Is
Thank you so much for joining us.
Glad to be here.
So what do you think about the concept of leaving the nuclear age?
I don't think we ever are going to, and I think it might be dangerous if we got too
close to that.
The first part is I just can't imagine all the nuclear powers giving up their nuclear
weapons.
I mean short of the science fiction scenario, you know the flying saucers coming down and
saying okay the game is over, or even I think if there were nuclear use, which is not to
be excluded especially on the Indian subcontinent, I don't even think that would lead all the
states to think this is just too dangerous, partly because even if they all wanted to
give up nuclear weapons, if others were willing, and I'm not sure that would be the case, you
know, who goes first, how do you make sure that others really have given them up.
Those hurdles I would be amazed if were surmounted, but the more important point which is, I mean
what I've said so far a lot of people agree with, but regret, the more important argument
I'd make which I know a lot of people disagree with, but I think more of them haven't really
thought about it, is the world of global zero is actually very dangerous, maybe more dangerous
than the world we have now, I know it doesn't seem to make sense because it's a world without
nuclear weapons, and well there are two aspects about that world, one is people who worry
about American power should really worry about global zero.
And may I reconfirm, by global zero you're not talking about the group, you're talking
about the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Yes, exactly, I'm using it for a world without nuclear weapons, because in a world without
nuclear weapons, what's Trump's enforcement, conventional, a strange word, you know, regular
tanks, guns, etc., well there are some countries that don't match the U.S. in nuclear weapons
but can do plenty of damage as we'll talk about, no one comes close to the U.S. in conventional
forces.
So if you were a citizen of any country other than the U.S. that would worry about the U.S.
and you don't have to be quote anti-American to worry about the U.S., I'm American, I worry
about the U.S. use of power, I'd really worry in a world without nuclear weapons, we can
do anything that force allows, that isn't anything of course, but that's, you know,
doing, that's a lot.
So this goes back to your seminal work, the meaning of the nuclear revolution in which
you argue that for deterrence, okay, and I'm guessing that's part of what you're saying
now.
Yes, but also, and related to deterrence, if you got a world in which everyone did give
up their nuclear weapons and everyone trusted that everyone else had, you haven't gotten
rid of, you can't get rid of the knowledge on those countries of how to build nuclear
weapons.
And assuming that international politics still is separate sovereign states, you know, the
Martians haven't come down to rule us, the U.N. hasn't turned into a world government
or anything like that, each country, each at least of the old nuclear states really
has to eye the others very suspiciously because if I don't have any and you get one or two,
that is, you know, makes me very vulnerable.
Now if we both have a hundred or a thousand and you get two more, that's a big deal.
But if we're at zero, you get a few, I'm really very insecure and so I don't have to be offensive
to worry, I think, gee, if you get one or two and I don't have any, so maybe I'd better
get one or two and put them in the basement just to be sure.
So when you think of the arms race potential among countries that are capable of nuclear
weapons, which is all the ones that have them now, plus several, that's very unstable.
But then by this argument, wouldn't those countries without nuclear weapons then want
to develop them?
Yes.
And those...
And that makes us safer?
No.
Yeah.
And not only the countries, how many of them are not aging, nine that have nuclear weapons,
but there are a number of countries, Sweden, who could be more peaceful than Sweden.
Let's remember the Swedes conquered half of Europe and was at the 17th century, you know,
that can come back.
At any country, especially worrying about American conventional force, then if they
don't have them now, if everyone else gives them up, hey, if we got them, that would be
a very, you know, that would make us much more secure or enable us to do nasty things
to our neighbors.
Short of shooting all the nuclear scientists and technicians or the nice thing in the movie
or Men in Black, the little pen that erases people's memories, I think that a zero level
is not only impractical, but it's a place that if we got to, it would be extraordinarily
dangerous.
Do you think within this scenario that other countries are going to develop nuclear weapons?
You know, this has been...
It's still very hard.
Whoever said...
I thought it was Yogi Berra, the American baseball player, but I've told it's Niels Bohr
who said, prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
What we know is that ever since the nuclear era started, we've over-predicted the rate
of proliferation, almost every president, almost every analyst looking, as it was said,
we're going to get at a much higher pace.
I think more, unlike some people who think more would be better, and we might talk about
that, I don't think that.
So I would like to keep us where we are, if not roll back some countries.
I'm guardedly optimistic that the nuclear deal with Iran, if it holds, I think it probably
will, but no way to tell, that I think means you won't see other countries in the Middle
East going for nuclear weapons.
And if North Korea doesn't test a lot more, or build a lot more, and I worry, because
I think they will, then I think Japan is not going to go nuclear.
And we're barring unforeseen circumstances, they always occur.
It's hard to see who's next in line, what country would have the strong motive for
nuclear security, domestic pressures, pride, which are the three main drivers.
I don't see the next ones in line, and although, as I said, prediction is difficult, we always
knew who the likely candidates were.
We were wrong that a number of them would get weapons, but we haven't seen cases where
sort of out of the blue, oh my god, we never thought X country was going to get nuclear
weapons, and now it has.
So I'm guardedly optimistic that we won't see the spread, but I should say that a marvelous
political scientist, friend of mine, you're doing Kenneth Waltz, the leading American
theorist of international politics, who was very perverse, he always liked making arguments
that disagreed with everyone else.
And he argued proliferation would be good for the world.
Why?
Because he said nuclear weapons really stabilize Soviet-American relations, and we should talk
about that briefly and what it means for the future.
And if we accept that, he said, well, it'll have the same effect in all other pairs.
And he argued some validity, but debatable, that relations between, say, India and Pakistan
have been much more stable since they both got nuclear weapons.
True, there have been no war since they both had weapons, been some terrorist, some slightly
scary things, but those scary things didn't lead to war, whereas they might have before,
and can even argued in an infamous article in Foreign Affairs that if Iran got nuclear
weapons, it might make the Middle East more stable, again, by perpetuating mutual deterrence.
I think that argument has a number of things that are wrong with it.
It's an argument of a type, academics-like, because you know it's wrong, but you really
got to work to show that it's wrong, and then when you show this wrong, you realize, well,
maybe I'm wrong, maybe he really is right, I don't think so, but it's a good academic
argument.
But the whole idea of mutually assured destruction as somehow creating peace just seems so oxymoronic.
It does, and I've argued in two of my books that that really is right.
I don't think for a minute I can prove it, but the counterintuitive logic isn't so crazy.
Notice that in the old days with conventional weapons, even if they were quite destructive,
someone could win a war, I mean the U.S., Britain, and France, one world war one by
almost any definition, say it was a mistake to fight it, you know, there are lots of things
to argue about, but in the end it's hard to dispute that we won, and again, the allies
including for Soviet Union, one world war two.
If both sides not only have nuclear weapons, but have what we call mutual second strike
capability, which simply means the weapons are numerous and most important secure enough
so that they can't be destroyed in an enemy first strike, what that means is quite clearly
if there's a nuclear war, both sides lose.
Each side can destroy each other.
And in some scenarios actually the whole world through what they call nuclear winter could
suffer, I mean it could really wipe out mankind perhaps, but even if that isn't right, at
least the two countries that fight both lose, and they know they're going to lose because
this is so clear, and you've never, you know, and that is new with nuclear weapons and that's
why I didn't coin the phrase, I shamelessly took it from others who got there before me,
say it's a revolution because in international politics, in great powers, the engine of international
politics is the possibility of winning wars, and even when states weren't fighting it,
they were like teenage boys to be sexist and sex, right, they had to be doing it all the
time, you know, they're thinking about it all the time, so great powers were always
thinking about the possibility of war, often planning for it, often trying to avoid it,
but it was central to everything in their relations, but once you say, we can't win
a war, they can't win it, they know it, we know they win it, they know it, it makes the
world arguably much more stable, at least in terms of actually using the weapons.
But it's weird because we really have a paradox, these weapons are very important for international
politics because they can't be used, but how can something be really important when everyone
knows it can't be used?
Khrushchev, you know, Nikita Khrushchev became the first secretary of the Soviet Union, 54,
power, he said, at first he said he could not sleep at night because he was in charge of
nuclear weapons, and then he realized they'd never be used, and he said, and then I slept
soundly from then on.
But to play devil's advocate, for example, I mean, you know, human error, and there have
been, you know, the possibility of an accident, the testing is so deleterious to health, you
know, so it isn't as if they are benign by any means.
Well, there are several, I agree, and there are several parts, one, nuclear testing above
ground, it was a big debate at the time, how dangerous, no one thought they were healthy,
not even any presidential candidates ever said that, but there was debate on how unhealthy,
but certainly it was not good.
And of course then we agreed, testing underground, and even the new nuclear powers generally
have tested underground.
Then there are accidents of two types, one is if you will, a pure accident, someone if
you won't, smoking around a bomb, and there are some pretty horrendous stories in a recent
book that are mostly public, but he had a number that we didn't know quite as much about.
Near misses.
Yes, by physical accidents, fires in planes carrying bombs, there is a lot of effort to
try to make them very safe.
So how can we say we are safer and more secure with this?
Well, there is still a chance, and you are absolutely right, because even on the pure
accidents you can't fully test the things, and if you make them 100% safe you can never
fire them.
And there was one case, our first generation Polaris warheads, these are the submarine
launch warheads, the safety measure was great, turned out five years later we learned the
warhead would never go off, because the safety measure, yeah, was so good it was not going
to allow the missile ever to be filed, or the warhead ever to go off.
So you've got that, and then you've got several different kinds of human accidents.
Exactly.
I take India and Pakistan, which I think Clinton called it the most dangerous place on earth,
and neither Indians nor Pakistanis liked that, that's one thing they agreed on, but
Clinton was right.
That is still the area where nuclear war is most likely, and one of the scenarios is unauthorized
use in the Pakistani army, especially coming out of domestic unrest.
Another is a coup by Islamic militants.
These tell us not to worry, they've got it all taken care of, worry.
It could also be argued that just the culture of secrecy around nuclear weapons also does
not give comfort.
Well there's a real paradox in that, I think you're right that on the one hand you need
secrecy to decrease the chance of accidents, but on the other hand, the very secrecy means
that outsiders with real expertise can't look at their plans and say, you know, I've looked
at this for six months and I've found a backdoor, and if you don't do that, you know, when you're
in charge there may be a backdoor, and there are all sorts of crazy possibilities.
One thing again, especially the U.S. and Russia, or India and Pakistan even more, if you think
you're about to be attacked or under attack, you're more likely to launch preemptively.
Well the weapons are pretty secure, but the warning systems depend on electronics, and
there are lots of problems.
My former colleague and friends, Big New Brzezinski, tells the story that he was woken
up one night when he was at Jimmy Carter's security advisor and told there were 22 nuclear
warheads on the way.
He had five minutes to decide, so he gets ready, he's very worried, Kai comes in two
minutes later and says, Mr. Brzezinski, they're now 222, and he's more worried, he thinks,
wait a minute, Kai comes in next, and again, another minute, he says, they're 2222, and
Spig stops worrying because he figures out, right, something's got to be wrong, and the
next time they come in with 22,000 when the Soviets don't have that, computer glitch instead
of printing out zeros, it was printing out twos.
That's disturbing enough, but also when we think that many of these weapons systems actually
are computer based, which means that they're vulnerable to hacking, you know, and that's
a good question.
I don't know, no, I've read studies that say that that is also another thing.
There'd be two things, and I don't know the expertise for that.
One would be, could you hack in fire or a weapon?
The other is, could you hack in and spoof the warning systems?
And I just don't know, I'm sure the U.S. government and the Russian worried government, but the
Pakistani government, I mean, which doesn't, not to derive the, but they have put a lot
of resources, but they don't have the resources that we have, and they're the warning time
is much shorter.
And so that would be another security risk, potentially, now I would like to actually
go back to the whole point of your talking about deterrence, but also, what about the
fact that many of these weapons are on this hair trigger alert?
Would you be willing to take some off that?
Yes, yes, I think there's no reason to have them on alert.
We have done some de-alerting, Bruce Blair, who was, if not the expert one of the two
or three real, who served as a Minuteman launch officer in the Cold War, and turned up a
number of fascinating, disturbing things about command and control systems, and he's worked
on the de-alerting for years, and unlike some people who make proposals for arms going to
war, he really knows what he's talking about.
And I think there are various kinds of de-alerting, and there are a lot of details, but basically,
there are things you can do to reduce the chance of an accident, and things that do
the introduce more time between the time you say, oh boy, I'm really, really worried,
and time you could fire something, a missile.
The only argument against that is, oh, what if an enemy can sort of get inside your time,
you know, and fire me up with it?
And I think that's given our intelligence and the state of world politics, at this point,
I regard that as implausible.
De-alerting is reversible, so if suddenly Russia seemed even more reckless and bellicose than
it is now, you could reverse it.
There may be arguments against de-alerting, but I've never heard them.
So if you were asked to give your personal opinion, which you often are, would you say
that, would you like to see just de-alerting across the board?
Yes.
You know, I'd like to propose that and hear if someone can rebut it.
And the other thing I think de-alerting does, because it's a step to putting nuclear weapons
in the background even further, because if, you know, I say, look, global zero isn't
going to happen, bad if it did.
But there is the potential that we've talked about and potential, especially, say, in the
subcontinent, but elsewhere for nuclear war.
Because even if I'm right that now there are no people lining up to get it, that can change.
So one thing that would be very helpful would be if we no longer had to have programs like
this, that I mean, if those of us who worked on nuclear weapons were sort of out of business,
people didn't think about them.
Oh, you know they're there, but you don't dwell on them.
They're not.
But they still get funding.
What?
But they still get a lot of funding.
Well, yes.
Now, the question of the modernization, which is the funds, there are two parts, and they're
both difficult.
One is the safety.
One reason we've had in the last 10 years a number of things that shouldn't happen,
like flying missiles, you know, the bombers across the country with nuclear weapons and
no one knew there were nuclear, including the crew, knew there were nuclear weapons on
there.
So part of the reason for that is in the Cold War, people handling nuclear weapons, that
was the high prestige in the Air Force.
That was the big ticket.
Once they're unimportant, it's not the fast track in the military.
Who do you put in all the schlemiel who we know can't do anything?
We don't want him doing something important like being prepared to fight, so have him
or her watching the nuclear weapons.
So you need enough so that organization takes it really seriously.
And then there are safety-related issues and others about the degree of modernization.
So we probably have to spend something.
A trillion?
I'm skeptical.
It's big business, you know.
But you have to really judge that very hard because it takes enormous expertise.
And what we've got to do is have people with expertise, but different opinions and different
interests, argue with, and people like you and me and more important, Congress, the President
and counterparts in other countries, listen in on that conversation and make the judgment.
Well let's say if you were to give, so you say zero does not make sense, okay?
What number would make sense to you?
Well, here we have the problem of there are countries other than the U.S. and Russia with
nuclear weapons.
And we're talking the question of China and North Korea, both of which are increasing
their arsenals.
If we in Russia drop too much without capping their programs, they may have an incentive
to increase.
We don't want that.
The U.S. and Russia has, what, 95% of the weapons or something like that?
A rather large percentage, so we could say.
But it's probably not in the 90s anymore.
Pakistan's really ramping up.
China is now increasing.
That might be in the 90s still now.
And partly it's a question of whether we're counting those in stockpiles that are stored
but not on unworkable bombs or not, that's a big deal.
We have a lot of them that really are de-alerted, but fully, I mean, that is out there somewhere.
Because we don't know because of secrecy.
I think the numbers are open.
But if we cut our active stockpile too much, you run into that problem.
But a smaller number will certainly do it.
But it's less the number than, I think, the salience in there.
I mean, I don't think you would feel safer if we had, say, 300 than 1,000.
It's what you get used to.
And there is something to be said for the decrease, even if you're not going to get
to zero, because first, that lives up to part of our commitment in the nonproliferation
treaty.
Exactly.
And some people think that really influences nonnuclear powers.
I don't, but it's sort of the illegitimate debate.
But it, again, could be part of saying, look, these are things that may exist, but they're
not important, and partly saying taking the numbers down shows they're not important.
What about the push now for the humanitarian impact initiative, and looking at that and
all of these nonnuclear states joining and saying, from a humanitarian perspective, they
just are unacceptable?
What would you, how would you argue about that?
Well, I mean, it's certainly true.
A nuclear war would be the greatest humanitarian disaster.
We thank you so much for having joined us, Dr. Robert Dervis, and for having shared your
insight with us.
And we thank you also for joining us as well.
