The Pentagon is rethinking America’s nuclear weapons strategy – including lowering the barrier for their use in the battlefield. Why national security analyst Joe Cirincione says this could spark a new nuclear arms race.

Guests

Joseph Cirincione, national security analyst. Vice chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for International Policy. Author of multiple books about nuclear weapons policy, as well as the Substack “Strategy & History.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In 1946, a year after World War II had finally ended, Dr. Albert Einstein gave a radio address to students at Northwestern University in Chicago. He spoke about the world the young people were about to step into, a world utterly transformed by nuclear weapons.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: What is the situation? The development of technology and of the implements of war has brought about something akin to a shrinking of our planet. Economic interlinking has made the destinies of nations interdependent to a degree far greater than in previous years. The available weapons of destruction are of a kind such that no place on Earth is safeguarded against certain total, total destruction.

CHAKRABARTI: Einstein himself had played a role in the creation of atomic weapons. In 1939, he sent a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany was at work harnessing the power of nuclear chain reactions to create, quote, “extremely powerful bombs.” That letter from Einstein spurred Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project and the U.S.’s lead in the creation of nuclear weapons.

Einstein spent much of the rest of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons. He told the Northwestern students in 1946 that hoping for the best was not enough to avoid destruction.

EINSTEIN: A permanent peace cannot be prepared by threats, but only by the honest attempt to create mutual trust. One should think that the wish to create a decent form of life on this planet and to avert the danger of unspeakable destruction would tame the passions of responsible men. You cannot rely on that, my young friends. May you succeed in activating the young generation in this sense so that it will strive for a policy of peace on a grand scale.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, to me, the most timeless line in that excerpt is when Einstein says, quote, “One would think that the desire to create a decent form of life on this planet and to avert the danger of unspeakable destruction would tame the passions of responsible men.” End quote. Einstein clearly didn’t think that would be enough. The very next year, 1947, he and many other physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project created the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and every year since, that publication, The Bulletin, has published the Doomsday Clock, a warning of just how close they think the world is to nuclear Armageddon.

And this year, they pushed the clock to 85 seconds before midnight. Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, made the announcement.

ALEXANDRA BELL: The risks we face from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies are all growing. Every second counts, and we are running out of time. It is a hard truth, but this is our reality. It is now 85 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the world has ever been to midnight.

CHAKRABARTI: The closest it has ever been to midnight in the Doomsday Clock’s almost 80-year history. Well, let’s bring Joseph Cirincione here. He’s a national security analyst and the vice chair of the board of directors of the Center for International Policy.

He has many decades of experience regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear nonproliferation. He’s written many books about the subject. He also runs the Substack Strategy & History, and he recently wrote a post that also appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called The Pentagon’s Secret Plan: Reviving Cold War Doctrines to Lower the Threshold for Nuclear War.

Joe, welcome back to On Point.

JOE CIRINCIONE: Meghna, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to actually start with those Einstein clips I played. Today, what does it make you think, hearing Einstein warn 60 years ago that the simple desire to not have nuclear Armageddon is not enough to, as he said, “Tame the passions of even the most responsible men.”

CIRINCIONE: Those are great quotes. What a wonderful way to begin this discussion. And of course, Einstein is completely correct. You would think that the commonsense approach for humankind would be to limit or get rid of these weapons that we invented, the most destructive weapons humankind has ever developed.

But for 81 years, since we used the weapons on Japanese cities at the end of World War II, there’s been a struggle between the people who want to get rid of these weapons and people who want to get more of these weapons, and it’s gone back and forth, up and down. We’ve had waves of the arms race accelerating to insane levels of nuclear weapons.

About 70,000 nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War in the mid-1980s. We’re now down to about 12,000 nuclear weapons held by nine different nations, most of those held by the United States and Russia. And that’s the lowest we’ve been since the 1950s, but 12,000 nuclear weapons is still a lot. And we’re still locked in the struggle between those who think that these are terrible weapons that could end human civilization in a few minutes, and those who think that these are essential weapons for their national security.

That struggle continues.

CHAKRABARTI: Before we get to where we are today with the Doomsday Clock, Joe, sticking with what Einstein was warning about, the world heeded his warning, not just his but for many other people. And in fact, after the Second World War, we did enter something of a period of hard-won global consensus, right? Over the dangers of nuclear Armageddon, which gave rise to a number of global treaties. Right? Can you just very briefly walk us through kind of the important highlights of that history?

CIRINCIONE: One of the reasons the United States started the United Nations in 1945 was to bring an end to war, or at least minimize the number of wars that would occur because we realized that with the nuclear bomb, any conventional war could escalate to a nuclear war.

In fact, the first resolution introduced into the United Nations was by the United States, by President Harry Truman, calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. And that didn’t work. Cold War rivalries soon killed chance to get rid of that. The Soviet Union realized if the U.S. had a nuclear weapon, they had to have one, too.

And we set off on an arms race. But during all that time, in the 1950s, the 1960s, there were efforts to restrain that arm arms race. People understood that this was insanity. People compared it to lemons running off the edge of a cliff … or two scorpions in a bottle, that if one struck, the other would strike.

It was mutually assured destruction. We did get a number of arms control treaties, most prominently beginning in the 1970s with Republican President Richard Nixon, guided by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that limited nuclear weapons in 1972, capped the number that the U.S. and the Soviets could have, limited national missile defenses at the same time.

And that started a process that really peaked in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. Remember Ronald Reagan’s strategy was peace through strength. In some ways, that did work. His nuclear buildup at the beginning of the 1980s led to mass protests around the world, Europe and in the United States.

The public was horrified about nuclear weapons. I would say during the ’80s, that was the number one issue in national security, how to control the nuclear weapons the U.S. and the Soviets were fielding. That came to a conclusion at the end of the 1980s. Ronald Reagan began the process that not just limited nuclear weapons, but started to reduce them with his strategic arms reduction talk. And then led to George W. Bush continue that. George W. Bush continued that. And we had a series of arms control agreements that destroyed nuclear weapons, bringing us, as I say, from 70,000 down to 12,000 today. But now it’s leveled off. There are no more nuclear arms control talks.

Many of the treaties these Republicans and Democrats negotiated have been jettisoned.

CHAKRABARTI: By the United States

CIRINCIONE: By the United States and by Vladimir Putin. Both of them cooperated in killing many of these treaties. There are no talks underway, and in fact almost all of the nine nations that have nuclear weapons are engaged in processes to build more of these weapons and build weapons for new uses, as in their doctrines.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Joe, I’m going to tease listeners here and say that when we come back from a break, we have a break in a couple of minutes, we’ll talk about what you wrote recently regarding the Pentagon even flirting with lowering the threshold for nuclear war. So folks, stick with us. We will get to that.

But I will also still want … I want to talk about the anti-nuclear movement’s success, and maybe it has now become a victim of its own success. Because when you mention that phrase mutually assured destruction, I was a child of the ’80s, and so that was a very common phrase. It took me right back to middle school. We weren’t doing duck and cover in the ’80s, but there was constantly this sort of penumbra of concern that unless something was done, we could actually end up wiping entire nations off the face of the earth and plunging the entire planet into nuclear winter.

The Day After, right? You remember that movie? It was a cultural moment. But I would argue that there’s a couple of generations of Americans alive now who’ve never even heard that phrase, and maybe have never even had to worry about or felt like they had to worry about nuclear war because of the reductions that you talked about that happened in the ’80s and ’90s.

CIRINCIONE: Yeah. The theory underlying most of our nuclear acquisition has been that because we were facing an authoritarian foe, the Soviet Union and then later China who could not be trusted with these nuclear weapons, who might use these nuclear weapons, we had to have our own versatile stockpile of weapons to deter them from going first so that if the Soviet … So the Soviet Union wouldn’t even think about attacking us, because they could be assured that we would strike back and it would be mutually assured destruction. Everybody would suffer in this war. And that strategy has obvious problems, because it depends on rational actors on both sides.

And as John F. Kennedy famously summed up in his speech to the United Nations: ‘We’re living under a nuclear sword of Damocles that could be cut at any moment by accident, miscalculation, or madness.’ And that is just as true today as it was then.

Part II

CIRINCIONE: Right now, in the Pentagon, there is a secretive nuclear review going on that aims to give President Trump more options for using nuclear weapons. Unlike previous nuclear posture reviews, this is a close-hold affair according to officials. It’s primarily the Pentagon, also involving the Department of Energy, the department that actually makes the nuclear weapons.

But it excludes the State Department, the National Security Council that have been included in previous estimates. It’s not going to be public breaking with precedent. It’s supposed to be a close-hold review. And the idea is to allow the President of the United States to have more options for how to use nuclear weapons early in a conflict.

And this is one of the most dangerous concepts left over from the Cold War, the idea that nuclear weapons are not just useful for deterrent to stop the bad guys from attacking us, but they could be useful in winning conventional wars. And so we should design not just very big nuclear weapons on missiles and submarines and heavy bombers, but smaller nuclear weapons that could be used on cruise missiles or short-range rockets or dropped by jet fighter planes that could turn the tide in a conventional war we might be losing.

This is an extremely dangerous concept, and it’s not getting anywhere near the congressional or public scrutiny that it deserves.

CHAKRABARTI: The reason why we know that this review is underway even though it’s not public is because, were you looking at the remarks from August 5th from the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby, that he gave at the United States Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium?

CIRINCIONE: Yes. That is the most complete public statement we have from the administration.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So by the way, folks, his remarks, there’s a transcript of these remarks. It’s actually on the Pentagon’s website. I’ve got it here in front of me, and he does indeed say that that this new review will not be public-facing.

He full-blown admits that. Now, as you said, that completely deviates from standard or typical practice for the Pentagon. Do you have any indication that members of Congress even know about this?

CIRINCIONE: I expect that at some point there will be congressional briefings on this.

There have been a few to talk about the process previously. But no details have been released. I don’t think the armed services committees have yet had a full, a classified briefing on this, and I don’t even know if one is planned. That’s part of this tendency in the Trump administration to keep everything secret, close hold, involve a few officials.

They don’t really care about Congress. They don’t really care about public opinion. You see this across the board, and nuclear is no exception.

CHAKRABARTI: He says, by the way, just so folks know directly Colby says, quote, “This is not designed to be a public-facing review.” He says it right there. Okay, so let’s go back to what you’re saying could be the major change.

It’s not just in the kind of arsenal that the United States wants to build up under the Trump administration, but its use in winning conventional wars. So does this mean that the Trump administration is looking at creating a framework where it would lower the threshold for the use of tactical nuclear weapons?

CIRINCIONE: Yes, absolutely. That’s the idea. And the idea is it’s sort of a theoretical idea, and it’s one that’s been around since the 1950s. And that is if you can control what they call the escalation ladder, if you can have escalation management of a conflict, you can win that conflict, maybe even deter the conflict from beginning in the first place if the enemy knows that at every stage of the conflict you have superior military force that can be brought against them.

And in many cases here, take the war in Iran, for example. We’ve seen that the United States, which spends over a trillion dollars a year on military weaponry, it’s been basically defeated in a war by a country that spends about $7 billion a year. We cannot win that war in the Persian Gulf.

We have lost that war. That’s a kind of a situation where you might be tempted to bring in bigger guns. In this case, say, a small nuclear weapon to destroy the deeply buried underground facilities at Natanz or Isfahan or Fordow. That might be a temptation. You might confront a Chinese invasion of Taiwan that’s massive and comprehensive, and the U.S., very far from the conflict, doesn’t have enough firepower to deter that.

Again, that’s a scenario where you might decide to use some regional nuclear weapons delivered by ship or by plane that could destroy that Chinese invasion. That’s the idea. So you want to make these weapons friendly for battlefield use in the idea that knowing that the enemy knows you have them, they might not start the conflict in the first place.

CHAKRABARTI: This philosophically, Joe, sounds exactly like Cold War thinking, right? That was the entire point, was deterrence through strength, and strength being demonstrated by the size and capability of both the USSR and the United States nuclear arsenals.

CIRINCIONE: Yes. During the Cold War, right now we have about 5,000 nuclear weapons total, maybe about 2,000 of them actually deployed, ready for use in a moment’s notice. But during the Cold War, in the 1980s, we had 35,000 nuclear weapons, and a whole lot of them, probably the majority of them, were battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons deployed on short, medium and intermediate range rockets, deployed on ships.

We had nuclear depth charges, nuclear torpedoes. We had nuclear landmines. We had all kinds of nuclear weapons, and the idea was we could use these to win a nuclear war. That was insane. That was insane. You had all kinds of leaders denouncing that policy, and finally, because basically of Ronald Reagan and the reductions he started, we started to get rid of those weapons.

And in 1991, George H.W. Bush got rid of 14,000 of those weapons with one executive order, including taking all the nuclear weapons away from the Army, taking them off of Navy ships, et cetera. And the Soviets then reciprocated, and that led to a reduction. So we don’t see many of these battlefield nukes deployed anymore.

We have a few hundred left. The Russians have more, but they’re mostly in warehouses. They have a thousand, maybe even 2,000, but not deployed, just stuck, it’s stuck. They haven’t disassembled them yet. And so the new Pentagon review would reverse all this. They would start bringing these weapons back.

They would start using, they would, they want to build, for example, a new sea-launch cruise missile, which would bring nuclear weapons back on the U.S. surface fleet for the first time since 1991. They want to develop smaller warheads for some of our intercontinental missiles so that we could use missiles fired from submarines to hit battlefield targets, things like that.

There’s a vast array. There’s no end of proposals coming out of the nuclear industry for this. And now we have a Pentagon that seems eager to embrace them in the spirit of a warrior ethos of reviving this idea of peace through strength.

CHAKRABARTI: Joe, so can we get a little technical here for a second?

CIRINCIONE: Sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I think we’re still in a popular understanding of nuclear weapons, that when we talk about them, people naturally think of sort of the city-obliterating type of nuclear weapon. But when you’re talking about these battlefield nukes or these tactical nukes, what kind of damage can they do?

CIRINCIONE: Oh, okay. Let me give you an example. This is one thing that Trump actually implemented in his first term. We have about 14 strategic nuclear submarines. Each one of these submarines, they prowl the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each one has 20 tubes, 20 launchers in them with 20 missiles.

Each one of those missiles has about five warheads on it, nuclear warheads. I know that’s a lot of numbers to throw at you, so it’s hundreds and hundreds of warheads per sub. Most of these warheads are very large, hydrogen bombs, thermonuclear bombs. They’re 455 kilotons, 455. By comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. So each one of these bombs is about 30 times the size of Hiroshima. So you could think of that, 30 Hiroshimas per warhead, a sub with five warheads, 20 of those missiles. That’s a lot of destruction. That by itself, each sub by itself could, you know, easily destroy the Soviet Union, Russia, China.

The argument is that we’ve been self-deterred from using those. The weapons are so big that they’re not usable anymore. So Donald Trump or his Pentagon of those days, ordered that two of those missiles should now be fitted out with very small nuclear weapons. About eight kilotons, about half a Hiroshima.

The idea is we’ve got this beautiful missile that could, from any, from the middle of the Pacific, could hit an area the size of a football field, 5,000 miles away. It’s an extremely accurate missile, but let’s use it to now, not to destroy a whole city, but to destroy a port, to destroy a formation, to destroy another enemy’s military formation.

That would make it more usable, but that’s only one weapon. This Pentagon review is talking about bringing on several other types of weapons, including new, smaller, more usable air drop bombs, new cruise missiles, et cetera, to make them easier for a president to decide that they want to go nuclear in a conventional war they might be losing.

CHAKRABARTI: Joe, half a Hiroshima bomb, though. We had … 150,000 people die in Hiroshima.

CIRINCIONE: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: 80,000 of them died instantaneously. So half a Hiroshima is still 40,000 people being vaporized.

CIRINCIONE: Just to put this in perspective, if we had one, if a conflict led to one city being destroyed by one nuclear weapon, that would be more destruction than we’ve seen since World War II.

If we had a conflict that led to 10 cities being destroyed by 10 small nuclear weapons, that would be a level of destruction unprecedented in human history. If we had 100 cities destroyed by 100 nuclear weapons, that could actually trigger a global nuclear winter that could kill most food crops in the world and lead to a global famine that could kill two billion people, even those very far removed from the conflict itself.

That’s the level of destruction we’re talking about. These are earth-changing, world-changing weapons, and we have thousands of them, and now the Pentagon wants to build more.

CHAKRABARTI: I’m always concerned with how language is used in politics, Joe, and to hear, when people, when elected officials or members of the Trump administration talk about tactical nuclear weapons, it’s a sanitizing phrase, right?

Because it’s not just quote-unquote, “taking out a port.” It would still cause, as you just said the kinds of destruction we haven’t seen in 80 years, and it could very rapidly accelerate because so many more nations have nuclear weapons now. This is getting us to what I think is the most disturbing core of what seems to be a shift in American thinking under the Trump administration.

The United States for a long time, and correct me if I’m wrong, Joe, but held on to a doctrine that it would never be a nation that did the first strike, right? That use of nuclear weapons would only come in as a retaliatory response. True?

CIRINCIONE: No.

CHAKRABARTI: No, okay.

CIRINCIONE: Sorry. (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: No, I’m glad you’re correcting me here.

CIRINCIONE: No. For example, we obviously are the only country to have used nuclear weapons, and we used them first in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But since then, we’ve talked about them as a deterrent force, but we’ve never ruled out going first. And there have been repeated efforts by people like me to adopt a formal, what they call no first use doctrine, or to adopt a doctrine that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons was to deter other countries from attacking us, and presidents have refused, including Obama and Biden.

People who have spoken generally in favor of it haven’t actually changed the doctrine. So no, we do not have what’s called a no first-use doctrine. We reserve the right to go nuclear first.

CHAKRABARTI: I wonder how I came away with such a profound misunderstanding.

CIRINCIONE: Because we talk about it that way.

You get the impression from public statements that we wouldn’t even consider using this, and we only have them ’cause the other guys have them and we are a democracy, and we value human life, and we would never use these weapons willy-nilly. Are we still that democracy? Do we still have a president who believes in the value of human life?

The problem we’re facing in the world today is that more and more of the countries that used to be democracies are no longer democracies, and they have nuclear weapons. They have authoritarian leaders with nuclear weapons.

We used to consider them responsible stewards of nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan, Israel, the United States itself. And all of those countries now have authoritarian leaders. In fact, for the first time in the history of the nuclear age, the vast majority of nuclear weapons are controlled by authoritarian leaders.

Some of them, like China, Russia, North Korea, have established authoritarian states, but India, Pakistan, Israel, the United States clearly have authoritarian leaders who have a very different concept of their powers on the value of human life and the necessity of democracy on restraints, et cetera. So we’re entering a very dangerous new world not just because there’s new technologies, not just because there’s a new arms race, but because the nature of the leaders that control these nuclear weapons has fundamentally changed just from the beginning of this century when you would have to say there was only one authoritarian leader with nuclear weapons, and that was China.

Now, there’s seven.

CHAKRABARTI: So Joe, you’ve just hit on something which I think is so important to understand because you’re describing a world that hasn’t existed before, in terms of the combination of political leadership and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. We’ve got about 30 seconds before our next break here.

If these authoritarians all are looking at the world as a place of returning to great power conflict through the singular authority of these, quote-unquote, “great men,” is that one of the things that’s leading you to this concern about the lowering of the threshold for the willingness to use nuclear weapons?

CIRINCIONE: Absolutely. Vladimir Putin has made more nuclear threats in his war with Ukraine than all the leaders of the world have made in the last 81 years. It’s every week he’s threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we got used to that.

We think of him as a dictatorial, unresponsible, maybe even crazy leader. The President of the United States tosses around similar language all the time, and it comes up all the time when people worry about the mental stability of our president. We always say he has his finger on the nuclear button.

That’s exactly right. We have a group of authoritarian leaders, and all of them have their fingers on the nuclear button.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Joe, you said something earlier which I want to push on a little bit more, and I am honorably chastened that I had such a big misunderstanding about the doctrine of no first strike. But it’s an important point that you made that all presidents since the dawn of the nuclear age, Republican and Democrat, have never been willing to let go of nuclear weapons as actually a quite a central part of America’s overall military strategy.

So I want to just play some recent comments here from a member of the Trump administration. This is Dr. Robert Kadlec. He’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Deterrence, Chemical, and Biological Defense Policy and Programs. And he was before a House Armed Services Committee hearing in March saying that the United States needs to modernize its nuclear forces to defend against a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

The role of our nuclear arsenal in this context is not to fight and win a nuclear war, but to deter China escalating to nuclear use in the first place, or from believing it can use its nuclear arsenal to coerce us into accepting a fait accompli. Our nuclear forces must provide the president with credible options to manage the escalation, demonstrating that any nuclear use will be met with a response that leaves the adversary worse off.

CHAKRABARTI: And then he also said, Dr. Kadlec also talked about actually something you had mentioned as well, Joe, and that’s the fact that the planet, the world, the United States needs to be ready for the possibility of simultaneous coordinated attacks in multiple parts of the world.

This does not mean we must match their combined arsenals warhead for warhead. It means we require a nuclear force sufficient to inflict unacceptable costs on both adversaries under any contingency, ensuring that neither believes that they can exploit a crisis elsewhere for their own gain.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Joe, I want to follow up that with one other comment made by Elbridge Colby in that August 5th symposium that he gave.

And he’s the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He said, “The nuclear forces and modernization of our nuclear deterrent is the single most important initiative for the American military. At the end of the day, we have to have a survivable, diversified triad. We have to have secure second-strike forces. We have to be able to provide strategic deterrence and a capable and credible extended deterrent that’s coupled with our conventional forces.”

So I guess what I’m trying to get to here, Joe, is what is meaningfully different now than the policy or the strategy that we had under previous presidents?

CIRINCIONE: Those are great quotes. Thank you for bringing them up, Meghna. The first thing is that this is the kind of military techno babble that passes for strategy in Washington. You can see these kind, the way they talk about them is very high concept ideas. But what it means, what they want the Congress to do is give them hundreds of billions of dollars.

We spend about $100 billion a year on nuclear weapons. They want to give them that money to develop more weapons and make it easier to use these weapons. And under the idea, which is not crazy, that the enemy has to be, has to know that they can’t win a conflict so therefore might deter it.

That means that you have to be prepared to wage that conflict. You have to, in order to convince the enemy that there would be nuclear weapons used in the conflict, you have to be ready to go use them. So you have to deploy, build them. You have to deploy them. You have to train with them. You have to practice using them.

That gets us into extremely dangerous territory. That means that you’re now, what this might mean in practice is that it would erase the very sharp line we have between conventional military operations, so the battlefield commands like the Pacific Command or the Central Command, the command that’s waging the war in Iran right now.

They’re divided from the people who control the nuclear weapons, the strategic command. You might see the blurring of this, and battlefield commanders might now have direct access to nuclear weapons that are being deployed from their ships, for example, or stationed with army brigades that are launched.

This is the strategy we had in the 1950s and ’60s. Colin Powell writes about this in his book, An American Journey. When he was a major, I think, he was assigned a NATO control of a command of a nuclear artillery brigade in West Germany and was told that if war breaks out, we would fire nuclear shells.

These are some of the 10-kiloton, 20-kiloton Hiroshima-sized weapons. We would fire those weapons at the advancing Red Army. Powell writes this was the craziest thing he ever heard. We’d be, in effect, destroying West Germany to save West Germany. And he swore that if he was ever in a position to do something about it, he would.

And when he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he’s the one who implemented George H.W. Bush’s policy of getting rid of 14,000 nuclear weapons, including the nuclear artillery brigade he commanded. So that’s the idea. We rejected that idea. We’ve had, for decades now, we’ve been moving away from those crazy Cold War policies.

This nuclear review, people like the gentleman you just quoted want to bring it back in the name of deterrence. But what it really is a recipe for nuclear war fighting.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this all goes up to the commander-in-chief, right? The President of the United States. And I have to admit, I have a hard time, I have a hard time reading almost anything that our current president says, but especially on this. Because many years ago, he was quoted as saying, “If you have nuclear weapons, why don’t you eventually use them?” Which opened a lot of people’s eyes to what might have been the president’s view on nuclear war.

But more recently, a couple months ago, and then also just a couple of days ago, when asked specifically about Iran, because you had mentioned Iran earlier, the president just a couple of days ago said, quote, “I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to. We’re the greatest nuclear power in the world.” And then several months ago, about five months ago he said, “A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anyone on anyone.” So we talk about finger on the button. What do you think?

CIRINCIONE: Trump is all over the map here. He just says stuff, what does any of it mean? What we do know is that in September, he went before the General Assembly of the United Nations and threatened to annihilate Iran. Annihilate Iran and do it quickly. The only way to annihilate a country of 92 million people and do it quickly is nuclear weapons.

So he doesn’t say it there, but that clearly is his implication. And the desperate situation we’re in right now, and I want to be careful here, is that we have a president who, let’s say, his mental stability is questionable, and he is losing power. And a desperate president in the last two years of his administration could take desperate actions.

He could be clinging to these instruments of power or terror that nuclear weapons provide to maintain his position, his power, they are the ultimate threat, and if a desperate president finds himself in a corner, either globally or domestically, he might go to extreme measures. And that’s the problem we have, because under the system we’ve developed, the President of the United States has the sole unfettered authority to use nuclear weapons, meaning he’s the only one who can give the command, and when he gives the command, it cannot be countered.

He doesn’t need anybody else’s approval. He doesn’t need to go through a cabinet level review. He doesn’t … there’s no Supreme Court review. There’s no request to Congress. He can pick up the phone, order a nuclear strike, and within five minutes, the missiles would be flying, and no one could stop it. That is an insane state of affairs.

Maybe it was justified in the terror days of the Cold War, but it certainly isn’t justified now. And if the Democrats control Congress again, or if the Democrats become, take over the White House in a couple of years, at the top of the list should be changing that doctrine so that no one person, sane or insane, can order a nuclear war.

And the last thing we should be doing is having a Pentagon review that gives a president, including this president, more ways to start a nuclear war.

CHAKRABARTI: Which, as you said, it’s not going to be public, or it’s not going to be an interagency review.

CIRINCIONE: Yeah. Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. It’s one thing to have concerns about … it’s a huge thing to have concerns about the mental stability of the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces, a.k.a. the president, but it’s also not just that. There’s a whole solar system, let’s call it of people around the president, of groups around the president who are advocating for a much more aggressive nuclear posture by the United States. You wrote about this. I actually hadn’t known about this until I went back and looked at your writing, Joe, that in Project 2025 there’s an entire section that outlines how I guess Russell Vought and others who helped put together Project 2025, how they see the United States as rebuilding or amplifying its nuclear arsenal.

CIRINCIONE: Oh, absolutely. As I say, this has been going on for 81 years. Get rid of these weapons. No, we need more of these weapons. It’s a global phenomenon, certainly here in the United States, and you’ve always had people, mainly conservatives, who have argued that we need more nuclear weapons, and we have to be, we have to demonstrate our willingness to use them.

And you even have people like Keith Payne, who’s an advocate of these doctrines, writing an article in 1980 called Victory Is Possible, arguing for how we could fight and win a nuclear war. And sure, we’d lose 20 or 30 million people, but that’s far better than losing to an authoritarian state, and the world that would bring about.

So you have … this is their mindset. This is what they think. It’s not just Dr. Strangelove, which by the way, is probably the most accurate description of our nuclear strategy depicted in any single movie. But now you have the folks at The Heritage Foundation, the people who brought us Project 2025, having a detailed plan, not just conceptually, but programmatically.

How do we do this? How do we increase the number of nuclear weapons we make? How do we bring the whole complex of laboratories and production facilities, how do we gear that up and ramp it up to what they call wartime production rates? That’s their phrase. And how do we get the American people on our side?

And when you look at what they advocated, it’s like going down a checkbox. They have maybe 10 steps the president should take. Sure enough, he’s taken almost all of those 10 state steps, let me read a couple of these … I’ve got them right here in front of me.

Prioritizing nuclear weapons programs over other security programs.

CIRINCIONE: There you go. Colby said it’s the most single important mission. We just lost a war in, with Iran, but somehow nuclear weapons are the single most important thing we do? But yes, right off the top, that’s it. This is mission number one.

CHAKRABARTI: And there’s another one here, which is quite eye-opening. Reject any congressional efforts to find more cost-effective alternatives to current plans. That’s interesting.

CIRINCIONE: One of the biggest programs we have now under way is of building a new ICBM. They call it the Sentinel ICBM, replacing the 400 or 450 that we have now, and it’s a hugely expensive program, hundreds of billions of dollars.

The members of Congress have said wait, do we really have to build a new one? Can’t we just modify the existing one? That’s what they’re getting at. Make sure there’s no cheaper alternatives. We want brand-new systems, new hundred billion dollar contracts across the board.

Check, the administration is doing that.

CHAKRABARTI: So you mentioned that developing new nuclear-armed sea launch cruise missiles even though the Navy has not actually requested that.

CIRINCIONE: Check.

CHAKRABARTI: Increase the number of nuclear weapons above current treaty limits or existing program goals, so bigger, stronger weapons.

CIRINCIONE: Check in progress. So the last existing arms reduction treaty we had was called the New START Treaty. It expired. Donald Trump let it expire, so it doesn’t … there is no treaty limiting U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons. Neither side has actually broken the treaty limits yet, but the Heritage Foundation and people in the new administration, Trump administration, want to do that.

The easiest way to do that is take the land-based ballistic missiles we have, and instead of putting one warhead on them, quickly upload four or five warheads on them, increasing by thousands the number of strategic warheads that are deployed and ready to fly. I expect we’re going to see a move in that direction in the next two years of the Trump administration because they know the clock is ticking.

If they’re gonna implement this plan, they’ve gotta do it now.

CHAKRABARTI: So there’s two more out of the many remaining bullet points here that I just want to quickly hit on. Prepare to test new nuclear weapons even though the United States did sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

CIRINCIONE: Just to be clear, we’ve conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests, more than all the other countries in the world combined.

China, for example, has conducted, I don’t know, 40 or 50 nuclear tests. But some people if you want to build new nuclear weapons and you want to have new warhead designs, you’re going to have to test them, and that’s what they’re pushing for. And you can, there’s a number of officials who are pushing towards that, and that they want to move to a test preparedness posture, so getting the test site ready.

That’s a one to two-year process it would take. This is the test site in Nevada, so people in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, or Arizona, the downwinders who had cancer rates skyrocketed because of the tests we conducted over all these years. It’s not over. These guys want to start it up again.

So yes, that’s in train as well.

CHAKRABARTI: So there’s many more bullet points, which I’m afraid we don’t have time to go through. We only have a minute left, Joe, and there’s something really important I want to close with.

CIRINCIONE: Okay, good.

CHAKRABARTI: We’re also in the world of AI now, right? … And you wrote in your article that’s on the Bulletin that the sort of expected risk of a nuclear war with the advent of AI is sky-high, and that you say that almost every war game that the United States has run on the use of tactical nuclear weapons actually escalates the possibility of global nuclear war. We have only got, I’m sorry, about 30 seconds left, Joe. It doesn’t seem as if the people who actually think about military strategy believe that a more aggressive nuclear posture is going to make the United States safer.

CIRINCIONE: One thing we do is regularly run war games to test out scenarios. So let’s test out the idea that having nuclear weapons ready to use in a conventional war would, could bring that war to an end. Wrong. Most of the war games we’ve conducted where one side or the other starts using nuclear weapons escalate to global thermonuclear war.

And when you run war games where AI is involved, 98% of the time AI chooses to go to a global thermonuclear war.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.