Nuclear Weapons Expert Dr. Peter Pry | PBD Podcast | EP 155
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PBD Podcast Episode 155. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick and Dr. Peter Pry.
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About:
Dr. Pry is the Executive Director of Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a Congressional Advisory Board dedicated to achieving protection of the United States from electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cyber-attack, mass destruction terrorism and other threats to civilian critical infrastructures on an accelerated basis. Dr. Pry is also the Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy Forum, a Congressional Advisory Board dedicated to developing policies to counter Weapons of Mass Destruction. In 2015, Dr. Pry testified in Denver on Colorado’s first attempt to pass EMP/GMD legislation.
About Co-Host:
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
0:00 - Start
8:30 - Is America as paranoid today as they used to be?
15:00 - When was the last time America was 'paranoid?'
18:30 - How much of the paranoid stems from borders
22:00 - Who do the people trust the least?
33:00 - America's filtering system
39:00 - Americans born here are the most anti-american
44:00 - Ukraine/Russia - what don’t we know
1:10:00 - Best defense right now
1:15:00 - What should we be doing?
1:21:00 - World War 4 - China/Russia
1:26:00 - what is the biggest threat? Nuclear/EMP/Cyber
1:31:00 - how tough to build an emp
1:39:00 - Nuclear shelter
1:44:00 - How does the average American protect against nuclear weapons
If you do not know who Dr. Peter Pry is, let me formally introduce him to you.
Number one, he is the world's leading expert on WMD's weapons of mass destruction and EMPs, which we'll get into EMPs later on today.
We got a lot of questions on EMPs.
Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a congressional advisory board dedicated to achieving protection of the United States from electromagnetic pulse, EMPs, cyber attacks, mass destruction, terrorism, and other threats to critical civilian infrastructure on an accelerated basis.
Was former intelligence officer with the CIA responsible for analyzing ready Soviet and Russian nuclear strategy, operational plans, military doctrine, threats, perceptions, and developing U.S. paradigms for strategic warning.
That's from 85 to 96.
Has written multiple books.
His latest book, Blackout Warfare, Attacking the U.S. Electric Power Grid, A Revolution in Military Affairs, just came out last year.
BBC took one of his books, Soviet War Scare, in turning into a documentary.
National Geographic took another one of his books, Electric Armageddon, and it became a TV documentary.
And he holds a certification in nuclear weapons design.
That is our guest today, Dr. Peter Pry.
Thank you so much for making the time for being on the podcast.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
Yes, it's a, you know, folks, this is going to be a very much of a, this is such a serious podcast today that I think I have to manage expectations with you up front.
My colleague here, Adam, never wears glasses.
The topic is so serious that he had to put on glasses today because he had to at least look like he knows what he's talking about in this topic.
So that was his position in Getook.
You got to fake it till you make it.
Okay, yeah.
If you want to compete, throw your glasses on.
Dr. Prye.
But look, there's a lot of stuff going on today.
Here's some, I mean, I got a lot of questions.
I just kept writing questions down.
Why is Russia acting weak with Ukraine?
Misconceptions about nuclear wars and EMPs.
The mindset of a Russian, how different it is than an American, the Eastern versus the Western.
Who's more paranoid and prepared?
Is it us?
Is it Russia?
Is it China?
Why are we willing to entertain a war with Russia over Ukraine?
Can an old nuclear weapon break down?
A lot of our nuclear weapons are 30-plus years old.
Can that break down?
Is it like a car?
Is it something that can work even 10, 20, 30 years from now?
Or do we have to update them?
Super EMP weapons.
What's the best defense against nuclear weapons and EMPs?
Anyways, there's a lot of different things I want to cover with you here today on the podcast, but I'll just open it up to you.
I gave the intro, if you don't mind sharing with the audience a little bit more about your background so they will know what things you've worked on and then we'll get into specific topics.
Sure, I was the chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission for 17 years.
And that commission was headed by the world's actual foremost expert at electromagnetic pulse, Dr. William Graham, who my privilege to work for him as the chief of staff.
He was President Reagan's science advisor.
He ran NASA.
He's the Free World's Albert Einstein of EMP.
And when I was in elementary school, he was a young defense scientist who was on the defense science team that discovered the EMP phenomena during the 1962 Starfish Prime high-altitude nuclear test.
You know, I worked on the House Armed Services Committee professional staff with a very wide portfolio, nuclear weapons, electromagnetic pulse, but also NATO enlargement.
I ended up going to most of the countries that were former Warsaw Pact countries that wanted to come into NATO.
And I advised Congress against expanding NATO eastward precisely because I thought it would result in a new Cold War with Russia that we didn't want.
And that we would be unable to defend these countries because we can't project power that far.
And it's right in Russia's backyard, and they can project the power.
Moreover, it would provoke Russia, lead them to rely even more heavily on nuclear weapons to deal with the emerging threat of an eastward expanding NATO.
You mentioned my CIA background.
So that I worked also before I joined the CIA, I was an analyst in the what used to be called, it doesn't exist anymore, but it was called the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
And so I was a verification analyst responsible for looking at: are the Soviets complying with the arms control treaties?
And that gave me great insight into how the arms control system works.
And they were violating all the treaties, practically.
But within the Arms Control Association, it gave me insight.
The State Department and people in the West were very, very reluctant to ever admit that any treaty was being violated.
So in order to acquire enough data to say that, yeah, the Soviets are violating the treaty, it would often take years and years, and there'd be a non-compliance before we would withdraw from the treaty.
But my background is my professional background has been in nuclear weapons and strategy or national security issues all my life.
I guess I should mention my, it goes even back before I was born.
You mentioned you were a refugee from Iran.
My own parents were grandparents who were refugees from communism.
They fought on the side of the whites and lost to the Reds during the Revolution, and they came over here in the 1920s.
And there'd been a strong vein of anti-communism.
I was raised with that.
Both my family, my father, my uncles fought in World War II.
And we were always more or less lectured that you can lose freedom in a single generation and that someday the bad guys, the fascists or the communists, are going to come for us.
So we need to be prepared.
We need to be strong and we need to defend this country.
And that was dreamed into my head when I was a kid.
I was studying military history when I was a teenager.
My first book, I think, that set me on the path I read when I was 13 years old was Herman Kahn's on thermonuclear war.
And I said, that's what I want to do.
13 years old.
Yeah, because those are, I learned from military history that the military technologies that are most decisive in every period, whether it was Alexander the Great Sarissa, which is a longer spear than anybody else had during those classical periods, or whether it was the organization of the Roman legions, that used catapults and had better organization than other armies, the technology tends to be decisive in future wars.
And nuclear weapons were the decisive weapon of our era and still are.
And so I thought, well, if I can become an expert in this and help protect freedom, protect the free world, protect the United States by making my contribution that way, that's what I'm going to do.
And I tried to join, I tried to follow in the footprints of my father and wanted to join, go to the Vietnam War, but I was rejected, you know, because my eyesight back then was so bad.
I've had LASIC since, but I was legally blind, you know, at the time, and nobody would take me.
And so I said, well, maybe I can get into the CIA.
And the rest is the story of the rest of my professional life flows from that.
What a career.
Thank you for your service.
We also learned that the CIA is not too concerned about eyesight.
I didn't know that before, but that was good enough to learn about that.
But going through this, so you said a lot of different things.
So this has been ingrained.
It's in your DNA.
You've been wired.
You felt the fear and the angst communism creates, control creates, losing your freedom creates.
Do you think America is as paranoid today?
You know how they say only the paranoid survive.
Do you think America is as paranoid today as they used to be years ago, where they treated enemies in a different way?
Are we a little bit more cocky, loose, arrogant, and a little bit too much of, let's share all our secrets with the world and everything we're doing.
And you think we're still in that paranoid mind where we're worried about the enemy like before?
Are we a little bit more looser today?
I don't think the United States has ever been paranoid.
I think the great, and that, frankly, is perhaps one of the things that threatens our very existence.
And I think the thing that makes the world so dangerous is between the free world and the totalitarian dictatorships that we face today, there's a broad gulf, not just in terms of freedom, but in terms of strategic culture.
Countries like Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, there's strategic cultures that are paranoid, genuinely paranoid, so that they see threats that don't even exist.
And so they're willing to overreact and overprepare and strike out against threats that are fantasies in their minds.
We're just the opposite.
Our civilization is what I would call dysfunctionally optimistic.
You know, we think that everybody loves us or we want the rest of the world to love us.
We think that the rest of the world understands that we're not the aggressors.
We don't do Pearl Harbors.
This flows from the nature of the civilizations.
I should provide some clarification.
Why is it that these totalitarian states and military dictatorships think this way and have these perceptions?
That's because internally, political power comes out of the barrel of a gun for them.
Most of their leaders have murdered their way to the top.
They have constitutions and laws that are fake, that are just intended to increase the totalitarian power of the state over their people.
The way they operate internally is not through negotiation and compromise and contracts and the rule of law.
They operate the way criminal gangs operate.
And in the end, it's the survival of the fittest.
It's might makes right.
It's a zero-sum game.
It's not a win-win kind of an outcome.
There's the living and the dead.
And that's how it operates within places like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
And so they project their experience and the domestic hells that they've created onto the world stage.
And they figure everybody else is like that.
So they, you know, and that's how the world operates.
For us, it's just the opposite.
Our domestic society believes in win-win outcomes.
We try to negotiate differences.
We try to, we have contracts and the rule of law.
We believe in fair play.
And we think the rest of the world is like that.
And this is manifest, for example, in the numerous arms control treaties that we've signed with the Soviet Union and now Russia over the years.
And we never seem to learn.
They violate every one of them.
And we never seem to learn that for them, these contracts are not binding.
That they're willing to cheat on them because they don't believe in something.
We have, I guess a manifestation of this thing is, in our view, in our culture, in our civilizational culture, we believe in this thing called peace, for example.
There's a condition of peace, and then there's war.
Whereas for these other civilizations, there is only war.
You know, there's war within the society to stay in power.
You're constantly at war with the other side, even though we call it peace.
It's really, from their perspective, the early moves in the chess game.
You're moving the pawns during the period of peace, but you're really at war.
And you're getting ready for the war that's going to come.
And this makes us extremely vulnerable.
It's why we are constantly taken by surprise in the wars that we end up engaging in, because we fail to understand that other civilization.
One of my jobs at the CIA when I worked there was to understand the threat perceptions of the other side.
What is their military doctrine?
How do they think we could get into a nuclear war?
How do they think?
That's not an easy thing to do.
It's one of the hardest things to do, to stand outside of your civilization and try to put yourself into the mind of your adversary.
And we don't do that well.
And so you've got the worst possible combination here when it comes to the clash of civilizations.
A totalitarian civilization that's extremely paranoid, sees threats everywhere, is ready to strike out, and extremely naive, dysfunctionally optimistic, thinking that we can solve any problem, that nobody sees us as a threat, and that actions that we take will not be perceived as existential threats to our adversaries, that they understand we're not going to attack them.
It's the deadliest combination you can have for getting into a world war.
You know, you said a lot there, and I want to unpack a lot of the things you talk about.
To me, that's the mindset in the world of business.
It's the different mindset between a founder who builds a business versus an executive that comes in for a job.
The founder is always wartime, and sometimes it becomes problematic when it's not wartime.
It's peacetime.
But you're always paranoid.
The executive is like, oh, we've got plenty of money in the bank.
We can spend the money.
You know, sometimes in America, presidents come up thinking, we have so much money in the back.
We can spend it.
It's not a big deal.
We're already powerful.
We can do this, so they're not as paranoid as they once used to be.
My father says never is a very powerful word.
You said we've never been paranoid.
Are you saying never as in 1776 or never as in 40 years, 60 years, 80 years, 100 years?
Well, I'm speaking in relative terms compared to the North Koreans and the Chinese and the Russians and our contemporary adversaries.
I don't think we've ever been as paranoid as they.
Including Founding Fathers?
Oh, including the Founding Fathers.
If we understand, maybe we're using the word paranoid in different ways.
I mean, a paranoia is a dysfunctional psychological condition.
Got it.
That means that you live in a fantasy world where you imagine that you are surrounded by threats.
Some of them may be real, but many of them are not.
And I think I don't think that describes America in any phase of its history.
If anything, we have been a nation of optimists throughout.
The founding fathers, take them as an example.
They had, I would describe them as very optimistic people because they believed, you know, they believed that God intended men to be free, which I think is true.
They believed in the ability of human beings to use rationalism to govern themselves, which is why we had the American Revolution.
The whole reason for the American Revolution, it was a gamble on human optimism, on the ability of human beings to be free, that you didn't need to have a monarchy, basically a tyranny,
in order to have a good society, in order to keep order in society, that people were capable, in a very decentralized way, because the founders' vision of what America should be is very different from what it is today.
But they had this vision of a federalism with a small F, where people would be governing themselves in their hamlets, in their villages, and that's where most governance would take place.
And then at the level of the states, okay, that would be the next level.
And the least amount of power was supposed to be in the federal government in Washington.
This is a revolution in the way men were supposed to be governed.
Not a top-down system where a king is deciding everything for you and it's implemented on the ministers and you peasants are just supposed to obey.
What an optimistic vision of human nature and of how to build a good society.
And throughout our history, we have believed in that.
Look at our trust in bringing immigrants into this country.
Even though there were lots of prejudices and biases, we had this faith in the ability of human beings to use rationalism and to enjoy freedom so that we would bring in Catholics, emigrants of different races, and that we could put them all together in this mix, and it would all work.
In America, it would make America not only would make it a better place and an even freer and more prosperous place.
And they were right.
They were right for, anyway, for a long time.
The system seems to be breaking down today, but that's not because the founders were wrong about the fundamentals.
It's because we have forgotten the fundamentals.
Question about the, Pat brought up the topic of only the paranoid survive.
And essentially the debate that you guys are having right now is the optimism versus paranoia.
How much of the paranoia that the North Koreans, the Russians, the Iranians, Chinese have stems from borders versus the United States?
I mean, we're very lucky.
I mean, our founding fathers and our fathers before them had to sail across the Mayflower, and we know the whole story, just to get to a place where they could have their religious freedoms and free from persecution.
And they found this essentially utopian society where basically you didn't have to worry about getting attacked on mass scale.
I mean, I get it, Native Americans, and we can kind of have all that.
But when you're looking at China or Russia's borders, they border China.
Russia, the East End, borders Iran.
China, North Korea, I mean, we don't have to bust out a map right now.
But how much of that paranoia is just naturally built in that you mentioned versus the utopian optimism that stems here in America?
It just comes from our simple borders.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, another way of putting it is their histories, the different histories that we have.
You know, as you point out, ours is an incredibly benign and relatively bloodless history.
I mean, the only major war we fought on this soil was the American Civil War, 750,000 dead.
And that was more than a century ago, okay?
All that time since our wars have been fought overseas.
And even in the great wars, World War I and World War II, our casualties compared to the casualties that everybody else suffered were relatively light.
300,000 dead in World War II versus you take the Soviet Union lost 30 million dead in the very place where the Ukraine war is happening now.
They're called the bloodlands for that reason, 30 million dead.
And China lost tens of millions in the World War II.
The Koreas lost millions of people.
And this is in the 20th century.
It's not a long time ago.
They're losing tens of thousands of people now.
And if you look back across the history of those areas, where these states are, they are red with blood.
And there are constant wars.
Just if we take Russia, beginning in the medieval period, the invasions by the Mongols, invaded by the Swedish Empire, invaded by Napoleon, World War I.
And then, of course, the Nazis in World War II invaded again.
And an extremely bloody history.
And for them, their paranoia is understandable because of their history.
It flows from their history.
We shouldn't think of them as irrational, but they're differently rational because of their history.
And that rationality is so different from ours because their historical experience is so different from ours that they don't think like us.
And it is not easy to anticipate and have a meeting of minds and all the rest.
I think that's hard to highlight.
Yeah.
Is that we think a little bit differently because they're naturally paranoid, whereas we're naturally optimistic.
Let me ask you guys this question.
Let me ask both of you guys this question: Is who do they not trust more?
The people, right?
Do the Russians trust their government more than they trust America?
Does America trust our government more than we trust the enemy?
The people.
What I'm going with this is, like you said, when America was first founded, it was about the federalism with the lowercase F.
Well, you said a small F, right?
Okay, which means we made the decisions for our lives and to each a zone, go find a way to make money.
We're not going to get in your way.
We didn't really have that much taxes back then.
It was, you know, survival of the fittest.
Go be industrious, create an economy, create a small business, build something for your family.
Here's some land, XYZ.
Today, the government is massive.
So today, I can speak for myself and some of the friends that I speak to.
It seems like some people are more paranoid.
And who they don't trust sometimes today is the U.S. government with their decision-making process.
So there's an element of paranoia today because America is not what America was founded on.
It's a different America today than what it was before.
And this is left and right.
They both like a big government.
They both like control.
They both want to feel they can make the right decision for us.
Where based on what you're saying, the founding fathers more, hey, I think you can reason.
And your ability to reason, we trust you.
Go figure out a way to win for your family.
And we're going to leave it up to you.
So paranoia to me is also different for different positions.
Like as a general of the military, I would hope our general is somewhat paranoid.
For the frontline guys, I would hope they're a little bit paranoid.
For folks who are working in your world, I hope you go to sleep at night trying to think what Putin's next 15 moves are, because if you're not, I'm deeply concerned.
So the part I think about paranoid is more proper preparation prevents poor performance, right?
We're overly prepared against the enemy.
Do you think the concept of paranoia has changed today with the people of America towards the government versus the enemy?
Or do you think, yeah, we should still go back to being more optimistic because future does look bright.
Everything's going to eventually work itself out.
Okay.
Maybe we should use the word suspicious, you know, for some of these things.
This idea of paranoia or suspicion of the government, I think part of the problem in our society is that we're less suspicious or less paranoid, many of us, than we should be.
You know, one of the principles of the founders, one of the consensus views that existed, and this is right in the, you know, in the Federalist papers and all the rest, is the American people are expected to be suspicious of government.
That was part, and that was one of the things that made the American character different.
We believed in rugged individualism and self-sufficiency.
We were supposed to be a nation of farmers and small shopkeepers.
They understood the principle.
As Thomas Jefferson said, that government governs best, which governs the least.
Behind that principle is the understanding that the increase of government power inevitably erodes your freedom.
You cannot have stronger and stronger government and be free, because you're giving government more and more control over yourself.
And therefore, the founders expected Americans to be extremely suspicious of government.
And indeed, in those days, before television and radio, one of the entertainments people had was politics.
People would get together in bars and taverns.
They would listen to political speeches for hours.
They were much more engaged, I think, than Americans are today.
We think of ourselves as more informed and more sophisticated.
They were very sophisticated and well-read, those early Americans.
And that's one of the reasons why they were suspicious of the growth of government at any level, whether it was at the village level or at the state level, and especially at the federal level.
And indeed, the Federalist papers, famous papers written by Madison and Monroe and Alexander Hamilton, were written to try to convince in the aftermath of the American Revolution, where we had just thrown off a monarchy.
They were written to try to convince the states, you need to come together, you know, in a federal government, and we'll have a centralized government in Washington to manage relations between the states and to defend the country and to manage foreign policy.
But don't worry, this government in Washington isn't going to become another tyranny.
Because the states didn't believe that.
There were a lot of people called the anti-Federalists who didn't want that.
They said, we just fought a revolution to get out from under monarchy.
So the whole debate over the Constitution and the Federalist papers showed how suspicious people were of the growth of government.
And that basically that limited government produced the America that we enjoy today up until, I guess until the progressive era started changing things.
You mentioned about taxes, for example, low taxes.
People didn't have to pay income taxes.
It was unconstitutional to pay income taxes until the progressives changed that, I think, in 1910 or 1913.
And they amended, yeah, they amended the Constitution, and that opened the floodgates.
Because one of the things the founders, you know, the reason it was unconstitutional is they understood that if you gave government access to people's income and you could tax them, I think the phrase was, government will eat out the substance of the people.
And basically, that was what has happened and led to the explosive growth of government.
Today, people, unfortunately, I think, are much more trusting of government than they were throughout most of this country's history.
Now, there are exceptions, of course.
People who are conservatives, who understand the history of this country and the principles on which it's founded, tend to be suspicious of government and increasingly so because of the greatly expanded power of government.
But there is also half of America's family.
I mean, the Democrat Party, people who actually want to have socialism, really communism is what it is.
They call it socialism and democratic socialism to dress it up, but it really comes down to full-blown communism in terms of the way they're behaving and what they're after.
And these people actually think government is the answer to all problems.
They want the government to take care of them.
They want the government to save them from climate change, from institutional racism, from all of these fantasy threats that the government tells them are real and is the reason we should give more power to government to save them and protect them and to protect them also from people who disagree with them.
Because if you disagree with them, the idea of being able to have a civilized debate and argument, rationalism requires you to respect other people's point of view and concede that they may be sincere and not evil, and that you need to have a conversation with them and convince them to your point of view.
That is being rapidly lost in our society by the other side, which has all the earmarks of becoming an effect and a totalitarian movement within our country and threatens, and not just threatens, but frankly, I think we've already lost.
I don't think we're a constitutional republic today.
I think we're in the faces of a soft tyranny.
And why do I say that?
Because I think for some years we haven't been a constitutional republic.
The first year of the Trump administration, not President Trump's fault, but the Democrat Party's fault when they brought the false charges and tried to impeach the president for being a Manchurian candidate,
all of which has been proven to be false, that he was an agent of Russia and repeatedly abused the intelligence agencies to try to basically have a coup d'état against a legitimately elected American president.
The point is that both political parties, to have a true constitutional republic, have got to respect the Constitution and the rule of law and recognize the legitimacy of the political power of the other side when they win elections fairly.
And that didn't happen right from the beginning of the Trump administration.
So you don't really have, we haven't really lived in a true constitutional republic.
What we've been undergoing is a civil war between a nascent totalitarian movement on one side and the people who still believe in the Constitution on the other side.
And we're trying to, I hope, that we can get back to becoming a constitutional republic again.
but there are very profound problems in our strategic and our civilizational culture and our politics and all the rest that have resulted in this.
And it's not going to be easy to overcome.
We may go the way of most free systems.
I mean, history is not populated mostly by free systems.
Mostly they are tyrannies and military dictatorships and authoritarian type systems because freedom is hard.
It's hard to be a free people.
You know, you have to be actively engaged.
You have to be the kind of American the founders had in mind.
You know, someone who was going to be always suspicious of government, always jealous of his ability to manage himself.
It was a point of pride among Americans, for example, throughout most of our history not to take charity.
The idea of taking a handout from your neighbor would be disgraceful.
You know, it was considered a sign of manhood and of good citizenship that you should be able to take care of yourself and your own family, you know?
And if you couldn't, that was a source of shame.
And that very healthy instinct has gone away to an attitude that people feel the government owes them a living, you know?
But that's a topic we could go on on an all afternoon.
But yeah, I think we're in great trouble that way.
Oh, on the other side, where the Russians are concerned, for example, if we're talking about that, I mean, Putin is more popular right now.
I mean, he's probably more popular than he's ever been, you know, despite the Ukraine.
Amongst his own people?
Yeah, among his own people.
Can we stay on this topic?
I have one other question before we go into Putin.
I want to get your perspective on what's going on in Putin versus what we see on media.
So just a curiosity.
If America is building the country that it's building, the founding fathers, and they're going through what they're going through, you know, I applied for a job when I was 21 years old when I got out of the military and I'm dating a girl who's working on Morgan Stanley-Dean Widow.
I know nothing about securities, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, nothing.
I'm a 1.8 GPA kid.
I'm a hummer mechanic.
This girl's like, hey, listen, you got to get into financial services.
I send my resume to everybody.
I have no clue who Goldman Sachs is at the time.
I sent my resume.
Do you realize I wanted to see the reaction of the people who saw my resume?
My resume showed Haagen-Daz, Bob's big boy, Burger King, military, and Bally Total Fitness.
I wish I would pay money to see the reaction of the hiring managers that says, what the hell is this guy thinking about sending a degree of a resume like this to us?
But I was oblivious.
Goldman would never hire somebody like me.
My pedigree, my background, who I was.
So Goldman had high standards.
Don't you think a country who offers as much as we do, our filtering system of who we must keep a higher standard to what people have to do to earn certain things versus trying to please everybody?
I don't know if I can explain this properly.
Look, I'm a byproduct of immigration that ended up being here.
And when we came here, we didn't have a lot to offer.
I'm thankful for it.
I'm not coming from that point of view.
All I'm saying is, if we are from the mindset of here's everything America offers, what are you bringing to the table?
Okay.
So for me, I'm like, I'm going to pay my debt off by serving your country, okay?
And I'm going to pay my debt off to you for America giving me the opportunity by paying a lot of taxes, creating jobs, and not having to rely on the government so taxpayers don't have to help my family out.
And I'm just going to be a citizen that gives back to this country.
What happened to the what do you bring to the table?
What happened to what do you bring to America?
What happened to what do you offer us?
Instead of, let's just take everybody.
It's like tomorrow Goldman Sachs announces and says, look, we're offering jobs to everybody.
We don't care if you've got anything.
We don't care if you got a background.
We don't care if you got anything.
If you've never had a job before, we're hiring.
That would be ludicrous for Goldman Sachs to announce something like that.
If America was supposed to be that country, why do we drop our standards and turn it instead of keeping high standards for people?
We're almost begging people to say, oh, it's okay, don't worry about it.
Let us take care of you.
Oh, it's okay.
Not what are you going to do for us?
When did that shift take place?
Well, I understand.
I mean, this is outside the emigration policy is not my area of expertise, but I'm familiar with some of it.
But it happened, I think, in the 60s, you know, when they decided to broaden immigration so that we'd start bringing in a lot more people from the third world.
But I mean, I think the real motives behind it were even at the beginning, a calculation by the Democrat Party that they were going to be the political beneficiaries of greatly expanded immigration.
And there were standards, there were efforts to protect the border, obviously, even as recently as Bill Clinton was concerned about protecting the borders.
But we've very quickly had political power taken over in the Democrat Party by radicals.
Part of this radical left-wing ideology that dominates the Democrat Party today is a belief in globalism.
And the seeds of globalism didn't start with Joe Biden or in recent times, but the concept of globalism really goes, has a long history.
But really, concept of globalism and internationalism, at least as far back as the aftermath of World War II, before that, that's why the United Nations was established.
That's why we have world court.
That's why we established NATO and then the European Union came along.
In academia, the concept of the nation-state got a bad reputation as a consequence of World War I and World War II.
Oh, nationalism and patriotism, these things result in wars.
And so we need to create a global citizen, people who identify with a one-world order, and go beyond the nation-state.
And the League of Nations was an early attempt to do that.
The United Nations was an attempt to do that.
They would never, the elites and the globalist elites who believed in this philosophy never explained that as the reason to the American people because that would be extremely unpopular.
Americans throughout most of our history have been patriotic and don't think nationalism is evil.
And it isn't.
But we fought a lot of wars in the name of globalism.
But we haven't been explained to us that way.
That's why the United States has been all over the Middle East engaged in wars where it's very hard to find an American national interest that is justified, for example, by the Afghanistan war, where we've had people there for a long time.
And so part of this is an attempt to, it's not just the idea of having no standards to let people in, but it's an attempt to erase national boundaries and to eliminate the nation state as the organizing principle for the world order.
And that's why the Biden administration basically does not protect our border.
And talk about standards.
We have no standards.
And the border is wide open.
So that's where we are.
But I agree with you, certainly.
And throughout most of our immigration history, until recent days, I mean, even including up until the Clinton administration, you know, we were supposed to have standards and we were supposed to be bringing in people who would make a net contribution to the society.
And immigration policy was supposed to advance the interests of the American people who are living here and help make all of our lives better.
I was under that impression.
So let's talk about Russia under your critical.
If I may, because as you're saying this, I'm thinking there's nobody more nationalistic that has American pride as this immigrant right here, right?
Born in Iran, made it America.
And I found that seems to be true with most immigrants.
They're lucky to be here.
They're happy to be here.
Like one of the conversations you have with immigrants is, you have no idea what it's like over there in Cuba, in Venezuela, in North Korea with our friend Yomi Park.
I mean, we've interviewed these people.
You have no idea what's going on over there.
So you're talking about the immigration policies.
It seems to me that it's the Americans who are born here that are the ones who are a little anti-American, if you will, the far left of the Democratic Party.
They're the ones, in my estimation, they're the ones basically saying, oh, like, we're the bad people.
We're the bad guys.
They've kind of been indoctrinated or ingrained into this school of thought where the immigrants are like, dude, you have no idea what it's like out there.
Could you speak to that a little bit?
What are your thoughts on naturally born American citizens being a little more anti-American than even the immigrants you're referring to?
Probably a lot more anti-American than the immigrants they're referring to.
Those people who have experienced living in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, you know, of course, really appreciate this country.
They've had in their own lives the experience of what the alternative is.
Whereas Americans, especially American college students, tend to come from very comfortable middle class.
They've never had to live under a totalitarian regime or an authoritarian regime, don't appreciate this country and our educational system, from the high school level all the way up, has become a big brainwashing machine for leftist views, which includes anti-Americanism.
I remember when I was in graduate school, I mean, and this was back in the 1980s, I had the experience.
I mean, anti-Americanism was basically being taught back then, even then.
In what year was that?
Oh, this was 1983, sometime in 1980, the early 1980s.
You're saying anti-Americanism was taught in universities at this point?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I mean, there were some conservative professors at that point, but the general attitude was, well, to give you an example, required reading in one of our courses, history's literature, was Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice.
Cleaver was a Black Panther, violent activist, anti-American.
He wanted to overthrow the government of the United States and establish a black nation, a separate black nation in the old Confederacy, okay?
And his Soul on Ice book is a diatribe against the racist, evil America.
And I remember challenging the professor who was teaching that book, because this was Eltridge Cleaver's views trying to introduce us.
I said, how come we're not reading how come we're not reading Soul on Fire?
Because Cleaver, After, I think he shot a cop or something like that, or committed some crime.
But he escaped and spent many years living in Russia, Cuba, I don't think he went to China, but basically authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
And then he went to the U.S. Embassy and begged to come back to the United States.
And even if he had to serve jail time, okay?
And when he got off the plane, he kissed the tarmac, literally kissed the ground of the United States, became a Christian, and eventually ran as a Republican member of Congress in Los Angeles, lost.
But his soul on ice is a warning to people who used to believe as he did that America is the greatest country on earth, that we should all be grateful here.
And they did not teach that.
What did the professor say?
He didn't even know the book existed.
How did you know it existed?
I can't remember how I knew it existed.
This guy was reading nuclear physicist books at age 13.
But there's a lot of books out there.
For him to know it, just curious.
I read a lot of books.
Very obvious.
When I was young.
And I'll bet you that Soul on Ice is still required reading, but they don't require them.
They don't even tell them about the existence of the other book, Soul on Fire, where Ill Cleaver had the experience of what it was like to live outside of America and changed his mind and just completely reversed course.
Yeah, I just pulled it up right now.
What a perspective that you have with that.
But let's continue.
Let's go into some of these topics for your expertise.
So if the average person turns on the TV and wants to know more about what's going on with Ukraine and Russia, they would probably say Zelensky is a hero.
They would consider him Churchill.
Putin is the next Hitler.
They would say Putin is sick.
He's weak.
Ukraine is beating and winning the war.
America is doing a great job giving all this support to Ukraine and getting involved.
It's a great job we're doing taking care of these guys.
Everybody wants to go have a meeting with Zelensky.
Just a couple of days ago, Jill Biden was in Ukraine having a private meeting with Zelensky's wife, First Lady, and Trudeau was just there from Canada spending some time with Zelensky.
It is becoming a, and the world is getting behind Zelensky.
Now, as a person that's extremely paranoid, and let's add a new word to my vocabulary, suspicious, right?
I'm sitting there now wondering, is there something I don't know?
That was one of the reasons why we wanted to bring you here, because I want to see maybe you got a different perspective that we don't see.
When you see what the news is saying, when you see what's going on, do you see Putin getting weaker?
Do you see him sitting there, or do you see saying he's doing exactly what he was expecting America to get into this, to use this as an excuse to create a war against the U.S. and American people are not thinking the negative side effects of what could happen with this the next 3, 6, 12, 24 months?
I don't know.
What is your perspective?
How do you view what's going on versus the rest of the world?
Okay.
Well, first, I do think Zelensky is a Churchill-like character because his job is supposed to be to convince other countries to come to the defense of Ukraine, even if it's not in their interests.
I mean, that's what Churchill did with the United States in World War II, and that's what Zelensky is doing now.
He's supposed to be doing that, so that doesn't make him an evil person.
Putin may well be Hitler, okay?
But you have to, but you have to, Putin may be Stalin, all right?
But during World War II, we made common cause with Stalin against the common threat, which was Nazi Germany.
And in my view, the West seems to have completely forgotten the strategic big picture here.
And the strategic big picture is that we face the free countries face the greatest threat to our security, to our existence that we have ever faced in the alliance that exists between Russia and China and their client states, North Korea and Iran, in international terrorism, all of whom are part of a new bloc.
You know, they haven't formalized it with a treaty for all of them, although there are treaties between Russia and China.
And the West has been so slow to wake up to this reality.
You know, only now, I've been saying for many years that Russia and China are de facto allies.
And it seems to me, it should have been obvious to anyone, you know, who had been following the history of the relations between Russia and China.
China's superpower capabilities are built on Russian technology.
Their new missiles, their advanced aircraft, their ships and everything.
Russia basically helped build China into the great military threat that it is today.
It's likewise with North Korea.
It's amazing to me that Washington never seemed to be as surprised as it should be that North Korea could go so rapidly to acquire atomic weapons and the hydrogen bomb.
Last December, it displays the world's largest mobile ICBM that people think is going to carry MIRVs now, which is called Multiple Independently Targeted Rancher Vehicles, so one missile can send many independent.
How could North Korea do that all by itself?
Well, it hasn't done it all by itself.
Its missile technology has been provided to it by Russia and China.
They want North Korea to become a nuclear threat to the United States so they can fight a proxy nuclear war against us if they have to, to drive us out of the Pacific by raising the risks of providing our alliance guarantees to our allies in the Pacific, you know, so that we to change our strategic calculus to say, well, you know, if we defend South Korea, we might get in a nuclear war with North Korea.
Is it worth the candle?
If we defend Japan, is it worth the candle to risk Los Angeles on a nuclear war with North Korea?
Likewise with Iran, you know, the Iranian nuclear program, those are Russian nuclear reactors that were built for them.
The Russians are building more nuclear reactors.
North Korean's missiles are based on, usually based on North Korean technology.
Their best medium-range missile, the Shahab-3, is really a souped-up version of North Korea's no-dong.
And there are North Korean scientists and technicians and Russian and Chinese scientists and technicians in Iran helping them develop their nuclear missile programs.
So they have been a clandestine bloc.
Now finally, Washington sees that, oh, Russia and China really are allies.
They've been hoping that that hasn't been true for many years, right up until the Ukrainian crisis, but they are allies.
And our job number one for us is to be prepared to defeat this bloc, this totalitarian power bloc that is coming.
They are a bigger threat to us by far than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were in World War II, because they can destroy our homeland now.
Did you just say they're a bigger threat than the Nazi and Germany was in World War?
Than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan combined and fascist Italy combined because the totalitarian powers of that day could not reach across the oceans.
They couldn't project power across the oceans.
Now they can and they could destroy our society in 30 minutes and all their, even their allies.
And we should, by the way, when a country gets nuclear missiles, you really need to think of them as a superpower.
You know, we like to think of superpowers as, you know, meeting an economic definition.
When it comes to life and death, what matters is, can that country destroy you?
And can they do it quickly?
North Korea could destroy us, and it could do it quickly.
That makes them a superpower, even though the rest of their economy, in no other respect, are they a superpower.
But it doesn't matter.
When it comes to life and death, they are a superpower.
And Iran, I believe, is already a superpower.
I think that we've, it's another topic.
I just published a report today, as a matter of fact, that was carried in Israel called Iran EMP Threat, where I make the case that Iran has already got nuclear weapons, that they've had them for some time.
I'm not the only one who believes that.
There's a very credible minority view in the American strategic community that never gets heard, okay, that says, hey, Iran has already got the bump.
But this is the most formidable combination we've ever faced in our history, and I don't think we can beat it.
If we have to end up having a protracted new Cold War against this combination, we're going to lose.
And if it goes into a hot war, we're going to lose even worse.
So our job, number one, is to split the Russian-Chinese alliance.
That's our best hope for prevailing in the new Cold War.
That is our highest priority, to split that alliance.
And I think it's possible to do it, you know, because I think Putin and Russia has been discontented with that alliance.
I think they understand.
Russia is smart enough to see that China in the long run, after they defeat us, okay, there's going to be a World War IV between the totalitarian powers.
And I think Russia realizes because they've built up China to be such a strong power and they have a billion people that China in the long run is a bigger threat to Russia than the West is.
And I also think Russia is kind of disappointed in its relationship with China.
China is obviously on their side now and they're getting benefits from China now, but the relative benefits that have come from this relationship have much more favored China than Russia in terms of economic benefits, in terms of technology transfer, in terms of geostrategic influence.
I think Putin was waiting for Trump to hit the reset button.
And it was General Flynn's plan, his national security advisor.
He even wrote a book about it to say, you know, what we've got to do is hit the reset button with Russia to split the Russian-Chinese alliance.
And Putin was just waiting for that to happen.
But the Democrat Party made it impossible to happen because of these false charges that Trump was Putin's puppet.
And so he never got a chance to hit the reset button.
And the Democrat Party has gone on with this mantra about Russia, Russia, Russia being the, you know, being evil.
And now over the Ukraine war, you know, he's a war criminal.
So how could we make common cause with them and all of that?
And the focus is on defeating Russia in the Ukraine war.
And we're not going to be able to defeat Russia in the Ukraine war.
I mean, there's just so much to talk about here, because if Russia has to, they will resort to nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons.
They've cheated on the chemical and biological weapons treaties.
They have very sophisticated, offensive chemical and biological weapons.
They've cheated on all the arms control treaties.
And yes, I'm sorry, State Department.
I think they've cheated on the New START treaty, too.
It's the last treaty that they're supposed to be obeying, okay, which is it controls the strategic warheads that can reach us.
You know, I think they probably have cheated on New Start as well, and they have a huge advantage there.
We know they've got a 10 to 1 advantage, at least, in tactical nuclear weapons.
They probably have a 2 to 1 advantage in strategic nuclear weapons.
And they have the world's most advanced passive and active strategic defenses.
There are thousands of shelters and bunkers, hundreds of deep underground facilities for the Russian political military leadership.
They can protect the top 300,000 political military leaders in Russia in deep underground facilities that are under hundreds of meters of granite that are impervious to nuclear attack.
That's where Putin was.
I think it was on February 27th when he put his forces on nuclear alert.
There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of shelters for the general population.
Back in 2016, Russia had a civil defense exercise that mobilized 40 million people to practice a nuclear protecting their population against a nuclear war.
The subways in the major cities have blast doors so people can go down in the subways and be protected.
We have nothing like that.
We have nothing.
We have no serious civil defense program in this country.
We have our whole national missile defense comprises 64 ground-based interceptors based in Alaska and northern California.
And they're designed not to intercept Russian or Chinese ICBMs.
They're meant to deal with low-technology ICBMs that we thought would come out of North Korea or Iran.
And we've been fooled because there are North Korean ICBMs are actually much more sophisticated because they're based on Russian and Chinese technology.
I mean, think about this where North Korea is concerned.
There's only three countries in the world that have mobile ICBMs.
You know how complicated a mobile ICBM is?
I mean, that's basically Cape Canaveral on wheels, to be able to carry an intercontinental ballistic missile and have all the targeting and command and control assets in a truck, okay, to launch that ICBM.
Very sophisticated thing.
There's only three countries in the world that have mobile ICBMs, Russia, China, North Korea.
We don't have mobile ICBMs, you know, but North Korea does.
What does that tell you in terms of who helped them get where they are?
And so we've only got those 64 GBIs.
They've got 10,000 anti-missile and anti-aircraft, 10,000 nuclear and conventional capable, a very dense national missile defense surrounding Russia, to shoot down our warheads, to shoot down our bombers, to shoot down our cruise missiles.
So they are much better prepared.
And all their nuclear forces, 90% of them, are modern and high-tech and advanced.
They have weapons systems that we don't even have in our arsenal, like super EMP weapons and weapons that are specialized for X-ray effects and neutrons, ultra-low-yield nuclear weapons that could be just five, have very low yield, enough to take out a bridge or enough to take out the Pentagon and not break the windows of neighboring buildings.
Very high-yield weapons like the Poseidon.
They could have a weapon that could have a yield that is as high as 200 megatons, which is something like 20,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
We don't have weapons like that in our inventory.
And in fact, Joe Biden is retiring nuclear weapons, some of our best nuclear weapons.
He's canceled the Silicom N, which is a nuclear-armed cruise missile that was desperately needed to restore the balance where tactical nuclear weapons was concerned, because we have almost no tactical nuclear weapons.
And the Silicom N is gone.
He took that out of his budget.
And he's retired the B-83, which was our best, it was the last megaton-class nuclear weapon we had in our inventory, 1.2 megatons.
It's the only nuclear weapon we have that has a chance of generating a shockwave that's powerful enough to perhaps damage some of those deep underground facilities where the bad guys in North Korea and China and Russia can hide.
And it's gone.
So he's taken that away.
So we're building down while the others are building up.
But this lengthy disquisition on the nuclear balance is a reason why we should not get involved in the Ukraine war.
I think we should be pulling back, not going forward, because we cannot win a nuclear war with Russia.
And if what we're hearing is true, the narrative that's coming across on the TV and that Russia is really on the ropes and that Putin is crazy and he may fall from power, then we're very close to the nuclear brink, closer than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And our policies are creating a situation where we will get into a nuclear war and lose it.
But I know because you've been reading my stuff that I'm not convinced that that is the reality.
This is what we're being told.
But I'm not convinced that that's the reality.
There are all other realities, not all of them mutually exclusive.
May I continue?
Please.
Okay.
For one thing, John Bolton wrote a pretty good article from Gatestone recently that's a good corrective to a lot of the nonsense we hear.
And why do I say that a lot of what we're hearing on the news is nonsense?
Because almost everything we know about what's going on in the Ukraine war is coming from the Ukrainians, and from the Biden administration, but mostly from the Ukrainians.
And the Ukrainian government has an interest in convincing the West that they're winning and that the Russians are on the ropes and it'll be really easy to defeat the Russians in Ukraine if we'll just come in.
And so naturally, everything that they tell us is designed to convince us that that is true.
And the Biden administration has an equal political interest in convincing that is true because they want the Russians to look as bad as possible in Ukraine so that the narrative will not be that Biden basically experienced a defeat and humiliation even greater than Afghanistan when he drew the red line over Ukraine for Russia and Russia just rolled its tanks across it.
He basically put America and the West's, NATO's credibility on the line in Ukraine and blew it.
All those decades of trying to build up NATO's credibility and U.S. credibility, decades of it among successive presidents, was all thrown away by Joe Biden when he warned Putin not to invade Ukraine and he did it anyway.
Biden doesn't want the conversation to be about that because this is a humiliation and a foreign policy disaster that is thousands of times worse than Afghanistan.
And so let the conversation be about how the Russians are losing so badly and the worse the Russians look, the better that is for Biden.
So I'm not sure we can trust what we're seeing.
You know, the fog of war is always very thick in wars.
I remind the American people of two wars, the war in Vietnam, where right up until 1968, most Americans were convinced we were winning the war.
We were going to win the war, okay, until North Vietnam launched the 1968 Tet Offensive.
And All these promises from General Westmoreland that we had killed all of the Viet Cong turned out to be untrue and that our intelligence was all wrong about how close we were to victory.
And it was just a year ago, okay, that we've had the debacle in Afghanistan, where we did have boots on the ground for many, many years.
We weren't relying on the Ukrainians.
We were relying on our own intelligence agencies and our own best experts in the Defense Department to give us the assessment that don't worry about Afghanistan.
We can have an honorable withdrawal and we can have a government that will at least temporarily be friendly to the United States and moderate in its views.
And all of that turned out to be false.
Our assessment of the reality on the ground in Afghanistan turned out to be completely false.
So we don't have a good record, long-term or short-term, in terms of making accurate assessments about what's happening on the ground.
It could be that our whole assessment of what Putin's objectives were in Ukraine may be wrong.
You know, we've assumed because we are the West and we believe in fighting quick wars.
You know, we don't like war at all, and we want them to be quick and surgical, and that's how we fight war.
And because Ukraine isn't going that way, we may say, oh, this is just a disaster for Putin.
Maybe not.
You know, the Russian way of war can be that way.
For example, as Bolton correctly points out, Putin may have thought that invading Ukraine would go the way it did when he took Crimea, which was basically a blitzkrieg type thing, and he took it quickly and bloodlessly.
But there's another model to look at on the ground that was happening in Ukraine, in eastern Ukraine.
You know, there'd been this long, bloody war of attrition going on in Donetsk and Luhansk, eastern Ukraine, for eight years, you know?
And that's another Russian way of war.
And in fact, most of Russian military history, you know, is not quick, clean, decisive victories.
Mostly it's against the Mongols, against the Swedes, against Napoleon, World War I and World War II.
You know, it's a grinding, bloody, you know, you use mass and attrition to just eventually wear your enemy down.
And that's how you win wars.
And they're ruthless, and they're fought like a totalitarian, inhumane power, not, you know, the way democracies do, where we're very humane in terms of, or we try to be, you know, in terms of the way we wage our wars.
And that's and it may have been Putin's intention all along.
And I'm not saying he didn't suffer setbacks and all the rest.
You know, certainly there has been that.
But maybe Ukraine's chief objective wasn't the liberation of Ukraine and the takeover of Ukraine.
That's one of his objectives, surely.
But another, it may be that having the war is one of his objectives.
Military dictatorships.
Having the war with who?
With us?
With anyone.
Well, let's start with Ukraine.
Just having a war is a good thing from the point of view of a military dictatorship in an authoritarian state because it rallies the people behind you.
It shows strength.
It shows strength to your population.
It rallies the people behind you.
The Russian people are being told this isn't just a war against Ukrainian Nazis, but it's against NATO and the United States.
NATO and the United States are attacking us through Ukraine.
So if you're concerned about your political power, I mean, Putin has shored up his base by having this war, by rallying the public behind him at a time when he was suffering economically because of sanctions and stuff like that.
It's driven up the price of oil, which is in natural gas, which is great for Russia.
It's arms sales are another great source of Russian income.
But isn't it also tearing apart the Russian economy?
It can't all just be good things from this war.
You constantly see the bad things that are happening to the Russian economy.
The ruble has crumbled.
The oligarchs are fleeing from the country.
They have no money or access to the money.
They've shut down the payment system.
What's the payment system called?
The SWIFT payment.
So it's not like all these good things are happening because of this war.
We're not saying it's all good.
Sure, there are some negative things.
But spoken like a man of the West, to put economics, which is all the way we calculate it.
What is the cost?
Is the standard of living going down?
To us, that's what matters most.
But to a Russian, the people in the streets, people who support Putin, what matters is survival.
It is within the living memory of many Russians, and they learn in their schools that they lost 30 million dead.
That's just the dead.
Those aren't the casualties from World War II.
For them, the idea of survival and not being taken by surprise and not having another destruction of their country is far outweighs what the oligarchs may be suffering in terms of their lifestyles being set back.
The other thing is that war, the chaos of war, discomforts the West.
And because we don't like it and it makes us insecure, especially if you end up with a protracted war, and Bolton, in his article in Gatestone, talks about a 30 to 100-year war to take over Ukraine.
30 to 100-year war to take over Ukraine?
Yes.
That's in the title of his Gatestone article.
Maybe he doesn't mean that literally, but I can imagine it.
There have been such wars in history, the 30 years' war, the 100 years' war over France.
Nations, which we, you know, we think World War II is a long war.
But if you look at how long wars have lasted, some places, they go on for years and years, you know, decades even.
The recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia that was settled in favor of the Azerbaijan went on for 30 years.
The Gnargano-Karabakh war, okay?
You know, this is not untypical.
It's unusual for our experience.
And the benefit of a long war from the point of view of the bad guys is that we always want peace, this thing we call peace.
And so after a while, we will end up coming to the table to say, how can we resolve this?
And then the benefits will flow, as they have done in the past.
So that's one possibility.
Maybe Putin's calculation is to have a protracted period of war, just the way he did in eastern Ukraine for eight years.
I mean, he could have resolved that.
In fact, the European Union and Merkel met with Putin to try to resolve that war that was going on for eight years.
So he sort of experienced that, that even that little war going on in eastern Ukraine managed to get the discomforted NATO enough that it got us to a negotiating table to talk about resolving it.
But he had no intentions of resolving it.
So maybe this is just the long, protracted, grinding war that he had going on in eastern Ukraine writ large.
Dr. Brack, question for you.
Sure.
What is the best defense right now?
I know you said, hey, we have to figure out a way to split some of those relationships with China and Russia.
We've got to get strong.
Can't get these two powerhouses uniting because if China and Russia and Iran are on the same team, we're screwed.
I mean, what can you do if you got those three guys that are on the same team?
Russia, China just signed a 30-year contract with Iran for, what, $400 billion?
So Iran is now linked with China, and China and Russia are neighbors.
If they kind of team up and say, hey, look, America's the top enemy.
You hate them, we hate them.
Let's figure out a way to kind of weaken them.
This is a great opportunity for us to do so.
Aside from trying to split up, what else is the best defense we can play?
Could I just walk through two other possible scenarios in terms of what might be going on in Ukraine?
And then I'll answer that question.
You know, another scenario here, and I'll try to do it quickly, you know, is I think of the Spanish Civil War scenario.
You know, if Putin aspires to global domination, you know, which I think he may, he may want to test his weapons, his tactics, and blood his troops the way Hitler did during World War II, during the Spanish Civil War, before the Blitzkrieg was unleashed on the West.
You know, they tested it out, tested out the troops, the generals, in the Spanish Civil War.
That way you can find out, you know, who are the good generals, who are the bad generals, put the best people in charge, which tactics work, which don't.
How can we improve weapons and things like that?
So Ukraine could be a big laboratory experiment for this sort of thing.
And last is the Battle of Austerlitz scenario, Napoleon's greatest victory in 1805, which is much studied in the Russian general staff.
It should be studied in all academies.
In 1805, and I don't say this is likely, it's just a possibility, all right?
You know, Napoleon faced the combined armies of the greatest land powers of Europe in 1805.
He had marched his army from Paris all the way into Central Europe by forced marches.
And they were still afraid to attack him, the combined powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, because Napoleon had such a reputation as a great general.
But he had a plan to defeat all of these guys, even though he was greatly outnumbered.
But he just needed to convince them to attack him, to walk into his trap.
And so he did this by having defectors go over to the Russians and the Austrians and say, oh, the French army is really demoralized.
We're overextended.
We're so far from Paris.
We're exhausted from these long marches.
He had whole regiments run away from the Russians in the field to convince them that the French army, all they had to do was attack to defeat him.
He deliberately took the weakest part, the worst part of the battlefield, okay?
So they had the high ground, you know.
So everything looked perfect for defeating Napoleon, okay?
And then they attacked, and he dropped the hammer on them.
The battle ended with this humiliating thing where the Russian army had a retreat out onto a frozen lake, which he broke up with his cannon and hundreds of them drowned.
But that's the textbook, Napoleon's greatest victory, the Battle of Austerlich, was based on convincing the other side that you were weak, that you were on the verge of defeat.
All you have to do is come in and attack me, and you'll win.
And that could be happening in Ukraine.
I mean, so many of these things that are done wrong, I mean, so many fundamentals that the Russians appear to have done wrong, it makes me suspicious that maybe it's deliberate, you know, to convince us that, oh, these guys are so incompetent.
You know, let's just jump in there the way Lindsey Graham wants us to.
You know, we could find ourselves, if we were to do something like that and we get more deeply involved in the Ukraine war, that's right at the edge of our ability to project power.
We'll have a deuce of a problem getting our guys out if we're wrong about that calculation.
We're not going to be able to get them out.
And maybe the big plan for the general staff is to use the Ukraine as the bloodlands again.
What a great place for tactical nuclear weapons to use that 10 to 1 advantage in tactical nuclear weapons and suddenly go nuclear with this war and make Ukraine war could be the final solution for Russia of the problem of NATO and the United States, you know, by using their tactical nuclear advantage to obliterate us in Ukraine.
Anyway, those are other possibilities that I beg our policymakers to think about before we wave more deeply into the Ukraine war.
To your question, what should we be doing?
Well, what I think we should be doing is, again, going back to the big picture, we should be trying to split the Russian-Chinese alliance, okay, so we don't have to contend with this warring bloc.
And what we should do is I think we should be raising the readiness level of our strategic nuclear forces.
Right now, Biden has basically broken precedent back on, I think it was February 27th, that Putin put his forces on high alert.
His nuclear forces have been high alert.
They've been ready for a nuclear war.
They've been threatening a nuclear war every day.
And we haven't responded.
You know, in the past, when the Russians did something like that, we would raise the DEF CON level.
That's the readiness level.
The lowest level is five, you know, and our forces are at readiness five right now.
That makes us vulnerable to a nuclear Pearl Harbor.
The bombers could be destroyed on their bases.
Most of our ballistic missile submarines are still in port.
They could be destroyed in their bases with just two warheads.
The ICBMs are the only thing that would be ready.
We've only got 400 ICBM warheads against an enormous target set in Russia.
And they've got hypersonic weapons that could perhaps destroy those ICBMs before they could launch.
So what we should do is raise the DEF CON level at least to DEF CON 3 so that our forces are at a more survivable posture, so that the Russians would be less capable of doing a nuclear Pearl Harbor.
And then immediately communicate to Moscow that, look, we're raising our forces to DEF CON 3 because you guys increased the alert of your forces and you have left us no choice.
We don't plan to attack you.
This isn't a plan for a surprise nuclear attack.
We want peace.
So let's both sides lower the readiness of our nuclear forces back to a normal level.
And while we're doing that, let's have an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine.
And let's go to the negotiating table and negotiate a peace based on the peace treaty that you offered, that you, Moscow, offered to NATO and the United States before you invaded Ukraine.
That peace treaty, the Biden administration didn't even seriously try to negotiate it.
There were many points of that treaty that should have been acceptable to us, not least not having Ukraine in NATO and promising not to expand NATO further east.
It's even more in our interest than it is Russia's interest to not expand NATO even further to the east.
So there are many points in that treaty that should be acceptable to us.
The point of this process is that this could be a golden opportunity, okay, to turn lemons into lemonade and to hit the reset button with Russia.
Do you think he would entertain that?
I think he would.
I think he would because in the long run, because first I don't think Putin's crazy.
I don't think he's in a sick bed.
I think that Putin had wanted to realign himself with the West during the Trump administration.
I think that he sees China as the bigger long-term threat to us than the West.
I think that if he could return to normalcy, certainly his oligarchs would like it, as you pointed out.
So I think that there is a significant possibility that we could use this.
And the most important thing, immediate thing from my point of view, is the one vital national interest we have in the Ukraine war is to stop it because of the nuclear escalatory possibilities.
This idea that we can control our involvement in Ukraine and that nothing is going to go wrong, that things are not going to go off the tracks and turn into a nuclear war by accident or miscalculation is really unwise, frankly, ahistorical.
I mean, just think of how World War I started.
You know, a single bullet fired by a Serbian terrorist in the chest of an archduke blew up into a nuclear war very, excuse me, into World War I very quickly, you know, that killed millions of people.
Ukraine is far more important strategically than Serbia was, and the possibilities for escalation, they're enormous.
We need to get out of this situation desperately to avoid these escalatory possibilities.
So there are two huge U.S. national security interests that would be solved here.
Terminating the Ukraine war so the escalatory possibilities are ended and splitting the Russian-Chinese alliance so that we have some kind of a chance to win the new Cold War against China.
I think Putin could be persuaded to become a neutral, at least a neutral, but maybe even a strategic partner through the process of negotiating and resolving our conflicting security views.
You know, I don't think you're going to be able to, I think it's too much to hope that Russia is going to be contained forever and they're not going to want to have their empire back.
You know, that's what Bolton was talking about, about the 30 to 100-year war.
I think Bolton is right.
I think the Russian people, not just Putin, they want their empire back.
They want great Russia back.
And they are going to fight for 30 to 100 years, diplomatically and militarily, if necessary, to do that.
Do we have the political will to oppose that for 30 to 100?
I don't think so.
We didn't even have the political will to defeat the Taliban.
So let's be realistic about our foreign policy.
We're not the global, you know, we're not able to control the whole world.
And we're not responsible for controlling the whole world.
We're chiefly responsible to the American people, to protecting our lives, protecting this country, and protecting our civilization.
And this is, as I can see it, as the quickest way and safest way to end the Ukraine war and to position ourselves to win the new Cold War by achieving the most important objective right now, which should be to split the Russia-China alliance.
You said something that got me thinking.
So in your eyes, if you said World War IV for Russia is going to be against China, meaning World War III is going to be us, right?
So if, let's just say, Russia does choose to attack Ukraine, U.S. gets involved, and Russia says, screw this.
I'm sick and tired of the way U.S. Biden administration is handling it.
I'm attacking U.S. as well.
Done.
But I'm going to take a different angle.
If he does, and let's just say he succeeds, let's go to the succeeding part.
He succeeds, and it's a debacle here.
You know, you used the word.
It's a mess over here in the U.S.
Then, whether he likes it or not, he has to face off the last bully that's going to be stronger than him because it's getting stronger every year, which is China.
So it would be a very bad move on his end to do anything to U.S. because he's going to need U.S. long term to protect them in case something happens with China.
Because China's the guy that's standing alone by themselves, buying up all these small different places.
They're buying the cobalt in Africa.
Their strategy with Iran, with oil.
The way they're taking it is a very different strategy on how China's taking it.
Would you say the same thing?
Would you agree with that, that Russia needs America to make sure long-term they're protected from China?
The Russians are chess players, and I think that that analysis is possibly the way the Russians are thinking about this.
And it's even possible that one of the reasons we haven't been attacked yet is precisely because of that, that they need us in the long run, looking toward World War IV.
But I wouldn't count on that forbearance forever.
There's going to come a point where our involvement in Ukraine, if we decide to go the other way and become more deeply involved, kill more Russian generals, kill more Russians on the ground, try to defeat Putin in Ukraine, there's going to come another place where he says, well, I've got to be concerned with my immediate survival, and there's no hope of negotiating with the West.
But let me say this and conclude another thought on this about the negotiating the peace with Putin through Ukraine.
What if Russia decides not to negotiate with us?
Okay?
That's the other thing.
I mean, one of the hardest things in managing foreign policy and defense policy is situational awareness.
What is our situation via v Russia?
Is it possible to play ball with them the way we did with Stalin in World War II?
And it will tell us so much if we try to negotiate with Putin on the basis of his own peace treaty.
And then he says, no deal.
I don't, you know, this treaty, I'm not even going to negotiate with that treaty because I'm in Ukraine now.
That's going to tell us a lot about what this war in Ukraine is really about for Putin.
It will tell us, I believe, that Putin is Stalin and Z is Hitler in 1939, and Ukraine is Poland.
Z meaning Z.
Yeah, the dictator of China.
And Ukraine is Poland all over again.
And that this is all part of a plot by these guys, okay?
That they're unified behind closed doors.
And that they're not worried about losing in Ukraine and that this is the big move, okay?
That this is the big move.
This is 1939 all over again.
And it's important for us to know that.
That's a very good point you just made.
So are they maybe waiting for U.S. to make the move for them to say, you know, we reacted to your behavior.
You did this, and then we had to go and protect ourselves because you got involved in something where we told you, stay out of this.
So are they almost waiting for U.S. to be aggressive?
That could be the case.
They could be wanting the U.S. to come into Ukraine.
As I said before, the Austerlitz scenario provoke us to intervene.
A lot of the things, the atrocities, for example, almost seem calculated to inflame Western opinion so that we'll just on impulse send our forces in there so that they'll be destroyed.
I would also point out, too, by the way, I mean, it really isn't pointed out when you look at the balance of power here.
Russia is fighting the Ukraine war with one hand behind its back, you know.
I mean, they've only got 200,000 troops in Ukraine.
They've got a 2 million-man army.
They've got 20,000 tanks.
They only have 4,000 tanks or so.
The Air Force has hardly played that significant a role.
The Air Force has really held back.
It's either incredibly gross incompetence, which is what we're being told, or something else is going on here in terms of holding back all this power.
And I think it's time for us to be less dysfunctionally optimistic and a little more paranoid before we go forward and think about if we're wrong, again, here, the way we were in Afghanistan and the way we were in Vietnam, what's the worst that could happen?
And the worst that could happen is the destruction of the West if we play this thing all wrong.
Well, let's transition into that.
i don't want to take that chance especially you know we need time well yeah let's transition into that because i i want to i want to go into that which is you know uh most most the average person is like oh my god i don't want a nuclear war What if there's a nuclear war?
What happens?
How bad is it?
How ugly is it going to get if somebody does something like that, like Truman did back in the days when we responded back to Pearl Harbor, all this other stuff?
Okay, fine.
For you, what concerns you more?
Nuclear war, cyber warfare, biochemical warfare, or a super EMP type of attack that, you know, I read this somewhere that says, experts say our power grid can be destroyed, and when that happens, 7 or 90% of U.S. population will die within the first year.
Which of those four concerns you the most?
Well, I put super EMP and cyber together.
You know, in my book, Blackout Warfare, I describe this revolutionary new way of warfare that is in the military doctrines of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
And they are prepared to execute this, where the focus of the attack is national electric grids, okay?
Because we are an electronic civilization, and everything, all of our life-sustaining critical infrastructures, communications, transportation, even food and water, depend upon electricity.
And the military, the ability to project power and to operate your military forces and command and control, all depends upon electricity.
So the theory of this is that if you can take out the electric grids with EMP attacks and cyber warfare and special forces sabotage, small numbers of guys going in and shooting up transformers and stuff, you'll cause a nationwide blackout, and that will bring the other side to its knees.
And you'll basically win a war very quickly, potentially at the speed of light, because of the way EMP and cyber work.
And because it's even a so-called nuclear EMP attack is not a Hiroshima and Nagaseki-type use of an atomic bomb, it's not considered nuclear war in Russian or Chinese North Korean doctrines considered part of cyber warfare or electronic warfare.
And rightly so, because of the way the physics work.
You know, you detonate a weapon at very high altitude, 300, 400 kilometers.
It's so high that if you were standing on the ground directly beneath the explosion, you wouldn't even hear it.
I mean, it's 300, 400 kilometers over your head going off in the vacuum of space.
There wouldn't even be a noise, all right?
The blast wouldn't reach you.
There'd be no thermal or radioactive effects that would reach you.
The only thing that would come down would be the electromagnetic pulse, which is harmless to people.
It passes harmlessly through your body like a radio wave.
But it will destroy electronics.
Cars won't work.
You won't have any water because the electric grid would collapse and requires mills and volts to get water.
Food would start spoiling.
There's only enough food to feed people at three days in local grocery stores.
And in the whole of the United States, we only have enough food to supply people for 30 days, 330 million people, for 30 days at normal consumption rates.
And it would begin to spoil immediately.
And it couldn't be transported to market because the interstate highways would be jammed, transportation systems wouldn't work.
In effect, it's a way of subtracting from modern electronic civilization, you know, the technologies that make life possible today.
And a president faced with that, you know, wouldn't be able to operate his forces.
You might not even be able to retaliate with a super EMP weapon because it would fry the electronics and command and control systems and the missiles and the bombers.
And faced with, do I go and fight a losing war in Ukraine or do I mobilize what is left of the Defense Department to try to restore the electric grid to save millions of American lives before people start starving to death and society collapses?
Obviously, that latter choice.
And that's part of their calculation.
And we're even closer to that.
I'm most concerned about that scenario because before Russia goes nuclear in terms of the classical nuclear war where they would blow up ICBMs in their silos or attack bomber bases with nuclear weapons or even do tactical nuclear strikes in Ukraine, I think it's more likely that they would use what I call a blackout war, because it would kill very few people initially.
It's what's called gray zone aggression.
It's a non-traditional way of warfare that we really have no way of responding to, and it could be very quick and very decisive and to solve the problem without having to go to a large-scale nuclear exchange.
So I think we're even closer to that than we are to a nuclear war, and I think it very likely that they would exercise that option before they went nuclear.
How tough is it to build an EMP?
Any nuclear weapon that will generate an electromagnetic pulse, but there are also non-nuclear EMP weapons that would be part of this scenario.
The U.S. Air Force has one called CHAMP.
It's basically a cruise missile, and it carries a non-nuclear EMP generator.
And it doesn't generate a field as big as a nuclear weapon.
I mean, a single nuclear weapon is really all you'd need to take out the whole U.S. electric grid detonated at very high altitude.
But with a couple of dozen, maybe 20 of these cruise missiles or drones carrying non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse generators, they would follow the power lines.
And it would take hours instead of a second, you know, but they could achieve the same thing and black out the power grid.
Countries like Iran and even terrorist groups are capable of harnessing non-nuclear EMP weapons and using them in this way.
They have the sophistication to do that.
So it's not hard at all.
As a matter of fact, if you had the money, you can actually buy EMP devices, not intended to be used as weapons, but they could be used as a weapon.
There's a device called the EMP suitcase that looks just like a suitcase.
It's designed to be operated and carried by one man.
It puts out 100,000 volts, 100,000 volts per meter over a short distance, 100 yards.
That right there?
Yes, that's it.
How much does something like that go for?
I think 50,000.
That's not a lot of money.
Not for a terrorist group or a nation state.
But if you had a terrorist or a criminal or a disgruntled individual got one of those things and he put it in the chunk of his car and he drove up to an extra high voltage power substation, I mean, you see these when you drive down the highway all the time.
You know, we've arrived at a place technologically where a single individual could topple the pillars, technological pillars of civilization for an entire metropolitan area, like Miami or New York or Boston, just by himself, just with that.
And if you had a Yeah, and if you had a team of guys running around the country, you could black out the whole national electric grid just with these devices.
How come it's not happened yet?
Well, it has happened in Chechnya and other places.
It hasn't happened in this country yet.
I'll give them time.
I don't know why it hasn't happened yet.
We've been lucky.
The great German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said, God looks after fools, drunkards, little children in the United States of America.
Maybe that's why it hasn't happened.
But has anyone been caught attempting to do something of this capacity?
We haven't caught somebody with the RF briefcase yet, but we have caught, you know, Actually, I haven't caught the person, but there was a drone in Pennsylvania.
Somebody flew a drone that tried to make a different kind of an attack against the power line.
I'm not sure I want to get into all the technical details.
There was an incident not too long ago that happened in Canada where a disgruntled individual used, it wasn't a radio frequency weapon, but it was a different technology, even simpler, that enabled him to black out temporarily the Hydro-Quebec grid in Canada, put millions of people into the dark.
They did correct it after a day, but one guy did that.
And so there have been attacks on electric grids here in North America.
There were attacks in the electric grid in Mexico back in 2013.
The Knights Templars, a drug cartel, they used explosives and small arms to attack, to black out the electric grid in a province of Mexico.
They put about a half million people into dark so that they could go into the towns and villages and publicly execute people who were opposed to the drugs trade, the village elders and leaders who were opposed to the drug trade.
So if Neanderthals like the Knights Templars have figured out that the electric grid is a keystone societal vulnerability, just think what Al-Qaeda or ISIS or North Korea and these much more sophisticated actors could do.
We're very lucky.
I mean, I was kind of surprised when ISIS was on the ropes that they didn't just pay the Knights Templars to come across the border.
I mean, you know, and say, hey, go do to the United States, which you guys did in Mexico.
We've been, I think the reason it hasn't happened yet is because we've been lucky.
These guys are from Michokan?
They're Michokan and Jalisco.
That was the province that they did.
I know a lot of people from Michookan and Jalisco.
We've got to keep an eye on them.
Yeah.
Good friends.
By the way, going back to this, so you know what I would do if I was the U.S. government?
I would buy that company who sells those suitcases.
Everybody that buys it, they would be on alert.
That's exactly what I would do.
There's no way in the world I'm going to let that stay without.
I'd overpay to find out who the hell is doing this.
I'd go into a partnership and figure out.
I'd have a CIA guy working for that company.
I point out so I don't get sued.
But that has legitimate peaceful purposes.
They don't intend it to be used as a weapon.
Oh, I'm not worried about it.
There's guns that are intended to peaceful purposes in the wrong guy's hand.
That's the one thing you can do.
Exactly.
It's potentially a weapon of mass.
How do you use that for peaceful purposes?
And you don't even need a license to buy it, unlike a gun.
You need a license to buy a gun, but you can buy that without a license.
How is that used for peaceful purposes, though?
Well, you know, if you're designing an airport, for example, and you want to know how far away do I have to put the runway so that the radars don't fry the electronics and airplanes where they're landing, you can use a device like that to simulate the pulse that's coming off the radar to see how far things have to be spaced.
Or if you're laying out, if you've got a factory and it's got a lot of heavy electronic equipment, drill presses, metal bending equipment, stuff that uses a lot of electricity, they put out powerful electromagnetic transients.
And this kind of equipment is spaced too closely together, they can fry each other and commit factricide, okay?
So you need to know how far apart do I have, how thick does the shielding have to be, and that's what it's intended to be used for, you know, to help you, you know, you don't want to have to move the equipment in and learn by experience, you know, how far apart should I have put the drill presses and things like that.
You know, that's what it's intended for.
So it has, it does have a legitimate purpose, but perhaps you know, the but perhaps it should be licensed and we should have better control.
And perhaps no, just anybody shouldn't be able to purchase.
But we're not the only ones.
I mean, this is a U.S. company.
There's a German company that sells these thing.
I'm sure terrorists already have them.
And terrorists have used them.
In Chechnya, you asked why it hasn't happened here.
The Chechen terrorists figured out how to use them against the Russians in Chechnya.
They used to kill the electronics so they can go in and kill everybody in a military base.
Let me ask you a question earlier.
You were talking about nuclear shelters.
So I pulled up a couple numbers here.
Israel has nuclear shelters.
I think Sweden has like 63,000 or something nuclear shelters.
A lot of different countries have nuclear shelters.
So if we, whether that is something we have or not, it's definitely not talked about openly amongst people.
Do we have nuclear shelters in cities and communities where if something were to happen, here's what we have?
FEBA would probably say we do, okay?
But there's an enormous difference between what we've, what FEMA did, you know, back when we had a significant civil defense program.
You've probably seen those civil defense signs, you know, the radioactive symbol.
Sometimes they'll be in the basement of a library or something like that.
That's what our shelter is.
Those aren't the kinds of shelters they've got in Russia.
These are not serious shelters that are designed to survive a nuclear war.
They will provide you, it's better than nothing.
I mean, it's better to be in the shelter of a library, okay, if a nuclear blast happens or if there's radioactive fallout coming down so you don't get directly exposed to it.
But we don't have anything like what the Russians have got.
In the intelligence community, they're called deep underground shelters or Dougs.
I'm talking about some of the more famous ones are Chekhov and Shiropova, Kasvinsky Mountain, Yamatow Mountain.
These are shelters that are hundreds of meters deep on solid granite.
They're impervious to nuclear attack.
Is that a form of a shelter right there?
Is that a nuclear shelter?
Well, I think that's a missile silo.
Do you know what these shelters look like?
Like, does this look, this says a Moscow nuclear shelter right here?
Is this kind of what it looks like?
It's hard for me to see over there.
I don't have my.
I'd just be curious.
I'd be curious to know what these nuclear shelters look like.
That's the one I was looking at right there.
I think that's a.
Russia ready for doomsday.
It's deeply buried.
I think that's a missile silo.
I mean, that looks like the headworks for a missile silo.
But that could be the headworks to one of their shelters.
But that looks like a missile silo to me.
So FEMA would say we have nuclear shelters?
They probably would because they're optimists and they always put the best possible spin on thing.
But we don't.
Even for our political military leadership, the most famous shelter in the America is Cheyenne Mountain, the NORAD alternate headquarters, okay?
This was built in the designed in the late 40s and early 50s, and it was designed to survive an atomic attack.
Where's that?
It's in Cheyenne Mountain.
Is that Wyoming?
Where is that?
Yeah, near Peterson Air Force Base.
I don't know the state as well as I do.
I think it's in Colorado, but I'm not necessarily sure in the state.
But it's very close to Peterson Air Force Base, which is NORAD headquarters and Space Command Headquarters.
And Cheyenne Mountain is located near there.
It used to be, it's now the alternate headquarters.
And yeah, and it's inside of a mountain, and the buildings are on springs to survive a shockwave.
And that's the best hardest facility we have.
That facility will not survive an attack from a hydrogen bomb.
It'll survive an atomic bomb, but it's not hard enough for an atomic bomb, a hydrogen bomb.
Their shelters will survive attacks, probably even by our most powerful weapon, which was the B-83.
And some of these shelters are, we call them shelters, but Yamantau Mountain, for example.
And we still don't know the purpose.
Maybe it's for these oligarchs who are fleeing to the Ural Mountains.
But the Yamantau Mountain facility is like an underground city that can survive a nuclear attack.
Is this a nuclear shelter?
This is an article Guardian did saying how the U.S. has prepared for nuclear armageddon in this picture.
They're talking about this was something they started working on since the Truman days.
I don't know.
That looks like I know that some millionaires have purchased old Atlas silos.
And that looks like one of those.
You know, and this Atlas was hardened to survive an attack.
But that probably is somebody's personal fallout shelter from a converted Atlas silo.
How do we play defense against this?
Say the millionaires or whoever, but okay, so nuclear war happens.
I mean, these shelters are not going to fit 330 million people.
So it's not like these shelters, how are you going to manage shelters if something were to happen?
And even an individual family, okay, with food shortages or any of that stuff.
You know, you got people that own a lot of weapons themselves, a lot of, you know, ammo, a lot of guns, just in case something were to happen.
How does the average family, as well as the U.S. government, proactively play defense in case something were to happen?
Okay.
Let me.
One of the things we should have done was listen to Ronald Reagan and deployed the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was, you know, and that's one of the things we still could do as a government.
You know, the Strategic Defense Initiative was designed to render nuclear missiles obsolete by deploying high-tech space-based defenses that could shoot them down before they could reach us.
You know, the best solution or the best defense against a nuclear war is to not get hit in the first place by shooting down the missiles before they reach our territory.
And that's what Reagan had planned to do.
And, you know, history goes through cycles where technology will sometimes favor the defense.
And those tend to be more stable, safer times.
Because if you're the defender, you have to worry less about getting attacked because the technology favors a defensive posture.
Other times in military history, the technology favors the aggressor.
It favors offensive operations.
That was like World War II, when the introduction of tanks in combination with air power and mobile infantry gave the advantage to aggressors and to people who conducted offensive operations.
And those are more dangerous, less stable times, because he who strikes first tends to win.
We are living in the most dangerous and least stable times because the invention of nuclear weapons mated with missile technology enables you to destroy another country's retaliatory capabilities in 30 minutes or less.
And now, and it's getting worse and worse, the technologies are getting better and better at being able to destroy retaliatory capabilities.
With cyber attack, with EMP attack, you can do it at the speed of light.
And so the truism that he who strikes first wins is becoming more and more true, you know, to the point that the temptation to do nuclear Pearl Harbor on us may become irresistible.
And we do not do nuclear Pearl Harbors.
Our nuclear strategy is not based on striking first.
It's based on striking second and deterrence.
And that puts us in an increasingly vulnerable and dangerous position.
But we could reverse this potentially.
And this was the vision that Reagan had.
It wasn't just his idea.
There was a brilliant scientist, Robert Jostro, who wrote a book called How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete.
And it was the inspiration for this, to deploy space-based missile shield, you know, that would be able to intercept these missiles.
Edward Teller, the great, the guy who invented the hydrogen bomb, was all for this.
He was working on, there were a number of technologies that were very promising that SDI had.
And we should bring back the strategic defense initiative.
One of these technologies was called Brilliant Pebbles, and it was ready to be deployed under the Clinton administration.
But the Clinton administration, for ideological reasons, believed in mutual assured destruction, thought the ABM Treaty was the cornerstone of strategic stability.
And the left has always hated ballistic missile defense.
It's funny.
They hate nuclear weapons, but they hate ballistic missile defense too.
And so they're against both us having nuclear weapons or us having ballistic nuclear weapons.
Do they publicly hate it, but privately love it?
Or is it just a hate it, period?
They hate it, period.
Okay.
For ideological reasons.
Especially if it's in the possession of the United States, they hate it.
They don't seem to be that much bothered by Russian or Chinese nuclear weapons or their defenses.
They don't complain about that.
But whenever we try to improve our nuclear weapons or improve our defenses, the left screams bloody murder over it.
And it's happening in the Biden administration now.
I mean, I just explained how some of our most important nuclear systems have been canceled by President Biden, you know, that we really need, even though we're under this great threat from Russia.
What a time to be canceling our nuclear strength.
But we could deploy Brilliant Pebbles probably in five years for 20 billion, and it would completely change.
It has the potential of completely reversing this situation so that we would then have the advantage as the defender.
And the best scenario would be to start a defensive strategic arms race with our adversaries.
Because I wouldn't care if they were deploying brilliant pebbles and strategic defense initiatives of their own.
Because if you're in a defensive arms race, that makes the situation more and more stable.
And both all sides start to feel more and more secure because they're better and better defended against a first strike.
So there is a technological way out.
And that's one way out.
But if I could speak to a larger issue, you know, because I don't want to come across here as if technology is the only card we have to play.
We have a bigger, potentially a more important card to play.
And the way we should be thinking about waging the new Cold War is the way we won the old Cold War.
We have, for all their military power and nuclear power and specialized weapons like EMP and all the rest, we have an enormous advantage.
I hope we can hold on to it in the free world.
And that is, you know, I believe our systems that believe in, have a truer understanding of human nature and of how to organize the good society.
Our belief in freedom.
Okay, is one of, is a great advantage that we have over them.
Our systems are the vision, and unfortunately we're moving away from that.
So maintaining free elections in this country, discourse, rationalism, being the way we were, for example, under the Reagan administration, all right?
You know, when you could have conversations and rationally solve problems, we need to get back to being that way.
The further away we move toward authoritarian type type, we become as vulnerable as they are to this.
And this gives us staying power.
The fact that our understanding that our society is truer to human nature gives us greater staying power.
So our objective should be to split the Russian-Chinese alliance in the new Cold War, to try to contain China, to avoid getting into nuclear, any kind of a war, to avoid any kind of a major war with these powers as long as we can, to avoid that, because that's a game that they are more likely to win than we are.
They're better prepared for it.
That's what their whole societies are geared toward.
They exist for warfare.
And the Soviet Union was the most formidable military tyranny that ever existed in history.
But it was based on lies.
And these other systems are based on lies.
They're based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, of what makes the good society.
And these internal contradictions, if you can avoid fighting them long enough, they will destroy themselves and self-destruct if you can just avoid getting into conflict with them long enough and contain them for long enough.
That was the strategy that worked in the Cold War.
It was based on an article called the X article that was written anonymously by a guy who later was discovered to be George Kennan, a State Department, brilliant man, who said, this is how we need to deal with the Soviet Union in the long run.
You know, they will fall of their own internal contradictions.
They are so paranoid, they're going to spend themselves to death with their defense budgets.
So just try to keep the peace and contain these guys long enough, and they'll just self-destruct and we'll win.
And that's how we won the Cold War, and without it becoming a world war, which is a miracle in history, because normally when you have superpowers confronting each other, whether it's the Persian Empire and Alexander's Macedonia or the Carthaginians and the Romans, these things usually end badly.
They usually end with a huge world war, in effect, to resolve the dispute.
Here's what I'd like to do.
Here's what I'd like to do.
I think I can listen to you for four hours, and I'm getting smarter.
And I think people feel the same way as well.
And I don't think two hours was enough.
And folks, if you feel, I'm looking at the commentary, if you feel the same way as I feel, give it a thumbs up, subscribe, and order his book.
We're going to put the link below to his latest book, Blackout Warfare, Attacking the U.S. Electric Power Grid, A Revolution in Military Affairs.
Title, let's put that in the comments section in the chat box.
Would you be open to a round two?
I don't think this was long enough.
I think we need to do a round two if you're okay with that.
I would love to do another one because some of the stuff you're going into, I think, you know how I almost process the information you're sharing?
We've had a lot of different types of guests, you know, billionaires, mobsters, CIA, FBI, military, athletes, comedians, UFC fighters, you name them.
We've had a lot of different types of guests that we've had that we've interviewed.
And some of the information is kind of like, oh, that's very motivational.
Oh, that's very entertaining.
That was insightful.
Oh, I never knew that's kind of how, oh, it's kind of cool.
Man, I was great.
I feel motivated.
I feel like I can go out, my dreams become a reality.
But I think this is very, very super necessary information for every parent, every citizen, every person that has big plans in their lives with their wives, with their kids, for their husbands, for their families.
I think they need to be educated on the information you're sharing.
And you're bringing it from an angle of extreme reason and rational and an element of being suspicious and paranoid, which I think is very healthy.
So if you're open to it, I'd love to do a round two with you.
And I'm not talking a long time from now.
I'd like to do a round two with you sooner rather than later if you're okay with that.
Oh, certainly.
I'm pleased that you're willing to put up with me.
I can listen to you for hours, but I'm not kidding with you.
But sure, I'd be glad to come back.
I think this is really important.
And I thank you for the opportunity to share my point of view, which is a distinct minority at this time.
I mean, almost all the voices on both sides of the political aisle are calling for, let's get more deeply involved in that war with Ukraine.
Let's focus on defeating Russia and Ukraine.
And I think that that is a self-destructive strategy.
And people have lost sight of the big picture in terms of how we should be protecting America's national interests at this crucial hour.
Well, we're going to follow up with you for the next one.
Dr. Peter Prye, folks, if you just got in, go to the beginning, watch the whole thing, and stay tuned based on the reaction I'm getting from you guys.
Expect us to do part two here very soon.
Share this with your loved ones, family, friends.
I think everybody needs to hear this perspective that we're not getting from mainstream media.
I think we're back at it again Thursday.
Do we have podcast Thursday?
Oh, Thursday is a big roundtable libertarian debate with Spike Cohen, with Dave Smith, which him and Joe Jorgensen had an issue.
She didn't have good words to say about her.
Jessica Vaughan, and we're having Larry Sharp, who's running for the libertarian governor in New York.
I can't wait to talk to these guys.
The last one wasn't too pretty.
It was tough.
This next one here, they're coming to prove me wrong that that's the right thing.
