For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Lieutenant General Robert Gard, Jr.
He is chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, where his policy work focuses on nuclear non-proliferation, missile defense, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, military policy, nuclear terrorism, and other national security issues.
And I'm taking a note right now that I've got to make sure to ask him about Russia and nuclear talks at the end of this interview.
But right now I want to talk about Iran.
Welcome back to the show, General Gard.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing all right.
How about yourself?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Pleased to participate.
All right.
Well, so I think it's pretty likely you saw this article in Haaretz the other day about Netanyahu to ask Obama for bunker buster bombs for use against Iran, and I guess at least one report had it that Obama had told him no.
Well, the report I saw said we were going to ship them.
Oh, really?
But I'm not sure that's the case.
Well, I guess there are conflicting reports.
Now, these are conventional bombs.
They can penetrate 20 feet of concrete or 100 feet of earth, but that's not going to do you much good unless you can hit the hole after you develop it two or three times to get down far enough.
Well, that's something else I want to ask you about.
Maybe we can go into a little bit more detail about the efficacy of these actual bombs.
Well, let's go ahead and talk about that right now.
I read something at Harper's last week, and it was old, but it was debunking the bunker buster, and it was saying that, for example, the Natanz facility that has 85 feet of granite above it that is deep underground, that there is no bunker buster even with a nuclear warhead on it that can take that out.
Well, I'm afraid that may be the case.
Particularly if it's got 85 feet of concrete, that would mean you'd have to hit the hole, assuming you can penetrate 20 feet of concrete at a time, you'd have to hit it five times right in the same hole.
So I think the likelihood is pretty low.
Now, if you used a nuke, you would create havoc.
You'd kill hundreds of thousands of people.
You'd spread radiation as far as Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I don't think anybody in his right mind is going to do that.
Well, and even the very small nukes, like, say, one or two kiloton-type nukes, a way to put a somewhat powerful warhead on a small, thin missile like a bunker buster, still that would create, from what this article was saying that I was reading, far from it looking like one of those underground nuke tests that we've all seen footage of where there's just sort of this crater falls down deeper into the ground, that actually this would look much more like a plain old nuclear explosion above ground.
It would not be, you know, when they do those underground tests, they bury those testing devices way deep underground.
And again, like you're saying, these things can only go so far into the ground, and basically what it would do is just pitch a bunch of radioactive fallout into the air.
Yes, that's right.
In fact, there was a study done by a responsible scientific group, I forget the name of it, using a Department of Defense computer program, looking at the possibility of using the nuclear earth penetrator on both Isfahan and the enrichment facility at Natanz.
And that's where I was alluding to the fact that you would kill hundreds of thousands of people, and you'd endanger our own troops in Afghanistan, so it would be a disaster.
All right, now it's no secret that Admiral Mullen has said that the consequences, he seems to agree with you, that the consequences of any American attack on Iran would get way out of hand, which is something that apparently the leaders at the Pentagon, well, maybe not in the Air Force, but the rest of the Pentagon really want to stay out of.
And yet, well, Benjamin Netanyahu told Jeffrey Goldberg, look, if Obama doesn't stop Iran, I will.
And more and more there have been leaks along the idea that maybe the Israelis will just go ahead and scramble their fighter bombers and challenge Obama to intercept them and stop them over Iraq, which obviously he wouldn't do, and then they could actually drag us into a war.
Do you think that's a real possibility?
I think it's a possibility, and I think we should do everything to prevent it.
And the real problem is that unlike the Israeli attack against the Iraq reactor years ago, and the one in Syria more recently, you don't have just one reactor sitting there, highly vulnerable to a fighter bomber, as you've already suggested.
The facilities in Iran are well protected, and we don't even know where they all are.
So the best you could hope for is to set back the Iranian program, according to Secretary Gates, by a year or two.
And that doesn't buy you very much, and the consequences of an attack, as was illustrated in a Pentagon war game a few years ago, could prove disastrous.
Well, let's talk about that in detail, because often on the show we have experts on to debunk the accusations against the Iranians, and I think pretty much the whole audience knows all that chapter and verse.
But talk about that war game.
Maybe if you could, sir, please kind of draw out a narrative of what the first few days of war might look like, in terms of, well, I guess Wayne White said that the war plans he saw had 1,200 targets.
And then, of course, you have to clear the paths to all those targets, and maybe special forces to take out some of the anti-aircraft guns.
And if you could give us that kind of detail, what would an Iran war really look like?
Well, a lot depends on how it starts.
Now, if it starts with an air attack, you better hit 120 targets or 1,200, whatever the number was.
Because there was a war game conducted by the Pentagon, and I remember specifically retired Lieutenant General Von Rieper, who is a Marine, was on the red team representing the Iranians.
And this war started as kind of a buildup of the confrontation on the water.
And Van Rieper, playing the Iranians, used their speed boats to attack our Navy, sunk a number of the ships, and in effect put us out of action.
So the referees of the war game reinstated the U.S. ships that Van Rieper had knocked out so that they could proceed with the war game.
Van Rieper walked out and refused to participate any further.
So you better take out all the speed boats if you're going to start a war, because they can launch them against our warships.
They have anti-ship missiles.
They also could drop a vessel in the Straits of Hormuz through which passes some significant portion of the world's oil every day, and that would disrupt the delivery of oil, which would raise its price out of sight and create all kinds of problems in the world economy.
And that's just for starters.
You can imagine, as has been pointed out, the Iranians do have presence both in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Our forces, particularly our logistics train, is highly vulnerable, and clearly they would take military action against our troops and against our logistics.
It's not beyond the realm of possibility at all that they could initiate terrorist attacks elsewhere against our facilities or our interests or our allies.
You remember Saddam actually attacked Israel with missiles during Gulf War I.
Iran certainly could do the same.
So the consequences of this could be very, very messy and could really jeopardize our military action in both Afghanistan and, again, the logistics train into Afghanistan is quite long and quite vulnerable.
It already gets attacked in the Khyber Pass by people hostile to our interests.
If the Iranians put their mind to it, they could make the delivery of supplies very difficult indeed.
So I think that's why Admiral Mullen said he's got two wars, he doesn't need a third one.
And the consequences of such a war could be not only unpredictable but potentially disastrous to our interests.
Well, now, I'm sure you remember back, what, I guess three years ago, if I have that right, I think it was May of 2007, Dick Cheney sent David Wilmser around to the American Enterprise Institute and I think a couple other think tanks to leak that the Vice President no longer trusted George Bush's good judgment to get us into a war.
And so he was working on a plan to have the Israelis start it.
And then George Bush would be forced into a position to go ahead and do it.
So, I mean, on one hand, the idea of a little country like Israel dragging America unwilling into a war sounds kind of far-fetched until you realize that that was the Vice President's plan only one year ago or a year and a couple of months ago.
This is what the last Vice President of the United States wanted and this is the kind of thing that they're talking about even in Newsweek this week.
There's an article headlined about a third Muslim world war and it's about the possibility of Benjamin Netanyahu dragging the United States into a war with Iran.
Well, my own belief is, even if we didn't instigate it, if the Israelis attack Iran, the Iranians will see that they're using U.S. weapons.
We give the Israelis about $3 billion a year to buy our weapons.
And if they use aircraft, they're U.S.
-made aircraft.
And particularly if they use penetrating bombs, it will be evident that they got them from us.
So I think if there is an Israeli attack, we're implicated even if we don't initiate it.
And even if we oppose it.
What do you think about the idea that if you're sending in airstrikes, you also have to put in Army Rangers, Delta, Navy SEALs or whatever to attempt to take out the anti-aircraft inside the borders of Iran?
I would think that if we initiated a large attack against Iran, we could probably suppress their air defense capability without having to send in Rangers.
Now, you might need to send in Rangers to do other things, to neutralize other facilities, but we've really got a pretty good capability to suppress air defense.
When you mentioned that the Red Team game that they played there, that sounds familiar to me.
Was that the one where part of it was that the Iranians turned off all their radios and they started sending all their instructions by messenger on motorcycle?
And the U.S. side, I guess the blue team in the game, said, Hey, that's not fair.
For us to beat you is completely dependent on us being able to listen to everything you say on the radio.
And so restart it.
Well, I don't recall that specifically, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
That sounds a good deal like the general nature of that particular war game.
As I say, you don't find loyal, dedicated people like Von Riper out of a war game in a high dungeon unless we've really gone beyond the pale in trying to avoid the counter-strikes and so on.
Now, I do remember when we were bombing Kosovo, that Milosevic wouldn't turn on his air defense radar so we didn't know where they were.
And we didn't know when he was going to turn them on again.
Because the only way you can attack those air defense sites is if they've got some radar signal from them.
So if those are turned off, you've got real problems with suppression.
You don't know when they're going to turn them on again.
So that's a problem.
Well, what about the threat to the Navy?
Because I've heard on one hand that, hey, the Iranians have supersonic Chinese-made silkworm missiles that fly at just over sea level that could possibly even take out American aircraft carriers and so forth.
But then again, I also talked to a guy who apparently knew a lot about Navy strategy in the event of a war with the Soviet Union back during the Cold War and how practiced the Navy is at fighting from a long way away where they can hit you but you can't hit them, that kind of thing, that they have every means of protecting themselves from actually having any ships sunk by the Iranians, something like that.
What do you think?
Well, I think both of those stipulations are true.
If you're far away in an open ocean war, I think what you say is possible.
But the problem is that we have the ships right there in the Gulf that are close and the speedboats can get close enough so they can launch these anti-ship missiles and our ships are likely to be vulnerable.
Now, we do have weapons to counter those missiles but I think they could be overwhelmed as they were indeed in the war game that we were discussing earlier.
In fact, someone in the chat room just provided a link to an article in the Guardian about this.
It's by Julian Borger, I'm not sure how to say it.
War game was fixed to ensure American victory, claims General.
Well, and I guess this is sort of a side point but isn't it strange, I guess it seems strange to me having never been in the military, the incentive structure and the way that works inside the Pentagon.
Is it really the case that war planners would rather set up American forces for disaster than admit that they need to change their war plan otherwise it will be a disaster?
Well, no, I think the incentive is to try to make the war plan as realistic as you can.
Now, the war game is a different thing where you're testing out certain contingencies which then again should feed back to your war planning.
So, when you find out that there are vulnerabilities that you did not suspect or you did not hedge against in the war plan, then you change the war plan.
But I don't think in this case that there's a foolproof way of ensuring that it would be advantageous to the U.S. to attack Iran.
I mean, you make your war plans best you can but as the old saying goes, the war plan goes out the window with the first shot because you have to adapt to the contingency.
So, there are a lot of unknowns.
You can't really predict the outcome.
Well, I remember, I'm sorry I don't remember the guy's name, but there was an article in the Washington Post and then Gareth Porter followed up on it about what they call escalation dominance and how the Pentagon doesn't want to get into any fight that they won't control or they can't at least predict that they would control each and every stage of the conflict, that they would have the check made on everything that the opposing side did.
And so, you know, for example, they want to fight powers like Iraq that can't possibly defend themselves.
Yeah, but look, we didn't hedge against every contingency in Iraq.
There was no plan B.
The troops on the ground didn't have the foggiest notion what they ought to do when the insurgency started.
So, yeah, it would be nice if we could design war plans in that fashion.
But the war plan for the invasion of Iraq didn't even take into account the possibility of an insurgency.
It assumed that we'd pull the troops out very quickly.
Well, so that may not, that kind of thinking on the part of the generals may not stop a war against Iran either.
That's right.
Well, all right, so let's talk about the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There's a military strategist by the name of William S. Lind, who wrote an article a few years back in the American Conservative magazine, and it was titled, How to Lose an Army.
First, you surge into Iraq, then you dare to strike Iran.
And he says, it's kind of, you know, pretty ironic the way he says it in there.
He says, you know, every general that ever lost an army didn't think he was about to lose an army.
But you know what?
It happens.
And if we get into a war with Iran and we have our troops still stationed in Iraq, almost 100,000 plus all the contractors that are still there, et cetera, that they're not really a field army in Iraq.
They're, as he said, penny-packeted in little places on small bases all around the country.
And they're within perfect striking range of Iranian missiles and have basically no way to defend themselves against any Iranian retaliation against them for anything Israel and or America does against Iran.
Well, that's what I was saying earlier.
Our troops in Iraq would be highly vulnerable.
Now, at the time Bill Lind wrote that article, I think our troops were more spread out than they are now.
So in another sense, they're more vulnerable now than they were then because they're on larger bases essentially pulled back out of the cities.
So the targets would be more attractive to missile strikes.
But as I say, you can create havoc simply by interrupting the logistics train.
Which runs from Kuwait to Baghdad.
Baghdad.
Yeah, and it's a long way.
And as you know, in Afghanistan, the logistics trains are highly vulnerable.
And indeed, you read in the press, periodically they get attacked and trucks are destroyed, tanker trucks are destroyed.
Imagine if they really launched a campaign to try to do something to interrupt that.
Now, I don't think the Iranians are very active in either place.
They are reportedly training some people in IEDs and insurgent tactics.
But I don't think they're actively engaged themselves at this point.
But it doesn't take much to get them going if that should be something that they want to do.
Well, and at least for now, I guess we'll see who's able to form a government after the recent elections there.
But at least for now, the people that are closest to the Iranians in Iraq are the people that we've installed in power there.
Nouri al-Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr, the United Iraqi Alliance and so forth.
So if anybody in Iraq could be expected to be used by Iran against Americans in Iraq, it might just be the Iraqi army, as we call it now.
It used to be the Badr Brigade.
Yeah, and of course you've got factions that are in the Iraqi security forces that have disagreements with each other.
The Kurds versus the Arabs, the southern Shia versus Shia.
Well, there are two major groups of Shia, as you know.
There are groups being supported by the Sunnis.
That situation is by no means clarified, and we're not certain of the outcome at all.
In fact, Maliki has been raising Cain about a recount, which we're trying to discourage him from pushing.
I just saw something within the last 24 hours that said that the southern provinces controlled by Maliki's Shia may in fact take advantage of the Constitution to be a separate grouping of provinces.
The Constitution provides that Kurdistan is semi-autonomous and it has stipulations that provinces can join together in a semi-autonomous way.
And if the southern provinces do that, it could create a very difficult situation.
Well, I guess things have changed, and Muqtada al-Sadr has spent a lot of time in Iran, but at least the way it used to be was the Supreme Islamic Council really pushed for federalism and a strong alliance with Iran, and the Sadrists were for unity and Iraqi nationalism.
But I guess now that they got Baghdad, why not?
And who knows what else changed?
I guess we'll see.
But it does go to show that the Americans in Iraq are certainly not safe.
They're basically hostages of Iran right now.
I mean, basically, for the Iranians, probably their best bet is to keep America there, at least for the short term, if they can.
Oh, I think that's absolutely right.
As long as we're tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, we present a minimum threat to Iran.
Well, what if Netanyahu just scrambled F-16s and said to Obama, You're not going to shoot me down over Iraq.
I'm going.
What would Obama do?
Obama wouldn't shoot him down.
No, I don't think so.
So then, really, our foreign policy is completely outsourced to Tel Aviv now.
They can start a war, and Obama wouldn't dare tell them no.
Well, I'm afraid that might be the case.
I think we have really attempted, by sending Admiral Mullen and others to talk to the Israelis, including the Secretary of State and so forth, to discourage them from doing that, because of the potentials that you and I have just discussed.
Jesus.
You know, I don't know.
It's all so crazy.
On one hand, it's insane.
On the other hand, it's a very real possibility.
So I've got to just work that out for myself.
Let me quickly ask you about the negotiations with the Russians that have been going on lately, and particularly, I guess I'd like to ask you about whether you saw this thing about an Air Force journal, I believe, and one of the authors was an aide to the chief of the Air Force, I think it said.
Well, he's the head.
I know the article.
I've read it.
He is the head of the Policy and Strategy Division on the Air Staff, an active-duty Air Force colonel, is one of the three co-authors.
The other two are civilian members of the Air University faculty.
And they came up with the conclusion that you could, with 311 deployed strategic weapons, provide all the deterrence you need regardless of what other countries do.
Really quite a surprising conclusion.
Yeah, yeah.
I especially like the part where we don't even need the Russians to disarm.
As long as we can nuke Moscow, nobody's going to nuke us.
That's it.
Well, you know, I think that's probably right.
I'm not sure I'd rush down to 311.
I'd want to do it in parallel, because you'd never get the Congress to agree for us to do this unilaterally.
So I think our negotiations with the Russians are very important.
But the point is still a very powerful one, regardless of whether the Congress would understand it.
It is indeed.
And in principle, I very much believe that you can deter other nations from using nuclear weapons against our country, our troops in the field, or our allies, with far fewer strategic nuclear weapons than we now possess.
You know, I just this moment got an email update from Kev Hall here.
Business Week.
Bloomberg Business Week.
U.S.
-Russia reach nuclear arms accord, Kremlin says.
Well, we've been saying we're on the verge of it for months.
I hope it's right this time.
Can you tell us about the substance of this agreement?
Do you know?
Well, yes.
The guidelines are that we'll probably go down to something on the order of 800 delivery vehicles and something on the order of 1500 warheads, which is a decrease.
It's down by a little less than a third from what we're committed to at the present time.
So it's a useful agreement.
It's one that the two largest nuclear powers certainly have an obligation to try to negotiate.
Now, the president has said in his speech in Prague last April that this is the first stage, and the next stage would be to engage the other nuclear powers in the interest of trying to make more substantial reductions.
You see, this particular START treaty has nothing to do with the size of our nuclear stockpile.
Even though you keep reading articles that say that this will be a reduction in our stockpile, what it is is a reduction in the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons.
It doesn't require the dismantlement of a single weapon.
Our obligation under Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty is to negotiate in good faith on effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament.
So what we need to do, and this is an obligation of all five of the original so-called nuclear weapon states, we need to get phase one done and get on with phase two and start working toward further reductions.
If we want to strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty with the cooperation of the non-nuclear weapon states that will require even more stringent controls and verification, we have to show good faith in keeping our part of the bargain, and that's taking effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament.
Well, there's a whole conversation there about how we beat the Iranians over the head with the treaty that they abide by, and then we break it to benefit the Indians or whatever other policy.
But I want to ask you this.
This is my modest proposal for nuclear disarmament.
Let's start with getting rid of all the H-bombs.
Nothing in the megatons.
How about that?
That's fair.
We can still nuke Moscow with plain old atom bombs.
Not that I want to nuke Moscow, but the deterrent thing, I mean.
Yeah.
I think our W88 is something on the order of 475 kilotons.
That is the largest warhead on our nuclear subs, the W76, I think it is.
Now, are those just fission bombs or those are H-bombs?
Oh, no, they're H-bombs.
But they're still less than megatons?
Yes.
I see.
But it's just they're H-bombs so you can have a much smaller one for your missile, I guess.
Well, back when we were producing tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and so-called MIRV, Multiple Independent Vehicle Entry, we designed the weapons as light as we could make them so that we could put more of them on a missile.
Now, we've reduced the number of warheads on our land-based strategic missiles to no more than three and we've actually cut back on our submarines.
We're down to 14 nuclear submarines now.
But still, that's a lot.
We've got in our military stockpile something on the order of 5,200 weapons of which 2,200 are deployed, 500 are tactical that can go on aircraft, and then we've got about 2,500 in reserve, not counting the 4,500 that we have awaiting dismantlement.
Our total gets up to something on the order of 9,400.
The Russians have something on the order of 13,000, a number of those awaiting dismantlement.
Too many nuclear weapons for me.
Absolutely.
Way more than we need.
You know, I actually met with the Chinese Minister of Defense in 1979.
Well, when I took a delegation to China, just when it opened up, and he said to me, he said, all we need is a minimum deterrent, just enough to keep other people from being tempted to attack us.
It's estimated that they've got probably 200 warheads and only about 30 ICBMs, but we're effectively deterred by that.
This gives some credence to that Air Force study you and I talked about.
Right.
Yeah, boy, I sure am deterred.
I don't want to get nuked by China.
They may not be able to hit the East Coast, but they can certainly hit me, and they can probably hit all of America by now, right?
Who's that, the Chinese?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Their ICBMs are quite sufficient to hit the U.S.
Yeah, made in the U.S.A.
They have only recently started to introduce solid fuel ICBMs.
There hasn't been a liquid fuel in the past.
I mean, they have not put nearly the emphasis on their strategic deterrent that people seem to assume.
Their policy is minimum deterrent.
Before I let you go, let me ask you one more thing.
Do you have time?
Yes.
Okay, now this is off of nukes and back to perhaps in context of a war with Iran or just in general.
I read a thing by the war nerd, a guy named Gary Brecher, or Brecher.
I'm sorry, I don't know how to say it.
He writes for The Exiled.
Really smart guy, writes really interesting stuff.
One of the things that he wrote about was how aircraft carriers are absolutely obsolete, and that every single Navy captain knows it, and that they're completely defenseless from ballistic missile attack.
They might be able to, with their Aegeus radar and their Gatling gun, they may be able to shoot down an incoming missile from the side, but they have no defense whatsoever for a missile falling on their head.
Well, I tell you, I'm not really certain about this.
I do know that people in the Navy are concerned about the Chinese development of modern anti-ship missiles, and some claim, yes, that these large ships are vulnerable, but as you said earlier, if you're fighting a standoff naval engagement, where you're at some distance from the other side that could launch those missiles, you've got a much better chance of getting them.
Now, my own belief is that while the Aegeus air defense system has proved much more successful than the ground-based midcourse system against ICBMs, it's by no means perfect and probably could be overwhelmed by a multiple missile attack.
So I do think our large ships are certainly more vulnerable than they were, say, during World War II.
All right, everybody, that is retired Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I appreciate it.
Pleased to participate.
Everybody check out armscontrolcenter.org for the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
We'll be right back.
