➡ The article discusses the escalating tension between major powers due to the potential return of nuclear weapons testing. It highlights the dangers of nuclear warfare and the potential for catastrophic destruction. The author also mentions the political implications of such testing, especially in the current climate of strained relations between countries like the U.S., Russia, and China. The article ends with a call for the abolition of nuclear weapons to prevent a potential global crisis.
➡ The text discusses the potential for nuclear testing amidst a crisis, suggesting it could increase tension. The author believes this is unnecessary posturing, as the technology and knowledge to fuse hydrogen isotopes already exists. They also discuss the possibility that the current generation may need to witness a nuclear event to truly understand its power and consequences. However, the author criticizes the lack of consideration for nuclear weapons in war strategy discussions, suggesting that this could lead to dangerous escalation.
➡ The text discusses the dangers of nuclear weapons, highlighting their destructive power and the potential for misuse. It mentions the efforts of high-level officials, including Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and George Schultz, to reduce the number of these weapons. The text also questions the long-term viability of a global security strategy based on nuclear deterrence, suggesting that it could lead to catastrophic consequences. It ends by emphasizing the devastating impact of a single hydrogen bomb, capable of destroying an entire city and rendering it uninhabitable.
➡ The text discusses the dangers of nuclear weapons and the political tension between countries like the U.S., Russia, and China. It suggests that leaders might act out of fear or self-interest, rather than considering the best interests of their people. The text also mentions a movie scenario where an unknown source launches a nuclear weapon, causing global panic and potential escalation. It ends by questioning the logic behind such actions and the need for a more peaceful approach to international relations.
➡ The article discusses the potential for nuclear tests and missile defense systems, with a focus on the United States, Russia, and China. It suggests that these countries have been preparing for nuclear tests for some time, based on satellite data. The article also questions the effectiveness of missile defense systems, suggesting they may not be able to handle a large-scale attack. Lastly, it discusses the political implications of these defense systems, suggesting they may escalate tensions between countries.
➡ The article discusses the escalating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, focusing on the U.S.’s military expansion into Russia’s sphere of influence. It highlights the potential for a nuclear first strike capability against Russia, which has led to increased defensive measures from both sides. The article also mentions the placement of missile launchers in Romania and Poland, which could potentially be used offensively, further heightening the threat of nuclear war. Lastly, it criticizes the U.S.’s refusal to negotiate in good faith, suggesting this has provoked the current conflict.
➡ The text discusses the potential risks and paradoxes of reducing nuclear weapons. It suggests that while closing military bases can lead to economic growth, the reduction of nuclear weapons could potentially increase the risk of their use. The text also explores the idea of “escalate to de-escalate,” where a country might use a nuclear weapon to force others to back down. However, it questions whether this strategy would actually work, as it could just as easily lead to further escalation.
➡ The text discusses American policies towards Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, highlighting that the U.S. has historically not recognized Soviet control over these regions. It also delves into the potential consequences of escalating conflicts, including the possibility of nuclear warfare. The text further explores the idea of nuclear proliferation in other countries, suggesting that if the U.S. withdraws its military presence globally, other nations might feel compelled to develop their own nuclear weapons. However, it also suggests that diplomatic negotiations and treaties could prevent this from happening.
➡ The discussion revolves around the tension between the U.S. and Russia, particularly concerning Ukraine and NATO. The speaker believes that while the risk of nuclear conflict has increased, it’s unlikely to happen unless Russia starts losing, which isn’t the case currently. The speaker criticizes the U.S. for getting involved in conflicts that their allies can’t win, like in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and suggests that the best course of action is to withdraw support sooner rather than later. The speaker concludes by saying that while the situation is dire, it’s not likely to escalate to a nuclear conflict.

There’s this huge crisis, a literal burning crisis. And so now you’re going to start testing H bombs. However you measure the tension on your scale, it’s going up. You can read studies from the think tanks that talk about what a war with Russia or China would look like, where they just don’t even mention nukes. What if Beijing nukes Honolulu? Then we nuke Shanghai and threaten Wuhan and Beijing. And now we could lose all of our major cities and military bases to the golden dome is a pipe drain. You want a defensive missile system to take out incoming Russian nukes, you need nukes.

We’re gonna have a Mexican standoff where all the major powers are holding hydrogen bombs to each other’s heads. And this is gonna be so fail safe and foolproof that we’re not just gonna all die in a damn nuclear war once the bluff is ever called. We’re talking about a bomb that could kill all of Austin, Texas, destroy everything that we’ve built here for 200 years. You don’t understand the power of these machines. You don’t understand how dangerous it is. World war. This is a house of cars and it is in the process of collapsing right now.

You’re going to see an economic crash the likes of which we’ve never seen. My folks, Canadian prepper here today. I’m joined once again by Scott Horton, editor of Hotter Than the Sun. Time to abolish nuclear weapons, which today I think carries new meaning with all of the new talk about potential nuclear testing returning to the headlines. Scott, welcome back. Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me here. I’ll mention real quick too, that I do have a bit of a treatment on nuclear weapons issues in provoked as well. And I apologize because I promised and never did deliver the publication online of the missing chapter, the excise chapter of the book that was called Nuclear War, but I just had to cut it for space.

And so I have an almost completely edited version. I’ve just back burnered the thing to death here almost a year, but I’m going to publish that soon. So that’s a whole separate little chapter. As you mentioned, I edited that book. It’s actually just a book of transcripts of my interviews with nuclear weapons experts about all aspects of nuclear weapons. But I have my own little chapter, so people stay tuned. I’ll have that available here, you know, sometime soon, I guess. Awesome. Well, hopefully we can talk a little bit about that today as well. So Trump recently has started talking about restarting nuclear weapons testing.

And yesterday the Russian Security Council held a meeting where they are now talking about retaliatory nuclear weapons testing. What do you think they mean by this and why do you think this is happening now? What’s the purpose of it? What is your interpretation of these, these recent threats by both sides? Well, look, I guess I, I really wish I had been reading the defense press more carefully on this issue in the last year. I’m a bit behind the curve on that, I think. This is not just Trump, this is what the military wants is, you know, to just like they were the ones who wanted out of the INF treaty and as soon as we were out of the INF treaty, they tested a brand new missile they’d been working on in violation of that treaty.

Which one was that? Oh, I forget the name of the thing, but it’s a mid range missile that had been banned by the inf and it was in like Defense News and things like that. You know, it was, they covered that stuff. Nobody else cares. So like you’ll have the Federation for American Scientists and the Bulletin for of the Atomic Scientists and Defense News and things like that. But you know, like industry stuff like Defense News and, and similar, they are the ones who tend to cover that stuff the most. Maybe the Washington Times, where most of the rest of the media is just too unplugged for military issues and particularly nuclear weapons issues.

You just kind of have to be particularly interested in that. That’s usually my job as being an interview host myself and having these types of experts on the show to really help inform myself and everybody else. But I fall behind on that because then every once while I have to catch up, put it all down in a book and start over again. So I’m a little bit behind. So, but just here’s what I know about the current circumstance is that the Russians, in the midst of this proxy war in Ukraine, they have been testing, testing new nuclear weapons delivery vehicles.

They have not been detonating atomic bombs. They did test or claim to have held a successful test of a nuclear powered cruise missile and a nuclear powered nuclear torpedo. In other words, underwater drone or an airborne drone that have essentially unlimited range because of their nuclear power plant on board. They can essentially go around any defenses and hit your target, whatever it is. And so, and that goes along with their new heavy, they call it the Sarmat to heavy rocket that can host up to 24 hydrogen bombs on one intercontinental ballistic missile. And then they have their hypersonics of, you know, various descriptions which can also deliver nuclear warheads.

Now, Trump, pardon me, Vladimir Putin had originally debuted, at least in a speech he didn’t show, or he had like some video and some kind of cartoon representations and things. But he announced all of these things in a speech in 2018 during Trump’s first term. This is a direct result of W. Bush tearing up the Anti Ballistic missile treaty in 2001 and encouraging the Russians and then announcing. There was a big article in Foreign affairs in 2006. They said, Now’s our chance to achieve a first strike capability against Russia. So Putin said actually no, and, and set his government on this massive new secret program, which he announced in 18 that they had achieved all these things.

So then Trump came out with a truth social tweet saying that we’re going to begin nuclear weapons testing. And I’m sorry, man, I just did not memorize the word. I forgot what it was. But he added some weird. It wasn’t even a weasel word. It was like just an inappropriate term. I don’t mean inappropriate like boohoo way, but I just mean it was like something that didn’t quite fit. It was. I can’t remember what it was, but it, it made this subject a little bit muddy. Was he definitely announcing nuclear weapons testing or. It was nuclear something testing.

And it was still a little bit unclear, although I think Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, has said that, yeah, that is what they meant, that they’re going to start testing nuclear weapons. And so I think what they’re doing is. You see what I mean about. Sounds to me like the military wanted to do this and they’re taking advantage of Russia’s announcement to say, okay, well, we want to announce that we want to go back to testing our new designs. And then the Russians said, okay, well if you start testing nukes again, then we’re gonna start testing nukes again.

And look, ma’. Am. Okay, let’s say all other things being equal, nevermind libertarianism or human decency or morality in any way whatsoever, just all other things being equal in the world. America and Russia are these two massive nation states. You know, only America is really a global superpower, but the Russians still are a nuclear weapons superpower. We have approximately 7,000 atom and H bombs each. And, and so let’s just say that it was like 1999 and America and Russia basically are getting along. Not everything’s perfect. Well, 99 may be a bad year. The Kosovo war, let’s say 98.

Things aren’t perfect, but like, basically we have a spirit of friendship and cooperation going on here. We’re Trying, at least on the. Not just on the surface, but one layer deep, too. We’re trying. Right. Well, then if Bill Clinton said, you know what? We have some, the. Some new nuclear weapons designs and it’s just simply a matter of national security that we need to test them and make sure that they work, but we do not have any particular power in mind. We’re not threatening Russia, we’re not threatening China. And I talked to Yeltsin yesterday. We’re bros.

And it’s cool. I’m not saying that, but I am saying we just need to make sure. You see what I mean. Like, if he. If it could be defined in a purely technocratic sense, then the worst thing that happens is radiation and fallout and, and whatever results literally of the tests themselves. But the political fallout is essentially nothing because the Russians understand that, okay, they’re not really threatening us, they’re just testing their damn stupid designs. Maybe they could match, but still also insist that they’re not threatening and nobody needs to lower their DEFCON level here. It’s cool, right? That’s not what we have here.

Right now we’re in the middle of a proxy war right on Russia’s border, which they have expanded and, and which they are winning in which America cannot help the losing Ukrainians turn the tide in. And so there’s this huge crisis, a literal burning crisis. Like, as we speak, dudes are being blown apart over there. And so now you’re gonna start testing H bombs in the middle of that? It can only add to the tension if it’s. Whatever. However you measure the tension on your scale, it’s going up. The only question is how much if they start doing this.

And so why do you think they need to do it? Like, what is the. I don’t think they need to. I think it’s a bunch of muscle flexing and it’s stupid. I think that they know good and well how to fuse hydrogen isotopes together, and they have the computer power to model all of these things. And no, they’re not. Is it possible that they’ve made advancements and they’re not sure if it’s going to work, so they need to test it? Yes. Yes. And see, that’s what I mean is like, forget all, like, decency or morality, but just looking at it from their point of view, you could see why they want to do this.

Right? But it’s just. It’s almost like the diffusion of responsibility. It’s bad timing. Yeah. You have some, some generals and, and some nuclear weapons salesmen and Some senators and some media people and some people in the White House who want to do this for their kind of parochial interests inside their departments and agencies. Maybe there’s a nuclear weapons expert on the nuclear, on the National Security Council who would like a little attention from the President. And this is an issue that’ll get him some attention. He gets some facetime with the President because he gets to tell him nuclear weapons things.

And you know what I mean, you have those kinds of things. Well, what takes a backseat there? The fate of humanity, right. The overall interests of the American people and the people of the northern half of the planet Earth. And I’m surprised, I’m surprised that the response to this has been quite muted. Like there hasn’t been a huge outcry. And I always try to imagine, you know, because like yesterday was the one year anniversary of Trump winning the election and I distinctly remember him saying, I’m going to end the war in 24 hours. And then November 5, 2025 rolls around, we’re going to do a nuclear test, and all you hear is crickets.

But I, I could imagine that if Biden had said the same thing, people would be up at arms. So do you think that he has the political capital or are people just, is MAGA simply apathetic or is it going to actually be an unexpected spectacle of sorts whereby people get their lawn chairs out and there’s a concession stand and it’s big brouhaha and people are excited about a nuclear test? I mean, could it actually just the current climate that we’re in, could it actually be something that Mega embraces in a way? Ah, you know what, look, it’s a good question, and I gotta be honest, you know, and I’m sure that you agree with me in the same way that like, maybe your entire audience too, like I’m a boy, I like watching big explosions explode, dude.

And like nuclear explosions are really cool. And so if you’re just not a political person, you just want to see like a giant cool thing happen. You called it a spectacle. Yeah, sure as hell is. And so again, just like some nuclear weapons salesman from Honeywell, it’s just divorced from what else is going on in the world and what it means or the diplomatic language of it all the tensions between America and Russia and all of the different foreign policy, you know, consequences that are going to play out in here in Europe and wherever and who knows what.

And so it’s not the kind of thing that you want to just play around with because it really is fun and Like, I admit, because what the hell, it’s. The true story is In Iraq War One, I was 15 and I was stoked and I did not give a damn about the Iraqis. Like, I know it’s wrong to kill people, but as a 50, like, I was just a psychopath dude, I just wanted to see some bombs go off. They do nothing but show us all these cool planes and tanks and things all day. We never get to use them, you know, and then now.

And that was how the army felt too, man. We got all these forces in Germany and all we got to do is fly a few hundred miles south and we can finally use these things and against Soviet tanks too, in the Iraqi army. And like, what fun. See, without any analysis about, like, on the other level of what does this really mean for the future of the United States in the Middle east, etc. Etc. Etc. And now 35 years later, we. 40 years later we know how that. Or yeah, 35 years later we know how that looks.

So, you know, that’s, that’s the problem. So, yeah, you know, we’ve never actually seen a nuclear weapons test in high resolution. We’ve never seen, you know, all the videos, all the videos, all the videos we’ve seen of it are, you know, from like pre 1992, you know, we’ve never been able to use the new. And, and so what I’m trying to say is. Just let me get to this point. Sorry, is that. Do you think that there’s a potential silver lining in that maybe in order for this current generation to understand the true power and repercussions of nuclear weapons, maybe they have to have that, that visceral experience of it happening in order for us to appreciate the, the power of it.

I’m not advocating for it. I understand. Just saying that maybe there’s a potential silver lining and that this is a necessary step towards a reborn awareness of the risk of nuclear escalation? Yes, I absolutely agree with that. Right now it is so out of sight, out of mind. You know, nuclear weapons are essentially just an afterthought. You can read entire studies about proposals for how America, NATO could fight the Russian Federation, where they don’t even talk about nuclear weapons, even talk about the danger that they could be introduced into the thing. Well, what we do is we just go in there and use our tanks and use our planes and do our thing, and then we’d win.

And nobody even mentions vision or fusion. What? And it. Because the thing is, you can’t get paid $20,000 for a study if on page one you go, well, I mean, they got nukes, so we can’t. You know what I mean? So you gotta. You gotta just ignore that so you can write your. Your fun thing about how fun it would be to have a war. Same thing for, like, there’s, like, nostalgia for the naval battles in the Pacific against Japan. Like, that was exciting. All this talk about conventional war in. In Europe. You know, it has to kind of pretend like the possibility of nuclear escalation doesn’t exist so they can justify getting funding for said conventional war.

Same for Asia, too. They talk about a war with China. Like, it would just be a big naval battle, like a big showpiece thing like you see on the History Channel the dive bombers and all the stuff from World War II, and it’d be great. And, you know, I remember Michelle Flournoy says, well, what we need to do is we just need to have enough B1 bombers that we can just go in there with cruise missiles and sink the entire Chinese fleet in 72 hours. And the thing is, is, like, okay, lady, you think that this is the lady who demanded we triple the Afghan war and then oversaw its tripling as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and lost that war? But anyway, Ms.

Flournoy, fine. But then. Then what. What if Beijing nukes Honolulu after you sink their entire navy? Huh? What about that? Then we nuke Shanghai and threaten Wuhan and Beijing, and now we could lose all of our major cities and military bases, too. And so it’s fun to be Michelle Flournoy and talk like a tough guy, but. And ultimately she could get nuked with the rest of us. Although maybe she just thinks she’ll be living in a bunker or something. But, yes, I mean, this is absolutely right. I mean, you can go check me on this. It’s the most frustrating thing.

You can read studies from the think tanks that talk about what a war with Russia or China would look like, where they just don’t even mention nukes. Or they just give it the slightest kind of brush off. You know, they just go, well, we’ll just. Don’t worry about that. I remember one article about how we have to absolutely achieve regime change in Moscow and break Russia, the Russian federation, up into 15 more countries. And then he says, look, I know what you’re saying that like, yeah, but they have nuclear weapons. Well, we will just have to pull Russia’s nuclear teeth so that.

That won’t be a problem. Okay, what does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything. That means we all die. In a hydrogen bomb war, because hydrogen bombs aren’t teeth and you can’t pull them. So this is like a funny little analogy that you don’t have to elaborate and explain what that means. You’re saying, what, we’re going to send in the Navy SEALs in the Delta Force to seize every nuclear missile in Russia before they can launch one. Come on. You’re going to pull their nuclear teeth so that they can’t fight us. This is like a serious discussion that was in like Foreign affairs of the Atlantic Council or some crap like that.

You know what I mean? I, I have the source in the book where I quote it. And it’s not just some kook on Twitter or something. It was, you know, a think tanker where they just, they just engage in these fantasies. And so, yes, this is a huge problem. And yes to your question, setting off some H bombs in the sky where people can see them. And then that way they understand when you tell them, see, one of those could kill Dallas. One or two or three of those. And that’s it for, you know, all of the outskirts too, and get people to understand how dangerous these, these things are.

And you know, by the way, like, there are a lot of guys, seemingly mostly Republicans, not entirely, but there are guys who are like very, very high level, professional foreign service types who in their very old retirement age founded a group called Global Zero that was about. And this is not hippies from California anywhere. This was literally Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and William Perry, who. He had been Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, but he was no Democrat partisan. He was a wonk civilian mathematician from inside the Pentagon who got promoted to the top his way up kind of thing.

And he wrote a book called My Life at the Nuclear Brink. And these guys talk about how you don’t understand the power of these machines. You don’t understand how dangerous it is that we have these, you know, call it 10 or 12,000 H bombs sitting around in the world right now waiting to be used. It’s less than that. Call it 10 still that there’s a mathematical certainty they will be used. It just makes, you know, whenever I talk about nuclear weapons like this, I know what it sounds like to people. Look, I’m not a hippie. I, I literally am not one.

And I understand why anyone would hear this kind of talk as a call for like unilateral, unconditional surrender to the ChiComs. Oh, sure, give up our nuclear weapons and just let our enemies destroy us or something like that. But I’m not saying That, I don’t think anybody’s ever said that, quite frankly. But Ronald Reagan almost. He came within a hair of making a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 at Reykjavik to get rid of all of the nuclear weapons, all of them. Ronald Reagan was not a commie or a hippie. I mean he actually had been a New Dealer.

But anyway, he was Ronald Reagan by then, man in 1986, the great American conservative Republican patriot to the right of the Rockefeller guys and all that supposedly. And the only thing that ruined the deal was the Russians said you got to kill the missile. The new missile defense system, which was a harebrained scheme Anyway. Lasers in space 80s technology. We’re going to put lasers and anti missile missiles in orbit and all this. Give me a break. The whole thing was a multi trillion dollar never going to happen daydream that they had sold Reagan in the first place.

And of course if you dismantle all the H bomb, all the ICBMs, then you don’t need a missile shield anyway, dude. So. But it was literally, it was Richard Pearl, the Prince of Darkness, one of the major ringleaders of the neoconservative movement, who helped to destroy the momentum toward that thing in the administration at the time. There’s probably a lack of trust then on both sides because they probably suspected that, well, you’re making this, this defense system so that you could potentially at some point then reignite your nuclear weapons and then we would be at a disadvantage.

So there’s this national insecurity, right? In other words, Gorbachev had a reasonable objection and Reagan could have just said, yeah, you’re right, I don’t need a missile shield if neither of us are making nukes. And then, and we know from what actually did happen after that with the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting nuclear treaties during the end of the Cold War, which, you know, the, the wall didn’t come down till three years later. This is in 86 when it’s still the Cold War. People think the Soviet Union is going to last in the new century, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera at this time.

And, and, and he was still willing to make that deal. And then we saw very soon how with, under the various treaties that they did sign, the inspections regimes were absolutely honored and lived up to. The Americans came and dismantled. It wasn’t even the Russians. The Americans came and helped to dismantle the Soviet nuclear arsenal and they took all the uranium and plutonium and burned them in our nuclear reactors to fuel our.com boom. That was what happened to Russia’s nuclear arsenals. They did live up to that, the inspections. Ronald Reagan said, trust but verify, which means be polite and do not trust, right? Means go in there and verify.

You can make these deals, you can have inspections, regimes where you get that far. And now, by the way, nowhere in the Reagan deal here was the idea that a magic wish is going to come true and all the nuclear weapons will simply disappear along with the knowledge of how to make them. The idea was that America and the Soviet Union, which at that time had 30 and 40,000 of these things each, that we would dismantle our, our stockpiles down to about 200 each, which was, would give us parity with Britain, France, China and Israel at that time.

This is before India and Pakistan had them and I guess South Africa only ever had a couple and they were giving them up soon after that. Anyway, anyway, that would bring us down to parity with the other nuclear weapons states in the world. Then we’d see if we could get a new treaty. And the Soviet Union in America would promise to really lean on our allies too and get Everybody down to 100 and then let’s see if we can get down to 50. Let’s see if we can make a deal where we finally have enough trust that we can get rid of nuclear weapons.

And so it was not some harebrained scheme. It was a Ronald Reaganite program. And he believed sincerely that he was on a mission from God to get rid of these things, that it was his responsibility as president to do it. He tried to do it, but he got screwed up by his own administration making him false promises. He was pretty old and gullible and they kind of had their way with him on that point. But he tried and almost failed. So that ought to at least raise the possibility in your mind. And maybe you don’t have to be a hippie commie, you know, idiot from Hollywood somewhere to think this, that actually Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, Nixon’s Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, national security adviser in forts, and William Perry.

These men said we have to get rid of these things. So my hypothetical is think of it like this is just the question. Is this really supposed to be the common national security strategy or global security strategy for the planet Earth and humanity for the next, say, 275 years? This is how we’re going to do it. We’re going to have a Mexican standoff where all the major powers are holding hydrogen bombs to each other’s heads to keep the peace, you understand? To deter attack, you understand? And this is going to be so fail safe and foolproof that we’re not just going to all die in a damn nuclear war once the bluff is ever called.

You can think of a million scenarios where India and China start fighting over the Himalayas and all the rest of humanity thinks, what are you doing? India and Pakistan start fighting over Kashmir and China jumps in on Pakistan’s side and America says, you better not. And Russia says, you better not. That could happen next week. The whole thing is so stupid. It’s crazy, man. And there’s another, there’s another scenario. One last statement there, one last statement is you can look at the atomic archive and see the very high speed film footage of these things. They are scary as the devil, man.

They are very real. These, these hydrogen bombs that detonate in the high kiloton and low megaton range. We’re talking about a bomb that could kill all of Austin, Texas. Just one would make this city gone. Kill everyone for like seven miles around and make the entire place uninhabitable. Permanently. Burn the skin off of people for 15 miles in every direction. Destroy everything that we’ve built here for 200 years and all our civilization has built for 2,000, 3,000 years. Over what? Over. Some, like, egghead at the, at the University of Chicago did algebraic equation in game theory that says, trust me, dog, this is going to be fine.

This is how you do it. And then, I mean, just think of where this conversation started. The Americans and the Russians are bluffing with their new nuclear weapons technology. They’re showing their new delivery systems and they’re threatening to start detonating H bombs to intimidate each other. So just forget hippies. There never were hippies. The 1960s never happened. Just forget that. George Schultz said, snap out of it, bro. We have to solve this problem. We can’t continue on like this. Just think of what a low priority it is. One more thing Donald Trump himself said. I rambled earlier.

I mentioned the very positive things he said in his first few press conferences from the Oval Office after being sworn in for a second term. He said, I want to make a deal with Russia and China where we all drastically cut our nuclear weapons stockpiles. They’re too dangerous. They’re too dangerous, shouldn’t have them. Very dangerous, very terrible. We got to get rid of them. Why can’t we have that? Donald Trump, you know what, man? Why don’t you just get on a plane and go to Moscow and then say, hey, hand me the proposed treaty again here, Vlad.

We’re going to slash our nuclear stockpiles and we’re going to be best friends and we’re going to trade and we’re going to drop sanctions and we’re just going to absolutely just cancel the new Cold War. Gonna go out there like, well, that’s a bad comparison. I was gonna say Rabin and Arafat shaking hands. But anyway, go out there like Nixon and Mao and just shake hands, make friends, and then start like, what a great thing to work on first. Let’s start scaling back our nuclear weapons programs and our nuclear weapons threats instead of embellishing on them.

Yeah, there’s. I mean, there’s definitely some problems with that, you know, that would arise. But what do you. Have you seen the new movie on Netflix, House of Dynamite? I did watch it, yeah. So they propose. They propose a scenario in there, which is interesting. I didn’t think it was the greatest movie, but I. I thought that they. They create a scenario where there’s like, this plausible deniability scenario where it appears as though somebody. They don’t really say what’s happening. And I guess that’s the point, is that somebody is trying to instigate a fight, and so they throw up what we presume is a nuke in the film.

And not to, I guess, spoiler alert for anybody who hasn’t seen it, but we don’t know where this nuke came from, and it’s in the air, and we need to respond. There seems to be also an increased risk of. Of, like an inadvertent nuclear escalation arising not only as a result of some sort of accident, but because there’s so much global tension along multiple fault lines. You might have a scenario where a lesser nation state or somebody decides to throw up, do a shot across the bow, throw up a trial balloon. I don’t know what the right metaphor is, but, you know, to create a situation where if you want to instigate a fight between the Russians and the.

The Americans or the. The Chinese and the Americans, there’s now, you know, a Mexican standoff of sorts. And so there’s incentive for people to instigate a fight as well. Yep. Be it North Korea or maybe even China, maybe China says, well, you know, let’s. Let’s get the Russians and the Americans to destroy themselves. Or, you know, what were your thoughts on the film and. And those types of scenarios? Those. Yeah, I think, look, the important part of the film to me is where the President is trying to figure out, well, so what do I do? And all the arguments come in like, well, the voters aren’t going to like it if you don’t do anything, right? Like, whatever.

That’s a consideration whether you personally get to have power still. Okay, talk about public choice theory. Like, that was one of the first things that the character says. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s exactly what the President would be considered. Then another thing was, well, we don’t hit back at someone. I guess we think it must have been North Korea. And if we don’t hit back, first of all, other people will think that they can hit us now and we won’t retaliate against them. So we have to do it to send a signal to everyone else.

Right. And then of course, if you’re going to attack North Korea, you better wipe them off the face of the earth because they still have atom bombs, a few dozen of them, and some missiles. And so if you don’t completely destroy their military in anywhere you suspect could be a secret, anything, then you’re leaving the American people open to further retaliation. So now we’re not just hitting them with. We’re not just hitting Pyongyang with one atom bomb. Now we’re going to hit the whole country with 50 hydrogen bombs or whatever it is. And because it’s all about, oh, we got to send a signal and all these just absolute idiot perverse incentives if the whole world knows, look, if Russia and China know that they didn’t do it and everybody suspects that North Korea did it, but then North Korea is not taking responsibility and they’re not firing anymore, well, then what are you going to do? Any decent human being would just have to call time out instead.

What, you’re going to pick a random city in China and incinerate however many million people to make a point or something? Yeah. Are you really, again, some egghead like a game theorist at the University of Chicago? Told you. Oh, no, Chicago’s gone now at Georgetown University. Told you that. Oh, yo. No, sir, we estimate there’s a 72% likelihood. Right, like C3PO just making up stuff. There’s a, in this number increased likelihood that some other third party nuclear weapons state will now be more incentivized to attack us? No. Why would they do that? North Korea got one good one off on us.

So now China and Russia think they can get away with it. But, and the thing is, Katherine Bigelow didn’t just make that stuff up, right? Like she consulted all these experts who explained to her that that would be the, the thinking inside the administration. Here’s what it looks like when the Colonel hands the, the. The binder to the President. Here’s your menu of options for what to nuke and, and all of that. I mean, it’s very much like how it is, and it goes to show. And this is something that I really need to. There’s a guy named James Buchanan who wrote all about this and coined the phrase, and I never even read him.

I’m completely ignorant. Ought to at least have Grok explain to me what the hell. But I. It’s called public choice theory, and I’ve had it explained to me at least a few times. And it simply means there is no public choice, really, that the public choices, the overall decisions that the government makes on behalf of the people are made by people. And they make those decisions on their own behalf. First and foremost, they think about themselves. First and foremost, they do what’s right for them. Right? Just like Palpatine told Anakin, everyone with power is afraid to lose it.

They’ll do anything to hold on to it, even Yoda. And so, like, that’s. That’s how it is. And so people will, will go to nuclear war, act in ways that, that you couldn’t imagine they would think would be the right way to react. Because you’re looking at it, you’re like, sitting across the kitchen table from your wife and you’re thinking, like, here’s America, the nation, the society we live in, and here’s what we care about and what we hope for its future and all that. They’re not thinking that they have a different set of priorities that concern preserving their own ability to make the choices in the first place, their own power first.

Otherwise, who cares what their opinion is if they can’t enforce it? You know, they’re viewing it through the prism of, like, oligarchical power dynamics and how they are potentially going to be unseated if they do not act. And there’s this battle between the Chinese elites and the Russian elites and the American elites. And we’re viewing it as these impartial, you know, outsiders who are saying, well, there’s all these possible solutions, but from their point of view, it’s all about their own insecurities. And so this kind of works its way into this Thucydides trap situation where if we don’t get them first, you know, it’s like a prisoner’s dilemma where if, you know, they might cheat if, if we don’t cheat first.

So there’s this preemption game of chicken that, that happens. I’d like to talk about the Golden Dome as well, because you brought up the, you brought up the Reagan, you know, space missile laser defense thing. How do you think that plays in to all this? Because it seems like a lot of this stuff has been percolating under the surface. I mean, I read an article two years ago, I think it was either CNN or New York Times. They were talking about how satellite data had confirmed that all of these testing sites in Via Zemblya in Nevada and in a place in China, I can’t remember exactly where it seemed like they were being prepared to do these nuclear tests.

A month ago, you had Vladimir Putin state that he knew and it was an off the cuff remark that he made. I believe it was at some kind of conference he had made. He indicated that he knew that some other state, he was referring to the United States, but he didn’t address them specifically, was getting prepared to do a nuclear test. And then one month later, Trump comes out and says, we’re getting ready to do nuclear tests. So this has kind of been festering under the surface for a long time. They’ve been planning this for a long time, it seems.

What do you make of the Golden Dome and how do you think that factors into what’s going on right now and what do you know about it? I don’t know a lot of the details of, you know, the claim technology. I know that overall the missile defense systems are, you know, essentially a joke. You know, Daryl Cooper, my buddy and co host on provoked, that was his job actually. And he swears that like, no, if you shoot enough missiles at one of these things, you can bring it down. But like, mostly if you know who’s shooting it and from where and which direction first, which is not how it would really be in a war, you know, and so like even in that movie where the thing is fired from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, I’m not sure it’d be that easy for them to track it and launch their missiles even on the right trajectory in the first place.

And then there is a cause, as they explained in the movie, there’s a cost per missile. And so why not fire 10 interceptors at the incoming H bomb? Well, because we only have so many and what if there’s 50 more coming in after it? So we have to, we can only fire two defensive missiles at this one incoming missile, one fails and then the other misses. And so, oops. And the rocket Keeps coming. Sorry I’m spoiling this not very good movie for everybody. But the. I, I guess I do not have much faith in that because look, the ICBM’s coming in and we’re trying, especially in a war with Russia, we’re talking, you know, a thousand missiles coming in to targets all across the United States.

And so the ability of the, of the defensive systems to account for that and make up for that, I think is just, you know, a pipe dream. I don’t think that’s right at all that they, that they can defend us. You know, those missiles come in at like Mach 18 and it’s just extremely difficult to knock them out. My old friend Gordon Prather, who used to write for us@antiwar.com to retire, died now. But he, he, he built H bombs or tested H bombs. Know, worked for, he was the chief scientist of the army and he worked at Sandia National Laboratory.

And he told me, you want a defensive missile system to take out incoming Russian nukes, you need nukes. You can’t shoot them down, which is to pinpoint little cone of shrapnel, man. You take them out with H bombs in space. And this is what we call neutron bombs. They’re enhanced radiation devices, have a much thinner shell to hold the fusion reaction together. And so that ends up resulting in enhanced radiation instead of heat. And then that radiation would then be used to knock out the avionics and all the electronics on the incoming H bombs. And so he’s saying, if you really want to defend Chicago from an incoming nuke, you nuke that nuke in space.

Otherwise you’re gonna miss, dude. You know what I mean? It’s just, it’s certainly not fail safe in any way. So the golden dome, I think mostly is a pipe dream. And yet look at it from the Russians point of view. They gotta assume that these things are somewhat effective. And I’m sure they have pretty good intelligence about how ineffective they actually are. But that Sarmat 2 is designed to go around the South Pole and to carry 24 warheads. So it can take out. And of course some of those would be decoys, but essentially you could take out all of Texas with one of those rockets.

And so that was their answer to Bush’s tearing up the Anti Ballistic missile treaty in 2001 and then beginning to install the defensive missile stations in Poland and Romania and the radars in the Czech Republic was. Putin said, well, I could either match that with an also extremely extensive, expensive and unreliable defensive weapon system, or I can just make more missiles. I think I’ll just make more missiles. That’s cheaper and we already know how to do it, and so we’ll just do that and overcome your defenses. You’re saying that all of these new systems that Putin is creating, that they’re taking the, the route of finding a missile that can, like that’s why they’re using cruise missiles and these, you know, underwater drones, is because they, they’re maneuverable.

Yeah. Let me explain it better. Here’s what I should have said. I think I did mention this, but I didn’t explain it right. Really. W. Bush, he tore up that treaty, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, which said we can only have two defensive missile stations per country. In other words, not much of an, of a golden dome, because what would be the point? The other side will just make more missiles. At this time, we had 30,000 and 40,000 nukes each. And Nixon said, enough of this. The brinksmanship has got to stop. It’s just too many and there’s no point in going on like this.

So that was why they signed that treaty. W. Bush tore it up in 2001 and announced he wants to expand this defensive missile system. And then. Yes. So the, everything the Russians are doing is a reaction to that and saying, if you’re going to expand your defenses and we have to expand our offenses. And you know, there’s a. I’m, I’m pretty sure almost the exact same conversation happened with Oliver Stone, except I’m not certain about that. Forgive me, but I know that this discussion happened with Vladimir Putin and the former ambassador to the ussr, Jack Matlock, where Matlock said to him, this is at the Valdai Discussion Club.

And Matlock said to Putin, this would have been whatever Obama years. Okay. So before, like the worst of this current tension. And he says, Mr. Putin, come on. I know you have to understand the way the American system works. This whole ballistic, anti. Ballistic missile defensive system network is just a boondoggle, man. It’s just a way to transfer money from the American taxpayer to these connected industries. And I know you know how that works. It’s the military industrial complex. Right. And is it possible, Is it possible that it’s an offensive weapon? Well, hang on one second.

That’s a great question, but hold it one sec. So Putin just responded by saying, I do understand that, but one, you got to understand, I’m in charge of security around here. So I’m friends with. This is still in the Bush years. He says, I’m friends with George W. Bush. I respect him, and I believe he respects me. We have a good relationship. However, I have to protect my country. If you’re going to surround my country with defensive missiles, then I have to respond in my own way to counter that. It’s just business. I don’t want to do this, but this is the position that you’re putting me in.

And then he says, why can’t you just subsidize, I don’t know, like, biomedical or like construction companies or something? Why does it have to be missile defense systems that you’re subsidizing at my country’s expense and putting me in this position? Which is a fair question, but that is our system. You know what I mean? And Jack Matlock seemed to be saying that. So this really isn’t about you. This really is just about the government robbing my next door neighbor. You know what I mean? Please don’t mistake this and, and ratchet up tensions. And then Putin responds that like, hey, I’m sorry, but I still have to do what I have to do.

And then, I’m sorry, what would you just say? There just. Is the, the Golden Dome, could it have an offensive application that we don’t know about, or could the Russians suspect that it might? Yes. So here’s the deal with that. That’s absolute. Correct. And, and this goes to W. Bush’s whole thing tearing up the tree in the first place. And same thing for the Golden Dome. Now, again, like, if this was just peacetime, we have a few nukes, we have a defensive system, everybody leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone, that would be one thing.

But it’s not that. It’s the American world empire armed the teeth with hydrogen bombs and threatening people with them all the time, and expanding our military alliance right into Russia’s sphere of influence and all of these provocative things. So that’s first of all, the context, right? Then you can see how having a sound defensive system could in fact be like just wearing armor to a fist fight. Right now you have the ability to go ahead and be more aggressive in a way where otherwise you wouldn’t have been, because now you’re all armored up and think that you can go ahead and start a fight and win it where before you wouldn’t.

So it’s not just a defensive system in context, it shifts your incentives on your side and makes you more aggressive. And then, of course, as we’re talking about incentives, incentivizes the other side to try to match that, to deny it. And what I was going to say before I idiotically trailed off there on one of those tangents was that after Bush tore up that treaty in O2, in O1, and started this, a move toward building the defensive systems in Europe, they ran a really important article in Foreign affairs in 2006 that said, now is our chance to achieve a first strike capability against Russia.

That is, cancel Mutually assured destruction and achieve the ability that we know we could hit Russia with a nuclear first strike and then shoot down any retaliatory capability that they had left over and spare at least almost all American cities from retaliation. Maybe our hair would get mussed and we’d lose a few million. Otherwise, we could do it. We could get away with starting and winning a nuclear war against Russia. Well, guess what? They read Foreign affairs over there in Moscow, and they took that like, okay, clearly it’s on. And these people were speaking for industry, right? They were the nuclear weapons industry.

And, and the worst hawks inside the Pentagon, Joint staff, planning staff, I guess, you know, who were coming up with this doctrine. And the Russians, of course. I mean, imagine just for one minute, you’re a junior staffer on the National Security Council over there in Russia, and a new article comes out in Foreign affairs saying that good old stable mutually assured destruction is canceled. We must achieve a first strike capability. Right? The entire consensus around the table is not on our watch. And then you start making more atom bombs yourself. Simple as that. And that’s exactly what happened.

And it definitely seems like that’s what the setup is, because like you said, they put these Aegis ashore defensive systems into Poland, I believe. Yes, In Romania and Poland. Yeah. Which could also be offensive as well. And that’s right, because those, those launchers, they’re called the Mark 41 or the MK41 missile launcher. They can host Tomahawk cruise missiles. They fit right in there, along with the Sparrow defensive missiles. So, in fact, by the way, there’s like a little anecdote here where Bush said, this is for Iran. We’re going to protect Poland and Western Europe from Iran.

But Iran doesn’t have missiles that could reach Poland and they don’t have any nuclear weapons. And this is a joke. And nobody believed that. So Putin said, look, man, it looks like you’re trying to achieve a first strike capability. Like, you could shoot down my retaliatory response if you nuked me. And Bush said, no, Vlad, come on, man. This is so few defensive missiles that it couldn’t possibly be enough to shoot down an incoming salvo into Europe from Russia. We know what you could do to Europe and we don’t think we could shoot that down, so that can’t be it.

And Putin said, okay, well maybe it’s the dual use launchers then, and maybe you just want an excuse to move Tomahawks into Eastern Europe like you promised you wouldn’t. And then Trump tore up the INF treaty. So now you could legally put, so called legally put intermediate range Tomahawk cruise missiles tipped with hydrogen bombs in Romania and Poland in those Mark 41 missile launchers just waiting for a piece of paper to get signed. And, and Bush’s hoax would, would be proven alive finally. And then the offensive threat of nuclear war against Russia would be heightened. And this is something that he cited, Putin cited in his invasion, in his declarations of war against Ukraine.

He said, they’re putting these missile launchers in Romania and Poland. What if they put them in Kharkiv? A Tomahawk cruise missile could get to Moscow in 10 minutes. Forget it. I’m not going to tolerate that. And I’m not saying he was right to invade, but I’m saying, yeah, that is part of why he invaded. That’s not just some made up, ridiculous excuse. That was a legitimate security threat and America absolutely refused to negotiate in good faith about it. And so he said, this is my analogy, take it or leave it. America put his back up against the wall and he decided not to wait till he was all the way in a corner and go ahead and hit now instead of later.

And that was his decision. And I wish he hadn’t done it. And I disapprove of it. And I think it’s bad for Russia and I think it was still illegal and wrong. There’s just a no question that America provoked this fight. And that was a big part of how they did it was, well, maybe we just put these launchers wherever we want and we all know that we could just drop a Tomahawk in there and you wouldn’t know that we had. I mean, man, does that sound like just some made up crap or that sounds like actually a legitimate security concern of any state on the outside of America’s security umbrella.

Right? Come on. Well, Russia is currently surrounded by NATO offensive capabilities. And now NATO has a bunch of data that they’ve been acquiring through these Ukrainian drone strikes. So the stakes are getting higher and higher, it would appear. And it really does look like they’re trying to position themselves that some of those, you know, that hawkish mentality that you’re talking about still lingers in that they think that a first strike is feasible. Is that a safe assumption that maybe there’s people within the Pentagon who still are war gaming this possibility and actually kind of surreptitiously preparing? Yes.

You know, I’ve read the Defense Planning guidance that’s come out over the last, you know, I guess I have read Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden’s National Nuclear Posture Review documents at one point in time or another. I guess I don’t know if there’s a new one now. I don’t, I don’t believe that in any of them. They officially said that, yeah, we want to treat for. Achieve first strike capability. I don’t think that they have ever said that. Are they attempting to achieve that surreptitiously? Potentially, I think it’s not official American doctrine. Official American doctrine is still mutually assured destruction.

But they have definitely embarked on this massive new program to revamp America’s entire nuclear weapons arsenal and industry. And this was a compromise that Obama had to approve in order to get the New Start treaty ratified in 2010. And there’s actually a thing called the Nuclear Weapons Caucus and they represent the states that host the Minuteman missiles like Nebraska, Colorado, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and these are senators and yeah, senators from those states who all work together to make sure to keep the nuclear weapons industry humming because of whatever meager welfare they get from hosting atomic weapons in their states, which of course only makes those states targets for H bomb strikes.

And. But they get a little bit of money and so they literally have no shame whatsoever in calling themselves at the Nuclear Weapons Caucus. And they told Obama no START treaty unless you give us the money. And then of course, you know, Trump and Biden have only expanded on it since then. They said it was going to be $1 trillion. It’ll be 4 by the time they’re done. I think they already admitted it’ll be three. Is that we’re talking with their constituents. I can’t see that being a popular, you know. No, but position. See, they don’t sell it.

It’s just like George Carlin had a bit like this about like, we don’t want it. Not in my backyard. Except military bases. We’ll take military. Well, I’ll take a little nuclear radiation as long as I can get a job. Right. And like, you know, it’s all olive green and red, white and blue, man. You can’t argue with that. It was right behind you. Right. Yeah. Or maybe that’s a Russian one. The Russian one. But it’s, it’s acceptable because, hey, Uncle Sam wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for our own good. And all that’s kind of baked in, you know what I mean? Among the local populations, they just assume this is part of life.

And I think they probably would not instruct their senator. Now you bring home the nuclear weapons bacon there, Senator. But I think that they’re not in revolt over it because it is whatever substantial part of their local economies that they’re getting federal money through these military bases. Now you know, I don’t know if this is universal, but I know that there was huge rounds of base closures in the United states in the 1990s and in virtually every case then those bases turned into successful like office parks and, and things, industries moved in and things and they were all people were like, oh wait, what about the diner across the street’s gonna go out of business? See, that’s what Frederick Bastiat called the difference between the scene and the unseen.

And so yes, that diner is going out of business, but billions less will be destroyed and taken from that same diner’s customers paychecks. So you know, or at least there’ll be less demand for that same money. That’s really insane that we would put ourselves in, in such a high risk situation just to keep our, our jobs. But I mean we’re living in an idiocracy, which is why anything is, is possible at this point in time. There seems to be a paradox though of abolitionists that if you get rid of nuclear weapons, like during the Cold War, there was 30, 000 more or less each Soviets and the Americans combined total of 70,000 nuclear weapons.

And that was like a sure thing because those were kind of far more indiscriminate, they were less precise, they were dumber bombs for lack of better terms. And now we have 5,500 and they’re becoming far more precise. And so if you were to scale this back to say 500, then it almost creates a situation where mutual assured destruction is not a threat because. Right. You then have a situation where while we can’t destroy the world, but we can maybe engage in a limited nuclear conflict. I know a lot of people like Andy Jacobson always go to the most extreme kind of, you know, once one nuke is launched, they’re all going to launch.

And then there’s this other side that says, well, you know, we can, we can fight and win a nuclear war and it wouldn’t be that bad and radiation is good for you, that sort of thing. Where is the happy medium Here of understanding. Because it seems like there is that paradox. You know, if we get rid of too many, then there’s a risk that they. A higher risk that they would be used because there would be less disincentive to. Yeah, I had this discussion with a great nuclear weapons expert named Lyle Goldstein, who was at the Naval War College.

He’s a brilliant guy. He reads all, you know, the industry rags in Russia and China in Russian and Chinese, and he’s a brilliant guy. And I says, but Lyle, maybe we could just like get down to 10 atom bombs each and that’d be enough to deter. And he’s like, oh, no, no, no. Atom bombs are usable, man. Hiroshima bombs, in the mind of a general, a Hiroshima bomb, I don’t know, we could kill some enemies with that and I don’t see the big deal. He says, what keeps the peace are the city killers. The multi megaton strategic nuclear weapons.

They wouldn’t dare use those. So even if you want to get down to 10, better be 10 mega bombs, because that’s what provides that deterrent effect as you’re talking about. That was why Reagan’s thing was, let’s see if we can agree to get lower and lower and lower. And then in that spirit of cooperation that we’ve already achieved that this is even possible, then we try to go ahead and get rid of the rest. Because, yes, you’re right, there is a paradox of, geez, I don’t know if they’ve only got 10 and, and we still got 15.

And so, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, you could have that kind of attitude of maybe we can get away with it. You know, exactly what you’re so sure destruction is meant to prevent. And now as far as, like, would it be the world’s worst catastrophe and everybody would launch every missile they got and all that. Yes, I’m on the former side of that argument. I think all the war games show that if especially it’s America and Russia get into a nuclear war, then immediately all the hawks argue that we gotta use them or lose them.

If we don’t launch every missile we got, save. Save the submarines for the second strike, maybe, but at least if we don’t launch every Minuteman we have, and if we don’t launch every plane that we have, they’re going to bomb all our silos and air force bases. So are we going to let them bomb our nukes? Hell no. We’re going to use those nukes rather than lose them to them. And so it’s virtually just Automatic. Right. And you could just picture the scene out of any movie. Sir, we have to hit them now before it’s too late.

Time to launch. One minute. He’s gonna launch before he lets Russian bombs explode over his bombs and, and render them useless, almost certainly in every case. And they’ve done these war games over and over and over again and it always leads to catastrophe. And so it’s, Russia uses one nuke, they use an A bomb, we use an A bomb, they use an A bomb, we use an A bomb, they use two A bombs, we use an H bomb, they nuke NATO headquarters, that’s it. The whole place goes up in flames, man. You see what I mean, how it escalates very quickly in all.

And they’ve tried this, they practice this over and over. It seems like things progress at a slower pace though than they do in the movies. Like, you know, there was a big scare back in 2022, in November, Sergei Shoigu contacted Lloyd Austin and there was concern about potential false flag attacks or something like that that might trigger some nuclear chain reaction in terms of running up the escalation ladder. But don’t you think at each one of those nodes there’s a potential for de escalation? Like let’s say there was a use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine in order to make a point.

Like, let’s say the Americans pushed too hard, they put tomahawks in there and the Russians had to make some sort of deterrence statement. Is there not scenarios in your mind that you can envision where there is the limited use of a nuclear weapon and it doesn’t escalate to that nuclear extent? Or could that be the thinking in the minds of the Pentagon, some people. Okay, so here, here’s the story about that the Americans announced. I don’t know if it’s true, but I for face, let’s take it for face value, for sake of argument. Sounds right, I guess.

The Americans said that they know that the Russians have a new doctrine of escalate to de escalate, that if they ever got into a really bad position, for example, in Ukraine, they’re about to lose everything in Ukraine, including Crimea or whatever, which thankfully is not on the table. So we’re not going to have to address this. But if that happened, they might use a nuke in Ukraine and then the point of that would be not just to kill some Ukrainian troops and take a tactical victory, but to say to the Americans, we’re really pissed off now, we’ve crossed the line.

And Used an atom bomb. Now, don’t make it worse. Back down. They would be escalating to get us to de escalate. Right? The Americans said, oh yeah, well, we just ran a war game and now we’re publishing it in the media that says if you do that, we will nuke Belarus. Belarus, that’s right. Russia’s good friend and ally and next door state there. And we’ll make an example out of them because actually sa, I’m the one who’s loco, not you. And so now you better de escalate. But you see, why in the world would they think that it’s reasonable to think that the Russians would then back down if they absolutely would not be willing to back down in the exact same circumstances? Is that why Russia gave Belarus nukes? I’m sorry, if they gave them or what? I’m sorry, Is that why Russia put nuclear weapons in Belarus? Oh, no, it’s more complicated than that.

But, but still, like, I’m sure that may be part of the thinking there that like, definitely solidifying their alliance with that country for sure. So. But they, but the. They said that they would nuke Belarus if Russia used a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. Why would we put ourselves into that situation over Ukraine? Yeah, exactly. It’s crazy. It’s treason against the American people. Again. When Garrett Garrett wrote Defend America first, he said, listen, we understand that the French got a problem with the Germans, but that quite literally is the French’s problem, not ours. Our eastern frontier ends at Maine.

That’s it. And I don’t want to hear any more about it again. Now they’re telling us our frontier is deeper. Nasca provost in Eastern Ukraine. It sure as hell is not. It says, oh, Kiev is the beating heart of Europe. Oh, it is, huh? Not say, for example, maybe, I don’t know, Berlin or Paris or Rome, but Kiev. In fact, if you listen to American policymakers in previous generations, they would talk about Ukraine as being east of Eastern Europe. Brent Scowcroft said, we didn’t even want for Ukraine to be free of Moscow. We only wanted the liberation of Eastern Europe, not Ukraine.

He said, Eastern Europe ends at Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, period. Right. The Baltics, we don’t even just call that Eastern Europe. That’s its own special region. We call it the Baltics. And it’s a special case. Yes, it’s on Russia’s border, but in the Americans opinion, they never recognize Soviet domination of the Baltic states the whole time, not officially. And they were determined to carve out a special exception for the Baltic States. So I’m not saying I’m for that, but I’m saying in, in Washington’s eyes. But Belarus and Ukraine, are you kidding me? We’re going to have dominance in those countries only at the cost of starting a war with the Russians.

I just posted an article this morning on my Twitter and old Justin romando article from 2014. So you’re saying this is official policy, that if Russia uses a nuke, they’ll nuke Belarus. Yes, and threaten to nuke Moscow. Wow, I never knew. In other words, again, let me just repeat it one more time real quick. The Americans announced, I don’t think the Russians ever announced this, but the Americans announced that the Russians policy is escalate to de escalate. And the Americans said no, our policy is if you try to escalate to make us de escalate. No, we will escalate and make you de escalate.

And that was what they meant by that. And they ran a war game about it and then they published it. And their point was to say to the Russians, don’t change your doctrine because we’ll change ours to match. Right. But then as you can see, like as you repeat it in your question, it’s all kind of implicit in your question. But then wouldn’t the people of Belarus all be a bunch of innocent murder victims in this entire scheme here? Yeah, yeah. That’s the, again, the insanity of this entire question. Again. This is why Henry Kissinger and George Schultz at the end of their lives said, man, we have to adjust.

This is not right that we’re holding these machines over the heads of humanity like this. It’s just not right. The Soviet Union is gone. We have to find a better way. Henry, they must see something in Ukraine that they feel is that important, worth fighting for. Screwing Russia. Yeah. Restricting Russia’s ability to sell natural gas to Germany. That’s what American dominance over the planet, that’s what they have to lose. Other people getting along without us in the middle of it. That’s really what you think it comes down to? Hey, right, so crazy, crazy stuff. Is there any.

What do you think about new start? Is that going to be. Basically because it seems as though the, the Russians are being stonewalled. They claim that they attempted to have some conversations about that. Not only that one, but about test ban treaty and a few other treaties, space based weapon treaties and things of that nature and that they’ve been stonewalled. Do you think it’s going to be successful? If I remember right, America never ratified the Test ban Treaty. But we’ve abided by it anyway. Right. I was like, you know, custom, but I don’t think it’s ever been officially.

And the Russians backed out of it on in 2023. Right. And as far as the test, I mean, pardon me, the, the New START treaty, there have been positive signals from both sides, but I don’t know about the progress of, of any negotiations on that. And let me tell you, if they let that thing lapse, it’ll be the worst sin. That is the last nuclear weapons treaty restricting stockpiles of American and Russian nuclear weapons. It would be the absolute worst decision anybody ever made since Bush tore up the ABM treaty. If they do that, which by the way, when he did that, that killed start two and start two would have banned all MIRVs, the multiple independently targetable re entry vehicles.

So that would have meant one warhead per rocket on both sides or I’m not sure if it counted for subs or if it was only for, for air and land based missiles or and you know, airplane based bombs. But well, whatever I think it was for all missiles, Navy and land based missiles is what it was. No MERVs. And when Bush tore up the AVM treaty, it also killed START to. But so anyway, so that’s why when we talk about the Russians have this new heavy rocket that can launch 24 warheads. Yeah, because of George W.

Bush. But then, yeah, New Start is all we have left. And again, that’s the one that Obama had to bribe. Had, yeah, essentially bribe the entire nuclear weapons industry with a trillion dollars to get the Senate to even pass the damn thing. And so, man, God, what a crazy conversation. You know, reminder, especially for the young people watching this. Soviet communism. World Communism ceased to exist in 1991. Our contest now is with Republican Russia with a red, white and blue flag and a conservative Republican Christian president. Yes, he’s a strong man. He is el presidente for life over there for the last 25 years.

I’m not ignorant about that. But he ain’t Khrushchev or Stalin or Andropov or any of those thugs. I mean, the Soviet leadership were just the worst criminals. God, they’re horrible men. Horrible. Putin, you know what, he’s absolutely committed his sins and, and his war in Ukraine is the worst thing he’s ever done. But he also has proven for 25 years that he is willing to do business with the United States of America if we treat him fairly. And, and I don’t think his demands are unreasonable or unfair. Demands? It’s just that the Americans are bullies. Their attitude this whole time is, screw them.

What are they going to do about it? And run roughshod over them. Whereas his demands have been things like, please stop backing suicide bombers against my children and stuff like that, you know. Lastly, I just want to ask you about nuclear proliferation in other countries. We have Poland wanting nuclear weapons. We have Germany coming under the nuclear umbrella of, I guess, France and in the UK or there’s been some kind of negotiations about them getting weapons. Is there a possibility that we see other states seek nukes in, like, if testing recommences? Yeah, well, this is a good question, and it’s a possible major contradiction in my position, right, is because I want America to come home from everybody everywhere.

But that means no umbrella anywhere. And that means that then other countries will be more incentivized to get their own nukes. This is how James Baker got the Soviets to agree that they would prefer America stay in Germany, in a reunited Germany, because you want the Germans to have their own independent foreign policy and their own nuclear weapons, or you want us to be there. And the Soviets said, actually, we like you better than the Russians, now that we think about it. I mean, better than the Germans, now that we think about it. Right. So if America just absolutely does come home, might Japan and South Korea and Poland and other countries arm up with nukes? Yes, they might.

On the other hand, you know, could we have England and France sign treaties with Germany and Poland where they promise to come to their rescue with the atomic warheads they already have, and this have Britain and France’s nuclear umbrella instead of ours? Because there still would be heavy incentives against arming. Because arming up with nukes, obviously, again, can be a defensive deterrent. It could also make your enemies very wary and. And be very provocative. After all, you know, if Poland really broke out on a Manhattan Project, the Russians might be able to bomb it before they were able to finish it the way we did in Tehran.

Bombed their nuclear program. Not that they were making nukes, but you know what I mean? So there is a danger that, you know, on the other hand, you know, China, it’s not like Japan has to worry that the Chinese are just biding their time until their chance to steal Japan and occupy it and take those people over and kill them all, right? Like, that’s not in the cards here in any time, in even the intermediate future. And so I think, you know, you could have maybe if America disarms and the Chinese are really not interested in war with Japan.

Maybe China and Japan can negotiate that. Japan promises to still not get nukes if China will reduce the number of theirs or reduce whatever its posture here or find a new opportunity to cooperate there or whatever it is. And so I don’t think that, I mean because look the other direction of this argument is that America must simply create a one world government and a monopoly on nuclear weapons so that only we have them so no one else can have them because anybody has them, they’ll use them. And we don’t believe in that. You know, we have anarchy among nation states.

There is no overruling power of the nation states. And, and it’s, we have this double edged sword all the time, right? America is the ultimate school marm with the ruler telling the whole world you better stay in line or else. And, or else potentially means Armageddon, right? Or else means we will do anything to maintain this dominance and, and including even pick fights that could result in escalations out of control. I mean Brent Scowcroft, George Bush Senior’s man, he didn’t want to bring Ukraine into NATO. He, as I just said, he didn’t want to even want Ukraine to be independent at all.

Thought it was the height of folly to expand NATO into the east. This, he wasn’t a liberal Democrat. He was George Bush seniors right hand man, General Brent Scowcroft, four star general like or three, turned national security advisor and co authored Bush seniors memoirs with him. Right? He was known as Bush senior’s alter ego and best friend. And he came out against NATO expansion in the 1990s not because he’s some naive commie hippie but because we’re going to unnecessarily cause conflicts again. We’re having this discussion nuclear weapons while there’s a proxy war hot in Ukraine makes the whole context of this so much more fraught with danger really.

It’s just the problem is as always, right, the unorganized masses are unorganized and there’s just not much we can do about things like this. These questions are made by people so far above our pay grade, right? And the public, as you say, we need to see H bombs going off to even believe they exist, right? Like does anybody even. There’s actually there’s a few who think, who think they don’t exist. Yeah, Kurt Metzger, my, my friend, I can say this about him, he won’t mind. My, my new friend Kurt Metzger the comedian doesn’t believe that there’s nuclear weapons.

I said well do you believe in atoms? But like yeah, there’s a. There’s a consensus among some groups of people that that whole thing’s a hoax. So. So that’s how removed from these questions the public can be, when really it should be absolutely our highest priority. I mean, I just think nothing else matters other than the relationship between Washington and Moscow. The entire future of humanity hangs in the balance. Where do you think we’re going to be this time next year with this? Will we have seen a nuke go off? Will we have. No, no, no, I’m not betting on that.

Look, I think the, the risk has increased, but I’m not saying it’s increased to likelihood. I’m just saying I don’t like it and everybody ought to be ramping things down. You know, when I was a boy, I asked my dad, Jesus, this Reagan guy gonna get us into a nuclear war. And, and when I was what I just say, it was when I was in first grade, I guess I was a six. And he goes, nah, I don’t really like Reagan’s brinksmanship. You know, I guess it was 82, first grade says, I don’t like Reagan’s brinksmanship and the way he’s like, increasing tensions with the Soviet Union.

However, he does not want a war, and nor do the Soviets want a war with us. They. Everybody in charge knows how destructive it would be, and they wouldn’t dare. So I don’t like his confrontational approach. Do I think, like, yeah, that’s what he’s trying to do is make things so bad that it turns into a war. Nah. And so, like, yeah, sorry, but that’s what I was raised on. What are you going to do? That’s what my dad told me when I was six. So it’s the same thing I’ll tell you now. Like, come on, man.

They don’t want to use nukes. But the thing is, it could happen and that should be bad enough. The fact that they have made this a real risk and that they’ve made it an increased risk is unacceptable. Well, you’re far more optimistic than I am. I look at November 5, 2024, when we were told many people naively bought into the idea that the war would end in 24 hours. And here we are talking about Tomahawk missiles, nuclear submarines off the shores of Russia at nuclear testing. If we play that tape through a few more months, I very concerned that we might actually see something.

But. Well, let me, let me, let me assuage your concern there a little bit. And then I’m sorry, I realize I’M late now and have to run. But the thing about that is, is you’re right, he was not able to end the war. He wanted to, but he didn’t know what the war is really about or the stakes involved or what it would take to end it. He just thought he’d just get in there and start shaking hands and slapping backs and figure it out and then. But no, that’s not going to work on calling an audible on this one.

The Russians have too much at stake. They’re in for a penny, they’re in for a pound. They’re winning the war, but they haven’t won it yet. They’re winning slowly. They have not taken all of the territory that they have claimed now belongs to them and they own all of Luhansk, but they don’t own all of Donetsk, Zaprozia or Kherson. And they don’t seem to be very willing to compromise on that. Certainly not on done Yetsk, potentially on Zaprozia and Kherson, although unlikely. And so they are probably just going to keep fighting. And there ain’t a damn thing that Donald Trump can do about that is the real answer.

Unless he was willing to just absolutely make best friends out of Putin, which is essentially. And out of Putin’s Russia, which is essentially politically impossible for him to do. If it was his only priority of his presidency would be we are putting an end to this Cold War right now, damn it then maybe. But he can’t do that. He’s not doing that. And so the war is going to continue. On the other hand, the only real risk that nuclear weapons are going to get broken out in this thing is if Russia starts losing. And they’re not losing, dude, they’re not in danger of losing any of the territory that they hold, much less Crimea and you know, their all important naval base and all that.

The only risk that they would use atom bombs if they were is if they were really in desperate straits. And that’s not in the cards. So that’s the bad news for our friends, the Ukrainians, but that’s the good news for the rest of humanity, is there’s no obvious reason why this will escalate to nuclear conflict. The west will lose and then they’ll abandon their friends and leave them high and dry to be slaughtered just like always. Because that’s the best case scenario is that we abandon them sooner than later because we got our friends into a fight they can’t win, same thing we did in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

And so that sucks for them and we need to call it off as fast as possible for sure. But the Germans, the French, the British, they’re not brave enough, desperate enough to say, oh yeah, well, we’re going to jump in now. We’re sending our air force and our infantry. No, they’re not. And so that’s it. It’s so in other words, the war sucks, but there’s no, there’s no real reason to think it’s going to escalate to a nuclear conflict. Now the western side is going to lose, but the western side is in the far east of even eastern Europe.

So they don’t really care. See, they don’t really care. They’re not losing Warsaw and they’re not losing Berlin. So doesn’t matter to Washington. Not really. Okay. Interesting perspective. Scott Horton. Check out the Scott Horton show on YouTube. YouTube loves it when we keep it on the platform. So I’ll let you guys go over there, subscribe to his channel then if you want, you can also subscribe to the Scott Horton academy and definitely check out the book hotter than the sun, which is a. A collection of interviews with experts like the late Daniel Ellsberg. Thanks for coming on, man.

I appreciate it and look forward to talking to you again. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. And everybody, please check out Scott hortonacademy.com awesome. Take care. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
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