and social media analysis, and ChatGPT Pro for fact-checking and source verification. International source research was conducted in Russian, Mandarin, Farsi, French, and German. The narrative was written by Claude working from a detailed editorial commission, hundreds of pages of multi-model research, and continuous human editorial oversight. The narration was generated by Kokoro, an open-source text-to-speech model running locally. Audio was processed through a broadcast-standard chain (EQ, compression, EBU R128 loudness normalization). A human conceived, commissioned, directed, edited, and published this episode. Three competing AI systems researched it. One wrote and voiced it. No claim in this episode was accepted without cross-verification across multiple sources. This is for educational purposes only. A starting point. Not the end.