All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm 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 the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and author of Inside the ICBM Lobby.
And this is a press release, a very informative one, at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
That's accuracy.org.
How the ICBM Lobby is Threatening Armageddon.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Thanks for having me again.
Happy to have you here.
This is one of the goofiest, ironical, crazy things of our times, is that there's such a thing at all as the ICBM Lobby, and I know I'm a broken record on this, but I think I speak for regular people when I say that.
You just sort of maybe never thought about it, or maybe it just goes without saying that somehow the military decides how many nukes they need, and then they make them or order them or something, and it just doesn't really come up that you have businessmen who are trying to get rid of some H-bombs here who will do anything that they can to bribe the Congress to make sure that they can keep selling to their captive market, the Energy Department and the Pentagon, in preparation for the destruction of all of humankind, as long as they can make a quick buck right now.
Just the same as any other racket, just the same as a company that sells tanks or shoelaces or combat boots or whatever it is to the military.
We have an ICBM Lobby that you say here is threatening Armageddon.
So please do tell, sir.
Well, as you're pointing out, there's a lot at stake here.
It's not about overcharging for boots.
And the ICBM is particularly dangerous.
I mean, all nukes are dangerous, but because the president has a few minutes to decide whether to launch them in a crisis, there's a danger of an accidental nuclear war due to a false alarm.
And there have been false alarms before.
So if we were going to get the nuclear problem under control, the first thing you'd want to do is get rid of ICBMs.
And yet you've got senators from the states where the ICBM bases are, or where they do development work on the ICBM, who've blocked almost every single attempt to spend less on ICBMs, to reduce the numbers, to even study alternatives.
At the end of the, when they negotiated the New START Treaty, they got rid of 50 of them.
There's 400 left.
So they said, well, let's destroy those 50 silos.
The lobby said, oh no, maybe we'll need them in the future if we rebuild up again.
So literally any little change that you might think about, this lobby, which is senators from relatively small states, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, and Utah, have had kind of a stranglehold on policy on this, backed up, of course, by the corporations.
Northrop Grumman has a $13 billion plus no-bid contract to build a new ICBM.
It's not bad enough we have them in the ground, but now they want to spend over $250 billion building and operating a whole new one, which of course, in wonderful Pentagon parlance, they call the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, which doesn't sound so bad, not like something that's going to end life as we know it, but that wouldn't be a good name, the missile to end life as we know it.
So they stuck with GBSD as their acronym.
But anyway, yes.
So this is, I think, because of what's at stake, the fact that a relatively small number of senators and corporations are keeping us down this road, I think is one of the most dangerous and outrageous examples of influence peddling that we have.
Yeah, it's completely crazy.
And now, just off the top of your head, can I ask you, do you know, how many megatons are we talking about in the missiles that we're discussing here in these Minutemen, for example?
Yeah, I don't know.
I know it's like many, many multiples of the power of the bombs that killed a few hundred thousand at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So it's, it's, it's huge, huge explosive power.
And of course, they're...
Are these, do you know if these have multiple reentry vehicles, you know, per missile?
Yes.
That's the ones we're talking about here, right, are the big ones, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So you could have one rocket that actually takes out four or five cities, something like that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So, you know, the US has 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons and about four or 5,000 in the active stockpile.
So, you know, a handful of those, if you had an exchange of even 100 of those thousands and thousands, you would probably end life on the planet, because you'd interfere with heat getting in, you'd have famines, you'd have all kinds of horrific consequences.
So all this talk about, well, we need more because China's building a few missiles, or, you know, we don't have enough to take out their nuclear weapons in a conflict.
Once you start using nuclear weapons, essentially life is over.
And so a lot of the arguments used in Washington for why we need a tweak here, a more reliable weapon there, a different capacity here, really is irrelevant to our survival.
In fact, it's a counter to our survival.
Yeah.
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Well, you're such a hippie, how could anyone be opposed to the power to destroy a city in one shot?
After all, as Bill Kristol might say, it's kept the peace for the last 75 years.
Never mind the Koreans and the Vietnamese and the Iraqis and whatever, people like that don't count.
Between the major powers, we haven't had major wars because atom bombs are too big to use.
And so thank goodness everything's great.
What do you say to that?
I think it does.
You know, it makes the country think twice about having an all out war with another nuclear armed power.
But as you said, you know, most of the wars have been in states not only that don't have nuclear forces, but don't have major conventional forces either.
And so there's been great suffering under this sort of umbrella of what they call deterrence.
And deterrence is not, you know, it's not guaranteed.
Depends who's got their finger on the button, depends on other developments.
You've got now all this kind of clamoring for better war plans against China.
What if they overreach?
I mean, China's a nuclear armed power, and yet they're making all these plans for striking deep into Chinese territory and naval battle over Taiwan and all these things that kind of imply that we would, in effect, in the national defense strategy, they're saying, well, we have to be able to win a war with Russia or China.
What on earth does that mean?
When you've got nuclear armed powers, how do you win a war against somebody that can destroy your society just as you can destroy theirs?
So it's, you know, there's been, I think it has shifted the focus of conflict away from great power conflict towards, you know, fighting in the rest of the world to the detriment of millions and millions of people.
But I think even that notion that it's sort of going to hold the peace doesn't, is not guaranteed and we're in dangerous waters at the moment because of the demonization of China.
Right.
And if you look at the past 75 years, well, that's nothing, right?
That's a blink of an eye.
So the fact that mutually assured destruction has worked so far is no guarantee at all.
And boy, what a failure if it ever fails.
You're talking about losing cities at a minimum, maybe losing entire civilizations off of the face of the earth, setting humanity back a thousand years or some crazy thing.
Yeah, it's basically people starving from famine.
It's a risk that's not worth taking at any level, you know.
Yeah.
Man.
All right.
Now, so I think part of the context here, though, is that there's pressure to get rid of these minute men, right?
Some reasonable people inside the military establishment even think that, you know, we could just rely on our subs and air power and we don't really need the nuclear sponge in the middle of the country.
That's the other crazy, ironical thing about all this is all these minute men are there mostly to distract Soviet or Russian forces that they have to waste all their nukes nuking the middle of the country, which is supposed to somehow spare the coasts, which is ridiculous anyway.
We'd lose New York and D.C. and L.A. and San Francisco in a nuclear war with Russia anyway.
But there's this nuclear sponge idea, I guess.
The reason we're talking about this is some people are objecting to that and saying maybe we could get rid of these things.
And so you're really telling the story of the lobby pushing back and saying, no, you can't do that.
We've got to keep these no matter what.
In fact, replace them with brand new ones, etc. and on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And as too often happens, people from the military and the Pentagon don't really tell you what they think until they get out of office.
They're not in there necessarily fighting for this when they've got more power to do something about it.
But nonetheless, there's a whole long list of retired generals, heads of the strategic command.
Former Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry is particularly vocal about getting rid of ICBMs.
Dan Ellsberg now is speaking out as this being the most, the biggest nuclear danger.
He just did a piece with Norman Solomon for The Nation that sort of makes that case.
So there's a lot of arguments and a lot of people who know their way around this issue saying we don't need these things, but not enough people on the inside.
And of course, their decision making isn't always based on what makes us safer.
It's like, well, we don't want to lose a Senate seat in Montana or we don't want to lose these campaign contributions or we don't want to be perceived as weak.
That sort of blanket argument for spending more and more in the military.
I always love that line.
We're afraid that someone will call us cowards.
Yeah, that would be a real problem.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like if you really had the courage, your convictions, that wouldn't bother you.
Right.
You know, if you're such a tough guy, stand up for what you believe in.
Yeah.
Now, here's the thing.
I'm sure you probably saw this when they're talking about these given these nuclear submarines, nuclear powered, not nuclear weapons subs, but nuclear powered submarines to the Australians.
I was reading a thing.
I might have the date wrong here, but I don't think so.
I'm pretty sure they said, listen, the time it's going to take to transfer this technology to the Australians, prepare the infrastructure and everything, train up all their people on it to be able to use it right.
We're talking 2050.
And it's just all baked in there, unsaid, is that we do not foresee an era of diplomacy with Russia and China.
We foresee the status quo holding, if we're lucky, we'll still have a nuclear standoff with these two major nuclear weapons powers into the indefinite future.
And that's the framework that they look at everything.
And the new ICBM would last till 2075 if they build it.
So it's sort of like, yeah, this is this is supposed to be in perpetuity in their view.
And using that time to actually do arms control or disarmament or change the calculus or have a diplomatic opening to any of these countries is not even in the scenario, you know.
It's crazy.
All right.
So everybody, you can find I'm not sure how to get to it from the front page of the Center for International Policy, but just Google this up, everybody.
It's inside the ICBM lobby, special interests or the national interest.
And it's by the great Bill Hartung.
It's here at the Center for International Policy.
And you find this great press release that also links to Ellsberg's article in The Nation at the Institute for Public Accuracy.
That's accuracy.org.
And I know you got to go, but I really appreciate you make a little bit of time for us here today, Bill.
Oh, yeah.
Always great to talk.
All right, you guys.
That's the great William Hartung.
