Yale Professor Paul Bracken, author of the book, The Second Nuclear Age, joins us on The Great America Show to talk about the growing threat to U.S. national security from within and without.
00:00:30.000Hello everybody, I'm Lou Dobbs and welcome to the Great America Show on this Memorial Day holiday.
00:00:36.140The day in which we honor those members of our military who died in service to the nation.
00:00:41.700We want to take this moment to thank those American heroes whose sacrifice secured and preserved our liberties in these United States of America.
00:00:51.440This is, above all else, a day of remembrance.
00:00:54.800God bless all who have sacrificed all for our constitutional republic and the American way of life.
00:01:01.820And to all who are serving the nation now in uniform all around the world, we thank you for your service.
00:01:08.780Today, in my opinion, America faces the most complex range of threats in our history, from both within and without.
00:01:16.220America is a nation that is without question, in political and societal turmoil, our national security at risk from a failing education system, corrupt government, open borders, the entry of millions of illegal immigrants, and deadly drugs produced by the Mexican drug cartels in league with communist China.
00:01:38.080Those drugs kill more Americans than in any war this century.
00:01:42.380And then there are the external threats.
00:01:44.840The Russians are warning the world they may use tactical nuclear weapons against the Ukrainians and implicitly against their allies.
00:01:53.480The Iranians are seizing ships in the Persian Gulf and advancing rapidly to their goal of having nuclear weapons.
00:02:00.740The Chinese will, in a matter of years, have more nuclear warheads than the United States.
00:02:06.080And the race for the fastest and most lethal hypersonic missiles is underway, and the United States, by most estimates, lags behind both Russia and China.
00:02:23.400The U.S. military hasn't met its recruiting goals in years.
00:02:27.100The woke military is losing experience, combat service members, officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted.
00:02:34.200Our military faces shortages of weapons, ammunition, and munitions.
00:02:39.440And obviously, weak leadership, civilian, and military pose a threat all their own.
00:02:45.600Our guest today is expert in not only defense and national security, but also technology and the military-industrial complex.
00:02:53.680Our guest is Yale professor Paul Bracken, who spent much of his academic career thinking about the unthinkable, and he is the author of the book, The Second Nuclear Age.
00:03:04.220Paul, great to have you with us here on The Great America Show, and thank you for being with us.
00:03:08.680And now, more than 15 months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Paul, the Biden White House is fighting a proxy war against Russia.
00:03:19.320China is bolstering Russia's surprisingly weak military.
00:03:23.360And out of nowhere, it seems a group of African nations is interested in brokering a truce between Russia and Ukraine.
00:03:30.680How in the world did we get here, Paul?
00:03:32.680Well, a couple of things going on here.
00:03:35.180First of all, you see the South Africans selling anything they can to Russia now.
00:03:41.560So this idea that we have a global democracy block that's all cooperating in this war isn't exactly the case.
00:03:50.940But I think the deeper issue here is like we saw with the Chinese trying to start a negotiation, which is it bypasses the United States.
00:03:59.440We're seeing something which has been long predicted, which is a multiple polar world, many decision-making centers, no longer run by two big powers, no longer run by the United States, as it was for a long time.
00:04:15.380And I don't think we're prepared for this at all, particularly in the State Department, but also in the Pentagon, because it raises whole new issues about alliances and how solid they really are.
00:04:26.460You see this in Asia, where I do a lot of work.
00:04:30.620There's a tremendous skepticism that the United States would come in to defend Taiwan or South Korea or the Australians.
00:04:40.440That's one of the reasons we did this submarine deal with the Brits.
00:04:44.780Remember, we're selling the Australians a nuclear-powered submarine.
00:04:47.800And they're really demanding, the Asian countries, the ones I just mentioned, are really, what they want is a strengthening of the U.S. nuclear guarantee to them.
00:05:01.480Because they look at something which does not get the attention that it really needs is this massive Chinese nuclear breakout, where the Chinese in 10 years are going to be at American force levels.
00:05:16.880And they're asking themselves in Seoul and, you know, in Canberra, will the United States really use nuclear weapons to defend us against China or against North Korea when China has the ability to destroy the United States?
00:05:35.620And so they're scrambling in Washington, more the Pentagon than any place else, and actually more in Congress, to come up with sort of interim answers to this in the form of theater nuclear weapons.
00:05:49.400But it's really a big problem, and it ultimately shows the increasing doubt that the United States has either the political will or the military power to defend all of this big world we're in all at the same time.
00:06:07.180And I think they're also irritated at our rhetoric, which promises all these things.
00:06:13.820But when it comes to actual behavior and taking actions, they just don't see it.
00:06:19.400The uncertainty, the tensions are palpable, because China is asserting itself, obviously, and in direct conflict with India, which a lot of people are not thinking about.
00:06:34.680But here are the two largest countries in the world that are straining at one another and creating another, if you will, problem for a world that hardly needs another.
00:06:47.460Right. One of the things that has happened is that the U.S. has tried to make strategic deals with India, particularly on the intelligence and reconnaissance fronts.
00:07:00.880So this is not getting a lot of attention.
00:07:06.060But look, India has a nuclear force, and they're modernizing it.
00:07:10.980If we ask ourselves, why has the Ukrainian military been so effective?
00:07:16.260The answer is because they're killing so many Russians with highly targeted missile attacks.
00:07:22.360And where do they get that information?
00:07:27.380So the potential for the United States to transfer information, targeting information to India to make life very difficult for the Chinese and to create a separate front so that China can't put all of their energy against Taiwan.
00:07:45.600But they have to worry about what's happening, you know, over the Himalayan mountains.
00:07:51.640Let me point out something here that most people have forgotten.
00:07:55.860And it's that when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger went to Beijing in 1972, Henry had in his briefcase the beyond top secret documents that he collected from the Pentagon
00:08:11.440about the location of every Soviet nuclear weapon east of the Ural Mountains with their longitudes, their latitudes.
00:09:12.900You can put 10 warheads on a single missile, and they can really change the nuclear balance with respect to China.
00:09:22.240So it's a very different world we're going into.
00:09:25.620We're used to one of two nuclear superpowers.
00:09:29.640We have three today, and I'm arguing you may see a fourth in the form of India.
00:09:36.040And just imagine a Cuban missile crisis with three or four countries in it.
00:09:42.000I mean, this has huge implications because there's another technological trend I don't think people pay enough attention to.
00:09:51.040And that's that you can destroy an enemy's nuclear forces with conventional warheads now because they're so accurate.
00:10:00.700And this makes life very potentially dangerous for any country with a small nuclear force.
00:10:07.620I don't know how we're going to handle this, but this goes into this soup of technological political complexity that we're going to be working out for many years to come.
00:10:20.700You've been a visiting scholar at the CIA, Beijing University.
00:10:27.240Give us a sense of your judgment of the two bureaucracies, if you would.
00:10:36.400Just your own personal sense about their effectiveness, their commitment, their capacity.
00:10:41.960Well, the Chinese are highly focused, in a way that the Pentagon is not, on Taiwan, essentially.
00:10:51.960This makes life a lot easier for them, number one.
00:10:56.060Number two, the other thing we have to understand is that China was able to skip a generation of innovation that the U.S. did not skip.
00:11:06.660If we're still pouring billions of dollars into maintaining armies, ships, airplanes, stuff like that, China is cutting the size of their mass infantry army.
00:11:20.300And they skip the generation of tanks, radars, aircraft, jet fighters, stealth, to pour it into cyber warfare, to pour it into hypersonic missiles, to pour it into AI.
00:11:35.940But to get to the heart of your question, I don't think the Chinese have thought through how they're going to use this in a real crisis or a real war.
00:11:50.220We learned in the Cold War that what we thought was going to happen didn't happen.
00:11:56.780That is to say, the problem wasn't surprise attack by the nuclear Soviet Union.
00:12:02.720The problem was how to fight a limited war in Korea, then Vietnam, and what role nuclear weapons played in that.
00:12:12.720OK, so I don't think China has really thought about that very much.
00:12:18.080And I wish they would, because it's very dangerous.
00:12:21.940China has now the ability to go on nuclear alert, DEFCON 2, the way the U.S. did in the Cuban crisis.
00:12:30.200And this means flying around dozens or even hundreds of hydrogen bombs on airplanes, putting them on these reefs, which they fully intend to do, these artificial islands they've been building.
00:12:48.380So they're climbing a learning curve to get to the United States side.
00:12:53.760The way I see it, we've climbed this learning curve 40 years ago, but we're now going down a learning curve because we've forgotten about the existence of nuclear weapons.
00:13:07.720That China will use these to threaten us, to get us to pull the Seventh Fleet back to Hawaii because we can't risk it, because it's vulnerable to nuclear attack.
00:13:23.000And I don't see the Pentagon really taking this seriously.
00:13:27.540They play war games with respect to defending Taiwan, but there's no nuclear play in it at all.
00:13:37.320It's as if it's a force on force, almost an academic model.
00:13:43.580When in the reality, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, you'll see leaders in probably all countries be scared to death of an escalation.
00:13:53.600And that can be used very effectively if the other side is more frightened of nuclear war than you are.
00:13:59.440We'll be right back with Paul Bracken.
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00:15:24.300We're back now talking with Professor Paul Bracken.
00:15:29.000Paul, I want to go to the issue of the Pentagon, not considering some of the imponderables, but imponderables that you do take into account and give great thought to.
00:15:57.260I mean, not letting China get too far ahead of us, bringing allies along who need the technology.
00:16:07.440That would be India and, to some extent, South Korea, bringing the European Union along, both in terms of their nuclear forces in France and Britain, but also in terms of their just their general technology.
00:16:24.800So it's kind of a very complicated management problem so that not one set of powers gets too far out in front of the other where they might exploit it for military purposes.
00:16:40.880This national security team that you referenced earlier, and we're talking about Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, the national security advisors and their cohorts, are, I think, by even the left considered not top rate in terms of talent or experience.
00:17:03.240We have a president that is woe-begone.
00:17:10.560He is compromised in the minds of most and highly ineffective, except in destructive direction and initiatives.
00:17:21.760What are we to do when you have a second-rate national security team and a president who is effectively a non-entity?
00:17:31.600Yeah, there's a tough question, but I believe some people are asking it in Washington, which is to say, what would we do if we got into a really serious crisis?
00:17:47.720Which one thing we have not gotten into is like a crisis that could seemingly go all the way.
00:17:55.240And there's not really a lot you can do in the bureaucracy without challenging civilian control of the military.
00:18:05.000So it's sort of pockets of people that I talk to who are very concerned about this, but they really don't know what to do.
00:18:14.680They don't see it getting any better, and it may get worse if there is another team, the replacement team for a second Biden administration.
00:18:27.400You know, heaven only knows what that would bring.
00:18:30.920Let me just say it, because people won't.
00:18:33.280But they are afraid of a nuclear version of the exit from Afghanistan.
00:18:39.580In other words, a crisis where you have to take important decisions in a very short period of time.
00:18:51.220And you put an overlay of nuclear weapons on it or major military clashes of a kind we would see in a war between China and the United States.
00:19:03.280And the Afghan Taliban could not really shoot back.
00:19:09.840We're now dealing in this multipolar world with countries who can shoot back.
00:19:16.520And I just I find a lot of concern that we're not taking this problem on head on.
00:19:22.100You know, I have to say you're scaring the hell out of me just to contemplate this this president, this commander in chief with this this cadre of of so-called national security experts around him.
00:19:41.440And I mean, that is just a thought that no one in the national media is contemplating, discussing, reporting.
00:19:50.320There is not a lot of thought, it seems to me, going into the leader coming from the leadership of our military and certainly not much coming from this White House or from, frankly, academia to this Pentagon or to this White House.
00:20:58.620How to buy and use technology efficiently.
00:21:02.540I would be much happier if they were to draw into government people who were from engineering schools or business schools or even some of our big technology companies.
00:21:16.100Now, you're beginning to see some of that out of necessity, but I don't think it has really gone far enough.
00:21:23.960Grant strategy as a topic is has many, many books and articles about it.
00:21:30.140But they're all drawn from the social sciences or the humanities.
00:21:35.980Not from the B schools and the engineering schools.
00:21:40.920So that's something we could change over time.
00:21:45.000There was a time where you could expect to see a CEO give up his job.
00:21:52.400Usually it was a man give up his job as CEO or chairman of the board and go to Washington and serve the country in some high position within the Defense Department or the State Department.
00:22:04.960Bring lifetimes of not only achievement and success, but huge, huge, huge stores of knowledge about the world.
00:22:19.680Let me just go back to the of how we got here.
00:22:22.860Back in the Cold War, you look at the sort of architects of the U.S. military, people like Herman Kahn, Albert Rolstetter, Andy Marshall, Tom Schelling.
00:22:40.280They all came out of the Rand Corporation, which was set up in the early 1950s.
00:22:49.700They broke the government's monopoly on the debate.
00:22:56.160And back in the 1950s, we could, you know, if we had more time going to the U.S., the Pentagon was operating nuclear weapons in a way that was unsafe.
00:23:07.160In a way that would get you into a war by accident.
00:23:43.720Back in the 50s, the subject we were discussing was the creative people and very smart people going in to work for the government.
00:23:52.420And the point I want to make is that the leading people who were the architects of the U.S. military, so people like Albert Olsen, Herman Kahn, Andy Marshall, Tom Schelling, I could go on.
00:24:11.260So when they started to look at the problems, they found that there were huge potential for accidents and misaligned objectives, which would get you into a nuclear war that you didn't want to get into.
00:24:31.740And the effect of these people, it wasn't that we agree with them or not.
00:24:37.820It's that they broke the government's monopoly at the time.
00:25:06.420Which is the government, even the Pentagon, which is trying to do a good job, is just used to being in charge.
00:25:15.460It's a military top-down command system.
00:25:18.100The academics and the think tanks today don't challenge it, except on issues like you were outlining about diversity, equity, inclusion, and things like that.
00:25:32.360They don't point out that nuclear weapons, as China builds up a force to rival that of the United States, are going to make an enormous difference.
00:25:42.900They don't point out that countries now have the ability to destroy enemy nuclear weapons with conventional targets because of super precise missiles.
00:25:54.880I often ask audiences, why would anybody want a hypersonic missile?
00:26:23.440Well, if you think about that for a minute, it brings in a whole new layer of intelligence and reconnaissance and tracking.
00:26:31.380How this is all going to work is something that has not been sorted out.
00:26:37.160And to me, it illustrates the need for fresh thinking of a kind we saw when the 1950s brought in outsiders into the national security establishment.
00:26:48.620Today, most of the focus is on just making the missile faster, not like what sort of trouble are you going to get into it with it or on what are you going to do if they blind our satellites?
00:27:03.960Is there, in fact, a consideration going on at any level about what all the hyper ideological conflicts in this country are doing to our national security?
00:27:17.400And I'm talking about the media, 95% of which is just energized around the idea of Marxism, Marxist-Democrat party leaders.
00:27:31.140Our institutions are in the grip of all of this woke nonsense, indoctrination of left-wing principles, and very little attention in K through 12 to actual education.
00:27:47.340And we've had, and I'm saying that advisedly, we're not turning out the same level of student that we once did from our high schools for entry into college.
00:28:17.340Many reasons for this, but I believe the educational system, K through 12, and especially the elite higher education system, has a lot to do with this because if you combine hyper specialization, which is what most academics now are engaged in, and I was aware of that.
00:28:42.480What I underestimated was the ideological change for whatever you call it, CRT, DEI, a whole range of issues.
00:28:55.960Which to me, which to me, the biggest problem that it created was that it drove out thinking about big policy issues.
00:29:44.280This followed President Obama's Prague speech in 2009.
00:29:48.320Well, I didn't even feel safe to go to this meeting because I thought, it is not going to happen.
00:29:56.520China and, good Lord, North Korea are not going to give up their nuclear weapons.
00:30:02.360But I didn't feel like that I would even be respected by making this rather obvious point that they're not going to give up their nuclear weapons.
00:30:12.400And I've been proven to be right, as anybody who had any sense could see in 2011.
00:30:21.000So this driving out of big problems, which are now not being studied really at all in academia today, whatever the problem is, climate change, war and peace, inequality, there's an automatic leap to the progressive answer.
00:30:40.920And there's no debate or attempt to look at other solutions the way there was when I started my academic career.
00:30:54.220You know, I think, Paul, so often that we see the left emerge loudest and boldest in our media because their answers are so simple.
00:31:06.380There's no rigorous thinking, there's no critical judgment, and there's very little possibility that we're going to get to an intelligent and effective answer.
00:31:16.520Because we have created a whole society of liberal arts experts on things they don't even comprehend or who are completely unprepared for a technologically advanced world that they can only sort of drool at as they talk about what I consider to be nonsense.
00:31:38.280Well, I agree, and that was the purpose of the liberal arts back in the 50s, 60s.
00:33:06.800And thanks, everybody, for joining us today.
00:33:09.060We'll be taking up the debt ceiling negotiations that appear to be disastrous for the Speaker of the House and the GOP.
00:33:16.000Among our guests this week, Judicial Watch's Chris Farrell, former Trump presidential advisor Peter Navarro, and tomorrow our guest, Congressman Austin Scott.