A Return to Nuclear Testing

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 distinguished scholar of global security at Middlebury College and a distinguished fellow, apparently, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute with my friend... Aaron Stein, president. Who allowed you to do that? I don't know. I was reliably informed I would never work at FPRI again after I turned down that internship.

I'm certain.

Aaron Stein 0:39

I mean, I guess we could say we're doing a big congee project together so we can put the big library incident, what is it, of 1996 behind you? Something like that. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. We may name the library after you, but... You know, it's good to be back. We haven't done this podcast in a long time.

Jeffrey 0:58

We have been busy. Life is just crazy. For listeners, you know, obviously, I mean, one of the big developments has been that Middlebury College is ending academic programming in Monterey.

Aaron 1:13

No more whales for you, my friend. No, no.

Jeffrey 1:16

Well, I mean, who knows what the future holds for me? But I have a cross campus appointment. So I guess I can I can I can maybe invest in some I could invest in some winter gear or I don't know. Well, we'll see what other things life throws our way.

Aaron 1:37

Well, speaking of things being thrown our way, I wasn't ready for this. How about you?

Jeffrey 1:43

John Lennon said, give me some truth. Donald Trump gave us a truth. So we may be in the nuclear testing business again? Well, let's read the statement because I don't know what the F this means.

Aaron 1:58

I don't think anybody knows what it means, but that's spoiler alert for later in the podcast.

Jeffrey 2:02

All right. I will try to read this and I will try to read it straight. All right. The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country. Not sure that that's true, but okay. Do you want to fact check it as we go along or just leave it? No, I just, every time I look at it, this was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons during my first term in office.

Okay, none of this is true, but fine. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I hated, all caps, to do it, but had no choice. It is probably the recapitalization that he didn't actually do, but okay, fine. Russia is second and China is a distant third, but will be even within five years. That's true-ish, not really, but you know, it's okay.

Yeah. Because of other countries' testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War, not its name, to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump.

Aaron 3:24

F does that mean? All right. I don't know. When it came out, I still don't even know what it means. And I don't think his administration knows what it means. I think we should set the context.

Jeffrey 3:34

Yeah. This came after the Russians claimed a successful test of Borovetshnik. And we haven't seen it. And Poseidon. And also Poseidon, yes.

Aaron 3:43

Yes. And so there is stuff going on, right? And then he likes to helpfully tweet out that we have nuclear submarine, nuclear armed submarines, I should say, right off the coast with Russia.

Jeffrey 3:56

Yes. So it is unclear, I think, from this initial statement and from... The initial reaction of the White House, what the president intended to say. And I do think that there's a little bit of no one knows what the president says, but they all know that they need to say it's the greatest thing they've ever heard. So there's like a little a little bit of of of going back and forth.

We get two statements. The first by J.D. Vance, which I'll just play for you, I think doesn't clarify anything. Anything.

Other voice 4:32

Here's what J.D. Vance says. We have a big arsenal, obviously. The Russians have a large nuclear arsenal. The Chinese have a large nuclear arsenal. Sometimes you've got to test it to make sure that it's functioning and working properly. We've been working very closely, even with nations that we don't have the best relations with, to try to limit nuclear proliferation.

The president's going to keep on working on that, but it's an important part of American national security to make sure that this nuclear arsenal we have actually functions properly, and that's part of a testing regime. To be clear, We know that it does work properly, but you got to keep on top of it over time. And the president just wants to make sure that we do that.

Jeffrey 5:07

All right. I have many things to say. So first, the Department of Defense does not test nuclear weapons explosively. That's the Department of Energy. Yes. Okay. Okay. Because it comes after the Burevestnik and Poseidon nuclear tests. Is it Poseidon? I always knew it as status six. Are they calling it Poseidon? I guess Poseidon is what I'm seeing in the papers now.

Poseidon status six. It's the autonomous underwater doomsday torpedo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it came after the test of those things, which were not nuclear explosive tests. They were tests of delivery systems. I thought Trump might mean we would be conducting tests of the delivery system since that's what DOD is responsible for in any event. That was my first reading as well.

However, we test those all the time.

Aaron 6:09

But is he aware of those tests all the time?

Jeffrey 6:11

I mean— Fair, also complicated because while the United States does not conduct tests of nuclear weapons that produce a chain reaction that go critical, the United States does test its nuclear weapons all the time in the sense of conducting so-called subcritical tests. And doing surveillance of the weapons and subjecting the components of the weapons to tests and even doing Dart, using Dart to take pictures when they implode the damn things.

So I don't know what this means, but then we got this statement from Pete Hegseth. Yep, Major Pete. Yeah.

Other voice 6:59

What type of testing is the Defense Department tasked with? Great question.

Other voice 7:03

And how soon? Well, we would work with the Department of Energy, but the president was clear. We need to have a credible nuclear deterrent. That is the baseline of our deterrents. And so having understanding and resuming testing is a pretty responsible, very responsible way to do that. I think it makes nuclear conflict less likely if you know what you have and make sure it operates properly.

So it's the right directive. We're moving out quickly. And America will ensure that we have the strongest, most capable nuclear arsenal so that we maintain peace through strength.

Jeffrey 7:35

Yeah, okay. So, I have questions.

Aaron 7:40

I'm going to be honest. It didn't sound like, if I had to guess, Hegseth actually got a briefing because he did sort of say, well, we will. He used the future tense, which suggests that they had not prepared for this. It's not like we have been working with. It was we will work with. Yes. Maybe I'm reading too much into semantics.

Jeffrey 7:59

Yeah. And again, here, I want to emphasize that Both Vance and Hegsath mentioned this issue of credibility, reliability. Funny, none of them use the actual word, which is confidence. It's confidence in the stockpile, right? Because Newsflash, we never explosively tested nuclear weapons frequently enough to have statistical confidence in the reliability or to have a statistical idea of reliability.

So really, the purpose of testing was to build confidence in the people and the processes that produce the explosives. Right. And, you know, like... The solution is that instead of explosively testing the weapons in the desert, which, by the way, does not build the level of confidence that people might imagine it does, and we could talk about why, the U.S. has made these vast investments in stockpile stewardship, so there is a much richer scientific understanding to the point where, if you ask designers...

They think we know more about weapons today and that we have more confidence in those weapons than in the era in which we were explosively testing them.

Aaron 9:19

Right. And there's all sorts of ways that you can measure, let's say, the scientific tools to achieve that level of confidence. I think that's been really helpful in this thing is that people... Or they said there's been multiple reports put out in terms of how you would measure that confidence. And those haven't stopped, you know, going forward to the point where there is still confidence in the stockpile.

Jeffrey 9:40

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, one example that I think is really great, David Hoffman, who was at the Washington Post, wrote an incredible article maybe 10 years ago where he got Bruce Goodwin at Livermore to tell the story of how... The U.S. had confidence in the B83, but apparently the U.S. did not, in the era of explosively testing, understand all of the failure modes of the B83.

And in particular, there were failure modes associated with the transport of the B83. This is the stockpile to target sequence. It's not just does it blow up when you drop it off a plane. You actually have to get it out of storage, put it on the plane, and you can do things all along that will affect the yield.

And Goodwin tells the story, which I think David filled out with some reporting, that That they actually, using the computer simulations, were able to discover a potentially serious failure mode in the B83 that we did not know about during the era of nuclear testing, because we have a much better Data-driven understanding and modeling of the weapons now, and they were able to then fix that problem all without explosive testing.

And so it goes back to this fundamental idea that in the era of no testing, we still know more about nuclear weapons in general, and we know more about the nuclear weapons we have. You don't need to test to have confidence, but yes, go ahead. This is where I sort of

Aaron 11:25

What do I want to say? We are involved in a couple of signal chats that the Secretary of Defense is unfortunately not in, right? I guess, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view. At the moment. And we are having these nerdy conversations, right? We are sharing documents. We're doing this. We're doing that. We're speculating.

Jeffrey 11:47

You mean being professionals who are somewhat in command of their domain expertise. Okay, fine.

Aaron 11:54

We're doing a good faith effort here, which we're kind of recreating on the pot, right? I don't think any of this was going on. I don't. I want to continue this conversation. I think Trump was reacting in the moment to Putin's boasting about Poseidon and Borovetshchik and just spit something out. One, because I wrote this or tweeted there, I don't know what you call it.

I would have had on my bingo card, and we talked about this, any Republican administration flirting with the idea of testing again because they have wanted to test again, or at least people have wanted to test again for a while.

Jeffrey 12:35

Yeah. Well, you saw that in the Robert O'Brien piece, which was nuclear testing and fissile material production to own the libs. Right. Which was crazy because we actually have more fissile material than we need, but okay, fine. Right.

Aaron 12:50

And I swear it's tied up in like the Ukraine war and Russia ceasing to export sort of physical material for reactors. It's all this stuff sort of coming together. He's simply responding in the moment to something, which is why you get this confusion. Right. And so I don't think they know what they want yet. To be very clear.

OK, I think that's hypothesis A.

Jeffrey 13:14

Yes. Yes. That Putin tests Brevesnik and and Poseidon. And just like in Dr. Strangelove, where the doomsday machine is explained, you know, it's George C. Scott is is General Turgidson who says, you know, gee, I really like to give me one of them doomsday machines.

Aaron 13:33

And I went with those two. And I would assume that he's been briefed on what has been out in the literature for a while, which is that the U.S. believed the Russians are violating the CTBT on subcritical tests. But this gets into a really specific nuance on, like, what that violation is. And if you don't really graph it, this goes back to my original point, if you're not, like, following the science at, like, the granular level, you don't know what the F you're talking about.

Jeffrey 13:59

Yeah, so I think that's worth discussing because... You know, one, hypothesis B is precisely this, that he was briefed that the U.S. has concerns that, and this, like the wording on this is delicate, but the United States, Russia, China, and others all agreed to a zero-yield CTBT, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Mm-hmm. For what I think are good reasons, the treaty does not contain a definition of explosive yield or what a nuclear explosion is.

Right. There are, you know, some like little complicated things like a nuclear reactor is a chain reaction, but we all know that's not an explosion.

Aaron 14:54

Yeah, it's the, you know, when you see a test.

Jeffrey 14:57

You can implode material and not cause a chain reaction, right? Which is a subcritical task. And so we say that that's okay. And we say, if you actually get a self-sustaining chain reaction, if you are like technical, if K is one or more, then we say that's over the line. That's our legal understanding. There's a whole debate about whether we reach that understanding or not with the Russians and the Chinese.

Weirdly, the Chinese say we did. But the American side says we did not. So that's a whole other thing. But into that gap has raised the question, do the Russians and the Chinese have the same definition we do? Right. And in the compliance report in the pre-COVID era, there were allegations by some people in the intelligence community that Russia had conducted some extremely low yield experiments that may have crossed that line.

And this is different. There were no allegations that China had done so, but China had a low level of transparency, and so we were worried that maybe they did. And it's possible that people who would like to do more Venturesome, low-yield experiments under the CTBT have sought a different legal interpretation of what zero means? Correct. On our side.

On our side, and therefore they used this, and that's where this on equal basis information comes from. Now, the problem is, I don't think the Russians and the Chinese are equal.

Aaron 16:38

No, I think that's accepted in the community, albeit with a medium level of confidence. Let's keep the confidence level going up, is that the Russians are perhaps at the one end of the spectrum, and then actually us and the Chinese are at the other end of the spectrum in terms of understanding. So I'm holding two fingers up.

Jeffrey 16:55

We're over here, they're sort of over here. Maybe, you know, and I mean, the Russians are like lying liars who lie. So, you know, maybe we have a perfect understanding with the Russians and they're just like cheating, who knows?

Aaron 17:07

I want to drill, because again, this gets very sciency. We're talking about little differences. We're not talking about boom. We're talking about, I don't know how to describe it.

Jeffrey 17:17

Yeah. Hydro nuclear experiments, right? We are talking about pounds of explosives, not maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe in some cases, tons. But we are almost certainly not talking about hundreds of tons, right? Right. And so, and then.

Aaron 17:40

It's tough to know. The stuff we talked about on the podcast, I think it feeds into the testing of delivery vehicles. Where do those testing of delivery vehicles take place? Both Poseidon and Borovishnik. In the Arctic. And Novaya Zemlya. Where would the Russians have test nuclear weapons? Oh, that's interesting. At Novaya Zemlya. It's the confirmation bias that comes from beautiful pictures of things moving around Novaya Zemlya.

That's just sort of what I think. It could serve to him in like a... I don't know. It is... Well-reported that he likes things visually. And so you're serving these things up in a sort of visual manner with little amounts of text.

Jeffrey 18:26

Well, you know, and I will say the number of people who don't understand the difference between nuclear-armed, nuclear-capable, and nuclear-powered, which you see all the time when people start talking about submarines. Yes. You know, it's like...

Aaron 18:41

Yes, and so... I think that, I mean, again, I don't know the answer, but it could be hypothesis A and B shoved together into spitting out, I guess, a truth, you know, that sort of sets things in motion. And the outcome is yet to be determined in terms of where we're going. But we talked about this on a previous podcast.

DOE was concerned enough, or at least was trying to be transparent enough to where they started to invite people to come take a look at our test site because the Russians are concerned about us.

Jeffrey 19:17

Well, and, you know, we saw the Russians build new facilities in Novaya Zemlya. That was some of the work that we did. We thought maybe it was for a dedicated subcritical testing site. We watched them build a bunch of new buildings in the past couple of years. And, you know, I argued, and I think... I think the outcome of this was good, although I'm not sure everybody in the government liked it.

You know, I pointed out, if you looked at the U.S. test site, you would see similar levels of activity. Now, the U.S. is very open, is very transparent. You can work out what the U.S. is doing there. I don't in any way, shape, or form mean to draw any kind of equivalence, except that To say that if you are just looking at this externally and you're a Russian analyst, it's going to be pretty easy to look at what the U.S. is doing and also the Chinese and come up with a bullshit story that will work internally for you about how, well, the U.S. and the Chinese are already doing it, so we should do it.

Aaron 20:22

I think that's why the testimony is important. I think I derailed us from planning.

Jeffrey 20:27

Well, and I guess the last thing I would say is, you know, kudos to Jill Ruby and Marv Adams and Corey Hinderstein for arranging those transparency visits. Because, you know, that was, I think, that was a really useful way to differentiate what the U.S. was doing from what Russia or China might be doing. But yes. The reality is we don't know.

And the deputy commander of STRATCOM, who's been nominated to be the commander of STRATCOM, outright said in his nomination hearing that His understanding was that Russia and China are not conducting explosive tests, which I think is a very useful thing to have on record.

Aaron 21:09

Yeah, I'll read it. We were looking for the item. I couldn't quite pull up. What he said was, I wouldn't presume that the president's words meant nuclear tests. I believe the quote was. Start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. He continued, neither China or Russia has conducted a nuclear explosive test, so I'm not reading anything into it or reading anything out.

To my knowledge, the last explosive nuclear testing was done by North Korea in 2017, yada yada.

Jeffrey 21:39

Which I think is consistent with whatever the Russians were doing that caused concern, it appears to me that it is not recent.

Aaron 21:50

I think the original, I was looking this up yesterday. I should have pulled up. No, it was about a decade ago.

Jeffrey 21:58

Yeah, right. Well, so you see it in the pre-COVID State Department compliance reports. And then after that, they just say, we don't discuss this anymore. You can see the old reports. So, you know, I'm not, I don't think that it is I don't think that it is, what is the right way to say this? On the one hand, I don't think the Russians learn that much from cheating.

On the other hand, I understand that you can't just ignore cheating, but there are other ways to deal with this. And so I have a proposal, Aaron.

Aaron 22:37

Oh, I mean, do we wanna talk about why it would be bad, because we let the Chinese catch up before we get- Yeah, let's talk about why it'd be bad. Okay.

Jeffrey 22:45

So I wrote a whole article about this on the Foreign Affairs website. The US has done a thousand nuclear tests. The purpose of those tests is not to assess that the weapons themselves work, but it is to build a database of understanding of how thermonuclear phenomena happen. I mean, yes, they are testing concepts that are executed in the weapons.

Yes, they have rarely, but only very rarely, taken weapons out of the stockpile. But mostly these are more like science experiments because, and this is, I think, a really interesting feature, you know, throughout the Cold War, the U.S. would have computer codes that would say, you know, if X happens, then Y should happen. And those would be based on our understanding of how thermonuclear explosions work and the different, you know, elements of it.

And the codes had things in them called knobs, which is you do X and instead of Y, you get 2Y. And, you know, you ask the question, W-H-Y-Y-Y. Or in this case, Y2Y instead of just Y. And so the codes just had a, you know, you just put a two in. They didn't know what the reason for it was.

They just knew experimentally that was the correct answer. And so one of the big things that the United States has done in stockpile stewardship is eliminate many of those knobs. Omar Hurricane, greatest name in the field, got a Fermi Award for knocking out a knob or two.

Aaron 24:29

And should we go into the Stock-to-File Stewardship Program? This isn't some rickety, unfunded thing that sits at the edges of the DOE budget. This is a well-funded apparatus. It comprises the labs, elements of the labs, and there are tests being done all the time.

Jeffrey 24:50

Right. So I'm belaboring this point, but I just, the point is with a thousand plus tests worth of data and a enormous investment in simulation facilities and incredible supercomputers, the U.S. has a really now profound understanding of how its nuclear weapons work. Yeah. But consider the case of China. They've caught up with supercomputers. Yeah, we have that data.

Yeah. They have built really amazing analogs, as best I can tell, to our stockpile stewardship facilities. You know what they don't have? Nuclear test data. Yeah. They only did 45 tests and the majority of those were atmospheric and therefore poorly instrumented. And the early ones that went underground were not, I think, all that well instrumented. They could also have beautiful codes that would allow them to design slimmer, lighter, more efficient nuclear weapons, but I...

Aaron 26:00

The Ozempic of nuclear weapons design. Slit that thing down and make it lighter.

Jeffrey 26:06

I don't know if they have the data or not, but they have... So much less data than we do. So why, why, why, why? This would be like one of the greatest cell phones. Why would you create a world in which they can get all the data? Because I got news for you. Your 46th test, way more valuable than your 1,046th test.

Okay, so what's the proposal?

Aaron 26:30

I've spinned it because I just remain so unconvinced that we're going to end up in a place where we're going to be doing undergrounding tests again. But perhaps I'm wrong. What's your proposal? Ozempic sponsors the podcast.

Jeffrey 26:45

No, sorry.

Aaron 26:45

Go ahead.

Jeffrey 26:46

The president wants a Nobel Prize. Oh, I love that. This is out-of-the-box thinking. This is why you're a distinguished fellow. We're naming the library. The president wants a Nobel Prize. If the president resumes explosive testing, he's not getting a Nobel Prize. Absolutely not. That's on the table. It's the opposite of Nobel. Now, he has spoken... Passionately and and I believe sincerely about the revulsion that he feels based on the destructiveness of nuclear weapons. It has been a consistent thing in his talks about foreign policy since he was being interviewed to run for president. Straight up think that's sincere. Me too. I got a lot of bad things to say about the man. That's completely sincere. So that's a thing he shares with the Nobel Committee.

It does. I mean, Barack Obama got a Nobel Prize for eliminating nuclear weapons when he didn't even eliminate any nuclear weapons. He just gave a speech about it. OK, so, you know, the bar here, not that high. As I mentioned, the Senate will not ratify the CTBT. Never. Now, you and I know that's because Republicans are not going to ratify anything with Clinton on it.

Aaron 28:11

Never.

Jeffrey 28:13

However, Senate Republicans in the 1980s did not wish to ratify the threshold test ban treaty. I see where you're going. I love this. And Ronald Reagan, who campaigned against it, but also had a genuine revulsion to the destructiveness of nuclear weapons. He didn't like that TV movie. Decided that he would send Paul Robinson to negotiate a verification protocol to, quote unquote, fix...

The TTPT. Exit or exit? 2.0? Now, I don't have a lot to say about the quality of that verification protocol. I will argue that the joint verification experiments were incredible.

Aaron 29:00

I think we did a long-lost podcast episode.

Jeffrey 29:02

Yeah. Love the JVE. Love the JVE. Good job. Good job there. Only Donald Trump can fix the CTBT. You know, you can name a treaty after him. He can take Steve Witkoff. Stevie. Or one of the guys from the PIFIAB, O'Brien or Garber or any of these dudes. Sure. And he can tell them, I need you to go to Moscow and Beijing.

And I need you to get a side agreement, a verification protocol just among the nuclear states, the nuclear weapon states, maybe you gotta go to Delhi, I don't know, where we're gonna agree what, we're gonna get the same definition of a nuclear explosion. And maybe we'll even do some test site transparency measures. And then he will take this verification protocol And he will say to Senate Republicans, I fixed the treaty.

I did a thing that Clinton didn't do, and Obama didn't do, and Biden didn't do, and that none of these guys could have done, because only I, the greatest deal maker in the world, could fix that treaty. Only Trump could have done it. You can add an X for T, it's the C-T-T-B-T. That's right. People are calling it the Comprehensive Trump Treaty.

We're being slightly tongue in cheek, but it's actually a good solution. No, I'm not being tongue in cheek at all. Reagan did this. Reagan straight up was like, I campaigned against this treaty, but actually I'd quite like to have the treaty. Paul Robinson, go get me a verification protocol so I can strong arm Republicans into voting for this thing because I want it.

Trump could absolutely, one, get this deal. I don't even think it would be a heavy lift. No. It's just, it's like you agree on like some definition of criticality. You agree on disclosing to one another your experiments and you have some limited on-site monitoring, which, you know, is... Not really intended to verify things down to the finest level.

It's just intended to build a little confidence that, you know, we're all more or less acting the same. Because to be clear, cheating at this level really doesn't matter. You can't say that. Like that can't be your- That's what I was trying to get to earlier. Like when we were talking about minute changes, it kind of doesn't matter.

I mean, yeah, it's whatever. But the point is then he goes to Senate Republicans. And I mean, let's be clear, Man doesn't have any pets, does he?

Aaron 32:12

I have no idea.

Jeffrey 32:13

Well, if he did, the Senate would confirm one of those pets as a Supreme Court justice if he told them to, right? I mean, you know, like the man, don't like the man. He has political power, real political power. Senate will ratify the treaty. He can say he fixed it. He can get the treaty ratified. He can strong arm the Chinese and the Indians to bring it into force.

And then you know what? He will actually get a Nobel Prize. He deserves it. He would deserve it. I would be the first person to stand up and say, you know what? He got it. We wanted this thing for a long time and he did it.

Aaron 32:56

You know, like, if you actually listen to the Vance talk, the Vance response to the question, right? The reporter asks a good question, right? And we don't have to play it again. But he is confirming that they're – I mean, he's confirming what we already know, is that they're having conversations for an informal news start following, right?

Yeah. He says right there, we need arms control. He says nonproliferation agreements, but what he means is arms control. But it's okay when they say that, Aaron.

Jeffrey 33:26

When we say it, dirty hippies. When they say it, you know.

Aaron 33:29

Well, he's younger than I am, just sort of centered from Ohio. He doesn't know anything about these issues. Other than what he reads. I don't mean that as a criticism of him. It's like, this just goes back to sort of my understanding of these people as they're sort of being thrown into these things. Yeah, that's true. And he's just responding in the moment.

But what he's talking about is in the absolute... He was talking about Newstart and the need for a follow-up. You could tag it to that, I guess. I'm belaboring my own point. If we acknowledge and accept that they are having conversations for an informal Newstart follow-up, handshake agreements and keeping everything as is with basically passive monitoring and we are going to go over 1550, whatever that means.

There is another pathway to tack this onto it as well.

Jeffrey 34:13

Yes.

Aaron 34:13

This is the new arms control verification mechanism, you know, that could be used to assuage a skeptical set.

Jeffrey 34:22

I, I, you know, again.

Aaron 34:24

We're not in Vegas. Do you think we actually do a, do a test?

Jeffrey 34:30

So what, I'm a little, I'm a little. I meant Vegas for betting, not Vegas because we'd be close. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, if your goal was to just destroy the treaty

Aaron 34:47

Yeah. I think a lot of people would want that in GOP circles.

Jeffrey 34:51

I would just, I would seize this moment to do hydronuclear tests, which the, and I would announce them and the Russians and the Chinese will follow suit. And I think, you know, the treaty regime will start to unravel. Explain hydronuclear tests. You know, it's where the yield is small. It's, you know, it's under a ton, you know, it would be pounds.

Kilograms, but it would have some yield and it would be clearly prohibited, I think, by the treaty. And it would match what the Russians are accused of doing. That's right. And, you know, I might even get a little bigger than that, you know, in just, you know, I would just, whatever I could accuse the Russians of doing credibly, and credibly here is a very low bar, I mean, like whatever I could just say, you I would I would do that now.

He does that. He does not ever get the Nobel Prize. We know that. I mean, like I know like we're slightly like. You know, he. If he resumes, if if there is a resumption of nuclear testing, it is seen as his. Action, I think that forecloses. I mean, that's a boy. Testing to own the libs is one thing.

Testing to own the Nobel Prize committee is a whole other ballgame if your goal is a Nobel Prize. It's like trying to get a job at FPRI.

Aaron 36:21

Well, you can go from failed intern to distinguished fellow. I mean, there's a pathway there. We've created it. 30 years.

Jeffrey 36:32

It literally took 30 years.

Aaron 36:35

But look, I don't know how you handicap it. I don't gamble. I think the resumption even of a very low yield nuclear testing, I still think isn't, oh, I guess it's more possible than it was three days ago.

Jeffrey 36:51

Well, so I think you could do a low yield test quickly. What I think you can't do, well, because it would be like a little experiment that overruns. Yeah, OK. But if they want to do a proper yield test, that's like 24 or 36 months on paper. And I don't think they can pay it.

Aaron 37:10

And how do you pay? So I have the same question. I mean, the economy is not dragging, but I have that question. Yeah, yeah. This is out of budget. They just went through the defense budget. I realize that, again, this is DOE budget, but we're in a government shutdown. We're looking at a C. There's no money for this appropriated within the process.

Now, I realize we're in a different sort of state of being where money gets pulled and moved.

Jeffrey 37:34

That's right. I mean, they take it out of the border wall or they, you know, I mean, maybe they defund Sentinel for another year. I mean, who knows? But there is, I just, there is no money appropriate for this. That's true. None of this is legal. No, I mean, just just to be clear. Also, we signed the treaty.

And so there's the Vienna law, Vienna Convention on Treaties. It says we're bound not to defeat the object or purpose of the treaty. So in theory, the president would have to unsign it, but he probably wouldn't unsign it. They would probably just break the treaty. And, you know, like the Supreme Court would be like, nothing means anything.

It is Calvin ball. Yeah, exactly.

Aaron 38:10

Let's put the issues of legality aside, because I think we've learned that the law can be more limber than a yoga teacher here in the 21st century. Limber like a Carmel yoga teacher on Benzies.

Jeffrey 38:22

But...

Aaron 38:31

A actual high-yield nuclear test costs a lot of money. Yeah, it takes time, too. It takes time, and there's no money for it. If I had to go for worth, I think this ends up going. It's more like... They paint a Minuteman gold and they sort of fire it off and they say, see, we got something.

Jeffrey 38:52

Yeah, and if you do it with a nuclear weapon, then you're violating the LTBT, which, I mean, again, like... Well, to them, they'll say that that's just sort of, LTBT sounds like LGBT. Yeah, we need to start calling it the Partial Test Ban Treaty, right? Yeah, you should go there.

Aaron 39:10

Anyways, that's where I just pulled that one line out of my head is when you know we've gone off the rails. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast, $3 for your student, $5 if you're not. Support the show. Join the Slack channel where there's all sorts of chatter. I'm using my fingers for people not watching on YouTube about what this all means, where we're going.

And we could ride that bird straight into Moscow, you know what I mean, and deliver the note about Peace Prize. But hopefully they listen to us. I don't want to go back to this world. I don't want to do this. Embrace the chaos, Aaron. Thank you. Everybody have a good rest of your day. Bye-bye.