ExclusiveBehind the Scenes of Nuclear Diplomacy With Gloria Duffy

Our Bay Area Innovator today is Gloria Duffy. Gloria has been Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration. When the Soviet Union broke up, there were nuclear weapons left on the territory of Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. We managed to eliminate 7,000 nuclear weapons in those countries, got the commitment of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to become non-nuclear. In April of 2022, she was appointed by the Speaker of the House to a Congressional Commission regarding the United States' most effective nuclear weapons strategy, as well as the country's overall strategic posture and stability. We had very deep briefings by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. I had seen some evidence that China was adding to its nuclear arsenal significantly. I was concerned before, but more concerned after I learned the details. Currently, she is the President and CEO of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903. It is so important for us to be unified as a country, especially when it comes to our defense. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Espas. Gloria, welcome to our program. Thank you so much. Happy to be with you. Glad to have you here. So, you've had an amazing career, and you continue to have an amazing career. So, I would like to, you know, we probably can talk forever about the different chapters in your journey. We can only touch on a few of them. First, I'd like to ask you about your time in the 90s, when you were the Assistant Secretary of Defense under the Clinton administration, and you negotiated the weapons of mass destruction dismantling with, I guess it was Russia already at that time. It was no longer the Soviet Union. Please tell us about it. What was it like working with the Russians, and specifically, what was accomplished through your tenure? Thank you. And it was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Okay, it's a long title, and I think... It's a long title. Didn't you have like the longest title in the White House? In the Clinton administration, yes. So, I was based in the Defense Department. When the Soviet Union broke up, there were nuclear weapons left on the territory of four of the countries, four of the new countries, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Only one of those, Russia, was entitled to keep the weapons. As the inheritor to the Soviet Union, under treaties with the U.S., there was really only supposed to be one country with the weapons. So, the U.S. policy was to try to get the other three countries to give up all the nuclear weapons on their territory. And for Russia to do some things, we also wanted them to do to reduce the numbers, protect the weapons better, and do some other things. So, I was involved in negotiating with four countries, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. We worked with them on their nuclear weapons, also chemical weapons, biological weapons, and also the expert scientists who had the knowledge of how to make the weapons. We did some things to ensure that those scientists stayed home and worked on civilian projects and did not go to other countries and help them make nuclear weapons. So, it was a program created by the U.S. Congress. Senators Nunn and Lugar, a leader from each party, led passing some legislation called the Nunn-Lugar Act, or the Cooperative Threat Reduction Act, in which the U.S. Department of Defense was allowed to take $400 million a year and work with those countries to get rid of their weapons of mass destruction. Mainly nuclear weapons. So, that's what I did. I worked at the Defense Department with our Secretary of Defense, with my boss, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, and a whole team, and within the government, in the White House, State Department, intelligence community, and with other countries also, NATO, Japan, to eliminate those nuclear weapons, especially outside of Russia. So, we didn't end up with a whole new group of nuclear powers, nuclear weapons powers. We managed to eliminate 7,000 nuclear weapons in those countries, got the commitment of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to become non-nuclear, and then again, some programs with Russia to better protect the weapons on their territory, dismantle some of their weapons, dismantle the weapons coming back to Moscow or Russia from other countries, and also to re-employ weapon scientists working on civilian projects. Not any longer working on weapons of mass destruction. So, it was a very successful program. It was passed by Congress in the early 90s, and it has gone on many of the years since then, continuing to do that work. So, the weapons were removed from those countries. They were. Next, I want to talk about the strategic posture of the United States. So, you were called to be part of this committee, right? Can you tell us how did you get called? How did it start? Sure. So, the Strategic Posture Commission has recently completed its work. It was established in 2022 by congressional legislation, and the idea was the United States needs to take a look at the threats facing us from other countries on a strategic level. That means nuclear threats and other major military threats, and look at our own strategic posture, our weapons, our doctrines for use of the weapons. How well do they stack up? What do we need to do in this current climate that we face? So, I was asked by then Speaker of the House Pelosi to serve on the commission. It was 12 former officials of the U.S. government who worked on defense in their careers. So, it could be the Defense Department, the State Department, the intelligence community in Congress. We had a former senator on our commission, and our job was to evaluate the threats facing the United States and recommend how to respond. We turned in our report in October of 2023, and we just recently turned in the final classified annex to our report, and the commission has just finished its work. Please share with our audience, what is it like to get a phone call from the Speaker of the House, arguably the most powerful woman in American politics, to ask you to be on this commission? What was that like? Well, I was extremely pleased and honored to be asked. Nancy Pelosi is someone I have known for a long time and admire, respect, and consider her a friend. And she said, when she called me, she felt I had the knowledge of the weapons and the strategies that would make me the person she would want to appoint. She had one appointment to that commission as Speaker, and she felt that I was the person to bring to that work. And so, I was honored to serve. I respect her greatly. She's done amazing things for our country over her tenure as Speaker and in Congress. Did you accept right away, or you had to think about it for a couple of days? I didn't know what it was when she called me, and she had someone follow up to explain to me what it was and point me to the legislation that established the commission and laid out in great detail what it was supposed to do. And so, I didn't accept on the spot. She didn't ask me to accept on the spot, but her staffer called me and we went over it in some detail, and I said, absolutely, yes. So, I went through some of the report. It's very comprehensive, very detailed. It mainly has to do with realigning our strategic weapons and nuclear, you know, with the new threats that exist. Now, it seems like Russia and China are the main culprits in this thing. Did you have any surprises when you started to investigate and to look into this? Anything that surprised you? So, we had a lot of classified briefings. That's one reason you had to be a former defense official to serve on this commission. You needed to have a security clearance, which I've had since I was 23 years old. So, you had to have, and worked in this area so your clearance could be upgraded and refreshed, which mine was. We had extensive briefings. We made site visits. We went to Los Alamos, where our nuclear arsenal is maintained and refurbished. We went to STRATCOM, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. There were some other visits to other U.S. military commands. We had very deep briefings by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. I had known the general outlines of what was happening, but not the detail. And once I learned more of the detail, I was more concerned. I had been shown some aerial photography taken by a commercial company over China a couple of years before, maybe in about 2020, that showed the digging of many new missile silos on Chinese territory. So, I had seen, and these were publicly available photographs, I had seen some evidence that China was adding to its nuclear arsenal significantly. But again, I didn't know the details until I had the classified briefings. Again, I was concerned before, but more concerned after I learned the details. The United States is a free country and everything is open. Now, I do realize that there's probably a classified annex, like you mentioned, to this document. But regardless, the document that it's public, do you think that puts us at a risk or gives away a lot of the information to our adversaries? Because Russia and China will probably not publish such findings publicly. So, a lot of the findings, most of the findings, were about the threats from other countries. And those other countries know what they're doing. So, revealing it or discussing it isn't providing them with anything they don't know. And just to summarize, we found that the U.S. will soon face what we call a two-peer nuclear threat. We are already deterring Russia with our own nuclear arsenal. China has been a country with a small number of nuclear weapons, but they are rapidly building up to the same level as the U.S. and China, U.S. and Russia, so that we would need to deter both countries at the same time, which presents a challenge for us in terms of whether to add to our arsenal of nuclear weapons, improve them, target them differently, or use other methods like defending our territory better or employing other methods to make sure that we are not at risk. So, most of it was about the threat we face from others. In the unclassified version of our report, we did not talk at great length about our own forces and their attributes or lack thereof. We did mention some things. We feel that our program of refurbishing and updating our nuclear weapons and their submarines, bombers, and missiles that carry them is lagging and it needs to move more quickly. But I don't think that any of this is something that other countries don't know. It's mainly intended to alert our country, our Congress especially, about the need to fund and push ahead on the programs that we need to ensure our own security. So, in the report, North Korea is mentioned, of course, with Iran and China and Russia. Now, I want to ask you about North Korea. How is it that such a poor country, and small country for that matter, has such a powerful nuclear arsenal and not just the development of it, but the modernization or the continuing to have this and building more? It just seems unusual that they can do that. Well, on a smaller scale, it's what happened with the Soviet Union. It was a poor country in all senses. Shortages of goods and lack of technology in the commercial sector. They focused everything on the military and North Korea does the same. I mean, as you know, the population starves while the funds go into the military. They have also had assistance from other countries, including, again, the Soviet Union and others. So, their allies and friends have helped them in the past. But mainly, it's starving the economy, the civilian economy, to put whatever is available into the military. Was there any indication that China would be helping them as well with the weapons or with the modernization? Not clear. Now, China and Russia, again, if they partner with each other, it seems like they would be more dangerous for the world. Has there been any discussion during the committee about how to separate them, how to basically divide and conquer, how to have them not join up together against the West? I think you point out an important issue, which is their collaboration presents a threat to the U.S. And the two leaders, President Xi and Putin, are similar in the sense of being authoritarians and very much resenting the leadership provided by the U.S. and NATO and other Asian countries, Japan, South Korea. They would like to replace us as world leaders. They do see benefits in collaborating in certain ways. We didn't really take a position on driving a wedge or driving them apart. But I think there's a sense by many people that there are some interests we can still pursue with China in the commercial area. And there are policies that we need to pursue with Russia related to Ukraine and related to Russian behavior. So they're each on their own track, but try to meet the challenge from each of them and take advantage of any opportunities for benefits with either of them that truly benefit us. As far as the U.S. nuclear modernization, is it the purpose of it more of a deterrent? Because most people would say that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over. So is that the main reason? Yes, it's a deterrent. What we mostly want to make sure is that no country feels like they could perpetrate an attack on the U.S. that we couldn't respond to strongly enough to make it unprofitable for them to do it in the first place. So we need what's called a secure second strike capability. That means our ability to strike back so strongly, even after their attack, that we would decimate their forces and their country. So we need that secure second strike capability. So we need enough weapons and effective enough weapons to strike back if we were ever hit. That's the theory of deterrence. Then they would never strike against us in the first place. So that's the deterrent theory and approach. But we need enough weapons and effective enough weapons to overcome whatever attack they might send against us. So they'll think twice about it? More than twice. Think hard about not doing it. We also don't want a country to be able to threaten us so that we would not take steps we feel are right to take in the world. So we have been helping to defend Ukraine. We don't want to be threatened to the extent we could never do something like that. Or say Taiwan were under threat from China. We would want to be able to take the steps we feel are needed to assist or prevent China from taking an action against Taiwan. We don't want another country to have enough nuclear weapons that it would immobilize us or paralyze us from taking steps in the world that we think need to be taken. Speaking of Taiwan, our network and myself, we've done a lot of investigations in Chinese issues. I worked on a bio lab in Ridley where there were Chinese nationals running the lab. Almost every other day you hear about China's spies trying to steal information and whatever. Was this part of your discussions, the economic espionage or the infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party in the West? Or was it mostly specific on weapons? It was specific on weapons and policies. We did look at things like cyber security. This is a major concern coming from China, North Korea, Iran, Russia. Cyber security, everything from our weapons, our infrastructure, meaning utilities, water and dams and electricity and so on, our financial system, our financial transactions, and our democracy. All of the interference that clearly occurred in 2016 in our election process from Russia. So not spying and espionage so much as what we call non-kinetic threats. That means threats other than physical weapons, threats to our system and our democracy and our functioning as a system. Those were part of our report and are very significant and important and require measures by us to defend against them. I remember hearing a little anecdote about President Obama. I think he was probably in, maybe he was still president-elect and he was given his first briefing on classified or security information. And he said he was looking around the room to see which window he can jump out of. And reading the report that you put together, it almost gives me that feeling that there's so much danger, so many things can go wrong that you almost feel like you don't want to deal with it. I wonder, after your recommendations, can you tell how much has been implemented? It's still very early, I realize that, but is there any idea of the progress of implementation? First, let me say I'm proud of the work we did on this commission. It was 12 commissioners, six appointed by Republicans in Congress and six appointed by Democrats. So presumably six Republicans and six Democrats. There was a formula for the appointments by the House and Senate leadership and the two defense committees. It's a consensus report. There's no difference of opinion, even among six Republicans and six Democrats. We worked hard at that. We resolved every difference we had. We went over every word and every recommendations. I think there's 165 findings and recommendations. It is so important for us to be unified as a country, especially when it comes to our defense. One thing we noted is how the lack of agreement on a budget, the continuing resolutions we have in place of a budget is very harmful when it comes to defense. Our defense budget is approved two or three months at a time. We don't really have an ongoing defense budget. This way of doing business is very dangerous for the U.S. We commended our report to Congress and the country as a consensus report. Here, look what we did. You can do it too. We really exhorted Congress, especially when it comes to defense and funding our programs, collaborate and find a way to find consensus. I'm saying that to let you know that when we submitted it to Congress, it was a unified report from people of both parties. There is a piece of legislation in the Senate that embodies many of the recommendations of our report. It's still in the process of committee consideration and consideration by the Senate. So there are some members of the Senate who have taken our report as a whole and said, look, here's a whole list of things we need to implement that this report is calling for. I don't know details yet of our recommendations as to which agencies have implemented, which we had many recommendations. I assume we'll go back at some point and look to see what's been implemented. We are still in the process of doing briefings and speaking. Six of our commissioners were on a panel a month ago at STRATCOM, Strategic Air Command in Omaha. It was a conference on deterrence. It was a collection of over 800 military leaders, congressional leaders and other leaders from the U.S. and our allies. So we presented our findings there. There was a lot of agreement in that conference about the types of recommendations we were making. So I think they will filter their way in and we'll keep emphasizing at different panels and conferences and meetings what we were saying. So the final result is yet to be seen. And just to clarify, the whole recommendations is for the next eight to 10 years, right? That's the window. Well, next I'd like to switch gears and talk about the club that you're the president of the oldest club in the United States, the Commonwealth Club. Please tell us for the audience who may not know about it, what are the events you have and what is the club about? Sure. The Commonwealth Club is the largest and oldest public forum in the U.S. A very important part of democracy is public discussion and dialogue about issues. In San Francisco, right? Well, and we do this every day, all day. We're the largest entity like this. We have lectures, panel discussions, all types of events where people come together to discuss everything from the current election campaign to climate change issues, to social justice, to education and every topic that relates to our society. People come and speak and talk and question and exchange views in a respectful way, helping us all to be better informed and better citizens. We broadcast our programs. We're celebrating the 100th anniversary of our radio broadcast. We are the longest running radio broadcast in the United States called the Commonwealth Club of California. You find it on 300 radio stations all over the country every week. And we also have podcasts and video broadcasts and a YouTube channel and millions and millions of listeners and viewers and so on. So we are a broad public forum on all issues and we have events every day and sometimes several times a day. And if I'm not wrong, you have speakers. I think there were two presidents that were speakers along the years, right? Every president of the United States. I think through, gosh, I think through at least George Bush, the younger Bush. I'm not sure. I don't know that we had President Obama or we've had President Biden, but before he was president. So it's really every president for most of our history since 1903. Sounds like an amazing organization. It's a wonderful organization. It's full of life and dialogue and debate, which again is a very important pillar of democracy. And now you have, in November, you had a Distinguished Citizens Awards Please tell us about that. Who's going to be there and how did they make it? Sure. Every year we hold a big fundraiser to support our activities. It's called the Distinguished Citizens Gala. It will be November 14th this year in San Francisco in our building. We have a beautiful building on the waterfront on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. And we are honoring five individuals who are leaders in different sectors and who embody our concepts of dedication to the public interest, public information, a rich and vital society. So you make the cut. There's a committee that chooses the recipients every year. And so recipients this year include, for example, Dagmar Dolby and her family. Dolby Sound, you may be familiar with. Her husband founded that company and they are just wonderful philanthropists that support many different causes, including women's rights to choose for themselves in terms of health and wellness. And it includes Tom Horn, who's the president of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Fine Arts Performing Centers of San Francisco. And it includes the head of the Gladstone Institute, Deepak Srivastava, and a couple of a few others as well. And we're very proud of our honorees that we feel that they embody the best in our society and leadership in different fields. Gloria, thank you so much for your time. I know you have to go to a meeting pretty soon. I appreciate your time and thank you for everything you're doing. Really appreciate being with you. Thank you for watching another episode of the Bay Area Innovators. If you think of someone who should be on our program, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. Thank you for watching and we'll see you again next week.