Transcript
Transcribed automatically: it certainly contains errors. It’s pretty good, just not perfect. We provide it here because, for accessibility, it’s better than nothing.
Aaron Stein
0:07
You are listening to the Arms Control Wong podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament. I'm Aaron Stein, co-host of the show, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.
Jeffrey Lewis
0:18
And I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wong blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
Aaron
0:29
It's good to have you back, Jeffrey. We're really keeping up the schedule here.
Jeffrey
0:32
I think we owe Scott a real vote of thanks for rescuing the podcast. Absolutely.
Aaron
0:42
Thank you, Scott. But, you know, I'm sitting here back in Washington, D.C., looking out the window. It's fall now. So we have, I would say, Monterey weather, about 75 degrees and sweatshirt and jeans.
Jeffrey
0:53
Yeah, I'm not going to ruin it for you. It is definitely not sweatshirts and jeans here today. It's sunny and beautiful.
Aaron
1:02
You know, I always question why I ever left California. We need more jobs out there for people like me.
Jeffrey
1:09
Wouldn't that reduce my salary if there was competition?
Aaron
1:12
It may, it may, but that's not really my problem now, is it?
Jeffrey
1:17
No, I guess that's true. That's not. It's lovely.
Aaron
1:23
Right. So today we're going to be talking about something that's been in the news a lot. It's popped up recently. Popped up? Popped up.
Jeffrey
1:34
Is that a basing mode, Aaron?
Aaron
1:35
It's a basing mode. Exactly. We can get into why that matters later.
Jeffrey
1:40
ICBM basing modes.
Aaron
1:42
Right. There's been a lot of debate, at least out there, because cost estimates coming out about the replacement for the Minuteman 3 and an op-ed by friend of the pod, Bill Perry.
Jeffrey
1:53
Yeah, so there has been this really vociferous debate between the Air Force and CAPE, the Pentagon's Cost Assessment Entity, about how much a new ICBM is going to cost. And that has, I think, prompted some questions not just about its cost but about its value. And it seems that Bill Perry, who – Was instrumental in launching the MX missile program in the late 1970s, no longer thinks that we need a land-based leg of the triad.
Aaron
2:28
Right. So, I mean, just looking at the numbers in front of me, the CAPE has assessed that the cost is about 35% above what the Air Force has estimated. So rather than it being $67 billion, their estimate is $85 billion.
Jeffrey
2:43
Right, and that's the, is that the low, right? That's the CAPE low cost.
Aaron
2:50
Right, so on their spectrum of the cost, it's the lower end estimate, yes.
Jeffrey
2:55
So it's sort of terrifying that CAPE's low end is higher than the Air Force's estimate.
Aaron
3:00
Right, so they're basically calling BS on the cost figure attached to the replacement of a missile.
Jeffrey
3:06
Yeah, and I should say here, you know, the director of CAPE is Jamie Morin, who worked for Kent Conrad in the Senate and was the director, the staff director of the Senate ICBM caucus. So it's not like Jamie is hating on the ICBM.
Aaron
3:27
Right. I mean, the ICBM caucus... Advocates for the continued land-based leg of the triad in Congress and something that Bill Perry just took on.
Jeffrey
3:40
But the point is his background is favorable to the ICBM. So if he looks at you and says like, no, no, I think it's going to cost more, chances are it's going to cost more.
Aaron
3:49
Right. It's a good way to put it. Exactly. And this is leading again to the debate we were talking about earlier than Bill Perry saying, well, maybe we should just get rid of these things altogether because we can rely on SLBMs.
Jeffrey
4:01
Right. And so much of that, I think, turns on this question of how the ICBM is going to be based. And it seems to be that although there's been some talk about Mobility and other exotic basing modes from time to time. I think there's a general assumption that these things are going to end up in silos, and that's kind of an interesting conversation to have.
Aaron
4:27
Right. So there was a talk that the replacement could be made mobile. Ultimately, they've decided to keep them in silos. And this is something that Bill Perry knows a little bit about, as does the Pentagon people in charge of studying this stuff. Because we've done this before.
Jeffrey
4:45
Not our first rodeo.
Aaron
4:47
It's not the first rodeo.
Jeffrey
4:49
Aaron, it's so boring to put them on trucks.
Aaron
4:53
It is boring. It's not as fun when they're overt about it, so you can't go track them down and geolocate them.
Jeffrey
5:01
Yeah, there's so many more interesting things that we can do.
Aaron
5:06
Right. And so I think with this podcast, we've decided that we're going to keep it lighthearted and take a look back at some of the more outlandish ICBM basing modes that came up in the original study, the study that we're talking about for the MX.
Jeffrey
5:21
Right. So we have in front of us and we will post it online. A study by the Department of Defense in December 1980 by the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. I believe that would be Bill Perry, would it not?
Aaron
5:38
It would be Bill Perry. Hey, he's bossed back up, friend of the pod.
Jeffrey
5:42
So his office in December 1980 released a study called ICBM Basing Options, a Summary of Major Studies to Define a Survivable Basing Concept for ICBMs. And it is a... I'm just going to go ahead and say it. Gorgeous. 83-page illustrated tour of basing modes from mundane to insane.
Aaron
6:17
There are such good ones in here. And then what makes it really great, for people listening, we have it posted below so you can follow along. This is in the era of pre-computer graphics, or at least very rudimentary computer graphics. And so I think somebody had to sit down and illustrate it.
Jeffrey
6:36
Yeah, it used to be back in the day they hired artists.
Aaron
6:40
So it's not a PowerPoint presentation.
Jeffrey
6:42
Which I love. It's way better. If you're going to show me an air-launched ICBM, I don't want some terrible piece of bomber clip art that you pulled out of Microsoft PowerPoint. I want somebody to sit down and draw a damn plane.
Aaron
6:59
My favorite part is they put little splashes in the ocean. When we get to why there's little details that they added but you know I you know I read this back in grad school you know and I haven't looked at it you know basically since we decided to look at it and let me tell you like I had so much fun with it like on my commute in the morning because I commuted on a train on the Amtrak you were sort of giggling away as you yeah but some of the basing modes you know involve like Commuter trains.
I'm sitting around looking at the Amtrak staff going, yeah, I'm not sure this is going to work. Okay.
Jeffrey
7:43
So, my favorite one, I don't, I don't, did you, did you, did you come across the ground effect machine?
Aaron
7:53
I did. The gem.
Jeffrey
7:56
The gem? Gem. What page is that? That would be page 60. Okay.
Jeffrey
8:04
You may be staring. It took me a little bit because I – now, when you read it, you can interpret the illustration, but it's a little bit – I'll just read it for you. This concept rapidly disperses a missile force on warning without making use of public roads. Right, right, right. So how do you do that? Right, how do you do that?
Fast, jammed vehicles ride on a cushion of air enclosed by semi-flexible skirts. The hovercraft in regular passenger service between Dover, England and Calais, France is a related example.
Aaron
8:41
I'm going to put them on hovercraft!
Other voice
8:44
But my favorite part... Where is the hovercraft, though?
Aaron
8:50
The desert. It's in the desert, right. It's in the middle of the desert. And I'm going to get to why I think that that's a problem to begin with. But if you go down to the description discussion, it says... The chief constraint is land area.
Jeffrey
9:02
Yeah, because you can't run it up a mountain.
Aaron
9:05
Right, so they're just sort of stuck in a little grid. Out in the middle, I think, in Death Valley. Or at least one of these sort of great plains where it would just be so effing hot for the people driving it around. I find it hilarious.
Jeffrey
9:16
This is probably going to mark my age. Do you all remember the Pixies? I do. And so you remember Black Francis of the Pixies had a less successful solo career?
Aaron
9:30
See, this I do not know. This gets into the obscure.
Jeffrey
9:33
He did as Frank Black, and the first single off his first solo album, which is pretty fantastic, is called Los Angeles. There's a shot of him out in the desert riding on a hovercraft.
Other voice
9:46
And so I get only when I think of this, of this, of this nuclear armed hovercraft blasting across the desert, this giant plume of dust behind it.
Jeffrey
9:57
I'm thinking of like this scene in the video where he's doing precisely.
Aaron
10:01
Well, my favorite one, you know, is a completely different environment. You know, it's it's it's page 24 for the listeners. It's called Hydra. And then. Literally, the illustration is fantastic, by the way. And its cousin, Orca, is even better, which we'll get to in a second.
Jeffrey
10:17
Yeah, I feel like Orca is better, but Hydra has a better name.
Aaron
10:21
Right. Orca is on page 26 for the listeners, and it's better because in this basing mode, the ICBM is put in a waterproof steel canister that's tethered to the ocean floor. And, you know, I'm just hanging there, you know, in the ocean. And then, you know, The picture is so fantastic because there's a whale.
Jeffrey
10:49
Yes, the whale is just hanging out near the canisters.
Aaron
10:53
The whale is hanging out near the canisters, and then there's a kelp bed sitting next to it. It's just fantastic. I also like it because I'm a dive master. To make money in college, I would go trudge out into the cold waters of the Pacific and take around students and lead them around. And the way I would always navigate from the boat is I would just take compass readings from where the boat was moored, you know, tethered to the buoy.
And sometimes, you know, I just get this sort of thing. It's like, you know, what happens if you get on the wrong tether out there in the middle of the ocean? Say, whoops, need to go for a dive. But whoops, that's a nice CBM just stuck to the bottom of the sea floor.
Jeffrey
11:32
I do think, I mean, one of the things that's worth discussing about the document is, you know, it's not just a list of crazy basing modes. It's so much more than a list of crazy basing modes. And so there are assessments of each of these systems across the same set of criteria. And I love, like, there are just some of them, you know, so it's negative feature, Major negative feature, satisfactory, and major positive feature, right?
Like the sort of scale of one to four. Security gets an X as negative feature, but not major negative feature. You're leaving the thing out in the ocean.
Aaron
12:21
Well, Hydra is better because they're just floating. The other concept is that they aren't actually tethered. They're in the waterproof canister, and then they have a buoyant collar around the front end of the launch tube there. They're just expected to float with a little radio transmitter, and they would just check in from time to time with GPS.
Jeffrey
12:48
And my favorite – Can you imagine when there's like a typhoon and these things like wash up in Japan?
Aaron
12:56
I didn't even think about that actually because they do recognize one of the problems of this. They say like the Hydra concept also presents a safety problem of an unprecedented kind. The idea of missiles with nuclear warheads floating unattended in ocean waters introduces an unacceptable hazard to navigation for the world's shipping.
Other voice
13:17
Unacceptable, but still just a negative feature, not a major negative feature.
Jeffrey
13:23
No, I think for Hydra, they give it the... Yeah, for Hydra they give it – so their negative feature is an X, and major negative feature is an X and a dot. And I think Hydra gets an X and a dot for security. Oh, it does. It does.
Other voice
13:37
You're right. I was looking at Orca.
Jeffrey
13:39
I know. You've got to keep – the Hydra illustration is the little – so I guess they designed it to float. It wouldn't do an underwater launch. It would float, but the top would be above the water.
Aaron
13:52
Yeah, it would just sort of poke right out of the surface.
Jeffrey
13:54
So look at the illustration. It's basically waves and the top of the canister popped out of the water with a little radio antenna, right? Right. But then look at the horizon. I see the horizon. Is it like a little ship off in the distance?
Aaron
14:13
Is that a ship? I thought that was land.
Jeffrey
14:17
No, there's, it's got like, it's got like, it's like a steamship, right? That's right, that's right. Coming off of it to like, give it this sense of motion that, you know, it's just lurking there as the ships are going. Really?
Aaron
14:32
Oh, there's another one involving water that I think is fantastic. You know, it's called the Ship Inland, page 28.
Jeffrey
14:40
Oh, this is a particular favorite of mine.
Aaron
14:45
Then you, by all means, take it.
Jeffrey
14:47
No, no, no, no, no, no. You're driving. I'm going to hijack the conversation soon enough.
Aaron
14:52
No, because I live next to a river. We have a nice view out of our apartment, so I look down on a river. I get this concept that the barge would carry ICBMs, MXs, on inland waterways. And the ones that they talk about is the Mississippi River.
Jeffrey
15:13
Yeah, I know.
Aaron
15:14
And the Great Lakes.
Jeffrey
15:15
So I grew up in a little river town on the Illinois River, which feeds into the Mississippi River. And we would have to cross the Mississippi River a fair amount because it was not that far from the house. I went to school on the Mississippi. So I'm used to the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Illinois. These are really big rivers.
And there are these massive barges going up and down. And so it is sort of insane to think about But if you've never seen the Mississippi River, it's big.
Aaron
15:45
Right. But what's funny is they go through the overpressure. What would they have to over – the PSA requirements to harden the potential boat in the event – because they're thinking about a saturation attack I think from the Soviet side. And one of the things they say is it has to apply to a five PSI. And that one of the problems with this, though, is that, you know, is is is that that wouldn't be enough, essentially, is that is that in a large scale attack, the Soviets could just take out the Mississippi River.
Jeffrey
16:17
Yes, you could just barrage it. Right. You know, string of nuclear explosions from Minneapolis down to New Orleans. Right.
Aaron
16:30
And so then they also moving so great a number of nuclear weapons on heavily traveled waterways is potentially, potentially a severe threat to both public safety and to missile security.
Jeffrey
16:42
Yeah, because there are barge accidents. Like, that happens.
Aaron
16:46
Right, or, you know, you think of flooding in New Orleans a couple years ago and just recently, you know, you have a barge sort of wash ashore.
Jeffrey
16:54
Sometimes there are storms and barges sink. Right.
Aaron
16:58
And, you know, and one more, sorry, I'm hogging the conversation, but the sea sitter is fantastic too. That's page 32 for the listener. Do you remember, is it the spruce goose down in Long Beach? Yes. You know, this big sort of aquatic plane that just sort of sits there and you can go tour it. So the Seasitter, I think, was by Lockheed.
I Googled it, and on Pinterest, they have the design schematics. You can go look at it on Pinterest. And the idea is that a massive aircraft would just sort of hop around the Atlantic carrying a few ICBMs. And in the description it says you'll fly to one place and you'll sit there. Then you'll fly to another place and you sit there.
So I get this sort of, like, in my mind, these missileers just sitting out in the Atlantic bobbing away, you know, just waiting to fly to the next way station, you know, as they're waiting perhaps to launch an ICBM.
Jeffrey
17:55
Man, a twin-hull amphibian aircraft which carries four 80,000-pound missiles, each bearing five warheads. Gross takeoff weight is 2 million pounds from water. My favorite is they compare it to – 1.85 million pounds from water. I'm sorry.
Aaron
18:13
Go ahead. Next sentence. As a comparison of magnitude, the gross takeoff weight of a Boeing 747 is 0.7 by 5 million pounds. The whole thing is insane.
Jeffrey
18:24
I know. I know. It's like three of them.
Aaron
18:29
They talk about how they have to mount the specially designed engines, the bigger turbofans, on top of the wing in order to protect it from sea spray.
Other voice
18:42
Well, so...
Jeffrey
18:48
Along those lines... I am particularly fond of, on pages 36 and 38, there are two concepts. Basically, well, on page 34, there's a wide-body jet, right? So you put an ICBM in a jet, and you drop it out the back and fire it, a test that the U.S. actually did.
Aaron
19:12
Right, which they mentioned.
Jeffrey
19:13
Yeah, and Tom Moore loves this. Tom Moore showed it to me and, and I, I don't know, I would say once a year, Tom and I retweet the video of him dropping I think it's a minute man out of the back of a C5, right? Which is just, just insane to see. Right. But one of the, the concerns with this approach, I mean, there are many But is that it's not in and of itself any more survivable than the bombers because it's sitting on a runway with the bombers, right?
Yeah. And so like, if you blow up the bombers, you are going to blow up the ICBMs because it's not different in any way, shape or form. And so they had these like two different approaches to try to get the airplane up in the air Well, I shouldn't say faster, but basically to increase the number of airfields, right, that these things could be at because you don't want to put them at bomber bases.
And so they have the short takeoff and landing. Right. So you have this bomber that basically can take off with a very, very short runway.
Jeffrey
20:32
Which is kind of amusing in and of itself. But I loved the vertical takeoff and landing. Correct.
Jeffrey
20:40
Right. Because you've got a – now, it's not as big, right? Because it could only carry a 25,000-pound missile. Right.
Aaron
20:48
So it'd be a different missile.
Jeffrey
20:50
Yeah. But basically it's twice as big as a Harrier. Right. Right? With the engines, right, that like tilt – Right. You know, but like, which we've done on fighter aircraft, but this is twice as big as that. And so the engines are going to tilt and you're going to get this vertical takeoff, you know, and then the engines are going to tilt back into a normal position and like the airplane is going to fly off with the missile.
You're not laughing, but this is absurd.
Aaron
21:24
No, I am laughing because the idea is also that we would be under attack and so they would have to, I just imagine this thing landing in the Walmart parking lot. They'd have to go take off where it would land on the roof of the Costco or something as it bounces around allegedly the country as we're under nuclear attack.
Other voice
21:46
Well, the way that they –
Jeffrey
21:48
Yeah, the way that they illustrate this, right, is they have these maps of the United States with all these dots on it that, you know, allegedly show the air bases where they could put it, right?
Aaron
22:00
So it shows the... And one flying, one taking off next to the other. Yes. It's sort of a mid-tail of the engine. Oh, goodness.
Jeffrey
22:12
So can we go back to ship inland for a second? Sure. This is one thing I think is really interesting about this document. Despite the fact that. Which page is this for the readers? Oh 28 ship inland, nuclear armed barges. Yep. You know, despite the fact that this has, I don't know, I didn't count them, but, you know, like two dozen different basing modes.
They don't actually discuss, other than to dismiss it, one of the basing modes that actually broke out into the press in the late 70s. And Bill Perry actually got specifically asked about it in Congress and said, we studied it and we're not going to do it. Which is instead of putting them on barges, you could build ballistic missile submarines and put them in the Great Lakes.
Aaron
23:15
Is that like a variant of the SUM?
Jeffrey
23:18
Well, it's a variant of a couple because Ship Inland mentions it, right? On page 29, they say, system of barges moves randomly over coastal waters, well, 14,000 miles of coastal waters, 12,000 miles in the Mississippi River system, and 3,000 miles in other inland waterways. Deployment on the Great Lakes would be excluded by the Rush-Bago or Baggio Treaty with Canada, right?
Because we have this treaty with the Canadians to not militarize the Great Lakes, right? So that's the objection. To me, this is the craziest thing I have ever seen. Like, this is 83 pages of insanity.
Jeffrey
23:55
And then suddenly you get to this one mode, and they're like, oh, that would violate a treaty. We can't do that.
Aaron
24:00
They bring that up a few times, actually. You know...
Jeffrey
24:05
There are multiple proposals here that violate treaties, right? And so under arms control, there is an X with a dot.
Aaron
24:12
Right. Another good one is page 18, orbital base.
Jeffrey
24:16
God forbid we should have to renegotiate a treaty with those pesky Canadians.
Aaron
24:21
Right. I would just do orbital base. Forget the outer space treaty, but that one is the idea that you would launch a ballistic missile into space and then place the warheads in orbit. And then you could direct them to targets, or if hostilities sort of go down, you can then splash them down in the oceans and then go retrieve them.
Jeffrey
24:42
Yeah, that's on page 18.
Aaron
24:43
That's the first one.
Jeffrey
24:45
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aaron
24:47
But you know what I took away from this?
Jeffrey
24:50
By the way, we have never had an uncontrolled reentry of a satellite before.
Aaron
24:58
Yeah, I mean, it's almost as crazy as putting these things on like a Zeppelin.
Other voice
25:02
On page 40, the dirigible, dirigible, yeah, dirigible, dirigible, dirigible, you know, you know, it you know what they don't like calling them? They don't like when you call them blimps. The preferred nomenclature is aerostat. Now, thank you. Wait, wait, wait. If it's an aerostat, it's tethered, right? No, no, aerostat means it patrols around Pennsylvania.
Aaron
25:35
That's good. That's real good. Okay. We got that.
Jeffrey
25:44
That's right. By the way, there have never been any disasters involving blimps that I can think of.
Aaron
25:52
Never had the Vector in F-16 to shoot something down.
Jeffrey
25:55
Well, I was thinking of the Hindenburg.
Aaron
25:57
Oh, the Hindenburg was good, right. For some reason, I keep thinking J-Lens.
Jeffrey
26:01
Yeah, admittedly, you wouldn't use flammable... What do you call the buoyant gas that's in the balloon? It's not fuel. It's... What is the... What's the... That's actually a really good question.
Aaron
26:21
I have no idea.
Jeffrey
26:22
Fueling? Yeah. The lifting gas.
Aaron
26:27
The lifting gas.
Jeffrey
26:29
Call it the lifting gas. You would not use a flammable lifting gas.
Aaron
26:34
My favorite... Another one of my favorites, again, just because I brought it up in the intro, is that I take the Amtrak when I commute, you know, and on page 54, they have the commercial rail basing option. And the idea is... To sort of blend in special trains to circulate ICBMs over existing commercial railroads in quote-unquote less populated parts of the northwestern third of the U.S. And my favorite part is standard railway locomotives operated by civilian train crews haul the trains over the railroad.
So they're basically saying that we're just going to slap a car at the end of the Amtrak, and we're just going to drive it around basically Washington State.
Jeffrey
27:20
I'm just shaking my head.
Aaron
27:23
So while you're going to get your coffee in the cafe car, when you're flipping over your Wi-Fi, you can have an ICBM behind you. But that's the ultra-quiet car. No talking there. The ultra-quiet car. One thing I did find... Sort of analytically interesting, is that if you pay attention to when they start talking about the limitations of some of the basing modes, and I'm having trouble finding the page at the moment, but some of the underground basing modes, you know, us pulling a, like Iran or North Korea and putting something in a deeply buried bunker, essentially.
And they start talking about the vulnerabilities of that deeply buried bunker. I found that interesting, well, both because the idea, it's the covered trench on page 66 is one of them. Both the sheer size and sort of audacity of having to build these things and how ridiculous and farcical that is, but how analytically for us as we look for these types of things, The vulnerabilities they pose and even just the cost associated with the potential adversary having to do this.
Do you know what I mean?
Jeffrey
28:43
Yes. Yes, I do. But – so I would abstract that a little bit in that I am endlessly fascinated by the – what would you call it? The – The world that the authors of this document live in. Because while environmental impact is something that is a criteria that each of these basing modes is discussed in, you know, they don't...
Really live in our modern world where it's, you know, nearly impossible to build anything like, you know, like I just, I like, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna just take these nuclear weapons and I'm gonna like tether them off this, you know, protected or this endangered coral reef, right? You know, they can't even build one is gonna complain about that.
Aaron
29:59
Yeah, you know, if you live, you know, we live, well, I used to live in California, you know, you can't even, you know, get the environmental permits to build a high speed railroad, you know, to expand the 405 freeway in Los Angeles took about, you know, close to three decades. And in Santa Barbara, you can't build oil rigs, you know, unless they're over the horizon.
Jeffrey
30:19
Well, and so, you know, and I know historically, I know that it was precisely the debates about MX basing mode. So it was this discussion. That was one of the very first instances where environmentalism... Environmentalism was a thing that had really started in the 70s, right? I mean, I know it started before, but politically it really became a potent force at the same time that the MX basing modes were coming under consideration.
And so in a strange way, this document in 1980... Hasn't caught up to what will be really fierce environmental opposition to a lot of these basing modes. And so the basing mode that they will ultimately pick initially for MX is going to come up against what we would call NIMBYism today, not in my backyard. So it is kind of historically interesting to me to look at the document, not to get all serious, but just looking at it The authors are living in a world that doesn't exist for them.
You know, like they're going to pick one of these modes and they're going to go out into the big scary world. And it turns out, you know, like ranchers in the West are going to be like, you're going to use how much water? Like, no. Right. Yeah. You know, and there's a great article to be written about how local environmental concerns scuppered MX basing modes.
But I just think that's an interesting document.
Other voice
31:55
Can we go back to being funny?
Jeffrey
31:57
Yeah, of course. Because I love the basing mode immediately before commercial rail on page 52, Sandy Silo.
Aaron
32:07
Oh, I love Sandy Silo.
Jeffrey
32:08
Sounds like a children's character. Hi, kids. I'm Sandy Silo.
Aaron
32:12
I love Sandy Silo for a number of reasons.
Jeffrey
32:15
I'm an encapsulated missile buried at a 2,000-foot-deep hole which is filled with sand. On command, pressurized water fluidizes the sand, and my capsule floats up. At the surface, the capsule opens and launches the missile.
Aaron
32:30
How does that even work? Like, just the whole thing to me is... Sand just screws everything up. That's just sort of like Maintenance 101 when you're diving on the beach. It's like, don't get sand anywhere. It'll just screw everything up. How are you going to put an effing nuclear weapon under a whole bunch of sand?
Jeffrey
32:49
So, for the record, that was the principal disqualifier for Sandy Silo.
Aaron
32:56
Can I ask another funny question? Do you think that this is like... You had to come up with, like, 45 basing options, and so, like, the authors just got a little drunk, let's just say, they got drunk and then just said, oh, like, just throwing stuff at the wall, saying, let's just put it under a whole bunch of sand, you know?
Jeffrey
33:15
No, I don't know. I think there's a little bit of both of those things. I mean, I think on the one hand... You and I have certainly been in enough meetings in Washington where people get weird.
Aaron
33:29
If you sit in a windowless room with bad sandwiches, you start to lose your mind.
Jeffrey
33:34
Yeah, we've definitely – I have certainly been in the kind of discussion where the slightly crazy defense guy who's like 70 who – Knows what he's talking about technically, but like doesn't have any sense about him, you know? No, like, you know, he's a, he's a guy who's been in a windowless room for 30 years, and so he knows a lot about ICBMs, but like zero about the ranchers who are going to prevent him from building his preferred basing mode. Will make some crazy suggestion like, I think we should put them on barges, and you'll kind of roll your eyes like, you, okay, like, okay, I haven't thought through this yet.
But I can already think of nine reasons that this is a terrible idea. But then the person will persist, like, no, no, no, we can deal with that problem. And you realize that they're taking it a little too seriously and this is just a giant waste of time because you and I know that these things are going to end up in silos.
And so I think that it's sincere in the sense that there were a lot of these crazy ideas getting floated. Yeah. But I do sometimes wonder if the people putting it together must have thought to themselves, like, fine. You want to come up with all these crazy ideas. We'll look at every single crazy idea you have and we will work through it very carefully.
And guess what? We're going to get to the end of it. And you know, it, the least crazy idea is going to be well, they'll end up picking I think we'll protective shelters. Yeah. But but, but ultimately I think we all know it's going to end up in silos. Yeah. So I think maybe there's a little bit of humoring the crazies, but I suspect that some people did take this really seriously.
Aaron
35:24
Yeah, and there's a lot of talk in the document that's also interesting sort of analytically about automating a lot of the processes. You know, is you could make some of these processes automated. And we obviously haven't done that for a number of reasons. But, you know, there was, you know, thinking about it back then. And it doesn't entirely mirror the debates we're having now, maybe about the B-21 or something like that, but about, you know, taking humans out of the loop, you know, sort of the Whopper in the Magic Brother movie.
You know, and I found that interesting, too. You know, just pulling, you know, besides this document just being incredibly hilarious because it's unhinged. But, you know, there are some interesting problem sets that they were working through.
Jeffrey
36:01
Well, one thing that I thought about when I read the document is a parallel to something that Bill Perry said in his book. In his book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, available from all fine booksellers and published by Stanford University, he mentions how he did some work on jamming Soviet ICBMs. Early Soviet ICBMs were thought to be radio-guided.
I actually think some of them even were. And so they did a study on the casualty reduction you could achieve if you jammed radio guidance. And they figured you could reduce casualties, I think, a significant amount, maybe by like two-thirds. And so he came away from that thinking to himself, well, first, it would be really good to jam the radio guidance because you would substantially reduce casualties.
But second... Holy crap. Even if I substantially reduce casualties, it's still a catastrophe. And he brings this up over and over again in the book that he has this kind of view that you have to work cooperatively to reduce nuclear dangers because you just the radio guidance study kind of clarified for him the idea that. No matter how successful they were, it wasn't going to be perfect, and so it wasn't really in any important way a solution to just defend against Soviet ICBMs.
Well, I thought the same thing. Now he's concerned or convinced that maybe the ICBM is a waste of money. And I wonder if this experience isn't in the back of his mind, that at some level – I mean the joke I always tell is – Why, like, you know what the perfect ICBM basing mode would be? If we could put them on vehicles that traveled under the oceans and let them sail around out there.
Jeffrey
38:05
Like, what is it about an ICBM that's special or better than an SLBM? And I kind of get the sense that you go through this exercise and at the end of it you're like, actually nothing. Like, I think I just want them on submarines. Yeah.
Aaron
38:21
Right, and that's what he writes in his op-ed. This is the subject of a podcast that we thought about having this week, but we decided to push it off for a couple more is this exact question. So, I mean, I don't want to get into it, but I really want to, but I don't want to foreshadow that.
Jeffrey
38:41
No, I don't think we should get into it. I just think that what I take away from his op-ed – I mean, he doesn't say this, right? But he does say it. In the op-ed, he says that during the Cold War, the United States relied on ICBMs because they provided accuracy that was not then achievable by submarine-launched missiles or bombers, and they provided an insurance policy in case America's nuclear submarine force was disabled.
And he says we do not need an additional insurance policy. Like... He has this idea that, like, you know what? These things are just not as good as submarines. And I suspect, I can't prove it, but I suspect going through this whole crazy experiment of trying to come up with a basing mode that wasn't silos, you know, that in some ways replicated or complemented the advantages of the SLBM force, I suspect he got to the end of that and was like, just like with the radio jamming, like, yeah, I could do it, but it would be really expensive and at the end of the day not worth doing.
Aaron
39:50
Right. And the other alternative is that we could just build them on the south side of a mountain. Page 50.
Jeffrey
39:57
Well, you're back into it.
Aaron
39:59
Trying to end on a happy note. But unfortunately, we don't have a lot of southern-facing mountains. That was the principal restraint on that one.
Jeffrey
40:08
Well, wait. We have some.
Aaron
40:11
We have some.
Jeffrey
40:12
It's just that, as they point out, much of suitable land is national.
Aaron
40:21
Well, maybe that would be a way to get more federal funding for our national parks system. Just toss it right under George Washington's nose. Just toss in there an ICBM. Right there up in Wyoming.
Jeffrey
40:34
Oh, my God. What an amazing illustration that would have been. Actually, I have no idea which way Mount Rushmore faces.
Aaron
40:41
Neither do I. I'm riffing here.
Jeffrey
40:43
Would it have been great if the tops of their heads popped off? And like each of the presidents was one silo.
Aaron
40:51
See, this is what happens. This is where we need to wrap up. See, we've been in the room too long.
Jeffrey
40:55
This will emerge from their heads being fired off.
Aaron
40:59
See, this is what happens. We've been in the room too long drinking bad coffee. Now all of a sudden we're throwing out even alternative basing scenarios to the crazy stuff they put out. So I think this is our most upbeat and happy podcast start to finish since we started this whole, you know, this whole thing.
Jeffrey
41:18
Yeah, it's absolutely – it's been an enormous amount of fun. And I think ultimately it serves as a preview of a more serious podcast that we're going to have. At the end of the day, ICBMs go in silos.
Aaron
41:32
Go in silos. Exactly. But, you know, I will say I think the current document that's probably still classified probably has poor clip art.
Jeffrey
41:46
Yeah. It probably does.
Aaron
41:48
Yeah. So shout out to the artists. We really appreciate it. And I hope our listeners enjoyed following along with their wonderful illustrations. Aaron. Yes.
Jeffrey
41:59
Thanks for driving.
