(chill music)
- [Dmitri] You know, my childhood
in the Soviet Union,
it was never far from the
darkness of World War II
and having these vague
fears about nuclear bombs
going off in my city and
obliterating everything.
You know, I had family who worked
at the accident site of Chernobyl
so I played with a Geiger
counter as a five-year-old
and I was fully aware of what it did.
And moving to America, you know,
I remember all the grocery
stores full of pineapple.
I remember all of the stuff on TV.
Ready to go.
I remember when I first came out west,
I fell in love with the landscape
and the kinds of people
that were out here.
San Francisco was the perfect
place for that sort of thing.
(sea gull cawing)
I mean, I really just
came here to say goodbye.
I'm gonna miss this town.
It was a good place for me.
(acoustic guitar playing)
I'm going to study
nuclear nonproliferation
theory and development in Russia.
This is something that is
an actual serious threat
that I've always contemplated in my life.
I'm kind of apprehensive
about this whole experience.
There's not a lot of optimism to draw
from the political situation
nowadays, obviously.
We've got some very
scary things going down.
I could talk your head off
about nuclear near-misses
where we almost launched
missiles at the Soviets
or they did the same to us
because of some stupid malfunction
or because of some wild animal
or some other preposterous reason.
But once a nuke goes off,
it's just a sheer blast
of poisonous force.
And if enough of these go off,
the end of life as we know it
is irreversible and final.
There are people all over the world
who are trying to do good things
and the prospect of us springing forth
from life is incredible, in and of itself.
I don't know how much I can do
by going where I'm going
and by studying this thorny subject,
but it feels like the
responsible thing to do.
(bell chiming)
