Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Corey Hinderstein
Former deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration
Episode Summary
In this episode of One Decision, hosts Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain's MI6, are joined by Corey Hinderstein, former deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
As an expert on nuclear weapons and testing, Hinderstein breaks down President Trump's latest comments that the United States will resume testing of its nuclear weapons and what that means for foreign adversaries like Russia, China, and North Korea. She lays out the significance of a robust nuclear weapons state and the responsibilities attached, and what the process of testing actually entails. Plus, Hinderstein shares the story of when she first located the nuclear centrifuge facility in Natanz, Iran and how it shaped the legacy of the JCPOA.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
Key Themes
Nuclear weapons testing
Significance of a robust nuclear weapons state and the responsibilities attached, and what the process of testing actually entails.
"This is a quote from the episode."
— Whoever said it
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
Hinderstein: I mean, is the number one priority of the leadership is the is the nuclear program, the military as a whole, the nuclear program specifically, and as we know from the society, this is not a society that is going to have arguments about guns or butter. It's gonna be guns.
INTRODUCTION
Raffini: Hello, and welcome to One Decision. I'm Christina Raffini, joined, of course, by our cohost, sir Richard Dearlove. In today's episode, we're gonna be talking about nuclear, nuclear testing, and why countries around the world seem to be revisiting this thing that we kind of once thought we'd put to bed or at least diplomatically put to bed. We're gonna speak with Corey Hinderstein. She's a big expert in the field, someone I've used a lot throughout my career. She was the number two at the NNSA, that's the National Nuclear Security Administration, and her portfolio was the defense nuclear nonproliferation. So we wanted to get her opinion on that and what the nuclear situation is around the world right now. So, Corey, thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate you joining us.
Hinderstein: So happy to be here.
INTERVIEW
Raffini: I just wanna start off by saying you you heard the president talking about how we're gonna potentially restart testing on nuclear weapons. Why did that surprise you, and is that something we need to do?
Hinderstein: It was a huge surprise. And what's really interesting is there have been a number of comments seeking to clarify this position, and I think some of the comments that have come out over the last few days had just complicated things even further. So it's really unclear whether the president is seeking to do underground nuclear testing, you know, full up nuclear explosions in tunnels in Nevada, which he seems to be indicating. But at other times, he's talking about trying to do the same things that our adversaries are doing. And according to him, that includes what he calls nuclear testing, but what we're aware of is mostly the systems of, you know, delivery system testing like missiles, including some really new and scary capabilities, but nonetheless not underground nuclear testing. So I would say after three days of clarification from Trump's first comments on the way to his meeting with president Xi, we are more confused than ever.
Dearlove: I thought that The US was in a position now to do mostly simulation when it came to, you know, nuclear testing and that it got beyond having to make, you know, live nuclear banks underground, although, obviously, the Chinese, North Koreans, perhaps the Russians aren't far advanced. I mean, where where do we stand on this issue of computer simulation then?
Hinderstein: Well, I sir Richard, that is exactly the position that, that we've been in for the last thirty years, which is when we said we were going to end nuclear testing and entered into this voluntary national moratorium, that, by the way, was joined by all of the other nuclear weapon states. We agreed to do that because we knew we had the capability to get all of the information we needed about the performance of our nuclear weapons and nuclear arsenal without that testing. So it doesn't mean that we just put them on the shelf and don't look at them. It actually means that we've been engaged in the most kind of scientifically advanced, complicated, and frankly expensive science program in the world for the last thirty years. We've built really big machines. We've built computing capabilities. Now the fastest supercomputer in the world that's ever been measured is the El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And that computer is fully classified and is dedicated to modeling nuclear weapons performance. So when I talk to the weapons designers and the folks at the national laboratories, they're the first ones to say that we know more about our nuclear weapons now than we ever did while we were doing nuclear testing. The second piece of that though is that we also have all the data from those tests, and we're using that data to validate all the machines that we have. So it's not that the nuclear test history is irrelevant. It's it's extremely relevant. It's just that we don't see the need to get more data because we have all that in our back pocket.
Raffini: Is this a scientific test? Is there anything we're actually gonna learn by restarting these tests, or is this mostly political? Is it more a signal and show force for something the president wants to do?
Hinderstein: As of now, if we really started the preparations for an underground nuclear test, it would most likely be a demonstration. It would be sending a political message, and not necessarily a helpful one, but it would be, you know, in principle, it wouldn't be a science experiment because we don't have a question we are seeking to answer. There isn't a set of questions that the test would be designed around. And I think that that's a really important distinction because it also has to do with, you know, what kind of instruments would we use, what kind of data would we be trying to gather. It's really kind of a dynamic where you can do an easy test quickly and they can send a message, or you could do a complicated test. It would take longer. It would be more expensive, and you might be able to gather some data. But frankly, there isn't a question about our arsenal right now that this kind of test would be the answer to.
Raffini: What's a hard test versus an easy test?
Hinderstein: I think a hard test would be one that is designed around a set of questions, a set of scientific questions, and it would have to do with the instrumentation. So are you looking at the primary? Are you looking at the secondary? Are you looking at some sort of element of performance of the material? There's a there are a lot of ways to draw huge amounts of data, especially now. I mean, when we ended nuclear testing, it was thirty years ago. Think about how technology has advanced. And so there have been people who've said, wouldn't it be great to do a test now using the tools that we have that we didn't have available to us before? But that's much more about, like, do science because it's available, not because you need to do it.
Dearlove: Corey, but if if The US were to start testing physically, doesn't that make it easier for, let's say, the Chinese and the Russians to say, well, you're you know? I I mean, aren't we sort of handing them an advantage to make advances which might not be made otherwise if The US has got this very sophisticated capability already?
Hinderstein: I think you're exactly right. That is one of the key questions that I have, which is if we are gonna test in order to kind of get to some sort of perceived parity, you know, they're testing, so we need to test, and we can come back to that question about whether they're testing because they're not. But if there was an assertion that they're testing and we want to become equal with that, actually we're already starting with the advantage and all we would be doing would be opening the door for them to close the gap. Like I said, we have all these nuclear tests in our history. We have over a thousand. The Russians, you know, Soviet Union, and then the Russians, they had on the order of 700. The Chinese have done less than 50. So I could imagine if I were a Chinese nuclear scientist and looking at the buildup that they want to pursue and looking at questions like how to integrate new nuclear devices with some of these new missiles and delivery vehicles they're building, I think that they have a much stronger case for testing than we do, and they would love for us to open the door for that. They so far have not been willing to be the first ones to break that moratorium. But if we broke it first, I don't think they would be that far behind.
Dearlove: So, I mean, you were mentioning statistically the number of tests there. I mean, I'm not aware recently that the North Koreans, for example, I mean, they've been testing their delivery systems, as you said at the beginning, and not actually testing the warheads. Right. But whereas and the Chinese are way behind statistically. The Russians obviously are not to the same extent. I mean, is that the I mean, in terms of the sort of lineup of testers, does that give us a reasonably accurate picture at the moment then?
Hinderstein: Right. So you're right that nobody has been doing underground nuclear, you know, full scale nuclear testing in recent years. The last one to happen was North Korea in 2017. So, you know, when we saw president Trump speaking about this issue, one of the things he said is that everybody else is doing it, and it's really not true. Not only are our peers and near peer adversaries not doing it, but even North Korea hasn't done it since 2017. Although, to be fair, they do maintain the capability to test on a shorter time horizon. What Russia and China are doing is they are doing what could be called underground nuclear tests, but it's really at a scale that's very different. They're doing subcritical experiments at their former nuclear test sites. But guess what? So is The United States. We're doing these subcritical experiments, which by that, I mean that that's a combination of high explosives and nuclear material, plutonium, and they do these small scale explosions so that they can watch the behavior of the plutonium when impacted by high explosives, but it doesn't create a self sustaining chain reaction. So it's really not the same as a full underground nuclear test. We're doing those. We're in fact upgrading our capability in Nevada to do more and more advance of those experiments. And that's exactly the kind of what we call stockpile stewardship, stockpile surveillance that we can do because we're not doing underground nuclear tests. But so, you know, there have been some questions in recent years. Have Russia and China in their subcritical campaigns, have they been kind of tipping over to get a little bit of criticality, you know, of short lived chain reaction? And there have been some questions raised about that. The state department has made those comments in its annual compliance report, but we don't have solid evidence of that, and certainly The United States is keeping all of our experiments subcritical, no chain reactions, which is, in our mind, is what it takes to remain compliant with the commitments that we've made, including the comprehensive test ban treaty.
Raffini: So during the first Trump administration, they pulled out of the INF treaty with Russia, which was for those intermediate range nuclear weapons because they alleged that Russia was cheating and that it put The US at a disadvantage. But, you know, Corey, we talked about this when we talk about compliance with inspectors. Everyone I ask, even when I say, you know, if Iran, Russia, these countries are cheating, why does it matter that we maintain the facade of these agreements? And everybody I've talked to says, because they at least have to maintain the facade of agreement. And when you pull out of the treaty, it's just anything goes. Do you think that is part of this? Do you think that set the stage for this? Talk to me about what impact that had on nuclear proliferation and if you think this is the a kind of inevitable next step or or I don't know. What's your take?
Hinderstein: Yeah. I think that it's harder to pin consequences on any one treaty. But I do think what we have seen is a rollback of a number of arms control treaties. We've certainly seen the INF treaty, even the conventional forces in Europe, you know, conventional arms control treaty, the anti ballistic missile treaty withdrawal. We've seen, you know, obviously, Trump withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal. And we now have, you know, upcoming in not that long, the expiration of the last remaining big nuclear arms control treaty, the New START treaty, which will happen in February of next year. So I think what we're seeing is an overall erosion of this idea that it it's in our benefit to have our adversaries constrained, even if that means that we're a little bit constrained too. And so it's really a philosophical change over the last few years that we don't wanna be constrained. We believe that we will always be more constrained because our adversaries will cheat and we won't. So we're putting ourselves in a box that they're not going into. And I do agree with you that I think that's a little shortsighted. I mean, first of all, we know that these treaties actually have constrained our adversaries. You know, even since Russia withdrew or announced that they were not gonna comply with certain elements of the new START treaty even before its expiration, we do believe that they're adhering to the central limit, which is the overall limit of 1,550 deployed strategic weapons. So at a time when they're evolving their nuclear delivery systems and introducing these novel systems that are frankly quite destabilizing, we at least know that there is a central limit that's being held, and that's the kind of foundation on which we can build for future action and frankly make our own national decisions. We've seen arms races in the past. We know it's not a good outcome, both in risk, but also in expenditure resources. So I do think that this phase that we are going into, which is kind of the end of arms control treaties, or at least maybe a significant pause in their implementation is a pretty scary world, and it's one that introduces a lot of nuclear risks.
Dearlove: So I just wanted to follow-up on that because, you know, someone of my age who was sort of heavily involved around the periphery, you know, okay, in an intelligence organization. There's some urgency of, you know, the SALT negotiations, the START negotiations. There was real pressure and concern and fear that drove these things forward. And you're right. We seem to have been in a period where, obviously, you know, technically, because the Cold War ended, there was a relaxation in attitude. But do you now I mean, from what you're saying, you're envisaging, let's say, the emergence of a new standoff, a new crisis, and, let's say, an entirely new set of disarmament negotiations. Is that what you're actually envisaging?
Hinderstein: I mean, it's what I would hope for. And when I say that, it's because I think that the alternative is so, it is frightening. And when I say kind of that I think that we should be entering into a new era of negotiation, it's not to necessarily replicate the last era. And that's, I think, an important point. And maybe the framework in the future is not exclusively around numbers. Maybe it's around capabilities. Because when we start talking about the, quote, unquote, three body problem with Russia and China, if we stick to straight numbers, then we do have a problem in The United States and in the West collectively if we think about, you know, The US, France, and The UK as kind of having a common interest in this outcome, which is we would say from a numerical perspective that we would need enough to counter both Russia and China either independently or, you know, even worse collaboratively, whereas they each might define their needs as only relating to us, which means we're always gonna be driving to greater numbers. But maybe we need to be thinking about what are the risks and threats, and how do we manage those in a way that isn't the kind of arms control of the twentieth century, which was extremely not just important, but successful for that time period. I think about capabilities. I think about needing to come back to this relationship between offense and defense. I mean, it really seems like a lot of people who are talking about Golden Dome, for example, kind of forget the lessons of the 1960s, seventies, and eighties about how, you know, increasing defenses drives adversary capability up. So these are new conversations that we need to come to with fresh eyes. And I'm afraid as a strategic community, and I put myself in this, we haven't done a good job of saying what would we actually want out of a next generation of arms control. And to a certain extent, I wouldn't write that off. In the interview that the president did with 60 Minutes, he started his conversation about nuclear in talking about how he's talked to Xi and Putin about, you know, denuclearization and how he is concerned about nuclear weapons. And he does have statements going back to the eighties about his concerns about nuclear weapons. So it could be that, you know, if anyone could reach an agreement on this, it might be him only because he comes at it with the backing of the party that has tended to be the more cynical when it comes to arms control. But I'm not holding my breath for that either.
Raffini: Is there any legitimacy to the argument that The US nuclear stockpile is aging? Is that a legitimate concern? Do these weapons work? Will they do what we need them to do if we need them?
Hinderstein: It it is a legitimate question, and it is one that the entire national laboratory, you know, NNSA national laboratory system is oriented around answering. And by that, I mean, we should never take for granted that these weapons will work and will work as designed and as is incorporated into our military planning. The responsibility of being a nuclear weapon state means that we have to be able to understand the weapons, make sure that they are safe and secure, and that in The United States, we adhere to what we call the always never principle. The guiding force in The US nuclear weapons complex is the always never. That the weapons must always work as designed when called upon and must never work unless called upon. And so that's a really heavy responsibility. And in The United States, the way that we manage that responsibility is on an annual basis. Literally every year, the three directors of the NNSA national laboratories, which is Los Alamos National Laboratory. A lot of people know about Los Alamos, especially after the Oppenheimer movie. Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lab directors have to write a letter to the president that asserts that they have confidence in the arsenal, and they have to do that every year. It is data driven. They look at all of the information that's been gathered from the stockpile management and stockpile surveillance program. It is illegal for a letter, a comma, anything about their letter to be modified. It is their letter and their letter alone, and they have to make that certification every year through the secretary of energy to the president. If there were ever a question, and there have been questions in the past, looking at some piece of some weapon or weapon system, they have the responsibility to talk about that, what the consequences of that would be, what information they would need to make sure that they not just gained, but in fact maintain the confidence in the operation of that weapon system. And so that is their responsibility. It's one that they take extremely seriously. If you ever talk to a lab director, it's the most important job that they have, not just managing these complex of, you know, thousands of scientists, but actually making that assertion. And it's really important. And that's why there is a nuclear test readiness requirement. You know, through multiple administrations, there's been a requirement that we'd be ready to test if we ever needed to to answer one of those questions. But the fact of the matter is none of those questions have risen to the level of nuclear testing yet. And it's hard for many people to believe that there is a question that would rise to the level of an underground full scale test. But it's something that every year has to be assessed and asserted.
Dearlove: Corey, can I ask you about one or two of the things that Putin has recently mentioned, which maybe fall outside the context of the disarmament agreements that or let's say, containment agreements that are still relevant? And I'm not thinking about this nuclear cruise missile, which I regard something as of an irrelevance. I'm thinking more of the recent statement, which I was certainly aware of without going to detail of, you know, an undersea nuclear weapons, which can unleash tsunamis. Okay. This sounds a bit science fiction, but I know in the past it's something that was taken seriously. I mean, how do you view that type of issue in the context of what we're talking about? Because, you know, it it's not really covered at all by weapons control agreements that are in existence.
Hinderstein: Certainly, Putin has asserted that it's not covered, and I think that's a perfect example of kind of thing that if we were gonna go forward with new agreements, we have to make sure it actually captures what we care about. And I would argue, sir Richard, that that is exactly the kind of system that we should care about. But this system which they call Poseidon is both nuclear powered and nuclear armed. And it's similar to what they announced with this cruise missile, which was both nuclear powered and nuclear armed, which makes it independently maneuverable that it could be deployed for long periods of time, that it could sit offshore and just wait until it was called upon to be used. It's a really kind of destabilizing system, but it does show that, you know, we talk about nuclear modernization. We use that word modernization. We kind of use it equally among The United States, Russia, and China. But the three countries are actually doing very different things. So US nuclear modernization really is about maintaining a limited set of nuclear capabilities. You know, we call them tail numbers. Right? The different types of nuclear weapons. As opposed to expanding that set, we have limited it in order to manage it in a more efficient way, but we make sure that we are always introducing upgraded safety, security, electronics, things that can be supported through the supply chain, etcetera. That's what our nuclear modernization program is. And currently, there are six or seven, depending on who you talk to, concurrent modernization programs going on. Some of those are for the historic nuclear weapons, and some of them are for new ones like the W93 that's intended to be deployed on the new missiles that will go on Columbia class submarines. China's modernization is about numbers. While they are bringing onboard new kinds of nuclear weapons, primarily, they're just trying to build their numbers. So they've got a massive serial production underway, and they're trying to get, you know, 1,500 nuclear weapons as quickly as possible and the goal is by 2030 or the early 2030s. So their modernization about numbers. Russia's modernization is about novelty, and this is exactly what you're getting at. They're saying, look. We have lived in a world with bombers, ICBMs, nuclear cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, etcetera, sub launched, ground launched, air dropped. But what they're looking at is what kinds of things can we introduce that kind of go around our traditional systems of managing nuclear escalation and nuclear threat. And that's really dangerous in a different way. And so when I talk about thinking about what nuclear arms control should look like for the twenty first century, it's exactly these kinds of systems, and they're not alone.
Raffini: Corey, I always enjoy the new fresh nightmares that I get after talking to you. Listen. We've spoken a lot about Iran. You and I have and on this podcast. But for folks who don't know you, I did wanna talk to you a little bit about, you know, your role during the JCPOA. And and didn't you kind of find the Natanz facility? Wasn't that kinda your thing?
Hinderstein: It was. My family does like the joke that I started the Iran nuclear crisis in 2002, and it hasn't stopped ever since.
Raffini: Of course, that gives me way too much credit because I knew we needed to blame someone. I just didn't realize it was you. That's nice that we have a name. That's good.
Hinderstein: But, I mean, and really with all credit to my friends and colleagues, like sir Richard who come from the intelligence community, I have no doubt. In fact, I'm 100% confident that they were tracking Iranian capability before I was on the outside. But it is true that I was part of the team at the Institute for Science and International Security. I was the one who actually spent hundreds of hours in the map library and going over Farsi information to try to actually find the facility that an Iranian opposition group had been indicating was under construction. They called it something else. They actually called it a fuel fabrication facility. In the end, the facility that I found and then as part of the team, we identified was the centrifuge facility that we all now know as Natanz. And I was the first one to kind of identify that publicly in an unclassified way because I was not part of government at that time. I had never had a clearance at that time. So we were doing everything on the unclassified level, and it did kind of kick off the understanding about the trajectory of that program that, unfortunately, the legacy we're still dealing with today.
Dearlove: Well, I just wanted to ask a question about the North Korean program because okay. I'm a bit out of date now. But, you know, my understanding is that they're still very primitive, let's say, on the specific targeting side, so that the North Korean program is simply, well, you know, we've got this. And if it goes in your direction, it'll hit your continent. We're not quite sure where. But it it isn't a fully tested, designed, sophisticated program in the sense that we would understand the major nuclear programs held by the major nuclear powers. And in terms of everything one reads and sees, it's still I'd still judge that North Koreans are sitting in that rather primitive, but still sufficient position that, you know, they have they have a weapon. They have a means of delivery, and that's enough. I mean, do you okay. That's a very primitive and basic assessment. But would you agree with that sort of statement?
Hinderstein: I think that your point of comparison of North Korea, certainly, vis a vis the five declared nuclear weapon states, you know, US, UK, France, Russia, China, is much less sophisticated. And I would also argue that it's also significantly less sophisticated than India and Pakistan, for example, and their nuclear programs. I think what we're seeing with North Korea, though, is that their learning curve has been quite steep, and so they are devoting huge amounts of resources. So I wouldn't take for granted that their improvement is not just significant, but speeding up. We are not seeing as many kind of catastrophic failures as we used to see. We're not seeing as much, in fact, in some cases, we're not even seeing as much kind of bragging about things that we can look at and say, well, I'm not sure that they have had the data to back that up. So while I would agree that they're behind, I think they're catching up. And to a certain extent, the fact that they can credibly threaten a nuclear use, not just in their region, but beyond the region. I think that once you kind of pass that threshold, while I agree that we may not have as much confidence in their weapon performance for sure or their targeting or the effectiveness, if you think about the military effectiveness of their plan, I think that they've crossed the Rubicon of where I would consider that still something that is a very real threat and one that has to be managed as opposed to dismissed, which I know you weren't dismissing it, but some have tried to dismiss it over time. And I think we have learned our lesson. You know, these are folks who know how to get things done, and they're putting a lot of resources towards improving their arsenal and increasing their capability.
Raffini: Corey, it's been fascinating as always. Any places where you see any bit of hope or promise for diplomacy?
Hinderstein: Well, I think the only thing I would see is that in the wake of this announcement about nuclear weapons testing, you've seen a lot of people come out of the woodwork to say, this is a bad idea. You know, you have not seen the people jump on who have kind of said, we've been hiding in the background all along, but now that our issue is out there, we're so excited. You know, you haven't seen the weapons labs say, this is a great idea. You haven't even, you know, people have been quoted in the press from the Heritage Foundation saying, this isn't a good idea. And you saw secretary Wright, the energy secretary come out yesterday morning on Sunday and say, we think this is about systems testing, testing all the different independent pieces. It's not about testing things altogether. So even as the agency that might get the glory of this, he's saying this is not what we're talking about. So if this consensus can build and grow, I hope it can be an element of restraint on the president.
Dearlove: Alright. Corey Hinderstein, thank you so much for joining us. It was fascinating talking to you. I mean, you're so knowledgeable and give us such a thorough picture. It's really great. Thank you very much.
Hinderstein: Thanks. Thank you.
Raffini: For more conversations with leading decision makers and thinkers, check out onedecision.com and our YouTube page where you'll find additional videos, commentaries, and explainers. If you like the show, please leave us a review or a comment. I'm Christina Raffini. Until next week, thanks for listening.
