From Satan to Sarmat

Jeffrey Lewis 0:07

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

Aaron Stein 0:25

And I'm Aaron Stein, president of said Foreign Policy Research Institute. And Jeffrey, I think we need to say the phrase that all of our listeners have been wanting us to hear.

Jeffrey 0:41

We got another one. We, we got another one, although that's, I think, not necessarily clear to people. And so if you're clicking on it, you think you're getting, you think you're getting an episode about Sarmat, but actually you're getting an episode about Fobs.

Aaron 1:03

Yep, the RS-28 Sarmat. Maybe we should start just by informing the listeners there was a test, apparently a successful one. We're recording this on Friday, May 22nd, about a week ago, maybe a little bit more.

Jeffrey 1:16

And it worked. Yes, yes according to the Comrade Supreme Commander-in-Chief the launch was successful, and the test results confirmed the correctness of the design and technological solutions used, as well as the missile system's ability to achieve its specified characteristics. Two big thumbs up for the Sarmat.

Aaron 1:44

Yeah, it has a trouble test history, and so the positive test, I think, is worthy of news, but I wouldn't call it, at least reliably tested. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that, although you know, missile reliability is really, I think, in the eye of the beholder. It works well enough.

Jeffrey 2:11

And it's a big missile. It is the biggest, I think. Yeah. It's huge. So Sarmat is the replacement for the SS-18 Satan. I don't know what the classified name for this is going to be. Son of Satan would be great. Satan 2, Super Satan. It's got to be an S because it's a Russian strategic ballistic missile. But...

It is the replacement for the SS-18. It is a large, liquid-propelled ICBM. The SS-18 had a throw weight of 8,800 kilograms, which is, you know, a lot.

Aaron 3:00

And this is more. It's a lot of missile. You know, actually, for people who don't know what throw weight is, it used to be really, really... I mean, I guess very important to actually think about because it was the basis for early arms control, how much missile could carry or throw.

Jeffrey 3:17

Yeah. And you know, I don't really know what throw weight is. It's more of a concept or an aspiration. So for listeners who aren't like deeply involved in this, obviously the range of a missile depends on its payload. The added weight from what it's carrying. And so when you are trying to limit missiles and you're trying to categorize them by range, this has to be done in respect to payload.

But payload itself is complicated because the payload isn't just, for example, the 10 freaking warheads that the SS-18 could carry. The payload is also the bus that would dispense them. The payload might also be the mass of things like countermeasures. And when... This question of what would an equal or a strategically equivalent set of limits look like on US and Soviet nuclear arsenals emerged in the 70s.

Our right wing friends who hated all agreements nonetheless made a good point. You know, sometimes the worst people in the world have a good point, which is it doesn't make sense to just count missiles because some of the Soviet missiles were really, really big. And so each missile could carry many, many more warheads. And so you wanted some kind of equivalency in numbers, you know, very rough parity, but you also wanted some kind of parity, or maybe balance is even the better word, in terms of throw weight, which is...

The amount... Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you were about to say it, I think, as well as I did.

Aaron 5:14

Yeah, it's just the amount that the missile can carry or otherwise throw across the world.

Jeffrey 5:19

And even then, within that, you know, you get choices. You could have one really big freaking warhead. You could have a bunch of little warheads. You could spend some of that on a bus to make your little warheads more accurate. Or you could have a stage that would allow it to go in orbit and come back down.

Aaron 5:39

That's right. A lot of things you can do with throw weight. It's fungible. It is. And so I think the point of that transgression, I was setting it up, is that this is a big freaking missile. And if it has more throw weight than the SS-18, which already had a huge amount of throw weight, this thing, at least on paper, can carry very heavy stuff very, very far or put heavy stuff into orbit.

Jeffrey 6:08

Yes. And, you know, I'm navigating to it. I think Putin says this, but he says it In a way that is both technically naive and vague.

Aaron 6:29

His version of the nuclear dust, not a bad descriptor for a very technically naive person. Right.

Jeffrey 6:37

So what he says is, he's talking about what makes Sarmat special. And so, you know, the first thing he says is the total yield of the delivered warhead is more than four times greater than that of any existing most powerful Western equivalent. We could probably sit down and work out what that might mean, but that's like not as impressive as it sounds because we tend to like accuracy, but whatever.

Yes.

Aaron 7:12

I think we should also back up and say we have made the decision to carry less than the Russians. That was made a long time ago, and we were learning to live with that. Right. Well, we believe in counterforce.

Jeffrey 7:21

And so we have this idea that at the beginning of the war, we are going to strike Russian – Military targets and command targets, and we are not going to go right for the cities because we want to structure Russia's incentives to also not go right for cities. The Russian view is, you die, we're going right for cities on day one.

That's right.

Aaron 7:48

They've never signed up for our version of events.

Jeffrey 7:51

You know, look, John Steinbruner was my dissertation advisor. His advisor was Bill Kaufman, who came up with Counterforce. Bill Kaufman's view was... I know they say they're not going to play along, but are they really going to commit suicide? We should at least give them the chance to not do the dumbest thing possible. I think that may be true.

All that Deloitte Christmas, so you're saying there's a chance. There's a chance. Obviously, the thing here is to not have the nuclear war in the first place, but the Russian position at least is, no, we are going right for cities. You can suck on some Sarmat. So you know, Putin is dutifully repeating on bad day you will die, but then the next thing he says is second, and then he says, and most importantly, right? So it's, it's, it's more important than that. And then this is the phrase: the missile can travel not only on a ballistic but also a sub-orbital trajectory. Now, just technically, this is nonsense.

Which is when, in English, when we say suborbital, we mean ballistic. It's going up and it's coming down. It might be high enough that it's above things in orbit, but it's suborbital because it's, you're not achieving orbital velocity and angle. That's what we mean by suborbital. I think. Yeah, no, I've just come to think of orbit because people don't really know what orbit is.

Aaron 9:24

Least of all Vladimir Putin, it seems. Yeah, it's speed and angle so that if you're falling over the Earth's horizon, you don't get closer to the Earth. Yeah.

Jeffrey 9:34

And you fall over the horizon forever. If you hit the Earth, that's a ballistic trajectory. I think ballistic and suborbital mean the same thing. He's drawing a distinction. I think by suborbital, what he means is fractional orbital.

Aaron 9:51

And I think the range of the missile, at least as he says it, is the dead giveaway. A ding, ding, ding.

Jeffrey 9:59

Right. A range of over 35,000 kilometers. Well, my man, the Earth is only 40,000 kilometers round. He's not hitting Russia. He's not going to go all the way around the earth just to hit Russia. He means the long way around to the US. Maybe they could just do that with a single warhead, but the video they released in 2018 showed it going over the North Pole, but then also going over the South Pole, and then they showed lots of warheads arriving.

My guess is...

Aaron 10:42

Wait, what? Was that the Mar-a-Lago video when one hit Mar-a-Lago or was that for Status 6 and the other ones?

Jeffrey 10:48

I think that might be a different one because I'm looking at it right now and the Russians were, give them credit, the little globe that they animated doesn't have real countries on it.

Aaron 11:01

Oh, okay. It was just far enough away to where if you go the long way around, you don't actually keep going over the North Pole and continue back and hit yourself.

Jeffrey 11:11

Yeah, and I'm watching the bus deploy these – you know what? I am – You are right, I am wrong. That is Florida.

Aaron 11:24

Yeah, no, he hits Mar-a-Lago in the video. They weren't subtle about this video. I think that's Florida.

Jeffrey 11:30

It's West Palm Beach. Isn't that Florida? I got to be honest. I don't really know what Florida looks like. I mean, I know it's general shape, but like...

Aaron 11:42

They hit West Palm Beach. They weren't being subtle in the video. I think they were going after Disney.

Jeffrey 11:49

Oh, that's Florida. Oh, my God. That's the Everglades. Oh, shoot. Yeah, you're right. They hit Florida. I stand corrected, Aaron. I didn't even notice that.

Aaron 12:03

Yeah, they're aiming in the video at Mar-a-Lago.

Jeffrey 12:09

Yeah. So I do interpret him to be saying that they are going to deploy a fractional orbital bombardment system, which I don't like that term. It's just orbital bombardment. If you go up into orbit, you're in orbit. If you do a fraction of an orbit, it doesn't matter. That's fine. That's orbit. That's a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

But, you know, the Soviets did a FOBS in the 70s. Yes.

Aaron 12:43

The late 60s into the early 80s, I think.

Jeffrey 12:46

Yeah, yeah. They kept it around. That's right. I think 82 is when they gave it up. And if I'm not mistaken, that was on an SS-18.

Aaron 12:59

I was just looking at this earlier. Can I tell you my interpretation of the 35,000 kilometers? Yeah. I think that's his – so I agree with you on the sort of imprecise language. But I think by saying 35,000 kilometers, he's actually – he's using the fraction of an orbit argument all over again. Because it doesn't do a complete rotation around the Earth, so therefore it's not a full orbit.

It's not a full thing around the Earth. And so I think he's trying to suggest that this is legal under the Outer Space Treaty because it's not an orbital bombardment system. It's just that fraction.

Jeffrey 13:45

I think that's right. And Sam Lehrer has done some really nice historical work. I mean, the thing Sam... Confirm, we knew for a long time, but Sam has some great documents, I think, that really help make this just very crystal clear. For the Soviets, this was just an orbital bombardment system. And the Johnson administration was just like, oh crap, not now.

Like, please, not now with the orbital bombardment. And so we, I believe, are the ones who invented The false fractional distinction. Yeah, because the Johnson people, I mean, and I think this is basically correct although it was the Nixon people who ended up carrying the ball across the goal line. We're like, we just got to get them into arms negotiations, then we can handle it. Then, yeah, and it's an SS-9 by the way. That was the early Fobs. Oh, was it an SS-9? Is it? Oh, you know, because it's that damn. So this is the thing drives me nuts.

Right, because we've got the 9 and the 18, but they're all for them 36s, right?

Aaron 14:59

Yes, it's the R-36.

Jeffrey 15:00

But then for them, it's the R-36M. Wow. Oh, God, missile names. Anyway, I think that's what that's going to be. So I think... You know, this is just like, we are going to relive this whole experience where they're going to deploy these systems. And, you know, obviously we're either going to like, well, we're going to do a mix.

We're going to race. And then eventually we'll talk and we'll see if the talking produces anything, but maybe we won't talk with this guy, but we're going to race first.

Aaron 15:48

Yeah, and I think the orbital bombardment system, as I think we've talked about many times on this podcast, it's – I view them now as sort of a panoply of systems, right? So it's status six, the underwater autonomous drone. Burveshnik, Skyfall, right? Which does the same basic thing. You can go all the way around, even if it will take 36 hours to get there because of how slow it will fly. Yep. Sarmat are sort of additions to your traditional Russian nuclear force, which are ground-based and to a lesser extent sea-based legs of the deterrent, all of which is to ensure that their deterrent cannot be Hedged against with missile defense or conventional precision strike.

Jeffrey 16:38

And he says that in the statement. He goes out of his way to say both that this program dates to the withdrawal from the ABM treaty. I keep saying 2003. I guess it was 2002, wasn't it? It was at the end of, it was basically, I believe it was the start of 2000. Did he announce it in 2002 and then it took effect in 2003?

Think it's end 2002 and actually took effect in early 2004 but again i'm not googling this i'm looking this up at the moment we'll see now i do that all the time myself i want to know because i think of it as oh no no no oh i did 2001 december 2001 bush announced he was withdrawing so it must have been 2002. i just whatever time it's a flat disc so he says that the work had been ongoing For a long time.

He says, but after the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, we were forced. And I want to emphasize forced. Oh, I'm reading the translated version, because in the English he says compelled. To consider ensuring our strategic security in the new reality and the need to maintain a strategic balance of power and parity. That is precisely why I emphasize again, Russia began work on developing advanced systems.

And then he goes on to list the other ones. So he says, avant-garde, Kinzhal. Kinzhal. Right. He mentions Berefesnik. He mentions Poseidon. He mentions Oreshnik. So, you know, I think this is, True, you know, like, I, I think we are now seeing the impact of, of that decision. And you know, maybe all this would have happened anyway. Things were different, they'd be different, but I definitely think he believes every word of what he said.

Aaron 18:34

Now, I think what's also different about this is in addition to orbital – I really should be able to pronounce the word given how much work we're doing on this. Orbital bombardment.

Jeffrey 18:45

I can't. Orbital bombardment.

Aaron 18:47

Orbital bombardment. Orbital bombardment. Orbital bombardment.

Jeffrey 18:50

You know what you could just say, Aaron?

Aaron 18:52

FOBs. Investment in FOBs. It's now paired with really nasty stuff they're doing in space. Like, yes, you know, the nuclear weapon in space. You know what I mean? They're planning to leave stuff lingering around, you know, at the edges of LEO, that will make us very, very uncomfortable. You know, and that we will be nasty, you know, to contemplate, to think about. Yeah, I think

Jeffrey 19:29

One thing that's occurring, and, and this is probably a, a larger, broader discussion, but it comes up a lot in the track two discussions that I, I participate in in with the Russians. We tend to not believe them because we have this kind of attitude of, if a nuclear war starts, and this is very much like that point I was making about Bill Kaufman That we're going to be getting into this thing very reluctantly.

And this thing is going to start, and we are going to then want to find our way out of it. And so we imagine that the Russians have this idea of escalate to deescalate. And so we have created for them, in our minds, a whole bunch of limited options. And that might be true. But that is not what the Russians say.

You know, I think the Russians do consider like a warning shot, but I think the only context in which they quote unquote escalate to deescalate is not the one that you hear in think tanks. It's the, they're going to use one to show they're serious and their position is the next move is everything. So they're going to kill everything in orbit and they're going to kill as many people in the US as they can.

Aaron 20:53

Yeah, and in order to do both, right, well, let's leave orbit aside, but in order to do that second part, which is kill as many people, is they are worst-case scenarioing the trajectory of U.S. missile defenses.

Jeffrey 21:04

That's right, which is why I think they're going to kill everything in orbit, because that's part of their strategy to make sure they can kill as many people in the U.S. as possible. That's right. And to the weakest point, I continue to think counterforce is a good idea. This is the weakest point to counterforce is I have no evidence whatsoever that the Chinese or Russians are going to play along.

Aaron 21:26

No. Well, at some point, all these exercises become academic. We've had this conversation. It's do you kill 100 million or 99 million? Do you know what I mean? It's sort of like you're messing at the edges.

Jeffrey 21:40

Well, I just can't imagine what if these things starts except for in the dumbest way possible. So I'm still all about off-ramps. But I don't think Putin's an off-ramp guy.

Aaron 21:54

No, I mean the nuclear – or the sort of simulated nuclear-armed satellite that seems to have failed? Yeah, that seems to be the case. But they would go together.

Jeffrey 22:07

I think that's what you're saying.

Aaron 22:08

Yeah, yeah. They would go together. Is that the satellite goes first?

Jeffrey 22:12

You – Well, everyone is like, that would be such a drastic step for them to kill everything in orbit. And I'm like, my man, that is the first step toward trying to kill everyone in the United States. That's right. That is an enabling step of I'm going to blind all the sensors. I'm going to eliminate any of the defenses.

Yeah. It's like, no, no, trust me. At the end of this, no one is going to be talking about the satellites.

Aaron 22:43

So what I find interesting about this, and I don't have enough technical details, is And where I think this gets silly from their side is that the redundancies that they're building into their nuclear deterrence require a level of staging and precision across launch to where you'd have to stagger your nuclear launches. Do you know what I mean?

So like Borovesnik, let's assume, would go first because it flies, we're assuming, about 500 miles an hour because it's a cruise missile, right? Yes. And they're going to send it, you know, in weird ways that presumably somebody would see, right? Yes. Which flies slower than, let's say, the SS-18 equivalent that's just flying a regular polar trajectory, right?

And then you have Sarmat going the other way, you know what I mean? Which gets you to orbit, and it does take longer to go that way, even if you have the range. And so how does... It doesn't make any sense conceptually because that bolt from the blue attack wouldn't be like a single, like the 1983, like great sort of ending scene to War Games.

It's not like everything goes at once. Everything lands at once. It seems like it's like an air campaign.

Jeffrey 23:55

I mean, I do think the Russian posture is retaliatory.

Aaron 24:08

I do too, including the stuff up in orbit, if they would ever put it up there.

Jeffrey 24:12

And this is one reason why I took then and continue to take the extremely unpopular opinion that our fears of Russia using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine were largely a panic on our side. Because I don't... Understand that there are two cases. There's a case where Russia uses a small number of nuclear weapons in Ukraine where they don't put their force on alert.

That strikes me as being impossible to imagine that the Russians would do that because nobody starts a nuclear war without putting their nuclear forces on alert. You will get creamed. President will have no choice but to just immediately hit you with everything the US has, especially when you put out videos shooting his house, right? But the Contrary or converse piece of that is, if you bring the entire Russian strategic force to a state of alert and then begin using nuclear weapons, you have no credible way of conveying to the United States that this isn't, as you say, just the stuff that got here first. Yeah, and you're still gonna get creamed. Yes, and so Absent some weird miscalculation, which could happen, none of that vibes with what I think the Russians think about this stuff.

So I just don't think the Russians were ever close to using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. I think they wanted us to think they were. I think they wanted us to respect their nuclear weapons more. They were trying to get some leverage. But I am much less worried about the Russians engaging in limited nuclear war As a bad thing, then I am worried that they're not willing to think about limited nuclear scenarios.

And that in the event of a miscalculation or an unexpected escalation, that they are just going to like turn to the end of the book.

Aaron 26:27

Yeah. Yeah. And that's good. I just. And that's what Sarmat looks like to me. Yeah. No, I mean, from just a, and look, maybe I'm not read into some operational details or something like that. Because we're seeing missile war for the first time in the Middle East. Yeah. Large-scale missile war. It's not what we thought it would look like, right?

It's like salvo, defense, bunker down, sit, prepare, arm, fuel, go. You know what I mean? And so it's more like choreographed and separated by hours rather than – Like the dramatic scene in the movie where you have 32 minutes, right? Isn't it 32 minutes, which is the sort of missile defense sort of pitch before the first warheads hit?

But some of these systems now will take longer than 32 minutes. I mean, Skyfall will take much longer than 32 minutes.

Jeffrey 27:27

Yeah, so do you think, I mean, so then do you think, and I don't have an answer. This is a genuine question. I don't either. I mean, like, I guess one thing you do is when you're real big mad and ready to go, but not quite ready to go, maybe you... You put the orbital bombardment system up and it does multiple orbits.

And you put Bervesnik out of the ocean and it starts doing figure eights. Yeah, over the YSM layer. Like really, seriously guys, we're sick of this. Stop.

Aaron 27:58

Yeah, exactly. So that's my – so forget the fraction again. But then we're going to try to shoot that shit down. That's the problem. Exactly. But you would put it in orbit, right? So again, I just like to think of this thing as like the space shuttle. I know it's not a space shuttle. It's not a space shuttle.

It's kind of the space – it's the little space plane, right, in terms of size, right? I would think. You'd put – Yeah, and so you put the, what do we call it, the X-47 or something like that, right? The space plane?

Jeffrey 28:25

Are you thinking of the 37, the X-37? Yeah, I've gone off on a tangent.

Aaron 28:29

The 37B, oh, I'm so bad at this. Okay, you put up their version of that, which is what orbital bombardment kind of is, right? And then it just starts doing orbit. And then you're like, what is that? You're like, well, we'll never tell, but we launched it with a Sarbot, right? Yeah. By the way, go ahead. And it's just like, that's a signaling device, but it's a different signaling device than putting your nuclear forces on alert.

Jeffrey 29:01

True. It's weird. Do you know where this also pushes us back to?

Aaron 29:07

Sprint.

Jeffrey 29:08

Nowhere. Well, eventually. Eventually. I mean, the SSA team was the big argument for space-based missile defenses. You want to try to... I know. Because they're slow. For all the discussion about how stupid space-based missile defenses are, the one scenario where they're borderline plausible, they're still a bad idea, okay? They're still a bad idea. But the nice, long, slow boost of a Sarmat.

Aaron 29:39

Yeah, especially if it's chugging over the South Pole. That's a big trajectory. Okay.

Jeffrey 29:47

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, I presume you can shoot. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like, Oh, I don't know. It just is. Oh, you know, you make a move. We make a move. You make a move. We make a move. Suddenly we got, you know, SBIs. We got Brilliant Pebbles and fobs. Gliders, we can't shoot that. We can't shoot that stuff down, right? And what stuff we already have, you don't even have to really build anything, you know, unique or exotic to shoot this stuff down. I think, I think that's probably right. I mean, what, like, what does this world look like where we've got, I mean, this is like the worst sci-fi novel ever, right? We've got the counter Fob system sitting in Alaska, it's freezing, you know, you got the guys Well, the start of our screenplay.

There's a Russian spy hidden among our brave National Guardsmen stationed in Antarctica with the anti-FOBs defense. It's like Ice Station Zebra, but dumber.

Aaron 30:57

Oh, you could do a real good remake of The Thing. There we go. There you go. But instead of it, it was a thing in the north or the south. I realize I'm quoting a John Carpenter movie from the late 70s, so half of our listeners are just like, what is going on here? We should have a filming.

We might be off the rails. I was about to say, that's that music where we've gone off the rails. It's just a weird world. I'm just going to sort of wrap up by saying the Outer Space Treaty is... I think it's dead. I don't know what to say. Well, okay. I think...

Jeffrey 31:30

I don't think it's dead, but it is definitely the case that the arms race is migrating to space. And if we want to preserve some of our existing legal infrastructure to slow or discourage that, now is the time. So Alex Glazer and I have... A project that we're working on to see if you could verify that satellites don't have nuclear weapons on them before they get launched.

And there are people who are doing studies on verifying things in orbit. So if we, you know, like everything, if we didn't want to do this I think technically we would have ways to assure that we weren't doing it. The problem is we wanna do this. Right? And so like all the, you know, Alex and I came up with the most beautiful verification scheme in the world, and you can backstop it with the most perfect on orbit verification.

And people are gonna be like, well, I don't wanna do that because I want to have nuclear weapons in orbit. So, you know, like people saw the first five minutes of 2001, You know the satellites at the beginning of 2001 after the bone gets thrown up? Those are supposed to be orbiting nuclear weapons.

Aaron 32:58

Now you're really going vintage for our Gen Z and elder millennial, even me, elder millennial listeners. No, I mean, and the work that we're doing together is almost exclusively on Bob's.

Jeffrey 33:15

I should have said. I was going to do the voice.

Aaron 33:19

Yeah turns escalation dynamics and oh man okay well maybe the big positive out of this is that i'll write an adaptation of the thing set in 2036. that's fantastic in in station zulu alaska by the way watching for fobs i should i should add we know that russia and belarus are doing

Jeffrey 33:44

Nuclear exercises that involve both strategic and non-strategic nuclear forces. Yeah. But we're going to let those play out. The team's on it. We're going to have a great outbrief for listeners when all this nonsense ends.

Aaron 33:59

Yeah, I've already been asking for the show notes and was making inappropriate jokes in our chat. I don't even know what you guys are seeing. I mean, we're just starting to look.

Jeffrey 34:09

I mean, it's still going on, as best I could tell. So we'll collect all the videos and images. We'll geolocate everything. You know, for the ones they did, what, like a year and a half ago, two years ago, we geolocated, I think, almost every one of those things. Got beautiful satellite image of a 12 GUMO unit set up to do the Warhead installation.

Yeah.

Aaron 34:30

Never thought I'd see that. Yeah. No, it wasn't even the Showtime version. It was the full, it was the full, you know, X-rated version. It was good stuff. Yep. But yeah okay that's off the rails patreon.com acw podcast where you can join the coolest black chat slack channel in the world and where you can talk about 2001 space odyssey the thing and verifying orbital bombardment systems from station zulu and erica thanks everybody for listening