Angry Planet - No, the Trump transition isn’t endangering U.S. nukes. Here’s what to really worry about

Episode Date: January 18, 2017

On Jan. 9, 2017, Gizmodo ran a story titled “Trump Just Dismissed the People in Charge of Maintaining Our Nuclear Arsenal.” The article published claims from unnamed members of the National Nuclear Security Administration who said the incoming president had ordered them to clear out their desks before his inauguration. People on Twitter traded speculation about what an empty NNSA might mean for America’s nuclear security come Jan. 21. Within several hours, however, Gizmodo updated the story, changed the title (to “Trump Is Letting Go the People in Charge of Maintaining Our Nuclear Arsenal”) and issued a correction. The situation, it seemed, was not as dire as everyone suspected. During the first few hours after the stories publication, U.S. Naval War College professor and nuclear policy expert Tom Nichols took to Twitter to calm everyone down. He urged caution in the face of panic, reminded people that the NNSA wasn’t a very old agency, its role in nuclear security unclear and that transitions are always messy. But that doesn’t mean he’s not worried about the President-elect’s plans for America’s nuclear arsenal. This week on War College, we sit down with Tom Nichols to discuss the Gizmodo story, the NNSA and Trump’s nuclear ambitions. For Nichols, when it comes to Trump you never know until he takes action. When it comes to nukes, even minor actions can have dire consequences. by Matthew Gault edited and produced by Bethel HabteSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. The idea that if there isn't an administrator to replace the outgoing administrator in the next 10 days that somehow all of our news, nuclear weapons are going to be left by the street during, you know, fissionable material pickup day. It's simply not accurate.

You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols. He is the course director for security strategy and forces and an expert on national security and a jeopardy champion. He's long been a critic of American nuclear strategy, and he's here to talk to us today about President-elect Donald Trump's nuclear ambitions and what we should worry about and what we shouldn't worry about. All right, so I want to get started by talking about this Gizmodo story that has a lot of people freaking out.

It's titled, Trump just dismissed the people in charge of maintaining our nuclear arsenal and explains that the Trump transnational. and explains that the Trump transition team told the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration to clear out their desks. Tom, what's going on and should we be worried? Well, that story, at first, of course, Matthew, I should note that I only speak for myself here and I don't represent the Naval War College. That story I found pretty upsetting, not because anything in it was upsetting, but because I thought it was sensationalizing something that was pretty ordinary. Gizmodo, in the time since the story first appeared, Gizmodo last night. already published a correction, noting that no one actually said the words clear at your desk, that there's been no actual communication between the transition and the folks at an NSA and so on.

So in other words, they basically took what happens in every transition, which is that political appointees have to tender their resignations, and they built a story around it that said, oh my God, the nuclear stockpile will be unguarded or unverifiable or something when in fact that's not true. And in fact, it's important for listeners to remember that the National Nuclear Security Agency has only existed since 2000. So the story was full of things like, well, against precedent or tradition or in, you know, breaking with previous and so on.

Well, there's only ever been two administrations that have governed the NNSA to begin with. So this was really an attempt to kind of create a story out of, I think, a pretty ordinary transition story. And they've since corrected the story and the correction basically says that there was no story. Right, because transition is normally pretty, it's pretty much like this. The new boss comes in and a certain number of the bureaucracy tenders their resignation and steps aside, correct? Correct. And I think one thing that's happening aside from the fact that, you know, the president's elect ran a pretty incendiary campaign. And, He tweets a lot and butts heads with people as he singles them out. But regardless of this president-elect or any other, the fact is Americans haven't seen a real transition in eight years. And that's a long time.

I mean, if you're in your mid-20s, for example, you've really never seen one in your adult life. And even if you're 40-ish, you've only seen two in your adult life. And I think people forget that. They get, you know, they're used to the idea of continuity because we had two. back-to-back eight-year administrations. So transitions look worse than they are to people who haven't seen them in a long time. And I think that's part of the problem. And the Obama administration made use of many of the Bush administration's people, too, for the first couple years, right?

Yes. And ironically, the Obama administration was criticized for being too slow to replace them. There's a kind of Goldilocks problem here where if a new administration comes in and says we want to replace the previous appointees, that people say, well, you know, you're rushing into it and getting rid of all these people. Whereas if they keep them, people who supported the nominee say, well, you're not replacing them. You're not affecting the change we elected you to do. Replacing a federal bureaucracy is, again, where political appointees are concerned. It was a very large undertaking. And I think people have unrealistic. expectations of it in both directions because they don't happen that often. All right. To circle back to something else you mentioned, this agency or administration has only been around since 2000. What exactly do they do? Well, I think it's, I don't represent them, obviously, and I don't represent the government.

Their own mission statement, their website notes that they take military science apply to nuclear security, and I think they do a reasonably good job of that. They talk about things like the security of the stockpile. verifiability and how to make sure our weapons are adequately protected and work and a lot of other things that fall under the large umbrella of nuclear security. But the idea that if there isn't an administrator to replace the outgoing administrator in the next, you know, 10 days that somehow all of our nuclear weapons are going to be left by the street during, you know, fissionable material pickup day. It's simply not accurate because the,

the work of that agency will continue. As other folks have pointed out, a lot of the things that NNSA does need advocacy in Congress. And if they don't have a director, then obviously they would have less of an effective advocate in Congress. But that's not what the story was about. And so we have to keep those things separate. All right. So I want to switch gears then a little bit. The last time you were on the podcast, you were very critical of American nuclear strategy,

or as I think you said, the complete lack of nuclear strategy. Has that changed since the last time we talked? And what do you see the president-elect doing? I don't think anything's changed. And I think we're doing things the way that we've done them since the end of the Cold War, which is that we continue on with a kind of mini-mean of our Cold War strategy, which is that we have a triad, we have a certain amount of the nuclear force ready-to-go status, but smaller.

and in fewer numbers, but still basically doing what we think worked before. And I think there's reason for that. I mean, the Cold War was a successful, I think a successful exercise in nuclear deterrence. But I don't think that's where we live in now. But I think that the deterrent and the way we think about the deterrent has proceeded on autopilot. And I can't quite get my arms around what the president-elect wants to do with the nuclear force. I think a lot of the people that are coming in with him believe that we have to have a more robust, a bigger nuclear deterrent, or at the very least, a newer nuclear deterrent. But I'm not

sure what more we can do now that President Obama has signed off on a 30-year trillion-dollar modernization. I mean, at some point, I'm not sure what you add to that. I think that probably, and I'm guessing here with my own personal opinion, that could mean that programs that Congress and the previous White House want to hold up like a long-range standoff missile, a new nuclear cruise missile, those programs may get a more sympathetic hearing now. But it's hard to tell because on the other hand, just to finish that, but the president-elect has also made it very clear that he, you know, doesn't like bloated costs and expensive projects like the F-35 and Air Force One thinks he's tweeted about it.

So there's, who knows which one of these will find a more sympathetic hearing. Who are the people that he's bringing in that are pro bolstering our nukes? I don't know. I am only guessing from the kind of articles that have been written by conservatives who have supported the president's campaign. Of course, there were a lot of folks who supported the president-elect's campaign as a default setting against Hillary Clinton. With that said, I don't have any specific idea of who's handling nuclear policy or who's going to be handling nuclear policy. I'm extrapolating from folks, for example, at Heritage and other conservative organizations that have argued for a larger and more modern nuclear force who seem to be more

in tune with the president-elect. But as to individual folks on the transition, I just don't know who they are more handling those issues. If we could circle back again, what were those two weapons systems that you just mentioned, the long range? Yeah, the long range stand off, a new generation of a nuclear cruise missile, which would be used to, well, I argue, and I wrote a piece on this about a year ago in the national interest, that to me, a long-range nuclear cruise missile is a nuclear war-fighting weapon rather than a deterrent. Now, within the nuclear community, I think, in the nuclear strategy community, you get folks who argue that a nuclear war-fighting weapon is a deterrent because it shows a willingness to use a weapon that you're

actually keeping around for a deterrent purpose. But that's one of them. So this long-range cruise missile that would go in ahead of bombers and suppress air defenses or take out other targets that are closer to the edge of a country's borders. Why do you feel that that's more aggressive and more of a warfighting capability than a deterrent? Because it, Tim, and again, my own view is that it's predicated on a series of nuclear strikes that paved the way for another series of nuclear strikes. Nuclear cruise missiles themselves aren't really a standalone deterrent.

And you can't, they're not, you're not gonna launch them from the United States as a threat to China or Russia or whoever you're trying to get to deter. So anything that looks at nuclear exchanges as a protracted, iterated process, something I'm not comfortable with. And that was the, got the core of my book.

It sounds a lot like some early cold war rhetoric, some Vietnam era talk from people like Curtis LeMay, right? These are the kinds of things that he was advocating. I don't think that's fair. I mean, I think that even the people I disagree with on nuclear strategy have a much more nuanced than I, and I would even say in some ways more elegant view than that. I mean, this is not a bomb them back to the Stone Age. If I were going to try to represent their views as fairly as I can, I think what they would say is having weapons that are usable, that have an actual mission that are part of an escalatory ladder shows a seriousness of intent that it actually provides a deterrent in and of itself because they're not just big bombs

sitting in silos waiting to kill billions of people that the enemy knows you'll never do. This was part of the problem if you leap back even before LeMay and Vietnam. This was the problem with our strategy of massive retaliation where we said we don't really have a lot of other kinds of nuclear weapons. We don't have a lot of conventional weapons. If you communists do something bad, we'll pick a time and a place of our choosing and we'll drop a big nuclear bomb on your head. And for understandable reasons, that just wasn't a credible strategy. It was all we had. I always tell my students, that wasn't a strategy so much as it was an act of desperation. This is part of a strategy of deterrence, not what I accept, but when I understand

that says, look, you have to be able, and let me just back up for a minute, say it was a strategy we used during the Cold War when I did think it was actually a very sensible strategy. I just don't think it is now where we said, look, here's our whole nuclear war plan. This is how it would unfold. This is how we would end up walking from a small war that maybe nobody wanted all the way to a strategic nuclear exchange. And it might be in a way that we didn't want, but that we can show you is actually a very rational progression that doesn't require a madman. And it doesn't require a mistake. it'll be a series of ratchets like on a wrench that will keep turning and turning and turning

unless you stop what you're doing. So in fairness to, again, in fairness to people who advocate these systems, I think they're coming from a very intelligent, very elegant theory of deterrence, but it's not one that I think is actually very, doesn't correspond well to how actual human beings and decision makers will act in these circumstances. Do you think it makes it too easy? Yes. When I was writing the book, one of my friends since retired, he was an Air Force officer, and we used to argue out some of these concepts.

He said, he finally exploded at your release. You know, you're trying to take options away from the president. And I said, yes, you're right. I was kind of like Jack Nicholson in a few good men. I said, you're damn right. I am. Because I didn't want, and I don't want there to be a lot of nuclear options that look usable and easy. And I think we tend to be too casual about that.

And I think that was part of the problem during the Cold War, is that we got too comfortable with these weapons and too comfortable with the idea of using them. And I think we got over that, and I'm worried that we're heading back to it again, that we talk about nuclear weapons and people kind of shrug and they say, well, you know, use a nuclear weapon,

what's the big deal? They're usable, they're just another weapon. And I'm very worried about what I think some folks have rightly called the conventionalization of nuclear force. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, it's treating nuclear weapons as though they're just big conventional weapons to say, well, you know, we don't have to drop a weapon on Beijing or St. Petersburg that's going to kill a billion people all at once, that we have little tiny nuclear weapons and they're really

useful because they can do things that other weapons can't. And they're sort of like, you know, they're bigger than a hand grenade, but they're smaller than the end of the world. And I think that is an unhealthy way to look at them. I always liked Henry Kissinger's comment many years ago that there's a kind of virginity to nuclear weapons that's going to be lost if they're ever used again after Hiroshima. They haven't been used in combat. It was a terrible thing. And from then on, there's been a, depending on who you want to ask about this, there's either been a taboo or a tradition or a general allergy to ever thinking about using nuclear weapons. And I don't think that we ought to lose that.

I don't think that we ought to get over that because I think then it makes smaller uses of such weapons thinkable and then things get out of control very quickly. I think we overestimate that the other part of this conventionalization problem is that we overestimate just how much control we'll have over nuclear exchange because we have a great deal of control over how we use conventional force. And I don't think that's going to apply when you get to using nuclear weapons. weapons. All right. Let me bring this back around to current politics. I'm going to read you some

quotes. You may know where I'm going. So the first one is from Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is just before Christmas. Moscow must strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems. And then there was some, you know, there's been some back and forth in the press between him and Trump. Trump later tweeted, the United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such a time as the world comes to see its senses regarding nukes. You know, the press kind of went after him for this, and they said that he was perhaps calling for a new nuclear arms race, and he said, well, let it be an arms race.

We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all. What do you think of this rhetoric? Well, let's take them separately first. I think Vladimir Putin sounds like any other Kremlin politicians circa 1980. He is a throwback to the Soviet era, and whether we like that or not, and President Obama and Secretary Kerry say, well, you know, it's a 19th century guy in the 21st century. Well, that may be true, but he's the guy we have to deal with. And I find it deeply unhealthy. I think we found out after the Cold War that a lot of Soviet senior military officers had a lot of anxiety about nuclear weapons, just as we did.

And I found that a really reassuring thing to find out. I think to some extent, this is just Putin using the kind of rhetoric that Soviet leaders used to use because he doesn't know anything, doesn't know how to do anything else. That's the he is a product of that system, and he talks like one. The bit he adds about, well, we have to evade any missile defense. The Russians for a while we're pushing this idea that they have a warhead that can, at the last minute, out maneuver missile defenses and do all kinds of crazy, magical things. The fact of the matter is, I don't think the Russians are that worried about missile defenses because they know we don't have them other than the limited system we're trying to field

smaller threats. And the way that a country like Russia or China defeats a missile. defense system is just to add more warheads. They don't need special, stealthy, maneuverable, jinking warheads, although Putin has claimed that they're developing them. With the President Alex tweet, once again, and I've said this in other venues, it's difficult to know what he meant, because we're all trying to extract a nuclear policy out of 140 characters. The second part where he says, let it be in arms race, that was one report that he had said that to somebody, and I'm going to leave that one aside because I've never seen that corroborated. If it were true that he said,

let it be an arms race, I think that's unwise because arms races are, they're expensive, and especially in a post-Cold War environment, they're unnecessary. But as for his first part, there's not much there to form a policy out of them to say, well, you know, we should have nuclear weapons until the world comes to its senses. You could almost have rewritten that and stuck it into President Obama's 2010 nuclear posture review, and nobody would have noticed. I think the problem is that the President-elect tweets these things, and he already has a reputation as a flame-point personality, and so people read a lot more into it. This is one case where whatever my other concerns about future American policy, I'm trying not to read too much into one tweet about this. I think Putin is talking

like a Soviet era leader, and I think President-elect Trump is talking in generalities that don't yet have a policy behind them. So that's my personal read on it. And on his tweet, I also think it's important to note that, as you said earlier, we've already have a trillion dollar, you know, package over the next however many years to bolster the nuclear program in America already. Right. It's not too far out of field that that could be what he's referring to. But again, you're right, we're just extrapolating from 140 characters. And the other point about that, I mean, I think a lot of these tweets and hints, you're right, had that modernization program been turned down, for example, had that not had the president, current President Obama, just dug in his heels

and said, look, I'm not doing this. I think from there you could extrapolate out and say, well, okay, clearly, you know, President-elect Trump means he's going to, you know, revisit that and back up. But that policy is already in the pipeline. So I think, you know, I guess we're in heated agreement here that we're all trying to kind of read the tea leaves out of a single tweet. That's probably not a good idea to read too much into that until there's actually a policy coming out of the White House. All right. Let me ask you a series of Cold War-related questions because we keep bringing it up. What is different about the current era and the Cold War that the old Cold War strategies for nuclear deterrence don't work?

What made them work back then and why don't they work now? Well, the stakes were high enough during the Cold War that the extreme threats that we made, each other with nuclear weapons were actually more credible. We had two global socioeconomic systems that were basically contesting their mastery over the world. And whoever lost, there was not going to be any prize for second place. Whoever lost was going to be eradicated in one way or another. Certainly their social political system was going to be eliminated. And both sides felt that their entire existence as countries were at stake. So when an American president or a Soviet leader could say, look, don't push us so too far toward, you know,

whatever this problem is because we would rely on our nuclear deterrent. You could understand why those strategies have been developed because each side felt that if they didn't fall back on that, they would literally be eliminated from the face of the Earth. There are very few things. I mean, again, I'll raise people like Henry Kissinger or Bill Perry here to say, if you're thinking of this as a strategist, how do you compare that to today? What is the existential moment where the president of the United States, or for that matter, the president of Russia or the president of China says, I now have to allow the use of nuclear weapons because my national survival is so at stake that this is actually a strategic choice. I think you have a much harder time getting to that

explanation or getting to that outcome. I'm concerned that, and I think a big part of my fear, and I think you see this in the writings again, of people like William Perry, is not that we're going to get to that point now by a conscious decision. We're going to get to that point now by a series of mistakes and bluffs and foolish moves that then put us into a corner that somebody on either side or both can't get out of and don't know how to get out of. Whereas during the Cold War, that mutual assured destruction strategy, you could at least underpin it by saying, look, we don't want to do this, but if the only alternative is our eradication as a political system and maybe even as a people from the face of the earth, then, yeah, we're going to rely on these nuclear

weapons. And I think that that added a kind of desperation and credibility to it that is much harder to make the case for today. I've said for years that an honest cold warrior test would be that once the Cold War is over, could we, could we the Cold Warriors mobilize to reduce those numbers of nuclear weapons? And I think every president since Ronald Reagan, including Ronald Reagan, has left office with fewer nuclear weapons that I came in with. And I think we've passed that test pretty well. And I hope we continue to. So interestingly, then, if I'm hearing you correctly, part of why we didn't die during the Cold War or one civilization wasn't wiped off the face of the earth is because of the terror, because we were all so afraid. Absolutely. And also because each side

understood that all the marbles were at stake, that we each side believed that the other would use nuclear weapons because they knew that to lose World War III was to lose their existence as a system, as a people. I'm a little concerned that now people talk about using nuclear weapons for far less drastic things as almost again, this conventionalizing like, well, you know, if there's a problem in North Korea, we'll just use nuclear weapons. I had a debate with somebody a few years ago where my opponent suggested, in this debate, suggested taking all of our troops out of South Korea. And I said, well, okay, but we have alliance commitments and we don't want to see South Korea attacked by, you know, North Korea. And the answer was, well, nuclear weapons. And I think that's irresponsible. I think

even during the Cold War, we didn't think that way. And I think now, you know, to say, well, we just start using nuclear weapons because we have them. I think that's something of a crutch. Whereas during the Cold War, we had an opponent who stated objective was our elimination as a system from the planet. And that created a certain amount of credibility all around, if that makes any sense. The stakes were high enough to actually talk about the reality of nuclear deterrence. Do you remember when you started hearing that argument? How new is that kind of, is that line of thinking? Well, it's not new. And it goes back to the 1970s and the search for limited nuclear objectives and limited nuclear war scenarios.

But again, even then, the search for limited scenarios was part of deterrence. It was part of a way to say to the Soviet Union, look, we're willing to fight out these small nuclear wars with you because that could be the uncertainty that tips us to our large nuclear wars. so don't start anything. I think the much more casual talk about using nuclear weapons began shortly after the end of the Cold War when we wanted to draw down our other forces and we wanted to have something to fall back on to try to realize this illusory peace dividend and to say, well, you know, we can cut down our commitments because we have a nuclear deterrent. And we don't have to have as many troops in, you know, this region because we have a nuclear deterrent. And we don't have to have as many tanks here because we have a nuclear deterrent. My colleague and friend, Bridge Colby, likes to say, who I differ with him very strongly in the issue of nuclear

weapons. But he said, you know, it's true that nuclear doves tend to be conventional hawks for exactly that reason that we, you know, we're not trying to, I'm always concerned about people trying to fill the gap where there should be conventional force with some kind of nuclear crutch that says, oh, don't worry about it, that we don't have enough people or enough ships or enough tanks. We always of different weapons. And I think that started in earnest in the mid-1990s. All right, I want to ask you, I'll ask you one last question, then I'm going to let you go. And thank you so much for joining us, by the way. Thank you for having me. And once again, a reminder that I am here only representing my

out views. Right. If you could impart one lesson, because the cold, as the Cold War is over, the Cold Warriors, I'm sorry to say, we're beginning to lose them. If you could impart one lesson on the next generation about nukes, what would it be? That's a great question, and it is true. We are losing the old Cold War nuclear strategists. We're not minting them anymore. Admiral Mullen said that almost 10 years ago that we don't have those specialists anymore. We need them.

My admonition to a new generation nuclear strategist has always remember the remarkable and awe-inspiring power of the thing you're dealing with. Bernard Brody once said that there are only two facts about nuclear weapons that we need to remember. One is that they exist and two is that they are remarkably destructive. And I think what I would want to impart to a next generation of nuclear strategist is never underestimate the seriousness and the world-changing nature of the kind of weapon you're dealing with. It's not just another weapon. It's not just another tool in the toolkit. It's something unique and something that,

whether it sounds overly dramatic or not to say that it's nonetheless true that it has the ability to end most life on earth in 30 or 40 minutes. And I think we should never forget that when we're dealing with these weapons and how to use them. Tom Nichols, the U.S. Naval War College, but speaking only for himself, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. It's hosted by Matthew Galt, and produced by Bethelhabte. That's me. Please subscribe to War College on iTunes, and leave us a rating and review there. It very much helps other people find the show.

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