Joe Cirincione on Nuclear Restraint

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

November 13, 2019

JOE CIRINCIONE: We deploy genocidal weapons on a routine basis every day, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That is what America's nuclear force is.

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MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above. I'm Mark Hannah from the Eurasia Group Foundation. Today, I'm joined by Joe Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund and host of the Press the Button podcast. This is a podcast about nuclear weapons and arms control. They do a seven-minute nuclear news roundup because seven minutes is apparently the time it would take for a U.S. president to respond to a nuclear attack. Today, Joe is going to help us better understand the threat of nuclear weapons in the context of the twenty-first century. We dive into the conflict taking place along the Turkey-Syria border as well, including how nuclear weapons play a role in this specific part of the Middle East region.

HANNAH: So, Joe, let me start by asking. Last I checked, we are in 2019. We are in a moment when people are talking about cyber warfare and drones. Nuclear weapons seem very 1970s and ‘80s. Why should Americans be paying close attention to nuclear proliferation today?

CIRINCIONE: Great question, Mark. Thank you very much for asking. And of course, it's understandable. There are more challenges that we can handle, it seems. But of all the challenges and threats we face, there are only two that threaten destruction on a planetary scale, and those are climate change and nuclear weapons. Climate change can destroy human civilization over decades. Nuclear weapons can do it in an afternoon. Climate change gets a lot of attention, and it should. Philanthropies spend a lot of money on climate change, about a billion a year. Nuclear weapons are the forgotten planetary threat. We don't see them. They’re in underground silos in the Great Plains of America. They're in submarines that patrol under the oceans or in remote bomber bases in North Dakota or Louisiana, but they are still here. People understand that the Cold War ended, but they don't quite understand that the weapons remain. We've come way down. There used to be, at the heyday of the Cold War, about 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with most held by the United States and the Soviet Union. We've come down to about 14,000—big strides because of treaties and policies that American presidents and Russian presidents have made together. There are fewer countries now seeking these weapons. The trends over the last several decades have been great, except for now. Since Trump became president, those trends have reversed. Every single nuclear-armed country is now building more nuclear weapons. There were no talks about reductions. There were no talks about talks about reductions. There have always been those people who resisted arms control, who thought we should depend on U.S. military might for our security, not pieces of paper. Even as I say it, it sounds strong, right? It sounds convincing. There has always been this debate—people who have seen compromise and negotiation as close to treason.

Interlude featuring archival audio

CIRINCIONE: What's been different is that those people used to be in the extreme of U.S. policy. Now they are making U.S. policy. John Bolton, in his catastrophic seventeen-month tenure as a national security adviser, was instrumental in whipping down several key pillars of the international security architecture.

New ones like the anti-nuclear deal we had secured with our allies to stop and roll back Iran's nuclear programs, long-standing ones—Ronald Reagan's intermediate nuclear forces treaty that eliminated intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe—he tore it down. And now there's a new one on the chopping block. Right before Bolton left office, he put in front of the president a memorandum to get out of the Open Skies Treaty. This is the most benign pillar you can possibly imagine. Eisenhower thought of this idea. He couldn't get it. George H.W. Bush got it. It's an agreement in which the U.S, Russia, and thirty-two other nations do unarmed surveillance flights over other countries’ territory, so they won't be caught by surprise. The information is shared among all thirty-four participants. But it's an international agreement, and there are some people who don't want international agreements. They think it's tying down America.

HANNAH: What is Bolton’s and others’ argument against the Open Skies Treaty?

CIRINCIONE: That it's outmoded. This is a favorite one, as if you're old, you’re no good. I'm old.

HANNAH: I think you're great, Joe.

CIRINCIONE: I think I’m relevant. It’s this idea that it’s from a different era. Well, we negotiated this treaty in 1992. It was after the Cold War. So the idea is, number one, that these no longer suit American purposes. But it goes back even further. It is this idea—and Bolton and others write about it—that the U.S. is the most powerful country the world has ever known. That is true in many dimensions, but they're talking primarily militarily. And so we need to have maximum flexibility and multiple options, and that is the way we are going to 1) secure our country from attack, and 2) transform the nature of other nations to be more pro-American and less hostile. And treaties will bind us down and strap us to this illusion of global norms. That's their argument.

HANNAH: This is an outgrowth of the “peace through strength” quip, which is kind of a canard because our strength doesn't necessarily make us—it might deter other countries from attacking us, but it also sets a pretty bad example to other would-be aggressive nations, doesn't it?

CIRINCIONE: That's exactly right. Turkey is the most recent example of a country who thought they were militarily dominant, so therefore they can determine what's going on at their borders—that the way to secure Turkey's borders is not through negotiations or some kind of political or diplomatic or regional process, it’s through ethnic cleansing. It’s to get rid of the people that you see as a threat. You just go in, take it over, and kill them—that's what great powers do. We are reinforcing that erroneous norm.

HANNAH: And for countries that do have nuclear weapons. Turkey is not one of them yet—yet, and we'll get back to that—but the United States is setting a pretty poor example by not maintaining a no-first-use policy. Can you explain to our listeners what a no-first-use policy is?

CIRINCIONE: This debate goes back seventy-four years to whether we should have been the first to use a nuclear weapon over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did we have to do it? Was it the right thing to do? Was it morally right to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians for decisions they had nothing to do with? But we did. Since then, no one else has, which is kind of interesting. We've been in a lot of wars. We've lost a lot of wars. Our allies have lost wars. People have suggested using nuclear weapons. No president has ever done it. Not just here—no leader of any of the now nine nuclear-armed countries has ever used a nuclear weapon since. A number of people—for example the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith—say the policy of the United States should be never to start a nuclear war. His bill is actually one sentence: The policy of the United States shall be never to use a nuclear weapon first.

HANNAH: That sounds pretty commonsensical. To somebody who's listening who is not steeped in foreign policy or national security knowledge, why would we start a nuclear war?

CIRINCIONE: Well, exactly. The reasoning in favor of that is we have many, many other tools at our disposal. We are the most powerful conventional military force the world has ever seen. We don't need these weapons. And number two, if you use them, as Colin Powell says, you are crossing a line. You could use this in a battlefield, and you could imagine a scenario where it would be nice to have them. The problem is what comes next. You don't want to make the fallacy of the last move. If you use a nuclear weapon at or near China or Russia, they will have a response, and they are not going to sit there and just take it. So the logic is not to use it. And why? Why do people object to this? For exactly the reasons they objected to international treaties. They want maximum flexibility. They believe keeping our enemies uncertain of what we would use and when we would use it strengthens U.S. hands. I think it increases instability.

HANNAH: You've just said something pretty startling to me: ten, twenty, fifty times as powerful as the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How powerful are the nuclear weapons that exist right now?

CIRINCIONE: In the early 1950s, the United States, and then quickly the Soviet Union, perfected fusion bombs—what they called thermonuclear bombs—which use a small bomb, the atomic bomb, to create the heat and radiation and pressure necessary to fuse isotopes of hydrogen together. This is the basic energy of the universe. It's really remarkable that human beings can tap into, create, and master, in some sense, the basic energy force of the universe—the energy that powers the sun and all stars, that gives us life, that creates all elements in the universe.

HANNAH: Seems very godlike.

CIRINCIONE: Well, and so there's something to that. You get to do this, to not just split atoms, but to fuse atoms. You get a god complex—you think you can use this, and you'll use it wisely. Or if in anger, it's just anger. Things like that. You have now a nuclear weapon that is of unlimited destructive power. There is technically no limit to how much power you can build from a hydrogen bomb—look at the sun—and it's just a question of how much hydrogen you want to fuse. I think the largest bomb ever detonated was done so by the Russians. It was one-hundred million tons of destructive force. Let's get this straight. The average bomb the U.S. drops in combat is about a thousand pounds, about a half a ton. The Hiroshima bomb was 15,000 tons of destructive force. So it's like having a thousand B-52's, but it is one plane. It's one bomb. That's why the people of Hiroshima weren't worried when they saw the Enola Gay flying over—it’s one plane. What could it do? So, that's powerful. That's enormous. That changes warfare.

But then, we went further, and with a hydrogen bomb, you can get, not fifteen tons, but 150 tons—ten times—300 tons. These are enormously destructive. In fact, when the debate in the United States was happening over whether we should build the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller was for it. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Manhattan Project, was against it. The scientific panel that was reviewing this said, “No, don't build these things. These are weapons of genocide. There is no military purpose to them.” Well, we did go ahead and build them. And that's the weapons we deploy. We deploy genocidal weapons on a routine basis every day, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That is what America's nuclear force is—about 4,000 of these hydrogen bombs. The Russians have a similar operational force

HANNAH: That stretches the imagination, and it gets to the point you made earlier about these weapons being capable of planetary destruction, of posing an existential threat to the United States and the world.

CIRINCIONE: Yes, the use of just one nuclear weapon would be a catastrophe we haven't seen in almost a century. The use of ten nuclear weapons would be destruction beyond anything we've ever seen. A hundred nuclear weapons is a destructive power beyond history. It's almost unimaginable. We have 14,000 of these things in the world. Now, you may not agree with me that we should eliminate every single one of them. That's what I believe. I think these are immoral weapons. They serve no military purpose. We should get rid of them, and if we don't, something terrible is going to happen. You may not believe that, but surely you can believe we don't need to have 4,000 in our own arsenal. Maybe we could settle on one hundred. I'll give you five hundred. Let's go down to five hundred. As you reduce, what that means is you reduce the risk of miscalculation. You reduce the risk of use. You lower their value in U.S. strategic planning, and therefore you set a model for other countries. And you reduce their attractiveness to those countries that could build these but have made the strategic and political decision not to. If you don't do this path, if you don't have steady reductions, if you don't get down to lower and lower numbers, more people are going to build them.

HANNAH: There are people who agree with you that exist in positions of power. In fact, every single United States president going back to John F. Kennedy, to Truman—the stated policy of these administrations was the full denuclearization of the world’s arsenal.

CIRINCIONE: That’s exactly right. The very first resolution introduced to the United Nations, which we started, was introduced by the United States, and we called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and pledged to give up U.S. nuclear weapons when we were at a position where we were the only ones who had them.

HANNAH: And even at the height of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan made the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons the stated policy of his administration.

CIRINCIONE: Yes, I was on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee in the ‘80s, and I thought Ronald Reagan was the devil. I blamed him—and many of the Democrats I was working for did—for the arms buildup. That's the last time we built a whole new generation of missiles and bombers and subs. It cost billions and billions of dollars. But it turns out he really did mean peace through strength—this wasn't a trick for him. He really did think nuclear weapons should be abolished from the face of the earth, as he said in his second inaugural address. In his second term, that's exactly what he tried to do. He came very close—he couldn't quite make the deal with Gorbachev at the summit in Reykjavik—but he started a series of arms control agreements that slashed the new nuclear arsenals and broke the back of the nuclear arms race. We have Ronald Reagan to thank for the progress we've made.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: So why can neither the party of John Kennedy nor the party of Ronald Reagan get this done?

CIRINCIONE: I'll give you three answers to that. The first is the conventional one, that there is a strategic debate about whether this is good or not, whether we need nuclear weapons or not. And this, of course, goes way back to people who thought we should get rid of them right away. And people thought, “No, this is how we're going to ensure U.S. dominance in the world.” There are still many, many people who think nuclear weapons are the backbone of American security—as former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said—or the bedrock of our security. They sort of look at it that way. They imbue these weapons with almost magical powers. So you have that, and there are others who say, “No, this is not our greatest security; this is our greatest threat. It's not just that something terrible might happen to us, we might do something terrible. And if you're not worried about us, be worried about South Asia.”

There’s an arms race going on in South Asia that is out of control right now. People are dying on the line of control in Kashmir. Those are two countries that have fought four wars already—India and Pakistan. They have about 150 nuclear weapons each. If they go to war again, every war game I'm aware of means it goes nuclear.

Interlude featuring archival audio

CIRINCIONE: If it goes nuclear, it's not just going to kill several hundred million people in South Asia. Scientists have now calculated in new studies this year that a hundred nuclear weapons used in South Asia would put enough soot and particulates into the air to cloud the earth. That would lower global temperatures by two or three degrees. “Oh, that's not bad,” you might say, “a cure for global warming.” No, no, no. It would kill somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the food crops in the world for two or three years. That induces mass famine. About a billion people would die just from hunger, and of course, when you have that kind of global catastrophe, you're talking about basically the end of human civilization as political institutions crumble in the face of this horrific threat.

So you've got to worry about a war in South Asia that you won't actually feel, that won't affect you—all your cities will be just fine. TV shows will still be on, but you won't be able to get food, those who want it. But that's just the strategic version. It's really driven by the money. We spend about fifty-five billion dollars a year on nuclear weapons and related programs. That's a lot of contracts. I've been in this town a long time. Contractors outnumber peace activists about a thousand to one.

HANNAH: Is that an actual statistic?

CIRINCIONE: Which one?

HANNAH: A thousand to one.

CIRINCIONE: Easily. Anybody who's worked in a congressional office understands who comes to see them and what influence this has on them and the persistence of the lobby. Whether it's the Pentagon saying it or the contractors saying it or your local union saying it or your Chamber of Commerce saying it—I've experienced this firsthand. So, you've got to be really committed to say no to these people.

HANNAH: As the David to their Goliath, how do you try to tip the scales back in favor of, or at least give a voice to, people who are on the side of you?

CIRINCIONE: You find champions. You find champions who are willing to do it, who are not worried about their campaign contributions from contractors, where the jobs—I'll give you a great example: Representative Adam Smith. Adam Smith is now the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, a twenty-year veteran. He knows nuclear weapons. He represents the Seattle area of the state of Washington. The state of Washington has 1,320 nuclear weapons—the sub base. If the state of Washington was an independent country, it would be the third largest nuclear power in the world. Adam Smith knows nuclear weapons. What does he think? What does he want to do? We have too many. We're spending too much. We don't need those numbers. We have other defense needs that could use that money, and we should not use nuclear weapons. First, we have an outdated Cold War policy. He's in favor of pushiness.

And that gets me to number three, about why we haven't done it. Number three is presidents have come in with the right policy. I would say Barack Obama was a great example, and I would say even Ronald Reagan in his second term was a great example. What they've lacked is the plan. How do you do this? How do you actually do this? How do you overcome the resistance of the Pentagon? How do you satisfy those members, for example, from Montana, who are worried about losing the two thousand jobs associated with their ICBM intercontinental ballistic missile base in Montana? Where's the alternative revenue stream you're going to give them so that you can wean them off of their reliance on the revenue they're getting from the nuclear weapons complex? Where are the people you're going to place in power? Does the person you're putting in the Pentagon really agree with you, or are they going to get caught up in the machine and just think their job is to manage the money flow the way most people do when they get over to the Pentagon? So, you've got to have a real plan for doing that, and I don't know any president, even with the best of intentions, who's come into office with that kind of plan.

HANNAH: We've recently withdrawn from Syria, which has caused massive instability as Turkey moves in. One of the issues that's not being discussed is the fifty U.S. nuclear weapons we keep at the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Can you talk a little bit about why we have nuclear weapons in Turkey in the first place and what the dangers might be?

CIRINCIONE: It's sometimes easier to understand the insanity of our nuclear policy by looking back to the days when we went nuclear nuts in the ‘50s and ‘60s and when the policy was defended as absolutely necessary for American security but we now realize was crazy. This was in the day when we thought we needed nuclear weapons for everything, that this was the weapon of the future. We didn't build just missiles and bombers; we built nuclear torpedoes and nuclear depth charges. We had nuclear rockets and nuclear landmines. My favorite crazy weapon is the nuclear bazooka.

We built a two-person, hand-launched nuclear weapon that would go about a quarter of a mile. Why anyone would want to launch a nuclear weapon a quarter of a mile is beyond me. Even the Army figured this out, and they ended that one. But, in that crazy period, we deployed thousands of nuclear weapons around the world. We had a thousand nuclear weapons in South Korea. We had thousands around Japan. We had thousands in Europe. The base at Incirlik, about seventy miles from the Syrian border, is one place where we store these nuclear weapons. Now, we have taken almost all of these out from Europe over the years—Democrats and Republicans, George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. We moved hundreds of them. They took them quietly out of three particular countries in that period. No problem. Incirlik remained. And we have about 150 left. There are fifty in a Turkish-controlled base with about 2,500 U.S. soldiers there. This is insane. This is a crazy place to keep them. Even if you decide for some reason we need to have air-dropped bombs in Europe stationed forward-deployed in Europe, why would you keep them in Turkey—a country that is now unstable, where we have a president who's talking about developing his own nuclear weapons—at a base that during the Turkish coup two years ago was surrounded by Erdogan’s forces and had the electricity cut off. Now you think, well, so what? He's not going to get the weapons right? No. Our bases are not fortresses. They are not designed to withstand a determined assault by the host nation. So, yes, Erdogan could overrun that base. Yes, he could get the nuclear weapons. Would that rupture the U.S.-Turkish alliance? Absolutely. Unless the president of the United States decides he's OK with that.

HANNAH: I was talking to a colleague, a very bright guy, about the research we at EGF do into the possibility of a less militarized foreign policy. He said, “You guys in the restraint community—you have a lot of great ideas, but the one thing you have to be sanguine about is if you draw down, other countries are going to develop nuclear weapons. And then there's nothing you can do about it.” But what I've seen is countries like North Korea and Iran are pursuing nuclear weapons, at least in part, because of aggressive U.S. foreign policy, because they see a nuclear weapon as the ultimate deterrence against U.S. intervention. So, Joe, you're an expert in this stuff. Do our wars around regime change—does our intervention make nuclear proliferation more or less likely?

CIRINCIONE: More likely. These anti-restraint people drive me nuts because their bigger argument is to point to the conflicts around the world, and many of those conflicts around the world are the result of our failure to exercise restraint in 2003, when we broke the dam in the Middle East and toppled a more or less stable regime that was keeping a fair amount of strategic balance. Maybe you didn't like that regime. But look at the chaos we've unleashed, the trillions of dollars, the tens of thousands of lives that have been lost from those struggles. And yes, it is difficult to extract and to solve those now, but it was a whole lot easier back in 2003. But on the specific question of nuclear weapons, you can point to that region of conflict, and you could see this is what spurred Iran to accelerate their program. Their nuclear program had ended in 2003. The U.S. intelligence concluded their nuclear program, which wasn't all that serious, ended in 2003. They wanted to negotiate. We didn't want to negotiate. As Dick Cheney said, “We don't negotiate with evil. We defeat it.” John Bolton was asked what lesson Iran and North Korea should take from the war in Iraq. And he said, “Take a number.” So, if you're one of those states, you go, “Oh I see; you want to topple us. Well, we had better beef up.” And one of the ways to beef up is to develop nuclear weapons. You can look at both Iran and North Korea and see their programs accelerated at that point for the number one reason people get nuclear weapons in the first place: security. And the second reason is prestige. You can look at history and see disarmament and nonproliferation have proceeded hand-in-hand, two sides of the same coin. The arms race and proliferation on the other side have also proceeded hand-in-hand. If the big boys think they need new toys, the little guys want them, too.

HANNAH: Up until the Obama administration in the United States, nuclear command and control was massively outdated. It was literally run on floppy disks. So as part of the New START treaty, there was an effort to modernize that infrastructure. Can you tell me about that effort and how effective it's been?

CIRINCIONE: During the debate over the New START treaty, Obama pledged 88 billion dollars for the modernization of weapons, infrastructure, and programs, including the command and control system that has now grown into a 1.2 trillion dollar program—1.7 in dollars adjusted for inflation, so almost 2 trillion. Well, there are parts of the nuclear arsenal that really do need so-called modernization, that are kind of outmoded. But you have to understand that the government has been making a choice. They have been choosing not to modernize the command and control systems because, frankly, they are less profitable than the weapons side of it, than building new subs and new missiles. That's where the big bucks are for contractors, not in more modern computer software. So, they've been making a choice here of where to spend their $55 billion a year. Better choices, and you'd get better command and control. You could delay some of the weapons programs in order to maybe improve the way we actually control these weapons before you build them.

And Obama was on the path to doing that as part of his effort to get a New START agreement, to continue the Reagan and Bush agreements. He pledged $88 billion to modernize some of this infrastructure and to look at it because these weapons are wearing out. We are at the point where the weapons Reagan built are all reaching the end of their operational life. If you want to keep those forces, you've got to build new ones. Obama never thought he was going to have to keep those forces. He thought New START was just a step toward a real reduction treaty that would slash us down by another third or so, and these reductions would continue.

Interlude featuring archival audio

CIRINCIONE: But the reductions did not continue. The Senate Republicans objected. They have blocked any further talks. Trump is not interested in any further talks. Putin is not interested in any further talks. It's not just a U.S. problem. So, these little acorns of programs have grown into a two trillion dollar oak tree. We are on the hook to spend almost two trillion dollars over the next twenty-five years on an entire new generation of subs, bombers, missiles, and warheads. Maybe we'll get rid of the floppy disks, and maybe we'll get some modern computers along the way. This is a fiscal disaster. If you want to do something about U.S. infrastructure, about a Green New Deal, about health care, about funding schools, yes, maybe get a two-cent tax on the wealthy. But you're going to need to reorient some funds from the existing committed funds, and that nuclear honeypot is just sitting there begging to be diverted. So my advice to any candidate who is serious about becoming president is to start thinking about how you move the money from the two trillion dollar nuclear slush fund to things that will really improve American security.

HANNAH: Why do you think people aren't aware that we have two trillion dollars earmarked for more nuclear subs?

CIRINCIONE: Now we're circling back to where this began. Why don't people worry more about this? Why don't they know about this? And part of it is it's just crowded out by all the other issues, and I understand that. But I'm telling you, of all the issues you have to deal with, this is one that can destroy everything else you're dealing with. So my plea is just for people who are worrying about policy, who are working on policy, to take a small percentage of their time, their resources, and their grant money, and work on this part of it.

HANNAH: Joe Cirincione, thank you very much for joining us. You can find his podcast, Press the Button, at ploughshares.org/pressthebutton, or wherever you get podcasts.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. You can, of course, find our podcast as well at noneoftheabovepodcast.org. If you like what you heard, please do subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple podcasts, Google, and anywhere you get podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.

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