Another Crazy Train

Jeffrey Lewis 0:18

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 0:34

And I am Aaron Stein, chief content officer at War on the Rocks. Jeffrey, it's been a minute.

Jeffrey 0:39

It has been too long, Aaron. You know, the problem is there's been a lot of bullshit going on.

Aaron 0:46

It's the crazy train. I heard that Ozzy Osbourne has a new album out, and so it's like oldie but goodie time. It's nukes, Europe, and the crazy train of death on the Telegraph newspaper.

Jeffrey 0:57

Just a thought. I would have more time for podcasts if people stopped making shit up. That's just a little PSA here from Arms Control Wonk headquarters.

Aaron 1:09

It's a good example of bad OSINT and like bad OSINT, like feeding hysteria and the crazy train. So why don't you describe the bad OSINT so we can, the listeners know what we're talking about.

Jeffrey 1:19

All right. So there are there are two examples of bad OSINT. Actually, one of the examples of bad OSINT is not that bad. The first example I just disagree with and, and it's, it's It compares rather favorably with the second comical example. The example that I don't think is that bad, which I was much nicer about on Twitter, and here my objection is as much about the reaction as it was the underlying analysis.

I think I've been appropriately respectful of people I generally think do an okay job. Is there was a claim that there were Russian bombers that were at a different air base than they are normally located at. And this was hinted at. To be a sign of an impending nuclear strike. And the analysis actually was reasonably careful, even if I disagreed with a lot of it.

But then the reaction in the public was freaking Looney Tunes, right? It's like Putin poisoning bombers for nuclear strike on Ukraine. And then the second one in which no such care was taken by the analysts was this claim that there was a nuclear weapons convoy headed toward the Ukrainian border. And, you know, people lost their f***ing minds, man.

Aaron 2:42

Well, it made it out into the Telegraph, which as I understand it, I'm not up to date on like my British tabloids, is not that well regarded. But I think it's well regarded enough to make people nervous. Oh, no, it is extremely well regarded as toilet paper. But I would say it's in the premium aisle of toilet paper.

It's not like the National Enquirer.

Jeffrey 3:07

That's, that's absolutely true. It is not like that, by the way you know, do you know the famous yes minister bit about the press?

Aaron 3:22

I think I do, but I'm not sure all of our listeners do.

Jeffrey 3:25

Okay, so Jim Hacker, who is the minister in question, says... He's basically being told about who reads what or how the press reacts, and he says... I know exactly who reads the papers. And by the way, this is like 30, 40 years old now, and it is still absolutely true. He says, the Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country.

The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country.

And the Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.

Aaron 4:13

Okay, fair enough. All right, that's good. That is good. I didn't know that one.

Jeffrey 4:18

Oh, the whole clip is fantastic. And then there's a jaw-droppingly funny line after that regarding the sun, which is so funny that the actors actually lose it and they just leave it in. Okay. Well, so, yes, it is a conspiratorial rag, which, by the way, I should pause here and say, you know, if you work at The Daily Telegraph and you aspire to not write a conspiratorial rag, we don't hold that against you.

All kinds of people work at places and for people who are disreputable and go on to find careers. For example, our own beloved super producer, Scott.

Aaron 4:57

Look, everybody's going to put food on the table during times of famine. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. That's right. But if we're talking about the specific claims, they were pulling from Twitter, I believe, that were suggesting that certain – it was railway cars, wasn't it? Or certain markers on railway cars suggested that the convoy was super secret and special and needed to be guarded very closely and therefore was indicative of nuclear weapons moving.

Okay.

Jeffrey 5:25

Yeah, so we should probably go through these in the reverse order. We'll start with the dumb crazy train first, and then we'll go to the slightly, not slightly, the more sophisticated bomber story. But the crazy train is about a freaking turret, okay? So what happened was in the spring, in May, Russia began serial production of a new turret for its armored vehicles.

And this is an uninhabited turret, so, you know, robo-turret. And at the time, what the press report said was that one mission for this would be escorting special cargoes. And we had seen it previously on a particular vehicle. It can go on a number of armored vehicles, but we saw it on a particular armored vehicle. And what people concluded, I think reasonably, Is that one of the early adopters of this new turret with this particular armored vehicle would be the 12th GUMO, the 12th Main Directorate, the people in Russia who move nuclear weapons around and handle them, right?

So what happened was there was a train filled with trucks, and the trucks are like pretty unremarkable Russian military trucks, right? They all look the same. It's not like you can see the license plates, you know, whatever. They're just trucks. But also on the train were a number of those armored vehicles with that turret that we associate with the 12th Maine Directorate.

Aaron 6:56

Right. Again, when I saw it, I just thought they were moving the turrets and the trucks. I didn't really put two and two together.

Jeffrey 7:03

So this is the problem with this bit of analysis. First... Eventually, the train was geolocated to Sergeyev Posad, which means it's like outside of Moscow. So you don't you don't it's not near the front. You don't know that it's heading to the front. There's a ton of rail lines between this train and the front, and it could be going a lot of places.

So it could have been coming from the place that makes the turrets. Like they may have installed them on the vehicles and they might have been shipping them out to Russian military units, some of which would be located near the front. Like even if it was 12th GUMO, which by the way, we don't know. But even if it was 12th GUMO, there are 12th GUMO locations between the front and where the train was spotted.

So like you don't know they're going to the front. You don't actually know that they're 12 GUMO, right? Because one of the things the news reporting said was that the defense ministry was being super quiet about who was going to get it and made the observation that some of them might go to Ukraine because they're in need of armored vehicles.

Aaron 8:09

They've lost a lot, yeah.

Jeffrey 8:10

So it's entirely possible that these were for a whole other unit other than 12 GUMO and maybe they were going to the front. It is also possible that they were going to 12 GUMO and either the vehicles... Or the vehicles and their crews were congratulated on volunteering for the special military operation. You just don't know. And also, these are just the escort vehicles.

So a convoy of vehicles that escort nuclear weapons is not a convoy of nuclear weapons.

Aaron 8:51

The information doesn't come... So the pictures that were coming out of the information that was used to make that premature analysis also – One video on TikTok and one picture as far as I can tell. Right. And it's incomplete. We have news reporting on the other side. So this is where you always want to fill out your OSINT, right?

Like you had news reporting on the other side where you had U.S. officials – Expressing some concern about Russian nuclear rhetoric, but saying they had not seen any movement of their nuclear forces. That's one. And then two, we do have images of what these railway cars, these specialized railway cars to carry Russian nuclear weapons actually look like.

Jeffrey 9:35

Yes, because we paid to modernize them.

Aaron 9:38

That's right. We actually know a lot about these things because we used to walk around our nuclear establishment a lot in the 1990s.

Jeffrey 9:45

Yeah, you know, back when things were good and we were trying to help them get rid of these things and we didn't want people to steal them. So we have lots of images of the specialized rail cars that the Russians used to transport containers with nuclear weapons in them. And we have pictures of the containers. And like Michael Dutzman and I literally cracked open a reference book and took photographs of the pictures of the rail cars.

So. For this to be a nuclear weapons convoy, I would have needed pictures of the specialized rail cars. But even then, I pause and note, Russia moves nuclear weapons around its country all the time. Russian nuclear weapons have relatively short service lives. There are a lot of them. And so a significant portion of that force is in transit Either to be replaced or is on its way or is new and out to replace the things that had been pulled.

So I think some of the U.S. statements were really careful and they actually, you know, reporters were like, well, wait, what are you trying to say to me? A lot of U.S. statements were something like we aren't seeing any unusual movement. Which is to say, like, we see movement all the time. And honestly, you see it in the US and you see it in the UK.

And the example I used online are the crazy people in the UK who freaking bomb spot the UK's nuclear weapons convoys. Right, and I want to come back. I do not recommend this as a hobby, by the way, just for the record. Yeah, there's a funny, funny story which I posted on my blog a couple years ago, and I, I don't know I don't remember now. I think it was in Nevada where some reporter starts following an unmarked white truck, and like, eventually, you know, he's like constantly following it, and so the trucker calls it in, and you know, like The feds show up and they're like, yeah, you need to stop following the white truck.

He's like, I demand to know what's in it. They're like, you need to stop following the white truck, man.

Aaron 11:58

Yeah, he has his rights. And something I want to come back to is that if they were actually serious about using these things. You wouldn't necessarily want to hide the movement, right? Because that's going to be the natural retort to some people listening to this podcast who are Daily Telegraph readers who are going to say, well, they wouldn't want to show this stuff off, right?

But I want to come back to that at the end. I think there's a general illiteracy about how we talk about nuclear weapons and how they would be employed going on because of the concerns that they may actually be used.

Jeffrey 12:31

Yeah, because I think we really should make the point, and I want to talk about the bombers for a second, but If Russia is gonna use any nuclear weapons, whether it's one, two, six, or 6,000, I think you're gonna see the entire Russian nuclear force Change its readiness level. You're going to see just a lot more activity.

Because if you're the Russians, and even if you just plan to use one, if you're a Russian general, you don't know what the U.S. is going to do in response.

Aaron 13:01

Correct. Let's put that in a tab. Sorry, let's put a pin in that one. Because the bomber story, that one was more credible to me. I just kind of shrugged at it, though. Okay.

Jeffrey 13:14

Right. So that's, I mean, that's a case where, and again, I hesitate to compare these two things, even though, because this is as much about the reaction to the story as it really is the underlying analysis. The underlying analysis is basically fine. The Russians have certain air bases, particularly Engels, where there are nuclear armed bombers. And Some of those bombers, two different kinds, in fact, I should look up and double check, but I believe it's a TU-160 and, well, not A, it's, I think, maybe three or four TU-160s and a number of TU-95s.

Those show up at Olenia Air Base on the Kola Peninsula.

Aaron 14:11

You should tell listeners where that is. I know where the Kola Peninsula is.

Jeffrey 14:15

Up by Murmansk, up near the Arctic Circle where their nuclear submarines are based. And so rather closer to Finland.

Aaron 14:22

Right. It's up there close to the Nordics.

Jeffrey 14:24

Yeah. So that's a notable thing. And I think that the analysts who noted that this is an unusual deployment were right to say this is an unusual deployment and this is notable. What happened was, and by the way, they did a whole pattern of life analysis, which you needed to do with the train. To make the train credible, you had to be like, here's where these units came from, here's where they got on the train, here is where the train is going, here is where they are getting off.

This movement is not a typical movement, it is an atypical movement, right? And they don't do that for the train. The analysts for the bombers do, do that, right? And they are like, these things come from angles, they are now at Olena, that is an unusual deployment for them, that is noteworthy and must be noted. Like, yes, fair enough. The problem is people then immediately jump to the idea because the Cola Peninsula has so many nuclear weapons in storage.

That, like, they were flying there to get nuclear weapons. And the problem with that is, one, Engels has its own nuclear weapons storage, so these bombers would have been flown away from their nuclear weapons. Hans Christensen did a really nice piece maybe a couple years ago on the refurbishment of those nuclear weapons bunkers. And two, we have seen Russia position strategic bombers at this airbase in the past to do strikes against Syria, which is weird because it's further away from Syria than Engels.

But what they wanted to demonstrate or practice, I don't know if it was for us or for them or for both of us, that they could do really long range strike missions. And so I actually think rebasing the weapons there, the bombers, that's notable because maybe they were going to do, and they may still yet do, bomber patrols.

They may very well do longer range strikes against Ukraine because they're trying to kill two birds with one stone, demonstrating their ability to do long range strikes while carrying out these conventional strikes. At the extreme end, if it had been part of a larger pattern, you might have concluded they were dispersing their bombers, which actually might indicate a nuclear strike.

So I just think you can't Immediately jump to the conclusion that the relocation means that they're nuclear. And it's probably less likely because they're moving them away from their nuclear weapons. And we have seen them conduct strategic strikes and I presume patrols out of this base before. So again, I don't think that was a problem with the underlying analysis.

But as in both cases, I think the thread that ties them together, which I think gets us back to the thing we really wanted to talk about, Which is people want to believe that there is going to be a nuclear strike. And so they interpret everything they see through that lens, which is bad OSINT.

Aaron 17:29

It's confirmation bias. And I wouldn't say people want to see a nuclear weapon strike. I think people have convinced themselves that a nuclear weapon strike is imminent or at least very possible, and therefore they're looking for indicators to confirm their own opinions. Yeah. Which, by the way, is... Go ahead. And that's also a way to cope, right?

Because they're scared. It's a way to try and rationalize stuff.

Jeffrey 17:51

That's also how nuclear wars start, by the way, is when one side believes the other side is about to launch a nuclear attack. So that confirmation bias process is extremely dangerous. And if you think that policymakers are somehow immune to the shit that appears in the press... You're crazy because they do not remember what they got. They don't remember what they got in classified briefings versus what they read in The New York Times in the morning.

And so you are constantly feeding the, you know, intellectual titans who run our countries like Liz Truss this kind of brain garbage. You are increasing the risk that they're going to do something stupid.

Aaron 18:31

No, completely. Absolutely. Open source feeds and frames how people interpret even classified briefings. And so when you have a whole bunch of bad OSINT, I guess, it can certainly poison the way people are predisposed to think about briefings that they get where there's uncertainty.

Jeffrey 18:51

So this is where I want to come back to your big point, which I think is the takeaway of our little conversation, which is, oh, my God, do people not know about nuclear weapons?

Aaron 19:04

Look, I wasn't sentient enough in the 80s to understand if the debates were better back then. But my God, this field has atrophied in the past 30 years. We're still quoting your mentors like Schelling and stuff like that. And nobody's stepping into the breach to at least simplify or explain these old concepts. And so it's just being interpreted by this class of analysts, most of which are online, who don't know what they're talking about.

Jeffrey 19:32

I made this, now this is not an analyst who said this dumb thing, but it was a perfect example. I made this analogy that why would Putin blow up his own pipeline? And I, you know, I, Tom Schelling had a great little anecdote about burning bridges or setting fire to the grass behind you in order to commit yourself to a certain course of action, incredibly signal to the other side that like, you know, you can't deter me, you're going to have to compel me.

And people accused me of saying that, like, Putin was playing nine-dimensional chess. And it's like, dude, burning your ships is, like, a staple of, like, literature in antiquity. You don't even have to be a literature file.

Aaron 20:17

You just have to watch The Hunt for Red October. It's one of those favorite scenes where Sean Connery says, why did Cortez burn his ships?

Jeffrey 20:23

Yeah, like, so that was actually my joke in the tweet. I was like, yeah, it's nine-dimensional chess if you've never read a book or seen a movie.

Aaron 20:32

Right. It's the entire premise of Hunt for Red October is he informs the fleet so he can't turn around and lose his medal.

Jeffrey 20:41

Yep. So I just, I don't know why this is so, why our field is like this. But, yeah. So one thing I think and like I this is more of a judgment call. I'm not saying that if someone can disagree with this and I would I would I would still respect that and I'd be interested in the argument.

My sense is, for example, that. There's a whole there's going to be an entire process to using a nuclear weapon. And if you are Russian generals, I think it is very unlikely that you would envision a limited nuclear use where you didn't take other steps to be prepared for a severe escalation. Because that's just I mean, the guys I know who worked in that biz back in the day, and maybe it's atrophied so much that.

The Russians wouldn't do it. But, you know, they would be like, well, you know, there's going to be a move after our move and we need to be prepared for that move to be like a little bit bigger. And so I would think that a limited use of nuclear weapons would still be accompanied by a pretty broad change in the operation of their strategic forces.

Like, I think they would put some of their submarines, more of their submarines out to sea just to be sure that they're survivable. They can launch from the dock, but, like, they're much more vulnerable that way. They might put, you know, mobile missiles out into the field. You might see some changes in patterns at bombers. You might see them disperse bombers.

So I just... This idea that, like... Somebody is going to just pull one out of a out of a bunker and like put it on a freaking, you know, truck and like put it on the truck on a train and drive it to Ukraine and fire it with like no other indicators is I just it feels very disconnected from all the data we have about how these organizations operate.

Aaron 22:31

Yeah, I mean, I'll put that. In simple terms, and I'll pivot to one last point, then we can wrap up. It's just, basically, if they're going to light one of these things off, they're going to assume that there's going to be a response. We've signaled that there would be a response, whether it be nuclear or non-nuclear. And organizations tend to be worst case scenario thinkers.

So they would put on alert their strategic forces, i.e. Their long range forces, so they could hold targets in Europe and in the United States at risk. And show us that if you respond in ways that we don't like, Then we can light one off in downtown D.C. That's essentially it. So we'll fire one off somewhere in Ukraine, you stay out, and then you can't use one.

So the indicators that we would pick up may not necessarily be a rail car. It would be all the ancillary pieces that would go into how they would prepare for the second, I guess, for the second mover in this case, which would be NATO and the U.S. to their use of a nuclear weapon.

Jeffrey 23:27

I mean, Aaron, this is why Herman Kahn built an escalation ladder, even if he was not the kind of man who could plausibly climb a ladder. That's right. You have to be prepared to dominate the rungs of the escalation ladder, because if you do not dominate them, then your first move allows the other side to put you in a much worse position.

A simple thing you would have to do is be prepared to respond.

Aaron 23:52

Or be in shape to climb a ladder. But now I remember my point. My point was that you and I wrote a piece at the beginning of this where people feel uncomfortable as you edge out onto the slope. People are feeling uncomfortable because the Russians are making noises that are taking them out a little bit onto the slope.

That doesn't mean that imminent use of nuclear weapons is coming. I still think it means deterrence is basically fundamentally working. People just don't realize that it works by everybody being anxious. That fear you feel is deterrence.

Jeffrey 24:28

That is what deterrence feels like. That is what the T-E-R in deterrence means. It is from the Latin for terror. You are not deterred unless you feel the terror. And it doesn't work unless there is a chance it will all go wrong. So if you don't like it, which, you know, like there's an argument that we should not like this for too long.

You know, your problem is with deterrence, which, you know, I think is a very intellectually respectable objection. It is.

Aaron 24:55

It is. Final point is, do you, does anybody in your life use like that citizen app?

Jeffrey 25:03

No. What is that?

Aaron 25:05

You know, it's like where people like it, like it collects all the police reports in your neighborhood. And so you suddenly become very aware of how much crime is going on around you, even if mostly it's petty and it makes you very nervous.

Jeffrey 25:16

A classic reporting fallacy. Right. Which you see when people are like complaining about how we're in border crisis because the Biden administration has stepped up arrests.

Aaron 25:27

Correct. Yes, it's the dependent variable problem, but that's not my point. I joke in these playdates with parents at the park that that's brought to you by the people of Xanax, by the makers of Xanax, because you need to take one every night, but that's what deterrence is. It's brought to you by the people of Xanax. You either take one and don't panic, keep it organic, or you live in fear and you have to do something to try and manage that fear.

Jeffrey 25:53

100%. If you weren't anxious and frightened, deterrence would not be working. The point is to scare the shit out of you so that you don't do anything crazy.

Aaron 26:03

Do you know where people do fantastic OSINT work that is unsullied by the craziness of Twitter and just trying to make determinations for one video?

Jeffrey 26:12

Holy crap! Have they been doing absolutely amazing things.

Aaron 26:18

That would be the one and only Arms Control Onk special forum that goes behind the paywall, which you can get access to if it's patreon.com slash acwpodcast. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you are not. You join our Slack channel. That Slack channel is the OSINT Mecca. It is where the greats go to practice their craft.

Jeffrey 26:41

Aaron, it was awesome to talk to you. It's good to see you, my friend, and we'll do it again soon.