Angry Planet - How Many Nukes Does It Take to Win a War? (Trick Question)

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comThe world is living with a Cold War hangover. The logic of deterrence, which dominates the minds of the people who plan nuclear wars, means that America must have enough nuclear weapons to credibly threaten to destroy the world should someone launch nukes at it. That thinking led to a world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and that was just when the U.S. had the Soviet Union to think about. Now it’s facing the twin threats of Russia and China. Does that mean America needs twice the nukes to handle twice the threats?Some in the Pentagon seem to think so, and the world is embarking on a radical and expensive nuclear build up the likes of which it hasn’t seen in a generation.What if there’s another way? James Acton is here to pitch us on a world where Optimal Deterrence does not mean spending trillions of dollars on new world-ending weapons just to make sure everyone else doesn’t use theirs.Acton is a co-director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program and the author of a new article that outlines the 21st century nuclear arms race and a new plan to stop it.Podcasting from an iPhone in a closetThe apocryphal camera lens storyThe nuclear teaseWhat are nuclear weapons pointed at?How to win a three-way nuclear warThe dread logic of counterforce targetingTrump’s nuclear reticenceHow many nukes are there anyway?How to spend a trillion dollars on nuclear weapons upgradesActon’s big idea“I don’t think we lose much by ceasing to target an adversary’s nuclear forces.”“It doesn’t matter if they believe it or not.”Optimal DeterrenceRussia’s nuclear torpedoCarnegie Endowment for International PeaceSupport 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. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is almost entirely listener supported? It's true. Go to Angry PlanetPod.com.

You'll get early commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes. We just published one that's about using open-source technology to track Nazis, both online and offline. You can look at it. You can listen to it early again at angry planetpod.com. Here's the show. Have you plugged in that iPhone? I have like 80% charge. Okay.

We're going to trust you. Yeah. This is the first time you've done it from a phone in like 10 years? I think it is. Yeah. I think I did it from a phone once in the Reuters days. Yeah. No, I'm the consummate professional.

I've never let myself. get into this situation before. You always have the studio, yeah. That's right. Also known as my basement. Hey, there's plenty of podcast studios and basements all across America. I think that's where most of them are, in fact. Well, or from what I've heard, closets.

People find a tiny closet and then convert that. You have a very swish-looking thing, Matt. It's the camera. It's mostly the camera. It's a very expensive camera that is too much. for what we're doing. So you can blur the background. Well,

it's a depth of feel. Like, that's how nice the lens is. Yeah. No, but I mean, that's the, your, your, shallow depth of field there

is created by the camera rather than by software, I'm assuming. Yep, yep, it's the, it's the lens on the camera and it's not the,

yeah, thank you. Yeah, this is a, I'm going to keep this because it's such a bizarre story. I have a friend that makes movies here,

makes cheap little horror movies. And he's the one that sent me up with the camera. And he's also like a military guy. And he gives me the lens. And he's like, these are the lenses that were, I don't know if this is true at all. It's like these lenses were made by, they were made from repurposed Soviet steel. And they're from the 1960s. And they're the same lenses that like, you know, wives would take pictures of their husbands when they like summered in their dachas. And, And it's just like had this long story about it. And I don't know if any of that's true.

But I'm going to decide that it is. I think that's the right move. It's a great story. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. Jason Fields is hiding in a, in his office on his iPhone. It's a first for the show.

We've got a wonderful guest with us here today. James Acton, sir, can you introduce yourself and kind of give us your background? Sure. I'm James Acton. I'm co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I started off as a physicist. I did a PhD in physics, not nuclear physics as it happens, and decided that I wanted to pursue a career in public policy without really having much idea what that involved. But after a couple of jobs, I got a two-year offer to work at Carnegie in Washington, and that was 17 years ago. So the reason I wanted to have you on the show is you've just published this paper at the Council on Foreign Relations. Is that right? I'm just pulling it up real quick. Called Optimal Deterrence that was very interesting to me for two reasons. One, I think it's a really good, the first half of it, or maybe the first 60, 70 percent of it is a really good outline of where the nuclear.

clear world stands right now and like what the current challenges are and like what things might look like in the next 10 years kind of like where things are trending. And then also a like a policy recommendation or a set of policy recommendations that when I read them I was like I understood the logic of them but I had a visceral negative reaction. And like when I explained and then I explained it to Jason what it was and I watched him like reel back. But like, But also, the more I think about why, the more I think about that policy recommendation, the more sense it makes to me. And the less terrible a world it would be, despite it being kind of frightening. Ladies and gentlemen, that's what we call a tease.

Stay tuned. And you'll learn about these policy recommendations. But I think that, like, to get there, I do think it is important to kind of set it up. And there's people, like this is a generalist show. There's people that maybe aren't involved in the nuclear world. So I want to get like, I want to explain to people like what's happening right now because it's pretty wild. We're kind of in this a, we're at the beginning of, or maybe not even the beginning of, we're deeply involved in America, China and Russia in a new nuclear arms race, right? A new buildup.

We are. I, you know, I think we are on the verge of this three way. nuclear arms race. We have an arms race in the Cold War with the United States and the Soviet Union. And now I think we are on the verge of a three-way arms race involving Russia, China and the United States. And to understand why that arms race is happening, in my opinion, you have to go back to this weird, arcane, terrifying question of U.S. nuclear targeting, which is the question of how if the US ever had to use nuclear weapons, it would do so. What would the targets for US nuclear weapons be? There's a wide, you know, amongst, I think very few people have considered this question,

but amongst those who have, I think many of them probably assume that cities are the targets, that the goal of nuclear use would be to kill as many people as possible. The US insists that's not the case, that we would use nuclear weapons in some sense against the same kinds of targets that we would use conventional weapons against, including the other side's nuclear forces. Now, I want to make it clear, that's not the only thing the US targets, and we're going to get on to everything else to the US targets, I'm sure, later. But the US does target Chinese nuclear forces. It targets Russian nuclear forces. And the goal there is if we ever thought a large-scale nuclear war had become likely, the military wants to give the president the option

and it's an option of attacking the adversary's nuclear forces preemptively, destroying as much of the adversary's nuclear force as possible before they could take off as a way of ensuring that we, the United States, would succumb to less damage in the event of a nuclear war. That's a concept called damage limitation. And the thing about damage limitation is the more nukes the other side has, the more nukes you need. you know, if your goal is to have enough nukes to attack the other side's nukes preemptively, if the other side builds more, you need more. And that's what's happening with China today. China's building up. And more than that, we're also worried about, believe it or not,

a three-front nuclear war, that the US may be involved in a nuclear war with Russia and China. So the goal there is no longer just to attack each state's nuclear forces individually. There's fears that we might have to attack both of them together. that adds to get more pressure on US numbers. And so there's actually a pretty broad, I would argue, pretty broad bipartisan consensus now that the US needs more nukes. My point is if we build more, the Russians and Chinese are going to build more precisely, precisely, so that we can't destroy their nuclear forces preemptively. But by the logic of counterforce targeting, as I've just been describing it, if they build more, we need more. And, you know, another world,

phrase for that kind of dynamics is an arms race. And, you know, that's what I believe we're in the early phases of today. Well, so one question jumped into my head when you were talking about this. Why do you need nukes to destroy other people's nukes? So today, I mean, various reasons. Okay. And like at some level, the answer is maybe 40, 50, 60 years from now we won't. You know, there are people who argue that non-nucing

weapons are becoming better and better. Maybe we will be able to destroy the other side's forces without nukes. But as it stands today, you have targets like ICBM silos, highly reinforced holes in the ground. Those are almost certainly out of the reach of current non-nuclear weapons. Another challenge is, in fact, the most survivable parts of Russia's and China's nuclear forces and not their submarines. That's the most survivable part of the US nuclear forces. In the case of Russia and China, it's their mobile missiles. These are literally gigantic missiles on the back of trucks that roam around and, you know, they try to survive by the adversary, the US, not knowing where they are. If we have some idea where they are, but not exactly,

the huge blast radius of a nuclear weapon is better for destroying them than conventional weapons, where you need to know exactly where the other side's mobile ICBMs are. Now, attacks against submarines would probably be done today with conventional weapons rather than nuclear weapons. I mean, the US, apart from anything else, doesn't have any nuclear-armed anti-submarine weapons. But, you know, the bulk of damage limitation today would rely on nuclear forces to do that, kind of heavy lifting, the attacking the adversary. And this is a thing that has, in the logic of deterrence, as we understand it, from the Cold War, has a first mover advantage, right? The person doing the preemptive strike probably maybe wins, wins, quote unquote.

So this is, there's a whole debate about, is nuclear war meaningful, right? Is there any sense in which you could meaningfully win a nuclear war? It's certainly the case that if the US attacks first, we have the potential to destroy a whole bunch of adversary nuclear weapons. Now, look, one question there is whether Russia and in the future, China, might launch its nuclear forces in the narrow window of time between when we launch and when our nukes hit the ground and explode. Russia has long had that capability. It's called launch under attack. It's launching your nuclear forces after the other side has attacked you, but before their nukes go boom. China's trying to develop that capability today. So, you know, the first thing to say is if the other side does launch under attack, your counterforce attack may have very little effect at all. That's something that the counterforce advocates, the damage limitation advocate don't like to acknowledge that Russia has long

had a long chandra attack and China's trying to develop it. But, you know, let's say that they decide not to use a launch under attack. Well, the threat there is that even if we destroy most of their nuclear forces, what survives, they would probably launch at our cities. And, you know, there's that wonderful moment in Dr. Strange Love. We are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing, but it is necessary now to make a choice to choose between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable post-war environments

one where you got 20 million people killed and the other where you got 150 million people killed you're talking about mass murder general not war Mr. President I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair must but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed tops depending on the brakes So for me, you know, part of the reason I disagree with damage limitation is for a real president, you know, an actual person who's been elected, even President Trump I would include in this category, who actually has a fairly healthy respect for nukes, is just not going to go, well, I find nuclear war meaningfully more attractive here because I'm only going to lose 10 cities or 20 cities rather than 100 cities. So, you know, for me, there is no sense in which a large scale of nuclear war can be one. So how about the nuclear winter that we were old told about?

You know, because that was the sense I always thought that nuclear war couldn't be won because we'd all have to deal with the fallout. So there's lots of reasons in my mind why nuclear war can't be one. The sheer number of deaths is one. If you think about what effect it would have on society, on food production, If you think about the government services, if you think about the psychological agony of the survivors, I mean, I think there's lots of reasons why nuclear war couldn't be one. But another one is nuclear winter. A nuclear winter occurs when soot from burning fires is lofted very high up into the atmosphere, where if it gets high enough, it can stay there for a number of years. and it reflects sunlight, and you would see a very significant decrease in global temperatures.

Now, there's a fair amount of debate about how many nukes would have to go off and where they would have to go off to induce nuclear winter. There is genuine scientific uncertainty there. I think everybody agrees that if you're at the point of large-scale nuclear strikes against cities, and hundreds of nuclear weapons are going off in cities, there's going to be nuclear winter. If there are very limited nuclear strikes at sea, you definitely are not going to get nuclear winter, right?

Where along that spectrum, nuclear winter occurs, there is genuine scientific uncertainty about. But, you know, that is yet another reason in my mind why a nuclear war is not winnable in any reasonable sense of the term. A large-scale nuclear war is not winnable in any reasonable sense of the term. I also want to chase another tangent from your previous comments because it's something I think I probably agree with you on, and I would say is probably counterintuitive.

Tell me about Trump having a healthy respect and fear of nuclear weapons. So I think all I would say there is just listen to what he said. You know, he's talked about the fear of the nuclear. He's talked about, you know, how nuclear weapons are very dangerous. dangerous. He's, you know, that's been something that I, you can hardly call it a major element of his philosophy, but, you know, he has periodically raised concerns about, about the use of nuclear weapons and, you know, occasionally advocated for things in a very vague general sense like denuclearization. Now, you know, I don't think he's pursued.

the right, if you're afraid of nuclear weapons, if you want to reduce the risk of nuclear war, I disagree with a lot of the policies that he's done. You know, just to give you one example, in my mind, his strikes against Iran have increased the likelihood that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons rather than decreased them. So, you know, I, I certainly don't want to say that I think the president has handled the nuclear threat well, but I think there's evidence he does have a genuinely healthy fear of nuclear war. And I think it's good when leaders have that fear. I would also point out he's had a mighty hand in destroying a lot of the treaties, not just the JCPOA, that have helped get us where we are now. Yes. I mean, for example, you know, in his first, so in his first administration, he withdrew from the JCPOA, the Iran deal.

When Iran was complying with that agreement, and to my mind that was a catastrophically bad decision. he also withdrew from a treaty called the INF Treaty, which prohibited certain kinds of medium, intermediate range, ground launch, ballistic and cruise missiles. Now, in fairness, Russia was violating the treaty. You know, I put those, I put those two things in different categories. Like, I think it was a bad idea, but I understand the logic behind withdrawing from the INF when your partner is, when the other party is violating the agreement. I think there were, better ways of handling what were genuinely real and serious Russian violations. You know, I think the withdrawal from the JCPOA was not just terrible policy.

It was, in my view, just immoral at some level. You know, because Iran was, U.S. intelligence was assessing Iran was abiding by that agreement. And I think, you know, the very bad position we find ourselves in with Iran is directly traceable back to abandon an agreement. The other side was complying with. and having absolutely no plan for how you were going to deal with it afterwards. All right, let's switch gears just a little bit. I want to get into specifics about the current state of the arms race between these three countries.

Let's start with China. Maybe 10 years ago, it's not like they publish numbers, but based on our best guesses, pretty educated guesses, they had like 300. Give or take. Absolutely. Compared to America's and Russia's more than a thousand. So what has happened in the last decade? Do we have any idea how many they have now?

And what have we seen that is changing about how they think about nuclear forces? If you say, the best estimates from a decade ago were about 300 warheads in China. now best estimates are probably roughly double that, about 600. And some of these estimates, by the way, come from the US intelligence community. There is a report published every year by DOD that does contain some numbers in, and it expects China to be heading towards a thousand warheads. Now, let's put that in comparison with the US. And this is where you tend to get a lot of confusion because there's lots of different ways of measuring how many warheads a state has.

If what you're looking at is the total stockpile, let's put aside weapons that are old and awaiting dismantlement and are not considered active any longer, but include everything else. Deployed, non-deployed, in storage, whatever it is. The US has, I forget the exact number, but it's roughly 3,800 under that metric. That seems to me the relevant comparison to the Chinese 300-600 number. Now, there's a smaller number the US has that are physically attached to delivery vehicles that are able to be used at short notice. But the total US stockpile, as I say, is something under 4,000. So the Chinese stockpile is still significantly smaller than the US stockpile.

and, you know, I don't question for one second that China is building up. I don't question that it's going to keep building up. I somewhat disagree with the intelligence community over how fast that buildup is going to be, because I think China is going to have, appears to be having some challenges making the plutonium it needs for more warheads. But, you know, it's a fairly minor disagreement in the grand scheme of things. There is a real debate over why China is building up. You know, there is a debate over where China is a debate over whether it's building up for offensive or for defensive purposes. I have something of an intermediate view for what it's worth. You know, my view is the build up in China's long range forces.

And I mean by that forces with long enough range to reach the United States. That is defensive because China is worried that we may, in a conflict, destroy its nuclear forces preemptively. This goes back to this issue of damage limitation. The US is very explicit about its goal of damage. limitation. There are ways in which even though the US Arsenal is not getting bigger, the US is getting better at damage limitation. And, you know, I think, you know, to my mind, that is a major, probably the major drive of China's build up in its long range forces, is ensuring those forces could survive

a US first strike. Then China is also building up regional nuclear forces, those that could be used against Japan, those could be used against Guam, for example. That does strike me as something a lot newer in Chinese thinking. China never really thought much about a limited nuclear war historically. It appears to be thinking more about that now. I think there's lots of questions. You know, would China historically have said it would never use nuclear weapons first? Is it thinking about the regional forces merely giving itself proportional options if the US uses nuclear weapons first in the region, or does it imagine using nuclear weapons first in the region? I don't know the answer to that question. But, you know, all in all, we are seeing a buildup of China's nuclear forces.

The other thing I thought was interesting that you mentioned in the paper is the change in the posture of the forces in peacetime? Yeah. So historically, China has taken the view that it can afford to wait after a US nuclear strike. You know, US does a nuclear strike on China. A bunch of its forces are destroyed. It's going to retaliate with those that survived, but it took the view that it was fine to wait. And we saw exercises from China, and this is 20 years ago now, that involved retaliation practicing a week, if I remember right? Certainly many days before retaliating. Now China is placing some of its nuclear forces on alert, which means that it's mating warheads to delivery systems, some of them, so that they can be used at short notice. And China's

investing very heavily in this technology to do what we were discussing before launch under attack. That is to launch its nuclear forces after US nuclear forces have been launched, but before they land. Now, whether China has a functional launch under attack capability today, I can't tell. tell you, but it's very clear it wants that. And if it doesn't have it today, I think it will have it in the near future. So we are seeing not just major changes in the number of Chinese nuclear weapons, but in Chinese force doctrine, the way it would employ, deploys, and the way it would employ those forces. Is it possible to sneak a nuclear attack? I mean, everyone seems concerned about that. It's a good question. I mean, I think the answer is, if you really wanted to do a small one,

you could. It would be very hard to do a large one. You know, we've seen operations recently. Ukrainian strikes against Russia, Israeli strikes against Iran, where the attacker had smuggled drones into the adversary's country and they were sitting there ready to be used. I think you could do that with nuclear weapons if you wanted to. It's a scary thought, but actually they're not very radioactive weapons, this I think surprises people. But before detonation, after detonation is a different story, but before detonation, they're not very radioactive, very hard to detect. So yeah, you probably could smuggle a few nuclear weapons into another country. I don't think that would help you do a large-scale first strike, you know, to attack and destroy as much as you can on an adversary's nuclear

forces, you're going to need missiles that can be delivered very accurately in very large numbers. Got it. All right. Tell us how Russia is changing. So today with Russia, there is, I don't think we see much in the way of change of Russian numbers. Russia, the US intelligence community still assesses that Russia is basically complying with New START, which is the final US-Russia Arms Control Treaty.

It limits the very long-range nuclear, U.S. and Russian nuclear forces that can reached the others' homeland. Russia appears to be complying with that agreement in terms of numbers. It violated the agreement by prohibiting inspections, which means that there is uncertainty about whether they're complying with the treaty. But, you know, the intelligence community said, if Russia is violating it, it's not by much, and it's probably not violating it. There have been some claims from officials that Russia is building up its arsenal of shorter range weapons, so-called non-strategic weapons. That's not reflected in official documents.

That's only been said in speeches. But Russia's probably developing a bunch of new capabilities. Russia is developing a bunch of new capabilities. I mean, they've had press conferences. He's been very proud of many of this. Some of which are kind of scary. I mean, to give you one example, or two examples, Russia is developing a nuclear-powered,

nuclear-armed torpedo called Poseidon. So this is a, you know, this is the doomsday weapon against the United States, if you like. This would be carried under oceans. It would travel very fast over very long distances, park itself by the US coast, and then detonate an enormous nuclear warhead. Russia is working on a nuclear powered cruise missile. I think a lot of us when we first heard this thought this was a typo, a nuclear armed cruise missile was meant, but no, it was a nuclear powered cruise missile. Now, the testing of this system has not gone very well. Russian scientists have been killed in a test previously.

I think this is a particularly, the technical term for this is a back ship weapon. But it is a particularly outlandish weapon, and I'm skeptical it would ever be fielded, but some of the capabilities that Russia's currently working on, I'm sure, will be fielded. And you start what's left for, what's left, of new start expires in February next year. That will lift the last remaining limits, which are on Russia's very long-range nuclear forces. And that, you know, I am expecting to see a build-up, maybe not on the 1st of March or whenever it is, but over the next few years, I'm expecting to see a build-up of Russian nuclear forces. They already withdrew from the treaty, though, right?

I mean, it had already kind of... No, well, okay, so the Russians have announced that they won't be bound. by the inspection provisions of New Star. They've also refused to show up and talk to us about it. They are violated. What both sides have said is that they remain committed to abiding by the treaty's central limits for the time being. Gotcha. Yeah, and I think that Putin has floated, has attempted to use New START as a lever in some of the Ukrainian negotiations in the last like six months.

I just like, I don't remember these these negotiations. are coming up again in February. It has to be renewed. If you believe, you know. I'm skeptical we're going to get serious negotiations before the expiry of New Star. He tried to use New Star much more as a lever in the Biden administration. And that didn't all.

No. Well, I think he knew that Trump maybe wouldn't care so much about Obama-era nuclear negotiation, nuclear treaty. He's not a super big fan. Yeah, I mean, look, I would say, this. I think Trump personally likes the idea of striking a deal with the Russians, striking his own deal with the Russians. Now, I think given everything going on with Ukraine, the US and Russia

have very different views about what should be in a follow-on treaty. I think there are very few people in the Trump administration who want to follow-on treaty. I think there's a bunch of reasons we're not going to get a follow-on treaty to Newstart or even a kind of follow-on agreement. but it's not totally impossible. All right. And then lastly, the one I think that we probably know the most about, how's America doing? Badly is the short answer.

And this is part of the reason why I think an arms race is a bad idea is because even if you think an arms race is a good idea, the United States simply does not have the industrial capacity to arms race right now. Now, the way the US has done nuclear modernization historically is it ignores the problem and then does everything at once. So we do modernization in a series of waves. And another wave is becoming due now. We are kind of really ramping up expenditure. So there's an effort on there's efforts underway to build new submarines, the Ohio,

sorry, the Columbia class that will replace the older Ohio class. There's efforts to build new ICBMs, the intercontinental ballistic missiles. There's lots of different warhead modernization. There's desire for a new sea launch cruise missile with a nuclear warhead. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on. And this is going very badly. Like there is no, I don't want to, I can't, like, there's no, the way to put it.

80% cost overruns just for the ICBM program, I think? The poster child of programs that are going really badly, the worst one is the Sentinel program, which is, at the last count, 80% over budget and is getting further over budget. Now, this is the program to build the new ICBMs. There was a plan as part of that to comprehensively refurbish the silos, which, to be clear, are in, like, objectively really bad conditions. Like, you know, we have to acknowledge this.

It turns out to be so difficult to refurbish the silos and so expensive, DOD now thinks it's cheaper to build new silos. Well, and also the new missiles won't fit in the old silos, right? I think they're bigger. I think there was enough physical. They would have to redesign, you know, as the purpose of, in the process of, refurbishing the silos. It would expand out. Okay.

You know, they wouldn't have room for the new missile, but the silos are in such bad shape. They actually now think it's cheaper to build new silos than refurbish the old ones. Well, I think that's terrific because doomsday preppers love to buy these silos. So actually, this could be a huge profit for the United States as a real estate deal. And you do see old silos on, on, uh, Zillow sometimes. They are cheaper than houses in the Washington, D.C. area.

But I think the new silos are going to be built right next to the old ones, is my assumption here. So I don't think that land is going to be sold. But to give you a sense, it's not just how much over budget it is. It's also how long it's taking to, how long it's going to take to do. So at the time in, this is about 15 years ago now, 10, 15 years ago, DOD is what's called an analysis of alternatives. It looked at different ways of preserving US ICBM capability. And officers, military officers came out of that kind of saying,

we cannot extend Minuteman 3 beyond the 2030s. They're the current ICBMs. Impossible to do that. It is much cheaper to go forward with Sentinel. Now, the Central program is so far behind over budget, it's taking so much longer than expected, they're now looking at keeping Minuteman 3 in the field until 2050. So it's like, you know, perhaps as long as two decades beyond what we were previously told was possible. So I am, you know, the upshot for our purposes in all of this is over the next two decades,

the big challenge the United States will have is keeping its number of nuclear delivery systems, at the current level, right? Not even forget arms racing for the time being, though I will qualify that statement in a second. Forget arms racing for the time being. The challenge for the next two decades is preventing our number of missiles from dropping.

Now, let me add that caveat because this is an important caveat. The US has a bunch of warheads in storage. We also have a bunch of delivery systems that are not loaded with as many warheads. as they can carry. So we do have an option to increase the number of warheads in the short term. Increase out number of deployed warheads quickly by what's called uploading, taking weapons out, warheads out of storage, putting them on ICBMs, putting them on submarine launch ballistic missiles. That is something the US can do. The number that you could upload is classified. I think a thousand

is a reasonable guess, but it is just a guess. So, you know, in terms of our deployed warheads, we could go from 1500 to 2,500, very roughly, fairly quickly. At that point, we can't actually add more deployed warheads until the 2050s. So that's, you know, we could do, we can kind of do a bit of an arms racing sprint, and then we have to stop and avoid being blown backwards by the wind, he says, kind of mixing all his metaphors. you know, before, before we get to the point where we can resume arms racing in the 2050s. So even if you think arms racing is good as former Trump, as then, as Trump's arms control ambassador claimed in his first administration, you know, even if you think arms racing is good in principle, we are in a really bad position to arms race right now.

And we see things are 80% over budget, but. And going up, like no one, no one is going to. is going to end at 80% over budget. No, it's definitely not going to end at 80%. Because they haven't even started, like, the logistics of digging those new silos and the people I've talked to and the things that I've read, it's pretty

nuts what they're going to have to do. The reason is because every silo is different. Every missile is the same. Every silo is different. Every silo is built at a slightly different location in slightly different rock. And you're dealing with whatever it's

to be 400, 450 individual civil engineering projects. You know, at least... And they're talking... Designed a missile. Like, just... You then copy that missile exactly. You can't quite do that with silos. And just the bringing in the workforce to build the silo,

they have to build, in some of these locations, they have to build like Wildcat cities, these temporary, almost like a North Dakota oilfield city just for workers to come in and build everything. And then you start fighting with the local community and things get, you know, things get held back until like all of that gets resolved. So it's going to be, yeah, it'll take, it'll take decades. It'll cost way more than the, what is it right now, like 600 billion? No, it's not.

I'm trying to remember the figure. I mean, it was, it was the original estimate, if I remember rightly, I think it was something like 70 to 80 billion. And it's now 80% over that. Okay. I thought it was more than that for some reason. So there are a couple of questions here, I think, really. One, I have, why was it possible to do this 50 years ago or 60 years ago? And we can deal with the other question later. Sorry, one more thing back.

The 600 billion number is the total expenditure on nukes over the next 10 years. Gotcha. It's not the central expense. It's not the Sentinel expenditure on silo specifically. Okay, I knew I had that number in there for some reason. Thank you. So, look, I'm not sure I have a great answer to the question of why we could do this historically. You know, part of it is, I think, there was a much greater societal acceptance in the Cold War of nuclear weapons.

It's not that I think American society is terribly against nuclear weapons. today by any means. But there was, I think, a much stronger sense in the Cold War that it was vital for the preservation of the United States and democracy to have a very large nuclear arsenal. I think people were less, there was less opposition. You know, the challenges of large-scale civil engineering projects are in no way limited to silos. You know, one of the things the US is just we're just not very good at as a nation as large-scale civil engineering projects. you know, look at, you know, attempts to expand the subway in New York, for example. You know, I can't give you figures off the top of my head, but as I understand it, it's like,

you know, by far the world's most expensive subway line, the one that's just been extended, I think, on the east side. It's like $4 billion for less than, for like four stops, each one cost a billion dollars. And, you know, whether that's because, you know, again, this is way outside of my area of expertise, and I don't know whether that's health and safety regulations, bad procurement, union issues. I have no idea. But my point is here that we as a nation are really bad at building infrastructure cheaply, and we should not expect military construction to be exempt from that general challenge we have.

A lot of the US defence industrial base has not been focused on missiles. There are some areas of military technology in which the US excels, and the quality of our missiles, I think, is still very good. But, like, it just hasn't been a major focus of what we've been doing. So, you know, that part of the defence industrial base is atrophied. You know, I don't have a terribly good reason about why it's so difficult and so expensive. But, you know, both in terms of the civil engineering aspect and the weapons aspect, cost, time and cost are things that are not in any way limited to that.

One can find analogies across similar challenges, I should say, across both the military sector and the civil engineering sector. Do you have any, this is extreme like nerd tangent, but do you have any thoughts to know anything about challenges around plutonium pit production? Yeah. So this is, at the center of every warhead is something called the pit. This is a metallic, roughly spherical looking thing. This is the, these days plutonium that is compressed by high,

explosives until it goes critical and that's where the energy for the initial explosion comes from. Modern weapons have this fusion component, this thermonuclear component that the primary ignite, but you've got to get that primary to ignite first. This is another challenge the US has had is pit production. Now, you know, US pits were extremely well built, unlike Soviet pits and they lasted a very long, they lasted a very long time. And the US had a pit production facility at Rocky Flats, which was raided by the FBI for multiple violations of health and safety. Was it the early 2000s, the late 90s? Here's the late 90s.

Okay. So, and the US has been struggling to recreate a pit production capability since. And there was a thing that came out a few years ago, I think, where NNSA had said it, a year or two back, NNSA said it kind of, it made at least one pit in the new facility. 89 and it was formally shut down in 92. Rocky Flats, okay. Yeah, Rocky Flats. It was a bit further back than I remembered.

And the U.S. has not had a credible pit production capability since. The current plan is to open a pit production facility at Los Alamos to open a second one down in South Carolina. The SRS coming back online. And to produce, I forget the current target, maybe it's 80 pits per year, is the current target and, you know, nobody thinks that's going to happen for the foreseeable future.

You know, for what it's worth, I don't think it's a bad idea to have a pit production capability. I'm not entirely clear why you need to do that at two sites, and I think 40 per year is probably perfectly adequate. I'm not against having a pit production capability, but it's yet another example of where trying to do ambitious things like open two sites, spread your resources more thinly and then that slows down progress on any given site. Well, it also is to me indicative of kind of where nukes are now in America. It's this thing that we kind of took for granted and then forgot about and kind of aged and ailed.

And now it's like, oh shit, we have to pay attention to this again. And as you said, the industrial base isn't there. You know, the last place that was making pits was raided in 1989 by the FBI. Like, that's the last time anyone really thought about it, and now here we are. Trying to spit all this up again. And, you know, there's kind of two responses to this. One is to say, maybe our ability to build up large numbers of nuclear weapons quickly, or rather the lack thereof is a reason for not getting into an arms race.

And, you know, there's other folks who basically just want to wave away this problem and just argue essentially that by exhorting us to greater efforts, you can somehow circumvent all of these problems. And, you know, I think responsible governance here is recognizing, this is not the only reason for my policy recommendations, but, you know, we are in a very bad position to arms race right now, and we should accept that as kind of a, you know, either, depending on your perspective, that may be a good thing or a bad thing,

but it's a reality that we face. So let's answer the T's then because you just set it up. Given all of this information and living in the world that we do where, you know, Russia and China are nuclear peers, I think it's probably a decent argument that more people are going to get nuclear weapons following North Korea. And, you know, what then do we do instead of maintaining the capability to use overwhelming nuclear force to do a like wipe out somebody else's nuclear forces.

What is your recommendation? So as I said at the beginning, the United States doesn't just target adversary nuclear forces. That is the single biggest driver of our numbers, but it's not the only thing we target. So there's a bunch of targets that you could put in this counterforce bucket. Adversary nuclear forces, nuclear command and control, enemy leadership, I would put. in this bucket as well, because one of the reasons you attack enemy leaders is so they can't use their nukes. And then there's some other stuff we target as well. Conventional military forces. War supporting industry. Those are things, and war supporting industry means stuff like,

I mean, not exactly what it means, but it probably means stuff like oil production, metal production, munitions factories, that kind of thing is war supporting industry. I mean, the US has a famously expansive interpretation of what's war-supporting industry. So one can fit an awful lot under that title, especially if you call it war-sustaining industry. My argument is basically that we should stop doing the counter-force part. We should stop targeting adversary nuclear forces, command and control and leadership, but continue to target conventional military forces and war-supporting industry. Now, that is a somewhat different view from, you know, traditionally debates about targeting policy have been about counterforce versus counter value. The idea has been that either

you target the adversary's nuclear forces or you target population per se. And that is illegal. People argue it's immoral. There's lots of objections to targeting population per se. My argument is we have a third option and we know we have a third option because we're already doing it. We already target war supporting industry. We already target conventional forces. That is what I would focus on instead. And, you know, I would just emphasize here that I don't think there are, you know, very briefly, given that I'm very skeptical of damage limitation, given that I don't think we can meaningfully limit the damage we would suffer in a nuclear war. I don't think we lose much by ceasing to target an adversary's nuclear forces. On the contrary, I would actually argue that

targeting an adversary's nuclear forces makes nuclear war more likely, precisely because it gives them an incentive to go first. If they're worried we're going to wipe out their nuclear forces, they have a strong incentive to use nuclear weapons first. So on balance, I think we benefit by not targeting their nuclear forces. And then secondly, on the conventional forces in the war-supporting industry side, that gives us credible limited options, which I think is a good thing. You know, I don't think we want the president to have a choice of, you know, huge high-yield warheads against targets in cities as a first option. I think one wants the president to have limited options. And at the high end, you know, under the status quo, counter-force strikes would destroy the adverse.

as a functioning society. And attacking war-supporting industry and conventional military forces would have the same effect. You know, it would create such an unbelievable level of damage that it would... The costs of those strikes would massively outweigh whatever the adversary hoped to achieve by war.

So, you know, to my mind, this alternative policy has the deterrent benefit will be good for deterrents and will avoid arms racing and reduce escalation risks. So just to be very clear, it is about targeting military producing industry and military targets with lower yield nukes. I don't really get into the yield question at all in the paper. You don't, which is why I'm asking now. You know, the answer is we have, I mean, at some level, the answer is we have the nuclear force we have.

Fair. We actually, you know, we have some low-yield options at the moment. There is a desire to have a few more low-yield options. The vast majority of missiles don't have low-yield options on them. And, you know, I, if we were designing a nuclear force from scratch to do my targeting policy, I guess I would make a number of changes above the. I wouldn't design it to look exactly like the current force. But we have the force we have, and you can't just magic a new force into existence.

How do you signal this to Russia and China and make them believe it? So two things that. The first one is, in terms of arms racing, it doesn't matter whether they believe it or not. My view is right, we just shouldn't build up. The current force size is adequate. We might want to do it. We should want to do a lot of ongoing modernization. efforts, but we don't need more. And we can choose not to build more. We are a country with

agency. We are not forced by Russia and China to build more. And it doesn't know from an arms racing perspective, it doesn't matter for one second whether they believe us or not. It does matter in terms of escalation. You know, part of my argument is if we move away from counterforce targeting, that reduces escalation pressures, but that requires them to believe us. And I have two answers as to that. The first one is just simply that if we don't build up, over time, they will come to see that our policy is credible, or at least have placed some emphasis on that. You know, the day after we announce this policy, they're not going to believe we give up, we've given up with counterforce targeting. I accept that entirely. But if we don't build up,

and they do build up, and when, you know, if we don't have the capabilities to do counterforce, because we're not building up in response to their buildup, then I think that sends a reasonably strong signal. The other thing is I wouldn't look at this issue in isolation. I believe that we need to think very carefully about how we would act in a crisis or conflict to avoid giving the Chinese and Russians incorrect evidence that we were about to attack their nuclear forces.

So, you know, just to give you one example, certainly in the case of Russia and probably in a case of China, their satellites that they use for both communicating with their nuclear forces and their non-nuclear forces. If we were to attack those satellites

to degrade their nuclear forces, that might send, sorry, if we were to attack those satellites to degrade their non-nuclear forces, that might send, they might interpret that as preparations to attack their nuclear forces. So I would look very deeply at,

you know, I would have a strong presumption in a crisis or conflict against doing things like attacking these satellites that have both nuclear and non-nuclear functions, to avoid giving them the reason to believe that, you know, extra reason to believe that we were going after their nuclear forces. Is there a risk also of, is at some point you may have to bat, and I mean, this is also an argument against what we're doing right now, but at a certain point, do you have to put your money where your mouth is and blow something up?

And then what happens next? So my argument, I'm certainly not arguing that nuclear war is safe. You know, I'm somebody who believes that in extreme situations of national survival, I would not preclude the use of nuclear weapons in those situations. it would be an enormously colossally risky act and I you know I don't um in any way you know want to give the impression that I think you could use nuclear weapons and avoid escalation any nuclear use would carry real risk of escalation to all out nuclear war we can argue how high or low that risk is but it's clearly there so unless you're going to forsake the use of nuclear weapons entirely

or you're going to forsake the first use of nuclear weapons. You know, you do have to, there's always going to be risk and you have to kind of think up the best policy. To my mind, you know, imagine just to give you an example, Russia and the, you know, Russia had invaded the Baltic states. And NATO was launching a war of liberation and the Russian started to use nuclear weapons. What would be a kind of good response to that situation?

would it be a good idea to start blowing up Russian nuclear forces and Russian silos? You know, there are concepts out there of limited counterforce of being a good thing to do in the event of a limited nuclear war. You know, my view is that would just encourage them. That would send out the message that we're absolutely going after their nuclear forces and they need to go big as soon as possible. Or would our most credible response to be to attack military bases, not as a way of physically, trying to win the war against the Russians, but as a way of trying to terrify them into backing down. So, you know, part of, I've always believed the most credible targets early in a nuclear war, your least bad choice, is to go off to the other side's, like, key conventional installations.

As I say, not as a way to win the war by brute force, by treating nuclear weapons like large conventional weapons and destroying their conventional forces, but as a way of terrifying, as a way of trying to make the adversary back down. And so, you know, to my mind, my preferred policy of targeting conventional military forces and war-supporting industry gives you the targets that are the least bad things to hit early in a nuclear war. So how would the Russians or Chinese know that's what we're targeting? And I mean, The short answer to that is they might not. Like, again, I'm not going to argue that limited nuclear war is a safe thing,

and we should not worry about the possibility of escalation. You know, a lot here would depend on the choice of target. If the target were, say, a Chinese ship preparing to invade Taiwan close to the Taiwanese coast, I think it would be pretty unambiguous what we were targeting. If there were military targets close to civilian areas, it would be a pretty crazy thing to attack those early in a war. I mean, a lot of this is about, you know, thinking about targets that don't cause massive civilian casualties, at least early in a nuclear war. But again, at the end of the day, what one has to come down to is a comparison, a comparison between my policy and the alternative. And for me, early in a nuclear war, the possibility of limited counterforce strikes, which I should say,

an option as it stands at the moment. I mean, you know, I'm certainly not claiming that the only option presented to the president under the status quo would be limited counterforce strikes. I, you know, I'm sure there would be other options. But I just cannot conceive of why, you know, if you want to make the adversary misinterpret your intentions, if you're using limited strikes to make the adversary back down to terrify the adversary, why would you attack the enemy's nuclear forces? Like, that's super prone to be misinterpreted as preparations for large-scale attacks against their nuclear forces. You know, I just view those kinds of operations as something close to national suicide. And so, you know, I'm, again, I'm not going to tell you that I think my policy has no risks in nuclear war.

The risks of nuclear war would be horrendous. I just think it's a better policy than the status quo. Yeah, that's why I liked this paper so much and thought it was so interesting, is that, It did produce that horror reaction in me, like when I got there, but also, we already live under this nightmare sort of Damocles now that is much worse and have lived under this for effectively 80 years, 80 years as of a few days ago. And that's, you know, that's, for me, that's central in all of this is, you know, you have to compare what I'm proposing to the state.

as quote. And you know, one thing about the visceral horror of thinking about nuclear war. And, you know, I want to emphasize here, I think it's a really good thing to think about that visceral horror. You know, as nuclear strategists, you can get caught up a lot in the language of counterforce and countervalue, which is at some level, I think, intended to prevent you thinking about what, you know, what countervalue means in practice. You can get caught up in that. And it's important to recognize the scale of what you're talking about. For me, this is a huge problem with the status quo. Let me, let me give you one example, which is talk of a counterforce strategy to describe the US current policy gives the impression that we would be nuking silos deep in Siberia, far away from people

and we could fight a very clean clinical nuclear war. The reality is that the US, while we say we do not attack civilians per se. We absolutely do not preclude the possibility of nuclear strikes against legitimate military targets in and around cities. There are Russian ICBM bases that are close to cities. There are key Russian command and control facilities that are in Moscow, and we don't forsake the possibility of attacking there. I don't like attacking command and control at all. So, you know, to describe US strikes as counterforce, I think is to deliberately underplay what a large-scale nuclear war would look like. The extent to which attacks against legitimate military targets in and around cities would cause collateral damage beyond imagination. Now, my policy has that as well. I'm not going to

tell you my policy doesn't have that. War-supporting industry is typically not, not excrued, but it's typically in and around cities. And, you know, I think anyone contemplating this should have a visceral horror of nuclear war. And as I said, I'm not going to tell you that I think my policy avoids, you know, huge amount of collateral damage. But I think that's true under the status quo anyway. I think the big benefit of my policy is you're not arms racing in peacetime and you're less likely to get all out escalation because you're not targeting the adversary's nuclear forces. Jason, do you have anything else? No, I mean, it's something to think about. You're just sitting with the visceral horror in your tummy. A little bit. I mean, yeah, it's like, do you want to die by the dagger or the sword? I mean, you know.

But again, I would look here about the, for me, risk you can think about as being probability times consequence. under my policy, the consequences of a large-scale nuclear war is at least as bad and honestly, possibly worse. But I think the probability of war goes down, probability of a nuclear war goes down. And that, that for me is, you know, in addition to the arms racing benefits or the not arms racing benefits of my policy, you know, what I see is one of its main benefits is making nuclear war and especially all-out nuclear war less likely. And, you know, you have to, I think to do that, you have to contemplate some pretty horrific things.

But it's kind of very much borne out of a desire to avoid getting to that point of a large-scale nuclear exchange. So one more question I had was, since it's so expensive to build these silos, would we ever consider doing or matching the way the Russians and Chinese do it by putting our missiles just on the back of trucks? I mean, I know prices are going up for trucks, but I bet they're cheaper than silos. So it turns out they're actually not cheaper than silos. No?

Now, whether it would, whether, you know, I shouldn't be too definitive about that because given how much it's going to cost us to build silos, Maybe mobile basin would end up being cheaper, but historically that's absolutely not been the case. And it's not, you know, these are absolutely enormous multiple axle trucks. And, you know, the missile itself is more expensive because it has to be able to withstand being bumped around on roads or maybe off roads. And then you need a bunch of technology, you know, one of the things, key things with missile accuracy is knowing exactly where you've launched your missile from. Siloes are very easy because they're fixed. Mobile missiles, you then have to start dealing with how you do with accuracy. So, you know, I still think it's probably true that mobile basing is unlikely to be cheaper than silo basing. It encounters a bunch of domestic opposition.

You know, it's one thing building new silos very close to, if not on the same land as existing silos. Having mobile ICBMs roving around Nevada, Utah on trucks, it's going to be deeply unpopular. Now, it's a really survivable basing mode, like the cold-blooded nuclear strategist in me goes, having the option in future to convert Sentinel to a mobile mode is not necessarily a bad thing. The realistic kind of more political person in me is like, well, we're never actually going to do that. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate. I appreciate. that makes sense. James, thank you for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this.

I will link to the paper in the show notes. Is there any other thing that you have anything else to plug? Is there any where else people should go to see your work? Well, firstly, thank you for having me. This has been a lot of fun. I very much enjoy being able to have these kind of detailed in-depth conversations. I have done a lot. I've been writing a lot on Iran recently, arguing against military strives.

on Iran and arguing that they haven't particularly had good effects. You can find all my writing over at our website, which is at www.c-eip.org, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.org. I'll throw a link to that as well in the show notes. And again, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. It was a great chat. Thank you.

That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. If you like the show, good Angry Planet pod.com. month, you get early commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes, all the bonus episodes, and the written work. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.