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Nuclear Tests and Delivery Systems00:15:07
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Chronicler of Adventures, award-winning best-selling author David Graham, whose books include The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Wager.
He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
And I started to realize that this odd little old manuscript contained the seeds of one of the most extraordinary stories of survival and mayhem I had ever come across.
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Back with us this morning is the executive director of the Arms Control Association, Darrell Kimball.
He's worked on nuclear non-proliferation and arms control issues for about 35 years.
So Darrell Kimball, when you see the president's Truth Social last week that says, quote, because of other countries' nuclear testing, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis, and that process will begin immediately.
Well, so he seems to be referring to what I just mentioned, which is the program of non-nuclear explosive testing experiments that the Department of Energy, specifically the National Nuclear Security Agency, is responsible for, the Weapons Labs.
We're spending about $20 billion a year on this program.
One of the key features are what are called sub-critical experiments.
These are experiments underground in Nevada, the former nuclear test site.
I've been to the underground facility where this is done two years ago on an official tour.
These are experiments involving the plutonium that is the key element in the core of a nuclear warhead.
They fire a high energy pulse of energy at this speck of plutonium, tiny amount, and they learn about the physical characteristics of the plutonium to make sure it's not aging.
And this helps them understand whether the existing warheads in the arsenal continue to work as designed.
And they've been confirming that they do work as design for the last 27 years.
The lab directors, strategic command.
But these are not nuclear explosions.
They do not produce a self-sustaining amount of energy, self-sustaining chain reaction, which is what we would define as a nuclear test explosion.
My understanding is what Russia did recently was test essentially the delivery systems for nuclear weapons, essentially missiles, which we can do that, but not with nuclear weapons.
This is to make sure that the delivery system that carries nuclear bombs is working.
Then there are the nuclear test explosions that were done during the Cold War.
From 1945 to 2017, there were 2,056 nuclear test explosions conducted by nine countries around the world.
The United States conducted an extraordinary, you know, 1,030, 215 of which were above ground, 100 at the Nevada test site above ground outside of Las Vegas.
We amassed an enormous amount of knowledge about nuclear weapons that way, but the primary purpose was to proof test new warhead designs to make sure that they worked.
Today, the task is different.
It is how do we, the United States, maintain our existing warheads in a safe and reliable manner.
Then there's another kind of test, the one that we were just talking about that Chris Wright talked about, which is non-explosive experiments involving nuclear material.
So the president may be thinking about or may have heard about any one of these three things.
There needs to be a clarification.
And let me just point out that if the United States were to resume underground nuclear testing at the Nevada National Security Site, as it's called today, it would take many months.
I've been there, I've talked to the officials there, I've seen the test readiness program equipment.
I think it would take 18 to 36, probably closer to 36 months, to get an underground test prepared.
There would be enormous opposition from people in the state of Nevada.
Just this year, the Nevada state legislature passed unanimously a resolution saying they supported continuing the U.S. nuclear test moratorium.
75% of the American public in a poll conducted last year say they support continuing a global nuclear test moratorium.
So if the president is planning this, it would cost a great deal of money, hundreds of millions, months.
There would be congressional opposition.
Congresswoman Dina Titus, who's from Nevada, on Friday introduced a bill that would block the president from being able to resume nuclear explosive testing underground in Nevada.
So we need some clarification.
And the final thing we add is if the United States were to do this, or just to announce that it's pursuing it, what are the international security ramifications?
Other countries are going to start preparing to resume nuclear testing.
North Korea.
Russia has said it will conduct nuclear tests if the U.S. does.
Underground, not mushroom clouds in the atmosphere.
Nonetheless, because the United States has a longer and more detailed knowledge of its arsenal than any other nuclear country, we have an extremely sophisticated arsenal, several warhead types.
We don't need to conduct nuclear explosive testing for any military or technical reason.
But other countries with less of a nuclear test explosion pedigree could gain knowledge from additional nuclear test explosions, particularly states like North Korea or India or Pakistan, which have conducted a far smaller number of nuclear weapons.
So this would be a non-proliferation disaster and a national security own goal, to use a soccer analogy.
If you have questions on this topic, now is a great time to call in Darrell Kimball with us of the Arms Control Association.
Here's how you can call in Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, Independents 202-748-8002, and we'll keep Darrell Kimball with us until that Speaker Johnson press conference starts at the top of the hour, 10 a.m. Eastern is where we're going to go after this program ends.
Darrell Kimball, for folks who don't know the Arms Control Association, you've been on this program several times, but what is it?
So we're a non-governmental organization, the Arms Control Association.
We're a medium-sized think tank.
We do research.
We do public education.
We were established in 1971 with the mission of reducing and eliminating the threats posed by the world's nuclear weapons, particularly nuclear weapons.
And we publish a journal, Arms Control Today, that explores these issues.
It's a platform for ideas.
And we've got more information at armscontrol.org.
As folks are calling in on phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, the Nevada test site that you're talking about, you say you were there last year.
How does one go to a nuclear explosion test site?
How do you walk around there?
There's been above-ground and below-ground explosions there.
There are, as I said, hundreds of nuclear test explosions that have been conducted there.
There are what are called subsidence craters that pockmark the desert landscape.
It's sort of from above, it looks like a moonscape.
I was there in 2023 on an official nonproliferation experts tour that the NNSA organized to basically demonstrate that the site has been transformed from a nuclear weapons testing site to a national security and nonproliferation site.
And we visited the underground facility where the United States conducts these sub-critical nuclear experiments that Chris Wright was speaking about.
And so that's where it is.
The other world's nuclear-armed states have their own test sites.
The first test site for the Soviet Union was in Kazakhstan.
There were over 400 nuclear explosions in eastern Kazakhstan up until 1990 when the Kazakh people stood up in protest and told Moscow no more nuclear tests in Kazakhstan just before Kazakhstan's independence.
So there has been a long history of people standing up in opposition to nuclear testing because the atmospheric testing that took place from 1945, mainly until the early 1960s, until the limited test ban treaty that Kennedy and Khrushchev signed that banned atmospheric testing, that spewed poison into the global atmosphere.
We still have tens of thousands of downwinders in the United States who are being supported to some extent by a program called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.
There was a big debate about that last year.
So there are downwinders in these other countries too.
So, you know, President Trump's announcement that the United States is going to resume nuclear testing, I think, also is being seen as a slap in the face to those many thousands of people who've been affected by nuclear testing through the years.
So as I said, the U.S. Congress imposed a nuclear test moratorium in 1992 that lasted nine months.
Bill Clinton decided to extend it because nuclear testing was not deemed necessary to maintain the arsenal.
And he put in motion global talks on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
That treaty was concluded in 1996.
It bans all nuclear weapons test explosions.
It has set up a global test monitoring system called the International Monitoring System to detect and deter violations of the treaty.
187 countries, including the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, have signed that treaty, which means they're legally obligated not to engage in any activity that violates the object or purpose.
But in 1999, in a highly partisan and brief, after brief debate, the U.S. Senate rejected U.S. ratification of the treaty.
So for that reason and others, the treaty has not formally entered into force.
And what's important about that in the context of this is that it means we don't have the option to order on-site inspections of another country if we believe they're cheating on the test ban.
Chad's up first in Houston, Texas, line for Democrats.
Chad, you're on with Daryl Kimball.
unidentified
Hey, hey, thank you all for taking my call this morning.
Mr. Kimball, I just had a question.
If we don't have the money, you know, the United States don't have the funds for state and federal government-funded programs like food stamps, how would we have enough money as a state, as a country, to afford these nuclear tests that Donald Trump is saying that we're going to start resuming?
Well, the caller's got a great question, and I think that's a question that if people are concerned about it, they should be talking to their members of Congress about.
Some facts to keep in mind about the nuclear weapons budget of the United States.
The United States is currently spending about $70 billion a year to maintain and operate and upgrade the existing nuclear weapons arsenal.
That's the delivery systems, the missiles, the bombers, the warheads on these weapons.
The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Agency is spending about $20 billion on weapons activities.
And right now, the United States is in the process of replacing the missiles that carry nuclear weapons, the submarines that carry missiles that carry nuclear weapons, and strategic bombers that carry nuclear weapons.
And the estimated price tag of that program over the next 10 years exceeds $1 trillion.
So as with all issues, we've got choices to make about where the dollars go.
Additional nuclear testing, resumption of nuclear testing, would cost additional hundreds of millions.
But I think the real cost is to U.S. national security because it would set off a chain reaction of nuclear testing by other countries, which is not in our interest.
That would raise the global nuclear tensions that are already far, far too high.
Mr. Kimball, you mentioned that it takes a long time to get the site, the situation ready for a nuclear test.
That's good, but I don't know how well you know or have been observing Donald Trump himself.
I can tell you, I actually worked with and around Donald Trump in the mid-90s.
And you can see from the way he handled the East Wing change and the bathroom change.
He doesn't care about time.
He doesn't care about going through the proper procedures.
He'll go around and cut corners and this and that and the other.
So be it good or be it bad, if he decides to pursue this.
And you never know with him.
He'll mention something, and then a few months later, he'll come back to it again and hit on it.
If he decides that's what he wants, he will probably just push through quickly and carelessly.
Like you can see how careless the Department of War has become with how they handle some things.
Also, I have one last question, if you'll bear with me.
And I don't know if it's off-topic or not.
I also have a background with some people that were here in the U.S. in the early 2000s to take advantage of the U.S. and the Russian situation, how to make money, this and that and the other.
I still have a little bit of contact with one of the guys in Russia.
And going back to the beginning of the invasion that Russia pulled, when everybody's worried about Russia's a nuclear power, Russia's a nuclear power, so we can't defend them.
He told me at that time, and you could see it from how poorly they engaged in that invasion, that the Russian nuclear arsenal at that time, because who knows how they've upgraded it since since they're working on war stuff, it was in pitiful, pitiful shape because nobody wanted to spend money on it or maintain it.
Everybody was interested in how much money you get.
I mean, the Trump administration has shown that it will cut corners, it will blow past regulations on the environment or safety.
So the official requirement that exists for resuming what's called an instrumented nuclear test, one that provides data for the weapons scientists, is 36 months.
A simple demonstration test, an underground nuclear blast that simply says this particular nuclear weapon has gone off, which I think is completely, completely unnecessary.
That would take less time.
But we do need to just keep in mind that certain things would need to be done to make this happen.
A, the Department of Energy would have to bring in people who can drill a vertical shaft deep, deep underground, probably from the oil industry.
They would have to prepare a nuclear device to be lowered in there.
They have to bring in equipment to lower that warhead there.
It would require a very large crane, which is currently not at the site.
They would have to backfill the vertical shaft to make sure it doesn't blast out.
I mean, all of this does take time to do.
Whether it actually takes 36 months or not, we shall see.
I think before this can be done, however, there will very likely be a serious, I hope, debate in Congress, some serious questions about why is this necessary or not.
And so, you know, the public will have a chance to weigh in.
That treaty will expire in less than 100 days on February 5, 2026.
If that treaty expires, it is possible that, in theory, the U.S. or Russia or both could increase the number of nuclear weapons on the existing missiles and bombers we have by doing something called uploading, putting more warheads on each missile.
That would not be good.
The Chinese would likely see this and they might accelerate what they're already doing.
So one of the things that's important for Donald Trump also to answer is there was a proposal from Vladimir Putin on September 22nd of this year.
He said that the United States and he would propose that the United States and Russia continue to respect the central limits of the New START treaty, which is 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 700 missiles and bombers for one more year to build confidence and to provide time to negotiate some sort of new agreement.
On October 5th, Donald Trump was asked by a reporter, what do you think?
He said, I think it's a good idea.
Now, the two countries have not formally agreed to maintain those central limits.
That would be a very good idea.
And so one of the other things that reporters and members of Congress should be asking the president, well, what's your proposal to Putin?
How do you respond to Putin's proposal?
And are you going to engage with Russia?
And how are you going to engage with China to exercise, to try to impose some nuclear restraint on China?
So we are on the verge, if we don't have new constraints, John, a new era of nuclear competition, not just between the U.S. and Russia, as during the Cold War, but between the U.S., Russia, and China.
And if Donald Trump adds nuclear testing to this radioactive mix, it's going to be all the more dangerous.
When you talk in terms of subcritical and all of these things that people might not understand, it simply means that you're testing all the components that go to detonating the nuclear core.
And yes, this is a technical topic, but lay people, I think, can understand more than enough in order to get their heads around this.
So as you said, a nuclear warhead, a nuclear bomb, requires fissile material, a critical mass, a certain mass of plutonium and or highly enriched uranium.
And with most U.S. nuclear weapons, conventional explosives implode the hollow plutonium core, so it creates a critical mass of the plutonium atoms coming together, which then releases the energy in a massive explosion.
So these are not firecrackers.
These are not conventional bombs.
These are weapons that produce enormous energy.
The bombs, as everyone remembers, that destroyed Hiroshima Nagasaki were relatively small nuclear bombs.
They were 15 to 20 kilotons of TNT equivalent.
But nuclear weapons don't just create a blast.
They produce enormous amount of heat exceeding temperatures that are on the sun.
It produces enormous amounts of radiation.
And the blast kicks up soot and it creates enormous fires which produce fallout, radioactive fallout that can spread many, many, many miles downwind and it can loft it into the atmosphere.
So if nuclear weapons are used in a conflict in the hundreds, it would have not just the effect of killing potentially hundreds of millions of people initially in the first hours, but creating atmospheric effects that change the climate, that make it difficult to grow crops in certain areas.
So this is why President Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, said in 1985 at a summit in Geneva, a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
So Donald Trump, I think, understands that.
But my concern is that he is engaging in policy and behavior that is at once conciliatory.
He says he wants to engage with Russia and China in denuclearization talks.
But then he's threatening to resume nuclear testing.
So these contradictory statements, unclear statements, I can tell you, they're creating a great deal of confusion in other capitals.
And it's important for the administration to straighten out what they're talking about and why.
Well, it's a good question about how we can and whether we can eliminate the 12,000 nuclear weapons that still exist on Earth.
There are ways, pathways that this could be accomplished.
We're on the wrong path at the moment.
What I can tell you is that from my perspective and the perspective of most of the world's nations, the pursuing the goal and taking steps to move towards the goal of a world without nuclear weapons puts us on a safer path.
Fewer nuclear weapons possessed by fewer states, fewer to no nuclear weapons threats, no nuclear testing.
That all makes us safer.
And if folks are watching their Netflix this week, I will mention that there is a remarkable film by Academy Award-winning director Catherine Bigelow called A House of Dynamite that illustrates in detail, at a heart-pounding pace, how dangerous the current nuclear deterrence balance of terror is.
I mean, how easily things could be sent in the wrong direction if there's a missile that is fired or we think a missile is fired at us and how we react and how other countries react.
So in my view, it is unsustainable to maintain so many nuclear weapons with so many countries.
At some point, nuclear deterrence is going to fail and we could see a nuclear conflict.
Well, there are a lot of scenarios that are worrisome.
You know, just this past year, India and Pakistan had a hot conflict exchanging missile fire.
They're nuclear arms.
That conflict could easily have gone nuclear.
And it was good that President Trump helped intervene to bring an end to the fighting.
So that's a nuclear flashpoint.
The war in Ukraine mentioned here.
Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994.
They had to.
They couldn't maintain them.
Russia wouldn't have allowed it in 1994.
Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict.
But note that Ukraine keeps hitting back and has kept Russia from taking over more of Ukraine.
But that could become a flashpoint between NATO forces, Russian forces that could escalate also.
The United States and China, there are tensions over the Taiwan Straits.
There's a possibility of the conflict between the U.S. and China could go nuclear.
And then there is our friend Kim Jong-un in North Korea, who possesses a small but extremely deadly arsenal, about 100-some nuclear weapons and various missiles.
If there's a conflict on the Korean Peninsula, that conflict would almost instantly go nuclear because that's Kim Jong-un's strategy.
If you hit us, if you attack us, if you try to decapitate my leadership, I'm going to strike back with nuclear weapons.
And the distance between North Korea and Seoul is kilometers.
And so that could be a disaster.
So any one of these conflicts could go the wrong way if they erupt.
And so we need to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, reduce their salience.
We need governments to be speaking with one another.
Right now, the United States and Russia are not speaking on a regular basis about risk reduction.
The U.S. and China are not doing that.
North and South Korea are not doing that.
So it is worrisome, but we can do things about it.
We have done things about it before with public pressure.
Congress presidents have taken leadership to reduce the nuclear risk, and we need to do it again.
We should just keep in mind that it is the President of the United States who does have the sole authority to order the launch of nuclear weapons and doesn't require consent from others.
That is the current U.S. nuclear posture.
So that's something everybody should just keep in mind as a fact.
There have been changes in the nuclear decision-making process through the years as the amount of time that the president has has been reduced.
I mean, since the 60s, this has essentially been the situation where the president has the authority to launch nuclear weapons either first or in retaliation to a real or perceived attack.
It would take about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on where the missile is launched.
As folks who watch a House of Dynamite might see, that particular scenario had a missile that only took 18 minutes.
So it is a very short decision time.
And the president is under enormous pressure to make a decision about whether to retaliate or not, based probably on not a lot of good information that can be gathered.
And in that 30 minutes, the president might be golfing.
The Secretary of Defense might be seeing a doctor.
I mean, there could be a lot of reasons why all of the best advice is not even available and all the information is not there.
So one of the things we need to do to reduce the risk is to extend the time the president has and to remember that an instant retaliation is usually not, well, never, I would say, wise because we have the ability with our submarines, which are invulnerable to attack, to retaliate at any time of our choosing.
But that's how fast nuclear war between the major nuclear armed states could take place.
That's not the most likely scenario.
And all of a sudden, out of the blue attack is probably a regional war that leads to nuclear use on a limited scale that then escalates.
I have questions about how much nuclear fallout has affected from the previous wars and even situations where we have just like Three Mile Island or the other places in the world where nuclear fallout, even Fukushima in Japan, how that's affected so many people across the world and continues to affect the Chernobyl accident, all those things.
I'm just curious as to how many lives it's cost and it's continuing to cost without all that stuff.
Well, it's hard to estimate exactly how many people have died or fallen ill because of nuclear testing related radiation poisoning, but it is in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
It is very hard to draw a straight line between a radiation, low-level radiation exposure and a particular cancer or disease outcome.
But safe to say, you know, we cannot afford to have atmospheric nuclear testing resume.
And if there were a nuclear war, this would be among the many effects, the atmospheric effects of the nuclear radiation, as well as the soot that would erupt from the fires from a nuclear war.
So we cannot afford to see that happen ever.
One thing I'd just say about the previous caller real, real quick, John, is no matter where you stand in this issue, no matter what you think, I would respectfully encourage everybody, ask your member of Congress, ask your senator what they are doing to reduce nuclear risks.
What are they doing to explore and ask the president what he's thinking about and what he's doing?
This issue has fallen off the table as many other issues have risen, but this is something that I think is very important to help set our policymakers in a safer direction.
Thanks so much for joining us in person on the live stream on C-SPAN, anywhere else you're watching for our conversation with House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Sam Graves of Missouri.
We'll talk a bit about News of the Day, FEMA reform, and the role that the federal government plays in disaster response and recovery.