Angry Planet - How to Count Nuclear Weapons

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/No one is really sure how many nuclear weapons are out there. Every number you see is a best guess. Russia and the U.S. have the most, sitting at around 5,000 each. France has just under 200, China has about 500 (and is probably building more), and North Korea has around 50. The world’s nuclear powers love to keep the details of these weapons secret, but not too secret. It’s a complex game of signaling and secrets, one that can be difficult to parse from the outside.Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists is here today to walk us through the world’s nuclear powers and the wannabes. Over at the FAS, Korda spends his days looking at high resolution satellite photos of Chinese deserts, pouring over footage of Russian military drills, and reading every line of Pentagon budgets. All that information is mixed together to produce the Nuclear Notebook: a constantly updated inventory of world ending weapons. The Nuclear NotebookNuclear Threats Are Looming, And Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out ThereSupport 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. Hello, listeners. Welcome back to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. How about that is just like a quick intro, Jason? Oh, I love that.

You like that? Okay. We're here with Matt Corder. Sir, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you work for? What do you think you're doing on this podcast? Great to be here. Thanks for having me on. So I'm Matt. I'm a senior research fellow for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. So we track global nuclear arsenals using open sources. So we use satellite imagery, budget data, treaty information. We watch missile parades. We do all sorts of weird stuff like that. And we try and put together the giant puzzle that is. what is going on with global nuclear arsenals. The end product here is called the nuclear notebook, right?

Yeah, and that gets published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists every couple months. So we just put out our most recent notebook on China, if I'm remembering correctly, all the months are blurring together, and the next one is going to be on North Korea. And it's been two years since we lasted on North Korea update. And man, there is a lot going on. Well, there's a lot going on across the entire planet in general in the nuclear space. Way more than, say, when I was a kid. We're in this position now where all the old treaties are falling away and everyone is kind of rebuilding, building new, modernizing.

How did we? I know this is a big question, but how did we get here? Oh, man, that is a big question. I guess a lot of different things, right? So I guess if I had to point to some of the trends that we're seeing as to why everything is going so badly right now in the world of nuclear weapons, I point to a few things, right? So one is that all nuclear armed countries right now are very much embracing this kind of new paradigm of great power competition, right, that we're seeing, right? This is kind of the new buzzword that's been floating around D.C. for the past, like, I don't know, I want to say like five years or so now. But really what it amounts to is, you know, this kind of new phase of geopolitical tensions in which countries are envisioning the possibility of actual conflict and competition with each other. And so they're building up these arsenals to try and both prevent conflict, but then if conflict happens, the idea being that, you know, they have nuclear. weapons that for some countries, they envision that those weapons could be used in a conflict,

right, which is dangerous. That kind of moves us into the second trend that we're seeing is that countries are sort of, at least some countries are moving away from this idea that nuclear weapons are just for deterring, you know, nuclear attacks, right? And they're just for deterring, you know, invasion, things like that. And they actually could be used in the context of war fighting, right? So we're seeing certainly some countries this is happening very much right now in what's going on with Ukraine and Russia. There will be a lot of big debates as to what is the role of Russia's tactical nuclear weapons in that conflict.

Could they be used in order to actually, you know, achieve a specific war aim? Certainly North Korea has a policy, at least from what we can see, that they would use nuclear weapons really early in a conflict. So all these things mean that countries need to be building out more and more weapons, at least from their. perspectives. We're also seeing the decline of arms control, right? So you mentioned treaties falling away. Countries seem to really no longer value arms control in the same way that they used to. Right. Used to during the Cold War, you would see countries that were ideologically opposed to each other, but who could still sit down at a table and agree that capping nuclear arsenals was in their best interest. That is no longer the case. And arms control has become

very politicized. And I think also, you know, we're seeing, you know, there's a few other things to throw in there, right? There's a lot of financial incentives to be building up big arsenals, right? So you have countries, pretty much every country has a big military industrial complex. And, you know, those to varying degrees are enmeshed in the political realities of those countries as well. So there's big domestic drivers to be building up nuclear weapons as well.

That's not just in the U.S., but when we start to think about countries like Russia, China, right? Why are they building up, especially China? Why is China building up so much? You can point to a lot of external factors, but there's probably a lot of internal factors that we don't really understand that have to do with, you know, political favor and, you know, the sort of the military and the financial issues. So there are a lot of different sort of factors that are all sort of part of this big picture. But everyone, unfortunately, the trend is that definitely things are getting a lot worse and we're seeing military stockpiles go up. For example, in the United States, the The Minuteman modernization is going to cost, what, $1.8 trillion?

So the 1.8 trillion number is the number that's thrown around for the modernization of the entire nuclear complex. The Minuteman modernization and the replacement to the new missile called the Sentinel is a sizable portion of that. The acquisition is like, keeps going up, right? It was previously projected at like somewhere a little bit below 100 billion. Now it's significantly above 100 billion. And, you know, so we're definitely seeing Costco up across the board too. But there's a lot, just to say that there's a lot of money in this. Oh, yeah.

This is a massive, massive moneymaker in many ways. So it used to be that all these things were legacy systems from the 70s that no one really thought about. And then when we started thinking about them again, Oh, well, you've got to spend a lot of money to get them up to spec, right? You can't have people running command and control off of floppy disks. No, no, which I think until very recently was still happening. Like more recent than we want to think about. Like five years ago.

I think they probably got off. And this is for the audience, this is not, for people that even know what floppy disks are, these were the big floppy disks. They were not the small ones. They were the giant like 1970s floppy disks. discs. I think they still have some small floppy disks around that play a role. But I hope the big ones are not playing a role anymore. It's kind of funny because it's a positive thing in some ways if the discs have degraded and they can no longer use them. Wouldn't that be great? You know, the world didn't end because they couldn't, you know, find the copy of the seven and a half inch floppy disk.

It's funny because when they, you know, when they have been thinking about, you know, the United States is going to be deploying this completely new missile system, right, the Sentinel. And there have been these big debates about, you know, how much do we want to upgrade from floppy disks? Because the nice thing about floppy disks is can't hack that, right? You can't hack a, that's solely mechanical system. It's like trying to like hack a jukebox or a typewriter. Like it doesn't work.

Right. But, you know, the Sentinel, there is going to be some networking of that system, right? We don't really know exactly the extent of what that's going to look like. But there have been some pretty big debates of it. Like, all right, well, how much networking is a good thing? I guess you want to transition off the floppy disk because they're really old. But like there was something kind of like beautiful about them in a way about their age. Yeah, but I mean, it's still, there's always issues, right? like they used to go in and you would

see the bomb and you would have a physical code that you would almost like you were spinning a lock, right? And a lot of times the default codes were just still in place and hadn't been updated. I think the code was just like eight zeros for like a decade. Yeah, for a decade. No one had bothered to go in and spend them correctly.

Oh my God. So there's, yeah, it's funny. There's always, it's this thing that is super, that can be the most important thing in the world for like 10, 15 minutes. But other than that 10 or 15 minutes, people aren't really paying attention to it all that often. Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, that's interesting. It's a very, like, low probability, but immensely relevant problem. Yeah, in those moments when we're really seriously thinking about, you know, how our nuclear

weapons going to get used, it's the most impactful thing in the world. It's like it's the decision to use nuclear weapons will almost certainly be the most consequential decision that anyone has has made in the context of at least like modern human history. But up until that moment, yeah, there really isn't that much public attention on it. Although that's starting to change, right? We're seeing especially over the past few years there's been a real sort of resurgence of the nuclear debate in the eyes of the public. And I think that's partly because of, you know, everything that's going on in the world and these conflicts where nuclear weapons could be used. But also we're seeing all these great, you know, sort of cultural artifacts that are being produced about nuclear weapons like Oppenheimer and, you know, other things of that nature that I think are really sort of bringing this conversation back to, you know, back to the public zeitgeist. Fallout is one that I'm watching right now.

And it's, it's great. Yeah, I have a suspicion. I'm actually working on something about this right now, a written piece that, the wild breakout success of the fallout television show. If you believe Amazon's numbers, 80 million people have watched it, which is just like incredible for a modern television show, especially one like that, which is kind of like goofy and gross

and deals with the horror of nuclear weapons. There's something, I have a suspicion that this news is starting to trickle out to the wider audience. and people are realizing that this nuke stuff hasn't gone away and that fear is coming back and they don't know what to do with it. So they watch Fallout, you know, Oppenheimer, a three-hour movie about people talking that is half in black and white makes a billion dollars at the box office.

The Fallout TV show is so successful that two of the video games connected to it become bestsellers again 10 years after they were released. That's strange. Like all of that stuff's kind of weird. And I do think part of it is that we're afraid of new, like every week we get a new news story about Russia, you know, just reminding everyone that they've got nukes, that they may use them in X, Y, or Z situation. Can I actually suggest some other possibility? Because it, and this is totally something just popped into my head. But with Fallout and so much of the other stuff, it's kind of nice to be worrying about the old nuke problem.

instead of the myriad other problems that we're constantly faced with. You know, it brings us back to the 1950s and that warm glow of the nuclear pile. Here's an anxiety we know how to deal with and this is how we deal with it. Right. And I think a lot of people, you know, people are young enough don't take it seriously in any way. So, you know, they get to enjoy the aesthetics. And, you know, every three years in this country, the apocalypse gets a new life. You know, people really enjoy the apocalypse in the United States and what it's going to be around after.

What is life going to be like after the apocalypse? That's really interesting. I feel like it really does map really nicely, as you're saying, to this sort of like fatalism that that folks generally have about nuclear weapons that perhaps people don't have as much about other sort of big, you know, big existential issues. or like climate change. There's a lot, you know, like, yes, there is like a level of fatalistic humor in that, but I think there's a much more of like a call to action vibe associated when people talk about climate change, especially young people. That is not the case with nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons, I feel like is that the conversation is very fatalistic, like nihilistic and fallout maps so cleanly onto that that I, it certainly is like scratching that little itch in my brain, even as someone who works on this, on this, uh, this issue. And fallout also supposes that, um, there will be a world after and it'll be kind of fun. It's true. Right. Uh, so this kind of sets up my curveball question really nicely. So I have to go with it, unfortunately.

I was going to save till the end. Um, I was talking with a friend about this stuff, um, because I saw him, noticed him playing fallout online and I was just asking him about it. And he told me that he felt that worrying about nuclear weapons was a privileged fear. And that financial insecurity, climate disaster, that kind of stuff is like much more pressing in his mind. And that if you're worrying about nuclear weapons, you've probably got a couple of other things solved and you found something else to be frightened of. What do you think about that? Oh, man, that's really interesting.

My gut reaction to that is that it depends where you live and what your interaction with the nuclear weapons complex is. I think for folks who sit in Washington, D.C. and get paid to pontificate about nuclear risk, and I count myself in that group. Yeah, I think there certainly is a level of privilege there. I think that, you know, it means that, like, yes, this is the issue that I've chosen to dedicate my career towards. But it means that I, you know, there is a level of sort of financial security. There are things that, you know, while I'm worried about this very existential sort of like low probability, you know, very high impact event, at the same time, like, like, there are a lot of other issues out there that I might choose to focus on. they more directly affected me, right? And so, like, I think, and I just sort of speak for myself as, like, a member of this DC, you know, intelligentsia in the nuclear field. But I think there are a lot

of folks around the world, right, especially, you know, in the United States, who are affected by nuclear weapons every single day, regardless of whether or not they go off, right? So if you live near, or if you historically live near uranium mines, right, if you have, if you currently live or have historically They lived near the various testing sites that we saw in Oppenheimer. It was something that the film didn't really touch on, but is a really interesting issue about the chronic and generational medical effects of folks who live near Trinity and those various test sites that still have generations of cancers that persist to this day, like really rare, rare and debilitating cancer.

So, like, in that way, I think this question about privilege as it relates to nuclear weapons, it does depend a little bit on, like, your positionality in relation to the field. If you are sort of just, you get paid to think, which is an amazing position to be in, I think there really is like this level of privilege. I think that's a really interesting point. But I think if you're suffering the effects of nuclear weapons on a daily basis, even if they're not going off, like, that's. That's as serious an issue to you as things like housing or financial insecurity or those other, like, really proximate issues, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And it's interesting to me because you are really isolating the problems geographically, too,

meaning, like, you have to be near a site or something like that as opposed to, I mean, am I ever going to think of those people sitting in Washington too? and, you know, I guess sort of get paid to think, I guess. Thank God I'm not paid to think coherently. So anyway, it does seem like, yeah, I mean, you have to, if you're hungry, then you're not thinking about nuclear weapons. But it's also, in that case, then it's the exact same problem we have with, you know, global warming.

and because if you're hungry or you need to get somewhere, you're not thinking, I better not buy a car. You know, you're not thinking, I mean, you have to be in a somewhat privileged position to actually give a shit about the global, about global warming, even though I would say that's a high probability event. Right. And it probably affects you more on a daily basis than nuclear weapons do. Absolutely. Absolutely. you have got a lot of friends and family in Texas the last two weeks who've definitely been on the forefront of that issue. So the grid gets hammered in hailed in sizes that has never been recorded before drums into their houses. Drum is maybe a small word for the size of the hail.

It's pretty big. It's like DVD size. It's wild. Wow. Well, so that nuclear war will take care of that, as they used to talk about in the 70s, that we'll have the fallout, will protect us all from the sun, and we'll have nuclear winter.

There's that fatalism, I think, right? That kind of almost facing the apocalypse with open arms, at least I don't have to worry about my mortgage or car payment or any of this anymore. If I survive, all that's wiped away and, you know, maybe what comes after will be better. I would say no. but again,

Fallout maps quite neatly onto that, right? Who knows? You know, maybe we'll see like a, you know, in all these questions about like what happens after the collapse, right? Whether it's, you know, in Fallout or in like the Last of Us or in, you know,

all these different kind of dystopian shows, you know, there's the real question about like, are we going to replicate the hierarchies that exist today or will we be able to form something new? I don't know. I'm vaguely hopeful, but it's hard. In the studying you've been doing, who do you think is most likely to use nuclear weapons first?

Because I'm going to assume if someone uses them first, there's a much higher probability that someone else will use them too in retaliation in some way. Yeah, that's a great question. The region that I think a lot of folks will typically point to as the most kind of nerve-wracking region that keeps people. people up at night is Indian Pakistan. This is an area where there are a lot of drivers towards early escalation in a conflict. Right. And that's what really, when we talk about early use of nuclear weapons, right, you look at, right, what are the incentives for one side or perhaps both sides to escalate the conflict

quickly, right? Because that's part of their nuclear doctrine. And also are there technical drivers, right? Like, for example, the accuracy of the weapons or how vulnerable they are or, you know, how likely they are to be sort of premated with their systems, like that sort of thing. And Indian Pakistan takes the, you know, that region takes a lot of boxes when it comes to sort of crisis instability, as folks call it. There are other regions around the world where, like, there is a relative level of stability, even with nuclear weapons. I'm not worried about the UK using nuclear weapons first or France using nuclear weapons first. It doesn't make sense for their doctrine.

You know, they're in a pretty stable situation. You know, it's hard for me to imagine a situation where countries like that would use a nuclear weapons first. But Indian Pakistan, in the context of a conventional conflict where one side is losing and there's a lot of misinformation going around and there's sort of systems and people clamoring towards an early response, I can imagine something like that happening. And really, even if we just look back a couple years ago, there was this really weird and very undercover story where an Indian missile was accidentally launched during a routine exercise into Pakistani territory

and impacted on a building. And nobody was hurt, which is great. But apparently it was, you know, an accident. There was just a series of things that went wrong. But you can totally imagine a situation where if that happened in the context of a conventional conflict, which luckily was not happening at the time, but like those two countries, that happens on a not irregular basis. Like if that happened in the context of a conflict, like who knows what kind of hell could have broken loose there, right? So I just think back on that situation and I look at these sort of technical and policy drivers towards escalation. And that makes me very nervous.

And they really don't respond to outside pressure the way other, you know, no one's going to enforce a treaty on them. No. They don't care what anybody else thinks. They're the sanction, whatever sanctions you put them on them, they're not getting rid of their nukes. Yeah. At this point, I don't think, I don't think any country is getting rid of it at this point. But certainly, like, if you look at that, that particular incident, that was really revealed. because after the missile was launched, India didn't make a statement about it for like two days.

So they basically just kept super quiet. And Pakistan certainly, but also like I think folks internationally were wondering what the hell just happened, right? This is one of the only times that a nuclear-armed country has accidentally launched a missile into another nuclear-armed country's territory. and they didn't make a statement about it for like 48 hours, right? So they're like that gives you a sense of just, you know, this region, yes, like there are a lot of sort of multilateral security factors and what countries do affects what other countries do. But they just decided to not make a statement for 48 hours and there wasn't anything

that anyone could do about it. I think it created a lot of confusion as to what, what had happened and what was going to happen next. To be clear, it was a conventional missile, not a nuclear missile. It was a conventional missile, but there is a lot of misreporting around that particular missile, and you will often see headlines, both in India and Pakistan, attributing a nuclear capability to it, even though the U.S. Intelligence has said that this is a conventional missile, and by all accounts like that, that seems to be the case, but you'll often see a lot of misreporting, and particularly in countries where there isn't that much nuclear transparency, you'll see journalists or headlines just sort of

like elevate a missile status from conventional to nuclear, like out of nowhere. And so that tends to catch fire. So there was a lot of reporting at the time that was like nuclear capable missile launched from India into Pakistan, and there was some reporting that had to come out afterwards. I was like, nope, that is a conventional missile. But it just sort of shows like there's a lot of misinformation out there about what's nuclear and what's not. I assume that those are two countries with low nuclear transparency. Yes. Yeah.

So what do we know about what their capabilities are in terms of how many missiles do they have in what form do they take? Yeah, it's really, you know, it is difficult to have a great sense as to the size of the arsenals of both countries, Indian Pakistan. you know, we can sort of piece things together by looking at force structure a little bit because you can make some assumptions, right, that a country isn't going to produce, you know, hundreds more nuclear weapons than they can deploy, right? That doesn't really make much sense because they're expensive, right? So, and it takes a long time to make those weapons, right? So you probably want to produce what, what you can deploy in so you can sort of match a little bit the force structure to the weapon systems themselves. So if you look at, how both countries are sort of developing, they're developing quite differently, right? Because they have different nuclear doctrines, right? So India is following along much closer to how we would understand, like, you know, the conventional sort of like nuclear triad.

And by convention, I don't mean non-nuclear. I mean like normal. Like a nuclear triad of, you know, you have aircraft that can deliver nuclear weapons. You have a bunch of ballistic missiles. and they're starting to sort of build out this sea leg as well, right? So you have air, sea, and land. So India has a few submarines that they're building. Those have taken a lot longer than I think they had hoped.

They have this presumed bomber mission. And then they're developing a lot of different types of nuclear capable ballistic missiles. And what's particularly interesting about India and perhaps a little worrying is that for years, it was presumed that India's warheads were stored separately from their missiles during peacetime. But what we're starting to see is that as they are deploying ballistic missile submarines, you typically, if those are going on deterrence patrol, you typically want to have warheads on board.

And they're starting to deploy their missiles in canisters, right? meaning that those warheads are typically going to be premated with their launchers. So if that's the case, then, you know, coupled with some statements that we've seen from Indian officials that say, you know, it used to take hours or days for our missiles to be launched. Now it's more like minutes, right? That tends to, I think, make people worry a little bit. But you're starting to see these sort of like both technical and also policy drivers towards maybe pre-mating or at least like moving the warheads and their missiles a lot closer together,

which means that they can be launched a lot quicker. The Pakistani context is different, right? Because their policy is they are very worried about a massive conventional invasion by Indian forces onto their territory. And so their policy is that they are developing and they have an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. right so these like very sort of short range relatively low yield weapons that they say can be used very early in a conflict to prohibit or I guess like to prevent an Indian conventional invasion. So you have these two kind of competing doctrines a little bit, right, where India says like, okay, we're we have a no first use doctrine, you know, we're not going to use nuclear weapons,

but they have a big conventional force and Pakistan says, okay, well, you have a big conventional force, we are going to use nuclear weapons early because that's what we have to do in order to forestall an invasion by your end. So it's these two very different doctrines, but both, you know, quite, quite worrying in terms of the potential for nukes to be used quickly. So how much of this doctrine is out in the open? Because I know in the United States, is it every five years a nuclear posture review is published where the president, the Pentagon kind of... Yeah, it's typically when there's a new... a new administration. Okay. It's every, every new administration,

which makes sense that the, the Pentagon and the president kind of collaborate on saying, this is what our nuclear doctrine is. Here, where the lines are, here's what we're working on, kind of gives everyone a vague idea of where they're thinking is. Do other countries have anything like this that is for public consumption at all?

Yeah, that's a great question. Some countries do. many do not but certainly some countries do like the UK comes out with a like a periodic sort of defense review every few years or so where they talk about

like they're talking about sort of the whole gamut of military defense issues and nuclear forms a part of that and they talk a little bit about their posture there it's not like a nuclear posture review in the sense that the US does one and it's usually quite long and you know is very detailed but other countries have made statements to the effect of how they might use nuclear weapons,

what the context would be, what they're going to build. Other countries are a little more subtle, right? So, for example, North Korea, to my understanding, does not have, like they have various laws relating to the use of nuclear weapons, but it's not like a policy document in the way that we would recognize the U.S. nuclear posture review. Well, but for whose consumption would that even be in North Korea, right? Good question. Probably for our consumption, right?

Because I guess like, you know, when it's North Korean state media, you know, to some extent, some of that is important for domestic consumption. But there is a lot of external signaling that countries want to do, right? Because it's in their interest to do so, right? So North Korea tends to do a lot of really public signaling about basically telling us, like, exactly, you know, they'll take a photo of like Kim Jong-un and then in the background, there will be like a map that like very clearly shows exactly what the targets of North Korean missiles would be, right?

That kind of photo is meant for us, right? Like we are meant to interpret that and see, okay, here is how their nuclear posture would go, right? Here's what would happen in the context of a conflict. So for some countries, you have these like written out policy. documents. And for others, it's like, you basically have that, but you sort of have to, like, put the puzzle pieces together a little bit. North Korea, I would say, is like not that subtle. Other countries are much more subtle. And then on the other end, you have a country like Israel, right,

which does not even acknowledge its own nuclear possession. And, but by all accounts, has an arsenal of weapons. But we don't have a good sense of what their doctrine is, right? You can only sort of go to history, right? And at different times, you know, there have been times when nuclear use was debated, at least according to, you know, former Israeli officials in the context of like the Um-Kypur war or, you know, things like that. And you can sort of piece together like, okay, here's maybe when they might use nuclear weapons, you know, but they're not releasing any kind of document at all because they're not acknowledging possession. Why do you, if the, the point of a nuke is deterrence in one line of thinking.

Why do you think Israel does not tell anyone, or at least not acknowledge, let me ask it this way, because they're so strange about it. Absolutely fascinating. Can you explain Israel's relationship to nuclear weapons, I guess is probably the best way to ask this question. Yeah. Yeah. So I can try. to the best that we can understand. So Israel has had nuclear weapons, by all accounts, you know, since, like, the 60s, right?

So the program goes back quite a ways. And when Israel developed its nuclear program, right? This was at the time when a lot of countries were sort of experimenting a little bit with proliferation, and there was a real threat of sanctions because you know, the U.S. was, you know, the U.S. and other nuclear armed countries, to some extent, we're trying to police, you know, who is able to acquire nuclear weapons and who isn't. And so what Israel sort of came up with with its nuclear policy was what it called Amimut, which is this sort of translates to like ambiguity in a way.

And basically what that sort of how that functions in effect is that they, said, we are not going to be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, right? That's the phrasing that you will often hear from Israeli policymakers, you know, various presidents, things like that. The way that they define the words introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East is, in my opinion, is so specific to like very certain criteria to make it basically meaningless. Because the way that they've understood introducing nuclear weapons to the Middle East

is not publicly testing nuclear weapons, not using them, not announcing that they have them. So like these really public displays of sort of promoting their nuclear policy. But by all accounts, they do have nuclear weapons. It's clearly in the back of everyone's mind

in the context of, you know, any conflict involving Israel. And so, you know, it's like really like this weird semantic debate. But originally the reason why this policy happened, like this policy of opacity was in order to avoid a potential conflict with the United States in terms of like economic sanctions and things like that because the U.S. wanted to aid its ally in, you know, providing technology, but also didn't want it to acquire nuclear weapons. and so there was this kind of like neat little bit of state craft where both sides sort of said, okay, we're going to have nuclear weapons, but we won't introduce them, putting that in quotation marks, introduce them publicly into the region. And then that's our way sort of out of this, this weird sort of semantic battle, right? Because the U.S. had also a policy of nonproliferation. And so it didn't want to create this like double standard by acknowledging Israel's possession.

So it kind of goes back to like this weird era of 60s like Kissinger statecraft. But that's the policy that we have now. Well, and it kind of, if you're Israel, it makes sense to me that you want to at least have ambiguity if not missiles. Right. Right. I mean, you know, you want to have everyone. It's kind of funny because in the end after the Iraq war where we killed Saddam Hussein, I remember reading this great analysis. of why he didn't just let everybody look because he didn't have anything of any particular value.

And the analysis read basically that he couldn't admit that he had nothing. Not really. You know, he had to have that ambiguity in order to keep himself in place in the region and in his own country. So his like this sort of weird kind of pride led to giving us the excuse to invade and, you know, led to his downfall. I love this stuff. It's just so many, you know, levels going on at the same time, if any, if there are any levels at all, frankly, because I think people make this shit up, don't they? You're nodding vigorously. I think everyone should know.

All right. Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners. Welcome back. We're talking to Matt Cora about nuclear weapons. So, when does Iran get to? nuclear weapons.

Oh, God. Hopefully, hopefully never. Right? These are the, yeah, this is the big question now, right? Is how are things going to change, especially, you know, in light of recent events, you know, what's going to happen? You know, the, the Iran nuclear deal, right? The deal that sort of put these, these caps on how Iran was able to, you know, produce fissile material and like a level of inspections, you know, it feels like a real,

like product of its time. But it was meant to just be, you know, this stepping stone, right? Like it wasn't meant to sort of be the end all, be all of nuclear engagement with Iran. And unfortunately, like, that's it, the trend is really moving into a, into a dangerous, you know, dangerous territory, right? Because we're seeing that Iran for many years now has been basically hedging and saying, okay, well, we could, you know, develop nuclear weapons, but, you know, we won't if you, you know, provide certain incentives. And it's really not always in a country's interest to develop nuclear weapons, right? Because you can imagine that for Iran, if they really start going for it, there are going to be very serious consequences, specifically,

you know, likely coming from the Israelis, right? So, and they probably want to avoid that. So But sometimes there's a limit to how much hedging can get you, right? Because you want a hedge to be able to get something back in return. And my concern is that they're going to keep creeping up to the line in order to promote this hedging policy. And eventually maybe you just sort of like stumble over it because domestic politics and just like there's so many, at that point you get to so many drivers towards actually producing the weapons.

and that's a concern for me, right? Just sort of seeing like, okay, well, if they've gotten, if there's a point where they get too close and, you know, there is already going to be like an international response and their domestic, you know, domestic drivers are to actually like really push for it, then could they actually go for it? You know, I don't know. You're saying they could oopsie doodle their way into nuclear weapons? Maybe not like trip and acquire one, but like,

Once you get to a certain point, I think like there's a lot of, there are a lot of incentives to just, you know, actually go and develop the thing, right? Like that's, that's going to be ultimately like a big political decision. But politics, there are so volatile, right? So you, it's, it's hard to know, you know, where is the threshold going to be? Who's next to develop a nuclear weapon? I mean, we can say after Iran or before Iran, but I mean, you know, we've had these countries. is popping up. It certainly doesn't seem like anyone's getting rid of any. Ooh, that's a great question. So we're definitely seeing, you know, debates about, you know, nuclear development in countries like South Korea, right? South Korea is a big one, right?

Like, just over the past, like, five to ten years or so, there's been a really significant increase in the percentage of South Koreans who want an independent, like, indigenous nuclear deterrent. And that they feel that no level of U.S. engagement with them, right, even when it comes to the possibility of the U.S., like bringing back nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, no amount of outside engagement is going to be enough in that they really do want this kind of independent deterrent of their own. I see that as a, you know, a potential future possibility, depending on how things go, especially with the next election, right? Because, you know, the next election in the United States in particular, right?

Because, you know, we sort of saw what happened during the previous administration. And there was this real, like, weird game that was going on with South Korea where it was like, you know, really, you know, the politics of the day was very much like, like, oh, South Korea should take care of their own defense. And if you want South Korea to take care of their own defense, like many South Koreans feel that the best way to do that is to build their own nuclear deterrent. And I think, like, they have the means to do so. And I'm nervous that there isn't really a mechanism to prevent it from happening. And there, you know, there have been some pretty interesting analyses put out there as to, like,

what the consequences might be if they went and did it. and, you know, I'm not necessarily sure that those consequences would be super crippling, right? Like, you'd definitely run into economic sanctions and things like that. But, you know, if that's the direction in the country, like, if they feel that they can absorb that, then I'm not sure what exactly would be standing in their way, like a few years down the line if they felt that they weren't getting enough from the United States. So, like, that's why, like, this, I think a lot of countries are watching what's going to happen in November here. really closely because I think countries are going to make decisions about their own security

based on whether or not they feel that the U.S. is there for them in the context of a conflict. And, you know, when we think about, you know, when we think about like wanting the U.S. to spend more money on itself and like getting its own house in order before being like the world's, you know, sort of world's protector, which, you know, that argument I can completely sympathize with. And I think there are a lot of ways in which that makes a lot of sense. But there is also this sort of flip side of, okay, well, then are you prepared to risk the possibility of a country like South Korea going nuclear? And some people might say yes and some people might say no, right?

And so you sort of run into questions like that. I'm moving to the moon. We've got plans to nuke the moon on file. That's fine. That's true. What about Japan? Japan I'm much less worried about. you know, the technological capability is there in terms of like fissile material stockpiles, things like that.

But, you know, Japan is still a very anti-nuclear country. You know, its population, I think, very understandably, is, you know, very anti-nuclear, not just with nuclear weapons, but also, you know, think of what happened with Fukushima and things like that, like that, like that, really reverberates a lot in the national consciousness. So, and I don't think the security driver is as top of mind there as it is in South Korea where, like, there is this real concern about what's going on with North Korea, with China. And so, like, you know, not to say that, like, there aren't drivers in Japan, but I'm, you know, taking steps towards nuclear weapons is a really significant political step that it will put you, it will turn you into a sort of like international. pariah, if that's the direction you want to go, I'm more nervous about other countries feeling comfortable with that than I am with Japan. So what is going on in China? That's the newest nuclear notebook, right?

I think the, I don't know if you haven't been on the show before, but you and I have talked about this. I think the last time we talked is ICBM silos in the desert. Yeah. Are there more? Has anything changed? Oh, man. So, um, there's some more.

There is some more. Yeah, so I guess to bring folks up to speed, you know, China for decades had, you know, it sort of seemed like China was satisfied with just a few hundred-ish nuclear weapons for its security, right? It had this sort of, I guess what sort of outside scholars would call like a minimum theory of deterrence in some way where, you know, it would only build a relatively small number of nuclear weapons that could be used in retaliation, and that attempting to build more or attempting to match the U.S. or Russia didn't really make any sense because it didn't fit with their doctrine. And also, it's really expensive, right?

So, and they, you know, throughout the Cold War, China was just like not that interested in pursuing really significant nuclear weapons development. That appears to be changing. a little bit, right? So we're seeing, you know, a pretty significant jump in China's, you know, estimated warhead stockpile, right? So, you know, just a few years ago, we were estimating somewhere along the lines of like 300 nuclear warheads. You know, now we're estimating somewhere closer to 500. DoD is predicting that China could potentially go up to somewhere around 1,000 by the end of the decade, which would, you know, easily, like, it's already the, probably the third largest

nuclear country, right? But it's, you know, would really outpace some of its other, other, the other nuclear-armed countries. It's still likely to be much smaller than both the U.S. and Russian arsenals, but, you know, we are seeing this big jump. And what has really characterized this jump has been the discovery a few years ago of, you know, how. hundreds of new missile silos in the desert. And we were involved in one of those disclosures, as well as some other organizations, in the nuclear field.

What we are probably seeing, and there's still like a ton of unknowns about how China is going to operationalize these, is a few things, right? You know, there are real questions about whether China's doctrine is changing or whether or not they are just sort of reinterpreting their doctrine to accommodate a much larger number of weapons.

because, you know, to some extent, China's probably looking around at what's going on in the U.S. and Russia and in other countries and saying, okay, well, these countries are developing really significant conventional counterforce capabilities that can attack our nuclear weapons sites. They have really significant advancements in ISR, right, just the ability to even track what it is we're doing. And they are, you know, are getting better at missile defense, like that sort of thing. And there is probably some extent to which they're looking around and saying, okay, well, our 200 to 300 weapons are a little more vulnerable than they used to be. And so now our definition of what is a minimum deterrent to make sure that we're no longer vulnerable, that definition of what minimum means has probably gone up a little bit. And now they're saying, okay, well, we need a few hundred more and we need them deployed in these different ways in order to make sure that we still have the, a quote unquote minimum to satisfy our security. That's sort of one way of reading their doctrine,

and it doesn't necessarily come with significant changes to longstanding policy. There is another way of reading their doctrine, right, or reading what's going on here, which involves really significant increases and changes to things like a longstanding no first use policy, right? Changes to not having a launch on warning policy, which is something that China previously said it didn't have.

Right? Now the U.S. DoD is saying China probably does have a launch on warning policy, which means that, you know, upon announcement of ballistic missiles incoming, China might choose to launch its nuclear weapons first. Right. So there are ways in which you can sort of interpret this buildup both as like nothing is fundamentally changing. It's just the stockpiles getting bigger or the policies and doctrines that, China's had for many decades are actually changing. And it's really difficult for us to know externally

which direction it's going in. And it's also possible that like, you know, China builds up to 500, 700 warheads and then stops, right? Because it says like, we've now hit our minimum and we don't need anymore. And there's also another pathway in which they go up and build another thousand warheads, right? And, you know, that will require a lot of people. plutonium production and things like that. But like, we don't know at this stage which direction they're going in. So we're going to have to watch really carefully. So we have to talk about Russia or the audience will be mad at us. What's Russia building? So Russia, like the U.S., basically like every nuclear-armed country, they are replacing

pretty much every single piece of their nuclear weapons infrastructure, right? They're taking all these old Soviet-era systems and they are building much newer, you know, bigger, better systems. So we're seeing new aircraft. We're seeing new ballistic missiles, you know, including new ICBMs. We're seeing new submarines and new delivery vehicles for tactical nuclear weapons as well. So pretty much everything is getting replaced. They claim to be pretty close to the end of that modernization campaign, but like these campaigns happen pretty much on an ongoing basis forever because of the timelines that it takes to build weapons. So, you know, they're saying like, I think that the latest percentage is somewhere like above

90% of all systems involving nuclear weapons in Russia are now like modern, meaning not Soviet anymore. But that doesn't mean that they're going to like stop building. There's already plans to build the next follow-on system and then probably the system after that. and these things just kind of go on forever. So, yeah, so we're seeing basically like a replacement of everything. So other than getting rid of the floppy disks and I guess making sure that if any of the solid fuel, for example, or something like no longer works or what's the incentive?

I mean, if your nukes work as they are, why do you spend a trillion dollars to upgrade them? What does an upgrade mean in a case like this? You know, I know I'm ignorant, but still a missile is a fucking missile, is a fucking missile, is a fucking missile. That's a great question. So, yes, there's a few things here, right? So you can point to there's like the safety upgrades, right? Which those, you know, those make sense, right? You know, there's better safety that's happening all the time.

And you might like want to swap out a warhead. with one that has like insensitive high explosives, for example, right? It would just is a little bit safer, doesn't go off if you don't want it to. Not that like warheads are just going off all over the place, but like it's just like an extra degree of safety, that sort of thing. And then there's like command and control resilience, right? As these systems get older, you know, they might, your command and control might degrade a little bit.

And also as things like, you know, I guess as offense gets better, Right? You worry that like your command and control could be degraded and then you can't fire your weapons, right? So even if the weapons work well, then your command and control can't communicate with them and then they can't launch, right? And that could degrade deterrence. So those are some of the things that like we're definitely seeing across the board. Countries are investing in these, you know, better safety, better command and control, that sort of thing. But your question raises a really good point, right, as to what is the purpose of some of these systems, right? Especially ICBMs. Right? This is like the, the, the clearest case of, you know, is this a good investment or not, right? Because they are, they are sitting in holes in the ground, you know, to some extent, like, yes, they're, they are in the war plan, right? They're going to be used in the context of a nuclear conflict. But they're also there to, like, absorb a big nuclear strike. So they're there, you know, in some cases, to sit and be destroyed. You know, they might also, they might also be used, right? Then I might also be launched, but, like, they, you know, part of their, their point is to absorb damage into the

center of the country in this very, like, less, not very populated area. And to raise the sort of the ante for other countries to target the U.S. Do you need, like, a brand new missile to be able to absorb damage? I'd say there's a really, there are really big questions about, like, why would we, why would we pay so much more to have, have a brand new thing be destroyed instead of a slightly older thing. Now, there are, the things that sort of go into that are about calculations of risk, right? So, right, it's, it's trackcom's job to make sure that the weapons will function as they're supposed to up to a certain level of risk, right?

If the president says, you know, I want to be like 95% sure that that all 400 of my weapons are going to go off when I want them to, then you're going to have to continuously upgrade those weapons to reach that threshold, right? Because you have to make sure that they're always, always, always going to work. If you're willing to accept a slightly lower level of risk, then you don't necessarily, right, you might not necessarily have to keep replacing them.

And there are real questions about whether or not, you know, would quote unquote deterrence suffer from having that reduce risk. And I think there are a lot of debates out there suggesting some people say yes, some people say no, I tend to fall more on the more skeptical side because I'm not certain that a country would behave differently if it thought that there was a 70% chance

that 400 missiles would land on its territory versus like 90% chance. I think those are both equally scary to me. if I'm a world leader. But others think differently, right? So, like, there is this, like, big debate, but I think your question is really important, right? And it points to these big questions, but like, do we need, is the cost worth getting us that extra level of risk tolerance? Now, someone else must have suggested this at some point, but I'm going to give this idea to the federal government for free.

How about we put a lot of dummy missiles around? and still have like one in every 10 silo has a real missile, but no one knows which is which. And you just like, they have to take them all out just as if there was only, you know, as if they were all filled with real missiles. And we save a trillion dollars. I love it. It's the shell game.

Yes. This is what, and I think there are still real questions about like, what is China doing with its ICBMs? And, you know, folks have suggested, like, China historically does not like spending money on its nuclear program because from their perspective, it's a waste of money, right? Like, you can achieve a deterrent effect using other means. And maybe they would do something like the shell game, right? Try and actually deploy fewer warheads, you know, save a bit of money. Didn't you all catch them faking some of the construction infrastructure with, like, giant balloons?

Am I misremembering that? So one of the signatures that we used to identify the field was through these big air domes that sort of would go over like a tennis court. But we don't know what's going on inside that air dome, right? Because it's covering it up from satellite imagery. You know, it's also like an environmental protection. Like these things are in the desert and deserts get like windy and sandstorms and all that. So like you want if you're doing like sensitive silo construction, you want to cover it up. But, like, you know, what we saw was the start of construction, then the dome goes up, and then we saw the dome go away a few months later, and it's the, and then there's a silo lid.

Right. It's really difficult to know what is going on underneath those things. It's just a giant plate in the middle of the desert. Well, like, the genius is that you have to assume, right, and military planners have to assume every single one of those things is filled, right? That is genius. And they might be, right? Like, we don't know. Well, we have a tradition of ending our most dire topics on a lighter tone.

And I think that that's probably a good place to go out. Matt, if people want to learn more about the horrors of nuclear war, where can people find what you're working on? Yeah. So you can go to fass.org. That's our website. We have a whole nuclear page there where you can. get sort of up to date on our numbers. We've got a blog there where we put out all of our open source discoveries.

And you can follow us on Twitter as well. I'm at Matt Corda. Perfect. Thank you so much for coming onto Angry Planet and walking us through this. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. There's a lot of fun. That's all for this episode of Angry Planet.

As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gold, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. Hey, if you like this and you want to hear it commercial free, you want to hear episodes early, go on to Angry on to angry planetpod.com and sign up $9 a month, get you written work, get you commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes, and get you bonus episodes. I've got one coming out later this week that is all about the Daniel Perry case in Texas. We've got a conversation with Matt Farwell next week coming out about the aesthetics of the American Apocalypse.

A lot of great stuff happening here over at Angry Planet. Again, go to Angry Planet pod.com to sign up. We will be back later with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.