05/26/16 – Will Saetren – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Will Satrin.
He's the author of Ghosts of the Cold War, Rethinking the Need for a New Cruise Missile.
And he's got this piece at warisboring.com.
And it's co-authored with Jeff Wilson here.
It's called No, You Can't Have a Small Nuclear War.
Here, I didn't even know that was an argument.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm very good, Scott.
How are you doing?
Real good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And so I guess, you know, everybody's heard that they're setting about a new project over the next, what, 20 or 30 years, they say, to spend a trillion dollars completely revamping and rebuilding America's nuclear weapons arsenal, I think, pretty much from the ground up.
And a big part of that, as you guys talk about in here, is this dial-a-yield cruise missile, nuclear cruise missile, that is designed to be, quote-unquote, usable in battle.
They can make them small enough where it's still a nuke, but I guess, you know, bigger than a daisy cutter or something.
But not so big as to kill a whole city, multi-megatons, that kind of thing.
And you guys are warning that we're better off with multi-megaton bombs than we are making the smaller tactical cruise missiles.
Is that right?
Absolutely, yeah.
And it is kind of paradoxical.
But the megaton-class weapons, the big weapons, they, throughout the entire Cold War, you know, if you bought into this idea of mutually assured destruction, it was the notion that you could never, ever use nuclear weapons on your adversary because their response, no matter how small, would be devastating.
And so this idea developed starting in the early 1980s that you could make the nuclear weapons smaller so you could essentially use them for nuclear surgical strikes.
So we're not talking something like, you know, the size of Hiroshima or Nagasaki here.
This is, for instance, take the example that we give in this article about a NATO country being invaded by Russia.
So let's say Latvia, for instance.
The United States and NATO would feel obliged to respond in some manner because Article 5 would kick in, right?
An attack on one member state is considered an attack on all.
How would you do that?
Well, the United States and NATO doesn't have a conventional superiority in the European theater.
Overall, they have the superiority, but most of the forces are actually in the United States or they are overseas in Iraq or Afghanistan.
So what would you do in that case?
Well, it would be extremely tempting to be able to use a low-yield nuclear weapon for a limited nuclear strike.
This is something that military planners are talking about openly.
Frank Kendall said that an LRSO armed force would give us options and flexibility in the event of an extreme crisis.
Now, Frank Kendall is the Pentagon's top acquisition chief.
Now, that's really scary because they don't necessarily define an extreme crisis, but they also – the United States official doctrine does not rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack.
So by adding this dialogue yield feature, as you said, the ability to go as low as 0.3 kilotons, it kind of creates this mentality that you can fight a limited nuclear war, conduct limited nuclear strikes in order to stop a conflict from spiraling out of control.
We argue, however, that any nuclear use is uncontainable.
Nobody knows what's going to happen.
And in fact, there was a war game conducted in the early 80s by the Reagan administration, but they tried that example.
They war-gamed that exact scenario.
Wait, hold on a second because that's a whole long story I want to let you talk about.
But before you go that far, let me ask you this.
When you say 0.3 kilotons as far as – as low as this thing will go, how does that compare to the Moab bomb or the Daisy Cutter, which are the biggest non-nuclear weapons in the arsenal?
Do you know?
I'm not 100 percent sure on the explosive force of the conventional weapons.
So I'm a nuclear expert, but I would assume that it is fairly similar.
Yeah, it doesn't sound like – because Hiroshima was 10 or 15 kilotons, right?
That is correct.
It was 15 kilotons.
Fifteen.
Yeah.
And that was the smaller of the – 98 percent less, roughly.
Yeah, so it's a wonder why they would not just at that point go ahead and use the Moab or the Daisy Cutter.
I guess as you're talking about, the point is for the enemy not necessarily to die in such great numbers that we win the war, but for them to see the flash and change their mind about whether they want Latvia or not.
Absolutely.
And, you know, when you're talking about conducting actual surgical strikes – so we have a weapon in our inventory right now, in the United States infantry, that's called the JASM-ER, and it is a conventional cruise missile.
It entered the force in 2014.
So that is a cruise missile, brand new, extremely high-tech, and it has a 1,000-pound-class explosive warhead.
It also has an earth-penetrating capability.
So when that missile, cruise missile, hits its target on the ground, it actually burrows about nine feet into the ground and detonates, which amplifies the explosive force of that already 1,000-pound-class explosive warhead 20 times.
So I wrote this – as you said, I wrote the article called Ghosts of Cold War, Rethinking the Need for Nuclear Cruise Missile.
That's one of the main arguments against it is that there is almost no mission, and the military hasn't really been able to justify it when asked, that cannot be conducted by the JASM-ER or another conventional equivalent like you just pointed out.
There really isn't a mission for it.
And if you really, really, really need a nuclear weapon to do the job, there are other weapons, nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal that can do it.
So this just sounds like an Air Force attempt to replace this weapon because they already have an air-launched cruise missile that was built in the early 1980s.
It's coming to the end of its life expectancy, and they want to replace it.
However, the geopolitical reality that existed at the time that it was built doesn't exist anymore.
We have stealth bombers now.
We didn't have that at the time.
There was this firm belief that we needed the ALCM, the ALCM, the air-launched cruise missile, in order to essentially reach the Soviet Union with the air-breathing lead of the tri, which is the planes, right, the B-52 bombers.
The man who is essentially called the father of the cruise missile, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who oversaw its creation, has come out and said, we don't need the LRSO.
This weapons platform has outlived its relevancy, and it's actually becoming dangerous because of the new additional capabilities that the Air Force wants to put in the package with the new weapons platform that didn't exist in the old platform.
Okay, now, so, and this goes to what you were starting to say there about the test in the 1980s.
This theory, explain this, the theory of a de-escalatory nuclear strike.
Right.
The idea behind a de-escalatory nuclear strike is essentially you have two big nuclear weapons powers facing off, and they're about to engage in large-scale conventional warfare.
So, one party will use a low-yield nuclear warhead to demonstrate to the other party that they mean business, and they're willing to go all the way, right, to demonstrate resolve to the other opponent.
You know, kind of saying, like, this isn't a poker face, I'm not bluffing, I'm willing to go all the way.
The problem with that theory is, what do you think is going to happen when you use a low-yield nuclear weapon against any adversary, right?
So, back in the Cold War, we were talking about the Soviet Union.
It's highly unlikely that they're just going to take it, you know, lying down and not respond in kind or with an even greater strike of their own.
So, this is exactly what Proud Prophet, the war game that you're referring to, I believe in 1983, tested.
So, the war game started with a political crisis in the Mediterranean.
Then it escalated to the point where there was a face-off between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, and essentially NATO fired first.
They fired a low-yield nuclear weapon at the Warsaw Pact in order to demonstrate resolve.
The theory was that this would give them a second to pause and think and say, oh, whoa, NATO's really serious about this, we better back down, it's not worth it.
Well, that's not really how it worked out.
What happened was that the Soviet Union saw it as a threat, an attack on their way of life, responded in kind, then the United States responded with a full-out nuclear strike, and when those missiles were launched, the Soviet Union launched theirs, and that was pretty much game over.
I think the immediate result was that almost a billion people died as the direct result of the nuclear exchange, and in a short period of time after, another billion perished just because of the radiological fallout.
Then even more people died after that, because essentially what happens when you fire off, hypothetically, when you fire off that many missiles and they detonate, they create a lot of soot and ash and stir debris up into the atmosphere, and essentially the entire global crop cycle is disrupted, and then if you're lucky enough not to die as an immediate effect of the bomb or the radiation itself, you die of starvation because food can't grow.
Yeah, billion here, billion there.
Pretty soon you're talking about real casualty numbers.
Yeah, right, no kidding.
It's almost like the movie Dr. Strangelove when you're talking about casualties in terms of mega deaths.
It's absolutely bizarre, but the unique thing about this particular war game was that senior U.S. military officials played themselves, so the Secretary of Defense at the time played himself, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff played himself, and the results of the game wasn't as catastrophic as it was because they were crazy, but they followed to the letter American war plans at the time, and that is what led them to this place of absolute insanity.
Ronald Reagan, when he was presented with the results of the war game, is rumored to have become so sick, physically sick, that he had to cancel all of his appointments for the rest of the day.
And that was really the beginning of the end of the really aggressive nuclear policy that the United States has had up until that point.
Reagan became a champion of nuclear disarmament.
He reduced the stockpile, the nuclear stockpile, almost more than any other president other than George H. Bush, Sr.
He also almost entirely abolished nuclear weapons in 1989 with his Soviet counterpart Gorbachev.
They came incredibly close to reaching a final agreement that would have removed these weapons from the face of the planet, but because of American intransigence about SDI, more commonly known as Star Wars, and the Soviet Union's failure to realize just how important that was to the American administration at the time, it never happened.
So we missed that opportunity.
That doesn't mean that a world without nuclear weapons shouldn't still be the end goal.
We should absolutely move towards that.
But one step at a time, and adding a new weapons platform on top of the thousands of nuclear warheads that we already have, the LRSO is completely redundant, it's expensive, it detracts from other conventional capabilities that we can actually use.
And in essence, going back to Frank Kendall's statement about giving the president unique options in a time of crisis, by giving him the option of using the LRSO, you're basically giving him the option to end the world as we know it.
And that's a non-option, period.
It should be taken off the table.
Well now, Daniel Ellsberg has talked about the nuclear war plans from back in his day, when he was a nuclear war strategist for a time there in the Pentagon, and he's published the charts that show, it's funny, they're like elementary school level, the most simple line graphs of the hundreds of millions of people who will be dying week by week by week in the event of an American war with the communist bloc back then.
There's a great book, I love any chance to recommend this, speaking of Dr. Strangelove and everything, it's Andrew Coburn's great book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
And he talks about how in the 1990s, when they did these war games, Rumsfeld oftentimes would play the president or the secretary of defense, and how every single time that he ever did, the whole world always died.
And even if they had it rigged, they were trying to rig it where there was a way out, and we can negotiate over Austria or whatever the hell it is, nope, too bad, too late, they've already nuked Denver, and we're not going to let them get away with that, and we'd rather get everyone else killed than not nuke back at this point, or whatever the hypothetical was.
It always, always, always escalated.
And maybe that's not all Rumsfeld, it's easy to make that Rumsfeld.
It sounds like what you're saying, that's kind of the structure of the game.
They talk about also hitting the same target 175 times in a row or whatever, because the Navy and the Air Force and everybody else wants their shot at the same radar station, so they're just supposed to nuke it over and over and over and over again.
Absolutely.
When I first got into the arms control business years ago, I thought that targeting one city, one bridge, like Moscow, the Kremlin, with one nuclear warhead would be more than enough.
That is actually not the case.
So American war plans call, I forget the technical name for the doctrine, but it's basically you hit a target three times.
Why?
Because the first time there's a chance that it might survive.
Let's say the Soviet Union or Russia, should I say, is targeting the White House.
So you drop a bomb on Washington, D.C., but there's a chance that you might miss by a little bit directly over the White House, so parts of the White House might survive.
So you want to hit it twice, then you want to hit it twice, just to make sure that you've absolutely annihilated the target.
It's madness.
The only two times in history that nuclear weapons have been used were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those bombs are vastly, vastly inferior in terms of lethality to what we have the capability of doing now, and those cities were completely wiped out.
I mean there was almost nothing left, almost not a single structure standing.
And American war plans say, no, you've got to hit it three times.
That's why we have so many weapons in our arsenal today.
And it's madness.
7,000 ready to go, huh?
Thousands ready to go.
In the 1950s, actual American military war planners thought that 150 nuclear weapons, tops, maybe 200, would be enough to deter the Soviet Union from any attack.
Why?
Because that's enough to completely wipe them out.
Yeah, obviously they were right about that.
Yeah.
More than enough.
It inflicts such damage on them that it would be unacceptable casualties, and that's really what deterrence is about.
You don't need thousands of weapons to be able to hold the entire world hostage.
You just need enough to convince your adversary that maybe me launching my weapons at the other guy isn't such a good idea.
That's really what deterrence is about, and that's why the size of the nuclear arsenal that we have today is such a terrible idea, and why going lower in terms of yield is such a bad idea, because then you're kind of bypassing the 70 years of military doctrine, right?
Deterrence, that you want to be able to convince your adversary that I will inflict unimaginable casualties on you if you mess with me.
Yep.
Well, and you brought up Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik, or however you're supposed to say it, which it's a world historical level failure and tragedy, what almost was accomplished there but not.
But on the other hand, it certainly, as you said, does prove that, hey, if Ronald Reagan, the Republican, and most of his career known as a hawk, if he can get within one handshake of agreeing to abolish all nuclear weapons from the U.S. and Soviet arsenals, and then I'm sure the deal was to insist all our allies disarm their nuclear weapons as well, then that just goes to show we don't need dial-a-nukes, and we don't necessarily need mutually assured destruction.
They call it MAD for more than just ease of acronyms sake.
I mean, it's pretty applicable, you know.
A nuclear war, a multi-megaton nuclear war still could happen.
And it seems like any president who really wanted to engage with the Russians on this and negotiate an absolute abolition, in fact, as I'm sure you could explain, huge parts of the American establishment have turned really anti-nuclear, and especially old retired guys, former secretaries of state and all that, have formed this global zero saying, hey, we can really get rid of nukes.
Now that they're out of power, they feel the responsibility to do something about it.
Yeah, and it's kind of funny, but, you know, so yes, there's this huge movement now of former administration officials, former secretaries of defense, former Joint Chiefs of Staff who have come out and said nuclear weapons are insane.
You know, General Colin Powell, my favorite example.
So when he started out his career in the military, he was an Army lieutenant in charge of a nuclear howitzer in Germany that was aimed at the Folded Gap in case the Soviets came in and invaded.
Then later on in his career, he was in charge of all nuclear weapons, right?
As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he had supervision over all the nuclear weapons in the American arsenal.
He would wake up in the morning, he would get a briefing on where exactly we thought the Soviet submarines were in relation to the East Coast and what would happen, you know, how much warning would we have if they decided to launch their nuclear payload at the United States.
And he said in this 2010 movie, The Nuclear Tipping Point, I highly recommend it.
In the intro to it, he had a ten-minute little introduction and he said after all of those years and all of those experiences, there's one thing that I have convinced myself of and that is that nuclear weapons are completely useless.
They can never be used.
And he's absolutely right.
These are guys that firsthand saw the madness up close, knew what a nuclear war would mean for everyone, not just the enemy.
We launched a full-out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, it's game over for us, it's game over for Europe, it's game over for everyone.
There are no winners in a nuclear war.
But the real problem is that such a huge segment of the American populace doesn't even know that the threat is still there.
They think that the Cold War ended.
We don't have any more nuclear weapons.
It's absolutely shocking the level of ignorance about nuclear weapons.
So PSR, Physicians for Social Responsibility, hosted this video contest a couple of months ago to raise awareness on nuclear weapons.
And one of the winning videos was essentially they set up this camera in a room and then they interviewed pairs of millennials, people typically in the demographic of no more than 30, and they asked them different questions about nuclear weapons.
And I remember two pairs were interviewed and they specifically asked, how many weapons do you think we have left in the nuclear arsenal?
And they said, one of the answers was, I don't know, 15.
The other one said, zero.
We don't have any more nuclear weapons, right?
That is the level of ignorance that is just absolutely appalling because if you don't know about the problem, you can't do anything about the problem.
Almost more likely than war was with the Soviet Union, a nuclear war, was that we were going to do something stupid and blow ourselves up.
The Air Force back in 1963, I might be a little bit off on the date, but it was over Goldsboro, North Carolina, a B-52 that was carrying two live hydrogen bombs in the megaton range, broke up during a training exercise and dropped two bombs on North Carolina.
Now, one of them just kind of like face-planted, went straight into the ground, nothing happened.
But the second bomb behaved exactly like a bomb is supposed to when you drop it out of your bomb bay.
The parachute deployed, the triggering mechanisms went off, and on that bomb were five safeties to prevent an accidental nuclear detonation.
Four of them failed.
The last one that actually prevented the bomb from going off was the technical equivalent of a light switch.
It's just two pieces of wire that are connected to make an electrical circuit and disconnected when you flip the switch.
That is how close North Carolina was to being no more.
And then what would they have done?
Said, oops, Jimmy accidentally screwed up?
Or would they go ahead and say, well, we have to pretend that the Russians did it and launch a war at that point?
That is an excellent question to which I will say I do not know the answer.
I can only speculate.
But I do not think it would have had a positive outcome.
All right, one more crazy thing I have to say to you or put to you as something to respond to if I can't figure out a way to form it in the form of a question.
How about this?
Did you know, as the reporter Mark Perry explained to me on the show, pretty much everyone at the Pentagon believes their own giant pile of stinking lies about Russian aggression.
And even though they all know for a fact that America did the coup d'etat and overthrew the government of Ukraine in February of 2014, they just compartmentalize that away straight out of Orwellian doublethink and insist that Vladimir Putin is a ranchivist who is trying to recreate the old Russian empire, if not the Soviet Union.
And your hypothetical here, an invasion of Latvia, oh, it's only a matter of time before he moves into the Balkans.
And, jeez, I don't know, why not all the way through Poland and Germany to the Elbe River and we'll have to stop him at the Folded Gap again and all of this.
And they're lying, and they know they're lying, but they believe it.
And if you ask any of them, oh, yeah, everyone at the Pentagon knows that this is their era of America having to defend the world against Russian aggression.
Even though, just look at the map, it ain't the Warsaw Pact that's expanded to our borders.
It's our military alliance on theirs.
Yeah, you know, I won't speak to the conflict in Ukraine.
I don't really think it matters who caused it.
Personally, I don't necessarily believe that America had any part in that whatsoever.
But it's kind of beside the point, because, like you said, right, in the American military establishment, there's this idea that Russia is on the warpath and that they are going to take over all of Europe if they are given the chance.
I don't believe that's the case whatsoever.
I think they're overplaying their hand in order to get bigger budgets or whatever their motives are.
But if you think about it, Ukraine is not a NATO country.
Ukraine was vulnerable.
And I think Vladimir Putin made a very, very calculated gamble that if he went after parts of Ukraine covertly, we wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
And he was right.
We weren't.
You know, Rand put out this report recently, it was in February, that our tactical nuclear weapons in Europe are completely useless because at the end of the day, the Kremlin will call our bluff that the Americans are not willing to trade New York for Riga.
So that's kind of my take on the situation, is that Putin is being very calculated and he would never, ever mess with Article 5 of NATO in a NATO country because if he does, I think he's smart enough to know that the United States would have no choice but to respond, right?
And all of NATO would have no choice but to respond.
And I can only hope and pray that they would respond with conventional weapons and conventional tactics because once you go nuclear, you've opened a Pandora's box that you have absolutely no way of knowing that you can close again.
And if you can't, everyone is a loser.
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Will.
Good one.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me on.
All right, y'all.
That is Will Satrin.
And he's got this great piece.
It's at warisboring.com.
And let me get his co-author's name right here too, Jeff Wilson.
But Will is the author of Ghosts of the Cold War, Rethinking the Need for a New Cruise Missile.
Thanks again.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
All right.
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