The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Going Nuclear + Live Q&A Announcement || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Our next Live Q&A on Patreon is here! On April 9, Peter will join the Analyst members on Patreon for question time! In order to get in on the fun, join the 'Analyst tier' on Patreon before April 9.Link to join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanAs the Trump administration shifts US foreign policy, several countries are taking notice of the rising global instability. It looks like the nuclear question is getting thrown around by quite a few of those countries.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/going-nuclear-live-qa-announcement

Hey, Al Peter Zion, coming to you from Colorado. You are getting this message so that you can be informed. On April 9, we're doing something called Question Time, which is basically when our Patreon members can grill me live about whatever's going on in the world. And the primary topic for the event this April 9 is going to be Trump's tariffs, which come out the week before, and their effect on the American and the global economy moving forward. So sign up for our Patreon system now.

Join the fun. Bring your questions. and we'll see you April 9 at noon Eastern. If you can't make it, that's okay. You can get a recording as long as you sign up. Hey, everybody. Peter Zeyn here coming to you from the home office. I apologize for being inside, but there's 70 mile an hour winds outside, and recording is just not possible.

Today, it's the 17th of March, and the news is that American Defense Secretary, Pete Hankseth just canceled defense talks with the South Koreans. He had a really good reason for doing it, but South Koreans functionally don't have a government right now. The former president was impeached currently out on bail, which just feels weird linking those words together. And they haven't had new elections yet. So there really is no one of authority to speak to about really deep strategic issues. And there is a very deep strategic issue that needs to be discussed.

The South Koreans have been looking at what the Trump administration has been doing with Ukraine and the European allies and even bad-mouthing the Japanese of late. and they are coming to the unfortunate conclusion that they are going to have to go it alone on their defense policy. Now, South Korean military forces have basically been under this American umbrella, not just in terms of actual security protection, but actually leadership since the Cold War. If a war were to break out and the North Koreans were to invade South Korea, technically the entire South Korean military is under American command, even though there's only about 30, 35,000 American troops on the peninsula compared to 10 times that for South Koreans. In addition, the South Koreans are one of the few countries that by Donald Trump standards have actually met their defense procurement goals over the course of this last several decades,

typically spending more than three to three and a half percent on defense the entire time, just kind of the range that Donald Trump until recently said you were supposed to be in. And at the moment, the Trump administration hasn't really badmouthed the South Koreans in any way. like they have the Germans or the Italians or the Brits or the French or the Ukrainians or the Japanese. You know, it's a long list. You get the point. Anyway, the South Koreans see it a reading right in on the wall because they realize they are not what you would call a major ally. The South Koreans are not capable deploying forces really outside of their theater. And so they are definitely in the category of defense consumer regardless of how much of the weight they try to shoulder themselves. And their concern is if the Trump administration just turns his eyes to them,

but it's just a matter of time before the United States moves on. And so they are dusting off the policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that would allow them to do a sprint to a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks, if not days. And this has earned them the labor by the United States of sensitive energy country, meaning that they are no longer a complete non-concern when it comes to nuclear proliferation, but now something where it's on the radar. And that's exactly where they should be. And having a discussion at the very top level between the Americans and the South Koreans on what can and would and should happen under all these scenarios is exactly what needs to happen.

But there's no one to have that conversation with Hegsef at the moment. So, delay. South Korea is hardly the only country that is going to be in this bucket. We have a number of other countries who are concerned about what the United States is doing and realize that they need to, or coming to the conclusion, that they need to come up with a own defense plants. And one of the things you have to consider, if you haven't had a sufficiently strong conventional force for a while, you know, like South Korea has, building up those conventional forces takes years, if not decades. I mean, the American General Staff situation is 50 years in the making. Aircraft carriers from the point that you decide that you want to do it.

You go through the design, you go through the procurant, you go through manufacturing, and then finally a field testing, you know, you have a 20 to 25 year process. Considering the speed at which things are unraveling in Europe, most countries just don't have that sort of time. And so countries who want to actually look out for themselves that can't really rely on conventional forces in the shorter medium term, which raises the question of nuclear weapons. The country that is, of course, under the greatest pressure is Ukraine. and we're supposed to have a conversation very soon between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin of Russia, which will give some indication of just how much Ukrainian territory the Americans are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve a peace deal. But keep in mind that there are multiple nuclear power reactors in Ukraine.

And Ukraine used to be where all the brains of the Soviet military industrial complex used to be on nuke issues, on aircraft issues, and on missile issues. So the idea that the Ukrainians, when under pressure, can't go nuclear, is silly. Next slide of countries in that are already publicly discussing where and how to get the nukes, Poland's at the top of that list. They've actively asked the United States to deploy nuclear weapons to their soil, and that has gotten broadly rebuffed. And so now they're discussing what they need to do to get their own. The road for Poland will be a little bit longer. They don't have a native nuclear industry, but their manufacturing capacity is

robust. All they have to do is get the nuclear material and they'd be off to the races. It would probably take them three to nine months in order to get a functional weapon. Not an expletable device. They could probably do that in weeks, but an actual deliverable weapon probably within three to nine months. The next country up is the one that I am of course most worried about, and that's Germany. They're having the discussion not should we get nukes, but how should we get nukes. Option one is to partner up with the French and pay money to the French so that the French nuclear deterrent, which has existed since the 50s, also covers Germany. But at the end of the day, the French are the ones who would control that arsenal and whether or not it should be

used or not. And so the other option is for the Germans to get as close to the threshold as they possibly can get experience in doing the milling in order to make the warheads enriching the uranium of the plutonium, and again, they have a nuclear industry so they can do this themselves. And the idea that the Germans could not put a nuclear device into a deliverable weapon system. And Germans have been ours manufacturers for a very long time. That would not be a challenge. In between, look to Sweden and Finland. Here are two countries that, like Ukraine, already have an indigenous nuclear civilian fleet.

And the Swedes, like the Germans, already have an indigenous, robust military system for contracting and manufacture. Both of them are openly discussing these options, and if they do decide to pull the trigger, both of them would have a deliverable weapon in under a month. Rounding out the list in Europe, look to Romania. Like the Ukrainians, they have in nuclear industry, however, their weapon systems are subpar, pretty much all imported.

So they could get a device, use it as a failsafe, but getting the deliverable system would be probably a bridge too far at anything less than a 12-month time frame. But it's a lot faster than doubling the size of your army. Over in East Asia, in addition to the creams, the two countries to watch, obviously, are Japan and Taiwan. Both have a arms industry, both have the materials, both have plenty of scientists and engineers who have experience with both. You just have to marry the two together. It's just a question of how many funds, how much they decide to put behind it.

And in the case of Taiwan, if they really did feel that the Americans were leaving, well, They really don't have any option but to get nukes. And while the Japanese Navy may be much more powerful in terms of reach in the Chinese Navy, the home islands are within range of a lot of Chinese weapon systems. And so if there was a war, I don't doubt who would win in the end because the Japanese could choke off the Chinese mainland. But the damage could be extreme. About the only way to mitigate the risk there is deterrent. So that means nukes.

So there we're talking about eight countries that are likely to pick up nukes in the nut. too distant future based on how American policy unfolds in the next several weeks to months. Something the Trump administration is learning is something that every administration before it has learned, including the first Trump administration, is that if you want to write everyone's security policies, you have to give them something. And during the Cold War and until very recently, it was a guns for butter trade. The U.S. would protect global sea lanes so that anyone could trade with anyone at any time, and in exchange, the Allies allowed Washington to write their security policies. What the Trump administration is doing is not just breaking that deal, but saying

that we're not going to protect your trade. You are on your own, but you're also on your own for defense. And that forces all of these countries to take matters into their own hands. And if they do that, the United States loses the ability to say what can and cannot happen with weapons systems. And that leads to a world with a lot more nukes in it and a much, much, much higher likelihood of actually having a weapons exchange.