Nobel laureates plea for diplomacy to prevent nuclear war

USA Today

6 days ago

On Monday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY White House Reporter Davis Winkie breaks down what nuclear experts said last week about the current state of nuclear threats and what to do about it. Support for President Donald Trump's immigration policies fell in a new poll. USA TODAY National Immigration and Border Reporter Lauren Villagran discusses Louisiana's place as a major immigration detainer. Israeli fire killed 67 people seeking aid in Gaza. WNBA All-Stars make a CBA statement with 'Pay Us What You Owe Us' shirts.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Monday, July 21st, 2025. This is USA TODAY's The Excerpt. Today what nuclear experts are saying about present-day threats, plus support for Trump immigration policies drops in a new poll, and we hear how one state in the south is approaching immigration detention facilities.
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Top nuclear experts gathered last week to offer world leaders a playbook for reducing the risk of nuclear war. I discussed with USA TODAY White House reporter, Davis Winkie. Thanks for joining me, Davis.
Davis Winkie:
Good to be back, Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, just tell us a bit about this meeting of Nobel Prize winners and nuclear experts in Chicago, why was this held?
Davis Winkie:
Nobel Prize winners and physicists have long considered themselves the guardians, so to speak, of the nuclear world, because of their pivotal role in the creation of the nuclear bomb. A couple of physics Nobel winners thought the threat of nuclear war keeps creeping higher and higher in recent years, so this year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Trinity nuclear test near Los Alamos, New Mexico, this group of Nobel laureates assembled in Chicago, and brought together nuclear policy experts, former government officials, diplomats, et cetera, to face down the challenges in reducing the risk of nuclear war right now, and to provide a declaration of policy recommendations that could help world leaders to reduce that risk.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, Davis, in terms of what they functionally did here, it's clear many of them hammered home the point that international agreements are key to reducing some of the risk of nuclear war. Let's start with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Can you help us understand what that is, and how did this come up during these discussions?
Davis Winkie:
The CTBT, as it's known in nuclear circles, arose in the mid 1990s, after a lot of leading nuclear powers agreed to stop nuclear testing. A handful of the world's countries have at least signed this treaty, and have agreed to pause testing. However, it has not gone into binding effect, because nine countries that are specified in the treaty as needing to ratify it, or have their legislatures or governing bodies formally approve it. The United States is one of those countries, as is Russia, as is China, as is North Korea. The CTBT has always existed at the limit of its current potential. It has an organization headquartered Vienna, that does incredibly sophisticated technological monitoring of seismic activity around the world, satellite imagery, et cetera, that allows them to tell us in near real time whether something that has occurred is a nuclear test or not. That's incredibly valuable for international stability, but it's limited because of the fact that the treaty is not in enforced, and now you have Russia, China, and the U.S. potentially considering resuming explosive nuclear testing, because they are not bound by this treaty, because they've not ratified it.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, shifting gears, AI is entering basically every facet of society at this point. Does it have a role in nuclear spaces, Davis?
Davis Winkie:
Taylor, you've touched on something very hotly debated in nuclear policy circles right now, what is the appropriate extent in areas in which that AI can be integrated? Everybody pretty much agrees that the AI should not, SKYNET style, decide when and where the missiles are being launched. You cannot give control of the missiles over to AI. Former president, Joe Biden, and Chinese president, Xi Jinping, actually agreed to that publicly last year. So there's common ground among the nuclear powers on some of the limits of AI, but there's questions still swirling around what's the proper role of AI in things like early warning systems. It's a good thing, Taylor, that we've never had a global thermonuclear war. What that means, however, is that there is not global thermonuclear war data on which to train AI models for something like early warning, or targeting solution, or any of these other potential applications across nuclear command control and communications enterprise.
One of the major things that came out at this conference though is the Vatican's representatives there was really outspoken about wanting there to be an independent faith leader component of assessing the morality of AI integration, which largely does align with some of the other initiatives regarding AI that we have seen coming out of the Vatican recently. I, for one, am really interested to see how these further policy recommendations and such develop in the months and years ahead.
Taylor Wilson:
USA TODAY White House reporter, Davis Winkie. Thank you, Davis.
Davis Winkie:
Thanks for having me.
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Taylor Wilson:
Support for President Donald Trump's immigration policies fell in a new poll with stark differences between Republicans and Democrats on deportations, and the use of detention facilities. The poll out yesterday from CBS YouGov found that immigration is the top issue that swayed respondents' opinion on the president. 61% said immigration and deportation policies mattered a lot, followed by inflation and the economy. Overall, the poll puts Trump's approval rating at 42%, with disapproval at 58%. The survey previously found Trump's approval rating was 45% last month. In the latest CBS poll, 56% disapproved of the president's immigration stances, marking a 10-point drop from polling at the beginning of Trump's second term in February, the outlet reported. Support for Trump's immigration policies is split along party lines, nearly all Republicans surveyed, 91% say they approve of the president's deportation program. Among Democrats, 14% say they approve. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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One state in the south, long known for its prison economy now houses more ICE detention facilities than any other non-border state. I spoke with USA TODAY national immigration and border reporter, Lauren Villagran, to learn more. Thanks for joining me, Lauren.
Lauren Villagran:
Thanks for having me, Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
How involved is Louisiana with detaining migrants? How many detention facilities do they have?
Lauren Villagran:
I think a lot of Americans don't realize that Louisiana is actually one of the biggest ICE detention center posts in the country. So Texas is the largest, and has the most ICE detention centers, but Louisiana is number two, with nine total dedicated ICE detention facilities.
Taylor Wilson:
How and why has the state become such a deportation hub? When did this begin?
Lauren Villagran:
Back in 2017, the state was going through a criminal justice reform. The result of that bipartisan reform was that many of Louisiana's prisons, the state is known as one of the world's largest incarcerators per capita, were emptied of many prisoners who were in jail for low-level offenses, and that's around when some communities turned to the federal government. ICE at the time was looking for ways to expand immigration detention, and they came to Louisiana, saw that there were empty beds, and they had people to fill them with. So you started to see a pretty dramatic expansion of ICE detention around 2019 in Louisiana. Several organizations have studied this phenomenon, the ACLU of Louisiana, Tulane University, researchers, and we had the opportunity to travel to Louisiana last month.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, I want to hear about that trip, Lauren. What did you see? Tell us about this experience.
Lauren Villagran:
Photographer, Omar Ornelas and I traveled around the state. Many of these detention centers are located far from New Orleans, the sort of metropolitan center of the state at the southern tip. You have to drive 3, 5, 7 hours to reach some of these facilities, many of which are located in rural communities, sometimes deep in the woods. There were, in July, more than 7,000 people detained in ICE detention in Louisiana.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow. Lauren, what are some of the advantages of Louisiana for immigration officials? And what are some of the advantages for Louisiana?
Lauren Villagran:
As of this recording, DHS had not responded to multiple requests for comment from USA TODAY. We asked why DHS, why ICE went to Louisiana, so far from the border, and we didn't get a response. Now, what we learned from community members, from immigration advocates who work in the area is that Louisiana had a number of advantages. One, it had these empty jails and prisons, so there were facilities and infrastructure already available. There were members of the community who know how to do corrections work, and the immigration advocates will say there was another reason as well, Louisiana is located in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, it's a circuit that has historically been very difficult for immigration advocates to win their cases, the immigration judges in Louisiana are considered some of the toughest in the nation.
Taylor Wilson:
And in terms of some of those advantages for the state itself, you're hearing similar things on the ground there?
Lauren Villagran:
Certainly for the smaller rural communities that had facilities that were an anchor to the economy, of course. The federal government offered to pay more than the state per bed, per night. And a facility where you've got several hundred people working there when your community is maybe a population 4,000 or so is a pretty big deal. It was considered economic development.
Taylor Wilson:
President Trump is increasingly leaning on Republican-led states far from the U.S.-Mexico border to detain and deport immigrants, as you write. Are other states following Louisiana's lead as more federal funding moves to ICE detention?
Lauren Villagran:
We saw Congress give ICE $45 billion for detention over the next four years, that quadruples the agency's annual budget currently. So we're going to see likely a huge expansion of immigration detention in this country.
Taylor Wilson:
We went through some of the apparent advantages for some of the players here. What do critics say about using these states to detain migrants in this way? What are some of the due process concerns and other worries?
Lauren Villagran:
There's been a practice for a long time now that seems to have accelerated under the current administration of detaining people far from their families. Now, previously, immigration detention was often used for recent border crossers. For example, under the Biden administration and under the first Trump administration, you saw moves to detain asylum seekers at the border. People would cross the border, and then be transferred to Louisiana. Now, as interior enforcement has ramped up, you're seeing people get picked up all over the country for immigration violations. But unlike local jails where folks might be taken into custody in their community, in this case, immigrants are being sent very far from their communities and their families. Some of the higher-profile detainees that we've seen under the Trump administration, Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist, Kseniia Petrova, the Harvard University researcher from Russia, they were removed from respectively New York and Boston, and sent to Louisiana.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, Lauren, great reporting work on this story. I found it really eye-opening. Lauren Villagran covers the border and immigration for USA TODAY. Thanks, Lauren.
Lauren Villagran:
Really appreciate it, Taylor. Thanks.
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Taylor Wilson:
Israel opened fire and killed dozens of Palestinians as they waited for UN aid trucks in Northern Gaza yesterday according to the Gaza health ministry, as Israel issued new evacuation orders for certain areas. There are continued starvation concerns in the enclave. Palestinian health officials said hundreds of people could soon die as hospitals were inundated with patients suffering from dizziness and exhaustion due to the scarcity of food and a collapse in aid deliveries.
And Pope Leo called for an end to what he said was the barbarity of war as he spoke of his pain over an Israeli strike on the sole Catholic Church in Gaza that killed three people on Thursday. Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks in the nation of Qatar, aimed at reaching a 60-day truce and deal to release Israeli hostages held in Gaza, though there has been no sign of breakthrough.
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All eyes were on the WNBA, as the best players in the league gathered in Indianapolis over the weekend for the All-Star game, and they used that opportunity to make a bold statement to the league, walking onto the court for warmups in black T-shirts that read pay us what you owe us. One of the main items on the All-Star Week agenda was a face-to-face meeting between the players and league on collective bargaining agreement negotiations, as the current contract expires at the end of the 2025 season. According to multiple players, that meeting did not go well. Still, more than 40 players turned out for the first meeting with league officials in months. WNBA commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, had a different tone, saying she believed the meeting with players had been productive.
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Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.