03/31/16 – Greg Mello – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, Scott Horton Show, I'm him, scotthorton.org, etc., like that.
Introducing Greg Mello.
He is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group and an expert on nuclear weapons.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Greg?
Good morning, Scott.
I'm fine.
Good.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
So tell me, they're holding a nuclear security summit.
That must be a big party where they celebrate spending trillions of dollars more on nuclear weapons.
Is that right?
Yeah.
No, it's an international confab with world leaders gathered to talk about nuclear terrorism mostly with side conversations on issues of mutual interest.
But still alcohol and strippers and stuff though.
Yeah.
Right.
So it is kind of a party, but where they pretend to be concerned about nukes rather than just in the nuclear weapons business.
I see.
Yeah.
Something like that.
And well, as far as that goes, how much of a problem are the so-called loose nukes?
Are there really any loose nukes from the old USSR or is it really much of a danger you think that a kook like Ayman al-Zawahiri could get his hands on the ability to split some atoms?
Well, I don't think there are any loose nuclear weapons.
There is, I think probably one of the bigger concerns is U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.
There's activists broke into a nuclear weapons bunker in Belgium, for example, and just kind of sat there, took videos and the, because no one wants to really invest in the security of those nuclear weapons because that's very expensive.
And Belgium has issues of integrity of the state and so forth, as we all do.
But maybe a little more in Belgium.
So no, nuclear weapons.
I don't think that there's a big risk of nuclear weapons per se running loose.
There could be a higher risk for nuclear sources like are used for hospital sterilization or for geological disposal.
It could become a dirty bomb.
Or then there's nuclear power plants, which I'm scanning over the material produced by the administration.
I see that they're kind of downplaying that risk.
But in fact, all nuclear power plants are vulnerable to insider risks.
And the spent fuel pools are extremely dangerous.
So they're, you know, nuclear technologies as a whole have inherent problems, especially where there's a huge amount of nuclear material gathered in one place.
You need hundreds of people to operate them.
It's difficult to vet everyone perfectly.
Well, you know, I think it occurred to a lot of people after September 11th that if they hadn't decided on symbolic targets like the towers and the Pentagon and I guess the White House or the Capitol, whichever the fourth plane was meant to hit.
And they had all just decided to suicide bomb those planes into nuclear reactors around the country, all of which are available on Google Maps or I guess at that time on your Maps Go map that they certainly could have done a hell of a lot of damage.
They're all just wide open targets from the air as far as that goes.
Right.
Yes.
There was a debate after that after 9-11 and before about whether commercial aircraft would penetrate the containment domes at these reactors.
But I think that the answer is that they would.
The shafts of jet engines are very heavy, strong objects, and they would penetrate.
Well, and even the fuselage of the plane, even though it's well, and I don't know how thick of concrete we're really talking about here, but even though it's aluminum, still aluminum, pretty thick and going hundreds and hundreds of miles an hour and not just a leading edge like a plane, but the fuselage keeps coming and coming and coming.
So yeah, you see it do more and more damage, you know, as it crashes, that kind of deal instead of just squinching up like a cigarette butt.
And we've learned, I think, if we didn't know before from Fukushima, that loss of power, loss of control of various systems at the nuclear power plants can lead to catastrophic meltdowns.
All right, now, I'm no nuclear physicist, but I'm friends with one.
And his expertise, Gordon Prather, his expertise was making H-bombs.
And so this wasn't his area of expertise.
But I've heard him used to me before that.
It seems kind of a mystery that in the 2000 teens that we can't just go somehow from nuclear energy straight to electricity and skip the heat and the steam and all that at this point.
Work along those lines had been done for so long and whatever.
And, you know, I remember him kind of remarking that he thought all these nuclear reactors seemed really primitive and that, you know, things could be done in a way that does not require this much dangerous waste, et cetera, et cetera.
What do you think of that?
Well, it's a it's a positive dream, you might say, but it is still just that.
There isn't any way to produce large scale nuclear electricity without heat and waste and nuclear fuel cycle, which is vulnerable to proliferation and all the rest.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, as we saw with the Fukushima thing, the the fact that they even have nuclear reactors in a place like Japan on the ring of fire is just, you know, how bad does the average nuclear plant have to be shaken for, you know, as you said, major systems to fail, which is enough.
Right.
I think that some of the workers in Fukushima unit number one, before they saw the plant failing and were told to get out before the tsunami hit just because of the earthquake, because pipes were off the walls and systems were failing.
So it's, you know, it's it's it's an error prone technology and it's very and to prevent those problems is very expensive.
So, you know, you if you don't get it one way, you get it another way.
It's a problem.
Yeah.
All right.
So now back to the weapons, because that's the real big deal here.
I actually just saw recently the documentary, The Man Who Saved the World, where the the Soviet officer who refused to believe his computer that warned that America had launched a first strike back in was it 1981, I guess, whatever.
But they show him on a tour of the Minuteman missile silos in, I guess, North Dakota or South Dakota or something.
And he's explaining, oh, the tour guide is explaining that the Minuteman missiles that they had there, I think he said a megaton, one megaton, that that was as much as all of the bombs dropped or more.
That was oh, I know what it was.
That was a 40 percent more than all the bombs dropped in World War Two combined, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes, that that's how much a megaton is that we're talking about when when Hiroshima was 10 kilotons.
We know that the United States has thousands and thousands and thousands of these things, these H-bombs that are in the megaton range, and it's been reported here and there.
I don't know the exact expert source on it, but I've read this repeatedly from time to time about how the bureaucracy between the missile launch department, the submarines under the control of the Navy, the air bombers, how they all claim priority over the different targets to where I was just reading recently there is a radar station or some small command headquarters in the suburbs of Moscow that's on the list to be nuked 67 times or something like that in a row because of all the different nuke agencies angling for their shot to whatever it was.
This kind of thing, that sounds like it couldn't possibly be true, seems to kind of really be true.
What you said about the security in Belgium, it's not in anybody's interest to pay too much mind to it, they don't think, and it sort of seems like the same thing with our entire nuclear weapons policy.
We got hardcore critics like you and the Quakers and then crickets.
Right?
I mean, is anybody trying to undo this stuff at all?
Well there are, and let's go back through this.
So the situation you described about the size of the warheads and the number of warheads on the target, that was more characteristic of the Cold War.
But if we were to divide, let's say divide that ICBM yield by let's say half or a third, it really doesn't change much.
And take that 67 warheads on a target, then divide that by something, it doesn't change that.
We have thousands of nuclear weapons ready to launch.
We have about 7,000 intact nuclear weapons in the stockpile and in a dismantlement queue, which is moving very slowly and which the administration does dip into and exchanges weapons back and forth.
So the question of how real is that dismantlement queue is also with us.
The Russians are about the same.
So there hasn't been, in terms of the effects of nuclear weapons, there hasn't been that much change because if nuclear weapons are detonated, it only takes a few to destroy a country.
It only takes a few hundred, let's say, to create a nuclear winter, which is universally fatal.
So, I mean, we're way over the universally fatal threshold.
Our war plans are basically all just suicidal.
So in terms of effects, nothing has changed.
There are critics in the arms control community, very smart people, who would like to trim the aggressiveness of the massive modernization plan that we have now in place.
And I think that should be supported and mentioned.
So for example, the United States is planning to build more than 1,000 stealthy nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in the 2020, against which there is no defense, no realistic defense.
And the military's really thrilled about this.
They think this is the greatest thing.
Now, of course, that just means that there'll be more offense.
So we're back, really, at the end of Obama's presidency, we're back in a major arms race.
This country's planning to spend more than a trillion dollars on nuclear modernization, which means upgrading, designing and building new kinds of warheads, new kinds of weapons.
It just came out this week that an old Reagan idea for moving ICBMs around is now the preferred option of this administration.
So we're back, in some ways, we're back in the Reagan era, because the president and his people seem unable to provide any kind of leadership in this field.
Or all too much leadership in the wrong direction, anyway.
Yeah, there we go.
And now, so here's the thing, too, though, about, and this is kind of confusing to me, when something is so obvious to me that I just can't believe that this is the policy.
And yet, it's every day, one way or the other, one subject or another.
You put nuclear warheads on cruise missiles.
That means anytime you launch a cruise missile at anyone, their military command is more likely than not to go ahead and bet that that missile, more likely than not, is a nuke.
And then these same people are the same ones who just a couple of years ago, and maybe they're still following through with this, were talking about, hey, I know, let's put conventional bombs on three-stage intercontinental ballistic missiles, which, again, same thing again.
All we were doing was launching a 500-pound bomb to kill one family.
And oops, we got Los Angeles nuked, because our adversaries thought we were coming at them with an H-bomb.
This is a very important point you raised there, and it has been raised by former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who used to be a big cruise missile fan, Andrew Weber, who was a top official in the Pentagon under Obama, until the neocons maneuvered to get him fired forward.
And he was blocking this missile, and now he's not.
So it's going forward, and this ambiguity is absolutely nuts.
It is really nuts.
And it shows the nuclear warfighting mentality, which has crept back into the Pentagon, into the STRATCOM, and, of course, into the weapons laboratories, where probably never left, which is something that, by the end of the Cold War, there was a reluctant admission that, you know, we just can't fight a nuclear war.
But now it's back.
Absolutely crazy.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't I just read a quote from Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense, saying just that, in completely unembarrassed terms, that, you know, yeah, with these dial-the-yield tactical nuclear weapons, it makes them much more usable.
And it wasn't a warning.
It was a sales pitch, I think.
Yes, that's right.
You did read that.
I can't remember where, but I'm pretty sure you did read it.
Jesus.
I mean, yeah, it was just a couple of days ago, and I thought, well, he must be putting on his pretend gray beard for a second, and he's warning us about what we're doing, right?
No, apparently not.
No.
Because the theory is, you know, the nutball theory, straight from Dr. Strangelove, is that for the deterrent to be credible, it has to be usable.
So the more we talk about the usability of nuclear weapons and the practicality of conducting nuclear war, then the safer we are, right?
I guess so.
Hey, you know what, as long as I have you here, let me ask you, well, I've got a couple more things, if you've got time.
First of all, could you just teach us a little bit about how the nuclear weapons lobby works?
Because, you know, I've been interested in the economics of politics and the special interests and how they get their ways, no matter which special interests we're talking about, for a very long time.
And yet, it's still, I had this magical thinking about nuclear weapons, that this is really a demand-oriented business, and that when the government needs nukes, they go to the nuke makers and get them.
But the idea that this is really a supply-side industry, just like Lockheed with the fighter jets, that you have people basically pushing, you know, people in private industry, and I guess in the government, pushing nukes on the military more than they even want them necessarily.
And this kind of thing, just as you would have with any other special interest lobby, it just never occurred to me that it could really be that way when we're talking about H-bombs.
And yet, I think I've been disappointed to learn that I was really naive.
Well, I think you described it pretty well.
And any of us can only see part of this big elephant, but here it goes.
The nuclear weapons business is almost completely privatized.
So there are commercial interests, and then there are ideologues, and they are located in the military now, as well as in Congress and in what you might call the deep state, the graybeards, which are very influential in think tanks and as individuals and on boards of corporations.
Then there are commercial interests.
So the Department of Energy, for example, that makes the warheads, they have a subsidiary called the National Nuclear Security Administration that actually is the part of DOE that makes the warheads.
It's about 97% privatized.
So companies like Bechtel, B&W, I guess BWXT, whichever, or B&W, I guess, again, they changed their names.
AECOM, URS, University of California, they are all involved, Fluor Corporation, Lockheed Martin.
They're all involved in this business, and they form a kind of cabal.
Another feature is that they put their staff people into place inside Congress and inside executive agencies.
Sometimes they're on change of station assignments, so they're actually being paid by Bechtel, let's say, and they're making policy in the Department of Energy or in the Pentagon.
Or they may be sort of laundered after they leave, say, a weapons laboratory, and they get set out for six months or whatever the required amount of time is, and then they appear in a new guise as a senior staff member of the House Armed Services Committee.
And there they play an outsized role in determining policy because the members are extremely busy raising money and so forth, so the staff really do most of the thinking.
It is an enterprise.
It has its ideological and its economic and its political component.
The political component is oriented around pork barrel politics.
Our state, and here in New Mexico, conceives of itself as a dependent, a vassal state which requires its senators to promote nuclear weapons at every opportunity.
Yeah, it's really something else.
And of course, why would it be any other way?
How could it possibly be any other way?
It only takes the, you know, you just have to stop and consider it for a minute that of course that's got to be how it is.
Just the same as, you know, the company with the contract to sell tube socks to the Pentagon.
They got millions of dollars at stake.
Think they're not going to spend thousands lobbying to make sure they keep their millions?
You know, same with anything.
So yeah, same with the H-bombs.
Makes perfect sense.
As insane as it sounds.
But now, so what about the Nonproliferation Treaty, which the Senate ratified and which says we promise to get rid of our nukes?
Is that just completely a dead letter at this point?
Well, yeah, it is as you just described Article 6 of the treaty, which yes, we did ratify and it is part of the highest law of the land, and we don't pay any attention to it.
We have to pay, I guess, international gatherings, we have to make some kind of noise about our future, distant future ambitions to get rid of nuclear weapons.
But it's all just smoke.
Meanwhile, we're blocking every possible avenue that would lead to that.
And yeah, so the NPT has the US and other nuclear weapon states have created a lot of tension in the nonproliferation community by this type of hypocrisy.
And we seem comfortable with a kind of nuclear apartheid world.
And it's not comfortable to everybody, certainly not in the Middle East, because of Israel's nuclear arsenal, especially.
And it leads to a lot, some countries have decided that North Korea, for example, that they will be safer with nuclear weapons than without.
So no, it's not a stable situation.
Hey, it just came up in my last interview, that Andrew Coburn had written this great piece for Harper's called Game On.
And it was about how all the military industrial complex types in DC were celebrating the advent of the new Cold War with Russia that Obama's helped gin up here.
And I was just wondering if you hear talk like that in New Mexico, where people are really excited about the brave new future where we get to, you know, make even more weapons.
Did you hear about the bad news about our relationship with Russia?
Because I like stuff like that, you know, the out of the mounds of babes kind of thing.
I haven't personally heard that sort of talk in its baldest form.
But there, every time there is discussion of more money, and sometimes that is connected with renewed, let's say, there's the obligatory bashing of Russia and Putin to justify it.
There's rejoicing, yes, more money for the labs, more money for the Air Force.
We have to have this because of Russian aggression.
And definitely, there's a triumphalist, you know, our lobbying will be more successful now.
That's the sort of tone of it.
And it is extremely deplorable, as much as it is completely false as far as the demonization goes.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, that's the whole last interview there.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
Was there anything important about the Nuclear Security Summit that I should ask you that I didn't get around to?
Oh, gosh, well, perhaps only this that, you know, that the US government has its purposes in hosting the summit.
And some of them are good, you know, and some of them are hidden.
Maybe good.
Maybe it's good to talk to, between Obama and Erdogan of Turkey.
Maybe that's just an absolute good, and maybe they need a cover of a Nuclear Security Summit to have that conversation.
But what is particularly hard to swallow is that the US NGO and nonprofit community has allowed itself to be engineered into a kind of cheering section that is not asking difficult questions and not holding the administration to account, or is doing so only to a minor degree and at a very late date.
And so it's ineffectual.
We are not making progress on these issues, in part because the community of dissent, which used to be vibrant, is now more and more composed of what has been called excellent sheep.
And so the public does not see dissent, and nobody – it's very difficult, except places like your show – to punch through the layers of dissembling.
All right, Shaul.
That is Greg Mello.
You can find him at lasg.org.
That's the Los Alamos Study Group, lasg.org, boy, which proves you guys got that URL way back in the day when URLs were a brand new thing, lasg.org.
That's great.
Expert on nukes and opponent of them.
Thanks very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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