Matthew Kroenig (associate professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow at The Atlantic Council) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity and National Security conference on Nov. 3, 2018.

Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Mark. It’s a pleasure to be back here at the Christianity and National Security Conference. I spoke here last year also on the subject of nuclear weapons. So, as Mark said, many people see nuclear weapons as a moral abomination, a weapon that can destroy an entire city. But today, I want to make the case, the moral case for nuclear weapons, and in fact argue that US nuclear weapons may have been the greatest force for moral good in the world over the past 70 years. And I want to make the case in four parts.

First, let’s look at the security environment and make the case that nuclear weapons, whether we like it or not, are back in international politics. Second, talk about some of these arguments about the immorality of nuclear weapons and a little bit about why I think that’s misguided. Third, talk about the desirability of US nuclear weapons. And then finally, conclude.

Whether we like it or not, nuclear weapons are back. Nuclear weapons were central to the bipolar Cold War strategic environment, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. And then the Soviet Union came to a close, and I think many people thought that nuclear weapons would become relics of the past, that we’d come to our senses. What were we doing during the Cold War? And so, for the past 25 years, we haven’t really worried very much about nuclear weapons. But I don’t think that’s because humanity has somehow become more enlightened. I think it’s because nuclear weapons are really tools of great power competition.

So they were central to the great power competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. But over the past 25 years, we’ve been blessed with a respite from great power competition. Rather than national security challenges facing the United States—terrorism, insurgency—nuclear weapons weren’t really relevant to those challenges. And those actors didn’t pose a nuclear threat to the United States. But unfortunately, great power competition has returned.

The US national security strategy published last year, the national defense strategy published earlier this year, says the return of great power competition with Russia and China is the foremost threat to the security and economic well-being of the United States and its allies. So I think as interstate great power competition has returned, so has the salience of nuclear weapons in international politics.

Turning first to Russia. Russia has a frightening nuclear strategy that they call “escalate to de-escalate.” Basically, the idea is that if they get into a conflict with NATO, Russia is not confident that they could prevail in an enduring conventional conflict. So they plan to use one or two or a small number of nuclear weapons early in the conflict to try to frighten Western or US leaders to back down. If they invade Estonia, if NATO comes to the defense of our NATO ally, Russia could use one or two nuclear weapons on NATO ships or Warsaw or one of the things they’ve actually exercised in their military exercises, with the hope that President Trump or Angela Merkel or other Western leaders are going to say, “Oh my God, we’re not going to fight a nuclear war over Estonia. Russia can have whatever it wants in Eastern Europe.” So the risk is low. I don’t want to frighten anyone, but I think the risk of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia is higher today than at any time since the 1980s.

But it’s not just Russia. North Korea is expanding and modernizing its nuclear arsenal. North Korea could become only the third US adversary with the ability to threaten nuclear war against the US homeland. So I think sometimes people say, “Well, why do we worry about North Korea? India, Britain, a lot of other countries have nuclear weapons.” But North Korea, again, would be only the third potential US adversary to have the ability to strike this room with a nuclear weapon. Russia and China were the first to, and we’ve been dealing with those threats for decades. But North Korea would be only the first country in several decades to have that capability. So this is a real threat to US national security.

Best estimates are now that North Korea has from a dozen up to 60 nuclear warheads. They already have missiles capable of reaching US allies and bases in Asia. And experts disagree, but they’re on the verge of having an ICBM capability capable of reaching this room, and the trend lines aren’t good. Their capabilities continue to improve.

China—the national defense strategy says the great power competition with Russia and China is the foremost threat facing the country. But behind the scenes, many defense officials will say, “We’re really, over the long term, worried about China.” China could be a real peer competitor. China, of course, also a nuclear power, China is expanding and modernizing its nuclear arsenal. And so any conflict with China would also have a nuclear shadow.

And then finally, Iran. Iran has an advanced nuclear program. And according to the best estimates, if Iran’s supreme leader decided today to produce as much highly enriched uranium as quickly as possible, he could have enough material for his first nuclear weapon within about a year. So we have serious nuclear threats facing the country once again.

Now, many people would say, “Well, this is crazy. We just need to ban these weapons. These weapons are immoral.” And as Mark pointed out, there’s a growing feeling within Christianity that nuclear weapons are immoral and we need to ban them. Now, this is a change. During the Cold War, the Catholic Church endorsed nuclear deterrence because of the peace that it provided. But in recent years, there’s been a change, with many Christians arguing that the nuclear weapons themselves are immoral, that any weapon that could destroy an entire city is immoral in and of itself, and that nuclear deterrence as a strategy, even threatening to slaughter innocent civilians as a way to produce peace, is in and of itself immoral.

So there’s been a growing nuclear ban movement. Many countries that don’t possess nuclear weapons themselves or that aren’t under the protection of America’s nuclear weapons, something I’ll talk about in a minute, have been supporting this international ban movement. There was actually a vote in the UN General Assembly banning the possession of nuclear weapons. So the idea that we should just get rid of nuclear weapons might seem appealing. But I would argue that we need to question the feasibility of this and the desirability.

So first, the feasibility. Is it even possible to get rid of nuclear weapons? And I think that if you look back at the Obama administration, President Obama did make a good-faith effort to move in this direction. He gave a famous speech in Prague in 2009, saying that his goal was to eliminate nuclear weapons. And his administration’s strategy was to slowly reduce the number of US nuclear weapons and arms control agreements with Russia, then to bring on other countries, China, and India into the negotiations, and to all slowly move down together.

In pursuing that goal, they did get Russia to agree to reduce with the United States the size of its strategic deployed arsenal. So we signed this new START treaty in 2010, where the United States and Russia both lowered the size of their strategic deployed nuclear arsenals to 1,550 warheads. Now, that might sound like a big number, but it’s way down from the Cold War highs. In 1967, the United States had 31,255 nuclear weapons. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union had over 40,000 nuclear weapons.

So now we’re down to 1,550 each. And again, the Obama administration’s strategy was that we would slowly ratchet down. In practice, we see that that didn’t work, because instead of as the United States reduced the size of its nuclear arsenal, instead of following America’s lead, other countries saw an opportunity, and they said, “If the United States isn’t going to play in this space, this gives us an asymmetric advantage.”

So Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea all began relying more, not less, on nuclear weapons, and their strategies, including this Russian “escalate to de-escalate” strategy. Russia did reduce its strategic deployed warheads according to the treaty, but they began building new nuclear weapons that weren’t covered in the treaty. China, India, Pakistan, North Korea all expanded their nuclear arsenals.

So this idea that we can just reduce our nuclear weapons and other countries are to blindly follow America’s lead, I think has proven to be incorrect. So if you really want disarmament, the problem is not Washington, DC, or Paris, or London. I think it’s Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang. So if you can convince Kim Jong-un and Putin to give up nuclear weapons, then we can have more of a discussion. But I think there’s a real feasibility question,

but more importantly, I think for today’s lecture, is the desirability question: Would it be desirable to get rid of nuclear weapons? And as I said at the beginning of my talk, I think US nuclear weapons have been one of the greatest forces for moral good in the world over the past 70 years. So why do I say that? One, is for deterrence. So we saw what a world without nuclear weapons looked like before 1945: World War One, World War Two, the Napoleonic Wars, Peloponnesian Wars, Punic Wars – countries were free to fight conventional wars with each other. Since 1945, we’ve had this remarkable period of great power peace, seventy years without a war between major powers. And I think a major part of that is US nuclear weapons.

Now, some would say nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence in general, but I don’t buy that because I think if the United States and its allies did not have nuclear weapons but the Soviet Union did during the Cold War, I’m not convinced we would have great power peace. I think we’d be living under communist systems today, likely in North America and Europe. I think Russia, the Soviet Union, would have been aggressive. So I think it was US nuclear weapons that deterred the third major power conflict. Second and importantly, is extended deterrence. There’s another major role of US nuclear weapons because what’s special about United States nuclear arsenal is not just that we deter attacks against ourselves.

Now, that’s what other countries do – Britain, Russia, China – use their nuclear weapons to deter attacks against themselves. The United States uses its nuclear weapons to deter attacks on the entire free world. We have formal security alliances with over 30 treaty allies that depend on America’s nuclear weapons. The 28 other members of NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia, arguably others, are relying on America’s nuclear weapons for their security. So US nuclear weapons have protected Western Europe, protected Asia for the past seventy years and provided geopolitical stability in those regions.

Third is assurance. So in addition to protecting these allies, we essentially make a deal with them. We say don’t build your own nuclear weapons and in exchange, you can rely on America’s nuclear weapons for your protection. So if it hadn’t been for that promise of extended deterrence, it’s very likely that many of our allies would have nuclear weapons today. Germany, Japan, South Korea, are countries Taiwan are countries that had nuclear programs in the past and the United States through these extended nuclear deterrence commitments, the provision of the US nuclear umbrella, convinced these countries to shut these programs down.

In one prominent example, in the 1970s, Taiwan had a plutonium reprocessing program. Plutonium reprocessing, one of the most ways to make fuel for nuclear weapons and the United States came down on them pretty hard and said you need to shut this program down or else you risk jeopardizing your relationship with the United States. Taiwan agreed to shut the program down and in fact, one Taiwanese scientist said when the Americans got through with us, I’m surprised we’re still allowed to teach physics here in Taiwan. So many people argue the United States should come home. Why do we have all these defense commitments around the world?

And we could certainly make that choice, but I think if we decided to do that, if we decided to withdraw from our alliances in Europe and Asia, it’s likely that Germany, Poland, Japan, South Korea would build nuclear weapons. In fact, a majority of people in South Korea today say that support South Korea building its own nuclear weapons. So this has been a constant battle of the United States reassuring allies they’re serious. Experts in Germany saying, you know, if we can’t rely on the United States, maybe we should consider building our own nuclear weapons. So US nuclear weapons have stopped the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world and arms races in many important regions.

A fourth issue for the morality of US nuclear weapons is counterforce nuclear targeting. And so this is something that I think non-specialists don’t really appreciate. You know, many of us who have been exposed to nuclear deterrence theory in high school or an intro to international relations class have this kind of mutually assured destruction model in mind. You know, we threaten to slaughter a bunch of people in Moscow and Beijing, they threaten to slaughter a bunch of people in New York in Washington, and both of us are so afraid to go to war that there’s this kind of mutual deterrence, mutual stability.

But that’s not the way US nuclear strategy works. We don’t threaten to slaughter innocent civilians in other countries. Rather, we engage in so-called counterforce nuclear targeting. So the United States plans to use its nuclear weapons only against legitimate military targets. So we target Russian, Chinese, North Korean air bases, ballistic missiles, naval bases, command and control sites. Now, of course, when you’re using nuclear weapons, these are powerful weapons so there would be large-scale collateral damage, but there is a moral distinction between targeting legitimate military targets and purposely trying to slaughter innocent civilians.

So other countries have different strategies. China, we think, has a counter-value strategy. If there were a nuclear exchange, they would just try to kill as many Americans as possible. That’s not US strategy. We actually try to limit collateral damage and only target military targets. So part of this is for moral and legal and ethical reasons. And President Obama was very clear about this in his 2013 guidance to the US Department of Defense. He said that we follow the law of armed conflict. The law of armed conflict is very clear that you distinguish between legitimate military targets and innocent civilians and we only target legitimate military targets.

But there’s also a strategic reason to this as well – so-called damage limitation. You know, the point of US nuclear weapons is to provide stability, to deter conflict, but God forbid if there is a conflict, we want to protect ourselves and protect our allies. We’re not just going to sit back and say, “Okay, now we accept our mutually assured destruction.” So U.S. strategy, by targeting every enemy nuclear weapon we can destroy on the ground, there is a nuclear weapon that’s not going to fall on the territory of the US ally or of the United States itself so this goal of damage limitation has been an important part of US strategy going back to the Cold War. In the Nuclear Posture Review, the Trump administration’s nuclear strategy released earlier this year, one of the explicit objectives of US nuclear policy is to achieve our objectives if deterrence fails. One of the first things they talk about is limiting damage. For all these reasons, I think that US nuclear weapons have been a force for good. We’ve deterred great power conflict, provided stability to our allies in Europe and Asia, and dissuaded our allies from building their own nuclear weapons, starting an arms race, or increasing the risk of nuclear war.

Our strategy of counter-force targeting is, I think, moral in and of itself and very different from the way other countries approach the issue. So what does this mean going forward? Well, I think it means that as long as nuclear weapons exist (and this is something that President Obama said), even though he would like to eliminate nuclear weapons, the United States needs to have a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent. And I think that’s correct.

But our nuclear weapons are getting old. How many of you drive cars? Probably most of you. How many of you drive cars that were built in the 70s and 80s? Probably none of you. If you do have a vintage car, you know, bless your heart. But when you get in, you may not expect it to start every time and need some patches. Well, our nuclear weapons were built in the 70s and 80s. At the end of the Cold War, we put off the modernization because during the War on Terror, during the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, we didn’t see nuclear weapons as a priority.

But now they need to be upgraded. So in 2010, President Obama put in place a modernization plan to modernize US nuclear weapons, submarines, bombers, aircraft over the next 30 years. And there’s bipartisan support for these plans. The Trump administration says that they would like to continue these. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of modernizing US nuclear weapons over the next thirty years is over one trillion dollars. Some people have looked at this price tag and said that this is unaffordable; we need to scale back. But to put that number in context, one trillion dollars over 30 years comes to about 5% of the US defense budget. So is 5% too much to spend on nuclear weapons? Now, I guess reasonable people can disagree.

But Secretary Mattis, actually every Secretary of Defense going back to Chuck Hagel under Obama, has said that nuclear deterrence is the most important mission of the US Department of Defense. So is 5% too much to spend on the most important mission? Again, reasonable people can disagree. But I think it’s a good value. And Secretary Mattis put it well. He said, “We can afford national survival,” and that’s what nuclear weapons provide. So I think I’ll end my remarks there and look forward to question-and-answer. Thank you very much.

What about missile defense? That’s a good question. The question was about missile defense. So missile defense also contributes to strategy in all of these ways as well. It contributes to damage limitation. Again, our goal is to prevent a nuclear attack. But, God forbid, if North Korea uses a nuclear weapon against Japan, South Korea, or the United States, we’d want to be able to prevent that. And so if we can’t destroy the missile before it takes off, then our last chance would be missile defense to intercept it.

It also contributes to assurance. We want to make sure that Japan, South Korea, Poland feel secure so they don’t build their own nuclear weapons. So one of the ways we do that is by deploying missile defenses on their territory. And it also contributes to deterrence and extended deterrence. If you’re Russia contemplating one of these escalate-to-deescalate strikes, if you’re in North Korea thinking about a nuclear attack and there’s a reasonable chance that the attack is going to be shot down by our missile defenses, maybe you think twice about it.

You know, why conduct an attack if it’s only going to be shot down? Our regional missile defenses, the shorter-range defenses that we have in Europe and Asia currently, are much better than our homeland missile defenses. So you may have heard about this THAAD missile defense that we deployed to South Korea that led to some controversy. We also have Patriot missile defenses in Japan and in Poland. According to the testing data, they’re accurate about seventy-five percent of the time. So that’s not bad. You know, it’s not a hundred percent, but it’s much, much better than zero.

If there was a missile coming at me, I’d prefer a 75 percent chance over zero percent chance. Homeland missile defenses. So we have homeland missile defenses designed to protect the continental United States. Currently, we only have 44 interceptors and two bases, one in Alaska and one in California. And those missile defenses, according to the testing data, are about 50 percent accurate. Again, not a hundred percent.

Now, but one of the things we would likely do if there’s an incoming missile from North Korea, rather than just expending one missile defense interceptor to go up and try to get it, we’d likely shoot several. So 50 percent chance of one x and another, you know, the probability begins to improve. But there is a problem. You can do the math. You know, we think that North Korea has a couple of dozen nuclear weapons now. But Russia, we think, has 1550. China, we think, has about 300.

So again, do the math. If North Korea shoots over one and we need four interceptors to get that, we have 44, we’re in good shape. But if they shoot over, you know, a dozen, maybe we’re still fine. But if Russia or China attacks us with hundreds of nuclear weapons, the missile defenses don’t really make much of a difference. So currently, we say our homeland missile defenses are limited defense meant to deal with regional powers and rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

But there are some interesting new technologies that are being developed, including directed energy. Because currently, our missile defense technology is hitting a bullet with a bullet. You have an ICBM coming in at high speed, we shoot an interceptor at high speed, and we have to intercept directly. Now, not everyone does this. Russia actually has nuclear-tipped missile defenses. They put a nuclear warhead on their missile defense interceptor, and if you have a nuclear warhead, then you don’t have to have a direct hit; you just need to get close, if you’re detonating a nuke over your own territory.

So not something the United States is willing to do. But new technology, there’s directed energy. So basically, the idea would be putting a high-powered laser on a drone, and the drone could circulate around North Korean airspace. And if North Korea conducted an attack, we’d zap it with a laser on its way up. So that’s cheaper than an interceptor and has a lot of potential. So it’s something that we’re working on. People who are focused most closely on this issue say that probably by 2025, we may have these directed-energy missile defense interceptors.

Hi, Jacob Potter. I’m a member at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Do you think the morality of nuclear weapons also extends to chemical or biological weapons? Thanks. It’s a good question. So there’s this terminology, Weapons of Mass Destruction or WMD. WMD includes nuclear, chemical, biological. Sometimes people also throw in radiological dispersion devices or so-called dirty bombs. So I think this WMD category is misleading because these are very different weapon systems, very different technologies.

I guess, first, the short answer is no. I think there’s a difference. But let me explain why. So I think nuclear weapons are really the only true weapon of mass destruction. So chemical weapons, as we’ve seen in Syria and World War I, can cause a lot of damage to the human body. People died in grotesque ways. And so I think that’s one of the reasons that it was incorporated into this WMD category. But it’s not a true weapon of mass destruction.

I mean, Assad’s killed many more people with conventional weapons than he has with chemical weapons. And similarly with biological weapons, there are some difficulties with weaponizing biological weapons. Now, the people who are focused on this area say there are some things just over the horizon that could make biological weapons true weapons of mass destruction using genetic research and other things to make kind of superbugs. But currently and historically, we haven’t seen biological weapons used in this way.

And dirty bomb is essentially wrapping radioactive material around a conventional weapon. So some say these are really more weapons of mass disruption, not weapons of mass destruction because the idea would be if a terrorist or somebody used this, the first responders would show up and their Geiger counters would be going crazy and they maybe would mistake it for a nuclear attack and so people would panic. But actually, the damage from a dirty bomb would essentially all be from the conventional explosion. The radioactive part just causes confusion.

So when some of these are very different things, you know, over the past 70 years, nuclear weapons are the only weapons that have really been incorporated into the center of a country’s national defense planning and the only ones that I think have proven effective in this deterrence role. Which they got time for a question? Outstanding. Thanks so much for comments, Jason. Regent University, but I’m also an active duty Navy lieutenant commander flying F-18.

So my experience with nuclear weapons is as far as the nuclear enable switch in the cockpit, which is interesting to look at. You touched on extended deterrence, specifically U.S. deterrence, Japan’s, Taiwan, South Korea. I’m curious of your thoughts on the current administration’s removal from many alliances treaties as we pull back this national sentiment. How is that affecting? We’ve already touched on South Korea, the sentiment there, “We need our own nuclear weapons.” How is that diminishing our nuclear extended deterrence in that region?

It’s a good question. So there is something of a disconnect, I think, between a lot of the rhetoric and statements coming from the Trump administration and then our actual policies. As Mark mentioned in his opening remarks, I also should, I meant to mention, I was raised Methodist and my wife and I currently attend Christ Church Church down the street here in Georgetown. But so that’s one of my affiliations, and another one’s at the Atlantic Council. So the Atlantic Council has traditionally focused on European security, and this is one of the areas where the Trump administration’s rhetoric has been harshest—what’s the value of NATO? It’s outdated, maybe we pull out of NATO if the Europeans don’t spend more. And that has had an effect.

But what’s interesting is if you look at the underlying policy, the Trump administration has actually, with its underlying policy, has been better towards European defense and tougher on Russia than I think really any administration since Ronald Reagan. So the Trump administration has increased spending for the European Defense Initiative, increased spending for NATO defense, it’s provided arms to the Ukrainians to fight the Russian invasion there. It’s strengthening nuclear missile defense, including specifically for some of these threats of the Russian escalate to de-escalate strikes. We struck Assad in Syria after he used chemical weapons. Assad is a close Russian partner. That’s not something that Putin liked. We announced just last week or two weeks ago that we’re going to pull out of this INF treaty in response to Russia and cheating and build our own capabilities in this space. So the underlying policy has been really tough to Russia and good to Europe.

So I meet with European defense officials often in my role at the Atlantic Council, and what they say is that, you know, as national security professionals, we like most of what Trump is doing with its actual policies. We like a lot of the personnel in the Trump administration; they’re professionals. But they say this rhetoric is really unhelpful, and it means that our politicians don’t like the Trump administration, our publics don’t like the Trump administration, and that complicates our ability to cooperate with the United States. So I think the answer is mixed. Our policies are reassuring, but a lot of the rhetoric is not. And you do see a renewed interest, I think, in nuclear with serious experts from Germany, even Australia, saying maybe we should reconsider our nuclear options, maybe we should build nuclear weapons. So I think the underlying policies are good. I think it would be even better if the rhetoric matched that.

Joshua Smith, the Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, and Jonathan Schell wrote a book called “The Unconquerable World.” I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it or not, but in that book, he argues that we escalated our deterrence capabilities so high that we’re no longer able to have these third-party competitions with Russia and China through allied nations, and so we’re allowing some of these smaller conflicts to kind of run amok. But we’re protected against the great power competition area, but not for like the smaller conflicts around the world. How would you respond to that, sir?

Well, I haven’t read the book, so I can’t respond directly to his argument, but there is this idea of a stability paradox that if nuclear weapons provide deterrents at the highest end, then maybe that creates space for lower-level conflict. And so I think there is some evidence of that historically. People would say in the Cold War, maybe the reason the United States and Soviet Union were competing in Cuba and sub-Saharan Africa and other places in Southeast Asia was because it was too dangerous to compete directly in Western Europe.

Also, if you look at Pakistan and North Korea, I do think that there’s an argument that Pakistan and North Korea have become more aggressive since acquiring nuclear weapons. So I think they think that nuclear weapons can kind of serve as a shield that would deter a major power attack, and so this gives them more freedom of action. In the case of Pakistan, cross-border raids against India, in the case of North Korea, since acquiring nuclear weapons, it’s sunk a South Korean warship, shelled South Korean islands, threatened to nuke the United States. So I think there is that risk.

If Iran acquired nuclear weapons, I think we need to worry about the same thing, that they would think that this is a shield, we can become more aggressive in the Middle East, challenging Israel or other countries in the region. So I think the solution is that nuclear weapons are good for a few things. Deterring major power conflict, I think, is something they’re good for. They’re not good for dealing with every challenge.

And so I think when it comes to lower-level challenges from Russia and China, which we do see, and you know, Europe, we used to think of as our allies, we’d go together and fight in Afghanistan or whatever. Europe is once again becoming the battleground. Russia and China are actively involved in Europe, trying to peel away our traditional allies. China has the 16 plus 1 strategy they call it, where they’re trying to buy off countries in Eastern Europe, they’re making major investments in the Czech Republic. So I think this is a real challenge to the free world and one that we need to push back against, but I think we have to use tools other than nuclear weapons for that.

Thank you very much, sir.

Hi, I’m Kaitlyn. I’m an undergrad at the King’s College. When you’re speaking about the morality of nuclear weapons, it seems like you’ve been arguing a case of pure consequentialism, suggesting that because nuclear weapons have helped create peace in some way, about their moral nature change at the point in which they’re actually used. And really, why should we care about the morality of deterrence at the point where the first missile is fired or the first bomb is dropped?

Yeah, good question. And you know, I should have started by saying I’m a political scientist and national security strategist, not an ethicist or a Christian theologian. So, you know, I may not be the best person to speak directly to this question, but I think that the logic doesn’t really change. So imagine that Russia used — so here’s the scenario I worry a lot about, many professionals worried about: We saw Russia invade Ukraine in 2014. What if they did something similar in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania? These are small US allies right on the border of Russia but their allies, unlike Ukraine. So I think we couldn’t just stand by. We’d have to come to the defense of our allies. And so we do that. We’re flowing in forces into the Baltic States to protect them, to try to push out Russian forces.

Well, Russian strategy calls for using nuclear weapons early. So imagine you’re President Trump or a leader of a Western European country. “We’re going to defend our NATO ally,” and Russia uses a nuclear weapon on an airbase in Poland. You know, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s the first time nuclear weapons are used since 1945. So how do you respond? I think some serious people I’ve talked to said, “Well, we back down. We’re not going to fight a nuclear war over Estonia.” Okay, that’s one option. But then what message does that send your adversaries? That says, “Use a nuclear weapon or threaten to use a nuclear weapon, and you can do whatever you want. We don’t have the stomach to push back against that.”

Others would say, “Well, no, our policy since 1945 has been nuclear retaliation. They use a nuclear weapon; we’re going to hit them back with everything they’ve got. We’re going to nuke Russia so hard.” So that’s an answer as well. But okay, we launch a major nuclear attack on Russia. You know, Russia has — you know, it’s used one nuclear weapon, so it has 1549 left. What does it do? Does it decide to retaliate against Poland or Paris, London, the United States? So I think the right strategy, and what the Trump administration has actually laid out in a new Nuclear Posture Review, is to threaten limited nuclear response. That if Russia uses one or two nuclear weapons, our choice isn’t suicide or surrender — suicide through a massive nuclear exchange or backing down — but rather, we’ll respond with one or two or seven nuclear weapons. And the point of that isn’t to fight a nuclear war but rather to deter the nuclear conflict in the first place.

But if Russia were to use a nuclear weapon, then I do think that the United States should respond with a limited nuclear attack of its own. And I think that that would be the moral course. Not doing that would tell every nuclear-armed adversary on earth, “Use nuclear weapons and take what you want.” It would tell non-nuclear states, “Build nuclear weapons, threaten to use them, and you can take whatever you want.” And so I think responding to nuclear use with a nuclear attack is important for re-establishing deterrence and discouraging the spread of nuclear weapons.

My name is — I want to talk about the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific. I think it’s time for change, meaning I think Japan should go — always should urge Japan to go nuclear. I don’t think they will, but I think they should, and I think we should urge them to go ahead and do that. If we have enough air to force, trusting Japan, which is another issue, but I am for it. But how about you?

Yes, well, I respectfully disagree. So I think we see the same problem, though, that stability in Asia has been really underwritten by American military power there for many decades, but the balance of power is rapidly shifting as China becomes wealthier. It’s investing a lot of those resources into military power. You know, I worked — well, 15 or so years ago, I was working in the US government. I talked to colleagues about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and they would joke and say, “What do you mean, the Million Man Swim?” Because China didn’t even have the capabilities to get forces to Taiwan 15 years ago, but that’s rapidly changed. Many defense planners really questioned the ability of the United States currently to defend allies and partners.

But I don’t think the answer is giving allies and partners nuclear weapons. That’s been a consistent part of US non-proliferation policy for 70 years, that the spread of nuclear weapons is bad for us and bad for the world, whether it’s to a friend or to an enemy. We want to stop our friends from building nuclear weapons as well. So I think there are other things we can do to address the shifting balance of power. So one is for the United States to increase its capabilities, and that’s part of the reason the Trump administration withdrew from the INF treaty a week or two ago. Not because Russia is cheating in Europe — that’s part of it — but also because these capabilities would be very helpful for countering China’s firepower in Asia. Ninety-five percent of Chinese missiles would fall within this band INF range. So if we can build capabilities in that space, it helps us to counter China. In addition, we can encourage our allies to work more closely together in Asia. As you know, there’s this new concept of the Quad of Japan, India, Australia, and the United States working together to balance China. So I think we can do it with US nuclear weapons and with the conventional capabilities of the United States and our allies working together, and that it would not be desirable for Japan to build nuclear weapons today.

Thank you.

Yeah, I got the feeling that we’re going to be sorry in about three, five years, but I’m hoping that I’m wrong.