All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Kingston A. Reif.
He is the Director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, and that is armscontrol.org.
And he co-wrote this piece with Shannon Bugos, I guess, probably, called No Progress Toward Extending New Start.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
Good to be here.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Such an important story here.
The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, New Start, from 2010, is about to expire and must be renewed, I think you say here, by February, or it's gone and it's not looking good.
So what's the deal?
That's right, Scott.
It is not looking good.
The New Start Treaty is the sole remaining arms control agreement, limiting at least a portion of the size of the still enormous U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.
Seventy-five years after the first and only use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the close of World War II, there are still 13,000 nuclear weapons remaining on the planet.
Over 90% of those weapons are in the hands of the United States and Russia.
And as I mentioned, New Start is the only remaining arms control agreement following the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty last August, limiting the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.
And were New Start to expire in February with nothing to replace it, there would be no limits on the size of the U.S. and Russian arsenals for the first time in roughly half a century.
The risk of unconstrained nuclear competition between the United States and Russia would grow in the absence of any restraints on those arsenals, and the risk of even more fraught relations between the United States and Russia would grow.
Since late last year, the Russians have repeatedly offered to the Trump administration to extend New Start by five years, as allowed by the treaty.
An extension would not require the approval of the United States Senate.
It only requires agreement between the U.S. and Russian presidents.
And unfortunately, the Trump administration has stiff-armed Russia's offers to extend the treaty.
The Trump administration has raised numerous unconvincing concerns about New Start.
And instead, the Trump administration is focused on trying to negotiate a much broader and more ambitious, first-of-its-kind arms control agreement to replace New Start that would include more types of nuclear weapons than those limited by New Start, and would also include China for the first time.
Now, this is an ambitious and praiseworthy goal, but there's simply not enough time to make meaningful progress on such a broader agreement before New Start expires in less than six months.
And there's also no real evidence that the Trump administration has a realistic strategy to actually achieve a broader agreement.
So the right choice remains to extend New Start, but unfortunately, the administration continues to resist making that choice.
All right.
So first of all, I'm confused.
How can it be that this is the last treaty standing?
I mean, I know that Bush got us out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, but that wasn't a limitation on actual nuclear missiles at all.
And then the INF treaty that kept the medium-range missiles out of Europe, that makes sense.
But didn't Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and for that matter, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford before them, sign vast treaties limiting nuclear weapons?
I mean, during Reagan and Bush, at the end of Reagan and during Bush Sr., they disassembled 40,000 of these things or something.
Those treaties are still in place, aren't they?
Well, so there were treaties.
So to narrow down the focus on agreements limiting specifically the U.S. and Soviet and now Russian nuclear weapons, you're right.
There were a number of treaties that were negotiated during the Cold War and even after the Cold War, but several of those, some of those have expired.
The INF treaty, as you mentioned, which was negotiated by President Reagan in the late 1980s, the Trump administration, in response to Russia's wanton violations of that agreement, withdrew from the treaty last August.
And in terms of agreements limiting the strategic or long-range nuclear weapons possessed by the United States and Russia, the only remaining agreement is New START.
So in other words, under New START or whatever, then you have SALT and SALT II and whichever previous ones, they expire, but they become irrelevant that they expire.
But now instead of having layers of treaties preventing the stockpiles, you end up with only one scrap of paper standing between us and another full-scale arms race.
Potentially, that's right.
And we saw how easily they got rid of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
And have they begun to already introduce medium-range missiles into Europe based on that?
So we have not begun fielding ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Europe or the Asia-Pacific.
We're still several steps away from that, but the administration did last year, in the wake of withdrawing from the treaty, test two types of missiles that would have violated the agreement.
And the administration's goal is to try to field those systems in both Europe and Asia, although there would likely be obstacles to doing so, a major one of which is that none of our allies in either Europe or Asia have exactly been rushing forward to offer to host such missiles.
Well, that's good, at least.
You know, the Germans and the Russians, they fought before, and they didn't like it, I'm pretty sure.
So maybe the cool, patient wisdom of the Germans can keep everything fine and peaceful over there.
Well, so let me tell you what I think I have learned from my layman surface reading of this and interviewing a few experts, and then you correct me where I go off the story, I'll try to hurry.
But essentially, what my understanding was that yes, possibly the Russians were violating the INF Treaty first by making these new missiles, or maybe re-engineering previous missiles to have essentially an intermediate range.
But they didn't want them in Europe, and they didn't introduce them in Europe.
It was for the frontier with China.
That was what they were for.
They don't need long-range missiles for nuke in China, they need medium-range ones if it comes to that.
But then the Americans seized on that and said, oh, well, you're violating the INF Treaty, so maybe we're going to have to go ahead and leave it, too.
But the real reason that they did that is because they, too, want to ring China with intermediate-range missiles.
And so here, Russia and America both have essentially torn up the treaty that kept nuclear missiles out of Europe in order that they can both supposedly deter China or threaten China, however you want to characterize that.
And so I guess then that leaves us with what you just said, that well, at least the French and the Germans and the Poles don't seem to be in a hurry to accept a bunch of new American nuclear missiles.
So we got that going for us.
But is that narrative essentially correct, according to your understanding?
So I think there's quite a bit of truth to that.
I certainly wouldn't want to excuse Russia's violation of the INF Treaty.
And as far as I understand what has found its way into the public domain with respect to U.S. intelligence about Russian deployments of the illegal cruise missile, ground-launched cruise missile that they developed in violation of the treaty, that there are some of those missiles that have been fielded within range of NATO Europe.
So I thought Russia's violation merited a strong response.
The violation was completely unacceptable.
And there was even a case to be made, I think, for withdrawing from the treaty.
But I didn't believe at the time and still don't believe that the decision to withdraw was a wise one.
The strong case there that you're referring to just being that, hey, they're violating it and we can't be suckers stuck in a treaty that they're not abiding by?
Correct.
Exactly.
But there's got to be six ways to try to get them back in the treaty before you throw the thing out.
Right.
And I think that the Trump administration made a serious diplomatic effort to attempt to resolve the compliance concerns that we had with respect to Russia's development and fielding of these systems.
And I just thought that we would have been in a much stronger position to continue to put pressure on the Russians alongside our allies while remaining a party to the treaty.
And I still don't see a military need for the United States to field missiles prohibited by the treaty, either in Europe or in Asia.
So for all of those reasons, I thought that remaining a party, continuing to pressure Russia to call out Russia was the right course of action.
So I think you're certainly right in how you described part of the rationale on the part of Russia and the U.S. for wanting to get out of the treaty.
And that pertains to China.
There are certainly concerns in the United States that the U.S. military posture in Asia with respect to China is worsening and that the United States needs to take additional military steps to prevent a further erosion of the conventional military balance in the Asia-Pacific.
Part of the way to do that, those making these concerns, is to try to field longer-range conventional ground-launched missiles on the territory of allies in the Asia-Pacific to counter China's very large arsenal of such missiles, both nuclear and conventional, because of course China was never a part of the INF Treaty.
Again, I think that the case for fielding those missiles is not a particularly strong one, but you're right in noting that that was clearly a motivating factor for many of those in the Trump administration.
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You know, all these game theorists think they're so rational and mathematical and everything, but this is complete madness, right?
This whole conversation should be taking place inside a comic book somewhere, where people allow politicians to own these machines that can kill entire cities in a moment's notice, one at a time.
It's just unbelievable.
It goes without saying, and yet we should stop and emphasize that if these were just, I don't know, it seems like any decent man in the same position as Vladimir or, how do you say it, Xing or Trump, that these guys, their only responsibility in the world is to find ways to limit all of this, and not with all this ridiculous bluffing.
As you said, they're using the lack of Chinese participation in Start as an excuse to cancel it, rather than making a real effort to try to get the Chinese into it, when, after all, they only have 300 long-range missiles.
You quote them mocking the Americans, saying, how low can you go when they only have 300, and we're up, America and Russia, in the, what, still 7,000 each, if you talk deployed and stocks, right?
If you talk all warheads, including those warheads that we've retired, but not yet dismantled, you're in the range for the United States and Russia of about 6,000, so still orders of magnitude larger than China, so you're correct.
That's really right from your point of view, too, that Trump's not serious about trying to bring China into Start.
He's using this as a half excuse to kill it?
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to conclude otherwise, based on how the administration has gone about this.
There is simply, in my view, no credible explanation why extending New Start would be inconsistent with trying to bring China into the arms control process for the first time.
As I mentioned at the top of our conversation, the effort to get China off the arms control sidelines is a worthwhile and praiseworthy goal, but not at the expense of or as a condition for extending New Start, which appears to be the administration's approach.
As you said, the United States and Russia have vastly more nuclear weapons than China.
The nuclear threat that continues to be posed to the United States by Russia remains a more urgent one.
In fact, extending New Start is a prerequisite to making progress on a broader deal for a number of reasons, one being there's simply not enough time to negotiate a first of its kind, never-before-seen arms control agreement of the kind the Trump administration says it wants before New Start expires in February.
Given how close we are to an election in this country, the incentives for Russia and China to engage on such an agreement are limited, given that President Trump may not be president in a few short months.
So in our view, extending New Start is simply a no-brainer and entirely and completely consistent and, in fact, a prerequisite for a broader deal and bringing China into the process.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you've got severe cognitive dissonance on the Democratic side about all these Russia issues.
Occasionally you hear somebody like Dianne Feinstein or someone in the Senate saying, geez, we kind of like these treaties, but then all of they'd spent the last four years accusing Trump of being a pro-Russian trader, falsely, I might add.
And so anything, in fact, you know, they'll do the litany on TV of every single thing he's done to benefit Russia, some of which are things that are absolutely against Russia's interests that they just spin as a favor to Russia anyway.
Well, he got out of the INF Treaty.
Well, that's what Putin wanted him to do and all of this.
And so if Biden comes in, he may, as far as I know, flip a coin, be worse on this.
I don't know what's his history in the U.S. Senate, you know, or any role he played during Obama of getting New Start through.
But if anything that you do that Putin agrees to is serving Putin, then we can't do anything other than ratchet up tension, right?
So I think that the Democrats clearly have, you know, expressed deep concern.
And I think legitimately in many respects about, you know, Russia's, Russian actions, including Russian interference in the 2016 election and concerns about how strongly the Trump administration has responded to that.
But at the same time, they have also been very clear that arms control with Russia remains in the U.S. national interest and that extending a New Start is an absolute must and the right thing to do.
President Biden has also expressed strong support for extending New Start.
His record on arms control issues in the United States Senate is a very strong one.
We need a major course correction when it comes to U.S. leadership on arms control and non-proliferation.
And, you know, I think if were President Biden elected, he would he would pursue such a such a correction.
And a first step would be to extend New Start.
And he has made that clear.
Isn't that ironic, Biden, who is the Ukraine hawk and whose Democratic Party has been leading, you know, this McCarthyite level fake Russia scare in this country for the last four years.
At the end of the day, he's still the same guy was back in 2000 and I don't know, seven or six or whatever, who would have favored getting along with Vladimir Putin.
In fact, in a rambling answer, when he opposed them digging through his secret papers, his private papers for evidence of this sexual harassment accusation, he said, well, geez, they might find in there things that I said about Putin that they want to use against me.
Right.
Because he knows that in the past he had said things like Putin's a reasonable guy.
I'm not saying that I like him, but we can deal with them.
Right.
That's Biden's history of statements about Russia is that we've got to find a way to get along.
And that was what he was afraid would be quoted now.
So and then you have Donald Trump, who ran on getting along with Russia, who's been so successfully, quote, reigned in by the Russiagate scandal that he's twice as bad as the Democrats wish he was when it comes to the most important issue in the world, hydrogen bomb control between America and Russia.
Yes, well, certainly in the case of President Trump, I mean, the you know, he is in a professed certainly a desire to have a better relationship with Russia.
And, you know, in my view, the one step that he could take on foreign policy that would be strongly supported on a partisan basis in this country would be to extend a new start for the reasons I just described earlier.
But I think part of the constraint on President Trump's ability to agree to that, as you know, he has he strongly opposes pretty much anything that his predecessor, President Obama, negotiated.
By definition, it was a terrible agreement if President Obama negotiated it.
We saw this with respect to the the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration withdrew from.
And we've seen this with respect to some of Trump's reported statements about New Start as well, in terms of Trump associating it with associating it with a terrible Obama deal.
Right.
You know, it's funny, too, that at the time that they passed it, Obama made a deal with the Senate, with the nuclear caucus in the Senate.
I'll give you a trillion dollars to completely revamp the entire nuclear arsenal if you'll sign this treaty.
And so Trump kept that part of the deal.
In fact, he doubled it, but he got rid of what that deal was a compromise to get, which was the treaty limiting the total number of the stockpile.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're that assessment is absolutely right.
The Trump administration has proposed to expand the role of capability and spending on the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while at the same time he has undermined longstanding nonproliferation and arms control agreements.
So absolutely right.
We've we're we're on the verge of the complete collapse of the U.S. U.S.-Russian arms control architecture, while at the same time spending on U.S. nuclear weapons sustainment and modernization is skyrocketing.
Amazing.
OK, now I'm going to read to you this short quote.
It's not very long, but I have to preface this, you know, with a disclaimer about how absolutely insane this sounds.
And people might think that I have gone completely crazy, but I'm reading from the New Republic and they link to their source, a Q&A with the Hudson Institute, a very powerful conservative think tank.
And I guess it was two or three weeks ago now, a man named Marshall Billingsley, who is Trump's arms control envoy.
It says here conceded that major power nuclear accords were vital to human security.
But he added that if the New START treaty fell apart, everything would be fine.
Quote, The president has made clear that we have a tried and true practice here.
We know how to win these arms races and we know how to spend the adversary into oblivion.
Your response to that, Kingston?
Yes.
Well, I'm familiar with that, with that quote from Ambassador Billingsley, clearly word of the devastating economic crisis facing this nation has yet to make its way to his office at foggy bottom.
Look, this is part of the problem with the administration's approach to trilateral arms control.
As I said, there's no real realistic strategy to convince Russia and China to limit types of nuclear weapons that have never been limited before and to get China to join the arms control process for the first time, other than attempting to coerce Russia and China to the negotiating table with threats of attempting to spend them into oblivion and starting a new arms race.
That's not a responsible approach.
It's not a credible approach.
It's not going to work.
We're not going to be able to coerce or embarrass Russia and China to come to the table.
So I think it's indicative of the bankruptcy of the current administration's approach here.
Yeah.
It's completely crazy.
By the way, while you're talking, I just checked the national debt clock to be sure.
We're working on $27 trillion right now.
During Ronald Reagan, when he took office, it was still in the hundreds of billions.
When he left, it was $4 trillion.
And so they got away with that.
Deficits don't matter, Dick Cheney said.
But now they're talking about starting when we're already at the end of our rope.
They want to start the 80s all over again.
Right.
Not to mention how dangerous such a new, unconstrained arms race would be.
We knew what it was like to live in a world in which there were no agreements limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear forces when the U.S. and Soviet relations were deeply strained.
And that's not a world that we want to return to, which again brings us back to the point that we started with, that an essential first step to avoiding that world is to extend New Start.
Yeah.
Absolutely right.
And then, so who's influential who could do a thing about this?
Are there swing votes where it matters at all, or this is all just a foregone conclusion determined by Lockheed and Honeywell lobbyists in conspiracy with Democrats and Republicans on the Hill?
Well, I think it's important for your listeners who are concerned about this to do what they can to engage with their members of Congress on this subject, particularly their Republican members of Congress, to demonstrate to the president that this is not a partisan issue, that this is something that he would be praised for.
And so I think that's our best course of action here, is to continue to make the case.
But I must admit that the prospects for successfully convincing the president to make the right decision here don't appear to look very great.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you so much for all that you do on this issue and for your time on the show today.
I really do appreciate it a lot, Kingston.
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Kingston Reif.
He is at the Arms Control Association.
It's armscontrol.org, and this piece is called No Progress Toward Extending New Start.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
