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All right, y'all, welcome to the show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Check out the archives at ScottHorton.org and at LibertarianInstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show.
And introducing Tom Kalina, and he's got this one in DefenseOne, DefenseOne.com.
This article is just unbelievable.
Welcome to America's nuclear sponge.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
It's great to be here.
Thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
It's been quite a while since we've spoken.
Everyone check the archives.
Real good one about the bogus, I don't know what else to call it, the corporate welfare scam that is the missile defense system that they keep pretending to build and all this.
So good one there for you in the archives.
But this one, oh, and I'm sorry, I meant to say Tom Kalina is the policy director for the Ploughshares Fund.
Now, this article is just unbelievable, man.
I hope you guys in the audience will help pass this thing around.
Welcome to America's nuclear sponge.
What in the world is a nuclear?
It sounds like maybe part of the missile defense system.
It's all right.
If they set off any hydrogen bombs, we'll just deploy our nuclear sponge.
Well, what this basically means is that the United States has about 400 ballistic missiles deployed in the upper Midwest, and that these are not weapons that would ever actually be used in warfare.
They're really there to attract Russian missiles towards them.
So what you would have, the theory goes, and I do not subscribe to this theory, that Russia would target these weapons in the upper Midwest, Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado, as a way of drawing Russian forces there so they couldn't be used against other places in the United States, for example, big cities, or against other weapons that the United States has, for example, nuclear armed submarines.
And therefore, Russia would never launch that attack because the United States would always be able to respond.
That's the theory.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't hold up because the United States could respond anyway.
Even if Russia targeted U.S. missile submarines that are under the oceans, they would have no confidence they could find them.
So the United States will always be able to respond to a nuclear attack.
We do not need to sacrifice the entire upper Midwest to do it.
OK, so but premise one, though, rewind a minute.
These are never to be used.
You say this in the article, paragraph two here.
These ICBMs are not meant to be launched ever, not even in a nuclear war.
But then, so according to the textbook, then doesn't that take them off the table as a serious threat to the Russians that they would need to target them?
I mean, if you know that, then they know that, that they're not to be used.
You know, it goes like this, right?
The United States would never launch these weapons first because if we launch them first, that would guarantee a Russian response.
And that would be game over.
You know, the United States and our civilization would be over as far as we know it from a Russian nuclear attack.
But we'd never launch them second either.
And this is what people, you know, what is rarely ever explained by by the Air Force is that if we were if we were thought we were under a nuclear attack, we wouldn't know that until the warheads land.
And you don't want to you don't want to launch our weapons by mistake.
But if you wait for the warheads to land, of course, the things that are targeted, which are these states, are already gone.
If you launch them before the Russian warheads land, one, you may be starting an accidental nuclear war because you don't know if it's real and there have been numerous false alarms in the past.
But two, you're launching them back at empty silos in Russia because the missiles have already been launched.
So from that perspective, you don't want to launch them first.
You don't want to launch them second.
And that's it.
There's no third.
So these these missiles are basically targets waiting to be hit in the upper Midwest and the upper Midwest is therefore essentially a national sacrifice zone.
It's got a huge target on it.
And I really don't think that people in those states understand how their real estate is being used.
And now, you know, I remember there being some kind of controversy about this, and I wasn't sure whether this was really a thing or not.
And if it was, I'm for it, I think.
But what you just said that the doctrine is to wait and make sure that the whatever A or H bomb explodes first before you launch, that we don't launch just because the computer says we've got a thousand coming over the poles.
Because as you said, there have been so many false alarms.
Was that really right?
That the doctrine has changed?
That we really do sit and wait, Mr. President?
We've got to make sure even if that means losing D.C., we wait and make sure.
In fact, the doctrine is I mean, the doctrine is really out of step with the times because one, U.S. doctrine says we can use nuclear weapons first, even without any indication of a Russian attack, which, as I've already said, makes no sense because that would invite the end of the United States.
But we also have a doctrine called launch on warning, which says that if we think there's a Russian attack, we can launch before the attack arrives.
Can but not shall or how's it written?
How's it?
It doesn't say shall.
These are options that the president has.
Right.
There's no shalls or oughts to them.
So one option for the president.
And these are the president's weapons, by the way.
These are Donald Trump's weapons.
One option is to use them first out of the blue.
Another option is to use them when we think there's an attack coming in, but we have no actual proof that there is.
And the third option, and I would say the most likely option, is to let them be destroyed in the ground.
And now, by the way, on that chain of command, is the secretary of defense not even in the chain of command when it comes to this?
The president orders go straight to the Navy and the Air Force.
Is that it?
The secretary of defense is in the chain of the order being given.
So the president makes the order and it goes through the secretary of defense and then through the military commanders down to the launch officers.
But none of those people have veto power over that order.
I mean, again, these are the president's weapons.
The president makes the decision.
If someone in the chain decides not to forward the order, they would immediately be fired and someone else would replace them who would carry out the order.
So the only way to stop a presidential order to launch a nuclear war is basically a coup of some kind, which is highly unlikely.
These people are trained to follow orders.
That is what they do.
They do it very well.
And if the president were to order a nuclear war, I have high confidence that that is exactly what we would get.
Well, and there was some analyst recently was explaining, I'm sorry, I forget who I'm cribbing from here, that the system is set up so that the order goes through and is obeyed.
There is no and then we stop for 15 minutes and drink coffee and make sure and have another discussion with the Joint Chiefs of Staff first or some kind of thing that it's already set up that the order goes very quickly from, you know, his words to God's ears.
Indeed.
And not only is it set up for no debate whatsoever, because it's built for speed, you know, not for consideration or democracy.
And this is the real problem here is because it's built for speed.
It gives the president this option to launch when we think the missiles are coming, but we don't really know.
And that creates, to me, the most dangerous situation of launching a war by mistake, because we've had at least three and probably more false alarms where the computer systems told us there was a Russian attack coming over.
It turned out to be wrong.
So if we had launched our weapons in response to what we thought was an attack, we, the United States, would have been initiating a nuclear war to end not only Russia's existence, but our own.
Now, that's a really chilling thought.
And so we should be doing everything in our power to reduce any chance of such a nightmare scenario.
And as long as the ICBM sit out there in the upper Midwest, they create that use it or lose it pressure on the president.
Because when when there is this unclear notice of a Russian attack, the president literally has minutes, maybe 10 minutes to decide, am I going to launch our weapons or am I going to wait to see if the attack is real?
The answer should always be wait to see.
But in that moment, and if you have issues of temperament or judgment, if you are in any way prone to respond over the top and too quickly to things, that is a dangerous situation.
Well, and, you know, I mean, the Air Force bases themselves are huge targets, but at least it does make a little bit more sense that if we didn't have silos, land-based fixed silos full of these things, but we had, hell, even mobile launchers, the way the Russians have more of theirs on mobile launchers, like in Spies Like Us, that kind of thing, that at least that makes it possibly and, you know, of course, did I say subs and planes?
That makes it the incentive structure to the president when he has to make the decision and it makes more sense that he could wait and see because it takes away that use them or lose them.
That actually they're not going to be able to take out all our planes that have already scrambled and they're certainly not going to be able to find all of our nuclear submarines.
God knows how many we have of those.
Right, right.
No, one could argue that if you're going to have these ICBMs, they should be mobile.
But let me just say that during the Cold War, when the risks really were perceived to be great, we determined that it was enough to have submarines invulnerable at sea and enough to have bombers in the air that we didn't also need mobile land-based missiles.
Now to say 25 years after the end of the Cold War, when sure, there are still threats out there, but they're not anywhere near the kind of threats we were facing during the Cold War.
To argue that now we need to mobilize or make these ICBMs mobile, to me, is really not the best use of our national resources, particularly given the fact that, you know, so now we're coming around to the fact that these weapons all have to be rebuilt now.
They're getting older.
We've had these ICBMs in the ground for a generation.
Now the Trump administration wants to rebuild them all at the cost of about $100 billion.
Okay.
$100 billion.
So the question is, is that how the nation wants to spend $100 billion?
That's just for the men in the silos?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's just the cost of building them.
To maintain them over 30 years would be another $100 billion.
You're talking about an over $200 billion lifecycle cost of continuing this mission, which to me is really against U.S. security interests and is certainly against the interests of the fine people of Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, and back to this sponge doctrine, I mean, I guess if you have a room full of all the smartest people at the University of Chicago and they agree that this is what their little committee should write in their notebook, that this is the, you know, the nuclear doctrine that we have to choose from, this is the best that they can come up with, it's true after all, right?
The Russians have thousands and thousands of H-bombs.
And so it makes a certain kind of sense, I guess, if you're a student of Albert Wohlstetter, that, well, we don't want them to take out all of our cities, but you know, sorry Nebraskans, if we can get them to dump all their H-bombs in the middle of nowhere, then tough for you guys, but it maybe would spare some of the rest of our civilization, something like that.
Yes.
Yes.
I'm just not sure that Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado have really been asked their permission for that and whether if they were that they would agree.
And the other thing to say is it's simply not necessary, right?
You know, if we're going to draw a Russian attack anywhere, better be out into the oceans.
So let's put our money into more submarines, for example, because they're not vulnerable in any case.
But if the Russians are going to target anything, let them target the oceans.
They shouldn't be targeting, you know, our great American heartland.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, my friend Gordon Prather used to make H-bombs for the U.S. government, and he was the chief scientist of the Army and all these other things, worked at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and all this.
And I asked him, you know, hey, man, how is it that you made H-bombs?
Really?
I mean, how do you rationalize this?
And I'm not exactly sure, you know, he designed them in this and that, whatever roles he had, but he was involved in making H-bombs for sure.
And he said, well, listen, man, I mean, we were keeping the Reds from crossing the Fold of Gap and conquering Western Europe.
And, you know, our leaders had decided that that was the line we'd drawn and that it was worth it and, you know, more or less made sense to us.
We're with that.
And they had, the theory was they had so much conventional armor that it would take American atom bombs to stop them if they really went for it.
And so it is what it is.
But hey, guess what?
The Soviet Union ceased to exist back in 1991.
They pulled their troops back a thousand miles and yet we still pretend like nothing changed at all.
I mean, no, that's not really true.
They did get rid of tens of thousands of these things, but they still got 10,000 left.
So what the hell?
Right, right, right.
And we're still, you know, we're still arming ourselves as if the Cold War is still going.
But in fact, it ended, as you say, 25 years ago.
We should not be doing the same things we did 25 years ago.
We actually have an opportunity here to take money that we would otherwise spend on nuclear weapons and put it into things that really makes America great.
Right.
You know, whether it be infrastructure or whether it be paying off the debt or whether it be student loans, whatever it is, it should not be a new generation of ballistic missiles in the upper Midwest whose main purpose is to be destroyed sitting in the ground.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, you talk about all the money that it costs, $100 billion just for those.
Barack Obama made a deal basically with the senators that if they would pass the Start 2 Treaty, he would go for this trillion dollar, which we all know means $3 trillion, complete overhaul of the entire nuclear weapons arsenal and industry, brand new factories and assembly lines and everything, the biggest honeypot in the world.
And so, you know, can Quakers and Plowshares funds, activists and libertarian groups ever hope to match the influence of these companies that make the nuclear weapons, and for that matter, the so-called civil servants on the government payroll that make these weapons?
After all, just the slightest percentage of that money recycled into lobbying makes them as powerful as a foreign state or something, right?
What are we going to do about it?
Seriously.
You're exactly right.
I mean, the amount of money, as you say, a trillion dollars over the next 30 years going into rebuild the U.S. nuclear arsenal is a huge amount of money.
And as you say, some of that money goes to lobbyists and some of that money goes to think tanks and, and, and that's a serious force that we have to, we have to reckon with.
But you know, we're going to fight it.
I mean, groups like Plowshares, as you say, groups like Friends Committee on National Legislation, other groups, the Arms Control Association, there are many good groups out there that are fighting this fight to spend taxpayer dollars wisely and not to waste them.
And we're going to keep going with that effort and do the best we can.
We feel hopeful that when Congress goes to grapple with all the different things they want to fund, that they will find that this is simply not up there on the top of the list.
But that's an education effort.
That's an advocacy effort.
And we're in it to win it.
Yeah.
Good deal.
Well, now, listen, so I don't know, I actually, mostly I'm just an interview host, but I'm trying to do better about activism and this kind of thing.
And you know, I've got this new institute now I've created with some friends, the Libertarian Institute.
Oh, great.
And, yeah, I mean, I'd like to do some work along these lines that actually, you know, do something other than, you know, exposing people to your work and that kind of thing.
It seems like the smart thing to do, not that I know how to do it, but this is, I'll try to form it in the phrase of a question kind of a thing, like Jeopardy, is we've got this organization called Global Zero, which is basically an anti-nuclear weapons organization along the same lines as the work you guys are doing at the Ploughshares Fund.
But what's notable about them is they have all these Republican secretaries of state and defense and including Democrats, too.
But you need your right flank covered politically on this kind of issue so that you don't just seem like a bunch of whiny hippies or whatever kind of thing.
Because, listen, I mean, as you well know, I mean, that kind of image will completely destroy you.
So we have all these Republican officials, George Shultz and Kissinger level, so-called gray beards and all this kind of thing.
But the deal is, is they don't seem to really do anything.
They have they've they've got a great website and they've staked out a great position, which is we don't need nukes.
But it seems like, man, what a what a gigantic thing that's just sort of sitting there.
What did what do you do and what do I do to kind of, you know, crack the whip on them and get them to actually make some decisions here about whether we're going to stop this trillion dollar thing before it starts going forward right now in 2017, for example.
Right.
Right.
Well, yes, we work with Global Zero as well.
We think they're a great group.
They're doing a lot of work with young people, trying to bring young people into this issue on college campuses.
So I would stick with them.
We need them in the Senate is where we need them.
We need them badgering the people who actually have the power and saying, you can't do this.
You have to stop.
So here's here's the thing, though.
Here's the thing.
And it comes back outside.
I'm going to put the I'm going to put the emphasis back outside of Washington, because none of the decision makers in Washington will make the right decision unless they hear pressure coming from their home state.
Right.
So as you say, the money is flowing in Washington in the wrong direction.
You know, lobbyists have the money, contracts have the money.
So if politicians are left to themselves, they'll do the easy thing and vote for these weapons systems and for money to flow in that direction.
But if they hear from people in their home state saying we won't stand for this, we don't like this.
If the people who live in Montana, for example, say, hey, we don't want to be a nuclear target.
We don't want to be part of the nuclear sponge.
We want out.
That tends to change the dynamic way better than individual lobbying from people like us in Washington can do.
So to me, that is the most important thing people outside of Washington can do, is get in touch with their members of Congress and tell them what they want.
Yeah.
Well, you know, they're the ones who named it the nuclear sponge, right?
Not you.
I mean, that is pretty much an indictment.
Well, what we're going to do is we're going to have them obliterate the entire center of the country and hopefully the coast will be all right.
Uh huh.
I don't know.
It sounds kind of objectionable on the face of it.
It seems like maybe that just just right there.
I think maybe you found our issue to to grab on to.
Well, if you want to talk about, you know, an elitist policy, I mean, that is it sacrificing the middle of the country so that, you know, so that the coasts survive.
And this is there's a populist message here, too.
I mean, you know, you can't let Washington keep sticking it to you like this.
And this is really a classic case of Washington making decisions in secret, thinking that the public won't really understand it.
But it does not serve the interests of the upper Middle West at all.
And it is time to get people there to realize what's going on and to make some noise.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if he knows it or could possibly ever figure it out.
But Trump, who has talked about how he wants to abolish all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth ever since the 1980s, called it the ultimate deal, wanted Ronald Reagan to send him to Russia.
I don't know if he could have struck it.
Ronald Reagan couldn't, almost did.
But he seems to kind of have this daydream about that would be truly great.
That's the ultimate deal would be to abolish nukes.
And he's got his right flank covered, especially if he could convince the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, to stand by his right side and go up there and say, damn it, us and Russia, we're going to work out a deal to get rid of all the nukes and we're going to pressure the rest of the nuclear weapon states on earth that we are doing this right now and you're coming with us.
He could do it because he's a Republican.
No Democrat in the world, no matter how bad he wanted to, could even think about something like that.
But if Nixon can go to China and Ronald Reagan can come, to be honest, within a whisker of a deal to get rid of all American and Soviet nuclear weapons back in at Reykjavik in, what is it, 86, right?
Then it's doable.
I don't know if there's anybody in the White House who could explain that to him, how that works with the Nixon goes to China thing, but he really could, I think.
He could.
He definitely could do it.
And the Secretary of Defense, as you say, General Mattis, I think is sympathetic to reducing nuclear forces.
The problem with Trump is that he just can't quite get his act together.
I mean, it was just reported yesterday that he was on a phone call with President Putin from Russia.
And on that phone call, President Putin wanted to extend the only treaty on nuclear weapons we have right now that's in force and reducing forces called the New START Treaty.
President Putin wanted to extend it.
And President Trump said, ah, that's a bad deal.
I'm not interested.
Now, if we don't have that treaty, we're not going to be able to continue arms reductions with Russia at all.
And both countries will be completely unconstrained in what they can do.
So as much as Trump in some ways says he likes nuclear reductions, he often acts in the opposite direction.
So he's a very mixed bag and we'll just have to see where it all comes out.
Yeah.
No, I really like Landay, but I'm kind of suspicious of that story though.
It took so long to come out and it has him basically telling Putin, hang on a second, and then asking Flynn what to say, and then saying, oh yeah, no, I'm against it.
I don't know.
I guess it's possible.
It just didn't seem right to me though.
Well, I've heard that through very respectable sources.
You have separate sources other than Landay and Reuters?
Yeah.
So I believe that story and it took a while to come out because there aren't that many people that were privy to it.
I'm worried about the people that leaked that story because there can't be very many who actually were privy to that conversation.
Is it okay if I quote you on that, that you have separate sources that back up Landay's journalism there?
Sure.
Okay.
Well, I mean, he did just say it on this recorded interview, but I'm going to put that on Twitter.
Oh man, that is quite regretful.
It is.
It is.
I mean, we'll just have to see where that goes.
I believe that story, but I also believe that, you know, I don't think President Trump really has looked at these issues very deeply and I don't think he fully understands what he's doing.
One thing he said was he keeps mentioning his brilliant uncle from MIT who taught him all about nuclear weapons.
And I read this thing back like a year ago or something where someone had said, you know, I mean, the guy is clearly as shallow as everybody can tell that he is, but he does have a real interest in nuclear weapons and that they had had a discussion with him back in the 80s where he could tell you the difference between all the long range and mid range nukes in Europe and this and that and the other thing and where they were and the MX missile and this and that.
Like he had a real interest in it and a real opposition to them.
It's one of those things.
It's, you know, sort of like Russia where he kind of has an instinct to overall, you know, have better relations with Russia.
But then again, like you said, more or less, his attention span is so short that God knows what he's going to flip flop all around one day saying we ought to get along with Russia the next day is literally saying we should shoot down their jets over the Baltic Sea when they buzz our ships, which are, you know, maybe maybe or maybe not in international waters, but have long range missile launchers attached to them and and are there clearly threatening in the first place.
And so, you know, flip a coin on any given day whether this guy is going to finally solve the Cold War problem once and for all or turn it hot.
You know, that's right.
But, you know, as you said, I mean, he's a dealmaker.
He wants to make a big deal with Russia.
He wants to be presidential.
So this would check both of those boxes if he can negotiate some major deal with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons.
That would be massive for him.
And of course, if it's the right deal, we would like that, too.
But he, you know, he can't just snap his fingers and make it happen.
He's got to he's got to work it.
And he's doing a lot of other things that right now seem to be going against that goal.
So where where he's heading is anybody's guess right now.
All right.
So that is Tom Z.
Kalina.
He is the policy director for the Ploughshares Fund, and he has a piece here at DefenseOne.com.
It's really called Welcome to America's Nuclear Sponge.
You got to read it.
It'll blow your mind.
Thank you very much for your time, Tom.
Scott, thank you so much for having me.
Really appreciate it.
And that's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, y'all, for listening.
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