School of War - Ep 129: Frank Gavin on Nuclear Strategy and Ukraine (War in Ukraine #2)

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Frank Gavin, the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and contributor to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, joins the show to talk about nuclear strategy and the war in Ukraine. ▪️ Times      •      01:36 Introduction      •      01:53 What are nuclear weapons for?     •      04:15 Pervasive but not used     •      09:53 Invasion insurance     •      17:58 Better to be near-nuclear       •      22:26 How might Putin use nuclear weapons?      •      26:04 Learning by doing     •      33:48 “It’s all happening at once”     •      41:31 Rattling the saber works       •      48:04 “We will get them back”         •      50:07 History and Strategy Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Follow the link to buy the book - War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World

Nuclear weapons haven't been used in combat since 1945, but everyone agrees that their existence and threats of their use have had a significant impact on the fighting in Ukraine. In this second episode of our mini-series on Hal Brand's book, War in Ukraine, we talk with Frank Gavin, America's leading historian of nuclear strategy about how, well, we all learn to keep worrying and feel anxious about the bomb. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today.

Francis Gavin, the Giovanni Anjali Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Advanced International Studies, author of numerous books and articles in particular on nuclear strategy. And he is a contributor to the How Brands edited War in Ukraine, Conflict Strategy and the Return of a Fractured World, a chapter on nuclear. lessons from the war. Frank, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, Aaron, for having me. Great to be here. So I thought I would just open with the question of the day. Then we can take it from there. What has the war in Ukraine taught us about what nuclear weapons are for? It's a great question, and I'm afraid my answer is going to be frustrating and certainly frustrating to me. And that is because nuclear weapons are particularly difficult subject to study because you are studying a non-event. What we care about is nuclear war. What we care about is nuclear use. And it happens so rarely

that it's very hard to make any definitive assessments. And yet it's so consequential and it so affects behavior of states, both in explicit and implicit ways, that we have to try to do our best. And so it often involves sort of guesswork. We try to look at history and try to make some arguments from the past. We try to rely on deductive theories about how nuclear weapons affect calculations of states and leaders. But the fact is that the good news is we haven't had any thermonuclear wars and we haven't any nuclear use since 1945, the bad news is it makes it very hard to say anything definitive about it. So it's a frustrating answer to be sure. We'll come back to Ukraine, but the nature of your answer makes me want to range a bit further

afield, at least initially. That fact itself that there hasn't been any use since 1945, five, what does that tell us about nuclear weapons and how we've come to think about nuclear weapons strategically? I recently read, and it was kind of a fun and wild and terrifying experience, William Borden's There Will Be No Time. I was turned on to it by Eric Edelman. We discussed it here on the show. And I had only known Borden as kind of one of the villains of the movie Oppenheimer prior to

that. And it was a fascinating book, sort of far seen, talking about things. that would become real elements of nuclear strategy, but certainly not in 45-46 when it's written. But of course, his expectation, as I assume, was the expectation of many at the time. Of course, we're going to use these things. People are going to use these things.

This is more now will involve nuclear weapons. I don't think he was, I don't think that was a unanimous view, but it certainly was a view. So the fact that they haven't been used, what does that tell us? So, Aaron, it's a great point. And I think, I often think back, and imagine it's 1960.

And you've gone through 15 years with nuclear weapons, a little bit less with thermonuclear weapons, extraordinary increases in the ability to deliver them at speed around the world. You were to say to somebody, now imagine you're in 20, 24, and these weapons not only have not been used, but in fact, the predictions for how many states would have them, predictions for how many of them there would be are wildly off the mark. And I think it's an extraordinary story. And it's one that few anticipated and it's what's humbling about it because I think if you were in 1960, you fully would have expected at some point for there to have been a nuclear war. And as you correctly point out, most people calculated it would happen. And what's

really interesting is after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which is arguably the closest the world came to a thermonuclear exchange and really does scare people, it really did seem to alter people's understanding perceptions of nuclear danger. And even though the Soviet Union in the United States were deep and bitter ideological and geopolitical rivals that absolutely load each other and wanted to see the end of each other's system, that moment seemed to mark a understanding where both recognized it was probably in their best interest to do something about this. And it's the beginning of what you see as efforts, some more successful than others, to limit both the spread of nuclear weapons, also to think about arms control, to think about hotlines and

things like that, where there's a real conscious effort to say, well, maybe this doesn't have to be inevitable. Maybe the things we can do to push back against it. And you really, you have a few crises here and there afterwards, but nothing anywhere near as terrifying is the Cuban Missile Crisis. And you have a world where nuclear weapons are constantly persistent, they're constantly there, sometimes invisible, but always affecting everything. But that danger that we anticipated and expected that they would be used, not really happening. And so it's a remarkable story. Can I just ask the kind of blunt, dumb question? Why has nobody used one?

So I think that over time, and I think this is actually germane to the discussion today, the consequences and costs of using them far outweigh any possible political gain. Now, one can imagine desperate scenarios where that logic shifts. one can imagine World War II or World War I like scenarios where states find themselves in a desperate position and they would calculate differently. But thus far, we haven't seen a set of geopolitical circumstances where a state could rationally conclude that using nuclear weapons would generate such advantages that it would be worth the extreme. extraordinary risk.

And so now, that's a kind of a tautological answer in that being aware of that, that also affects geopolitical calculations. It's sort of the question I always ask my students, if you were looking at, say, a crisis in South Asia and you could choose between eliminating Pakistan and India's nuclear weapons or resolving the underlying tensions between the two, which would you do? And of course, it's hard to disaggregate those two, right? So, but it highlights that no state has yet made the calculation that using these is worth the unbelievable cost that it would bring back.

I'll respond to that with something that seems to me to be kind of a plain fact, but maybe I shouldn't be so confident in it. So I'll say this and invite your response. But it seems to me that one of the reasons why there have not been, why a nuclear power has not found itself in an extremist position, like, say, France does in the spring of 1940 or, you know, any other example we might want to pick from the First or Second World Wars has a lot to do with the existence of nuclear weapons, of course. And this gets us back to Ukraine, the challenge then, or at least an important challenge among the very important challenges,

is understanding how nuclear logic interacts with conventional, strategic, logic because there's clearly a relationship there and that relationship is clearly playing out in Ukraine. And one obvious way in which it plays out or has played out since 1945, which what your comment illustrates is, it can have a pacifying effect. It's a bit like, this is kind of a crude pop culture comparison, but it's a bit like the mobsters flying in poor Mr. Pentangeli from Italy for Michael's testimony in front of the, I guess the Senate hearing where he's called in before the Senate to talk about mafia activities. And nothing ever happens to old Mr. Pentangeli.

They just flying back to Italy in the end, but his presence in the room certainly chills the desire of the witnesses to rat on the mob. Nukes sort of play that role. They never have to do anything in order to do a lot. That's a great way of putting it. I make two responses to that. I sort of start out the last book I wrote on nuclear weapons, where I compare nuclear weapons to a ghost in an old house.

You live in a haunted house, and you go a very long time, you don't see the ghost, you don't know it's there, and you forget it's there, although you condition your behavior. Then all of a sudden the ghost rattles, and it scares you unbelievably, right? And so it's rarely explicit, it's rarely there than it until it is. And then my good friend Vipin Nourang has thought more about this stuff than just about anyone often calls them invasion insurance, right? If you have them, they don't, they turn out to be. be limited in their ability to get you much in the world, but they're really, really good at preventing people from messing with you and taking your territory, which is why the situation in Ukraine is so germane today.

Well, one possible consequence we could see from the war that you discuss in your chapter, but that does not seem to have happened yet. I'd like to get your comment on this is Ukraine famously, after. the end of the Cold War gives up its access or potential access to nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees. And now it is the subject of an invasion. So one might expect that a consequence of that fact pattern to be real proliferation or expanding aggressive desires on the part of non-nuclear powers become nuclear powers, because why would one want to be, why would one want to be Ukraine if one could avoid it? Why would one want to be Gaddafi and give up a nuclear program

only to suffer the consequences of being regime changed subsequently. And yet you point out, we don't seem to be seeing that. Why do you think it hasn't played out that way, at least not yet? So it's furly, and it could be that things are happening that we don't see. It could very well be that given the sort of global norms against developing nuclear weapons as well as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, if you were a candidate to do that, there's any number of reasons I think you might try to hide that you were doing it. So all this is with a caveat of saying, we don't know.

And I'm always interested in what is the possible breakout candidate that no one's keeping an eye on. We focus on countries like Gulf states and South Korea. On the back of my mind, I'm always wondering about Vietnam, right? Because Vietnam's not part of a formal alliance with the United States. It faces a big aggressive neighbor. It has a civilian nuclear industry. And another candidate, depending on how it assesses its future connection to the United States, is a state like Poland, right? And these are states that are fully capable of doing it.

And so there's a couple things I would say. To my surprise, it seems that when given the choice, states appear to prefer a deep and meaningful security commitment from the United States over their own nuclear weapons. which is interesting. Now, the relationship, the arrangement that you mentioned with Ukraine was far less of explicit security guarantee. But if you look at countries in NATO, if you look at, say, the Gulf states, even South Korea and Japan, you get the sense that having, in ways that I wouldn't have expected, that they prefer to have that commitment from the United States as opposed to their own nuclear weapons. And if I were to kind of speculate why, it seems to be that even though there's all sorts of credibility concerns with any state offering of protection,

and particularly given the volatility of the American commitment, since we all know in the post-war period, the idea that the U.S. would make any commitment to anyone is somewhat historically novel, that it appears that the costs of developing your own nuclear weapons, and by cost, I mean exposing yourself more to your enemies and adversaries, exposing yourself to global opprobrium, outweigh the benefits that come from just throwing your lot incompletely with the U.S. That's very speculative, but that's just my guess, because like you, I fully expected a lot more proliferation pressures. I really anticipate it, because as you say, it's the perfect test case. Here's a state that had access to nuclear weapons, and it's brutally and ruthlessly invaded by

nuclear power. The world kind of stands back and doesn't do a lot because there is sort of an implied bargain in the NPT that you're not supposed to let this happen, even beyond security arrangements. You would have expected the whole thing to start really kind of crumbling. The second thing that I think is interesting, when you're in a security relationship with the United States, sort of the best place to be in the world is almost nuclear, right? It's almost like courting or seduction, right? It's like it's the getting there and almost being there that's better than the being there. And I think countries ranging from, you know, the countries in East Asia,

the South Korea is and the Japan. You even see this a bit with the Gulf states. If you say, well, I don't know, I'm going to have to go nuclear unless you provide more. more of these assurances to me. The United States says, okay, what do you need? What can we do? And again, it's hard to test how serious those states are about asking for those insurances and what they would do.

In the early 70s, the United States treated Japan rather brutally. It ended the Brentwood system without telling them. It opened up to their enemy, China, didn't consult with them on any of this. It was in the middle of a period where the nuclear nonproliferation treaty had been signed but not ratified by Japan. And American power appeared to be on decline in the early 1970s. It was kind of a perfect test case for when you would expect a state to say, all right. And there were rumblings in East Asia, Taiwan and South Korea, wondering about America's commitment.

In the end, none of them went nuclear. And so all I can, this is, again, just speculation. But it just seems like if you have a choice between being protected by the United States or being on your own with nuclear weapons, states appear to prefer the former. And that's speculative and it could change and things could be happening that we don't know about. But I, like you, have been surprised that there has not been more proliferation pressures in the last two and a half years. Your answer is keep making me want to sort of wander away from Ukraine.

So I'm going to again. But we'll come back. We'll come back. So how should we think about Iran then in this category of proliferation consequences of recent events? You make a case, I think it's a pretty persuasive case, that there's something really appealing about being near nuclear. You could argue that the Iranians are kind of near nuclear right now. I think that's pretty clear. But, you know, Tehran is not Tokyo.

The view of the world is pretty different from those two places. and without even getting really provocative and getting into regime types and revolutions and things like that, you could just make the observation that Tokyo kind of likes the status quo in the Western Pacific and would like things to stay more or less

as they are in terms of where borders are currently drawn, et cetera. And Iran doesn't seem too happy with current power arrangements in the Middle East and would like them to change. So do you mean your observation that it's pretty appealing to be near nuclear as a kind of blanket statement that states if they're thinking clearly would all

come to that conclusion, or do you think the circumstances of the individual state are going to affect this? Yeah, I think the latter, because I can think of two models when you were asking that. On one hand, if you were to say, look at India and ask, how much has India gained for itself from getting nuclear status? You could say, not really a whole lot. It probably guaranteed that Pakistan would develop nuclear weapons. Doesn't really help it with a lot of its, you know, with its border conflicts with China because, you know, China's never really wanted to invade and conquer it. It spent a period of time sort of as an outcast.

It didn't really help it develop its own indigenous conventional military capabilities, which are, you know, fairly meager compared to it, what it should be. And you'd say, well, you know, if you want to be, if you're trying to, if you're trying to be like Tokyo, that's a bad model. The other model, of course, is North Korea, right? And if you're North Korea, you have nuclear weapons. The world has to pay attention to you. They can't bring about regime change. You can generate trouble. And so I think it would depend upon whether or not, again, I think you say exactly the right thing. It depends on what your goals are. If your goals are aggressive and expansionist, then nuclear weapons

might provide you with that sort of shield to prevent people from intervening conventionally. If you're sort of more concerned about your own stability, including regime stability, and you want to kind of generate some benefits to you without taking the full step of going nuclear, which invites all sorts of problems, you know, then you might take the Japan issue. And I think what must be interesting, it'll be fascinating to see how this is debated in Tehran because once you cross that border to nuclear weapons, you've both invited lots of potential costs and Iran's cost that could be quite high. You've also lost that leverage of being almost.

And you have to weigh for yourself to the benefits that that provide, do they nullify the risks and the opportunity costs. And that's a calculation that, and I think you're right, states base those on their temperament, history, ideology, goals in the world. And I have no idea how they think in Tehran about this. And I could imagine someone making a presentation. And occasionally you hear from people who know Tehran, who they become infuriated when you compare them with North Korea.

and they always say, oh, we like the Japan model, which isn't entirely credible, but of course, who wouldn't want to be Japan and not North Korea? But I do think, and I don't know enough about the strategic culture there, but if they were to make that step, they'd lose a lot of those benefits. And again, they generate benefits from being almost nuclear that they lose then with the costs of being nuclear. So it's a hard one to know, but it would be fascinating to see how they make that calculation. Moving from the question of whether or not you would want to acquire weapons to the question of

how you might use them, I'm going to ask you to channel your inner Vladimir Putin, which, you know, one morning you wake up, you really just want to restore the glory of the Russian empire, force your enemies to respect you, et cetera. And let's assume, for purposes of this question, that you have decided that actually the costs of using a weapon in the context of Ukraine out, excuse me, the benefit. of using a weapon in the context of Ukraine outweigh the cost. I think most people when they're speculating about this, especially back in 2022, we're speculating that you'd probably see, you know, quote unquote, tactical

employment of a weapon. Perhaps you gave this some thought at the time as well. How might Vladimir Putin use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine or how might he would, how might he have back in 2022? How might he in circumstances going forward? And to what end, that is to say, Would it be to achieve battlefield effects? Would it be to affect the policy of other countries? Both much more one than the other. Just help us understand the rationale.

So you can imagine a variety of uses, and none of them offer clear cut and obvious benefits. The first one, which the intelligence community seemed taken by, and this is the idea of a demonstration shot, right, to demonstrate results. and seriousness. And one of my favorite memos from shelling to Kennedy in the summer of 61 during the Berlin crisis talks about the idea of using nuclear weapons, not for strategic, not for tactical purposes, but to serve notice that you're serious. And this is the one, it's where the divide between, I think, theoretical and practical is probably the widest. I can imagine you say, you're getting all of the vulnerabilities and costs without any benefit. And it's It seems like one that we were seized by in the beginning, but as time went on, didn't seem

to make a lot of sense. The second, of course, is some kind of tactical battlefield use. And you could imagine, particularly as Russia was suffering defeats on the battlefield, if there had been a complete collapse of their front and the Ukrainians had a free and open field, perhaps even going to, you know, to seize Crimea, you could imagine a scenario where a tactical use of tactical nuclear weapons to stop that kind of advance or to to reverse those gains would be possible. The third would be, and again, Putin has shown himself pretty unconstrained and a pretty awful human being. You just use them to punish Ukraine. You drop Obama in Kiev and see what happens.

You dare the West to respond. And as horrible as it is to consider that, you can't something like that out. Relatedly, I've always wondered if one cross, one of the problems of nuclear weapons is when you cross that threshold to think about using them, you've removed an important constraint. And then you start opening up the possibility because you've calculated during some serious trouble or you've calculated your adversary is not going to respond. Then all of a sudden you say, well, do you use one in a supply depot in Poland and see what happens? Do you drop one you know, in Great Britain to scare them, right? And it's not, all of these have plausibility problems,

but all of them kind of remain anything short of a strategic nuclear exchange, which one presumes Russia wouldn't do, are ones that you could imagine would be considered. I mean, ultimately, I think none of them, Putin probably has eliminated all of them. But as I kind of mentioned in the essay, he develops, he generates lots of political benefit from not making you realize that he may or may not have eliminated them. Well, let's talk more about that. How would you evaluate the American,

the NATO response to however it is that you want to characterize what Putin actually has done with nuclear weapons, whether it's actually a bluff, whatever, whatever it is, his use of the the possible use of his weapons as a kind of shield, as a kind of effort to deaden foreign intervention into the war to his detriment. How have we done? You quote in the chapter, someone characterizing the Biden policy as learning by doing. Say more about what that is and just give us a sense of how this has affected the United States' policy. So that's a terrific article by Janice Gross-Stein a fabulous international relations professor of the University of Toronto, published that in Texas National Security Review,

and it had a big impact on me. And I think the first thing I would say is that the way, when I think about assessing how a leader has to calculate these risks, I'm sort of in all the responsibility they face and terrified by the lack of knowledge or history they have to go on. And so as I mentioned right off the start, you're really faced by radical uncertainty. There's not even probabilistic assessments don't really help because we don't have any history to go on here.

And so on the one hand, and so part of me that generates two responses. One, some kind of respect and empathy for what policymakers have to go through. And then some sort of lack of patience for people on either side who make these kind of say, oh, we're risking nuclear war, we shouldn't do anything. Or, oh, there is no risk of nuclear war. We should do everything, right? And they're making basically arguments developed from their priors on deductive analysis. They don't really know, right?

we could find out tomorrow that Putin uses a nuclear device or invades Estonia or does any number of things. And we would look back on it, you know, ex post and say, oh, well, we should have anticipated that. But, you know, we're looking at these things ex ante. So that's the first thing I would say is that these are very, very hard. And I have a lot of empathy for people who are in the position of having to try to make these calculations because it's really hard. And, but the problem comes, as I mentioned in the chapter, is at the same time that you need to be mindful and respectful of the awesome responsibility of thinking about nuclear use, the way nuclear weapons work is they incentivize people to lie and to bluff into ways that other aspects of international behavior don't. It turns out that leaders don't lie a whole lot, even some of the most terrible ones, because there are costs. the line. The one exception to that really is nuclear bluffing, right? Because, and I really was taken by this when I spent a lot of time looking at the dynamics of the crisis between 58 and 1962,

where it was clear Khrushchev explicitly was bluffing. And then you see some evidence later that Nixon, who was vice president during the first part of this and probably took some lessons from this, also engaged in some nuclear bluffing. Because the idea is that we're all so desperate, to avoid nuclear use and to be responsible, that you can take advantage of a state or leader's responsibility by saying, I don't know, I might do this and you might concede to them. And the example I always use, if you and I were in some kind of tussle, you had 150 tanks and I had 50 tanks, at the end of the day, when push came to shove, I know that you have 150 tanks and you're going to use them and I'm probably going to lose, so I'm going to back down.

Whereas if you have 150 nuclear weapons and you're responsible and I have 50 nuclear weapons, I behave irresponsibly. The variable that matters is not how many do you have, but your resolve, which is inherently only known after the fact, you have all sorts of incentives like we do in any kind of quarrel to exaggerate our resolve. And so it probably is the case that Putin understood that and understood the incentive to inflate nuclear risk. And it's also probably the case that you can't dismiss it as completely out of hand as a total why, because who knows. So it's a very, very hard issue. I think I would not, one of the things about nuclear brinkmanship is that there's a level of ambiguity.

And why, as I think the administration handled aspects of this fairly well, one of the things I thought was probably unwise is when the president did that, I think it was in the York Times. up bad voices, we're explicitly trying to avoid World War III here. These are the things we're not going to do. And, you know, Eisenhower, when he faced these kind of things, it always made it clear, you don't say anything, right? So let your adversary guess, because that adds to your deterrence. So that, there was probably an understandable desire to limit the risk and perhaps be, for lack of a better word, too responsible. But it's an understandable flaw, but that is one. I probably wouldn't have written or published that op-ed.

But other than that, I mean, this is a really tricky or difficult issue. And there may have been times that Putin was interested in doing. I talked about this a bit in the chapter, but the whole September 22 incident where we apparently had actual real intelligence that they were willing to use or preparing to use tactical nuclear weapons. I mean, evaluating those things is very, very difficult. You know, one of the things that I'm struggling with is I try to understand what's going on Ukraine is precisely the subject of your chapter in our discussion today, which is just the way in which nuclear logic and conventional logic interact. And there are things about this war that do

feel a little bit new under the sun. And maybe that's just a function of my, you know, relative youth that I'm saying that. Maybe if I had a longer view or were better read, I would realize that's not the case. But there is this way in which you have a war in a place which your colleague and editor Hal Brands points out in the introduction to this book is a classical geopolitical hinge point. You know, the access point to Europe from Asia or Asia from Europe. Plenty of invasions have gone back and forth on this step, seen in a very broad sense, broad historical sense. Nothing that's happening here is particularly surprising. It's all kind of in the broad pattern of the history of the Russian Empire and the history of the region and what the region seems

to demand in its interactions with human politics. But then, you know, nukes are there and they have not stopped the war. They are affecting the war as it continues. And you go back to Borden, who, as you can tell, I'm a bit taken by. You know, it makes these bold claims, many of which turn out to be actually kind of interesting and somewhat borne out, perhaps in modified ways, and others, which are clearly, he's just wrong. He says, for example, that the existence of nuclear weapons and rockets together mean that armies are obsolete. There will be no more armies. There will be navies, Frank.

There'll be navies because you can put the rockets on the ships. And because you can spread stuff out, like, navies will have a role in nuclear warfare. But armies are done. It just doesn't make any sense. They can't. The wars are going to be so quick and so violent, the concentration of troops and tanks. It's just, you know, throw your Spikeman out the window, throw your McKindra out the window. He basically actually almost literally says that.

It's done. And yet it's all, it's all happening at once. There is a strategic conventional logic and a strategic nuclear logic and a policy logic that's somehow supposed to knit it all together. And I struggle to make heads or tails of it. Maybe there's something you've written or someone has written that draws the connections between classical geopolitical reasoning and strategic reasoning is a subset of it and nuclear reasoning because I have not read it. Yeah, no, it's a really good point. I think that confusion is the sign of your intelligence, actually, and your honesty, because it is. So, you know, just to give an example, there was a CFR did this very interesting study group that Bob Blackwell and Phil Zelico did on Taiwan.

It was really, really good. And it was basically talking how dangerous and vulnerable Taiwan was and looking at all the different contingencies. And I was on the study group and I read a draft and I said, what about? nuclear weapons and the authors were like, well, this is, you're not going to use nuclear weapons in this. And I thought to myself, we're not going to use nuclear weapons then. When would we use them, right? And it's what's, and this gets to, it's kind of a point you made, we, there are things that we explicitly expect nuclear weapons to affect our calculations, right? The great fear in the 1950s was a bolt from the blue, a thermonuclear attack that looked like Pearl Harbor, that

looked like the beginning of Operation Barbarossa that came out of nowhere and just eliminated us. And because that was what with the historical memory they had and they had memories of these giant wars, we don't really think about that anymore. And we kind of believe because of the satellite revolution and sensor revolution and the incredible sort of power of strategic level deterrence that we don't expect that to happen. So that big thing is gone. But what about everything underneath it? And I talk in the chapter about the debate between Jervis and Snyder about, does that make sub-nuclear conflict more likely or less likely? You know, Jervis was one who believed that, well, nuclear weapons provide such uncertainty

would actually make the world a lot more stable, kind of in that Borden sort of way, that you wouldn't really, it just really wasn't worth having these conflicts, where Snyder said, no, actually, it's going to make more things allowable. But that's, you know, Jervis would respond and say, well, but when do you get to that point that you trigger that nuclear stuff? You don't know what that line is. That's why there've been all these interesting debates about escalation dynamics. And all of this is happening, I would say, in an environment where a lot of the underlying factors driving and shaping why states do what they do might actually be shifting. This is kind of a controversial position. Hal and I sort of argue about this,

lot because, you know, how is Mr. Geopolitics? And for me, one of the puzzles about Russia's move in the Ukraine is that when you think about what makes for power in the 21st century, in 1900, if you take the Donpas, you have its wheat, you have its coal, you have its supplicant population, it adds to your power. You know, wheat, coal, and an angry population. And by the way, in 1900, no one in the world cares what you're doing. In 2024, if you have the you have the coal, you have an angry population that is incredibly difficult to get to your side, and you've got a world furious at you, even if it's not unified. It's not really a good bet, right? And how does that interact with the nuclear side of things? So I think your point is

exactly right. I think the assumption that many people had, and for lack of a better term, we might call the defensive realist camp, that nuclear weapons would really really chill conflict has turned out not to be true. And we see conflict and aggression and danger everywhere between nuclear states, non-nuclear states. On the other hand, the return of those kind of cataclysmic, totally mobilized wars for Eurasian dominance that work and imperialism that kind of marked the period from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, that both seemed not to be happening and nuclear weapons seem to play a role there too. I mean, you could imagine if, you know, comparing, say, Japan during World War II, when it kind of goes on a rampage,

you imagine a world now, the United States leaves East Asia, China goes in a rampage, Japan, South Korea, they develop nuclear weapons, Vietnam developed nuclear weapons, it's really hard to conquer states. Is China really going to try to, you know, it lost the last time it fought Vietnam. Vietnam is much better at fighting now if it had nuclear weapons. So it's, it's, I think you're correct to say. It's this weird mix where it's nuclear weapons, again, like that ghost in the house. It has these effects on how we behave that we're not even fully aware of. And it makes it very, very hard to discern. It also makes it really dangerous because you assume a universal level of understanding, but your point to Putin, and this is another point I made in the

chapter that because of the nature of nuclear weapons, how it developed, it's pretty much universal that states that have them, the decision falls in the hands of the leader. You know, if it's a president Biden or a Trump, they have sole authority, it's a Putin, it's a Xi, that's pretty much how it works. And so who knows what happens and how these calculations are made on an individual level like that? So it makes it very, very confusing. And I think your point that some things are new, some things are old, and it will be interesting

to see because I think we're wrestling through this now. If you were to put, I shouldn't say a gun in my head, but if you were to ask me what my best guess is, my best guess is that Putin probably has been bluffing and that we've probably self-deturred more than was necessary. But that would be an ex post analysis, right? In the actual real crisis facing that danger, I am total empathy for those people who don't want to make that leave. That being said, my hunch is that, again, one of the things that nuclear, for Putin, and I talked about this in the paper, if he were to use nuclear weapons, in some ways, it would be a terrible outcome for him because there would be all sorts, he would lose China, he would lose India,

the global south, probably would have protests in his own country, and the gloves would be off for us. So it's, again, I know this is deeply frustrating for people to say, well, Frank, what is the answer? is the absolute lesson? What does this tell one? And that's what's so hard about it. It just generates more questions and why I'm sympathetic to those who have to face this is they have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and imperfect knowledge. Well, is this fair as a lesson? I mean, let me try one. And you tell me if I'm being overly simplistic. But the history of the war, even so far, without knowing its full outcome. And I guess if suddenly the Russians collapsed and the

Ukrainians regain their territory that would probably obvious what I'm saying, but assuming the outcome isn't that good, it's something less good than that. Nuclear saber rattling works. It works with limited effect. It's not, it's not one Putin-Keeve, at least yet,

but it has chilled, allied support, American and NATO support for Ukraine. And so if you were China-Iin, Taiwan, which in a way is in a similar strategic position, as Ukraine or diplomatic position in the sense it's not a treaty ally of the United States,

is not formally enjoy guarantees of extended deterrence and so forth. You're going to launch some kind of blockade or operation. Well, you're going to rattle your nuclear saber because it probably is going to help. Is that fair or am I underthinking it? So no, I think that's, and this is a debate that I've had with Hal who makes that case and it makes it very eloquently. One of the things I always sort of, and it's a, it's a very. awkward, uncomfortable thing to say, but in a world, imagine a world where Russia doesn't have nuclear

weapons. How much of a strategic interest is actually Ukraine to the United States? I think, obviously, we want to live in a world order where naked aggression from authoritarian states against innocent sovereign states does not happen, and if it does happen, it is punished. And for that reason you want to see the United States and its allies support Ukraine as much as possible. But in a terrible world with lots and lots of tradeoffs, I think it's fair to say that America's interests in Taiwan are both more complicated and more vital than they were in Ukraine in some ways. And it's hard to really talk about it this way, but if you, I talk about this a little in the chapter where I say, of course, you could make the case. Western response has been slow.

The situation has been horrendous for the Ukrainians. There may have been missed opportunities to exploit Russian weakness earlier because we didn't move quicker. On the other hand, if you told someone on, say, February 20th, two and a half years later, that Russia had not conquered Ukraine, in effect, had suffered grievous losses and was on a long-term downward trajectory that this war had only made worse while NATO had stuck together, which remember, we're only a couple of years removed from President Macron saying it was brain dead, that it's sort of you've got people slowly, reluctantly, not as cool as they might, but increasing the defense expenditures. You've added Finland, which is a potent fighting force, and Sweden. And some of the underlying disagreements

in NATO, say, between the southern and western states and the north. Northern and Eastern States have not exploded out into the open. And all my trips to Europe, you find Europeans desperate to find ways to think about how they should rebuild their industrial military base and do more. And if you were to say, okay, that's not an ideal outcome. The U.S. though, has, in another little thing, if I was trying to looking at this, I could look at this in a variety of different ways. And one is one of the less discussed stories of all this is the amazing ability of American intelligence to predict this, to provide targeting. And given that if I'm sitting in Beijing and I'm thinking, they spend 90% of their intelligence capabilities on me, not Russia,

and look what they can do to Russia. It would get me a little bit freaked out. So in all of these things, that's the terrible thing. You can argue them either way. And when you can argue things either way, that generates uncertainty. And when you generate uncertainty, there presents both deterrent possibilities, but also possibilities to manipulate that. And I sort of come out of this thinking, again, I think the U.S., in retrospect, could have done more and done it more quickly. But we can also imagine worlds where they did less, where Europe splintered, where Russia did much better. The scenario that always scares the heck out of me

is what if on February 24th, Russia had moved into Estonia instead of Ukraine and really challenged the heart of Article 5 commitments. Do we, and Estonia at that point was indefensible, right? And would we have used nuclear weapons to stop that? Probably not. And if we didn't use nuclear weapons to stop that, how are we supposed to get Estonia back with, and you could imagine, you know,

that's a kind of scenario that, think you could have had far worse outcomes. So it's not ideal, but it's certainly far from the worst. And honestly, the flip side is I've been kind of struck by how restrained Russia has been. And I wonder how the nuclear dynamic plays on this. To me, if you had said that Russia would not have hit supply depots in Poland, I would have said, no, of course they're going to do that. And then what do you do? Right. We haven't been confronted with that yet. So how those lessons translate into Taiwan, I think, are trickier. China has its own reasons for wanting to have the salience of nuclear weapons be decreased, which is, I think, one of the reasons it's probably put

pressure on Russia. It's a different scenario. Invading an island is a lot harder. On the other hand, supplying an island is a lot harder. So it's hard for me to know exactly what lessons. On balance, though, if I were Xi, and I would be a little. This whole two and a half years would have left me a bit unsettled, less, not confident, more unsettled. I have a different view than how on this, I think. With regard to your point on Estonia, in the fall of 2021, I was at the Halifax Security Forum, I think it is, and one of these small dinners that they do. And, you know, many of the dinners were about East Asia. There was one, one dinner that dealt with European matters that fall.

There were sort of transnational issues as well. One, one dinner was about, NATO and Europe. I happened to go to that one. A senior official with responsibility to know what's what in these things was talking about, you know, Putin's behavior and threats. And at this point, in retrospect, this person probably knew, because this is, you know, Thanksgiving, they probably knew that something was afoot with regard to Ukraine that they didn't say that. And they contemplated a scenario about a Russian move on the Baltic states in which this person said, I was shocked. I was totally shocked. They made no reference to nuclear weapons, kind of unsurprisingly. They said, look, the reality is, if Putin invades the Baltics, we will not be able to stop him initially, but we will get them back.

And I was just flabbergasted. I mean, I didn't have, I mean, I, I wasn't in a position to disagree. This was a person who, who knew better than I, what the capabilities and limitations were in reflecting on it, it seems reasonable as an assessment of where things stood in fall 2021. But it's just a blunt statement of our kind of weakness in the face of Russia conventionally was striking. Yeah, no. And I think when you say get it back, how are you going to have D-Day for Tallinn? That was the implication. That was the sense of it, that we would fight our way back, whether through the Baltic Sea itself or up through the, I was about the Swahki gap. You know, one way the other, we would get back. Yeah, yeah.

And again, this gets to your earlier question about proliferation dynamics. I mean, I've got to imagine, I mean, I don't know, but if I'm a responsible person in Riga or Dylnios or whatever, I have my nuclear scientists on speed dial. I mean, you know, it's just because it's better now and I think that Russia's both weaker, NATO stronger, having Finland and Sweden involved helps that. We've obviously rotated additional forces there. I mean, it's still a daunting challenge but man i i i would and i see this all the time when i'm in europe and you run into our balded friends i mean they're obviously very worried and concerned as you would expect them to be but it's there's one thing where geopolitics still does matter you look at a map and you look at what it would

take and that's not an easy assignment so and it's one where when you think about well having nuclear weapons might actually be the solution there right but who knows Last question, hopefully more of a softball, because I've asked some, I've thrown some, some, some harder ones. But what book, you know, if Gattis's strategies of containment is a great one-volume survey of American strategic thinking during the Cold War, what is the corresponding volume for strategic nuclear thinking or nuclear policy? Is it, is it something that you have written that I will be embarrassed to confess I've not read, like nuclear. weapons in American Grand Strategy? Is that book not about that? What is what is the best one-stop shop if you want to understand how America thought about and was prepared to use nuclear weapons in a phased fashion through the Cold War? So I would have to say the person that had the greatest

influence on me in this front was my dissertation advisor, Mark Tractenberg. And he wrote a volume called History and Strategy. And it was published in 1991. And it wrestles with, and one of the nice things is he has a website. There's various essays he's written since on various questions. He's got a great essay on accidental war. He's got some interesting stuff on shelling. But he has this book History and Strategy, which is a connected separate essays. But he's got this one article, a wasting asset about the dramatic change in the nuclear balance between 1949 and 1954, when nuclear war was really, really a real possibility and perhaps even more of a possibility than during the Cuban Missile crisis, and how America had to utterly and completely transform its grand strategy in ways

it never could have imagined facing this unbelievably daunting prospect of defending a prostate Europe in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful Soviet Union, trying to rely on a Germany that had only just been defeated because it was Nazi Germany, all while your forces are stuck in this battle in South Korea and how that crisis just completely transformed how the United States thought about nuclear weapons and came to rely on nuclear weapons and developed a nuclear strategy and its nuclear thinking. And he's got other chapters. He's got chapters in the Berlin crisis, chapters on the Cuban Missile Crisis. And And to my mind, still 30 plus years later, it's the most sophisticated, subtle and insightful

analysis of the dynamics of nuclear weapons and how they shape international politics. Frank Gavin, contributor to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy in the return of a fractured world. And I just, I, so I want to add this, a director of the Kissinger Center at Seitz, which, you know, we've talked a bit about how brands over the course of this conversation, His work, your work. I recently talked to Sergey Redchenko and his new history of the Soviets in the Cold War, Soviet leadership. I think the Kissinger Center is doing some of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking work out there on matters of real life and death consequence for those of us interested in international politics. The work that has come out from you and your colleagues has genuinely helped me think things. through. And so kudos to you and thank you for that. Thank you for coming on the show. Well, I really appreciate Aaron. That's really nice of you to say. I also add my colleague, Mary Sorati, who's also been a great commentator throughout this. But it's just really terrific

to be on, you know, to talk to you. And this was a great conversation. And thank you for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.