 Welcome to Newport in the winter. Got some snow finally. My name is Dave Pallatti. If you haven't been to this lecture before, I'm honored to be your host for this evening. And I will give you just a few administrative comments before we get right into this fascinating discussion. First off, I'd like to thank Fran from our base family and fleet support center, who's here. She's a co-sponsor, totally encourage you to stop by and see her on the way out. She's got some great materials. Thank you very much Fran for being here this evening. As part of this series, we continue to deliver our lectures in a fashion that's very similar to what Naval War College students get. In fact, this one, David, is probably identical to one of the lectures you give. And the same type of engagement with questions and answers is not only desired, but it's encouraged. So you'll have a nice chunk of time at the end for asking questions. Please hold your questions until Dr. Cooper offers up the time. Please just to keep things on track. Similar to previous lectures, this one will also be for attributions. So just keep that in mind as you ask questions. There is a videotape rolling in the back. Your face isn't on it, but your voice will be on it, just to keep that in mind. And also, please remember that Dr. Cooper is going to express views tonight that are his and his alone. They don't necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the US Navy, or the Department of Defense. Now, for tonight's awesome lecture, we're very fortunate to have Professor David Cooper with us. He is currently the James V. Forestall Professor of National Security Affairs here at the Naval War College. He just recently finished up tenure as the Chair of the National Security Affairs Department for eight years. I think he's quite relieved to be teaching and researching again and not having to do some of the administration. He's researched and published extensively on various topics related to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Prior to becoming an academic, he served for nearly two decades in the Pentagon within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, including as the Director of Strategic Arms Control Policy and Director of Non-Proliferation Policy. He holds a PhD in political science and international relations from the Australian National University and is extremely well-published, as you would imagine, having written numerous chapters, scholarly articles, and a book on non-proliferation at WMD. And he has another book in works right now. Please join me in welcoming Dr. David Cooper. All right, well, thank you very much. I'm going to try to make this a relatively quick overview. I'm not necessarily good at not blathering, so I'm going to try to discipline myself and move through it just to give everyone kind of on the same page and background, and then I want to try to leave as much time as possible for your questions so we can get into more of a discussion about what different piece of this topic is of interest to you. And I will just reinforce that disclaimer. These views and everything that I say are strictly my own. And in some cases, I will be saying things that are relatively controversial, and I'll try to identify the things I'm saying that others may disagree with just to make that clear. So we'll throw that away. All right, let's start with just some basics, some nuclear weapons 101. I mean, this whole topic, nuclear weapons, arms racing, that's so Cold War, right? I mean, this is stuff from movies that you saw, maybe in black and white, Dr. Strangelove, and that sort of thing, Failsafe. This was a big deal in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s, but who really cares about nuclear weapons anymore? And that really has been the story of the last quarter century for 25 years. We haven't really worried about nuclear weapons. They've still been there, but the numbers have been coming down, and then mostly what we've been worried about is not having new countries that we find particularly worrisome, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, getting nuclear weapons, because even a few nuclear weapons in the hands of those sorts of countries could be very worried. But we haven't really worried about things like nuclear arms races for a very long time, for basically three decades. So I put a question mark on the title of this, a new nuclear arms race. I'm gonna remove that question mark figuratively by the time we're done and answer in the affirmative, but let's walk through. So when we think of nuclear weapons, these are the images that inevitably we have at the back of our mind. The terrible images of the attack on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the only time that nuclear weapons have been used in warfare, and the terrible destruction that we know resulted from that. And so you look at these images and it kind of conveys to you the idea of just the horrific power of these types of weapons. And yet these images are incredibly misleading. This is not the result of nuclear weapons. This is an atomic attack. I'm not gonna get into the difference between fission and fusion and all sorts of technical things, but suffice to say that these nuclear weapons would now be considered very small, very crude, these atomic weapons. So let me give a little nomenclature. Kiloton versus megaton. You may have heard of that. That's how we measure the explosive power of a nuclear weapon. And so basically a kiloton is a measurement that simply means the explosive equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. So the weapon that was dropped on Hiroshima was about a 15 kiloton weapon. What that means is that that weapon had about 15,000 times the power of a ton of TNT. What's a megaton? A megaton is a million tons of TNT. So a kiloton is a thousand, a megaton is a million. So I just want everyone to pause and sometimes you hear numbers, but let's scale our minds up between a thousand and a million, a thousand, 10,000, 100,000, a million. So that's how far away a megaton is from a kiloton. So the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons. The largest thermonuclear device ever tested was in the 1960s. It was the Soviet Sarbama test. That was a 50 megaton explosion. The weapon itself was designed as a 100 megaton weapon but was only tested to 50 kilotons. So again, Hiroshima, 15 kilotons, kiloton thousand, megaton million, 50 megatons designed to 100 megatons. Now there's good news. Sarbama was basically a publicity stunt. This weapon was never usable as a weapon of war. It was just too big. It was never deployed. No weapon this size has ever been deployed. But what I want you to get your mind around, if you see here, I'm gonna try not to step in front of the screen here, because then you can't see, but if you come over here, might be hard for you to see. This is Sarbama. These are US nuclear tests from the 1960s and this is the mushroom cloud that came up from it. So this is Sarbama. This is the US thermonuclear tests and in this tiny circle right in there is blown up here, that's Hiroshima. So Sarbama, Hiroshima. So yes, we see the destructive images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and we think that we understand what we're talking about. That is not even an order of magnitude scale of what we're talking about. All right, so let's bring this forward to today. Today, the largest US warhead is just a bit over a megaton, about one point to megaton. So again, to do that comparison, this is the mushroom cloud that that warhead would make. That's Mount Everest. That's the typical height of a commercial jetliner and there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So in that sense, the good news is we're not dealing with Sarbama, but we are dealing with the megaton range versus the small kiloton range. Let's talk about what this means. Now let's look at a smallish Russian bomb in the half megaton range. This would be considered a standard Russian warhead. What you're seeing here is a map of Washington DC and this is what it would look like if the Hiroshima bomb were dropped on the Pentagon. This is not the total lethality, this is only basically the fire blast, but these would be the people who would be killed instantly. This is a standard Russian warhead dropped on Washington DC. The difference as you see is it takes in the entirety of Washington DC, that one standard size warhead. And of course, again, this is just the blast radius in terms of the firestorm. You would have radiation and far bigger effects. So again, just in terms of giving you a sense of scale of a Hiroshima size event versus a single Russian standard size warhead on the nation's capital. Now unfortunately, I gave you good news about Sarbama. Now I have some bad news. The bad news is there are unverified reports that Russia's new canyon nuclear armed autonomous torpedo, which was unveiled to great fanfare by President Putin as one of his doomsday mega weapons is slotted to carry a 100 megaton warhead. Twice as big as Sarbama. This is truly a doomsday machine. These are unverified reports. Some of them are based on accidentally leaked documents by the Russians. So we don't know if this is true or not. We don't know if this is an attempt by the Russians to say they have something more powerful in the works than they really have. However, videos have been released of the actual torpedo and it is essentially an autonomous submarine. So it is perfectly plausible that a warhead of this size could be put on such a device. That autonomous torpedo is said to travel at speeds of over 100 knots and therefore essentially any coastal city in the United States would be vulnerable potentially to that system. And Canyon is not the only new doomsday weapon that Russia is planning to deploy. And whereas we really don't know about that, among the others, they are much further along. They are beginning to deploy and we have fairly high confidence in what we're looking at. So now, taking center stage, let me introduce the Satan 2 missile. Satan 2 is a road, mobile, heavy missile of the sort we have not seen since the Cold War. The Satan 2 missile carries enough multiple independently targetable re-entry warheads that according to the Russians, a single Satan 2 missile deploying its warheads would be capable of utterly destroying the state of Texas in its entirety. So a single missile with all of those warheads that it carries could kill Texas in its entirety. All right, so that's nuclear weapons 101. Well, with me, sun's still shining outside. Let's take a deep breath. But this is important context to understand what we're talking about. How big a problem is this? Why is it happening and what are we doing about it? Let me turn to that. That's not gonna help. Oh, come on, a little humor here. Unfortunately, that isn't gonna help. This is not a problem where local solutions are going to work. This is a global problem, if you will, or becoming a global problem. So let me get into where we've been in recent years, where we are, and where we may be going. It's hard to believe it was only a decade ago, literally a decade ago next month, that President Barack Obama heralded in a wave of optimism that nuclear weapons were on the way off the stage of humanity. He announced the U.S. was supporting a initiative to make a world free of nuclear weapons. We would be taking steps, we'd move towards it. It would combine further reductions with the Russians, bringing other nuclear powers into the process and stopping countries like Iran or North Korea from getting those weapons. And there was a tremendous amount of optimism. As a matter of fact, President Obama essentially won a Nobel Peace Prize for this initiative. 10 years is a long time. What are the concerns? Well, the concern for a long time hasn't really been on the existing nuclear powers. It's been on the idea of nuclear proliferation. And the big fear has been nuclear tipping points or nuclear spirals. What does that mean? That means that if enough new countries sort of violate the non-proliferation treaty that says no one who doesn't already have nuclear weapons can get them. At a certain point, other countries are gonna come in and the tipping point is a tipping point where the NPT treaty just sort of unravels very quickly. Or you have the idea of proliferation spirals where it's in a particular region where you have a spiral of one country in the region gets it and then it creates a regional dynamic. And this has been a concern for a long time. Now the good news is, well, let me take you back and show you how long it's been a concern. I actually have a musical interlude for you which I bet you weren't expecting at this conversation. So back in the 50s and 60s there was a guy named Tom Lehrer. And he was basically the late night satirist of his day. And he did a song right after the Chinese exploded their first nuclear weapon and became the fifth country to acquire nuclear weapons. If we can roll the tape, let's listen to Tom Lehrer's song. A few weeks ago, the American Press reported that China had exploded a nuclear bomb. Now this was a great leap forward for China, of course, but it was an even greater leap forward for the American Press because for the first time they called it China instead of red China. For 18 years they've been hoping it would just go away. And for the first time they called it a bomb instead of a device. So with China possessing the bomb, it makes us wonder who's next. First we got the bomb and that was good cause we love peace and motherhood. Then Russia got the bomb but that's okay cause the balance of powers maintained that way. Who's next? France got the bomb but don't you grieve cause they're on our side, I believe. China got the bomb but have no fears. They can't wipe us out for at least five years. Who's next? Then Indonesia claimed that they were going to get one any day. South Africa wants two, that's right. One for the black and one for the white. Who's next? Rills getting tense, once one in self defense. The Lord is our shepherd, says the psalm. But just in case, we better get a bomb. Who's next? Brig is next to go and who knows? Maybe Monaco, we'll try to stay serene and calm when Alabama gets the bomb. Addictions at that time were that within a decade or so probably 20 or even 25 countries would have acquired nuclear weapons and indeed many countries were pursuing them very actively, there we go. So the good news is that didn't happen. We have had nuclear proliferation but it's been very limited. We have Israel, we have Pakistan in India, we have North Korea, we believe we have still a problem with Iran but that is debatable but the fact of the matter is that we have not had that sort of highly proliferated world that people were worried about. We took steps, we imposed with the Soviets the non-proliferation treaty and basically made clear to the rest of the world that this was something everyone needed to get on board with and we've had a pretty good run at enforcing that non-proliferation treaty. So in that sense, that really is the first piece of good news and perhaps a cause for optimism. A second cause for optimism. There are remarkably less nuclear weapons in the world now than there used to be. At the height of the Cold War, the peak inventory globally was at about 70,000 nuclear warheads, 70,000 nuclear warheads. I'm not gonna go back to megatons and kilotons but that's 70,000 individual nuclear warheads today it's estimated that we're down to under 15,000. Now by any measure that is a remarkable reduction in the overall number of nuclear weapons so that is another potential cause for optimism. Now it's not gonna surprise you, I've laid out the case for optimism. I think that there is more reason to be concerned and pessimistic than there is to be optimistic. In terms of proliferation, we've been worried about nuclear tipping points and we've been remarkably successful at avoiding them. However, unless we actually solve this North Korea situation and despite the wave of diplomacy that we've seen, I and most of the experts in the field are skeptical. Likewise Iran, we are keeping the lid on the Iran nuclear deal for the moment whether that is a permanent solution is shall we say debatable and I would say it's a dubious proposition. If we have a situation where Iran gets a nuclear weapon, the Saudis have essentially declared that they will get a nuclear weapon too. The Saudis have begun what's called a hedging strategy. The most oil-rich country in the world has decided it needs nuclear power. The Saudis also have very close relations with Pakistan. So the Saudis probably could get a nuclear weapon if they wanted to. Iran, I'm sorry, Israel has nuclear weapons. However, they have a policy of ambiguity. They could step out of the closet, declare that indeed they do have nuclear weapons, reveal they have a robust program, take other steps. And indeed, if that happens, there's a possibility that other countries such as Turkey or even Egypt might feel compelled in a regional nuclear arms racing spiral to jump in. By the same token, if North Korea continues along its path, if China, and I'll talk about China in a moment, continues to grow its own nuclear arsenal, then it's quite possible that Japan and possibly even South Korea or other countries in the region could follow suit. So even though we have not had a case of rapid proliferation over the decades, it is not inconceivable that in at least one region that you could have a rapid proliferation spiral. It's also not inconceivable that if it happens in one region that it will spill over. That if the NPT is seen to be basically crumbling, that people aren't gonna wait for it to crumble in their region. So that, I think, is a cause of pessimism. Ironically, I don't think that's anything near the worst of our problems. Whereas for the last 30 years, we have thought about non-proliferation as the key challenge of nuclear weapons. I don't think that is the key challenge in the decades to come. In the decades to come, I think the key challenge is a return of great power nuclear competition, otherwise known as arms racing. At this stage, we are seeing a situation where all of the major nuclear powers for the first time in decades are undertaking massive modernization of their nuclear weapons programs. Modernization sounds not so bad. Modernization, that's kind of when you traded your VHS player for the DVD player and then you went to the streaming service. That's modernization. These modernizations, though, are not modernizations in the sense of replacing one kind with a slightly better, newer, and longer-lasting kind. We are seeing a move into modernization that features entirely new types of systems, such as that heavily-merved heavy ICBM, such as that nuclear torpedo, such as, I believe, more significant within anything what's called hypersonic maneuverable glide vehicles, which are going to, I think, have a more profound impact than the ICBM, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile did, when it was introduced in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's going to require us to completely, basically our missile defense will be quickly rendered obsolete, and then we will either need to reconceive our missile defense into something much more ambitious, which those who we are defending against will find much more threatening, which could, again, trigger what we call action-reaction cycles. And in fact, the politics are there. What I've described is a technical arms race, a technology-driven arms race, but this is part of a larger transition in the international system. The U.S. national security strategy has said we're returning, we had a bipolar system, where it was the U.S. and the Soviets in the Cold War, then we had what's called a unipolar system, where the U.S. was sort of the unchallenged lone superpower. The national security strategy says we're returning to an era of multipolar, meaning various great powers, all competing with one another. Well, all of those great powers are nuclear powers, and all of those nuclear powers are engaging in an expansion, and in some cases potentially a dramatic expansion of their nuclear weapons programs, and in one case, that of Russia, Russia has adopted an overt doctrine of nuclear coercion and belligerency. So I'll just read this, because I think it bears reading. This was in his address to the Federation Parliament. President Vladimir Putin said, with the new system, there is no limitation, he was talking about one of those doomsday weapons, there is no limitation, it can attack any target through the North Pole or via the South Pole. No missile defense system will be able to withstand it. That's a statement of technology. Now there's the political statement. We made no secret of our plans. We spoke openly of what we wanted to do. They, us, they kept ignoring us. Nobody listened to us, so now, so listen to us now. This is an open statement of nuclear belligerency. Now again, who knows what the purpose of that is, who knows where that's going. However, it's something we certainly need to pay attention to, and in fact, President Trump is reported to have responded immediately afterwards, if you want to have an arms race, we can do that, but I'll win. So it's not just that there are the technical manifestations of return of nuclear arms racing. There are the overt political maneuverings associated with great power rivalry and a nuclear arms race. And then there's China. China is the only one of the five nuclear weapons states allowed to have nuclear weapons under the MPT that has been growing its nuclear force. We and the Russians and the Brits and the French have spent the last three decades reducing our forces. That's how come we went from 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world down to under 15,000. The Chinese, though, have been growing and modernizing their force. Now the thing is, no one really worried about that much because, one, their force was so much smaller than ours, and two, we didn't see China as a real strategic enemy. Now that we're moving into where that's a question, China is developing a full scope nuclear force, a triad, as we call it. They're developing a new stealth long range bomber to deliver strategic nuclear weapons. They are delivering, they are developing a new class of ballistic missile submarine and they are developing a new class of heavy-merved ICBMs, their own version of that Satan, too. By the way, we don't have any heavy-merved ICBMs. We don't have any road-mobile ICBMs. So this is something that is a concern. Now that said, China still has a relatively small nuclear force, we think, but it's growing and we don't know. What are these funny little blobs? This is what's called the underground Great Wall. The Chinese nuclear weapons program has dug thousands of miles of tunnels and we don't really know what's in them. We do know China has enough fissile material to have produced far more nuclear weapons than the hundreds that we think they have. There have been Russian analysts who have suggested that the Chinese actually have many more nuclear weapons than they're claiming, possibly as many as the US and the Russians. That is not a widely held view. It's a very debated point. One side of the debate says, well, the whole point of having a nuclear deterrent is to let people know they better not mess with you. There's no point in having a nuclear deterrent if you hide it. As a matter of fact, one of the great lines from Dr. Strangelove, if anyone has seen that movie from the 60s is basically Dr. Strangelove says, but there's no point in having a doomsday machine if you didn't tell anyone you have a doomsday machine. On the other hand, there are plausible reasons why China may be hiding this for the moment for a big reveal at some point in the future. We just don't know and I don't wanna speculate. That said, what we do know is China has been building up and is continuing to build up. So if we look here, here's at the unclassified level where we think the nuclear weapons are. We in the Russians are just a few hundred less than when this chart was made because we've continued doing reductions under new start. Everyone else is just a little higher than this is about two years old because they've continued to build nuclear weapons. And again, I highlight the estimates of China are about 270, but some estimates go up to as much as 12 or 1400. It's just, we don't know and China has not talked to us about that. So let me get to the last point before I finish up and that is this idea of what I would call transregional or multipolar nuclear arms racing. Only nuclear arms race in history was a bipolar nuclear arms race. The US and the Soviets during the Cold War. And a bipolar arms race is actually a relatively stable situation. They tit, you tat, but everyone is kind of looking what do they have, what do we have and no one wants to fall behind and everyone's sort of balancing and that can lead to these action reaction cycles. They get this so we feel we need that, vice versa and that's how we got up to 70,000 nuclear warheads. But it was still a pretty stable system. And the idea of deterrence and this idea we had of assured destruction that as long as the other side knew that whatever they did, they would be destroyed in the end in any case. That you could take out three quarters of our nuclear weapons in a first strike doesn't matter, one quarter of our nuclear weapons are still enough to wipe you off the face of the earth that that would be stable. And we were arms racing but we were arms racing against each other. The problem now is we have a multipolar situation. So those action reaction cycles get a lot trickier. Let me give you some ideas of what I'm talking about. Pakistan is a nuclear arrival of India. India is a nuclear arrival of Pakistan. India is also a nuclear arrival of China and vice versa. Pakistan is arms racing against India but India is arms racing against China. What does that mean? That means as Pakistan does things and provokes India to do other things, China gets nervous. The US is a nuclear arrival of China. The US is a nuclear arrival of Russia. Russia and China are nuclear arrivals. So how does action reaction work? Well, let's take an example from the headlines, the INF Treaty. President Putin told us more than a decade ago, I can't stay in the INF Treaty. Why? INF Treaty is intermediate range systems. Well, US INF can't hit Russia. The vast majority of Chinese nuclear weapons are on intermediate range systems. China's not in the INF Treaty. The reason Russia was cheating on the INF Treaty was basically because they couldn't not respond to China and China wasn't in the INF Treaty. Work this all out. So for example, we are doing things to improve missile defenses with Japan because of North Korea. Japan's freaking out about North Korea. Japan's openly talking in their society about maybe we need nuclear weapons of our own at some point. We don't want that. We're like, no, no, no, calm down. We're giving Japan missile defense and saying, okay, we're gonna give you missile defense. The North Koreans, sure, they have nuclear weapons, but we can handle that. But guess what happens when we're giving Japan missile defense and when we're moving missile defenses into South Korea? Who freaks out? China freaks out. Because China's saying, well, wait, if you have missile defenses, those could be used against us too. So when you look at Russian and China developing hypersonic glide vehicles, as I talked about, they're doing that because they're afraid our missile defenses are going to threaten their retaliatory capability. So they feel they need to do something. The problem is hypersonic is gonna require us to take missile defenses to the next level, meaning literally the next level, outer space. You can only defend against hypersonics with the space-based missile defenses, which will freak Russia and China out all the more. Action reaction cycles. The problem is this time, what some pair does because of each other will freak out other people who will have to respond to it because you do not have a nice stable US, Soviet, hey, we're arms racing. What did you do? What do I do? It's this multipolar situation with multiple nuclear rivals. Indeed, it's even been suggested that the US may come to the point where not only do we not try to convince Japan to get nuclear weapons, but that we're gonna want Japan, that we're gonna want South Korea, that we're gonna want Germany, that we're gonna want Australia to have nuclear weapons. Well, because they're on our side, I believe, in the words of Tom Lerra. Now, this is not a world that's inevitable, and this is not a world that is even necessarily probable. It depends on a lot of different factors, mostly political factors, and whether the US, China, Russia, India really do start developing great power competition or whether we can figure out a way to settle that down. The weapons aren't gonna cause any of this, the weapons aren't the cause, but the weapons are gonna be a very serious symptom. I'll end on a downer of a note. I know you probably think I've already been on a downer of a note. The problem is, even though this isn't inevitable, it's by no means implausible, and I'm not even sure it's improbable. And yet, we really don't know how this is going to work. There has never been a multipolar world in the nuclear age. The two most stable international systems, unipolar and bipolar, are the only ones we've ever known in the nuclear age. We are now moving into a more traditional international system, which is always thought to be less stable, and that's multipolar competition. And so unfortunately, the tools that we have right now are simply not up to the task. So most of them have ceased to exist. One of my controversial statements last year was that by the time I gave this talk again this year, I thought the INF Treaty would be toast, but I said now, hey, that's controversial. Many people don't agree with me. Unfortunately, well, the INF Treaty's toast. That basically leaves the new START Treaty as the last piece of the bilateral US-Russian architecture. It expires in 2021, and I think the chances of it being extended are 50-50 at best. Even if we do extend it, well, guess who's not a part of it? China, India. So I don't think that's really likely. The last piece of news and the worst piece of news is that the newest effort to deal with this, I would characterize as dangerously unserious. The response has been to basically pursue a global ban on nuclear weapons that no nuclear weapons state or close ally of a nuclear weapons state has supported or frankly will support. This is the sort of feel-good thing that you do when you're not doing anything serious. And the problem with that is I may not be right, that this is our dangerous nuclear future, but it's plausible enough we should be thinking seriously about what serious things we can do to manage and mitigate that situation. And at this point, we're not. We're not at all. And so with that, and almost exactly on time to leave a half hour for questions, let me turn to questions and ask any part of this, please, let's turn this into a conversation. Good evening, thanks for that lecture. Question, the principles of mutual shared destruction, won't that still apply in this multipolar nuclear arms race you were describing? Yes. So one of the great debates is how automatic and stable is deterrence. So now I'm gonna, sorry, the war college, I'm an academic so I'm gonna get a little academic on you. That kind of depends on your theory of the matter. So we have some, what are called neo-realists who have argued, such as the late Ken Walts and others, that nuclear weapons create an automatic deterrent situation. That even just a few nuclear weapons, no one's gonna mess with anyone that has even a few nuclear weapons. And so Walts created a great controversy by saying, we're getting this all wrong. Let's not fight proliferation, let's encourage it. If nuclear weapons made the world unsafe for a US-Soviet war, then let's make the world unsafe for an Indian-Pakistani war or any other war. That's a minority view. And as a matter of fact, the majority view goes something like this. Asymmetric multi-polar deterrence becomes incredibly complex. So just kind of as a mathematical proposition and assuming that no spirals or turning points happen and it's just the countries we have today, if you look at whose rivals and whatnot, you've got something like 20-something nuclear relationships just today. And if this world comes to pass, we probably will have new entrants. So the answer to the question becomes how automatic is deterrence and how much can we rely on it? And unfortunately, this is where the historians have sort of gotten us all a little worried. Because we came out of the Cold War feeling pretty good about ourselves. It's like, hey, look at that. We had this multi-generational arms race and struggle, ideological struggle, and it all ended without a war. That must be because that deterrence worked. The problem is the historians tell us that, well, it did work most of the time, and then a few times we got really, really lucky. And the problem is that in a nuclear world, it needs to work every time, all the time, forever. Whoever the leader is, whatever the disputes and the various combinations are, and there's a lot of feeling that, wow, that, yes, deterrence clearly is a powerful thing. It clearly matters a lot, but at a minimum, the argument is it doesn't happen automatically. At a minimum, we need to set up a system where we can manage deterrence. Now, the confidence in deterrence has become so questioned on both, if you will, from the hawks and the doves, that both on the left and the right, if you will, the hawks and the doves, for at least the last decade, if not more, the argument has been as this history has come out, we can't rely on this. We need, this is just, we are playing, if you'll forgive the pun, Russian roulette, and at some point, it's not gonna work out, but one nuclear holocaust will ruin everyone's day. So they've argued we need an actual permanent solution. And the one side has said there's only one permanent solution, the total abolition of nuclear weapons. The only solution, we can't rely on deterrence, we need to get rid of all nuclear weapons. And the other side, that was the doves, by the way, the hawks have said, well, sure, that would be great. We'd be all for it, but you're naive, you're out to lunch. It's not gonna happen, it's not practical to think that you're going to get all these countries to give up their nuclear weapons. So the hawks say, but therefore, we need a different solution. We need to go into missile defense all out. We need to solve the problem by basically making the offense no match for the defense. At which point, well, now, we don't need to rely on assured destruction, we just go back to kind of the Reagan idea of a shield. And the doves say, well, we love that. That would be great, but you're naive. You're out to lunch, that's not practical. You can't actually do it. And the sort of depressing proposition I will throw out to you is what if they're both right? And if they're both right, and it'd be great if one or the other could be proved right, because then we solve this problem and we come out from the nuclear shadow. That would be wonderful. But if they're both right, then we need to sort of muddle and manage our way through it. And that's a much tougher proposition. So everyone can hear. Pretty awesome to you is that that middle row that kind of really touched on the IEA or the idea of public deficit or problem that has implications beyond all orders. So my question is, can there be a middle row between the left and the right that you just described where we can go ahead and invest in the technology and the modernization and failsafe that backstop if you will idea while still pursuing the start to or start three eventually. I mean, you painted a pretty dismal view on the idea of the treaties and how they fell apart. But at one point, those didn't exist and everybody got to the table and were convinced that that was the right one. So is there that still possibility with the multi-polar world today being the one variable that I see between the 50s and the 60s and today? I sure hope so, because that's what my book that I'm writing right now is about to say that's kind of where we need to go. No, no, and here's why. I mean, the bottom line is, so again, back to the hawks and the doves, the nuclear abolition versus the full up Star Wars sort of missile defense. Both sides say that not only are you naive, it's not gonna work, but both sides say you're worse than naive because in trying to get there you create a dangerous situation. So the hawks to the disarmers. The problem is as you come down and you come down, there'll be a point where you'll get to such a low amount of nuclear weapons that cheating becomes really viable. I mean, suddenly, if everyone's down to having 100 nuclear weapons, someone with 500 nuclear weapons where they hid 400 of them in a tunnel suddenly becomes the dominant nuclear power and can kind of pop up and say, aha. As a matter of fact, it creates what's called deterrence and stability. If I only have 100 nuclear weapons, well guess what? It's not crazy to think I can take those all out of a first strike and then win the war. So the hawks say not only isn't it feasible, it's downright dangerous and the doves turn around and say to the hawks, well the same is true of missile defense because even if you could build that missile defense that we don't think you could build, even if you can, you're not gonna get it like that. And at a certain point where you're building it, if others realize, uh-oh, they're gonna build it, well now you're about to make their nuclear weapons obsolete. What does that suggest they do? Well, that's gonna put them in a situation where they need to use them or lose them. Again, what if they're both right? The answer to your question in that middle way, that's kind of what we did in the Cold War. Arms control was never a solution. It was trying to sort of manage these things and create a process and figure out what was gonna create instability and try to just sort of, as a matter of fact, arms control is one of the most hated ideas by both the hawks and the doves. The hawks hate it because it's constraining things and if you're gonna be in it, you gotta be in it to win it. The only solution is kind of nuclear superiority plus defense and the doves hate it because you're basically saying, yeah, we're living with nuclear weapons, we don't think we're gonna get rid of them. We're sort of managing around the edges. Now, it was the organizing principle that everyone could kind of get behind in the Cold War. To get to your question, the answer is none of those Cold War tools work because the whole Cold War structure is there's two countries, so we're gonna do the arms control between us and then there's everybody else and we're gonna do non-proliferation for them and that's the IAEA's job, go look out for those other people and then we're doing an arms race. Well, it's either bilateral or it's everybody. What we're gonna need here is to reinvent arms control, which is again the topic of the book I'm writing, to be a multipolar approach to arms control or what in the business we call a plurilateral approach. So not 60 or 70 or 100 or whatever countries, but we're going to need at a minimum the US, Russia and China and that's not really the minimum because China's not gonna sign up to this if India's not brought in at some point and Russia's not gonna sign up for it unless France and Britain are brought in at some point and so at a minimum we're gonna need India, France and Britain at some point but the core Russia, the US and China but even that gets complicated because India's not gonna be able to do this unless someone takes care of Pakistan for them. That's what I was saying. I don't know the answer. But everyone says well what's the, show me the magic treaty that does this. We I believe are in a situation very similar to the situation we were in in basically 1958. Things are now changing and we haven't even gotten our heads around what this all means and really all I'm trying to do in giving these lectures now and again and writing the book I'm writing is to say we need to start thinking about this stuff again and we need to start realizing that the old tools that we've had that have worked so well are probably not up to the new environment we're heading into and that we don't know how that's gonna work in the new environment but ban treaties and or missile defense are at a minimum probably not going to be easy to do and in reality I don't think in our current political environment or the foreseeable political environment you're gonna have support for either of those kind of maximalist solutions. So I think we're gonna be muddling through but no the IAEA, China if we're getting to serious great power rivalry no one wants the IEA involved that's gonna have to be between the actual nuclear rival. Will we speak about the expert level such as yourself and we speak about the heads of state top leaders in the countries that do possess these weapons and you think going back to Hiroshima can you quantify at all the degree of conviction of top leaders to move in either direction and what is inhibited having this kind of instability or stability? Well I think one of the inhibitors is that nuclear weapons are actually a very useful tool of national power from a leader's perspective. It's very easy for us to think well what's my big concern? My big concern is that the world doesn't suddenly go crispy and that's all she wrote but from an international politics point of view it's not just that nuclear weapons deter other nuclear weapons to be honest that's the easy part. Why Russia is all in on nuclear weapons and the reason they're all in on nuclear weapons is their conventional forces are incapable of defending Russia against either NATO or China and certainly on a two front war. Russia is using nuclear weapons to make up for the fact that they have a conventional deficiency and nuclear weapons are actually pretty cheap in terms of the bang for the buck you get. The irony is it's the exact opposite situation. So in the Cold War Russia was constantly calling for a no first use pledge that no every country will say we will not be the first one to use nuclear weapons and it was the United States that said no we're not gonna say that because our concern isn't that we're gonna invade you our concern is you're gonna invade us that you're gonna have more powerful conventional forces and you need to know that yes if you do that we will use nuclear weapons and I need to actually convince you of that and this gets to now I've stayed away from deterrence logic but there's a whole logic of credibility. Charles de Gaulle famously said France needed its own nuclear weapons because he could not rely that a president of the United States would sacrifice New York to save Paris. A Chinese general in 1995 very much echoed that when he said well the US needs to remember is it really willing to sacrifice Los Angeles to save Taipei. So a big part of what nuclear weapons are about are preventing are compensating for conventional weakness and preventing nuclear coercion because Russia now has thousands more small tactical battlefield nuclear weapons than we have and President Putin has started reminding us of that. So it's not just that nuclear weapons are to stop other nuclear weapons President Putin in his mind either believes or wants us to believe he believes and this is the problem with deterrence it's all about perceptions. So it's really all just a mind game thing. So he either believes which would be very scary or he wants us to believe he believes that he now has a battlefield advantage and so the Russians have adopted a doctrine of escalate to de-escalate and what that means is we will start using tactical nuclear weapons the minute we think we're losing even if it was us who started it. So it gets very strange very quickly in this world of nuclear strategy and nuclear doctrine but the fact of the matter is the narrative that we had tried to convey for decades was nuclear weapons are really only good to stop other people from using nuclear weapons against you they're not really very good for much and that's why we're getting rid of them and you should not get them. And the problem we have now is we're not getting rid of them anymore. We're recapitalizing, we're the last to start recapitalizing but the Chinese are recapitalizing the Russians are recapitalizing the Indians are recapitalizing by the way all the criticism of our missile defense the Chinese have a big missile defense program the Russians have a big missile defense program the Indians have a big missile defense program. So the problem is these are actually from a national point of view very useful weapons and the only great powers that don't have or think they need nuclear weapons for all intents and purposes today are Japan and Germany and that's because we've told them that's okay you basically can have ours if you need them we have your back and a big question in all this is how long they will continue to believe that now that's actually some leverage we have there's nothing that scares Russia more nothing on the planet than Germany with nuclear weapons Germans scare Russians in a way that no one else does for very recent historical reasons and the exact same is true when it comes to China and Japan there is nothing that would scare China or bother China more in the world than Japan armed with nuclear weapons so in a weird way that's kind of leverage for us I mean one of the things we have to say hey we better not let this all spin out of control because those folks are kind of happy now but if things spin out of control sorry I know that's and again believe it or not I'm trying to keep this as undocked or strange lovey as I can without it sounding too crazy thank you for the lecture I think one of the responses to your response to this last question one of the essential elements of that response was that for a long time a lot of these countries saw the United States pursue a heavily militarized foreign policy and so since they have a conventional imbalance they saw nuclear weapons as defense against that policy or they pursued nuclear weapons to provide them with defense against American policy so my question speaks to really this essential element of the conundrum which is trust and central to the whole idea about arms control is verification regimes so my question really is will there ever be a time whether it's pluralistic deterrence or arms control agreements where the international environment we live in will have enough trust through verification regimes to actually achieve any progress down this recommended path or whether there'll just be a continuation of burying them in the holes in the ground whether they're in China or in North Dakota or wherever they are while we continue to write paper that doesn't have the trust. My answer and this is now sort of double super duper just my own view and certainly controversial but my feeling is that we are not going to have anything dramatic certainly in terms of reductions and probably even in terms of caps or bands on new technology until the shape and contours of whatever this new international system we're moving into becomes more obvious because the problem is in the face of sort of a transitional international system where no one quite knows what's going to happen that's where trust is the hardest because everybody is then inclined to well let's just you know let's hedge our bets here once that system settles down and if we make it through I mean we all think of arms control and we think about reductions and we think about the INF Treaty and we think about the START Treaty and the new START Treaty all of that happened basically at the very end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s when basically the Soviet Union fell apart. For the decades before that we had very modest treaties the SALT Treaty basically the SALT Treaty went into force and that's when we kept growing to the 70,000. What the SALT Treaty did do is give us a process to talk helped us understand each other's deterrence theories and logic and helped us actually head off some things that everyone understood would be the most destabilizing so I'm you know if anything if we could get probably not a ban but at least a cap on hypersonic delivery vehicles you know okay everybody gets 50 that's not enough for a first strike or maybe even 100 but you know if we don't have something like that we're probably back to I mean this is gonna be the new delivery vehicle that makes everything else obsolete so we're gonna need as many as they have and that's how that all works so yes I think there might be a scope for that but not in the way we think of it start treaties and what not I mean the first thing the Chinese won't talk to us the Chinese position on engaging in any sort of arms control or even transparency discussions goes something like this well you're so big meaning we in the Russians and we are so tiny how tiny we won't tell you but tiny compared to you trust us what's in all those tunnels we don't wanna talk about that just trust us you're so big and we're so tiny you keep cutting and you keep coming down and when you've come down enough that you're near us we'll tell you and then we can all talk that's been the Chinese position for basically about the last 20 years the Russian position on tactical nuclear weapons where they have an overwhelming and overwhelming majority is what we should only talk about strategic nuclear weapons where by the way we have an advantage and we say yeah but we're worried about those tactical too so we'd like to do both and in the 2002 Moscow treaty and then in the 2010 New START treaty we did a Charlie Brown in the football twice where both times the Russians said we'll tell you what let's do the strategic treaty now and then we'll do the tactical after and both times guess what happened we did the strategic treaty now and we said okay we're ready for the tactical and they're like let's think about that a little more because they have an advantage over us so they haven't been willing to negotiate with us on that so this is just all a long winded way of saying we need to get back to the basics of just sitting down and having a process where we're all admitting that we're gonna talk about what we're doing why we think we're doing it and where the dangers might be and where we can all live with well maybe if we all don't do that and we're nowhere near having that process so I mean I guess my answer is something along the lines of think modestly because right now we're sort of nowhere so we're gonna have to start and we didn't start with INF and start we started with very modest things and worked forward and essentially just tried to manage the problem till the political situation changed and that's probably what we're heading into so again right now with a transition in the international system is China gonna be our peer rival? Are we going to be adversaries? Is there a new Cold War? Are we containing them? Is Russia really gonna ally with China? It's a stark enemy or might over time Russia realize that its interests are more in the West? I'm looking out over a decade, two decades, three decades no one knows the answer to those things many academics are having a field day writing books talking about where all this might go but we don't know until that settles down I don't see a big comprehensive solution to this I think it's more just a problem we're gonna need to manage. Even sir I think you were coming into well I guess you work here so we're coming to see you lecture so. I'm sorry. My question is what do you see as the main challenge for the United States when dealing with Russia and China states that don't have democratic forms of government where they can kind of plan 30 years in the future where we kind of flip it back and forth every four or eight years so how do we combat that kind of how they have one vision for doing things? So that's always been a challenge I mean democracies are not meant for efficient continuity on foreign policy or anything else we are in a particularly fraught political period now we've been in a political period for at least a decade where bipartisan consensus has been rare so we're in a particularly challenging moment in terms of the effectiveness of our democracy to sort of do that sort of things but that's just, that's how it is and to be honest the other systems have challenges too you have Russian generals saying that their big concern is essentially color revolutions being fomented by the United States meaning their own people may rise up we have China that has a model that kind of has to have economic growth it's like a shark that dies if it stops swimming so I mean all of these countries have their challenges I think the issue is how do you not get caught up in sort of the drama of right now and think as we say here at the War College a bit more strategically and kind of look at the structural issues and figure out how to work through that and I think it's gonna be a challenge we're certainly going to need either our alliance system to be strengthened and to go back to much more what it was like during the Cold War or if we're not going to desire allies then we're gonna need to figure out what that means and what the alternative system is right now we have an alliance system that we're expressing ambiguity about ambivalence about and that's worrying to me if only because either we need if that's the system we're going with then we need to be doing everything we can to shore it up and if we've decided that's not the system then we better be figuring out what's gonna replace it so yeah I mean we've got some challenges but the Chinese have challenges the Russians have lots of challenges I mean Russia is not the big threat we're facing if we get through the next 20 years Russia is aging they're in demographic decline they have essentially an extraction economy they do not have an economy that's sort of innovating and what not so I mean Russia is facing Russia right now I mean President Putin is sort of realizing that this is this is the moment where they have maximum residual but Russia in the end is gonna need to decide to be a junior partner of China or to sort of take a balancing and be kind of more neutral between China and the West or to join the West I mean Russia's not going to be able to play in this game looking out 20 or 30 years unless something very drastic changes and there's real questions about China so you know I again pontificating on where all this goes I don't know I'm just focusing on the fact that while everyone is heavily armed and arming even more with nuclear weapons that's a piece of this puzzle we need to keep our eye on because again that's one that if we get even a little wrong it goes very wrong Thank you Dr. Cooper for a thank you so a couple of admin notes I see Dr. Terry Rorick sitting here you'll see him in maybe six weeks Terry is that right yeah so if you wanna learn about the denuclearization of North Korea so dive in just to one country Terry will be with us we've got quite the lineup coming up we're so you know anything I've said Terry in terms of specifically looking at the Korean problem Terry Rorick is a national asset he may be one of the smartest people in this area in the country so just needed to say that and I'll add that I'm standing between two national assets as you probably got from the lecture tonight so as you look at that lineup there there's a lot of really cool topics coming up and then surprise surprise Admiral Harley challenged me to get Mr. Jim Stockdale the son of the legendary Admiral James Stockdale to come and I think we're gonna squeeze him in on May 14th but I will get that date out via email and social media that is quite the moving and really heart wrenching lecture that you'll get from him in the discussion so we've got six more not five more until the end of the year and if you didn't get a chance to sign up on the sign up list right as you exit on your right or left they're up on the glass wall we are tracking who's participating if you wanna get the cool certificate for participating in about 70 to 80% of these I'm gonna push it down to probably 70 you'll get a nice, cause we want you to come and there's some new folks in the audience too welcome for any of the new students and families that checked in anything else to close on? Please drive safe it's really cold out the roads are gonna be slick and icy and we will see you in a couple of weeks, thank you.