Dennis Gormley

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. I'm the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I am Aaron Stein, the director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in a sunny Philadelphia.

Jeffrey 0:31

It's sunny here too, but gloomy in my heart, Aaron, because Anne has left us and we're back to the classic configuration of you, me, and a microphone.

Aaron 0:45

That's right. Connecting over Zoom. I mean, I wish Anne well. Her time on the Arms Control Wong podcast was too short, but I think she's moved on to better places for herself professionally, and so I wish her well as she moves on to our friends at Planet Lab.

Jeffrey 1:02

Yes, I had to submit my first tasking request to Anne. There's something nice about that. I don't know why. I don't know. I really love it when students, and I think because she worked with us, people forget that Anne started as a student here. I love it when students end up as my boss or people who control my life.

Because I think it is a perfect moment of justice, you know? Was I a good and fair professor? Because if not, ain't going to get my f***ing tasking. That's right.

Aaron 1:42

You're no longer going to be the first to be dropping exclusives to CNN. You'll be after a few others because your email gets moved to the bottom of the pile. Absolutely.

Jeffrey 1:51

It's the way the world should work. Be nice to the people you meet on the way up because they're the same people you'll meet on the way down.

Aaron 2:01

There's something far bigger meaning to that, particularly given that we're recording this podcast a couple of days after the election.

Jeffrey 2:08

Yeah, that. But you know who was nice before? To people younger than him.

Aaron 2:15

I was about to say, I think I said this in our super secret arms control WhatsApp group, is that it's a time to talk about somebody who was truly, truly decent and wonderful and who did treat his students nicely because I was one of them.

Jeffrey 2:30

Yeah, so Dennis Gormley passed away, and if you've been listening to the podcast for the last, I don't know how many years we've been doing it, we would frequently make references to Dennis, friend of the pod. We were always too lazy to actually get Dennis, friend of the pod, on the pod.

Aaron 2:47

I think he was fly fishing most of the time in his later years.

Jeffrey 2:52

Yeah. Dennis was just a fantastic person. And, you know, Aaron, in the past few years, so many of the people who were mentors to me have have passed away. So John Steinbruner, Tom Schelling. Bruce Blair, Jan Nolan, and now Dennis. And I really haven't been able to write about them in the way that I would like to.

I wrote an obituary for John, but I wasn't able to talk about Tom or Jan or Bruce. And for some reason, Dennis, who Jan was very close to, I feel like it's opened me up a little bit. And I guess I kind of want to remember the good times with Dennis and just... Also, just kind of reflect on what it is to become a middle-aged scholar as you look up to these people.

And it's not that you ever get smarter than they were. It's just that they aren't there anymore. And then a generation thinks somehow we're competent. But at least I know the secret that Dennis was better.

Aaron 4:02

I have... So if you go to the, well, then Monterey Institute, now Middlebury Institute, is it one credit? Is it still one credit? Like Missiles and Missile Defense? The weekend seminar? Is that what it is? I think it is now two credits because it's been expanded.

Jeffrey 4:23

A friend of the pod, George Herbert, teaches it with Ferenc Dolnocki-Varish.

Aaron 4:29

Right. So back in my day, it was Dennis who had come out to teach it, and that's where I met him. And it was one of those courses at Middlebury, Monterey, that I was just super excited to take because it's not everywhere in the world. I don't mean this as a plug, where you can take a course like this over a weekend and you really got to learn from somebody.

And Dennis was like I was like there was 30 people. It's in the main auditorium on the second campus. I can't forget. I forgot the names of all these places, you know, but it was a full on. That's funny because, you know, that auditorium is in the McCone building.

Jeffrey 5:08

Is it? And every semester when I teach my security and arms control in Northeast Asia class, which is a decision-making class, there is a case study involving the director of the CIA under Johnson, a guy named John McCone. And I always ask the students, who is John McCone? And I get blank looks. And I say, well, what's John McCone's wife's name?

And they look at me like I am insane. And then I point to, I actually don't know how to pronounce it. I think it's the John and Thylene McCone building.

Aaron 5:42

That's right.

Jeffrey 5:42

I mean, speaking of memento mori, right? People name buildings after humans so that they aren't forgotten. And yet all these students who are literally studying what John McCone did are going in and out of the building, not even noticing. But yeah, you took that class in the auditorium there.

Aaron 5:58

Yeah. And I... Liked the class so much is that I stayed after the final day as the Sunday because it was a weekend class and he sat there talking to me for an hour, you know, about cruise missiles and missile defense. It was the first time really ever grappling with the subject. Then, as I moved forward in my professional life He was always there to answer questions for me.

Like, like again, I was a random student. Like he knew me for like 30 minutes, but I would send him a an email and be like, you know, I read this. What do you think about that? Can you read over something I wrote to make sure I don't sound like an idiot? And he was always there to help me out.

And you know, it was, We got sort of close over email because I was always constantly peppering him with questions about cruise missiles and missile defense. And he was never too good to respond to my emails. And I think that's a life lesson I've carried with me as I've moved on and gotten a little older myself.

Jeffrey 6:57

Yeah, I remember we invited Dennis to participate in one of the Isidarco meetings in Andalou in the Italian Alps because Dennis had done such amazing work on cruise missile proliferation, which is definitely something we should talk about. But I just have this incredibly fond memory because, you know, the way that... Trip works is you have to fly in and out of Milan and, and to get to on the low, you have to take a train across Northern Italy from Milan to Metsa Corona.

And then you take a bus up into the Alps. And Dennis and I were on the same flight and, And so we agreed that we would take the train together from Mezzocorona to Milan and then have dinner. And it is just a spectacular memory because as we are getting ready to get on the bus to go down to the train, Dennis says, why don't we go to this deli?

And we bought... I don't know how many Italian cold cuts. And Dennis was great because he was like, you know, slightly embarrassed because mortadella is sort of, you know, Italian bologna. Yeah. He dearly loved mortadella. So we got we got a bite and it's delicious. He shouldn't have been embarrassed. And so we got all of these cold cuts of meat and cheese and we got a bottle of wine and we just sat on that train.

Eating and drinking the wine and talking until we got into Milan, checked into our hotel, freshened up and then went for a fantastic dinner at, of all things, a Sicilian restaurant in Milan. And it just was Dennis was just filled with these incredible stories. From what I think was a really amazing career that you really could only have had in the Cold War.

Aaron 9:00

Yeah, I remember the thing that really got me is he told this great story about how he examined a scud. I think it was in the 70s. I'm sure you've heard this story. Have you heard him tell this story? No, I didn't hear the scud story. I hope I'm not butchering it because it's been about 10 years since I heard it.

Maybe it's been 11 years since I heard it. But I think he was along one of the first research teams that got a look into a scud because I think the Israelis had gotten their hands on one in one of their wars either in 67 or 73. And I remember him saying they pulled it apart like it was held together in the center by like wood.

Like the frame was wood of all things. And that it was so incredibly cheap to make but also so incredibly effective because it was cheap and ultimately reliable. And I remember just thinking, like, and of course you, like, you embellish in your mind the story of, like, somehow, like, I think they brought the Scud to the U.S.

I may be butchering this story, but I just have this, like, this opening, the big, you know, door of the airplane, you know, the cargo door, and just this missile sitting in there and Dennis walking under the plane. I know that doesn't happen, but in my mind, at the time, that's what I was thinking about going, like, wow, this guy is, like, the coolest person in the world because he got his hands on a Soviet Scud that the Israelis sent over.

Jeffrey 10:15

Yeah. So for listeners, Dennis had started his career in in the army doing intelligence and that turned into an intelligence career. And then a time at Pacific Sierra Research, which was a government contractor that allowed Dennis to buy a beautiful house in the Shenandoah and get in the habit of going to the inn at Little Washington. Which Jill and I had dinner with Dennis and Sonia one night there.

It was, it was, it was really pretty, pretty glorious. But, you know, he did have this incredible, he was careful about talking about classified things. But he had this kind of just amazing time, I think particularly as a contractor, when he would get brought in to do analyses. And the one that I definitely wanted to talk about Which I've always wanted to write a novel about this, and I actually have pitched it, and pretty much everyone thinks it's boring, but I think that it's this incredible story, is that in the 1970s, the U.S. assessed the location of nuclear weapons bunkers in East Germany, right?

So Soviet nuclear weapons stored in East Germany, there were assessments of where they were. And by the way, After Dennis told me the story, I tracked it down and it's true. I actually found in a declassified document, NIE 11-14-79, the list of sites.

Aaron 11:49

And when you were a writer on your blog, not just a podcaster, I think you wrote it up on your blog. Yeah, very briefly.

Jeffrey 11:55

And Dennis had this... Idea, which is from reading documents that Russians had these things called PRTBs, which is like Mobile Technical Rocket Base. And Dennis was like, Bunkers are either, you know, backups or decoys, or just that, you know, there are no nuclear weapons in those bunkers. His view was that the, you know, so that the idea was the weapons were in the bunkers and that in the event of a war the weapons would be moved out of the bunkers and given to the missile units And Dennis's view was that the bunkers were either decoys or backups or just misassessed and that instead he thought the nuclear weapons were stored with these units called PRTBs and his idea was that the PRTB would meet the missile unit in the field.

And people thought he was nuts. And I always I love this because just for me, it's perfect. Imagine Dennis arguing like in the event of a nuclear war, you're going to be hitting empty bunkers. And anybody who is at all bureaucratically minded is going to be like. Dennis, in the event of a nuclear war, doesn't matter who's going to be right or wrong, right? Like Dennis just was stuck with this idea and everyone like no one cared and Richard Clark in his book, and I think this is why Dennis was willing to tell it to me, either got it declassified or just, you know, leaked it himself, said that in the 1980s a Russian soldier defected across the Odor River And and he had like this amazing story, like why?

Well, the answer is that this this soldier, this Russian conscript deployed in East Germany had saved all his money to buy a motorbike. And and his his captain had actually driven over it and like was like, well, sorry, you shouldn't have left it out. And so the kid was like so pissed about his motorbike. He was like, like the Soviet Union defects.

And the debriefing was like, yeah, he's just a low-level conscript. It doesn't matter. But there's a little note that said he worked at some kind of, the way Clark describes this, some sort of transportation unit called a PRTB. At which point, Dennis and Clark were friends, I guess, partly because they both live out in the Shenandoah. Dennis is like, that's where the nuclear weapons are.

And, you know, told Clark about this whole thing. And they basically re-debriefed The defector and the defector basically confirmed Dennis's story. And what I loved about that, because we were able to kind of come back and look at this later after the wall fell, Dennis actually went to this guy's unit, which was in a place called Torgau.

And, like, walked around and looked at it and, you know, sort of satisfied himself that he was right. But after Dennis told me that story, I both tracked down the declassified locations, and it turns out Torgau was not a place we believed nuclear weapons were, right? So definitely if Torgau was a nuclear weapons storage location because of the PRTB, then it was not assessed by the intelligence community.

But even better than that, I found... An online alumni group of people who had to do their service in PRTBs, including at TORGAU. And there aren't many references, but there was one direct reference to that unit from a person who'd been there handling nuclear weapons. And while they didn't talk about the weapons, they talked a lot about the storage containers the weapons were in.

And one guy remembers sleeping on the canisters because either the canisters themselves or the area in which they were kept were heated. Right.

Aaron 15:49

I meant to say they were warm. It gets cold out there.

Jeffrey 15:53

And I just, for some reason, I just, I love this story, right? Because it's Dennis in a nutshell, right? It's this highly technical discussion of where the nuclear weapons stored. This... Willingness to say, I know why you've assessed these facilities as being weapons bunkers because of the security arrangements. But looking at the way the Soviets talk about their missile operations, I believe these PRTBs are not maintenance units that they are intended to handle the weapons and deliver them.

And then just the ultimate Dennis story of after he's out, you know, this kid swims across the Oder River. And, you know, Dennis, like, somehow convinces Richard Clark to get them to re-debrief them. And then, you know, the kind of, I mean, it's a movie, right? The ending scene is Dennis walking around that abandoned missile base after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact of the Soviet Union.

And he said that there was a car following him. So I think when Dennis showed up, the new German authorities wanted to keep an eye on him. So it just, Dennis. And radiation science, if I remember correctly.

Aaron 17:04

Yeah. He, I mean, another story he told me is, I think he did some work for the Swiss government. Yes, I know this story. Maybe Dennis told us two different versions. No, I mean, his story for me is that, you know, basically is that the Swiss government Went to him and contracted with him about the event of a Warsaw Pact, you know, Western War, you know, their response times for missile impact times, if I remember correctly, and how they should, you know, fight.

I'm butchering the story.

Jeffrey 17:35

Well, the way I remember the story, and by the way, there are a bunch of Dennis stories I'm not going to tell because they involve Dennis' often acidic observations about people we all know. But the way I remember this story is that the Swiss government had this idea that in the event of a clash between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, because they were neutral, they would be left out of it.

But they, for some reason, became concerned that the Soviets would choose to violate their airspace.

Aaron 18:17

Yes, that's it. Okay, you're telling the story better than I am.

Jeffrey 18:21

And so they realized, and I don't remember what it was that triggered this recognition in Switzerland, but they realized that while they probably wouldn't be invaded, that there was an extremely good chance that the Soviets would choose to overfly their airspace. And I think what Dennis concluded they were likely to do is to drop mines on the airfields.

So that the Swiss couldn't use them to put aircraft up and thus protect their own airspace.

Aaron 18:58

And so Dennis was involved in...

Jeffrey 19:01

Persuading them, I think if I'm remembering correctly, to purchase mine clearing equipment. So the idea is that on day one of the war, the Soviets would just lay down a bunch of mines on their airfields to just, so that they could overfly Swiss airspace and the Swiss would have to come out, clear off the mines, and then they could go back to continuing air operations.

You know, the other Dennis story I love, which dates to his time at Pacific Sierra, which just goes to like it utterly goes to like what just a character Dennis was. And I all of Dennis's stories, I fact check, not not because I didn't believe him, but because they're they're all too good to be true. And every time I would check them out, they worked.

He told me that, you know, Dennis was a great lover of food. And he had a meeting in Germany. And there was a restaurant in Strasbourg called La Crocodile that had gotten a Michelin star. And by the way, I literally have gone so far as to purchase a Michelin guidebook from that year. And indeed, there is a restaurant called La Crocodile that has a Michelin star and it gets a glowing review.

Right. Okay. And so Dennis had this idea that he could, even though he had flown into Germany, he arranged to fly out of Strasbourg. And so he in Germany rents a car and after his meeting drives like a lunatic down the Autobahn, goes into France and has dinner at Le Crocodile and then, you know, is going to fly out the next day.

But in all of this hecticness, he locks his keys in the trunk. With his luggage and, you know, if it had just been the keys in the trunk, you know, just like, yeah, whatever, you leave the keys in the trunk, you tell the rental company where it is, you pay some fine, whatever, but but his luggage is in there, so he really, he really feels like he has to be able to get get the luggage and and the keys out. So they call a locksmith and this is in the late 1970s and so World War II is, you know, less, you know, it's like 30 years, 30 years prior, right And he said that he had this sinking feeling when the French locksmith in Strasbourg shows up and takes one look at the German car.

And instead of, you know, doing some like delicate little operation, just gets out a drill and just punches into the trunk. And he said that every year Pacific Sierra Research would give a kind of booby prize to the employee who had the most, you know, wasteful travel expense. You know, it was like a, it was sort of...

You know, they didn't really punish people because you needed people to do their jobs and you wanted them to feel free to, you know. But on the other hand, they wanted to shame people a little so that those things didn't recur. And so the way they did it was the booby prize. And, you know, basically the damage that the guy had done to the body was enough that the rental car was a total loss for the rental car company, right?

Because... Oh, wow.

Aaron 22:12

Okay.

Jeffrey 22:13

Well, because, you know, they're not going to...

Aaron 22:16

They're not going to patch the, buy a new trunk lid or whatever it was.

Jeffrey 22:19

Yeah, right. So they sold it. So that was the single most expensive item involving travel for Pacific Sierra Research that year when an angry French locksmith nuked a German car. And I think I'd have to look. As of a few years ago, I think Le Crocodile was still there. So I've never been to Strasbourg, but that's on my list.

And even if it's not there, if there's a restaurant even in that physical space, and I'm in Strasbourg, I'm doing that just for Dennis.

Aaron 22:50

Well, yeah, once we could travel again, seriously. He was also he wrote the book on cruise missiles way before any of us did I know is that true yes in fact he was he was the goat I mean I always call him the goat on cruise missiles like he was there yes before any of us so in the 80s

Jeffrey 23:09

Jan Nolan was writing articles about ballistic missiles outside of the U.S., China and, you know, basically what then was called the third world, which is a, you know, archaic and vaguely offensive term. But, you know, Jan was writing about ballistic missile proliferation and Dennis was her friend and he was writing about cruise missile proliferation and people thought they were insane.

Aaron 23:28

We're on Zoom. Jeffrey, if you see me looking around. Yeah, it's missile contagion. Yeah, I know where it is.

Jeffrey 23:34

It's too far away for me to go get. But, you know, I was thinking this morning, Dennis went from being a crazy person who said cruise missile proliferation was going to happen straight to people saying that this was a boring hypothesis because everybody knew cruise missile proliferation had already happened. And he never got his, I think, period of due where people are like, oh, crap, Dennis, you were right.

Aaron 23:59

I remember when I first read the book, I want to say it was 2008 and I was sitting in LAX waiting to board a flight to Istanbul. I think it was my first trip ever to Turkey. I was reading it in the airport and somebody looked at me and goes like, man, that's just crazy reading. You know what I mean?

I'm like, oh, you should read it. You know what I mean? But like he made stuff that like that should be boring. You know what I mean? Like a book, a 250 page book on cruise missile proliferation should be a page turner. But I read it on a flight to Istanbul because he made it so accessible, so clear and lucid.

And I still reference it all the time. I use it all the time in my in my work.

Jeffrey 24:36

Yeah. A little later, Dennis told me some of the origin stories of that work. He actually, as part of the work at Pacific Sierra, had been contracted to go hang out in Paris and figure out where French defense companies were on the system, the cruise missile systems that would eventually become, you know, Scalp and Storm Shadow. And he actually was kind enough.

He gave me a copy of that report. That he wrote, but he cut out the most sensitive parts. He wrote another one. Even to the end, he was going to protect... The classified info. I mean, the report wasn't classified because he was it was a completely open source investigation. Just go around Paris and, you know, see what you can find out.

But he had this sense of propriety of like what would be appropriate to share with me or not. So. I still have it, and I'm bummed that I don't have the complete copy. I actually tried to get it declassified, and the entity that paid for it said it no longer existed. And I just think that's Dennis in a nutshell.

Aaron 26:05

One of the papers I read a lot, because again, back to the Monterey days, This was back at the New START negotiations. Do you remember Russian claims about conventionally armed Tomahawk being the first strike to take out ICBM silos? I do. That paper, and he wrote the paper about how the warhead was too small.

Jeffrey 26:27

Yes, I remember that paper. Even at the highest CEP. Yes.

Aaron 26:30

I love that paper. I love that paper. I've read that paper five times. I have it sitting somewhere. You know, it's somewhere in this house. I've dragged it across the world. Istanbul, I dragged it to Geneva, I dragged it to D.C., and now it's up in Philly. I use that paper and I use cruise missile contagion all the time.

He has this one section in cruise missile contagion about the testing of Tomahawk. About how it's an iterative test cycle. Tomahawk was from the 1960s, 1970s, I can't remember the exact origin, but how the current version, the block, whatever we're in, in 2020 has gone through so many cycles of testing. It's just so informative just to hear how his brain worked.

And about just stuff about moving from tacit to explicit knowledge. The whole thing, the whole gambit with his work has been so influential. And stuff that we talked about in this podcast. When those Iranian cruise missiles slammed into the Saudi Aramco facilities. I think you guys pulled the sat pictures and they were precision impacts. All I could think about was, Dennis, this is it.

For me, it felt like the culminating moment of the work that I had been reading of his for so long. Obviously, it goes back farther. He was so far out in front of everybody.

Jeffrey 27:51

I would be remiss if we didn't say that. I mean, one of the truly great things about cruise missile contagion was that on the one hand, it was a careful effort to document. And maybe this is why it wasn't as popular as it should have been. On the one hand, it was a careful effort to document the spread of cruise missiles.

But on the other hand, there was a significant portion of it that was dedicated to the idea of why cruise missiles hadn't already spread so quickly, which, you know, in Dennis's opinion, which I think is probably right, is that the technology, while it had become widely available, there was this tacit knowledge that countries were going to have to acquire.

And, you know, at least in Dennis's view, as I remember it, he never had any doubt that they eventually would get there, but he had a very realistic view of Of the pathway they would have to take and the challenges they would encounter and why the actual proliferation of the systems lagged behind the availability of the technology.

Aaron 28:54

Yes, the tacit versus explicit knowledge. Sometimes we forget that. I mean, to this day, you forget that. You look at somebody, like, the pathways to do something are conceivably easy because the concepts are widely understood, but actually physically putting it all together and then testing it is the other half of the battle that isn't as easy as one would always assume.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what else to say other than it's too bad. It's really sad.

Jeffrey 29:31

It is really sad. Dennis was such a mentor and role model. And I'm glad we did this because I still haven't really been able to work up the courage to talk about Jan and they were friends. And so I feel like this is one more step toward me getting to the point where I can look back on all the people we have lost in the past few years

Aaron 29:59

Who were I think so important to our field in general, but then, you know, specifically to how I approach it. Our field is changing so fast because the people that we would look to they are dying. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. And the elder states people, you know, are, it's just, it's the students of the, we've just had like a generational change I would say in arms control and I do think it's going to take us relearning some of those skills.

I really mean that. Me being with some of the younger people, we haven't been nearly as steeped in this as the generations that came before us. And we have a lot of... Is it explicit knowledge that we have to understand about about process?

Jeffrey 30:49

Well, I would say, you know, the positive thing is that this is an opportunity for a younger generation. You know, this is this is a chance for people to really come in now, I think, and and make a difference. And, you know, be happy to happy to share what insights we learned from that that wonderful group of people.

Aaron 31:10

With that, Jeffrey, it's been a while. Our schedules just have not aligned in the pandemic with child care. I'm teaching a course now and all this stuff, so I actually feel I owe it to the listeners to say it's mostly my fault. I've just been so busy. But I hope to change that in the coming weeks as the podcast reboots itself with a return to the two original hosts.

So to more podcasts, my friend. To more podcasts. One last, just to Dennis, his mortadella, his love for food, and his just being a nice dude. He was great. Goodbye, Dennis. Goodbye, Dennis. You were wonderful.