Arsenals of Folly | Richard Rhodes | Talks at Google

Good afternoon. Welcome to the latest installment of Authors at Google. Today, we're pleased to host Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes is best known for his series chronicling the history of nuclear weapons. Although he's written 22 books, including four novels, the first book of that series, the Making of the Atomic Bomb, won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, among many other. The second book in the series, Dark sun, chronicled the development of the hydrogen bomb, and that was equally heralded. He has just published his third book in this series, Arsenals of Folly, which follows the Cold War nuclear arms race. All three of these books have been constant best sellers and are considered the seminal and most important historical works on this topic. He is currently at work on the fourth and final book of the series, following Nuclear Weapons in the Post Cold War World. On a more local note, Mr. Rhodes is affiliated with the center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. He lives in Half Moon Bay. With that, I would like to welcome Richard Rhodes to Google.

Looks like we're on. Can you hear me? Okay, good. It's nice to be here. That fourth book which I'm now working on, I just figured out the title, so I'll share it with you. I'm going to call it the Twilight of the Bombs, echoing the Wagnerian opera the Twilight of the Gods. It seems appropriate since I think the gods were going to put together a big war that would end the world, even though they were going out that way. I want to talk about three things today and make sure to have time for your questions and comments. I assume we have about an hour, is that right? Okay, I'll talk a little bit about the classic nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, because a lot of where we are now started then, of course, a little bit about the situation today. And then I want to ask your advice about a possible system for tracing and controlling nuclear terrorism. I'll get to that last and leave it with you so you can think about it. I think you have very special skills that might be of use in the very large program of eliminating all the nuclear weapons in the world. When I worked on this third volume, Arsenals of Folly, the basic question for me, having written a book about the development of the atomic bomb and a second book about the development of the hydrogen bomb in the early Cold War, the basic question for me was how did we get to the point where the Soviet Union and the United States had between them something like 20,000 strategic nuclear weapons and altogether more than 70,000 nuclear weapons? Given the fact that even one nuclear weapon throughout the years of the Cold War was more than any political leader on either side was willing to risk exploding. To give you an example, I asked Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and the Secretary of Defense at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He knew then, because we had recently put up our first generation of spy satellites, that the Soviets actually had only four ICBMs, and they were crude liquid fueled weapons that took about 24 hours each to fuel, crank up the gyros and launch. In fact, they had always planned, if they needed them, to launch them serially against American cities. They had, of course, quite a few shorter range missiles and tactical nuclear weapons in and around Cuba. But no one in the White House knew that at the time. When McNamara learned in 1989 at a conference in Cuba from a Soviet general that there were some 162 nuclear weapons in, on, or around Cuba in submarines waiting to be mated with their launchers on land, he turned white as a ghost. Because the Joint Chiefs and many others in government had been saying, now is the time during the Cuban Missile Crisis, now is the time to take out Cuba, to solve this problem, to get rid of the communist government there. If we had moved in that direction, if we had done that, we would have inadvertently started a major nuclear war which would have taken out at least the southeastern quadrant of the United States and all of the Soviet Union. Indeed, because of the plans for targeting that we had at the time, which involved not only destroying the Soviet Union with what Curtis LeMay called his Sunday punch, everything in the arsenal in the first hour, but also involved bombing our way through with our bombers, not our missiles, bombing our way through Eastern Europe and destroying the Eastern European satellites, even though, as we've always felt, they weren't voluntarily working with the Soviet Union and then going on and taking out China as well, It would have been really the end of civilization. In 1962, no one had yet thought of nuclear winter. The idea that all the smoke and fumes and other particulate material from the fires that would be caused by nuclear weapons would put up a pall of smoke that would spread around the world and reduce a full scale nuclear war, reduce the average wintertime temperature by 50 degrees in most of the Northern hemisphere, destroying agriculture and causing millions of people to starve. So those are just a few of the clear and evident facts that were available to anyone during the years of the Cold War. Our leaders, our experts, our technicians, Soviet leaders and experts and technicians and so forth. What in God's name was everyone thinking of? That's a complicated question, as it turns out, and there are political and ideological and even philosophical aspects of it. But the one part that I looked at most with the greatest interest and want to talk about today is the organizational and technological part. What I found, and I was fascinated with this, was a general tendency from the beginning to mentally reduce the destructiveness of nuclear weapons in order to have any sense at all of what they were or how to use them or if they could be used. Let me give you some specific examples. Paul Nitze, who later became one of the leading arms negotiators for our side during the Cold War. Pretty conservative man, but a very good negotiator, as it turned out over the years. His job during the Second World War was to lead this strategic bombing survey that was organized in the last years of the war to see what the effects of all of our strategic bombing had been. Because strategic bombing was new in the Second World War, certainly on the scale we pursued it, it was new. Most Americans don't realize that we not only burned out Hamburg and Dresden, the famous European cities that were firebombed, but every city in Japan of more than 50,000 population. Indeed, the destructiveness from our firebombing campaign in Japan was. Was in every way, city by city, equivalent to what a nuclear attack would have been if you extract from the calculations the radiation aspects of nuclear weapons. When nhtsa, at the end of the war went to Japan to assess the firebombing campaign, which, by the way, Robert McNamara had been the operating officer for curious connections that we find, Nitze was not struck by, by the degree of damage of those two bombs because the degree of damage was not greater in terms of physical damage on the ground than what we had done, let's say, to Tokyo on the first night of firebombing with 1000 B29s carrying six pound incendiary bombs that had started a firestorm, a sort of what we now call a mass fire, a natural tornado with winds of 2 and 3 and 400 miles an hour coming in as the fire chimneyed up. And it was a night when there was a lot of wind. That first fire, it burned out 18.5 square miles of downtown Tokyo and is estimated, I think, conservatively to have killed at least 140,000 people. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed far fewer people and the physical damage looked very similar. So thus, if you boarded a plane in Tokyo after the war and flew over the city, you could see nothing but burned out houses and broken gray roof tiles. And then you flew down the green length of that beautiful archipelago with all of its bamboo and pine trees on the mountains and flew over Hiroshima, and all you saw was a burned out city with gray, broken roof tiles. So NHTSA came home convinced that the atomic bomb was a weapon that you could use to fight wars with, but that it would not necessarily be decisive, just as the firebombing campaign had not been decisive despite its extent. And that became the attitude he carried into his participation in forming the founding rules and ideas of the Cold War. He wrote the famous national security council document, NSC 68, which defined the Cold War as much as anything would do, that basically said, these are an implacable enemy, the Soviet Union, and we have to be prepared to fight a nuclear war with them. He does not seem to have taken into account the fact that this was one plane carrying one of these bombs, and that if you multiplied the number of planes or missiles as time came along, that you were talking about vastly larger destruction than one bomb would do. Nor does he seem to have considered the prospect, which came true very quickly with the development of thermonuclear weapons of hydrogen bombs, that these were very small weapons that had been used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, they would be called today tactical nuclear weapons. 15 kilotons, 22 kilotons. Horrendous and destructive, indeed, but small by the standards of a weapon. At one point we were flying around in our B52s, 25 megaton hydrogen bombs. And I ask you to consider that change of scale and how much more destructive such a weapon would have been. And we ultimately ended up targeting dozens of them just on Moscow and hundreds on the Soviet Union, as, of course, did they on us. It went both ways. And I don't mean to suggest that we were any more at fault than the Soviet Union, except that we have always claimed to have the high moral ground. And in that sense, I think we were more at fault. But I'm not looking at that now. I'm just looking at the technical part. The other problem was that the Air Force, from the beginning, strategic bombing, had been invented by an Italian military man in the 1920s. At least he'd written about it first and at length, and had challenged and fascinated the young pilots of the day. Eventually that became the U.S. army Air Corps and then the U.S. air Force. We built a mighty bombing force to use in Europe and then and in Japan as well during the Second World War. And the whole theory was that if you went behind the front lines Everyone wanted to get out of the trenches of the First World War. How do you avoid that kind of locked up, horrible conflict? The Air Force people saw the possibility of flying over and bombing the factories where the weapons of war were made. Of course you'd kill the people who worked in the factories, but this was going to be pinpoint accuracy. You're going to drop bombs so that they went right onto the factory and not anywhere else. And on that basis it seemed morally acceptable to bomb what were in fact, of course, civilians. But they were making the weapons of war. Perhaps the argument makes sense. The trouble was the great bomb site that was built by our side during the Second World War. The Norden bomb site required that you line the plane up for about three minutes before you drop the bomb. And under the incredible fusillade of ack ack fire coming up from the German side, no pilot was going to keep his plane in a straight line for three minutes. He was going to zig and zag and that threw off. They were bombing with high explosive bombs five miles outside of town. In fact, the average error of bombing at that point in the war was five miles. These were not nuclear weapons, these were simply high explosive weapons. They were bombing cows in pastures outside Hamburg, basically. And that was infuriating and frustrating because there was a great passion for having an air force for following through with this model. We spent a lot of money building bombers. Certainly the fleet that then went on to firebomb Japan. The B29S was a very expensive investment, almost as expensive as the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs. And if the Air Force failed in its mission and it was even worse over Japan, they were flying at 29,000ft and they discovered something no one had known about before, called the jet stream. There was a moment when they were trying to bomb a factory 10 miles north of Tokyo. And the bombs, because of the wind factor from the jet stream, fell in Tokyo harbor. The joke among the Japanese was, they're trying to drown us. But of course they weren't. They were trying to do this thing that existing technology didn't allow to be done. So they ended up bombing cities, killing lots and lots of civilians. For many people, that was a very painful thing to do. And if you look at the records after the war, you see that there was every attempt made to minimize the fact that there were many, many civilian casualties. Not surprisingly, no one wants to kill a lot of people just because they're there. A few bloody minded people do, but most people don't, including pilots. Nevertheless, when they were confronted with the fact of nuclear weapons, when the Air Force was basically told, as Curtis LeMay formed the Strategic Air Command in the late 1940s, your job is to protect this country against a nuclear attack by other countries. And the way to do that is to be prepared to hit them first with nuclear weapons. Impossibility, really, because how do you know? We tried to work out a lot of ways to know. But anyway, the essential problem was, how does an air force use nuclear weapons to wage a war? We first targeted cities, as everyone does when they don't have enough nuclear weapons, as India and Pakistan target each other's cities today. But eventually the targeting program became one of the, in a sense, pretending that nuclear weapons were precision instruments. They did this primarily by only calculating the blast effects, rather than calculating all the other effects. Most significantly, mass fire. Because nuclear weapons, with their huge pulse of light, of energy in the form of photons, instantly starts vast fires all over the area under the explosion, which quickly coalesce and merge into mass fires. Let me give you an example that one of your colleagues here put together for me that I think brings the point home. The arrow, of course, is pointing on us. That's Google. This is the blast epicenter of a 300 kiloton nuclear weapon that burst about 1500ft directly above us. I assume you know your neighborhood well enough to have a sense of how big that is. The radius is actually 3.6 miles. And I'm talking now about everything within that radius, within this circle would be totally destroyed, except heavily reinforced concrete buildings, which, however, would have all their windows and all their physical structures blown out and probably with serious consequences for anyone inside. But that's just the blast area. And if I were a targeter for the Air Force out in Omaha, that's what I would calculate when I figured out how many nukes I had to drop on the base or on Google. Whoops. How do I back up? There we are. This, however, is the fire damage. Oh, great. Okay, thank you. Which is about something like 5, 4.6 miles. Now, again, I'm only talking about the worst fire damage. Fires would extend out wherever there were trees and so forth for many more miles. But this is an area that would be completely consumed by a mass fire. Everything organic within this area would be destroyed, burned to ash, more fires farther out. And we don't even consider with this schema, radiation, smoke, ash, dust, noxious gases, fireball anomalies, emp, which I'm sure you all know about, which would essentially destroy everything electronic in the whole region. Crater ejecta and blast driven debris, those are some of the other effects of a nuclear weapon. So our entire targeting system was based on a false premise that mass fire. The argument was we can't calculate the effects of mass fire because it depends on the weather. Well, that was true in Japan and in Europe. But when you get above about 100 kilotons, there's no question of weather. These things make their own weather. The winds at the edge of this mass fire would be blowing at the rate of about 4 or 500 miles an hour and the air would be multiple degrees of boiling point. So they should have been figuring this at very least. The fallout plume, which would be lethal within the central part, would extend out depending on the wind there it would be a weather effect for possibly 40 or 50 miles. This was the result really of a combination of our government and the Soviet government trying to figure out a way to use this new thing under the misapprehension that it was a potential weapon of war. My point in mentioning all these gruesome large scale effects is simply to what bring the central point to me into this conversation. The central point is these are not weapons of war. No one has ever since the beginning figured out a way to use them as weapons of war. It's not without significance that not one has been exploded in anger since 1945. It's too dangerous. And everyone, whether we call them madmen or rogue states or whatever, figures that out pretty early on. Maybe so we hope. But the Cold War is over and this whole subject seems to have fallen off the table. The Soviet Union dissolved. Russia acquired the weapons that had subsequently become the property of Belarus and, and Ukraine and Kazakhstan. That's a great story that I'm going to tell in my next book. How those three countries decided basically to give up nuclear weapons and signed the npt, the Non Proliferation Treaty. The two sides have reduced their number of weapons, although not nearly as far as they would have to do if nuclear winter would is not to follow from some such an exchange today, just to give you an idea, China has about 400 nuclear weapons, of which interestingly only 20 are strategic nuclear weapons. China opted for a minimal deterrent and never built more than 20 ICBMs to attack any other country that attacked it, saving itself a great deal of money and obviously being a successful, being successful at deterring. At the same time, France has about 400 nuclear weapons. Why on God's earth France needs 400 nuclear weapons? I don't know. India has about 60 Israel at least 200, Pakistan about 40. But Russia still has about 10,000 nuclear weapons. We still have at least 10,000 nuclear weapons, the UK about 200. Why does it matter? If they're all safe and snug in their silos and their bunkers, why does it matter? It matters because there's no such thing as a machine that doesn't go haywire. As you well know, the risk of accident, of theft, of inadvertent use, or of deliberate use after theft is scary. Some of our most knowledgeable experts in the subject of the potential for a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States or elsewhere estimate that the odds are anywhere from 50 to 100% within the next 10 years, either because they've managed to steal a nuclear weapon and disarm its security devices, which our weapons have and Soviet weapons are coming to have with our help, but which most other. Certainly India and Pakistan don't have that kind of security structure built into their weapons. They use disassembly and separate storage as a way to secure their weapons. And that obviously has its limits. If for, let's say Pakistan, which to me is the most frightening place in the world right now, were to collapse as a country, as a government, then what happens to all those disassembled pieces? Or think about the fact that a few weeks ago an order went to an air base somewhere, I think, in the Dakotas, to deliver six conventionally armed cruise missiles to a base in Louisiana. And the airmen who loaded those missiles loaded instead, unknowingly, six nuclear armed cruise missiles which were then flown for six hours across the United States. No one knew they were there. Technically speaking, no one knew where they were going, if they had been stolen by an inside job or whatever, they were on their way to wherever they were going to be used. If that can happen to what is supposed to be the most secure control system in the world, my God, we're all in trouble. But that's not all, because even inadvertence and accident and theft, we can kind of dismiss. Let me show you a graph in a second here that will show you, I think, better than anything I can say, why it's of importance to you that we think about how you can go about solving the problem of all these nuclear weapons abroad in the world. This graph is a follow up on the first nuclear winter studies that were done back in the early 80s and mid-80s by Carl Sagan and a group of scientists around the country. You'll recall if you read those papers, that they figured what it would take to cause a nuclear winter in terms of a major nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, yielding a total of 10,000 megatons of explosive force. They grafted and showed, using the very limited climate change models of the day, showed how the smoke and pall would spread around the world. You can find those things probably today on the Internet. I haven't looked. Some of Carl Sagan's colleagues and younger students from that time more recently decided to look at what would happen today as the result of a small regional nuclear war. And the nuclear war they chose would be 100 weapons exchanged between India and Pakistan with a yield of no more than the Hiroshima bomb, 15 kilotons. So that's a total of 1.5 megatons, not 10,000 megatons. But they assumed, as they rightly should have, that those weapons would not be exploded out in the desert somewhere on a missile silo, but would be exploded on the cities of the two countries with all the combustible materials available to start mass fires. The result, they found, was a somewhat less severe, but absolutely threatening to the world nuclear winter. How do I do this? Just space. That's the beginning of the war. And now you can watch the smoke spread over a period of time. The data is at the top. I guess the message is we should all move to Antarctica. Their estimate was that it would be something like 5 to 10 degrees average drop in world temperatures. But that's enough to destroy crops all over the world and cause a serious starvation crisis all over the world. This will stop in a second once everything is spread. In fact, even Antarctica isn't going to help us, is it? So they stopped on July 7th when the spread was complete. You can find these graphs online if you're interested in following up and looking at. All right, that's the problem. And at various levels and degrees, you can imagine something like this happening between Israel and countries in the Middle east between. Well, as other countries develop nuclear weapons, which they're certainly working on doing. I mean, North Korea was. Maybe they've stopped. Iran certainly is. They may have slowed down. These possibilities are there. And of course, the American and the Russian nuclear weapons are always brooding in the background as a possible, a possible accidental war. How do you solve this problem? This is a problem in every sense as serious as global warming, but with no long term or even reasonably short term possibility of amelioration in terms of where we are now. It could happen five minutes from now, it could happen tomorrow, could happen next year. When it happens, it will be immediate and over a period of months fairly fatal to many of us throughout the world. What's the answer? Do we try to get everybody to cut down on their weapons? To some degree that's been happening, but it's obvious that there are still far too many. Many people who have been involved in this question have concluded that the only solution, however utopian it may sound on first mention, is elimination. Getting rid of all nuclear weapons. A few years ago, if I said that, I would have been considered a peacenik who had no sense of the realities of the world. But former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry, former Senator Sam Nunn, and a dozen others with real hard experience working in government at the highest levels have in the past two years decided that the threat simply of a terrorist weapon 5 kilotons in Manhattan or in Washington would be, is enough to think that we must figure out a way to go to zero and stay there forever. They are meeting annually to try to work out the very hard practical steps that would be necessary to do that with all of the conflicts that are built in to such a question. Interestingly, many of the steps that would be necessary to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world are steps that it makes sense to take anyway to reduce our overall risk. Even if we didn't get rid of all nuclear weapons, but only some part of our arsenals. I mean, the obvious thing is the United States and Russia are still at a position of launch on warning with 15 minutes to decide whether or not we need to launch against what our radar tells us is an incoming attack. The president in that 15 minute scenario has about three minutes to make up his mind. Only a president as quickly decisive as George Bush, I think really fits that scenario. So they're working on and will shortly publish the first round of expert papers and discussion that they held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford in October. I've been attending all these meetings. I'll write about their effort in the next book as a way of writing about the whole problem of abolition. One of the problems that they confront, although I don't think they've really thought about it a lot yet because it's kind of down the road, but it's a very serious problem. It only takes about 5 kg of plutonium, about that much to make a nuclear weapon. Even if you're making a crude World War II design, if you know anything about making nuclear weapons, you can get by with as little as 1 kg, which is about the size of a marble There is, according to Sig Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos, in the world today, about 2 million kg of plutonium and about 2 million kg of highly enriched uranium. Gathering all that stuff up, sequestering it from theft, finding a way to destroy it. And the way you can destroy it is to burn it up in nuclear power reactors. By the way, which we're doing right now with Russian warhead material. Half of the nuclear power reactors in the United States today, or rather half of the electricity made by our nuclear power reactors is from old warheads, which is one of the best justifications for nuclear power I've ever found. When I've talked to skeptical people. It's not even costing us any money because we sell it to the utilities, we the US Government. But the problem then is with all this stuff out there, we're never going to get it all together and put it away. It's just not going to happen. So once you're down to zero, how do you prevent someone from cheating? How do you prevent someone from gathering up a little bit of this material, making a few weapons and using them to threaten the world? Now they could threaten the world forever. Because the interesting thing about eliminating nuclear weapons is all we're really doing is moving back the delivery time to a period, let's say of months or a year or two, rather than 30 minutes. The knowledge will be there, the technology will be there. Any country that starts to try to build a nuclear arsenal, to threaten the rest of us would first have to deal with our concerted efforts at diplomacy and then at our concerted efforts at conventional war. And if those things didn't work, any country that felt threatened by this rogue could always go back to building nuclear weapons themselves. At the end of that long track, during which there would be many, many points of possible negotiation or elimination or control, we would simply be back to the dilemma where we are today. So it's not utopian. What's perhaps right now seemingly utopian is how do you keep track of the possibility of, of individuals or sub national groups or even states clandestinely trying to build a nuclear arsenal. It seems to me that one approach that would help, it wouldn't be everything. There would be the usual governmental things. One approach that would help would be to enlist everyone in the world as a concerned citizen prepared to report suspicious activity. And that is a job for the Internet. That is something I'd ask you to think about. Think about how that would happen, because it wouldn't be an easy thing to organize and maintain. It wouldn't be easy to sort the noise, sort the data from the noise, which would be considerable. I found a story in the New York Times A couple days ago the Metropolitan Transit Authority, basically the subway system in New York, posted a notice in their cars after 911 saying if you see something, say something and listed a phone number to call. Now several years later they're reporting on last year, 1944 New Yorkers called in. What did they say? Significant number of calls about suspicious packages. Most involved backpacks, briefcases and other items accidentally left behind by their owners. Well, that's okay, but 11 calls were about noticing people in the subway who were counting the. They thought they were usually Muslim people. They thought perhaps they were counting the number of people to see where would be the most efficient place to put a bomb. At what time of day. Well, once they checked it out, they were using a new semi mechanical device for praying. Instead of the beads, they were using this little clicker. They were for sale all over Muslim stores in New York. A modern version at the time says of rosary beads, bad signal, false noise. At least three calls resulted in arrests for trying to sell false identification. A Brooklyn man was charged with making anti Semitic threats against his landlord and threatening to use sarin gas on him. A Brooklyn jeweler called in his competitors names and denounced them as terrorists and said they were planning a subway bomb attack, clearly hoping to destroy their business and so forth. So there was a lot of noise that had to be sorted and if you think about something that would scan the whole world, it would be a hell of a lot of noise. On the other hand, the National Security Agency scans every Internet, sorry, every email and other communication that leaves or comes into the United States. So it's clear the algorithms are out there somewhere for pulling the word bomb or the word uranium or whatever out of all this vast amount of communication. But that's not really my point so much as this great new revolution of horizontal control rather than vertical control that is slowly changing politics and the rest of everything in the world. Society has to somehow be available, I think to make it possible for all of us to participate in keeping track of what's on, going, going on around us. Maybe we start with the scientists who might have a better idea what to look for. I don't know. But I ask you just if you like to have busman's holidays from your work, to think a little bit about this question and how it might be accomplished. And if we get something that makes sense, I will write about it in this next book of mine. Because I'm certainly going to deal with this question. In a way, raising that question. And that issue brings me back to the very beginning of writing about this subject, when I explored the early efforts of the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr to try to tell Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill that these were not bombs, that you couldn't use them for war, that they were what he called a much deeper disturbance of the natural world, which indeed they are, and that they had to be considered. He tried to tell these leaders, as a common danger to all mankind, a common danger that therefore should lead all of us, regardless of our other disagreements, to be prepared to sit down and deal with it. Something like that has happened in the 20th century in dealing with infectious diseases. Most of you probably know that smallpox was eradicated in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century by a concerted effort through the World Health Organization that had Americans entering North Korea and North Koreans entering America and Pakistanis going to India and Indians going to Pakistan to inoculate people. The Soviet Union supplied the vaccine, the United States supplied the jeeps and the money to pay for the public health systems that had to be spread out around the world. But finally, by around, I think, 1986, the last individual who had smallpox on Earth was found and everyone around him vaccinated, and the disease died out. I know it still exists in a couple refrigerators, but it's not something that people get in the world anymore. So it is possible, if people perceive something, to be a common danger, as smallpox was, for everyone to decide. It's worth everyone's time to stop worrying about everything else for a moment and deal with this, this danger. Nuclear weapons fall, I think, precisely in that category and therefore have the same potential for all of us working together on them. One of the things that Bohr said that I think applies directly to my appeal to you to think about how everyone could be involved in an international surveillance network. One of the things that he said that I think is one of the most profound things about the whole subject was this. The very fact that knowledge itself is the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis. And of course, by openness, he means no barriers to communication back and forth about the problem, which is another way of saying what I was just said before. So I'll stop there and then ask you to comment. We're going. We're taping and videotaping. So either use the mic or I will repeat your question after you've offered it. Thank you very much.

I have a question about what you've just said, which is that how do you get people to understand that this is a common threat? In your book Making of the Atomic Bomb, you did talk about Niels Boren going to Churchill to try and talk to Churchill and say this is a different sort of situation. And basically you said that Churchill kicked him out of his office because he thought that Vohr was either a nutcase or a Soviet spy.

Yes.

It doesn't seem to me that things have changed all that much. So what makes you think that this still is the hope, considering the fact that there's still plenty of people who think that it makes sense for me to have the bomb so that I can protect myself against you?

Including the United States, of course. Most notably. Absolutely. President Bush. There are lots of answers to the question. Let me just give you one. In order to reach a point where everyone disarms, at least with nuclear weapons, you. We will have to. Everyone will have to meet the security needs of the various countries that have nuclear weapons. What do I mean? I asked the general who's in charge of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program what it would take for Pakistan to disarm. He didn't take a moment to reflect. He said immediately, if India does. That's what I mean by common security. Common security was the idea that Gorbachev brought to his negotiations with Ronald Reagan that allowed him to be prepared to say, the Soviet Union is prepared to give up all nuclear weapons if you will do likewise. It didn't happen because of some conflicts about Star wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative, but it nearly happened because Reagan also understood that the country could be destroyed and that the only way to solve the problem was to get rid of the nuclear weapons. So there is an answer. It's a complicated and involved one. The other answer, of course, is education is spreading the news as widely as possible. If Al Gore and his chalk talk had as much effect on changing people's minds about global warming as it seems to have done, then I think there's hope for us all. I'm working right now with a couple of people on a documentary film specifically about how do you do this? Not the utopian we must do this, but what are the practical steps necessary to make this happen? That's going to be, we hope, for theatrical release in a couple of years. I won't be the Al Gore figure. We don't know who that will be, but. So the answer is, it is a different time. So much was bound up in the Cold War that is not bound up in the Cold War anymore. And it seems now that at least two countries have been willing to take seriously the idea three, actually, six actually might think about it, that they don't need nuclear weapons. South Africa had a small arsenal that they took apart and threw away after the end of the Cold War. Ukraine, as I said, Kazakhstan and Belarus decided not to become nuclear powers. And see, that's four. I'm blocking on the other two. Anyway. You see my point, sir?

Yes. In order for any widespread program of disarmament to be effective, it's going to be necessary for both the population and the leaders of the existing nuclear powers to believe that, as you say, these are not effective weapons of war. But the only examples we have of nuclear weapons being used in war is in Japan during World War II, and there is currently a widely held recession that that was very effective in ending the war earlier than we could have with conventional arms. What can we do about this?

You know, it's true that Truman felt that we had finished the war with nuclear weapons, but it's also true that I can show you statements of every leader on both sides since Truman, actually including Truman after the war, statements from every leader of both countries that nuclear war is impossible. In Ronald Reagan's favorite phrase, nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. We didn't fight any because everyone understood we couldn't, that it was too dangerous, that the effects would be far vaster than even our. Our kind of burglarized version of targeting that we used. So I think we're in a very different place. The problem really is, I think, convincing leaders for whom the weapons are basically not for security but for prestige. You know, the Indian foreign minister, Minister of defense, when they had that five series test in 1998, announced afterwards. We're a big boy now. The other big countries are going to have to pay attention to us. And that's another reason countries decide or think about going nuclear. On the other side, there are at least 4, 40 countries in the world today that have sufficient nuclear infrastructure that they could become nuclear powers within a year or two. It's very interesting that they haven't chosen to do so. It's not at all the obvious choice. It isn't something where when you get the technology, you immediately go nuclear. To the contrary, most of them have made the other choice. And the list of countries that worked on nuclear weapons would amaze you. It's Sweden and Belgium and Mexico and Canada and Australia and so forth all over the world. Yugoslavia had a bomb program at one point. So the good news really is that it has not been an obvious way that countries should. Should go. I don't say it would be easy, but if you imagine the United States taking the lead and proposing to eliminate all its nuclear weapons in a staged process, if everyone else does the same, I can see, and it almost gives me chills, what a transformative event that would be in the world. Thank you.

Hi, good segue. You mentioned us taking. Taking the lead. I guess I feel rather cynically, unfortunately, about our country in the last eight or so years.

Don't we all?

Yeah, recently more hopeful. But it seems like basically we need something such as the. A reinvigorated non proliferation NPT type treaty. And so I guess could you speak a little bit more about what's being done here within this country amongst our elites to maybe do something like that and to get this actually on the political radar screen.

First of all, two of the Democratic presidential candidates have already signed on to the Shilts initiative that I mentioned. Barack Obama and John Edwards. I assume Hillary Clinton is waiting to test the waters. I don't know, but she's aware of it as well. Beyond that, some of the steps that the Schultz group have identified, they're really obvious. We have never ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban, which cuts off nuclear testing and therefore cuts off the development of more sophisticated, smaller, et cetera, bombs. It would be to the United States strategic advantage, even under present terms, to do that because China never developed the really miniaturized weapons that we have and has not been able to do so because it's observing the ctbt. We haven't ratified it in the Senate yet. It's sitting there waiting to be ratified and no doubt will be ratified if a Democrat is elected in this next year. So that's an obvious step. There is a fissile materials cutoff treaty that's sitting, waiting to be brought up and dealt with, which is another step where you no longer make plutonium for weapons or highly enriched uranium for weapons. These are some of the beginning steps of which there could be many more that would eventually lead to this stage that I'm talking about. It does take political leadership. One of the things the Schultz group is doing, having presented all these ideas to the Bush people, I mean, to Condi Rice and Dick Cheney and George Bush himself, and getting nothing back but silence, they've decided to go international. They're holding their next meeting early this February, next month in Oslo to bring in people from all over the world, government figures, to deal with this, start expanding the whole thing. So the development, I think is there and I think it's very much in the air. I didn't mention to you, I don't think I'm working on a play right now, a theatrical play about the Reykjavik Summit. And just a few days ago the Washington Post announced that Ridley Scott has just signed on, or has almost signed on to make a dramatic film based on the Reykjavik Summit. I'm planning to beat him to the punch. But in the meantime, there's something in the air these days, perhaps because of the Shultz initiative, people rethinking all of this. Actually, the reason Republicans as conservatives, George Shultz got into this was because of 9 11, the real and gut gripping realization that if those men in those planes had been able to develop a nuclear weapon to carry along with them in some other context, that it really would have been a much greater horror than it was and a much greater destructive force for the whole world, certainly economically. So they're awake, as they were not unfortunately awake at Reykjavik and trying to push the whole thing forward. And there's a great deal of support from the more moderate branch of the Republican Party and from the Democratic side as well. I think we'll see a lot of this happening in the next four years, depending on who's elected, of course. I don't think Mitt Romney would do it.

Yes, I still hear a disturbing amount of talk about space defense initiatives, Star wars and the like. What are your thoughts on the likelihood of such a system being enacted? And if that happens, the likelihood of essentially space being cut off to us for centuries?

The United States continues to pursue an extensive research program in space based war. How far along it is, it's one of our black programs, basically, I don't know. But we of all people with all of our communications linked up to satellites should realize what a bad idea that is. It's what sabotaged the Reykjavik summit. Gorbachev. The only thing he asked for eliminating all nuclear weapons was a delay in the launching of the Star wars program for 10 years. And Reagan was so tied to that idea that he wasn't able to agree. So we're working on it. Whether others are. I'm sure the Soviet Union has its, or, sorry, Russia has its programs too. And I don't know where that's going to go. But if we don't pull back from all of these issues, you can imagine the disaster that would befall this country with even minimal space damage to our satellites.

It seems like the, the, the kicker for all this is that almost any country in the world can disable a space based weapon system by launching a garbage bag full of ball bearings in space.

Sure.

And I don't know why people don't understand that who are trying to build these.

Well, you know, unfortunately a lot of weapons systems, including this whole area, are tied in with American politics in terrible ways. You know, Star wars was not invented by, was not a technological development that then moved over into the political sphere. It was an idea put together by Ronald Reagan's kitchen cabinet of multimillionaires, guys like the Coors family and so forth, to differentiate the Republican party strong on defense from the Democratic Party weak on defense. And it took on a life of its own with all sorts of people who knew better saying, oh yes, this will happen tomorrow. Reagan really didn't understand the technology and perhaps didn't want to. He saw it as something that was a vision for America. We're great at technology, we'll make it happen somehow. We spent $44 billion on the SDI program and now we're spending billions more on, on ground based missile defense. So. And this, this other program for actually moving into space itself. I think if we can move this country and other countries toward reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons, all of these things are going to follow because they won't make sense anymore. Yeah.

In your talk you almost touched the essence of the Prisoner's dilemma in the sense of nuclear arm race. Do you mention it in your book? And would you like to mention something about it? Because what it actually says or the conclusion is that where all sides are armed with nuclear weapons, it sees much more stable equilibrium than when no one has it. And in fact, you touched it in the sense that having 30 minutes length or time to response contributes to the stability of the equilibrium. While two years span, someone will someday think that they can hide their efforts for a year and a half and then they are going to conquer the world first.

I don't think Prisoner's dilemma necessarily says 15 minutes launch time is part of that. The fact is a non weapon, non nuclear weapons world is still a nuclear world. Countries will still know how to do these things and be prepared to do them if they feel their security has eroded necessarily. Deterrence has always worked on the basis of the assurance of being able to retaliate, not on the basis of how quickly you can retaliate. We were perfectly comfortable when we had bombers that took five to 10 hours to get to the Soviet Union. Now we have missiles that take 30 minutes. I cannot believe that that's a more stable situation than a longer time. But there's no reason why countries can't reach the point where they think of themselves as essentially. I'm looking for that word that we use for these Second Life and other programs. What's the word? Virtual. Virtual. We can all be virtual nuclear powers and take whatever pride people care to take in that and still be prepared to retaliate. I have always wondered what people think anyone, including a terrorist group, would do with one nuclear weapon. I know they could claim they had two and perhaps they would have two and they would wreak horrible damage somewhere with those two. But then what? Where do you go from there? That may well be part of the rationale for the endless buildup of arms during the Cold War, where somehow it seemed that there was a marginal advantage with each additional weapon. But I'm really not prepared to believe. I mean, if we can begin to think about dealing with the world scale common problem of global warming, surely we can include this other vastly dangerous environmental effect in our concerns about the future of the Earth. And with that, I think we're done. Thank you so much.