Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #53 "History shows nuclear war will never happen.” with David Holloway

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Bad Idea #53 "History shows nuclear war will never happen.” with David Holloway · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
I think we're entering a new and very dangerous period, partly
0:04
linked to changes in the world order, NATO being greatly
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weakened by U.S. policy. We have the rise of China.
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So we won't have, you know, 2 nuclear superpowers.
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We'll have three nuclear superpowers.
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Welcome to saving the world from bad ideas.
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I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a few bad ideas in my time.
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I used to go out in the night time to destroy GMO crops, and I
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also opposed nuclear power. But then when I looked at the
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science, I found I got it wrong. Oops.
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I've learned the hard way that none of us are right all the
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time. So now I'm here to challenge the
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assumptions that we all too often take for granted because
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the future depends on us getting it right.
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Hello. My guest today is emeritus
0:45
professor at Stanford, the historian David Holloway, whose
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new book Nuclear Weapons and International History has
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recently been published. And on the back it's, it says a
1:00
superbly comprehensive and accessible account of humanity's
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perilous dance with death through the atomic age.
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And that's a nice blurb by Mark Linus, author of 6 Minutes to
1:09
Winter. So I hope that was useful for
1:11
you, David, in, in, in in promoting the book.
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But it's it's an amazing it's amazing read and welcome to the
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show. Thank you.
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Yeah, I'm glad to be here, and thank you for the blurb too.
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Pleasure at any time. It's a very it took me a while
1:25
to get through it because it's such a comprehensive book.
1:27
You study you, you cover the whole of the development of
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nuclear weapons right from, well, the Manhattan Project and
1:34
in 19 from 1943 onwards. You could probably correct me on
1:38
that all the way through to the end of the Cold War and tell me
1:43
what what, what the theme was that you wanted to to deal with
1:47
in this book that you haven't written about before and it
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hasn't been covered elsewhere before.
1:52
What I really wanted to deal with was the international
1:56
history of nuclear weapons, because there are lots of books
2:00
about the Manhattan Project, about Robert Oppenheimer, about
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British nuclear history, about the Soviet Union.
2:07
But when we think about nuclear, the impact of nuclear weapons on
2:13
international relations or the impact of international
2:15
relations and nuclear weapons, we're really dealing with
2:18
relationships. And I wanted to try to, as the
2:22
kind of focus of the book, deal with US Soviet relations from
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both sides. And, and that I think has become
2:31
over the recent years more possible because more archives
2:35
were opening up in the, in, in Russia on their own nuclear
2:39
history. And of course a huge amount has
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been written about U.S. Policy And I wanted to bring in
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European powers, so Britain and France and Germany, which of
2:50
course didn't acquire nuclear weapons, was a central issue,
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and also to deal with Sino Soviet relations as well, and
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South Asia. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's
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fully comprehensive, as you say, because you also talk about the
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development of the the French bomb, the British bomb, the
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Chinese bomb, which are often left out because it's often that
3:14
this story's told as a tale of two superpowers or it's or it's
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told us just the atomic bomb and the Oppenheimer.
3:22
The the story of Oppenheimer, of course, in the film, all, all
3:24
very well known. And actually you, you spend a
3:27
bit more time talking about the development of thermonuclear
3:30
weapons. So the hydrogen bomb, which
3:31
really was the the deal breaker, wasn't it?
3:35
That was what gave us the Cold War, essentially, rather than
3:37
just the atomic bomb. Yeah, I think the, the the H
3:41
bomb is a a big step forward in terms of sheer destructiveness.
3:44
So we had a, we had a Cold War I think already by then, but that
3:49
introduced the prospect of destruction on an absolutely
3:54
catastrophic scale. And you have from both,
3:59
certainly from the Soviet scientists to their leadership,
4:02
and indeed in the US too, the argument from the scientists
4:07
that this is so destructive that it could really, you know, who
4:11
knows, result in the destruction of all life on Earth.
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And it's a major step in in that.
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So I think they that thermonuclear turning point, as
4:22
I call it, is really crucial. Yeah.
4:24
And without getting in too much into the physics, although I
4:27
find it fascinating, maybe explain to people what the
4:31
difference is between the the atomic bomb and the hydrogen
4:34
bomb because I think it's actually really, really
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important and and also complete as I think it's completely
4:40
fascinating. So just give us a a quick 1-2 on
4:43
that. Right.
4:44
So the atomic bomb is a fission bomb and it comes from the
4:47
splitting of the heavy elements, I mean uranium and then
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plutonium. And you split those, and that
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releases energy up to you could get up to about 500 kilotons,
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remembering that Hiroshima was about 13 kilotons.
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But with the hydrogen bomb, it's the fusion of the light
5:06
elements, like the energy in the sun, and there you actually have
5:10
unlimited destructive power. The Soviet Union in 1961 tested
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a bomb that was designed to produce 100 megatons.
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Compared that with, you know, 13 kilotons and Hiroshima.
5:25
And they did detonate it, although they cut the yield down
5:29
to 15 megatons. So it's an enormous shift in the
5:33
sheer destructiveness of the weapons.
5:36
Yes, that was the famous Tsar bomber.
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Uh, I presume, and there are, there's quite a amazing piece of
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footage film actually on the, you can find it on YouTube of,
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of the detonation of that, that weapon, because it was
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absolutely colossal and caused shock waves which are felt over
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quite a lot of Northern Europe. So the I don't think they were
5:58
ever weaponized into a deliverable form at the 50
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megaton level, but the standard ICBM nuclear missiles have
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always been more than one or two or three megatons, haven't they?
6:08
So this is the the payload which you actually could essentially
6:13
devastate whole cities. Yeah, absolutely.
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And the Soviet Union did deploy some moreheads up to 20
6:20
megatons. So you destroy a whole area, you
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know, of concentrated industrial area.
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For example, I think of the East Coast of the US, northeast coast
6:30
of the US, That was something they had in mind.
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Or a a missile field with the number of silos.
6:36
You know, a single A20 megaton bomb could destroy that.
6:41
Yeah, and tell us a bit about how the hydrogen bomb project
6:47
continued. Like, because it was originally
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developed during the same time as the Manhattan Project, wasn't
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it? Well, at least the idea was for
6:53
the Super and that was the brainchild of Edward Teller and
6:57
what's his name, Ulam. So tell us how that design was,
7:01
was finally completed. And because that was with the
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the and the initial tests that were carried out in the Pacific.
7:06
Right. So during the the war in the
7:09
Manhattan Project, Edward Teller worked on the idea of a super
7:13
bomb. And super because in principle,
7:16
the explosive yield could be U unlimited depending on the
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amount of thermonuclear fuel you put in it.
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But it turned out that his initial concept of the design
7:27
didn't work. What you needed to do in the end
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was to exert extreme pressure on the thermonuclear fuel to ignite
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it and to, you know, continue the react the thermonuclear
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reactions once the fuel was ignited.
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And that was very difficult. And Truman took the decision at
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the beginning of 1950, yes, we'll build the H bomb.
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But two years later, it wasn't clear how that could be done.
7:57
And it was really the two men you mentioned, Teller and
8:02
Stanislav Ulam, who came up with the idea for how to compress the
8:06
thermonuclear fuel. So in 1954, but then especially
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in 1955, there was a series of thermonuclear tests in the South
8:17
Pacific and in the Marshall Islands.
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And the first of these was called the Bravo test.
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And that had a yield of 15 megatons.
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In other words, more than 1000 times more powerful and more
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destructive than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
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And that CRE that couldn't be hidden.
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I mean that became known to to everyone that there had been
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such a a test. And that really is where the
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kind of consciousness, I think of the just this massive
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destruction begins to affect international politics.
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The Soviet Union had received in espionage, I mean, intelligence
9:00
about what Teller was doing in the early stages.
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And they tried to develop that concept that Teller had had.
9:09
They didn't succeed, but they came up with a design of their
9:12
own less powerful than the American, you know, bravo shot,
9:17
but they also hit on the same notion of how to compress the
9:23
thermonuclear fuel. And they tested what's sometimes
9:26
called a two stage nuclear weapon in November of 1955.
9:31
So the so that was both of them had made the breakthrough and
9:36
the Soviet Union had tested in 1954, I think, sorry the the
9:42
Bravo test and the Soviet Union then in November of 1955 and.
9:47
This is less than 10 years before the Cuban Missile Crisis,
9:51
which famously of course, was the closest the world probably
9:55
ever got to nuclear war. So what?
9:59
What stage was the arms race at by then?
10:02
I understand that the US had many more nuclear weapons than
10:06
than the Soviets did, but were they in a position, had it come
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to a hot nuclear war in 1962, to cause the kind of worldwide
10:18
destruction that we we could expect with a very large scale
10:22
exchange of nuclear weapons, that might have been the case
10:24
later in the Cold War. They yes, they had enough to do
10:27
that. After the end of the Cold War,
10:30
the Russian Los Alamos did a study of what the consequences
10:35
would have been in 1958 if there had been the US Soviet nuclear
10:40
war. And their conclusion was that at
10:43
that time the US had enough nuclear weapons to turn the
10:48
Soviet Union into a radioactive desert.
10:51
Uh, at that time the Soviet Union had no intercontinental
10:56
missiles, but they had bombers targeted at Western Europe and
11:00
could have, you know, done that and missiles also beginning to
11:03
be deployed that could reach targets in Western Europe.
11:07
So this is in 1962 you mean? This is 195819. 58 OK.
11:13
Yeah, the point, which is when this study was done in Russia
11:16
after the war about what the consequences would have been by
11:20
1962. Yes, the Soviet Union, if the
11:24
missiles they put in Cuba had become operational, could have
11:27
done enormous damage in the in the United States, because they
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carried 1 megaton warheads, that's generally assumed.
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And they could have reached Washington, they could have
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reached New York, and the assumption was that's where they
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would be targeted. But still, the US had more
11:47
weapons that could strike the Soviet Union than the Soviet
11:50
Union had weapons that could strike the United States.
11:55
But still, enormous damage would have, you know, followed from
11:59
any exchange of nuclear weapons, enough to make Kennedy and
12:04
Kristoff really want to back away from a nuclear war.
12:09
And it's very interesting in the correspondence between them
12:13
during the crisis where they say, you know, we both
12:15
understand what this war would mean, but we we can't, we can't
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go forward with it. It's a war they didn't want,
12:22
that they came close to having. And in fact, they'd already
12:25
taken steps to defuse the situation, I believe when before
12:29
the most dangerous point, which was probably the confrontation
12:33
between the, the, the Russian submarine and the the American
12:38
Navy. That's famously known now as
12:41
Black Saturday. And there's various different
12:43
versions of this story. I tell one in my own book.
12:46
Can you give us give us your version and explain just how
12:51
close we came? So there were a number of things
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on on on the Black Black Sabbath 1 was AU 2 USU 2 reconnaissance
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plane was shot down over Cuba. That was one thing.
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Secondly, there were submarines that have been sent to to Cuba
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and one of those B 59 was identified and US kind of anti
13:16
submarine group surrounded it and was dropping practice,
13:20
dropped charges on on the submarine which obviously was
13:24
submerged. And the captain of the submarine
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at one point got so concerned that he apparently ordered or
13:33
what came close to ordering the launch of the one nuclear
13:36
torpedo he had on the submarine. But there was another officer
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senior to him, officer for the group of commander of the group
13:45
of submarines, who persuaded him not to do that.
13:49
And the submarine surfaced. And then there was another
13:53
crisis moment because the captain, you know, the US was
13:57
flying aircraft, you know, just a few meters above the submarine
14:01
was firing not so much of the submarine, but around it and
14:05
creating a very dangerous situation.
14:07
The the captain again thought, Oh my God, we're, we're under
14:11
attack. Let let me go and, and launch
14:15
the torpedo. But in fact, they realized that
14:18
what the US was doing was not attacking the submarine, but
14:21
just make creating a very dangerous situation, uh, a kind
14:25
of warning. And the decision was taken not
14:28
to fire the submarine. It was AUS aircraft carrier.
14:31
What if that had been hit with a nuclear submarine and the
14:35
submarine just sailed away? There are different accounts of
14:39
it. It's but I think that to my
14:41
mind, is the kind of base, basic situation where really we were
14:46
saved by the professionalism in a way of a number of Soviet
14:50
naval officers. Yeah, I don't believe the well,
14:53
indeed, I don't believe the US Navy was actually aware that the
14:56
Soviet submarine was equipped with a nuclear torpedo.
14:59
No, no, it wasn't. I mean.
15:02
And and they weren't, and the US Navy wasn't acting under direct
15:05
orders from President Kennedy or anyone.
15:08
So this is, this is what happens in war, isn't it?
15:10
Is that decisions are taken and that could have led to a
15:13
confrontation had the had the nuclear torpedo been fired.
15:16
As you say it's AUS major, you know, aircraft carrier or
15:20
something then do you think, I mean, it's, you're not meant to
15:23
do what ifs as historians, but do you believe that would have
15:25
escalated into a into a major nuclear confrontation?
15:28
I think there would have been enormous pressure to escalate
15:31
because the Joint Chiefs and Staff were already pushing for
15:35
an attack on the missiles in Cuba.
15:38
And I think that would have been almost the, you know, the
15:41
response. Look, they're willing to use a
15:43
nuclear weapon against one of our aircraft carriers.
15:46
You know, they have these missiles now becoming
15:49
operational in Cuba. We'd better destroy them before
15:51
they start launching these those at US.
15:54
And it was a very dangerous moment, I think.
15:57
And you're right, the, the crisis does show, certainly on
16:01
the American side, the difficulty for, let's say, the
16:05
president to control everything that's going on in terms of, you
16:09
know, manoeuvres, confrontations among naval forces or, or
16:15
whatever. And it became, I think then a
16:19
kind of tenet of crisis management that, you know, you
16:22
really had to control everything that was going on.
16:24
But that's not that's not possible.
16:28
You lose control, different units or different boats are
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confronted with UNAC anticipated consequences and may lose
16:37
communication, which the Soviet submarine had done and didn't
16:41
know whether there was a war going on already or not.
16:45
You know, so it was very dangerous and and we have so
16:49
much information about now that it in some ways is the the prime
16:54
example of a number of real dangers of, of military
16:59
confrontation or indeed of the whole nuclear situation.
17:03
And they did lead to steps to at least increase communications
17:09
between the Soviet Union and the Americans, didn't they?
17:12
And also ultimately, I suppose, to arms control and the nuclear
17:18
weapons, the test ban treaty as well.
17:21
Tell us what you think the long term impacts of the Cuban
17:25
Missile Crisis were then on the on the on the Cold War nuclear
17:29
brink brinkmanship. Yeah, I think in Washington and
17:32
in Moscow there was a clear understanding that this had been
17:36
extremely dangerous and that steps had to be taken to avoid a
17:42
war that Kennedy and Khrushchev understood was something you
17:47
absolutely should not have. And they had had a conversation
17:51
summit meeting in Vienna in 1960, one where they explored
17:54
that. And at one point, Khrushchev
17:57
says to Kennedy, ours is a joint account and we must make sure
18:01
there are no miscalculations. And I think that was very
18:05
important. Cuba showed how dangerous it
18:07
could get. So the immediate steps were the
18:11
hotline was introduced so you could have rapid communication
18:14
between Washington and Moscow because it had taken sometimes
18:18
hours for messages during the crisis to, you know, get from
18:22
one place to another. And the partial test ban treaty
18:26
was signed also and that was really an indication that the 2
18:33
powers could reach agreements on limiting certain things.
18:38
That was more in some ways an ecological treaty than than one
18:43
aimed at stability. But during the 1960s then you
18:47
had the idea of agreements limiting intercontinental
18:52
ballistic missiles, limiting anti ballistic missile defences,
18:57
and in general a much greater openness to discussion.
19:01
And you also had some informal discussions with the Pugwash
19:06
Group and senior Soviet scientists.
19:08
And all of that, I think created the background for the Saltwan
19:13
agreements in 1972. Well, as I say, it's interesting
19:17
how the anti nuclear movement almost began with the many of
19:23
the scientists who actually had been involved in developing
19:26
thermonuclear weapons both on the Russian side with Sakharov
19:28
and on the Western side as well. How?
19:32
And there was the Russell Einstein manifesto which came
19:36
out I think after the Castle Bravo test and the radiation of
19:40
a lot of the world and in particular the Marshallese
19:42
really suffered radiation impacts and on their health when
19:46
they were, when they experienced fallout which wasn't supposed to
19:49
happen. I mean, I think the yield of the
19:51
test was much higher than was expected.
19:53
There was also a Japanese fishing boat which was affected
19:55
by radiation. How did the anti nuclear
19:59
movement, which sort of perhaps began at that point, how did
20:02
that evolve and what kind of influence did it have?
20:04
Well, they're different elements.
20:05
So I mentioned Pugwash already. So there was the Russell
20:09
Einstein manifesto and that really called for, you know,
20:14
avoiding what they called universal death, you know,
20:17
everyone dying from a war. You had to move back from that.
20:21
And I think that was influential with governments in especially
20:26
in the US and, and in in the Soviet Union.
20:29
There was also a, a more popular reaction.
20:33
I mean, the, the tests in the Pacific were public publicised.
20:39
So people knew they had happened.
20:41
And of course, in Britain, CND really develops us, you know, to
20:46
get rid of nuclear weapons altogether unilaterally.
20:49
Some of this you have both a stimulus to disarmament.
20:53
Let's, let's get rid of these weapons and also really a second
20:57
track, which is arms control, which is our goal may be
21:01
ultimately to get rid of the weapons, but what's more
21:04
important now is to create to, to define what a stable and safe
21:09
relationship is between countries that have nuclear
21:12
weapons. And and that's a somewhat
21:15
contradictory message because of course, plans were still being
21:21
drawn up. And one consequence of the Cuban
21:24
Missile Crisis was that the Soviet Union took a decision to
21:28
match the United States in in the size of its strategic forces
21:32
and to begin a build up, which the US didn't manage to discover
21:38
until several years later. And that presumably got us to
21:42
the stage of mutual assured destruction and the development
21:47
of theories of deterrence to explain a bit about how the
21:52
military on both sides were thinking about this and why it
21:56
was accepted that having 10s of thousands of nuclear weapons
22:00
pointed at each other was somehow a situation which was,
22:06
well, it's not necessarily desirable, at least tolerable.
22:09
Yes. I mean, I think the idea of
22:11
deterrence really originated in in well, partly in Britain, but
22:16
also mainly in the US in the 1950s.
22:19
That deterrence becomes a really important category in the US for
22:24
thinking about nuclear war or thinking about preventing a
22:27
nuclear war, especially in Europe.
22:30
But as you mentioned, the the post Cuban Missile Crisis
22:35
created a situation which in which mutual assured destruction
22:40
are MAD. Of course as the acronym is
22:42
became unavoidable. the US had very large forces and the Soviet
22:49
Union biddled up very large forces in the 1950s and early
22:54
60's. The Soviet military strategy had
22:57
been a preemptive strike. You know, if there's going to be
23:00
a war, we need to strike first. Partly influenced by the memory
23:04
of 1941 and the the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
23:09
But by the late 1960s S So U.S. forces were of course, large,
23:15
and the Soviet Union came round to the view that a preemptive
23:18
strike wouldn't save you from devastating retaliation even if
23:23
you got in first. And therefore what you had to
23:25
think about was the certainty of a retaliatory strike.
23:31
And they really moved to deterrence in the late 1960s,
23:35
that the main goal is to ensure that even if we are attacked
23:40
first in the way most favourable to our adversary, we will still
23:45
be able to devast, retaliate in a devastating way if they do
23:49
attack us, which had been essentially the notion developed
23:54
in the US of strategic stability, where each side can
23:58
retaliate in a devastating way. Yeah, in.
24:01
My book. I'm quite critical of the US
24:03
posture of launch on warning because it OO obviously carries
24:09
this enormous risk of Southeast sending off potentially hundreds
24:14
of Icbms, these nuclear missiles when the supposed incoming
24:20
attack has just blips on a radar screen.
24:22
Essentially, you have to get your missiles out of the ground
24:25
before the incoming strike potentially affects your ability
24:29
to retaliate. And that has led to a new a
24:33
number of occasions where there's been very close calls
24:37
with false information and so on.
24:39
When, when did the US develop that posture and how did that
24:43
that evolve during the Cold War? I'm not.
24:46
Sure, when they started to develop it, but in the 1960's,
24:54
the idea of launch on warning, you know, was was put forward
24:59
and the rationale in a way was as the Soviet Union built up its
25:06
forces, you wanted to be able to, you know, retaliate.
25:10
If there was a Soviet pre emptive strike, you needed to
25:13
somehow respond to that before it actually struck you.
25:18
And in the Soviet Union, the idea really began in the early
25:23
19, well, late 1960s. At the time they were coming to
25:27
this view that the retaliatory capability was crucial.
25:31
You know, they weren't relying now on a preemptive strike.
25:34
They're relying on the capacity to retaliate.
25:37
Well, one way to have that capacity, or at least to, well,
25:42
to have the capacity is to be able to launch the missiles
25:45
before they actually reach your their targets, right?
25:48
Or to be able, sorry, to destroy the incoming missiles before
25:52
they reach their targets. And it's interesting in the US,
25:56
the Carter administration said, yes, we have this capacity to do
26:00
it, but it's, we don't rely on it.
26:02
But the very statement in a way, and the, the very idea that you
26:07
have a launch on warning capacity is part of a deterrent
26:11
because it complicates the other side's calculations about a
26:16
nuclear strike on you. Because they have to take of
26:19
account of the fact that maybe you can do this and destroy, you
26:23
know, retaliate before you've destroyed any of their, their
26:27
systems. And that was certainly part of
26:30
the thinking in, in, in the Soviet Union as well.
26:34
But of course it's, I agree with you, it's extremely dangerous.
26:37
And we have on the US side in in under Carter, a number of
26:42
incidents where, you know, the warning screen showing, you
26:47
know, hundreds of ICBM, the famous. 3:00 AM The famous 3:00
26:51
AM phone call. Yeah, Well, can you tell us a
26:55
story? Well, the the.
26:57
Story I've heard is is from Bill Perry, who was Defense Secretary
27:01
at the time, that he gets a call in in the middle of the night
27:05
saying that there's an attack coming in.
27:08
There are, I think, 200 Icbms on their way to the US and he
27:13
thinks, oh, this is the nightmare I've always dreaded.
27:16
You know, what do we do? Well, it turns out it's a false
27:20
warning. Yeah.
27:21
There were three incidents for which we now have the
27:24
declassified documents about, about those false alerts.
27:27
Uh, and in the first one where Bill Perry is woken up at 3:00
27:35
in the morning and you know, cruiser bombers have scrambled
27:40
readiness for, for, for some kind of retaliatory attack.
27:44
One of the things is the, in the investigation done afterwards as
27:49
to how this happened concludes, well, it could have been a human
27:53
error or it could have been a, a computer error.
27:56
We don't really know. And that's extremely worrying in
28:00
itself. And on the Soviet side, there
28:03
was the famous incident of Colonel Petrov, who was at the
28:08
early warning duty officer and the early warning of a ballistic
28:13
missile attack outside Moscow. And he sees the same thing
28:18
coming from the USA launch there of individual missiles, not a
28:23
whole group coming at the one time.
28:26
And and he decides that, yeah, this is a false alert.
28:31
And that's what he passes up. And it was a false alert.
28:35
But if he had said and, and Central Command had agreed, if
28:39
he had said no, this is a real attack that's coming our way,
28:43
then if the EU, the EU, then the Soviet Union was prepared to
28:47
launch on warning. And you can imagine, you know,
28:50
what devastation that would have caused and.
28:53
Actually, I think, and this all sounds like ancient history.
28:56
Well, not, not so ancient, not that long ago, but these
28:58
postures are maintained today extraordinary extraordinarily.
29:02
We still have a launch on warning posture in the US.
29:05
I'm not quite sure what Russia's situation is.
29:08
How dangerous do you think the situation is today in 2026
29:13
compared to these these periods you were talking about earlier
29:16
in the 1960s, seventies and 80s? I think we're.
29:18
Entering a new and very dangerous period partly linked
29:22
to changes in the world order, you know, you NATO being greatly
29:28
weakened by, I think by U.S. policy.
29:32
And we have the rise of China. So we won't have, you know, 2
29:35
nuclear superpowers. We'll have three nuclear
29:38
superpowers. But also, and maybe more
29:40
important is new technologies, especially, especially
29:44
artificial intelligence. So one of the interesting things
29:48
is there's a big debate, uh, and indeed a big move to, to say
29:53
that you should never launch a nuclear weapon without human
29:57
involvement because, you know, I mean, human involvement may not
30:02
be the answer. Of course that can be dangerous.
30:05
Who knows what the kind of pressures on a political leader
30:08
would be in in a crisis, But there are dangers.
30:12
And especially if you think about false alarms coming in,
30:16
false signals, that's a kind of spoofing.
30:20
Well, can can your AI systems distinguish that from a genuine
30:26
launch? I mean, there may be ways to do
30:28
it. I'm not.
30:29
I'm not saying I think this is could be quite complicated, but
30:33
it would certainly AI could certainly complicate that kind
30:37
of issue greatly, leading to one side to rely on evidence whose
30:44
basic quality it's not in a position to analyze in the in
30:48
the few moments in which a decision might have to be taken
30:51
or whether by a machine or by a person I.
30:57
I still don't see why a launch on roaring posture is even
31:00
necessary when you've got submarine Icbms which are out
31:05
there somewhere in the oceans and have the ability to
31:08
retaliate and can't possibly be taken out on the 1st strike.
31:10
So why do both sides keep this strangely dangerous attitude?
31:16
I think. Part of it is to do with the a
31:20
difference in thinking about how do you actually conduct a
31:23
nuclear war with as being different from deterrence.
31:27
So you say in deterrence, we have to have the capacity to
31:30
retaliate. But if there's a war, both
31:33
sides, I think would want to strike first.
31:37
And you know, they would have lists of targets they would try
31:39
to to to strike. And one of the dangerous things
31:43
at least that I here about AI is that it will make the oceans
31:48
transparent. So some of the things that we
31:51
relied on for deterrence as you mentioned the submarine launched
31:55
ballistic missiles or the heartened or mobile Icbns, they
32:01
may be maybe possible to identify them to remove as it
32:06
were the the secrecy or the the kind of ability inability to
32:12
locate them and that would be extremely dangerous and now.
32:16
President Trump is talking about an anti ballistic missile.
32:21
She shield, what's he called it the golden Dome or something
32:24
very reminiscent. Yeah, very reminiscent of Ronald
32:27
Reagan's Star Wars. Uh, what's, what's the Well,
32:32
tell us about Star Wars first, first of all, because it
32:35
actually plays quite an important role in the end of the
32:37
Cold War yes, so. Ronald Reagan in in 1983
32:42
suddenly announced that he wanted to build a system that
32:48
would defend against ballistic missiles and remove the danger
32:52
of ballistic missile attack on the United States.
32:57
And he was persuaded by various people, including E Edward
33:01
Teller, that the new new technologies were available to
33:05
make that possible. And so he launched the Strategic
33:09
Defense Initiative to explore new kinds of particle beams, new
33:15
kinds of sensors to design, put together this ballistic missile
33:21
defence shield that would prevent any incoming ballistic
33:26
missiles from the Soviet Union from reaching their targets in
33:30
the end. And that, that caused, uh, great
33:34
complications with the Soviet Union, which of course saw this
33:38
not as just something to defend a defensive system to defend the
33:42
US, but they saw it as a system to deprive the Soviet Union of
33:47
its retaliatory capability. So that, you know, leading to a
33:51
very dangerous relationship between the two sides.
33:55
In the end, they it was discovered that the new
33:58
technologies didn't quite make it possible to to build what
34:03
Reagan had in mind. But that has people have
34:07
continued to work on the technologies.
34:09
And now Trump has proposed this golden Dome whose actual
34:13
structure is very unclear. I think they're still trying to
34:16
come up with some, you know, concept.
34:19
The technical people I talked to may already be kind of self
34:25
selected group, but they they say no, this won't work.
34:28
It'll it'll have flaws of course it will you could create
34:31
something that could intercept missiles, but you'll require so
34:36
many satellites in space and they'll be vulnerable to attack
34:39
You're you're just kind of moving the arms race I into
34:43
space without providing protection against a
34:47
sophisticated ballistic missile attack.
34:50
Well, they're. Probably looking at the success
34:53
of Israel's Iron Dome and the ability of, of the Ukraine also
34:57
to, to shoot down incoming missiles.
35:00
So what's different about Icbms and the, the, the Golden Dome
35:03
from how the, the defenses of against ballistic missiles using
35:08
Patriots and so on at the moment?
35:10
Well, it's. Partly their trajectory and
35:13
their speed and the capacity to when you want so you would want
35:19
to shoot them down in mid flight.
35:21
But for ICICBMS can carry dummy warheads which you know can be
35:27
hard to distinguish in space shaft.
35:30
There are all kinds of countermeasures that could be
35:32
worked out against I interceptor missiles.
35:35
And that was a consideration of those methods was a a major
35:40
factor in in the debates in the 1960s about ABM and and in the
35:45
1980s about SDI. And also the notion is that if
35:51
you're defending against nuclear armed ballistic missiles, you
35:57
might get half of them, but if half come through, you're still
36:00
in deep trouble. And and so that that that's also
36:04
another way in which, you know, any, any adversary would try to
36:10
develop the means of EV evading the system.
36:13
And just to be said in the war, I think in World War 2, if
36:19
you're not down 10% of bombers coming over, you are doing
36:23
pretty well German bombers, but that doesn't do for nuclear
36:26
weapons. Well, like maybe.
36:28
Explain a bit about what's different because ICBM to of
36:31
course go into space and come back yeah and re enter the
36:34
atmosphere at an incredible speed, which normal ballistic
36:38
missiles don't they presume you stay within the atmosphere and
36:39
kind of vulnerable to being shot down the whole time.
36:41
So and you've also got the nerves the the way that they can
36:46
split apart and have multiple warheads.
36:48
So maybe just explain a bit about why why Icbms are quite,
36:53
quite so scary. No I.
36:55
Think for the reasons you gave. They do fly through space for
36:59
part of their trajectory. They re enter the atmosphere at
37:02
very high speeds and some of the larger missiles could carry, you
37:07
know, up to 40 warheads so and decoys and shaft.
37:12
And so one of the big problems in in ballistic missile defence
37:16
was extra atmospheric discrimination.
37:20
How do you discriminate between the things you want to destroy?
37:24
How do you discriminate those from the things that you know
37:27
don't matter? And that was a major problem,
37:31
I'm sure there. And, and so also the payloads
37:36
that the, OR the weapons that the Ballist Icbms and SLBMS were
37:41
carrying were, these were becoming more accurate and also
37:48
more destructive because increases in accuracy, uh,
37:52
increase the damage they can do as compared to a particular
37:56
target, as compared with increases in yield.
38:00
So you had, you know, there were 70,000 nuclear weapons in the
38:05
world in the mid 1980s and about 20 odd 1000 strategic ballistic
38:12
strategic weapons. So you know, those, those
38:17
redundancy built into, into these systems.
38:20
I think the actual architecture for the Golden Dome is not yet
38:24
out, but I also already there are questions about, you know,
38:29
how, how effective the missiles will be.
38:32
I mean, the Iron Dome has been very effective for Israel.
38:36
I mean that and that's been a very big success.
38:40
But the translation from that kind of system, you know, to to
38:45
intercept missiles, shorter range missiles, cruise missiles,
38:51
ballistic missiles is very different from dealing with
38:55
intercontinental missiles. But the other thing is that
38:59
you're now getting a development and naturally some Russian
39:03
systems designed essentially to deal with any ABM system, I mean
39:09
submarines or torpedoes, rather nuclear armed that could be FI
39:14
fired at red speed, fractional or, or, or, or missiles that can
39:19
come in, say to the US from different TRA trajectories, not
39:22
just over the North Pole, but you know, around the North Pole
39:26
as well. So when the US withdrew from the
39:30
ABM Treaty in 2002, there was a a serious Soviet response in
39:37
terms of developing or doing research on new kinds of
39:41
strategic systems that could evade ballistic missile
39:45
defenses. Yeah, you mentioned.
39:47
The US withdrawing, that was George W Bush, I believe.
39:50
He obviously detests President Putin and everything he stands
39:54
for. But actually the US has played
39:56
quite a a negative role in dismantling the Cold War arm
40:03
control system, hasn't it? And.
40:06
To the extent now where there's nothing left and the last, I
40:09
think it was New START treaty ceased to exist in February this
40:13
year, so. Yeah, who's to blame?
40:18
And how do we get to that situation?
40:22
Well, it was 1. Of the the features of of the
40:24
Cold War as there were efforts to kind of create a nuclear
40:29
order with the strategic arms control, with the nuclear non
40:32
proliferation treaty. I mean these were flawed, I
40:35
think, but nevertheless they provided a kind of reassurance.
40:39
So there was a hope that that could be strengthened,
40:43
especially after the end of the Cold War.
40:46
If you think about the the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin
40:50
of the Atomic Scientists in 1991, it was 17 minutes away
40:55
from doom or from midnight. Now it's 85 seconds.
41:00
So we've had a serious kind of working.
41:03
And yes, I think it was a big mistake for the US to pull out
41:07
of the ABM treaty. And I think it had a rather
41:12
important effect on on Russian policy.
41:14
But of course, the US then said, well, this is not aimed at
41:18
Russia. This is aimed at North Korea.
41:20
It's aimed at Iran. But unfortunately, the Russians
41:25
didn't buy that. And so that was a factor.
41:28
I mean, there are lots of other issues to NATO enlargement and
41:32
so on. I think looking back, it's a
41:35
great tragedy that we were not able to build on, you know, the
41:41
situation that existed in, say, 1991.
41:45
And I didn't go into that in the book because, well, the book's
41:49
long enough. And I ended on the, in a way, on
41:53
the happy, uh, occasion of Gorbachev's speech at the United
41:58
Nations, kind of essentially saying, which he called the anti
42:02
Fulton speech. So anti Churchill's Iron Curtain
42:07
notion, anti the Iron Curtain can reunite Europe.
42:13
And yes, we managed to reduce the number of nuclear weapons
42:17
from 70,000 to about 12,000 in the world today, but that's
42:22
enough to do enormous damage. And that all now seems to be in
42:27
reverse. The nuclear order has gone.
42:29
The non proliferation treaty is in great difficulty.
42:32
There's no strategic arms control talk.
42:35
China is building up its forces. the US and Russia are also
42:39
building up their forces on the assumption that they will need
42:43
them for the next decades, You know, So yeah, it's a bit.
42:46
It's a. Bit weird, and I talk about this
42:47
in my book actually, because yes, 12,000 nuclear weapons is
42:51
enough to cause a nuclear winter and devastate the planet's
42:53
entire biosphere and essentially end human civilization.
42:56
And yet we all accept this as being normal, a background part
43:00
of of of everyday life. And people don't really talk
43:04
about it and don't really engage with it.
43:05
There's no large scale anti nuclear movement.
43:08
It's not politically salient. And that's very different to the
43:11
Cold War situation when you had an enormous anti nuclear
43:15
movement, CND and all of the other groups mobilized millions
43:18
of people to March and protest and vote against, against the
43:22
threat of nuclear weapons. I wonder why it's so different
43:24
today. Part of the.
43:25
Explanation I think is we have other existential threats like
43:28
climate change, which has attracted more more attention
43:32
partly because I think after the end of the Cold War the anti
43:37
nuclear movement wasn't so, so powerful.
43:42
There was a sense somehow this was being dealt with by the EAR.
43:45
Early agreements between, you know, Russia start one and start
43:50
2. I mean, there were complications
43:52
but it seemed as though we were on the same track.
43:55
Everyone understood we're not going down that path.
43:58
Mistakenly, I think and I in retrospect unwisely kind of
44:04
negle neglected the dangers or ACC accepted the dangers in a
44:09
way and other other factors came more to the fore.
44:13
But I think now there's a lot of concern about nuclear weapons
44:18
also there's in the book I tried to to explain as it were one,
44:25
the understanding among political leaders of the nuclear
44:28
weap POW powers that this would be a total disaster for
44:32
everyone. That was important.
44:35
Secondly, the notion of a nuclear threshold not to go
44:38
nuclear. That was also, you know, if if
44:41
you cross that you're into very dangerous territory.
44:45
But I'm afraid that that is passing by the way, there's more
44:48
talk of low yield nuclear weapons, which would be below 10
44:52
kilotons. But you know, Hiroshima was 13
44:55
kilotons. You know, low yield sounds, oh,
44:58
that's not a problem. But in fact, it could be a real
45:02
problem. And you could have escalation
45:04
from there because I think once you're using nuclear weapons and
45:08
you say, oh, we only use this yield, someone will say, no, no,
45:11
you did this damage here. You know, I think we're in a, a
45:16
dangerous situation and to some way, part of my purpose in the
45:22
book was to write about the dangers and the planning and the
45:26
crises, but also to write about the efforts, right, about the
45:32
understanding that developed, I think mainly between the US and
45:36
the Soviet Union during the Cold War that you really had to avoid
45:41
this, this the, and that was a shared understanding.
45:44
Even though there were temptations of brinkmanship, You
45:47
know, we can use threats, we can use movement of forces to signal
45:51
that, you know, we're less afraid than you are, that kind
45:54
of thing. But still, I think at the
45:56
political level there was an understanding reinforced on both
46:01
sides to sit from, from the mid 50s on to say no, this would be
46:06
terrible and is there. Anything good you can say about
46:09
nuclear weapons? I've heard the case made that
46:12
they kept the peace essentially after 1945 because the
46:17
superpowers which might otherwise have found themselves
46:19
in a hot war had to stay in a Cold War because of the threat
46:24
of mutual assured destruction. Do you think that's a reasonable
46:27
case? I think there's an.
46:28
Argument to be made that the political leaders in Europe, in
46:33
Soviet Union, the US did understand that that kind of war
46:38
would be terrible. And therefore, I, I don't rule
46:41
out that there was some deterrent effect there.
46:44
But I think I came to the conclusion that especially in,
46:48
in relation to Europe, what was somehow very important, the most
46:52
likely start for a nuclear war would be a political crisis.
46:56
That one side on the other side that one side would intervene in
46:59
and say, OK, we're going to liberate West Germany or East
47:03
Germany, let's say. So I think a kind of political
47:06
stability a accounts for the absence of a nuclear war in
47:11
Europe. It's a more important factor
47:13
than the sheer existence of the weapons and, and how the whole
47:17
thing ends is when communist regimes in Eastern Europe
47:21
crumble. And Gorbachev allowed that to
47:25
happen, probably couldn't have intervened anyway to to to
47:29
maintain all of that. But nevertheless, there was a
47:32
kind of opening where the weapons play some kind of role,
47:36
but it's not to my mind, the major role in, in, in that
47:41
particular case. So I I tend right at the end
47:47
about deterrence seems to allow us to plan to do the most
47:51
horrendous things. And, you know, that raises the
47:54
issue of intention. Do we really, are we convinced
47:58
we would want to launch, you know, 1000 nuclear warheads
48:02
against Russia or China, wherever Andrei Sakharov, the
48:08
Soviet physicist and, you know, defender of human rights made
48:12
the argument? Well, deterrence, maybe we can
48:15
tolerate it for the time being, but ultimately we have to find
48:19
something else. We have to find something else.
48:21
And it's not at all clear to me what that something else is now
48:26
or that we're moving in that kind of direction.
48:29
Well, the the. The dream of a world without
48:32
nuclear weapons has been obviously there from the outset,
48:35
since they were developed, of course, including by many of the
48:38
scientists who had a direct personal role in developing
48:41
them. And I suppose the closest moment
48:44
perhaps was that rather extraordinary conversation
48:47
between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik.
48:49
When was that 19891980? Six.
48:52
Yeah, so so. Yeah, explain that story,
48:58
because it was a summit which supposedly ended badly, but
49:01
actually there was almost agreement on both sides to
49:05
eliminate nuclear weapons. Yes, it's a.
49:07
Very, extremely interesting. So in a rather heated discussion
49:12
at really in the last session of the, the summit, there's
49:16
discussion about would you, would you get rid of bombers?
49:18
And anyway, at, at some point Reagan says, uh, of as far as
49:24
I'm concerned, we could get rid of them all.
49:26
And Gorbachev said, yes, I agree with that, let's get rid of them
49:31
all. And George Schultz, who was
49:34
present as Secretary of State, also said, let's do it.
49:37
And I talked to one of the note takers, Tom Simons in that
49:41
meeting who said who described it then as the exchange that
49:45
rang around the world, which it did it it created, oddly enough,
49:50
it became almost respectable to talk about getting rid of
49:53
nuclear weapons. But that and and that was based
49:58
that Schultz was here at Stanford.
50:00
He returned to Stanford after he stepped down, you know, after
50:04
the end of the Reagan administration.
50:07
And he and and Bill Perry, whom I mentioned earlier, who is
50:10
former Secretary of State, was also at Stanford.
50:14
And I think for a year or two, they thought maybe something
50:17
really can be done. And then they just became
50:20
disillusioned, didn't think it would happen.
50:23
And that's an interesting episode where somehow the
50:29
promise was held out there. And the reason they took action
50:33
was they wrote an op-ed piece saying let's get rid of a world
50:36
free of nuclear weapons. And they got a massive response
50:40
from around the world who wrote sorry.
50:42
Who wrote the op-ed? Schwartz.
50:43
George Schultz, Sam Nunn, Bill Perry and Henry Kissinger.
50:48
And they got an enormous RES response from around the world
50:52
and, you know, newspaper editorials, letters and so on
50:55
saying let's do this, let's get rid of these weapons.
50:58
And they thought there is this groundswell of, you know,
51:03
they're awful things, let's get rid of them.
51:05
But in the end, it didn't work. It didn't succeed, even though
51:09
they persuaded Barack Obama to make in the speech in Prague
51:14
calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
51:17
But that didn't didn't work. And it's it's, it's a very
51:21
interesting and, and in some ways dispiriting.
51:26
It is. It is.
51:26
Dispiriting and it's kind of strange as well.
51:29
There's only 9 nuclear weapon states in the world, there's 140
51:35
or 50 odd other states who are endangered by them possessing
51:39
these nuclear weapons. And so it's in the interest of,
51:43
well, not just the majority of humanity, but in the interest of
51:45
literally everyone to get rid of them.
51:48
And clearly the existential risk is not still not just there, but
51:54
ever present and potentially escalating all the time as well.
51:57
And it's I, I don't really by this idea that climate change
52:02
has overshadowed it. I mean, I suppose it has to some
52:05
extent, but they're not the same thing at all.
52:06
Climate change is, is definitely happening, but it's a lot less
52:10
bad. The nuclear war, nuclear war
52:11
might never happen, but if it does, it destroys this, the
52:13
whole planetary environment. And yeah, when I talk to people
52:17
about this and say, why aren't we, why aren't we taking more
52:20
action, people have just shrugged their shoulders and
52:23
said, no, it's impossible. You know, you'd never.
52:24
How would you get Kim Jong Un to the to how do you get Putin?
52:27
How do you know? And it's actually seems more
52:30
difficult in most people's minds to do something about these nine
52:34
nuclear weapons states than it is to to to change the whole
52:37
energy basis of modern civilization, mainly fossil
52:40
fuels, and transform that to clean energy, which is a very
52:43
big project indeed. Yeah, somehow that's easier than
52:46
just getting rid of nukes, I think.
52:48
People well say 10 years ago, I remember a discussion with a
52:53
visiting group of PhD students from Europe coming in and, and
52:57
when I said I was interested in nuclear weapons, they kind of
53:00
rolled their eyes. And when I asked them what they
53:03
were interested in was climate change, they could do something.
53:06
There was research that could be done, things that could be
53:09
mobilized and improving the situation wasn't dangerous.
53:12
You were, you weren't, you know, seeking to improve renewables or
53:17
to, you know, support policies of that kind that wasn't
53:20
dangerous. Whereas, you know, who knows
53:22
what removing nuclear weapons would do?
53:25
How, how would you do it? You're dealing with some very,
53:28
what they call here bad actors. I mean, you're dealing with
53:31
states that, you know, are unpredictable and dangerous.
53:34
Who knows what might happen. So oddly enough, I think they,
53:38
uh, you're, you're right. It, it should be easier to get
53:41
the 9 states to come together to get rid of the nuclear weapons,
53:47
but somehow that seemed more difficult than actually doing
53:50
some work that would have an effect on, on climate change.
53:54
I I think there's much more to it too, though, unfortunately.
53:57
I think the nuclear weapons are built into national histories in
54:02
in a way that, you know, gives them an emotional resonance with
54:08
many people in society, symbolic people who wouldn't want to see
54:12
them used, but nevertheless feel, yeah, we're safer because
54:17
of them. And I think that's, I think
54:19
that's mistaken because I think I said, you know, to Terence, I
54:24
don't dismiss it completely, but I'm dismissed the notion that
54:28
it's foolproof because we've had crises, we've been close to
54:31
nuclear war and it is dispiriting.
54:35
And I do talk to colleagues about, you know, what can be
54:38
done, what major shift can we find?
54:42
And I, I don't S see that I was involved in that, you know,
54:48
well, free of nuclear weapons project and meetings and writing
54:52
some stuff. But it was very dispiriting that
54:55
after about 18 months, it just, it wasn't going anywhere.
54:59
And there was a lot of opposition in the US and in
55:02
Russia to doing it. Well, you're a historian, not a
55:06
futurist, but learning the lessons of history of the
55:10
nuclear age. What do you think our chances
55:13
are of surviving the next, I don't know, 20-30, forty 50
55:17
years when I. Was writing the book and coming
55:21
close to finishing it. I had a somehow not a change of
55:26
attitude, but a, a greater awareness of the, the efforts to
55:34
deal with nuclear weapons, the a kind of, uh, human consciousness
55:40
that this was a real danger. We would have to get, get rid of
55:43
them or to at least work as hard as we could to eliminate, to
55:51
reduce the risk from them and, and the danger of them.
55:54
I'm now not feeling that. I feel more dis dispirited at
55:59
what's taking place and depressed by what's taking place
56:02
now. But oddly enough, it did make me
56:06
feel that it's a history of terrible weapons of great
56:10
dangers, but also of many admirable people who have tried
56:16
to deal with this. You know, whether anti nuclear
56:19
movements or diplomats or, you know, whatever it's, it's a very
56:24
mixed. And in that sense I thought,
56:27
yes, it's it. There is an element in there
56:31
that somehow might provide a building for dealing with this
56:36
and and and surviving the dangers that they create.
56:41
Well, I'm not. Sure.
56:42
You've given us a well, I was. I was wondering whether you'd
56:46
give us a 5050 chance or a 28 chance.
56:50
Or when you say you're pessimistic, what does that
56:53
actually mean? It means not that I think, you
56:56
know, we'll have a nuclear war of of a kind of global kind
57:01
within 20 years, but we might have a situation in which some
57:05
nuclear weapons are used and that who knows what that might
57:08
mean. Would that be a wake up call to
57:10
say, hey, this is is dangerous? Or would it just be an
57:15
escalation to say, oh, if these are going to be used, we have
57:18
to, you know, different countries would say we have to
57:20
have them too. You know, things about being
57:24
historian. Is that so you so many
57:27
predictions one reads about are wrong.
57:30
Remember CP Snow saying, oh, it's a mathematical certainty.
57:33
Within five years we'll have a new two war.
57:36
This is back in the 1950s. Well, we haven't had one.
57:41
And it's in some ways remarkable that in 80 years we haven't had
57:48
that war. And maybe that's just postponing
57:51
it. But nevertheless, it has to
57:54
offer some kind of of hope. I think that ultimately we will
58:00
be able to find some kind of of of resolution, some kind of way
58:07
out of minimizing what I think are a terrible danger, terrible
58:12
threat. And one of the reasons I wrote
58:15
the book was well, was really to look at, I mean, it's mainly US
58:21
Soviet, but to look at the, the interactions among different
58:26
countries and in the US and Soviet case, the emergence of a
58:30
kind of agree under mutual understanding that, you know,
58:34
this would be terrible for everyone involved and therefore
58:38
to avoid it, well. We're saving the world from bad
58:41
ideas. On this show, I proposed a bad
58:44
idea to be We can live with nuclear weapons.
58:48
Would you agree? Yeah, I think.
58:50
It's a very bad idea. Even if we, even if we'd done it
58:55
for 80 years, that doesn't provide a guarantee of the
59:00
future. Yeah, no.
59:02
And it's it's kind of extraordinary that we take such
59:06
pains to avoid other other risks.
59:08
We've got big efforts to prevent pandemics.
59:11
We've got even an asteroid deflection program run by NASA
59:14
and others to prevent an asteroid colluding with the
59:18
Earth. And yet we've got these nuclear
59:21
missiles, which are worse than asteroids in many ways, pointed
59:25
directly at our own cities in their thousands and maintained
59:29
on hair trigger alert 24/7. So just how smart is that?
59:33
Not very, I don't think. But people who are interested to
59:36
find out more about the history of this should read your book.
59:38
And I'm just holding it up to the camera for people who are
59:40
watching on YouTube by David Holloway.
59:42
It's called Nuclear weapons and International history.
59:45
David, thank you so much for joining us on saving the world
59:49
from bad Ideas. Thanks very.
59:51
Much Mark. Thanks so much for listening to
59:57
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