Do not go away. [indiscernible chatter] [indiscernible chatter] hi, thank you very much for joining us of the second part of our interesting discussion on the commissions findings on strategic posture. Our first Panel Focused on what was at the heart of the report. Our second panel will focus on what they think about that in the discussion with some of the leading scholars on posture and nonproliferation. Directly to my left, a senior fellow at the center for strattera strategy and security at the event to counsel and former deputy secretary for Missile Defense policy. We have the Board Director at the Atlantic Council and the former under secretary of defense policy at the department of defense, then we have the Vice President or Global Nuclear policy program at the Nuclear Threat initiative. Thank you all for being here today to share your own thoughts, and i would like to kick it up with a very broad question. We just heard about the findings, recommendations, the buildup, but i want to ask you when you read through it did you think that the commission met its mark and come up with a solid red ford, and what recommendations did you not see that you would have liked to have seen in there . I guess i will go first. I think they did meet. You have to understand why the commission was created. When congress created a commission it means there is an issue that congress cannot resolve it, so Nuclear Weapons is one of those. There was a Previous Commission chaired by two former secretaries of defense in the 2000 nine time frame, and at that Point Congress was arguing over whether to build a reliable replacement warhead, nuclear systems. Our really divisive debate they could not resolve, so they appointed a commission, and the commission did not necessarily resolve those two issues but many got work into the obama view and had a difference. Likewise, i think what is going on here is that while there is a consensus, there has been a consensus between republicans and democrats to continue to modernize u. S. Nuclear forces, and remember the system we are looking to modernize now was begun under the Obama Administration and reaffirmed under trump and now reaffirmed under biden, but the big question is it a dump is it enough . This Commission Found that Replacement Program is sufficient but it is not enough. We need to know more, and the question is how much more . Now we will argue over how much more, and the has done a great job, the Biden Administration of identifying the problem. The need to deter limited Nuclear Attacks as well as largescale new your tax, but they have not taken the next step to determine what changes need to be done, and whether this is because they run out of time but there are no more pressing issues, the thing is this commission is going to spread them into action. They have to react. If they do not, they risk not only National Security assurance, but also political concerns, because if they did not take action against the chinese threat, we have an election coming up in 2024, right . I can guarantee that the republicans will have an opportunity to try to engage with the Biden Administration over whether or not to go doing enough to meet the deterrence challenges. First of all, i respect the commission i have some serious criticism. I think the first is cost. I know the argument is it is all out in the future, but we also have to anticipate expenses that come out in the future, and it is a formidable list of things, which includes whether quietly conventional defense that is adequate or both the gators, and the report was published. If someone had been doing a report like this on help to deal with the conventional threat in the future, the 14 days ago they would have said we will be cutting way back on the middle east. We will save a lot of money that way. So i think in order to make meaningful judgments, you have to have some kind of a sense of what the Resource Requirements are going to be, and for those people who will not be in favor of doing it or doing very much, there will be people who are in favor of doing it and would do it by raising taxes, and there are people who were in favor of doing it by cutting other parts of the federal budget, and there are probably at least in theory of people doing it by increasing the total amount of the gdp that goes to the government. I am not saying it is unaffordable. Senator kyle is right. We can afford what we need to do. It is a question of what are the other things that we need to do that might be affected by this decision. Second, i think that the problem about what we do in terms of the chinese buildup, i think we are focusing on the wrong part of the chinese buildup if we focus primarily on the additional icbms. I think the chinese capability and that the gator, which some mentioned, is so much more serious problem. The argument that there are a lot more systems, so there are a lot more targets get you into the fallacy, which says you define the size of the Nuclear Force by the number of things you can hit if you wanted to. For a long time, that drove our planning. It was not supposed to. We did not admit it, but in fact it drove the planning for nuclear deterrence. Personally, i would think it is more important for the three Party Problem to emphasize survivability. A survivable force that cannot be preempted and has the capacity for all practical purposes destroy the other side. That is mutually assured destruction. It is not how we planned the force, shape the force, but it is hard to get away from the preposition that the biggest deterrent to nuclear war is uncertainty in everybodys mind about what would happen. Well, it will be a limited attack, and people would understand that the fact that we went over, rather than is very significant, but that depends on a calm judgment being made, and i think the serious question is how do you develop a strategy and a doctrine which deals not with the ultimate attack against everything or with the essentially demonstrative attack. The demonstrative attack is hard, but it is not as hard as what the Commission Refers to as courses, so that i think is a problem. And also, michael, who in my opinion was probably the wisest man to have right on these issues said the problem with deterring nuclear war is the problem of conventional war. It is impossible to imagine a scenario in which any country would use new your weapons except a rising out of a conventional war or fear of an enema and imminent conventional war, and that goes to the cost question. It is easy to say we should have a conventional defense, to have a credible deterrent you need a reasonably credible conventional defense. I am not saying the commission did not address it, but it is a somewhat harder problem, and it addresses the cause problem. I have some other comments too, but that is going on too long anyway. First, i want to express my deep respect for the commissioners, all of whom i know and have worked with, and have tremendous experience in National Security, and obviously a deep commitment to our country. The things that i agreed with, and a lot of things i have questions and concerns about. I think they really got the threat assessment right, and that is very important. I really want to take a minute to say it was really impressive and important to have this Bipartisan Commission focused on how important it is to have u. S. Global leadership and to work closely with our allies and partners. Those are really important principles at a time when there are seminar leadership who are questioning and are on a more isolationist event, so that is important, and they emphasize that in the rollout event that i went to. It was a consensus report. I think it papered over some different significant perspectives. I think one of my most important points is this is not the answer to the difficult question of how do we respond over the longterm to the threat that has been described so well in the report. It is one input, and it is one input heavily weighted toward the military aspect of a toolkit. In some ways it is kind of a worstcase defense planning document. If the environment continues on a trajectory that it is now, these are the things that we need to think about. You can take issue with that even there, but what it does not do and partly because it was not met him congressional legislation as it does not take back from the wider lens and state what are the things we can do diplomatically, through arms, through lots of tools, and frankly our own actions including selfrestraint in some areas to discourage or ensure or incentivize russia and china do not go down the worstcase path that they are all in so i have lots of questions, and i will save them. Lets start with the numbers. We have four generations thought of each of the assured destruction and deterrence as a numbers game. If they have so many, we need to have so many, and what struck me is that shifting away from that thinking. How can we start to plan and await that is not china is going to a 1500, therefore we have to have that . I think with all due respect, you misstated the significance of assured destruction, and the term has become bloated loaded, but another of michaels point was Nuclear Weapons mean that the cost of the war came to be entirely independent of who won the war, and the significance of the incredible power of Nuclear Weapons is used in theory in a particular way, they would leave the initiator, the victor vastly worse off than if they had not proceeded, and as i said, that is a physical fact. People talk about will, we accepted assured destruction. We did not accepted. We recognized it is in fact, just like the law of gravity complicates airplane design. And that is the kind of ultimate foundation of deterrence, because the possibility that that is where you will end up is the biggest restraint on starting. As i said, i think the serious problem well, on the numbers, in my mind the chinese buildup is very unfortunate, although from the point of view of china, the chinese were promptly say this. Why are the americans and perhaps the russians, 1600 countable under the arms controllable agreement, but if you account for uploads it is a lot more, why are they pretending to be so nervous about our having of force that will be maybe 20 , 25 . They may have the capacity to build up iron, but i think more numbers are important, because it is important to show that we are doing, we are responding and doing it in useful ways, but i think the problem is much less what we do and how we think about deterrence strategy, not the kind of simple numbers that go up in a black board. Having said that, you asked numbers. That is the way people in washington think about this problem, but what if i were to suggest to get the actual numbers that need to increase are quite modest . And he could be accomplished within the context of an armscontrol framework. I will just throw this out. There is a strawman argument people are saying we need to add up the number of chinese targets, the number of present targets russian targets and we need to match stigma. No one in the government is suggesting that, ok . It is a smaller number. It could be, for instance, the treaty that existed prior was called the moscow treaty, and it was 2200. Lets say we go from 1550 up to 2200. Can we accomplish our deterrence objectives by going up to 22 hundred . That is something administration will have to calculate depending upon their strategy and the types of targets, but maybe that is possible, and if that is the case would if we agree with roger to go back to that level . So we have solved the china problem, both of us. You need at least 1500. Anything beneath that is an efficient, but you definitely need more. That was determined back in 2010 when the senate did its treaty. This is ground that has been plugged before, and the notion that we can get by with less is a nonstarter. Everybody agrees more, not everybody. It is not just this commission put the center for Global Security research, the center for international csis, they have done studies and all found some more is needed, but we are not talking about an arms race. We can solve this problem within an arms race, but we need is the administration to put together a package to expand to us how they would make meet the requirements the past commissioners are laid out in a way that would not start an arms race, and i think that cannot be done. I did not find the report compelling that we need more or different Nuclear Forces at this time. The report is very ambiguous. It is actually silent on what are the assumptions, because you are planning you have to make some assumptions about russia and about china, and the number one assumption that is not hardly discussed is what will russia be doing in the absence of armscontrol . And conversely, do we have any interest at a restraining russia, and at what level . And then this question of whether we need any additional capability to do with china, and when . China is said to have 500 Nuclear Weapons, not all deployed, compared to 4000 four russia and the United States, so this is something that is happening on the road and more quickly anticipated a couple of years before, but we are not there yet. And so it is not laid out in the report, and another really important question i have is the report and the commissioners have emphasized the urgency of some decisions that need to be made now so that we have options available in the future, which in theory and principle make sense to me, but the report was very unclear about specifically what are those decisions that have to be made now, because as Michael Gordon pointed out, it is definitely not about keeping production lines more in force, strategic delivery vehicles 15 and 20 years hence, so that is not the issue. I suspect there might be issues in the weapons complex, but it was not stated, so that sense of urgency was not matched by discussion. More numbers now does not seem urgent to me at all. Can i just say one other thing . This goes back to the issue of just we ought to be thinking more, and there is a chapter at the end of the report, then we head off and mitigate the risk we are worried about with russia and china through diplomacy and negotiations and arms control agreements broadly defined, even a commitment at the end of new start to not exceed those limits would be a place to start. And all of that could obviate the need for the kinds of observations in this report, many of which will be unachievable and too costly, not to mention destabilizing the not the path we should be going down for our security. Just to set a baseline, one of the report of the report to present this finding is that the program monetization records must be continued. Just to even get a baseline beyond that, we have not had a great power war for 80 years with the current arsenal. What is it about the current arsenal that is now insufficient that is the biggest import that you think needs to be addressed now . For me it is the regional aspect of the problem. Imagine that we are engaged in a war with say russia and nato. We are fighting a conventional war. We need forces there to determine limited nuclear used by the russians, and we have 361 bombs that can be delivered by Fighter Aircraft in europe, but what happens if while we are engaged there china now decides to end the to invade taiwan. Now we have to deter china from going nuclear. All of our Nuclear Assets are in europe. Are you going to move some of them over to the asian region and dilute your european deterrent . You do not have to make that choice if you build Nuclear Capabilities that are dedicated to the specific region. If china knows we have those capabilities, then they are less likely to decide to go to work. We do not have any Nuclear Forces structure in there, so one of the examples is a Nuclear Cruise missile where you do not have to ask their allies for their permission, but china knows we have submarines out there that can be used promptly in the region. Now they understand there is no way they could use limited Nuclear Deployment and gain an advantage. It just adds to the deterrent effect, but it does require additional capability. To be fair, with the administrations sink they recognize that problem. They are saying we have capabilities to deal with that. They are suggesting you could launch a b52 bomber with the christmas oh, get it into the region. You could take tactical fire and moving into the region, or maybe use a submarine launch. We have those capabilities, but they are not necessarily prompt. They are not necessarily present in the region, and if they are deployed to the region they are not survivable, but most importantly china is building up its regional Nuclear Capabilities. If we do not respond to that, that sends a signal potentially to try and at that we are not willing to compete in that area, and consequently it sends a signal to the allies that we are not willing to run the risk on their behalf. I think this last point, ruffalo ralph lowe couldnt speak it is a good idea. Not because it adds military capability, although it does. One of our biggest problems in asia is building structure in the region that people are willing to stand up to china, because most of the Asian Countries have some option of accommodation, and it is a problem we do not have to nearly the same degree in data, and i think one of the greatest advantages of a nuclear arm c launched sea launched Cruise Missile is for all practical focuses it is a asia focused capability, and it will allow us without the incredibl