[light contemporary music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And on today's episode, we are keeping things light, by asking how real is the threat of nuclear Armageddon?

As Vladimir Putin's battle losses in Ukraine mount, his nuclear saber rattling has gotten louder, so we're worried about that.

Meanwhile, the Iran nuclear deal shows no signs of life, unlike their nuclear program, which experts believe is weeks away from developing a viable weapon.

And then, you've got North Korea, which has signaled plans to significantly increase their nuclear arsenal in the year to come.

So how do we even get through 2023 alive?

And by the way, on the bright side, what's going on with nuclear fusion?

Those are the things I'm planning on asking Rafael Grossi, the Director General of the nuclear weapons watchdog group, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- Hello Sergey.

- [mouth spits] Hello, a pleasure to be here.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis, and by.

[light contemporary music] [air whooshes] [light electronic music] - [Ian] There's a fine line between optimism and delusion.

But for the nuclear watchdog Rafael Grossi, a sunny disposition is a requirement of the job.

- Because we have to have this optimism of the possible.

- I love his attitude, but the global security landscape is as dire as it has been in decades.

It's almost quaint, looking back on the trading of nuclear threats between North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and then-President Donald Trump.

- Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself, and for his regime.

- Though it might not feel so quaint if you were one of the thousands of Hawaiians who woke up to a false ICBM missile alert, blaring on your phone.

A lot of those people thought they were literally about to die.

And make no mistake, North Korea continues to pose a very real nuclear threat.

In fact, Kim Jong Un called for a quote, "exponential increase" in his country's arsenal.

Today, Kim's got plenty of company.

Humiliated by his military quagmire in Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin has turned his country into the world's most dangerous rogue state.

His military also controls the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station in Ukraine.

It's Europe's largest nuclear plant, and it has suffered repeated shelling, and power cuts, raising concerns of radioactive disaster.

And of course, Putin also has at his fingertips the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, even a little larger than America's.

Nor has he been subtle about his willingness to use it.

[Vladimir speaks in foreign language] - Meanwhile, Iran, Russia's most important military ally, has been steadily at work developing its own nuclear weapon capabilities.

With the 2015 nuclear deal dead, dead, dead in the water, its program has become both more advanced, and less monitored.

That's not a great combination.

Iran's government announced in November that it would begin producing near weapons-grade enriched uranium, using some of its most advanced centrifuges at a facility that's buried really deep inside a mountain.

Experts believe that Iran today can produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks.

That's the closest Iran has ever been to what they call nuclear breakout.

Now add to the threat assessment, a modern arms race to create smaller, faster, and smarter tactical nukes, and the potential for mutually assured destruction because of accidents and miscalculation will be higher in 2023 than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962.

So how do we avert nuclear disaster in the year to come?

I'm asking the man who wakes up every morning with that question on his mind, and somehow still manages to get out of bed.

Nuclear arms watchdog Rafael Grossi joins me now.

Rafael Grossi, thanks so much for joining us today.

- My pleasure, how are you?

- I'm very well, I'm very well.

To start off, very quickly, for those that are not familiar with your organization, the IAEA, could you just give us a moment on what it does and how it helps protect us from nuclear proliferation?

- Well, the IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, founded in 1957, an American idea, originally, Atoms for Peace.

That may ring a bell for some, President Eisenhower at the General Assembly of the United Nations.

But now it's, it does a lot, lots of things.

It tries by inspections to prevent nuclear material in any of the countries operating nuclear power plants.

There are more than 400 all over the world and associated facilities, that this material is deviated to to non-peaceful uses.

It also oversees the safe and secure operation of nuclear facilities all over the world.

And on the promotional side, if you want, it also helps countries in areas less known by the general public, areas like nuclear medicine, nuclear applications, everything nuclear.

So we are from the nuclear watchdog to the nuclear enabler for development, a big portfolio.

- Of all of the concerns globally, in terms of the most imminent nuclear threats, what are you most worried about right now?

- Well at the moment is of course, the possibility of a nuclear accident in Ukraine, at the moment.

We have many things on our plate, as I'm sure you may know, Iran, North Korea, other things.

But since you use the word imminent, or more urgent or more pressing, undoubtedly what's going on in Ukraine with the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, Zaporizhzhia, being regularly shelled, I think it's quite a thing.

- You've actually had inspectors on the ground now for a few months, if I understand correctly, in Zaporizhzhia.

- Yeah, indeed, I went there.

I took them there.

It's not the same people.

They have rotated, but we went there in the beginning of September.

Was quite a dangerous itinerary there.

But finally, we made it to the plant, and we were able to settle a permanent mission by the IAEA, which performs a number of functions.

First and foremost, provide assistance, technical advice to the plant operators, and at the same time inform, because quite clearly, because of the nature of the situation, as you know this is a Ukrainian facility, but that has been occupied, or which sits in territory occupied, controlled by by Russia, which creates an unprecedented situation.

So we are there.

We are overlooking the situation.

We are informing on the condition of the plant, the problems that may appear, and in particular, the physical integrity of the place, which as I said, incredible as it may sound, has been shelled on a number of occasions.

- No, it does sound incredible.

And I wanna be clear about this, because this is a Ukrainian plant.

It's the largest plant, as you say, nuclear plant in all of Europe.

It has been physically occupied by Russian soldiers illegally, but it's being shelled.

Now, I assume it's being shelled, therefore, by Ukrainians.

Is that correct?

- Well, this, what you say is a very complicated issue, since we are there on a combat zone, on an active, disputed combat zone.

So I try, from my perspective, I have a mission to accomplish, which is to prevent a nuclear accident from happening.

So in, and my organization is, among other things, as I was saying in the beginning, is an inspectorate.

So a good inspector, an auditor, before coming to any conclusion, has to have the elements to a certain, things like what you said.

What we know is that this is happening, and that this should stop now.

So what we, what I have been trying to do, and I'm trying as we speak to do, is to bring everybody to an agreement on protecting, sanctuarizing, if you allow me the word, the plant, so that it is not used as a platform for any military action, or it is not attacked, whoever may be doing that.

That could be relevant at some stage, but what we need to have and to find is a common understanding on the fact that no one, neither Ukraine nor Russia, would benefit from a nuclear accident in that part of the world.

- Can I ask you how close we've come in your view to a nuclear accident so far, and what such an accident, God forbid, would look like?

- Well, we have been close to it.

For example, when I visited the plant, I was taken to a roof, a rooftop of a large hole, where fresh nuclear fuel sits on racks, waiting to be moved to the plants.

Well, there were two very large holes on that roof that have been caused by ammunition, high-caliber ammunition which could have impact the fuel there, creating a big accident there.

There have been other occasions where other parts of the facility were impacted by ammunition, by shelling.

So the possibility of an accident is there.

It's not a hypothetical scenario that we are creating to alarm anybody.

The dimension of the accident would depend on the amount of radioactive material that would be involved.

It could range from a very limited amount to something quite big.

So, and I'm sorry if I'm not being precise, but it is the gap, is the delta that it is so worrying, because it could be, you know, you have literally dozens, thousands of uranium, enriched uranium sitting there, some plutonium in the spent fuel.

So the consequences could be really dramatic.

- So this, I mean, this is an insane situation.

Before we move on to a couple other places, I wanna ask you a last piece.

Do you think the Russians and the Ukrainians are now finally taking your proposal adequately seriously?

- They do, I must say.

I met with President Zelenskyy a few times.

I met President Putin in October.

We were discussing this.

So I think the seriousness, the problem at hand, is very well understood.

The problem here is that this table negotiating at has become a bigger table, where you do not only have diplomats or nuclear safety experts, you have generals, you have people in green fatigues.

So, and this is a war.

So people are looking at the establishment of the zone through the lens of the military advantage or disadvantage that it may create.

And this is what makes it a bit more elusive.

But I'm working very hard to try to bring them to some sort of agreement, not among themselves, because they will never agree with each other.

They will agree, and this is what I'm asking them, they have to agree with me.

And that is good enough.

- You're not only focused on Russia, Ukraine.

Iran has been, of course, a big headline issue for a long time.

The nuclear deal feels farther away now than it has for really, since it's been put together.

And we see higher amounts of uranium enrichment, higher amounts of stockpiling, deep in a mountain that the Israelis tell me that they couldn't get at militarily if they wanted to.

How close do you think we are to Iranian nuclear breakout, and do you see this as increasingly inevitable?

- Well, I think this has already happened.

If by breakout, one means the amount of material that you would need if you decided to do that, to have a nuclear device.

That line has been passed.

But of course, having the nuclear material does not mean automatically that you have a nuclear weapon.

There is a lot of nuclear material around the world.

Here, you have to have a bird's eye view, and this is the, the IAEA is the only eyes and ears of the international community through its inspections.

To do that, to ascertain, what is the nature of the Iranian nuclear program, the JCPOA that you're mentioning is one important, big important part of this, because it was a way that had been agreed to try to provide some containment to what was otherwise a rapidly growing nuclear program.

But in parallel with that, there is a program that exists independently of JCPOA or no JCPOA.

And there also we have come to a very, I would say, difficult situation with Iran.

I'm trying to reestablish the level of cooperation which is needed, commensurate with what you just described as a program that is adding capacity, is adding material.

They are having, you know, last generation centrifuges, which are these machines where you enrich uranium, you separate the isotope that is useful for you.

And at the moment, they are enriching uranium at large quantities, at a level of enrichment which is very, very close to the military level.

So I've been saying that, of course, the IAEA wants to provide the diplomatic, technically neutral platform for a good understanding.

I hope this message is heard in Tehran, and I hope that I will be there soon, or that I can be there soon, to restart, to reset this dialogue in a way that would prevent this situation from becoming a very, very critical situation.

- At the beginning of the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal, my understanding is that they were largely cooperating fully and transparently with your organization.

Is that fair to say?

- Well, I was not director general at that time, but I can say that according to the reports that we were looking at, there was compliance with the agreement as it was described and as it was agreed, yes.

- And we can say that they're now near fully out of compliance.

- Well, I would say that the JCPOA, although as a formality still exists, Iran itself has announced that it is not bound by any of the nuclear obligations that were part of it.

- Last place I wanna bring you to is North Korea.

We could do this for hours, but you know, I know you were just in South Korea recently.

The North Koreans have been testing a lot more ballistic missiles, some of which seem to be ICBMs.

I know that they have announced that they are planning on significantly expanding their nuclear weapons program.

Talk to me a little bit about to what extent you see a breakdown in the stability between South and North Korea relations as a consequence of that.

- As you rightly say, I was there in December.

I could meet with President Yoon and the foreign minister and others in Seoul.

And of course the IAEA was kicked out from North Korea back in 2009.

That doesn't mean that we do not have a pretty good idea of what is happening there, and a very precise idea of what is happening there.

And we see that this program, which was originally relatively limited to the Yongbyon nuclear compound near Pyongyang, has now spawned and expanded to other sites, to other facilities in country, that now they are not only reprocessing nuclear fuel to get plutonium.

Now they are enriching uranium, as you know.

So they are developing all the acquisition paths that are necessary to have even more nuclear weapons.

But we cannot sit on our hands.

I think it's important to reconstruct channels of dialogue and conversation.

And I manifested to President Yoon, and I would be ready to do that, of course, with the DPRK, to contemplate the possibility of having the IAEA, much as we are doing with two countries at war, like Ukraine and Russia, to provide an arena, a platform, a table for some understanding, in trying to prevent this problem to become bigger.

Of course, the situation has changed.

DPRK is now a nuclear possessor state, although outside the remit of what is legitimate, but they have them, they have these nuclear weapons, and something must be done about it.

The IAEA is ready.

- So since we've been talking about all these horribly depressing things that you're spending so much time working on, before we close, let me ask you about a little more upside, which is these recent fusion breakthrough announcements.

I'd love to just hear how excited, how surprised you were to hear about these experiments being successful, and do you think within a decade or two, that we might actually see fusion energy as a viable technology?

- I do, I do.

And I think that the good thing about this successful experiment at the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the United States is that it proves that we are on the right track, that the lines, I don't want to get too techy here, but that the research lines that are being pursued are correct, that we are extracting from these experiments far more energy that we are putting inside.

It's a matter of getting the necessary stability.

You know, plasma physics is incredibly delicate, and it requires a lot of conditions to be reached in order to have a commercially usable means in this area.

But let me say, since we are talking about these very important things, that we see a very interesting time for nuclear energy in general.

Now we see that for to get to a decarbonized energy mix, nuclear must be part of the solution.

Nuclear is part of the solution.

So be it fusion in a few years, but good ole fission now, it has a very important role to play, and the IAEA is there to ensure that it's done safely.

- Rafael Grossi, thanks so much for joining us on "GZERO World."

- My pleasure, thank you very much.

[light electronic music] - You just heard my guest talking about fusion, and that's a thermonuclear reaction that actually creates more energy than it requires.

Unlike fission, which is currently used to power nuclear reactors and weapons, fusion would generate no dangerous waste, or cause meltdowns at power plants.

It's a holy grail for the future of energy, and has long been a goal for scientists everywhere.

Earlier this season on "GZERO World," I asked U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm about the Biden administration's ambitious goals for fusion.

- The president has made a commitment.

It's a, he has a vision in a decade to actually see commercial steps toward fusion.

Fusion is really hard, and this is why it's been so difficult to achieve.

However, our Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we have a national ignition facility that is focused on fusion with lasers, made a big milestone in the past few months, to be able to achieve that.

- And achieve that they did.

In mid-December at that very lab, scientists successfully carried out a short burst of nuclear fusion.

It only lasted a few trillionths of a second, so I'll be honest, I missed it.

But it was enough to count as one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the past century.

It's a victory for the United States, in an ongoing race against China to develop the first commercial fusion plant.

Don't get too excited.

By all accounts, could take decades before fusion can happen at scale, but still, what a difference a few trillionths of a second can make.

[light electronic music] And now to Puppet Regime, where Vladimir Putin squares off with a rat.

- Good evening, we are here with an exclusive, someone who claims to have known Vladimir Putin as a child.

Please welcome Sergey the Rat.

Hello, Sergey.

- [mouth spits] Hello, a pleasure to be here.

- Now Sergey, you have a story about Vladimir Putin.

- Wait, wait, wait.

To be clear, Putin has a story about me.

It's in his autobiography.

- Okay, well what is the story?

- Well, it's Leningrad, maybe in 1958, '59.

[light retro music] This was back when Soviet Union was great again.

So one day I'm hanging out in communal apartment, when along comes this snot-nosed little kid, chasing me with a stick.

It makes him feel like a real big man, chasing around a little guy like me.

He chases me all the way down to basement, and finally I'm cornered.

So I have no choice.

I turn, I squeal and bite at his ugly face.

[light retro music] [laughs] And right there he turns pale, shrieks, and runs away like a little punk.

- Wow, Putin ran away, huh?

- Yes, he found his own off-ramp in a hurry.

[laughs] - And what sir, would you say is the moral of this story?

- Well, as Putin tells it, it was, and I quote, "a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered."

- Right, and he tells that story as a warning, yes, like the West shouldn't ever push Russia into a corner or else- - Look man, I am no highfalutin geopolitical analyst or pundit.

What I know is trash.

Literally, I love trash.

If you ever do a segment on trash, that would be a much more appropriate use of my expertise.

- Well, we'd be happy to have you on to talk about the likely U.S. presidential candidate someday, yes.

- Huh, you tell me what you see today in Ukraine.

Is Putin the one backed into the corner, or is he still that garbage punk who picked the wrong guy to mess with?

♪ Puppet regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see or even if you don't, but you're still scared by the day after, like, "No, I don't want nuclear Armageddon," check us out gzeromedia.com.

[logo dings] [uptempo contemporary music] [light electronic music] - [Announcer] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor, First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis.

And by.

[light contemporary music] [light orchestral music]