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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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Tom Kalina.
He is writing again here at defense1.com with William J. Perry, the former Secretary of Defense under William Jefferson Clinton.
And so welcome to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Scott, I'm doing great.
Thanks so much for having me here.
All right.
So the piece is called $264 billion for ICBMs, for you kids, that's Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, that would be destroyed in the ground?
No thanks.
And so there's so much here, but I guess just go ahead and define for us here what you talk about in the subhead.
Creating a new nuclear sponge makes neither fiscal nor strategic sense.
I don't know, sir.
It sounds to me like if you've got a thing that can soak up nukes, then we should probably have one of those, right?
What are you talking about?
Yeah, I guess you could see it that way.
But just a little context, I mean, for your listeners who don't know, the United States is planning to spend about $2 trillion, with a T, to rebuild the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next few decades.
And some of us think that's excessive.
The Cold War ended 30 years ago, and the Soviet Union is no more.
And so some of us, like me, think we should stop and rethink what we're doing before we sort of jump feet first into spending that much money on nuclear weapons, when we may not need them.
Nuclear weapons are not the kind of thing you want to build and then take down later when you realize you build too many.
You want to think it through before you do it.
And now we have that opportunity.
We are planning to spend all that money and build all these weapons.
So now is the time to ask the tough questions.
So a big part of that $2 trillion program is to rebuild the land-based ballistic missiles known as ICBMs.
Wait, can I stop you for a second here?
I'm a bit confused.
So they announced this project back during Obama years.
It was part of the compromise he had to make to even get the New START treaty passed, right?
And then Trump came in, and I was under the impression that they had doubled or tripled the price tag by then.
But now you're saying it's the Biden years, and they haven't actually begun on the project of revamping the arsenal and the industry and everything yet?
Well, you know, some parts have begun.
Some parts are still in planning.
I would say this part of the ICBM, the land-based ballistic missile, is sort of furthest along in that they've already signed contracts for development.
Trump administration signed a contract last year for $13 billion with Northrop Grumman.
So these things take time.
And to get to my facetious ridiculousness at the beginning here, the point being that this nuclear sponge that we're talking about is no magic sponge in the air.
It's these land-based ICBMs.
They are the nuclear sponge.
In other words, American towns and American farms.
Exactly.
So if you live in the states where these missiles are based, and those states are Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming, the heartland of America.
If you live in those states, you have some share of the 400 ICBMs that are deployed out there.
And the mission for these ICBMs is really hard to discern if you talk to the Air Force.
They're very cagey about it.
But ultimately, they have no intent to launch these missiles, even in a nuclear war.
The point of these missiles is to draw a Russian attack to these states, to the U.S. heartland.
Yeah, but the Russians read Defense News and so then, or Defense One, so they know that then, right?
So why would they bother wasting all their H-bombs on missiles that are not in the Red Book in the plan to be used, even in the event of a war?
Well, I mean, the larger point here is that no rational Russian leader would ever attack the United States with nuclear weapons, because there would be a devastating response.
I mean, that's what deterrence is all about, is the United States has enough nuclear weapons deployed in enough diverse ways that if we were ever attacked by the Russians, which I don't think will ever happen with nuclear weapons, we would respond with our submarines at sea, for example.
I got to tell you, Tom, my biggest fear when you say that, I just think of it the other way around.
Might the Russians defend themselves with nukes if America attacked them?
Because I think America's the much more likely aggressor.
Well, that's a good reason not to attack Russia.
Sure.
We should never put ourselves in any situation where a Russian nuclear attack might be the response.
And Russia should never put itself in a situation where a U.S. nuclear attack might be a response.
So we both have to be tremendously careful in this situation.
And the decision for the U.S. leaders and the taxpayers to decide right now is do we want to spend $260 billion on a new fleet of land-based ballistic missiles whose only purpose is to be destroyed in the ground?
There's no plans to ever use them.
They're there just because I would say they've always been there.
People can't really think fresh in this space.
And there's a lot of money to be made from these missiles.
I mean, $264 billion goes a long way when you're talking about a defense contractor or a member of Congress that is getting donations, campaign contributions, and jobs and careers.
And so it's very hard to derail a process and a bureaucracy that is so upset towards that goal.
It really is amazing where it really all just does come down to the economics of bureaucracy and contracting.
Where these corporations have a huge interest in selling H-bombs.
And so then that's it.
The tail wags the dog.
Congressman, let me tell you why you need these H-bombs.
And then rather than what the average kind of high school civics student might presume, which is, you know, the government comes to industry and says, look, we need 14 of these things or whatever it is, and then that's it.
That essentially they're no different than the AARP or the gun lobby or the Israel lobby or anybody else.
Gimme, gimme, gimme.
And they'll stop at nothing.
If they could, they'd sell, they would build the American arsenal back up to 40,000 nukes like in the battle days if that was what they could persuade the government to do simply for their own interests at the expense of the future of the entire species, even.
Which is a lot worse than the AARP.
Well, right.
I mean, so there, so, you know, there are some uses of money that are a waste of money, but they're not necessarily dangerous.
Right.
Over, overspending on, you know, water projects or whatever.
But overspending on nuclear weapons is actually dangerous because the more we spend on nuclear weapons, the Russians look at that and say, well, we better spend that much money too plus some.
And that's how you get into an arms race.
And once, as we had during the cold war, and as we know from that experience, once both nations are building up, they're distrusting each other and you get in closer and closer to that brink, um, where some sort of misunderstanding or some sort of accident or miscalculation can lead to nuclear war.
And thankfully, uh, when the cold war ended, um, we, we were able to step back from the brink with arms control agreements that reduced the number of weapons we had quite significantly.
Uh, but that was 30 years ago and we seem to have forgotten why we started those reductions.
And now we're in a situation where rather than thinking through this logically and saying how many weapons we really need, we're rebuilding them all at, at, at such a huge price with money that we don't have and then we can't afford given all the other things that are going on in the country right now.
I mean, don't worry, Tom, we'll just borrow from China.
Yeah, right.
But I mean, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, dealing with, with COVID, uh, and the economy and healthcare and climate, all these things, you know, to think that we really should spend $2 trillion on, on rebuilding the nuclear arsenal, uh, to me is just, it's just not logical thinking.
And you know, I'm glad you mentioned the part about the arms race here, cause there is the Russian side of this and, um, you know, I have the book, I really, uh, have meant to read this.
I have, uh, caught up on these interviews, but the Oliver Stone, Vladimir Putin interviews, I know that there's one clip where Stone says to Putin, essentially, I think they're talking about the anti-ballistic missile, uh, treaty that Bush scrapped and then put, started putting the radars and missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic and all this in the name of protecting Poland from their arch enemy, Iran, uh, which everybody laughed at when Bush said it, but took seriously when Obama said it, but anyway, Stone says to Putin, come on, Vladimir Putin, you know how corrupt America is.
This whole thing is just a boondoggle, man.
It's just welfare for the anti-ballistic missile corporations, right?
But it's, this doesn't really have anything to do with starting a fight with you guys or anything like that.
And Putin says, oh yeah, no, I know, I understand American economics, uh, you know, but then he goes at the same time, Oliver Stone, what am I supposed to do?
Man, you know, you're kind of putting me in an awkward position where you're ringing my country with anti-missile missiles.
I have to take that seriously, regardless of the perverse economic incentives in your country and political incentives in your country behind this, I have to respond in kind.
And then it was, I think a year, maybe two years after that was when he gave his big speech and announced that we have brand new heavier missiles with more MIRVs, and we got a new nuclear torpedo, and he claimed a, um, a, uh, nuclear powered cruise missile that essentially has unlimited range and so can outflank any missile defenses that the Americans might deploy against it, et cetera, and all of these things and saying, essentially, this is the position that you put me in by withdrawing from all these treaties and coming at us in this way.
And at the dawn of the 21st century did not have to be this way at all.
As George W. Bush ripped up that ABM treaty, just as Oliver Stone says, so they could just pay off political contributors to the Republican Party back then.
It's actually, you know, the United States has done a huge favor to Putin by over arming ourselves, because Putin's a tough guy in Russia, right?
He needs to motivate his rule by fear.
And so he can point to the United States and say, you know, this is, this is, you know, the United States coming to get you.
They're a threat to Russia.
I can protect you.
I, Vladimir Putin, uh, as a tough guy who's going to spend a lot of money in the military, I will protect you.
And so we, the United States is contributing to Putin's power base by posing as a threat and allowing him to portray us as a threat rather than creating a different narrative where, yes, we shouldn't trust Russia.
Putin is a dangerous character, but we shouldn't be giving him any excuses to feed his power base built on militarism and anti-democratic tendencies.
Even the academics at Georgetown University call it the rally around the flag effect, right?
Well, which is, you know, why governments allow themselves to be attacked at some time.
In fact, I even read about how the Japanese had staged an event at a train station in order to justify attacking China at the beginning of World War II was because it's a good way to get people rallying around the leadership is look something bad happened to us.
Same reason Roosevelt turned a blind eye a couple of years later at Pearl Harbor to go ahead and give us something to be upset about.
So yeah, why would we play into that narrative for him?
You don't have to comment on Pearl Harbor if you don't want to, but you can if you want to too.
Well, I mean, there's certainly, um, you know, enough evidence to show that Pearl Harbor could have been prevented, um, but that, uh, it was not.
And in part of the reason it was not is, is because, you know, uh, the government and the president at the time were looking for a reason to get into the war.
So there's lots of stories like that, unfortunately.
And so it doesn't mean, I didn't mean to say that Putin is making the Americans act hawkish towards him or anything like that, but I'm saying that's the effect that he's exploiting that you're describing there.
It's a very powerful and very well known factor in politics.
It's why governments always play the victim.
And so as you're saying, it's the American, uh, stance toward Putin, if anything, in effect is serves his interests, his domestic political interests in solidifying his power and continuing to.
Absolutely right.
Um, not that I care, but the people who are doing it are the ones who care the most.
So what the hell?
I mean, I happen to think, you know, they call the guy Hitler all the time.
He seems like Hindenburg to me.
I'm not so sure.
You know, I think there are people who are to the right of him in the country that, uh, might make us miss him if, uh, you know, people come at him with the worst things.
And he says, well, you know, you know, ask him about conflicts with America and accusations by America and whatever, even the conflict in Ukraine, he says, yeah, you know, our American partners and us sometimes disagree about some things, but they sure are our partners.
And we sure do like working with them when we can, which I know it's just talk, but Hey, he doesn't have to be that cool at all, right?
He could be the Russian Donald Trump and thank goodness that he's that cold and unemotional.
I think he's a guy that, in other words, in a political way, he could turn on a dime and, and work with America if the Americans would have them, I think, you know what I mean?
That's right.
And just an example, um, you know, something that, that the Trump administration, uh, refused to do was to extend the new START treaty.
And this is a treaty that was really completely in our interest and Russia's interest because it capped both of our strategic arsenals, um, at a lower level, uh, had to be renewed.
Trump wasn't renewing it.
Uh, Putin was supportive of renewing it.
And then, and then renewed it when Biden came in, uh, uh, just this year.
So, you know, he's a much more, he's, he's a practical person, uh, and, and you can work with him, as you say, in ways that, uh, working with Donald Trump was very difficult to do.
So yeah, we could probably do worse, um, than Putin, uh, but we could do better too.
And we should be, we should be working on it as much as possible to try to get a better future for Russia.
All right.
In fact, this is the big buried news of the last week and a half or whatever was that Putin and Biden talked on the phone and agreed to have talks face to face at some point in the near term future, I believe, correct?
That is correct.
And, and, you know, we don't, you know, these are, these are been labeled as sort of strategic stability talks.
Um, but it's a great sign because even, even when US and Russian relations are bad as they are now, they still have an interest in preventing nuclear war, uh, between them, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and, and so many other things.
And it's often when relations are at their worst that you need to, uh, nurture these these bilateral discussions so that we both understand each other.
So I'm, I'm really happy, uh, that both Biden and Putin are open to having those discussions even when in every other context, um, they're not getting along at all.
So it's a very welcome sign.
Right.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Okay, now I'm sorry I should have clicked on your name before I did the introduction here.
You guys just wrote a book together, you and William Perry, and would you remind me the name of his previous book on nukes that he put out?
Um.
Haha, sorry I put you on the spot.
I don't remember it either.
Anyway, Perry, this is a very serious guy.
My understanding, I read a little thing about him one time, this is a guy who essentially worked his way up as the ultimate wonk in the Pentagon to the position of Secretary of Defense.
Not a former military guy, but a former civilian employee of the Pentagon, I think, for much of his career, and then essentially was the absolute brainiest guy they put up there.
Not an ideological guy.
I forget now, I think he resigned over something important or was kind of forced out over something important.
I know he told the truth about the Khobar Towers attack in the face of the giant lie that it was Iran that did it, when it was Al-Qaeda that did it.
So I respect his integrity for that, because that was a huge one.
And then he wrote this thing, you know, people might think I'm an alarmist on this, you don't hear me predicting nuclear war soon or anything like that, I just know how big these explosions can be.
I heard this quote the other day, sorry I'm rambling, but I love this.
It was from Jack Kennedy, he said, you know, if we had a nuke go off in one American city, that's 600,000 dead in one day, well that's our entire war dead from the Civil War.
And we haven't gotten over that in 100 years, he said.
And so that's the level of devastation from these hydrogen bomb machines that we're talking about here that these men are holding on to.
So you know, it is that important.
But so instead of just, okay, well, the guy with the podcast from antiwar.com says, so here's the former Secretary of Defense saying, hey, Tom, let's write a book together about why we need to rein this thing in hard and now because it's really a danger, right?
Is that what's going on here?
That's what's going on.
And just to answer your previous question, his previous book was My Journey at the Nuclear Brink and that came out at 2015 and that was kind of a biography of his life in government and it's a great read.
And then we wrote just recently, came out just last year, The Button, The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump, where we really wanted to set out a new nuclear policy for a new administration.
And luckily, that turns out to be the Biden administration, because they'll they'll certainly be much more open to this than a Trump administration would have been.
But we really want to lay out a new policy for reducing the threat of nuclear war.
And that's that's what we're all about.
OK, well, tell me more about that.
So starting off with who needs a triad, right?
Let's get rid of all the Minutemen missiles.
And I like I've probably told you this before because it's such a good one.
It was the American hero, the great Ron Paul, told the Washington Post.
And I like that part of the story, too, that it was the post that he was addressing when he said this.
And they were trying to come at him hard with what isolationist he was in all of this.
And he said, you know, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines.
And the truth was they couldn't say anything to that because that's simply true as far as a nuclear deterrent and as far as our torpedoes can kill your troop ships.
So no one's approaching our shores from any direction ever for the next thousand years.
Nobody's invading North America.
Give me a break.
And so then they didn't have here we have a trillion dollar defense budget when all we need is a couple of good submarines, Tom.
So I mean, any just just to put a fine point on that, you know, any one of our nuclear armed submarines could destroy the 50 largest Russian cities in a day.
Fifty largest Russian cities.
We have 14 of those submarines, OK?
So that is the deterrent.
That is the force that convinces any sane Russian leader not to attack the United States because most of those submarines are deployed out at sea and are invulnerable at any given time.
Now, if if you are worried about the possibility, very remote, that at some point those submarines can be discovered under the oceans, then you might want some insurance.
And that's why we have nuclear armed bombers, long range bombers that can be scrambled or launched in an emergency that also carry nuclear weapons and that there is really no need for the land based ballistic missiles that are there in the heartland of the United States.
And as we were discussing, are only there to draw nuclear weapons from the from Russia towards them.
And not only could we save a lot of money by not building those things, but we'd be much safer.
And this is really what we wrote this book about, is to draw public attention to the danger of accidental nuclear war, because we think and most analysts agree, as we've been discussing, that Russia is not going to attack us intentionally.
They know that such an attack would be suicidal for Russia and devastating for the entire globe.
They're just not going to do it.
But accidents happen.
And we have a system where those land based ballistic missiles are on hair trigger alert, just in case, you know, Russia would launch a surprise attack because those weapons are so vulnerable, because Russia knows where they are.
But imagine for a second that our satellites tell us that there's a Russian attack coming.
The president would be under huge pressure to launch those weapons before that Russian attack arrives, because those ICBMs are vulnerable, they will be destroyed in the ground.
But if the president were to do that, were to launch those weapons on warning of attack, if that's a false alarm, and we launch our ICBMs, it is us who just started nuclear war by mistake.
And to us, that is the ultimate nightmare that we should be working against.
And so that's what the book is about.
And that's why we'd be safer without the ICBMs, because their vulnerability creates this false alarm danger, this danger that we could blunder into nuclear war and start nuclear war by mistake.
This is so funny to me in a way that you just think that there's, you must have the guy with the roundest egghead at the University of Chicago who came up with the most brilliant game theory, you know, calculus equations for figuring all of this stuff out.
And yet, boy, the way you explain it sure does sound stupid that the plan is to never use these nukes.
They're only there to draw nuclear fire.
But if they do, then we'll use them so that we don't lose them, even though we weren't going to use them.
And this is the kind of thing that it sounds to me like a junior high school kid could know better than.
Yeah, I do.
And I'm probably not much smarter than one of those.
But the brightest men at the University of Chicago gained all this out on their supercomputer and said that this is the best nuclear policy for the United States of America to protect the American civilian population from the Russian enemy.
Is that right?
That's pretty much it.
I mean, people don't tend to plan on mistakes.
They don't tend to plan on blunders.
But you know, all of this is built around people who are human, who make mistakes.
And it's going to happen.
So you got to plan for it.
Completely bananas.
It's you know, this is the problem, right?
It's you know, when you're living through a satire, sometimes it's hard to really zoom out and see it.
That's the anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg's book, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
Him and his buddy from Rand went and saw Dr. Strangelove.
And when they walked out of the theater into the bright sun, they said, man, that's not a satire.
That's a documentary.
That's exactly how it is.
And and including the thinking behind all of these policies.
And it's just crazy to think that humans allow other humans to own these machines and hold us all hostage in this way like this.
There's got to be a better way, you know?
Well, there is a better way.
And it's just the system is designed to prevent those better ideas from getting in.
You know, I'll just give you an example.
The Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing just this week.
And who did they invite to testify?
You know, all of the people that that were involved in designing the current system.
All the people from the inside, sort of the nuclear policy elite who don't want to change anything or don't want to even entertain new ideas.
And so it's just so hard to get new ideas into the system.
Any kind of fresh thinking.
It's next to impossible.
Why?
Because of all of the moneyed interests that are at stake.
Right.
People just want to keep the contracts moving, keep the weapons going.
Everyone's happy.
But there's very few people like me that are arguing to rethink this stuff because there's no constituency for it.
Right.
You know, it's a small community in Washington that are making these arguments to Congress.
But we're completely outnumbered and outgunned by the defense contractors, by the military brass, by, you know, all of these people that have way more money, way more staff time and way more influence than we do.
So.
But you have these huge names, too.
I mean, what does that say?
When you had George Shultz just die, but you had Shultz, you have Henry Kissinger and help me out.
I know there's a few more names that have signed on to this global zero thing where these are considered, you would think, the wisest gray beards at the Council on Foreign Relations.
What does William Perry even get there, say, well, William Perry, they don't even listen to him where he goes, listen, I'm the smartest guy in this town.
And then everybody else is quiet because they know that that's correct.
And then he says it doesn't have to be this way.
Listen.
And they say no.
You know, I for example, I tried to get Bill Perry invited to this Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this week and he was not invited.
And the reason he was not invited is because he's saying things that are inconvenient for the senators to hear.
The senators want to buy these new ICBMs.
They want this money to keep flowing.
They don't want people to come and upset the apple cart.
And so.
Pardon me.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry to interrupt.
But again, we're talking about the former secretary of defense of the United States of America.
And not like some winger like Ramsey Clark was the attorney general for a little while or something.
Right.
About a guy who, by all accounts, deserves as much respect as any of these people would have to give a guy with his biography and former station in that town.
Correct.
That is exactly right.
And he has spent way more time thinking about these issues than anyone that they had testify at that hearing this week.
So not and not only did they not invite him to testify, but then they had the gall to have one of the testifiers basically to critique our book.
The button without us there to defend it.
So it was a complete cheap shot, a complete, you know, just a real insult, if you will.
And what was that criticism?
Go ahead and defend yourself now.
Well, I mean, they're they basically just tried to say that the book was unrealistic and that the findings were not sound.
And but they didn't have any actual argument.
They just characterized it that way.
Well, you know, they portrayed the book as minimal deterrence where they which is actually not the case.
We're not arguing for a minimal deterrent.
And they're saying that if you have a minimum deterrent, you can't do certain things like defend an attack from Russia.
So it was it was to me a very weak critique of the book.
They didn't really go into the main arguments we're making, like the fact that we should not be worrying about intentional attack.
We should be worried about accidental war.
And if you are worried about accidental war, you need to take certain steps, like, for example, not giving the president sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.
You know, I don't think we've ever come closer to nuclear war, certainly in recent memory than when President Trump was in the White House, when, you know, the hordes were attacking the Capitol building and he had control of the nuclear arsenal at that moment.
That to me was a terribly scary moment.
Yeah.
Who is he going to nuke?
France?
No, but I mean, he was not in his right mind at that moment.
And we gave him the authority to if he wanted to destroy the world.
So we need to take that kind of thing seriously and and take our chain of command seriously and take the issues of accidental nuclear war more seriously than we take intentional war, because it's much more likely.
Well, in fact, I mean, on that sole authority thing, I mean, that's I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure that's, you know, the best argument there.
I mean, in fact, contrary to that, Jan Elsberg says that 10,000 people got the authority to launch nukes in this country.
You got lieutenant colonels that could launch a nuke right now if they wanted to, and nobody could stop them spread all over the planet.
And he wasn't you know, and he admitted he wasn't up to date on every last thing, but he knew enough.
I mean, he helped design the whole system for American nuclear war.
And he was saying the myth that you need the president and the football and the codes to make this happen is simply just a construct from TV.
Yeah, I have great respect for Dan Elsberg.
I disagree with him on that point, because I think today there's there are quite a number of safeguards, but there's no safeguard against a deranged president, you know, calling up the Pentagon and saying, it's time to go to nuclear war.
Well, in some of these silos, didn't they have it where the password was all zeros and had been for 20 years and stuff like this?
Yes, but but still, you can't you can't initiate that order unless the president gives the OK.
And so it all they're not supposed to write, but I mean, you could have two guys turn two keys and hit four zeros and launch the thing and nobody could stop them if they went strange love crazy and decided that today was the day, right?
Or like if there was a miscommunication out in the Pacific somewhere and people couldn't be reached, but assume the worst and have the authority to deploy weapons, that kind of thing.
No.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the submarines are the better example, because the submarines can launch their weapons essentially by themselves, which, you know, in some ways is a good thing, because you want the Russians to know that even they if they attack the United States and they take out the leadership.
That isn't going to stop the submarines from retaliating if they want to, because this is the argument people make for having ICBMs on high alert, for example, is that you've got to launch them before the attack arrives, because if you don't, you could take out the president and our ability to retaliate.
Well, that's not true because you can't get at the submarines.
And the submarines have the ability to launch their nuclear weapons, even if the entire continental United States has been wiped out and there are no more decision makers left.
And that, to me, is the ultimate deterrence, fail safe, why Russia is not going to attack us, because they cannot in their own minds in any way come up with a scenario where the subs would not be able to retaliate.
Yeah.
And on the Trump thing, please don't get me wrong, because I'm not a Trump guy.
I've never been a Trump guy.
In fact, I've always hated him my whole life, ever since the 1980s.
But I don't think there was ever any reporting that said that he was considering nuking anyone or any kind of thing like that.
He's clearly a son of a bitch.
But I'm not so sure that's the most productive talking point, because you're provoking a lot of people by saying it that way, who, for whatever stupid reason, love the guy, when the point still remains that, OK, senile old Joe Biden confuses the nuclear football for his breakfast.
I don't know.
You know what I mean?
Doesn't matter.
The point is not not on character, but just the authority and again, the devastation of these machines.
Just one of them can kill a whole city, right?
That's the thing.
Sure.
And I you know, my my my broader argument is that is that no president should have sole authority because all presidents are human.
Some more human than others.
All presidents are.
Fair enough.
They all make mistakes.
The one that that I found the most terrifying was President Trump.
But there have been other presidents like President Nixon, who we knew was was drinking in the White House during Watergate.
And he also had sole authority.
So so it had a serious discussions with Kissinger about maybe we should just go ahead and use atom bombs.
Yeah, he's on tape saying that.
So and we've had presidents that were on heavy medication like Kennedy.
We've had presidents that had, you know, declining mental abilities while in office like like Reagan.
So there are many historical examples of plenty to tell us that we should not entrust the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons to any single human.
Right.
Hey, by the way, I got an anecdote for you that I'm sure, you know, you know, much of this or maybe all of it, but it's certainly an important facet of the story of Abel Archer and the exercises in the 80s.
So the main story is that there was a Russian spy in the UK, and he assured the Soviets that this is just an exercise.
This is not cover for the attack of the Soviets were really worried that this was just cover for the beginning of an attack.
And he promised them that, look, I'm your best guy in the UK.
And I swear to God, this is OK.
I think he was in part of NATO, a Brit in NATO.
And thank goodness he was a Soviet trader spy, giving them that solid information.
But then the other the part you brought, I think that's the common narrative.
But then the part that I learned on this show was talking with Chas Freeman and Chas Freeman talked about how, in fact, he may have written this in an article to that he intervened and I think had to, like, rush over there in a scene from a movie kind of thing to intervene and make sure that Vice President Bush would not sit in the president's chair in the exercise because that signal to the Soviets, that was the thing that had them that would make them panic the most.
And he insisted that it was I guess they had the deputy secretary of defense play the role or something like that instead.
And in order to reassure the Russians that we're not about to attack them, but they were about to attack us because they thought it was on.
It was a very scary moment, that's for sure.
And then the American people like what they're doing exercise in Europe, who's about to nuke who?
Nobody's nuking anybody.
Right.
But like, yeah, no, we almost had a nuclear war over.
They're not talking on the red phone.
They have the red phone, but they're not talking on it and they're misinterpreting each other's signals and diplomatic maneuvers and languages.
Yep.
Which is why, you know, it's so important, as we said before, that that Biden and Putin are going to talk later this year.
We really need that kind of bilateral communication to happen to prevent just those kinds of misunderstandings.
Yeah.
I, the book was completely stupid, but I read this novel when I was a kid in high school called This is the Way the World Ends.
And it begins with a flock of some kind of condor or some stupid giant bird flying over the North Pole.
And the Americans panic and think it's a nuclear attack.
And so everybody dies.
Well, that actually there's a grain of truth in that.
Yeah.
Where when Gorbachev, when he was leader of Russia, when he was in office, there was there were swans, I think it was.
And the swans confused the radar.
And and he he got a report that there was a U.S. nuclear attack coming and it turned out to be swans.
And so he kept a statue.
I'm hoping I'm getting the right bird here.
He kept a statue of a swan on his desk to remind him of how mistakes like this could happen.
And that's something.
Boy, yeah, that Gorbachev, I should read biographies of him.
There's a guy I respect without knowing enough about him personally.
But I even as a kid, I was very interested in watching him help the Russian nationalists dismantle the Soviet Union the way that they did.
That's one of the most heroic things anybody ever did was preside over the disillusion of that empire that way.
He was a fascinating person who played a fascinating role in history and and, you know, getting back to what you said about Bill Perry and him resigning.
One of the biggest mistakes that that I think the United States made after the end of the Cold War, which was was accomplished by Gorbachev as much as anybody else, that we didn't continue that relationship and make friends with Russia instead of supporting them and bringing them into the community of nations.
We ostracized them and put them down and tried to keep them down.
And the example of that is is NATO expansion.
NATO and the United States expanded NATO into the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union's version of NATO, rather than which creating a military threat towards towards Russia rather than working with them to bring Russia into NATO.
That was a huge missed opportunity.
That was the reason why Secretary Perry considered resigning at the time that happened, because he knew we were missing an historic moment to build peace with Russia.
And instead, that was the beginning of the new Cold War, which we find ourselves in now.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm so glad that you got back to that, because I think I had known that and I had just forgotten what was the controversy.
I knew it was something big.
And then that was it was the most important thing of all.
And, you know, and just doing a little bit of research, there's the the great everyone should read this.
I haven't read it yet.
It's and now a word from X by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, 1998, where he talks with George Kennan about why not to do this.
And then and I really need to read Perry's book and y'all's book together here.
But I know that Jerry Brown, the former California governor, wrote an essay for I think it was the New York Review of Books or something like that.
And see, I was in high school in the 90s and I paid attention to the bombing of Iraq and stuff like that.
But I had missed this whole, you know, kind of origin argument on NATO expansion at the time.
Or I guess I had read a bit about it, but I had not picked up on because I was interested in it.
But I had not picked up on this kind of elite dissent in this way.
But Jerry Brown in there, he says that McNamara and NHTSA and I forgot I need to go back now.
But it was this long.
Oh, and Robert Gates, I'm pretty sure, was on there.
It was a long list of hawks like, I mean, I'm sure you understand this stuff a lot deeper than I do.
But the way I understand it was where Kennan wanted containment, NHTSA wanted rollback.
Well, here they both are saying we should not be doing this NATO expansion and essentially demanding that Bill Clinton call it off.
And then just all for not.
Right.
Right.
Right.
So there was there was a tremendous, as you say, elite opinion opposition to it.
But there wasn't really in the United States any political opposition to it.
Not much public attention to it.
They needed pollers votes in Illinois.
That was the that was the decision for Bill and his men.
It was a political call for the White House.
And they made the wrong call, man.
Look at this.
All right.
Listen, I'm sorry I kept you so long.
But I just like talking to you so much.
You know, all this great stuff.
Thank you so much for doing the show.
And I'm going to get to this book sooner or later here, everybody.
It's Tom Z.
Kalina.
He's writing with William J. Perry, the former secretary of defense at DefenseOne.com 264 billion for ICBMs that would be destroyed in the ground.
No thanks.
And their new book out last year, it's called The Button, the new nuclear arms race and presidential power from Truman to Trump.
Thank you so much, Tom.
Scott, thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure.
Really appreciate it.
