BEYOND STRANGELOVE: GETTING TO NUCLEAR NORMALCY

Welcome to War Room, the official podcast of the U.S. Army War College online journal, graciously supported by the Army War College Foundation. Please join the conversation at warroom.armywarcollege.edu. We hope you enjoy the program. The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense. Make sure not to miss a single episode and subscribe to A Better Peace, the War Room Podcast at warroom.armywarcollege.edu forward slash subscribe. Welcome to A Better Peace, the War Room Podcast. I'm Dr. Tom Spahr, Deserio Chair of Strategic and Theater Intelligence at the U.S. Army War College and your host for today's conversation. In September of 2023, Vladimir Putin suspended Russia's participation in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or NUSTAR, because of the U.S.'s support for Ukraine. And since then, he has positioned nuclear weapons in Belarus, conducted nuclear exercises, and warned of cataclysmic consequences for the West's continued support of his adversaries. During the Cold War, the Army trained the force to fight on a nuclear battlefield. But when the Cold War ended, the Joint Force shifted its focus away from nuclear weapons as it was fully occupied fighting counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now, nuclear is back in our wartime vernacular. And yet, I would argue that most of the Joint Force knows little about fighting in a nuclear environment. As General Merkin Muffley told us in the famous 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove, gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room. Yet we must at least talk about fighting in the war room. Here at the Army War College, we have several lessons, both in the core courses and electives, that cover nuclear deterrence theory down to conventional nuclear integration at the operational and tactical levels of war. And starting this academic year, we are fortunate to have assigned for the first time a functional area 52 nuclear and counterproliferation officer, leading a seminar, but perhaps more important, educating our faculty. So my guest today is Colonel Jeremiah Ashleman. Colonel Ashleman served as a field artillery officer before he transitioned to nuclear and counterproliferation functional area officer in 2009. He served TORS as a nuclear officer at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, or DITRA, both in the U.S. and with our NATO allies in Germany. He also served at NORTHCOM, managing the Mobile Consolidated Command and Control Platform. As a colonel, he was a military advisor to the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, or CWMD, Office of the Department of Homeland Security and the CWMD Division Chief on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. Immediately before coming to Carlisle Barracks, Colonel Ashelman served as the director for the non-nuclear capability modernization in the National Nuclear Security Administration. And not insignificant, he is a 2019 graduate of the Army War College, and that was my class. So we are, in fact, classmates. Colonel Ashelman, Jeremiah, welcome to the War Room. Thank you, Tom. Hey, Jeremiah, let's start with why. I briefly in my introduction talked about conventional nuclear integration and why it's back in our curriculum now. But you're the expert. Can you elaborate more on why this matters, on the importance of understanding nuclear operations for our military officers? Sure. Just for a little bit of context, you're absolutely right. After the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no threat. And so you go through the 90s with the peace dividend and a huge de-emphasis. That's when the army got rid of all of its nuclear weapons. And then, of course, we get into the war on terror, and there's really no thought whatsoever. It's not until the 2018 National Defense Strategy where Secretary Mattis said, we are going to have to fight large-scale combat operations against near-peer adversaries. And he specifically calls out Russia and China, both of which are nuclear arms. So the nuclear-armed battlefield became a thing. And we started thinking about it then, but we didn't really make any significant strides until Putin went into Ukraine in 2022. Him going in itself wasn't that significant. What was really significant was he was able to use nuclear coercion to get the West to back off. For a long time, we argued about sending in tanks and F-16s because we were afraid of nuclear escalation. And so I think that's really the trigger point that starts to make this significant again. And in terms of the students that are here in particular, we have experts. There's a whole core of F-A-52s. There's about 300 of us. But the experts aren't going to do the fighting. So we're here to advise. We're here to help. We're here to help plan. But we're not going to be the commanders on the ground. So the commanders need to have some good appreciation for how this works on the battlefield. Yeah, I think you nailed it. I can remember as a lieutenant and a captain, the NBC officer, we used to say it was that nobody cares. NBC is what that stood in and how foolish would that be in this environment? Yet it's not all about Putin and Russia, right? So China has a role in this as well, and North Korea. But let's talk about China specifically. How does their increase in the quantity of nuclear weapons affect both the geopolitical and the military environment for nuclear strategy? That's a great point. If you were to look at their historical use of nuclear weapons, it was as a final backstop. They had several hundred weapons, which if you were to look at the U.S. in particular, we've got 450 missile silos. So if you're going to try to do a counterforce action against the U.S. and try to cripple our nuclear military, 300 is just not enough. They're now somewhere around 600 on their way to 1,000 by 2030 and could easily be at 1,500 by 2035. Now you're getting into the realm there of being able to do some kind of first strike to be able to challenge us militarily in the nuclear space, which is a completely new direction for China. And in particular, if you were to look at how that would play out on the battlefield, it gives them a lot of options that historically they just wouldn't have had. So that Chinese threat has really given us some impetus to relook our nuclear weapons as well. So we've done this before. This isn't new. Nuclear in the curriculum, nuclear in our strategy. What can we learn looking back to the Cold War and nuclear deterrence theory that might be still applicable today? What can we learn from that whole period? So there's a couple of big pieces, some at the strategic level, some at the smaller operational tactical level. At the strategic level, some of those theories are still totally valid. The idea of shelling, being able to punish, the idea of escalation that Khan gave us in his ladder with the various rungs, those are still valid. I think we in the U.S. are behind at the strategic level. You look at, and in particular, what Russia has been able to do in the nuclear coercion space. It just seems like they have a lot more rungs. And so I don't think that we've kept up in the thought space with how do we use what is arguably the best nuclear deterrent in the world. When you just look at the capabilities and the engineering and the delivery systems that we have, we don't use that. I mean it sits there day to day as a mutually assured destruction kind of protection that backstops ultimately all of our strategies. but you don't see that used in a muscular way uh historically here in the last decade or so we've done a couple of different things we've moved some b1s to the philippines we'll surface a submarine off of the uk uh those are our messaging techniques which are great nowhere near the sophistication i don't think the russians have and so at the strategic level i would say we've got some thinking to do when you look down at the operational tactical level during the cold war we had a lot of interesting thought of how do you win on that battlefield? Again, a small nuclear weapon is maybe 10 kilotons. And 10 kilotons is relevant because we have a lot of agreements with the Europeans that will detonate 10 kilotons on their soil and not more. And so even if you look at a 10 kiloton, you're looking at a mile diameter that's just kind of gone. And then a couple of miles beyond that that blown down on fire somewhat irradiated How does that compare to to say Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II Actually very comparable So Hiroshima 15 kilotons Nagasaki about 21 And so you're looking at something very, very comparable to those size bombs. And so that gives you a good idea of what the devastation would look like. But if you're talking about something of that scale, a division front, maybe that looks like 25 or 30 miles, you're going to blow a hole in that. And so how do you set up your force? How do you maneuver? How do you disperse things in order to minimize the impact of the initial? That's important. Even more important is how do you recover from that? And so historically, for the last 30 years, we would often use a nuclear detonation as our index. It's just too hard. Nuke pops. Everybody go home. And thank you for your time. The exercise is over. The exercise is over. How do we fight in the future when we don't trigger a nuclear war? So no, that's – Right. So the first piece here is having our staffs understand there is life after the detonation. It's big, a lot of effects, but there's life after that. How do you recover and then move on? So that's a big piece of it is having the staff thought processes in place so that they don't get paralyzed. Second, we're used to dealing with mass casualty events. We train for that periodically. We've had to do that, unfortunately, from time to time. But when we talk about mass casualty events, we're talking about dozens to hundreds, not tens of thousands. And so it's a different scale that you have to think of, in particular when you're looking at the types of casualties you would have, given that the thermal pulse may be the largest area of effect. So you're going to have people that have been burned significantly, but not killed by flying shrapnel or blast or radiation. How many burn beds are there in any particular state? And usually that's often numbered in single digits or dozens. If you needed 1,500 burn beds after an event, what do you do with that? The Army is not prepared to do something like that. And so thinking through those problems now, and I'm not recommending that we've got, you know, mass units out there that can handle tens of thousands of burn victims. It's just how do we think through that problem set? Doing that thinking now and building that into the doctrine and then the training I think is critical to how we fight on the operational tactic. And building that mentality that we can fight through this, right? And we might have to fight through this if it does happen, God forbid. Absolutely. And to that effect, Hollywood, I don't think, does us any favors because they have kind of misrepresented what these things are and what they do. Right. So to your point about fighting through, to get the most effect out of a nuclear detonation, you typically want to use an airburst, which changes how the energy comes out of the weapon and what effect happens on the ground. It converts most of that effect into blast. So you'll still have some radiation. You'll still have a very, very tiny amount of fallout. But generally, you're going to be looking at blast and thermal. Well, immediately after that blast and thermal, your roads may be clogged and things are burning, but there's not a huge radiation threat. Most people think of nuclear weapon, fallout, never go in that area again. That's not really the case with airbursts. You can do that. You can use these as essentially a giant minefield and create an area denial type weapon by laying it down on the ground and making a crater. but that's not the best way to use these things. And so for a mechanized unit to have one of these go off and then button up and drive through that terrain is reasonable. I remember there were some exercises where we had soldiers like 900 meters from the point where the actual weapon went off during the early Cold War, probably with the purpose of building that confidence that, hey, we can fight through this. If we are properly equipped in our vehicles, like you said, buttoned up in the vehicle, the war will go on and we can't give that – cede that advantage rather to our adversaries. That's a great point. During those test shots, we had soldiers and Marines in trenches that were far enough back that they're not getting the immediate effect of it overhead. So they're far enough back. They're in the shadow of that thermal pulse and of the prompt radiation. And after it went off, they stood around for a while and then they walked down to ground zero, not in vehicles, just walked down. And heck, we had some tactical nuclear weapons, right? The Davy Crockett's were actually assigned to ground units that they would fire. So interesting. Hey, let's come up just a little bit and tie it into joint war footing, which is a big part of what we do here at the Army War College. You know, what should leaders serving on joint staffs and leading in the joint force think about when they're contemplating fighting in this environment? You already touched a little bit on it in the number of beds in the medical, but what else can we build upon that? What should they be thinking about? That's a good question. I think there's a handful of joint warfighting functions that are heavily impacted. Depending on how we went with this at the tactical level, fires could be impacted. You mentioned the Davy Crockett. Back in the day, the army had about 10,000 weapons, nuclear weapons, way more than what the other services had. For kind of that exact use, when the Soviet hordes would be coming through, you could use these to blow big holes in their formations and delay them while we were trying to mass forces and stop them from coming into Europe. So in the fires concept, we might actually get back to that where the army has these things. I don't know any particular inside baseball, but certainly when you consider something like a small Davy Crockett type nuke versus a JDAM, it's night and day difference. And so the effects you could achieve on the battlefield are huge. We need to start to think about that. Even if we were just going to use the B-61s that the Air Force currently has, same. It's night and day difference from the typical munitions folks are seeing. I think there's very much an intelligence component to this. kind of in two fronts. The first would be being able to detect adversary nuclear weapons. And I'm thinking predominantly about Russia. They have thousands of what we would call non-strategic nuclear weapons that are governed by the treaty. You could also think of these as battlefield nuclear weapons, ground launch cruise missiles, artillery, that kind of thing. If they're arrayed against us with stuff like that, the faster we can find it and eliminate it, the less probability gets used against us. The other aspect of the intelligence piece that I would really look at is the early warning side. If I can give a unit 15 minutes to prepare before a detonation goes off, they can assume a much higher posture and protect a significant amount of force. Again, anything inside that circle that's covered by the immediate nuclear effects, that's just gone. But those folks that are on the edge of that circle and even beyond, I mean, you could potentially save significant portions of a brigade by having just a few minutes worth of nausea, even a minute to get inside the vehicles, close the hatches, close your eyes. That's a big one. You can actually become blind if you're not even looking at it because the light is so bright. just that minute is pretty substantial. Yeah, that's interesting. And in intelligence today, I was just reading Amy Ziegert's book. When she talks about this and she talks about how we're better at detecting because we have so many people looking with commercial imagery now, but at the same time it takes away perhaps some political maneuverability for politicians. You can think about during the Cuban Missile Crisis when they were the only ones that had that information. They had privileged information. That's gone, right? But your point on the early warning to the military and particularly the land forces is a great one. And I want to go there. I want to just pull on that thread just a little bit. We specialize in land power right here at the Army War College. So what do you recommend at the Army and other land power elements or marine counterparts, et cetera, to think about when they plan for contemplating and think through fighting in this nuclear environment, which we already said we have to be able to do. Yeah, there's, I guess, a couple of thoughts. If you were to look at the rings of effects from a nuclear weapon you got the couple on the inside the closest ones to where the detonation happens There really nothing you going to do for those folks There won even be folks left And then you get to this kind of intermediate range. How big is that, would you say? Depends on yield. And so for a 10 kiloton, you're looking at about a mile. And nuclear weapons are governed by the same physics as everything else in that the area of effect essentially grows as the cube root of the yield. So going from 10 kilotons to 20 kilotons does not double your effect. And so going from two to eight would double your effect in essence because you're doing the cube root piece. so thinking about um units and the protection function uh there's nothing you're going to do for those folks in them in the inner ring then you're going to have this ring of folks uh who are wounded uh most of them have probably received a lethal dose which means there's really nothing you can do for them uh other than make them comfortable for as long as you can and then you're going to have the walking wounded those are the folks that have been hit by flying shrapnel maybe a little bit burned. If we were to look at preserving combat power, those are the folks that are going to be able to return to the fight. And so having first an understanding of what those rings look like, how big they are, being able to quickly measure what that yield will be and slap that on a map so that you understand, all right, I want to send our equivalent of first responders into this area and start bringing those people out and taking care of them. And that's huge. the other piece and it's very much coupled to the discussion about the early warning piece the stuff that we have the the nbc type suits are really good at keeping out particulate matter they're not going to keep out radiation at all so the radioactive particles great and really for that you just need the mask for the rest of it the the suit isn't going to do you any good But being inside of those vehicles is pretty substantial, especially if you're in a tank. The more mass you can put between yourself and the blast, the more protected you are. So as we look at future force development, this would be an area that we need to start to think about in terms of the protection value of the people. And then lastly is the protection value of the equipment. We have a lot of MIL standards out there that govern how resilient equipment is to electromagnetic pulse. When your nuclear weapon is close to the ground, the electromagnetic pulse is small and usually overcome by the other effects. So you don't – it doesn't matter because whatever was going to be affected by the EMP is affected by something else. But when that weapon gets up higher into the atmosphere, that EMP grows and it can grow massive. It can be thousands of miles wide. And so looking at putting those functions back in, those MIL standards never changed. We have a really good appreciation for just how hardened something needs to be. It just costs money. It costs weight. And so starting to enforce some of those standards back in to that level. So again, our radios are hardened, but we need to make sure everything's hardened to that level. That's why some of those radios are probably so heavy, you know, that we would think because they have that coating. That probably makes some resistance to that EMP. And I hated that as a young paratrooper when I had to jump that thing in. Why is this thing so stinking heavy? I can buy a cheap one at Radio Shack. That's a lot lighter. But there's a reason for that. There is, and even to the connectors so that the connectors can prevent some of that feedback, which is another excellent point that you bring up. I can harden my radio to the nth degree and protect it, and we have that technology. Or I go to RadioShack or whatever replaced RadioShack, and I buy 100 really small, really cheap radios, and I keep a bunch of them powered in the back of a truck that's protected. And when it happens and this one on my belt is fried, I just go grab another one. That's another way to think about it and might actually be a more effective way to do business. I hadn't thought about that. It seems like it would make sense for us to fight dispersed in a nuclear environment. And if you remember, we had the pentomic divisions right back in the 1950s and 1960s. There were groups of five versus the three regiments and three battalions. But can you describe what the thought process was behind a pentomic division? Sure. The governing thought – and this came largely from the airborne generals who had fought dispersed in World War II. Let's make smaller units that can operate independent. So they bring their own sustainment with them and they can operate independent of a division headquarters, which is helpful because the division headquarters is going to be a target. but that we also give them a tremendous amount of firepower. So you talk about the weapons that the army had. That was driven largely by these pentomic divisions. Let's give them this unbelievable firepower. Not a lot of stay in power. Divisions were often less than 10,000 people. But we give them decent mobility, a truckload of firepower, and we're going to win on the offensive side rather than trying to take hits from these weapons. And when we do take hits, It's losing one of five rather than two-thirds of five. Good concepts all. The pentamic division didn't last very long, largely because it just didn't have the staying power. So when I need that division to do something conventional, it just didn't have enough force to be able to do it. So some balance of having enough, making sure it's spread out enough, being able to concentrate that on the objective, because that's still a very, very important part of the way we fight, and then be able to disaggregate it again quickly. The better my intel is, the more early warning that I have that I could disperse, then that works in my favor. If I don't have that good early warning, and in particular with a lot of the battlefield-type weapons that the Russians field, we're not going to have a lot of time because they're so close to the front. Right. So it seems like the better option is to be able to task organize relatively quickly to spread the force out if we were to get in that environment, but not to cripple ourselves by having these things full-time, small without staying power in case we have to fight a counterinsurgency or something like that or mass forces. Makes sense. Hey, so you gave a great lecture earlier this week to the students. You spoke in that lecture about several broken arrow incidents. I thought it was fascinating. Can you explain to our listeners what you mean by a broken arrow incident and perhaps what's your favorite or maybe favorite is not the right word but the most instructive about the security of our nuclear weapons? That's a great question. We've got two terms that we typically use. The first is bent spear, and that's where we have a weapon that is damaged. It is probable that it won't function as advertised, and then we have to take it out of service, send it back to the Department of Energy and get it fixed and get a new one. Broken arrow is when we have some kind of incident with a weapon, and that could be a catastrophic accident or it could be where somebody tries to take one from us, those types of events. Probably one of the most interesting and certainly politically, the ramifications of the politics lasting the longest was from Palomar, Spain. In 67, 68, we were flying Operation Chromedome, which was a continuous airborne alert where we had three routes all headed toward the Soviet Union, one east, one west, and one north, where the aircraft were always loaded with nuclear weapons and there was always one on station. So you'd have one being loaded. You'd have one en route to station, one on station, one coming back from station. And it's just a continuous churn in three different directions. As you might imagine, when you've got 12 aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons continuously around the clock, eventually things happen. For years on end, probably. For two years. Two years. It was actually an accident, a broken arrow that ended Chrome Dome because it was just becoming politically challenging. But the one on Palomaris, we had an aircraft loaded with four nuclear bombs. It was doing a refueling with a KC-135 tanker. The refueling operation didn't go well, and the aircraft – both aircraft started coming apart. Unfortunately, all the aircraft on the tanker were killed. A couple of the crew on the bomber bailed out and survived, but all four bombs came down. It kind of happened close to the coast. So you had one bomb that went into the water and three bombs that went to land. They were using conventional high explosives at the time which are more shock sensitive than unconventional high explosives And when they hit the ground the explosives detonated Now this is both a good news and a bad news story The good news is that our one safety functions worked If you have one detonator go off it will not create the spherical compression needed for the weapon to go nuclear. It will just start deadening on one side and the explosives will essentially blow the plutonium core out the other side. So the high explosives went off, But the nuclear part of it did not go off. Correct. The sad part of that is it took that plutonium, turned it into a powder, and scattered it all over a bunch of tomato fields. So bad. Bad tomatoes. Bad that we dropped three nuclear bombs on Spain. It probably doesn't help. It doesn't help. Political challenges, I can imagine. There were significant political challenges. The third bomb landed on the ground didn't go off. So we were able to recover that. A couple of interesting aspects to this. The bomb that landed in the water, of course, there was nobody that could really pinpoint where that was in the water except a Spanish fisherman who was out there and said, the bomb's right over there. And when they went down, that's where they found it. It took a while for us to get there and took a while to find that fisherman who was offered up the information. We went down. We started bringing it up. We dropped it. And when it hit the seafloor. It was twice dropped. Dented the weapon. All right. So now you've got like some significant damage to the weapon. we were able to bring it up it did not go nuclear either the weapons that did explode on spanish territory contaminated those tomato fields which led to a lot of fear that well the tomatoes are now going to be radioactive the high explosives went off but the nuclear did not correct scattered that correct so it was a you know it was a 50 pound hand grenade with radioactive material So it was essentially a dirty bomb. But then who wants those tomatoes? We went through, we scraped up 1,400 tons worth of dirt, put it into 55-gallon drums, brought it back to the states. By scraping up the topsoil there, you're essentially getting most of the radioactive material, but you can't get all of it. And that wound up being the problem. So for quite a while, the Department of Defense bought the tomatoes that those farmers grew to keep their economy going. But what do you do with all these tomatoes? Well, they put them in the commissary to demonstrate really to the international audience that, see, we said they're good. They're actually good. We'll eat them ourselves. Effective but disturbing at the same time with both of us having military families. Yeah, and I'm not sure if they told the commissary customers about that or not. So this lasted quite a while before the Spaniards were content that it was safe. There is still some residual radioactivity there. It's minimal. It's a couple of times background. So it's not harmful. But we paid the Spaniards a lot of money over the years, and we made our final payment in 2014. So this happens in 66, and it takes us until 2014 to finish paying the economic damages from nuclear weapons that didn't go nuclear. Okay. No, that's a great story, and thank you for sharing it. And we're getting near the end here, but I always like to talk a little bit about Hollywood, right? And Hollywood can be both helpful and problematic surrounding war, particularly nuclear war. So what are your recommendations? What are the best movies or TV series you recommend to people? And then what are the most problematic? Yeah. I think a good one back from the 80s, and this one had huge TV viewership when it aired, was by Dawn's Early Light. It's kind of an older one. You've got a B-52 crew, but you've also got the political aspect. and it largely deals with escalation management. At the end, escalation wins, deterrence fails, but it is a fairly tense movie. It was aired publicly and had one of the highest viewings of the time. I think more contemporary, The Day After does a pretty good job of showing you the effects on a population after these things, not the population directly under the bomb because that population is gone, but those that are left in the aftermath of these things. when they're close enough to the effects to feel them. And then very, very recently, House of Dynamite, although very disgusted with the ending, does a really, really good job capturing the system that goes into place from the time you detect a launch to the time the president executes an order. And I love how they did it from the three different perspectives because as soon as that alarm trips, and it trips in many places at once, the actions that go into effect are almost instantaneous it is it is awesome to watch our system jump into action when when it's needed yeah and the way that's presented in house of dynamite is is is terrific you feel the tension you really do they really build it up how about how about bad ones what one drives you crazy i think probably my least favorite would be broken arrow uh i won't critique the acting and all um but the scenario you might get in trouble you know That's fair. With my mother, if you critique John Travolta. I will stay away from that. But the scenario itself is pretty implausible. OK. So just terribly unrealistic is what you don't like about that one. How about your personal – what's your personal favorite nuclear war movie? Believe it or not, Dr. Strangelove is required viewing by all 52s. We take a night when we're out at the qualification course to grab our popcorn and our soda and watch that. But it's pretty much required viewing for all strategists as well. I think that all instructors here at the Army War College because it's – especially with our dean is a huge fan of it. He has a nuclear scholar himself. So I think recommendation to all Army War College instructors, watch Dr. Strangelove. I love it. In particular, you've got this like absurd humor that's running through the entire thing that underpins a very, very significant reality. And so you can watch it. You can laugh at it. And then a couple of hours later, you're like, wait a minute. So it does make you think quite a bit. That scenario in and of itself was plausible for part of our history when we were concerned about decapitation type events. That could actually have happened. Probability low, but could have. We have moved well past that. Right. So while we've moved past that scenario, we certainly haven't moved past quoting Dr. Strangelove. That will be part of our curriculum here. Okay. So before we wrap up, I always like to give my guests the opportunity to have the last word. Any alibis, what haven't we spoken about that you think our audience should know in terms of nuclear strategy and operations? Yep. Thank you. So the Army in particular has been moving back into this space for a little bit. But PME is the first part, and we started with basic training and the first lieutenant course. It used to be called OBC. Now it's BOLIC something. And as the years have gone, we've moved that education up. We're now to the point where we're building this education into the War College so that the whole force has some understanding of these weapons. But it's just some understanding. So for the folks that are leaving here getting ready to take brigade command, your soldiers have some appreciation for what this looks like. But it's kind of like when you get a brand new soldier from basic training and they've got some individual skills, but you've got to teach them the collective. It's the same thing. We would love to see commanders build this into their training plans so that not only their staffs, as we talked about, can think through this and not get paralyzed, but their soldiers are ready to do that very rapid response and then fight through confidently. All right. That's terrific. So, Jeremiah, thank you for your time today. We are out of time. So just one more time, I want to thank Colonel Jeremiah Ashelman for joining us on A Better Peace, the War Room podcast. And thanks for what you're doing here at the Army War College. We love having a 52 on the staff now to help us bring back this critical understanding of nuclear war. And thanks to all of you for listening And please send us your comments on the program And suggestions for any future programs If you enjoyed the podcast I encourage you to subscribe to A Better Peace And please take time to review And tell a friend about the podcast Because that's how we get the word out to our listeners best From the War Room, I am Tom Spahr And that concludes our program Thank you for listening The views expressed in this podcast reflect those of the speakers And do not necessarily reflect the views policies, or positions of the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense. Let us know what you think. Provide us your feedback, comments, or suggestions through our webpage at warroom.armywarcollege.edu. And have a great day.