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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger that 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.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, 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.
I'll write y'all introducing Mark Perry, great Pentagon reporter, writing most recently, mostly for the American conservative magazine where he had a new one.
I can't find it in my tabs here, but it's all about America's new nuclear weapons policy.
How are you doing, Mark?
Welcome back to the show.
It's great to be here as always.
Great.
Well, I sure appreciate it.
And I'm very happy to have you here.
And I have the book.
It's on the shelf.
It's, it's on the to read pile.
I'm going to get to as fast as I can here.
Uh, but listen, so, uh, we've had a new national security strategy and a new national defense strategy.
Now we have a new nuclear weapons strategy.
What's the official name of it again?
I'm sorry.
I don't have it in front of me.
Nuclear posture review.
Nuclear posture review.
Okay.
So what's it say?
Everything's fine.
If only, um, what the nuclear posture review recommends.
And I think we could see it coming from what we know about Donald Trump is that the U S will build new nuclear weapons, but these will be different, not strategic weapons, but nuclear tactical warheads of low yield that we can use instead of strategic warheads, because as the authors of the nuclear posture review say, uh, the, the Russians do not think that our nuclear deterrent is credible.
Now understand they provide not one word of evidence that one bit of evidence that this is at all true, that this is what the Russians really think, but they recommend the adoption of new low yield warheads for our nuclear fleet, which would cost billions of dollars and be deeply destabilizing.
It's a real, it's a real problem.
This came out on Friday.
Uh, and while the rest of the country was consumed with what Mr. Trump was going to do with his FBI, um, they were slipping this by in the Pentagon.
And it's, um, it's, it's expensive and it's well, as one army officer said to me, it's, uh, it's a gateway drug to nuclear war.
Yeah.
Well, the Democrats ought to be thrilled, right?
We're going to show them Russians after all, right?
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah, it is.
They are.
Um, okay.
Now, so is this different than Obama?
Cause he'd already, uh, made a deal with, I guess, mostly the Republicans and their, uh, interests they're representing in order to get the start to treaty confirmed or ratified.
I mean, uh, was that they would spend a trillion dollars on revamping the entire nuclear weapons arsenal and industry and everything else.
I know Trump's already increased that to 1.7 or at least the media started to add the 0.7 since Trump came into power here.
But so are they really cranking up the tactical nukes above and beyond what was already the plan?
Um, there's no doubt that the Trump administration would like to increase our nuclear arsenal.
They say that's not the case, but it is the case.
And that in, and it's true that they would like to increase the money we spend on building, uh, that new nuclear arsenal.
But the question that I think we're all facing is where are we going to get the money?
Uh, we have, uh, budget caps in place, sequestration, uh, the defense department, the defense department's newest defense budget does not include the monies that, uh, Trump plans to spend over and above the $714 billion that he's already, uh, on the record saying he would like to spend.
So the question is where does the money come from?
So it's one thing to have a new policy, a new policy, but, uh, you know, it's one thing to have a new policy and there's a new policy, but it's another thing to implement it.
And I have real doubt that that's what's going to happen.
That the Congress is going to, uh, uh, double down on this, on this incredible deficit that we're running in the name of, uh, adopting weapons that we don't need.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know, man.
I mean, I guess I'm just speculating and using my imagination, but it makes sense to me that in their minds, a lot of these people's minds, uh, the think tankers and the planners, and maybe some of the generals, I don't know which ones versus the others, but you know, people are sick and tired of seeing thousands of casualties of American GIs.
That's a big part of why we do, why they do the drone war all over the world is because at least only they die.
And if our remote control plane crashes, there's not even anybody driving the dang thing.
He's safe and sound back in Nevada, sitting in a storage shed, you know?
And, um, and so it also makes sense to me from their point of view that they would think, well, you know what, if we have these small usable, even smaller than Hiroshima type, um, implosion bombs, these, you know, and we can dial a yield down to, and we can make them extremely accurate cruise missiles, then great.
We could even have big wars against, you know, I don't know, somewhat medium-sized states without risking, without doing like George W. Bush and marching the 3rd Infantry Division.
Because, right, it's not like they're going to call off the empire.
They just want to figure out better and more efficient ways to do it.
So maybe little nukes is the way to go, huh?
Well, I think there's a realization in the military, and there has been for some time, that the United States is overextended.
I was talking to an Air Force officer the other day, very senior Air Force officer, who said to me, Mark, we've been in the air since 1991.
We've been deploying our Air Force since 1991.
You can only continue to do that for so long before the planes break, the pilots get exhausted, and we just can't do it anymore.
We're overextended.
That's the problem.
And the money now that we are going to put into this nuclear program would be much more wisely spent repairing what we have and increasing our readiness.
And if it's a choice between the two, I think in particular you'd find the Army and the Navy wanting to spend money on readiness and not on nuclear weapons.
So, you know, I think there's a lot of pushback on this nuclear posture review from inside the military itself.
It's not just, the anti-nukes people and the peaceniks that are opposed to this.
The military is scratching its head.
Why do we need to have these weapons now when we have other priorities?
And it's a good question.
I think it undermines the nuclear posture review.
And it seems to me, to kind of repeat my point made a few minutes ago, it's one thing to have a new policy, and it's another one to implement it.
We just don't have the money to do it.
And the military is very skeptical that if even if we had the money that we should do it.
Right.
Well, yeah, it makes a lot of sense from their bureaucratic interests that at least major parts of the rest of the Pentagon would not want to see that money go to the nuclear divisions.
You know, my friend Gordon Prather, who is a nuclear physicist and worked at Sandia and was the chief scientist of the Army for a time and all that kind of thing.
He always said that the nuclear warfare part of the military is like the dead end loser cul-de-sac.
There's no room for promotion there.
These are, as Mr. Byrne said on The Simpsons, do nothing nuclear weapons that just sit there.
And so that the people in charge of running them, you don't necessarily get the best people, you know, and the less ambitious, I guess, end up in charge of that part of the military.
And then the rest of the military sort of considers them to be, you know, the second cousins that they don't care that much about because they never get to use the nukes anyway.
So there's sort of like, it's just, I don't, I don't really know.
And he hadn't been in government since, I guess, the early 90s or something.
But anyway, it sounds about right that in the social psychology of the Pentagon military imperial society there that they have their divisions and the nuke guys aren't the cool guys.
Why would they get the trillion dollars when the army needs it, etc?
Well, you get, you get both sides of this.
There are people I've talked to in the Air Force like this, or nuclear thinkers like Peter Hussey, who I quoted extensively in the article in the American Conservative, who swear up and down that without our land-based strategic nuclear forces, our country would be wiped off the face of the earth.
Now, and he swears by these, you know, these 400 missiles out in the Great Plains sitting there and have been sitting there for 40 years, are absolutely essential to our defense.
But if you talk to other officers, the Army and the Navy, these guys look like, like janitors with nothing to do.
And it isn't, it isn't a great career path.
And there has been some pushback on that.
We know that former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry has called on, he called on President Obama to scrap one leg of the triad as absolutely unnecessary, and that was the land-based missiles, and to focus attention on the submarine and bomber launch missiles.
We could certainly do without one leg of the triad and still be able to destroy the world umpteen times over.
And we could save ourselves billions and billions of dollars if we did it.
So there is, you know, we're not alone in, in, in questioning whether this kind of nuclear arsenal with some whatever it is, 4,000, 5,000 nuclear warheads necessary, because it's not.
We're not the only ones doing it.
People who really know this subject are standing up and saying, it's enough of this.
We're spending way too much money.
It's absolutely unnecessary.
We don't need to build out what we already have.
And not only that, we can get rid of some of what we have and still be able to defend ourselves and deter any kind of nuclear enemy.
So, you know, the good news is we're not alone in thinking this.
There are reasonable, rational people who spent their lives studying this who agree.
Yeah.
Well, so now a couple of things here.
First of all, in terms of the posture review, Obama at one point, I guess throughout his presidency, starting early in his presidency, he modified American policy that previously had left open the possibility of using nuclear first strikes against any country in the world, or I guess not our allies, but anybody else, and maybe even our allies.
And then Obama changed that to no, we will not use nuclear first strike against any non-nuclear country, except maybe Iran was the way that he had put it.
They were the exception to that.
But then I think I read, and I don't think it was in your article, forgive me, but I think I read that Trump has now gone back on that and that that qualification that we promised not to use nukes in any first strike, aggressive war against anyone, that that promise was now off the table, too.
Well, we, Mr. Trump, in the Nuclear Posture Review, includes, stipulates that we will be able to use nuclear weapons in very extreme circumstances.
That is to say, not just nuclear weapons aimed at us or fired at us, that we retain the right, if there's a huge cyber attack, for instance, we would retain the right to use nuclear weapons.
Now, there's been over the last three days, a lot of back and forth on this.
And this is typical Trump administration.
Some people say, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't stipulate that.
And other people in the Trump administration say, well, we certainly do.
And so it's not clear where the policy is, but it's very clear from the Nuclear Posture Review that the thinking among conservative Trump people is that we would retain the right to use at least tactical nuclear warheads against non-nuclear powers if there was an overwhelming attack on the United States, a conventional attack on the United States.
You know, this is, this is the slippery slope of first use, which we, which we have not renounced if, if, and, and that's what, what we used to push back against the Russians and to a lesser extent the Chinese.
So it is on the table.
We are still, despite people's skepticism, we are still on a fairly sensitive air trigger in this country on nuclear weapons.
And to get off that air trigger, what we have to do is adopt the views of William Perry, the former Secretary of Defense, who says that we need to get off of launch on warning.
We are, we are too close to an accidental nuclear exchange for us to even consider launch on warning, according to William Perry, and I'm inclined to agree.
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Well now, so what about kind of the end of Mutually Assured Destruction?
You know, there's a great clip that Ray McGovern, I saw this presentation that Ray McGovern gave, where he played this clip of Oliver Stone interviewing Putin, which I never have seen that.
But he's saying, hey, come on, Putin.
You know that missile defense is just a corporate welfare, you know, jobs program for rich people kind of thing, man, and that we don't really mean any harm with this.
And Putin says, you know what, I suspect that that's true.
However, look at the position you're putting me in.
You're ringing my country with anti-missile missiles.
So what am I supposed to do?
I have to treat this like it's a real thing, don't I?
And so, of course, he answers his own question.
Of course, yes.
And so now he's making better missiles all the time.
That's what Trump said as he was running for president.
The Russians, they're making better and better missiles.
Of course, it's in reaction to our missile defense, but is it really the plan that we want to get to the point, our military wants to get to the point where they're confident that they could launch a first strike on Russia and take out so much of their capability on the first hit or first series of hits and then be able to shoot down the rest, that they could really be able to get away with launching a preemptive, quote-unquote, war against Russia without losing American cities and thus canceling out the mutually assured destruction policy?
I don't, I have never talked to a single military officer ever anywhere of any senior rank who believes that the United States would ever under any circumstances launch a first strike against Russia or China or any other country.
Those who have the responsibility for this, the combatant commanders, are among the most careful, I think, and I've found among the most careful and deliberate thinkers about nuclear weapons of any people I've met.
I don't want to go so far as to say they're scared shitless of them, but a lot of them are.
They know that once, you know, once a missile is even spun up and preparing for launch, the whole world is watching.
The Russians know it, they can see it, they've got satellites that look down on us, and they would do the same, and it would, it's very, very hard once you've started on that escalatory ladder to bring it back down.
I think the problem that we're having on this is that, you know, Mr. Putin has deployed intermediate range missiles in western Russia, and we think that that has been a violation of treaty obligations that Russia has signed on to.
His response is, you know, the undermining of the treaty obligations occurred when we extended NATO to his borders, in which he had no choice.
So, you know, sitting down with Putin and kind of sorting through this before we escalate much further is important.
In the current environment, as you know, sir, having followed this, in the current environment, that's going to be very hard to do because of Mr. Trump's apparent love of the Russians, or so it's said.
So, you know, we are far away from conducting another series of negotiations to reduce the number of warheads, or to get us off launch on warning, or to dampen, you know, the kind of worries and, let's say, a bad karma of the nuclear environment.
And that's a problem.
Yeah.
Well, but so what about, well, okay, wait, on the timing there, when they moved the medium range missiles, that was before or after the announced plan to put anti-missile missiles in Poland and the radars in the Czech Republic in the pretended name.
I mean, when George Bush said that this was to protect Poland from Iranian nuclear missiles, the whole world laughed.
When Obama said it, people pretended to take it seriously.
I don't know why.
But at the time when Bush originally said that, people were just laughing.
It was obviously ridiculous.
And Vladimir Putin himself laughed on TV about it.
That's the way I remember it.
The solution to this is to not really pay attention to what happened when, but to try to sort through what was said to whom in 1989, when Germany was reunited, and the United States made the initial promise not to expand the borders of NATO.
That's what we should focus on.
I think that...
And that case was recently proven.
It's all in the National Security Archive at Georgetown University now.
Just in the last few weeks, all those documents came out proving beyond a doubt what Jack Matlock had said on this show and Ray McGovern had said on this show.
And they were authoritative sources on that.
Absolutely.
That's true.
But the guy who I really point to as the problem on this is the one who started the problem was Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbot.
And their point was that, well, the nations of Eastern Europe wanted our defense umbrella.
This was not aimed at Russia.
Russia was then in a very different spot, didn't seem to raise an objection.
And nothing was ever written down about not expanding the borders of NATO.
In fact, Russia was a member of the Partnership for Peace and was on the road to becoming a member of NATO at some distant point in the future.
So the fact that things have changed, I think Bill Clinton would argue, wasn't his fault.
But it still remains, I think, as you pointed out, part of the historical record, that we had made an implicit, unsigned promise to Mr. Putin that Russia, and to Yeltsin, that Russia would not be threatened by an expansion of NATO.
And someone somewhere either ignored the promise or purposely reneged on the promise, but there we are, and here we are now.
Yeah.
Well, but see, in just that, and Clinton, Bush, and Obama did NATO expansion, but Bush repudiated the Missile Defense Treaty and started building these anti-missile missiles.
And so, you know, I don't know who's responsible for it, but somebody up there in your neck of the woods thinks that they need to, I mean, because doesn't don't all those anti-missile missiles change the dynamic of mutually assured destruction?
It sure seems on the face of it.
They're trying to cancel out the Russians ability to respond to a nuclear attack, which that changes the entire balance of the equation of we can't nuke you because you'd nuke us back.
Truth is that if you sit up here in my neck of the woods, as you appropriately describe it, and you throw a spitwad in any direction, you're going to hit a neoconservative.
You know, Democrats are now neoconservatives.
Bill Kristol's now on MSNBC.
So we have, you know, warrior monks all over the place flexing their muscles about American power.
And when you hear that stridency every single day, it's hard to get a word in edgewise.
And it's certainly hard enough to get on national television, which is now the medium for journalism, and say, it's not true.
No, this is true.
None of this is necessary.
Nobody's really paying attention.
It's Russiagate 24 hours a day, first of all.
And secondly, it's hard to argue with the American people who have incredible trust in their military, as, you know, as I think they should.
These guys don't want to go to war.
But it's hard to talk about the cost and the dangers involved because people are headed to work and coming back and watching the Super Bowl.
So, you know, this is where we are.
Yeah.
Well, and even if they put out the day after again, there's no network TV consensus like it was in the mid 80s when everybody saw that show at the same time, including it had a major effect on Ronald Reagan, the president at the time, they say.
And, you know, you bring up this about the Russiagate here, just one last point.
It seems so obvious.
The art of the deal is invite Putin to D.C. and just tell all the Democrats, screw you.
I'm signing a new treaty to scale down nuclear weapons and to make a peace deal in Syria and to do this, that, and the other thing that the American people are going to love.
And you can cry about it all you want.
And James Mattis and the rest of them can resign and cry over it if they want to look at my signature on the new treaty.
They're going to impeach him and remove him for signing a nuclear deal with Russia.
They're going to be able to spin that like it's treason.
He would be able to shove that down their throats and win and triumph and get reelected big time.
And instead, he's letting them walk all over him with what he, I think, correctly describes as completely trumped up nonsense about him being some Russian agent.
Well, I think one of the surprises here is that if Mr. Putin were invited to come to Washington to negotiate a new nuclear arms treaty, lowering the threshold for nuclear war, James Mattis would likely stand up and applaud.
And I think Rex Tillerson would stand up and applaud.
And I think even H.R. McMaster would stand up and applaud.
But I think so, with Russia.
What these guys are worried about now, when I talked to my Pentagon guys just as recently as last Friday, what these guys worry about now is Korea.
They're not even worried about Iran.
They're worried about Korea.
It's Korea 24 hours a day.
They view it as a very volatile situation.
They're very worried about it.
While everyone is focusing on Russia, I think that the real worry here is that we're going to have some kind of inadvertent or maybe even preventive attack on Korea.
It's not out of the question.
And I think people are working overtime to try to solve that problem.
And God bless them.
I hope they do it.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
I know you got to go, but we got to talk again soon.
Thank you very much for coming on the show, Mark.
It's always a pleasure.
Good talking to you.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Mark Perry.
He is a Pentagon reporter and foreign policy analyst.
His latest book is The Pentagon's Wars, and he writes regularly at TheAmericanConservative.com.
This one is called Trump's Nuke Plan Raising Alarms Among Military Brass.
And y'all know me, ScottHorton.org for the show.
Also, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
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