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You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
But we ain't killing they 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, you guys introducing the great Andrew Coburn, Washington editor at Harper's Magazine, author of the book Kill Chain and most famously now, although a little bit older, the book Dangerous Liaison about America's relationship with Israel.
And he's also written about Iraq and what was before Kill Chain for some reason, I'm sorry, I'm spacing out.
Andrew, welcome back.
Before Kill Chain.
Oh, the threat where I talked about the height of the Cold War and the Russians were meant to be all over us and 10 feet tall and I pointed out this really wasn't true.
Right.
And what about Iraq that you wrote with Patrick back in the nineties, right?
Yeah.
What was it called?
Out of the Ashes it was called.
It was about Iraq.
It was really a, it was a biography of Saddam really.
Saddam Hussein, remember him?
Yeah, he was going to attack us if we don't attack him first.
Well, absolutely.
Because he had all those nuclear weapons and chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, which he was ready to rain down on.
Anyway, that shows you should always believe American and US intelligence.
Right.
You sure can.
And you better not contradict them or you're guilty of treason.
Absolutely.
And they'll haul you off in chains, which is probably what's about to happen.
Yeah.
I guess we'll see.
I'm going to be in the concentration camp with all my favorite writers, so I don't really mind that much.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I want the bunk by the window.
Yeah, exactly.
I just hope Bovard doesn't snore.
That's all.
Oh God.
One more thing to worry about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So listen, you write great stuff, man.
I'm a big fan of your brother, Patrick.
I really liked Alex, too.
Founder of Counterpunch, of course.
Your late brother, Alex Coburn.
But Patrick, of course, is the most important journalist in the world, covering the wars for us, for the independent and all that.
And I interview him all the time.
But you really write some great stuff, too.
Tends to be more long form type journalism rather than war dispatches like Patrick.
So you guys complement each other very well, I think, in your talents there.
And this one is in harpers.org.
How to start a nuclear war.
Apparently, it's really easy.
Yeah, kind of horrifying, really.
I mean, I tell the story, you know, it starts off with this guy, Bruce Blair, who was in a missile silo in the early 70s, bored out of his mind, like most of them.
And he figured out how to launch not just his own unit, his own squadron, which was 50 missiles, 60 megatons, which would have killed a few hundred million people, but how to launch the entire US nuclear arsenal.
Basically, how to blow up the world in one easy motion.
And you say he was a first lieutenant in the Air Force.
Right.
And he pointed out to me, I should have made it more clear that he was a first lieutenant, but there were people who were in the same position, who were second lieutenants straight out of college.
You know, you graduate, you throw your cap in the air, what all.
And then a few months later, you're sitting in front of a missile silo, which means to blow up the world.
All right.
Now, so if I know TV, then I know that that means that, well, he would have had to pull a gun on his buddy and force him to turn the key at the same time, and they'd be able to launch maybe one missile.
So what are you talking about?
Well, he would have had to knock out, unless his partner in the silo was in on the scheme, he could, he'd have to knock him out or, you know, flip a sleeping pill in his coffee or something.
Anyway, he has to restrain him in some way.
But once he's done that, what he needs is there has to be two of them.
He needs a guy in another silo.
And once he has that, then the whole, you know, it's over the season.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
No, you go ahead.
I was gonna say, so it's not just that if one guy in one silo, and one guy in another silo can control those two missiles, but then working together, they have access to the whole network.
They have access to the whole squadron to 50 missiles.
And if one of them is in the command silo for the squadron, there's like a special one, which is because there were five launch control centers for each squadron.
So if he's if one of them is in this special silo, which kind of oversaw the rest, then they two together could launch, as I said, not just the missiles in that squadron, not just the missiles in that base, which was already several hundred, but the whole US nuclear arsenal.
I mean, the bombers would probably the bombers probably wouldn't have would have checked and wouldn't have done it.
But the rest would go off.
Certainly the land based missiles, which was 1054 would go off without recall.
Yeah, and there's nothing that they can do to turn off an ICBM on its way, right?
Absolutely not.
Not no one's ever there's no self destruct mechanism on board, which actually come to think of it, there should be.
Yeah, absolutely.
Although I guess then, from their point of view, that would make it vulnerable to hacking and, and that kind of deal.
But yes, well, yeah, that's exactly what they would think, say, of course, and they would, would minimize the risk that it would continue on its way and, you know, blow up Moscow or Beijing or something.
And now, yeah, this is a big revelation in Dan Ellsberg's new book, which I'm not quite finished with yet the doomsday machine, but he talks about, you know, he was a nuclear war planner back in the day, and how he just absolutely could not believe the nuclear war plans, as they were set when he started devising on this for the Pentagon and for the Rand Corporation, how if anything happens anywhere, there's a conventional battle breaks out in Berlin or something, then every Chinaman and every Russian dies.
All of them.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Automatically.
Pretty much automatically.
No way to turn it off.
And I guess he tried to change that.
But you report in here that they changed it back, that any war with Russia means we're going to go ahead and take out all of China too.
Right.
Well, there's several things happened.
One was, well, just deal with the China thing first.
When China became our friend in the early 80s, and we, you know, Jimmy, we normalized relations and had ambassadors and all that good stuff.
They took China out of the war plan, like we don't need to kill every single Chinese inhabitants of China anymore.
Then in the 90s, under the Clinton administration, Clinton okayed a new nuclear posture, which out at Omaha, at Offutt Air Force Base, which is the home of strategic command.
This is where George Bush Jr. ran to hide all day long on September 11, 2001, deep underground.
Well, well done.
Well done.
Yes, indeed, indeed.
Anyway, even deeper underground was the Joint Strategic Targeting, Target Planning Staff, I think is the proper name.
So they read in the, you know, they read, they got a document saying Clinton's changed the nuclear posture in whatever way.
And they said, aha, this means that China's our enemy again, which it didn't really say that, but they chose to interpret it that way.
So they put China back in the war plan.
So once again, if anything, anything sort of broke out, you know, up goes China in a, you know, in a big puff of smoke.
Isn't that funny?
Where it's just like anything else, right?
Congress passes a law and then the FCC decides to interpret it this way or that way.
These guys get to do that with nuclear war plans and presidential orders.
Right.
But not only that, at least if, you know, good example with the FTC, but at least Congress might know that, that that had happened.
People would write about it.
In this case, Clinton, the White House, didn't know that this had happened, that we were going to kill a billion Chinese until Bruce Blair, my informant who told me about this, he was on a trip to Omaha and he was chatting with the general in charge who casually mentioned that they'd put China back in what's called a single integrated operational plan.
And he, when he got back to Washington, he called up the White House and said, you might like to know that this has happened.
They had no idea.
Incredible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's something Ellsberg talks about too, where Jack Kennedy said, I want to see the war plan.
And they told him no, and then they said, okay, we will.
But then they showed him something that was not the war plan at all.
And he was the president of the United States and they told him to go to hell.
You're not cleared to see this.
Yeah.
But even then there were layers and layers because it turned out that the war plan, you know, okay, so the war eventually, you know, I think since Kennedy's time, they did, the White House did get to see, well, the PA war plan, which was not the war plan.
The Joint Chiefs back in over the Pentagon, they had what they considered the real war plan, which they wouldn't show the civilian leadership.
But that wasn't the real war plan either.
The real war plan was the one that was being drawn up deep in the base, you know, many layers down at Offutt Air Force Base.
So for example, you talked about Ellsberg just now.
Ellsberg, you know, he was so horrified.
He and others were so horrified by this, you know, scheme that you outlined, you know, which was anything happens, you know, a tank, a tank backfires in Berlin, and we instantly push the big red button and blow up the entire world.
They were horrified by that.
So they worked hard to get that plan modified.
So we got, for various reasons, we got the counterforce plans, which was in a great different options, like, for example, the President could say, would be have the option saying, okay, we're just going to fire nuclear missiles at the Russian nuclear missiles and other big, important military bases, bomber bases, and so forth, and we won't blow up their city.
Okay, so that improvement might, you know, sort of saves a few hundred million Russians, tens of millions of Russians, at least.
But meanwhile, at Offutt, they didn't think too much of this scheme.
So they found military targets in the city, or very close to the city.
So they were, you know, around Moscow.
So Moscow itself wasn't targeted, maybe, no, no, no.
But there were plenty of multi-megaton aimpoints around, you know, just around the outskirts.
Moscow would have been, in the words of, you know, a history of this, completely obliterated every Soviet city, even if the President said, we are not going to blow up, you know, we're going to withhold the city targets, we're not going to blow them up.
And we're just going to go for military targets, even then, every single Soviet city would be able to would have been obliterated.
You know, there's an anecdote about, and this is when the USSR still existed when Dick Cheney was being sworn in as Secretary of Defense in 1989, under George H.W. Bush, that he was briefed on the war plans.
And at some point, even Dick Cheney started squirming in his seat and just said, this is insane.
How many H-bombs can we hit Moscow with in a row?
I mean, what are we trying to dig down to the center of the earth or something?
There's nothing left to blow up there after the first 50 have gone off.
And it really makes you wonder about this.
And this is what you talk about really in the article, how so much of this has to do with the structure.
I mean, I guess I'll put off the incentive structure about the generals and the presidents and all that, the way you do it.
But what's the incentive in the bureaucratic structure that makes them write a war plan like that?
Where not only do we find a loophole where we really want to drop an H-bomb on Moscow, but as you say in here, Moscow itself could be subject to a hundred nuclear explosions.
And I get it.
They're like, okay, the submarine officers, they want in on this too.
But still, how do you get to a hundred?
Well, here's how I think it works.
I mean, my belief and the only way to understand all this is money.
Think about the money.
So you have all these interests, interest in producing missiles, interest in producing warheads, interest in devising plans for all this, interest in producing bombers and all that.
Okay, so we want to produce, to keep the Lockheed or the General Dynamics Corporation or whoever, keep them happy and profitable.
We want to put in place an order for a hundred missiles.
Okay, so now we have to find, how do we justify this?
Well, we have to find targets for them.
And the basic rule, as I recall, was they wrote this rule for themselves that we have to be able to cover 80% of our assigned targets, even under any circumstances.
So that meant you needed to have a huge excess of delivery vehicles and warheads.
So it all starts from the need to find targets for these devices, because you need to find excuses to buy them.
So once you've done that, then you have to scratch around and say, well, you know, we can drop a megaton bomb or warhead on this entrance to the Kremlin, but maybe there's a 0.000001% chance that the other entrants still would survive.
So we better send another megaton bomb on that.
You see what I mean?
So it's all a matter of finding excuses.
The whole drive of the bureaucracy is to think of excuses to find targets for these bombs on their warheads.
And this is why we, as Americans, have the right to do this and to hold the whole world hostage with this H-bomb sort of Damocles over all of their necks, is because we're so moral and guided by such American virtue that they better just bow down.
They have no argument against it, even though this is the actual morality of the American empire.
They'll nuke Moscow a hundred times.
Well, right.
And, you know, basically, someone could make some money.
I mean, we'll target them and we might end up doing it.
And it's, you know, this is, as I mentioned, now it's a hundred aim points in Moscow alone or around Moscow.
Today, this is, well, I guess we have a new Cold War now.
But, you know, that's been, the Cold War ended, you know, the big Cold War ended in 1991 or 1990, whenever you want to date it.
And we said, that's great.
And we, you know, the bombers were taken off alert and looked for a moment, like peace might break out.
But they, you know, the central machinery of, you know, nuclear destruction carried on, you know, carried on.
There were still people sitting in the silos, still people sitting in the bunkers, drawing up target lists.
You know, this deadly machine, megadeth machine carried on, even though, you know, we were, at least for a while, you know, friends with Russia.
And by the way, you know, it's absurd that there should be this obsession with Russia, where the Russian defense, the total Russian defense budget, which is roughly thought to be $61 billion, or the equivalent of that, is less than the amount the US defense budget has gone up this year.
You know, it's ridiculous.
Absolutely, it is.
Well, it's not supposed to be realistic.
It's just supposed to be convincing.
Those are different things.
In fact, I don't remember the name of the article, but we talked before and you wrote a great article for Harper's back a couple of two or three years ago, about a big celebration in Crystal City, where a bunch of arms manufacturers are meeting, and they're so excited that, you know what, you know, we made a lot of money bombing peasants in Afghanistan and Iraq and this kind of thing, but the real money is in the big ticket items, bombers and jets, and all the stuff that we need for a cold war with Russia.
And they all figure that, oh, don't worry, we won't all die under fusing hydrogen atoms.
It'll be perfectly cool.
What a great way to make money without having to work, really, for them.
Yeah, I mean, the actual incident I described in that piece, I remember, was the day Putin took over Crimea, and a friend of mine happened to be attending a breakfast.
He was a lobbyist, and he was attending a breakfast.
He wasn't actually a defense lobbyist, but he happened to be there at this meeting with, I think it was, what's it called, Mike Royce, who was head of the Intelligence Committee, and the rest, everyone else in the room was a defense industry lobbyist.
And he said, oh, I met him that day.
He said he'd been there, and I said, you know, what was it like?
And he said, I described the mood as borderline euphoric.
Right.
They were just so happy.
Yeah, otherwise, they'd have to get real jobs.
They'd have to get real jobs, yeah.
Exactly.
It's so hard to get across to people that this is all about money.
It's all about keeping the economy afloat.
Basically, what's left of the U.S. manufacturing base is mostly defense.
And that's, you know, we need a Cold War.
We need all this to keep the show on the road.
Yeah, we have a wartime economy because that's all we have left of an economy, and because we have a wartime economy, because so much of our—this is what David Stockman calls the Great Deformation, where it's a massive bubble toward, you know, basically bending the entire economy toward militarism.
And then all these other little bubbles, dot-com bubble here, housing bubble there, those are the little bubbles on top of the big bubble.
Exactly.
You put it very well.
That's exactly it.
That's exactly it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, and let's hope it doesn't take H-bombs to pop the damn thing.
Yeah, that's really it.
I'm getting pretty scared, I've got to tell you.
I mean, the hysteria that's on now, I must say, has me quite frightened.
Yeah, you know, Pat Buchanan makes this point, I brought this up in the last interview, sorry audience, but I like it.
Pat Buchanan said, you know, the line was drawn during the Cold War, that if the Russians, and in your book, The Threat, you showed what a joke this was, but still, if the Soviets tried to roll their tanks into Western Germany, across the Elbe River, then we would go to nuclear war.
Don't you dare try to conquer Western Europe.
But you crush an American provoked uprising in Hungary, or in Czechoslovakia, you crush solidarity in Poland.
You know what, we're really sorry, guys, but that's just too far outside of our sphere of influence.
We're not going to go to a nuclear war over Prague, or over Warsaw.
And yet, now we've moved that line from the Elbe River all the way to the Russian border.
Not that the Russians really have a plan to reconquer Eastern Europe anyway, but it seems like we're trying to give them a motive to do so, to rebuild that Stalinist, you know, cushion of the borderlands, of particularly Poland and the Baltic states, to keep them as a shield, to keep the West out.
Now we've moved all the way to, you know, you talk about the accidents and the close calls.
How itchy must the Russian trigger finger be right now, when we have troops right on their border?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting, as you say, that was the excuse all the years of the Cold War.
I mean, Cold War I, let's call it.
We had to, you know, the Russians were poised to invade Western Europe, and we therefore, we offered the guarantee that we would blow up Russia if they tried to do it.
You know, as I mentioned in the article, right after the end of Cold War I, in the sort of brief sunshine period, when you could do such things, people at think tank or a research institute, the BDM Corporation, got a contract from the Pentagon to go over and talk to Russian national security types about what they, you know, what they've been thinking during, you know, during the Cold War.
And there were all these very interesting interviews, including where they said, we've never had the slightest intention of invading Western Europe.
It never even crossed our mind to even think of such a thing.
So the whole justification for the whole, you know, huge part of the whole nuclear posture was all completely spurious, you know.
And that, you know, there's a guy that's sort of a hero of my article, one of the heroes, or the hero of mine is a guy called Lee Butler.
I talk about him in the article, who was, he rose to the very top of the American nuclear war machine.
He was head of Strategic Air Command and head of STRATCOM.
And then, even while he was in the job, but certainly after he left, he started to think this is all, you know, he realized it's all complete madness.
And he, you know, since has gone around campaigning against, you know, for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
And he says, the whole idea of deterrence is completely stupid.
Everyone says, well, you know, deterrence, yes, we have to have, you know, made the means to deter the Russians.
Well, actually, he points out that, you know, the idea of deterrence is, you know, I, if Scott Horton, you know, thinks he's going to, you know, put a nuclear bomb in my car, you know, I'm going to, he has to know that I'm going to put a nuclear bomb in his car.
Um, that's the terror.
But actually, that assumes that I know that Scott Horton, what Scott Horton is thinking, and that I know that Scott Horton knows what I'm thinking.
In other words, you're judging, prejudging everyone's reactions.
And he said, you can never do that.
You have no idea what the other guy's thinking, especially not someone in the community.
So, you know, so the whole, the whole premise is false of deterrence.
Well, and you know, they say that deterrence, the point of deterrence is that we can't just destroy, it's not just that we can defeat your army, but we can, you know, evaporate your capital city.
And so all the people in charge of starting the war, their lives are now at risk too.
And yet we could bomb the hell out of Moscow without nukes.
Anyway, we got daisy cutters and Moabs and all kinds of things that we could slaughter plenty of Russians without actually splitting or fusing atoms together.
Sure.
No, when it comes to just deterrence, you know what I mean?
We can still burn your capital city down.
Don't worry about that.
Ask the Vietnamese.
I'll tell you.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We're pretty good at that off the Yemenese.
Yeah.
So now let's talk a little bit about what you say about how they changed the structure from whichever the STRATCOM command post to the different one where now it's higher ranking people are the ones who get the intelligence and are responsible for communicating with the president.
And that perhaps unintentionally, I think you're saying that this actually makes the ability for the military to sort of box the president in and force him to start a nuclear war, to jam him into starting a nuclear war.
It changes the incentives there compared to the way it was before.
Could you explain that a little bit?
Sure.
The way it was before for a long time was the early, initially the heat sensing satellites we have over Russia and Siberia at all times.
They see Russian missiles coming through the clouds from the bases in Siberia.
Like a minute later, the early warning radars in England and Greenland and wherever else they are, they were the main ones.
They pick up, they confirm that the Russian missiles are on the way.
So then where it used to be, that early warning center would report this to NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, whose headquarters were inside a mountain, Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, I think it's outside Colorado Springs.
They would then say, whoops, and then they would call the Pentagon war room, the National Military Command Center, which is sort of underneath the Pentagon.
They would then, whoever was in charge there would then call the White House and wake up the president and talk to the National Security Advisor and say, Russian missiles are on the way, you now have six minutes to decide what to do about it.
So what they've done, and this happened the first under George W. Bush, is they basically cut out NORAD.
I should explain that the guy in the war room at the National Military Command Center, he would normally be a colonel.
So he's got to decide whether or not to wake up the president.
If you're just a colonel, it's kind of a big deal.
So you might sort of take a few seconds, half a minute or even a minute, to sort of get confirmed to think about it.
Anyway, this is what I was told.
So they streamlined it.
So now, once the satellites, the radars have confirmed that the missiles are on their way, that immediately goes to STRATCOM in Omaha, and almost immediately goes to the commanding officer or his deputy, but the commanding officer is a four-star general.
He then calls the president, and he's a four-star general.
They're like gods in the military.
So he has no inhibitions about waking up the president and says, the missiles are on their way, and what do you propose to do about it?
Then the president can say, well, he might say nothing, but probably not.
He's going to say, okay, we'll do option two, whatever that means, blow up the Soviet and Russian military.
The president then gives the order.
When Trump came along, people started to get nervous about the idea of Donald Trump in a position to push the button.
So there was a congression where they asked the former head of STRATCOM, a guy called Kaler, they said, if the president gives the wrong order, says blow up the world, but you think that's not a good idea, what could you do about it?
He said, well, I would refuse to carry it out, or worse to that effect.
Then they asked the same question at some kind of security forum of the present head of STRATCOM, General Hyten.
He said, I would refuse to carry out that order.
I would tell him what he could do.
Well, that all sounded good and a big relief, and okay, we've got these senior military officers who are prepared to mutiny rather than start a nuclear war for the wrong reasons.
Who was starting a nuclear war for the right reasons, whatever they might be, but they would draw the line somewhere.
That was taken as a good grant for complacency.
Except that, what no one said, I point out in the piece, actually, the president doesn't need these guys to start a nuclear war.
Once he issues the order, using the special codes that he is, who he says he is, so you or I can't get hold of those codes, and give the order.
The president has sort of fail-safe methods of identifying himself.
The thing happens automatically.
It's nothing to do with the head of STRATCOM.
In fact, one guy who was very close to the whole- So wait, I mean, what you're saying is, so STRATCOM, basically, by moving the command authority around and putting in the hands of STRATCOM, that gives them, basically makes it easier for them to alarm and alert the president and try to convince him to do something.
But on the other hand, if the president wants to go ahead and do something crazy without them, there's nothing that they could do to stand in his way anyway.
Exactly.
Furthermore, it used to be the only scenario anyone could think of would be Russian missiles coming through the clouds over Siberia.
At least you know how long it's going to take for them to get here.
You can pretty quickly figure out where they're all headed.
That gives a degree of certainty about the whole thing.
But now they're saying, and this is a good excuse for an even bigger defense budget, oh, all these other people have missiles now, the North Koreans, the Pakistanis, the Iranians, which is a bit unrealistic.
They not only have missiles, but these are missiles that can not come on a direct trajectory.
They can maneuver, and the Russians, they can take off and head left and then turn right.
It makes it more uncertain.
You have to alert the president earlier.
You don't even have to wait for the missiles to take off.
Supposing we have hard intelligence that they might be about to launch a nuclear missile, a weapon of mass destruction in our direction, that might be in our direction.
Then you wake up the president.
So I say that they light the fuse earlier, which is a lot scarier.
I mean, this is all total hokum, because obviously no one's going to do that.
Anyone's going to launch a missile at us.
But supposing I was talking to a congressman, Congressman Ted Lieu of California, and I said, well, what do you think about them reacting to intelligence of an imminent strike?
And he said, well, there was a good intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, wasn't there?
And it turned out there wasn't.
But we invaded the country, killed hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of Americans for false intelligence.
So it's quite possible to conceive of us blowing up the world on equally false intelligence.
All right, Charlie, here's who sponsors this show.
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It's just great.
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Yeah.
You know, there should be much more famous story, I guess, right, of the Abel Archer exercise in 1983, where the Soviets really thought that it was cover for a first strike attack, that Reagan was going to launch a war.
And it was a traitor, thank God, who was inside NATO, who was a secret Russian spy, who reported back to them, I swear to God, it's just an exercise.
Don't freak out.
Don't overreact.
And so they didn't.
Right.
Was that the guy, maybe I'm thinking of the same guy, there was a guy called Gordievsky.
Actually, he was in the KGB in London, and he turned and went over to the British.
And he told the British, he said, Christ, back in Moscow, they're really freaked out.
They think the Americans are about to launch a first strike.
So that freaked out the British.
So Margaret Thatcher actually called Ronald Reagan and said, you better knock this off, because the Russians are taking you very seriously.
I think that's the same story.
Yeah, it sounds like you got a lot more straight than I do.
I need to go back and look at that.
So they ended up doing the exercise, but at least with some reassurances or something, right?
Yeah, I forgot what they did, but they did tone it down a bit.
Remember Ronald Reagan used to make jokes about bombing Russia?
Well, that was the thing, right, is he would say, yeah, the bombing starts in five minutes.
And then, you know, basically, you can imagine a bunch of the Russian counterparts to the American hysterics, the kind of thing that we're hearing right now, where they might refuse to take that as a joke, even though, come on, it's just Ronald Reagan screwing around.
Dude, he's not really going to start bombing.
But there's always going to be somebody who says, hey, that's secret code, for he really means it.
And look at the way the Americans are overreacting to Russia doing basically nothing right now, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, remember, as I mentioned in the article, the Russians came up with this, you know, dead hand system, they called it perimeter, by which if sensors detected a nuclear attack, I mean, actually bombs going off, then the Russian missiles would launch automatically, pretty much without human intervention, there was sort of one human link in the chain, but not a very, you know, that that was it, it was easily bypassed.
So, and, you know, we know sensors can get things wrong all the time.
So that was pretty scary.
The idea that we were all dependent on a Russian sensor or a bunch of Russian sensors working properly.
Yeah, man.
And do we know have they at least said that they turned that off?
And that's no longer the system?
Or is that still?
Yeah, it's a bit fuzzy.
But it looks like they have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's funny, man.
This, all this stuff about Russia now, and with Donald Trump in there, you know, I could, he's mostly a hawk.
Right.
And yet, going back to like 1986, or something, he said he wanted Ronald Reagan to send him over there to do a nuclear deal with Gorbachev.
And he seems to always, you know, that could be the deal of the century, right?
The one that Reagan almost made at Reykjavik in 89, to go ahead and abolish all of the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.
And then we get to work on our allies, too, and, and really create a nuclear free world.
And it's the kind of thing that could get him reelected if he could do it.
And yet, there's, instead, we have this entire, just complete, you know, Iraq War Two level insanity about what's going on with Russia and how they're his secret Manchurian brainwashed masters and all of this stuff.
So anything he tries to do like that, I mean, hell, just being on TV next to Putin is treason.
So what would they call it if he, if he signed on to the Democrats' New START treaty?
You know what I mean?
They'd call it treason, right?
Of course, of course.
Yeah, at least, at least he's got a bit more reasonable.
He told someone I know, a while back, I mean, I've forgotten when, 20 years ago, he said, this is who was involved in negotiating arms control treaties with the Russians.
I guess it was like, must have been back in the Bush administration.
Or even earlier, he said, here's how you negotiate with the Russians.
You turn up, you wait, you have a negotiating session set up.
You turn up, you wait, and you turn up half an hour late, so they're getting really pissed.
And then you walk in, and you go up to the chief Russian negotiator and say, fuck you.
That'll work.
Sheldon Richman said, yeah, everybody's mad at Trump for not putting a pie in Putin's face or kicking and pushing him down the stairs or something.
Am I not meant to say that on the radio?
I apologize.
Oh, yeah, nah, it's fine.
We'll cut out the kuh, but everyone will know what you said.
That'll be great.
Yeah, okay.
Expletive deleted.
Yeah, you know what you do?
What you do is, you karate chop them right in the throat, and then they'll do whatever you want.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly, yeah.
At least he didn't do that to Putin.
You know, I mean, the thing is, too, right, is we haven't had a real war here in so long.
What, 170 years now or something like that?
The Russians, they have a little bit different experience, and they tend to look at things a little bit different than the Americans when it comes to protecting themselves, huh?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They have a very...
I mean, even when we had a war here, it was just North versus South.
We hadn't been invaded since your great-great-grandfather burnt the White House in 1812, which, congratulations on that, by the way.
I always have to say, he did it with an army of freed slaves.
Right.
Or at least part of his army were freed slaves.
Take that, Mr. Madison.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly so.
But that really was the last time that the U.S. was attacked, and that was when the U.S., you know, barely reached past the Appalachian Mountains.
That's right, that's right.
The Russians, on the other hand, they've been invaded how many times?
Well, let's see.
Once, twice, three times.
I mean, very, you know, with very devastating consequences, you know, three times in the last 200 years, right?
Yeah.
250 years.
Okay.
I mean, people said, people who are a lot better experts than me have said that, hey, this really matters to the Russians.
They're terrified.
And that was really what was behind Stalin, you know, continuing to occupy all of Eastern Europe after World War II, was to just keep the Germans and the Americans out, to give, you know, let a bunch of Poles and Estonians be the, quote, darky shield to protect the Russians in the event of an invasion.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's exactly right.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
I mean, you could see why they'd be a little bit paranoid, a little bit.
And you look at how paranoid the Americans are, multiply that by however many invasions, right?
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Okay.
So one more set of questions here.
What about the new, it was a trillion dollar program.
They're already saying one point something, and it'll surely be a $3 trillion program by the time they're done to completely revamp the nuclear weapons arsenal and industry and weapons labs and everything in this country.
I guess it's a pretty big bargaining chip to bargain away in exchange for some pretty big Russian concessions, but it doesn't really look like we're headed that way.
Oh, no, completely zero chance, zero possibility that, you know, any president who tried to sign such treaty would be impeached immediately, as Trump probably will be.
There's plenty of really, really good reasons to impeach Trump, but I don't think this is one of them, but still.
Yeah.
If they do overthrow him, it'll be over some BS like this, trying to make peace with the Russians or with the North Koreans.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's amazing.
And you know what?
As long as we're on that, do you really think that they're, you know, that he might be thrown out of power before the next election?
Before the midterm?
Or no, I mean, before 2020.
I mean, I guess I'm worried that there's going to be- If they really try it, that it could really get out of control with the reactions to that, you know?
Yeah, I think not.
But I mean, never say never, you know.
I don't think it's likely.
I really don't.
Yeah.
Well, that's good.
I mean, Lord knows that all they got to Nixon over, it wasn't the secret bombing of Cambodia.
It was, you know, a break-in at the Watergate.
So, right.
You know, as long as they have real stuff to impeach him for, they won't, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
They'll need some trumped-up charges.
But the important thing, I mean, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the, you know, the defense, the whole nuclear so-called modernization, you know, complete rebuild.
You know, that's what it's all about.
You know, we have- and I should mention, I mentioned in the article that a gentleman, John Wolfstall, who was the senior nuclear guy or the weapons, you know, bombs proliferation person in the Obama National Security Council staff, he told me that he tried to get- or the White House, you know, the Obama White House tried to get the Pentagon to come up with a number for what our nuclear forces cost us every year.
And the Pentagon refused to tell them.
They said, well, we don't have that figure.
It'd be too hard to figure it out.
Too hard.
Well, you know, Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute and what's that guy's name?
Charles something who was really good a few years ago at one of these institutes in D.C., I forget.
And then I think Mother Jones Magazine also did a review of this where they said that if you combine the military budget with the Energy Department and all the cost of the care and feeding of the nuclear weapons and the VA, we're at a trillion dollars a year.
So there are outside estimates of that, at least.
But yeah, no, that's all that might be a moderate figure because, you know, we've got the defense budget, which is north of 700 billion.
Then you've got the Energy Department, which is all the nuclear weapons.
Then you've got the VA.
Then you've got you should include the, you know, the State Department.
Not that that's much, but I mean, certainly part of our national security apparatus.
And then you've got the interest on the money that we borrowed to pay for all this.
Right.
Well, and the cost of the CIA is how many tens of billions a year or hundreds.
Yeah, well, that's that's hidden and hidden inside the Pentagon budget.
So, yeah, imagine what it would be like if we had that money to spend making America great again, instead of threatening the whole world.
Dream on.
All right, Andrew, thanks for coming back on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure.
All right, you guys, that is the great Andrew Coburn.
You got to read his book, Kill Chain, about the drone wars, et cetera.
It's so good.
And check out this great article at Harper's.org, How to Start a Nuclear War.
All right, y'all, that's it for the show.
Check me out at LibertarianInstitute.org, ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, Twitter.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.
