Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 66 - Donkey Reading Series: America Needs A Dead Hand Ft. Martin Pfeiffer

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

On this iteration of the Donkey Reading Series Joe is joined by our friendly neighborhood Nuclear Anthropologist Martin Pfeiffer (@NuclearAnthro) to discuss the War on the Rocks article "America Needs A dead Hand". The article: https://warontherocks.com/2019/08/america-needs-a-dead-hand/ Support the show and get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/notifications Buy a shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store

Duck and Cover! Be sure and remember what Bert the Turtle just did, friends, because every one of us must remember to do the same thing. That's what this film is all about. Duck and Cover. Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of LimeBlood by Donkeys podcast. We are doing a donkey reading series again. With me today is Martin Pfeiffer, again. Hey! Because when I'm talking anything to do with nukes,

I have to talk to the only person who will talk to me about nukes. Am I really the only one? You're the only one I know, so yes. I have some names for you after this. That I know. So, going into this episode, I have to explain that for whatever reason, my mic was not working and I had to record this on my laptop's internal mic. So if it sounds bad, blame Mac. So we're doing the reading series on the War on the Rocks article called America Needs a Dead Hand by Adam Lothar and Curtis McGiffin.

Now, full disclosure, I did or my publisher did solicit War on the Rocks for a review of my book, which they did not do. So anything I say hateful about War on the Rocks has nothing to do with that today. It's all about this article. Another thing is Adam Lothar has a pretty checkered past, and we will not be talking about that for obvious reasons. Y'all need to run as nine.

So I saw this article about America needing a dead hand, and I knew it was kind of batshit insane, but I didn't know the proper context and way to explain how foolish it is, which is why I immediately reached out to you. I read the person filled with bitterness and hatred about the many petty things we did in the past that were uh bad ideas yes yes always happy yeah it's like rust coal sitting down at a at like the sands nuclear i was like the time is a flat circle let's build that hand

right everything old is new again and again and it does it really does feel like the 80s, which, as I told you, like, I don't even remember because I was a kid. But, you know, I read unlike some people, apparently, you know, and I'm forced to agree with you. I mean, I was born in 88, so I don't remember the 80s. But reading about the 80s and like the attitude that came from the cold war and the nuclear arms race and everything like we're kind of getting back to that where everybody is talking about oh we need to up our nuclear arsenal we need to spend more money on this russia's rolling out new nukes stuff like that and it's like yeah i feel like we've done this before oh several times um you know there's there's this this sort of imaginary threat that gets invoked.

And I would even argue that historically it's not even a new arms race. It's just we kind of had a pause in the old one. But we certainly never got out of it or got out of the basic rules of the game, which is why we have 2,000 hedged nuclear warheads about 6 point something miles away the basic roots, you know, um, basic rules of the game, which is why we have 2000 hedge nuclear warheads about six point something miles away from me. Uh, and of course the Russians keep a bunch of their, um, battlefield and other, I'm trying to think of what term to you, you know, non, I want to say not non, non long range ballistic missile. There we go. Uh, they kept some nukes

for things like, things like air defense and any submarine warfare. So like what are traditionally called tactical, but I'm not, you know, I don't believe in that concept of tactical nuclear weapons. Like there's no such thing as a tactical nuke. I mean, that's kind of my, you know, back in the day, the argument, one of the arguments was that, you know, the ocean, an encounter at sea with the soviet union was a potential nuclear flashpoint because low civilian casualties high stakes you don't want to lose your carrier to a submarine so you know break out the nuclear death charges and that's how the nuclear war could start i love that the idea that there's nuclear death charges

and nuclear anti-air missiles like Like that whole idea is just insane. In fact, the United States, the Soviet Union, as far as I know, did not deploy it, although they may have developed one. But the United States had the genie, which was the air to unguided air to air nuclear tipped missile. Just fling a nuke straight up into the air. See what happens. Well, no, it was fired from a plane, so the pilot had to do some really extreme maneuvers. Yeah, no, it was not a great idea. But we did it. It was the 50s and 60s, and it was kind of like, okay, well, let's put a nuke on it.

Great idea, Bob. Yeah, and it seems in many ways like we're kind of, as you pointed out, getting back to that in many ways. If you remember, uh, Elon Musk recently talked about nuclear Mars, uh, which is not what we're talking. I feel like I had to bring that up because it's why not? Um, my friend Taylor Genovese and I actually have a two part blog post on that called, uh, two piece because the only alternative is I think extinction it's it's quoting from an advertisement um but yeah yeah no that was that was special i mean at least when um our nuclear tech overlords actually are allowed to develop their own personally owned nuclear missiles we

won't have to wait for the climate apocalypse anymore they'll kill us all before it happens fingers i mean this is why i live near an airbase uh i wish i lived a little bit closer but then it has to be with the russians not the chinese because the russians have the warheads to spare i mean there's always you know on the other hand give it a decade it's like every tom clancy novel ever ever in like oh the russians lost track of their nukes and now ben affleck whoever has to come run after it again so i will say i read uh the sum of all fears and i think that's actually where i stopped with clancy and i did read red storm rising and even as a kid i was like really really you're gonna have a conventional invasion

in europe that doesn't go nuclear yeah that just doesn't work i mean we've seen it happen but like i guess you could consider that limited invasions. But also, Russia likes to pick on people who don't have nukes, same as us. I mean, Ukraine, we can have an argument about whether or not nuclear weapons would have still. But that's another topic. So today, though, Dead Hands. We're talking about the Dead Hand and um and the history of america's attempts to come up with a failed deadly system which is a word or a phrase that i did not know existed

before today oh yeah so normally right fail safe you know if the train engineer has a heart attack while the train is going and they slump to the ground. They have that little lanyard thingy that pulls the key out. Then the train will stop. Fail safe, right? Fail deadly. No, this way when the engineer has a heart attack, the whole train derails and kills everybody. Oh, conductor's down.

Train just explodes in the middle of the town. Yeah, well, fail deadly system went off. There goes another one. So yeah, it's an interesting thing. And theoretically, the motivation behind a failed deadly system articulated to a nuclear arsenal is that you ensure retaliation and retaliation is theoretically the basis of deterrence. Right. So the U.S., like I assume many other states with nuclear weapons, is really worried quite a bit. If you look through the declassified documents and the histories about how to make sure that if the president wants to, decides to fire off some nuclear weapons, they're going to be able to do so. The U.S. has not always shown what I

would consider to be the best judgment in terms of how it arranged that. And that includes in the realm, I would argue, of threat assessment. So I would say that U.S. worries about decapitation by the Soviet Union during the 1950s were just vastly overstated, for example. The bomber gap, the missile gap, the idea that they could decapitate United States leadership and nuclear forces somehow. It was just kind of a pipe dream in the 50s and really 60s and 70s. So one of the first things the U.S. so Eisenhower, you know, he had, he had some ideas. Um, one thing he did was pre-delegate nuclear weapons launch authority to certain combatant

commanders, right? So NORAD got it, uh, in case they had to use nukes to defend American aerospace, um, uh, Supreme, Supreme allied commander, Europe, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, and then they were able to pre-delegate their launch authority to a certain extent so that even if the president were killed, the military would still have the authority. Of course, there's a distinction between authority and ability. And the military does not need the civilian leadership

to provide the ability to use nuclear weapons, which is always a point worth remembering. Um, really? Oh yeah. I mean, how, you know,

because that leaves you open to exactly that thing. What if they killed the president and the vice president? That's fair. Or, or what happens when Bill Clinton loses his, um, card or Carter sends it to the cleaners or president Reagan is shot and it becomes evidence at the FBI.

It didn't Clinton like accidentally ditch the guy that had the nuclear football at a party or something like that. It's happened a couple, you know, it happens. It's, it's hard. Johnson at one point was on a different plane for,

you know, they were a little, maybe a little bit looser about it back then, you know. And as far as I remember correctly, the vice president hasn't always had a football either. So, you know, the nuclear president's emergency satchel. So the the fears about decapitation have waxed and waned over the years. Kennedy got or Johnson, I guess it would have been finally, I think it was him, got rid of Project Furtherance or Operation Furtherance,

which was, I mean, it was a fucking doomsday plan where, like, if a nuke went off and the president were killed, and you didn't know who did it, you know, or you couldn't find the president, you just launch everything. And everybody? Yeah, no, literally, China was in there.

Like, it didn't matter if china was a you know i mean that was the psyop in the in the early 60s the psyop had one plan it included just nuke everything uh it goes down we're taking the entire goddamn world with us no that's pretty much you know well of course what's funny right you've seen dr strange love of course of course right you know the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret. Why didn't you tell the world? And Cheryl Rofer, one of my good friends, and a very brilliant person, has had some really good thoughts on why you might not tell the world that you have a doomsday machine. machine. But it is also striking that the United States, as far as I'm aware,

never told the Soviets, like, hey, if you nuke us, you're not going to get away with it, right? We have this plan, we have this doomsday machine. And similarly, it doesn't seem that the Soviets told the US about their dead-hand system when they developed it.

It just kind of leaked out, right? That's how I, yeah. Kind of after the war, if I remember correctly. Cold War ended. To an extent, there's a lot of people, a lot of former high-ranking officers within the Soviet military who really wanted money and were very handsomely paid

for divulging information to NATO powers. Yeah, you know, that's the game um and this also by the way is you know one reason why we worry about extended government shutdowns causing financial difficulties for people with security clearances but whatever yeah if i if i was not paying members of my government i would definitely make sure all the people who are in control of my nuclear weapons and know about them were handsomely paid you know i'm gonna assume that didn't happen a doe was funded during the last one uh i know because i was still getting responses to my foyer requests um but yeah no rick perry's department was still getting funded. It horrifies me that we're at the point where I'm like, well, Rick Perry actually isn't doing an awful job or a terrible job.

Like, what hell have I descended into? Oh, God. mean by the soviet dead hand system because the article i think in this let me know if my reading of this is wrong kind of presents it as like the russians already may have what the article is proposing right this sort of automated retaliatory response system that's what they make it sound like they make it sound like they've had it since the 80s yeah no that's bullshit. And David Hoffman in his book is very paints a very, you know, very clear picture. The details of which may vary, but you can also look at Yarnovich's work, Nuclear Command Control and Cooperation, or Pavel Podbyg has, I believe, written pretty, pretty heftily on perimeter right, you know, it appears to have been that the Soviet leadership could grant launch authority to and launch ability to officers in super hardened structures who, you know, upon a certain series of signs, loss of leadership, seismic readings, etc., would then be able to fire off communication rockets that would then fire the missiles.

So it's actually not, in many ways, not that different from the U.S. Looking Glass or Takamo take charge and move out system where you would have a plane flying over the United States, sending out a launch order to the emergency rocket communication system, which would then launch a Minuteman-2 ICBM across the continent that would send out launch order. You know, we got rid of that in the 90s, by the way. Oh, okay. I was going to say, I have never heard of that. That is terrifying. The emergency rocket system, not the ability to launch the ICBMs from the plane. You can still do that under certain circumstances. And that's, so it seems like the authors of this article are using the Russian dead hand or perimeter system to be everything or anything they want it to be. It's sort of a generic threat. accidentally, I don't know that a dead hand system, right? A secured retaliatory ability is theoretically really stabilizing, right?

Supposedly. I think everybody having a doomsday weapon is the most stabilizing thing to have in the world. No, I don't think so either. I'm just saying that if the Russians, in fact, did have a dead hand doomsday machine, like, who gives a fuck? That just means you don't nuke them, which yeah, which is why we also,

you know, one of the other things that really drive me batshit about that piece is the way that the authors discuss theoretical potential options. Right. And yeah. So what was the first one so the first one they come up with is um an algorithm or ai-based system well that was number four so just for the the listeners right so the authors are arguing that the United States faces such a compression of time in regarding nuclear weapons that decision makers can no longer direct forces in any manner and that we should consider constructing potentially an artificial

intelligence system as either a decision aid or actually give it nukes itself, which is a shit idea. The second part. Yeah. I mean, it, the idea of not only putting, uh, some kind of hypothetical advanced artificial intelligence, which we do not have.

Yeah. I mean, no, no, you, you don't need to worry about whether or not it actually exists. The point is, do we need it?

Right. I mean, the idea of giving, of developing that, which has ethical loopholes and you know moral quandaries of itself and then giving it doomsday weapons is literally the fucking plot line of term and they note that and colossus i mean we have look you know as an anthropologist reading post-Holocaust nuclear war novels, let me tell you, this is not an uncommon, like, thing. Everybody knows what a terrible idea it is. The worst part is they note that. This is from the third or fourth paragraph. Admittedly, such suggestion will generate comparisons to Dr. Strangelove's Doomfday Machine, War Games Operation Plan Response, and Terminator's Skynet. Which is the trifecta.

If your idea reminds you of all three of those movies, you should probably stop. Yes. Okay, guys, it seems like we accidentally created the apocalypse here. Let's just keep this ball rolling. And there are, so one, you know, there are potential ways that if we did desire to pursue a certain system, which I don't think is needed, right? I don't see that air breathing, you know, land attack, hypersonic cruise missiles or stealth cruise missiles or boost glide vehicles. I don't see that any of that technology at this point or in the near future is going to so shift the dynamics of nuclear war large scale. Um, that that's a thing we need to

really like deal with beyond what we're already doing in terms of, or, you know, what we will continue doing in terms of nuclear command and control. I mean, these are not things that we've just like, like, it's not like just the president can do it, you know?

Um, in fact, I would argue that in the event of a nuclear war, you're probably going to end up having somebody who doesn't have constitutional authority ordering the launch of nuclear weapons. But at that point, fuck it, you're in a nuclear war, right? Right. I can see that happening as well.

Yeah. You know, the United States ballistic missile submarines didn't require outside information to launch their missiles until the 1990s. So if the U.S. government were wiped out, you still had, you know, a couple dozen missile submarines out there with enough firepower to destroy uh most of eastern europe asia china um russia etc i know this never happened in the united states but um i'm not entirely sure what the story was but i believe it was a russian submarine during the cuban missile crisis very nearly the world, and it came down to a vote, correct? Yeah. Akhipov, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it required three people to assent.

I believe it was the captain who was like, okay, they're dropping death charges on us. The war has already begun. So decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, which I would note is the same situation that the authors of this piece are theoretically trying to respond to, except that they're just shifting the problem of decision-making under circumstances of uncertainty to some sort of mythical genie AI that doesn't exist. But whatever. But yeah, so it came down to Archipelago saying, no, not a good idea. Let's surface and see what's going down. So yeah, there are multiple examples of where nuclear deterrence has failed partly or come very close to failing.

But theoretically, your AI machine won't make those mistakes that silly humans do. So the one thing that saved the situation, like, it was one human. And that's not the first time that happened in the Soviet Union. That's the most clear-cut case. The other example, like Petrov, he wasn't in the chain of command of fire sort of thing. But there was also, like, Abel Archer in 1983. um sort of thing but there was also like abel archer in 1983 and oh i always forget the guy's name uh who seeing that the soviets were starting to move toward a different posture with their air units did not respond because he figured oh we get into an escalation spiral here um and that

helped calm things down and i'm sure there are a couple that are still classified too oh i would i would imagine for every one we know about there's at least two we don't yeah i mean these are not things we like to admit to yeah and so like in those situations with uh a lot of trained people thinking that oh shit the world's about to end and the only thing that stopped them was human intervention like if we would have had some kind of fucking facebook t-shirt creating algorithm in charge of of our nuclear missiles we would all be dead yeah no the the captain thought that they were being depth charged right and the temperature was hot i mean yeah so you know that's always also one of the

worrisome thing is that no matter how strictly you set the parameters of your doomsday machine it's going to have false positives this is almost certainly so the united states at one point had what was called the bomb alarm or bomb alert system and it was a network of uh bang meters um so they detect the double pulse of an atmospheric nuclear detonation and we put them around a couple cities and some other places yeah they would false positive not infrequently um you know and so you just check like okay are they still say okay good you know chicago wasn't actually nuked. Just flick the light a couple times. But we had one at the Thule Greenland Air Force Base. And as Scott Sagan points out in his book, The Limits of Safety, had one of those Mark 28 weapons actually detonated, it would have looked a lot like a Soviet attack, because it would have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. The

bomb alert system probably would have told us, and we expected the Soviets to attack our early warning system as a precursor. And as Sagan points out, that could have gone really, really bad. Similarly, in the 1980s, there were a series of computer chip failures that resulted in Soviet missiles shown being launched at the u.s um i think it was 1979 uh carter's national security advisor got woken up at like three in the morning because incoming soviet attack it was like nope somebody just put in the wrong training tape oh shit so i mean you know and he tried to launch the bomber, you know, like, OK, so accidents happen.

And the idea that AI will somehow it's very difficult for me to comprehend the logical train of thought that says, OK, well, AI will somehow make us safer here. At least with the Soviet system, as I understand it, right? It still passed it off to people who were in a, you know, who weren't going to be theoretically killed in the nuclear attack, right? So you still left the decision to people making informed judgments. It was a delegation of authority, just like the US does, arguably. The idea of having a system autonomously decide is hair raising. And as you pointed out, at least three bad, you know, blockbuster movies worth a bad idea. And like, you know, your idea is bad when you have to note that science fiction authors raise a very good point on your doomsday weapon. day weapon yeah and i don't think that this conversation and in fact the authors make it clear that they're also drawing inspiration from the conversations around the use of artificial intelligence for target identification uh tasking autonomous weapons right we see that

that's absolutely terrifying yes right um and you know if you ask me what i think the probability of the united states signing a treaty that bans giving computers the ability to make life or death decisions um i'd put it at close to zero well it is zero for this administration um and very low for future ones which is fucked yeah like we shouldn't have to like have an argument like guys we shouldn't have to like have an argument like, guys, we shouldn't have AI killing people. Yes. And yes, this is where we're going. And so it it's an outgrowth of that. And it's also, I think, an outgrowth of, forgive me, right, Carol Cohn and her discussion of techno strategic abstraction and the way that we remove these theoretical scenarios from any actual grounding in real world circumstances or history and so that's how the authors are able to say like well

we could you know orient toward a secure retaliatory posture and i'm like what you know what the fuck do you think those submarines are there for bucko um scratch your ass like i mean you could also use them in a first strike role if you wanted to but certainly they're not vulnerable in the same way that at this point it's land-based missiles and bombers are which the authors discuss they don't discuss submarines um that's really telling in terms of their awareness of where the massive gaping hole in their argument is or at least one of them it's a pretty basic understanding of the nuclear triad. And they, I mean,

they, you know, I hate that term, but yeah, but like still that that's like the most. Yep. It's common. Yeah.

It's, it's a pretty standard rhetorical move. It seems in my experience to kind of like either ignore the subs or just be like, well, one day the ocean may be transparent. One day we'll fucking make the ocean burning hot lava and we won't be able to use our subs i mean that too right yeah and you know another thing it keeps coming back to like well we don't have the ai now but we did teach a ai how to play go which is like a board game, kind of like chess, I guess.

It's considered incredibly hard to learn. I don't know how to play it. But a robot is apparently an AI, rather, is the world champion of Go right now. And they're like, well, we taught it Go. We can teach it nukes. Like, come on, man. Yeah. So, you know, and we encountered this again in the 80s with discussions about sdi

which was an expert system not even ai so i'm not a computer scientist anthropologist people um but you know my understanding expert system is one that doesn't have the like neural net self-learning right it matches criteria and so on um but we had a lot of these arguments regarding like the foolishness of this idea and this approach then along with the fact that you can never test it in any meaningful manner a system that complexes strategic defense um you know and is like how do you test your AI doomsday machine. You have to do some kind of war game at best. And the U S has a wonderful history of kind of gaming its own war game. So they can't possibly lose everybody. I mean,

yeah. I mean, the one glowing example is a millennium challenge, 2002, where like they had a whole bunch of hypothetical weapons that were told they were totally going to have in five years. And they based the entire war game off those weapons capabilities, which they made sure one.

So like, yeah, these weapons were great. Let's develop them. Uh, and they either did not function or they sucked when they came out. Yeah. I mean, ballistic missile defense is a great example of the sort of the technology. You know, we can get the technology there and, you know, deployment while developing, while testing.

And when you look at the tests, even the ICBM class target was still going slower than one fired by the North Koreans would be going. You know, the test. I mean, of course you rig your ballistic missile test and that's, you know, a more deeper issue about defense procurement and funding and Congress and stuff. Um, then I can get it, you know, I just deal with nukes. I, some stuff's too big for me, but right. When you've created an incentive to gain the time

and it's always been there we did the same stuff with nuclear weapons procurement that I'm most familiar with in the 50s and 60s where you know why did we end up with Thor and Jupiter well the army and the air force didn't want to use each other's missiles okay

so we had two shitty intermediate range ballistic missiles instead in the Air Force didn't want to use each other's missiles. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So we had two shitty intermediate range ballistic missiles instead. Of what? Another idea that this article comes up with is a robust second strike, which, so the thing that it likes to talk about for this robust second strike to be a thing is uh is like we've talked about before is surviving and winning a nuclear war which is like okay well we're gonna lose half our population what do we do now yep no there are hints of like second strike counter force there uh again that's rooted in the 80s the, I personally, and I think that this is not

an irrational judgment from thinking through the ways that things will probably go and the difficulties of operating in a nuclear environment. Let's also point out that the authors completely ignore the fact that you'll probably be in, if you're at the point where you have to be using, you know, nuclear weapons, you're probably already in dealing with a degraded comms environment where you're facing jamming or destruction of satellites or something like that, which is really interesting because they portray it as being like, you know, you go from this thick, full line of communication all the way down to like, this tiny line of communication, but you really need the full thick line the whole time so you can you know flexibly direct your nuclear forces that's like that's a fucking pipe dream yeah um after a couple of dozen detonations like good luck you know good luck um for one thing you're probably not going to be able to find uh you know

unless as part of your strategic warning you've secreted the vice president somewhere, but the Soviet, excuse me, the Russians know where the federal, most of the federal relocation points are. Um, and that was pretty, uh, pretty lax in their, in their job, I would think. Yeah. I mean, look, during the cold war, the Soviets knew about the congressional relocation point, even though it was theoretically top secret, it was going to get nuked. There wasn't going to be a Congress. Continuity of government. Oh, no. Yeah, right. I do not support nuking Congress. I feel like I need to say that now.

I mean, yes. The Greenbrier. What a great place to die, right? Right. Isn't it like a tourist spot now? Yep. I want to go. I have a ton to go. That would be awesome. Yeah. So continuity of government. Is it about continuity of government or is it about continuity of a chain of command? And what do you want that chain of command to be able to do? And for a while now, we've been saying that we want that chain of command to be able to flexibly direct nuclear forces, right?

That's not impossible up to a certain point, but I would argue, once you start talking dozens, 100, 200, 300, 400, 700 warheads, like, what is there to direct? Yeah, I mean, there's no

communication lines that are going to survive the planet being turned to glass. I mean, so the other, well, a chunk of the northern hemisphere. Europe is fucked. Sucks to be you guys. Yeah, no, that's great. Every town being a kiloton apart is wonderful because it means you die quick.

Oh, thank God for the hot embrace of nuclear hellfire. Oh God, these days, it seems really tempting sometimes. And sure, US comm satellites, you know, ultra high frequency and such can communicate in a nuclear environment. Are they still going to be around? You know, at the same

time that we're talking about anti-satellite capabilities of China and Russia. I don't, you know, so or even with bombers um this is one thing that drives me a little annoyed you'll see right one of the things said about bombers is they're good because you can use them to signal you can launch them and call them back and even with ultra high frequency uplinks or whatever like that's really optimistic because if somebody starts taking out your sats or is jamming your comms or nukes your whatever or your several whatever it's like and you want to call back your bombers and they've still got six hours to get to their targets you may not be able to like generally

when you order the use of nukes you should probably plan on it being that's it you did that you know um so there have always sorry that was long and rambling, but the whole point being that, like, there's always been a lot of certainty. And I'm not sure that you can build your way out of it at any cost we're willing to pay about U.S. command and control. I got one that's even worse than that. The other option, preemptive strikes. Oh, yeah. Right. Starting nuclear war.

Yes. Which, you know, for a while has sometimes been our strategy and i assume it's probably our strategy against the north koreans if i had to bet uh oh i would assume so yeah you know if you see them but that's a different situation where you can observe them through whatever national technical means or whatever you know you'd have theoretically some strategic warning tensions are getting like, very few people are just going to whip their missiles out and nuke you for the hell of it. I mean, this whole thing is, I know we've already talked about this before, but their second option of a preemptive strike is the whole point that dead hand exists.

Yes. Dead hand doesn't need to exist if you don't do a preemptive fucking strike if the russians already have one then preemptively nuking them is going to set it off yeah so just don't do that right uh but you know escalate to de-escalate and you know this is where it also gets fun like well what if the russians say hey we've turned on our dead hand if you use a w76-2 against our homeland it'll fire automatically i mean i really doubt that that would happen but you know so there is there are potential um you know there are potential ways that like you could use a theoretically

irrevocable irrevocable dead hand system as leverage but but you'd literally like, that's such a fucking bad idea. You just shouldn't, you know, like saying like, Hey, if you do X, my computer is going to destroy the world. Like,

okay, just turn it off. No one's completely. You can't, uh, you'd have to be, who would, who would build such a thing?

This is a Dwight Schrute moment from the office. If you were seeing the office, he makes the computer program to immediately send all their errors to Who would build such a thing? This is a Dwight Schrute moment from The Office. Have you ever seen The Office? He makes the computer program to immediately send all their errors to management if they continue to make them. Oh, I didn't see that one. But yeah, right? So I forget his Twitter handle. He's on Twitter, and he ended up in The Guardian because he had set up a failsafe on his computer that in the event he didn't check in after a certain period of time, it would delete all his local files and send encrypted copies of his research to

trusted friends, right? Guess who got pneumonia? Ended up in the hospital. So his dead hand triggered. Then he says he's redesigned it and changed some things. Or if you put And he says he's redesigned it and changed some things, you know, but right. Or, you know, if you if you put all of your criminal contacts in the safety deposit box and then you're in a car accident and you're out of it for a week and your lawyer sends it to the police, you know, these are there are reasons we don't do this on a regular basis. It's like the there's something else or someone had something implanted in their heart. And if their heart stopped beating. they'd launch nukes. That was – so that's also been explored as a sci-fi plot with implantation of electrodes in the forehead.

What book is that? Is that Neuroman? Now, that's – all the nerds, I can hear them screaming at me now for not having this right off. It's one of the original cyberpunk things but also it was suggested that you could reduce the risk of nuclear war by implanting the launch codes next to the heart of a volunteer and then the president would have to carve them out to launch i have heard that one i think it's fucking hilarious yeah well it only i mean do you think that it would have prevented Cheney or our current, um,

you know, I think it actually would have had a, uh, uh, an opposite effect. If Dick Cheney was in charge, like we would just launch nukes. He felt like killing someone.

Right. Like, Oh, you're not exactly, you know, I haven't killed anybody in weeks. Get right in here. I'm down to shooting my best friend in the face with birdshot, which was terrible.

But yeah, so this is a thing practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must seem all too obvious when it's actually, you know, the world's ending. And if you ever read Level 7, you know, the world ending war there is triggered because of an accidental launch that triggers someone else's automatic response, which causes a escalation spiral between the computers. If you look at stock market algorithms and the worries about stock market algorithms causing a crash through reinforcing sell orders and such, it happens. Yep. I mean, these are systems that we worry about in the real world already. And the idea of articulating them to nuclear weapons is worrisome.

Now let's take another step back in time and talk about their next option, equivalent danger, which just sounds like mutually assured destruction to me. It's not because it's even better. So, yes. So my understanding of the way they're phrasing that is they're arguing that by pressuring the Russians and the Chinese, of whom we have 10 times as many nuclear weapons as the Chinese do sitting six miles away from me, but whatever, that if we also develop hypersonic systems and boost glide and presumably missile defense, that we can also make them worry about decapitation. And then they'll come to the bargaining table and they reference the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which that's one way to interpret it. And it leaves out a lot. The idea that by constructing a situation in which both sides have incentive to launch first based on uncertain or ambiguous warning information is a terrible fucking idea. And it

almost got us into a nuclear war during Reagan, you know. Like, no, thank you. So, their idea is they're going to build so many nukes that China, and on the border, like, I know we did that

quite a few times and so did the Soviets I mean that's the whole reason that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened is having nukes close to borders and at home but like this all just seems like, you know what we should do to counter the nuclear threat in 2019

we should just go back to 1980 It's really bizarre to me that this got published actually to counter the nuclear threat in 2019, we should just go back to 1980. It's really bizarre to me that this got published, actually. You know, there's an argument to be had about U.S. capabilities and nuclear command and control and its robustness in the face of potentially changing strategic right. And I'm talking like a defense intellectual here. There's an argument. There's a discussion to be had about that. strategic at writing. I'm talking like a defense intellectual here. There's an argument. There's a discussion to be had about that. This is not it. Which is to say that the authors, right?

No, that's not, that's not where, I mean, even their assumptions in terms of that supposedly U.S. decision-making time has been, you know, severely degraded. And like, yes, there are new challenges post, right? That's how it works. You and your adversary, potential adversary each time, you know, but at the end of the day, we have spent an enormous amount of money, time and effort being sure that like, you know, basically, almost no matter what, if you nuke us, we're going to nuke you back. And i don't see that anything has changed in such a way that we should doubt in any significant manner that capability at this time or in the foreseeable future um so you know in many ways i find this piece is is a solution looking for a problem and a terrible solution at that it It sounds like they wrote this article.

And I think I said already, I assume these people come from the correct background. They both work with nukes and nuclear theory and things like that. They should know better. Yeah, it's like when my dog shits in the carpet. You're six years old. You've been doing this for years. You should know better why are you doing this why are you the way that you are it's rewarded uh you know what defense company and we we have you know it is a it's it's it's kind of like mobile battlefield nuclear reactors right it's the zombie project that just never dies um no we didn't the russians the soviets

kind of did i mean mobile is a very loose term um we did develop in fact this is this may be why we want to buy greenland right is that we left a little bit of a mess um when we were doing project uh camp century slash project ice worm where the idea was is that we would dig these tunnels in the ice and it would be nuclear powered. And, you know, when we left, we left some stuff behind and we figured, oh, the ice will take care of it. Now the ice is melting. By stuff, do you mean horrible nuclear waste? I think it's mostly chemical and toxic, but I haven't looked specifically.

It could be worse. Look on the bright side. It could. I guess it could be worse. Look on the bright side. It could. We only turned this large swath of land into a super fun site. Don't worry about it. It's a small thing, relatively. Except it's not. We thought it would be

gone for forever. So this is that same sort of fallacy of the last move thinking that I find really prevalent amongst defense intellectuals. Okay, I participate in it too sometimes. Um, but right. That sort of abstraction, but also the idea that like, if I do this, this will get me security. Right. Um, but your adversary is going to adapt and respond. And this is part of the issue with ballistic missile

defense is that it's generally cheaper um to get past your defensive system than it is to upgrade your defensive system yeah just just let them just let them nuke us we'll be okay we'll move them back so this is kind of right this is the fundamental paradox of of nuclear deterrence in part or one of the fundamental issues is that we don't like being vulnerable in that sense um you know that donald trump or vladimir well donald trump pretty much unilaterally and vladimir putin with one or two other people could end the world as we know it right that makes me very uncomfortable i don't like it i'm not a fan yeah you know so and the system is theoretically stable only in a situation

of mutual vulnerability if you accept the sort of realist position that right the system is theoretically stable only in a situation of mutual vulnerability. If you accept the sort of realist position that, right, the state is always trying to fuck over other people and so on, you know, and as you know, because we've talked before, right at the end of the day, like I think this is a shit system that we really should change. And I realize that to a lot of people that sounds very utopian but your other option is that eventually something is going to go terribly horribly wrong and we're all going to die terribly i mean it really seems like we've invented this a system where the entire world is playing like russian roulette so this is one thing i i don't think americans realize is the extent of annoyance during the Cold War by other countries with regards to our willingness to risk everything over stuff that may not seem to them important or really be that important. You know, because even if we're not directly nuking you in the collapse of global trade networks and

potential climactic effects and all that, and of europe would just be a you know smoking radiating glass wasteland uh and so i think about that sometimes when india and pakistan are kind of going at each other yeah i mean a lot of people don't realize that one if one newt goes off now the world is fucked i mean a couple dozen and i'd say we'd start to it depends but yeah you know it's when a ball pen is made in three different countries right I mean I just don't see a situation now where a nuke could go off and it doesn't cause like this feedback loop of escalation you know I mean I tend to I tend to think that it would be very difficult. There are scenarios where I would see North Korea and the United States. I mean, it's hard to think they still keep warheads unmated to missiles, which may or may not have changed with their move to at sea to turn patrols. You can't have an accident where you think, OK, somebody just launched a nuke at me. Is it going a while, has been fairly relaxed. That like, okay, we'll have

strategic warning of possible nuclear war and we'll have time to move stuff around a little bit so that if they try and nuke us, we'll have assured retaliatory capacity. And they do that, you know, the Chinese have like 200 or 300 warheads total. I always assumed they had more. Yep. They dismantled their FISMAT production facilities, which always kind of struck me as like, huh, interesting.

They're starting, I believe, I believe that they have enrichment capability at this point or never got rid of it. You can scale that up. But if the Chinese were to go for a quote-unquote sprint to parody that everybody talks about not everybody but first off who gives a fuck if they have as many nuclear weapons as we do um you know that only really matters like if you perceive that having more nuclear weapons gives you some sort of leverage and it may or may not although i tend to say say that once you've reached the point where you can both destroy each other's functioning societies, your leverage is pretty much gone if you can destroy another city after that.

I think that's something that the writers of this article actually fully believe. So they said this is at the very, very end. This is at the very, very end. U.S. adversaries are working on their own fate accompli that will leave the United States in a position where capitulation to a new geostrategic order is the only option. The United States cannot allow that. Yep. Fuck you. fueled by like some really racist yellow peril throwback shit um while we're at it and fears about the united states losing its supposed predominant world position and like yeah and and the authors as you point out are very much invested grounded in and expresses expressive of

um a particular belief in a particular political economy in which nuclear weapons are fungible assets that you can use to do stuff with. Right. Other than kill millions of people, mostly civilians. You know, make you really happy is that Dr. Adam Lothar is the director of research and education at the Louisiana Tech Research Institute, where he teaches deterrence strategy. He's had a he was at, I want to say, Kirtland for a while as part of their nuclear weapons school. I have, in my prior encounters with his writing, I have, I don't think I've agreed with what he's written yet. But I've never met him or dealt with him in person, but I have not been impressed by his writing so far. I will have to echo that now since this is the only thing I've ever read that

he has written. Now, Curtis McGiffin is the associate. I've never heard of. I haven't either, but when you read his bio, it kind of makes sense of why he is kind of with Dr. Lothar here, which, by the way, Dr. Lothar makes himself like a fucking supervillain. I think it's pronounced

Lothar. Ah, damn it.illain. I think it's pronounced Lothar. Oh, damn it. Or Louther. But in any case. So Curtis McGiffin is the Associate Dean, School of Strategic Forces Study at the Air Force Institute of Technology and Adjunct Professor for Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Study, where he teaches strategic nuclear defense. Okay.

I am going to get a lot of hate mail about this um so i'm really tempted not to say it go for it how do i say this um i have sometimes not always been especially impressed by some of the literature out of the defense universities and associated think tanks oh no you're you're you're definitely in the right um the podcast for that because i think i've gone on record saying think tanks are cancer but so you know the the defense uh universities i've had numerous people uh tell me me that their how do I say this? Their editing and guidelines are very, very, very

low. You said it. Some of it is very good work. Some of it is really thoughtful and well thought out. Not all of it. Which is any university, of course. Yeah, of course. I graduated from a college once. What worries me, though yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, I graduated from a college once. So

I mean, what worries me though, is of course the volume and the repetition and the institutional affiliation, because it suggests that, um, right. There are certain ways of thinking that are structurally endemic and that keep getting repeated. I would buy into that as well. I mean, it's like when you, I mean, that's that's if your professors are writing stuff like this, they're teaching stuff like this, who then feed into the pool of people who will go on to write stuff like this. You know, it's it's a snake eating its own tail. As so Jacques Derrida, the French post-structuralist thinker, and this is the only thing I ever cite him for almost, reminds us that nuclear war is fabulously textual in the sense that short of having another one, other than the time we nuked Japan twice. Don't worry about that little guy. Right. We always ignore that one as the OK. Or we point to it as though it somehow

is exemplary of all future nuclear encounters and it's like not so much you know um but short of actually having a nuclear war right there's no way and this was a big issue for civil defense remains one and for continuity government right but short of having a nuclear war you can't really say what it's going to be like um and so that fabulous textuality allows for a lot of play with scenarios and um not all of it is grounded in consensual reality and also i mean you know scenario play is fun or there can be aesthetic pleasures to it um have you ever played defcon oh yeah yeah yeah right When you fire off the nukes and you're about to kill 300 million people in the game? Like, absolutely, you know? And you can see the trails and such.

I mean, there's certainly an aesthetic enjoyment to it. Or like Civilization, where Gandhi nukes you every 20 minutes. Yeah, right? I'd forgotten about that. There's actually, I love the story behind that. It was a bug that they just made mainline, but they accidentally made Gandhi a nuke-loving psychopath, and they just had to leave it in forever.

I mean, it's terrible, but it's also funny. You know, and the civilization, I love the civilization games. I think that they have a great take on nuclear warfare, actually, which is that it fucks everything up and you shouldn't do it. Because any time I stop playing, I want to say after Civilization 4. And I mean, if you used a nuke, you know, half the city population went away. It destroyed your farmland around it. Like, it was a mess. Yeah.

a mess. Yeah. And I mean, the people who wrote this article are basing, I believe they're basing their concepts on a concept that is so outdated with weapons that are now several times stronger than the ones that they've ever seen used. Well, so the U.S. arsenal has, I mean, the size of our weapons now is significantly smaller than it was even in the 70s and 80s. And oh, this is sorry, this point just really filled me with rage. So, like, I have to mention this. So the authors mentioned that, you know, supposedly we reassured the Soviets that we weren't going to target their leadership. This is fucking bullshit.

The United States. No, I mean, the United States has included. No, it is. It's just, it's not historically supported. We brought the B-53 nine-megaton gravity bomb out of—we added it back into the stockpile explicitly to be able to target deeply buried, hardened bunkers, Soviet. The Reagan administration made a concerted effort to tell the Soviet leadership that we targeted them and that they were vulnerable. I love that they bring that out as like, well, dead hand only works because we'll totally promise not to do a decapitation. Who's fucking buying this shit?

Like, oh, and in the in the advent of nuclear apocalypse and we're literally turning your civilians into shadows of themselves. We totally won't target you, bro. Right. It's and the idea is if you target, you know, who are you going to negotiate with? But as you point out, the hotline is, I mean, it's satellite and a landline. And I think the only terminal is that not the White House, you know, the military, but there's just the one terminal. Yeah, it's just and if so, if you are going to fight a nuclear war, and I don't recommend it, but if you are going to, I mean, your option, your best chance is to strike first, strike hard, attack leadership and weapons. Like Cobra Kai once said,

Strike hard. Attack leadership and weapons. Like Cobra Kai once said, strike hard, strike fast. No mercy. Right? I actually don't know what that's from, but I know the gif of it. It's from the Karate Kid. Oh, it's been a long time. But it is.

That's your only hope for damage limitation. But, you know, the United States has recognized for decades now, there is no hope of damage. Like, this is the thing. Nuclear war is not something you can fight and win yeah everybody loses exactly even if you win even if you end the conflict on terms favorable to the united states 10 20 million dead tops depending on the breaks is a big fucking deal to say the least um you know is it yeah in any case i mean and we're past the point where we're having debates about or we should be past the point where we're having debates about like oh god the russians can roll across all of europe if we don't have you know so-called tactical nuclear weapons to stop them and yet somehow we're not it's very mysterious to me i don't

understand i feel like defense people uh go in a circle of history like they'll they'll just like a great example is for years and years they talked about um like phasing out tanks and things like that and they bring them back and they'll phase them out and they'll bring them back and they're and they're now they're doing effectively the same thing with nuclear technology and warfare like you know that thing that we thought we didn't need in the 80s well pluto and uh you know the uh nuclear cruise missile and i would offer that in part the sort of circularity is right where the the rules of the game, quote unquote, haven't changed. And we're going to keep doing that as long as we continue to organize the world around violence as an expression of power and might makes right. And like, this is the world we've built in the world that we'll keep building.

And there's no technical solution to that. Right. There's no fundamental safety in a world with nuclear weapons, biological weapons. Right. There can't be. I mean, there can't be. There can never be true safety in a world where one unhinged lunatic could just end it all. Yeah. So, you know know my with that said absolute safety is impossible but we can at least make it so that we don't have a nuclear doomsday machine ready to fire 24 7 365 that's a good first step we shouldn't voluntarily make fucking skynet like if there's one thing that's yeah if there's one thing anybody gets from this episode is fucking skynet is bad, y'all.

Don't do it. Unless it's literally going to fire off the nukes immediately, killing us all. Please. Please, we welcome it. Right? Come on. Just end it. Yeah, you know, Whopper. And I actually think that's a great scene in War Games where the general is like,

and what does the computer recommend? And the computer recommends a full retaliatory strike and no shit that's what it's built to do right and that's exactly you know that's what the same person would do so you know in the actual so don't get me wrong like these worries about decapitate you know the president is dead in the event of a nuclear war um there are a couple of other things they talk about right like this notion of the more stealth cruise missiles you launch the more likely they are to be detected before they detonate right um hypersonics uh i'm i wonder if anybody's researching stuff into like detection long-range detection of sonic booms and um and so on but the more weapons that you launch the more likely your

chance of detection right so the idea that like three soviet attack subs could park off the coast and fire off 300 nuclear tip cruise missiles without you know like uh probably not yo um once again we would still be able to nuke them back. I mean, that's the thing that we've spent years building, or decades building, is like, no matter what happens, the world is going to end. We'll make sure of it. Yeah. That kind of brings us full circle back to, like, I guess in closing, I'll ask you, why do you think they wrote this? So, as always, I speak for myself.

Of course. You know, no, I mean, there are many reasons why people write an article, including that I assume that they believe, you know, I will give them the dignity that they believe this batshit idea. Right? you know, I will give them the dignity that they believe this batshit idea. Right. But from a, you know, from a certain perspective, it makes a certain degree of sense, maybe kind of, you know, and also it is provocative. People are talking, right. We're not, we're talking about something we weren't talking about last week. That is fair. They got us talking about how dumb they are. Well, you know, there's some Overton window stuff but here's the thing yeah it's not necessarily aimed at us so

this is you know the thing that happens like when i look at um nuclear weapon laboratory advertising from the 60s right who is that aimed at uh and in this case that article is not aimed at you and me, right? It sort of helps to define a problem, to create a set of analogies and metaphors that can be used by other people, right? It's a way of signaling. It can help build group. It can help build a point of focus around which people then talk, et cetera. So one of the things that drives me about these conversations is of course they never end. Because we're usually talking, or oftentimes talking past each other for different audiences.

And if you were to go up to the authors and be like, hey, that article was shit, it wouldn't get very far because y'all are high and you are contrasting on some very different assumptions about the world. That's fair. And I actually invite both of them on to my show so I could say your article sucked. I mean, I've done that on Twitter to people and I don't so much anymore they usually don't see it in my experience it's weird how they disagree on those fundamental facts that their writing is garbage

or it sounds like everything I've ever written is trash and I know it I would agree on my own writing as well so thank you again for coming on the show thank you for being my go-to nuclear outrage expert uh it's it's always glad it's always great to have you on my pleasure um we'll get you some more names too uh for new people so you have an assortment so

you don't just have to go with me you're always welcome to uh do you have anything you'd like to plug before we go oh Oh, let's see. My Twitter, of course, is at Nuclear Anthro. My links to my Patreon and my PayPal are, of course, in there. I would also point out that I maintain an online collection of some like 16 or 17 gigabytes of declassified documents and records which have been provided to me through the Freedom of Information Act and other research objects. So if you like to search for Martin Pfeiffer Nuclear Weapon National Security Archive

or something like that, it'll show up, and it's a resource for everyone to use for free. Thank you, and I look forward to being able to get you on the show and introduce you as Dr. Pfeiffer. So good luck with that, sir. Two years, maybe. All right. Thank you. Pleasure as always, sir.

Have a good one.