"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 87

In this episode: Is A New Nuclear Arms Race Inevitable?

January 28, 2025

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 87

Episode 87: Is a New Nuclear Arms Race Inevitable?

Very quietly, and with little public discussion, the U.S. military has undertaken a $1.5 trillion project to modernize America’s nuclear triad – the planes, submarines and missiles that deliver nuclear weapons. It’s one of the biggest and most expensive projects in American military history – more costly, even, than the Manhattan Project. But how necessary is this modernization effort? And what message does it send to our nuclear adversaries?

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Andrew Gebara: It used to be in the Cold War days, the worst threat we had to deal with was out of nowhere. There'd be a bolt out of the blue and 1,000 ICBMs would be crossing over the North Pole and we'd have a half hour to take care of it.

Lt. General Andrew Gebara of the United States Air Force is talking about the Cold War threat of ICBMs — intercontinental ballistic missiles, crossing into U.S. airspace from Soviet Russia — in a sudden attack that would likely mark a 30-minute countdown to Armageddon.

Andrew Gebara: I don't even want to think about it, but the reality is I get paid to think about these things.

Andrew Gebara: If it ever happens, it would be horrific, but it's actually a fairly simple problem to the President. Do you respond? Do you not respond?

If the Secretary of the entire U.S. Airforce is like the CEO of that service branch, Lt. General Andrew Gebara would be something like a senior vice president in charge of all things nuclear. He entered the Air Force as the Cold War was ending. And over the next few decades, nuclear tensions between the two global superpowers — and the global threat of nuclear war — seemed to dissipate. But that’s not the case anymore.

Andrew Gebara: The reality is, whether we like it or not, the world we live in today, we have several nuclear armed countries that do not always wish us well.

Tensions between the Cold War rivals were for some time eclipsed by threats like terrorism, but now they’re on the rise again. Russia has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and lots of them are pointed at the United States. Several of the most important arms control treaties with Russia have expired or are about to expire. And Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently threatened to use nuclear weapons in his war with Ukraine.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Nuclear saber-rattling from the Kremlin this morning, with Vladimir Putin appearing to threaten to use nuclear weapons if Ukraine fires American made missiles into Russia.

North Korea has nuclear weapons, too, and has more than hinted it's ready to use them. And then there's China. China's been hard at work building up a big nuclear arsenal of its own, trying like hell to join Russia and the U.S. at an exclusive table once reserved for the planet's nuclear superpowers.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Satellite images appear to show rapid construction at several suspected silo fields in China that could eventually launch nuclear weapons.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: A new Pentagon report saying China is accelerating its nuclear weapons program. A 2020 assessment found China had about 200 nuclear warheads. The new report warns that could grow to 700 by 2027, and 1,000 by the end of the decade.

And so, in response, with very little public discussion, the United States military has begun one of the biggest and most expensive projects it has ever undertaken. A colossal, one-and-a-half-trillion-dollar program to upgrade its nuclear weapons, many of which date back to the 1980s. Coming up, you'll get a detailed look inside this project — and what it means for you — from two experts on nuclear policy, nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

One of those experts says upgrading the nuclear arsenal is absolutely vital for keeping you safe.

Andrew Gebara: I want to be really clear. I don't believe conflict is inevitable and I don't believe out of control spiraling arms race is inevitable, but we will maintain that peace through strength.

And the other expert says spending billions on new nukes could touch off a new global arms race and heighten the danger of an already dangerous world.

Jessica Mathews: The problem is that when you are making plans based on worst case thinking, you inevitably and irreversibly escalate, escalate, escalate.

I'm Peter Bergen. This is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC]

[SOUND OF WIND]

Showing up in Kimball County out in the panhandle of western Nebraska can feel a little bit like visiting Outer Mongolia. The skies are staggeringly big and wide open. Wind-swept high plains stretch to the horizon. Something like 16,000 cows live here. And a little over 3,000 people.

[SOUNDS OF COWS MOOING AND BIRDS CHIRPING]

If there's a bustling center of geopolitical events somewhere on Earth, you might think that Kimball County is the place furthest away from it. But that would change instantly if we ever had a nuclear war.

Because dotting the landscape all across Kimball, are 80 or so little round hatches made of concrete and steel. They sit unobtrusively along county roads. They’re tucked behind chainlink fences and prairie grass. The hatches cover silos for Minuteman III ICBMs. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, tipped with nuclear warheads, which can be fired from inside the U.S., cross oceans, and hit targets on other continents. These missiles can launch at a moment's notice and detonate with around 30 times the destructive power of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.

And every day, 24 hours a day, rotating teams of two U.S. Air Force oﬃcers sit side-by-side in hardened bunkers buried 60 feet under the prairie, steadfastly manning the controls of these missiles. They're waiting for a call that would turn this quiet corner of Nebraska into the frontline of a nuclear war.

Thankfully, that call has never come. So the missiles stay out of sight. And since the end of the Cold War, they've also stayed largely out of mind and out of the news. That is, until recently.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: For the past 60 years, Nebraska's panhandle has been home to 80 minute man launch sites and nine alert facilities. Now the U.S. military is planning to pour 87 billion dollars in Nebraska alone to upgrade its missile defense system.

ARCHIVAL Kimball citizen: We've got about 3000 workers coming to Kimball, which doubles the size of Kimball.

Until I looked into it, I hadn't been particularly aware that the U.S. was undertaking this massive nuclear upgrade. But it's certainly been on people's minds in the places across the U.S. where the money is gonna be spent. Factories that build nuclear submarines.

Refineries that process uranium. And counties like Kimball where some of the weapons are based. The billions of dollars being invested give people across the country billions of economic reasons to welcome the project.

ARCHIVAL Kimball citizen: This will be the largest socioeconomic opportunity that we've had in over a half a century.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The price of modernizing Minot Air Force Base, as well as the bases in Montana and Wyoming, comes out to 4.5 billion dollars.

But from the Pentagon's perspective, the reasons to upgrade and modernize America's nukes are more strategic than economic.

Andrew Gebara: I think that it's helpful when you look at things like why modernize that we start from the threat and go backwards.

That’s Lt. General Andrew Gebara, of the U.S. Air Force, again. And in case you're wondering, this is his oﬃcial job description:

Andrew Gebara: Deputy Chief of Staff, strategic deterrence and nuclear integration. So think of that as the nuclear guy on the air staff. So on behalf of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, I'm the focal point for nuclear policy within the Pentagon for the Air Force.

Gebara says several nuclear-armed rivals have made it clear that they’re not interested in arms control, and they don’t wish the U.S. well.

Andrew Gebara: You have Russia that has modernized about 95 percent of their nuclear force.

Andrew Gebara: Uh, you have China that's in the middle of a strategic breakout, at the unclassified level last summer, we’ve announced that they reached 500 weapons and climbing very rapidly.

Peter Bergen: Nuclear weapons.

Andrew Gebara: Nuclear weapons, thank you. And then. On the North Korea side, uh, they are also building out very strongly. As a matter of fact, the head of North Korea had a bunch of photos of him walking through a nuclear facility. That's something that would never have happened even just a few years ago.

Andrew Gebara: They would have hidden that deeply. So they're all building out. To answer that, the United States has our triad of nuclear forces.

The "nuclear triad" is the three different delivery systems the U.S. military has for raining nukes down on potential enemies.

Andrew Gebara: Think of it as a three-legged stool for our nuclear forces. So we have a large land leg of the force that are land-based missiles. Those missiles are designed to deter that first strike.

Those are the 400-some silos containing nuclear-armed missiles buried out in western Nebraska and four other states in the American heartland.

Andrew Gebara: In addition to that, we have a submarine leg of our nuclear forces. Those are designed to assure a second strike capability.

These are the 14 Ohio-class submarines, the biggest ones the U.S. Navy has, each armed with 20 nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. The submarines are invisible from above and are frequently on the move.

Andrew Gebara: So in a horrific day in which a massive attack happened and those land-based missiles are taken out, we still have the ability to always respond. And because of that, that would deter that from ever happening in the first place. And then our third leg of the triad is our bomber leg.

These are 66 long-range, nuclear-capable, heavy bombers. They consist of twenty B-2 Stealth bombers — those black, boomerang-shaped, really expensive planes. And 46 much older and cheaper B-52s, which look a bit like an old-school passenger jet.

Andrew Gebara: Those bombers are not always loaded with weapons. The bomber leg is very useful for us because it is a strategic messaging tool. And so we have the ability to dial up or dial down our messaging to our adversaries to show our stake in a conflict based on loading those weapons. It's also very useful for the president because they are recallable. So once a submarine missile or an ICBM missile is launched, there's no coming back from that, but you can launch a bomber and still have several hours of negotiations and recall those bombers.

But Lt. General Gebara — who flew B-2 bombers early in his career — is here to tell you that the legs of the Triad are getting old. Take the planes for example.

Andrew Gebara: Those nuclear forces largely were built in the 1960s and re-modernized in the 1980s. And they're all aging out at various stages, but essentially at the same time.

Peter Bergen: When you say aging out, does that mean they just, they wouldn't work under certain circumstances?

Andrew Gebara: Well, it's important to make sure everyone understands the system is very reliable, safe, secure and effective today.

Andrew Gebara: So, in some cases, when I talk about aging out, I'm talking about just physical hardware aging out and needs to be replaced. In other cases, the hardware works fine, but the spare parts aren't manufactured anymore. And so over time they will degrade.

Andrew Gebara: Thirty-year-old aircraft for the B-2, the B-52s were built in 1960 and 1961. Just maintaining them is an ever increasing cost to the government. So finding those, you know, I'm not going to say they're vacuum tubes, but finding those old parts that don't exist anymore.

Andrew Gebara: You go to a vendor and you say, I want to buy 12 of this widget that hasn't been made since 1978. That becomes extremely expensive over time.

Anyone who's ever owned a used car can probably follow the logic. As parts wear out over time, the cost of replacing them starts to get really expensive. And if that car is so old or unusual that it's hard to find the parts, or the parts have to be custom made, at some point it makes sense to just buy a whole new car.

Andrew Gebara: What we're really talking about is making sure that this modernization allows no gap because the threat being what it is, we don't ever want an adversary to wake up and say, “Today is the day that we think we could succeed.”

A gap would be China or Russia or some other American rival building nuclear weapons in numbers or with new capabilities that the United States can't match. And Gebara says the Russians are already well on their way to fully modernizing their nuclear arsenal.

Andrew Gebara: I think we are just beginning our nuclear modernization efforts, whereas our Russians are 95 percent complete already.

Peter Bergen: Why did they do that?

Andrew Gebara: I guess you'd have to ask the Russians, but the Russians started several years before us, because they see the value in their nuclear deterrent for their national objectives.

Peter Bergen: The last really big arms control agreement standing is the START agreement, which expires in 2026. What does that mean?

Andrew Gebara: The New START Treaty caps the number of operationally deployed warheads for the Russians and for the United States at 1,550 operational warheads, and only for the signatories, obviously. So that has nothing to do with the Chinese, nothing to do with the North Koreans, et cetera.

Andrew Gebara: So after February 2026, when the treaty expires, there would not be any legal obligation to have those numbers where they are. After 2026 there's no longer any international law obligation.

Peter Bergen: And just to give us a sense of scale, each one of those 1,550 weapons

Peter Bergen: Each one of those is like 10 times bigger than the one dropped on Hiroshima, or…?

Andrew Gebara: There's various yields for them, but they all tend to be larger yield. Now, there are some, some attempts to have low yield capability, and we do have some that I would call around that Hiroshima-weapon-size force. And here’s why that we do that: we think it's important to have a spectrum of capability, so as to deter against all spectrums.

Andrew Gebara: So, let me give you an example of that. If an adversary, God forbid, was to detonate a small yield weapon a- something smaller than the Hiroshima bomb, that would be horrific, and I don't even want to think about it, but the reality is it could happen, and the world doesn't end tomorrow, and we have to be able to give the president options to deter that.

Andrew Gebara: If the only deterrent is a megaton-sized weapon, it could be that our adversaries view that as a bluff that's worth taking, and we don't ever want to have that be a bluff worth taking.

The logic here is to give the U.S. president an option for proportionately responding in the event that some state attacks U.S. forces or an ally with a very small nuclear weapon. If the only option U.S. Presidents have is some multi-megaton warhead, they might feel that they can’t respond at all.

Andrew Gebara: What we owe to the President is a spectrum of safe, secure, reliable options so that those adversaries are deterred. And so they decide not to do something, not because they just don't feel like it, but because they understand the consequences will be such that it is not worth their time to do that.

Peter Bergen: And what have you seen over the course of your career about how the discussion or the reality around nuclear weapons has changed?

Andrew Gebara: You know, I was commissioned in the, at the very end of the Cold War. So, 1991 I went to flight school, thinking that I was going to take my place in line, guarding America against the Cold War. By the time I was out of flight school, things were very different.

Andrew Gebara: This was post-Desert Storm world. And so we proceeded there for a long time. The Russians, obviously, had massive change within their armed forces.

Peter Bergen: Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons.

Andrew Gebara: Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons through the Budapest memorandum.

That's true. Ukraine became one of those rare countries to have nuclear weapons at one time and then agree to dismantle them. Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan had more than 3,000 nuclear warheads when the Soviet Union broke up. They were returned to Russia, dismantled, and turned into fuel for civilian reactors.

Andrew Gebara: Here's an interesting story that happened to me that might be helpful to you. In 2012, relations were much better with the Russians. This is pre-Crimea, pre-Ukraine, etc. And they had an idea that there would be a goodwill opportunity in which they would fly a Bear Bomber to the United States at Barksdale Air Force Base, and then we would fly a B-52 to Engels Air Base in Russia.

Andrew Gebara: And so, my boss ordered me as a colonel to lead the team to Engels Air Base to lead this site survey. So we went. We saw everything we needed to see. They were good hosts. They weren't trying to mess with us, but one thing I'll always take with me, and this has been 12 years now going on 13 years, on the end of the second day, they took us out to the end of the runway and we watched as one after another.

Andrew Gebara: They landed 10 Bear bombers, three Blackjack bombers, and a tanker. And it was very obvious to me that they were trying to message to us that they needed to be, you know, awed and feared and respected and what have you.

Andrew Gebara: So I took away from that a lot. And one of those things is, as I look at their armed forces, they are not up to the Western standards that you and I are used to. But if you ask me: can they load a nuclear weapon on their bomber and can they launch that bomber and get it to a spot where they can launch against the United States?

Andrew Gebara: The answer is yes, they can do that. And if you ask me, has that been degraded because of Ukraine? No, the answer is no, it has not been degraded. So whether 8we like it or not, we have to deal with that. We can't just wish away our adversaries’ threats. We have to deal with it.

Peter Bergen: Did you ever train for nuclear missions? I know that you were a B-2 bomber.

Andrew Gebara: I did. I started out in the B-52. I spent most of my career in the B-2. Those are both nuclear-capable bombers.

Peter Bergen: You spent a lot of your life working on nuclear arms policy and or potentially being on a plane that might deliver a nuclear bomb. I mean, it sounds like a pretty sober career.

Andrew Gebara: Well, it is sobering, but I will tell you this, I think a lot of people think of the nuclear capability as a horrific ending if, if they're executed and certainly that is true. But I and the men and women that do this kind of work don't focus on that. We focus on the lifesaving abilities of our nuclear deterrent force.

Andrew Gebara: So In my view, nothing has kept great-power war from happening more than nuclear weapons over time.

Gebara’s best evidence for this view is World War II. Or, to be more precise, the fact that we haven’t had another global war like it.

Andrew Gebara: One thing I do sometimes worry about the younger generation, they tend to think of the past in rose colored terms. So World War II, Captain America and the Avengers, that kind of thing. We don't have to pretend what a world would be like without nuclear weapons. We can easily see it. Just go back to 1945 and all of history. About 60 million people died in World War II. So roughly a million people every month.

Andrew Gebara: And that death at an industrial scale is something we don't ever want to go back to before. And so, immediately after the end of World War II, we have not had a completely peaceful world, but we have had a by far more peaceful world than we've ever seen in historical terms. And so, I think there's clearly a correlation there in our nuclear deterrent.

Andrew Gebara: And right now, as we speak, there's tens of thousands of people around our country — they're underground. They're at sea. They're in the air. They're doing all sorts of things to keep our way of life safe and secure, and I'm very proud of them.

From Gebara's perspective, the U.S. military keeps Americans' way of life secure by making a credible and deadly guarantee. Think of the U.S. nuclear triad as a three-barreled nuclear gun, aimed right between the eyes of any potential rival.

So far, no rival has dared to make a move. In this line of thinking, nuclear weapons actually save lives by deterring another country from using their own nuclear gun, even if it happens to be pointed right back at the United States. And so Gebara's basically saying that preserving this dicey nuclear stand-off, means preserving the deterrent.

That means keeping America's gun on display and in very good working order. Although Gebara probably wouldn’t put it quite like that.

Andrew Gebara: I think that's, uh, an oversimplification, but broadly correct.

[MUSIC]

Now I'd like you to meet someone who's a little skeptical of the Pentagon's arguments for spending $1.5 trillion on a modernized version of that nuclear gun.

Jessica Mathews: I believe that modernizing the land based missiles, the ICBMs that sit in silos, where the Russians and the Chinese know precisely where they are, is a waste of money.

Jessica Mathews was once president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before that, she served on President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council, focusing on nuclear proliferation and arms policy on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Jessica Mathews: I'm certainly not a peacenik. I have never been out in the streets, carrying signs. Nuclear weapons are a part of our reality and they can't be wished away. They can't be disinvented. So they have to be understood and they have to be controlled and they have to be thought about with clarity.

Mathews says it's important first to remember with clarity just how crazy the Cold War of the 20th century was. In a moment when nuclear war was on the table, even outrageous scenarios started to seem sensible. Mathews encountered one of those scenarios in a very personal way. Her late husband, Air Force General Charles Boyd, began his career as a fighter pilot. Early on he was assigned to a unit with a nuclear mission.

Jessica Mathews: One of his early postings was to fly from where he was posted and to deliver a nuclear weapon during a war in Europe. And he told me at one point that the flash from the weapon that they would deliver would blind the pilots.

Jessica Mathews: And so they were given an eye patch lined with lead and they were told just before you release the weapon, you put this eye patch on, your unprotected eye would be blinded. Then you’d take off the patch and fly with the eye that was covered. And I said something about how incredibly creepy that was and didn't they kind of have strong feelings about instantly losing half their vision?

Jessica Mathews: And he said, ‘Well, no,’ because they all knew that this was going to be a one-way mission, that there would be no place to land in Europe in the middle of a nuclear war. And so what did it matter if you died half blind or not? So, there is an otherworldly quality to nuclear war scenarios in the operational sense as well as in the planning sense.

Peter Bergen: You've written that the nuclear arms race, I'm quoting here, ‘drives intelligent people to extremes.’ I mean, the story that your late husband told you, it's hard to sort of get your head around. A bunch of very smart people got together and planned for a nuclear exchange that would have ended with 275 million people just dead from a blast.

Peter Bergen: Forget about the radiation, the burns, the, what follows later.

Jessica Mathews: Fires, yeah.

Peter Bergen: So do you have an analysis of how we got here?

Jessica Mathews: Yes, it's worst-case thinking. And oﬃcials who are responsible for safeguarding the nation and for doing these jobs, they have to consider worst case outcomes, but the problem is that when you are making plans based on worst case thinking, you inevitably and irreversibly escalate, escalate, escalate.

Jessica Mathews: I mean, in the 1960s, we grew from a tiny nuclear arsenal up to 30,000 weapons, which at that time was six times what the Soviets had. So you have to ask yourself, what were we thinking? Presumably we were frightened and we had an advantage and we seized it.

Jessica Mathews: And we felt that we were facing an evil and powerful enemy. But worst case thinking – is it's impossible for the other side to know that that's what you're doing and to distinguish that from, well, maybe that's what they intend to do.

Mathews says that during the Cold War, the most powerful weapons in history combined with worst-case thinking gave rise to truly monstrous plans for war. Back then the U.S. military's multi-service handbook for nuclear war was known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan.

Towards the end of Dwight Eisenhower's administration in 1960, the president sent a couple of science advisors to get a detailed briefing on the then current plan from the Air Force.

Beforehand, just for reference, one of Eisenhower's advisors had researched the name and location of a Soviet city that most resembled Hiroshima in terms of its size and concentration of factories.

Jessica Mathews: He had the name of this city in his head. And he said, What weapons are targeted for this city? Call it the Russian Hiroshima. And he was told, well, one four megaton bomb followed by three one megaton bombs. So, a total of seven point something megatons.

Jessica Mathews: This was six hundred times the weaponry that was dropped on Hiroshima, and we know what Hiroshima looked like afterwards.

Peter Bergen: And this was an obscure Russian city. It was not like a-

Jessica Mathews: Yes, it wasn't Moscow or, um…

Peter Bergen: Right.

Jessica Mathews: It was a minor industrial city. And so you have to ask, you know, what can lead people to such lunatic outcomes or such lunatic plans? I don't think there's any other word for it other than insane.

At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had something like 60,000 nuclear warheads combined, enough to kill lots of the planet's population and turn large swathes of both countries into radioactive wastelands.

Thanks to arms control treaties, there are 1,500 nuclear weapons deployed by each side now. Many of America’s nuclear weapons were dismantled and their parts put into storage.

But Mathews says the new nuclear age we're entering could now end up being more volatile and less predictable than the last.

Jessica Mathews: I think that during the Cold War and the years since, when the arms race was a bilateral one, and where we were pretty familiar with the capabilities of the weapons on both sides, I had a pretty relaxed view of the likelihood that we would end in a nuclear war.

Jessica Mathews: Now that it's a trilateral relationship, it's vastly more complicated. You know, in any sort of relationship, whether it's, three eighth graders in middle school or, three, nuclear weapon states, a triangle is an inherently more unstable relationship than a two party one. Because you're always worrying about, are the other two getting closer together than they are with you? And it's always shifting.

And not to be a middle school gossip about this, but it totally looks like Russia and China are doing exactly that.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: China and Russia announced a new partnership, with China saying it'll back Russia's foreign policy aims.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: The leaders of China and Russia promised each other deeper ties with quote, “no limits.”

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have over the years met more than 40 times in a partnership experts warn is deepening.

ARCHIVAL Analyst: This is a strategic nightmare to see the two, two of them hug like this.

Jessica Mathews: The other way in which it's so much more diﬃcult is that, you know we have been negotiating and talking and exchanging information and data with the Soviets and then the Russians for decades now, and we understand each other pretty well. What military officers’ thinking is, what Russian doctrine is. It's not to say we couldn't be horribly surprised, but it's unlikely. We know their capabilities, we know their weapon systems, all of that.

What the U.S. doesn’t know, Mathews says, is what China is thinking. Maybe they’re building a nuclear arsenal to demonstrate that they’re a great power just like Russia or the U.S. Or maybe they’re gearing up for an actual war.

Jessica Mathews: We just don't know.

[MUSIC]

Mathews says there's never going to be a way to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Nuclear weapons are here to stay. But she thinks things can be done to make the genie less dangerous. Countries can absorb the lessons of the Cold War, admit that nuclear wars are too monstrous to ever actually fight, and do the painstaking work of making treaties with each other to reduce nuclear stockpiles.

The U.S. and Russia drew down from more than 60,000 warheads to the 6,000 or so we have today. It took decades of painstaking negotiations, agreements and inspections.

And it was politically diﬃcult on both sides. But Mathews says we know it can be done, because it's been done before.

Jessica Mathews: As you know, Peter, the arms control negotiations, they take forever. And, they are always to some extent disappointing because you wish that, you know, sometimes the two sides could only agree to give up systems they don't really want anymore or the cuts are not as big as people hoped, all those things.

Jessica Mathews: But the fact is that the U.S. and Russia cut their combined number of nuclear weapons from 60,000 to 11,000 through arms control negotiations. And that was an astonishing achievement. And you know, I think if you had said at the beginning, this is going to lead to an 85, 90 percent cut in our combined number of nuclear weapons, people would have been highly skeptical. And yet that's what was achieved.

Peter Bergen: And you use the term “was.” Why do you now put this in the past tense?

Jessica Mathews: Because when I started to sort of immerse myself again into this material this summer, I was taken aback at how far a second arms, nuclear arms race had already begun. And how deep into it we are.

Peter Bergen: With almost no public discussion it seems.

Jessica Mathews: Exactly, exactly. And it made me realize, in the first arms race, the public was a big part of the effort to control it. And the big part was fear. You know, I'm old enough that in grade school, I got down on my hands and knees with my coat over my head under my desk, a singularly useless exercise, but one that we all did at the time, in case there was a nuclear weapons attack on New York City where I grew up.

Mathews says that fear helped push U.S. and Soviet leaders to make agreements to limit things like: the number of nuclear weapons each country built, or limit how they were tested, or limit where they were placed.

But today, most of those agreements have expired. And Mathews says the last one standing is the New START treaty. This agreement limited the number of operational warheads that Russia and the U.S. could each deploy to just over 1,500. And it set up a schedule of mutual inspections to keep both sides honest.

Jessica Mathews: But the treaty itself expires in February of 2026. So we're fewer than 500 or so days from having absolutely no guardrails on the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals for the first time in half a century.

Peter Bergen: Given that the Chinese are building up, the Russians are, certainly saber rattled about their tactical nuclear weapons. Is there anything that can be done to deter them or reassure them without the United States getting into a new arms race, or has that sort of horse already left the barn?

Jessica Mathews: Well, I think there is one thing. A lot of my friends, will laugh at this, but, the United States made the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would have banned all nuclear testing, whether in the atmosphere or below ground, was an American initiative and American priority for years, and when it was finally negotiated and it came time for the United States to ratify it, the Senate couldn't muster the votes to ratify.

This treaty was adopted by the United Nations in 1996. The idea was to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons by halting their testing and the development of any new ones. But the treaty never entered into force because several nations, including the United States, never ratified it.

However, in anticipation of the treaty taking effect, progress had already been made in building a worldwide system to detect nuclear blasts. It monitors the earth and oceans for vibrations from nuclear explosions, and monitors the air for radioactive particles and gasses those explosions leave behind.

Jessica Mathews: There is now a global set of listening posts, in effect, that can detect the smallest test anywhere on the planet.

Jessica Mathews: So the question arises, why don't we change our mind, why doesn't the Senate change its mind, and, ratify the treaty?

Mathews points out that President George H.W. Bush signed a moratorium on U.S. nuclear testing in 1992 that the U.S. has continued to renew.

Jessica Mathews: What started out as a nine-month testing moratorium announced by the first President Bush has now stretched to 32 years.

And Mathews thinks if the U.S. ratified the test-ban treaty and simply carried on doing what it’s been doing voluntarily for the past three decades, the move could nudge other countries to ratify it, too.

Jessica Mathews: Because in all likelihood, the Chinese would follow suit, and the other smaller countries that have not yet ratified would. And this would have a major global impact and would not cost anything.

Jessica Mathews: So, I think there are things. No question about that.

So Mathews is saying there are concrete steps the U.S. could take to respond to the new nuclear ambitions of China and the renewed nuclear ambitions of Russia. Steps she thinks are better than paying tons of money to buy three brand new-barrels for America's giant nuclear gun.

She does think some systems may need to be modernized. But in her opinion, one part of the triad — the land-based missiles buried out in Nebraska and other states — shouldn’t get an upgrade.

For one thing, she says the Russians and the Chinese know where all those missiles are. And, therefore building them in the first place didn’t make much sense.

Jessica Mathews: The only use you have is to use them in a first strike. You've got to fire them off before the other side fires them, fires missiles at them. So they are weapons that are both inherently vulnerable to attack and destabilizing because they have to be used first.

This idea that the Russians and the Chinese know the location of all the ground-based missiles isn't far-fetched. If you open up Google Maps, and go to a satellite view of Kimball County Nebraska, they're pretty easy to spot.

For example, nine miles due north of the village of Dix Nebraska — population 187 — next to a gravel road, you can see a couple of unassuming, one story buildings right by a radio tower. The buildings are surrounded by a chain-link fence, and if you ever decided to show up there uninvited, heavily-armed U.S. Air Force security guards would probably ask why you were poking around their missile installation.

And so this reality — that the missile silos are easy to find and thus vulnerable to attack — has been factored into some versions of U.S. plans for nuclear war. The spread-out locations of the launch sites, honeycombed across the high plains in parts of Colorado, Montana, North Dakota and Nebraska, would mean any nation trying to cripple the U.S. nuclear arsenal in a first strike would need to expend hundreds of its own nukes to do so.

Jessica Mathews: Yes, the idea is you would absorb, many of the enemy's missiles, aimed at those silos but it's a pretty pathetic argument.

Under this argument, the U.S. heartland becomes a so-called "nuclear sponge,” soaking up enemy missiles on the plains and leaving fewer enemy missiles available to lob at big U.S. cities or U.S. military bases. But this scenario also assumes that anyone living near the silos is essentially toast.

Jessica Mathews: Yes, exactly, and I'm sorry to laugh, but it’s, I think, on its face, it's an argument not worth taking terribly seriously.

The U.S. Air Force’s nuclear guy, Lt. General Andrew Gebara has a different view of the purpose and value of those missile silos hidden under the Nebraska prairie. Or as he calls it, the land leg of the nuclear triad.

Andrew Gebara: Here's how I look at the land leg. I think it deters an adversary from attacking us, and because of that, I think it's stabilizing. Here's what I mean by that.

Andrew Gebara: The way the system is set up, the different weapons are dispersed throughout the heartland, and they're designed so that only a direct nuclear strike can take a node out. They're hardened underground facilities, and they're interspersed in such a way that one near miss or one nuclear strike does not take out multiple nodes of the system.

Andrew Gebara: So because of that, only a massively attributable nuclear strike could even hope to take out the whole system. Multiple hundreds of warheads would be required to do something like that. So because of that, there are countries that don't bother to get a nuclear force because what's the point?

Andrew Gebara: Similarly, it deters smaller scale nuclear use. Because what's the point of taking out 30 nodes in the ICBM system if there's 400 nodes out there? Now, the country of Russia right now has the ability to launch that many weapons. China is in growth, they could not do that today. North Koreans, for example, could not hope to take that out. And so I think that's a very stabilizing thing.

Andrew Gebara: I would also say a couple other aspects to it, I think it's very assuring to our allies. So if we were to go to a force that didn't have the nodes of the ICBM, you could take out, or you could hope to take out the U.S. nuclear force with a very small number of warheads. A couple of bomber bases, a couple of submarine bases, and there might be hope that you could do that. And we would only have so many weapons to respond with. That might be enough to deter, but would it be enough to assure our allies?

Andrew Gebara: So, let me tell you what I mean. If China continues to grow and North Korea continues to grow and Russia is there and the United States suddenly radically shrinks their nuclear force to enough that's only good for the United States, what's the chances of South Korea staying with us? And if South Korea doesn't, does Japan stay with us, et cetera, and Taiwan? And you can see very quickly how this proliferation could spin out of control.

Gebara is saying that from his perspective, the main reason for burying all those missiles out in Nebraska is to not ever fire them. America is not brandishing all three barrels of its nuclear gun because it wants to blow anyone's brains out.

It's pointing the gun to scare its enemies into never daring to even TRY firing their own gun. And in this line of thinking, that deterrent strategy should help convince other, non-nuclear countries to decide they don't need nukes of their own.

And Gebara thinks that the U.S. upgrading that nuclear gun isn't causing an arms race. He says this is because the U.S. is simply replacing what's there already and because rival nations, he says, started their recent nuclear buildup well before the U.S. did.

Andrew Gebara: I don't believe anything in our modernization efforts have sparked the growth that we're seeing today. And the reason I don't think that is because they were growing before we ever started any of our modernization efforts. So the chicken came before the egg, if you will.

There’s a certain logic to that argument. But following it comes with a price. The amount is so big it can be hard to comprehend.

Adjusted for inflation, the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, cost about $30 billion over the course of World War II. To upgrade the nuclear triad as planned, the United States is on track to spend roughly double that amount each year for 30 straight years.

When she wrote about this, Jessica Mathews tried to illustrate the $1.5 trillion in terms of time. She pointed out that 1.5 trillion seconds would last 32,000 years.

But I think maybe the person who did the best job of trying to illustrate the real cost of big defense spending was President Dwight Eisenhower. He was no peacenik either, having come into oﬃce after helping to win World War II. And he described the cost not in inflation adjusted dollars, but in something more concrete.

ARCHIVAL Dwight Eisenhower: The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: Is there no other way the world may live?

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If you’re interested in learning more about the issues and stories in this episode, we recommend The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War by Fred Kaplan. It’s available on Audible.

CREDITS

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

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