08/28/12 – Mark Sheffield – The Scott Horton Show

Okay, our guest on the show today is my friend Mark Sheffield.
His blog is called Policy on Point.
And the latest piece is how to blow up the world.
Every man's guide to European missile defense.
Oh no.
Welcome back, Mark.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
I hate this article you wrote.
It's really good, the way you wrote it and everything, but the subject matter, it just drives me to frustration.
I can't really believe it, but then again, it's so obvious.
Why is America building a missile shield in Europe?
Who's behind it?
And what sort of wonderful consequences are you looking forward to?
Well, I guess the ostensible reason behind installing it in the first place is the threat posed by Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Supposed nuclear weapons program?
Yeah, they're going to nuke Poland as soon as they're armed.
Right.
So the one we're talking about now is the Obama administration's kind of rehashing of the Bush administration's plan to put – they were going to put – they call it the ground-based interceptor.
It's a silo-housed interceptor missile.
They were going to put them in the Czech Republic and in Poland, but the problem with that is you can actually install a nuclear warhead on the ground-based interceptor and turn it into an effective strike capability.
So the Russians obviously weren't happy about it.
So Obama scrapped that plan, and everybody kind of praised him for avoiding another arms race.
And then he moved forward with this plan called the PAA, which stands for the Phased Adaptive Approach.
And basically this would – it happens in four phases.
The first phase is already completed.
It's putting Raytheon's Standard Missile 3, the SM-3, on Aegis-equipped cruisers and installing Raytheon's X-band radar system in Turkey, in the air base in Turkey.
So that's already completed.
That radar has – the range is classified, but I've found different figures claiming about 2,000 kilometers.
So it reaches pretty far into Russia.
Phase 2 comes in 2015, and that would involve the deployment of SM-3 to Divestilu, Romania.
I'm not sure if I'm saying that right.
But at each one of these phases you get an upgrade in the missile.
That's one thing to keep in mind.
Phase 3, 2018, we deploy SM-3s to Red Dachau, Poland.
That's about 10 kilometers south of the Baltic Sea.
So at this point you kind of start realizing that it's not aimed at Iran.
Once you – if you even look at a map for a second, you realize that there's no way it's aimed at anybody but Russia.
Well, you know what's hilarious about this to me is that George Bush, at the time that they really started pushing this, it was toward the end of his term when he had no credibility left.
It was a post-Katrina thing, at least in the news.
But so when Bush pushed this thing, the entire world laughed in his face.
It wasn't even, you know, oh, over at antiwar.com they said, yeah, right, this is about Russia.
The whole world laughed.
Vladimir Putin went on TV and they said, so what do you think about America's plan to intercept Iranian missiles?
And he just joked about it.
And the whole room was like, you know, kind of chuckling to themselves as it was so obvious that this is all about Russia and has nothing to do with Iran and their mythical whatever the hell.
And everybody knew it.
And then Obama came in and goes, oh, yeah, well, we've got to stop Iran and their missiles.
And everybody quit laughing and pretended like that's really the policy and we believe it now.
Yeah, we believe that.
And even though these were the same people who had just been laughing and Bush were claiming it, it was so stupid.
And now here we still are.
And Obama, in fact, this is his big speech in the Czech Republic, right?
The whole first half of the speech is like a world free of nuclear weapons.
And the crowd is like, all right.
And then the second half of the speech is forget anything I just said.
We're putting anti-missile missiles in your country as soon as we can, just like George Bush was going to do.
And at least you've got to give the people of the Czech Republic credit because they all in the crowd crossed their arms and fell silent and got pissed off, where the Americans only heard the first part of the speech.
Yeah, well, what a utopian dreamer our great president is.
He wants to get rid of the nukes.
Right.
So once you actually put them in Poland and in Romania, at this point you're going to have the SM-3 Block 2A.
Oh, right.
It was just the radars in the Czech Republic.
Sorry, I got that part wrong.
Right, right.
And so SM-3 Block 1A is what we already have.
That's on our Aegis cruisers.
SM-3 Block 1B is going to hopefully, you know, from their perspective, hopefully be ready by 2015, Block 2A by 2018, and then Block 2B, which has another name, the next generation Aegis missile, is going to hopefully be ready by 2020.
At that point, if we get that installed, the SM-3 Block 2B, in Poland and in Romania, then we begin to field a credible defense against some full-range ICBMs, and that is when the Russians really start getting pissed off, you know?
So the central question, I guess, is if the system would work and actually defend people against, let's put aside the Iran thing for a second, if it would actually defend against a full-scale nuclear attack, would we want to do it?
And that's a pretty tough question, but the problem is that it won't work and can't work against a full-scale attack.
So what we're really tempting here is just more escalation with Russia in the east, and we're putting some of these missiles in Japan as well, so they can kind of be tempted over there as well.
But I guess the central issue is if it's not aimed at Iran and it won't protect us against a full-scale nuclear attack from Russia, then why risk this escalation?
Because the problem is, under our New START treaty, the one that's currently in effect right now between the U.S. and Russia, the whole maintenance of that treaty relies on maintaining nuclear strike parity between the two states, okay?
So if we put one interceptor on the Russian border, let's just make it simple, if we put one interceptor on the Russian border, to maintain the levels of parity, they need to move forward one missile, right?
Otherwise they lose the balance or whatever.
So we move forward interceptors that basically threaten attrition toward Russia.
If they want to launch a full-scale nuclear attack, they have to be able to take into account some level of attrition with regard to our interceptors taking out some of their ballistic missiles, right?
So whenever we move missiles forward, they're going to move missiles forward, you know, just kind of check us.
And then once they do that, you'll have all these Western politicians just, you know, crying havoc at this offensive Russian move, even though it was our offensive move in the first place that started the whole cycle.
So it really comes down to the fact that are we willing to risk an escalation of tensions for a system that's expensive and ineffective?
Yeah, the answer is yes, because nobody even talks about it or cares about it.
Everyone just gets to have their policy, and apparently their policy is buying Raytheon products.
Right, right.
And they can get us all killed, all being, you know, not hyperbole in this case, but like right down to the toads and everybody but the cockroaches.
So here's my thing, and really I skipped this part.
It's the beginning of the article.
You make a great point, Mark, here at Policy on Point, how to blow up the world.
Every man's guide to European missile defense, that when Mitt Romney said Russia is America's number one geopolitical foe in the world, or whatever he called it, that wasn't just some stupidity, and that's the way it was spun.
And, you know, I don't think I ever even had a chance to address that on my show, not that I remember anyway.
But that was a gaffe, under the very technical definition of gaffe, where it's an accidental truth.
No one in American politics is supposed to say we're trying to pick a fight with Russia.
And yet they are.
That is the policy.
That was the Bush policy.
That's been, well, the Clinton policy was kick them and rape them while they're down.
The Bush Jr. policy was try to pick a fight with them, and Obama has continued that.
And this is Mitt Romney promising more of the same.
Again, promising a giant welfare check to Raytheon.
And so the policy continues, picking a fight with Russia.
Everybody in the media treated it like we're friends with Russia now.
Everyone knows that.
Russia's not our geopolitical foe at all, not that we've ever heard.
What in the world is Mitt Romney talking about?
Boy, oh boy, what a dumb thing for him to say when apparently that's altogether not true as far as we know.
And yet, yeah, that's a lot of what American foreign policy is all about, encircling Russia, expanding NATO.
There are those like, say, for example, our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who would like to see Ukraine and even Georgia brought in to NATO.
Guaranteeing that if they ever do anything to get into war with anybody, we have to go to war with Russia for them.
And, of course, that's got a lot to do with the occupation of Afghanistan and the entire policy concerning Azerbaijan and Georgia and the pipeline going through there to Turkey, the BTC pipeline from hell and all of that.
So, yes, Mitt Romney, what he said was the true thing that he wasn't supposed to say, which is that, yes, due to America's welfare program for the missile manufacturers, they are going to press forward with this new arms race with Russia.
So the real problem is if we actually approach completion of the phase four, 20, because this next missile, block two, expands diameter for about, I think, 13 and a half inches to 21 inches.
Gadgets.
The problem is block two could realistically incorporate some technology gains from what is called the multiple kill vehicles program.
It was independently researched by Lockheed and basically the whole the whole idea behind one of these midcourse interceptors is you send up what you send up your missile and then little thing called a kill vehicle detaches from the missile and just tries to smash into it.
Right.
So.
The multiple kill vehicles is exactly what it sounds like, you just put a bunch of these on one rocket and, you know, boom, force multiplication.
So.
If we actually do that, then that's really going to accelerate this whole cycle of escalating tension, I guess, because I mean, if we put one of those on their border, they might have to put eight more nukes.
So.
The ratio just goes straight through and it becomes really, really dangerous.
And I think if you look at the piece, definitely, you know, put it in there more completely than I can right here.
But it basically serves as a way to counter the most dangerous nuclear weapons that we already have, which use what are called MIRVs.
And it's basically a nuclear missile or a missile with as much as 12 warheads, independently targetable warheads.
So you can think of the MKV as the counterpart to the MIRV.
And if we deploy those, the Russians are going to go ballistic.
Well, no pun intended, but yeah, that's the real danger if we actually complete this thing.
And the problem is when Obama scrapped Bush's plan, everybody liked him for it, right?
But he was really just playing, like I say in the piece, a game of economics and force multiplication because the SM-3 doesn't have – the old one, the GBI, needs its own silo and its own control per missile.
It's going to be land-based and mobile, but, well, it's going to be mobile.
So it just shoots off the back of a truck or a launcher, basically.
And you don't need all the radar and control systems.
So the SM-3 costs about 80% less than the GBI, and you get more of them, and you can move them around.
So you have a really flexible defense.
So even if we say they're aimed at Iran and we actually point them at Iran, we can always just move them and point them at Russia.
And they know that.
It's no secret, right?
So it's kind of like the only people who believe that it is pointed at Iran are the people that actually believe Iran is or has a nuclear weapon, which turns out to be 21% of Americans.
So we've kind of reached a point where we're the only ones swallowing our own medicine.
Everybody else knows what the actual deal is.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, because there's no controversy between the leading politicians in America about this.
And so as long as they're not arguing about it, TV will never talk about it.
And so it's just, it doesn't matter.
I know this is an untouchable subject.
I mean, maybe because people's eyes might just glaze over and, you know, you lose them.
But it's hard to think that either party actually wants to, you know, offer the Russians a handshake and say, Okay, we won't do this.
We know we're aiming at you.
It's almost impossible to think that.
And the problem is, along with the Russian situation, block two is going to be jointly developed and deployed in Japan.
So, and we're also putting Raytheon's X-band radar in Japan.
Which is just crazy.
I mean, those guys have got to be crazy for going along with this.
They think that makes them safer from who?
The Chinese?
I wonder if they're going to try to sell the American people that they're putting these things in Japan in order to protect Japan from Iran, too.
Is that supposedly about Iran?
Is anybody buying that?
Or does the government even have to bother coming up with lies that make any sense anymore to anybody?
Why do they even bother lying?
You can just say North Korea, and then there's your excuse.
Oh, yeah.
Well, they might have nukes, but they don't seem to work very well.
And their missiles are cardboard.
So they look great in a parade, but that's about it.
All right, listen, we got to go.
We're out of time.
Thank you very much for your time on the show, as always.
Appreciate it.
I appreciate it.
Everybody, that's Mark Sheffield.
His blog is policyonpoint.com.
It's really good stuff.
And this one is a great article, very in-depth.