Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 5/30/24 Ted Postol on How the US is Helping Ukraine Strike Russia’s Early Warning System

Episode Date: June 1, 2024

Scott is joined by Ted Postol of MIT to discuss the danger of recent Ukrainian strikes on parts of Russia’s early warning system. Postol explains why satellite limitations make Russia dependent on ground radar systems to detect incoming nuclear-armed missiles. He and Scott then discuss the stupidity of helping Ukraine damage the one thing that can help the Russians confirm they are not under nuclear attack. Discussed on the show: “Russia’s Antiquated Nuclear Warning System Jeopardizes Us All” (Washington Monthly) Ted Postol is a professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at MIT. He has written about nuclear weapons issues and the chemical attacks in Syria. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY 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 scott horton 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 ted postal he is professor emeritus of science technology and international security at mit and you probably all remember him from debunking the conche coon chemical weapons hoax of the Obama years. Welcome back to the show. Ted, how you doing?

Nice to be here. Very happy to have you here. So I have a section in my new book that I'm writing about nuclear war, and I cite you in there because of your previous warnings, especially I guess from two years ago at the onset of the Russia-Ukraine war, about essentially Russia's ghetto early warning system, and the danger that it poses to mankind. So now this has come up again because the Ukrainians,

I gather through drone strikes, have hit three radar stations inside the Russian Federation. And it's these radar stations along with the satellites that provide their early warning system for, you know, the threat of nuclear attack. So I was wondering if you could kind of take us through their systems and what difference it makes that the Ukrainians are hitting them now? Yes. Well, first of all, a very, very important point that your audience should get immediately

is that the Russians do not have a space-based satellite system that can see ballistic missile launches around the globe. So we do, the Americans do, but the Russians do not. They do do have a very limited constellation that looks at the northern tier of the United States. So they can see ICBM launches, but their capability does not go beyond that. So, for example, they cannot see launches of Trident missiles from the North Atlantic, which is the major threat corridor for Russia, at least with some. satellites. And they cannot see launches from the Gulf of Alaska, which is the second major launch corridor. And in the case of the two radars that were attacked, they're free

radars, but one of them is really not operating. So it's not critical for early warning at this time. But the two raiders, they attack look south into the Mediterranean and the Indian ocean and uh the united states has made a point of demonstrating that trident submarines do occasionally operate in those areas although those areas are not a a severe well they're severe and you know one trident submarine could destroy all of russia so but they um they are not uh you know as a critical a normal uh patrol area as the gulf of alaska is and the north atlantic So the bottom line is that there are no space-based satellite systems the Russians have that can fill in the early warning loss from these two radars if they have been put out of operation. Now, there is a radar.

There are a couple of large radars in Moscow, and those radars can see ballistic missiles coming in from all directions. But those radars, because the curvature of the earth, those radars, of course, can only see by line of sight. So they cannot see incoming missiles until those missiles come over. the curved earth horizon. And so this reduces their warning time to really maybe six or seven or eight minutes, which is not enough time when you go through the procedures for a launch order to be executed when it's issued by the Kremlin. So this means that other means have to be used, like putting the forces on higher alert,

or going to schemes like automated launch of their rockets if and when nuclear detonations are detected on Russian soil. In other words, they have an automated response system of some kind. And that's, of course, very dangerous. You just don't want computers doing this. So the fortunate thing is the radar at Orsk, which, looks directly into the Indian Ocean may not have been damaged. There's no evidence that I've seen that indicates to me the antenna or any area of it was damaged. The radar at Armavir, which looks into the Mediterranean and overlaps also the Indian Ocean,

that radar has suffered significant damage. And some people have been reporting that the radars are easily repaired on short notice. I honestly don't know what to think because it depends critically on what equipment is available to repair these radars. In principle, they could be put back in operation very quickly. but without knowledge of what kind of resources are available at the radar site, I don't know how anybody can say that the radars can be operating immediately. But I do think that the Russians are handling this in a very calm and professional way. The Russians are quite good at handling these matters in a cautious way.

they're more cautious than the United States is, and that's a good thing. I mean, so I'm sorry to say that I'm more concerned about reckless actions by the United States than I am by the Russians. But the Russians are in a difficult position with damage to these radars. Now, if other radars get damaged, that could be quite a lot more serious. So there are radars that are in range of these drone attacks in Russia that looked into the North Atlantic, for example. The North Atlantic is the A number one threat corridor for the Russians. Anybody who knows any, you know, I have been involved with the Russians talking about these warning systems because it's been an issue I've worked on for well over 25 years now. And I've talked with one of the, uh, commanding

of their strategic rocket forces, Victor Yessen, and I've met him multiple times. And, you know, he understands. I'm very confident that he understands what he's doing. But, you know, at some point, if he doesn't have warning systems to give him information, he has put in a very bad position, along with, of course, the leadership that he is supposed to serve. And it's important for people to understand that different people in different parts of Russian society have different responsibilities. So someone who's the commander of the strategic rocket forces, that person's responsibility is to be able to provide nuclear force for Russia if he is asked to by his commander-in-chief. That's his job. The commander-in-chief's job is to not get them into a nuclear war that will get everyone killed.

But the job of the strategic rocket forces commander is to be available and ready to take action if it's required. So he's going to simply do what makes sense in terms of increasing the ability of his forces to respond, given the constraints that have been put on them, if parts of their early warning system are not operating. This is not a man who is crazy. He's a man who's very stable, very impressive, extremely intelligent, but that is his job. So he's going to take whatever actions he sees fit cautiously, but nevertheless he's going to do it.

And that could involve putting certain kinds of decision-making apparatuses on alert, active that would not normally be active during a time when they do not have adequate early warning from their radars. This is a crazy thing to be doing. All right. So how often does it happen that they get some sort of false alarm from the satellite that they need to double check with the radar that they now maybe don't have available? Well, the system that they're using, they do have a satellite system, as I was, as I said earlier, that only looks in a very restricted area at the northern tier of the United States. The way it works is it looks at what is called the Earth limb.

Imagine you're looking at the disk of the Moon or the Earth, and you look at the edge of the Earth from where you're looking. And you try to see against the dark background of space the plume of a rocket that is rising above the horizon. They have a system that is what they call this earth limb viewing. So they have satellites that are on extremely eccentric orbits. By eccentric, I mean they rise to very high altitudes in the northern part of their orbit. And then they come down to very low altitudes in the southern part of their orbits.

And the orbital plane is tipped about 30 degrees relative to the axis of rotation of the Earth. And those satellites look at the Earth limb immediately at the northern tier of the United States. Now, because those satellites are moving, they're in orbit, you need a bunch of them because only one satellite will be in location at a time. And we know that the constellation needs nine satellites so that the constellation will always be able to see the northern tier of the United States at one time and, you know, at all times by one of the satellites. But at this time, they only have four satellites in place. So this means they only have intermittent coverage of the ICBM fields that, you know, are a threat to right. Russia. They, of course, have a radar, multiple, multiple radars looking in the direction of the United States. But without that the information from the satellites, they lose maybe 10 or 12 minutes of warning because the satellites would see the launch of the rockets very early in their flight. And the radars can only see line of sight. So they don't see.

the incoming attack for maybe 10 or 12 minutes later when the attack breaks the radar screens of the Russian early warning radar system. That means, of course, that the timeline for decision making at the top levels is compressed significantly. And so they have a significant problem with severely compressed warning capabilities. which has caused them to take other kinds of measures to assure themselves that if they choose to launch a response to an American attack, that they can do it. And this is not a good situation.

Now, I think... Ted, let me ask you, how come they can't just look down on the planet the same way the American satellites can? Well, the reason is when you look down. at the earth and the sun is shining. At night it's easier, but if you look down at the earth and the sun is shining, clouds, first of all,

about 65% of the earth is covered with clouds, typically on an average. And cloud tops are at high altitude. And at high altitude, the absorption of sunlight that's reflected in the infrared is very, very diminished. So they say the cloud tops are extremely bright in the infrared.

And if you think of this, let's just imagine, for purposes of conception, I'm looking into a square kilometer because I have these infrared systems, and each infrared system has many pixels. If you think of a pixelated image, and each pixel looks into, let's say, a square kilometer. The reflected sunlight from that square kilometer is huge relative to the light, the infrared signal from a missile that is above the clouds in that pixel. So what you have to do is subtract an enormous background signal.

in order to see a small signal that has just appeared from the rocket. Unfortunately, the background changes because the clouds are moving. And so if you had a perfectly stable background and you had a very high what's called dynamic range, that is to say you have very stable sensors who can measure intensities over time with very, very high precision, you can in principle subtract the bright background from the whole signal and see that there's a change and you have a missile coming, you know, through the clouds. But the technology to do that is fantastically complex. And for some reason, which I have not been able to understand, I want to be clear, I do not know why this is the case. the Russians have not been able to implement that technology.

Now, we know that they have not implemented that technology because they had a system they tried to launch in the 1990s called the Prognos system with dedicated eight satellites in locations that showed those satellites were not looking down. They were looking at the limb of the earth. So when you map out where they were looking at, you know, their satellite orbits, they all fit exactly into areas where the Russians would want to monitor.

So we know it was earth limb viewing. So that system was designed from the beginning, the earth limb view, not to look down. Yeah. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War. Undue influence, deceptions, and the neocon energy agenda by Gary Vogler, former senior oil consultant and deputy senior oil advisor for U.S. forces during Iraq War II. Remember how I wrote in enough already

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which would tend to make them already more nervous right in a launch on warning kind of sense and now with these radars being taken out they have less ability to confirm the absence of incoming ICBMs in order to prevent misinterpretation and false alarms. So I guess the question is, how much more danger do you think this really puts us in? Or it's just the kind of thing we shouldn't be messing with, but ultimately, they know that as bad as he is, Biden's not about to launch a first strike. So what the hell, right? Well, you could take that position, and there's truth to it.

All right. So I've already been accused as overstating the situation by, you know, some people. But that's not the right way to think of it in my view. And, you know, we could debate that. But it's like giving, you know, having a grenade sitting around and someone pulling the pin out of the grenade and letting it sit there without the handle being allowed to fall off. You're letting it sit on the table. It's just not a good idea, and the consequences of an error could be the end of the modern world as we know it, quite possibly the end of killing of billions of people, yet alone hundreds of millions. So the consequences of a mistake or an error or an accident are beyond any, you know, we're talking about a catastrophe that, you know, would wipe out 100,000 years. of human progress. So my own view is that this is not something you play with. You leave it alone. In fact, what I have tried to do for well over 20 years quite unsuccessfully is to convince the U.S. government that certain critical technologies could be a given to the Russians to help them implement their own system. Now, people say, wow, what do you? trying to do? You're trying to aid the enemy. Well, this is not conventional war. In conventional

war, I want to have the capability to watch what my enemy is doing and hide what I'm doing from my enemy. That's the way I successfully bring force against the enemy and defeat them. But in a nuclear weapon situation, we're both with the consequences of a mistake, is not winning or losing a war, it's a destruction of a large part of human civilization and perhaps human life itself. We don't really know the full consequences. This is not something we're having an advantage is a very good idea. It doesn't have any meaning. And it's basically, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, wasn't it like Eisenhower's idea to have the open skies treaty and that we only just got out of under Trump at the end of Trump there?

Well, if we had some presidents like Eisenhower leading us, I think we'd be better off because he understood what war was. I mean, Eisenhower was, of course, a major military figure during World War II. He understood how completely unpredictable things can be. I mean, you know, before D-Day, he sat down and wrote this. extraordinary statement that we have on the records about apologizing for the failure of the D-Day invasion and taking all responsibility for the failure, because he wasn't sure that the D-Day invasion would succeed. He didn't know if they were going to get pushed off the beach with tremendous losses. So, you know, so he knew what he was dealing with because he had the experience

of a military officer who understands how completely unpredictable things can be even when you have military superiority and you've done all the planning that makes sense. But we haven't had this kind of leadership. Of course, Kennedy was also very careful about these things. And actually, after the Cuban missile crisis, had Kennedy lived, I think we would have seen. many progressive and sensible arrangements made with the Russians to reduce the chances of accidents. But after Kennedy, I don't think we really had a president who's given this enough attention. Well, you know, the conventional wisdom is that mutually shared destruction works. We haven't had a war this whole time because nobody would dare.

And so what's the problem? You're standing in a room filled with gasoline vapors, and no one has lit a match to blow the place up, and so I guess things are okay. You know what, let me ask you this real quick. And I'm sorry because we're so short on time here, Ted. Yeah, sure, go ahead. Let me ask you this, and you know, you're a real expert on this. I'm just out here in the hinterlands. Well, you're as expert as I am, but go ahead.

Well, no, not really at all. But so I guess this is something that you're first. familiarity, you know, I'm kind of relying on here, is it seems like mutually assured destruction used to imply not just we won't nuke you and you won't nuke us, but that will be very careful around each other in a larger sense, too, because we don't want anything to escalate kind of along these lines. And it seems like that part has changed and that mutually assured destruction now sort of means in D.C. that we can do whatever we want, even to Russia, And they wouldn't dare do anything about it because of mutually assured destruction.

So we were like wearing it as armor into a fistbite to wear, you know, or it's like a license now to be worse rather than a wise reason to shut the hell up and back down sometimes, you know? Does that make sense? And I wonder. Well, I think there is a cavalier character to the decision making in Washington and particularly in the White House. And I do not believe that I do not believe that the people in the White House understand the problems with the Russian space-based early warning system. I do not believe it because I have over the years on several occasions been involved in talking to White House people at the highest levels. And every time I have to re-explain to them, re-explained. the problems with the Russian early warning space-based system.

What happens is there's a change of people in power. The people who come into power, they're all trained as political scientists or lawyers. They do not have adequate intelligence support. The intelligence people do not properly brief them as far as I can tell, because it's news to all of them. I, you know, I was at Stanford and I worked some of the time with Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense.

Terry did not know about this. He was the Secretary of Defense. And I provided him with, you know, Perry is a pretty technical guy. He knows what's going on. He's not just a political scientist. In fact, he's trained as a mathematician. And he didn't know anything about this. He was quite forthright about it.

to his credit, because a lot of these other people try to make believe they know things that they don't know. But Barry was quite forthright, so that was good. But he was not told, even as a Secretary of Defense. This is a serious shortfall in understanding that people in Washington have. Yeah. Well, you know, I know about it from you, and you made a little bit of a splash two years ago when the war first started, and there was that Washington monthly article I urge people to read about this issue. and, you know, I appreciate that you're talking about it now and trying to get people conscious of this

because it just seems like they're so overconfident in what they're doing and they're just risking everything, as you say here. So it's really important. I really appreciate it. Well, I would not call them overconfident. I would call them desperate and delusional because they have lost this war. This war is over. They have completely lost it. The idea that there's, anything they can do at this point to change the outcome is ridiculous if you know what's going on on the battlefield in Russia next interview with danny davis here in just one second all right danny davis will tell you better than i yeah then talking about you guys got a division of labor here today on the show it's going to work just great so uh thank you very much ted appreciate it thank

you all right you guys that's ted postal he is professor meredis at mit the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on K-P-FK 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com anti-war.com Scott Horton.org and Libertarian Institute.org