Transcript - America This Week, September 27, 2024: "How to Tell a True Nuclear War Story"

In an Internet landscape awash in warnings about things to be afraid of, there's surprisingly little concern about war. Also, Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week, I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you? I’m in Vegas so that’s why-

Walter Kirn: Which hotel? It’s a town I spend a lot of time in.

Matt Taibbi: Caesars Palace, baby.

Walter Kirn: Oh, right.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Famous from the Johnny Carson show back in the ‘70s. When I’d watch it at night and stay up late, everybody had always just come from Caesars or was playing at Caesars. Shecky Greene, Rodney Dangerfield and-

Matt Taibbi: Don Rickles maybe or ...

Walter Kirn: Rickles, yeah. And you got the feeling from the chat on Carson that they were all going to meet up at Caesars maybe later after the show. Johnny would maybe fly out and Charo and Carol Channing and all the other-

Matt Taibbi: Moe Greene.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, the regulars, they’d get together in a big suite and recreate the Brat Pack days or something and it had a huge romantic charge for me, Caesars Palace. When I first went to Vegas, it was a regular sized hotel but they’ve added massive pylon, extra towers to it now.

Matt Taibbi: By itself, it’s like Dubai. I got dropped off by an Uber when I got here and, to get to the hotel registration, I think I walked two and a half miles.

Walter Kirn: Did you drop any money along the way into a-

Matt Taibbi: I did not. I am now old enough that I don’t do that anymore but, yeah, no, it’s cool. My kids are here and they had never seen gambling machines before and they said, “Even the airport has slot machines, why do people gamble so much?” And I don’t know, how do you answer a child question like that but …

Walter Kirn: Tell them it’s a compulsion unleashed by the devil early in human history which has only grown over time.

Matt Taibbi: And it paid for all of this.

Walter Kirn: And it paid for all of this. But the very splendor of Las Vegas, of course, is proof that gambling doesn’t pay because it’s built with the money they make off you losing.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah, of course, yes. It’s why it’s doing so well now because, as desperation increases, people gamble more and, yeah, no, it’s a great, it’s a beautiful thing.

Walter Kirn: Right.

Matt Taibbi: So, yeah, it’s one of the only booming parts of the country it feels like.

Walter Kirn: Well, I live there part of the time and I can tell you that, though it’s booming in places, Las Vegas has a lot of dry crust on its bread and, as you get away from what I call the stationary cruise ship of the Strip, you see all kinds of things and some pretty despairing neighborhoods. As you gamble more, you move further toward the outskirts of Las Vegas until you get to a part in East Las Vegas where there are actually chickens running down the street, I’m not kidding.

Matt Taibbi: Probably feeding on your component remains that you have sold to try to pay your last debts on the way out of the city. Haven’t gotten there yet but we’ll see.

Walter Kirn: Good.

Matt Taibbi: So, all right. A lot happened this week, we wanted to start with a story that’s not getting a lot of attention though it seems to us it should. But a couple of days ago, it was Wednesday, I think, when this happened, that he did this? Let’s roll the Reuters story. Curiously, most of the stories about this, we had to get from foreign media.

Vladimir Putin: Speaker 1: The updated version of the document proposes that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear weapon state but with the participation or support of a nuclear weapon state should be regarded as a joint attack on the Russian Federation. The conditions for Russia’s transition to the use of nuclear weapons are also clearly defined. We will consider such a possibility as soon as we receive reliable information about a massive launch of aerospace attack means and their crossing of our state border, meaning strategic or tactical aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, hypersonic missiles and other aircraft.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, yeah. So, it’s a Reuters translation of a Vladimir Putin speech and the essence of it is that he is essentially changing Russia’s nuclear strategy or nuclear policy, he’s announcing a change to it. And the key part comes at the end where he talks about how we retain the right to deploy or apply nuclear weapons even when ordinary military attacks are undertaken against Russia or Belarus by a country that’s allied with the nuclear power. So, he’s clearly referring to Ukraine. So, this seems like a pretty big deal because this is in the middle of a discussion by the United States about whether or not it’s going to green light the use of long-range missile attacks into Russia but the reaction in the Western press has been interesting. So, let’s look at The New Republic. Trump suggests giving Vladimir Putin whatever he wants, so that’s their reaction on that day.

Walter Kirn: And what about the story supports that headline? Did you read it? I did.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, it’s actually an unrelated story. It’s all about how, if Ukraine were to suddenly surrender, apparently Trump said that would be much better and so they led with that.

Walter Kirn: In my reading of this story, what he’s saying is it would’ve been much better if there had been a negotiated peace before this point. And it didn’t sound like a call for surrender at all, it did call for negotiations but the headline spins it as capitulation which I found unfortunate. In a time of nuclear confrontation or pending nuclear confrontation, you would hope that the magazines which support the American government would be less contentious and less hyperbolic.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Okay, playtime’s over so you would think that, with this particular topic, you would cut out whatever normal political stupidity you’re applying to news coverage and play a little bit straighter, I guess. But there were a few, I would say, down the middle stories, NBC did one basically saying in a bland way that Putin had changed his nuclear policy but there were an awful lot that had a different character. We should probably ... Let’s look at the Kyiv Post which had this story called EU Rejects Nuclear Threat, Reckless Nuclear Threat. And that’s fine, you can call it a reckless nuclear threat, I think that’s totally legitimate. It’s the quote that’s a third of the way down the story if we scroll down just a little bit. Here we go.

“Not for the first time, Putin is playing a gamble with his nuclear arsenal,” EU foreign policy spokesman, Peter Stano told reporters, “We of course strongly reject these threats.” Walter, what does it mean to reject a threat?

Walter Kirn: I’ve been puzzling over that question all morning. Does it mean that we deny that it took place? Does it mean that we refuse to change our behavior as a result of it? Does it mean just, oh, go away? I’m not sure. I would think that any threat listened to would cause some consideration of some kind but merely to reject it sounds rather unwise or unreal. It has to figure into their considerations at this point. I guess they’re saying he’s full of it, don’t listen to this guy, he’s a blowhard. I saw in some of the other articles he’s just a bully, he’s trying to bully us again.

Matt Taibbi: Which could be true, that’s possible. But this is a nuclear power that is saying that it is changing its nuclear policy and, if we do what we’re considering doing, it will-

Walter Kirn: And what, Zelenskyy is in the United States right now lobbying for us to do. I think this was obviously timed to Zelenskyy’s visit to the UN, to Pennsylvania where they signed artillery shells next to his people and him. We’re obviously doing our own bullying, I guess. He’s about to present or has his, quote, path to victory which, as I read it, involves strikes into Russia. Now, I would guess that, United States not having been invaded as many times as Russia has in the last many decades, has a different feeling toward these things but I doubt that they’re going to let themselves ... I’m no geopolitics expert but I doubt they’re going to let themselves be thoroughly harassed on their homeland with missiles and so on without some response and it could go up that high depending on, I suppose, where those missiles land. The word as translated from Putin was massive. In other words, if one or two come in, he might not respond but, if he felt-

Matt Taibbi: I listened to the ... Sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: But if he felt threatened in a very substantial way, he would be willing he says.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So, he’s convening the ... In this meeting, it’s a three or four-minute intro with his security council and he reads out notes that he’s clearly just made to himself. And yes, he does say that but there were a couple of moments in his delivery that were, I thought, a little bit shocking. He uses this word [foreign language 00:11:57] which is common. So, he says, if there is a common military attack, that will invoke the response and that word stood out to me.

Walter Kirn: What does he mean an ordinary attack or common-

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. In other words, he’s saying, if the previous doctrine required a nuclear exchange or a nuclear strike before they would launch, now, an ordinary or common or-

Walter Kirn: Conventional in our terms.

Matt Taibbi: Conventional, yeah, yeah. So, he says that and you can see the looks on the faces of the security council guys, they’re ashen and looking down as he is giving this address, who knows what that means. But he didn’t look happy, Putin is somebody who likes to walk with a swagger, he does a lot of things that are intended to give him this Clint Eastwood-esque gunslinger personality and he likes to give a delivery that shows that he’s exceedingly confident. This one, he seemed a little bit anxious to me so, I don’t know, who knows what that means, we shouldn’t, I guess, read that too much into it.

But the point is, this story is, in its outlines, is not unlike something like the Cuban Missile Crisis where we had a story that one side considered not terribly serious and another side considered very serious. The Soviets back in the ‘60s were like, “Well, what are you talking about? You have missiles in Turkey, we’re going to put our missiles in Cuba, what’s the big deal?” and then, of course, we took it very seriously and that led to this very dire moment. So, why is this story not getting any traction whatsoever it seems like in the United States? In the rest of the world, it is, by the way, there’s some significant coverage of it.

Walter Kirn: Well, I have only theories. Number one, there’s an election in the US, Zelenskyy has now very conspicuously aligned himself with the Paris Democratic side and-

Matt Taibbi: Which has, by the way, triggered a letter of protest from the Republicans from, yeah.

Walter Kirn: Well, I would protest it. They used military assets to bring them into a swing state and have a photo op at an arms factory while very clearly expressing his disdain for Trump and for Vance as well. So, to call it a campaign stop, I think is fair if you’re the other side. I’ve never seen anything like it, especially not at this point in an electoral cycle. But my guess as to why it’s not being covered is this, it hurts Harris. I think it hurts the Democratic Party in general which doesn’t have a visible president at the moment. If we are on the brink of some kind of terrible engagement with Russia, wouldn’t you want something more than the rather elusive, incoherent Joe Biden at the helm?

Number two, looking toward the future and joy and all of the themes that we just saw last night re-articulated by Harris, don’t seem to have anything to do with ominous nuclear confrontation. I think it’s an issue that they feel helps Trump and they’re just downplaying it. They decided, oh, he does this kind of thing, why not just marginalize it for purposes of not, I think, scaring people into thinking that is World War III that Trump talks about but Harris doesn’t mention. It was, to me, significant in the debate that, when he gave a warning about it, she acted as though she just hadn’t heard it, she didn’t engage at all with the subject except to say, suggest that he was soft or something.

Matt Taibbi: The old World War III, that old saw basically, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, the old World War III saw. And so, the media right now, I think, to any fair-minded observer, the big media, the corporate media is trying to get Harris elected and they must have made some determination that this isn’t good for her and/or it’s trivial. I don’t think it’s trivial and I don’t see how they could. In any other situation, I think they’d report it if it had happened a year ago, say.

Matt Taibbi: Well, imagine how this story would’ve played in the ‘80s for instance? Back then, if a Soviet Bear bomber drifted off course into Greenland or something like that, we’d be scrambling jets from six different bases, it’d be the headline news story on every station. Every one of those confrontations got a lot of ink, right?

Walter Kirn: Sure.

Matt Taibbi: And when they rattled their sabers, we tended to actually sometimes overplay those stories in part, I think, to rally people to support more military spending now we’re doing the opposite. When Putin is overtly trying to threaten the United States and we should point out he’s not talking-

Walter Kirn: He’s not threatening the United States which isn’t at war with him, he’s threatening Ukraine. In other words, he’s saying that if I ... I don’t think he’s threatening retribution against the mainland of the US, he’s talking about the theater of war over there and low yield missiles, so to speak.

Matt Taibbi: Well, okay, this was the story ... I know we’re not supposed to watch Sputnik but this was a story on Sputnik, I think, this week as all this was going on.

Speaker 2: Amid escalating tensions in the Ukraine conflict, attention is shifting once again to Russia’s formidable nuclear arsenal, particularly the Akula class submarines, once considered a symbol of Cold War brinkmanship. These colossal vessels known in Russia as Project 941 and dubbed sharks are the largest nuclear submarines ever built. And as Russia’s conflict with Ukraine drags on, the West is forced to confront, not just the immediate military threat, but the broader specter of nuclear deterrence that Vladimir Putin could still wheel.

On September 23rd, 1980, the first of the Akula class submarines was launched from Severodvinsk marking a significant shift in naval warfare. These submarines were built not to assert dominance through sheer size alone but out of strategic necessity. Designed as a counter to the United States’ Ohio class nuclear submarines, the Akula’s most defining feature was its capacity to carry 20 R-39 submarine-launched ballistic missiles each far larger and more powerful than the Trident I missiles used by the US Navy.

Matt Taibbi: Okay, all right.

Walter Kirn: Do you ever get the sense that you’re watching the faux news intro to a movie when you see something like that?

Matt Taibbi: Right, yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think we actually saw that exact clip in Crimson Tide, right? That was the ... Yeah, when they had the fictional quasi-fascist president who takes over in a coup and ... Yeah, mm-hmm.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. Well, that wasn’t linked to what Putin just said but, obviously, it coincided roughly with it so that is what’s called brinksmanship. We got the big subs out and they’ve got all these missiles. I don’t know who Sputnik broadcasts to and I don’t know the ins and outs of its relationship to the state.

Matt Taibbi: It’s state media.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. And it’s, along with RT, one of the classes of media that, I guess, they don’t allow in some places in the United States, certainly not in Europe anymore. But I found this clip on YouTube so who knows what it is. But look, there was also a story I saw on Russian media about the deployment of submarines and how this might end up being strategically important, whatever. But they’re saying it and what’s the significance of their submarine arsenal has no significance to the Ukraine arena but it has lots of significance to us because they could be in New York Harbor and the whole idea is they design these things to basically have more firepower than our sub class. As you said, Russia is a country that has been repeatedly invaded, has suffered unimaginable horrors in those wars.

In the siege of Leningrad, you had 640,000 people starve to death, you had people feeding their children to their other children, you had the anti-cannibalism squads, they went through things that Americans can’t even imagine. This is still in the muscle memory of ordinary Russians and the whole idea of being invaded from the south or through Belarus is ... It’d be like if we had been invaded in Pearl Harbor six or seven times and then ships showed up near Hawaii again, that’s how they think about this stuff. So, I don’t know, I think this whole thing is crazy, the idea of going in there.

Walter Kirn: But imagine if the story was being played up here. If one reporter immediately asked Harris about it if one could find a moment in which she answers questions, if she refused to talk about, it would be significant. So, they’re making sure that doesn’t happen. If they gave the questions to Trump, Trump would repeat his ominous line about being on the brink of World War III and how I have a plan to end the Ukraine war and so on. So, it wouldn’t work to her favor for this to be a big story in the United States, it just wouldn’t. It would make work to the favor of the American people to know that this is going on.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Walter Kirn: And the idea that existential nuclear politics are being filtered from our consciousness for political reasons is scary to me.

Matt Taibbi: I don’t understand the idea of ... We can dismiss this as brinksmanship which it almost certainly is, right?

Walter Kirn: Everything is brinksmanship until the missiles fly, right?

Matt Taibbi: Right, right.

Walter Kirn: What would be a threat that they wouldn’t reject?

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Walter Kirn: I’m going to launch in one hour? He’s not going to say that. When it comes to that point, they don’t give warnings. So, whether we reject it or not, we’re probably not going to get many more warnings, maybe we’ll get this one repeated and do you feel lucky, I guess.

Matt Taibbi: I just don’t understand the logic of not telling people that this is happening. I do understand it politically but-