Transcription
Welcome everybody back to Neutrality Studies. My name is Pascal Lot. I'm an associate professor at Kyoto University. And today, it's my great pleasure to be joined again on the one hand by Ted Postol, a professor emeritus of MIT, who's been researching nuclear weapons and nuclear technology for many, many years. And we're also joined by our German colleague, Reiner, a former intelligence professional in Germany. Uh, we've had him on the show before. Reiner, welcome.
>> Nice to be here.
>> I'm very glad to be having both of you. And actually, we want to talk today about the insanity that is nuclear weapons, and especially the insanity of people who say that, oh, you know, this is something that needs to be prepared for, um, nuclear weapons use needs to be prepared for. And, uh, Ted, you have actually prepared for us slides on just to show to European colleagues what it means if we are talking about nuclear war on the continent. So, Ted, please take it from here, and I'll start your slideshow.
>> Okay. Well, uh, the point of this very brief discussion is simply to provide some factual foundation to the discussion that will follow. So, the, the, the hope is that we will have a common, uh, factual understanding of some of the issues we'll be, uh, debating, uh, among ourselves. And, uh, I, the basic points that, uh, need to be taken away from this discussion, assuming the discussion is adequately, uh, direct and, uh, and provides you with the information you need, is first of all, that the destructive effects of nuclear weapons are so large in extension and extensive that a nuclear war will really effectively, uh, end, uh, modern civilization. It, it could potentially end, uh, human occupation of the planet, but that's, uh, uh, less, that's not really fully knowable. But it's certainly, uh, not, uh, not out of the question that human extinction could be, could accompany the large-scale use of nuclear weapons. And, uh, a second fact that, uh, will be emphasized in this discussion, that, uh, this statement I just made, is an existential fact of physical reality. It's not a policy opinion. It's, it's a fact. And, and, and because of that fact, when you sit down and you talk about, uh, having a nuclear war, any kind of nuclear war, among the large countries like Russia and, uh, NATO in the, in the West, um, there, there can be no way of defining a sensible, uh, definition of, of winning, uh, a nuclear war. It, it simply results in the annihilation of everybody involved. And if you can come up with an argument for winning it, uh, some people try to, it makes no sense in, in any kind of meaningful, uh, human, uh, uh, human, uh, human terms.
So, let me go to the, uh, to the next slide and just give you, uh, you know, begin to lay the foundations for, uh, my, uh, uh, my, uh, short discussion here. Uh, this is, uh, uh, an aerial, uh, image of the downtown area of, um, Berlin, uh, and the surrounding areas. The little yellow circle shows a range out to about 5 kilometers from the central point where I will postulate a single Russian strategic nuclear weapon might be detonated in the, in the, in the eventuality of war. Let's be careful, uh, to keep in mind that a single nuclear weapon is a very unlikely outcome if these weapons start to be used. There would be hundreds of these weapons used in Europe, maybe even larger numbers. And so, I'm only focusing on a single weapon, uh, because, uh, it's difficult enough for a human being to comprehend the scale and destructiveness of these weapons. So, what I, so the objective here is to give you a, uh, visceral sense of the consequences of one of these, uh, detonations.
Uh, I, I have a slightly different perspective in the next slide just because it, uh, of this, uh, figure here. And, uh, in the next slide, I show you where the nuclear weapon would be detonated. It's a, this, um, the, the nuclear weapon would almost certainly be detonated at about 2 kilometers altitude above the, uh, actual, what's called ground zero. And the reason for that has to do with technical details of blast waves. It's meaningless whether it's, it's detonated at lower altitudes or not. But this is the altitude that would, with a very high probability, be chosen, uh, by the Russians. It doesn't mean it's exactly what would happen, but the general effects are essentially the same, no matter what the altitude of detonation.
Um, in, in the next slide, we show what is called the fireball, uh, from this, uh, uh, nuclear detonation. Now, the fireball is a bubble in the sky. It's, it's an atmospheric bubble. That is to say, the air density inside the fireball at this point is, uh, is about 1% of the density of surrounding air. So, what happens when the detonation occurs is, initially, the nuclear weapon, uh, detonates. When it detonates, in a very short interval of time, hundreds of millions of seconds, the internal temperature of the weapon, uh, goes up to maybe 100 million degrees Kelvin, 100 million degrees Celsius, really. And the center of the sun is about 20 million degrees Celsius. The surface of the sun is about 6,000 degrees Celsius because the sun is much cooler at its surface. And, um, and this fireball, uh, will be produced in about 1 second. It will take a full second for this fireball, which will eventually reach a diameter of over 2 kilometers. And, um, and the center of the fireball will be 10,000 degrees Kelvin or more. So, this is very hot inside the fireball. It's so hot that nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere will undergo chemical reactions producing nitric and nitrous oxides. So, the brownish, uh, the brownish cloud that you see from a, from a nuclear detonation, I'll show you an image later, is from the nitric and nitrous oxides produced in the very high temperature of the initial fireball.
Now, uh, the, the surface of the fireball is 8,000 degrees Kelvin. So, it's a couple of thousand degrees hotter, uh, than the surface of the sun. And because of that, each unit area of the fireball is radiating light and heat at two or three times that of the equivalent surface area of the sun. But this is not at 150 million kilometers away. This is a few kilometers away, kilometers, 5 to 10 kilometers at most. And, um, and the light and heat from this fireball is by far the most destructive aspect of the detonation. People focus on the blast, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But it's the light and heat from this fireball. It's like bringing a piece of the center of the sun down to the earth and letting it emit its energy.
If we go to the next slide, uh, we can, uh, see, uh, I've put in a little yellow circular spherical region around the fireball. And that's because at the end of one second, the fireball initially expands, creating a bubble in the atmosphere. Because the temperature inside is so high, the density of the air is very low, and the pressure of this high temperature air creates this bubble. Eventually, the bubble reaches a size about two, a little bit over two kilometers, where the pressure inside the expanding bubble, uh, it becomes the same as the pressure of the outside air. And that, so the, so the bubble just sits there, not expanding, but it will buoyantly rise because it's a bubble in the atmosphere, just like a bubble under the water would rise. And in the process of expanding, it compresses. It acts like a giant, rapidly expanding piston against the surrounding air. So, it creates a shock wave of enormous physical extent. Let me re-emphasize that although the shock wave is impressively powerful, and I'll show you some of its effects, this is not the most, uh, the most destructive part of the fireball. It's the light and heat, uh, that is, uh, produced by the fireball.
So, if we go to the, uh, the next, um, uh, slide, we see, uh, these bright yellow lines. Uh, the lower bright yellow line, uh, shows you the shock wave as it encounters the ground and becomes reflected upward. So, you see two semispherical shock waves. One is the, what is called the primary shock. It's just a shock from the initial fireball propagating outward, you know, going upward and outward. And you see a shock from below the ground, propagating upward. And that's the primary shock after it's reflected from the ground. And, uh, at the, uh, at the corner where the primary and the secondary shock come together, keep in mind this corner is on the ground, you get an adding summation of the two shock waves. So, the reason for detonating at this choice of altitude is so you can get this reinforcement of the shock that occurs when the weapon is detonated at a chosen altitude. It gives you, uh, more ground destruction. Again, this is kind of a technical point because, um, uh, this is, um, uh, a secondary effect in terms of killing and lethality and destruction. Notice in the upper left corner, uh, the time is now about 4 and a half seconds. So, this is a long time. I mean, keep in mind, if you were at a distance and could observe this with the proper protection, four and a half seconds is a long time to watch this thing evolve. And, um, uh, because the scale is so tremendously large, as, in the next slide, we just see what happens as the primary and secondary shock propagate out further. And, uh, there is a stem formed on the ground. If you look at the ground, uh, let's say on the lower right, you see a vertical shock stem, reflected of the reflected and primary shock, known as the Mach stem, after the famous German scientist who described the effects of Mach numbers. Um, and, uh, this is where the coalescing of the two shock waves is most effective at longer ranges. At shorter ranges, it doesn't matter, the pressure, the blast pressure is so large.
In the next slide, I just give you a sense of what happens at this 5-kilometer range. So, for example, in the upper left slide, uh, we see this structure. This is a structure that was built in the Nevada test site in the 1950s in the United States. This, uh, this structure is initially illuminated by the very early light from the fireball. The fireball is relatively small when it's initially starts and it starts growing in size. As it grows in size, it cools but gets larger, and its brightness increases. So, it's brightest at 1 second. So, at 0.1 seconds, it's not as bright as it will be at 1 second. If we look at the upper right side, we see when the, what happens to the front of the house when the fireball reaches its maximum size. You can see the front of the house is burning off. Of course, the light is shining into the house, and things are literally exploding into flames. It's not just initializing, it's exploding into flames. So, um, so the light from the fireball is tremendously intense. So, this is 1 second after the detonation when the fireball reaches its maximum size. If we wait now 10 more seconds, so this thing has been burnt to a crisp. The shock wave then arrives at this distance of about 5 kilometers. And you can see in the lower left corner, the top of the house, the roof being stripped off. You can see the line of the shock wave arriving across the roof, and the front, the front wall of the building buckling as the pressure wave envelops the house. And then, uh, at maybe a second later, the shock wave takes about 3 seconds to pass. Um, you see the house being crushed, and very high winds, 300 kilometers per hour winds, accompany the shock wave and just tear the house to bits. So, this phenomenon is just at 5 kilometers distance. There will be variations of this phenomenon out to a range of nearly 10 kilometers. Not as intense, but less so. But there will be fires out to a range of nearly 10 kilometers. And that's, that's the big killer, as I will show you.
If you just want to get a sense of what things look like at maybe, uh, let's go to slide 10, uh, 30 to 40. So, this is a half minute after the detonation. You see this fireball, I mean, this mushroom cloud. The details of it are not so important. Notice though that this cloud has a pedestal on the bottom. So, if you were in this region, you could not see anything. There were the streets would be filled with dust and and and violently burning structures, soot from the violently burning structures. You couldn't even see a street sign. If you were a fire department and you were on the streets and you're trying to look around, this is what happened in Japan during firestorms that were not initiated by nuclear weapons. But the firefighters couldn't even find their way around city locations that they knew because they couldn't see far enough away from themselves to be able to identify objects that would allow them to know where they were. As the fireball rises, this ball that I showed you earlier, which was this bright ball of superheated air, it rises up buoyantly, and the center of it rises more violently than the exterior, which is rubbing against the surrounding air, and you get this toroidal kind of cloud structure, which we all know is this mushroom cloud.
Now, just to give you, just to end with a quick look at several other slides, just to give you a feeling for the effects of this, what I call thermal pulse. It's maybe too abstract. This pulse of intense light and heat. I show, I have three images here of different things going on. This image, uh, on the upper left, is that of a school bus. You can see the school bus is, the surface of the school bus is burning off. The interior would be on fire. Anybody in the interior would be very, very, very severely burnt to the point that they would no longer be conscious. Lucky for them, at this, frankly, they would be, their skin would be turned to carbon. So, on the, upper right, uh, you see a scene of a forested area where you see cloud-like structure above the trees. That is the gas, the combusting gas that is coming off the trees, just coming into the air from the light of the fireball. This is not from the blast wave that causes things to be lifted off the ground. And this is from the thermal effects on the ground. You see this cloud-like structure. These, it looks cloudy near the ground. That is just smoke that has been generated by the amount of combusting vegetation from the light of the fireball. On the bottom, you see a tent-like structure. This could be a tree, just burning violently in the illumination of the fireball.
And, uh, in the next slide, you just see a classic scene, which is misleading. This scene is much more violent than some of the scenes I'm about to show you. And the reason for that, in slide 13, in the next slide, is because you have this vast area, in this case, maybe 500 or 300 or 500 square kilometers, set on fire simultaneously. So, you have this disc, this disc of fire, and the disc of fire heats the air over a vast area, hundreds of square kilometers, and that air starts rising. And as it rises, it draws in air, cooler air from the surrounding region. And you can see this effect in the next slide, where you see the discs of fire. The upper slide is actually a pedestal that's emitting combusting gas. It's maybe a third or fourth of a meter in size. So, the scale is very small. In the lower one, the scale is hundreds and hundreds of meters because it's a forest fire. You notice that the flames are tending to slant inward, and that's because the winds that are coming through them toward the center are being generated by the rising, the rising buoyant air within the disc. So, it's creating very high ground winds. Now, those ground winds have an average temperature above the point of above the boiling point of water. So, this is very hot air, and the wind speed is easily 150 kilometers per hour because the winds are so intense at the ground, and so the environments are extraordinarily intense.
Here, in the next slide, I just show you an environment from a forest fire, a large-scale forest fire. And this is less intense than you would see in the city because there's less combustible material on the ground to generate the ground winds. And you can see evidence of tornadoes. These tornadoes are generated by fire winds. In a longer talk, I could discuss how they're generated, but for now, the point is to show you how intense these extraordinarily hot winds can be. And so, if we go to slide, the next slide, we can see the horrifying example of what happened to a man. This is a photograph. I think it's from Hamburg. This man was in a shelter. I'll show you what happens in a shelter. The shelter was becoming incredibly hot. People were trapped in it, and they tried to run, and they got out into the open air. It was so hot they just collapsed, and they were essentially incinerated.
In the next slide here, you see what happens to the fate of people who stayed in the shelters. If they stayed in the shelters, what happened was they were essentially incinerated. They were cooked, in effect, by the shelter. The buildings above the shelters collapsed. The shelters were covered with hot, burning embers. They couldn't get out of the shelter because of the hot, burning embers. The shelter, over hours, gradually increased in temperature like an oven, like a pizza oven would increase if you had heat around the bricks. And these people were essentially desiccated. They were probably lucky because they died first of carbon monoxide poisoning, by all the evidence. So, they didn't have to roast to death, or they didn't have to go through the experience of roasting to death. When these shelters were opened, they found corpses like this. But the corpses disintegrated into soot once the air from the outside came in and they could oxidize further. So, so, just to jump to slide 21, so we don't have to delay it. This shows you, for those people who know a little bit, who have some idea of the area of Berlin, the central region that's got a slightly reddish hue to it would be completely destroyed by this mass fire. The high winds, the high air temperatures, everything within this area would burn. Anybody in this area who didn't, you know, who didn't have an extraordinarily specialized kind of shelter would die. So, essentially, everybody would die. And even if you were at Brandenburg Airport, the windows of Brandenburg Airport would be blown out. There would be small fires in the woodland toward the city that you would see at Brandenburg Airport. So, essentially, you know, 500, 400 square kilometers of area would be completely destroyed. Now, this is one nuclear weapon, you know.
So, in the next slide, I just show a notional possibility. This is the number of nuclear weapons that were used in a 1983 nuclear war game. So, it didn't, fortunately, it didn't happen. And it's my very rough rendition showing you fallout clouds, you know, radioactive materials, which of course would be coming from the clouds. And essentially, people in target areas would be killed quickly, and people outside of the target areas, of a very high percentage of East and West Germany, now Germany, would have died of radiation poisoning. And, uh, and I'll end it here, and we can use this as the baseline. So, this, I'm hoping, is the baseline of understanding of the potential consequences of a nuclear war breaking out. And of course, Reiner is one of our great heroes who helped prevent that in 1983.
>> It's, it's absolutely, it's absolutely shocking and insane. Uh, um, you know, the, the level of destruction that this can bring, and that there are people who, who think in terms of war games of this. Reiner, can you maybe tell us a little bit about 1983 and, and, and what went down back then?
>> Well, it's, we have actually, we have a parallel developing now because we were at the edge of nuclear Armageddon, but nobody had even, nowadays, hardly anybody knows anything about it because it never came to the public. And even political decision-makers only learned about the intensity of the crisis subsequently, many months later. And so, it was built on wrong perceptions. I mean, the Americans subsequently said, which the Russian war scare, which made them, uh, prepare, made them to overreact. On the other hand, the Russians had every good cause to be scared because the American neocons, I mean, the prince of darkness was, uh, Pearl and Wolfowitz and the whole lot. And I have one of them even coming to my office at NATO headquarters at the time to win us Europeans over to the possibility of a limited and winnable nuclear strike, a decapitation strike against the Soviet Union.
>> You were working for NATO at that time. You were in, you were in the NATO headquarters, and they, and somebody came over to you at that time?
>> Yes. Yeah. They were touring. They were touring. They were touring. And one of them was also in my office. And, um, they, they were trying to get the Europeans behind them, politically behind them. And theoretically, it worked beautifully because with the new, very fast Pershing tools, which had could reach Moscow and beyond, uh, within a maximum of 10 minutes, with a high, with a high, um, with precision of, I think, about 50 meters from the target. Yeah. From the indicated target. So, you could use a small tactical nuclear weapon with a, not a big civilian damage. That was also the presentation. And you could decapitate the military and civilian command, control, and communication systems. As a result, that is, I remember this, uh, even nowadays, almost word for word, as a result, the mighty, I was told, the mighty Red Army would, like, would run like a, on a farmyard, a decapitated chicken would still run across the farmyard, but wouldn't know what to do. And even if some of the silos, etcetera, the silos weren't even supposed to be touched, the silos with the deterrent missiles or the second strike missiles would survive. No Russian general or or or decision-maker would actually dare or think or take the responsibility now that everything was already, I mean, no decision could be taken. Nobody wanted to take the responsibility to then launch some counterstrike against the United States because then the full might of the strategic American forces would hit the Soviet Union. So, as a result, there would be chaos, there would be upright, and the people would actually, the ordinary people would think of Iraqs later and nowadays think of Iran, what they expect in Iran, would dance. The simple Russian people, or the Soviet people, would dance in the streets and welcome that the communists and their administrative oppressors had been blown away. Now, that was the idea, and we would be rid of the Soviet threat once and forever. So, that was the idea, and they did everything to do to implement it. You see, I, in alternate, in alternate weeks, I had to chair the current intelligence group in the situation center of NATO. That is the innermost sanctum where all the intelligence information from member countries come in, and where the DIA and the CIA send their assessments of new developments, etcetera. And we could see actually, and I could see the intelligence memorandum of the DIA about the new, how they discovered new communication modes, nodes, I mean, centers of air defense systems in the north of Russia, in Minsk and other places. And you can even read it nowadays in Ian Fischer, that he was, he was or still is an official historian of the CIA. He actually published a very interesting paper. It was at least unclassified until recent years, on on Able Archer and Rian, the Soviet scare, put it that way, of how the Defense Intelligence Agency and the US Air Force systematically tried to find the communication nodes of the Russ in the Soviet Union by doing what? By, for instance, flying the usual B-52 nuclear bombers towards the Soviet borders. And it looks as if they were penetrating, and as a result, of course, the Soviet air defense radars go on, they kind of communicate the information to the next center. So, if you look at all this through an espionage satellite, you can see where all the information flows in, where the node is on the first level, and where then the node goes, the local node then goes to the regional node, and goes on to Moscow or elsewhere. So, these things were systematically elaborated, and some of the stuff actually ended up on my desk when I was heading, when I was chairing the current intelligence group in NATO. And as a result, we could see that this was actually, they were preparing for it. The whole picture of this, however, did escape me. I didn't realize what the whole thing was really for. It only struck me at one moment, that was when the Korean Air Lines was taken down, flight 007, from over Siberia, over Kamchatka. Yeah, I think not over.
>> I think it was Kamchatka.
>> And, and so it was, I don't know if you remember the situation, but it was a Korean airliner which flew, took the northern route from Boston, I think, to, to Korea, and took the polar route, now down along, I mean, not touching Soviet territory, but down along the sea. And at one moment, just at the height where the Soviet restricted areas for the, where they had their missile silos as the counter, as a deterrent, or their deterrent assets against an American attack, just at that part when that started, an RC-135 American spy plane came from the US direction, and they actually met at one place. And in that one place, the Korean airliner did not continue along the coast to Korea, but penetrated the restricted Soviet area. And it was the RC-135 spy plane that flew then on the normal flight path of the Korean airliner along the coast. So the Soviets rethought, these tearing Americans are penetrating our holy, our most secret space. Hence, they send up some fighter jets, and they kind of tried to warn the 007 airliner. It was a big plane, actually, Boeing. Yeah, that's the other thing. It was a bigger version of the Boeing 707 because they had four engines. I mean, the radar signature looked the same, and also for the pilot, it was dark. For the pilot, it also looked the same. And it didn't look like a passenger plane because all the shutters were down. That, at least, was what I think if the, what the pilot, the meek pilot, who subsequently got the order to shoot that plane down because the plane did not, the so-called American plane, did not react to any warning. Not even then they shot some shots across the bow with the, what do you call it, the munitions which you can see, tracer munitions, and no reaction. And then they got the order to take the plane down. Now, that created, of course, a big thing. But weeks later, I got an IM from the DIA, I mean, Defense Intelligence Agency, over my desk, and that was a wording like manna from heaven. I mean, a windfall. We got, we now got all the modes and strategic communication centers, how it works in the Soviet air defense in the far east, because of course, in such a situation, everything on the Soviet side was up and upheld. They, I suppose they didn't even follow in their alarm all the security protocols, etcetera. And so that's what the Americans got out of it. Now, how you explain the whole thing is up to you. But something was wrong. Everybody realized at the time. But so back to the situation.
>> So the point is the fear. The Americans did to support this. I mean, the two feet that was. And then came the situation of Able Archer. And in this Able Archer, you had this situation. This Able Archer was an annual exercise. But this time, the Soviets thought, and were not only thought, they were convinced. This time, the Americans, I mean, these crazies are using this exercise to attack out of the movement of the exercise to attack us, to do this decapitation strike. And for the first time, in fact, the, uh, Pershing tools were actually moved into the field before this exercise. What was done? I mean, on the, and the whole number, I can't, I would have to look up my notes again, but the whole range of signals which would signify for the Soviets that an attack is imminent, like just change of codes, which they used to have, and all the little elements too. All went red.
>> Mhm.
>> And so the situation was that again, I only learned much, many years later, when I came out of jail, after I'd been out of jail for a few years, I met people, or people in the East who actually were working on Soviet airfields, etcetera. And they actually confirmed or mentioned it in, you know, Able Archer. And yes, we had the Soviet jet hunter fighters with tactical nuclear weapons sitting on the airstrip with engines on, waiting for the order from Moscow to go after the Pershing tanks to get them before they could shoot. I mean, preemptive strike before they could shoot or take off and hit Moscow. So that's how far we were. This was 1983. This was the situation like way after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was for Europe. This was the European like Missile Crisis. I mean, this could have ended the continent.
And Ted, you just, can you speak a little bit to this as well? Just what this means for the insanity of the continent, of how close the Europeans were to annihilation?
>> Well, I think Reiner is far more expert on the situation in Europe, but let me describe my situation at that time. I, the peculiar thing about my situation was I was an advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations at the time, and of course, my focus was the US strategic forces. I was, I had access to intelligence, but I was not directly involved in the intelligence operations. So, I was focused on the everyday functioning of our military, of US strategic nuclear military planning in the Pentagon. So, I was, quite honestly, unaware of this crisis when it was going on, although I was in the Pentagon at the time. But what I can say is that the United States was really poised to potentially strike back at Russia, because one of the things we saw, and incidentally, I want to underscore, I was not aware of what was going on in Europe at the time, but I was aware of our surveillance of undersea activities off the US coast. And so, this surveillance is acoustic underwater sound surveillance. There's a system called SOS, known as the Sound Surveillance System, that we were operating at that time. The Soviet submarines were well within the capability of SOS to be detected at long range. At long range, I mean, thousands of kilometers. Today, that's not true. Soviet or Russian submarines are very quiet, much like American submarines are, and they are undetectable by the sound surveillance system. So, I just want to give you, you know, the historical changes from the technology. But at that time, we were able to observe Russian submarines off our coast, and all of a sudden, we started seeing them off our coast. We saw Delta-class submarines. There were these, at that time, there was the Yankee class, which had shorter-range missiles, maybe 2,000-kilometer range missiles, but then there was the Delta class that had much longer-range missiles, but they started showing up off our coast. And I remember going to the, not very intelligent admiral that was heading my division and telling him, you know, we have to consider putting the bombers on alert. And of course, he told me, well, it's the Russians just bluffing. And I told him, I said, "That's not your job. That's the political decision-makers have to decide whether or not they want to react to this. It's your job to explain to them what the potential military implications of this are. You know, that's your job. If you ask me, I don't think the Russians are crazy enough to do anything. But if you ask me what our job is, our job is to make sure that the political leadership is properly informed and not scare them unreasonably, but also make sure that they know what's going on." And so, there were other theaters where things could have potentially gotten out of control. Because at that time, it's no longer possible for the Americans to do this. But at that time, we would use the sound surveillance system to, we'd get a rough estimate of where a submarine was operating, maybe within an area maybe 25, 30 kilometers radius. So, we didn't know exactly where it was, but that was good enough to assign an attack submarine, kill US attack submarine to that area where their sonar systems were much shorter range, but not so short of range that they couldn't acquire a Russian submarine-launched ballistic missile submarine. And so, you always had the possibility of an accident in those situations. For example, when you're trailing a submarine, the American doctrine was to never use active sonar. In other words, never send the ping out, so the enemy can never detect your presence. So, you only use sonar that is passive, that is listening to the enemy. And it's very difficult to measure your range to the enemy because the intensity doesn't give you a good measurement of range because the acoustic path within the ocean between you and another submarine changes all the time. So, sometimes it's much easier to hear, and sometimes much harder. So, there's always the potential for an unwanted or unexpected collision. So, you know, you had this situation where, you know, the potential for a serious incident was quite high. So, these are the kinds of situations we had during the Cold War where we could have really stumbled into a confrontation leading to a nuclear exchange, and especially.
>> Go ahead, Reiner.
>> I'm not surprised, Ted, that you, at the time, didn't know anything about this Able Archer, the Russian reaction, etcetera. Because even Ronald Reagan didn't know anything about it. Apparently, the documents, the declassified documents that I've now been studying since, show that he learned about all this, how close we've been to nuclear Armageddon, a whole year later. And that actually triggered him to say that must never happen again, that we get that those. And that triggered him to actually change his policy, which ended up in the meeting with Gorbachev, or contributed to the meeting with Gorbachev a year later, I think it was in Iceland.
>> So, uh, it is, that is not, I wasn't fully aware of what was going on. I was only aware that the, so the, the big brother, or the requests from Moscow were with such an intensity, and I could feel there was some real problem, and that they really feared that something. So, everything that actually they were interested in every little bit of piece which, which could, in retrospect, I understand, which could actually give a signal in one or the other direction. And as I was in the, during that time, in the NATO, the intelligence service, in the NATO current intelligence group, where everything comes together, I mean, and I could actually document also by having the serial numbers of the papers coming through the situation center, through the current intelligence group, so without gap, I could document that there was nowhere an indication of an imminent strike against the Soviet Union. So, in the end, I heard from others later, much later, that that helped to calm the situation down. And at this point, I just need to inform everybody, Reiner was working in NATO, and he forwarded the information he got to East Germany, and they forwarded it to the Soviet Union. So, this kind of intelligence sharing to the enemy actually helped calm them down, helped to ameliorate this misunderstanding, or this, well, this series of events that could very well have led to an unintentional start of nuclear war. And that's only thanks to you, Reiner, actually sharing this information with the East.
>> May I, let me take this opportunity to raise a point, and I'd be very interested if Reiner would agree or disagree with me on this. Um, it's my experience, which is now substantial, with various levels of political leaders, both who are in government and out of government, and you know, is that people at high-level jobs, certainly in the US government, and in some cases where I've met Europeans at high levels, um, they really are not well-informed. They may have had access to all of the intelligence that was available, but they don't know what to ask. They don't know, they're not necessarily briefed by people who are knowledgeable. What happens in Washington is you have these people who brief the upper-level leadership. They know nothing. Then they're just, they're, I always joke with my friends, I call them talking dogs. I call it talking dog briefings. And they don't have any primary knowledge of any kind, whether it's technical, or even political or analytical. And the net result is that even when you have political leaders who you would expect to be knowledgeable, they are not knowledgeable about very, very, very important matters. Let me give you a specific example that I found particularly interesting, although there are many others over the years. The accident of my scholarly activities brought me to Stanford, part of, you know, I'm at MIT, but brought me to Stanford at various times. And, you know, I wouldn't say I'm a bosom buddy of Bill Perry, the former Secretary of Defense, but Bill and I know each other reasonably well. And I discovered through a series of accidents, which is a story in itself, that there was a false alert in 1996 of the Russian early warning system that exposed the fact that the Russian early warning system does not have the capability to monitor ballistic missile launches from the North Atlantic, from our Trident submarines. They have radar systems that can see the ballistic missiles coming after they rise over the curved horizon of the Earth. But that reduces their decision-making time and their warning time by about 15 minutes because they can't see these things before they are launched. We, the Americans have a system that can do that. Now, so this false alert, which was not as serious as some people, it was serious, but not quite as serious as some people tried to over-dramatize it to be, was extremely important because it revealed this very fundamental shortfall in Russia's early warning situation, because the shorter the warning time, the more likely there could be an error leading to the use of nuclear weapons. And so, so I was talking, Bill and I were having the discussion at one point, and I started asking him about this incident. And I assumed that he, as Secretary of Defense at the time, that he would have been fully briefed on it, and he had no idea this incident had occurred. None. I had to explain the whole thing to him. Now, Perry is arguably one of the most knowledgeable Secretaries of Defense the United States has had in modern times. He's trained in technical areas. He's a mathematician by training. He ran a company that was involved in intelligence gathering before, you know, while he went into the government. So, he was extremely well-equipped to understand every detail I told him. There was no need to explain to him how a satellite worked or things like that. He understood it. I mean, he knew I could just talk directly with him and say, well, this satellite and blah, blah, you know, so on. And so he could immediately comprehend what I was talking about. Yet, as Secretary of Defense, he was not made aware of this extraordinary vulnerability that was revealed by this incident. And to me, this tells you how flawed and dangerous the lack of ability to keep decision-makers properly informed is in the West, at least. I get the sense this is not the same with Putin because I listen to Putin very, very carefully, and when he talks, there are, you know, to use an American, an English expression, if you read between the lines of things he says, you can see that he's talking from a much deeper knowledge than what he's talking about. But I really fear the situation, you know, what's going on with the American political leadership, and I think Putin does.
Reiner, in your experience, like, how does it work, the chain of command and the information, and how information passes up? Is it as dire as Ted is saying, also in Europe?
>> My experience is reduced to the chain of command within NATO and the connections, for instance, of the war council. If he had, for instance, in a crisis or in a top-level staff exercise, nuclear staff exercise, you probably heard about Vindex. Yeah. And the biannual Vindex exercise in which NATO high-level Vindex exercise in which NATO every two years was exercising the first use of nuclear weapons against a, in the course of a conventional crisis against Soviet or Eastern European troops or Warsaw Pact troops. And an interesting element in there was when I did, was the first, the first year I participated, or the first time I participated in this exercise in, I think it was either 1979, probably after two years, after I'd been there for two years, um, it, the exercise ended after we, NATO threw the first tactical nuclear weapon on some military concentration in Eastern Europe. I mean, and then the exercise was finished. And I actually asked one of the older colleagues, maybe.
Because in in NATO, it's it's we have lots of high-level military at NATO. Um, and I've um, and my kind of my civilian rank was the equivalent of my my uh partner on the military side would have been at the as of Lieutenant Colonel or or General. And um, so I had, but it was as I was from the political side, I was in the political affairs division of NATO, the civilian side, the primacy of pol of policy in NATO, NATO headquarters. Um, and lots of military as advisers.
And uh, of course, that explains that I was the the head of the current intelligence group, and I had an and there were a number of uh top-level military intelligence experts in that group. And I advised uh, and I asked at that very first time, I asked one of the uh more experienced older older uh participants if in the uh uh CI uh uh why does it finish now? What what happens? We used a tactical nuclear weapon against the Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Europe. What happens now? And she he kind of said, "Well, um, that would finish it anyway, so we don't have to play on any further."
Later on, I realized what the this game or gaming was uh uh was really for. It was for policy reasons to make sure that in the case of a real crisis and of the case of a real decision what would be taken to use nuclear weapons against the East, that no member country would then stand up, "Oh no, but we've got uh this law and we have this passage in the constitution, we can't participate," etc., etc. So that in the case, so and not so with every Vinttex exercise, uh these kind of catches were eliminated. So subsequently, they were eliminated on national levels so that in a case of a real war, it could be implemented without hiccups.
Uh, in the course of these exercises, of course, the use of these tactical nuclear weapons became bigger and bigger and bigger, the number of earth. And in the end, the last exercise that was already after after after the meeting of of of Gorbachev and Go and and and Reagan in in uh uh um, we actually used slightly over 153 nucle I I think 153 nuclear tactical nuclear weapons in two waves. The two first lot about over a hundred on Eastern European and uh uh uh industrial but also mainly on on on on military targets. But all and uh then there was a lack of of three days and then the rest. So all in all, I remember 100 53. And that was for the first time also uh nuclear weapons on East Germany because up to then the uh Germans had always uh uh insisted that there would not be a a nuclear weapon on East Germany.
But interestingly enough, there would be this time there was. I remember well on Dresden because historic parallel and of the firebombing of of Dresden and another uh uh military concentration in East Germany. And uh at that moment, interestingly enough, maybe we had a very important exception of a politician at CDU, Secretary of State for Defense actually, who was in the uh nuclear bunker uh in in near Bonn in the Ahr Valley uh who was taking the the uh the position of the Minister of Defense. And acted uh in the game, in the Vinttex game for the Minister of Defense. He actually stopped German participation at that moment and he said, "No, closed everything down and went back to Görden and said, 'We're not uh I'm not participating in this madness any longer.'" And people had to exist. Actually, I have a contact after after the end of the war, after my release, we had established contact and exchanging exchanging notes of of these days.
The other point I'd like to do, and that is ex again something very pertinent to the uh to pertinent to the current discussion about should Europe or should Germany have their own nuclear weapons, was that an important point that the uh target selection of in during Vinttex for the use of of of uh nuclear weapons in the East was always done. That was an American prerogative. So, uh the target selection was always never we never touched Russian territory. Never. Why? Implicitly is very clear because the Americans knew from the moment he hit Russian territory, it's going to come back against Russ American territory in the United States. And that is the old question of of uh the reliability of the nuclear umbrella of of the US nuclear umbrella for Germany. I mean, they were quite happy to fight to the last German uh in in a war against Russia or to even destroy most of of of Europe in the in in the in the in the course of it. Reminds me of that that famous saying, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
And I remember in that context an and a uh a a presentation by a at a nuclear planning planning meeting um in um in Oberammergau where I participated where an American general uh presented the problems of the Fulda Gap. Does that mean anything to you? The Fulda Gap? The Fulda Gap. So the Fulda Gap was a gap that is an a plain and through the Fulda Gap these thousands of of of uh Russian tanks were supposed to roll through and at storm and would be in within 48 hours at the Rhine, Calais, and and Ostend. And to stop this avalanche, of course, we needed to use nuclear weapons. Of course, the Fulda Gap is West Germany. And there this general explained, "Yes, in Fulda Gap, we got we got a real problem. The German villages are only half a kiloton away from each other."
>> Yeah, of course. >> Oh god. But >> Can I can I can I just interject here and say like, you know, this is a very huge topic, but it it needs a lot of time to explain. But Ted, maybe just if we can bring it back to in in closing, you know, this all of the learning from the destruction of these weapons to the inability to properly administer them with like all of the different steps of bureaucracy and and and and intelligence. What does this tell us about the current moment when actually the Europeans are thinking about creating weapons over here and more weapons over here, and the the place where we are in in 2026?
Well, I it it tells us uh really that the situation is extremely dangerous because uh people in uh influential positions, either decision-makers or advisors uh to decision-makers, are basically completely ignorant. I mean, uh uh I I was really struck by Reiner's uh uh uh point, you know, talk reminiscent of of uh reminiscence of uh uh Wolfowitz coming to talk to this NATO group about how we were going to use nuclear weapons, in particular Pershing, but uh but just in general, given that uh anybody who knew anything even close to the kind of uh presentation uh that I gave earlier at the beginning of our discussion would know is completely delusional and and leading to the destruction of all of civilization. Yet this man who is widely regarded in in these weird circles of I guess they're called neocons now, but uh uh is considered an intellect, and in fact, he knows nothing. He really knows nothing. And um, and and when I was in the Pentagon, I met a lot of other civilian decision-makers who I would describe the same way. So you have, and these are people who could potentially be advisors to higher-level people, and uh not to mention the military officers I met who uh were generally uh also not knowledgeable about nuclear weapons, which is not really, you know, it's not their business. I mean, the Chief of Naval Operations was a submariner. Why would he know a lot about nuclear weapons? Uh at least at least he was afraid of them. I mean, he showed a great deal of respect and fear of them, and he was interested in knowing enough to be able to uh, you know, uh think for himself about what he wanted to do. Now, I I could talk a lot about unwise positions he took, but but he he at least was trying to understand. These other people, they know. They know because they sat in a in a in a room without lights and and they said, "Oh, yeah. It's a nuclear weapon. It's it's okay. It's not a big deal."
Reiner, you wanted to say something, please. >> I I want to say it was not Wolfowitz personally who came to Brussels, but it was someone who belonged to this Richard Perle Wolfowitz group in in >> Frank Miller. Maybe Frank Miller. No, it is but it was >> but the ignorance of these people. >> Yeah. The ignorance of these people then is what is probably the largest danger to the whole thing because forget those are the people in ties and suits that will that will pretend to be the adults in the room when for a matter of fact they know they know >> nothing >> not even a fraction of what you two understand. So the the best hope I have is that there's enough people of your intellect working in these organizations and able to somehow somehow stop the the crazies uh uh from from from leading us into a nuclear Armageddon. But gentlemen, I would really like to thank you for this presentation. I mean, this is very important to understand just how close we already came to Armageddon. >> And we remain >> and we remain >> we remain close. Yeah. >> Yeah. And the Europeans should never ever >> anyone >> anyone who would like to read more about this just should go into to uh uh into uh look, I mean, there's plenty actually written about it uh in not everything is correct, but at least you get the you get to know that it actually existed. Yeah. Uh look, check it up on the internet uh uh Able Archer- Rian r y a, which is a uh an Russian acronym for a sudden nuclear uh uh missile attack. >> Yeah. Okay. Um, I will try to link this in the description below and I would like to thank both of you. We have to close now this this session, but this was very, very uh uh insightful. Reiner Rupp from Germany and Ted Postol from the US. Thank you very much for your time today. >> Thank you very much.