Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Aaron Stein
0:00
Hello, everybody. Aaron here. When we recorded this episode on Saturday, we were going off initial reporting in the Financial Times. Now, we still think the podcast is great, but we thought before posting it, we should note that the Chinese government has responded to the Financial Times report that started the podcast in the first place, saying that what they tested was not a FOBs But was actually a routine test of a reusable space vehicle.
We'd like to remind listeners that a space vehicle or a space shuttle is a hypersonic glider. So take that as you will and enjoy the show. Jeffrey really wants the audience to know that the space shuttle is a hypersonic glide vehicle.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:48
You are listening to the Arms Control Wong Podcast, a podcast on arms.
Scott LaFoy
0:52
No, no, no, no. Get it out of your system now.
Scott
0:59
Okay. Bobs! Are you done? Yeah. Thank you. Proceed. Okay.
Jeffrey
1:11
I think I am still Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Aaron
1:22
And I'm Aaron Stein, director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Scott
1:29
And I am Scott LaFoy, editor, super producer of the Arms Control Wonk podcast, forced to listen to this horrific whispering, and program manager at Exeter Federal Solutions for National Security and Intelligence. And it is 8.30 Eastern Standard Time on a Saturday. And Xi Jinping... That wasn't even me! It's Aaron this time. Aaron texted me just an audio sample of him saying that today.
It is everyone's conspiring to ruin my day. But Jeffrey, you're probably pretty happy.
Jeffrey
2:11
I mean, China tested a fobs. And I just want to hear it, Scott. How right was I?
Scott
2:26
You weren't wrong.
Jeffrey
2:30
Who in 2017 started tweeting about how much sense fobs would make for Russia or China or North Korea?
Scott
2:40
It was you, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey
2:42
Who recorded a whole podcast on how much sense fobs would make only to have his tireless producer- Can it? Because people would think I was a crank because I said we were going to see Fobs again. This is true. We should put the episode up on Slack.
Scott
3:05
I have made the promise that if the Patreon hits $10,000 a month, I will release that episode. And then if we hit $15,000 a month, I will delete that episode from the internet and everyone will thank me for it. But you did say this in 2000. Jesus, was it 17? God.
Jeffrey
3:21
The first tweet I could find was 2017 where I was like, Bob's would make a lot of sense.
Scott
3:28
This has been an ongoing concern in the back channels of Arms Control Wonk, and no longer is it a back channel issue.
Aaron
3:42
Well, okay, for... Okay, because we haven't released...
Jeffrey
3:47
I am so smart. S-M-R-T. Okay.
Aaron
3:54
I think we should – OK. So we should talk about the FT article that dropped the news. And let's say that we were expecting the news because there had been hints about this from the US for a little while now. But I think it's also worth going over what exactly a fob is because most people have not listened to the podcast since 2017.
Jeffrey
4:13
Yeah, I would say that I think that if you read the FT article, although the word FOBS does appear eventually in it, it's so focused on the buzzword of hypersonic that I think if you aren't really, shall we say, an aficionado of orbital bombardment and other novel delivery means, that it might not be immediately clear what the Chinese did.
Scott
4:44
Yeah, this was a complicated test, and I think the information released does indicate that.
Jeffrey
4:51
So I have with me the actual article itself, and so I will read the portions that I think are particularly valuable. So China tested a nuclear capable hypersonic missile. Okay, now freaking out here because so an ICBM is a nuclear capable hypersonic missile. So, you know, whatever, that's the way we have chosen to talk about these things.
And so even though it's not helpful, you know, it's understandable that that would be the lead. It's the buzzword. A nuclear capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe. Before speeding toward its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise. Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle, which flew through low orbit space, not a phrase, but okay, before cruising down towards its target.
The missile missed its target by about two dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence, but two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than U.S. officials realized. Where do we start?
Scott
6:18
Yeah, there's a lot of variables to pull apart here, and I think this is a lot of very easily conflated technical stuff that's happening all at once. Also, the fourth person asked about this should be fired.
Jeffrey
6:30
Oh, this is, we have no idea how they did this thing, said a fourth person who was unfamiliar with the space shuttle. God, when they get that, that they get that thing up in orbit, it goes like around the earth and it comes back down. Wow, holy. Now when it comes back down, does it have like a landing gear or does it just like, like, like slide to a stop? Sorry, I just, I was just, I don't know who Gomer Pile is, but.
Scott
7:06
And so we want to parse this into several different spots. We want to talk about hypersonics. And for people who've listened to the podcast, we've been doing hypersonic glides several weeks now because people won't stop testing them lately, it seems. We want to talk about fobs, which is different. And we want to talk about how fobs and a hypersonic glide vehicle can work together as one tech and kind of the two different flavors of that and which flavor we think is the actual one that was tested.
Does that seem about right?
Jeffrey
7:32
It does. And maybe at the end, we can suggest a peaceful version of this system. Where maybe we can make the hypersonic glider a little bigger, and we could put maybe some crew on it, and maybe we could give it a robot R. I don't know. I'm just spitballing.
Aaron
7:46
Jeffrey really wants the audience to know that the space shuttle is a hypersonic glide vehicle.
Scott
7:51
I would point out, though, Jeffrey, you are missing the opportunity to describe it as an on-orbit service vehicle that is maliciously going towards... Satellites and manipulating them like everything we say that the Russians are doing with their microsat stuff is stuff that the Soviets said during the space shuttle development time neither here nor there different episode actually already covered this okay so the place I want to start so the you know look so I give the first sentence which you know is almost certainly written by an editor kind of a hard time
Jeffrey
8:28
The second sentence is, I think, a very good description of things, with the possible exception of this idea of flying through low-orbit space. So the first thing I want to say is that one reason people are having trouble understanding what's happening is they don't understand what orbit is. And so I always say to students that orbit is not an altitude.
It is a state of affairs, which is to say that we fire rockets into space that go much, much higher than many satellites and come back down to Earth. And, you know, like we know some of these rockets as ICBMs. So to stay in orbit, it's not just a matter of going high. So there's no through orbit.
Orbit is a state of affairs. Orbit is when you are traveling fast enough at an altitude so that you are falling. You are falling, but you are falling so fast that you are falling around the Earth. You fall over the horizon and you just keep going in a circle. So it's not really an altitude. It's a state of affairs, right?
You enter orbit. And if you want to leave orbit, then you have to expend energy to slow down so that you start falling back down again.
Scott
10:07
So if you fly through low orbit space, the issue you're taking with it is that that is being descriptive of sort of a space. I don't know what orbit space is.
Jeffrey
10:15
This is like a chocolate rainbow. These are different conceptual things. Altitude is altitude. It's how high you are. But to be in orbit, you can be in orbit at any number of altitudes, but you have to be moving at a certain speed. And it has the condition that once you are in orbit, you are not getting out of it unless you expend energy.
I mean, you know, there's a tiny bit of atmospheric drag even in low Earth orbit. So eventually you'd come down. But... On any kind of practical timeline for like the space shuttle, you know, you go up into orbit and you're stuck there and then you got to expend energy to come back down. And so going in and coming out of orbit is a really different thing than being on a ballistic trajectory where you just go up and come down.
And it has nothing to do with altitude.
Scott
11:16
Right, and so the reason we're being very nitpicky and pedantic about this is, as we're trying to figure out what this was, there are really sort of mixed messages. So the phrase, circled the globe, implies that this missile either... Traveled literally the entirety of the globe from China into space back to China after circling. But the phrase low orbit space makes it sound like a colloquial phrase indicating that something hit like, I don't know, 400, 500 kilometers up during its orbit.
But it's not super clear if that means it hit orbit or if it passed through. It's a little bit unclear to us. It's a little bit unclear to me, at least.
Jeffrey
11:57
Right. I mean, I just think that The chance that they were going to glide 40,000 kilometers around the Earth is about zero. Correct. Expand on that. But explain that right now. So when we talk about an intercontinental glider, an intercontinental range ballistic missile travels more than 5,500 kilometers. And really awesome ones go 12,000 or 14,000 kilometers. And so when people are talking about intercontinental gliders, they're talking about things that fly several thousand kilometers, maybe 10,000 kilometers, right?
Or things that glide that distance, I should say. And typically they're gliding at the end, you know, so some of that is the boost and then, you know, then there's the glide.
Scott
12:47
The Earth is big. It's 40,000 kilometers in circumference, right?
Jeffrey
12:52
It does not seem to me that with current material science, it's very plausible that you're going to glide for 40,000 kilometers or whatever portion of that you don't do in the boost. It seems much more likely to me. That phrase orbit must have come up when the reporter was talking to the sources. So it wasn't just that it traveled high because again, every missile, like an ICBM has like a 1,200 kilometer apogee.
So when you say low Earth orbit, for something to be traveling that low, I think it's at least clear as a bell to me that it had to enter orbit and come back down. And to be fair, Frank Kendall, the Secretary of the Air Force, told us they were doing that. There was that big kerfuffle this summer, and I had to go to Twitter to defend Frank Kendall, which is like...
What the, like, I mean, Frank Kendall's politics and my politics, like you know, nine out of ten times I'm, I'm gonna be like, ah, Frank Kendall, what's he know? But like this time I was like, nah, I think that's probably right. Well, and here I want to really emphasize this point that you've made though, a normal ICBM.
Scott
14:12
During a normal minimum energy trajectory, you said the right number, hits 1,200, so 1,200 kilometers above the Earth's surface. That is in no definition low-orbit space.
Jeffrey
14:27
Right. That's right. Although, again, I'm going to object to the use of the word orbit and space together.
Scott
14:33
I know. And what I'm getting at is that when something orbits the globe, a low-Earth orbit satellite... The International Space Station, things like that, a low Earth orbit is going to be around, what, 400 kilometers altitude. Right, 250 miles. So a normal ICBM is traveling three times that high because it doesn't need to do much else. It's just going to, like, it just goes up and goes down.
Aaron
14:58
It's a ballistic trajectory.
Scott
15:00
But if you're trying to orbit the Earth... Exactly. But if you're trying to orbit the Earth, you don't go that high because it's silly unless you're trying to pull something, put something out of orbit, put something into medium Earth orbit.
Jeffrey
15:14
Yes. You may want to go into medium Earth orbit. You may want to go into geostationary orbit, which is like 36,000 kilometers. You may want to go into a highly elliptical orbit. There are reasons to go high, but the important thing is that all of those orbits... Are distinguished by the fact that you are not coming back down without expending some energy.
Correct. Because you are constantly falling in a determined orbit around the Earth, right? That's what the word orbit means. It's a circular or elliptical... Well, elliptical. It's an elliptical path around the Earth. And so... It makes an enormous amount of sense to take advantage of that difference between a ballistic trajectory and an orbital trajectory for weapons delivery.
And so, for example, if you think about it, if a ballistic missile is going to take much longer to go from one point to another on the Earth because it has to go so high, right? You're throwing it all the way up to 1,200 kilometers and it's falling all the way back down. A, an orbital system would go right up into orbit at only a few hundred kilometers be cruising at its appropriate orbital velocity.
And then you do a burn and it would come right down where you want it. And so like for a polar trajectory you know, the U S did these calculations in the sixties when the Soviets looked this system you know An orbital trajectory would be like 10 minutes quicker. And that's not the only reason you do this.
There are lots of other reasons you do it, like being able to go all the way around the Earth is pretty cool. But these are basically different trajectories that offer really different advantages if you're attacking.
Aaron
17:12
So if I could summarize this in one sentence, what you both are saying is that –
Scott
17:19
It doesn't fit the profile of a regular ballistic missile.
Aaron
17:22
And so it flies to a lower altitude and then it burns. And then it, it, it, It burns to hit the brakes. It burns to hit the brakes and then it comes back down. And the advantages of that is that you don't have to go so high to come back down. You can stay low and then you can do a... You put it up in orbit.
Yeah, you put it in orbit and then it comes back down.
Jeffrey
17:41
And it's going to stay there. If you wanted it to stay there for 10 years, it would. You wouldn't want to do that because people get a little freaked out and like try to shoot it down.
Aaron
17:49
Shoot it, yeah.
Jeffrey
17:50
But you put it up and it goes where you want it to go and then you bring it down. Then you burn and you bring it down. And the advantage is it's faster. And also, you don't know where it's going until it does its deorbit burn, which means your victim only knows where it's going to land like several minutes before it gets there.
Whereas with a traditional ballistic missile, once it burns out, you can calculate where it's going. So you would get, you know, a few tens of minutes of, well, 10 minutes of warning, 20 minutes of warning, something like that. So I think that's what they did. You know, when I read that article, I mean, Dimitri Sevastopoulos is a good reporter.
He is dealing with his sources who are clearly being briefed on technical information that they only dimly understand, which is okay. Like that's, I mean, that's not a, that's just like, you know, I mean, we know a lot about like missiles, but like, God, if I had to do something technical on, you know, I don't know. Economic development right I would be equally confused so it's not this is specialized knowledge and I think the translation is pretty good yeah and if it circled the earth and if you use the words low earth orbit that's an orbital bombardment system also known as
Scott
19:20
I said to get it out of your system. No, no, never getting out of my system. Scott, Scott, it is not getting out of my system. So one thing we have not touched on yet that I think is a really important thing is you touched on what an intercontinental glider would look like. The idea that, again, you're building something that glides 5,000, 6,000 kilometers.
But the description here is that it essentially flies through quote-unquote low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target, which I think we have generally interpreted on our end to mean that the hypersonic glide vehicle is basically for... For lack of a better term, local maneuvers. That is, you stay in orbit. Maybe you take an orbit, you fire southward so that you're dodging U.S. static national ballistic missile defenses.
You go the long way around, but you do it real fast. And then when you get close to your target, you de-orbit. But not on top of it, like a normal FOBS would. You deorbit with enough space that your hypersonic glide vehicle can now maneuver through potential local theater, whatever you want to call them, non-national missile defenses.
So you've got a little bit of wiggling and maneuver room, very literally, wiggle and maneuver room, once you deorbit. So it's a local HGV, local still being like, you know, 500 kilometers potentially, but It's a hypersonic glide vehicle that is not gliding intercontinentally. It sounds like a FOBS launch, an orbital launch that deorbits to become a hypersonic glide vehicle near the last miles of its target set.
And that's how I'm interpreting that.
Aaron
21:01
Same. It does the final wiggle.
Jeffrey
21:04
Yeah. So think about it like, think about this space shuttle. Put a nuclear weapon in the space shuttle's cargo bay. Kiss the astronauts goodbye. It's Bruce Willis. Fire that thing. Yeah, this was the plot of Armageddon, isn't it?
Aaron
21:25
Yeah, well, sort of.
Jeffrey
21:26
Armageddon, don't they go out to like an asteroid or something?
Aaron
21:29
They go to an asteroid, but like.
Jeffrey
21:30
Yeah. No, no, this is just, it's exactly like the space shuttle, except for you add a nuclear weapon and forget about the landing gear.
Scott
21:37
Wait, Jeffrey, was the space shuttle a hypersonic glide vehicle?
Aaron
21:42
Stop tormenting me, Scott. He gets to spike the football here. Let him have it, Scott.
Jeffrey
21:48
It's so frustrating because people are like, I don't know how they do that. You've never seen the space shuttle before? You put a glider on a rocket. The rocket puts the glider in orbit. The glider has a little engine on it. It could be a separate rocket stage with as with the space shuttle, you could, you know, integrate the thrusters into it.
So the rocket puts the glider into orbit, the glider fires a little bit of thruster to bring it down, and it glides home and it can either land on a runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Or it can crash land and go kablooey. And it just, it's a matter of like the space shuttle's bigger, but the space shuttle is a boost glide system that is perfectly capable of orbital bombardment because that's what it was originally designed to do because the dinosaur was a glider bomber.
Aaron
22:41
I love the dinosaur.
Jeffrey
22:43
Sorry, Eric.
Aaron
22:44
No, no. But I do think some of the confusion stems from We Mirror Image, how we intend to use intercontinental hypersonic gliders. So this is different than how we conceptualize what we want our hypersonics to do. Do you know what I mean? Well, that's true. But it is what the Soviets decided to do. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I just think that's worth teasing out because Scott keeps talking about it.
But like, we want our gliders to skip in the atmosphere at an ICBM range where this glider is doing a little wiggle upon reentry like the spaceship.
Jeffrey
23:17
I mean, I'm sure the Chinese are going to look at that other kind of glider too. Me too. And I bet this thing glides for a pretty long distance. You know, so it's not like I don't think that it, you know, it probably glides.
Aaron
23:29
Well, I don't know.
Jeffrey
23:29
But I would think, you know. A couple thousand kilometers might be reasonable. But I don't know. I was thinking about, I don't know what are the various things we want to discuss. One thing I want to talk about is the Soviet FOBS program because people don't have that right. People think that the Soviets looked at doing FOBS and then decided better, which is wrong.
The Soviets are like, that's a good idea. We should do that.
Scott
23:59
Had a whole third of an episode on it.
Jeffrey
24:01
Yeah, I know. But now I feel like we kind of got to come back. And then and then there's this other question of like, well, why is China doing this? Right. So the way I think of it is like, what the hell did China just test? What are they doing? And are we fucked? And at least for me, my answers are it's a fobs to defeat American missile defenses.
And yes, we're hella fucked.
Scott
24:27
I'll give you the first two points.
Jeffrey
24:29
Yeah, I'm not so worried about being f***ed as you are. So it's a FOBS with a glider. Okay, so it's a FOBS with a glider, a fractional orbital bombardment system. And yeah, actually, Brian Whedon wrote a really nice post the other day. The Outer Space Treaty says you can't put nuclear weapons in orbit. And so the Soviets were like, well, this isn't in orbit.
It's a fractional orbit. Brian was like, that is a crap legal analysis. And I agree, because orbit is a state of affairs. Even if you are only in orbit for a fraction of a full orbit, you are still in orbit. Right? But whatever. It's a terrible legal argument. It does give us the ghoulish name fobs. So the Soviets, when the US started building missile defenses in the 60s, Yeah.
And they did it. You know, I mean, I keep seeing people say that they like messed around with it and thought better of it. Like, no, no, no. They finished it. They started deploying it in the late 60s. They deployed up to 18 of the things. They kept them through the early 80s. And the only reason they got rid of them, as Asif Siddiqui, who is the best historian of this stuff, wrote, is because the U.S. was building Safeguard, right?
Which was the Johnson slash Nixon administration missile defense. And and it ultimately got canceled. Right. And I think it was Ford who gave up on it. And so once Safeguard was canceled, the Soviets were like, OK, well, we don't need this system because it's undesirable for lots of other reasons. And the thing it's designed to defeat is not there anymore.
But like that causal relationship is so important because the minute we are like, actually, Safeguard was a good idea. Let's do it in Alaska. Right. Then it absolutely recreates the conditions in which the Soviets and then now the Russians and the Chinese say, oh, well, okay. What do we do with that? Look it up in the books, guys.
What did we do? Oh, we did a FOBS. Okay. Bang. So to me, it seems like it's a very direct consequence of our decision to put a missile defense in Alaska. Yeah. And like it isn't a joke. It's a thing the Soviets did. They were there for more than a decade. It was a real system. It had drawbacks, but it existed.
Am I just ranting now? No, it's true. I mean you're not ranting, but I think – I mean I am ranting.
Aaron
27:09
So leading to the point too, I mean why would you do it is that there's incredible advantages if you're worried about the open-ended deployment of US missile defenses – A, to go over the other pole, and to B, be deceptive about where the attack could come from to complicate. And then finally, to add the hypersonics to this, is that you could put some maneuvering at the end of this to further complicate missile defenses, even if they were to improve.
Jeffrey
27:33
Yeah, you could fire the thing at, I mean, I don't know how much cross range it has, so I'm just making it up, but like, you could fire the thing at Hawaii and then have it make a right turn and hit LA, right? Yeah. So you get a much wider options for the azimuth that you're going to attack the US, which means we need more defenses in more places, which is expensive.
And that's just to deal with like the one thing they're doing. And just that, right? Right, right.
Aaron
28:04
The long list.
Jeffrey
28:05
You know, it's almost like we can't build our way to invulnerability, Aaron. I'm beginning to think that even with, oh, Defense budget of 120% of our GDP, we might not be able to make a leak-proof defense against every problem in the world. Perhaps we should reconsider our choices. Or... Maybe we could just borrow more money. I mean, I think that's why we're hella f***ed.
Aaron
28:32
Right? Like... So, but... I would say this, and Scott, maybe jump in here. I think people will be frightened because they're ahead of us, the quote-unquote race, rather than talking about what Jeffrey is talking about, which is that we're trying to build our way to invulnerability. I think that there's two stages here. Yes. Hundred percent right so let's talk about the concern that they have that because the reason you throw hypersonic into the front of this piece through your leak is that you're probably wanting to fund more hypersonics here in the u.s or something along those lines where you make that your your your forward leaning the hypersonic stuff isn't so isn't the thing for me it's it's that they're trying to build their way out of Is that they're trying to overcome U.S. missile defenses, right?
So in that sense, you know, what am I trying to say here?
Scott
29:30
They're the ones trying to build themselves out of vulnerability, and they have the— where we are trying to do it with static defenses, for lack of a better term, they are trying to do it with wiggly, clever offensive systems, right? But that's not how necessarily the conversation plays out here. The conversation is going to be they have a sexy glide vehicle.
Why don't we have a sexy glide vehicle?
Jeffrey
29:53
Right. Well, yeah, that's how it's going to play out. But do you know Chris Clary? Yeah. So I've known Chris forever. And it's funny. I knew him before he got his PhD. And then we were at a meeting together. And the great revelation at that meeting was like how clever and funny he was. And I hadn't like...
I don't know. Like the first time I met him, I thought he was clever and funny. But then the second time – then like when I saw him 20 years later, it was like, oh my god, you are really clever and funny. He posted a how it's starting, how it's going thing. And the how it started was the Lieberman Press article on US primacy, strategic primacy.
And the how it's going is the Chinese test of a FOBS. So to me – I totally agree that our response is going to be, oh no, they have the scary hypersonic things, so we need more of the hypersonic things. And the thing that's so frustrating about that is that we're just deepening this arms race. And the consequence of that, which is that we are constantly doing these things which we say are intended to increase our security.
But they are an effort to build our security on the vulnerability of others, which never works because others are just like, well, so you will deploy more missiles or we'll make fancier missiles. And then we're like, oh, for that strategy to work, we have to like now spend more money. And so we are just sucked into this situation where we are going to be spending ever greater amounts of money.
And our actual level of security is going to be gradually eroding. And it's so frustrating because when you're in that period of erosion, people are like, oh, you got to spend everything to fix it. But the problem is we are like the Trump people who have COVID. And we're like, well, I'll take more horse paste. It's like, no, that's not the drug for this problem.
It's like, well, what if I take three times the horse based?
Jeffrey
32:15
And so that, you know, that's, that to me is the fundamental nature of the challenge is that we're, we're, we're falling back into this arms race. And we don't want to admit that coronavirus is real. We don't want to admit that vaccines work. And, you know, so we're into great power. We're now strategic competition, which is horse paced.
And so like, we took a little horse based, it doesn't work. And now we're going to up the dosage. And the apparent plan is to up the dosage of horse based until we get better. And it's just like, you know what?
Aaron
32:51
We're f***ed. I nearly spit my beer all over my computer. That would have been bad.
Scott
32:56
That one got me quite good. That one did me a good chuckle.
Jeffrey
32:59
Strategic competition is horse-based. There is no security. It is like Paul Warnke said, the arms race has no finish line. We are apes on a treadmill, and the only victory a race like that has to offer is to be first off the treadmill.
Aaron
33:18
So I agree. But there will be people who listen who do not agree. Do you think that this in any way fundamentally alters sort of the dynamics of deterrence or incentivizing first use? Because I don't, right? Like I know nobody else does on this podcast, but I feel like we need to talk about it a little bit because people will be frightened about this.
Scott
33:42
No, I don't. It doesn't. It is. I mean, I think it falls pretty cleanly in that in an action reaction spiral of as the United States builds splendid golden walls around its airspace and its space space. Better word for that. People are going to look for splendid and quasi splendid and cheap as shit. Comparatively solutions to get around those.
And like Jeffrey said, for every dollar spent on that wall, someone else can spend half a dollar or 75% of a dollar or even just $1 to overcome it. And your dollar spent on that may incentivize that dollar spent. At least on that system. There's nothing special about a FOBS. Like, you get hit by a nuclear weapon, you get hit by a nuclear weapon either way.
The difference is that the FOBS is harder to hit with a ballistic missile defense.
Jeffrey
34:43
Right. I mean, I keep going back and saying it over and over again. In 2013. So this is like nine years of this that we've been doing this, right? Do you remember North Korea rolled six? I guess it was 2012, right? They rolled six K-08s down the parade.
Scott
35:12
For our listeners who have not been there, that is a presumed liquid-fueled ICBM that was never, to our knowledge, tested.
Jeffrey
35:22
Right? But we decided that, you know, we needed more interceptors. And you do four interceptors per... But whatever, we decided like, well, we already have some interceptors. So we just needed to up the number of interceptors we had. So we added 14 interceptors to the system in Alaska. It cost $1 billion. So 14 interceptors... Let's say you're like, and those are adding interceptors to a thing that already exists.
But let's say we just magically, like, let's say the, I don't know, the Colombians were like, we will build you a missile defense interceptor site. All you have to do is pay for the silos and the interceptors. And we went ahead and stuck them in Colombia. And we stuck 14 of them. That's good for three FOBs.
Jeffrey
36:23
I'm holding up the number three. It's four interceptors per target. Four FOBs, you know, if you get really lucky. A billion dollars.
Jeffrey
36:37
Every time the North Koreans – I mean, what I love is every time the North Koreans roll a multi-warhead missile down the road, right, which is kind of the same as, you know, let's say a DF-41. Let's say a DF-41, a Chinese DF-41 has – Let's just call it four warheads. That's 16 interceptors. So it costs a billion dollars to provide a modest defense against each one of those things.
Scott
37:04
There's no victory here. And backing up one little bit, I do want to acknowledge the U.S.'s official position that nominally GBIs, those interceptors, are not aimed at China. But that is not something that is, I would say, widely necessarily accepted within certain security circles and certainly is not believed to be accepted by the PRC, which we very much believe is very concerned about those interceptors and will continue to build out capabilities to overcome them.
Jeffrey
37:36
Well, and then there is also the problem is that when the Trump people were asked about the system, and they said that it wasn't sized to deal with Russia and China, but they said that they certainly would use it against them if they needed to. So... You know, if you're the Russians and the Chinese and the US says, well, it's sized for a much smaller threat.
Like one interpretation of that is that means some other country like North Korea. The other interpretation is that we'll go first and what will survive from the Chinese or the Russians, their surviving force will then be that much smaller threat.
Scott
38:16
Which is a different, I don't know that we should get into this late in the pod getting into ragged second strike issues, but yes, that's very much a very real concern for the PRC.
Jeffrey
38:27
I don't know if it's fair to what the Trump people meant when they said it, but like, if you're the Chinese, that's what you're going to hear, right?
Scott
38:34
It confirmed a lot of biases, certainly, on the PRC side.
Aaron
38:39
It has links to hypersonics, like the way we conceptualize hypersonics. Yes. Like our conception of hypersonic is not, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong guys, but it's not like theirs. Ours is hard target kill, you know, with conventional payloads. It's not a fobs.
Scott
38:59
Well, and if you want to be real weird about this, technically we are assuming that, I mean, the article indicates that it's nuclear capable, but I think it'd be frankly hilarious if China tested a prompt conventional global strike HGV before STRATCOM got one.
Other voice
39:17
That's just me. That'd be very funny to me.
Scott
39:21
And that's what, honestly, that's what I'm holding out for because that's just hilarious. But I don't think that's what they did because it's not really their thing.
Jeffrey
39:27
Well, it's funny because I think of all the snarky things that, like, US Twitter says whenever, like, a Russian or Chinese or Iranian or North Korean missile test fails. And, like, it would be, like, so humiliating. If they then were able to turn around and do that. And like, that's the thing about an arms race is when you start out with the lead, you're like, I'm awesome.
This is going to be easy. But countries catch up. Do you remember in 1992 when the Dream Team laid waste to international basketball? We don't do that anymore, right? I know that other countries are filled with tiny people who eat weird food and talk funny, but they are actually human beings who are just as capable as we are.
And when you find yourself in an actual competition... Whatever sense of superiority you have at the beginning, you realize how hard you have to work to earn it and keep it. And just the reality is, like, we're actually not God's chosen country, right? Like, there's no divine guarantee that we'll always be better than the Chinese or better than the Russians.
And so, like, I think we're starting an arms race that, you know, we might not win.
Aaron
40:45
Well, there is no winner.
Jeffrey
40:50
To bring you back full circle.
Jeffrey
40:53
Well, there's a winner. It's the person who gets off the treadmill first. Right. And by the way, one other thing. We can get off the treadmill because we absolutely have a secure second strike capability.
Jeffrey
41:12
We have prowling the seas, the capacity to To do an enormous amount of destruction. It's only because we are insisting on primacy, right? That this is so hard for us and so expensive for us. If we said, you know what? Nuclear weapons, they're there to deter other nuclear weapons. And you can build fobs and doomsday torpedoes and whatever the F you want.
But just know that no matter what you do, there are... You know, some number of fully loaded, you know, currently Ohio class and eventually Columbia class SSBNs out there that will lay your country to waste, we'd be good. We're done.
Aaron
42:08
And we would get more Trident, which is the adopted missile of this podcast. And I would get more boats.
Jeffrey
42:13
I would totally get more boats. I would get more boats. They'd be like, you know, Jeffrey, okay, we've settled on it, but it's going to have to be 30 SSBNs. I would be like, yes! When can I go on one?
Aaron
42:31
I think Jeffrey... You would support like just parking retired Ohio's on land so that you can still fire the Trident.
Jeffrey
42:41
Yes, I know it wouldn't work. Like a hillbilly who's got like the trucks up on the cinder blocks. Yeah, you could just do that. Like just go outside of my like high school in Pekin, Illinois and there'd just be a whole Trident SSBN up on cinder blocks. Like a little ladder and the guys would go in every day and they would just like...
Scott
43:05
Put it on a trailer, that counts as a mail.
Aaron
43:09
You adopt it like you adopt a highway and like people go and they paint it.
Other voice
43:13
You adopt it like you would adopt a highway. This is why we don't...
Scott
43:18
This is why we don't record podcasts at night on the weekend. Adopt a D5. Take care of your local deterrent.
Jeffrey
43:27
Ensure the safety of your neighborhood. The serious point there, which, I mean, like, we were just having fun with it, but, I mean, the serious point is, what did the Chinese make? They made a FOBS. Why did they make a FOB? To defeat our missile defenses.
Jeffrey
43:43
Why are we building missile defenses? What is our theory of what our nuclear forces are allegedly doing? Because we have deterrence. We have the capability to say that if you were to use nuclear weapons against us, you will cease to exist as a country. But we want this other thing, right, which is we want primacy. We want to be able to say not only can we lay waste to your country, but you do not have that option against us.
You can't do that. And the implication of that is you have to do what we say. And like that's just not a realistic outcome. Like that just isn't a thing that happens in the world where the Russians or the Chinese say, oh, shucks, you got us. They're not going to do that. So as much as we strive for primacy, they will strive to counter it.
And you can turn that around like, so do you mean we shouldn't do anything? Actually, Greg Weaver got really angry at me on Twitter about this. Like, what would you do? And the answer is nothing. Because their attempt to gain primacy will be as absolutely useless against us as our attempt to gain primacy against them is. It is a waste of time, money, and human endeavor.
So get off the f***ing treadmill. On the other hand.
Jeffrey
45:15
Aaron joining. I mean, it's cool, right? Like, I mean, I love orbiting nuclear weapons as a technology, but like...
Aaron
45:22
This isn't even disco vintage s***. This is like... Explicit Cold War era vintage. That's so wacky and wild, but not all that wacky and wild that we don't want to go back there. I think that's my final word is like, you don't want to go back to this wacky and wild stuff. When you read back in these books that some of the stuff that was being contemplated, they were so ridiculous, you're like, I can't believe people did this. And then you know, we should be smart enough to not do it again. Yeah, yeah, you know what it reminds me of?
The Slack channel?
Jeffrey
46:00
Yeah, okay.
Aaron
46:02
We're getting wild here.
Jeffrey
46:06
No, it just reminds me of the closing passage of Albert Camus' The Plague. In The Plague, Camus is treating the plague itself as a metaphor. It's for this dark thing that we suffer from and then banish, but it is always there if we are not vigilant. And that is how I feel about these exotic weapons, which is that all the crazy ideas of the Cold War, it's not that they disappeared.
It's that like after an epidemic, they were pushed away and
Scott
46:44
But they were always waiting to come back when we made terrible choices again.
Jeffrey
46:49
And so I found it. Here is how Camus ends it. And, you know, if you just imagine that we are talking about the human capacity to engage in arms racing and develop these horrible weapons as much as we are the plague, it's He knew what this happy crowd did not know, but what it could have learned from books, that the plague Bacillus never dies nor disappears for good, that it may rest dormant for dozens of years in furniture, in furnishing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves, and that, perhaps, the day will come when, to the misfortune or enlightenment of humanity, The plague will again bestir its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city.
Scott
47:41
Was our happy note going to be Camu?
Jeffrey
47:48
I just... No.
Scott
47:50
No, there's no...
Jeffrey
47:52
The happy note is that I am right. We're in the bomb shelter. It's a catastrophe. We're all looking at each other and I'm like, told you so.
Aaron
48:09
The happy note is that in my bomb shelter, they still have Sierra Nevada. So I can go a little bit longer.
Scott
48:18
Okay, but the pod, the pod cannot go a little bit longer. So if you would like to support the pod, you can head over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast and for $3 a month if you are a student or $5 a month if you are a regular human being. You can get access to our Slack channel where other interesting, cool people are getting featured in national level news for the awesome projects that they are executing independently and sometimes with us.
It is a Slack channel full of chaotic, good people and quite a few of them at this point. It is a very big place. So with that, it is almost 930 on the East Coast. We are deeply punchy Let's go run some numbers and start figuring this fob out for the next week. See if we need to do another pod on it.
What do y'all think?
Aaron
49:16
Give us more money and we can release the episode. No, no, no. Nope. Nope. Thanks everyone. Good night. Bye.
