Angry Planet - ICYMI: What's the Point of Nuclear Weapons?

Episode Date: February 27, 2018

This week we've got a blast from the past. Here's what we said back then:This week Thomas Nichols helps us understand America’s current nuclear strategy … or lack thereof.This August marked the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven decades later, Washington and the Kremlin control more than 7,000 nuclear warheads … each. Not all of those weapons are active. The two nations have deployed some, stockpiled more and disarmed far too few. And those numbers are down from where they were just a few years ago.Which is good because nuclear arms are the most terrifying weapons ever created. But with Russia and the United States sitting on so many potential Armageddons — not to mention other nuclear states such as China, India and Pakistan — and so many warheads unused for decades, it begs the question: just what are nuclear weapons good for?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. One of the things the Cold War was very good at was squeezing out the little guys off the big stage. It's the Cold War we're still on, and there were still a Soviet Union. I'm pretty sure that North Korea would never have developed the nuclear weapon because no one would have let them. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast,

that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Jason Fields will be here in just a moment speaking to you from the past. We are airing a rerun this week and wanted to give you a little bit of context on it. This one is from 2015, and what a difference a few years makes. Back then, we talked to Tom Nichols, who's a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and at the Harvard Extension. His most recent book is The Death of Expertise,

but back then he had written a book called No Use, which was about U.S. nuclear policy or, at the time, the lack thereof. Now, Tom argued then that the great superpowers, mostly Russia, China, and the United States lacked a coherent nuclear strategy, and that this was precipitating a slide towards North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons. Well, it's 2018. North Korea's nuclear program is continuing, undabated. And the White House's nuclear posture review has called for a change in American nuclear policy

that looks a lot like it did during the Cold War. With all that in mind, we thought it might be a good idea to go back to 2015 and see just what the world looked like back then. So what is the current U.S. nuclear strategy if we can just jump right into it? I mean, what role do they play nuclear weapons and what does U.S. see them as being for? Well, that's a good question because I think U.S. nuclear strategy is in transition. I think there's not really as clear an answer to that question as there should be.

The United States has done three reviews of its entire nuclear enterprise, as they sometimes call it, of its entire nuclear force, its nuclear strategy, thinking about nuclear weapons. And pretty much every time they do it, it comes up with the same answer that we've had since the Cold War, which is that they're there mostly to deter through being willing to actually fight. But, of course, nobody actually wants to use those weapons for fighting anything. And we then ask, well, how many of them do we need? And we always come up with the answer that we need fewer than we have now, but we still need them in roughly the same kind of configuration.

We need bombers, we need submarines, we need missiles. The last review of our nuclear strategy that was done in 2010 basically said, these weapons, we wish they were only for deterrence, but the world is still a pretty dangerous place. So we're kind of reserving the option to use them for fighting in some way or, you know, kind of ambiguous circumstances that would be very extreme. I think at one point the language is something like, but only in the most extreme circumstances, as though we would ever use them in nor. normal circumstances. And so we want them to be just for deterrence, but we still are kind of holding this sort of trump card in our pocket. But I think that means we're not really sure, because the Cold War is gone, but we still have a Cold War strategy and a Cold War force that's left over from 40 years ago. I guess the original thought, the one that we all grew up

with mad, mutually assured destruction, was that we would have nuclear weapons and overwhelming number of them, yet that we being the United States. The Russians also would have an ungodly number of nuclear weapons. Then if anyone were to launch, even one weapon, it would be met by thousands of others from the other side, right?

As opposed to, and what you're talking about now is we're reserving the right. I'm sorry if I'm repeating, but I just want to make sure I understand it. We're reserving the right to use a missile, or use a nuclear weapon, I should say, in case of a war going badly? Something like, what kind of war would go badly enough

that we would use one and just one? Well, you're understandably confused, because so am I. That's the question I keep asking, which is what kind of a war are we talking about where we're reserving the right to use one, two, three, ten nuclear weapons. And I think because our cold, because our force is still basically a Cold War force, that we still have long-range weapons, we have hundreds of warheads, we still have the ability to do immense

devastation, we're trying to figure out how to gain political leverage out of that with countries like North Korea or, you know, that has a handful or Iran that might want one. And so I think in that sense, we're doing the right thing by not being too specific. Because the last thing you ever want to do with nuclear weapons is to say, here's the whole menu of times that I would use a nuclear weapon. Because, you know, that's not the kind of thing that you want to kind of paste on the wall for your opponents. Ambiguity, uncertainty, chance are all things that you hope deter us your opponent from testing you. But I think we still have, when it comes to peer nuclear powers like Russia or China,

we still have a strategy that's based on being able to survive being hit and being able to strike back and destroy the other guy completely. Because one of the things, if you talk to kind of the vintage cold warriors, and I'm of that generation, you know, earlier before the broadcast, we were all talking about generations and I come out of that generation. What they would tell you is it's not how many weapons you have, it's how many you have left after you've been hit. And we took this to really absurd levels. I mean, at the height of the Cold War, at the height of our arsenal in 1967, we had 32,000 nuclear weapons. And the Soviets probably had something like 30 to 40,000 eventually. That's way more than enough to survive being struck by the other guy.

But we started to think about intricate war fighting scenarios that required a lot of planning and multiple strikes and so on. So I think that's the mentality we're still stuck in. All right. I can kind of see that. That we're stuck in that mentality. Earlier you were talking about the differences in generations. I'm of the younger generation. And I feel like my generation has a very different view of nuclear weapons.

And I think that some of the things that have been going on with America's military, their nuclear program speaks to that. You know, in 2013, the Associated Press published a number of investigative pieces about America's nuclear program. Airmen in the missile silos have left blast doors open. The Navy ended up expelling 34 soldiers after it learned that they cheated on an exam. Have things gotten better since then? Does this kind of speak to, you know, are we? the Pentagon sits around and strategizes, but doesn't really invest anything in nukes? I wouldn't even go so far as the Pentagon sits around and strategizes.

Let me just back up and say that years ago, and it's in the book, which I wrote a few years back, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said, you know, we just don't create nuclear strategists anymore. Right. So, you know, right off the bat, there's a problem. And I think after the Cold War, the kind of problems you're talking about with people getting lazy about procedures and, you know, there was the infamous case of flying six live nukes across the country on a B-52 that the crew didn't know about. All of these pointed to a problem that the nuclear mission had become de-emphasized and that people who worked in the nuclear mission

just didn't think what they were doing was important. I remember talking to a retired officer who was an ICBM launch officer during the Cold War, and he said they used to go to work, and there was a sign on the wall that said, not today, Ivan. Oh, my God, really? But that was, that's a great, I thought that summed it up beautifully, and it gave them a real sense of mission

to say, look, no matter what else happens in the world, America, the 50 states of the United States of America, and its closest allies in Europe and Asia, are safe that, you know, not today, Ivan. Well, now, you know, when you're going down to sit long alerts or not alerts, but long stretches of duty, you know, underground for a couple of days, what is it you think you're doing? You're defending against the gazillion to one shot that something terrible happens in the world. Now, as it turns out, the Russians are actually inadvertently

invigorating the nuclear mission because they won't shut up about nuclear weapons. But, you know, the fact the matter is the nuclear mission fell into kind of a twilight zone for a while. And there was a blue ribbon panel in 2008 that said, we really have to do something about those. It was chaired by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. And he said, even the Air Force doesn't understand its own nuclear mission anymore. And I'll just, I'll add one story before we move on. Years ago, I gave a lecture at the War College. It got to be a good 10, 12 years ago.

And I gave a whole lecture about mutual assured destruction and flexible response and nuclear strategies from the 70s and 80s. And an Air Force officer walked to me, a young guy, a young major. and he said, sir, that was a great lecture. He said, I'd never heard any of this stuff before. Which blew my mind. I mean, as an Air Force officer, he said, I said, you've never heard the expression? Mutual assured destruction? And he said, not until today. No sense of their own history, no sense of strategic air command in the 50s and 60s, nothing like that. And again, you mentioned generational issues. I think people below a certain age. I teach courses at Harvard Extension to younger folks, mostly, and they have no sense of any of this.

To them, this is all ancient history. When I talked to them about people growing up very fearful, and I tell them the classic Cold War kids stories. You know, we hit under our desks, and we did air raid drills and all that stuff. They look at me almost as if they're an inch away from saying, Professor Nichols, why would you lie to us about this? You know, nobody really did that. And I say, yeah, we really did. Well, that actually, I think it all comes around. You mentioned Vladimir Putin.

And he has been making these, they're not veiled threats. I mean, they are threats. They're open threats about nuclear weapons. I mean, to me, it all, it's part of a piece. I mean, yeah, if there are kids out there who don't believe this is a real threat, and they're not sitting there like I did actually in bed sitting up in the 1970s and just waiting for the bombs to fall, which made it very hard to sleep, by the way, if they don't have that sense.

But, yeah, I mean, all those weapons are still there, right? Each one more powerful than the ones we just had the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right? Each one of the weapons is pretty much, most of them are more powerful than the ones that hit those two cities. are all more powerful from there. I just wanted to make sure. Actually, I didn't want to say that in case we have a suitcase nuke somewhere that's not very powerful. But, so what kind of threat do you think? I mean, when Putin says the things he said, like, you know, I should have moved missiles into Crimea.

That was one thing specifically that I remember him saying. Does that change the situation? Does it really make the world more dangerous? Well, the thing that's missing today that made the Cold War so terrifying for us was not just, the number of nuclear weapons, but it was facing an opponent who every day, ideologically, was committed to our extinction. You know, the problem with dealing with the Russian regime now, and again, people who talk, when we talk to younger folks about it, or people don't have an experience of the Cold War, they say, well, you know, it's bad, but is it really that bad?

And the answer is no, it really isn't that bad. Are you dealing with the Russian regime now? They're thugs. They're gangsters. It's like dealing with Tony Soprano with nuclear weapons. It's a different situation than a globe-spanning enemy superpower whose entire raison debt was overthrowing your system of government. So that made it especially terrifying because every single time we butted heads anywhere, you waited for that fuse to be lit that was going to lead to the ultimate showdown and eventually Armageddon. So even I don't worry about that as much today. but I do worry about the recklessness of other regimes, especially the Russians, that could leave us back into that kind of situation. But it's different. Okay. Do you think that it's reasonable, though, if, let's say Putin did something horribly irresponsible, I'm not saying that I think

he will or anything like that. Just your sense. I mean, you've said already, it's not clear what our strategy is. But let's say he did use a bomb. I mean, do you think the U.S. has at this point of a response? I mean, if, let's say he used it in Kiev. This is a great place for me to note that I don't speak for the U.S. government. This is all my personal views. So, you know, this is my own scholarly outlook on it and not in any way related to the U.S. government. Of course, the U.S. government, I mean, every government that has nuclear weapons, make plans. I mean, there are all kinds of plans sitting on shelves. When I hear a scenario like that, though, I always back up to how did things get to the point where Vladimir Putin used the nuclear weapon?

Because I think a lot of the scenarios that we argue about, we argue about nuclear weapons, jump all the way ahead to assume someone used the nuclear weapon. NATO's deterrent strategy in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and particularly during the end game in the 1980s with the Soviet Union, was not based on that. NATO had a coherent deterrent strategy that linked the first bullet fired in Europe to the very last nuclear missile launched. Nobody, despite the way people think about Cold War nuclear strategy, it was always integrated into a larger strategy of dealing with the Soviet Union. And I fear we've lost that, that we have these arguments and people say, well, imagine a nuke. Well, I always back up to say, wait a minute. For example, in Europe, how did we become so weak that Putin decided to test us,

put us in a situation where things broke into open combat and nuclear weapons were used? Okay, so what about the less predictable and more frightening ideological enemies out there? Thinking places like North Korea, you know, we're talking about the Iran nuclear deal, wanting to keep that kind of weapon out of the hands of that kind of regime. Does this kind of brinksmanship work with those kinds of people? I don't think so, and I argue in the book that it doesn't. Because it's one thing to talk about an all-out nuclear holocaust with the Soviet Union, where it's for all the marbles, right?

They're going to destroy the entire United States, take apart the entire Western system of government, and whoever's left is going to rule the ashes. And the only way that you can deter them from doing that is to say that will take you with us. I think that's very different from threatening to nuke North Korea or Iran and destroy an entire region full of our friends

to irradiate. If the North Koreans use the nuclear weapon, are we going to hit them with five back? The Japanese might have some feelings about that. The South Koreans themselves. I mean, this, we never thought, despite the famous movie title that us Cold War kids all know, the day after. The reality is that American nuclear planning didn't, nobody's nuclear planning during the Cold War really thought too much about the day after. Because we figured, you know, if it happens and deterrence fails and we take the other guy down with us, well, then we hope the people in Brazil or Antarctica or whoever survives, manages to build a better world without us.

in this case we really do have to think about the day after we have to think about what happens the day after Iran uses a nuclear weapon and we decide to use two or three or four nuclear weapons against Iran and irradiate the entire persian gulf region and kill millions of people and sick or kill thousands sick and tens of thousands create an environmental disaster for years to come it's simply too facile to say, well, we'll just hit them with nuclear weapons. And I think we've used that as a crutch since the 1990s as a kind of placeholder for thinking about strategy. Personally, my feeling is we need to develop our conventional forces back to where they once were, because we've tried to get a kind of cheap answer by saying, well, if worse comes to worse, and then we fill in this blank space with nukes. But I don't think that's going to work anymore. So you think that we've kind of become

lazy in a sense. America specifically has become lazy. We had a previous discussion a few weeks ago where we were talking about a possible war between China and America. Why would it happen? What would it look like? And our guest said that it wouldn't

and his simple answer was nukes. And you're shaking your head. I think we have become we veered between two extremes. During the Cold War, strategy and particularly nuclear strategy was a cottage industry. I mean, every, every glass

building in suburban Virginia that was anywhere near Washington, D.C., had little hives of, you know, bright-eyed thinkers sort of teasing out nuclear strategy in World War III. Now we've gone the other direction, which is we just don't think about it enough. We just say, well, you know, it won't happen because we have shared interests and there are nuclear weapons in the world. And I think we make a lot of very, again, very facile, very simple assumptions. Now, personally, I don't think it's likely. I think it's very unlikely. But wars don't happen because people make them happen or want them to happen. Worse happen because of things that we can't control, unforeseen circumstances, accidents, misunderstandings, and other problems that are all part of being fallible human beings.

I keep coming back to the word lazy. I just keep thinking of the word lazy. It's lazy thinking. And we've become, it's funny because we've become reliant on this technology that we abhor, right, and that everyone's frightened of, but it's become a crutch in a way. Because it's an easy answer. It's the easy answer to an extremely low probability event. So, you know, if you don't want to sit around thinking about what what happens if World War III breaks out with Russia or Chinese, say, well, you know, we'll solve it with nuclear weapons. And it won't happen because of nuclear weapons and will never be hurt because of nuclear weapons. I think there is a, I call it a kind of magical thinking about nuclear

weapons. And I should just say, I was as hardline a pro-nuclear hawk during the Cold War as anybody you would have talked to because I think nuclear weapons did deter the Soviet Union. It was a fanatical regime. They were dangerous. And I think nuclear deterrence is not over. The question is, do we need to have the same kind of nuclear deterrence that we had during the Cold War? I am not a, just to be clear, everybody in the world is a global zero guy in a perfect world. But in the real world that we live in, I'm a global low guy, not a global zero guy. I think we can deter each other and keep the peace, but we don't need to have thousands of nuclear weapons to do it. I think we might need just hundreds, if that many.

So what does that new concept look like, do you think, that new deterrence? Well, I think without the ideological driver behind it, it means that we don't have to be prepared for every possible contingency, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. remember during the Cold War when you have an opponent who has said you know we're we're determined to eradicate you know this enemy regime and we will you know we will sing a dirge over the corpse of your your social and political system yeah you kind of sit there waiting for an attack out of nowhere we don't have that kind of relationship with Russia or China we have a tense

relationship with them we are at best frenemies at worst we're we are enemies, but in that sense of being strategic competitors, rather than dedicated ideological enemies like Kissinger's famous scorpions in a bottle. Or Khrushchev, what Khrushchev said, we will bury you, right? Yeah, although, you know, that's over the years, it's gotten lost that he meant we would bury you with our greater productivity and our better system and all that. I think the better comment from Khrushchev is, if you want an arms race, we will crank missiles out like sausages.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So, you know, when you're dealing with people like that, then, you know, you want to keep your powder dry. Putin says a lot of, a lot of very threatening things, particularly to the Europeans. But, again, the balance of forces between the United States and Russia is quite different, including the ideological competition and the situation in Europe. Remember that once upon a time in Europe, they had a whole belt of allies that they controlled and owned ringing their country. NATO now is 28 nations all committed to each other's defense, and the Russians are the ones. I mean, they simply don't have any allies. They don't have any friends.

And that makes a difference. The argument that we're strategically lazy doesn't just apply to China. I mean, obviously, we think about China. We hold exercises. We watch them carefully. It's not like we're not paying attention. But it's true that, well, nothing will really go bad because of the United States. nuke's is a pretty common argument. But you even find it, for example, in talking about pulling

U.S. forces out of Korea. Now, there are people who say, look, the Koreans can defend themselves. They don't need Americans there. And if you come back at them and say, well, what if the North Koreans take are departing, as they did in 1949, as a signal that they can then engage in aggression? And the answer you get is this kind of lazy shorthand of, well, nukes. And I just don't, I just don't that's a good answer anymore. We have to have a better answer than that because it's not a realistic answer when it comes to dealing with small nuclear powers or rogue states. Yeah, that makes sense. When you're talking about fallout, there's also, I mean, there's political fallout too. I mean, whoever uses a nuclear weapon next, you wonder if you wouldn't

be a pariah state. Back in the 90s, John Dwight, who became CIA director and was a prominent member of the Clinton administration made that case. He said, look, we should just have a doctrine that says anyone who uses a nuclear weapon is basically a war with the rest of the world. And I don't see how we solve that problem by using nuclear weapons ourselves. Now, there is one scenario to think about, which is a small country uses a nuclear weapon and it says, well, I have, you know, three more, and they're buried in a mountain in my country. It may well be that the only way you're going to get those weapons is by using a nuclear weapon. And I think then you are absolved of the moral responsibility here because if you're in danger of suffering a second nuclear attack, then prudence demands that

you do everything you can to avoid that. But I, again, I ask myself, how did things get to the point where we allowed that to happen? And I think the larger danger here is not that we're not going to modernize our nuclear forces. We're going to do that. We're going to have a nuclear deterrent. The problem is when we become so conventionally weak and so detached from paying attention to foreign affairs in general, that country start testing us and taking stupid risks that then can lead to a nuclear confrontation. I think that's exactly what happened in Europe. And that's why Putin keeps throwing dice because he thinks we're just, he thinks we're AWOL from foreign affairs. And to some extent, I hate to say it, he's right. I mean, it does sound like what you're saying is that that makes the world a more dangerous place.

In some ways, the Cold War was very reassuring in a kind of horrible way. Because we understood our enemy, right? Right. We had this all gamed out. We thought we had achieved a very high level of stability. Basically, I think the Cold War was a situation which we said, the chance of Armageddon is tiny, infinitesimal. And if it happens, it'll be the end of the world.

but we've worked this out so well that it's not likely to happen. Now we're in a situation where we say, well, nobody's really going to try and blow up the whole world, but we could end up in a situation where nuclear weapons come into play because we just weren't paying attention or there was an accident or there's some unforeseen actor that enters the stage that we hadn't counted on. One of the things the Cold War was very good at was squeezing out the little guys off. the big stage, that the United States and the Soviet Union kind of kept order. For example, if the Cold War, not that I'm nostalgic for the Cold War, and no one ever should be,

but if the Cold War were still on it, there were still a Soviet Union, I'm pretty sure that North Korea would never have developed a nuclear weapon, because no one would have let them. Right, now it feels like it's all little guys. There are no adults on the playground anymore. Yeah. And there are no adults on a playground full of children with machine guns is a way to look at it. Yeah, that, unfortunately, it's a very convincing way to look at it. One last thing I wanted to ask you about what's going on in space, I mean, from a defense standpoint, you wrote about alternatives to nuclear weapons, including rods from God.

Oh, that wasn't me. That's one of my, that was one of my colleagues at the War College. Yeah. No, that's, you're on that paper. You were on that paper. Yeah, you'd have to ask, well, rods from God, the idea is that you, you station these big titanium or, you know, kryptonite rods in space,

I think it was, yeah, I, what did I say? Titanium. Yeah, so you take these incredibly durable rods and then you use kinetic energy to fire them at the ground and they hit the ground with a kinetic force that's equivalent to a nuclear weapon. But without the fallout? But without the fallout and all of those other things.

But of course, then you're moving a whole, whole arms race into space because what happens when the bad guys decide to blow up one of your satellites? Then now you're running around in the exosphere, you know, taking out each other's space assets, blinding each other, knocking down GPS. You're going to end up in a nuclear conflict doing those kinds of things one way or another. It doesn't solve your problem. We're moving towards that, though, aren't we? I mean, there is kind of a space arms race going on right now.

I think it's important to distinguish between the military uses of space, like weapons in space, and space militarization, which is using space for all kinds of military-related needs. The militarization of space has been around since the first time we, since the Russians popped a satellite into the year in 1957. But, yeah, I mean, I think there's a, you know, everybody, all sides that can get into space are thinking about how. to use space to their advantage. One of my colleagues wrote a book calling space as a strategic asset, and I think that's how they all see it. But I hope that doesn't happen. Well, thanks very much for joining us today. I mean, it's really been a fascinating conversation. And I don't think I'm going to be quite nostalgic for the Cold War, but I think you made me

as close as possible. I don't think anybody should be nostalgic for the Cold War. I don't think anybody should be nostalgic for the Cold War, but predictability is something human beings crave, and the Cold War had a lot of it, but it's just a more uncertain world. That's the price we pay for the end of that ideological struggle. Thank you for listening to This Week War College to this rerun. It's a bit of a blast from the past. War College is Matthew Gult and Jason Fields. This episode was produced back when we were at Reuters, and Bethelhabte produced it. We still miss her. You can follow us on Twitter at War underscore College or reach out to us on Facebook at

Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. Tom Nichols also has a pretty entertaining Twitter account. You can follow him at Radio Free Tom. We'll see you next week.