NEW START UP

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Oh, Scott, we have to talk about Donald Trump 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.

Scott LaFoy 0:26

And I'm Scott LaFoy, master's candidate at the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies and Imagery.

Jeffrey 0:37

Oh, Scott, we have to talk about Donald Trump again.

Scott 0:40

We do. He did a thing and he tweeted some stuff and he talked on the phone and now we have like a full nuclear policy existential crisis.

Jeffrey 0:51

You know, he's good for business.

Scott 0:56

I had a tweet go viral. You did. You got quoted in The Guardian and BuzzFeed. Yeah. And it wasn't your normal nuclear insights. It was a Simpsons joke.

Jeffrey 1:10

Yeah, he was ranting about the Ninth Circuit court decision, and I... You know, I sometimes will say fix that for you and then add a picture to someone else's tweet. And so I added Grandpa Simpson in the old man yells at cloud episode. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, the downside is Donald Trump's talking about nuclear weapons. The upside is people really want to know what we think.

Scott 1:40

Yeah, so it looks like we're talking about the Nuclear Posture Review, with a capital NPR, and the increasingly confusingly named START Treaty that we're on. Start up.

Jeffrey 1:54

Donald Trump has issued a new National Security Presidential Memorandum calling for a new Nuclear Posture Review. And in a phone call with Vladimir Putin, Putin apparently proposed extending the New START Treaty. And Trump, I guess, put his hand over the phone, said whatever the Trumpian equivalent of what the fuck is the New START Treaty. Was told, and then took the hand off the phone and proceeded to talk about what a bad deal it was.

Scott 2:24

Which I think is the second time he's actually had to be quick briefed on what started. Wasn't the last time that he had a public thing about that was when he called it the Startup Treaty? We had a whole podcast, Scott. We did, and I'm going to put the same Rolling Stones sound effect in this one every time we say start up, new start, start me up, or any related thing.

Jeffrey 2:45

Yeah, so, I mean, the thing is, right, Obama did a nuclear posture review. And Obama signed the New START Treaty. And so, you know, whatever you think about the president's record on arms control and disarmament, that is basically the core of his legacy, you know, are the things that he did in the first year. And so now we have these two stories, right?

One is clearly they are going to do a nuclear posture review. But then the other is that there is this hostility to extending New START and then maybe some threat to renegotiate it that suggests, you know, we're moving in this different way in terms of nuclear policy. And so can't have an Arms Control Wong podcast and not talk about this, even if we're very tired of talking about Mr. Trump.

Scott 3:37

These are some pretty systemic... This is literally arms control treaty, like primary nuclear arms control treaties now being brought into question. Right.

Jeffrey 3:46

So, I mean, I think the thing that I wanted to do was to talk about the nuclear posture review first, then talk about... The new start treaty second, and then try to get a little meta and, you know, step back and think about what all this means and try to put these things in some kind of context that's, you know, other than we're all going to die.

Scott 4:11

Add a little cheerful spin on to it to maybe give some optimism.

Jeffrey 4:14

Well, Aaron and I used to have this thing about trying to end on a happy note. I think we've just given up on that. Oh, yeah. I don't think that's worked for the past, like, oh, man, month. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about National Security Presidential Memorandum. I think it's four, although the copy on the website isn't numbered.

Do you know this thing about... Presidential guidance, how every administration changes it. These were called PPDs, Presidential Policy Directives in the Obama administration. Are you old enough to know what Bush called them and what Clinton called them and what Bush called them?

Scott 4:54

I don't remember what they're called.

Jeffrey 4:56

Do you know? So this is, I think this is, so every administration changes the name Of the presidential directives that it issues on national security.

Scott 5:09

Right.

Jeffrey 5:10

If you start with, well, maybe if we go back, right? So Trump calls them national security presidential memorandums. Okay. Obama called them presidential policy directives. And then there's another category called presidential study directives, which we don't need to deal with. Bush called them national security presidential directives. Clinton called them presidential decision directives. Daddy Bush called them national security directives.

Reagan called them national security decision directives. Carter called them presidential directives. And Nixon and Ford called them national security decision memoranda.

Scott 5:51

That's a very weird pattern.

Jeffrey 5:53

So Republicans always put national security in front. Yeah, and Democrats, and I think this is like classic 70s outlook, you know, how you know we're hippies and we're like climate change is a national security issue. So Democrats always drop national security and just say these are just presidential directives because you know we conceive of security very broadly. But then no one can reuse anyone else's term.

Because, you know, why do dogs pee on fire hydrants?

Scott 6:34

That's such an odd territorial or like rebranding. Are they only on national security issues regardless of administration? Because I don't follow the pattern of these very well.

Jeffrey 6:46

Well, you know, Carter, I think, took PD, presidential directives, so that he could conceive of their scope more broadly.

Scott 6:56

Right. You know, which makes sense.

Jeffrey 6:57

Well, and it's that again, it's that liberal view that, you know, everything is connected to everything else. But now more than ever. So, you know, like you, you have that, I think, tendency, but then it hardens. Right. So it just becomes tribal. Like, you know, we do it this way and they do it that way.

Scott 7:15

And could you differentiate for both listeners and myself how that is different from an EO? How's that different from an executive order?

Jeffrey 7:25

I think that that difference and if someone, the historian in me would observe that, you know, the Constitution doesn't really have executive orders. Right. So this is just a practice that has developed. And so with the creation of the National Security Council in the Truman administration, there was just a need for a name of a presidential decision that came out of that National Security Council process.

Right. So even though they have all these different names, usually, you know, they have just an NSC number, right? Presidential Policy Directive 10. It'll often just be numbered NSC 10, right? So it's all in the NSC series.

Scott 8:21

Okay.

Jeffrey 8:21

So, you know, legally... Well, I don't want to speculate about legally because practice tends to accumulate a certain legal quality to it that I'm not qualified to sort of talk about, but I can sort of observe how the practice has evolved. But these are for decisions that the president makes out of the National Security Council process. And so not surprisingly, right, Democrats tend to put more people on to the National Security Council and the subsidiary committees, right?

And so Democrats tend to drop national security and just call them, as I say, presidential directives or presidential decision directives or presidential policy directives. Republicans have at least historically condensed that membership, you know, arguing for a traditionalist view of national security issues. And they always use national security. Although, as I say, I think at this point it's as much tribal as anything else.

Scott 9:15

Yeah, but the main difference in like an executive order comes from the desk of the President, where and where whatever these are named comes from the President in his acting role in the NSC specifically, right? Technically come from different institutional sources, even though they may come from the same. I can't imagine that they have any differing legal impact. But, but, but they definitely arise from different processes.

Right. Because they come from the same, from like a legal standpoint, they seem to at least come from the same sort of made up precedent oriented executive branch thing.

Jeffrey 9:53

Right. But I mean, you know, just from my perspective, virtually any decision that gets made about nuclear weapons is going to be enshrined in a presidential directive. Right. And, you know, so they all have these funny names, but, like, they're all the same thing. I actually remember, I know who came up with presidential policy directive for Obama.

Okay. And he was sort of deeply aware of this tradition.

Scott 10:21

Oh, that's interesting.

Jeffrey 10:23

And was, like, sweating it in the transition, like... Like, we got to come up with a variant on PD or PDD. And I still remember him telling me, I know what it's going to be. And it's like, well, what's it going to be? Presidential policy directives. Because, you know, you've done PD, PDD, and PPD. So I don't know what the next Democratic president is going to do.

Maybe a PPDD? PDM? Presidential Decision Memorandum? Oh, gosh. Yeah. Because you've had a decision. It's going to have to be something in the memorandum. Anyway, so there's a national security presidential memorandum, and it calls for a new nuclear posture review.

Scott 11:07

Right, and that is Nuclear Posture Review with a capital NPR. Yeah. So it is The Thing, a nuclear posture review.

Jeffrey 11:14

So we were talking about this off pod, and I, you know, following these issues, I don't or didn't realize how little people understand this.

Scott 11:25

There have only been three of these things. Yeah, which surprised me. This is a pretty big blank spot in my understanding of the U.S. conception of its own nuclear weapons management and policy. So I think we should walk through this for both myself and listeners' sake in what these things are.

Jeffrey 11:43

Okay, so the first thing is, as the name suggests, review, this is just a study. The study must be implemented. And so while the study will be a piece of paper, right, what it will essentially do is make recommendations. Now, the president will have signed off on the recommendations. And so they're, you know, they're more than just recommendations because the president knows what's coming.

But, you know, after the so the Obama administration came into office and they did their nuclear posture review and that was done in March 2010. And they spent a year discussing how they were going to go about implementing it. And then in sort of like August 2011, they started what they called the 90-day implementation study. So they did a study of the review.

Okay. OK. And the after a while, Lytton Brooks started to call it the increasingly poorly named 90 day implementation study because it dragged on for nearly two years.

Scott 12:53

That's basically just a self parody of the bureaucratic process at that point.

Jeffrey 12:58

Right. And so the president actually signed a PPD. Right. New nuclear weapons. It's called employment guidance. In I think it's June 2013. Right. His second term. So, you know, the road from the nuclear posture review to the implementation of those in the form of new guidance about how to use nuclear weapons. Right. That was a that that took the entire first term and, you know, the first couple months of the second term.

Scott 13:29

Right, and is there any information on how much that essentially ended up costing the government in terms of manpower and whatnot, or work hours and whatnot?

Jeffrey 13:40

Gates used to stamp the cost on every report. Oh, that's nice. It's a little passive-aggressive, I think.

Scott 13:50

That's a little past passive-aggressive.

Jeffrey 13:52

It's just aggressive, right? It's just like, screw you and your damn report. Oh, you know what? Defense.gov has taken – have they taken down the 2010 nuclear posture review? They have. Oh, that's interesting.

Scott 14:04

I was just going to pull it up to see.

Jeffrey 14:06

But the problem is it's just a review, but then there's this other review, which is the 90-day implementation study that takes two years that we don't see.

Scott 14:14

Right.

Jeffrey 14:15

So it's hard to know how much it costs. But, you know, the first big takeaway is that doing a review doesn't actually like I think presidents at this point, presidents, I think, feel like obligated to do one because Clinton, Bush and Obama all did one.

Scott 14:31

Oh, so it's starting to become sort of a just might as well check out how everything's going with a nuclear posture review at the start of your term.

Jeffrey 14:38

Well, yeah, like I think this is like a sign of their of the Trump administration's incompetence is that they think they're obligated to do this or that they think they're supposed to do this. But but it's actually a mistake. Right. Like what Obama discovered was a nuclear posture review. Sucks up all the time, you know. And like once the posture review is underway, then the President can't make any changes to the posture because he's prejudging the posture review.

Scott 15:05

Oh, so if anything, it could end up tying the hands of the administration to make important nuclear-oriented policy decisions.

Jeffrey 15:11

Right. So they do the posture review, and it gobbles up the whole first year. It comes out in 2010, and it's like, okay, so now we're actually going to do some of this stuff, right? And then they blow a whole other year talking about how they're going to do stuff, and then they blow a whole other two years doing a study of the study to get it queued up for the president to sign the document about how they're going to do stuff, right?

And if he hadn't been reelected, they wouldn't have finished it.

Scott 15:33

Right. Well, it could also be an interesting way to sort of write off and give an excuse as to why you haven't made any decisions. It's because you're still... We're in the review process, and I would not want to make a decision on a long-range strike bomber or an Alchem or whatnot, because I don't know what's going on until we get our review done.

Jeffrey 15:50

Right. You could totally use it deliberately to delay, but I think one of the things is... I think people don't understand that the three nuclear posture reviews are all very different objects. The first nuclear posture review was something the Clinton administration did voluntarily. It was the end of the Cold War. Clinton had campaigned on the peace dividend, and so he did this thing called the bottom-up review.

Where we were going to, you know, instead of just trying to incrementally change our military posture, even though, you know, you're always going to incrementally change things because that's, like, how life works, they at least did the PR piece of, like, we're going to do a bottom-up review of how many forces we need in this new post-Cold War era.

Scott 16:31

Right. And that was kind of a hallmark of post-Cold War things, of figuring out, like, hey, do we actually need, you know, enormous ground forces in certain areas? Like, this was sort of the spring cleaning that they did After the Cold War.

Jeffrey 16:44

Right. And so the nuclear piece of that was the standalone thing called the Nuclear Posture Review that was supposed to go along with the bottom-up review. Okay. And it was run by a very ambitious assistant secretary. Do you know this?

Scott 16:58

I do not.

Jeffrey 16:58

Oh. It was run by a younger, thinner Ash Carter with a worse haircut. Okay.

Scott 17:07

I... Anytime Ash... Wait, a worse haircut. Oh, you need to see... No offense to the former secretary. That's pretty impressive.

Jeffrey 17:16

Yeah, you should... On the Slack channel, we'll put up a shot of... All the glamour shots of the former secretary. Ash's early 90s haircut was sort of meh. At least it's not his mid-80s haircut. I mean, his mid-80s haircut is...

Scott 17:33

Oh, I'm going to have to look these up. I like, actually, any time Ash Carter shows up in a story, I really like them because I've followed a lot of his academic writing over the years, but I haven't followed his political career at all. So to me, until he was put into the Obama administration, to me he was an author.

And so when he showed up, I was just like, oh, hey, I recognize that name. I'm very disconnected from political personalities usually.

Jeffrey 18:00

So you need to read... Jan Nolan's slim, elegant little book, An Elusive Consensus, that is about nuclear policy in the Clinton administration and is largely about the 1994 Nuclear Posture Review. And it's largely... About ash as hero going in and trying to really change u.s nuclear posture i know it's hard to believe although it'll make more sense you know now we think of ash as you know he's standing up there you know fighting the good fight to keep nuclear posture the way it is but young and idealistic ash rolls in like we are going to get rid of icbms he gets destroyed Oh, you know, and I think all of us think that he has more careful attitude about nuclear weapons now.

Right.

Scott 18:57

It comes from the soul crushing period of the 90s.

Jeffrey 19:00

Yeah. Where he tried to do something different and and it just didn't work. He just couldn't get it done, you know. And it's interesting because people say he's actually very sensitive about it. Oh, interesting. And every time I mention it, people are like, he's probably going to be really angry at you for saying it. But I don't think he comes off badly.

I think he comes off as a young and knowledgeable but maybe not world-wise person. Who tries very hard to do what the president wants, which is to think differently about nuclear weapons and is defeated by the bureaucracy because it's hard.

Scott 19:43

Right.

Jeffrey 19:44

But then becomes this person who we all respect and think, you know, made a good secretary of defense precisely because he learned those hard lessons. You know? So I don't know. Everybody tells me, like, yeah, you shouldn't talk about it. It'll probably annoy him. But, like, I don't think it makes him look bad. I just think it is what it is.

But the bottom line of this is that posture review is a failure. And it results in a slide deck, right, as its output. And there are some changes that come out of it. Right. I don't want to say that they don't implement it at all because they do settle on a force structure that, you know, looks a lot like the force structure that they start with and, you know, whatever.

But they don't. What I think is really interesting is they don't change the nuclear weapons employment guidance until the second term. Which is a pretty good sign that the posture review failed, right? Because it's so successful that they leave in place Reagan's guidance, which called for fighting and winning a nuclear war against the Soviet Union, a country that no longer exists.

And when Clinton really does want to make deep cuts in the start process, right? He runs the next one out of the White House. He doesn't even bother doing a posture review because they figure out that the posture review is a mess. But then this leads to... So the next two posture reviews are not done voluntarily by administrations.

They are imposed by Congress.

Scott 21:18

Oh, interesting. Yeah. So... Are they imposed? I don't know if you know offhand. Are they imposed by hostile Congresses controlled by alternating parties? Why, yes, they are, Scott. So are nuclear posture views perhaps seen as ways to deliberately handicap or deliberately kneecap an administration's decision-making mechanism and forcefully admire them in a long bureaucratic process? Well, yes and no.

Jeffrey 21:47

They are designed to run out the clock, or at least the last two were, to run out the clock on unloved administrations. So as I said, the Clinton administration did a White House study on their next round of reductions, right? And they wanted to negotiate START II, which was the follow-on to START, which never entered into force.

The Clinton administration wanted to move on and negotiate another agreement, or at least some people, because the Russian complaint about START II is it requires them to make all these changes in their posture, and then they're going to have to turn around and trade away all these things they've done in START III. So they just wanted to, like, get on with it.

Scott 22:23

Right.

Jeffrey 22:24

Congressional Republicans didn't want the president to make any unilateral reductions. And so they had this amendment to, I think it was the authorization bill, that said the president's forbidden from spending any money to unilaterally reduce forces to start two levels. Okay. And ultimately, this was started to become a little bit politically costly for the Republicans because they were seen as being obstructionist back in time when people cared about this.

And and so the compromise that they worked out and remember, congressional Republicans really hated Bill Clinton. Right. The compromise they worked out is Republicans said, OK, we're going to drop this restriction. Right. On the next on the administration making reductions. Right. But before you do that, you have to do another nuclear posture review in, you know, fiscal year 2001.

Right. Which is their way of saying, like, screw you, Bill Clinton. If Al Gore wins, then he can do it. But we are going to run out the clock on you. And, you know, we think we're going to win.

Scott 23:34

Right.

Jeffrey 23:34

And they're right. And they get Bush. Right. And so Bush does a pro forma nuclear posture review. He basically just hands it off to, I think, Keith Payne. Keith Payne writes up a kind of, you know, wish list of priorities. And it goes in like a drawer somewhere, except for someone leaks it to Bill Arkin and it ends up in the L.A. Times.

And, you know, obviously it's the most prejudicial pieces. And, you know, in light of Iraq, it makes the Bush administration look like, you know, warmongering nutjobs.

Scott 24:04

Of course.

Jeffrey 24:06

You know, which, like, some of that is self-inflicted, right? I think Linton Brooks used to say that a lot of the nuclear policy debates were just referenda on whether the Bush administration could be trusted with sharp objects, right? So you remember the Bush administration, one of the things they wanted to do was the reliable replacement warhead. Right.

But at the end of the Bush administration, you had a Democratic Congress, which did not want to do the reliable replacement warhead. Correct. And so turnabout being fair play, the Democratic Congress figured out the way to run out the clock on Bush and the RRW was to say, we're not going to make any decisions about this RRW until we do another nuclear posture review, which will conveniently be scheduled for 2009.

Right.

Scott 24:56

Of course.

Jeffrey 24:57

Right. And so because, you know, whatever, if your guy wins, then he can do it. But we think our guy is going to win. It turns out Democrats were right. Obama wins. And so he comes in. And so, you know, Obama, the nuclear posture review was actually really harmful because remember, he inherited both the nuclear posture review as mandated by Congress, but also the need to replace the START treaty, which was expiring.

Scott 25:21

So we had kind of a bad, bad timing for two things. Big things happening at once.

Jeffrey 25:26

Well, and the start treaty was going to expire before they could reasonably be expected to complete the nuclear posture review.

Scott 25:35

Okay.

Jeffrey 25:35

But how do you negotiate an arms reduction treaty with the Russians before you do your posture review?

Scott 25:41

Oh.

Jeffrey 25:41

So the politics of it were really bad. So what they did was they did a super fast mini posture review in the summer. Okay. Which if it had been me, I would have just stopped. Right? Like quit while you're ahead. Right.

Scott 25:55

They got the numbers they needed. They went and they did the treaty.

Jeffrey 25:59

And then they finished the posture review. And so they got the treaty and the posture review in, you know, what, like early 2010. Although I think it takes them a while to ratify the New Star Treaty, right?

Scott 26:11

Of course.

Jeffrey 26:13

So, you know, like coming into this election... The Democratic platform, you know, a bunch of my colleagues were pushing to do another nuclear posture review because I think people have this idea that you have to do one, but you don't.

Scott 26:29

Right.

Jeffrey 26:30

And the thing that Clinton and Obama discovered was it just wastes time. Right. It's just a series of endless studies. Like, ultimately, the president has to say, these are my damn weapons. This is what I want to do. Fight the fight. Win the fight. Do what you want to do.

Scott 26:47

And deter with the arsenal that you have, not with the arsenal you want to have.

Jeffrey 26:52

Yeah. And, you know, Bush, I think they did sort of get it right in the sense that they were like, well, this is just this thing that was designed to stall out the Clinton administration. So, you know. You know, we'll write a nice little thing, but it doesn't really mean anything, right? It doesn't really. I mean, they had this idea of the new triad, but even they didn't care about it.

So, you know, coming into this administration, right, Trump is like, oh, we're going to do a nuclear posture review. But in a weird way, that's the worst thing he could possibly do if he cared, right? Because he's now... Preventing himself kind of tying his own hands with it. Yeah. I mean, and he can, he can sort of untie his hands if he wants, but it just makes everything more complicated.

And, and in a way is kicking things over to the defense department, which, you know, has historically run these things. Right. And, and in fact, I think that that's what the directive says, right? It's that the secretary of defense shall initiate a new nuclear posture review. So basically now Mattis has free reign to take as long as he wants and You know, to come up with whatever he wants.

And I don't think that the Trump people really thought about what they were trying to do. I think they just thought, well, Obama has one of these things, and so now we need one too, which is a terrible way to make a decision.

Scott 28:08

Well, it's the only bad decision the administration's made, so I think we can give it to him. By the way, did you see the draft of this memoranda? Now that you mention it, maybe, because it had some really weird wording to it.

Jeffrey 28:20

Yeah, well, so there's also a new ballistic missile defense review, which the Obama administration also did. They're just, you know, why does a dog pee on a fire hydrant? But they originally called it a missile defeat defense review.

Scott 28:34

Yeah, and it got really confusing as to whether or not, like, what they meant, or did they mess it up?

Jeffrey 28:41

Oh, yeah, I got a reporter call because the nuclear posture review section, actually, it sort of was like, there was like, you know, we're going to study the triad, and it's got to have, like, these ten characteristics, and we're going to study the nuclear complex, and it's got to have these characteristics, and we're going to study nuclear planning, and it has to have these characteristics.

And it was like this just incredibly badly written mess. And the final document... Combines those things, and so the triad, the nuclear planning, and the complex get condensed into nuclear deterrent. And then there's one list of characteristics which is like pieced together from all of the other ones. Okay. But then I got reporter calls because you know the original one said triad and now it says deterrent. Does that mean we're getting rid of the ICBM? And it's like no, no, no, it's just that the draft was, was, was written by a shit gibbon.

Scott 29:35

Hastily done. We're slowly entering an era where the subtlety of how the words are used may not actually be the story for a lot of these anymore.

Jeffrey 29:44

Yeah, you'd think, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I just, you know, I think the big takeaway from this is they're going to do this posture review, but it's like a self-inflicted wound. And, I mean, you know, I'm not crazy about, like, what they want to do. So, like, I guess I'm glad that they're hamstringing themselves.

But I bet it looks like the Bush one. I bet it's just, you know, Mattis will give it to some contractor or detailee and, you know, it'll look a lot like the, did you see the leaked defense science board? It's not really a study. It's a passage in a study, you know, where they talked about, you know, tailored deterrence.

Scott 30:25

Was this a recent one?

Jeffrey 30:26

Yeah, it was an unpublished December DSB study. It was a broad study about, like, defense priorities, but there was this, like, passage about nuclear weapons, and somebody gave it to, I think, Roll Call, and Roll Call published it. Oh, no, I missed that. But it's just some aspirational crap, right? Like, oh, we need new low-yield weapons to give us tailored options to respond to Russian efforts to escalate, to de-escalate.

Like, uh-huh. You know, like your classic Ida wish list. Yeah, yeah, it's like somebody, somebody, somebody, somebody bought General Welch breakfast, and you know, you know, it's pretty typical. I, nothing, nothing wrong with it. I mean I disagree, but it's not like I just think it'll be, it'll just be anodyne like that. Yeah. New START, on the other hand, that's interesting.

Scott 31:14

Yeah, we have. So they were not happy. Oh, I'm sorry. Startup. Startup.

Jeffrey 31:21

Do you think when Trump, do you think when Putin called it New Start and Trump like put his hand over the phone, it's like, what the hell is that? Do you think they went, that's startup, sir?

Scott 31:30

Oh, okay, thanks. Yeah, I remember that. I'm against that, right? Yeah, yes sir. I like to think that there's just a man in the corner of the room who kind of holds up a placard that just says no with three underlines on it. But yeah, so our president had a phone call with Vladimir Putin in which he said he did not like the New START agreement anymore because it was not favorable to Americans.

Jeffrey 32:02

It's a bad deal.

Scott 32:02

Or to the United States. It's a bad deal. It's a bad deal. That's the phrase he used, and that's the quote that's being passed around all the news sources now. It's a bad deal. Yeah. So why is it a bad deal, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey 32:15

You know, I mean, I think one of the things that's frustrating about this, I mean, there's there's there's what I think about that treaty. And there's like the role that that treaty occupies in Trump's worldview. Right. I mean, Trump doesn't know anything about the treaty when he criticized it on the campaign trail. He got its name wrong and got the terms of the agreement wrong.

Right. He said it prevented us from building new nuclear weapons, which it doesn't. Right. And he said that it allowed Russia to build up its forces, which is like half true. Right. It has the same limit for both sides. And we're the ones who wanted the higher delivery vehicle number. Like it's true, but that's a feature of appealing to people who didn't want the treaty at all.

They wanted the higher limit, not the lower one. Right. So, like, he doesn't really understand the treaty, but I think the part he cares about is that Obama signed it.

Scott 33:12

Well, and also it should be noted that misunderstanding the terms of the treaty, whether that's warhead count or whether or not the Russians are complying with it, is not uncommon. It is a very frequently misunderstood and mischaracterized deal. Very frequently.

Jeffrey 33:27

Yeah, you know, one of the things I wanted to talk about is, and we talked about this in one of our other podcasts, you know, it's not a perfect agreement.

Scott 33:36

And no treaty is going to be perfect. We're trying to work towards some sort of stable arms control thing.

Jeffrey 33:41

Yeah, but I mean, I think people kind of forget, like, what happened was there was the START treaty, which had an enormous amount of verification in it. There was the START II treaty, which never entered into force because the Russians felt it was too constraining. Or, to be clear... At the moment at which the Russians were willing to consider START II, they didn't want to build a whole bunch of new forces to comply with START II and then have to trade those away for a START III.

So we missed the opportunity for reductions. Then when Bush came into office, he negotiated the Moscow Treaty, which basically was a modest numerical reduction, but relied on START for all of its verification. And the Bush administration just wasn't interested or wasn't able to engage in extending the START treaty, in particular its verification provisions. And so the Obama administration is coming in, and people get focused on the reductions, because it's, you know, START is Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, right?

Right. But... It was really about preserving as much of that verification mechanism as possible. And the Russians were really not into it because the Russians were on the verge. At that point, they were just beginning to invest in all these new systems. Right. And so they watered down the verification pretty substantially. You know, there is a telemetry protocol, but it doesn't really result in the exchange of interesting telemetry.

You know, they wanted they got they got the monitoring off the Votkins missile production plant. And so, you know, like, the treaty was basically like, we're going to preserve as much of the verification as we can, and we're going to make some modest reductions as window dressing, but they're really modest, right? I mean, virtually all of the reductions were through changes in accounting, taking systems that were not real off the accounting, right?

Because, you know, START had these really rigid accounting procedures.

Scott 35:48

Yeah.

Jeffrey 35:49

And so, like, yeah, you know, it was an interim measure. It needed to be followed by something else. The warhead and delivery vehicle limits were too high. They allowed the Russians to initiate all of these new systems. You know, like this, I think the RS-26 is an intermediate range ballistic missile that contravenes the spirit of the INF Treaty.

But they found a way to get it treated as an ICBM under New Start. And since the numbers are so high, they could do it that way, which sucks. And, you know, they're looking at this new heavy ICBM, and they're now looking at Rail Mobile.

Scott 36:31

Yeah, they've got all these new fancy things coming up. And we're going to have to at some point address again what you just said about the RS-26 because we're going to get someone angry writing in about that.

Jeffrey 36:41

Particular theory yeah I know nobody likes me so you know like the Russians were you know it's a funny thing like and this is this problem that I think you always have which is if you try to manage or fix a problem You actually get blamed for all the stuff you can't fix.

Scott 36:59

A patch never is appreciated for the little bit it fixes.

Jeffrey 37:03

It's a bunch of mist. You are suddenly like, you get ownership of all these other problems. And, you know, like the Russians, there's a bunch of stuff they're investing in that's outside of the treaty, right? So they've got this crazy underwater drone that, you know, some people don't believe exists, but that the Russians constantly are trying to harp on.

You know, they have I am very worried about their cruise missiles, not just the INF violating ones, but cruise missiles on attack submarines, you know. And so, like, yeah, the Russians were on the verge of this big buildup and they wanted to get as much of the verification off as they could. Right. And they did want the number of delivery vehicles to come down because we had an advantage there, but they wanted to keep the warhead number as high as possible.

Scott 37:44

Right. And... Is that something you want to talk about briefly, just for listeners not familiar with this sort of, like, particularity within the treaties, the difference between warhead number counts and delivery vehicle counts? Because that's a big source of contention in all of these negotiations.

Jeffrey 37:59

Yeah, people don't quite get this. Like, yeah, like, so, you know, delivery vehicles, right, are the missiles. And the warheads are the things that go boom on the end of the missiles. And the American way is to gold plate everything. So we... Basically, it's not always one warhead per missile, but we have a very limited loading per missile.

Our ICBMs are all one warhead per missile, and our submarine-launched ballistic missiles are an average of four and a half or something. It's like four or five. The Russians are cheap. And because the Russians want to save money, they put as many warheads on as few missiles as possible, which is really destabilizing. So when we do an arms control negotiation, we are always trying to get them to bring down the number of warheads But not not necessarily the number of delivery vehicles.

Right. We would prefer all things being equal. We would prefer their warheads to be spread out more because that's a more stabilizing posture for both sides. And the Russians being cheap. Want to bring the delivery vehicle number down because that's where our advantage lies. And they want to keep the warhead number really high because the destabilizing posture is really cost effective.

Scott 39:17

Do they still count, are B-52s still counted as a single launch platform? That's right.

Jeffrey 39:22

A single warhead. They count as one warhead.

Scott 39:25

One warhead. So there are some caveats and some definitions that are a little weird, because a B-52 can carry several air-launched cruise missile options, but counts as one.

Jeffrey 39:36

But because we think of bombers as stabilizing, because it takes so long to get to their target, and they're not great first-strike weapons. So anyway, the point of all that is to say, the Russians are on the verge of this giant force modernization, and we can see it coming. And so the thing to do would have been to negotiate another round of reductions as soon as humanly possible.

And in particular, to reduce the number of delivery vehicles so that the Russians didn't have room to undertake this giant modernization. But treaty opponents were the ones who wanted the higher numbers. So, you know, it's this weird case where people are like, see, new starts bad. Because the Russians are doing all this bad stuff. And it's like, no, the Russians are doing all this bad stuff because a new start wasn't sufficient.

But you needed to do more, not less. So if you leave the treaty now, that big Russian... You open up a... Yeah, that's still going to happen. That giant buildup is still going to happen. It's just going to be bigger. And this is my column I just wrote for Foreign Policy. My frustration is our budget situation is so tight that...

Right. I think our numbers are going to come down treaty or no treaty.

Scott 40:53

Right.

Jeffrey 40:54

And so, like, the problem is not that New START is a bad deal for us. It's that, you know, New START was an interim agreement to preserve as much of the verification. But we needed to get that next round of reductions and we just never did.

Scott 41:10

Yeah. So, well, essentially it means that treaty or not, it looks like based on budgetary and political concerns, we'll be unilaterally reducing. Right.

Jeffrey 41:19

But that's not what the president's thinking about.

Scott 41:21

Of course not. He's thinking about getting this good deal and about winning.

Jeffrey 41:25

Yeah, I mean, well, no. You know what I think he's thinking about? I put this in my column. This is not nice. Okay. I think, how did I say it in the column? Sort of delicately. I don't know whether the president hired two Russian hookers to urinate on the bed in the hotel that the Obamas slept in in Moscow.

But I do know that he is directing a steady stream of warm invective at the Nuclear Posture Review and the New START Treaty. I was blunter on Twitter. I said he's pissing on the New START Treaty and the Nuclear Posture Review for the same reason. He's allegedly hired two Russian hookers to piss on Obama's bed. It's about defiling the president's legacy.

It's not about the national interest. It's not about a calculation. He doesn't know what's in the New START treaty. He doesn't know what a nuclear posture review is. He just knows that he's the president now and he needs to undo all this stuff.

Scott 42:28

Establish his own territory and branding on policy.

Jeffrey 42:30

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I half expect him to, like, arrange a speech in Prague where he, you know, you know, literally urinates on one of these documents. Maybe just figuratively. It talks about how much he loves nuclear weapons. You know, I don't know.

Scott 42:49

Yeah.

Jeffrey 42:52

I think that's what that's about, right? I don't think this is about, like, The president doesn't like the bomber counting rule in New Star. Come on.

Scott 43:03

Was it you who posted to Twitter him talking about nuclear negotiations in the 90s?

Jeffrey 43:09

Yeah, 80s, 80s. 80s, 80s. 80s.

Scott 43:12

Back when he had much more believable hair.

Jeffrey 43:16

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. There's an amazing Washington Post article, which is, you know, a fawning profile of at the time a young Donald Trump in which he is publicly lobbying to get the job, you know, for what are ultimately the INF talks.

Scott 43:40

Yep, he's looking to be a negotiator.

Jeffrey 43:42

And he says, I'm going to get us a great deal with the Soviets. And they're like, well, other smart people have tried to do that. And he's like, well, I know what I'm going to do, but obviously I can't tell you. Because then you know your tactic, but trust me, it's going to be so tremendous you're going to love it, you know. He, he's the same, same guy. And interestingly when he was running for President he had breakfast with another reporter, I think for a magazine called Manhattan which no longer exists. It was republished on Slate where you know he tried to show off to this guy.

How much detailed information he had acquired about nuclear negotiations, and this guy was snowed by it.

Scott 44:26

So he, I mean, he learned how to talk big about missiles. I mean, like he says in his article, I can learn everything I need to know about missiles in half an hour.

Jeffrey 44:34

Yeah, I know, you know, I'm thinking we get him out here to Monterey and we charge him full tuition, but, you know, give him the half-hour version of the curriculum. Ha ha ha ha!

Scott 44:43

Well, see, I'm mad because I feel like I've wasted a bunch of time. I need to find one of these teachers who can give me everything I need to know in half an hour. There you go. What are we doing here?

Jeffrey 44:50

There you go. President, you know they say this. He likes memos. One page, bullet points, no more than nine.

Scott 44:57

Yeah, and I can almost see from a perspective of negotiating, if you are just there to be the negotiator, I could see a world in which someone believes that they could get a list of bullet points and win sets, and their job is to just make those win sets happen. But that's not really what negotiations are supposed to be just about.

It's supposed to be reaching a consensus to move forward with certain forms of mutually beneficial policy. Ideally. Ha.

Jeffrey 45:31

Ha. Ha. So anyway. Anyway.

Scott 45:40

We have to find a happy note.

Jeffrey 45:43

Well, you know, I think the happy note is that regardless of what the president thinks, you know, Secretary Mattis in his confirmation hearing made clear that he's aware that the cost growth associated with the nuclear modernization threatens to squeeze out other priorities. And so the nuclear posture view might be a giant wish list, but Mattis is at least aware of the financial constraints that he's laboring under.

And Tillerson is, you know, he also made comments about the importance of remaining engaged with the Russians on New START. And so, you know, I mean, I think one of my frustrations with Trump and specifically with people who support Trump is I think there's this idea that, you know, the Obama administration was somehow filled with people who weren't trying.

Right. But like our nuclear policies look the way they do because like we, you know, you start with the force you start with. You make the same choices about when to replace things because they retire when they retire and you have the amount of money that you have. And then when you go and try to negotiate with the Russians, you have the same Russians.

And so, you know, this idea that you're going to get some fundamentally different result when you start with the same forces, start with the same budget and, you know, start with the same Russians. Like, it's crazy. Right. And I think that Mattis and Tillerson get that, you know, that they can have confidence in themselves. They will make maybe slightly different choices and maybe they think that they will make better choices.

But the idea that the choices are going to be radically different is just is is is a fantasy. And I think ultimately that's why, you know, you see. Them being much more cautious about it. And so my only question is, you know, now that the president is sort of on record as wanting to defile these two agreements, is there some face-saving way to get him to accept that he's actually somewhat constrained by reality?

Scott 47:39

Right.

Jeffrey 47:40

And so, you know, like, that's the happy note, which is he is constrained by reality. And the only task is, like, is, you know... Navigating the weave and then getting inside that thick skull of his. It's a thicket designed to keep truth at bay.

Scott 47:55

That is a disgusting image.

Jeffrey 47:57

All right, well, maybe this is where we should stop. Hey, Scott, thanks for joining me. Thanks for driving, Jeffrey. And thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, give us a review on iTunes. It really will help push us up the charts and more people will discover us. And if you really, really like the podcast, check out our Patreon page.

For a mere $3 a month, you can join our Slack channel. And I think Scott is on the verge of some really cool subscriber benefits at higher levels.

Scott 48:29

Yep, we're putting them up this week on Patreon. Finally got all the proofs and stuff done. Now I'm just trying to take pretty pictures of it to make them look nice.

Jeffrey 48:37

Awesome. Sounds great. Thanks again for listening.