All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our next guest, our first guest, our only guest today is Wade Bays, and he is Research Director of the Arms Control Association and writes for Arms Control Today and is featured in newspapers all around the country.
His website for Arms Control Association is armscontrol.org.
Welcome to the show, Wade.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I'm happy to have you here, and there's a lot of important news coming out just this week about America's relationship with the states of Eastern Europe and the installation of radar systems in the Czech Republic and then presumably later missiles in Poland.
And this is a subject that obviously is extremely important and yet very little covered even on this show.
So I'm glad to have an expert opinion on here to help explain what's going on here and what's the use.
I guess the news is that they signed a deal in the Czech Republic yesterday, right?
That's correct.
There was an agreement reached between the United States government and the Czech Republic for hosting a radar that the U.S. intends to base in the Czech Republic to try and track missiles that may be fired from Iran towards Europe or the United States.
The agreement still has to be ratified by the Czech Parliament for it to take effect, so this isn't necessarily a done deal yet.
Now, I know it's in the news that Iran has done these missile tests and so forth, but I thought it was sort of mostly an open secret or what have you that this has really nothing to do with Iran.
This is about encircling Russia.
Well, I mean, I think the U.S. government, there's definitely sizable portions of the U.S. government that do believe that this is about countering Iran or other countries in the Middle East that may develop ballistic missile systems that could threaten Europe or the United States.
I should just note about the Iranian test today that those systems that were tested are not capable of reaching Europe.
The longest-range system was a medium-range system, so it's capable of reaching southern Europe such as Turkey or perhaps Greece, but it can't reach into central Europe or eastern Europe or northern Europe, and it's estimated that Iran wouldn't be able to develop a longer-range missile that would be capable of targeting most of Europe or the United States until about 2015.
So there is some time before one really has to feel compelled to build a system to defend against the Iranian threat.
But there are others, such as those who sit in Moscow, who see the system as designed for countering the Russian strategic deterrent.
And I should also note that Senator John McCain, who is an advocate of missile defense, has noted on his website that he sees missile defense as playing a role against so-called rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, but also as an important hedge against potential peer competitors like China and Russia.
Now that language goes beyond what the Bush administration and the Clinton administration have all said, which is we're looking at missile defense to counter states that are trying to acquire longer-range systems, not against China and Russia, because it's just not feasible to defend against those two countries because they have such a large number of ballistic missiles already or the capability to expand their arsenals in the case of China.
So does that mean that under McCain administration that the mandate for missile defense would be much greater, or that Bush and the Clinton administration have basically downplayed that angle, but that's really what they were doing all along anyway?
I think there's certainly those in the Pentagon and others who see missile defense as a hedge against China.
I don't think there's no secret about that.
But politically and publicly they say it's not designed against China because they don't want to upset Chinese sensitivities.
But I do think under the McCain administration, at least publicly it appears, that he would be given more of an expansive mission in the sense of trying to provide a potential defense against China and Russia, which is more expansive than that previously discussed by the current Bush administration or the preceding Clinton administration.
Oh man, there's so many different directions I can go from all you've said so far.
Let's get back to Iran, I guess, for now.
When you talk about by 2015 then they may be able to hit Central Europe, that kind of thing.
In the coverage today they say they were testing medium and long-range missiles, but I guess what the American media calls a long-range missile is the one that you say might be able to hit Greece or Turkey.
Yeah, there's always differing interpretations or labels for missile launches.
The U.S. government's specific definitions are that a short-range system is something that is 0 to 1,000 kilometers.
A medium-range system is something that is 1,000 to 3,000 kilometers in range.
An intermediate-range system is something that goes from about 3,000 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers.
And then a long-range or an intercontinental ballistic missile, ICBMs, which most of the public are familiar with, those are the systems that the United States and Russia, previously the Soviet Union, used to target each other in the Cold War, those are systems that have a capability of 5,500 kilometers or greater.
Now that is the range of systems that Iran would clearly have to develop, something that has a 7,000, 8,000-kilometer range to be able to target the eastern seaboard of the United States.
To reach into Europe, it would probably need to develop a missile that is more in the intermediate category, so you're looking at something that has a range of 3,500 or 4,000 kilometers.
But getting there from where they're currently at, which is around a 2,000-kilometer-range missile, is still a tough engineering feat.
It's tough to do.
It's rocket science.
It's not easy to do.
It's no guarantee that Iran will be able to develop these long-range systems.
I think it's important to go back and look at previous projections of how countries would acquire ballistic missiles or how soon they would be able to.
You go back to 1998, which is when there was a commission that was initiated by Congress to re-look at the ballistic missile threat because Congress, the Republican-controlled Congress, did not agree with the assessments that were produced by the intelligence community.
The intelligence community at that time, around 1995, said that we're not going to see a longer-range ballistic missile threat from countries like Iran, North Korea, or Iran until about 2010, at least.
Those who are proponents of missile defense and those who saw a bigger threat in those countries commissioned another independent study to look at that, which was led by Robert Gates.
The current Secretary of Defense.
Gates essentially confirmed the intelligence community's analysis.
Then they go back a third time and get another commission.
This one is actually headed by Donald Rumsfeld.
This commission comes out and says, we assess that Iran or North Korea could develop a longer-range ballistic missile within five years of deciding to do so.
By the way, we think that they may have already made such a decision.
So they radically increased the threat perception that there would be ballistic missile capabilities by Iran, North Korea, that could reach the United States within five years.
But that has not come to pass.
Right now, as I said, the U.S. intelligence community's current estimate is that Iran won't be able to acquire an ICBM until about 2015 at the earliest.
As you can see, this is a difficult thing to achieve, and there's lots of complications.
I don't think there's any kind of hard and fast rule for determining when a country would actually acquire such a capability.
Well, that's interesting.
That's a whole chapter of Team B revisionism on the part of these guys that I didn't even know about.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, yeah, I'll definitely have to go and find my footnotes so I can refer to that whole little chapter in the future.
The other thing there is that the Iranians don't have any nukes to deliver on any missiles they might have.
I mean, what's the biggest conventional bomb you can fit on an Iranian missile anyway?
Well, I mean, that's hard to say.
I mean, they could definitely deliver some type of conventional payload, but as you said, they don't have a nuclear warhead to put on that missile.
So the real value of that missile is basically nil.
It really couldn't do that much more damage.
And if Iran actually wanted to harm European interests, they would go about it in a different way.
And that's the other aspect of this debate that gets lost is, is it realistic to think that a regime in Iran would actually threaten to launch a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead at Europe?
One has to sketch out scenarios in which that would be possible or why they would do so.
And I think the only scenario in which one might contemplate that an Iranian regime would think of doing something like that is if it was a last gasp effort by a dying regime that was already invaded by U.S. forces or European forces and they felt like they wanted to go out martyrs.
I mean, the fact is the Iranian regime is not going to launch missiles at Europe or the United States out of the blue without provocation or even as a threat because they understand what would follow, which is they would be completely demolished and taken out of power.
This regime wants to stay in power.
It doesn't want to lose power.
And I think that's one thing you can learn from the Iranian revolution is this regime's tenacious hold on power, that it doesn't want to give up power.
So it's not going to go about doing something that would invite the United States or Europe to take it out of power.
So I think the scenarios in which people assume Iran might acquire this missile and may threaten Europe or the United States are greatly exaggerated.
Yeah, well, and even if America set this one out, the Europeans could take Iran just fine without our help, even without NATO at all.
It would be difficult, but they could certainly do damage to Iran.
Nothing Iran would contemplate because of its large economic ties with Europe.
I mean, it would be shooting itself in the foot if it ever tried to threaten Europe or actually attack Europe.
So now this goes back to the question of, I don't know, can you give me a percentage, 70-30, 60-40, of people inside the state who really believe their own hype that this is about Iran or back to the question of encircling Russia in the new Cold War?
I don't know.
It's hard to say.
I mean, I do think that the majority of folks that work on this issue do see Iran as a threat down the road, and they do see this as a mechanism for lessening that threat.
But the Russia issue is an interesting one, and I don't think you'll have anyone really say that it's about encircling Russia, but that's how the Russians perceive it.
And if you're staying in Moscow, what you've seen since the end of the Cold War is a growing encirclement by NATO.
Whether it's intentional or not, one can debate, but the fact is that NATO has added ten additional members, I believe, since the end of the Cold War, including former republics, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, that sit on Russia's borders.
There's disagreements over the Conventional Armed Forces and Europe Treaty, which actually set out specific limitations on the amount of tanks, armored combat vehicles, heavy artillery, combat aircraft, and attack helicopters that NATO and the Warsaw Pact could deploy in Europe.
The whole intention of that was to prevent countries from moving all those pieces towards the center of Europe and making that a potential flashpoint.
It was supposed to remove the possibility of either side launching an out-of-the-blue kind of attack that would take the other by surprise.
It was supposed to remove that possibility, and it did that.
But Russia now sees NATO expanding and NATO conventional capabilities are growing while Russia's conventional capabilities are lessening.
So by default, Russia has now actually adopted NATO's old policy, which was to put a greater reliance on tactical neutral weapons and neutral weapons in general to deter a conventional invasion, which was actually what NATO first did when it faced a much larger Soviet army back when the Cold War initially got underway.
And now there's this guy, I forget his name, but I guess he finally gave up.
He would post the same comment on the anti-war radio section at antiwar.com over and over and over again, which was that by putting these missile defense systems in Europe, that we could force or are forcing the Russians to adopt a strike on warning posture for their military, that usually they would have, I guess, two or three more fail-safes before launching, but that now having the threat closer to them, at least if it hasn't already made them change their policy, it's at least pushing them toward the idea that as soon as the computer starts blinking red, they ought to go ahead and launch because they don't have much time before a first strike by the United States would be successful.
Well, I don't think there's much, actually, that the United States and Russia could do to lessen the amount of time that the systems are already kind of triggered to go.
Oh, well, that's comforting.
One of the things that has been largely ignored by many people is that the nuclear threat posed by the United States and Russia toward each other has not dissipated, even though relations presumably have improved.
And the reason is because the United States and Russia continue to keep weapons on high alert.
The U.S. ICBM force, the Minuteman IIIs, can be launched in a matter of minutes.
And the same goes for Russia's ICBMs.
So both systems, both postures, are still very much on a very tight trigger.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a hair-trigger posture, but it is a very high-alert posture in which, you know, once the decision is made, it would not take very much for those missiles to actually be launched.
I mean, the processes and the mechanics of it kick in, and it's automatic.
There's an automaticity to this where once the process is started, it's going to carry through.
So that's been a concern raised by many analysts here in Washington, is why can't the United States and Russia lessen, or I should say lengthen, the time required to be able to launch the nuclear forces, which really has not undergone any change since the Cold War ended.
And that seems like the kind of thing that could be verified, right?
But nobody just wants to give an inch on it.
Yeah, I mean, there are things that would be hard to verify, such as electronic things, but there's also more expansive steps one could take, such as decoupling the warhead from the missile and then, you know, leaving the silos open so you could verify that.
That would be something that would certainly expand the amount of time required to fire ballistic missiles.
There is the counterargument that if you are in a crisis situation, then when you do put the warheads back on top of the missiles, that's going to even escalate the crisis further.
But I think that, you know, is really kind of worst case scenario analysis, which is aimed at preventing these measures that would actually give us some breathing time in a crisis.
You know, this is one of many steps that have been advocated by the four former statesmen, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, and Senator Sam Nunn, who have advocated in two Wall Street Journal op-eds about reestablishing nuclear disarmament as a goal for U.S. security policy.
And they've talked about the need to lengthen the time required by the United States and Russia before they can fire their missiles, just as a way to lessen tensions and reduce the chance of accidents.
So ringing Russia with anti-missile missiles can't really make that much of a difference in the policy, because it's already so close to hair-trigger alert, as you almost say.
Right.
As I said, I don't think the Russians could do more so their missiles could be fired quicker, but I do think it just further sours relations between the United States and Russia, which really have been going down the toilet over the past eight years.
Part of that, you can't lay it all at the foot of the Bush administration.
Part of it is that Russia is feeling more powerful because the revenue is deriving from its natural resources.
It's feeling stronger about itself after several years of really feeling as if it was being kicked around, and so it wants to reassert itself.
But at the same time, the Bush administration has magnified these feelings by essentially neglecting Russia and saying that it didn't matter, and not recognizing Russia's security concerns and saying, oh, Russia will live with this.
And we forced a number of things down their throat that they didn't want to live with, such as the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which actually proscribed strategic missile defenses and proscribed putting these missile interceptors in foreign countries.
So we're trying to force-feed these policies down Russia's throat, and it doesn't want to swallow them.
This is causing a severe deterioration of relations between the U.S. and Russia, and this is something that the next president, whoever that may be, is going to have to try and remedy.
Another thing that we haven't discussed is the fact that the one mechanism that is available for the United States and Russia to actually have a great deal of transparency into each other's nuclear arsenals is the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START.
That agreement is actually going to expire in December of 2009.
Now, the United States and Russia have initiated negotiations about a successor agreement, but so far those have been unfruitful, largely because the United States first drug its feet about actually doing another treaty.
This is kind of the general administration's reaction or allergic reaction to having binding commitments that could limit U.S. flexibility.
And now the United States is resisting the notion of going down to lower warhead levels, which Russia wants to do, and the United States is resisting the idea of actually putting limits on the number of ICBMs and bombers and other strategic delivery vehicles, which is a feature of START, but was dropped in the agreement that was negotiated by the Bush administration in 2002, known as the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty.
That agreement does not have any verification measures.
It relies upon the mechanisms and the regime put in place by the START agreement, which, as I said just a few minutes ago, expires in 2009.
So if there is not an agreement reached in early 2009 by the next administration, this very important window into each other's nuclear forces is going to close, and both countries are going to have to then revert to worst-case analysis and worst-case guesstimating about what the other side is doing with its nuclear forces, which is not a situation that I think we want to revisit, because that is what led to the arms race in the first place, was countries making assumptions about what the other was doing.
Okay, now I guess we can assume that John McCain would continue the worst of the Bush administration's policies.
I don't know of any reason to say otherwise.
In fact, I've seen essays by people like Randy Shuneman and Robert Kagan and so forth, and indications that John McCain wants to pick a fight with the Russians, kick them out of the G8 and all that.
So unless you disagree with that substantially, my real question is, is there any reason to believe that Barack Obama would be any better?
Well, two things.
One, on McCain, I mean, to be fair, he has said, departing from the Bush administration line, that he wants to reach an agreement and is willing to reach an agreement with Russia on further reductions of nuclear weapons.
Now, that's a very vague declaration.
I should note that the current Bush administration, current President George W. Bush, when he was campaigning in 2000, made a similar speech in which he said, we need to get rid of these obsolete relics of the Cold War.
We have too many.
We need to get rid of them.
By the way, I should note that he also said we should reduce the alert posture of weapons.
And those are things that he didn't really follow through on, at least on the operationally deployed level.
And so McCain, he has expressed his interest in going lower, and he has actually also said we should revisit the notion of working toward nuclear disarmament, just as Senator Barack Obama has said.
But there's still some very good questions about how McCain would actually accomplish that, given what you mentioned, which is kind of this tough guy approach to Russia and kicking it out of the G8 and taking other steps that would rankle Russia.
And I don't see how that would make Russia more conducive to signing an agreement to reduce nuclear forces lower.
With Senator Barack Obama, I think he has been more ambitious in saying that he wants to relook at the U.S. nuclear posture, that he would like to work towards a world without nuclear weapons, and he introduced legislation, I think it's S1977 is the number, that he introduced with Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican of Nebraska, last year, which laid out a raft of proposals for reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and which talked about the need to go lower in U.S. forces, as well as taking a more sensible approach toward missile defense and making sure that it's effective before you deploy it.
And that's one thing that we really haven't touched upon in our discussion so far, is that the proposed deployment of missile defenses in Europe, aside from antagonizing Russia, really doesn't make sense in the sense that the system is unproven and you're deploying it against a threat that doesn't yet exist, that hasn't materialized.
The system that we're planning on deploying is similar to the one that we've deployed in Alaska and California, but the interceptor is different.
It's a two-stage interceptor instead of a three-stage interceptor, and it hasn't even been flight-tested.
The three-stage interceptor that we have deployed is 7-for-12 and very scripted missile defense test, in which we know where the target is, we know what it looks like, we know where it's headed.
That's not going to be the situation in real life.
So they haven't gone through operationally realistic testing.
So the systems we're planning on deploying in Europe haven't even been tested, they haven't been flight-tested, and Congress has said that you can't deploy these systems or work at deploying them until they've been proved through operationally realistic testing.
And now the Pentagon has come up with a plan of three tests that it would hope to complete by the end of 2010, but at the same time, this administration hasn't really been able to pull off more than one test per year, and so that seems like a very ambitious goal that's not going to be met.
Well, and it seems like if we assume, and I was going to ask you about that, because I know that technically speaking they basically just, well, as you said, they script these things where the missiles are pre-programmed to meet at an exact place in the sky, and then they say that that was a successful intercept.
I wouldn't go quite that far, but there is a general box into which they are shot, and there's no countermeasures, and there's other things that diminish the realistic nature of the testing.
But, yeah, I mean, they don't represent what would happen in the real world.
Right, because in the real world, the Russians would have all kinds of multiple vehicles off of each rocket, decoys and all kinds of things.
I read one thing where they talk about the giant airborne laser for shooting down nukes on their way up, and the Russians said, fine, we'll just paint our missiles in chrome paint, and then we'll just deflect your laser.
It seems like even if we took for granted that, okay, the system works perfectly, that the Russians can just turn around and turn a couple of screws and overcome with countermeasures whatever gains we've made.
Yeah, that's a true statement.
I mean, countermeasures and the even easier process for them is simply to overwhelm the number of interceptors that the U.S. has, because Russia deploys hundreds of missiles, whereas we're only talking about deploying tens of interceptors.
So they wouldn't even need to bother with decoys if they were actually interested in attacking the United States, which I think is very far-fetched.
But, you know, there is that possibility that lingers out there somewhere.
Hopefully it never comes to that.
But I should note that the U.S. intelligence community assessed back in 2000, and it has continued to assess, that countries like North Korea or Iran would, by the time that they test a long-range ballistic missile, also have been able to successfully acquire and deploy countermeasures that could probably defeat the U.S. system.
So it's not just Russia that can deploy countermeasures.
It's Iran and North Korea that in all likelihood, if they were able to develop a longer-range ballistic missile and then made a nuclear warhead on it, would have the technical capability to design these countermeasures that would allow them to circumvent U.S. defense.
And it seems like, in terms of the Russians at least, that they could attack any anti-missile missiles in Poland with just conventional forces, right?
Send fighter jets after them and fighter bombers.
Yeah, and they've thrown out the threat that they would target the Polish and Czech sites with missiles of their own.
So they've made it known that if these systems are deployed, they're obviously going to be added to our hit list in the event of a conflict.
I should note that Polish officials have said that even though the Polish government so far has kind of been driving a hard bargain on negotiations with the U.S. about hosting the site, because I think they're concerned about being left out of the branch if the next administration comes in and decides not to go ahead with the project.
And I think they're also interested in acquiring additional military systems from the U.S.
But the Polish officials have said that the more bellicose the Russian threats grow, the more likely that they're going to be driven into a deal with the U.S.
So the Russian threats may be counterproductive at this time.
Well, that's interesting.
I guess it seems like the politicians in Poland just need to take a couple of steps back and see what it is that the Russians are making bellicose threats about.
I mean, I'm looking at ABC in Australia today, and they say Russia threatens to react against a U.S. missile shield.
There it is right in the headline, who did what first.
And nobody can really dispute it.
And what the Russians are saying is that they will react with military resources.
They are going to change their military posture in order to confront this new threat.
No, exactly.
And that's what they have said.
I think one thing that we need to keep in mind is the Poles and the Czechs and the Hungarians and others have a much different history with the Russians than we do.
You know, NATO expansion wasn't enough for them.
I don't think they feel that comfortable that Article 5 means that the United States is going to come rushing to their defense or that Spain or France is going to come rushing to their defense.
Again, in a very admittedly hypothetical and seemingly unrealistic scenario in which Russia takes military action against any of those countries for any reason.
So what they want, I mean, they're not interested in missile defense for missile defense sake.
They're interested in missile defense because it's a way of developing a closer relationship with the United States and making sure that there are U.S. personnel and U.S. technologies and other things that are deployed on their territories that serve as a tripwire for making the United States be very concerned about Polish and Czech security.
Well, tell me about the population of Poland and the internal politics in their legislature and that kind of thing.
Is everybody for this over there?
No, no.
I should caution you that I'm not an expert on Polish or Czech public opinion, but in very general terms, both countries, the majority of the public is opposed to these proposals.
They're concerned about, one, the Russian reaction.
Two, they're also concerned about this historical precedent where they had foreign military forces, in this case the Soviet Union, deployed on their territories, and they didn't like it.
There is a sense of independence that the public wants to maintain where they don't want to be a satellite or a base for the United States.
So that's also feeding into it.
So the governments there definitely are out of step with public opinion.
Now, whether or not public opinion or the government will win out if these agreements come before the two parliaments remains to be seen.
There was talk a month or so ago that the Czech parliament, it was a toss-up whether or not they would actually approve the agreement.
Now the trends seem to be that the Czech parliament would approve it, even though public opposition to the idea has not slackened whatsoever.
I don't know why that's the case.
I'm not an expert on Czech politics.
I'm not an expert on Polish politics.
But the same situation exists for Poland where the general public is opposed to the concept, but the government is pushing it very hard.
Well, you know, Melvin Goodman, who's a former Soviet analyst at the CIA, wrote the book Failure of Intelligence.
In that book he quotes a high-level CIA guy, and this is actually in the context of the rendition program and using former Soviet bases in Poland for rendition.
And one of the CIA guys, a very high-level guy, I think, says, ah, you know, Poland is the 51st state.
The American people have no idea.
I mean, I think there are some in the Polish government that would, you know, like to feel that they have that close of a relationship with the U.S.
I mean, they certainly have put a priority on, you know, establishing that link with the United States.
I should note, though, that the current government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has also put an emphasis on improving relations with Russia.
And that's one of the reasons these negotiations have dried out, is because there was a parliamentary election that brought the Tusk government into power back in October, which kind of interrupted the U.S.
-Polish negotiations that were underway.
And the Tusk government said, well, let's hit the pause button on this, and let's go talk to the Russians and hear what they have to say, because, you know, it is our neighbor, and we should have better relations with them and not just the United States.
So they're kind of doing a dual-track approach now, that they're trying to talk with both Washington and Moscow, but clearly, you know, they are upsetting Moscow by the talks they're having with Washington.
And I'm not sure how they're going to kind of balance this down the road.
Well, you know, I have this thing where I think that defending the American people from intercontinental hydrogen bombs actually should be a priority of this government, that we ought to have missile defense systems in America.
And so the problem is context.
It's not like we're a normal country in a normal time, and our government's job is simply protecting us from foreign attack.
We're talking about putting these in other people's countries, on the borders of other countries, even, after that.
And we're talking basically about wearing armor to a fistfight, rather than simply something that's for defensive purposes, for protecting the American people.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think there is the question about missile defense.
Is it truly defensive?
In other words, is it more likely to be a shield behind which the United States can undertake offensive action?
I mean, that is how some perceive this, is that this would give the United States greater flexibility in confronting or dealing with a state like Iran or North Korea if they had ballistic missiles that could reach the United States, that this would give you an added sense of confidence that you have a defense in place to counter these weapons.
So, therefore, you can be more ambitious or more aggressive in your actions against those countries.
And maybe you would take the risk that you necessarily wouldn't before.
And I think that's obviously very troubling.
I think, clearly, missile defense at best is a safety net if everything else fails.
And I fear that if there are certain people, certain mentalities in the United States that if they had missile defense would think that there's two things.
One, they could think that we don't need to talk to countries like Iran and North Korea because we have missile defense and it will protect us from a ballistic missile attack.
So we don't need to engage with these countries and talk with them.
We don't need to try and resolve these disputes.
Or the second, as I alluded to earlier, the other more egregious scenario or a discomforting scenario is the possibility that the United States would say, well, actually we have this missile shield.
Iran and North Korea can't hurt us.
So let's be more aggressive in trying to actually pursue our stated goal of regime change, which has been this administration's policy up until the past year with North Korea.
It was all about changing the regime, not about getting the regime to change its behavior.
So, I mean, that's something that I think people haven't really looked at when they think about missile defense is what's its true purpose and how is it going to be used.
And I should note that when one talks about missile defense, I think there is this natural reaction that you want to be protected against ballistic missiles.
But I think you have to walk through the scenarios of when would a country likely use this.
And they seem very small.
And then, you know, a terrorist is never going to have a long-range ballistic missile.
This is not a threat that we have to be concerned about from terrorists.
And if one thinks about a so-called rogue regime launching one of these things, that seems pretty fantastic as well because as the U.S. intelligence community has assessed, you know, a ballistic missile is the least likely method that a country would take to attack the United States with a nuclear weapon.
You know, there's far more reliable, cheaper, sneakier ways to do it, such as smuggling it in the hull of a ship, you know, smuggling it in a car.
You're not going to launch a ballistic missile because that identifies where it came from and you're inviting immediate retaliation.
So, you know, the worth of missile defense, I think, is a safety net if diplomacy and everything else fails.
You know, the focus should be on dealing with the problematic source, securing loose nuclear material so they don't find their way into terrorist hands.
And that's the thing what it comes down to is an issue of opportunity cost because the United States under the Bush administration has been investing about $10 billion a year into missile defenses.
You know, that includes short-range battlefield defenses, which I think are appropriate things to do.
But the overall amount on missile defense is about $10 billion a year, whereas we're only spending $1 billion a year on trying to secure and eliminate nuclear materials at their source, such as in Russia or in other states of the former Soviet Union.
And clearly that should be a priority.
Well, yeah, that's Sam Nunn that you mentioned earlier.
That was his act, the Nunn-Lugar Act, to try to buy up all the excess fissionable material there in the former Soviet Union.
But now when you talk about, okay, what it's worth to you is basically what I was saying, right?
Last chance, fail safe to keep a hydrogen bomb from landing on Chicago or something.
Exactly.
However, you know, from the point of view of the war party in this country, when they're doing this missile defense, I know there have been these kind of controversial military papers put out by the Pentagon over the past few years describing nuclear posture.
Is this an attempt on the part of America to basically undo the doctrine of mutual assured destruction and to attempt to create a situation where we think we can start a war with anyone, including Russia, and that they won't be able to hit us back in enough of a way to deter us from starting it?
There are some analysts who argue that the United States has reached a point of primacy where it could maybe conduct a first strike against Russia.
You know, I would dispute that notion.
I don't think we've reached that.
Is that a goal, though, among the war party to be in that position?
Is that what they're working for here?
I'm not sure who exactly the war party is.
I would put it this way.
I would say that the United States, those who shaped and produced the Nuclear Posture Review of 2001 for this administration, that a goal was to maximize U.S. flexibility, military flexibility, and being able to use or employ nuclear weapons in various circumstances or other capabilities.
And it's defense.
Administration officials say that the posture was intended to diminish reliance on nuclear weapons.
But at the same time, they talked about the need to investigate or explore new design weapons for special circumstances, such as trying to reach bunkers buried deep underneath the earth or developing low-yield nuclear weapons, such as something that would be five kilotons or less, so you would reduce collateral damage.
Therefore, when you use that weapon, the effects would be less.
And their argument was that opponents right now calculate the United States wouldn't use its nuclear weapons because of the political firestorm that it would create, not to mention the fallout, the physical fallout from using those weapons.
But they argued, but if we develop smaller weapons with lower yields, maybe our adversaries would think twice.
Maybe they'd think we're more likely to use these weapons.
And there's Ambassador Lyndon Brooks, who was the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration for the administration, noted in testimony that he favored developing what he called, quote, more usable nuclear weapons for the purpose that they would have, he argued, more deterrent value.
And secondly, if you were forced to use them, then they would have less collateral damage.
So there are those who are trying to get around this notion of mutual assured destruction and trying to get rid of it.
They say that deterrence has lost its value in a world in which countries or the actors you face may not be rational.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, if we can end the show on some good news, it would be that nobody's used these things since Truman.
That's exactly right.
I mean, there is a strong, strong taboo against nuclear weapons.
And even Bush administration officials acknowledge, and I think Colin Powell was one, that there is no such thing as a low-yield political nuclear weapon.
Any decision to use nuclear weapons would be monumental and would only be done at the last resort.
So it seems like this is something where the bureaucrats and others who are invested in these weapons and maintaining them and keeping them are trying to find roles for justifying their continued existence.
But that is running up against, as we talked about earlier, the views by Senator Stamnett and others, that we really should be starting to move towards a world without nuclear weapons because these weapons pose such a danger to the United States as well as all other countries.
And the safest thing for us to do would be to get rid of them.
All right, everybody.
That's Wade Bays from armscontrolassociation.org.
And he writes for Arms Control Today.
Thank you very much for your time today on the show.
And thanks for having me.
