A Future for Arms Control?

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:18

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East, recently returned from the once caliphate, Andalusia. You were in Spain? That's where I've been for the past two and a half weeks. We couldn't really figure out our schedules because I think you have a class now. Were you slicing up eyeballs?

I was drinking a lot of wine and eating a lot of pork, which, if you know me, is my special place. And I was very, very happy.

Jeffrey 0:49

Olives were really good, too. I have always wanted to go to Spain. I had a friend just decide to, like... Off to Spain for like three years he like kind of like had this like okay little life and he was like I think I'm just gonna like ball it up and throw it in the trash and just like move to Spain and you know like kind of cobble together a living and I don't know that he's ever been happier than that

Aaron 1:16

Every time I go to Europe, I mean, the one time I tried to stay in Europe was when I went to this idyllic little village in Tuscany called Bagno Vignoni, which nobody's ever heard of. But a British friend of mine's mother decided to buy a land there and build a house, very under the Tuscan sun-y type house.

Process for her, and I went there and we stayed at this little bed and breakfast, and it's the only time I asked the bed and breakfast person if she would just keep me on as a handy person. She said no, but I tried a lot of pork and wine there too. well, sadly, we we don't get to sit here today and discuss all those wonderful things. We have to talk about nuclear weapons.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. And really a total misunderstanding or incoherence from this current iteration of the U.S. government about what to do about those weapons as we look down the future of arms control.

Jeffrey 2:19

Yeah, so for listeners, what we're thinking about discussing today is the situation with the New START Treaty. Because we know the subject sort of came up at Helsinki, at least in the most general way. And we know that there is discussion about extending the New START Treaty for five years. At this point, really the only functioning arms control agreement, you know, there may be at least the only functioning bilateral arms control agreement for controlling strategic arms.

There's going to be a meeting in October to discuss extending it. It seems like the topic did come up at Helsinki, although no one knows what the hell happened at Helsinki. And in order to figure out what the hell happened at Helsinki, the Senate actually doing its job. I mean, I mean, that is a compliment. Like, thank you.

Got the Undersecretary for Tea, Andrea Thompson, and the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, David Trachtenberg, over to Capitol Hill and asked them some questions. They didn't really get any answers, but I think we've got enough for a podcast.

Aaron 3:31

Yeah, and I think that's the place to start because for fans of the show and our regular listeners, we talked about New Start a lot. And I'd say the way that we both describe it as the treaty that was agreed to in a hurry with the expectation that even though it would last for at least 10 to 15 years, it would be interim in quotes.

And really a threshold to more robust, I think, discussions about even deeper cuts. And I think that's what the Obama administration was going for, but then we got the Trump administration.

Jeffrey 4:05

Yeah, you know, I actually think this is not really about trashing the piece of s*** treaty, but it's important in putting it in some context, you know, where when the Obama administration took office, the START treaty was set to expire. And the existing arms control agreement that existed, that's a terrible way to say that, but the Moscow treaty that the Bush administration had negotiated relied on the START treaty for verification.

And so the Obama administration actually had to rush in its first year to negotiate an arms control agreement with the Russians to replace START, basically to preserve as much of the verification mechanisms as possible. And As a consequence of that, The way that we looked at this debate was really kind of screwy because, you know, what Republicans had called for before the election when they thought they might win was a modest agreement, one that basically kept as much of the verification as possible and made really pretty trivial reductions in offensive forces.

And then, of course, it was... A Democrat negotiating this agreement. And, you know, like, I mean, suddenly Republicans decided that they were like against it, you know, so eventually they did get the Republican votes they needed. But it was it was this weird thing that happened where like the treaty that got negotiated was negotiated in a rush.

And the aims of the treaty were very low. And I think the resulting treaty was not very good. But that wasn't really the problem. It wasn't that this was an amazing agreement. It was that this was an agreement that would hold us over. It would preserve as much of the verification measures as possible and didn't really entail big reductions.

So it should not have been controversial. It was supposed to be easy. It turned out to be... The last arms control treaty I think that we're ever going to get ratified. You know, and it just, you know, it is what it is. And so now, as we've lived with it, we've started to see its flaws. And by the way, it's, I mean, I was expressing frustration about this.

You know, the flaws that the treaty opponents pointed out were invented and imaginary, and the actual flaws of the agreement, like, no one got around to.

Aaron 6:41

Yeah, and those flaws have come out sort of in this broader discussion about the end of arms control, which we've had before, but I think is worth bringing up again because what you're saying here is, and you've said it multiple times, is this may be the last treaty on arms control we ever get, or at least the one that can survive pummeling in a hyper-partisan Senate.

Jeffrey 7:01

Yeah, I mean, it's very frustrating if you go back and you read the opponents. You know, in a functioning political system, You would have had the treaty and its opponents would have understood it. But instead of opposing it for partisan reasons, they would have had a kind of well-developed theory about what was wrong with it. But like that didn't happen right what you have was just basically pretty shallow partisan criticism that was easily dismissed you know and and and and the treaty passed muster but then there was no debate about the deeper underlying problems that the treaty wasn't able to deal with and how you would go about eventually fixing those and by the way you know.

It's that's still true. Like the stupid framing from, you know, whatever. I guess it's almost 10 years ago now. I guess it's eight, right? Yeah, we're getting pretty close. That's why they're having these hearings. You know, was that it was a gift to the Russians, which is just. Absurd you know there's a there's a new from this summer you know there's a new op-ed opposing i shouldn't say new but there's an op-ed from this summer opposing the extension of new start titled don't give russia the gift of extending new start it's like you know the treaty opponents yeah like they're not doing their half right like they're not They're just sort of reflexively opposing it without really grappling with the challenges in the relationship that exists and like how we put into place an arms control arrangement.

Which is super frustrating to me because like Russia is on this like, you know, building spree. Building all these crazy systems, and there's like no serious, no serious discussion of using arms control to deal with like the intercontinental, the, the nuclear-powered intercontinental range cruise missile you know, the, the doomsday torpedo, all the crazy, the Russians are building. We're just kind of like shrugging our shoulders when you know like that's why arms control was supposed to exist.

Aaron 9:12

And to be clear, I mean, a lot of the criticisms that were out there about it and why in this partisan way that this was being called a gift to the Russians was that there was this assumption that the Russians were poor and were no longer in the business of building systems. In fact, they were in the business of Of decommissioning systems on their own because they couldn't afford them, and therefore, why would the United States self-limit because we're rich and they're poor?

And ultimately, that has proved to be the main problem, I think we would both say, of New START, is that we have this artificially high number on declared strategic delivery vehicles.

Jeffrey 9:51

Yeah, I'd say it's two things. I mean, one is that the force levels are too high Which both allows for the Russians to Merv the crap out of a bunch of systems, but also allowed them to violate the INF treaty because all of their, I mean, everybody knows that this is like my hobby horse and nobody in Washington cares, but I care.

One of the Russian ICBMs is actually an SS-20 clone, and it's an INF system. And the Russians are able to do it legally by counting it as an ICBM under start, and because the start numbers are so high, there's no penalty to them for doing that. But then I think the other thing is it just doesn't... It didn't account for like a whole bunch of crazy long range systems that we're now seeing be developed.

And I think like the nuclear powered cruise missile, which, you know, I think is having some problems. And so it's not a system that's likely to be deployed anytime soon. Yeah, I hope. Probably won't be effective anytime soon. Like that's... The new Star Treaty, as best I can tell, really has no way of dealing with a system or capturing a system like that.

So it's like missing systems and numbers that are too high.

Aaron 10:56

Yeah, I actually want to get to that in a second, but like... I think it's important to then bring this back to the hearing because what the hearing demonstrated, and again, the Senate was doing its job. They were trying to get answers about what was discussed at Helsinki because apparently, I think from the Russian side, one of the bullet points in the bilateral Trump-Putin meeting was future arms control, was that this administration, at least from their public testimony, doesn't seem to have settled on whether or not they should renew New START.

And I think that is ultimately, even though we have some problems with the treaty, I don't think we should let it expire either. Because again, it's one of those things where the purpose of arms control to use political ways to bind countries, even if the agreements aren't perfect, is being lost amidst this hyper, sort of almost running around like the chicken with your heads cut off idea that you have to counter the Russians in each way with aggression rather than, I would call it smart diplomacy.

Jeffrey 11:59

Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, there are a couple of things. And, you know, this just gets my general frustration with Washington. Right. Because I like everybody is enthralled to this stupid escalate to deescalate idea. And so it's like people are super worked up about Russia's nuclear forces, but they're like worked up about an imaginary doctrine that doesn't exist.

While, you know, like the Russian doctrine that does exist, which is awful, you know, is developing these science fiction systems that are designed to defeat missile defenses. You know, and which will... I mean, the phrase that John Steinbrenner used to use that James Acton has picked up, which I think is really the right phrase, right? They deepen that sense of entanglement where you have all these complex systems and you don't really understand how they interact.

And so you have this system that... Is, you know, just arguably not stable. And so, you know, like, my complaint... My complaint about the New START Treaty is not that it's... You know, it's not the complaint of the opponent, which is that it's too much. It's that it's too little. You know, it was watered down too much to get the votes of the opponents, which I guess you have to do.

But, you know, it's not a it's not a failure as a treaty because treaties are bad. It's a failure as a treaty because opponents made it impossible to negotiate a good one.

Aaron 13:24

Yeah. Yes. And then now the political space and our debate is even limiting something as simple, I mean, as renewing it for five years to give space to have serious discussions and thoughts about what the future of arms control should look like and how we would want to both sort of Imposed top-down bilateral stability on what is a highly tense relationship with the Russians and two where we would like to spend money on our own nuclear forces because that's the thing that always gets me is we're not well postured to play the Russian game because we want to spend money elsewhere and so if you don't capture these systems that they're building And they don't have any top-down restraints on where they're allocating money for new nuclear delivery vehicles.

And they're either operating in a gray zone within the treaty or outside the treaty entirely. We want to spend that same amount of dollars on conventional forces, missile defenses, something along those lines, and not on sort of new nuclear systems, if that makes sense. New nuclear systems, sort of these crazy, wacky things like a nuclear-powered cruise missile or the stealth drone torpedo that just wanders around the oceans to deliver radioactivity in ports.

Jeffrey 14:45

Well, I mean, I hate to sound like a broken record, but I... Actually, you know what? I don't mind sounding like a broken record. But, you know, I think this ultimately comes down to missile defense. Yeah. That, you know, the United States has been unwilling to negotiate. You know, the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty, which I think was the impetus for all these crazy Russian programs.

100%. And then the United States has been unwilling to discuss limitations on missile defenses. Yeah. And I just think it's not that complicated of a problem. If you were the Russians, the entire bilateral arms control endeavor Is worthless to you if it doesn't constrain missile defenses. If it doesn't include defenses, then you don't want any of it.

And I get the sense that because of our own political problems, we've never been able to understand that you can't refuse to count half the systems.

Aaron 15:44

The whole premise of arms control was one of acceptance of mutual vulnerability. And if you aren't willing to discuss missile defense because you think you can eventually build your way out of that vulnerability, you incentivize the other side, in this case being the Russians. To explore ways and to build their way out of the problem, which is to ensure that the American side is vulnerable to their attack.

Now, they may be paranoid about that. They may be entirely, you know, worst case scenario-ing, you know, for their own internal defense reasons. But there is an underlying logic that Pushes this forward. And if you're unwilling as we move forward in this arms control process to grapple with that basic reality and not bring in missile defense, you're probably not going to get very far and you're going to be self-limiting.

Jeffrey 16:37

It's one of the really frustrating things because I actually remember there was an article written by someone I like. So I'll only subtweet it, looking at the anniversary of the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. And, you know, the conversation was sort of like, well, you know... All the good stuff that the proponents of withdrawing suggested would happen, like in terms of getting better defenses, those didn't come true.

But neither did the direst predictions of the people who said withdrawing would undermine the arms control regime. And it was like, you know, I think it was like on the 10-year anniversary or something. And so it was, you know, the implication was 10 years was long enough to see the impacts of these things. And it really wasn't until this year that we like really started to see how fundamental, you know, the reorientation of strategic systems really has been.

So it's just like we've I think we ended up dismissing the idea, you know, like people used to say the ABM Treaty was the cornerstone of strategic stability and the Bush administration withdrew. We waited ten years and we're like, oh, the sky hasn't fallen. So that must not have been true. And it's like, no, that was true.

It's just the bill hasn't come due yet. And like now, now it's here.

Aaron 17:57

Yeah. So let's talk about that bill coming due, because I think it's again, it's linked to the congressional testimony about the the inability to articulate a coherent, future oriented agenda for arms control. The concurrent problems with arms control. You mentioned the ABM. We have the Russian violation of the INF. And then we have the press conference, you know, where Putin unveiled all these systems and you guys over at your shop have been tracking the nuclear power cruise missile and had some cool work over on NPR, the National Public Radio.

Jeffrey 18:39

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing that I want to talk about, I kind of want to end with the, the open source stuff, because you know, I'm pretty, I'm pretty excited about that, and that's like, that's gonna like, that's gonna be my happy ending. That'll cheer us up. but you know, it does seem like in Helsinki there was some kind of discussion about the future of New START.

I actually kind of think that, you know, in the same way that only Donald Trump is dumb enough to give Kim Jong-un a summit, only Donald Trump may be dumb enough and popular enough among Republicans to, like, cut a deal on missile defense, you know? And I kind of don't understand, like, of all the things that, like, of all the, like, ways in which Putin can make Trump do things, like, why doesn't he make him do this?

Not least because I just want to hear Republicans defend cutting missile defenses. Yeah. But, you know, my sense or what I understand is that while Trump is open to extending New START, he wants to find some non-Obama way of doing it. I mean, yeah. Because this is really about, you know, again, like the Iran deal, Donald Trump wants out of New START for the same reason that, you know, he watched those two hookers pee on the bed.

It's about undoing Obama's legacy. He's actually happy to have an arms control agreement, but it has to be his arms control agreement, and it has to be better.

Aaron 20:09

Again, if we end up in a place where he's willing to discuss missile defenses, you know, I mean, what bothers me is it just doesn't seem like there's a coherent process that's overseeing this. I mean, there's something to be done. You think there's no coherent process? But this is where process matters. I mean, you send your two, I mean, essentially middle management, you know, within the government bureaucracy in charge of arms control.

You're relatively senior people, and they're totally ill-equipped to answer because I don't think the administration has figured out what it wants to do, other than the fact that the most important person in the country, President Trump, is willing to make a deal, but he hasn't grappled with all that would take, what would necessarily have to be included, or at least what the Russian demands would be.

Jeffrey 21:02

Well, you know, I just I mean, it goes back to my fundamental concern that, you know, you don't have. You know, one of the two parties doesn't have a serious discussion about arms control. Right. They have an ideological opposition. And so then when those people are in positions of governance. They just, they aren't, I don't think they're really equipped.

And, you know, like, that's a kind of nasty partisan comment. But, you know, like, the kind of flip side of that is true, too. Like, it's not like I think the Democratic negotiators on New Start set the world on fire. So, you know, like... I just I just don't think that, you know, I just I'm not sure that the expertise, you know, whereas the Russians like take it very seriously and there is continuity and there are people who who do this over time and like they know what they're doing.

I don't I don't get the sense that that that we're quite as well equipped.

Aaron 21:59

Yeah, that certainly seems to be the case within Congress. There was a lot of turnover from historical memory on the congressional role in the approvals process for arms control agreements and even within the top levels of the executive because it's just something that – Atrophied, I would say, and this is one of your things that you say all the time, is like during the peace dividend years right after the Cold War is that that wasn't capitalized on because the assumption that things would always be good and therefore you can kick that cow down the road for more robust arms control because you could not foresee a return to an adversarial relationship.

Jeffrey 22:45

Let's talk about the good thing. The good thing is the Russians trying to pick the cruise missile airframe up off the bottom of the ocean.

Aaron 22:52

The good news is that they're struggling a little bit, and that's never good news. Never bad news. It's bad news that they're struggling. No, it's good news that they're struggling. I love it. It's good and bad. Throw money at this system. The whole thing is so absurd. It's like, just waste money. I'm all for that.

Jeffrey 23:13

Well, I think they're still going to waste money. So for listeners... And actually, a lot of this stuff, other people are doing in the open source. So we find these sites, and then they don't stay secret for long, which is kind of a battle for us. What do we want to announce when we see people on Twitter also finding the same sites?

But Russia has this nuclear-powered cruise missile under development. And we were able to geolocate the test site at Novaya Zemlya. And there's also, by the way, a sister facility at Kapustin Yar, where we think they don't do the nuclear part of the testing. But this summer, we saw the Russians pack up. They took everything down. And we saw crates show up and boats take the crates away.

And then we heard that the U.S. intelligence community thought that the Russians were doing a recovery effort because of the types of ships that were involved. And indeed, we used maritime tracking services to go watch. And, you know, the reports were there were three ships and, you know, we found three ships and one of them was a nuclear fuel carrier.

Which seems like the kind of thing that you'd use to bring back the radioactive airframe. So, yeah, I mean, it was a kind of interesting thing. I think some people say that, oh, the Russians are just packing up for the winter, which is not true, because the four tests of the system were done over the winter. They were done between November and February.

And so while it like Novaya Zemlya sucks to be at in the winter, I'm guessing that the Russians like doing it in the winter because it's harder for us to monitor.

Aaron 25:00

I was about to say it's probably because of the cloud cover, right?

Jeffrey 25:03

Well, ton of clouds, not much light for optical systems. So we actually worked with Airbus to put a synthetic aperture radar over that thing so that we could actually see through the clouds with no light. But sadly for us, what we caught was them packing up shop. So, you know, maybe they're moving it someplace else where we're going to have to find it all over again.

Maybe they're taking a break to go back to Capustin Yar and try to troubleshoot some of the problems. It's unclear. But, you know, the U.S. intelligence community said that, you know, all four of the tests were failures. The one that went the furthest went into the drink. We were able to figure out the trajectory it was going on, and we'd read how far it went and, like, yes, indeed, that would have been in the mouth of the Strait.

So, you know, I don't think that's a system that's ready for primetime. So, you know, like, it is kind of cool, like, watching them, like, try to develop one of these systems.

Aaron 25:58

Yeah, I mean, that's a good way to frame it. It's like the open source tools allow to track progress in ways that we used to have to read about in leaks. And the leaks probably weren't always as forthcoming as we would have wanted them to be.

Jeffrey 26:12

Well, and one of the things I really like to do, and one of the reasons we like to have a firewall between us and the intelligence community, is when NBC gets a story like that, and it's like, well, there are three ships involved. We can then go ahead on the open source side and look at the AIS tracking data and look at the satellite images and confirm that, yeah, that ship's there.

I mean, one of my favorite comparisons is we have a satellite image of one of the boats And then an AIS ping, and the AIS ping is in the exact location of the boat 18 minutes later. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, so you get this picture, and then a few minutes later the AIS pings, and it's like, yes, that's the boat.

And I did an overlay, and it's slightly misaligned, but you can see that it's the boat in the same place, and the boat's just out there alone in the water. You know, it's the only boat there and it's AIS pinged, which I, I thought, I thought it was pretty cool. So that was fun, you know, and, and it's nice too, because Grace Liu and and Anne Pellegrino you know, our, our future Dave and Melissa, right.

Our, our like rising stars did a ton of work on it. And Ann did a bunch of the interviews for NPR. So I think it's kind of like, We're watching a whole new crew come along, which I'm excited about.

Aaron 27:36

Yeah, that's cool. I mean, it's nice to cultivate new people to do really cool and interesting work, particularly because we need more experts on this field. But what I think, to close this thing out, and it's something that we've talked about before, but I think bears repeating, is it seems counterintuitive To self-limit on the U.S. side as a means to place restraint on the Russians that are strategically advantageous.

But I feel like it needs to be said because as we grapple with what future of arms control should look like, It should be lower numbers. I mean, that's like both from a humanitarian perspective and from a strategic perspective. And the definition of strategic systems should no longer be based on the discussions we had in the 1980s.

Do you know what I mean?

Jeffrey 28:31

Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, I think, you know, I mean, we've had this conversation before, but when the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty, And the Russians complained about it, the natural US impulse was to say, like, we'll just build more missiles. Like, this is no threat to you. You could just build more missiles, which is so foolish because, of course, the Russians wouldn't just build more missiles.

Like, it bothered them more than that. They then undertook all these crazy systems, right? And so the whole point... Is to get numbers down and to prevent all the lunatic ideas so that you've got a, you know, what you really want to do is move to a situation where the two countries have mutually reinforcing minimum deterrence. You know, that it is in neither party's interest under any situation to initiate the use of nuclear weapons.

And that requires eliminating all these crazy systems And bringing the numbers down, and at least to me, the core piece of that, the only way that you can bring the numbers down and get rid of all the other crazy systems is to not have strategic defenses. Creating the requirement to overwhelm. Or cap. That's a shitty way of saying that.

Right. If you have strategic defenses, the other side has an incentive to overwhelm, and that then puts you off on this path of high numbers and crazy types.

Aaron 30:07

That's right. And so this is a Russian position, at least it was on New Start, and at least future New Start was linking of offense and defense. That has to be something that has to be grappled with. Because as you just said, without a hard cap on missile defense, you incentivize the other side to build more missiles.

I mean, we talk about in the context of the Middle East, my bread and butter all the time. You put in more Patriot, you put in more THAAD, Iran will just build more missiles. You know, this is just, the Russians build much nicer missiles than the Iranians. I'll just stop there.

Jeffrey 30:40

Well, you know, I mean, yeah, well, stay tuned on that. We're sitting on some Iranian developments. That's, yeah, that's kind of interesting.

Aaron 30:51

Yeah, that's a tease. You know, with that, you know, I think we're done here, Matt. I'm done. All right. You know, and for... So if you are a fan of the show, you probably already give to our Patreon page, which is at patreon.com slash ACW podcast, where we are rolling out and have for the past... Mostly three weeks, been doing shorter, bite-sized podcasts called Brilliant Pebbles, where we talk about relevant arms control and non-proliferation issues that catch our attention but maybe don't merit a full 30-minute podcast.

On this latest episode, we talk about the latest Iranian missile test and how it seems to be built around this idea that you have to beat the Theater or you know you have to beat american missile defenses so for those that don't give just hop on over to patreon.com slash icw podcast and that's five dollars a month to get into our slack channel where we talk about a whole bunch of cool arms control wonk things if you're a student it's three dollars and you get access to our second podcast brilliant pebbles aaron Yes.

Thanks for joining me. It's good to be back. And thank you for listening.