Busting the Burevestnik

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

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 and the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog. We have a special guest.

Decker Eveleth 0:25

And I'm Decker Eveleth, an associate research analyst at the CNA Corporation. That's right.

Jeffrey 0:31

Decker, a.k.a.

Decker 0:32

Ducko, has graduated.

Jeffrey 0:34

He is out in the professional world. I am free. And yes, he is no longer subject to the abuse and torment. The pizza dough theory of ego development is now over. He rises and falls on his own merits. And you're having a little bit of a rising period. You found something pretty cool. Why don't you tell the listeners about it?

Decker 1:01

Yeah, so we have found, or I have found with Jeffrey's insight, the likely location for Russia's Burevestnik missile deployment. And it's quite a sight.

Jeffrey 1:16

So, you know, For listeners, Burevestnik is also known as Skyfall. That is the nuclear-powered cruise missile that Russia has been testing over the past few years in the Arctic. There were hints in the public record that Russia was moving toward deployment in October. Vladimir Putin said they had conducted the final test. I don't actually think it's the final test because they're back up there doing stuff at the test site.

So I think they will keep testing it. But I think him saying the final test meant they were about to deploy. And then Pranay... At the Arms Control Association, Pranay Vaidhi, he actually made this kind of offhand reference to how the United States, unlike Russia, wasn't developing a system like this. And the fact that he highlighted it in his speech, I think, signals that the administration is super fixated on this.

But yeah, Decker found the launch site. There's no really we. You did this. In fact, how the hell did you end up looking at this place?

Decker 2:30

Yeah, so the really interesting thing about the launch site is it's next to, I think Pavel called it a national level nuclear storage facility. 43 warheads. And so I was just going through trying to build a catalog of those facilities to get a better sense of, of 12th GUMO operations and how the Russians you know, operate their stewardship programs.

And noticed that they had built this facility next to one of those sites, a site called the log, the 20 And the first thing that jumped out to me was the presence of what was very obviously a missile checkout facility, you know, a bog standard, like that simple check facility, which sort of stopped me in my tracks.

Cause that, that's the thing where it's like, okay, there's something here now. And at first, yeah, go ahead. At first I was very skeptical because it's, it's, it's a, I think it's unprecedented, right. To have a, a, Deployment site like this situated directly next to a store facility like this. And so the first day, I went to Hans.

And I was like, Hans, because the site is next to a couple of air bases. And so I was like, is there some sort of new missile system that is being introduced to aircraft in this region that I don't know about? And nope.

Jeffrey 4:10

So I like this story because one, why did you reach out to Hans first? Because then when you reached out to me, you were like, hey, and carefully, you carefully concealed what you thought the thing might be. And you were like, so what do you think this is?

Decker 4:26

And I was like, I know what that is. Holy crap. I mean, that's what you do when you want an independent analysis is you don't come there with the preconception of what it is. But I definitely did want other people's eyes on it because it's a really weird facility. We can jump into that, actually. Yeah.

Jeffrey 4:44

Well, I mean, so one thing that I think is really interesting about this as a case study. So, first of all, this is like pure image interpretation. Yeah. There is now some collateral, but that collateral has only emerged once you put a pin in the place and said, hey, this is what I think this is.

Decker 5:02

Yeah, Russians, Russians have come out of the war to tell me that it was obvious the site was. Everybody knew it. And yeah, everyone knew it. And there were like records. And I was like, cool. Why didn't you follow the records?

Jeffrey 5:13

Yeah. You know, and they're probably it. It's probably the case that like a lot of the work that we do in the open source community, there were multiple ways to solve the problem. Mm hmm. But I find it really interesting in talking to John Landay, the reporter who wrote up the story, because as I was walking him through why I was persuaded that you were right and it was what you thought it was, you know, it's it really is almost the epitome of photo interpretation because it's not like you see the launchers out there.

Yeah. It's that you see these Two anomalous things that are not supposed to be next to one another. You see what is obviously a missile launch site. And you see what is obviously and had previously been identified as a nuclear weapon storage site. And the reality is those two things are just not in Russia co-located.

Decker 6:14

Right. I mean, this is the thing I always try to tell people when I introduce imagery intelligence is that Imagery intelligence is not the practice of cataloging. Imagery intelligence is the practice of critically thinking about overlapping data sets. It's just those data sets for us are images, right? And I think the fundamental case study here is the V1 launch sites, right?

Babington Smith in what, 1943?

Jeffrey 6:47

Are you repeating my class back to me, Decker? I am. There will be a quiz. Just for the record, there could be a quiz at the end of this.

Decker 6:54

The role of students to mentors is A, repeating their advice back to them, and B, stealing the books from their office.

Jeffrey 7:02

Do you have my copy of Arms and Influence, you son of a... No, I think I own that.

Decker 7:09

I do have your copy of Seabury, by the way, which you told me not to take.

Jeffrey 7:14

Ugh. That's okay. I held on to Steve Fetter's copy of Stefanik's Anti-Submarine Warfare book for a good decade before I returned it. I would like Seabury back, however. That's rare. As you were saying about the V1 launch sites, that's one of the two examples I really like to make this point, but go ahead.

Decker 7:33

Yeah. A British imagery analyst named Constance Duncan-Smith successfully Basically saw aerial imagery of the V1 launch ramp, this like concrete ramp on imagery. And she was like, well, that really looks like a place you would launch some sort of small airplane or something like that. And, you know, she wrote that up and it was considered and then dismissed.

And then what, like months later, they got another image of a V1 sitting on the ramp,

Jeffrey 8:10

Well, she ended up doing it because she actually... Was convinced that's what it was, but no one else believed her. So she just kept looking at the ramp. And I mean, the way she tells it, this story may have gotten better in the telling, but it is amazing, is that that was like slightly outside of the area she was responsible of looking at.

So like after other photo interpreters were done with their photographs, she would go through their outbox and pilfer it and be like, hmm. Yeah, that's a, that's a history changing picture right there that you missed. And she like, you know, ate some other poor photo interpreters lunch that day. But I do think, I mean, to me, that's what was kind of neat about this case study is that, and, and obviously we haven't had it confirmed.

It looks like the IC didn't wave John Landay off it. And it, it, you know at the very least Russian trolls haven't tried to tell us these things are wind farms yet.

Decker 9:14

No, it's the other reaction. It's the other reaction of it being, oh, we knew about that, or like, oh, it's obvious.

Jeffrey 9:20

Yeah, but I just think it is that sort of like, you know what a missile base looks like, and this is clearly a missile base, and it has nine prepared launch positions, but there is no reason that you would have built a new missile base next to an old nuclear weapons storage site unless it was something weird, like what I imagine are canisterized...

Systems with both a reactor and a warhead in them. And I presume, you know, like they don't want these things driving around and they don't want to take them a big distance from the storage site to the launch site. They just want to like get it out of the bunker and, you know, send it on its merry way.

Decker 10:02

I mean, let's, let's talk about the launch sites. Cause that's the real key to the whole study basically. Right.

Jeffrey 10:09

Paint a visual picture for the listener.

Decker 10:13

You've got nine launch sites that you can sort of drive through. There's no building there, but you can sort of like take a trailer or a large vehicle and drive straight through it. And there's two really interesting things about the launch sites. First of all, they are pointed in very specific directions, right? The launch sites are laid out in which you have...

They're clearly built to be facing particular azimuths. And the second really interesting about the launch sites is that they are burned. Each one has sort of earthen rampart around it.

Jeffrey 10:55

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the azimuths because here I think we might look at this a little bit differently. You know, one thing I notice is that they're not... They're in sort of like a weird pattern. And, and so I wonder, do you think that's, do you think those, those angles have to do with where they will ultimately end up, which given that they have basically, you know, at least hypothetically extremely long range, or do you think it has to do with like what they don't want to take off over?

Decker 11:42

I would suspect it's the former, not the latter. If And my interpretation of that is partly based on the fact that this site is weirdly close to both St. Petersburg and Moscow. It's, like, in between. And, like, if you were worried about not flying over stuff, I think you would put the whole facility in a different location, maybe.

Right?

Jeffrey 12:06

I mean, it is a super weird place for a first deployment. Yes. It's not where I would have put it.

Decker 12:14

Yeah. And that's the only piece of major pushback I have gotten from people is that particular point, is that it's in this weird location.

Jeffrey 12:25

So I have a hypothesis about this. It's a fancy system. Yeah. It's a fancy, complicated system that's got not just the warhead, but it has the kind of probably pretty finicky reactor.

Decker 12:40

Yeah.

Jeffrey 12:41

And my suspicion is it probably requires a higher level of personnel to keep the whole system up and running. Yeah. And my guess is it's just probably easier to keep those people happy. If they don't have to, you know schlep out to perm or someplace, someplace really freaking distant, if instead they can, they can come from. Yeah.

Decker 13:11

I mean, There's also a higher level of that hypothesis in line with what Cheryl Rofer was writing about this being sort of a like a pet project that Putin has endorsed. And, you know, the idea of there maybe being like a rush like, OK, guys, it's Friday two o'clock.

Jeffrey 13:30

Time to have a couple of shots of vodka and then go pet the burr of ass next. Yeah.

Decker 13:34

I mean, there could be this, you know, Russian teller figure who this is his pet project that's been endorsed. He's going to put it where he wants to put it.

Jeffrey 13:42

You know, I mean, I'll never argue against bureaucratic explanations. Yeah, no, none of none of us are as dumb as all of us. So the other thing I wanted to talk about, I mean, I think we will ultimately get a confirmation. It's just a matter of time. And this is kind of how it played out with the silos.

Right. At first it was silence from Stratcom. And then you had you had Chucky Dick patting you on the head and talking about how great it was. He didn't have to pay you.

Decker 14:10

Oh, my God. That was amazing. Yeah. For those who are not aware, the first confirmation we got was the head of Stratcom giving a speech in which he, this was after I had found you men and Matt Korda had found Hami and Richardson or Richards gets up there and he's like, usually I had to pay people to do that.

And by the way, could you keep looking?

Jeffrey 14:40

Yeah, yeah. So one of the interesting questions is, like, so f***ing what? You know, I mean, and I think this comes through really clearly. I mean, Putin loves to talk about this thing. Oh, yeah. And both the Trump and Biden administrations have made a big deal about how... Frightening or threatening this thing is, although I think mostly it's threatening because it's an environmental nightmare and it's a terrible idea.

But you have an article in Foreign Policy that I think is pretty persuasive, making the point that a lot of the worst case scenarios that people dream up about this thing are probably not very realistic. So I wanted to know if you wanted to say something about that.

Decker 15:31

Yeah, I think there are two aspects we can engage with here. First is the imagined use cases of the system And then there is the technical feasibility of those use cases, right? So the first thing, there's a lot of concern about the system giving Russia some pretty exotic signaling capabilities, including- Just doing figure eights over Berlin. I mean, literally one of the things I read was like, They could fly over Copenhagen and, and, you know, as a signaling method.

And my response was that if you're, I mean, there's no universe in which, whatever would we do? Yeah. Like it's not even, it's not like evasive. Right. It's, it's just a cruise missile. Like it's not really stealthy.

Jeffrey 16:22

A subsonic one at that.

Decker 16:24

Yes. And so like, there's, I don't think it's really giving Russia a lot of new capability signaling-wise. I also am very skeptical of the technical feasibility of the mission that Putin has described for the system, both in the loitering capability it's supposed to have, because, I mean, the longer you loiter the system, the longer you give NATO to respond and Get more eyes on tracking that system, right?

So my view is like the longer you loiter it, you're giving up the penetration capability it theoretically has. And the last point is that, you know, you're really going to try and develop a guidance system that can independently navigate this cruise missile over 200,000 kilometers? Like, you know, how are you going to do that?

Jeffrey 17:27

Yeah, and if you're doing something like loitering out over the ocean, if you're not getting regular GPS updates or something, your locational awareness is going to degrade. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, the way I look at it is, I think it is A, exactly what Putin says it is. It is a system that is designed to evade missile defenses by allowing them to attack from different angles.

Mm-hmm. It is, B, what you say, undesirable for a number of reasons, which is why the United States, when it looked at developing such a system in the 1950s and 60s, decided even in the era of high Cold War crazy that this was not a great idea, rejected it. But, C, to go back to the earlier point about bureaucratic explanations – Know this is kind of what happens in an arms race right you have money flowing into labs you have people with pet ideas and so it's sort of not surprising that in an era in which putin says give me everything you've got to defeat u.s missile defenses they're gonna give him a menu of a bunch of bunch of things some of which are just crazy some of which are outlandish he's gonna spend a bunch of money on it and if it if it works in the

The minimal sense of the word works, like can fly around, you know, you end up with some systems. Which, by the way, is also why they deployed fobs, even though they ended up deploying only a trivial number of them.

Decker 18:59

Right.

Jeffrey 19:00

And I'm behaving. I mean, I agree. I haven't said it yet. Yeah. But I might.

Decker 19:07

I agree that the best way of conceptualizing the mission is they might view it as Pretty straightforward way to target sites in the other hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, by developing an intercontinental range low altitude penetration capability like, like this system. I have some concerns about doing that because, I mean, I think the biggest problem is that Canada is flat.

You know, how are you, how are you going to navigate with the already notoriously unreliable Russian Turcom and TS max systems over 4,000 kilometers of flat Canada? Good luck with that. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to hit Whiteman, like, I guess you could try.

Jeffrey 19:56

Yeah. I mean, I, I, you know, There's, there's always a point. It's, it's one of the most challenging things when you do analysis like this, like you have to separate what makes sense in some abstract situation versus what makes sense to people making a decision. Because I, I agree, right? If somebody came and said, oh gee, we got to get ourselves some of those, I would be like, are you freaking out of your mind? This is like the worst.

No, this is a terrible way to do this. And honestly, had I been advising Putin, I think I would have just been like, hey, you know how you deal with the less than 100 interceptors in Alaska? We're just going to put 500 more warheads, you know, or you could just fire in the other direction or come over the South Pole or, you know, like, yes, there are there are simple things.

There are simple, inexpensive, easy things one can do to return oneself to the original level of security prior to the deployment of the missile defense system. But that's not how governments work. Right. I mean, so it's it's no surprising that, you know, someone was like, I can make an unbelievable Unlimited range missile, and then I think you see the appeal of that when Putin talks about it, like he loves bringing it up. Oh yeah, I mean, and he's, nobody else has one of these, like it's a, like it's a Ducati or something. I think that the suite of exotic weapon systems that he has unveiled is, he may consider that to be sort of like a part of his legacy.

Decker 21:33

Right. That he has bolstered the the deterrence platforms of Russia. And we have all these new novel unique capabilities that are very, you know, cutting edge. Theoretically. Yeah.

Jeffrey 21:43

I mean, it's it's a good example. Like I remember George W. Bush, who is smarter than people, gave him credit for, I think, really nailed Putin when he he observed that like it was really important, important for Putin to tell people that like his dog was bigger than theirs.

Decker 21:58

Right.

Jeffrey 21:58

You know, it's like, so like Putin was telling about how his dog was bigger than I think it was Barney, you know, was Bush's dog. And Bush was like, it's an interesting person who's worried about a thing like that, right? I think the fact that I fundamentally agree with you that this system is not nearly as survivable as many other things they can do, not nearly as usable as many other systems they can develop.

But clearly it scratched some itch for something special and exotic. And, you know, decision makers are crazy.

Decker 22:31

I mean, the other the other key point I would make here is one problem that even the Soviets had was the need to financially support the defense industry. Right? I was talking to Mike Albertson about this, where after the Cold War, the US commissioned a series of studies talking to the Russians about what did we get right and what did we get wrong about assessments of the Soviet Union?

Jeffrey 23:00

Oh, I know the BDM study. This is one of my favorite Washington stories, but go ahead.

Decker 23:06

One of the key points that was made was the fact that We really got it wrong in which we assumed that there was more intentionality to developing and deploying certain weapon systems that were actually just intended to prop up some industry.

Jeffrey 23:22

Oh, and what was lovely about this is it was the Office of Net Assessment that funded it? Yeah. And they were like, Andy Marshall was like, really expecting the study would come back and be like, ah, your competitive strategy spent the Soviets into the ground. And the actual study came back and be like, nope, the Soviets spent themselves into the ground because of their terrible command economy and internal politics.

And the cover letter Andy Marshall writes on that study is scathing. And it all but says that if the original project leader had not left, it would have had a different outcome. So, yeah, but I think that's right. I think that there are, you know, there are things like Putin's ideological concerns. There are going to be the way that the people in the nuclear and missile industries, you know, think of like, what do we do to get money?

And these two things interact, right? Because like, how do you get money from Putin? You give Putin something Putin's excited about. And this is a man who wants a bigger dog. Yeah. So you're like, hey, what about an unlimited range nuclear powered cruise missile? Nobody has one of those. And, you know, he writes you the check. And, you know, it's not like we at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies are above being motivated by the power of a very large check.

We're all here.

Decker 24:42

Is that our happy note?

Jeffrey 24:44

I think that's our happy note. So how, what's, I was just, before I let you go, how was the reaction to the peaceman? Both the discovery, but then the peace and foreign policy.

Decker 24:54

Very good. I have heard good things from people here over in D.C. about the sort of analysis. And just everyone seems to be shaking their head about what the system is supposed to be doing. Yeah.

Jeffrey 25:09

Well, this, this makes me feel good because it's, it's a little bit like when a parent asks a child how things are going. What they're really asking is, are you going to move back into the basement? And it sounds like you will remain gainfully employed and, and among our finest, most distinguished, and most beloved alumni. Yeah, as long as I keep learning about boats, I think we're good to go. All right, so Decker, thank you so much for joining me today.

Decker 25:38

It is always a pleasure to return to the fold.

Jeffrey 25:42

And listeners, thank you for tuning in and listening today. Next time, I'm sure I will be back with Aaron Stein. But if you like these podcasts and want them to continue and or just want me to keep buying Decker drinks every now and again, the way that you can fund that is becoming a podcast supporter. On Patreon.

It's patreon.com forward slash ACW podcast. It's $5 a month for regular people, $3 a month for students. Decker, have you updated your student subscription? Well, anyway, you know, it's the honor system here at the ACW podcast. So one more time, Decker, thanks for joining me. Yeah, no problem. Anytime. And thank you for listening.