02/04/14 – Tom Collina – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 3,000 of them now going back to 2003.
Really?
You can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashscotthortonshow.
And we're live here, of course, on Liberty Express Radio, 3 to 5 Eastern Time, weekdays.
Okay, next guest on the show is Tom Z. Colina.
He is Research Director at the Arms Control Association.
That's armscontrol.org.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you very much for joining us today.
I appreciate it.
And I really like this journalism that you did here about missile defense, U.S. missile defense.
I guess it's kind of an op-ed, but it's got a hell of a lot of facts in it.
I'll call it journalism.
U.S. missile defense isn't ready for prime time.
And the first thing I thought when I saw that headline, I got to say is, but wait, isn't it the future right now?
We're living in 2014.
It's got to be ready by now, this missile defense.
And you know what's funny, too, is I'll go ahead and say at the beginning here is I always thought this whole thing is stupid.
Shoot a bullet with a bullet.
It never did work.
They rigged all their tests.
Everybody's known all this for decades and decades.
What a big joke it was.
And it's too bad.
Reagan and Gorbachev could have made a deal to get rid of all of their H-bombs if only Reagan hadn't believed in this ridiculous myth of the missile defense.
But then I was thinking, you know what, maybe I'm completely wrong about that because they do have air-to-air missiles that fighter jets use to shoot down other fighter jets.
That seems like it's pretty complicated mathematics to get a Sidewinder to hit what it's supposed to hit, a MiG going mock something or other, and juking and turning.
So maybe, you know, if you do the equations right, you can figure out how to hit a bullet with a bullet.
But then, so that begs the question, what's the problem?
If it still doesn't work, it's still not ready for primetime, that is, an actual threat, in 2014?
Tom?
Well, I think you're quite right.
I mean, it turns out that hitting a bullet with a bullet is really quite difficult to do.
And the Pentagon has been trying for decades now and has spent, you know, tens of billions of dollars trying to do this.
And what's happening is that the tests that are being done are simply failing.
The most recent test that was last July failed to hit its target.
The two previous tests in 2010 both failed to hit their targets.
Now, these are tests.
These are scripted, unchallenging tests to just see if the system that we already have deployed is working.
And they've missed now three times in a row.
So it doesn't give you a lot of confidence that if this test or this system were used under an actual attack, which would be a more stressing environment, you know, than these scripted tests, again, if we can't hit the scripted tests, we're not going to hit the real target in a real attack.
Right.
All right.
Well, a couple of things here.
First of all, only tens of billions?
Because I would have thought more than that.
But then second of all, hey, what's a few hundred billion compared to saving Los Angeles?
So, you know, maybe a test in the test doesn't work, right, because they're just shooting one missile.
But what if you went ahead and shot 500 missiles at the incoming thing and just cross your fingers and hope something stops them?
Right.
Because you're talking, you know, probably multiple reentry vehicles or whatever.
So if you got 20 warheads to shoot down and you shoot 500 missiles at it, who cares how much it costs?
Shoot them damn things down.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, there there are budget realities to these things.
I mean, right now, you know, the United States, I mean, really, you know, the estimate is about 40 billion dollars that has been spent on the 30 interceptors we have deployed in California and Alaska right now on missile defense in general, including a lot of the concepts that were promoted by President Reagan for space based things.
And some of the far out ideas, if you add up all that stuff, it's well over 100 billion dollars.
But but the 40 billion figure is just for actually what we have deployed in the ground right now.
And you know, and this is only so much money that you can spend on this stuff.
And you know, the reality is, is that at some point it becomes so much cheaper for an attacker to attack than for you to defend.
It's it's simply not a cost effective system.
And that's the problem we have right now, is that even if you can get a system that could reliably hit a target in these scripted tests, it's relatively easy for an adversary, you know, even a less developed country like North Korea to put up decoys, because what's happening is these intercepts are happening in space, OK, but not happening in the atmosphere like a fighter jet or, you know, or a missile, that kind of thing, but happening in space where things are floating along and there's no drag.
So something like a balloon flies at the same speed and trajectory as the real target, the warhead you're trying to hit, as does, you know, the debris from the missile itself is all kind of traveling around in what's called a threat cloud.
And so the interceptor has to kind of get up there in space and look and say, well, which is the real target and which is the fake one?
And there's no, the system really can't tell what's the real thing from the fake thing.
And so, in fact, we already have that kind of situation where, you know, the interceptor goes up there and it doesn't see, it doesn't have one target.
It's really got about 25 and it's got to figure out which one, which one's the real one.
And so you quickly see that the economics of this don't work out, that it's way cheaper to put up, you know, 25 real and false targets.
Yet we're putting up interceptors that, you know, are costing hundreds of millions of dollars each and simply can't keep going with that.
So in other words, it's not just a matter of, you know, the cost of trying to save Los Angeles or an American city from being lost or something like that.
It's that it can't work, that just compared to the countermeasures against it, it will never be able to keep up with the countermeasures, not at the rate of spending required to keep up with countermeasures.
That's what you're saying.
It probably can't work and it certainly can't work cost effectively.
And I guess the more direct answer is that there are alternatives that are much more effective.
So, for example, we have, the United States has a nuclear arsenal of offensive weapons.
The reason we have it is to deter countries like North Korea from attacking the United States.
So it's wrong to think that these missile defenses, which have proven to be ineffective, are the only thing standing between us and attack from North Korea.
That's not the case at all.
The reason, one of many reasons that North Korea would choose not to attack us is because they would know if they did, they would get attacked back.
And not only that, they'd get decimated because we have literally thousands of nuclear weapons that we could launch in North Korea.
I mean, that's the main reason why a country like North Korea isn't going to attack the United States, not because there's a defense system standing there.
Well, and it's also important to note that the reason that anybody's even talking about North Korea is because America has no actual enemies anywhere in the world.
At worst, China and Russia are our frenemies.
There are our trading partners and our strategic partners on all kinds of projects all over the world.
And, you know, certainly between us and China, we can't do without each other, economically speaking now.
And there's really, we're out of continents where there might be bad guys lurking with ICBMs here.
The only real threat, well, not the only one, but the worst threat, of course, would be some kind of accidental war between us and Russia, or maybe if there was some severe change of regime here or there in some midterm future, Cold War is back on or worse, something like that.
But otherwise, that's why we're talking about defending from North Korea, because they're the only ones that we can even conceive of who might someday get a rocket that can reach far enough to hit Anchorage or something, right?
Right.
And, you know, make no mistakes.
The North Koreans are working on that capability.
You know, no doubt there is a potential threat that could be mounted from North Korea.
They're working both on the missiles and the nuclear weapons.
But my main point is that even if they achieve that capability, you know, they'll be deterred from using it because we have much greater forces than they do.
Their main goal is to get attention for themselves, kind of like the bad kid who can only behave badly to get attention for that.
Right.
And there are other alternatives, like negotiate away the threat, that kind of thing, too.
But I wonder if we go back to the hypothetical of a North Korean or even, you know, because the Chinese, they don't have that many nukes, say, if we got in a war with them and they shot what, a couple of dozen nukes at us, maybe, you know, the possibility of being able to shoot those down.
What about, you know, my understanding and my friend Gordon Prather, he used to make nuclear weapons.
So what he told me was, forget all this shooting, heat seeking missiles in outer space.
What are we talking about here?
What you need is an enhanced radiation thermonuke, a neutron bomb.
You set off those in space and that's the only chance you had.
Not that it's foolproof or anything, but that's the best chance you have in knocking out incoming ICBMs.
And if you're talking about missile defense, that's not about shooting off enhanced radiation devices in space, then you're just wasting money.
Well, you know, I think there's a general sense the American public is not going to be supportive of launching nuclear warheads into space.
So from a political perspective, that tends to have been a non-starter.
Plus the fact that once you detonate one nuclear warhead in space, you pretty much blind all your other interceptors.
So it's very difficult to then...
I see.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, that wasn't supposed to start up quite so loud.
You can finish your statement there.
Anyway, so nuclear interceptors are pretty much a non-starter.
And so we're stuck with the non-nuclear sort of bullet to a bullet situation, which has so far not panned out.
Right.
All right.
Hold tight right there.
We've got to take this short break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Tom Killeen, a research director at Arms Control Association, armscontrol.org.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Some stock market investors are making money hand over fist, while others sit on the sidelines afraid of the dangers.
Are you looking for answers?
Before you invest one dollar, I'd like you to take the time to watch this new video from Martin Weiss at moneyandmarkets.com.
The video names the seven riskiest and four safest major stocks in America.
Learn from the experts and invest wisely.
Go to crisis16.com.
That's crisis16.com.
Hey, y'all, Scott here.
Like I told you before, the Future Freedom Foundation at FFF.org represents the best of the libertarian movement.
Led by the fearless Jacob Hornberger, FFF writers James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, Wendy McElroy, Anthony Gregory, and many more.
Write the op-eds and the books, host the events, and give the speeches that are changing our world for the better.
Help support the Future Freedom Foundation.
Subscribe to their magazine, The Future of Freedom, or to contribute, just look for the big red donate button at the top of FFF.org.
Peace and freedom.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here.
Don't you want a bust of Murray Rothbard for your desk at work?
A Ludwig von Mises for your bookshelf at home?
A Harry Brown or Ron Paul as a gift for a friend?
Check out these awesome busts of your libertarian heroes at MyHeroesThink.com.
They come in six or nine inch sizes, and now in color, too.
Of course, gold, silver, or bronze.
I've got the Harry Brown one on the bookshelf in my office, and I love it.
Just click the banner at the right margin at ScottHorton.org, and enter promo code ScottHortonShow to save $5.
That's MyHeroesThink.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show, I'm here talking with Tom Kalina from the Arms Control Association.
That's ArmsControl.org, and we're talking about the missile defense boondoggle and possible threats and what can be done and this kind of thing.
I notice here you have a headline.
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to read this, but it's Hill to Fix, Not Expand Missile Defense, and so I'm curious as to what fix you think there might be.
Sure.
Well, one of the interesting debates that's been happening on Capitol Hill lately is that there are some members of Congress that wanted to expand the missile defense system.
Right now it's deployed on the West Coast, Alaska and California, and they wanted to build another site somewhere on the East Coast.
But the problem with that, there are many problems with that, but one of the main problems is that the technology we have on the West Coast doesn't really work yet, so it makes no sense to export it to the East Coast and build another system until at least you've got the technology down.
And so what Congress decided to do in its defense bill for this current year is to reject that idea of building an additional site on the East Coast and instead take that money and actually add money to the budget to fix the current system that you already have.
And the key part of it that people focus on as really being not reliable is this little thing, well, it's not that little, but it's the thing that goes on the tip of the missile, it's called a kill vehicle, very exciting to name there.
The kill vehicle is actually the thing that goes up into space and looks around and tries to find the warhead and actually smash into it so that it explodes, and that's a very difficult thing to do.
And the kill vehicle we have now, there's actually two different designs of it, neither one have proven reliable.
So what Congress wants to do is spend money to redesign that part so that it works better.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration is planning to expand the system we have on the West Coast today by about 50% using these same kill vehicles that are unreliable.
In other words, you're saying they have a pretty good idea of how they could do it better, they want to use the old kind, I think you say in your current article here, they want to use the old ones as the targets to shoot at, but instead of going ahead with the redesign and making something that might work better, or maybe that would be another way, so I'll let you answer that if you want, but they're going to just go ahead and expand what they already know doesn't work.
Well, they're doing both at the same time concurrently.
So in other words, they are working on a redesign, but they're not going to wait for that redesign to deploy or expand the system, which I think doesn't make a lot of sense.
What they should do is go ahead with the redesign, prove it to be effective, and then if it is effective, then you go ahead and expand your system with the newly designed kill vehicle on it.
I don't see why you'd want to expand the system until you're ready to do that.
Now, some might say, well, the threat is such that we can't wait.
Let's not make it the perfect enemy of the good.
We have this threat from North Korea.
Let's expand now.
Well, in fact, the threat from North Korea isn't really there yet.
It may be emerging, but North Korea hasn't yet tested a missile that could get over here.
If they did, they'd only have ones or twos.
Well, you already have 30 interceptors deployed on the West Coast, depending on how effective you think they are.
So there is a defense of some kind already in place, and again, as I said before, the main thing that protects us from a North Korean attack is the fact that we can retaliate with massive force.
Right.
Well, and I mean, if they were to try to nuke Seoul right now, they'd have to take it there on the back of a flatbed truck, right?
Well, you know, I mean, they have short-range missiles that they could use.
We don't really even know that North Korea has a warhead that they could put on a missile.
That's not sure either.
There's a lot of unknowns about North Korea, but certainly, you know, there are reasons to be concerned about North Korea.
We need to worry about that.
But expanding missile defense at this point is not the answer.
Well, whatever happened to the airborne laser project?
That was going to be really cool.
You could blow those ICBMs up as they leave the silos from a 747, right?
Yeah, I mean, those kind of ideas turn out to be tremendously expensive and not very effective and have their own vulnerabilities.
So you can imagine having lasers floating around in space.
They're tremendously vulnerable, and what they basically discovered is that if you put stuff in space, it becomes much easier just to shoot those things down than to ever try to mount an attack, you know, before you would do that.
So that's why, you know, attention is really focused on ground-based interceptors that would launch up and try to intercept things in deep space, but even that is pretty hard.
And now, well, now why is it exactly so hard?
Is it just because of all the dummies?
Because again, you know, a Sidewinder missile, that's 1970s technology or something.
Those things can take out a MiG, spin it all around, right?
Again, you're doing this in space.
It's not the same as doing something in the atmosphere.
But I have to say that, you know, the main reason is that in this kind of offense-defense relationship, the offense always has the advantage because they choose when to attack and they choose the technology to attack with.
In other words, the United States in this case, which would be the defender, puts its defenses into the ground and it's, you know, we're an open society.
So pretty much people know what the technology is and what the sensors are that we put in the ground.
So then the attacker says, okay, you've deployed a defense with an infrared seeker or an infrared sensor on your missile.
So I'm going to deploy a decoy that you can't see with that infrared sensor and I'll launch that.
And so you've always got this part of this story where the offense always has the advantage because they can go, they go last.
They choose when to attack and they choose what to attack with.
So the defense is always putting out technology that is going to be, you know, in a sense, you know, yesterday's technology by the time it's out there.
Plus the fact that- So a laser costs a lot, but plating your rocket in chrome is pretty cheap.
That's right.
So the United States is doing very expensive stuff that there tends to be very simple countermeasures too, that the enemy can respond to.
And by the way, is chrome plating your rocket a pretty effective countermeasure?
That was my idea.
You know, I just, I don't know about that one, but there are other ones.
For example, if you had, one of the reasons why airborne lasers proved to be pretty ineffective is that when rockets are launching, they tend to spin.
Okay.
So if you've got a laser and you're focusing it on a missile casing, you need to focus it on one spot for a long period of time to get hot enough to rupture the missile.
Well, if the missile is spinning, you can't do that.
So it's these little simple things that really sort of mess up these grandiose ideas.
Right.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Well now, so let me ask you this, obviously you're a real expert on, you know, all kinds of issues here as far as nuclear weapons and everything else.
So why is it, do you think, that America still holds on to so many thousands of nukes, some deployed, some still on the shelves, and why we still have pretty much the same nuclear Cold War stance against the Russians as we did back in the days of the USSR?
Is there something wrong with the incentive structure in Washington, D.C. that keeps it this way?
Or this is really the best idea anyone has for keeping America safe?
That's a great question, and it's a complicated question, but I would say the main reason is that, you know, the political situation is such that it's very hard for politicians to change things, particularly in the national security sphere, because people are so much in the mindset of, well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and if you make any changes, you might, you know, you might make America unsafe and this kind of thing, which is really unfortunate because we could save so much money and make ourselves so much safer by reducing U.S. nuclear forces and bringing Russia down along with us.
But instead, because we have this go-slow attitude, and politicians that promote these ideas are basically accused of sacrificing or endangering U.S. security, that politicians are essentially gun-shy and don't want to push on this too much out of fear of being called weak on defense.
But in fact, these are very pro-defense arguments, because if we, the United States, reduces its forces, Russia can be encouraged to reduce its forces as well, and that's what reduces the danger to the United States, is bringing down the Russian forces.
Plus, I mean, we're going to spend somewhere around $300 billion on nuclear forces over the next decade, $300 billion with a B. And we can reduce that dramatically if we simply downsize the level of forces that we have.
So we can save money and we can actually make ourselves more secure at the same time by reducing the arsenals and the warheads.
Let me ask you this, is it true that in Washington, D.C., the hydrogen bomb lobbyists work just the same as any other lobbyist, whether for agriculture or for medicine or guns or Israel or anything else, where they just go up there and they work as hard as they can to get as big a piece of the pie as they can, and it doesn't really matter that they're selling weapons that could destroy all humanity and maybe life on Earth forever.
It's just the same as any other business.
They're just here to seek their rent.
You know, I mean, there aren't nuclear weapons lobbyists.
You wouldn't see someone with a business card, you know, because, you know, nuclear weapons are us on it.
But there are certain there are certainly entities in the federal government who have an interest in the in in nuclear weapons being being perpetuated and and having them be there for a long time.
For example, you know, you've got you've got land based missiles deployed at missile bases and those missile bases mean jobs to members of Congress.
You've got, you know, submarine contracts worth, you know, billions of dollars in key states.
And and those and to those states, those are those are, you know, major job contracts right there.
So there's there's there's a vested interest in maintaining the level of nuclear weapons that we have and the forces against the forces that are calling for reductions in nuclear weapons simply aren't as well financed as the forces that are building nuclear weapons.
And that's really we have a mismatch right now between those that are calling for arms reductions and arms control and those that are calling for modernization of the weapons that we have.
I mean, it's not just there's a lot of star power behind.
It's not just Jane Fonda and a bunch of liberals and stuff.
It's George Shultz and Henry Kissinger say we ought to start downsizing down to very, very few nukes.
Right.
That is true.
I mean, there's a lot of big names out there, but it's but it's not enough to take on, at least at this point, the industrial political interests that are focused on on sustaining the stockpile we have today.
Right.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're out of time.
Thanks very much for the very interesting conversation here.
Appreciate it, Tom.
It's been a pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
All right, everybody.
That is Tom Kalina.
He is research director at the Arms Control Association.
That's armscontrol.org.
And he's got this one at defenseone.com.
The word one U.S. missile defense isn't ready for.
So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth grade.
You want real history and economics.
Well, learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods's Liberty Classroom.
And if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at Scott Horton dot org, we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.