Let the Uploading Begin

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and proliferation. Good one, keep going. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis. I'm a distinguished scholar of global security at Middlebury College and a distinguished fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Aaron Stein 0:27

And I'm Dr. Aaron Stein, president of Foreign Policy Research Institute. And this is the proliferation and upload podcast from now on. You got me there. I didn't do that on purpose. That was an accident. So you are now the epitome of Dr. Freud and the slip right there? I suppose. Oh, God. Well, I guess in our super secret signal chat, we started sharing around a recent Real Clear Defense piece by sort of the Intelligista.

I would call them sort of the consensus of nuclear grand poobah things. Talking about the Trump administration's, are we calling it a nuclear posture review or a nuclear posture strategy session?

Jeffrey 1:11

The Trump administration has called it a nuclear strategy review, so an NSR, and the

Aaron 1:23

I'm trying to think about the good pivot here. It's bringing up things that came out from that previous congressional study, which name is also escaping me at the moment, talking about how to deter two adversaries, right?

Jeffrey 1:38

Right. So there is this whole public debate that we have every four or eight years about a new administration coming in and how are they going to approach nuclear weapons. And you know, one of my pet peeves is that we got in this habit of doing nuclear posture reviews. Yeah, it became sort of the things that a new administration does.

Right. And so for listeners who are just catching in, the original nuclear posture review, this was not a thing that anyone did until the Clinton people. And the reason they did it is because the Cold War freaking ended. And they did something called the bottom-up review. And the part of the bottom-up review that was kind of shaved off and done as a standalone piece under Ash Carter back when he believed in arms control was called a nuclear posture review.

And that thing was a total catastrophe. They didn't even write a report. They had a slide deck. Right. I remember this. And then... And then politics happened, right? So Congress, which at this point, really the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans who are obsessed with Bill Clinton's . Are making his life miserable. And one of the things they do is they prohibit funding for any further nuclear reductions.

And that kind of gets challenging for them. And the way that they solve their problem is they say, fine, we'll lift the restriction on funding for nuclear reductions as soon as the administration does a nuclear posture review, which is a way of running out the clock on Clinton. Then to get the Republicans back, Ellen Tauscher does this to George W. Bush. He wants money for the first the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, but later the Reliable Replacement Warhead. And she says, you know, you can have the money once you figure out what the weapons you already have are for, right? Which is like, that's like a very parent thing, you know, it's like.

You already have a toy. And so she runs out the clock on Senate Democrats and House Democrats. She was in the House. Run out the clock on Republicans by saying the next administration will do nuclear posture review. And then after that, it becomes like a thing. Yeah. And it never needs to be a thing. You don't have to do a review because as the Obama people discovered, you do the review, the posture review.

And then you end up having to do a second study, which essentially redoes the review. You know, so the Obama people did a 60-day implementation study. Yes. Which took like two and a half years. So Linton Brooks would walk around calling it either the long gestating... Or the increasingly poorly named 60-day implementation study. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think this is a way of saying that the Trump people did their own in 2018.

They got wise to it. They're not doing it this time. They are doing it out of DOD. Rich Colby is one of the co-chairs, but this is supposed to be a close hold. Small thing. And they're getting beaten up by Senate Democrats about it. But I think it's the right decision. Yeah.

Aaron 5:02

You know, this is one of the one of the things the Trump administration is doing that I don't ultimately care about and I think would actually establish good precedent, which is to stop doing these theaters of because I think of nuclear posture reviews is like their studies basically in response to the Senate demanding studies, as you said, to run out the clock so that they don't have to fund things that they don't want.

Jeffrey 5:25

Right, because it's a big – it's essentially a giant exercise in time-wasting. And I get it. If Congress is going to make you waste time, you got to do it. Right. But if Congress is not going to make you waste time, don't waste your own goddamn time. Yeah, no, I agree.

Aaron 5:43

No, no, I completely agree. And – So then just do the implementation study. And so they're doing the study. And I guess what triggered this podcast was there is now considerable debate because, A, we no longer have arms control, right, about how you can order.

Jeffrey 6:01

New start. We can have all the nuclear weapons we can build.

Aaron 6:05

And so if you're talking about the NPR that came about starting in the Clinton administration, this is the first one that will be done in recent memory that will not look like the ones that had come before it because there is no real limitations.

Jeffrey 6:20

Right, and I think it's going to be the first one where the number goes up, up.

Aaron 6:23

Right, exactly. So there's no upward limit on where we can go other than just how much money do we want to spend and what is the capacity to build up.

Jeffrey 6:35

That's exactly correct. And so that, I think, frames up the immediate choice, which is right now there is very little capacity to build new systems. I mean, all those systems are under development. Know, like the B-21s are starting to come off the line, and you know, but you know, Sentinel is over budget, behind schedule delayed in part because the President stole all the money one year for his airplane. Let's say that the bill for deferred maintenance on ground silos was a bit higher than they're initially anticipated, and then he got an airplane. Yes, it, it.

It also didn't help that people lied about the cost to get it through, which we knew they were doing, but whatever. That's standard. That is a time-honored procurement technique. That's true. It does not make anyone any worse. Yeah.

Aaron 7:21

You underbid the contract and they say, oops, have a little bit of overruns. Okay, keep going.

Jeffrey 7:25

You know, we're slowly reestablishing the ability to produce bids. Yes. You know, so all of that means you're not going to be churning out new warheads and new delivery systems, which leaves you... With one other option.

Aaron 7:45

Just upload those things, baby.

Jeffrey 7:47

Upload those things. Right. So the Strategic Posture Commission, which was the commission that John Kyle and Madeline Creeden. Did they co-chair it? Is that how we did this?

Aaron 8:04

I honestly cannot remember. That was the one I was talking about. Yes, they co-chaired. I was like reaching for the- Oh, no. She was the chair. Yeah, I don't think Kyle was involved.

Jeffrey 8:10

I remember this now. Go ahead. He was the vice chair. I mean, this was like a classic Democratic step on your own maneuver. Yeah, we talked about it. Where- We demanded a strategic posture commission, and then we decided to fill it with mostly Republicans.

Aaron 8:25

Yeah. This was, let's say, even a more genteel time in Washington politics, and Democrats who were in charge decided to make it bipartisan.

Jeffrey 8:35

It's just Democrats are stupid.

Aaron 8:38

I was being kind to our colleagues, but sure.

Jeffrey 8:40

I just...

Aaron 8:42

I just, you know, like... That was the one I was reaching for because we did do a podcast on it. It's somewhere in our archives and we were not fans. Yeah.

Jeffrey 8:53

Well, I mean... It was fine. I mean, I ultimately found it to be sort of monotonous reading.

Aaron 8:57

It was fine. But it's nothing we hadn't heard before. Go ahead.

Jeffrey 9:01

I mean, I just tend to be very skeptical of commission reports because they tend to use words to paper over policy differences.

Aaron 9:09

Yes.

Jeffrey 9:10

And then everyone takes those words and then when the commission is done, they interpret those words to mean what they wish they meant. Right. And so you don't, I don't think they actually build consensus so much as they just create paper that people can argue about what it means. And so that to me seems like a pretty useless exercise.

And indeed this is happening now because what the posture commission recommended was that the Air Force and Navy exercise uploading. Mm-hmm. That they prepare to upload if we need to. And now, some of the people, Are saying, well, what we meant was we were recommending we upload. And it's like, well, that's not what you wrote. And that's also not what some of your other commissioners say.

But that's, again, like the nature of this endeavor of papering over policy differences.

Aaron 10:10

And I think it sort of matters more because, and again, I think we said it at the time, you now have an administration that will not feel burdened by increasing numbers, at least deployed numbers, not just because of New START, but also because they don't care about arms control.

Jeffrey 10:25

Yeah, and again, for listeners, the US has about 4,000 nuclear weapons. The START treaty limited us to 1,550. We didn't always stay right at 1,550. We were usually sort of in the 1,400s. The real number is either higher or lower, depending on what you think about Bombs for bombers.

Aaron 10:44

Yeah, because bombers are counted as one, but they can carry more.

Jeffrey 10:47

They're counted as one. They're not really deployed because the bombs are sitting in a bunker, but whatever. But of the 4,000, so you're kind of at call it 1,500, 1,600 on the deployed strategic side, there's kind of an equal number of spares. And then a few hundred non-strategic or so-called tactical nuclear weapons. The question is, do you take a bunch of those spares and put them back on the missiles?

So do you go from like four warheads on a Trident to six or eight?

Aaron 11:22

And we should say, in order to meet that 1550 number, the way that we did it more or less was to just take warheads off of deployed systems and just put them in a closet and lock the gate.

Jeffrey 11:34

Yes, that's right. I mean, there is one other exception that we will talk about later. But yeah, Minuteman can carry three warheads. But right now, they're all at one. But they could be at three. Right. And Trident could carry, is it six? It's six or eight. Okay. And I think. Depending on, depending on the, I mean, I think, I think the warhead loading, I don't, I don't know this is true, but my sense is the warhead loadings on Trident might actually exceed the number of warheads.

Oh, okay.

Aaron 12:04

But what we should say is on some of the boats, tubes were either welded shut Yes, that's right. Or converted to just carrying Tomahawk. And Tomahawk, the nuclear mission was eliminated. Right.

Jeffrey 12:23

One thing that I guess is really important is, you know, we can talk about the op-ed that the five senior former officials, including our friend Vipin Narang wrote, which argues for uploading, and we should talk about why, but we should keep in mind that when we are talking about uploading, narrowly speaking, uploading means putting more warheads on missiles.

But I think over the long term, there are two other things, one which is, I think, very classified because Vipin Narang in congressional testimony, this was cleared, made a stray comment that no one is willing to talk about, which was about increasing launcher capacity.

Aaron 13:14

I think it was a speech, not testimony. Was it? Was it? I have it here. It was a speech at CSIS.

Jeffrey 13:22

Oh. You know what? That seems right. OK. So I don't think it was Stray.

Aaron 13:27

I think it was cleared.

Jeffrey 13:30

Well, that's right. Oh, it was totally cleared. I mean, Stray, like, I've never seen any other reference to it.

Aaron 13:35

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally.

Jeffrey 13:37

And like, I don't know how, you know. So we don't know what that means. But that could mean.

Aaron 13:44

We should read the quote, right? Go ahead. Do you have it? I do. The exact line was, we have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs that could offer national leadership increased flexibility if executed.

Jeffrey 14:05

Yeah, so who knows what that means? Maybe that means redesigning Sentinel so it can carry more warheads. Maybe that means making the warheads smaller so you can put more on Sentinel. Maybe that means adding tubes to Columbia, although it seems much too late to do that.

Aaron 14:22

I guess you could argue that. Maybe it means, does it say future launchers? Yeah, to increase future launcher capacity.

Jeffrey 14:34

Yeah, I see it's so vague. Like, does that mean existing launchers in the future or future launchers in the future? I don't know. It could be popping open four tubes that are sealed on submarines. It could be making non-nuclear systems, nuclear. So I just think all that, we have to keep in mind that's in the background.

Aaron 14:56

Yeah.

Jeffrey 14:57

Because on the one hand, we are narrowly talking about uploading, but there may be... Other things that will follow uploading.

Aaron 15:07

So I think we should talk about the op-ed from the four. Is it four or five? I have it open here. So I think we should talk about the op-ed from five.

Jeffrey 15:16

It's Madeline Greene, Vipin Narang to Democratic officials, Frank Miller, who has mostly been associated with Republicans, although I think Frank will tell you he would have served in any administration, and I believe that's true. I have it here.

Aaron 15:37

Eric Edelman. Eric Edelman, yeah.

Jeffrey 15:39

Who was a career foreign service officer who also would have served in any administration but is definitely a Republican.

Aaron 15:46

But not a Trump Republican. I'll say that for Eric.

Jeffrey 15:48

No, no. None of these people – well, anyway, I like some of these people quite a lot. Yeah. And then there's Keith Bain, who did the Bush administration's 2000 waves of like two nuclear posture reviews.

Aaron 16:13

Yeah. So I think the point is, is of the five, these are not people who are necessarily completely ideologically aligned, and they served in different administrations, different posture reviews, and they all wrote the same op-ed or attached their name. Yeah.

Jeffrey 16:28

You know, and I do – I think that they still have a certain amount of wordsmithing. Oh, they do. And probably some papering over of differences. Like I think Keith Payne and maybe Vipin or Madeline wouldn't necessarily agree on everything. But I do think there's a strong – as a group of people – and by the way, I'm not sure I agree with the recommendations.

But as a group of people, I think this is basically like – People who think that U.S. nuclear policy should reflect continuity.

Aaron 17:02

Yeah, I think so.

Jeffrey 17:04

I mean, you could have thrown some Greg Weaver in there. I don't know why Greg Weaver didn't get involved, but, you know.

Aaron 17:10

And I think the big one that they call for here, and I'm looking for the exact line from it is I mean, they're basically arguing for uploading. What they're saying is in the op ed, if I can paraphrase, is that The world is more dangerous, there are two nuclear-armed adversaries, our assumptions are rooted in the early 2000s, we need an increase in numbers, but in order to rapidly increase numbers, would strain the defense industrial base.

And so the most plausible way in the near term to get increased numbers is to upload capacity on current deployed systems, along with fielding systems now under development, I think SLCMN being the one, and an air launch cruise missile for F-35.

Jeffrey 17:57

Yeah, and I think one thing that's worth pointing out is that the way this is framed is very similar to the way that Jake Sullivan and Pranay Vati talked about this in the Biden administration. Which is that as China's number comes up and they're in the low 600s now, they're expected to get to 1,000 by 2030. They might get to 1,500 by 2035.

We have no idea kind of what their actual endpoint is. One question is, do you take the 1,500, 1,600 that the Russians are at Strategic side and the 1,000 or 1,500 the Chinese will be at and just add those together. And then that's our number, which is like the simple way of thinking about it. And what the Biden people had argued, they were right, is you don't do that.

What you do is, and this is maybe where I'm a little more skeptical, but you have a target set and what you really have is a targeting problem and you just want to cover the targets. Right. And so the op-ed makes the argument that, you know, this would not represent a huge change in U.S. force structure. It would just be additional merving in order to make sure that you can cover Chinese targets plus Russian targets.

Aaron 19:28

Now, I don't think that gets us out of our arms race problem.

Jeffrey 19:33

No, I don't think so either. I think Upload is... Preferred, not because, not for the reasons, like when you write an op-ed, when five people write an op-ed together, like there's a lot of compromising and, you know, wordsmithing, and you settle on things that you can settle on. But to my mind, the frame of the piece is, you know, this allows us to Relatively easily solve our targeting problem without doing anything crazy.

But my view is we actually can't do anything crazy right now. And I'm not sure that doing something, because the idea is, well, this is less crazy than things that Trump might do. But the problem is just because it looks less crazy to us doesn't mean that the Russians and the Chinese won't see it as Worthy of responding to.

Aaron 20:42

Right, because I think the way I would frame this is We could be saying to ourselves that we need to upload because we simply have more targets we need to hit with a capped number of launchers, at least in the near term, because bringing new delivery vehicles, I should say, not launchers, bringing new delivery vehicles online right now is prohibitively expensive with what's going on.

But the Russians and the Chinese, my guess is do not view themselves as a single entity. And so if they see the US increasing numbers, even if we're saying it's to basically split across the two countries, they're going to say, well, we can't take that for a fact. So we want to build up to your number just to be on the safe side because they can do that too.

Jeffrey 21:35

That's right. And that comes through in all the track two dialogues and the international meetings I attend where I cannot get Russians or Chinese to understand this dynamic. I mean, I had a really funny argument with a Chinese colleague where we were talking about the silos. And I'm like, you understand...

Aaron 21:57

Stratcom is going to assign warheads to all of these silos, and he's like, why? That's crazy. Like, do you, what do you, did you not get the counterforce briefing? Yeah, I mean, well, this is all a discussion about counterforce, which we talked about, I think, in our last podcast, but sometimes we record them in order which is how we still do the nuclear we still do the nuclear war planning, nuclear war planning.

Jeffrey 22:25

Yeah, I couldn't get the Chinese people I talked to to really... And it's hard to talk to Chinese experts now, right? So I don't want to act like I have some... None of us, I think, really have amazing access anymore. I guess some people still do. But, you know, it's much more scattered conversations. But at least in the conversations that I had in the last couple of years, it was really hard to get people to sort of grasp These silos are going to lead to upload.

Oh, yeah. And like that causal chain of events, which is not unlike in the US, right, where we, like Keith Payne actually used to sort of deny that arms race dynamics were real. And it's like, but my man, you are literally demonstrating that arms race dynamics are real now. Like he wrote this article called Action Reaction Metaphysics.

And it's like, dude, you are just literally saying the Chinese are taking an action and we have to take a reaction. Yeah. Hey, you know, and so and I, you know, I actually do take his point that they are mitigated or mediated through a lot of things. So it is not it is not the simple action reaction dynamic people mentioned, but like, I couldn't get the Chinese to grasp this as a problem.

Really hard to get Russian colleagues to grasp that the US response was going to piss them off. You weren't going to like when our number goes up either.

Aaron 23:52

Yeah, and I do think as part of this, I don't want to take the conversation too far astray because I'm seeing it come back more and more is the tactical side, which is basically is that The Russians or the Chinese have more options to control escalation with sort of a disparity in shorter range systems. And so I think that needs to be mentioned as well, because I think it helps explain elements of Vipin's maybe stray remark or sort of foreshadowing remark, which is that increased launcher capabilities.

That's my read on that.

Jeffrey 24:28

Well, okay. That's interesting. See, I... Yes, so I take, I still take future launcher capability to mean upload, but the thing you're saying is also true. And this hasn't been talked about. We got a bunch of new nuclear weapons under development.

Aaron 24:46

So I didn't, when we were pre-podding, so I consider myself well-read, and I didn't actually know about this. And so we saved it for the pod. I knew about the launcher capability. Go ahead, you just take the floor here.

Jeffrey 25:00

Well, I mean, let me say, I hate the word new nuclear weapon, because I don't know what a new nuclear weapon is. They're all iterations on the same few ideas. But- Proven physics, as I would say. We know it works. Yeah, but you're right about these are regional capabilities, or at least- I don't know what we call them.

Aaron 25:23

Well, it's getting really blurry now because we can talk about that. It's also blurry. This is getting blurry. I mean, this is, yeah, we're like at the 3D movie without the glasses on.

Jeffrey 25:33

Okay, so there's NDSA.

Aaron 25:35

Yeah.

Jeffrey 25:38

Right, which is an air-delivered capability to defeat hard and deeply buried targets. Yes. So basically it's new Jack Arnab.

Aaron 25:54

It goes boop.

Jeffrey 25:55

Yeah. Right? Which... I am on record. I wrote an op-ed with Bridge Colby like 20 years ago about this. Maybe 15 years ago.

Aaron 26:11

You're a fan of this.

Jeffrey 26:13

That is the sort of capability that I think... Like... Look, I was against the stupid low-yield warhead for D5. Yeah, well, that's it. Yep, yep.

Aaron 26:25

The W76-2, yep.

Jeffrey 26:27

Yeah, I'm against the nuclear-armed silicon. Silicon man. Like, I just think these are just stupid capabilities that are just completely useless. Yeah. I didn't love the B61-12, although I appreciate that they've now at least done a B61-13 with big yield. So that made that program a little less stupid, in my opinion. But I'm somebody who thinks that the only reason you would ever use a nuclear weapon is because you don't have any other way to execute this mission.

And like an air delivered HDTB, HDBT defeat capability is pretty useful. I mean, we're learning that some of those Iranian bunkers are too deep.

Aaron 27:16

Yes.

Jeffrey 27:18

Yes.

Aaron 27:20

And that would be... Yeah, so I mean, and I don't think that, and that would fall under the air launch capabilities that have been called for, right? Which is to give more capabilities for air launch cruise missiles, essentially.

Jeffrey 27:35

I don't know what they're dropping it off of, but you could drop a B61 from a strategic bomber. You can drop a B61 from an F-35, so who knows? And then there are these... Rapid capability team like warheads, and there are apparently two of these now under development, and we don't really know anything about them other than that I think one of them is a regional capability.

But yeah, there's this whole thing called Nevermore, which is the ability to rapidly prototype new nuclear weapons designs. Which I think it got described as the name of the warhead for Dark Eagle, which I don't think is correct. I think it's the program that would rapidly produce warheads for things like Dark Eagle, or if you wanted to put a warhead back on the Tomahawk on Typhon, or if you wanted to put a warhead on the SM6 on Typhon.

Aaron 28:40

Yeah, and this could just reflect my bias. When I read these things, I think they're looking for theater capabilities. I think that's right. On Typhon. Maybe I'm wrong. This is just speculation. And so if I was to guess what slickum N that Warhead Appropriated or something similar to it for Tomahawk and then a warhead for Dark Eagle and then a potential warhead for SM-6 because they would all carry the same.

Or one that could go along with that delivery system so that they have a conventional, non-conventional option for ground-based deployment in either Asia or Europe.

Jeffrey 29:27

I think that's probably right, but like you, I don't know.

Aaron 29:30

The answer is I don't know. What's interesting is we were looking at the diameters of each missile before that. And so, you know, like, because Dark Eagle is obviously the most important one because we just, it flies the farthest.

Jeffrey 29:43

And Admiral Richard, a.k.a. Chucky Dick- Has already called for a nuclear-armed Dark Eagle.

Aaron 29:48

Oh, that's right. You know what? That's right. Look, so that's my guess. It's a guess, right? And so it's upload plus theater capabilities. Although I'm not sure Dark Eagle is theater. That's why I keep sort of going, it's getting squishy.

Jeffrey 30:01

It's below 5,000 kilometers. 3,500 kilometers, allegedly. Allegedly. I mean, that's far. I mean, yeah. I mean... Yes.

Aaron 30:14

I mean, Guam's a long way away. Guam is a long way away from China.

Jeffrey 30:16

Yeah. But I mean, I think from the Chinese, that feels theater.

Aaron 30:20

Yeah. I mean, I guess my mind, I guess these definitions we have are all built around the European theater.

Jeffrey 30:29

Yeah, I think that's right.

Aaron 30:30

And Europe is small, and the Pacific is not.

Jeffrey 30:34

Right. Well, and so much of the – I mean the whole like why are some things strategic and other things non-strategic? And the answer was just if you couldn't hit CONUS from the Soviet Union or Soviet Union from CONUS, we wanted to leave it out of the trees. So we just drew the line. There isn't some – Profound metaphysical difference.

It's just like we wanted to limit some things and this was the basket of we were able to limit. The famous example of this precisely is the Tomahawk, sea launch cruise missiles. The Russians are like, those are totally strategic weapons. The Navy was like, you will sign a treaty that limits this incredibly useful system over our dead body.

And so then there you go, right? So now it's not strategic, but like, whatever. I mean, you know, the funny example of this is, you know, this is why the MTCR is 300 kilometers, is Korea.

Aaron 31:40

Oh, yeah, yeah. The listeners should know this, but yeah.

Jeffrey 31:43

I mean, we just, yeah. So anyway, we're prisoners to geography in that way. So yeah, I think that the upload debate, Will be the precursor to debates about increasing launcher capacity on the strategic side, but then also these new warhead types are going to come out and that might, if they can solve the pit production problem, that then might lead to a bunch of debates about nuclearizing systems that at the moment are conventional only.

Aaron 32:25

Which is going to be a weird world because it's going to make arms control much harder. Harder. Look, I said it before and I'm going to say it again. It will restart the debate about testing. I don't think all the chatter about the Chinese cheating on CTBT requirements or Trump, I guess, truth socialing, whatever you call it, about the need for nuclear testing is divorced from this.

Jeffrey 32:55

I think, I think that's right. And, and maybe the simplest way to say it is, which goes back to the original point, you know, there's a vibe shift, because this is the first nuclear strategy review in which the number will go up. You know, poor, poor, poor George W. Bush took such a beating in the press, and now we can see how much they reduce the stockpile, you know.

All that, and admittedly, as Lindbergh once said, all of these debates boil down to, do you trust George Bush with sharp objects because of Iraq? But they actually were dramatically reducing the stockpile during that period. And now the stockpile is at its nadir, and I think it's coming back up. Yeah, I heard you. And that's a vibe shift.

And if the stockpile is going to come back up, then every other debate we have changes. Because we might need more delivery vehicles. We might need more optionality. We might need different warheads. We might need smaller warheads. So now we might need to re-look at testing. We have to reconsider transparency. Everything that we have gotten used to since 1990

Aaron 34:17

Is about to reverse and and it's going to be really different no totally but you know who i actually blame for all this ewan decker who i blame decker he found the silence it's decker if we hadn't found it it's decker evelis fault because he found the silos if he didn't find the silos maybe we'd all be living in ignorance

Jeffrey 34:38

These are Schrodinger's silos. Exactly. Until you look at them in a commercial satellite. If they're only real to the intelligence community, does that in fact mean that they're not real from a policy perspective? Possibly.

Aaron 34:51

And what if they really are windmills?

Jeffrey 34:55

Yeah. Yeah. What if they're windmills?

Aaron 34:57

What if they're windmills?

Jeffrey 35:00

I don't know, man. You know, I'm annoyed. There's an article that someone wrote in which they accused me of... Mocking the discovery of the silos and accused me of saying they were windmills. I was like, off, dude. Like we found them, you idiot.

Aaron 35:19

That is somebody who was using AI to summarize the debate and was probably pulling from a transcript we did on a podcast where we were being, where we were joking. And this comes up as Jeffrey Lewis once mocks this, you know what I mean?

Jeffrey 35:35

Well, it's true, I was mocking And I was talking about windmills, but boy, yeah.

Aaron 35:41

Yeah, no, look, I think the broader takeaway is that we're going to increase numbers, but we won't know about it. The way that we knew about the total number of warhead numbers is because we would publish them, was it yearly or was it semi-annually? I can't remember as part of New Star reporting requirements.

Jeffrey 36:01

I mean, it was supposed to be every year, but it was, you know, And that was really only an Obama thing, to be clear. Before Obama, the US stockpile was not declassified. The closest we ever got was Colin Powell Gave some congressional testimony in which he did give the numbers for the first time. I actually used that during the Obama administration. I showed that to the Post to show that the number had at least once in the past been declassified or stated in an unclassified setting. It wasn't necessarily declassified, and no harm had come of it. My point is, is that the numbers were at one point relatively easy to obtain, or that we had a standard baseline, and they were given to us. Yes.

Aaron 36:46

And now this administration and I don't think any future administration is going to just be handing out the numbers.

Jeffrey 36:53

No, no, I think that's it for that's it for numbers. We're going to be back to. Observing that pit production is resuming and making estimates about stockpile size based on our best guesses of what annual pit production is. And it'll be stuff in the Washington Post like, you know, reports say, and sometimes those reports will be wrong.

You know, the U.S. is producing tens of pits per year. And it might actually be hundreds because the person doesn't know. We won't know.

Aaron 37:27

It's not going to be a fun time. I mean, it may allow for us to do more funded work, which is sort of how we pay ourselves, but it's not pleasurable. Well, it's pleasurable.

Jeffrey 37:37

It's pleasurable. World's bad business is good.

Aaron 37:41

So we want everybody to direct their hate mail to Decker Ebola, who I know listens to the show. It's his fault. so yeah, all your fault, Decker. how dare you look, how dare you look, there you look, and then you, Jeffrey, for proving that they're not windmills because if they were windmills, no, no, I think, I think they're windmills. AI, AI, I definitely think they're windmills.

Patreon.com acw podcast to support the show three dollars if you're a student five dollars if you're not and we are considering i want to make an announcement sort of turning this into a newsletter let us know if you want that in our slack channel if you are a member Put it in the Slack channel. We'll collect the responses and see if we can pull that off.

But don't hold us to it. We're going to try or at least consider it.

Jeffrey 38:34

Jeffrey, anything before we sign off? Hey, we're podcasting more.

Aaron 38:36

We got it. We got the rhythm back. My life has slowed down a little bit. I think yours has too. And welcome to the Arms Race podcast. Start me up. Always a pleasure.