The Duran Podcast - Toward a Second Cuban Missile Crisis? - Theodore Postol, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

Toward a Second Cuban Missile Crisis? - Theodore Postol, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Hi, everyone and welcome to today's discussion. I'm Glenn Dyson, and I'm joined today by Alexander Mercuris and Professor Theodore Postol. Welcome. Nice to be here. Thank you. So, yeah, for those not aware, Professor Postol is from MIT and also is one of the leading experts on missile technologies. Besides his immense technical expertise, he also has background from the Pentagon, And if you're researching arms controlled, then most likely you have come across this work. Certainly I have.

And yeah, I must say, I've been looking forward to this discussion as I cited you frequently. Ever since my PhD from 2010, as one of my case studies was on the US withdrawal of this ABM treaty and NATO's development of strategic missile defense with the AG system. So anyways, I always continue to come across the work of Professor Postol. so yes, this is a great pleasure. And I thought we could start with a very new development, which is curious about the implications of this delivery of American missiles to Germany. They will be sent in 2026.

This is the, yeah, this is, well, I guess set to disrupt the nuclear stability in Europe. So I guess this has been going on for a while ever since the U.S., not just withdrew from the ABM treaty, but then the INF Treaty in 2019. We now see that the U.S. has announced it will deploy these missiles to Germany, which, if I'm not mistaken, could possibly reach Moscow in two to three minutes. Now, it seems to escalate the threat of first strike. And I was wondering if you could explain what this missile are. why they're important?

What are the repercussions? And I don't know, would it be an exaggeration to draw comparisons to a possible second Cuban missile crisis or terminus as such? Well, I think it could well result in a second type Cuban missile crisis type of event. But that would be an event that would be much harder to back out from. than the Cuban missile crisis was. So, in fact, it would not only result in a very significant, very high level of crisis, but I think the ability to back away from the edge

would be a lot harder because so many of these weapons would be in place on both sides, and it would not be possible to quickly draw them back. Cuban missile crisis, it was possible for the Russians to say, wait, wait, we're going to stop deploying them because they weren't fully deployed, although it turns out there were nuclear-armed missiles already deployed. I believe we did not know that at the time of the crisis, which probably would have escalated the crisis even further. And the Russians were able to take a step back very wisely. And of course, it was resolved with the United States withdrawing long-range missiles it had in Turkey quietly. And that was a generally good result, it seems to me. But if all these missiles are deployed in Europe, particularly by the United States, how does one say in a period of extreme crisis where all of a sudden pulling these things back,

that would take time, it would be very hard to verify, and the result would be extremely difficult to lower the level of crisis intensity in a short period of time. So I'm extremely worried about this situation. I think that this deployment could create probably the most viable avenue to a sudden development into World War III that we have yet had put forward to us. I mean, the big concern I've had earlier was that interference with the Russian early warning system by the West could increase the chances of an accident on the Russian side because of certain important limitations they have in their early warning system. But now introducing these systems into Europe will add a second, probably much more viable, much more likely

sudden path to sudden escalation and crisis. And I think this is very, very, very dangerous. And I'm concerned that this will fall through the cracks because of all the other, you know, very important political things that are now happening. So if you guys would tolerate it a bit, I would be happy. I would like to show you some slides that sort of lay out the technical parameters of this. These slides are intentionally constructed so a non-specialist audience can quickly understand them. And you guys, of course, could interrupt at any point during my present. which would be fine because I think interruptions are actually good.

I don't want to make this an academic lecture, but I just want to show your audience some of the facts that really make this situation so people can independently understand based on what I show them how dangerous this situation is. Well, I absolutely think that we should see the slide. we should see the slides because we are talking about a very dangerous situation. I can remember, I don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis,

but I do remember the concerns about the Pershing and cruise missile deployments in Germany in the 1980s. My sense is, without having any understanding of the technical situation, any knowledge of the technical situation, up to this point that this is an even more dangerous situation that we have today. So I, for one, would absolutely welcome to see the slides and to get a better idea of what it is that we're facing. Yeah, well, I ask you guys to move me along, if at any point I seem to be going to,

I'm going to try to keep it appropriate for a non-specialist audience, but I ask for your help. So let me just go to the slide. Can you see the slide that shows the timelines for Russian nuclear strikes from Cuba? I have an error message from Zoom, but can you see my slide or not?

I see your viewing Ted's screen, but I don't see anything. I see a dark thing. I don't know whether Glenn... Oh, I guess I won't be able to show the slides. Wait, maybe... I... Yeah, sorry. Okay, let me... I have some of your documents, perhaps this would work.

Sorry. Yeah. Is it this? Yes, now I can see it. No, I can see it. I can see it clear. Just take my glasses. Okay.

Yeah, all right. Yeah. This slide simply shows arbitrary locations in Germany and on the German border relative to Moscow. And it shows that for these particular trajectories, these are what are called ballistic trajectories. By ballistic, I mean the warheads are traveling trajectories like a baseball player throws a rock. And so they're on a high, they reach relatively high altitudes during their flight. And because of that, the radars in Moscow can see them only about six minutes before they're, they would actually arrive at Moscow.

Flight times are actually longer. Flight times are closer to 10 or 12 minutes, but the radar is a curved earth and the radar cannot see below the curved earth. The radar basically looks in a straight line. Glenn, could you put up a couple of the other slides and I'll stop you? No.

There you go. That's a good slide. This slide shows you two distinctly different kinds of trajectories. The upper trajectory shows you the path of a warhead that is launched on what would be called a ballistic trajectory, one that is traveling mostly under the influence of gravity and momentum, you know, without much air drag being involved. Now, the darkly gray area on the upper right corner of the field of the figure shows you the area where a radar can see the incoming object, because it's the line of sight adjusting for the curvature of the earth. and but you'll see there's a light gray area below it, which is an area which the radar is blind and where the radar is blind.

It just cannot see over the curvature of the earth. Now, if you use glide vehicles as they are talking about, the Americans are talking about, they've been not very clear. I have a rough idea of what they're talking about, but I can tell you when I look through their data, it's ambiguous what they're talking about, which I think I'm quite sure is not unintentional, that is intended. This lower dark curve shows you a hypersonic vehicle trajectory.

Now, the hypersonic vehicle can be given a speed very close to the speed. In fact, when it's launched, it will have very close to the burnout speed, which would be on the left side of the right near the launch

site, because the rocket only is in powered flight for maybe 60 seconds or 90 seconds or something along that line, not very long. And then it's either on a ballistic trajectory, if the trajectory

throws it into the sky, or it's on a very flat trajectory. Now, this very flat trajectory could not occur unless the vehicle is able to obtain some lift from the atmosphere. The way it obtains lift from the atmosphere is it has a slight, rather than being exactly aligned with its velocity. it has a slight angle of attack. She doesn't need much, just at one or two degrees,

because it's traveling at very high speeds, and the body itself generates enough lift that it's basically flying like a very high speed airplane. Now, because the lift is only small, and the drag generated by the lift is even smaller, you can think of this vehicle as roughly flying a straight line and at a speed roughly equal to the speed of the ballistic trajectory. So this thing is in some sense on a much shorter timeline

because its speed is the same, but the distance over which is traveling, because it's on our nearly flat trajectory, is much shorter. Now, to make things worse in terms of the geometry of this situation, you could see that this trajectory will only enter the visible area for the radars in Moscow very shortly before it actually is going to arrive at Moscow. And when you do the arithmetic, the Russians would have no more than two to three minutes of warning of this thing arriving. Now, a question, I think anyone could ask themselves, but I certainly would invite both Glenn and Alex to react to this, is what possible constructive purpose can generating a threat? threat like this for the Russians have in terms of maintaining the stability of the nuclear

situation in Europe. The Russians will have to be on a very short timeline to react, and they will, naturally, they will put in place various kinds of mechanisms that will allow them to respond whatever happens. This means that there will be some kind of procedures that to pre-delegate launch authorities to different forces. And any mistake in that pre-delegation process could lead to inadvertent nuclear exchange. You know, the shorter your timelines, the desire should be to make the timelines longer

because the issue is not just a time of flight. There are two times to keep in mind. It's first the time of flight, but then there's the time of warning. And the warning time in this area, two or three minutes is nothing. It's simply, I mean, you couldn't even get the leadership out of a bathroom in that time. And so you're creating a situation where both sides would have large numbers of tactical nuclear weapons where the launch times would be relatively, the time of flights would be relatively short,

which incidentally would mean that if some targets were attacked and you were a launch platform, you would be informed about the attacks. You can be sure that the Russian system, just as our system, would set up a complex and elaborate system of information exchange. So all of a sudden, one of your important platforms disappears because it looks like there was a nuclear strike on it.

Everyone will know about it instantly. And this will raise the level of alerts enormously. Now, whether if you have a situation where you have set up some rules of engagement where authority is pre-delegated, the whole place could go up like an explosive. you know, nuclear exchange within minutes, literally within minutes. And you're setting up this situation knowingly. If you, you know, it's hard for me to believe as a technical person that anybody with any common sense would do this.

So I'm sitting here talking to you guys as if you're the decision makers. You're the people in the White House. I'm trying to explain this to, but they're all going through the briefing slides too, too fast to read them. And I'm saying, you know, this is a really dangerous thing to do, and it's counterproductive to your security as well as that of the Russians. So this is my concern. We are really setting up an unrecoverable Cuban missile crisis in the future. And that, of course, would almost immediately escalate into a large-scale nuclear exchange where strategic weapons were involved as well.

This is really insanity. It's absolutely terrifying. Can I just before we get into, just to clear one quick thing out of the way, is there any way that the Russians themselves could find a technical solution that would give them some more alert, you know, inform them that, you know,

these kind of strikes are happening. I mean, putting up, you know, radars in space. I've heard of things like over the horizon radars. Please understand. I don't know anything about things. But I mean, is there anything that they can do in that respect? There are devices.

Well, first of all, let me talk about the simplest, conceptually the simplest device, which is a satellite in space that looks down at the earth and just looks straight down at the earth and sees the bright plume. from rockets when they're launched. The United States has this capability now. The capability has been built with enormous technical,

and I should add economic commitments by the United States. The system I'm talking about is a system called a space-based infrared system. It's sometimes called cibbers, because of the acronym SBIRS. And this system is at the apex of infrared sensing and computational capability. So what this system does is, first of all, it has a two-dimensional visual view of the Earth. like it has infrared sensors on what's called a focal plane. Like in a camera, when you take a camera and you're taking a photograph, there are many pixels, many independent sensors in the camera

that each measure the intensity and color of part of the field of view. And from that you construct an image. Now, infrared sensors are extremely difficult to fabricate in large numbers. They're not like visual sensors. Technical reasons are not concerned here. But it's extremely difficult. So typically what countries that, what the United States has done until more recently with the cibbers is you construct what's called a line array, a line sensor, and you scan back and

And there's a time delay between when you revisit the object. And when you look down, it's very difficult to see an object against the background because the background is changing. Their clouds are moving, reflections off mountaintops are changing over time. And you're looking into an area, maybe a kilometer on a side. So you're seeing everything, all the brightness from that one kilometer on a side area. and you're trying to pick out the added brightness from a missile that's in powered flight. And so the way you do this in principle is you look at two different times and you subtract the difference. And unless you have a very accurate sensors, because the sensors also have variations,

you get a precision in a subtraction that allows you to pick out the difference in two, to a missile, then you call a potential hit. And I say a potential hit, because you could see a lightning strike, for example. So what you do then is you say, well, what's happening in the other pixels around? I know if the missile is in powered flight, I'm going to see it over the next pixel here. So I look at the next pixel or the pixels around, and lo and behold, I see another pixel. And when I see a third pixel in the old system the Americans have, I say, this is a real, I call it a missile detection, even though I've seen evidence for it earlier. That's the way the Americans did it for the last 30 years. And then we were able through tens of billions of

dollars of research effort to construct what we call two-dimensional focal planes. In other words, things that look like a camera. A camera. This is incredibly technically demanding to be able to construct these things. And we've been able to do that. So now we look down and we stare rather than scan. So now the thing that makes scanning, staring, fantastically superior is in a thousandths of a second I can get an image. I'm not sweeping.

I'm not using the thousands of a second to sweep. So every thousandths of a second, I can subtract frame from frame. So my ability to see very low intensity targets is enormously higher. And we can now do this with the space-based infrared system, we the Americans. Europeans No one else can do this at this time because we have this unique technology. Now, the Russians, for reasons that I quite honestly have no idea about, I mean, I've tried to have been unable to build a system that looks down at the earth. My guess, and I want to underscore it is a guess, is that they have not been able to build the space-qualified infrared. Remember, these sensors in space are being bombarded by electrons and gamma rays and neutrons.

And so you have to have them hardened to radiation. And you also, when that radiation strikes it, it gives you a false signal. So you need to be able to build these specialized kinds of sensors. On the other side, you have to be able to do vast amounts of subtracting and moving things around. and that requires fantastic levels of computation. And I have circumstantial evidence from my discussions with Russian scientists who work on these systems, that they have not been able to develop this specialized technology. I want to be clear here that the quality of the scientific expertise in these people is superb.

These are not monkeys. These are scientists of the highest caliber. They just don't have the technology to implement this kind of system. So they went to a system that looks at a glancing angle to the earth. And what they try to do is the Earth is here and there's a very elliptical orbit. It looks like this. Very close to the Earth at one point, maybe. 15 or 1,600 kilometers altitude, up to about 40,000 kilometers.

So it's a 12-hour orbit. It's called the Molinae orbit. This is a well-studied orbit. And the satellites, they have, there are four satellites they now have. They call them Tundra satellites. And each of them will spend about six hours because they're moving slowly at the apache, looking at a glancing angle at the ICBM fields of the United States. And they look above the Earth surface because the reflections from the United States

are too bright with them to reliably subtract with the technology available. And the background of space is black. And so they see these missiles above the edge of the Earth in flight. but you can only see a very small area with these kinds of constellations. So they look at the ICBM fields of the United States. Now, that's good. I mean, from my point of view, it's good they can see our ICBM fields, but they have to assume. And it's probably a reasonable assumption, but if I were a Russian military person,

I would not consider it a certainty. It's probably a reasonable assumption that they will see an American, ICBM launch against them if the United States is attacking them with nuclear weapons. But the United States has more strike power by a large margin in its submarine forces in the North Atlantic and in the Gulf of Alaska. They can't see those areas with the satellites. So they can't see an initial launch. So they cannot rule out the possibility the United States which launches.

it's ICBMs, and then when the ICBMs come over the radar horizon, then we would launch our, when the submarine launch missiles come over the radar horizon, then the launch of the ICBMs would occur now because the submarine launch ballistic missiles can do tremendous damage to all their communications, command and control. So it would be a coordinated attack of this kind. Incidentally, I want to underscore, this is insane. This is a military perspective, an ill-informed military perspective, as any well-informed military person would tell you,

this is going to lead to the destruction of both countries. So this is, if it were conventional military attack, that is to say, where the amount of damage you could do would be significant to the conventional military force, this would be a strategy that makes perfect, sense. So if I were attacking an enemy division and I blinded its command and control and then struck, that's fine. I mean, that's normal military strategy. But with these nuclear weapons,

the levels of destruction are so great that you can't do nearly enough damage to the enemy's forces that they won't be able to destroy your country in return. So this is a profoundly ignorant view of how you can fight and win a nuclear war, which I might add was a dominant perspective. When I was in the Pentagon, this was the kind of thing that was talked about routinely. And, you know, I was a senior civilian analyst, and I didn't care. I mean, I cared, but I didn't, I wasn't going to worry about my promotion. So I would sit in a meeting and I said, well, what's the outcome here? I said, we're dead.

We're all dead. But otherwise, the conversation would go on interrupted. So, I mean, I remember being at a meeting. I couldn't help myself. I probably shouldn't have done it. Where there's a big briefing to all these civilians, all these big shot civilians who, you know, and who don't know what they're doing and don't know what they're talking about.

And there was a discussion about. how many Russian forces we destroyed in this simulation. And we were destroying, according to the simulation, we had destroyed some very large fraction of Russian land-based ICBMs. And I couldn't help myself. I finally said to the briefer, he's a general officer, probably two or three stars, and I said, how do you know those missiles will be in their silos

when our warheads arrive. Because I look at that, that thing's coming. And he says, well, we don't deal with that issue. So I say, well, how can you not deal with that issue? You're a soldier. You're supposed to be protecting our country. And, of course, there was no response.

But the point was that this kind of thing was just sort of accepted by the audience. This is why I'll bring this up as a secondary issue. I was so nauseated by the American Congress reaction to this Netanyahu speech. I have to say I was nauseated. It brought me back to my days in the Pentagon where people would be sitting there listening to nonsense that is so serious and so dangerous and so wrong and would in fact be accepting it. In this case, the Congress applauding it. I just, I have to tell you, I am really frightened these days. I'm a person who is quite afraid.

And I'm afraid in part because of the capabilities of these systems I have studied throughout my career, but mainly more so because of the complete ignorance and indifference to information that I have seen in the political leadership, which you guys have helped educate me to. I mean, I was also aware of it from my own personal experiences, but it's a very concerning situation. I was just thinking, I was writing some notes to myself before our discussion, and I was just one of the things I wanted to say was, you know, my training has been mostly technical. Of course, I've worked in a policy environment, so I know something about it.

But I'm very short of the kind of in-depth social and historical training that you and Alex and Glenn have. And I've been over the last few years, as I've gotten older and closer, I'm officially retired from MIT. I've done a lot of reading of history because it's an interest. I realize it's valuable, but I've never spent any time on it. And I think about the, you know, it has created a more visceral understanding of history for me than I ever had. It was more abstract for me. So when I see, when I read about the 1933 Nuremberg rallies, it was not as real to me as it now is. You know, it's now real to me.

And, you know, the clueless of Tsar Nicholas II, you know, the clueless of the clueless of, the clueless of, the clueless of, you know, the clueless of, the leadership in 1914 in Europe that led to World War I. And I see the same cluelessness before me. And the technology I'm aware of, I know in detail, is scaring me to death. So what the Russians could do in principle, but not in practice, is have a satellite system that looks down. Now, I have been laughed at for decades, because for decades, I have been advocating this in the American system, that the Americans provide certain key

technologies to the Russians that would allow them to build such a system. This I've been advocating since 2000, before 2000, during the Clinton administration. I first tried to try and, of course, they left at me because, you know, they're also wise relative to me. But I discovered during the, and I want to say, I discovered the American intelligence system did not know about it. So this should tell you, Jacques Bold made a comment in one of his interviews. I think it was with Dan Davis about he doesn't know what the, he just made an offhand comment about he doesn't quite know what the, he doesn't quite know what the American, political leadership learns from its intelligence sources. Well, I think I could answer Jacques's

question. They don't learn anything. The intelligence system is not communicating. It may have the information, but in this particular case, it did not have, the American system did not have the intelligence that the Russian system was non-functioning, was inadequate. And the way I discovered this, just so it's clear, I absolutely unambiguously discovered this, is the Clinton administration in 1996 was talking about doing something with the Russians, because at that time, people were trying, well, some people were trying to bring the Russians

into a global cooperative arrangement with the West, and the Russians were enthusiastically trying to do this. This situation we now have was avoidable, no question in my mind. And I was working with all these Russians, and I started understanding some things about their early warning system inadvertently. I want to be very clear. I was not in any way attempt to, it's like we're colleagues, and we're talking. And each time something comes up, a little bit of information gives me insight that I was not trying to gain, but we're working on a cooperative project. And when the false alert occurred in 1996, I started investigating the false alert, and the false alert revealed to me that the Russians did not have a look-down, space-based warning system.

That's a whole story. It's a very interesting intellectual story, but it's not of concern here. But I knew for a fact I had figured out all of the details. So my first, I was, of course, frightened by this because my concern was, of course, an accidental nuclear exchange. And things were good at the time. So we know how that alert worked out because things were very good at the time. And the Russians had certain systems operating that made things much less likely there would

be an accident. In fact, I don't think there was a grave danger of an accident at all, in spite of. of certain Westerners who claim otherwise. There's a lot of false claims being made about these ideas, these issues. Now, so I immediately, at that time, had a relationship with people in the Secretary of Defense's office. They had not yet written me off, although I was still a great annoyance to them because I was working against them. They were trying to cancel a project that I thought should continue. They ultimately did cancel it, demonstrating another example of Americans not sticking to their

commitments. But they invited me in to give them ideas on early warning ideas to propose to the Russians. So I walk into this office. At the time, one of the people was an Undersecretary, who was a of mine, and he just drops all of these code word documents on a table in front of me, a coffee table in front of me. Take a look at these and then tell us what you think. And it's all this intelligence documents on the American understanding of the Russian early warning system. I start leafing through them, and it's nonsense. It's all wrong. It's not even close. it doesn't even have a cartoon that comes close to showing what the situation was. I was stunned.

And I said, this is not what you're looking at. And then, of course, I spent time informing them. But then I said to myself, I can't inform the Americans about this without informing my Russian colleagues that I have told the Americans about this. I don't want to be in a situation of being a spy to the Americans. I want to be an international citizen on this. I'm not revealing anything about the American knowledge, but I do think, you know, I do feel obligated.

So I arranged to go to Moscow and brief my colleagues while they were in Moscow. One of them was the chief designer of the Russian space-based early warning system, Anatoly Sovin. a hero of the Soviet Union, and tell them what I believed I understood about their system and what I had told my American colleagues. I wanted them to know this,

and I wanted them to know this because I wanted them to know that I was advocating that the United States enter a cooperative program with the Russians to help provide critical technologies that would allow them to implement their own system. And before the briefing, another one of friends of mine,

I remember him saying to me, he says, you can't go in there. They just told me they won't talk to you. I said, it's the only briefing I prepared for this thing. It's the reason I'm here. So I'm going to go in, and I'm just going to start presenting this. And if they walk out,

it's their right. It's there. You know, I, but very fortunately, I had a good personal relationship with Sovin. And during my talk, he actually said, well, you're wrong about this, which I'm sure he understood what he was doing because, you know, he's, you know, he's a man of great intellect. And so basically I understood that the errors I understood instantly because they were based on a lack of knowledge. I was making assumptions about what they could and couldn't do. But that strengthened my commitment to going back and trying to get the Americans to do this. But instead, these cold warriors in the Pentagon, including the person who invited me and gave me all this. access, they tried to find it.

So if you remember, there was the Y2K cooperation, year of 2000, when all these, like, your computer's going to blow off when it goes from 99 to 100. I mean, this is ridiculous. And so they chose the most silly, technically ridiculous issue to make a big deal with the Russians about. when in fact the issue was that it was critical technology that we could have shared, incidentally shared without risking our own technology lead. Let me explain this because this is important,

because the so-called realists, you know, military guys who understand, blah, would say, well, you're giving them this technology, you're not giving them the technology. What you do is giving them a device. they have no hope of fabricating. No, it's like me giving you an ultra I-9 core, Intel Central Processing Unit Core, and say, well, here are all the specifications, build the computer with it.

Well, you could build a computer with it because once you have that device and all the ancillary tech, but you could never reproduce that chip. The technology, the reverse engineering is not what people think it is. And so if you gave them this critical technology and say, here it is, here are all the parameters, do with it as you choose, then they could build a system that was impervious to American interference. And it would give them the capability to look down and see these missiles launch in this case from Europe. But there's no hope of doing. So people are laughing at me, but in fact, there is no laugh, last laugh in this,

because we're talking about, you know, the end of the world. There will be no history or right if this thing happens, if this catastrophe happens. Can I ask you why? Sorry, for the real sentence. Go ahead, please. As you say this, I keep thinking, why? because you explained before that these systems

by putting this missile system in place, this intermediate range systems, that the mere threat of a decapitating strike on Russia would force them to well decentralize, I guess, who can

do the retaliatory strike, which is effectively more people with the red button, which you don't want, but also less warning for assessing threats, which would mean they would have to do a preemptive strike a lot quicker. This is to a large extent how we got into with the Abel Archer exercise in 1983. This is how we almost ended up in a nuclear war. So I understand with new weapons systems and technologies, you always have to look at the

offense defense. But was there any change in Russian deployment? What would justify this escalation if nothing changed on the Russian side? Why would the Americans, I guess, do this? because ultimately this will be very negative for not just American Western, but the security of the world overall. So how... First of all, you have a top leadership, a top leadership that is totally ignorant.

I can't say this enough from personal experience as well as observing their behavior politically. And unlike earlier times in the American political system, there appears to be nobody in a potentially influential position who is able to raise the questions that you're asking. In the past, we have had people in the Congress who have, for example, during the time of the deployment of the Peacekeeper Missile, the MX missile, there were people. in Congress who were very concerned that the MX would pose such a short warning strike threat to Russia that it would invite a nuclear attack from Russia. And so legislation was actually passed that the MX or peacekeeper could not be deployed unless the Department of Defense could put it, could could base it in a way that would be survival.

That is to say, could not be destroyed in a preemptive attack. That's how I got into this business. I was on a study team that studied this. And of course, there was no practical, you could come up with all kinds of theoretical schemes, but, you know, like a theoretical scheme, like a mobile missile that's on a train. How do you think the average neighborhood would react

where the trade comes through pulling, through pulling a bunch of MX missiles on it through the neighborhood, or, you know, or when a train gets derailed with these MX missiles. So the practical issues that came up with each one of these deployment schemes really precluded anything but putting them in missile silos, which the Department of Defense ultimately wanted to do. And the Congress said, no, you can't do this. will give you only a very small number, much smaller number of MX missiles than you want.

They wanted 200, but they went down to 50 in silos. And the reason for that was people in the Congress did not want this missile deployed in a way that could look like it could destroy the bulk of Russian land-based forces. And so there were restrictions from the Congress. The people in the Pentagon, who I work with, would have been happy to do it. I mean, they see their job as providing additional strike power. They don't see their job as thinking. And let me tell you that I'm not talking about the military officers. I'm talking about the civilians in the Pentagon.

These appointed people who know nothing about the technology, and they don't take the trouble to learn about it, in spite of the fact they're in the same building with people like me. All they have to do is pick up the phone and say, Ted, come on up here and tell me what's going on and how this system works and what are the issues as you understand it. They don't do it. And as a result, you have a group of people who are ignorant who are not, they think they know, they don't, I don't like using simplified terms like group think, but it is group think squared or cubed or to higher power, because you cannot become an appointee. In order to become an appointee in the security establishment of the American government,

you have to show that you have the right attitude. So your attitude, I'm tough on the Russians. I'm so tough on the Russians that I will do things that are not in our security interest to show you how tough I am on the Russians. So for example, even though the Cold War is over and the Russians are earnestly trying to become integrated, show that they want to be a partner with the West. I'm going to do things that are counter to encouraging them to do this. Like, I'm going to cancel this cooperative program on satellites that Ted Postal has been trying to get me to cooperate on that we had agreed to with the Russians.

We had signed contracts with the Russians. I'm going to, I could send you a group of letters. You might actually find them interesting where I actually wrote the people in those. When I was talking with the Russians, I talked to this very impressive Russian admiral who told me something that I was so shocked about, I thought I had to write the American government. We were sending, this was after the hostilities had come to an end. It was in mid-1990s. It was supposed to be agreeing that we were no longer, and we were making national level,

statements by Yeltsin and the President Clinton, we are no longer enemies. While this is going on, we are sending Los Angeles attack submarines into Russian territorial waters to spy on the Russians when they are dismantling submarine-launched ballistic missiles according to the START Treaty. Now, let me explain what's going on here. When they dismantle these missiles, they launched them from a ballistic missile submarine, which is on the surface, and they just popped them out of the submarine, and they fall into the water. In other words, they don't ever ignite.

And that was the way we had agreed during the treaty details to destroy these Russian missiles. These Russians agreed to destroy these missiles. So they would do this, and there would be observers, you know, from the West, observing this going on. So there was, we knew, we had verification, of this activity was going on. Well, what happened is the Russians discovered

that there was a Los Angeles class submarine operating every time we did this in their territorial waters. And they dropped grenades on it several times to let the grenade goes off. It doesn't damage the submarine, but makes a loud sound. So they know that they've been discovered

and they try to chase them out. And I said, how can this be going on? you're invading a country's territorial waters within a tax submarine when we're supposed to, we wouldn't do this to the British, you know, so,

although I think I would support it these days after watching the British, but, but, you know, it was, it was extraordinary. So I wrote a letter to the Pentagon and I got this really snotty

letter back. It's none of your business. What do you mean? It's none of my business. So I then wrote to the senior ambassador who was overseeing the Russian-American relationship. And he wrote me a letter lying. I have these letters. I keep things.

Lying to me about what was actually going on. And so I finally wrote the head of the Senate, the chair. of the Senate, then it was, I think, Dachal. And Dachio was there, and all of a sudden it stopped. You know, all these activities stopped. I was never told about it. I was told by the Russians these activities stopped. So I wasn't even given the courtesy of a thank you by the U.S. government and feedback that would have told me that I could be helpful in the future. So what do you see? You see a bureaucracy that's most of the U.S. government.

mostly aimed at protecting itself from being seen as ignorant or not fully informed. They want to project an image that they know things that the average person doesn't know because they have access to all this intelligence. Well, I had access to this intelligence, and I can tell you that there were lots of things that were very impressive that our intelligence systems were able to obtain through the various methodologies, but there was a lot we didn't know. And there was a lot I learned from newspapers when I was in the Pentagon that I did not see in our intelligence reports, even though I had access. So this idea that these people have all this knowledge is a very dangerous idea to

accept, and it's even more dangerous that they actually think they know something. I mean, I can't tell you how nervous I am about the ignorance of these people. And, of course, it's very hard to tell how ignorant they truly are because they're liars, too. I mean, when you look at this guy Blinken, he can't not know some of the things he's saying. When you look at Biden, he can't not know some of the things he's climbing. I mean, it's not possible to think that the Russians have what, what did he say, 230 or 330 30,000 casualties in this NATO speech he gave, it was filled with lies. How can he not know that?

The internal intelligence must have the same assessment that media zone has. I mean, they're going to use the same techniques, maybe a more expanded version of it. What's it, MediaZona, I think, is there. They're going to use the same techniques that MediaZona is going to use, except they have more feet on the ground in Russia and more resources to collect background information. But they have to know that there's no 230 or 330,000 dead Russians over this incursion.

How can the president not know this? How can they not be briefed on this? If he's not briefed on this, everybody in the leadership of the American intelligence community should be fired, starting with the director of national intelligence, the DNI in the White House. So, for example, when I looked at the White House report on what happened in Zamalka in 2013, the nerve agent attack, I could tell from this published report, which was published because they were trying to justify attacking the Syrian government at a time where ISIS was potentially able to take Damascus.

The Syrian government was on the edge of losing Damascus at that point. They were going to attack the Syrian government because of this nerve agent attack supposedly executed, by the Syrian government against this region in Zamalka, Damascus. Well, anybody, anybody who knew what they were doing could see that this report was done by an amateur. It was amateurs. I want to underscore this. Just a quick look by me showed that the,

showed that the, I could immediately see that there was all kinds of text, technical intelligence errors in this document. Then I read years later that I read years later that that Ben Rhodes claims to have written this document, the National Security Advisor for Communications, I think it was, and that he did this in consultation with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.

Now, I don't know if this is true because I know I've been in Washington and I know everybody's a genius and everybody knows more than you do and everybody has all the special intelligence access and not to mention no knowledge of the technology. But if wrote this report with Jim Clapper, with James Clapper,

Clapper should never have ever been involved in any level in the American intelligence apparatus. He knew nothing, and this report was a total fabrication. So just being a knowledgeable person, and then seeing what these guys produced, and then seeing what these guys are claiming, immediately revealed to me that either they were lying or they had no idea what they were doing.

The same occurred with, with the attack on Conchay Coon, where I'm forgetting his name, this lieutenant general who has been the National Security Advisor. If he knew what he did as an officer, he would have looked at this crater that they were saying was the source of a nerve agent release and immediately, immediately known that this was a crater

from an artillery shell. I can show you manuals, U.S. Army manuals that talk about the shape of artillery craters because the shape of the artillery crater can be used

to find the direction of the artillery. So this is not a minor issue. If this artillery crater has a shape that's tier-like, the tier shows you the direction from which the artillery shell came.

And so if you have a couple of craters at different locations, you can cross-fix from the craters alone to the location of the artillery that's firing at you. So this is not a minor thing. Any artillery officer would in a second tell you this was an artillery crater. This was an explosive shell. It was not a crater produced by the impact of a sarin-carrying munition. Now, here, this guy immediately produces a false argument after Trump had attacked with

cruise missiles the Syrian government or a nerve agent attack that didn't occur. Could not have the evidence he had clearly and unambiguously shown that this was not the source of a nerve agent release. That's a more complicated story that, again, could have begun. But the point is that if you have a technical knowledge and you look at what these people are claiming, you can very quickly see that they are lying about the intelligence, partly because they are totally ignorant and partly because, unfortunately, the press is ignorant. The journalism, the level of journalistic professionalism has dropped precipitously over the last few decades. And I had a conversation with one young woman. She was talking about a multi-stage ballistic missile, and she didn't know what a multi-stage ballistic missile was, but she was writing the story about it.

So this is what, so we have a breakdown across our culture. I mean, it's at the level of our, it's at the level of our, of our, of our decision makers because we didn't have a uniformly ignorant. They have very effectively removed anybody with a willingness or ability to think independently, by filtering out anybody who showed doubts or any difference in perspective. This has been a very highly developed filtering process that has brought us to the situation we're in today. I'm sorry, go ahead.

I just wanted because this is a few quickly things. From what you've been discussing, I mean, this sounds like a much more dangerous situation than the one we had in the 1980s with the crews and Persian missiles, because in what I can understand, we now have situations where these glide vehicles are able to fly under the radar. I remember that the Russians were worried they were only going to get, was it 20 minutes warning back in the early 1980s,

they're now going to get two minutes warning. And I can remember how alarmed and worried they were about that then, And I'm sure that they will be much more worried about it this time. That's the first thing. The second is, and this points directly to the points that you were making just now, about the fact that people don't know, they don't understand. There's been minimal discussion about this issue in the United States and in Europe, in Germany, where I remember the huge amount of protests there was in Germany.

People were concerned about it then. they were well informed about it. It seems to be creeping up on people in Germany, this time that they don't really know, and it isn't talked about at all. Is one way forward doing something that I remember used to happen, to some extent, at least, in the Cold War, which is that the scientists in the United States

and the scientists at that time in the Soviet Union used to come together. I can remember there were various conferences. I don't know, pugwash still exists nowadays and those kind of things. But it was very, very useful. It was terribly important. And it did help to shape debate. You had scientific voices. And if they couldn't get through to their own bureaucracies,

and I'm sure the Russians are the same problems, by the way, maybe in a different way. But it did inform the public. Does anything like that exist? nowadays or anything like that scale, because if it does, I barely know about it. Well, neither do I. The Pugwash conferences, I was invited to one a few years ago, quite a few years ago. I'm not normally invited, although I don't want to sound, I do have some knowledge that you'd

think would be interesting to them, but I'm not normally invited. I found the Pugwash conference that I went to. It was more of a social gathering than it was a discussion of what I consider to be serious issues. I met almost nobody who followed, there was no follow up on any of the contacts I made there who claimed to be interested in the kinds of things that I could provide for them, which, you know, I'm now in a stage of my career. where I would be absolutely tickled pink to be a mentor to some younger people and provide them with technical input that, you know, I have years of lectures

and things of that kind that I can share with them and discuss with them. Nobody interested. Nobody interested. Nobody, you know, nobody following up. I just had a brush. A brush. I've had a three-year running, a fight, along with my colleague, a colleague of mine, Richard Garwin, who's one of the most

distinguished scientists in the United States, who's spent his whole career on issues of national security. He was the guy, he's 95 now, he's still alert, and Dick was the guy as a young man who built the first hydrogen bomb. He was the guy who implemented the first. And to this day, he was still active, fortunately, for all of us. And he and I discovered that the American Physical Society put out a report a few years ago on missile defense that was filled with fundamental errors. So we approached the people who had done the report and pointed the errors out, and they stonewalled us. To make a long story short, we eventually uncovered information that didn't.

indicated that they had lied about the analyses they had done, had lied about this. This is this is first class, big time, unambiguous misconduct, scientific misconduct. Three, three presidents, three presidents of the American Physical Society have been involved. Francis Hellman, Rosner, Yovigas Rosner, and his third president, now have been involved in covering up the operations of the presidents of the American Physical Society have been involved in covering up this operation. I cannot find a journalist in the scientific community to cover this story in spite of the fact I have hundreds of pages of unambiguous evidence to show that the American Physical Society, as an organization,

engaged in scientific misconduct involving the presidents and the lower level officers of the American Physical Society, presenting documents that would be misleading to the American public and the American Congress on missile defense. And science journalism community is not interested. Well, what is their job to tell everybody how great scientists are, how the scientific community, If you just listen to the scientific community, you'll know the truth. That's not true. In fact, if you listen to the scientific community, you're going to get a bunch of second-class scientists who have painted themselves as experts in science, technology, and policy,

who have no real knowledge of the technology. I can tell you for sure. they had nine referees on this on this document they claim i can't i haven't been able to find any which they have no if they were all secret you know all these referees are secret referees and uh but dick arwin and i in 10 minutes in 10 minutes looking at the first reference thing found it was fundamentally flawed but they had nine experts and they represent themselves as an expert team Now, what is the country going to do if this is the best advice we can get? We had a similar experience with the American National Academy of Sciences.

They produced a flawed report. Two people who directed the report. One was a guy who was a lawyer who was on record being an advocate for missile defense, but who knew nothing. He was a lawyer who knew nothing. It was a former Pentagon's lawyer. The second person, they had two people, was a Lockheed contractor

who had conspired to fake a missile defense experiment and got caught. Okay? These were the two people, the National Academy of Sciences, chose to lead the study. And surprise, surprise, the study was profoundly flawed,

profoundly flawed. And we took it apart piece by piece in front of the Congress. You know, we discredited them. This is the National Academy of Sciences. So why didn't the National Academy of Sciences have someone like Richard Garwin on that team? Garwin knows, you know, he's a genius. He's one of the great geniuses we have benefited from. You know, they don't want me because I'm a nuisance.

You know, I'm just the guy who's always asking their own questions. Garwin is a member of a National Academy of Sciences. He's a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a National Academy of Medicine. But he wasn't on that, and he wasn't allowed to comment on it. So what makes you think or anyone think when you look at the situation in the science community that we, the world, as well as the nation, the American nation, can depend on the scientific community. It's a joke. It has completely failed in its obligations to the country, to my nation, the United States, and to the world in general. It's a total failure, and it's a danger

to the future of our country because there are people who have no knowledge who say, well, I was trained as a physicist, so therefore I must know. This guy, Robert Rosner, the second president, I mean, this guy is a total fraud. been clear. Robert Rosner, last president of the American Physical Society, is a total fraud. And he is involved in scientific misconduct. And he is a distinguished professor of public policy at the University of Chicago. Nobody cares. The university doesn't care. The community around them doesn't care is Francis Hellman, the president of the of the American Physical Society before Rosner.

She's also a total fraud involved in scientific misconduct. She was the dean of science and technology at Berkeley. She took a leave from the job to be president of the American Physical Society for a year. Community has done nothing about this. No self-pleases. I'm sorry.

No, no, sorry. I was just going to say, because we're marching towards possible. I'm sorry. Get me off. Cuban missile crisis. I was just, yeah, trying to think if there's possible another component as well, because you mentioned the incompetence in terms of absence of technical skills. You also mentioned conformity as there's a little tolerance for dissenting voices.

And also the political culture, obviously, in which one can't be soft on Russia. as this diminishes political credibility, so it has to be tough, irrespective of the consequences for one's own security. But ideology also seems to be, to me, a critical factor. For example, I found an interesting quote by Reagan, which was a few years after the Abel Archer exercise in which the Russians thought they were under a surprise attack and the world almost ended in nuclear war. Reagan wrote the following.

He wrote three years, had taught me something. surprising about the Russians. I emphasize surprising. Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. I'd always felt that from our deeds, it must be clear to anyone that Americans were moral people who were at the starting of birth of our nation had always used our power as a force for good in the world. And I thought this was interesting because these are the two main rivals in the Cold War who are fearing the other one will destroy them. And if one is surprised that they might see you as a threat, this, you know, tends to smell of some, well, in the literature, it's often referred to as ideological fundamentalism,

if you can't see the other one seeing you as a threat. But it also, for me, it seems to resonate a bit again when I listen to this NATO speeches at this, at this, well, what would call it, reunion or summit. Because when they're asked about this new weapon system, which are unrolling, which is effectively, you know, the INF was a response to this, that we wouldn't have accidental nuclear war. Now, we say, ah, let it go. We'll deploy the system anyways, even more advanced, of course. But when they're asked, they say, well, you know, we have to defend ourselves.

Everyone knows we're a defensive alliance. And it's starting to sound like a cult. You know, as you said, they know it's not true. You can't be a defensive alliance if you keep attacking other countries. but still, this idea that others shouldn't be concerned at all about the weapon systems we deploy. I think you're absolutely right, Glenn, but it's also a cult at the lower level. It's a different social mechanisms or feeding the different tiers of the cult. And when I was in the Pentagon, I was specifically working on issues related to nuclear war planning.

And that was my main area of focus. I was very interested in taking the opportunity to educate myself as broadly as possible because I realized I was not going to spend my life there. I knew I didn't want to spend my life there. So I said, this is my graduate education being paid a salary. So I had my fingers in everything I could because I was an advisor to the chief of naval operations. and I had license to get into all kinds of things. But one of the things that was very clear to me was, for example, the United States

Strategic Air Command, at that time it was Strategic Air Command in the 1980s when I was there, they wanted a decision that would allow them to plan nuclear strikes on the assumption that the United States would strike first. They came to us. They had these briefings, and when you basically took the briefing apart, they basically said, give us the license to plan so we can plan a strike, a first strike against Russia. The official policy at the upper levels was that the United States was not going to plan for a first strike. So we did have an official policy that we would not plan for a first strike.

But the actual implementation of the policies they wanted, they wanted the implementation of a policy that would have caused the planning at the working level to be aimed at planning for a first strike. Now, if you had had a crisis, these guys would go to the president and say, you know, we have to strike first. Because I saw the briefings to the president. And the briefings to the president never said we don't have to do it. a thing. What the briefings to the president should have shown, and I saw these briefings, should have said, Mr. President or Ms. President, we don't have to strike. We have these submarine forces, even if we lose the ICBMs, we have the bombers and the submarines that could

do more damage than the ICBMs could ever do. You have an option to not do anything until we know more. But they never say that. They say, he's a... Here is your timeline to get the ICBMs launched before those Russian missiles arrive. So they're telling, they're precluding the president from knowing about options that could be much safer and much less likely to result in a catastrophic accident. They are misinforming the president. That's what we were doing. I don't know if that's the case today. It's a long time. But I'll bet you it is the case today too. I'll bet you it's the same situation because nobody knows

what goes on at the planning level the so-called big shot of policy makers you know, civilians who oversee this they don't do any homework so someone like me comes to them and says look deputy assistant

secretary of defense you have a problem here let me explain it to you they're not interested. You know, I had one of these clowns. He was at Stanford. His name is called, Colin Cole. This guy knows nothing. They brought him into Stanford.

They gave him an academic position, which is crazy. There's no academic knowledge that, I mean, you should not allow this guy. It's academic malpractice to allow this guy to talk to students. That's my position on that. academic malpractice. He's a fake and a fraud. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And you're exposing students to him and claiming you're educating the students. That is not the role of an American university. And Stanford University should not be involved in that. But, you know, that's going to continue. You know, that's the world that I see. You see a broader world. I give you

credit for it, you've helped me understand it. But it's the world that I see from below the in the trenches. The world in the trenches looks pretty bad to me as well. It is very bad and it's very dangerous. And I think what you've been telling is actually compliment something that I think both Glenn and I see, which is a system that is not just willfully blind. And the word is willful because they could open their eyes. They don't want to see. but which seems to be structured or hard, hardwired, to take more and more risks and more and more very reckless risks. It's like they're gambling constantly, raising the stakes, not understanding the stakes, and not recognizing the terrifying risks that they're taking with all our lives, with everything.

By the way, I hear military people tell me exactly the same thing. you know, that they supply more and more weapons to the Russians, always making assumptions about how the Russians might respond to these moves, discounting any suggestion that the Russians might want to push back in some way or might react in some ways that might be, you know, dangerous for us. And always the tendency seems to be that, you're going to escalate the risks all the time. In pursuit of objectives, which are never very, very clear what those objectives anyway are.

I mean, Glenn has always said, you know, they seek victory in Ukraine, but they never define it. They are going to deploy these terrifying weapons in Germany. There's a terrified, I mean, these incredibly dangerous weapons in Germany, but they never quite tell us what they think exactly the presence of those weapons is actually going to achieve over and above, whatever deterrent effect, our existing weapons are. And the result is the risks grow all the time. We have military people, you mentioned Daniel Davis, military people telling us this. We have diplomats telling us this. Now we have yourself, scientists telling us this.

And scientists who understands, you know, the weapons and the capabilities and the potentials that they had. I just wanted to make that point. I mean, I'm a little shocked. In fact, not in my mind. I mean, I am being very shocked about many of the things that I've heard about scientists, the scientists especially. I was expecting always that scientists had some, you know, larger, so.

role. Anyway, never mind. We did it one time. We did it one time. There were giants in the science community. Richard Garwin was one of them, this colleague of mine. Another man who died a few years ago, unfortunately, is a guy named Sidney Drell, who was at Stanford, who was a very powerful political force. Sid was, unlike me, you know, Sid would walk into a room and he'd work the room

like a politician. I could never do that. It's not me. But he was also very knowledgeable and very responsible and knowing and and aiming at bringing about, you know, educating people to the issues. But now, I mean, I speak about Stanford because that's the place I was before MIT. Stanford has become a total whole of absolutely false. false information. I mean, I had an argument in the hallway last January with Mike McFaull, who I'm sure you know. And I was stuck. I expected, I confronted him with some things he had said in a seminar that were wrong. And I expected him to come back at me with, you know, some some silly but wrong arguments.

He had nothing to say. He literally told me, well, I don't know anything about that. He says, if you don't know anything about that, why did you say it? You know, he literally said at one point during this exchange, he said to me, well, I really want to get rid of Putin. And I said, well, Mike, can you explain to me how are you going to do this? He says, well, I don't know. He said, what? You're telling me you want to get rid of Putin.

my view, you don't know why, but now you tell me you don't know how. But you're talking about it. You get on, and the news media puts this guy on time after time. He's a big figure played in the news media. And, you know, if I picked a person off the street, I could not do worse in terms of what he knows. He knows nothing. He has put no effort at any left. He did not know at that time that Avdi Ivka was about to fall.

He knew nothing about it. I confronted him with that in the seminar because he was talking about the, you know, in the seminar was a bunch of Ukrainian refugees. And I felt bad for them because, you know, it's their country being destroyed. And he's talking to them like they have a war to win. And I just said, you understand that the Ukrainians have between 400 and 500,000 casualties now, and they're about to lose the most important strong point they've held. And he said, are you attack, this was his response.

This is a seminar, supposedly academic. He says, are you attacking our speaker? I said, no, Mike, I'm not attacking the speaker. I'm informing you because he was hosting the speaker. and then it degenerated into all kinds of accusations that I was speaking out of turn. Nobody was interested in the fact that I had just injected a piece of information that showed the complete seminar, which had gone on for an hour, was based on a fiction, a complete delusionary understanding of the situation. They were not interested in the fact or challenging it. They were only interested in that I was not recognized by the chair,

and I just put it in because I couldn't get recognized because these guys were doing all the talking. It was this one little circle, you know, communicating with itself and speeding itself up into a frenzy. I mean, this is what the academic community at Stanford now looks like. I'm sorry? No, no, well, McFall, he's also known for giving very aggressive statements on both NATO expansion and missile defense.

It was back in 2012, we had this comment when he said, you know, because he was going to be tough on Russia, pointing out that we're not going to reassure the Russians on anything regarding neither NATO expansion or missile defense. And his point was, you know, we're going to build whatever missile defense we want, whatever is good for our security and our allies, that's our only priority. It's not taking into considered the Russians. But this is, again, the logic failing to... security dilemma because if you ignore their security, they will respond in a way which then

will undermine American security. So this idea that you try to reassure or take into account adversary security as some kind of a charity, something that shows weakness, it's just, yeah, it's a little bit fanatic, I would say, because this goes against the whole point of departure in international security, which is the security competition. You don't want to elevate that competition if it's not required. I mean, yes, promote security for itself to the extent it doesn't undermine the adversary security. This is why I'm so surprised by this, well, shouldn't be surprised, but shocked by this new weapon systems, this new missiles being deployed to Germany because they seem to have

little purpose for defense, but it only aggravates the security dilemma. It's a little bit like this Ukrainian strikes on the Russian early war. warning systems for nuclear attack. If I'm not, you would know better, of course, but it has very little, if any, significance on the battlefield, but it opens up the Russians or make them more vulnerable, at least, to nuclear first strikes. For me, it doesn't make any sense why this McFall logic, if you will.

I can tell you, I can tell you, this is something people should know. McFaul, who implemented the part, part of the reset in 2009 and was responsible in part for arranging for the or implementing the deployment of the Aegis Assure systems in Poland and Romania. He did not know, I want to make clear, he did not know that those systems were a violation of the INF treaty. He did not know this. I know this because he came to me and asked me questions about the system.

He asked me questions, and it was clear, this was years later, incidentally, not 2009. He did not know that he was implementing a violation of the IMF treaty as part of the Russian reset that they blamed, that failed, but they blame the administration Hillary Clinton blames on the Russians. That's a pretty serious level of ignorance. And his buddy, Colin called also did not know this. a later generation of expert decision maker in the Pentagon. This is really hard to believe that these people do not even know they violated the INF Treaty before Trump withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, 10 years later. This is really serious, in my view. It's a different level of ignorance than I think you have one of,

made out for the public with Alex. I am so concerned, I can't tell you, I'm beside myself. I think we all should be. That is my big take. I mean, it's not just that these incredibly dangerous and reckless decisions are being made. It's how they're being made. The fact that there is apparently no sort of break

inside the system anymore and no real thinking about this it's just as if it just happens that they're planting these things in Germany because they can and not really looking beyond that and what that means

and simply saying well we're not going to concern ourselves with what the Russians will do in response because well that's just them we're only concerned about what we can do We're not going to let what they might feel or how they might respond impact on us because that would somehow be showing some concern for wider things and that might require us to talk to the Russians, which of course is not what we want to do.

It is absolutely terrifying. It is, it is, I would say it was mad actually. I mean, it is, you said you used the word insane at some point. I think it is actually insane. Well, I think it's delusion on a scale and it matches the description of insanity. You know, the image that I keep going back to is because of my limited understanding of history. I'll be helping with you. I just keep thinking of, you know, Sir Nicholas II.

Every time he made a decision, you said to yourself, how could he do this? I mean, he had the information. He was advised. And he still did something that was so contrary to his own interest, as well as the interest of the Russian state. And, I mean, I look at these people. I said, how could you be so reckless, unconcerned about having even the most, I mean, how can you say, I want to get rid of Putin? without knowing how are you going to do it? And he didn't only say it to me.

He said it on, you know, on television, in interviews, nobody apparently asked them, how are you going to do it? I don't think that's the problem. Putin is not the problem in my judgment. But the point is that that's his prescription of the problem. But he has no idea. He says, I don't know how. I just, I was stunned.

I didn't know what to say at that point. you know anyway this is the level of thinking it's it's i mean i now say i don't know i don't i don't only know i not only don't know what they think i don't even know if they think and i think i think the latter is the question that that is most appropriate now so any final thoughts before we run this up well i i as i said i I come away from this program. Amos is very shocked and very alarmed, but then better to be alarmed and to know other problems than not.

I mean, complacency never helps. I will say this. I do want to add on a positive note. I was in Germany about two weeks ago, and I did find, strangely enough, at the sort of level of people that I meet, including very young people, and they had heard about the fact that Missiles

were coming back to Germany. And they were worried. I mean, they weren't worried in the way that perhaps they need to be to the extent that they need to be. But they were definitely very worried. They were very concerned. And they felt that they didn't want these weapons

in Germany at all. And, you know, I could sense that, you know, from below, not at all from above, but from below, that Aenez was growing and fear and worry was growing. and I think that might eventually lead to something positive. But at least I'd like to think so. Well, I say this without any malice,

but with great respect and admiration. I hope I have ruined your day. He'll be a bit more informed, but also a bit more alarmed, unfortunately. But, well, I do think that the Russians will respond in some manner. and to counter this. And I'm also quite certain at that point in time, our political media leads will all cry out in unison that this is unprovoked. So I hope for wiser leadership.

Anyways, Professor Postol, thank you so much. This has been very interesting. Thank you both for all the work you've done. I appreciate it.