Do You Trust Epstein Elite With Nuclear Weapons?

Conor here: Paul Jay talks with Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists about a range of issues with the U.S. nuclear modernization program, including the Sentinel ICBM, hundreds of billions in cost overruns, the Golden Dome fantasy, and an irrational and dangerous launch-on-warning. Most worrisome of all? The very same people making decisions about nuclear weapons in an uncontrolled arms race are all over the Epstein files.

By Paul Jay. Originally published at TheAnalysis.news.

Paul Jay
Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. As I record this, Prince Andrew has been arrested for information that came out in the Epstein files. In fact, the arrest doesn’t seem to be based on his pedophilia and involvement in Epstein’s sexual network with young girls. It seems to be another form of corruption, passing on secret financial information to Epstein, but I guess it’s all part of this same scandal. But we’re not going to dig into the Epstein files here. It’s more about the Epstein files as a window into the elite culture, or at least much of the elite’s culture.

I got to know Gore Vidal pretty well before he died, and I interviewed him many times, and he said, “You know, you have to know,” I can’t do his voice properly. He said, “The elites have no morality. They are completely amoral, and most people just don’t understand it.” Of course, Vidal understood it because he came from those elites, and he was pretty amoral himself, frankly.

But the question I’m asking here, in an age where nuclear weapons are now in a completely unmitigated arms race, with really no arms limitation treaties in place at all, and not just a nuclear arms race, but an AI nuclear arms race, are we going to trust the fate of humanity to the people named in the Epstein files? Apparently, it’s hundreds, and many, many of them are CEOs of major corporations, serious politicians, a current president, and a former President. This stratum, which is completely drunk, rolling in enormous amounts of wealth, and many, not all, I guess, but many, obsessed with sexuality and buying yachts, are we trusting the fate of humanity to these people?

Okay, we’ll be back in just a few seconds to talk about where we’re at in terms of nuclear weapons and what the threat looks like today.

It was during the Obama administration that there was a modernization of American nuclear weapons, billions and billions of dollars. It was partly an exchange, we’re told, for the Republicans to support an arms limitation treaty, except they kind of didn’t really, but Obama got it through anyway. That set off a whole new arms race, and it gave rise to the Sentinel missile, which is a new ICBM, and eventually, what we have now, the Golden Dome, which is Trump’s pet project.

So now joining us to talk about where we’re at in terms of this modernization and what we can do to reduce the risk of nuclear war is Matt Korda. He works with the Federation of American Scientists, and he’s also a consultant on our film, How to Stop a Nuclear War. Thanks for joining us, Matt.

Matt Korda
Thanks so much for having me.

Paul Jay
So I hope you didn’t mind my connection of Prince Andrew to Epstein. There’s something there, but anyway, let’s focus on what’s going on. You do a lot of work keeping track of what’s going on in terms of the modernization of not just American nuclear weapons, but Russian and Chinese, but let’s focus on the U.S. right now. Where are things at, and what should people be demanding? We can sort of end our conversation with what would reduce the risk of nuclear war? But start with where we’re at in the arms race.

Matt Korda
Yeah. So one thing that I’ll preface with is just because you also mentioned it in your introduction about the nature of the leaders that are involved in nuclear decision-making. Something that’s really important to recognize right now is that out of the nine countries that have nuclear weapons, the vast majority of them are operating in authoritarian systems right now, and I include the United States in that. This is a spectrum.

Obviously, there are some countries where it manifests differently, but in terms of the people that are empowered to make decisions about what kinds of nuclear weapons to develop, how to deploy them, when to use them, there’s a level of information sharing that is done by yes-men and people who are working towards what they think a decision maker wants to hear. That is something that is characteristic of a lot of authoritarian systems.

Paul Jay
Just let me jump in. The historian, Gary Wills, made an interesting point. It starts with the U.S. Manhattan Project. It’s based on so much secrecy.

Matt Korda
Yeah.

Paul Jay
It gives rise to a culture of lack of debate, lack of discussion, and that’s what we have now. There’s a complete taboo about even talking about where things are with nuclear weapons.

Matt Korda
Yeah, and so when we put this in the U.S. context in the present day, there is a lot about the U.S. modernization program that we do not know because it is shrouded in secrecy. So, for example, there are entire budgets of certain big-ticket weapon systems that are classified, and there’s no reason to classify them. It’s not a national security secret how much something costs. The reason to classify something is that you’re trying to shield it from domestic public debate in the context of a worsening economic crisis and growing inequality. There are going to be people wondering why we’re spending so much money on a particular bomber or a particular type of missile system that isn’t supposed to be used.

So, where we’re at with this modernization program in the United States right now is that this is a program that is under an immense amount of stress, but is being pursued anyway. What I mean by stress is both economic and budgetary stress, as well as just a general programmatic stress that is happening by virtue of the fact that there’s a lot of delay, there is poor contractor performance, and there is a lack of communication between the contractors and the Air Force or the Navy. This keeps coming out time and time again with basically every big-ticket weapon system.

If we look at the Sentinel ICBM, for example, this is the most high-profile weapon system that the Air Force is in the midst of procuring. Originally, we were told that it’s impossible to life extend the current system for much cheaper. That was what many folks were recommending because it was just technologically impossible. Instead, we have to buy this entirely new missile for a vast sum of money, and what we were told is that it was going to be cheaper than actually life extending a current missile system because we’re going to be able to reuse all this prior infrastructure, reuse launch cables, reuse existing silo holes, and things like that.

Now, fast forward a few years, and what we’re seeing is that basically every assumption that the Air Force and Northrop Grumman made about that program has turned out to be incorrect. So they’re not going to be able to reuse old infrastructure. They’re not going to be able to reuse the same cabling. They have to dig new holes.

So there’s a law called the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which is designed to ensure that big-ticket procurement items are kept within budget and within their originally planned timelines. The Sentinel ICBM has gone way above its initially designed limits, and it has triggered a breach of this act, which means that there’s all this new scrutiny that’s supposed to be put on it. But what’s happened is that the Department of Defense has basically said, “Okay, we’ve breached this act because the program is so behind schedule and so over budget, but we’re just going to green-light it anyway.” There is no real interest in pausing or scrutinizing the program. It is like things just sort of continue based on inertia and the status quo.

Paul Jay
I think it’s important, too, that as much as we’re going to talk about the Trump administration and how much they’ve increased all of these budgets, it was actually under Biden that this act was triggered. There were supposed to be congressional hearings, which are triggered under the act, and Austin, the Secretary of Defense, went ahead and signed the go-ahead anyway, even though they hadn’t had the hearings.

Matt Korda
Yeah. There is really not a ton of daylight between Democratic and Republican administrations in the context of nuclear weapons. When you look at the Obama administration and then the first Trump, then Biden, and then the second Trump administration, there’s a lot more continuity than there is change with regards to nuclear policy. There are a few small tweaks around the edges, and we can talk about what those look like, but on the whole, there is a real sense of progression continuing on from Obama and this current iteration of the modernization program to the present day.

Paul Jay
There’s been some focus in the reporting, not a lot, on the cost overruns and such. But the fundamental question is, why ICBMs anyway? Tell us the story. People like Ellsberg, I interviewed Sam Nunn, a center insiders recently. They actually think the ICBMs, the whole program, whether it’s existing or Sentinels, are in their suffix, actually extremely dangerous.

Matt Korda
Yeah. So when we think about why the United States has ICBMs in its current form, the story that we are told and the rhetoric that we often hear from leaders in the Air Force or in DOD is that the United States has this nuclear triad, these three legs of the triad, air, land, and sea, and they each have their own unique qualities. That the submarines are invulnerable because they’re very stealthy and secretive. The bombers are flexible, and you can recall them, and you can use them for signaling. The ICBMs shoot the fastest, basically, and so they’re on alert all the time and can hit their targets quicker than anyone else.

There is a lot baked into that story. It makes it seem very clean. It makes it seem like this is a posture that the United States has always had and always needs to have, but that isn’t the case. The reason why the U.S. had ICBMs to begin with is not just because they had this beautiful idea for this perfect posture and then built around it. It was a lot of jockeying between members of the Air Force and the Navy wanting to push for pieces of a domestic military budget that would benefit them, and these competing doctrines of how to use nuclear weapons that popped up around those specific weapons.

So what we saw back then, and this is a trend that continues today, is that weapons technology gets developed, and then ideas and doctrines about where, how, and when to use them get thought of second. It’s not that the doctrine pops up first, and then we have to build a weapon to fit into it perfectly. It’s typically the other way around, and that was certainly the case with the ICBMs.

When we think about… When we fast forward to today and have real questions about why we are sinking hundreds of billions of dollars into an ICBM program that, frankly, very much feels like a legacy of the Cold War. The reason why the U.S. is doing this… There are a few reasons. One is that there’s a tremendous amount of lobbying power that these corporations that are building the ICBMs have on Congress and on the executive branch to push for it to be built. That is something that is baked into the U.S. procurement.

Paul Jay
Tell people what the ICBM caucus is.

Matt Korda
Yes. The ICBM caucus, there is a group of representatives and senators in the United States Congress who typically represent states that host Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in their states. So in states like Montana, Wyoming, sometimes Nebraska, Colorado, and North Dakota. They work together. Just like any caucus in Congress, they work together on legislation that protects their interests, and in this particular realm, it’s to ensure that ICBMs continue to be a mainstay of the U.S. nuclear deterrent, and that legislation isn’t taken to try and reduce the number of ICBMs, or to close a base, or to do anything like that.

Because of the way that campaign finance laws work in the United States, there is often a lot of interaction between major companies that are involved in building ICBMs and election campaigns for Congress, the Air Force, and things like that. So there’s just kind of this big revolving door that tends to happen. But something that’s important to recognize, too, is that the reason why we have ICBMs, yes, there is absolutely a lot of lobbying power and a lot of money that goes into this, and that’s kind of the case with every major military procurement program that happens.

But ICBMs are kind of funny because they exist because of the uniqueness of the U.S. nuclear doctrine in pursuing what’s called damage limitation. The idea behind damage limitation is that, in the context of a nuclear war, you want to be able to hit as many things as you can that will then limit the amount of damage that comes back to you. So in that sense, you need to size your nuclear force to some extent in relation to other countries’ nuclear forces.

This has been how the U.S. has done nuclear deterrence for many, many decades, but that’s not how every country does nuclear deterrence. There are some countries that think about their deterrent in different ways, where they say, “Okay, we don’t need to be trying to limit as much damage coming back to us as possible. We just need to be able to credibly threaten another country with a small number of nuclear weapons, because that should be enough to deter them from attacking us.”

So that’s when you have countries like what China used to be, where China would have a very small number of nuclear weapons, and they said, “It doesn’t make any sense for us to spend more money on nukes because it’s a waste of money, and our deterrent is credible enough that we don’t need to have thousands. But the United States has never thought like that. The United States, for decades and decades throughout the Cold War, has always been about trying to limit the damage that comes back to it. As a result, it feels that it needs these ICBMs.

Paul Jay
Let me put this in other words, because if I’m right, that only works as a first strike strategy. It doesn’t mean anything as a second strike, because if what’s coming at you is already coming at you, if it’s a full strike. So this whole theory is just nuts because-

Matt Korda
It’s based around operating at the exact outset of a conflict, basically. Hitting things very quickly.

Paul Jay
So it’s based on launch on warning, really, but the stupidity of launch on warning is that you don’t know whether what’s coming at you is real. We’ve had instances where it’s been radar bouncing off the moon. It’s been geese. Now you introduce AI and the possibilities of hallucination and analyzing sensor and satellite information. You don’t know if what you think is an attack is an attack until it lands.

Matt Korda
Yeah.

Paul Jay
But the point of it is you can’t stop it anyway. So you might as well wait and find out if it’s real or not, because if you fire, “on launch on warning,” you’re going to guarantee something’s going to come back at you.

Matt Korda
Yeah.

Paul Jay
But then they have another crazy theory when you confront someone who supports this program and explain what this is. So they come back at you. “Yeah, we know, but it’s a nuclear sponge.” But they don’t want to tell the people of Montana what a nuclear sponge is.

Matt Korda
Yeah, it’s interesting, right? So the way in which people talk about where the nuclear weapons in the United States are based is, it’s often framed in the context of this sponge idea, which is that because the United States deploys so many ICBMs across such a large amount of territory, and the locations where those ICBMs are deployed are very much away from densely populated cities, that they sort of raise the ante for another country to launch nuclear weapons. If they chose to do so, they would all go towards the middle of the country. This area, which is not filled with a ton of people, is not particularly dense, and it would soak up the nuclear weapons that would otherwise be directed towards cities or things like that. This logic is a little confusing, I guess, for a few reasons. One is that it’s-

Paul Jay
You’re very generous to call it confusing, but keep going.

Matt Korda
It is confusing, but it’s almost impossible to imagine a country launching 900 to 1,000 nuclear weapons at the middle of the country and not also hitting other centers of decision-making power in the United States. It’s impossible to imagine hundreds and hundreds of warheads going to Montana and not several going also to Washington, D.C., New York, or Seattle, where the submarines are based. So this idea that warheads would be drawn towards the middle of the country and away from the cities does not really hold a lot of water for me because they’re just going to hit everything. So this idea of, “being able to save lives” by drawing warheads to the middle of the country, to my mind, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

Paul Jay
It’s so stupid. Either you’re going to launch on warning, and they aren’t going to be there when the other side’s supposed missiles are coming in. The silos are all empty by that point if you’ve launched on warning. Or you’re not planning to launch at all, and they’re going to sit there to be targets, which, if that’s your plan, why hit them? There’s no point. The point is, this is all madness. Ellsberg called it institutional madness, but it’s madness to make… It’s all about money-making. As you know, the United States has enough submarines to wipe out every major city in Russia and China. There’s absolutely no point to any of this.

Matt Korda
I think on top of that, this idea of… Even when we think about the submarines, a lot of these arguments about the ICBM start to fall apart, because what we’ve been told is that the submarines are stealthy, but the ICBMs can launch faster. There have been a bunch of studies done, including government-sponsored studies, that indicate submarines can actually launch just as quickly as ICBMs, assuming that command and control is stable. Submarines are much closer to their targets, so even if you want to take them at the logic of you need to be able to launch quickly, submarines can probably get you a warhead on your target faster than ICBMs.

Some of the logic about, “why we have ICBMs, and the perceived need to have them” doesn’t tend to hold up under a lot of scrutiny. There are ways to change. If the U.S. wanted to change its policy away from damage limitation, then it would reduce the need to have ICBMs at all.

Paul Jay
Well, I think there is no need for ICBMs, but the underlying-

Matt Korda
At least in doctrine form.

Paul Jay
Yeah, but the underlying thing is, why on Earth would anyone launch a first strike against the United States? It’s impossible to believe.

Matt Korda
Yeah, it’s [crosstalk 00:23:22].

Paul Jay
Everyone knows the U.S. has submarines, so there’s no way you launch a first strike against the United States and you don’t commit suicide.

Matt Korda
Yeah.

Paul Jay
So we’re supposed to think that Russia and China, which are the only countries that could possibly have the capability of launching a first strike against the United States, are going to commit suicide? It’s beyond insane. Now, what we know about nuclear winter, launching the first strike, even without a second strike, back at you, probably ends you anyway, the number of fires that would be created.

Matt Korda
Yeah.

Paul Jay
I mean, the whole underlying set of assumptions is nuts, but we don’t talk about it. The Sentinel system, how much is that thing going to cost now?

Matt Korda
It’s a great question. We’re looking at hundreds of billions of dollars.

Paul Jay
And they’re talking about the Golden Dome. We won’t get into it now. We can talk about it more on another show, but the short of it is, it can’t work. The Golden Dome, a missile defense system, and this is just one in the latest iteration of Missile Defense System boondoggles. I’ve said this before. The argument against the missile defense system is that you can’t hit a bullet with a bullet. Now they’re claiming with AI, maybe you could hit a bullet with a bullet, an incoming missile.

Matt Korda
Yeah.

Paul Jay
But you can’t… AI cannot distinguish between a bullet and the bullshit.

Matt Korda
Right.

Paul Jay
There’s no missile that comes at you, no warhead that comes at you without hundreds of decoys, and there’s no way to know what’s the decoy and what’s… I mean, the whole thing, the premise, every single piece of it is nonsense, but it’s being driven partly by money-making and partly by internalization of the Cold War. But talk about what you face, because your job, essentially, is to try to alert people to the state of things, and it’s hard for you guys to get traction.

Matt Korda
Yeah, it’s challenging. The Golden Dome issue is a really interesting one because there are always going to be advantages for the attacker over the defender, because of the issues that you mentioned. It is so much cheaper. It is so much easier to be able to build decoys and build all these things and embed them into your systems in order to escape any kind of defenses. Essentially, what it should do is make you think that defense is just not worth investing in because it is so much money to make a system work that basically is trying to beat the laws of physics. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s probably impossible at this scale.

Paul Jay
Yeah, but that’s the point.

Matt Korda
But this is where-

Paul Jay
The objective is the money. I have this tagline. I want to put a little trademark next to it. It’s not about the dome, it’s about the gold.

Matt Korda
Yeah, which I think completely makes sense. I think it’s clear also that, given the outlines of what they’re trying to pitch as the Golden Dome, it ranges from things that are theoretically very possible on a very small level to the most fantastical ideas that are just impossible to put in place. But it’s by having such a wide aperture, it’s basically allowing everyone to line up, line their pockets, and figure out ways to pitch the government on things that I don’t think are ever going to happen.

In the meantime, I think a big challenge is how to then convince countries like Russia and China, which the U.S. ostensibly is saying it wants to engage them in arms control, how do you convince them to come to the table when at the same time, you’re building a system that’s specifically designed to negate their nuclear deterrence? Even though we know that the Golden Dome in its most ambitious form is not going to happen, and probably Russia and China know that it’s also not going to happen, but what is anyone supposed to take away from this? What incentive is there for them to come to the table if the U.S. is planning on continuing with this idea of trying to be able to shoot down every missile that comes from Russia or China, which I don’t think is-

Paul Jay
I think because Russia and China understand what the real objective here is. As much as the previous systems, and when our film comes out, you’ll see the SAGE system, the BMEWS system, and even SDI, but the real objective of the Golden Dome, I think, and I’m certainly not the only one, has nothing to do with missile defense. It has to do with the weaponization of space, and it has to do with being able to fire weapons from space down to Earth. If you can dominate that sphere, then it gives you an advantage.

Paul Jay
The truth of it is, once that unfolds, then, of course, the Russians and Chinese have to do the same thing.

Matt Korda
Yeah, of course.

Paul Jay
We just have another boondoggle arms race. But I think the key to understanding this is that the objective is the arms race. That’s the objective.

Matt Korda
Yeah, and I think we see that from all countries. Just because the U.S. wants to build this Golden Dome, which I think is going to cause more problems than it is trying to solve, you have to have arms control partners in wanting to come to the table. I don’t think Russia and China want to do that either. You were seeing that Russia’s engagement in arms control is not in good faith at all. So they are not a helpful partner here, and the U.S. is not-

Paul Jay
They’re not because the United States isn’t a helpful partner either.

Matt Korda
Yeah. I think there are no heroes in the nuclear arms control environment right now.

Paul Jay
I interviewed Sam Nunn just a few weeks ago, and he made an interesting point to me. He said the arms limitation treaty negotiations, which are not happening now, he says, “In some ways, the treaty isn’t the most important part of it. It’s the fact that they’re sitting down regularly and talking to each other.” They humanize each other. They realize they are both concerned about not committing suicide. It creates channels to reduce miscalculation and accidents. He says, “These guys aren’t even talking to each other now.”

That goes back to the fact that the bloody media in the U.S. and Canada, we’re both in Canada right now. We both go back and forth all the time. The media doesn’t talk about any of this stuff, even though there is nothing more threatening to humanity than this uncontrolled arms race. Just to finish off, I know you have to go, but where are we right now in terms of whether there is anything being done to reduce accidents, miscalculations, or misunderstandings?

Matt Korda
Yeah. So there’s really interesting work that is being done, I think, at the NGO level to try and interrogate these problems a bit. So there are organizations that are experimenting with how to expand, for example, a crisis communications hotline between all the nuclear-armed states. That kind of thing I think is really welcome, of course, then you have to have states that actually are interested in communicating during crises. There are organizations that work on trying to put together track 2 dialogues or track 1.5 dialogues between countries, American researchers, and Chinese researchers, just to try and circulate ideas back and forth. I think those kinds of things can be really helpful.

What we do is we primarily focus on transparency, and so we try to provide a common understanding of how many nuclear weapons are in the world, which countries have them, where they’re deployed, that sort of thing. I think that work can be helpful to try and at least give countries a common ground to start negotiations and engage with each other without revealing classified information. The problem is there’s only so much that you can do as outsiders if countries are not actually interested in engaging with each other on a real level. So I think at the moment, we’re all trying to lay the groundwork for when the policy window opens back up and when political will actually takes over and countries start seeing the value in pursuing negotiations. But right now, there is sort of a limit to what we can do to try to reduce risk.

Paul Jay
We really need an anti-nuclear war, an anti-nuclear weapons movement, again, like there was in the early ’80s. It’s critical. I think people need to understand this. The whole rationale for the nuclear weapons arsenal, the whole protocol, everything is based on you have to demonize the enemy, and you have to sell a worst-case scenario. The worst case is that the other side is going to launch first. If you can’t sell that to Congress, to the American people, if that isn’t the underlying assumption of the whole structure, then you can’t sell all these new weapons systems. So you have to keep hammering. “The other side’s unreasonable. We don’t have a partner to negotiate with.” Of course, Russia has its own military-industrial complex.

Matt Korda
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Jay
China now has its own military-industrial complex. They all profit from the worst-case scenario con job, and we’re allowing it. We’re allowing these people, the kind of people obsessed with sex and wealth as we’re seeing in the Epstein files, we’re allowing them to rule the world. We’re not… us people, why aren’t we up in arms about the risk of nuclear war? There are midterm elections coming up, and then the presidential. It’s an opportunity. People have got to make this an issue, and if it doesn’t come… Even progressive candidates, they barely understand these issues.

I saw AOC at the Munich conference. She was asked about Taiwan, and she kind of fumbled. It’s a complicated thing, but it was an opportunity to talk about the threat of nuclear war. She doesn’t seem very well-informed on it. I don’t particularly blame her. I think it’s true of most of the progressive candidates. They don’t even understand these issues. So if you’re watching this thing, educate yourself and start demanding that people running for office understand these things.

Okay, Matt’s got to run to another interview, so I’m going to say a quick goodbye. But why don’t we keep doing this, a few weeks from now, and keep the conversation going?

Matt Korda
That sounds great. Amazing. Thank you so much.

Paul Jay
Thanks, Matt. Very appreciated.

Matt Korda
All right. Thank you. I’ll see you later.

Paul Jay
Thanks for joining us on theAnalysis.news. Please don’t forget, we only exist with your donations. We don’t just cover the issue of nuclear weapons, but we’re focusing a lot on it, partly because it’s a preoccupation of mine right now, because of this film I’m making, How to Stop a Nuclear War. If you want to know more about it, write in, but we can’t do any of this without your financial support. So if you go to the website, theAnalysis.news, and make a donation, it will be much appreciated. Thanks again for joining us.