Biden and the Bomb

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:20

I'm Aaron Stein, the director of the Middle East Program and the National Security Program, actually acting director of the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I'm wearing two hats now these days. You're wearing two hats, but you have only one head, Aaron. That's right. And our office is closed for about a week now. So I'm not really directing anything other than making sure food gets on the table three times a day.

Jeffrey 0:43

Yeah. So for listeners, we're playing around with format right now. We're using Zoom to record this call because my entire work life has switched over to Zoom. I am teaching classes by Zoom. I'm having meetings by Zoom. And I thought, f*** it, we'll pod with Zoom.

Aaron 1:04

Yeah, it's nice. I'm using Zoom a lot now too, including for my son's pre-K-4 yoga class this morning at 9 a.m. That tells you something about how hard these teachers are trying in this sort of age of uncertainty. So we have physical education online via Zoom in our living room today.

Jeffrey 1:25

Yeah, we did a guitar lesson by Zoom. So that was something.

Aaron 1:30

Yeah, I think we're... We pledge to do more podcasts in this time because we know a lot of people are at home, but we don't really want to talk about the issue at hand. We want to try and keep to our subjects because I don't know about you, Sometimes I need an hour break, two hour break from the news of doom.

I don't know about you. So hopefully we can do that.

Jeffrey 1:51

My God, I was going through my podcast last night trying to sleep, which, by the way, didn't happen till 2 a.m. And every freaking podcast was like, what is the impact of the bad thing on this? Or what is the impact of the bad thing on that? And it's like, can I get a break from the fucking bad thing for five minutes?

I just want to listen to some shit about bad things that happened to somebody else.

Aaron 2:15

And fall asleep. Yeah, exactly. I'm listening to these. I'm actually going back. I'm listening to old archives of like really weird esoteric podcasts, because you know, I don't want to hear about the bad thing all the time. and so we're going to keep that up. we have, well, we, we kind of have four hosts that we can do. We realize that both you and I and Scott and, as well, you know, sometimes, you know,

Jeffrey 2:40

Happens at home, and we can't just jump on the phone and Zoom and talk about these things. So we have enough people to where we can keep pumping out content, right? I, I think so. And you know what, we're going to try to do as we go through this is try to not just pick news of the day podcasts, but also to try to deep dive a little bit on various historical things, you know, just Not really always responding to the news cycle, but just kind of focusing on the research that we're doing or the things that interest us because, you know, in the course of a day.

Yes, some of my work is related to things that you see on TV, but we're actually Now we're doing it by telework, but we are still doing a lot of fundamental research on historical issues, whether it's Revisiting what we know about North Korea's nuclear facilities, which by the way, newsflash for future pod, it turns out there are a bunch of facilities that haven't been disclosed that we're kind of squinting at trying to figure out what they do.

You know, all the way over to say, Israel's missile program, which is one of those things that's super important, but we don't talk about.

Aaron 3:48

Yeah, and there's a whole bunch of stuff we can talk about, and we are going to talk about it. But I think on this podcast, we are going to talk about something kind of topical, you know, amidst the bad thing. We'll call it the bad thing. Is... It looks like we have a Democratic nominee for the Democratic Party as we move forward, how voting takes place with the bad thing.

We'll figure that all out. But he has a history on arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, the wheelhouse of this podcast.

Jeffrey 4:23

Yeah, I think for listeners, one of the strangest things that's affecting Aaron and I is that we are used to thinking of Joe Biden as a senator or a vice president in terms of our issues. And so at least for me, Aaron, I don't know how you feel, but I have been really kind of Disoriented by the fact that in our popular discourse, or at least discourse on Twitter, Joe Biden is treated as this Republican.

And full disclosure, I did not vote for him in the California primary. But on our issues, he's always been quite progressive. So I've never quite understood the vitriol aimed at him. And I thought it would be kind of interesting to explore How he has interacted with our community, since that seems to be like a really different experience than say what the online left is experiencing.

Aaron 5:26

Yeah, I mean, again, full disclosure, he was not my top candidate as we move forward in this. So, well, we haven't actually had our primary yet here in Pennsylvania, if you can believe it. But when we do, we are a vote-by-mail state, so you can do that. So if any Pennsylvanians are listening, make sure you sign up to do that.

I already have. I was going to probably vote for somebody else. He was probably my third choice in this candidate. But again, full disclosure for people on the podcast, I don't think this will be a big surprise. I am a Democrat. And I will be voting for our nominee on the other end of this. And I will probably work really hard to try and volunteer on his campaign.

I just want to get that out of the way, full disclosure. But yes, it's this interesting dichotomy where within the primary season, he's obviously not the most leftist candidate out there. And clearly, he's not the most leftist candidate who is left in the race. Bernie Sanders is still around. But because of his long track record, I guess, as a senator and as a vice president, he has a lot of interaction with the arms control community.

And that gives us at least a window into how he would view these issues. And it's reassuring. I mean, I guess it's satisfying. I don't know what the adjective I'm looking for here.

Jeffrey 6:47

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it's just from my perspective and I should say, you know, I don't have to do like the disclosure thing that you do because I am not going to volunteer on a campaign. I will enthusiastically hope that the Democratic nominee who at this point is all but certain to be Joe Biden will win.

And I will be happy as a clam about that. But I think my campaigning days are over since I think the reason people often do that is that they'd like a new gig and- I'm fairly happy with my gig, or at least I wouldn't be happier with any of the gigs I might be offered at DC. But when I came to DC, and I guess this is kind of the first place to start, Biden was really, really great on issues of arms control and nonproliferation.

And there's actually, if you look, Biden was the featured speaker At the Arms Control Association's Paul Warnke Conference in, I think it was in 2004, but I was- I was about to say, this is a long time ago. But I was there, right? I was a graduate student at the time. And by the way, shout out to...

Little Paul Warnke, who is a recent graduate of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, named after his grandfather carrying on his grandfather's fine tradition. But Biden was the keynote speaker And, you know, it's 2004. It's right after the invasion of Iraq. And it's really as the Bush administration is making, you know, a series of choices about nuclear weapons that I strongly, strongly disagree with.

And I remember him giving the keynote speech and two things stuck out about it. One was, you know how he has this, like, absurd persona where he, you know, like, uses words like malarkey?

Aaron 8:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. It's his trademark.

Jeffrey 8:53

Yeah, well, somebody on Twitter has, like, a Joe Biden insult generator. Have you seen it?

Aaron 8:58

I have not actually seen that.

Jeffrey 9:00

Oh, now I'm typing because I want to find it. It turns out it's actually quite complicated. I was trying to like work out the rules. But like, yeah, here's somebody's got like a list. So you've got like one list. Is it like an adjective? Like lying, cheating, swearing, sniveling. Another is like an animal, you know, like dog, lizard, pig.

Anyway, but what's hilarious is I will never forget, like I'm a graduate student sitting there and he's giving this speech and I actually went back and found the transcript because I wasn't sure he really said it. And he really does, he's asked or he raises the issue of the Joint Data Exchange Center, do you remember this?

Aaron 9:44

Oh, yeah, yeah, no, I definitely remember this. I mean, but I think for listeners, you should give a brief background of what that was. I mean, this is taking me back to, I still call it the Monterey Institute. This takes me back to the Middlebury Institute days. But yes, I remember the Joint Data Exchange Center.

Jeffrey 9:56

Well, like, this is really fairly wonky, right? There was this proposal after the Norwegian rocket incident, right, where Yeltsin thought the U.S. might be launching a surprise attack, which was a bad thing, and we never want that to happen again. There was this ill-starred plan to create a joint data exchange center, basically a center in Moscow where US early warning data would be routed in and combined with Russian early warning data.

Basically, so that at a time when the Russians didn't have great warning data, they would have something in place. And moreover, they would have our warning data. And so, you know, they would have an idea that we weren't going to launch a sneak attack. Never went anywhere for lots of complicated reasons. It was a really good idea.

But like super wonky. In the middle of his speech, he directly addresses this, which is really funny. But he does it in Biden way. He says, with Russia, we should get off the dime and get the Joint Data Exchange Center up and running. I remember sitting there like, get off the dime. Like, when was the last time a telephone call cost a dime?

You know, like this is like, because that's the metaphor is get off the dime is like you're on the phone too long and you should like hang up the phone and go do it. And it's like, I mean, you know, it's like right from the 1960s.

Aaron 11:22

There's something very apt about that, particularly with some of his stuff that he said during the debates, you know, about record players and stuff like that. So it's nice to know he hasn't changed.

Jeffrey 11:31

But, you know, I mean, the point is, like, this is an issue that, at least from my perspective, most politicians wouldn't even be aware of. And he not only, like, went out of his way to highlight it, which, you know, warmed the cockles of my otherwise dead, wonkish heart, But then he, he, he does it in this like way where you can tell that like, this is actually one of the things he cares about.

Right.

Aaron 11:58

You know, and I know you have another Biden story. I'm actually, that was actually a good one. So I'm curious what your, what your other one is.

Jeffrey 12:06

Okay. Well, so the, the second story relates to early on in the Obama administration. And again, right, for listeners, they may not remember this, but the Bush administration had wanted to design a new, I hate the word new because it doesn't have any technical meaning, but just for simplicity's sake, we'll say a new nuclear weapon called the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

RRW, another throwback to my time at Miss. Right. I mean, you know, I mean, look, it's it's funny because, again, this is like now that's five years after the get off the dime speech. But it's it's still 10 years ago. And Biden is, you know, like still in like his late 60s or something. Right. Right. So in 2009, Biden is now vice president.

And this proposal for this new nuclear warhead, which had existed in the Bush administration, is still kicking around. Remember, Obama kept Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense. And so Gates wanted to revive it. And Obama, you know, I know people love St. Barry of Prague, but he really didn't have any idea what he was doing at the beginning.

And Gates and Clinton, Hillary Clinton, who at the time was Secretary of State, would often agree to things in advance of principles committee meetings in order to box Obama in.

Aaron 13:35

Which is what others have tried to do with Trump, like Madison Tillerson. Right. It's a common tactic.

Jeffrey 13:41

And, and, and I should say this, this story, it comes to me in multiple different ways, but you can all read it. The, the late great global security newswire, which was, I know. Yeah. You are, you are vintage there. I know. I know. Lane Grossman. Wrote this story. And I've actually had people separately tell me it. So I'm kind of mixing her version and the version that I heard.

But basically, Gates and Clinton decide in advance that they are going to revive the RRW at one of these principal committees meetings. And because it's going to come as a surprise, you know, they think it's going to like push through because it's going to have, you know, the support of defense and state. And by the way, my source for this is not my friend John Wolfstall, who normally would be there, but was on paternity leave at the time.

You know, for the birth of his lovely daughter who would, you know, later, have you ever seen the famous picture of John's daughter with Barack Obama because her hair is sticking straight up because she's got like really curly hair? Yeah, I have, I have. I think John's put it on social media, but yeah. Once or twice. So John's not there.

So he's not the source of this. But the way, you know, Elaine tells it like, Basically, Gates drops this on the table and Clinton is like, yeah. And everybody in the room just kind of backs off. So the Secretary of Energy, Steve Chu, is like, oh, OK, it's a great idea. You know, just, you know, basically everybody's backing down.

And Denny Blair at the time, who was DNI, is like, you know, like, oh, you know, we can... Maybe we could do a study of foreign reactions and it gets to Biden and Biden is like, no. No. The president said, no new nuclear weapons. I was in the Senate when this thing came up. We don't need to do this.

No. And I guess at that point, actually, is when Blair said, well, we could do a study of foreign reactions to see if there will be negative international implications. And Biden was like, nope. Don't need a study. I know what the reactions are going to be. We've been having this debate for five or six years. Like, just no.

And his really strong, like, over my dead body actually kills it off. And my kind of favorite, like, coda to this is I have a friend in D.C. who worked for a member of Congress, not at all on our issues, right? So something... Utterly different, as different as you could imagine topic-wise. And my friend was in a meeting with his boss and with Biden, and Biden starts telling this story to this member of Congress, right?

And as I remembered, he says, you know, it's the best thing I ever did for Barack Obama, and he doesn't even know I did it, and then proceeds to recount it all. So my friend calls me, like, super excited, like, Hey, do you know that story you told me? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, I just got it from Biden himself.

So, you know, I mean, I, you know, I just to, to, to take it back to kind of the broad issue, you know, and I, I understand that like our issues are just one tiny issue and like, I, I get it. So much other stuff is super important. But on the issue of whether we are all gonna die in a nuclear war or not, Joe Biden's pretty good.

And again, I didn't even vote for the man.

Aaron 17:39

And what's interesting is if we project forward, okay, and let's say he wins, and I'm not exactly sure he will. We have absolutely no idea. The landscape that he would inherit in terms of a non-proliferation arms control state of affairs status quo, There are, it's kind of analogous to where it was when the Obama administration took off.

I mean, look, with the caveat that we're kind of in uncharted territories, and I don't want to sort of suggest that there's a level of- Well, the Great Recession was like some serious shit, which I think people forget. I'm not even talking about the Great Recession. I was talking about sort of like the previous administration's aversion to arms control, right?

Sort of half-hearted approaches to it. Enthusiasm for, again, the improper term, but we'll use it for simplicity, New nuclear weapons and Vladimir Putin, you know? And so if you're judging him on that track record, again, this narrow thing, maybe that would be, I mean, that would be a way to sort of think about how he would frame these issues when he chairs the principles meetings.

Does that make sense?

Jeffrey 18:50

Oh, absolutely. And in fact, I mean, One of the complaints, I told some of these stories on Twitter and one of the complaints I got directed back at me was, you know, great, so he'll avoid a nuclear war, but you know, we'll all boil slowly to death in a climate apocalypse because he won't do anything. But you know, in fact, I think the reason that I'm so comfortable with him on at least national security interests broadly Is because I do think that it's a mindset, that when he looks at the danger posed by nuclear weapons, he doesn't have the simplistic idea that if we just spend more money on defense or we just build more nuclear weapons, we can just solve these problems.

He really does get, I think, at a really fundamental level, That when you are dealing with these really big challenges, that states can't, not states, there's states and states, countries can't solve these problems by themselves. Like we really, We really have to cooperate with other countries. We have to pool our sovereignty and we have to understand that it's not really good guys, bad guys, that we're actually like all in the same boat.

We share this fate. And, and so I kind of think at like some fundamental level, he, he gets the need to cooperate in order to fix big problems internationally. And so for me, like that's a, you know, that's like a, that's a, that's a, Pretty big thing, and certainly a contrast to the very stable genius who currently occupies the gig.

Aaron 20:38

Right. Yeah, my only Biden story is where I focus most of my time, which is on Turkey, which is, you know, he was again vice president at the time, and, you know, Erdogan had I mean, for people who don't follow, Erdogan didn't used to have slick communications. This was in 2012. Maybe it was 12 or 13. I can't remember.

And one day, we all sort of get word. I'm working in Istanbul. I was a consultant to the International Crisis Group. And we all were following Twitter at that time. And Erdogan is rushed to the hospital. And nobody knows why. And everybody has a mother who has a cousin who has a brother who has a sister whose best friend's neighbor was the nurse in the OR.

And the thing that comes out is that he has stomach cancer or some sort of cancer at that point. And I have since heard this, and I've heard this from a very reliable source, and I won't say who it was, but Erdogan disappeared from social media for like 36 days. So they didn't even keep up the veneer of him tweeting.

So this was, again, he didn't have good comms at that point. Everybody is weird. There's a whole side plot to people visiting the office, auditioning for the gig, and I won't really go into that. But Biden was the first, I think, one of the first foreign leaders to see him afterwards. And they met him in his house in Istanbul.

And he was only supposed to talk to him for 15 minutes on doctor's orders, something along those lines. Because Erdogan, importantly, has a colostomy bag hanging off his body as his bowels about being ready. And Biden had just come from Iraq. And he proceeds to lecture Erdogan, who at that time was much more pliant towards international leaders than he is now, for 45 minutes on the differences between Sunni and Shia.

While both the US ambassador to Turkey and then the national security advisor in Turkey, or the equivalent, what we would call the equivalent, the national security advisor, are slowly tapping their watches. You know, so he's long-winded in private, even when the head of the state is recovering from major surgery. And willing to get to the nitty-gritty on ethnic differences on a neighboring country.

Jeffrey 22:58

I have to say, I think the last thing I want to observe is that, you know, Bob Gates famously said of Joe Biden that Joe Biden was wrong on every important issue of the last 40 years. Where did he say that? I can't remember. Does he not say that in the book? In his memoir?

Aaron 23:21

I've never read the full memoir. The memoir is terrible.

Jeffrey 23:27

I know people love Bob Gates and they see him as this figure above politics, but to me that memoir was the most cynical effort to cash in on On a high position because it didn't have any real substance. It read like a travelogue. Like I went here, I went there. Meanwhile, he's dropping a few observations about, you know, about various things.

It's really, I think that book is, I read a lot of memoirs because we do a lot of decision-making analysis, right? So I, you know, there are like really good Memoirs, and there are really bad ones, and Gates and Clinton's memoirs were terrible. that's a good one. you know Wendy Sherman's book's pretty good. super short. And Ben Rhodes's book, surprisingly, is, is, is really quite good. I mean, I shouldn't say surprisingly. He's a wonderful writer, but You know, usually people are a little better at the end of their career.

Like, you know, when they're like looking back. I mean, one of the things that really sucked about Clinton's memoir is, you know, it's like, it's like half the truth released with the expectation that she would run for president, right? So you're not going to really get Grant's memoirs unless the person is like well and truly done. Yeah, it's, it apparently is, It's in the memoir, and then he's asked about it, and he said on NPR's morning edition, frankly, I believe it, the vice president, when he was a senator, voted against the aid package for South Vietnam.

He said when the Shah fell in Iran in 1979 as a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran, he opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense buildup. He voted against the B1, the B2, the MX, and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War, so on. A number of these major issues, I just frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been wrong.

Aaron 25:34

I like all those votes. I mean. The MX vote, I would say, would probably be something else that falls into our wheelhouse.

Jeffrey 25:40

Yeah, I mean, I like, yeah, I think it was probably pretty insane to keep propping up South Vietnam. When the Shah fell, it actually wasn't clear how that was going to turn out. You know, there's a revolution and there's a second kind of consolidation of power. So I don't actually think it's insane at that point since lots of people were later persecuted.

We're very excited about the Shah falling. The B-1's giant waste of money. The B-2's giant waste of money. The MX's giant waste of money. And by the way, if we'd never done the first Gulf War, we probably wouldn't have had the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. So I don't know.

Aaron 26:19

I think Joe's...

Jeffrey 26:23

You know, obviously you can't really imagine a purely alternative universe, but I feel pretty comfortable taking the other side of those issues from Bob Gates.

Aaron 26:34

Well, is that a happy note? I think that's a happy note. Yeah.

Jeffrey 26:39

I mean, I, you know, like I get it, I get it. No candidate is perfect. You know, actually the candidate I voted for in California, I found quite aggravating in a number of ways. So I think, you know, you're always trying to, to make a bunch of decisions when you're picking a candidate. So, you know, nobody's perfect, but I don't understand why people are so angry about it.

There were, I don't know, Four candidates that I would have been perfectly happy with had either of them gotten the nomination.

Aaron 27:13

It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. Maybe that's really the happy note and the uplifting spirit to end this podcast. Everything is going to be okay. The earth will continue to rotate. Probably. Well, as we said, we're going to be doing a lot of these and we'll be doing some historical deep dives. We'll be rotating the hosts and we will be trying to keep up as much content as possible while juggling working from home, children, Jeffrey classes, me.

We're editing two books at the moment. So trying to get those chapters up and running. So, right. And if you enjoyed the podcast, head on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast, where if you were a student for $3 a month, you can join our Slack channel, which we did an episode about a couple of weeks ago on the open source stuff they did on the shoot down of the Iranian jet.

Jeffrey 28:04

Right, which by the way, to continue the plug, led to a second story, Fabian Hinz's analysis of the graves in Iran. Came via a Washington Post reporter having... Videos and a location and a satellite image, but really wanting a different set of humans to take a look at it. And where did he come? He came to the Slack channel.

That's right. And we learned about it at Miss or CNS from the Slack channel. And then, you know, Fabian jumped in and did amazing Fabian things. But it's a cool place, the Slack channel.

Aaron 28:47

It is a cool place. It's a cool place to hang out. And it's a good place if you're stuck at home and you want to interact with really cool people. It's a lot of social interaction. But that $3 is just for students. For everybody else, it's $5. So join the Slack channel and help us produce podcasts. With that, Jeffrey, good to see you.

Good to see you. We'll see how the Zoom experiment turns out. We're doing this with Zoom. They are not a sponsor. But if they would like to sponsor this podcast, you're more than welcome.

Jeffrey 29:13

Their money spends.

Aaron 29:16

All right. It's four o'clock here on Friday, so I'm going to have a beer.