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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 a fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, 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, y'all, introducing Lawrence Whitner.
He is the author of Confronting the Bomb, and we publish him regularly at antiwar.com.
Check out his website, lawrencewhitner.com.
Oh, I forgot to say too, he's a professor of history emeritus at SUNY Albany.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Fine.
How are you today, Scott?
Very well.
Appreciate you joining us on the show and all your great articles about nukes and why we shouldn't have them.
It just sort of goes without saying that we've got all these nukes, thousands and thousands of nukes.
And I guess, you know, for the end of history, we're just supposed to think that, hey, mutually assured destruction has kept us safe so far.
So why not sit on piles of thousands and thousands of nukes?
So what do you say to that?
Well, I think they haven't kept us safe so far and they're likely to end the world.
So I think we should be concerned with getting rid of them rather than adding more through a vast nuclear buildup program.
Yeah.
All right.
So, well, first of all, and we'll get to that in a second, that article at antiwar.com is called Getting Ready for Nuclear War.
But you know what, I think maybe part of it is people just really don't appreciate the power of an A-bomb or an H-bomb.
But why don't you explain a little bit?
Well, the atomic bomb, of course, used against Japan in 1945 destroyed entire cities.
That is, a single bomb destroyed Hiroshima and its population, and a single bomb destroyed Nagasaki.
Those were atomic bombs.
Hydrogen bombs, which are based on a different kind of explosion, can be made a thousand times as powerful as the atomic bomb.
So that today, a thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb can massacre up to 300,000 people.
And that's a single one, given the fact that the United States and other countries have thousands of them.
We're talking about the destruction of virtually all life on Earth.
In the event of a war between America and Russia, for example?
Yes, yes.
Well, the United States and Russia have roughly 14,000 of the 15,000 nuclear weapons now in existence.
So particularly, a nuclear war between the United States and Russia would be a total disaster.
Yeah.
Well, and so, and they talk about, it's funny, because they don't always really make this clear.
But if you look at it for a little bit, you get it that, oh, a tactical nuclear weapon is one that you would use against actual enemy forces on a battlefield somewhere, where a strategic nuclear weapon is when you just decide on genocide and attack the cities of the opposing country.
Right.
Although, I should add, tactical nuclear weapons can be made and are made as strong as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Right.
And so, well, okay, now, most H-bombs, are they into the tens of megatons?
Or really, the point of an H-bomb is so you can miniaturize it, and you can still kill a whole city with a tiny little bomb compared to something like Fat Man and Little Boy, right?
Yes, yes.
They're improved, if I can use that term, so that they can be more accurate, that targeting is simpler, that the missile carrying the warhead can steal under or over defenses.
But they're much more powerful than atomic bombs, and can do the job much more effectively.
I like the way Daniel Ellsberg explains, because this puts it in context that people can get, right?
He says the Nagasaki bomb, this implosion plutonium bomb that they used on Nagasaki, a bomb like that is the blasting cap.
That's the percussion explosion to cause a thermonuclear reaction, and the megaton results that you get from H-bombs.
Yes.
Oh, and I should add that Ellsberg was a top US nuclear war planner, starting in the late 1950s, up until the early 1970s.
So he really knows what's going on when he talks about or writes about nuclear weapons.
Yeah, I'm in the middle of his book, I accidentally put it down, but I'm about to finish The Doomsday Machine here, where he talks about how until he changed the plan, the plan was if any nuke goes off anywhere, if there's a fight over Berlin, or whatever happens, that America would destroy every single city in Russia and China.
Yes, right, right.
And that there was no way to even call it off.
It was just it was automatic doomsday machine in practice, ready to go.
Right, right.
And in fact, he still believes that's the case, generally speaking, with regard to the US-Russian confrontation.
And he points out that the Russians adopted a system which would automate a nuclear war, that is, in the event that their computers saw signs or believe there were signs of a US nuclear attack, there would be an automatic Russian response against the United States.
Crazy, just crazy.
So, and now again, this is, you know, one bomb per city, kill us all, and throw, and as Ellsberg loves to emphasize, too, of course, the smoke from all the forest fires and all the rest of the Dresden-type firestorms and city after city after city, that all that soot will go up higher than the clouds up into the stratosphere and block the sun and end, you know, the ability for people to grow crops even down in the southern hemisphere, too.
Basically, we'll all starve.
Right.
Scientists call that nuclear winter.
And in fact, that means that countries that had no part in beginning the nuclear war or fighting the nuclear war would find that their populations were destroyed.
Their agricultural systems would be destroyed.
People wouldn't have enough to eat.
And if they survived from the fallout, they would soon die from starvation.
All right.
But now you say they haven't kept us safe.
But you know what?
We haven't had a major power war since the advent of fission and fusion bombs.
So maybe you're wrong.
Well, it's possible I'm wrong.
But nonetheless, there have been some some pretty fierce confrontations between nuclear-armed countries.
Ellsberg and others have pointed out how close the United States came to nuclear war back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And his new book, The Doomsday Machine, makes that point very clearly with some very startling anecdotes.
And in fact, there have been numerous other times when nuclear-armed nations have come terribly close to nuclear war, for example, India and Pakistan, both of which are now nuclear-armed and have actually fought three wars between themselves.
Although they didn't revert to nuclear weapons, but they might well have done so had the war gone badly against one or the other.
Hmm.
Well, and I think, you know, we talked with Con Hallinan on the show a little bit about that, where there's this really bad imbalance.
I don't know what the, you know, Harvard game theorist, mathematician guys think of this, but you have a situation where the Indians mostly have these giant strategic city killer nukes, and the Pakistanis have many fewer of them, but many more tactical A-bombs, and that they've even delegated command over them to the colonels in the field in the current standoff over Kashmir.
And so, if the Indians send conventional tank forces, the Pakistanis quote-unquote have to use tactical nukes against them, and then the Indians quote-unquote have to respond to that with nukes, but they really don't have little bitty Nagasaki type nukes.
They only have massive H-bombs city killers to wipe Pakistan off the face of the earth, which of course raises the question of whether China's going to sit still and let their ally Pakistan get killed, and what America would then do about that.
And you're talking about major trouble real quick, even in the event of a quote-unquote limited nuclear war there.
Yes.
I mean, the situation's terribly dangerous, and particularly with impulsive rash leaders who are in charge of these nuclear weapons.
These include not only people like Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, but military commanders who are trained to use weapons, including nuclear weapons, and as Ellsberg points out, have the authority to use nuclear weapons.
There's a great deal of talk about how the American president carries, or his aide carries, his aide carries this nuclear football, as it's called, this device to actually launch U.S. nuclear weapons.
But Ellsberg points out that there are all sorts of U.S. military commanders, some of them field commanders, that have the authority to use nuclear weapons, and are ready to do so short of a presidential command.
And he thinks that's true for many nations.
Right.
And there's quite a few now inside the NPT and outside it.
You know, we're just supposed to trust Benjamin Netanyahu to not use nukes in whatever situation.
And, you know, he's at least as reckless as any Pakistani colonel, if you ask me.
Right.
Absolutely.
Oh, Christ's sake.
And, you know, I still remember from 1998, I'll never forget, for some reason, it just made an impression on me that it was the week of the a finale of Jerry Seinfeld's show.
And that's all anybody talked about while India and Pakistan were setting off nukes and threatening each other and testing them.
And nobody even really noted or really knew or cared or paid much attention to it at the time.
And but there was this one Pakistani general, I think it was like a two star something, told, I guess, the CNN camera where you tell those Indians we're not afraid of them and we're ready for this that way.
And it's like, yeah, you know what?
Whether you're afraid of an A-bomb or not is really not the question, other than whether that kind of ridiculous, you know, George W.
Bush kind of faux macho nonsense could start a war that could get so many people killed.
I mean, it sounds to think that, you know, as the old saying goes, there's some kind of cliche, right, about this, about the our ability to create technology compared to our ethics and the manner in which we control the technology we create.
Nukes, of course, being the supreme example.
Right, right.
Humanity's gone much further in its technical knowledge and wisdom than in terms of its ethical and political sense.
All right, Larry.
Now, in your article, Getting Ready for Nuclear War at Antiwar.com, you talk about this new ha-ha one trillion, yeah, right, project to completely refurbish America's nuclear weapons and how that was an inducement by Obama to the Republicans to sign on to the New START treaty.
I mean, what did the New START treaty even do if this was how to get the Republicans to support it, was to give them three trillion dollars worth of corporate welfare for nuclear bomb manufacturers?
Yes, well, what happened was Obama came to office and he made a very bold declaration stating that henceforth it would be the U.S. government's policy to move toward a nuclear weapons-free world.
Very nice statement, and if it were carried out, would have been a tremendous boon to all humanity.
However, his first step in that process was to sign this New START treaty with the Russians, which did eliminate a third of their strategic nuclear weapons, the big nuclear weapons.
A fine thing, and he brought that to the Senate for ratification, and the Republicans simply stood firm against it, at least most of them did, so that he needed some extra votes to get the necessary two-thirds, and therefore he gave them something they wanted, which was a guarantee of U.S. nuclear weapons buildup, the refurbishment of the entire U.S. nuclear complex, the manufacturing plants, the missiles, the warheads, and so on.
So that he gained something from the New START treaty in terms of the long-range goal, but he also got the United States on track to continue developing nuclear weapons for the next century or so.
And this program, it was soon found, would cost $1 trillion, an enormous amount of money, particularly in the context of a supposed goal of getting rid of all these nuclear weapons.
Well, soon this ballooned into costing even more, and then when Donald Trump campaigned in 2016, he claimed the U.S. nuclear weapons complex wasn't at all adequate.
In fact, he said U.S. nuclear weapons didn't work, and therefore he was going to have a tremendous buildup beyond Obama's.
And so now the estimate is that the U.S. nuclear weapons buildup, which is underway, will cost $2 trillion.
And therefore, it's really gotten totally out of hand and is the worst nuclear escalation throughout U.S. history.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I haven't even really read all the books about this or something.
I guess I probably should.
But that public choice theory where they emphasize that there really is no national interest the way you or I might conceive what's best for our country, because at the end of the day, the people implementing the national interest have their own interests.
And so you could have a society of 300 million people do a completely irrational thing, so-called, with our decision making, which is what you just described.
This kind of compromise between our two parties and between two of the three branches of how we're going to do this, and it's a century of new nukes, and obviously no room for even a question of whether this is really what the American people want and expect out of their security force.
Yes.
Actually, polls have found that when the public is told about what's going on with this so-called nuclear modernization program, the public says it doesn't want it or it finds this absurd, and they would prefer getting rid of nuclear weapons to developing more of them and modern kinds of nuclear weapons.
Well, and so that's another thing, right?
And you talk about this, is they're pretty open about the new kinds of nuclear weapons they're developing, and it's not just corporate welfare, because it really matters whether they put nuclear missiles.
As one proposal I remember in the Obama years was, let's start using non-nuclear three-stage ICBMs, which of course just confuses the issue.
If somebody's shooting an ICBM at you, you'd think it's probably a nuke, but now you've got to trust the Americans that maybe it's not, maybe it's just an assassination with a three-stage rocket or something.
So now, the opposite of that is, hey, let's start putting nukes on missiles that have always been conventional, or not always been, but let's start deploying more and more nuclear cruise missiles, which means that if we're launching conventional missiles at somebody, they might have to go ahead and assume it's nuclear, even when it's not.
Yes, well, that's what's happening with a new proposal of the Trump administration.
His nuclear posture review, the official statement of nuclear policy that all presidents in recent years have issued, calls for the development of a U.S. ballistic nuclear missile that will be fired from U.S. submarines.
Now, in fact, those missiles have been conventional missiles up to now that are fired from these submarines, but this will simply confuse, say, the Russians, who if the U.S. fires a missile that might be conventional from its submarine, the Russians will have to assume that it might be a nuclear missile, and this will lead them not to retaliate with a conventional weapon, but with a nuclear weapon.
So this confusion of the enemy means that the U.S. government will find itself attacked with nuclear weapons, even if it's not using them itself.
Yeah, I read one thing about this where they were talking about the cruise missiles that would be stationed on battleships in the Baltic Sea, where they're right within range of Moscow, which is, you know, not far from Russia's western border at all.
And so that this was the kind of thing where if you're going to be switching off what have been these particular kinds of missiles had only been armed with conventional warheads up until now, and now they want to confuse that issue too, which talk about hair trigger alert.
And, you know, they do flybys and there's been some kind of, you know, pseudo top gun type scenes in the Baltic Sea already.
And of course, in the Black Sea as well, in confrontations between Americans and Russians.
And as you said, we don't know, I don't know, you may know some of the details of this, but certainly the way Ellsberg says that there's a lot more people in the chain of command who have the authorization to launch these nuclear weapons than just the president.
It's not just like in the movies.
And that's probably the same way on the Russian side, too, where maybe some naval commander gets upset about what's going on in the Black Sea, a battle gets out of control, a few of his people get killed, and he launches a tactical nuke or God knows what, right?
Right, right.
I think one of the most startling revelations Ellsberg makes is that US military commanders have authorization to begin a nuclear war, that it's not just the president.
And he believes this is the case with respect to Russian military commanders and a host of others in other nations.
The reason for this, he mentions, is that these countries fear that if there's an attack on their central command headquarters, they would be decapitated in terms of their nuclear strike forces.
That is, the one person or a few people who could launch their nuclear weapons would be destroyed.
So to ensure that they could retaliate, they give authorization to give the launch command to a whole range of US military and other military commanders.
So that authority to begin nuclear war is not centrally controlled, but rather dispersed widely.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with this, too.
So much of what I read about NATO expansion, they talk about it.
And from, you know, inside, like if you read the National Interest or Foreign Affairs, they talk about it like it's a social club.
They even, you know, kind of openly and ironically say, you know, it is sort of like, you know, if you're a European leader and you want to be a part of the big club with the fancy people and be seen at the right dinner parties and stuff like this, that this is important.
This is what you do.
You join the EU and you join NATO.
And that's the point of view of, you know, obviously from the Americans and our closest allies in Western Europe, is this is how to keep everything's status quo and everything under control.
And yet, they just absolutely refuse to look at it from Russia's point of view.
Maybe they are being cynical, and they really are just encircling and threatening Russia.
But they claim that they're certainly not, and they refuse to even believe that the Russians really think that this is a threat to them at all.
And they continue to talk about letting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO as well, as though this isn't really an American military alliance.
In fact, I have a friend who lives in Latvia, who came across some American soldiers in town the other day.
You know, we have troops really literally right on Russia's border right now.
Right, absolutely.
And the notion, well, let me begin by saying that I don't believe the Russian government is totally guiltless in the U.S.-Russian confrontation today.
In fact, I think the Russian government has done some terrible things.
But nonetheless, it's very naive to assume that if one expands NATO right up to Russia's border and deploys nuclear weapons in countries on Russia's border, that the Russians are not going to respond with their own military buildup and their own aggressive tactics.
And the whole controversy now about Russian intervention in the American elections and in European politics, I think, reflects the consequence of this nonchalant NATO move right up to Russia's borders.
A very dangerous thing from Russia's standpoint, which encourages the Russians to resist.
And that's what they're doing.
Hmm.
Well, and even, I mean, really, their support for the fighters in Eastern Ukraine is part of it in the Donbass War, which was really launched by the Kyiv coup government.
But, you know, the thing that gets all the attention is their seizure of the Crimean Peninsula.
But as James Carden pointed out on the show, and he provided me the footnote, I have it from the British parliamentary investigation and report about Crimea, that three former Ukrainian presidents, pro-Western Ukrainian presidents, signed a letter saying now is the time to kick the Russians out of the Sevastopol naval base, where they had maintained their lease there since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
And they said, you know, now we're going to do this.
And of course, this has been a professed goal of a lot of American policymakers, dating back to Zbigniew Brzezinski, at least, about depriving Russia of their warm water port, making them merely a regional power with no ability to be a world power and really cut off their access or attempt to cut off their, obviously, their deep water, warm water port there in the Black Sea.
And that was the line that they crossed before the Russian so-called little green men emerged from the naval base and seized the peninsula without actually killing anybody when they did it.
And I'm not saying it's great or whatever, but I'm saying in the overall context of things, look at what was going on there.
So, play the counterfactual the other way, where the Ukrainian government had actually followed through on that and kicked the Russians out of there and the Americans who had said they want to move in there and build a NATO base at Sevastopol.
Imagine if they had done that.
That's the hubris that these guys have.
That's the point of view that they're coming from, is, you know what we should do?
We should kick the Russians out of Sevastopol and take that base for our own.
And no one in the room is saying, guys, this is insane.
How could you think that this is what you're going to do when, you know, as you put it earlier, the existence of our species is at stake here?
Let them have the effing Black Sea, man, seriously.
You know?
Right.
Well, the major problem, it seems to me, is that there's a notion that a nation-state, particularly a powerful nation-state, can, through build-up of its military might and threatening another country, can get that other country to back off and behave in a way that this first country would like.
The reality is that by sufficient bullying or intimidation, the bully country ends up antagonizing the other country so much that it eventually fights back, and it resists, and it builds up its military strength, and you're engaged in an arms race and often a war.
The opposite way to move in international affairs that many statesmen have proposed is to encourage friendship between countries and cooperation among countries so that they don't fear one another, but instead are willing to cooperate with one another so they don't feel under threat, but instead feel a pull toward being a responsible part of a secure international system.
Yeah.
Well, so yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that.
You know, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the nuclear weapon states say that they'll disarm.
America's bound by treaty, by law, to disarm our nuclear weapons, but we can't because of national emergency, x, y, and z, say that we can't because Putin and whatever, blah, blah, blah.
But so, I know that you believe in a real nuclear-free world, in all your great writings that I've read, that you think that this is a real possibility, and I guess maybe if you explain how you think it really could work, that we have a process for denuclearizing all the NPT countries and the rest of them, too, and real disarmament and a forcible disarmament, and allaying my concerns that someone would end up with a nuclear monopoly.
Everyone would disarm except somebody, and then they'd hold us all hostage or something.
I don't know.
So go ahead and talk about that a little bit, please.
Okay.
Well, in terms of getting down to smaller numbers of nuclear weapons, that is, some degree of disarmament, but not total disarmament, it's been done already quite successfully.
The world used to have 70,000 nuclear weapons in existence.
It now has 15,000.
Now, that's still 15,000 too many, but it's far fewer than in the past.
And nothing terrible has happened through that disarmament process.
And in fact, speaking simply in terms of deterrence, it doesn't much matter whether the United States has 30,000 nuclear weapons that it once had, or some 6,800 that it currently has.
The United States is still a very powerful nation, and no nation is going to want to be subject to an attack by thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons.
So one can eliminate the vast bulk of the nuclear arsenals in the world without any adverse consequences, as has happened.
But to get down to zero, which is another matter, it seems to me you're going to have to have serious verification and inspection in place.
And that's often been the case with past treaties.
The New START treaty does involve that.
So did the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.
That is, nations agreed that there would be inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, including military officers of the various nations involved, and they could actually see that disarmament was taking place.
So it's quite feasible to move down to zero without any surprises, if there is inspection and verification.
And that's the hope in terms of U.S. dealings with North Korea.
And that's been part of the process in U.S. and Russian disarmament, as far as it's gone over past decades.
Well, I guess, you know, part of the problem is, you know, Iran is a long way from here and Russia.
And I don't know, it seems to me like being able to verify the non-nuclear status of Russia would be impossible.
But you're saying that, no, inspections regimes actually exist and work, and this is a doable thing.
Right.
And in fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency is in Iran today, inspecting and making sure that the Iranians don't develop nuclear weapons.
This is perfectly satisfactory to the U.S. government and its allies, and other governments too, until Donald Trump came into power and said, no, it's the worst deal ever signed and we can't accept that.
Well, it seems to me it was going just fine.
There's no sign that the Iranian government was developing nuclear weapons.
And countries like Britain and France and Germany and so on say it's foolish to be scrapping this treaty, which allows us to inspect and verify that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons.
So the same thing can happen with respect to Russia, and in fact has happened.
Furthermore, technology, as we said at the beginning of our talk today, has advanced so far that the U.S. government can see virtually anything going on in any part of the world.
There are drones and there are all kinds of high-tech devices that can enable verification to take place.
So it's not as if we're back in 1945, much less 1900, when it comes to inspection techniques or spying techniques.
We're in 2018, when the possibilities of inspection and verification are much, much better than any time in the past and have worked so far.
Tell me, how did the NPT get ratified by the U.S. Senate in the first place, if it really says we'll get rid of nukes?
Did they argue at the time that, don't worry, we're not going to go with that part?
No, no.
Well, actually, the story of the NPT is fairly interesting.
What had happened was that the Soviet and U.S. governments got together and they said, wouldn't it be nice if no other country developed nuclear weapons and we have a nuclear monopoly?
So they both thought that was a great idea.
Whatever their other conflicts, they want other countries to get nuclear weapons.
Although it is true that a few other countries had them at that point.
China had them, Britain had them, France had them.
But still, they wanted to retain a near nuclear monopoly.
So this deal made perfect sense for them.
But when they announced this at the U.N., other countries said, well, why should we agree not to develop nuclear weapons when you're going to maintain this nuclear monopoly?
So the U.S. and Soviet government were forced to modify the NPT so that there were two parts to it.
The first said that no additional countries would develop nuclear weapons.
But the second part was that those countries that had nuclear weapons would get rid of theirs.
So rather than escalating up, the treaty said, we're going to de-escalate, we're going to move down to a world free of all nuclear weapons.
But the U.S. and Soviet governments never liked that very much.
They've been forced into it as the price of getting some kind of treaty through.
So they dragged their feet after that, as did other governments that had nuclear weapons, or the very few, such as Israel and Pakistan and India and North Korea, that added nuclear arsenals after that.
So the vast bulk of the world's nations stayed true to their treaty commitment and didn't develop nuclear weapons.
But the nuclear powers dragged their feet and said, well, we're signing disarmament treaties every now and then, and we're cutting back on their nuclear arsenals.
But basically, they're in no hurry to get rid of their nuclear weapons.
And so, since that treaty went into force in 1970, there's been some measure of disarmament by the nuclear powers.
But there are still 15,000 nuclear weapons in existence.
Yeah.
Well, it really goes to show that most countries on the planet, there's, what, 195 of them or 96, depending on what the CIA's doing in Southern Africa at any given time.
And most of them don't want nukes at all.
Most of them figure their security is better protected without them.
Let's stay within the NPT.
Right, right.
And in fact, last fall, the bulk of the world's nations signed on to a nuclear weapons ban treaty, banning nuclear weapons and calling on the nuclear powers to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons.
Now, all the nuclear powers, all nine nuclear powers today said that they would not ever sign that treaty, and that treaty was a terrible thing, and so on.
But it did show that the vast majority of the world's nations do want a nuclear-free world and have had it with the nuclear powers that have grown so impatient that they finally got together and said all nations should agree to ban nuclear weapons.
Well, you know, it's interesting, too.
Gordon Prather used to like to point this out a lot in his column at antiwar.com about the double standard where they're constantly beating innocent Iran over the head when they were never making nukes in the first place.
That's right.
And they use the NPT and alleged violations of it by Iran that are totally false as a possible cause to attack them, and certainly all the sanctions.
And just think about it, the entire 21st century worth of lies and punishments over Iran's never existed nuclear weapons program.
My God.
At the same time, they're making nuclear deals with India, which has nuclear weapons and is outside the nonproliferation treaty, and they say, hey, look, tell you what, we'll sell you some uranium so you can use yours for bombs and whatever in this kind of deal.
Just like Reagan at least turned a blind eye as the Pakistanis built their nuclear weapons arsenal, just as the CIA turned a blind eye when AQ Khan stole the centrifuge documents from Urenko in the first place.
But anyway, what hypocrites?
They'll help proliferate nuclear weapons whenever they want.
George Bush is the one who pushed the North Koreans into nuclear weapons when they had a perfectly good deal to not have them and to stay away from them.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, the U.S. government had sanctions in place against countries that developed nuclear weapons, and it could have imposed them, and indeed for a short time did impose them on India and Pakistan.
But they soon lifted them.
And in fact, they made the deal you mentioned with India, namely to provide India with fissionable material that could be used for its nuclear power plant fuel, while the Indian government could then pull out a fissionable material that it had that it was using for those power plants and use that for its nuclear weapons.
So that there's enormous hypocrisy going on on the part of the nuclear powers.
And Iran is a good example of that sort of thing.
That is, Iran was singled out by the U.S. government since it had the potential to build nuclear weapons thanks to the development of fissionable material through its centrifuges.
But it wasn't using it yet in any case to build nuclear weapons.
There was no sign that it was going to.
But it had that potentiality.
So the U.S. government said, oh, no, no, no, this can never take place.
You know, we're going to see to it, perhaps with war as a club, to force the Iranians to comply.
We're going to see to it that they don't develop nuclear weapons.
And finally, an agreement was signed with the Iranians that they would not do so and inspection would be in place and so on.
While at the same time, the U.S. government ignored its own commitment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to eliminate its own nuclear arsenal.
I mean, it really is an amazing thing, right, where they already were in the NPT.
They already had an IAEA agreement.
And everybody who wasn't a liar and knew anything about it was saying, look, we know they're not making nuclear bombs.
The IAEA continues to verify the non-diversion of their nuclear material, etc.
But that wasn't good enough.
In order to stave off the threat of war, they needed a whole new deal to secure Iran's program, inspect it and verify it and lock it down and reduce it in an unprecedented fashion compared to any other deal with any other country, in order just to cancel the lie that there was a nuclear threat here, when that lie was already debunked every, what, three months by the IAEA reports.
Right.
And in fact, that same system of verification could be used in all countries to ensure that they don't develop nuclear weapons.
And it could be used in nuclear powers that have divested themselves of their nuclear weapons to ensure that they don't begin developing them again.
So the sauce for the goose could be in this case, but it's not.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sure you heard it leaked that Trump's going to meet with Putin.
And Lord knows that's going to cause a firestorm over at the MSNBC, huh?
Right.
But so here's one thing about Donald Trump.
Well, we know a lot of things about him.
Number one, of course, it should not have to go without saying, we'll say it, but you can't count on this guy.
Nobody can.
However, I think it's interesting that as he likes to talk about, his uncle was an MIT professor and taught him all about nuclear weapons.
And he can speak very lightly about them and in a very flip manner about them, but he certainly does understand what's a megaton and this kind of thing.
And there was even an interview that he did with, I don't know, Playboy magazine or whatever the crap it was back in the 1980s, where he was saying, and I think he was serious.
He was really pushing.
He wanted for Ronald Reagan to send him to be a special emissary to the Soviet Union to negotiate abolishing nuclear weapons.
And this is something that, even though that sounds like all Professor Whitner and his pie in the sky, this is something that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev almost did.
They came within a hair's breadth of a deal to get rid of nuclear weapons at one point.
And Donald Trump, this has been an interest of his.
So maybe he's fire and fury, and one day he'll kill us all.
Or maybe, actually, I don't know.
What do you think?
And politically, wouldn't it be the most hilarious way to stick it to the Democrats if he could sign some massive nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians and make the Democrats run against that?
You know what I mean?
I think I like the possibility for now.
Well, it's certainly possible, but I don't think it's very likely.
On the other hand, Ronald Reagan, of course, who had opposed every arms control and disarmament treaty ever signed by his Republican and Democratic predecessors, was the one to actually make a real nuclear disarmament deal with the Soviet Union and to at least talk about building a world without nuclear weapons.
And he did that, I think, because there was such massive popular pressure against the nuclear arms race of the early 1980s, including polls that showed that the vast bulk of the public in the United States and around the world wanted a nuclear weapons-free world, that Reagan turned 180 degrees and began to talk about that rather than about beating the Russians in the nuclear arms race or winning a nuclear war, which he had done in the past.
So it's possible for Trump to do that, and I think that would make him very popular.
But I don't think Donald Trump is now the sort of politician who's willing to do that sort of thing.
Well, it wouldn't have to be all or nothing, either.
I was kind of conflating an all-or-nothing deal with some kind of reduction.
But really, anything would be great, right?
Oh, absolutely.
And let them say, aha, see, he's Putin's Manchurian candidate, and we'd all just laugh.
I mean, how far do they think they can take that stuff?
Right, right.
Well, we'll see.
I have my doubts Donald Trump's going to do it, but he certainly has the ability to do it at this point.
Yeah.
I mean, and that's the irony here, right?
We finally got a president who's not a Clinton or a Bush.
I mean, Obama was just a Clinton, right?
Finally, something shook loose, and an anti-establishment candidate came in.
It's Donald Trump.
Oh, God.
All right.
So, this is the mess we're in.
Very good.
Thanks very much again, Larry, for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate your time and your attention to this very most important issue.
OK.
Thank you, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
All right, y'all, that is Lawrence S. Whitner.
LawrenceSWhitner.com is his website.
Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY Albany, and author of Confronting the Bomb.
And this article's at Antiwar.com, Getting Ready for Nuclear War.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
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