AW: My prediction is that it will be (like everything he attaches the "golden" adjective to) a boondoggle and a grift. I do not think it will ever see the light of day as a working system. I guarantee you that the big contractors who are working on it are planning to go well over their allotted budgets and well over their stated time frames. (Why do I say this with such confidence? Because that's what they do on pretty much every project these days. There are only a handful of big military contractors for this kind of thing these days, because of all of the consolidations, and they know it.)

My experience is that the only experts who believe Golden Dome is a good idea are people who are, in one way or another, in on the grift. This is going to be a massive transference of public wealth into a system that had about zero chance of actually being useful.

Separately from that aspect, missile defense definitely aggregates tensions and leads adversaries to pursue methods that would overwhelm or defeat it. Which can lead to an even more risky world.

The way I like to put this is: imagine if Russia or China announced that they were developing systems so that the US nuclear deterrence would be worthless. What would the US do? Would it just "roll over," would it say, "you got us"? Or would it do whatever it took — even by pursuing systems that would otherwise be prohibitively risky under normal circumstances (like smuggled weapons) — to restore that sense of security?

And also (non-coincidentally) it seems likely to scuttle any possibility of arms control treaties being viable.

Again, I know it sounds petty to point this out, but he is telling you, in what he names it, what it is about for him. It's not about the dome. It's about the gold. It's a grift, and there is literally no reason to give any of these people the benefit of the doubt otherwise; they are nakedly corrupt and nakedly incompetent.

This is a solid question.

There are a few arguments people make when it comes to ballistic missile defense. One camp holds that missile defense is inherently destabilizing because it spurs adversaries to develop new and bigger and more terrible offensive weapons that can beat whatever defenses are in place. Another camp argues that a viable missile defense system would increase stability by creating doubts about whether a counterforce first strike could get through the defenses and destroy the other power's weapons. And then there are those who argue (with strong evidence) that there's just no cost-effective way to establish a comprehensive missile defense architecture.

So, that brings us back to Golden Dome. Russia and China were already modernizing their nuclear forces and developing next-gen stuff before Trump announced it. So I am unsure of the extent to which this actually raises the temperature. But the amount of money committed to this thing simply isn't enough to make a meaningful difference in terms of establishing an effective missile defense shield when you compare it to past CBO cost estimates. We'll see if the initiative can make meaningful progress in technology maturation for the overall architecture.

Always glad seeing you around, dude.

That's not a question!

My knee-jerk take is that if it's in an unclassified CBT and isn't taught in-person or in a SCIF, it's probably something the Russians already know. I'll hold my tongue on my thoughts about the U.S. mil's CBT obsession.

As for the most interesting thing that didn't make the cut ... I spent probably two hours on the Library of Congress site flipping through photos taken of the murals painted in ICBM-related facilities at Grand Forks AFB. There were some really cool ones, like this Viking riding a sled pulled by polar bears.

Very cool, thanks for sharing

Have civil defense planners planned around the use of salted bombs that use long lived fallout such as activated Co-60 as an aerial denial weapon?

Never in anything I have seen. But to be clear, there is very little by way of real "civil defense planning" going on these days.

Is it true that the event of a nuclear conflict Russia has plans to detonate warheads as ground bursts in the farm belt in an attempt to impact us agriculture?

I don't think anybody really knows current Russian targeting priorities. The US position is generally to assume that Russian priorities mirror US ones, but there is really no (public) reason to think that.

In this new era of "might makes right" are you concerned about nuclear poliferation in the Gulf states, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Germany?

Over the long term (decades), yes. Over the short term (months, years), no. Spinning up a nuclear weapons program from scratch is that fast of a thing, politically or technically. Japan is probably the fastest of those technically.

Are you concerned about the transfer of nuclear weapons technology between North Korea/Russia/Pakistan and Iran?

Sure. The real next questions — the hard ones — are "how concerned should one be (compared to other concerns)?" and "what kinds of policies ought to be pursued to inhibit that kind of thing?" One of the big issues for me at the moment is that US foreign policy is so chaotic, aggressive, and downright predatory that I do not see how they can leverage anything serious towards these kinds of problems. Aside from the fact that they are burning bridges with the allies they'd need for help on dealing with these issues, there is only so much diplomatic "bandwidth" and "attention" that any state has, and so inventing new crises constantly means that they are sapping resources away from other possible issues.

Could AI lower the barriers to entry for nuclear weapon design? Could it help find alternatives to the Teller-Ulam design for primaries, help accelerate the development of pure fusion weapons that don't require a fission primary or even help weapons experts design large scale non-nuclear emp's?

I very much doubt it. I think this question rests on two false assumptions: a) that "AI" (in one form or another — presently it is basically a marketing term and can refer to several very different computational/statistical approaches) can come up with really clever engineering solutions that nobody has thought about and are non-obvious and yet can be shown to be true, and b) that nuclear weapon design is actually hard to do. b) is definitely not true for a state willing to invest a little bit into it, and has not been true for a long time. a) is, I suspect, not true — I've seen nothing to make me think it is true, anyway.

Two areas that I think issues with AI and nukes are going to arise (based on listening to a lot of security types talk about these things) are: a) there's a possibility that things like machine learning might be able to make it much easier to detect the likely positions of submarines, which would possibly impact their real or perceived second-strike capability, and b) if AI-based systems are used for threat assessments and attack warnings and so on, and are tasked with providing "options" to policymakers, that can introduce novel forms of misinformation and error and mistakes which would be very hard to diagnose and debug in real-time (because of the essentially "black box" nature of how these kinds of systems tend to work).

In this new era of "might makes right" are you concerned about nuclear poliferation in the Gulf states, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Germany?

I'll answer this one. I have different levels of concern for each of these groups, but I've spent the most time looking at South Korea (and wrote about the potential proliferation implications of their nuclear sub deal with the U.S.). Experts I talk to think that Seoul has the most compelling motive to nuclearize and may be trying to achieve nuclear latency — their president explicitly asked that the U.S. permit them to establish a domestic fueling capability for the subs. Public opinion there also supports building nuclear weapons.

Can AI lower the barriers to entry for nuclear weapon design? Could it help find alternatives to the Teller-Ulam design for primaries, help accelerate the development of pure fusion weapons that don't require a fission primary or even help weapons experts design large scale non-nuclear emp's?

This is gamma spectroscopy question so it might be out of your wheelhouse Alex. With the advent of cheap, low resolution gamma spectrometers like the Radiacode and KC-761 that are capable of very very rough isotope identification for a few hundred dollars, is it possible that we're in the beginning of a democratization of low cost isotope identification? Can these cheap low resolution gamma spectrometers be mass produced and released in the field for the detection of improvised nuclear devices or dirty bombs?

I mean I'd argue that we're already seeing that to an extent. Russia was making explicit nuclear threats and reportedly considered battlefield use earlier in its war with Ukraine — they wanted to compel Ukrainian surrender or at least deter Western support. And China could well use nuclear coercion and threats to discourage RoK/U.S./Japan intervention if they were to invade Taiwan in the years ahead.

AW: If you mean "peaceful" purposes, foreseeable future is potentially a very long time... but the only non-weapons projects with "nuclear devices" that seem to be taken seriously these days are nukes as potential destroyers/diverters for asteroids on incoming trajectories.

During the Cold War, the idea of using nuclear weapons to excavate harbors, dig canals, frack natural gas, stop underground oil well fires, and even as parts of direct power generation systems or rocket propulsion systems were all studied and floated to different levels of seriousness. There are no real champions of this kind of thing at the moment. But if we've learned anything over the last decade or two, the appearance of consensus can be deceiving... at the moment, resurrecting those kinds of projects would take a lot of effort, technical and political.

It is very hard to say what is "likely" with him. What I will say is: if Trump did decide to make a nuclear order, and it was not a "Trump wakes up one day and orders a suicidal attack against Russia and China" (the "crazy president" scenario), but rather something more within the error bars of "imaginable nuclear use" (e.g., as the response to a provocation or event), then I think it is pretty likely that the rest of the administration will work to implement that order. I think to imagine otherwise is to imagine that the system not work the way it is intended to work, and that people who have hitherto shown zero actual interest in constraining very dangerous and detrimental actions would somehow have a sudden change of character. It's possible — but I wouldn't bet on it. I'd be on the system working the way it is supposed to. I would also point out that the Trump people have done a very good job of making sure that the high ranks of the military are filled with loyalists.

The situations I worry about for nuclear use are not anyone waking up and feeling crazy. I worry about crises that slide out of control. I worry about pressures to escalate in the face of apparent setbacks. I worry about people who believe setting off nukes, even small ones, makes one look "tough" and "macho." Many people like this current populate the highest ranks of the American government.

Trump made pretty explicit nuclear threats to North Korea during his first term, and he occasionally references the capability. The guy, however, seems to genuinely want nuclear disarmament, but Russia and China (especially) are unlikely to come to the table, even with the New START treaty expiring in a month.

Probably. I admittedly haven't done a ton of reporting on the Oreshnik, which can reportedly go quite fast, but it's unclear what its actual operating status is.

I try not to share my personal policy preferences on subjects that I cover. That said, my personal views did indeed shift a little bit based on my reporting for this project.

Mur, why you gotta be doin the most rn

Yeah, the Sentinel program has had a lot of issues. The Pentagon is optimistic that they can salvage it by placing it under the control of a new 4-star position that directly reports to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and giving up on reusing MMIII silos. The missile itself is progressing relatively fine, from what I'm hearing. But then you get into the question of what warhead it will carry: the National Nuclear Security Administration is woefully behind schedule on reestablishing rate production of plutonium pits for the W87-1 that is supposed to go onto the Sentinel.

Thanks for the Q — I mostly cover the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, so I've got nothing for you on these.

I do not think this administration will do any nuclear sharing agreements.