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The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
I can look at the mirror now and I say...
All right, you guys, introducing Michael Clare.
He wrote again for TomDispatch.com.
He's the author of The Race for What's Left.
And he's writing a new one called All Hell Breaking Loose.
And this one he wrote for TomDispatch.
Of course, we reprint it all at, well, pretty much everything Tom and his people write at AntiWar.com.
This one is called Making Nuclear Weapons Usable Again.
Oh, great.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How you doing?
Fine.
Good.
Appreciate you joining us today here.
So, yeah, I guess to cut right to the chase here.
It used to be, I guess, that in order to really make sure you got them good, you had to make a 20 megaton H-bomb.
But nowadays, the accuracy of American delivery systems is such that we can dial back down to very small-yield nuclear bombs, like, say, Hiroshima-sized or Nagasaki-sized nukes, that then are perfectly, question mark, usable in battle.
Sir, is that right?
Oh, yes.
We can deliver any kind of nuclear armageddon you care to think about.
Many times over, as a matter of fact.
All right.
But now, so it really is kind of a new era, then, in terms of dialing down from the large multi-megaton yields to these more, I guess, as they call them, tactical rather than strategic nuclear weapons?
You know, there's always been a certain amount of reliance on smaller nuclear weapons.
But the trend over the past 10 or 15 years, since the end of the Cold War, has been to move away from that.
Understanding that the use of those, or not so much the use of them, but having them in your arsenal, made the possibility of a nuclear war more rather than less likely.
That's not the argument that's made for them.
The argument that's made for them is, if you have these low-yield tactical nuclear weapons in your arsenal, the other side is going to be less likely to start a war with you, so it's good for deterrence.
But many analysts believe it's the other way around.
If you have these in your arsenals, one side or the other, facing defeat on the battlefield, would be tempted to use them.
So it makes the initiation of nuclear war more likely.
And the trend since the end of the Cold War has been to move away from those, to make nuclear war less and less thinkable likely.
And that's been a blessing of the Obama administration, and we've all slept better for it.
But now in the Trump administration, and in the Vladimir Putin administration, there are people who feel that's tied our hands too much.
It's made us risk-averse.
So we need to go back to having more of these tactical nuclear weapons in our arsenal, so that we could threaten nuclear war more readily.
And that's what scares the crap out of me.
And you're saying, well, I guess we'll get back to Obama in a second, but you're saying the Putin administration and Russia feels the same way about their nukes?
Because you're talking about nukes that are all made for targeting Russia with.
You're not saying that's what Putin is having Trump do?
No, this is a two-way dance.
I'm sorry, there's so much nonsense about Trump and Putin right now.
I wasn't exactly sure what you meant by that, but I'm glad that you've not gone insane.
This is a larger pattern of the major powers, including India and Pakistan as well, wanting to, as they put it, lower the threshold for the initiation of nuclear combat.
So as to scare the bejeebus out of the other side, to frighten the other side.
And you're saying the Russians are doing this now as well.
They're making smaller and smaller yield nukes too.
Yes, or at least that's the claim.
So our side says, well, we have to do the same thing.
That was what Trump himself said, right?
We've got to keep up with the Russians.
They're way ahead of us on nuclear.
Yes, that's what he says.
There are a number of pieces of this to discuss.
One of them is just what exactly are the Russians doing, and that's not entirely clear.
And number two is copying them, assuming that's what they're doing, is going down the same path in our best interests.
And I'm saying what the Russians are doing is somewhat unclear, and we should get to the bottom of this before we do anything risky, number one.
And number two, even if that is what they're doing, going down the same path as the Russians, assuming that's what they're doing, is not in our best interests, because that's only going to push the Russians and the Chinese further down that path and put us at greater risk.
Right.
Of course, the obvious thing to do is open new negotiations and make things less.
And in fact, if you're Donald Trump especially, just invoke Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik, where he was a hair away from abolishing all nukes in the world.
And then that way, I mean, he is a Republican after all, right?
The politics of it makes sense to me.
Well, this is where we're in this strange, surrealistic world of 2017 in Washington.
You know, on one hand, Trump is accused of being too close to Vladimir Putin.
And for reasons that we all know about, given the last election and Russian meddling in the election, that's one thing.
On the other hand, we need Trump to be able to negotiate with the Russians.
And when it comes to nuclear issues, he's adamantly opposed.
Yeah, I know.
Well, all the politics and all the pressure of, you know, all this pretension that it was Putin and not the American people that elected Donald Trump last year, and that the worst thing about him is that he says, yeah, we ought to get along with Russia, means that he's constantly got to prove that he's not.
Or at least, you know, that's the pressure on him.
I don't know.
He is kind of a wild card.
You know, there's a new story today about arming Ukraine in BuzzFeed, because the politics of it are you have to prove that you're not this guy's puppet.
But that doesn't stop Trump from giving Putin a free hand in Syria, which he did, apparently, so far as I could tell on the telephone the other day.
Well, I mean, they already won.
I mean, I think the one thing that's actually the best thing that he did so far was stop the CIA support for the jihadists in Syria there.
And then, I mean, after all, what right does the CIA have to back a bunch of jihadists in Syria?
So to stop doing that, that may be, you know, handing a free hand to Russia.
But the only reason Russia intervened in 2015 is because the American-backed terrorists had severed the highway between Aleppo and Damascus and were marching on Damascus.
So, you know, I'm not saying everything they've done there is right since then, but they're defending the internationally recognized sovereign government in Damascus against a bunch of foreign mercenaries and terrorists and murderers.
Well, from my perspective, it's one bunch of murderers against another bunch of murderers.
Well, of course.
I never meant to imply opposite of that.
I just mean, you know, who started it matters, right?
It's just like Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but that doesn't mean he started the war against us.
Yes, but from my perspective, looking at this from the global geopolitical map, it looks to me like Trump is ceding to Russia control of a large piece of territory on the global chessboard.
And that's a question to discuss.
But I think we should get back to the nuclear equation, because on that, Trump is unwilling to give any ground whatsoever.
And from a Russian perspective, this is really scary stuff.
And the Russians are bound to respond by beefing up their nuclear arsenal, and that's only going to put us in greater danger than we were before.
Well, so there's also the question of North Korea, right?
So, I don't know how much you know about this, but I'm just guessing.
It doesn't seem like there's a plan for an invasion of North Korea that would not include using nuclear weapons in an attempt to take out their nuclear weapons, or maybe the worst of their hardened artillery and other weapons that they have that they can direct at Seoul right away.
Because you have to knock out all of North Korea's, you know, offensive or defensive capabilities almost immediately, or else you're going to have hell to pay, right?
So, I don't know if that's built in.
Any nuclear weapons used by the U.S. against that dug-in artillery north of the DMZ is going to create radioactive dust that's going to spill over and kill Americans stationed in their families right by the DMZ.
So, that's killing our own.
Well, but wouldn't the theory be that you use a bunker buster so that most of all that explosion goes underground and becomes usable?
Yeah, I think Jim Mattis is smart enough and his associates are smart enough to have told Trump that that scenario has too many risks to be plausible.
I do think that Mattis and company have prepared a range of scenarios for Donald Trump that include that use.
So, I'm not saying it's not on the list of possible scenarios.
I think they've given him a range of scenarios, beginning with conventional strikes on North Korean facilities, nuclear facilities and launch facilities.
That would be the lowest level conventional limited strike up until a full-scale use of conventional force, and then going to limited nuclear strikes.
And I'm sure no decision has been made, but I also believe that somewhere in a locked closet somewhere, in a safe somewhere, there is a list of these various scenarios with code names behind them waiting for the next incident to occur, which could occur at any day.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's my thing, too.
I mean, I'm not trying to be too alarmist about it in terms of thinking that they really are going to attack.
I agree with you, especially that Mattis knows better.
Mattis has said publicly that, listen, this would be the worst fighting of our lifetimes.
Absolutely.
He was being very serious about that when he was including Vietnam in that, right?
He was including maybe even the previous Korean War in that.
So, yeah, I mean, he certainly was worn against it.
On the other hand, though, I guess I'm just saying like you're saying about that safe full of options.
If it comes to like a real regime change, I just assume it must be baked in that you'd have to use nukes really in any major war, any serious war other than like the slightest skirmish and then try to stand off and negotiate anything that escalates beyond that.
They've got a couple of dozen nukes.
Right.
And so the fear would be we got to hit.
And oh, they're so crazy and irrational over there that we absolutely have to take out their nukes before they can use them.
It seems like would be the foremost priority among the Americans in the event of a war with them.
Yeah, well, I think that this is a topic around which other parties have also weighed in, like China, Japan and South Korea.
And I do believe that when Mr. Trump was over in Asia a week or so ago, that those parties made clear to him that we would rather find another way to resolve this than the one you just mentioned.
Because in any of those scenarios that you described, Scott, they would suffer catastrophic damage one way or the other.
You know, no matter what, they are likely to experience some of the fallout from all of that, literally and otherwise.
And so I think they're telling Trump that just cool it and let us work on this.
And he seems to have given them a green light.
Now, I don't know how long this will last.
That is to say how much time he's willing to give China and the other countries in the region time to to find a non-military solution.
So we may come back to what you're talking about.
I mean, it sounds like he's drawn, at least publicly speaking, he's drawn the same red line that Bush ever since Bush pushed the North Koreans into possessing nuclear weapons in the first place.
And then I don't know if Obama ever said it this way, but he seemed to have had the same policy, which is that the nuclear issue must be resolved first.
And only then can we negotiate about anything else when, of course, that's a dead letter.
That's a dead letter, right?
That's, you know, it sounds like it's designed to not work.
It's designed to maintain the current standard.
Yeah, so I agree with that.
On the other hand, I think China might come up with a plan that, you know, a roundabout solution that involves some kind of concessions on North Korea's part in return for some kind of quid pro quo on South Korea's part that the U.S. will go along with.
That would be the best hope, I think.
Yeah, maybe it's all just the art of the deal, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
You can't quite trust it.
But then again, like you said, I mean, as we're discussing here, the alternative, the way that they frame it, is unthinkable.
So somebody better, you know, really prioritize this and get it right.
Although, honestly, I got to tell you, and this is a little off topic from your piece here, but it's on the same subject.
For the life of me, I cannot really figure out what Cheney and Bolton were thinking in breaking the agreed framework and in more or less, you know, in a word, kicking the North Koreans out of the NPT and their safeguards agreement and pushing them toward a nuclear weapons program right at the time that they're preparing to invade Iraq.
And what did they think was going to happen other than the North Koreans are now going to have nukes?
Right?
I think Washington has been on, you know, sleeping pills all this time.
It's just an unwillingness to face up to the consequences of not addressing North Korea more directly and doing things that are unpalatable, like meeting with the Kim family and working things out with them in a way that we may not like, but we'll have to live with.
All right, hang on just one second again.
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Well, again, I mean, not that Trump has the depth or, you know, probably any wisdom whatsoever would even understand this if you explained it to him.
But if Nixon can go to China and shake hands with Mao, then that means that Donald Trump, the Republican, the capitalist from Manhattan, skyscraper tycoon and all this, he could go to North Korea and shake hands with them.
Yeah, build a Trump Tower in Pyongyang, for God's sake.
Sure.
Why not?
Go over there and make a deal.
Make a deal.
Yeah, that's what it's going to come down to because I think any other outcome would be catastrophic.
And, you know, it's easy to say that, oh, you know, it's only going to be South Koreans and North Koreans that will perish.
Not true.
There are something like 30,000 American soldiers, men and women, based very close to the combat zone.
And they have families there.
And there are tens, hundreds of thousands of American citizens who live in Seoul and the surrounding area who are also at risk.
Yeah.
Well, and if nukes start going off, then that's going to poison a lot of people, you know, in China and probably Japan.
And depending on which way the wind blows, poison the Pacific Ocean and God knows what, you know.
That's right.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so let me ask you about Obama here because I can think of a couple of things that Obama did right about nukes.
And that was when he gave a pretty speech, at least the first half of the speech he gave in Prague was a good speech.
And in fact, I even remember watching it live.
And the people were so excited in the first half when he said all this metaphysical stuff.
And then he got to like, yeah, and that's why we're going to continue the policy.
And they were like, oh, and they all were, you know, visibly, physically disappointed to hear where he was going with this.
But he did actually, I think he said otherwise in that speech, but he did actually back off and did not continue the Bush anti-missile program for Poland and the Czech Republic.
That was really the best thing he did.
But at the same time, this trillion dollar project to invest in a whole new revamped nuclear weapons arsenal and nuclear weapons industry in this country, that all started with him.
As the Democrats love to brag and remind us that, you know, Donald Trump likes to pretend that this was his idea, but it was our hero, Barack Obama, who wanted to, you know, I see this stuff on Twitter sometimes from these centrist Democrats.
And so I'm glad they won't let us forget.
But so is there something I'm missing or was he really just, you know, not maybe quite as bad as Trump or Bush, but still pretty damn bad on this?
That is an interesting question.
So, yes, President Obama gave permission or whatever the word is, let the Pentagon proceed with research and development on a new generation of missiles, ICBMs and submarine launched ballistic missiles and a bomber to replace the existing strategic missiles.
The existing strategic triad, as it's called.
He did never authorize purchase, procurement or deployment of new weapons.
He kind of left it to the next president, who I believe he assumed was going to be Hillary Clinton.
And I think he felt he believed that possibly Hillary would be in a stronger position to slow some of this down.
I can't read his mind.
I don't know.
There's no question that he gave authority to proceed down this path.
No question, you know, without saying we absolutely are going to go ahead with all of this.
He also said, you know, we hope that we could negotiate with the Russians to further downsize our arsenals.
He negotiated the New START treaty, which substantially reduced the U.S. strategic arsenal.
And that's when that expires in a couple of years.
The notion is that the next stage would be a further contraction of the U.S. arsenal.
So maybe he believed that through these arms control treaties, the need for the new weapons would evaporate.
So I don't know what he actually was thinking.
But as you say, there's no question that he authorized original work on these weapons systems.
And that's deeply troubling.
I think part of it was a compromise that he made with the Senate in order to get START II through.
Yes, I think you're right.
We're going to do a little bit of limiting here, but don't worry.
We're going to give you just as much nuclear weapons welfare.
You'll still get to cash all your checks just to make less weapons, you know.
And not that many fewer, I don't think, you know.
And by the way, can you elaborate about that a little bit about what were the limitations in that treaty?
The new START, as it's called, this treaty limits the U.S. to 700 collective delivery systems between land-based missiles, ICBMs, sea-based, submarine-based ballistic missiles, and bombs carried by bombers.
And that was a reduction from what, do you know?
I do not know.
And a total of, now I can't remember.
It says here in your article 1,550 warheads and 700 delivery systems, yeah.
Yeah, total warheads.
So the U.S. would have a choice, as does Russia, the same number, how to deploy that number.
And that, by the way, is supposed to be under the treaty completed by the beginning of February of 2018.
So I assume that that process is completed by now or to be completed.
And I do not know what the final, how the allocation was made between ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers.
I think from a strategic point of view, the submarine ones are considered the safest, the hardest to destroy in a first strike.
Therefore, the ones that are best for the purpose of deterrence.
You know, I had this guy on the show.
I can't remember his name anymore, but people could find this pretty easily.
He wrote about how all of the silos, all those Minuteman missiles and all that in the trial, the land-based ICBMs, that those are meant just to be targets.
Those are there to be the nuclear sponge to attract Russian ICBMs to these American states, Colorado and North Dakota and Montana and whichever one's on the list there, so that they can take most of the hits and hopefully spare the population centers on the coasts while the rest of our nukes, our bomber force and our submarines go to try to take out theirs and this and that.
You can see where Dr. Strangelove comes from and all that.
Once you accept the premises, a certain number of thoughts down the chain about how to fight these wars, then all these things become very thinkable.
And then they become reality.
They really dug these holes and buried these missiles and they have guys sitting in them with keys right now.
But really, their only purpose is to be a target.
Yeah, well, this is the most secret part of the whole thing is what are the targets and what is the firing sequences.
And I have no clue about that.
I wouldn't even know where to begin.
And I think you're right.
There's a way in which Dr. Strangelove's thinking takes over.
And that's what my article is about, how there's a new element of this Strangelove thinking that's taking over, that we have to be able to make our arsenal more usable, that we're stuck with these old city busters.
And God forbid, President Trump may have scruples about bombing every city in Russia in the event of some kind of incident that occurs in Ukraine or somewhere, that he may hesitate to slaughter 100 million people.
So better that we give him some smaller nukes so that he won't have so many scruples about slaughtering millions of people.
He could do it on a smaller scale.
That's what really sickens me.
That's what all this new talk is about, to make it easier for him to lessen his conscience about ordering the use of nuclear weapons.
Well, and that sounds crazy, but no, I mean, that's nuclear weapons doctrine for, I mean, there's whole histories of this, right?
Since the advent of this thing and since the end of the Second World War, that when and under what circumstances do we use these nukes?
In fact, I have the PDF sitting on my desktop of Daniel Ellsberg's brand new book, The Doomsday Machine, and his job at the Defense Department was coming up with this stuff.
And his father actually designed the assembly line for the first generation of atom bombs, turned down the contract to design the assembly line for the H-bomb, said, man, I don't want anything to do with that thing.
But anyway, so, yeah, I mean, he showed me, he published an article at Truthdig one time where he reproduced a DOD chart that said, it was just, it was funny, it was almost like if you were teaching a line graph to second graders, and you gave them the most simple line graph that you could come up with, and it's to show how many hundreds of millions of people are expected to die in the first seven days of a nuclear war.
And you get to a billion by Friday.
Yeah, well, we have a local doctor here, Dr. Ira Helfand, who's one of the principal figures in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who says that all these studies underestimate the level of death because it's going to poison, create a cloud, a permanent cloud, and block out the sun and spread radiation and kill the food supply for a large part of the human population, so that what's really going to be the consequences is starvation for half the world's population.
In any imaginable nuclear encounter.
Yeah, well, and also you figure too, we're talking about mostly the northern hemisphere nations fighting against each other, which are, you know, most of the most developed economies in the world, and I guess throw in China too, if there was a real war with Russia, then you're talking about, you know, GDP of Earth being cut by three-fourths or more, right?
All global trade, all market distribution systems completely turned off overnight.
Yeah, that is about the size of it.
So it's not just the initial slaughter, which would be bad enough, but everybody would be affected one way or the other, sooner or later.
Yeah.
Oh, man, something else.
All right, well, listen, I sure appreciate your attention on this issue.
I think it's so important, and especially, and everybody's taking notice that this guy Trump, of all the presidents, he seems pretty erratic.
George W. Bush killed a lot of people, but he didn't seem like he was personally inclined to flip out.
You know what I mean?
Not the way this guy does.
Well, apparently America's senior officials are coming to that conclusion too.
There's reports that McMaster came to that conclusion recently that's come out, calling him a kindergartner in his command of the information.
Well, and by the way, was that on the subject of nuclear weapons, the kindergartner crack?
I think it was on his command of military issues.
Yeah, just overall, yeah.
Typically nuclear.
Yeah, no, that's something else.
So I guess maybe this is the first time since 1983 or 1984 that we could have an anti-nuclear weapons movement in this country.
I think we need to see that if we're going to save our souls.
You know, fun fact, Donald Trump back in the 80s told an interviewer that he wanted Ronald Reagan to appoint him to be the special negotiator to go over there and deal with the Soviet Union and get rid of all the nukes.
And he liked to talk about how he had an uncle that taught at MIT that taught him all about nuclear weapons and he was very interested in them.
So, I mean, I know he's a very shallow guy, but this is something that he has, you know, back in his younger days, I guess, taken an interest in and took an interest in being seen as Donald the Great who got rid of all the nukes too.
You know what I mean?
Superman 4 and all of that.
That was a point of view he used to have anyway, this guy.
So, you know, it's possible that if the framing of the issue was right, that this could be the parade that we invite him to lead, right?
To come and race to the front of, like politicians do.
Rather than to be necessarily an anti-Trump movement, it should be the movement for Donald Trump to do the right thing or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Yes, I hear you.
I could see that.
I don't think he has the ability to grasp that.
Yeah, that's the real problem.
Even if he just had five more IQ points, right?
Something more than that.
Yeah, okay.
But, yeah, just a marginal difference at this point would make a difference.
Wish, wish, wish, wouldn't we?
Yes.
All right, listen.
Michael Clare, everybody.
Go read him at TomDispatch.com and at AntiWar.com.
This one is called Making Nuclear Weapons Usable Again, Normalizing Nukes, the Trump Doctrine.
And read his book.
It's called The Race for What's Left.
And the next one coming out is All Hell Breaking Loose.
All right.
Thanks very much, Michael.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Take it easy.
Bye.
All right, you guys, and you know me.
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