(Just Like) New START is Over

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I am Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a distinguished scholar of global security at Middlebury College and a distinguished something or other at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Aaron Stein 0:24

You are something with us, not the librarian's assistant. I am Dr. Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Jeffrey, it's good to see you. I saw you actually in person on Monday. Yeah. There was an actual meetup.

Jeffrey 0:35

Knocked back a couple of cocktails. I found my way to Resica, suitably warmed up. And and protected against the vicious cold of the East Coast. But now I am, I am now back ensconced in California, where boy, West Coast, best coast. The the sazeracs that you introduced me to are were both dangerous and fulfilling, and dirt and certainly keeps you warm. I it is not my favorite bar in DC, but I will say Round Robin holds a special place in my heart.

Aaron 1:13

Well, I'm trying to come up with a you spin me right round, maybe right round. We've talked about New Start ending for a long time. And so it's like dead or alive, right? It's actually dead, to get with the 80s music trope. I'm trying desperately to land this transition. It's not working.

Jeffrey 1:30

I mean, maybe there's a Monty Python, not dead yet. But in that case, the person wasn't dead. And New Start, thoroughly, thoroughly dead. Yeah, so for listeners, the New START Treaty, which was negotiated at the beginning of the Obama administration, within living professional memory of both Aaron and I, was extended the one time it was allowed to be extended.

And on the 5th of February, it expired. Yep, it certainly died. Thus bringing into an era, I think, Rose Gottmuller, who negotiated the agreement, Doesn't like it when I say this. I like to say this is the first time since the negotiation of SALT I and the ABM Treaty that we have been without any bilateral arms limitation with Moscow.

She, I think, correctly likes to point out that when SALT I expired, SALT II never got ratified, and so there was, in fact, another long gap. But I think the ABM Treaty counts. So depending on how you count it, it's either first time since the Reagan administration or first time since early Nixon that we have been without some kind of bilateral arms control.

Aaron 2:47

Yeah, I think the – I mean the issue is sort of pedantic for us nerds because now you're getting me questioning does the ABM count because is it a bilateral arms control? So I'm looking at you puzzling with the – But no, I'm definitely on your side. But I think the two sides have for now done what we've talked about on this podcast, which is signaling a willingness to sort of abide by the upper limits of the treaty, or at least Trump has, Putin has as well.

Although I'm not sure how long that's going to be because that seems pretty tenuous.

Jeffrey 3:20

Yeah, there was this report in, I think, Axios that said that on the sidelines of meetings in Abu Dhabi, Kushner and Witkoff, who I think it's safe to say we've come to see as like the voices of reason in this administration, not necessarily the voices of competence, but reason.

Aaron 3:43

You know, they are who they are, and they certainly are everywhere around the world wherever there's a crisis. I mean, I appreciate them trying. They're doing something, aren't they?

Jeffrey 3:54

They seem to have worked out a handshake agreement with the Russians to not exceed the start limits for six months while beginning to talk about a treaty that will follow it. There was a truth social post by President Trump who- A truth. A truth. Yeah. Called New Start a very badly negotiated treaty, which Rose was having some fun with yesterday at a meeting at Stanford.

By the way, that was wild. People were asking them to sign stuff with the date, which I thought was kind of not the kind gesture that they think it is.

Aaron 4:42

That would be something. I used to print out really funny, like insulting tweets and put them on my bulletin board. And so I don't want to actually put up. I understand why you'd want to do that.

Jeffrey 4:51

So he indicated that they wanted to negotiate another treaty. There are other indications that they are going to start uploading the force.

Aaron 5:01

So that was what I was saying when it was tenuous, is that other sides of the administration's mouth are saying, well, we can upload the force. Exactly.

Jeffrey 5:07

I mean, I understand that. For listeners who maybe have not been following the horrific ins and outs of this nonsense, Vladimir Putin had offered a one-year voluntary extension. The treaty cannot legally be extended, but they were simply going to abide by the central limits, which are the numbers, but without any of the definitions or the verification, which I found – I mean – It's like asking –

Aaron 5:33

It's like asking chat GPT to like take the Odyssey and condense it down to a single page in terms of taking the amount of text out. You lose a lot of sort of the nuance, right? But you can get the general idea.

Jeffrey 5:46

You know, I still think, for example, Oreshnik in Belarus is a violation of the New START treaty, but whatever.

Aaron 5:52

It most certainly is.

Jeffrey 5:55

So it looks like they had a handshake deal, basically not to do anything drastic in the next six months. But with no verification, with no agreed definitions, whatever the nature of that handshake deal is, Russia can basically do whatever it wants. And I suspect we can do whatever we want. So I would not be surprised if, particularly as submarines start to return to port, they go out with a larger warhead loading.

Aaron 6:25

That was the other thing I was going to say. It's not just the upload on land-based ICBMs. It's the undoing of some of the modifications on the Ohio class. Yeah.

Jeffrey 6:35

And I mean, there are also maybe things like reversing the tubes that were disabled as part of the New START treaty, right? Every submarine had 24 tubes. They went down to 20. Hard to get information from the Navy out of how they did it. But my sense was that, however, that the manner, the last time I looked, the way they did it was fairly reversible.

It was not like they poured concrete in the tubes.

Aaron 7:01

No. No, they most certainly did. I imagine it was just welding.

Jeffrey 7:04

Yeah. So I actually did look this up once. And, you know, so my sense is we may see, well, we actually probably won't see. The number may climb up. But the Russians won't know. And, you know, with no definitions, right, with no treaty, you know, what counts as a deployed strategic offensive force? And, you know, the answer is, well, whatever I want it to be, which, you know, to be fair, this is what Putin does with a Reshnik, right?

It's an ICBM when he wants it to be, and it's an intermediate range missile when he wants it to be.

Aaron 7:40

Yeah, I think the central, so the way I think about it is expansion of nuclear forces on our side would come from uploading and reversing some of those, let's say, reversible changes made to come in compliance with New START, right? The constraints in rapidly building up the force for us are actually defense industrial base. It's actually, we don't have the facilities to build as many nuclear weapons as we used to.

Jeffrey 8:05

Stockpile is basically the stockpile and will be so for a good long while.

Aaron 8:10

Exactly. And so there is incentive sort of at the, so we're talking about stuff like at the edges. I guess, well, let me take that back. You can get significant numbers in increase, but it's out of the total number of stockpile rather than new things being built. That's right.

Jeffrey 8:27

And so from my perspective, the advantage of getting into some follow-on arms control arrangement

Aaron 8:36

The two-page memo.

Jeffrey 8:37

I mean, you could do the Bush approach of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, which Lytton Brooks once described as two force postures stapled together with a preamble.

Aaron 8:50

Yeah, exactly. It's a memo.

Jeffrey 8:52

As long as there is predictability, then you might see an upward tick in forces, which would probably not be great. But what I really want to avoid is the yo-yo phenomenon we saw in the 60s, where we thought there was a missile gap with the Soviets, and so we programmed in very large force increases. When we realized that there was not a gap, we curtailed those force increases.

But too late, because by then the Soviets had already programmed in their own very large force increases. So we basically zoom past them. They start catching up. And as we level, they zoom past us. And then we feel the need to then start zooming again. Right. And if you have that, like, what do you.

Aaron 9:45

What do fancy political scholars call this one? Political science scholars? It's called an arms race in our neck of the woods.

Jeffrey 9:52

But with the lag, it means that you get the kind of chaotic behavior because it doesn't – the oscillations get wild rather than dampen. Because they're mistimed, because it takes everyone a while. I mean, I think a good example of this is Bush leaves the ABM Treaty in 2003. It takes the Russians a few years to decide what they're going to do.

Then they start all these stupid sci-fi weapons, and then we start seeing them in the last few years finally come off the line. Yeah, exactly. Know now the Russians are happy, they're back to you know their their original position, but like we're now gonna act, and so I I am very worried about like the yo-yo effect. So just getting some kind of predictability would be valuable, more so I think than even the number, even if the number goes up. Yeah, and

Aaron 10:52

Trump has, I mean, he's been consistent about this, is that these, I think in his mind and the idea of arms control can no longer be bilateral. And he really insists on China being part of this. So I think you could see dual tracks. I think you can have the memo approach, right? With the Russians in some level of predictability, even if you see an increase in total number of warheads deployed, total number of warheads deployed against total number of warheads stockpiled, right?

The stockpile won't change. But the prospects of getting back to a longer term agreement, while grim and certainly not really possible in six months, the level of granularity of even a new start, I'll just leave it at that, by including the Chinese makes this even more difficult.

Jeffrey 11:37

Well, I mean, I have consistently thought that the inclusion of the Chinese is a poison pill.

Aaron 11:47

Oh, I agree. But I'm not sure. Do you think Trump thinks of it as a poison pill or he really believes it? I think he believes it. I mean, I think he believes lots of crazy things. So sure. Yeah. It doesn't matter fundamentally.

Jeffrey 12:00

But, you know, I mean, I do think it's weird because we have such a larger arsenal. You know, New Start is 1550, but it counts every bomber as one. So it is not actually 1550. It is more like 1700. And then you have the reserve, which is likely to be uploaded. So...

Aaron 12:21

We should explain that. If somebody was coming in, because we keep saying upload, I mean, we should explain what upload means for those who are just coming to the podcast. Right.

Jeffrey 12:29

So every ballistic missile submarine has 24 tubes, four of which are disabled. In each of those remaining 20 tubes, there is a single, beautiful, tried-my-favorite five, right? Yeah, our favorite. The bestest missile that ever was. And on the top deck of that missile, there are a number of warheads. There can be a number of W-76 warheads or a number of W-88 warheads, a smaller number of 88s because they're bigger and heavier.

But there can be at least eight. And so the reality is that the U.S. sends those boats out with an average of four to five warheads on each missile. Per missile.

Aaron 13:19

Yeah, so half of the amount they can carry.

Jeffrey 13:22

Yeah, maybe a tad more than half, but basically a tad more.

Aaron 13:25

Maybe a tad more, yeah.

Jeffrey 13:28

But you could fully load those missiles. Now, that would make the range of the missiles shorter, which means you'd have to patrol them closer to Russia or China, but that's fine. There's a reason the US shifted a lot of its, the bulk of its, not the bulk, but we have an unbalanced deployment. We have more boats in the Pacific than in the Atlantic because they can cover more targets that way.

But then over time, you could also restore those four tubes. You could load those. And so you really could expand the number by a few hundred warheads. Per boat? Per boat. Well, no, I think total. I mean... Total. I mean, let's work this out. I didn't do the calculation.

Aaron 14:12

Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 14:14

If you've got a boat going out with... 20 times four. I'm going to say four and a half. That's 90. Okay. And you could send it out pretty much immediately with 22 times eight. That's 160. So you'd add 90 warheads. Right. If you add the other four. My math is terrible. 70 warheads. This is great content for our listeners.

And if you could send them out with 24 tubes and eight warheads, then you'd be at 192 a boat. So you're adding like 100 a boat.

Aaron 14:49

Yeah, 100 per boat, exactly.

Jeffrey 14:50

Now, I mean, that's a lot. Do you have that many warheads in the stockpile? I don't know, but you know.

Aaron 14:58

Isn't that, that's for the Department of Energy to figure out, not drilling for energy. Indeed. So like, I think you could, you know, you could go from the current situation.

Jeffrey 15:06

Now, you know, not every boat is out all the time, but in a crisis, you can flush boats out. So it's, you know, I think it's, It's a potentially significant increase. And you can also take the land-based missiles, which are, as far as I know at the moment, still all a single warhead. And you could get three warheads on them.

Aaron 15:28

Correct. Correct.

Jeffrey 15:28

So you could substantially increase the size of the deployed force in the near term through upload. But we do not, I think, currently have the ability to produce large numbers of new warheads.

Aaron 15:42

Right.

Jeffrey 15:43

Although I think we're going to program that in. Yes, no, I think so too. And so then here comes your yo-yo because the Russians and the Chinese are going to get to whatever number, but we're going to have programmed in our buildup. And like those things will a decade or 20 years from now start coming off the line.

Putin will be dead. Xi Jinping will be dead. Trump will be dead. But the decisions they make will still have consequences. I don't know if you saw the other day, Admiral Richard, a.k.a. Chucky Dick. Said that his approach to thinking about Chinese nuclear forces is you take whatever estimate the IC has and you double or triple it.

I didn't say this, but okay. That's interesting, Matt. Just as a force planning construct, right? The idea that Mean if taken literally and i i i i have learned that we don't take people figuratively we should pretty much take them literally he's going to look at the ic projection for 1500 warheads and he's going to plan for a world in which it's 4 500. yeah and and so then if you imagine the force decisions we'll have to make to deal with that that's going to be a huge force And long before we get there, the Chinese are going to be like, wow, that's a lot of nuclear weapons you're building for our tiny force of 1,500.

Aaron 17:07

Right. Yeah. But that's the danger.

Jeffrey 17:12

And so... Oh, but I was going to say, I mean... The other reason we can't bring the Chinese into an arms agreement is, what, are we all going to agree on the same number? We're going to give them a permission slip to come up to 1,550?

Aaron 17:26

So that's the thing. I mean... Their numbers are so much lower than ours still, even with the expansion. So the treaty is they give up. They cry, uncle. They say they're real sorry for building all these nuclear weapons. I do think we should say where those numbers came from, the 1550. And there are sublimits within it. But there were some of us back in the day where those numbers are too high.

And they're too high for a number of reasons. We talked about the podcast.

Jeffrey 17:54

The late John Harvey, who I really liked, Overtly said to me once, and gave a talk in which he said it, but for whatever reason, I can't find it documented anyplace else, that one of the important concepts that they had was dissuade. So they were convinced, this is the early Obama administration, I mean, it was late Bush, early Obama, I think this was a generally held view, that you could discourage the Chinese from the so-called sprint to parity.

By maintaining a force that was a factor of four or five larger than theirs.

Aaron 18:31

And there was also a widely held belief that the Russians would never be able to catch up or would lack the defense industrial base to ever keep up. And so there was all sorts of assumptions.

Jeffrey 18:43

They were wrong. It was like, we will get to be at 1550. The Russians will struggle to stay at that number and the Chinese will be too cowed to try to catch up. In fact, we are now going to live in a world in which we are like, oh crap, we are looking at two giant nuclear arsenals that will each be the same size as ours.

Aaron 19:02

Do you remember the second Obama administration, the numbers that were being thrown around for like the follow on to New START? It was 1,000, right? And people were like, how dare you? It was to basically take that top line number of 1,550, and there's all sorts of caveats and definitions, and bring it down to 1,000. Do you remember the outrage?

Yeah. I mean, people went nuts over that. I was like, it makes no sense. I was just kind of looking at it, and I was just like, okay. And then there was even... There was even bringing it below 1,000, and that was going to be the enticement or the carrot to actually begin to engage the Chinese. Yeah.

I mean, I just – 2012, man. A different time.

Jeffrey 19:45

Well, I think a lot of these arguments are instrumental in the sense that they're not – people don't look at the international situation and then come up with policy recommendations. They start with the policy recommendations they want, and then they make arguments about the international system that support that. So, like, if you really cared about a Chinese sprint to parity, you would have had to think really long and hard in a way that no one did about how you incentivize them not to do it if the leadership changes, which it did, and if they suddenly found themselves as real rich.

Right, both of which happened. But, you know, I think when Rumsfeld started talking about his sprint to parity, he wasn't actually worried about it. He just didn't want to reduce the number any.

Aaron 20:42

Right, no, exactly.

Jeffrey 20:43

So this was a good argument for him to make. And he's dead now, so he doesn't have to pick up the check.

Aaron 20:49

And just to close the loop on this, even in this abstract world where people would be able to follow through on the president's directive, or at least call, Witkoff and Kushner go to Beijing, right? What's the number? Because what's the number of deployed Chinese systems?

Jeffrey 21:03

I mean, it's really hard to know. I mean, the number that... It's just hard. It's just hard to know, but it's in the hundreds. It's like, how much of the silo field is full? How many of the DF-26s are primarily for a nuclear mission? How many warheads are available to them? It's just really hard to know, but it's in the hundreds.

It's not 1,000 yet.

Aaron 21:26

It's like 300 to 600, if I'm remembering. It's somewhere in there, right? And so we come down by 900, right? Well, again, these numbers don't mean anything. Well, they do mean something very specific in the annex, but in the aggregate, yeah.

Jeffrey 21:40

I mean, this is crazy. But if you think about it, if Barack Obama had gotten the Russians to agree to go down to 500, and had gotten the Chinese to agree to only build up to 500 and stop,

Aaron 21:58

Yeah, it's a cat.

Jeffrey 21:58

Yeah, it's a cat. Right? We'd be in a vastly better world than the one we are in now.

Aaron 22:04

Did you see the fallout after the JCPOA? And the one we are heading to, but he would have been crucified.

Jeffrey 22:12

That's insane. He would have been impeached. They would have actually convicted. The only thing that would have been left of him would be, like, the charred remnants of a tan suit. We would be so much better off... And honestly, if we had come down to that number and Republicans had demanded a massive reinvestment in our production capacity, if we had gone down to that number and the Chinese had like gone right past it to cheat and we had spent the last 15 years putting ourselves in a position to flip the thing back on, We'd still be in a better position.

We'd be in a better position if we had agreed to a low treaty with a really stringent, presumably John Kyle driven infrastructure modernization and the Chinese cheated.

Aaron 23:15

Is this the segue to the next podcast you want to do?

Jeffrey 23:18

Oh, you mean about how we'd be better off if we had settled for an agreement that would have, A, avoided the problem we're about to face, and B, given us tools to deal with it if they cheated?

Aaron 23:28

Yeah. Yeah. It turns out this is a recurring theme. Well, that, as we say in the business, is a professional tease for the next episode of the Arms Control Podcast. Did we hit everything on new start? I mean, I guess what we should say is... I have long thought that we will get sort. I've said it on podcast after podcast.

We'll get something of the ilk of sort 2.0. Do you think that's right? Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Yes, yes.

Jeffrey 23:57

We will get two force postures stapled together with a preamble.

Aaron 24:02

And you know what? That'd be great. With a preamble. I'm actually all for it now. And yeah, I think that'll happen. I think it'll happen. I will say this.

Jeffrey 24:13

The kind of careful, lawyerly, detailed arms control arrangements that we in the field believe are necessary are often not necessary because these are fundamentally political bargains. And when the political bargain stops working for one party or the other, you're not going to end up in court. The other party is just going to cheat or leave. Yeah, and I think, yeah, go ahead.

Well, so that's it. So I actually think if the US can strike a durable political bargain with the Russians where we say, we hate you, you hate us, we are locked in a desperate struggle for control, but also we don't want to have a nuclear war and we don't want to spend a bazillion dollars in an endless arms race to nowhere.

What if we just called it at 2000 weapons? That's a good deal even if, you know, that practically means we're at 2,300 and they're at 2,400 or, you know, vice versa. So, you know, I don't know that everything needs to be perfectly equal or that things need to be perfectly defined. But the restraint has to be in both parties' interest.

And the minute it isn't, the deal is dead no matter how carefully you've written it.

Aaron 25:33

Right, and that's exactly what we've been facing over the past couple of years with Russian cheating, to be very bluntly. Okay i think we hit it patreon.com acw podcast three dollars if you are a student five dollars if you're not join the coolest slack channel in the world where you can learn more about new starts than anybody this side of california at the now closing middlebury incident international studies thanks jeffrey