We Need a Renaissance in Deterrence Policy

Welcome to Shield of the Republic a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two that strong and balanced foreign policy is a necessary shield of our Democratic Republic. Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments, a Bulwark work tributor and a non resident fellow at the Miller center. My normal partner in this enterprise, Elliot Cohen, the Robert Eisgood Professor Strategy at Johns school advanced international studies in the Arleigh Burke Chair of strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies is on the road. So I’m soloing today, but I’m very happy to bring on to shield of the Republic. A very special guest.

Former colleague in government, of over thirty years standing and a frequent co author, on matters of national defense strategy and particularly nuclear strategy. Franklin Miller. Franklin, Miller is a phi beta kappa graduate of Williams College, and a longtime public servant, He’s been a political military affairs officer in the Department of State. He has been a civil servant in the Department of Defense, and for many years, the head of the office of, strategic policy in the office of the secretary of defense and senior director for defense at the National Security Council in Bush forty three and a Jonathan Last Treasure even if he is a New York Football Giants fan. Frank Miller, welcome to shield of the Republic.

Eric, it is it is a great pleasure to to to be with you. And Well, I’m not sure this is the season of talking about the giants.

Well, as a as a rent, sorry, commander’s fan. You know, I don’t have much to write home about either. Frank, it is a great time to be talking because there is a lot going on in the area of nuclear strategy and questions of nuclear, escalation, potential escalation, that have been hanging over us, for the entirety of this war in Ukraine. I wanted to start by taking you back to to one of your important elements of public service, which is when you served on the Schlessinger Commission, back in the last couple of years of the Bush forty three administration when you had already left government. And the commission had been appointed by, then Secret Podcast to look into the, a very embarrassing episode in which a US Air Force crew accidentally loaded a fully armed nuclear weapon on a US plane, in my knot, air force, and it might not air force base and then shipped it off to Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana where there were no facilities actually to receive it.

And I think it’s fair to say that one of the conclusions that your commission reached was that these issues of nuclear strategy had, first of all, suffered from neglect inside the military services, not just the air force, but, the other services as well. Since the end of the Cold War, and that we were really losing our kind of nuclear deterrence skills. That is to say the expertise both in the hardware, of the development and manufacture and maintenance of nuclear weapons, but also the software, you know, the understanding of nuclear strategy of escalation dynamics of of nuclear deterrence. That report was roughly fifteen years ago. What is your assessment of kinda where we stand today?

Those those those were not great days. And and you’re absolutely right. And I think that that to some degree, we still suffer from the the problems which were uncovered as a result of the Slicenger panel. The the air force Yeah. All the services had and basically dropped the nuclear mission from their, focus.

After the end of the cold war, only the Navy strategic submarine force and the Air Force ICBM Force maintained, a strong focus on nuclear operations. And so the bomber community and and the and and the fighter community in the air force would rather not have thought about it would rather the mission had had gone away. And and that was one of the core issues that this licensure panel looked at. I mean, sadly, five years later under then Secret Podcast, a similar study was done and found that the Air Force had not improved again. But I think since then, the Air Force leadership has paid more attention to to nuclear operations.

It’s not yet where where I would want it to be at the at the peak of of of nuclear readiness during the cold war. But I think we are moving into an era as you and I have discussed on many occasions that that’s that that’s coming. Intellectually, I don’t think we we have recovered from the end of the cold war. I’m afraid that the that the community is dominated by two different groups of people. One is a group of people who who believe that arms control is the answer to all problems.

And arms control can can deal with difficult situations. It can mitigate the threat But when you’re dealing with, a serial arms control agreement, violator like Vladimir Putin, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to talk about arms control. The Chinese aren’t interested in arms control. The more we tell them that they ought to be, the less interested they are, because they play that game very well. So On the one side, there’s the arms controls group.

On the other side, and I hate to sound like the the old bureaucrat that that that I am and that you are there are a bunch of people who’ve never had to deal with the responsibilities of government who’s talked very blithely about, well, we can use a nuclear weapon or we can use a bunch of nuclear weapons. And and, you know, the whole point of the tariffs is is is to prevent major aggression, not not to use these things and come up with with easy pet solutions that say, oh, well, we can just use a couple. So, I’m afraid that that, we we need almost a renaissance in in talking about deterrence policy as it came up out of the cold war. And what does it mean? And how do we apply it to a world that is increasingly dangerous with with two nuclear peers, Russia and China, and a KJU, North Korea, that increasingly has the capability to hit the United States within three weapons.

Yeah. I worry that people are, you know, really you know, sort of blithely unaware about just how dangerous and damaging these weapons, you know, would be if used You know, it it struck me not long ago that, a former colleague of ours in government, you know, Andrew Marshall, was I think the last person I knew who had at actually witnessed an atmospheric nuclear test, you know, when we we stopped atmospheric nuclear testing in the early nineteen sixties. And so the number of people who really have that kind of visceral sense of these weapons, are are kind of dying off and people who spent a lot of their graduate school lives or undergraduate lives studying about this subject, like you and me, are sadly aging out, of, you know, the the business. And there are, you know, some signs of a revival of interest in the subject that been a lot of good. I would say, you know, history that’s been written of, some of the early years of the, cold war and about nuclear deterrence and, more and more cold war history is is being written that gets at these subjects.

But I think my sense is we still lack you know, sort of a core of people who have really trained in nuclear deterrence skills, I would call them. Of the kind that were, you know, more common when you and I were in government in the eighties and nineties before the end of the cold war.

I think that’s exactly right. And and I think I think part of it has been replaced by an altruism, a misplaced altruism, that suggests that that Once the United States takes a step, all other nuclear powers are gonna take the same step. That’s a bit of cultural arrogance to be perfectly blunt. So first, the notion not to knock the administration, but to knock the administration that we’re going to reduce the role of nuclear weapons. Well, all fine for the United States to say that.

The evidence points to the fact that that the Russians, the Chinese, and the North Koreans have increased the role of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the pronouncements by the Biden administration that it’s going to reduce the role of nuclear weapons don’t make the world safer at all. And similarly, we we we’re subject from time to time to the notion that well, we’re just going to work with the Russians until they understand that fill in the Bulwark, something’s going to make the world safer. Well, first of all, the Russians do what they do or the Chinese do what they do because they have a plan. They have it.

They have a a thought out strategy. And our telling them that birth ICMs are a bad thing. It’s not gonna get them to a bad merge ICBMs. In fact, they are they are, very much involved and invested in Merge ICBMs. And telling them that transparency is important doesn’t stop them from cheating and doing things, that that are in direct violation of agreements that they’ve signed.

But But we we need to get past that naivete in this altruism and deal with the world as it actually is. And and I think that’s exactly to your point. The Terrence in the gold war was about a nasty war, a nasty world that had to be, that had to be moderated.

Yeah. I mean, the the curved ICMs, of course, those are intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently, retargetable, warheads. Or reentry vehicles, that we have argued with the United States have argued or destabilizing because they could potentially lead one side or the other to believe that they had the capability of executing a a first strike that would disable such a large part of the adversary’s nuclear forces that they would really have very little ability to retaliate or inflict damage on, in return. And we’ve argued these are destabilizing. So we have demurrer we have gone to single warhead missiles, which I think we could all agree are more stabilizing, but you know, our adversaries seem to be moving in a different direction regardless of of what we do.

You know, all of this started to come back, of course, I don’t wanna say into vogue, but into focus for people with the start of the, Ukraine war in February of twenty twenty two. Although people who have been paying attention, like you and me, know that back in twenty fourteen, Vladimir Putin already had said, at the time of his seizure of Crimea, that when that invasion was going on, of the so called Little Green Man that, you know, Jonathan Last uniformed Russian forces that went into Crimea and took it over from Ukraine. That he was contemplating the use of nuclear weapons if the United States had tried to intervene or intercede in that in that effort. So the the whole, notion of nuclear sable rattling by Russia really, antidates the outbreak of the Ukraine war, but it really came into focus for a lot of people I think during that war. And my observation, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this.

My observation is that it has waxed and waned the the sort of saber rattling. That much of it appears to be for effect that it is to say that Russians noted early on that president Biden and his staff were, saying on and off the record that they were going to resist, you know, help Ukraine resist Russian aggression but they didn’t wanna help so much that, this war escalated into World War three. And the very aware of the danger of nuclear which is not an unreasonable thing to be worried about. I mean, I think everybody should take it into account. The question is, how much credit should you give these threats.

It’s striking to me that many of these threats when Putin makes them anyway are very general and broad about, you know, terrible consequences, things that nobody’s ever seen before, etcetera. But when he’s been asked as he was again recently at his Valde Club. Very specifically, you know, are you prepared to use new nuclear weapons. He says there’s no use case here. There’s really no purpose in using nuclear weapons in in Ukraine.

And that really is of a piece with a very long Soviet tradition during the cold war of making these very big broad threats, but in the in, you know, when it comes to actuality in the Cuban missile crisis in the nineteen seventy three, Yum Kipper War, in the face of, you know, real potential nuclear use backing backing off. Most recently, this occurred as I said at Valday, this club discussion club that is held in a location in Russia where he has one of his many homes where an old acquaintance of ours, Sergei Karaganov, was, making the argument to Putin publicly that he has made in writing multiple times over the last couple years that Russia should calculatedly seek to lower the threshold for nuclear use, and, possibly even use nuclear weapons just to, you know, show that, the NATO alliance and the United States that Russia is really deadly serious about this. And shouldn’t be trifled with. And Putin, of course, poo pooed that. You know, my reading of this is good cop, bad cop, and that it’s all aimed at manipulating the perceptions of the Biden administration and causing them to exercise more caution on things like attack but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Well, I think you’re I think I think you’re exactly right. I mean, the the thing about about Putin who still appears to have a grasp on on reality to to a large degree, not a perfect degree, is that he is well aware that a move that he takes could put the very existence of his country in peril. And and that Our nuclear capabilities and and NATO’s nuclear capabilities still hold at risk the things that he and his leadership value most, their own existence. Like, the FSB that keeps them in power, their their military forces, their war supporting industry. And and and despite the the brash talk of of academics, we don’t hold the responsibility of power nobody knows that a nuclear war could be limited.

So so the first use and, you know, we Americans, we talk about Oh, he might use a nuclear weapon. Well, he crossed the threshold. I think he’d use multiple nuclear weapons, but that that’s that’s an aside. Starting starting a nuclear war could end up in the destruction of of not only mother Russia, but but a large part of the planet. And I think he knows that.

So his intent is to scare us to get us to not do things we ought to be doing. And and to let his surrogates do that while maintaining a tight leash himself on on the nuclear trigger, to some small degree or no? To some reasonable degree, it’s Bulwark. You and I have written in the past about the fact that, you know, if we had only supplied, the the the, long range strike systems earlier, that would have made a difference. If we had got the armor there, earlier, it would have made a difference.

If the x f sixteens were there now, Ukrainian air superiority might might make a difference, but in the the period of time from February, of twenty two to now. Because the Ukrainians didn’t those capabilities. The Russians have built these these immensely strong lines of defense, which makes the Ukrainian task, breaking through so much harder. So to some degree, it’s Bulwark, but at the end of the day, unless we believe that that Putin or G or KJU are are totally, lunatic and out of touch with with with three hours of the world. This is going to be a lot of posturing.

And in in all three cases, I think they are very savvy people. The Chinese nuclear, blackmail is is more subtle. Than that of of Putin and his cronies or Kju, but it’s it’s there nonetheless. And I think it’s our job, job of our administration to to to be sober about this and to point out that, you know, this this would be an extraordinarily foolish thing for the Russians to do with with peril that that, is inherent for the survival of the of the Russian state. And and there are great reasons why they wouldn’t do it.

This is where it seems to me, the connection to what we were talking about earlier comes in, the of knowledge and awareness among senior policy makers of the traditional literature on nuclear deterrence and escalation dynamics comes into place. I mean, Tom is shelling, you know, the Nobel laureate, who wrote, a great deal about nuclear strategy, but it was one of the first people to apply game theory to study of nuclear strategy was one of the original people at Rand who had to wrestle with these issues when they were, you know, really fresh and new argued famously that, you know, nuclear deterrence was a competition in in risk taking. And that that a lot of this was about manipulation of risk and what he called being able to impress upon your adversary the risk that leaves something to chance. The the notion that You know, if you go down this road, as you were saying, there be monsters, I mean, that that this is potentially the end of your society potentially the end of life on the planet. You know, if you actually pursue this course of action.

So So I I I really think there’s a absolute connection here between the lack of study, the lack of knowledge about this whole issue set that has existed since the end of the cold war and some of the behavior we’ve seen on the part of the Biden administration. And the ability of the, Russian Federation and particularly Putin to to manipulate us. You know, I wanna talk about it, an article, a colleague of ours, former colleague Greg Weaver, who, for many years, was worked at, stratcom, has written about restoring NATO’s, you know, nuclear deterrence. I mean, he he is basically written about what you and I have just been talking about. All of these nuclear threats, the potential, for use, which he may take, I think, a little more seriously than you or I, but, you know, we can’t completely rule out that, that Putin might might do this.

What what is your sense of, you know, what he, you know, was writing about and arguing for in terms of steps to restore a bit of NATO’s nuclear deterrence and and what steps would you take if you were still in or advocate if you were still in government to do that?

It’s it’s it’s a great question, Eric. I I so so, you know, during the immediate years of the post cold war, Nato NATO decided that there was no threat from the east and and that Russia wasn’t a threat and that Putin wasn’t a threat. And I think that all started to change in two thousand eight when he when he invaded Georgia in fact two thousand seven when he made that speech I think it was also at, Val died, but but Bob Gates was there as sucked out.

That was Munich. I think that was a Munich security number.

Correct. Of course, it was. It was. And and I mean, we we even had the situation where the then German foreign minister in the in the in the twenty tens said, well, we’re very happy for the Americans to have a a nuclear umbrella over us as long as we don’t have to bear any risk. Well, that’s not what NATO is about.

I mean, the foundation of NATO is risk sharing and burden sharing. And and no member of Congress or the US senators support in nuclear umbrella if risk and burden sharing isn’t broad and and and complete throughout the line. So I think Putin, as he has in many ways, has raised NATO’s awareness about further the the awareness of NATO government I’d better. But in in the population, the importance of nuclear deterrence, the importance of preventing aggression, the importance of enlarging the Alliance. Thank you, Finland, and soon, Sweden.

So so Putin has has reminded people about the threat. The the notion of of of NATO’s nuclear burden sharing by which the the the the political science phrase means that that everybody has to have a part in this current has been for decades since the end of the cold war embodied in aircraft squadrons allied aircraft squadrons in what the press tells us are five countries. Having a role in delivering US nuclear weapons should NATO decide it needs to use nuclear weapons in the president of the United States agrees. There is some notion I think Greg touched on it about about bringing Poland into that mix. I I believe that that creating a new nuclear air base in Poland, is the wrong answer.

I mean, first of all, it moves closer to the to the Russian border, which is, is in fact, going to get the Russians, you know, fairly concerned. Second, it puts the weapons, very close to to, Russian short range missiles. Third, now the US air force, which never never really has has enjoyed this mission, has embraced this mission as is truly important. Would have to sync you know, a large amount of money building of a nuclear storage facility there, that’s not going to happen. But I think there are better ways to do this.

And I think that and and you and I should probably think about writing a piece on this. NATO is in the process of replacing its its cold war era f sixteens and and tornadoes with f thirty fives. That’ll be a very modern deterrent. It’s in the process almost completed, I think, of replacing The the the the gravity bombs that were in NATO, in NATO Europe, which dated from the sixties and had vacuum tubes for goodness sake, with with more with more modern weapons. So NATO will have in its in its air forces you know, a fairly credible capability, military capability.

I think that that as as some of the nations transition to f thirty fives. There’s no reason why their pilots, their best pilots can’t be assigned to other NATO units. I mean, they’re all going to be speaking English. This is part of the the the the core competency of of NATO pilots. And so you could take a Polish pilot or you could take, say a Norwegian pilot, and and assign them to, a squadron in in the Netherlands or in Germany.

And by making known the fact that pilots from those countries were involved, you would, in fact, broaden the participation and the burden sharing, but you do so in a way which was militarily sensible rather than trying to stand up a whole new unit. Very close to the Russian border. And I think it would be less politically damaging, with with the Russians, but it would still send a very strong signal.

Yeah. I mean, there there’s a historical parallel here, of course, which is, as you were saying, if you put these weapons forward, they become a a target for preemption by, by Russian short range and intermediate range missiles. Which was precisely the position we put ourselves in, in the, late, really early nineteen sixties with the, Jupiter missiles that we put into Italy and and Turkey in particular. Which became the subject of the bargain between Kennedy and khrushchev in in, nineteen sixty two during the missile crisis. I mean, interestingly, Albert Wolfetter, who is another one of the sort of, you know, grand old man of nuclear strategy also at Rand at the same time that, you know, shelling and Brody and Herman Khan was there, argued in the late nineteen fifties against those deployments precisely for the reasons that you you you just articulated saying this is they’re just gonna be targets, you know, for a preemption and it’s actually kind of escalatory.

We shouldn’t do this. So, you know, there is a kind of a history. It’s this is why it’s important to know the history. So, you know, of of these earlier earlier efforts. I I think it’s important for our listeners to know that, when you were talking earlier about The effort that Europeans were making after the end of the cold war to say there is no Russian threat and no Russian enemy, there was a proposal by the Germans in fact to walk out of these kind of arrangements, which, you know, luckily, you know, didn’t go forward, but a big part of the reason it didn’t go forward was that you and Corey Shockey, who’s a been a, on shielded the republic and a friend of our show.

And George Robertson, the Lord Robertson, the former NATO Secret Podcast general, wrote a very important essay, for the center for European reform, arguing against this, which actually help change, I think, the the the argument inside NATO and and preserved, you know, the dual capable mission for for NATO and the shared, shared burdens and and risks of of the nuclear mission. And I very much agree. I think, getting Polish pilots into the mission as opposed to having nuclear weapons in Poland is the is the right way to send the signal to share the burdens and share the risks. That’s something my colleague at CSBA, Evan, actually advocated some some years ago in a in a piece that we did at CSBA on extended deterrence. So I I very much agree with that.

You mentioned Frank earlier that Vladimir Putin was a serial violator of, arms control agreements. I I have, as you do scars, to, you know, to pair bear that out. I mean, I was in government when I think you had already wisely left, but, when the Russ decided that they were going to suspend their participation in the Cfe agreement, the conventional forces in Europe agreement. Which was a very interesting reading of the treaty because if you actually read the treaty, there’s absolutely no provision for suspension. There is a pro there’s a provision for termination.

But the the then Russian deputy foreign or later ambassador to the United States, Sergei Kislyak explained to me that, well, surely, if the negotiators had negotiated a termination clause, they, you know, would be, you know, clearly had mind, you know, some lesser measure like suspension. So therefore, it was okay. I I did tell him that that was very, you know, very ingenious legal theory, and I wish we had thought of it when we were wrestling with the question of the ABM treaty back in two two thousand one and two thousand two. But, you know, there’s been you know, there’s been a series. So there was this, in the late, Bush administration, there was the suspension of Cfe and enormous effort on the part of the Bush administration to try and scratch whatever itch there was, because one could make an argument.

You know, Secret Podcast said to me, look, I have some sympathy for Putin’s position, and this treaty was negotiated when there there were two rival alliances. Now all of his former allies are in our alliance. So, you know, does does this make sense? Which was fair point. But, you know, we went through all these gyrations, all these non papers to try and figure out what can we do to make this more palatable to the Russians who never responded, ever, to any of the proposals other than to say, not enough, you know.

And, you know, I got the I got the impression, which I think is correct, that they didn’t have a grievance that could be assuaged. They just wanted to be aggrieved. And and so we then had, of course, the violations of the INF treaty, which led ultimately to the Trump administration, doing the right thing and getting out of the treaty. I mean, the INF treaty had banned the United States and, Soviet Union and then Russia as successor state from having any ballistic missiles in the range of five hundred to fifty five hundred kilometers, the intermediate range. But we were the only two countries in the world barred from, from those kinds of weapons.

China’s developed thousands of weapons in that range. Iran has developed thousands of weapons in that range. The Russians were violating the treaty, so there was only one country that was actually abiding by a limitation of missiles, which is the United States. We ended up getting out of that treaty. And now the Russians have suspended again, not ended, but suspended their participation in new start, which kind of leaves us a little bit blind to whether or not they’re actually adhering to the numerical limits.

And there’s now talk about, them undoing their ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty. Now it’s a treaty that the United States signed but the United States Senate has never ratified. Although since nineteen ninety one, we have, in essence, abided by the terms of the treaty. What do you make of of of all of this? And, should anybody be concerned about it or not?

Well, I think I think that what you point to is a pattern. Russians don’t like being constrained by treaties. They’re like us being constrained by treaties, but they don’t like to be constrained by treaties themselves. And the Russians play fast and loose with the truth. We don’t because the free press keeps any US administration pretty much in in line.

I remember when you and I were cubs working on on on the original deployment of the INF. And every couple of months as the number of Russian intermediate grew higher and higher Breznev would say there’s an approximate balance of nuclear forces in Europe, and I remember working on a chart that was in one of the defense apartment annual reports to Congress that showed as the as the Russian numbers kept going up and there were no NATO numbers yet, FreshNaf kept saying, well, there’s still a balance here. Well, that was complete falsehood, but nobody really called him on it until we put it in the defense, in the defense report. When the Bush administration decided to aggregate the AB entry to get out of the treaty as opposed to cheating on it, but to formally say, we’re going to get out. Everybody said, oh my goodness.

The US is is is is is going to build, a shield of of anti ballistic missiles That didn’t happen, but at the time of the Bush administration decision, and even today, the Russians have more ABM systems than the United States does. But you can’t really find that in the literature. You certainly don’t find it in the press. People say, well, you know, the United States got out of the treaty. Well, the Russians had already within the treaty built up a large the force of ABMs.

And by the way, their ABM missiles have nuclear warheads. Unlike, unlike our interceptors, which, it just have a dummy kinetic warhead with no explosives in it at all. Right.

And so we come to the test ban treaty. You know, somewhere in the last three weeks, a story came out that we wanted to give the Russians more access to our, you know, nuclear test facility so called in Nevada to assuage any concerns they have that we might do nuclear testing. Well, First of all, it would take a huge amount of money and several years before we were ready to do nuclear testing. We are not ready to do nuclear testing. Second, the Russians are testing.

The Russians are testing right now. The state department has said publicly. Based on, obviously, intelligence, that the Russians are testing at very, very low levels, levels which are are useful to their weapons designers, but which are deliberately designed to be below our threshold to detect them, although we did catch them in in this and so the Russians are testing. And the same state department public reports based on intelligence say, We think the Chinese may be testing too. So this kind of hypocrisy goes along, and yet people say, well, you know, I saw the report that said, the United States may be testing or getting ready to test a nuclear weapon, which is total nonsense.

Again, I mean, we need to have people who are more informed about the truth as opposed to blaming us, you know, the Gene Kirkpatrick School, Jean Kirkpatrick, the late Chief Patrick Babester, to the UN under president Reagan, who who famously said there’s a group of critics out there in the west that blames America first. I mean, look at what happened in the late nineteen eighties when when Yeltsin, finally admitted that, yes, for decades, the Soviet Union had been violating the biological weapons treaty. We weren’t the Russians the Soviets were. And that that doubt still exists today. The Soviets and and the the Russian signed the chemical, weapons treaty.

Not no side is supposed to have chemical weapons. But they tried to kill Skripal, in in the UK using chemical weapons. They tried to use chemical weapons against other political, opponents of the of the regime.

Trying to kill Navalny with it. Exactly.

So again, I mean, it’s time for a generation of journalists to start talking about what’s really going on in the world as opposed to blaming America first. I’m sorry. It’s a bit of a rant on my part,

but really annoying. I couldn’t agree more. What impact would a Russian Duma de ratification of the CTBT have. I mean, is that just rattling our cage more kind of effort to manipulate us about, oh my god. They’re gonna start nuclear testing again.

It’s it’s kinda hard to understand what the point is, really.

Well, it’s to rattle our cage. It’s it’s it’s it’s to it’s to scare us again and to get people again running around on the street saying, oh my god. This is this is this is a preliminary to to them getting ready to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. So we need to back off our support of the Kiev government. As I said, they’re already testing.

They’re testing at a level which gives their weapons designers whatever they need to develop new nuclear They don’t need to go to a larger test. And they don’t even have a facility to do a larger test. I mean, the the facility, Novaya and Samya is is designed to do small scale underground tests at this point. So the military value of of such tests is is pretty much zero. But this is all designed to affect Western public opinion and Western governments.

You know, and sadly we keep falling into that trap.

Yeah. I mean, another thing that they tested recently was the Buddha Vesnik, which is this nuclear powered cruise missile, which was, a weapon, concept, a nuclear weapons concept that the United States considered at one time and abandoned because we concluded that it was too dangerous to have a nuclear reactor flying around that might explode you know, with the attendant, you know, radiological mess that it would, create which may have happened in Northern Russia during one of the earlier tests of the Burvest Nick Russians have not come completely clean about what happened with that test. I think it was Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was think it was former under Secret Podcast state Chris Ford who described this, as a flying mobile Chernobyl.

I think that’s right. I think that’s right. Yeah.

But again, I mean, it’s not I mean, I I suppose there might be some advantages because arguably a nuclear powered cruise missile could fly, you know, around the world for a long time, you know, before it came to earth, but, you know, all of these weapons again seem to me more, you know, there’s a Russian expression who got to, you know, scare the children. It’s more Yep. It’s more to to scare us than it is for any particular military purpose. Frank, I wanted to wrap up our conversation. With something you talked about earlier that you and I testified about together in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee a year ago, which was, and we had we wrote a joint statement, which will, we’ll put in the program notes for this show.

For our listeners. And then I want want you to just preview for us before we wrap up completely. The work you’ve been doing on the congressionally mandated strategic posture commission, whose report will have just come out when listeners are listening to this podcast. So first on the what some people have called the three body problem, something you converted to. We are in an absolutely unprecedented situation for the United States in which we have to deter not one nuclear peer and one very much lesser nuclear power as the PRC was for most of the cold war with a very small limited nuclear arsenal.

The, China, military power reports the department of defense and statements by senior intelligence officials on the record and the Congress have made clear that, China is building up to parity with us and with the Russians, the levels that have been set by the new start treaty of fifteen hundred fifty warheads on on each side. So we now have to deter two nuclear peers at the same time. You and I have suggested that that that may need to result in some changes to our nuclear posture, some uploading of weapons We’ve talked about earlier. We downloaded Minuteman ICBMs to one warhead rather than three. We’ve got to follow on to the Minuteman three coming on.

We had to think about how How we structure that for the future? Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser gave a speech to the arms control association in June, in which he said, yes, this is a novel situation, but the United States doesn’t have to match, the, Russ and Chinese weapon for weapon in order to deter both. He left unsaid exactly what he thinks the US nuclear posture should be. Recently, three authors, Charles Glaser, James Acton and Stephen Feddder had an article in Foreign Affairs in which they Started with Jake Sullivan’s speech in a in essence as a point of departure and said Jake Sullivan’s exactly right. We don’t need to do anything to increase our nuclear weapons, force, structure or posture, to deter both Russia and China.

We got plenty to do it right now, but we have to change our nuclear strategy because our current nuclear strategy which is to target Russian nuclear forces, command and control, war enabling, industry, etcetera, commonly called counter force strategy requires too many weapons to hit all the targets. And instead, we ought to just go after you know, big urban industrial areas, population centers, which is commonly called a counter value strategy, and then we have all the weapons we need. Walk our our listeners through what’s wrong with that argument. I think you and I both agree that it is a deeply flawed argument.

It is a deeply flawed argument. Let me go to one point that you made about Jake’s own because I think people and and certainly the that trio, have misinterpreted what what Sullivan said. I believe that I’m speaking for myself, this is not the commission. I believe that we need enough nuclear weapons to hold at risk what enemy, potential enemy leaders value. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

But but a simple weapons count that if the Russians have and the Chinese have y. We need to have x plus y. That is foolish. I think I think that’s what Sullivan was saying. I mean, we need to have what we need for deterrence.

But simple, you know, uh-uh, just just piling weapons on weapons and going back to that old freeze from the the the fifties about making the ruble bounce. I I don’t think that that’s a a meaningful, policy. And again, it goes to your your early point that people don’t understand deterrence anymore. And and that is absolutely totally, starkly, the fact with those three authors who who suggest holding at at risk, the population of of Russia and China. Now now, the those people don’t affect their leadership’s decisions.

The leadership, in fact, ships, millions of them off to prison camps, where they’re tortured and and and it’s subject to nineteen eighty four like, the novel orwellian, surveillance, values to say that what’s what’s what’s what’s a million people? That’s that’s nothing. Deterrence is all about getting into the minds of potential enemy leaders and saying to them, if you do this, if you go to war against us, the world is not going to be as you want it, and you’re going to lose everything that you value. And and the congressional commission of which you spoke makes that point that the way to deter effectively is to hold at risk what potential enemy leaders value. And what is that?

It’s it’s themselves. It’s their support structure, the FSB, KGB. It’s the people’s armed militia that keeps them in power and terrorizes their own peoples that these guys can can run their countries. It’s it’s the key elements of their military forces, and it’s their war sustaining industry. And if you say to them, if you go to war against the United States, if you use nuclear weapons, those things aren’t gonna be gone.

You will not dominate the post cold war world, whatever the post cold I mean, the post war world, whatever the world is. And and so to threaten populations is both immoral and and against the law on on on armed conflict, but but it’s totally meaningless because it misses the mark. And to have people say this is to repeat this non sensical. Well, let’s just hold cities at risk the way we used to. We we did that from forty seven to forty nine only because Those were the targets that we could hold at risk.

In nineteen forty nine, we began targeting those assets that the stalin felt were most important. And and there’s essentially a continuum from then. Mac Demera, of confused everybody deliberately with this concept of counter force and counter value, but Mackamara’s, war plans also focused on what the Soviet leadership valued of themselves, their military, the the the KGB controls.

And that was largely under the influence of William Kaufman, who had come in Yes. From the rand corporation based on a bunch studies he and Andy Marshall and others had done about

Right.

The most effective deterrent would be to go after the forces, not the public, not the population.

So it’s it is a deeply flawed argument. And and these guys are smart enough and have been around long enough to know that it is a deeply flawed argument, and they’re simply trying to pluck it out of the sky to make the case for fewer weapons. The number of weapons that they would like to have back in new start days or twenty ten was a world where Russia wasn’t a threat in China. Wasn’t in a discussion and you fast forward today where you look at what the Biden administration is saying about Russia and China as threats, and you know that’s wrong. And they know that’s wrong.

If they are intellectually honest, and I I leave that point for others to decide.

Tell us about the commission. You know, this is a successor to, a commission that was, set up by the Congress back in two thousand nine, as I recall, two thousand nine ten, which was headed by the late, Jim Schlesinger and, Bill Perry to former secretaries of defense. That looked at our strategic posture. Yours is the successor commission. Give us a preview of the findings.

Well, the findings will will roll out publicly on on the Thursday, October twelfth. And, it was a diverse set of people, which I think makes the fact that that the commission report is is a consensus report all all the stronger. And and the commission recognizes that the world has become dramatically more dangerous over the past, period of time since the the previous two thousand eight, two thousand nine commission, and that as a government, the United States government needs to make decisions urgently to prepare ourselves and our allies to be able to deter effectively into, into the future. And so as as you were were alluding to And as you and I have testified in the past, we need to be able to deter Russia and China simultaneously. We need to have enough weapons to do that.

But we don’t need to have weapons to be able to make the the ruble balance. We need to look at the modernization program, which has been the strategic monetization program that’s been proceeding since the Obama years because that is a necessary modernization of our nuclear forces, which were allowed to age and atrophy over the past several decades, but that program is not sufficient. In the out years, in the out years, we’re going to need more Columbia class. Submarines. We’re gonna need more, B twenty one bombers.

We’re gonna need more cruise missiles, to hang on those, on those bombers. Before the for the period of time when there’s a transition as we move from the old force to the new, we are likely going to have to take warheads out of storage and and put those on our submarine launched ballistic vessels and on our ICBMs. So There’s a clear need to get ready to enhance our forces in in the in in the near term. We’re going to need, a capability in the Pacific theater to deter China from using low yield tactical nuclear weapons of which they, as you, as you indicated, have have large numbers. And we don’t currently have a good capability in theater today.

We are going to have to think for the first time about some degree of of missile defense against small Chinese and Russian attacks. And and that’s that’s that’s something new, but it’s something very important. We need to we need to put more attention against our long range conventional strike capabilities. Our navy can’t get into, areas in the South China sea because of Chinese defenses. Those defenses have to be destroyed if the Navy has to move in.

We have systems that are getting ready to deploy but neither the army nor the navy is moving anywhere quickly enough. We’re gonna need a whole lot more air tankers. To be able to cover the Pacific and Europe at at the same time. And the report says that we need to pay attention to these things. And also to looking at the the capacity we have or more appropriately, we don’t have, to build nuclear weapons and to maintain our nuclear stockpile because many of those facilities eric date date to the nineteen fifties.

I mean, this is these are you know, the movie Oppenheimer, these are from the Oppenheimer period. Because we decided we didn’t need them at the point you made it at the very beginning, that nuclear wasn’t very important to us. So I I think the commission report as a consensus report is a powerful document that that twelve individuals from private life who range from you know, conservatives to very liberal came out and agreed on on eighty one different recommendations. A hundred and thirty one findings and eighty one recommendations. To improve our posture to be able to deter and to prevent war in the future.

Frank, that’s a a great summary, I look forward to reading that report. I think it’s a very important one, and I wanna thank you for being a guest on shielded the Republic these issues are not going away. So I reserve the right to recall you to to service, in a future episode, but thanks so much for for being.

I would look forward to that. We clearly need to write a piece on on NATO. And I wish you, all the the the best is as you work on the National Defense panel, which is which is terribly important stuff. And I hope that what we have done in the strategic posture commission helps inform your work.

I’m sure it will. I know it will. Thanks so much.

My pleasure.