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All right, you guys on the line.
I've got Hans Christensen from the Federation of American Scientists.
He is the director of their nuclear information project.
Welcome back to the show, Hans.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Tell you what, we got into a little conversation on Twitter the other day, not to do a show about Twitter and Twitter events, but just we were discussing, you were discussing the B-1 bomber flights over the Baltic states flying out of Norway on these exercises.
And then I was saying, look, everybody, nuclear bombers.
And you corrected me.
And I know you're right about this, because I remember this actually from when they were doing overflights over the DMZ in Korea a few years ago, I guess under Obama, that actually a B-1 is not a nuclear bomber, although it can be fitted to be one.
But typically they're not.
And so then they would be understood to not necessarily be nuclear bombers, but still some kind of bombers.
But can't they launch cruise missiles?
Could you please explain to me what I don't know about B-1s and their significance here?
Well, so they used to be a nuclear bomber.
They were developed to fly low level nuclear attack missions into the Soviet Union.
But when the B-2 bomber started coming online and air defenses improved, they were removed from that mission.
And so in the late 90s, they lost their sort of assignment of nuclear weapons.
They were no longer assigned to nuclear missions in the warplanes.
However, they still had the equipment on them.
So they could, of course, you know, the weapons could come back on if they needed to, et cetera, et cetera.
However, under the New START treaty with Russia, that equipment was removed.
And so today the B-1 bombers are physically incapable of delivering nuclear weapons.
So it's not about, you know, we normally don't do it or, you know, well, they could be put back on or something like that.
No, they can't.
They do not have the capability.
We would have to reinstall equipment, rewire the aircraft, load software that is specific to the nuclear weapons to be able to do that.
So it is a conventional bomber.
I see.
That's very interesting.
And I didn't realize that was part of the New START treaty.
So it's not just a matter of, hey, you know, put a tomahawk in the belly of the thing, drop it out of the bomb bay and then remote control it with whatever you need to.
No, correct.
It doesn't have nuclear capability.
Okay.
All right.
So then what is the significance of the Americans flying B-1s?
I mean, hey, don't get me wrong.
I prefer to them flying B-2s over there.
But what is the significance of them flying B-1s, I mean, essentially right on the Russian border there in all three Baltic states?
Well, it is a gradual escalation of bomber operations that has happened over the last five years or so, but really sort of kicked in after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
Immediately after that, a U.S. strategic command started strengthening the integration of U.S. strategic bombers in the defense of NATO.
And that led to a number of campaign, a number of plan upgrades.
And we saw a gradual escalation in the number of weapons, the number of bombers that were deployed to Europe, how often they deployed, how many, but also what bases they started going to.
And now we're beginning to see them using more bases that they've never gone to before.
A couple of years ago, we had a B-2 that landed in Iceland for the first time ever.
This now with the landing of the B-1s in Norway, the operations out of Norway, is the first time ever, as a matter of fact, that U.S. strategic bombers are ever operated out of Norway.
Not even during the Cold War did we do that.
So this is a significant escalation of bomber operations.
And of course, the question is, what are we trying to accomplish with the bomber operations?
Is there sort of a strategy here?
And so flying over the Baltic states with B-1 bombers is obviously a great display of military power and supposed to signal both to the Russians, but also to the Baltics that were there.
But of course, the question is, what is it going to accomplish since those bombers would not go there in times of war?
That would be too close to the Russian air defenses.
So this is sort of a public relations display, if you can say.
So in other words, they're kind of implying that, you know, if this was a war, these wouldn't be B-1s, they'd be B-2s, and they'd be full of H-bombs.
And that's sort of like hitting Iranian-backed Iraqi militias in Syria.
It's a little bit of a lesser demonstration to make the larger point.
Is that right?
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, you sort of remind all the audiences, whether they're in Moscow or whether they're in the Baltic capitals, you know, that we have this capability and we can do whatever we want.
And so that's sort of the bigger message.
But of course, again, the issue is, what do we hope this is going to accomplish?
Is this going to make the Russians back down and say, we're sorry, we didn't mean Ukraine and we're not going to, you know, we're not going to threaten you anymore?
Or will it drive this competition, military competition to the next level that we've seen?
And so far, at least in my view, there doesn't seem to be much other thinking behind these operations other than this is what we do.
You know, we deter, we strengthen deterrence, therefore we fly further, we go further, we deploy more, we go to more places.
So you know, it's very predictable what's going to happen next year or even this summer.
You're going to see more bombers going further places, maybe starting out of bases we haven't seen before.
So that's the plan.
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And also with that whole narrative, of course, and I'm not blaming you, it's just, it's how it goes.
They can never admit their role in starting the conflict in Ukraine and supporting the coup d'etat there, and even threatening to kick the Russians out of the Sevastopol Naval Base before the Russians then in reaction decided to seize the Crimean Peninsula.
And then the war in the East was the people of the East reaction to having their elected leader overthrown in a coup.
And then they were attacked by the new coup regime.
Americans were up to their eyeballs in all of this.
So instead their story is, well, what happened is Russia invaded Ukraine.
So now they're the aggressor.
And so now when we fly possibly capable someday again, nuclear bombers off of their borders, and that's just deterrence and containment and defensive measures against their aggression.
Well that's your take on it, but I'm not going to- I know.
And you know what?
I don't expect you to, but I'm saying it's a hell of a narrative when they can never admit their role at all.
You know?
Isn't it?
Well, it is one thing to invade a country militarily.
It's another win to sort of meddle in its internal affairs.
Agree.
Sure.
Two different things.
Although even then they didn't really invade, right?
They sent their special operations forces across the border to keep Kiev from conquering the Donbass, but they didn't invade, like take Odessa or even, they didn't even take the East when the East tried to join Russia.
Excuse me, military forces rolling across the border, taking up positions, arresting local people, holding down the country.
They have Crimea today.
It is invaded.
It is occupied.
Well, I thought we were talking about the East in the Donbass rather than Crimea.
That's kind of a different thing in a sense, but anyway, so I mean, but come on, you've heard us.
I'm sorry to go down this trail, but I was just, anyway, you've heard the phone call.
You know, the Victoria Nuland was busted two weeks before the coup saying, we're going to do a coup and F the EU because the Germans are taking too long.
And so we're going to go ahead and the vice president, Joe Biden and Robert Sary at the UN are going to help us do this.
And then Yatsenyuk is the guy that we want to be the new prime minister and we want Klitschko to stay out.
You've heard that phone call.
You know that the Americans were involved in, and again, I mean, I'm not saying you deny, you said, well, meddling is different than war, but still they precipitated that whole crisis and overthrowing an elected government there.
That was step one, right?
So again, that is your view.
I don't want to go down that path.
All right.
Let's talk more about airplanes.
How about in the Trump years, at the very end of last year, what, November, December, they were flying, was it B-52s, I think, over the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and how do you say the Oshkosh in the east there testing Russian defenses and that kind of deal.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So that's the, that's the play now that, you know, on both sides, they're busy, you know, operating their forces for several reasons.
One of course, is that everyone wants to, you know, develop their contingency plans and upgrade them, et cetera, et cetera, because we're now in the official military adversarial relationship again.
So all those wheels are turning.
But in addition to that, they also want to operate their forces.
So they, they turn on the light, so to speak, on the other sides, air defenses and glean information about what their capabilities are and how they plan to operate their forces, you know, if, if it came to a clash.
So there are a lot of objectives of flying these aircraft, but what's, what's very striking about the operations that have been happening on the NATO side, of course, is that those operations have gradually moved further east.
And there are more of them.
They're, you know, persistent.
They go up and down the border, very close to, to the Russian air defense systems, explicitly to be able to, you know, trigger them so you can learn from them.
And I was just watching this morning that, you know, a couple of, of intelligence aircraft were going back and forth on the northern and eastern side of Kaliningrad, whereas another larger intelligence aircraft came from Central Europe and took position south of the border.
So you suddenly had these, you know, three intelligence aircraft going up and down on the sides, constantly monitoring what's in there, looking in, whatever.
Explain Kaliningrad to the audience, would you please?
Oh, sorry.
Kaliningrad is this little isolated enclave that, that is in the corner of the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland.
It's sort of a, a chunk, a leftover of Eastern Europe, Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, that is still part of, of Russia today.
Whereas the Baltic states were, you know, liberated, obviously, and Poland was liberated.
That chunk is still part of Russia.
Which makes it a real important kind of potential flashpoint, right?
Right, exactly.
Because it's very heavily militarized, obviously, you know, for the purpose of defending an isolated chunk of territory that is completely surrounded by NATO territory.
So in a way, it is sort of like Russia's Berlin today, you know, just like NATO had Berlin back in the 1950s, that was inside East Germany and surrounded on all sides.
That's a great comparison, a really good one, an informative one.
And now, so let me click another tab here.
I got Air Force F-15 Eagles also training in the Baltic Sea and they are training on, if I understand this right, AGM-158 joint air to surface JASSM's missiles, which are nuclear capable missiles.
Is that correct?
No, they're not nuclear, they're conventional.
But it's nonetheless an important development because, you know, in the Cold War days, the only aircraft that could fire very long range precision weapons were strategic bombers.
Since the Gulf Wars, there has been a tremendous development of conventional firepower and as well as range of cruise missiles.
So now we're seeing this introduction of very long range, well over 1,000 kilometers, cruise missiles with pinpoint accuracy going not just on the bombers, the strategic bombers, and by the way, the B-1s are some of those that are equipped with them, but now also going on fighter bombers, shorter range fighter bombers.
They sort of become small strategic bombers, if you will, with these capabilities.
And this is a vast expansion of long range conventional air delivered firepower that's happening.
So we are talking about this stuff being integrated on all the bombers and on all the most important fighter jets in the arsenals.
And we're talking about 10,000 of these missiles planned to be produced over the next decade plus.
Crazy.
I'll invest in Lockheed now, everybody.
Well, so, I mean, for as long as we've got on this earth as a species here, now, so let me understand this right.
How difficult compared to a B-1?
How difficult is it to put a nuclear Tomahawk or whatever kind of cruise missile on the belly of a F-15?
Well, it's not.
I mean, it just involves, you know, the right pylons, the mechanical hookups, so to speak.
This is not a giant missile.
This is much smaller than a Tomahawk or an airline cruise missile.
I'm confusing because, I mean, this was sort of part of my question about the B-1s in the beginning then.
Yeah.
I mean, why not just fire off Tomahawk missiles?
How many minutes does it take to convert a B-1 to be able to hold a Tomahawk and use it?
What would it take?
You know, it would take, you know, maybe a year or two to do that.
You would have to send it through, you know, a new weapons integration program and run all that stuff.
I'm sorry.
I'm just so ignorant about this technology.
I'm so confused.
How come it's so much easier to fit an F-15 with a nuclear cruise missile than a B-1 bomber?
It's not a nuclear cruise missile, it's conventional.
But it is not easier.
Well, but a Tomahawk can be an H-bomb, right?
You can put an H-bomb on a Tomahawk cruise missile, can't you?
Or do I have no idea what I'm talking about today at all?
No, the Tomahawk used to be nuclear, but it has been denuclearized.
Today, it only exists as a conventional cruise missile.
I mean, the U.S. military, by and large, went out of the sort of tactical nuclear weapons business.
And the only, the only aircraft today that can shoot long-range nuclear cruise missiles is the B-52 bombers.
None of the others can do it.
And not even the Navy?
The Navy is completely out of the nuclear, tactical nuclear business.
Only the Navy's big strategic nuclear submarines that have nuclear, long-range nuclear missiles on them.
Right.
All other surface ships and attack submarines have lost their nuclear capability.
So everything, the priority today is conventional, long-range conventional precision strike.
And there's a good reason for why the military prioritizes that and wants that instead.
Because you can use that stuff.
You can't use a nuke.
And so, yeah, you can fly around with nukes and say, oh, I'm big and don't do anything.
But if it comes to it, you know, you can't use it because then you have World War III.
And so they want the conventional.
And so integrating this, not just on the strategic bombers, the conventional missiles on the strategic bombers, you know, the B-1 and B-1 can carry 24 of those cruise missiles.
So now they're integrating it on the F-15Es as well.
And we're going to see the F-16s get it.
We're going to see the F-18s on the carriers.
They're going to get an anti-ship version of it.
We're going to see the F-35, the new stealth fighter coming out, getting it.
So this is going to go everywhere.
And it's taken a while to incorporate it on the F-15.
But this mission we saw just a few weeks ago in the Baltic Sea was one of the first times they have, to my knowledge, exercised in an operational way that function of the F-15s with the JASM capability.
Right.
Okay.
Now, so here's the thing, though, you know, we talk on this show a lot about how our government is often frustrated because they can't really have a war against Iran, because even though it's not really a major power that threatens us, it's a pretty big bite to chew to try to take them on.
They have the ability to defend themselves in many ways.
Invading Persia with a land army is totally out of question.
And then even when it comes to air war, that they still have all these capabilities to kind of hit back.
And then so now I'm kind of trying to transplant that same sort of argument about now we're talking about planning and really preparing for a large scale conventional war, not with the Persians, but with the Russians who still have H-bombs and at some point would use nuclear weapons to defend themselves against a full scale conventional war.
If they thought that that was what it came to.
It sounds like I always say this, but it really just seems like this.
Everybody knows they have nukes.
It goes without saying that they have nukes.
But so it goes unsaid that they have nukes and they talk about this like they really think that they could fight and win a conventional war with Russia with just a bunch of nifty new cruise missiles without actually risking losing America's major population centers in the attempt.
Yeah, you're not supposed to say, yeah, you're supposed to tell me this is another thing I'm wrong about today, Hans, what?
Well, so, you know, there are so many wheels there that intertwine and, you know, one one element of it has to do with thinking about what would happen once you start using nukes and how will that happen?
Another one has to do with, you know, fine countries have nukes and they have large military forces, but countries also threaten each other and they move their forces around.
Neighbors feel threatened.
What do we do about it?
And so, you know how it is over the decades, you know, the Russians have, you know, armed themselves because they felt threatened.
We have armed ourselves because we felt threatened.
Everybody does this and everybody operates and upgrades their plans.
You know, it may not make a lot of sense and be, you know, dangerous and all that kind of stuff.
But but that's what's happening out there.
And so right now, when we officially are in a military adversarial relationship with the Russians, that means all the agencies start upgrading their plans, strengthening their capabilities, going on the hill to argue for more systems that could do more quicker, faster, better.
And so that's the wheel turning.
That's how it always is.
And so the same thing is happening on the Russian side.
You know, they're busy arguing for their modernization, deploying their systems, et cetera.
And the Baltic states are biting their nails because they see what's happening on the other side of the border, et cetera, et cetera.
Those those are the things unfolding every day.
None of that's going to change is only going to get worse unless there are officials, political leaders who say, wait a minute, this doesn't lead anywhere good.
What can we do to change it, to slow it down, to ease tension and to move us out of this predicament?
And that leadership in this country has to come from the White House.
If it doesn't come from there, you know, we're full speed ahead.
Yeah.
You know, even at the height of all of the Russiagate, everything you'd hear people like Dianne Feinstein and a couple of others of the elders of the Democrats in the Senate saying things like, well, you know, we do want to keep this nuclear treaty and stuff.
And, you know, all this hawkish kind of propaganda and political positioning aside, we don't really want to come into conflict with the Russians.
We have made so much progress in scaling down tensions.
Why just certainly not at the cost of these treaties.
Do we want to ramp up this rhetoric?
And yet they did.
Right.
It was only because Trump lost the election that New Start was saved.
Otherwise, we might be in a full scale, which we kind of already are.
But we'd be in an even worse arms race right now without without New Start or anything to replace it either.
Right.
Yeah.
I could say at least this new administration is officially committed not only to extending that treaty, which happened, but also to seek other arms control agreements and limits on, you know, nuclear capabilities.
We'll see if that happens.
But there's a much broader issue here that also has to be addressed.
Nuclear forces don't exist in isolation.
You know, countries resort to nuclear capabilities for a number of reasons, some of which are about military, the sense of military vulnerability, ultimate security, these types of thoughts, but also national prestige, other things.
So so that's one element of it.
But of course, they're shaped also by the way we and the Russians operate and the Chinese operate general military forces and how we built those capabilities.
To what extent do they deter adequately?
And to what extent do they go over the top and become more threatening?
So threatening that they actually deepen the commitment on the other side to holding on to nukes and modernizing nukes and modernizing their military capabilities, et cetera.
That is the dilemma we always have, how to avoid this sort of what some people call prudent defense plan from going overboard and becoming so provocative and aggressive that it makes things worse.
And I think that's that's a situation we are in both on our side of the European border, but also there in the on the Russian side of the border.
It's an issue the Chinese have to deal with as well.
All major powers have to stop and think about this.
And if they don't, well, guess where are we going to go?
It's no surprise.
We spent 40 years trying to get out of the Cold War.
Yeah.
Or or having fun, relishing having one, depending on which role you played in that thing.
So tell me this in the last few minutes here.
We got five minutes actually still.
Can you tell us about the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons?
Yeah.
So a couple of years ago, a number of countries that were part of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the NPT treaty, started getting together and said, you know, we don't think there's enough progress on on sort of the important principles in that treaty and commitments in that treaty to nuclear disarmament.
So we want we want to take some extra action.
They got together and they drew up a treaty that was adopted by a large majority in the United Nations.
And so many countries are sufficient.
A number of countries have signed on to this treaty and ratified it that had actually entered into force or into effect here earlier this year.
The nuclear weapon states hate this treaty because it challenges them to give up their nuclear weapons, of course, but also because they argue that you're doing it the wrong way.
You can't just give up nuclear weapons.
You have to go through a step by step process.
And that step by step process is the NPT regime, the way we've been doing it for 40 years.
And these countries are saying, well, duh, we're doing this because we haven't seen enough progress under that.
You know, so this is with us now, this treaty.
Countries are pushing for it.
More is going to sign on to it.
But of course, the treaty itself will not dismantle a single nuclear weapon unless nuclear weapon states decide to join it.
And so far, there's no indication that they want to join it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, what we need is the entire mass movement of the seven billion humans to insist that obviously, first of all, all the non nuclear weapons state join.
And then it's all of humanity versus what, eight states that hold these machines that can kill entire cities with one shot.
And then it's up to the rest of us then to end it.
And isn't it right that in the NPT, that the U.S. and the rest of the nuclear weapon states, well, that signed it.
So not Israel, India or Pakistan, or I guess North Korea now.
But they were in the NPT, North Korea.
But for the rest of the nuclear weapon states like France and Britain and Russia and China, we've all promised to get rid of these nukes right in the NPT before this one.
Yeah, that was always the ultimate promise, so to speak, in that that in return for non nuclear countries promising not to develop nuclear weapons or acquire nuclear weapons in return for that, we promised that we, the nuclear weapon states, would negotiate in good faith about the elimination of nuclear weapons.
But it was also talked about in the context of general and complete disarmament, general and complete disarmament.
So not just nuclear.
And therefore, what we're seeing right now is that some of the nuclear weapon states are beginning to say, yeah, but wait a minute.
This is not just our responsibility, it's also your responsibility to help create the world that makes it possible to get rid of nuclear weapons.
So that's the that's the kind of argument we're in right now.
All right.
So, you know, I just talked with the great Peter Van Buren, former State Department official and very wise thinker about this stuff.
And he really likes how there never was a nuclear war this whole time and that everybody knows that they can't fight.
They're not going to use.
We can bluster and bluff against China and Russia all day and vice versa if you want to see it that way.
But nobody's going to do the thing.
And I says, well, but yeah, if it does happen, the problem is it's a really severe consequence.
And the risk of escalation into general nuclear war and the, you know, the decimation of the northern hemisphere at a minimum, this kind of thing is within the realm of possibility makes it, you know, kind of just as risky for other reasons or more risky for other reasons.
Even if the game theory equation makes perfect sense, that, of course, we could never fight, you know, that the cooler heads always prevail.
But I wonder what you think about all that, like where you fall on that spectrum of the level of emergency for humanity here with these machines sitting around.
Well, I think the reason people throughout the decades have been so obsessed with nuclear weapons is for the obvious reasons that they're enormously dangerous instruments and people are afraid of them.
And this is not just about, you know, left wing activists running around the streets and screaming.
This is also about career government officials, even military officials.
Sometimes you can argue that even people that are in the military nuclear planning are some of those that have the most respect for nuclear weapons because they know what can happen if you use them.
So I think it's sort of a, you know, people just come to very different solutions about this.
You know, if you're concerned about nuclear weapons, some people end up in one bucket where people say, well, let's get rid of them all quickly.
Other people end up in another bucket that says, yeah, but that's exactly why we need them.
So nobody will use them.
So the concern leads to these two very polarized forms of solutions.
One is to get rid of them and the other one is sort of hold on to them.
That's kind of bizarre.
Yeah.
And I'm of two minds myself.
Right.
I'm kind of saying, you know what?
For all the hype, I don't really care if the Ayatollah gets an atom bomb.
What if Putin gave him a couple of atom bombs to keep the Americans out?
I don't think he's going to use them.
Even Benjamin Netanyahu told Jeffrey Goldberg that he doesn't think that the Iranians would hit Israel in a first strike or something like that.
Of course they wouldn't.
Even Mao Zedong, who was a raving lunatic, he didn't go throwing atom bombs at people.
And so they seem to make responsible gun owners out of politicians in a sense.
Right.
And they have kept, as the neocons say, they've kept the peace for 75 years.
Never mind Korea and Vietnam and those little things.
But between the major powers, we haven't had these catastrophic world wars anymore because of them.
So that makes a lot of sense.
But then again, on the other hand, yeah, boy, once you start losing cities and mutually assured destruction fails, then you kind of wish that we'd come up with a better plan.
Well, I hope smoldering ruins is not the only measure by which we think about whether nuclear weapons have worked or not.
There's another element that has to do with the way they color and affect international affairs and threat perceptions, et cetera, et cetera.
So I think there's a lot to be said about, you know, my concern personally is not that some owner of nuclear weapons one day is going to wake up and say, let's go bomb someone.
That's not my problem.
My problem is that when you have them and they're integrated into your military strategies, if you get into a fight that starts, of course, conventionally, you very quickly start moving in directions where you could escalate.
You could need to escalate.
And once that happens, all these theories fly out the window.
Absolutely.
And all these reassurances, they fall pretty fast.
And so that's my concern, that we think we know what's happening, but we cannot predict what it's all these pathways to potential use.
And imagine you're in charge and your aides tell you there are nukes headed this way right now, sir.
Imagine the fear and the mindset that now a president is in, a national security advisor is in.
How certain are you?
Well, show me that computer readout.
Who launched them?
Why?
What?
When?
Whether to launch H-bombs?
I mean, this is crazy that we have it set up like this.
The ultimate Mexican standard.
Is it Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd where they just get bigger and bigger guns until it's the whole world?
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
One more.
No, I just thought that's a good analogy.
I mean, people who make cartoons sometimes really get it.
They see how absurd it is.
But I think that the bottom line here is that whatever we believe in, we have to make sure that we don't end up starting operations and programs and policies that back us up in a corner where all we depend on is rattling the swords and in each other's faces even more.
We have to have sane policies that try to turn down the heat and make policies safer and posture safer so we do not have these incidents and accidents that lead to use of nuclear weapons.
Right.
Okay.
Thank you so much for your time, Hans.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Great.
Thanks for your call.
Really appreciate it.
Okay, guys, that is Hans M. Christensen.
He is at the Federation for American Scientists.
He is their director of the Nuclear Information Project.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
