Making Sense with Sam Harris - #186 — The Bomb

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Fred Kaplan about the ever-present threat of nuclear war. They discuss the history of nuclear deterrence, U.S. first-strike policy, preventive war, limited nuclear war, tactical vs. strategic weapons, Trump’s beliefs about nuclear weapons, the details of command and control, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

When was the last time you thought about the prospect of nuclear war? I mean, seriously thought about it. And had even a semblance of an appropriate emotional response. I mean, just think about it. It's as though you've lived your whole life in a house that has been rigged to explode. And it's as rigged now as at any point in the last 75 years. rigged now as at any point in the last 75 years. In fact, the doomsday clock was just advanced closer to midnight than it has been at any point in the last 75 years. It now reads 100 seconds to midnight.

Now, whether you put much significance in that warning, just take a moment to consider that the people who focus on this problem are as worried now as they've ever been. But do you think about this? If I were to ask how long it's been since you worried that you might have some serious illness, or that your kids might, or how long has it been since you've worried about being the victim of crime, or how long has it been since you've worried about being the victim of crime, or worried about dying in a plane crash. It probably hasn't been that long.

It might have happened last week, even. But I would wager that very few people listening to this podcast have spent any significant time feeling the implications of what is manifestly true. All of us are living under a system of self-annihilation that is so diabolically unstable that we might stumble into a nuclear war based solely on false information. In fact, this has almost happened on more than one occasion. Do you know the name Stanislav Petrov? He should be one of the most famous people in human history, and yet he's basically unknown. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces

who is widely believed to be almost entirely responsible for the fact that we didn't have World War III in the year 1983. This was at the height of the Cold War, and the Soviet Union had just mistaken a Korean passenger jet, Flight 7, for a spy plane, and shot it down after it strayed into Siberian airspace. and shot it down after it strayed into Siberian airspace. And the U.S. and our allies were outraged over this, and on high alert. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had performed multiple nuclear tests that month. And so it was in this context in which Soviet radar reported that the U.S. had launched five ICBMs at targets within the Soviet Union. And the data were checked and rechecked, and there was apparently no sign that they were

in error. And Stanislav Petrov stood at the helm. Now, he didn't have the authority to launch a retaliatory strike himself. His responsibility was to pass the information up the chain of command. But given the protocols in place, it's widely believed that had he passed that information along, a massive retaliatory strike against the United States would have been more or less guaranteed. And of course, upon seeing those incoming missiles, of which there would likely have been hundreds,

if not thousands, we would have launched a retaliatory strike of our own. And that would have been game over. Hundreds of millions of people would have died more or less immediately. would have died more or less immediately. Now, happily, Petrov declined to pass the information along. And his decision boiled down to mere intuition, right? The protocol demanded that he pass the information along, because it showed every sign of being a real attack. But Petrov reasoned that if the United States were really going to launch a nuclear first strike, they would do it with more than five missiles. Five missiles doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's also believed that any of the other people who could have been on duty that night, instead of Petrov, would have surely passed this information up the chain of command.

And killing a few hundred million people, and thereby wiping out the United States and Russia, as you'll soon hear, our retaliatory strike protocol entailed wiping out Eastern Europe and China, for good measure. This could have well-ended human civilization. So think about that. The year was 1983. One way to remember where we were there is just to remember the movies released that year. Here's the list. Return of the Jedi, Terms of Endearment, Flashdance, Trading Places, Risky Business, The Big Chill, Breathless, Scarface, Silkwood, Star 80, The Right Stuff, Rumblefish, The Outsiders, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

It was a good year for movies. But those were almost the last films ever made. Ironically, War Games and The Day After were also made that year. Those were both films that encapsulated this concern about nuclear war. And there have been several other incidents that were nearly this scary. For example, in 1960, U.S. radar equipment in Greenland interpreted a moonrise over Norway as a large-scale Soviet attack. And this put our own weapon systems on high alert. However, Nikita Khrushchev happened to be in New York City at the time, at the UN, and it was reasoned,

surely the Soviet Union wouldn't initiate a first strike with their leader on U.S. soil, right? There was even one occasion where a war game scenario got accidentally loaded into the computer at Strategic Air Command, and it was believed that 250 ballistic missiles had been launched at the U.S. And then it became clear that, in fact, it was 2,200 missiles that were incoming. Then it was only subsequently discovered that this was a false alarm. So when you think about human fallibility and errors of judgment, and realize that this ability to destroy the species is at all times, every minute of the day, in the hands of utterly imperfect people, and in certain cases, abjectly imperfect people.

Think of the current occupant of the Oval Office. It should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. And the infrastructure that is maintaining all of these systems on hair-trigger alert is aging, and in many cases run on computers so old that any self-respecting business would be embarrassed to own them. And yet, for some reason, almost no one is thinking about this problem. For some reason, I find that I've just begun thinking about it seriously for the first time in several decades. So I'm planning to do a series of podcasts on this topic, and this is the first. Today I'm speaking with Fred Kaplan. topic, and this is the first. Today I'm speaking with Fred Kaplan. Fred is a national security columnist for Slate and the author of five previous books, but his most recent is The Bomb,

Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. He's also written a previous book on this topic, The Wizards of Armageddon, and he's covered cyber war and other related issues. Armageddon, and he's covered cyber war and other related issues. He also holds a PhD in international relations from MIT. And in this conversation, we get into many aspects of this problem. We discuss the history of nuclear deterrence, the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. first strike policy, the distant and dismal prospect of fighting a limited nuclear war, tactical versus strategic weapons, President Trump's beliefs about nuclear weapons, the details of command and control in the U.S., and many other topics. And there's no paywall in this episode. I consider it a public service announcement. So, without further delay,

I bring you Fred Kaplan. I am here with Fred Kaplan. Fred, thanks for joining me. Oh, thank you. So you have written an all too timely book. I mean, the truth is it would have been timely last year or the year before that, or really any year that I've been alive. But we're approaching the 75th anniversary of the Trinity test and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And you have written The Bomb, Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, which is a really a fantastic introduction to one angle on this problem. There have been many books about this issue, but you really take the president's and administration's eye view of what it's like to think about this problem with fresh eyes every decade and how ineffectual that winds up being. And it really is a very strange look at what every president seems to experience coming into office. Right. Well, my first book, which I wrote in 1983,

which was called The Wizards of Armageddon, was about the group of defense intellectuals who invented these notions of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting. And it got into the administrations, and I got, you know, thousands of documents declassified back then and interviewed everybody. But at that time, for example, there was almost nothing declassified on what, say, President Kennedy thought or said about any of this. And now that I take another look at this subject in some depth 37 years later, and there's all kinds of things declassified. And that's what this book is about. It is about the presidents who confronted crises in which the use of nuclear weapons was contemplated seriously. And there were more of these crises than people

think, and how they thought through the issues and what they came up with. Yeah. So just to give people the context, anyone under the age of 65 who is hearing us right now has lived every moment of his or her life on the brink of possible annihilation by nuclear bombs, whether by intent or by accident. And the prospect of accident really has been ever present. There have been extraordinary accidents. And the fact that you and I can even have this conversation right now and haven't spent the last nearly 40 years just living in a toxic hellscape is really due to the restraint of one person. I mean, the Soviet commander Stanislav Petrov. This is a name that should be familiar to everyone. I mean, this is, if ever there was a

person who saved the career of our species single-handedly, it's him. And yet this name will be unknown to most people. This was a fairly tense moment in U.S.-then-Soviet relations, and he was the lead in the Soviet Air Defense Command that night, and he saw on the radar screens American ICBMs. What he should have done by all of his training was to alert his superiors. But he looked at it and he said, no, this can't be right. This has got to be something wrong. And so he did not tell his superiors, who might have taken a much more precipitous action, as, for example, you know, just a short while before this incident, air defense commanders saw what appeared to be a spy plane coming across Soviet territory.

It was, in fact, Korean Airlines Flight 7 and did shoot it down. But, you know, kind of like that movie War Games, where people think it's a real war, but in fact, it's just an exercise that's playing out in real life. No, there are, but, you know, it's not just people lower down than this. I would contend, for example, that President Kennedy did, in fact, single-handedly prevent World War III from breaking out during both the Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crises of 1961 to 62. widely known and were actually systematically concealed to some effect. Perhaps go into that for a second, because it gave us a sense that bluffing on the brink of nuclear war was a successful strategy because people thought that that's what had happened, that he just basically stared Khrushchev down and, you know, Khrushchev blinked.

But that's not quite what happened. That's not what happened. And, you know, Khrushchev blinked. But that's not quite what happened. That's not what happened. Most of us do know now, because it was revealed 20 years after the fact, that, in fact, on the final day of the crisis, Khrushchev proposed a deal, a secret deal. I will take out my missiles from Cuba if you, United States, take out your very similar missiles from Turkey. And Kennedy took the deal.

What isn't generally known, and I don't know why it isn't known, because you can listen to this whole exchange on tapes that were declassified 20 years ago, but that you will read about in maybe two or three other books, if that many. But Kennedy reads the proposal, and he says, and, you know, this is, he secretly tape recorded all of this. He goes, well, this seems like a pretty fair deal. And everybody around the table, all of his advisors, not just the generals, but the civilians too, Bobby Kennedy, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, all these paragons of good sense and reason, feverishly opposed this deal. NATO will be destroyed. The Turks will be humiliated.

Our credibility will be lost forever. And, you know, Kennedy let them talk. And then, you know, he said, well, you know, this was on a Saturday. The following Monday, the United States, the military was scheduled to start in the attack. There were going to be 500 air sorties a day against the missile sites in Cuba, followed four days later by an invasion. And Kennedy took the secret deal. He only told six people about this, though. And in fact, he put out the myth that there was no deal because this was the height of the Cold War. It would look like appeasement. One of the six people that he did not tell was his vice president, Lyndon Johnson,

who therefore went into the Vietnam War convinced by the lesson of Cuba, the false lesson of Cuba, that you don't negotiate. You stare them down. But here's what's even scarier. We later learned, this was not known at the time, that some of those missiles already had nuclear warheads loaded on them. So, you know, they could have been launched on warning. Another thing we didn't know until much later is that the Soviets had secretly deployed 40,000 troops on the island of Cuba, some of them armed with tactical nuclear weapons, to stave off an anticipated American invasion. Therefore, if anybody else around that table except John Kennedy had been president, or if he had said, yeah, you're right, this is a bad deal, let's proceed

with the plan, then there would have been a war with the Soviet Union without any question. have been a war with the Soviet Union without any question. Yeah, it's amazing. And so in your book, you report on the details of these encounters between each U.S. administration and the war planners, which are generally the Air Force and the Navy, and each incoming president, whether we're talking about Kennedy and his team with McNamara or Nixon and Kissinger or Clinton and Obama and their teams, each president comes into these meetings and for the first time is told what our first strike and second strike policies are. And each one, it sounds like, comes away absolutely appalled by what the doctrine actually is and committed from that day to changing it.

And yet, each has found himself more or less unable to change it in ways that fundamentally alter the game theoretic logic here. I mean, and these discussions are like really out of Dr. Strangelove. The most preposterous scenes in Dr. Strangelove are no more comedic than some of these exchanges, because these are plans that call for the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people on both sides. I mean, ever since Kennedy, we've been past the point where a first strike prevented the possibility of a retaliatory strike from the Soviet Union. So we're talking about protocols that are synonymous with killing 150, 200 million people on their side and losing that many on our side. And for the longest time, the protocol was to annihilate China and Eastern

Europe, whether they were even part of the initial skirmish with the Soviet Union. The U.S. policy throughout the 1950s and into some of the 60s, the policy, this wasn't just the Strategic Air Command, this was signed off on by President Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was that if the Soviet Union attacked West Germany or took over West Berlin, and this was at a time in the late 50s, early 60s, when we really didn't have any conventional armies in Europe. But the plan was that at the outset of the conflict, to unleash our entire nuclear arsenal at every target in the Soviet Union, the satellite nations of Eastern Europe. And as you point out, China, even if China wasn't involved in the war,

and it was inquired, well, how many people is this going to kill? And the estimate was about 285 million. And that probably was an underestimate. Now, what happened in the early 60s was that the Soviets started to develop their own nuclear arsenal that could hit us. And some people said, well, this policy is a little loony, quite aside from any moral qualms that you might have about it. If they invade Western Europe and we respond by nuking them, they're going to nuke us. This is a policy of suicide. And so beginning with Kennedy and McNamara, they tried to devise some plans to make the initial use of nuclear weapons, and by the

way, this was almost always our going first, more limited, something that was maybe just aimed at their military forces. And maybe that would halt them from responding, or they did respond. Maybe they would respond just by hitting our military forces, not killing zillions of people. Maybe we can bring this down. And one thing that I learned from researching this book is that, you know, Kennedy and McNamara would sign off on this new guidance, kind of setting new options, as they called them, limited nuclear options for the war plan. And basically, the commanders at Strategic Air Command in Omaha pretty much ignored it. They just didn't do it. They always wrote into the directive something like, to the extent this is militarily feasible, or when appropriate, you know, we will limit.

And, of course, they could rule, well, no, it's not militarily feasible and it's not appropriate. Not until really, and every president since tried to bring down the limited options, really not until practically the end of the war, the end of the Cold War, did this situation change? And then it changed through the most kind of bizarre and unlikely way, in a way that nobody else, as far as I know, has ever written about. So yeah, perhaps give us that change now and tell us what you understand our policy is today. Right. So the directed policy, by the time George H.W. Bush became president, and actually this was even a little toward the end of Reagan's presidency, the policy from Washington emphasized a lot of limited nuclear options.

You know, we're not going to throw off everything right away. So there was a civilian who was working for, of all people, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who was a different kind of guy back then than when he was when he became vice president, who had read all of these doctrinal things over the years about limited nuclear options. He goes to the latest SAC briefing about the nuclear war plan. He hears nothing about limited options. You know, what's going on here? So with the permission of Cheney, he and his team get very, very deep into the actual nuclear war plan, deeper than anybody, any civilian had ever done before. And they discovered some amazing things,

that there was an amount of overkill that nobody could have imagined. For example, and this was in the late 80s now, there were 700 nuclear weapons, most of them of a megaton in explosive power or more, that were aimed at Moscow. There was an air base, a Soviet air base in the Arctic Circle that couldn't even be used for three quarters of the year. 17 nuclear weapons were aimed at this base. There was an anti-ballistic missile site in Moscow that we learned after the Cold War couldn't have hit, couldn't have shot down anything.

There were 69 nuclear warheads aimed at this site. And then the real insight came to this. George H.W. Bush was negotiating some nuclear arms reduction treaty. And the civilian, whose name was Frank Miller, asked one of his contacts at SAC, he goes, listen, if we brought down the arsenal to such and such number of weapons, Could you still perform your mission? And the officer said, that's not the way we think about this. And he goes, well, what I mean? He goes, no, no, I understand what you mean, but we're not authorized to ask that question. What we do here is we take the weapons that we have and we allocate them to the targets that

we've listed. In other words, in the actual war plan, as opposed to what people were saying in Washington, at no point did anyone say, okay, how many of these things do we really need to accomplish whatever the aim is, you know, nuclear deterrence, nuclear war fighting, limited strikes, whatever you want to do, how many do we need? Nobody had asked that question. At one point, there was, whatever you want to do. How many do we need? Nobody had

asked that question. At one point, there was a SAC commander named General Jack Chain, who testified before Congress. He said, I need 10,000 weapons because I have 10,000 targets. And a lot of people thought that either he was kidding or he wasn't too bright, but no, that is how this was determined. It was a completely mechanical thing that utterly divorced from any sort of rational undertaking. Yeah. To give an even clearer sense of the redundancy and overkill in these plans, I forget which administration uncovered this, but they did an analysis of the targets in the Soviet Union, and they found a Hiroshima-sized city that was basically positioned similarly with respect to industry and infrastructure, and analyzed how much was targeted upon this one among hundreds of targets. And it was 600-fold the destructive power we brought down on Hiroshima that was allocated to this as yet nameless city.

Yeah, this was back in 1960 when SAC was creating its first, what they called a SIOP, a Single Integrated Operational Plan. single integrated operational plan. And yeah, the Eisenhower science advisor sent one of his staffers out there and the staffer said, I'm going to look up, I'm going to ask the CIA what city most resembles Hiroshima, which was hit with 12 and a half kilotons. And he went out there and he said, how many weapons do you have aimed at this city? And this guy who I talked with for my first book, and I mentioned this in this book too, and he'd forgotten the name of the city, unfortunately. But yeah, it was three weapons, each one with like four megatons and three more with one megaton. And yeah, if you do the math, it was well over 600 times the destructive power. And yeah, the whole war plan was like that,

and it remained so for decades. And even the mechanics of the war plan, it was completely balkanized. For example, let's say they said, okay, we want to destroy the Soviet tank army they also would destroy the factories that made the tanks, and the factory that made the spare parts for the tank, and the factories that rolled the metal for the tanks, and the mines where they got them. I mean, it was just so redundant. And so this kind of redundancy and thoughtlessness really wasn't addressed, wasn't acknowledged, realized, addressed, and changed until right after the Cold War was over. So basically, we, in many ways, you know, lucked out through these decades when, you know, basically no one was in charge. This was some giant machine that was completely dysfunctional. So what is our current policy as you understand it?

Well, our current policy, as I best understand it, our current policy, I mean, you know... Let's leave Trump aside. We're going to get to Trump. I was going to say that there's the political level, which is above invisible, sort of. And then there's this stream of thinking and policy at places like Omaha that run their own separate logic. But still, you know, we do have a policy and always have that we reserve the right to go first. the right to go first. Now, it might not be a bolt from the blue for a strike, but for example, if an ally is invaded or if we're dealt a cyber attack or a chemical or biological attack, we reserve the right to go first. And in fact, Obama led a discussion in the National Security Council to see if we should change that. And he was talked out of doing it. So our policy, it's not strictly

and never has been strictly a retaliatory policy. You know, there's been this myth all along that, you know, well, the policy is mutual assured destruction. They attack us, we blow up all of their cities. Our weapons have never been primarily aimed at an adversary's cities. Our weapons have never been primarily aimed at an adversary's cities. They have always been aimed primarily at military targets. Now, the military targets, many of them are near, some of them are even in cities. So it's not like millions of people wouldn't get killed. But the point has been everybody who has actually been involved in making the policies and executing the plans envisions

nuclear weapons as military weapons writ large. And even McNamara, he came up with the phrase, as he called it, assured destruction. The idea that they attack us, we attack their cities. A critic of that called it mutual assured destruction so that he could come up with the acronym MAD. That was a critic. But even McNamara, in top secret memos, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson would say after outlining this,

he says, now, if a nuclear war actually happened, this is not how the weapons would actually be used. Of the thousands of weapons we had, only about 200 were aimed at what were called urban industrial targets. The rest were all military targets. McNamara came up with this idea of assured destruction. In other words, once you get to the point where you have the number of enough weapons to blow up, say, every Soviet city that had 100,000 people in it, even though that's not how they were aimed,

then you don't need any more. This was a budgetary and political device to dampen down the appetite of the Air Force, which wanted even more missiles than he agreed to. So it was strictly a rhetorical device. It had absolutely no resemblance to the policy that actually would have been carried out if a nuclear war had happened. So currently, we still have not renounced a first strike option. No. In fact, not only have we not renounced it, we explicitly say that we preserve the right. We've even threatened to do this recently. I mean, Trump threatened to not only nuke North Korea, it wasn't even in response to a conventional attack, much less a nuclear attack.

Trump threatened to nuke North Korea if they continued to threaten us verbally. And that was something new, I have to say. Yeah, when six months into his presidency, he comes out of his golf course in Edmonton, New Jersey, and threatens to rain fire and fury like the earth has never seen on North Korea. Not if they attacked South Korea or if they attacked us, but just if they kept talking in a threatening way and kept testing missiles? This is what we call not a preemptive attack, but a preventive attack, attacking a country for developing the mere capability of attacking us. And here's the interesting thing

about that. You know, often Trump will say something and he's just talking out of his hat. He was not talking out of his hat. On his orders, the military had developed a new war plan against North Korea, which was designed to unleash a series of attacks, starting small

with possible escalation all the way up to nuclear, in response to a provocative seeming test. And that year, you know, the North Koreans launched about 15 missile tests. And on each test, there was assembled a conference call among the various commanders. And this was the kind of conference call that would be assembled if there were intelligence of, say, an impending Russian attack. And Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense at the time, was given advance authority, if he thought it necessary, to launch not nuclear missiles,

but we had, there was these short-range or medium-range conventional ballistic missiles called ATAKOMs, advanced tactical missiles, in South Korea. He was given advance authority to fire them at the launch site in North Korea with the intention of destroying the launch site and maybe killing some leaders too. It was known that Kim Jong-un liked to go watch some of these tests. And there were two occasions when Mattis did, he didn't launch them into North Korea, but he launched these missiles into the Sea of Japan in parallel with the North Korean missiles, just as kind of a signal that, hey, we can do this and we could aim them to the left instead of the right the next time you do this. So this was some very dicey stuff going on. So when Trump talked about

fire and fury, he was talking about what was actually reflected in the plans at the time. Let's hold Trump for a second, because I still want to talk through how untenable all this is, even with totally competent and well-informed and ethical minds in place. What's so crazy-making about the status quo here is that it seems to derange everyone by its logic, no matter how well-intentioned. Even at the outset of all this, Bertrand Russell, although there's some dispute about how fully he articulated this position, but he certainly said something that could be construed as support for preventative war against the USSR before they got their own nuclear capacity because he kind of walked through the annihilationist logic of

nuclear proliferation and realized... In fairness, he changed his mind later. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. So you don't have to be a moral monster to contemplate killing hundreds of millions of people once you spend too much time down this rabbit hole. That's right. But also not just hundreds of millions. I mean, you know, we now think about people who advocate limited nuclear war,

these limited nuclear options, or using nuclear weapons strictly as another military weapon. That sounds horrific. But when that began, these were people trying to come to grips with trying to minimize the damage, trying to mitigate the moral horror of these things. But then what happened? Let's linger on this point for a second. Sure. Why is the prospect of fighting a limited nuclear war so untenable? Because everyone seems to flirt with this, but then come away thinking, or at least when asked point blank, I mean, even the people who've prepared the limited nuclear response plans, when asked, well, how likely do you think it is that this will stay limited? It seems that, you know, to a man, they say, well, it's not very likely, right?

Right. Well, so here's the idea. Here was the first strategy for this that some people came up with around the late 50s, early 60s. The idea is, okay, Soviets invade Western Europe or take over West Berlin or something. Instead of just launching all of our stuff, how about if we do this? How about if we just destroy their strategic nuclear forces, their missiles and bombers and submarines? And then we say to them, okay, we've withheld a lot of weapons and we have them in submarines or in missile silos or something, you can't easily attack them. Back off your threats, take away your army, let's talk, or we'll unleash the rest of our weapons, which are aimed at your cities. And, you know, in other words, it's trying to make this

like a chess game. You know, it's checkmate in four moves, right? The problem with this is the problems are several fold. First, there neither was nor is any intelligence that the Soviets and now the Russians have any notion of this as something that they are able to respond to or want to. Second, it's not like the people in charge are omniscient beings who can look down on the earth like a chessboard and say, okay, we destroyed those targets, and now we have complete control over all of our other weapons. We know exactly what the chessboard looks like, and they know what the chessboard looks like, so we can control our moves. In fact, once you start firing off nuclear weapons, all kinds of things can happen. Communications networks go out, you know, electromagnetic pulse, whether or not the president or the Soviet or Russian, the Soviet premier or Russian president can actually still communicate with the missile men and the submarines is an unknown thing. It's just, this becomes not so easily controlled

as your nice academic blackboard exercises might suggest. Also, there's a matter of interpretation that we're relying, in this case, would be relying on the Russians to interpret our limited strike as a limited strike. As a limited strike. For example, when this guy Frank Miller was doing these analyses in, you know, as late as 1990, 1989 to 90, he asked someone at the Defense Intelligence Agency to do an analysis of the Soviet early warning radar systems. And he said, okay, because they, you know, they were able to get some copies and so forth. They said,

okay, at what point were the Soviet Air Defense Command no longer be able to see discrete missiles coming over the horizon, but just the whole screen is like a big blob. And it was at about 200. In other words, if we launched any more than 200 missiles, it would just fill up the entire radar screen. They wouldn't know. This would look like an all-out attack. And at that time, the smallest limited nuclear option that we had would have involved shooting 900 missiles. So, I mean, given all the very fancy and sophisticated dialogue on this, you know, going back to 1960, if this had ever really happened, it's gotten a little better since. But if that had happened at any point, and even if the Russians were willing to give this a shot, to play this kind of tit-for-tat nuclear exchange, as they called it, they would have been completely unable to do so. So it was all just an abstraction that had no resemblance to reality.

Yeah, that's where we get shades of Dr. Strangelove. I mean, it's very hard to get out of the absurdity of this. It's, you know, Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time Dr. Strangelove came out in early 1964, was a Pentagon official and not at all the anti-war guy that he later became. But he had done some very, very detailed studies on the nuclear command control system in the late 50s and early 60s, probably knew more about it than any other civilian. 50s and early 60s, probably knew more about it than any other civilian. And he told me that he and an associate played hooky one day to go see a matinee of Dr. Strangelove. And he came out of the theater and he turned to his friend and he goes, that was a documentary. Yeah. I want to take sort of the highest level game theoretic problem here, which it seems to me, I mean, there are several aspects to this, but I mean, first of all, they're not weapons of war.

You can't really use them, right? Because it's certainly at every point past Eisenhower to use them is to assure your own destruction. As you say, these are weapons of suicide and annihilation. And nonetheless, they persist. But here's where we kind of stumble into the paradoxes. They persist because one, the difference in our world politically between having them and not having them is substantial. When you have them, countries treat you differently than when you don't have them. Right. So, you know, we invade countries that don't have them and we don't invade countries that

have them. And they only work as a deterrent for conventional or nuclear aggression from outside on the assumption that you'd be willing to use them. And so they only deter, let's take the simplest and gravest case, you know, our relationship to Russia now. You know, our nuclear arsenal only deters a Russian first strike on the assumption that we would actually respond to a first strike with a retaliatory strike of our own. And yet when you look at the logic of this act, just imagine the psychology of a president upon hearing of an incoming first strike. I mean, first, we've already established that he has to worry about whether or not he might be, you know, the system's been hacked or something could be off

and there's not really enough time to fully vet all of that. How much time is there now? How many minutes does the president have to respond to a first strike from Russia now from, you know, from subs and missiles? Well, from subs, from Russian soil to our soil is about a half hour. But for submarines, it could be like, you know, eight minutes or something. Oh, it could be right off the coast. Yeah, it could be. It could be. Okay.

At the outside, he's got a half hour to decide whether before he witnesses the ruination of everything he cares about, and that is if he's not immediately reduced to ash himself. You know, if he survives, he's going to witness the obliteration of society. The United States is about to become a toxic wasteland inhabited by people who have accidentally found themselves far enough on the periphery of a fireball and a blast wave such that now they get to nurse their burns and their shrapnel injuries and await radiation poisoning in something very much like hell, right? We're talking about every facet of civilization being suddenly destroyed, communications, food production, everything in an

instant. And so now we have a president who, in contemplating this, which is going to happen in, you know, whether eight minutes, 15 minutes, a half hour at the outside, he has to decide, he or she has to decide, whether in what is likely to be his last act of any significance on earth, he wants to be the greatest mass murderer in human history by ordering a counter-strike and killing hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the world in a way that will do absolutely no good to him or anyone else he will ever know. So it works as a deterrent only on the assumption that a president will do that, right?

To what human purpose, what is the purpose of doing that in that scenario? And yet the assumption is not only that that will happen, I mean, that's the policy. We rely on that expectation. And without that, none of this makes any sense at all. It's just the game theory breaks down. If you're not going to retaliate to a first strike, you have no deterrence against a first strike. And then you may as well not have these arsenals in the first place. Here's where you're getting into the true dilemma.

So if all you wanted to do is deter, yeah, you say, OK, you hit us. We're going to devastate you. We're going to destroy you. But then, yeah, so then they start getting nuclear weapons. So then it becomes, well, is that deterrent really credible? As you put it, if they attack us and just attack our military forces, say, will they really believe that we would strike back against their cities? And so people with good intention said, yeah, you're right.

We need to create our own limited options, and we need to be able to say, okay, no, we'll strike back in a limited way. That becomes more credible. But then to do that, you've got to believe it yourself. So you've got to develop some doctrine to do this, some certain kinds of weapons to do this, some plans to do this. And as this evolves over a period of a decade or so, the concepts of nuclear deterrence and nuclear warfighting converge. In this rabbit hole of logic, there is no longer any distinction between the two. To have a credible deterrent requires a nuclear warfighting capability and mentality.

And, you know, it's interesting. President Kennedy was the first one to address this in a roundabout way. Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is on tape. This is another one of these secret Kennedy tapes. He and Secretary of Defense McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are talking about the next year's defense budget. And Kennedy says, you know, I don't understand why we're buying more nuclear weapons. I mean, it seems to me that 40 missiles getting through and destroying 40 Soviet cities, that that should be enough to deter. I mean, when the Soviets put 24 missiles in Cuba, that was enough to deter me from a lot of things. But then as the conversation went on, Kennedy said, you know, actually, I guess if deterrence failed, I guess I would want to go after their missiles, not their cities. And I guess I need more than 40 weapons

for that. And, you know, therein he weapons for that. And therein, he stated the dilemma. But then he drew an even broader realization. Kennedy believed that if there was a war with the Soviet Union, it would probably go nuclear. And if you started in using nuclear weapons, there would be little way to prevent it from going all the way. And so Kennedy decided, prevent it from going all the way. And so Kennedy decided, we need to get out of the Cold War. That's the problem here. And he gave a speech at American University in June of 63. And it's fascinating to go back and read this speech. It's quite a lyrical speech where he basically proposed it into the Cold War. And Khrushchev, the Soviet papers, Pravda and Izvestia, they reprinted this speech in its entirety. The Soviet government, they lowered the jamming. They turned off the

jammers to let Voice of America and Radio Free Europe come in so that people could listen to this speech. And Khrushchev responded to it. You know, he told the U.S. ambassador, this is the greatest speech by an American president since Roosevelt. And they started doing things like a test ban treaty and a hotline, and they were going to do a lot more. And then Kennedy gets assassinated. A year later, Khrushchev is ousted. And really, not until 1964 does the nuclear arms race, as we know it, really start to take off. So there was a potentially pivotal moment way back then, and we've been following the turn that the pivot actually ended up taking ever since. Yeah, I guess we should clarify a couple of points as we've used this distinction between tactical weapons and,

I don't know if you've named them, but strategic weapons. How do you differentiate them? Because to speak of tactical weapons, these are not as small as people might imagine. I mean, our tactical weapons are about as powerful as what we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oh, usually more. But tactical weapons are, say know, say if you're fighting a war in Europe or any place and you want to use weapons on the battlefield, those would be tactical weapons. If you want to use weapons against the homeland, those are strategic weapons. It's kind of a weird use of the term. But for example, you were talking about, you know, this whole dilemma of the usability of nuclear weapons.

Just last week, the United States deployed a weapon, a new weapon that has been talked about for a while, called a low-yield warhead for the Trident missile and Trident submarines. This would be a warhead of about eight kilotons, whereas ordinary Trident warheads are about 150. And the idea is that the Russians have been talking a lot and even doing a little bit of testing and exercising of using low-yield weapons against, say, NATO if there's a war in Europe, say, against NATO, you know, say, the air bases where we're storing smart bombs or something. And the idea is we need a low-yield warhead ourselves to show them that, hey, we can respond to you in kind if you do this. I mean, it gets very Baroque. I mean, we already have weapons of about this yield on planes. We could drop them as bombs. But it became a kind of a doctrinal fine point. So the question is this. On the one hand, yeah, you know, we shouldn't have weapons that are 200,

500 kilotons, a megaton. Wouldn't it be better if they were like eight kilotons? But, you know, there's this other notion that the more you think that these things are usable, then the more likely it is that you'll use them. And also, let's think about this. Eight kilotons is still not, you know, Hiroshima was 12 and a half. There was a, and I write about this in the book, there was a seminar, there was a conference at Aspen, Colorado a couple of years ago where one of the people who was a big advocate of these warheads was on a panel. And the moderator asked him, so when you say low yield, what do you mean? And he said, well, it's high single digits. And the moderator said, you mean

kilotons? He goes, yeah, yeah, kilotons. He goes, so sort of like Hiroshima. And he said, well, yeah, you can get pejorative about it if you want. And the moderator said, well, no, I'm not being pejorative. I just want to make clear to everybody that we're not talking about firecrackers. You know, eight kilotons, that's 8,000 tons. That's 16 million pounds. You know, one of these weapons- 16 million pounds of TNT. Yeah. Yeah. Plus the radiation and the fire and the smoke and the radioactive fallout and all the rest. But the blast alone is more destructive than any bombing raid, much less single bomb that anybody has ever seen since the end of World War II.

So you can kid yourself. I had a professor of this stuff once who, when talking about the defense budget and the destructive power of weapons, he said, it's easier just to leave off the zeros, the billions of dollars and the thousands of megatons or whatever. You can kid yourself. You can look at this in a way too abstract way. And kid yourself that you're still talking about, even on very low levels, just an enormous amount of destruction that the likes of which, you know, nobody currently alive and active has ever seen. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. Fast forward to the present where the current occupant of the Oval Office has changed our perception of the risk

here. And I think in part, this inspired your recent book as well. I mean, we've all realized that the so-called human element here is paramount. And when we start promoting humans of dubious qualifications into the positions of greatest power in our society, it becomes scarier than it might otherwise be. And as you pointed out, I mean, we have a president who has threatened nuclear war. Now, you've also pointed out that previous presidents have threatened it. I think Ellsberg at one point states in your book that prior to Trump's threats, there have been at least 25 explicit threats of first strike from our side. But mainly in response to some actual threat.

Yeah, something conventional, the war in Vietnam. Whatever. I mean, it's interesting. You detail one meeting on this topic among congressmen where some Democrat just makes the concern explicit. We're here dealing with a president who seems uniquely unstable and unqualified to make decisions of this kind. And now we need to talk about just exactly what is standing between his capriciousness and the annihilation of another country, should he wake up in the middle of the night and choose a first strike over tweeting. What stands in his way? And what was interesting, one thing that was interesting in that discussion was that none of the Republicans really demurred on that assessment of the president's character.

No one with a straight face can deny that we're in the presence of someone who shows a very different temperament than we're used to in a president. So what is your understanding of what stands between his next thought and the annihilation of half the world should that thought be, what I need to do now is launch a first strike? What stands in the way would be a kind of a massive act of insubordination. I mean, what you're referring to is that, yeah, shortly, in the first year of Trump's office, around the time of the fire and fury, there was a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on presidential launch control authority. This was the first hearing

that Congress had held on the subject since the mid-70s. And it was initiated by Senator Bob Corker, the then Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who kind of had just learned that the president had the sole authority to do this. He didn't have to ask permission from anybody. He could just do it on his own. And so he called this hearing. And yeah, as you said, one of the Democratic senators said, you know, let's cut through the crap here. The reason why we're having this hearing is because our president is reckless. And yeah, you go back, look at the transcript. This was an open hearing. I watched it on C-SPAN 3 when it happened. But yeah, no

Republican demurs at all. So they go through this whole thing. There are several witnesses, including a retired general who had just recently been the commander of strategic command. And he admits that, yeah, you know, he could do this on his own. I mean, there were all kinds of conferences and consultations that he's supposed to go to, but, yeah, he could do it. And this general, whose name was Bob Keller, retired general, he came away from the hearing very frustrated because as he told them, he goes,

look, if you guys want to change the launch procedure, you know, you're entitled to do that. You have the power to do that. You know, again, there's not much time to do anything if it's responding to somebody else's first strike, but if it's a contemplated preventive first strike, I mean, if you guys want to pass a law that says Congress must be consulted or a majority of the cabinet has to vote okay, you can do that. Let's do it. And of course, the Senate did nothing. This is a four-hour hearing. They did nothing. And he came away frustrated that, you know, what you really shouldn't do is raise questions about the legitimacy and reliability of the command structure and then do nothing about it. You know, hey, you want to do something about it, okay. But don't just raise a lot of questions, which may or may not be valid, and then do nothing about it. But, you know, this is what Congress, you know,

except for a few years after the passage of the War Powers Act in the mid-70s, Congress, they've always shirked responsibility for this sort of thing, either for going to war or for getting out of war. They don't want to take the blame if things go south. They're happy to let the king make all the decisions. And then if it turns out well, they can say, yes, I was supporting him. And if it doesn't, they can wash their hands of it. It's kind of disgusting, really. They're shirking their constitutional duties in this respect. Well, this is where we land squarely back in Dr. Strangelove territory, because when these conversations are happening around the details of command and control, and someone asks the question, well, what would happen if the president is off his meds and

orders a first strike? At first first you get a very sanguine response. Well, the military can always refuse an unlawful order, right? They're supposed to. They're supposed to. Yeah. But this is where you get a Kafkaesque wrinkle in the machinery here because any preset attack plan, right, of which there are Lord knows how many, the fact that they're preset, the fact that they're in the manual proves that they have been already vetted by lawyers, right? That's right. By definition, they're legal, these first strike attack plans.

And this was admitted by General Keller in the course of the hearing that, you know, who decides whether it's a lawful order? He goes, well, the head of STRATCOM would do that. And then, but what if it's already a plan? And, you know, he had to admit that, yeah, it all comes down to the human factor. And, you know, it's interesting. President Truman, at the very beginning, at the dawn of the nuclear age, you know, he was very bullish on the atomic bomb when it ended World War II. But then he took a look at it, you know, all the footage and the studies showing how destructive

it was. And there's this meeting that was recorded in the diaries of David Lilienthal, who was his atomic energy commissioner, where he's meeting with his generals and he says, you know, this isn't a military weapon. It can't be used to get – it kills women and children. And so he took the bomb out of the control of the military, put it under civilian authority, his authority. And in fact, for many years after that, if SAC, you know, if some crazy general wanted to launch a nuclear attack, he would have to get the bomb from the Atomic Energy Commission. That was changed later, but still, it was airtight.

But the assumption of this was that, well, the civilian in charge would be the sane one. And, you know, as we know from reading, you know, Hamilton and Madison and these guys, they always foresaw the possibility of a tyrannical leader, which is why they worked into the Constitution all kinds of checks and balances with the legislature, with the judiciary, with the possibility of impeachment. And, you know, there weren't any nuclear weapons back then. So they weren't thinking of checks and balances on that. And nobody has ever since.

There was one incident in 1974 in the last days of Nixon when he was, you know, going around the White House sloshing drinks and getting all paranoid about Watergate investigation and so forth. James Schlesinger, the Secretary of Defense, went to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and said, listen, if you get any strange orders, don't carry them out without talking to me first. And again, at the time, neither Schlesinger nor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was actually in the chain of command.

Nixon could have done something. Really, how a launch attack. Basically, you know, the football, it isn't, you know, the black box that the president has. There's nothing in there. There's a book in there. There's a book in there. And it has code words to use to launch certain kinds of attacks. And this suitcase is carried by a one-star general. And the president gets on a certain phone

and calls the National Military Command Center, which is in the basement of the Pentagon, and he talks to a one-star general there. And he says something, and I don't know what it is, And he talks to a one-star general there. And he says something, and I don't know what it is, that authenticates his identity. It's not like, you know, there are movies where he puts his fingerprints. It's nothing like that. But he authenticates his identity. He tells which option he wants to fire.

And then the National Military Command Center, again, a one-star general, conveys that order to the people in the missile silos, to the people out in the submarines, to the people in the bomber bases. And the people who occupy the National Military Command Center are picked according to their, well, they're not picked according to their creativity, okay? They're picked for their readiness to salute and follow orders. And they're not necessarily in on what's going on, you know, nor are the people down in the missile silos. They don't know. You know, I remember in that scene in Dr. Strangelove when they're up in the bomber and they get this order and they say, you know, what's going on? He goes, well, if he sent this order, that means that the Russians have already attacked. You know, they don't know. And unless

one of them stands up and says, no, I'm not going to do this, for which he's really risking treason, the order will go out. It's amazing. We have built a doomsday device, which is, it just seems on its face, so poorly calibrated and is driven at every point by the most unreliable device of all at this point, just the, you know, whatever human brain manages to get itself elected and put in, you know, put in proximity to the football. It's, do you have anything you think of that is wise to say about how we can pull back from the brink here? I mean, what do you think we should do politically, you know, over the next 10 years to change the status quo? Well, you know, yeah, you said it's a poorly calibrated machine.

In fact, it's very finely calibrated to give the president the sole authority to do this. So, yeah, as I say, you know, you have to look at it in two ways. If we're talking about responding to a strike that's already happened or that's in the process of being, you know, hey, there just isn't any time to go consult in Congress or the cabinet. But if you're talking about, okay, I want to launch a preventive— I'm stuck. I'm not even convinced that the logic of responding to an all-out nuclear strike makes any sense. Well, one thing that you want to do is—and we've done it to some degree, and Obama tried to do more of it but got resistance—is to sharply reduce the number of weapons that we have on American soil.

So, for example, if we had no land-based ICBMs, or even just a few, right? Now there are only 400, and they're single warheads. You know, we have a few thousand weapons. If everything else was pretty invulnerable to an attack. You could ride out the attack. Just because the ICBMs are under attack doesn't mean the president has 20 minutes to respond. He can let that happen and then contemplate a little bit more. So one thing to do is just to get rid of even more of the ICBMs, get rid of them all together. Serious people have thought about that.

It's like it's an act of jujitsu. You deprive the other guys of their target. So that's one thing that could do. Then they would just have to be targeting the population centers. Well, but I don't think anybody would do that as a first strike because they would face... I mean, you're right. The question would become, why should we kill Moscow just because they killed New York? Well, I don't know either, but that's a hell of a chance to take. So the reason, just to close the loop on that point, the reason not to get rid of our land-based missiles is if someone were to invent tomorrow a great way to take out submarines, we would be left without a deterrent.

That's the argument. That is the argument. But bombers can take off and go into airborne alert, too. But, yeah, there's always an argument. You know, it just so happens, you know, why do we have three legs of the triad, the land-based missiles, the submarines, and the bombers? Because we have three services, Army, Navy, and Air Force. Eventually, the Air Force got the land-based missiles. Originally, that was going to be the Army.

So if we had five services, we'd probably have five different kinds. So it's all a coincidence, but people have come up with very elegant arguments for protecting all three legs of the triad. But, you know, it's all a little bit arbitrary. And especially if you look at, well, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. It's all just, it's kind of arbitrary. And the technology has come first and the arguments and rationales have come after the fact. And it seems that we're now poised to... Oh, wait, I'm sorry. You also asked what else we could do.

Yeah, yeah. I'll just add one piece here to what you just said with reducing our armaments. It seems like we're on the cusp of what looks like another arms race, at least potentially, because we have a new START treaty with Russia that lapses in 2021. That's right. And then, you know, who knows how we're incentivized to improve our nukes after that. I mean, depending on what they do. Do you have any sense of where this is going in the near term? Well, it's a disturbing thing.

I mean, there has been a dark side to arms control treaties too. Over time, you know, a president needs to get two-thirds of the Senate to ratify a treaty, and he also needs the joint chiefs of staff to endorse it up on the Hill to get even anybody to take it seriously. And so what has happened a lot ever since the first SALT treaty back in 1969, 72, with Nixon, was that the chiefs or the Republicans in Congress said, okay, yeah, I'll go along with this treaty, but you've got to buy the following weapons. And, you know, Jimmy Carter had to buy onto the MX missile, even though he loathed it, in order to get SALT II. President Obama had to agree to somehow modernize all three legs of the triad in order to get ratification of New START. Now, Trump doesn't have this problem. The New START treaty, which placed modest limits, it had modest reductions and placed limits on both sides' nuclear arsenals,

and also provided for quite intrusive inspection rights to verify that both sides were continuing to abide by the treaty. It expires in February 2021. All that it takes to extend it is to get two guys in a room and to sign it. That's all it takes. And, you know, the weird thing is that there's nobody in the U.S. military now who's arguing that we need more nuclear weapons. Many think we need new nuclear weapons and different kinds of nuclear weapons. Nobody's pushing for anything to go beyond the limits that were set by this treaty. But Trump, partly because he just doesn't like treaties because they confine our flexibility,

and more to the point, this was negotiated by Obama, and therefore it can't be any good. That's the fundamental reason why he got out of the Iran nuclear deal, even though all of his advisors at the time said he should stay in it because at the very least, it was better than no deal. It's very personal with him. But yeah, if you just take the limits off, and especially if you get rid of the forms that allow for inspections, then the gloves are off. The rope is loosened. These guys could build more and more. For example, Trump got out of the intermediate range nuclear forces deal that Reagan and Gorbachev signed. He got out of the treaty. The Russians had been violating it a little bit. Actually,

the Russians never liked this treaty. To say we're leaving it and they leave it, they could do a lot more with it than they do. But then the first thing that the military does is start testing missiles that had been banned by this treaty. And I called up several people who I knew in the Pentagon. And I said, so what is the strategic rationale for going back to building these kinds of weapons? And they said, well, we don't have a rationale yet. We haven't talked with the allies yet on where they might be based. We don't know what the targets are. We don't know what the reason is. But it was basically, OK, we can do it, so let's do it. And the rationale will come later. And I'm afraid that especially if relations between the two powers stays quite tense,

the military will just go on their ways to build as many as they can. And then other countries, which have been constrained in part by our own restraint, will then say, well, okay, time for us to get into this game too. Yeah, well, we've talked about how this all comes down to the decisions of the president when push comes to shove. And, you know, we know we have a very stable genius in charge. There are a couple of details in your book that shed light on Trump's beliefs about his own insight into the nature of this problem. One actually predates his presidency by many years where he nominated himself to be someone who could negotiate for the U.S. in our nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union. Paint that scene for me. So President George H.W. Bush is elected president in 88, and he's about to occupy the White House in 89. And Trump has just written this best-selling

or quote-unquote written this best-selling book called The Art of the Deal. And he's fashioned himself as a terrific dealmaker. And he wants to become the U.S. arms control negotiator. And he lobbies himself. He knows a lot of Republicans. He says, yeah, put me up for this job. And everybody thought it was a joke. He was kind of a laughable character at the time.

And so he meets at a New York cocktail party, Richard Burt, who was the veteran diplomat who Bush had, in fact, actually nominated to become the negotiator. And Trump says, I understand you're the guy who's going to be the negotiator, right? And he goes, yeah. He goes, listen, I have an idea for you about how to get a good deal with the Russians. And by the way, this story has been confirmed to me by Bert. So Bert, you know, he kind of, you know, it's an interesting character. So he says, yeah, what's that? And Trump says, okay, so here's what you do. First meeting you have with the Russians, you go in late and then you walk up to their side of the table and you pound your fist on the table and you say, fuck you. And, you know,

Bert obviously did not follow his advice and negotiated a pretty substantial arms reduction deal a few years later. Over the same period of time, another one of Donald Trump's business ventures went bankrupt. So, you know, do the math on that one. The other incident which you're probably asking, is the famous meeting in the tank with all of his advisors. So, you know, certain aspects of this meeting have been written about in other books, in Woodward's book and in this new book, Very Stable Genius,

by the Washington Post reporters. He goes and has a meeting in what's called the tank, which is the Joint Chiefs of Staff's conference room in the Pentagon. And all of his advisors were there, the military's there, and they're giving him a kind of a tour d'horizon of the world and our alliances and our problems and prospects and good things and bad things. And at one point, and I was told this by a few people who were there, one of the generals shows this chart showing nuclear weapons over the past, number of nuclear weapons over the past decades. And the peak was around 19, the late 60s, we had 30,000 nuclear weapons. And now we have about 3,000. So it shows this graph going down. And this was meant as an illustration of the, you know, the worthiness of nuclear arms control and good relations between the nations and so forth. Trump says, he says, he looks at it a different way.

He goes, how come I can't have as many nuclear weapons as I had back in the late 60s? And it's explained to him that, well, you know, there are these arms control agreements and it's very expensive and there was real overkill back then. We never really needed this many and what we have now are really more capable. And, you know, he nods his head. He gets it. But then I was told about a week later, he's in a White House meeting with his then national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, and some other people.

And he says, his mind flits back to this chart. You know, why can't I have as many nuclear weapons as some earlier president did? You know, it becomes a, you know, a dick measuring contest. You know, how come I can't have it that big? And, you know, it's explained to him again, like, well, you know, you build way more weapons than you need, then they'll think that we're about to launch a first strike, and then they'll build more weapons. And, oh, okay. And then at least once, maybe twice, two more times over the next few weeks, he raises this again. He just can't get it out of his mind. And it gets to the point where word gets around about this. And Mattis says to a group

of his own assistant and undersecretaries, you know, don't worry, we're not going to get into a nuclear arms race as long as I'm here. We should remind people in response to this first meeting, where Trump had been given a tour of our arsenal and asked this question of why he can't have more bombs. When Trump was out of the room, what did Tillerson say in response to Trump's performance at that tank meeting? Yeah, I mean, this had been reported elsewhere, but I got it confirmed by a few people. But Secretary of State Tillerson, as Trump has left the room, he says in kind of a stage whisper, but that can be heard by several people in the room, he goes, the president is a fucking moron. And, you know, when that was revealed, you know, you knew right then and there that Tillerson's days as secretary of state were numbered. And in fact, he was canned about four months later.

He was canned about four months later. There's no reason to take this too far in the direction of what will be perceived as partisan politics, but this really is a nonpartisan point. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, most military officers really are nonpartisan. They stay out of politics. They don't want any part of it. And if they're partisan, they're Republicans. I mean, it's... They see themselves as part of a chain of politics. They don't want any part of it. And if they're partisan, they're Republicans. I mean, they see themselves as part of a chain of command. They do not want to get involved in this. And yet, you know, the source for a lot of these stories, both about Trump, both in my book and,

I assume, in other accounts, are military officers. And yeah, to the extent we do know something about their voting record or political inclinations are generally not Democrats, right? Yeah. Well, Fred, you've given us a fairly startling tour of startling terrain. I'm nonetheless grateful. It's depressing, but very useful to talk to. I'm worried that it seems like very few people are thinking about this, right? This is not, it's only with the emergence of Trump that we've been reminded, you know, that many of us have been reminded that this sword of Damocles has never not been over our heads. But it just seems like we should be thinking about this much more. But there's this additional wrinkle, which is thinking about it is

it's just so hard to get your mind around the reality of the risk and just how bad these outcomes are or would be if anything really went wrong. Yeah, this is the main reason why I wrote this book. I had written this book, The Wizards of Armageddon, in 1983. And I thought there would never be another reason to write a book about this subject again. And, you know, what struck me when Trump did the fire and fury remark is that for the previous, I don't know, 30 years, almost nobody had been thinking, much less worrying about this stuff. This was from another era.

And yet, you know, the people in the subterranean world where these weapons were still being churned out and the war plans were still being devised and exercised and, you know, scenarios were being drawn up. This was still going on underneath, under our own radar scopes. And you could say that one thing that Trump has done is to remind us that these things still exist. And the reason that I wrote the book was because I thought it was time again to write something that spelled out the entire history of this thing and laid out the dimensions of this rabbit hole into which we had plunged down into all these years ago and where we are still, you know, running around in a maze, even if not of our own making. And that's the thing that, you know, the presidents who have dealt with crises in which nuclear weapons have been contemplated, they have actually dug very deep into this hole.

They have, the record shows that they've examined the logic, examined the scenarios, really plunged themselves into it, and then come away thinking, nope, I do not want to go there, and scattered out of the hole and tried to come up with a diplomatic solution to the crisis. stuck with a president who is not known for thinking deeply about things, who acts by his own acknowledgement on his gut. And, you know, guts can lead to very turbulent places. Well, Fred, thank you for your work and thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Oh, thank you.