Angry Planet - What's 'The Deal' With Iran's Nukes?

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

What do mid-century funnyman Tom Lehrer, nuclear Armageddon, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action have in common? They’re all features of the excellent podcast The Deal—a show all about the Iran nuclear deal.As its host once said, he’s not here to fix problems. He’s just here to narrate the collapse. Well, that narrator is here with us today. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is an expert on all things nuclear, the host of The Deal, and Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.Recorded 3/11 because amber is the color of our energyFaulkner and hot toddieshow to make sure someone gets nuclear weaponsthe Libya of it allAngry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War 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.

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Freedom has never safe-guided people. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. And I am Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. What do mid-century funny man Tom Lehrer, nuclear Armageddon, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action have in common? They're all features of the excellent podcast, The Deal, a show all about the Iran nuclear deal. As its host once said, he's not here to fix problems. He's just here to narrate the collapse.

The narrator is here with us today. Dr. Jeffrey Lewis is an expert on all things nuclear, the host of the deal, and director of the East Asia Non-Proliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm a bad person for saying that, aren't I? Okay, well, this actually brings up an interesting point, because one of the things I really like about the show, is it... Your show, by the way. Your show, by the way.

Yeah, the deal. A theme that runs through it is the way learning about nukes warps your sensibilities. I think in one episode you say that it gives you a dark sense of humor because otherwise you'd just be crying all the time. So that's a feature of hiring a bunch of producers who don't know anything about nuclear weapons. So when we started this creative endeavor, I suddenly found myself around people who everything I said, they were like, That is weird and creepy. And so it really focused a light on the gallows humor and just the kind of cynicism in darkness that arises when you study something like nuclear war all day long. It was a good learning experience for me.

And it was a nice chance to warp some young people's minds. Normally, we like to start the show with basics, but I feel like with nukes and the JCPOA, it's so complicated that we would be here all day. Let's just get weird right off the bat. What's the biggest misconception that Americans have about nukes? The biggest misconception is easy. It's that there is some kind of second vote required for the president to use a nuclear weapon. Every movie that you ever see, like my favorite is what's the dead zone with Martin Sheen is a coaked out president, which is great because Martin Sheen is like everybody's favorite dad president in the West Wing,

but like the coped out version of him with his hand on an authorization device demanding that someone else authorize it. The reality is that these shows have these like long, lengthy, like, debates. And in reality, in the most demanding circumstance, the president has just a few minutes to make a decision. And it's utterly up to him or her. So it's just really a question of, what do you want to do? And you phone it in and order a nuclear war like you order a pizza. If people understood nukes in nuclear war, do you think they might actually vote a little bit more carefully? So this actually is the argument that happened with Trump. People can talking about Trump's finger on the button, Trump's tiny little finger on the big red button,

because it was like a metaphor for his manifest unfitness for the office. And so I think at some level that resonates. And I think that's why Hillary Clinton kept saying it over and over again. But I guess for me then the question is, could people really reckon with the reality of these weapons? And I think we can't. And it's the reason there's so much misinformation about them. because whenever I explain how nuclear command and control works to just a normal human being, they're like, no, it doesn't.

No, it does. This is my job. I get paid money. I got an office. I got staff. Like, yes, how it works. No, that's crazy. They wouldn't do it that way.

And so there's, I think it's totally true that if people really grasp what the plan was, that they would be like, oh, no. But at the same time, I think that is precisely why it is so hard for people to really get it. All right, so what's your command and control spiel that the mind rejects? The command and control spiel that the mind rejects is the idea that this system is biased toward being ready to go.

And whenever people talk about the system and they call it a hair trigger, generals with many stars get very angry about that word because they say, my hair trigger implies it could go off at any moment. It's not at all like that. But it kind of is. And the reason it is, and I know why they don't like that. term. But at the end of the day, the whole system is organized around a simple idea, which is that we have to be ready to use nuclear weapons in the most demanding scenario possible. And what is that scenario? It's that Putin wakes up one morning and says, yaha, and pushes his button and catches us

by surprise. And so the whole idea is we're not going to have any inkling that there's about to be a nuclear war on until the Russian missiles break through the clouds. And then that sets this just enormously crushing time pressure in motion because the satellites have to see the missiles, they have to report it down, that has to be checked out, then they have to call the White House, and then the White House has to tell the president, and the president has to make a decision in time for that message to go out to the launch unit so that our missiles can be up and away before theirs get here. And actually, this is a goofy, goofy thing. But the idea was like, if you don't do that, if you can't do that thing, then the Russians will never be deterred.

They'll think that they can get the jump on us. And so it distorts everything we do. And actually, this is a chance for me to say something nice about George W. Bush. The poor man gets lambasted for reading The Pet Goat on 9-11. Do you know this story? Of course. It's like the best thing he ever did. Because what happened was exactly like a nuclear crisis,

where we have a serious security crisis playing out in the United States. He is in the middle of something because presidents are always in the middle of something. and Andy Card walks up and says, Mr. President, America is under attack. In the nuclear command and control world, and he doesn't know it's not a nuclear attack, because it just says America's under attack, he's supposed to jump up like his hair is on fire, run out of the room, leave the crying, screaming kids, and get a briefing and make a decision whether to end the world in a minute or two. And his defense, which he was lampooned for, but I think is right, is he was like,

when you were in a crisis, you have to slow down. You have to be calm. People are watching you. They're looking at you for cues. You need to take your time and make good decisions. Now, I don't think he'd make good decisions with all the time he had. But I actually think in that moment, he did the right thing. And it's exactly the thing you're not allowed to do with nuclear weapons. My favorite anecdote that I use, it's a historical one to drive this home with people, is that before we started building silos, strategic air command was in the skies above the planet, ready to drop nuclear bomb. on Russia at a moment's notice. Was it like 7.5 seconds or 7.5 minutes, something like that. Often they were on speed because they were doing pulling long hours and they dropped a bunch of, they lost a bunch of nukes, right? Repeatedly, that's what ended up killing the program, was they kept dropping nukes and causing environmental disasters, one in Spain and one in.

So let's get into the JCPOA. What is, you know, which is the whole point of your, your show. the deal. What is the current state of the Iran deal? What part is Iran adhering to and who else is involved beyond the United States? Yeah, so it ain't great. The deal is basically a deal between Iran and the international community represented by the United States. It used to be the EU, so it was the EU and three EU countries, but it was Germany, France, and the UK. And obviously the UK is not in the EU anymore. But the United States, three European countries, and then Russia and China. And what they really are representing is the UN Security Council.

The deal is in a really tough spot because the Trump administration ceased participating in it. We broke our obligations under the agreement and reimposed sanctions. And Iran responded, and honestly, people get really worked up about this. But I think this is what happens when someone screws you. You screw them back. That's just, I don't know, maybe I'm, other people seem to be bothered by this concept, but I'm a redneck from Illinois. And that's, That's what you do. So the Iranians have stopped complying with the deal in various steps. Basically, they have walked away from all of the commitments involving limits on their nuclear program. And now they've entered the more serious phase where they're actually scaling down the access of the

international inspectors who make sure that they're not misusing the technology. And they say, if the U.S. comes back into compliance, they'll come back into compliance. But Biden is pretty wary of the politics of this? And he says, no, you have to go first. And so we have a standoff. One thing I think I really want to stress here is Iran's perspective on all of this, because I think that Americans just extremely don't think about it. Can you walk us through what the last five years has been like for them? And what the logic of a country like Iran developing a nuclear weapon may be? Like, why would it look like a good idea for them to do it? Yeah, I think the place to start is by keeping in mind that Iran has poisonous, fractious politics that are just like our own. And so just like

I can't stand Donald Trump, there are a lot of Iranians who can't stand the current president, although he's a sort of more moderate figure. Like, they have the same divisions that we do. And so if you're the Iranians, there are, there's a group of people who basically says, look, the world hates us. The United States is implacably opposed to us. They would destroy our government in a moment's notice if they could. get away with it. And the only thing that keeps them at Bay is being strong and what's stronger than having a nuclear weapons capability. And those people actually, I believe, were running a nuclear weapons program up to 2003. You know, there are also people in Iran who say nuclear weapons are as

much a liability as they are an asset, that they are a very limited capability that brings a lot of international pressure. And that if Iran really wants to become strong, what it needs is to get sanctions off and it needs to engage with the international community and it needs to build up its science and technology. And those are people who think the nuclear energy program is great, but they look at weapons and they say, ah, there's actually more trouble than it's worth. And those are the two groups contending. And the way the JCPOA came about is Hassan Rohane, the current president, campaigned on getting sanctions relief. He said he was going to resolve the nuclear issue, get the sanctions off Iran. And that was incredibly appealing to millions of

Iranians who elected him. And they elected him twice. He can't run for another. term. But there's going to be a new Iranian president in June. And so now this fight basically is coming back again between people who say, look, this was a good deal. Trump was an aberration. We can put Humpty dumpy back together again. And we can get what we really want, which is lasting the country's isolation. There are people who like the country's isolation, right? The hardcore elements, they don't care about sanctions, right? They want a bomb. I think if you're looking at it from the Iranian perspective, it depends a little bit who you are. But the one thing that they both have in common is of them feels like they can really trust us. And like for good reason, because they can't.

Well, and beyond the diplomacy failing and what happened with Trump, there have been several incidents of violence in the past five years. Can you talk about some of those? Yeah. The United States and Iran have been killing each other for decades. It's not like we're in this environment where we get along great. The Iranians have supported a lot of proxy groups, have done really bad things. And we have our own, we have our own things that they're, that they're pretty annoyed about. The dark turn things took this past year, I would say, is that in the face of violence by Iranian proxy groups in Iraq, the Trump administration decided to kill a high-ranking general in the Revolutionary Guards. His name was Kassim Soleimani.

And he was like a big deal. If he hadn't died, I think he'd be running for president right now. And that triggered this enormous crisis. And I think people don't understand how dangerous it was because Iran responded to that by launching more than a dozen. I'd have to go back and recount them again. But a large number of missiles at Ainal Assad, a U.S. base in Iraq. And miraculously, no one was killed. And this led some Americans to say, oh, the Iranians missed on purpose, which is just,

if you know anything about firing a whole bunch of missiles at a base, like that's not a thing you can do. And it did enormous damage. And there was, I think, more than 100 traumatic brain injuries. And the Iranians were gloating that they killed people. Happily, it seems that they didn't kill anyone. But I think that was a very dangerous moment where they were deliberately trying to kill a significant number of American soldiers as retaliation. And they were expecting that we would retaliate back. And in the middle of that, hyped up Iranian missile crew shot down one of their own airliners. And it's horrible, right, because it's more than 100 innocent, you know, people, children who die, but in a weird way that de-escalated things. Because the IRGC had to come out and say,

yeah, we accidentally shot down one of our own airliners. And it took the bloodlust out of the moment. But this was a real moment where we killed an extremely important person to them. And they were out for blood and fully expecting the thing to escalate. That stuff could have gotten out of hand. So how much does it make them want to have a nuclear bomb? I think for some people, it's an incredible argument for a nuclear weapon. Look, I'm somebody who studies North Korea. So there are people in Iran who want a bomb, and the template for what they want is North Korea. North Korea is a country that had a deal with the United States, just like the JCPO, just like the JCPOA in 1994. They didn't follow it quite as well. And the Bush administration

pulled out in 2003 promising just like Trump did that they were going to get a better deal. And instead we got six North Korean nuclear weapons tests and a bunch of ICBMs parading through the streets. So that's where this could end up if we don't play it right. What about Libya? Oh, Libya. Gosh, I had so many arguments with friends of mine in the Obama administration when they were doing this. It's a funny story with North Korea because people forget when the Bush administration struck that deal with Gaddafi. One thing they tried to do was convince Gaddafi to go talk to the North Koreans to tell him to tell us.

them that we always keep our promises. And when Gaddafi died, the North Koreans didn't let us forget that. So I think that if you are a hawk sitting in Iran, it's pretty easy to go, okay, we tried it your way. We negotiated the deal. And it was a great deal. It was a fair deal for everybody. We gave up a lot. They gave up a lot. And what did they do? They screwed you. Just they screwed Gaddafi. And you know who they haven't screwed? Who they haven't invaded? Who they haven't killed? The guys of the nuclear weapons in North Korea. That's what I want. I'm like, I don't like nuclear I'm a disarmament person. But you've got to admit, that's a pretty good case, right? If you had to do a public debate, which side would you rather have? I think it's much easier to make the case for the

bomb if you're Iran than to make the case against it. And they also have the example of India and Pakistan who didn't have weapons until fairly recently. And now both sides have them. And it doesn't seem like there have been any consequences. Is that right? No, that's exactly right. And in fact, it's the opposite of consequences because the Indians calculated that eventually we'd get over it. And we did, right? The Bush administration negotiated a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement that required literally waiving a U.S. law preventing it. It was an enormous lobbying effort by the Indian government, but they got it. And they're getting basically exceptions. So somehow India has achieved a bunch of carve-outs that there are a country that is not allowed

to have nuclear weapons under the NPT, but has nuclear weapons, but doesn't have to any of the rules that everybody else does. And the Indian calculation was like, we're big enough, we're important enough, you'll freaking get over it. I'm not sure Iran is that big and that important, but you can certainly see how people would tell themselves, look. If you can make an exception for those people, you're going to, in the end, make an exception for us. This is a complicated question that goes into a lot of history. Why are we so hung up in America on Iran specifically? I mean, I think it's the hostages. And I mean, look, we have our own challenges in America. We have ample amounts of racism that are easy to weaponize. And the fact that they're Muslims is scary to a lot of people.

But I think at the end of the day, you know, I often sit and I look and I say, how is it that we, that we find ourselves in a situation where we look at Saudi Arabia and we look at Iran? And one is our best friend and one is our worst enemy. And I think the actual answer is that they're both a mix. Like, I'm not saying that the Saudis shouldn't be our allies. I'm just saying that they're like things I like about them and things I don't. And I feel the same way about the Iranians. But they are locked in this deadly enmity and we are locked in it too on the side of Saudi Arabia. And I think that has a lot to do with the hostility that both the Iranian revolutionaries in 1979 felt toward us because of things they had perceived that we had done. And our ability

to return that hostility. And like, it is always really hard to make peace because they've done a lot of really shitty things. Now, they would point out, like, we have done a lot of really shitty things. You always make excuses for yourself, right? You say, well, that was an accident or, well, you did that thing first. And we think we're really good people and we only do really shitty things when we're pushed. They feel that way about themselves. But it's hard. It is really hard to forgive and move on. And I think you honestly saw that with Gaddafi. Was it in our interest to try to bring that government out of the cold and get it to end its support for terrorism? Yeah, absolutely.

Did it absolutely suck that you had to look at the victims of their terrorist attacks and say, boys will be boys. We're moving on. Yeah, that sucks. And so I get why we're locked into these cycles of conflict. But I also recognize that if you don't break out of them, all you do is create more and more murders. It's interesting, though, also they have. have a gerontocracy ruling over there. We have one here. And I would just go back a little further than

you did, which is the hostage situation came up because we backed the Shah for years. And the Shah wasn't a particularly good guy. And I think a lot of the players who are still on the stage, they remember that stuff really well. I think it's personal for some of them. Or is that going too far? No, I don't think that's going too far at all. In fact, I teach a really tedious class on U.S. policy toward nuclear weapons in Asia. And it's historical, and it starts with Truman. And every class period, I try to illustrate to the students how the arguments that are being made and the people making the arguments don't change as quickly as we think they do. And my favorite example of that is we do this case study involving Japan in 1969. And the students all feel like it's a million years

ago. But the prime minister is Shenzhou Abe's great uncle. And Shinsul Abbe is like an old teenager during this time. And his great uncle is actually motivated because he doesn't want to end up like his older brother, who is also the prime minister, who is Shinsu Abe's grandfather. And so it's, yeah, that's 50 years ago. But 50 years ago is a human, is not a full human lifetime. And so I think that there are still Iranian Americans who fled, who like Cubans in Florida, want their stuff back, which like I get. There are, though, there are still. still, you know, people who survived, I'm sure the torture at the hands of the Savak, which is the Shah's really vicious secret police.

And yeah, I don't know. I'm going to mess it up. But what was that thing? It was Faulkner who said, like, the past isn't even really the past. Yeah, I don't know the exact line, but I think that's the general thrust. Yeah. Now I'm thinking about Faulkner's hot toddy recipe for some reason. All right.

We're going to pause there for a break. We are on with Jeffrey Lewis talking about the deal, both his podcast and the Iran deal. All right, Angry Planet listeners. Welcome back. We are talking to Jeffrey Lewis. So what is the state of Iran's nuclear program if it even has one? Like, what does it actually look like? We're guessing a little bit.

But as best we can tell, Iran had a honest to goodness, no-shit nuclear weapons program that was running in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And owing to a variety of factors, the lid on that program got blown. and became a public matter. And there's a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that the Bush administration released in unclassified form, or at least the summer, in classified form. That said, in the wake of the international pressure that Iran faced, they halted this program. And halt is like a weird word.

It's supposed to be like a military metaphor for a march so you can halt, but you can resume. I'm like of the era of like mixtape, so I would say paused. and that kind of freezes things in amber. And so everything that we've seen since then has been about Iran having a civilian nuclear energy program and the international community trying to get to the bottom of just how far the nuclear weapons program went. And as best I can tell, what happened was the Iranians

really did pause the program. They boxed everything up. And they stuck all the documents in the CDs at a warehouse in Tehran, where it came to the attention of some enterprising Israeli agents. I who scooped everything up and absconded with it. So I think we are now at the point where we know that they had this program before 2003. We know that it got paused. And we're pretty sure that at the time of the JCPOA, it was still in some kind of stasis.

That's been a couple of years now, and things have been really ugly. And I think if they resume the program, they're not necessarily going to tell us. And like, where is it? I think they have an option. I think they've been a year away from a bomb for a decade. They have an option. I think they still have not chosen to exercise that option. But I worry if this goes on long enough, they will.

And if they do, they can. There's nothing we can really do about it short of invading and occupying the country. Is it hard to make a nuclear bomb? You said they're about a year away? No. North Korea could do it. I always remind people like the U.S. made the first nuclear weapon, and we did.

did two different designs in a span of just a few years in 1945. And yeah, we spent a ton of money and we had the world's best scientists, but once you do it, right, it becomes vastly easier for everyone else because what can be done and in general terms what the right solutions are. Now, you still have to work them out for yourselves, but there is a world of difference between sitting in the 1940s and saying, would this work? Versus today where you say, I know this will work. I just have to do the calculation. I think we've seen pretty consistently, no one's ever, there's an asterisk here, but to a first approximation, no one has ever tested a nuclear weapon and not gotten it to go off first time. The North Koreans got a little greedy and tried to make a

fancy nuclear weapons so they didn't get everything they wanted, they quickly fix that problem. So, if everybody passes the exam, is it a hard exam? That's depressing. I told you, I'm fun at parties. No, I know, no. This is the kind of show we do, actually. This is the mood we aim for. All right, so what does the Middle East look like if Iran gets a nuclear weapon?

Yeah, it's hard to say, the reason that I hesitate is when the Israelis absconded with all those documents, which like whatever you think of the political implication of releasing them, it's a hell of a story, right, to just exfiltrate all that stuff. The nuclear weapons program that the Iranians describe is incredibly modest. It was going to be like a South Africa like program. South Africa had nuclear weapons in the 80s. And it was going to be like, you build six and you put them in a basement. And you don't tell anybody about them unless you really need them. And if they stick to that, we might not ever even know. But the scenario one worries about. And like, that's like the best possible scenario where it's, whatever, they're in a basement

somewhere and someday you work it out. But the worst possible scenario is what I call the ski helmet problem. Like, skiing is super dangerous. And if you put on a helmet, you're safer. And some people, normal, reasonable people, go ahead and ski down the slopes the same way and enjoy their new enhanced level of safety and security. Other people put the ski helmet on and become a demon. They choose to spend that safety on being crazy. And there was some research in the 1960s, which I'm not sure really pans out, but the original research involved seatbelts.

The idea is early adopters of seatbelts. Instead of getting to the grocery store safely, they got there five minutes earlier by driving like ludicics. The question is, if Iran has nuclear weapons and it feels safer, does it just feel safer and therefore it chills out? Or does it think now we can do a lot more nasty stuff in Iraq and Yemen and Syria? because what are you going to do about it? And interestingly, Saddam Hussein was asked this question. What would you do if Iraq had a nuclear weapon? And his argument was act crazy. He said, we will drown

Israel in a river of its own blood. And I thought to myself, like, Saddam Hussein, not a safe driver. And the question that we have is, would the Iranians be safe drivers or not? He's also not terribly bright. No, and I guess he wasn't terribly bright, but to actually say, hey, I'm going to drive off a cliff if we get nuclear weapons. Then you have to go in and get him. And that to me is the ultimate insight about nuclear weapons, which is we can come up with really fancy deterrence theories about how this is all going to work out. But at the end of the day, the people making decisions about nuclear weapons are human beings. And have you met the humans? A crazier, more irrational species I have yet to encounter. And in Saddam's case, one of the reasons

he just stood there and did nothing as he was deposed is he was convinced that George Bush wouldn't go into Baghdad, which is like insanity. We all knew George Bush was going into Baghdad, but he had built his own information environment and not his life and the life of his family depended on him understanding something that every single American understood and he couldn't pull it off. You add nuclear weapons to a situation like that, and I think the Supreme Leader in Iran and frankly, certain U.S. presidents, every decision maker has information limits. And those limits are so dangerous when they involve nuclear weapons. What's your view on why we haven't had nuclear war then? I don't know. It's obviously the choice is, do you believe it's a luck, or do you think that

it's the strength of deterrence? And this all comes down to how you feel about close calls. When you look at a close call, an incredibly dangerous crisis that could spiral out of control, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, you can either look at it and be like, the system functioned as planned, or you could look at it and be like, holy crap, someone is trying to tell me something. And I think that ultimately comes down to one's just perspective on life. So what I would say is I can't really answer. I suspect it's probably a mixture of deterrence probably is pretty strong. I don't think anybody is going to use nuclear weapons carelessly. But at the same time, I think there's a little luck because we see people do stuff that they don't mean to all the time. And so the place I come out is, it's not that I think that there's

going to be a nuclear war tomorrow or the day after. It's just that I know that if we decide to run this risk forever, sooner or later our luck will run out. If we can pivot to a different part of the world, building on irrationality and relatively modest nuclear supplies, can we talk about the Tuesday a hearing with Senator Tom Cotton. Tell the audience what happened and why it's bad. I will just say it's bad. I will make that judge the call. Tom Cotton has this idea he calls nuclear overmatch. And I don't really understand what this means, which is weird because it's my full-time job to understand this stuff. But it's some combination of somebody else has more nuclear weapons or better nuclear weapons. And that's bad. And we can talk about why or he thinks why. And he was really

pushing Admiral Davidson on this idea of what would happen if China had this idea of nuclear overmatch. And Admiral Davidson says, you know, they'd have to like quadruple their stockpile to get to there. And I actually- Real quick, can you just to lay out the numbers? Can you tell what we think China has and how many America has? So China has, it's like 100, 200. And the United States is limited by treaty to 1,550. Sorry, 1,000, 1,000, 1,000.5.5.000. 750 warheads on a smaller number of missiles. But that counts every bomber as one, even though bombers carry 12 or more, depending on the loading. So in arms control, 1550 is about 1,700. So, you know, like, 1700 is actually, last I checked, 200 times 4 doesn't get you

to 1,700. But I think that if I got in trouble, because I said it, Admiral Davidson, it said sex tupil. Tom Cotton might have gotten the wrong idea. The point is, Cotton is pushing this idea that the Chinese are going to catch up to us. And they're not anywhere near us yet. And what he says at the end, which is what I think is so dangerous, is he says, winning an arms race is expensive, but it's better than losing a war. And to me, that is such a terrifying statement because, first, there is no winning a nuclear arms race. There's no finish line.

Paul Warnke, famously compared the nuclear arms race to two apes on a treadmill to nowhere. There's no idea of what it means to win a nuclear arms race because there isn't a finish line. But what does it mean to win a nuclear war? That's also just insane notion. I can imagine reasons we might have a war with China. I cannot imagine any conflict that we could have where either party would lose a couple of cities to a nuclear weapon and think, we won, that was worth it. That's a W. Now, there used to be this article in D.C.,

these two guys said if you could keep casualties down to 20 million, that'd be a W. Which, by the way, it's the same number in Dr. Strangelove, where Buck Turgensen says that, we wouldn't, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair must. Come on. So there is this persistent idea that having more or better nuclear weapons, that that is worth doing because it is worth restarting the arms race because you can somehow win it. And that is embedded in the idea that you can win a nuclear war. And to me, that's just like all fantasy talk.

Aren't we at the point, though, even now after the Cold War and the treaties and all that? Couldn't we just blow everything up anyway? We're adequately armed, I'm assuming. You make the rubble bounce. That's, look, there are, like, people get paid a lot of money to come up with these reasons. So I shouldn't be too negative about them. People have the idea, like, first of all, your force has to be survivable. And we love things that are redundant.

So we, whatever is survivable at sea, we have to have that same case. capability on land. There was this crazy idea in the 70s that I love for its utter insanity that said that the real way to measure who had the stronger nuclear force was after the first exchange. It's like, they go, we go, and then you count up the numbers. You know, it's like, wait a second, what? There's nobody left to count. Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's no one left to count. There was the general who famously said if at the end of the war, there are no Russians and one American, I count that as victory. He's entitled to that opinion.

I just don't happen to share it. There's overkill, right? There's actually a word for it. It's called overkill. And we did it once before, and Tom Cotton wants to do it again. No, he's charming and witty and likes birthday cake. The Washington Post did a piece that made him seem sympathetic. And it was focused on he and his wife's love of birthday cake, even when it isn't their birthday.

That's the kind of sour note that we like to go out on here. But I do have one more. Jason, do you have any more questions, actually? There was one thing that I wanted to ask about, which is the Iranian missile situation. Oh, yeah. Because I think they're pretty good at missiles. Oh, yeah. They put a satellite up.

This is if they did get a nuclear bomb. One of the questions is always, they couldn't get it here. Yeah. Now, they haven't built a rocket yet. They could get it here. But they've built rockets that don't leave any doubt that they could build such a rocket if they want it, if that makes any sense. The Supreme Leader put a limit on them that said, Iran's missiles aren't going to have a range of more than about 2,000 kilometers. And what he really

pressed, and this has been interesting bureaucratic thing, the IRGC, which has the missiles, wanted increasingly long-range missiles because you want missiles or penises and everybody wants a bigger one. But the Supreme Leader said, no, you're going to do accuracy. And so they have an incredibly large capacity to make missiles. And they have produced a large number of them. and they could really readily make an ICBM if they want. But what's really interesting, and we saw it at Aynal Assad, is how much they have invested in making accurate missiles. And one thing we actually did is we got a high-resolution satellite imagery of the base

and found all the craters and went and estimated what they were probably shooting at and calculated the accuracy of their missiles. And the Iranians had bragged that they had an accuracy of 10, 15 meters for their missiles, and that's basically what we found, which is 10 or 15 meters accuracy when you, you're talking about 700 to 1,000 kilometers is pretty good. So yeah, they don't have such a missile at the moment, and they have said that they're not going to build one at the moment. And I don't think we should be too nasty and cynical about that, because if they change their mind, they could do it real fast. This brings up another thing that I think is really interesting

about the deal in what you do in general, satellite imagery and open source intelligence more broadly. How has that changed the world and what you do? It raises the question of what it is I do, because what I do today or the way I do my job, I couldn't do 20 years ago. And actually, a lot of what I do is motivated by the sick feeling I had during the run-up to the Iraq War. Because, like, I understand that political actors have an incentive to say everybody was fooled. I got to tell you, not everybody was fooled. Like, lots of people in civil society where this case seems weak. And there was a lot of,

if you could see what we could see, then you'd change your mind. And it's like, yeah, I've heard that before. That's a crappy argument. But what could we say? We couldn't do anything. They're the ones with all the pictures. They're the ones with all the sources.

They're the ones with all the little animator drawings. Like we on the outside had to be like, well, we don't think your evidence is very good. And they just whatever, hippie. And then you invade and there's nothing there. And so for me, that triggered this just desire. to see if we could create what really is the equivalent of a public intelligence function. Could we do many of the same things that are done in a classified basis, but with open information

that everyone could see? And a core part of that is satellite imagery. There's a famous case in a rock of a facility that was incorrectly described by a defector. And if we had the satellite imagery, we would have seen that there was a wall that made it impossible for him to be telling the truth. So just being able to see with our own eyes what people are talking about is super valuable, but it's not really just imagery. We creep on people's social media profiles. We build computer models of missiles to see how far they fly. We have a whole program just in measuring things, like measuring how big something is in a picture, measuring how fast a missile is moving in a video. We have really tried as much as we possibly can to use commercial, public, open information

to replicate those functions. And yeah, for me, it's, it is a completely different way of knowing about the world. We are in season two of the deal. What can we expect in the next couple episodes? We're about to drop an episode on medical isotope production in Iran, which doesn't sound all that exciting, but it's really fascinating. It's an interview with an Iranian who came to the United States and helped invent the PET scan. so that we talk about why in the United States we have nuclear medicine and why the Iranians might want nuclear medicine.

Because nuclear weapons, it's not just about killing millions of people. That same technology can save millions of people. And we're also going to look at some of the other factors. We're planning an episode on inspectors, which is turning out to be a little hard to put together. And I think we'll probably end up talking about that Iranian missile strike against Ayn al-Assad. But at the moment, season two, it's just one episode and it really is focused on this question of, why do we take? the easy things and make them so hard. Jeffrey Lewis, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, that's all for this week.

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