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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, 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, you guys, introducing Ted Postol.
He is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at MIT.
And you guys I know on this show and around these environs are familiar with his great work debunking the lies about the Gouda attack 13, the Khan Sheikhoun attack 17, and half of the Douma attack 2018.
And we got some missile technology stuff to talk about and treaties and all kinds of things today.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you doing?
Fine, fine.
Just got back from Germany, finishing a cold.
Well, Germany sounds fun.
Sorry about the cold.
What was going on in Germany?
Oh, I just gave some talks, German Physical Society, and then some talks that were attended by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and parliamentarians.
I see.
People are concerned about the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
And of course the Germans are a major recipient of the problems that will be created.
Good times.
All right.
Well, I'm going to ruin the segue and I'm going to get back to that in a minute because you wrote this very important thing for The New York Times.
I want to talk about the whole INF and we can get back to the Germans and every bit of that.
But I was incredibly intrigued and impressed and interested when I read this long form piece at The Intercept about the Douma chemical attack.
It's by a reporter named James Harkin.
And this is the one people, well, it's one, it's actually two.
This is where the accusation was chlorine and sarin.
And there were two different scenes, including the people saw the video of the children at the hospital being hosed down and given kind of asthma inhaler breaths and stuff like this and supposed chemical attack there.
And what I read in this article that was so interesting was that there you were in complete agreement with Brown Moses and the guys over at Bellingcat who said that part of that story was correct.
Not the scene at the hospital.
Robert Fisk got that right.
That was suffocation from dust, from bombing, from conventional attacks.
It had nothing to do with a chemical attack.
However, the chlorine and there was no sarin, but the chlorine attack at the apartment building that did, in fact, kill all these people that you agreed with him about what had happened there.
So he must have got it right, because I know that you guys have a history of not seeing eye to eye specifically on Syrian chemical attacks.
I didn't agree with him because I had no idea what he was saying.
I was asked about this.
I guess that's a much better way to put it.
I think we provided Arkin with an analysis.
Right.
Y'all's analysis apparently was exactly the same on this is a better way to put it.
Because, yes, I didn't mean to say you were assenting to his view necessarily.
I would not say that because I produced an analysis.
I was not aware of what they were talking about.
But my analysis was simply done in response to a question that I received and information I received.
I have no idea what Mr. Higgins said and how he arrived at a conclusion.
Okay.
Very important point there.
Well, according to Harkin, anyway, according to the Harkin piece, y'all's analysis was the same.
So did you want to tell us a little bit about what you found there?
Yeah.
Well, I'm surprised that the analysis was the same because Harkin was completely unaware of the issues that I raised when he asked me the question.
So I just find it very curious that he would call this a similar analysis.
The conclusions may be the same, but it's not clear that the analysis is the same.
Basically what happened is Mr. Harkin asked me about the chlorine attack, and I had not looked at that.
This was not an issue I was focused on.
And he provided me with some information that allowed me to look at the physical circumstances associated with a particular attack.
And I looked at it, and when I saw the circumstances, I realized that there were canisters of chlorine dropped on this building.
And in particular, there was a canister that fell headfirst.
By headfirst, I mean the canister had a valve on it at the top of the canister.
And the top of the canister hit the building first.
And due to an unfortunate accident of circumstances, it penetrated the roof.
So it was sort of like a needle that delivers fluid into your body, penetrating through your skin.
So the top of this canister was penetrated into the roof of the building.
And there was information that Harkin provided me with about the interior characteristics of the building.
And that allowed me to make an assessment of how much chlorine and how quickly the chlorine would have gone into that building, the upper floor of the building.
And it immediately became clear that the concentration of chlorine at the upper floor of the building was so high that if anybody simply opened the door and encountered the room where it first came in, they would simply go unconscious almost instantly because the levels were so high that it would just simply overwhelm an individual's systems.
And you just simply hit it and collapse, which is a very unusual situation that the chlorine density would be so high.
And it's also clear that the chlorine is significantly heavier than air.
So it was clear that the chlorine came into the building at a very high level.
It was then simply settling down through the stairwells to lower levels.
And the concentration, if it was roughly uniform throughout the building, would have been so high that people would have really suffocated very, very quickly.
The levels of concentration were many times above what would be a lethal concentration.
So people would have really in tens of seconds in that environment would have probably gone unconscious.
So I speculated, and it is a speculation, but I think it's a reasonably informed one, that the chlorine came in so fast that people who might otherwise have just run away in panic were exposed at levels that just caused them to be incapacitated and they were essentially killed.
And there was another factor that I guessed about, but I don't know it's correct, but I do know that people were widely instructed, probably so actually, to go up to higher floors of buildings when a chlorine attack was going on.
Because most of the time the chlorine containers would be opened in open areas.
And so the chlorine would sort of—it's heavier than air, so it would sort of creep along the streets like a low fog.
And if you were in an area where you had all this chlorine, the best way to get away from it is to go up to a high floor in the building because the chlorine would mostly be settled near the ground.
And what may have happened, and it sounds quite plausible, is the people in the panic in the building just followed those instructions and they ran right up into the jaws of this even more concentrated chlorine and just collapsed and died.
That's a pure guess.
But it's based on an analysis.
It's not based on claims that have no scientific basis.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
Hey, everybody, buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
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If you want a signed copy, check out scotthorton.org slash donate and help arrange that for you there.
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Find out all about it at foolserrand.us.
Okay, so that makes a lot of sense then about the casualties there.
And I think there were people in a basement as well, right?
I don't know all the details of the situation.
I was asked about was it plausible that chlorine could have killed people.
And after looking at it, it was clear to me that in this particular situation it could have.
I had already told Harkin that the chlorine, from what I, my analysis of chlorine attacks, I wouldn't even call it analysis of chlorine attacks, was that although chlorine is extremely toxic, it's not, if it hits the ground and chlorine starts coming out of a bottle, you know, one of these pressurized bottles, it's going to form a plume and it's going to be a visible plume.
And people are going to be able, in general, to get out of the way of the plume.
They'll be frightened.
It's really mostly a weapon of terror.
It's a weapon that's designed to scare the living daylights out of a population and cause them to leave.
I'm not trying to suggest that this is more moral than killing them.
I'm just saying that I think that's probably the objective of dropping these chlorine containers rather than just killing people.
And, of course, you can smell chlorine at a very long range.
For example, you can easily smell remnants of chlorine at a kilometer or two range.
It's a very distinctive smell, no doubt about that.
It's going to be nearly the concentration to kill you.
But it's going to scare you because if you're worried about nerve agent attacks, which have nothing to do with chlorine, but if you're worried about that, then you're going to be scared into thinking maybe something else is going on.
So, again, I don't want to sound like I'm in any way think this is a moral thing to do, but if you're trying to just scare the hell out of people and causing them to run away from an area that you want vacated, it's a tool that you would have.
And that's the way it looks to me in the case of what the Syrians were doing.
Now, this doesn't make it moral.
No, we understand what you're saying is descriptive and not normative here.
Let me recap here just a little bit to make sure I understand here.
In almost any other circumstance, a chlorine bomb, like you're saying, it would be dangerous but not lethal.
It would be good for chasing people out of an area, that kind of a thing.
In this circumstance, you made the needle analogy, it happened to puncture the roof of this building and this upper room and floor in a way where it created a very dense cloud in this building that then went essentially down the stairs and hit everybody lower than that, essentially in that building and killed all those people.
So that makes a lot of sense, helps explain what went on there.
And it even explains why people may have made an honest mistake in thinking it must have been sarin, since chlorine doesn't usually kill in that kind of a manner.
I don't know about that part.
Nobody knowledgeable who was an analyst would have suggested sarin.
I mean, I know there was a lot of this discussion.
I mean, I know the inspectors said they found no evidence of that whatsoever later.
Well, sarin is a very fragile molecule, and it disintegrates very easily.
And chlorine would just remove the sarin very quickly.
And it's just nobody who knew what they were doing, again, ethics and morals apart, would use them in combination.
It's much more effective to use a nerve agent.
If you're aiming at killing people, nerve agent is, and you have it, nerve agent is a much better choice.
It's odorless, and people will just simply, and the level of toxicity is enormously higher than chlorine.
So you can get people, you can kill people very fast and effectively with nerve agent if you have access to it, and that's your objective.
Chlorine is just, it just makes no sense to use it if your objective is to kill people.
And now in this case, what's your level of certainty that it would have been Assad's forces to drop these chlorine bombs in the first place here?
Well, I don't know anybody else who would have been in a position to drop chlorine bottles.
I mean, it seems to me pretty clear that the Syrians were dropping, the Syrian helicopters were dropping chlorine containers.
So I don't, I wouldn't even begin to think of an alternative at this point, because who else has helicopters to drop these things from in that area?
So I think it's pretty clear that this was an act of the Syrian government.
So at least, I just don't know who else could have done it.
I think there's an issue with Sarin, because in spite of claims to the contrary, there is very substantial reason to believe that some rebel forces have access to Sarin.
And so when you talk about a Sarin attack, unless you have clear and unambiguous evidence that it was dropped from a Syrian aircraft, which so far the one case we looked at in Khan Sheikhoun turned out to be just manufactured, unless you have clear evidence that it was released by the Syrian government, then it's hard to know who actually did it.
And there is an incentive to kill people, even your own people, with Sarin, if you have it, and then blame it on the Syrian government, because you want the United States to attack the Syrian government as it did, and as it almost did after the Gouda attack.
So I don't, I want to be clear that I have no, it's not, I'm not saying it's unambiguous that rebels use Sarin against their own people.
I'm simply saying that when you look at the evidence, you cannot rule this out as a significant explanation.
And I don't believe Sarin that was used could have been Syrian-produced Sarin, because we know exactly what the Syrian-produced Sarin looks like.
And if there was such evidence, I think the UN and the United States government would have had to put it forward, and they haven't been able to.
There's just been circumspect claims made by people who don't have access to the actual data, so.
Well, and so do you want to go ahead and comment on Khan Sheikhoun 2017 as well?
Well, I think in Khan Sheikhoun we now have a, I think, a pretty clear understanding of what didn't happen there.
There are reports that I believe are probably correct, but we can get to that later.
But what the analysis done by me, and then later six other members of a scientific group we formed, so we have seven people now, clearly indicates that the crater at Khan Sheikhoun was produced by an artillery rocket.
And we're very sure it was an improvised artillery rocket.
And the reason we are sure it's an improvised – well, first of all, we know it's an artillery rocket, because the shape of the crater is absolutely characteristic of a crater produced by an artillery rocket or an artillery shell.
You can find – we actually discovered this after we did supercomputer calculations to determine how the crater was formed.
So we postulated, among several things, an artillery rocket landing and detonating at that location, because the explosive in the rocket warhead is long and narrow.
The warhead is maybe 25, 30, or 40 centimeters long.
The front end of the warhead is close to the ground, and the back end of the warhead is maybe at a 45 degree off the ground along the line.
And this causes a somewhat tear-shaped crater to be formed.
And in fact, we discovered – after we discovered this in our own independent calculations, we found artillery manuals for artillery officers that said, oh, if you find craters like this, you can use the shape of the crater to find the direction from which the artillery was firing.
And this is – before people had what are called fire-finding radars, which is a fairly recent development, artillery officers would go out and look at these craters, and they would use the shape of the crater to estimate where the artillery was firing from, the direction.
And if you had several craters where you got the direction, you could cross-fix and get a rough estimate of the location of the artillery unit or the rocket firing unit.
Now, if you look at video data from the Khan Sheikhoun scene, we actually see two other craters of the same size as the one that was supposedly the location for the sarin release, right along the direction of the – that you would have predicted from this first crater.
So there are three craters all in a line.
Well, that certainly is compatible with a crater produced by an artillery rocket explosion.
Then if you look at the crater itself, you expect to find certain markings in the ground from the fragments from the warhead.
A warhead – a standard artillery piece or rocket artillery warhead has metal around it, which is intentionally designed to fragment and create a spray of metal fragments that are extremely lethal.
And in the case of a – it's very hard to get the casing of – the metal casing to fragment into many small fragments.
You need to really have very highly controlled metallurgical procedures to create a casing that will fragment into many small pieces.
If you don't have this highly controlled metallurgical process, you get fragments that tend to be large, much larger, and you get many fewer fragments.
It's much less lethal.
And we see evidence for that, indicating that the warhead casing was made out of a non-specialized metal that would cause very large amounts of fragments that would be produced by an actual warhead that was sold maybe by Bulgarians or Romanian or even Russian arms manufacturers.
So we can see that the shape of the crater and the markings from fragments indicate that the warhead was a warhead that was manufactured locally.
It was an indigenous warhead.
And then the rocket motor casing is split, indicating that the rocket motor casing was produced out of a regular pipe.
Most pipe that is used in most applications is a strip – is manufactured from a strip of metal that is rolled into a pipe and then welded.
A specialized pipe, which has no welds in it, is forced through a cylindrical seam-like structure.
So it's formed as a pipe that has no welds in it at all by forcing it through this special press.
Now that is a very expensive process relative to just the alternative manufacturing technique.
But what it allows you to do is make a pipe that has a much thinner wall and is much stronger.
And for purposes of a military – for military applications, you want to have a thinner pipe for the rocket motor so the rocket motor weighs less, has more propellant in it, more propellant weight in it.
And so you would not get a split casing like we see.
So we know that the rocket motor from this artillery rocket, which is what we see lying in the ground, is manufactured from – is an indigenous manufactured rocket motor.
And the twist in the rocket motor is from the fact that the initial explosion of the warhead digs a hole in the ground very quickly, which the rocket motor casing follows into the crater.
And the front end of the casing gets caught in the crater, causing the back end of the rocket motor to twist forward just like a pole vaulter.
You imagine a pole vaulter taking a pole and placing it into the ground and then using their forward momentum to launch themselves over a barrier.
And this is why the rocket motor – the casing is twisted, because the force of torque is so high from the impact.
And so we explain everything from the computer calculations.
So there's no question that this was formed by an artillery rocket, which was indigenous.
So all this other stuff – now, if it wasn't said, as claimed by Mr. Higgins and actually the UN, from a bomb that failed to detonate as it should have, because if it was a chemical bomb, it should have detonated above the ground.
There should be an explosive charge inside the middle of a drum-like bomb that would cause the container to burst.
Well, it obviously – it would have had to fail to burst at a height above the ground where the maximum efficiency of chemical dispersion occurs.
But if it hit the ground, it would have meant that the fuse caused it to fail and caused it to not detonate above the ground.
That can happen.
But if that happened, then you would see large pieces of metal associated with the container.
Right.
Associated with the bomb.
In other words, because it would have just crashed and not exploded.
There would have been more wreckage.
There might have been an explosion from the central charge, but the explosion would have just sort of dispersed the casing.
It wouldn't have shattered the casing.
So you would see strips of metal on the ground.
You would see the front and back plate of the bomb.
You'd see the tail fin of the bomb.
All of these would be prominently on the ground.
And there might be a little bit of a crater, but it wouldn't be as dramatic and as well-shaped as this particular crater that we see formed by the explosion.
In other words, I'm sorry, but this is kind of a long way of saying that that crater in the road where they say it was where the sarin bomb went off was already there and was from plain old conventional artillery.
And so the gas cloud came from somewhere else.
Well, it's not clear that there was a gas cloud at that location because the wind direction, if you look at where the casualties were supposed to have occurred, the wind was going to the east at the time that this crater was supposed to be formed.
The area of casualties was to the south.
So someone needs to explain why the wind somehow was moving south and caused the casualties in this area to the south.
There was also evidence of tampering with regard to a dead goat.
There was a dead goat that was somewhat to the south and to the west of the crater, maybe 50 or 80 or 100 meters.
And when you look at this dead goat, it certainly has the appearance of an animal that died from tarin poisoning or something very similar.
There's no question when you look at the foaming at the mouth of this goat and its nostrils.
On the other hand, in fact, the U.N. claims, and I believe that this is probably correct, that hair they were given from a goat, which could have been this goat.
We have no knowledge of the chain of custody, but let's assume, let me just be agnostic and assume that the hair was from this goat, showed evidence of sarin on the hair of the goat.
The problem is when you look at the goat carcass, it was dragged to that location.
You can see drag marks behind the goat.
The goat would have dropped in its place.
It wouldn't have dragged itself.
It wouldn't have drag marks behind it.
So that's consistent, and this is a speculation.
That's consistent with the goat being poisoned someplace.
If you have a small amount of sarin and you put this goat in a room with it, you can kill the goat and then drag its body over near this crater and claim that it was killed by fumes from the crater.
You could do the same with birds and things, where they did find sarin on the feathers of birds.
So there's no reason to believe that this wasn't staged.
It all appears to be claims made that don't fit together, except when you assume that the whole thing was made up.
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Isn't it correct that the UN had it, that some people were showing up at the hospital complaining of the gas attack before it had even supposedly happened on the timeline?
These reports are very hard to know what to make of them.
I can talk about other sources of information that I don't claim to be party to, and I think they may be right.
But you severely doubt that there was even a gas poison attack there that day at all at this point?
Well, I think people may well have been injured from toxic substances, and I do not even rule out that some of those substances were sarin or sarin-like.
So I'm saying it did not happen at that crater.
It did not happen as claimed by the UN and Mr. Higgins.
Now, there is an alternative story on this that is plausible.
I'm not saying it's true.
I don't know.
But Seymour Hersh reported that the purpose of the attack was to kill extremists who were having a meeting in a room in Khan Sheikhoun, in the city.
And the particular room was on the second floor of a building where the first floor held an agricultural supply store.
So you had the second floor, a room where a meeting was occurring, and the first floor, an agricultural supply store.
What Hersh reports from his people – so I'm saying this is not me.
This is Hersh, Seymour Hersh.
What he reports is that the intelligence people, which in this case was Russian intelligence, which had identified the meeting time and location, had told the American intelligence that they were going to have the Syrian government kill these people with a bomb.
And they warned the CIA so that if the CIA had an agent, it also penetrated the leadership, that their people would not be at this meeting.
And they also had determined that the basement of this agricultural supply store was an ammunition dump for the rebels.
So it was not only for agricultural supplies, but it was an ammunition dump.
And so there was apparently, according to what Hersh was told, a discussion between the American and Russian intelligence about whether or not to proceed with such an attack, because the expectation was a single bomb that would kill everybody in this room could set off this ammunition dump.
And there was concern about that.
But then there was basic agreement between the two parties to proceed.
Now, when the attack occurred, no one could have known this before the attack.
It was an extremely gentle wind on that day.
There was almost no wind at all.
And so when the building was hit, they not only killed everybody in the room, they set off this ammunition dump.
And there were secondary explosions and fires.
Now, since there was almost no wind, you had this gigantic cloud of very toxic materials, which may or may not have included terror.
We just don't know, because we don't know what was stored in that ammunition dump.
And this big cloud would have been hundreds of meters on a side, and it would not have been moving, because the wind is going to not move it off.
And this particular area was surrounded by housing.
So probably there were people who were poisoned and subjected to toxic ingestion and poison.
And probably there were people who were killed by it.
And certainly there were other people who were not killed but injured, severely injured.
So this particular story fits everything that we've observed.
I'm not saying it's correct or not.
I can't verify that.
But that's what Hersh has reported, and he has a pretty good record of being right on these things.
And it fits everything that we looked at, because we looked at the weather very carefully.
And if, in fact, what Hersh reported is correct, the weather condition was perfect for this kind of unintended loss of life or injuries, secondary effects from the attack.
So if anyone's to be blamed for the attack, it's really the Americans and the Russians, both of whom seem to have agreed that it was important enough to get this group of extremists.
And it's hard to know.
I wouldn't necessarily say blame.
Blame is a strong word, because this is a war.
And in war, there are always – anyone who thinks you fight a war with that unintended victim is fooling themselves.
So it's anybody's guess whether this was the right choice or not, but it certainly was not the Syrian government executing a nerve agent attack.
That is for sure.
Well, I have to say that Hersh's story was later confirming and, of course, adding detail to what, on this show, we heard from Phil Giraldi, former CIA officer.
That day, April the 4th, 2017, he came on this show and said CIA and military sources say that the Russians did this, that they gave the Americans a heads up and full awareness.
They'd been kind of surveilling the place for weeks, and everybody knew this was going to happen.
And they had – on the deconfliction line, they had told the Americans, OK, we're going to go ahead and hit that building now.
And everybody knew that that was what had happened and that whatever gas had come out was as a result of that.
And so we heard that that day.
So when Hersh came out – Yeah, well, I wasn't aware of this, so this is interesting to me that you had already heard this too.
Yep.
I came at this knowing nothing.
Yep, and that was military and intelligence sources from right away on that as well.
And people are welcome to check the archives at scotthorton.org.
In fact, I'm going to interview Phil Giraldi later today and maybe talk about that a little bit more.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
If you could send me a link to that, I'd be very interested to hear that.
Yes, I'm making a note right now.
Yes, please do, because this will be very interesting to me.
OK, great.
Now, I've got to talk to you before you go.
I hope you have some time to talk about this incredible piece that you wrote for the New York Times.
I really learned something here about the anti-missile missiles.
And I guess I thought the whole controversy with Bush and then the Obama program, which had changed it somewhat, but the basic theory was we're going to put anti-missile missiles in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic, and it was all going to be in the name of protecting Poland from Iran somehow, but that this was some kind of threat against the Russians, obviously, to basically help to enable a possible nuclear first strike by nullifying their retaliatory capability against us.
However, I apparently got that all kind of twisted, and it's worse than that and different than that.
And you explain in this article in the context now of Trump withdrawing the United States from the INF, which is the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which in, I think, the Bush senior years had taken American missiles and Russian missiles out of Europe.
Yeah.
Basically, there is this really valuable treaty known as the INF Treaty, INF standing as an acronym for Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was basically negotiated around 1987, and it resulted in both Russia and the United States not deploying certain kinds of missiles that would threaten the other, that would result in extremely short warning and short warning attacks, in fact, attacks that might not even give any warning because of the proximity of the weapons and the difficulties in detecting their launches.
And this was a very good thing because if you have a crisis, you don't want one side or the other to start launching nuclear forces because they think they're under attack.
Most people who worry about accidental nuclear war, and this is an area that I've done a lot of work in, worry about, they don't worry about someone rationally making a decision to use nuclear weapons, although that could happen, improbable in my view, but you can't rule it out.
You worry about circumstances that cause people to make a very bad decision that escalates quickly out of control.
And in a crisis where both sides are very nervous and you can't tell if the other side is in, and both sides have weapons where it's hard for the other to detect preparations to launch or even knowledge of launch before all of a sudden things start happening, there's a chance that somebody could think they're under attack and start launching weapons in order to prevent them from being lost.
One hopes that this will never occur, but if it does occur, it could escalate into a very large exchange of nuclear weapons.
And the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was an important and very effective step away from allowing these kinds of forces to be deployed on European soil.
There are still problems of accidental war, but the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty did help a lot in reducing the level of tension and diminishing the possible ways that such a catastrophe could be initiated.
And now, what really happened, people don't want to talk about this because people, they want to blame the other side, in this case Trump versus the Democrats, for all of the problems.
Now, there's no question that Mr. Trump is being totally reckless in this situation, so I don't want there to be any ambiguity about my views on this.
But the fact of the matter is that the conditions set up for this current situation were set up by the Obama administration.
The Obama administration was concerned about a situation set up by George W. Bush, which was called the European Defense Initiative.
And what the George W. Bush administration wanted to do was place large missile defense interceptors in Poland.
These were the same kinds of interceptors that are now deployed in Alaska.
So these are big interceptors.
They look like ICBMs. They're as big as Minutemen ICBMs.
And they wanted to put 10 of them in Poland.
And a second site, the argument was it would be a second missile defense site to be able to intercept Iranian long-range missiles that could be launched at the United States.
Of course, these missiles have never emerged, so there's another discussion about threat inflation there.
So Obama inherited this bad decision by the George W. Bush administration, and it looks like he was looking for a way to placate the Russians, who were very much against this.
And I think the Russian concerns were valid in this particular case.
So unfortunately, it seems to me, in fact I'm sure at this point, that Obama's advisers did not do a good job.
They did not give him correct technical information about this decision.
And he inadvertently decided to deploy this system called the European Phased Adaptive Approach that had two characteristics that are remarkably bad for future stability with Russia.
The first was the system had no missile defense capability against long-range Iranian missiles.
Remarkable.
And somebody ought to say, who was involved in this?
You can't just only blame Obama.
You've got to blame his staff.
And in any case, the radars were not powerful enough to see warheads at long enough range for a relatively slow interceptor associated with this kind of system to get to the intercept point.
So it could just be overflown.
It would just be overflown without the ability to intercept Iranian missiles.
And so it was a system that was pointless, that had no defense capability.
The second problem was the land-based component of it, which were to be sites that were going to be deployed in Poland and Romania.
Those sites were being used simply for political reasons, to placate different countries, in particular Poland and Romania, with regard to promises that were made earlier by the Bush administration.
So they were going to put these sites in Poland and Romania, and the sites had the ability to launch offensive cruise missiles.
And those cruise missiles were in violation of the INF Treaty.
So the Russians immediately raised concerns about that.
So I talked to Sergei Rogov of the Institute for the Study of Canada and the USA, and he told me that Mike McFaul, who was a principal advisor to Obama, that he told Mike McFaul in 2009 that this was a violation of the INF Treaty.
I happened to be living around Stanford part of the time, and I've been trying to get Mike McFaul to explain to me what happened, but he won't talk to me.
So my assumption is McFaul screwed up, along with his buddies.
They didn't provide the appropriate technical input to the president before he made this decision.
I don't know that's true.
It just looks that way to me.
I'm sorry?
I'm a little confused, because I thought that the whole point of the Aegis radar was to enable anti-missile missiles, but you're saying that this Aegis radar system here was not.
It can't do the job.
You should not assume that the Aegis system isn't an extremely capable anti-aircraft defense, because aircraft have very large radar cross-sections, radar reflectivity, relative to ballistic missile warheads.
A radar cross-section of a combat airplane might be a significant fraction of a square meter.
Think of it as an effective reflecting area.
A warhead could be one thousandth of a square meter, a thousand times smaller.
The warhead is moving at five or six or seven kilometers per second.
The airplane is moving at 300 meters per second, so it's moving more slowly.
It's also at ranges of tens of kilometers, while the warhead could be at ranges of many hundreds of kilometers.
So the radar, which is tremendously powerful in terms of tracking and engaging aircraft, is unable to do anything against this very small radar cross-section object that's traveling at very high speeds at very far distances.
Okay.
I'm sorry?
I'm sorry?
But then when it comes to the cruise missiles, how is it that the Aegis radar helps to enable possible cruise missiles there, which obviously a Tomahawk could be a nuke or a conventional bomb, right?
No, the Aegis radar is irrelevant.
The problem is the Aegis radar is the Aegis missile defense system that's on the ground, called Aegis Assure.
The Aegis Assure system consists of a radar and then a very elaborate missile control system, a system for carrying missiles and firing missiles, and that's known as the Mark 41 vertical launch system.
It's just a set of canisters that are designed to hold missiles in them and to launch missiles.
So that's the sword side of the Aegis system, the ability to launch a missile.
Okay.
Now, so to red team this a little bit, if you and I are on Vladimir Putin's staff or we're members of the Russian military, we're looking at this and we're saying, yeah, Mr. President, the thing is here is the installation that they're putting in, it can't be used for what they say it's for.
It can be used for targeting us with extremely fast, very short notice giving cruise missiles that could be armed with H-bombs.
That's a message.
I'm sorry?
So the Russians, you're right.
So the Russians look at this and they say the Americans are claiming it's a missile defense.
It clearly can't work, doesn't work that way, can't work that way.
But it can be used to launch offensive missiles against Russia.
And those missiles happen to be noncompliant with the INF Treaty.
So the Russians say, what's going on here?
I mean, I was an advisor to the chief of naval operations.
If the Russians did this, I would say they're in violation of the treaty.
That would have been my advice to the chief of naval operations.
I'd say they're in violation of the treaty.
They've got to stop this.
But in our case, we don't want to acknowledge it.
I mean, it's believable to me that Obama doesn't understand this, because Lord knows what Obama understands.
And yet, this has to be delivered by somebody.
Well...
Is it just arms salesmen or is there really a strategy behind this or not?
I think it's possible.
First of all, I don't think it's possible that it was intentional on the part of some people.
And it's also possible it was just short-sightedness and the political parameters taking over relative to the realities that would be understood by more technically informed people.
It was certainly a gigantic screw-up.
And I'm furious with these Obama staff people who were supporting him during this decision.
I was in a role when I was in the Pentagon of supporting the chief of naval operations in similar decisions, and I took my job very seriously.
I didn't necessarily agree with what the decision was, but it was my job to make sure that everybody understood what the potential consequences of the decision was.
And my guess is Obama didn't know, because his staff didn't tell him.
And the reason his staff didn't tell him was probably because some of the staff didn't know, and they did not do their homework and check.
So not knowing is not an excuse.
Doing your homework or not doing your homework is also not an excuse.
But there were also people who should have known who didn't tell him.
For example, Ash Carter, the secretary of defense in the later last two years of the Obama administration, at the time of the earlier decision was the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
Carter would have had the responsibility for looking into the technical issues and informing the president about this problem.
He obviously either didn't do his homework or didn't know or didn't have the situation properly looked at.
So he's responsible for the mistake, as well as other people on Obama's staff.
Now, did Carter know that this was a problem and not say anything?
I think it's possible, because Carter was willing to undermine the president's attempts to have a peace treaty, a peace arrangement in Syria that was negotiated between Lavrov and Kerry.
As well, he's a real wonk from inside the Pentagon, not just some political appointee type hack.
I mean, I know Carter very well.
We used to be friends.
We're not friends now, but we used to be friends.
He is smart, and he is smart enough to know.
I don't like his views and his ethical standards, but he's smart enough to know exactly that this would have been a problem.
So the question is, did he knowingly do this?
One last thing here on the INF Treaty.
We're out now, and it's not because the Russians called out Obama for violating it.
They tolerated that violation politely, and yet the accusation is they developed some mid-range missiles.
I think even critics of the decision to leave the treaty are saying that apparently, possibly, they really did develop some mid-range missiles, but even then they're pointing them at the Chinese.
Actually, I talked with Chas Freeman on the show, the former diplomat and intelligence official.
He was saying that really the real reason America wants out of this treaty isn't even about Russia.
They know that Russia's somewhat pseudo-mid-range missiles, at least, are for China, not America.
But America wants to deploy mid-range missiles against China, as well, in the Pacific.
And so that's why we're sacrificing, essentially, this incredibly important Reagan-era peace treaty with the Russians in order to get at the Chinese.
And so I wonder what you think of that, and I wonder what you think of the Russian missiles.
Were they really in violation?
And if so, what should have been done about that?
All these kinds of things.
Well, I have no idea if the Russian missiles are in violation, but I do have very serious doubts about the intelligence claims.
I want to be clear here.
I'm not saying the intelligence claims are false.
I'm saying I don't know whether or not they're true.
And the reason – I've watched intelligence claims in the past, and I know for a fact that the intelligence claims that were absolutely, unambiguously true turned out not to be true.
And it's not – and in my case, it's not simply the weapons of mass destruction under the Bush administration.
It has to do with the intelligence after the Damascus siren attack that the Obama White House claimed to have released.
That intelligence was totally false.
There was no way that they had evidence that the Syrian government, as they claimed, was the source of that siren attack.
And I wrote extensively about that.
The rockets that were used for that siren attack could not possibly have flown from Syrian government-controlled territory.
And we proved it, and the UN agreed with that.
The rockets were too short-range because they were carrying – they had this big barrel of siren on the front end, and they only had a two-kilometer range.
And they would have had to have a 20-kilometer range for them to be flown, as claimed by the Obama White House.
And that tells me something was very wrong with the intelligence.
And I still have the videos of John Kerry swearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that our intelligence was absolutely right.
And they had checked it and rechecked it.
This is his statement.
We had checked it and rechecked it because we are sensitive to what happened in the Bush administration where the intelligence was wrong.
Well, hey, we're having this conversation just two days after Mueller finally admitted after two years that there never was anything to Brennan and Clapper's claims about Trump and Russia either.
Well, we just don't know.
I'm not saying the intelligence is wrong.
I'm just saying the emphasis that we know and the claims of the intelligence community mean nothing to me.
Now, let's say, though, because you are an expert in a lot of areas about this.
I know you're not necessarily a diplomat.
But if it was true, if the intel was true and you were impressed that, hey, it looks like the Russians are skating the line on this treaty, what do you think should be done?
Let them just take advantage of us, Ted?
No.
I would say they're in violation of the treaty.
We need to confront them.
Incidentally, we're in violation of the treaty.
Treaties are important.
Treaties should be followed to the letter of the law.
You can't allow treaty – you can't just sort of let each side whittle away at the legality and the language and intent of the treaty.
Both sides have to follow the treaty to the letter of the treaty.
So we need to address the Russian concerns about the Aegis Ashore, and they need to address our concerns about the range of dismissal.
And so that would be my position.
And so I would – so when the Russians offer, as they did on I think it was January 5th is the date I recall, to allow us to intrusively and transparently inspect this dismissal, but in exchange they need to be able to inspect the Aegis Ashore system, I would say both sides have a right to those inspections.
We need to go through the inspections.
We need to negotiate the differences.
And maybe if we have – if we find there are problems on both ends, then we need to come up with some understanding that's mutually acceptable to allow these treaties to stay in place, because the benefits to each side – the strike benefit of the Aegis Ashore is really not militarily significant, nor is the possibility that this dismissal that the Russians have might be – might have a range somewhat longer than 500 kilometers.
I don't know – I don't know it's more than 500 kilometers, but if there's an issue, we need to get that resolved.
And the treaty needs to be followed.
Both sides need to absolutely let the other side determine to a reasonable satisfaction that either both sides are within the bounds of the treaty or there needs to be some negotiated, mutually acceptable understanding about this noncompliant situation on both sides.
But – so I would be for negotiating.
There's nothing – nothing in either noncompliant claim is significant enough militarily to justify losing this treaty.
The loss of this treaty will be far more dangerous to both sides than some marginal military issues that could come up from these noncompliant arrangements.
So I'm not saying – I think they need to be addressed.
So I'm not saying ignore them, but I'm saying that it's not worth losing the treaty over it.
And the idea that you can't perform certain military missions because you don't have these kinds of weapons is totally ridiculous.
We have ballistic missiles on submarines that can deliver nuclear warheads to any range we choose.
And you don't need thousands of warheads on thousands of other additional kinds of delivery systems.
There is really no military contingency that's real that you can come up with that can't be addressed with weapons that already exist in the United States, in Russia, and in China.
So let's forget about losing this treaty over some imagined advantage you would have because you can have cruise missiles of 600 to 1,000 kilometers range.
This is just totally ridiculous when you look at the military – the way military forces can be utilized these days.
The flexibility is just so high that this is not a problem.
All right, you guys.
That's Ted Postel.
He is professor emeritus of science, technology, and international security at MIT.
Thank you very much for your time.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
And please send me that URL to the earlier discussion.
Will do.
I already found it, and actually I accidentally lied.
It was two days later, April the 6th.
It doesn't matter.
But it's on its way there.
And everybody, the article at the New York Times, this extremely important piece is called, Are Trump and Putin Opening Pandora's Box?
Thanks again, Ted.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can 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.
