Overtime – Episode #594: Julia Ioffe, John Heilemann, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Moss.

Okay, welcome back.

Welcome to Overtime.

Okay, here are the questions.

With Donald trump Trump avoiding prosecution in new york and the sacker family being shielded from criminal liability over purdue farm is it time to admit that money can buy you impunity uh well that was always the case i was gonna say that's like a long time ago what time is there anything they admitted that years ago but the trump one is astounding i mean i think two people in that office now have resigned over the decision not to prosecute him and we're talking about the family business they were going after in new york and one of them i think is out in the news this week week saying he's guilty that he believes that Trump's guilty of multiple felonies.

I mean, almost in public he is.

This has been going on for a long time now.

And look, I get it.

We normally don't prosecute former presidents in this country.

But this guy was

bad stuff.

And why did the DA in New York make that decision?

I don't know.

Is that brag?

In New York?

I don't understand.

I don't know.

Okay, I'd love.

Where are our good investigative reporters to find out that answer?

We're investigating the question of Soviet ass buzzers.

That's what we're supposed to do.

Ever since that,

ever since that came up, I've been devoting all of my investigative energy to that question.

Well, speaking of that, how would the U.S.

military respond

to a nuclear or chemical attack on Ukraine?

And unfortunately, we have to consider that possibility, don't we?

Yeah, I think that is the...

Well, let's ask you and then ask a senator.

What do you think?

Well,

you know, we were talking earlier, and I joke that Putin is just like me and you.

Obviously, he's not, because he is considering using chemical weapons and nuclear weapons, and he's put the nuclear weapons use on the table repeatedly.

And I think that is a question for us.

Well, rhetorically.

We don't know if he means it.

It's bad enough to do that, but he wouldn't.

I don't know if there's a difference at a certain point.

If the leader of a nuclear power threatens to use it, says he's put his forces on alert on like DEF CON, whatever.

I think it's...

It's happened before.

People have raised that level up to...

Well, you have to take it seriously.

Yeah, you have to take it seriously, but it could be just

brinksmanship.

What I'm saying is, I don't know what's in his mind.

And he must, that's why I asked you about how rational is he?

I mean, he always seemed like a rational guy, but nuclear would be taking it, even chemical, but especially to a level that the world would change

immensely.

A lot of his propagandists have been saying, you know, what is the point of a world existing if Russia doesn't exist in it?

And what is so scary about that is I think Putin feels so cornered and so trapped by the mistakes that he has made in this campaign, and it's become so existential for him that he might do crazy, irrational things.

The question is, if he does it in Ukraine and not in a NATO country, does NATO respond?

And now there's talk of, well, if the cloud crosses over into a NATO country,

is that that considered an attack?

A nuclear bomb on any of us is a nuclear attack on all of us.

I mean, this is the topic, actually, of this Sunday's Showtime the circus.

And we are looking at this very question.

It's like, it's been a crazy week.

I mean, you've got not only all the things Putin has been doing throughout the war, you know, as Biden was headed to Brussels, you had members of the Duma on state TV saying, if NATO rolls out peacekeeping forces, we should nuke Warsaw.

Now, you know, how seriously do you take that?

But Julia's right.

I mean, the reality is that because in the old days when you had mutually assured destruction, it was like the attack would have been Russia attacked, the Soviet Union attacked the United States or vice versa.

Both of them decided not to do that because they knew they would incinerate both places.

In this case, you've got the situation where Putin is more likely to detonate a tactical nuke.

What happens if Putin decides that he wants, in his desperation, decides he wants to send a tactical nuke into Kyiv?

It's like, well, there is no NATO doctrine of self-defense there.

And so one of the things that they're discussing, they've been discussing behind the scenes, is that question.

They don't want to come out and say what they will do and they have not.

But the question of what do you do in that situation and knowing that every war game model that's ever been done,

you get one escalation, you get one tactical nuke that you respond with one.

It very quickly turns out to be in five hours there's 90 million people dead.

So it's like

the escalation ladder ramps up very fast in that situation.

So figuring out what to do about that, how to posture on it, it's a really, really hard question.

And it's interesting, I mean, this is such a change in Moscow because in Soviet times, as fucked up as that system was, they at least understood that a nuclear war was unwinnable for anybody, right?

And now they seem to think, well, define war and define nuclear.

And what if it's a small nuke?

What if it's like a nitty-bitty nuke and it's just on Kiev, which is not in a NATO country?

Do we get away with it?

And as for

brinksmanship, you know, for months, as he was building up

so many troops around the border with Ukraine, surrounding it all three sides, there were a lot of people who were saying he's not going to do it.

That's crazy.

It's just brakesmanship, yeah.

Yeah, no, no.

So we have to believe him when he says what he's going to do.

The chemical weapons issue,

and you touched on it,

the world has to be outraged at this.

And I think it is absolutely a game changer.

It could cause escalation like we've never seen before, and bad shit happen.

But maybe on the other hand,

You know, if we could get China to join us in the sanctions, it would bring them to their knees just that fast.

Not that the sanctions aren't working a lot very, very well right now, but they're only out is China.

That's their only out right now.

But again, I'm sorry, I love you, John.

I have to do this because you are a senator.

Yeah, go ahead.

I have to press you on it.

Yes.

The nuke, let's say he does fire a nuke.

What does the United States do?

What do you vote that we do?

You are one of the 535 people.

Thank you.

If we still have a Constitution where it's the Congress that declares war, because we don't, really, I mean, they gave up that power a long time ago, and the President seems to have taken over unilaterally, which is wrong, but we could get into that at another date.

But let's say it's still up to the Congress how to respond.

What do you say we do, a nuclear attack on Kiev?

I'm telling you that the response would be very, very bad.

Would be very, very bad, because you would respond in a like manner.

And then that would be a lot of fun.

But that sounds like they're less firing off a nuclear weapon.

I am telling you that I don't think you can take anything off the table at this moment in time.

And I think it could escalate, just as John Howman has said in a way that none of us want to see.

Right.

I mean the problem is that the situation gets ramped up to the point where everyone's on high alert.

You know,

in war, there's a lot of confusion.

Nobody knows really what's going on.

There's a lot of misperception.

You've got

the phone lines are basically cut.

Normally you would have our Secretary of Defense talking to his counterpart in Moscow, not happy.

They're not taking the phone calls.

So we don't really know what they're thinking or even what they're saying they're thinking.

And in a situation like that where tensions are escalated, no one knows what the other side is thinking or what they're doing, what's posturing, what's not, the worry is more, is not like Putin's going to nuke Manhattan or London or Paris, but that a mistake gets made,

a missile gets launched, and no one's sure what it is.

It's the possibility for error, a small error that then triggers the response that is, well, we have to respond to that.

We're not trying.

That's a different issue.

We're manufactured error.

We're manufactured error.

I talked about that last week.

There have been many nukes that have been lost.

There were a couple of cases in 83 and 95 where

the Soviets thought, 83 it was the Russians in 95, thought that an attack was underway, but they didn't respond because, oh no, it's just birds or something, or our radar is screwed up.

But we're talking about, let's not avoid the question, a deliberate attack.

And it's the ultimate, like, there are no good answers.

There's only the least bad.

And I'm kind of with you, that the least bad answer that you have to go to is that it cannot stand.

You cannot set the precedent that you can nuke somebody and get away with it, it, which means that you have to nuke.

Now, maybe that doesn't mean Moscow, but I just think you can.

How else are you going to live in a world where someone thinks, because there's how many nuclear powers?

Ten now, and there's going to be more.

You have to...

It's just.

Here's the other thing.

Can I just add another thing?

That we've already gotten to a point that's really bad with Ukraine getting invaded like this now a second time.

Ukraine gave up the nuclear weapons on its territory in 1994 in exchange for territorial sovereignty.

They were granted.

There there were no concrete guarantees in the agreement that somebody would fight for them.

But now, you know, after what happened with Libya, what happened with Ukraine, if I'm a small country, I want nukes because then nobody will invade me.

It's the problem with the proliferation pressure.

Now everybody's going to want to have nukes because they've seen how this has played out.

But again, I'll say, Billy, when they do these war game scenarios, which is all we ever do, right, because we haven't actually had a nuclear war since 1945, we haven't dropped any nuclear weapons.

When they do them, there's a moment in the scenario, the first thing happens, right?

Russia launches, let's say, one tactical nuke.

At that moment, there's a choice to make.

Do you respond with a nuclear, commensurate single tactical nuclear warhead back, or do you stay conventional?

And in most of the simulations, if you choose nuclear, you end up with 100 million people dead very fast because of the way the systems are built to escalate.

And so for a lot of people,

this might be the wrong political answer, but that if you,

that is the gate.

It's that first response.

And once you go through one gate or the other you are on the path very quickly towards

not inevitable but very likely global devastation or not and again It's one of the trickiest things why when the government runs these these these tests They say they almost always end up with total global thermal nuclear war.

There's no this it's just unwinnable.

It's the way that things are built.

They're built to kill and escalate.

Great note to end on.

Yeah.

Have a great Oscar weekend, everybody.

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