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Introducing our friend Con Hallinan again from foreign policy in focus and his own blog is dispatches from the edge blog.wordpress.com and uh, yeah, he writes this great stuff for FPIF, which means we rerun all of it at antiwar.com including this one last week.
These nuclear breakthroughs are endangering the world and what a great job you did on this one.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing con?
I'm fine, Scott.
Yeah.
Scary stuff.
You're completely freaking me out here.
All right.
So as, uh, Ali Sufan's morning email says, he always seems to miss the bottom line.
Anyway, you got the bottom line in here.
Uh, so let's talk about it.
You say mutually assured destruction was never the policy.
Now the policy has always been first strike.
It's just that now they can actually get away with it.
At least they think exactly.
And this started in, in 2009, uh, the Obama administration, uh, you know, sort of presented it as what they were going to do is that they were going to, uh, modernize the warheads and make sure that they would work and all of that kind of stuff.
And, uh, there was a, it was a bad idea to begin with, but what they didn't tell people they were doing was that they were creating this new, what they call superfuse.
And what it allows for is it allows for a smaller warhead fired from a submarine to be able to take out a hardened missile silo.
Now, the way that nuclear war has traditionally worked is that land-based land-based missiles, ICBMs are, are much more accurate, um, than sea-based ICBMs, but, um, they're also more vulnerable because they're, they're stable.
Everybody knows where they are.
And so they've always been considered, um, you know, a little iffy kind of thing, but, but you always had a backup, which was your submarines and submarines weren't terribly accurate.
Um, but they weren't supposed to be, cause they were not designed to take out other nuclear weapons.
They were designed to retaliate and destroy cities or destroy military formations or whatever.
But with this new superfuse, they now have the ability for a submarine to, um, take out hardened ICBM silos in a first strike.
And, uh, you know, people keep in mind that, uh, if you take a, a Ohio class submarine, um, which carries 24 Trident II missiles, that means 192 warheads.
And the warheads have an explosive force of anywhere from 100 to about 475 kilotons.
And again, keeping in mind that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons and the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki was about 18 kilotons.
So these are enormously powerful weapons.
And, um, the, the, uh, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put together an article by these three guys who are really experts on this, and they sort of put out a warning saying that all of a sudden, if it's possible to, to actually, uh, contemplate fighting and winning a nuclear war, in fact, what they said explicitly was that the new changes were quote exactly what one would expect to see if a nuclear armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike unquote.
And, you know, this is at a time of rising tension, uh, between the Russians and, and NATO and certainly rising tensions in, in the far East with, uh, with China.
So, uh, you know, they're putting out a warning, nobody's picking it up.
And, um, it's really disturbing.
You know, these are things people kind of steer away from the subject of nuclear war because they can't really imagine it.
It, I think that's, that's a, one of the real disadvantages of nuclear war.
Nuclear weapons are, are either so destructive people say, oh no, they'd never use them or they don't really understand how destructive they are.
And uh, so, you know, there's the Indians and Pakistanis are constantly threatening one another.
Um, and the possibility of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan is, is a real possibility.
What people don't necessarily understand is that if there were such a war that would have worldwide consequences, you would produce enough smoke that you would shut off sunlight so that you couldn't grow wheat in Russia and Canada.
Um, you'd also deeply affect the, uh, Asian monsoon.
They figure that approximately a hundred, a hundred million people would probably starve to death as a result of a war between India and Pakistan, a war between the United States and Russia or China with vastly larger weapons.
Um, you know, there's no way to really contemplate, uh, what that would mean.
Uh, and Hey, at least a few hundred million humans would survive probably Probably You know, underground somewhere in Australia, out back somewhere.
Well, you know, they're, they're moving to New Zealand.
There's a, there's, there's this big movement in the last year of billionaires buying up land in New Zealand and 15% of them are Americans and they're, they're literally thinking in terms of survival, Scott, that's, that's what they're thinking.
Not that they should spend any of that money trying to roll back the empire or anything like that.
Anyway.
All right.
So wait, there's so many follow up questions here already to talk about, and then we can go on about it, even more stuff.
But so first of all, tell me exactly what the heck is a superfuse?
This means, I guess you're saying it means that they can set off the nuke closer to the target.
That's what it is.
And what it does, what it does is it doesn't make the missile more accurate because the problem with, uh, submarine missiles is that when you're on land, you know exactly where you are.
Well, if you know exactly where you are, then it's easy to figure a trajectory, to drop a weapon exactly where you want it to hit.
But when you're in the ocean, uh, you're never quite certain where you are.
And even though it, you know, if you're, you're, you're knocking out a city, it doesn't make any difference if you're four blocks off, um, you know, the city's gone.
But if you're knocking out a silo, uh, you, you really need to cut, you really need to be right on target because you have to be able to produce at least an explosion of 10,000 pounds per square inch in order to knock out a reinforced silo.
What these new superfuses do is that they allow you to be much more precise exactly where you're going to detonate the weapon.
And what it does is this, I mean, there are two basic warheads in the, in, in the U S arsenal, the W 76 and the W 88.
The W 76 is the most common and it's a hundred kilotons, uh, and the W 88 is much bigger.
It's about 475 kilotons until they developed the super feet fuse, uh, knocking out a reinforced silos was the job of the W 88, but they don't have that many of them.
They have lots of W 76 is with the new superfuse, the W 76 can knock out a reinforced silo, which means what you're saying then is under the, the balance of these missiles, uh, or the, these kinds of, uh, nuclear warheads as determined by these previous treaties had maintained a certain level of balance between us and Russia.
But now it's just because of the increased accuracy.
Now we can devote all the lower yield nukes to taking out those silos, which means we have all these higher yield nukes to hold in reserve as you write in your article so that then the theory would be we can hit virtually all of their silos, maybe with a few left over, but then we can say, ah, ha ha, we still have thousands of high yield multi mega ton H bombs to hold over all your cities.
If you even dare to think about retaliating, don't even try it or else it'll be, will it completely erase what's left of your civilization?
Exactly.
In other words, they, uh, with the super fuse, you could knock out almost all of the Chinese and Russian missiles, uh, missile silos, um, and still retain 80% of your nuclear weapons, 80% of them.
And, and so therefore, as you said, you said it perfectly, which is you say, okay, you want to retaliate?
We still have 80% of our nukes.
Exactly.
And, and it, it, it's, you know, it's scary because one of the things that putting these very accurate missiles now on submarines is that submarines can get a lot closer to, you know, to your shoreline.
In other words, if you're firing a, say a minute man, three missile from Kansas, um, goes over the pole, um, and strikes, uh, the Russians are over the pole and, and strikes, uh, China.
Well, you got about, uh, about takes about 30 minutes for, uh, a, uh, a weapon to do that.
But if you have, uh, a minute man two, uh, uh, on a, uh, on a trident, a missile or, uh, excuse me, a trident missile on a, on a, uh, on a submarine, you can get within, you know, 50 miles, a hundred miles of, of somebody's shoreline and boom, um, they've got 10 minutes, 15 minutes at the most to decide, uh, whether or not they're under attack.
And the other thing I think that, that, that's a little scary here is that there really is a technological gap between, uh, the United States and the Russians.
The US has very sophisticated space-based sensors and they can pick up, uh, a missile launch anywhere in, in the world and track it and make a decision.
Is this real?
Is this the real thing?
Uh, where's it going, et cetera, that the Russians don't have a very sophisticated space-based sensor system.
What they've done is they built a big sensor system on land problem with bail on land is you don't have over the horizon ability.
So you only have like 15 minutes to figure out whether or not somebody is starting a nuclear war.
That doesn't give you a lot of time to check on things.
And, and this came up because, um, um, about a decade ago, the, uh, Russian suddenly went to full alert and there was a lot of puzzlement in, in, in the West.
What was going on?
Was it just a test?
What happened was that the Norwegians fired a missile that was headed, not for Russia, but it was headed over the, the North pole.
Um, it was a, um, uh, a weather missile, but the Russians on the ground couldn't determine exactly where it was headed.
And what they saw, what they thought was they thought a minute man too, was coming in at high altitude.
And one of the, one of the kind of, uh, strategies for nuclear war for a first strike nuclear war is that instead of launching a vast number of missiles, what you do is you take one missile and you detonate it, um, at about 800 miles high over, uh, a country that produces a huge electromagnetic radiation pulse.
And that goes down and it just fries all of your rate, fries, everything fries, all your cars.
It fries all your ambulances that fry all your hospitals.
I mean, it just, it, the electromagnetic radiation just absolutely blows anything which is not protected away.
And nobody's been able to really develop really good protection against all electromagnetic pulses.
Well, I got to push back a little bit there though, because, uh, you know, my friend Gordon Prather is a nuclear weapons scientist, um, from back when, and he says, in order to do that, you need neutron bombs, enhanced radiation, uh, uh, H-bombs basically with real thin shells on them.
So most of their energy is reduced, is released as radiation instead of as heat.
And that it's actually not that effective, which doesn't negate what you're saying about the Russians would fear such a thing, but that wouldn't be an effective way of launching any kind of attack.
And we hear this kind of scaremongering about North Korea and Iran all the time, of course, about the dangers of the EMP pulse and all that, but really only America has neutron bombs capable of producing such an effect anyway.
Well, the Americans actually have an EMP bomb that's not a nuclear weapon.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, they're really made for missile defense is what they're made for taking out incoming nukes coming over the pole.
Right.
But if you detonated a hydrogen bomb at 800 miles over Russia, you would do a lot of damage.
Well, one bomb, I mean, you know, wouldn't take everything out.
But, you know, 800 miles, I mean, they're, you know, they're quite surprised by how effective those electromagnetic pulses are.
In any case, one of the problems here is that the other side doesn't know what you're up to.
And one of the things that's happened is that the Obama administration has been deploying anti-missile systems in Poland and Romania.
And there's also a plan to to produce anti-missile systems aboard ships, the Aegis system.
By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but can you please be more detailed about the status of that?
Because I thought that Obama had backed down.
This is the famous hot mic moment when he told Medvedev, just let me get reelected and we'll chill that out.
Yeah, no, they're they're there.
They actually are deployed now in Poland and Romania.
And we say it's it's for the Iranians.
Well, the Iranians don't have a rocket that can that can get there, be they don't have nuclear weapons.
And it's the same thing why the Chinese and the Russians are upset about the FAD system that's being set up in South Korea, because they see it not directed at North Korea, but that the radar system is directed at them.
And so they're very, very unhappy.
They're what they're worried about is this.
And they're saying that this is what's going to happen.
What they're worried about is you put up these anti-missile systems.
The Obama administration could have gone back and re-signed the anti-ballistic missile treaty that the Bush administration withdrew from in 2002, but they didn't do that.
So the idea behind the anti-missile system, at least the paranoia, if you're if someone's setting up an anti-missile system, is that somebody launches a first strike at you.
They don't get everything.
You launch a counter-strike, but it's obviously an enfeebled counter-strike because most of your missiles have been destroyed.
You launch this counter-strike, and you have an anti-missile system, which picks up the few missiles that you're able to get in the air.
Now, between us, you know, the most famous thing about anti-missile systems is they can't hit the side of a barn, and in general, they can't.
Certainly, the systems that we have deployed in Alaska and San Diego and stuff, I wouldn't depend on them to do much of anything.
But can an opponent, a potential enemy, take that chance?
So from the point of view of the Chinese and the point of view of the Russians, they see the United States developing the ability to launch a first strike and increase the number of anti-missile systems that are going up.
The most logical response to that, if you're the Chinese or the Russians, is to hell with nuclear treaties.
We're just going to build a whole lot more rockets and a whole lot more warheads, and you won't be able to get them all.
And so I think what this does is that it's going to ignite a nuclear arms race.
We have already ignited a nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan.
I want to hear Trump tell it.
He says, look, the Russians are embarking on improving all of their nuclear weapons.
We have to keep up with them.
Yes, yes, yes.
He's just defending the policy he inherited from Barack Obama, of course.
Right.
And it's really in place at this point.
What's not in place is that there's an infrastructure aspect to it that's not been put in place, and that is they've modernized the—basically everything's armed now with the superfuse.
What they're also contemplating is building up the infrastructure, which means more aircraft carriers, more missile-firing cruisers, destroyers, submarines, et cetera.
Now, that part, that's where the trillion dollars comes in.
That's what's—if they do that, it's going to cost a trillion-plus dollars to do it, and it will probably take another 10, 15 years.
Right now, Con, I've got to say, you know, ultimate nuclear holocaust aside, because people don't believe in it.
As you said, it's unthinkable, so it's unimaginable, and after all, it hasn't happened yet, except two times.
But anyway, so out of sight, out of mind with all that end-of-humanity stuff.
But what about just the waste of all of these most brilliant people who can figure out how to split atoms and put them back together again and all this crazy stuff, wasted on ultimate specious side here, when what—just think of the lost opportunity costs.
As Frederic Bastiat would say, we see this, but what's unseen is what these people could be producing in terms of goods and services if they had to get real jobs.
They could be saving humanity.
You know, there's still like one-tenth of humanity goes to bed hungry at night, maybe a fifth.
I mean, these problems aren't solved yet, and these guys are sitting around still figuring out how to fuse hydrogen atoms together over my city.
Yeah, it just is—I mean, Scott, it's one of those things that, you know, you look at and it's almost as hard to contemplate as nuclear war.
You just say, this doesn't make any sense.
You know, Oxfam just did that study that found that one percent of the world's population controls 50 percent of the world's wealth, and the top 20 percent controls 96.4 percent of the world's wealth, which means that 80 percent of the world gets by on less than 5 percent of the world's wealth.
Now, that's an unstable situation, and the idea of being—of wasting all of this scientific knowledge, building things which, if you use them, they will destroy the world, instead of dealing with a really unstable situation, which is, of course, going to be greatly exacerbated by climate change and everything.
It's just—I don't know.
It's hard to get your head around it.
It really is hard to get your head around it.
Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
Capitalism, narrated by me, Scott Horton, at audible.com.
It's a great collection of his essays and speeches on the important tradition of liberty.
From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our statist enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
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Well, I should point out, we should note that when they talk about those very fewest people at the top, I know it's the very fewest people at the very top of that list.
That's all new wealth that they had created.
So it wasn't like these were all, you know, the great-great-grandsons of John D. Rockefeller.
Oh, no, a lot of this stuff, yeah.
It really is new wealth that they've created, and then, yeah, these guys are the owners of it.
But you're right that we don't have a natural order of seeing where these capital investments would go if the system wasn't rigged.
So that's like Bill Hicks used to joke that if everybody woke up and realized that how insane this all is, well, it would destroy the economy.
The whole thing would fall apart.
It's all built on the arms industry and all of this stuff.
It would be this major adjustment.
Of course, the joke is that all this stuff is a waste and that there might be a huge disruption in the economy for a minute, but no more than all the people who lost jobs shoveling horseshit when automobiles were invented destroyed the economy back then, you know?
It's still an improvement.
And not only that, but just think about not necessarily all the brains and the engineers, but what about all the brawn that's just wasted being infantry in the military?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, the amount of waste that goes into this is just incalculable.
Well, one thing I think that people should really press for, that actually is something you can kind of get your hands around, is two things.
One is take nuclear weapons off of their hair trigger status.
In other words, remove the warheads from the launchers.
You can watch this stuff.
You know when people are loading up their nuclear weapons.
We knew it when Pakistan did it in 1999.
So you take all of the nuclear weapons off of hair trigger status.
It's not difficult to do.
The second thing I think is kind of harder to do, but I think it's most sensible, which is that you make a pledge of no first use.
Now, what that means is that if you have a situation where there's some kind of dust up between the Russians and the Americans, or the Chinese and the Americans, or NATO and the Russians or whatever, okay?
People know that you're not going to resort to nuclear weapons.
And that's a really important thing.
I want to get rid of them.
I mean, that's what the Non-Proliferation Treaty is supposed to do.
That's what Article 6 of the Non-Proliferation Treaty does.
It says that you're supposed to get rid of nuclear weapons.
That may take a while.
But the idea that you can't get rid of them is nonsense.
I mean, you know, there are all sorts of things that have been banned that were very effective in warfare and are now banned.
Gas, dum-dum bullets, you know, etc.
It can be done.
The only problem is that there's a, as you said, there's an establishment that, you know, this is a vast undertaking, a trillion dollars.
That's a lot of money.
A lot of people are making a lot of money on this.
And it's very hard to get the scientific community to back away from these things.
Even Bob Shear wrote a book called Eating Tuna Fish, Talking Death.
And it's really a fascinating book.
And what he did was that he interviewed all of the nuclear scientists at Livermore and Los Alamos and things like that.
And the interesting thing about it is that these guys are fascinated by nuclear weapons.
I mean, they really love working with nuclear weapons.
They don't even think of them as weapons.
They think of them as puzzles.
And they're solving these puzzles.
Yeah, and they're so zoomed in on the thing that they're looking at it out of context.
They're not thinking about what it is that they're actually making.
You know, I asked my friend Dr. Prather about that.
Hey, Doc, I mean, you're such a great guy.
I love you.
How could you make H-bombs, man?
This is your thing.
You know, these can't be used except indiscriminately, my man.
What the hell?
And he told me, well, you know, at least back then I believed and I guess I kind of still believe that we were keeping the Reds from crossing through the fold again.
But now, forget it.
You know, there's no justification for this now at all.
The Soviet Union's 25 years gone.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, at least then there was something that, you know, you and I ain't buying it.
But at least there was something like rationalization.
Wait, there was the, you know, there was the Cold War and I think probably, Scott, probably you and I are the only people who understand what the folding gap is.
But, you know, that was basic of NATO training, you know, training.
The Soviet path into the Western Europe.
That Soviet armor was going to pour through the folding gap, right?
But at this point, you know, we've now increased the accuracy of these things to the point where people could contemplate trying it.
And it scares the hell out of me.
I got four grandkids.
You know, you just say, you know, if there's going to be a nuclear war, I personally think that it's an illusion.
I think a first strike is an illusion.
I think that the other side would have enough nuclear warheads to use them and basically destroy civilization and everybody that we know and love and everything that we like.
And it just it's hard to get your head around.
Yeah.
Well, and again, it's just like you said about how unthinkable and therefore unimaginable it is.
But we're just past the hundredth anniversary of entering into World War One, where tens of millions of people were killed.
World War Two, where, you know, according to a thing I read recently that said that maybe 50 million had died just in China.
I thought, well, geez, now we're pushing 100 million for all of World War Two killed probably 90 percent of them or more civilians.
The unthinkable has been thunk and has been carried out before.
And, you know, Daniel Ellsberg printed in his nuclear weapons series that he did for Truthdig a few years ago.
He published the chart from the DoD.
And this was his job, was dreaming up this stuff.
And he published the chart of this is how many hundreds of millions of people are to be expected to die in the first day, the first week, the second week, the third week on this neat little line graph where we're up into now four or five, six, seven, eight hundred million people working on a billion now.
And these are just as you say, these are, you know, scientific men in their uniforms and their smocks and doing their work.
You know, like Robert Duvall and THX 1138 looking through his little microscope at their little thing out of context.
And ultimately, I mean, it's almost a sure bet, isn't it at this point that they're dooming humanity to extinction?
I hope modern civilization.
Anyway, we're going to have to start all over again because of these guys.
If there's anybody left to start.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Of course.
Yeah.
They'll be the ones who survive.
Right.
The people most responsible, the people all bugging out are the people who could stop it if they cared about anybody else.
Oh, yeah, sure.
And they're the ones that can get underground.
And, you know, what am I going to do?
Nothing.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
OK, brother.
Appreciate it.
I'll talk to you soon.
All right.
OK, guys, that's a great con.
Howling over at foreign policy and focus fpif.org.
This is a really good one.
Many goes into all the great details for you here and explains all this stuff.
You read this.
You'll be able to explain it to your friends and your family, too.
These nuclear breakthroughs are endangering the world.
Yet that's no overstatement whatsoever there.fpif.org, antiwar.com, of course, as well.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's fun drive time at the Libertarian Institute and at antiwar.com for that matter.
So give us all your money, please, because of all the great work that we do for you.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Bye.
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