It Is 89 Seconds To Midnight

A conversation about nuclear war — and how to prevent it

“As we enter the new year, hope is eclipsed by foreboding.”

That’s how the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ushered in 1984.

“The accelerating nuclear arms race,” they continued, “and the almost complete breakdown of communication between the superpowers have combined to create a situation of extreme and immediate danger.”

For that reason, the Bulletin had decided to move its Doomsday Clock ahead: Three minutes to midnight.

The clock had been invented in 1947 as a physical manifestation of the existential threat to humanity posed by nuclear weapons. It was both a symbol how an open atomic race was setting humankind on “the dreadful course anticipated since 1945,” they wrote at the time. The only thing which could prevent the “inexorable trend leading to atomic war,” they argued, was “a largescale imaginative political solution.” The clock would tick closer to midnight as the world inched closer to nuclear armageddon, and further away as states began scaling back their nuclear ambitions. In 1972, the clock was set to a full 12 minutes from midnight: An indication that humankind did not wish to play at the brink.

By 1984, the progress had begun unravelling. “Arms control negotiations have been reduced to a species of propaganda,” the Bulletin wrote that year. “Every channel of communication has been constricted or shut down; every form of contact has been attenuated or cut off.” The chance for serious miscalculation was great, they concluded. The Clock had not been this close to midnight in three decades.

If the Bulletin had only known how right they were.

Three months earlier, in a bunker outside of Moscow, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was monitoring the USSR’s network of early warning satellites. This was, generally, a boring job. But previous months had put everyone on edge: The Kremlin had grown increasingly paranoid that the United States was preparing a nuclear first strike on Moscow. The nervous Soviets had even shot down a Korean passenger plane, fearing it was an American surveillance plane mapping out their ICBM silos.

So when Petrov saw the screens light up, showing that the Americans had fired a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union, he froze. Then it showed another missile. And another, another, another. Petrov knew the protocol: If he informed his bosses, the USSR would launch an immediate retaliatory strike. Mutually-assured destruction was not just a warning, it was a promise.

And then Petrov did nothing.

Given he had helped set up this early warning system, Petrov know a simple fact: It was notoriously unreliable. He suspected this was a glitch, a hallucination by the machines. So he waited. The only way to prove his gut right was to wait and see if they were annihilated.

They weren’t.

The Bulletin didn’t know of Petrov’s bravery — his story wouldn’t come out for more than a decade, after the fall of the Soviet Union. And they didn’t know just how paranoid and nervous decision-makers on both sides truly were. But the Bulletin got one thing dead right: Nobody was talking.

In the ensuing years, the world took a big exhale. The end of the Cold War, the disillusion of the Soviet Union, the launch of the START treaty: It all brought the world back from the brink.

Today, we are hurtling back to that brink. On Tuesday, the Bulletin inched the minute hand closer to midnight. Further nuclear proliferation, climate change, growing biological threats, and the proliferation of disruptive technologies have all made the world a more dangerous and uncertain place. They write:

Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness. The United States, China, and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization. These three countries have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and they can do so if their leaders seriously commence good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined here. Despite their profound disagreements, they should take that first step without delay. The world depends on immediate action.

It is 89 seconds to midnight.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, a conversation with Brian J Morra: A retired U.S. intelligence officer who is all too aware of how close we came in 1983. He was there.

In recent years, Morra has chronicled the nuclear near-miss of the early 1980s in The Able Archers, a true-to-live thriller which brings to life the people who averted disaster.

At a time when we have some very unstable people in some very powerful places, we could learn some lessons from 1983.

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The following transcript has been, as always, edited liberally for length and readability. I should note that this conversation took place before the November election, when the prospect of Donald Trump’s re-election still felt somewhat distant.

For fans of spy thrillers and historical fiction, I can’t recommend Brian’s books enough: The Able Archers and The Righteous Arrows. While they are fictionalized, they borrow from very real events, which Brian was intimately involved in.

With that said, here’s our conversation.

I want to start by talking about the first book of the series, The Able Archers, because first off, it's not every book that gets blurred by Robert Gates, the former head of the CIA, but your book has that distinction. Talk to us about the dedication that appears in the first couple pages of this book. Tell me about the three names that it goes out to.

Brian J. Morra: Robert Gates did write an endorsement for the Able Archers — which I wasn't sure he would do, frankly. Because, over the years, he and I have not always seen eye-to-eye on the 1983 nuclear war crisis, which is the basis of the story of the Able Archers. Although there’s a Netflix series, The Bomb and the Cold War, that came out earlier this year. In episode five of that series, Robert Gates and I speak about the nuclear war crisis of 1983, and I was very gratified to see that we were definitely on the same page, at least in the Netflix series. So that was nice to see.

I dedicated The Able Archers to three men who were instrumental in keeping us out of a global nuclear war in the fall of 1983. And I knew two of the three men very, very well. Two were American, they're the ones I knew, the others was a Soviet officer, who I did not know.

The first gentleman was a man named Charles L. Donnelly Jr, and he was an American Air Force four-star general. And at the time of the Able Archer crisis, specifically in September of 1983, he kept us out of a shooting war with the Soviet Union, after the Soviet Air Force had shot down a Korean civilian airliner. It was a terrible tragedy. But what you probably don't know is that in the 48 hours or so after that shoot-down, the United States Air Force and the Soviet Air Force nearly got into air-to-air combat, and it was General Donnelly who pulled us back from the brink from getting into a shooting war with the Soviets at that time.

The second gentleman that I dedicated the book to was a Soviet officer. He was a lieutenant colonel at the time. His name was Stanislav Petrov. Later, once his story became known, he was known to many as the man who saved the World. Stanislav Petrov, on the night of the 26th and 27th of September 1983, was the watch commander at the Soviet's National Missile Defense Center outside of Moscow. He received indications of intercontinental ballistic missile launches coming from the United States, targeted at the Soviet Union, and they were coming in waves, Petrov, was not a normal watch commander — he was actually a scientist, an engineer who'd been called in that night because a colleague of his was ill. He made the call that these could not be real launches. He knew the Soviet missile warning satellites intimately, their pluses and their minuses, and he determined that these were not real launches. They were false alarms, for some reason that he couldn't figure out that night.

So, he courageously made the call that this was a phantom attack from the United States, which it was, and he advised that the Soviet Union should not retaliate. He, unfortunately, had his career ended because of this heroism. He was criticized by his leadership for not following protocol, and not informing the Kremlin. He did not inform them because he was afraid they would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike thereby causing a global nuclear war. So Petrov is the second guy in my dedication page.

The third and final man is another Air Force, US Air Force Intelligence general officer named Leonard H. Perroots. He was one of the top military intelligence officials in NATO in November of 1983, during the final crisis in the Able Archer crisis of that autumn. And the reason I dedicated the book to him is that he quelled the final crisis, which in many ways was the worst crisis of the three. The Soviet Union thought that a NATO nuclear war exercise that was going on in the first two weeks of November of 1983, codenamed Able Archer 83, was cover for an actual nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Because they believed that, they prepared their forces — all of their nuclear forces — to go to war. And the posture they achieved was more significant than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

General Perroots informed the NATO leadership of this, and he urged them: Don't respond. If we go to a nuclear alert, that'll convince them this is the real thing, and they may launch on us first. He was correct. It began to calm the Soviets down and that crisis finally ebbed out over the course of a week or two.

When talking to people about this event, I described it as using the story of how we almost wound up in a nuclear armageddon as a very great way of understanding our current geopolitical quagmire. And the automatic response I get is: Oh, you mean the Cuban Missile Crisis? And when you say no, it's the other one, people tend to look back at you with a bit of a blank stare. But you made the case to me that, and I think it's a really interesting one, that in many ways, 1983 was much more precarious than 1962. And it's primarily because of the lack of communication between both sides at that moment. So talk to me a little bit about the lack of the red phone on the desk in 1983.

I'll start with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of you, I'm sure, have read books about the Cuban Missile Crisis, seen films about it. I guess the most recent one was Thirteen Days that came out, gosh, probably 20 years ago now. So the Cuban Missile Crisis is well known. It played out in public when it was happening. President Kennedy gave national televised addresses during the crisis. The communication aspect of it is critically important. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was an open line of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, officially. And when the official open line of communication began to get bogged down, President Kennedy opened a covert line of communication with the Soviets, through his brother — who started meeting with the Soviet Ambassador to the United States in Washington on a secret basis, so that Kennedy could send private messages to Nikita Khrushchev, who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party in Moscow at the time.

So Kennedy had two conduits. He had this official open channel, which again got bogged down at various times during the Cuban Missile crisis; and he had this secret, covert channel where he could negotiate in privately with Khrushchev. And it was really that covert channel that proved crucially important to ending the Cuban Missile Crisis, peacefully, in 1962.

By contrast, when Ronald Reagan was president and a guy named Yuri Andropov was General Secretary in the Soviet Union, and there was virtually no communication. And that lack of communication predated the fall crisis in 1983. It really began when Reagan became president and the Soviets decided he wasn't someone they really wanted to talk to, and vice versa. And that lack of communication got even more pronounced, I would argue, over the course of the year of 1983. It's remarkable how many bad things happened that year. It is remarkable how dangerous that year was. In fact, later, Mikhail Gorbachev called it the most dangerous year in human history.

So the lack of communication in ‘83 was a major, major, major ingredient in the stew that became the Able Archer crisis, because as these various crises occurred — the Korean airline shoot-down the Petrov incident, and then finally the Able Archer exercise itself — Washington and the Kremlin were just not talking to each other. And that, as Robert Gates later said, nearly caused us to stumble unknowingly into a global nuclear war.

I don't need to tell you, but one of the primary objectives of intelligence work is visibility: Understanding what's happening through the fog of war, behind enemy lines, in hostile territory. And what I find really striking about your book — acknowledging that it's fiction, but it's fiction based on true events — got me thinking a lot about the degree to which the US did not have visibility into the Soviet Union and vice versa. And how much that lack of visibility almost led to some unbelievably catastrophic miscalculations. Talk to me a little bit about the role intelligence services and the advent of technology like satellite and other means of seeing beyond the horizon sort of had an impact and in many ways didn't have an impact in averting this tension.

Well, you make a great point. I think one of the other hallmarks of the 1983 crisis — and if any of this sounds familiar to the situation today, it is — in ‘83, the intelligence services of both sides were, I'll use a term that we use in the intelligence business, which is: Mirror imaging. That is: When you're trying to see the other person, the adversary, you really have yourself looking back at you. And I'll give you an example of what I mean by mirror imaging, and it's from the 1983 crisis. The Soviet leadership, Andropov and company, believed that the United States was going to launch a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. What he didn't know was when, and under what circumstances it would do so. In the US intelligence community that view, that interpretation of Andropov’s mindset, was laughed at. If you were an intelligence analyst and you said: No, I think, and Andropov really believes we are going to initiate a first strike, it's not just propaganda for domestic purposes. No, he really believes that! You would've been laughed out of the room. Because the reaction would've been: There's no possible way he could believe that, we don't do that sort of thing. We're not postured that way. We'd never do that.

But the reality of the 1983 crisis was that Yuri Andropov really did believe that. And on the Soviet side of the ledger, they were mirror imaging also. They thought: Well we, the Soviet Union, would start a war under the guise of a military exercise, therefore the Americans would do the same thing. Therefore, Able Archer 83, this big nuclear war exercise has to be cover for an actual first strike. So they were mirror imaging, we were mirror imaging, and we were both getting it wrong and almost tragically wrong.

Let's move the slider ahead a little bit. Because, coming out of ‘83, coming out of this near-catastrophe, there seemed to be this waking up — detailed, in a fictionalized way, in your book — this acknowledgement that the world can't keep living on the brink. And you start to see some of the treaties that get negotiated and signed. Treaties that, I think, many people still think are in effect today. Talk to me about this rationalism taking hold, with humanity on the front foot as we get through the ‘80s and ‘90s and after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Right. The Able Archer crisis had a big impact on Mikhail Gorbachev — he was not the top leader in the Soviet Union at the time, but he was in the top leadership. So he saw all of this unfolding, and I think it's fair to say it scared the hell out of him. When he became the top leader in 1985, he wasn't sure Reagan was ready to talk. As it happened, Reagan was ready to talk. Because the Able Archer crisis, once Reagan fully comprehended the scale and the scope of it, scared the hell out of him too. If you remember the Reagan years, in his first term as president, he was very antagonistic toward the Soviet Union. We had lots of confrontations. The big one was the fall of 1983. In his second term, he became a nuclear arms control advocate.

And he and Gorbachev together spawned a golden age of arms control. And the very weapons that had really been the basis for the Able Archer crisis in 1983 were not just reduced, they were actually eliminated. A complete class of nuclear weapons were eliminated by a treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev signed called the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. And, as Justin points out, a lot of other nuclear arms treaties then followed for strategic weapons and even conventional forces.

Today, none of those treaties are in force anymore. And none of those treaties ever involved China. They were bilateral treaties — the nuclear arms ones, at least — between the United States and the Soviet Union. And one could argue that, well, the so-called New START treaty is still in force, and it is, officially, until 2025. But the Russians, under Vladimir Putin, have already said: As far as we're concerned, it's a dead letter and we're walking away from it. And that was the last man standing, so to speak, in terms of arms control treaties from the Cold War years. All of those treaties are essentially defunct. So arms control today is basically not happening.

It's not the phrase you want to hear on a Wednesday evening. It feels weird, now, to look back at this. And feel a bizarre sense of nostalgia for a time when it was still possible to pick up the phone and talk to a single person with whom — if you could figure out an agreement, a treaty, even an understanding — you could improve global order and reduce the risk of catastrophe in a matter of hours, days, weeks, months. We are now in a point where that's no longer really the case. We are now in a — I know the phrase you use is ‘a multipolar world’ — much more than we used to be. It's no longer the US and NATO on one side, and the USSR and the Warsaw Pact on the other. It's now a myriad of nuclear powers and non-state actors who pose a threat. There are potentially new nuclear countries coming online in the near future, and there's been a ‘democratization of arms,’ as you write in The Righteous Arrows. Talk to me, I know this is a big question, this is a heavy lift, but talk to me about this multipolar world of varied threats.

It’s a big question, a big topic, the multipolar world. If we want to start with something somewhat manageable, we can look at it through the nuclear lens. What's very alarming, today, is the rise of China as a great nuclear power. Historically, China had had a nuclear weapons policy of ‘sufficiency,’ as they called it. They would keep a couple of hundred nuclear weapons online, just to make it really painful for anyone who might think about doing something bad to China — like invading it, for example.

Under President Xi, China changed that policy. For last 10 years or so, China has been on a nuclear weapons-building binge. The estimates are that by 2030, China will have achieved near parity with the United States and nuclear weapons. Today, by the way, the most modern and largest nuclear force is Russia's. It's not the United States. So by the early 2030s, it's likely that we will live in a world that will be a tri-nuclear world, and we don't really have the tools for that, frankly. We don't have a doctrine for that. We learned — sometimes through trial and error, but we learned — during the Cold War, when there was a bipolar nuclear world, how to manage the relationship with the Soviet Union. But as we've seen in 1962 and in 1983, that nearly went off the rails. A tripartite world is inherently unstable. And again, we don't really have a doctrine for how do we deal with this.

One of the other features of this new situation, this new tripartite world, is that we have evidence that China and Russia are collaborating now on their nuclear weapons programs. And one of the fears is that, in a crisis, they might do more than collaborate. They might actually team up and essentially assert to the United States: You're now facing double trouble because we are teamed up together against you.

To add to the mix, one has to look at a country like North Korea, which is a nuclear-armed power, and which has weapons systems that can now reach North America. And the North Korean story has flown under the radar screen since the Trump presidency, and since the Trump negotiations with Kim Jong-un broke down. But since those negotiations failed, the North Koreans have gone on a big nuclear weapons building program binge, and they have many, many more nuclear weapons now than they did five or six years ago. So that's of concern because nobody really controls North Korea — the Chinese don't, the Russians don't, and they're collaborating. And the North Koreans are selling Russia lots of military munitions and other hardware for their war in Ukraine. What is North Korea getting in return? Are they getting advanced nuclear weapons technology from Russia in return? That's a concern. And then there are wannabe nuclear powers like Iran. The multipolar nuclear world is one that we didn't really have to deal with during the Cold War.

And then there are plenty of other non-nuclear, as we know, flashpoints around the world right now. Like the war in Ukraine — which is a conventional war, but a war in which the Russians have threatened the use of nuclear weapons when it has suited their purposes to do so. So a multipolar world, I would argue is much less stable than what we experienced during the Cold War.

How do you even manage that? And I realize the answer might be: As carefully as you possibly can, but in looking back at ‘83 and ‘62, we can at least point to periods of time where there was open communication, where there was that red phone on the desk, or maybe there was even multiple lines of back channeling happening. How do you manage an ability to walk back from the brink? How do you manage deterrence? How do you manage cooler heads prevailing, when it's not just two powers on either end of the phone line? Where it’s not just China as the third partner, but also Iran, also North Korea, also India, also Pakistan. How can you possibly manage that level of uncertainty and chaos? And maybe most particularly, how do your former colleagues — or, I guess, your successors — think about it?

They're struggling. I will tell you, in both the intelligence community and the foreign policy arena, everyone is struggling with it. What I'm somewhat gratified to see is that in the last two years or so, there's at least a dialogue about it. I see a lot more writing in journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy and more academics weighing in. So that's a start, I suppose, and it’s healthy to at least have some dialogue. I am disappointed, I'm probably not surprised, but I'm a little disappointed that there's not more of a serious discussion about these issues politically in Washington, and certainly there isn't in this presidential campaign.

But to your point about beyond the borders of the United States or beyond the borders of NATO, what could we be doing? Well, the state of communication is really bad between NATO, Washington and Moscow; between NATO, Washington and Beijing. And as far as communication with Pyongyang and Tehran? It's basically non-existent.

So I believe that a very useful first series of steps would be to try to set up some sort of institutional dialogue with Beijing and with Moscow. I think they are the critical actors in this, but the signs are not promising.

The United States has gone to Beijing and asked for talks about arms control talks. And the Chinese agreed to a meeting or two, but this past July they said: Forget it. We're done. We're not going to talk anymore about that. Their precondition was: We are not going to enter into any dialogue with the United States about arms control unless and until the United States cuts off all armed shipments to Taiwan. That was just a few months ago.

Putin made a couple of speeches in early 2024 about New START, saying, essentially, it's a dead letter. I see no value in talking to the Americans. We're walking away from it. The United States has put out more than feelers. The United States has sent CIA Director Burns to Moscow several times to talk to senior leaders about many things. On Ukraine, of course, but also about restarting arms control talks. And he's been rebuffed.

You saw it, just last week, that Putin made a public announcement about refining their nuclear doctrine, which included: We reserve the right to strike states that are striking us, if they are supported by nuclear powers. Wink wink. Meaning the United States, meaning Ukraine. And he also stated that if a nuclear power provides material support, intelligence support, targeting support to an adversary that's firing weapons into Russia, we reserve the right to strike that nuclear power. So the Russians aren't terribly interested in talking either. I am not sure where that leaves us, frankly.

Probably nowhere good. Let me ask you, because The Righteous Arrows, this book is about America providing extraordinary and high impact munitions to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to beat back a Soviet invasion. The parallels to where we're at today in Ukraine, I think, are fairly obvious. Maybe they're not Stinger missiles, maybe they're long range drones, but many of the circumstances are the same. The fact that Vladimir Putin is now willing to say: We consider that level of support tantamount to a first strike and grounds for nuclear retaliation, says to me we are somewhere in very uncharted territory. That's not a question. That's just a general fear and concern.

I share your concern. It does say that we're in a very different spot. The Righteous Arrows is about how the CIA supplied Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the Afghan fighters to shoot down Soviet aircraft in their war in Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev’s response to that was not maybe I'll threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. It was: We’ve got to get the hell out of Afghanistan, this ain't working. He called it “a bleeding wound.” So it was a completely, diametrically opposed reaction that you see between Gorbachev and 1986 and Putin today.

I asked you earlier about the role visibility played in the threat of miscalculation. I think a lay person would say: Oh, visibility must be so much better today. How could it not be? Everyone has a high-end surveillance device in their pocket. We have satellites mapping every corner of the earth. And yet the level of uncertainty remains unbelievably high. I don't expect you to have any classified intelligence to share with us — although if you do, I'm all ears. But what do you think the state is of visibility is today, and is that leading to the potential for miscalculation?

I think the state of visibility, on a technical level, is, in some ways, much better than it was in 1983. What I think most people in the intelligence community would agree with me on is: Yes, we've got better visibility into what they're doing, what they're building, the weapons systems, how they're deployed, and all that. But we don't have a clue what they're thinking. And that's the real gap is that we have Beijing under President Xi. He is kind of a black box, and it's very difficult to discern what the Chinese leadership is really thinking about, in terms of what they are likely to do under a given set of circumstances. I think the Russians tend to be a bit more transparent actually than the Chinese do. Putin telegraphs a lot of his punches. Putin talks publicly a lot. He behaves more like a traditional Western politician in many ways. In his travels around Russia and around what he calls “the near abroad” — the central Asian countries and so on — he does press conferences all the time. He's talking all the time. And in this country, a lot of what he says is viewed as disinformation. It's viewed as misdirection or misinformation.

I still listen to a lot of Putin's speeches, in the original Russian, and he's not misdirecting. He's pretty much telling you what he thinks. Of course he's cagey and he's subtle at times and all of that, but he's relatively transparent. Nonetheless, his system in Russia, in the Kremlin, and his senior leadership is very, very closed. It's much more closed than it was 10 or 15 years ago. So it's difficult to get inside that black box as well. So we have a very tough time discerning motivation and discerning really how they're weighing different courses of action.

It seems fairly obvious to me that there was a real urgency in opposing nuclear proliferation coming out of the Cold War, even in the early 2000s. I think many Canadians will remember the end of the CANDU nuclear program, in part, because of fears around proliferation. Many Ukrainians today will bitterly note that they gave up their nuclear weapons in the name of non-proliferation. But today, it does seem like that has gone out the window. Increasingly in this uncertain, unstable, multipolar world, many people are talking openly about the need for self-protection through nuclear weapons. What is it going to take for that return to sanity to come back into the halls of power around the world? Will it take another ‘62, another ‘83, another near miss for us to finally wake up?

It might. One of the things that I'm beginning to see people in Washington worry a lot more about now is the credibility of America's extended deterrence. And if you think about the world from the 1950s up to the current time, one of the deals, so to speak, that the United States has made with its allies — not just NATO allies, but with Japan, South Korea allies in the Middle East — has been: You guys don't need to develop nuclear weapons because you will exist peacefully under our nuclear umbrella. The concern that's beginning to surface in Washington, and in other foreign capitals, is: Is extended deterrence really credible in multipolar nuclear world?

Is it really credible for us to believe that the United States nuclear umbrella is going to be effective if China and Russia are collaborating together on not only nuclear weapons development but in, god forbid, deployment?

So there's real concern about this extended deterrence. If countries begin to lose faith in it, would they decide: Hey, I better develop my own nuclear force, much like the French did in the 1960s? Would Tokyo take that decision? Japan, the only country to suffer nuclear attack? That's a concern.

Another concern on the proliferation front, I think, is to watch for violations of the nuclear test ban treaty. If countries who are signatories to the nuclear test ban treaties start nuclear testing — or even countries that are not signatories to it — if they start active nuclear testing again, that to me is a threshold that says: Oh, well, if China's doing it, or if Russia's doing it, then it's okay for me to test nuclear weapons and develop nuclear weapons. If that taboo is broken, then I think there could be potential for other countries to decide, well, it's okay for me to break taboos too, and I'll start developing nuclear weapons even though I've signed a non-proliferation treaty.

The other thing that's of grave concern too is what's happening in the Middle East right now. Iran, according to the Director of National Intelligence in the United States, is just weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon. Israel knows that, of course, and so do the Saudis, so do the Emiratis, so do others in the Gulf region. And one of the proliferation fears has been, if Iran does develop and field nuclear weapons, how can Saudi Arabia stay non-nuclear? How about the Emiratis? You could see a cascading of countries that decide that, well, for my personal security, I've got to have it. And oh, by the way, we don't have all that much confidence in the United States extended deterrent anymore. So it's kind of a double whammy that might drive people to develop their own forces.

That's unnerving. We're obviously about a month away from a landmark US presidential election, and we are looking at two very different visions for international affairs. Just sketch this out really briefly, what the two paths we're looking at. What does Donald Trump mean for the state of nuclear deterrents going forward? Just an easy question.

Trump would has been vocal about tariffs. He's been vocal about really economic confrontation with China in a major, major way. And it's remains to be seen whether he'd be able to follow through on those threats, because the president is not unconstrained. With respect to the war in Ukraine, he's made assertions that he could end it tomorrow, but has given no indication of how. So I think his foreign policy is more difficult to predict. And in fact, when Vladimir Putin was asked in June in a press conference, who do you support in the US presidential election? His immediate response was, I'm not getting into that. I don't interfere in anybody else's elections. So next question. And the next question was, who do you support in the US presidential election? And he said, well, since you're pinning me down, I support Joe Biden. And they said, why? And the reporter asked him why. And he said, because I've known him for decades. He's very predictable. He's very predictable. The other guy, I don't know what he's going to do. So I think if Putin thinks that Trump's unpredictable, I must agree with Vladimir Putin.

So it's hard to know. I think in terms of your specific question about deterrence, I think it is a central question for the next president. And I don't think either one of them are thinking about it at all. Frankly, I've seen no indication of it. And when you speak of nuclear deterrence and the United States extended deterrence that we've talked about, the US took a “30 day holiday” from nuclear modernization beginning in the early 1990s. And now the United States is confronted with a huge bill to pay because all three legs of the triad — which are nuclear bombers, nuclear submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles — have to be modernized simultaneously. And it's enormously expensive, and it's politically unpopular, especially in Western states where these ICBMs are based. So I think, whoever is elected president is going to be dealt those cards. Are you going to continue this nuclear modernization effort? And this nuclear modernization effort — as a professor at Yale said to me last week — all this does is have us running in place. We're not gaining on the Chinese, we're not gaining on the Russians. It just keeps us from falling farther and farther behind. So I think they're going to be confronted with the bill for the nuclear deterrent, but I do think deterrence, generally speaking, should be a topic. And nuclear deterrence should probably be top of that deterrent list.

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That’s it for this rather depressing and anxiety-inducing dispatch.

As you have probably noticed, things are chaotic right now. Having lived through reporting on the first Trump administration, I think I’ve learned a very valuable lesson: Do not swing at every ball.

It has been just over a week since the inauguration. I am trying to keep tabs on everything without freaking out about everything. We’ll see how long that holds up.

In Foreign Policy, I have a piece on the dim prospects for a peace deal and the emptiness of “security assurances” for Ukraine. Then, in The Toronto Star, I have a column about the value of “making Russia small again.”

If you’d like to hear me break down the security threats posed by the incoming Trump administration, I joined the Secure Line podcast to chat with some very smart people about exactly that.

For those in Toronto, I’m delivering a talk at St. Andrew’s United Church on Thursday, on conspiracy theories and religion. Fans of Bug-eyed and Shameless will find that interesting, I’m sure. It’s open to whoever wants to join!

Until next time.