 My name is Clark Murdoch. I'm a senior advisor here in the International Security Program. I was the project director for Project Adam and also the principal author of the main text of the report. We followed to this what we call a competing strategies approach, which I found to be very invigorating and challenging exercise. We hired three independent think tank teams headed by my colleagues, Wright Keith Payne from NIPP, Bridge Colby from CNAS, and Barry Blackman from the Stimson Center. And we asked them within a common analytic framework, which we developed together, analytic framework being what the general security environment would look like in 2025 to 2050, and some framing assumptions about the kinds of threats, the kind of opportunities might exist in that time frame. We had a little bit of a debate about whether that was too far into the future and there was too much strategic uncertainty. And I have to say that all of my colleagues to the right gamed me on this a bit because they brought in the time span to say, well, we'll talk about 2030 and beyond, not all the way out to 2050. And then even though they had very different views on the role and value of US nuclear weapons, their recommendations for the force posture for 2030 and beyond were pretty much the same. As one of them noted, not much changes by 2030 when you're talking about strategic modernization. I said, OK, guys, you've got me. Look out a little bit further into the future, and which they did in their final papers, all of which are attached as appendices to the report. And then we had a debate. Then I formed my own views. We had another debate. I consulted with other subject matter experts outside and then wrote my final report. So what the report really consists of are the three independent papers, which each of my colleagues will speak to independently. And then my final recommendation, so how to look at the issue in the context of the report. So without any further ado, I'll turn to Keith. He will speak briefly on what he talked about. OK, thank you, Clark. We were basically looking at a series of recommendations for force posture, as Clark said, looking at a number of decades. So my colleagues and I tried to go to basics and identify what are the fundamental drivers of force posture requirements. And we identified two fundamental drivers. One is the US set of US goals as they exist now and are likely to endure for several decades. And the second is the context, the threat and the geopolitical context within which the United States pursues those goals. So those were the two fundamental drivers that we identified. And with regard to the priority of goals, none of those were too surprising. We identified deterrents, extended deterrents for allies, the assurance of allies, limiting damage directly or indirectly, in the case deterrents ever fails, and finally non-proliferation. Those were the goals that we identified as priority goals. And what we looked at was how each of these goals can have its own set of requirements. They don't all overlap. So it's very difficult, in fact, possible to identify a single force posture that is essentially optimized for each of those goals. The goals have entailed different requirements and in different contexts as well. So what we look at is sort of a sliding scale of requirements per goal per the threat environment. We looked at the threat environment in some ways as now self-evidently highly dynamic. And we can go into details about that if anybody likes of why we determined the threat environment to be highly dynamic. But as I said, I think it's probably self-evident at this point, in contrast to the Cold War years. So we looked at a highly dynamic threat environment and even an environment within which the priority of US goals can shift. And some plausible contingencies, extended deterrents, could be the goal of greatest priority at the time. If deterrents ever fails, then damage limitation is going to be self-evidently the highest priority goal. So you can have a shifting set of priorities, even though these are the traditional priorities, within a shifting threat environment. If that all sounds like three-dimensional chest, it sort of is. So within that set of goals, within this very dynamic threat environment, we were trying to find a metric that became a fundamental metric for defining the requirements for nuclear forces. And that metric for us, and the work that my colleagues and I did, was the ability of the US force posture to adapt to a large number of possible contingencies in a great context of change. How do you have forces that can adapt to deter in one context? In that context, there may be a wide variety of threats, and you want to be able to determine many of them. How to extend deterrents across a wide variety of potential threats to allies? How to assure allies in a wide variety of potential contexts? And so the metric that we identified as a priority metric for identifying US nuclear requirements was the adaptability of the force posture and planning. And so when you identify a fundamental metric like adaptability, therefore you need to say, so what does that mean? So what does adaptability mean? What does that descriptor mean? And we identified it in two different ways. One, flexibility. And by that, we meant the flexibility of the US response options, essentially saying that the United States needs a variety of options to cover the spectrum of goals within a broad potential spectrum of threat contexts. So the adaptability of the force depends on the variety of options to address those goals, deterrents, extended deterrents, assurance, damage limitation, and proliferation to address a variety of goals in a range of contingencies. So the flexibility of the US force structure became a fundamental metric. And then the resilience of the force structure. So what's resilience? So resilience is the ability to withstand change, the ability to adjust to adverse changes, either technical or geopolitical. So we essentially went from this sort of large opening point, what are the basic drivers? The basic drivers being US goals within the context, the context being highly dynamic and subject to a great deal of change, which then suggests as we sort of neck this down as fundamental metric for US forces should be that they are adaptable, which means they need to be flexible. They need to be resilient to provide the best deterrent possible, the best extended deterrent possible, the greatest assurance for allies possible, the best options if deterrence ever fails, God forbid, and then supporting non-proliferation. And so just to not take this longer, Clark, than you'd like us to, what are the attributes of an adaptable force structure that's necessary given the threat environment within which we now live, and we identified several characteristics that would facilitate adaptability. Let me just list those. And some of these will sound very familiar. Some of them are somewhat new. One is survivability. Another is range. Forward deployment is a third. Capability for prompt or delayed response is a fourth. The capacity for variable payloads and yields, accuracy of the systems, a range of delivery platforms, and the readiness to provide new nuclear capabilities. Didn't call for new nuclear capabilities, but called for the readiness to provide for new nuclear capabilities if necessary. And if deterrence fails, if deterrence fails, a range of capabilities for direct and indirect damage limitation for US society and for allied society. Why is that? Because deterrence can fail. Swight your best efforts. So those were the basic drivers and the basic logic of our position that we presented in the report. And it led to the various recommendations that we gave, which I'm going to take time to go through in a minute, but just leave it at those opening remarks. Bridge. Great. Well, thanks very much, Clark, and thanks for the opportunity to participate in this fascinating study. I'll just run briefly through the key themes of our study, the CNAS contribution. From our point of view, there are two basic dynamics that are driving the increasing relevance or salience of nuclear weapons in the geopolitical environment, and particularly US nuclear weapons, leading to a greater relevance than envisioned in the 2010 nuclear posture view or in many other studies and official documents that have been released in recent years. The first is the increasingly competitive and contested geopolitical environment. I don't need to remind this audience that Russia is increasingly assertive and revanchist. China is increasingly assertive in the South and East China seas and around its neighborhood. Of course, we still have rogue states or whatever, like North Korea. And more broadly, the kind of traditional power structure of the world is changing. Traditional US allies like Europe and Japan are declining in relative power. And other states that are rising, if you will, are not clearly aligned with the United States. We'll see what happens. But basically, the world is a kind of more uncertain and contested place than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Second are some military technological developments that are unfolding. One is the increasing relevance of nuclear weapons in the strategies of potential US adversaries. Here I'm thinking, for instance, of Russia's so-called escalate-to-de-escalate strategy. Putin and the Russian elite have made very clear they're reliant on nuclear weapons. North Korea is obviously increasingly relying on nuclear weapons that it's now obtaining. And China is sort of a TBD, but my estimation is that we're likely to see nuclear weapons playing a more significant role, albeit more limited than in the case of Russia over time. But equally importantly, we also see, I think, going forward, and here's one area where I disagree to think with Clark, is a declining margin of US conventional military superiority. I think basically this is a function of the exploitation of the technologies and practices associated with the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs by a much broader array of countries that includes China and Russia as well as a number of others. Now, the Pentagon is commendably trying to extend US military advantages through things like the third offset strategy, and it makes a great deal of sense, and I hope it succeeds, but it's unlikely to lead to a restoration of the degree of military advantage that the United States enjoyed in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. So these are the kind of basic, I think, background conditions that US nuclear policy needs to take into account. Now, going forward, I think US nuclear forces and policies should continue to be oriented on deterring not just nuclear attack, in my view, but all forms of major aggression against ourselves and our allies. Now, despite some particular language, I think that's even in the 2010 NPR is still the US standard and has been, more or less, since 1945. Here I assume that, and we assumed, that the US would and should continue to maintain its extended deterrence structure at post-1945 international strategy. Now, while we think, you know, I think that nuclear weapons should be used to deter this any kind of major aggression, including particularly nuclear weapons. I also think that, and we said in the paper, that nuclear weapons should be reserved for extreme circumstances. I like the terminology from the 2010 NPR. I actually like it more than last resort, which we can talk about if of interest, and that they should also promote stability. But, you know, basically as a status quo power, which I think we should be a status quo power, probably speaking, US nuclear forces should be designed to preserve and defend this status quo as far as it pertains to our extended deterrence structure. Now, I think the logical corollary or consequence of this is that US nuclear weapons should and need to do more than threaten unhindered devastation. Obviously, the United States, it's not very credible if the United States threatens to loose apocalyptic destruction that might in the case of Russia, or certainly would in the case of Russia, and to some extent China, call forth a matching response over something less than a very central or very grave interest. Also, it's a bad idea, right? In addition to it, it being incredible. It's also not something we would want to be forced to. So the key, I think, going forward, and this basically remains the same as it has been for some time, certainly since the emergence of vulnerability with the Soviets, the key is for the United States and the National Command Authority to have plausibly usable options that would deter adversary escalation, ideally, or if need be, compel or persuade them to de-escalate a war that they've made nuclear. And alternatively, especially out kind of in a decade plus out, such options should be able to provide the United States with strikes that could be initiated in a first use contingency, since I do think the US should reserve the right and the ability to use nuclear weapons. First, again, in extreme circumstances to respond to aggression. This is particularly important in the context of the Western Pacific, although if we don't do enough in the Baltics, it could come about there as well. The logic of the nuclear policy I'm talking about is to have nuclear options that when used would convey resolve, basically the willingness to cross the nuclear threshold, but also the result to continue escalating in a meaningfully painful way to the adversary. Ideally, that would also allow for the positive influence or rectification of the conventional flight that was the presumed precursor to such nuclear use. That is, if an adversary is using nuclear weapons to knock us in the conventional flight, we should have nuclear weapons that could respond to at least even out that effort. But that is not necessarily and meaningfully convey the resolve and the willingness to tolerably de-escalate. So a kind of a discriminant or flexible nuclear policy. The problem is that today, I think the US nuclear force, especially going forward, is not optimally designed for this, which is not particularly surprising as we've been focused on reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, not without good reason. But I think the changing military, technological, and strategic circumstances in the globe are making that less sensible. And so there are a couple of things that I'll just touch on briefly that I think we'd wanna do to make this nuclear strategy a reality out into 2030 and beyond. One is a C4ISR architecture that can support and enable this kind of posture, which means the ability to communicate with forces, communicate with the enemy, to have good intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance so that you can see what you're striking and understand it quite clearly and conduct battle damage assessment, et cetera, et cetera. The idea of this kind of thing is to make the National Command Authority thinking about using nuclear weapons as smart and knowledgeable as possible because part of the idea of this is to enable the National Command Authority to conduct a limited nuclear war, but also enable it to do it in a way that does not excessively court further escalation. I don't wanna sound sanguine here, but this is the kind of thing that you wanna give the National Command Authority as controlled capability as possible. In terms of weapons, I don't see, I'd recapitalize the triad, I'd build a long range bomber in relatively large numbers, I'd build a long range standoff option, but one of the things I would do is I would push to have much more variability across the force in terms of weapons effects without getting into specifics. It seems to me ideally we would have platforms and forces that could perform a variety of effects from every or at least most different platforms. I don't see why that makes a lot of sense to only have really, really large options as we currently do. I'd also look at things like the earth penetrator capability. Obviously there are technical restrictions or kind of technical boundaries on what we can get away with on this or what we can develop on this, but for me, this is a classic stability problem. This is not a first strike weapon really. Basically you don't wanna have Kim Jong-un or somebody else be able to go underground and think he can have sanctuary from US forces, so I think you could restrict the numbers that you would employ. This is also not a new capability, the EPW has long been in the US force and a validated requirement, but the basic logic here is that if we're gonna pursue the national strategy that we've been pursuing for some time and I think we should, we need to have a military capability that adds up to that and that means having a effective deterrent. Now a lot of this is gonna be a conventional military that hopefully continues to have advantages, ideally major advantages, but it also means having a nuclear force that can credibly say to potential adversaries, don't escalate against us and don't conduct major aggressions. It's just gonna be too costly, risky and dangerous for you and I think for some time we've obviously been able to kind of sideline nuclear forces, you know, fortunately in a lot of ways because of our massive conventional advantage, but I think as that declines, we need to be more frank in Canada about what we need from the nuclear force. It doesn't require revolutionary changes in our force, but it does require some that may be uncomfortable, but I think it makes sense, thanks. Very. Well thank you. My colleague Russ Rumbau and I were the odd men out in this group and we have a rather different view. To summarize, we believe that US security benefits by seeking to minimize the importance and roles of nuclear weapons and perceptions and actions of foreign leaders. For the United States, nuclear weapons serve only to deter nuclear attacks on ourselves and on our allies and that maintaining US conventional superiority is the key to US security. However, by emphasizing nuclear modernization or nuclear weapons, this raises, this, excuse me, harms our conventional superiority by raising the prospect of false alternatives and by its direct effects on budgets and on the training of US military personnel. That is, it takes time away from things that they might otherwise be doing. In our recommendations and summary are the US should work diplomatically to constrain nukes as circumstances permit. We should adopt policies and doctrines and work politically to strengthen the nuclear taboo and we should adjust the force postured modernization programs to reduce expenditures. Let me just go into a few of those. Probably where we disagree most strongly is the question of whether the US can maintain conventional military dominance. First, US security, of course, depends mainly on political leadership, on diplomacy and on economic instruments of power, both public and private. But it also depends on our conventional military superiority, which is quite high because of the scale and the longevity of our investments and advanced technologies and the systems that have resulted from that and on the size of our forces compared to potential adversaries and on the quality and training of our people. Obviously, I can't do everything we might wish to accomplish in the world, but we can defeat any conventional threat and we should be able to maintain this superiority in our view for decades if we're willing to allocate resources to do that. The Russians to some degree and the Chinese certainly are advancing in their military capabilities, but they remain inferior and I'd be happy to debate that later on. And so maintaining our current technological and qualitative and quantitative edge should be the highest priority. And this will be hampered increasingly by the nuclear budget and particularly as we get in the procurement phase of that budget in the 2020s. US policy, we believe the primary goal should be the elimination of nuclear weapons from all nations. That's not gonna happen anytime soon, but I would never say never. People said never about the end of the Cold War and it ended. There has, taking a long view, there's been considerable success toward this goal over the past decades. There's been reverses in the last few years, but there's no reason why in principle at least this can't be turned around in the future. It obviously requires the resolution of fundamental political conflicts, the relationship between Russia and Europe, Russia's place in Europe, and the relationship between China and its neighbors and the US and China's respective roles in East Asia. But these are problems that perhaps are solvable over time. Until that time, until these ideal goal is achieved, we believe the US should stress its firm commitment to retaliate for any nuclear attack against itself or its allies. And we should be clear that no matter how small the yield, no matter what the target or no matter what the range of the weapon that launches a nuclear weapon against us, our forces or our allies, we will retaliate. We don't have to state the size of the retaliation, the target of the retaliation or anything else, but we must be firm that we will retaliate for any nuclear attack. But we should also make clear that this deterrence is the only purpose of US weapons. Making that clear will not change Russian nuclear doctrine, of course, but establishing that principle is very important that we should stick to that. In my view, and that's all we need to do because that's the only purpose our nuclear weapons serve, that conventional weapons cannot serve. And in the interim, we should do what's feasible to strengthen the non-proliferation regime that's completing nuclear weapon free zones and perhaps expanding them, reforming the NPT so it has some meat against potential withdrawals from it, giving the IAEA greater resources and strengthening safeguards on civilian facilities, increasing the transparency of the P5 and other nuclear weapon states, conducting experiments on verifying limits on warheads, which is the next step in arms control and supporting public and private efforts to stress the humanitarian consequences of any nuclear war. I believe it's very important that we continue to remind people that even small nuclear wars could have catastrophic consequences. And to close the implications for forces of a policy like this. In our view, as the current generation of nuclear weapons ages out, we can reduce the number of weapons unilaterally. I don't know if it's to 1,200 operational weapons or 1,000 operational weapons as counted by START rules. And remember that means many more weapons since bombers only count as one weapon, but in fact bombers carry many weapons. And keep perhaps another 1,000 weapons in reserve. To our view, this force is large enough to inflict so much damage on any adversary that the retaliation threat would be credible. We would maintain the triad even with this smaller force, perhaps eight to 10 subs. We'd go down to two minute man wings and maintain minute man with minimal expenditures for some time. I don't believe there's any need to replace minute man to the degree to which it's being placed, it's planned to be replaced now. The current force can be stretched with minimal expenditures into the 2040s. We support the new bomber primarily for its conventional role, but it should be given the nuclear capability. We would phase out tactical nuclear weapons as their service lives expire and we'd downsize plans for infrastructure modernization. We would take those savings and divert them to much more relevant capabilities to protect our security. Most importantly, the survivability of our command and control system, continued R&D on defenses and deployments of those defenses, missile defenses as they mature, cyber, EW, and the next generation of advanced conventional technologies so we can maintain our military advantages. Thank you. Thank you, Barry. I'll try to be brief, although perhaps not any briefer than my colleagues during that time. While I'm probably closer to Barry than I am to Bridge on how rapidly U.S. conventional superiority will erode in the coming years because maintaining conventional superiority is really, really expensive and we're the only country that spends that kind of money so I think that the superiority will go on considerably longer, I think, then. The bridge might maintain. I draw almost exactly the opposite conclusion that Barry does on what is the implications of conventional superiority by the United States. To me, this lowers the nuclear threshold because it convinces our would-be adversaries to increase their reliance upon nuclear weapons or to acquire a nuclear weapon in order to be able to maintain the autonomy that we enjoy by our possession of nuclear weapons. So I think U.S. conventional superiority stimulates a desire to proliferate and stimulates a desire to rely more heavily upon nuclear weapons and their strategy. And there's certainly nothing in the behavior of Putin's Russia over the last several years that would dissuade me from that belief. So my belief is that if our conventional superiority lowers the nuclear threshold and encourages others to think about the attractiveness of escalating to the nuclear level, we have to counter that by denying them, as Bridge would say, the attractiveness of the nuclear response to our conventional superiority. And that means having a robust set of discriminant capabilities able to respond proportionally at the lower levels of the nuclear escalatory ladder. That's the fundamentals of deterrence, is that you're able to respond proportionally in kind so as to dissuade your adversary from taking the move in the first place. So my first belief is that like Keith, like Bridge, I believe that we have to develop a robust set of discriminant nuclear options to be able to not dominate at every level of the nuclear escalatory ladder, but be able to respond in kind. The second thing I believe, probably more strongly than any of my colleagues do, is the necessity of maintaining a robust set of forward deployed options for nuclear weapons. People tend to forget that during the Cold War, when deterrence and extended deterrence really matter, and we're not there yet, but when they really mattered and our allies and friends had real security anxieties, our declaratory policy was one thing. But what we really did was forward deploy lots and lots of nuclear weapons. We had 7,000 nuclear weapons forward deployed in Europe at the pinnacle of the Cold War. In Asia, we had almost 1,000 deployed under Korean Peninsula, about 3,000 total in the Asia Pacific Theater. So when the Soviets at that time looked out at their borders, they didn't just see a ring of American men and women in uniform, they saw a ring of nuclear weapons. And they knew that any major conventional aggression on their part would go nuclear because all the weapons were there. And their use would be stimulated by the actual conventional aggression and would leave the next stage of escalation, actually nuclear escalation up to the Soviet Union, which hadn't yet gone to the strategic level or the US Soviet level. So my belief is that right now, the South Koreans may know this, as public opinion polls indicate, but when they're concerned about the potential for attacks from North Korea, they want either one forward deployed US nuclear weapons or two their own nuclear weapons. And those become very clear choices because, as Barry would point out, gotta have a nuke to deter a nuke. And having nuclear weapons on your territory is the best guarantee that if you are attacked, a nuclear weapon will be employed. So my belief is that while I think bombers are important and they're an important hedge capability, what's really important are nuclear capable aircraft that can be deployed forward on the territory of our allies. So that the share, the burden sharing that's involved is not just simply our extending a nuclear umbrella based in the continental United States and trying to put the umbrella over our allies, but actually taking the umbrella over and stamping it down on their territory so that the ally and the allied publics share the risk of nuclear escalation. And that makes a much stronger commitment and therefore has a much stronger deterrent impact. So my emphasis on the strategic posture for 2025 and beyond is one, you have to have discriminant nuclear options and two, you need to be able to have a robust forward-deployed nuclear weapons if the event should call for it. So there are other important differences, but there are other important similarities, but I'll stop at that point, turn it open for questions. Yes, state your name please. What I'm hearing today is a lot of regurgitation of thinking that was very popular in the Cold War that we could engage in a low-level nuclear war and not find ourselves in a catastrophic escalation that would sweep other countries, other continents into a nuclear war. At the time in the Cold War people eventually decided that they couldn't guarantee that escalation wouldn't happen so they dug up the atomic mines in Europe. They gradually pulled back tactical nukes. What do you think has changed in US Russia dynamics that we could now foresee a low-scale nuclear war that wouldn't escalate? And separately, could I hear a discussion about the need for the long-range standoff weapons? What gaps would it plug? What are the envisioned uses where it would come into play? Thank you. I'll try to answer that briefly and then ask my colleagues if there's something they want to add to it. Of course, people were concerned about nuclear escalation during the days of the Cold War, but there was never an employment of a nuclear weapon and there was never an escalation from an employment of a nuclear weapon. People started reducing their nuclear inventories and the full range of nuclear inventories when the Cold War was over. That's when people started getting rid of their nuclear weapons. Not before when the Cold War was over and there was no longer a Soviet Union to deal with or an ideologically driven conflict to deal with. So the point that I would make is that one of the reasons why nuclear weapons weren't employed during the Cold War and there wasn't any escalation during the Cold War is that the major competitors thought very hard about these kinds of things and made many, many moves in advance, made communications to each other, had deployments that would suggest that there would be a rapid escalation and because the deployments, 7,000 nuclear weapons in Europe, indicated there would be a rapid escalation, there was no nuclear war in Europe, nor major conventional war. I mean, one of the things that as people talk about a world without nuclear weapons, we know what a world without nuclear weapons includes. Looks like it's World War I and World War II. With regard to the question about limited options, go back and check your history and the commentary on the discussion. I don't know of anybody who can credibly change that. Nobody can credibly guarantee that once nuclear weapons are used, if that were to happen, that there would be a cap on the escalation. Nobody can promise that. I don't know of anybody who ever has promised that. So if you can find someone who says, why do you now think that escalation is impossible with low-level weapons, you're pushing on an open door. Nobody promises that. Ridge doesn't promise that. I certainly don't promise that. Clark doesn't promise that. I'm sure Barry doesn't promise that. I promise it. Okay, so there's one outlier. No, no, no, no. That's not part of the discussion. It never was in 1974 when Dr. Schlesinger introduced a Schlesinger doctrine which brought in low limited nuclear options. You never promised that there would be a cap on escalation. No, that's not what it was about. It was trying to make sure that control of escalation would be possible. In other words, if someone uses a nuclear weapon against you, what you don't want to do is have to respond with some large PSIOP, Single Integrated Operational Plan to use the alternative, some large unconstrained strike. That's ridiculous. And you don't want to have capabilities that are only capable of that or that have that as their only potential. You want to have very finite limited options so that if you have to respond, you have the option of responding in a very limited way so that you can control escalation if it turns out to be controllable. And you hope very much that your ability to contribute it that way helps to keep escalation from going to what Herman called the top run of the escalation ladder. So nobody's promising that escalation could be controlled, but the limited options that Bridge talks about and Clark talks about and I talk about are an aspiration so that if nuclear war happened, someone does use a nuclear weapon, you have the option of at least trying to keep a cap on the escalation by not going to some very large indiscriminate response. Well, I'll just say briefly because I think Keith put it very well. I mean, I think actually the point, Rachel, is actually explicitly not that you're trying to get out of mutual vulnerability. Actually, the limited nuclear options, I think, is Keith rightly said in the Cold War. And again, today are designed to make that threat to total escalation more plausible. The problem is that if you have a nuclear doctrine where you have no other option than a total response, your an aggressive and risk-taking adversary can definitely see the possibility of using a nuclear weapon or threatening to use a nuclear weapon and having you back down because you don't have a good option. We know this, the Russians are thinking about this right now and I think there's good reason to think the North Koreans are thinking about it right now. So basically the limited options actually sort of connect the ladder so the adversary can't say, well, there's no way they'd use it so I'm gonna step into that, I'm gonna call his bluff and step into that gap that's created on that ladder and then push the onus of escalation back onto the other side and then they have no good resort. I mean, I think the other thing to bear in mind why it's actually particularly relevant today is, I mean, the Cold War, there was a very severe military problem but political resolve, although obviously always an issue, was less of a problem because people did fear getting under the communist boot. Today we have the possibility of war breaking out with countries that we don't have this kind of totalistic ideological opposition with, the fear that once you go communist you never get out of it. And so I think limited use is actually potentially more plausible and again, I think the Russians are a good deal. So you need a military strategy that is more plausibly limitable as Keith puts it. On the LRSO, I think the value of the LRSO comes from several things. I mean, one is that we want the next generation bomber to be penetrating but we know that, based on what we hear from the Air Force and others, the capabilities of low observability and stealth are under pressure. We also don't know how successful the LRSB would be and how much it could penetrate. Could it hit all the targets you'd possibly need or want to hit? So I think it gives you a kind of a redundancy which is part of the issue that tried and of course, long range standoff attack is something that we're doing anyway. So we're not talking about a radically new type of weapon. I also think it has a cost imposition value in the sense that it puts additional air defense problems on the potential adversary. I have, no one knows what would happen if a nuclear weapon would be used and no one can have confidence either that any nuclear use would lead to total escalation or that it could be controlled and I certainly didn't mean to imply that the US policy should be to send out all its weapons in retaliation to any strike. We can reply with one weapon or two weapons or as many weapons as matches the provocation and hope that the conflict can be ended at that point. But I've made, throughout my career, I have studied crises, nuclear crises in particular and the level of information, the level of confusion at the highest political levels is the most prominent factor that comes out of this. I think of the Pueblo crisis when North Koreans seized the Pueblo and incidentally, we couldn't respond, Clark, because the only ready aircraft we had were equipped with nuclear weapons at that time. Disproportionate response to be sure. Senator Russell, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee calls up Lyndon Johnson and he says, for God's sakes, do something. And Lyndon Johnson said, I am, I'm trying to find out what the hell the Pueblo is and why was it doing what it was doing? And that's kind of the, because there's so many parts of the bureaucracy, so many parts of the military and I just have my, I just think it's the extraordinary risky to try to maintain any kind of limited nuclear response and therefore urge measures to maintain our conventional capabilities. For example, if you think of the Russian threat to the Baltic states, I fully support pre-deploying US armored force, the US armored equipment there and exercising it with battalions, that'll deter the Russians far more than adopting any kind of nuclear response to what they might do. Hank Gaffney, for 13 years from 1966 through the end of 1978, I did all this stuff. And of course, all of these things are all the old arguments. We never, do you remember Jim Martin? Did you know Jim Martin? He and I used to have long arguments, whether there was any such thing as de-escalation and all we could go to was nobody could predict anything like that. On the limited options, I had the opportunity to go with Schlesinger to the two hearings he had in March and April of 1974 got to correct the transcript after it was over. And he had created these LNOs, 10 to 20 weapons and Muskie, who was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at that time, said, when are you going to use those? He said, I'm not gonna use them. I just want the Soviets to know that we have an option in case they think they could get away with 10 weapons. And he had to go in through that with Muskie four different times. I'm not sure if Muskie ever caught it. And I see Clark has his Mini Nukes article out today. It's utterly absurd. I mean, talk about the only small weapons we were talking about was a simple replacement of the 80 inch round, which seemed, turned out to have a funny other effect because the old 80 inch round was a heavily clumsy thing. And by the way, 7,000 weapons, actually 7,227 because I had the custodial duty and NATO about that kind of stuff. 1,000, at least 2,000 had no launchers. The honest Johns warheads and the Nike herk because we couldn't go below 7,000 for the political reasons. So all of these are the same old arguments. And I'm on Barry's side. Let's remember, the only threats Putin has issued is if NATO makes a massive, massive invasion into Russia. That was the 2010 doctrine. It's the 2015 doctrine as Oleg Ollaker talked about here at CSIS about a year ago. So let's keep this all in perspective. Do you want to say something to that, Bruce? Yeah, maybe. I think I'll pass on that. Well, no, I think what's interesting is that we all agree that you need limited response options, right? And I think we all agree that's important for deterrence. And I think Hank's point about what Schlesinger said is exactly right. And I think there were interviews with him, not to get in the Cold War history, but interviews with him at the end of the Cold War where he said, yeah, I mean, basically this was designed to couple US strategic forces to the security of Europe and to make sure that the Soviets didn't see a gap. And I think the basic idea, kind of stepping back on the weapons issue a second is like, do you think it's possible that we could face an adversary who might think that taking that risk and then either threatening to use nuclear weapons or actually use nuclear weapons in the midst of, say, a Baltic contingency, could that happen? Could you see Putin doing that? And I mean, if you go through the pages of military thought, as I know other people have, the Russians are thinking about this and they've got the nuclear force to back it up and they've got a lot of discriminant and intermediate kind of capabilities where they could put us in a real bind. And I think the logic that really all of them, maybe a less buried, but I think at a fundamental level the same is to say you can't use a limited capability in extremists and get away with it. And just to, I mean, a classic example, I mean, the Berlin crisis was probably the closest along with Cuba was the closest the world got to catastrophe, but in Fred Kemp's book on Berlin 61, he has a conversation where Khrushchev is arguing with the rest of the Politburo about what the percentage level of going to nuclear war is. And Khrushchev says, well, as long as it's 5% or under, we should push them in Berlin. And it's sort of like, well, Khrushchev is obviously known as kind of a gambler. But, you know, Putin took Crimea and is in Ukraine and has local conventional superiority in the Baltic. I mean, I think on Barry's point, absolutely you want a conventional capability, but you then, you don't want to then create the Clarks, the point Clarks pointing to, which is, oh, well then, if we just escalate to the nuclear level, they have no, no good response. And just kind of one other thought, sorry to go on, is it's interesting that Clark and I have different analyses of where the conventional superiority is. But I think we agree on the appropriate nuclear doctrine, which maybe says that it's not that sensitive to the military technological environment that actually they're sort of over-determined. Yeah, something to that, if I might start, and that is going back to Dr. Schlesinger's introduction of limited nuclear options in 74, a document called MISM 242, which is now in classifying, but he wants to look at it and look at it. What Dr. Schlesinger said in some of his open commentary on MISM 242 was that he wanted an option to use as a handful of nuclear weapons, not even 20. A handful of nuclear weapons. Was that because he wanted to use them? Of course not. It's because he wanted to make sure that nuclear weapons weren't used either at the high level of violence with lots of numbers, or at the lower but still grossly extreme level of violence with smaller numbers. He said, I want to be able to deter the Soviet use of nuclear weapons at the low end and at the high end. And he thought it was more credible if the United States had these limited nuclear options to be able to deter at the low end of the numbers. So the point that Hank Gaffney makes is a very simplistic concept that it's very hard to describe so that people understand for some reason is that limited nuclear options, as folks talk about them, including Clark and Clark, bridge with Barry and myself, isn't so the United States will start using nuclear weapons at the low end. It's so that deterrents can be as credible as it can be up and down the spectrum of the escalation ladder, again, to use Hermann Cahn's metaphor, so it's not to use them as Dr. Schlesinger said. And what he thought he was doing was presenting the Soviet Union at the time with essentially a choice within which there would never be a good option to use nuclear weapons, either at the low end or at the high end. That's what it's all about. And some folks say, well, that sounds like Cold War thinking to put that forward now. Well, just because Dr. Schlesinger introduced that in 74 during the Cold War doesn't mean we shouldn't try and have a deterrent that discourages in the extreme the use of nuclear weapons at the low end or at the high end. That still strikes me as a pretty good goal to try and deter to the extent that we can. The use of nuclear weapons at the low end and at the high end. And if having these limited nuclear capabilities helps to deter at the low end, that strikes me as a very good way to go for that very specific purpose of trying to deter the nuclear use and to be able to stop the escalation of nuclear use. If that turns out to be possible, and as Barry said, no one knows if that's possible. The fog of work can creep in and cause all kinds of problems. But again, you don't want to ensure the large scale of use of nuclear weapons by having that as your only option. That was the point then, it's still the point now. Right, basically, he wasn't talking about tactical weapons, he was talking about strategic weapons. Now, within the strategic. Over there? Yeah, this is Dr. Willie Curtis from the US Naval Academy. I think you do an excellent job in having CSIS do these types of issues and so forth. My concern now is however that even the gentlemen that you're talking about that were strategic analysts during the Cold War and so forth, you have to keep in mind that those individuals had experience essentially from the Second World War, the conventional side. Then they had at least what, 40 years of formulate these strategies and carry them out and so forth. My concern is with the next generation of people that are gonna be in those positions, but now I'm looking at the millennia generation. Some of you may fall into that category here. I'm 76 years old, so I'm gonna retire. Where are we gonna get the replacements from the people? So we have to start thinking about that and in your question regarding some of your questions, you pose to the panel regarding Cold War thinking and so forth. Remember, we don't live in an environment that is bipolar anymore. We're in a multipolar threat environment which I describe as regional threat environment. So there's too much focus on Russia. We gotta think about the additional threats and that's where I think this generation, the next generation of analysts, have to take into consideration the past history but when Keith and others talk about the adaptability of our strategic forces, I think that's the direction we're gonna have to be concerned with. So thanks, I appreciate it. Next time let me know where the metro is. Stop it. All right. Right there. Thank you. Stanley Orman, ex-UK, even older than your good self. As Keith knows, I was responsible for the UK deterrent for some 20 years. And when I was working the US-UK program, we believed very strongly in extended deterrents. All I've heard today seems to suggest you've been thinking in a vacuum because I don't believe Europeans now believe in extended deterrents. The US does not express that forcefully enough or realistically enough. The other thing is the study that you've undertaken now is at least 12 years late. It's been obvious since just after 2000 that we're going to live in a multi-polar world and we had to look at how deterrents would operate. What seems to have been overlooked in the discussion today is that deterrents is a two-way process. Countries which are hostile to us really believe that if they have a nuclear warhead, they can exercise deterrents against US coercion. I haven't heard these subjects expressed at all today. Well, and the other final point I wanted to make is that it's nice to talk about the possibilities of modernizing the weapons, but the nuclear industry here has been so decayed that I don't believe you could make a decent new system in the next 10 years. I just think you're flat-wrought on that. Now, maybe that's because I actually know something about the nuclear enterprise here, but it is not as decrepit as you and Donald Trump would appear to believe in terms of they can't make a nuclear weapon that works anymore. I just don't believe that. Our nuclear weapons do work. I don't see anybody acting on the assumption that they won't work. The notion that our deterrents would collapse because the leader would say, well, they're willing to use a nuclear weapon, but I'm not sure it's gonna work, so I'll go ahead and do what I want to do. That's just not the way it's gonna work. I do think that when you look at the study itself and the kinds of things that are talked about in each of the independent papers as well as my own, is looking at the interplay between our deterrent threats, our extended deterrence commitments, the assurance that our allies draw from it, and the effect that it has on both adversaries and onlookers to this. My belief is that when you look at proliferation dynamics, it's probably best to look at it region by region. In the Middle East, I think we may have crossed the tipping point already, and that we're starting to look at a proliferation dynamic that while a nuclear deal might extend it, there is a proliferation dynamic that's going on in the Middle East. There's still a chance to stop it. I would argue in the Northeast Asia, that's where extended deterrence commitments are made and discussed bilateral bases to the United States and South Korea and the United States and Japan, where we've made efforts to buttress those assurances and buttress the cooperation during those times. But again, I think they're looking at very seriously whether when the chips are down and it really matters, the United States commitment can be concerned on. That's why I think forward deployed nuclear weapons is very important in that regard. In the case of Europe, which you turn to, NATO makes an extended series of extended deterrent commitments. It's part of the NATO's strategic concept. It was part of the defense and deterrence posture to say that they haven't talked about extended deterrence in a long time, just isn't right. It just isn't true. Now, have they talked about that in the context of a Vladimir Putin who says in a recent interview, well, I considered increasing the alert of our nuclear forces when he seized Crimea, but they said he didn't have to. He didn't say he was deterred from doing it. He said he didn't need to do that because he could seize Crimea anyway. It was below the threshold. So I think in those kind of circumstances, thinking seriously about it is well overdue. Whether it's 12 years overdue or not, I wouldn't speak to. Of course on deterrence to the class of this fall an effort is to be done and that is to introduce these subjects in a measured, mature way to folks who are going to be in positions of responsibility. So I thank you, Dr. Curtis, for taking that on. And Dr. Curtis isn't the only one doing that. Clark, to my left, has run the Pony program for how many years now, Clark? 12. 12 years, and I'm 12 years too late, right? For 12 years, it has done exactly that and that is to try and, to the extent that it's possible to impart whatever the gained wisdom is over the last four decades on these subjects to a new generation. I've tried to do that with the program at Missouri State University, which is probably located here in the Washington area through a whole series of graduate students. And I'm quite pleased to say that I think there's a lot of progress in getting these ideas across the spectrum, on all sides, to be well understood by a good number of folks. So I'm less pessimistic than a lot of other people are about that point. Let me go back to Stan's comment and just say where I think Stan, I agree with some of the points you made, but one of them I think is just, again, flat wrong. And that is that the allies don't believe in the nuclear umbrella anymore. I think that's what she said. It isn't a belief as in the tooth fairy. Many allies put great value on the nuclear umbrella. Not all of them because they're in different threat contexts, but many allies still put enormous value on the nuclear umbrella and on extended nuclear deterrence. And if you don't understand that, you can ask them. And if you were a Baltic state, or if you were Poland, or if you were the Czech Republic, you would put great value on it. If you were in Japan, you would pick the great value on it. In fact, what we've seen the last five years is the increasing willingness of allies to be vocal about the great value that they put on the extended US nuclear umbrella. So whether it's a belief or it's a disbelief, I don't get into whether one believes or one doesn't believe. What I do know, and this isn't from my making this up, it's from what allies have told us, allies who were in senior positions of authority have said, yes, the US extended nuclear umbrella is still enormously important to us. In fact, during the strategic congressional posture review, by parts of the posture which Clark was involved in, a number of people here were involved in, we invited a series of allies to come in and talk to us about their views on nuclear weapons. And at the end of, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 allies coming in and presenting their views, many folks on the need of commissioners were essentially struck by the degree to which allies were willing to be quite vocal about, not only the value of the US nuclear return for them in their context, but the details that they would put forth as to what they saw was important within the US nuclear capability. It wasn't just some nuclear capability writ large, it was some specific capability why to provide them with assurance. They weren't shy about saying it, in fact, I remember one commissioner said, who knew? Who knew they cared so much? He came across very strong. And what we've seen since then, that was in 2009, are repeated statements by key allies who were in very precarious positions, saying, yes, the extended nuclear deterrent is very important to us. Ukraine obviously isn't a member of NATO, but you saw the former Ukrainian defense minister come out months ago and say, we really shouldn't have given up those nuclear capabilities, look where we are now. So, Sam, where I agree with some of your points, if that's what you said, that the allies don't believe or don't care, I just think that's why. Barry, you had a comment? Yes, I mean, I think throughout the time I've worked on these issues, which is a long time, their allies have expressed concern about our willingness to carry out our security commitments, particularly nuclear commitments. This is a recurring theme for decades. It depends, and it waxes and wanes, it depends primarily not on capabilities, I would argue, but on their perception of American leadership and willingness to engage in military conflict around the world. And obviously there are problems now. But when I look at the European allies particularly, what I doubt is whether they believe there's a threat. When I look at their unwillingness to spend minimal amounts on their defense and continuing to cut defense budgets, even in the face of the Russia's new aggressiveness, then I say, you know, like what's up here? I think so, there are bigger political problems that these questions of the credibility of our commitments depend on bigger political issues than actual capabilities. I'd like to take the opportunity just to reinforce what Barry just said. The recent Pew Global Attitudes study report is something I would commend all of you to read. It's pretty startling. Doesn't focus on the nuclear issue and extended deterrence in that concept, but it does look at the willingness, among other things, of NATO allies to go to war, to use force if one of their NATO allies is attacked by another party. One of the examples is about 35, 38% of Germans say yes, the rest of them say no. Same is true of the Italian publics in terms of do you use force to resist and attack upon a NATO ally? At the same time, those same Germans, about 65% of them say, well, the United States would come to our defense, of course, and I look at that and I say, wait a second. What kind of world are we living in when we come to your defense, but you don't come to the defense of any of your NATO allies. These are the kind of things that get at the fundamental core of the security commitments in Europe and why there are concerns far removed, I think, from just the nuclear element as well. And at the same time, you have Russian officials that are saying, well, we're gonna deploy these Iskandar missiles in Kallengrad and, of course, they're nuclear capable. I mean, the security environment in Europe has fundamentally changed, I think, in the last three years, and NATO has a long way to go to catch up to it. I'm sorry, question right there. Hi, I'm Carly Millenson. I'm a student of international relations at Princeton and my question is how likely is deterrence to fail looking to the future and then how should that estimation change our strategic profile? Very much you start this time. Well, I don't think anyone can answer that. There is no answer to that question. It depends on where and when and in what circumstances crises between nuclear arms states emerge. You could certainly imagine a crisis on the Indian in South Asia between India and Pakistan and deterrence failing in that case. Nuclear deterrence failing. One could imagine a situation which if NATO does put some conventional capabilities into the Baltic nations and for whatever reason, the Russians are, as Putin said, lunatic enough to invade and it does come to a conventional stalemate where the Russians would use their exercise their doctrine and use some couple of weapons or something to try to de-escalate the war and the war. In which case I would expect that NATO would respond in some way with nuclear weapons. So you could imagine them but I certainly wouldn't predict when, where, or if deterrence would fail. Here's one case where Barry and I disagreed, Barry said, I think there's no way to put a probability on it. There is, it's somewhere between null and 100%. And unfortunately... We don't know where. We don't know exactly sure in the fall part of knowing where it's going to be. So you asked a great question because in this town there's a sport about putting probabilities on things. So you'll hear all the time. You know, it's a 10% probability over some period of time. It's a 50% probability or it's 100% probability over 10 years. Let me suggest to you, no one knows that. In fact, epistemologically, we can't know that because the variables that are involved are so broad, so diverse, so many of them are so close to our ability to understand them, that anybody who gives you an answer to that question that it's 87% or something like that, what you do know is that they're blowing smoke because they have no idea what they're talking about in terms of the likelihood of that. But let me go on because you asked a key question and say, well, what difference does that answer make to you? It makes a huge difference. Let me give you an example. The late Ken Waltz, great professor of international relations, came out with an article before he passed away, a flyer on should have a nuclear weapon. Another set of articles was, why more is better? Essentially, Professor Waltz was in a camp that said, it's very unlikely that deterrents will fail. In fact, if you're dealing with rational actors, you could pretty much count on it working. He didn't take it all the way to say camp bound, but he said, very likely to work as long as you have rational actors. And where did that take Professor Waltz? It went to the recommendation he made, it was sort of counterintuitive within academia, well, in that case, we should have lots of nuclear weapons because we'll create lots of balances of terror and we'll have peace everywhere. Why should Iran have a nuclear weapon? Well, because it will help to create a balance of terror with Iran, with Israel, excuse me. So the answer to the question that you posed is actually a very important question. And the answer that one takes on that can help define what you see as the value of nuclear weapons on the contrary side, because deterrents can fail and we can't put a probability to its failure. My view is that we should make at least the feasible preparations for its failure that we can make that could be useful in some conditions. And so it suggests different ways to go. You think it's gonna work very, very, very well and essentially without failure, that can lead you in the one direction. If you understand that the probabilities can't be put down with any credibility and it can fail, it can lead you in another direction. I think just to come and brief on that, I mean, I agree with both very many people who said that. I think actually the word, it's a great question, but I think the word that I prefer is actually plausible, not likely, because likely is not only can we not know, but also it's influenced by what we do and what others do, right? But I think for me at least, and I think for everybody up here at least, deterrents failure, speaking more concretely, the outbreak of war is possible. My feeling is that nuclear weapons kind of chill strategy, but they don't kill it, right? Countries still behave strategically and in some sense, sometimes aggressively, maybe because they feel threatened or maybe because they're acquisitive or some combination of both. But so they're still acting and jockeying under the nuclear umbrella and I think Frank Gavin is a professor at MIT and I'd really commend his work on this point. He has superb critique of Waltz, which I think, I agree with Keith, I mean, I was actually rereading Waltz's debate with Sagan for a class I was teaching in the spring and I noticed that Waltz concedes that if Saddam had had nuclear weapons that the United States would not have fought back, which completely undermines his argument, right? But the point again, it gets to this like calculation thing about Khrushchev in Berlin is, I think that it's possible that other leaderships could say I think it's less than a 5% chance, less than a 1% chance that the Americans would use nuclear weapons and I might be able to put them in a box where they can't really respond. And I think under those circumstances, it's possible that people would use force. I think that's the world that unfortunately we continue to live in. And so in that respect, the consequence for me is to have a nuclear strategy that says we don't wanna use these weapons, we think they're tremendous enormous horrible consequences but we are prepared to do it because when we recognize the consequences but we have options, I think what Barry is saying about resolve is right but we don't wanna put too much weight on resolve particularly because we're extending deterrence. I mean, it doesn't make sense for the line allegedly from Kissinger and if he didn't say that he should have which is that great powers do not commit suicide for allies, right? I mean, we don't wanna blow up this beautiful city for the Baltics if we can possibly avoid it so we need to have options that are short of that that responsible people could present to the President of the United States and say, here's something you can do that will communicate to the Russians that they are getting close to the cliff and we're prepared to keep going but also gives them reason and ability to de-escalate the conflict so that's kind of that. We're not doing too well with off ramps in the current Ukrainian crisis. How about way back there? I've been choosing people in the front. Justin Ruhman, Department of Defense. Practical question, in today's sequester budget environments and choosing between the third offset strategy cuts to other departments, how would you pay for prioritize these investments or would you scale them in terms of time? I mean, we have lots of choices to make are ready between the services and between projects in the services and the third offset strategy. What would be this in terms of your priorities comparison to those choices? The affordability issue is one that does get a lot of attention in this current sequester environment, budget captive, budget control act. But the fact is that right now we spend about 4 to 5% of the defense budget on nuclear modernization. Even in the forces, I'm sorry, nuclear forces total, even in the 2020s, as Barry pointed out, when a bow wave of investment comes in that raises the percentage of the defense budget to 8% to 9%, which is still less than any other country, nuclear country, nuclear power, spends on its nuclear weapons. We spend an awful lot of money. We can afford it, it's a question of whether we want to afford it. Of course, there's trade-offs under sequester level limits, but $600 billion a year is a lot of money and you can find room for nuclear modernization if you want to make room for it. Yeah, this is the heart of our argument. Yes, the amount we spend on nuclear forces is relatively small now, it will increase. However, the budget environment is not going to change, it's going to get worse. You look at the CBO projections and because of our failure, our inability to make reforms in defense practices, such as consolidating headquarters, reforming compensation, and so forth, procurement R&D money is going to be continually squeezed down. So every dollar, even if it's a few dollars spent on nuclear forces takes away from dollars we could spend on developing advanced conventional technologies, protecting our C-cube dye, improving our ISR, and so forth. And to me, the higher priority is on the conventional side. Yeah, I think we are facing budget stringency and we have to deal with that reality, and I think Clark's right, we're serious about doing this, we should spend the amount of money that we should spend, but to various point, we do, when presumably we'll continue to live in a stringent budgetary environment, but I don't accept the idea that it's either a haircut across the existing sort of accounts, speaking of that in programmatic or strategic terms, or that it's got to be between R&D. I mean, I think the real question is, what is the United States as a defense enterprise going to try to do with its money? And to me, the point that we should be doing, given the threats to our military superiority and the potential nuclear employment strategies of our possible adversaries is, we need to maintain the upper hand on the kind of the military technological high end, and that means having the most sophisticated kind of conventional forces, having the requisite quantity, but basically having forces that nobody can think they can out-escalate, and that means both high end conventional forces and nuclear strategic forces in order to do what the 2014 QDR said, which is don't allow an adversary to escalate its way out of conventional defeat. So to me, if I were chopping things, look, we all know that you've got to do BRAC, military personnel compensation stuff. So at some point, hopefully, we'll get serious about that before the international security situation deteriorates enough to force us to do it. But if forced, I would take away from forced structure and capabilities that are expensive and don't help us achieve those objectives. Things like stabilization operations, lower end kind of counterinsurgency capabilities. Those kinds of capabilities can remain resonant in force, but they can be put in the reserves, they can be put at a smaller level. There are huge buys that we're gonna be doing on various kinds of capabilities that are really, really expensive and that's where the dollars come out. But I really push back at the idea that we need to take a haircut, and I'm not saying this is what you're suggesting, but I think we're not gonna be providing the wars of the 1999 and 2003, or we need to be really careful about doing that because we face serious challengers to our fundamental geopolitical strategy, particularly in China and Russia, and we need to have the forces to deter them, and that means high-end conventional forces, absolutely, but also our strategic forces. I think we have time for one more question. Yes, right there. Thank you. A peat-shutley retired State Department arms control person. One topic you haven't mentioned. Somebody else could, I'm sorry. I'm just. One topic you haven't mentioned is the clarity of a trigger, an initial use of a nuclear weapon, and what I'm asking is, with the confusion over cyber, and who's taking cyber action and where it's coming from, what would happen 20, 30 years from now if the picture becomes so confused and ambiguous that we don't know if cyber gets tangled up with nuclear, who's doing what? You know, the notion of a kind of an accidental nuclear misunderstand the cyber attack on Europe is a bit far-fetched, but the issue is the increasing interconnectedness of our cyber space capabilities, but say nuclear command and control, precision strike, and the compressed timelines potentially, and sort of pressure on the ability to deliberate about responses and directly perceive it. So I mean, I think that's a real issue. You know, in our report, you know, I call for more work, I think that in 2010 NPR was right to try to push for more deliberate space for decision-making, basically to correctly ascertain what's going on, and so forth. You know, since you mentioned arms control, you know, I talk about it a little bit. I mean, I think arms control is a very important role, and actually something stemming exactly from what you're talking about. I mean, I think the era of, you know, packs oriented towards disarmament is over. You know, that's just unrealistic, and it doesn't help, and it's too complicated, but actually we need arms control kind of measures, and that, you know, whether that's a formal treaty agreement or not, or just kind of agreed measures is actually really important for precisely this kind of thing. You know, if you can say, let's say we agree not to fiddle around with each other's nuclear command and control system, that's something that Richard Danzig has proposed. Now, we need to analyze this. We need to look at not to attack nuclear command and control-related satellites. There's another right? These are the kind of ideas that actually make and go back to the original idea of arms control and stability that I think we do need to explore, because, you know, what arms control should be doing is trying to shave the edges off, the kind of unnecessary edges, if you will, off of our, you know, our rivalry and potentially worse with the Russians and the Chinese, and we are going to be at loggerheads with them, because that may be worse, but the last thing we want is to go to war by mistake, effectively, and so arms control, you know, should try to help it. Another idea is we want our GBIs to be able to shoot down an North Korean missile, but if you shoot a GBI from Alaska to a Russian, it may look like something else. Yeah, is there some way that we can, you know, we don't want to have the political overhang of shooting down North Korean ICBM. So, you know, we need to protect the security of our systems. We're not going to give the Russians a veto, obviously, but are there kind of mechanisms that we can work towards to promote stability? And that's something that I think is fully compatible at least, I think, well, I'm talking probably with what anybody here is talking about. It might be a different vision for Kerry, Barry and Keith, but yeah, anyway. Keith? Yeah, let me just suggest that the question proposes a really important question, and that is the attribution of the attacker, because for deterrence purposes, attribution of the attacker is in some ways presumed. I mean, if you want to deter by design as opposed to by luck, and we would like to deter by design as opposed to by luck, then at least the opponent needs to believe that we can identify with the source of the attack. And that can be a real problem. It's not, you mentioned it's a potential problem, the cyber world, I agree, I think you're right. It's also a potential problem for BW, a biological weapon attack. Being able to identify the attacker could be very difficult. Identifying the attacker for an EMP threat could be very difficult. And so, one of the points that I've made, not in this study, but elsewhere, is that an activity that I think is important, and the labs can be very involved in this, is to help the United States have some confidence that it can attribute the source of the attack, whether it's cyber or bio, or EMP, because that's one of the ways to help deterrence work by design. And in the absence of that, at least if an opponent doesn't believe that attribution is possible, that can be one of the ways, I think as Bridget gets earlier, that deterrence can fail. You're able to engage in a BW attack for whatever reason the country might want to do that, with some level of confidence that that'll never be attributed to them. Whereas there are lots of potential mechanisms for deterrence to fail. Unfortunately, I think that's one of them. And it gets back to, it's not about the numbers of nuclear weapons, it's about the U.S. ability to attribute actions to the perpetrator of the action. Barry, a last word? Well listen, I wanna thank everybody for coming. I also wanna thank my colleagues again for participating in this study. I found that an extremely fruitful and useful dialogue between us all. Thank you again for coming.