The Deal

Jeffrey Lewis 0:01

You know, what you've written is like 95% correct, and 50% of the people are going to be able to get 10% of it. 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.

Anne Pellegrino 0:30

And I'm Anne Pellegrino, an independent analyst in Monterey, California.

Jeffrey 0:35

What are you baking this week?

Anne 0:37

I have actually, forgive me, forgive me of my sins, but I have not been baking as much lately. I've been cooking. I've been doing a lot of cooking. Doing the sous vide. We fixed our grill, so I've been grilling. I've gotten all my vegetables in my garden finally growing, and so... Are you smoking any meat?

Jeffrey 1:02

I've been making beef jerky. I love how you took that seriously. I just meant you could like take some food and like hang it outside in the enormous smoke nightmare that is the Monterey Peninsula.

Anne 1:16

Yeah, yeah, no, I've been trying to find ways of staying entertained while avoiding the COVID smoke, fire disasters that are the West Coast right now. It's pretty nice today.

Jeffrey 1:33

It is.

Anne 1:34

For once, the air quality is good and I see blue sky. And so after this, I'm going to take advantage of that and do some stuff outside.

Jeffrey 1:42

Yeah, I actually hid out upstate New York, hid out in upstate New York and tried to get out of this nonsense for three weeks, basically until my in-laws couldn't handle the family anymore. There are different child rearing practices across generations, Anne.

Anne 2:08

Well, we are glad to have you back on the West Coast because now it makes it easier for us to podcast.

Jeffrey 2:14

It does. That time difference. Boy, I never understood what an inconvenience it was for poor Aaron.

Anne 2:21

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Aaron, we love you. We're sorry to say is part of the reason why Arms Control Walk episodes have been rather scarce lately. But it's okay because the deal is wonderful. Yeah.

Jeffrey 2:36

It really has dropped. Did you like it?

Anne 2:39

Yes. Yes. Well, so, okay. I was thrilled about it. I knew it was going to be great from the moment that you gave us the preview of your, you know, intro. With the BBs. The BBs. That was genius.

Jeffrey 2:55

I could actually go down, grab the BBs. You can recreate it.

Anne 3:00

It was really genius doing that. And so I was very excited for episode one. And episode one did not disappoint. Like, you know, we'll get into it. But I just... Again, forgive me, Corey. I did not realize how much of a badass she was early on. And like, I was thinking of putting myself in that position and being like, that's what we try to do.

But she did it in a much harder environment in terms of open source imagery and like killed it.

Jeffrey 3:39

Yeah, by the way, I should say, credit where it's due. So for this narrative podcast, which will end up being five episodes, we hired... Two amazing Gen Z producers, plus Erin Davis, who teaches podcasting at Middlebury, is overseeing everything. And one of those two producers, Juliette Luini, is actually the one who came up with the BB experiment. Yeah, I knew about it.

But she was actually like, hey, so I read about this thing that people used to do with some BBs. And I was like, oh yeah, that's the BB experiment. She's like, yeah, that would make good tape.

Anne 4:29

Yes, it did. It certainly did.

Jeffrey 4:31

I'd love to take credit for it, but it is in fact... The 20-something who gleefully admits that she doesn't know anything about this stuff, which I think is what made her such a great producer.

Anne 4:44

Yeah, no, that's the perfect kind of like, she knows as someone who is not in the nuclear realm, What would be most engaging to a wider audience. She was, yeah, I think it's great. So kudos, Juliette.

Jeffrey 5:03

I will say, I mean, one of the great things about hiring young producers, young people are totally not impressed. So, you know, like we interview Wendy Sherman, we interview Ernie Moniz. You know, there's all of this, you know, discussion about these important and powerful people. And like the kids are just like, huh? Oh, yeah. Who's that? My favorite was we were talking about John Kerry and one of my producers was like, Who? And I was like, he was the Secretary of State. It was like, oh, oh, oh, yeah. It was like, he, he ran for president, and the producer was like, oh, when, when was that? And I, 2004? It's like, yeah, I was, I was six. I didn't really notice. In, in fairness, I am literally on the cusp of millennial versus Gen Z. So, but I knew, I know who he is.

Made them such great interviewers because they were willing to ask questions that you or I might, you know, feel like we were supposed to know the answer to, even though an audience wouldn't. And they weren't at all impressed by any of these people. I mean, they were nice and they liked them, don't get me wrong, but like they weren't, you know, starstruck by any stretch of the imagination.

Anne 6:28

Right, which I completely would be. And so... I can imagine not asking the right questions because they didn't want to seem dumb.

Jeffrey 6:39

Yeah, and they didn't care. It was awesome. It was just awesome. I think we got really, really good tape because of it. Yeah.

Anne 6:48

Well, back to episode one. Yeah, I just can't get over... I just can't get over... I mean, as a practitioner of... You know, Corey taught you, you taught me, and so hearing about her experiences, like going to the archives and pulling out the maps and making all these lists of features that were described in the press conferences that she went to, like that level of work in detail Is extremely impressive. And I think today, when everything is, you know, we, we have access to everything online, that we, we still do some of that in-depth work. It's just, it just looks completely different. But it's was just so much harder, I think, for what she.

Was doing.

Jeffrey 7:45

Yeah, every step of Corey's research was so labor intensive. So if people haven't listened to the first episode yet, it's organized around Corey Hinderstein in 2002, when she's a young research assistant in Washington, goes to this briefing by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Where for the first time they publicly allege that Iran has a secret nuclear facility at a place called Natanz.

And Corey is actually the person who goes and finds a satellite picture and says, that's an enrichment facility, which is like a really big deal. And you could do all of that stuff back then, But it was so hard. And so one of the kind of interesting dynamics we had as I was talking to the producers, you know, just going back and forth with them about, like, how that interaction would play out.

Like, yeah, there was an internet. So, you know, you could email things. But, like, that couldn't support really easily emailing a file.

Anne 8:57

Mm-mm.

Jeffrey 8:58

The size of a satellite picture. And in fact, I still remember downloading satellite pictures for the first time and my computer just choking on them. You know, so like back then it's, you know, she has to like fax the order form into, I think it was GOI or maybe it was Digital Globe back then. I mean, there were two and now they're the same and I don't remember which of the two it was.

I think maybe it was Digital Globe, but she had to fax them the form and then wait for a CD in the mail.

Anne 9:28

Yeah, I really appreciated hearing her walk through her methodology because I think the steps that she took, whether it was all analog or back then or digital today, is a really good example of how thorough you're supposed to be when doing this type of research as well.

Jeffrey 9:50

Yes. You know, I just, I keep going back to, you know, there's that, there's that scene where, you know, she is sitting in the basement of the library of Congress waiting. And I don't know if you've ever done that. I mean, I remember having to do that. You know, you would go to the library of Congress and they have an incredible collection of books.

So you definitely wanted to go, but you know, you couldn't browse the stacks. You had to submit a request and wait. So, you know, she had separately told us she loved Jane's Addiction. So we worked that in.

Anne 10:25

Oh, man. Yeah. So.

Jeffrey 10:31

But, you know, Corey was the first person who, when I saw her working with satellite photographs, she was the person I talked to about, like, how do you do that? And I remember, like, at that point, I didn't even realize you needed, like, you know, specialized software, right? Like Envy or ArcGIS. Mm-hmm. And she was like, oh, no, no, no, no.

You can't like you actually like you have to have the software and you have to be trained in the software. And I was like, oh, although weirdly now we use a lot of Photoshop.

Anne 11:06

Yeah. Things have come a long way.

Jeffrey 11:09

I'm a half Photoshop, half QGIS user.

Anne 11:16

Yeah. Yeah. Well, now that I am. Independent and cannot access those old software that we used to use. Yes, QGIS is great.

Jeffrey 11:31

Hey, Planet has a QGIS plugin. So you can just open up QGIS, put in your Planet username and password, and they'll feed that data right into it.

Anne 11:47

Inject it into my veins, as people say now.

Jeffrey 11:51

Those kids, those crazy kids.

Anne 11:53

Well, so, you know, I guess what I would go look at is I would go look at Natanz today and see what's up, what's different than what Corey found back then.

Jeffrey 12:04

I mean, you know, today would be way easier, right? Like I just, I get the, I get a kick out of her having to like actually like follow the directions that he gave on a map because, you know, there's like not the equivalent of like Google earth and, or, you know, Google maps or Bing maps or Yandex maps.

It's just like, Like she's actually got a, like a map and a translator and is like, you know, there and she can only have the map while she's sitting there. And so she's got to pay the guy to come hang out with her.

Anne 12:35

I mean, I imagine that while time consuming and really intense labor, like I think some of my favorite moments of research have also been when I've been looking at Historical maps and things that just don't make sense and trying to figure out their puzzle. That's a really rewarding task.

Jeffrey 13:04

Yeah, especially when you realize a historical document's wrong. In fact, I have a perfect example of that that's going to be a case study later. Poor listeners can't see me holding this up, showing it to... Oh, it's a V2 guide.

Anne 13:20

Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:21

Yeah, so this little guide published by the Smithsonian, which in the back has very specific parameters for the V2, AKA the A4, we put it in Missile Toolkit and it didn't fly. Really? No. So we began to suspect that the numbers the Smithsonian released were wrong. So we track down this, this bad boy, which is a formerly classified 1946 US Army report.

And it has different numbers. Do those work in Missile Toolkit? That one flies. So we think that the most commonly cited report Numbers for the V2 are wrong. All of which is to say, what you're saying is when you're dealing with these old historical documents and you have a puzzle and it clicks, it feels so freaking great.

Yeah. Which is exactly what Corey experienced.

Anne 14:27

When I had all those three maps of the test site up at Novaya Zemlya and I was trying to figure out... Like, why there were two different, like, official versions of the same map that were literally that didn't, didn't match, didn't match? It drove me insane. Yep. Although, you know, did it have a lot of work to do? I find, in my case, I'm already on the cusp of insanity, so no.

Jeffrey 14:56

One little discrepancy on a map and I'm stark raving Trump.

Anne 15:01

This was early on in my days at CNS. So the crazy hadn't quite fully kind of set in yet. Maybe it was a catalyst for it.

Jeffrey 15:14

So what'd you think of the Wendy Sherman episode?

Anne 15:20

I thought it was great. It's totally, it's completely different from episode one, but I can see the kind of through line of it. And I was really struck by, I've never met Wendy Sherman and I haven't read her book yet. So I was pleasantly kind of surprised at her kind of no-nonsense attitude towards the other negotiating parties.

Like it just was... Things were the way that they were and everyone had to deal with it.

Jeffrey 15:56

Yeah, you know, that was a really interesting episode to assemble. And I have a note from a friend of mine who said, well, I'll just read it. And I think that really comes through in this episode. That, you know, he says, it's very good and it's compelling storytelling. I could quibble with some of the characterizations, but it would all be things at the margin.

And my answer is, well, I would quibble around the margins too. Like it is so hard to tell that story in a honest way. True and compelling way, which is to say, or maybe I should say honest, factual and compelling. Like there are definitely times when you, when we had to choose between like, do you get the facts basically right in order to get the story right?

Honest and truthful, right? Or, or, or do you try to like ladle on the facts until it's just perfect? And at which point, either no one can understand it, or you actually lose the truth of what happened. And I, and I think a great example is, you know, in an episode, like, you can really only have so many characters. Yeah, yeah. And you've got Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan and Oman doing so much of the negotiating in private, and you've got Wendy Sherman running around in public.

And then they handed off to her at that last meeting in Oman. And then she has to go and, you know, tell the, you know, tell the other members of the P5 plus one, and then, you know, see the negotiation through to the end. But it's so strange, right? Because on the one hand, this is an episode that is about the value of having a back channel.

And she only goes to one back channel meeting. But the flip side of it is the truthful part of it is exactly what you identify, which is it's not the fact that they, you know, it's not like, did you have hummus in Oman? It's that moment where she has to get on the plane and go tell the other P5 plus one that they've been doing this in secret.

And it's her, it's the fact that she told them and the way that she told them that is the true thing.

Anne 18:32

Yeah, that she was like, they had to confront this uncomfortable power dynamic and it just, you know, lunch was a bit uncomfortable, but I don't know.

Jeffrey 18:44

That's just what had to happen. But we, you know, like it's strange because on the one hand we have to like, I mean, I don't think we say anything that's untrue. But it just stinks, I think, from a, you always want to put more in that you can't, like that, you know, Bill Burns is a bit player in the episode.

He certainly wasn't a bit player in the back channel, you know. But we'd actually had a version in which we wrote him in really substantially and considered asking him to sit for an interview. And then the story just became incoherent when you did that.

Anne 19:19

Yeah.

Jeffrey 19:20

You know, it's unbelievable how hard it is for people when they are just listening and getting introduced to a battery of new names to really stay with it. And in fact, it's a funny thing. One of the nice things about the Obama people generally, and certainly about Wendy Sherman, is she always makes sure to mention every single person.

Anne 19:55

Like she doesn't leave anyone out.

Jeffrey 19:56

She absolutely does. It also makes her tape a nightmare to work with. Right. Because it's like, so I went into the meeting and you're like, okay, tell me about the meeting.

Anne 20:07

Well, there was Bill and there was Jake and, you know, and that part where you're like, she was like, Bill is here. And you're like, that's Bill Burns.

Jeffrey 20:14

Right. And I mean, like that, that makes her a wonderful person.

Anne 20:19

Yeah.

Jeffrey 20:19

Because she does give people credit. She doesn't write them out of the history. She's constantly mentioning people who are important or helpful. And that's awesome. And maybe as an oral history might work really well. But gosh, when you're just trying to tell the story and it's like, I just need you to get to Oman and come home with a deal.

So it's really interesting. I mean, there are definitely, there are definitely a ton of editorial decisions that you make when you're storytelling and you just, you know this phrase with writing, kill your darlings? There are so many wonderful stories, individuals, bits of tape that it turns out you can't use.

Anne 21:09

Yeah, no, I get that, not from the podcasting side of things, but from all of the projects that we worked on, and we were, like, we just threw as much detail as possible into things, and then people who were editing, they were, like, this is totally incoherent. This may be, like, the best thing that you've ever, you think that you've ever created, but, like, no one's gonna know their way, have to, like, work their way around this, so, you know, you have to tell a story, and you've...

Really got to pare it back. We were like, ah, shit. Like, but I'd like all of the information.

Jeffrey 21:44

It reminds me of John Steinbruner, my dissertation advisor, who I loved. John always felt like every sentence, every single word needed to be perfectly factual. And so in the end, he would write these sentences and no one could understand them. And so I remember Chuck Thornton, who was also a PhD student at the time and I, we became experts at parsing John's utterances.

And at one point I started joking like, read it in the original German, it makes more sense. Because he just had this, You know, incredibly precise way of writing. But, you know, I would say to him, like, you know, what you've written is like 95% correct and 50% of the people are going to be able to get 10% of it.

You could write something that was like 80 or 70% correct and then 90% of the people would be able to get like half of it.

Anne 22:52

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 22:53

You know, so it's always a dilemma, which I, I mean, it's fun to wrestle with, but gosh, I don't know. One of my producers, Erin Davis, she said that embrace imperfection.

Anne 23:05

Storytelling is a feat. And I think y'all have done an excellent job in episodes one and two. So I'm looking forward to the next, the next few to drop.

Jeffrey 23:14

I can give you a sneak preview.

Anne 23:16

Oh yeah, please. What, tell me about episode three.

Jeffrey 23:19

Well, at the end of episode two, I said they're going to need a scientist or two. Yes. Yes. So it's an interview with Ernie Moniz.

Anne 23:26

Uh-huh.

Jeffrey 23:28

And while we did not get an interview with Ali Salahi, Richard Stone, a journalist at Science, gave us all his recordings of his interviews with Salahi. Oh. So you get the story of Ernie Moniz's relationship with Ali Salahi at the end game of the negotiation.

Anne 23:51

That's cool.

Jeffrey 23:52

From both their perspectives.

Anne 23:54

That's really cool.

Jeffrey 23:56

And so I think that might be a good one. I don't know.

Anne 23:59

Yeah. Okay. I'm excited now. What else is new? You mean besides fires burning?

Jeffrey 24:06

For listeners, we're thinking about ending episodes now with a little potpourri. We can't end on a happy note, right? There's the bad thing we won't talk about. There's the fact that things are on fire. There's the stress of the political moment. And there is all this other nonsense. But through it all, I don't know. I think we're doing some pretty interesting work.

Anne 24:29

Yeah. Are you doing any work on decoding these super duper weapons?

Jeffrey 24:37

Well, I know not everyone agrees with me. I am quite satisfied that the best explanation for Trump's demented rambling, keeping in mind that a demented rambling will only roughly approximate reality, I think he was talking about the super duper missile.

Anne 24:56

Because he- What's the super duper missile for listeners?

Jeffrey 25:00

They're, yeah. The common hypersonic glide body, which isn't a missile. But on two occasions in public, Trump has bragged about a new weapon the U.S. was developing, which isn't really a missile. It's a glider for missiles. And it's not a perfect fit for what he said in his interview with Bob Woodward, but it's pretty close, which is he always has the same theme, which is he talks about how incredible the weapon is and how Putin and Xi don't have one.

So I think, you know, given that he's talked about it on two other occasions, I think that's it. A lot of people think it's the W76 Mod 2. And the only reason that I don't go for that hypothesis as my top choice is because one, I don't think there are any other cases of Trump bragging about the W76 Mod 2.

And I can see why, because it's low yield.

Anne 25:57

Not a big enough boom for him.

Jeffrey 25:58

Yeah, well, you know, it's like the joke I always say, tiny nukes for tiny hands. Oh, gosh. So he's never really bragged about that before. And I actually, when I listened to the tape, he calls it a nuclear weapon. And then I think he's correcting himself by calling it a weapons system. So I actually think on balance, tonally, he's not talking about a nuclear weapon.

Although, you know, Woodward thought he was. So, you know, the correspondence of Trump's language to reality is pretty weak.

Anne 26:29

So we've been fussing around with that, getting ready for the North Korean military parade.

Jeffrey 26:34

And we've got a North Korean military parade coming up. Dave Schmerler, you know, they've built a bunch of sheds at the parade ground to hide all the vehicles. And there's a lot of shed space. So it might be a big parade.

Anne 26:50

Sneaky North Koreans.

Jeffrey 26:52

Might be a big parade. You know, before, I'll put down a little marker that I'm not the only person to notice. I'm stealing this mercilessly from somebody who doesn't want to stick their neck out. CNN, before the Winter Olympics in 2018, reported that the North Koreans were going to, the US intelligence community believed North Korea was going to shock us with the amount of missile launchers that they displayed.

And so if that reporting was correct, the fact that they've now built all these vehicle shelters at the parade ground where they're practicing and you can see the tire marks, Suggest that we might see a lot of vehicles. Although we'll see, you know, I mean, the North Koreans love to torment us, right? They love to just get us all worked up and then be like, oh, look, it's an anti-air system.

Anne 27:51

I know, the letdown for the Christmas surprise was pretty real.

Jeffrey 27:56

Yeah, although I will say, I think that engine test was a bigger deal than we realized.

Anne 28:03

You're probably right.

Jeffrey 28:05

Just because the press doesn't care. Right. We won't look back on that and think it's a big deal.

Anne 28:11

Yeah.

Jeffrey 28:12

And we've been, you know, measuring missiles. I think I'm going to write a paper on how to model missiles.

Anne 28:20

Oh, that's great.

Jeffrey 28:21

We've done a lot of cool stuff that maybe we'll get its own episode. That would be great. Doing a new crane analysis.

Anne 28:32

Ah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey 28:34

Having all kinds of fun. So lots of open source work going on. I'm teaching a class this semester on open source analysis.

Anne 28:42

I think it's really funny that the progression of who has taught that class has gone from me and Grace to you.

Jeffrey 28:53

I know. Well, it started with Melissa.

Anne 28:55

It was Melissa.

Jeffrey 28:57

It's like a bad photocopy, right? It starts with Melissa who did a really great job. I'm sure you and Grace did your best. And now it's in the hands of a complete incompetent who has no idea what he's doing. Are you kidding me? So next, you know, we'll probably have a cat teach it. The cat will just pause, will just hit the keyboard and randomly select data.

Yeah, well, it's gone from a workshop to it's a semester long class. So it's a pretty cool class. I mean, it sucks because of the bad thing, but we're doing a lot of in-class assignments, geolocations and things. We redid the famous one with Aaron's shirt.

Anne 29:37

Oh, yeah? Uh-huh.

Jeffrey 29:39

I got to tell you, so for listeners, I once geolocated a picture of Aaron Stein because he was late for a podcast. And I used the picture he sent me of his happy hour to tell him where he was sitting. And I freaked him out by telling him he was wearing a checked shirt, which I could see in the reflection of his glass of wine.

Almost every single student picked out that checked shirt.

Anne 30:03

Yeah, kids are smarter these days. They're getting good at it.

Jeffrey 30:07

Yeah, don't listen to the old people, kids. We're stupid. Yeah, us old people, we're like Donald Trump and Nickelback. You're way better than that.

Anne 30:18

Oh my gosh, yes. Yes, we are.

Jeffrey 30:22

So yeah, that's what we're up to. What's on your cooking agenda next?

Anne 30:28

Ooh, I'm making a soy balsamic marinated chicken with some grilled zucchini from the garden and I think a caprese salad tonight.

Jeffrey 30:43

Yeah. Well, you know, if you go back to baking and a loaf of bread should show up at my door, I won't refuse to eat it.

Anne 30:52

All right. Duly noted. I've just replenished my flour supply, so.

Jeffrey 30:58

Well.

Anne 30:59

Should get back into the game. Hey, Anne. Yeah.

Jeffrey 31:03

This episode was brought to our listeners by The Deal. The story of the Iran nuclear deal, how it came together, how it fell apart, and what that means for the rest of us. It's available wherever you get your podcasts. Help us out, subscribe, and rate the show. If you like these witty discussions about Anne's cooking and the classes that we teach at MISS, or maybe if you are a weirdo and you find the actual meat of the episode to be the most interesting part, you can always support us by going to our Patreon site, which is Patreon.com slash ACW podcast for $5 a month.

You can support us and gain access to our members only Slack channel, which I think is probably the universe's finest private open source discussion group at this point. And if you're a student, you can get that for only $3 a month, which I have to say it's probably the best networking opportunity I could imagine. We have You know, reporters troll our Slack channel looking for stories.

So you too can create an international incident, even if you're 19 years old. So with that, Anne, thank you so much. Always a pleasure. Letting me blab about the deal, which by the way, you can get anywhere you get your podcasts. And thank you for listening.