Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/20/22 Peter Van Buren: How Close to the Brink Are We Really?

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

Scott interviews Peter Van Buren to talk through the risk of a nuclear detonation related to the war in Ukraine. Both Scott and Van Buren think the use of nuclear weapons is unlikely, but they dig into the differences in their views of the situation. They also explore how a conventional escalation could play out. Lastly, they turn to North Korea where Van Buren sees the greatest chance of nuclear disaster originating.  Discussed on the show: “Nuclear Chicken Is Overrated” (The American Conservative) “Inside the U.S. Effort to Arm Ukraine” (The New Yorker) “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard” (National Security Archive) Fail Safe (1964) “What Jefferson's Critics Miss” (The American Conservative) “Who is Winning the War in Ukraine?” (The American Conservative) Peter Van Buren worked for 24 years at the Department of State including a year in Iraq. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and the novel Hooper’s War. He is now a contributing editor at The American Conservative magazine. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Thc Hemp Spot. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, sorry, I don't mean to go all FDR on you or anything, but here's the new deal. All the interviews are now going up first at Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Of course, they'll all be going up at Scott Horton.org the next day, and the archives going back to 1999. We'll still be free for you there at Scott Horton.org. But I've got to generate revenue, you know. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already.

Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you. at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up for the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com

slash Scott Horton's show. Hey, look, you guys, on the line, I got Peter Van Buren. He used to work for the State Department, but he's a good guy now. And he wrote this book called We meant well about working for the State Department

in Iraq and the ghost of Tom Jod about the financial catastrophe. and the tip of my tongue about Hooper's War. Hooper's War, exactly, about, it's a novel about World War II Japan, but really it's about you and me right now. And his website is, We Met Well, and he writes regularly at the American Conservative, and from time to time, at least at the Libertarian Institute, at Libertarian Institute.org.

Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Peter? It's a pleasure to be here, Scott. It really actually is. Good. I like talking to you too, man. I'll tell you what. I like reading your stuff too. You're pretty bright. So a lot of us have been worried that, you know, not to be too alarmist about it. Like, oh, there's going to be a nuclear war. I have a friend of mine who texts me every week or so. Like, okay, what do you think it is, man? 90, 10, 80, 20, 70, 30. He's moved out to the country. I'm kind of not that alarmist. I think, you know, it's probably not going to happen, you know, just like my whole life. It hadn't. happen. At the same time, though, I think it can only be fairly said that the current level of tension and violent crisis between America and Russia is worse than 1983 and the Abel Archer near miss and just that whole kind of era of tension of the early Reagan years. We weren't in a hot war, proxy war on Russia's border, never mind the USSR's border at that time. And then, you know, So people bring up 1962, which, you know, I was raised to understand was the absolute brink of nuclear war,

meaning you cannot get closer to nuclear war than that. And there were some things, right, where one of those subs almost launched a torpedo and where Kennedy kind of had to ignore Khrushchev's second letter and just accept the terms of the first one. And these kinds of things, this whole Bobby Kennedy, I read the quote today, Bobby Kennedy told the, I forget, who, his Russian contact, I forget if he's the ambassador or not. Listen, we're facing the threat of a military coup d'etat here. You've got to understand the pressure that we're on, that we're under. That's the attorney general talking. He's afraid the military's going to remove him and his brother from power.

And so that's some pretty bad times. You know, that's the brink of it. They did, but it was a year and a half later. Yeah, exactly. And that's different. I had a couple of cutouts. You have to bring up the. the deniable parts.

No, but so that's, I guess, if that's the brink, we're somewhere between 1983 and 62, and so even then we didn't have fighting. We just almost did

have nuclear fighting. But, so anyway, I'll be quiet now because you got this, I just want to hear you talk about what you think about this. You have this article where you go,

eh, you know, I'm only moderately concerned, if I can paraphrase, so I want to hear you thinking. I wouldn't even go with moderately concerned. I'm not, I'm not actually concerned that there's going to be a nuclear war. I think I'm far more worried in kind of a broad sense that there would be some accident that would, if you want to know what keeps me up at night, it's North Korean

industrial safety and security. It's the idea that those guys have nuclear power plants where they've got to have been duct taping the duct tape for the last 20 years. And that's what keeps me up at night if you want to if you want to talk about worrying about nuclear stuff you know north korea's on my list here today actually and i think that's very important but we'll get to them okay you know that one of those nuclear power plants goes critical and they don't have a clue of how to control it and the wind blows the radiation all over Seoul or all over Tokyo or vice versa and then the chinese uh feel they have to intervene in order to stop a global catastrophe and so the Chinese basically invade North Korea, and the United States has to sit there and decide whether

to trust the Chinese are basically just showing up long enough to tamp down the nuclear destruction or whether the United States needs to get directly military involved against the Chinese. And since there's not much the bomb in North Korea, that whether the United States needs to start striking north of the Yalu River at the buildup of Chinese forces, and meanwhile, the nuclear power plant is leaking all over northeast Asia. So that's my disaster scenario. And that one is as real as one untitened bolt somewhere in North Korea. So if you want to worry about something, slide that one into the mix and see where that leaves you.

But the good news is that let's talk about the Ukraine and let's talk about nuclear weapons. Now, in order to understand my argument, you have to. to sort of agree with a couple of stipulations. And it's easy here with you because you're actually thoughtful and educated, as opposed to, say, Joe Biden and the entire American strategic power structure. But you've got to realize that Putin, like nearly every world leader, I was going to say all world leaders, because I do believe that's true. But nearly every world leader is a rational person. He didn't get to that position. power. He's not holding onto that position of power by being irrational. And if anybody wants to

send a postcard in and kind of lay out some irrational act by Putin, you know, you're welcome to do that. That's not to say everything he does works out. He makes mistakes. But they're mistakes that occur within a rational, predictable structure. And that means you can anticipate them and you can react to them in a rational, predictable way. Irrational means that they don't make any sense. and you know you're not going to do it it's how you end up with the uh the tiger in your hotel room in that one movie you know that's all irrational actions it was it was the hangover um not a bad movie all things can do very very very very light on nuclear strategy however so we won't go any further with that so you start with Putin being irrational not a madman not a crazy person

and then you go back and you say well why is he invading why did he invade Ukraine and the gut level reason was that he needs a buffer zone between himself and NATO. NATO lied to him at the end of the Cold War and said, we're not planning on expanding east. Don't worry. Well, not to him personally. He was still a young pup at that time, but lied to the old Soviet Union and said, we're not expanding east.

And then basically started expanding east. And the Russians, the Soviets first, and then the Russians later had to react to that. And it's taken some time. They had a kind of a revolution and stuff like that that slowed them down. And then they got kind of tangled up in Afghanistan. Who would ever think about doing something that stupid? If you want to argue irrational, that's about as close as we can come. But I was talking about the Americans there.

You got it. And so Putin needs a buffer zone between himself and NATO. And that's what he's doing in the Ukraine. and he's been able to satisfy that for the most part. He's gotten a bunch of land that at least it hasn't gone as well as it should have militarily for Putin. And so it's not quite back to the 2014 borders, but it's going to eventually work its way into that same place.

You're going to go, you're going to look at an end game here, that sort of status quo of February of 2022, which is basically status quo of 2014, where you've got the eastern chunk of Ukraine, a good 20% of the country under Russian control. If that's the goal, then you don't need nuclear weapons to do that. Conventional weapons are going to work just fine,

and in fact are working just fine, and that anything beyond conventional weapons would be a mistake in the irrational act and therefore isn't going to happen. We can go deeper and talk about, well, what can you do with nuclear weapons? Well, let me stop there and see what you think. Well, I'm not so sure that it'd be that easy. In fact, this is kind of my first objection to your article when I was reading it was.

I'm not so sure that I think you kind of say, like, yeah, you know, at the worst, he'd have to lose face if all it gets is the eastern Donbass back to where he was. But, I mean, at this point, he has, you know, officially annexed all the way to Curzon, and including Zabrosia there. And, of course, you know, I mean, Mietvedev, I believe is sort of the winger up there. But Mievvv says it's time to annex Odessa next. And obviously, Odessa is the jewel. McGregor is certain that eventually they're going to take Odessa to. Because historically, it's a Russian city.

it's part of essentially the old Russian, you know, sovereignty through that area there. They would like to take Odessa, yes. Yeah, well, and so they've had some setbacks, but then again, they're calling up a massive army here, too. Right, a conventional army. Right, yes, a conventional one. And I'm not arguing the war's over. I'm just saying why we're not going to. So I want to ask you actually about how the war is going, too, because that is a huge part of this.

You know, I'm reading a thing this morning from McGregor, which is typically, pessimistic from the Ukrainian point of view about their ability to withstand Russian pressure over the long term. But then I'm sure you saw this thing in the New Yorker where they talked about how you have the CIA and the Special Operations Forces and the

Joint Chiefs Command Structure, Joint Staff, whoever, who are helping the Ukrainians plan this war and they got all these fancy algorithms that helped them, you know, figure out their counter-attacks and they've got these high mars and harm missiles now that have given them this huge advantage. They didn't

have before and all of these things. And so they're pretty sure that they're going to be able to continue to push the Russians all the way back out again. So there's an unstoppable force and immovable object in the form of massive Russian infantry on one hand and NATO technology and money on the other. And I don't know how much manpower the Ukrainians really have. It seems like a nation full of fighting age males if you can script them all. So it looks to me like the war could go on and on and the battlefield could be, you know, could go back and forth quite a bit in that, you know, I don't, you know, what's there, Evelyn Farcas used to work for Obama, had a thing in what should call it, the Hawks news that came out yesterday about, and

the subtitle even is, like, yes, we do risk escalation to war between America and Russia, but we can't stop now. You know, like, that's the Democrats talking here, is, you know, they're saying that and but again oh it would still stay conventional though i guess don't worry by the way the best the best war mongering ever was a bloomberg column and i can't remember dan dan something i can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it but he basically within the span of about 1200 words walked his way from proxy war with ukraine to to overt war with russia to war with china and war with iran and a triple front war and he did this so skillfully that you kind of reading along like, oh, okay. And I guess that's when

we start fighting the Iranians. Yes, basically. And it was, it was nicely written, very, very skillfully written to you realize it's all utter crap. Now, I mean, go back, go back and look what you're saying, because, you know, I have a weak heart. And what do you do? You come right at me with the American military, which hasn't won a war since 1945, is going to, it's so powerful that it's going to sweep the Russians off their feet in the Ukraine. Okay, but that's fair. That's fair. However, you know, fighting the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents with landmines and, you know, our guys out just patrolling, getting, you know, blood to death, playing bullet sponge. That is different than going mono-a-mono with an actual land army

that's made of tanks and hard positions that can be bombed and that kind of stuff, right? Here comes the judo move because, in fact, that's one of the arguments I make against Putin using nuclear weapons is that the use of nuclear weapons under whatever circumstances would bring the United States into the war conventionally. There's no question in my mind about it. It may be air strikes. It may be more special forces. It may be a bigger step than that. But it would bring the United States in conventionally. And for all the the criticism we offer of the American military, basically this is the war they've been preparing to fight since 1945.

Yeah. A standard infantry slug match. I saw David Petraeus interviewed the other night. And he was positively giddy talking about the capabilities of the German tanks and the American missiles. and it was really kind of comical because he started out in his current professorial thing where he's quoting he's quoting clausowitz and all that kind of good stuff and then when he got to the capabilities of the German tanks he just lit up like a kid at Christmas you know it's it's like you're going to shoot your

eye out David and it's like I don't care do you know what those babies can do and they've been waiting to fight this war for for 70 some years And that is something that weighs on Putin's mind. He's watching what a subset of American conventional forces can do to him. And he's weighing out whether to escalate against that. But the escalation cannot include nuclear weapons because that would bring the United States in conventionally. And if I were Putin, rule number one for me would be don't let the United States have the excuse they're desperately looking for to get involved conventionally. Biden's going to lose an election in about two weeks. And the Republicans

are going to be hearing more from their constituents that it's the economy stupid, fix inflation, do something about gas prices. We don't really care that much for the time being about Ukraine, even though there's generally support for the war, that's not what they're hearing from their constituents, and that's not what's going to win them the midterm elections. And so I think following the midterms, there's going to be a lot less enthusiasm for American intervention here. And the last thing that Putin wants to do is make it inevitable that the United States does intervene more directly, and that would be use of nuclear weapons. So if you needed a quick one, it would be Putin doesn't want the more deeply involved, either conventionally or

with nuclear weapons, because it's the war we've been ready to fight for 70-some years and do have a reasonable chance of succeeding with. Well, and I have seen Petraeus speaking of Petraeus, and he seemed to be speaking for the government here on this week, I guess two Sundays ago, he said, yeah, if they used a nuke, we would destroy every last bit of their conventional capacity inside Ukraine, and we would sink their black sea fleet. Yeah. So my thing is not, oh, I think Putin is about to break out a nuke any minute now.

I'm just saying, for the sake of our argument here, he's already broken out. one. And you bring out, you, you bring up a couple of different scenarios, you know, that don't make too much sense where he might or whatever. But if he used a small nuke there, America does this. And my argument is, well, if they're already using nukes, at least one, and then we completely destroy their military and sink their Black Sea fleet, the way Petrae says, well, what are we think they're going to do then? They're going to nuke NATO headquarters is what they're going to do. then we're going to all die. Well, this is why you don't start.

I mean, this is the problem with nuclear war is once you get going, it tends to go to its natural conclusion. You know, all those war games that are played out in Washington, D.C. all the time, basically, unless one side unilaterally says stop, no, they almost always end with Moscow and New York glowing in the dark. because you do work your way up very quickly up these steps, and they're big steps when you're talking about nuclear weapons. They're not sort of, we'll fix it later steps.

They're incredibly destructive nuclear weapons are like that. And I think Putin is well aware of that and isn't going to do it. So you take a look and you say, well, fine, he's got a, I wonder if they call their adversary the red team or not, because we always call the Russians the red team and we're always the blue team in these war games and whatever. I wonder if they call themselves the red team

or do they switch it around or how they would. That's an interesting point. Let's see if I'll take a couple of callers on that one. Okay. So back to the question of how determined America is to see a Russian defeat in Ukraine and how much it means to them to not

lose. And I think your major premise here is, and they're willing to settle for 2014 lines. I mean, God, I hope that's right. But they just annexed, you know, a third of the country, officially anyway. Yeah, it's a, it's a nice thing to say you've annexed something. In reality, this, they control certain pieces of territory, which they're going to continue to control, largely because they're, they're Russian. They're Russian speaking. They're Russian sympathetic. You know, this idea that every Ukrainian is going to fight to the end, doesn't necessarily apply to all of the 20% of Ukraine that Russia has taken hold of. A lot of it is very sympathetic to Russia and not unopposed to being part of Russia.

The Russians are doing what they can to make that so. They're deporting people and they're moving populations around and they're putting in place measures that cause people to get up and immigrate westward and things like that. So they're digging in in a political sense. and the annexation is just really a sliver of all that. It doesn't mean that much. Nobody is going to go to the UN and argue that we took a vote and they voted for us,

so you've got to let us have it. I think it's just one step combined with moving populations around, putting in place rules and laws, if you will, that will cause people to leave if they don't like what the Russians are doing and make it easy for them to do that. Don't bomb the convoys. and all that other good stuff. So if you're doing all that,

you're making these areas more and more Russian. The annexation itself is just, like I said, a bit of paper. It's not going to really be that controlling. But in the end, it simply has to end somewhere. And I don't think the Russians are as dumb as they look and are going to ask for another Afghanistan. The United States would be thrilled to give them another Afghanistan, where we micrometer increase the level of equipment and troops and technology to the point

where we just keep the Ukrainians from winning, but we don't let them slip into losing. Basically what happened in Afghanistan, where the Soviets just got backed up against the wall and they couldn't go forward, they couldn't go backward, and they just bled out. I don't think the United States would have a problem at all in doing that in the Ukraine, but I'm thinking maybe the Russians are smart enough not to do it twice. Okay, so Biden says, well, we're close to Armageddon. Yeah. But then, by the way, you know, the reason I'm saying that is because I need you guys to understand that we got to give Putin an off ramp here.

We've got to find a way to let him back down. So he's not saying we've got to find a way to negotiate with him where he gets to win something. Not yet. But at least, you know, that's like opening the door for time. talks, that was the most positive thing, believe it or not, that Armageddon statement, the second half of that statement was the most positive thing I've heard out of this administration this whole time, that they at least recognize that they can't just hand him a total defeat, either maybe they can't or they may not do that, because it just doesn't

make sense to do that. They've got to figure out a way to bring the war to an end sooner than later. I don't know. I wouldn't go with sooner rather than later. Like I said, the United States is very happy to watch. to bleed the Russians here as long as it stays within the boundaries that it currently

is working within. Now you notice you didn't have this massive refugee flow like you did out of Syria into Western Europe. That was all contained inside Poland and all that. That's all good news. The United States is very careful about what

weapons it's giving the Ukrainians and I'm sure equally calm. Every once in a while something goes wrong where somebody blows up a pipeline or a bridge or something like or or or a daughter and you know where things go go a little bit haywire but i mean those are all containable events you go back to nuclear weapons because in the end of the day that's what we're what we're talking about here and the step from conventional to nuclear is one that no one has ever taken except the united states in 1945 um and the fact that no one in

70 years has taken that step in all the variety of situations tells you something. You know, the United States should have, by any military thinking, simply purely military thinking, the United States should have used nuclear weapons in Korea. When we were getting chased out of North Korea by the Chinese army, you know, the whole Chosen Reservoir scenario and all that good stuff, the United States should have used nuclear weapons. That would have been, that's the perfect use of nuclear weapons, is to blow up large concentrations of the enemy. And the Chinese were massed in human waves. They were otherwise unstoppable by conventional weapons. And the United States was not only losing face, but losing

tactically the whole point of what they achieved so far in the war. It would have been the perfect use of nuclear weapons. And it didn't happen. And it was Harry Truman, the same guy. who'd used him before. And it was Harry Truman, who you know was not a big peace nick on this, on this particular issue with Curtis LeMay, you know, advising him and Douglas MacArthur in control on the ground in Korea. So, you know, the scenario was right there. That would have been the perfect use of nuclear weapons. I don't know if China had a nuclear weapon at that time, but certainly they didn't have the delivery systems that would have been, they would have been minimal threat. The Russians would have made a lot of noise, but in the end, not.

particularly care if the United States nuked, you know, 50, 60,000 Chinese soldiers. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, guys, anybody who signs up to listen to this show by way of Patreon will be invited to join the Reddit group. And I'm going to start posting stuff over there more.

That's patreon.com slash Scott Horton's show. Thanks. Hey, y'all, libertosbella.com is where you get Scott Horton's show and Libertarian Institute shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and stickers and things, including the great top lobstas designs as well. See, that way it says on your shirt, why you're so smart?

Libertas Bella, from the same great folks who bring you ammo.com for all your ammunition needs, too. That's Libertasbella.com. You guys check it out. This is so cool. The great Mike Swanson's new book is finally out. He's been working on this thing for years. And I admit, I haven't read it yet.

I'm going to get to it as soon as I can, but I know you guys are going to want to beat me to it. It's called Why the Vietnam War? nuclear bombs and nation building in Southeast Asia, 1945 through 61. And as he explains on the back here, all of our popular culture and our retellings and our history and our movies are all about the height of the American war there in, say, 1964 through 1974. But how do we get there? Why is this all Harry Truman's fault? Find out in why the Vietnam War by the great Mike Swanson.

available now. But you mentioned accidents earlier. And I think this is a big one is, you know, if you look at Afghanistan on the map, well, there's an entire Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan there between Russia and Afghanistan. And you look at Vietnam, there's an entire China between Russia and Vietnam. And the Russians did support the Vietnamese in their resistance against the American invasion there. But there was no way that was going to escalate into a war with Russia. Now, something goes, you know, a car backfires in East, or in, you know, West Berlin inside East Germany, something like that.

That's a real problem because now you're talking direct conflict with the Warsaw Pact there. But having a proxy war in Vietnam or Afghanistan, you know, one way or the other bleeding, one or the other to bankruptcy there. That's not the same as this where you're talking, we're 300 miles due south of Moscow here. But you're also dealing with skillful practitioners. You know, the U.S. and the Russians know how what their weapons do. They know how to control their weapons. When we talk about accidents, I'm not worried about some corporal pushing the wrong button. I'm much more concerned about nuclear power plants going, going the wrong direction, things like that. Because, you know, I doubt there's a tactical nuke anywhere within 500 miles of Ukraine at this point in time. Yeah, but what about all the mind reading that they suck?

bad at you know that oh if we do this they'll do that and if we do this they'll read it this way and this diplomatic language they're terrible at understanding each other and projecting uh you know thinking and behavior on to others and but as soon as you get to the and then they'll go nuclear then it's like uh-oh we better we better back off uh you know make it two steps back off two steps just to be safe you know the idea would be that you that mind reading stuff when it goes when it goes bad but as soon as you start talking about nuclear weapons, it's a different world. And so far, in 70 years, and history is, we study history because it helps us understand what's going to happen next.

You know, nobody has felt the need to go nuclear, including in scenarios that varied from pretty significant military usage scenarios to political scenarios and what have you. I mean, a nuclear weapon in Vietnam would have been a massive political action has nothing to do with the quality of the war. We would have blown up a huge swath of jungle. I mean, it was like, you know, Agent Orange kicked into up to 11 or something like that. I mean, but the idea that that you would have changed the course of the war is zero. It would have been a political gesture to show how serious we were. So you got to come back to these scenarios.

And I'll challenge your listeners to come up with a scenario other than the ones I have about what you do with nuclear weapons, not just in Ukraine, but pretty much anywhere in any war in any world. Well, look, I mean, as you know, you wrote a book about this. I mean, every August, we hear from every American that it's perfectly legitimate to use a nuke to end a war sooner than otherwise. wise would have ended that's the american rationalization for using a new and under that thinking Putin could just say look either surrender I'm going to nukeyev and then what we're going to cause bluff well that in fact is is what we is what we probably would do with the quiet mention that we have nuclear weapons too which is the big difference between Japan 1945 and anything else is the United States was the sole nuclear power and what the Japanese were essentially a defeated nation. They couldn't even pull off a serious terrorist attack in 1945 if they

wanted to. And so the idea of using the nuclear weapon to nudge them forward in negotiations, which is the standard textbook American argument, we know that's not necessarily accurate, but that's the standard argument. You know, only works if you're the, you're, you're side, the other side doesn't have anything at all that they can wheel back against you. And that was that, I mean, the Japanese were at that point relegated to crashing their own

planes into our ships in hopes that that would help in some particular way. Nobody kind of thought through the, you know, gee, they got a lot of big heavy ships and we have a few small light airplanes. Yeah, this might work. Let's give it a try. But let's

go back to this. So let's start with what the United States was thinking to do with Japan at one point, which was a demonstration nuke. This was very seriously considered in 1945 that we were going to pick an island in the Pacific, get all the people off of it, and then blow it up with a nuclear weapon and invite the Japanese to watch it

and make sure they understood exactly that we did this with one bomb and the island is gone. And that this was going to serve the same purpose as blowing up Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And that idea was eventually discarded the same way it's been discarded in the Vietnam scenario or anywhere else, because all it does is prove lack of resolve. You know, you try to say, well, we're really ready to blow up Kiev. So we're going to set off this nuke, you know, over the Black Sea and show you that, yep,

and it's like, yeah, we know you have nuclear weapons. We know they probably work. what are they what are you proving here you're proving you don't have the guts to bomb kiev so i i would say demonstration nuke off the table the second is theoretically possible but doesn't seem to be the nature of this war and that is basically used nuclear weapons as a big dumb gigantic conventional weapon we could mass together x number of our artillery pieces and fire them all at the same time, at the same place, and achieve near total destruction, or we can drop one teeny little nuclear weapon and basically get the same thing done.

This was what was done in Japan, actually. We had burnt Tokyo to the ground a couple of weeks prior to Hiroshima with conventional weaponry and fire bombs and things like that. The destruction in Hiroshima, if you discount the deaths over the next 20 years from radiation poisoning, which arguably the war was over then, but just because we kept killing them didn't really matter, that wasn't really part of the plan. The plan was, let's destroy Hiroshima with one little teeny nuclear weapon and show them what we plan to do to all their other cities. We could have done it with conventional weapons, but it just didn't have the umph behind it. So you can do something like that in the Ukraine, but what are you going to blow up? I mean, you're going to irradiate territory, you hope to conquer, you're going to just bring the United States in as an after effect and say, okay, well, we turn Kiev into cinders.

now the Americans are on the ground in Ukraine, not necessarily a win-win situation. Got prevailing wins to deal with, too. And yeah, there you go. Think about that. You've got prevailing-literal blowback. You've got, ooh, points to Scott on that one. Literal blowback, plus the possibility that the United States is going to get involved with their own nuclear with. Third would be some kind of leadership decapitation strike, you know, where you're going to blow out Zelens, and hope he'll be replaced with someone who's more willing to negotiate and things like that. Again, you can do that with conventional weapons.

It requires a level of intelligence that so far I don't think the Russians have. The United States tried to do it twice with Saddam and missed both times. So it's not an easy thing to do. It also assumes that Zelensky is this miracle man, this, you know, combination of George Washington, Winston Churchill, and I don't know, George Patton, that the Western media makes him out to be that his loss would produce only some wimpy shadow of the former president himself that a future leader wouldn't be just as angry and determined so i don't think there's anything to do with that um and then the last is just to force a surrender by just blowing stuff

up um you blow up one ukrainian city and say surrender yet you blow up a second ukrainian city say ready to surrender yet pull up a third one we really want o'd ready to surrender yet. But that, again, worked at 1945 only because the Japanese were utterly unable to defend themselves and unable to strike back in any way whatsoever against the United States. The Russians aren't going to get two nuclear blasts for free, the way the United States did in 1945. And we would have had a third one if the bomb had been, you know, the bomb had been ready because the Japanese still hadn't surrendered. Okay, but I got more paranoid takes. okay what about it says in the media there that the russians specialize in low yield nukes even

smaller nukes than hiroshima and nagasaki and that this is exactly what they're for is to make up for the fact they don't really have the kind of conventional strength that america can deploy but they can drop atom bombs in the single digit kilotons that essentially are just big bombs forget a taboo it's a big bomb when you need one you can't forget a taboo you can't just leave the taboo to the side taboos are this taboo is there in a real okay but so why they make so many of the little bitty ones then well because we have them and you know how you know how this works this was this was the cold war the united states has this kind of weapon they have that kind of weapon you know if if russia

uses a small itty-bitty little tactical nuclear weapon the united states is not going to blow up Moscow, Leningrad, and Vladivostok. Well, not for another three or four days, right after it escalates. Yeah, exactly. They're going to have a little bitty one, and we'll have a little bitty one, and they'll have a bigger one, and we'll have a bigger one, and so forth. No, no, they have them because we have them, and we have them because they have them. And if it comes to using them, then they want the option of being able to choose what kind of

weapon they use, how big a splash they make. All right, now, but so our guys say that they have a, a policy called escalate to de-escalate, that they would use a nuke in order to prove what badasses they are and how serious they are that they would use a nuke. And that if you go back to Trump

years, his defense department ran, you know, war games and then leaked him that said, that'll never work on us. If you ever use a nuke to escalate to de-escalate, we'll just nuke Belarus or something like that. We'll use a bigger one right away, so don't try that.

In other words, our policy is escalate to de-escalate. And, but so there, but they're apparently incapable of saying, yeah, but they're going to accept our escalate to de-escalate policy just about as much as we accept theirs, which is not at all. So, in other words, once somebody sets off one of these, assuming they're right about the Russians at all, that's kind of my question for, if you even think that's really their policy at all, but if it is, see, that's the other thing, right, is, you know, it's really easy to project your own rationality on to them. And I agree that Putin might be ruthless, but he ain't crazy,

you know, but at the same time, yeah, you know, there's public choice theory and, you know, weird incentives that affect government employees when they make decisions. You know what I mean? I don't know. They make bad decisions all the time. I mean, this war itself was. But they haven't made this one. And this is what I'm kind of leaning more heavily on. And so it's a little bit more than simply projecting my own rationality on there. It's a idea that at the end of it all, in 70 years, in every single possible scenario that happened, it hasn't happened.

Nuclear war hasn't happened. It's based on my own. I never served in Russians with the State Department. I never negotiated anything with Russians. I don't know if I ever even met any Russian diplomats, maybe one, you know, like a party or something. But I never worked with them. So I can't be one of these kind of Russian experts that's on MSNBC and all.

But I can say that in every single instance where I worked with a foreign diplomat, when the doors were closed and there were no cameras, it was a lot of very rational people talking very, very rationally. Sometimes with the caveat that, hey, as soon as the cameras come on, I'm going to have to become irrational again, but don't you believe it, all right? Yeah, fair enough. And that counts with various kinds of Koreans and Chinese and even our allies. Everybody in the end, nuclear stuff is just too big a threshold across. Putin knows that if anything was going to cause harm to Mother Russia, it was going to be starting a nuclear war with the only other nation on Earth that has him outarmed as a nuclear power.

And if anything was going to defeat his goals in Ukraine, in other words, grab this territory and hold it, it was going to be something, anything that brought the United States in as an overt force or NATO in as an overt force. And nuclear weapons ticked both of those boxes and therefore cannot be on the menu for Vladimir Putin. All right. Now, I know you just said that you're not a Russia expert from your time in the State Department, but you also did say that the Americans promised the Soviets that they would not expand NATO.

into the former Warsaw Pact states and republics if they would withdraw. And so I know that, obviously, we all know that from the New York Times and from the National Security Archive at George Washington University. That's right. And from Ted Snyder's great writing at anti-war.com. But I wonder if you also do know that from your time at the State Department that everybody talked about that and everybody knew that that was the deal literally at work, not just in the newspaper.

You know, I think it was an understood thing. I can't speak to it as directly as I may like to. But first, the idea is that we now, we understand and accept that that's what really happened. National Security Archive has done fantastic work on this. And they have quotes from the first George Bush. They have quotes from Colin Powell. Colin Powell was flying back and forth, trying to negotiate. He was working on these negotiations.

James Baker in particular was working on these negotiations for George W. Bush. And it was without a question that, according to the National Security Archives, that these guys were promising the former Soviet states that they would be under NATO's protection. How do you think they got the Ukrainians to give up 5,000 nuclear weapons other than to promise them protection from the Soviet Union if they, gave up the nuclear weapons. Now, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter if they got real NATO or they got pseudo-NATO, which is what Ukraine got out of the deal, because it's what people think they got, not necessarily what the reality of this is. And NATO has been proceeding,

or I'm sorry, Ukraine has been proceeding as if they're under the NATO umbrella. They take their actions every day when Zelensky says, you know, we're going to fight to the end. He's saying, because NATO is going to be covering my ass here in case things go real bad. If the Russians decide to send all 300,000 of those new conscripts in at one time, NATO has got me, it's got my back in some form of that. The United States lied to the old Soviet Union. We absolutely straight up told them that NATO had no eastward ambitions, and in fact, we did. and that lie has come to finally bite us in the behind

because Putin has decided it's time to do something about that. He's been nibbling away, obviously, over the years with Crimea and the Dombas and things like that. And then he finally decided with this invasion of the Ukraine in February that he was going to take a bigger bite and put a lot more land in between himself and Ukraine. And this is good old-fashioned World War II stuff where you want lots of terrain that it takes a long time for tanks to drive from one place to another between you and the other side. It all goes back to the lies that were told, and it all goes back to us not being willing to take advantage, to us being willing to take advantage of a situation where briefly the Soviet Union was so weakened that they weren't able to really stand up for themselves.

It shows what happens when you don't let the diplomats do what they do best, which is try to reach some kind of lasting balance as opposed to something that looks and sounds good when instead you're rushing to get these nuclear weapons out of the hands of all the former Soviet Union places and leave them all bare and naked with the promise that you, the quiet promise under the table that Latvia and Lithuania and places like that are all going to become NATO countries. Who were to funk it? Yeah. Well, you know, so I'm not saying there's a threat of this that I've ever heard of any credible one. But let's say that tensions escalate over Kaliningrad and Russia and Belarus start threatening in Lithuania. Yeah. And let's say they put troops in Lithuania. They're going to carve out a corridor to Danzig, I mean to Kaliningrad.

And so then we go straight into World War II, I mean three at that point. um is america you know pat buchanan has said for years come on we've really going to fight russia for lithuania we're making promises that we have no intention of keeping but i wonder if that's really true i just seems like biden would be happy to get austin texas newt over lithuania if it came down to it a promise is a promise it says it right there on a piece of paper well if if new if austin is threatened you are welcome to come stay with me until until the crisis blows over we can do Hawaii has been heavily militarized. I hope that you really.

I'm about a 15-minute walk from Pearl Harbor, okay? If you want to talk about proximity to nuclear weapons, I mean, I think among all of your guests, unless you've got someone who flies B-52s, I think I've got a good, good chance of being the closest one to an active nuclear bomb at this moment in history. I've got Pearl Harbor. I've got Hickham Air Force Base.

I've got Chofield Barracks. They're all within long walking distance, short nuclear radiation distance from where I'm sitting right now. I always knew you were a Japanese spy. And here I am a spy for all comers. Oh, no. Nonetheless, isn't that the whole question? I mean, that's the whole thing with NATO. That's the whole thing in a sentence is how true is it?

And are you ready to risk every, you, Mr. Putin, ready to risk everything to find out. how true the NATO pledge is. And I think the answer is that NATO would have no choice but to honor the pledge for Lithuania, knowing that if they didn't honor Lithuania, they would be challenged, you know, in Germany or Poland or someplace, arguably more substantial. And the Russians know that we can't give in on those smaller, less, quote-unquote, less important places. And we know we can't.

It was a real devil's bargain to pick those places and bring them into Lithuania. I mean, Lithuania, Bulgaria, you know, pick your Croatia. You know, pick which one you want where are you going to try to convince Americans. And Americans are easily convinced that we need to go to war for Lithuania. So the American public is certainly not one of your obstacles. I think we would, in fact, go to war over Lithuania because it would be the way of preventing, convincing the Russians of that and truly doing it if necessary.

If they step over the line, we step over the line, convinces them to stay on their side of the line. And it's worked. Well, until it doesn't. Until it doesn't, right. Yeah, sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good.

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interviews. The thing is unbelievable. Check out this incredible piece of art at Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton and you'll save 25 bucks and this show will get a little kickback too. That's Rickasali.com slash Ron Paul. Casali is C-A-S-A-L-I, Rick Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping too. So this is the thing too is You know, not to belabor the point, but that's kind of the point, is, as you said before, though, and this is why it'll never happen, so rest assured, fine, but once they start going off, there's no way to back down from there. America loses the city, what are we going to just take it? Nope, we're going to have to nuke back, they're going to nuke back, et cetera, et cetera, and then especially very early in the exchange, somewhere the blue folder gets taken off the shelf, it says, use them or lose them. If we don't launch all our Minutemen right now, they're just sitting there, and they're silos, like sitting ducks, which that's their fault for putting them there, but they're the nuclear sponge. That's what they're there for.

But so, then we got to launch them all before the Russians hit them in their silos. And so at that point, you're talking about, you know, World War II worth of people killed every day for a week or so until it's all over. I want to put in a plug here for a great 1960s movie, show up on Hulu or Netflix or somewhere every once in a while called Failsafe with Henry Fonda as the president. And basically, I can't remember the setup, but something happens that the U.S. and the Russians now are ready to go to nuclear war with each other. and Moscow accidentally gets vaporized by the United States. And in order to convince the Russians not to escalate to full nuclear war, the American President Henry Fonda volunteers to bomb New York City ourselves and to vaporize New York City as a way of proving that we want the war to stop,

that we'll do the job ourselves. And the film ends with, we shouldn't tell the ending. but the film ends with New York getting vaporized. It's so unfair. They should have had to nuke D.C. Why Newk New York? They're so selfish. Yeah, I know.

There's also a strong argument that we get rid of New York and start over. So, you know. Well, I know you have your own personal feelings, man. I'm in Austin. I don't know much about that. But I know that I would have preferred to see D.C. Newt, even though my buddies Grant Smith and Garrette. reporter and a few others live there.

Well, we'd save Gareth as a national treasure. Yeah, we'd have to get Gareth out of there first. He'd be secretly smuggled out of the city to a secure location. But does that sound like a fair trade to you? Moscow for New York? Should be the capital. Capital for the capital. You bought the government.

It should be the capital for the capital, I guess. I don't know. Maybe the producers had it in for New York. Maybe, you know, whatever they have. Love government because they're Democrats. Well, that could explain it to. It's a liberal Hollywood thing again. Yeah.

All right. Enough of this nuke stuff. Wait, let's talk about nukes but in Korea because this is something that I know you have some real expertise about. Okay. And it occurs to me. I know I'm right.

That 20 years ago, I don't know, today, somewhere right around there, John Bolton and George W. Bush ruined everything. The first thing they did was break the agreed framework deal. and they announced over a lie that the North Koreans were spinning uranium enrichment

illegally, which there's no proof they had an enrichment program at all. And it wouldn't have been against the agreed framework or their safeguards agreement if they had been doing so anyway. But the Americans broke the agreed framework. Then they announced new sanctions. And then they announced the new proliferation security initiative, which was claiming their unilateral right to seize North Korean boats on the high seas. And then they put them in the nuclear posture review.

saying maybe we'll just have to put North Korea on the short list for a nuclear first strike. And only then did Kim Jong-il announce he was leaving the non-proliferation treaty and withdrawing from his safeguards agreement and started making nuclear weapons. Every single one of which he's tested, his regime, him and his son have tested, have been made out of plutonium harvested from their Yongbyong reactor that the Soviets had built for them back then. None of them uranium bombs. anyway, and no evidence of that aluminum tubes nuclear program that Bolton lied about back then. And so it was 100% John Bolton and George W. Bush and Kim Jong-il's fault equally that North Korea is sitting on a pile of nuclear weapons right now.

And then, ever since then, they had no plan. I don't know what they thought their plan was. Maybe this was their plan. They preferred North Korea had nukes. I don't know. That's one question. But then, ever since then, Bush and Obama and not so much Trump, there was, well, yeah, ultimately he hired Bolton and ruined it. So, yes, ultimately Trump too. And then now Biden, continuing the Obama-W. Bush policy is, screw North Korea. We hate them. We won't talk to them. And as soon as they unconditionally surrender all their nuclear weapons to us, then we'll think about talking with them about anything else.

until then we hope that they have another famine soon because we hate them so much sincerely the democrats and the united states of america and that's it so i don't think that that that's very smart and i think that like what you say about man a guy could drop a wrench down a silo in north korea and the thing would go off you know yeah so um so make some sense of this and correct me where i don't know what i'm talking about but i know that i do so you don't have to, but, uh, so, I mean, what is the damn problem here? I think the, the, the problem is, is that, you know, Bolton and, and, and Bush thought either they were going to call North Korea's bluff and North Korea wasn't going to do anything, or that North Korea was going to give them an

excuse to go to war and they would have gone to war. And instead, North Korea kind of threaded it, threaded the needle kind of carefully and was able to go test the nuclear weapon. without seemingly pushing the United States into some kind of nuclear response. I think North Korea exists because we want a bad guy that is like truly always bad. I think this is one of the things that pissed everybody off when Donald Trump made his nascent efforts to make peace with North Korea. It's like, no, no, no, North Korea is the bad guy that's always the bad guy. and it's the one we don't argue about it's not it's the one where you know we don't send people there on good faith goodwill building missions it's north korea man it's always the

bad guys the worst of the worst um and the fact that north korea has nuclear weapons is incredibly scary to me because there you have people who are like i said industrial safety has got to be a terrible can't it doesn't seem like it's their strong point you know what let me interrupt you here for just a second for there are a lot of young people listen to this show and and who knows people were just interested in politics for the first time in their lives maybe they don't understand about north korea at all that ain't it really right this is the like by ratio the greatest garrison state in the history of the world right like two-thirds of the population are in the military and everybody's a government employee and everybody's hungry and it's like

Stalinism still, and it sucks. Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to get a feel for what's going on in North Korea because people tend to say opposite things. They say things like that, and then somebody goes in visits and comes back and says, you know, it's not a great place, but people seem to be making

a living and getting by okay like that. And then somebody else comes back and says, no, no, there's a famine that just killed 300 million billion people. And we better but we don't, you know, we haven't seen the bodies, but they're missing. We can't the people. Yeah, I heard those before Bill Clinton. So, yeah. Yeah. And so you're left with this,

this great mystery about what the hell is going on there. But everybody's happy to have North Korea just kind of stay where it is, including, by the way, the Chinese. And this is very important because North Korea, if it has any allies or friends or people that it works with, I'm not sure the right word anymore, but somebody like that out there, it's going to be the Chinese. And Chinese are thrilled to have North Korea as a buffer zone, speaking of buffer zones like in Ukraine, are thrilled to have North Korea as a big old buffer zone in between them and the United States military poised in South Korea. And, you know, we fought a war in the last 70 years there in North Korea, where American troops went right up to the Chinese border.

And as we talked about earlier in the show, almost created a scenario for the, the use of nuclear weapons. MacArthur was certainly pushing for it. Yeah. MacArthur was certainly pushing for it, as was Curtis LeMay and the whole World War II crowd who saw it as an extension without realizing how things had changed. But nonetheless, you know, North Korea exists because it has to exist. We have to have an ultimate bad guy for the United States to oppose all the time. You could see how poorly Russia worked out.

You know, we were friends with Russia for a while. and then we became enemies with them again and now everyone seems to be much more comfortable with them being an enemy of ours than being a friend of ours. The article that you had referenced early... I hate the way whenever you get the most real is when you talk about all this

like it's some stupid movie because that is how it is. It really is and you know you need to give more credit to movies I think because they tend to be more accurate these days than straight up political stuff. stuff. But I'll give you just a small personal example. The article that you have referenced a couple of times on the American conservative, the American conservative, note the title, was picked up by

Pravda and their English edition. And it's like, how the hell did I end up on Pravda arguing against nuclear war? Yeah, arguing against, you know, that it's much of a worry now. Yeah. And it's entirely possible that not everybody was pleased that I ended up on Pravda. I mean, I had nothing to do with it. They grabbed these articles off the web and reprint them. And, you know, the kerfuffle blows over eventually. Ironic things are ironic. Who gives us. But, I mean, the point is, is that we're at war with the Russians, aren't we? Almost, sort of. You know what? They just, and this was going on right before the war broke out. And then I swear I better find the footnote now because I'm going to forget it. I just saw a thing the other day where U.S. and Russia and Ukraine launch a rocket into space together.

Like, this is still going on. October 5th. Russian launches to space from U.S. And then September 21st, Russians and Americans share spacecraft despite nations, this and that. Oh, yeah, yeah, the International Space Station, sure. Yeah, and then, you know, right before the war, it was a Russian rocket with American astronauts flying a Ukrainian rocket engine up to the International Space Station up there. So, you know, not to be all one world communist or anything, but I think, like, probably we could just get along with them and not have to. Is that the Star Trek theme?

No, it's the international, the communist. Oh, got you. same thing. Yeah. I don't believe in that stuff, man, but I'm just saying we could get along with them. Come on. Of course, of course. But it's funny to see some of the old timers getting hauled out to be commentators and, you know, the nuclear strategists from the 60s and 70s. And in all the people I don't watch TV, man. I can't take it. I don't have the stomach for it no more. I have to tell you, I've got a, I've got a hospitalization coming up. And I think the thing that terrifies me the most is not the possibility of sudden death at all, which would, you know, in many ways get me out of a lot of

deadlines I'm having a hard time with. But instead, the idea that I'm going to have to watch like a week's worth of television because there's nothing, I won't be able to get out of the bed and I'm not going to be able to roll around. And it's not really the environment where you can do a lot of serious reading. So I'm going to end up watching. Podcasts, man. You need TV. I need podcast stat for this man. Yeah, big time. Otherwise, it's this idea. that I'm going to have to watch network news and TV shows. You know what's great, man? It's just watched Norm McDonald.

That's all you got to do. There's so much. I'm not Norm. It's the YouTube channel. I should give that a try. Now, there will be pain killers involved. He's got a great bit on North Korea, too, where TV is like, ah, North Korea.

And he's like, yeah, I don't know. I'm not really feeling it. You know, I'm trying to be afraid, but I'm not really afraid. Does anybody wake up in the middle of the night going, oh, no, North Korea is coming. No, we don't. Hey, wait, but so, you know who might think that would be the South Koreans? And, you know, I read this thing. I bet I asked you about this before, but I don't remember because it was back a while back.

But it was in the L.A. Times where some Smarty Pants guy, you know, who's for this, who wasn't being critical. He was explaining that, look, man, you know, we don't want peace with North Korea because we want them as a threat that we hold over the heads of the South Koreans and the Japanese so that they will let us keep our troops in their countries. But you see, our troops are in their countries not really for North Korea at all. They're there for China, but we can't say that. So that's why we want to prevent peace.

And that sounds exactly like what American politicians and state department jerks. Once upon a time, there wasn't even a China to worry about. You know, this whole occupation of Asia thing that we do started before there was, I mean, China in 1945 was a destroyed, wrecked country. They certainly weren't a threat to anybody. They were fighting a revolution that no one expected the communists to eventually win. We didn't garrison Japan and Korea and everything. I just read an interesting article about the turning of Palau into an American military facility.

Palau is one of those little tiny, tiny, idyllic islands out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever they show the pictures, it's always got this turquoise water and people travel all around the world. They go scuba diving there and to make it into a giant fortress because it happens to be geographically in an interesting place. Now, we built this garrison before there was an enemy. We just waited for the enemy to sort of evolve. And it turned out to be, you know, the Russians really and then the Chinese secondarily. But we built the garrison and then we waited for the bad guys to emerge. And that, I think, is one of the things that stands out when you look back at the history of modern Asia is we didn't really address a threat.

We addressed, we just waited for the threat to emerge and then we were sitting there ready for it. Kind of tells you where our head was in 1945. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's all in NSC-68 and all of that stuff. And, you know, there's this famous, I guess that's NHTSA versus Kenan, but Kenan, there's this quote from him saying that, well, geez, and actually, I forget now the year of this. He might have said this at the beginning of the Cold War, maybe toward the end.

Anyways, I can't look it up now. It's too late. But the point is, he says, oh, no, you know, if the Soviet Union sunk under the ocean waves today, we would have to come up with a new enemy, you know, to stand in. temporarily until we could come up with a real one to replace the Soviet Union because otherwise our economy would fall apart if we had to transition away from our warfare economy and I'm thinking you know what George Kennan probably doesn't know all that much about economics but that sounds

completely stupid to me just if you do the syllogism in your head where you take in all this effort and all this capital to make things that are only used for blowing up property and people. It sounds like a net minus all the way around. And so then you've got to get in some BS about the velocity of money or some kind of thing. You know, Putin was said to Jack Matlock in 2015. Jack Matlock was like, look, man, you know that this missile defense thing is just a boondog. They're just stealing money from the American people. Everybody knows it doesn't work. It would never work. I don't even have enough missiles to begin to try to shoot down what you got. So you should not worry and you should not react

too bad against it. And you know that, right? And so Putin goes, you know, why can't you just subsidize some other part of your economy instead of missile defense and bring my country with anti-missile missiles? Because then, no, of course, I can't just not react. I'm the head of security around here, man. What am I supposed to do? And then, of course, three years later, he announced his

massive new generation of nuclear missiles that he has that he built in response to Bush tearing up the ABM treaty and pushing all this ballistic missile defense stuff. But anyway, by the way, I got to say real quick before I finally shut up and let you talk, which is that Keith Knight has been talking to a bunch of libertarian economists and interviewing them and crunching the numbers on this

and is hard at work writing a refutation of canon and how that's just really not right, that if we stop wasting money on militarism that somehow will be poorer. Nah. And the nice thing is, is that given what you've just discussed, you know, here we are,

we managed to put the old Soviet Union, we just call them Russians now, we put them back on top. There are our number one enemy again. And, you know, we just, with a, there's a very good slide of hand, we managed to take them

from being our new partners. You know, there was even talk at one point about Russia becoming part of NATO, which would have kind of eliminated the whole point of NATO. But nonetheless, you know, they at least kind of felt enough that they could joke about something like that. And now, look, we're fighting the Russians again. And it's going to be bear versus, you know, what are we, the eagle? Bear versus eagle, you know, with the dragon and everything else like that.

And we're right back to where we started from. It's almost as if, you know, the 90s and the zeros didn't happen. And we just skipped right from, you know, 1989 to now. So I have here in my office, my, I got these way back in high school in the 90s. Someone gave me these as a gift. The Cold War Unicorns, Kami versus Freedom. Oh, that's excellent. Yeah, they're great.

There used to be this great toy store called Toy Joy and Austin had, you know, Albert Einstein action figures and crap like that. Yeah. Offbeat stuff. so that was one of them very good yeah man so i guess time to invest uh what little money you have that hadn't been inflated away in the war machine if you don't mind money soaked in blood because it's the only way you're going to get a good return in joe biden's america that's it strongly there kind of definitely go conventional 9010 you know leave have a few speculative dollars in the nuclear side of it but really the real money's to be made in conventional weapons kids um if

I can give you just one word. It's conventional weapons, son, conventional weapons. You know, how about the delivery systems for nuclear weapons like those bombers? Because they can make a bunch of bombers then just fly them around in circles. But those things are expensive, man. They are. And then, you know, the chance of an accident or somebody makes a mistake or flies too far. It's all conventional weapons.

We're blowing through weapons, you know, mortar shells and the stuff that you're, your great great grandfather would have used in the civil war basically we're blowing through it like uh something through a goose and that through honey through a goose and there we go honey oh good that may be a place good place to leave this now i was thinking that thought honey through a goose thank you so much for your deep wisdom on this issue there peter van buren you're great as always thanks scott all right you guys peter van buren he was at the state department now he's over there American conservative most of the time. Nuclear chicken is overrated.

And before that, who is winning? And what Jefferson's critics miss, which I missed, so I didn't ask him about it because I ain't read it yet. But that's interesting. All right. See you guys later. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com,

Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute. Thank you.