START UP

Aaron Stein 0:02

You're the puppet. You're the puppet.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:03

You're the puppet.

Aaron 0:04

Not a puppet. Wrong.

Jeffrey 0:10

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in the foggy bit of California.

Aaron 0:26

I'm Aaron Stein, a contributor to the Arms Control Blog and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East in fall weather, Washington, D.C. Did you say foul weather? Fall. Fall weather. It's getting cold.

Jeffrey 0:40

Fall weather. Oh, yeah. You're in one of those places where the leaves turn colors.

Aaron 0:44

Yeah, turning colors. And, you know, yesterday I was wearing – I had to put on a sort of overcoat. It gets cold in the morning when I start my commute.

Jeffrey 0:52

So, you know, one of the things I love is that when people talk about how wonderful the weather in California is, if they don't live here, they say they would miss the seasons.

Aaron 1:02

I'm from California. I never miss the seasons.

Jeffrey 1:04

Yeah, I don't miss the seasons either. That's something that only people who don't live here say.

Aaron 1:09

I was in Los Angeles a week and a half ago sitting on my parents' patio in shorts and a T-shirt doing some work outside. It was fine.

Jeffrey 1:17

Yeah, it turns out I never am sitting bathed in sun, you know, with a lovely summery cocktail like a margarita thinking, boy, I wish I was freezing my testes off.

Aaron 1:30

If I wanted seasons, I'll get on an airplane and fly to Colorado to go skiing and I'll come back. I get you. I get you. Yeah.

Jeffrey 1:37

Well, this actually is true for us. Like my kids think of snow as something that exclusively occurs in Tahoe.

Aaron 1:43

Yeah. Yeah. No, I get that. So it's just –

Jeffrey 1:46

It's Christmas. We drive to Tahoe, spend a couple of days in the snow, and I'm reminded why I don't like living in places where it snows, and I drive home.

Aaron 1:54

You always make me question my life choices on this intro. Why am I not in the foggy bit of California with an ocean view?

Jeffrey 2:02

I don't know, but you know what makes me question my life choices?

Aaron 2:06

I think I do, but tell me.

Jeffrey 2:09

Our electoral system.

Aaron 2:13

It's almost over. I mean, we're recording this on Wednesday, October 26th. I think it'll be posted a couple days after. We're so close for it to being over.

Jeffrey 2:22

Oh, so close. But we had one more debate. Yes, we did. The nuclear. It came back up.

Aaron 2:29

The nuclear came back up. I think this is one of my favorite parts of the nuclear in this electoral cycle. Start up.

Jeffrey 2:40

I know. I know. I was like, he thinks the treaty, Donald Trump thinks the new start treaty is called startup. Like who the hell is advising him? Keith Richards.

Aaron 2:51

So I have to, I was watching the debate. I was sitting, I was sitting in my, my living room. You know, the television was low because we have a 15 month old and I thought I misheard it. But because like Twitter instantly catches the stark, I was like, Nope, I heard that one correctly. He called it startup.

I tweeted at you.

Jeffrey 3:09

I hope Super Producer Scott just drops a lot of clips from the Rolling Stones Start Me Up podcast.

Aaron 3:21

There was a lot of doozies in sort of that. That was grading on the curve. That wasn't the worst answer he gave that night. No. No.

Jeffrey 3:33

Maybe the part where he refused to accept the results of the election unless he won. Unless he won was – that came later. That was the day after.

Aaron 3:40

That was the clarification. That was the pause for dramatic effect. This one – see, the worst part about startup is – we've talked about the Donald before. Like he inadvertently puts his finger on issues sometimes. But it's like the guy who crams for the test at the last minute is just blurting stuff out.

Jeffrey 4:00

He absolutely believes things that allegedly respectable analysts believe. It's just that he says them in such a blunt way as to lay bare, I think, the silliness of the underlying belief. Which is why I admit I kind of like having the guy around, you know, if only as a kind of... You know, like if you were to say like, I'm sorry, that careful argument you gave really just boils down to this simplistic idea, which is stupid.

People would accuse me of attacking a straw man. But it's like, no, no, no. That's what Donald Trump said.

Aaron 4:37

He's just the orange man. He looks like a scarecrow. I'm going too far. Yeah.

Jeffrey 4:43

With the kind of yellow straw plastic hair.

Aaron 4:47

Yeah. And sort of just, you know, in the word fall, he looks like a pumpkin. That's the color of his skin.

Jeffrey 4:52

You know what he is? He's like the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz who doesn't have a brain. Doesn't have a brain.

Aaron 5:01

We didn't come on the show just to talk about Start Up and Start Me Up and Donald Trump's sort of skin tone.

Jeffrey 5:06

Well, that's true. I mean, the place to start is what he actually said, which was wrong. Right. Which is that He asserted that under the New START treaty, which he called START UP. START UP. That Russia – I mean there are – it was a longer answer, but either that Russia expanded their arsenal and that we didn't or that Russia is allowed to build nuclear weapons under the treaty and we aren't, neither of which is true.

Aaron 5:39

But it's a disaster. Essentially – It's a disaster because the implication is that we're losing at everything and that Russia has more warheads than we do and just has better nukes, I think was ultimately what was coming down. And so under a Trump presidency, we would fix all that.

Jeffrey 6:00

I mean, I do think it's a good place to put out a few basic conceptual ideas about how the treaty works, because on top of that, then there was a series of stories about the numbers that were released under the New START treaty that I think, although the underlying story by David Axe was quite good and quite correct, And I'm not just saying that because he quoted me, but I mean, I think generally David did a really good job.

Some of the secondary coverage of it wasn't so great. But, you know, the treaty has these two kinds of numerical limits. Right. So they have a pair of limits on the number of delivery vehicles, the missiles and the bombers and the launch tubes on submarines. And then they have the warhead limit. And one of the things that made me crazy during the New START debate is opponents of the treaty would say like, well, the Russian the Russian number of missiles is going to come down no matter what.

Right. So we shouldn't we shouldn't pay for what we're going to get for free. Kind of neatly ignoring the fact that the Russians merv the hell out of their their missiles. They put lots and lots of warheads on them. And so even as the numbers of of of missiles go down, the number of warheads was going to stay the same, if not go up.

Aaron 7:10

Right. Exactly.

Jeffrey 7:14

Right. So this is actually a case where we wanted a lower number of warheads and the Russians wanted a lower number of delivery vehicles. And we had to try to compromise and negotiate an across-the-board reduction in which there were fewer warheads on fewer delivery vehicles. A level of sophistication that Donald Trump didn't quite get because, in fact, the Russians had to bring their warheads number down slightly.

And we have the same limits. And yes, the Russians are modernizing their force, but so are we. Right. They started their modernization a little earlier than we did, which, you know, is the kind of thing that people get all worked up about now. But in 30 years, when our forces are 15 or 10 years old and their forces are 20 or 30 years old, you know, we'll have the opposite feeling about it.

Aaron 7:58

Yeah, and there has been – the associated coverage comes, I think, built around the little fact sheets that they put out once every month or so about how we're doing on reaching those sort of aggregate limits on launchers and warheads. And you have seen a Russian tick up. So above the 1550 number, the Russians are still above it, and it went from, I don't know, just pulling one out, from January 2015, it was 1643, and then the last one it's up to 1796, compared to the American number in the last one in October 2016 of 1367.

So that's where you get this discrepancy that they're beating us by, say, some 400 warheads.

Jeffrey 8:47

Yeah, I mean, this is such a classic example of no good deed going unpunished, you know, because they publish these fact sheets. One thing, so that one of the good things about the New START treaty, right, and actually I think the treaty, while I think it was the right treaty at the right time, I always saw it as an interim measure and often thought that this treaty will ultimately be a failure if it's not replaced with something else at some point.

And, you know, now it's not looking like it's going to be replaced with something else. So we can talk about all the ways in which the treaty is inadequate. Yeah, right. Well, but, you know, one of the good things, you know, credit where it's due. And there were a lot of good things in the treaty, which is why I thought it made a good interim step, was that it has this database which is continually updated.

You know, it isn't like you make a once a year declaration. There are all kinds of requirements for declarations under the treaty, which are way too complicated to get into. But the point is, you know, when every six months the State Department releases the number of delivery vehicles and warheads, that is a snapshot on a single day.

So the number the next day may be higher or lower because it counts things that are deployed, right? So, you know, if you put the missiles in the submarine in the launch tubes and the submarine goes out to sea, that's deployed, right? Those things go on the books. And if the submarine comes in from a patrol and you take the missiles out, then it goes off the books.

And, you know, sometimes... You know, they're doing maintenance or work on ICBMs, and so that number goes up and down. So you, for example, see the March 1st and September 1st of 2013 The U.S. warhead numbers went up. They went from 1654 to 1688. And then in March 1st of 2014, right, six months later, they dropped back to 1585.

And then in September 2014, they jump up to 1642. But we're not increasing the size of our force over this period, right? We're making... Steady reductions toward the goal, but when you're looking at one-day snapshots rather than that whole six-month period, you know, you might get a misleading number.

Aaron 11:12

Right, and that's the long and short of it about how you see fluctuations on the Russian side and why it's completely disingenuous to judge the entire treaty and the effect of sort of the disaster metric based upon a couple of fact sheets. Frankly, it's just dumb. Because on top of all that, there is time, there is a built into the treaty itself, there is time limits to get below the 1550 number permanently.

Jeffrey 11:41

Right. I mean, I this I think came as a shock to people that, you know, you don't like like they think like, oh, you signed the treaty. And then the next day, I mean, I don't know what people think happens. So you just like gather up the nuclear warheads and put them on the track on the on the curb with the trash.

And like the you know, the garbage truck comes along.

Aaron 11:58

No, it's a sign that it's in San Francisco tradition. It's a sign that says freeze last grotties.

Jeffrey 12:08

Actually, it's funny. You know, we did a focus group as part of a polling exercise. And it turns out that this actually is a popular misconception about arms reductions, that when you talk to... They're actually not average voters. These are voters who are considered relatively high information voters. And they're certainly very confident about their knowledge. They are largely against nuclear reduction agreements.

And it's like, why? And the answer was, well, you don't know what happens to those warheads once you take them out of the arsenal.

Aaron 12:40

Like, yes, you do. They're verifiably dismantled.

Jeffrey 12:44

Like, that's a, you know, like, you got to cut the planes up and let the satellites see them. And, you know, okay, we don't do warhead verification, but we could, right? And, you know, so we tried all kinds of things to, like, reach these voters. Like, we tested things. Like, you know, like, what if you explained to them...

That the, you know, Russians down blended the HEU from the weapons and, you know, those that was put into fuel, which powered nuclear reactors and that like, you know, 10% of your baseload electricity comes from, you know, former Russian nuclear weapons. And the answer is they just refuse to believe it.

Aaron 13:20

Yeah, well, you know, Hillary Clinton was involved. No, that's not true. Hillary Clinton was involved in the selling of uranium deposits to Russia. I mean, come on. Oh, God. Don't even get me started. Can I continue with my San Francisco story for a little bit? I always wanted to put a GPS tracking device when I was in college on some of my couches to figure out where they went in the city.

A little open source analysis about recycling of my couches I put on the curb. That's fantastic. We can do the same with nuclear warheads, by the way.

Jeffrey 13:47

That would be like a great New Yorker article, right? Like just following a couch as it gets handed down over a decade or something.

Aaron 13:53

Right. So to bring the podcast back onto the rails. And so – Yes.

Jeffrey 14:00

Is that a pun, Aaron? Because we're going to be talking about nuclear weapons on rails. It is.

Aaron 14:04

That was foreshadowing. So, I mean, I don't know what else to say. It's just other than the latest number where it shows a gap of 400. It's not even a big deal at all other than it came up in the debate and it prompts a few sort of worrying stories about sort of the great Russian bear and the sort of cowering and weak Obama, none of which accurately reflects what was in the treaty.

And I think – Misses the point about where we should be asking questions.

Jeffrey 14:35

Right. One of the things that needed to be explained was, so first, the fact that we're publishing this data or the State Department is publishing this data is a good thing. And so it's not nice to misinterpret it because that discourages transparency. And instead of having these six-month data sheets, I'd like to have weekly or monthly. More data would be even better.

But then on top of that, there's this seven-year period from the time the treaty entered into force in order to make the reductions. So the Russians don't have to get under the limits, and we don't have to get under the limits until February 2018. That's them. The treaty is enforced for three years. Right. So they have to live under and we have to live under the limits for three years.

And then we can extend the treaty once more for five years, which I think initially I would have thought would have been a mistake because I don't think it's the ideal treaty to be living under. But given how crappy relations are, I'm going to just go ahead and suggest extending it is absolutely better than letting everything expire.

Aaron 15:43

But I think that's the most likely outcome at the moment, don't you?

Jeffrey 15:45

I mean, that's what I think. You know, half a loaf, I'll take it, right? Right. But I think one of the smart things that skeptics of the treaty have asked, I think that we don't need to be worried about this yet, but I think they are right to ask, you know, looking at the uptick in the numbers, Do we think that this means that the Russians will not get under the treaty limit?

Because, you know, like you could imagine a scenario in which they just blow through the treaty limit, right? And we can't really formally complain about it until the day goes into effect, right? And then, you know, they've got like three years of stalling, which, you know, go by in a flash, right?

Aaron 16:33

Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Jeffrey 16:35

You could imagine they might do something like that. And so I think it's worth asking whether that's a likely outcome, although, I mean, I don't actually, you know, like worry is interest on a loan that may never come due. It's not clear to me that there's any reason to think particularly that's going to happen, and it's probably too early to be worried about that.

Aaron 16:55

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, it's something to keep in the back of your mind, particularly as the date gets closer. And then that's when the fact sheets become extremely relevant for sort of outsiders trying to judge the treaty itself, is as we get closer to February 2018, what do the Russian deployed numbers look like? And then...

And then, you know, draw conclusions after that. I mean, about it. I mean, I have nothing else to add. Although I'm not really concerned about it either because I actually believe that the Russians have an incentive to come below 1550. I don't think that they have an interest in staying above it for a number of reasons. I think we'll get into it as the conversation goes forward.

Yeah. Because of where we ended up both at the 1550 number of warheads and the delivery vehicle numbers as well.

Jeffrey 17:52

Yeah, so there's actually – the way that I approach this problem of does the uptick in warhead numbers, which actually really is – The deployed delivery vehicles number just kind of fluctuates up and down, right? And so the uptick in the total number of warheads is really an increase in the... Number of warheads per missile, if that makes any sense.

Yeah. So the question is, why is that number going up, right? And because you can imagine looking at what are the changes in their force posture that are causing the number to go up. Some of those might scare you and cause you to think like, oh, they are going to break out of the treaty. And then others might...

Reassure you or at least show you that, like, no, there's a path that the number is going to come up. And then, you know, there's a reason to think eventually it will go down. And there is a great little paper published by the Carnegie Moscow Center by Alexei Arbatov that has a chart in it. And it's totally buried.

Like you might not even ever notice it. But it has it's from last year too. So it, it's sort of, he wrote it kind of in advance of this uptick in numbers. So he, you know, like it's like, like we were warned, right. Which I love. It it's called an unnoticed crisis, the end of history for arms control, which I think is Like it's, it's like a super terrifying title, but there's this reassuring chart where he shows this bulge, right?

Where the number of deployed warheads was going to go up and it's going to go up for a short period and then come back down. And published this before said bulge actually began to happen. And he doesn't exactly show how high it's going to go. I think he maybe depressed that number a little bit. But basically what's happening is they're deploying a whole new generation of ICBMs.

That's what I was going to say. And they have multiple warheads on them. And so the number of warheads is ticking up because they aren't yet retiring the things that those are going to replace. Right. But if they, if they, and he actually sort of shows this little bulge, if they ultimately then pull out those forces, then, you know, like they retire the SS-18 team.

And don't replace it on a one-for-one basis with something new, which we'll talk about in a second, then they'll easily get back under the number.

Aaron 20:52

Right. So what I was going to say is that – and I actually hadn't seen the Alexei Arbatov piece, but I think that the uptick in numbers is linked to the testing of new missiles to bring them in. And so we're at this stage right now where – It's sort of like this – it makes me actually think of the American electorate.

I know that sounds really odd. It's like this really weird demographic shift that's going on now where you're just overlapping. And so you have somebody come like the Orange Menace, like Donald Trump, and then you have other people there too. So you have old legacy systems that are going to go offline as they begin to replace them.

And as they come online, you have this overlap.

Jeffrey 21:31

Are you talking about like Trump supporters as old, old racist legacy voters? Yeah.

Aaron 21:41

Well, yes, that was exactly what it is.

Jeffrey 21:43

We're just waiting for them to die off, leaving the Gen X all right.

Aaron 21:48

That's exactly what I was going for. You got it, you know. Yeah, exactly. And we had the test. I mean, I think October 26, Russia unveils RS-28 Sarmat Satan 2, the new missile.

Jeffrey 22:06

Son of Satan.

Aaron 22:08

Son of Satan. Yeah, that's the Gen X millennial Donald Trump voters.

Jeffrey 22:15

Yeah, I mean, I would say that that's the, to me, that's the big question. The reason I think the Russians are going to come into compliance with the treaty is I don't think they're going to be able to deploy new forces quickly enough. In order to violate the treaty limits with new forces. So if they choose to violate the treaty, they're going to be doing it with their older nuclear systems that they're just leaving in service, which they could do.

But it's kind of expensive and seems sort of dumb, right? I mean – Yeah, especially – But I kind of would rather them spend the money on the old ones and keeping them around.

Aaron 22:58

That's another question too. I mean worthy of an entire other podcast. It's about financing of this on their side in addition to ours. But yes, I think that's right.

Jeffrey 23:07

Right. So I mean like not that I want them to violate the treaty but to the extent that they spend money suboptimally, I don't know.

Aaron 23:15

Yeah, bring in the millennials.

Jeffrey 23:17

Yeah. But yeah, they have under development and now Makayev has shown off a little little model of it. A brand new ginormous, that's a technical term, liquid fueled ICBM. Right. And if they deploy a lot of those things, packed chock full of warheads, then, yeah, they could get up over the number. But I, you know. I suspect, given how close we are to the treaties, the entrance gate, at which you've got to be under the number, and the fact that it's only going to last for three years, and the fact that I suspect the Russians may not want to extend it, I just don't think that thing's going to be ready for large-scale deployment before the treaty expires.

Aaron 24:04

So I think they'll come into compliance because... How they use the RS-26 so effectively shows that they have an inside and outside understanding of this treaty like down to granular detail. And so they wouldn't F it up on this. They would choose to play with the limits in a different way. And I think that's important.

Jeffrey 24:32

Yeah, I mean, this is the part where I say even though I think the treaty made sense as an interim measure and it was important to preserve as much of the verification infrastructure as one could and the reductions were... Pretty modest, I mean, there actually were, I mean, there are, I don't want to say there were no reductions under the treaty, because there were a small number of reductions, but mostly what happened is we took things off the books through accounting measures that we, that counted as deployed under the old START rules but weren't really deployed, and or made cuts that we were planning to make all along, like getting rid of Deuce, the the weird ICBM squadron, and bringing down the number of launch tubes on submarines, which we always plan to do, and so on, so.

You know, it made sense as an interim measure to just preserve as much of the verification as one could. And it was nice that there were some reductions to go in the press release. But boy, this treaty has a lot of gaps and limitations in it, which are acceptable as an interim agreement, but are, I think, going to be a problem going forward.

Aaron 25:37

I think it's important to remember the circumstances under which the treaty was negotiated. It was rushed.

Jeffrey 25:45

Oh my gosh. Well, and there was a gap, right? I mean, they didn't, they didn't make it. It ran out of time, start expired. And there was a period of no arms control or no strategic arms control. And, and, you know, the Russians were not in much of a mood to do things. And so, you know I mean, I know people always want to make this a partisan argument.

And, and, you know, we can like start pointing fingers back and forth, but The Obama administration came into office with very little time to do this agreement, and they pushed it through, and so I'm glad they did. So I don't want to throw stones too much, but at the same time, I think we have to be clear-eyed that in the haste to get the agreement done, We may have left some loopholes is not the right word, but there are just some gaps that we're going to come to regret, like slickums.

Aaron 26:42

Slickums, right. I was going to say there's Lewis's dictum that makes an appearance in this podcast that made an appearance in our last podcast on the INF and the Iskender.

Jeffrey 26:53

Yeah. So the START treaty did not cover sea-launched cruise missiles because we did not want it to cover them, which is fine. And I understand why we did that. But it did contain an agreement for declarations. So we each had to declare the number of nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles. And it had a limit. It was 880, which is like so high that it wasn't a real limit at all.

And frustratingly, the New START Treaty, which also doesn't cover sea-launched cruise missiles, again, which is fine. I understand why it doesn't. It would take a lot of verification. Like, that's a long-term thing we would need to work on. But it did not preserve those declarations. And so now there is no limit, which doesn't matter because the limit was always really high.

But there's also no reporting on the number of nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles. And seemingly no plan... To address what looks like a pretty big gap, which is that the Russians think of sea-launched cruise missiles as strategic. They think of nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missiles as strategic, I guess I should say. They're investing enormously in a new generation of sea-launched cruise missiles.

We think they are deploying them off the coast of the U.S. J-Lens. That's a problem. Yeah. You know, at current numbers, it's probably not the end of the world, right? But it is an unaddressed system. And we let go the only little thing that we had to address it. So we're kind of going in the opposite direction.

But... If we do think about a follow-on treaty, we're going to have to talk about sea-launched cruise missiles. As much as I would love for Bill Perry and Andy Weber's idea of a ban on nuclear-armed cruise missiles to happen, I don't think that's happening. And so I suspect we're going to have to have some kind of verification regime.

So some limits, but also a verification regime, which is going to be... It's hard to imagine with this particular Russian government.

Aaron 28:52

Yeah. Anyway, and then all of the ancillary concerns that led the U.S. to not want selectives to be included in the first place will still be there the next time this thing comes around. But I think...

Jeffrey 29:05

Except the Russians will also share them.

Aaron 29:10

You took the words right out of my mouth. Except for this time around, you have an adversary catching up in cruise missile development. And something that I think often goes... I mean tell me if you agree with this. I mean as we – and I'm thinking of the cruise missiles. There's a push here to go conventional with cruise missiles where I don't see the same push in Russia.

And so there's still a greater emphasis on nuclear weapons inside of Russia than the cruise missile debate I think crystallizes and captures that. Yeah.

Jeffrey 29:43

Yeah, I think I mean, the Russians love conventionally armed cruise missiles. Right. So they they they they. But you're right. They also love nuclear armed cruise missiles. And so I think they just they love cruise missiles. I mean, I think I mean, I I I often imagine that, you know, like like I think Vladimir Putin loves cruise missiles so much.

Like I imagine like his condoms are painted up to look like an R-500.

Aaron 30:07

This is continuing your jokes from last week.

Jeffrey 30:14

Yeah, maybe. There's a whole universe of jokes we didn't get into. You have to be careful.

Aaron 30:20

We don't have a parental discretion on our podcast downloads from iTunes.

Jeffrey 30:24

You don't like the idea of a little condom painted up to look like an R-500? It's got this very distinctive paint scheme with these little red rings. I'm sorry. You just, you just, yeah.

Aaron 30:39

I don't know how to respond to that. So I'm trying to think of a pivot. I'm trying to pull a Hillary Clinton and pivot, but I don't know what to do. I'm trying to get us to rail mobile.

Jeffrey 30:52

You're trying to get us to rail mobile. Well, you know what we could do? We could just have, we could, we could just have super producer Scott drop in Ozzy Osbourne's crazy train.

Aaron 31:02

I like it. I like it. We start with the stones and with some Ozzy.

Jeffrey 31:07

This is a loud podcast. Yeah, you know, we should talk about RailMobile because that is, I think, another potential challenge. Although, I mean, I can't tell how serious the Russians are, right? Like, I keep seeing reports that they're starting up the RailMobile program and then that they're canceling the RailMobile program. Yeah, no, I see the same. Which I think is a money issue.

Aaron 31:33

So that's my understanding, is that... It's financing dependent and every time it comes up, the finances prove too great. And ultimately, it's an idea that sort of doesn't fully materialize.

Jeffrey 31:50

Which I don't really understand because I always think of rail mobile ICBMs as being relatively cheap. But I guess the Russians have gotten so good at... Maybe good is the wrong word. But, you know, they've figured out their whole tell thing so that it's just cheap for them to keep churning out new Yars tells rather than try to stick it on a train.

Aaron 32:13

I mean, that's what I was going to say. I mean, and does it replicate the capabilities they already have for the investment, so the cost... The cost-benefit ratio just never flips. It becomes something that's worth pursuing when you have road-mobile ICBMs.

Jeffrey 32:29

Yeah, it's funny. This is always my pain of dealing with politicians. So as we were trying to put this together, I was going through thinking like, OK, so I have all these complaints about roads. The new start treaty that, you know, I think need to be addressed in a follow on agreement. Or if we are going to merely extend the treaty that then we've got to be like prepared for this you know, universe of problems.

And so I went back and it was like, you know, did anybody who posed the treaty make any of these arguments? No, no, Like, no, they had these totally specious arguments, which is, like, so frustrating. But, like, on the Rail Mobile, that is a perfect example where, like, there is this real – you could lodge this real objection to the New START treaty that it does not prohibit Rail Mobile launchers and that – Although they keep canceling it for finances, it does seem like over the long run that that might be a really inexpensive way if they paid the big startup cost to dramatically expand the number of launchers in a way that would be hard to verify.

And, you know, like, that's a shortcoming of the treaty. Maybe not a treaty-killing shortcoming, but, you know, something we could honestly talk about. But then I went back and looked at the people who were opposed to the treaty, and they claimed that the treaty wouldn't even cover them, which is just, like, false. Like, Like, really? Like, you had a real argument.

And, like, all you had to do was not lie about it. And then they said, you know, oh, no, it wouldn't even cover them. They wouldn't count. Like, no, that's not.

Aaron 34:00

They definitely would count, but that's not really.

Jeffrey 34:02

They would totally count.

Aaron 34:04

This is like the same argument, sort of line of argument, is that the Russians were always going to be beneath the DV limit. So we traded something away that they were already willing to give. And then fixating on a 400 – a day of 400 warhead gap. It just makes no sense.

Jeffrey 34:24

It literally makes no logical sense if you understand the way – It's like you could really complain about this treaty and make really good arguments and we could really have a national security debate where we could actually focus on governance and making a stronger treaty. Or we could come up with conspiracies about the implementation commission. Start me up.

Right. Jesus, guys.

Aaron 34:50

But it's something I don't actually know. Do you think rail mobile was low-hanging fruit that just sort of got left out because of the rush nature in which the treaty was negotiated or that would have entailed concessions on the US side? I really don't know the answer to this.

Jeffrey 35:04

Yeah, I don't know either. I mean I – Like, we all love Rose, and I don't think any of us want to... And, you know, the late Ted Warner's beloved... I don't say anything bad about a dead person. I never really interacted with him much, and, you know, I don't have any basis to... Share the, the love for Ted Warner, but nor do I have any reason to dislike him.

I just didn't know him that well. So, but people really love Ted Warner. And so, you know, they knew what they were doing. So it's, it's hard to argue that they're idiots. On the other hand, I mean, I do often look at the, the cables from the new start negotiation, which are available thanks to, thanks to WikiLeaks.

And, you know, they're kind of boring, I think, if you're not like deeply into it. But it does seem like something had changed on the Russian side. And we went into the negotiation thinking we were negotiating with the Russians of the mid-2000s, with the Russians who were rightly complaining about stuff that the Bush administration was doing. Or I don't know what the mindset was, but...

Like, I think we had in our mind a universe of Russians that was not the actual Russians who were sitting across the table. And they were saying, I think, surprising and different things. And I feel like we didn't always on the U.S. side pick up on what the Russians were really getting at. And, you know, maybe that's because the Russians don't.

You know, there's a Russian tendency to say something which is not true, right? And you have to kind of like dig a little bit to figure out like what the truth behind it is. And maybe that's understandable because as I often say, maybe the defense, the general staff didn't want to give an itemized list of vulnerabilities for us to exploit.

But I do, I see in those cables a kind of talking past one another.

Aaron 36:57

And you can see how that could happen Because of the Russian side's consternation at the Bush administration, what's it called, sort? So you can see how you could come to a conclusion as you're in a transition team of the Obama administration and you have to hit the gas to get this thing finished, that your underlying assumptions going in are that you're going to have a willing and compliant Russian side and that this is going to go bing, bang, boom pretty easy.

Jeffrey 37:32

Right. I think that's exactly what happened. To the Russians who show up in, you know, like, 2009, who are like, oh, no, we don't want a treaty. Like, all these verification measures are coming off, good. All these limits are coming off, fine. If you want to dramatically cut the number of delivery vehicles down to where we are, great.

But other than that, piss off. And, you know, like, I think they just weren't prepared for, like, these people. I mean, it kind of all goes back to the stupid reset button, right? Yeah.

Aaron 38:23

Yeah.

Jeffrey 38:24

Yeah. You know, like we have this idea that like the problem was that the Bush administration was bad. And like whether or not you think the Bush administration was like maybe it was the Bush administration's fault that attitudes hardened in Moscow. I'm actually not sure of that. I think attitudes hardened in Moscow for like domestic reasons.

Aaron 38:43

And an oil boom.

Jeffrey 38:46

Yeah, you can't take that stuff back. Regardless of whether it was the Clinton administration doing Operation Allied Force or the Bush administration ignoring the Russians or just Vladimir Putin being a fascist bastard, whatever your explanation for that change is, once that change happens... Like you don't get to be like, oh, hey, you're right. We acted together in this like really short-sighted fashion.

Can we reset back to, you know... 1996. It's like, no, like it's over, you know. And so I think they weren't quite prepared for the Russians that they were dealing with. I mean, I tease. I'm talking too long. I'm sorry, Aaron. But, you know, we Potter does this simulation.

Aaron 39:33

I was in it. I was 2000. Shoot. 2009. I did it.

Jeffrey 39:43

So in Bill Potter's simulation, that year, often they do an NPT review conference, but that year they did a new start-like treaty?

Aaron 39:53

That was me.

Jeffrey 39:56

Oh my god, you were in that class?

Aaron 39:58

I was the head of the American delegation.

Jeffrey 40:02

Holy crap. How did I not know this?

Aaron 40:04

I don't know. It doesn't come up in everyday conversation.

Jeffrey 40:07

Oh, cause I wasn't working there at the time. So I got, I got there right after that.

Aaron 40:10

Right. Me too.

Jeffrey 40:12

Yeah. So I was shocked at like, what a great deal you got, but that's because, you know Nikita at the CTBTO, what's his last name? Perfiliev? I can't.

Aaron 40:22

Perfiliev. Yeah.

Jeffrey 40:23

Yeah. He's a teddy bear.

Aaron 40:27

He gave us a lot, man. And a lot of the negotiations were finalized at the Crown and Anchor after a few beers.

Jeffrey 40:36

Right. Well, so you had, you know, you had like a nice Russian. Rose did not have a nice Russian. You know, she had Antonov and she had like, you know, terrified about Stalinist purges Antonov.

Aaron 40:55

That's true, you know. But I think the... And we were at the Monterey Institute for... We were at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, so the underlying supposition was non-proliferation on both sides. The founding ethos was different.

Jeffrey 41:11

But, yeah, you got, like, a way better treaty than, you know, one got in real life because, you know, of course you did, right? Like... It all depends on the Russians you're negotiating with.

Aaron 41:25

Right. Our Russians were easier. But you want to – go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. But I find the way that they've exploited the treaty, and it links back to the last podcast we did on the INF as well, to be perfectly sort of illustrative of this – Sort of hard-ass mentality that they went in with, and that, you know, they know the treaty backwards and forwards, and will seek to exploit it for their own gain, because this is not Russia of 1996.

This is Russia of 2016, and To me, everything they view within a lens of a zero-sum game with the United States. And so they are looking for every angle and every advantage to one-up us and to take advantage of what they perceive as perhaps weakness or perceive as where they got the better of us.

Jeffrey 42:26

Right. And I mean, to me, that's the last kind of big flaw is that – The START series of treaties, starting with START in the early 90s, starting with START, when that series of treaties has to interact with the INF Treaty in a way that reinforces the INF Treaty. Like the INF Treaty, which was negotiated first, right, it's the 1987 INF Treaty, always had a flaw in it.

Which is to say the... Oh, gosh, this is such a long story. Maybe I should just say what the problem is and we talk through it because it's a little bit complicated. But the New START Treaty... Left the INF Treaty naked to the RS-26 problem. So the Russians have this new missile, which technically is an ICBM under the New START Treaty, so it's not illegal.

But we all think it is a circumvention. It's a legal circumvention. It's not illegal. They had every right to do it. And, you know, shame on us for giving them the gold-plated invitation, but it's a circumvention of the INF Treaty. And, you know, the GLCCM, which we talked about last week, is a real problem for the treaty, and it's a violation.

But on top of that, there's this whole other system that we never talk about, which if it weren't for the GLCCM, we would still be complaining about. And, you know, we can talk about why, but I think the New START Treaty enabled that maneuver.

Aaron 43:56

Yeah, the RS-26 is like the Uber sort of phenomenon, whereas it may be illegal, it's quasi-illegal, but everybody ignores it. You know, especially in municipalities where the taxicab union is pretty strong. You know, it's a two-stage... It's a YARS, if I remember correctly. It's a two-stage YARS that they tested... Basically right over the strategic ICBM threshold with one warhead once, declared it, and then, being Russia, packed the whole damn thing with so many warheads to where it now comes beneath the range, allegedly, and therefore gives them an intermediate range ballistic missile, a nuclear-capable ballistic missile, sort of going against the spirit of the INF while taking advantage of New START.

Jeffrey 44:52

Right, and what's so interesting to me is, so this is exactly what they did with the SS-20, which was the missile that was the reason for the INF Treaty. So we negotiated the SALT interim agreement with the Russians, the Nixon administration did, and the SALT agreement had this limit on ICBMs, right? And so they took the SS-16 and they popped off the third stage and put three warheads on it so that it got under the salt range limit.

And so it was no longer an ICBM and they started deploying them, right? And they could hit targets throughout Western Europe from the... The motherland. Right. And they could pull them way back. So... The original complaint was, hey, you, Nixon administration, negotiated this strategic arms control treaty with the Russians, right? And they screwed you, right? Because they...

Created this intermediate range force in large numbers that's below the range limitation. And it's not really a tactical nuclear weapon. It really is a strategic weapon. It's just short enough range that it doesn't count under the treaty. And they're sort of building all these up. So you get this whole process. Right. With the dual track or double track decision and our own intermediate range nuclear forces in order to get rid of the SS 20.

And that's where you get the INF Treaty. And so when the INF Treaty was up for ratification, everyone knew this was a problem. Right. Every single person knew that the Russians could. Take an ICBM, pop off the third stage, pack it full of warheads, and have a treaty noncompliant missile, right? And so back in the day, I mean, I hate to romanticize back in the day because actually the 80s weren't so great, right?

Like Congress was, you know, not filled with ethical giants. But they did have a really substantive debate. Yeah, go ahead.

Aaron 47:03

You mean they weren't the world's greatest deliberative body?

Jeffrey 47:07

Yeah. You know, like like John Tower, you know, like not not not a good human being. But they knew, right, they knew that this was always going to be a problem. And so one of the conversations that happened around the or one of the debates that happened about whether or not to ratify the INF treaty was they knew that they had to make sure that the start treaty numbers were Or that the START treaty provisions somehow closed off this route for the Soviets, right?

So that, and the argument was, and I think it was a good argument, was, you know, we're negotiating a START treaty, and if we bring the numbers down, down, down, down, down, right, because they have so many ICBMs, they aren't going to have any space left over for this trick, right?

Aaron 48:01

Right.

Jeffrey 48:02

They could they could violate the INF treaty by, you know, doing what they've done now, which is popping off the third stage, testing with one warhead, then packing it full of warheads. But it would you know, it would be a circumvention. We would have to talk about it and it would come at the expense of their real ICBMs.

Right. So if you get the number of ICBMs low enough, you would disincentivize the Soviets to do this. So they had this concept. But like we forgot, like we just totally forgot about that. Right. And so, yeah, here we are negotiating new start. And the Russians are like, yeah, we want we want to go down to like 500 delivery vehicles.

And we were like, no, no, no. Right.

Aaron 48:40

And they foreshadowed this at the top. You know, they were. Basically, broad 35,000-foot analysis of New Start is that we wanted lower warhead numbers. They wanted higher warhead numbers. They wanted lower delivery vehicles. We wanted higher delivery vehicles. And so within this paradigm of you can pop off the third stage and warhead it out, neither one of the U.S. starting positions didn't take that into account.

Jeffrey 49:09

Yeah, so Lewis's dictum, right? Like, we fight hard to not go down to 500 delivery vehicles until we go down to 700, thus leaving the Russians with 200 extra delivery vehicles. Right. I don't know. What are the Russians going to do, right? And so, of course... Hating the INF Treaty, the Russians take full advantage of this. They take a Yars, pop off the third stage, put a warhead on it, test it to full range, call it a new start accountable treaty item.

And now they can deploy a substantial number of those in circumvention of the INF Treaty totally legally, right? And so these treaties all have to work together. And, you know, like, I get that, like, maybe that would have been impossible. Maybe the Russians always planned to do this. And so no matter what... You know, we weren't going to be able to like close off this, this, this route and maybe it was impossible to foresee.

You know, I, I didn't think about it at the time.

Aaron 50:11

I can tell you in our simulation, we had no concept of this.

Jeffrey 50:16

Yeah. Well, your children, your children, You know, like this task falls to the Ted Warners of the world with, you know, 40 years of experience. Right. Or the Jim Timbeys, right? That's their job because they're the people who were actively working these issues at the time of the INF Treaty. And, you know, like the reason that you respect wise old people is they sort of, you know, look at things like, son, I think you're forgetting that in 1987 we knew, you know, like you need them to do that.

So, you know, I don't know if maybe they tried and they failed or they just figured it wouldn't work or maybe they did forget. You know, I don't I don't know. But like, yeah, now we're at the point where they have a totally legal route to deploy an SS 20 clone. It just makes me think of – It doesn't violate the INF Treaty.

So we're screaming about the glickum. But even if we weren't screaming about the glickum, this is a problem.

Aaron 51:14

It makes me think about sort of the underlying – from the get-go at that 35,000-foot level, you have an inherent conflict, right, where the Russians will always want higher warhead numbers because of the way they deploy nuclear force. They just have big, heavy liquid-fueled ICBMs. And we, for a number of reasons, some of which we've talked about on this pod, automatically gravitate, in order to keep the triad basically, automatically gravitate towards higher delivery vehicles.

And then when it gets debated about the merits of the treaty itself, it gets boiled down even further into, well, we should build as many DBs as we can because we have the money and the Russians don't. And it completely obstructs from real thinking about Because it comes down to sort of Trumpian thinking. He put his finger there again.

It comes down to like a pissing contest into who has more rather than how they deploy forces versus how we deploy forces and how to take advantage of those mutual vulnerabilities. Does that make sense? Well, we have this.

Jeffrey 52:22

Yeah, it totally does. And the point is we have the solution, right? The solution was in START II when there was a ban on multiple warheads on land-based ballistic missiles.

Aaron 52:30

Right. Exactly. Going down to a single warhead on land-based ICBMs.

Jeffrey 52:35

That was the solution. And we liked it. And the Russians didn't really like it. And, you know, we had this standoff where basically the Russians said, and their version of the argument at the time wasn't terrible. It was, look, we don't want to build a whole bunch of single warhead ICBMs only to have to then turn around and trade those away because we don't have that kind of money.

So they wanted to go from start two to start three, another round of reductions. Right. And the Clinton administration felt like that was silly, that we had the treaty, we should ratify the treaty and then turn around and negotiate the next one. And, you know, the Russians never, they ultimately do ratify the treaty, but with a bunch of poison pills under the leadership of a young and energetic person.

Aaron 53:20

Julian Assange? Might be.

Jeffrey 53:24

People thought young Mr. Putin, at the time he was very young, people thought he might be a puppet of the Yeltsin people.

Aaron 53:31

That's funny. That's really funny. I'm not a puppet. I'm not a puppet. You're the puppet. You're the puppet. You're the puppet. You're the puppet. Wrong.

Jeffrey 53:39

Putin, definitely not a puppet.

Aaron 53:42

Not a puppet. Wrong.

Jeffrey 53:46

I'm going to do this in a meeting someday. I'm just going to sit there. Wrong.

Aaron 53:49

Wrong.

Jeffrey 53:51

No, I didn't.

Aaron 53:52

Wrong.

Jeffrey 53:54

Nasty woman.

Aaron 53:55

Nasty woman.

Jeffrey 53:58

He's such a clown. He is. Oh, God.

Aaron 54:01

Only a few more days. November 6th. November 6th. Then it's over.

Jeffrey 54:06

But... You know, that's a happy note.

Aaron 54:10

It is. I was trying to think of a pivot to the end. You don't want to let that happy note pass. November 6th. Happy note. It'll end. Yeah. I think just to summarize what you just said as we pivot to the end there, it goes to show that there's no easy explanation. So these things all build on one another.

And I think it's important to, as we, you know, the 2018 deadline comes and then you have three years to then begin to plan for the next round of negotiations. I mean, sort of we are where we are. And the Russians have a history. We shouldn't forget that history as we go forward and when we try and

Jeffrey 54:49

Negotiate the next round, you know, if and when that actually happens. Yeah, I mean, I am hopeful that this kind of you know civil war in the Republican Party will maybe break loose. That cadre of. Of Republican defense experts who were so instrumental, I think, in getting the first START treaty, right? Who were not ideological lunatics, but who were deeply knowledgeable and conducted themselves on a nonpartisan basis and, you know, really knew what they were doing.

Aaron 55:31

They negotiated. Yeah.

Jeffrey 55:33

Yeah. Right. Like like getting those people back into the debate, you know, I think would be so valuable because, you know, I would love to be in a position where we could have a frank discussion of the shortcomings of the START treaty, the new START treaty that wasn't wasn't a political polemic. Right. That wasn't a call for withdrawing from the treaty or wasn't a backhanded way of getting at the president, but was just literally a discussion of like, yes, this treaty made our security better, but it's not perfect.

Right. What do we need to do together next? And, you know, maybe it's too much to hope for that. But I'm just hoping that, you know, as the crazier voices in the Republican Party really estrange themselves, maybe that opens up a little freedom for some of our friends to come back to the debate and make really helpful suggestions.

Because, you know, frankly, there's stuff we got to do.

Aaron 56:30

Yeah, that is a positive and happy note because it gives us another podcast to talk about in the future.

Jeffrey 56:36

Aaron?

Aaron 56:37

Yeah?

Jeffrey 56:38

Thank you for helping us end on a positive note.

Aaron 56:41

That's part of my job, so my pleasure.

Jeffrey 56:44

And thank you for talking to me.

Aaron 56:46

Also part of my job, my pleasure.

Jeffrey 56:51

And thank you, listeners. It is not part of your job, and we hope it is your pleasure. If you like the pod, please consider leaving us an iTunes review. And if you really like the pod, check out our Patreon page. Super producer Scott has it up and humming, and I think we're probably pretty close to coming up with some subscriber benefits.

So thank you for listening.