Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Tick tock motherfuckers! Tick fucking tock!

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

Everybody saw this coming.

Yes we did.

What fresh hell is this?

How does anyone do Gilligan’s Island as trump world and not cast Jared as Gilligan?

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Something seems odd about that, but i have been drinking.

I personally stopped the public option…

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

The house always wins.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Reality always wins in the end.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Shelter in place is one thing. shelter in pants is quite another.

These guys can go mcfuck themselves.

You are here: Home / Archives for Cheryl Rofer

Retired chemist. I've done a lot of chemistry that has to do with policy, particularly nuclear policy.

Cheryl Rofer has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2017.

President Biden Summarizes The Meetings

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He does a better job than I would have. This is from his remarks before he got on Air Force One.

The question he is responding to is an explicit variant of Kaitlan Collins’s question, to which he had responded curtly earlier. It’s a silly question, like the other “killer” question the media are obsessed with. I’ll paraphrase it: Mr. President, we just heard Vladimir Putin say the same things he always says. Why haven’t you changed his behavior? My even curter answer would be “That’s because it’s not how this works.” But Biden was much kinder. [There are cuts between the quote boxes. Bolding mine.]

I started on working on arms control agreements back all the way during the Cold War.  If we could do one when the Cold War, why couldn’t we do one now?  We’ll see.  We will see whether or not it happens. 

But what do you — I mean, the thing that always amazes me about the questions — and I apologize for having been short on this before.

If you were in my position, would you say, “Well, I don’t think, man, anything is going to happen.  This is going to be really rough.  I think it’s going to really be bad”?  You’d guarantee nothing happens.  You’d guarantee nothing happens.

There’s a value to being realistic and put on an optimistic front, an optimistic face.

He then goes through a litany (I’ve edited generously): “Look, you said the G7 wouldn’t buy my stuff. Did that happen?

When I went to meet with NATO — “Oh boy, they’re not going to be happy.  They’re all going to be against Biden meeting with Putin.  They’re not going to want that.”  Did you hear a single, solitary syllable?

And the same way when I met with the EU.  “The EU is not going to like the way Biden is operating.” 

Now, what would have happen if I had said, before I went into those negotiations, “You know, I think it’s going to be really hard.  I think it’s going to be really difficult.  I’m not so optimistic about — I don’t see anybody really changing”? 

I don’t have to trust somebody — we didn’t have to trust somebody to get START II.  It wasn’t a about our trust — “Well, I trust the Russians.  I can tell, man, they’re really — they’re — I can look in his eye, and they’re really very, very truthful.”  It’s not that at all. 

You have to figure out what the other guy’s self-interest is.  Their self-interest.  I don’t trust anybod- — look, I’ve got to get in the plane, but I’ll say it — you’ll hear me say this more than once.

It makes no sense for me to negotiate with you.  It makes no sense for me to tell you what I’m about to do.  It makes — not because I want to hide anything from you.  Why would I telegraph that?

I’m of the view that, in the last three to five years, the world has reached a fundamental inflection point about what it’s going to look like 10 years from now.  I mean it literally.  It’s not hyperbole.  It’s not like I’m trying to pump it up.  I think it’s a genuine reality. 

 And so each of the countries in — around the world, particularly those who had real power at one time or still do, are wondering: What — how do I maintain and sustain our leadership in the world?  That’s what the United States is going through right now.  How do we sustain us being the leading, the most powerful, and most democratic country in the world?  A lot is going on. 

I don’t know about you, I never anticipated, notwithstanding no matter how persuasive President Trump was, that we’d have people attacking and breaking down the doors of the United States Capitol.  I didn’t think that would happen.  I didn’t think we’d — I’d see that in my lifetime.  But it’s reinforced what I’ve always known and what I got taught by my political science professors and by the senior members of the Senate that I admired when I got there: that every generation has to re-establish the basis of its fight for democracy.  I mean, for real, literally have to do it. 

So, there’s a lot at stake.  Each of the countries, we have our own concerns and problems, but we still — as long as I’m President, we are going to stick to the notion that we’re open, accountable, and transparent.  And I think that’s an important message to send the world. 

Open thread!

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A Couple Of Articles

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I’ve been quoted in two news articles yesterday and today. I’m reasonably pleased with both of them.

Exclusive: US assessing reported leak at Chinese nuclear power facility

Zachary Cohen called me with not enough information on this reported leak. The odd thing about it was that France had notified the United States, and high-level US meetings were reported. So: secretive country, nuclear leak. Hard for me, even, not to feel resonances with Chernobyl. My early guess from the information we had was that it was a broken fuel element, and that’s what it turned out to be. The reason France contacted the US had to do with sharing nuclear information. When a country gets nuclear technology from the US, restrictions are attached about sharing it.

The Lab Leak Theory Doesn’t Hold Up

Justin Ling covers the major claims about a laboratory escape being the route of the SARS-CoV-2 virus into humans and finds them wanting; further, that a natural pathway from animals to humans is more likely. Long article and may have a paywall. This one should become the standard reference for refuting the lab leak bros.

Open thread!

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Biden Takes Adam’s Advice

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President Biden met today with the Prime Ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Today is the anniversary of the beginning, in 1941, of the Soviet Union’s deportation of citizens of those countries to Siberia and Kazakhstan after invading.

Adam suggested a larger group of countries, but these three, on this day, will send a message to Vladimir Putin.

[It should be noted that Estonia’s Prime Minister is female, though.]

Open thread!

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The Biden-Putin Summit

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What can we expect from the summit meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin?

Nothing.

That is the expectation that Biden is setting. There will be no grand pronouncements, no reset, maybe not even a perfunctory statement of agreement on a minor point. That is part of the reason that Biden plans to hold a press conference by himself. The other part, of course, is in contrast with Donald Trump’s disastrous showing at Helsinki.

But the meeting is necessary and important. Russia is a major country, with a nuclear arsenal equivalent to America’s. Russia is adjacent to our allies in Europe and supplies energy to many of them. It has a long land border across which untoward things can happen. Those are reason enough for the leaders to meet.

The meeting is important because tensions between the two countries have increased during the 21st century. The United States has pulled out of treaties that stabilized the relationship rather than try to resolve problems. Russia has acted as an international spoiler. Both sides need to show reliability in their actions. That can only be done through meetings.

Many issues might be discussed – the situation with those treaties and how to go forward, the situation in Ukraine, American sanctions on Russia, Russia’s attacks on dissidents inside and outside Russia, the situation in Syria, America’s return to the Iran nuclear agreement, relations with China, the uses of the Arctic, and more. Both men have their own lists of priorities. It’s likely that their aides have exchanged those lists and are working to pare them down to fit in the time available.

Those aides have also been gaming out something like a SWOT analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. I’ll do a bit of that here. Obviously, I’m coming at it from an Americentric viewpoint.

The real strength internationally today is in dealing with the pandemic. The pandemic hinders economies and military strength. Biden understands this and has made controlling the pandemic his first priority, with some success. In contrast, Russia is going into another wave of disease. Its people are more reluctant than Americans to be vaccinated, and its vaccine may be less effective than others. Brazil and Slovakia have raised questions about quality control in its manufacture.

Russia’s willingness to take risks to upend other countries’ expectations in terms of invading its neighbors and willingness to kill individuals seen as dissidents both inside and outside Russia is a strength. It keeps opponents off guard and makes the most of capabilities that are weaker than others’.

Russia’s role as a supplier of natural gas to Europe is a strength in dealing with Europe, to be used as leverage against the formal alliances of NATO and the EU. Both of those alliances are strengths, emphasized during Biden’s visits these two weeks.

Both countries have weaknesses in their domestic political situations. America has a major political party that is sympathetic to and influenced by Russian organizations. Russia’s poor economic situation and repression of dissidents have led to demonstrations, which repression may damp down. Putin is not grooming a successor, which is not a problem now but will become one at some point. America’s last president contines to try to undermine the succession.

The summit itself is an opportunity for Putin personally. He wants Russia to be seen as an equal to America, and a summit provides favorable optics. But that doesn’t improve Russia’s economy or pandemic status. And Russia is an equal in nuclear destructive power.

The opportunity for both is to feel the other out, understand him better, try out approaches. The personal relationship is far from the whole thing, but it’s not unimportant.

The biggest policy opportunity is likely to be in the area of the now defunct nuclear treaties. Both sides understand that nuclear war or accident is the greatest danger facing them. Additionally, both sides are looking at very expensive plans for modernizing their nuclear forces. In the economic crunch of the pandemic, sizing those plans down would be significant. Communication of actions that might look like war is important. Bringing China into discussions of limiting numbers of nuclear weapons is worth thinking about. The most that might be achieved in this meeting would be agreement to hold working meetings on these topics.

Biden will bring up Ukraine, and Putin will bring up sanctions. The most that will be mentioned of these subjects in any communiqué will be that they were discussed. Maybe some positive words can be ginned up about the Arctic.  It is possible that there will not be a joint communiqué.

Threats to a chummy outcome with roses and unicorns are pretty much everything about the relationship, which is why Biden is damping down expectations, and Putin isn’t saying much either.

In the leadup to the summit, both sides are making gestures of strength and perhaps signaling ways forward. They are predictable and not very significant.

One that I find significant is that NATO made a statement that it will not deploy new land-based missiles to Europe. It wasn’t planning to, but Russia has deployed potentially nuclear cruise missiles in the area. It was these missiles that were the proximate cause of the American withdrawal from the INF Treaty. Russia says it is willing to come back to an INF-style treaty in Europe, but it will be a long way. The activity around this issue suggests it will be discussed, although the best we can expect is the formation of a working group.

Biden will have his own interpreter and note-taker with him. He may also have Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken along. Putin will have a similar complement of his people. The summit will take place, and we will move along to the next thing.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner

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Quick Open Thread

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I plan to write a post on what to expect from the Biden-Putin summit, but here’s a foretaste. Last week I finally said on Twitter, in plain English, what I’ve thought for some time: that nuclear weapons are unusable unless we want to destroy the Earth, so we should say that and explicitly move toward that goal. I didn’t emphasize, but will here, that I am not calling for instant destruction of all nukes, but rather stating elimination as the goal and taking steps in that direction.

So today I was very pleased to see this

And I had to gloat a little.

Open thread!

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Steve Bannon’s Useful Idiots – Addendum

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The story of the alleged laboratory escape (“lab leak”) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been shopped by the Trumpies, mostly Mike Pompeo, since early in the pandemic. Its form has varied, sometimes a bioweapon, sometimes not, but there has been a concerted effort to get the story into the media. Thanks to the useful idiot bros, Pompeo and his minions, using Bannon’s tactics, may have finally succeeded.

On Twitter, John Culver (@JohnCulver689), whose bio says he is a retired intelligence officer, pointed out a Daily Beast article from June 2020, debunking a report by a Pentagon contractor. When I read it, I vaguely recalled the claims of changing car traffic around the Institute indicating that a leak had occurred. The claim was ridiculous enough that I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Peter Jacobs (@past_is_future), whose bio says he is a climate researcher, offered a longer set of analyses. He points out four attempts to shop the story this year.

That whole thread is worth reading. It covers some of the material I’ve covered recently and points out that it’s Murdoch media in the US and Australia that have helped launder the story. He also mentions David Asher, who turns up in Christopher Ford’s open letter (also here) and the Vanity Fair article that depends on him and other unreliable sources.

Ford was the Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation under Donald Trump. He also served in that part of the State Department under George Bush. He actually knows something about the job, which was unusual in the Trump administration. Although I disagree with his policies, I felt some relief when he was appointed in contrast to the know-nothing wreckers Trump appointed in other agencies. But it turns out that was not the whole story.

A Soviet practice that Trump picked up was to put someone in charge of an agency and then put “minders” below them. The Communist Party ideologue was often the second person in an agency. Something like that may have happened to Ford.

His open letter documents his difficulties with Tom DiNanno and David Asher in January 2021. He does not say how they arrived in his agency, although Ford says DiNanno admitted that, although Ford was nominally his boss, he was acting on instructions from another official in State, who took his instructions directly from Pompeo. Ford says he has no way of knowing whether this is true, but it is a heck of a thing for a subordinate to say to his boss.

 A month or so earlier, Ford had tasked them with forming “an ‘expert vetting group or process’ that would involve real scientists and intelligence experts” to evaluate claims “before going public with dramatic steps such as having Secretary Pompeo announce that it was ‘statistically’ impossible for SARS-CoV-2 to be anything other than the product of Chinese government manipulation, sending ‘demarches’ to foreign governments with this theory, or writing up China for having violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in connection with COVID-19.” Apparently that was what DiNanno and Asher wanted to do in December, just before Trump was to leave office.

Ford wanted to know from DiNanno and Asher why the claims had not been subjected to peer review and why they were “running around the interagency spreading these allegations.” His argument to them is that of a responsible government official: Before going public with claims, one must make sure they are correct or risk deep embarrassment. DiNanno’s claims went even further – that SARS-CoV-2 was a genetically-directed bioweapon. Ford’s response to that is “uh, wow.”

DiNanno and Asher bypassed experts in Ford’s department and other parts of the Department of State, as well as the Intelligence Community. A panel of experts was convened on January 7. The “statistical” claim seems to have been a Bayesian analysis done by someone who had never done a Bayesian analysis.

Further, “this statistical analysis is crippled by the fact that we have essentially no data to support key model inputs.” The expert panel tore it apart.

Ford’s letter is intended to justify his actions in the light of accusations published in the Vanity Fair article. He claims, with documentary evidence, that DiNanno and Asher were pressing hard to get a sensational story out about SARS-CoV-2 and to follow up with diplomatic actions against China. All this took place in the earlier parts of the timeline provided by Peter Jacobs and in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Ford may also be trying to distance himself from Pompeo and the Trump administration.

Does the dishonesty of Pompeo and his minions disqualify the idea that SARS-CoV-2 might have entered the human population through laboratory escape? Of course not, but it is necessary to say this to avoid accusations from the bros. But it seriously calls into question the sources for many an article.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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Steve Bannon’s Useful Idiots

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Scientific opinion on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus got into human beings has not changed much over the past year. The greatest probability is that a human caught it from an animal; a long ways down in probability is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Nonexistent probability is that it is a biological weapon.

Most human diseases have come to us from animals. We know the origins of some of them. Studies of this kind take years and even decades. We have known about SARS-CoV-2 for a year and a half. Many similar viruses are known to exist in bats.

Those studies now can call on genome analysis. A number of virologists and epidemiologists make this their career. A professional who spends all their time on this has a wealth of knowledge that is never published – their last conversation with a colleague, the ways that ideas have gone wrong in the past, and much else that goes into their judgments. A professional in a given field also has a sense of how to evaluate new developments. Without this background, it’s easy to cherrypick data and publications, even without realizing it.

The popular writers who have been pushing the idea that the possibility of laboratory escape has been unthinkingly neglected have none of this background. They may not have thought about it for the last year, but that is not a significant consideration. Nor does their evaluation of the probabilities of various scenarios.

In particular, Nicholas Wade’s article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists should not be used as a reference. Wade demonstrated his ignorance of genetics in a book in which he argued that racial differences are genetic. Much of the argument on the transfer of SARS-CoV-2 depends on genetics. Likewise, Donald McNeil, Wade’s former colleague at the New York Times, supports Wade.

Much of the argument over laboratory escape is that Donald Trump and his people had this one thing right in the overwhelming cascade of racism and antiscience that they blasted out through 2020. But why? Whatever they said about laboratory escape was within a blame-China frame, free of evidence. In the same way, once Wade proved his inability to understand an essential part of the argument, I dismissed him.

There is so much being written on this subject now, that heuristics are necessary to weed out the garbage. That is one of them. Another that I use is seeing stuff that’s wrong in an article. I then discount the rest of the article.

A stopped clock is right twice a day. There are some things right in all of these. But when those things are combined in a faulty frame, they become meaningless or worse.

And so we come to what I think of as the bro culture pushing the “lab leak theory.” Words are important, and they know it. Scientists say “laboratory escape,” as I do here. The phrase “lab leak” is very, very recent. It’s an attractive alliteration, helps the phrase to stick in the mind. Where did they get that terminology?

The bros include Nate Silver, Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, David Leonhardt, and others. All well-off young white men with large media platforms. Most of them also felt that they were more qualified than the epidemiologists to decide when and whether masks and other non-pharmaceutical interventions are necessary. The media culture they are in favors being the first with the hottest, often contrarian take. They have been the primary promoters

There may be a story in how they became aware of this “great failure of the media” they now excoriate. Yesterday, Christopher Ford, Donald Trump’s Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation, published a striking open letter on both Medium and his own website. There is a lot to the letter; it seems primarily to be a response to criticisms of him in a Vanity Fair article that my heuristics told me to reject. Within the letter, however, is a documented story of how two of the minions Mike Pompeo inserted into Ford’s agency set about crafting a story of China’s developing SARS-CoV-2 as a biological weapon. As Ford tried to stop them, they burrowed in further, keeping their activities from him.

The simple question is where the bros got their tips and whether those tips are related to the disinformation campaign developed in Ford’s shop. Certainly the zone is being flooded with mis- and disinformation, as Steve Bannon recommended.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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