The Bunga Bunga Theory of Deterrence

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

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

Aaron Stein 0:19

And I'm Aaron Stein, the director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. How you doing, Aaron? I'm okay, all things considering. I went outside today in a tank top for the first time in probably about six months, so spring is in the air on the East Coast.

Jeffrey 0:35

If you're wearing a tank top, you should watch out for javelins. I hear they're pretty lethal.

Aaron 0:40

Or maybe get a sunburn from the potential for thermonuclear war.

Jeffrey 0:48

Ugh. SPF a million. I'm so glad that Cold War nuclear terror is back. I missed it. I feel like I'm eight years old again. Daddy, are we gonna die?

Aaron 0:58

Well, we can, you know, that famous line from Hunt for Red October, my daddy taught me how to build a bomb shelter in the backyard or something along those lines. We can just start digging. But what of those of us on the East Coast that don't have a backyard? Where are we supposed to go?

Jeffrey 1:11

I think the thing is you don't want a bomb shelter because you don't want to live through it. That's the whole idea. I'm just... I'm just really excited for my kids to get to relive the war scare of 1983 and so that they can be terrified at like eight, nine years old, just like I was. It's a real father son bonding moment.

Aaron 1:29

We got to condense it down for tick tock. And so I don't think it's going to make it because it can't keep their attention span long enough. I think you're cool.

Jeffrey 1:38

So, listeners, as you can tell, we are going to talk a little bit more about nuclear weapons and the Ukraine crisis today. I guess I don't want to call it the Ukraine crisis, right? Because that makes me sound like a Chinese diplomat who doesn't understand that Vladimir Putin is trying to f***ing invade Ukraine.

Aaron 1:57

Has invaded Ukraine. He's technically not succeeding, but he's killing a lot of people.

Jeffrey 2:02

Yeah. So the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces which is going oh so badly for the Russians, which I will admit I'm sort of, you know, it's a, I won't say I'm delighting in it because obviously the humanitarian consequences are awful and I wish that the Russians had never done that. But it's it's gratifying to see that the Ukrainians are, are mounting a very effective defense.

But the fact that Putin seems to be losing or is not winning as quickly as he wants or does not necessarily still have confidence that he's going to win, I think, has engaged a whole bunch of questions about what comes next. Now that we're looking at a protracted war as opposed to, you know, a quick a quick sprint to victory, which is what he imagined and a protracted war.

Raises all kinds of additional questions about how a protracted war may or may not result in a nuclear war, which is the subject of our niche podcast.

Aaron 3:03

Yeah. I mean, we were being – we were joking around in the intro, but obviously it's very serious. But I think both you and I, we were talking off-pond, have – Independently, because listeners will know this, we do communicate off pod, but it's not like we're in constant communications, have more or less independently come to a similar conclusion about what we think the role of nuclear weapons are in this conflict.

And I got to be honest, we were joking. And I mean, I see limited utility for any nuclear weapons in this conflict. And I think that's the point.

Jeffrey 3:37

Yeah, and I think we should probably take turns talking about, first, the opportunities for Russia. But I also want to talk about if Ukraine had had nuclear weapons, what difference that would have made to the conflict. Because it is interesting how there is a sort of nuclear backdrop to this whole thing. I mean, I guess the place to start...

Is the fact that the Russians have now invented this absurd justification that the Ukrainians were attempting to build nuclear weapons, which I have no idea what to make of.

Aaron 4:13

I'm frankly flummoxed. I literally have no response except to kind of ignore it, except that we have to pay attention to it because it's now become a central sort of fulcrum around which their narrative of the conflict pivots. But it's just beyond bizarre and so absurd. Like, There's a deep down part of me that's just wondering if they're just trying to invent reasons that the US used to go to war in Iraq.

And this is like, well, that one works, so we'll use that one too.

Jeffrey 4:39

Yeah, right. I'll have a number three, please, to justify my war of aggression. Yeah, I will say that we at CNS a couple of years ago got asked to look at some – Allegations that the Russians had made, I think, in the context of the Donbass conflict, that the Ukrainians were attempting to build a dirty bomb. And, you know, it took us, I don't know, maybe half a day before we realized that all of the documents were fabricated.

So they'd actually created a forged Ukrainian order, which had like the same number, if I recall correctly, as a real Ukrainian order, but it also had the exact same like signature. Like it was a hand signature and it was, you know, they're all slightly different. We looked at like this guy's every one of his signatures and they literally just copy and pasted new text on.

And then the allegations involved a location that we were able to check out with open source, including some Russian reporting and some satellite images. So I guess I should say it's not a total surprise to me. That of all the lies that the Russians have invented to justify this fiasco that they've undertaken, that one of them might be this.

But I guess it is important to say for listeners, this is laugh out loud funny in a sense, because there's just never been any credible evidence. There's never been any credible evidence that Ukraine has been trying to build nuclear weapons. And it would take facilities that they don't have.

Aaron 6:18

I mean, I don't even know if there's anything more to say on that. I mean, other than it's just – it's a farcical narrative. But one in which is now creeped into sort of one of their bullet points about why they're doing what they're doing. I mean – I guess it's important to push back. But I'm not sure it's worth sort of getting in the back and forth about this sort of on the depths of Twitter or anything like that to push back, quote unquote.

Jeffrey 6:42

The other thing I would say is one thing that is useful about this particular event is it's – it has all the hallmarks of a Russian influence campaign in terms of the way that the – The way that Sputnik and the other Russian media have sort of handled it, right, by doing the, like, we're just asking questions, but, like, flooding the zone with this garbage coverage that just keeps raising the issue over and over again.

So, yeah, we've probably talked about it already enough, but it's... It exists there, and I do wonder, you know, when the Russians tell these lies, do they start to believe them themselves?

Aaron 7:22

Well, that's always the ultimate, like, Unanswerable question. There's this viral clip going around of some Russian, either academic or Russian-affiliated politician on a British television channel who's with a straight face, suggesting that Ukrainians are shooting at themselves. And you just have to wonder, does he really believe it, or does he really believe it because he risks 15 years in jail?

Jeffrey 7:45

Yeah, nobody wants to be Navalny's cellmate.

Aaron 7:49

I certainly wouldn't. But, you know... That's the question is, is the bullshit not really for us? It's actually for them. And so the English language stuff that gets projected outwards isn't really trying to convince anybody else other than their own population, who by all accounts are completely bewildered by what is going on and were not prepared for this.

And so they are dealing with the consequences of an action I would say a majority probably didn't think was going to happen and are grappling with the severity of it both in terms of the loss of lives for people they may know. But also in terms of loss of access to the world. I wouldn't want to be flying on an Aeroflot jet anytime soon and all of that will come with that.

I do think that perhaps there was some value for themselves.

Jeffrey 8:37

Would you say that the Russian information ecosystem is sort of at one end of a very long table, separated from the rest of our information ecosystem by many, many empty chairs?

Aaron 8:53

Unless you're a group of Aeroflot stewardesses, you do not get to sit at the right side of the thing. I'm going to come back to them. Those are my favorite thing about why we're all going to live. But I think the second part is that What was it? Day two or day three of this conflict when it became absolutely clear that the Russians were sort of like fumbling and bungling about, you know.

And a friend joked in a WhatsApp group, you know, like there's all this talk about all this, you know, foreign weaponry. It'd be good to like – Stack up the kill rate between certain foreign weaponry and mud and to see which one has a higher kill rate in terms of what's going on with Russian soldiers. And this takes us back to the beginning.

It's always fun to make fun of the Russians, particularly over here, because they make a good villain. And Putin certainly did that when he used a strange phrase to talk about nuclear weapons, which sort of sent our field into a frenzy to try and figure out what exactly it is he was signaling.

Jeffrey 9:47

Yeah, I think we've now tracked this down. So I can't speak Russian, so I won't say it in Russian, although I put the actual phrase on my Twitter account, which, by the way, no one does. It was really interesting to see all these people arguing about what Putin meant. And, like, nobody bothered to, like, go get the Russian and be like, here is the Russian phrase, which...

I did. I... Okay, yes, the two weirdos. I did put it on Twitter, but yeah. But that was like a fairly unusual step, which I thought was really weird. But it translates as special mode or special regime of combat duty. And what I found really interesting is when I went back and looked, that phrase did not appear except in one case, and it involved air defenses in Russia and Belarus after 9-11.

And so pretty early I was convinced it probably wasn't an alert because as certain Russian generals have reminded me, their forces are already on alert.

Aaron 10:48

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 10:50

Yeah. But what Shoigu later said, the defense minister, but then also General Yesen has said it at a public meeting and I think in a few other places, and I'm sort of lumping together the things people have said. So this is a – some of this is not in Shoigu, but it's from people explaining Shoigu, is that this was a measure that applied to command posts.

And so typically a Russian command post is going to have six soldiers on duty, and this measure would increase the number on duty during any given shift from six to, say, nine or twelve. And there would be no change to the launch units because they have a fixed number. You know, like if you went into a Russian silo, there are only so many chairs.

And I don't just mean like literally chairs, but I mean seats where you could do something meaningful. Yes, both of us – listeners, both of us have our arms up turning keys. Turning keys. Which is not very helpful for you if you're listening. But – and Aaron and I did it at the same time. So you're all dead.

Aaron 12:06

Well, I think it's important because the media picked it up as alert. And I don't mean this as a criticism to the media, although it's a slight criticism to the media. It doesn't appear to have been an alert. Words matter. And there's this – we've talked about this on the show. This usually translates into people who explain the news to us either on television or in sort of the op-ed pages, many of which are usually ill-informed about the button.

So I'm turning my finger because they're not pushing a button. They're probably going to be turning a key. And alert means something different than what we think he said. Now, I think it was the ambiguity in the abstraction in the language and the fact that it was a very sort of oddball phrase to where people I turned to to help explain the Russian nuclear forces to me were also genuinely perplexed as to what he meant.

Jeffrey 12:54

It was not a phrase that I had heard before. And once I tracked it down in Russian, again, I could find only one other instance. And that was in reference to air defenses, which, by the way, then made sense. Because once I got the explanation, it's like, oh, that's what they did after 9-11. They put more people on duty in their command posts in their air defense force.

Yeah.

Aaron 13:15

And so – and I do think we would be unwise or cavalier to suggest that there wasn't a little bit of signaling on his side. Well, he did it on TV.

Jeffrey 13:26

You don't put your forces on nuclear alert on live TV. I mean he – you just – you write an order, right? The fact that he verbally ordered this on television with everyone watching and then they put it up on YouTube with that clip. I mean they clearly relished. The fact that there was going to be that response and that they could then go ahead and say, you know, oh, you worked up Westerners who don't understand anything.

You know, you're freaking out over three to six extra people in a command post. And yeah, they knew what they were doing.

Aaron 14:01

Then the body language doctors got involved and they were like convinced that Shoigu was like uncomfortable because he himself was about ready to die, which I'm always very hesitant to suggest because I don't sit in meetings with Vladimir Putin. I would probably be uncomfortable being in the presence of the men myself.

Jeffrey 14:15

Gerasimov has allegedly been fired. Shoigu is allegedly planning a coup. And this is all based on the fact that, you know, like they probably have been in this meeting for four hours and need to take a shit. That's right. I mean, like, what is the uncomfortable look on Gerasimov's face? Like, well, he probably shouldn't have had three cups of coffee and that multigrain muffin this morning.

That's the uncomfortable look on his face. He's not being fired.

Aaron 14:46

Yeah, and the fact that he can't hear Putin because he's about 400 feet away.

Jeffrey 14:51

He should get one of the stewardesses to carry the messages back and forth. That's right. He needs the stewardesses. I think it's time for that conversation because so much of the Putin interpretation is actually the whole nuclear alert discussion was really, I think, a proxy for. Is he crazy? And the is he crazy question really boils down to one, he's made some bad decisions and two, he won't sit near people at a table, which does look weird.

Aaron 15:22

Yes. So the – yes. And then some questionable provenance, air quote, FSB documents that have magically made their way to like race car drivers on Twitter, which may or may not be true. And then people are over-interpreting all this stuff. Yeah, I've been in COVID isolation. I haven't really gone out. I feel pretty good. I'm not ready to die.

I haven't invaded anyone. Look – It is the – it's a proxy for the rational case, for the rational actor theory. Is he – he was crazy enough to invade Ukraine. So he may be crazy enough to use the bomb. And so we're really uncomfortable. And then you have very prominent people who a lot of people turn to who are reaffirming these anxieties in like interviews, right?

Like – I'm not casting shade at Fiona Hill, but a lot of people talk about Fiona Hill. She's become a household name to a lot of people outside of this thing. And when she gives an interview to Politico and says, well, maybe he will, maybe he won't. I can't rule anything out. People pick it up and roll with this stuff.

Jeffrey 16:29

Yeah, I mean, I have to say I'm a little immune. Immune is maybe not the right word. This stuff all leaves me cold because when I was at CSIS in the 90s, we got hooked up with some old guys who were sort of tangential to – do you remember Jerry Post? Yeah.

Aaron 16:53

No.

Jeffrey 16:54

He was the psychologist who made a living diagnosing world leaders from their TV appearances. Oh, yes, yes, yes. And there was a whole cottage industry of like, you know, Saddam's crazy. And, you know, like this – there was this – I mean, racist is probably the wrong word, but like real othering thing going on. Like we're going to refuse to understand these other actors in the world.

And the way that we're going to do that is to have some... Second-rate psychologists come on TV and diagnose them from afar, which real psychologists wouldn't do. And we're going to use that information to allow us to build our own Putin-like information ecosystem where we're sane and they're not. And so I just feel like this is a thing that people are attracted to.

Aaron 17:51

Yeah. No, I mean, this characterized both sort of probably the left as they treated Trump and now the right as they treat Biden. These amateur people treating them as brain addled and losing grip with reality because of- I'm not sure that's wrong about Trump.

Jeffrey 18:08

He just suggested that we paint some planes with Chinese markings and bomb the Russians and tell the Russians it was the Chinese, which I-

Aaron 18:20

True. It was pretty good.

Jeffrey 18:21

I mean, that one's up there. I take your point that, you know, there is that whole left-wing grifting ecosystem. And I know, you know, I've seen them and they're real and they're crazy as F. But, yeah, I – boy.

Aaron 18:38

Yeah.

Jeffrey 18:38

Yeah.

Aaron 18:39

Well, my point is, to move this on, my point is that people graft on to sort of clips in like things that you see online and then it's used to feed your own narratives about what you think is going on. And again, it reinforces your own anxieties.

Jeffrey 18:57

Which you have done in an extremely astute way, I must say, Aaron. I am persuaded.

Aaron 19:04

I mean, okay. So I have always felt that the – as soon as – okay. Let me back up here.

Jeffrey 19:12

I love this. By the way, listeners, he hasn't explained it, but I'm going to call this the Bunga Bunga Theory of Nuclear Stability. This is Aaron's Bunga Bunga Theory of Nuclear Stability.

Aaron 19:23

I have a lot of these pet theories that I don't let out in the ether. But when he made the initial comments – I mean, I have to admit, a chill went through my brain and I was like, well, what the fuck does that mean? Do you know what I mean? And so then – but once I started digging into it, I started to reassure myself.

And ultimately what reassured myself was his meeting with the Aeroflot stewardesses – flight attendants? The Aeroflot flight attendants. They were all female.

Jeffrey 19:51

Yeah, I was going to say – I mean, I appreciate you using non-gendered language, but like he didn't invite any guys.

Aaron 19:58

Yeah. There was no dudes in that room except for him. They did not get the long table treatment.

Jeffrey 20:03

No, they did not.

Aaron 20:05

Suddenly his COVID fears evaporated. His COVID fears were gone. He was wearing the spiffy tie, right? He clearly liked to be in the company of about, what, 40 attractive women? All sort of like hanging on his every word either because they're coerced or maybe they really do like him as a person or as a leader. Yeah. You don't get the 40 girls together to like talk about the future of the country.

If you think the future of the country is about literally to go up and smoke. He likes being around women. He likes his fancy things. He doesn't want to kill himself. And I promise you, if he was crazy and irrational. Sorry. Yeah. That suggests to me that he's not irrational. It suggests to me that he's a horrible man.

He's not hanging out with Ava Braun in the Fuhrer bunker. No. He's got this sort of like- He's bringing in the Airflot stewardesses because he still loves his life. He still loves his life. That's right. So he's like, I may have crippled the industry and you all are out of a job, but you get to hang with me now and I get to choose.

And like that's like I look at that and I just go, I think we're going to be okay.

Jeffrey 21:16

You know? Yeah. You know, one thing I would add is that the reason I'm cautious about all of the efforts to analyze him psychologically is I think back to a few years ago. Do you remember when he went to Mongolia? And he's on the tarmac and they play the Russian anthem, which is, you know, the old Soviet anthem rewritten.

And he breaks down in tears in the middle of it.

Aaron 21:43

Mm hmm.

Jeffrey 21:44

And so we had this magnificent glimpse into his inner mental life, right? Mr. Tuffy is breaking down into tears during the anthem. Something is going on there, but we don't have the slightest idea what, and we still don't. And I think that is a useful caution. We got a brief glimpse into his inner mental life. We have no idea what the hell is going on.

And then it closed. And so, you know, I say that not to say, well, maybe he's secretly crazy, but that we can't We can't be involved in the business of deciding he's crazy and deciding he can't calculate just because he made a bad decision because we don't really have access to a full accounting of his worldview, the information he has access to.

Sure, like a lot of dictators, he's probably isolated and a victim of his own bubble, but And, you know, we've seen some of the things he's done over the years, so we have some idea of his personality. But I think we flatter ourselves. Even Macron, who I think correctly said when he got done meeting with Putin that last time that it was a different man.

You know, and I think that he was very astute in seeing that something had changed. But there's, I think, a real limit, all of which I would say would be we should not I think we agree. We're not going to dismiss the possibility that things get out of hand. But it's too easy to write the man off as crazy, especially when, as you say, we have the Bunga Bunga theory of nuclear stability.

Aaron 23:18

It's also the Botox theory. If you're still getting Botox shots and you're in the Bunga Bunga room, you care what you look like and you want to live life. That's my overall theory. I also think it doesn't make any rational sense. There is nothing that nuclear weapons can accomplish in this conflict. You see it. Could he use it on a limited basis if he's losing in Ukraine?

Use them for what? Yeah. I think we all have to be cautious. It's Monday, March 7th. The war has been going on for what, 10 days now? I've lost track. But it's not even two weeks old. I think we can all agree that the invasion didn't go as planned, but I think that there's a general hypothesis amongst real astute observers of the Russian military is that one reason that they failed so badly was one, bad assumptions.

He thought the Ukrainians would roll over. But two is that they didn't want to destroy infrastructure. Now, they may have moved on from that, but that suggests at least at the upper levels who we have to assume were aware of what was going on, that they didn't actually want to destroy this place. And the Ukrainians are not at risk of a huge counteroffensive here to seriously threaten the Russian homeland.

They're just at risk of blooding up a Russian army as they try and besiege urban areas. I don't see a place to use nuclear weapons unless you are willing to invite more international condemnation and if you want to destroy a city. And I just don't – they can destroy a city without nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 24:53

Well, I think one of the reasons that I'm unhappy with the kind of Putin suicide nuclear scenario is I do think it also then distracts us from the realistic routes we have for things getting out of control. Right. And what I'm genuinely concerned about is that if the war continues to drag on, and I think it now looks like it will drag on.

We're going to see much, much more pressure in the United States and in Europe to do more to aid the Ukrainians. And... Yes. That's going to... I mean, we are not neutral in this conflict. And if you are shipping arms... To a belligerent, you know, your party. And as the Russians lose, I do worry about the possibility that our involvement escalates, both in terms of what we're doing, but also Russia's desire to try to interdict that involvement.

So, you know, we're shipping more stuff. And then they start to take a look at striking things. And the place that, you know, this really pops up for me, because I'm willing to run those risks for the lethal aid we're sending now, but the place that pops up is the infamous no-fly zone idea.

Aaron 26:16

Yeah. The no-fly zone is beyond preposterous. It's indicative to me that we have an – maybe I shouldn't say this on the pod, but I'll say it anyways. We have an entire – Sort of cadre of experts and analysts who the no-fly zone is the de facto tool that you lean on whenever you don't know what to do or you feel helpless.

Because it's what we did in Bosnia, it's what we did in Kosovo, it's what we did in Iraq before we invaded in 2003 and it can stop Russian overflight. It's an entirely preposterous idea because it is a full military operation and it will require doing things to the Russian armed forces that is inherently escalatory. And I know we have some historical documents there.

But I also have a note of optimism here too. And it's that one thing that the Biden team has clearly demonstrated over and over again to me is that they are immune from the online conversation pressure. Yeah.

Jeffrey 27:21

This was clear during the campaign, right, where everybody was telling them how wrong they were until they won.

Aaron 27:26

And then this has been clear ever since where everybody was telling them they weren't doing enough on Russia. And then they do everything and people are like, well, holy shit, they did a lot. Right? And we're not always flattering to the Biden administration. Probably future pods or previous pods, I mean, talking about future pods, we've discussed their sort of slow return to the Iran nuclear deal.

But this one, I think we can say that they've handled well. They've been adamant that this is just not going to happen. You know, and so this is sort of like, again, Biden is not crazy, you know, and I wouldn't put him in the same class of Vladimir Putin, but I would say that he's immune from the pressure and like maybe wrapped in his own bubble that protects him from this push upward of online chatter.

Jeffrey 28:08

Twitter is not real. I mean, Twitter is a bubble. Like there are so many tankies on Twitter. How often do you encounter tankies in real life?

Aaron 28:18

Well, I mean, if I went by my Twitter mentions, I'm the dumbest person on earth and I get everything wrong.

Jeffrey 28:23

I mean, one thing I – I mean, I do want to talk about why I think it would be a bad idea to do a no-fly zone. And the example that I used the other day online, which turns out to have stirred the pot a little bit, is that – A no-fly zone is a euphemism. What it means is our aircraft should – our pilots and our aircraft should participate in combat operations against Russian and if they get involved, do they even have Belarusian pilots and aircraft?

They do. That's what that means. That we should – Yes. We should engage in combat operations against them. And so one of the weird things I keep hearing people say – Is, well, the Soviets were able to have pilots dress up as Chinese pilots, and then the Chinese and the Soviet pilots painted North Korean markings on their planes, and they participated, and the U.S. knew it, and that didn't lead to nuclear war, so it's fine.

So the problem with that Is that it really did make the United States angry. And the participation of aircraft from a sanctuary in Northern China, right? That's where all the air bases were led the Eisenhower administration when they came in to reassess us war strategy. And, They decided – I'm not saying they discussed. They decided that if armistice negotiations were to break down – now, happily, they did not.

And they got an armistice later in the summer. But they decided in the spring of 1953 that if armistice negotiations broke down, they would go for a military result is how they phrased it. And that would require expanding the war into China. To target those air bases and that the best way to do that was to use nuclear weapons against those air bases in China.

And so the idea that it didn't escalate, it's like, but it was going to. And just to close that thought out, Eisenhower was really clear in his memoir that he decided to use nuclear weapons because he thought that this was a legitimate strategic target and they needed to do it to win. He knew the allies would be upset, but he said they'd get over it if we won.

And he closes on this chilling note of he thought there was a very good chance the Soviets retaliate, and he just felt awful about the unprotected Japanese cities that would probably be targeted in a retaliation. And that was the end of that sentence. He didn't say, so therefore I wasn't going to do it. He was willing to accept the retaliation because he believed it could be kept limited and it was worth the price of winning.

So like if you're Putin and you're thinking you're going to lose this war because of aircraft operating out of NATO bases, I do think he might hit them.

Aaron 31:22

I do too. I mean – and he may think that the Bunga Bunga Room is safe because I think one of the underlying subtexts of the Eisenhower discussions was that nuclear weapons were basically his only option, right? Or like one of the only options on the table where there are many different numbers of options that could be used to strike inside to Poland or Romania or Poland in this scenario.

Yeah. This was actually when I heard the leak that we were going to be greenlighting the transfer of old Soviet airframes from Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria, via Poland to the Ukrainians. That's another moment where I had to show you a pucker. Or I was just like, what the fuck are you guys doing? You know, if you're going to do that, keep that really, really secret and don't like plaster it all over fucking Twitter.

I support doing it. I do not support talking about it. Just do it. Like the fact that it's leaked now, right, removes all ambiguity as to about where they're coming from. And so it's just like this is a dead idea and it should be a dead idea. And when you hear that Poland and Bulgaria and Slovakia are like saying no now, it's like those leaders have some sense.

Right?

Jeffrey 32:38

But once everybody shuts up, maybe we can revisit it in three weeks.

Aaron 32:44

Well, this speaks to another part of this, which is that the crisis isn't just about Ukraine anymore. It's now become politicized in the US. I don't even mean along partisan lines. It's now become a vehicle for For members of Congress in particular to show off their sort of tough foreign policy bona fides as they run for president in 2024.

And so like you can throw shit out all you want and you can stand behind your member of Congress title and you can write letters and you can give interviews all you want knowing that you don't have to deal with the repercussions of that because you don't actually make any policy.

Jeffrey 33:28

Yeah. Right. You can live tweet Zoom meetings including one that – Right. Yeah.

Aaron 33:34

Well, you can create a straw man and then run against it even though the straw man is doing a good job. It's that I would have done it. It's the implicit thing of like if we were in power – and again, this isn't even – this is just to say that these people are – They're clowns. They're clowning themselves.

Jeffrey 33:53

Marco Rubio is a clown. Nikki Haley is a clown. They will do anything that they can to get elected. That's all they care about. You know, like, these people would murder their own children if they thought it would make them president. Like, you just, you can't, you can't base your life on what politicians say. Like, it's a bad idea.

Aaron 34:15

But we turn to them to sort of explain the situation to us. That's hyperbole, by the way.

Jeffrey 34:21

I'm not sure Nikki Haley would actually murder her own children.

Aaron 34:25

We're just asking questions.

Jeffrey 34:26

Like, Sputnik!

Aaron 34:31

No, but that was another moment for me, is that when that became something on Twitter, and I think somebody in the European Union, I cannot remember who it was, said they'll be in the skies in an hour. I was like, where the fuck are they flying from? You're really going to be having these things flying from Poland?

Like, somebody needs to get out in front of this. And this goes to another sort of, like, weird escalatory scenario, which is that, what, NATO's, what, 30-member alliance now? Like, I always can't remember if it's 29 or 30.

Jeffrey 34:59

I used to keep track because they had the publication called NATO's However Many Nations. But I haven't seen a paper copy of that in years. And maybe it doesn't even exist.

Aaron 35:08

I'm a director of research. I should remember this. I believe it's 30, but, like, whatever. Yeah. Is that you do have independent foreign policies being executed under the umbrella of NATO. And that is the implicit sort of – and that is the explicit belief that some of these countries – Can depend on the United States to ultimately defend them.

And so they can operate under the euphemistic umbrella to pursue some of their own policies, many of which is anti-Russia. You know what I'm saying?

Jeffrey 35:34

Yeah. So I, it is my fundamental concern because while like you, I think Putin does not want this to escalate to a nuclear war. You know, I buy the, I buy the bunga bunga theory. I am Cautious now that we think that this is going to drag out because if he continues to lose and he believes that our support is a crucial aspect of him losing You know, people kept saying like, oh, Eisenhower's views are so old fashioned.

No one would think like that today. I think they're perfectly reasonable for a political leader because his views, which I think will be Putin's views are, I need to do this to win. People forgive winners. And if I can keep the cost contained, I'm willing to pay it to win. Those are not absurd views.

Aaron 36:28

No, they're not irrational. For me, that is the one actual worry. Although I really don't worry all that much. I think that's a reassuring note. But the thing I'm actually – I think it's something that friend of the pod, James Acton, I think pointed out. I want to say on day one or day two of this Twitter – of this conflict on Twitter, excuse me, which is Ukraine has a lot of nuclear power plants and there's a lot of shit flying around.

And I think we had that sort of surreal experience where I'm sitting at my kitchen dinner table trying to feed two kids and watching a firefight outside of a nuclear power plant.

Jeffrey 37:09

I mean, webcams are amazing. I watched that same firefight play out. There are other nuclear reactors in Ukraine, so I'm not sure that this is a dead issue. Yep. You know, that's dangerous. The containment units of those things are not that great.

Aaron 37:28

Well, that was actually – so the general sort of theory and this is a little out of my area. Well, it's a lot out of my area. But like the general sort of theory of the case is that these are not Chernobyl type reactors, right? These are more updated, modernized, pressurized water reactors.

Jeffrey 37:47

Oh, wait. So they are inherently – I mean, they're VVR. They're VVERs.

Aaron 37:54

Yeah, I think they're the VVR-1000s, right? Right, but they're old. They are old. Yeah, no, I'm getting there. Okay, sorry. But I'm going to say – yeah, no, is that these aren't Chernobyl. They are modernized reactors, but modern is being used loosely here. They are older, right? And so, I mean, regardless of age, I wouldn't want any artillery around there to breach the containment domes or anything along those lines.

Jeffrey 38:25

I mean, I – That's right. My sense is the containment at those reactors is not great. And so the possibility that they're getting hit with missiles or rocket artillery does cause me a certain amount of concern. Big time. I mean, I just generally I think don't shoot at the reactor is probably like a good life lesson, life rule.

Aaron 38:59

It's the hunt for Red October. Final scene, you know, a lot of things don't react well in here to bullets.

Jeffrey 39:05

Yeah.

Aaron 39:05

You know, just do what Sean Connery said.

Jeffrey 39:09

You know, because there are – it is a complex – it's a complex complex. You know, so if you – I mean, one thing I worry about are the spent fuel ponds. You know, if they – if you can't keep that water cool and it boils off or evaporates, you have a spent fuel fire. You know, they're just – A lot of systems that those reactors and the associated facilities need to keep running.

And so, you know, again, having a running gun battle through the reactor complex just does not strike me as like the awesomest idea.

Aaron 39:45

Yeah, it was like a dystopian OnlyFans moment, I think, for a lot of people, you know, where the webcam was free and it was really bad to watch.

Jeffrey 39:53

Yeah. You know, the last thing I want to ask Is this difficult question about the value of nuclear weapons. I have friends who say that nuclear weapons are excellent invasion insurance. Yep. The problem is the record on them is actually not that great. The Egyptians were willing to take Sinai from the nuclear-armed Israelis. The Argentines were willing to take the Falklands from the nuclear-armed UK.

The Chinese, who at the time had a very pathetic nuclear arsenal, were willing to initiate a conflict on the border with the nuclear-armed Soviets. And every time I raise those issues, people say, well, those don't count, you know, because everybody knows you're not going to fight a nuclear war of the Falcons or the Sinai or the, you know, an island in a river.

And so I want to ask that question really directly, which is if you were the Ukrainians and if you did have these mythical nuclear weapons that Vladimir Putin imagines or that other people think they could have kept, which we've said enough about. Yeah. Would you have used them yet?

Aaron 41:10

No.

Jeffrey 41:11

It's hard, right, to come up with a scenario where if you're maybe fall of Kiev, although even then, if you're still fighting it out. I don't know. I think the Russians could salami slice their way to a victory. And you would never get to a point where you were like, yeah, I want to use the bomb. Which, by the way, is exactly the famous scene in Yes Minister.

That's true.

Aaron 41:43

I mean... I mean the scenarios sort of in these fantastical war plans from the Cold War was always that you could use them to like delay Soviet advance like through mountainous areas, right? And somehow not have it escalate and that's my daughter who I'll have to go get in a second. The Ukrainians have slowed them down considerably, and time is now on their side.

And so the idea of using a nuclear weapon, even in the event that Kiev is besieged and encircled, seems pretty silly to me. I mean, I can't think of a scenario where it would be used.

Jeffrey 42:25

So I'll just close that thought by saying I think we have decided that nuclear weapons are in this class by themselves. Well, there's one other item in the class, and that's a magic wand. But they're not actually that. They're city destroyers. Randall Munroe, who does XKCD, has this wonderful book where he tries to explain everything using just very small words.

And his word for nuclear weapon was city burning machine. And if you call it a city burning machine, it's a really interesting question. If you were the Ukrainians, at what point do you start city burning, knowing that city burning comes back to you? And I think you even lose the war conventionally before you do it. And to me, it really calls into question the value of these weapons, even in their core mission of invasion insurance.

Aaron 43:18

Unless you have one in the Bunga Bunga room, I think you hold it back.

Jeffrey 43:22

I mean, yeah, well, this is why pre-delegation exists, right? Because it never actually makes sense to use them. Yeah. Got to burn your bridges and leave a little threat to chance. Quote my friend Tom.

Aaron 43:33

Well, yeah, no, I mean, I've oddly come out of this. You know, I would say before this started, I thought we were going to see an increase in the salience of nuclear weapons. I still think that's true politically. But I think practically, as you think through scenarios – We joke about it, which tends to be our shtick on this podcast because that's really our personalities.

But –

Jeffrey 44:01

I don't know what you're talking about. The Bunga Bunga theory of nuclear stability is an absolutely serious concept. And I will be submitting a paper to international security with that title.

Aaron 44:10

I was about to say, you know, I've never been published in international security. But like, imagine if that one go into the peer reviewers, you know, even making it past the first gate. But I think practically, as you come out of this, and yes, leaders sometimes make stupid decisions. I'm actually oddly reassured that these weapons aren't going to be used.

Jeffrey 44:33

Doesn't mean I'm not nervous, but that's it for me.

Aaron 44:37

And with that, I'm going to do the readout because I have the junior junior fellow upstairs screaming at me and she has a tendency to hurdle herself over her crib. If you want to join the conversation where we do lots of OSINT work on this conflict, where it's the hot place to be. If you want to be cited in the places like the Washington Post or The Economist, you can become a member of our Slack channel, which is patreon.com slash ACW podcast.

$3 a month if you're a student, $5 a month if you are not. And you can join us. Jeffrey, it's been real, and we'll be in touch. Talk to you soon, man.