The Actual Demise of New START

Aaron Stein 0:06

And I am Aaron Stein, Chief Content Officer at War on the Rocks. And I think my first publication on that blog...

Jeffrey Lewis 0:30

Was when I was a student at the then Monterey Institute, now Middlebury Institute, about a new start simulation.

Aaron 0:36

Yeah, that's right. You guys were negotiating with students who were Russians, but the kind of Russians who study in America. So they were like kittens, and they just rolled over and made a nice agreement that everybody liked.

Jeffrey 0:50

They rolled over on everything because I think we – I can't even remember, but we had some non-binding language on missile defense in the preamble. Or they may have even gotten into the treaty, but I had secretly suggested that we were going to violate that anyways. I think you called it smart, right? Yeah, and I think we stole that name from Dr. Patricia Lewis, who is at the Chatham House now and previously at MISS.

One of my favorite people in this community. She's a great person, and that was her name. We cribbed it. I guess we should have inserted a footnote into that treaty. I think her reputation will survive your petty act of plagiarism, Aaron. You know, in terms of prominent public media officials, my act of plagiarism is far less than others that I'm just not going to go into right now.

Aaron 1:38

Ain't going to be writing any posts about New Start anymore.

Jeffrey 1:40

We're pulling your avatar, Aaron. It seems like the end of the road, to quote one of my favorite boy bands, Boyz II Men.

Aaron 1:53

I think we are out of the bilateral arms control business for a while now, which I will say was not completely unexpected. But like death, which comes for us all when it arrives, it's still rather unpleasant.

Jeffrey 2:09

Yeah, yeah, it's not a pleasant feeling. I guess for listeners, the U.S., And we've been talking about this, which is the suspension of inspections as part of New START, originally over COVID, but then sort of got merged with the broader Ukraine brouhaha. The cancellation of the BCC meeting in Cairo, ultimately leading the U.S. to find Russia in noncompliance with New START, and Russia saying – or Putin himself saying at the end of a very long speech that Russia was withdrawing from the treaty?

Is that his exact – or suspending implementation?

Aaron 2:42

Yeah, I believe suspending implementation, which I know has some – Some legal distinctions, but if you're on the outside, New Start is dead and it ain't coming back, I think, is where we are right now.

Jeffrey 2:57

So we're effectively in an era now where the bilateral arms control agreements that had basically been framed since the 1970s, but really since the 80s and 90s, I think have all just gone up in smoke one by one.

Aaron 3:12

Yeah, I mean, we have had some kind of bilateral limitation in place with provisions for inspection since the SALT I Interim Agreement and the ABM Treaty in the early 1970s. And now, 50 years later, is that right? Am I doing that math right? It's back to the bad old days of unconstrained arms competition. I think we could see this coming.

I went back and looked at an article I wrote a few years ago where it was really clear to me that the Trump administration was not going to extend New START. And so I asked the question, like, is this the end of the road for that era? And I think it was clear that it was, that if you had a Republican president, they weren't going to extend or replace.

And my sense was, and I think this has turned out to be the case, that a Democratic president would try to extend New START. But I don't think the Russians are all that interested.

Jeffrey 4:12

In the replacement, I guess, in a new agreement that would follow the extension.

Aaron 4:16

I don't think they're interested in bilateral arms control at the moment. And to me, this has been a long time coming. A lot of us came of age in the late 90s, early 2000s, when the Russian state, even under Vladimir Putin, cared a lot about having a treaty. So the Bush administration was very negative about an arms control treaty with the Russians.

They were happy to make reductions, actually, but they did not want to do it in the form of a treaty, and the Russians pushed really hard to get it in the form of a legally binding instrument. And one of my criticisms—I mean, this is a very mild criticism, so maybe criticism is even the wrong word—but one of the mistakes that I think that we collectively made during the Obama years—and so that's officials, but also those of us who are on the outside— I think a lot of people overestimated how eager the Russians were to get New START, which is why the negotiations were so torturous at the end.

I think there was an assumption that it was like the 10 years prior where Putin placed a high value on this, and so therefore we actually could— Really ring concessions out of the Russians. And it turns out that she was on the other foot, that it was the Obama administration that wanted to deal with the Russians. And the Russians were suddenly like much more interested in rolling back verification because they were about to deploy a new generation of strategic offensive arms.

And I think that kind of sets us up for where we are today, which is they were not as enthusiastic participants in this regime as we had imagined that they would be.

Jeffrey 5:52

Yeah, I think looking back in hindsight, and I think the Ukraine war is a good frame for this, I didn't realize at the time, and I was a graduate student, so I don't give myself a pass, but I wasn't really influential in the field, not to say that I am now, was that they were at the precipice of an arms buildup at the time when these negotiations were happening.

Yeah. The assumption that I had at the time was, I think like everybody else, was that they were eager in making reductions. And as you said, maybe the two went hand in hand. They were eager in building up all of their forces, including the nuclear ones.

Aaron 6:27

Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of these classic, I don't know if it's daylight dollar shirt stories or romantic comedies where, you know, the two partners are never in the same place. But there's this period in the late 1990s, early 2000s when they're still broke, right? And they want that predictability so that they can make reasonable force investments and so that they don't have to arms race, which they can't really afford to do.

So that's the period in which they're interested in constraining and ultimately getting, I think, some predictability on U.S. missile defenses, in which they're freaked out by... The possibility of subsequent arms negotiations, making reductions that create like havoc with the previous reductions. Like they were terrified that they were going to go to all these single warhead missiles and then they were going to like build these new missiles and then have to negotiate them away in a future arms control agreement.

So they really wanted that predictability in terms of the future legal environment. And Then they got richer and maybe just Putin's attitude shifted. And by the time the Obama people showed up and they were like, oh, hi, we're back.

Jeffrey 7:35

We'll hit the big reset button. Reset. You know, oh, look, it's Rose. You love Rose.

Aaron 7:40

And, you know, everybody loves Rose. But like, you know, at that point, I think the Russians... We're on the precipice of being in this very different place, which has, I think, fully manifested itself now, you know. And so all of a sudden, you know, like the Russians are just much tougher and much less interested in reaching any kind of accommodation with us.

So, you know, I mean, well, it's not surprising.

Jeffrey 8:09

It's not surprising. And again, to fast forward to the present, I think the basic assumption a lot of people make is that the war in Ukraine has been a catastrophe for them, but it's also eliminated significant amounts of their conventional equipment. And so nuclear weapons become a far more salient factor in their security planning vis-a-vis the United States and NATO.

And so constraints on those weapons in that sense no longer make sense because I guess their acute fears of being inferior to the US, which I think drove a lot of their early force planning in the early days of the Cold War, Are back again. And this idea that they can recapitalize is far more difficult and longer into the future on the conventional side, so that nuclear weapons are a more important part going forward of how they envision ensuring their great power status and guaranteeing their security.

Aaron 9:02

So I think that's all very rational, and I wonder if they are being that strategic about it. So let me ask you a question. Do you think This is much more than a fit of pique. Because it strikes me that one thing that I observe about the history of the bilateral arms control process is that the people who engage in it at the working level are real wonks, but all of the people at the political level are kind of disengaged from the technical details, and they're just feeling vibes.

And so, you know, Carter pulls SALT II because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which on paper is insane. You know, A has nothing to do with B. If anything, the fact that the Soviets were mired in this like horrific occupation of Afghanistan, a lot of that going around these days. You know, would I think have argued for trying to work harder to reduce bilateral tensions and the risk of nuclear war.

But of course, the reality was, it's like if the Soviets are doing something bad, we don't make deals with people who are doing things that are bad. So I wonder, is this just... My read on this is this is just Putin is mad about Ukraine and he is mad at us and he wants to take away from us anything he can.

And we signaled that we cared about this. And I think he drastically overestimated how much we care about it.

Jeffrey 10:33

No, I don't disagree. I think nuclear weapons, I think in some respects, is a solution in search of a problem, right? Because their use is so difficult and catastrophic to think about. They become much more of a signaling device and much more of a coercive tool rather than leaders actually contemplating seriously using them. And I think that's borne out in Ukraine as well.

And so what I'm talking about this as well is that when Putin is angry and they're in the reverse situation to Carter was in 1979. It's that we invaded Ukraine. The West is doing something bad. Therefore, we can't do anything with the West. And so we have to punish them. Nuclear weapons becomes the sort of solution to like, well, okay, then we can use them, we can use them both coerce the West, and then people and interested parties within the bureaucratic system can say like, well, we can also use them for much bigger things.

And so like, the vested interests use these broader arguments to rationalize what is the ultimately irrational, which is to kill yourself in a nuclear exchange.

Aaron 11:37

Yeah, you know, decision makers, they make decisions. Not always the best decisions. No. Oh, there's one thing I want to do in the middle of this, which is, you know, I do think it is worth talking a little bit about the endgame of how we got here. And so, because I think there is a legitimate question to be asked about whether the decision by the State Department to find Russia in noncompliance...

Contributed to the moment we're in? And I think the answer is, we have probably made some decisions that hastened this moment. But ultimately, I don't think it would have changed things. And so what I'm saying is, Early on in the conflict, the Biden administration made it clear that they were not interested in talking to the Russians about strategic stability until the Russians were prepared to engage in good faith.

And I think there's a degree to which we somewhat politicize these discussions. The Russians simultaneously were doing their own things, right? So they were denying inspectors access on the grounds of the pandemic. But I think it became clear over time that they were just delaying inspections. But it was really hard to tell if this was sincere or not, or at least you couldn't prove it.

And then the Russians, you know, ghosted the U.S. on the, well, they canceled at the last minute, the bilateral consultative meeting. And so it's hard because On the one hand, I'm sure the Russians interpreted the decision to find them in noncompliance as politicizing the treaty. I think they probably sincerely believe that. On the other hand, I, you know, and admittedly I'm biased because these are my friends, but like, I don't know what the State Department was supposed to do.

You know, like the Russians were not in compliance with the treaty and they had like, there was no evidence that they were going to get into compliance with either the inspections or with holding the meetings as they were supposed to. So it raises this interesting question of like, how did that process then, I think, shape Putin's decision making about the treaty?

Jeffrey 14:02

So this always leads to the, I guess, criminology 2.0. Did they do this on purpose because they've always wanted to get out of the treaty? Or did this just come up in a peak of rage? Yeah. Because that's the question everybody will debate, right? Putin, the master strategist, he did this because he didn't want to be bound by arms control any longer and he wanted to build up his forces.

That'll be one argument. The other one was, well, one had nothing to do with the other. And this was really a poorly thought out political decision on the Russian side. And the outcome of that is the end of bilateral arms control.

Aaron 14:41

Yeah, and, you know, I sort of imagine it as, you know, it's like a building that's been neglected for many, many, many years. And the foundation has rotted away, which, by the way, for me was the ABM Treaty. I mean, I just fundamentally, like... I am, I am the student of John Steinbrenner and Tom Schelling. Like if you do not have the ABM treaty, you, you cannot have bilateral arms control on offensive arms.

Like I just, I firmly believe that. And so when, when the foundation has become unstable because you've removed it, when the overall building has been neglected in so many different ways when you have made alterations to the agreement just by, in terms of like new forces you're building Like the day the building falls down, it's not because there was like strong winds that day, right?

Like maybe the winds blew it over, but I think you really have to look at things much more comprehensively. And so for insight, I have reread David Holloway's magisterial Stalin and the Bomb because we are entering this new Cold War with Russia, right? And I think it is really interesting to go back with hindsight and ask the questions about here were the policy choices that faced the Truman administration.

We know with hindsight how things turned out. We have much better insight into the Soviet system today. Were our decisions good ones, right? Were our policies, did they help the situation or did they hurt the situation or did they not matter at all? And, you know, it's like, it's weirdly comforting, but in like a very depressing way.

Jeffrey 16:30

What was your takeaway?

Aaron 16:32

I mean, Holloway's conclusion is that our decisions and policies were bad. And they hastened the collapse of the relationship. But that it was always going to happen because the fundamental driver of that dynamic was how Stalin conceived of his security. And he saw... Stalin saw building the Soviet Union's security as a process of subjugating and controlling his neighbors, moving his borders and creating satellite states.

And that that was fundamental and that there was nothing we could do. You know, the big debate was like, do you tell the Russians about the bomb before you use it? And there's like really good evidence that the Russians don't take nuclear weapons seriously until we drop them on Hiroshima. Right. So their program is kind of it exists, but it's just kind of bumping along.

It's not really moving real fast. And then we use nuclear weapons and Stalin is like, oh, now I get it. Do that. But at the same time, like that, that goes back to my analogy about the house and the foundation, like that was always going to happen. Like, he was always going to get it, and even if we had shared the information with them, even if we had done a demonstration instead of using the weapons, even if we had tried to set up an international organization right away, he was going to figure out what they meant, and the moment he figured out what they meant, he was going to understand that through the lens of how he looked at his security, and it was going to be, I need some of those.

Like, I got to control Poland. I got to control most of Germany. And oh, by the way, I need my own nuclear weapons. And so I think David thinks the Cold War in this sense, or at least the arms race part, is fairly inevitable. Policy criticisms notwithstanding. And I kind of feel like that's where we are with Putin.

Like, I have lots of criticisms about choices we've made, things we could have done differently, things I think that hastened getting us to this point, which may even be consequential because we may have hastened getting to the point where as if we had stalled long enough, you know, Putin might have died or, you know, had a personality shift, which people weirdly do later in life.

You know, you never know. But I think at the end of the day, Putin has agency, and this crisis that we're experiencing is driven by the failure of Russia to transition to a democratic system. And instead, the rule of Russia by somebody whose views about domestic rule and views about international relations are the same, and they are that he can only be secure if other people are insecure.

Jeffrey 19:17

So I'm reading Vladislav Zubak's A Failed Empire at the moment. And it's a history of Soviet foreign policy. Obviously, the first couple of chapters talk about the end of, I guess, the post-World War II era before their detonation of their first atomic bomb. I mean, just my reading of it is very similar to David's takeaways is that that man had a very paranoid sense of security, born out of traumas, I think, from his childhood, but also traumas from World War Two, and the massive losses to the Soviet Union, and then dreams of expansion of Soviet territory into and I'm just going to quote the title of the book.

An empire, right? And so when he saw the United States using nuclear weapons as a coercive tool, right? Because how could you not, right? If we transport ourselves back to 1945, that's a big boom, right? And we're grappling with it in real time. And yes, some of the political choices, in hindsight, we disagree with. He wanted to be able to Do similar things.

This was a weapon of war to many people. And so the program begins, a crash program begins to catch up. And so much of Soviet history on this on this topic is driven by that paranoia of having to catch up to the United States.

Aaron 20:43

Yeah, I mean, it's one of the reasons I feel like our debate about NATO expansion and what Putin is doing is so impoverished, because we have this, like, really simplistic debate about, like, was it NATO expansion or not? And, I mean, at some level, like, that's crazy, because it all comes down to how... The people in Moscow making decisions, which is largely Putin, but also the people around him, how they choose to interpret NATO expansion.

Like you and I know NATO is not going to invade Russia. Nuclear weapons are fantastic invasion insurance, right? We are unwilling to engage in direct conflict in Ukraine precisely because we are worried about escalation. There is zero chance we are putting, you know, tanks on the road and like taking Russian territory. That is absurd. At the same time, we don't get to pick what's absurd and not.

If Putin is afraid of it, then he is afraid of it. And I think that that ultimately is kind of why I think our debate is so impoverished, because what he's doing in Ukraine is... And it is absolutely, I think, the result of a worldview that has him do the same thing to dissidents in Russia, right? He just is not a person who can conceive of being safe and secure without dissidents.

Dominating his neighbors, right? He builds his security on the insecurity of his neighbors, and he builds his security domestically on the insecurity of the people around him. Like, he has no other way. And so, like, maybe we made that a little worse. Maybe we undermine the people around him who could have been like a better influence. There's a whole debate about whether COVID isolated him from moderating influences. So, like, I do think our policy matters at the margins.

But just this whole discussion about NATO expansion, like denies the Russians any agency, right? It treats them as though they are like just mechanistically responding to the stuff we do. And like, no, they, they have a choice. They a hundred percent have a choice. And, and for whatever reason, we are so wrapped up in our own political debates.

Like we, I think sometimes we just can't say like, you know, like, I mean, it sucks, but like, this is what dealing with Putin is like just like it was like dealing with Stalin, you know? I teach this in my class, by the way. It's like right there, there's this historical debate about the cause of the Cold War.

And I always tell the same joke, which is I am of the view that there are three causes of the Cold War, Stalin, Stalin, and Stalin.

Jeffrey 23:21

It's funny you put your finger on that. It's like we oftentimes, well, how should I phrase this? Our debate becomes politicized over like how to pursue policy choices. And so then we try and insert, in this case, Russian motives for that. And so it's not like taking what Russia does as a constant variable and then trying to gauge how to respond to it in line with U.S. interests.

It's saying, here's how I think U.S. interests are, and then here's how I will mold Russian behavior to fit my preferred policy outcome. So the debate becomes politicized. And the thing that I'm thinking about here is the Russian violation of the INF. We can debate why they violated the INF, because they never liked the INF. They didn't like that we pulled out of the ABM treaty.

They're concerned about missile defenses. I think that's all true. But then they ultimately made a decision to build a ground-launched cruise missile to hold at risk ABM sites in Europe so that they could have an intermediate-range nuclear delivery system In violation of a treaty that they signed and that was still in force. Like that is agency on their side, like whether or not I agree with their decision to violate the INF or not.

And I think that that sort of permeates how we should understand their, their behavior.

Aaron 24:41

Yeah. And there's one other thing I would say, which is like, we get really moralistic about it, which drives me crazy. Because like, I don't know, like we do things too. Like it's just like, you know You know Jarvis Cocker has a whole song about this like the people who run the world are awful and so like We withdrew from the ABM Treaty.

Like, that was bad. You know, like, we invaded Iraq. Like, that was bad. But, like, it's also sort of within the realm of normal bad behavior for great powers. And so, like, as horrific as the invasion of Ukraine is, and, like, as committed as I am to having the United States, like, absolutely make sure that this is a failure for Putin and that he does not achieve his aims— I mean, this is kind of what big powers do to their neighbors.

It's awful, but it's not unusual. And so sometimes I feel like we get very moral about this stuff, and that just seems really strange to me.

Jeffrey 25:50

In many ways, to pivot, the conflict has reinforced the salience of deterrence and nuclear weapons as tools for... To control escalation. I know we're all, everybody's worried about escalation because everybody is worried about escalation means that deterrence is working. Yes. I think we wrote that.

Aaron 26:08

We keep telling people the fact that this sucks and is terrifying is a, it's a feature, not a bug.

Jeffrey 26:14

Right. And so then everybody keeps trying to tease out lessons from this conflict. And I think one of the lessons and perhaps, you know, in an era of unconstrained arms control, We're staring down a slew of, I guess, new nuclear states. We're talking about the DPRK here, maybe Iran. We can talk about that in a different podcast, but also China and Russia.

I don't know what we call it. Maybe the dawn or the restart of potential arm race? Oh, I... The reset button. It's the reset button. I mean...

Aaron 26:48

I definitely have like I have sort of big thoughts, which maybe maybe happily sit in a different podcast. But I will observe that I was at a meeting the other day where I mentioned the fact that we were about to run two simultaneous arms races, one with Russia and one with China, and that this was going to be extremely dangerous and extremely frightening.

And I was so annoyed because a friend of mine said, you know, oh, gee, Jeff, you're cheery. And the entire room laughed. And I'm like, we should not be laughing about this. Like, this is like a really significant change in the threat environment. And it is going to be very dangerous. And I think we just aren't processing it.

I was talking to Walt Slocum, who I adore, and Walt was just marveling at the fact that we have a gigantic conventional conflict raging in the heart of Central Europe right now. And it has not escalated to nuclear war. Can you imagine if you had gone back in time and tried to explain to, say, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter that the Soviets have to use force to put down a rebellion in Poland?

And it's dragging on for a year, and we're shipping arms to the Polish resistance. I mean, they would be like, that's going to end in a nuclear war.

Jeffrey 28:24

And not just shipping arms overtly with presidential fact sheets. Yes. You know what I mean? Like, I've sent you 500 of X, 900 of Y, and we have more coming. Yeah.

Aaron 28:33

Yes. And saying, by the way, which I think we should say, like, it's not like I don't want to disassociate myself from this, because I believe we should say, like, we are committed to ensuring that this aggression is a strategic failure for Putin. Like, yes. But like, Jesus Christ, that would scare the pants off Richard Nixon. And we've just acclimated to it, right?

We've just sort of acclimated to like, well, I guess it's going to be okay. Like, it's probably going to be okay. Probably.

Jeffrey 29:04

Probably. Probably. Probably. That's the point. It's the uncertainty that drives the deterrent relationship. It's like, well, if I go, you go. And if you go, I go. And then that's bad. And so I want to hang out with my Aeroflot stewardesses, at least on the weekends. And so I'm not going to do this. And we're going to keep fighting.

Aaron 29:20

Yeah, but I think people have just kind of slid into this and they really haven't Wrap their heads around the fact that we have this incredibly hostile relationship with Moscow now.

Jeffrey 29:35

Yeah. When do you think it was this bad? I'm just curious. A comparison.

Aaron 29:42

When do I think it was this bad? I think it was this bad during the Korean War.

Jeffrey 29:49

So I was going to point to the early 1950s. Yeah.

Aaron 29:51

I don't think it was this bad at any point. I mean, obviously there was the acute moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But I think that was... I don't think Khrushchev was... I think Khrushchev miscalculated there, and he was eager to get out. I think Brezhnev was looking to make things chiller. I do think it was bad in the early 80s, but I think we were driving that.

Well, their paranoia was driving that, right? Our... Our choices were interacting with their paranoia. But that was almost all on their side. So yeah, I think it was the Stalin era, then the Korean War, where they had Soviet pilots engaged in direct combat with us, and we just pretended that they were like, wow, that was painted like a Chinese communist plane.

So I'm sure that guy was Chinese. Yeah.

Jeffrey 30:50

Yeah. No, no. It is wild. Well, I was going to— It's just wild. I don't know what else to say.

Aaron 30:59

But I just wanted to make the point that it's not just that we have this hostile relationship with Moscow. The Chinese, I think, are coming around to the idea that they have to pick. You know, and that things with the U.S. for them are going to end up the same way that they are with Moscow. And so I think that relationship is, the U.S.-China relationship is much more damaged than normal people, than people in like regular everyday life realize.

Like elite attitudes right now are so hard. And they're so uncompromising on both sides. Yeah. And, you know, in that context, and I think, you know, for the North Koreans and the Iranians and a whole bunch of other actors, it's like, well, like the world's, the world's drawn upsides. And it's, you know, weirdly, it's not, you know, it's not capitalism and communism now, it's authoritarian states and not authoritarian states.

And so we actually have a bunch of traditional friends, you know, who are like sitting on the fence. And I shouldn't just say authoritarian states, because there are a bunch of illiberal democracies. But like, that's why, you know, Modi and Orban and And the Saudis, and Erdogan in Turkey. I mean, that's why they're all on the fence is they don't like this democracy stuff.

Jeffrey 32:22

Let me ask you one final question because it touches on, I guess, tying it all together. I want to pick up on the Chinese point, and I realize the podcast got a little meandering, but I think it's important. One of the successes at the start of this was the US publication of its intelligence products, sanitized versions of its intelligence products.

We know you're coming. Here's where your dudes are. Your dudes are going to come down through here. Don't do it because we're going to do X, Y, and Z. Are we doing the same thing now with the Chinese as they're contemplating arming the Russians with artillery shells? I've seen a big, I've sort of seen a repeat of the playbook.

We know what you're thinking. We know that you're contemplating doing this. Don't do it because you're going to suffer the consequences of A, B, and C. And to your point about the Chinese feeling like they have to choose, it is a policy decision to go public with intelligence. But is this one of those sort of moments that we were talking about at the beginning of the pod where their paranoia and their sort of things are driving their own agency and that we're reacting to them and that we are actually locked in a cycle?

And then to bring it full circle, that we'll have escalation dynamic risks in an entirely different potential conflict.

Aaron 33:34

Yes, absolutely. For me, what's happening in China is the mirror of what happened in Russia. And it's you have a world leader... Who has dismantled any institutions that might have curbed his authority. And that, I don't know if you'd call it personality type, that outlook, like whatever it is, that kind of worldview... Is one that doesn't believe in cooperation.

It's one that doesn't believe that you can pursue shared interest. It looks at the world in a fundamentally zero-sum way, and it says that your insecurity is my security, and my insecurity is your security, and so my goal is to make you as insecure as possible while making myself as secure as possible. And I think... You know, I think we struggle because on the one hand, we don't want to get locked into that cycle.

And so you do want to try to build connections where you can to make sure that leader is surrounded with people giving alternate advice because it's not all black or white, right? There are choices and gradations. So you kind of want to try to mitigate the harm of that cycle, but at the same time, you have to, I think, be honest that there's a fundamental limit to what you can do.

You are trying to play for time. Manage risk, avoid the worst possible crises. And, you know, you're hoping that, you know, when change comes, because change always comes. And I don't mean like, oh, a miracle happens and, you know, Xi Jinping dies and is replaced by a cute, cuddly panda bear. But I just mean that things change.

Leaders change. The people around leaders change. Leaders change because they die. They change because they get different ideas. Putin's a very different person, I think, than he was 20 years ago. He certainly looks different. He's maybe in a different circumstance. But you're just trying to kick the can down the road. I mean, I was told the same joke about the— North Korean delegation that went to the Olympics in South Korea.

And people were outraged that, you know, that some of the characters that North Korea sent. And I was always like, I don't know what you're so bummed out about. I just want to live another four years to see another Winter Olympics. Like, sometimes it makes sense to stall for time. So yeah, I think the big structural stuff is moving against us right now.

And there's probably not much we can do about it. But that doesn't mean that you don't try to make a difference at the margin, just to live long enough to have a chance to try something else.

Jeffrey 36:18

In the absence of arms control, do you think we're on the precipice of a big buildup? Because I'm not so sure. And I think that that's what people will glom onto is like, well, they've withdrawn or they've suspended, right? And the Chinese are building up, but we may hit a ceiling and that ceiling is more or less where we're at now.

I don't know if that's true.

Aaron 36:37

I think the answer is yes and no. The answer I think is no, that in the short term, I think Russian warhead loadings may exceed the ceiling, although it'll be very hard for us to tell with no inspections. But I don't know that we'll see a massive upload, at least not in the near term. In the long term, I think it is more complicated because the Russians are going to have to program in new systems, and they may— In an unconstrained environment, just buy more than they would have bought.

And then that's going to interact. So my sense is that as long as this administration is in power, and by this administration, I don't just mean the president, but I mean the people that the president has picked. My sense is that The view is that Russia and China both pose very serious challenges. There's probably going to be some adjustment to US nuclear forces, but it's not going to be like you build your Russia force, you build your China force, and you add the two together.

I think it's going to be you build one force that's big enough to deal with Russia or China with maybe a little margin. And so that might Tamp that arms race dynamic a little bit, you know, a future administration could take a very different tack. You know, and my sense is Russia and China, in part because of the different approaches they have to pesky environmentalists, can probably in the near term build faster than we can.

And so if you, like, I just don't know if or when they will expand their numbers, but you could get kind of a yo-yo effect where they like really build up pretty fast. And then we being much slower program in our own large buildups. And then they stop and then we catch up and maybe even go past them.

And then, you know, we kind of go back and forth, which you saw a little in the Cold War, right, where we we programmed in really big buildups being afraid of the Soviets. They were behind. We were like, oh, we're way ahead. And we plateaued. And the Soviets like, well, we got to catch up, got to catch up, got to catch up.

And then they blow past us. And then we're like, oh, we shouldn't have plateaued. And then we jump up and you get that kind of back and forth dynamic.

Jeffrey 39:07

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron 39:08

So over the long term, I worry about that. In the short term, no. I think, you know, maybe their warhead numbers will go up, but that's probably it.

Jeffrey 39:16

Yeah, same with ours too. We have upload capacity too, as the Russians always used to like to tell us.

Aaron 39:21

Yeah, I think STRATCOM is going to, you know, I have no evidence of this, but I just, if I were at STRATCOM, this would be the time I would like re-up my request to keep at least a portion of the Minuteman 4 smurfed.

Jeffrey 39:36

Yeah, dust off that old PowerPoint slide.

Aaron 39:38

I mean, you know, ain't no treaty now.

Jeffrey 39:41

Yeah, and dust off those old basing modes. Orca, orca, orca. No, I'm just kidding. Good times, good times. I think we hit everything. Yeah, wild times.

Aaron 39:56

You know, Aaron, do you know where a great place to wait for the end of the world is?

Jeffrey 40:02

It's in the virtual online OSINT Star Wars type bar of cool people who get together every single day to talk about these things. Where can they find that?

Aaron 40:12

Is that patreon.com forward slash ACW podcast?

Jeffrey 40:17

That's right. And for $3, if you're a student, $5, if you're a normal person, you get exclusive VIP access to that bar, aka our Slack channel, where you can talk about all these things. You can also get into the super exclusive VIP section in that Slack channel, which means you can be cited by the Washington Post or The Economist because of the work that you are doing in there and how cool it is.

So don't miss out on the coolest place in the arms control long space, patreon.com slash hcwpodcast. Jeffrey, it's good to have you on the show.

Aaron 40:46

It's great to talk to you, Aaron. You