Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/24/22 Joe Cirincione: US Actions Don’t Justify Putin’s Attack, But They Set The Stage For it

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Scott is joined by Joe Cirincione to talk about the situation in Ukraine. They start with some background on the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. They discuss the levels of warheads and how its evolved. That brings them to the current crisis, where Cirincione says nuclear weapons are in the mix. They discuss how recent history has led to what’s happening. Finally, Cirincione explains the technology of nuclear defense systems and how it plays into our current situation. They end on a slightly positive note with the good news coming out of JCPOA negotiations with Iran.  Discussed on the show: “New scientific review punctures myth of missile defense” (Responsible Statecraft) Joseph Cirincione is a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute and a national security analyst and author with over 35 years of experience working on these issues in D.C.  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; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. 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

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 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys introducing joe serencioni from the plowshares fund and here he is writing at the quincy institute welcome back to the show joe how are you doing just great scott

thanks for having me back on i don't know if you even remember me I don't think we spoke us since the Bush years, but I'm very happy to talk to you again. Thank you. Great to be on. What do you want to talk about today? Yeah, well, I mean, there's a few different important topics, but you wrote this really important piece for the Quincy Institute, ResponsibleStatecraft.org. New scientific review punctures the myth of missile defense. Are you trying to tell me that George W. Bush tore up the anti-ballistic missile treaty for no good reason, Joe? That's exactly right, and particularly in light of the Ukraine crisis, we can look back at this last 20 years and see that tearing up these arms control agreements was not a very good idea. You really took down a lot of the guardrails that you wanted to have, and it began with the tearing up of the ABM treaty.

You remember, this is the treaty that Richard Nixon negotiated with Henry Kissinger as part of his effort to limit nuclear arms. And the logic was, if you're going to limit the number of offensive nuclear weapons you could have, you have to limit defenses. And the reason is simple. Any defense can be overwhelmed by an offense. So if a country is going to build up a defensive system, the easiest thing for the adversary to do is increase the number of offensive weapons. That was the offensive defensive cycle that was going on in the beginning of the 70s. When Nixon and Kissinger negotiated these treaties, it was a set. We're going to reduce offensive.

We have to limit defensive. In 2002, which George W. Bush decided, no. We now have a technological solution to this. We have weapons that can intercept the other side's ballistic missiles. We're tearing up the treaty. We're going to deploy a defensive system that was now 21 years ago, 20 years ago. And we're no closer to having a system that works today. than we were when George W. Bush made this terrible decision.

You know, I'm sorry for skipping around, but can we rewind about a half a generation from that point and go back to the greatest tragedy that ever took place in the history of humanity, which was the Rikovic summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, where they came, according to all accounts I've ever heard of or read, within a hair of abolishing all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth? And then, isn't it the case that Reagan scotch the deal because his men told him that this fantasy that we're going to be able to shoot down all the incoming Russian nukes and we would rather build up defenses than get rid of all the missiles we need to defend from in the first place? Yeah. No, you're exactly right. I've spoken with the late Secretary of State George Schultz, who was the only other American in the room with Reagan and Gorbachev and Gorbachev's trans. translator at that time. And he recounts and the transcripts of that meeting bear him out that Gorbachev said, you know, let's get rid of the all strategic weapons, the long range systems on missiles and bombers and subs. And Reagan said, and yes, and let's go further. Let's go get rid of the short range ones too. And Gorbachev said, yes, let's get rid of them all. And Reagan turned to George Schultz and said, can we do that, George?

and Schultz didn't hesitate. He said, yes, we can. And they walked out of that room with an agreement in principle to get rid of all nuclear weapons. But when Reagan ran this by his advisors, including Richard Pearl, who many people call the Prince of Darkness, they were aghast at this. They didn't want to give up the nuclear weapons. And they walked Reagan back. And Reagan then went went back to Gorbachev and said, look, we'll do this, but we have to be able to deploy our missile defenses, what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative at that point, the Star Wars program. I have to be able to do this. And Gorbachev said, no, no, I can't go back to my military and give up my weapons and have you deploying these other weapons. How about if we keep that

in the laboratory for 10 years, just in the research stage? And Reagan wouldn't do it. He said, no, no, I got to have this insurance policy. And that's when the deal collapsed. And that's when the Reykivik summit ended in failure producing those grim photos you see at the end of both men not smiling at all it turns out they both were wrong Reagan was wrong he could have given it up there was no miracle technology nothing has advanced since then to allow us to intercept long range ballistic missiles and Gorbachev could have let Reagan pursue this fantasy because nothing would have come of it right so we missed this moment to solve one of the greatest threats facing humanity, the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Man, the wisdom of the staircase, right? Like, Gorbachev must have been just absolutely kicking himself that he didn't just say, but Mr. President, if we don't have any missiles to shoot down, you don't need anti-missile defenses. So let's just, and then here's the thing you're really killing me because I had never heard the counteroffer that. Let's just, you know, a very reasonable counteroffer.

let's study that together for 10 years. Yeah, Soviet Union didn't even exist for another two years after that, you know? And then, am I right? I've seen the pictures where Gorbachev is essentially following Reagan down the stairs from the building where he's getting in his limo. And Gorbachev is saying, Mr. President, stop. Let's go back up there and talk about this one more time. Please don't go. And then, but it's too late.

That's it. It's too late. We missed the opportunity. To their credit, neither one of them gave up. They didn't get the elimination they'd hoped for, but a year later, they did negotiate with Reagan's biggest, one of his biggest accomplishments, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which again has something to say about the current situation we're in. This is where Russia and the United States agreed to destroy these brand new nuclear weapons that they've been pouring into Europe, what's so-called intermediate range. so not quite ocean spanning, but bigger than short range or medium range missiles so that Russia could hit European targets, but our deployments in France and Germany and Italy, we could hit Russian targets

and they said, we're going to get rid of them all. We're going to get rid of them all. And they eliminated almost 2000, perfectly fine nuclear weapons attached on the missiles and banned them globally. Trump just tore that treaty up when he was in office. because some of the military, in our military, wanted to deploy weapons like this again. He tore it up, said we have nothing to worry about from Russia. Well, guess what? With Putin's invasion of Ukraine, once again, we hear talk about Russia deploying these kinds of weapons back into Europe and on the American side of us deploying these kinds of weapons against Russia

and against China. We never should have torn that agreement up. Well, that's one of Putin's stated fears now is what's keeping you from putting nuclear-tipped tomahawk missiles in those dual-use MK41 missile launchers in Romania and Poland now that you've torn up the INF Treaty. That's exactly right. Yeah. That's exactly right. And now, let me go back to Reikovic for one second here, because this has always been a thing of mine. And I think I know the answer to this, but I'd like to hear what you think about this.

What about the idea that, well, look, even if Reagan again. Gorbachev agreed to get rid of all of their nukes, that still leaves Britain and France and China and Israel and Indian Pakistan and at that time, I guess, probably South Korea. I mean, pardon me, South Africa. And so what about them? Would it just be the case? The idea would be that America and Russia would just lean on their friends and allies and say, listen, if we're getting rid of our nukes, you're going to get rid of yours too and that the idea is the rest of the world would just go along with that if the U.S. and USSR were, you know, arm and arm on that? Well, nobody talks about unilateral disarmament, so just the United States giving them up, or even bilateral disarmament, just the U.S. and Russia.

But it's widely recognized that because the United States and Russia have 90% of all the weapons in the world, 90% of all the nuclear weapons. So we have about 5,500 weapons in our arsenal in various stages of readiness. and the Russians have about 6,200 in their arsenal. And everybody else has a couple of hundred at most. Even, you know, France has about 300. China has about 300. And so it's widely recognized that in order for us to have real progress towards nuclear disarmament for all nine nuclear nations,

you've got to get the U.S. and Russia to come down lower. Get them to come down to about 1,000 weapons each, even a thousand deployed weapons each. You do that, and now you're in the same ballpock at these other countries, and now you could have what some people talk about is a freeze and reduce agreement. So you get China, in particular China, but also the others, to freeze their nuclear arsenals at their current level, and for the U.S. and Russia to continue talks about further reductions, so that now you're having multilateral disarmament talks, and everybody's in the mix, including India, including Pakistan, including Israel. They're all in the mix, and they're all talking about how to stabilize the situation so we don't get to the brink of nuclear war. All right. Now, I'm sorry I'm skipping around, but there's so much here and so little time.

On the intermediate nuclear forces treaty, the narrative went that the Russians were breaking it first, we think, because they got these missiles that by looking at them seems like they fall within the prohibited range here. and then the Trump administration's response to that was, oh, yeah, well, we're just going to tear it up then, rather than, boy, we better sit down and start negotiating and make sure we can save this treaty, guys, in the name of Ronald Reagan or something like that. But I talked to Chos Freeman, the former State Department official and intelligence officer and all these things. And he says, you know, to paraphrase, that essentially what was going on here is, yeah, it looks like the Russians were violating the treaty, but they weren't deploying them in Europe. They were deploying them along their frontier with China. Or at least that's why they were doing it was for their, I don't know if they were deploying them yet, but that was the purpose of it. And then he says, and that's why America tore up the treaty, too. They weren't interested in putting Tomahawk H-bombs in Romania and Poland. They want these mid-range nuclear missiles for China, too. And so, America and Russia let this intermediate nuclear forces tree that kept nukes out of Europe since 87, or medium-range nukes out of Europe since 87, in order that they could both. target China, where Russia and China are getting along better than ever now. Seems like a real

waste of effort on their part. But, you know, I wonder what you think about that. Is that really right? Now we have, as you're just describing, a potential nuclear standoff in Europe, where we just didn't need to have one at all here. Well, I would say two things. And first, one of the most disturbing things about this Ukrainian crisis, in addition to the people being killed on the around right now is how Putin is talking about nuclear weapons. I mean, he is quite specific here. In his declaration of war, basically, he said that Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. That's true. And that anyone who dares to oppose us will be met with the level of destruction that they have never experienced. So he is directly making nuclear threats to the

United States, to NATO, to anybody who would dare oppose his invasion. So this is front and center on his mind. I know most Americans and most people in the world don't think about nuclear weapons, but Putin does. Putin does. And so you realize that we have squandered so much time not pursuing more forcefully efforts to reduce these weapons, to separate them from conventional conflicts. And while we haven't been doing that, the militaries in both the United States and Russia and other countries have been moving to reintegrate nuclear weapons to their combat strategies. In other words, they are blurring and in some cases erasing the firebreak between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons so that nuclear weapons just become another step up the ladder. So the worry is that if Putin loses in Ukraine, if he starts to lose, he may be tempted to use a nuclear weapon to prevent that loss, which would for him not just be the end of a loss of a battle, the loss of a war, but maybe the loss of his rule, maybe the loss of his life if Russians rebel against this insane war that he started. So nuclear weapons are very much in the mix now of this crisis that the invasion of Ukraine has started.

And that brings us back to the INF Treaty. I was on an advisory board of the State Department during that time, and I saw the information about Russia's cheating. And yes, they were. There's no question about it. They were testing a kind of missile in a range that was prohibited by the treaty. That testing is prohibited. The development of a system like that is prohibited anywhere in the world, not just in Europe. The failure of the Obama administration at that time was to do something about it.

I was appalled that this. We knew about this for several years, and the Obama administration could not come up with a way to enforce the requirements of this treaty and to prevent that deployment of that Russian system wherever it was deployed. the Trump comes in and he just rips it up and this is completely insane just because somebody is speeding you don't repeal the speeding laws just because somebody kills somebody else you don't repeal the laws against murder but that's what we did with the INF treaty because they were cheating at the margins on this but still cheating we tore up the whole treaty and and I believe we're going to come to regret this if we see Russia once again deploying these systems that we could have stopped in Europe or on the border with China. Yeah. And now, am I right? Is that the way I heard that tale correctly?

And any errors are mine, not Chas Freeman's. I'm just recalling and paraphrasing, but is that really right that in both cases, Russia and America really weren't even doing this for each other, but they were doing it for China? It's certainly true of us. This is what we want. The day after Trump pulled out of the treaty, the military tested along a missile that could go in these intermediate ranges, but they've been blocked it. And then what they want to do is deploy it.

Speaking of violating the treaty of developing the things, right? Right. You can't even develop it. You can't test a weapon at this range. It was a very good treaty. Well, they had one ready. They had apparently developed one if they had one ready to test the day after Trump tore the thing up, right?

It was an existing missile that had never been tested at that range. Oh, I see. So now they could test it at that range. I see. So that's where. Now, I don't know about what Russia's main purpose was. They were certainly looking at China, but I wouldn't say they were looking exclusively at China. For us, it was all about China.

We weren't that concerned about Russia at that point. We are now. All right. Now, I'm sorry. I hate to keep going back to the 80s on you, but I was just a kid then, and I lived through this, and I was paying attention, but I was really in elementary school. So I don't know. But the way I remember the story, and as I've kind of learned it since then, I haven't really read any books about this or anything. but essentially, isn't it right that Reagan did this massive build-up of medium-range missiles in Russia, I mean, pardon me, in Europe, I believe in response to Russia deploying them first, and these were the Pershings, right?

And he spent a trillion dollars on this or whatever, and then he turned right around, negotiated them away again. As you said, destroyed all these perfectly good missiles, and that, I guess essentially he had played this extreme game of nuclear poker here. that like, oh, you want to put medium-range missiles in Europe, huh? I'll show you medium-range missiles in Europe. This had people terrified in Reagan's first term, right? And then he did the right thing and got rid of the things and signed this magnificent treaty that only now we're talking about has been destroyed 30 years later, right?

Well, you're killing me here, Scott. I was working on the House Armed Services Committee in the 80s. So I was already dealing with these things. Were you born? Is that what you were kidding? 176. So yeah, I was in third and fourth grade during hands across America and all that stuff. So I'm doing this and I was deeply opposed to Ronald Reagan. I thought he was the devil incarnate. I was working for the Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee. Remember, Reagan comes in on this myth of the window of vulnerability. All the hawks had rallied around the growing Soviet threat and the fear that Russia was soon going to have a first strike.

capability, meaning they had enough nuclear weapons to destroy all our weapons in a nuclear strike and keep enough in reserves that they could deter us from launching whatever might remain. And this was the window of vulnerability, they said, and we had to build up our nuclear forces. And Reagan comes in, and he does that. He starts building a new MX missile, the ICBM, a new bomber, a new sub. He just goes, haul hog. The defense budgets sky rockets again.

And then in his second term, he makes a pivot. And it turns out he really is a nuclear abolitionist. He really thinks that we could, as he said in his second inaugural address, eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. And he tries to do it. And he was influenced by things like the day after, that show that turns on TV. He was influenced by the intelligence he was getting, where he learned that the Soviets really thought we were going to attack first.

and he never conceived that the Soviets could think that we would attack them. But he's convinced that these weapons have to be eliminated, and he comes real close to doing it. He misses it. And I write about this in the Quincy issue brief on nuclear forces, but then he does the INF Treaty, and he gets rid of those, and then he starts negotiations on strategic systems, and he starts what he calls the start talks, the first treaty that would actually eliminate weapons rather than just limit the arsenals. And he negotiates a treaty that cuts U.S. and Russian then Soviet forces in half.

And his successor, George H.W. Bush, continues that work. He also cuts U.S. and Russian forces in half. And he goes further, unilaterally reducing, taking thousands of weapons off of our Navy ships, denuclearizes the army, pulls the nuclear weapons out of Korea, etc. And you really get this feeling like it's over. We've escaped. We're safe now. We didn't eliminate them all, but we're on the way.

And sure enough, here we are, you know, 20, 30 years later. And we are down by 80% from the heights of the Cold War. We had about 66,000 weapons during Reagan's term. We're down to 13,000 weapons globally now. But the reductions have stopped. The steam has gone out. of nuclear disarmament. Obama failed in his vision of making the elimination of nuclear weapons the focus of his national security strategy. Trump reversed it and started beefing up again,

pouring money into these systems, and now Joe Biden's about to issue a nuclear posture review that will basically stay the course, tweak Trump's policies around the edges, but not fundamentally change them. I think the crisis in Ukraine is showing us how dangerous it is not to continue to reduce and work towards the elimination of these weapons. These are one of the three great threats that threatened destruction on a planetary scale. Climate change can do it over decades. Pandemics can kill millions in years. Nuclear weapons can destroy humanity in an afternoon. We ignore this danger at our peril. Yeah, absolutely right there. Now, so listen, you already absolutely condemned what Putin is doing. I mean, as we're recording this on Thursday morning,

we're about 12 hours into a full scale assault on Ukraine, and presumably they're going all the way to Romania. Maybe they're only going to take the eastern half of the country. We're at that point here. There's just no question whatsoever that this is, I won't say entirely unprovoked, but absolutely unreasonable and unnecessary. So that's the question, though, is to a guy like you who's been around this whole time and who I know knew better all along and warned them all along. For example, W. Bush, you shouldn't tear up this ABM treaty. Barack Obama, you should not put these anti-missile missiles into Romania and Poland because this guy Putin is dangerous. And if you listen to what he says, he takes this threat, as you put it earlier, very seriously.

We don't think about nukes. He thinks about nukes. This was in his rant the other day. was, what are we going to do? We're going to let them put missiles in Ukraine, pointing right at Moscow? No, it's on now. And so I'm not saying he's justified in any way. I'm 100% with you. I'm not saying reasonable, but I'm saying what he's doing is rational. And we know that it is because people like you have warned for 30 years that this is not the, or 25, that we should not be expanding NATO, tearing up our treaties, and getting in the Russians face in a way that puts them in the position to do something very horrible, which is, I think, what we're watching play out this morning, right? Yeah. Yeah, it really does underscore that when you have a moment,

when you're able to move forward on reducing nuclear weapons, you really have to seize the moment because it opens and shuts very quickly. And in this case, I think we'll there's nothing that we did that justifies what Putin is doing. Let's be clear about this. But a lot of what we did set the stage for what Putin is doing and the NATO expansion that George Keenan warned us at the time in the 1990s when the Warsaw Pact collapsed and we were just starting to let in those Warsaw Pact countries into NATO, he warned that this was going to stimulate the worst kind of militaristic and revisionist

nationalist fears in Russia, which it did. Obama was warned when he put in what he said were defensive missiles, which is true. We were putting interceptors in Poland and Romania to try to intercept an Iranian ICBM, should they develop a nuclear weapon, should they develop an ICBM. They have developed neither, but we still put those missile tubes in Poland and Romania. And the problem is, as you point out, you're very well versed on this, Scott, that these are the same kinds of missile tubes we have on our Aegis cruisers and destroyers. In fact, it's called a land-based Aegis system.

And while we have interceptors in them now, those same tubes could house offensive nuclear-tipped missiles like the Tomahawk cruise missile. And Russia wouldn't know what was in the tubes because there's no arrangement for inspections. And I was in the advisory board and the State Department during the Obama years and I heard the Russian complaints and there were brushed off by State Department officials, ridiculous. The same way Reagan thought it was ridiculous that we would ever attack Russia, Obama officials says, no, NATO is a defensive alliance. Well, it doesn't look defensive to Russia. And we don't need these weapons.

They're serving no purpose. So what is the point of keeping those interceptors in Poland and Romania? It looks like you're preparing for an attack on Russia. And that's why one of Putin's demands in the letters he sent back to the United States and Europe on this was that those missiles had to be taken out, as well as, by the way, the U.S. had to rejoin the INF Treaty. So these issues are front and center for him, even if they're not for us. Right. And listen, you know, I have a friend who is very upset who is saying to me, Putin is insane, he's insane, he's insane. And I'm saying, listen, the guy is brutal, maybe is the word that you're looking for, something like that.

But this is strictly business. And if you listen to his statements, I mean, he does talk about, you know, older humiliations and this kind of thing. But even on just, even in the middle of his rant, he's saying, look what happens. The communists gave away Ukraine, let him be independent. And then, but the Americans want to have it. They won't let it be independent. it either belongs to us or it belongs to them well it belongs to us not them and he even said you know Kiev has run out of DC which is yeah kind of true so um you know it's uh what he's doing is

obviously a severe move um but it's it is rational if not reasonable you know i'm with you i think it's it's very dangerous to to brush this off as insanity You know, is megalomania a type of insanity? Yes, it is. I got a degree in psychology from Boston College, so I can comment. Yes, it is. And is he a megalomaniac? Yes, he is. But is he crazy like they mean that is irrational, cannot be reason with no. Because that excuses some of the mistakes we made that paved the road to this moment. Again, nothing we did justifies what Putin is doing. But it certainly set the state. for what Putin is doing. You can look back and see these missed opportunities. These things that we thought were signs of strength on our part that were very threatening to not just Putin, but to lots of Russians, the ignoring of Russian concerns when we could have incorporated them fairly easily into our plans. It really was the hubris of the unipolar moment when we thought we were the only remaining superpower in the world, and we could do whatever the hell we wanted.

And if that meant intervening in Kosovo to end atrocities, we would do it. If that meant surrounding Iraq and then invading Iraq, we would do it. If that meant occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, we would do it. If that meant killing almost a million people over 20 years in this war on terror, we would do it. And every step of the way, we thought this was justified in that it really was nobody else's business. But Russia didn't feel that way. You could imagine Putin looking at this and saying, look, man, if you can do that, why exactly can't I do this? If you can invade another country, why exactly can't I?

Or what? This is not a Middle Eastern country, so it doesn't count. You know, those are the kinds of norms we set that others are now saying, look, I'm just doing what you did. And we can see what it's like. If we got a rethink, what would have been like if we had spent the last 20 years enhancing global norms, strengthening international law, reducing nuclear arsenals, reducing conflicts instead of acting the way we did in our eubristic arrogance? Hang on just one second.

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Subscribe to their newsletter to immediately receive your free copy of getting started with backyard chickens. That's freerangefeeder.com slash Scott. Yeah. I'm surprised he didn't outright. I mean, he was sort of parroting the Americans. I'm surprised he didn't outright say, listen, I'm concerned that they could develop nuclear weapons

and give them to these right sector terrorists to use against us. And also, it's our responsibility to protect. We think they're going to wipe out. the entire province of Lujansk, just like you guys claimed about Gaddafi and Benghazi in 2011. Samantha Power says, I have to intervene to save the people, you know, because it is. And what do they do in Libya? I guess, well, in Kosovo, they went around the UN entirely.

In Libya, they lied to the Russians. And so we're just going to protect Benghazi, we swear, and made a chump out of Medvedev, who went along with it. And apparently enraged Putin, who returned to the presidency after only one term instead of two, as had been expected, because the Americans not just did that war in Libya, but screwed the Russians on it to launch the war, too. You know, just one more little thing there. That is exactly right, Scott. And people forget this. Again, it doesn't justify what Putin is doing, but you have to understand, we are not blameless here, the kind of policies we implemented. set the stage for what's going on now.

And you're right. He is echoing the same kind of charges that we made, both about Iraq and about Iran. He said he will not allow Ukraine to have nuclear weapons. Well, that sounds a lot like George W. Bush and there's justification for the invasion of Iraq. It sounds a lot like what presidents, from Bush to Obama to Trump, to Trump, to Trump. Trump to Biden are saying about Iran. Neither one of those countries have nuclear weapons, right? Iraq couldn't build a nuclear weapon. Iran can't build a nuclear weapon for, well, it would take the many years to do it. Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons, cannot build

nuclear weapons, but you still make this ludicrous charge. And again, Putin's saying, well, it worked for those guys. I'm going to play the same play here and see if it works for me. and as you say, also adding in the responsibility to protect. I'm protecting the Russians. That's why I'm going in. Again, standards that we invented, we set this up, the responsibility to protect, it's coming back to bite us. Yeah. All right, now, listen, we're out of time, but I want to keep you.

Can I keep you another 10 minutes here, please? Sure. Okay, I'm happy to say. Great. And while you're talking, I'll have to ask my guy to bump my next guy for a minute because there's so much important stuff to get to here. because you mentioned Iran, and I want to ask you a question about Iran, but first, I want to ask you about a debate that I know of. It never happened right in front of me. It's a disjointed kind of a debate.

But my old friend Gordon Prather, who used to make nukes for Uncle Sam back in the day and was the chief scientist of the army and a great anti-war-liz activist in the Bush years and writer for us at anti-war.com. he tells me that look man you want to take out incoming Russian nukes coming over the poles in outer space the only way to do that is with an enhanced radiation device in other words a neutron bomb

that doesn't explode with heat so much as has a thinner shell so that the fission and fusion take place mostly in a radioactive form rather than just fire and then that radiation is what you would use to take out

incoming nukes and it's a severe way to do it, but it's the only way to do it because anything else, you're trying to shoot a bullet with a bullet and in outer space where everything is ice cold. So all your infrared stuff and heat seeking this and that is not going to work right. And you're talking about such high speeds. Just forget about it. But then I met a guy at a thing and he said, well, look, actually, that was my job as building these anti-missile missiles. And I'm here to tell you we can hit a bullet with a bullet. But the question is, how much are you willing to? to pay for these bullets, we're firing at the bullets because it is a matter of cost. And if you're

willing to pay enough of a price for an anti-missile missile, yes, I can shoot down an incoming rain, at least from North Korea if they launched a handful. You know, Russia's shooting their whole arsenal on doomsday. Forget it. You know, but so I wonder what is your position on that? No, we cannot shoot down a bullet with a bullet unless the other. bullet is cooperating. That's the way to think about this. So, over the, you know, when we first started doing these kinds of systems in the 60s and 70s, we couldn't come close to hitting a bullet with a bullet.

We couldn't come close to having one of our interceptors actually physically hit the incoming warhead for all the reasons you said. And so we armed them with nuclear warheads. Our first defensive systems that we deployed the Sprint and Spartan systems in the late 60s, early 70s were nuclear armed. And these were the systems that Nixon was going to eliminate. The Russians were doing the same thing. So we limited those to two sites per country, as it turns out.

The Russians deployed one around Moscow. We deployed one around an ICBM field for six months before the army itself, who was in charge of this system, said this is stupid, and we took it down. So we have had no defensive systems. In the 80s and 90s, there was the dream. dream, and this is what Reagan promoted, of new kinds of technologies, laser beams, particle beams, speed of light weapons that could do the job. And Reagan was convinced it could work. In 1987, the American Physical Society, the nation's leading association of physicists, issued a study

that said, no. We're nowhere near being able to develop weapons like this, and we won't even know if we can do it for a good 20 years. So that took the steam out of that balloon. So we went back to what we call kinetic interceptors so not laser beams but regular interceptor missiles and we got better at getting them to be able to hit and and guess what it turns out under perfect conditions you can do it so we've had 19 tests of systems like this and in half of them we've been able to hit it but here's the thing the system has to cooperate in these tests they're really demonstrations We know exactly when and where and how fast the incoming target is coming at us. There is no attempt to deceive or suppress the defensive system.

And so under those conditions, we know exactly, including in some of these tests, putting a transponder on the warhead, sending out a signal to the interceptor, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. Right. So it hones in on that interceptor. We have never, never tested them with the kind of simple countermeasures that our own intelligence services say any country can deploy, including simple balloons that look like the warhead floating in the cold vacuum of outer space. A balloon travels just like a heavy metal warhead. We haven't tested them against chaff, simple things that can confuse and blind the radar or transponders or jammers. None of those things that we test them against. So go.

Wait, just you're saying, not that we haven't succeeded in a test, but that they haven't even bothered to try to test that. Right. There was one test. There was one test where they put up a balloon that looked too close to what the warhead looked like and the interceptor missed. So they stopped doing it. And all this time we haven't done it. And this is what the new APS study says, the new American physical. Society study says is they looked at both the current interceptors we have. We have 44 interceptors

based in Alaska and California designed to interceptors of North Korea and ICBM. And some in Congress and in the military say that we could deploy such a system to defeat a Chinese threat or a Russian threat. They looked at this and they said, no, it doesn't work. The system itself is fatally flawed. The one that's in the ground doesn't work well enough. It doesn't have enough reliability for us to depend on it. But even if it worked perfectly, it still couldn't do it because of this countermeasure problem. And by the way, it doesn't account for enemy suppression techniques. For example, knocking out the radars before they launch their missiles, the kind of thing that you would expect an enemy to do.

Nor do any of the other proposed systems that are on the horizon, what they're called boost phase intercepts, things that try to intercept the missile. when it's just being launched in that two minutes before it goes into outer space when it's slow and fat and hot when you can see it more clearly and there but a chance they say you have to be too close to be able to do that and you'd only have at most a minute or two of warning it's an impossible mission and this i hope this new study has the same kind of impact that the study did back in 1987, where it took the air out of the laser balloon, I hope it restores some kind of sense to the Biden administration that convinced them that they can't be spending $20 billion a year on these missile defense programs. We have to go bring them all back to the laboratory,

all back to the basics, and don't start deploying systems or pushing systems into production until you know they can work, and that will be decades. I mean, man, Joe, what you're telling me here, this entire era, the whole 21st century long so far, starting with W. Bush tearing up this treaty in December of 2001, if I got my date straight here, just a couple of months after Putin was the first person to call on September 11th. Yeah, he announced it in 2001, and then he did it in 2002. Uh-huh. And then, and this whole time, and Obama going along with this whole thing, too, installing these radars and these anti-missile systems. And again, from MK. 41 dual use launchers that terrify the hell out of the Russians and provoke them this entire way where I was going to say to Biden's credit, he was climbing down a little in his counteroffer to Putin and said, yeah, let's establish a verification regime for the missile stations in Poland

and Romania so that you're not upset about that. But it's just too little too late, man. What are they even doing there? They don't even work. They're just decorations anyway. But then so let me ask you this now. Is the controversy purely just the, the dual-use launchers and how they could be a disguise for Tom the Hawks, or is the threat really that they might work and that what the U.S. is doing is they're really wearing armor to a fist fight and making it, you know, it's not defensive at all. It's putting America in the position of being able to attempt a first strike, where they can take out enough of Russia's nukes on the first hit that they feel like they can shoot down anything that

survives for a retaliatory strike because they have Russia ringed with these things. Because, you know, it seems like I've seen, I think in the interview with Oliver Stone, for example, I think Stone even says, come on, you know these things don't work, man. This is just a boondoggle for corporate America. You know how it goes. And Putin says essentially, yeah, of course, Oliver Stone. However, I'm in charge of security around here, man. What am I supposed to do when you're ringing my country with anti-missile missiles?

I got to make better missiles, don't I? And I think it was a couple years after that that he debuted in his speech, all of his new missiles. That is exactly right, Scott. You got it. So let's go back to the Poland and Romanian launch tubes that are there. I think there's three factors. And, you know, as usual, it's never just one thing. So there's three factors. And one is the offensive threat. I think that's a genuine concern. The U.S. dismisses this. That's crazy. But if you're a Russian, And you've been attacked a lot. You know, this is something you've got to be aware of. So that's number one. Number two is the point you're making. And the Russian and Chinese are both acting this way.

The missile systems are the worst of all worlds. They don't actually work, the anti-missile systems. They don't actually work, but the adversary can't count on that. And they've got to calculate that eventually the United States, we're so capable, might get them to work. So therefore, in order to preserve their deterrent, in order to keep their nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States, they've got to make sure that they can penetrate any current or known defensive system.

And that's exactly what Russia is doing. And Putin has a point. In 2001, when Bush did this and then implemented in 2002, he said, don't do this. you're going to I'm going to have to respond to this and it took two decades but in 2018 he unveiled five new super weapons he called them typical exaggeration some of these things will never work but he unveiled them all designed to circumvent U.S. missile defensive systems whatever we deploy in the future cruise missiles that could fly under them nuclear power torpedoes that we wouldn't even detect, powerful ICBMs that could attack us from the south that would

fly not over the North Pole, but over the South Pole because all our defensive radars are north facing. Things, maneuverable glide vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds. These were all, you don't need any of these unless you're going up against defenses and now China's doing the same thing. China has a very small nuclear force, about 300 weapons. And, but, they are now afraid that the U.S. is moving to a first strike posture, just what we fear the Russians, the Soviets were doing in the 1980s, that they are, the United States is aiming to be able to launch a strike against their weapons and take them all out and then have a defensive system that can mop up the 10 or 20 that might be left. So China is doing what? It's deploying

new weapons might grow its force, might double its force, maybe even triple it. It's based, it's going to deceptive basing modes, mobile launchers, multiple silos, and it's developing weapons that can evade our defenses. So not just balloons and decoys, but maneuverable warheads that you can't track and therefore you can't hit, hypervelocity systems that could glide in through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. All these things are happening. And we, our response to this is to do what? Our response is to develop more nuclear weapons to counter China. And if this sounds like an arms race, you're getting the point. This is exactly the dynamics of an arms race.

We think everything we're doing is defensive and everything our adversary doing is aggressive and offensive. And we're in the middle of it. And this Ukraine crisis is going to make it worse. There's not a chance in hell that Congress is going to reduce the military budget of the United States, even though we're spending more on the military than we have since World War II, since World War II already. There's not a chance we're going to cut that in the face of a war in Europe. There's not a chance we're going to cut on nuclear weapons. Why? Because the

first thing people go to is in a crisis like this is strength. They want to feel strong. And if you're a Democrat, you're scared to death of looking weak on defense. So the Democrats' default position on defensive issues is to look strong, whether they think it's smart or not, what they're concerned about as appearance, not capability. Yeah, exactly. No, what if they call us a wimp? We can't have that. We've got to act off to appease all the bullies who are bullying us.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, that's the only thing that's presumably a little bit better than the Democrats is that they're a little bit less hawks than the Republicans. That's the only, which is not even really true, right? They're just absolutely horrible, but it's, you know, rumored to be the one good thing about them, you know? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's Democrats who do want to cut the budget. In fact, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith, is one. He thinks we have way too many nuclear weapons. But does he do anything about it? No, he does not because he knows that the committee won't go along with him. He couldn't get the Democrats in his own committee to vote for cuts

to the budget or to cut nuclear weapons. So now he doesn't even try. And I got to tell you a lot of what is that the problem here is not just this political perception, but the hammerlock that the military corporations have on the Congress and on the Pentagon. We think about nuclear weapons the way we've been talking about them as, you know, strategic moves and counter moves and defensive systems. But they're also a product. They're a product that a corporation makes. And corporations, as we now know, will sell you products that will kill you, whether it's tobacco or opioids or have false cures for COVID. If they can make a buck off it, somebody's going to sell it to you. And the same is true for nuclear weapons. We are,

set to spend $634 billion this decade on nuclear weapons, $634 billion. That is a very large market. And Northrop Grumman and Lockheed and Boeing and Raytheon make a lot of money on nuclear weapons, and they don't want anything to disrupt that market. So they deploy an army of lobbyists in Washington. They contribute generously to members of Congress. They have a revolving door where members of the military cycle in between programs to build these weapons and corporate offices that sell these weapons. They've got the thing, they flood Washington think tanks with grants to mute criticism of their programs. They advertise heavily in Washington media markets to sell these as instruments of peace, not instruments of war, and they succeed.

I mean, you know, you don't have to think too far back to when you saw strategic bomber. overflying a football game. It happens all the time. You know, we've accepted these into our American vision. Yeah. And it works. And it's very profitable and it's very hard to shake. So it's not just politics. It's profits that are keeping us on the nuclear knife's edge. Yeah. Look, that's such an important point. And I'll speak for my own ignorance here. And I know it's therefore fair for me to project it onto the rest of the population, too, that you and I could talk about any kind of crooked government boondoggle thing all day and all night. And still, the part of my brain that says, you know, nuclear weapons is the same racket. Just, it's, I put that off till last to

understand. I even know, even knowing everything I knew about the military industrial complex and how they push their crappy fighter jets and every other thing, somewhere in the back of my mind was this fantasy left over from, I don't know, 1980s movies or, or my 1980s government school education or something that, uh, essentially at the end of the day, nuclear weapons are a completely demand side economy. You know, the military tells the Congress how many nukes they need and the Congress buys them for them. But I mean, what are you telling me that people, you have H-bomb salesmen like you have used car salesmen or like you have, say, gun companies who want that military contract or that FBI contract or something like that? People out there,

are beating the bushes to see if they can get rid of H-bombs, like an inventory of furniture down at the outlet, that, like, yeah, that's exactly what it is. Man, I got to get rid of these H-bombs, Senator. You got to help me get rid of these H-bombs, and that's exactly what it is. No different than any other government racket in America. That's what you're telling me here. It is. It is.

We think that some things are sort of immune to market forces, but no, I'm telling you. Those aren't market forces. those are contracting forces. That's different, right? Yes. They got a product to sell. I was on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee and the Government Operations Committee for almost 10 years

and I was regularly visited by these lobbyists, taken out to lunch when we could still do that. I heard their briefings. I went out to their facilities. I saw where they built them. I went to the congressional districts, which are heavily dependent on these contracts for jobs. I visited the missile fields.

I'm telling you, it is a very large, very expensive, very powerful nuclear industrial complex. It is very, very hard to go against it, which is why they win. You have to have a president who's willing to counter this. You can't do it at the assistant secretary level or even, quite frankly, at the Secretary Defense level. You've got to have a president who is determined to cut it. And that's why the only time we've really. made progress on this is when we've had Republican presidents cutting the nuclear weapons.

Reagan did it. George H.W. Bush did it. W. Bush actually cut the nuclear force in half. He was concerned about different things, not nukes. Clinton, Obama, nope. They kept the nuclear arsenal pretty much flat during their eight years in office. And Joe Biden unfortunately looks like he's going to do the same with his nuclear posture view coming out in a few weeks, changes at the margin. The president has not made this a priority, and if the president doesn't, the machine wins. Yeah. Okay, here's the silver lining that probably isn't going to matter because we're all going to die. But Joe, what's going on with the JCPOA? Are they actually going to save that thing? You got a couple minutes here? We are. This is the good news. One of the issues that is

embroiled American politics for almost two decades now. We might be back to restoring the deal that shrank Iran's program, that put it under a microscope, that froze it for a generation, that Donald Trump foolishly tore up, said that he was going to give us a better deal, that he was going to hammer Iran with maximum pressure that was going to cause them to comply or collapse. None of that happened. The situation got worse. is closer to being able to build a material for a bomb now than they were during any other previous period. It looks like we're going to get that deal back. Perhaps this week, perhaps next week, most likely next week. And we'll get it back in here. Even though the Russians are at war with

Ukraine, the Russians are still cooperating in these talks. They're part of the talks. China's cooperating with these talks, as they did, by the way, in 2014, when there was also a conflict in Ukraine and also the talks going on. So I think we're going to get this deal back. It'll be a big win for Biden. And it's actually might be good that it happens during this time of Ukraine crisis because it may take some of the political heat against it. This always hard line is ready to slam any president who negotiates an agreement as an appeaser as weak. I think Biden's going to be able to withstand that quite easily because the forces have changed. The countries in the region want the deal back. The military and intelligence officials in Israel want the deal back. The resistance

to the deal is still there, still well-funded, but much smaller than it has been in the past. So I think that is the silver lining. At least we're going to solve that nuclear problem. Yeah. And boy, this thing going on with Russia and Eastern Europe sure makes the I Tola and little old Persia seem like a side show anyway. Can somebody just, we'll get the assistant deputy secretary of state to take care of that while we're dealing with important business over here. You know what I mean? Which hopefully means cooling things off and backing down and trying to negotiate, not escalate. But so can you tell us real quick? Does this mean that they're banning all their dumb, tough talk about abolishing the sunset provisions and adding provisions about Hezbollah and missiles and everything under the sun? And does it mean that They're really willing to lift the sanctions, like in the deal, which Obama, you know, sort of kind of did, but never really finished following through on, I don't believe. And, you know, Trump certainly never followed through on. So, in other words, I mean, the Biden guys are climbing down a few rungs on this ladder enough that the Ayatollah is going to welcome them back into the deal. Or is it that the Iranians are really seeking some compromise here on their side, too?

I don't know what they got to do. I know they're not promising to abandon their mid-range missile program. Every successful international agreement requires two things that the sides compromise and that both and that the sides are all able to declare victory. So it's got to look like a win for both sides. So this is not the Japanese on the deck of the USS Missouri unconditionally surrendering. This is an agreement that is reached and there's something in it for both sides. We're going to go back to the agreement we had, which I will remind you, was working.

Iran, it was impossible for Iran to build a nuclear bomb under that agreement. It reduced Iran's nuclear capability significantly, and whatever else Iran was doing, at least they didn't have a nuclear bomb to back it up. But it also provided sanctions relief for Iran so they could start to do business with the rest of the world. That's what they want. We want the limitations, the restrictions, the reductions in the program. the Iranians want to be able to sell their oil. And guess what?

We actually want them to sell their oil. You see what's happening to the price of oil this week? That Iran deal is going to increase the supply of oil globally. It's going to lower oil prices. It's going to have a positive impact on inflation in the West, particularly in the United States. So this is actually going to be a good deal. This is going to be a win-win. We're going to win for the reasons I just cited.

Iran's going to win because they're going to start making money again. And as we're making this deal, it isn't that the countries in the region are afraid that Iran's going to now go on a tear, flush with petro dollars and it's going to start funding Hezbollah. No. What you see is diplomacy is increasing in the Middle East. All of Iran's rivals, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman. They're all in diplomatic talks with Iran right now. There's talks of the president of Iran, visit. Saudi Arabia. Boy, would that be a region-changing event? So you see that this is, there's more good news than just the JCPOA coming back. It looks like we might be able to start getting dialogues going on the regional level that can address the regional issues, like support for Hezbollah, if Israel is willing to talk, like the Saudi Iran rivalry, like limits on Iran's ballistic missile program, but all of these have to follow the restoration of the JCPOA. That's the foundation for any further diplomacy. You can't do it all in one deal. You've got to

build a new security regime brick by brick, and that may be what the restoration of the JCPOA allows us to do. Yeah, great. All right. Thank you so much, Joe. It's really great to have you back on the show, man. I really appreciate it a lot. My pleasure, Scott. I know we went longer than you intended. I hope some of it is useful to you and your audience. Yeah, every bit of it, absolutely. I know they'll feel the same way, too. So thank you again.

Thank you. All right, you guys, that's Joe Serencioni, formerly at Plow Shares, and now at Responsible Statecraft, the Quincy Institute, ResponsibleStatecraft.org. And you've got to check out this really important piece. New Scientific Review punctures the myth of missile defense. The Scott Horton show and Anti-War Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.