Glide or Die

Jeffrey Lewis 0:08

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. 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 0:24

And I'm Aaron Stein, Director of Research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Scott LaFoy 0:28

And I'm Scott LaFoy, Super Producer at the Arms Control Wonk Podcast and Program Manager for National Security and Intelligence at Exeger Federal Solutions. Scott. Hey, guys. If I'm here, what does that mean we're talking about?

Aaron 0:42

You know you love it. We can't do a podcast without you about this topic, Scott. Glide or die. Glide or die.

Jeffrey 0:57

Right. So listeners by this time will know that North Korea conducted a missile test. And it's an interesting little test because the North Koreans released a statement and a single freaking picture indicating that that test involved a hypersonic glider. So here we are. Welcome to 2021. It's like 2017, but weirder.

Aaron 1:27

They've joined the hyper hype, haven't they?

Jeffrey 1:30

We'll never hear the end of the hyper hype now.

Scott 1:33

Yeah, I can't. This one, I know we're going to talk about why this one wasn't a surprise. This one caught me pretty flat-footed. This one caught me real off-guard. Okay, well, listeners. That's on me at this point.

Jeffrey 1:45

Don't be like Scott. Kim Jong-un in January told us all the bad shit he was going to do. Yep. Still on that list of bad shit in addition to references to tactical nuclear weapons is we got a nuclear-powered submarine coming in and we got a solid propellant ICBM, right? There may be a few other little things in there.

But he said in January at the Workers' Party Congress – and, you know, ain't no party like a Workers' Party party – That North Korea was going to do a test of a land attack cruise missile check and that North Korea had completed the development of a hypersonic glider, check. So here we are, should we talk about what it looks like before we, we jump into it here a little bit about how little we actually know about this thing? Yeah, one freaking picture.

Scott 2:40

Yeah, I hate this. This is very frustrating for analysis. And it was a great photo.

Jeffrey 2:45

No. And the image is all backlit. Yeah. So we're like jacking up the contrast, trying to look at the thing.

Scott 2:52

This is one of those where if USFK and Indopaycom didn't say this looked weird, this one sent a bunch of red flags because it looks like they're trying to hide stuff in the photograph, which they are. But it appears that they're hiding what they said.

Jeffrey 3:08

Yeah, I mean, what I would say is just in examining it, the glider, to me, looks like a conical glider.

Aaron 3:17

Yes.

Jeffrey 3:17

And it's backlit, and it's at a weird angle, and so, you know, maybe it isn't conical, but one thing I noticed that people were saying, which is probably a thing that's worth correcting, is people really imagine that gliders are all shaped like the space shuttle. With a flat bottom and wings. But if you like the history of the space age, you know about lifting bodies.

Wings are not necessary for flight. And most hypersonic gliders like the common hypersonic glide body, swerve, all that fun stuff. Those are conical shapes with, you know, tiny itty bitty wings, which this has.

Scott 4:03

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. It definitely is consistent with a hypersonic glide vehicle.

Jeffrey 4:09

Right. But I think most people don't realize that gliders can be cones. I think people really think of gliders as like maybe looking at little airplanes, like little airplanes. And, you know, there's a great documentary. I guess it's a book. And then there is kind of also a documentary on lifting bodies. And it's, you know, I think the book is called Flight Without Wings.

Yeah. So you don't really need wings. You get a lot of lift off the conical body, and you can use the tiny little wings as control surfaces to move around.

Scott 4:41

That's right. And even though we have only a little bit of data, it looks like it's off a Hwasong-12 slash Hwasong-14 first stage, maybe a little bit of a stubby one.

Jeffrey 4:52

Yeah, I measured it. I make it about 80% as long as a Hwasong-12.

Scott 4:58

Okay.

Jeffrey 4:59

So I went ahead and did a little very rough modeling just to see if the parameters that got reported kind of checked out. And, you know, basically they did. So it looks like they cut down a Hwasong-12, you know, used the same engine, just a little bit less propellant, and fired that bad boy.

Aaron 5:20

Yeah, to a very short range. Yeah. So that's what I was going to take us next is there's speculation about that because the range was short.

Jeffrey 5:30

Yeah. So what I did was I built a computer model of a stubby Hwasong-12. So it's like 20 tons of propellant, something like that, which is a little lighter than our estimates of the real Hwasong-12. Made a wild-ass guess about the dry mass. Another wild-ass guess about how heavy the glider would be. And then I fired that thing using Missile Toolkit on a depressed trajectory so it didn't get up over 30 kilometers.

And, you know, the... The modeling software is not really optimized to do this. So it, it deposited instead of a glider, I just had a, a kind of warhead that fell and that thing fell like Between 200 and 300 kilometers down range, which means the booster would have fallen like a little bit below that. So I, I think that when the ROK said the, that it traveled 200 kilometers and never got about, never got above 30 kilometers, I would say really broadly that is consistent with a short wasong 12 with a heavy glider on it.

If what, what they saw was the, the booster come down.

Scott 6:45

Hmm.

Jeffrey 6:47

Now, that leaves the question of, did it fail to separate and they all came down together? Or did the glider separate and then glide on and none of the ground-based sensors saw it? And I don't have an answer to that. But, you know, I was hoping that when we did the modeling, it would be something really obvious like… The booster would have had to go to 600 kilometers or something.

Scott 7:08

Right.

Jeffrey 7:09

And then we could have said like, oh, it clearly failed. But as it is, it's like, I don't know, it either worked or it didn't. But I can't rule out that it worked.

Scott 7:18

And we know that from external reporting, like South Korean and U.S. sources that are normally quick to report these, we're very slow in bringing those parameters out as if something was weird.

Jeffrey 7:31

That was noteworthy. They were slow. They were really slow this time. And... Partly, it was launched from Mupyong-ni, the epicenter of Dude, Where's My Tail, my favorite presentation on a single North Korean facility. It's over 60 slides long. I know that facility better than I think I know my hometown, which is pretty inland. And so this, I think, would have been hard for ground-based radars to see.

And it may have been that the U.S. either didn't provide or I'm hoping I'm hoping they saw it. But maybe they didn't even didn't even see the glider or, you know, again, maybe none of it worked. One thing I will say is that the North Korean statement basically said the test met all its objectives, but it didn't say how far it flew.

Scott 8:23

Hmm.

Jeffrey 8:24

And normally, you know, like with the cruise missile, they were like, this is how far it flew. They were pretty upfront about that.

Scott 8:31

They've gotten real granular in their bragging recently. We're going to come back to that.

Jeffrey 8:36

Right down to disputing our measurements of South Korean missiles, which I'm just like, they need to get some better mensuration software as far as I'm concerned. But I don't know. I'm like 60, 40. It didn't fly very far just because they didn't brag about it. And, you know, we didn't see it. But, you know, if I know if the U.S. government comes out tomorrow and was like, yep, it glided 600 kilometers, then I would I would accept that.

No problem.

Scott 9:05

But the roundup of it is where it was weird reporting that made it clear something odd was happening. You ran the numbers and it seems to roughly kind of fit, but it's not it's not a clean enough fit to be like, ah, yes, this was a successful test.

Jeffrey 9:19

Yeah, well, I mean, we don't really know anything, right? So I had to estimate, like, well, how heavy is the glider? And I, you know, I don't know. So I tried a variety of numbers. At, like, 1,500 kilograms, I get, like, pretty nice agreement, and then, you know, the thing is gliding at the beginning at, like, 3 kilometers a second, which is sort of, you know, that's definitely hypersonic, and that's up there, but it's also not, like, That's not like the high, high, high end.

So, you know, it's kind of I don't know. It's one of those funny things about modeling where you can you can make a model and it's totally plausible. But it's like also entirely my own fantasy other than like 30 kilometers, 200 kilometers and, you know, a Hwasong-12 engine, which does not bound reality very much.

Scott 10:10

This is a tough one.

Jeffrey 10:12

I mean, it's just fun to kind of back of the envelope it and get an idea, which is useful, you know, to sort of be like, okay, well, it's not crazy. And it gives us like a hint about like what kind of other information we'd want to look for. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's one picture in a North Korean statement.

Aaron 10:31

Do you want to talk about why they would even want a glider in the first place? I mean, they're fucking cool. Missile defenses.

Jeffrey 10:42

Besides them being cool. I mean, why does the United States want gliders that it has absolutely no use for?

Aaron 10:48

Well, you could talk to Kendall about that. He has his own questions about hypersonics. But I do think we should talk about, you know, for people who don't listen to every episode of this podcast, what are the inherent advantages to building this type of thing and why it was so noteworthy? Why did it make its way into the speech, for example?

Scott 11:09

Yeah. So a hypersonic glide vehicle so that we have to kind of take the US out of this equation because the US reasons for getting hypersonics tend to be very different from everyone else. But the upsides of a hypersonic glide vehicle are going to be that it is good at. Frustrating missile defenses because it basically gives you not the full maneuverability of a cruise missile by far, but more maneuverability than just a basic re-entry vehicle from a ballistic missile, certainly more than a normal MARV, and allows you to kind of scoot lower than a ballistic re-entry vehicle would go, so you can kind of hide under the radar. See our entire episode about land attack cruise missiles from North Korea, it's a lot of the same advantages, just sort of far.

Faster and less maneuverable, if that makes sense. So that's going to be one of the big ones. It's hard to see. And because it's moving so fast, you have less time to see it.

Jeffrey 12:04

Yeah, like you could fire it out of the ocean and have it make a, you know, a sharp turn kind of back inward, which is going to probably fly around some radars and, you know, and other radars, even if they see them, it's going to be moving so fast, you'll fly through the radar before, you know, people have really time to react.

So I, you know, I don't, I am not someone who thinks that these things are like the end all and be all. I know some people who are like, we should build hundreds of them. But I think they are a nice complement. To other systems. Because if you have, say, a KN-23, which is going to do that pull-up maneuver, and so that's going to kind of fly under radars, and you're firing from the ocean, which is going to come in from weird angles, and then you have these hypersonic gliders that are also coming in from weird angles, and you have cruise missiles that are flying in low, you know, you're basically just requiring the U.S. to have a really...

Flexible and resilient sensor architecture to deal with this wide variety of challenges. So even though I think hypersonics are not the most impressive of all of these systems, You know, like I don't like my kid makes me play these dumb, these dumb, you know, games where you play like like Clash Royale. Right. Where you like throw down cards.

And, you know, it's not always about the most powerful card. It's about throwing down the card at the right moment when the other side isn't like quite ready to deal with it. Now, you know, it's a silly example, but I think at some level it's true. It's just it just adds to the complexity of the missile defenses have to deal with.

That's how I'd say it.

Scott 13:47

It's like not a silver bullet, but it adds to a real robust strike package that's pretty hard to come against. It adds to their deterrent effects that they can generate. It makes it real hard to guarantee that they're not getting anything through.

Jeffrey 14:05

And also, let's not underestimate boys with toys. Everybody's got a hypersonic vehicle. Japan is looking at a hypersonic gliding projectile, and I mean, can you be a real man as a dictator if you don't have a hypersonic glider? I don't think so. I mean, I do think that that is a substantial part of it, whether or not All these systems ever get built.

The hyper hype is real.

Scott 14:32

Oh yeah. Well, to their credit, like the reason I said, I was surprised hypersonic glide vehicles. Like again, it's not new technology. You can pull the, the D tech reports from like 1968 about HGVs. You can find the 1950s articles on them. They're hard to build. They are still quite complicated. And I mean, like, it's not like an air breathing Hypersonic cruise missile where like you do I feel like you need the the hypersonic wind tunnel like I'm still surprised that that's always been a flag for me was we've never seen hypersonic ground test infrastructure in North Korea that I am aware of but what the heck like this one caught me off guard this this one I did not expect because of the lack of infrastructure and warning except bloviating in a speech but you know that's not even the part that I think is the wildest

Jeffrey 15:22

About this whole thing. I mean, we're all focused on the glider, but... You want to talk about ampules? The ampules.

Scott 15:28

The ampules, yeah. A word I had hoped to not have to revisit after 2017. When we were trying to figure out how the Hwasong-14 and 15 could possibly be dragged around without exploding.

Aaron 15:42

We are really niche in esoteric podcasts, by the way. I just want to throw it out there. This is why this show is so great. But go ahead.

Jeffrey 15:50

Well... I mean, okay, so, for listeners, one of the reasons that liquid propellant missiles suck is that because the propellants, particularly the oxidizer, are so corrosive, and because they're so dangerous... You can fuel your missiles in advance and drive around with a fully fueled missile. But it's like not the safest thing on Earth. And it does limit the lifetime of the missile.

And so, you know, the North Koreans had a lot of incentive to go from liquid propellant missiles to solid propellant missiles because life just gets easier. You know, they're more flexible. They're less of a pain to operate. Right. You know, they're quicker to launch and, you know, with the caveat that you can speed up liquids too, but just at the cost of making things weird and hard in other ways.

And so, you know, this shift that we were seeing from the North Koreans to solid propellant made a lot of sense, but of course they didn't have, they don't yet have those big solid propellant Rocket motors. And so like the Hwasong-15 was like, you know, impressive in the sense that it could carry a nuclear weapon anywhere in the US, but they still had to crank that sucker up and then, you know, fuel it while the US Air Force was furiously trying to kill them.

Scott 17:13

Which takes hours and requires potentially dozens of fuel trucks on site.

Jeffrey 17:21

Right. And so we'd had big debates among ourselves about whether they could, you know, do things like pre fuel the missile and then just take the risk when they were erecting it. Like, you know, like, would the missile hold up? You know, and I would say it was kind of ambiguous. Yeah. But of course, and also then there are the questions of like, how would the oxidizer do in extreme temperatures and a bunch of stuff like that.

And so the obvious solution to this always is what the Soviets called ampullization, which is for a number of missiles like submarine launch ballistic missiles that use liquid propellant, but also some surface-to-surface missiles where they wanted to use particular propellant combinations. They would factory fuel the missiles and seal them So that you could either put them in a canister or drop them in a submarine tube or, you know, you could put them in a silo and then they would be totally sealed off.

And, you know, you had like a, you know, a 15 year lifespan for those things. And they had many of the advantages of a solid propellant missile. And so, you know, but to do that, you have to do all kinds of internal technology because you don't want the oxidizer. You know, it's like the whole the valves and the lines.

You have to make sure everything is like sealed up. And then the thing I really love is once you get a factory fueled, you got to weld everything shut. Which Michael Dutzman found a great video of the Soviets doing this. Oh, it's incredible because like you have a you have a rocket filled with hypergolic propellant. How do you weld that thing up?

And the answer is automated welding.

Scott 19:05

Okay.

Jeffrey 19:06

And actually, that's what the Soviets bragged about. Ambulization required technological innovations in terms of protecting the valves and fuel lines and things. But the Soviets were proud of the automated welding. And then you had this factory-fueled missile, which you could ship out to units. You know, you could just put it on a train and, you know, send it out and stick it in a submarine or put it in a canister and carry it around in a vehicle.

And so, like, that makes a lot of sense for the North Koreans, particularly, I would say, canisterizing intermediate and intercontinental range ballistic missiles. And we've seen them show us canisters and we are always like, man, are those canisters for solid propellant missiles? Well, maybe some of them. Are for factory-fueled liquid propellant missiles.

Scott 19:58

If they do a canister-launched liquid propellant missile, I'm out of the field. I quit. I'm done with the podcast.

Jeffrey 20:05

I think that's where this is. I mean, it makes a ton of sense for them, right? Because... If it's factory fueled, you don't have to waste the time fueling it. And honestly, the canister is going to support the, it's going to provide some stiffness if you are trying to erect a, boy, missiles are penises, aren't they?

Scott 20:24

They really are.

Jeffrey 20:25

Stiffness erect like all the, you know, Jesus Christ. But it, the canister is going to provide support if you're lifting the missile up. Yep.

Scott 20:34

So it makes a lot of sense for them.

Jeffrey 20:36

And they said it, right? They said they had ampulized the Su-12.

Scott 20:40

It's like they were literally reading our Twitter DMs from 2017. Drives me crazy. It is worth noting, though. So just like small caveat on it, people don't do that for IRBMs and ICBMs. It is still like when we talk about how the North Koreans still have like essentially the largest mobile liquid missiles, that still holds ampulized or not.

It's still a risk and a big one. It's just that this is the... When someone has tried to mitigate this type of risk before, this is the technology they've used. And it does look like the North Koreans are figuring out how to do that magical anti-corrosion stuff, or they're claiming to. This would not necessarily offset the desire for that solid-fueled ICBM, though.

That's still ultimately... Tends to be the route one goes if you can figure out solids Jeffrey, you mentioned that you know it makes life easier, the, the canister is a, or sorry, the solids make the life easier for the soldiers, not necessarily for the engineers and scientists, which it I would say dramatically increases the risks for they're still moving towards that solid ICBM, the ampulizations, if is, is, I would still see it as a stop gap.

Jeffrey 21:51

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, the SS-11 was an ICBM, and it was like 40 tons. And that was ampulized and put in a canister. So I do think that this is a plausible thing for the North Koreans to do. But I say that in full awareness of the fact that the Soviets also simultaneously moved to solid propellant.

So I agree with you that this is a stopgap. This isn't over yet. That's the last thing I want to say, is this is not over yet. There are things left in Kim Jong-un's speech. The nuclear-powered submarine, the ICBM test, the solid propellant ICBM test, I mean. And not all of that stuff might be ready this year.

But I just I don't think we have yet seen all of the new stuff we're going to see. And, you know, I mean, maybe they won't build all this stuff because it's a lot of different designs. But I still feel like we're in the we're in the early phases of the annoying, annoying stuff the North Koreans are going to show us.

Scott 23:04

Yeah, this may be a long this may be a long winter. Not a good one. Was one of the other things in the speech MERVs, if memory serves, which could be, you know, multiple independent reentry vehicles, the thing that everyone says North Korea is moving towards, having multiple, essentially, nukes on one missile. And that's what we think the absolute chonkest missile in the world would be good for, potentially.

The one we covered, what was it, last October? Last...

Jeffrey 23:33

Yeah. Although, I mean, maybe it's going to have a glider on it.

Aaron 23:39

Should we talk about the difference between, like, Marvs and Glider? Because there was some speculation it may have been a Marv.

Jeffrey 23:44

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's a Marv, but... That's a thing worth discussing. Sure. Because I don't think people understand the Mark 500 Evader.

Scott 23:56

That is a name I haven't heard in a long time.

Jeffrey 24:02

I love the Evader.

Scott 24:03

They have tested Marvs in the past as far as... Well, they've tested something that's either a Marv or just a terminally guided reentry vehicle in the past. We're not sure which. I'm not sure which.

Jeffrey 24:14

Yeah. But I mean, one thing you can do with a Marv is just... Like the Evader... It moved really violently, which made it very hard to intercept. But at the same time, that came at real accuracy loss. Because it needed to move pretty violently, but then you had to get it back to where you wanted it to be.

Whereas I think hypersonic gliders, they don't move as violently, but you could probably get a lot more accuracy if you can keep talking to them as they're going. So it is kind of interesting to me that people talk about maneuvers pretty generally, but they don't often specify – What kind of maneuvers we're talking about, because, you know, if a glider tried to maneuver in the way that like the like a cruise missile, the the no.

Well, certainly if you try to maneuver like a cruise missile, but if it I think if it tried to maneuver like the evader, I'm not sure it would hold up to that level of stress.

Scott 25:17

And just for listeners, because we didn't define MARV, that's a maneuverable reentry vehicle. It's sort of something not quite as fancy as that. Well, some of them are as fancy. Basically, you put some little control surfaces or some reaction wheels in your reentry vehicle. And as it's coming down from a ballistic arc, once you hit the atmosphere, you can do little wiggle worm maneuvers to change sort of what your target is or where you're going exactly.

So you don't have to do that straight line with your ballistic trajectory.

Jeffrey 25:48

You know what we're not going to talk about in this podcast, but is on my mind.

Scott 25:53

No, I don't. FOBS! Oh, f*** me.

Jeffrey 26:01

You saw what Kendall said about Chinese fobs, right?

Scott 26:05

Yeah.

Jeffrey 26:06

You think the idea of flying over the South Pole hasn't occurred to the North Koreans? Do you think they're sitting there looking at that missile defense system in Alaska and saying, well, I guess there's just nothing we can do about it.

Scott 26:22

Oh.

Jeffrey 26:25

Fabs. They make so much sense. They're so terrible, but they make so much sense.

Aaron 26:34

Oh, no. This is the long-lost podcast.

Jeffrey 26:38

The Soviets. They deployed them. People are always like, that was a crazy idea. Nobody ever did that.

Aaron 26:46

The Soviets deployed them.

Jeffrey 26:49

And you know why the Soviets took them away? Because we got rid of missile defenses. Because we got rid of the defense they were designed to defeat. And also they sucked. This is your white whale, Jeffrey. They wouldn't necessarily suck now. That's your white whale. And we're not getting rid of that defense.

Scott 27:13

I hope the listeners will understand from this reaction why the previous fobs episode is buried in episode hell and will never be released. But much like fobs, it just seems that episode's coming right back around the bend again.

Jeffrey 27:29

Nothing I can do to stop it, but it's coming.

Scott 27:32

It is coming.

Jeffrey 27:34

Orbital bombardment is coming.

Aaron 27:36

The listeners, Jeffrey's like hunkered in his office. Like I can just see his eyes like on the camera. He's whispering.

Jeffrey 27:44

If I were North Korea, I'd have my big old ICBMs and I would be like, some of them have a bunch of warheads. Some of them have gliders and some of them are fobs.

Aaron 27:58

That's the long lost B side. When this podcast finally wraps up, Somebody's gonna uncover the fobs episode.

Scott 28:06

And just as a reminder for listeners, so FOBS referred to fractional orbital bombardment systems. It was an ICBM that could be launched at a range that instead of flying over the Arctic to hit the United States, it would fly the opposite way, go over the Antarctic, where no missile defenses were aimed essentially at the time, and take the long way around.

So it being called a fractional orbit because it's like, you know, It's only going to stay in orbit for 0.95% of an orbit to get around some space treaty stuff.

Jeffrey 28:39

And you know, for a given trajectory, they're faster.

Scott 28:46

Oh, that is true. Oh, and I hate it. It's going to be the intro for this episode.

Jeffrey 28:59

Anyway, that's not something North Korea has even said they're interested in doing. I will 100% say that's true, right? So the Workers' Party Congress, Kim mentioned a bunch of stuff. He didn't mention that. I'm just saying that.

Scott 29:13

That's what you would do if you had his budget in engineering. And there are technical hints.

Jeffrey 29:19

Well, here is a serious observation. In 2016, I said to people, North Korea wants a thermonuclear weapon and an ICBM that can target the United States. And people are like, ha, that's ridiculous. In part because our view of them is that they're ridiculous and that they don't warrant the attention that would be conferred by having these things.

They feel exactly the same way, and they want that status and that attention, and that's why they're building this stuff. So what I would say is that even if their technical capabilities occasionally let them down, even if it takes them longer to do things, we have to understand that they don't think they're a joke. And that they're committed to developing capabilities to defeat our regional and ultimately our national missile defense capabilities.

And that leads them down the same technological path that the Soviets went down and the Russians are going down again a second time. The same technological path that the Chinese are starting to go down. The North Koreans are going to follow, maybe not with as many, maybe not with as good, but they don't think they're a joke.

And they're going to try to do all the same thing. So the hypersonic glider looks goofy and maybe doesn't even fit their strategic situation all that well. But they don't think they're a joke. And they think that if the Japanese and the Chinese and the Russians and the Americans are building them, they're going to at least give it a serious look.

Scott 30:48

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 30:50

And so, you know, they're not 10 feet tall, but we also shouldn't underestimate... Their desire to have these things. Yeah.

Scott 30:59

No, it's, it's a very serious and real capability or very serious.

Aaron 31:11

For listeners it's we're recording this in unusual time. It's a little later in the night. So I think we're a little, we're a little looser here as, as hosts.

Scott 31:19

Yeah. It's punchy when you do a podcast at eight 30 in the eight 30 in the evening.

Aaron 31:24

Yeah, it's 8.50 East Coast time, although Jeffrey, it's only 5.50 for you, but you're still in your office.

Jeffrey 31:30

True.

Aaron 31:30

I'm going to get a beer after this. Yeah.

Jeffrey 31:33

Maybe a beer and a taco.

Scott 31:39

No, no, we can't do it again. And if you, dear listener, would like to underwrite that beer and that taco, you can head to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for $3 a month, which is almost a street taco price in DC, and that kills me. If you are a student and five dollars a month, which is most which is a street taco in Washington, D.C., you can get access to our Slack channel where many beautiful, brilliant, incredible people are doing fantastic projects, getting in various newspapers of merit and note and exchanging cool memes about the nukes.

So again, that's patreon.com slash ACW podcast, Aaron, Jeffrey. It was great to join you again on this this evening. Cutting.