Modernization Molehill

Toby Fenwick 0:02

Is your mother home? I'm not sure about this. I'm in Vermont with my parents and I'm not quite sure. I think she went out to try. I brought some jam.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:21

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 weblog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California.

Aaron Stein 0:35

And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the Arms Control Wonk blog. I'm also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a doctoral fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Jeffrey 0:46

The UK is having a general election in May 2015. It's hard to say who's going to win, but a coalition government looks possible. And the Liberal Democrats, the most likely coalition partner for either party, have some definite ideas about nuclear weapons. The UK has to replace its fleet of Trident ballistic missile submarines. That costs a boatload of money.

Sorry for the pun, Aaron. And the UK, like everybody else, is broke. So we're joined by Toby Fenwick, a research associate with Center Forum, the UK liberal think tank. And that is liberal in its proper European meaning of markets and democracy. Right, Toby?

Toby 1:19

It certainly is. Full-cornered liberalism, the individual freedom, economic freedom, and liberty for all.

Jeffrey 1:26

Means something a little different here, but you went to school here, so you know these things.

Toby 1:31

Indeed, I went to Middlebury as an undergraduate, so we're delighted to have Miss as part of the Middlebury family.

Jeffrey 1:35

Are you disappointed you weren't able to spend the summer out here in the sunshine and the beach, the sand in your toes?

Toby 1:42

I grew up in Queensland, so all that stuff is kind of pretty much passe for me. But the idea of spending a summer with you and you and the team out there would have been excellent, I guess.

Jeffrey 1:52

Yeah, Aaron, we just had Toby out and he gave a really well-received talk on these super important questions about how exactly the UK is going to afford a nuclear force given the austerity it's under. Too bad you... It's your own version of Modernization Mountain.

Toby 2:07

Yeah. Yes, but Modernization Mole Hill doesn't have quite the same ring to it as the UK.

Jeffrey 2:13

What was that terrible Hugh Grant movie? The Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain. Am I the only one who remembers this?

Toby 2:23

The idea of any, that sort of summarizes any Hugh Grant film for the last 20 years. A confused Englishman is unable to sit down and enunciate his inner turmoil to some American woman. That's true.

Jeffrey 2:39

So as a serious note, Toby, can you tell me a little bit about the upcoming general election and how you see it playing out? Because I think, you know, for most Americans, we don't, We don't necessarily follow how coalition governments work and how a coalition partner who's particularly interested in an issue can have a dramatic impact on a government's policies.

Toby 3:04

Certainly, that's absolutely fine. So the election will take place on Thursday, May 7th. And it's 650 constituencies across the UK, including Northern Ireland, for the House of Commons. And winner takes all, except there won't be a winner. So the winning post to form a majority government is 326 seats. By the time you take out the Speaker and the two deputies, that reduces to obviously 647.

And then by the time you take out Sinn Féin, who... The Northern Irish political wing of the IRA, who refuse to take their seats, they'll typically win four. So the actual effective size of Parliament is 643, which means that instead of 326, you're moving down a little bit towards 320. But in reality, if you can get 315 seats, then you're unlikely to lose a vote of confidence.

So obviously in 2010, we had a general election in which nobody won. And the Liberals, Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives formed a coalition, which has comfortably survived five years, much to everyone else's surprise. The last formal coalition in the UK was the wartime coalition. And the last time the government didn't have a majority was the Labour government in the 1970s.

Who were supported by the Liberals, but there wasn't actually a coalition agreement. So one of the first things that was done was they instituted a five-year fixed-term parliaments act. Which is revolutionary for the UK and everyone else looks a bit confused by. Because until that legislation had passed, the Prime Minister of the day could simply go and wander down a birdcage walk to Buckingham Palace from Downing Street and decide that there would be an election in six weeks' time.

And that meant that the executive had far more power in determining the electoral timescales. And also the ability to manipulate policies to give them the best shot of winning. Because of the Fixed-Term Parliament Act, we're now on a five-year cycle, and if you want to have an election at a different time, you then have to sit down and either have a vote of no confidence, at which point there's 14 days for anyone in Parliament to try and put an electoral majority together, Or there then is an election.

So it's quite difficult to have an early election now. And so what we would expect is a hung parliament after May 7th, at which point there will be need to throw a coalition together. And at the moment, it's going to be very interesting.

Jeffrey 5:55

And I was asking you about this, but the SNP has ruled out joining a coalition with the Labour Party. But I gather the Lib Dems would be quite willing to consider either option or am I wrong about that?

Aaron 6:11

And then of the likely coalition partners, unlike the U.S. election, nuclear issues in particular, Trident becomes an issue because they all have a specific policy that they formulated on. So there's actually something that may happen in terms of nuclear policy after May 7th.

Toby 6:26

Right. So let's start with the brass tacks. SNP, Scottish National Party, these are otherwise known as the people who lost the Scottish independence referendum last year. Nobody's gloating. Well, no one is gloating because they managed to get 45% of the vote and they increased the number of members of the SNP from something like 20,000 to over 100,000, which is saying that one in five adults in Scotland is actually a member of the SNP today.

Yeah. And whereas 45% is not enough to win a referendum on independence, it gives you a very strong base to win first-past-the-post constituencies in a direct UK election. So what we're expecting, or what they're expecting, is to have of Scotland's 59 seats, the SNP, which currently has six, could end up with Somewhere north of 40. And indeed, if there are more extreme projections are in place of potentially 50.

Now, what this would mean is that this would wipe out the 41 seats that Labour holds and has held sort of continuously since the 19... in many cases, the 1920s. But Scotland has been basically a Tory-free zone since 1997. So whereas Ed Miliband, the... Sort of North London wonkish leader of the Labour Party, if it was a normal year and Scotland was going to return six SNP MPs, he would be well on the way to a parliamentary majority.

The SNP is likely to deny him that. And they have a very kind of... Regionalist approach, clearly. They're still looking to produce independence. And one of the things that they've always campaigned on is getting Trident out of Scotland and making Scotland a nuclear weapons-free zone. And of course, with just the UK having four Trident boats, they're all based on the Clyde just outside Glasgow.

In fact, just around the corner from Holy Lock, where the US Polaris Poseidon boats used to call. So the question then is, what does the SNP want? Well, it says that it's going to vote against Trident. It's opposed to this, that and the other. The slightly more cynical version is that the SNP is actually very keen for Trident to stay in Scotland because they're keen to have it there as a stick to beat the unionists with if there's another independence referendum at any point in the next five or ten years.

So I think the real question is the SNP have said they're not going to go into coalition with Labour. But they might do a confidence and supply arrangement where in return for a number of concessions, they wouldn't vote against the government and they would vote for the budget. And they've said they're not going to vote for Trident.

And there's been a really interesting dichotomy. The paper that we just published, Retiring Trident, which you can get from the Centre Forum website, Initially there was a response from the SNP which said this is ghastly, you're all terrible, typical unionists want to run build money spend money on bombs whereas their, their parliamentary team in Westminster had a much more nuanced view and thought that this would be a potential step forward. So we'll see. So Toby

Jeffrey 10:12

Tell me about, though, the Lib Dem view, because it seems like you're far more likely to end up as a coalition partner with either the Tories or Labor. And I know in 2010, taking a second look at the decision to replace the Trident votes was part of the coalition negotiation. So I just wonder if you could tell us where that was heading now.

Toby 10:33

Okay, great. So in 2010, the coalition, the current coalition was brought together. The Tories are very keen on full boat, like for like replacement. UK continuing to have CASD, Trident through and beyond 2060. Either with existing Trident 2D5 life extension missiles or whatever replaces that, as long as it's the same size, which we hope it will be.

The next question. So the Liberals were opposed to this. They wanted something different. So the objective then was to kick the decision into the long grass. Two studies were issued. The first was the Trident Value for Money study, which resulted in a small reduction in the number of active warheads down to 120 over time, which will provide some small savings, and reducing the number of warheads per boat from 48 to 40.

Which allows you to have a reduced stock but doesn't actually save that much money. And then the Liberals proceeded with the Trident Alternatives Review, which was run by the government and published in July of 2013.

Jeffrey 11:45

And this is the infamous Toppenny Trident?

Toby 11:49

This is the infamous document that you, yes, got lampooned as Tuckney Trident, but also decided that any answer, so take AWE, Aldermaston, the British Nuclear Weapons Complex, 26 years to produce a new warhead for an as yet undeveloped supersonic cruise missile.

Jeffrey 12:10

But just to be clear, it was cruise missiles on attack submarines with nuclear weapons, or were they held in reserve?

Toby 12:18

So they were looking at a number of options, including supersonic cruise missiles off JSF, supersonic cruise missiles off submarines, and, you know, a future bomber or something like this. Anyway, the costings were done in such a way that in all cases, you would have to build two new Trident submarines to cover the gap between 2032 and the early 2040s when the replacement system would be available.

Which meant that everything was more expensive than like-for-like replacement of trudging. And so in 2013 at Glasgow, in the national conference in September, the Lib Dems adopted a policy of two or three boats, non-CASD, mostly sailing around unarmed, and this would... Produce between 40 and about 40% of the military effectiveness of the existing system for 93 to 97% of the cost.

Jeffrey 13:19

So, but did that, did that, I mean, I mean, I know it got lampooned, but did that, so is that now a dead letter?

Toby 13:27

Well, it's really interesting. The manifesto that's just come out is much more open than that. It doesn't mention...

Jeffrey 13:35

This is the Lib Dem manifesto.

Toby 13:37

Correct, correct.

Jeffrey 13:38

It doesn't mention SSBNs.

Toby 13:40

It doesn't really talk about this. It's talking about taking a step down the ladder. And honestly, at this point, the numbers are so extreme. So like for like Trident, and indeed the previous two or three boat Trident program... Would consume between 25% and 35% of the total defense equipment budget for the period 2018 to 2032. That's a modernization mountain.

Aaron 14:07

Yeah, and it just seems like nobody's quite figured out what the policy should be. And the policy proposals that are being put out there are very divergent. I mean, am I wrong in that assumption?

Toby 14:20

So this is the question we tried to answer in our new paper. So we set out and said, the Labour Party are talking about credible minimum independent nuclear deterrent without explaining what that is. And we set out to answer the question, using the recently declassified 1982 criteria for minimum deterrence that the UK developed at the time it decided to go from Trident 1 to Trident 2, what was the cheapest way of achieving that minimum deterrence?

And we alighted on freefall bombs off JSF, and particularly looking at the availability of B61-12, which was something that wasn't confirmed in the U.S. program at the time that the Trident Alternatives Review was written.

Jeffrey 15:06

Hey, Tom B., what was the 1982 criteria for minimum deterrence? What did you have to blow up?

Toby 15:13

So this is actually a really interesting story. It started in 1978 when David Owen, who was the Labour foreign secretary and who would later come to promise with Cy Vance with the Vance-Earn plan in Bosnia in 1991-92, turned around and said, look, Britain's been fixated on the Moscow criterion, i.e. The ability to destroy the most heavily defended target in the Soviet Union, namely Moscow.

His question to his officials was, if we kill a million Russians, isn't that going to be enough? And this was very un-British in terms of actually looking at massive amounts of death and destruction. And so a guy called Sir Anthony Duff, who was the leader of the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1978, did a study Which then Roy Mason was involved with in 1982 and updating it.

And they came up with three kinds of deterrents, all of which would deter the Soviet Union, but would have different levels of assurance. So the highest level of assurance was the ability to attack and destroy with a high level of confidence the Soviet leadership's bunkers outside of Moscow. The second level of deterrence was the ability to destroy Moscow and or Leningrad, plus some other Russian cities.

And the minimum level of deterrence that was required was either destroying 10 Soviet cities, not including Moscow or Leningrad, or getting 30 warheads onto Soviet territory. Which would have killed roughly a million Soviet citizens, and that would have been considered enough of a deterrence factor for the UK.

Jeffrey 17:10

Hey, just a quick question. Did either of you ever play the card game Nuclear War by Flying Buffalo? No.

Toby 17:17

No.

Jeffrey 17:18

Oh, you guys really missed out. It's a game where your goal is to kill all of the other people in the other countries. You take turns with cards, dropping bombs on them. And there inevitably comes a point in the game where you have to ask, does anybody have change for a million people? Jeez.

Toby 17:36

Well, I look forward to this over a pint of speckled hen on the crown and anchor next time in Monterey.

Jeffrey 17:43

I'm sorry. Anyway, those were the three criteria. So sorry, Toby, finish your thought.

Aaron 17:49

You based your assessment on the F-35, on the 30 bomb criteria, correct? Yes.

Toby 17:57

All the 10 cities criteria. All the 10 cities criteria. So it was, could you achieve either of these? And in fact, the third set of targets that we outline in the book is actually a strategic attack on St. Petersburg. So we thought that if we could do St. Petersburg, then we were relatively happy we could hit 10 other Russian cities and getting 30 warheads into the Russian Federation would similarly be met.

Now, one can always ask the question, was it, if it was enough under the Soviet Union in 1982, at the depths of the Cold War with the full coercive power of the Soviet state, which whatever we think of Putin is not today's Russia, with social media and a kind of managed democracy. I mean, one could argue that, in fact, the level required for deterrence is even lower.

But to avoid any perception that we were simply marking our own homework, We set out to use the Cold War criteria, which is why we stuck with Duff Mason 82. Putin was the, what, deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, right? yeah. But then again he's not a sentimental sort. No and well, I was chatting with Nikolai at this is Nikolai Sokov, my, my colleague.

Your colleague in Monterey. And I had to point out to him that we had to have an aim point. And so given that it was the scene of the last time that we, the Western Europe, successfully intervened in Russian internal politics, we used Finland's station at the end.

Jeffrey 19:40

How did Nikolai take that?

Toby 19:42

He was initially quite confused and then thought it was very funny.

Jeffrey 19:45

Those are the best jokes, right? The ones where it takes you a minute. Yeah, so there you go. Okay, so just to get my head around this, so the Lib Dems are likely to be, or there's a very good chance they'll be in coalition with one of the two parties, the The funding profile for Trident replacement looks really intimidating.

You're a classic European liberal party. You care about markets and democracy, which usually means not busting the treasury. You don't want to gut the conventional forces. So is this something that the Lib Dems are likely to make a serious issue over in coalition negotiations, whether it's getting another study or tell me what that's going to look like?

Toby 20:34

I think the answer is if we're in coalition with the Conservatives, then all of this is dead in the water because the Tories have made a red line. But the electoral arithmetic means that at the moment that looks unlikely. So the question for Labour, are you really wedded to it? And some of Labour are. But the leadership are certainly equivocal on Trident and have kept repeating the line of credible minimum independent nuclear deterrent as cheaply as possible, which whatever you think of Trident is not what Trident is.

So the question then is, well, you'd have a study. The first thing you would do in the case of a Lib Dem Labour government is that shortly after the election, you would initiate an update to the Trident Alternatives Review. And then both Labour and the Liberals have said that in the forthcoming Defence Review... The Trident or the British nuclear weapons system should be a tradable item, which is Treasury speak in the UK for if you don't spend all the money on this, then you get to keep at least some of it to go and spend on other things.

And we can argue about how much that is. But I think in the proposal, we have a conventional proposal. Significant increase to the conventional forces, but actually the nuclear dedicated force, which relies on a lot of dual role stuff, is costed at about 16.7 billion pounds. And the gross savings from cancelling Trident would be between 21.5 and 29.8 billion.

So the net savings overall, therefore, would be Would be between five and 13 billion pounds over the 14 years. And, you know, you could see cutting a deal where the Treasury would take half of that net savings as the MOD's contribution to deficit reduction. But they would have paid for the Nuclear force and its concomitant very significant increases in capability, particularly for the Navy in the conventional sphere, whilst leaving between two and a half and six and a half billion of additional spending for the conventional forces.

Aaron 22:53

Do you think that this will become like a corollary for what's going on more broadly with British defence spending? And I know that there's a lot of talk that the UK is sort of shirking its role as a global power and as a I'd say a credible partner for the United States because of the flat military budget.

And do you think that post-May 7th coalition politics, these two issues will be equated, that if you give up the nuclear role with Trident, that you will no longer be seen as a credible power globally?

Toby 23:21

Yeah. It's a great question, Aaron. I think what we've seen in the last couple of weeks is the Tory backbenchers in particular moving against their own party leadership over the issue of meeting 2%. Your colleague, Malcolm Chalmers at RUSI, has written a very important paper last September which demonstrates that You know, UK defence as a portion of GDP, all other things being equal, could fall to 1.7, potentially even 1.6% at the end of the next parliament.

And there's a lot of us who are not okay with that. Particularly given that the government has just legislated to make overseas aid spending 0.7 percent forever. So there's a real question around what is how does this fit together? What are the actual priorities? And I think the U.S., particularly given David Cameron's very public rebuke of the rest of NATO Europe at the Newport conference, Summit last September, for everybody else not meeting 2%, for the UK not to meet 2% at this point would be raising very serious questions about its overall credibility.

That, however, I don't think translates into does this mean that you have to have Trident to be credible? I think, you know, the real question is, can the UK do conventional operations worldwide? Does it still have the force multipliers in transport, in refueling, in intelligence to do something more than that? Sort of send some special forces or send a battalion here or there.

And so I think the question really is the UK needs to work out what its place in the world is, what it wants to do, and the best way that it can sit down and contribute to alliance capability.

Aaron 25:13

That's my follow-on question. So isn't the nuclear debate sort of a corollary to the UK hasn't quite figured out where it wants to be in the post-Core War world? And, I mean, extension of that, I mean, do you see... Any move away from Trident is actually being politically feasible for any of the parties involved. I mean, I know that they could put together a study and they may talk tough before the elections, but is it feasible when the rubber hits the road?

Toby 25:37

I think it is, actually. And for the first, you know, the only reason we're having this debate, not to be very clear about it, is not that the UK has suddenly become unilateralist. It's simply that the cost of replacing the ballistic missile submarines means that you gut the rest of the conventional forces. I mean, the MOD are apparently planning for an army of 50,000 to 60,000 active duty men.

And, you know, it's not clear what you could do with that. And if that's the actual cost of coming, of staying in the SSBN club, you know, people from across the political spectrum who are interested in defence are sitting down and saying, you know, I'm just not OK with that. So I think the reality is that the UK will have a continuing nuclear role.

I don't think that there's any serious chance that there's going to be unilateralism. But this position, particularly if we have a Lib Lab coalition, of let's have something that provides a... A level of nuclear capability that allows us to integrate more closely with NATO, particularly NATO DCA, the partner nations, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Italy, and crucially allows us to step up our level of conventional capability To allow us to maintain the role that we would like to play in the world of a power with global responsibilities, able to support coalitions of the willing, and crucially, and I think the stuff that came out of London last week about, you know, potential increased threat from Argentina, of this... Oh, you guys are still giving them hell about the Falklands.

Well, the Russians apparently are about to lease the Argentinians one or two squadrons of SU-24 fences. Ah. So, you know, ultimately the UK has been very clear. We had a referendum in the Falklands two years ago in which a North Korean-style 99.9% of the population decided that they wanted to stay as part of the UK. The Argentinians obviously rejected this And so the single requirement that must exist for the British forces is in the event that there was a successful invasion of the Falkland Islands, the UK needs to be able to go and take them back.

And that then sits down and talks about a naval presence plus an amphib plus a carrier force able in the conventional environment to go and mount an operation 4,000 miles from the nearest base to do an opposed landing and take the islands back.

Jeffrey 28:28

Well, so Toby, let's talk about your proposal because, I mean, if I understand it correctly, it's driven by a desire to meet the 1982 deterrence criteria while still having enough money left over to be able to invest in that kind of conventional force. So why don't you just outline for us a little bit the details of the proposal?

Toby 28:52

Sure. And that's exactly right. It was to meet the defamation criteria of 82 as cheaply as possible. And invest wherever possible.

Jeffrey 29:01

As efficiently as possible, Toby.

Toby 29:04

Correct. Correct. As efficiently as possible. Thank you, Jeffrey. So we're looking at 100 B61-12s produced in the UK under the previous MDA agreements with a ceiling price of $60 million a weapon, which is twice the US headline cost. We then want to convert the two forthcoming Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers to convert them to have cats and traps instead of being jump jets, which will obviously significantly increase their conventional capability.

We would then convert the UK F-35 orders from the F-35B jump jet to the F-35C, which is longer range, has bigger weapons capacity, and it's cheaper as well as being more capable. And then adding five more SSNs to the UK fleet to bring them to 12. Adding additionally four of the new Type 26 frigates to the existing buy.

Adding Hawkeyes and Greyhounds to the air wing of the carriers. You know, adding back maritime patrol aircraft that were deleted. So the UK currently has no MPA capability. Converting the existing Airbus A330 tankers to include the ability to receive fuel and also to have boom refueling, both for UK and allied assets, and then adding some nuclear C2, which overall costs £16.7 billion.

And the net of that is that all of a sudden, the UK is significantly more conventionally capable, as well as having the credible ability to disperse its QRA nuclear force to 18 UK bases and UK bases worldwide, as well as having two carriers on alert.

Jeffrey 31:03

So you could put the nuclear-capable F-35s on the carriers?

Toby 31:11

Correct.

Jeffrey 31:12

Oh, I didn't notice that little wrinkle. Yeah, it's with the cats.

Toby 31:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this would – and indeed the – obviously there's an ongoing discussion here in the U.S. about whether the USAF is going to pay for the F-35A to be converted to – or certified for the nuclear mission.

Jeffrey 31:28

Yeah, you know, it's quite expensive. It's a couple hundred million dollars for the program, and then you've got to pay to do it on each airframe you want to execute it on.

Aaron 31:38

Yeah, and the earliest I've seen actually is 2024 is when the code could conceivably be ready.

Toby 31:43

Yeah. Oh, really? OK, because we were working on a 2020 timeline for DCA Europe and a $350 million budget. So we've actually budgeted for that full $350 million to be paid by the Brits if the EU staff and Europe couldn't get themselves organised on this. So we've used very conservative costings because we would expect to share that cost, but it would mean that the F-35s on the carriers...

And both carriers have a capacity of 36 F-35s, potentially with a surge beyond that. And so you'd end up with 72 nuclear-capable jets at sea, for example. So it's a posture that gives real flexibility, and at the same time is a verifiable step down the nuclear ladder in accordance with our NPT requirements. And, you know, at some point in the future...

If we were looking at further nuclear reductions in Europe and with the UK, it's going to be politically much easier to sell that if you're in a position where you haven't just invested 30 billion plus pounds and scalped the rest of the forces to produce a fleet of SSBNs that you're just about to retire. So I think having dual-use equipment in this case provides a level of scalability to the UK nuclear force that doesn't currently exist.

Aaron 33:11

So Toby, we – oh, Aaron, did you want to say something? No, I'm just saying certainly it's a creative way, particularly with the dual-purpose equipment. Your delivery vehicles so that the shock maybe of coming down the line and then having to make further reductions, you can justify that more than investing such a large amount into new boats to carry trade.

But Jeffrey, go ahead and just pick up right there. Precisely correct.

Jeffrey 33:34

Well, I was going to tell Toby, we always used to try to end on a happy note, but we were pretty miserable at that. So instead, we've started to end by asking people what they're reading. But in your case, I assume you're going to want to plug your report.

Toby 33:47

So plug your report, Toby. So if you go to centerforum.org, it's called Retiring Trident, an Alternative Proposal for UK Needs Closed Deterrence.

Aaron 33:57

And I would be very interested in people's views. Just check out right beneath. We'll have a link right beneath the show, right on the page.

Toby 34:06

And what I'm reading personally, I'm reading a rather brilliant book on Kosovo statehood.

Jeffrey 34:15

I didn't know you could make that sentence in English. Can you put those words together? A brilliant book on statehood in Kosovo?

Toby 34:21

So Professor Mark Weller at Cambridge has written a wonderful book on the Kosovo experience and what that means for my own other academic interest, which is about how states get formed. So this is the intriguing question of what should America's birthday be, given that it probably shouldn't be the 4th of July. So this is a whole other issue, and arguably the best time to celebrate July 4th will in fact be either May 1st when the 1783 Treaty of Paris, actually formally granting independence, came into effect, or sometime in late October when Henry Cornwallis finally paid the price at Yorktown for his tactical ineptitude.

We won fair and square, man.

Jeffrey 35:10

Toby's a dual national. He both won and lost.

Toby 35:14

But in both cases, I think I lose, Jeffrey, because it was all down to the French, right?

Jeffrey 35:19

That's true. Hey, Aaron, what's on your reading list?

Aaron 35:24

I just bought J.M. Berger's and Jessica Stern's new book on ISIS. So that's on my to-read list.

Jeffrey 35:30

Mine is funny. I spent the weekend preparing for my class and we're doing Taiwan's nuclear weapons program in the 1970s. And in particular, we do the case of Pierre Noir, the beautifully named IAE inspector who actually quite sadly died on an inspection in Taiwan. But it's one of the few instances of secondary source reading I let my students touch.

And it's a journal article, but it's Nuclear Nightmare Averted. By David Albright and Corey, then gay, now Hinderstein, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 1998. And it's an amazing review of what we know about Taiwan's nuclear weapons program from the 1970s. Hey, Toby.

Toby 36:15

Sounds great. Can you put a link to that on your website too? Because it sounds like a very interesting read.

Jeffrey 36:19

Yeah, you know, I might even put up the Pierre Noir documents. Toby, it was really great that you came on. I very much appreciate you joining us.

Toby 36:25

It's been a real pleasure and I look forward to working with you guys in the future.

Jeffrey 36:28

Thank you. Everybody who listens, thank you for listening. And as always, leave us an iTunes review if you like the show or if you work for Vox. You can just say nice things about us like Max Fisher did. Okay. Thanks for listening. Great. Have a good day.