The Rapid Race in Space

Jeffrey Lewis 0:07

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the William J. Perry lecturer at Stanford University and a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Aaron Stein 0:24

And I'm Dr. Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, calling to you from Philadelphia. Do you know when you, I, whenever you say William Perry, it makes me think, weirdly, of like the Billy Joel song, like "Oh, New Jersey"?

Jeffrey 0:40

See, I think of the fridge,

Aaron 0:42

And I think William Perry in a Billy Joel song would be Billy P, Billy P, Billy P, and I realize I'm disgracing a legend at the moment. For some reason, I have Philly and Jersey on my mind because you were here a week and a half ago, two weeks ago?

Jeffrey 0:58

Yeah, that was great.

Aaron 1:00

You know, it's an okay town you got there. You blitzed through, but you made it.

Jeffrey 1:05

I did blitz through. Jesus, that was – yeah, on my way to Yerevan. That's another conversation.

Aaron 1:10

Yeah, and so we sort of had this amalgam of topics, which is we're – Because again, for branding purposes, we've kept this the disarmament non-proliferation podcast, but really it's the arms racing podcast, right?

Jeffrey 1:26

A lot of that going around now, yeah. And so we can't change the brand name because that would be bad for brand identity. Well, and what's old will be new again. We will come to our senses someday, I think. Someday.

Aaron 1:41

And so perhaps we'll sort of start with a narrative arc that you identified in your recent foreign affairs piece that came out, I think, the day you got to Philly. So to be honest with you, I didn't read it until right before this podcast.

Jeffrey 1:54

To be honest, you still haven't read it. Well, I read the top section, but I don't pay for foreign affairs.

Aaron 1:59

There we go. And so I didn't have time to Houdini it to get behind the paywall. But I don't want anybody at the Foreign Affairs Corporation to come after me for copyright infringement.

Jeffrey 2:10

Yeah. So I have an article in Foreign Affairs, which now has been out a couple of weeks. So I guess it's fish and chips now. But it's... It was really an effort to talk about the way in which trends in space are coming together because of the renewed arms race. I almost think of it as not really a rejoinder, but Vipin Narang and others have pointed out correctly That it's a curious thing to call whatever competition we have with the Russians and the Chinese in arms race because the pace is quite slow.

Just because the pace of producing new bombers and ICBMs and submarines is at such a slow build-out that race is not necessarily the world's best metaphor. It's more of an arms walk. And while I think They're right about that. I think that's not true in space. OK. That space is moving much more quickly, it's much more dynamic, and that a lot of the arms race dynamics that we're seeing on involving strategic systems While they take a long time to play out, at the, you know, like I'm gonna upload or I'm gonna build more ICBMs, level you are seeing like just a lot more interest in targeting both the sensors in space and also moving capabilities to space, and then targeting those capabilities. All of which, by the way, the piece came out before the US said so, but The Secretary of the Air Force said that the US has, he was very careful what he said, but space control weapons on orbit.

Aaron 4:09

That came out the day after our game concluded and a bunch of our board members and interested public, but not necessarily at the granular level of perhaps listeners to this podcast, We're like, see, you were on the right track. What do you think that on orbit capability is? Because I see a lot of speculation. And to be honest with you, I don't know how valuable it is to speculate about what's up there other than to just think about the trend lines that we're seeing.

They felt it necessary to say something. And we can quibble about whether or not it was actually necessary because of this sort of steady drumbeat Of, let's say, increasingly alarmist reporting about Chinese and Russian capabilities in space. I think sort of emblematic of your broader take, which is this is a race.

Jeffrey 5:01

Yeah. The statement is interesting because it was described as a space control capability, and they don't say ... The US has offensive and defensive counter space, and the Secretary didn't say either of those things. He just said space control weapon. But then he added to defend the joint force. Right. And so, you know, that could be a weapon that is designed to disable a satellite that might attack U.S. assets in space.

But it also could be a weapon designed to attack assets in space that support terrestrial operations that could be used to attack. So, you know, I think the wording was deliberately very vague. He went out of his way to say he wasn't going to answer any questions, including whether it had been tested or not. Right. And so, you know, I think it's...

It's hard. One thing I would say is that over the past few years, in both budget documents and hearings, Indo Paycom, I guess just Paycom again, has been pushing for an unfunded requirement involving space control in order to target Chinese command and control. And also there has been an unfunded requirement for a classified space program.

Aaron 6:22

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 6:23

So, you know, I think we've, we've seen the signs that there was a move in this direction. I think it is very, my sense is it is very China focused. It is, it is possible it was born of interest you know, born out of interest of dealing with the Russian space nuke. You know, should such an object ever be placed in orbit, but I, I, you know, There was a, I was part of a spirited discussion by two former officials, one of whom hypothesized that this was deterrence messaging.

And the other of whom, which I think I might be more persuaded by, thought, no, we're just about to be in a position where we're going to start launching lots of things. And those things will be in unusual enough orbits and will not have explained purposes. And so it's going to come out because of how our space posture is going to change.

And so you might as well own up to it.

Aaron 7:22

Yeah, I mean, a famous phrase on this podcast, por que no los dos? I mean, I think the Secretary of the Air Force said it was for deterrence purposes. And again, I think we've talked a lot about on this podcast about how that word deterrence gets butchered and its original meaning has all but been lost in sort of the retelling throughout the decades of the Cold War and now post-Cold War, whatever era we're in now.

Jeffrey 7:49

For listeners who may not remember, I do not believe in conventional deterrence. I do not believe conventional deterrence is a thing.

Aaron 7:56

Self-deterrence certainly is not a thing. No, don't. Stop triggering me. It's not for any sort of true definition of deterrence in my opinion. But it is very much in the zeitgeist of what we have come to ascribe to being deterrent capabilities. And not to go too far down a rabbit hole. Coercive signaling, but for good. Yeah. Well, you're always the hero of your own story.

And then on top of that, I could definitely be persuaded that we're at the precipice of a lot of stuff being placed in unusual orbits. To get at this, you know, to use DOD language, to get at the problem set of over the horizon targeting by the Chinese. That would be a problem for the Navy beyond the first island chain.

And I would certainly, if I was sitting naked out on a carrier, want a little help.

Jeffrey 8:53

Yeah, I mean, look, this is how, I mean, Soviet Rorsats were one of the big things that, you know, drove the U.S. to look at anti-satellite weapons in the 70s. So it's, you know, all these arguments are perfectly reasonable. I would prefer we not do anti-satellite weapons for lots and lots and lots of reasons, but But then again, there's a bunch of stuff I'd prefer that we and the Russians and the Chinese not do.

And we seem really committed to doing these things. So here we are.

Aaron 9:24

So is this a good segue that we actually ran a game to see how different team – to see how the US, the Russians and – Yeah, we started a nuclear war, Aaron. To respond to – Essentially set in 2035, reports of six of what was it, Cosmos 2558 or whatever it is, the Russian space nukes floating out there and then the Russians signaling that they were going to leave the Outer Space Treaty because they didn't like how Starlink was aiding an insurgency in occupied eastern Ukraine

Jeffrey 10:02

Yes. Yeah. So which was, I mean, first of all, as a man who has typically not enjoyed tabletop exercises, that was a really good time.

Aaron 10:11

You went in kicking and screaming. You were not happy to be there. Well, you were happy to be there to see friends, but I would say that you weren't enthralled by playing a game.

Jeffrey 10:20

I was not, but it was a good game.

Aaron 10:23

Do you want to tell the listeners what surprised you?

Jeffrey 10:28

Well... My concern about tabletop exercises is the tiny, tiny, tiny part of me that is a social scientist. I'm not sure what good the data is, but I think it is a really intellectually fruitful Thing to watch, to just see how different people respond and how different groups process information and see the crazy things they do. To me, that was really, really great.

And 10 of 10 would do it again. I think my biggest takeaway was how uncritically the teams believed everything we told them in terms of intelligence.

Aaron 11:17

Yes, the Intel injects were never questioned. It was really strange. Well, if you were playing, would you have basically said, are we sure the intel is true?

Jeffrey 11:28

I mean, that's what I say every day, all the time about all intelligence, which, again, is not intended as an insult against intelligence. It's just, you know, finding out secret stuff you're not supposed to know is hard. And so even if you're really good at it, it's pretty easy to make a mistake. And we had actually, you know, I certainly thought we had given them a very clear prompt where U.S. and European intelligence assessments subtly differed.

Yes, that was on purpose. And nobody took that. They were like, oh, look, it's two flavors of yes. And it's like, wow. Yeah. That's not what that says.

Aaron 12:13

Could we talk about the most interesting proposal that came out of Team Blue? Oh, you love this so much.

Jeffrey 12:23

Yes, you may.

Aaron 12:23

I can't describe who came up with the idea, but that was completely enamored and enthralled. We gave the Team US a limited golden dough.

Jeffrey 12:35

Yes, we did.

Aaron 12:36

We did this on purpose because it was set in 2035 and I mean, this is all funding dependent, but well, I mean, I'm struggling to kind of explain this. We at some point expect the Trump administration to do a highly scripted test in orbit.

Jeffrey 12:59

Yeah. Yeah, we gave them a crappy space-based interceptor layer. Yes, and

Aaron 13:06

Again, this is funding dependent and everything is variable and could change, but they certainly seem like they're itching for a test, right?

Jeffrey 13:12

In a lot of the ways that the- Oh, they've said the interceptors are flight ready, which I suppose is technically true, but absurd.

Aaron 13:23

Yeah, I mean, who knows? Okay. So anyway, so we give- And one of the, in round two, which was that Team Blue decided to use Golden Dome to blockade Russian space launch.

Jeffrey 13:37

Well, and the best part was that person said, you know, these are terrible missile defense interceptors, but do you know what they can hit?

Aaron 13:45

And I was sitting there as the Team Blue adjudicator, and I was like, whoa. And then the guy, well, not name his name, but he's a great dude, was like, I'm actually basing it off of an Arms Control Wong podcast episode. I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, it was you. He's like, you said on an Arms Control Wong podcast that they would make great weapons to shoot down Falcon.

And I was like, I was joking. I was like, that was a joke. But then you and I, and I think we had to pull over a couple more of the adjudicators, were like, would this actually work? And we determined that... Close enough, right? I think so, yeah. I had never envisioned Golden Dome being used for a blockade weapon rather than as a missile defense weapon.

Jeffrey 14:37

Yeah, I mean, we hadn't speculated, you know, a propos of Victus Hayes. We hadn't speculated on a responsive space launch for the Russians. Yeah, it was... Which is how you would have to try to break through that.

Aaron 14:52

Yes, and it was, I mean, it was truly... And awesome idea. Essentially, it was a tool that says, well, lift the blockade if you deorbit safely, these things that we're curious about. I thought that was a really interesting way to go after this potential problem without shooting them down in a way I would never think about.

Jeffrey 15:20

Yeah, because what I especially liked about it is because the actual Russian countermeasure To the blockade would be hitting delete on space and using all of the nuclear weapons that were in order. Right. It sort of sucked all the escalation space. It sucked up all the escalation space and really put the Russians right up against start the bad day.

Aaron 15:50

And what's interesting is that when – because you left from Philly for Yerevan, Armenia. Did you ever get – I sure did. Did you get the cherry kebab that I kept telling you to get?

Jeffrey 16:01

So these were organized dinners. We had many Armenian – Meals with many, many kebabs. And I'm not sure how I would know if one was cherry. I mean, they, they had, you know, various, you know, marinades on them. So I'm maybe, I don't know.

Aaron 16:18

Did you have the Armenian pizza? I think, you know, the Lamaju.

Jeffrey 16:21

Yes. Those are delicious.

Aaron 16:22

And, you know, somebody. Crust is a little thin for my taste. It's a very thin crust. Crispy Armenians, one of the differentiating factors between them is I believe the Armenians like them more crispy than they're served in Turkey.

Jeffrey 16:38

We can definitely talk about Yerevan because as with Philadelphia, inexplicably I liked the place.

Aaron 16:48

I also took you to a vegan restaurant. I took everybody to a vegan restaurant for – Yes.

Jeffrey 16:54

It was good and the right decision. Okay.

Aaron 16:56

But anyways, so you are involved in this track two dialogue. Whenever I think about – and everything you read about with the Russians and stuff, they're worried about Golden Dome but sort of in the abstract and that it can negate their deterrent. Secondary uses don't really ever come up. Or perhaps they do, and I'm just unaware of them.

But I don't know. It's sort of a prompt just for you to talk about the latest from the Russians.

Jeffrey 17:25

Yeah, I mean, I really can't. There's a level of confidentiality that needs to be respected, both in terms of not really talking about What specific people say, but not even really talking generally about what we discussed, but you know, I will say just kind of very broadly, I, I am surprised and have brought up that Golden Dome hasn't elicited as much of a reaction from the Russians as I would have expected and I think I think part of the answer is it's priced in.

Yeah. And in a weird way, and this is obviously not something we talked about because this is just like my deep, I don't know if they're that deep, but my personal reflections on like why these things don't come up in this way. And so I think they get sort of priced in and then You know, people decide it's bad or good for a particular reason, and then they don't really go back and revisit, which is why I think it was so surprising to see the space blockade.

Yeah, exactly.

Aaron 18:46

Because, you know, what was an offhanded joke on this podcast, I guess... Helped inspire creative thinking about how to respond to a problem in the moment.

Jeffrey 19:00

One thing which I don't know how common is in games, but the teams had such distinct personalities. Yes. Our Russians were very passive. Yes. Until they understood how aggressive the Americans were being. Yes.

Aaron 19:21

And then they kind of had a panic attack. I was adjudicating on Team Blue, so I didn't get it. You were floating around more than I was.

Jeffrey 19:29

Yeah, I mean, it was really strange. The Russian team was just very... For a group of people who'd put a bunch of nuclear weapons in orbit, they were like... What we're just, you know, we want to talk about peace and we want to deescalate this crisis. And I mean, almost to the point where I was not sure that they were really, I mean, you'd never want to say somebody is not playing their role.

Right. But it was very interesting because when they got that really vociferous American reaction, they kind of panicked.

Aaron 20:03

Yeah. And it, it ended with what's funny is the game ended actually with strikes on earth Not in space. And I wonder, because there's just a time limit. It was a Friday. Everyone needed to go home. And you needed to get to Yerevan. One more round, we're done. I guess that's the value of these games, is that they're fun to play.

Because for me, they always, the very even smaller social scientists than you and me, doesn't treat them as social scientific experiments.

Jeffrey 20:42

Yeah, which is, I think, fair because for the most part, I think they're not.

Aaron 20:46

They're more, for me, a way to elicit how people react to crises. And then two, it always challenges my thinking in terms of what goes on, especially when players finally step out of what they think the other side would do. Particularly with Team Red, and then ultimately just play as if you're responding to the moment in the crisis.

So you are playing a role. But at some point, if you're playing the role to... Guess faithfully, yes, you know, you waste moves, particularly on Team Blue, like you would take a lot, I mean, you know, maybe not this administration, but you would take things for consultation with the NATO, NATO allies, and thereby wasting a move in what is obviously something that you try and win in, in, less than three, and so yeah, anyways but I guess this is the, the pivot point back to Like your foreign affairs piece, which I promise I will read in more depth after the paywall is removed in ways that I'm not going to talk about on a podcast, is It's not just them.

It's not just sort of them being the state actors. Because we continue to talk about this. The push for orbital assets coming out of private companies, whether it be AI, whether it be defense, whether it be imaging, Is just incredible. And you're in the Bay Area, and I think for people who don't spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, these things are sort of treated like abstract things, like these crazy people doing a bunch of, taking a bunch of happy pills.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of psychedelics out here. That is true, but you get my point in that there's actually real serious stuff going on and a lot of money being thrown at this stuff. Calling it the Wild West, I still think is even generous because the Wild West at least had a sheriff in the movies.

Yeah. There's no sheriff. There's nothing.

Jeffrey 23:00

I mean, it's hard to know. How much of some things are a bubble in, in the way that, you know, we went through the internet bubble in the nineties, but after the internet bubble popped Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google were still really freaking rich. And after the internet bubble popped, legacy news media was still deeply F yeah.

And so, you know, I think there are aspects of the current moment that feel like a bubble, but I think that sometimes obscures how enduring the underlying changes really are. And actually, I will say this comes up in a lot of track two meetings where particularly people from other countries that don't have access to these tools Don't really understand.

Aaron 24:00

I mean you were talking about this. I can't remember either this was a call for work or maybe where this is. Is the pervasive way that we're talking about this and perhaps even the way I think people misunderstood like let's say erstwhile anthropic engineers talking about the end of humanity and how this is pretty commonplace in these discussions in the US.

Those discussions maybe in the US or Europe are far more unique than they are ubiquitous.

Jeffrey 24:31

Yes, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I actually, before I got to Philadelphia, this was my crazy trip. I was in DC and I was at a National Academies, they call them conclaves, which is a weird freaking name, to talk about Yeah, right. To talk about what our track two dialogues look like. And so I was talking about what AI looks like in strategic track two dialogues versus what AI dialogues look like for proper AI dialogues.

Oh, yeah. And my observation would be that Alignment and safety are Anglo-American affectations. I think that's right. You know, everybody else, and I do think the strategic side, this may be a sign of just knowing arms racing more than knowing AI. But everybody else, I find, treats it like a competition to be won, which to be clear is also how the President of the United States describes it.

He's very clear on that.

Aaron 25:42

This shouldn't be written down. Yeah, and they're not.

Jeffrey 25:45

The idea of, oh, we should slow down to give alignment time. They're all like, no, I got to get across the finish line. Yes. I want to win. I think I can say this because I'm the one who said it. I had picked up a point Ankit Panda had made, which I think was Quite important, which is that you probably can't understand the AI safety discourse and the level of catastrophizing without understanding the degree to which the Bay Area has a huge community of rationalists and effective altruists.

Aaron 26:26

Yeah, the people who end up at, what's that, not the hot springs up north, but down by you in Monterrey.

Jeffrey 26:36

No, they're not really that hedonistic. We can discuss, but I think that worldview is lost on a lot of Russians and Chinese. They don't have a context for understanding how someone who is deeply concerned about existential risk, particularly someone who's a long-termist in their thinking, conceives of these things. I'm not making fun. I'm not even disagreeing, I'm just saying that for the Russians and the Chinese, it's just like they see rationalist EA arguments about the risks of AI, and they just assume that that's the American view.

And they don't really have a sense that like, well, people have different levels of P-doom. And those different levels of P-doom sort of map to... Bigger, broader intellectual currents that aren't always simpatico with each other. And I think it matters. I have a pretty low level of .

Aaron 27:58

And I think it matters for this conversation, as we sort of bring it to a close, is not sort of to wax nostalgic about AI. What I was talking about earlier was this idea of orbiting or orbital data centers. Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey 28:17

They're going to do it. Everybody's like, they're not going to do it. That's crazy.

Aaron 28:19

It's a little thing that we're talking about. They're going to try. Yeah, well, they're certainly going to do it. And if those orbiting data centers operate in much the same way, again, just throw out the economics, throw out the feasibility for a second, but let's just run the exercise sort of intellectually. This adds to the necessity in other countries of thinking about how you limit compute on the U.S. side.

I mean, look at EpicFury. Whatever you think of EpicFury, all the reporting suggests that Maven uses AI for U.S. targeting.

Jeffrey 29:02

And what I think people want to put in space is inference, not training? Yes. And so all the inference is in space? You...

Aaron 29:12

You have a viable military target up there. And so these are things, I think about it a lot like the imagery sort of companies, and I'm not going to use names, but they started as we want to help with National Geographic, take pictures of the ice cap. And your business model, just because the largest customer is Department of Defense, mutates over the years.

And I can just see this all coming to a head in 20, 30 years. And again, and we'll land the plane here. The Wild West had a sheriff and there were basic rules. Whether or not you could extend those rules outside of your little town was sort of up for debate. There's not even a sheriff at this moment in terms of where we're going.

Jeffrey 30:04

Sounds like somebody has got a project on rules for outer space.

Aaron 30:08

Well, it's the culmination of all this. So the war game was meant to test. Basically what goes wrong if your foreign affairs piece sort of like ultimately comes to fruition. And we're not even scratching the surface yet.

Jeffrey 30:22

Well, and I'm, for listeners, I'm teasing Aaron because we also have a much lower profile set of discussions going on at a project on what mechanisms commercial space companies might use Might want, whether that's better insurance, more robust public policy solutions, cooperation among themselves, in order to better protect the assets upon which their wealth and hope for the future of humanity is based.

Aaron 31:05

Well, it's a brave new world. I mean, you're out in the Bay Area, hopefully not doing too many psychedelics. You're a professor. That's not my bag, man.

Jeffrey 31:13

I know that. I'm just kidding. That was a joke for all listeners.

Aaron 31:16

And I just think that our field is changing really, really rapidly and we have to keep up. And hopefully we can keep doing that.

Jeffrey 31:25

I think that's right, and I'm psyched to keep doing it with you, my friend, in podcast and now occasionally meet space.

Aaron 31:33

Yeah, and so meandering show today, but we didn't really have one thing that we could focus on. And as you can see, Jeffrey's been traveling a lot, really busy at work with a lot of cool projects, but we'll come back next week. We'll talk about stuff.

Jeffrey 31:46

Still building through us.

Aaron 31:53

My favorite part of the game was at some point, one of the players asked for a picture of a satellite. And we quickly, as adjudicators, made a picture of a satellite using, I think it was Claude or Chachapiti, I can't remember. And for fun, what did you want to put on the solar panels?

Jeffrey 32:13

Oh, I wanted to put Rose Cosmos.

Aaron 32:17

So this is not the picture we passed out in the game. The picture that passed out in the game was legitimate, but we made a B-roll.

Jeffrey 32:22

We decided to be like responsible adults for once. Of a Rose Cosmos label on the solar panels.

Aaron 32:30

And so with that, we're officially off the rails. Patreon.com slash ACW podcast. $3 if you're a student, $5 if you're not. Join the Slack channel. I found out today there's some really cool people in there. I should probably go say hello. Thanks for listening to our meandering conversation about the future of space.

Jeffrey 32:45

Great to talk to you, Aaron.