Angry Planet - Reagan's Failed Attempt to Put Lasers in Space

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan stood before the American public and promised to put lasers in space. The Strategic Defense Initiative was meant to be the ultimate bulwark against communist intercontinental ballistic missile. It didn’t work.Deriseively called Star Wars, the system never worked. To this day, methods for shooting an ICBM out of the sky are shoddy at best and fantasy at worst. Joining us today is Joe Cirincione. In his own words on his substack at joecirincione.substack.com. He is a national security expert and author with 40 years of experience on these issues in Washington, D.C. and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held a number of prestigious roles in the nation’s capitol.To see the clip of science fiction authors Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven talking about meeting with Reagan and “winnninng the Cold War with Star Wars” go here:https://youtu.be/i-lSr2ud8NcAngry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.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. People live in a world and their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I am Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galtz. Bill Murray said it best. nearly 50 years ago when he sang the words, Star Wars, those near and far wars, and so on. Are you not going to do it in tune?

You're not going to do the voice? I don't think you actually want to hear that. I don't think anybody wants to hear that. I don't. Star Wars. Those near and far wars. Yeah. There we go.

Okay. Thank you. All right. Perfect. So, but we're here today to talk about different Star Wars, one that got more than its nickname, though, from the movies. In 1983, Ronald Reagan stood up to propose a space-based, maybe laser-ish, anti-ballistic missile system. Well, it's been 40 years. So where are those laser satellites? Joining us today is Joe Serencioni. He has his own laser satellite. No, probably not. In his own words, on his substack, the substack, by the way, is Joe Serencioni at Subtion.

Sustack.com, and we will have a link to that in the show notes. He is a national security expert and author with 40 years of experience on these issues in Washington, D.C. He's a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and has held a number of prestigious roles in the nation's capital. So thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, Jason. Thanks for having me on. We would really like to start at the beginning when we do these shows. because we know that not everybody is 50 years old, like myself.

You know, so what was Reagan Star Wars speech about? Why did he do it then? Was there a particularly grave threat that week? Well, as you remember, in the beginning of the 1980s, there was an intense U.S. Russian, U.S. Soviet arms race underway. And people were genuinely afraid that the, that the conflict between the United States and Soviet Union could lead to a thermonuclear war. There was massive demonstrations in the streets.

One of the largest demonstrations ever held in the United States was in 1982 at Central Park, where almost a million people turned out to protest the U.S. and Soviet behavior. And Reagan was elected on a peace through strength program. So he came in and he started pumping money into the nuclear programs, which he said had fallen dangerously behind the Soviet programs. This wasn't true, but that was his belief and that was his program. So billions of dollars were now going into new missiles, new bombers, new submarines. And all of this set of a certain panic in the general public, public, both here and in Europe. And in some ways, this was more of a political than a military speech. He was trying to calm the fears and to present an idea that some scientists had been kicking around for years, which is that you could construct a global system that would protect the United States from long-range ballistic missiles.

that no matter how many warheads the Soviets fired at us, and remember they had thousands of missiles at that point that could fire tens of thousands of warheads, nuclear warheads at the United States, that you could build a system that could effectively render, as Reagan said, render those nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. And that's the vision he presented to the American public on March 23rd in 1983. He stunned even his closest advisors who didn't know. that he was going to do this as a rather closely held speech. And he stunned the military leaders

who were in charge of these programs, particularly the laser programs that Reagan thought would be the answer. And they had been on Capitol Hill that very day briefing members of the House and Senate about the progress which they were encouraged by, but said we're a long way from being able to turn these into effective weapons. That night, their boss goes on TV and presents it as a very real near-term prospect. It was a kind of fantasy he was selling, right? Like, I believe that they had even at some point in the Reagan administration brought in science fiction authors to describe for them weapons they thought would,

I'm literally trying to source this as we talk, but I know I remember seeing these guys talk about it. Well, they didn't need science fiction writers because they had scientists who were telling him this. I mean, a big reason why Reagan made that speech was that he had been briefed by Dr. Edward Teller, who's famous for being the father of the hydrogen bomb. He was part of the Manhattan Project, and he thought the atomic bomb was too small, that we really needed a fusion bomb, the hydrogen bomb, which he then went on to create at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Teller told the president that he had in his lab a proof of principle of a desk-sized weapon, a desk-sized laser that could be launched into space, and each one of these laser satellites would be able to destroy hundreds of Soviet warheads as they streaked over the pole. I don't think he told Reagan that it was powered by an atomic bomb, but, He discovered that later.

But the idea behind this, what they call the X-ray laser, the Excalibur laser, was that they would harness the power of an atomic bomb through hundreds of microfibers, little glass rods that would channel the energy of the explosion at the incoming warheads right before they themselves were destroyed, and this focused energy would eliminate the incoming warheads. Reagan believed that. It was a lie. It was a complete fantasy. So you didn't need science fiction writers to make these things up. Scientists themselves were making this things up. Despite billions of dollars of investment in that particular program, there was never a proof of concept. It was never going to happen. It was wildly beyond our technological capability

then, as it is now. But Reagan bought it, and that was the vision he sold the American public. and that's when you started to see these cartoons of all these laser weapons in space, zap, zap, zap, zapping, you know, warheads off. And that's why this program was quickly dubbed Star Wars, because that was the movie that was then out that was popular in capturing the public imagination orienting us all towards space fantasies. This was seen as a space fantasy. It was Larry Niven, who's best known for Ringworld,

and he was on the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which was one of these people that was kind of messed up in the SDI stuff at the beginning. Obviously not like a prime mover, but I think it's, I always think it's interesting that he was there. I loved the Ringworld series. I'm a big Larry Niven fan. I did not know that he was involved in Star Wars. I'm sorry to hear that. He's talked about it publicly too.

I'll dig up the interview and put it in the show notes for people. That's great. I also recommend him. Moten God's Eye, which you wrote with Jerry Pornel as well. Yeah. But that aside, how was the speech received? Did anybody think this was a good idea at the time? Oh, some people did.

Oh, absolutely. I'll tell you, so there's two reactions to it. And one was sort of the public at large and the journalistic world. And this is this speech put Reagan on the cover of Time magazine with a very fanciful space cover. featuring Star Wars. You know, they branded it Star Wars there. And for a big part of the scientific community and the general public, this was nonsense. This was a sales pitch. And that was, by the way, correct. And that was a correct reaction to it. But there was a hardcore of defense advocates and scientists like Teller who believed this vision. Richard Pearl was in an assistant secretary

of Defense. He was a big, in the Reagan administration, he was a big proponent of this vision. And there had been a group, I was just getting started in national security at the time. I was a graduate student at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. And during that winter of 82, 83, I had trekked down in a snowstorm to hear Daniel O. Graham, Daniel O. Graham, who was a retired General who was selling something called High Frontier, and he believed that this missile defense system would work, and that the problem was we've been focusing on ground-based defenses. So we had, or had tried to develop a missile defense system in the 1960s and 70s. It was called the Sentinel or Safeguard System, and we had 100 interceptors ringing our ICBM bases in the Dakotas,

in North Dakota, and the idea was you would use these ground-based missiles to shoot up into the air at the incoming Russian or Soviet attack, and they would detonate a nuclear bomb in the atmosphere. And the nuclear bomb would put out so much heat and radiation that it would destroy the warheads before they get hit the ground. Now, that was clearly, even as I described this, a less than ideal defensive system because you're detonating dozens of nuclear weapons over the your own territory in order to protect a few of your ICBMs. And Daniel Graham was brilliant. I know, but this is the system we deployed. We deployed this at the end of the 1960s. I didn't know. We actually had this for a while. It was actually so stupid that we shut it down

after about a year. The Army said it wasn't worth maintaining. But the Russians kept theirs going. So they had 100 nuclear-tipped interceptors stationed around Moscow. In fact, I think they still do. It's a little unclear whether there's still nuclear tipped, but I believe they still have that system. So Graham had a correct critique. He said there's no way a ground-based defense system can be effective. There's too many ways to overcome it, to defeat it, to overwhelm it. And what you really need is to have your weapons based in space. And because of the progress we're now making in the 60s and 70s, we could do this by the 1990s. If we started now, we could put these weapons up in space. And he too believed the lasers, will be the answer, a speed of light weapon, you know, could you zap this, you missed,

that's okay, you could recalculate and quickly have another, a second, third, fourth chance to hit with the lasers. And he was, he was preaching this gospel. I got to tell you, when he briefed this at the Center for Strategic International Studies, CSIS, where I was then a research assistant, after he left, everybody just shook their heads. They thought this guy was loony tunes. but he too got the ear of President Reagan. He too started to convince Richard Pearl this was possible. So there was this group that thought this was the answer and this would be the way that we could go. And more than that, it would sort of justify the expenditure that we were making on offensive nuclear weapons because our goal, remember, was to make these impotent obsolete and we could do both at the same time,

defensive systems, offensive systems, and this would win the nuclear arms. race force. And that actually worked. A couple years later, that is in 1985, I was on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee, and I was assigned oversight responsibilities for these programs. So I then spent, well, all my 10 years in Congress as a congressional investigator doing oversight into these programs. I was at all the briefings. I got a top secret code word clearance. I went to the places. I went to the labs. I went to the defense contractors. I got to tell you, not one of these schemes worked. Not one of them. And there were dozens of proposals. They would get funded. They would get built. They would get tested. They would fail. And then another one would say, well, forget that. We have another one for you. And it was like making sausages. There was one system after another coming out. There was the directed energy weapon. There was the particle beam weapon. There was brilliant pebbles. There was kinetic kill.

vehicles. One after the other, they would come out. None of them worked. We spent, well, as it turns out, if you go and count everything, how much we spent from Ronald Reagan's speech to now, it's $380 billion in current dollars. $380 billion was spent on missile defense programs, mostly on the long-range intercept programs. None of these things have ever worked, but we're still funding it at about $10 billion a year. I'm glad you. I'm just going to say, you know, $350 billion. I mean, that's almost like a stealth fighter.

Maybe two stealth fighters. What do we think? Our B-21 bombers are probably going by $2 billion a pop now. A submarine, ballistic missile submarine, it's about $2 to $5 billion for a sub. So that gives you some range. An aircraft carrier costs about $8 billion. So that gives you some range of what we're talking about, the money that we've wasted on these programs when we could have been building other things.

So I'm glad you said till now. We're sitting here in the year 2023. And ICBMs are still this big part of the nuclear triad. And we are still trying to get around the fact that it turns out that it's incredibly hard. to shoot one of these out of the air. Right. We've got this kind of fantasy that we can once the, or we would like to believe a fantasy that once the nukes are launched,

and like the system that we've kind of set up begins working as intended, that we could fire our way out of it somehow, that we could not suffer the repercussions of these missiles coming down. Why is it so hard to shoot an ICBM out of the sky? Right. So whenever I talk about missile defense, people say, well, what are you talking about? Missile defense works. Look at Iron Dome in Israel. Or look at what the Ukrainians are doing now. They're shooting missiles out of it. And that's right. They are.

Because one of the things that does work is missile defenses against short-range threats, against scuds, which we became familiar with in the 1991 Gulf War, against these short-range rockets, ballistic missiles that will go. hundreds of miles. And they're very large systems, and they usually land. The warhead remains attached to the fuselage, so it's a big target. And we say that these targets are slow, fat, and hot, because they're burning. You know, you can see them. You can track them fairly easily, and they're all within the atmosphere. And it turns out you can, and after decades of effort and billions of dollars, we have perfected some very good short-range systems like the Patriot, which I investigated in the 1991 Gulf War, where it didn't work, by the way. It shot down, perhaps, somewhere between zero and four of the 44 Scuds that tried to engage.

But people thought it worked. And that actually also propelled the SDI program, because if you could do it here, well, surely we could do it there. Same thing. But the big difference is now when you're trying to do a lot, the Patriot system has since been perfected and works pretty well in tests, the THAAD system, we have an Aegis system that we put on our Navy ships, cruisers, and destroyers that works very well, as a matter of fact. So you can do this. You can hit a bullet with a bullet over short ranges. But when you go to long ranges, so ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles that travel thousands of miles, these things are coming in at, you know, Mach 7, mock five to five, seven, they're going coming, they're traveling very, very fast. I'm sorry,

they start traveling somewhere between five or seven times. The speed is sound. Might one say that they are traveling at hypersonic speeds? They are. All ICBMs are hypersonic. And they're reentering the atmosphere at something like five to seven kilometers per second. So the per second, right? So these things are fast. They're small. They're just the warhead. There's no fuselage. And they're cold in space. So this is extremely difficult to target. And that is the main problem that has never been solved. They call it the discrimination problem.

Can you see it? Can you see it? It's extremely hard. Well, over the years, we've developed sensors that, in fact, can pick it out. And we've developed some technologies under perfect conditions. We can launch a ground-based rocket that can hit it about 50% of the time. The current system we have, which is about 44 ground-based interceptors in the frozen tundra of Alaska and part of California, under ideal conditions, it works about 50% of the time. But here's the catch. That's, in order to hit them, you need to have a target that's cooperating with you.

That is the target that is about what you expect it to be, that is coming in at a fairly known velocity and known direction. the test is set up so you know you know what's happening you know the exact point this thing's going to be at the exact time it's almost like two missiles hitting each other in these tests because it's so carefully scripted if you try to do a test and they did this once where you also put up with the warhead decoys balloons that look to the radar identical to the warhead they suggest like my lard birthday balloons. Nothing particularly fancy. Because in outer space, not only can know when hear you scream, there's no air. There's no friction. So the balloon is traveling at the same speed as the warhead. It looks identical to the warhead to your radar. And you can rig it so it looks identical to infrared sensors. You could put a little, you put a little filament in there to heat it up a little bit, make it look the identical signature. You can put your warhead inside a balloon. You could be looking at 10 balloons and you don't know which one has the warhead. There's all

kinds of things you could do. When you do that, and we've conducted one test where there's a warhead and a couple of decoys, couldn't pick it out, couldn't see it. And so that means that all these ground-based systems that are trying to find the, find the warhead and hit it, can't find it, therefore they can't hit it. And that's just the beginning of your problems, not to mention if an enemy is going to attack you, one of the first things they'll do is take out your radars on the ground. So before they launch their ICBMs, they're going to go after your defenses. In the business you call this suppressing the enemy's air defenses, that's what you do. And, of course, there's jamming of this, there's sabotage, there's all kinds of things you can do to kill the system,

which is why 40 years after Reagan and $380 billion, we are no closer to an effective national missile defense system, than the night he gave that speech. Those are serious technological problems and no amount of vision or political will or a persuasive storytelling is going to overcome hard facts. Why do we keep chasing it then? Well, for one thing, you make money.

People make money selling missile defense systems like all weapon systems, and there's a pitch there. And there is an ideological belief As Sam Nunn says, the Star Wars program is much more about theology than it is science. There's a belief that there's got to be a way to do this, that the American will can do this and that people who don't want to do it are defeatists. And so people are critical of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who in 1972, negotiated the first treaty limiting nuclear arms. offensive arms, the Salt Treaty, Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. But in order to do that,

they also negotiated the Anti-Bilistic Missile Treaty, which limited defensive weapons, which is why we only deployed one limited system of 100 interceptors, and the same with Russia, because they recognized that there was an internal logic to defensive and offensive arms. If your opponent was building up a defensive system, you had to assume it was going to. to work and therefore you had to build more offensive arms to overwhelm it, which is, by the way, the easiest countermeasure. You have 100 interceptors. We will target you with 160 warheads, which, by the way, is what we did. As part of my investigations, one of the things I did was got to talk to the heads of us to teach you command, and they said they were never worried about

Moscow's defensive system. They would just overwhelm it because nuclear warheads are comparatively cheap the kinds of things you have to build for a defensive system. So Rich Nixon and Kisinger recognize this that in order to main same stability in the arms race, in order to freeze the arms race and then then get paved the way for reductions, you had to limit not just offensive but defensive arms. That was a heresy for some conservative defense proponents who believed that America had a technological advantage. We were tying our hand behind our back, that what we had to do was just, you know, crush the Russians with our technological advantage. And to this day, many people believe that the internal collapse of the Soviet Union that eventually brought it down in 89 to 91 was

caused by the realization that the Soviets could not out-compete us. And some people still give Star Wars credit for bringing about the end of the Cold War. This again is a complete fantasy, and we know this from Gorbachev himself. We know this from internal documents. SDI was never a significant economic or technological factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. But ironically, some of this work did pave the way, because as this thing didn't work in 84, 85, 86, 87. Ronald Reagan shifted gears. And he maintained his vision that he wanted to make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete, but he decided the way to do that was to negotiate directly with Gorbachev and just eliminate the weapons. And he tried to do that at the summit in Reykjavik, you may remember. And it couldn't quite seal the deal, in part because of Star Wars. Gorbachev wanted him to limit the Star Wars program to just research for 10 years. Reagan didn't want to. do that because he still believed it could work. Turns out both of them were wrong. Either one of them could have given in on this point. It never worked. It wouldn't have mattered. But because of that,

they couldn't make a deal to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But they did achieve a deal to eliminate the thousands of missiles based in Europe. And then later, Reagan achieved the start treaty. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the first treaty to actually cut nuclear weapons and he cut him by 50 percent. George H.W. Bush cut him by 50 percent more. George W. Bush cut him by 50 percent more. And it's those negotiations that have reduced the nuclear threat. We now have just a fraction of the nuclear weapons we had during the Cold War, still about 12,000 total in the world, but that's down from about 70,000 that we had in the 1980s. Star Wars, did they play, it never played a direct role in that. But I think at some ways gave Ronald Reagan some of the confidence he felt he needed

the insurance policy he thought he needed to go to reductions and walk down that path. So that's the legacy of Star Wars, honestly, is that in some ways it helped encourage Reagan to negotiate and reduce these weapons. It never was an answer in itself. You're listening to Angry Planet. We'll be right back. And we're back with more of your favorite show, Angry Planet. I always wondered if you did come up with anything, which it sounds like we're never going to come up with an actual system. But if one did, why not just give it to everybody? And then that's the end of the threat. Well, this is actually, was Reagan's view.

He said that. You know, everybody should have these are defensive weapons. You know, you can't use, despite what Marjorie Taylor Green thinks, you can't. You can't use space-based lasers to actually target Earth targets. I mean, once the laser goes into the atmosphere, it disperses. It just doesn't work, you know. So the laser only works in space. And in the existing program that we currently have, we still have a national missile defense program.

It's still trying to develop these ground-based interceptors that they hope will work. They won't. But if they're also looking towards lasers, and we are making progress on lasers. They're more powerful. They're smaller. They use less energy to do. But the idea that you're going to build a constellation of these things and be able to launch them in space and maintain them for years and years and years and that they're going to work the first and only time you might need it to work, that still remains a fantasy. But that's where the research still is.

Is it possible sometimes, say, the end of the century, we would have a laser that we might? it might work, but that means you need a research program. You don't need a program that's rushing to develop this thing, a weaponizer. You can't think that it's going to solve your problem anytime in your lifetime. This is what's not going to happen. And that's why the emphasis still has to be on reducing and eliminating these weapons, not trying to build, as Reagan said, a system that would defend the nation from nuclear missiles the way a roof protects a family from rain. That is simply not going to happen. There is no magic solution here.

As long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, they will be able to threaten us and we will be able to threaten other countries. Looking around in its 2023, it feels like there was a long, there was a lot of progress. towards denuclearization over the past 20, 30 years, that it feels like we're in a bad place at the moment or trending in a bad direction. You know, Trump obviously had a lot of super fun things. T's pulling out of New Start. Eventually Putin pulls out of New Start,

announced over the weekend that they're going to be moving strategic nuclear or strategic nuclear weapons into Belarus. You know, how do you feel now? Now, how do we stop this continuing? Can we stop this from continuing? Well, Matt, your instincts are correct. That feeling is accurate.

I would say all the arrows are pointing in the wrong direction. So it's hard to predict what's going to happen, but you can go take a look. The last nuclear reduction treaty was the new START treaty that was negotiated in 2010 when entered into force shortly thereafter. There's been no follow-on treaty. When President Obama envisioned this, he thought this was just a stopgap measure when we'd go on to a serious treaty that would make deep reductions. It didn't happen. So there's no talk about having a new treaty. Every single nuclear armed nation, there are nine countries in the world with nuclear weapons from Russia all the way down to North Korea, all of them are developing new systems. Some are just

replacements for aging systems. Some are brand new capabilities. China, for example, is increasing its deployed nuclear weapons. It's got about 450 of them deployed. We have about 2,000 deployed. Russia has about 2,000 deployed. The Ukrainian war has elevated. the risks of these in a way that we haven't seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis or perhaps the early 1980s, you know. I think it's right to take Putin's threats seriously. He keeps threatening to use nuclear weapons if he's losing the war. I don't think he will. I don't think there's a winning scenario for him. There's no way that you could use nuclear weapons and it will end the war. Almost certainly it would provoke a global reaction against you that could take economic

form in the form of sanctions that would bring Russia to a grinding halt. No ships, planes, or trains would leave or enter Russia. There'd be a diplomatic isolation. There could even be a military reaction on the part of the United States and NATO on a conventional level to counter this, to take out, for example, the units responsible for firing that nuclear weapon. The U.S. military force by itself could be used to take out all of the Russian army in Ukraine in a matter of a week or so. You know, there are things we would do. And those threats that have been communicated directly to Putin and the leadership,

those concerns that have been communicated directly to Putin by people, not just the United States, but President Xi of China. Just last week in their meeting, they issued a joint statement that said a nuclear war cannot be one and must never be fought and also said that no country should be deploying nuclear weapons outside their territory four days after that state. Putin goes and announces he's going to station nuclear weapons in Belarus, the neighboring nation that also borders Ukraine. That's an ally of Putin. He violates his own agreement. To me, these threats right now are rising because Putin understands he's losing the war. And that his only, that his hope is that he can outlast and overwhelm the Ukraine. defenses, but in order to do that, he's got to cut off the Ukrainian access to arms and munitions and financial support. And in order to do that, he's got to convince the Western

public, and particularly the American public, that this war does not serve any vital Western interest. And if they keep backing Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war, is it worth it? And that is a message that does resonate among certain parts of this, of the public. And so he keeps hammering away at it. So I look at his decision to announce his suspension from New Start. What he said several weeks ago was not that he was going to start deploying new weapons. That would be a direct violation. But he was no longer going to cooperate in the inspections and the data exchanges and the meetings that are usually held to make sure that each side is living up to this treaty.

Those are all designed. And now his announcement that he's going to move. weapons into Belarus and equip some airplanes to be able to deliver them, those are all designed to raise the risk of nuclear war and to get the Western world too nervous to continue with their aid. We don't see any actual movement in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the summer months he said he's going to be finished with the nuclear storage facility in Belarus on July 1st. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of propaganda and a lot of attention. given to the fact that he actually does it. He takes the weapons from the storage facilities,

which are in places like Engels Air Force Base, which is so close to Ukraine that the Ukrainians have been hitting that base with unmanned drones. That's how close it is. And he moves them over to Belarus. No military advantage to doing this. There's no practical military benefit to move them from where they are already very close to Ukraine to another airfield close to Ukraine. It's purely propaganda. It's purely to sort of rattle our chains. And I think it's working for a certain segment of the population, and you see certain political figures on the left and right picking this up. Ron DeSantis, for example, directly raises this when he says we shouldn't be aiding Ukraine. It's not our fight, and why risk nuclear war?

or you see the editor of the nation magazine on the left saying pretty much the same thing. This does work. He hasn't rattled the center of our political establishment left and right. We're still firmly committed at a congressional level, at a presidential level to supporting Ukraine. But over time, it could. And as these threats start to get more, let's say graphic, if we actually start to see the movement of nuclear weapons. And I think we will this summer. people could get genuinely

frightened and politicians might react to that. It's interesting to me that Ukraine actually gave up its nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons that were at least on Ukraine's territory. So did Belarus? So did Belarus and Kazakhstan, all three of them? Yeah. I guess what I'm wondering about is deterrence and mutually assured discretion. and all that fun stuff.

Does it work? I mean, would Ukraine be better off if it had kept its nukes? Not to use them, but just to have them. Yeah. You know, I know a number of experts who are now engaged in projects on they call more or less rethinking deterrence and looking at some of the assumptions you've made. This is a huge issue to sort of unpack.

back. On the one level, deterrence has worked. I mean, there hasn't been an use of nuclear weapons in 78 years since we bombed Hiroshima Nagasaki. And as someone who spent most of his career looking at these issues, writing about these issues, the history, the policy, the deployments, the contracts, that would have stunned scientists and experts in the 1950s and 60s if he were told them we could go this long. Nobody believed that was possible. And one of the reasons is deterrence, knowing mad, mutually assured destruction. If you attack another country with nuclear weapons, they're going to send them back to you. So this is basically a suicidal act.

You might threaten it, but you're not actually going to do it. Okay. So I think that has mainly worked. And the main fear that many of us have had is that there's an accident. There's a miscalculation. There's a mistake. And we have throughout the nuclear age repeated early, warning failures where one side of the other thought the other side was actually attacking them,

that the big board at NORAD lights up and the officials think there's an ICBM attack coming on. It turns out it's a flock of geese. This is true. This is one of the incidents. Or a rising moon. Or as recently as 1995, the Norwegians were testing a weather rocket that Boris Yeltsin's military came in and told him it was the beginning of a U.S. attack. It was a submarine launched, missile, and they opened up the nuclear football, the codes for launching a nuclear attack and told him he had to fire before that warhead hit Moscow. And fortunately for us, Yeltsin wasn't drunk. He didn't believe that his friend Bill Clinton would do this. He waited. There was no explosion. They closed the nuclear football. We escaped Armageddon. But we've come that close. So when people

talk about this, it's mainly about the system that we built, this deterrent system. system, which has a value, which does work. But it's the mistakes, the miscalculation, the madness element that makes deterrents such a fragile system. So it works wonderfully until it doesn't, and then it fails catastrophically. So, you know, do you really want to base the future of the planet on this system like that? You know, so that's one thing. That's one part of the rethinking deterrence. The other part is looking at what Putin's doing now. We have long believed that nuclear weapons sort of were the foundation of our national strategy, that this is the thing that allowed us to go commit troops and confront aggression around the world

because nobody's going to take us on directly. You know, if we're fighting Iraq or we're fighting Vietnam or even if we're aiding Ukraine, nobody's going to take us on directly because we have nuclear weapons. Well, here comes Putin, and he's flipping the script on this. and he's using it on his side to go launch an invasion of a neighboring country, and he's using his deterrence to deter us. He's using his nuclear force to say, don't mess with me or I will use nuclear weapons. And the Biden administration has to take this seriously. And in the first six months of the war, I think you didn't really know if Putin was in control.

of all his rational capabilities. I mean, who would do such a thing like invade Ukraine? Was he crazy? Would he launch a nuclear weapon? Was this an existential battle for him? I think we've learned over the course of the war now that this is more of a bluff than most of us thought, including me, and that this is more about deterring the U.S. from aiding Ukraine and trying to have a pressure point to convince Ukraine to surrender than it is about preparation for a national nuclear war. But all of this has made us want to rethink, Matt, as you raised, the question of deterrent. Does it really serve our national interests? Are nuclear weapons really are ultimate security or are they our ultimate threat?

If Putin didn't have nuclear weapons, wouldn't we have intervened by now? And the answer is yes, we would have. It's only Putin's nuclear weapons that are protecting him from a U.S. or U.S. NATO assault that would stop this invasion, rolled him back all the way to Moscow. Well, Matthew, I mean, there's a million other things to talk about. But on the other hand, that is the most depressing note we could go out on. And that's where we like to try to get to on this show. You left to end on a down road.

We really do. You'll be scared. Be very scared. That's where we like to leave people. Anxiety-ridden. Well, you should be worried. I mean, the stakes are how you got to pay attention. to this stuff. It's not going away, and we still live in a democracy, and the will of the people

matters, and whether we're going to give into this kind of nuclear blackmail or not depends a lot on the American voter and who they vote for, who they support, and what they tell their politicians they want. All right. Well, do you want to say anything about your substack? Is that the main place people will find you nowadays? As it turns out, yes. After 40 years in this town, I've stepped down from my positions of running programs and stabs and raising money and spending money. And so now I'm just writing. And I discovered this platform, Substack, and they sort of came to me and asked if I wanted to write for them. And I said, what is this? You know, I'm a guy who still thought TikTok was a breath mint. So I didn't really get some of this stuff. So a high,

a Substack turns out to be a wonderful publication platform. And I just finished my second piece. And I realize I've got a basement full of files and testimony and history. And, you know, I've written or edited seven books. I've written hundreds of articles. And now I want to sort of bring some of that knowledge to bear in a quick, digestible, you know, newsletter that will go out a couple of times a week, absolutely free to people. So if you like, if you hear, if you like this discussion, go check out my substack. You just go to substack, Joe Srincioni or as you say, Jason, serencioni. stack.com. Thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of Angry Planet. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistants of Kevin Medell. This is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us onubstack.anggrayplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you.

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