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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 Daryl Kimball.
He is the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association.
That's armscontrol.org.
Welcome to the show, Daryl.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you.
Great to have you here.
What a headline here.
I got to tell you, I love the title of this piece, Enough Already, No New ICBMs.
That's my new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
So I really like the title here.
No New ICBMs.
That could have been the title of my next book, which is going to be a collection of interviews I've done on the question of nuclear weapons, so I'll have to come up with something else.
New ICBMs.
I thought the problem was we already had more than plenty.
Well, we do have more than plenty.
The United States has 400, to be exact, with 400 very large thermonuclear warheads on each one of them.
What's being proposed is a new fleet of 400 new missiles with a new variant of the warhead at a cost of about $264 billion over the lifespan of the program, which is supposed to be 50 years.
There's a lot of questions about this that I explored in this piece, starting with, does the United States need to continue to have 400 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles plus all of our other long-range delivery systems with nuclear weapons to deter other nuclear-armed countries?
My view, and actually the view of the Pentagon, is that's far more nuclear weapons than we need.
And yet the government is planning to spend your tax dollars to build a new set of missiles to perpetuate that very large nuclear arsenal.
And now when you say that's more than the Pentagon says they need, are you referring to that study that was done under Robert Gates in the Obama years that said we need just a couple of hundred nukes to deter all other major powers in the world, something like that?
Well, not that low.
I mean, some defense officials, going back to former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was the SecDef under John F. Kennedy, he came to the conclusion that it would only take about 100 nuclear weapons on the part of the U.S. or the Soviet Union to deter a nuclear attack by the other side, given how absolutely devastating nuclear weapons are.
But what I was thinking about in this article is in 2013, the Pentagon, at the direction of President Obama, reviewed the target list of the U.S. nuclear war plan.
That is, the targets in Russia, China, a few other targets, where these weapons are supposed to go in a conflict.
They determined that the United States could reduce by one third the number of deployed long-range nuclear warheads, and still have more than adequate number of nuclear weapons to hit all of those targets, to hold them at risk, as the Pentagon language goes.
So that means that, you know, the United States could, according to the Pentagon itself, reduce the stockpile from about 1,500 deployed warheads on these long-range missiles at sea and on land and in air, to about 1,000.
And yet, the nuclear modernization plan that is going forward right now, that started under Obama, accelerated under Trump, and now Biden is reviewing, would call for maintaining that large, larger stockpile number in perpetuity, decades beyond where we are today, at enormous cost.
We believe it's time to fundamentally rethink how many nuclear weapons are necessary, and even if we need a large number, what about the option of extending the lifespan of at least a portion of the nuclear weapons that we have today, rather than building an expensive new set of land-based, sea-based, and air-based weapons?
It has been argued, hasn't it, by, you know, not activists, but real credential types, that we don't really need the land-based ICBMs at all, that our submarines and air power should be enough, and then that way we're not drawing a bunch of enemy H-bombs at our states, at our homeland, by having these missile silos, I hate that homeland, at our country, by having all these missile silos buried all over the Midwest and the northern states there.
Well, exactly.
I mean, the United States has what has been called a triad, a sea, land, and air-based force, and the missile silos in, it's Nebraska, it's Wyoming, it's Montana, parts of Colorado, is very much a nuclear sponge.
I mean, part of the rationale that the advocates of these land-based missiles make is that, you know, these weapons would absorb a large portion of a Russian attack, and it would draw those detonations basically away from other targets, you know, urban targets in the United States, and therefore we need to have these weapons.
That is, I would say, a rather bizarre argument.
The United States and Russia could instead, I would say, radically reduce the number of, or eliminate entirely their land-based ICBM forces, thus reducing the need for either one of them to have those weapons in the first place.
The other problem with this argument is that, you know, the land-based missiles are a use or lose force in a conflict.
In other words, if American military officials detect a launch of nuclear-armed missiles from Russia or China, they need to make a decision, the president needs to make a decision about whether to launch these land-based nuclear-armed missiles within minutes, and the current plan requires the president to decide in probably less than five to ten minutes whether to order the launch of these weapons and to get them out of their silos before they might be hit by the Russians, let's say.
Now, this hair-trigger alert situation, officially known as launch on warning, really increases the risk of miscalculation, of nuclear war by accident, and there have been numerous incidents in the past where false communication signals, false radar signals have suggested that the United States or Russia is under massive attack by the other, and that has led to, you know, alerting the forces, waking up the president in the middle of the night, getting preparations going to launch U.S. or Russian weapons.
This is a situation that is neither necessary or safe, and so, let's imagine that, you know, the Russians do suddenly, for some crazy reason, decide to launch an out-of-the-blue attack against U.S. missile silos, even if all of these weapons were eliminated, the United States still has a massive, and I mean massive, retaliatory force at its disposal that the Russians would have to be thinking about.
Just one sea-based U.S. nuclear-armed submarine carries about 160 nuclear warheads, and each of these warheads has an explosive yield of about 100 kilotons or greater, and to put that in perspective, the Hiroshima bomb, which destroyed utterly the city of Hiroshima in 1945, was a 15 kiloton, that's TNT yield equivalent, warhead.
So one U.S. nuclear-armed submarine could devastate a very large country and kill tens of millions of people all by itself, and we have eight of these, sometimes as many as ten at sea at once.
So the need for the land-based force is highly questionable, and people like former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, who was the Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton, have argued that we can eliminate the land-based missiles entirely and reduce the risk of nuclear war by accident in significant ways.
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And thanks.
You are raising so many important questions.
I don't know how to organize them all.
Can we start with why it is that or how it is that some certain eggheads at the University of Chicago and the Rand Corporation and the Air Force or whoever, the Navy, have decided that this is how it has to be, and we have some game theory algorithm that says that this is smart, and we don't have to listen to Kimball, and we don't have to even listen to William Perry, who, as far as I understand, really worked his way up from in the Pentagon up to Secretary of Defense and is a super wonk on this stuff.
But his concerns just don't mean anything somehow, it seems like.
Well, I mean, there are a couple of questions in there.
I mean, one is, how did this crazy philosophy come into practice, and why do we continue to perpetuate it today?
For real.
And it is crazy, right?
Like, the first time I learned the word nuclear sponge from Tom Colina, I thought, man, I got to get out of this line of work.
I just can't do it.
And people email me still to this day.
Is that right about the nuclear sponge?
Where can I read about that?
What is that?
I mean, and that's nonsense anyway, right?
Like in a full-scale war with Russia, we're going to lose New York City, and DC, and Long Beach, and San Francisco, and everything else, too.
They're not going to waste all their nukes on South Dakota.
They're going to take out Austin, Texas, too.
Well, they're going to waste the silos that contain these ICBMs and a lot of other places, too, because there are, quote unquote, military targets in large urban centers, or near large urban centers in the United States.
So in an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia, which could involve as many as 2,000 nuclear weapons from each side, you're talking about utter devastation.
You're talking about immediate deaths from in the first two or three days in the hundreds of millions.
And then you're talking about longer-term effects from the fires, the radiation, and the fallout.
And then there are the longer-term climatic effects, which, you know, even a small nuclear exchange involving just a couple of hundred warheads would put enormous amounts of soot in the atmosphere, and it would have long-term climatic effects.
So for all these reasons, you know, a nuclear war can never be won, and it must never be fought.
And, you know, these realities raise questions about how many nuclear weapons do you really need to deter the other side?
Shouldn't we put these, to the extent that we're going to have these weapons, shouldn't we be deploying them in such a way that reduces the risk of a first use by one side or the other, or an accidental launch that's based upon a miscalculation about being attacked by the other side?
And it is very hard to change this Cold War philosophy that the United States nuclear deterrence strategy is still based upon, because we have a bureaucracy at the Pentagon that makes it hard to change.
We have politicians that are reticent to take on these big issues and to make significant changes.
We have vested interests in the defense industry who are lobbying very hard to have members of Congress support taxpayer spending on this new fleet of ICBMs, a new set of nuclear-armed submarines, a new strategic bomber.
So there is a lot of inertia behind this set of ideas.
And then, of course, Russia, being antagonistic, being just as, having a very similar nuclear deterrence philosophy, you know, they help justify the perpetuation of this mutual assured destruction situation.
So I think there are ways we can change this.
I think there are opportunities.
I think we are at a moment here where President Biden may actually shift away from the approach that we're now on.
He's got to make decisions about whether to plunge ahead with this new intercontinental ballistic missile program, or to pause it and reevaluate to see if there are other options that can and should be pursued.
And that's what we're trying to do right now, and Congress is debating this, will be debating this in the coming weeks.
All right.
Now, if I remember it right, this whole program to revamp the nuclear weapons arsenal and industry, new factories and labs and, you know, revamp all Sandia and Lawrence Livermore and every other thing in this giant thing, that this was Obama's compromise with, I almost can't believe that this is real, but what the hell?
It's America in 2020, something.
They have a nuclear caucus.
You talked about the lobbying where the tail wags the dog and the H-bomb industry helps determine the policy that says we need more H-bombs.
And so Obama, to get the Republicans to sign the new START treaty, the last treaty standing that limits strategic arms between America and Russia, he had to make this deal.
Okay, we'll give you $2 trillion to completely revamp the industry.
But I guess my question is, well, you correct me if I'm wrong about that, but that's the way I remember it.
And then, but secondly, then, though, is Biden bound by that promise?
Could he not just cancel that?
Or I guess, you know, Congress must have, it must have been, you know, encoded in law somewhere or whatever.
But to what degree can Biden now just break Obama's promise to the nuclear caucus and say, well, you know what?
I got my treaty and screw you.
We have all the H-bombs we need.
I mean, presuming that he agreed with you and I on this at all.
Well, you know, as you say, back in 2011, when President Obama needed to get 67 votes, including Republicans, to approve the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, he had to promise that he would invest in modernizing some elements of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
What he didn't do, however, is he didn't say exactly how much he would spend.
He couldn't do that in part because, you know, that's future Congresses and future presidents who'd be doing the spending.
But he did make a commitment to pursue this program.
Now, that was in the early days of what we're now much more deeply into with respect to this program.
The costs now for the modernization of the air and the sea and the land-based legs of the triad have greatly exceeded the original expectations way back in 2011.
The Trump administration proposed some new weapon systems that were not in the earlier plans in 2011.
So I would argue that, you know, Biden is not bound to pursue the plan as it has evolved and grown in cost and scale and scope over the last decade.
And he has a responsibility to take a second look at it because the costs of this program are very difficult to sustain.
The total cost, I mean, I mentioned that the cost of the new ICBM, $264 billion, the total cost over the next 25 years for the new delivery systems and refurbishing the nuclear warheads, we're talking about at least $1.5 trillion over the next 25 years or so.
And that is likely to rise.
So a budget on that scale, on the schedule they're looking at, that is going to eat other parts of the defense budget alive.
It means that there's going to be a battle, it already is, between guns and guns.
And then there's the issue of should we be spending that much money on the Defense Department at a time when we have a pandemic, we have an economic crisis underway, we've got people who are hurting, we need money for infrastructure, healthcare, other things.
So he has a responsibility to take a second look to evaluate, do we need this many nuclear weapons, do we need to pursue the modernization in this very expensive fashion, or are there some less expensive, more cost-effective ways to achieve the goal?
Let me ask you this, Darrell.
My friend Daniel Ellsberg says, we've got to get rid of these nukes, you don't understand how dangerous this is, and you don't understand how sharp is the knife's edge we're standing on here.
And just because Mutually Assured Destruction has worked for the last 70 years or so doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way, and the first time it fails, we're all dead.
And so everybody needs to snap out of it and get their act together.
Then my other friend, Peter Van Buren, he was a former State Department officer, Foreign Service officer for a very long time, and he's like, nah, come on.
The reason MAD works is because nobody wants to get nuked, and even in, you mentioned all the near misses, the reason they're near misses and not hits is because somebody always is wiser, somebody always thinks better of doing the stupid thing, even at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, even during Abel Archer, and everybody's as paranoid as can be, cooler heads always prevail, and so he acknowledges that, yeah, if they do start going off, it's a real problem, but that essentially, somewhere along the line, the game theory equations are correct, that they just won't use them, and so don't worry about it.
Well, to me, that latter argument, that it always works out in the end, and deterrence is never going to fail, is naive.
History shows that we have gotten through earlier crises and earlier close calls about nuclear weapons use through dumb luck, more than good management, and wise decision making, and the other factor we got to remember is that, you know, today, we're not just talking about the United States and Russia and their deterrence relationship on a knife's edge, we're talking about China being much more assertive, we're talking about North Korea, which is now a nuclear armed country, we're talking about India and Pakistan, which border one another and have had border skirmishes that could easily have led to nuclear use, but for, you know, some, I would say, lucky and smart decisions on the part of a few individuals.
So there are multiple flashpoints that we now need to worry about, and, you know, deterrence has not failed in the sense that we've not had nuclear weapons use again, but that does not mean in any way that it's going to continue to somehow, either through luck or good management, continue to work.
And so, you know, just as though, I mean, we all know that we're facing a climate crisis, right?
We know that our dependence on petroleum and fossil fuels is not something that we can sustain indefinitely.
We know that that's dangerous for our planet in the medium, in the long term, and that we have to wean ourselves off of that petroleum-based energy economy.
I think just in the same way, we have to recognize that nuclear deterrence and threatening to use massive numbers of nuclear weapons against other countries if they use them against us is a dangerous and unsustainable model for international security.
And we've got to move away from that.
It's not going to happen overnight, but it is not sustainable.
So I think, you know, in the end, Dan Ellsberg is right.
I mean, Dan Ellsberg was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he worked this issue from the inside.
I would trust his warning, and we need to heed that kind of warning.
Yeah, I forget the original source now, but it's a very credibly sourced anecdote out there.
People can find it where, when Dick Cheney became Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.in 1989, they sat him down and showed him the nuclear war plan with Russia, and at some point Dick Cheney was disgusted and said, just turn this thing off, because it showed them nuking Moscow like 300 times.
And he just said, what in the world, who drew this?
You know, I want to review, somebody, Paul Wolfowitz or somebody rewrite this damn thing.
What is going on here?
And when Dick Cheney's that frustrated with the war plan, you know that there's some miss and dis incentives in there.
My friend Gordon Prather, who worked at Sandia and made nuclear weapons, that was his career making nuclear weapons for the Cold War, he said, their reputation, this is just, everybody knew this in the military.
He was the Chief Scientist of the Army.
He said, listen, nukes is a dead end job.
So all the losers become the officers in the nuclear department.
Instead of having the sharpest, best minds, you have really dangerous kind of slobs, who end up getting shuffled off to that department.
And these kinds of things where somebody better be taking a fresh look at this.
Oh, here's a good question I was going to ask you.
There must be a new nuclear posture review being worked on right now to come out this year for the new Biden administration, right?
Do you have any, does anybody, you know, have any input?
Is there any kind of discussion among you wonks about like, hey, it doesn't have to be this way.
Let's broaden our minds a little bit and think about how we could do things differently instead of just how some lobbyist wants?
Well, so what's, what's very frustrating and important to understand about nuclear strategy is that the president and the president alone makes the final decision.
But if the president does not provide the kind of direction necessary, the planners at the Pentagon will tinker at the edges and we, we don't see too many changes.
So nuclear policy reviews, often called nuclear posture reviews, they're incredibly important and they can lead to significant changes.
But it requires that the president provide clear direction about where he or she wants to go.
So yes, Joe Biden and his team are going to be doing some sort of review of existing nuclear policy.
It may not be a full blown intensive review.
It may be a, a kind of a rapid review as opposed to what was done during the Trump and the Obama administrations.
But he has a chance to make some key adjustments.
And what's interesting about Joe Biden is, you know, perhaps more than any other president in US history, he understands what's at stake.
I mean, he's been in the Senate since 1972, vice president.
He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He understands what nuclear war is and why we have to avoid it.
He understands arms control.
He understands nuclear strategy quite well.
So you know, he, I think, has a, an understanding and he has also said some things during the campaign that are very interesting that suggest that he could make some significant changes.
He said in 2017, I cannot see, nor can President Obama, a scenario in which the United States would need to, or should use nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
That's important.
He's also said that we need to reduce our excessive spending on nuclear weapons and we need to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in US national security policy.
So those are positive, um, uh, statements, but- Hey, you say the New START Treaty, which is the most important thing in the entire world, right?
You've got to give him credit for that.
And then, but so that also- Well, he did that in the first week.
Did he get us back in the INF Treaty or the Open Skies Treaty?
Do you think there's any pressure on him to get back in the other treaties that Trump abrogated here?
Well, I do know that the Obama administration and US allies in Europe who are still part of the Open Skies Treaty are looking for ways to bring the US back in.
It's not easy after Trump officially pulled the US out, but they're looking at options.
So that's positive.
We'll have to see what they come up with.
But the big challenge now that the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty has been extended for five years is, uh, you know, how and when will the United States and Russia get back to the negotiating table to discuss the other issues that go beyond New START that they need to discuss?
When are they going to do this?
What's the strategy?
It will be very difficult in this next phase of nuclear arms reduction discussions with the Russians to work out some common solutions because the Russians are concerned about US missile defense capabilities that they think could obviate their nuclear retaliatory weapons.
The US is concerned about Russia's stockpile of tactical, that is battlefield, shorter range nuclear weapons.
Both sides are concerned about the cyber offensive capabilities of the other and how that could interfere with nuclear command and control, especially in a crisis.
So there's some tough issues they got to work out.
And as you say, the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, is now gone.
And the Trump administration launched programs to build new US intermediate range missiles.
The Russians already have some in the works that were prohibited by the INF Treaty.
So they also have to solve this old problem, which Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had solved years ago about avoiding a missile race in this intermediate range class of weapons.
So my point is there are a lot of tough issues they're going to have to sit down and knock around and figure out some answers to.
Real quick on the INF thing.
My understanding there is, and I got this from Chasse Freeman and other real experts about this, but I wonder if you concur with this, that he said that Russia was breaking the deal, but they were deploying their medium range missiles along their frontier with China, not in Europe, and that the Americans, instead of just negotiating and figuring out a way to proceed, decided to take advantage of the opportunity to also break the deal in the name of the Russians breaking the deal first, but not because they want to reinstall medium range missiles in Europe.
The Germans wouldn't have them anyway, right?
But it's because they also want to ring China with medium range missiles.
And so they scrapped this treaty that kept medium range nukes out of Europe in order to both threaten China.
I would agree.
Or deter China.
Let's be generous.
I would agree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there are many in the Pentagon, in the U.S. kind of defense circles who've chafed at the INF treaty themselves, and they don't mind that they're now free of the restrictions because of what they want to do vis-a-vis China.
But it still creates the problem that there could be deployments of intermediate range cruise missiles in Europe that increase the risk of a conflict in that region in the future.
So that's another issue that's going to have to be on the U.S.-Russian negotiating table.
So it's important that Biden put a plan together, that he begins discussing these issues with the Russians, and that they're serious about it, and they need to come up with some solutions before the New START treaty expires in 2026.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry, because I got a bunch more questions here.
I could talk with you about this all afternoon, but I'm sure you have to go too.
But thank you so much for coming on the show, Daryl.
This has been great.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for paying attention to this important issue that affects all of us.
All right.
Well, if you have an email list, please put me on it.
Will do.
All right.
You take care.
Stay safe.
All right.
Have a good one.
Everybody, that is Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, and his latest is called Enough Already, No New ICBMs.
That's at armscontrol.org.
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.
