Missile Materiel and Adventures in Munich

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

You guys, you are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, non-proliferation, and disarmament. 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. And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Refute Career Center for the Middle East.

Scott LaFoy 0:29

And I'm Scott LaFoy, and I just got to see a Kiam up close.

Aaron Stein 0:33

Yeah, so we've been bad. It was a long...

Jeffrey 0:43

Long winter's break for us. We've had lots of stuff going on. Aaron, you were skiing in Vail and got geolocated doing it.

Aaron 0:52

Yeah, I wanted to throw something out there for the Slack members because I felt bad because we weren't potting because I went on a three-week vacation.

Jeffrey 0:59

And I went to Munich for the security conference. And we've just been all over the place. And I thought this would be a good episode... Where we just caught up with some of the things that have been going on in our life. Proliferation Potpourri.

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Aaron 1:56

It's good to be back, Jeffrey. It's been a while. I mean, I was down at the other end of the world in New Zealand for the last two weeks of my vacation, and I have to admit I missed potting with you.

Jeffrey 2:07

I missed potting too. You know, there were any number of things that happened and I thought to myself, good God, this would make a good podcast. But I think of all of them, you have the best one.

Aaron 2:18

Yeah, I mean, I should start at the beginning. You know, I had gotten wind through a friend that the Nikki Haley show, Entel, of the Kion missile, they were making it open to journalists and think tankers. And so we jumped on this. And so we've been, you know, for listeners, trying to arrange this for going on, like, I think about three weeks over a month now.

Yeah. And unfortunately, well, fortunately for Scott LaFoy and I, is that we were able to go today.

Jeffrey 2:46

Yeah, unfortunately for me.

Aaron 2:49

But unfortunately for you. This is the one time where it pays to be on the East Coast, my friend. You couldn't make it out this morning. And so Scott and I made the trip out to Joint Base Anacostia this morning to go have our own tour of the Kiam, the Slash Burkan 2. I have to tell you, it was awesome.

Yeah. It was totally awesome. I was so pumped up.

Jeffrey 3:13

So let me say, we were not terribly skeptical going in. We did have a few questions. But from your language, calling it a kiam, I'm going to take it that you boys are now persuaded.

Scott 3:31

I'm fairly well persuaded. I think one of the things we talked about on and off pod a little bit was the spot where planar fins are supposed to go. And obviously, Qiam is sort of the only scud derivative that doesn't have those planar fins. It has a very distinctive little sort of bump where those go. And in person, it's a lot less ambiguous that those little bumps are there.

It was very good to see it in person to kind of get the The angles we needed to confirm a few things, and look at some serial numbers and some inertial guidance units and whatnot.

Jeffrey 4:06

For listeners who don't remember our obscure discussion of the nuts and the bolts of the missile debris that was put on display, the quick version of this is that when the Houthis started firing missiles at Saudi Arabia... I had a big debate with my staff where I looked at these grainy videos and said, I don't see planar fins.

And every model, every Megan model of the Scud has fins except for one, and that's an Iranian version called the Kiam. And if you're going to pop off those fins, Then you're going to need a different or a better guidance system connected to really effective actuators that can steer the missile and keep it stable. And so the real question was, is this thing that we're looking at finless?

Because if it is, then it's almost certainly Iranian.

Aaron 5:02

Yeah, and our hosts, I have to say, had done their homework on our own podcast. And so one of the first things that they brought to our attention as we walked in and the presentation began. And so you walk into the Hangar 1 on Joint Base Anacostia and off to your left is the missile. And one of the first things they brought to our attention was this planar fin issue.

And they pointed out, you know, the three bolts. That held on together. What were they calling it, Scott? You know, they had a name for it. The Windbolt Cover.

Scott 5:34

Windbolt Cover.

Aaron 5:35

Want to see anything else, you son of a bitch?

Jeffrey 5:38

Right. Nope, we're good. We're good. Nope, that's...

Aaron 5:43

So we have some ultra-graphic wonk porn photos that we got of that. But, you know, it's clear that, you know, of the open-source picks that you can match to the Keom versus... What is painted, you know, with that blue definitive color, Burkan 2H, you know, they have that same, I guess they're calling it wind bolt cover configuration.

And that was just, you know, awesome to see in person. I mean, again, I wasn't skeptical to begin with. I largely, I mean, I believed... The presentation, as was laid out, because it fit with our own open source analytical work, and it just looked like a Qiam. But then to see it in person is that you just got to get a feel for it.

And exactly, not through photographs, is that, yes, this is the back end of a Qiam. And you're able to move up through the missiles and, again, count all the ports just like you were on the pictures. And it has that Kiam color, you know, is what we were talking about in person. You know, that sort of desert brown, you know, skid mark brown, as I like to call it.

Jeffrey 6:48

And I think here's where you need to remind, we should remind listeners that, you know, this was like a little bit of a dinosaur skeleton. It wasn't all the same individual. Some of the debris was from one strike and some of the debris was from the other strike, but together it added up to a nearly complete missile.

Scott 7:09

Is that correct? That's correct. And they were very straightforward about that and showed us sort of exactly which. They were divided by pallets and they showed us which pallets came from which impact and whatnot, which is very helpful for sort of figuring out which ones were which, of course.

Aaron 7:24

Within the context of the presentation, they had some interesting data points that they shared with us about range. This thing flew about 940 kilometers, or at least had 940 kilometer range, which jumped out to me as, again, confirming a lot of the open source work that particularly your team has done, Jeffrey. Good to see. And then one thing that they pointed out, you know, something that we had talked about on the last podcast, is you saw those janky welds up close.

And, you know, it's far more striking to see, like, you know, the machine welds where they're like, you know, little dimes laid on top of each other versus sort of like, I guess, the gooey looking welds where it looks like a melted candle like around different parts of the missile. And that, you know, Whereas we focused a lot on that to sort of answer questions about where it was made, manufactured, stuff like that.

Was it welded together back in country, in Yemen, I should say. The thing still flew out to its expected range. So while the way it welds may not be fantastic, even craptastic gets you more or less what they were going for.

Jeffrey 8:36

Yeah, and I guess that the assumption there is still that they must have cut them up because they thought it would be easier to smuggle them in.

Aaron 8:42

They implied that in the presentation. I don't want to put any words in anybody's mouth, but I think they said that the assumption is that they were cut up for smuggling. Didn't shed any lights on the likely route of smuggling, but that they were smuggled. And then they pointed out something interesting too is that inside one component of the missile is that there is a quality control stamp.

Jeffrey 9:04

Oh really? That wasn't the stamp on the actuator and wasn't the marking on the circuit board in the guidance system? It was a third quality control stamp?

Scott 9:15

Yeah, it was in the junction box. There was a quality control stamp that not only had a QA marker, but was also dated using the Western calendar to, I believe it was 2015, which was very interesting.

Jeffrey 9:31

By the way, did you get any pictures of the two Russian components in the... In the Junction box, we've been having a lot of fun looking at those.

Scott 9:40

Yeah, I just got a lovely draft article from one of... That would be Michael Dutzman. Michael sent me a draft article, and we got something that's not in that. So I'm going to send that over after the pod to him because there were a couple of industrial components in that that I took a picture of that were not included in the article yet that were also of an industrial stamp that I'm not familiar with.

It's a bit of data that I don't know what to do with, so I'm going to send that over after this.

Jeffrey 10:10

Yeah, I mean, you know, they were just, the components are things you can buy online, and they're not particularly, I don't want to imply that these are, you know, that this is kind of evidence of Russian assistance. In fact, one of the interesting things is that some of them are quite old and past their shelf life. But I guess they still work just fine.

It's a really interesting thing to see all of the bits and pieces laid out like that.

Scott 10:36

Indeed. Did they have for the... I can't remember it. I don't have it in front of me. For the original presentation, did they have Warhead component or RV sort of slag and components laid out?

Jeffrey 10:48

Yes. In fact, I think we told the story on the previous podcast. I squealed like a child because one of the pieces of debris sitting on the pallet is a piece of debris that was seen at the Riyadh airport. And it confirmed our analysis that the warhead had separated, which isn't a surprise because at that range, if you don't separate the warhead, the atmosphere is going to do it for you.

But that, you know, the missile body had fallen in Riyadh, but that the missile warhead had gotten all the way to the airport, which was, you know, indicative that the Saudis either missed or didn't even try to shoot it down. By the way, you know, this is a kind of fun opportunity to say, you know, there was that second attack on Riyadh a few weeks later.

Mm-hmm. So Dave and I did the same analysis for that, and the Saudis missed again. It's exactly the same thing. The missile body fell in Riyadh. It clearly was from a different launch point because the kind of angle of attack is different, and the impact point was very different. Actually, I think... Incorrectly reported. I think the Yemenis weren't shooting at the palace the Saudis said they were, but they were actually shooting at a bunch of government buildings next to the military air base.

But again, the war had separated, and it nearly creamed a car dealership. We worked a little bit with the New York Times, and they sent a stringer over to check it out, but it was all blocked off by police who weren't letting anybody take any pictures.

Aaron 12:24

I think it burned a car. Oh, yeah. I mean, that could be also riots after the Super Bowl. You never know. Yeah. Go Eagles.

Jeffrey 12:33

But, you know.

Scott 12:34

Yeah, I forgot. That's right.

Jeffrey 12:38

Adam Rawnsley's celebration of the Super Bowl, by the way, has been totally incredible.

Scott 12:44

Yeah, he got me to shill against Aaron Maeda about it and had me sending him, so I got to be his personal Russian bot for the week.

Aaron 12:52

Speaking of Rawnsley, they were also prepared because Rawnsley and I had recorded our own follow-on podcast to the original Kion podcast about the drone and the drone boat and then the Tufan, the other three things that they had on display there. And, you know, while Scott was, like, macro shots of the... Just to set the picture, I mean, we're sort of jumping around, but just to set the picture, I was sweating, like, by the end of it because we had, like, 20 minutes to take photos, and so I was, like, running around in circles trying to take as many photos as possible.

So just to set the scene there, you know, and so, like, I was, like, taking as many pictures of the drone as possible, like, knowing full well that Scott would take pictures of the missile. But one thing that was really... Cool to see up close about the drone was the level of craptasticness of the drone becomes far more apparent when you can touch and feel the thing.

It's very light fiberglass and all of the components... Sort of seem put together basically from just cobbling things together that you could find in a hobby shop or things that you could source online or not very difficult. But nevertheless, even though the fact that it's decidedly low-tech, these things are ultimately used and are pretty effective on their side because of...

You know, just the asymmetric ways that they employ them. And so just touching and feeling the thing was really awesome.

Scott 14:29

I was particularly surprised on the... I mean, we didn't really cover this as much on the previous podcasts. Thought to be the Shark 33 boat, which they had the Shark 33 suicide boat components on hand to show, which was literally, you know, you say craptastic, it's like... Over-the-counter Garmin guidance systems with over-the-counter security cameras that the security...

I was actually pretty kind of impressed by the security camera where it's you let a security camera's built-in automatic motion sensing device guide a steering system and guidance system for the boat. So it has its own basically electro-optical terminal guidance system on a boat with a Styx warhead strapped to it. Like, there's some very clever devices going on.

They even turned on the guidance system and let it point at us. It was very interesting.

Jeffrey 15:25

I love the idea that they're pointing the guidance system. They pull out all the stops.

Aaron 15:29

And one thing that was interesting that they shared, too, was that the warhead on that drone suicide boat is from a Styx anti-ship cruise missile. You know, and so one thing that we've talked about on this podcast, you know, in our sort of ongoing homage to the great Dennis Gormley has been, you know, the proliferation of anti-ship cruise missiles and then the possibilities of conversion to land attack.

This is a different way of proliferating of those anti-ship cruise missiles and to use the warhead With these off-the-shelf guidance and optical sensors to do some serious damage to a Saudi warship. I mean, they had pictures and they told us, I think it was 12 meters deep penetration from that warhead on a Saudi naval vessel. And that is one of those really...

Interesting ways is that they repurposed something that we talk about on this program a lot, cruise missiles, into this asymmetric drone boat with the craptastic off-the-shelf systems.

Scott 16:34

I should note real quick, the guidance system itself was not off-the-shelf because the guidance system, they did have custom industrial circuit boards printed for them. That was the sort of... Secret sauce of it all was they did have special some pretty sweet guidance set up, but it was entirely surrounded by off-the-shelf systems. It was still 99 off the shelf. It was very impressive. You should come out. I mean, they're still doing the tours. I mean, you guys come out, you know. We'd go back with you. They probably have us. They were extremely nice. We went to the Burger King.

Yeah, they were very generous. I'm very happy they reached out to us with this invitation. This was very helpful for us, both from an analytic standpoint and very educational. I mean, it's not every day you get to see the inside of SCUD-derived missile systems. We have a lot of helpful data for future wreckage analysis that we could pull out of this.

This was very good.

Jeffrey 17:31

Yeah, I'm jealous because you know I'm a visual learner. And so the... Quality of work I could do if I could actually lay my hands on a damn scud would be so much better, just knowing my analytic limitations. And so I really... I was willing to move heaven and earth to get out there, but, like... You had only been back from Munich.

Not this semester.

Aaron 17:53

Your reason for not potting for, what, 48 hours? 24 hours? When we got the notification that it was on. Ugh.

Jeffrey 18:03

Yeah. I mean, you know, actually... So it wasn't all that enjoyable of a trip because I'm not sure what I'm calling it. Chancellor's Revenge. I had like four days. It was horrible. Basically, I had to keep up a pretty steady rotation of going from the meeting room to the toilet.

Scott 18:33

Last time you came back with some sort of nasty flu or a head cold because we did our live podcast episode. Then you just had the worst one going up there.

Jeffrey 18:40

Yes. Yes. It was terrible. You know, I think I pushed myself too hard because I actually did two really cool things. The Munich Security Conference, obviously, it's a very, very fun thing to do. And it's such a great meeting. And I mean, this was like a down year where we can talk about it down, not quality wise, but just down like the world sucks.

But I also popped down to Friedrichshafen to talk to our friends at Airbus, who we are expanding our collaboration in synthetic aperture radar imagery. I'm going to have to be a little bit cagey about it because we're going to publish this stuff. But just abstractly speaking, radar image pictures sometimes let you look through the roofs of buildings.

So you can see stuff happening inside buildings. We took a look at a North Korean site where it turns out there's a lot of landslides near a road. Because you can see the hillside keeps falling. You know, we looked at an Iranian site where we never see any activity, but you can actually see that the ground surface is disturbed when the trucks drive by.

So they're avoiding being out when satellites are overhead, but then at night they're out there driving around doing stuff. You can see all kinds of incredible things with radar images, and they're really expensive. Yes, they are. And so we have this... Very impressive. Well, impressive sounds like, I mean, to me it is impressive, right? This really amazing relationship with Airbus.

And I'm hoping that we'll do a lot of really interesting work. You know, we did together the... The Punggiri nuclear test site, where you could see that the mountain had subsided. And I think there's going to be a lot more of that coming. And so that was a two and a half hour train ride. Yeah, so I literally got into Munich at like six o'clock, had dinner, got up at five in the morning, hopped on the train, spent the whole day in Airbus because it was like a two and a half hour train ride, came all the way back, and then was really ill. Could you maybe talk about some of the nuclear-focused...

Panels at the conference and maybe some of your big takeaways about maybe the state of the transatlantic world here yeah I mean it was really interesting you know obviously because it's a European security focused conference the INF treaty was on a lot of people's minds and I think the thing I would say is that our allies are not persuaded you know the Russians just deny that they're violating the treaty and And we have not, it seems, persuaded people in Europe that this is true.

And by the way, it's certainly true that we haven't persuaded them that the cruise missile is a violation. We haven't done any work to persuade them that the RS-26, which I think is a very serious circumvention of the treaty, we've done no work to persuade them that there's anything wrong about that. Because technically it's legal, even though it's legal because we did a bad job negotiating the New START Treaty, I think.

So people aren't, you know, they're sort of abstractly worried that the U.S. and Russia, that like mommy and daddy are fighting, but they don't actually, I think, hold the Russians accountable. And it's muddied because, you know, the Nuclear Posture Review created a situation of moral relativism. Like, All the bad stuff the Russians do, there's now a, but you also do this bad stuff, and so you are equally responsible kind of attitude, which I think is really terrible.

I mean, it's... No matter what you think of the policy proposals in the Nuclear Posture Review, my read on Munich is we have just basically written a blank check for the Russians to do any horrible thing they want with their strategic forces. And they will say, well, look at the Nuclear Posture Review. And our allies will shrug and say, yeah, pox on both your houses.

So... Great job, guys.

Aaron 22:59

So that's surprising to me. So I think while I was down in New Zealand, and this may have been between one or two glasses of Pinot Noir, three or four, which are quite good from the central Otago Valley plug, is that the Trump administration is commissioning a study on the RS-26. I mean, do you think that that would be sort of a step in the right direction?

Jeffrey 23:19

I don't know. You know, I'm getting a little bit down about the... I'm a little bit down about the prospects of persuading people. You know, actually, I went to a nice luncheon that the Vienna Center, right, our Vienna office, it's technically its own institution, VCDNP. Uli, our guy at VCDNP, put it together. He's pretty awesome. And Steve Peiffer was the luncheon speaker.

And... You know, in the room, one of the things I wanted to bring up was, you know, because it was very much focused on the Glickham, the cruise missile, which is a violation, and I wanted to push that we also talk about the RS-26, which I think is an SS-20 clone. And, you know, folks weren't having it.

Although there's an interesting, like, I don't know, current in these, sub-current in these debates because people say one thing and you know that actually they're thinking another. Like a senior person from a foreign country, I basically said, you know, like, well, why don't you deploy your own damn cruise missiles? And that person sort of said, like, oh, we would never do that, but I actually know that that country is negotiating for the purchase of said cruise missiles.

You know, so, like, the discussion at its surface is not always the real discussion. But people were not, yeah, people were not Worried you know, it was, I don't know, I, I found myself like on the right wing of the room saying like, yeah, if the Russians were like building a two dedicated nuclear weapons systems to target me, like, yeah, I would want to do something about that, you know. And that made me like the crazed Cold Warrior.

Well, if you're on the right end of the spectrum, that spectrum is probably pretty left. But no, it wasn't actually. I mean, that's the crazy thing is I think politically I was probably the furthest left person in the room. But there was some weird signaling thing going on about like, you know... It's apparently very impolite to suggest that in the 1970s, US had to provide intermediate-range nuclear forces to Europe because only the United States had the technology to build intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles of any quality.

And to say that today, that that no longer holds, that European countries could certainly build, albeit conventional systems, but conventional systems of great quality... That they could base on land or at sea or put on aircraft. It was like that was not the right thing to say.

Aaron 26:09

What about other elements of the conference? You know, I know that, you know, there was some talk about, I think, disarmament panels and something along those lines, maybe just the general mood of maybe the U.S. and the Russian speeches that you saw. I mean, I think we saw snippets of the Lavrov and McMaster talks, but it's always different to see them in person than to just sort of read the transcript online or just snippets of it, you know, pulled for Twitter.

Jeffrey 26:33

Yeah, you know, it really is. ... Like, the Deputy Secretary of State, was it John Sullivan? He always looks confused. Like, I think it's just his resting face. Like, I'm not sure he actually is confused. But he looks perpetually bewildered. And he's this kind of, like, you know, short, like, fireplug of a man. And he's got this kind of, like, demeanor.

And it just like, you know, when you read it, it doesn't come through. But like when he's like saying these things and he's reacting and he has like approximately no poker face, you know, it just looks very different. So, you know, Kislyak... Gave the you know the big the big uncompromising you know speech which was you know basically go to hell although interestingly I kind of agree with Kislyak Kislyak you know he does a great job of acting offended you know like when you know he almost certainly isn't but he really went after escalate to deescalate which you know is this whole other conversation we've had poor Greg Weaver is like On Twitter, trying to convince everybody that de-escalate to de-escalate is a thing.

And, you know, Bruno Tertre just wrote a thing about how it's not a thing. Or at least not a thing in the way that people imagine. But Kislyak was, like, really worked up about that. Now, that was, like, the main angle of attack he took on the nuclear posture review. Right? That you've invented this fake posture for us to justify what you want to do.

Which is, like, you know... 80% true you know like like we've sort of like yes as it turns out like the Russians are doing like 12 horrible objectionable things but we've gone ahead and invented a 13th thing to be really angry about like which is probably weird You know, but Sullivan sort of, you know, he basically stuck to the talking points.

The one place where body language mattered was somebody mentioned the bloody nose. And Sullivan repeated the talking point that that was not really a thing they were considering. But it was his physical revulsion on stage when someone said it that was actually the most persuasive part of the presentation.

Aaron 29:05

So the body language match with the talking point rather than just sort of like when the eyes go blank and I'm just remembering memorized lines.

Jeffrey 29:12

Yeah, I think it succeeded in persuading me that at least from his perspective and, you know, government's big and there are different groups of people. But, you know, and I OK, I'm biased because I've always thought this was somewhat of a bluff anyway. Yeah. But it persuaded me that from his perspective, he felt like the language had gotten out of control and that it had created an impression that was not accurate and he was unhappy with it.

But, you know, like I've never met the man in person. So, you know, his stage demeanor may just be his stage demeanor. And, you know, I mean, who says I'm any good at reading people? But it was my impression for what it was worth. The other thing, though, was B. Finn's talk, right?

Aaron 29:52

Yeah, I was going to say, because you tweeted about that. Maybe we could just talk about that. You had a tweet about Beefin's talk, and we've talked about Beefin, and she's a former guest of the pod?

Scott 30:03

Yeah, she was on an episode with Andrea a while back.

Jeffrey 30:07

You know, this is always hard because there's a certain amount of subjectivity involved. My impression was that when the panel with Sullivan and Kislyak and there were a couple other characters finished, that the room more or less cleared out. I was sitting next to a colleague who said, well, that's not really fair. It's the end of Saturday.

It always starts to clear out. But there was a step down. People who wanted to hear Kislyak and Sullivan were just not interested in sticking around and hearing from the hippie. I think that's a fair thing. They just took off. And I think more to the point, Nick Burns, who was presiding, had to, like, clink a glass with a spoon and tell people to quiet down and show some respect.

Because, you know, like, the conversation was sort of, from the break when the one panel ended, kind of spilled over into the beginning of their interview. And... You know, I know technically she is not the Nobel laureate. The organization is. But I think that there's a certain amount of civility and respect that she's owed. Whether you like her opinions or not...

You know, I would think that a person from a tiny office that's like three people, right? That got the Nobel Prize in our field. Like, you know, like sit down, shut up and, you know, listen. You don't have to agree, but like politely listen. And Burns had to like shush people. And I just, I don't know, to me...

It felt like there was a failure to engage. You know, that people just did not want to hear what she had to say. And in fact, when she finished, no one asked a question. Burns had to call on someone. And then it sort of, you know, conversation picked up. I think Vartan Gregorian said something nice about her, and that was kind of, maybe there was one question, and that was it.

And it just, it really struck me that, you know, I've had this long-running idea that our failures in terms of diplomacy, right, our failure to confront Russia's violations of its treaty agreements... Is a broader failure to build a constituency within Europe for resisting Russian aggression. And I think the reason for that is because a lot of our policymakers grew up in an era where you built that constituency in the center to the right.

And today the Russians own the right. You know, all these right-wing politicians are tools of the Russians. And they still have their friends on the left. You know, there's still Gerhard Schroeder, you know, fussing around. And we just... We have to build a different coalition of human beings. And that different coalition of people involves people on the center left who are very uncomfortable with nuclear weapons.

And so I think instead of shaming the Russians about their increased emphasis on nuclear weapons and this litany of horrible systems they're building, we kind of made common cause with the Russians as nuclear weapon states against the Beatrice Fihn of the world. And the problem is she's eating our lunch. You know, she's winning over a lot of people.

And I, you know, I don't think this treaty is ever going to go into effect. You know, I certainly don't think the U.S. or any other nuclear weapons state is going to sign it or give up nuclear weapons under it. But it is going to complicate our extended deterrence and our diplomacy. And it's going to be a pain in the ass.

And at the end of the day, everybody's going to be pissed at her, but they have no one to blame but themselves. And, like, this was a perfect example of that. Like, not paying any attention to her. You know, like, she's kicking your ass. You should at least sit there and see how she's doing it.

Aaron 34:25

You know, we've talked about this on the pod before, and I think it loops back to your original thing about INF and sort of brings everything, you know, full circle is, I guess, questioning old assumptions about how these things will be solved, particularly as we, sort of the Transatlantic Alliance, gear back up to To think about the Russian threat and our subset of this, you know, the arms control challenges, the arms control escalation.

You don't want to use escalate, de-escalate. Sort of the escalation scenarios and the way nuclear weapons are being thought about, you know, is... You know, it's not enough to just go back to the way, to how we were doing things before and that this idea... I like this idea, the way you frame it, is that the right wing has been captured in certain respects...

By Russian propaganda. And in order to build back up consensus on nuclear weapons issues, you have to grapple with the uncomfortable things, particularly as advocates of nuclear weapons, as the nuclear weapon states are, that more and more allies are getting more and more comfortable with disarmament. And so your toolkit is just a lot different.

Jeffrey 35:38

And what I don't understand about that discomfort is, I mean, to me it seems like such a natural argument. You know, like, there is a centrist, center-left coalition in Germany of people who are deeply uncomfortable with nuclear weapons. And if we were doing, not even doing more, but just talking about nuclear weapons in a way that was not fundamentally alienating to them, it would be so much easier to then turn around and point at all the s*** the Russians are doing.

And being like, that's the problem. Look, it's a violation of a treaty. Oh, look, it's a circumvention of a treaty. Oh, look, it's an underwater torpedo drone that's designed to douse cities in radioactive sludge. These are horrible, horrible things. Who's the problem here? But the problem was that the Obama administration started this with this idea that disarmament was something you do with the P-5.

And everybody else needs to shut up and get out of the way. And then it's like, that's, that's, that's actually confusing our friends and our enemies, you know? You know, okay. The French and the UK, like those are our friends. But, but the Russians and, and to some extent the Chinese are not. And, and, you know, like we ought to be building building a Consensus view on nuclear weapons that's capable of commanding a majority in our most important allies, and that would include Germany and Japan and other places. And I just feel like we're not doing that. I have a positive thought. Okay, no, I'm just gonna ask you your last. I'm just the last question because I'm genuinely curious. You know what'd you come away thinking about?

Aaron 37:30

Again, just the state of the transatlantic relationship. We are the Atlantic Council, something that we think a lot about here. Just to foreshadow my own thoughts on this, I think that there's a lot... Of hyperbolic rhetoric around it. But when I look at the nuts and bolts of it, I actually think we're better off than we were five years ago, but we're worse off than we were 25 years ago, if that makes sense.

So I'm just curious now that this is, I think your second year going, you know, you see it in person in ways I do not more granular in your days. What did you think? I mean, it was bad.

Jeffrey 38:05

It was not a, it was not a happy meeting. You know, actually, often when I think about happy events for meetings, I think about, you know, meeting people who are good and interesting. And kind of the revelation of this meeting to me is Tobias Bundy, who's the head of policy and analysis at the Munich Security Conference. I got to talk to him a little bit.

He is really talented. And, you know, like his tweets after it are a bummer. You know, and I think he's a kind of an example of a person who's focused on, you know, this liberal international order that we had built together. And I think it's under quite a lot of stress at the moment. I think Dan Dresner, who was there, also tweeted this, you know, that like so many people made reference to that liberal international order.

And I think it was... Clear I think for most of us that that that's that that's what's collapsing and it's you know I mean it's easy to blame the the Russians for assaulting it but like the reason Russian propaganda is effective is is is precisely because we have big swaths of this country You know, that are, are enthralled to Trumpism and, and, and big swaths of the UK that voted for Brexit.

And you know, I think there is a deep concern that you know, Merkel is bleeding a lot of, a lot of votes off to the right to the Aufdeutsch Nazis. So, you know, it's it, it, it, it did not feel good. It did, it did not feel good. And I feel like we need a If we're going to reestablish a consensus, it's probably going to have to be in a different part of the political spectrum than it was 25 years ago.

And that means appealing to slightly different people. Now, maybe that's broaderism because, like, I am that person. You know, it's like, come over here. I think we could build a coalition on the center left more so than on the center right. You know, maybe, maybe that's broaderism, but I, I just think that, you know for all of the Trump administration officials trying to act like this is normal, it's not normal.

You know, it's not normal and it's not the basis of a transatlantic consensus. And so I think if we want to preserve that, I, I just, I just think that you know, it's on the center left. And, and that means talking about nuclear weapons in a different way.

Aaron 40:27

So we need a positive thought. I mean, I already offered one in that New Zealand piano noirs were a revelation.

Jeffrey 40:32

Hobbit houses make great bomb shelters.

Aaron 40:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do too, and... You know, it's very warm down there because it's their summer, and so I got to escape it here on the East Coast.

Jeffrey 40:44

My happy note was I got back from Munich, and I stopped f***ing so badly.

Scott 40:52

I have no idea how I'm doing the edits for this episode. I have no idea what the tone of this episode is now.

Aaron 41:03

Well, it's like our New Year's catch-up. We didn't do a proper New Year's show because of our travel schedule. And so this is the first Arms Control Wonka 2018.

Scott 41:14

And we still got... What else we got to talk about? Not today, of course, but people be looking for... We've got Nuclear Deterrence Summit, which we got press passes for and was very interesting. The podcast went... It's not really on the road. It's on the blue line. So I guess that didn't really count. Yeah. For those of us who live...

I don't know, man.

Jeffrey 41:32

With the way the Womata works, that was... Jesus Christ. I mean... Did you get a survivor's medal? I survived the blue line.

Scott 41:45

But we got some cool stuff out of that. Lots of good life extension and... Jokes between the national laboratories. We've got a Chinese interceptor out of Corla again, which we did an episode about that a while ago when y'all were doing cool work on that over at California. Hopefully we'll have some new stuff on that soon. And then what was the other big one we were talking? I feel like something happened in North Korea recently. Did something? Does anyone know any missile event that happened in North Korea recently, or is that just me? No, I think we're, we've been clean for a while. I mean, there was a parade.

Jeffrey 42:19

Oh, God, that feels like a billion years ago.

Scott 42:21

Yeah, it does, because 2018's as long as 2017 already. We have a big parade. We've got to talk at least a little bit about someone's Iskander-alike.

Jeffrey 42:30

Yeah, well, we got to measure it. I mean, we, you know, so many of these things, I mean, not to, I'm not going to go substance, but so many of these things that have piled up now, I think we have to look at carefully.

Scott 42:42

Very, very, very carefully. The DN3 launch in particular, and the, you know, the weird solid fuel looking SRBMs out of North Korea, both are like... There's a lot of weird little points of data that can be very easily linked together incorrectly to draw the incorrect conclusion that probably the people with the data want us to draw. So we got to take those one step at a time.

Jeffrey 43:14

It's nice if we put our confirmation bias on display, but it's better if we actually do the work first.

Aaron 43:19

Yep. So I guess the happy note is that we have a full plate for 2018 and we're back in the game. We are.

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Jeffrey 44:11

Have things over on the Slack channel, Scott. I haven't dropped in in a while because I've been, you know, occupied with number three. The Slack channel is good as always.

Scott 44:20

We actually had during Juche Fest this year, during the North Korean Army Building Day Parade on February 8th, we actually all sort of got together and found appropriate streams and we're going to kind of as a community watch through them. Before we got the bait and switch where they didn't show the entire parade. So instead, as a community, we watched through like two hours of North Korean documentaries and propaganda that KCTV put up, and it was incredible.

So if you would like to be part of maybe the most niche... Possible community available and essentially the now the equivalent of twitch watches kctv together for five dollars a month or three dollars a month if you are a student you can support us over at patreon.com slash acw pod and get access to our awesome slack channel

Jeffrey 45:13

And we're now up over $2,000 a month, which means we're going to start doing our satellite imagery.

Scott 45:19

We have been shopping around for that for this month, finding something cool, because we want to get something that's... Interesting but not inaccessible. So it's something that like, I don't want to get like, oh, this is burn scarring, guys, like, this is going to be something that the community can use and be interested in, and is not like the kind of dumb granular stuff that we get really excited about, but really has a very marginal usage. And also, if you're hanging around the Slack channel.

We have quite the number of pictures from our DoD visit of the Qiam short-range ballistic missile. How do you pronounce it, Aaron? Tufan? Tufan. The anti-tank guided missile. The drone that has a name. Kassif one man it's very clear what my specialization is the Kassif one and the shark 33 suicide boat so we've got a bunch of these fancy pictures we're sort of going through them now making sure which ones are actually came out well which ones I messed up because I'm a bad photographer and we're gonna post a number of these on the slack channel so come hang out it's gonna be a good month for imagery

Jeffrey 46:36

That's so awesome.

Scott 46:38

Aaron, Scott, thank you for joining me. See, I would say the same, Jeffrey, but you didn't join us today. F*** you.

Jeffrey 46:50

You son of a b***h. Let me tell you where you can put that kiam, you bastard.

Scott 46:58

I'm going to stick this kiam right into your Riyadh International Airport. Ah,

Jeffrey 47:07

And thank you for listening.