Reviewing the Nuclear Posture Review

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

Take a f***ing hammer to the smartphone. 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 0:24

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East, calling today from a very wet and rainy Philadelphia. It's sunny and beautiful here, Aaron.

Jeffrey 0:37

I knew you would say that, but we have to start the show talking about weather.

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Aaron 1:13

Yeah, Sonny here. It is 64 degrees, so last week it was down in the teens, and so it feels like I'm in the tropics, so I actually feel like I have better weather than you do.

Jeffrey 1:25

Well, I'm just glad that you're getting some sunshine because it means all of the people who've been in their little windowless offices cranking away on the Nuclear Posture Review, now that they have finally come up for air, their pallid complexions are going to get a little sunshine.

Aaron 1:44

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's Friday. It is January 12th. Can we call this Nuclear Posture Review Leak Day?

Jeffrey 1:52

Nuclear Posture Review Leak Day. Well, it's a pre-decisional draft of the Nuclear Posture Review, which has been leaked. And so maybe Cheeto Jesus is going to get his big thick nub pen out and write, I want to nuke whole countries all over it. But short of that, yes, I think we have a leak of the Nuclear Posture Review, which to me looks plausible.

Aaron 2:18

The document is entirely what I would expect a right-wing, sort of more hawkish view on nuclear weapons document to look like. And so I'm not all that worried about it.

Jeffrey 2:29

Yes, I do think we should talk a little bit about what nuclear posture reviews are, because my sense is that we are sanguine in part because we think of this document as doing something very specific. But I, I think that the best summation of what this document is was provided by Survival's Matthew Harry's, who, who I am a big fan of and his quick take was, lots of this, I can't say it in his plummy British accent, but lots of this is not my cup of tea at all. It's not quite as bad as might have been feared, and it's more swamp than Trump.

Roughly what any incoming GOP administration would have written, albeit on the hawkish end of that spectrum. And I think that's about right.

Aaron 3:20

Yeah, you know, I wish I could say it as well as he did. And I think he tweeted that too. So he managed to fit that all in 280 characters, which is pretty fantastic.

Jeffrey 3:28

Yeah, I read the tweet, and I will admit I added a few words here and there that he omitted because he would never, never be so careless as to speak in real life in the slapdash way that one does on Twitter.

Aaron 3:44

Yeah, well, I think a good place to start, too, is to talk about what the NPR actually is. I mean, it is a policy document, but I would say it's more aspirational rather than marching orders, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey 3:58

Right. So, you know, this is a really stupid thing that has been done. And over the course of the summer when Hillary Clinton said she was going to do a nuclear posture review, actually I think it was written into the Democratic platform, I was screaming my head off, don't do it. This is a really dumb idea. I think people get the idea that this is something every administration must do because the last several have done it.

But, you know, that's not at all accurate. The reality is this is the fourth nuclear posture review, but it is really the first one that was undertaken voluntarily on the basis of this, I think, really dumb idea. That new administrations must do nuclear posture reviews. You know, the first one, the Clinton administration undertook it voluntarily, but it was part of the bottom-up review process.

They had this whole comprehensive look at U.S. defense planning after the Cold War, and they kind of separated the nuclear piece into something called the nuclear posture review. And by the way, it was a catastrophe.

Aaron 5:10

Yeah, it didn't go very well.

Jeffrey 5:12

It was led by Ash Carter. And Jan Nolan, in her beautiful little book, Elusive Consensus, details this. Carter, at the time, you know, we think of Ash Carter today, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, or now former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who's very pro-nuclear. He was an assistant secretary who was close to Bill Perry, who was the deputy.

And he... He really tried to lead the elimination of the ICBM force and got worked by the bureaucracy. Yeah, absolutely. And so that nuclear posture view was a total catastrophe and it produced nothing other than a slide deck. And when the Clinton administration actually needed to look at making reductions and rewriting the guidance for the employment of nuclear weapons, they did another study.

But this time they didn't do a nuclear posture review. They did it out of the White House. I mean, I like to joke that... The first nuclear posture review was such a disaster that the Clinton administration decided to leave in place the Reagan-era guidance to fight and win a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, a country that no longer existed.

Aaron 6:24

Yeah, and then was the second one the Bush administration won, the one that also leaked as well?

Jeffrey 6:29

So what happened was there was this big fight during the Clinton administration where the Congress, controlled by Republicans, had, in a National Defense Authorization Act, prohibited the president from making cuts to U.S. nuclear forces. And this was... A source of a lot of stress because basically, there was a start to agreement, but it was clear that the Russians weren't going to ratify it.

And when they ultimately did ratify it, they ratified it with a bunch of poison pills. But when Clinton got to the end of his second term, Republicans in the Senate were willing to let up a little bit. And basically what they did was they agreed to remove the restriction once another nuclear posture review had been completed. And it was really a stalling tactic, right?

So that basically scheduled the review for the beginning of the next administration. No one knew who was going to win. But basically, they said, okay, we're going to take this restriction off, but we're going to play out the clock on Clinton. And as it happened, Bush was elected, and then he got to do the posture review. By the way, the same thing happened with Obama, which is turnabout being fair play.

A Democratic-controlled Congress hated the robust nuclear earth penetrator and then the reliable replacement warhead programs. And so during the debate about the RRW, Again, restrictions were placed on the president, and then ultimately what congressional Democrats agreed to was they would be willing to consider a reliable replacement warhead once another nuclear posture review had been conducted, which ran out the clock on Bush, and then Obama inherited it.

It was a really stupid thing because Obama also inherited the expiration of the START treaty. And so they had to do a mini posture review over the course of the summer so they could go ahead and negotiate the New START treaty. And then they followed it with the big nuclear posture review. And so, like, you know, my observation is nuclear posture reviews have actually always been a way of wasting time.

Aaron 8:38

They're a bureaucratic tool to play, you know, to use the term football with the nuclear arsenal, you know, to try and at least impart your own ideological views on what the arsenal should look like.

Jeffrey 8:49

Well, but they do. They waste time. And so, you know, as a consequence of this, the reason I was very against a Clinton administration doing another nuclear posture review and why I was very happy that Trump decided to do it is, you know, they burned up a whole year. There was a whole year in which they could have been doing all this stuff, but instead they spent a whole year talking about the stuff they're going to do.

This document is going to drop in a few weeks. And my guess is, because of the way the budget process works, the budget will have been basically fully developed. Yeah. And so they may have slipped in a little money for some of the stuff they want to do, but they're really not going to be in a position to take anything from this review, which is, as the name says, just a review.

It's a study. It's recommendations. Recommendations will not implement themselves. You know, the Obama administration did a 90-day implementation study. After the nuclear posture review? Do you know how long it took? I actually don't. You tell me. This is great. Linton Brooks started calling it the increasingly poorly named 90-day implementation study. The longer it dragged on, it took almost two years.

So Obama didn't sign new guidance on the employment of nuclear weapons to replace the Bush guidance until June 2013, which was... In his second term, so like a Nuclear Posture Review is a good way to piss away a full term, because now they're gonna have to shift over, and you know, you could have a Democratic Congress in power before any of this stuff gets done. Yeah, and just to put a fine point on it, the way I think about it too is that

Aaron 10:38

It's a review. It's aspirational. You can sort of conceptualize it as a wish list. But in order for that wish list to come to fruition, somebody has to pay for it. And so as you move forward, we already have the 2018 NDA moving forward. And as you just said, the budgetary cycles don't work in favor. Particularly, I believe, because this is a leak, it's supposed to come out after the State of the Union address, if I'm remembering correctly.

Jeffrey 11:06

Yeah, I think I've heard February 2nd. Right. Although, you know, who knows when it will actually drop. But, you know, one of the things that is really interesting is so now they've burned an entire year on this. Review. Now they have a review with some recommendations. You know, they could very easily burn another year trying to figure out how to operationalize these things, starting these programs, and they really won't have any serious money until the next budget cycle, unless they were really clever, which, you know, honestly, nothing about this administration has struck me as really clever.

And so, you know, that and that That budget process, which will then, you know, if you assume that it is in the budget that will drop a year from now, you know. Yeah, 2019. You won't get any of that money for a year after that.

Aaron 12:04

Right. And that's conceptually start of 2020? Yeah. Which is presidential election year.

Jeffrey 12:11

And at that point, you know, I mean, maybe they get another four years, but like they are... They are on exactly the same path that the Obama people were, which is just spinning their wheels, pissing away time. Which is fine. Like, that's why you do a nuclear posture review. I mean, like... Maybe people have forgotten that's why you do a posture review, so they'll be totally disappointed that they're wasting time.

But the point of these things is to waste time. They're not actually in any way, shape, or form correlated with policy change. If you want to change the policy, you just effing change the policy, right? You don't spend a year having meetings about things.

Aaron 12:58

Yeah, let's talk about what's in it, because if you do view it as like maybe a hawkish right-wing wish list of what the arsenal should look like in certain capabilities, there are things that jump out of it that, I mean, I guess are indicative and analytically interesting in that this is how they conceptualize nuclear war. I'm talking about the low-yield Trident D5 and then the nuclear arms slickum.

Jeffrey 13:22

Yeah. So I think for most listeners, the two proposals that come out of this, which, by the way, were clearly going to come out of this. I mean, they were flagged in that 2016 Defense Science Board report. You know, this idea has been kicking around a long time. And in some ways, they are analogs to the kinds of things we saw in the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, which was also a sort of wish list.

One is an effort to resurrect nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles for attack submarines.

Aaron 14:01

Let's talk about maybe just a brief history of what those things are and how they went away, because I think that's important in this background.

Jeffrey 14:06

Right, well, so let me just put those two things on the table. It'll be a new nuclear slickum, and the other thing is a low-yield option for the D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile. But let's talk about the new slickums. You know, in a way, this is exactly the position of the Rumsfeld Defense Department, which is the Rumsfeld Defense Department every year directed the United States Navy to plan for a replacement for the nuclear-armed Tomahawk, which was going to retire in 2013.

And you know what the Navy did? Every year they said, yes, sir, and then didn't do it.

Aaron 14:43

They had a study on a study.

Jeffrey 14:46

Right. And so, you know, like, it's cute that Jim Mattis thinks that he is going to say we're going to get a new nuclear-armed cruise missile for our submarines. But, like... He is not the first out-of-touch old man to do this.

Aaron 15:09

He's a lot more witty in his comments than a lot of those people, so give him some credit.

Jeffrey 15:14

Oh, he's charming and wonderful, but like... I suspect the Navy is going to work him because they worked Rumsfeld. Like, they don't want to do this. And, you know, like, unless he's really willing to make this his full-time job, I suspect the Navy is going to slow roll this sucker.

Aaron 15:37

Yeah, and we should say that because they'd rather spend their money elsewhere. And I think that's the point.

Jeffrey 15:44

Yeah, I mean, this gets into really interesting questions about operational issues. You know, one of the best or funniest lines is this report of this task force that was set up in the wake of one of the many incidents involving nuclear weapons where... It was a, it was a task force of led by Jim Schlesinger. All right.

But mostly civilians and, and, and, and former, former military folks who are now, you know, tie wearing muckety mucks in DCs. You know, they complained that the military kept using military effectiveness as a criteria for nuclear weapons. So maybe they're not, they're not militarily effective, you know, and it's, but you don't understand the political value. It's like, Oh man, So this is your non-falsifiable claim, which I think gets to kind of my broader complaint with the document as a whole, which is there's a lot of asserting that the world is a certain way, but it's only going to persuade people who already believe these things.

And we'll talk about escalate to de-escalate because that comes up in this context of the low-yield D-5. But for the nuclear-armed cruise missile, there are real operational constraints associated with cruise missile guidance because you don't want to GPS guide them for fear that someone will spoof the GPS.

Aaron 17:17

I think that's important to underline. Yeah. Within the nuclear mission is that GPS isn't really used.

Jeffrey 17:22

Right, because you don't want someone to spoof the GPS and fly the nuclear-armed cruise missile someplace else.

Aaron 17:28

Right.

Jeffrey 17:29

Which, you know, may have happened with one of the drones that the Iranians got their hands on.

Aaron 17:36

I think it's pretty well documented is that, you know, GPS, especially unencrypted, is easily spoofable. And one aspect of this was that the Iranians landed a stealth drone the U.S. was flying over. Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:48

Yeah, I mean, I think the details of that are pretty unclear, and everybody is... I think there are people who dispute that that is what happened. But I think conceptually, just... Generally speaking, you can see the problem, and so there's been a real reluctance. And so what that means is that the nuclear-armed cruise missile didn't take advantage of GPS-like conventionally armed cruise missiles, and instead it used inertial guidance and terrain contour matching.

And the problem with terrain contour matching, or TURCOM, is missiles... Are looking down and trying to figure out where they are by matching a digital model of the terrain to what's beneath them, in the course of doing that, right, they fly into mountains.

Aaron 18:32

Yeah, they go, they clobber.

Jeffrey 18:34

Yeah, they clobber. That's right. And so, you know, you could see in the Gulf War with conventionally armed cruise missiles, they would fly these really long ingress routes over Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which are these kind of roundabout routes into Iraq because they could not fly over flat, featureless desert. And ultimately, they had to suspend some of those cruise missile firings because those cruise missiles were clobbering in allied countries.

And you can, like, you know, like North Korea is small. And so if you're going to use a nuclear-armed slickum against North Korea, you're going to have to fly it over Japan and South Korea so it figures out where the hell it is. And then you're going to run the risk that it's clobbering, which is not a trivial risk.

You know, it was a couple percent. And the Navy was just like, no, I don't want to do that. And so this idea that, I don't know, listeners will know this always annoys me, but I really don't like the idea that we would spend money on a system that the Navy has decided is not militarily effective on the grounds that it makes the Japanese feel good.

I just cannot accept that spending money in a suboptimal manner And reducing our overall military capability can in any way, shape, or form be reassuring. That's just crazy to me.

Aaron 19:55

Yeah, but that's the argument made in favor of the Slicum is that it's a reassurance tool, particularly for the Japanese. And you can see that it would be tied to the North Korean issue as a means to try and revive it.

Jeffrey 20:07

I mean, but it's literally like saying, like, we're going to take this pile of money that could be spent on our defense and we are going to light it on fire. And that will be like such a grand and romantic gesture that the North Koreans will see how much we love Japan. Like, I like I don't I don't like this is not how my brain works.

Aaron 20:25

Yeah, and ultimately, I think you have widespread, because it was retired in 2013, and I don't think it's coming back. I think it's staying in retirement. Even though there may be some training in the gym, it'll ultimately decide not to come back and enter the wild again.

Jeffrey 20:42

Yeah, I mean, you know, the program may limp along, but my guess is the Navy's going to slow roll this. The other one, which is really clearly foreseen in the Defense Science Board report, is the idea of a low-yield setting for the D-5, which is... Your favorite missile. I love the D-5, but... If I find myself in a position where I'm advocating that the United States launch a large number of nuclear-armed D5s at the Russian Federation, it ain't going to be with a couple hundred tons of yield.

Aaron 21:23

Yeah, I mean, so we should... The justification given for the low-yield option on D5 is that this would be... A more credible means to retaliate, or at least to retaliate against this idea that the Russians would escalate to deescalate in a conflict along NATO's periphery, particularly the Baltic states. Would you say that's an accurate summary?

Jeffrey 21:48

Oh, that is precisely the argument. And by the way, in fairness to the Trump administration, who we are about to paint as baby-eating war maniacs, the Obama administration believed exactly the same thing. And their solution was slightly different, but to my eyes, not any better, which is, you know, the new long range strike or long range standoff, right?

The new cruise missile, the warhead for the new cruise missile was going to have a variable yield. And so, you know.

Aaron 22:24

You should say air launch cruise missile.

Jeffrey 22:25

That's right. So whether it's an airplane responding to this Russian escalate to de-escalate with a cruise missile that explodes with a couple hundred tons of yield, or whether it's a Trident submarine launching a ballistic missile that... Blows up in exactly the same place with exactly the same you know, few hundred tons of yield. It is exactly the same idea conceptually, and, and I think that they're kind of equally dumb. And I should mention here that amongst like real Russian security experts, of which you know I am not

Aaron 23:05

There is confusion and at least heavy questioning about whether escalate to deescalate is actually their policy. So we are going back to one of your earlier points. We are asserting that this is their policy. Whereas I would say that there is argument about whether this is actually their policy. And so is escalate to deescalate more an American boogeyman to give ourselves new capabilities?

Jeffrey 23:26

Yeah, I don't. I mean, I have seen all the same evidence, and to me, that evidence is utterly not compelling. Me too. You know, it is a few stray comments by officials that if you squint hard enough and ignore the context, you might be able to cobble into a doctrine. I think the most I would say is that there are...

People in Moscow and some people in the DC area who think about nuclear weapons in this way yes and so it's not that there it's not that you couldn't find anyone who thinks this but I actually think this isn't less a Russian idea and more an American idea about the Russians and so you know quickly in one sentence what it is Oh, sorry, the idea is that we're fighting a war with the Russians and they're going to engage in a limited use of nuclear weapons, which escalates the conflict in order to cause us to back off because we will either have to be faced fighting them while they are using some nuclear weapons and we are using none, or we will then have to escalate to a much larger nuclear exchange, which we don't want to do.

And it gets back to my... Like what has happened is not that really the Russians have said that they want to do this. It's that we have this really unique American habit of trying to plan out scenarios, which by the way, like nobody else does. Right. Where we're like, well, what if what if they hit an airfield and it was an airfield with no one around and it was, you know, 100 tons.

And so, you know, the village was far enough away. So it only broke glass. Then would our nuclear threats be credible? You know, and like we engage in these like like grad school seminar type debates. I just, you know, this is why I like French deterrence theorists. Like, they don't do that. You know, it's like, wait, I'm sorry.

Did a nuclear weapon go off in France? Yes. Okay. F*** them.

Aaron 25:36

Yeah. I mean, the scenario is that they would pulverize the Baltic states and that escalate nuclear weapons in anticipation of a NATO counteroffensive. And therefore, they could settle the terms of the conflict on their own, to settle the conflict on their own terms before NATO could overwhelm them with conventional superiority. I think that is sort of the generic scenario.

And within that are these wonderful scenarios we build about... Using small nukes on airfields out there in Romania or something like that.

Jeffrey 26:07

Yeah, so the way that I conceive of this is, you know, we have a culture in the United States of trying to imagine the most demanding employment scenarios because we have this kind of like classically McNamara view that, you know, like you can't have a credible threat unless it's based on a credible plan. And that really is like our strategic culture.

But it is such a hyper-rationalist worldview, and like, look, I studied under Tom Schelling. I mean, I have been wasted in the man's house. I love the guy, right? Like, he gave me my beautiful espresso machine for my wedding. Like, That is a worldview that is native to Cambridge, Massachusetts between 1962 and about 1974. I don't think anybody else really looks at the world this way, and I just don't think it's credible to imagine that if we used a 10 kiloton weapon instead of a 100 kiloton weapon, or a one kiloton weapon instead of a 10 kiloton weapon on an airfield in Russia, That that is really going to be meaningfully different in terms of its escalatory potential.

Because one, you don't know that the Russians will know exactly how big it was. And two... It's going to be this really complicated information environment where they're making broad assessments about not just what has been done, but where the war is going. And so this idea that you can signal in this way and have it be received and understood perfectly where, you know, Putin says, well, you know, if it'd been 100 kilotons on that airfield, I'd have been really sore.

But like, you know, it's one kiloton. And so I'm good.

Aaron 27:58

Like, it's just crazy to me. Their early warning would pick up a Trident launch. They wouldn't know what's on the what's on the warhead until it detonated.

Jeffrey 28:07

Yeah, and I think ultimately this gets back to my bigger complaint about the document as a whole. And it's not that they want new cruise missiles, which the Navy doesn't want because they have some crazy idea about what reassures our allies. By the way, anybody who thinks that the nuclear-armed cruise missile Is, what, like, 1% as important in terms of alliance management as just the crazy shithole that is Donald Trump?

Aaron 28:36

Seriously. I mean, it's the Twitter feed versus the cruise missile. The Twitter feed's more important.

Jeffrey 28:43

I mean, like, seriously. I mean, can you imagine... Sitting down with someone and being like, okay, so the Japanese are really alarmed, as are the South Koreans. I can either begin a 10-year process of deploying a new nuclear arm that will be associated with some attack submarines, which may occasionally be in the Pacific, or I'm just going to take a hammer to the smartphone.

Is there anybody in the world who would be like, look, the Twitter feed is distressing, but really we need the cruise missiles. Everybody would be like, take a f***ing hammer to the smartphone.

Aaron 29:19

That's right, the hammer only costs $2.

Jeffrey 29:23

So that's an instance where they have this, I think... You know, very DC-centric view of reassurance that emphasizes nuclear weapons to the, you know, exclusion of all the other factors that are, in fact, more important. And similarly, I think with the D5, again, this is very DC-centric. Well, here's what we worry that the Russians might do, and so we're going to believe that the Russians are doing it.

Like, that's what bothers me about the document, is it's not that the Ideas are the end of the world because they're not. We have had nuclear-armed cruise missiles in the past. We have low-yield nuclear weapons. It's that the Sophistication of the worldview they express is deeply disappointing to me. This document really doesn't provide any insight into the nature of our nuclear predicament.

And I worry that what it shows is that to the extent that the building is thinking about this stuff at all, they're not thinking Thoughts that are very insightful. And so, you know, it's kind of a symptom of a policy that's going nowhere, whether or not we end up building these two stupid nuclear weapons.

Aaron 30:48

Before we wrap up, can we talk about the graphic and what we picked out from there on the Twitter feed?

Jeffrey 30:54

Yeah, that was cool. I have to say, see, this is one thing I like about the Trump administration. These people are willing to name names.

Aaron 31:03

Yeah, some rare praise on the podcast. But yeah, absolutely. We've talked about this before with the INF.

Jeffrey 31:09

Not only was Chris Ford willing to go out and give us the Russian designation for the SSC-8 screwdriver, but the chart showing foreign modernization programs confirms, as far as I know for the first time, The existence of status six the autonomous underwater vehicle carrying a large thermonuclear weapon that i guess is intended to drench manhattan in a radioactive slurry yeah and it's made famous because i think they released it by letting pictures being taken over somebody's shoulder at a russian nuclear conference Yeah, you know, it had been leaking to Bill Gertz that they had this program under development.

And then the Russians went ahead and let, I mean, I don't know. I think we're all fairly skeptical it was an accident, but it's possible it was an accident.

Aaron 32:08

I don't believe it was an accident at all. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Jeffrey 32:13

I think that's probably more likely than not. Yeah, there was a slide showing a lot of details about this thing. And the thing is, the camera briefly focuses on it for a moment, so you can dig this out. But I think a lot of Russian experts were quite skeptical that this thing existed. Maybe it deserves its own podcast.

But I think I said at the time, and the Nuclear Posture Review confirms that, nobody in the Pentagon's laughing.

Aaron 32:43

Yeah, no, it's right there. It's nuclear modernization since 2010, and it's in the Russia column. It is black and white, but you can tell Russia, and it's in the sea-based column. A little graphic.

Jeffrey 32:53

That is why I ultimately get frustrated with this document, because on the one hand, I am glad that they are identifying some of these systems, and my sense is there are more systems out there that should have been included. But we should stop pretending that we aren't also modernizing our forces.

Aaron 33:08

Yeah, that's bull fecal material.

Jeffrey 33:12

It's absurd. You're building a new ballistic missile submarine, like an entire class of them. And we are building a brand new nuclear capable bomber. And we have a new cruise missile that is under development. And like, okay, those things haven't been done yet. But we are spending vast sums of money on them. And, you know, regardless of what this document says, we will spend even more vast sums of money on them.

Aaron 33:41

We are not falling behind is what I think you're trying to say.

Jeffrey 33:44

Yeah. So, I mean, I am a little annoyed. I mean, look, this document is unclassified, which, by the way, so was the Obama one. The previous documents had been classified, but the Bush administration learned their lesson because they classified it, and then it immediately leaked to Bill Arkin, who published all of the juicy bits. Yeah, it was fun.

I think it made them look slightly crazier than they were. I don't think the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review was as bad as the excerpts made it look. But this one is clearly going to be released in an unclassified form, which is good, but it also means that it, it is, it is really a press release, you know, and there's a lot of bad DC conventional wisdom that bleeds through which I will have a lot of fun mocking over the next, you know, six months, but you know, having said that, like I do think that you know In a world in which it might very well have said, you know, had a heading for whole countries that were going to get nuked.

You know, it's what you would expect from a hawkish Republican administration. You know, it is not... The mainstream in America is not where I would like it to be, but this is not outside of that mainstream.

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Aaron 35:44

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I am shocked but pleased to see that we have journalists who are now actually signing up. So, you know. Yeah, it's the place to be. It's the digital online place to be. Well, thank you for joining me and thank you for listening.