 Okay, I think we're about ready to get started. So if folks could grab their last plate of food, grab a drink, and grab a seat, I'll be introducing our debaters, our topic on de-alerting. We're happy to again have, this is now our fifth debate, and the Pony Debates the Issues series, which is an extension of the online blog that Pony started earlier this year. Pony, the project on nuclear issues, does a number of things. Most of you here are familiar with that. I'll just kind of give you a brief rundown. We do conferences, you know, four a year, three regional conferences in our capstone conference in December. Coming up here in December 15th, we're having our capstone conference at Omaha at U.S. Strategic Command. If any of you want to join us for that, you know, let me know. The event page is up online. You can register online quick and easy. We'll let me know if you have any questions. We also run a Nuclear Scholars Initiative, which is basically a six-month series of workshops for young professionals and graduate students who are interested in working on nuclear issues. We bring them together with nuclear experts to kind of run through the gamut of nuclear policy and operational issues, and help them get smart and develop and give them a chance to publish on various incendiary nuclear issues. The blog, like I said, is something we started. You can find the web address and the materials on your seat. We started this early this year. It's been a big success. We've kind of worked our way into the nuclear blogosphere, I think, fairly seamlessly, and we are happy to have this live component. We're able to take a closer look at some of the issues that we discussed on the blog and at the conference or elsewhere. So here we're discussing tonight, deal-earning. This is a tricky issue. The resolve statement, as you can see, is a bit of a mouthful. It involves a lot of policy and operational issues and constraints. So we're happy to have Walt Slocum here and John Steinbruner, who will help us work through those and should hopefully put on another entertaining and successful debate. We've got John Warden, who is an intern at CSIS here, serving as our moderator tonight. John, you may not know and doesn't have a bio in the materials. He is a... just recently graduated from Northwestern with a major in political science and history. Also a highly successful debater. He was the winner of the... is it the Copley Award? Yes, the Copley Award last year that's awarded to the top debate team in the country. So John, I'll turn the mic over to you and put it in your able hands to introduce the format and tell people how things will proceed from here on out. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Mark. I guess the only thing we'll add is, unfortunately Clark can't join us tonight because he's still recovering from illness, but he really loved the format and is really excited that so many of you could make it out to the debate tonight. The format of the debate is we're going to have opening speeches from each side that are seven minutes each, starting with Mr. Steinbrenner on the affirmative and then Mr. Slokom on the negative. Then we're going to have a period of cross-examination between the two of them, where each will have a three-minute period to ask each other questions. Then there's about a ten-minute period where I will ask moderator questions back and forth to each side followed by audience questions where we hope to have about 30 minutes where we can have some mics and get all of you all involved. And then finally a three-minute closing from each side. So at that, we can start with Mr. Steinbrenner with the first affirmative speech. Okay. My case is going to be based upon five assertions, and if we have more time, I'd be willing to elevate them to arguments. So first assertion is that it is a basic fundamental fact of international security that for two decades, or nearly two decades, U.S. military investment has been roughly comparable to the rest of the world combined and more than ten times greater than any plausible opponent. And the implication of that, I guess I better start this to tell me running down, the implication of that is that the United States itself cannot be successfully attacked by any conventional combined arm offensive of any magnitude, and that U.S. allies can be protected, defended against such assaults with conventional means alone and that that is an adequate deterrent for that particular problem. Second assertion is that it is also a fundamental fact that nuclear weapons are the only immediate source of lethal physical damage to the United States. That's the only way in which we can be hurt to the point that it brings the viability of our society into question. And I would derive from that the implication that it is a fundamental interest to the United States to achieve the greatest restriction on global deployment that is feasible. And I think for them, they are only weapons against us. We should restrict them to the extent possible. Third assertion is that the legacy deployment pattern which features thousands of weapons on rapid reaction alert pre-programmed for mass attack that pattern greatly exceeds any plausible deterrent requirement that remains. In fact, what it does is embodies the historical inclination to attempt to protect against or to limit damage in the case of war by preempting against the opponent. That is what the configuration of the force is about. And because of that configuration it creates an unjustifiable risk of some inadvertent catastrophe being triggered. It enables a large catastrophe to occur. Fourth assertion is that there is an obviously superior deterrent force configuration whereby all weapons would be removed to securely protected and continuously monitored storage and there would be reliably transparent protocols for reactivation in the case of there was any immediate requirement. So lock them up and don't bring them out unless you think you need them and reassure the rest of the world continuously they are indeed locked up. That configuration would provide adequate deterrence for any contingency since the weapons could be reactivated if required. It would essentially eliminate the risk of an inadvertent catastrophe and would provide a much higher standard against terrorist access than currently prevails. Fifth assertion is that the interlacking legacy pattern of large scale forces operationally inclined for a preemption if it ever comes to that that cannot be transformed into the superior configuration by unilateral actions. The initiating party would be too exposed to a preemptive attack threat for that to be judged intolerable so the only way you can get there basically is to initiate negotiations to do it on an agreed schedule under agreed terms. And hence I would conclude that the resolution should be affirmed not only to increase the time available for the authorizing decision as the resolution alludes to but to render the operational practices much safer than they currently are. And I think I would only use about half my time. Vating. The premise of this discussion which I think is clear from Dr. Steinbruner's opening mark is that deterrence still matters. That it is still a valid national security concern to worry about a possible confrontation with Russia deterring Russian nuclear attack in a confrontation like that would be a major concern. You can debate whether that's a good premise but that has to be the premise of this issue. You can certainly debate what kind of force is appropriate or necessary to have effective deterrent in that context but that's not what we're debating. Those questions are wholly separate from the issue of physical de-alerting is a wise much less unnecessary measure while we are still concerned with deterrence. So let's start out by being clear that what the resolution refers to which is reversible physical changes to substantially increase the time required to launch. What does that mean? First it would be physically impossible for any American nuclear weapon to be launched until they were re-alerted. Second the de-alerting would be reversible. They could be brought back to readiness for immediate launch. Third re-alerting would take significant time days or more and it would have to be transparent at least in the sense that the world would know that re-alerting was underway and these measures would have to apply to all nuclear forces. Now there are plenty of technical problems and certainly we will have an opportunity to discuss later. These include how to avoid making the de-alerted components immensely attractive targets and non-trivial how you would have an agreement that impacted equally on the SLBM heavy US force and the ICBM heavy Russian force. But let's leave those aside. Let's assume for purposes of argument that you could meet these practical and political difficulties. My case against de-alerting rests on two simple points. The first is that it would be affirmatively dangerous in a crisis because it would lead to a mobilization race as each side hastened to restore alert levels thereby deepening the crisis and creating real or imagined incentives to pre-empt. And it is not necessary to deal with whatever dangers may exist from having substantial part of the nuclear force ready to be launched. Let me begin with the effects in crisis because that's absolutely the most important part of the case. Let's imagine that the United States and Russia have done what the resolution requires. Each side still has a large nuclear force but that force is entirely off alert but each side also knows that in a relatively short period of time they can be brought back to ready status. And for the agreement to be verifiable in normal times if one side starts re-alerting the other side will immediately know. Now imagine a crisis bearing in mind that it is preeminently indeed, I would argue almost exclusively in crisis conditions that we would easily worry about deterrents in a practical sense. And it is in a crisis that we are most worried or should be most worried about foolish and catastrophically regrettable but wholly conscious decisions. Each side knows until it manages to reverse the de-alert it will not be able to respond to an attack and the other side will know that it can't. So de-alerting has to be undone to have a working deterrent. It seems clear that each side will then start to re-alert. But seeing the other side crank up its readiness would itself add fuel to the crisis. But it's not just the generalized increased intention that makes a mobilization race so dangerous. Both sides would realize both sides would realize that they would give me like two minutes both sides would realize that there would be a huge potential cost to coming in second. Because the side that is first will at least in the eyes of the adversary have an option to strike before the other side is re-alerted and an incentive to do so while it has a fleeting nuclear monopoly. So in a US-Russia crisis in which nuclear restraint is most important the last thing we want to do is to create a situation in which both sides have every incentive to do things that will in fact make the crisis worse. But de-alerting would do exactly that. Thus, de-alerting would bring into the nuclear relationship between Russia and the United States an almost perfect equivalent to August 1914. Because the European powers all feared that they would be vulnerable if they did not and they all depended on mobilization. They all believed that they would be vulnerable if they didn't mobilize and the resulting mobilization race was in itself a major factor in unleashing a terrible general war. My view is that even a small increase in the risks of stability in a crisis is a terrible mistake. And I don't think the cost would be small. But if it were really the case that de-alerting is the only way to reduce whatever risks are inherent in the current situation it might be worth considering but that's not the case. Let's start by getting a basic fact about U.S. nuclear weapons straight. They are not on hair trigger alert. Only the president can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The requirement and it not only that he must issue an order but it's busters by a system of electronic locks that can only be released when the operators receive codes that they don't hold. So the right image is not a hair trigger but a gun with a safety on it. And not only a safety but a safety locked in place by a combination lock that the person holding the gun doesn't have. If there are weaknesses in these arrangements they should be fixed by fixing the arrangements not by making it impossible to carry out orders promptly. Nor is physical de-alerting the right way to deal with whatever risks there is in misunderstanding about an early warning. Better warning systems and in particular exchanges with Russia and other nuclear powers warning information is a far better way to do it. The real problem and I think at the core of most advocacy of de-alerting if not most of the anecdotal argument for it is the danger of preemption. The way to deal with that however is to maintain a survivable force and de-alerting would make the force less survivable. The day may come when the United States and Russia and any other nuclear power no longer believe they need to maintain a nuclear deterrent but until that day comes de-alerting in the sense of physical disablement from prompt launch is not only unnecessary it would add to the dangers in just those conditions in which the risks of deterrents failing are greatest. Well, if you imagine a much more extended conversation it would have to do with the Waltz axiomatic assertion that mobilization crisis mobilization would be more dangerous under a de-alert arrangement than it is under the current regime and the current forces do mobilize under crisis conditions without their normal configuration so I want to ask why do you assert that and why do you think that that is sort of an axiom rather than something that might be designed around? It certainly it is certainly true that under current conditions if there was a crisis you'd probably both sides would alert forces but there is a huge difference between an alert arrangement you add to an already and I agree by the way an already excessive level of nuclear force and one in which the side that succeeds in mobilizing first has any effect on nuclear monoptism maybe not for very long but the fact that it might not be for very long makes it all the more dangerous that it creates this pressure to say we have an opportunity on one side and on the other side that we face a danger and I think that would be much worse than the crisis in the current arrangement I frankly think that it would be better for both sides if the alert force were a larger relative part of the total force and more survivable and it is not coincidence I believe that the British and French no interest in going first have designed a relatively high alert in effect the maximum alert they can get out of their force for the maximum survivability there are good reasons to maintain the triad but if you had to make a choice the thing to do would be to build a small high alert survivable force do I have another question I'm happy to we got loads of time I don't think I do this for a living I will wave my objection to the time limit and you found the condition of course that you would the why do you think that it is impossible to design re-alerting arrangements such that nobody would encounter an advantage of reliability in the course of implementing well I was going to ask you how you would do that because I can't imagine how you could have a re-alerting arrangement which was not presumably the way the re-alerting would work would be one of the things you've written some of the things you've written would be you'd have the warheads would be storage separate for the ICBM that's the easiest one presumably there would be some kind of a monitoring system that would confirm that they were in fact where they were supposed to be all you would know is that the monitoring system was no longer in place the only thing that on-site inspection would go back the only on-site inspection tells you you're no longer allowed to do the inspections and I think that would be a problem it's an alarm that re-alerting has started but it's not an answer and moreover as long as deterrence is an issue we can argue about deterrence that's a whole separate subject as long as deterrence is an issue the sites will have every incentive to design their system so they can be re-alerted rapidly and I think that is the core of the argument against what I call physical de-alerting just note that the counter proposition would be that if you got the respecting operating organizations and gave them the instruction to design a de-alert arrangement such that the crisis instabilities you're discussing would be if not made impossible at least minimized I think it is clear that there's quite a lot you could do to have it, which is now in grain to go to higher and more sort of intense alert in response to perceived threat let me pick up on your notion that you're conceding that deterrence is still relevant which indeed I did that's not the same thing as saying it's the only thing we care about and one can't ask about priority too and the implicit notion about radical de-alerting called that would be to subordinate deterrent to the higher priority of managerial control not to get rid of it it would still be there and it would still be available but the revised configuration of forces I said would impose much greater managerial control on both sides and between them and still provide for the mobilization of any deterrent force that you thought you needed resumably mobilization is not for the purpose of going into a preemptory configuration but going through a retaliatory configuration why can you not get there? well first of all I'm strongly in favor of managerial control that has virtually nothing to do with de-alerting unless you believe that the only way you can get effective control is by not needing it by making it impossible and then you get into the question of how you transition from the condition in which you can't do the condition in which you can I believe that the current U.S. arrangements and for all the business about doomsday machines I think there's a good deal of reason to believe the Russians who have exactly the same incentive as we do in this country have done more or less the same thing is to build in very strong managerial control into the system most with respect I believe Brooks is here knows more about this than I do but there's not a whole lot of other people who have had as much exposure to this as Lin my view is that the current system makes it as close to physically impossible as anything in the real world is for American nuclear weapons to be launched without two things happening a valid presidential order and we can talk about succession and decapitation in a day-to-day situation a valid presidential order which is acknowledged by the recipients of the order to be valid and second the receipt of an outside code think of it as a combination of a lot I really like this analogy of the gun with the safety that can only be fired the safety can only be taken off the pistol if you have a combination that you don't hold that somebody else gives you rather anticipate people will say Barack Obama does not himself hold the code if people assume that is true I will concede it for purposes of argument to tell you the honest truth people who write about it don't know either but the point is that the people who control the weapons don't hold the code so in terms of managerial control I think we got that problem as close to solid as possible and if people who actually know the facts think there are problems with it we should look and make sure there are we've had a couple of really bad screw ups with nuclear safety and security arrangements which have nothing to do with this problem but indicate that things can go badly wrong with things you thought should work right that's a legitimate thing to worry about and we should look at it but it doesn't have any necessities it is not a situation where the only way you can solve the problem is by simply making it physically impossible for the weapons to be used in a day to day I'll ask a couple questions and then we can open it up to the audience that's okay you took up time you can get one if you want I have a serious simple technical question what would you do about the submarine what would I do about the submarine keep them as the answer and rig it so that the mobilization for the U.S. would be into a submarine force where would the submarine how would you arrange to have the submarines both survivable and not able to be launched immediately let me give you a procedural answer I've admitted that this could only be done by negotiated agreement there would have to be a working group of operational managers on both sides you guys go figure this out how do we do this and don't tell me you can't do it I want an answer I am not going to sit here in details of physical configuration operations of the submarines but I would say if told to do it they could do it and again the image is not that we're worried to attack it's going to arrive in half an hour what we're worried about is giving some kind of escape valve if you will to those people who think that the residual deterrent effect of simply the stored weapons is not enough they have to be brandished in some way and therefore you have to be able to do that how do you do that in such a way that you do not create I would ask the operational forces to do that I would ask them to do it in tandem and I would expect them to be able to solve the problem I must given that the United States the bulk of the United States alert force is in submarines it seems to me that the answer that somehow somebody else will figure out don't you have any vision of how this would work I mean it seems to me that one possibility is the range I mean they'd have to be a long way away since the range of thought is that one of the possibilities that would be one of the possibilities and another possibility is you could separate them out on the submarine itself but I think the point is is not to sort of get to hang on up the principle is that we do not want an imminent preemptive attack ever we don't want that ever to happen because although what you said about the degree of managerial control on a given day is let's say more or less correct it's never perfect but remember Murphy's law something go wrong and eventually will okay let's suspend our belief in Murphy's law for the normal day to day circumstance it's not the same thing as forces that begin to worry about an actual confrontation and begin to transform their internal arrangements from the overwhelming negative control configuration that does prevail on a given day to positive control which means I'm going to assure that I can operate even under a preemptive threat if I have to do so the forces have that state they have no experience with that state as you know I irritated both Amy and Walt by using this analogy they are zoo animals they've never hunted in the wild fortunately we don't want to ever have them do that but if they did our understanding of the dynamics would be much less assured than you suggest and I'm just saying that we don't ever want to try to experience a situation in which we have an interaction going on between two forces who are worried about detecting and preempting against preemption and particularly when there's an imbalance in the preemptive capability the United States having a lot more of it than the Russians do that is not under crisis conditions or even mild crisis conditions a stable situation that's the whole point I'll just ask a couple questions and then we'll get to the audience one of the I guess first for Mr. Steinbrenner what do you think it would be the scenario or the most likely scenario where the catastrophe that you've described this accidental or miscalculated launch would occur any scenario that involves even fairly low level tension between NATO on one side and the Russian military establishment on the other would begin to get us into this territory you pick your situation and I would fortunately it's a little hard to imagine as we're sitting here today but to say that it is inconceivable I think is way outside the bound the Russians do something sort of provocative in Estonia the Estonian government cranks down Estonian Russians the Russians mobilize we decide that that is inappropriate and you begin to get a little bit of a situation given the very stark imbalance in preemptive capability between the two sides including particularly the conventional weapons we could get in early trouble with a scenario of that sort because the Russian side is worried about our preemptive capability and we're worried about how they would do the other scenario I'll give you from Russian sources there is a designer of the Russian command system who's retired who has said if terrorists knew what I know it would not be impossible to trigger a launch directed against the U.S. meant to trigger a U.S. retaliation as the apocalyptics of the scenario and he said we ought to make that more possible more impossible than it is and that requires mutual discussion nobody paid any attention I'm personally a little nervous about just dissing an argument of that sort because the guy knows what he's talking about I have two follow-up questions and then I'll move on the first is the scenario you described as the most likely was there was some crisis that triggered it in Estonia I think was the example you gave isn't that the same type of crisis that would make it so that both sides would start reconstituting their forces so that they would be on high alert and then the second part of my question is a lot of times the way people describe the reason that there would be a launch when they see a sign on the radar there's a miscalculated launch is that there's a use it or lose it where we think we have to launch our nuclear weapons before theirs hit the ground in order to take out sufficient numbers of targets if that use it or lose it pressure exists even in a de-alerted regime wouldn't the United States still have an incentive in Russia as well to use conventional forces for that same kind of counter force strike what I'm trying to suggest is that if you take the nuclear weapons out of the equation on an immediate basis you have much greater hope of keeping them out which is what you want no, I mean if you get a mild crisis and that's really all that we're likely to have between NATO on one side and the Russians on the other if the nuclear weapons are de-alerted they're not going to be sort of brought back in immediately the problem is that the two forces in particular the Russian forces really are vulnerable to a pre-emptive attack if the other side is cold-blooded enough to do it and there is an imbalance in this regard just given the inherent what I said before the imbalance in military investment and the physical distance between NATO and Russia on one hand being closed and Russia and the US on the other being very far away the point is we do not want to create a situation in which the weaker force begins to be nervous about its ability to handle the situation without appealing to its nuclear weapons and he is nervous about its ability to preserve its nuclear weapons and the Russians have every reason to be so worried at the moment we don't want that situation and that we would be much better off by the de-alerted arrangement okay, Walt one of the last things that you said was that when the nuclear weapons were no longer needed for nuclear deterrents you might hope that we would have an arrangement like this and you also said that crisis stability was the or at times of crisis was the times when it was most important that we have stability of our nuclear forces do not think that a de-alerting regime between the US and Russia could have a confidence building effect that might make it so that it was less likely that there would be a crisis in the future the crisis let's take a step nuclear weapons are not going to be used or even thought seriously about being used unless there is an exogenous crisis John is perfectly reasonable in saying you can imagine even during the Cold War it took a huge stretch it wasn't inconceivable you can imagine some kind of political conflict that Baltics is a perfectly reasonable one Ukraine you know, pick your stand and I'll invent a crisis to build up around it that's when you worry about general war you worry about large forces that's what nuclear weapons that's when nuclear weapons become most important and when you have to be most sure that you have a system which will minimize the risks of their being used and people talk about war by mistake the chances of a war by a mistake in the sense of a electronic glitch that sets off or even somebody misreading a radar or other signal on a day to day situation is much less than a mistake in the same sense that the first world war for that matter from the Japanese point of view the second world war of mistakes that is decisions made by leaders believing that there was a vulnerability or a potential vulnerability that they had to act so it was not to be disadvantaged and that's what I think is at the core let me just say one word about this issue of the Russian vulnerability of the first strike the Russians talk about it look at how, first of all the Russians do maintain first of all they maintain some silo based ICBMs second they don't maintain a very large submarine force at sea they normally maintain some part at sea and second if the Russians are in this prison they have the key in their pocket as long as the price of oil is over about $40 a barrel they spend lots of money on defense and if they really thought that they were vulnerable to a bolt from the blue American attack it's to send the goddamn submarines to sea a little bit all they have to do they've invested a very large amount of money in building a mobile ICBM force now admittedly most of it stays in garrison when we were going to build a mobile ICBM force we were going to keep most of ours in garrison I didn't think that would be a great idea but it's how we plan to do it and the reason is and they did this even during the cold war the Russians maintain a much lower alert level cynical because the Russians knew we're going to know when the war started because they were going to start it but you can also say the Russians the Soviets were Marxists and the Russians are historians and they agree with what I said a few minutes ago war's starting a crisis there are plenty of examples of tactical surprise there are very few examples of strategic surprise and harvard was not a strategic surprise june of 1941 was not a strategic surprise everybody was screaming this time his spies, winston Churchill germans who were sympathetic who didn't want germany to start a war with the soviet union since they know how to turn it out were screaming at him that Hitler was about to betray the nazi soviet pack but the Russians maintain this posture because they think when it comes to it they can mobilize I think it would be very dangerous we would be better off both sides if they had a more survival day to day force not because they have to worry about it from the blue but I don't like the mobilization race but that's a choice for them we agree on what the problem is it's not sort of an accident or mechanical failure it is an uncontrolled interaction of the crisis that's what we have to worry about and I would just point out that it's a little disingenuous from their point of view for us to say well just go do a more submarines and send them to sea it would be okay because we chase them when they go to sea we play the same game we've always played and at any rate we're sure that we can do it if we want to and the Russian surface navy is just not up to protecting submarines that can see against us over an extended period of time unless we take the heat off and so to say well things as they are we're both going to conduct traditional operations which are fundamentally hostile and you just have to do it such that we can't get at you and play your part of it that is not I would think an appropriate arrangement for the current circumstances current circumstances and let me just talk a little bit more fundamentally they do require for many reasons much more fundamental security accommodation between Russia and China and the United States and currently prevails and why well we can talk about global warming and the need for really dramatic transformation of energy generation globally in that context we can talk about Iran and the need to sort of be on top of that situation we can talk about the residents in both Afghanistan and Iraq and there's a lengthy conversation the bottom line of which is we have very strong reason to have much more stable if you will and much more accommodating relationships with these countries than we have at the moment and this is one of the main items of getting to take us out of what's really an implicit confrontation and potentially lethal one and into a more mutually managed situation and I would contend if we do do that we are much less likely to have the crisis it's out of control much less we don't increase its likelihood we reduce it a great deal can we both sides let's start with some audience questions I think Chris and Mark will be going around with some mics we'll start down here question for each John I was sort of surprised by the suggestion that a confrontation over a NATO member would not lead the Russians to re-alert given that every Russian I've talked to has stressed that it is only their nuclear capability which prevents NATO from invading them today and so I'd be interested in a little more of your analysis on why the Russians would in fact be willing to hold off on re-alerting because that's Walt's basic argument that we'll re-alert at the very worst possible time and for Walt you know my views on that I'm on the other side of you from John but what's wrong with the idea of pulling together as he suggests a joint US-Russian working group to see how you would do it if the two presidents decided to do it why is that dangerous other more useful things to do I have no objection to diplomats or technicians talking to each other I indeed with respect I don't think most people who are in favor of re-alerting have thought through either the technical or those little technical problems of storage either they're going to be all over the place or they're going to be in a few targets which might attract the targets maybe even as John points out for conventional weapons and the time when only we have the level of accuracy necessary to make that danger is not good I think it would actually strengthen my side of the argument if it was more serious discussion of how you would actually what this world would actually look like I have no objection I don't think I ever reject the trying to understand problems better maybe there is some way to solve the submarine my guess is the Russians don't think there's a way to solve the mobile problem and incidentally John is almost certainly right that the Russians I hope there are no navy people in the room with these troop believers I think the Russians exaggerate the submarine capability but presumably that's the reason they've invested in mobile ICBMs but our anti-submarine capability is not good against mobile ICBMs let me can see that's quite a good question and it smokes out the fact that I would have to admit you're not going to do de-alerting and only that it's part of a package that would have to include quite a bit of understanding about the management of conventional forces I would simply argue that in the context of such a package you can prevent and that would be the whole point of preventing them from going to this car to re-alert the force to and the whole point would be again reassurance the problem with the Russians is not that they're unacceptably aggressive the problem with the Russians is they're overly fearful and they have some pretty good reason and so the a real policy, this would have to be embedded in a larger policy involving reassurance about the handling of U.S. NATO conventional capabilities which are pretty threatening to them if we were in that situation if Mexico could do what NATO can do screaming about it much more than they have been Thanks I have a question about since the president has set the ambitious agenda of moving decisively toward lower numbers and eventually zero to both of you at what point down that ramp you get to situations where de-alerting becomes either more sensible or are we considering for example in your case is it necessary to in your mind retain alert forces all the way to zero we actually get down to a point where we're beginning to say this is where it makes sense I think, as I said the best answer to that is look at the British and French who are at a minimum force for it to be viable given that we can't keep submarines at sea all the time I mean in some sense survivability which includes survivability of the command and control and the force being available when needed is more important at lower numbers in some important sense it is probably true that if the only thing you're using nuclear weapons for is to prevent a catastrophic attack a threat to your existence then probably the warheads on a submarine are enough if all you wanted to do and I don't know I don't know how the French target their force but it presumably is not targeted the way we target it's targeted on cities to cause as much damage as you can at least to convince this other side that that's what you do and small forces by definition are more vulnerable to preemption than big forces and therefore I think as long as you're going to have nuclear weapons then as long as you're going to add a deterrent and it's the deterrent problem not the nuclear weapons that's a little bit of the issue if you assume a world in which nobody is worried about either being overwhelmed with conventional force or being attacked with nuclear weapons the problem would be what should you do with the battleships because we don't worry about battleship problems anymore but it seems to me as long as you have that condition and you have nuclear weapons having them be survivable is essential because otherwise they're attractive target and survivability includes readiness for use because making them not ready for use makes them less survivable unless somebody can explain to me how that's not the case does that answer your question I mean well tell that to the people who live here I think it's fairly clear that as you go to lower numbers first of all you have to have a more accurate count than we currently do at the moment nobody knows within a very large number what the worldwide total is because the national accounting systems are not telling each other about that and they don't have confidence in reports so to get to seriously low numbers we first have to introduce a global accounting arrangement that tends over a fairly lengthy period of time probably to something like unit accuracy and there's a big argument of whether we ever get there but we can certainly get a lot closer than we currently are until you can have accurate accounting of the numbers you're not going to get either low numbers or you're certainly not going to get zero or anything like that so the way to think about this is that if you want to go in that direction that is one stage you have to go through a global accounting arrangement so we have an accurate account and I think as you reduce whatever they are that pretty sort of sharp restrictions on alert rates are going to be necessary in order to avoid the preemption problem becoming greater as you go to lower numbers and I think we just disagree on how hard it would be to work that out I think it can be worked out but what I would say is that anybody who wants to advocate global zero has got to first advocate a global accounting system that includes all weapons and fissile material and recognize that it takes quite a long time to get there we're not anywhere near that at the moment and I would argue that as part of establishing such an accounting system taking them off alert is one of the natural things you would do even what you said, Walt, I'm just wondering would you advocate then that India and Pakistan should be on alert? I think one of the real problems with the India-Pakistan situation now is that, again I don't know and I doubt it more than a handful that people do though for sure but it seems pretty clear that they're in the situation that in some sense I worry about irreligion, presumably most of that effort that in a crisis they would either have to hurry up and get the weapons allocated to the operational delivery systems and there would be a temptation to try to interrupt that process I mean, if you were the Indian general staff and there's a crisis it's hard to imagine a crisis between NATO and Russia it's incredibly easy to imagine a crisis between India and Pakistan we have one every five years so we're due for nothing it's hard to if you were in the Indian general staff and you saw the facts beginning to do whatever it is they have to do which is presumably get gravity bombs out of storage and put them on F-16 you don't need a nuclear weapon to interrupt that process I would the Indians are reportedly muttering about getting submarines which would be a good thing because at least they would be in a secure situation where they wouldn't have to work it's probably equally true that if the Pakistanis believe they have the capability to do anything about it they would have the same temptation to try to interrupt things I also don't believe that these countries if nobody said they could have the Chinese they got to find a way to get serious about it even the Israelis by all accounts are putting stuff in sufferings because it's they've got to anything on land in Israel and it is a good thing that they are survivable and in order to be survivable in my view they have to be in some sense I have a question about the race to re-alert Mr. Slocum presumably if we're in a de-alerted, demated state we'd have more warheads storage areas than we have now and there would be more dispersion of them other than within the ICBM bases and other places so I guess my question is about the window of vulnerability that you refer to is that one side could have such complete confidence that they knew which warheads were in storage areas in transit being loaded onto ICBMs and elsewhere that they could confidently launch a counter-force strike without fearing any sort of second strike retaliation so is the fact that warheads would have to be transited from a storage site to warheads enough ambiguity to provide deterrence and a crisis in and of itself I could answer that better if somebody had a concrete illustration of how they were going to do it but the de-alerting has to be verifiable I take it that we're talking about a verifiable arrangement I guess you can imagine an arrangement in which you don't know where the weapons are you only know that the launchers don't have them on them you're either going to have to monitor the launchers or monitor the weapons and the one that you monitor you're going to know where they are not necessarily it's a little hard to imagine a monitoring system that doesn't include knowing what it is I have talked to Richard about this and Richard is an advocate of de-alerting but he's also honest enough to say that the problem of submarines is a very very tough problem and if Richard Garwood can't think of a cute technical solution to a problem like this it's a hard problem nothing is going to be insoluble but I have not only respect but genuine affection for Garwood he has had some great ideas some of which I wish we had the sense to implement but the problem is I will tell you one of the things I would worry is that the first country to get ready with their weapon ready on alert and available would propose a freeze on the real that is because the process has to be transparent at least to know what it's starting and the first side we get a submarine to see and we do whatever it is to make it effective again in the end and we then announce this is a accurately this is a dangerous situation and we should both stop and the penalty for not stopping is we will do things I mean you can play out the scenario and I also think you have to take seriously that as long as deterrence is relevant people would design the force so that it could be rapidly re-alerted and in a way it was hard hard to interrupt in particular to the Spass I noticed the question asks for physical means of impeding the re-alerting process and I was wondering if either of you so far has addressed social or political means of impeding the re-alerting process so for instance with physical means perhaps you can delay this for 90 hours let's say and according to Mr. Schlokam there will be a race for each side to get it done in 80 hours instead of 90 hours and whoever's slowest loses but if we were to do something more creative in a political sense if we had some international troops and monitors on each side monitoring these weapons and saying okay if one side or the other side wants to re-alert you both have to do it a little bit at a time simultaneously say you know a few weapons here on each side whether it be 10 or 5 or 20 or whatever you think is the right number in a right amount of time instead of 90 hours to re-alert in a race to be the first you could have 90 days to re-alert so that we don't have a nuclear war starting within the first 100 hours of a crisis and in 100 days or 90 days or 60 days there's much more time for each side to think about it and perhaps come to a solution before we get to this nuclear war I think you're identifying the basic spirit of the real idea there physical any physical mechanism would not by itself be adequate and the whole idea involves weaving around very elaborate rules such that the rule is they shall not sort of indulge in a re-alerting race to blandish weapons in the other guy's face and that you will back up those rules and not just sort of agreements in principle but operational practices that sort of basically provide reassurance that we're going to honor the rules and the whole point of this is to keep out of the crisis circumstance in which the alert process begins in one side or the other or both simultaneously begin to worry about a real imminent preemptive capability you want to keep them away from any serious preemptive capability in the immediate circumstance and of course you would associate it with a lot of monitoring rules and various reassuring arrangements which is why I don't accept Wall's characterization of the situation they would inevitably re-erase and it would be more dangerous than not now I think we can fix it so that that is decisively not true and that there is not only the physical de-alerting but a set of rules that effectively prevents this kind of behavior would it make it physically impossible maybe not but you can make it a lot more less likely to occur than it currently is and that's what it's doing I would like to live in a world in which the relationship among states was the kind you described we have an arrangement like that now called the NPT and I think it works fine for countries that want to play by the rule it assures us that Japan does not have the clear weapons which Japan already said the question whether Japan has nuclear weapons is like the question which was more true in the old days now does Switzerland have an army today no tomorrow it has an army of 400,000 people that it works the NPT system works fine for countries that understand that it is in their interest to continue to play by the rules if you begin by the hypothesis that both sides will play by the rules they're not going to have a crisis of this kind kinds of crises we have over bananas that's the whole point look I would like to see a world like that and with respect I think there are a lot of things that can be done that begin to advance toward that let me just address the pre-engine not totally probably the right on this question I think the United States relies too much we don't have to what we should say is because we have a survivable force we do not for deterrence need to rely on preemption in any of its variants from preemption in the sense that we think they've decided do we think they're preparing do we think we see the missiles in the air we don't need to rely on preemption we should not do something which I think we tend to do which is a mistake which is to define what the full force the full alerting force is capable of is what is quote necessary for deterrence and therefore you get this argument well deterrence will be less satisfactory if we don't have the alert force where it will be fully effective there are a lot of things we can do that will reduce the preemption risk and I think we should do it and they will involve some quite substantial changes in how we do business you can't change the fact that physically if you have a survivable force you have a tension you can always fire first but there are a lot of things we could do that would reduce the reliance on preemption look I am afraid that the record is that the only thing you really know if you're dealing with somebody who wants to violate the rules the only thing you really know is that he's turned off the monitor that's why the North Koreans kicked the inspectors out that's why the Iranians run into all these games with the inspections that's why Saddam did the same thing it produced a war a war by mistake I'm deadly serious when I say if everybody would agree to play by the rules and everybody was confident that everybody would play by the rules it would be a much better world we probably wouldn't need nuclear weapons at all then we could in fact go to zero I would say therefore begin to develop the rules that everybody is induced to play by and underneath that argument is the question of are we dealing with intrinsic threats i.e. ones that are motivated by some impulse for hostility are we dealing with derived threats ones that are motivated by fear of what we might do and I think if we have a difference is that I am primarily concerned about derived threats which is why I emphasize the relative superiority of U.S. forces I think it gives us a lot of derived threat problems and Walty is still sort of validating or worried about intrinsic threats there's a fundamental difference clearly the world has both so it's a question of what's your relative weight on these two things it seems that two of the big problems that both of you have been speaking of tonight with is the survivability of the force and the temptation to preempt in time of crisis and it occurs to me that if we're on our way to global zero and we happen to get arm reductions into the hundreds rather than thousands of warheads that we enter a realm where missile defenses might actually be a means of solving both of those problems and I wanted to get your thoughts on that if you're willing to put very drastic restrictions on the offense and that's not just numbers there are other restrictions that are on it maybe you can make missile defenses work but they're dependent upon those restrictions but you're not inside of a missile defense system that can stand up to an optimized threat basically and so yeah if you're a devotee of missile defense and you're willing to engage in very restrictive rules about offensive deployment then you can imagine a missile defense system that might provide a meaningful system we're not inside of such a thing I underscore imagine I am in favor of the kind of missile defense that we are in fact building which has got some reasonable capability against very small attacks and unsophisticated ones you can argue very small includes very small sophistication as well as but I mean John will accuse me of living in the past but you probably know the argument that one of the arguments against missile defenses is they allow you to clean up your mistakes from your preemption and you can't entirely avoid that well one of the arguments for a limited missile defense is that if you think there's any possibility of accidents and so on it may give you some some way of dealing with those I don't think that's an argument that would justify missile defense program in and of itself but it's a kind of unheard improvement and I can even understand the argument if you had a high confidence system that there were no nuclear weapons and no missiles capable of delivering if you're not really certainly no nuclear weapons ICBMs are a pretty expensive way to deliver high explosive or even chemical then having some having some kind of missile defense against my hypothesis non-existent threat it'd be quite good I don't think missile defenses are the answer to the US Russia or even China problem let's take two more questions and then you can have your closing statements I have a pretty simple question that I'm guessing both of you might have thought about to what extent might de-alerting either increase or decrease US vulnerability to non-Russian nuclear attack I'll be happy to concede that if the only thing we had to worry about was rogue state attacks that put China to the side because we don't know where China will be in the 20th then because there's very little there's very little that the other side could probably do to interfere with our re-alerting I wouldn't worry so much about I mean the whole problem of what kind of a nuclear world you would want if there were no Russia and no Russian nuclear weapons and no and also probably no China problem is an interesting one that would certainly be worth thinking seriously about because maybe we'll get there someday you won't be surprised that my answer is probably still you'd have one submarine with a few missiles in it because it's there and it can't be found that you worry about the Russian we don't worry much about Russian ASW we worry a good deal less about Iranian ASW but it it's that's a good question if you assume a way the potential of US or maybe a US-China confrontation then the whole question of what kind of nuclear force it's mainly a US-Russian problem and the two sides have a long way to go before other players become very significant but you can be sure you're not going to go all the way whatever that means without bringing the others in so you're not going to have a situation in which the United States and Russia have this totally de-alerted arrangement and there's no constraint on anybody else that ain't going to happen Mr. Steinbrenner, you began your talk with Five Assertions part of the first one was that US allies can be protected by conventional means alone however this ignores the US extended nuclear deterrent for our allies and that extended deterrent relates to providing our allies reassurance about threats that are not necessarily from Russian nuclear forces they could be from North Korea, they could be from other regional rogues they could be from China can you please address how your proposal would affect the US extended nuclear deterrent I would accept that under any arrange when I'm talking about being extended to allies that means core deterrent deterrent against a nuclear attack my statement was we have no need to apply nuclear weapons to any other form of attack even in protecting allies so yes of course if somebody imagines that they're going to attack a US ally with a nuclear weapon the US deterrent would be applied against that situation if they're proposing to attack it with conventional forces there's no need and no justification for evoking US nuclear weapons we can handle that and should handle the conventional means extended nuclear deterrents not extended to other forms of attack of course they'd be available the US well I mean the deterrent arrangement is going to allow for reactivation so I don't know what you mean by timely to imagine an attack that somebody outside the system of the alerting well the arrangement is not going to talking about is a broader security arrangement North Korea is not going to be allowed to have a nuclear weapon to wield around under these circumstances nor are the Iranians you're not going to get the alerting unless you clean up those problems and you can't and I think it would help actually in some ways if we do this to be sort of more decisive or at any rate acceptably decisive about those circumstances no nuclear weapons either in North Korea or in Iran or anywhere else now we do have the residual problems I'll mention the Indians and the Pakistanis are a big problem and if you want to worry about one of them using a nuclear weapon against a US ally then you have to worry about comparable rates of availability and all that sort of but I would imagine if a de-alerting standard is set between the United States and Russia that same standard could be applied to everyone else and would certainly before it goes to completion okay if you all there's heavy pressure here the let me just admit that that essentially the statement I might make at this point would be inappropriate now I was going to suggest is that I acknowledge that's talking about de-alerting in this town at this moment if not in this room some people in this room may be more amenable to it it's a bit like talking I was imagining think of an analogy and I'm imagining one of somebody a civil rights leader went to try to talk to a Southern country club in the 1940s about their rules of discrimination and I would imagine the conversation would have some of the same character completely unimaginable for nearly all the members and the few that saw that maybe there was a point to the question would not imagine that anything was going to happen anytime soon okay but low this 60 years later a fair amount along those lines has happened and my sense is that this issue is of this character that has to do with basically civilizing a relationship which is unacceptably and unwisely confrontational and those people steeped in it who currently dominate the relationship have a very difficult time imagining how that could ever happen or should ever happen I at least am going to hope that 40 years from now and I won't be around to see it it will have happened that may be a provoke I would be very happy if the world changed so that the broad context that John describes perfectly it might happen at the moment lawyers put in everything that I said before is hereby repeated fully as if it was set out fully herein