Angry Planet - The American Iron Dome Is an Expensive Boondoggle That Won’t Work

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comPresident Donald Trump wants to build an American Iron Dome. He even signed an executive order to make it happen. It’s a terrible idea, one we’ve tried before, and one that will make America less safe.In this episode, Joseph Cirincione returns to the program to detail his personal history with complicated and costly missile defense systems.It all starts during a snowstorm in 1982 and with the High FrontierZombie defense pitchesIt’s almost impossible to knock a bullet out of space with a bulletHow Israel’s Iron Dome worksSlow and hot vs fast and coldLasers don’t work, thanks TellerPitch: lasers in space. Reality: missile batteries in AlaskaThese systems only work half the time and only under perfect conditionsSpaceX contracts abound!A Pentagon Powerpoint slide enters chatJason’s Superman reverie, starring Gene Hackman as Lex LuthorHow do China and Russia react?“The enemy gets a vote.”The last arms control treatyRonald Reagan: anti-nuclear advocateHow SDI kept us from eliminating nuclear weaponsAnatomy of an arms raceAI is coming to nuclear command and controlProject 2025 and Trump Are Cooking Up a Recipe for a New Nuclear Arms RaceThe Iron Dome for America Executive OrderThe national missile defense fantasy—againProliferated Warfighter Space ArchitectureWhy the US General In Charge of Nuclear Weapons Said He Needs AISupport 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. It really is amazing to see these, you know, proposals, these reports, these conservative proponents of the system come up and say the same thing, decade after decade. And nothing works, but that doesn't dissuade them from dusting it off. and what you have with the Ion Dome for America proposal is basically the system that High Frontier was proposing back in 82 that the SDI system devolved into.

By 1988, I wrote a report for the House Democratic Caucus on this system that was then called a strategic defense system. And it is basically the architecture that Trump outlines in his, is Iron Dome for America Executive Order. But that's just all for general background. We should do it the way you think makes sense for the listeners to walk him through this. And I'm ready to go anytime you are. Do you mind if I'm going to use everything you just said, if that's all right, as the intro to the episode? You've already, you've already given us like the nice personal introduction to all of us.

But can you give us your name? Sure. My name is Joe Serencioni. National Security analyst and author here in Washington, D.C. I'm currently the vice chair for the Center for International Policy Board of Directors. And SDI or Missile Defense or the Iron Dome or whatever you want to call it, as you said, is a personal issue for you. I hadn't thought of it that way, but you kind of beautifully articulated all of that at the top. In 1982, when I was a graduate student at Georgetown University, I trudged through a snowstorm about this time of year to go down to CSIS, which was the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then a sleepy think tank associated with Georgetown University, to hear a briefing by a retired general Daniel O. Graham. And he was promoting an idea that he called High Frontier. And this was a proposal to establish and build with what he's, called off-the-shelf technologies, this is back in 82, off-the-shelf technologies to put in space

a constellation of hundreds of rockets, interceptors, clusters, garages, he called them, of interceptor missiles that would basically be like rockets that we'd fire to shoot down a jet fighter from one jet fighter to another. We'd put them in space, and this would give us a space-based defense against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. missiles. We all listened to this idea, and then when he left, all the senior people there, I was just a young researcher, all laughed at the idea. I thought it was absurd. It couldn't possibly work. There were numerous problems with it, but the joke was on us because a year later, President Ronald Reagan on March 23rd, 1983, proposes the Strategic Defense Initiative,

what was quickly dumped, dubbed Star Wars, with basically the same idea. But instead of kinetic kill vehicles, interceptor rockets, he would have lasers in space because he had been told by Dr. Edwin-Teller at Lawrence Livingwell Laboratory that Teller had a proof of principle back at his lab, a desk-sized device, one laser that could wipe out the entire first wave of SS18 warheads fired by the Soviet Union. Reagan was captured by this idea, a perfect shield, a shield that could protect America from missile attack the way, as he said, a roof protects a family from rain. And this idea just took off and it dominated the strategic discussion in this town in 1980. I, by 1985, had been hired by the House Armed Services Committee, and I was put as one of the

investigators for this program, for the SDI program, for nuclear weapons. So I've been tracking this system and ideas around building a impenetrable shield for over 40, 42, 43 years now in this town. I've got a firsthand look as an independent expert, as a congressional investigator, and as an author. And it's just amazing to me how this illusion persists. Despite all the evidence that we just can't do this, these ideas refuse to die. And we're seeing it again in President Trump's proposal for an iron dome for America. So why doesn't this work? It works for Israel, right?

Ah, so this is a common confusion, just to get a little historic again. In 1991, I was on staff of the House Home Services Committee, and I heard then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney come up in 91 after the 91 Iraq War and claim. that the performance of the Patriot missile in that war, which we then believe had been nearly perfect. Another investigation I did a couple of years later showed that that was not true, that the Patriot, in fact, had not worked very well. But it was then perceived as having worked well, and he said this proves that missile defense works. And he took the performance of this theater missile defense system and used it to justify a billion-dollar increase in a strategic defense system. Now, what's the difference? It turns out that now, after decades of effort, we can build systems that are pretty effective at shooting down short-range rockets. That's what the Israeli Iron Dome system is. It is very small interceptors that are aimed at shooting down rockets that travel tens of miles, make 45-mile maximum. And these are fairly easy to see. They're slow. You can, you can, you can, build batteries with scores of intercepted rockets that can be fired in Bollies at these rockets as they

come in and you can shoot them down. Now, not 100%. We don't really know how good the Ion Dome is, but it's pretty good. And Ukraine has shown that we can do this to with drones with anti-aircraft systems, with drones of our own, but this is all short range. These are things that are traveling fairly slowly through the atmosphere. But once you get to interoperance, you get to interoperable, intercontinental range, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, these things are traveling at approximately 15,000 miles per hour. So about four to five miles a second. And they're not in the atmosphere. They're going in outer space. They're hundreds of miles away. They are small, hard warheads. They're hard to see. They're hard to track. They're hard to detect. And they come in at velocity. that are even greater, like seven kilometers per second, it's almost impossible to shoot this down.

And here's the other problem. No matter how many interceptors you build, 100, 200 interceptors around a site, the opponent can just quickly overwhelm your system by firing more warheads. The advantage always goes to the offense. So the perceived success of Iron Dome in Israel is being used by the Trump administration to say, see? And this Trump actually says, says this. Other countries have this, why shouldn't we completely erasing the distinction between the pretty good effectiveness of defenses against short-range systems that travel tens of miles and the inability to duplicate that on an intercontinental scale when you're dealing with a target that's traveling thousands of miles. So I have a question about, because Israel is, you know,

at least they're claiming that they have two levels beyond. Donned Iron Dome, right? They've got David Sling, which I think is more intermediate and then arrow, which is supposed to be long range. I don't know what long range means. Well, in this case. More like medium range. So hundreds of miles. So they can they can shoot down things that are traveling from Iran, for example, rather than just coming from the Gaza Strip. Yeah. So this is called a layered defense. And it's the way experts have approached this problem. understanding that your defense is going to be imperfect at various levels. So let's build multiple layers. So that's exactly right.

They have a four-layer system. Iron Dome for the very short-range rockets. David's Sling, which is a slightly longer range interceptor that can reach out further and intercept higher in the air. And then Arrow 2 and Arrow 3, two different versions of Arrow that can do the same thing. And so the Arrow 2 and the Arrow 3 are equivalent to our Patriot system or our Thad system, or the Aegis system. All of these are what we call theater missile defenses.

They're designed for short-range rockets. So things that travel like a scud, like 100 kilometers, 150 kilometers, something like that. And the reason you can do that is because these missiles are fairly slow. They're fairly fat. They tend to be the missile themselves,

not just the warhead, so it's a bigger target. And they're hot. You can see them, especially in the boost phase. taking off and you can track them very quickly. So we're able to do that and do it with a fair amount of effectiveness. Plus, you're dealing with systems that are inherently inaccurate. So I suspect that many of the intercepts that Israel and Ukraine are claiming are actually missiles that have

been fired by Russia or by Israel's or by Iran, for example, they just go off target. They miss the target. This is what we saw in the Patriot example. We, we, I combed over that data for over a year with a team of experts. And we found that many of the missiles, the scuds, that the army said they shot down, it turns out actually landed in the ocean, landed it landed in an orchard. And they had missed it, but their system had indicated it intercepts, so they claimed it. It turns out that the evidence only supports about zero to four intercepts out of 45 scuds engaged. So I guess I'm just, it's important that people understand.

that that's not the enemy that we're talking about. We're not talking about Iran, in this case, sending relatively slow missiles, slow hot missiles. We're talking about technologies that actually, I would just say, and you tell me, correct me, more and more countries have, actually. I mean, like North Korea is now able to send not just slow hot rockets. I mean, they are actually dealing with a real intercontinental ballistic missiles, right? that's exactly right. And so to deal with this, people recognized in the SDI experience that you couldn't do this. And it became pretty clear you could not build a comprehensive shield. So they scaled the whole program down in various ways. And they kept scaling it down. So by 1988, I was the staff director of a Democratic task force in the House of Representatives that was that we wrote a report. on the then version of SDI back then, and they had scaled it back.

They realized that the lasers just didn't work. You couldn't do that. That's a whole other issue. We can get into why lasers don't work, but the technology is not there. You cannot build a laser that is small enough to launch, that is powerful enough, that can dwell on the target long enough. That doesn't exist and it still won't exist.

It didn't exist in the 80s. It doesn't exist. Now you can't do it. But that's still the other. idea in Trump's plan. When they realized this, they scaled it back to something they called the strategic defense system, which looks a lot like the architecture that Trump is describing in his executive order. A layered defense, there would be some kinetic kill interceptors in space, meaning interceptor missiles that would fire at the enemy missiles. They'd be ground-based

layer of this too, of various kinds, kind of duplicating the Israeli version, we would have that too. And these multiple layers would get multiple shots at the system. And that's what Trump is calling for now. But even that, this didn't work in the 80s, in the 90s, and it was scaled back even further. So today, what we have, after decades of effort, you know, and spending $415 billion on missile defense systems since Reagan speech in 83, $415 billion. What we have to show for it is a system of ground-based interceptors in Alaska. 40 interceptors in Alaska, four in California. It's called the ground-based defense system.

And this has a chance of intercepting a North Korean missile. It's designed to provide some protection against that threat specifically, North Korea, because they only have a limited number. At this point, they probably have somewhere on 40 missiles that could hit the United States with nuclear warheads. And we have 44 interceptors. Already, you're probably seeing the problem here. You know, you know, that you, even North Korea can overwhelm the system. But here's the bad news. That's not the bad news? The The bad news is that the system only works about half the time in tests. So after all this effort, we can hit a bullet with a bullet.

It's amazing. We couldn't do that in the 80s, the 90s. We can do it now. We can hit a small warhead in space with an interceptor about half the time, but it has to be under perfect conditions. The target basically has to cooperate. You have to know what it looks like. You have to know when it's being launched.

They only conduct these tests in daytime, for example. no nighttime tests. They don't allow the target to try to evade or to try to spoof the system, which you could easily do, and we've been doing since the 1960s, by deploying our warheads with decoys, with balloons, basically, that look exactly like the warhead. But in the frictionless outer space, no air, they travel the same. There's no air to sweep them away. So instead of finding a target that's one warhead, you might be. be confronting 12, 20, 100 warheads. Chaff will do the same thing.

Jammers. And so we have an extremely limited system that provides an extremely limited amount of protection against even a primitive threat like North Korea. We have no chance of effectively defending the country against China or Russia's systems which can overwhelm us, spoof us, blind us, evade us. And we haven't even talked about blinding the system by, for example, shooting out the radars before you do your launch, which is an inherent limitation of all ground-based defenses. That's what Iron Dome for America in Trump's vision is trying to overcome the inherent

limitations of ground-based defenses. They're trying to solve that by putting all this in space. Where, and here's, if you read the print, what the defined print of the proposal, they're trying to intercept not the warheads, but the missile itself in its boost phase. Because a ballistic missile goes through phases. It has a launch phase, a boost phase that can last about three to five minutes. And at that point, it's very vulnerable. It's slow. It is hot.

It is fat. And it's going, you know, but after that three to five minutes, it then goes into free flight, a ballistic trajectory. And it's a predictable curve. curve, parabolic curve that it follows, like throwing a baseball from the outfield to home plate. You know where this is going to go. When the guys throwing the ball, you know, they have an idea of what angle they have to take in order to hit home plate. Same with ballistic missiles. Same thing. So it's in that ballistic arc, the height of it, it's all in outer space. Where it's traveling throughout a space. That's where you have the decoy problem. That's where you could have multiple warheads released by the missile. So in order to overcome that, the dream has been. been, since I've been tracking these programs, since I heard Daniel O. Graham give me the pitch in a snowstorm in 1982, the dream has been boost phase intercept. To get the missile as it's

launching, that's what Iron Dome envisans, either with kinetic kill, hit-to-kill interceptors, or with lasers should they ever be developed. That's the holy grail of missile defense, and it remains a receding target. It's always, you know, it's like fusion is always, fusion energy is always 20 years away. Well, effective boost phase intercept is always 20 years away. They keep promising it, and I've heard them over and over again say it's right around the corner. It is not right around the corner. It is extremely difficult to do. It just, I don't mean to go on, but just one last thing. In order to get boost phase intercept, you've got to have your satellite, your killer satellite, above the launch site. Well, the launch.

site is fixed, it's at wherever it is on Earth, the satellite is an orbit. So it's not stationary, it's not hovering. So that means you have to have multiple satellites. So you have to have a constellation of satellites. It takes about 20 or 30 satellites in a constellation to give you coverage. But because the Earth rotates, one orbital path isn't good enough. You're going to need a half dozen orbital paths. So you're looking at something like 300 to 400 satellites to cover one launch site. Ha. You're getting to see the picture of the problem you have, the scale that you need to build

on in order to have a shot at intercepting a missile in boost phase. So that's what Elon Musk is for. He'll just keep sending up rockets until... I don't know. No, that's not going to work. He's got a bunch of SpaceX satellites up there already, so I would imagine that you would put a SpaceX, like, satellite on each one of these interceptors, and then you could double up, right?

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So this is, you know, there's also kind of a sideline here. You know, whenever you see a big government program proposed, you always have to ask, you know, quibono, Latin, who benefits, quibono. Well, obviously the people were building the system benefit, the big defense contractors, but also the launch company that's launching them because a big part of the expense of this is getting this stuff into space. Who's the number one launch company in the world right now? SpaceX. Elon Musk, 134 launches last year. This system, whether it worked or not, would be a boon for SpaceX because it would require, I would say,

thousands of launches into space. And that's just to get the thing up. Remember, this thing has got to be maintained in space. These things wear out in space. They're going to, so you have, it's another problem that is plagued this kind of idea since the beginning. You've got to maintain these systems in space, very difficult to do. And divide code that makes them all sync together, what they call a battle management system of computers and radars and sensors that all have to work. perfectly the first and perhaps only time it's ever used. These challenges, I think we've just covered all of them, the system can be overwhelmed. It can be spoofed.

It can be blinded. The launch costs are enormous. The operations and maintenance challenges are enormous on this. And the computer control systems are beyond anything we can do. All of these have prevented. This vision, which is very appealing, a shield that can protect America. These technological realities have prevented a system like this from being built. Conservatives, like the ones at the Heritage Foundation, that wrote all this up in Project 2025,

what Iron Dome for America, what the president's executive order calls for, is basically the chapter in Project 2025 on missile defense. these guys have been true believers since Ronald Reagan. They were backers of the SDI plan back then. They back it now. They believe, and you can see it in the text of the executive order, that it's been a lack of political will that has stopped us from doing this, not technological challenges. They claim falsely in the executive order that Reagan's SDI plan was canceled

before it could deliver the results. It's canceled. Well, that would be news to the missile defense agency, which is a direct successor to the Strategic Defense Initiative organization that I investigated when I was in Congress. No, this has not been canceled. We spent $415 billion on these systems. We've had our best scientists, our biggest corporations. People have been trying to do this. We've had 42 years of presidents, 20 of Republicans, 22 of Democrats since Reagan's speech, all of them tried to do this and failed. There is no way in hell that writing an executive order and willingness into existence is going to produce a system that can actually protect America. It ain't going to happen.

So line five of Section 3 and of the executive order to get real weird and specific. development and deployment of a custody layer of the proliferated warfighter space architecture. Do we have any idea what that means? Because it sounds like putting dudes in space. Well, that is, that thing actually exists. There is something called the proliferated warfighter space architecture that exists, that's in there. It's, and its idea is to develop a comprehensive plan. Oh, I found the DOD slides.

Yes, of all the various elements of how this would work. And so you proliferated, they mean multiple systems, layered defense, basically. That's what they're, that's what they're talking about. I know, once you get into this world, there's all this lingo that sounds very much. impressive, but often masks very, very serious technological, scientific, or economic problems with what they're proposing. Or they're going to put them all in low-worth orbit, too. That's great.

Again, where all the space-sex satellites are. Right. Low-worth orbit, because they have to be close enough to have this, especially if it's a hit-to-kill rocket, to be able to hit the boost. You only got, as I say, somewhere between three and five minutes. to detect, track, and then intercept this system. So you've got to be pretty close to it. Low Earth orbit, that means more satellites have to be there

than if you were in higher Earth orbit and had a system that could reach down, you know, 60, 70 miles. So I just want to go back for a second to the Elon Musk part. I just sort of love this because do you remember, do you guys remember Superman 1 from the 80s where Lex Luther decides that he buys up all of this land in Arizona and Utah? and Nevada, and he then turns it into beachfront property by launching a nuke out to, you know, hit the San Andreas fault. He didn't succeed, of course, because they're Superman. But what I... It's just Gene Hackman.

Yes, yes, he was so good. He was so good. But it's the same thing. To me, there's a similarity here with, you know, Elon Musk setting up a situation where SpaceX can't help but win, you know. And he came up with a, I mean, this is just a, it sounds like it's just such a load of crap. But it's going to make him money. It's going to make other people money. Oh, yeah.

We're going to spend a fortune on this. It doesn't have a chance of working. You can do it. If you wanted to, you could just do a comprehensive scientific panel to look at this problem and say, can we do this? And the answer would be, as it has been every single time, we've convened such a system, starting with the American Physical Society, with their. landmark report in 1987 that basically said directed energy weapons lasers will not work. We're two decades away from knowing whether or even feasible. You could do that and save yourself a whole lot of money, but that ain't what we're going to do. That's not what the executive order calls for.

It calls for a plan. Give me a plan for deploying this. And right now, this last week, the administration has put out requests for proposals. So they're moving. There's going to be a a big meeting February 18th where contractors are going to come in and talk about their proposal. So the money is going to start flowing out the door. We may be canceling foreign aid, but we're going to be spending like crazy on this search for the Holy Space Grail. If you are China or Russia and you are watching this happen, how do you react? Well, they've already reacted. And here's the other problem with missile defenses is that the enemy gets a vote, right?

You've heard the free. The enemy gets a vote. No good plan survives contact with the enemy. Well, that's what happens. And we've known this from the 50s and 60s because we've been trying to shoot down ballistic missiles since the first Nazi V2 slammed into London. This is not a new problem. We have been working on this.

And in the 50s, the main threat to the United States, the main threat to the United States. United States was Soviet bombers. So we built a gigantic NORAD system of interceptors, fighter planes, missiles to protect the country. I don't know about you. You're younger than me, but I grew up outside New Haven, and we had a Nike missile base outside New Haven, Connecticut. It was really cool looking missiles. They had these fins on them, like a 57 Cadillac. They're just really cool. So those were all for bombers. When Sputnik happened, and all of a sudden you had, I don't. I have a ICBMs that were the main threat, they realized, well, you can't shoot that down with the Nike Zeus. So we had to develop a new system.

Eisenhower started missile defense. It was called Project Defender to try to find some kind of space-based defense that could work. So he failed. They took the Nikes and they made them some Nike Zuses, made them go further, faster, and put nuclear weapons on them. That would be the warhead because you couldn't hit to kill, but you could put a nuclear bomb. This became the sentinel system or the safeguard system that Nixon deployed around not to protect the country, but to protect an ICBM base in North Dakota. So we actually did this. In the 60s and early 70s, we built a missile defense system, a point defense system that could protect the ICBMs. And the idea was we would prevent the Soviets from striking first and knocking out our systems.

And that's what the shield would do. It would make sure we had a second strike capability, but then you face these problems, that the Soviets could then deploy more warheads than we had interceptors. And the same for us. The Soviets deployed an ABM system, anti-ballistic missile system around Moscow. A hundred interceptors ringed with nuclear warheads. They still have it, by the way. They still have it. When we asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff in congressional hearings, are you worried about that?

They said, no. We said, why not? We will just target more warheads than they have interceptors. And that is the enemy response. It always has been. You build a castle. I'm going to build catapults. The offense has the advantage. They have ways to go about that. And the Russians just days after Trump's announcement said, well, you know, you're going to, you're basically going to go to war with us. You're saying that you're going to build a system that is going to prevent us from having deterrence against you. You're saying you're going to have a shield that will prevent our weapons from reaching you. Well, we can't allow that. We can't allow our deterrence to completely collapse. We will now have to look at options for more and different types of weapons, which is what happens.

And so that's why you see the Russians looking at things and trying to develop things like underwater, drones, this nuclear torpedo, supposedly nuclear power that can travel thousands of miles. Missile defense can't stop that. Well, now you're going to have a system to stop that. Long-range cruise missiles. Again, a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed, long-range cruise missile that can go thousands of miles. Again, missile defenses can't do that. They're looking up in the outer space.

They can't defeat a cruise missile, which is why in Trump's executive order, they also call for a cruise missile. Defense of America, which is, again, it's hugely technologically, basically impossible task. But in all these circumstances, the advantage goes to the offense. It is just much cheaper and technologically easier to overwhelm, spoof, fool, go around technologically or kinetically blind and cripple a system. It's so much easier to do that than it is to build the system in the first place. let me just give you one little stat on that. This ground-based missile defense system I told you we had, the ground-based mid-course defense system, these 44 interceptors that we have in Alaska and California, it costs $53 billion. $44 interceptors, over a billion dollar an interceptor. There is no way that that is cost-effective.

The Russians know this. The Chinese know this. But it does mean, is that it kills any prospect of negotiating limits on offensive missiles. No country can agree to limit their offensive missiles if you're building a defense. So this dilemma was recognized long ago, which is why when Richard Nixon in 1972 negotiated the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, salt, it was coupled with the ABM Treaty. So while we're limiting offensive systems, we're also going to limit defensive systems because they understood the dynamic. You can't have a chance of limiting offense if you don't limit defense. That logic is denied by people like the Heritage Foundation or the people pushing missile defense to this day because they believe that without political will, without technological might, with a military plan, we can overcome the,

these, you know, bespeckled arms control nerds who are trying to limit America, trying to bind up American power, we can overcome all that. We can do it where others have failed. That's important context to throw out there that this comes at a time. We are about one year away from the failure. I would say that it's probably already failed. of the last remaining nuclear arms reduction treaty, right? Newstart dies, officially dies February 5th,

2026. Right. If it doesn't get picked back up. And at that point, for the first time in my lifetime, I think, there won't be any kind of, the world's nuclear powers will not be trying to reduce and cool the temperature down on paper in any way. It is just build up now.

That is the world we live in, right? That's exactly right. When this discussion first began in earnest, when the Star Wars system, when the SDI program really gripped the imagination, and we started putting serious money behind it in the 80s, you know, all these things we just discussed, we discussed them all in great detail. And I'd be happy to give you my 100-page report from 88 on this estimate. I should just redo it and put Iron Dome in for STI. But as it turns out, Ronald Reagan learned from this. I mean, he really thought this was going to work. He believed the scientists.

He believed that people at Heritage who told them this could work. And it became clear by the end of his second term that he couldn't, and he made a pivot. And he pivoted to negotiating reductions in nuclear weapons. And he struck, he tried to get rid of all of them at the conference, at the, in Reykjavik, Iceland, with Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the Soviet Union then, and they came real close to killing it. They stumbled over SDI. Gorbachev said, you got to give up this program, because as long as you got this, I'm not going to be able to eliminate all my weapons. And for Reagan, it says, no, this is my insurance policy. I got to have this in case you cheat.

And they just couldn't come into agreement. So that is what killed their proposal to get to zero nuclear weapons. But to Reagan's credit, he went and negotiated a treaty with him, the START Treaty, Strategic Commerce Reduction Treaty, the first treaty to not limit but reduce offensive nuclear weapons. And he cut the U.S. and Soviet stockpile in half, in half. We had like 30,000 nuclear weapons at that time. The Russians had 30,000, too. He cut it in half. And then George H.W. Bush implemented that, negotiated a follow-on agreement. George W. Bush did his own effort and cut the work. the arsenal and half again. So because of these Republicans, Republican leadership, we've climbed down from a world where we had 70,000 nuclear weapons in the mid-80s to one where we have 12,000 now. Still a lot of nuclear weapons enough to destroy the world many times over, but a far cry. But that, as you say, Matt, has stopped. There have been no new arms control treaties since Obama negotiated new start over Republican objections in 2014. And that's about to go. And when that goes, that is pretty much the end of the arms control regime. All this, these things that we put in place

since the 1950s over multiple presidents of both parties, all that is going to come crashing down. Trump seems to have no interest in rebuilding this. And we will be living in a world dominated by officials and proponents who believe that American military might is the way to assure American security in the world, not these pieces of paper, as they call it, these treaties that we will follow, but the other guys will cheat on. This is setting us up for a very, very dangerous future. Yeah, another thing that struck me in the executive order made my hair stand on in a little bit and maybe talk me down. But development and deployment of capabilities to defeat missile attacks prior to launch and in the boost phase.

Now, in the boost phase, I understand. But prior to launch? Well, this is actually something that's feasible when you come to a country like North Korea, which is surrounded by, it's on a peninsula. And you can position assets on ships or on air bases that could destroy a missile before it's launched. So while it's on the launch pad, while it's on was being rolled out of its shelter and getting prepared for launch. This is much more feasible to do. They call this left of launch. So before it's launched, you can actually do this.

And you could have drones that could hover, patrol the coast. There have been various proposals for how to do this. It doesn't work when you come to things like China or Russia because their launch fields are very far from the coast. You can't pre-position assets there. And space-based defenses basically you'd be talking about nuking them from space.

And I suppose that might be captured under this category. But that again gets us into very dangerous territory. You're talking about himming in enemies, right? Which is like if you're building infrastructure around their country,

to shoot down anything they may fire, that also doesn't lead to a lot of trust. Oh, no. Oh, no. It's absolutely the opposite. No, now you're in an arms race. I mean, we're already in an arms race. There's nine countries with nuclear weapons in the world. All of them are designing new weapons. And some like the United States have been for the last 10 years investing in a whole new generations of weapons. So we're building a brand new bomber, a brand new sub, a brand new missiles, brand new launch centers. We're recapitalizing the basically the nuclear weapons that were built, starting with the Carter and Reagan administration. So at the end of their operational life, we're going to spend an estimated $2 trillion on new weapons. Well, Russia's doing something similar.

China's expanding its own arsenal, Britain, France. They're all India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel. They're all building new nuclear weapons. The only way to counter that is with negotiations led by the United States and Russia, which have the biggest arsenals. 90% of all the weapons in the world are held by the United States and Russia. So you want to be reducing them. As we just discussed, those reductions have stopped. So now we are back in an arms race that we haven't seen since the 1980s.

And you put in a missile defense proposal like this, well, you're just throwing gas on it. You know, here it goes. Now it's an all-out official cold war. war-style arms race. Right, because to your point, these are public declarations. It is not as if Beijing and Moscow aren't reading these and know exactly what's going on and adjusting accordingly. Absolutely.

Absolutely. They're taking this. I mean, you see, for example, you've probably heard a lot over the last five years that the Department of Defense now estimates that China is expanding its ICBMs. For years, China had what they called a minimum deterrence post. So that when we had thousands of weapons that could hit China, they only had a handful. They had about 90 that could reach the United States. But that was plenty.

I mean, how many American cities do you have to threaten to deter us of attacking, right? So they're right. That strategy worked for them. But then we started building newer, more capable systems. and we're not just, the new missiles that we're building are not just newer, they're going to be more accurate. The subs were, same with the subs, same with the stealth bombers, et cetera, plus we're developing hypervelocity systems, maneuvering warheads, all kinds of things that are going into this new and improved nuclear triad. And the Chinese got worried that we might think that we had a first strike capability, that we could hit them and knock everything out. And then we started talking about missile defenses again.

And the missile defenses start to make sense as something that could hit the few remaining missiles that might survive or U.S. first strike, basically mopping up whatever survived from a first strike. So the Chinese thought, and they're very clear about this, well, we have to have more missiles, the dynamic we were discussing earlier. So instead of, you know, 300 nuclear weapons, then now up to 600 are probably going to go to something like 1,000. It's still much less than the United States have. We have about 5,000 nuclear weapons. So, but we see them doing that and we say, aha, see, the Chinese are marching. They're racing to try to, we can't allow that to happen. we have to build more weapons to counter theirs, and that is the essence of the arms race dynamic.

Each side thinks its weapons are fine, and it's the other guys' systems that are the problem. Yeah, I remember during the first Trump administration, one of the reasons he gave for pulling out of so many of these treaties was that, well, you know, this is between Russia and America, but China's not involved and we've got to get China on board or else none of this works. That's right. And China pointed out, as you just did, like, hey, you guys first, you've got thousands. We have a couple hundred here. And now here we are. So there is a way out of this. I mean, there is, you know, you can propose a nuclear freeze.

I mean, it's, you know, it was an idea that was popular in the 1980s, but it makes sense today where everybody would just pause. And the U.S. and Russia would agree to reduce. So, you know, we each, well, U.S. and Russia field about 1,700 offensive strategic nuclear weapons. Okay. So if China has 600, you could come to an agreement of the Social Security. But you freeze right there, China. Russia and the United States will come down.

We'll get down to say a thousand deployed. And then the three of us can have talks and we'll negotiate the next steps. There's a way to do that. The countries haven't shown the will to do that, either because Putin doesn't want to do it or now Trump doesn't want to do it. Although he makes some nods in that direction every once in a while. He made a noise like this at Davos that he would like to eliminate nuclear weapons. Okay. But nothing he's doing chose any actual inclination or steps to implement that.

that rhetoric. So what does that leave us? I'm sorry, but like if we keep having, you know, growing stockpiles and China's growing their stockpile and we still have mutually assured destruction, I guess, but where does this actually leave us now? I mean, are we more in danger than ever before? Or are we just sort of status quo ante, but like, you know, just more danger in case it ever goes all wrong. You know, we have come very close to nuclear war over the last decades. And many of the members of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That was a very public display of how close we came.

But there have also been a number of incidents where, unknown to the public, one side of the other thought they were under attack, falsely, computer error, mistake, misinterpreting intentions. The Russians thought they were under attack. in 1983, for example, a very famous incident and was stopped only by one colonels unwillingness to pass along the launch order. In 1995, when Boris Yeltsin was the president of the Russian Federation, the Russian surveillance system mistook a Norwegian weather satellite for a U.S. submarine launch ballistic missile,

thought was the beginning of a nuclear attack. And for the first time in the nuclear age, they brought the nuclear football, the Russian equivalent of the nuclear football, to Yeltsin and told him, this is 1995, we are under attack. You have to launch our missiles before the U.S. could destroy them. Fortunately for us, Yeltsin wasn't drunk. He didn't believe that his friend Bill Clinton would do this. And he waited. There was no attack. There was no explosion. The mistake was discovered, they closed the nuclear football, we dodged it. But that kind of thing, I mean, that, that's no Cuban missile crisis. That's out of the blue mistake. Well, if that happens now and Putin's told this during a time of tension, what's you going to conclude? If Trump is told this during a time of tension, what's you going to conclude? So it's those kinds of risk that you face that are accelerated by the production, and deployment of new nuclear systems, whether defensive or offensive, and the hot rhetoric that goes around this.

So we know this dynamic. We live through a whole Cold War with this dynamic. And even, as I just said, in the post-Cold War period. So proposals like this, systems like this, rhetoric like this, visions like this, it makes the risk of nuclear war greater. It doesn't reduce them. it makes the world more dangerous, not more secure. The other thing that worries me about this, and this is something I'm going to be doing some reporting on soon, hopefully,

is that a lot of these systems, not at the command and control level, not at the decision-making point, but in various other places along the way, are getting artificial intelligence? Yes. Like, we are getting these systems that we know, know we're kind of classically prone to hallucinations and making mistakes that are going to be the

machines that are telling us, hey, we see incoming missiles. Hey, we're watching over here and something doesn't look right. And we're going to be taking more humans out of those trees. And I just worry about how that's going to play out over the next, however long we have. We are going to have artificial intelligence involved in nuclear command and control. I can flat out predict it. It is going to happen for several reasons. One, there's already proposals to do it. Proposals by some Air Force personnel who argue that the introduction of advanced technologies and offensive systems like hypervelocity, like stealth technologies.

Reduce the warning time. You might not be able to detect that you're being attacked. until you only have two or three minutes to decide and understand what the nature of the attack is and come to a decision, AI can be very helpful and can do all that much faster than humans can. Okay, you think did these people ever watch the movies? Do they understand what it means to have artificial intelligence in charge of your commanding control? But it's also when it comes to things like space systems, extremely complex. This is one of the challenges that thwarted SDI back in the 80s.

The computer systems, we didn't have the capability to provide adequate battle management systems for all these diverse components that all have to be integrated and under extreme duress. We're talking about, you know, decision windows in the 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Again, AI, it'll be argued, can handle that faster. than we can. For that, for these, just these two alone and other reasons, I think the pressure to introduce artificial intelligence into the command and control of nuclear weapons is going to be irresistible. Is that the kind of frightening note that you want to end on, Jason? I know it's a little early.

No, no, no. It's only a couple of minutes. And I think we'll take those minutes to contemplate the end of the world. You could, you know, Skynet was, you know, a frightening. a frightening device that has stayed with us for a reason, right? And as we advance into this in this new cold war, this new arms race, you know, those kinds of things are a lot more plausible, a lot more feasible, a lot more likely than anyone ever thought they were when Arnold Schwarzenegger strode on stage in the first Terminator movie. That stuff is real. it is here.

It could happen. Yeah, I have the, I'll put this in the show notes. In October, Anthony J. Cotton, who's the head, who's Air Force General in charge of Stratcom, gave a speech that was meant for like a military audience. That was all about why Stratcom needed AI and how it was going to revolutionize how everything works. So I've got an article about it and you can watch the raw speech. I will put it in the show notes. Everyone can see just exactly what their thoughts are because they're not hiding them.

It is coming. And the gains to people are too attractive to outweigh the costs. And I really think that we are reactionary people and a reactionary species and it's going to take something bad happening before we stop any of this, unfortunately. I worry about the angels of our better nature and luck have won out so often in the past. It feels sometimes like we're due for something bad, for a stark reminder. I think you're absolutely right. And just take this, we spent an hour talking about this, and it's truly frightening, truly one of the catastrophic risks we face. And yet, in the news over the last few weeks, this has gotten inches.

of print, right, compared to pages and pages of all the other things that are going on. No, I'm with you. We're going to be spending a lot of, we're going to waste a lot of money on these systems. The risks are going to go up and up, and it's going to take something terrible to have us reverse course. I just hope it doesn't involve a nuclear explosion. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gull, Jason. Fields and Kevin O'Dell. If you like us,

angry planetpod.com. Subscribe, get access to commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes early. We will be back again next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until now.