04/20/16 – John LaForge – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing John LaForge.
He's got this brand new one we're running at AntiWar.com today, Voices of Reason versus the Doomsday Lobby.
Welcome to the show.
John, how are you?
Oh, thanks, Scott.
I'm fine.
Very happy to have you on the show.
Tell me, what's the Doomsday Lobby?
Are you just calling people names?
Where'd that come from?
Well, that is a nickname that we've applied to what they themselves call the ICBM Coalition.
It's a group of 10 U.S. Senators who have large Air Force bases in their states, either that or bases that deal with the land-based intercontinental ballistic missile system, and like to maintain those systems in spite of their dangerousness, their danger to the people they're supposed to protect, and the redundancy and just plain anachronistic nature of these land-based missiles.
But so, it's your name for them, but they themselves, they identify themselves as a group, as the Nuclear Weapons Lobby, the ICBM Coalition?
Yeah, they actually call themselves that, and they set out little position papers with regard to the Minuteman III missiles, as they're called now.
That's the remaining 450 land-based missiles are all Minuteman IIIs.
And they like to use these 40-year-old arguments that they're somehow defensive or effective as a deterrent, which is, of course, a pretty easy argument to poke holes into, considering the number of attacks that they've been perfectly unable and incapable of deterring.
Attacks on the World Trade Center, on the USS Cole, any number of attacks against U.S. targets.
Well, so there's a lot of things to talk about, even right there, to follow up on.
First of all, I just finished watching the movie, The Man Who Sold the World, a few weeks ago.
The Man Who Saved the World, yeah.
What did I say?
You said sold.
Oh, no, that's an entirely different...
That's an escape video.
Yeah, I just watched The Man Who Saved the World, a few weeks ago, about the Russian officer who refused to believe his computer and launched a retaliatory response back in 1983.
But in part of that movie, he's taking a tour of a Minuteman silo in, I believe, North Dakota.
And the tour guide explains that just one of these Minutemen, with, I think, they're 10 megatons.
And he explains that that is more, just one of these, is more than all the explosives, more explosive power, than all of the bombs dropped in all of World War II, in all theaters of World War II, including the nukes that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He says that if you combined all of those bombs together, that's about 60% of the explosive power of one Minuteman nuclear weapon.
Is that right?
At 10 megatons?
That used to be correct, but these days, it's really not.
He might have been referring to the totality of the missile system at the time.
A single Minuteman III missile now, they have been pared back from the height of the Cold War era, is a one warhead missile with a 300 kiloton explosive power, about 20 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
So, there used to be bombs on the B-52s that were 9 megatons, which, as you pointed out, is explosive power greater than the totality of those used in World War II.
These Minuteman IIIs are single warhead missiles now, but the point of the movie, I believe, The Man Who Saved the World, is that these things are accident-prone, and they're destabilizing.
And that's the gist of my piece today at the website, because it's not just peace activists and anti-nuclear investigators who are saying these things are dangerous.
William Perry, Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, has been on the lecture circuit saying that these ICBMs are imminently retirable, and that they should be eliminated because he says, and I'm quoting, they're not needed, they aren't necessary, and they're the most likely source of an accidental nuclear war.
In fact, some active-duty Air Force generals have been saying the same thing.
There's a Lieutenant General, James Kowalski, who was Vice Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, which is the group in charge of all the land-based missiles.
He said, the greatest threat to my force is an accident.
The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid.
He's talking about his own launch officers, and this was in 2014, just two years ago.
And that's the problem with these missiles, is that they're prone to accidents, and the force that's in charge of them is prone to malfeasance, having lost their mission and their purpose about 27 years ago at the end of the Cold War.
Well, and even then, my understanding is, is the nuclear weapons force was always seen as a career dead end inside the military, where all the kind of losers were shuffled off, like all the washout FBI agents become ATF instead, you know, that kind of thing.
And we've seen recently, with all these different scandals, gambling and drunkenness and all kinds of just base corruption, that is really the kind of thing that can compromise the officers and some of the highest level officers in charge of these missiles, right?
That's right.
Just two years ago, the Air Force had to fire 92 of the missile launch crew members because they were cheating on their launch proficiency examinations.
You know, they're under extreme pressure to get a perfect score on those exams all the time.
And you can imagine, they don't want any slip-ups in the launch procedure for a thermonuclear weapon.
So the pressure is enormous, and getting a perfect score is sort of expected.
And the fact is, somebody got a hold of the answers, and they were texting the answers to these exams to one another using their smartphones.
And that's just one of the scandals.
In 2014, there was a pair of launch office administrators found to have been distributing narcotics across six Air Force bases.
And it was an investigation of that drug scandal that revealed the cheating scandal.
So there's just a string of these problems underway in the missile force.
Well, you know, it's important to get into that kind of thing, because I think the average American not really considering nuclear weapons really very often at all, if they ever consider them, they probably just assume the best.
They really cut, I think, the benefit of the doubt that the most responsible men in our military must be in charge of these things.
And they must run their drills very often and make sure that they're doing a really good job, because what are they going to do, be careless with nukes?
It's kind of unthinkable, and so it's not thought of.
When, in fact, we're talking basically about the same people who run the post office, only they're in charge of the H-bombs.
Yes, and these land-based systems are so oversized and unusable in military or ethical terms that there's been quite a string of civilian and military officials, high-ranking officials, who have come out and said they can be retired.
William Perry's just the latest in a long string of these officials.
Yeah, many of them Republicans, right?
George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and all these guys, Robert Gates, have all signed on to this Global Zero campaign, right?
Yeah, Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, he signed on to this report in 2012 that was written by James Cartwright, another vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He said the arsenal is big enough and plenty large enough with none left on ICBMs.
Now, he became Secretary of the Defense later on, and during his confirmation hearings before the Senate, he stuck to that position that the ICBMs could be eliminated, quote, without leaving the U.S. at risk.
Paul Nietzsche, who was a hardline anti-Soviet Cold Warrior, a hawker, an advisor to Ronald Reagan, after he retired, he said he saw no compelling reason why the U.S. should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons.
This is a direct quote from an op-ed he wrote in the New York Times.
He says, maintaining nuclear weapons adds nothing to our security.
And then he said something quite staggering, really, to the nuclear weapons establishment, because it undid the deterrence theory all in one fell swoop.
He said, quote, I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the U.S. to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us, end quote.
Well, that's just a recognition that our conventional forces are so overwhelmingly powerful that nuclear weapons are redundant, completely needless.
And you're telling me, John, this is the same Paul Nietzsche that really amped up the containment doctrine and made it the rollback doctrine and was kind of the Paul Wolfowitz of 50 years ago, that same guy?
Yeah, the same guy, the founder of the Committee on the Present Danger.
Yeah, the guy that made George Kennan look like a little wimp.
That's right.
Super Hawk.
Amazing.
OK.
And so, you know, and help me out with this, too.
You mentioned in your article begins with this report from 2010 you've referred to here about just how little we need these things.
But I could swear and maybe I just have it wrong.
I could swear that there was a report.
Maybe it is this report I'm thinking of, but I could have sworn there was a report that came out under the auspices of the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Robert Gates that said that America could do with as few as 14, one, four, 14 nuclear weapons, that that would be enough to basically threaten the capital of all the major world powers who could dare ever nuke us and that that was more than enough at 14.
And yet I just I don't know.
I don't see that number here.
And I haven't seen it anywhere since then.
I tried Googling around.
I found a lot of other things except that.
So am I just remembering the wrong number there about the same report we're talking about?
I'm not sure.
I haven't seen that number myself.
I saw a report.
It was also a 2010 report by a guy, a colonel named Saltzman.
Colonel Chance Saltzman said 311 was the total that would suffice for a so-called deterrent posture.
The point is the same.
There's only about 100 major cities in the whole world.
And there's no nuclear armed opponents in the world anymore.
China is our most favored nation status and biggest trading partner.
And Russia has an economy the size of the Netherlands now and is no threat to us.
And also a big trading partner.
You know all the boogeymen out there like Iran and North Korea that the public cares about day after day.
They don't have any nuclear weapons.
And so 311 warheads that are deliverable by the US Navy or the Air Force are obviously more than sufficient to scare off any adversaries.
Well, and that's the thing.
You hear about 6,000 here, 7,000 there.
You know, obviously it sounds like a hell of a lot of nukes to have.
But then when you really focus on 311, as you say, that's way more than enough than you could possibly ever need in the absolute worst case scenario, right?
Russia, China and Europe all gang up on us.
We still don't need 311 H-bombs.
Holy crap.
So then now switch back to 6,000, 7,000 again.
And I guess here's where we get back to the beginning of the interview here.
This isn't about national defense at all.
And where Americans might assume that there are competent military men in charge of the nukes, they probably also assume that there's some, you know, academic objective egghead who's come up with the mathematical game theory that says that this is exactly how many we need for our defensive purposes or something like that.
But that's just not right.
It's a bunch of lobbyists selling H-bombs the same as they line up to sell the military Humvees or fighter jets or any other thing.
That's exactly right.
There are four major US corporations that are designing and manufacturing the missile systems and their upgraded guidance systems and rocket motors.
And those 10 senators from Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, oddly enough Louisiana and Utah, they get a lot of campaign contributions from these major corporations, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and others.
And so it's just the revolving door of campaign finance and buying a few votes.
As you say, it has nothing to do with defense anymore.
If it did, people would be asking questions about the nuclear weapons work that's done in the laboratories in these factories where the workers are exposed to radiation and being harmed from developing the nuclear weapons themselves.
McClatchy Newspapers, maybe you've reported on this.
McClatchy News Service, the third largest newspaper chain in the country, reported that 33,000 US weapons workers died over the course of the 70-year nuclear arms race just from on-site radiation exposures.
These are the people these weapons are supposed to defend, and they're just killing our own.
And as Paul Nietzsche said, they're a threat mostly to ourselves.
I'm glad you did mention that because I really dropped the ball on interviewing the McClatchy reporters about that study or that massive report that they did a couple of months ago.
So I'm glad you brought that up so people can go and look that up.
And, of course, they're basically treated like a bunch of Army privates when it comes to their health care and the government taking responsibility for what they've done to them as well, right?
Yeah, there are a lot of compensation if they can prove that their illnesses came from their worksite exposures.
And it's very hard to make that case.
About 100,000 people have tried, and 52,000 have been denied compensation.
So it's a difficult thing to establish.
And, yeah, the burden of proof on them, a bunch of people are handling plutonium and all this stuff.
And it's like, yeah, geez, for some reason I got leukemia, but I don't know what it is, you know?
Well, it's just as Robert Perry says, again, William Perry, I'm sorry, Secretary of Defense under Clinton, he said these nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security.
They now endanger it.
He's got a website since he retired from the Department of Defense.
It's called William Perry Project.
And he comes right out and says, after a lifetime immersed in special access to top-secret strategic nuclear options, he's led to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security.
These are amazing statements from the top of the food chain there at the military, and we need to pay attention to them and forget these doomsday lobbyists who are just trying to maintain their large Air Force bases.
Right.
Yeah, anyone who studies the slightest bit, I mean, just scratch the surface of what's public about nuclear weapons, you know, planning for actual nuclear wars and what they would look like, and you'd just be horrified into being an activist almost immediately.
Like when Daniel Ellsberg wrote those articles for Truthout a few years back and included the most simple elementary school line graph of the hundreds of millions of people who would be dying within the first weeks of a nuclear war with Russia.
And just, you know, yeah, for the first week, probably about 150 million.
And then after that, it'd be up to about 250 million.
And, hey, you know, it's just statistics.
A bunch of, again, you know, a bunch of eggheads sitting around with slide rules, figuring out just, you know, how to hold the sword of Damocles over the necks of all of humanity.
It's just amazing.
And then the masses of the people, the 7 billion of us on the planet, meh, whatever, out of sight, out of mind, not really worried about it.
I mean, people don't really use those things on each other nowadays anyway.
Right.
And so it's not even an issue.
If it's an issue at all, you know, Obama made an issue out of it when he became president, you know, kind of for PR reasons, and he got his little Nobel Peace Prize and all that.
But now he's ushering in this program to spend a trillion, which probably means two or three by the time they're done, on a whole new generation of nukes, including more usable ones.
And you identify the campaign contributions.
There's no other, you know, incentive pushing back the other way.
Not really.
No one is saying that, hey, this doomsday lobby is spending nuclear weapons industry money to convince us that it's a good thing for them to make us targets of nuclear bombs.
I mean, what good does it do the people of North Dakota to have missile silos everywhere, when, as you point out in your article, got submarines out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean can handle this without making all of our North Dakotan neighbors targets the way that they've done.
The whole thing makes no sense at all.
And yet, look, it just rolls on and on.
It's not even a news story.
Probably hadn't been on 60 Minutes or Primetime Live or something in 20 years.
I'm glad you mentioned this trillion dollar program that was announced by Obama about two years ago, spending $360 billion every 10 years for 30 years to completely rebuild the nuclear weapons production infrastructure in the United States.
And if your listeners want to get a good analysis of it, there's a brand new report that's been published by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, and they can download it.
It's called Trillion Dollar Trainwreck.
They can download that at ananuclear.org.
Just check out Trillion Dollar Trainwreck.
And it's an analysis that shows this budget proposal hasn't been approved yet.
It needs to be pared back.
It needs to be eliminated, and it's going to take a groundswell of public opposition because it's in the works to maintain the design, development, and production of new nuclear warheads well into the next century if this doesn't get cut from the budget.
Absolutely amazing.
Well, don't worry.
Hillary Clinton will take care of it for us.
Well, you know, it's more militaristic than Barack Obama, where this proposal came from in the first place.
Right.
Yep.
We're screwed.
All right.
Well, listen, you're doing great work, and it's not going unnoticed.
So I sure appreciate your writing and appreciate your time on the show today, John.
Thank you very much, Scott.
Glad to be here.
All right, y'all.
That is John LaForge.
You can find his article today at antiwar.com, Voices of Reason versus the Doomsday Lobby.
And then he was also recommending this study, Trillion Dollar Trainwreck at ANANuclear.com or .org or something.
Anyway, Trillion Dollar Trainwreck.
Come right up.
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