Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all, introducing James Carroll, former Boston Globe columnist and author of 20 books, including House of War, which is on my shelf.
And shame on me for having shame on all of you to everyone for having not read that, except those of you who have.
House of War, the history of the Pentagon.
And here he is at Tom Dispatch with this extremely important and educational piece.
It's called Entering the Second Nuclear Age.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
Thank you.
It's a privilege to be with you.
Very happy to have you on this show here.
And so what I really like about this article is you're talking not just about the politics of withdrawing from the INF Treaty, but the politics of how we got into the INF Treaty in the first place.
And this sounds, everybody, like it might be boring, but I would encourage you to just think about hydrogen atoms fusing together and then the opposite of that, peace instead, and the survival of humanity, which would seem to be a priority.
So what exactly is the INF Treaty and why does it matter to us here?
Well, first of all, it's a privilege to be discussing this with you.
There's nothing more important to me than the effort to curb the still powerful impulse toward nuclear war, and that's what we're talking about.
The INF Treaty was a very precious agreement that was struck between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1987, an agreement signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
And the reason it was precious was because for the first time since 1945, when the United States built two atomic bombs at Los Alamos, the number of nuclear weapons started to go down, started to be reduced.
At that point, the United States and the USSR had arsenals, nuclear arsenals combined of more than 60,000.
Imagine 60,000 of these genocidal weapons.
And the world was – there was a kind of broad feeling of despair about this.
We today have kind of forgotten it.
But the great thing that happened unexpectedly was Ronald Reagan, who's remembered as a hawk of hawks, turned out to be a man who was determined to turn the corner against nuclear weapons.
And with Gorbachev, he did.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, it reduced the number of intermediate missiles, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which go from continent to continent.
The intermediate-range missiles were mostly a matter of being located in and at Europe.
But Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to eliminate land-based intermediate missiles.
And within a year, a couple of thousand nuclear weapons were removed from deployment and destroyed.
And that began the agreements, the series of agreements between Moscow and Washington that did two things.
First, it led very quickly, within two years, to the end of the Cold War, to the demise of the Soviet Union, which every expert had predicted would never happen nonviolently.
But it did happen nonviolently.
But the second thing the INF Treaty did was it showed that it was possible to move toward the reduction of nuclear arsenals, ultimately to eliminating them.
And that's what Gorbachev and Reagan promised to do.
The reason this is an issue now and the reason you and I are talking about it is because last week, well, the week before last, President Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the INF Treaty over the protests especially of people in Europe and people in Moscow.
And President Trump has decided that arms control, arms reduction is not an American priority anymore.
And his abrogating of the INF Treaty is a signal of the new nuclear age we're entering right now with an abandonment of the ideal of nuclear elimination and replacing it with the reinvention of American and ultimately Russian, ultimately Chinese nuclear arsenals.
So it was a bad day 10, 12 days ago when the United States was announced as leaving this treaty.
And that's why I wrote the piece.
And you're good to have taken note of it.
Thanks for letting me discuss it with you.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's really a great history, too, of how it happened.
And as you say, you know, people remember Ronald Reagan basically as a snapshot instead of eight years sort of process there.
And so it was a lot more complicated than either side, you know, so-called side would like to frame it.
But so I wanted to emphasize, I think, you know, this is the part that made these intermediate missiles the priority was just because of the short flight times, right?
That if there's ever going to be a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviets, that it suits us better if, you know, the furthest we or the closest we have are, you know, submarines.
But for the most part, the missiles are coming over the poles.
And so that would give either side enough time to make sure that they're right, that they're really being attacked with nuclear weapons before they respond.
Whereas if you have the missiles right there in West Germany, then that makes it, that reduces Soviet their time that they have, their margin of error, I guess.
And then the same way vice versa, right?
So that was why in the Reagan years, while he was, even while he's hawking it up and building up all these forces, it was really almost like a game of cards as a negotiation to end up drawing these down.
Is that how it was?
Yes, that's true.
And you offer a good summary there of what was at stake in 1987.
Of course, it's very different now.
I mean, in those days, the intermediate range missiles, so we would have had Pershing missiles stationed in Germany, for example, that could have hit Moscow in 10 to 15 minutes, as opposed to the ICBM intercontinental missile in Minot, North Dakota, that would hit Moscow in 35 minutes.
And that difference in time was a crucial matter of giving the, well, basically, the strategists on both sides time to decide whether the attack was real, whether they had time to not launch a counterattack.
It was a bit of an attempt to make things less dangerous, yes.
It was also removing Europe from the target, the ground zero target of the American and Soviet nuclear standoff.
But all of that is sort of irrelevant now because— Well, wait, we got time for now, because I'm interested about then still.
Did that mean that they really took all the missiles out of Germany then?
Is that what it amounted to?
Yes, they did, yes.
All of the nuclear missiles were removed from the continent of Europe.
And now—and basically, the American nuclear force is based in ICBMs in the Midwest of the United States, are nuclear-powered submarines, and cruise missiles launched from bombers.
And the truth is, what cruise missiles launched either from bombers or submarines can do very quickly within— I mean, there are submarines in the Baltic that can hit Moscow in a matter of minutes.
So that whole business of time urgency is not what it was then.
The larger point here is that what we're talking about doing is walking away from the treaty regime, the system of treaties that enabled the Soviet Union and the United States to end their terrible standoff peacefully.
Russia and China are not going away.
And they're nuclear powers, and they can readily become hostile nuclear powers to us.
And the idea of resuming an arms race with them, where we start to add nuclear weapons to our arsenal, is suicidal, suicidal for the human species.
We have to protect this habit of treaties.
And the walking away from the INF Treaty undercuts the habit of treaties.
That's the reason this is an urgent public moment.
And it's very disturbing, frankly, that when the INF Treaty abrogation was announced a little over two weeks ago, it was in the news cycle for about two days, and pretty much—it wasn't an issue in the elections.
You didn't hear the Democrats raise it up any more than the Republicans.
This is a hugely important moment, and Americans should be joining people from around the world to say, Don't do this.
Don't do this.
Don't walk away from these treaties.
And yes, I take all your digital currencies and all that, too.
So, there you go.
Find out all about that at scotthorton.org slash donate, and patreon.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, so now, here's the thing.
It's sort of a small footnote to the story, right?
Here is the bit part that Donald Trump had in it back in the 1980s, where he was a famous TV star back then, even, and said that he was such a great negotiator that Ronald Reagan ought to send him over there to negotiate nuclear weapons, because he really—and he likes to talk about his really smart uncle, who was a professor at MIT, who taught him all about nukes and thermonukes, and how he understood them so well that he knew why we had to get rid of them all.
And he was just the man to negotiate the abolition of nuclear arms.
And so that was at least the spirit he was coming from back then, as kind of ridiculous as that sounds.
He's the president of the United States now, so what does that tell us?
And so, you know, maybe—I don't even really believe this, but maybe, just as a possibility for you, hypothetically, maybe he's playing his game of cards the same as he's done with Korea and is trying to do with Iran, that he's kind of threatening this buildup maybe so he can negotiate it away and make some real progress.
What do you think of that?
Well, yes, I don't claim to have a crystal ball to see either into his mind or into the future.
But if that's the case, it's an incredibly reckless roll of the dice, because what we're talking about here are nuclear weapons that can simply destroy the human species.
Caution, prudence, consultation with our allies, and consistency are essential for this process.
And the most important element of all of that is the tradition of international treaties in which a nation gives its solemn word that it will be bound by an agreement, and that agreement is then ratified by the legislature of the nation.
That is worth something.
Nations cannot hope to be at peace with one another if treaties can be completely disregarded by one side.
And that's what we've just done.
Well, I don't know about in all cases, but it sure is a shame to see it done when we're talking about restricting the deployment of H-bombs.
I mean, for God's sake.
And especially when it's completely unnecessary.
It's not like anyone who's not a liar says that Russia is about to march west into the rest of Europe.
I mean, come on.
Well, we don't have to believe that Russia is friendly and no threat to understand that the way to deal with Russia is by entering into agreements that we both benefit from.
Russia doesn't want a resumed nuclear arms race either, but they'll certainly engage us in it.
There's no doubt about it.
Which, by the way, I mean, the story here, James, is that the Russians are the one who broke the treaty, that they have a situation with China where they're both developing medium-range, intermediate-range missiles for each other, but that, hey, those missiles could be repurposed for use against NATO, and so therefore they're cheating.
And so that's why we had to break the deal.
It's their fault, not ours.
What about that?
Yes, that's the argument.
But the truth is what Russia has done and is doing is ambiguous.
It's not really all that clear.
They seem to be repurposing existing missiles.
They're not creating a new missile force.
But the point is the reason the treaty exists is that it's in the context of the agreement that one nation can challenge another nation.
And that's precisely the value of the INF Treaty.
The way to tamper down the belligerence of the Russians and Vladimir Putin is by entering and protecting the treaty regime we have with him.
What we just did is basically invite Putin to expand his nuclear force.
We've just basically dared him to do it.
And make no mistake, he will.
He will expand it.
An incredibly foolish way to proceed.
Sorry to go back to the history of it here, but it's interesting to me that, as you say in here, that Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, actually resigned over this way back then.
Which I guess if you had told me that he resigned over Reagan wanting to negotiate away all the nuclear missiles at Reykjavik, which almost happened.
But I was surprised at this, that he would have resigned over this.
Well, Reagan's inner circle was appalled that he said yes to Gorbachev's proposal to get rid of the INF Treaty.
I'm sorry, to get rid of the intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
And the reason they were appalled is because they didn't believe that the Soviet Union could be trusted.
They turned out to be wrong.
Gorbachev turned out to be profoundly trustworthy.
He did everything he said he was going to do.
Well, and this goes to what you're saying about the treaty having a mechanism for the resolution of conflict in the treaty itself.
That they thought this would be a poison pill when they told Reagan, you have to insist on inspections.
That there's no way that the Reds are going to agree to that.
And they said, sure, inspect.
So that part of it has been part of it all along.
That they could have sent guys with glasses to go over there and figure this thing out.
Exactly right.
I mean, for 50 years, the Soviet Union refused to allow anyone from the West to come into the Soviet Union and look at anything of its military establishment.
Gorbachev changed that.
Gorbachev allowed inspectors into and onto military sites inside the Soviet Union precisely to look at the dismantling of the intermediate-range nuclear force.
The other objection that was thrown up was, if we get rid of the intermediate-range nuclear forces, Europe will be vulnerable to the Soviet forces that are in Poland, Hungary, in the Warsaw Pact nations.
Gorbachev said, oh, okay, I'll just simply withdraw all of the nuclear forces from those nations, which he did.
And a minute later, what happened?
All of those nations declared their independence from Moscow.
In other words, Gorbachev wasn't kidding.
He wanted to end the nuclear standoff, and Ronald Reagan saw the wisdom of what he was proposing and joined him in it.
The irony is that today Ronald Reagan is remembered as this stalwart, ferocious, warmongering hawk who would have had nothing to do with such sort of – what would we call it?
Kind of weak responses.
Well, that's not true.
That's not true at all.
And Reagan's greatness is that he said yes to Gorbachev.
Right.
Now, do you agree with the – I don't know if it's conventional now, but there's a history that says that when he previewed the miniseries, The Day After, which depicted H-bombs going off, I guess, in Missouri, and a race in Kansas City, Missouri or something, that that really had an effect on him.
You know, doing the imagining for him of what it would really look like for Russian H-bombs to be going off over this country.
And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to pull this thing back now.
Do you think that that's really right?
Yeah, it makes sense to me that that would be the case, but mostly because that's the experience millions of Americans had.
I remember watching it.
I was a kid in elementary school at the time.
And there were other movies.
You know, in 1982, a million Americans gathered at the United Nations in New York City demanding a nuclear freeze.
I mean there was tremendous popular anxiety about a coming nuclear war.
We're kidding ourselves today if we think that nuclear war doesn't threaten us still.
Of course it does.
And we should take the occasion of President Trump's presidency to rekindle our commitment to get rid of nuclear weapons because President Trump makes the danger of these things all the more clear.
Well, you know, something that is so important to all of this, of course, is the economics of hydrogen bomb production and the politics in Congress of making that happen.
Where I think if you had, you know, your friend's very nice mom, she would never imagine that the way it works when it comes to nuclear weapons policy in America is, you know, greatly dependent on the same kind of just rent seeking and lobbying and, you know, log rolling and whatever, all port barreling and things.
All these things, just the way Congress works in the most cynical make the sausage sense where Honeywell has their lobbyists.
There's even, I learned, I don't know if it's in the House or the Senate or both.
It's one or the other.
I forget that there is actually a nuclear weapons caucus where these representatives from these Western states, they are here absolutely to represent the interests of those who make the H-bombs and to make sure that more H-bombs are made.
And that when Barack Obama tried to and succeeded in getting the START II treaty through, that the compromise was that he would sign the rest of us up for a trillion, already now a $2 trillion program to completely revamp the entire nuclear weapons arsenal and industry.
And brand new factories and brand new shiny jobs and promotions for every, you know, job holder at Los Alamos and all of these things to just, and that was unstoppable.
It was basically the only way that Obama could get the treaty through that had some limitations on deployed nuclear weapons.
So that part was good, but it really, and then when Obama came, like I said, it went from a trillion to $2 trillion.
So it's, you know, at least with the F-35 Lockheed, you know, ridiculous, that makes it onto TV and people understand the rent seeking and the military industrial complex and the corruption.
Not that we can really do anything about that, but when it comes to H-bombs, I think it's just beyond people's imagination that that's really the economics of H-bomb production in America is it's just as cynical as it could possibly be.
And so here we are still with tens of thousands of these things, at least in storage, if not deployed.
And now we're about to start making a whole new bunch of them for the next decades.
Right.
And there are two consequences for all of this.
One, other nations will follow suit, not just the other eight nations that have nuclear weapons today, but other countries that don't yet.
There's no reason to expect that Japan, Saudi Arabia, obviously Iran, but other countries, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, will find reasons to develop their own nuclear weapons.
That's part one of the consequence.
And part two is that this ends in only one way, which is the nuclear Armageddon, because that's the nature of these weapons in which the human species commits suicide.
That's what's at stake in this.
Yeah.
Or more like, you know, a fraction of a percent of us kill all of the rest of us.
But yeah.
And are left with what?
Yeah.
I mean, they'll have some underground cities that'll last a few decades here or there, I guess.
But there are a few of those, but not too many.
Well, the insects may survive us, but I don't know that much else will.
Anyway, it's a very grim prospect.
Just to return to the main point here, the INF Treaty, a sacred pillar of nuclear hope, was just abrogated by the United States.
And this should be high on the list of what we Americans are objecting to.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the Democrats need to put this on the list of what we campaign about going into the next election cycle.
Nuclear arms reduction, the rescue of nuclear arms reduction, has to be front and center as part of the Democratic Party platform.
Do you expect – well, good luck with that – but do you expect for them to immediately start deploying missiles?
I mean, the Europeans don't want these anyway, right?
No, the irony is that what Trump has just done has almost no strategic meaning because intermediate-range missiles are not needed.
Cruise missiles launched from submarines in – The Poles might want them or something, I guess.
Well, you name it.
It does nothing to change the strategic military balance.
Well, what – of course, what will change is, as you point out a minute ago, is there are billions of dollars in industry, in companies that are going to be benefiting from this, and a huge wholesale reinvention of the nuclear arsenal.
Our European allies are appalled and terrified by this.
When Trump announced that he was withdrawing from the INF Treaty, the voices of Europe were loud and clear, please don't do that.
Europe doesn't want the missiles.
There's a bevy of defensive missiles in Eastern Europe right now that are not in violation of this treaty.
They actually were in violation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty that President Bush withdrew from in the early 2000s, which is the beginning of this undercutting of the treaty regime.
But basically – And that was John Bolton, our current national security advisor.
He doesn't really do anything except attack the nuclear arms reduction infrastructure.
That's what is done here.
Well, let's hope an economic collapse comes before the Omnicide.
Maybe that will help turn this thing around a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, I take your point, and I'm grateful to you for lifting up this question with your listeners.
Yeah.
Hey, listen, it's extremely important work, and you're really kind of chiming into a conversation that Daniel Ellsberg has helped to get a little bit louder over the last couple of years with his book, The Doomsday Machine.
And there have been a couple of others, too.
I forget all the authors' names, but there's been quite a few good books about this lately.
And so it isn't the 1980s all over again, but it's good to see that there are people who are still blazing that trail and setting that precedent for the rest of us.
So thank you.
Well, I very much appreciate this being on your list.
It's very important, and your listeners are lucky to have you.
All right.
Well, thanks a lot.
James Carroll, everybody, author of House of War, and this one at AntiWar.com and at TomDispatch.com, entering the second nuclear age.
Thanks again.
All the best to you.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash ScottHortonShow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
