S9E2 From Maine and Beyond: Nuclear Weapons Technology, Treaties, and an Uncertain Future
In this episode, we interview Rebecca Gibbons, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine, who discusses why Maine would be a strategically and politically amenable place for nuclear weapons placement, as well as the current state of affairs regarding nuclear weapons.
[00:00:00] Rebecca Gibbons: Hours long mission, what’s that and what is that like to be in that bomber and how it affects your body. But just like emotionally and psychologically, he said, if we did our mission, I might have been on a mission date that killed a million people.
[00:00:15] Eric Miller: Hello and welcome back to Maine Policy Matters, the official podcast of the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where we discuss the policy matters that are most important to Maine’s people and why Maine policy matters at the local, state, and national levels. My name is Eric Miller and I’ll be your host.
[00:00:30] Quick note before we get on with our conversation, that we recorded this before February 5th and did not know whether or not the New Start Nuclear Arms Treaty would be extended or allowed to expire and it ended up expiring. So with that in mind, we will continue on with our episode today.
[00:00:50] We’ll be continuing our conversation about nuclear deterrence in Maine with Dr. Rebecca Gibbons. She is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine. She previously served as a fellow and associate of the project on Managing the Atom at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. After receiving her PhD from Georgetown University in 2016, her research focuses on the nuclear non-proliferation regime, arms control, disarmament norms, public opinion, and global order.
[00:01:23] Her academic writing has been published in journals including Journal of Politics, contemporary Security Policy, journal of Global Security Studies Journal of Strategic Studies, Washington Quarterly and Non-Proliferation Review. Her Public Affairs commentary has been featured in Arms Control Today, the Hale US News and World Report, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War On the Rocks, and the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage.
[00:01:49] And now onto our conversation.
[00:01:52] Hello, Rebecca. Thank you for joining us today. During the Cold War, why was Maine a strategically and politically amenable location for housing nuclear weapons as part of the strategic air command in the United States? And how did our geographic location dictate that choice? Is it as simple as how far northeast the state is situated in the continuous United States?
[00:02:12] Rebecca Gibbons: Yeah. So thank you for this question and I’m just, I’m really excited that you asked about Loring Air Force Base and what was going on there. I grew up in Maine and I did not know a lot of this history and I teach nuclear weapons, so I’m really excited to visit, to go to the museum, to talk to people who are stationed there, and then to teach my students more about this.
[00:02:30] So Loring Air Force Base? Yes. It was in Limestone and it was a strategic location, as you said, for geographic reasons. So two geographic reasons in particular. So one is that, if we were gonna send bombers, nuclear-armed bombers to potentially attack the Soviet Union, then going over the Arctic is the fastest way, right?
[00:02:49] And so you want to be north for that, to make that a shorter mission for those people in the aircraft and those bombers. But also being so far east we were the most direct route to Europe. So if the US, if something happened in the Cold War and the US had to be involved in a NATO mission, then you know, it helps to be closer to Europe.
[00:03:11] And one of the things Loring Air Force Base did was refuel a lot of aircraft as they were traveling across. So that was an important part of the mission the fueling mission, whether at base or in the air in terms of nuclear weapons, which is really my focus, I think. It’s fascinating. There were B-52s, right, which are nuclear capable aircraft, which were housed at this base and they did training missions around the country. I was reading about one veteran, talking about a 19-hour mission, where they flew to Europe and back to exercise what it would really be like if they had to. And when they were doing those exercises, they did not have nuclear weapons in the bomb bays of the bombers, but they had B-52 crews that were on alert, ready to go when we were at this high alert status during the Cold War, ready to go in minutes of time to get on the runway and be up in the air with nuclear bombs. So that’s a really important part of the Cold War mission.
[00:04:09] The other thing though that is fascinating is just this large weapons depot that was there. It was originally the North River Depot and eventually became part of Loring Air Force Base, and this was, I think, fascinating. It was the first weapon storage facility built in the US was, which was specifically for nuclear weapons, right?
[00:04:28] So they knew that was the mission for this location when it was built. And this was highly classified, right? But there were many different kinds of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The US and the Soviet Union, as you probably know, experimented with a lot of different ways to put nuclear technology, nuclear devices on a target.
[00:04:46] And so there was several different types of devices and weapons underground there in this highly classified facility. But that would also mean if aircraft coming from another Air Force base had to pick up those weapons, they would pick them up from weapon storage facility. So those are the two kind of ways that nuclear arms were involved in this space in a Aroostook County.
[00:05:06] Eric Miller: It’s so fascinating. I imagine the, like the pilots and the people working with the bombers to get them ready and then the flying and loading and everything to being on alert, doing something as innocuous as like playing a game of cards and then all of a sudden it’s, okay, we’re gone and you have to be ready for that.
[00:05:22] And it, it is just like an incredible state of mind to be in and amazing to me. But you mentioned Loring Air Force base near Caribou in Limestone there in northeastern Maine, which was built in 1953. You mentioned it was highly classified, which makes a lot of sense and as far as the public perception, obviously there’s a lot of investment.
[00:05:41] People knew that, people are moving there. They’re a large construction project. What was the public perception of the airbase, or airbases like it across the country, and it seems like people weren’t necessarily sure that nuclear weapons were there, but was it like broadly known, quote unquote, that nuclear weapons were there?
[00:06:01] Rebecca Gibbons: Certainly knowing that the B-52s were there and knowing that was nuclear capable aircraft, I think the public would understand that. And of course, this is a time in history where in the nuclear age where nuclear weapons, a nuclear war, all of that is so much more salient than it’s been say in your lifetime, in my lifetime.
[00:06:17] And I think people would assume that in terms of the B-52s, I think the weapon storage facility was so highly classified that wouldn’t be something that would be regularly talked about. There were over flights, you can read stories of, students in school. Teachers had to stop talking, not necessarily the bombers, but fighter, jets flying over.
[00:06:35] I think there was, you talked about, the town grew like over 400% in a short amount of time, right. And they had schools and hospitals and stores and it was a kind of a bustling place during this period. And it seems, everything I’ve read and I’m interested in learning more and maybe interviewing people who were stationed there at the time.
[00:06:51] And it, it seems like now there’s the museum and there are days where people can come and see some of the old infrastructure, which was at the time kind of cutting edge, right? Some of the hangers that were there. And it’d be fascinating to see, but I’d love to talk to them more. But it seems like there was this positive community that was really contributing to US efforts during the Cold War and was, had a really important mission because of the geography.
[00:07:11] Eric Miller: That’s interesting and so like it, of course, that local community is pleased with the investment and the economic prosperity that comes with the 400% increase in the town population. And as far as the country goes. It seems like people are pretty, of course, we’re coming out of the victory World War II, the US is, has really separated itself as a global superpower.
[00:07:38] We’re the only ones with nuclear weapons for a very short period of time, and we’re high on our laurels. So as far as public perception of military buildup and strengthening, that there wouldn’t be much opposition to something like this.
[00:07:53] Rebecca Gibbons: Yeah, I don’t think so. I think there’s always people who are rightly terrified of nuclear war.
[00:07:57] I was reading an article about one of the people who was, I believe, a navigator on one of these B-52 crews and just talked about you talked about being ready and it’s like you have to be physically ready, right? Like you might be on this hours-long mission, what’s that? And what is that like to be in that bomber and how it affects your body.
[00:08:14] But just like emotionally and psychologically, he said, if we did our mission, I might have killed, been on a mission that killed a million people, right? And so it’s it’s really important I think, for all of us, and I’ll talk about this more in a minute, I think, but just to recognize what these weapons do and their destructive capability.
[00:08:31] And so I think people are probably more comfortable with the deterrence aspect of the mission. We’re ready and we’re alert to prevent this from happening, not because we think we’re going to go to nuclear war because we know that, would be society ending in some ways, right? Depending on how, on the nuclear exchange that occurred.
[00:08:48] And then I think I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that yes, this was a really important base and a lot of, it was an important mission, but that like many places like Loring Air Force Base that we’re, or bases, or our bases, there is certainly environmental degradation that has come with that. Right.
[00:09:09] And I did wanna mention that, this area is what we call in the US government, a superfund site, right? So the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency and federal funds are responsible for cleaning up this area. And I went back and looked at the different letters from the EPA over time, and there was a point where it’s like kind of made it sound like, oh, we’re done. This place is cleaned up. We’ve dealt with all the environmental residue. And then more recently, realizing these forever chemicals, right? These PFAS that we’ve all heard about in Maine, because in various places, they’re in our farmland. Now the Air Force is going back with the EPA and looking at contamination of drinking water.
[00:09:48] And you can read, this is all on a government website, so there’s real positive, but there’s real negative, and it has affected the drinking water of people who have lived in the surrounding area. And it’s partly for this like foam that was used to potentially put out fires and would’ve been trained with, but, leaches into the surrounding environment.
[00:10:06] So I, I just, I don’t wanna make it sound like it’s all this like positive story because that can be devastating to people’s health.
[00:10:13] Eric Miller: Absolutely. And it’s, I you brought, you bring that up and we actually talked about this in part one as well. The difference in the environmental ethic of, okay, we have, it was just the early fifties and late forties. A very different world than what we have now and to bring us into 2026. We now know that Loring Air Base was decommissioned in the nineties as the Soviet Union collapsed and US emerged in its unipolar moment. And at that point, Maine was not considered a strategic station for nuclear weapons anymore.
[00:10:45] And so the state of weapons technology is also developed greatly. And on top of that, nuclear weapons are not usually on top of popular discourse. So you have this confluence of geopolitical and domestic political, and changing priorities that have led to nuclear weapons somehow going from the forefront of everyone’s mind to in the, toward the bottom of the discourse, unless you have a rogue actor that were afraid that they’re going to acquire or create, develop their own nuclear weapons program, North Korea being maybe the most salient example of a regime that acquired a weapon. And Iran being maybe the most significant enduring regime that’s been trying to develop one.
[00:11:31] So how has the international community dealt with nuclear proliferation since the end of the Cold War and is deterrence the primary vehicle for preventing nuclear weapons development and use today?
[00:11:42] Rebecca Gibbons: Yeah, so I think you’re right on to say the Cold War ended and this became a much lower salience issue.
[00:11:49] When you think of the popular movies that came out throughout the Cold War about nuclear weapons, we just don’t have those in the same way. I would encourage people to watch Catherine Bigelow’s film that came out in the fall. ’cause it does. I had, I signed it to my students. ’cause it does get you a little bit back in that mindset.
[00:12:05] But yeah, that’s just not, popular culture didn’t focus on this. Our leaders didn’t talk to us about this. It becomes this sort of like esoteric Cold War thing, even though the weapons didn’t go away. Right. And they’re still devastating. So I would say, initially with the end of the Cold War, we saw some real positive developments in terms of lowering nuclear risk, right?
[00:12:26] So we’ve had a series of bilateral treaties with Russia to lower the number of nuclear weapons that we have. So START was the big one that was eventually signed by George HW Bush and Gorbachev that was signed in 91, and that is the treaty that it lowered the number of nuclear weapons the most significantly.
[00:12:47] It’s hard to give you an exact number because it depends on how you measure. Are we talking about an individual warhead? Are we talking about the kill tonnage or mega tonnage? So you’ll see I’ve seen everywhere from 30 to 50% reductions, but it’s a very significant reduction on both sides. It also allows us to exchange information about the existing nuclear weapons that we have. We exchanged telemetry data. When we tested nuclear weapons or tested a missile that would be a nuclear capable missile. We just, we had onsite expense. Onsite inspections. So just a lot of information was exchanged. I would argue that was a trust building period of time.
[00:13:28] And I like to remind people, including my students, that there was a time in the nineties when people thought that Russia was gonna join nato. Right. The nineties was a very different decade. Right. And I think about this a lot. Like what? Could something have been different in the nineties that would lead us to a different place than we are today?
[00:13:47] Or are these just big trends with great power politics that where we are between the US and Russia and China in 2026? But that’s perhaps an aside. So we did have this series of treaties, the most recent one. Was signed by Obama and extended for five years in the first days of the Biden administration, and that’s called New Start, and that actually expires very soon on February 5th.
[00:14:11] So there’s no activity that we can see between Putin and Trump. I think Trump’s most recent quotation is just if it expires, and at that point we will have no. No international law or legal treaty limiting the number or capping the number of nuclear weapons in the US and Russia and those two countries matter the most because as of now, of the nine nuclear weapons states, the US and Russia have 87% of all the weapons in the world, right?
[00:14:44] So Trump has said, oh, he’d like to bring China in. Putin has said, I think that. France and Britain’s nuclear weapons should be part of that, but neither side seems really interested in those arguments, and so it seems like it’s going to expire, which I think is unfortunate, both for the possibility of a nuclear arms race.
[00:15:03] Moving forward, we maybe thought we left the era of a nuclear arms race, and also just for the trust building that comes from exchanging that information through an institution like a treaty. I’d also point out, like we talked about. Nineties, but I think there was even hope in the early two thousands for greater reductions in nuclear arms.
[00:15:22] There was a famous op-ed written in the Wall Street Journal that Henry Kissinger was a part of. It was a bipartisan group of former officials, and they made an argument similar to what you were talking about before, where. Nuclear weapons might have served their purpose during the Cold War, but now we’re more worried about terrorists having access to this material, like nuclear material.
[00:15:43] We’re worried about rogue states, like you said, North Korea, and so maybe these things are too dangerous for this era and maybe the US should actually lead in reducing nuclear weapons. That was a huge, that was a watershed moment. That was 2007. It was thought. That, maybe the status quo isn’t going to hold, and maybe we can enter an era where we really significantly reduce.
[00:16:04] And obviously we’re not there today. We’ve had increased tension between the US and Russia, between China and the us so it, it didn’t go in that direction, but it doesn’t mean that there weren’t people still really strongly advocating. And for. Nuclear disarmament. And in 2017, a new treaty was established at the UN called the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons.
[00:16:27] And that is a treaty created and ratified by non-nuclear weapons states that are against nuclear weapons that wanted to create this new treaty. To create a norm to try to stigmatize nuclear weapons, and something like a third of the states in the international system or a third of the countries are a part of that treaty.
[00:16:46] So even though we see nuclear weapons states seeming more interested in nuclear arms today, there’s this whole parallel effort of countries that are vehemently against nuclear weapons. These are countries that many of them are in what we call nuclear weapons free zones. So some whole continents are nuclear weapons free zone.
[00:17:04] So all of Africa is a nuclear weapons free zone. All of Latin America is a nuclear weapons free zone. And there, there are others. But it’s it’s fascinating that a majority of states in the world have rejected these weapons. We don’t need them. We actually think they’re a source of insecurity.
[00:17:18] Yet the nuclear weapons states keep holding onto them and saying, we need these for our own national security. Another treaty that’s really important to understand when we’re talking about the development of new nuclear weapons and potentially new nuclear weapons states, if the Iranian regime decided to go nuclear, right?
[00:17:32] With its nuclear material is a treaty known as the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons shorthand, MPT. This was a treaty that was. Primarily negotiated in the 1960s between the US and the Soviet Union, and I would argue for strategic reasons, right? They looked out at the world and said, we have this advantage.
[00:17:51] We have this weapon. A few other states have developed it too, but we don’t wanna live in a world where 20 to 30 countries have this weapon. And the MPT essentially says that any country that had detonated a nuclear weapon by January of 1967 could be an official nuclear weapon state, and everyone else couldn’t.
[00:18:08] Right? So everyone else in the world becomes a non-nuclear weapon state, and so those five happen to be the same five that are on permanent members of the security council, although that’s more of a coincidence than by design. But it’s the us, China, Russia, France, and Great Britain. It was the Soviet Union, of course, at the time.
[00:18:27] Had detonated nuclear weapons, so they become these five official nuclear weapons states. And that treaty says everyone has access to peaceful nuclear technology for medical purposes or agricultural purposes, or for energy generation. But only those five can have nuclear weapons. And the non-nuclear weapon states are inspected by international inspectors.
[00:18:48] Right? The International Atomic Energy Agency brings people into, in inspect and makes sure that no one’s diverting that nuclear material. That enriched uranium, that plutonium 2 39 into a weapons program, right? And that treaty has all but five members of the international system in it.
[00:19:06] Today it’s, most people laud it, both politicians, pundits, scholars, as being a highly successful treaty, right? We have nine nuclear weapon states when many people thought there would be many more. That treaty was. Extended indefinitely in 1995. So that’s one of the wins I would say for non-proliferation that happened.
[00:19:25] I think some non-nuclear weapon states look back today and say, that was a period of time where we had some leverage. ’cause there was gonna be a vote on extending it. Maybe we had some leverage to say, okay, we’ll go along with extending this treaty, this MPT if you do more on disarmament. That didn’t really happen.
[00:19:41] The non-nuclear weapon states didn’t really get a lot for going along with extending this treaty. So this treaty will extend in. Perpetuity, but I think the question is how much legitimacy is it going to have? How much support is it going to have? The US has been traditionally the primary promoter and stakeholder of this treaty, and yet we may be taking actions that contravene some of the spirit of the treaty moving forward in terms of where it is today.
[00:20:09] North Korea is the only country that withdrew. It was in this treaty, and that’s why it got the peaceful nuclear technology that it. Has to develop its nuclear weapons program. It withdrew in 2003. Israel, India and Pakistan are three nuclear weapons states that never joined. They’re outside the system and then the newest country in the international system.
[00:20:26] South Sudan has never joined. We know there’s a lot going on there. Also, in the nineties, we had South Africa give up its nuclear program. Very small nuclear program. Had something like six. A half nuclear weapons. So it was building a seventh at the time, but it gave up these weapons, right? So no longer became, no longer was a nuclear weapons state.
[00:20:45] South Africa is the only country to build an indigenous nuclear weapons program that then gave it up. But similarly, another success was that Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, after the Cold War ended. As they become independent nations, they have nuclear weapons on their soil from the Cold War.
[00:21:06] Actually, interestingly, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear weapons possessor at the end of the Cold War, just for how much of the Soviet Union’s weapons were on its soil. And so it took some time negotiating, but eventually those three countries gave back. The nuclear material destroyed the nuclear delivery vehicles.
[00:21:28] If you want, if you’re interested on YouTube, you can watch videos of them kind of destroying missile sites and cutting these planes apart. So I’d say those were two big successes. North Korea is also, obviously a failure. Whatever is happening with Iran seems like a failure. I’d, I have to point out that the Iran nuclear deal as negotiated by the Obama administration was succeeding.
[00:21:51] And Iran was complying with it according to international inspectors. And then the Trump, the first Trump administration pulls out of that agreement and Iran very slowly starts to walk back on, on the guardrails of that agreement. And now we know they have a lot of enriched uranium and they’re taking other, doing other activities.
[00:22:14] I, you said if they decide if they develop nuclear weapons, I think. I think there’s certainly a capability. It’s just like the political decision hasn’t been made and is still up in the air. So hopefully they stay on the line of being non-nuclear. But obviously a lot of what is going on there is very concerning in terms of their enrichment.
[00:22:33] And that brings us to the current period of time, which I think is very concerning for a number of reasons I mentioned before, right? We have growing tension between the US and Russia. Russian leaders have talked about their nuclear weapons in the context of the war in Ukraine just days ago. The Russians shot off a, it was a hypersonic, intermediate range missile that is nuclear capable.
[00:22:58] It did not have a nuclear warhead in it when it, landed in Ukraine, but it’s nuclear capable. So it’s sending a message like we could do this. And it was also very close to the Polish border, which sends a message to nato, right? None of these developments feel very good. We know China’s building up its arsenal.
[00:23:14] It’s at 600, but. At least the Department of Defense thinks that it’ll go up above a thousand in the coming years. We had President Trump made an this offhand comment about returning to nuclear testing, which we haven’t done in this country since 1992. And that would be a huge breach of a longstanding norm, right?
[00:23:32] We just, with what happened in Venezuela, it just, it does feel like we are entering this new era. We don’t have a name for it, of course yet, but it feels like a return to great power competition, spheres of influence. You keep hearing people, imp pundits say might makes right, this very kind of realist world where if you have the hard material power, the economy, military technology, you do what you want and everyone else suffers what they must, to quote Thucydides.
[00:24:00] Yeah, I think we’re at a really concerning time. And then you add to that the fact that the public is not very engaged on this issue, so it’s not like people are, I don’t know how many people are calling up their senators, Congresspeople and talking about this. You have the potential for AI in the future to somehow be involved in our military decision-making.
[00:24:17] There’s just, I would argue a lot of concerning developments right now, and particularly living in a democracy. Those of us in the public, like how are we engaging on this issue? Are we just trusting the powers that be to make these decisions on our behalf? Yeah.
[00:24:35] Eric Miller: There’s so much to tug at what you said and trying to order my thoughts here.
[00:24:41] So you mentioned some of the nuclear disarmament successes. And channeling my inner Zelensky might actually say it’s a failure that Ukraine got rid of some of their nuclear weapons, but that’s up to one’s own subjective view on what the-
[00:24:57] Rebecca Gibbons: Well, can I say something about that?
[00:24:58] Eric Miller: Please. Yeah.
[00:25:00] Rebecca Gibbons: Yeah. I think once Russia attacked Ukraine in February of 2022 a commonly heard refrain was, wow, if Ukraine had just kept those weapons that were on its soil at the end of the Cold War, it could have deterred Russia. And I just, I think it’s too simple of a counterfactual and I think it’s useful to just lay out, they didn’t have command and control of those weapons.
[00:25:20] Ukraine wanted to be closer to the west, right? Aspire to aspires to join NATO, aspires to join the EU, the European Union, to be closer to the US. None of that is possible in a world where they decide to keep their nuclear weapons. President Clinton was very clear that certain aid was contingent on them joining that treaty that I mentioned, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, the NPT on certain aid being forthcoming.
[00:25:45] So they, I don’t think with its kind of strategic position in the early nineties, I don’t think Ukraine had a lot of choice about keeping those nuclear weapons. There’s a great article by a scholar Maria Rost Rublee, where she kind of attacks that counterfactual. And I think it’s quite useful to think about.
[00:26:04] It’s very unfortunate that Russia did not abide by the security guarantee tease that it agreed to in 1994 right? I think that’s a huge failure. I do think there’s an under-appreciation. I see this as one of the existential threats. Even if, every person is not destroyed in nuclear war. If you imagine just, destroying city centers around the world with nuclear weapons, just imagine kind of rebuilding after that, what government looks like after that, what the rule of law looks like after that. I think it would completely change society, right? If we had some kind of nuclear exchange.
[00:26:37] One thing that’s come out with that effort to develop that new treaty to stigmatize nuclear weapons is one of the things that they did that was novel is they brought a lot of survivors of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or from nuclear testing, right? Nuclear testing has been done many places around the world in Algeria, in Australia, South Pacific, and Western China. Nevada, like all the different places where the US New Mexico, where the US has tested and so there are many examples of societies that have been affected by nuclear testing. And so they, when they had their conferences and to try to promote this idea that a treaty was needed to ban nuclear weapons, they would bring these people to speak and give their testimonials about what it was like to witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki aftermath, or how nuclear testing has affected the health in their community. Kazakhstan had, has a, had an Soviet nuclear testing site and they have a lot of ramifications that have come from, all the radioactive, the radiation that was there from the testing, all the byproducts of those tests, and so I think it’s underappreciated.
[00:27:46] I also think we do know that there have been nuclear accidents. Fortunately, none in which a nuclear weapon was detonated. But the US military dropped four nuclear weapons on Spain during the Cold War. There was one dropped on North Carolina. The Department of Defense has declassified a list of these accidents, and we have a more transparent society than many nuclear weapons states, so we don’t necessarily know the accidents that may have happened in other places.
[00:28:11] But when you just think there’s over 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, many of which are. Much more powerful than the ones that the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, right. Measuring in kilotons versus megatons and just the devastation. I can’t think anything else, but it’s underappreciated.
[00:28:29] We, there, there were close calls during the Cold War. Many are, some are famous, some are less known, but there are times when, just like a single individual, this happened during, even during the Cuban missile crisis, right? There was a Soviet submarine that wanted to launch like a nuclear depth charge, and there was one person on that sub that said no, and they had a rule in which, you had to have agreement and it didn’t happen.
[00:28:52] But that could have led to war. There’s examples of Russian satellites perceiving an incoming ICBM or a few ICBMs from the US and then someone having to make the decision, no, that’s probably not happening. I’m not putting this up the chain. So it just, when you really look into it and look at the close calls and accidents, the number that we have, the tensions that are increasing, right?
[00:29:14] Whenever you have crises and people are heightened, it increases the chances of misperception. We’re not in the Cold War anymore, where there was the kind of more direct communication and we were so focused on the Soviet Union and they were so focused on us, we just, we don’t have that kind of practice going on anymore right now.
[00:29:34] So I think where we are is much more dangerous than we were then in many ways. And when I mentioned AI, our focus in the US on missile defense has caused Russia and China to develop different capabilities that can overcome missile defense. That’s one of the reasons that hypersonic missiles, like the intermediate range one that Russia shot against or targeted Ukraine with on Friday.
[00:29:55] Having these exotic systems that can, not be detected by the radar for missile defense. And then we have Trump saying, well no, actually we need Golden Dome. We need a space-based system. And to me that’s just part of an arms race, right? You have, you build up defensive capabilities, the offense, they’re gonna try to compete.
[00:30:13] So you build up the defense, you build up the offense, and it’s just gonna continue. And where does that end, and we’re spending trillions of dollars on this. And I think in addition to the public being concerned for our own kind of safety and what happens if nuclear weapons are detonated, this radiation doesn’t respect borders.
[00:30:29] So you know the states are going to be affected, that we’re not targeted if there’s nuclear explosions, right? It’s just how much money we’re spending on it, as taxpayers and thinking about, where your money goes and is this, is Golden Dome where you want your money to be spent or is it on something else?
[00:30:44] You know where the US is? Modernizing all three legs of the triad. The US nuclear posture is familiarly called a triad, and it has three legs. It has an air leg, and those are the bombers. Then we have a land-based leg, and those are intercontinental ballistic missiles that are in silos in the United States.
[00:31:06] They don’t move around. They’re just in their silos. Those can be launched very promptly. And then we have the sea-based leg, which are submarines that we think of as being less detectable, and they can launch submarine launch ballistic missiles. Now, the reason why some advocate for this triad is because they see each leg having kind of pros and cons.
[00:31:28] For example, let’s take the aircraft, the bombers. You can send a bomber mission out and keep contact with it and recall it. You can use the bombers for signaling. So the US has, for example, taken either a B-2, maybe a B-52, but certainly a B-2 and overflown North Korea. Now those lanes, when they did that, did not have nuclear weapons on them.
[00:31:48] But it’s a show of force. It is a signal that this is possible, right? So that is a signaling function. You can recall them. The submarines are considered the most survivable leg of the triad in the sense that even if somehow all our ICBMs are intercontinental ballistic missiles in the continental US were destroyed and say, someone took out our Air Force bases that had these bombers on them, you would still have these submarines in the ocean that have extreme firepower and that’s what deters anyone from attacking us in the first place. And so there have been discussions at times, could we go down to a dyad? Could we keep the bombers and the submarines and get rid of the ICBMs?
[00:32:27] There is a pretty strong ICBM lobby. They make an argument that those ICBMs are a sponge that will absorb a bunch of the adversaries first strike that they have to calculate these different silos in as they do it, and those are the ones that are on alert and can be launched quite quickly. So that’s the advantage there, right? We’re getting new intercontinental, so ballistic missiles, the new Sentinel program, we’re getting new submarines, subs that are nuclear power, also launch nuclear missiles.
[00:32:55] And we have the Raider, the new bomber that is nuclear capable. And so you can see different assessments of how much that’s gonna cost, but it is billions, maybe trillions of dollars, and so I just think as taxpayers, it’s important to understand that, and I don’t, this is something I think about every day I wish people cared more about this issue, but I know any person that studies an issue a lot, like people wish people focus more on the environment and climate change or any number of things.
[00:33:24] And I, I don’t blame people for not, our lives are very complicated, right? We have a lot of things pulling on our time. There’s just so many ways in which, who has time to dedicate themselves to really learning about this. And, but I do think it’s really important.
[00:33:39] Eric Miller: Yeah. And what my immediate reaction to what you say there is the communication from political leaders to be the ones that underscore the importance of this. And I think many do that from time to time, but at the same time, there’s a lot going on. And so that’s what we try to cover on the podcast. And you’ve been doing a great job articulating how Maine was relevant in during the Cold War and where we stand now. Is there anything else you’d like to add that we haven’t discussed yet that you’d like to plug resources or any additional information as we close out the conversation here?
[00:34:17] Rebecca Gibbons: No, I think we’ve, we have covered a lot in a very short amount of time, and I’m sorry for the information to overload, but I think I would just reiterate that we do seem to be entering a more dangerous time where we’re not gonna have bilateral arms control after February 5th between the US and Russia.
[00:34:32] We have new technologies that are being built, increasing tensions amongst great powers, and that these things still exist and there’s over 12,000 of them in the world. When I’m at the beginning of the semester, when I teach my class on nuclear weapons, I always ask students to try to estimate, how many nuclear tests happen in the world, in the Cold War, or in the nuclear age, how many nuclear weapons exist in the world, how many nuclear weapons states are there?
[00:34:56] And pretty consistently people underestimate. And so I think, I think it is something that we all need to learn more about and we can’t necessarily count on leaders to talk about this. Yeah, there’s other policies that I think are important to think about. The something that came out, I think from the Kathryn Bigelow movie, House of Dynamite, I have a recent paper out with a think tank in DC on sole authority, and that movie gets at sole authority.
[00:35:21] So Idris Elba is the president, right? And when it comes to the decision of whether we use nuclear weapons in this country, the buck stops with that person, right? Sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. And that’s another thing that some people in Congress have been concerned about. Do we want an individual to have a first use launch of nuclear weapons against another country?
[00:35:40] Is that a wise policy? Our alert posture, we have a launch on warning posture. So we would be able to deploy, say our ICBMs before they are attacked and destroyed by an adversary. But that also means that, there’s possibilities of accents and misperceptions take on kind of a, another level of, I don’t know, the the kind of stress and import around them.
[00:36:05] It just takes on another level when you have that kind of posture. Some countries keep their delivery vehicles and their nuclear warheads demated, so you wouldn’t have that same kind of pressure that we have with our alert posture. So I think there’s so many different policies we could talk about, but I think thinking about sole authority, thinking about how much money we spend on these, thinking about our alert posture, all things that ultimately, it would be nice if the public knew more about, so we could have more public debate about, what we want our government doing in our names. We do know what nuclear weapons do to bodies. We do know what they do to cities. We do know what they do to the environment. And so those are facts that we do know.
[00:36:44] Again, the devastation wrought by these weapons. If people are interested in this, Alex Wellerstein is a nuclear scholar who has something called Nuke Map, and I don’t know if that came up in your previous discussion, but you can go to a website called Nuke Map and go to any kind of place in the world geographically, pick which weapon you wanna use.
[00:37:02] Do you want it to explode in the air? Do you wanna explode in the ground? And you can see what kind of effects it would have. What is the casualty rate, what kind of radiation perimeter do you have around ground zero? And it’s pretty scary when you look at some of the weapons that are in current arsenals and what they can do.
[00:37:21] Eric Miller: That’s fascinating. We’ll link that in the description. And it sounds like Loring Air Force Base did not have nuclear silos, but they did have the bombers because they’re specifically built for that.
[00:37:31] Rebecca Gibbons: They had the bombers.
[00:37:33] Eric Miller: Thank you, Rebecca, so much for taking the time to chat with us and illuminate us on the state of the world and nuclear weapons and international relations, all of that, and as it relates to Maine.
[00:37:45] Rebecca Gibbons: Well, and thank you so much for your interest in this topic. I really appreciate your questions and just that we get to talk to the public more about these issues.
[00:37:56] Eric Miller: If you enjoyed this episode and the previous discussions we’ve had on this podcast, please consider donating to the Maine Policy Review by visiting the journal’s website linked in the description. Our team includes Barbara Harrity and Joyce Rumery, co-editors of Maine Policy Review, and Jonathan Rubin, director of the Policy Center.
[00:38:13] Special thanks to professional writing consultant Kathryn Swacha, technical writer Nicole LeBlanc, and podcast producer, editor, and writer Jayson Heim. Our podcast music is composed by Nathanael Batson. Visit MCSlibrary.org to learn about Margaret Chase Smith, the library in our work in public policy and education.
[00:38:34] Find episode materials, the full transcript and resources in the description of this episode, and on the Maine Policy Matters website. Share your topic ideas via the form on our website and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can find all of our episodes wherever you find your podcast. And thank you for listening.