Front Burner - Russia, America and a new nuclear arms race

Episode Date: February 7, 2019

Nuclear weapons expert and Obama adviser Jon Wolfsthal on how the treaties that once prevented a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, could be unravelling today.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Michelle Parisi, the woman behind Alone, A Love Story.

Season 3 is coming out on February 5th. Love, sex, travel, motherhood, it's all in there. You don't expect anything less from me by now, do you? So put on some tea, make some space under the blankets, and get ready to hunker down with the final season of Alone, A Love Story. alone a love story. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Today, I want to zoom in on one moment in Tuesday night's State of the Union when Donald Trump talked about pulling out of a treaty with Russia. It's called the INF Treaty and it was signed back in 1987. Decades ago, the United

States entered into a treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capability. At the time, the Cold War was ending and decades of terrifying escalation were receding over the horizon. And the U.S. and Russia were starting to think about a world where they weren't trying to destroy each other all the time and destroy the planet while they were at it. So to bring down the temperature, they agreed to a series of treaties banning all kinds of nuclear weapons. Maybe the most important treaty was the INF, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. We have listened to the wisdom of

in an old Russian maxim, dovii no provi, trust but verify. So Donald Trump says the U.S. is withdrawing from the treaty because Russia has repeatedly violated its terms. Canada and our NATO allies are backing him. Trump also said that if a new treaty can't be reached, the U.S. will outspend every other country when it comes to weapons. Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others, or perhaps we can't. With all this news, a lot of really smart people are wondering if we're about to see another dangerous nuclear arms race.

Today I'm talking to John Wolfstahl. He was a nuclear weapons expert in the Obama administration, working on non-proliferation issues. This is FrontBurner. Hi, John. Hi, how are you? Good. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So as I just mentioned, on Tuesday night, Donald are you? Good. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.

So as I just mentioned, on Tuesday night, Donald Trump and his State of the Union reiterated that the U.S. is going to pull out of this treaty. And I want to get a sense today of the roots of this treaty. I know by the late 80s, Ronald Reagan is president and the Cold War is coming to an end. The U.S. has about 23,000 nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union's over 30,000. Each one of these could destroy an entire city, were many more times powerful than the weapons the U.S. dropped at the end of World War II in Japan. The two sides were engaged in a full-on arms race. Everything the Soviet Union did was seen as a direct threat to the United States and

NATO. Every response that we made to those threats were seen as a direct threat to the United States and NATO. Every response that we made to those threats were seen as a threat by Russia. And we were in this cycle of arms racing that threatened to spiral completely out of control. And it was in the 1980s that Ronald Reagan campaigned on being a true cold warrior, was really going to confront and get rid of the Soviet Union and engage in regime change. He famously joked at a press conference that, you know, the missiles start flying in five minutes, which almost set off a nuclear war because the Soviets thought he was serious. My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.

You talk about this close call when Reagan made that speech. What are some examples of some other close calls that we saw in the 1980s? Yeah, we've had a series of them. And, you know, I think inherent in these is the false premise that human beings are smart enough all the time to manage the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. I mean, the classic case is the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Good evening, my fellow citizens. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.

The Soviet Union tried to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba, which would put them within 90 miles of U.S. territory. They got caught. Shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States. We then threatened to invade Cuba, and the Soviets threatened to retaliate with nuclear weapons.

We were able to avoid that conflict by some creative diplomacy. This is a copy of President Kennedy's letter to Premier Khrushchev, and perhaps the most important words in it are in the last paragraph, of President Kennedy's letter to Premier Khrushchev, and perhaps the most important words in it are in the last paragraph, where President Kennedy says, we now step back from danger. But we've had instances where in the 1980s we had a U.S. nuclear alert started because somebody put in the wrong training tape at North American Air Defense. Computers inside the North American Air Defense Command in Colorado signaled that the Russians

had launched a surprise nuclear attack. It was all a mistake, of course. Instead of having a tape that ran the routine program, it was a tape that looked like the Soviets had launched. So we see lots of these small instances where neither side really wanted to provoke anything. But as John Kennedy famously said in the Cuban Missile Crisis, there's always someone somewhere

who doesn't get the word and does the wrong thing at the wrong time. And that's when things can get out of control. That sounds terrifying. Can we talk about these intermediate range missiles, the missiles that this treaty signed in 1987 essentially banned? I know there was a worry at the time that these could be the hair trigger for war. It's hard for us to imagine this now, but during the Cold War, Europe was divided right down the middle along the Berlin Wall.

The United States had troops in West Germany and the Soviets and Warsaw Pact, we thought, poised to roll through the Fulda Gap in Germany and invade the West. And so into this mix where you had troops in very close proximity, the United States and Russia both had thousands of battlefield nuclear weapons. And in the 1970s, the Soviets replaced an older generation of land-based, short-range tactical nuclear weapons with something called the SS-20. It was a missile that could go about 1500-2000 kilometers. It had three warheads on it and the United States and NATO saw this as a provocation and they decided to replace their aging missiles with a new generation of both

ballistic missiles that fly very quickly. Launched from West Germany, the new Pershing could attack targets in the Soviet Union. Its navigational and targeting system gives it a high degree of accuracy. And nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, which were brand new and that couldn't be picked up by Soviet radar. This cruise missile, the Tomahawk, is being loaded into a submarine for a trial test. Because of its small size, this type of cruise can be carried on conventional Navy submarines. And so we suddenly had a situation where the United States or Russia could launch weapons and targets could be destroyed in five or ten minutes.

Wow. And that undermined what we refer to as crisis stability. In a crisis, you want the default to be to pull back, not to search forward. And these missiles undermine that stability. And did this treaty signed in 1987, did it solve that problem? It did get rid of about 2,500 missiles. And it wasn't just about getting rid of these missiles in Europe. There were some hardliners in the Reagan administration who took the original proposal that neither the United States or Russia should have these missiles in Europe and said, well, look, Russia might go for that because they

can move all these missiles over to East Asia and threaten Japan. So let's have a global ban. And to their shock, Gorbachev said, yes, that's a great idea. Let's have a global ban. And by Mikhail Gorbachev, of course, you mean the then leader of the Soviet Union. Right. Up until 1987, any time we went to the Russians or Soviets and said, look, we want to negotiate arms control, but we have to be able to inspect this. We have to be able to go and be on the ground and see these missiles and see them destroyed. And the Soviet Union was a closed country. There's a reason Beatles albums and blue jeans were a hot commodity because you couldn't just import things into the Soviet Union.

And again, to our surprise, Gorbachev said, yeah, let's have on-site inspection. Let's be able to verify with each other that these things are actually being destroyed. And that opened up not only getting rid of these missiles and verifying it, but then a couple of years later in 1991 opened up the new agreement called the START treaty, the Strategic Reduction Treaty. We signed the START treaty as testament to the new relationship emerging between our two countries and the promise of further progress toward lasting peace. Which capped both sides to having no more than 6,000 nuclear weapons each and allowed for Russians to come and inspect in the United States and Americans to go inspect in Russia. And this is where Reagan's favorite line, trust but verify, came in. And that was the principle that was broken open by the INF Treaty.

The maxim is, dovii, no provi, trust but verify. You repeat that at every meeting. And how difficult was it for Gorbachev and Reagan to get to that first treaty in the first place? Oh, it was excruciating. I mean, when the United States announced that it was going to deploy these new missiles in Europe in the early 1980s, NATO almost ripped itself apart. You had protesters scaling the fences at air bases in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands where these things were going to go in. You had millions of people marching in the United States and in Europe against these missiles and against the arms race.

West German police were out in force for the demonstration at the U.S. European headquarters near Stuttgart. Some said Germans had remained silent during the Nazi tyranny and they don't want to make the mistake of silence again. So you saw President Reagan come in ready to do battle and be the ultimate cold warrior and because of the mass movement and because of the risk to NATO then pivoted in 1985 and said, let's negotiate a deal to get rid of these missiles, or at least get them out of Europe.

We are for, and have for several years now, been advocating a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons. So is it fair to say that the INF Treaty led to the Strategic Reduction Treaty, which really ushered in a period of time in the 90s where we saw a stable peace between these two superpowers. You can go further than that. And a lot of people feel the INF Treaty was the watershed moment that led to the end of the Cold War. Okay. That Gorbachev recognized, as Reagan did,

that you could not win and therefore should not fight a nuclear war. Both sides said, you know what, this is crazy. Neither side is going to win this. Let's pull back and let's change the nature of the relationship. And then, of course, that led to further erosion in Soviet control and to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Gorbachev quit live on satellite TV. As a result of the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the USSR. Maybe we could zoom forward now and to recent years. Just quickly, you were in the Obama White House and what was your job there?

So I had two jobs. For three years, I was Vice President Biden's nuclear advisor. years, I was Vice President Biden's nuclear advisor. And then for two and a half years, I was a special assistant to President Obama and the senior director on the National Security Council for Arms Control and Nonproliferation. So I was essentially the president and vice president's main advisor on nuclear weapons related issues. And when you were there in sort of 2014, around that time, what was your sense of how Russia was complying with this treaty, with the INF Treaty, you know, on nuclear issues in general? By 2014, it was clear that Russia was violating this agreement. The United States publicly stated in 2013 that Russia had illegally tested a ground-launched cruise missile that could go more than 500

kilometers. That's the minimum range that's banned by the treaty. And we had been working for actually a year before that with Russia to try to bring them back into compliance. So by that point, it was clear Russia was cheating. What wasn't clear was whether or not Russia had any interest in saving this treaty and we could actually bring Russia back into the fold. The working premise in the Obama administration was that was probably unlikely. But because the small number of missiles that Russia had deployed, didn't change the strategic balance between the United States and Russia, we didn't need a military response. And therefore, we could engage in diplomatic and economic pressure to bring Russia back in. And in the intervening years, has any of that diplomatic or economic pressure worked?

I think it's fair to say that the Obama administration efforts didn't succeed. We were not effective in getting Putin to change his mind and to reverse course. I give the Trump administration credit for declassifying the information that was very useful in uniting NATO to confront Russia, to convince our NATO allies that there was a violation here. They now admit that there is a missile, but they say it's below the range that's banned. For years, Russia said they would never display their systems because they hadn't violated the treaty. Russia's now offered to show this missile to American inspectors. Russia's clearly trying to position itself as the reasonable party here. And again, because the United States doesn't have a military requirement to respond yet,

I think we have time to work this problem, which is why withdrawing from the treaty strikes me as being both premature and counterproductive. Okay, so can we talk about why you think it might be premature or counterproductive? I mean, Donald Trump has pulled out of this treaty, all of our NATO allies are backing him on it, because they say that Russia is responsible for the demise of this treaty. So why do you think this isn't a good move? Look, I would have no problem if the Joint Chiefs of Staff came to us and said, Russia has these missiles, we have no way to deter them or respond unless we have some of our own, then I think it would be a closed case. But they haven't said that. And so the question is not so much,

what's the military impact? It's what's the political and strategic impact? What Russia wants and what Putin has been trying to do by supporting President Trump is to divide and conquer. He wants to sow discord in NATO, and he wants to create these tensions in the alliance so that we get weaker since he can't get stronger. The NATO allies, particularly in Canada, in Germany, and the Netherlands that supported this move, they did so because they thought the threat of withdrawal would convince Russia that they had to come to the table. And that by supporting the United States, NATO allies would convince America that we could do better together than we could divided, and that the US was serious about

saving the treaty. What they didn't factor in was that the president's national security advisor, John Bolton, who has been recently described as an arms control serial killer, relishes destroying these treaties. He has a string of agreements dating back to the 1990s and 2000s that he's killed. And why? What's his thinking behind this? There are a couple of reasons that he's put forward. He's been very transparent. He doesn't believe that international law is binding. He believes that the United States should not be constrained in nuclear agreements because our intentions are good and therefore our possession of nuclear weapons is a stabilizing force in the world. And lastly, he doesn't believe that American sovereignty should be constrained by international agreements. The United States makes the UN work when it wants it to work. And that is exactly the way it should be because the only question, the only question for the United States is what's in our national interest.

This is the man who said we could get rid of 10 floors of the United Nations. The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today, it would make a bit of difference. So, you know, he's now found a willing vessel in the president who can be easily convinced with an argument, Russia's cheating, therefore it's a bad agreement, therefore we should get out of it. It is the American position that Russia's in violation. It is Russia's position that they're not in violation. So one has to ask, how do you convince the Russians

to come back into compliance with obligations they don't think they're violating? Is it possible that getting out of this treaty also gives a gift to Russia in a way? Like, can Vladimir Putin turn around and use this for propaganda purposes in some way? Not only could he, but he has. You know, it's a nuclear get out of jail free card. Putin no longer is under pressure for violating the treaty, and he gets to keep his missiles. And the United States is seen as welcoming a new arms race. And President Trump played into that on Tuesday night when he basically said, if there's going to be an arms race, then let there be an arms race. That's not the way to win hearts and minds and to keep our NATO allies united behind us.

Right. That moment in the speech. Am I right? It's this one where he says that that possibly we could create a new treaty, one that includes China. Or perhaps we can't, in which case we will outspend and out innovate all others by far. all others by far. Yeah, and this has been a routine line by President Trump since even before he was elected. And it's the mind of somebody who simply refuses to acknowledge that nuclear weapons and the threats to use them come with a cost. There are arguably benefits to having nuclear weapons. Many people believe they have deterred aggression and can keep the peace. But reasonable minds can at least recognize that there's a danger to these weapons through accident, through miscalculation, or simply the consequence of their use. How much do you think people should be worried about this, this possibility that we could see

a new arms race? I think people need to wake up and recognize that we're already in an arms race. The fundamental basis for stability between the Soviet Union and the United States was that both sides would remain vulnerable to a nuclear strike by the other. Nobody nukes the other because they know they're going to get nuked back. In 2002, when the United States got out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned nationwide missile defenses, the Russians said, well, wait a second, you're going to make yourself protected against our retaliation. That gives you the ability to strike at us first, and we can't deter you. That touched off an arms race that we're now seeing come into full force. And I do think over the next 10 years, we're going to see a tremendous increase in the number, the types, and the sophistication of nuclear weapons. Do you think where we are now, is it a reflection of the failure from multiple administrations? Or is this just coming to a head now?

Well, you know, I think, as we say, there's plenty of blame to go around. Quite frankly, I'm not worried so much about how we got here. I think there are lessons there. I think the question is, how do we effectively manage these threats going forward? And I think we need to reaffirm with the Russians the fundamental basis that ended the Cold War in the first place, which is that a nuclear war can't be won and should never be fought. If we can come to that kind of basic agreement between the United States and Russia, then I think all manner of other things are possible. But if Russia decides that, you know what, we're so conventionally inferior that we need to make these nuclear threats and we need it, then we have to have a much larger strategic conversation with our allies about how we deter that and how we stabilize the world. I'm not sure that putting INF range missiles in Europe is the right answer to that, but I think we have to have

a broader conversation about what that world looks like. Right. So we essentially need to get back to the place that Reagan and Gorbachev were all those years ago. If in the United States, we can come back to a place where we recognize that nuclear war would be a disaster and that nuclear threats undermine our security, then I think we at least have a chance for improving the situation. John, thank you so much for this incredibly informative and also terrifying conversation. Well, I'm sorry to terrify people. But, you know, we always say that the best way to deal with these dangers is to do something. And we ended the Cold War once because the public cared about it and forced their leaders to take it seriously. And the hope is that we'll do that again. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

We'll be back in a second. Discover what millions around the world already have. Audible has Canada's largest library of audiobooks, including exclusive content curated by and for Canadians. Experience books in a whole new way, where stories are brought to life by powerful performances from renowned actors and narr Canadians. Experience books in a whole new way where stories are brought to life by powerful performances from renowned actors and narrators. With the free Audible app, you can listen anytime, anywhere, whether you're at home, in the car,

or out on a jog. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. During his State of the Union address, Trump also talked about another nuclear power, North Korea. He announced he'll be holding a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the end of February. Nuclear testing has stopped, and there has not been a missile launch in more than 15 months. Despite Trump's claims that his first meeting with Kim Jong-un would result in the denuclearization

of the Korean peninsula, a recently leaked confidential UN report suggests the opposite. The report says that the North Korean nuclear and missile program is intact and that North Korea's behavior hasn't changed. If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.

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