Iskander, INF and Kaliningrad

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

Vadim, do you have a bag of d**ks? You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. 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.

Aaron Stein 0:21

And I'm Aaron Stein, a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:28

Hey, Aaron, you want to talk about the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty?

Aaron 0:34

I do, but, you know, I think we're doing our listeners a disservice if we don't start with a quip about the weather in your ocean view.

Jeffrey 0:40

Ah, it's beautiful, slightly overcast, but I can see the ocean.

Aaron 0:45

It's nice here on the East Coast. I'm back in Washington. Where are you sitting? I'm sitting in my private bunker here at the Atlantic Council office so I don't get interrupted with a telephone call live on air.

Jeffrey 0:55

And I would say it's 65... Do you have your own Fuhrer bunker?

Other voice 0:59

We call it the quiet room because we've embraced the open office concept here at the Atlantic Council.

Aaron 1:05

So I have to retreat. But no, it's nice here. 65 degrees and sunny on the East Coast at the end of October. How's that global warming treating you?

Jeffrey 1:15

Well, we're kind of loving it. It means we get dolphins and whales at funny times. Hey, you know where the weather is terrible?

Other voice 1:21

Where?

Jeffrey 1:22

Kaliningrad. Kaliningrad.

Other voice 1:25

It's not nice up there. The farther north you go, you know, not nice. Absolutely not.

Jeffrey 1:30

It's unclear to me that Kaliningrad, the tiny Russian enclave in the Baltics, that they won fair and square from the Germans in World War II. It's not clear to me that it's ever nice. We do a lot of open source work and it always looks overcast and kind of nasty.

Aaron 1:43

I think when you get that close to the Arctic Circle, you're just sort of doomed for it. So you just have to start drinking a lot. Get yourself a few days.

Jeffrey 1:50

Yeah, I think the Estonians and the Finns and Lithuanians and Latvians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although, you know, it used to be Germany.

Aaron 1:58

I think we still wish it was Germany. It would make the Baltz more militarily defensible.

Jeffrey 2:03

Well, Kant, the great philosopher, was from there before it was called Kaliningrad, when it was called, what, Konigsberg.

Aaron 2:12

I didn't know that. That's a good piece of history.

Jeffrey 2:15

So as the philosopher in me, it's kind of sad because it's not really the kind of place you would want to go visit as a tourist.

Aaron 2:22

No, no. It sort of seems like the Russians just use it as a forever place to hold that part of the world at risk.

Jeffrey 2:30

It is a giant military base, and the Russians seem to have put some new missiles there, although it's not clear to me whether they mean to put them there forever or just for a little bit. Iskanders.

Aaron 2:41

Right, Iskanders. Friend of the pod. I think they've been involved in every podcast we've done on the INF, which today's will do as well. But in the news recently, I think October 8th, and The Guardian says that there is As you just said, deployments of the Iskander-M in Kaliningrad and discrepancies about what they're there for.

Jeffrey 3:02

Yeah, well, it sounds like the Estonian Defense Ministry were the people who put this out initially, that there was a Russian ship that transported the missiles since, you know, it is a sort of enclave, right, that is physically separate from the territory of Mother Russia. So they shipped it in. Although the Russians say it's just there for an exercise, and the Russians kind of bragged about doing it really openly so that the U.S. would see it.

And that is, I mean, I do have to say that is something that the Russians have done, I think, from time to time, that they have put Iskanders in for training exercises, irritated us because, you know, they treat these kinds of short-range ballistic missiles as a kind of countermeasure for missile defense deployments, and then they take them back out.

Although I guess it remains to be seen whether they're actually going to be deployed there on a permanent basis.

Aaron 3:49

Right, and that's sort of the crux of the issue there. Is this another exercise? What's the Russians say? Or are they going to be deployed there permanently? And it comes amid the backdrop of all of the disagreements about the INF and how there are parallels there as well.

Jeffrey 4:05

Yeah, so we are super carefully watching the Iskander deployments. And we actually geolocated both the military unit that handles the... Well, that would handle the Iskander, right? Because right now it has SS-21s. But if Russia puts Iskanders in, they'll give them to this unit. And we also geolocated the training area near a place called Pavenkovo. But you know how we did it, Aaron.

Aaron 4:33

No, I don't, because you haven't published any of your findings, and I don't even know how you guys did it. But I'm sure your team of wizards, Schmerler, was probably involved.

Jeffrey 4:41

No, this was pre-Schmerler. We did this about a year ago. We can't publish it because it's too obscene.

Other voice 4:46

It's too obscene.

Jeffrey 4:48

We used the equivalent of Russian Facebook. Oh, really? What is it called again? Yeah. VK.

Aaron 4:55

VK.

Jeffrey 4:56

VKontakte. Yeah. And it turns out these guys have published all of their pictures from their time there, and so you can get pictures of the SS-21s, and you get pictures of them, you know, being serviced. And then the other thing is Russian conscripts are pigs.

Aaron 5:16

So... As soon as you said obscene, I had an idea of what you guys were up to, but I didn't want to say it because I thought maybe my mind went into the gutter, but now I think I'm on the right track. Why are they pigs?

Jeffrey 5:27

Dude? Bag of dicks. As we are going through all of these pictures... Yeah? We find all kinds of pictures of, obviously not just the pictures they take when they're on the job, but the pictures they take when they're having fun, right? And so that involves a lot of sweaty, drunken men. It involves a lot of men on toilets.

They like to take pictures of each other going to the toilet, which I don't really understand. But my favorite picture is a guy with a bag of dildos. He's poured the bag of dildos out. And seems to be, like, counting them or inventorying them. And, you know, it became such a joke because, you know, then there are pictures which, you know, like, more seriously show those same guys, like, in their uniforms about to go out on a training deployment, right?

And, you know, we can sort of geolocate the areas of the different training deployments. But, like, it's got, you know, like, they've got all their kit laid out, you know, and we just imagine that, like, one of the questions is, you know, like, you know, Vadim, do you have a bag of dicks? It's like, yes, okay, we go, you know?

Like, why do you have a bag of dildos?

Aaron 6:46

This brings whole new meaning to all of that sort of subset of the arms control community that tries to explain these issues through penis size.

Jeffrey 6:55

Yeah, I got to tell you, just open source work on the Russian military is not safe for work. That's for sure.

Other voice 7:04

I don't know where to take this conversation so we don't lose our non-parental… Anywhere.

Jeffrey 7:09

The answer is take it anywhere.

Other voice 7:11

I don't want to get that warning on iTunes.

Jeffrey 7:13

Anywhere but here.

Other voice 7:14

I don't want to get this warning.

Jeffrey 7:18

Well, let me push this back into a little bit more positive direction. The reason that we do this, right, is we're trying to watch to see if the deployments are temporary, which is to say, in addition, also using satellite images to see if they really are just putting the Iskanders at the training polygon. And then shipping them home, or if there's evidence that then they're either making changes to the base where they would be deployed, or other kinds of open source information that would indicate that the Iskanders stayed.

Aaron 7:52

And when, if and when they do stay,

Jeffrey 7:56

We're interested to see if the Iskander is, in fact, the launcher for the INF treaty-prohibited ground-launch cruise missiles. So it's our way of looking for better open-source information on potential treaty violations.

Aaron 8:12

The bag of *** is just a happy bonus. A happy side note to once again raise awareness. Sort of overall assurances about the competency of the Russian armed forces. But I'll leave that aside.

Jeffrey 8:26

By the way, they also grow their own pot.

Other voice 8:31

What? For listeners, we really didn't talk about this before we started recording. This was all posted on BK?

Jeffrey 8:39

Yep. I mean, they're conscripts, right? So they bring their smartphone, they do their two years, they take all kinds of pictures, they leave the military, and then they put them up. But yeah, there are pictures of them in uniform growing. Which is exactly what you want when it comes to potentially nuclear-armed cruise missiles, right? Or nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

The Iskander can have both.

Other voice 9:01

We're having a lot of debates in this country about who should have their finger on the button.

Aaron 9:05

I guess we can have stone-dildo-loving Russians up there in an enclave with their finger on the button.

Jeffrey 9:11

I just imagine this guy is, you know, they're like in the Tochka launcher. It's, you know, like heading out to the countryside to start the nuclear war. You know, he's got the bag of dildos on the seat next to him. And, you know, he's got like Cypress Hill, like blaring on the stereo, you know.

Other voice 9:27

In all seriousness, you know, the deployments matter. I mean, there's two issues. I mean, the deployments matter because of the associated...

Aaron 9:36

INF-Glicem issue, but the Iskander itself, because of its range and where the Kaliningrad enclave is situated, gives the Russians, you know, I don't want to call it unique capabilities, but, you know, it's sort of a strike asset, you know, that... Does it circumvent or at least sort of go against, like, at least the spirit of the INF Treaty?

I mean, I know that doesn't make much sense because they... Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Jeffrey 10:02

Yeah, you know, early on, one of the big questions that I had when we were looking at the treaty prohibited cruise missile, right, which has a pretty serious range, is, is it really just a Kaliningrad problem? Which is to say, like, yeah, it stinks if it's sitting in Russia and they're violating the treaty. But, you know, Russia is now so far back.

And it has Belarus and Ukraine between it and Central Europe. Is it the case that the countries that would have been threatened by the cruise missile really still also would have been threatened by things like the Tochka, which are in Kaliningrad, short-range ballistic missiles? So was there some new capability? Like if you put this in Kaliningrad, then it can go all the way to Paris or something.

Other voice 10:55

Right.

Jeffrey 10:56

I think ultimately, though, you know, I've concluded that the Russians like the political aggravation that Kaliningrad causes. You know, it's funny, like the Estonians get really angry about it, but the Estonians share a border right with the Russians. So they're already hella screwed. It's just that. Just the idea, I think, of deploying things into Central Europe, I think that just the political message that sends is upsetting to some Europeans, and that makes Vladimir Putin and other people who are happy, it makes them happy, right, because they're angry about missile defense deployments and other things.

But having said that, there is this other question, which is, You know, what's going on with the treaty-prohibited cruise missile, because there's the second story, which is that the U.S. intelligence community believes it's not just that the Russians are testing the treaty-prohibited cruise missile, it's that they're producing the airframes at such a rate that goes beyond what you would need for a testing program, and that means they think that deployment is imminent.

Aaron 12:07

Right, and I'm going to pick up on – I don't think – I'm with you on that in that I don't think that the enclave provides – the deployment of Iskander in the enclave provides them with a capability that they wouldn't otherwise have. But what Kaliningrad does beyond the political optics is that it makes defense of those sort of outlying NATO Baltic states, Estonia being the most obvious – You know, militarily impossible, if you ask me, even from a conventional standpoint.

And so it's a very nice bargaining chip, if I were Vladimir Putin, never to give up. And then you can just needle and needle and needle with these deployments, whether or not they're training or whether or not they're permanent. And that chips away at this ultimate sort of goal, at least what I think it is, is to drive uncertainty within the alliance about ultimate security guarantees.

Jeffrey 12:58

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. You know, I mean, while you could... So the thing is, right, there are these two missiles that are causes for concern for the INF, right? The first is not a violation. It's just, it's kind of a... Well, since I've already said the word, it's a dick move, right? It's the... A dildo move.

Yeah, right. It's the... What is it? It's the RS-26, right? It's the... It's the first two stages of an ICBM. They tested it once with one warhead so it counts under the new START treaty, which is another podcast we should do. But then they pack warheads on, and so it looks just like an SS-20, which is the missile that the whole INF treaty was about prohibiting.

So they could always use that system if they wanted to target someplace like Paris. Then they could use that from Russia proper. I guess the idea is, you know, if the cruise missile, which is the actual violation, and we can talk about what it is, but if this new cruise missile that the Russians are reportedly developing, which is in violation of the treaty, it's got like a 1,500-kilometer range.

It's a proper violation. Maybe you could put it in Kaliningrad. It could go to, like, Paris.

Aaron 14:06

Right. It's a proper violation. And this gets us back to the Iskander and what you were just talking about before we went off. Yeah. Is... If they're permanent, your concern is that it's not just the Iskender. It's also the – we're just calling it the Glico. I'm going to call it the Glico because there are – what do you call it?

That's right. Missile designations, the Imkender-K, all that stuff. But then that could provide them with the different capabilities, as you just said. And so that's really the concern.

Jeffrey 14:37

Yeah, so it's a really thorny problem, but the long and short of it, and we should talk about the cruise missile itself, but one possible thing that's happening is that the cruise missile that the Russians are building that likely violates the treaty That cruise missile might be for deployment on the Iskander, right? So the Iskander has both ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

It has a 500-kilometer range cruise missile that is INF compliant. But it might be that it can handle this bigger one. If that's true, right, then under the INF Treaty, what happens is all of the Iskander launchers Become treaty-prohibited items. And so your ability to get the Russians back into treaty compliance becomes almost impossible because now it's not just that they have to give up this missile.

It's that the treaty requires them to give up all the launchers. And that's for the reason that it's super hard to verify. So unless you get to a point where the Russians either give up the entire Iskander force...

Other voice 15:42

Which they won't do.

Jeffrey 15:43

Or, yeah, you replace the INF treaty with something with even more stringent verification.

Other voice 15:48

Which they won't do.

Jeffrey 15:50

I'm waiting for you to say that, right? Then the treaty's in real trouble. And so I think, yeah, the treaty's in real trouble.

Aaron 15:58

That's exactly right. And it's something we brought up on previous INF podcasts on here is that, you know, Russia's sort of dissatisfaction with the INF was becoming – was always there. But I mean it's to the point now where I think they're openly daring us to basically say it's over and then have us withdraw. It's a wonderful thing Tim Pot dictators do is that they make things so untenable domestically in countries is that they can then blame you when your side pulls out because the thing is all but dead anyways.

And so we talked about this before. The idea is to try and strengthen it, even how difficult it is.

Jeffrey 16:36

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to me that on the one hand, there have been this series of leaks in the New York Times that have detailed how the U.S. intelligence community has come to think that the Russians are developing a cruise missile that has a range longer than 500 kilometers and therefore is a violation of the INF Treaty.

And that's all spooky stuff. And one of the big arguments you hear from the administration about why they can't persuade the Europeans to take a tougher line on this violation is that all the information that we have about this missile, You know, is super classified. That's a technical term, Aaron. It's not just that it's highly classified, but it's that the intelligence community doesn't want it released, right?

Yeah. But on the other hand, the reason we know about this on the open source side is they put out a press release.

Other voice 17:24

Yeah, they did.

Jeffrey 17:25

Yeah.

Other voice 17:27

Go ahead.

Jeffrey 17:28

Oh, so GOSNIP, right, the people who built the guidance system, Announced that there had been this series of tests, right? And it listed all of these missiles that we knew about, right? They were kind of known cruise missiles. And then they listed one we did not know about, the 9M729. Right. And that, you know, it's very hard to know what that cruise missile is, except for the number, right, would suggest it's for the Iskander.

Other voice 18:00

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 18:01

And it's clearly not the number for the 500 kilometer range cruise missile. You know, and so what is it? Right. And so I think on the open source side, what we've what we've concluded is that, you know, there's just really one cruise missile in Russia and it's the or one new cruise missile. I should put an asterisk because I don't know what the air launched, but there's the have you know, the caliber.

Aaron 18:25

I do, yeah.

Jeffrey 18:27

So, yeah, okay, so the way I tell the story is I say, like, there's one cruise missile made by Novator. I call it Ivan. When Ivan gets put on a ship and he's got a couple thousand kilometer range, he's known as Kalibr. And when Ivan goes on a Iskander launcher, he's going to be the 9M729, which is the treaty-prohibited ground-launched cruise missile, but that they're the same missile just with a different paint job.

And what makes this complicated is sometimes the Russians want to sell Ivan And so they sell sea-launched cruise missiles, and then they run into the MTCR. So they've got a reduced-range version of Ivan, which is called Club. Well, they call it Club, and that's got 300 kilometers. And because they want to obscure their noncompliance with the INF Treaty, They have a version for the Iskander that's 500 kilometers and complies with that.

And then they call that the R-500. But underneath it all, I think, is Ivan. Ivan is a couple thousand kilometer range cruise missile. It can be deployed on ships. It can be deployed on the Iskander.

Aaron 19:41

And they've been bringing it out of the garage recently, the Kalibr.

Jeffrey 19:47

Oh, yeah, they're definitely showing off the caliber. They're showing off the caliber.

Aaron 19:52

Sorry, that obstructs some of the things, some of the, they use the designations on the sea launch versus the ground launch one to try and obscure their own violation of the IONET.

Jeffrey 20:03

Yeah, I mean, I think having the caliber, I mean, having the caliber, you know, that is a missile that if you put it on a truck would be a violation of the INF Treaty. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, right? Because we did the same thing. Our Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missile is basically the same missile as the ground-launched cruise missile that we eliminated under the INF Treaty, right?

It's the same airframe. So there's nothing kind of... There's nothing untoward about the fact that a cruise missile is a cruise missile and it takes a relatively minor modification to put it on a ship or put it on a truck or put it on an airplane. But my guess is that the treaty-violating cruise missile looks a lot like Kalibr.

It might be a little different. I mean, I say it's all Ivan. You know, it might be, you know... Ivan's fraternal twin, Volodya, or something. But it's basically the same missile. Volodya, I like that.

Aaron 21:00

Yeah, I like that. It's something we talk about a lot. Do you think, and this is a question I genuinely have, is that the turn towards the INF violating Glico, I mean, is... Is in addition to being able to hold targets at risk in Paris with a different system, is also a reaction and move towards American missile defense.

And so in a way to blunt American technical superiority is also driving them – and the way cruise missiles can do that, particularly missile defenses, is driving them to invest in those systems. Because oftentimes when you hear about caliber – You know, sort of the dominant explanation for why they want to do it is to simply show off that they can compete with Tomahawk.

And I think that's wrong. I mean, I think there's partly something right to that, but I think the investment in cruise missiles, conventionally armed cruise missiles, is more than just trying to show that they can do the same thing as the United States.

Jeffrey 22:06

Yeah, well, like, this is Lewis's dictum. I mean, we, you know, I always argue that whatever concession you win in an arms control negotiation, you will regret it in direct proportion to how much you invested to get it. Yeah, of course. We fought really hard to keep sea-launched cruise missiles out of the START treaty. And won. Right.

And M1, and we have, I think both sides have wanted to do this, but we acquiesced to this. Fought very hard, or at least collaborated with the Russians to come up with very favorable accounting rules for cruise missiles on bombers, which is especially true in New START, right? Where a bomber counts as one nuclear warhead, no matter how many cruise missiles it carries.

We'll talk about that on Wednesday. Yeah, so we created this enormous incentive for the Russians to invest in cruise missiles. Then you layer onto that the fact that we're putting missile defenses in place that, you know, I think the Russian complaints about missile defense are... I don't want to say they're overblown. I think they are more complex than the Russians let on.

But they certainly want to be able to hit those missile defenses. And so, as our friend Dennis Gormley would happily point out, the missile defenses we built are not particularly effective against cruise missiles. So we've created this enormous incentive for the Russians to build cruise missiles. And they've done it, right? So they've put nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles on attack submarines, I think, so that they have an additional sea-based threat against the United States.

They've developed this new air-launched cruise missile, which I'm not fully sure what it is and have a lot of questions about. And it's not surprising to me, then, that in addition to the treaty-compliant cruise missile they made for the Iskander, That they've got a better one in their back pocket. Because we've created that incentive system, right? So when they say they hate the INF Treaty, which I think is true, and they hate it for lots of reasons, I think there's also this simultaneous kind of like, and we've got the missile right here, we just have to put it on a truck.

Aaron 24:20

Yeah, I mean, exactly. And what's interesting about this is that Are they calling our bluff? And so they have developed a system, at least that's what the leaks tell us, and they've agreed recently to this special verification commission about the INF to discuss these compliance concerns on their side. And then they're going to try and turn it around back on us on things that they think U.S. systems that are a violation, at least in spirit, of the INF Treaty as well.

Jeffrey 24:59

I don't know. The three issues they raise are armed drones, which they think should count as cruise missiles under the INF Treaty, which … It's wishy-washy.

Aaron 25:10

I don't mean to take the Russian position, but it's … I don't agree with it in the slightest bit because an armed predator or a reaper is not a tomahawk, right? The Russian air defense would take that thing down. But they are cousins.

Jeffrey 25:28

So I think that, well, okay, so the answer is what do we do, right? And we have called for a meeting of the Special Verification Commission. Cue the conspiracy theorists. Sorry, you know, every arms control treaty has some kind of bilateral or multilateral body to deal with implementation disputes. And although that's normally super mundane and boring, it seems like these always get blown out of control.

Like the New START, the Bilateral Compliance Commission, I think it was, or maybe it was Bilateral Implementation Commission, turned into this whole conspiracy theory. So we're calling a meeting. The Russians say they're going to show up, but they say they're going to show up to talk about all the violations, right? So one was armed drones, which I agree with you is kind of like...

That should be easily resolved as the kind of routine compliance matter where an unexpected technology that isn't really a violation of the treaty arises and you've got to account for it. The second is missile defense targets, which I also think is kind of ticky tacky. They feel like some of the boosters that we use as targets in missile defense testing.

Are treaty noncompliant. And I guess there's an element where that's probably true, but again, it's not, you know, we're not trying to defeat the purpose of the treaty. It's just that we have a couple of systems that, you know, you would definitely want to have confidence-building measures around. But then there's the last one, which I think is interesting, which is they want to talk about the Missile Defense Launcher

Aaron 26:57

The, the, the SM3 launcher that we're deploying ashore, is it, it's SM3? And they want to talk about the Mk41, which is, well, that's, that's the vertical launch system, right? So it's a generic thing. And one other thing I find interesting, it's the same system that launches both Tomahawk and, and the missile. Is that correct if I'm remembering?

Jeffrey 27:17

This is where we sit silently for Scott to go, yeah, actually.

Other voice 27:21

Yep, it's the common launcher for all Aegis-compatible missiles, including the, what is it, like the Sea Sparrow, the SM-2, SM-3, all variants of the SM-3 and the Tomahawk.

Aaron 27:33

See, that's so fascinating because, you know, within the Navy, we put everything to be sort of common launch tubes. Common launch system, the MK-41. And then when they built that thing in Romania, they basically just took an Aegis ship and just sort of parked it at a Romanian airfield.

Jeffrey 27:49

Oh, have you ever seen pictures of it? It physically looks like a ship. It looks like the tower of a ship. And they've basically arrayed the internal components. It's not exactly the same. I've actually seen a side-by-side, but it's close enough that any random person would be like, Wait, is there a ship sitting on that runway?

Aaron 28:13

They could have achieved the same effect by like taking a ship, like a retired ship and just sort of like put it up on stilts and just stuck it in the middle of the runway. It looks alive. But that's really interesting. That gives them wiggle room to talk about the Imkander launch recipe. And that's an interesting thing.

Jeffrey 28:29

Yeah. So I think this all goes back to The fundamental problem. You know, the Russians say, and we think that they're being crazy, but I think they believe that the existence of the land-based missile defense interceptors in Poland and Romania are ruses to have nuclear-armed Intermediate-range ballistic missiles that can hit Moscow and decapitate them. I think they truly believe that.

And even if they... Even I think if you can convince them that that's not the plan today, I think they are absolutely convinced that that's what we're going to do. And this is where I pause and note that that's probably because that's what they would do.

Aaron 29:26

Yeah. You know, I have some sympathy for their logic, even though I think it's totally insane. You know, the SM3... I mean, for all the crap-talking we do about missile defense, it's a pretty unbelievable machine in how close it can get to incoming missiles itself. If you were completely paranoid and you had the worst-case scenario plan and you were a Russian sort of nuclear strategist, why wouldn't you make the ultimate assumption that the Americans are just being stupid by trying to do hit-to-kill and not put a large explosion on top of these things?

Then they could really deal a... A blow to our second strike capability and therefore incentivize first strike or decapitation. It actually makes sense to me if you put yourself sort of in a little bit of a conspiratorial mindset and you have the worst case scenario plan.

Jeffrey 30:19

Yeah, so there's two things. I mean, there's one is that the launcher itself, right, could launch a sea-launched cruise missile like the Tomahawk. Right. And that, you know, used to come in a nuclear-armed variant and has a lot of range. So there's the question of whether you would know... That what was sitting in the launchers were, in fact, the missile defense interceptors.

But it's also the case, and David Wright and I, and by David Wright and I, I mean David Wright with me kind of encouraging him. You know, we looked at various models of the SM-3 as the burnout gets higher. And they, you know, start to get up to Moscow with relatively small nuclear payloads. So, you know, you don't have to be...

You don't have to give the U.S. too much kind of credit for being better than the open source information before, if you are already worried about this, you might start to get super concerned. But this is one of these recurring things where the Russians say it. You know, they apparently said it to Bob Gates, who repeated it, and people were kind of...

I mean, I remember U.S. officials saying he was shocked that Gates repeated the Russian statement because it should have been classified. But also, you know, Putin has now said it publicly that the launchers could contain INF noncompliant missiles or they could be quickly converted and that they wouldn't know.

Other voice 31:45

And by the way, right, we just did this with...

Jeffrey 31:49

With I think it was an SM2, right? I think we gave the SM2 a land attack mode. And so not that the SM2 has that kind of range, but the point is these technologies are all kind of the same and you don't have to be that paranoid. And so I think, you know, like in some ways it's the perfect metaphor for the relationship where all of these issues I think could be resolved And they could be resolved in a way that would be satisfactory from the perspective of Russian security.

But they require the Russians accepting that we're not scheming to cheat and destroy them. And I just think that is not mentally where Putin and the rest of Moscow is at the moment, right? So, like, all it takes is political will, and so therefore it's hopeless.

Aaron 32:42

Or President Trump could probably handle it.

Jeffrey 32:47

Yeah, well, that's, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't know. Scott, can you do a Trump voice? I'm not even. This is true. I got to tell you, those countries, they don't, they don't pay their NATO dues. We're going to take those missiles right out. It's going to be so fast, you wouldn't believe it.

Aaron 33:06

You wouldn't believe me.

Jeffrey 33:08

Believe me, you, you, you, so fast their heads will spin.

Aaron 33:12

Right. Oh, in all seriousness. And then you can see a sort of look. A reason for a new low-flying cruise missile to hold these things at risk. I don't mean to get too far into the Russian side. I think they're entirely paranoid, but one should expect that, particularly at a time when relations between the two countries are so bad.

And so putting in the same launch system, because that's just what we do. That's the way we launch our systems, is likely to turn heads in Moscow about what the hell the Americans are up to.

Jeffrey 33:50

Yeah, you know, I had often thought that we could have used the Russian concern over the possibility of nuclear-armed missile defense interceptors being used to decapitate them as like an opportunity to talk about command and control issues. You know, because the Russians, you know, my big proposal is that we ban nuclear-armed missile defenses because the Russians still have a nuclear-armed missile defense around Moscow, which is a terrible idea.

And they were terrified that we might have them. And so if you could build confidence that these things were not nuclear armed, you would also be building confidence that missile defenses were actually defenses and that they weren't covert ways of violating the INF Treaty. But I just feel like this now has gone so far and that the Russians are so invested that they are not giving up these systems.

And so it's not clear to me what we do.

Aaron 34:46

They have every incentive to insert poison pills. And so they have every incentive to agree to this, to the SVC, the Special Verification Commission. Because if they can make the treaty and our participation in it Essentially null and void, is that you incentivize voices within our own political establishment to pull out, thereby absolving the Russians of ever having to come clean of this, and then laying all the blame on our feet?

Jeffrey 35:12

Yeah, so that ends with kind of the thing that I'd like the U.S. to do next, right? And the Department of Defense has looked at a series of, I think, countervailing measures, right? Brian McKeon gave some nice testimony where he talked about the different baskets of things they were looking at doing. But, you know, one argument that Republicans on the Hill have made, and like, hey, look, here, I think they're right, is that we could sanction the Russian companies that are involved in violating the INF Treaty, right?

And so that's Novator, which makes the cruise missile, Titan, which makes the Iskander launcher, and Gosnip, which makes the guidance system. But the administration... Doesn't want to do that, right? They've been asked about it in open testimony, and they've said that they're considering it, but that they don't have plans to do it now. And they make an argument.

I find, I don't know, I'd be interested in what you think, Aaron, but I just think it's really uncompelling. They say that, well, they've talked to the Europeans about it, and they can't give the Europeans the intelligence that they would need to make a really convincing case. And the Europeans respond by saying, well, we're not parties to the INF Treaty, and so therefore we can't really sanction the Russians for violating it.

So we'd be sanctioning them on our own, and they think that that's not worth doing. That's a mistake.

Aaron 36:32

When I was living in Europe, I had a lot of interaction with German people. Air Force and military officers. They were really up to date on this issue. Some of them were friends of the pilot who would tune into the INS specific ones because it's of great concern to them far more than it is to us. I don't understand why we wouldn't share aspects of this intel with closest allies, especially when you could leverage American extraterritorial sanctions to allow Europeans to allow To affect European countries without having to have the European Union sort of vote their own sanctions in anyways.

And so you could get buy-in from sort of the big ones, sorry, UK, France, and Germany, and then a few others. You have the Balts as well. And then that way you could sidestep the southern tiers, or the Greeks, the Italians, and the Spanish, on sanctions-related issues. And I don't see why not on this, other than perhaps sanctions are an overused tool in the American arsenal.

Jeffrey 37:41

Well, you know, there are also... You know, I've been like talking to some colleagues. I also think there is a legal case to be made. I mean, I know the at a simplistic level, it's easy to say, well, there's, you know, the INF Treaty. That's a bilateral agreement between the United States and Russia. And it doesn't involve the Europeans.

By the way, Lewis's dictum. Guess who wanted to keep the Europeans out of the treaty? Right. Us. Because we didn't want to constrain British and French deployments. It's a whole other podcast. Yeah, but now here we are listening to how that's a problem. But, I mean, I think there are legal arguments, right? One is that the Soviets insisted that as a precondition of the INF Treaty that the Germans surrender their Pershing missiles, which were separate from the INF negotiations because they were under German control, right?

And so the Germans... Agreed to give up the missiles, provided that, and then they had a list of conditions, and they basically amounted to, I mean, the one was that there was a verifiable INF agreement, right? And so if the Russians are out of compliance with the INF treaty, then arguably the Germans have every right to get those missiles back, yeah?

Aaron 39:00

Yeah, why not?

Jeffrey 39:01

And so it seems to me crazy that the Germans can't make the argument, you know, within the EU, like, look, We have every right to ask for those missiles back with American nuclear warheads to be stationed here. If we have that right, isn't it better that we have some diplomatic tools to try to address that so we don't have to do that?

If we have that right, shouldn't we be able to collectively agree to sanction the Russians in the hopes of bringing them back into compliance with the treaty diplomatically instead of going this deployment route? So I feel like there are potential legal arguments. It's also the case that the EU didn't The EU didn't really exist in its current form at the time of the treaty, but there are lots of pan-European institutions which talked about how important the treaty was for European security.

So it just seems crazy to me. It seems to me that the European argument is really, if this is true, that this is what they're saying, that it's an excuse for not acting. That it's not a real legal barrier. And And that to me is in some ways worse, right? Because I don't care what we do to respond to the Russians, but I think the Russians have to know That by violating the treaty, they're going to meet a unified NATO response.

And so I actually think there's value, even if this is a little bit hard, there's value in doing something hard so as to impress upon the Russians that, yeah, we're going to take this seriously and we're going to work collectively in response to it. It's not a free lunch. You can't just go develop these systems and everybody's going to look the other way.

Aaron 40:38

It's a way within the NATO context I think it's something that they can all rally around. I mean, who wants to be under the threat of Russian cruise missile attack? Right, so it's something that you can actually get unity within the alliance on as well.

Jeffrey 40:55

Yeah, I mean... This gets to a bigger pod that we probably have to have on the future of transatlantic security and what it means today. But I think there is a really strong case to be made that the people who are trying to keep nuclear weapons relevant in European security are the Russians. And that ought to be an unpopular thing in Europe, and it ought to be a unifying thing in Europe.

And if we have to adjust our policy to highlight that difference, then I think we should do that. Because at the end of the day, the Putin people love these crazy far-rightists. Right. And we've got to build a coalition of people in the center right and center left who care about a strong transatlantic alliance and want to be able to see Europe as a kind of whole and free place that's, you know, like free from the kind of coercion that we see the Russians dishing out in Ukraine at the moment.

Other voice 41:46

But I think we can do that.

Aaron 41:48

I do, too. And I think that's a happy note. I think it's a positive note. I think it is, Aaron.

Jeffrey 41:55

Hey, Aaron.

Aaron 41:55

Yes.

Jeffrey 41:57

Thank you for helping us end on a positive note.

Aaron 42:00

Of course. That's part of my job here on the podcast, is to figure out the off-ramps so that we always end on a happy note.

Jeffrey 42:07

And Scott, thanks for being a super producer. It's what I do. And listeners, thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, please consider giving us a review on iTunes. It helps get the word out about our little endeavor here. And if you really like the podcast, we have a Patreon page. We could absolutely use your support.

And Scott, you've got some interesting things in the work for future supporters.

Other voice 42:35

That we do. We've got some new Patreon backer rewards that we're going to be rolling out in the next couple weeks once we get the details worked out. But they'll be pretty neat and unique to the Armed Control Wonk podcast. And fans of nuclear weapons and conventional weapons should pay attention for some neat swag opportunities that may come up.

Jeffrey 42:54

So, thanks for listening. Thanks for helping get the word out. And have a good weekend.