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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is David Culp.
He is legislative representative of the Friends Committee on National Legislation's Quaker Nuclear Disarmament Program.
He spent 15 years on nuclear arms control and disarmament legislation, and was instrumental in the passage of the Nuclear Testing Moratorium in 1992, the ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and the defeat of a new nuclear bunker buster warhead in 2004.
Heroic.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you?
Thank you.
Appreciate being on.
Well, I sure appreciate that bio of yours.
That's something else.
Thank you for your efforts.
It sounds like we'd have one more kind of nuclear weapon for ready use by the Pentagon if it wasn't for your efforts here.
Well, not just me.
There are literally hundreds and thousands of people that worked on every one of those campaigns.
It's not a one-person operation.
Sure.
Okay, so now here's the thing.
I don't know nothing about the START Treaty.
Maybe it's terrible.
Maybe it's wonderful.
But I know that I don't want the U.S. government or any other government to have any nuclear weapons anymore.
I appreciate the fact that it seemed to have kept great powers out of war for quite a few decades now.
But then again, they could lead to the extinction of mankind.
So there's nothing more important in the world than getting rid of nuclear weapons.
Does the START Treaty do anything real to head us down that road?
It definitely heads us down the road.
It, by itself, is a very modest treaty.
What it does is it would lower the limits on U.S. and Russian strategic weapons by a third on each side.
And strategic means what?
Is that like medium range versus long range or something?
Right.
Strategic means, in simple English, it can go from one continent to another continent.
In other words, it gets shot up by a big missile that goes up into the atmosphere, travels across the ocean, comes down on another continent on the other side of the world.
That's strategic.
Oh, I see.
So the limits right now are 2,200 on each side.
What this treaty would do is would cut the maximum number down to 1,500.
And it also would extend the verification procedures, inspection procedures, that were established originally under the Reagan administration.
This treaty is really an extension of the original START Treaty that was negotiated by Ronald Reagan and finished by George Bush, the father.
Unfortunately, that treaty expired in December of last year.
Right now, we have no treaty with Russia that covers inspection of each other's nuclear arsenal.
We did up until December 5th.
That was in place for 15 years.
That has expired.
This would renew the inspection procedures on both sides, and it would cut the number of nuclear missiles aimed at each other by a third.
So those are the two main points of the treaty.
All right.
Now, how is it that just the treaties lapsed and there's just not enough political pressure in the Senate to keep these things in force?
Well, for a treaty to pass, all treaties— Well, I mean, you're saying we used to have agreements that allowed mutual inspection.
Those have lapsed now.
Those have lapsed.
The treaty that was negotiated by Reagan and Bush expired on December 5th of last year.
And so we would need a new agreement.
The Obama administration knew this when they came in office.
They started negotiations immediately with the Russians.
They completed those negotiations in April of this year.
The treaty was submitted to the Senate in May.
We're hopeful that the Senate is going to vote on this in September.
The last arms control agreement that came to the floor of the Senate passed 95-0.
The treaty before that passed 92-4.
In the past, these arms control agreements have passed by overwhelming bipartisan majority.
This treaty has run into a lot of opposition.
All the Democrats support it.
Senator Lugar supports it, Republican from Indiana.
Senator Bennett, Republican of Utah, is leaning for it.
But almost all of the other Republicans are undecided or at least unannounced.
And there's a couple of Republicans out there, Dement and Inhofe and Kyle, that are urging defeat of the treaty.
Well, how hard is the administration pushing?
They're pushing very, very hard.
This is the priority of Secretary of State Clinton, the priority of Vice President Biden.
They've got literally an army of people involved in providing answers to questions for Congress.
Republican senators have submitted 787 questions on the treaty to the administration.
A lot of people have had their August vacations canceled to try to answer those questions.
Congress has held 21 hearings and briefings just on this treaty.
Some Republicans are calling for more hearings.
They're submitting more questions.
They're asking for more delay.
To us, it looks like simply a stall tactic by some Republicans in the Senate to try to deny the president a victory.
In the past, every Republican that was in the Senate voted for the most recent arms control agreement, 95-0.
Now they're trying to stall the treaty.
What they don't want to see is the president get a legislative victory.
They were putting politics ahead of national security over nuclear disarmament issues.
In the past, arms control issues were not a partisan issue.
We've got Henry Kissinger.
We've got George Shultz.
We've got every Secretary of State, every defense secretary that has spoken up supports this treaty.
It's a handful of very conservative Republicans that are trying to block this treaty.
That's really too bad.
I remember reading that Barack Obama had been kind of taken under Dick Lugar's wing and had gone with him to Russia.
Lugar really kind of beat it into Junior Senator's head that something has got to be done about this stuff and kind of getting the old Nunn-Lugar program of buying up any excess fissile material from the old Soviet Union back in gear and this kind of thing.
My impression was that Obama was made to care about this issue.
He always takes these giant stands and then backs down from every bit of them.
So I guess I'm really glad to hear that you're saying that the Obama administration is really pushing on this.
It's absolutely shameful that Republicans would obstruct nuclear disarmament issues over a midterm election.
I actually saw a clip of Fox News saying, is the START treaty going to leave us helpless until it's too late?
And then they actually went out to an atom bomb, out to commercial.
The president who first proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons was Ronald Reagan.
Your listeners don't have to believe me.
All they do is just put in Google, Ronald Reagan nuclear weapons, and they will see the guy who first proposed this was Ronald Reagan.
He believed in eliminating nuclear weapons on a step-by-step basis.
That was the basis for the original START treaty that we had with Russia up to last December.
Also, it's worth pointing out that at the time he wanted to do that was a time when the Soviets still had those tank divisions that the nuclear bombs supposedly were there to prevent from rolling into Western Europe.
The Cold War was still on, and it was Ronald, bear in the woods, Reagan.
That's right.
We had the old Soviet Union.
We had the old Warsaw Pact.
And Ronald Reagan, to his credit, stuck to his principles and deeply firmly believed that we should be eliminating all nuclear weapons because they were more of a threat to ourselves than they were to anyone else.
And his Secretary of State, George Shultz, I can tell you has been over here in the Senate pushing as hard as he can to try to get this treaty ratified.
Henry Kissinger is another big supporter of this treaty.
Unfortunately, we've got a handful of ultra-conservatives that are trying to hold this up, primarily for partisan political reasons.
If this treaty had been submitted by the most recent President Bush, in my opinion, this thing would have been done a long time ago.
But these guys don't want to let this President have any legislative accomplishments.
They think that somehow this is going to help him get re-elected.
I want to get this treaty ratified.
To be honest, I don't think that is going to have much of an impact in President Obama's re-election fortunes.
But not getting this done is simply allowing us to return us or the Russians at some future point to the old Cold War.
There aren't any limits today on either side's nuclear weapons.
Right.
And real quick, before we go out to break here, approximately how many hydrogen bombs does each side hold right now?
Under the treaty, 2,200 on each side.
All right, y'all, we're talking with David Kulp.
Hold it right there, David.
It's David Kulp from the Friends Committee, y'all.
We'll be right back.
Talk about starts tomorrow after this.
You know, some of the hardest core peaceniks in this society are the Quakers over at the Friends Committee on national legislation, and especially on nuclear weapons issues.
I don't know where we'd be without them.
We might have already been blown up by nuclear fusion in our neighborhoods.
Right now, I've got apparently the heroic David Kulp, judging by his bio here, a legislative representative from the FCNL's Quaker Nuclear Disarmament Program.
And we're talking about the START treaty that Obama's trying to get through the Imperial Senate right now.
So if I look on Wikipedia and they say that America has 5,000 nuclear warheads, that means that right now 3,000 of them are just in storage waiting to be put on top of a missile?
Is that it?
In round numbers, yes.
We've got 2,200 deployed strategic weapons.
We've got thousands of others that are in storage at various military bases.
We have a small number of what are called tactical nuclear weapons, roughly 200 or so that are over in Europe.
So you add up all that together, yes, you come up with 5,000 total nuclear weapons.
But of that, 2,200 are literally a push of a button away from being delivered to Russia.
And the same thing is true on their side.
They've got roughly 2,200 that, with a push of a button, would be flying over to our country.
And now, there was an Air Force study that came out just a couple of months ago, I'm sure you're familiar with it, that said that all we need is, what, a dozen nukes?
And we have all the deterrent capability we need.
We could do Moscow and Beijing and London if it came down to it, we're fine.
That definitely is true, and I saw that study and it opened a lot of eyes.
Not that this is the first time people have said it, but as to who said it, that the Air Force Association said it.
But unfortunately, Scott, the reality is there are big financial interests behind this nuclear weapons complex.
Well, now, you know, I was going to ask you about that, because my friend Gordon Prather, he used to work at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, and I guess you're familiar.
And he says that in the military, nuclear weapons is the path to, it's the career dead end.
Once you get into nukes, you're done for.
You're going to be sitting in a dusty office in the back.
You're off the track to higher rank and authority there, and so nobody wants to have anything to do with the nuclear project.
I guess it's just assumed they're never going to be used for anything, they're not good for anything.
Seems like there's a lot less pressure inside the Pentagon for these kinds of programs than we would have for, say, the new F-35 or whatever.
But so then that leads to the question that you're just alluding to.
Whose interest is it in?
It's obviously not in the 300 million of us en masse here.
Whose interest is it in to keep making hydrogen bombs when the Cold War's been over for a generation?
There's a couple very, very large facilities that are part of what's called the nuclear weapons complex.
One big facility is down at Oak Ridge in eastern Tennessee.
Another very big one is at the Los Alamos National Laboratory outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Another one is Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The last one is the Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, east of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Each of these facilities, and there's a couple other smaller ones, each of these employ thousands of people.
They're very highly paid jobs.
If you go down there to the Y-12 plant, these are the best paying jobs for 100 miles around.
There's not very many high-tech jobs in eastern Tennessee.
Those are the people that are benefiting the most from keeping these arsenals at very high numbers.
What you're talking about with the military is exactly right.
If you talk to the military in uniform, they think a lot of this is just a complete waste of money.
These weapons, in their opinion, are probably never going to be used.
Before they ever could use them, they have to go to the president to get approval.
None of them see that a president is ever going to let them use nuclear weapons in a war.
So they are much more interested in high-tech precision conventional weapons that they can actually use.
It doesn't mean the military has all become pacifists.
They're not.
But they have really gotten disinterested, is probably a good word, disinterested in nuclear weapons.
They're really interested in seeing that money instead being used for high-tech conventional weapons.
One time I asked Gordon Prater, how could you do it, Doc?
How could you work on nuclear bombs?
And he said, well, look, the way we believed it, and I think he said he still believes that this is right, that their job was keeping the Soviet Army from coming through that fold of gap and that it was worth it.
That's certainly what they believed and how they justified their jobs and whatever.
But that was over 20 years ago still.
The Soviet Army went back behind the Ural Mountains 20 years ago.
And it's just amazing that small interest groups could continue to push for a hydrogen bomb policy.
Well, there is another group at the right-wing think tanks here in Washington.
And the Heritage Foundation is the biggest one behind this.
They have set up a brand-new lobby group called Heritage Action just within the last couple of months whose priority is to try to defeat the START Treaty.
You can Google and find all of this.
They're the main group here in Washington that's opposed to it.
Back home outside of Washington, it's the people at these sites and the members of Congress that they represent.
But the other thing people have to realize, it only takes a third of the Senate to block a treaty.
That's written into the Constitution.
We have to get 67 votes, two-thirds votes, to get through.
If you take a look, very few votes have occurred in the last two years on anything.
That have gotten 67 votes or more.
The most recent big contentious vote that we had was on the recent nomination for the Supreme Court justice.
That got 63 votes.
So it shows you how difficult it is to get to 67.
Very few votes in the last year and a half have gotten 67 votes because we have such a polarized Congress right now.
Well, it's just, you know, any senator who is just thinking about his political interests here and is thinking, well, you know, the Heritage Foundation from the right is saying that I better oppose it and whatever, they could all just as easily say, oh, yeah, I'm here with Dick Lugar.
And Dick Lugar is the nuclear weapons expert of the Senate, and forget it.
I'm going along with what he says.
And they would have all the political cover they need as far as politics goes to say, no way, I'm with Lugar on this.
Well, I agree with you.
Unfortunately, we've got a lot of political midgets in the Senate right now, really on both parties.
And what you're talking about is the courageous stand of simply standing up and speaking common sense.
And there are very few members of the Senate that are willing to do that today.
Dick Lugar is definitely an exception.
And what you just said, a lot of members of Congress will tell you privately that they deeply respect Dick Lugar and his knowledge and so on.
But then they're not willing to take those tough stands.
I mean, that's what they say over and over and over.
You get some other people to take the tough stand, and I might be willing to follow along.
Yeah, well, they'll take tough stands when it comes to any terrible thing.
But when it comes to even moving us down the path of getting rid of the hydrogen bomb stockpiles in the world, that's a bridge too far for these Republicans.
But I don't want to leave your listeners with too pessimistic of a view that all this is hopeless.
Let me go through the numbers again.
All the Democrats, the two independents, Senator Lugar of Indiana, Senator Bennett of Utah, you add all those up together, we're pretty confident of all of them, 61.
And there's a couple other Republicans that we think, once we get to a vote, probably would vote for it.
So we're not that far short.
But to get a vote, we have to get 67.
We've got 61 today that we can take to the bank.
We've got to get six more.
We think this vote is going to come up perhaps late September, maybe the first week of October.
Between now and then, there are literally dozens of organizations at the national level, at the local level, that are working very hard to get their senators to support this treaty.
We're six votes short.
The moderate Republicans are who we need.
And there's a relatively good chance, 50-50 chance, that we can win this vote if we get it up for a vote.
And how can people help you?
Well, the best thing to do, people want to...
First thing I'd encourage them to do is spend about five minutes doing their own research on the web.
That's the beauty of Google.
You can be your own research department.
Take a look at the State Department website on this.
If you want, take a look at the Heritage Foundation, too.
You can Google our website, fcnl.org.
Put together a very simple one-paragraph email and send it to your senator.
Don't try to write a three- or four-page letter.
People in Washington just don't have time to read that stuff.
Write a very short, concise, in your own words, paragraph to your senator urging support for the START treaty.
All right, everybody, that is David Kulp from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Again, the website is fcnl.org.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
I appreciate it.
