The Coming Nuclear Hurricane

25:55So in an autocratic regime, for example, regime stability, the centers of power, et cetera, as well as their nuclear weapons, which they can use to hurt the United States and hurt allies. Part of the reason we did this, as we touched on, is for extended deterrence. It was really hard to convince allies in the late 50s that we're willing to trade Washington for Berlin because we essentially promised, like, don't worry, we're not going to have a lot of conventional forces on your territory. We're not going to have nuclear weapons forward deployed on your territory in West Germany. But if the Soviets come across the line, don't worry, our bombers will be in the air.

26:28We're on our way to Moscow and we'll nuke them. And the Soviets know that. So they're never going to try and test us. Well, multiple Berlin crises later, allies are nervous and we need to come up with a better plan. One part of that plan is the United States deciding they're going to both forward deploy nuclear weapons to assure allies. They can actually sort of see the representation of extended deterrence on their own territory, but also develop the types of nuclear weapons capabilities that are fast and accurate, that could actually destroy nuclear weapons that an adversary has on their territory or has on a allied territory like a Warsaw Pact country before they can ever get off the ground.

27:03Now, I think a lot of people think that when we talk about the damage limitation in our piece, we're referring to the U.S. wanting to, you know, engage in nuclear preemption or things like that. But the fact of the matter is, if the United States is expected to try to restore nuclear deterrence in a regional war, a limited war, let's say, over Taiwan or over NATO territory against Russia. You want to be able to ensure that a president is able to potentially engage in an escalating conventional conflict, potentially need to respond to limited nuclear use with our own limited nuclear use, while also having an option in the back of his mind that if this continues to get out of control, the United States is going to be able to try to destroy, defeat and intercept, if you think about missile defense as well, as part of the equation, all of these nuclear capabilities before they can do as much damage as possible.

27:54Now, the reason that China becomes so significant in this is we've only ever had to do that with Russia. We've always treated China as a lesser included case. As we mentioned in the piece, historically, China's had maybe a dozen silos or a couple dozen silos. Slow liquid-fueled ICBMs take hours to get ready, potentially. Now they're developing these silos where they can put solid fuel large ICBMs, put lots of warheads on each of those ICBMs, and it creates hundreds of new targets that the United States has to think about. The reason silo ICBMs are so significant, of course, is that given the hardness, given the fact that they're underground, given the fact that they're way in the hinterlands, these aren't easy things for us to engage with conventional weapons.

28:34You traditionally need a hard target kill ability to go after ICBM silos. And so China producing all of these silos, putting ICBMs in them and loading warheads on them, which I think they're going to do progressively as they build their warhead stockpile, is going to create this challenge for the United States in the coming five and 10 years, where we just may not have enough weapons available to both convince China that they shouldn't engage in limited nuclear use or engage in a conflict with Taiwan that could escalate, while also being engaged with a Russia potentially in a European conflict as well.

29:07As Vip had mentioned, if China had chosen to put all these new warheads on submarines or at air bases, that's a conventional problem. The United States probably doesn't need to worry about those beyond what we already do today. But they specifically chose to do silos. It creates unprecedented dilemmas for our force posture. You can't treat Russia and China in isolation anymore. Because if we are in a deep crisis or conflict with Russia, and China has regional revisionist ambitions, it may seize that opportunity to start the music, in which case you will have to be forced to deter both in theater and in terms of strategic escalation at the same time.

29:50And it's not as if you have the luxury of saying, well, if I'm in a crisis with Russia, I can just ignore China. Or if I'm in a crisis with China, I can ignore Russia. So you have to think for the first time about what it means to have sufficient capability and to implement what is our enduring strategy. We go to some length to explain why we believe the enduring strategy, which prioritizes an option for damage limitation, just an option, by the way. It's not a requirement for damage, it's an option for damage limitation, to preserve American and allied lives and to limit the damage to the US homeland and allies is still sort of the preferable strategy as opposed to when you hear a shift in strategy to quote unquote counterpopulation targeting, right?

30:33Just city busters. Well, that exposes the US, If you don't destroy Russian or Chinese capabilities or hold them at risk, then you've just exposed the US homeland and allied territory to massive reprisal that could end society as we know it. And so we prioritize this concept of meaningful damage limitation, which has been enduring US strategy. And our recommendations, I think, settle on this doesn't require having more nuclear weapons than Russia and China combined, because that's not how that strategy works. It's not a warhead count. It's do you have sufficient capability to induce in both Moscow and Beijing's minds that they will not have enough capability to achieve their political military objectives?

31:21And that isn't a math that requires the combined total warheads, right? So it's a modest increase, we argue, to implement this strategy. It's not an arms race. And by the way, we're not the ones racing. The Chinese and the Russians are already dead down the straightaway, and we're stuck in the starting block. So this criticism that we're sort of promoting an arms race, I think, is sort of misplaced. But I mean, this is why China creates dilemmas for our strategy. I think that's a really key point. And to be clear, the counterforce targeting, which is the kind of existing model as you're describing it, The arsenal is aimed at damage limitation by matching targets of the adversary's nuclear force.

32:03So you want to be able to eliminate the force. We're not targeting Russian cities or Chinese cities. And that would be a shift in strategy that some argue, I take it, would allow the force not to have to grow. And the other assumption is, which you challenge, is that if we stick to the existing strategy, we're going to have to essentially double the force. We have to have enough to match China and Russia combined. Can you just walk us through why that isn't actually accurate and it's a more complicated equation? I think there's a bit of a straw man that's used. So when, you know, Vibin and I, people like us who are advocating for essentially retaining what the United States has done for the last six or seven decades have this damage limitation objective in addition to sufficient forces to, you know, be able to deter a second adversary.

32:53I think maybe we need to be a little more specific. We're not talking about doubling the force. We're not talking about Russia, China plus one. Really what the United States needs to be able to do under this strategy is ensure that the prompt nuclear weapons of Russia and China are held at risk. Submarines, aircraft, the sort of tactile theater range missiles, that sort of thing. A lot of those are things that can be targeted using different types of capabilities. They don't necessarily need U.S. nuclear capabilities. Some of them do. Some of them don't. So the reason that we are suggesting that there might need to be more deployed U.S.

33:27nuclear weapons is because of China's silos. Those are prompt nuclear weapons on ICBMs. They can get out of the ground quickly if China has adequate warning, and they can shower the United States or ally territory with warheads. Those are the types of things that you need to focus on in a strategy that's based on damage limitation. But the fact that China has 1 ,500 warheads doesn't mean we need to target every single one of those warheads with a U.S. nuclear weapon, right? Ten of those warheads might be on a single missile. 200 of those warheads might be on a single SSBN that an attack submarine could sink.

34:00So I think that having to break down the math, it's not just sort of linear numbers. It is apples, oranges, and pears that you have to think about as well. I think a lot of even nuclear experts are either willfully misleading or ignorant about their targeting strategy, which is the US uses its strategic warheads to hold at risk a certain subset of delivery systems in the adversary, not adversary warheads. So for example, if Russia were to upload onto its existing delivery system, so Russia has 1550 warheads approximately deployed on its existing delivery systems, it could double that to 3 ,000.

34:40And it wouldn't change a single thing about our posture. We would not have to increase our deployed number of warheads if Russia decided to go to 3 ,000 deployed warheads on its existing delivery systems. What does change our calculation is, as Pernay said, the Chinese ICBM silos, not the SSBNs, not the bomber force, but the ICBM silos. So that's what's driving sort of the math here. And it's not a warhead count, right? It's not, oh, Russia has 3 ,000 deployed, so we need to have 3 ,000 deployed. The strategy is, I think, more nuanced and sophisticated than that. And I think the response I have to those who are allergic to the idea of more deployed weapons – remember, we're not even talking about growing the stockpile of our existing nuclear forces.

35:29we're talking about moving some weapons from the stockpile to the deployed force to be able to strengthen deterrence, to reduce the risk that nuclear weapons are used, and to make extended deterrence more credible to stop our allies from thinking about nuclear weapons and maintain alliance cohesion. And so, you know, I think a lot of folks say they love the allies, but then aren't willing to do what it takes to actually assure the allies, particularly when it doesn't require building more nuclear weapons or engaging in an arms race. And so I think a good faith debate on this is important and necessary, but it needs to be in good faith, right?

36:06I think, you know, some of the accusations made about how U.S. targeting policy works are sort of misplaced and misguided. Core to the U.S. retaining this position in the world is going to be the maintenance of this strategy. I'm not saying that the U.S. needs to have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world for all the reasons that Vipin mentioned. I think we have a smaller arsenal overall than Russia right now. And that's okay. We tend to try to compare ourselves. Sometimes people see Russia develops a capability. They argue the U.S. needs the exact same thing. That's not what we're doing in this article.

36:34We're essentially saying that at a strategic level, the United States needs to retain these core components of its nuclear strategy. And frankly, it's much more important now that they retain these core components because underneath what undergirds U.S. nuclear strategy are these separate policies related to extended deterrence, modernizing a nuclear arsenal, non-proliferation, and arms control and the ability to pursue arms reductions in the future. We have to retain our nuclear strategy in order to advance our policies in all of those areas still, in addition to, as I mentioned, trying to preserve the international order against revisionist powers that are huge, wealthy, have lots of nuclear weapons, and are willing to wield them to try to take over smaller countries next to them.

37:15Another key point in your article, and you mentioned it here when you talk about Russia, is that the threat posed by Russia now is quite different in a way than China. And we've seen that in the case of Ukraine. Many people will have followed this, that Russia on the back foot towards the end of 2022 is really threatening nuclear use in a way that is new or has not been seen in decades. And And what is so alarming about that, as I think you point out in the article, is that this is a different conception of nuclear strategy. This is an offensive conception of shielding some kind of conventional action with implications for other powers.

37:57Can you just talk about that? And why is that? It's not just about Ukraine. This is a larger issue. When I was a graduate student and everyone told me not to work on nuclear strategy because it was dead, I cut my teeth on India-Pakistan. And Pakistan has a very acute security dilemma from its perspective, which is a conventionally superior nuclear India. And it was sort of – it's in the strategic competition that believes with India and developed a nuclear strategy that over time has enabled subconventional aggression, terrorism against the Indian homeland, deep in the Indian homeland, right? Bombay in 2008, this latest attack in Pahalgam, and uses the threat of nuclear weapons to deter conventional retaliation.

38:43And so Pakistan was like the OG for like showing the world how a reliance on nuclear weapons can enable an offensive strategy. Now for Pakistan, it was really like subconventional as terrorism. But Russia, with the tables now turned being the conventionally inferior power, but having sort of localized advantages in its near abroad, I think realized that it could attempt territorial revision and then use the threat quickly and then use the threat of nuclear use, limited nuclear use. It has this inventory of up to 2 ,000 treaty unrestricted, unaccounted for non-strategic nuclear weapons. Those are not accounted for by New START.

39:25and could use that huge inventory to deter NATO unwinding of its conventional aggression. And it sort of used that playbook in Crimea, but then to greater effect in 2022. And we sort of referenced this in the article, but Jake Sullivan and Colin Kahl have all talked about the October 22 crisis, the fall 22 crisis, because it actually spanned beyond just October. And that was sort of this moment where there was a fear that Russian lines would collapse, particularly in the south and Ukraine, and it might resort credibly to non-strategic nuclear weapons use to stave off that collapse or at least try to reverse it.

40:06It's tempting to be complacent or at least sort of optimistic that nuclear weapon use didn't occur then and Putin didn't reach for non-strategic nuclear weapons use. But I would only point out that the conditions where he would use them weren't met. So it wasn't a fair test about Putin's risk tolerance to use nuclear weapons, and I would argue it didn't dissipate through the course of the war and is not over. I would not put it beyond Putin to sort of violate the quote unquote taboo if it suited his interests or Russia more broadly. And so fast forward to China, you're thinking about a Taiwan invasion and you look at what China is developing in terms of not just a strategic force, but also its theater nuclear forces alongside this huge suite of conventional ballistic missiles.

40:53This is a China that is developing a forced posture to enable the same kind of strategy against Taiwan or South China Sea or sort of anywhere else in its region where it can attempt territorial revision or aggression and then use a threat of limited first use to deter the US and its allies from unwinding that aggression. So I think this is now a feature of the new nuclear age that we were not really accustomed to during the Cold War because we were the conventionally inferior power to the Cold War, right? So we were the ones threatening to go first. Now it's our adversaries, and that has huge implications.

41:27Oh, and by the way, don't sleep on North Korea. Same problem. Yeah, and I think as Vipin highlights, this really crystallized. If you look at the fall 2022 crisis and you look at the media discussion about is Ukraine security assistance going? Is it going to include Abrams? Is it going to include F-16s? Why is the U.S. being so slow, etc.? it's really hard to piece together something significant that has really happened here, which is that we saw a credible threat of Russian nuclear use. We saw that sort of crisis abate because conditions weren't met as they've been described. And then you saw everyone just get back into the game.

41:59You saw the United States and European allies actually provide more and more, cross their own red lines, frankly, and provide more and more types of assistance to Ukraine that allowed Ukraine to stripe deeper into Russia. you saw Russia essentially shrug, suspend the New START treaty, continue to issue nuclear threats and use nuclear rhetoric and sort of raise the temperature on the kind of nuclear part of the conversation internationally, and also revise this nuclear doctrine saying that it's willing to attack nuclear weapon states that are supporting non-nuclear weapon states whom Russia is engaged in a conflict with, clearly a way to describe the United States, United Kingdom, and France who are supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia.

42:36And so this is sort of a harbinger of the age that we're entering, where we're going to see nuclear weapons intermixed in these conflicts, perhaps proxy conflicts, perhaps direct conflicts between the United States and its adversaries, while everyone still tries to do what they need to do in terms of security assistance, conventional war fighting, et cetera. And the nuclear risk is going to always be a part of any confrontation now that involves one of these two adversaries. As you look at the nuclear force and thinking about how to strategically align it with these kinds of current threats, are there options or ways of structuring the force that would have given the United States different options in 2022 had that crisis happened and had we already made certain changes?

43:21Or would there have been a way to stave off this kind of threat? Or what is the sort of approach for that, given that we're likely to see this again? I mean, one point is that sort of decisions made now about capabilities don't come to fruition for at least a decade, if not longer, even with regional capabilities, which can be fueled quicker. But the fall 22 crisis crystallized, for me, this congressional sort of push and requirement then that the Department of Defense, along with the Department of Energy, develop a dedicated regional capability primarily for the maritime environment in the Indo-Pacific.

43:57because for me, the one lesson was, okay, you may not be able to develop a capability anytime soon that changes our flexibility in Europe because we just consolidated down to the modernized B61, TAC-12, and F-35, and that is fit for purpose now. It did suggest, look, we need to think about what comes next in Europe. And Pranay and I mentioned both an air launch capability or ground launch capability to provide more flexibility as Russia develops more sophisticated integrated air and missile defense, especially, right? Because the B61 has to be delivered to target. It's a gravity bomb. But in the Indo-Pacific, our cabinet, as we say, was pretty bare.

44:36And you don't want a fight in the Indo-Pacific where the president's only choice, if we're sort of losing a conventional conflict or winning a conventional conflict, and China reaches for a theater nuclear capability, you don't want any president to ever be in a position where the only choice is to go big or go home. And so it really galvanized, I think, in my mind, the idea we needed a dedicated regional deterrence capability for the Indo-Pacific, which we've never really needed before because we never faced sort of this threat of regional employment by China or North Korea until the last five years.

45:10You know, they're different geographies. You can't use the same capability in, you know, sort of land Europe that works there in the Indo-Pacific because the tyranny of geography, you know, makes an aircraft deliverer of gravity bombs sort of not all that credible in the Indo-Pacific. And so I think that was a real lesson from October 22 for me. And the idea that you always want to be focused on what are we trying to deter? Who are we trying to deter and where, right? And because we are extending deterrence and facing adversaries across two vast oceans. Nobody else does that. And so the mix of capabilities that we need to deter and assure is different from what China and Russia have.

45:52And so we always want to be attuned to that. And that's sort of what Pranay and I worked on in the last couple of years in the administration. And the relevance of regional nuclear capabilities sort of paces this shift in foreign policy objectives of the adversaries, right? I think, you know, in the Obama administration, we didn't really talk that much about the need for loyal nuclear capabilities beyond modernizing the gravity bomb in Europe that Fittman mentioned, the b61 because we weren't really worried about conventional war being initiated under a nuclear shadow save for maybe north korea but even then north korea's arsenal is very different you know 15 years ago than it is today now it's kind of all we talk about right especially in the nuclear community we're worried and frankly in the defense community writ large we're worried about a china attempted military reunification with taiwan we're worried about what is putin going to do after ukraine or what more can putin do in ukraine or what will he do against moldova or what could he do against a NATO ally.

46:43And all of this is going to be predicated by these large nuclear armed adversaries reminding the world as they embark upon some sort of ambitious or aggressive military campaign or political and military campaign against a smaller neighbor, reminding the world frequently like, hey, we have a lot of nuclear weapons and we're going to parade them in our capital cities and we're going to wield them as necessary to keep the United States out of our neck of the woods. This is where regional nuclear capabilities have become more important, unfortunately, because we're worried about these conflicts being initiated, perhaps at the same time, perhaps sequentially, or perhaps one at a time in parts of the world that are far away.

47:19We're lucky in Europe to have a NATO alliance and a coordination body at NATO, something that Vipin led during his time at the Defense Department to talk about nuclear weapons issues with 30 plus allies all at once. We do not have that in Asia. We don't have any forward deployed weapons. We're extremely reliant on what will be attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines for nuclear deterrence in the theater and that's probably not going to change anytime soon because the us is unlikely to deploy b61s and f-35s like we have in europe on taiwan or south korea or japan in the near future we're at a position right now in the next five to ten years where the united states is struggling to modernize the strategic nuclear arsenal and struggling even more to introduce new capabilities quickly and so something that can help with the regional nuclear deterrence question, we shouldn't be too picky as to what that is.

48:10If we could get an air launch capability on an F-35, because we already have tons of F-35s, I think that would be better and faster. The question is, can the U.S. do it? And we have a lot of doubts that our complex is able to support a quick change, though I do think that's something that we worked on together in the last administration and certainly the new administration should work on as well, figure out a way to get our complex to be a little bit more responsive to this rapidly changing geopolitical environment. And I think one thing for listeners that is important to emphasize is that the modernization program was conceived at a time when none of these challenges were envisioned.

48:43And so, you know, the idea that like the modernization program is going to be sufficient in terms of types and maybe even numbers, I think on its face is sort of litigatable at the very least. And so, you know, there is the launcher cliff, the consolidation of the B61-12. And so the idea that it's sacrosanct, given challenges that we didn't anticipate or account for, I think, needs to be reopened. And that's one of the points of the article, too, right? Like, we need to think about very strategically, what do we need to deter and assure and not be sort of just beholden to decisions that were made 15 years ago in a completely different environment?

49:21One of the great things about your article is the final section where you kind of step back and say, we're in the world of the possible. What can we do? And you lay out some really important solutions I want to talk about in a second. But before we do that, let's talk about extended deterrence for a minute, because I think that here again, we have a new situation and you've described two acute pressures on extended deterrence. One is that suddenly we're in this world of regional threats that we haven't really seen before. And the other, of course, is that the U.S. is in a new position in which there are questions about its ability to sustain that extended deterrence umbrella, which only the U.S.

50:00has done for 80 years. And can you just lay out that challenge and what are the key issues here? I think there are two challenges for extended deterrence. We both argue that extended deterrence is not just good for allies, it's good for the US, and it's good for the world. It is our greatest nonproliferation tool. I would argue that of our 34, 35 formal allies, the lone exception for the one that decided that it would not live under the US extended deterrence umbrella was France. The UK got nuclear weapons before extended deterrence architecture really evolved, and it was sort of the legacy of the Manhattan Project.

50:38So France, at De Gaulle, is the only leader who decided, you know what, I'm going to go on my own. But otherwise, it's been remarkably successful. And right now, I would say the question about our ability to maintain extended deterrence is actually easier. We know what we need to do to maintain the credibility of our extended deterrent to convince adversaries and our allies that we can successfully limit damage to them and to the homeland in two theaters. That's actually conceptually a lot easier. I think the real questions are about our willingness. And we're seeing a strain in US domestic politics that, you know, whether it's prioritizers who focus on China, if you're in NATO, prioritizers are still sort of, you know, there's a real question about your commitment to the extended deterrence in NATO, right?

51:25And then there's the isolationist wing, which is just come home America. For 75 years, we've had a bipartisan commitment to our extended deterrence commitments. And we've had sort of questions of credibility in the past, but not of this flavor. It's often been about specific systems and Republicans and Democrats both agreed on the importance of extended deterrence, but disagreed sometimes about how to best obtain it. Now there are real questions about whether we should even do it. And if we do do it, should we prioritize one theater over the other? And that has huge implications, I think, for both, not just nuclear walks.

52:02And this is really our big takeaway from the article, I hope, is this is important to American foreign policy writ large. This isn't a debate for Pernay, myself, and you. This is our most senior leaders, our presidents, our secretaries, our national security advisors have skin in the game about the future of American foreign policy and grand strategy here. Do we think our commitments to Europe still matter? Does Europe still matter for American grand strategy? Can we walk and chew gum at the same time? I think we're of the view that we can. We've done it in the past. And this idea of prioritizing is important, but it doesn't mean abandoning.

52:39Prioritization does not mean abandoning NATO. And I want to be clear, I'm not sure the Trump administration is going to do that. I think there's still a debate as to what, you know, sort of our grand strategic posture is going to be. But I think those are the fears in Europe, right? Having just come back from Europe, I think the fear is they hear the word prioritization, and for them, that is covert for abandonment of Europe. And I think we both believe that that is not fit for a superpower and that we can both, we can, we can maintain our credible extended deterrence payments in both theaters at the same time.

53:09The only point I'll add is, Vibben and I have been saying this a lot, but if setting aside the kind of unpredictability of the current administration, what allies think about Washington, if the difference between a U.S. ally proliferating and beginning their own nuclear program, potentially getting into a conflict as a result of it, or staying under the extended deterrence umbrella, is the United States deploying 200 more warheads on its ICBMs or 300 more warheads on its submarines at sea? you know, not growing the arsenal per se, but deploying more warheads because we're trying to deal with these two large nuclear armed adversaries at the same time, while convincing our allies that we're able to deal with both of those adversaries at the same time.

53:45If that prevents an ally from going nuclear and keeps the number of states that possess nuclear weapons where it is today, you do that deal 10 times out of 10. I would take that deal any day of the week and twice on Sunday. We fluctuated our nuclear arsenal over the course of the Cold War, in part because we're just pumping out warheads like crazy before we even knew what to do with them. But also eventually, in furtherance of a pretty tight nuclear strategy that required us to do more and have a larger arsenal than we would if we were just worried about defending the U.S. homeland, but also probably convince these countries that, you know what, the United States actually is interested in having our back and based on their capabilities can have our back.

54:22That overall strategy comes under strain because of what China is doing, but it's not out of reach. And what we're advocating for is not a massive change to the U.S. nuclear posture. I think there are some who think we need to do that. But what Vip and I are most worried about is this 10-year timeframe before we have a new submarine come online, new ICBMs put in silos in the ground, a new bomber that hopefully will be deployed on time. I think out of the three, that's the one that's most on time. But before you're going to get all these modern capabilities to replace legacy systems, we got to figure out what we're able to do for the next decade when we think China is basically accelerating its warhead increase and its ability to deploy ICBMs in those silos, while the U.S.

55:02is facing this kind of trough in our modernization program where we're spending lots of money, but new capabilities aren't coming out quite yet. So uploading a few warheads, from my perspective, is a pretty easy thing for the United States to do. And you can also do that in the context of an arms control agreement to where we ended up with our article. Vibit and I are not coming out against arms control. Far from it. We think arms control will be extremely useful in helping manage the international environment that we're entering. Just finally, during your time in the Biden administration, you began some of these steps that you push for in the article and call for others.

55:33What do you see sort of in the near term, the next five years? What are sort of the key steps that could be made? I mean, given where we are now with budgets and what is possible with existing systems that could be deployed differently, or ones that are in the near term available, what are sort of the strategy for the immediate future look like? I think the first thing that we need to see in the Trump administration is whether they're going to maintain some continuity with the nuclear policy and strategy of the Biden administration. Are they focused on this two-peer problem, if you will? I don't really think two-peer is a good way to describe it.

56:10Essentially, how are we managing deterrence against two large, powerful nuclear-armed adversaries, major powers in Russia and China? If the Trump administration agrees that we need to be able to deter Russia and China together, both with our nuclear arsenal but as an overall defense strategy as well, then they need to take some prudent steps. They need to make some decisions. How much risk are they willing to accept of this China silo problem while also retaining the ability to come to the aid of allies in Europe if Russia decides to aggress against a NATO ally? That might involve needing to put some more warheads on ICBMs, as well as more warheads on the Trident SLBMs, the submarine-launched ballistic missiles that are on our ballistic missile submarines at sea every day.

56:51They also need to see if they can accelerate a regional nuclear capability like the sea-launched cruise missile that we've talked about previously. Maybe they can get a version of that out, as we mentioned in our article, in a few years as opposed to 10 years. I'll believe it when I see it, but to me, those are the types of steps that they could take to try to shore up nuclear deterrence. And all of this is going to be kicked off by deciding on an approach to manage the end of the New START treaty in February of next year. The president in January, upon entering office, raised some eyebrows when he said he wanted to pursue denuclearization talks with Russia and China.

57:24I think a lot of people who focus on arms control policy on the outside are wondering what that could look like. I think that the United States and Russia will probably at some point have a conversation about what they should do about New START expiring. I don't think that there'll be a new treaty. I think obviously what we're seeing today with Ukraine policy and the continuation of the conflict there means that it's going to be really hard for the two sides to sit down and have a meaningful kind of strategic stability discussion that could include an arms control treaty at the end of it. But the two sides may agree that they shouldn't really upload a ton or that they should try to keep some sort of limit on the number of warheads they each deploy.

57:58What the United States has to do is make sure it builds in some headroom so that if President Trump decides that the way he wants to manage this multiple deterrence environment is by having more warheads on ICBMs and SSBNs on a daily basis, he needs to make sure that any arms control agreement, whether that's a political agreement or a legally binding agreement, any new agreement with Russia allows for that headroom. And then as Vipin mentioned, if the Russians also deploy a few more warheads to match ours, that should be OK from our perspective because we've already got the Russia deterrence challenge more or less figured out.

58:31What we don't have figured out yet is how to deal with those silos in China. I think, you know, the actual options are for the administration to sort of work out. I'd certainly think in terms of priorities, managing the launcher cliff and the sea leg is the most important because those are the most important capability for holding at risk Chinese silos. We have to commit to the Sentinel program. All of that, I think we largely all agree on. I think the most important thing is a commitment from the administration that while China and Russia are sprinting down the straightaway, we can't stay in the starting block.

59:06right we did and laid the foundation so that these options could be executed but we didn't execute any of the options because we've we left it and believe that the decision space should be left for the next administration and now i think there's there were sort of uh if you had asked me at the end of last year 24 whether the trump administration come in and actually faster than we did i would have said yes but they have not yet and a lot of that is because i think people are still coming in But the president himself, he and President Biden probably don't agree on a lot of things, but I think they do agree that nuclear weapons are an existential threat to humanity.

59:45And so the most important thing to reduce the risk that Russia or China or North Korea use nuclear weapons, short of the denuclearization sort of talks that I think he kept referring to in the campaign, is ensuring that the U.S. deterrent is not vulnerable. And strengthening that is, I think, the most important thing now until the time comes when Russia and China are willing to sit down and talk in good faith about arms control. And so I think the most important thing right now is a commitment from the administration to not stay in the starting block, because that's where we still are. Vip and Prane, this was a great discussion.

1:00:20I guess I can't help but ask a final question from two nuclear experts. What keeps you up at night? What is the kind of most urgent thing on your mind when you look at this landscape of rapidly shifting threats and our ability to respond to them? Honestly, I'm still catching up on sleeves. So nothing really keeps me up at night. But I will say, to answer your question, my biggest concern, of course, is that the administration in this sort of ongoing debate internally of prioritizers and isolationists and status quo, America firsters, whatever you want to call the various factions, that there is increasing doubt over the next few years among allies that the United States is actually a security guarantor that is willing to use nuclear weapons to defend them.

1:01:09because I think a world in which friendly countries and frankly unfriendly countries or non-aligned countries all decide that the United States has withdrawn and is not going to be the sort of not just a superpower, but somebody who is interested in affairs around the world, which is not just about our nuclear arsenal, by the way. It's about the fundamental, what do you think the United States role should be in the world? If those countries see the United States as withdrawing, my concern is that we're really sort of in that Lord of the Flies, might makes right world. And beyond the umbrella allies of the United States, you'll have a lot of countries that decide maybe they need to pursue their own nuclear weapons just because they're sick of having disadvantage against a country next to them where there's been ethnocentric conflict, unresolved border disputes, you name it.

1:01:56These sort of sub-regional issues between countries that we thought had mostly been set to the side over the course of the post-Cold War period could end up spiking again, except with nuclear weapons involved. That's really what I worry about the most. If we get this moment wrong, you're going to see a lot more countries possessing nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons programs in the coming five and 10 years than the decade preceding it. Yeah, I fully agree with that, maybe unsurprisingly, mostly because it would be a self-inflicted wound. You don't want to get in the mind of Putin or the Ayatollah, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping.

1:02:29One thing we can control is the credibility of our own extended deterrence architecture. And if we let the nuclear umbrella get leaky or fall apart, it'll be a self-inflicted wound. And I don't know how anyone can look at the conflict between India and Pakistan, four days in May, the 12-day war, Israel, Iran, and say, you know what would be a great idea? Is if Poland or South Korea got nuclear weapons next, right? I fundamentally think that it undermines our freedom of maneuver. It creates more risk in the world. They're at risk of getting killed by either North Korea or China or Russia, respectively.

1:03:05And it's just more instability in the world. And we can avoid it through very easy and cost-effective measures because we know how to do it. And the allies want it and it's good for American security. So this would be a tragic self-inflicted wound and it's something we can control. And right now, I agree with Pernay that is sort of the biggest concern. And I know that's the concern, particularly in Europe and in South Korea. I think those allies are particularly nervous at the moment. We have to get the easy stuff right. Thanks again, Vipin and Prane. What a great discussion. I urge all listeners to read their article in the New Foreign Affairs, How to Survive the New Nuclear Age.

1:03:42Great speaking to you. Thanks, Hugh. Really appreciate it. Thanks to Foreign Affairs and to you for all your hard work. And, you know, really appreciate the time and the opportunity to do the pod. Hugh, thanks a lot. It was good talking to you. We're happy to do this again sometime. And I hope everyone goes and reads our piece in foreign affairs.

1:04:03Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. The Foreign Affairs interview is produced by Kanish Tharoor, Molly McEnany, Ben Metzner, Caroline Wilcox, and Ashley Wood. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Our theme music was written and performed by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arena Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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