[inaudible conversations] thank you very much for joining us for 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 it in discussion with leading scholars on strategic posture and nonproliferation. Directly to my left, to reintroduce because it has been an hour, a senior fellow at forward Defense Center for strategy and security at the Atlantic Council. Is also former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and Missile Defense policy. We have the honorable walt slocum, Board Director at the Atlantic Council and former undersecretary for policy at the department of defense and lynn rustin, the Vice President for Global Nuclear policy program at the Nuclear Threat initiative. Thank you for being with us today to share your own thoughts. I would like to kick it off with a very broad question. We just heard about the findings and recommendations to build up but i want to ask you, when you read through it, did the commission make its mark and come up with a solid path forward and what recommendations did you not see that you would have liked to see . Yes. I think that they didnt go in there. In that sense. You have to understand why the commission was created to begin with. When congress creates a commission that means theres an issue so politically divisive that they cant resolve it through the normal Committee Process and Nuclear Weapons was one of those. The Previous Commission chaired by bill kerry and james and or injure congress was arguing over whether to build a reliable warhead, robust nuclear pantry, these were nuclear systems, really divisive debates, they appointed a commission in the commission didnt solve those two issues but many of their ideas got worked into the Obama Nuclear posture in moderating that particular review. Likewise, whats going on here, theres a consensus, has been a consensus to continue to modernize Nuclear Forces and the system we are looking to modernize now began in the Obama Administration and reaffirmed under trump and reaffirmed under biden but is that enough . Is it enough . This particular Posture Commission found the program of record is sufficient but not enough. We need to do more in the question, how much more . And now we are going to argue over how much more and the administration has done a great job identifying the problem, the need to deter limited Nuclear Attacks as well as largescale Nuclear Attacks but havent taken the next step to determine what changes need to be done and whether its because they ran out of time or not engaged in more pressing issues. This will spur them into action, they have to react. If they dont, they risk now Million National concerns if they dont take action against the chinese threat, we have an election coming up in 2,024, right . I can guarantee you the republicans will see it as an opportunity to engage with the Biden Administration whether they are doing enough to make deterrence challenges. I respect the commission because the difficulty of getting people, if you know the people involved, they are doing a lot of things. They were able to writing meaningful report covering what they could agree about and in many cases formulations that dealt with alternative views. I have serious criticism. I think the first is cost. I know the argument it is all in the future, we have to anticipate these things in the future. It is a formidable list of things which includes rather quietly conventional defense that is adequate for both theaters and the report was published if someone had been doing a report like this on how to deal with the conventional threat in the future before 10 days ago would have said we will be cutting way back and save a lot of money that way. In order to make meaningful judgments you have to have some kind of sense of what the Research Requirements are going to be and for those who are not in favor of doing or doing very much there will be people who are in favor of doing it by raising taxes and people in favor of doing it by cutting other parts of the federal budget and probably at least in theory people in favor of doing it by increasing the total amount of gdp that goes through the government. Im not saying it is unaffordable. Senator kyl is right. We can afford what we need to do. Its a question of the other things we need to do that might be affected by this decision. Second, i think the problem, what we do in terms of the chinese build up, we are focusing on the wrong part of the chinese build up if we focus primarily on additional icbms. The chinese capability in the theater which some commissioners mentioned is more serious problem. I think the argument of a lot more systems or targets issue into the fallacy which says you define the size of the Nuclear Force, the number of things you could hit if you wanted to. Prolonged time, that drove our planning, wasnt supposed to. We didnt admit it but it drove the planning for nuclear deterrence. Personally, i would think it is more important for the 3 Party Problem to emphasize survivability, survivable force that cannot be preempted and has the capacity for a all practical purposes destroy the other side. Thats mutually assured destruction. It is not how we plan the force, not how we shape the force but it is hard to get away from the proposition the biggest deterrent to nuclear war is uncertainty in everybodys mind about what would happen. It is all very well to have a limited attack and people but understand the fact that we went over rather than somewhere else. Is very significant. That depends on call judgment being made. 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 the essentially demonstrative attack is hard but not as hard as the Commission Refers to as coercive so that, i think, is the problem. Also, Michael Quinlan who in my opinion was probably the wisest man ever to write on these issues said the problem of deterring nuclear war is conferring conventional war. It is for all practical purposes impossible to imagine a scenario in which any country would use Nuclear Weapons except are rising out of a conventional war or fear of a conventional war. That goes to the cost question. It is easy to say we should have a conventional defense and have a credible conventional deterrent you need a reasonably credible conventional defense. Thats a problem. Im not saying the commission didnt address it but it is somewhat harder problem and it addresses the cost. I have some other comments too. Thats going on too long. I want to express my deep respect for the commissioners. All of them i have known and worked with and had tremendous experience and deep commitment to our country. There are things i agreed with and a lot of things i had questions and concerns about. They got the threat assessment right and that is very important. I 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 us Global Leadership and work closely with our allies and partners, really important principles at a time when there are some in our leadership who are questioning that and in a more isolationist sense. Thats really important and they emphasize that in the event that i went to. It was a consensus report. It clearly papered over some significant different perspectives. I think one of my most important points, this is not the answer to the difficult question of how to respond over the longterm to the threat that has been described so well in the report, it is one input and one input heavily weighted toward the military aspect of a toolkit. In some ways it is like a worstcase defense planning document which says if the threat environment continues on the trajectory it is now, these are the things we need to think about. You can take issue with that but what it doesnt do because it wasnt from the congressional legislation, if it doesnt take back or stand back from the wider lens, what are the things we can do diplomatically through arms control, through lots of tools to actually, through our own actions including selfrestraint in some areas to discourage or insure or incentivize russia and china to not go down the worst case. I have lots of questions. I will save them. I will ask about this. Lets start with the numbers. We have for generations now thought of mutually assured destruction and deterrence as a numbers game. If we need to have so many, what struck me is that shifting away from that thinking, how can we start to plan in a way that china, where we have to have x. All due respect, you have misstated the significance of assured destruction. The term has become loaded. Another Michael Quinlan point, Nuclear Weapons, the cost of a war can be entirely independent of who, quote, won the war. The significance of the incredible power of Nuclear Weapons is used in theory and a particular way they would lead the initiator, the victor, vastly worse off than if they had not proceeded. As i said, that is a physical fact. People talk about we accepted assured destruction. We didnt accept it, we recognized it is a fact, like the law of gravity complicates airplane design. That is the kind of ultimate foundation of deterrence because the possibility that is where you will end up is the biggest restraint on starting. The serious problem on the numbers, in my mind the chinese build up is very unfortunate though from the point of view of china, the chinese will promptly say this, why are americans and perhaps russians, 1500 under arms control agreement, its not 1500 and reality. It is a lot more if you account for uploads, why are they pretending to be so nervous about us having a force that may be 25 . I think more numbers are important because it is important to show we are responding useful ways. I think the problem is less what we do and how we think about deterrence strategy, but not just simple numbers that go up on a blackboard. You asked numbers. That is the way people in washington think about this problem. What if it suggests to you the actual numbers that need to increase are modest and can be accomplished in an arms control framework. I will throw this out. The argument that we need to add up the number of chinese targets, the number of russian targets and match the combined route, nobody i know who has been involved in this business and the government is suggesting that. It is a smaller number. The treaty that existed prior to that is the moscow treaty and lets say we go from 15522200. Can we accomplish our targeting objectives by going after 2200 . Maybe that is possible. What if we agree with russia to go back to that level . We solved the china problem. What it seems is we need at least 1500. Anything beneath that is insufficient, you need more. When the senate did advice and consent, this is ground that has been plowed before. Thats a nonstarter. The question is everybody agrees more but not everybody. Not just of this commission but the center for Global Security research, csis, steady bipartisan groups all found some more is needed but we are not talking about an address, we can solve this without an arms risk about what we need, the administration to put together a package to explain to us how they would meet the requirements of the commissioner in a manner that does not do that. I think that can be done. A couple things. I did not find the report compelling is that we need necessarily more or different Nuclear Forces at this time. The report is ambiguous, actually silent on the assumptions. You have to make some assumptions about russia and china and the number one assumption thats not hardly discussed is what will russia be doing with arms control. And conversely an interest in constraining russia at what level. Than the question of whether we need additional capability to deal with china and when because right now china is assessed to have 500 Nuclear Weapons compared to 4000 below or above for russia and the United States. This is something that is happening down the road more quickly than anticipated a couple years ago. We are not there yet. It is not laid out in the report. Another important question, emphasize the urgency of some decisions that should be made so we have options available in the future which in principle makes sense to me but the report was unclear on specifically what are those decisions that have to be made now. As Michael Gordon pointed out, its not about keeping the production lines for strategic delivery vehicles, 15, 20 years, thats not the issue. I suspect there might be issues in the weapons comments, it wasnt stated so the sense of urgency wasnt matched by a discussion of what isnt urgent ormonde bears now that dont seem urgent to me. This goes back to the issue of we ought to be thinking more, there is the chapter at the end of the report, can we head off and mitigate the risks we are worried about with russia and china through diplomacy and negotiation and arms control agreements broadly defined, the commitment at new start not to exceed those limits, and all of that could obviate the need for the kinds of options in this report, many of which would not be achievable and too costly, not to mention destabilizing, not the path we should be going down for our security. To set a baseline, where the report finding the program of record modernization methods may continue, not sufficient, we heard, to get a baseline, weve not had a great power war for 80 years with the arsenal. What is it about the current arsenal but insufficient, the biggest vulnerability that is addressed now. Is the regional aspect of the problem. Imagine we are engaged in a war with russia in nato. We are fighting a conventional war. We need forces to detour alluded nuclear use by the russians and p609 bombs by Fighter Aircraft and what happens when we are engaged there if china decides to invade taiwan . We are still deterring nuclear use against russia and deter china from going nuclear. All our Nuclear Assets are in europe, move some of them over to the asia region and the european determined. You dont have to make that choice if you build Nuclear Capabilities in the pacific region. Of china knows we have those capabilities they are less likely to engage in a war. Thats not a modernization issue. We dont have any Nuclear Force structure there. One of the examples is the Cruise Missile where you dont have to ask allies for permission but china knows we have submarines that can be used promptly in a contingency, now they understand there is no way they could use limited Nuclear Employment and gain an advance and add to the deterrent effect so it does require additional capability. To be fair, the administration recognized that problem. They are suggesting perhaps you could launch a b52 bomber with a Cruise Missile, take technical fires into the region or maybe use submarine launched Ballistic Missile radio, we have those capabilities but they are not necessarily present in the region and they are deployed to the region and not survivable but most importantly, china is building up its regional Nuclear Capabilities. If we dont respond to that, that sends a signal potentially to china that we are not willing to compete in that area and a signal to the allies that maybe we are not willing to run risks. The last point, nuclear see launch Cruise Missile is a good idea, it is not so much because it has military capability although it does for all the reasons. One of our biggest problems n asia is building structure in the region that people are willing to stand up to have the option of some kind of accommodation. And its cop probably dont have nearly to thea same degree and i think one of the greatest advantages of a Nuclear ArmedCruise Missile is that it is for all practical purposes, not necessarily, but for all practical purposes it is an asia focused capability. And it would allow us without the incredible political chaos of trying to deploy properly deploy american Nuclear Forces in japan or the philippines or wherever, it provides a genuine answer, it is highly survivable. It is prompt. Its very accurate. It can be made very, it is very accurate. It probably has as good penetration as anything else, and we can point to it and say this is the physical manifestation of our commitment to use Nuclear Weapons if necessary in asia. Now, i dont necessarily believe that that would succeed in deterring chinese a chif for some ultimate reason they decided it was important but in order to have credible convention conventional defense with a Nuclear Element to it, and in order to have a Political Coalition in asia that will stand up to the chinese, in many ways it is as important to reassure the allies as to deter the chinese, bec