Making Sense with Sam Harris - #210 — The Logic of Doomsday

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with William J. Perry and Lisa Perry about the ever-present threat of nuclear war. They discuss the history of nuclear weapons, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missi...le Crisis, the present threat of accidental nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, unilateral disarmament, the psychology of deterrence, tactical nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, details of command and control, nuclear proliferation, the steps we could take toward safety, strategic missile defense, nuclear winter, 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.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. This is yet another occasion where I'm putting the whole podcast outside the paywall. We've been doing this a lot during the pandemic. There are certain topics where I feel a responsibility to reach the widest possible audience, and I seem to be doing podcasts on these sorts of topics of late. So the topic today is the threat of nuclear war, and as you'll hear, I think the prospect of our blundering into a nuclear war, either by accident or political miscalculation, is probably the greatest risk we face. And its danger is compounded by the fact that
Starting point is 00:01:06 almost no one appears to be thinking about this risk. So this podcast is another PSA. I'll just remind you that if you value what I'm doing over here, subscribing is what makes that possible. And it's what helps this platform grow. And it's what makes it a place where I can talk about anything. Now, as chance would have it, we're coming up on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb in about a week.
Starting point is 00:01:38 July 16th is the 75th anniversary of Trinity, the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Whatever the merits or necessity of our building the bomb, and even using it to end the war with Japan, that can certainly be debated. But what is absolutely clear to anyone who studies the ensuing 75 years is that these were 75 years of folly, nearly suicidal folly. And this has been a chapter in human history of such reckless stupidity that it's been a kind of moral oblivion and there's no end in sight. Rather, we have simply forgotten about it. We have forgotten about the situation we are in every day of our lives. This is really difficult to think about, much less understand, the enormity of our error here is stupefying in some basic sense.
Starting point is 00:02:50 It's like we were convinced 75 years ago to rig all of our homes and buildings to explode, and then we just got distracted by other things, right? And most of us live each day totally unaware that the status quo is as precarious as it in fact is. So when the history of this period is written, our descendants will surely ask, what the hell were they thinking? And we are the people of whom that question will be asked. That is, if we don't annihilate ourselves in the meantime.
Starting point is 00:03:31 What the hell are we thinking? What are our leaders thinking? We have been stuck for nearly three generations in a posture of defending civilization, or imagining that we are, by threatening to destroy it at any moment. And given our capacity to make mistakes, given the increasing threat of cyber attack, the status quo grows less tenable by the day. the status quo grows less tenable by the day. The first book I ever read about the prospect of nuclear war was Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth,
Starting point is 00:04:11 which originally came out in The New Yorker in 1982. It's interesting that Schell's work here stands exactly at the midpoint on the timeline between the world of today and the invention of the bomb. So 37 years had elapsed since the Trinity Test. One shell wrote The Fate of the Earth, and another 37 years and a few months and change have elapsed since he wrote that book. If you haven't read it, it's a beautifully written and amazingly sustained exercise in thinking about the unthinkable. And I'd like to read you a few passages to give you a sense of it.
Starting point is 00:04:54 This is from the beginning, starting a few sentences in. These bombs were built as weapons for war, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threatened to end history. They were made by men, yet they threatened to annihilate man. They are a pit into which the whole world can fall, a nemesis of all human intentions, actions, and hopes. Only life itself, which they threaten to swallow up, can give the measure of their significance. Yet in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much.
Starting point is 00:05:36 We have thus far failed to fashion, or even to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them. This peculiar failure of response, in which hundreds of millions of people acknowledge the presence of an immediate, unremitting threat to their existence and to the existence of the world they live in, but do nothing about it, a failure in which both self-interest and fellow feeling seem to have died, has itself been such a striking phenomenon that it has to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament as this has existed so far.
Starting point is 00:06:12 End quote. So there Schell gets at the strangeness of the status quo, where the monster is in the room, and yet we have managed to divert our attention from it. And I love this point he makes. It's a violation both of self-interest and fellow feeling. Our capacity to ignore this problem somehow seems psychologically impossible. It's a subversion of really all of our priorities, both personal and with respect to our ethical commitments to others. A little bit later on, he talks about this state of mind a little more. Because denial is a form of self-protection, if only against anguishing thoughts and feelings, and because it contains something useful, and perhaps even, in its way, necessary to life, anyone who invites people to draw aside the veil
Starting point is 00:07:06 and look at the peril face-to-face is at risk of trespassing on inhibitions that are part of our humanity. I hope in these reflections to proceed with the utmost possible respect for all forms of refusal to accept the unnatural and horrifying prospect of a nuclear holocaust.
Starting point is 00:07:26 So there, Shell is being more tactful than I'm being here, admitting that this denial is on some level necessary to get on with life, but it is nonetheless crazy. Year after year after year, we are running the risk of mishap here. And whatever the risk, you can't keep just rolling the dice. And so it seems time to ask, when is this going to end? As Schell describes the prospect of nuclear war or nuclear accident about as clearly as anyone can. This is from later in the book. Let us consider, for example, some of the possible ways in which a person in a targeted country might die. He might be incinerated by the fireball or the thermal pulse. He might be lethally irradiated by the initial nuclear radiation. He might be crushed to death, or hurled to his death, by the blast wave, or its debris. He might be lethally irradiated by the local fallout.
Starting point is 00:08:31 He might be burned to death in a firestorm. He might be injured by one or another of these effects, and then die of his wounds, before he was able to make his way out of the devastated zone in which he found himself. He might die of starvation, because the economy had collapsed, and no food was being grown or delivered. Or because existing local crops had been killed by radiation. Or because the local ecosystem had been ruined. Or because the ecosphere of the earth as a whole was collapsing. He might die of cold, for lack of heat and clothing. Or of exposure, for lack of shelter. He might be killed by people seeking food or shelter that he'd obtained.
Starting point is 00:09:10 He might die of an illness spread in an epidemic. He might be killed by exposure to the sun if he stayed outside too long following serious ozone depletion. Or he might be killed by any combination of these perils. But while there's almost no end to the ways to die in and after a Holocaust, each person has only one life to lose. Someone who has been killed by the thermal pulse can't be killed again in an epidemic. Therefore, anyone who wishes to describe a Holocaust is always at risk of depicting scenes of devastation that in reality would never take
Starting point is 00:09:43 place, because the people in them would already have been killed off in some other earlier scene of devastation. The task is made all the more confusing by the fact that the causes of death and destruction do not exist side by side in the world, but often encompass one another in widening rings. Thus, if it turned out that a Holocaust rendered the earth uninhabitable by human beings, then all the more immediate forms of death would be nothing more than redundant preliminaries, leading up to the extinction of the whole species by a hostile environment. In much the same way, if an airplane is hit by gunfire and thereby caused a crash, dooming
Starting point is 00:10:17 all the passengers, it makes little difference whether the shots also killed a few of the passengers in advance of the crash. On the other hand, if the larger consequences, which are less predictable than the local ones, failed to occur, then the local ones would have their full importance again. And then jumping a little further on here, there are two further aspects of a holocaust which, though they do not further obscure the factual picture, nevertheless vex our understanding of this event. The first is that although in imagination, we can try to survey the whole prospective scene of destruction, inquiring into how many would live and how many would die, and how far the collapse of the environment would go under attacks of different sizes, and piling up statistics on
Starting point is 00:11:01 how many square miles would be lethally contaminated, or what percentage of the population would receive first, second, or third degree burns, or be trapped in the rubble of its burning houses, or be irradiated to death. No one actually experiencing a holocaust would have any such overview. The news of other parts necessary to put together that picture would be one of the things that were immediately lost, and each surviving person, his vision drastically foreshortened by the collapse of his world, and his impressions clouded by his pain, shock, bewilderment, and grief, would see only as far as whatever scene of chaos and agony happened to lie at hand. For it would not be only such abstractions as industry and society and the environment
Starting point is 00:11:45 that would be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. It would also be, over and over again, the small collections of cherished things, known landscapes, and beloved people that made up the immediate contents of individual lives. The other obstacle to our understanding is that when we strain to picture what the scene would be like after a holocaust, we tend to picture what the scene would be like after a Holocaust, we tend to forget that for most people, and perhaps for all, it wouldn't be like anything, because they would be dead. To depict the scene as it would appear to the living is to that extent a falsification, and the greater the number killed, the greater the falsification.
Starting point is 00:12:22 The right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse, but from that vantage point, of course, there is nothing to report. Anyway, the writing is wonderful, and it's still an important book, 37 years hence. and in today's episode I'm speaking to a man who has been presiding over this impossible situation since nearly the beginning, because today I'm speaking with William J. Perry, and also with his granddaughter Lisa Perry. As many of you know, William Perry has served in many capacities here with respect to our stewardship of nuclear weapons and our navigation of the Cold War. He was the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter
Starting point is 00:13:15 Administration, and then he was Secretary of Defense under President Clinton. He oversaw the development of the strategic nuclear systems that are currently in our arsenal, and his offset strategy ushered in the age of stealth and smart weapons and other technologies that changed the face of modern warfare. In 2015, he founded the William J. Perry Project, outlining his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, and he's been trying to educate the public on how urgently we need to take practical steps to reduce the danger of the status quo. He has a new book out called The Button, The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power, From Truman to Trump,
Starting point is 00:13:59 and The Button goes into this terrifying history and the terrifying status quo. He's also an emeritus professor at Stanford University. And as you'll hear, at 92 years old, William Perry is quite worried about our situation. And he continues to work to convey that concern to the general public. I mention it in the podcast, but if you haven't seen his video on the prospect of nuclear terrorism, which is only one facet of the problem of nuclear risk, you really should see it. It's a great animation that brings home just how crazy our situation is with respect to that variable alone. Also joining me today is Lisa Perry. Lisa is the communications director for the William J. Perry Project.
Starting point is 00:14:53 As I said, she's the granddaughter of Secretary Perry. And she's now dedicated to helping sound this alarm about the modern threat of nuclear weapons. And to that end, she has a new podcast titled At the Brink. You can go to atthebrink.org or just download it in your podcatcher, and that podcast is well worth listening to. And it was a great honor to talk to both Secretary Perry and Lisa Perry. And as you might expect, we discuss the ever-present threat of nuclear war. We talk about the history of nuclear weapons,
Starting point is 00:15:31 the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the present threat of accidental nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, unilateral disarmament, the psychology of deterrence, so-called tactical nuclear terrorism, unilateral disarmament, the psychology of deterrence, so-called tactical nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, the details of command and control,
Starting point is 00:15:53 nuclear proliferation, some of the intermediate steps we could take toward safety, the prospects of strategic missile defense, nuclear winter, and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Secretary William J. Perry and Lisa Perry. I am here with Secretary William Perry and his granddaughter, Lisa Perry. Thank you both for joining me.
Starting point is 00:16:22 Thank you. We're happy to do it. So, Secretary Perry, I've already told you I'm going to stumble over your honorific. I'm going to default to calling you Bill, which you've already assured me is inoffensive. So thank you for that. But you have a book coming out titled The Button, the new nuclear arms race and presidential power from Truman to Trump. And you also have started the William J. Perry Project at williamjperry.org, the purpose of which is to educate the public on the dangers
Starting point is 00:16:52 of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. And we were just talking offline about how we've gone to sleep on this topic. So I do want to get into the psychology of this with both of you. And Lisa, happily, you have a new podcast titled At the Brink, which discusses your grandfather's work and the ongoing dangers of nuclear weapons. And when that comes out, I will remind people, both through this podcast and whatever other podcast I release at that point, that they should tune into it. Because I do think this is probably still the most pressing issue of our time, and it is quite deranging to recognize how little attention it is getting, even from people like myself who acknowledge that it's probably the most pressing issue of our time. It's probably been the most pressing issue of every moment I've been alive,
Starting point is 00:17:46 and yet most of my moments have been spent blithely ignoring this issue. So I just want to welcome both of you, and perhaps we can begin with you, Bill. What is your history of engagement with this topic? I have been involved as a consultant on nuclear issues dating back to Eisenhower, and I've been personally advising presidents since President Carter. So, in the earlier administrations, I was an anonymous person working on studies. In later administrations, I was anonymous. Where would you have been during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is often thought to be the moment of greatest peril we've ever experienced? Did you have a moment-to-moment experience of
Starting point is 00:18:36 that, or is that something that you... I did. Again, it was an anonymous moment, a very important role. I was called back before I ever knew there was a Cuban Missile Crisis. Before we even heard that term, I was called to come back to Washington to help out by the deputy director of CIA. And he asked me to head a small team. There must have been six of us, I think, whose job was to study the intelligence that was coming in every day, particularly the photographs from the overflights, but the communications intelligence as well, and to write a report by the end of the day
Starting point is 00:19:11 which would assess whether or not the medium-range missiles which were being deployed in Cuba were operational yet or how long it would be before they became operational. This report got to President Kennedy first thing in the morning and helped him decide how much more time he had for diplomacy. So it was a very important role in that in the face of advisors of his who were urging an attack on Cuba, a military attack, he was trying to hold that off as long as possible to give diplomacy a chance to work. But he wanted to know how long he had to do that. And so the purpose of this study we were doing each day was to basically
Starting point is 00:19:50 advise him how many more days he had for diplomacy. I didn't appreciate until very recently. I just recorded a podcast with Fred Kaplan, who wrote a book focusing on the experience of each administration that has engaged with our nuclear policy. And I wasn't aware of the degree to which Kennedy was essentially being goaded to war. And the mistaken impression we got that he sort of stared Khrushchev down and Khrushchev blinked, there was a sort of back channel deal around pulling our nukes out of Turkey, which is what de-escalated the crisis. And I think that wasn't revealed until 20 years later. What lesson do you draw from that moment in history? And how has your thinking about nuclear weapons evolved since? Well, I was close enough to what was happening
Starting point is 00:20:45 that I believed, well, every day that I went into the analysis center, I believed it was going to be my last day on earth. I knew the president was being pressured to take military action. I could see how dangerous the military action would be and how likely it would be to escalate. What I did not know at the time, and therefore the President did not know, was that in addition to the medium-range missiles, which were not yet operational, the Soviets had also deployed so-called tactical nuclear missiles. They were already there, they were already loaded with nuclear warheads, and the military commander of that unit had the authority to use them. So, if Kennedy
Starting point is 00:21:27 had accepted the advice of his military advisors to attack Cuba, in particular, if he'd made an invasion of Cuba, our troops undoubtedly would have been decimated on the beachhead with tactical nuclear weapons and a general nuclear war, we truly have called it. Now, we didn't know that at the time. And so when Kennedy assessed that the likelihood of a Cuban Missile Crisis erupting into a catastrophic nuclear war was one chance in three, he made that assessment without the knowledge that those tactical nuclear weapons were already there and already operational. So the situation was much more dangerous than he realized. I would assess the likelihood of that ending a catastrophic war. Knowing what I now know, it's better than 50-50. real beginning is our first use of them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, how did you view our use of... I mean, let's take, I mean, I guess Nagasaki is harder or perhaps easier to
Starting point is 00:22:34 dismiss as a misuse of nuclear weapons, but what did you think and what do you think about our use at Hiroshima? Well, at the time, it's easy. I can easily tell you what I thought then. I was a 17-year-old. I was about ready to go into the Army. You would have been sent to Japan? I was actually sent to Japan, but that was after the war was over. So a few months after the bomb was dropped, I went into the Army, and after basic training, went on to the army of occupation in Japan. So I was wholly in favor of it at the time. It was only later that I began to see the ramifications well beyond the quick ending of the war. Right. We should remind people of the history here, because this was, the war against Germany had already been won, right? Hitler was already
Starting point is 00:23:23 dead at that point. And this was really a story of ending the war with Japan earlier than it would have ended otherwise. Really, I don't think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there was any concern that we were going to lose the war with Japan, but we were thinking we were going to save many, many American lives by ending it emphatically with this first use of nuclear weapons. I just plead ignorance here. What was the justification for Nagasaki, and why not let the implications of the bombing of Hiroshima have their psychological effect? Why did we so quickly follow on with the bombing of
Starting point is 00:24:05 Nagasaki? Well, the outcome was never in doubt. What was in doubt is how many deaths would be resolved, we'd be required for that to happen. We had at the time an invasion force already on the way to Japan and being assembled to go to Japan. It would have been an invasion force even larger than one we had at Omaha Beach. So this would have been a big invasion, very costly invasion. That was one point. Second related point was the Japanese army was not prepared to surrender. Even with invasion, they were prepared to fight on the beaches, in the towns, in the hills, on the mountains, fight to the death.
Starting point is 00:24:46 So it would have been a very costly invasion in human life. Not just, we thought, of course, about American human lives, but there probably would have been millions of Japanese deaths resulting from that, and a long, prolonged guerrilla warfare. So at the time, and even to this day, I have no doubt that the alternative to dropping the bomb would have been a very costly invasion. Even after we dropped the first bomb, the Japanese army was not prepared to surrender. And even after we dropped the second bomb, the army was still not prepared to surrender. And the surrender only occurred when the emperor did something that was totally unprecedented. He intervened, and he went on the radio and announced his surrender.
Starting point is 00:25:29 Right. The army was still opposed to surrender, and in fact, there was a boarded attempt to make a palace coup after he announced his surrender. So the resistance to surrendering in Japan was very strong, and it was by the most powerful group in Japan at the time, the Japanese army. So any assessment of the bomb dropping has to be made with the understanding of what the alternative was. And we have pretty good information then and even better information now on how recalcitrant the Japanese army was being and how unwilling they were to surrender. I think it's also important, historical context, to understand Truman didn't actually,
Starting point is 00:26:14 so when he was vice president, he was not informed about the Manhattan Project. He did not know about it until he became the president. They told him that they had been working on this project and they had developed an atomic bomb, which came as quite a shock to him. And so when it was actually the generals who brought forth this plan to Truman, saying, we have these weapons and we have put together this plan
Starting point is 00:26:41 to attack these cities in Japan. And originally, actually, it was not Hiroshima who was the first city that was chosen, and then they moved it to Hiroshima. But as historical evidence indicates, they somewhat misled Truman to believe that they were targeting military targets, not specifically civilian cities. So when Truman agreed to this plan, he thought that they were mostly going to be targeting military targets. And just with the amount of communication and how long it took for information to get out, it wasn't really until the Nagasaki bomb was dropped that they were really understanding the numbers of deaths that were coming out from these incidences. And that is when Truman actually went in. They had a plan to
Starting point is 00:27:30 continue to drop bombs. They were going to drop more than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And after Nagasaki and the reports were coming in of the, you know, hundreds of thousands of deaths, that Truman went and said, no more. I will not let you drop any more bombs and took the power away from the generals to have any authority over these weapons. And in fact, that is the history of the beginning of what eventually would become presidential sole authority over nuclear weapons was that transfer of military to civilian power and making sure that nuclear weapons stayed under civilian control to make sure and try to take this power away from any potentially power-hungry sort of military members, which, as you know, then sort of morphed into its own problem.
Starting point is 00:28:22 So we have just landed really in the center of the morass here because this is not an easy problem to think about because we have already demonstrated the actual utility under certain circumstances of having these weapons. In fact, it's even plausible to say that lives were saved by the use of the first atomic bombs in World War II. And we've already demonstrated our willingness, obviously, to use them under certain circumstances. And as you point out, Lisa, the transfer to civilian control, which makes so much sense in light of that first experience, is now its own enormous problem in the presence of someone like Donald Trump, who's followed every moment of the day with the so-called nuclear football.
Starting point is 00:29:13 We're in the process of rethinking that or trying to inspire our society to rethink that. And it's hard to find a line through this that is going to check all the boxes that we want to check here, or it's going to allow us to arrive at all the topics we want to arrive at in a systematic way. But I mean, here's the general picture that worries me and that I'm getting from having begun listening to your podcast, Lisa, and becoming aware of Bill's work and reading other sources here. There's a logic of nuclear proliferation and deterrence, which seems somewhat inescapable and diabolical, because having nukes is the difference that makes the difference on the world stage in so many cases. Countries just treat you differently once you have nukes. They don't tend to invade you. The reason why a country like North Korea or Pakistan or India
Starting point is 00:30:06 would want nukes or Iran now, it's not crazy for them to want these weapons because it's a fact of the matter that this power matters. And deterrence only works between nations on the assumption that a country will actually use its nukes. So the fact that we believe that nuclear-armed countries will use their nukes to respond to any significant aggression and, of course, any kind of nuclear first strike, that's the psychological reality that gives the game theory its mode of force. But this status quo, the fact that we have countries and individuals who have nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert and with launch-on-warning protocols, and we have this demonstrated, at least professed willingness to use these weapons under certain circumstances, is what makes the possibility of stumbling into an accidental
Starting point is 00:31:06 nuclear war so real. And I know, Bill, in your book, you write that actually the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war is much higher than a war started in earnest because some country initiated a first strike on another. I don't know if you have a first point of purchase you want to take on this problem, Bill, but it just seems to me that the status quo should really be intolerable to us because we have a world that has been rigged to explode really based on mishap, right? Based on misinformation, based on the prospect of faulty radar or cyber attack, or even the derangement of a single individual? How's it that you think about the current moment? Because I'll just add one more fact here. The doomsday clock that has been registering our alarm for 70 some odd years now
Starting point is 00:31:59 is at its closest point to midnight than it has been at any point in history. It's now 100 seconds to midnight in 2020. And in 1953, it was at two minutes to midnight, and it was at around four to five minutes to midnight during most of the Cold War. So according to the clock, we are at more risk than we've ever been. And yet, it seems to me that most people have gone entirely to sleep on this issue. So talk to us about what it's like to be on the brink, Bill. The first point I would make is that I agree with the bulletin's assessment. And without putting minutes or seconds on it, I would simply say that the danger of
Starting point is 00:32:38 a nuclear catastrophe today is at least as great as it was at any time during the Cold War, and yet almost no one in the public understands that reality. So that's just one important point. The second thing to consider is we have assessed the danger for decades now as being the danger of a surprise attack on the United States, what we called during the Cold War a bolt out of the blue. And we geared our policies and we geared our force structure to deal with that threat. I believe the reality today and even the reality during the Cold War was that was never the main threat. The threat has always been the danger of an accidental war, the danger of blundering into a nuclear war, either through
Starting point is 00:33:32 a political miscalculation or through a technical error. We had several examples of each of those during the Cold War, which happily we survived. One of them, of course, the most significant chance of a political miscalculation was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And as we talked about earlier, I believe the chance of that having erupted into an absolutely catastrophic nuclear war was probably better than 50-50. There were other political miscalculations on the Cold War, but that's perhaps the most, that's the poster child of them. Beyond that, there was a possibility of a technical accident. And we had at least three false alarms in the United States that I'm aware of, and at least two in the Soviet Union that I'm aware of. And any of those could have resulted in an accidental nuclear war. So, the real danger during the Cold War was not a bolt out of the blue. The real
Starting point is 00:34:28 danger was blundering into a nuclear war. And I believe that that is the same situation today, and with at least the same likelihood today. Not that Russia or North Korea or Iran, you name the country, is going to deliberately launch an attack against the United States, but that we will blunder into some kind of a nuclear exchange with Russia or with one of the smaller powers. Just to sort of demonstrate the level of randomness and really how dangerous and how likely we could really just stumble into an accidental nuclear war. There's this really pretty crazy story of actually what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was an incident at a airbase in Duluth, Minnesota,
Starting point is 00:35:20 where it was late at night and patrols were patrolling the base. And it's in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone was on very high alert at the time. And someone noticed that there was someone trying to climb the fence into the airbase. And they went in a panic and tried to set off the alarm for an intruder. And they actually hit the wrong switch. And they instead set off an alarm,
Starting point is 00:35:49 which then notified the base to then launch their nuclear-armed planes to start working towards a possible attack. It turned out that it was a bear. A bear was climbing a fence at an airbase in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And something as simple as that could have stumbled us into a nuclear war. And it's truly when we're at these moments, these politically charged moments when things are at their most scary, when it's the easiest for us to stumble. It's part of the reasons why the fire and fury rhetoric from
Starting point is 00:36:33 President Trump was so concerning, because whether you believe he would actually follow through or not, just putting out the notion that he might supercharges the atmosphere for people to interpret things that they might not otherwise and to make decisions based on those interpretations, which could really lead us to this escalating situation. is pretty straightforward and is fairly solid. But part of the issue is that there are actually some assumptions that we make about the situation that is in place for deterrence to hold up. And some of those assumptions include, we assume that the people involved are rational actors. And we also assume that everyone involved has accurate and complete information, which unfortunately, especially in crisis situations, is not always true. And when you don't have full and complete information, you make decisions based on incomplete information,
Starting point is 00:37:39 deterrence can fall apart. Yeah. We're talking about human minds here and human emotions and human assumptions and the psychology of confronting risk. And just to unpack a little more what you said about the fire and fury moment. So what we have there is President Trump threatening nuclear war. He's not the first president to do that. Many have done that since the first and only time we used these weapons. It should be understood that we have not renounced the option of a nuclear first strike. So the world is on notice that we and other nuclear powers are poised to use these weapons. It's our stated policy that under some circumstances, we will use them, even in response to conventional aggression.
Starting point is 00:38:32 And in Trump's case, he was threatening their use in response to mere provocation, not conventional war making on the part of North Korea, but just further nuclear testing or even just further verbal threats that move the line of bellicosity a little further. But it's often thought that we would make an enormous gain, enormous step towards safety, if we would renounce a first-strike policy and had merely had a second strike policy. But as you look at this, it should be clear that even if we had just a second strike policy, even if we told the world that under no circumstances would we be the first to use these weapons, we would merely respond to an attack upon us with a second strike, even that policy leaves us open to an accidental nuclear war. Bill,
Starting point is 00:39:27 your book starts with a scenario where a fictional U.S. president gets bad information about an incoming strike that he learns too late was bad information, and he launches a retaliatory strike, which then becomes the real first strike to which the Russians respond with their retaliatory strike, more or less ending human history. So correct me if I'm wrong, Bill, but it seems to me that while it would be progress of a sort to get to a second strike policy, we still have a time bomb on our hands. We still do, notwithstanding that I'm strongly in favor of moving to this second strike policy. It removes one of the probabilities, one of the possibilities
Starting point is 00:40:10 of accidentally blundering into it. It doesn't remove all of them. But before we start talking about the possible path back from the brink here, maybe we should just talk about a few other terrifying concerns. Honestly, one of the most terrifying pieces of media I've seen over the years was an animation that you put out, Bill, now a few years ago on nuclear terrorism, which it doesn't really fit into this logic of proliferation and deterrence in quite the same way, because any group that would do this is not, these don't tend to fall into the rational actor category. And also, it wouldn't necessarily be a nation state against which we could retaliate in response to an act of nuclear terrorism. But anyone who hasn't seen this video needs to see it. I'll put
Starting point is 00:40:57 a link to it on my website. But they'll describe the scenario you concoct for nuclear terrorists and just how destabilizing a very low-tech attack on us could be. The scenario we imagined was a rogue group within a small country's nuclear program. This is a rogue group that has access to the material, but is not under full control of the government. And they build one nuclear bomb, ship it back to the United States, where their agent in the United States then detonated on Pennsylvania Avenue. The level of catastrophe of just one, let's say, Hiroshima-type bomb is more than most people would ever imagine. You know, besides 100,000 or so people casualties from this,
Starting point is 00:41:55 there is the terror and the panic. In this case, it's in Washington. The government is decapitated. And the conclusion from it is a level of catastrophe that's really hard to imagine until you start going through the possibilities of a scenario like that. So we made that video to dramatize the point of how catastrophic one small nuclear bomb could be and the danger of nuclear terrorism. The good news from all this is that the one danger that we actually made some headway
Starting point is 00:42:31 on in the last number of years is the one of nuclear terrorism. President Obama instituted a program of getting all the nuclear powers together to take steps to improve the safeguards on the fissile material. And I would say that whatever the probability of a terror group getting a nuclear bomb was 10 years ago is substantially reduced because of what he has done in that area. So there is one bit of good news in all this is that we have taken steps, taken actions to reduce the likelihood of nuclear terrorism. is that we have taken steps, taken actions to reduce the likelihood of nuclear terrorism. Well, that's good to hear.
Starting point is 00:43:10 The only real likelihood of a nuclear terror group being able to get a bomb and make it go is if they can somehow get their hands on the fissile material. If they could do that, it's easy to imagine how they might be able to build a crude but effective nuclear bomb. Yeah, yeah. Have you followed any progress or lack thereof in our ability to detect nuclear materials coming into ports in shipping containers? I don't believe we could count on being able to detect that. There's another way, if I were the terror group, I would be pretty confident I could find a way of getting the fissile material in. Right. Correct me if I'm wrong,
Starting point is 00:43:42 but I think in that video, you talk about the prospect of a group setting off one bomb and then saying, you know, we have 10 other bombs in 10 other cities, you know, meet our demands or those go off too. Yeah. In the video, they only had one bomb and they brag about, they threaten the use of other, and the terror effect of that threat is as great as if they actually had them. So the panic, not just in Washington, but all across the country, is very great. And the economic catastrophe that results from that is very great. And you can look at just the changes that happened in our country after 9-11, changes that happened in our country after 9-11. And you can just imagine and extrapolate how much greater that something like a nuclear terrorist attack could be. I mean, there have been some experts who say, you know, this could be the end of our constitution as we know it, that this would
Starting point is 00:44:35 really challenge pretty much everything that we hold as a nation to approach something like this. There is an upside to this, though, which is that there are things that we can do. And as my grandfather brought up, part of why we need to be having dialogues with countries like Russia, no matter what is happening in other realms in politics, we need to continue to have dialogues with all nuclear nations, Russia in particular, because of how much this is an issue and that we cannot address the threat of nuclear terrorism as a single country. adamant to work on this because they have the materials, they have access to the materials, they need to make sure that they are securing these materials because it is quite an intense endeavor to process these materials. It is not simple. It's not something that can be done casually. So generally, when you're talking about terrorists getting their hands on fissile material, it's going to be coming from somewhere else.
Starting point is 00:45:45 They're not going to be generating it themselves. And if it's coming from somewhere, it's coming from a refinery that is established. And there are ways to track that. And that is what came down to with the Iran deal is that despite all of whatever critics may say, there are ways to track these things. And then they're quite robust. But we need to have a global cooperation to make sure that everyone is doing their part to secure these materials and to make sure that they are staying out of the hands of bad actors. But that requires dialogue, which unfortunately, in our current political environment, has pretty much gone away, particularly between the U.S. and Russia. And that does leave us more open to this sort of situation. What was your views about our rescinding the Iran nuclear deal or stepping out of it ourselves?
Starting point is 00:46:41 It was a major step backwards. We were gaining some degree of nuclear security through the Iran, the treaty we had with Iran, or the agreement we had with Iran. And we just walked away from it. We walked away from it because the agreement we had did not include restrictions on other things that Iran was doing that we didn't approve of. And I understand why we were concerned about those. But because an agreement did not do everything, doesn't mean we should give away what it did do. And what we did give away was the ability to constrain the nuclear program. That was, I think, a serious mistake.
Starting point is 00:47:28 a serious mistake. What about the argument that we should just unilaterally disarm, or at least declare that there's really no scenario under which we would use these weapons? These can no longer be viewed as weapons of war, given the logic of deterrence. the logic of deterrence? I think we could take significant steps in that direction. Not all the steps that are needed, but some of them. One in particular, when the last year or so of the Obama presidency, the second term of the Obama presidency, he was planning to reduce our nuclear stockpile unilaterally down to a thousand weapons. That is the number of weapons deployed. We had a treaty which limited it to about 1600. And he said, we don't need 1600s. And so rather than going through the details of a new treaty or agreement with Russia, he just unilaterally said, we're going to drop them to a thousand.
Starting point is 00:48:23 That was a sensible thing to do. Whether or not Russia followed suit, which was at least a possibility, but he got so much static on that that he backed away from it. So yes, it's a good idea, but politically in the United States and probably in Russia as well, politically, it's very difficult to do if it's not matched by what Russia's doing. And we didn't have any agreement to where the Russia would go down to a comparable amount. So a good idea, but politically very hard to do. Right. Well, I guess just in thinking about this, I mean, there is something fatalistic or even nihilistic about one's cast of thinking when one kind of goes through these scenarios. But if you just imagine the case of the worst case scenario, Russia decides to execute a full
Starting point is 00:49:15 first strike against us, and we're informed of it with a dozen minutes to spare. What is the rationale for retaliating under those conditions? Why would any president or any administration want to pointlessly kill hundreds of millions of people on the other side simply because we're all about to die? You're essentially doubling the likelihood that you'll usher in a full nuclear winter and erase human history entirely. If we could think ourselves to the point of realizing that it wouldn't be tempting to use these weapons, even in the case where they seem to most cry out for their use, at least the legitimacy of their use, what is the point of having them? What you're describing is what would certainly go through the mind of any president
Starting point is 00:50:12 if he saw an attack heading towards the United States. It's exactly, I think, what he would be thinking. And he might very well decide not to launch the retaliatory attack, even though he was capable of doing so, for the reasons you've described. But of course, for deterrence to be effective, each leader, the leader of each country, has to take the posture that he's going to do that. And it has to be a credible posture, so he cannot allow any doubt to creep into the other side's mind. But no matter how firm he is before this happens, no matter how clear he is of what he will do before this happens, if the attack has
Starting point is 00:50:52 actually taken place, he would certainly go through that line of thinking. Any human being who is the president of that state would certainly have to consider the possibility of not responding. would certainly have to consider the possibility of not responding. But I think the more fundamental point, Sam, is that all of our thinking on this has been oriented around the possibility which is exceedingly remote, which is that the other side is going to launch, see some political advantage to launching a major attack on us. You know, hundreds of nuclear weapons going off in the United States. What is the advantage of the other country doing that?
Starting point is 00:51:30 What is the reason that he would do that? It just seems to me to be almost an irrational viewpoint, and yet our whole deterrence, our whole force posture, all of our policies are based on that as being the threat, whereas, in fact, the real threat is a threat of blundering into a nuclear war through an accident or through a political miscalculation. That certainly was true all during the Cold War, and it's also true still today. And because we have made the wrong assumption of what the threat is, we've taken a whole set of actions in terms of policy, in terms of force structure,
Starting point is 00:52:09 that are designed to deal with this non-threat, which in fact aggravate, make worse, the real threat we have, which is a threat of an accidental or blundering into a war. What incremental steps could we take that would importantly change the risk calculus? I mean, I think one idea that I've heard you discuss is just removing our land based missiles. Maybe if you think that's a good idea, talk about that. And then let's talk about any other good ideas that are out there. Well, ICBMs are by almost by definition a first strike weapon because they are in known locations and it can be taken out. And so, you would use them as a first use weapon, not in a response weapon because they would be taken out before you could respond.
Starting point is 00:53:13 So that makes them exceedingly dangerous because of their vulnerability. If the president is alerted to an attack coming on the United States, he would have to assume that that attack is going to be the first wave of that attack is going to be directed against our ICBMs. And therefore, he'd be faced with the decision as to whether to launch those ICBMs before the attack impacts. And if he decides not to launch them, he risks losing all of the ICBMs. If he decides to launch them, he risks having accidentally started a nuclear war if, in fact, the alert he got was a false alert. So the ICBMs are, first of all, a first-strike weapon, which we don't plan to do, and secondly, uniquely dangerous because of the possibility of leading to an accidental war. For that reason, I think whatever level of nuclear forces we think we need for deterrence ought to be put into the submarine forces and air forces, The time frame for that decision is roughly on the minute value of five to 10 minutes.
Starting point is 00:54:32 And mind you, you know, this could be in the middle of the night, woken up the president coming out of bed saying there are missiles on the way. You have five to 10 minutes to decide whether you use our ICBMs to launch a retaliatory strike or we lose all of those ICBMs. And it's really, it adds to this level of tension and this level of risk that you would insert into this situation that really seems untenable to maintain that situation. And that's an issue that's not an issue with any of our other nuclear weapons, our air and sea missiles, since those are generally considered in moving around in different locations
Starting point is 00:55:17 and wouldn't be able to be so susceptible to a first strike. That danger is not academic to me. Many years ago, many decades ago, when I was the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, I got a phone call in the middle of the night about 3 a.m. This was 1979, I believe. Phone call in the middle of the end when the voice on the other end identified himself as the watch officer to North American Air Defense Command. He said his computers were showing 200 ICBMs on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. He quickly went on to explain that he was convinced his computers were in error, and he was calling me.
Starting point is 00:55:59 I was a technical person in the Defense Department. I wasn't in the chain of command at the time. He was calling me to see if I could help him figure out what went wrong with his computers. But before he called me, before he knew it was a false alarm, he did call the president. The call went through to the president's national security advisor, who was Brzezinski. And Brzezinski waited for a few minutes before waking the president. And before he actually got to the president to awaken him, he got the second call telling him there was a false alarm. But he was within a minute or two of waking the president, Carter, who would have then had less than 10 minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs. In the middle of the night,
Starting point is 00:56:40 no opportunity to consult with anybody, no way of getting context on what was going on, no way of assessing whether this was correct or not correct. He would have to make that decision. No president, no person should have to make a decision like that. But it's completely because of the vulnerability of our ICBMs to attack. It's interesting. I hear these details. I'll just cast back onto my underlying concern here, which is that I feel like we are ill-equipped to have an appropriate psychological response to how insane this system is that we've built.
Starting point is 00:57:28 system is that we've built. We're now into the third generation of human beings who have built and maintained the system of self-annihilation, which in the limit must approach a probability of one of malfunctioning. We're just living year after year in this completely untenable circumstance. And yet the insanity of it, the masochism of it is hard to keep in focus. As much as I'm paying attention to nothing else in this conversation, I know I'm going to go on with the rest of my day after we get, after we get off the line, and other things will capture my attention and be far more compelling to me than this problem, which I can do very little about. And I can do more than most people about it by having conversations with people like yourselves. There's a kind of moral paralysis around this, because this is unlike so many other threats to our survival. This is
Starting point is 00:58:28 completely self-imposed. We're having this conversation in the context of coronavirus making its progress around the globe and terrifying everybody. And that's a real problem that we didn't invent and that we are not sedulously maintaining. And that, it's the solution of those sorts of problems that should draw all of our ingenuity and energy. And yet, we have this other problem. You'd think it would take, you know, either the real existence of Satan or, you know, some diabolical superintelligence to mislead us into a place of being this idiotic with how we've prioritized our values. We're here, we're stuck here, and we can't find a way out. I don't know if you have anything to say in response to that. I'm just kind of dumbstruck by the fact that
Starting point is 00:59:21 this is such an enormous problem. It is so unnecessary, and yet it is also difficult to keep in view. I do have something to say about that. First of all, I agree with your assessment of how serious and how idiotic the problem is. But I do not agree with your assessment there's very little you can do about it. It's the view that people have that they can't do anything about it that's got us in the fix we're in today. There are things you can do about it. In fact, this podcast is one of those things. The reason we have the problem is an education problem. People do not understand how dangerous it is. The political leaders do not
Starting point is 01:00:00 understand how dangerous it is. And and therefore we continue proceeding down the path with policies that allow us this dangerous situation to continue. There are a number of things we can do about it, concrete specific things. There are political actions which no one of us can take, but if we can educate the public and educate our political leaders, then they can take those changes, which would greatly reduce, simple changes which would greatly reduce. For example, ending the presidential sole authority, prohibiting first use, prohibiting launch on warning, all of those things, which are easy to do, could make a big difference in the danger. And you and I can take actions through education that can lead to the public state of mind, which could create the environment
Starting point is 01:00:47 in which the politicians could take those actions. It's part of why I got so invested in this when my grandfather started his foundation to start working to educating the public on these issues. I was so inspired because, as you said, I am part of the so-called millennial generation. And despite who my grandfather is, I really didn't understand that these were issues that were relevant today, that these are modern issues, that these are something that I needed to worry about. And when I started to grasp the scale and severity of what was really happening around me. I couldn't do anything but try and do something about it, to try to raise the alarm on it. That is why we started our podcast. And that's sort of the focus of what we're talking about is not just diving into what are the
Starting point is 01:01:40 specific issues. Let's understand how we got here, what they are, but also, you know, talking about what are concrete solutions that we can start working towards to reduce the danger? Because I think one of the things that happens when we talk about nuclear weapons in particular, that comes up a lot in the dialogue about this issue is people tend to have this sort of all or nothing approach. And it's understandable. It's this really overwhelming concept. It's hard for us as humans, for our minds to grasp the level of devastation, the level of destructive power that nuclear weapons have. And it's much easier for us to just shut them out than it is to think about what it is that we have created here. But the truth is, is that there are incremental things that we can do to start to lower the risk. And that is actually
Starting point is 01:02:33 very worthwhile in doing. It is very worthwhile in taking the time to push for these changes. And in fact, it may not seem like it, but there have been things that have happened over the decades since nuclear weapons were invented that have lowered the risks. And it's just a matter of we need to bring the attention back to these issues so that we can continue to push for those things. And one of the things right now that is so concerning to me is that because we do not have this general public education about this as an issue, there are things that are happening in the background that we are doubling down on nuclear weapons because no one is standing up to say, no, we do not want this. We do not accept this. Particularly, and unfortunately, this actually happened under the Obama administration, is that he approved what is so-called the nuclear
Starting point is 01:03:22 modernization program. He approved this as a way to get the New START deal passed. And unfortunately, as good as the New START deal is, and I'm glad that he was able to get that passed, the fact that he pushed through this nuclear modernization plan, I think, is going to be largely a negative. What the nuclear modernization plan is doing is taking all of our older nuclear arsenal and updating them. But it is more than that, because understandably, it does make a lot of sense and it is very smart to make sure that if we are going to have nuclear weapons, that we make sure that those weapons are in strict operational shape, that they are in the best operational shape that we can make them to be. However, what is happening is that we are basically
Starting point is 01:04:11 rebuilding a Cold War arsenal without ever questioning whether we should continue to have any of these weapons, when this is really the perfect time to say, let's look at what we have and really question, maybe we could do better with less. Maybe we could reduce and get rid of our ICBMs. Just let them go into the trash heap, let them phase out. Maybe we could, you know, lower the number of weapons that we have overall. And in fact, as part of this nuclear modernization plan, the Trump administration has tacked onto it. And we are now developing so-called lower-yield tactical nuclear weapons, which are particularly concerning because there is this thought and this fear, and I think it's a very founded
Starting point is 01:04:58 fear, that having a lower-yield nuclear weapon lowers the threshold for our military believing that they could use these weapons in a tactical and military sense. And as many experts will say, there is no understanding of when you use any nuclear weapon, whether it is a so-called tactical nuclear weapon or a full warhead, whether that would not escalate to a full-blown nuclear war. And of course, to give you context, these tactical nuclear weapons are roughly, you know, eight to ten kilotons, which is on par with a Hiroshima-style nuclear bomb. So these are still incredibly disastrous, devastating weapons. And this is the sort of thing that we are slipping into because we do not have the public awareness and that political pressure to start changing things. There's really not too many
Starting point is 01:05:51 people in our elected government right now who are fighting for these things. There are a few who are educated and are fighting, but they don't have enough allies to really make much happen. There is, in fact, actually legislation. There is a no-first-use legislation that has been put forth. There is also a limiting presidential sole authority legislation. Congressman Ted Lieu and Edward Markey have put forth legislation that would remove presidential sole authority to launch nuclear weapons first without the approval of Congress. It does allow for a president to be the sole decider in the event of an attack to allow for that safety scenario, but it would remove what is currently our U.S. policy, where the president
Starting point is 01:06:39 and the president alone has the power and complete authority to launch a nuclear weapon without any checks or balances. And those are things that we can do concrete today, right now, to lower these risks, to start to work towards a world in which eventually maybe we don't have nuclear weapons anymore. Can you see the possibility of getting rescued by new technology here? I mean, what one idea that I mean, perhaps other people have had it and spoken about it, and I'm just not aware of it. But what if our cyber war capabilities became, you know, suddenly decisive, and we could just turn out the lights and zero out the financial system in a target country. And in response to that, we decided, okay, we're getting out of this nuclear game. We're never going to launch these weapons, but
Starting point is 01:07:31 threaten us with those weapons. We'll turn your lights out. Is there any rescue that could come from a lateral move here that would take us out of the standard logic of deterrence? of the standard logic of deterrence? I do not believe so. I think just the opposite, that the new technology, for example, cyber, aggravates rather than mitigates the threat. The cyber could be used by a rogue nation or by a malignant third party to interfere with our command and control or Russia's command and control. So as I see it, it increases the possibility of an accidental nuclear launch rather than... And so to me, the cyber is a problem and not a solution.
Starting point is 01:08:22 I want to just remind everyone of the human element here, because the current scenario is that this is for the president to decide. And the clock in many of these cases is ticking very quickly. And so you have Carter being woken up in the middle of the night or almost woken up, and he would have had minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs. Is it true, Bill, that this could be apocryphal, but I remember hearing that Reagan thought that our ICBMs could be recalled after launch. Is that true? Has any president actually believed that? I don't know if that's true, but it's a certainly plausible theory because you would think we would have
Starting point is 01:09:06 that capability. And in fact, we have decided not to have, deliberately decided not to have that capability because of the fear that somebody might, again, some malignant person after we launched might send up a signal to deactivate the nuclear warheads. So whether that was a good reason or not a good reason, we do not have that capability. So once we launch them, they are gone. Now, it's reasonable for people to believe that we would have a recall capability or destruction capability,
Starting point is 01:09:40 and therefore it's quite possible that Reagan actually believed that for a while. But I'm sure somebody would have set him straight on it if he did. Yeah, but obviously, the current occupant of the Oval Office doesn't really advertise his eagerness to fill in the blank spots on his map of what's going on. And that's married to a claim to understand everything, no matter what the topic is before him. And none of this inspires confidence. And I think even his supporters would imagine that he knows less about the details here than probably any occupant of the Oval Office before him, right? And so you can imagine he's being given the prospect of using,
Starting point is 01:10:26 you know, tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons and never even bothering to understand that, at least as you say, these weapons are as big as what we dropped on Hiroshima. Like the idea of just using these on the battlefield in Eastern Europe in response to some provocation, and the logic or lack thereof by which you arrest a slide into a full-scale nuclear war having used them, even his supporters, I think, can't have any confidence that he has thought through any of this or upon being forced to think it through with the clock ticking, will be especially good at it. Who's happy with the status quo here? It seems hard to change the status quo. Who's making it hard to change? I have to say that I share your concerns there, but I've also been concerned about
Starting point is 01:11:17 other presidents through the years as well. Anytime you have a president that has a psychological problem, anytime you have a president who's into heavy drinking, anytime you have a president that's taking medication for whatever reason, President Kennedy, for example, was taking heavy medication to alleviate the pain he suffered. And we have no way of knowing that that could have caused an impairment of his thinking, but it's conceivable. We do know that Nixon was into heavy drinking the last month or so of his presidency, and
Starting point is 01:11:51 that would be a very significant, substantial problem. So while I'm particularly concerned about the problems you described with President Trump, I really do not want any president to have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. Yeah. Yeah. Although, as Lisa pointed out, this was considered progress when we lifted it from the hands of the military-industrial complex. Well, we took it from the military, and that was the right thing to do. Right. Why does it have to be with just one civilian? Why can't it? We have, when we declare war, according to our constitution, it requires an act of Congress. The founders believed that
Starting point is 01:12:30 declaring war was such a consequential act that it should require, there should be impediments from the way to doing it, and then no single person should make that decision. And certainly, launching a nuclear attack on another country is an extreme version of declaring war. Right. But then how would this apply to a retaliatory strike? Because if we only have 12 or at the outside 30 minutes to get our act together... The reason we have evolved such a dangerous set of policies is because we have believed that the threat was a surprise attack from the Soviet Union originally and now from Russia, a surprise attack against the United
Starting point is 01:13:10 States. And therefore, all of our policies, including how we respond to that, have been based on that theory. And given that, then the idea of having a single person make the decision and make it quickly makes some sense. But if you take away the necessity to make a decision in five minutes, if you say we have an hour to make the decision or a day to make the decision or a couple of days to make the decision, then having a single person make that decision makes no sense at all. And I think I want to illustrate just how scary our presidential sole authority system is, is that right now, the way that the U.S. system works, partly, you know, in that mode to respond to this threat of a potential bolt out of the blue, the president
Starting point is 01:14:00 can order a launch of nuclear weapons using the football. That order would then go on to the National Military Command Center, which would then go to the missileers and the bases and things. There have been generals in recent meetings in questioning whether we should rescind this power in lieu of the threats that President Trump has made, generals who have said, former generals of STRATCOM, claiming that we shouldn't worry because the military would not follow any unlawful order. In particular, they bring up the notion of military law requires the notion of proportionality and appropriateness. However, those orders do not necessarily go through STRATCOM to get to our missileers. They do go to STRATCOM, but they go at the same time. And actually, I've spoken
Starting point is 01:14:53 with Bruce Blair, who is a nuclear security professor, as well as a founder of Global Zero, and in his history was himself a nuclear missileer several decades ago. And he talks about, you know, during his time in that position, how rigorously that they are trained to respond to these orders and roughly in the space of three to five minutes that they would get this order. So this is really a regimented system that when it goes, when the order is confirmed, it goes through. No one can countermand it. It goes through from the president to the missileers in a couple of minutes that we would then be going to turn the keys to launch these nuclear weapons. And in fact, he said in all of the years that he was doing this,
Starting point is 01:15:42 they were never trained to stop. They were never trained to stop or ask. As long as it was confirmed, they would turn the keys to launch the weapons. I think the simple point to make here is when the general says they would not follow a new legal order, if the president sends a command to launch, that's a legal order. president sends a command to launch, that's a legal order. Whatever the reasons behind it, it's a legal order. So what the Stratcom general was saying was really a non-sequitur. Yeah, this also came up in my discussion with Fred Kaplan, and he pointed out that the fairly Kafkaesque logic here is that any protocol, any launch command that's already in the book, right, has been vetted by military lawyers. So if you launch anything that's off the menu, it is by definition a legal order. And now you're just adding the further logic that if it's coming
Starting point is 01:16:38 from the president, it is also by definition a legal order. It's amazing. So let's just talk about proliferation for a moment, because obviously the greatest risk is the status quo of mutually assured destruction between Russia and the US. But many other countries are acquiring or have acquired or are seeking to acquire these weapons for reasons that are not surprising. The difference between, you know, if you're North Korea with nukes and without nukes, you are treated very differently by the powers you provoke. And so it is with Pakistan, and so it would be with Iran. What are your thoughts on proliferation? I mean, it's easy to see, you know, from their point of view, we have a system that,
Starting point is 01:17:26 I forget which country first used this phrase, it might have been India, but we have a system that looks like nuclear apartheid, the haves and the have-nots with this technology. What do you think about the prospects of halting proliferation at this point and even rolling it back? Not very good for the reasons you've just given, that any country can see the advantage to their security of having nuclear weapons. That's not an illusory advantage, it's a real advantage. North Korea, when they got nuclear weapons for obvious reasons, which is they believed it would give them security, what they saw as a real threat, which is a threat of the United States overthrowing the regime.
Starting point is 01:18:08 So they got nuclear weapons to deter that threat, and they successfully, I think, accomplished that mission. So any country can see that as a good deal. For that reason, years ago, we created what's called the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty so that the countries that wanted to take advantage of that would have some reason not to. And the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gets the non-nuclear powers to agree not to go nuclear. And in return for that, the nuclear powers agree to work towards phasing out and decreasing their nuclear capability.
Starting point is 01:18:50 So that was a two-sided deal, and that has been pretty amazingly effective through the years. But if you look at that today, you can see that the nuclear powers are not maintaining their end of the deal. In particular, both Russia and the United States are now beginning a major new buildup of nuclear weapons, basically repeating with new and better technology, repeating the buildup of the nuclear buildup of the Cold War. So the attraction of having nuclear weapons is very real. The Nonproliferation Treaty has managed to offset that attraction and given us a very successful several decades of relatively low proliferation.
Starting point is 01:19:33 But I think that's beginning to fall away now because of the action of the nuclear powers and not holding up their end of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Is there a tension between nonproliferation and fighting climate change now, given that new generations of nuclear power seem to hold a lot of promise for us? Is that part of the unraveling of the prospects of nonproliferation, or is that not a variable? Well, it figures into the equation as follows, that a way of proliferating and proliferating more or less secretly
Starting point is 01:20:09 is to do it under the guise of nuclear power. And the poster child for that is North Korea, which had what they advertise as a commercial nuclear power program, which they use to build nuclear weapons. So that's the only case I know of where that has happened, and it probably could have been prevented by better monitoring through the Non-Proliferation Treaty. I would not use that as an argument against the use of nuclear power, which has a considerable advantage
Starting point is 01:20:45 in terms of another existential threat we face, which is a threat of global warming. So yes, nuclear power could be an avenue, a path towards nuclear weapons that you have managed to keep your nuclear aspirations secret. But there's only one example that I know of where that has been done. There's a possibility that Iran might have a dual-use program as well, but there's been quite a lot of attention and pressure to keeping that from happening. There is also actually a flip side to that in which there is a potential perceived benefit, which first of all, there is quite a difference in the type of
Starting point is 01:21:25 facility that you would have as a nuclear power facility that you would need to have to enrich the type of material you would need for fissile material. And it's quite different from most facilities that you would build for nuclear power. So it is actually fairly easy to detect whether there might be illicit action happening there. And that's often what is the focus of the surveillance on Iran and making sure that they were not working towards a bomb. But there's also the potential positive side, which is actually, if we were to try and work towards disarmament, there needs to actually be a place to put all of this fissile material. You cannot
Starting point is 01:22:06 just abandon it. You actually need to put it somewhere. You need to recycle it. You need to blend it down. And one of the best ways to do that, one of the best ways to get rid of that material is actually to blend it down and put it into nuclear power facilities. And there's actually one of my favorite stories. During my grandfather's tenure as Secretary of Defense, he helped to champion a program, which is the Nunn-Lugar Program, which unfortunately, I think, has not gotten enough attention throughout history. It's a program that was instituted in post-Cold War to try and go into former Soviet countries, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, who after the collapse of the Soviet Union suddenly became nuclear weapon states overnight
Starting point is 01:22:54 and did not have the money or the infrastructure or the political will to maintain these things. And in fact, Ukraine at the time became the third largest nuclear weapon state in the world when this happened. So to the level of the numbers of weapons that we're talking about here, this is a huge endeavor. And, you know, all of these countries were incredibly financially unstable. This posed a huge security risk. And the Nunn-Lugar program was a program instituted in the U.S. to work alongside
Starting point is 01:23:25 these countries and the newly formed Russia to go in and secure these weapons, to dismantle them, and also work with the former military members there to rehome them, to retrain them so that they wouldn't be brought up by potential terrorist organizations who might be seeking these weapons or seeking, you know, scientists or people who know how to work with these weapons and to dismantle the submarines and all of the things that go into a nuclear infrastructure. This is huge multi-year endeavor to do this. And part of what they did is the material that was dismantled and blended down from these former missiles was bought by the U.S., by nuclear power plants. this legislation was that at the time from roughly, I think it's 1995 to about 2002, some 20% of U.S. electricity was coming from nuclear power. And for those, you know, roughly a decade, the amount of power that we were drawing from these former nuclear missiles was about 50%.
Starting point is 01:24:43 from these former nuclear missiles was about 50%. So our lights, 10% of our lights in the entire U.S. were powered by former Soviet missiles for about a decade. Wow, that's symbolically quite beautiful. It would be nice to go further in that direction. So the Nunn-Lugar effort there, did that reach some kind of fulfillment or did it sort of peter out for lack of... Well, we succeeded in eliminating all of the nuclear weapons in those three countries, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, all of them. That all happened during the term I was Secretary
Starting point is 01:25:20 of Defense. Before I left office, those were all dismantled. the term I was Secretary of Defense. Before I left office, those were all dismantled. I recall post-September 11th, there was an ongoing concern that al-Qaeda, in that case, could get nuclear materials from one of the former Soviet republics because you had materials that were under padlock in certain cases, and you had the implosion of economies where you had some thousands or even tens of thousands of nuclear engineers and scientists who had no jobs, right, or driving taxi cabs or working in some menial way, and you have the prospect of this incredibly valuable material being able to be stolen and distributed to terrorists. How sanguine are you about how fully that's been contained?
Starting point is 01:26:10 The Nunn-Lugar Program was directed at all three of those problems. On the first one, dismantling the nuclear weapons and fissile material, that was 100% completed during the period I was Secretary of Defense. On the second one, the nuclear sciences and nuclear technology, we made progress on that. And I think that problem is greatly mitigated, but you could never say it was completely eliminated. What, in your view, are the most tractable, most achievable concrete steps that we could take now? I mean, for instance, bring us back to the command and control issue, where to get this out of one ape's hands and at least make it a decision by some committee or consultation with Congress, what would be
Starting point is 01:27:00 required to do that? Could Congress unilaterally decide to diminish the president's power to launch a first strike or a retaliatory strike? Yes, there is legislation already pending with the Congress, which has no chance of approval in the present environment, but there's legislation pending to end presidential sole authority and first use. The question is how effective that legislation could be against a president determined to use them anyway. But that would be a major step in that direction. Certainly, we could, through legislation, retire the ICBMs.
Starting point is 01:27:43 That could be an action taken solely by Congress if they decided they wanted to do that. We could also limit strategic missile defense. That's, again, an action that could be taken by Congress. Let's just linger for a moment on that. What is your view of strategic missile defense and any possible improvements that could be had along those lines? Is it just destabilizing to the logic of deterrence, or do you think it could actually land us at some place of greater safety? The biggest problem with strategic missile defense, aside from the fact that it's pretty expensive, is that it doesn't work. Do you think that it actually can't work, given that it's always going to be easier to evade it
Starting point is 01:28:26 than to respond to the evasions? Yeah, the reasons it doesn't work are quite fundamental. And without going into detail, it amounts to the fact that the offense, in this case, as in many other cases in the military, but certainly in this case, the offense has a huge advantage over the defense, maybe a 10 to 1 advantage. In the case of missile defense, that is primarily because of the ability to put decoys out, which can easily saturate the system. Now, that is limited to the case of strategic missile defense systems that operate in the outer space, not in the atmosphere. But that's the way our system works. operate in the outer space, not in the atmosphere.
Starting point is 01:29:08 But that's the way our system works. It works in outer space, and therefore, it's highly susceptible to decoys. And so, fundamentally, it has very little chance of working. So, that's one disadvantage of strategic missile defense. The other disadvantage is that the other side fears it might work. And therefore, they have incentives to find ways of bolstering their offense. So, it stimulates the offense without mitigating it. That's aside from the fact it costs a lot of money. Right. Yeah. And it also, it adds to the sense that if you imagine the view from the other side, the view from our adversaries, if they believe that we believe that we have a dome protecting us from any incoming nuclear missiles, they will judge the likelihood of our possible first use as being higher because we think we're immune from retaliation, which then is just provocative in his own right.
Starting point is 01:30:05 To be clear, no, even the most pessimistic analysts in Russia today could not believe that our present deployed missile defense system poses any threat at all to the ICBM force. It's too small for further. But they do fear that it's the base on which we could rapidly build and that we could build a system which we might believe would defend our country. And they base their policies and their programs on the belief that we're going to follow through on that possibility. I did want to bring up one other effort that we really haven't touched on that is happening to try and work towards securing our future, a future, you know, maybe free from nuclear danger, which is that actually several
Starting point is 01:30:51 years ago, a treaty was passed at the UN, which the prohibition on nuclear weapons, a treaty was passed at the UN to ban nuclear weapons entirely. And now this treaty has not been ratified yet yet because we're still waiting on several countries. We need a few more countries before it is fully ratified, but they are actually quite close to that. The organization that was behind that is ICANN, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICANN is actually an organization that is a number of organizations that come together to work towards this effort. And it was actually a legal push to try and make nuclear weapons illegal. And they've actually been quite successful. They were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Starting point is 01:31:35 for their effort to pass this ban. And you have a lot of critics who come out and say that this is a pie in the sky effort, that there was no point to do this, that this is impossible. But I spoke with Beatrice Finn, who is the head of ICANN, an incredibly intelligent woman who is championing this issue. And I think she made a great point,
Starting point is 01:32:00 which is they based this treaty off of the treaty to ban landmines, which has actually been incredibly successful. And it's not to say that there are no more landmines or that we even expect that in five, 10 years that there will be no more nuclear weapons, but you need to institute a goal. You need to set a standard for the world to start to work towards, to put this global pressure. And particularly what I think is really interesting that came out of the UN treaty was you had all of these non-nuclear states who finally had a voice in this issue. Because you really, as you said, there is this sort of dividing line between the haves and the have-nots.
Starting point is 01:32:43 And the majority of the world does not have nuclear weapons. However, they are subject to the decisions of the nuclear weapon states and how they decide to manage these weapons. They're really held hostage by this insanity. And, you know, how incredibly inappropriate is it that a few countries get to decide the fate of the world based on the power that they have decided to develop and also preventing other people from developing it themselves. And these non-nuclear weapon states are standing up and saying they do not accept this risk value. They do not accept that this is how it should be done. And they are trying to reclaim their power and say that they should have a voice
Starting point is 01:33:26 in how this is handled and that we should really be looking at, you know, how the world wants to handle these nuclear weapons. And while, you know, even the people working on this treaty understand that just putting it into place doesn't mean that it'll happen tomorrow.
Starting point is 01:33:43 They understand that this is a process, but it is about sending a message and about setting an expectation to work towards this. Of course, all of the nuclear weapon states have refused to participate in this discussion, as you might expect. But I think, you know, this isn't just, you know, an issue between Russia and the U.S. This isn't just an issue between Russia and the U.S. This isn't just an issue between India and Pakistan. Just to demonstrate the level of seriousness that the devastation that could happen even from a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. And just so people understand, there's roughly about 15,000
Starting point is 01:34:20 nuclear weapons around the world scattered throughout the nine nuclear weapons states. And U.S. and Russia have about 90% of those, and then the rest are scattered around. But there have been studies done to show that even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons, about 100 Hiroshima-size bombs, and this is often experts worry about India and Pakistan in particular being maybe if there were to be a exchange between nuclear weapon states, those two countries may be the most likely for something like that. If there were to be an exchange of 100 nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan, the devastation, not just the number, the millions of people who would die, but the global impact on our climate, you know, the issue of nuclear winter, which unfortunately, you know, was people thought that it was debunked, you know, in the 80s. But that's actually not true. There's quite a lot of research that has come out with modern tools to demonstrate that this is actually a very real fear. And just
Starting point is 01:35:26 100 nuclear weapons could cause a global climate catastrophe of a drop of roughly two to three degrees Fahrenheit in global temperature. And the fallout on our production of food and the mass starvation that would follow based on these studies shows on the numbers of one to two billion people would be affected by the mass starvation that would follow. So this really is something that all countries should have a voice on because it's something that affects everyone. Just to be clear, the issue with nuclear winter is you're talking about all the ash and debris lifted into the atmosphere blocking sunlight. Into the stratosphere.
Starting point is 01:36:14 Yeah. Yeah. So we're talking about crop failures. Once you have cloudy skies for years at a stretch, you would expect food production to go way down. I guess I want to close the door to any climate denier in Trumpistan who thinks, that sounds rather good. We can mitigate the fiction of global warming by reducing global temperature by a few degrees. What's wrong with that? So yeah, actually, you brought me to,
Starting point is 01:36:46 let's just address for a second, the claim that going to nuclear zero is a completely quixotic and impossible dream. What should seem impossible is the maintenance of the status quo. We should recognize that the place where we started, where we acknowledged the perverse utility of Hiroshima, there are certain bounded circumstances in which you can make the case that having and using nuclear weapons actually works. We're not in that situation anymore. We're in a situation where the prospect, I mean, certainly when you're talking about the U.S. and Russia, the prospect of winning a nuclear war, it no longer exists, right? You know, you can annihilate your enemy, but your enemy also gets to annihilate you. And you've also, by reference to what we just talked about, you've probably annihilated yourself anyway by ushering
Starting point is 01:37:45 in a proper nuclear winter. And there may be some local cases where one nuclear power could destroy a non-nuclear power or even another more primitive nuclear power without suffering the logic of retaliation. Most of the world is not in that circumstance right now. And the circumstance we are in is of a really badly calibrated doomsday machine poised to detonate based on misinformation, right? So anyone who thinks it's impossible to walk back from the brink here isn't really thinking about how untenable it is to just maintain our perch right on the edge of it. You've both been incredibly generous with your time, and this has been an education. Is there anything you want to say by way of conclusion here and bring us into the end zone?
Starting point is 01:38:42 Yes, I do. My first comment would be that the total elimination of nuclear weapons is not going to happen soon, if ever. But the danger is so great, the danger to all of civilization is so great, this is a goal we should be working towards. Ideas matter. And the idea that nuclear weapons are a danger to all mankind is a fundamentally important idea and we should continue to keep that idea in front of the world. But secondly, even before that happens or if it never happens, there are many things we can do to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons and that danger primarily resides in an accidental or blundering use of nuclear weapons through a technical
Starting point is 01:39:25 error, through a political miscalculation. And a dozen or so very important political steps, which we could take this year, next year, which would greatly reduce those dangers. We should be focusing our attention on doing those. Some of those involve ending the political presidential sole authority, involve prohibiting launch on warning, prohibiting first use. These are dangers we face we don't have to face. We can simply get rid of them. We can retire all of our ICBMs and still maintain a strong, very strong deterrence. And that not only greatly reduces the danger, but saves us hundreds of billions of dollars. We can limit strategic missile defense for the same benefits. We don't have to wait for new treaties.
Starting point is 01:40:12 We can take actions to reduce our nuclear forces without the benefit of treaties. And we can elect a president that understands these issues and is committed to trying to deal with them. Those are all things that can be done in the relatively near term that will greatly reduce our dangers while we, over the longer period of time, work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. And beyond making political noises to those ends, are there organizations that people can support that are doing effective work in this area? I mean, what's the role for philanthropy here?
Starting point is 01:40:47 Yes, there's many such organizations. The Nuclear Threat Initiative is one very important initiative in Washington, D.C. that works for illuminating the nuclear dangers and taking steps towards minimizing them. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in Chicago is another such organization. Many of the World Authority Councils and Councils of Formulations around the country work in this direction. So there are things that can be done to reduce political dangers. One organization is focused particularly on this issue, which is called the Plowshares Fund. And so the Plowshares, that's located in San Francisco. And the Plowshares Fund. And so the Plowshares, that's located in San Francisco,
Starting point is 01:41:28 and the Plowshares Fund has supported other organizations that are working towards reducing the danger of nuclear weapons. So if a person says to himself, what can I do? I would say there are two things they can do. The first is to get yourself educated on this problem, which listening to this podcast is one way, but it could also be a pathway towards other ways of getting educated. And the second thing it can do
Starting point is 01:41:51 is to support the organizations like Plowshares and like the Bulletin of Islamic Scientists that are working, and like the Nuclear Threat Initiative, that are working with very capable professionals working on this problem full-time. Oh, that's great. That's great. Lisa, do you have any closing thoughts? Yeah, I think you hit on it exactly, which is that we cannot afford nuclear weapons,
Starting point is 01:42:16 both in risk and even financially. The nuclear modernization program right now is projected to cost upwards of $1.7 trillion, trillion with a T, $1.7 trillion just for this program alone, just for nuclear weapons over the next 20 or 30 years. And the risks that it presents to us are untenable. We cannot afford to maintain this status quo. And I think it's really important when talking about this, it can be easy to get overwhelmed. It's easy to feel defeated and hopeless, but there really is hope here. Nuclear weapons, like you said, these are man-made weapons, unlike climate change, which is involving a lot of different forces that are being influenced by humans, we created these weapons and we control these weapons. And when it's a people-made problem, it means that there can be political solutions.
Starting point is 01:43:14 What we need now is the political will to start pushing for those solutions. And like my grandfather said, it is about educating yourself and educating others. So it's listening to this podcast, listening to our podcast, sharing it with people, talking with people, making a ruckus, really starting to get the dialogue started, in particular with younger generations who did not grow up during the Cold War and may have not realized that these risks were there and that they were there at such a level as to say, you know, if you don't accept the existential threat of climate change, you shouldn't accept the existential threat of nuclear weapons, even more so that, you know, we are doing this to ourselves. And to go out there and to push our government, to push our politicians to start to make these changes, to reduce the dangers, and start to work towards a world in which maybe we can start to have the conversations about working towards a global zero. There is a world in which that can happen, but we need to make these first steps to start the dialogue.
Starting point is 01:44:19 Sam, I'd make one final comment. I've stressed several times, and you yourself have stressed, the importance of education in this field. And I'd like to give you an example, which is three years ago, my granddaughter Lisa knew nothing about this problem. And she hopped on the project, went through a self-education process, and now I consider her an expert in this field. went through a self-education process, and now I consider her an expert in this field. So it is possible for people, if they get concerned, if they get interested, to learn enough about it to become real experts and to learn what actions to take and how to take them that can reduce the danger. So do not give up. The first step is educating yourself, and the next step is try to take political actions to manifest some of the things that your education points you towards. That's a great note to end some of the things that your education points you
Starting point is 01:45:05 towards. That's a great note to end on. And I just want to thank you both for taking the time to educate me. Again, I'll remind people that, Lisa, your podcast is coming. It may, in fact, be out the moment we release this, or if not, very soon thereafter. And that is at the brink. And we will link to that. And Secretary Perry, your book, The Button, is soon to be born. Look forward to that. And also you have the website, thewilliamjperryproject.org. And I just want to say, again, I'm now going to promote you back with your honorific. Secretary Perry, I just want to thank you for decades of service on this front. Of all the people who are anywhere near the chain of command,
Starting point is 01:45:47 so many of them advertise their unfitness for the job, and you have never been one of those people. So thank you for being that smart person in the room. Thank you, Sam. Good to talk to you this morning. Thank you so much.

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