Low-yield Nuclear Testing in Russia?

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

It's like that meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at one another. 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 0:26

And I'm Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Jeffrey 0:32

How was Turkey, Aaron?

Aaron 0:34

Good. It was good. It was nice to leave the continental United States for a little while. Nice weather out there, always good food, and it's good to be back.

Jeffrey 0:45

Yeah. So I was just in Singapore. It is also good to be back. I was sitting next to someone having a pretty sumptuous Cantonese meal, and he was regaling me with the joys of Turkish food. Oh, really? So just know that Turkish food is beloved the world over.

Aaron 1:08

Yeah. No, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I'd recommend everybody try it.

Jeffrey 1:13

I don't know what the segue from Turkish food to low-yield nuclear testing is.

Aaron 1:19

Maybe there isn't any other than it's good to be back and there's been a lot of news since I was gone in the Wall Street Journal and there's all sorts of speakable material going on.

Jeffrey 1:28

Yeah, so for listeners, you may recall that there have recently been some allegations that Russia is conducting very low-yield nuclear tests. And we wanted to go back and revisit that because it touches on a bunch of work that we have done in the past, including some work I did at the New America Foundation on coming up with a way forward for ratifying the CTBT, up to and including the work that Anne Pellegrino and I did On Nevaeh's Emily.

And by the way, Anne sends her regards. She is swamped at work today.

Aaron 2:03

Yeah, so she got the day off. Well, just doing work. The day off from the pod. The day off from the pod. Yeah, but no, no. I think the best place to start is, like, you know, the U.S. made an allegation about Russian actions, about very, very low-yield nuclear testing. And I think the broader context of how the allegation was made and the whole allegations are worth discussing as the opening point for the podcast.

Jeffrey 2:28

Yeah, you know, the rollout for it was a pretty classic Washington – leak is probably the wrong word because all – Not all. The information at least initially was cleared for publication, although there is a leak involved. But it's a pretty classic structure. So the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA, beloved by us as do it again – He was giving a talk at the Hudson Institute organized by Rebecca Heinrichs.

And in his talk, he had a single sentence that is drawn from what appears to be a new intelligence estimate asserting that the Russians are conducting very low-yield nuclear tests.

Aaron 3:22

The United States believes that Russia probably is not adhering to its nuclear testing moratorium in a manner consistent with the zero yield standard.

Jeffrey 3:31

That's right. That got picked up by the Wall Street Journal. What's interesting is there are two Wall Street Journal stories. The first Wall Street Journal story – Is based on seeing Ashley's remarks before he delivered them.

Aaron 3:46

Right, so that's the leak you were talking about.

Jeffrey 3:48

Someone either at DIA or the Hudson Institute or who saw the presentation, maybe when it was being cleared in the interagency process, we don't really know. Someone sent that information to Michael Gordon at the Wall Street Journal, who then, of course, showed up at the talk, which I suspect he would not have otherwise.

Aaron 4:10

Yeah, that's true. These talks get given a lot in Washington. So it's not always worth leaving your lunchtime cubicle.

Jeffrey 4:18

Right. And he then asked Ashley a question. And strangely, Ashley got nervous and started to backpedal. Yeah. No, it was interesting. Exactly. Yeah, that's online. You can actually watch it. And he sort of retreated from that sentence because Gordon asked him pretty directly, like, are the Russians doing this? And he really just said that they have the capability to do this.

Aaron 4:44

Right, and I think it's important for listeners who aren't as nerdy as we are to describe what type of testing that we're talking about before we dive into this.

Jeffrey 4:56

I know, I always skip over this, and it's so difficult. And it's difficult in part because it is hard to define these things, but the long and short of it is There are nuclear explosions that we think of as like the classic nuclear test. The big boom. Right. There are much smaller experiments that can be done, including experiments that don't produce any yield at all.

So subcritical testing where there isn't enough material or there isn't the right kind of material for there to be any chain reaction. That's obviously not prohibited by the CTBT. Right. There's hydrodynamic testing, which also doesn't produce any yield that's not prohibited by the CTDT. But then there is this class of explosions that are almost entirely the conventional explosive.

And that would be permitted, but you get a tiny amount of yield, a few kilograms. The US wanted permission to do up to four pounds, which is like nothing. Those are kind of an interesting class of experiment. The Russians did a bunch of those experiments during the test moratorium in the early 1960s in the United States we didn't find them that interesting we didn't do as far as I understand it nearly as many as the Soviets did but then obviously once the test ban was negotiated that Prohibited underground nuclear testing, there had to be kind of a discussion.

And we'll talk about this, I guess, maybe later.

Aaron 6:52

Later.

Jeffrey 6:53

In terms of how they went about defining it. But really what is at issue is these tests that are too small for the U.S. to detect seismically. In a way, it's the perfect allegation because the Russians may or may not be doing them. I'm certainly not willing to say that they aren't because they had a big affinity for them in the early 1960s when they were living under a test moratorium.

But because you can't detect them, it's easy for somebody who hates the CTBT to say that they are doing it because you can't prove that they're not.

Aaron 7:28

Right. And we'll come back to why that matters at the end of the podcast. But I think just one thing before we pivot to is why this would be intrinsically valuable. Because when I was following this on my Twitter feed, and we'll talk about this, it was like, okay, we've accused them of doing this before. But second is for the non-initiated into the nerdiness of very small yield nuclear testing.

Is why this would be ultimately be of in their interest you know because they're like oh russia's conducting nuclear weapons explosions oh my god freak out rather than like this this isn't as scary as it sounds yeah you know there are kind of two ways of answering this question the from a u.s perspective

Jeffrey 8:17

Hydro nuclear tests are not considered valuable. The United States did not do a large number of them in the past, even when testing was allowed. When the test ban was being negotiated, the Jasons, the independent scientific group that for many years was asked by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to provide independent opinions on things, they looked at this issue in 1995 and said that a persuasive case has not been made for the utility of hydronuclear tests for detecting small changes in the performance margins of current U.S. weapons.

The National Academies looked at that issue as well. They also concluded that they didn't think that these experiments were terribly useful. At the same time, the flip side of the question is... The Russians or the Soviets did a lot of these experiments during their test moratorium, and that was a surprise to the United States because we don't consider them very valuable, and we don't fully understand why they decided they were so valuable.

So you kind of have this debate that then plays out like... Are hydronuclear experiments valuable for Russia's goals? And it ends up, I think, being an empirical question, not a purely scientific one, because when we're asked technically, do we want to do them? The answer is like, no, not really. But it's not an insane CTBT hating thing to say that there is some evidence that the Soviets then and the Russians now place more value on these experiments.

Even if our assessment is they don't make that much of a difference.

Aaron 10:04

So ultimately, the allegation that's being made is that the Russians are going back to this in violation of what they've agreed to as part of the CTBT, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Yeah. And that's like the broader context with which it takes place.

Jeffrey 10:18

Yeah, that's right. And You know, there's now a second Wall Street Journal story that was published the next day that made it clear, and this is where there was a leak, that there is a new intelligence assessment that suggests that Russia is in fact carrying out these low-yield tests. But it's a slippery argument that gets made because what sometimes happens is people say, The Russians know what they're doing because the Russians have publicly committed to a zero-yield test ban.

And in fact, I think in some of the Duma ratification process, it was really clear that hydronuclear experiments would be prohibited under the treaty.

Aaron 11:01

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 11:03

Other people say, well, you know, there isn't really a definition. The treaty, there's just this side deal, and the side deal is really worth discussing. And that side deal is open to interpretation, first of all, because it's classified, so nobody on the outside has ever seen it. People on the inside who claim to have seen it have differing opinions about how strong it is.

You know, like Stephen Ledegar, who actually I met in his house in the Palisades in New Jersey. And interviewed him for my dissertation on this issue was convinced that it was an extremely detailed document. Others disagree. And so those people – some people say, well, the Russians just have a more flexible interpretation of zero yield. But at the end of it, it's – just – I mean we should talk about like what evidence looks like at some point because – You know, you don't know.

I mean, unless you have a Russian saying to you, like, yes, we are doing this, and then you have the question of whether you believe that person. But, like, unless you have that, I think it's just an issue of speculation.

Aaron 12:17

Right, and I think what you've said on Twitter, and I think it's worth mentioning here before we dive into what the satellite imagery has shown you guys at Novaya Zemlya, is that this isn't the first time we've made this claim, and the first one it sort of went awry because some of the supporting evidence wasn't as – Was misinterpreted.

It was totally misinterpreted, right? And then it was, I would call it confirmation bias, right? Leading towards why one would be skeptical and why you guys do what you do with your open source stuff.

Jeffrey 12:51

Yeah. So in the... Late 1990s, and by the way, this is all documented in a really great story by Bill Broad and Patrick Tyler in the New York Times in 2001. In the late 1990s, a dispute broke out within the US intelligence community over this issue, whether Russia was conducting very low-yield tests. And the story opens with a great quote.

This question, one intelligence analyst said, is tearing the community into pieces. It was so political because it starts as a highly technical issue That is very difficult to observe. And so there's an enormous amount of room for speculation. And then that technical issue becomes a central piece of this deeply polarizing political question, which is, should the United States ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty?

That political question was deeply wrapped up in the late 1990s obsession that Republicans had with President Clinton's penis. It was a weird time. But the point is, you have that political situation, and it, I think, then poisons this discussion.

Aaron 14:15

Right, and we should say that the U.S. has signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Bench Treaty, but it's never actually been ratified, whereas the Russians have signed and ratified it.

Jeffrey 14:24

That's right. The Russians signed and ratified U.S. ratification in 1999. Failed. And failed for all of the reasons that our political system is broken, right? It was literally brought to the floor and then defeated.

Aaron 14:41

Yes.

Jeffrey 14:42

Which is not normal for a treaty, you know. I mean, it's... There is some bad ledge affairs decision-making from the Clinton administration. And there's some playing politics with national security by treaty opponents. So I don't love that moment in American history, although it's better than the current one.

Aaron 15:04

Correct. But back to the point is that I think the allegations about Russia on this was in 97. So it's a mid – it's before it's actually presented for ratification. But it's part of this question about whether or not it's in the US interests to completely ever give up the right to test nuclear weapons again.

Jeffrey 15:20

Yeah, there are two funny stories from this period. I mean I guess the first one we should tell is the time that the US demarched the Russians about an earthquake.

Aaron 15:29

Right. That's the first one. I'm leading it there, man. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 15:33

I know. Poor Aaron. This is like Jeffrey's favorite story time. I'm teeing you up, man. So in 1997, there was an earthquake in the ocean off the coast of Novaya Zemlya near the nuclear test site where any clandestine nuclear test would have occurred. And the U.S. intelligence community Misinterpreted that seismic event as a nuclear test, and Madeleine Albright demarched the Russians over it.

And then it turned out it was an earthquake. There was actually, they had to put together a panel that George Tenet, who was the DCI at the time, created. And the panel had to go back and look at how they effed it up. And it's a really interesting story. Tell it well. So yeah, so it seems that at the time of the earthquake.

The Russians may have been doing a subcritical experiment at the nuclear test site. That's a pretty typical thing to do. The U.S. does subcritical tests, which don't produce any yield, in an unused test shaft at the Nevada test site called UA-1. And it seems like the Russians do the same thing, although theirs are tunnels, not shafts. So there was a lot of activity at Nevaez Emlia.

Famously, someone pointed out that there was a helicopter on site, which they associated with the presence of a VIP plane. Which then they inferred to be a coming experiment of some kind. And so when they saw the seismic event – and it's a little hard to tell where seismic events occur. Like have you ever actually worked with that data?

Yeah. It's – Like seismologists will object and they'll be like, no, no, we're very good at locating things. But like they aren't. I mean, they're really good at locating things relatively. And if they have tons and tons of time going back and refining things. But like the first event, like when you get an event bulletin and it has a computer generated location.

Those will often be pretty far off, certainly far off enough that something at sea might be confused with something at the site.

Aaron 18:00

Yeah, in the neighborhood, but when you're making an accolade station like this, you want to get down to the street block.

Jeffrey 18:05

Yeah, I want to know the exact mountain so I can correlate it to a tunnel. And they're not good at doing that quickly, certainly not in 1997. And so they are – I think one of the headlines that looked at the aftermath of this, they're hasty. And then they go ahead and demarche the Russians. And we loved this as a case study because – Once we started getting satellite images of Nevaeh Zemlya, which is like hard to image, right?

Because it is so far north.

Aaron 18:41

Yes, we've talked about this on a previous podcast.

Jeffrey 18:42

Clouds. You don't get a lot of satellite coverage just because depending on the orbit, you may not be at that latitude. So there are fewer satellites taking images of it. And then, yeah. The weather is dreadful. So it is often cloudy. And when it is not cloudy, you know, half the year, the sun doesn't come up.

Aaron 19:04

So you don't have sunlight.

Jeffrey 19:07

So it turns out it's very difficult to monitor this, this location. But once we finally got commercial images, we see helicopters there all the freaking time.

Aaron 19:18

So you guys have started looking at this thing. I think this is Anne. I think she said in one of the things you sent me, a presentation she gave at the Middlebury Institute about how this was her first nuclear love, her ability to model this place. Because you guys went back and looked at it, building off of this study.

And some of the stuff that's going on up there about they tested the cruise missile up there and some allegations that they may be interested in testing again.

Jeffrey 19:43

Yeah, well, we, you know, I think we were informed by this event because, you know, if you think of it as a case of confirmation bias, not trying to be rude to the people who made the mistake because, you know, I think they know they made a mistake and they're embarrassed by that fact. In like, we all make mistakes, but you want to ask the question, like, well, how does that happen?

Right. Like, what's the, what's the nature of, of that bias? And I think the answer is they had generated signatures that they associated with testing events. And, you know, in their defense, the signatures you're going to have up there are like, It's going to be, and it's changed, like for a while they would bring a ship with a helicopter in and they would put the ship at the dock and then the helicopter would like move people around.

And so I understand how one would get in the habit of mind of thinking that certain events look like tests. But of course the problem is that doesn't really allow you to distinguish between types of events, particularly if a country is changing its test pattern as they would after signing the CTPT. Right. So I think Russian subcritical testing probably had many of the same signatures as yield testing.

And so while I understand the temptation when you get the seismic event and you see the helicopter on site to put two and two together This is a case where it wasn't that simple. And so we kind of liked the idea of being able to do that on an open source basis so that if a situation like this were to arise again, which it has, we would be able to participate in that discussion as civil society and say, well, helicopters are, yes, a signature, but they're not that great of a signature.

Aaron 21:47

Yeah, I mean, it would be a multivariable equation, and this is just one of many. You're missing X, Y, Z, you know what I mean? Yeah, that's right. So you can't complete it and come to an assessment. And that comes through when Ashley was put under Gordon's questioning. I think it's at the 24-minute mark. Maybe we'll put it in the show notes beneath.

That appears to come through as he drops out of the certainty that's in the statement that leads the first Wall Street Journal story into like nuance hedging, hedging, maybe a better way to put it into some hedging.

Jeffrey 22:25

Yeah, I mean, it's hard because Gordon reports that the intelligence assessment, you know, he doesn't quote it. He paraphrases it. Right. Which is not a great sign.

Aaron 22:42

Somebody's probably describing it to him.

Jeffrey 22:45

That's right. And and so caution. Right. There be dragons. But that it's not faithfully adhering to an international treaty banning nuclear tests. Right. It's like, wow, that that's vague. But like, I kind of get what it might mean. But then when he is pressed, right, the phrase he says, we believe they have the capability to do it the way they're set up.

Which is a big problem in this debate because I think an issue that we have in the United States is that the people who make assessments Of what the Russians need to do to maintain their arsenal are people, or at least have historically been people, who are deeply skeptical of the test ban and worried that it will constrain our ability to do what we need to do.

So if you ask a test ban opponent, who by the way might sincerely believe that we need to continue testing, Do the Russians need to continue testing? That person's answer is going to be yes, right? Right. Because that is their sincere view about the need of nuclear testing. And the problem is I don't think you can reason through this stuff with first principles.

This is an empirical matter. You actually have to ask the question, like, what do Russian scientists believe – And do they have the political power to get that belief past their political masters or to persuade their political masters of their view? And I didn't put this in the tweet thread, so it's like a little, you know, podcast has some bonuses.

This is exactly why the U.S. screwed up its assessments of China's participation in test ban negotiations, which have now been declassified. And actually, when I talked to Steve Ledegar before they had been declassified, he told me that he found the intelligence assessments of what the Chinese wanted or were going to say totally useless. Because they all assumed that Chinese scientists would approach the test ban as our scientists would.

It's mirror imaging. It was totally mirror imaging. And... It turns out that, yes, the Chinese had concerns about the test ban, but they had the wrong set of concerns in the intelligence estimates. In the intelligence estimates, they thought that the Chinese would be willing to – they really thought that the Chinese were concerned about the technical constraint imposed by the test ban.

And that a kind of secondary question was the infringement of sovereignty from inspections, right? And so their theory was like, well, the Chinese would agree to inspections. Basically, if they thought they could get away with some low-yield testing. It's a slight simplification. But in fact, the Chinese view was the opposite, which is they were willing to deal with the zero-yield part.

But what they really didn't like was the infringement of their sovereignty from inspections. And that was a function not of the whole political system, but of the guy who ran the test site. He just really did not want foreigners crawling around on his test site and it turned into a whole big deal and it had to go all the way up to Jiang Zemin to resolve it at the Clinton level.

Aaron 26:34

Did they self-inspect? Stop it.

Jeffrey 26:38

This joke, I could go on forever. I know. But I mean the point there is that when you ask technical people to assess what the Russians or the Chinese need to do, That's going to be informed by their technical perspective, which is not inherently wrong. It's just as we saw with this issue of hydronuclear tests, sometimes foreign scientists reach different conclusions about what's necessary and what you can do with certain things.

Aaron 27:05

I mean I just think about it like this. Like if you have this logic that like to maintain the stockpile, you need to ensure that you have the ability to test at some point down the road or you may – to reserve the right to test down the road. And if we have this assumption, then therefore other countries must have the same assumption because they also have nuclear weapons.

Do you know what I mean? But it's a simplistic logic chain. Whereas other countries may view it differently. And that's where the nuance comes in, going back to like the allegation, right? So the allegation and what we think is a new, what's been stated as a new intelligence assessment about why they would think that the Russians are doing this up there.

I know.

Jeffrey 27:45

Yeah. And, you know, you see this a little bit in some of the declassified information from the late 1990s, where there's a declassified intelligence report. From 1999, which is like absolutely the period in which, I mean, it's a little bit after, but it's like the exact period in which people are convinced the Russians are doing these experiments.

And it's an account of an article written by Mikhailov, who was the head of the nuclear program. And, you know, it gets written up, like he is pressing for hydronuclear experiments, right? And when you read the intelligence report, it really gives you the sense that there is this strong constituency within Russia for conducting low-yield experiments. And then like a year or two later, then there are declassified documents saying Russia is conducting these low-yield experiments, right?

We actually have that article because it was a public article. And when it's translated... Its tone is really different than the intelligence report and the Mikhailov tone. And like, yeah, he wanted to do low yield tests for sure. But his whole thing is like the US is going to start doing these low yield tests. And so Russia needs to do them too.

Aaron 29:08

It's a side note, but I'm reading this book about how the Russians bungled into Afghanistan. And that's one of the driving factors. Is that the U.S. are going to come anyways because there's been some political instability, so we have to go first.

Jeffrey 29:20

You know what I mean?

Aaron 29:21

It's really great.

Jeffrey 29:22

But it's the classic – it's the – you know, it's the – it is the classic phenomenon where, like, Americans who want to do low-yield experiments or, frankly, return to nuclear testing are, like, pointing at the Russians – Right. And Russians who want to do low yield experiments and or resume nuclear testing are pointing at the Americans.

It's like that meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at one another. Right, right. Because that's how labbies feel. And so it is not surprising that if you ask a former labby who's now in an intelligence capacity, like, do you think the Russians want to conduct low-yield testing? The answer is going to be yes, partly because it's true that that's what labbies want, and I'm sure that's what the Russian labbies want, but it's also because that's what we want.

And I think that that leads to this kind of conviction that it must be happening. But when you actually look at the evidence... You know, it might be happening, but it might not.

Aaron 30:27

I mean, so let's, let's talk about that. So you guys, you've seen, I mean, did we talk about this in the podcast? I can never remember, but like you guys have done work up there. So you think you have an idea of what they're seeing?

Jeffrey 30:38

Yes. Because when we saw it, we were like, Oh, that's interesting. The Russians do these experiments at a portion of their Nevaez Emlia test site, a place called Matochkin Shahr. And basically, it is a little town they built with a dock on this strait that bisects the island, the archipelago. So it's two islands. It's a grim place.

It's a grim place and Anne Pellegrino and I play the game of how much money would it take to get you to live there for how long, right? So it's like how much would you – how much money would you need? What kind of living arrangements would you need? Let's just be clear that the amount of money that we would insist on and the living arrangements we would require are both greatly in excess of what is actually offered to the people who go there.

It's grim and – So there is a town, so there's a dock and a town and a tiny little airport and then roads that lead to all of these tunnels running under mountains. And we noticed a few years ago That they began repairing all the buildings in the town. So knocking down old buildings, sweeping up debris, which, by the way, there was just shit everywhere.

I mean, it was a mess. And suddenly the town started looking a lot nicer. And then we noticed that at one location where there was one test tunnel, a second test tunnel appeared. And this actually was very close to the town. It wasn't sort of set far away like a lot of other of the test tunnels, but it was very close to the town.

In other words, like very convenient to get to. And unusually, outside of the entrance to these two tunnels, Russia built a series of four buildings. And that is something we have never seen at a Russian test site before. The Russians, they go out, they dig a tunnel, they put the device in, they seal the tunnel, they explode it, and then that's it.

There's no infrastructure that's built there. It's just the tunnel. This is the first time we saw an external infrastructure, which really looked like this was a tunnel they were going to be going in and out of quite a bit. Which struck us as it's almost certainly the equivalent of U1A in the United States, right? It is a location that is a dedicated facility that's going to get used over and over and over and over again.

And so we looked at that, and we all had the same conclusion, which is someone is going to conclude that the Russians are doing low-yield nuclear testing. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, our guess is it's probably just for subcritical testing, and it's exactly like the United States one. But the Russians point to U1A and they're like, oh yeah, sure, you're only doing subcritical testing there.

You're probably also doing the bad stuff. Of course we're going to make the same allegation about them. They have real questions about what we're up to. It's not surprising that we would have those same questions about them. So we absolutely thought the construction of this facility and the renovation of the town... Is absolutely going to lead to a resumption of these kinds of allegations.

And, you know, like, lo and behold, here they are.

Aaron 34:08

Exactly. And so, like, I mean, and I think that the point is, is that in your study of this case study, the one from the late 1990s, is that because some of the declassified stuff talks about the intel, is that You're pretty – I mean pretty certain is not the right word, but you guys think that this is at least one of the major components that is driving the updated new intelligence assessment.

You can never rule out that there are more sources of information, but if this is just it, then you have to be scratching your head with some skepticism.

Jeffrey 34:34

Yeah, I mean we have a pretty good idea about how much they knew about Russian nuclear testing in that period. Because we have many of the underlying documents are declassified, and there's also the report that gets issued because of the panel that has to look at the false allegation. Which, by the way, and I say this in the Twitter thread, but if you want a hint about how George Tenet became Mr. Slam Dunk in Iraq, read that report and then read Tenet's summary of that report to President Clinton.

Aaron 35:08

It's a masterpiece in covering your own ass.

Jeffrey 35:15

Yeah, he absolutely misrepresents what the report finds. It's close enough that you couldn't really accuse him of misrepresenting it. But bureaucratically, it has the effect of taking what was already a pretty friendly report and basically saying, like, it's fine. Sometimes you're going to, you know, demarsh a country over an earthquake. It's like, that's not exactly what they said.

And at least back then, the quality of their information was not great. And frankly speaking, I don't think it could be better because there are limits to what you can do monitoring seismically. There are limits to what you can learn looking at buildings even if you have better imagery, even if you have radar imagery, other kinds of things, which we do have on the commercial side now.

There's just only so much you get from staring overhead. You really have to get inside the building. And even if they have a person coming out, you really don't know if that person's reliable. You don't have a way to check technically what that person says. The only way you're going to be able to resolve a dispute like this, and even then it's going to be imperfect, But it is if you have an arms control framework in which these experiments are only permitted at declared sites.

In this case, it would be Novaya Zemlya, that building, well, that complex at Novaya Zemlya or U1A at the United States. And then you had access to those sites and then the ability to check out allegations of things happening elsewhere. And if you don't have that... I just think from an intelligence perspective, you are, you are going to be stuck in, in, in this universe.

Aaron 37:15

Yeah. And then just to, I mean, to, to, to, to pivot to the end, it also comes down to having a settled definition, right? And like, this gets back to the side agreement that we were talking about earlier, you know, the side agreement that nobody's ever seen, but, but I think we, we, that, that exists.

Jeffrey 37:32

Almost certainly exists because Letigar told me it existed and told me a lot about it in detail that probably he should not have. But he was very old at the time and he didn't live that much longer and he had exactly zero to give. So it was a very frank discussion about the negotiation. But also I've had the Chinese side tell me about it.

Aaron 37:56

I mean that's the place to bring this full circle. I used to be an academic.

Jeffrey 38:02

You used to be. Now you're a scholar. I used to do things like go to China and talk to the head of the nuclear weapons program and ask him about like, so what was the CTBT negotiation process like from the perspective of the labs? And he would answer those questions. It's like, oh, OK. Yeah. I'm pretty sure the thing exists, but there is a question of how detailed it is.

The CTBT contains no definition of what a nuclear explosion is, which was a good idea because it would be insane to sit down with Malaysia and explain to them the ins and outs of subcritical nuclear testing.

Aaron 38:45

Yeah, so I think that's important to mention. Not a great idea. People will be like, well, why didn't you do that? Right. It was to – you didn't want to tell people how the sausage was made.

Jeffrey 38:54

Right. Well, you would have to give them classified descriptions of nuclear explosions and test events. I mean you'd have to like give them a recipe, right, which is not – Yeah. Like, no. Exactly. Like, we're not doing that. And you don't really need to do that because a new nuclear state, and this may not be true forever, but at least at the time it was negotiated, and I still think today, you're not really going to get a lot of value out of low-yield and no-yield events until you have a certain amount of test data of your own.

So it... It isn't really going to be all that useful. A new nuclear aspirant is probably not going to just rely on very low-yield tests. In fact, the National Academies found that. That idea was affirmed a couple of years ago. It makes a lot of sense not to negotiate a definition in the treaty itself. But then to have a side agreement, and in Ledergar's accounting, it was really the Chinese who pushed for this, because the nuclear powers who do understand how complex it is and do know about things like hydronuclear tests that produce very small amounts of yield that could never really be detected, certainly not by the IMS system and probably not by any system unless you were literally on site, They wanted to sit down and work out with the other nuclear powers like, okay, so like when we say zero yield, we mean these things are okay and these things are not okay.

And there is allegedly this piece of paper that describes that. And then there's a discussion about whether – there are two discussions. There's one discussion about whether that piece of paper even exists. And when people say, oh, it's not clear Russia ever agreed to a zero-yield test ban, what they're really doing is denying the existence of that paper.

Because the Russians don't like using the word zero, and they don't use it very much, but they have used it. And there is this piece of paper that defines it. And then there's a second, I think, smarter argument that's harder to deal with that says, well... I have seen the paper and it's not that great, right? It's squishy.

Right. And I haven't seen the paper, so how am I going to dispute that? Which gets to this question, which I think I raised on the Twitter thread, and I just think is the big question. If that's true, then do something about it.

Aaron 41:41

Yeah, so then the question becomes intent behind this. I mean they may really believe it, but going back into the political vortex that this thing then enters into is that – is this another hammer to go after the Russians on the sort of broader question of arms control? Is anybody actually interested in trying to solve it? Right.

Jeffrey 42:00

And I mean I got – I got very frustrated with the Clinton administration because we pushed this idea. Mort Halperin and when he was alive, Ernie Cantor, we had this – You know, like genuinely bipartisan. Good God, it was painfully bipartisan. Let me tell you, there were moments when I wanted to gouge my own eyes out with a spoon.

Don't ever do anything that's truly bipartisan.

Aaron 42:25

You know, I'm still not important enough to be asked. It was.

Jeffrey 42:27

I mean, like. It could be truly, truly, truly miserable. But whatever, Arnie and Mort were great together. And Arnie had been an opponent of the CTBT and Mort obviously was a proponent. And we actually worked out a proposal, which I thought was brilliant, which was that if you don't believe the side deal exists or if you think that the side deal is somehow inadequate and you worry that there is no way to verify the side deal, Like, send someone to Moscow and probably Beijing and, you know, what the hell, Paris and London are nice too.

Work out a P5 agreement that does define what you need to define and does put in place test site transparency measures. And then I would now add that having actually seen the Russian facility and having seen the American facility and having a pretty good guess about the Chinese one, When you actually see these facilities, you can imagine what a transparency agreement would look like.

You can imagine what monitoring in and out would look like. Frank Von Hippel and Suzanne Jones – actually, she is the first author on the paper. I should say Suzanne Jones and Frank Von Hippel wrote a paper 20 years ago about what verifying a subcritical test would look like. You could technically do this. Oh, my God. I'm sorry.

What? Because you're so right.

Aaron 44:03

Of course you could do this. Could you imagine what it would be like trying to get transparency measures out on the U.S. side and the sort of hysteria on Twitter about Russians walking around our test facilities? Speaking of Chinese infringement of international sovereignty, right?

Jeffrey 44:19

Yes, yes.

Aaron 44:20

I'm sighing.

Jeffrey 44:20

You're right. We make fun of the Chinese for being neuralgic about foreigners walking around at the test site, but Yes that is yeah that is a thing that would happen here too yeah the Obama administration had no appetite for this like they wanted to talk about getting the CTBT ratified but anytime that you were like okay well here is like a practical plan you know it was like all that that seems like it'd be a lot of work

Aaron 44:46

Nice job by you, Sonny.

Jeffrey 44:48

Send Lyndon Brooks to Moscow. Like tell Lyndon you don't get to come home until you have a definition and some test site transparency measures. And like they just – they wouldn't do it.

Aaron 45:01

Why do you think they wouldn't do it? Because it was just – because it wouldn't be ratified anyways?

Jeffrey 45:05

Yeah, their argument was they couldn't admit – first of all, their argument was Republicans don't have a point. And we won't admit that they have a point about the lack of a definition. Which, like, on the one hand, I am kind of sympathetic to. Like, I get, like, yeah, I think the argument is mostly political. And, like, people like Steve Rademacher probably would never have been satisfied.

But, you know, on the other hand, like, you got to get to 67. So if your starting point is... Like, that there is no hope of getting to 67, then there is no hope of getting to 67, right? Like, why not try? Right, right, exactly. And, you know, I mean, I think the flip side of it is, I actually have, like, a tiny, tiny, tiny hope that you could do this with the Trump administration.

Because this is what Reagan did. You know the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which limited nuclear explosions to 150 kilotons? Mm-hmm. Reagan campaigned against it because he was 70s Ronald Reagan, right? Like, he hated arms control and hated the Soviets.

Aaron 46:18

And then got into office. The decade of 1970s, not his actual age. Right. That was a bad joke. I'll see myself out.

Jeffrey 46:27

Right? But that's exactly what happens, is when he gets into office, he wants to, like, do something on this. Then... They basically negotiated a new verification protocol. So they did something called the Joint Verification Experiment, where there was a nuclear detonation at the Soviet Union and one in the United States that allowed each side to calibrate the seismic system to know what the relationship between the yield and the ground motion was.

Yeah. Which was awesome and useful. Paul Robinson did it. And then they agreed to a definition of explosion. And the reason I know this is because I was at this meeting at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And Paul Robinson was there. And he was like, we should negotiate a new protocol. I did. And he was basically bragging.

And he was like, I got a definition of explosion. So I went back and I looked up the definition that he negotiated. And I want to read it to you.

Aaron 47:26

This will be good.

Jeffrey 47:27

Yeah, okay. So the term explosion means this, I'm reading this, the term explosion means the release of nuclear energy from an explosive canister. Okay, the next one, the term explosive canister means with respect to every explosion, the container or covering for one or more nuclear explosives. So the term explosion means the release of nuclear energy From a container or covering for one or more nuclear explosives.

Oh, that's good. He was very proud of his definition. That's fabulous. And I thought I could be churlish, or I could appreciate the fact that this was sufficient to get the TTPT passed to Republicans. I mean...

Aaron 48:26

Is it dumb? No, no, it's very straightforward. It's literal. It's very literal.

Jeffrey 48:32

Let's put it that way. But did it make them feel better? It did. And we got the TTBT, and then you have to ask yourself, Jeffrey, do you care more about having the TTBT Or the elegance of the definition. And the answer of if Paul Robinson wants to feel like he really got to the nub of the issue here.

Okay. Rock and roll. I'm good. I'm good. So, you know, we just have to find, like, who is the Republican. Right. Who we can send to Moscow and Beijing and, you know, if they make progress, London and Paris. Right. Who can get the Russians to agree that an explosion is a thing that comes from a nuclear explosive?

Aaron 49:31

I'm in. I'm in. I'm not a Republican, but sign me up.

Jeffrey 49:36

Well, because I think the reality is what it did is it allowed people who were against the agreement to say that they had fixed the treaty.

Aaron 49:44

Their concerns had been nullified. They had done their job of oversight. Right.

Jeffrey 49:49

And, you know, like Donald Trump would be delighted to say that he fixed Bill Clinton's terrible test treaty. Yeah, there you go. Right. He fixed it because he is the greatest dealmaker and he knows all about the nuclear because his uncle told him about the nuclear. You've heard about the uncle? I have. Right. And and, you know, because because the uncle had told him about the nuclear, he sent this very fine man and, you know, insert very fine white man.

He would send a very fine white man fix the terrible treaty. And like, we're good. We get the CTBT and you can mock it. But wouldn't like wouldn't you flatter the man's vanity to get the CTBT?

Aaron 50:36

100%. 100%. We could put Trump across the Vick.

Jeffrey 50:41

Yeah. The Vienna International Center where the CTBTO is, we could just project Trump.

Aaron 50:48

We could tell him it was one of his hotels. Yeah, it'd be stamp of approval. You get a laudatory arms control on podcast. Trump, we like you.

Jeffrey 50:55

Yeah. So we go get a new side deal. That says, you know, zero is zero, and we'll get some test site transparency measures, which would be good, and we get the CTPT.

Aaron 51:07

Yeah, zero is zero, and we define zero as being zero.

Jeffrey 51:12

You know, if they want to do better than that, fine. I mean, I do slightly worry that they're going to carve out a four-pound exception.

Aaron 51:23

Just don't make it be the metric system, right? No kilograms. Yeah, that's right. We're off the rails.

Jeffrey 51:28

We're getting off the rails. Making fun of our own political system at the moment. But yes.

Aaron 51:34

Yes. Yeah.

Jeffrey 51:35

So anyway. Yeah. Russian nuclear testing. Russian low-yield nuclear testing. It's fine. Yeah.

Aaron 51:39

In the books. Man, this was a good one. Anything to plug? Sorry the sound quality sucks. Apologize to listeners. Yeah. We're going to get that one right. Anything to plug coming up? That you guys are working on?

Jeffrey 51:53

No. No. I mean, well, you know, we have that Middle East Missile Map, but we already did the podcast on it.

Aaron 51:57

Yeah, that was right before I left for Turkey. It's a cool site. For those of you who enjoyed the podcast, you can head on over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast. And for as little as $3 a month, if you are a student, you can get access to our Slack channel. And for $5 a month for everybody else, not being a student, you also get access to our Slack channel.

And you also help support getting on the podcast and getting up and doing these fun things every week. With that, Jeffrey, thanks for joining me. It was a real pleasure, Aaron. Good to talk to you. It's good to get the band back together. And we'll chat next week with Ann. So thanks, everybody, for listening.