The Donald and the Nuclear 3: Tokyo Drift

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

I'm depressed again. 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.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East. Hey, Aaron, back from Japan. You are. I think this is the third time you've been back from Japan on one of our podcasts.

Jeffrey 0:39

Well, I go twice a year, and we've been doing the podcast for a couple of years.

Aaron 0:43

Was the last time the one where we entertain listeners with stories of you going to the spa and coming back after and recording a pod in a state of relaxed bliss?

Jeffrey 0:58

No, I think that was a year ago. This last time when I was in Hiroshima, it was a much more busy affair. I don't know. I guess I'm getting old and getting tired. But this time I went to Nagasaki. I got to see the other place we destroyed with a nuclear weapon. It's a really interesting and different experience.

The museum is really not the same as Hiroshima. It's a totally different approach.

Aaron 1:23

You say Hiroshima is one of those places that most people should visit just to get a sense of the destruction and how people who've actually had nuclear weapons used against them conceptualize the bombs. Do you have the same experience in Nagasaki?

Jeffrey 1:37

I did. You know, the museum is consistent with the tone of Nagasaki. Nagasaki was a Catholic city. I don't know if you know this. It was one of the few places in feudal Japan that was open to the West. And the comparison that Japanese people make is that in Hiroshima, it's very activist-oriented and angry and focused on change here on Earth.

And the argument about Nagasaki is that because of its strong Catholic history, that it's much more introspective and prayerful and focused on kind of What the broader meaning that this has for humanity as a whole. And so it's a different experience. And so I now think that everybody should do both. I suspect if you are a Catholic...

Like the late Michael Quinlan was, a Catholic who's deeply concerned with issues of nuclear weapons, Nagasaki would probably be more moving. But as a secular lefty, there's a lot about Hiroshima that I find more to my outlook.

Aaron 2:58

You're a secular lefty? I had no idea, given the tone of our podcast and talks offline. Totally shocked about that revelation. I know, really hard to figure out, right? I went to a Lutheran college. I went to a Jesuit college, so, you know, and I may also be a secular lefty, but I don't want to give anything away too much to the listeners.

But I have to ask, you know, we've had an election here, and how are people back there in your conversations, in your very busy meetings, reacting to our new president-elect?

Jeffrey 3:31

Well, I think it's probably a good thing that most of the high rises in Tokyo don't have windows that open. People are pretty freaked out. The one piece of advice I got was, don't be surprised if no one asks you about Trump. And I thought, what? What do you mean? And the advice or the explanation was that People were so frightened and so disturbed that they had no idea what to say to Americans.

And, and actually I found that to be kind of true that my friends were aghast and my colleagues were aghast and would privately express that But people I didn't know that well would sort of dance around the subject and you could tell that they were just kind of like squinting at me to figure out if like inside me was a, you know, hate crime committing Trump voter.

It was really interesting. They're deeply disturbed.

Aaron 4:37

You know, some of the stuff he said, one of the very few things he said about foreign policy directly impacts them. So I can imagine people being very, very unnerved about Trump. The decision of the general electorate here in the United States.

Jeffrey 4:54

Well, and they had the visit by Shinzo Abe, their prime minister, to Trump Tower in New York. And that's an entire political discussion that they're having within Japan about whether that was an advisable thing to do. Because, you know, the president-elect is not exactly, at this point, surrounded by much of an infrastructure. And so the prime minister of Japan The prime minister of Japan, he was quite proud of being the first foreign official to meet Trump.

But the population of Japan, I think, is a little more divided about that. But, you know, that's really what I wanted to talk about in this podcast was this question about why... Trump is such a walking campaign for nuclear disarmament. Josh Pollack wrote this short little piece in the blog, and in it, he raises some of these questions.

And I think, you know, and we've made this case before, but Quite apart from the things Trump actually thinks and whether he thinks them at all, right, whether they are deeply held commitments or just, you know, things that come out of his mouth without any thought. It is really interesting to watch people's beliefs about nuclear weapons. Express themselves through their anxieties about Trump.

So I thought we would have a podcast. It's not really about Trump per se, but about what our reactions to Trump say about what we really think about nuclear weapons.

Aaron 6:38

Yeah, and it's a theme that we picked up during the campaign a lot. It's this idea of Sort of singular decision-making at the top of the command and control about using nuclear weapons. And the central theme of Hillary Clinton's campaign was that you don't want this man, Donald Trump, to have access to the nuclear codes. And I think, or I know, is that it's at least prompted a lot of debate in the media about one person, Having the authority, the president of the United States having the authority to launch nuclear weapons.

And because Trump is such a unique character in American politics, that's made a lot of people deeply, I guess, woken them up to at least this very issue about the idea of nuclear weapons and command and control. Well, so I wonder about that.

Jeffrey 7:25

I mean, I, and maybe it's just that I'm dealing with eggs on Twitter.

Aaron 7:33

You do engage the trolls far more than I do.

Jeffrey 7:36

I do. I feed the trolls. I'm not supposed to feed the trolls, but I do. I am shocked at the persistence of the folk belief in the United States and elsewhere that two people, the president and someone else, are required to lawfully order the use of nuclear weapons.

Aaron 8:00

That's crazy. I have a theory about this.

Jeffrey 8:05

OK, but let's just say, right, as a factual matter, that folk believe that the president needs someone else to sign off on now, still his order. That's wrong. The president is the... Only person, while he is alive, who can lawfully order nuclear weapons. But he is not merely necessary. He is sufficient. It only requires the president's order.

But you have a theory about why people can't accept this.

Aaron 8:40

Well, I mean, one, we'll talk about it. I mean, it's the idea of deterrence being lumped into how actually decisions are being made. But two, I think it's the two-step authentication of the codes. Yeah.

Jeffrey 8:51

Oh, so you think that the two-man rule, the unfortunately named two-man rule, because it's not all men, but the two-man rule at the lower echelons of authority, you think people just presume that goes all the way to the top?

Aaron 9:10

Yes. And in certain movies, you know, and I have it in my head, but I can't remember when this is going on, is that when Is that this sort of in popular culture gives rise to the idea that it's like, oh, no, there's a whole bunch of people in the room who will be talking it over and arguing in a member of high stress about the use of nuclear weapons.

So it's been dramatized, dramatized.

Jeffrey 9:33

Yeah, that's certainly what it looks like in movies, right? That there's all this time for them to talk and to call people. I find that really funny because, you know, you look at the timeline for an actual launch under attack of nuclear weapons, and we did this timeline for the Nuclear Threat Initiative. We should put it up in the show notes.

You did. Oh, you know what? Yeah, we can put it up in the show notes and maybe on the Slack channel we'll host a discussion about what went into that. But Do you need to get that?

Aaron 10:06

My phone keeps ringing into caller ID since the United States government. I didn't ignore. Hopefully they'll leave it.

Jeffrey 10:16

They're listening to our podcast. It's Donald Trump.

Aaron 10:20

Yeah, right.

Jeffrey 10:22

He's calling in. Yeah, he's calling in.

Aaron 10:25

Yeah.

Jeffrey 10:25

So, I mean, this came up in the campaign when Clinton made that argument that, you know, there was this very limited time for the president to make a decision. And once the decision was made, that, you know, there was very limited time to actually, for each step in the process. And, you know, obviously the Twitter eggs decided that she had revealed classified information and, you know, was some kind of traitor, which was in and of itself ridiculous.

But Our argument was, no, no, you can figure out how much time there is in the launch under attack scenario because there are just physical limitations, right? And you have some accounts by various participants in the process. And really, the president only has a few minutes to make the decision. But what I find interesting is, like, a launch under attack scenario, like, which we sometimes see in a movie, actually plays out in the space of time of a sitcom.

A sitcom with commercials, right? So, yeah, the idea that there is this, like, Long period of time in which dramatic tension can build. I think that makes sense for movies. But the real life version is going to be far less exciting because there just is not time for that kind of drama.

Aaron 11:39

No, of course not. Right. And then, so the, it's like Josh said in the piece, it's like, you know, the check on the command authority for one person to launch the weapon is actually the, the, the election. And so the, you know, as I, As I was thinking when I was reading the piece this morning, is that elections have consequences, and one of them is inheriting this thing that's been built over time to launch nuclear weapons.

I think the premise in the other ultimate check is this idea of deterrence, is that these weapons aren't actually – the idea is that nobody would actually press the button because we would be ensuring our own destruction at the same time. And so that's another check that I think drives the idea that, no, no, there are ultimate checks on the one person being able to use the bomb, even if it's not internal to the U.S. government.

Jeffrey 12:28

So I think that's the crucial idea. I mean that's the big – Thing that I take away from watching Americans react to the idea that Trump with a bomb is a terrifying thought, right? I think if you truly look at Trump and think, this person is so unfit that I am actually worried that he will use nuclear weapons, I don't think you believe in deterrence, right?

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's just, it is interesting to me that we have this official discourse in which we are incredibly confident about Deterrence and the value of nuclear weapons, and we are committed on a bipartisan basis to modernizing our strategic forces so that we will maintain a strong deterrent against this range of threats. And yet we then transition to this other conversation where we talk about Trump and the bomb, and all that crap that we said about the stability of deterrence.

You know, is revealed to be something that we don't believe in because we don't think deterrence is robust against a evidently plausible electoral outcome. I think that's really interesting. I think most Americans don't actually believe in deterrence.

Aaron 13:51

So I think that's true to an extent, but I also think that people are horrified that When they come to terms with the destructive power of these weapons and then the idea that the check on the use of these destructive power is the election itself. And that while they may like a sort of rogue firebrand as a populist leader, You know, they don't like the idea of somebody who goes off the handle on their Twitter feed having such robust authority.

And I think it shows, and I don't want to sound like a coastal elite here, but a little bit of ignorance about the extent of presidential power, ignorance about presidential power, just writ large. And then just nuclear weapons being the most sort of manifest of it because of the size of the weapons involved.

Jeffrey 14:43

Aaron, I don't mind sounding like a coastal elite. I gotta say, I grew up in the rural Midwest, and I find this... You people from the coasts, it is the funniest combination of... Not you specifically, but, you know, especially journalists who write about, you know, like my people. Like it's on the one hand really contemptuous. But also like when they try to be nice, it's this weird mixture of like contemptuous and patronizing.

It's the strangest thing. Like. Look, most voters are deeply, deeply unaware of how nuclear weapons work, right? So I don't think that that's an insulting thing to say. You know, people have their own lives. I have a friend. I think I've mentioned her on the podcast. She is... Definitely the definition of a coastal elite, right? She's got an EU citizenship as well as another country.

I'm trying to keep her anonymous. She got a law degree at Berkeley, lived in Oakland, lives here in Carmel, right? She once asked me... Do we have missiles that can go all the way from the United States to Russia? Like, she's not dumb, right? And she's a coastal elite, and she has no idea how these things work.

So, you know, I don't think we have to, like, apologize for the fact that, you know, we know more about this particular topic. What I find so interesting, though, is in this way, when you're dealing with people who don't really know anything, right? And again, that's fine, right? Like, there's a whole bunch of crap I don't know anything about.

But when you deal with people who don't know anything, you get this fascinating case of revealed preference, right? Because it's like this person knows nothing about nuclear weapons. What do you think the command and control structure looks like? If they can't tell you what it does look like, what they will tell you is what they think it should look like, right?

Yeah. And they will tell you that it requires these two people and that it has all of these safeguards and all of these checks. And they will tell you that there is all of this time because that's what they want to be true. And what I think is so interesting is that for the most part and, you know, the Trump election changes this a little bit.

For the most part, they have not been confronted with the fact that that folk belief is false. Right. And that the way that they imagine nuclear weapons working is not how they work. And I think underpinning it all is the fact that once they learn what the command and control structure is like, they're not such big fans of deterrence.

And to me, that's interesting, right? Because, you know, if you imagine, if you... I think to count on deterrence, you have to have a really strong expectation that it will be robust against a whole bunch of leadership types. Right. And if we are routinely in the United States and, you know. God forbid in France, if Le Pen gets elected or, you know, who knows what's going to happen in the United Kingdom.

Right. If you are not confident that people who are occasionally, not routinely, but even just occasionally elected. If you're not confident with those people having nuclear weapons, like I would say you don't believe in deterrence, which is fine because I have I have my doubts about it, too. Right. But you're a hippie like me. Like you're you're you may want to pretend that you believe in deterrence, but you really don't because, you know, you think that these leaders should not have nuclear weapons.

Aaron 18:29

Well, because it's the inherent. Or I think conflict in the way deterrence is at least described, is that in order to prevent nuclear war, you have to be prepared to fight nuclear war. And I think that makes people profoundly uncomfortable when you have to be prepared to fight nuclear war because the level of destruction is so high.

I mean, I just keep coming back to this point. And the level of destruction is just completely catastrophic. And so the question becomes if you aren't Willing to be prepared to fight nuclear war, then what value does nuclear weapons have? And I think that the discomfort, at least, you know, sort of put out there by the coastal elites and those inland who voted for Trump, who voted against Trump, I should say, are having is this very profound question is that, you know, if you don't like one man having access to being able to launch, then you probably don't like nuclear weapons.

And so then that comes back to the question of what a nuclear value – what value do you describe or ascribe to nuclear weapons if you feel like this? And that's the question you're getting at.

Jeffrey 19:41

Yeah. I mean I think that for a lot of people, they like to imagine that they're the sort of people who believe in deterrence. Right. That they most people like to think of themselves as being tough minded and pragmatic and, you know, not afraid to take risks. I mean, these are all things that we prize in society.

And so I think. There is a kind of aesthetic associated with being someone who supports disarmament, which most people dislike, right? They dislike the idea. And it's like, Oh, well, you know, you're, you're weak. And, you know, it's the same reason. I think Carlos Lozada was the book reviewer for the post was laughing that in this book that Mike Flynn was a coauthor of Moscow, Mike Flynn, our, our new national security advisor.

That he always puts tough minded in front of diplomacy because, you know, like diplomacy always sounds kind of like something a wussy would do. Right. Like, so I do think that people reject that aesthetic.

Other voice 20:43

Right.

Jeffrey 20:43

And they adopt for themselves this view that they have this attitude, you know, But then when you put it to the test, you're like, oh, okay, so that means you're fine with Trump having the button, right? Because that's what deterrence means. They're like, oh, no, right? And I think that's a really interesting tension. And it kind of goes to the second point that I wanted to make, which was, you know, if I think people are genuinely more uncomfortable about deterrence than they let on, I think that since they are afraid to just say, like, No, we should eliminate these weapons, right?

They don't want to sound like they're wussies, to use Carlos Lozada's perfect phrase. We engage in a lot of discussions about, like, how we're going to make this system safer, which I think are just backdoor routes to disarmament without admitting it. And I think that that's a funny human foible.

Aaron 21:44

Yeah, or at the very least, You would be called wussies in another name if you ask me because the pushback would be very strong. But there are a lot of advocates for just accepting the risk and to say that nuclear weapons are a force for stability and that there is a small, very small chance of deterrence failing, but that's far less than the damages or horrors of a large conventional war like World War II.

And so, yeah, just suck it up and take the inherent risk because if you add more layers to the command and control system You don't have a lot of time. You run the risk that the government could be decapitated without striking back, therefore making yourself more vulnerable to the first strike. And so you're in a tough spot if you want to add more layers to this.

Jeffrey 22:35

Yeah, I mean I want to talk about the – The people who are genuine and I think sincere advocates for deterrence because they are they're not they're not the people that I'm making fun of at the moment. Right. Because they they have a logical argument. And I want to sort of address that with skepticism, but also a certain measure of respect, because I.

I think that that is a more responsible attitude than what I think we often see, which is this kind of posturing on the one hand where people say that they favor deterrence. But then when you actually look at their actions, it's like, oh, no, you you, too, have doubts about this endeavor. Right. So, I mean, one of the things I think about is.

It goes back to this folk belief that there are two people who have to sign off on an order to launch. In a similar way, there are people who want to make it harder to use nuclear weapons. Not just harder from a policy perspective, because I would restrict the situations in which we'd use them, but they want to make it...

Physically more difficult, right? And in some cases that's involving more people in the process, and other cases it's lengthening launch time. And there are a whole bunch of proposals, and you know, I am usually pretty skeptical of those proposals because I kind of feel like they are nods toward the need for disarmament. But they're timid, right? They won't admit that that's what they are.

Like, if you actually think we should make it so hard that the president can't use nuclear weapons, then you're just for disarmament, right? Like, just say that. You know, if you want to make it impossible for a president to launch a first use of nuclear weapons, don't... I think don't try to restrict that ability legally, right? Take the damn weapons away, you know. And I, I think that, I think this is one reason I pick on this congressional proposal a little bit. Like, I think it's, it's bizarre to hand the President you know let's call it, you know, 15,000 nuclear weapons, right? That, that are deployed. And so it's more than that, but you know, 15,000 strategic deployed nuclear weapons.

To hand the president that force and then be like, yeah, but, you know, we don't want you to be able to use it. Right. Like have the courage to say, like, no.

Aaron 25:14

Yeah. And I think that's exactly right. And I think it raises I think many people who are profoundly uncomfortable with Trump are. Are uncomfortable because of the way he's conducted himself suggests that he may be short-fused or, let's say, you know, prone to the conspiracy, prone to conspiracy theories and gets news through a heavy filter that most sort of sane, rational people think, you know, skews his worldview and therefore are calling into question, I think, one of the fundamental principles, like, you know, Fundamental principles under determining deterrence, which is that all people are operating from the same set of facts and are therefore rational.

And if our president isn't rational, can deterrence work? And then I would expand it out into, you know, I think this is the first time I think people are grappling with the fact that it's us who may have a slightly strange leader and not them. Do you know what I'm saying? So we would be contemplating.

Jeffrey 26:23

Yeah, totally.

Aaron 26:23

Right. And so the idea that you could have accidental launch or launch upon Trump waking up in the morning, one of his buildings gets torn down, is resonating with people more than, oh, there may be a crazy person over there in, say, North Korea because they're backwards and they're supposed to be crazy.

Jeffrey 26:42

Aaron, I think that's precisely right. I remember in D.C. when we were working on the possibility of miscalculation or accidental launches or unauthorized launches, we encountered this really interesting phenomenon. On the one hand, we absolutely know that the United States is just as prone to accident as any other country, right? Because we're relatively transparent, we have like the laundry list of the accidents and close calls, right?

Starting from all of the crazy stuff that Scott Sagan found went wrong in the Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, up through the six live nuclear weapons that got flown from North Dakota to Louisiana and were, you know, not properly secured for like six hours. And yet, despite all the evidence that American human beings are just as subject to Murphy's Law as human beings in every other country, we discovered that the only politically acceptable way to talk about accidents Right.

Right. But if we ever implied that that problem might apply to the U.S. president, these huge intellectual walls went up. Like, you know, you're... That's crazy. You know, you are just some disarmament hippie. Like, that's not possible, right? And I just... I just find Trump's arrival, you know, such a vicious riposte to that reluctance to accept that, like, yeah, we're imperfect, too.

Like, we make mistakes, you know. The joke I always make that nobody ever laughs about is Murphy is certified to handle nuclear weapons, right? Right. Hey, you gave me a chuckle. No, no, I get it. I think I've tried that joke like 50 times and it's always met with blank stares.

Aaron 29:10

I think it goes back to this stylized notion of how most people think the bomb is used rather than, well, we never have an actual, I mean, the one case study we have from 1945 has no applicability to today. And so we don't, Really know how a leader would act, you know, in that, you know, 20 odd minutes that he or she would have to make that decision.

But I think most people just prefer not to think about it because most people assume the process works because they ascribe rationality and at least functionality to the top level of the US government, which now I do not, I think people are starting to look twice at it. And I think that gets to the whole issue of, well, now we'll, How can we have a system where only one person can make a decision that's not quote-unquote democratic?

And personally, I don't see any other way around it if we continue our posture the way that we have it. And other countries that we have nuclear weapons continue to posture their weapons like they do as well. And so elections have consequences. And so Trump is inheriting this thing, and we'll have it. And other leaders will have it.

Other leaders have the same thing as well. You can't change these things unless you get at the fundamental question of the value of nuclear weapons now and in the longer term. And I think that is the issue. What do you actually think about nuclear weapons now and maybe 50 years from now?

Jeffrey 30:45

Yeah, it's the parents case for nuclear disarmament. Like, this is why we can't have nice things. Right. Like, yeah, you point at Trump like this is why we can't have the bomb. Right. Like, it doesn't matter that. Yeah, there is this argument that deterrence works. But it comes at this risk. Right. And I think the interesting thing for me is that Trump illustrates how fundamentally uncomfortable people are with this risk.

Well, that's the third thing that I want to talk about. Right. Yeah. Which is I want to come back to your point about people who don't shy away from this argument. You know, people who do make what I think is a sincere case for deterrence. Try to sketch out not necessarily why I think they're wrong, because I do think that we get a benefit from deterrence in the short term but maybe a place where we can integrate both the value that we place on the security of the nuclear weapons provide in the short term.

But also at the same time, so I said integrate, right? Integrate the concerns that the election of someone like Trump surfaces, right? So the way that I do it, and I don't know how you think about this, is I mean, I think that the most distressing thing about nuclear weapons and deterrence is that We really put those in a kind of central place, right?

In our security policy. You know, you, you'll often hear people say nuclear weapons deter great power war, right? Like that's the worst possible thing that can happen. And our solution to that worst possible thing is to set up this system where if we return to those battle days, there will be a Holocaust. And our view is that No leader will be so crazy as to send us down that, that path. So that's what I mean by sort of nuclear weapons are at the center of our security policy. I, you know, people will say like, oh well, they're, you know, they're playing a declining role, or they, you know, they play a peripheral role. But I, that core task of deterring great power war, that is where people launch the argument for deterrence. And I don't think they're wrong about that.

But I am deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and this is where I think we bring in the Trump piece, deeply uncomfortable that this will work forever. You know? It might work for 100 years. It might work for 200 years. It is really hard for me to imagine that this system of managing great power relations will work indefinitely.

Aaron 33:40

Yeah. ... Was that too dark? No, I was thinking, but then the question becomes, isn't this a broader question about how you manage great power competition and nuclear weapons are a subcomponent of it, but a major subcomponent because, again, of how powerful they are. And so I'm thinking here of the China-US relationship and all the articles written about that rather than the Russia relationship.

Jeffrey 34:10

Right, well, I think... That if we accept this idea that we're not going to want to rely on deterrence forever, right? And strangely, I just, I find myself, I come back to Ronald Reagan, right? And I know that, you know, it's like the classic lefty thing to try to reappropriate Reagan for disarmament purposes. But I do think that he was somebody who was deeply uncomfortable with this idea of relying on deterrence forever, right?

And sort of was able to kind of Articulate that notion right for him there was this transition to something else right so he wanted to transition to missile defenses and and whatever you think about the wisdom of strategic missile defense and I'm not a fan I'm kind of impressed that he had this idea of like, oh, wow, this one thing is not going to work forever, right?

And now he had this unbounded technological optimism that was like, okay, so we're going to do this other thing, right? We're going to build these perfect defenses, and they're going to make nuclear weapons, I think he said, impotent and obsolete, and then that's how we're going to get rid of them, right? And I'm deeply skeptical in the medium to intermediate term, you know, I don't know, next hundred years that that's a feasible approach, right?

But I love that idea that we're at least thinking about how we're going to transition away, right? So I guess that's the first point I would make is, you know, with regard to your point about like China or Russia and, you know, which model we have in our mind, we have to think about what a transition looks like, right?

And that's a... That's a really complicated question that goes to the heart of like what nuclear weapons do. So I, I don't know. It does that. No, it makes perfect sense. Is that what you were? Is that what you were kind of, does that advance our conversation?

Other voice 36:11

It does.

Aaron 36:11

I mean, well, isn't the move towards hyper-accurate or more accurate conventional forces paired with missile defense already being played out, at least currently, in being able to push nuclear weapons to the periphery? My concern with this approach is that, despite all of the hysteria in the media and in the world about potential near-peer adversaries, is that in the short term, short to medium term, I think US advances in these type of systems incentivize other countries to rely more heavily on the bomb.

I'm thinking of Russia and China here at the moment. You have a near to medium term tension between US conventional superiority and China. Nuclear weapons, and then if you push forward, does conventional, conventional superiority then boomerang back and make nuclear weapons more salient for deterrence? And so I see us in a potential military cul-de-sac where we keep going in circles because options to get rid of the bomb incentivize the bombs used first by near-peer adversaries, then possibly again by us.

Jeffrey 37:23

Well, I think that's the core challenge of the transition argument, right? If your idea is that you want to transition away from having nuclear weapons at the center of our security... You can't get rid of all the nuclear weapons and replace them with something else, right? You have to transition. And that's a process that takes place over a period of time.

And new technologies come online and they interact with nuclear weapons. And the idea is that they will eventually interact with nuclear weapons in a way that will make them obsolete. Right. But you have no guarantee of that. Right. You run the risk that that exactly what you described will happen, that they will increase people's reliance on nuclear weapons or they will interact in ways that make existing nuclear arsenals unstable.

And so. The big. Point I wanted to leave with is, you know, so much of the language that we have about disarmament takes as its starting point the idea that nuclear weapons provide deterrence and they provide deterrence in the way we think they do. Right. And so a lot of our literature and like some of it is really good literature.

I think James Acton stuff on low numbers is just remarkable. But that entire body of work is premised on the idea that nuclear weapons are awesome and we're giving up this awesome thing. And so we have to find this delicate way to give it up. Right. I have always had the opposite view. Notion or suspicion, right? Because people will always say, well, what if you give up nuclear weapons and then someone gets one, right?

And I think that is totally dependent on the idea that nuclear weapons are awesome and amazing and have this huge effect, right? But I actually think it's the opposite case, that it's not we're going to give up nuclear weapons, which are so great. It's that we're going to come to realize that nuclear weapons aren't so great, that they're not credible because...

Mass murder is, you know, not something that is going to be consistent with any notion of a political victory in a war or leaders are just we're going to find that the value of settling disputes with violence is far less than than the cost. Right. We're going to it's not that nuclear weapons will. Change, it's that we'll change, right?

And that we won't see nuclear weapons in that same way. And so like chemical weapons or, you know, landmines or whatever, the fact that somebody has one, we'll just kind of look at that like that's a... You know, kind of embarrassing thing for them, and it would be terrible if they used it. But we don't assign it that same prominence.

You know, because I have this idea, which is just an idea I've been kicking around. I actually was talking to a friend of mine who's a political scientist about it. We're thinking about testing it. On the one hand, we imagine that nuclear weapons deter because of their destructiveness, right? But like, what if there are alternative reasons that nuclear weapons prevent war that aren't deterrence based?

So, for example, I don't know if you've ever read the letter that there are two of them, but that Khrushchev sent Kennedy in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Aaron 40:56

I have. I think you're foreshadowing the next part.

Jeffrey 40:59

I am foreshadowing the next part. Well, you know. Khrushchev, in expressing the horror of war, doesn't talk about nuclear war. He talks about World War II. He talks about a war he experienced, right? And so I actually wonder if... You know, World War II was pretty destructive. And the early models of making sure that nuclear weapons... We had enough nuclear weapons.

We're like, well, we need to be able to do more damage to the Soviet Union than World War II did. Because, you know, clearly... The Soviet Union survived World War II, so we got to be able to do more than that, right? But what Khrushchev was conveying was like, no, actually, like, World War II, that was really bad, right?

And I'm deterred by that. Like, I don't want to do that again. And I actually wonder if what nuclear weapons provide... It's not just destructive power because there are lots of ways that we can wreak destruction. But like they occupy, and this goes back to this initial point about Trump, they occupy this place in our heads, right?

They are not merely forces of destruction, but they are important symbols. And I wonder if they give political leaders an excuse to back down or to compromise. That it's easier to say, well, we didn't want to run the risk of terrible destruction. It's easier to say that if nuclear weapons are involved than if conventional weapons are involved, even though conventional weapons are plenty destructive.

And so... You know, it may be, and we should test this idea before I run wild with it, but it may be that nuclear weapons are embedded in our security in deeper and more conceptual ways than we realize, and that the task of eliminating them isn't going to just be about switching the technologies or finding ways to verify, but it's actually going to be about changing how we think about security, right?

And so on the one hand, that's kind of like... Harder. So maybe that's not a happy note to end on. But on the other hand, I think it is potentially a sustainable path, right? Where it's like, no, actually we don't have to solve every hard problem involving disarmament, because those hard problems are more decorations that kind of dress up these, you know, deeper, more fundamental ideas.

Aaron 43:24

I think the happy note is that Twitter plays no role in the decision to use nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 43:32

For now. For now. Wouldn't that be great? Yeah. If the president just tweeted at the National Military Command Center or maybe even directly to the Launch Control Center.

Aaron 43:44

Good. I'm the undisclosed bunker. Launch Authority, go.

Jeffrey 43:47

You're like checking your messages and it's like, hit them with everything you got.

Other voice 43:51

Is that a valid launch order?

Jeffrey 43:53

Oh, yeah. No, look, that's... Maybe he could send the EAMs that way. He could type them out.

Aaron 43:58

Yeah, you know, I think the NSA BlackBerry wouldn't allow this. That's the happy note.

Other voice 44:06

That's the happy note. What if he woke up the next morning and checked your messages and was like, oh crap, I had a thing to do last night.

Other voice 44:17

I'm depressed again.

Jeffrey 44:19

Hey, Aaron. Yeah. Thanks for talking to me. Thank you. And thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, please leave us an iTunes review. That helps promote us. And if you really like the podcast, consider supporting us through our Patreon page. We've set up the Slack channel. And Scott, are we having a lot of fun or a little fun?

Other voice 44:41

We are having a responsible amount of fun right now. We just sent out the second or second and a half wave of Slack invites. So if you donated at the $3 per month tier or above, check your email. We've had a few people who've noted they haven't gotten them. Check your spam folder. And if it's not there, send us a message.

We'll resend it.

Jeffrey 45:04

Great. Yeah. Well, I'm having a lot of fun. All right. So Aaron, thank you for joining me. Scott, thanks as always for being a super producer and listeners. Thanks for keeping us in business.