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- [00:00]
Senior Correspondent at Wired
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- [01:16]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, February 1st, on Dorothy I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Last week, the country's leading atomic scientists announced an update to the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic measure of how close the world is to annihilation. Citing concerns about President Trump's attitude about nuclear proliferation, the team advanced the clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest it's been since the early 50s. This came after a leaked draft of the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review revealed its proposal to greatly increase the US Nuclear arsenal, adding weapons that are smaller and more precise. On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, Trump made an offhand remark about his administration's policy we must modernize.
- [02:10]
Unnamed New Yorker Writer/Editor
And rebuild our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so strong and so powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression by.
- [02:25]
David Remnick
Any other nation or anyone else. Perhaps someday in the future, there will.
- [02:33]
Unnamed New Yorker Writer/Editor
Be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are not there.
- [02:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
Yet, sadly, former Secretary of State George Shultz, who served under President Reagan, is also alarmed. Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
- [02:57]
Unnamed New Yorker Writer/Editor
He warned, nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons, and we need to draw the line there. And one of the alarming things to me is this notion that we can have something called a small nuclear weapon, which I understand the Russians are doing that, and that somehow that's usable. Your mind goes to the idea that, yes, nuclear weapons become usable, and then we're really in trouble because a big nuclear exchange can wipe out the world.
- [03:26]
Dorothy Wickenden
Steve Kahl joins me to discuss the escalating possibility of nuclear warfare under President Trump. Steve, welcome.
- [03:34]
Steve Kahl
Thanks, Dorothy. Good to be here.
- [03:36]
Dorothy Wickenden
The Pentagon has sent its draft of the Nuclear Posture Review to the White House for review based on the version we've seen. How is nuclear policy changing under Trump?
- [03:48]
Steve Kahl
A couple of ways. One is the reference to modernizing the nuclear arsenal, which might include, if it were approved, developing weapons with lower yield, which would, in theory be to increase deterrence by lowering the potential threshold for actually dropping a bomb on a, an opposing army, for example. That's a very disturbing departure in this draft and in the thinking of the administration that's been made public. The other kind of escalation, it's not a radical departure from the Obama administration or the Bush administration before it, but it's significant because of the times we're in, which is this kind of language around when you would use or threaten to use nuclear weapons to retaliate for something other than a nuclear attack. So a massive cyber attack, for example, you know, writers have pointed out this is madness because even if you contemplated a devastating cyber attack that left the United States in the condition that, say, Puerto Rico's been in since the hurricane, the rationality of responding to an attack like that with a nuclear strike against a nuclear power, it would be insanity because you would simply be inaugurating a nuclear war to follow on the devastation of the cyber attack. So I'm not really sure the where the administration is going to come out in articulating this in public. The danger with these kinds of doctrines is that you enunciate them in order to deter adversaries from taking action. But then you also change the landscape and you encourage more nuclear weapon building in anticipation of a new doctrine.
- [05:33]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, Trump also mentioned in this speech that the other major nuclear powers are looking to develop new weapons, too. So this is, you know, the new arms race. What is happening in Russia and China?
- [05:45]
Steve Kahl
Well, Russia's economy has been shrinking at least until very recently. Because of the collapse in world oil prices. And it has long term demographic problems. And it has to manage the dilemma of having great power aspirations but not having the industrial or population base of a rising great power. And it has compensated for that since the collapse of the Soviet Union by relying on nuclear weapons as its principal claim to being great power. It has continued to invest in that direction. The idea of building smaller nuclear weapons. I'm not really sure I understand what kind of Russian doctrine is, other than it creates a new kind of threat by lowering the potential threshold for using a nuclear weapon, say against a foreign army, where you're really just striking soldiers on the battlefield and not trying to wipe out cities. There has been in general, in the world a return to so called tactical nuclear weapons as part of war planning and deterrence strategy. The most prominent place where that's happened is in Pakistan. So it's, I'm afraid, a trend that now the United States seems to be responding to as well.
- [07:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
Eric Schlosser wrote not long ago in a New Yorker piece, he sort of posed the question, how do you prevent a nuclear attack while preserving the ability to launch one? Is that kind of the undergirding principle here?
- [07:17]
Steve Kahl
Well, it evolved. These were shocking new weapons. After Hiroshima, very few people even knew they were on the cards. And then after the second World War, the tentative alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly collapsed, and the main theater of rivalry was Europe. And Soviet forces occupying central European countries and parts of Germany, you know, entered into what became known as the Cold War. But in the beginning, there was a fear and even an expectation among American generals that it would be a hot war really, really quickly. They were planning to fight a new war in Europe in the early 1950s, the late 1940s. And so they initially saw nuclear weapons and advocated for nuclear weapons during the Eisenhower administration as battlefield weapons. So you had this gap emerging between civilian leaders who thought nuclear war was unthinkable, especially after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and military planners who really did see them as usable weapons, at least for a while during the 50s. Then you had other disturbing episodes where the Eisenhower administration threatened to use nuclear weapons to end the Korean conflict in an effort to persuade China that it was serious about this. So there's a lot of loose talk about actually using weapons first. Then the Soviet Union successfully tested and they started to build up intercontinental ballistic missiles. We started to build up missiles. And by the end of the 50s, you had an arms race in which it was no longer possible to seriously talk about A small scale nuclear war. If you touched off a nuclear war, it was going to escalate into city busting, massive strikes. And that was when the kind of idea of mutual deterrence through the kind of threat of ending civilization as we knew it started to evolve. But it was still highly unstable, as we saw during the Cuban Missile crisis. So that's the Next turning point, 1962. We almost end up blowing up the planet over a territorial dispute. It was only then, really, that a fairly stable regime of large scale mutually assured destruction started to settle in. And leaders on both sides began to accept that this was really a theoretical weapons system, not a practical one.
- [09:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
And Ronald Reagan as well, who moved dramatically Right. During his eight years as president from harshly criticizing arms control to really serious concern about the threat of nuclear annihilation.
- [09:58]
Steve Kahl
Yeah. And he proposed to Gorbachev in Iceland that the United States and Soviet Union should negotiate to eliminate their entire nuclear arsenal. That was one of the magical moments, I guess, that President Trump was referring to. They have occurred. In fact, what happened after the Cold War was a steady marginalization of nuclear weapons in international strategy. The US And Russia drastically reduced their arsenals and everybody moved toward a more submarine based, light deterrent where you always had the capacity to deliver a devastating retaliatory strike if somebody pushed the button. But there was no longer this massive system on high alert. And that's the state we've been in for a good while. The acceptance going the other way have been in Pakistan and India. But only Russia has had to keep returning to nuclear weapons as a linchpin of its military posture because it has seen this deterioration in other areas of its military kind of system?
- [11:01]
Dorothy Wickenden
But didn't we also see under Bush and Cheney the beginnings of this sense of disdain that we heard in Trump's remarks too this week about international treaties and negotiations where the non proliferation idea is grounded?
- [11:18]
Steve Kahl
Yeah, there was a lot of kind of skepticism about the viability of the non proliferation regime, but really the Bush administration did not do some things that a truly hawkish administration in this space would have done. It didn't, for example, break the testing ban, and it did maintain pressure on threshold countries like Iran and North Korea. So I don't think Bush and Cheney thought that the non proliferation Treaty was very meaningful as an arms control mechanism. But a lot of European countries believe in it deeply. And so when the Bush administration needed Europe to pressure Iran and North Korea, it used that language and it endorsed the framework that most of the rest of the world still takes seriously.
- [12:08]
David Remnick
Right now. We are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [12:38]
Dorothy Wickenden
I remember a piece that you wrote for the magazine almost a decade ago about a nightmare scenario. And I think at the time you sort of said perhaps in 10 or 20 years where there'd be a kind of crisscrossing of hair trigger nuclear deterrence among very unstable governments. Where are we now on that particular front?
- [12:58]
Steve Kahl
Well, you have a very unstable deterrence regime between India and Pakistan. That's very worrying because there's lots of radicals in Pakistan and they're making smaller and more portable bombs all the time. And I think the reason the Doomsday Clock got moved a little closer to midnight has to do with the broader instability in the international system ushered in by the Trump administration and its disdain for alliances and the worry that's growing around the world that the stable U. S led order of the last half century or so is ending and that it's not just going to be that China is going to rise and renew questions about how a declining great power and a rising great power will avoid war, which was the big worry of the last 10 years, but that actually the whole system may become much less stable and the result will be that medium sized countries will be tempted to acquire nuclear weapons for the same reason that, say, Iran did, which was that it feared that it was going going to be attacked by the United States. And you're going to have many more unmoored decisions in capitals around the world about whether or not it's necessary nationally to have your own nuclear weapons because you can't rely on the United States anymore in a crisis. We've got lots of nuclear capable allies in Asia, for example, Japan, South Korea, that have genuine reasons to feel anxious about their neighborhood, about China's intentions about North Korea. If they started to doubt that the United States was going to be there when needed, their national governments would return to programs that they had in an earlier era which brought them to the brink of building their own weapons.
- [14:48]
Dorothy Wickenden
And so there's been a lot of focus lately, thanks to Trump's childish taunting of Kim Jong Un about the danger of a nuclear exchange with North Korea. What is your level of concern there?
- [14:59]
Steve Kahl
Hi. I mean, not a nuclear exchange, but I'm worried that the Trump administration will talk itself into some kind of preemptive strike. Preemptive war has a pretty bad record in our recent memories, and in this case, the results are pretty predictable. North Korea would retaliate in one way or another. Whether it would retaliate with nuclear weapons, I would doubt, because that would simply invite the destruction of North Korea. But to retaliate with massive conventional attacks on South Korea or some kind of missile strike on the United States below the nuclear threshold, I mean, these are events we don't want to witness. You know, I'm hopeful that this loose talk is just Trump's idea of the madman theory, that he needs to make himself seem dangerous and unreliable in order to persuade North Korea to back off of its testing program. But unfortunately, we know that this is not just an act. This is the president's temperament.
- [16:00]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and based on what we've seen so far, the administration does seem to be entertaining the idea that limited nuclear war is worth considering.
- [16:09]
Steve Kahl
Well, they're certainly preparing to fight it. I don't really understand what circumstances it would be in the interest of the United States to participate in a low level nuclear war. I mean, we have the best conventional military in the world by orders of magnitude. There's no territory that we can't seize if we absolutely, out of desperation or after being attacked, need to do it. We also have very advanced cyber weapons programs where generally understood to be much better on offense than on defense. And so those are the areas where we're not in equilibrium with our adversaries, nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, it only takes one to be in equilibrium with an adversary. So then, if you're in combat with a non nuclear nation, why, for moral or tactical reasons, would you ever be the first to use nuclear weapons? I don't understand the move to smaller weapons unless it's part of some deterrence theory against Russia. Because they have them, we need to have them. But this is all a little bit murky at the moment, to be honest.
- [17:22]
Dorothy Wickenden
Another worry is the possibility of a nuclear war starting by accident. And there were incidents during the Cold War where there were technical malfunctions and mistakes by personnel that created false alarms. We saw in Hawaii very recently, people who are notified to take shelter due to incoming missiles, that this is still a concern, perhaps even more so with our aging arsenal. What are your worries on that front?
- [17:48]
Steve Kahl
There's reason to be worried, because with North Korea in Particular, we're having to ramp up our alert posture because they keep doing unpredictable things and testing missiles that could reach American territory. And so it's necessary to be on higher alert and to make faster decisions. What Hawaii was such an unsettling reminder of is an era that I remember as a child, but which really hasn't been a part of American experience since the end of the Cold War, which is that the really harrowing thing about the nuclear deterrence regime at its peak during the Cold War was how fast everybody had to make decisions that affected the fate of the Earth. To go back to a world even on a smaller scale, with North Korea, where generals and president are being asked to make consequential decision on such a tight timeline, obviously we're not going to fire off nuclear weapons at North Korea. Even if they're sending one our way, they couldn't possibly disable our capacity to retaliate. But just the hair trigger alert system, the civilian panic, the return to civilian defense measures, the shortened timelines, the high alert status, it's an invitation to accidents and mistakes.
- [19:02]
Dorothy Wickenden
On that sober note, I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much, Steve.
- [19:06]
Steve Kahl
Okay, maybe we'll talk about something happier next time.
- [19:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
Steve Kahl is a staff writer and the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He has a new book out this week, Directorate the CIA and America's Secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast Apple, and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This podcast is produced by Alex Barron for newyorker.com with help from Hannah Wilentz. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [19:51]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director. I'm Michael Kolory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [19:58]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [19:59]
Senior Correspondent at Wired
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
- [20:01]
Katie Drummond
And our show, Uncanny Val is all.
- [20:04]
Senior Correspondent at Wired
About the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [20:07]
Katie Drummond
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech, right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [20:38]
Steve Kahl
From prx.