New START, Nuclear Weapons, and the New Landscape: Arms Control and Deterrence Post-Ukraine

Jack Capizzi:  Well, hello, and welcome to today’s Federalist Society virtual event. Today is Tuesday, June 13, 2023, and we are presenting a program on the “New START, Nuclear Weapons, and a New Landscape: Arms Control and Deterrence Post-Ukraine.” As always, please remember that any statements of opinion are those of the speakers on the call and are not representative of The Federalist Society.

 

Today, we are joined by Stephen P. Rosen, Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs at Harvard University. In addition to his roles at Harvard, where he has also served as a Harvard College professor, head of Winthrop House, and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. Professor Rosen has also served as the civilian assistant to the director, Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Director of Political-Military Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council, and a professor in the Strategic Department at the Naval War College.

 

He participated in the President’s Commission on Integrated Long Term Strategy and in the Gulf War Air Power Survey, sponsored by the Secretary of the Air Force. He currently serves as Senior Counselor at the Long Term Strategy Group. He has published articles on ballistic missile defense, the American theory of limited war, and the strategic implications of the AIDS epidemic. His books include Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military, Societies and Military Power: India and its Armies, and War and Human Nature.

 

Our moderator today is Dan West. Dan is a member of the Executive Committee for The Federal Society’s International and National Security Law Practice Group. As a reminder, we will take Q&A from the audience. If you have a question at any point during the program, please type it into the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen, and we’ll handle your questions as we can towards the end of today’s program. With that, thank you all so much for being with us. Dan, over to you.

 

Dan West:  Well, thanks, Jack, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. And thank you, Professor Rosen, as well, for making time to be with us today.

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  My pleasure to be here, Dan. Thank you.

 

Dan West:  Today we’ll discuss nuclear weapons and arms control, a topic that unfortunately has gained new salience in recent months. In February of this year, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would withdraw from the New START Arms Reduction Treaty, which was the last arms control treaty remaining between the U.S. and Russia, which together control almost 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads. That treaty placed limits on the nuclear arsenals of both countries and provided for mutual inspection regimes.

 

Then, in late March of this year, Putin declared that he would place nuclear capable Iskander ballistic missile systems in Belarus, which shares a border with Poland. This would be the first time that Russia moves nuclear warheads outside its borders since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. While technically nonstrategic, these missiles can carry nuclear warheads across a range of up to 500 kilometers. Last week, Putin said that he would retain control of these tactical nuclear weapons placed in Belarus. And Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko announced just yesterday that he expected to have them “in several days,” and that he’d be willing to use them, saying, “There would be no hesitation if we face an aggression.”

 

So we’ll start today’s conversation by discussing the status quo ante before the Ukraine conflict for nuclear arms and the treaty regimes that govern them. Then we’ll discuss Russia’s recent actions and consider potential responses and paths forward. Finally, we’ll take a step back to discuss the nuclear landscape more broadly, considering the potential role of China and other global powers in the years ahead, as well as the prospects for civilian nuclear energy. But let’s jump in, and let’s start with the basics. Professor Rosen.

 

Could you talk to us about the nuclear state of play after the end of the Cold War? What are the relevant governance structures? What are the treaty regimes? And what are the other influences on the possession and development of nuclear weapons, both legal and political strategic? And, also, it’d be great if you could talk about what nations have nuclear weapons, what nations have agreed to forego them, and what nations keep pursuing them, sort of in the face of international containment efforts.

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  Great, Dan. Let me go through the foundations as quickly as I can without overlooking anything important, and then we can go on to some of the ways in which the situation is evolving. The relevant nuclear weapons arm control agreements that were in existence—and some of which are still operative to begin with—is the Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibits the testing of nuclear weapons underground, in space, or in sea and so forth. That agreement is in effect. It has been noted that the Soviet Union may be -- sorry, Russia may have been conducting tests which are at the very limit of the threshold established by the Test-Ban Treaty.

 

      But basically, the understanding is that Test-Ban Treaty has held. China has not been testing since the late 1990s. And that agreement is in place because it serves the interest of Russia and the United States and China. They’re content with the status quo. They don’t have any large incentive to cheat. And nuclear weapons are a relatively mature and stable technology. So although there has been some cheating alleged against Russia, and there does not appear to have been major substantive changes in the balance of power as a result of that.

 

The treaty that bans the presence of nuclear weapons in outer space is still in force. Again, that’s something that we monitor carefully because there are occasional tests by China of missiles, not with nuclear weapons, but which go into space, and which go into orbit. And there is some concern that there might be the possible introduction of nuclear weapons into space in ways that make it harder for the United States to detect them and defend against them. But, by and large, people would say the treaty has prohibited the presence of nuclear weapons in space, that by the treaty has permitted the presence of nuclear weapons in space. And that is something again which is to the advantage of the major powers.

 

The Nuclear Proliferation Treaty is obviously an interesting and defining case because the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has not prevented Pakistan from testing and acquiring nuclear weapons, has not prevented India from testing and acquiring nuclear weapons. They were not signatory powers, so they were not bound by them. But if the object of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was to limit -- to prevent the increase in the number of countries having nuclear weapons, it did not prevent India and Pakistan from getting them, nor has it prevented North Korea from acquiring them.

 

And, on current estimates, it has not prevented Iran from becoming a threshold nuclear weapons state, which could assemble upward of something like eight nuclear weapons in a period of six weeks -- six to eight weeks, depending on how you estimate it. So the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is one of the pillars of the Cold War arms control agreement regime, has been gradually eroded, either because countries that did not sign it advanced their interests or because they were -- North Korea, which technically is a signatory power to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, did not abide by its terms.

 

The major treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union, which went -- continued into effect after the Soviet Union ended, were the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limited the number of interceptors of the United States and the Soviet Union, and then Russia, could have to defend their countries against long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles. That treaty was terminated in the early aughts by the United States on the argument that it was no longer relevant given the changes in the global environment, and they are still -- and it unnecessarily constrained the United States in the development of necessary ballistic missile defense technologies.

 

Similarly, the so-called INF Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—the treaty which provided for the withdrawal and destruction of theater-ranged nuclear missiles owned by the United States and Russia from Europe at the end of the 1990s, the withdrawal and destruction of American Pershing II missiles and long range cruise missiles, and the withdrawal and destruction of Soviet SS-20 missiles, and which then prohibited the United States and Russia -- or the United States from constructing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, theater-range nuclear missiles, missiles with ranges less than 5000 kilometers but over 500 kilometers—that treaty was never signed by China. China in the beginning, in the late 1990s, early aughts, produced and deployed hundreds of theater-ranged nuclear weapons.

 

And, again, the United States made the argument, I think accurately to my point, that this was a treaty which was no longer relevant to the realities of the world. The countries that needed to be bound by this treaty were not bound by it, whereas the country that was bound by it, the United States, was severely constrained in responding to what other countries were doing. It was also argued, in my view correctly, that Russia was violating the terms of this treaty even before the United States ended it by building long-range cruise missiles.

 

So, now, the last remaining, therefore, U.S.-Soviet bilateral arms control treaty was the START II, which limited the number of intercontinental weapons and provided mechanisms for the mutual verification of that. And that, as you mentioned, well, Vladimir Putin walked away with -- walked away from. And the United States last week decided, announced that it was no longer complying with that treaty by supplying information to Russia under the terms of that treaty about American nuclear weapons forces. So it is not quite safe to say that we are now in a world which is effectively unaffected by or ungoverned by nuclear arms control agreements. But that is basically the truth. Although those agreements have become less and less relevant and effective, and, even without their formal renunciation, they had become less important in terms of governing actual behavior.

 

In terms of the actual behavior of Russia, which I think is what we care about—we care about arms control agreements because we hope that they constrain the behavior of countries in ways that make the world safer—beginning in the late 1990s, the government of Russia began to develop a set of new nuclear weapons doctrines which took advantage of the fact that they had somewhere around 4,000 tactical and theater nuclear weapons, which they believe gave them a great deal of power and influence. And the question was, are nuclear weapons actually politically useful? Nobody thinks—I don’t think—nobody in the United States thinks that you could fight a nuclear war and come out of it with anything other than a complete end of civilization.

 

So why did the Soviet Union insist on keeping this large arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, which are sometimes referred to as war fighting weapons or battlefield weapons? And the Russian writings became more and more clear over time. They went through in some internal debates. But their basic argument, which has been elucidated by scholars such as Dima Adamsky, is that nuclear weapons can be deployed by Russia in and around areas of political contestation in ways that constrain the behavior of Russian adversaries so as to make it more possible for Russia to engage in non-nuclear military actions because their adversaries are constrained by the presence of Russian nuclear weapons.

 

Basic logic is, “I’m going to put nuclear weapons in and around the battlefield, and you’re going to be more careful because of that. I’m going to put nuclear weapons in Belarus Therefore, you’re not going to”—you, United States, NATO, Ukraine—“you’re not going to conduct any non-nuclear attacks on Belarus because you might wind up hitting Russian nuclear weapons, and we might retaliate for that attack on our nuclear weapons by using them.” So this is the idea of introducing threats that leave something to chance. This is the old Cold War terminology. “I’m going put -- I’m going to do something risky. I’m going to put my nuclear weapons close to the battlefield, or maybe even on the battlefield. I’m not going to use them. But you’re going to be really careful, and therefore, I can get some benefits.”

 

And the Russians may have done something like this by deploying nuclear weapons in Syria. There’s a debate about that. The evidence isn’t clear. Now, they’ve said that they’re putting nuclear weapons in Belarus. And the purpose of it is to make it harder for Ukraine, harder for Poland, harder for NATO countries to conduct actions that limit the ability of Russia to operate from Belarus. So Russian doctrine emerged, “We’re going to use nuclear weapons to constrain and coerce our adversaries, but we’re not going to use the nuclear weapons ourselves.” And now, they seem to be executing that doctrine.

 

Lastly—and then I’ll stop because there’s a lot more we don’t want to discuss—the Russians have been deploying these new undersea nuclear weapons, large manned nuclear submarines. And they claim large, unmanned, nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarines near the United States. “These are doomsday weapons,” they say. “We can blow up all of the coastal areas of the United States by detonating very large nuclear weapons underwater.” And the reaction of the United States is, “This is horrible, but it’s also a little bit crazy because you could already blow up the United States with ballistic missiles. So now you can blow us up with missiles underwater, too. But how has the world changed?”

 

We don’t -- the United States doesn’t have ballistic missile defenses that would be effective against a full-scale Russian attack. So we’re already vulnerable. So why do you think we’re going to be more scared by these new undersea nuclear weapons? And so, there’s a debate in the United States. Is Russia behaving in a way which simply doesn’t take into account the reality of nuclear deterrence? Do they think that they can frighten us and coerce us in ways which they think are plausible, but may not actually be the case?

 

Lastly—and then I’ll stop—everyone in the audience knows that the Russians have been making more and more veiled nuclear threats with regard to Ukraine. We are in an existential war,” Putin says. “We will use nuclear weapons to defend ourselves in an existential war. We are changing the posture of our nuclear weapons.” And Americans look at this and say, “You’re bluffing. You’re not going to really use nuclear weapons. You’re not really changing your nuclear weapons posture. So you’re trying to scare us. You’re trying to get us to back away from Ukraine by making these veiled, ambiguous nuclear threats.” And the reaction of the United States to this point has been to say, “We’re not going to change our behavior. You’re not going -- you’re not going to bluff us. We’re going to call your bluff.”

 

And the big question that is on the minds of people like me who kind of follow this, does Putin now believe he has to do something to make his threats credible? Having made threats, which the United States ignored, “Hey, America, be careful. My nuclear weapons could be used. I think I might need to use them because my existence is at state.” And we say, “Yeah, right, you won’t do it.” Does he now think he actually has to do something using nuclear weapons to make himself look credible? Or does -- because if he doesn’t, he runs the risk of looking like he’s just been bluffing, talking. And he says over and over, “I’m not bluffing. I’m not bluffing.”

 

And internally, within Russia—and this is the part that is truly disturbing—he’s been more and more talking to the Russian people in ways with that -- which people say are getting the Russian people used to the idea of Russian use of nuclear weapons. “People of Russia, America used nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945 to limit the battlefield casualties the Americans had against the war -- would have in the war against Japan. Using nuclear weapons to save Russian lives would be just like what the Americans did in 1945. It would save Russian lives. People of Russia, NATO is trying to destroy Russia. Nuclear weapons are our last resort to prevent our destruction. We are in an existential crisis.”

 

So he’s not threatening us. He’s talking to the Russian people in ways which may be the way you talk to the Russian people to get them ready for this really drastic shift in behavior. So we don’t know what he’s going to do, but we’re watching him ever more carefully. And if the cart Ukrainian offensive begins to go well—or better than it is now—will Putin do something like detonate a nuclear weapon over Ukraine to prove to people that he hasn’t been bluffing, that nuclear weapons are part of his arsenal, and he will use them if necessary?

 

Nobody thought Putin would invade Ukraine, but he did. Nobody thinks he’ll use nuclear weapons now, but he might. So those two parts -- the reason I went into this is that this is behavior that takes place without regard to the arms control structures. This is simply the operational behavior of Putin, which was not meant to be governed by arms control treaties, is not governed by arms control treaties, and constitutes the real problem that we have to face now. So I got a lot out there just to get the ball rolling, but let me turn it back over to you.

 

Dan West:  Yeah, so that’s terrifying, A, but B, thanks for sharing it. A lot to unpack there. And I want to start with you. You mentioned the great powers coming together and agreeing on things –

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  Yes.

 

Dan West:  -- whether it was testing or other things. And, historically, the U.S. and Russia have engaged in discussions. They have reached agreements with respect to nuclear arms that they behaved, at least in part, as if they were governed by, if not fully. And this happened during periods of fierce antagonism. So even while concurrently fighting proxy wars, right—the hot proxy wars—Reagan administration signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Secretary Gorbachev in 1987. The Obama administration signed the new START Treaty with Russia in 2010 and the JCPOA with Iran in 2015. And so the question I’d like to ask is, are nuclear weapons special in some way? Why would bitter rivals see value in negotiating agreements of limited scope and then actually adhering to those agreements even when they’re fighting each other in cold and hot ways elsewhere in the world? And what might skeptics say about the value of those agreements?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  It’s a great point and gets to something very fundamental. There have been times in which there were shared interests between the United States and the Soviet Union in the area of nuclear weapons, which brought them together to agree to mutual constraints. The best example is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Russians really did not want West Germany to get nuclear weapons. They didn’t want Japan to get nuclear weapons. The United States also wanted to constrain the spread of nuclear weapons.

 

And so to maintain cynics in other countries, like India and China, to maintain the special position of Russia and the -- the Soviet Union and the United States at the top of the power hierarchy, they would say, “We will get together to prevent other countries from getting nuclear weapons, because if they get nuclear weapons, they can challenge us.” So the United States and Soviet Union agreed not to transfer nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons related technologies as a way of maintaining their special status. And you will notice the signatories to the NPT are the countries that already have nuclear weapons. And countries like India at the time said, “This is a great power conspiracy of the nuclear-have countries to shut out the nuclear-have-not countries,” which is why India never signed, Pakistan never signed, and so forth. So nuclear weapons agreements have been signed because nuclear weapons are special, because limiting their spread in this case was something that was in the interest of both countries.

 

The Test-Ban-Treaty similarly was in the interest because nuclear testing was creating this very serious problem of radioactive pollution, which was affecting the health of people all over the world. And at a point when nuclear weapons technology was mature and people didn’t think that more testing would produce great benefits, people agreed to stop testing. The 1987 treaty is very interesting because it appears to be symmetrical, but in fact it was asymmetrical, and the treaty was one that favored the United States, and which was originally rejected by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had long had long-range missiles that could strike in West Europe.  Going back to the 1950s, they had them.

 

They built new ones, the SS-20s, in the 1970s, which alarmed the West Europeans. And in response, the United States said, “Well, if you build new long-range nuclear weapons, we’ll build long-range nuclear weapons,” the Pershing IIs. And this very -- this was a very serious threat to the Soviet leadership because those missiles could reach Moscow. We claimed they could not. The Russians always say, “Don’t kid us. They can reach Moscow.” And they could decapitate Russian -- Soviet nuclear leadership in a matter of 10 minutes.

 

And the Russians looked at this and said, “You might have a war-winning weapon, United States. You could win the war by striking at our leadership. We want to get rid of them.” So in order to gain leverage over Soviet nuclear weapons, the United States built and deployed these nuclear weapons with the cooperation of the countries of West Europe, which posed an asymmetrical threat to Soviet nuclear national interests. So to get rid of them -- initially, the Soviet Union said, “We’re not going to get rid of anything.” But when we went ahead and built them, to get rid of this threat, the Soviets agreed to get -- to dismantle their weapons.

 

So it was a case in which Reagan, I think, deployed a very successful carrot-and-stick strategy. “We don’t like what you’re doing. We’re going to do something that you don’t like. And if you stop doing what we don’t like you doing, we’ll be willing to walk back what we have.” And that is unprecedented. I mean, that was really one of the most successful arms control agreement. But the thing that I want to get across is we first built the stick which we could use to threaten them, and then we say, “Okay, let’s -- we’re not going to bargain from a position of inferiority. And now, if you really don’t like what we’re doing, let’s talk about you stopping what you’re doing that also bothers us,” which I think may be a model for future arms control agreements.

 

So it’s -- there have been some nuclear arms agreements which served the shared interest of the great powers: ending nuclear testing, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. And there were some nuclear arms agreements that served the interest of the United States because we built a capability which very much the Soviet Union wanted to get rid of. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty also falls into that category. American anti-ballistic missile technology was much better than Soviet anti-ballistic missile technology. The Soviet Union, “If we live in a world in which the Americans get rid of their anti-ballistic missiles and we get rid of our or limit our anti-ballistic missiles, we, the Soviet Union, are better off.” But in that case, also, the United States built something which the Soviets wanted to stop, wanted to get rid of, and they agreed to a treaty.

 

The other treaties, like START, basically ratified positions which the Soviet Union already had and was comfortable with and which they could cheat, and where they could cheat at the margins. SALT II was violated by the Soviets taking a very special interpretation to the limits on the size of ICBM silos that could be built. So they wound up technically adhering to the limits of the treaty, but actually building weapons far in excess of what we thought they would be allowed to build.

 

So when treaties did not get rid of American capabilities, but rather ratified the status quo, the Soviet Union tends to cheat at the margins to try to achieve positions of advantage, all of which is kind of underlying Ronald Reagan’s dicta, which was, “Trust but verify.” But his underlying strategy was, “First, make -- give the adversary an incentive to negotiate with us, to give up things that we don’t want him to have. Make him calculate that if he doesn’t sign a treaty with us, we are doing things that he really doesn’t like. And so he’s better off signing the treaty than not signing the treaty.”

 

Dan West:  On this point about cheating, so you had mentioned earlier in your comments, over the last 10 years, Russia has been at the margin moving away from these treaties and cheating under them, developing new non-compliant weapons systems and things like that. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that “a treaty that is only respected by one side will not keep us safe.” So could you talk about our decision to withdraw from treaties previously, whether the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the JCPOA in 2018. Why would the U.S. exit an arms control agreement? And what’s the argument that leaving can make us safer rather than less safe?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  The argument in the case of the INF Treaty was that the treaty was constructed to deal with a world that no longer existed. The INF Treaty was a treaty specifically to deal with the problem of Soviet coercion of West Europe—Soviet nuclear coercion of West Europe. The Soviet Union collapsed. East Europe was no longer under the control of the Soviet Union. The intermediate-range nuclear forces that the Soviet Union used to station in East Europe, they could no longer station in East Europe because they no longer controlled East Europe. East Europe was -- so the treaty that was -- the aspect of the treaty which constrained the Soviet Union constrained a country which no longer existed, constrained a country -- the inheritor to the Soviet position was no longer able to do what the Soviet Union was able to do in terms of nuclear weapons.

 

On the other hand, the United States was still constrained by the INF Treaty globally, and it was facing China, which was churning out intermediate-range nuclear weapons by the hundreds to threaten our average -- and we could not respond in ways which made sense, both politically and militarily, by constructing equally long-range weapons. So, as I said, in my view, we were better off withdrawing for the treaty because the treaty was created for a world that no longer existed.

 

And the constraints which still were in place only served to stop the United States from taking actions that our allies wanted us to take, we wanted to take, and which were already matching, only matching, the activities that China was taking. If your goal is stability and an arms control agreement prohibits you from doing things which provide you the way to have parity and matching capabilities versus your adversary, then arms control is destabilizing. It’s locking in a position of instability by locking in a position of military and strategic inferiority. So I think the INF Treaty was one which simply had no longer served its purposes.

 

In the case, people will argue -- will debate the withdrawal of the United States from the agreement with Iran. And there, the argument really was not about the effectiveness of the agreement. Most people agree that, in large part, the Iranian government was conforming with the terms of the treaty. The argument was by agreeing -- by abiding by the treaty, we provided the government of Iran with large scale financial relief from sanctions. And the argument was, well, it’s worth doing that to stop them from more rapid development of nuclear weapons.

 

Critics of the JCPOA says, “The Iranians will only be slowed down. They’ll get nuclear weapons later anyway. And by adhering to the JCPOA, what you’re doing is you’re giving them more money to do bad things while they quietly develop the foundations of their nuclear weapons capability.” They’re not violating the treaty, but they’re keeping in place the capability to build nuclear weapons once the treaty is over, the agreement is terminated. We withdrew from the treaty, the agreement, and the Iranians accelerated their nuclear enrichment capabilities.

 

And you could make the argument that the United States and the countries of the region now face a more dangerous situation earlier than they would have if the JCPOA had remained in effect. The critic would say, “You were already facing very large-scale Iranian challenges to the region by non-nuclear means and by other unconventional means, and you really hadn’t stopped the Iranian nuclear weapons program. You just kind of put it on hold for a while.”

 

So you got a bad bargain. And people, reasonable people, have taken positions on either side of that. Personally, I thought that it was likely that the Iranians were building clandestine nuclear facilities underground, even under the terms of the treaty, at Fordo and other places. So we were not achieving meaningful constraints on the Iranian nuclear enrichment program. And giving a lot of money, billions of dollars, to the Iranian revolutionary guards was enabling them to do things which made real life security for people in the region much harder to achieve.

 

So I hope I’m not dogmatic on the subject of arms control. I think there are circumstances under which it is to our advantage. I gave some examples of that. But the basic position is arms control is to the advantage of the United States when we are able to get our adversaries to cease doing things which really threaten us. Because they are convinced that if they don’t cease them, we will be able to take actions which threaten them. And so power is the basis of successful arms control treaty, not simply a legal framework.

 

Dan West:  That’s fascinating. So coming back to recent events—because I think it’s too important not to touch on again—you made the comments about Putin’s rhetoric, about Putin maybe feeling like if bluffs are called too frequently, he’ll need to make a demonstration of his will or his resolve, internal propaganda being pushed out in Russia. How real is the threat? How seriously should we be taking these comments versus kind of empty saber rattling? And what would be the risks and the benefits for Putin, for Russia more broadly, of a potential tactical nuclear strike? What’s the strategic logic in a world where that does happen?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  Again, the backdrop is a world in which Putin engaged in saber rattling before invading the Ukraine. And we simply couldn’t believe that in the 21st century, somebody would do this in the middle of Europe, and he did it. And so everyone now is a little bit more cautious in saying, “Well, he’s rattling the sabers, and he might actually do it.” Let me give you -- let me give you a scenario which limits the risks to Putin and maximizes the benefits to Putin.

 

Putin, obviously, has military commanders who are not the best military commanders in the world. They haven’t performed that well on the battlefield. Many of them are corrupt. They’re maybe not totally reliable. He will be very reluctant to put nuclear weapons in the hands of his battlefield commanders. Who knows they’ll -- what will happen, I mean, or what other people might do to them? If I were Putin, I would prepare a long-range missile strike from deep inside Russia, using a long-range missile, which exploded over Ukraine, maybe near the Polish border, but over Ukraine—which Putin claims is a part of Russia—and detonates a nuclear weapon at a high altitude. And everyone sees it goes off.

 

And Putin said, “This is just to show you. The next one can detonate a little bit lower down, and it will destroy troops in the open -- in large areas. It can destroy logistics concentrations. It can destroy road networks. It won’t destroy very much outside of -- it won’t destroy anything outside of Ukraine. And Ukraine -- people of the world, Ukraine is part of Russia. So all we’re doing is detonating nuclear weapons over Russia.” This is something no American president would even dream of doing.

 

But think of what it does. It shows to the world that Putin really thinks -- that he cares enough about Ukraine to engage in this demonstration shot of a nuclear weapon over Ukraine, which if followed up, could actually do serious military damage to the logistics networks that supply the Ukrainian troops to the [inaudible 37:21] and says to the European -- to the United States, “And what are you going to do about this? What are you going to do about it? I launched this missile from deep inside Russia. Are you going to launch a strike against me deep inside Russia to retaliate? I don’t think so. I can do it again. You can’t stop me. You thought I would never do it. I did it. So why don’t you just accept the fact, NATO, I’m willing to do anything to keep -- hold onto Ukraine, and you’re not. And the next step may be something which is very painful for you guys.” That’s one possible nuclear option for Putin.

 

Another one is one in which most people think is a little bit more likely, which is an ambiguous radiological event inside of Ukraine. Something happens to one of the nuclear reactors inside Ukraine, and a lot of nuclear waste gets ejected out. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor finally has a problem, or there’s another reactor which goes wrong. Under circumstances where it’s not clear what happened or who’s at fault but which, again, Putin says, “I kept telling you that if you pursued this war, Ukraine, it was going to be very bad for you. It’s your fault. It’s on your head.”

 

And people have suggested that he might create a fake radioactivity release by bringing Russian nuclear material into Ukraine and then distributing it away, which makes it look like it came from a reactor. There are public news stories that the United States government has deployed nuclear weapons, radiological teams to Poland. Their job is to do nuclear forensics. I mean, they’re the people who go in and collect radioisotopes and then figure out, where do these radioisotopes -- where were they produced? We work very hard to kind of keep track of which reactors produce what kind of nuclear isotopes, things like that.

 

This was during the -- during the period where we feared nuclear terrorism. We did that so that we could track where a terrorist nuclear weapon came from. So it’s public information the United States has deployed to Poland teams that can pick up nuclear weapons -- radioactive isotopes -- sorry -- analyze them, and determine whether -- well, why do we do that? Well, we may be doing that because we’re afraid that Putin may stage a radioactivity event and blame it on the Ukrainians. Again, not something we would ever thinking about doing. Why would you -- how do you think it’s going to help you win? But his -- from his logic is, “I’m demonstrating to people the stakes in Ukraine are very high for you guys. Do you really want to keep this going?” And you can imagine the reaction in West Europe and in Germany or Poland. They’re going to be living next to a radiological event.

 

Dan West:  Yeah.

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  People will say -- will they say, “Okay, we’re going to double down, and we’re going to increase our levels of aid to Ukraine and we’re going to just beat the Russians”? Or they’re going to say, “This is getting too dangerous.” And Putin may calculate that the reaction will be, “This is getting too hot for us. Why don’t we sit down and talk?” Which is what he wants them to do. So this is nuclear nightmare scenario stuff. People don’t want to believe it could happen. I don’t think it’s terribly likely. But Putin has been behaving in ways which suggests he’s preparing his people for something along these lines.

 

Dan West:  Very sobering. Very, very sobering, the challenges.

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  And, by the way, the reason this is sobering is not just because of Russia and Ukraine. China is watching what’s going on in Ukraine.

 

Dan West:  Yeah. That was actually -- so the next question, Professor, if I can. So recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, Eric Edelman and Frank Miller had a take on China that I’d like to read and get your thoughts on. So, “Today, the United States faces the most complex configuration of questions about nuclear weapons that it has ever faced since the onset of the nuclear age. The most important new factor is the potential that the U.S. will have to deal with two near nuclear peers simultaneously. Today, China disposes of roughly 350 warheads, but that arsenal is expanding rapidly. The most recent report of the Department of Defense on Chinese military power suggests that by 2027, China will have some 700 warheads and route to nearly 1,000 warheads by 2030.” So I guess, first, do you -- do you agree with that assessment and the concern that they shared in their testimony? And if you could talk just more broadly about how would China use nuclear weapons to advance their strategic interests, and what can the U.S. do to respond?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  I know about both Frank Miller and Eric Edelman. They’re both very serious people. They’re not alarmists. The projection of the size of the PRC offensive nuclear arsenal is based on pretty solid evidence, which we have satellite photography of the constructions of several hundred new Chinese ICBM missile silos. And unless you believe that they’re going to just dig the holes and leave them empty, the logic is they’re going to build the ICBM silos and put the missiles that they’re already producing in them, which would easily get you up to the numerical ceilings that Eric and Frank mentioned.

 

And they’re doing it in ways which are not necessarily indicative of intents to start a war. The Chinese have for many years said, “You Americans are going full scale ahead with this non-nuclear precision strike capability”—prompt global strike is the Pentagon term for it—“any place in the world can be blown up with precision. Well, we only have a small number of long-range ICBMs, and you Americans probably can find them and, with a non-nuclear strike, take them out. So we’re vulnerable. We have missiles on submarines, but to be honest, they’re coming along kind of slow, and they’re not working all that well. So our nuclear deterrent is basically our land-based missiles. And you Americans look like you’re building the capacity to take them out with non-nuclear weapons, and you’re gradually building up your ballistic missile defense capabilities. You say it’s against North Korea, but we don’t believe you. It must be against us. So what do we do? Well, we’re going to increase our nuclear strike capability so that you Americans can’t take it out. It’s too big.”

 

So, again, the buildup of Chinese nuclear capabilities is real, not necessarily indicative of an offensive intent, maybe to better secure what they think they need as a strategic nuclear deterrent, and therefore is something which we should take into account but not become immediately alarmed about. The real problem is longer term, which is we’ve never been in a tripolar nuclear competition.

 

If you’re competing against Russia and China, do you need enough nuclear weapons to deal with the both of them put together? Which means you need a nuclear weapons capability that’s a lot larger than we’ve got now. Well, are Russia and China looking like they’re more willing to work together? Much more now than anybody would have thought two years ago. The American nuclear arsenal is capable of dealing with Russia. It was designed to be capable of dealing with Russia. It was designed to avoid the excesses of the Cold War, during which we overbuilt just in case, right? So we have just -- we have roughly parity with the Soviets in terms of missiles. Okay. We built up a nuclear force, which is basically okay, just good enough to deal with Russia, and now we’ve got to deal with China too. What do you do about that?

 

Well, some people say, “Look, Steve, don’t go crazy. Nobody’s going to start a nuclear war. If you can blow up a few of their cities, and they can blow up a few of your cities, that’s enough to keep everybody sober. So don’t get into these complicated nuclear war finding scenarios. As long as we can blow up the 10 largest Russian cities, as long as we can blow up the 10 largest Chinese cities, that’s enough. And we’ve got that. We’ve got that on our submarines.” Well, what if the Russians and the Chinese don’t think that way? What if they think that maybe they could launch a strike which limits our nuclear strikes, and therefore we have to have the ability to deter that, maybe defeat it?

 

Then you get into the complicated logic. How do we deter the adversary, given the way the adversary thinks? And if the adversary thinks that they may have some nuclear war fighting capabilities—and Putin talks like that—then you’re in a situation where you have to ask yourself, how much do I need? And what if you have to deal with North Korea at the same time? And Iran? We’re in new territory. We just -- we don’t have the analytical tools. We don’t have the policy tools, really. And people I know, people in American government are wrestling very hard with this right now, but they don’t know -- they don’t know what the answer is.

 

And, oh, by the way, we just signed an agreement which capped U.S. discretionary spending, and we got to take care of all these non-nuclear military requirements, and now you’re going to ask me for a lot more money to build nuclear weapons too. I’m sorry, we don’t have that much money. What do you want? Do you want aircraft carriers and submarines that can deal with China? Or do you want nuclear weapons to deal with a nuclear weapons war, which might never happen? So right now, we’re working -- we’re struggling to come up with enough money to modernize nuclear forces and to take care of the non-nuclear military forces that we’re facing and to deal with this possible Chinese-Russian strategic collaboration.

 

So when I said that we’re facing challenges now, that in some ways are more daunting than the ones that we faced in the Cold War, I meant it. Because suppose you wanted to pursue arms control, but how do you pursue arms control when you’re dealing with Russia and China, who have somewhat -- who pose different problems, have different kinds of capabilities? How do you construct a global arms control agreement that is relevant and appropriate for two very different kinds of adversaries? We just don’t know how to do that. We haven’t done it. So I’m agnostic about what the best approach is, but I know that we’ve got a big problem that we need to think hard about.

 

Dan West:  Yeah. So two more rapid fire questions, and then we’ll move to questions from the audience. And I’ll just take this opportunity now to encourage folks from the audience to submit your questions through the Q&A function in Zoom. But two quick questions for you, adding one layer of complexity to the already complex modern situation: AI, right?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  Yeah.

 

Dan West:  You’ve had technological advances in command and control, which are moving very quickly in the commercial sector and the broader economy but certainly have implications for nuclear weapons. Given the threat of no warning decapitation, will AI-controlled nuclear weapons become inevitable? And how do we think about that, given the profound power that’s involved?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  Well, the Soviets already developed a much less sophisticated form of automated control over their nuclear weapons. It was a so-called perimeter system, which was semi-automated, which would prepare Soviet missiles for launch on the basis of a computer algorithm. The computer would detect -- would get data from sensors of various different kinds and make a decision about whether or not to launch. And then there was a human in the loop who would say, “Oh, yes, go ahead. No, don’t go ahead.” So you don’t need modern AI to have automated control over nuclear weapons. Ballistic missile defenses were always automated. When you’re dealing with things that are coming at you at 10,000 miles an hour, no human being can process the data and make the decision quickly enough. It had to be automated. So things are different now, but it’s not as if we’ve never faced this kind of problem before.

 

I would say some of the AI applications are a little bit less apocalyptic, or sort of a little less dramatic, but equally important. AI is really good at taking masses of complicated data and seeing patterns from that. That may get applied to antisubmarine warfare capabilities. We rely on our nuclear submarines to stay hidden. Well, that’s because they’re very quiet relative to the background noise in the oceans. With enough data from -- enough big data from thousands of sensors and enough processing power, people are beginning to say, “Just how safe are nuclear submarines at sea?” If you can find them and you can blow them up, then the backbone of American nuclear deterrence all of a sudden is threatened.

 

What happens with AI governing all of these missile defense systems in which you have both countries deploying missile defense systems run by algorithms? So you’re living in a world in which algorithms are fighting algorithms. You have two robots fighting each other basically. We know that when you have algorithms competing with algorithms on the stock market, sometimes you get pathological behavior, right? You get flash crashes and things like that. So we have to -- I’m sure people are paying a lot of attention to this. But the interaction of automated systems on the battlefield is one in which we are likely to see some early and major developments, and we have to be very conscious of the complex interactions that we don’t foresee.

 

But in the nuclear weapons field, just to finish up, people are very conservative. People say, “Gee, do I want to put my nuclear weapons on the internet?” The answer to that is no. I mean, that’s just -- that’s just a bad idea. So I don’t link my nuclear weapons to anything connected to the internet because you just never know. And I think that is a very good, safe thing to do, and I’m hoping we continue it. I don’t know what other countries are going to do. I don’t know what China is going to do. So again, it is -- it is not crazy to say we should sit down with the Chinese and talk about this.

 

“Hey, China, in a world in which we both have nuclear weapons and we both have AI, shouldn’t we talk to each other to avoid certain practices that may wind us -- getting us both in hot water, even though we don’t want to?” And the Chinese have been totally resistant to that. The Chinese line has been arms control and openness is the weapon of the strong. “You, America, you’re willing to be transparent because you’re stronger than us. You’re going to use our openness to discover our weaknesses and use our weaknesses against us. We’re weaker, therefore, we must be more opaque to hide our weaknesses.” So they’ve resisted efforts to improve exchanges of information and an effort to deconflict some of our crisis management procedures.

 

Dan West:  So that actually ties, Professor Rosen, to one of the questions we got from the audience, which is, is there a benefit to negotiations in and of themselves for the sake of keeping the parties to the agreements talking? You could apply it to Russia or to China or anywhere else. Is there a benefit of the agreements or the discussions per se?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  There are some people who say that the process is the product, that by engaging in these negotiations, you build networks of trust, people get to know each other as human beings, they stop demonizing each other, and they don’t engage in exaggeration of hostile intent. You build a community of people who want to solve problems together. I don’t buy that, to be honest. It didn’t really happen in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. I don’t think it’s happening with China. As I said, the Chinese begin with a very suspicious position, and I don’t think they’ve changed it.

 

That said, negotiations which increase our understanding of our adversary, even if it increases their understanding of us, could be quite beneficial. And again, because it’s not a symmetrical situation, the Chinese already have access to lots of information about us. We don’t have access, or the same amount of access, to information about them. So I am open to the idea of having discussions with the Chinese in particular, even if we don’t achieve results immediately, if it helps us understand aspects of their behavior that we don’t currently understand well.

 

And that’s an open question. Maybe that’s possible. Maybe it’s not. Like I said, I don’t want to be ideological about this. But negotiations may be useful for improving mutual understanding, maybe. And if so, I’m willing to, with adequate safeguards and precautions, give that a try. But the idea that it’s going to be kumbaya and we’ll get together and play golf and become buddies, that I think is a little bit of an overly optimistic take on it.

 

Dan West:  Okay. Next question from the audience, do you think the negotiation of arms control and nonproliferation in the 1990s set the stage for the U.S.’s current predicaments? For example, has the Budapest Memorandum delegitimized the NPT beyond repair?

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  I think the NPT agreement was in poor standing before, and it’s in worse standing now. As I mentioned to you, the NPT didn’t succeed in preventing non-signatory powers from getting nuclear weapons, and it didn’t prevent North Korea from getting nuclear weapons. And the guarantee that was extended to Ukraine to protect its sovereignty in return for giving up its nuclear weapons that it inherited from the Soviet Union, there must be people around the world who say, “Gee, that was not such a great bargain for Ukraine. Maybe I shouldn’t do the same thing.” And it’s not just Ukraine. The government of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, gave up nuclear weapons and look what happened to him. And people will say, “Well, shoot.” And Saddam Hussein, his big mistake was he didn’t finish his nuclear weapons program and look what happened to him.

 

So my view is that there are countries around the world which are very seriously engaging in civilian nuclear energy programs, the purpose of which is to give them a nuclear weapons option if they need it, because they don’t believe in great power guarantees. Saudi Arabia is engaging in an activity to develop a civilian nuclear infrastructure. It’s getting military capabilities from around the world. I think it’s because they -- at the end of the day, they’re not sure the Americans will show up when Iran threatens them with nuclear weapons.

 

Turkey’s doing the same thing. A retired German Minister of Defense went on record saying, “Look, the Turkish civilian nuclear power program is a weapons program.” It gives them everything they need to build nuclear weapons. And that’s because they live next to Russia, they live near Iran. And the Americans, “Well, they’re part of NATO, right?” They’re actually supposed to defend Turkey because -- but Turkey and the United States do not get along that well. So I think that the events of the 1990s were continuations of existing patterns and trends, which made people around the world say, “At the end of the day, nuclear weapons guarantee our survival in ways that no international guarantees can. And nuclear weapons are expensive. Getting nuclear weapons means getting people angry at us. So we’ll do it slowly. We’ll do it incrementally. We’ll do it in ways which are covered by a civilian nuclear program, but we’re going to do it.”

 

And even countries as conservative as Japan have back channels said to us, “America, if we get into a fight with China, isn’t it -- isn’t it better if we have our own nuclear weapons? I mean, France has nuclear weapons. Great Britain has nuclear weapons. And you, America, you’re okay with that because it makes the Western defense posture stronger. So why not Japan?” Well, we got this thing about nuclear weapons in Hiroshima. But time is going by, and people’s attitudes are changing. So this is a very long-winded to answer. The NPT is of increasing irrelevance as a result of multiple events and multiple trends. And I would not count on the NPT to provide any safety for the United States or security for countries around the world going forward.

 

Dan West:  Great. Well, last question from the audience. We are out of time, so we have one final question from the audience. Thanks to everyone who submitted additional questions, and apologies that we can’t get to them. But touching on what you just said, the last question from the audience is about Iran. But I’d like to expand it actually to some of the other countries that you mentioned—Saudi, Japan, other countries. So the question is, is it inevitable that Iran will obtain operable nuclear weapons? Is there any realistic way to prevent it, at this point?  And you can apply that more broadly to the many nations that are seen to be taking steps in that direction.

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  The organizations that do the unclassified analysis of uranium nuclear capabilities have recently published their assessment that Iran has demonstrated the ability to enrich uranium to bomb-grade levels. They have enough uranium stock and enough centrifuges to produce eight nuclear weapons in something like two months. So I think, right now, we have to treat Iran as a de facto nuclear weapon state.

 

Israel has said over and over, “We will not tolerate having Iran as a nuclear weapon state.” If you have discussions with people in Israel, however, they said, “If it comes to it, we probably can develop a deterrent posture which stops the Iranians from doing things with their nuclear weapons that we don’t want them to do.” So I think, even in Israel, there’s a community of people moving towards we slowed it down as much as we could. It took the Iranians a lot longer than people thought it was because of Stuxnet and whatever else. But at the end of the day, nuclear deterrence can work, even between Israel and Iran.

 

And I think Saudi Arabia is internally debating, “What kind of posture do we need so that when and if Iran gets nuclear weapons, we can live with it? The Iranians don’t have the ability to coerce us or threaten us in ways which we cannot deter.”  So I think this is not -- this is not a happy ending. I think we’re moving towards a Middle East in which we have multiple independent nuclear powers. This has not filled me with good feelings and happiness. But it may be good enough to create a world in which nuclear weapons don’t get -- do not get used in the Middle East. Not the world that I would have preferred, not the world that I would have chosen, but it seems to be the world that is emerging.

 

Dan West:  Professor Rosen, thank you for your time today. Thank you for your ongoing efforts to help us navigate a world that we wouldn’t have preferred but seems to be thrust upon us. So thank you.

 

Stephen P. Rosen:  My pleasure. Thank you very much for the invitation to engage in this discussion. Thank you for your excellent questions. Thanks.

 

Dan West:  And thanks to the audience as well for joining us.

 

Jack Capizzi:  Thank you all for your time. We always do -- do offer listener feedback if you’d like to submit anything at [email protected]. But other than that, I’ll just reiterate. Thank you, Professor Rosen, for your time. And then, Dan, thank you for putting this together and then leading the program today. But with that, thank you all for being with us. We are adjourned.