Angry Planet - America’s Low Yield Nukes and the New Atomic Scare

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

From the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to, probably, New START, all the old treaties are failing. Nuclear weapons are back in the public consciousness in a big way and old Cold War ideas that we once thought relegated to the dustbin of history are back.One of those are so-called low yield nuclear weapons. The U.S. Navy recently fielded some of these SLBMs for the first time on its nuclear capable submarines. Are these weapons actually a game changer? When it comes to nukes, what’s the difference between yields anyway?Here to help us figure out how much trouble we’re in is David Wright. Wright is a Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The idea that they're called hypersonic weapons is a brilliant marketing move. Because people hear hypersonic, and they say, you know, these things, hypersonic means that they can move five times the speed of sound, and that just sounds incredible. And people don't realize that even short-range ballistic missiles move.

that fast and the long-range ballistic missiles can move five to four to five times that fast. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. From the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to probably new start, all the old treaties are failing. Nuclear weapons are back in the public consciousness in a big way. An old Cold War ideas that we once thought relegated to the dustbin of history are back. One of those are so-called low-yield nuclear weapons. The U.S. Navy recently fielded some of these SLBMs for the first time on its nuclear-capable

submarines. Are these weapons actually a game-changer? When it comes to nukes, what's the difference between yields anyway? Here to help us figure out how much trouble we're in is David Wright. Wright is a senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of concerned scientists. David, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here. All right, sir. So tell us about these new weapons

that have been loaded onto U.S. submarines, these so-called low-yield nukes. The United States decided to, the Trump administration decided to build a new set of warheads, which had a much lower yield than a current Trident warheads. What they did was rather than building a brand-new warhead, they basically took the second stage off of a two-stage thermonuclear warhead. So we have left is basically just the primary yield for the warhead.

The idea was to have something that had a yield of under 10 kilotons, where the original yield of that weapon was about 90 kilotons. What's interesting is that in order to put this on a submarine and to be able to use it, I mean, so U.S. trans submarine launch missiles can carry up to eight warheads because of downloading a number of warheads under the New START Treaty. Each one typically carries four to five. But under the way people think about using this weapon, you would want to launch a missile with just one of these warheads on it. So you would basically have a dedicated missile that had one of these little yield weapons on. And there's some speculation that they may be thinking about two per submarine.

So if that's true, then you're now talking about two submarine launch missiles per Triton submarine that just has one of these low-yield weapons on them. So that's the way that they've thought about deploying them. All right. Now, tell me again the difference between the yield, the original yield and the modified yield. What were those numbers again? The original yield of the W76, I believe, is 90 kilotons. And that was a two-stage thermonuclear weapon. The first stage of that weapon has a yield of probably six to seven kilotons.

So what they did was rather than building a new weapon, they basically took out the secondary. So all you're getting is the primary yield. Okay, so this is a true, I guess, because sometimes people say low yield and that covers a lot of territory, right? So I think at that KT, that's actually a pretty low-yield weapon. But when we're talking about nukes, does the yield really matter that much? There's this kind of this philosophy, I think, from what I'd call anti-nuclear activists, that a nuke is a nuke, right, no matter what the yield is. Yeah, you know, there's different ways to think about this, of course.

The United States has a number of low-yield nuclear weapons, mainly air-launched, or bomb dropped, that go down to, I think, one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. So much smaller than this. This is maybe a third of the Hiroshima bomb. So the U.S. has developed and deployed for many years even smaller weapons. The question of whether a nuke is a nuke, I think, gets to this whole question of how would a country in a crisis respond to the use of a nuclear weapon? And would they understand that this was a limited attack with a small weapon that was not supposed to get larger? Or how would they respond and what kind of response from the original user would that make?

And that, I think, is the concern that a lot of people have. If you go back and look even in the 60s, the 70s and the 80s, as people in the military were talking about this, There was a debate about whether or not you really could use low-eal weapons and whether you could think about having a limited use that would remain limited. And so that's really, I think, a key issue here that people worry about. Right. That's one of the things that really strikes me about nuclear discourse now is that in so many ways it feels like we're relitigating old ideas that we had generally thought of as bad in the past. Like there, you know, every time we got into a ground war, uh, throughout, you know, after World War II, there would be somebody would come out and say, usually Curtis Lameh until he died, um, that we should just go ahead and use low yield nuclear weapons and we can win this war, you know, very quickly. Uh, why does it feel like in your, you know, uh, in your opinion, why do you feel like this, these ideas are kind of coming back? why are all these old ideas that we thought had been kind of put away returning? You know, it's a very good question, and I wonder if part of it is that these debates sort of died away for 20 years after the end of the Cold War,

and people now are sort of rediscovering some of these issues without really being steeped in the history of it. I mean, one of the things that we saw led to a real boom in the number and the types of nuclear weapons at the United States and Soviet Union built during the Cold War was this notion of gaps, right? There was this sense of you have to match the other person's capability, system for system. If there were some area where the other country thought that they had a slight advantage, they might be able to use that in some way. And so that led people to try and patch that up. And that's a little bit what things feel like now. When you hear people talk about why we need this low-yield trident weapon, you hear people use the word gap,

the idea is that Russia may have the ability to use a low-yield nuclear weapon, and unless we were able to match them, that would leave a gap that would keep us from being able to respond. and give them some sort of military advantage. And I think the question there first is, well, we have a lot of, you know, over the years we've developed a lot of these low-yield weapons, most of which, you know, that are still active, are deployed in Europe. But also this question of, you know, do military people really think about this system-by-system

sort of equilibrium as opposed to, you know, deterrence more generally? And the notion of what's needed for deterrence, I think, is a really slippery question that gets people to build systems like this. Well, one of the things that struck me about deterrence is that we're all we, we're operating under this assumption that once one is fired, they're all fired, correct? That there's, yeah, that there's a concern about that. But. But it seems to, especially in a, sorry, go ahead. especially in a – I was going to say, you know, what people usually say is you're in a crisis situation. People are unlikely to have clear information about exactly what's happening or what the intent of the other side is.

And so how they respond to that is pretty much unknown. And there are a lot of routes that can lead you to pretty quick escalation. Okay. But the argument for a low-yield nuclear weapon, it would seem to me kind of butts against that, right? because it's about finding the lowest yield possible that you can deploy without, or use rather than deploy, without causing full-scale nuclear war, right? That's the hope. And I think the question is when people look at this, whether, in fact, in a actual conflict situation, that would be read the same way by both sides.

I think that's part of what people are concerned about. And do we have, what are the indications from Russia? I know that they love that Putin likes to get up and give speeches about how the fancy new nuclear weapons they're building. But most of them tend to be large, right? You know, we have the, the, is it the avant-garde nuclear-powered cruise missile that there was the accident with recently? What are the indications that they're building lower yield nukes? I haven't seen indications that they're building new ones. They built a large number of low-yield nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and are believed to still have those in storage.

And so the belief is that Russia has a number of these that they could use, that at this point they're basically taking a page from NATO's playbook during the Cold War, where NATO saw itself at a conventional disadvantage in Europe and saw a small-yield nuclear weapons. to be used on the battlefield as a way of trying to stop a tank attack. Russia now clearly worries about a conventional inferiority of its own and has talked about, in some circumstances, the possibility that if there was a threat to the nation, that it would use these in a conflict. Now, a lot of it has been made about whether or not Russia has what's called an escalation,

escalate, you know, to de-escalate a plan, which would mean to use small nuclear weapons in a conventional war to sort of slow down and de-escalate the war, and how they actually think about that. And from the reading I've done on that, it's actually not very clear whether that's actually how they think about it, how widespread that may be. So I think it's unclear. I mean, I would argue that the, let me be. see how do I want to phrase this? I would argue that the public face of Russia's military tactics

right now are to be confusing and oblique as much as possible. Well, I think that's right. And I think a lot of what Putin is doing is intended for domestic audiences to be able to say to the Russian people, you know, we've got this. And you'll see the U.S. and the West doing certain things. And, you know, we have. figured out how to deal with this. So I think a lot of his pronouncements are in fact intended for a domestic audience. Do we know of any other any of the other nuclear nations have anything like this, China, for example? As far as we know, China does not have low-yield weapons.

Now, clearly, if you have thermonuclear weapons, you could do what we did with the W76 and essentially just use the primary. On the other hand, we haven't seen any indication that I know of that China has been thinking about how to use

weapons in that way or looking at delivery systems for those kinds of weapons. Yeah, it does seem, just from my limited knowledge of Chinese nuclear policy, that they are, that they have it

ostensibly for the reasons that everyone says that they have nuclear weapons, right? That we've got a minimum amount of ICBMs we want to use to, and I believe SLBMs as well, to protect ourselves in the event of a nuclear war. And that's it, just from the little bit that I've seen. Well, it's interesting. If you go back and look at, again, I was talking about the dynamic between the U.S. and

Soviet Union during the Cold War, where you got this matching system for system and building up numbers, what's striking is you haven't seen China do that. So clearly they're thinking about this in a different way. And I think a lot of people have been trying to figure out exactly what does that mean. But the fact that they, I think, have not built all the different kinds of systems and built the numbers, says something interesting about their way of thinking about what they're right. All right. Tell me a little bit more, we can get a little bit more technical because I think that's interesting.

I think the audience would enjoy it. What is the difference mechanically between an ICBM and an SLBM? Obviously, one's much larger. Right. Well, they're actually, so ICBMs and SLVMs are, you know, roughly the same size. And in fact, there's an effort to reduce the size of submarine launch missiles just to get them to fit in the submarines. But, you know, the basic size, the basic way they work is pretty much the same. In the ICBM case, you've got, in the United States case, missiles in silos that are buried in the ground.

If they were launched, there's a cover that comes off the top. The engines start, and these things take off. In the case, the submarines, they're intended to be popped out of the water by essentially air pressure, and then they ignite once they're above the water. And from that point on, they're basically the same. They're somewhat different shapes, somewhat different sizes. But you have typically a multi-stage weapon, which is the way you get very high speeds out of long-range missiles. And then on the top you have what's called a bus typically.

So the last thing you have is a platform that can carry, in the case of the Trident submarine, up to eight. warheads. It has a little bit of ability to maneuver, and so it maneuvers around to get the right speed and direction for one target and drops off one of the warheads, then moves around a little bit more, changes its speed and direction, drops off the next warhead, and so it can target different targets very precisely. In the case of the low-yield triton, as I was saying before, the ideas you would

want to be able to launch just a single warhead, and therefore you would you'd only be carrying a single warhead on this bus. All right, we are going to pause here for a break. You are listening to War College. We are on with David Wright talking about low-yield nuclear weapons. All right, thank you for listening to War College. You are back from a break. I'm your host

Matthew Galt. We're on with David Wright talking about small yield nuclear weapons. David, has the U.S. ever threatened to use small yield nuclear weapons before? Are there any kind of historical precedent here? Or is there any kind of historical precedent here? There are precedents. I mean, during the Cold War, the United States talked about using them potentially in Europe if there were a large tank attack from the Soviet Union. One of the more interesting cases, I think, I've seen was in the 1950s when there was concern that People's Republic of China might attempt to take over Taiwan from the anti-communist forces. And the United States threatened at that point to defend the Taiwanese government by using

small nuclear weapons against essentially military buildings and airfields. and things that the China was, the PRC was building on the mainland next to the islands. And what's interesting about that is a couple things. One is that the United States military advisors were telling Eisenhower at that point that the United States needed to have used small nuclear weapons to be able to attack these these Chinese military buildups. And yet they were running into a problem, which is they said, if we use these things at high altitude, then we're not really going to destroy things in the ground,

but it has the advantage of not creating fallout. Whereas if we really want to destroy things in the ground, then we need to use them at lower altitude, and that would create significant fallout, which would be not only a problem for Chinese cities, but elsewhere as the wind carried this stuff along. And so what happened over time was that Eisenhower became more and more convinced that this was not a good idea. A lot of U.S. allies were very concerned about U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons, and it was actually getting in the way of the United States trying to get international pressure to force a resolution to all this. And what particularly interesting is that in recent years we've gotten more information from archives, historical archives,

and letters between Mao and the Soviet leadership, in which is clear that they didn't think the United States would use them. And they thought if the United States did use them, they not only would not be decisive in the battle, but that it would really turn international feelings against the United States and would there before be counterproductive. And so they actually, and at the same time, it's clear in these letters to Moscow that China realizes that it does not yet have the ability

and will not for a decade to think about actually trying to launch an assault in Taiwan to take back the island. And so what's interesting about that is there's a sense from that time that the U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons were effective in deterring China from trying to take Taiwan. And yet if you look at the actual documents from the time, not only did China not intend to try and launch a military attack on Taiwan because it just didn't have the capability, the military capability. But it really didn't believe the United States threats for any number of reasons. So it's actually a very interesting case to look at. That's kind of a perfect Cold War story, right? this threat that doesn't really exist

and coupled with the idea of that there's a good use case for nuclear weapons when there typically isn't. That's my opinion. But I think history kind of bears us out on that so far. I think that's right. So something that struck me, as I've been reading about these warheads, is that the administration called for their,

called to use them in its 2018 nuclear posture review. Yes. Is there anything else in that review that stuck out at you or now sticks out at you that we may be seeing in the future? Well, one of the concerns that's related to this is that there was a statement in the review that talked about trying to more closely integrate conventional and nuclear planning and operations. And again, when you're thinking about the way.

that a situation might go nuclear, if you're now integrating your conventional and your nuclear forces and you're thinking about how you train people to move from one to the other in certain situations, again, that gives me pause thinking about whether or not that's going to make it more likely that a nuclear war would start. And again, the counter argument to that people make is they say, well, it's actually needed for increasing deterrence, because if the enemy thinks that we have a greater capability and have planned and trained to use these things, then that's going to be more credible. And again, this seems to me to get back to this issue of what's needed for deterrence and what do you need to convince the other side of. Does it,

does it have to be specific to given situations, or is there a more general sense that Things may get out of hand, and therefore you want to be very careful when you're talking about these weapons. To that end, you know, you've been observing this space for a long time. A few weeks ago, the doomsday clock set 100 minutes to midnight, which is the closest it's ever been set. Do you feel that? Does it feel like the nuclear threat now is greater than at any other time in history? I'm not sure I would say it's greater than any other time in history. But having worked on this, you know, this set of issues starting in the 1980s, watching sort of a change in the way people thought about it in the 90s with the fall of the, you know, the Iron Curtain and sort of the end of the Cold War, people talking about getting rid of weapons and, you know, a much better relationship between the United States and Russia, which allowed arms control.

what I'm seeing now is things that sort of harken back to the kinds of dynamics that we saw during the Cold War. And in particular, one of the things that happened in the early 2000s was that the George W. Bush administration pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. The history of the anti-ballistic missile treaty was that in the early 1970s, when the U.S. and Soviet Union finally sat down to come up with the first arms control agreement to limit offensive weapons. There was a realization that if you were going to really have a limit on offensive weapons, you also had to have a limit on defensive weapons, because otherwise, if a country was worried that you were undermining what to turn it, they had left, the quickest thing they could do was to increase their number of offensive weapons.

And so the logic at that point was, in order to have offensive arms control, you also needed to have limits on defenses. That continued through 2002 when the United States pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. And part of what we saw two years ago when President Putin talked about these new nuclear weapons that Russia was building was it was very explicitly about systems that could either bypass or penetrate ballistic missile systems. and it was in response to the U.S. development of ballistic missile systems. And so, again, the idea of the ABM Treaty was to basically allow a predictable future where you wouldn't have to think about those kinds of things.

And my concern now is a sort of dynamic we're seeing with Putin talking about these new systems, with the United States talking about putting a lot more money into new types of weapons, rebuilding its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, building a whole new generation of land-based missiles, for example. Those are all the kinds of things that seem to me, when you're in a situation that countries are not talking to each other and thinking about limits and trying to think about predictability, that it can spawn both countries starting to build more weapons

and spend more money, and that can sort of take on the life of its own. I think the hypersonic issue is one of the things we're seeing right now, now with the United States and China and Russia all working on hypersonics. If you look at, you know, sort of the technical issues of hypersonic weapons, what you come to the conclusion is that they're not a unique silver bullet. They have these capabilities that people like to hold up, but in fact, you know, they don't look as good after 30 minutes as they do after 30 seconds. And as a result of that, my concern is that there's going to be. a lot of spending on this, a lot of concern, a lot of arms racing as countries build hypersonic

weapons end up with weapons that each country sees as somehow threatening, but actually is not all that useful. And that seems to me to be the sort of the classic dynamic of an arms race. You've just lighted on something I think is really interesting. I want to dig into it just a little bit more if we can. Yeah, hypersonic glide reentry vehicles, right? They are this new buzzword in nukes. I also, I think, share your opinion that they seem to be a little bit overblown and much more complicated than what they're being sold as. So can you can you kind of tell us what they're being sold as and what's wrong with that pitch? Well, so I think, you know, the idea that they're called hypersonic weapons is a brilliant marketing move. Because people hear

hypersonic and they say, you know, these things, hypersonic means that they can move five times the speed of sound and that just sounds incredible. And people don't realize that even short-range ballistic missiles move that fast. And the long-range ballistic missiles can move five to four to five times that fast. So the speed is not on its own something that is unique. And in fact, it's lower than with long-range missiles. The other thing that people say is that they're highly maneuverable in a way that ballistic missiles aren't. because typically the way these things are,

the glide vehicles work is they're launched on a ballistic missile. And then instead of arcing through, you know, high above the atmosphere and coming down the way a ballistic missile would, partway through flight, they come down and then travel at maybe 30 kilometers altitude. So traveling through the atmosphere and using the atmosphere to maneuver. That gives you maneuverability, but it also gives you a lot of time. drag. And so what happens, as soon as you get into the atmosphere, you start losing speed. As soon as you start maneuvering, you increase that drag. So maneuvering actually works against

the speed. So the more you maneuver, the slower the thing is going to be going. There's a, you know, one thing people talk about is these things would be undetectable in some sense because, you know, they have these magic properties. Again, if they're launched on a ballistic missile, all of the U.S. early warning systems that could see ballistic missile launches would see the launch, would be able to see what was happening. And as these things were going through the atmosphere, they would be generating a tremendous amount of heat because of drag. And so you would have infrared sensors, definitely develop infrared sensors, the kind that people are talking about, to watch these things. You could develop or use existing ground-based

radars to see these things coming in. So again, I think people get very spun up on the idea that they're hypersonic, thinking that that's a new capability, without thinking about the trade-offs between speed, maneuverability, and all these other things. Yeah, I often, I know this is crude and not quite what's happening, but I often think of it, like, you've attached,

you're attaching a kite to a warhead. anyway, that's neither here nor there. Well, you know, one thing that, you know, back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, the United States worried about how you get the accuracy of ballistic missile, long-range missile warheads up, and the United States actually developed what are called maneuvering reentry vehicles. And the idea was that you would launch a ballistic missile on this high, loft trajectory that went high above the atmosphere. And then during its reentry phase, it would have either it could shift its weight or have little fins or something so that it could actually control its trajectory a little bit and get higher accuracy. So the United States has had this ability to have high accuracy on these systems. It's never deployed them because it's never really needed them. So again, the other question is, what kind of systems here are you talking about?

you know, one possibility is that people are saying, well, if we had really high accuracy, you could use conventional warheads rather than nuclear warheads. That may be true, but I think, again, the question of how much damage can you create, how much accuracy can you actually get, how vulnerable or invulnerable would these be to local defenses, these are all questions that I think people need to look at pretty carefully. I want to switch tracks right here at the end. Something else that you've written about, and I think is under-discussed, is nuclear weapons and the election. We're in an election year.

The Democratic primary is going on as we record this. I think the only nuclear question I've seen anybody ask the candidates is about first use, which is important. But what else should we be talking about around nuclear issues when we are talking about politicians? Like, what are the questions? Well, so part of what we have found is that most politicians are, just like most of the public, are focused on issues like climate change, like the economy, all those sorts of things. And so it's not something that they are very conversant on. I mean, I think, for example, Elizabeth Warren is a bit of an exception here because she's on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, and so she has more of a background on these.

But again, it's not the kind of thing that you typically talk about in a campaign because it's not the kind of thing that people are asking you about. We would like to be in a situation where even if this was not in the top 10 concerns that people have, so that you're being asked. about it a lot, that the candidates understood that it's an issue that they're going to have to deal with. They're going to need to be able to figure out what kind of advisors

do I want on this? One of the things we saw in the Obama administration, for example, was that Obama I think was quite progressive on nuclear issues, and I think his Prague speech made that clear that he was really thinking big thoughts. On the other hand, a lot of the

people that he had as advisors and people in the Pentagon came out of much more of a status quo view of these things. And as he got busy with other things and didn't put the effort into sort of backing up the stuff that he talked about in the Prague speech, it was sort of business as usual. And so by the end of his presidency, people were saying, well, you know, the Prague speech was sort of a one-off and didn't really lead to other things. there was the New START Treaty, but not really big thinking. And I think that's the kind of thing that we want candidates to think about, is what are the issues, what kind of approach do you want to take to this?

And it's not just numbers. I mean, we think a lot about arms control and the New START Treaty and limiting numbers, but part of it is U.S. has built up nuclear policies, the fact that the United States still has a policy of being able to use nuclear weapons first, the fact that the United States is the fact that the United States still keeps its ballistic missiles on hair trigger alert so that they can be launched very quickly. Those are all things that started during the Cold War. There's not a good rationale for them, especially hair trigger alert, I would argue.

And yet, it's sort of become part of the dogma of the way that nuclear policy is set up. And we would, again, like people to be thinking about that and being willing to challenge some of these ideas. David Wright, thank you so much for coming on. to War College and walking us through all of this. Very nice to be here. That's all for this week, War College listeners. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell.

It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please follow us on Twitter at War underscore College. I'm on Twitter at MJG, AULT. Kevin is at KJK Nodell. We will be back next week with more stories from behind the front lines. Stay safe until then.