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 scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Tom Colina.
He is a Policy Director at the Ploughshares Fund, and here he is writing in the national interest, Why Are We Rebuilding the Nuclear Sponge?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Great.
Great to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
This is the same subject we talked about last time.
Would have been, I don't know, three or four years ago, something like that.
Right.
But I sure never have forgotten it, and people ask me about that all the time.
What's that nuclear sponge thing?
And I send them that piece by Defense News.
So okay, the question, the headline, Why Are We Rebuilding the Nuclear Sponge?
First of all, what is a nuclear sponge, Tom?
Yeah, great question.
So the people in the U.S. upper Midwest know what it is.
It's where the United States deploys its land-based ballistic missiles.
And just to back up, the United States has a nuclear arsenal made up of land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, as well as long-range bombers.
But the land-based ballistic missiles, which we call ICBMs, are based in the upper Midwest of the United States.
And their mission is a strange one.
Their mission is not really to be launched.
Their mission is to be targets, and that if there were ever an attack from Russia, which is highly unlikely, then Russia would have to take out those targets, those missiles in the upper Midwest, in order to avoid those missiles coming back at Russia.
So that's why it's called a nuclear sponge, where those missiles are there to soak up a Russian attack and to prevent, presumably, those missiles from being targeted at, say, New York or San Francisco or Austin, Texas, or at submarines that are deployed out at sea.
The problem with this is that it completely puts a target on the good people of the upper Midwest, and completely unnecessarily.
There's no reason why we have to draw that attack to the United States.
In fact, if you think about it, wouldn't we rather draw an attack outside?
Why are we drawing an attack towards the United States?
The whole mission simply makes no sense.
So in other words, as Ron Paul put it back when he was running for president in 2008, we could protect this country with a couple of good submarines.
And as you're saying, hey, if anybody's got to be a nuclear sponge, let it be the fishes out in the Pacific Ocean somewhere, right?
Exactly.
So if you didn't have the ICBMs out in the American heartland, then if the Russians were going to attack us, they would choose some other sites, but they'd also have to worry about the submarines, and so they'd have to go after those.
The thing is that the submarines are invulnerable.
When they're out at sea, no one else can find them.
So point number one here is that Russia has no incentive to attack the United States.
It would be a suicidal mission, regardless of whether the United States has these ICBMs out in the upper Midwest.
And so before we rebuild this force to the cost of about $100 billion, I mean, that's quite a lot of money, we should be asking the question, do we need these things?
I mean, remember, the Cold War ended 30 years ago.
Why are we rebuilding these weapons that are tremendously expensive, that we don't need, and puts a target on the back of the good people in the upper Midwest?
Well, as you just said, because they're incredibly expensive, as you write in the article, and we're going to talk all about the economics of the H-bombs here in a minute.
But just on the strategy thing, help me understand this, because I think America and Russia both have around 2,000 deployed and around 6,000 or 7,000 total H-bombs, right?
And so in the event of an emergency, I mean, never even mind the ones in storage, just the deployed H-bombs.
It sounds like the Russians have enough H-bombs to hit all the fields of silos in the Midwest, and New York and San Francisco and Denver and Austin and Miami and whatever else, Washington D.C., if we're lucky, also.
And also, I guess, try to hit whatever, I don't know, military bases overseas, you know, where nuclear bombers are stationed in Japan or whatever like that.
It still seems like 1,600 is a lot of H-bombs.
You could hit all the important military bases and all the important cities and, you know, important forces around the world, too, probably, with that.
Right.
And there's also a question here, you know, it wouldn't take a large nuclear attack like that.
At some point, it wouldn't matter where you are or whether you've been directly hit, because that's enough nuclear force to create something that is known as nuclear winter, where once cities start burning, you create so much fire and soot and smoke and ash that that all goes up into the upper atmosphere, and then there's basically a huge cloud that covers most of the earth, and then guess what?
The sun can't get to the ground, and we actually destroy our food supply.
So in some ways, you know, if you're in one of the cities that's attacked, you're in some ways the lucky ones, because it's going to be a year after that that things really go south for the rest of the world.
That was what my grandpa always said, was if there is a nuclear war, I hope the first one lands right on my head.
Exactly.
But these are dark conversations.
Yeah.
Well, hey, it's a funny thing about the nuclear weapons, because everybody knows we have them.
It's not like it's some crazy, you know, fringe topic necessarily, but it sounds kind of fringy because it sounds like if you're concerned about it, then you must be some kind of alarmist claiming that there's going to be a nuclear war that is going to break out any day now, and some kind of thing like that, where, you know, that's obviously not what you're saying, or what really any of the anti-nuclear weapons activists are really talking about.
But otherwise, it just kind of goes without saying that.
This is life in the 21st century, same as the last, that we got nukes, we're always going to have nukes.
That's how we keep the peace, they say, and, you know, to bring it up at all is really kind of the fringe position, when for everyone else, it's like the sun rising in the east.
That's all.
Right, right.
And it's too bad, because you're right, we're not saying that there's going to be a war tomorrow by intent.
And in fact, what I'm trying to say is that there is no reason why the United States would attack Russia or Russia attack the United States.
It would be a suicidal thing to do.
So in that sense, deterrence works, because neither side has any rationale or reason to attack the other.
But that doesn't mean accidents can't happen, right?
You can't deter accidents, you can't deter mistakes, and you can't deter madness, right?
So we have a president in the White House right now going under impeachment, which is a tremendously stressful process, and is quite impulsive, and some people would question his judgment.
But the president has sole authority to launch these ICBMs and all the rest of the U.S. nuclear arsenal on their sole prerogative, with no checks or balances from anybody else in the administration or in Congress.
So mistakes can happen, misjudgments can happen, and to me, that's the most likely way we get to nuclear catastrophe, is by a blunder, by a mistake.
And so we need to reorient U.S. nuclear policy to prevent the mistakes and the blunders, not to deter an intentional attack, which in my mind is a vanishingly small chance that that would ever happen.
Yeah.
Well, and there's two things that you mentioned there, where you have accidents like, oops, we accidentally dropped an H-bomb on North Carolina, and eight out of nine fail-saves failed, but one of them kept it from going off, but if it had gone off, that might have been blamed on Russia, they wouldn't be able to admit it was them, and they just go ahead and start launching bombs at Moscow, or God knows what.
And there's been, what, 20-something of those, Abel Archer and the Norway missile in 1993, and a few of those kinds of mistakes.
But then also you say misjudgments, I think that's the thing to really clue in on, is bad assumptions by politicians.
As you say, the worst hawk in the world doesn't want to start a nuclear war with Russia that extinguishes our species, and yet there's kind of really, I think, nobody as uniquely wrong about everything than a politician in the national government of the USA.
These people are absolutely nuts, and if the current nutball wasn't in power right now, he might have had an air war with Russia to protect Al-Qaeda in Syria under Hillary Clinton's no-fly zone, because the consensus is that the guy in the three-piece suit and the clean-shaven chin is a genocidal monster, and the Al-Qaeda suicide-bomber terrorists backed by Turkey and Saudi and the CIA are the moderate rebel heroes trying to defend themselves, and they really believe their own lies about that.
I mean, you can read their tweets.
They're still certain of that crazy narrative, and they were really talking about confronting the Russian Air Force for bombing the favored terrorists in Al-Nusra instead of the disfavored terrorists in the Islamic State.
And where you take Ukraine, where America overthrew the government, and then when the people in the far east of the country said, well, we don't recognize the authority of the new government, the new government attacked them.
And yet, every single day since March 2014, the people in Washington, D.C. have said that Russia invaded Ukraine and attacked Ukraine, when all they did was send a couple special forces guys to help the people of the east defend themselves from attack.
It's just a matter of chronology.
It doesn't matter whose side you're on.
It's just a matter of fact.
And yet everyone in D.C. is wrong, wrong, wrong about that.
And you could, I mean, I think they really believe that Putin wants to invade and conquer Eastern Europe.
They say it all the time.
And then they nod.
And, you know, at the impeachment hearings, they say, Ukraine is fighting them there, so we don't have to fight them.
In America, two different impeachment witnesses claim that, that the Russians are coming to attack the United States.
That is how stupid and horrible and wrong the people with the power in this country are.
So now tell me we couldn't blunder into a nuclear war.
I don't know, man.
I am concerned.
Well, the part that worries me the most is, is when you bring nuclear weapons together with cyber attacks.
Because what we're learning is that the U.S. system of command and control over nuclear weapons is a computer-based system.
Of course it is.
And you might think, well, that system is not going to be vulnerable.
They would take all the precautions to prevent that.
But no, it's vulnerable like any other computer system.
And so you almost have to assume, we know that the system has been hacked in the past.
It can be hacked again.
There are vulnerabilities with this system.
And so when you have alarms, advance warnings that attack, an attack may be underway, you have to be very careful about responding to that.
I mean, the United States has a policy called launch on warning, that we could, the president could launch those ICBMs out in the upper Midwest when there's a warning of an attack based on radar, satellites and computer information.
But if that information is wrong and you launch your forces, then you've just started a nuclear war potentially by mistake.
And this is another reason why we need to get rid of the ICBMs out in the upper Midwest, because the only purpose of those weapons is, as we said, to be a nuclear sponge.
And there is no rationale for launching them other than that, because if you are, you're launching them before you know that an attack is really coming.
And so again, all they are is targets.
And from that perspective, they're simply unnecessary.
Yeah.
Now, so who came up with the strategy of the nuclear sponge that, because I think first the missiles were put there to be used.
Now they're there, I guess you're saying for a retaliatory strike only, but even not, not even then.
It seems like their job really shifted.
But also that raises the question, why would the Russians target them?
If the Russians know that we're not going to use them, they're just there to be targeted.
Right.
I mean, I think, you know, back in the day, we only had the ICBMs.
And so, and they were, and the policy was to launch them on warning when we thought there was a Russian attack coming.
But then we got the submarines, and so we didn't have to do that.
And now there are real concerns with launch on warning, launching before you know, are real attack is coming.
But with the ICBM, and we should, we should not do that.
We should wait to see if we're really under attack before we launch our nuclear weapons.
In that case, if you do that, the ICBMs would all be gone because they're completely vulnerable.
They're sitting out there in their silos.
The Russians know exactly where they are.
Again, in the highly unlikely event that the Russians wanted to attack us, it would make sense for them to target those missiles, because that's a threat to them if they're attacking us.
And so they need to take them out.
But the problem is that they still wouldn't attack because they can't take out the submarines.
The submarines are still going to be there.
We have most of the U.S. nuclear forces on submarines, about 1000 warheads.
And so Russia will be decimated by the U.S. submarine response.
And what about cruise missiles?
Is that a fourth part of this triad now?
Well, the cruise missiles are on the bombers.
So when we talk about the bombers, they have two weapons on them.
They have gravity bombs that drop out from the bottom, and then they have cruise missiles that are shot off.
But those are both included in the bomber case.
I got you.
So part of the controversy over the anti-missile missiles being stationed in Poland was that the same launcher could shoot regular Tomahawk type, maybe not Tomahawk, but some kind of cruise missile that can very well be H-bomb capable.
Is that right?
Exactly.
So, you know, one of the problems with the situation with Russia right now, and you know, Russia has good reason to be frustrated with the West, as you were saying.
In part, look, the Cold War ended 30 years ago.
If your listeners, you know, remember back then, there was real hope that the West, NATO and Russia could create a partnership, right?
Put the Cold War behind us, build a much more positive relationship.
One thing led to another, and for a number of major reasons, for example, NATO deciding to expand towards Russia made Russia tremendously uncomfortable.
Another thing the United States did with NATO is to deploy, as you just mentioned, missile defenses in Eastern Europe that Russia saw as aimed at Russia, and more to the point, they feared the United States could deploy offensive nuclear weapons in those same launchers.
So these are all the reasons why, in my opinion, we are now at such a terrible state of relations with Russia, when with the end of the Cold War so long ago, we should have been in a much, much better place.
Well, just on that previous thought, it was because those launchers could be used, does that not mean the Russians have to assume that there are nuclear weapons there and that's what they would be used for, or else why would we use a dual-use launcher?
My guess is that the Russians have good enough intelligence that they can see what we're doing there, and they probably know we don't have those cruise missiles there.
But we should, the United States and NATO should, if we are so confident that we don't have offensive missiles in those launchers, we should let the Russians come in and see, come and do an inspection if we've got nothing to hide.
Well, now the INF Treaty's gone, so it looks like there's probably more chance they're actually going to deploy nukes there, right?
And one, yes, yes, well, the plan is not necessarily to deploy them there, but the United States is now deploying or developing a nuclear Tomahawk missile that could fit in that launcher indeed.
But this is one of the reasons why the Russians may have, and I believe Russia did violate the INF Treaty, unfortunately, by deploying prohibited short-range missiles.
But certainly their fear of the U.S. putting similar missiles into these launchers in Eastern Europe could have driven them to do that.
And both sides had concerns about the INF Treaty, so this treaty could have been saved, in my view, if the two sides had gotten together and explained to each other their concerns, right?
The U.S. concerns about Russian violations, and Russia's concerns about what we might use these launchers for in Eastern Europe.
Hey guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military-industrial complex and the power elite after World War II, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right-hand margin at scotthorton.org.
That's wallstreetwindow.com.
So I had read two things on that.
I had read that the Russians were really deploying these new treaty-busting missiles in, you know, in their south to deter China, rather than in their west to deter American or NATO forces in Europe.
So that's one thing.
And the second thing was, Chas Freeman explained on the show, that the reason the Americans didn't want to try to save the treaty really wasn't about Russia at all.
It was about their want to deploy treaty-busting missiles around China as well.
But as a result, we're going to end up having a buildup and a game of brinksmanship between America and Russia in Europe as a side effect of both Russia and America's China policy here.
Close?
Yes.
I mean, I think, look, I mean, let me put it this way.
The Obama administration knew about the Russian violation, and Obama wisely did not withdraw from the INF Treaty because he saw value in the treaty and he wanted to work with Russia to try to get them back inside.
Then President Trump comes along and he sees a treaty that the Russians are cheating on and he just decides, eh, I'm not a big fan of arms control anyway, let's just get out of this treaty.
And he throws it by the wayside, which was a huge mistake.
I really do think they could have found a way to everyone to stay inside and improve the treaty.
But the Trump administration decided to get rid of it in a very short-sighted move.
And so now what you have is the Russians are unconstrained in what they can do.
And the United States may now be seeking to put intermediate range nuclear and conventional missiles back in Europe.
I don't see anybody in Europe wanting these missiles, right?
I mean, I don't think any of the NATO allies are clamoring to have a redeployment of these missiles.
Back in the day, before the INF Treaty, there were huge protests in Europe because the European citizens did not want these nuclear missiles in Europe.
And that pressure in part led to the INF Treaty in the first place.
And now you see, as you were mentioning, the Trump administration wanted to deploy these missiles in the context of China, which to me is simply unnecessary.
A lot of what happens in Washington is, and this happened when the Cold War ended, is people thought that the Russian threat was going away.
So we need a new threat to justify the military contracts, the defense spending, all the rest.
And so China became the new threat, right?
China became the new monster under their bed.
It seems like if we didn't have that whole skewed system, that any reasonable government would have just said, hey, Russia, I have a great idea.
Let's invite Beijing to join the treaty with us.
So, yes.
Interestingly, that's what President Trump is trying to do with the different treaty, the New START Treaty, where he's trying to say, let's bring China into it.
The problem with that, although I understand the spirit of it, the problem of that is that, as you said at the beginning of the show, the United States and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons.
China has a few hundred.
So China says, well, I'm not interested in joining your talks.
We're a responsible, minimalist country when it comes to nuclear weapons.
When you all get down to our level, we'll talk, right?
There simply isn't a parity or a parallel set of interests to allow that to happen.
We really are still at the point where there's two mega powers in the nuclear sphere, the United States and Russia.
They need to get their act together to lower these forces that are not giving them security and they're only costing them a lot of money, and bring that down, and then China might be interested in talking.
But at this point, China says, look, this is not our problem.
You guys got to figure this out.
Right.
Okay.
So, as a segue here to the economy, first, I want to mention, because I know I sounded crazy earlier when I talked about we could have had an air war with Russia over Syria, but that was what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford, testified to Congress, why we needed to not have a no-fly zone in Syria.
So that was crazy me paraphrasing very sober guy in charge when he was explaining why he was against it.
But that's just for me.
But the real thing though is I wanted to bring up this old George Carlin bit about how everybody's got the NIMBY syndrome.
If you want to open up a halfway house or a group home for retarded people or something, not in my backyard, not in my backyard, except military bases.
We love military bases.
Even if they're loaded with nuclear weapons, I'll take a little radiation, as long as I can get a jab, because he says that's how desperate people are for work.
They're willing to make those kinds of compromises.
They don't even know that it's crazy and wrong that they should have to.
But this is a big part of your article again at National Interest.
Why are we rebuilding the nuclear sponge?
Money.
Right.
And it comes on a number of levels, right?
So here in Washington, where I am, you've got defense contractors that want, again, this program, the new ICBM program, is going to be a $100 billion program.
That's a lot of money.
And so to cancel that program would cost a lot of jobs and a lot of careers, quite frankly, in the nuclear defense space.
But when you bring it down to the local level, right, you've got states.
You've got military bases, missile bases in these states, say North Dakota.
And there are jobs associated with those bases.
So anytime Congress, say, wants to try to reduce or close a base or change its mission, you have a huge pushback from the congressional constituency of that state that says you can't do this to us.
We need those jobs, regardless of whether the mission of that military base is valid or whether they'd be a lot safer, right?
I mean, in the case of the ICBMs, I mean, these states are literally putting themselves in the crosshairs of nuclear war by hosting these missiles.
And in my opinion, they'd be much better off if those weapons weren't there.
At the same time, we have to understand that these things mean jobs.
And so if states are going to support an effort to remove these weapons, there has to be some other viable economic plan, right?
You just can't kick the people out on the street and say, you know, go do what you're going to do.
So this is where economic redevelopment comes in.
It would be really great, and I haven't done this, but people have been thinking about how do you bring different jobs to these states that would be better, more forward-leaning jobs, right?
I truly believe there's not much future in the industry of nuclear weapons.
I think it's on the wrong side of history, and that's not where you want to be building your expertise.
But there's so many- Well, mostly when they close down other military bases, you know, nuclear or otherwise, usually it just benefits the local economy anyway, right?
Right.
I mean, so once you get the state sort of on board working with the state or the community to find other ways to do things, it works out great.
I spent a lot of time in San Francisco where Ploughshares Fund has its other office.
We have one in San Francisco and one here in D.C.
In San Francisco, they had this military base out there called the Presidio, and then they converted it from a military base, from a naval base, to office space and all kinds of stuff.
Well, that is creating so much more economic benefit for the community than when it was a military base.
I mean, it's crazy.
So there are all kinds of things you can do, you just have to plan for it and convince the community that they will be better off once this transition is made.
And it's change.
People are scared of change, I get it.
But we need to work with people and convince them that this is part of a better future for them.
Well, and so, but here's the thing, when you're talking about that kind of money in terms of the contracts, because, I mean, I think you're right.
In fact, as hard as it seems, probably closing down the bases against the will of the local tax recipients there, as difficult as that is, that seems within the realm of possibility.
But it's, how do you break Congress away from Northrop Grumman, paying them chump change to pass these appropriations bills and to continue?
I mean, even I remember when they were passing the START II treaty, the Senate taxed so many riders on the thing, it was like a pro-weapons treaty.
You know, that was where a big part of where the new trillion, now $2 trillion plan to revamp the whole industry and weapons infrastructure and everything came from, I think.
Right.
And we really do have to call this what it is, which is corruption, which these defense contractors have way too much influence.
They take a lot of the money that they get out of contracts, and then they turn around and they spend it on lobbying to make sure they get the next contract or that this contract, the current contract stays in place.
And so they're giving money directly to members of Congress.
They're hiring government officials as they come out of government.
And then when they go back into government, they've been on the payroll of these corporations.
So the whole thing is a desperate need of change.
And unfortunately, you know, because of corporate corruption in these ways, the government is stuck.
There are certain things that, you know, people coming to these issues like, should we replace these ICBMs?
If you come at it from a rational perspective, the answer is no, we should not do this.
But that's not the way the situation is dealt with in Washington, right?
It's all about money, politics, connections, vested interests, parochialism.
And so we wind up getting trapped in bad decisions and wasting tons of money.
And it's a corporate corruption problem that really can only be solved from the very top.
We need a president to come in and say, it's going to be this way.
And if you don't like it, deal with it.
This is the way it's going to be.
Yeah.
You know, in a Carlinian way, it really is a riot, isn't it, that this could possibly be our system?
We could be talking about any other corporate welfare scheme for bankers or for arms dealers, for that matter.
But we're talking about H-bombs here, Tom, like it's just another public corruption scam, which it is.
But we're talking about bombs that could kill a whole city, machines that are made for the purposes of committing genocide.
Right, right.
And they, like anything else, become just another jobs-generating industry, regardless of the consequences.
I mean, it's kind of like climate change, right?
I mean, clearly, we should not be burning coal.
We should not be burning oil.
We should not be doing all these things that we're doing that contribute to climate change.
That corporate culture and the corporate incentives are such that those operations just keep happening.
So we're really becoming at the point where we all know what has to happen.
We all know what we need to do.
But the government and the way the government is run is such that we can't solve the problems with the answers that are right there if we're only smart enough to grab them.
All right, you guys, that is Tom Colina.
The article is called, Why Are We Rebuilding the Nuclear Sponge?
It's at the national interest.
Thanks again.
Thank you so much.
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.
