 Fred Kaplan, the bomb, presidents, generals, and the secret history of nuclear war. Fred was a new American fellow when he wrote one of his books, an absolute brilliant book called The Insurgents, about essentially the way the US military reorientated itself as it was losing the Iraq war. That was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. And I could not recommend it more highly. And I'm starting to read the bomb, which is also written in this very accessible and interesting way. Fred has a PhD from MIT. He's also a general critic on the side. And so we're lucky to have him here. He's going to talk about some of the big themes and key stories in the book, and then we'll open it up to a conversation. Thank you, Fred. Well, thanks, Peter. Thanks, everybody, for coming out. I wrote a book many years ago called The Wizards of Armageddon, which was about the inside story of the defense intellectuals who invented the concepts of nuclear deterrence, nuclear war fighting, and how some of these ideas got woven into policy. I thought that would be the last book that I would ever have to write about nuclear weapons, nuclear war. Came out in 83. And a few years after then, the Cold War ended. And for the subsequent 30 years, not many people really thought much less worried about nuclear war, nuclear weapons, until August 8, 2017, when President Trump came out to the lawn of his golf course in New Jersey and threatened to rain, fire, and fury like the Earth has never seen on North Korea. Not of North Korea attacked us, but if they kept making threatening noises and testing nuclear weapons and missiles, which in that sense was a new thing. This wasn't just I will attack them if it looks like they're about to attack us, but I will attack them if they seem to be on the verge of developing the capability to attack us. That was a new thing. Suddenly, everybody's getting very worried about nuclear war and nuclear weapons, but kind of in a paralytic sort of panic, because it had been so long since they'd thought about any of this, they really didn't quite know how to think about it. So I decided to write this book. And at first, I thought it would maybe just be an update of wizards, because as much time had passed between Hiroshima and wizards as between wizards and now, which is kind of startling. But then as I dug through the archives, when I wrote wizards, for example, there was very little, there was nothing that had been declassified about what, say, President Kennedy thought or said about the subject. Now there's all kinds of stuff, including tapes, which I think we didn't even know existed when I wrote wizards. So this book, as the subtitle suggests, Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, looks at it from the decision maker's point of view. The protagonist is the bomb. There's this kind of force looming over us all and setting the context for everything. And the subtitle is how presidents and their advisors dealt with crises in which nuclear weapons, the use of nuclear weapons, were seriously contemplated. And there are more of these incidents than is commonly understood and how they dealt with it. And one thing that a kind of a persistent theme in the book is that until now, every president who's faced this abyss has really dug quite deeply, has really immersed himself into it, into the logic, the strategic aspects, the scenarios, consequences, and in some cases, being prodded by advisors who talk about this in quite rational terms and are advocating the use. And in each case, the presidents, who in every case had really never thought very deeply about this before, and why should they, decide, they crawl, they get quite deep into the rabbit hole, and then they realize, no, this is going to be catastrophic. And they do everything they can to scramble out of the rabbit hole and try to resolve this crisis in some diplomatic manner. And the worrisome thing now is whatever you might think about Trump, he's not known to be someone who digs deeply into the logic of issues. And that is what it's taken. It's not the gut. And so if there really is a crisis, how will his particular take on matters influence things? And that's as yet an unknown. But looking at the history and how it began, many of you, I'm sure, have read histories of some sort or another. And it turns out that most of them were wrong about very key points. Where this really began, you have to go back to the end of World War II, when General Curtis LeMay, he was the head of the 21st Bomber Command at the time, fire bombing Japan. Spring of 1945, the head of the Army Air Forces asks him, when will this war be over? The Nazis had just surrendered, but the Japanese were fighting on. And so LeMay took the question to his staff, and they calculated how much more area in Japan there was to fire bomb, and how many bombs it would take to destroy it, and how quickly the airplanes could be deployed over. And he decided he concluded that the war will be over September 1st, because that was the date by which every square mile of Japan will be destroyed. So that was sort of his philosophy of war. It was bomb everything. And of course, in the meantime, August 6th and 9th, the atom bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so he didn't need to do this. But that amplified his view that you could really destroy. You could win a war by just bombing everything. So when the Strategic Air Command was formed, he wasn't actually the first commander, but he was the first effective commander of Strategic Air Command, which controlled the bomb, designed the war plans. And the fact that it was in Omaha, at first people said, well, it's kind of odd. It's out in the middle of nowhere. How is it going to be integrated into planning in Washington? Well, LeMay took advantage of that situation. He really did his own planning, quite independent of anything going on in Washington. And he created his own war plans. And the war plan was, again, to bomb everything. But so that by 1960, when they decided to put together all the nuclear weapons, mainly Air Force and Navy, into one, it was called single integrated operational plan, the SIOP. The plan was, and it was the plan, the only plan, was that if the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe or tried to occupy West Berlin, the plan was to unleash the entire atomic arsenal against every target in the Soviet Union, the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, and China. Even if China wasn't directly involved in the war, and it was estimated that this would probably kill about 285 million people. Now, this wasn't just LeMay. This plan was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and it was consistent with Eisenhower's policies. Because Eisenhower, he was very much a penny pincher. He did not want to go spending money on conventional forces all over the world to take advantage of any crisis that the Soviets might trigger. And his view was that if there was a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, it's probably gonna go to nuclear very quickly. And so the only way to, the real plan, he knew how horrifying the consequences of this would be. So his view was, we have to make the threshold as thick and as awful as possible. So if you do anything, you guys, we're gonna bomb the daylights out of everything. And that was the essence. That was the centerpiece of US policy. Then something happened in the early 60s. The Soviets began to develop their own arsenal. So this strategy becomes problematic, to say the least. If they invade Western Europe and we respond by blowing them to smithereens, they can blow us to smithereens. So this policy becomes a policy of suicide, really. So in the Kennedy administration, two things happen. One, a move is developed to actually build up some conventional forces in some places anyway. But second, also looking at possibilities to limit nuclear war, to limit the damage, as they called it. Maybe some people came up with a strategy. Oh, so war begins. Maybe as the first move, we just attack their strategic nuclear forces and then tell them, okay, we've degraded your forces and if you respond to us, we'll take our forces and reserve and attack your city. So it becomes a deterrent within the larger deterrent. And then there were five or six other options, sub-options, this and that. Now, when I wrote Wizards of Armageddon, the one thing that's wrong in the Wizards of Armageddon is that these limited options that were formed, which I learned about from interviewing the people who wrote them, I assumed that they were really put into effect. And one thing I learned from looking into the archives for this book is that SAC basically ignored these directives. I mean, not in a calculus, what they would do, they would arrange for the actual guidance which was co-written by the joint staff. They would have phrases like, to the extent possible, do these limited options to the extent that this is consistent with military objectives. And then of course, SAC would conclude that, no, it's not feasible and it's not consistent with military objectives. And so really nothing changed. And so by the time Richard Nixon became president and he and Henry Kissinger were briefed on the PSIUP, it was the same thing. It was the bomb everything policy. And both Kissinger and Nixon were appalled and they set out again to try to come up with limited options. Let me back up just a little bit to focus a little bit more on Kennedy and his evolution and the true tragedy of Kennedy's demise. Kennedy came into office believing in the missile gap. Soviets had, they were way ahead of us in missiles. His first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff a few days after inauguration, he told them, I'm going to be relying on your judgment. I'm going to be consulting you regularly. Then there were a few crises. Laos, Berlin, Cuba, where he realized these guys really aren't as smart as I thought they were. Berlin, a lot of people focus on the Cuban crisis and there's still a lot that's very misunderstood about that crisis, but Berlin is in some ways more important. What happened in Berlin is Khrushchev tells Kennedy early on when they had their summit in Vienna, by the end of the year, we're just going to seize West Berlin. It's really our territory anyway. Berlin, for those of you too young to remember, Berlin is 100 miles inside East Germany and there's this little on play of West Berlin, democracy and freedom, that we would be completely unable to defend with conventional forces of the Soviets just decided to cease it. So the plan was it had to be nuclear, it was the deterrent. So yes, we're going to do this by the end of the year. We're finishing World War II. We're going to be taking it over. Instantly there's planning and there's extensive documentation of this now in the Kennedy library. There was serious thinking about using nuclear weapons. It was discovered for example that there was no missile gap. There were only Soviet's had like four ICBMs and not much else and two people developed an alternative SIOP, 33 page plan, detailed targeting, 44 bombers, 88 weapons, destroy the entire Soviet nuclear force. However, there were caveats like, they might have a few of these survive or if their tactical missile survived, they could kill millions of people. So Kelly wasn't too interested in that. Although he did discuss it. This plan was discussed by the Joint Chief of Staff. It was discussed in the White House. Kennedy had specific questions about it and these were definitely written by Kennedy because some of the questions were quite naive. No advisor would put them on paper. Like if I launched missiles, could I recall them? Of course the answer is no. So anyway, Berlin happens. They go through this whole process. Major meetings where, you know, McNamara is pushing for a conventional response and General Norstad, the head of NATO says no. Building up conventional forces in Europe is a bad idea because it might persuade Khrushchev that we're not willing to use nuclear weapons and deterrence is projecting to him that we are willing to use nuclear weapons. And so they developed a four point plan in the Soviets move. Phase one, we move in a patrol. That doesn't work. Phase two, we move in a battalion. That doesn't work. Phase three, we start doing things like, you know, embargoes at sea, over flights, threatening UN Security Council resolutions, but that doesn't work. Phase four is nuclear. And then there's three possibilities there. Four A, a demonstration shot. Just blowing up a nuclear weapon someplace to demonstrate our resolve. Maybe they'll back down that. Four B, tactical nuclear weapons, blowing up some Soviet troops on the battlefield. Four C, all out war. Psyop, everything. And there was serious discussion. Well, Kennedy is asking, could I do four A or four B without its escalating to four C? And Paul Nitsy saying, I think we should start right away with four C because if we do four A, the Soviets might launch a first strike first and we wouldn't be able to respond. I mean, serious, this was, you know, so Kennedy finally, he doesn't like any of these ideas. So he decides to send the Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatrick to give a speech, announcing that there is no missile gap. And, you know, if Khrushchev had been abetting this belief, he'd been bluffing, he'd been saying in speeches, we're churning out ICBMs like sausages. So Gilpatrick give this speech. There is no missile gap. We're way ahead of them. We have this many weapons. They have that many weapons. Even if they launched a first strike, we would still be superior to them. We've got way more than they do on every single front we're way ahead. We know exactly what's going on over there. The Iron Curtain has been pierced. So Khrushchev reads this, of course. He's in the middle of a party Congress and he does two things. First, he calls for a test of a 50 megaton hydrogen bomb. Second, he truly fears and with good reason that the US is planning for a first strike and he knows that we know that he's got very little to respond with. And so what does he decide to do? Put medium range missiles in Cuba for the interim. The 24 medium range missiles in Cuba is like having 24 intercontinental ballistic missiles in Russia, which he only had four at the time. So that's the origins of the Cuban missile crisis. Then what happens, it is now widely known because it was revealed 20 years after the fact that we did not go eye to eye with the Russians and they blinked. It was not the case that Khrushchev, Khrushchev proposed on Friday, we'll take our missiles out of Cuba if you'd promised never to invade Cuba. And then on Saturday, he came up, nope, revised proposal. We'll take our missiles out of Cuba if you take your missiles out of Turkey. And the myth has been long perpetrated and it's still reported in many books, including Robert Keros, that Kennedy took the Friday night deal and ignored the Saturday deal. But in fact, that's not at all what happened. He took the Saturday deal. Bobby Kennedy and Dean Rusk proposed that he do this little switcheroo. And Kennedy says, and you can hear it on the tapes. It says, well, this is the proposal that's on the table now, we've got to deal with this. And what he says on the tapes, and it astonishes me that more historians haven't glommed onto that. This tape has been out there for 20 years. He says, well, this looks like a very fair trade. Any man at the UN, he says, would take this deal. It's a fair exchange. Everybody goes nuts. The thing about that, you know, McNamara and these guys acknowledged that yeah, there was a secret deal. What they did not say is that everybody around the table opposed this deal. Not just the generals, all of the civilians, Bobby Kennedy, Robert McNamara, MacGeorge Bundy, they all bitterly opposed the deal. This will wreck NATO. This will undermine the Turks. This will wreck our credibility. And then Kennedy, you know, he says, well, you know, this was on a Saturday. If the war plan had gone ahead on Monday, we were scheduled to start bombing the missiles with 500 air sorties a day, not nuclear, but 500 air sorties a day, followed by an invasion of the island the end of the week. And Kennedy says, well, you know, it seems to me, you know, if we start doing this 500 sorties a day and then the Russians grab Berlin and blood starts to flow. And it's revealed that this deal was on the table and we didn't take it where it's not gonna be a good war. Things like that. And they're going, people are going, and so finally at the end, Kennedy leaves the room and he tells Bobby to go to the Soviet embassy and tell them we're taking the deal. But you can't tell anybody. If you announce this, it's off. And then he called seven people into the room, into the Oval Office, told them what he's done. And they said, but you are never to tell anybody, ever. And he perpetrated this myth of accepting Friday and rejecting Saturday or ignoring Saturday because this was the Cold War. I mean, he called Eisenhower, there's a tape of this, calls Eisenhower, tells him, you know, generally you call him general, the crisis is over, we settled it and Eisenhower says, now, is there any kind of backroom deal on this? Oh, no general, and Eli dies, which, you know, it's amazing. But the thing is, what we know now and what wasn't known until many years later is that some of the missiles in Cuba had warheads on them. The nuclear warheads were there, they could have been launched on warning. Another thing is that the Soviets had secretly deployed 42,000 troops on the island of Cuba, some armed with tactical nuclear weapons to stave off a potential American invasion. The point is that if anybody else around that table had been president, or if Kennedy had been convinced by them and said, yeah, you're right, this is not a good idea. Let's proceed with the plan. We would have been at war with the Soviet Union, whether or not Kennedy or Khrushchev liked it. There would have been a clash of forces, inevitably so. So, you know, one lesson to this is that it's important if you elect president. So, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is where things get even more interesting for the long term, Kennedy is discussing, and this is on tape also. Kennedy is talking with McNamara and General Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, about the next year's defense budget. And he says, you know, I don't understand why we're spending so much money on nuclear weapons. It seems to me that 40 missiles that get through to 40 cities in the Soviet Union, that should be enough to deter. I mean, if the 24 missiles were still in Cuba, I would have been deterred from doing a lot of things, but from that, but then as the conversation evolved, he said, you know, I guess if deterrence fails, which is a phrase that we've all heard many times now, but he says, if deterrence fails, yeah, I guess I wouldn't wanna really destroy their cities. I guess I'd wanna go after their missiles, including their tactical missiles. And I guess that will require a lot more than 40 weapons. And so he's kind of articulated. Again, he didn't have any background in this, but he kind of articulated what we now see is sort of the central dilemma of nuclear strategy, which is, if all you wanna do is deter, it really doesn't take much. Blow up all the Soviet cities, you know, above population of 100,000. You know, even when McNamara talked about assured destruction in that sense, there are 200 weapons to do that job. That's all, a couple of hundred weapons. But if deterrence fails, and who knows under what circumstances deterrence might fail, then you have to think about doing these other things and can we limit the damage and do we go after their military forces and which one? And so as this dilemma developed over the decades, what happened was that the concept of nuclear deterrence, credible nuclear deterrence, the idea is it's not credible to blow up their cities because they can just blow up our cities. The idea of credible nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting kind of converge. They became the same thing, which is why when presidents kind of went through this, they got into the rabbit hole very, very quickly in determining, well, what do I do about this? So many years later to jump ahead, well, all of this remained kind of static. You know, all the talk of limited options and so forth, but the real war plan was still shoot off everything. And this remained the case really until the late 1980s, on the eve of the end of the Cold War, when there was this guy who's still around town doing some interesting things now named Frank Miller, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense, working under first Carlucci, and then Dick Cheney, secretary of defense. He sat in on a PSYOP briefing. And before coming to the job, Frank had read all the classified doctrinal stuff about limited options and this sort of thing. And he's listened to the PSYOP briefing and they got restrained in the use of nuclear weapons to kind of urge the Soviets to be restrained as well, all the signal sending, time shelling kind of stuff. And he's listening to the PSYOP briefing and there's none of this. There's none of it in this briefing. And he asks Cheney afterwards, he goes, what's going on here? He goes, I don't know. So Cheney empowered him to take a deep dive into the PSYOP. He ordered the people out in Omaha to give him every document that he wanted to look at. They secretly got hold of something called the Blue Book, which was SAC's manual on how they calculate which weapons against what targets and damage expectancy and so forth. And they discovered some extraordinary things. First, that the level of overkill was just staggering. I mean, there were 700 nuclear weapons. I mean, in the megaton range, aimed at a 50 mile radius around Moscow. There was a base, a bomber base, not even a recovery base, a base that Soviet bombers would land in after nuking the United States. In the Arctic Circle, was too cold to even be used for three quarters of the year. 17 nuclear weapons were aimed at this base. There was an ABM site in Moscow that we learned after the Cold War was completely useless. 69 warheads were aimed at, there were also the way it was done. For example, let's say a target set. Was the Soviet tank army. Well, not only were nukes aimed at the tanks, they were aimed at the factories that made the tanks. They were aimed at factories that made the spare parts for the tanks. They were aimed at factories that rolled the metal for the tanks. They were aimed at mines. Well, it was as if I were trying to prevent you from destroying your ability to cook dinner. And so I would destroy, not just your kitchen, but your refrigerator and your freezer and your pantry. I would destroy the grocery store where you buy the food. I would destroy the farms where the food at your grocery store. And I would destroy all the roads and rail lines between all of you. You don't really need to do all of this. I mean, even if you accept the legitimacy of the need to destroy your ability to cook dinner, I don't need to destroy all of these things. But that's how it was. And then came the ultimate revelation. At one point, George H.W. Bush was in power at this point and he was negotiating a strategic arms reduction treaty with the Russians. And one of Frank's assistants asked his contact in Omaha, I said, listen, they're doing this treaty. And if we cut the number of warheads down to whatever it was, would you still be able to perform your mission? And the guy, this is a senior guy in joint strategic target planning staff, which was a part of SAC that actually did the planning. He goes, well, that's not a question that we really deal with. He goes, well, what I mean is, no, no, I understand the question, but we don't do that. What we do here, we take the number of weapons that were given and we allocate them to the number of targets, to the targets on our list. And the implications of this are staggering because what it suggested on the operational level, on the level where things were really happening, not up to where politicians were making statements, but what was really going on, nobody had asked, how many of these things do we really need? You know, regardless of what the aim and the strategy is, how many of these do we need to perform the mission? I mean, there was a SAC commander at one point, General Jack Chain, who said once in a public hearing, I need 10,000 warheads, I need 10,000 weapons because I have 10,000 targets. And people at the time thought that either he was kind of joking or being flip or maybe he wasn't very bright, but no, that is exactly how this was done. It was completely mechanical. So under, with Dick Cheney's urging, everybody kind of became aware that, oh my God, this is a completely out of control machine. And so the number of required nuclear weapons without changing policy one bit was reduced from about 12,000 to 5,888. And the number is precise because one of Frank's assistants, a guy named Bill Klinger wanted to put on his license plate, 588, he decided not to, but that's how many went. And then when the Soviet Union went up in smoke, and so we didn't have to target Eastern Europe anymore, there's a lot of air defense targets in Eastern Europe. So missiles had to be aimed at the air defense targets so that the bombers could have a path to go through to their targets. The number came down to about 3,000. And the significance of this is when Bush, George Bush one negotiated a treaty that cut the weapons to about that level, the military was not resistant to this idea because they'd been through this exercise and realized that they really didn't need anymore. And then when Obama came into office, there was another very similar exercise where the head of strategic command would come to Washington, either to the Ovalot, to the Situation Room or to someplace in the Pentagon. Every couple of weeks for months, they went over every target. How many weapons were aimed at? Do we really need to have two weapons at this target? Could we have one weapon and so forth? And they determined that you could cut the number of weapons by another one third. But they also told Obama, we're not gonna endorse this unless the Russians reduce their number by a third as well. This was after a new start. So in other words, they had acknowledged that, yeah, for national security purposes and any other purpose, we really, we could get this down to about 1,000 weapons. Without changing, again, without changing policy, one bit. You know, this was under Bush W. Bush's guidance about the kinds of targets you need to destroy and what the aims are and so forth. You could get it down to about 1,000. And somebody who was working on this study told me that even with 1,000, you'd be making the rubble bounce a couple of times instead of three or four times. That was sort of the difference. So we always have had this surplus. So that leads to the present situation. So in some ways, what Donald Trump represents is something different. But on the other hand, you know, when Trump came out with this fire and fury statement, it was about at the same time that the Pentagon was signing this nuclear posture review, which talked about integrating nuclear and non-nuclear plans and developing new kinds of nuclear weapons and considering nuclear weapons as things that can deter a wide range of threats, not just the threat of nuclear attacks. All of that was not really new at all. It had been around for decades. Obama had kind of modified some of this in the language, but it was always there. But it was the integration of that plus Trump's reckless rhetoric that raised the stakes. And one thing that I discovered in interviewing people for this book is that when Trump talked about fire and fury, this was not, some things he says are just, you know, off the top of his head. This was not. There had been serious new war plans developed for a North Korean contingency and not based on an attack by North Korea but on a provocative test by North Korea. This was at his direction. It was a new study. And during that year, the North Koreans launched about 15 missile tests that involved about 22 missiles. And on each of those occasions, there was a conference call. Similar to the kind of conference call there would be if there was intelligence of an impending Russian attack. There was all the four stars got on the phone. On five of these occasions, cabinet officers were brought into the call. On two of the occasions, there were, one of the things that was involved in this plan was that Jim Mattis, Secretary of Defense was given advanced authority that if he thought a test was seriously provocative, he had the authority to launch, not nuclear, but there were short, medium range, conventional ballistic missiles called attack arms, advanced tactical missiles in South Korea. He was authorized to shoot them at the launch site. With the hope of destroying the launch site and maybe killing some leaders who are there. Because Kim Jong-un was known to go witness some of these launches. On two occasions, he actually launched these missiles, not at the test site, but out to the sea of Japan in parallel with the North Korean missiles, just to show them that, hey, we can aim these the other way that we want to. So, I mean, this got very serious and there were, Trump was told in briefings that, look, don't start anything unless you're reeling and ready to go all the way, all the way including nuclear weapons, because it's very likely to escalate if it gets that way. So, by the time he said fire and fury, this plan was in effect. And these exercises had been done. So, it was going to happen. The basic lesson that I draw from this is, as I say, as I said at the beginning, every president till now, and I've only gone over a few in this talk, have dealt with the threat of, with the idea of using nuclear weapons in a very serious way, plunging very deeply, coming out of the rabbit hole. It's unclear whether Trump would do this. There was a hearing, also around the time of fire and fury. It was not much covered at the time. It was an open hearing. I watched it on C-SPAN 3, Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Presidential Launch Authority, nuclear weapons. First hearing held about the subject by Congress since the mid-70s. And it happened because Bob Quaker, who was the chairman of the, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, suddenly realized you were to thought something like this would know it, but suddenly realized that the president had a sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, if he wanted to. And this alarmed him because this is around the time that Quaker was describing the White House as an adult daycare center and saying that Trump's rhetoric are gonna lead us on a path to World War III. He held a hearing. And this was confirmed in the hearing. Yeah, you can do this if you want. At one point, a Democratic senator said, you know, let's cut the, you know, let's get to the heart of this. The reason why we're having this hearing is because we have a president who's reckless, who has poor judgment who might get us into a war. Not a single Republican contested this statement. One of the witnesses, a retired general named Bob Keller, who had recently been Stratcom commander was very disturbed by this hearing because his view was, look, if Congress wants to change the rules about launch authority, especially for launching a first strike, hey, you know, yeah, they can do that. Stratcom can deal with this except to Congress, but they weren't doing that. And what disturbed him was the idea of publicly raising doubts about the reliability and legitimacy of the command structure and yet doing nothing about it. But that's sort of the situation we're in. You know, I'll just end on this thought that, you know, Harry Truman, after his initial glee over the atomic bomb, once he realized the destructiveness of it, he said to his generals, you know, this is not a military weapon. It kills women and children. We have to think of this in a different way. And he established civilian control. I mean, for a few years, if SAC wanted to launch a nuclear attack, they would have to go through the atomic energy commission to even get access to the nuclear weapons. The idea was the civilians would be more responsible than the military about this. Well, now the concern is almost the other way that the military seems to be more sensible and restrained about this than some civilians. When the founding fathers, you know, wrote the constitution, they figured that, you know, there might someday be a president with tyrannical inclinations and they created checks and balances, you know, Congress, the judiciary, impeachment procedures and so forth. There has not been in the 75 years that we've had the bomb any checks and balances on presidential authority to use nuclear weapons. We're all kind of crossing our fingers. And the thing is, you know, why have we not used nuclear weapons in all that time? I mean, I think if you had gone back in time, you go back in time, talk to somebody in 1947 and say, you know, I'm from the year 2020. And guess what? Nobody has ever used nuclear weapons since Nagasaki. They'd find that hard, but that's an amazing prediction to make, you know, that I don't think anybody in 1947 would have guessed that that could happen for such a long period of time. Why is that? Well, a few things. One, to some degree, nuclear deterrence works, right? I mean, this is a very restraining thing. The prospect that maybe if you launch nuclear weapons, you're gonna get clobbered too. But part of it is also that we've had the luck of some shrewd, sensible presidents and we've also had a fair spate of good luck. There have been incidents where false warnings of a nuclear attack and yet the people involved on both sides have said, this probably isn't real, so I'm gonna ignore it. But what if we had a situation where we have a combination of slow-witted leaders and bad luck and a crisis? What if there's a warning of an attack that's false at a time of tension and a leader who's easily convinced to jump into the fray rather than holding back and seeing what happens? So that's the basic outline and I'm happy to entertain your questions. Well, thank you, Fred, for a brilliant presentation. So picking up on that, I mean, India and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons when they fought three and a half wars since partition. Certainly they haven't fought any large-scale wars since they both required nuclear weapons, so you can say that somehow the deterrence has worked. And yet, to be exact, but I know anything about it, they seem to have kind of rather immature nuclear weapons doctrine, not dissimilar to the ones that we had in the 1950s. So, you know, if you do, because it doesn't, obviously, we don't have a monopoly on these weapons. Somebody else could have a nuclear exchange. What would that look like? Well, I think you're right. I don't like to make predictions, but if I had to make a prediction on, okay, where the first nuclear exchange might take place, I'd say India-Pakistan's a good bet on the one hand. I think, you know, even Dan Ellsberg in his book, which is very good, by the way, called the Doomsday Machine, he acknowledges that, yeah, there are probably a few wars that would have been thought if it hadn't been for the existence of nuclear weapons and their deterrent effect. And I think there probably would have been a major war between India and Pakistan, except for the nukes. But, you know, on the other hand, you know, here at least US Soviet, US Russian, there's 30 minutes warning time. There, there's like, you know, a few minutes. The possibility of preemption to preemption is quite striking, and you're right. I have no idea what their early warning radar is like and their command control. I do know that we helped Pakistan set up permissive action links, but they excluded us from the final step on the quite legitimate worry that we would insert ourselves. So we could, we could lock. And I do know that there is about a 400-page manual. I don't know what's in it, on a guide for special forces for how to seize control of the Pakistani nuclear forces. I have no idea how feasible this thing is or how much is wishful thinking, but you would imagine there's a plan for that. But also, yeah, there's that, when, you know, there's a school of thought, kind of an extreme version of international realism, which says that proliferation is a good thing because if everybody has nuclear weapons, they're all deterred from going to war. Well, you know, maybe, but... I think what you're saying is that you can be deterred, but also you can make a mistake. Yes, exactly, exactly. Picking up on that interesting thing about North Korea, I mean, because when I did my book, Trump and his generals, one of the anecdotes in the book is Mattis asked for, sorry, Vice President Pence and H.R. McMaster asked for a war game at Camp David in the fall of 2017. And Mattis didn't send any war planners and the war game didn't happen because he was essentially always trying to slow roll the president. Yeah, that's true. Mattis, yeah, he was given orders to create a war plan and he just ignored it. For one thing, you know, he hated McMaster, he disrespect McMaster, one of his big mistakes was not retiring from, and his friends told him this, you'll get retire from the army, resign from the army because you will always be looked upon as a three star general. He didn't have time, by the way. He went to Mar-a-Lago and within just over 24 hours, he was at the White House. Yeah, right. I mean, retiring from the army is not like... Well, that's true, but he could have made prepper. I mean, Scowcroft, when he was made national security advisor and he resigned his commission as an Air Force general because he did not want to be beholden to the president in the same way that an army was. He wanted to be able to provide some independence. So, yeah, Mattis detested McMaster, thought he'd talked too much and his armies, three star, I'm four star, and McMaster even complained to one of his colleagues. He treats me like a three star, you know? And yeah, Mattis also, he saw one of his objectives and McMaster detested this too, was to constrain the White House. There were several things that he and Kelly had this thing that both of them would never be out of town at the same time, you know, that kind of thing. And this is one reason why those guys all got fired too. I mean, Trump after a while sensed this. But in the end, he succumbed and he ordered work to proceed on this much more serious and preemptively geared warpland that had existed. I mean, there's always been contingencies for attacking North Korea, all the scenarios began with the North Korean attack on South Korea or something like that. This was, again, a response to a test that began with what was called the bloody nose. But nobody in the military thought seriously that that would be the last step and it escalated very, very quickly. What about low yield, neat nukes? I see quite a lot of news about the Trump administration or the Pentagon or who is pushing this? What does it mean? Well, the interesting thing about that, remember my talk about Frank Miller and he dug into the PsyOp because he was very interested in, his goal wasn't so much disarmament, it was making limited options truly limited. And so Frank has actually been the big advocate for several years now behind this low yield warhead. When Mattis had a meeting early on with what he called the graybeards, this group of seven military advisors who with whom he discussed the issues, Frank was one of these people. And he was the only one in the room pushing for this. The generals thought, now this isn't a good idea, you know what, launch a low yield weapon from a Trident submarine that also carries high yield weapons and how would the Russians know the difference and you're attacking Russia? That's a strategic weapon. And so- But they've been deployed. They've been deployed now. Yeah, they were deployed sometime at the end of last year. Hans Christensen and Bill Arkin kind of revealed this fact and then the Pentagon soon after confessed. Yeah, it's out there. And the idea of this, you know, it's a low yield weapon with about eight kilotons I've been told as opposed to the other weapons on Trident submarines which are ranged from 90 to about 450 kilotons. And the idea it's linked to the scenario where whether Russians are now having, they have low yield weapons and there are some manuals and they've even done some exercises where they've used them to, you know, push back an otherwise victorious NATO invasion of Russia or whatever the scenario is. But the theory is we need to match the Russians at whatever they do at whatever step on the escalation ladder. So they have low yield weapons and we don't then, you know, we're gonna be, we have to surrender or escalate it way beyond our comfort zone. So the way to deter them is to say, well, we can do this too. How does that compare to Nagasaki nine kilotons? Well, that's exactly, I mean, yeah. And Hiroshima, whether there is a very interesting, yeah, low yield is a relative term. You know, eight kilotons, 8,000 pounds, 16 million pounds, one of these warheads would be more destructive and powerful than any bombing raid, much less single bomb since the end of World War II. There was an interesting security conference in Aspen a few years ago where Michael Gordon, defense reporter for now the Wall Street Journal, was questioning Frank about this. And he goes, now, when you say low yield, what do you mean? And Frank says, well, high single digits. Why? Because we're kilotons. And he goes, so you mean kind of like Hiroshima? And Frank said, well, yeah, if you want to be pejorative. And Michael says, well, I'm not being pejorative. I just want to make sure we're not talking about firecrackers and that just did. One thing about the nuclear strategy game, if you get too immersed in it, you start thinking that all these notions, like in Shelling and Khan and so forth, that they're real. I mean, they're not based on anything. They're not based on any empirical data. They're not based on any intelligence data about how other countries think about this. It's pure game theory. It's like, you think that, okay, you're looking over a chessboard. Okay, here's my bishop. There's his knight. Here's my queen, king. Whereas if a real nuclear war happened, I mean, communication systems are gonna go out, satellites might be shot down. You might have a hard time communicating with your own commanders. You don't know whether this missile that you fired really hit its target, whether it exploded, whether you don't know what's going on. And there's no chessboard here. You're in, just talk about the fog of war. This is, you know, a radioactive fog of war. It's the idea that you could keep, the dangerous thing to me about the low-yield weapon. I mean, I don't, we have a lot of low-yield weapons already. They're on bombs, they're bombs on bombers, but you know, okay, you want a handful of low-yield weapons? You know, all right, you know, I don't really, you know, people talk about, well, you can't lower the threshold. People will confuse this with conventional weapons. Not really. But what the danger of it, it seems to me, is that when you start talking about low-yield, you get the assumption, you kind of get the feeling that this is something that's not very harmful, that is controllable, low-yield equals, you know, a more controllable, usable kind of weapon. And therefore, you might use it. That's the real danger. One final quick question before opening up to everybody here. So the book was edited by Alice Mayhew, who died two weeks ago at age 87. Yeah, right. So tell us a little bit about her and her editing process with you and your own process about reporting the book. Yeah, well, I was, I mean, I've written six books, four of them with Simon and Schuster, my first and then my last four, and she was the editor on all of them. She also edited, I mean, if you think about, just about any political writer at Simon and Schuster, she edited Woodward and Isaacson and David Moranis and, you know, the list, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jimmy Carter. I mean, you know, the list goes on and on. Like, I remember, I have two things about Alice. Like, I remember when I wrote Wizards of Armageddon and it was on paper then, I wrote that on an electric typewriter. There was one point, well into the book where she just kind of takes a red ink and she just crosses out like practically an entire page. She goes, people will stop reading the book here. And I said, well, I said, this is about three quarters of the way into the book. How are they kind of committed to that point? She looked at me like I was crazy. No, no, they're gonna stop reading right here. So, and then toward the end, I mean, editors used to edit a lot more than they do now. They're mainly doing acquisition and, and you know, I got better too. I didn't need as much editing, but one thing that she was very good at always, and I've heard this from other people too, was first kind of setting or at least approving that the general framework. Like, I thought initially I thought maybe I would write a sequel to Wizards, but then I thought maybe I'd write one of those little books, you know, kind of like 80 pages on deterrents or something, you know, a little big think book. And she goes, no, it has to be a story. Nobody's gonna be interested in this if it's not a story. She's right. And she was also very good with beginnings and endings, which are important and the hardest part of a book to write. And she didn't do much editing in this book, except although I did have some questions about how to organize the beginning and the initial ending was a bit repetitive and we talked through, she's very good about talking through things, especially on a conceptual level. And yeah, it's, it's interesting to see, I mean, she has influenced the course of just many, many books, her first book, the book that really got her into Simon and Schuster curiously was Our Bodies Ourselves. She acquired that book. And then of course, you know, all the president's men was kind of, she kind of helped originate the sort of inside Washington non-fiction journalistic book. That was... And what was your process to report the book? This book. Yeah. Well, it's a few things. First, I, you know, dug pretty deep into, I mean, the first chapter or two of this book, some of it is repetition of things I uncovered in Wizards of Armageddon from a different angle. In Wizards of Armageddon, I mean, the Freedom of Information Act back then was a potent tool. I got thousands of documents declassified and everybody was still alive. I talked with 160 people. So there was that. And, but also, since I, you know, since the intervening 35 years, there's been a lot more that's been declassified. And I used a lot of that. And then for later things, I interviewed a lot of people. And there are a few things in this book that are adapted from articles that I'd written. One, I have a whole section in here on the first strike plan that was looked at during the 1961 Berlin crisis. And this will tell you something about the vagaries of publishing. I wrote an article. Well, here, I had three pages about this in the Wizards of Armageddon based on talking with nine people about this first strike plan. And when I was at the Kennedy Library, there were, one of the people who was involved in it was a White House aide named Carl Cason. And the Carl Cason papers, there were several folders in the index marked Berlin 61. And I asked the archivist at the time, I said, when do you think these will be declassified? And he goes, well, as long as Berlin exists, probably never. So then Berlin didn't exist after. So I put in a mandatory declassification review and got all this stuff declassified. And so I wrote an article for the Atlantic Magazine called JFK's first strike plan. It came out in the October 2001 issue which was published on September 13th, 2001. It was going to get lots of publicity. I was, it was going to be a front page article in the week in review section. I was going to go on the today show. Oh, this was a big plan. And of course it was my own Kennedy curse. I mean, that's obviously, you know, for good reason it got, it got shelved. But so it appears here for in effect the first time. But the remarkable thing is that, you know, these documents have been out there for quite a while and nobody else has picked up on them. I mean, I'm kind of, you know, I'm still staggered by the example of the Cuban Missile Crisis. There might be three or four historians that have written accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis that rely on the full evidence of the tapes. These are tapes. I mean, maybe there's a historian here who can explain to me why, why, I mean, imagine a pivotal event like this where there are tapes that contradict the established history of what happened. And yet, you know, even a guy like Robert Carroll, his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis in volume four of his LBJ book, assumes the bullshit about this, you know, the Friday night Saturday switcheroo. It's a puzzler to me. If you have a question, just take your mic so it goes green and just identify yourself and we'll start with, is that Angela down there? Yeah, we have a couple of questions online. So the first one is, you said, POTUS has sole authority to launch, but what about POTUS-delicated authority to let individual commanders and even loan pilots to launch? Well, this is something that I've looked into and other people have looked into it more deeply. Danielsburg in his book talks a lot about delegated authority that was secretly allowed in the late 50s. He had done a very, very highly classified study of command control procedures. And a lot of people disbelieved him and then it turned out to be true. I've looked at it since and I'm kind of convinced and maybe Hansi, you've come to different conclusions, but I think there is no pre-delegated authority. I don't think it exists. And certainly for loan pilots and things like this, absolutely not. Whether a general Jack D. Ripper, a madman just wants to unleash it. I've talked with missile men who say that there is a way around the two key procedure. And there's nothing to do down there. You talk about that. Could one of us set up both keys? Apparently, some people have discovered ways to do it. But I don't... I mean, it's a question of what the Russians did. And I'm told this is still in place when we deployed the Persian two missile, which was very short warning time, very accurate. They saw that as a decapitation weapon. That's when they installed the so-called dead hand, which was a series of sensors kind of like the Doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove. Sensors that if they detected a nuclear explosion in Moscow, they would automatically launch a number of weapons in case the command authority had been killed. And I'm told that that system is still in place. I don't think we have anything like this. If we do, it's been kept very secret. Hans, do you have anything to contradict that? No, that's a true pre-delegation, much less than it's been passed. Have another one, Angela? Yes, we do. The second question, how, if at all, has the possibility of nuclear winter and it's potentially, sorry, potential globally catastrophic effects affected or been integrated into military planning on the use of nuclear weapons? As far as I've been able to tell, not at all. And it's not just nuclear winter. You know, when they, from the very beginning until now, when they calculate the effects of nuclear weapons, they've really only taken to account blast because blast can be very easily measured. There's lots of empirical data about blast that scales up quite proportionately. And so you can get one of these little circular slide rules where, you know, 500 kilotons, what range will buildings collapse or what range will this? It's pretty precise and scientifically based. But, you know, much more dominant effects of a nuclear weapon, things like fire, smoke, radioactive fallout, radiation, these depend on a host of extraneous factors, the wind, the weather, whether it's ground burst or air burst. And so presumably they could establish a range of possible effects, but instead they've just ignored it. Well, it can't be calculated. It's like, you know, if you've lost your keys over here where it's dark, but there's a light over there, you go looking for your keys under the lamp because it's light there. Well, your keys are back here. You're looking in the wrong place. I mean, some of the latest projections about nuclear winter are that, you know, setting off 80 nuclear bombs depending on the location. That might be enough to kick up enough smoke and dust and so forth to destroy all human life on Earth. And, you know, 80 weapons is about the number of weapons that's in the contingency plan for nuclear war with North Korea. So, and 80 is in the range of limited nuclear options is for a wide variety of contingencies is on the low end of the- Do you find this work depressing at all? This what? Your work? My work. In this space, I mean- Well, you know, I compartmentalize very easily. I've been asked what keeps you up at night and my answer is really not very much. I sleep quite easily. It's not because I'm insensitive to it. It's just that, you know, I'm not easily bothered and maybe that allows me to write works that seem like an ordinary work. But no, it's, no, I guess I need to be put on the couch for this one. I think, yeah, you've caught me in an awkward spot. No, it's funny. I think in a fundamental way, this could be wishful thinking. I don't think any of this is going to happen, really. But even if it's not used, it affects all manners of warfare and even politics below the level of actual use. You know, again, I keep mentioning Ellsberg in his book, he estimates that there have been about 25 occasions when we've threatened to use nuclear weapons and he regards that as tantam- Is it identical to actually using them in the same way that if you cock a pistol and aim it at somebody, you are using it even if you don't actually pull the trigger. So it affects world politics even now and you can gain tremendous insights about the nature of international politics, the nature of war, the nature of bureaucracy, everything about national security politics by the existence of this weapon and how people respond to it. Any other questions? Alex, back. Hi, thanks. You mentioned a few minutes back, the kind of nuclear graybeers, the graybeers that sort of senior group of men who've been around. Well, there's one woman actually. Oh, that's good, that's exciting news. I was hoping you could reflect a bit on the extent to which you see sort of the framings and the ideas and even the same people, policy makers who have been around since the Cold War, permeating our post-Cold War nuclear thinking and whether that's, whether and how that could be problematic. Well, a lot of these people are no longer around. They've died off. I think the last one to go was Andrew Marshall who had been one of the early strategic thinkers of the RAND Corporation in the 50s, was given the job of director of net assessment in the Pentagon, a job that his former colleague, James Schlesinger, created for him in the mid-70s when he was secretary of defense. And Andy stayed at that job through the early 90s. I mean, no, until just a few years ago, he was in his early 90s. He died, what was he, 97 or something? But, and this job wasn't even on any organizational chart and yet he had tremendous influences. He would hand out grants to certain people. He nurtured, he had one secretary of defense, Bill Cohen, tried to shut down the office or as an economy move. He was deluged with phone calls from people threatening all kinds of action if he did this. There was a guy who was an old professor of mine named Bill Kaufman who was an assistant, special assistant to every secretary of defense from Kennedy administration to the Carter administration. He had an instrumental role in creating the counter force strategy. And, but what has happened, the way the, their endurance and legacy has come down in a kind of a perverted way. Most of these people, while they invented and perpetuated a lot of these doctrines, did you ask them, well, do you think this is realistic? They would say, well, probably not, but you know, if there's a chance that we can limit the damage of a nuclear war, we need to, we need to do certain things to make that possible. As this doctrine, as these ideas have kind of been chiseled into stone and dogma, the next generation reading all these things, kind of suffers under the illusion that they're more realistic than anybody in the end who had come up with the ideas had believed. And so to the extent their legacy does live on, and I think it does, it's through acolytes. At this point, we're on to second or third generation acolytes who don't quite get the limitations, there's a moment, and it's in my book, in one of these graybeard meetings where Mattis, there's an argument going on, and Mattis says, does anybody in this room believe that nuclear war can be limited? And even like Frank Miller was saying, well, no, probably not, but then there was this guy who spoke up, who was the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense and charge of strategy named Elbridge Colby, who's still around. And he said, well, Mr. Secretary, many people of my generation think that, yes, there is a possibility of limiting nuclear war. And to be clear, he's in his late 30s, early 40s? Yeah, yeah. So after a while, if there are enough books and documents and so forth about this, you tend, it becomes like the legend of King Arthur. You kind of think that there really is a magic sword in the zone that you can pull out and achieve great power. So that's the danger. You very few people have taken a fresh look. Once you get into the machinery, you kind of get into it. And this professor of mine, Kaufman, he told me once that when he was in it, when he was in the thick of it, it was breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then when he moved away and looked at it from afar, he was like, God, that's a crazy world. But that's the world that we're in. That's the real conundrum. And then you? I'm an entire pathologist. Your book is titled The Bomb, but it's really actually about the bomb in the system. We turned it, we turned it. The bomb in what? The system's at the liverage. Yeah, yeah. But they're delivering the bomb. The bomb in the world of B-50s and B-36s. The bomb in the world of B-50s and B-36s is one thing. A bomb in the world of liquid-fueled ICBMs is another thing. A bomb with solid-fuel ICBMs that have circular probabilities of a couple hundred yards is another thing. So as one looks at how, at the history that you've just been covering, to what extent is there a technology driver involved in delivery systems that make old arguments absolutely much faster than you might expect? Well, it's true. When all this stuff began, the bombers were the principal means of delivery. And then, but really by the mid-60s, we're talking about ICBMs being the chief carrier of this. And you're right. I mean, I think what the effect of the missiles was that it made these ideas seem more realistic. I mean, if you're talking about preemptive first strikes, the ability to do this with a missile that gets there in a half an hour or a depressed trajectory accurate SLBM that gets there in 10 minutes makes it seem even more feasible than a bomber that will take eight hours to get over there. One interesting thing. And when I first heard this, I really had to ask a couple of people to make sure it was true. And it turned out it is. I don't think this is true any longer. But as late as the early 90s, no matter the option, even the smallest limited nuclear option wasn't so limited because every option, no matter what it was, had to involve ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers or cruise missiles. Every branch of the strategic nuclear force wanted to get in on all the options, which is first, I mean, just kind of like bureaucratic politics run haywire. But it's also kind of insane. I mean, even if you think the basic premise is sane, the idea, you're wanting to send a signal to the Russians that, hey, this is just a limited attack. We're only sending 40 missiles. Please respond accordingly of it all. But if you've got missiles going off and then six hours later, here comes a bomber dropping bombs or shooting off cruise missiles too. It's like, wait a minute. I thought you said that was it. So it's, and you know, I won't go into it now, but so much of the early history of the arms race, the late fifties, early sixties, especially, where it's really every bit as much a competition between the Air Force and the Navy as it was between the United States and the Soviet Union. This gentleman here. I'll go so on. Okay. I'm a retired mathematician. I was, but looking at this from the historians, you have people who came from these meetings with Kennedy and said, one thing, and then you say, we have tapes that say something else. In the end, how does one decide which really is the definitive? I would go with the tapes. If we're in this room and you know, you go out and talk with friends and you say, oh, Fred Kaplan advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament. Well, let's go look at the tape. I think the tape would be the authoritative source. There's a gentleman behind you. Although, let me just elaborate a little bit, not be so flip. I mean, there are some things in this book that are there are interviews. And I try to triangulate this as much as possible. I mean, when I'm talking about things that happened in the Obama, and I talked with about two dozen people in the Obama administration about things that happened there that haven't been written about any place else. And I double checked and triple checked as much as I could, and correlated it with available documentation. But yeah, there are some things I do not have documentation for. And you just have to, you know, make a guess. This is journalism. It's kind of a combination of journalism and history. And you know, that's what a lot of, but my point is to the extent that you can get to the primary source material, that's almost always. The source you should use. And thankfully, there's a lot of that out there now. And I'm kind of pissed that most historians for ignoring a lot of it. Aaron Goldzimmer, I'm a donor advisor. I just haven't heard you say anything about proliferation to non-state actors and how that might have changed strategy or thinking or posture. Yeah. Well, that's a difficult one because yeah, deterrence assumes rationality and the desire to live on the part of the entity that you're trying to deter, right? And it also assumes that say, a country launches a ballistic missile, you can trace the arc. And oh, that came from, you know, this launchpad and whereas in Al Qaeda or whatever. I think that danger may not be as great as it was some years ago. Shortly after the Soviet Union broke up, I think it was a very serious danger because there were a lot of truly loose nukes and there were a lot of unemployed Soviet nuclear scientists who were suddenly being offered money to go work for other places. And, you know, luckily, I mean, this is something that, you know, I think deserves even more celebration. You know, Sam Nunn and Richard Luger were approached by people that they'd known over the years, the Soviet Union, saying, hey, we've got a real problem and it's in the interests of the rest of the world to help us. And, you know, the Nunn-Luger amendment, we spent millions of dollars helping to lock up nukes and to dismantle weapons and to give money to Soviet science, Russian scientists. And I think we, and then, you know, Obama had this, which I regret not writing more about this, the NSS, the Nuclear Security Seminars or whatever, there was this international group that met to come up with new ways to provide security to loose nukes. It didn't go as far as he wanted it to go, but it went quite a ways. And things like, there's continues to be cooperation between the United States and Russia on nonproliferation because the Russians have always been, even way more than we are, very keen on preventing proliferation, even among their own allies when they were the Soviet Union, they didn't want their allies to have, because they wanted to remain in control. To Czechoslovakia or East Germany, it had nuclear weapons. They would fear that they would be turned on Moscow as much as turned on Berlin or a bomb or whatever. So I don't think it's, and then, you know, just having some nuclear material as people looked into it more, you know, it's kind of hard to turn that into a usable weapon. It's an industrial job. I think the notion of an alkydor or ISIS nuclear bomb is not as great as a lot of the more sensationalized fears. Other people may disagree with me on this. I don't know. I totally agree. I mean, in fact, when ISIS took over Mosul and in the Mosul University lab, so it was radioactive material, simple that they could have used in a so-called dirty bomb, they didn't know, I mean, it was cobalt or 80, I think. They didn't even know they had it. I mean, the whole, this is a total fantasy. The idea that terrorists are gonna acquire, steal, buy, make. It's harder than it looks. Of course, I mean, the Iranians, the Saddam spend hundreds of millions of dollars that never got there. And so it's a fantasy. Other questions? We'll go down the end here. Thanks, David Sturman here at New America. Some strategic theorists or analysts have argued that during the 90s and to the 2000s, broadly there was an increase in acceptance of preventive war, whereas in the past there was a taboo where there may have been planning, but it was shied away from. I guess I'm wondering in the context of our nuclear weapons strategizing, when it came to other states, either developing nuclear weapons or other strategic purposes, we wielded our potential threat against, did you see in your research a rising willingness to consider or engage in preventive war separate from sort of the deterrence or the sort of launch on warning, preemptive question, but specifically like counter pro-lib. So not launching on warning beyond. Well, you know, I mean, in the 50s, of course, there were a lot of people advocating preventive attack on the Soviet Union before they developed an A-bomb and then before they developed an H-bomb. I mean, there were serious politicians who were arguing for this and, you know, someone like General LeMay and General Power would have been delighted to do that. In more recent times, I mean, I can't think of any military people who are serious about, I mean, as I say, the nuclear war plan that Trump ordered into effect is against North Korea is a preventive nuclear war plan, or at least that's a central theme of it. And there's always been, you know, this notion which was been stated by every president since the threat started manifesting itself that we will not allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon, for example, I mean, Barack Obama said that too. I mean, he used cyber technology initially to block the development of, you don't need to do a preventive, I don't think Obama would have under any circumstances actually launched nuclear weapons at Iran just to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. One thing that might be a little bit worrisome, I think it's not worrisome because the premise is a little off, but what happens if Donald Trump comes to the realization that Kim Jong-un has been taking him for a ride with all of his beautiful letters and their summit bone on me. And, you know, I mean, it's already known that he's continuing to enrich uranium and expand his missile base. And, you know, what happens if he starts testing nuclear weapons again, or testing an ICBM, which is where Trump has drawn the line. He's saying, anything up to that point is fine with me. What happens, and then what happens if, you know, one thing that Trump really hates is embarrassment and betrayal. You know, will he go back to the rhetoric of fire and fury? I don't know. But that war plan that he put in place is still there. We have time for, okay, we're just taking together then. And then you can also. Richard Coleman, CBP, retired. The military is talking about this huge expense of replacing their aging antiquated missile stock pile, which sounds like a reconsideration again from the beginning of what we need. And it's a huge cost that they're talking about. Can you comment on that? Good question. Angela. We have one final question online, and that is, what is your thinking as to why these negative outcomes won't happen? Oh, there's not much thinking, just a sense. But on this question about the replacement, it's very interesting. And this is one thing I get into in this book. You know, Obama needed, you know, new start. He needed to negotiate that because start, strategic arms reduction treaty was about to expire. And needed new start as a centerpiece to his reset of relations with Russia. Which actually did accomplish quite a lot more than is generally understood. And so to get Senate ratification of new start, he succumbed to Republicans' demand to spend more on nuclear weapons and to modernize the whole triad. Now, the way he worded it in a letter to the Senate agreeing to this was that he agreed to request funding to modernize or replace all three legs of the triad. Modernize might mean upgrading the software, you know, upgrading the warhead, replacing the tritium when the stock war is down or something like that. He did not mean necessarily replacing all 450 ICBMs with brand new ICBMs all submarine, but the Republicans took it at that. And they put a price tag on it of $1.3 trillion over 30 years. And then, and this was very clever, people in the Trump Pentagon started talking about the Obama program of record. And that was to modernize new everything of all three. And so if you're coming into Trump, I mean, Matt initially was thinking about, maybe we don't need all this stuff. But if it's like, this is the Obama program of record, nobody was going to argue to go any less than what the Obama program of record was. And now at least Newstart set a limit. Okay, you could replace all of these, but you couldn't build more. And there was really no appetite in the military to build more. But if we're gonna let Newstart expire and there's no sign that I can tell of any, I mean, there are people in the State Department who have written up the paperwork to extend Newstart so that if Trump decides, yeah, let's extend it because it expires in February, 2021 or whoever the next president says, yeah, let's extend it, it can happen very quickly. No inclination to do that, so he could build more. I mean, INF treaty, he abrogated that because the Russians were cheating on it a little bit, but the Russians never wanted this treaty. They hated it from the moment Gorbachev signed it. They're happy to have that treaty done away. But what do we do? All of a sudden we start testing a medium range missile, the likes of which had been banned by the INF treaty. And I called some people in the Pentagon and I said, what's the strategic rationale for this missile, this new missile? And I was told, well, there really isn't one yet. We haven't yet talked any allies about where to base it. We don't know what it's gonna be aimed at. We don't, I mean, it's a conventional weapon because it banned conventional and nuclear. But no, there is no, it's basically we can do it and therefore we will do it. And so if you have that as your premise and you have a rather cavalier attitude to our nuclear weapons to begin with and a desire not to be constrained by anything that Barack Obama attached us to, which was I think the only reason why Trump got out of the Iran nuclear deal, then that's a recipe for a renewed arms race. Well, we wanna thank Fred for the brilliant presentation, the brilliant book. Thanks, thank you. And Fred is, I'm sure, willing to sign books if you would like him to sign. Absolutely.