Hilary and the LRSO

Aaron Stein 0:08

To the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control nonproliferation and disarmament. I'm Aaron Stein, the co-host of the show and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:19

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. How are you doing, Aaron?

Aaron 0:31

Good. I'm back on the East Coast. We have blue sky today.

Jeffrey 0:33

So did what happened in Vegas stay in Vegas?

Aaron 0:37

I don't know. I talked about it on a podcast last week from Vegas, so I'm not sure. Did I tell you something, though? No. I went down 45 bucks at the blackjack table. It's a roller coaster. After being up 140, I felt really bad going to bed that night. And then I woke up the next morning and read the New York Times and heard that a certain presidential candidate that we talked about last week can lose almost a billion dollars and not pay taxes.

So I felt pretty good.

Jeffrey 1:01

Yeah. So did you take that 45 bucks off your tax return?

Aaron 1:04

I did. I did. And, you know, I paid more federal taxes than somebody who can lose a billion dollars and still run for president. So I feel great.

Jeffrey 1:12

You know, the thing is, he lost that billion dollars on casinos, which, as I'm sure you discovered, it's really hard for a casino to lose money.

Aaron 1:25

Judging by the collective winnings of the Stein family after little Ollie went to bed, they should be doing all right. We did not do too well.

Jeffrey 1:40

Oh, wait, you were down to $45 or you had lost $45?

Aaron 1:43

I really lost $45, but I put a cap on myself to prevent any losses that seriously inflict my, you know, that will have me sleep on the sofa.

Jeffrey 1:52

Aaron, I would be profoundly shocked to learn that $45 makes a difference to their bottom line.

Andy Weber 1:57

I don't think you're a whale.

Aaron 2:00

No, anything but. I'm a minnow.

Jeffrey 2:04

I bet you you could have consumed $45 in free drinks.

Aaron 2:09

Oh, sure, absolutely. They still lost money on me. I think it's just an ad metaphor for the casino business, especially with what I was overlooking the other day. For people who didn't listen to the pod, I had a view of Trump Tower from the Venetian.

Jeffrey 2:24

We mocked Trump last week, right? And so now we have to consider the comments of Hillary Clinton.

Aaron 2:33

The nuclear makes a lot of appearances in this election cycle, keeping us in business.

Jeffrey 2:38

Yeah, I wish it would stop.

Aaron 2:40

Well, why don't you tell the listeners what happened about the audio fundraiser, the LRSO, all things for the podcast.

Jeffrey 2:48

So Hillary Clinton in February attended a fundraiser in Leafy McLean. I think you have to call it Leafy McLean literally or Tony McLean. And – She was asked about the long-range standoff weapon, the new nuclear-armed cruise missile that the United States is set to develop. And she maybe seemed kind of to say she might cancel it. You want to take a listen to what she said?

Aaron 3:21

Sure. I think Super Producer Scott can drop it in right here. Is that what you're going to do, Scott?

Andy 3:27

Madam Secretary, my name is Andy Weber. I was a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and my question is about nuclear weapons and the trillion-dollar modernization program. Secretary Perry and I have publicly called for cancellation of the replacement of the nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missile called the LRSO. And my question is, when your Will you cancel this program, if President Obama doesn't in the next 11 months, and leave the world in a ban on this particularly destabilizing, dangerous type of nuclear weapon?

Thank you.

Hillary Clinton 4:13

Well, I certainly would be inclined to do that for a number of reasons that you know so well. The last thing we need are sophisticated cruise missiles that are nuclear-armed. We know that Russia, Pakistan are developing tactical nukes, meaning both short and longer term missiles. This is one of the most dangerous developments imaginable. Russia has basically threatened to move those tactical nukes right up on their border with Eastern Europe.

Have the Baltics under the glare of tactical nukes, have Eastern and Central Europe facing the same. Pakistan is running full speed to develop tactical nukes, and they're continuing... Hostility with India, but we live in fear that they're going to have a coup, that jihadists are going to take over the government, they're going to get access to nuclear weapons, and you'll have suicide nuclear bombers.

So this could not be a more threatening scenario. The United States has to do what we can to try to prevent that from happening. Now, with Russia, I think it's pretty far along, but that doesn't mean we couldn't begin to try to pull it back. You know, we've negotiated a series of treaties. Most recently, when I was there, the New START treaty, we could begin to try to talk about tactical nukes.

We've got to do everything we can because, you know, if Pakistan has a tactical nuke, India's going to have a tactical nuke. And China's going to have a tactical nuke. And here we are in a nuclear... Threat area, unlike any we've ever had, where deterrence is harder because proximity is closer. So I would look very seriously at that.

I give President Obama a lot of credit for the nuclear security safety summits that he's held. We were very successful in rounding up nuclear material, in taking it out of countries and places where it could have posed a risk. And I know he's going to look at this before the end of his term. And there's nobody, I think, more respected than Bill Perry.

So the more Bill Perry speaks out and the more he can align himself, as he often does, with George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and all these other statesmen, Republicans and Democrats, the better off we'll be in trying to really cut this off. This is going to be a big issue because it's not just the nuclear-tipped cruise missile.

There's a lot of other money we're talking about to go into refurbishing and modernization. Do we have to do any of it? If we have to do some of it, how much do we have to do? That's going to be a tough question, so I will look to people like you and Bill Perry to help me answer that question.

Aaron 7:07

Just picking up on her comments, I think it was first published in the Free Beacon, correct?

Jeffrey 7:15

Yeah, somebody surreptitiously recorded it. And then either they forked it over or the Russians hacked in their email account and acquired it.

Aaron 7:28

Yeah, I think the backstory is that the audio file was sent, again, unencrypted Gmail of people involved in the campaign around, and then that got hacked, and then it ended up at the freebie.

Jeffrey 7:42

Got it. So the first thing I would say is, I don't think she has any idea what Andy Weber is asking her.

Aaron 7:56

It does seem that way, you know, is that she and then she gets, you know, when you get up there and you're giving a public speech and then you reach back and there's nothing there and then you just feel the need to keep talking.

Jeffrey 8:09

Yeah, so, I mean, I know what Andy's doing. And I don't begrudge Andy this. Like, this is exactly what you're supposed to do with candidates, which is you put them on the spot. And he does it in this really kind of artful way where he explains kind of sort of what LRSO is. He doesn't call it, you know, LRSO.

He explains it's a new nuclear-armed cruise missile. And he makes sure that he, you know, name-drops Bill Perry so that she, you know, gets her attention. Like, oh, this is a famous person you know, and he agrees with me. And so I think he's trying to get her to say this. But it's just clear to me as she starts to talk that even though she repeats cruise missile, she doesn't have, she has never heard of this program before.

And I should say that that's not like a, I wouldn't, I'm not mocking her for that. You know, like what we do is pretty obscure and arcane. And my guess is that Well, actually, it's not a guess. I know this. I was sitting at a conference with Andy Weber where a distinguished foreign diplomat was like, what is LRSO?

Right. And we had to, like, spell it out and explain what it did and explain its role. And, you know, this is a person who's a subject matter expert. It's pretty obscure. And she's, I think, clueless. She has no idea what he's asking.

Aaron 9:27

Right. Look, I completely agree. And I also agree that our subject matter is arcane. And then you start throwing around acronyms. I think we talked about this on the last pod, you know, with this. The acronyms also then trip people up. And so then she, her reaction was to sort of filibuster it and talk about the sort of destabilizing aspects of tactical nuclear weapons.

Which this is not.

Jeffrey 9:52

Yeah, this is not a – like LR is long range. SO is standoff. This is a strategic weapon. For me, I think the moment at which I – it occurred to me – I mean when she starts talking about tactical nuclear weapons generally and her emphasis is on Russia and Pakistan, I kind of got the sense that she's not really thinking of – A cruise missile on an airplane in a strategic role.

Although, you know, the Russians do have nuclear-armed cruise missiles and the Pakistanis are developing nuclear-armed cruise missiles. So you might think that she's just going someplace odd with it. But then she started talking about the New START Treaty, right? So she makes that reference to how, you know, the New START Treaty didn't cover tactical nuclear weapons. But the New START Treaty does cover air-launched cruise missiles on heavy bombers, which is what the LRSO would be.

And, in fact, the way the New START Treaty is written, it incentivizes the U.S. and Russia to build nuclear-armed cruise missiles for heavy bombers because each heavy bomber only counts as a single nuclear weapon, no matter how many nuclear-armed cruise missiles it carries. Right. So that's the kind of moment where it's like, no, no, no, no. When you're talking about New START, that's actually why we're doing this, and that's why the Russians are doing this, because you negotiated a treaty that put a premium on these things.

Aaron 11:20

Right, exactly. And so just with the way the accounting mechanism works, you have an incentive to pack as many cruise missiles onto, for all intents and purposes, one bomber. So that you can get under certain threshold limits within the treaty itself. And then she does mention that, and so that sort of leads into, well, she doesn't quite know what she's talking about.

Jeffrey 11:39

Right, because it's not that it didn't cover it, it's that it explicitly encouraged it through a very favorable accounting mechanism.

Aaron 11:50

Right, exactly. And this is the Weber-Perry argument, is that we should not be doing this, and I think it was the Washington Post op-ed, Because this is uniquely destabilized.

Jeffrey 12:02

Yeah. Can I grind one more little ax here about how little the State Department cared about nuclear-armed cruise missiles in the first Obama term?

Aaron 12:13

Oh, please. Go ahead. Settle some scores.

Jeffrey 12:16

Well, yeah. So in addition to the fact that air-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles count as one nuclear warhead per bomber no matter how many cruise missiles there are, And New START, just like Old START, doesn't cover sea-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles. And so the Russians could put as many sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles as they want on their attack submarines, right?

Aaron 12:46

Yeah.

Jeffrey 12:47

And one thing that some of us were annoyed by and tried to push was to, under the old START agreement, there was a limit on the number of sea launch cruise missiles you could have, right? It was 880, which was, like, so big it's not even a limit. But there was also a data exchange that you at least had to declare how many you deployed.

And the State Department made, as far as I can tell, zero effort to preserve that data exchange, right? And so here we are at this point where we're complaining and moaning about the proliferation of cruise missiles, whether they are air-launched or sea-launched, or in the case of the Russians, the ground-launched cruise missile that probably violates the INF Treaty.

But we have really, I think, fundamentally ignored this problem, which if people used to listen to the podcast back in the old days, this is where we would say nice things about Dennis Gormley.

Aaron 13:41

Right. I would say this is the Dennis Gormley story. Was it Italy and – Was it Italy, the train ride?

Jeffrey 13:47

Ah, what a train ride that was.

Aaron 13:49

Right. But... And then... So when I first listened to it, you know, just to pick up on this theme, I thought maybe she got confused about the strategic, non-strategic cruise missile aspect of this. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And so, you know, I said... I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt until she went off into the India-Pakistan stuff.

And then I said, well, she... She's not quite getting this thing. But, you know, because the statements are so nebulous, right, like both opponents of the LRSO and supporters of the LRSO have something they can sink their teeth into. And so they can use this as a vehicle to advance their own individual arguments of pro and for this potential new weapon.

And... When I listened to it, I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said, okay, that was just a soundbite. It probably doesn't mean very much.

Jeffrey 14:43

Yeah, so I was reflecting back on the time I spent volunteering for the Obama campaign in 2008 and just watching that process play out, like the early campaign during the primaries, the campaign once Clinton was out and all the Clinton people had been integrated. Then the transition period when he was the president-elect, and then the first, say, year of the administration when people got jobs.

Those are like four distinct groups of people. You know, the people who were prominent in the primary campaign, while they were still prominent in the general election campaign, there were like other new people, right, and that pushed things in a different direction. And in the transition, it was, you know, a third set of people, some of whom had been involved in the campaign, some of whom had not.

And then, like, none of those people got the jobs that they expected, right? It was a whole other universe of people who went in. And so the idea that at a fundraiser in February and off the top of her head remark, you know, is some window into – What the actual interagency discussions are going to be, you know, a year into the administration when the people surrounding her are completely different just seems to me to be crazy.

I mean, I remember we filled out on the campaign this survey for the Arms Control Association. And like the whole point was to put words in Barack Obama's mouth, right? Like the idea was like fill this thing out so that you box him in so that when he is the president, like he has to make good on this.

And I remember we worked on this one question about space. And, you know, we worked it all out with the nonproliferation team and everybody signed off on it. It was great. And, you know, whatever. Like, I'm sure Obama never saw it. But it shows up as his answers in arms control today. So. I didn't participate in the transition.

I know who wrote the space section that ended up in the transition paper. It was a different person who wasn't on the non-pro team. And he gave a radically different answer on space arms control that was actually much more forward-leaning than the campaign one that we had come up with. But he didn't get that job. Somebody else got that job at defense and state.

And those people were much more reluctant. And so while, you know, we had had like, you know, one arms control proposal in arms control today and which I think was we were going to ban arms. Debris-creating anti-satellite tests. Then the transition paper was like, no, no, no, we're going to ban weapons in outer space. And then the actual people who got the jobs are like, oh, no, no, no, we don't do arms control in space.

Like, you know, it's distinct groups of people who don't agree with one another, who are trying to fight to put words in the president's mouth, but, like, what matters are the people at the end who actually get the jobs. And so... I just – it just boggles my mind that responsible people who live in Washington, like they should know better, right?

They should know that an off-the-cuff remark by a candidate in February in a McLean living room bears zero – Relationship to all of the politics that are going to go on when you have a Secretary of Defense who feels a certain way and a Secretary of State who feels a certain way and a budget situation that looks a certain way.

I just think it's no help whatsoever into figuring out what she's actually going to do.

Aaron 18:12

Yeah, because something that I always think is important to keep in mind for actual sitting governments as they are being presented with having to make decisions about About obscure things. And the LRSO, you know, even though this is our second podcast on, I think, in less than a month, is relatively obscure within the broader scheme of the U.S. government.

A, if it ever does hit Hillary Clinton's desk, you know, it's because something's gone wrong, right? Or B, is it inherently within the bureaucracy, there's the heavy status, once you get there, towards status quo buy? I mean, that's at least what I think. And so... That fourth stage that you were just talking about I always I never thought about in stages, but, you know, if you want to say the fourth stage, it just inherently reverts back to the norm of what the policy should be.

And it's what we talked about in the podcast, the Trump podcast last week, is that, you know, our policy is the policy, just to quote Secretary of Defense Carter on your first use, right?

Jeffrey 19:13

Well, like, things are effed up for a reason, right? Like, the reason our policies look a certain way is usually because there's a coalition or a constellation of interests that supports that, right? And that's not... It's just like things are screwed up for a reason. And and, you know, this is a case where I think the Air Force.

Well, I don't know what you think, but I look at the designs of the new bomber. And I wonder if it's just kind of – I think we've said this. It's a kind of low-rent version of a B-2. It's not going to be all that stealthy. And so they want this standoff capability, and they want a dedicated nuclear capability.

And so these kind of arguments – Sort of unfold in that way, right? And the idea, and, you know, maybe that's why we exist on the outside, that, you know, you would step back from this cosmically and you would say, like, well, I understand why you want this capability, but, you know, we have to put this in the context of the proliferation environment and, you know, shouldn't we really be trying to eliminate these things?

Like, that's a really important discussion for us to have, but, like, that's not what the bureaucracy is going to default to. You know, like, the president's going to have to... She's really going to have to want... To end this program or it's going to have to have enormous cost overruns. Like it's, it's going to be like a way, way more complicated thing to cancel this than, you know, Andy, Andy, Andy ambushed her in a room in McLean.

Aaron 20:55

Right. I do. So I, I obviously can't comment on the stealthiness of the, the B21 Raider, you know, as they're calling it. I have to assume that, that, That when they designed and they eventually build this thing that it will be slightly more stealthy than the B2. But I actually don't think it matters. And it's something that, you know, and it's because I'm a huge fan of Gormley that He has this great chart in his book, and I'm at my office, I'm at my house, and his book's at my house, so I can't tell you what page it's on.

But sort of the increase in use of conventional cruise missiles through different campaigns in the United States, basically since they made their debut in war in the first Gulf War in 1991. And what if we think about it about that strata? You move away and further and further away from just having to fly an airplane over anything that could even resemble risk, no matter how stealthy the plane is, because you can put your bomber farther away and achieve the same level of accuracy that you would if you're closer in.

And so it's just the incremental changes in warfare. And I bring this up because my day job, it I work so much on Syria now. It's consuming my life. In the process of doing that, I actually talked to a lot of fire pilots about setting up a no-fly zone. They all talk about this issue in itself. It's to what level is the U.S. willing to put pilots at risk.

If you weren't willing to put pilots at risk, then you want to do it from range. Hence, you get proposals to just do things from farther away.

Jeffrey 22:34

Your observation is that the enthusiasm is less the precision offered by cruise missiles than the opportunity to move to a situation where you stand off. And so the precision is just, you know, it allows you to do things at a much greater distance. And you think that that's a function of being casualty avoidant in terms of pilots.

Aaron 22:58

Right. Exactly.

Jeffrey 22:59

So I agree with that. And you know what I think is crazy frustrating about that?

Aaron 23:04

What?

Jeffrey 23:05

Why are we building a man-bomber?

Aaron 23:07

Right, and then the fact that you're doing this with nuclear weapons in general, right? So you can make the argument I just made if you're solely thinking conventional speak, but, you know, when the nuclear is being contemplated, the idea of casualty-averseness for U.S. pilots becomes somewhat farcical.

Jeffrey 23:24

Oh, yeah, it's totally crazy, right, that you're going to... Well, maybe, though, that that craziness is probably endemic to the... You know, like it reminds me a little bit of the farcical proposal that the place to store the nuclear codes for the president would be sewn in one of his advisers so that the president would actually have to take out a knife and kill this person with his or her bare hands in order to get the codes.

The idea being that if you're going to kill a couple million people, you should probably be willing to kill one person with your bare hands. People are really appalled by this. But that would distort the president's judgment, right? It's kind of like the same thing, right? Like, oh, I'm going to put 20 kilotons on this target in this city, but I don't want the pilot to get shot down.

I mean, it is a little weird, but I do think that it sort of gets to the fundamental oddness of... Is that we want to try to imagine them as bloodless as possible, even though that's crazy talk.

Aaron 24:30

Right, and we didn't touch on it very much in the last LRSO podcast. It gets to why we actually need it, right? So if we take a step back and say, well, what are the arguments in favor for this missile? And the arguments I see put forward are to increase the survivability of the bomber fleet, right?

Jeffrey 24:54

Yes. They are definitely, I think, concerned that the B-21 is not that survivable. And, you know, it is true that Russian surface-to-air missiles have much greater ranges now, so you have to stand off from further away, and it wouldn't be surprising if the Russians sold those to countries we don't like.

Aaron 25:16

Right, and that they can detect stealth at greater ranges and plot a firing solution for said surface-to-air missiles, and so you can't be guaranteed of a second strike, so you have to pull yourself farther away. With conventional, I totally get the argument. Conventional makes perfect sense to me, and this is the Andy Weber–Bill Perry argument that they put out in their Washington Post piece.

And I think they quote a British defense specialist whose name is escaping me at the moment, but nevertheless they say that you cannot distinguish between nuclear and conventionally armed air launch cruise missiles. They look the same, right? Go ahead.

Jeffrey 25:59

No, I think that the way that the arguments evolved, and this is something that would be worth us discussing, is that They have this idea – they, the Defense Department, people in the Defense Department or – Say proponents of the LRSO. Proponents of the LRSO. That's the way to say that. That the Russians have this strategy of escalate to de-escalate, that the Russians might use nuclear weapons in a rather limited fashion in a conflict in order to get us to back down.

And the argument has been that LRSO is a way to respond proportionately to that. So we don't, you know, if the Russians fire a cruise missile off a bomber or a nuclear-armed cruise missile off a prohibited INF launcher against, say, an airfield in Poland, right, We don't want to use our submarine-launched ballistic missiles or our ICBMs. And so what we're going to want to do is use either dual-capable aircraft or a bomber, and we're going to be able to put one nuclear weapon sort of back on target in response, which is a view I think I'm prepared to criticize.

But I want to be clear about that because I think sometimes – And people like Frank Kendall have made comments that have been, I think, wrongly interpreted as suggesting we would use LRSO first. And in fact, I think it's the opposite. I think they're worried about this escalate to de-escalate scenario. Now, I don't find that a terribly compelling reason.

We could talk about why. And even if it is, I think, even if you don't believe me, I do think it's like a nice to have capability and not something that's like absolutely essential to maintain deterrence.

Aaron 27:52

Yeah, and then the idea is that if the bomber is detectable and therefore vulnerable, is that you can't do this de-escalate to escalate with a gravity bomb, say the B61. And so you need the LRS up.

Jeffrey 28:04

Yeah, they're afraid to put a pilot at risk, right.

Aaron 28:07

Right, and... You know, like theoretically that makes sense in that sort of scenario. But I have a lot of problems, and I think you do too, about the entire de-escalate to – I'm sorry, escalate to de-escalate.

Jeffrey 28:23

Yeah, I feel like it's the kind of thing, a little bit like the window of vulnerability that we have scared ourselves with. And so we imagine that that's what they're going to do. And I've heard a lot of people assert that this is the Russian policy. And I can kind of make out why one might think that.

You know, they tend to end exercises with a single strike off a plane, right? Or at least they've ended some exercises in that way. But it's not really clear to me that they're going to do that. And it isn't clear to me that if they do that, that it's going to matter. Like, if we're mounting a conventional defense of the Baltics, and we're beating them conventionally, and they do one nuclear strike against an airfield, you know, not a target that's going to get them hit really hard, I think I just want to continue with my defense and beat them.

Right? Right. Like, I don't want to nuke Moscow in response to that, and I don't know that showing off and using a nuclear weapon against a sort of equally barren airfield really accomplishes anything. And if we get to the point where they're signaling that they're going to escalate beyond that – Right. Then that's where core deterrence comes in.

Right. Like if you're going to try to use nuclear weapons in large numbers against our allies, then you are going to put yourself at risk for retaliation. So I feel like this is one of those classic American scenarios where we like talk ourselves into something. And like at some point we're counting how many angels are on the head of a pin, you know, like.

If they're going to use a nuclear weapon in a way that doesn't have a material effect on the outcome of the battle, then I don't feel the need to respond to it with my own nuclear weapon. I just want to beat them. And if they are going to use nuclear weapons in a way that has a material effect on the outcome of the battle, that's not an LRSO problem.

That's a bigger core deterrence issue, and we've got to talk about that.

Aaron 30:39

Exactly. I really have nothing else to add other than a targeted strike on one of their airfields given the state of their air force might help them.

Jeffrey 30:46

Isn't that right, Aaron?

Aaron 30:48

I love when people do that at meetings.

Jeffrey 30:51

They give a five-minute soliloquy because they're annoyed that they weren't invited to give the talk. Is that a question? Well, don't you agree?

Aaron 30:59

Well, sometimes in the pod I agree with you and I just have nothing else to add. It's like, yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. And I always... We, sort of the arms control non-pro community, well, really the war strategists, I should say, not our side, have played with this escalation models, right? And, you know, I just can't run through a scenario where the use of nuclear weapons is being contemplated.

Where it ends at a tit for tat, and then we say, okay, we're all done. And So it becomes a core deterrence issue, just as you said. I'm just repeating what you said. And if we still have that core deterrence, then the mission becomes somewhat superfluous. Especially, and I think this is the point you made in the last podcast, and I didn't, as sort of the driver of the conversation, flesh it out enough, when this capability might already exist.

Jeffrey 32:00

Oh, you mean the JASM-ER.

Aaron 32:02

Right, and so this is the JASM-ER argument. And is that there is a there already is a longer range cruise.

Jeffrey 32:11

Yeah, there's no question that we can put cruise missiles on targets in Russia. It's just a question of whether we want to do a nuclear armed one off a bomber, which I mean, I guess symmetry is nice, but I don't yeah, I don't feel the need. I don't know. This gets to a broader objection I have to the way we talk about nuclear weapons.

And as usual, kind of only Bridge Colby is willing to make the argument explicitly, which is why I like arguing with Bridge is he doesn't try to hide things.

Aaron 32:42

No, I was just thinking about him because he gave a podcast on War on the Rocks, you know, where he talked about escalate to deescalate. And so I was thinking about our conversation, how he would be thinking about it.

Jeffrey 32:53

Yeah, well, it's actually useful to argue with Bridge because he'll tell you what he's thinking. And like, Isn't worried about winning so much as he is about making the argument as elegantly as he can. You know, I tend to look at nuclear weapons at the value of nuclear weapons as being entirely instrumental. Like, can I destroy this target?

Yes or no. And a nuclear weapon is valuable if I can't destroy it any other way. But, like, I don't... I mean, the flip way I say it is Kim Jong-un doesn't care if I killed him with a nuclear weapon or a conventional weapon. He only cares that he's dead. And so... I often think that we get locked up in these kinds of theological discussions about nuclear weapons that are really driven by a point that Bridge has been willing to make explicitly, which is, well, sometimes I want to use a nuclear weapon for demonstration.

Like, I want to show that I'm willing to do this taboo thing. You know, and that I find objectionable. Well, so, first of all, it's not permissible to use Nuclear weapon to terrorize civilians, right? Like terror bombing is not okay, and you can dress that up in, in whatever language you want you know, talking about like the, the psychological effect on the enemy, but ultimately I think it's legally prohibited terror bombing, so it's not okay. And I think if you talk to military lawyers, they get very uncomfortable about precisely that, which is why Scott Sagan and I wrote that piece about not using nuclear weapons when conventional weapons Weapons would do. And so for me, the value of nuclear weapons as a deterrent is, do they contribute to winning the war in a meaningful way, right? And there are some targets that I think that is true of, right? And so I, you know, tend to be a little bit more accepting of nuclear weapons that are designed to target hard and deeply buried bunkers, right?

But if you're just like, oh, look, they blew up this airfield with a nuclear weapon to show they're willing to use nuclear weapons. I just don't feel compelled to blow up one of their airfields with one of my own nuclear weapons. I think like the ability to be like, yeah, guess what? I don't need a nuclear weapon to blow up that airfield.

Like I can just blow, you know, I can blow up that airfield too. And I wouldn't even do that. Unless blowing up the airfield contributed meaningfully to defeating them. So I just, I don't know. I feel like the way we talk about nuclear weapons is very symbolic and very disconnected from the actual military value that they provide.

Don't you agree, Aaron?

Aaron 35:54

I just have problems when you start to co-mingle conventional systems that you plan to use. In actual war fighting with nuclear delivery vehicles. And so this is the problem I have a lot with the entire cruise missile debate. I mean, is the nuclear role, you know, in a real... Conflict with a real adversary, and I'm not talking about Iraq, you know, or even Iran for that matter, but you know, a near peer, you know, to use DC lingo, someone who can hit back. Someone who, yeah, somebody who can hit back. Is that when you start to co-mingle delivery systems that look the same, that's inherently destabilizing, and especially if the mission Ascribed to this particular weapon is superfluous.

And I think we both think it's slightly superfluous. And that you can do it with other systems because it's a core deterrence issue. I don't see a need for the LRSO, but I do see a need for a long-range cruise missile. You know what I'm saying?

Jeffrey 37:00

Yeah, absolutely. I mean...

Aaron 37:02

I like long-range cruise missiles.

Jeffrey 37:04

Yes, I want very precise... Well, so I do want them. But I do accept that we are entering this weird... Era where you know like we've relied so much on nuclear deterrence at some level to keep the peace and as conventional weapons become more capable I observe that the United States and our allies and some other countries that face nuclear armed adversaries do tend to be tempted to To see a decapitation strike as a kind of appealing strategy.

Aaron 37:47

Are you talking about the Koreas again?

Jeffrey 37:49

Well, I'm definitely thinking about South Korea. But, you know, I actually wrote this little paper, which I dusted off the other day and was thinking about resurrecting, on the strike on Dora Farm. Do you remember this?

Aaron 38:05

I do not.

Jeffrey 38:06

At the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003...

Aaron 38:10

Oh, right. Of course, of course.

Jeffrey 38:10

Yeah, the Bush administration thought they knew where Saddam might be, and so they took a poke at him. And it's a fiasco. I mean, it's not a fiasco because people are stupid. It's a fiasco because it demonstrates how difficult such a strike would be. And, you know, I wrote it at the time because I was very skeptical of conventional Trident, right, which was the idea of putting conventional weapons on a very accurate ballistic missile launched from a submarine.

But I think it's equally true for cruise missiles that, on the one hand... These things are becoming incredibly accurate. So I think we're being tempted into these strategies. And I think these strategies are deeply worrisome to like the Russians. And at the same time, I'm not sure that they provide the easy victory that they're kind of advertised as.

And they do raise these kinds of interesting concerns. Stability problems. I don't, I don't have like a hat answer to that, but like, yeah, I think we're going to have conventionally armed cruise missiles. I think they're generally good. It doesn't mean that they, they don't stabilize themselves, yeah. I think it's another piece of reform policy about, about, you know, you know, let's call them size issues, and it was an entire collection of penis jokes, yeah.

Aaron 39:34

Right, because you could pull that off. I mean, you managed to pull off in the last foreign policy column something about your children rubbing French lotion all over a flat-screen TV. But it's my pet project, is the commingling of these systems that all look the same, especially when yours is much bigger than the others in terms of capabilities.

You put... Near peer is a term we use here in DC a lot, but we really don't have a close peer in terms of military, even China and Russia. So you actually incentivize them to rely more on nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 40:18

Do you see that in the – well, your interest is heavily in the Middle East. So do you see a variant of that problem there?

Aaron 40:30

Oh, sure.

Jeffrey 40:31

Yeah, okay, tell me about that, because I don't know. I always revert to Korea, because it's the only thing I know.

Aaron 40:40

The stability-instability paradox plays out in the reassurance of Gulf allies in response to the JCPOA. The response to the JCPOA was to massively increase conventional capabilities. Across the spectrum for all of the Gulf allies, just up until the past couple days with the final authorization to sell frontline strike aircraft and highly precise weapons that can penetrate Iranian airspace and that does have the capability for decapitation.

And oh, by the way, they have more ballistic missile defense than pretty much anybody besides us and maybe the Israelis. And so you incentivize an Iranian regime, even under restriction in the JCPOA, to focus on delivery vehicles, more missiles. So the Samorgasbord, all of these sort of systems that they're building can have utility even in a conventional role.

And so you have a missile race below the nuclear threshold. And increasingly it's precision versus just overwhelming saturation from the Iranian side. And so it's destabilizing. And I think that's the new norm.

Jeffrey 41:55

Well, that's cheery.

Aaron 41:58

It's not the happy note, but I just think that's the ultimate point here, is that it doesn't have to be nuclear.

Jeffrey 42:06

Yeah, well, so I guess this then gets to this core question that the Weber and the Perry proposal is about, which is... Do we want to try to ban nuclear-armed cruise missiles? And I think one of the objections to it has been that if you ban nuclear-armed cruise missiles, it doesn't solve all of your stability problems. But my response to that, not that I think we're going to get a ban on nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

I'm pretty glum about it. But it would be a good thing, I think, because my guess is it makes all these problems much harder. You're already going to have this underlying problem of these incredibly precise conventional weapons. But if you also have nuclear variants of them, it just seems like that problem is more complicated because you don't know which one is about to get used.

And you're not entirely sure what the purpose of the strike is, whether it's to just stop the war or actually try to kill the leadership.

Aaron 43:10

Yeah, I agree completely. I also agree with your assessment that the idea of a total ban is not going to happen for a number of reasons, partly self-inflicted.

Jeffrey 43:28

It seems like we've incentivized the Russians to spend a lot of money developing nuclear-armed cruise missiles, money that they are not going to want to just write off as a loss.

Aaron 43:40

Yeah, no, I do think we've incentivized them to build more than they probably need.

Jeffrey 43:45

I'm going to bring us back into reasonably mirthful, happy land. So it would be great if we could ban nuclear armed cruise missiles. I don't know that that's likely. And I'm not sure that we have to, even if I think LRSO is a waste of money, I'm not sure that we have to suspend LRSO to get there.

And in fact, I'm pretty sure that canceling LRSO alone doesn't get us there. But none of this matters because Hillary Clinton is not going to cancel LRSO.

Aaron 44:20

I think that's where we started in the status quo bias segment of the podcast.

Jeffrey 44:25

Right. So we're having this entire conversation, but none of it matters because what's going to kill LRSO is if the program goes over budget, if it doesn't work, if we don't have enough money. It has exactly nothing to do with Hillary Clinton's policy preferences, which as far as I can tell, don't truly exist on an issue like this.

Aaron 44:49

No, not on this particular issue. No, that's OK. That means we'll get to have more podcasts about it in the future as the debates keep happening.

Jeffrey 44:57

She's a busy lady. She's a busy lady. I will say though, which I thought was the most interesting thing from her remarks, you know what really got her attention? Was when Andy Weber mentioned he'd written the piece with Bill Perry. She did seem to feel the need to go out of her way to talk about how much she loved Bill Perry.

Aaron 45:17

I mean, and he's been out there. He's been making himself very public recently about his thoughts.

Jeffrey 45:24

Yeah, well, I just thought it was interesting. If you want a window into how you're going to convince a candidate or a president to change his or her mind on something... It was like, yeah, don't argue with her. Don't explain it to her. Like, appeal to people she's already decided she is going to listen to. So, you know, it was a real demonstration of, like, why somebody like Bill Perry matters.

You know, Andy could ask that question all day long, and he could explain it perfectly and, you know, give her a cogent argument, and she would just be kind of, like, nodding while checking her watch. But the minute that he's like, oh, Bill Perry said it, it's like, oh, well, that must be a great idea. I mean, it's really...

I mean, it's very insightful about Washington, but I think it also is why having somebody like Bill Perry working on these issues matters.

Aaron 46:12

And that is a real happy moment, is that he's working on these issues.

Jeffrey 46:18

Yes, Bill Perry, smarter, more important than either of us, and...

Aaron 46:23

Engaged and interested. Feeding the charge. Yeah, so that's a happy note. So we can thank the listeners now for tuning in again to the latest installment. And thank Bill Perry for keeping up the good work and letting us in on a happy note.