Making Sense - Sam Harris - #186

00:00:00.000 when was the last time you thought about the prospect of nuclear war i mean seriously thought

00:00:22.720 about it and had even a semblance of an appropriate emotional response i mean just think about it

00:00:30.880 it's as though you've lived your whole life in a house that has been rigged to explode

00:00:39.280 and it's as rigged now as at any point in the last 75 years in fact the doomsday clock was just

00:00:46.560 advanced closer to midnight than it has been at any point in the last 75 years it now reads 100

00:00:54.400 seconds to midnight now whether you put much significance in that warning just take a moment

00:01:02.240 to consider that the people who focus on this problem are as worried now as they've ever been

00:01:08.480 but do you think about this if i were to ask how long it's been since you worried that you might

00:01:15.920 have some serious illness or that your kids might or how long has it been since you've worried about

00:01:23.120 being the victim of crime or worried about dying in a plane crash it probably hasn't been that long

00:01:31.840 might have happened last week even but i would wager that very few people listening to this podcast

00:01:39.440 have spent any significant time feeling the implications of what is manifestly true

00:01:44.960 all of us are living under a system of self-annihilation that is so diabolically unstable

00:01:54.560 that we might stumble into a nuclear war based solely on false information

00:01:59.040 in fact this has almost happened on more than one occasion do you know the name stanislav petrov

00:02:07.600 he should be one of the most famous people in human history and yet he's basically unknown he was a

00:02:14.720 lieutenant colonel in the soviet air defense forces who is widely believed to be almost entirely

00:02:21.680 responsible for the fact that we didn't have world war iii in the year 1983 this was at the height of

00:02:30.160 the cold war and the soviet union had just mistaken a korean passenger jet flight 7 for a spy plane

00:02:40.400 and shot it down after it strayed into siberian airspace and the u.s and our allies were outraged over this

00:02:51.680 and on high alert both the u.s and the soviet union had performed multiple nuclear tests that month

00:03:00.000 and so it was in this context in which soviet radar reported that the u.s had launched

00:03:05.520 five icbms at targets within the soviet union and the data were checked and rechecked and there was

00:03:15.280 apparently no sign that they were in error and stanislav petrov stood at the helm now he didn't have

00:03:23.520 the authority to launch a retaliatory strike himself his responsibility was to pass the information up

00:03:29.280 the chain of command but given the protocols in place it's widely believed that had he passed that

00:03:36.720 information along a massive retaliatory strike against the united states would have been more or less

00:03:42.480 guaranteed and of course upon seeing those incoming missiles of which there would likely have been

00:03:49.280 hundreds if not thousands we would have launched a retaliatory strike of our own and that would have

00:03:56.800 been game over hundreds of millions of people would have died more or less immediately now happily petrov

00:04:04.640 declined to pass the information along and his decision boiled down to mere intuition right the protocol

00:04:14.160 demanded that he passed the information along because it showed every sign of being a real attack

00:04:20.560 but petrov reasoned that if the united states were really going to launch a nuclear first strike

00:04:26.320 they would do it with more than five missiles five missiles doesn't make a lot of sense but it's also

00:04:33.040 believed that any of the other people who could have been on duty that night instead of petrov would

00:04:38.800 have surely passed this information up the chain of command and killing a few hundred million people

00:04:45.520 and thereby wiping out the united states and russia as you'll soon hear our retaliatory strike protocol

00:04:54.000 entailed wiping out eastern europe and china for good measure this could have well ended human civilization

00:05:00.880 so think about that the year was 1983 one way to remember where we were there is just to remember the

00:05:08.160 movies released that year here's the list return of the jedi terms of endearment flash dance trading

00:05:17.120 places risky business the big chill breathless scarface silkwood star 80 the right stuff rumble fish

00:05:27.360 the outsiders monty python's the meaning of life it was a good year for movies but those were almost

00:05:35.200 the last films ever made ironically war games and the day after were also made that year those were both

00:05:43.200 films that encapsulated this concern about nuclear war and there have been several other incidents that

00:05:49.840 were nearly this scary for example in 1960 u.s radar equipment in greenland interpreted a moon rise over

00:05:58.960 norway as a large-scale soviet attack and this put our own weapon systems on high alert however nikita

00:06:07.360 khrushchev happened to be in new york city at the time at the un and it was reasoned surely the soviet

00:06:14.800 union wouldn't initiate a first strike with their leader on u.s soil right there was even one occasion

00:06:22.560 where a war game scenario got accidentally loaded into the computer at strategic air command and it

00:06:30.160 was believed that 250 ballistic missiles had been launched at the u.s and then it became clear that in

00:06:36.720 fact it was 2200 missiles that were incoming then it was only subsequently discovered that this was a false

00:06:43.200 alarm so when you think about human fallibility and errors of judgment and realize that this ability

00:06:50.880 to destroy the species is at all times every minute of the day in the hands of utterly imperfect people

00:07:00.000 and in certain cases abjectly imperfect people think of the current occupant of the oval office it should

00:07:07.440 make the hair stand up on the back of your neck and the infrastructure that is maintaining all of

00:07:14.320 these systems on hair trigger alert is aging and in many cases run on computers so old that any

00:07:21.600 self-respecting business would be embarrassed to own them and yet for some reason almost no one is

00:07:28.640 thinking about this problem for some reason i find that i've just begun thinking about it seriously for the

00:07:34.080 first time in several decades so i'm planning to do a series of podcasts on this topic and this is

00:07:41.200 the first today i'm speaking with fred kaplan fred is a national security columnist for slate

00:07:48.320 and the author of five previous books but his most recent is the bomb presidents generals and the secret

00:07:55.360 history of nuclear war he's also written a previous book on this topic the wizards of armageddon and

00:08:01.200 he's covered cyber war and other related issues he also holds a phd in international relations

00:08:08.400 from mit and in this conversation we get into many aspects of this problem we discuss the history of

00:08:16.800 nuclear deterrence the cuban missile crisis u.s first strike policy the distant and dismal prospect

00:08:25.360 of fighting a limited nuclear war tactical versus strategic weapons president trump's beliefs about

00:08:32.480 nuclear weapons the details of command and control in the u.s and many other topics and there's no

00:08:39.920 paywall in this episode i considered a public service announcement so without further delay i bring you

00:08:46.080 to fred kaplan i am here with fred kaplan fred thanks for joining me oh thank you so you have

00:08:58.000 written a um an all too timely book i mean the truth is it would have been timely last year or the year

00:09:03.600 before that or really any year that i've been alive but we're approaching the 75th anniversary of the

00:09:09.040 the trinity test and the subsequent bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki and you have written

00:09:15.680 the bomb presidents generals and the secret history of nuclear war which is a a really a fantastic

00:09:22.960 introduction to one angle on this problem there have been many books about this issue but you really

00:09:31.520 take the president's and administration's eye view of what it's like to think about this problem

00:09:38.720 with fresh eyes every decade and how ineffectual that winds up being and it really is a very strange

00:09:44.880 look at what every president seems to experience coming into office right well i my first book which

00:09:50.720 i wrote in 1983 which was called the wizards of armageddon was about the group of defense intellectuals who

00:09:59.200 invented these notions of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting and it got into the administrations

00:10:06.160 and i got you know thousands of documents declassified back then and interviewed everybody but

00:10:12.000 at that time for example there was almost nothing declassified on what say president kennedy thought

00:10:18.560 or said about any of this and now that i i i take another look at this subject in some depth 37 years

00:10:26.800 later and there's all kinds of things declassified and and that's what this book is about is it is about

00:10:33.760 the presidents who confronted crises in which the use of nuclear weapons was contemplated seriously and

00:10:42.880 there were more of these crises than people think and how they thought through the issues and what they

00:10:50.400 came up with yeah so just to give people the context anyone under the age of 65 who is hearing us right now

00:11:00.400 has lived every moment of his or her life on the brink of possible annihilation by nuclear bombs

00:11:09.440 whether by intent or by accident and the prospect of accident really has been ever present i mean

00:11:15.280 there have been extraordinary accidents and the fact that you and i can even have this conversation right now

00:11:20.880 and haven't spent the last nearly 40 years just living in a toxic hellscape is really due to the

00:11:28.240 restraint of one person i mean the soviet commander stanislav petrov this is a name that should be

00:11:35.120 familiar to everyone i mean this is if ever there was a person who saved the career of our species

00:11:40.720 single-handedly it's him and yet this name will be unknown to most people this was a fairly tense

00:11:46.800 moment in u.s then soviet relations and he was the lead in the soviet air defense command that night

00:11:56.080 and he saw on the radar screens american icbms what he should have done by all of his training was to

00:12:03.280 alert his superiors but he looked at it and he said no this this can't be right this has got to be

00:12:09.760 something wrong and so he did not tell his superiors who might have taken a much more precipitous action

00:12:16.640 as for example you know just just a short while before this incident air defense commanders saw

00:12:24.560 what appeared to be a spy plane coming across soviet territory it was in fact korean airlines flight seven

00:12:31.360 and and did shoot it down but you know that wasn't the only accident there there have been periodic

00:12:37.440 cases of uh you know a flock of geese mistaken for a flight of icbms a software failure where you

00:12:46.560 know kind of like that that movie war games where people think it's a real war but in fact it's just

00:12:51.440 an exercise that that's playing out in real life no that there are but you know it's it's not just

00:12:58.320 people lower down than this i i would contend for example that president kennedy did in fact single-handedly

00:13:06.400 prevent world war three from breaking out during both the berlin and the cuban missile crises of 1961

00:13:13.840 to 62 yeah in your book you report facts about the cuban missile crisis that were not widely known and

00:13:20.800 were actually systematically concealed to some effect we perhaps go into that for a second because it gave

00:13:28.240 us a sense that bluffing on the brink of nuclear war was a successful strategy because people thought

00:13:35.840 that that's what had happened that he just basically stared khrushchev down and you know khrushchev blinked

00:13:42.400 but that's not quite what happened that's not what happened most of us do know now because it was revealed

00:13:47.680 20 years after the fact that in fact on the final day of the crisis khrushchev proposed a deal a secret

00:13:56.560 deal i will take out my missiles from cuba if you united states take out your very similar missiles from

00:14:04.640 turkey and kennedy took the deal what isn't generally known and i don't know why it isn't known because you

00:14:10.480 can listen to this whole exchange on tapes that were declassified 20 years ago but that you will read

00:14:16.560 about in maybe two or three other books of that many but kennedy reads the proposal and he says and

00:14:24.960 you know this is he secretly tape recorded all of this he goes well this seems like a pretty fair deal

00:14:30.160 and everybody around the table all of his advisors not just the generals but the civilians too bobby

00:14:36.640 kennedy robert mcnamara mcgeorge bundy all these paragons of good sense and reason feverishly opposed this

00:14:45.440 deal nato will be destroyed the turks will be humiliated our credibility will be lost forever

00:14:52.400 and uh you know kennedy let them talk and then you know he said well you know this was on a saturday

00:14:58.320 the following monday they were the united states the military was scheduled to start in the attack there

00:15:04.000 were going to be 500 air sorties a day against the missile silos missile sites in in cuba followed four

00:15:11.200 days later by an invasion and kennedy took the secret deal he only told six people about this

00:15:18.400 though and in fact he put out the myth that there was no deal because this was the height of the cold

00:15:24.080 war it would look like appeasement one of the six people that he did not tell was his vice president

00:15:29.680 lyndon johnson who therefore went into the vietnam war convinced by the lesson of cuba the false lesson of

00:15:36.240 cuba that you don't negotiate you you you stare them down but here's what's even scarier we later

00:15:43.840 learned this was not known at the time that some of those missiles already had nuclear warheads loaded

00:15:49.760 on them so you know they could have been launched on warning another thing we didn't know until much

00:15:55.120 later is that the soviets had secretly deployed 40 000 troops on the island of cuba some of them armed

00:16:03.040 with tactical nuclear weapons to stave off an anticipated american invasion therefore if anybody

00:16:10.160 else around that table except john kennedy had been president or if he had said yeah you're right this is

00:16:16.400 a bad deal let's proceed with the plan then there would have been a war with the soviet union without

00:16:23.040 any question yeah it's amazing and so in your book you you report on the on the details of the these

00:16:29.680 encounters between each us administration and the war planners which are generally the the air force

00:16:36.320 and the navy and each incoming president you know whether we're talking about you know kennedy and you

00:16:42.160 know his team with mcnamara or nixon and kissinger or clinton and obama and their teams each president

00:16:49.280 comes into these meetings and for the first time is told what our first strike and second strike

00:16:55.280 policies are and each one it sounds like comes away absolutely appalled by what the doctrine actually

00:17:03.920 is and committed from that day to changing it and yet each has found himself more or less unable to

00:17:12.160 change it in in ways that fundamentally alter the game theoretic logic here i mean and these discussions

00:17:18.960 are like really out of dr strangelove the most preposterous scenes in dr strangelove are no more

00:17:26.560 comedic than some of these exchanges because these are plans that call for the annihilation of

00:17:33.040 hundreds of millions of people on both sides i mean ever since kennedy we've been past the point where

00:17:38.320 a first strike prevented the possibility of a retaliatory strike from the soviet union so

00:17:44.720 we're talking about protocols that are synonymous with killing 150 200 million people on their side

00:17:53.120 and losing that many on our side and for the longest time the protocol was to annihilate china and eastern

00:18:00.880 europe whether they were even part of the initial skirmish with the soviet union right the u.s policy

00:18:07.440 throughout the 1950s and into some of the 60s the policy this wasn't just the strategic

00:18:14.560 air command this was signed off on by president eisenhower and the joint chiefs of staff it was

00:18:22.160 that if the soviet union attacked west germany or or took over west berlin and you know this was at

00:18:29.680 a time in the late 50s early 60s when we really didn't have any conventional armies in europe but the

00:18:35.840 plan was that at the outset of the conflict to unleash our entire nuclear arsenal

00:18:44.640 at every target in the soviet union the satellite nations of eastern europe and as you point out

00:18:49.520 china even if china wasn't involved in the war and it was inquired well how many people is this going to

00:18:55.280 kill and the estimate was about 285 million and that probably was an underestimate now what happened

00:19:01.520 in the early 60s was that soviets started to develop their own nuclear arsenal that could hit us and

00:19:08.720 some people said well this policy is a little loony you know quite aside from any moral qualms that you

00:19:14.640 might have about it if they invade western europe and we respond by nuking them they're going to nuke us

00:19:21.520 this is a policy of suicide and so beginning with with kennedy and mcnamara they tried to

00:19:29.360 to devise some plans to make the initial use of nuclear weapons and by the way this was almost always

00:19:35.840 our going first more limited something that was maybe just aimed at their military forces and maybe

00:19:42.640 that would halt them from responding or if it or they did respond maybe they would respond just by

00:19:48.640 hitting our military forces not killing zillions of people maybe we can bring this down and uh one

00:19:55.360 thing that i learned from researching this book is that you know kennedy would and and mcnamara would

00:20:00.400 sign off on this new guidance kind of setting new options as they called them limited nuclear options

00:20:07.280 for the war plan and basically the commanders at strategic air command in omaha pretty much ignored it

00:20:14.240 they just they just didn't do it they always wrote into the directive something like to the extent

00:20:20.880 this is militarily feasible or when appropriate you know we will limit and and of course they could rule

00:20:27.600 well no it's not militarily feasible and it's not appropriate not until really and and and every president

00:20:34.800 since tried to bring down the limited options really not until practically the end of the war

00:20:40.640 the end of the cold war did did did this situation change and then it changed through the most

00:20:48.000 kind of bizarre and unlikely way in in a way that that nobody else as far as i know has has ever written

00:20:55.520 about so yeah perhaps give us that change now and and tell us what you understand our policy is

00:21:01.680 today right so so so the the the directed part by the time george hw bush became president and

00:21:10.240 actually this was even a little toward the end of reagan's presidency the the policy from washington

00:21:16.400 emphasized a lot of limited nuclear options you know we're not going to throw out throw off

00:21:21.840 everything right away so there was a civilian who was working for of all people secretary of defense

00:21:29.600 dick cheney who was a different kind of guy back then than when he was when he became vice president

00:21:35.600 who had read all of these doctrinal things over the years about limited nuclear options he goes to the

00:21:41.360 latest sack briefing about the nuclear war plan he hears nothing about limited options you know what's

00:21:48.240 going on here so with the permission of cheney he and as his team get very very deep into the actual

00:21:57.280 nuclear war plan deeper than anybody any any civilian had ever done before and they discovered some

00:22:04.000 amazing things that there was an amount of overkill that nobody could have imagined for example and this was in

00:22:12.800 the late 80s now there were 700 nuclear weapons most of them of a megaton in explosive power or more that were aimed at

00:22:21.280 moscow there was an air base a soviet air base in the arctic circle that couldn't even be used for

00:22:27.680 three quarters of the year 17 nuclear weapons were aimed at this base there was an anti-ballistic missile

00:22:33.600 site in moscow that we learned after the cold war couldn't have hit couldn't have shot down anything there were 69

00:22:41.280 nuclear warheads aimed at this site and and then the real insight came to this that george hw bush was

00:22:49.760 negotiating some nuclear arms reduction treaty and the civilian whose name was frank miller

00:22:56.640 asked one of his contacts at sack he goes listen if we brought down the the arsenal to such and such

00:23:02.960 number of of weapons could you still perform your mission and the officer said that's not the way we

00:23:09.360 think about this and he goes well what i mean he goes no no i understand what you mean but we're not

00:23:14.080 authorized to ask that question what we do here is we take the weapons that we have and we allocate

00:23:21.600 them to the targets that we've listed in other words in the actual war plan as opposed to what

00:23:28.720 people were saying in washington at no point did anyone say okay how many of these things do we really

00:23:35.760 need to accomplish whatever the aim is you know nuclear deterrence nuclear war fighting limited

00:23:41.920 strikes whatever you want to do how many do we need nobody had asked that question at one point

00:23:47.520 that there was a sack commander named general jack chain who testified before congress he said

00:23:54.640 i need 10 000 weapons because i have 10 000 targets and a lot of people thought that either he was

00:24:01.040 kidding or he wasn't too bright but no that is how this was determined it was a completely mechanical

00:24:08.560 thing that utterly divorced from any sort of rational undertaking yeah to give an even clearer sense of

00:24:16.640 the the redundancy and overkill in these plans i forget which administration uncovered this but they did

00:24:22.880 an analysis of the targets in the soviet union and they found a hiroshima-sized oh yeah city that was

00:24:30.800 you know basically positioned similarly within with respect to industry and infrastructure

00:24:36.800 and analyzed how much was targeted upon this you know one among you know hundreds of targets and it was

00:24:45.920 600 fold the destructive power we brought down on hiroshima that was allocated to this as yet nameless city

00:24:53.280 yeah this was back in 1960 when when sac was creating its first what they called a psyop a single

00:25:00.400 integrated operational plan and uh yeah the eisenhower science advisor sent one of his staffers out there

00:25:07.760 and and the staffer said i'm gonna look up i'm gonna ask the cia what city most resembles hiroshima

00:25:13.520 which was hit with 12 and a half kilotons and he went out there and he said how many weapons do you have

00:25:19.360 aimed at this city and this guy who who i talked with and for my first book and i mentioned this in this book

00:25:25.520 too and he he'd forgotten the name of the city unfortunately but yeah it was it was three weapons

00:25:31.040 each one one with like four megatons and three more with one megaton and yeah if you do the math it was

00:25:37.120 it was well over 600 times the destructive power and yeah the the whole war plan was like that and it

00:25:43.280 remained so for decades and and even the mechanics of the war plan it was completely balkanized for

00:25:51.680 example let's say they said okay we want to destroy the soviet tank army okay so what did they do well

00:25:58.960 they didn't only allocate weapons to destroy the tanks but they also would destroy the factories that

00:26:07.280 made the tanks and the factory that made the spare parts for the tank and the factories that rolled the

00:26:14.400 metal for the tanks and the mines where they got them i mean it was just so redundant

00:26:22.000 and so this kind of redundancy and and thoughtlessness really wasn't addressed wasn't acknowledged realized

00:26:31.040 addressed and changed until right after the cold war was over so basically we in many ways you know lucked

00:26:39.760 out through these decades when uh you know basically no one was in charge this was this was some giant

00:26:47.120 machine that was completely dysfunctional so what is our current policy as you understand it well our

00:26:53.760 current policy as i best understand our current policy i mean you know let's leave trump aside

00:26:59.440 we're gonna get to trump i was gonna say that there's there's that there's there's the political level

00:27:04.720 which is above and visible sort of and then that there's this stream of thinking and policy at places

00:27:10.720 like omaha that that that run their own separate logic but still you know we do have a policy and always

00:27:18.960 have that we reserve the right to go first now it might not be a bolt from the blue first strike but for

00:27:24.160 example if we're if an ally is invaded or we're dealt a cyber attack or a or a chemical or biological

00:27:32.800 attack we reserve the right to go first and in fact obama led a discussion in the national security

00:27:39.280 council to see if we should change that and he was talked out of doing it so our policy it's not

00:27:47.600 strictly and never has been strictly a retaliatory policy you know there's been this myth all along

00:27:53.360 that you know well the policy is mutual assured destruction they attack us we blow up all of their

00:27:59.200 cities our weapons have never been primarily aimed at an adversary cities they have always been aimed

00:28:07.360 primarily at military targets now the military targets many of them are near some of them are even

00:28:13.760 in cities so it's not like millions of people wouldn't get killed but the point has been

00:28:19.520 everybody who has actually been involved in making the policies and executing the plans envisions

00:28:25.840 nuclear weapons as military weapons writ large and even McNamara he came up with the phrase as he called

00:28:33.360 it assured destruction the idea that they attack us we attack their cities a critic of that called it

00:28:40.480 mutual assured destruction so that he could come up with the acronym mad that was a critic but even

00:28:47.280 McNamara in in top secret memos presidents Kennedy and Johnson would say after outlining this he says now

00:28:55.280 if a nuclear war actually happened this is not how the weapons would actually be used of the thousands

00:29:02.960 of weapons we had only about 200 were aimed at what were called urban industrial targets the rest

00:29:10.320 were all at military targets McNamara came up with this idea of assured destruction in other words once

00:29:16.240 you get to the point where you have the number of enough weapons to blow up say every soviet city

00:29:22.000 that had a hundred thousand people in it even though that's not how they were aimed then you don't need

00:29:26.320 any more this was a budgetary and political device to dampen down the appetite of the air force

00:29:35.120 which wanted even more missiles than he agreed to so it was it was strictly a rhetorical device it had

00:29:41.200 absolutely no resemblance to the policy that actually would have been carried out if a nuclear war had happened

00:29:48.640 so currently we still have not renounced a first strike option no in fact we we not only have we not renounced

00:29:57.280 that we explicitly say that that we preserve the right and we've even threatened to do this recently

00:30:04.320 i mean trump threatened to not only nuke north korea it wasn't even in response to a conventional

00:30:13.600 attack much less a nuclear attack trump threatened to nuke north korea if they continued to threaten us

00:30:20.400 verbally and that and that was something new i have to say yeah what what you know what when when

00:30:26.080 six months into his presidency he comes out of his golf course in edmonton new jersey and and threatens

00:30:32.400 to rain fire and fury like the earth has never seen on north korea if if not have they attacked south

00:30:39.600 korea or they attacked us but just have they kept talking in a threatening way and kept testing

00:30:45.600 missiles this is what we call not a preemptive attack but a preventive attack

00:30:50.400 attacking a country for developing the mere capability of attacking us and and here's

00:30:56.640 the interesting thing about that this you know often trump will say something and he's just talking

00:31:01.280 out of his hat he was not talking out of his hat at his or on his orders the military had developed a

00:31:08.880 new war plan against north korea which was designed to to unleash a series of attacks starting small with

00:31:18.080 possible escalation all the way up to nuclear in response to a provocative seeming test and and

00:31:25.840 that year you know the north koreans launched about 15 missile tests and on each test there was assembled

00:31:32.720 a conference call among the various commanders and this was the kind of conference call that would be

00:31:37.840 be assembled if there were intelligent intelligence of say an impending russian attack and

00:31:44.080 jim mattis the secretary of defense at the time was given advance authority if he thought it necessary

00:31:52.320 to launch not nuclear missiles but we we had there was these short range or medium range

00:31:59.040 conventional ballistic missiles called attackms advanced tactical missiles in south korea he was

00:32:05.440 given advance authority to fire them at the launch site in north korea with the intention of destroying the

00:32:12.880 launch site and maybe killing some leaders too it was known that kim jong-un liked to go watch some of

00:32:19.760 these tests and there were two occasions when mattis did he didn't launch them into north korea but he

00:32:26.160 launched these missiles into the sea of japan in parallel with the north korean missiles just as

00:32:33.440 kind of a signal that hey we can do this and we could aim them to the left instead of the right the

00:32:39.600 next time you do this so this was some very dicey stuff going on so when trump talked about

00:32:46.240 fire and fury he he was talking about what was actually reflected in the plans at the time

00:32:51.040 let's hold trump for for a second because i still want to talk through the how untenable all this is

00:32:58.480 even with totally competent and well-informed and ethical minds in place what's so crazy making

00:33:06.880 about the status quo here is that it seems to derange everyone by its logic no matter how well

00:33:14.240 intentioned and you know even at the outset of all this you know bertrand russell although there's some

00:33:21.040 dispute about you know how fully he articulated this position but he he certainly said something

00:33:27.760 that could be construed as support for preventative war against the ussr before they got their own

00:33:33.760 nuclear capacity because he kind of walked through the annihilationist logic of nuclear proliferation

00:33:40.240 and realized he changed his mind later yeah yeah you're right yeah so it's you don't have to be a

00:33:45.920 moral monster to contemplate killing hundreds of millions of people once you spend too much time

00:33:52.560 down this rabbit hole that's right well there was there but also not just hundreds of millions i mean

00:33:57.200 you know we now think about people who advocate limited nuclear war these limited nuclear options or

00:34:03.920 using nuclear weapons from strictly is up as another military weapon that sounds horrific but when that

00:34:10.080 began these were people trying to come to grips with with trying to minimize the damage trying to

00:34:18.000 mitigate that the moral horror of these things but then what what happened let's linger on this point

00:34:24.080 for a second sure why is the prospect of fighting a limited nuclear war so untenable because everyone

00:34:32.080 seems to flirt with this but then come away thinking you're at least one asked point blank i mean even the

00:34:37.520 people who've prepared the limited nuclear response plans when asked well how likely do you think it is

00:34:43.680 that this will stay limited it seems that you know to a man they say well it's not very likely right

00:34:50.720 well the the so so here's the idea here here was the the first strategy for this that some people came

00:34:56.400 up with around the late 50s early 60s the idea is okay soviets invade western europe or take over

00:35:04.480 west berlin or something instead of just launching all of our stuff how about if we do this how about

00:35:09.600 if we just destroy their strategic nuclear forces their missiles and bombers and submarines and then we

00:35:17.600 say to them okay we've withheld a lot of weapons and we have them in submarines or in missile silos or

00:35:24.480 something you can't easily attack them back off your threats take away your army let's talk or we'll

00:35:31.520 unleash the rest of our weapons which are aimed at your cities and you know in other words it's trying

00:35:37.520 to to make this like a chess game you know it's checkmate in four moves right the problem with

00:35:43.680 this is the problems are are several fold first there neither was nor is any intelligence that the

00:35:51.680 soviet and now the russians have any notion of this as as something that they are able to respond to or

00:35:59.040 want to second it's not like the people in charge are omniscient beings who can look down on the earth

00:36:06.880 and like a chess board and say okay we destroyed those targets and now we have complete control

00:36:13.760 over all of our other weapons we know exactly what the chess board looks like and they know what the

00:36:18.960 chess board looks like so we can control our moves in fact once you start firing off nuclear weapons

00:36:25.120 all kinds of things can happen communications networks go out you know electromagnetic pulse

00:36:32.160 whether or not the president or the soviet or russian the soviet premier or russian president

00:36:38.080 can can actually still communicate with the missile men and the submarines is an unknown thing it's just

00:36:45.280 this becomes this becomes not so easily controlled as as your nice academic blackboard exercises might

00:36:52.480 suggest also there's a matter of interpretation that we're relying in this case would be relying on

00:36:57.200 the russians to interpret our limited strike as a limited strike as a limited strike for example when

00:37:04.960 when this guy frank metter was doing these analyses and in you know as late as 1990 1989 to 90 he asked

00:37:13.280 someone at the defense intelligence agency to do an analysis of the soviet early warning radar systems

00:37:20.480 and he said okay because they you know they they were able to get some copies and so forth they said

00:37:26.720 okay at what point does is where the soviet air defense command no longer be able to see discrete

00:37:32.720 missiles coming over the horizon but just the whole screen is like a big blob it just it just and it was at

00:37:40.080 about 200 in other words if we launched any more than 200 missiles it would it would just fill up the

00:37:46.480 entire radar screen they wouldn't know this would look like an all-out attack and at that time

00:37:51.600 the smallest limited nuclear option that we had would have involved shooting 900 missiles so so i mean

00:38:01.840 given all the the very fancy and sophisticated dialogue on this you know going back to to 1960

00:38:09.920 if this had ever really happened it's gotten a little better since but if that had happened at any point

00:38:15.360 even and even if the russians were willing to to give this a shot to play this kind of tit-for-tat

00:38:22.560 nuclear exchange as they called it they would have been completely unable to do so so it was all

00:38:29.200 just an abstraction that that had no resemblance to reality yeah that's where we get shades of dr

00:38:36.720 strange love i mean it's very hard to get out of this it's it's you know daniel ellsberg who at the

00:38:43.680 time dr strange love came out in early 1964 was what was a pentagon official and not at all the uh

00:38:51.200 the anti-war guy that he later became but he had done some uh very very detailed studies on the nuclear

00:38:57.840 command control system in the late 50s and early 60s probably knew more about it than any other civilian

00:39:04.480 and he told me that that he and and uh an associate played hooky one day to go see a matinee of dr

00:39:11.200 strange love and he came out of the theater and he turned to his friend and he goes that was a

00:39:17.120 documentary yeah i want to take sort of the highest level game theoretic problem here which it seems to

00:39:27.440 me i mean there are several aspects to this but i mean first of all they're they're not weapons of

00:39:32.960 war you can't really use them right because it's certainly at every point past eisenhower to use them

00:39:41.120 is to assure your own destruction as you say these are weapons of suicide and annihilation and and

00:39:47.920 nonetheless they persist but here's where we kind of stumble into the paradoxes they persist because

00:39:53.280 one the difference in our world politically between having them and not having them is

00:39:59.280 substantial when you have them countries treat you differently than when you don't have them

00:40:04.400 right so you know we we invade countries that don't have them and we don't invade countries that have

00:40:08.720 them and they only work as a deterrent for conventional or you know nuclear aggression from outside

00:40:17.600 on the assumption that you'd be willing to use them and so they only deter i mean let's

00:40:22.960 take the simplest and gravest case you know our relationship to russia now you know our nuclear

00:40:29.280 arsenal only deters a russian first strike on the assumption that we would actually respond to a

00:40:37.120 first strike with a retaliatory strike of our own and yet when you look at the the logic of this act

00:40:44.480 just imagine the psychology of a president upon hearing of an incoming first strike i mean first

00:40:50.640 we've already established that he has to worry about whether or not he might be getting false

00:40:55.360 information right and he could be the next stanislav petrov who's just there's a radar glitch or a

00:41:00.480 computer virus or you know the system's been hacked or something could be off and there's not really enough

00:41:07.840 time to fully vet all of that how much time is there now how many minutes does the president have

00:41:14.800 to respond to a first strike from russia now from you know from subs and and missiles from subs from

00:41:22.240 from russian soil to our soil is about a half hour but for submarines it could be like you know eight

00:41:27.920 minutes or something right off the coast yeah it could be it could be okay at the outside he's got a half

00:41:33.440 hour to decide whether before he witnesses the ruination of everything he cares about and that

00:41:42.960 is if he's not immediately reduced to ash himself you know if he survives he's going to witness the

00:41:48.480 obliteration of society the united states is about to become a toxic wasteland inhabited by people who have

00:41:56.240 accidentally found themselves far enough on the periphery of a fireball and a blast wave such that

00:42:03.440 now they get to nurse their burns and their shrapnel injuries and await radiation poisoning in something

00:42:10.800 very much like hell right we're talking about every facet of civilization being suddenly destroyed

00:42:18.240 communications food production everything in an instant and so now we have a president who in contemplating

00:42:25.440 this which is going to happen in you know whether eight minutes 15 minutes a half hour at the

00:42:30.240 outside he has to decide he or she has to decide whether in what is likely to be his last act of any

00:42:40.480 significance on earth he wants to be the greatest mass murderer in human history by ordering a counter-strike

00:42:49.600 and killing hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the world in a way that will do

00:42:54.800 absolutely no good to him or anyone else he will ever know so it works as a deterrent only on the

00:43:02.960 assumption that a president will do that right to what human purpose what is the purpose of doing that

00:43:10.480 in that scenario and yeah yet the assumption is not only that that will happen i mean that's the policy we

00:43:18.000 rely on that expectation and without that none of this makes any sense at all it's just the game

00:43:26.560 theory breaks down if you're not going to retaliate to a first strike you have no deterrence against a

00:43:33.840 first strike and then you may as well not have these arsenals in the first place here's where you're getting into

00:43:39.200 the true dilemma so if all you wanted to do is deter yeah you say okay you you hit us we're gonna

00:43:45.440 we're gonna devastate you we're gonna destroy you but then yeah so then they start getting nuclear weapons

00:43:51.600 so then it becomes well is that deterrent really credible as you put it if they attack us and just

00:43:57.600 attack our military forces say will they really believe that we would strike back against their cities and

00:44:04.720 so people with good intention said yeah you're right we need to create our own limited options

00:44:10.800 and we need to be able to say okay no we'll we'll strike back in a limited way that becomes more

00:44:16.320 credible but then to do that you've got to believe it yourself so you've got to develop some doctrine to

00:44:21.280 do this some certain kinds of weapons to do this some plans to do this and as this evolves over a period

00:44:27.680 of a decade or so the concepts of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting converge in this frame in

00:44:37.200 this rabbit hole of logic there is no longer any distinction between the two to have a credible deterrent

00:44:45.920 requires a nuclear war fighting capability and mentality and you know it's interesting president

00:44:54.320 kennedy was the first one to address this in a roundabout way shortly after the cuban missile

00:44:59.600 crisis and this is on tape this is another one of these secret kennedy tapes he and secretary of

00:45:05.680 defense mcnamara and maxwell taylor the chairman of the joint chiefs are talking about the next year's

00:45:10.640 defense budget and kennedy says you know i i don't understand why we're buying more nuclear weapons i mean

00:45:16.720 it seems to me that 40 missiles getting through and destroying 40 soviet cities that that should be

00:45:23.520 enough to deter i mean when the soviets put 24 missiles in cuba that was enough to deter me from

00:45:29.120 a lot of things but then as the conversation went on kennedy said you know actually i guess if deterrence

00:45:35.760 failed i guess i would want to go after their missiles not their cities and i guess i need more than 40

00:45:42.160 weapons for that and you know therein he stated the dilemma but then he he drew an even broader

00:45:48.560 realization kennedy believed that if there was a war with the soviet union it would probably go

00:45:54.400 nuclear and if you started in using nuclear weapons there would be little way to to prevent

00:46:01.200 it from going all the way and so kennedy decided we need to get out of the cold war that's the problem

00:46:08.320 here and he gave a speech at american university in june of 63 and it's fascinating to go back and read

00:46:15.120 this speech it's quite a lyrical speech where he basically proposed it into the cold war and

00:46:21.200 khrushchev the soviet papers pravda and asvestia they reprinted this speech in its entirety the soviet

00:46:28.880 government they they lowered the jamming they turned off the jammers to let voice of america and radio for

00:46:34.880 europe come in so that people could listen to this speech and khrushchev responded to it you know he told

00:46:41.440 the u.s ambassador this is the greatest speech by an american president since since roosevelt and

00:46:47.280 they started doing things like a test ban treaty and a hotline and they were going to do a lot more

00:46:53.840 and then kennedy gets assassinated a year later khrushchev is ousted and really not until 1964 does the

00:47:00.640 nuclear arms race as we know it really start to take off so there was a potentially pivotal moment

00:47:08.720 way back then and and we've been sort of uh we we've been following the turn that that the pivot

00:47:15.200 actually ended up taking ever since hmm yeah i guess we should clarify a couple of points as we've

00:47:22.320 used this distinction between tactical weapons and and i don't know if you've named them but strategic

00:47:28.480 weapons how do you differentiate them because to speak of tactical weapons is these are not as small as

00:47:34.400 people might imagine i mean that our tactical weapons are about as powerful as what we dropped

00:47:38.400 on hiroshima and nagasaki yeah oh usually more but tactical weapons are you know say if you're fighting

00:47:45.520 a war in europe or any place and you want to use weapons on the battlefield those would be tactical

00:47:51.760 weapons if you want to use weapons against the homeland those are strategic weapons it's kind of a weird use of

00:47:58.480 the term but for example you're talking about you know this whole dilemma of the usability of nuclear

00:48:04.480 weapons just last week the united states deployed a weapon a new weapon that has been talked about for

00:48:11.360 a while called a low yield warhead for the trident missile and trident submarines this would be a warhead of

00:48:20.800 of about eight kilotons whereas ordinary trident warheads are about 150 and the idea is that the russians

00:48:28.960 have been talking a lot and even doing a little bit of testing and exercising of using low yield weapons against

00:48:37.280 say nato there's a war in europe say against nato you know say the air bases where we're storing smart bombs or something

00:48:44.800 and the idea is we need a low yield warhead ourselves to show them that hey we can respond to you in kind

00:48:54.400 if you do this i mean it gets very baroque i mean we already have weapons of about this yield on on planes

00:49:00.560 we could we could drop them as bombs but it became a kind of a doctrinal fine point so the the question is

00:49:08.720 this on the one hand yeah you know we shouldn't have weapons that are 200 500 kilotons a megaton

00:49:18.000 wouldn't it be better if they were like eight kilotons but you know there's this other notion

00:49:24.000 that the more you think that these things are usable then the more likely it is that you'll use them and

00:49:28.960 also let's think about this eight kilotons is still not you know hiroshima was 12 and a half

00:49:34.880 it's not that there there was a uh and i write about this in the book there was a seminar there's

00:49:39.680 a conference at at aspen colorado a couple years ago where where one of the people who was a big

00:49:45.760 advocate of these warheads was on a panel and the moderator asked him so when you say low yield what

00:49:51.680 what do you mean and he said well it's high single digits and the moderator mean kilotons because yeah

00:49:58.480 yeah kilotons he goes so sort of like hiroshima and he said well yeah you can get pejorative about

00:50:04.480 it if you want and the moderator said well no i'm not being pejorative i just want to make clear to

00:50:08.720 everybody that we're not talking about firecrackers you know eight kilotons that's eight thousand tons

00:50:15.040 that's 16 million pounds you know one of these weapons 16 million pounds of tnt yeah yeah plus the

00:50:23.120 radiation and the fire and the smoke and the radioactive fallout and all the rest but the blast

00:50:29.440 alone is is more destructive than any bombing raid much less single bomb that that anybody has ever

00:50:38.080 seen since the end of world war ii so you can kid yourself i had a professor of this stuff once who

00:50:44.960 when talking about the defense budget and the destructive power of weapons he said it's easier just

00:50:50.240 to leave off the zeros you know the billions of dollars and the thousands of mega megatons or

00:50:56.480 whatever you can kid yourself into you can you can look at this in a in a way too abstract way and kid

00:51:03.680 yourself that you're still talking about even on very low levels just an enormous amount of

00:51:09.920 destruction that the likes of which you know nobody currently alive and active has ever seen

00:51:15.680 yeah yeah so okay fast forward to the the present where the current occupant of the oval office has

00:51:25.360 changed our perception of the risk here and i think in part this inspired your recent book as well i mean

00:51:33.280 we we've all realized that the the so-called human element here is is paramount and when we start

00:51:40.160 promoting humans of dubious qualifications into the positions of greatest power in our society

00:51:48.080 it becomes scarier than it than it might otherwise be and as you pointed out i mean we we have a

00:51:54.320 president who has has threatened nuclear war now you've also pointed out that previous presidents

00:52:00.320 have threatened it i think ellsberg at one point states in your book that you know prior to trump's

00:52:06.880 threats there have been at least 25 explicit threats of first strike from from our side but

00:52:12.400 mainly in response to some actual threat is yeah something something conventional you know the war in

00:52:17.440 vietnam you know whatever i mean it's interesting you you you detail one meeting on this topic among

00:52:23.840 congressmen yeah where some democrat just makes the concern explicit you know we're here dealing with

00:52:31.520 a president who is who seems uniquely unstable and unqualified to make decisions of this kind and

00:52:38.880 now we need to talk about just exactly what is standing between his capriciousness and the annihilation of

00:52:46.720 another country should he you know wake up in the middle of the night and and you know choose

00:52:51.360 you know a first strike over tweeting what stands in his way and what was interesting one thing that was

00:52:57.520 interesting in that discussion was that none of the republicans really demurred on that assessment of

00:53:03.280 the president's characters no one can work with a straight face can deny that we're in the presence of

00:53:07.920 someone who shows a very different temperament than we're used to in a president so what what is your

00:53:14.160 understanding of what stands between his next thought and the annihilation of of half the world should that

00:53:25.920 thought be what i need to do now is is launch a first strike what stands in the way would be a kind

00:53:32.640 of a massive act of insubordination i mean what you're referring to is that yeah shortly very in the

00:53:39.520 first year of trump's office around the time of the fire and fury there was a hearing of the senate

00:53:45.440 foreign relations committee on presidential launch control authority this was the first hearing that

00:53:51.840 congress had held on the subject since the mid-70s and it was initiated by senator bob corker the then

00:53:59.520 republican chairman of the senate foreign relations committee who kind of had just learned that the

00:54:05.120 president had the sole authority to do this he didn't have to ask permission from anybody that he

00:54:11.200 could just do it on his own and so he called this hearing and yeah as you said one of the democratic

00:54:16.400 senators said you know let's cut through the crap here the reason why we're having this is hearing is

00:54:21.600 because our president is reckless and yeah you go back look at the transcript this was an open hearing

00:54:27.840 i watched it on c-span 3 when it happened that yeah no no republican demurs at all so they go through this

00:54:35.280 whole thing there are several witnesses including a retired general who had just recently been the commander of

00:54:42.400 strategic command and he admits that yeah you know he could do this on his own i mean there were all kinds

00:54:48.720 of conferences and consultations that he's supposed to go to but yeah he could do it and this general

00:54:57.280 whose name was bob killer retired general he came away from the hearing very frustrated because as he told

00:55:03.200 them he goes look if you guys want to change the the launch procedure you know you're entitled to do

00:55:09.680 that you have the country you have the power to do that you know again there's not much time to do

00:55:14.640 anything if it's responding to somebody else's first strike but if it's a contemplated preventive first

00:55:21.680 strike i mean if you guys want to pass a law that says congress must be consulted or a majority of the

00:55:28.000 cabinet has to vote okay you can do that let's do it and of course the senate did nothing this is this

00:55:35.360 four-hour hearing they did nothing and he came away frustrated that you know what you really shouldn't

00:55:42.640 do is raise questions about the legitimacy and reliability of the command structure and then do

00:55:51.440 nothing about it you know hey you want to do something about it okay but don't just raise a lot of

00:55:58.720 questions which may or may not be valid and then do nothing about it but you know this is this is what

00:56:04.480 congress you know except for a few years after the passage of the war powers act in the mid-70s

00:56:11.360 congress they've always shirked responsibility for this sort of thing either for going to war or for

00:56:17.040 getting out of war they don't want to take the blame if things go south they're happy to let

00:56:25.600 you know the king make all the decisions and uh then if it goes south if it goes if it turns out well

00:56:33.200 they can say yes i was supporting him and if and if it doesn't they can wash their hands of it it's

00:56:38.400 it's you know it's kind of disgusting really they're they're they're they're shirking their their

00:56:43.760 constitutional duties in this respect well this is where we get where we land squarely back in

00:56:49.920 dr strange love territory because when these conversations are happening around you know that

00:56:54.880 the details of command and control and you know someone asks the question well what would happen if

00:57:00.080 the president is you know off his meds and orders a first strike at first you get a a very sanguine

00:57:07.440 response well you know the military can always refuse an unlawful order right they're supposed to

00:57:13.680 right supposed to yeah but but but the this is where you get a a cop-esque wrinkle in the in the

00:57:20.480 machinery here because any preset attack plan right of which there are lord knows how many the fact that

00:57:28.080 they're preset the fact that they're in the manual proves that they have been already vetted by lawyers

00:57:34.800 right that's right by definition they're legal these first strike attack plans and this was this was

00:57:40.720 admitted by general keller in the course of the hearing that you know who decides whether it's a

00:57:46.080 lawful order he goes well the head of stratcom would do that and then but what if it's already a plan

00:57:51.040 and you know he had to admit that yeah it all comes down to the human factor and you know it's interesting

00:57:56.720 president truman at the very beginning at the dawn of the nuclear age you know he was very bullish on

00:58:03.440 the atomic bomb when it into the korea when it ended world war ii but then he he took a look at it you know

00:58:10.480 all the footage and the studies showing how destructive it was and there there's this meeting that that was

00:58:15.600 recorded in the diaries of david lilienthal who was his atomic energy commissioner where he's meeting with

00:58:21.200 his generals and he says you know that this isn't a military weapon it can't be used to get this is

00:58:27.600 it kills women and children and so he took the bomb out of the control of the military put it under

00:58:34.480 civilian authority his authority and in fact for many years after that if sack you know if some crazy

00:58:41.440 general wanted to launch a nuclear weapon attack he would have to get the bomb from the atomic energy

00:58:47.280 commission that that was changed later but still it was airtight but the assumption of this was that

00:58:54.880 well the civilian in charge would be the sane one and you know as as we know from reading you know

00:59:02.160 hamilton and madison and these guys they always foresaw that the possibility of a tyrannical leader

00:59:09.760 and which is why they they worked into the constitution all kinds of checks and balances with legislature with

00:59:16.240 the judiciary with the possibility of impeachment and you know they there weren't any nuclear weapons

00:59:23.600 back then so so they weren't thinking of checks and balances on that and and nobody has ever since

00:59:30.960 there was one incident in 1974 in the last days of nixon when he was you know going around the white

00:59:38.400 house sloshing drinks and getting all paranoid about watergate investigation and so forth james

00:59:45.440 schlesinger the secretary of defense went to the chairman of the joint chiefs and said listen

00:59:51.440 if you get any strange orders don't carry them out without talking with me first and again at the time

01:00:01.360 neither schlesinger nor the chairman of the joint chiefs was actually in the chain of command

01:00:06.720 nixon could have done something really how a launch attack basically you know the uh the football

01:00:15.440 it isn't you know the the black box that the president has there's nothing in there there's

01:00:19.600 there's a book in there there's a book in there and it has code words to use to launch certain kinds

01:00:26.240 of attacks and this suitcase is carried by a one-star general and they the president gets on a certain

01:00:34.400 phone and calls the national military command center which is in the basement of the pentagon and he

01:00:40.160 talks to a one-star general there and he says something and i don't know what it is that

01:00:45.280 authenticates his identity it's not like you know there are movies where he puts his fingerprints it's

01:00:50.720 nothing like that but he authenticates his identity he tells which option he wants to fire and then the

01:00:57.280 national military command center again a one-star general conveys that order to the people in the missile

01:01:04.480 silos to the people out in the submarines to the people in the bomber bases and the people who

01:01:10.480 occupy the national military command center are picked according to their well they're not picked

01:01:17.440 according to their creativity okay they're picked for their readiness to salute and follow orders

01:01:23.760 and they're not necessarily in on what's going on you know nor are the people down in the missile silos

01:01:29.520 they don't know you know i remember in that scene in dr strangelove when they're up in the bomber and

01:01:35.120 and they get this order and they say you know what's going on he goes well if if he sent this order that

01:01:40.800 means that the russians have already attacked you know they don't know and unless one of them stands

01:01:46.320 up and says no i'm not going to do this for which he's really risking treason the order will go out

01:01:53.520 it's amazing we have built a doomsday device which is it just seems on its face so poorly calibrated and

01:02:04.560 is driven at every point by the most unreliable device of all at this point just the you know

01:02:12.960 whatever human brain manages to get itself elected and put in you know put in proximity to the football

01:02:19.280 it's do you have anything you think of that is wise to say about how we can pull back from the brink

01:02:27.120 here i mean what do you think we should do politically you know over the next 10 years to

01:02:33.040 change the status quo well you know yeah you said it's a poorly calibrated machine in fact it's very

01:02:38.480 finely calibrated to give the president the sole authority to do this so yeah as i say you know it

01:02:45.600 you have to look at it in two ways if we're talking about responding to a strike that's already

01:02:51.440 happened or that's in the process of being there there you know hey there just isn't any time to go

01:02:57.760 consulting congress or the cabinet or but if you're talking about okay i want to launch but i'm actually

01:03:03.040 preventive i'm stuck i'm not even convinced that the logic of responding to an all-out nuclear strike

01:03:10.400 makes any sense well one one thing that you want to do is and and we've done it to some degree and

01:03:16.480 obama tried to do more of it but got resistance is to sharply reduce the number of weapons that we have

01:03:25.680 on american soil so for example if we had no land-based icbms or even just a few right now there are only 400

01:03:34.880 and there's single warheads you know we have a few thousand weapons you you if everything else was

01:03:42.080 pretty invulnerable to an attack you could ride out the attack just because the icbms are under attack

01:03:49.840 doesn't mean the president has 20 minutes to respond you can let that happen and then contemplate a

01:03:55.120 little bit more so one one thing to do is just to get even to get rid of even more of the icbms get

01:04:00.560 rid of them all together serious people have thought about that it's like it's a it's an act

01:04:05.120 of jujitsu you deprive the other guys of of their target so that's one thing that yeah then they would

01:04:12.720 just have to be targeting the population centers well but i don't think anybody would do that as a first

01:04:17.840 strike because they would face i mean i you're right the question would become why should we

01:04:24.080 kill moscow just because they killed new york well i don't know either but they that's a hell of a

01:04:29.360 chance to take but another reason just to close the loop on that that point the the the reason not

01:04:35.760 to get rid of our land-based missiles is if someone were to invent tomorrow a great way to take out

01:04:43.280 submarines we would be left without a that's that's the argument that is the argument or but bombers can

01:04:49.600 take off and go into airborne alert too but yeah there's always an argument you know it just so happens

01:04:54.400 you know why do we have three legs of the triad the land-based missiles the submarines and the

01:04:59.760 bombers because we have three services army near navy and air force they eventually the air force got

01:05:05.520 the land-based missiles originally that was going to be the army so if we had five services we'd probably

01:05:11.280 have five different kinds of so it's all a coincidence but people have come up with very

01:05:15.920 elegant arguments for for protecting all three legs of the triad but you know it's all a little bit

01:05:23.360 arbitrary and especially if you look at well yeah just i'll just leave it at that that's it's all just

01:05:29.200 it's it's kind of arbitrary and the the technology has come first and the arguments and rationales have

01:05:35.040 come after the fact and it seems that we're now poised to wait i'm sorry you also asked what else we

01:05:43.280 could do yeah yeah let me i'll just i'll just add one one piece here to uh what you just said with

01:05:49.280 you know reducing our armaments it seems like we're on the cusp of what looks like a another arms race at

01:05:58.480 least potentially because it doesn't our we have a new start treaty with russia that that lapses in 2021

01:06:04.160 and then you know who knows how we're incentivized to improve our our nukes after that i mean depending

01:06:14.080 on what they do what do you have any sense of where this is going in the near term well it's a disturbing

01:06:19.840 thing i mean there has been a dark side to arms control treaties too over time you know a president

01:06:26.480 needs to get two-thirds of the senate to ratify a treaty and he also needs the joint chiefs of staff

01:06:32.480 to endorse it up on the hill to get even anybody to take it seriously and so what has happened a lot

01:06:38.640 ever since the first salt treaty back in 1969 72 with nixon was that the choice the chiefs or the

01:06:47.200 republicans in congress say okay yeah i'll go along with this treaty but you've got to buy the following

01:06:52.160 weapons and you know jimmy carter had to buy onto the mx missile even though he loathed it in order to

01:06:59.760 get salt too president obama had to agree to somehow modernize all three legs of the triad in order to

01:07:08.080 get ratification of new start now trump doesn't have this problem the new start treaty which which

01:07:14.160 placed modest limits it had modest reductions and placed limits on both sides nuclear arsenals and also

01:07:20.800 provided for quite intrusive inspection rights to verify that both sides were continuing to abide by the

01:07:28.800 treaty it expires in february 2021 all that it takes to extend it is to get two guys in a room

01:07:36.400 and to sign it that's all it takes and and you know the weird thing is that there's nobody in in

01:07:42.720 the u.s military now who's arguing that we need more nuclear weapons many think we need new nuclear

01:07:49.520 weapons and different kinds of nuclear weapons nobody's pushing for anything to go beyond the limits that

01:07:55.440 were set by this treaty but trump partly because he just doesn't like treaties because they can find

01:08:02.480 our flexibility and more to the point this was negotiated by obama and therefore it can't be any

01:08:09.200 good that's the fundamental reason why he got out of the iran nuclear deal even though all of his

01:08:16.080 advisors at the time said he should stay in it because at the very least it was better than no deal

01:08:21.440 it's very personal with him but yeah if you just take the limits off and especially if you get rid of

01:08:28.400 the forums that allow for inspections then you know the the the gloves are off the the the rope is is

01:08:36.000 loosened these guys could build more and more for example trump got out of the intermediate range

01:08:42.160 nuclear forces deal that reagan and gorbachev signed he got out of the treaty the russians had been

01:08:47.520 violating it a little bit actually the russians never liked this treaty to say we're leaving it

01:08:53.200 and they leave it they could do a lot more with it than they do but then the first thing that we said

01:08:57.200 the military does is start testing missiles that had been banned by this treaty and i i called up

01:09:04.560 several people who i knew in the pentagon and i said so what what is the strategic rationale for

01:09:11.040 for for going back to building these kinds of weapons and they said well we don't have a rationale

01:09:16.960 yet we haven't talked with the allies yet on where they might be based we don't know what the targets

01:09:23.040 are we don't know what the reason is but it was basically okay we can do it so let's do it and the

01:09:28.640 rationale will come later and i'm afraid that especially if relations between the two powers stays quite

01:09:37.600 tense though the military will just you know go on their their their ways to build as many as they

01:09:44.240 can and then other countries which have been constrained in part by our own restraint will

01:09:50.720 then say well okay time for us to get into this game too yeah well we've talked about how this all

01:09:57.600 comes down to the decisions of the president when when push comes to shove and you know we know we have

01:10:04.320 a very stable genius in charge there are a couple details in your book that shed light on on trump's

01:10:11.440 beliefs about his own insight into the the nature of this problem one one actually predates his

01:10:17.040 presidency by many years where he nominated himself to be someone who could negotiate for the u.s in in

01:10:25.120 our nuclear stalemate with the soviet union paint that scene for me so so president george hw bush is

01:10:33.680 elected president in 88 and he's about to occupy the white house in 89 and trump has just written

01:10:42.160 this best-selling or quote-unquote written this best-selling book called the art of the deal

01:10:47.440 and he's fashioned himself as a terrific deal maker so and he wants to become the u.s arms control

01:10:55.120 negotiator and he lobbies himself he knows a lot of republicans he says yeah put me up for this job

01:11:00.560 and everybody thought it was a joke he was kind of a laughable character at the time and so he meets

01:11:06.480 at a new york cocktail party richard burt who was the veteran diplomat who bush had in fact actually

01:11:14.000 nominated to become the negotiator and trump says i understand you're the guy who's going to be the

01:11:20.560 negotiator right and he goes yeah he goes listen i have an idea for you about how to get a good deal

01:11:26.400 with the russians and by the way this story has been confirmed to me by burt so burt you know he

01:11:31.440 kind of that's an interesting character so he says yeah what's that and trump says okay so here's what

01:11:36.000 you do first meeting you have with the russians you go in late and then you walk up to their side of

01:11:42.800 the table and you pound your fist on the table and you say fuck you and you know burt obviously did not

01:11:52.560 follow his advice and negotiated a pretty substantial arms reduction deal a few years later over the same

01:11:59.680 period of time another one of donald trump's business ventures went bankrupt so you know do the math on

01:12:04.400 that one the other incident which you're probably asking about is the famous meeting in the tank with

01:12:10.160 all of his advisors so you know this is certain aspects of this meeting have been written about

01:12:16.400 in other books in woodward's book and in this new book very stable genius by the washington post

01:12:22.240 reporters he goes and has a meeting in what's called the tank which is the joint chiefs of staff's

01:12:27.280 conference room in the pentagon and all of his advisors are there the military is there and they're

01:12:32.240 giving him a kind of a tour d'orison of the world and our alliances and our problems and prospects and

01:12:38.800 good things and bad things and at one point and i was told this by a few people who were there

01:12:44.200 one of the generals here shows this chart showing nuclear weapons over you know the past number of

01:12:51.600 nuclear weapons over the past decades and you know the peak was around 19 the late 60s we had

01:12:57.680 30 000 nuclear weapons and now we have about 3 000 so you know it shows this graph going down and

01:13:03.960 this was meant as a as an illustration of the of you know the worthiness of nuclear arms control

01:13:10.920 and good relations between the nations and so forth trump says he says that he looks at it a different

01:13:17.640 way he goes how come i can't have as many nuclear weapons as i had back in the late 60s and it's

01:13:24.800 explained to him that well you know there are these arms control agreements and it's very expensive and

01:13:29.620 there was real overkill back then we don't never really needed this many and what we have now are

01:13:34.600 really more capable and you know he he nods his head he gets it but then i was told about a week

01:13:40.760 later he's in a white house meeting with his then national security advisor hr mcmaster and some other

01:13:46.440 people and he says he he my his mind flits back to this chart you know why can't i have as many

01:13:52.160 nuclear weapons as some earlier president did you know it becomes it becomes a you know a dick

01:13:58.060 measuring contest you know how come i can't have it that big and and you know it's explained to him

01:14:03.040 again like well you know you build way more weapons than you need then they'll think that we're about

01:14:08.480 to launch a first strike and then they'll build more weapons and oh okay and then at least once maybe

01:14:14.440 twice two more times over the next few weeks he raises this again he just can't get it out of his

01:14:20.280 mind and it gets to the point where word gets around about this and mattis says to a group of his own

01:14:26.780 assistant and undersecretaries you know don't worry we're not going to get into a nuclear arms race as

01:14:34.340 long as i'm here we should remind people in response to this first meeting where you know trump had been

01:14:40.340 given a tour of our arsenal and asked this this question why he can't have more bombs when trump was out

01:14:48.080 of the room what did tillerson say in response to trump's performance at that tank meeting

01:14:54.580 yeah i mean this had been reported elsewhere but i got it confirmed by a few people but secretary of

01:14:59.660 state tillerson as trump has left the room he says in kind of a stage whisper but that can be heard by

01:15:06.520 several people in the room he goes the president is a fucking moron and you know when that was revealed

01:15:12.940 you know you knew right then and there that tillerson's days as secretary of state were

01:15:17.960 numbered and in fact he was he was canned about four months later there's no reason to take this

01:15:24.320 too far in the direction of what will be perceived as partisan politics but this really is a non-partisan

01:15:30.520 point yeah absolutely i mean people middle most military officers really are non-partisan they

01:15:38.960 stay out of politics they don't want any part of it and if they're partisan they're republicans

01:15:45.760 i mean it's they see themselves as part of a chain of command they do not want to get involved in this

01:15:51.700 and yet you know the the source for a lot of these stories both in about trump both in my book and

01:15:58.300 i assume in in other accounts are military officers and and yeah that who to to the extent we do know

01:16:06.880 something about their voting record or political inclinations are generally not democrats right

01:16:12.280 yeah well fred you've given us a um a fairly startling tour of startling terrain

01:16:19.840 i'm nonetheless grateful it's depressing but very uh very useful to talk to you i'm worried that

01:16:28.160 it seems like very few people are thinking about this right this is not it's only with the the

01:16:34.660 emergence of trump that we've been reminded you know that many of us have been reminded that this

01:16:39.660 sword of damocles has never not been over our heads but right it just seems like we should be

01:16:46.880 thinking about this much more but there's this additional wrinkle which is thinking about it is

01:16:52.040 it's just it's so hard to get your mind around the reality of the risk and just how bad these outcomes

01:17:00.940 are or would be if anything really went wrong yeah this is this is the main reason why i wrote this

01:17:09.020 book i had written this book the wizards of armageddon in 1983 and i thought i thought there

01:17:15.100 would never be another reason to write a book about this subject again and you know what struck me when

01:17:22.280 trump did the fire and fury remark is that for the previous i don't know 30 years almost nobody had

01:17:28.860 been thinking much less worrying about this stuff this was from another era and yet you know the

01:17:36.640 people in the subterranean world where these weapons were still being churned out and the war plans

01:17:41.400 were still being devised and exercised and you know scenarios were being drawn up this was still going on

01:17:49.740 underneath under our own radar scopes and and you could say that one one thing that the trump has done

01:17:57.020 is to remind us that these things still exist and and the reason that i wrote the book was because i

01:18:06.340 thought it was time again to to write something that spelled out the entire history of this thing

01:18:12.480 and laid out the dimensions of this rabbit hole into which we had plunged down into all these years

01:18:19.820 years ago and we where we are still you know running around in a maze even if not of our own making

01:18:25.380 and uh that no and that's the thing that you know the presidents who have dealt with crises in which

01:18:33.480 nuclear weapons have been contemplated they have actually dug very deep into this hole they have the record

01:18:41.300 shows that they've examined the logic examined the scenarios really plunged themselves into it

01:18:47.640 and then come away thinking nope i do not want to go there and scattered out of the hole and tried to

01:18:55.720 come up with a diplomatic solution to the crisis and and we're now stuck with a president who is not

01:19:02.500 known for thinking deeply about things who acts by his own acknowledgement on his gut and uh you know

01:19:11.880 guts can lead to uh very turbulent places well fred thank you for your work and thank you for taking

01:19:18.080 the time to speak with me oh thank you

01:19:20.520 you

01:19:34.960 you

01:19:40.340 you

01:19:41.380 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 18, 2020

#186 — The Bomb

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