>> the university of missouri in saint louis host the hour-long event. >> thanks very much. it's great to be here. and thank you very much for the invitation. my current beau, "atomic obsession" is the main thing i would like to talk about. the early review of this called it unknowingly convincingly. i'm not quite sure -- i wasn't trying to be convincing. so maybe you will be underweight or conveyance, or none of the above or hopefully i'll do the above may be. the book is designed during the course of publishing history, there have been a large number of books that have cures for insomnia. in this case, however, i think it is the first book ever written and which does the author's intention. the book is really designed basically to put you to sleep, not in the hell because it's incredibly boring or anything,

not because concerns about atomic weapons have been so prevalent. for example, here's a statement by defense secretary robert gates. every senior leader when you're asked what keeps you awake at night is the thought of a terrorist inning up with a weapon of mass distraction, particularly nuclear. and this is fbi director robert mueller, somebody watching very carefully as he thinks there are dark circles under his eyes when he utters the words, nuclear device. he clutches his teeth. at one point when he is discussing the possibility of a nuclear threat from terrorists and anxious thought lets his left eyebrow like an arrow poised in midflight. and forcier investigated, ralph larsen has similar problems at nearly. he knows more shrewd with each passing minute that we are blind and al qaeda is looking for uranium, there's plenty of it out there with as low as 35 pounds sophisticate group

could build a jewish human sized about it we have never seen coming. that's why he can't sleep. he is going them. what i'd like to do, if my book is successful, we'll have a lot more sleep going on in din and therefore i hope better decision-making if that happens. i intend to take full credit for it. what i'd like to do is talk about several aspects which are in the book. and we'll have time for questions afterwards if you want to go into some of these in more depth. or hit me from other angles. the basic point of the book in many respects of nuclear weapons have not been very important. and they are not very significant, historically. and their spread is not very important and nuclear tears are very unlikely to get them. let me try to explain some of those. to begin with, nuclear weapons have been awesome, awesome but

hard upon electric. for example, this is a picture of hiroshima. another picture there. but as spencer, a history of his era talks about and he says using nuclear bomb everybody immediately thinks of the end of the world. and to what i am concerned about is that i think it's consequence that people basically just sort of mind stopped as soon as you say atomic bomb. like it is the end of the were. it obvious he wasn't the end of the world that this is hiroshima and this is what it looks like now. my concern basically as i survey do think nuclear weapons are extraordinarily destructive. but one bomb is not the end of the world. but nonetheless you have people like -- did a couple of

examples, j. robert oppenheimer after world war ii was asked about if three or four men could struggle atomic bomb, could they book new york? he said yes, they could blow up new york. if you take the kind of bombs, the nuclear bombs that existed and blew them up on the ground in new york, the amount of you would do, you would blowup essentially 1 percent of new york. so oppenheimer, when you could say blow up new york, was exaggerating. i don't want to say it wouldn't be a catastrophic event that i've argued this kind of exaggeration by factor of 100 by somebody who should know better strikes me as being a very bad idea. a similar argument was made in nature recently. this is the big scientific magazine in england. and just earlier this year, in

january 200 2009 and editorial s even a fizzle of highly enriched uranium device would take out most of manhattan. well, a fizzle of that heu device would be the kind of bombs that have been explored and tested so far by north korea. if one of those was set off in the middle of central park in new york, it would not destroy any buildings on the periphery. so the idea that it is a link of a bomb like that, i mean, if it is times where it would do a lot of damage obvious he. but it is very constrained to the idea that somehow the whole world comes to an end, that all of manhattan gets taken out by that, it is basic nonsense. there's also the argument that has a huge social event. george tenet, former director of the central intelligence agency, said this in his recent book that if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud they will make

history. i certainly agree with it. such an event with the superpowers, nor to if they come up with one tiny bomb, that's the same as a country that has 10000 of them, and they make bin laden's threat to destroy our economy, one mushroom cloud would destroy the economy of the message that if a bomb goes off in peoria, that would be a really bad thing, or columbus, ohio. that would be a really, really bad thing to do the idea that the whole rest of the country would fall apart, it just goes home and starts to do something like that, strikes me as being ridiculous, kind of exaggeration that these people are never basically great about the. there's this kind of hyperventilating, has been taking place now for decades. and trying to put that at least any degree of context. once again, i do want to stress that nuclear weapons are terrible and they can kill lots of people. it's just that one bomb like that is at the end of the

planet. and we would have years and years of that. let me talk about the extrapolation that's gone beyond that, do not own nuclear weapons, but now there's a new category known as weapons of mass destruction. the phrase has been around for quite a long period of time. but it only got really inflated and became very common in the 1990s basically in the first administration and under the clinton administration. and so what has happened in the nuclear weapons, which definitely are weapons of mass destruction was in there, but then also added were chemical weapons, and biological weapons. both of which are probably not weapons of mass destruction. chemical weapons, basic they are extraordinary difficult to control. a lot of them potentially good but not a single one. for example, in world war i, the

number of people killed by chemical weapons represented about seven tenths of 1 percent of the deaths in world war i where they were used quite extensively. some biological weapons, you know, kill hundreds or thousands people. but they are extreme hard to control. the japanese terrorist group tried to develop a biological weapon, not only didn't they kill anybody but no one even noticed. now beyond that there's also been sometimes a radiological weapons are added to the list. ideological weapons, they're most likely form for terrorism particular. are basically incapable of telling anybody. what they would do, except if there's an explosion, disperse the radioactivity, someone might be killed by the explosion your buddy radioactivity basically -- what happened, it's a relatively small area, radioactive background radiation would go up

some, such that if you follow the fairly conventional categories, what would happen is if he stayed in a place for four years nonstop, your chance of getting cancer would go up by maybe one 10th of 1%. that's not weapons of mass destruction. it seems to me. so it's more of an inconvenience than anyone else. no one talks about the. the danger would be that somebody would set off a dirty bomb, a radiological bomb in people with panic to get away. they have for years to get away. so what they should know is okay, that's a bad thing, so walk away. but no one ever basically says that that in addition, there's now been legally a definition on the books now of weapons of mass destruction which hand grenades which would be considered. revolutionary war must is that now you know why the shot was heard around the world. it was a weapon was a weapons of

mass destruction. and also those bombs bursting in air that francis scott key was so impressed by that those would be counted as weapons of mass destruction. so you got the exaggeration on top of exaggeration. now there is one thing which is important for the rest of my case, is that in some respects, at least these first three, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have a similarity in that they are very messy on the battlefield. in the case of nuke weapons, if you use them on the battlefield you've increased the radiation, then that competence things they times. chemical weapons have a similar sort of thing. they can blowback on you and so forth and you have to wear those horrible gas mask which is extra and inconvenient and sweaty and everything. and a case of biological weapons, you can get contemn a. takes a long time to make sure the area is safe. to where you want to hit the and me and take over all three of these have these kinds of disadvantages. okay. let me turn to the next issue. the question is how much of a

consequence have nuclear weapons been? since world war ii. and it seems to me they've done a very little historical consequence and have not been necessary to prevent world war iii or a major conflict in europe. and a big argument has been without nuclear weapons there would have been a war in europe and world war iii would of happened if it's what what i call the churchill counterfactual. churchill, after the war, world war ii, said there him or to after world war ii a paradox and a sublime irony whereby nuclear weapons vastly spread area of mortal danger with the potential result than safety will become a story trial of terror, and survival twin brother of annihilation. another way of putting that, is this, much more bluntly. that if counter to that nuclear weapons have never been invented, then what does counterfactual says is that the people running the world who are

so and cautious, so casual about the loss of human life, so masochistic, so incompetent, or simply so stupid that they could not have been held plunging into a major war is the worst thing could have expected with the kind of catastrophe they had just recently experienced. the point is that without nuclear weapons the united states and soviet union, and they got into a war, wouldn't have to worry about nuclear war. they would only have to worry about a war as big as world war ii. it seems to be if they did to it a deterrent that was plenty good. the world has been run since world war ii by either the same people or the intellectual heirs of the people who try to prevent world war ii from happening. because they thought it even worse than world war i, and they were right about that. it gave him no pleasure to find out that the idea that these people were there for casual stumble into a war that would be as bad or possibly worse than world war ii is just absurd it things under and seems to me that in addition, i do think that there has been -- there was

one of two powers. one was substantially anti-status quo which is the communist side. however, they never, ever had the idea of advancing communist revolution through hitler a christian. they were anti-status quo in the sense they want to subvert conscious. they want to encourage class warfare, revolutionary civil war and so forth. but nuclear weapons had no relevance in those cases, but basically what they wanted to do during this print of time was advance the revolution in that manner. and documents from after the cold war confirmed, which had been quite obvious during the cold war, that there never was any real interest on their part in dealing into any kind of major war, direct confrontational war with the west which would look anything remotely like world war ii. during which they lost 2 million -- 20 million. so essentially there was nothing to deter in many respects.

the next point on this is that militarily, if you look at it, the weapons have proved to be useless. there never seem to have a military compelling reasons to use them. quite apart from any more problems and so forth, the question is what good have the nuclear weapons done the possessors? one good that has been argued is a deterrent to war. it deter to world war iii. but the question is another war, whenever anybody has considered using them in korea or vietnam, gulf war, in afghanistan, whatever, basically they rarely come up because it's hard to find any good reason to use them. there aren't good targets that the weapons in the case of korea were relatively small in number. they wanted to save them for the big war they thought was going to happen in western europe. and so in many respects, when you start thinking about it, you basically find it very difficult to see any good reasons for

those. . .

they had a big significance but in terms of significant change in history, i don't think they've been very important. my favorite quote on this is from dwight eisenhower in the 1950s. he said we are piling up armaments because we don't know what else to do to provide for our security. in other words, he basically didn't think the russians were very likely to do anything that

would involve, you know, world war iii-type thing but instead he went along by and large with these massive increases in expenditures. and they continued to spend. someone has calculated that during the cold war, the united states alone spent enough money on nuclear weapons and the methods to deliver them to have purchased everything in the land except for -- everything in the country except for the land. or maybe it's somewhat less than that but anyway a huge amount. what did come out, however, is what i call -- what a historian robert johnson said, it's nuclear metaphysics. over the course of decades a bunch of people sat around big time, got big salaries to think about various ways you might manipulate nuclear weapons in various ways. we have the jargon of the time, multiple targeting reentry vehicles and then a whole bunch

of other things that came in, in various times, various concepts and so forth. and particularly dealing with the issue of deterrence. and the -- and the central posture in this was something that they called mad, mutual assured destruction. being able to have enough weapons and to have the position and the right kind of of way that both sides would be deterred from attacking each other. but essentially there was nothing to deter. neither side had the slightest interest getting into a war, certainly a nuclear war but one that looked like merely world war ii. but it was words, basically playing with words and concepts. okay. let me deal with a couple of other issues. one is the issue of nuclear proliferation. the proliferation of weapons has been -- nuclear weapons has been far slower than predicted because the weapons did not generally convey much advantage to the possessor.

in the '60s i wrote an article in which a lot of people are now worrying very much about nuclear proliferation. countries getting nuclear weapons particularly they are worried about china. and the predictions were that there would be a huge number of countries having them. for example, john kennedy was saying, i'm haunted by the feeling by 1970 there may be not 10 nuclear powers but -- there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of four and by 1975 there might be 15 or 20. i see the possibility in the '70s of the president of the united states to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have they say weapons. i regard that as the greatest possible danger. he was saying this repeatedly in the early 60s when he ran for president and then when he was president. he was hardly unusual in that. there are lots of people saying that. and that simply has not been true. there's a few countries that picked up nuclear weapons at the time but very few. i did this article in which i thought i would look at canada as a nuclear power.

and so, you know, canada could have been the second power. it was part of the manhattan project. it had reactors and so forth. as far as i can see the canadians never took it seriously and the question is why didn't they? the british were building it? the french were building it. why not the canadians? they had the technical capacity and so forth. in many respects they didn't see any value in it. it's a waste of money and it didn't fit into their image as a country and mostly i think that's what happened. countries have looked at nuclear weapons, they decided they're too much work. there's no gain from them. and there's -- you get a little bit maybe in prestige or self-inflated ego boost and maybe you got somebody to deter you may feel comfortable about that. but basically unless you got some sort of really pressing issue like that, there isn't seem to be much of a reason to develop them at all. and i think that's most countries. when you get to solicit 20 or 25

countries that are going to include, you know, canada and belgium and poland and italy and so forth. and most of those countries never even talked about it seriously. it just doesn't make any sense to them. and i think that's why the proliferation has been so slow. nonetheless, mohammed al-barady the chief united nations weapons inspector now 40 years later says we're reaching a point today where i think kennedy's prediction after being wrong for 40 consecutive years is very much alive. either we're going to move to nuclear disarmament or we're going to have 20 or 30 countries with nuclear weapons, italy, belgium, norway, who knows, sweden. and if we do that, to me this is the beginning of the end of our civilization. so this thing is very much still there. the gillpatrick report in 1965 talked about the world is fast approaching a point of no return. in the prospects of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. if they don't stop now and get a

real halt to it there will be a massive proliferation. you can read the rest. a guy who's now in the obama administration in 2005 basically saying that 40 years later this assessment still holds. in other words, gilpatrick was wrong in 1965. he was wrong in 1975, 1985, 1995 but in 2005 he's now right. we're still waiting on that. it's just been very slow. and we've had constantly things like this about nuclear cascades, tipping points, avalanches, waves, chains, dominos, points of no return, they have not taken back. when china got the bomb they thought india would have to get one. that's 35 years later. but this kind of still is still there. it's all over washington. we write books about the tipping point. i call it cascadology. it's still there.

so the fact that it's been disproven repeatedly for decades, for half a century doesn't seem to have slowed very many people down. okay. part of this which i already sort of discussed but let me go into it a little bit more is the issue about building a nuclear weapon if you're a country. the economic and organizational costs of fabricating a nuclear arsenal can be monumental. and a failure to appreciate has head to overestimations of a country's ability to do so. when you look at various countries as a number of people have done, what you find is once they get into it it's really hard to do. i mean, it took pakistan 28 years to develop a nuclear capacity. and they went into it saying we're going to get it even if we have to eat grass. in other words they realized it would be really costly. finally they made enough sacrifices and they're able to come up with the weapons. and, of course, pakistan is a

pretty sophisticated country technologically and it took them a long time. rather more typical, however, is what happened in libya. qaddafi, the dictator of libya, decided he really wanted to have some nuclear weapons. because the chinese had them and, you know -- is what one did. so there's this ego thing which is one of the reasons why countries sometimes get it. in 2003, he finally gave up arguing it's too costly and decides he's no longer interesting and that's old crap that he was talking 20 years before or whatever. when the u.n. inspector went to libya, he found qaddafi had spent $100 million trying to get pieces of a bomb that he could put together and a lot of the stuff was still in the packing boxes. they hadn't even opened it. so as he points out -- but this is the way he puts it. libya was in the preparatory stage of developing the capability that would move it to acquire a nuclear weapon. that is to say he was preparing

to develop a capability to move. so my question is, how is that different from being sound asleep? now another aspect of nuclear proliferation has been how unimportant it has been. there has been some, of course. the nuclear diffusion that has transpired that has remarkedly press and limited consequences. the biggest thing on this is going back to john kennedy is about china. china is the ultimate rogue. in 1963, 1964 it's moving toward a nuclear capacity. and people were extraordinarily alarmed about it. it would use the weapons or it would use them for nuclear blackmail and so forth. and so john kennedy was very alarmed about this. and he was, you know, in the vast, vast majority saying a nuclear test will be historically the most significant and the worst event of the 1960s.

actually, probably the most historically significant event and the worst event of the 1960s was john kennedy's decision to escalate the war in vietnam. in part largely to deal with what he saw as a communist threat coming from china. and the head of the central intelligence agency said unless the chinese threat is meant by a much stronger western alliance, nuclear war is inevitable. i mean, they are really hysterical. what has happened with the chinese bomb? answer, nothing. i mean, they wasted a certain amount of money. they built bombs right from the very beginning they said they would not use them first. they built far, far fewer bombs than they could. they got maybe 100 or something like that. and if they wanted to, they could have a lot more. and they hardly even talk about it. in fact, a lot of people don't even know that china is a nuclear power. i mean, who talks about it. they talk about the olympics. they are a lot of tv sets there. nobody says they got nukes too.

they haven't used them for blackmail and they sat in silos in various places and warehouses in various places. so it hasn't had much significance -- any as i can see basically except in causing a certain amount of alarm and excursions among various other countries. okay. nuclear proliferation, the next point, while not necessarily desirable is unlikely to accelerate or prove to be a major danger and i think that follows what i've been saying. that if it happens, you know, too bad. they'll be wasting a lot of money and effort but it's not likely to be a big deal. and there aren't a whole lot of countries anxious to jump in to waste their money on these silly weapons. so it's not likely to accelerate. on the other hand, strong efforts particularly since the 19 -- since the end of the cold war, 20 years ago, efforts to keep rogue states from obtaining nuclear weapons have been substantially counterproductive and have caused far more deaths

than have been nuclear on all-nuclear or all weapons of mass destruction in all of history. the chief case on this is iraq. the concern was that if saddam hussein got nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction like gas chemical weapons which he already knew how to make 'cause he used them a few times in the war against iran -- that if we got these weapons the world would come to the end and he would dominate the middle east. the whole idea basically -- and we're still getting this argument with iran now that somehow if saddam hussein had a weapons of mass destruction or two or a nuclear weapon and he would rattle his rocket and everybody would say whatever you want. oil prices up or down and you want to take over my country, anything. nobody has really examined that argument that he would dominate the middle east. he didn't control his whole country. only a shard of it basically. he didn't trust his own military with which he presumably would use to so-called dominate the middle east.

but there was never strong efforts on the part of the united states and other countries to try to deal with this threat. during the 1990s, there was major effort using sanctions against iraq. and -- and now, of course, there's been an antiproliferation war that began in wishing in 2003. the deaths that were caused by sanctions in the 1990s probably run in the hundreds of thousands. they were caused -- they were a necessary cause, they were a necessary cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths probably in iraq. far more than died at hiroshima and nagasaki put together and the same thing is true about the war of -- that started in 2003 and still going on. during the war, during the sanctions, rather, madeleine albright was asked on "60 minutes" -- and this is the only time i can think -- that i've been able to find in which a policymaker is asked this very simple obvious question.

madam albright, we have heard that half a million children have died from the sanctions, which is what the program was about. i mean, that estimate is almost certainly quite too high, but at any rate a lot of people had died. i mean, that's more children than died in hiroshima and is the price worth it? it's not that is saddam a nice guy. it's not we should do something about saddam. but the question is, we've done this and a lot of people have died is it worth it? a good question. as i say i know that it came up. madeleine albright then said i think this is a very hard choice but the price -- we think the price is worth it. i checked to see if anybody in the united states picked that up. i did a lexis nexus search on madeleine albright and no newspaper picked this up. they said we got the ambassador to the united nations madeleine albright saying we killed half a million people in iraq and it's worth it. shouldn't we talk about it? it never got talked about.

again, the numbers almost certainly too high but she didn't argue about the number. so what we had is antiproliferation has cost more lives than nuclear weapons have cost. okay. so let me -- by conclusion, basically, on proliferation is that although there's nothing wrong with making nonproliferation a high priority, if iran doesn't get nuclear weapons, that's just fine with me and if we can bribe them and browbeat them into not doing so, terrific. but it should be topped with a higher one. avoiding policies that could lead to the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of people under thee ca scenario fantasie. if saddam had gotten nuclear weapons not a good thing but he could have been contained and deterred. if he threatened anybody they would join an alliance probably including israel and russia and the united states to oppose him as they did when he invaded kuwait in 1990. that's not a desirable development. i would say it's a great thing but killing lots of people to

stop -- to worry about what he might do strikes me as being a very bad policy. okay. let me turn to the final topic i want to talk about is nuclear terrorism which is really keeping people awake. and what i'd like to argue is that the likelihood that terrorists will be able to build or acquire an atomic bomb is vanishingly small. that's what vanishingly small looks like. [laughter] >> okay. let me look for -- let me look first of all at how a terrorist might get a bomb. and then i want to deal with the scenario which generally people seem to think is the most likely way to get a bomb. one way which is -- most annual listi ist -- analyst to be given a bomb. the first place -- bombs are very expensive and difficult to make. and given some of this precious

cargo to a group you can't control, who might end up blowing it up in your own territories is not exactly very wise. furthermore, if you give the gift -- if you give the bomb to a terrorist, there's a good chance the bomb will be discovered before they set it off, obviously it will be discovered if they do set it off. and through policy -- process of nuclear forensics, it's very likely they'll be able to figure out where the bomb came from. so, therefore, you're on the spot. so the idea that a bomb would be given by a state, even a very flakish state is very remote unless they're just totally suicidal. a second technique would be to steal a bomb. bombs exist, loose nukes, this is frequently called. it's not clear there are any loose nukes anywhere we have had rumors about this for over 10 years. supposedly obama bin laden purchased 20s through the chezzens.

he apparently has those bombs and they are in his garden and he goes out and polishes them off or something like that. a stealing of a bomb is very tricky because if you steal, you have to be able to set it off and the bombs have safety devices on them. in the case of pakistan the bombs are in pieces, at least two pieces in two different places so you have to steal both pieces, know how to put them together and know how to set them off. the number of people who know how to set off a bomb in an unauthorized manner is very small. even the designers of the bomb and the people who maintain the bomb don't know how to set them off. it's a very sensible safety provision. they've got devices that will blow up the bomb if you tamper with them in a conventional explosion. and so basically what you're likely to be left with is a bunch of radioactive scrap metal if you try. so stealing is not a very good idea. there's another possibility is to make a bomb from scratch and

almost everybody agrees that's essentially impossible for a substate group. making the fissile material with uranium or plutonium is a extremely difficult task and takes basically a state. so, therefore, a terrorist group almost certainly can't do that. what they could do, however, was make the bomb with purloined fissile material and they put it together and they make it into a bomb. okay. the bomb they would make then would be basically -- it would be a very crude one. we're talking about making a bomb that's really primitive. it would be large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable and inefficient. they cut corners. they try to do it as easily and cheaply as possible. they don't have a lot of safety measures. they're not presumably worried about getting hurt themselves

when they're putting together the radiation and so forth. okay. what i did was i -- to work this out, i got four chapters basically working on this in the book. and what i did was i sort of went through -- i did a rariation. -- narrowiation. and when i was through, i went through and tried to make a list of hurdles you'd have to go through to be successful. so you have to do this and you have to do this and you have to do this. so it's a bulletin. and a bulleted list and when i was through i had 25. and i said well, 25 aesthetically too big a number. so i went back and jammed them down to 20. and that was hard. so that was good exercise 'cause basically i'm not very comfortable with it. i think they should really be more. but let's say there's 20 steps. i won't have time to go through all the list but let me just -- i'll give you the 20 steps on the slide and you can look at them if you want.

i tried to make each of them fairly independent but what i tried to do is make them discreet and the thing to stress on this is you have to do all of these, not just some of them. and everyone -- and they tend to follow one after the other. let me just -- i don't have too much time to go into this in detail. i'll be glad to later, if you want, but let me just sort of stress two things about this. particularly, from social science standpoint sort of stand out. one is you have to trust criminals. if you're going to get to the fissile material you have to find the guy where it is and subvert him a disgruntled russian physicist and he has to deliver to you. so he becomes a criminal or you have other criminals help you steal it or whatever. the problem -- the problem with the criminals is they are good at extortion. once they know what you're doing, they're likely to keep boosting their price, 1 million,

no, 3 million, no, 10 million. once you've gotten the stuff and you're now -- you've stolen uranium or something and you're trying to get it out of the country so forth, they know what you've done. so, therefore, they could lead the police who are going to be alerted by this to your area. and they're going to -- they're going to -- you know, they got vital information so, therefore, what the logical thing to do if you're a terrorist is to kill them. on the other hand, they're criminals and they probably think of that themselves. so what they're going to do probably is go to the authorities say these clowns came around in this barn say you've got any highly enriched uranium and i played along for a while and you can pick them up at any time. you'll get basically that kind of difficulty. the other area is actually manufacturing it in which you have to have a really good set of technicians, not somebody -- you can't go out on the street, you know, with these guys hanging around waiting for jobs and say anybody here know how to

make an atomic bomb? you have to get the top physicists from pakistan u or something who's got a wife, who's got a reputation and is being watched assiduously by pakistani intelligence. then they have to be there for a year or more making this bomb in this -- say the slum of istanbul or someplace to set up the machine shop to make the bomb and no one must notice. local people say, oh, yeah we always have ph.d.s in physics in the slum. it's a very common thing. and also local criminals must not say something weird is going on weird there. and, of course, the police have been alerted by the theft of the uranium. so basically what you get is a very difficult thing. it's also very difficult to put these together. steven younger the former head of weapons development in los alamos and he goes quite in bit of length of the difficulties of doing this for anybody including a substate group. and then you have to get it to

the country and then you have to get somebody to receive it and they have to be able to deliver it and they have to be able to set it off so there's 20 of these. as an exercise, i said okay, everybody says each of these -- when they discuss this, each of these steps is difficult but not impossible. and i agree. none of them is impossible. but they are difficult. okay. let's not say they're difficult. let's say there's a 50/50 a chance of being successful at each step. that's a pretty good chance. and so if there are 20 steps and there's a 50/50 a chance of being successful at each barrier, your chance of being successful is about 1 in a million. more realistically but still very gracious assumption -- let's assume there's 1 chance in 3 of being successful at each barrier and many of the barriers are much, much less likely than that. your chance of being successful overall is about 1 in 3.5 billion. if you're a terrorist and you're

thinking about this -- maybe they'll read my book. you begin to start thinking maybe this isn't such, you know, the world's greatest idea. so it's also been the case -- i won't have time to go into this now. but al-qaeda's capacity and probably its desire to attain atomic weapons have been much inflated. if you look at the evidence of their interest, it has been really quite limited. these are some of the things on this but i won't go into them. but there's various places where there's some occasions where they had some interest but it's very amateurish. when they got to afghanistan, there was no evidence that al-qaeda had any kind of nuclear weapon program really. there's some writing and stuff but nothing really. and they gave these interviews as you can see there but that was just as they're about to leave -- be forced leave afghanistan and they're obviously a bluff. there's pretty good evidence that there was a wmd program in al-qaeda. and it was focused almost entirely on chemical weapons.

and it was budgeted between 2 and $4,000. this isn't a big thing. okay. let me conclude then and we can have times for questions now. whatever their impact on activist rhetoric, strategic theoryizing, defense budgets and political posturing, nuclear weapons at best have a limited effect on history. have been a substantial waste of money and effort. have been -- have not been appealing to most states that do not have them. and are out of -- are out of reach for terrorists and are unlikely to shape much of our future. so let me end on that and suggest that you could sleep well. thank you. [applause] >> okay. questions, comments, expressions of deep outrage? yes, sir. >> do you have any idea how many

attempts? >> by terrorists? [inaudible] >> yeah, various countries have tried various times and given up. romania was going to get a nuclear weapons program. the leader of the romania decided the best person to run his nuclear weapons program would be his wife who took chemistry in college and did quite well. there was nobody who had tried to do it besides the japanese cult. they had a uranium mine and so forth. they had a lot of money, too. and they gave up. then they went to biological weapons and as i mentioned, those failed, too. so then they went to chemical weapons which by far and they released gas in a subway in tokyo and killed 11 people and then they were shut down and i don't want to trivialize the 11 deaths but that's what i characterize.

they may have tried to get some uranium at one time. in the training camps in afghanistan, people took a course in explosives. and when they got in there they found a bunch of notebooks that these guys had had. and so these various things and the last page is about nuclear weapons. and so that was like the last lecture so they had like one lecture presumably on how you make a nuclear bomb and it was all stuff you can get off the internet. it was just standard things. so that hardly -- people say that means they wanted to get it. there was no real effort to get it and bin laden wasn't interested in getting it. the drill i went through sort of suggests that. if you want to be effective as a terrorist you want to deal with weapons. you know what they are.

you know, how to set them off and ]ieds and so forth are just guns and i think they mostly insofar they've done anything relied on much more conventional and understandable and much more reliable kind of weaponry. [inaudible] >> i -- [inaudible] >> i think this is built-in. my book is trying to deflate -- i would say put in context, in reasonable context, this whole threat. but the trauma of hiroshima and the hype that's come out ever since, which has found a receptive audience, i think it's likely to stay forever. people are going to continue to

do this. there is -- there is -- there is an issue that's related to what you're saying also. is that when big problems go away, smaller problems get elevated to take over their place. so what the cold war went away, people said, what are we afraid of now? and so what they did was -- a nuclear proliferation then became a much bigger deal than before or terrorism. or you may remember japan -- japan was going to76s take overe world by buying, you know, the flash japan buys pearl harbor syndrome and there was a period of time when they thought japan was going to take over the world and their economy tanked so we had to worry about something else. i call it the catastrophe quota and there's things that you can grasp and pull up. but nuclear weapons it's stel -- you say nuclear weapon, everything thinks the end of the world and it has that kind of dynamism. the chapter in my book -- there

was a question whether issued write it. -- i should write it. i said bombs are like this, not like that. one bomb does not destroy an economy. one bomb doesn't destroy new york city. and that's out there in the literature because, you know, various -- you can calculate how big the bomb would be and so forth and no one has said in a sustained manner put that in real context. people knoww know it. but i decided i really needed it to fit in. but i kept looking for somebody else who had said it so i could hide behind them. and mostly i couldn't do that. it's also like 9/11 basically. 9/11 -- i wrote this book called "overblown" trying to put 9/11 in context and al-qaeda in context and so forth. but it's just very hard because, you know, people just understandably, of course, are very much exorcised by that that. >> i would like to say a couple of things. one to defend him because that's

his job. he's paid to say these things about nonproliferation. i wouldn't blame you so i would take him out of your discussion. the second thing i would say -- there is a way -- because look at the two dramatic cases of the moment. we're not preventing india from having atomic weapons. we are helping india having atomic weapons. why the case we're helping. but in the case of korea, north korea and iran, we want the opposite. why? because in the case of iran in north korea, that's one way of destabilizing the regimes is having them spend like crazy so in a way there is a purpose. it's one of destroying the local economy. they're starving the local people. you saw what happened in iran. they're in the streets.

they're not happy with the way the economy has been run in iran. the fact that they're spending all the money on atomic weapons -- and isn't this is the same thing that said to the soviet union? the best thing they could do is not feed their people or house their people or prevent them from drinking. but it was building atomic weapons. even in the old days. so in a way it has a purpose. it may be diabolical. it may be cynical. let them in a way i'm reaching this conclusion. let them -- oh, maybe we should distract them so they can build more. >> i disagree with your conclusion because i think you're giving them too much credit for cleverness. in the case of north korea it's even worse. talk about starving people because they're spending so much

money -- i mean, on the military generally and -- but including nuclear weapons. it's not clear, of course, that iran is even going to try to get nuclear weapons. they said they definitely do not want to get them if they're bombed by israel or somebody, their position on that might change. but it is -- it is a big expense. and places like qaddafi went through that for a while and decided it was very expensive. the iranian program recently -- their wonderful centrifuges basically don't work. but the idea is what we're trying to do is we're trying to do a favor to iran. don't waste your money on those stupid weapons. so in some respects i think that's a really good thing. what i'm against is killing people to try to do a favor for them in some respects. but you can make the case that spending a lot of money on missiles as opposed to airplanes on or nuclear weapons as opposed to conventional weapons makes a country less safe because it's wasting a lot of money they could spend on other weapons. even the case of israel, for example, 10% of their budget apparently is spent on nuclear

weapons. what good has it done israel? many times they needed more conventional weapons in their various wars. and ahey have obvious problems with hamas and hezbollah and so forth. where nuclear weapons are totally irvelvet. -- irrelevant. would they be better if their military budget was 10% higher or something. even in the case of israel, which has the thing pretty much under control, you could make an argument that's been a waste for them. they don't seem to have gained anything from it. yes, back there. >> a couple of questions. are you suggesting that, for example, if hitler had somehow gotten the bomb and not the united states during world war that there would have been no consequences? that's one question. secondly, both obama as well as henry kissinger and schultz and others as you know have articulated a vision of a nuclear-free world. in your judgment, how doable is

it. can we put the genie back in the bottle, untrain nuclear scientists, develop a system for detecting cheating, et cetera, et cetera that could lead to the vision. >> the case of the hitler question, what i've said is that nuclear weapons haven't made any difference in history at least since world war ii. however, not the same as saying they couldn't make any difference. so that one reason for getting nuclear weapons you might say, and i say this in the book is to hedge against the possibility of the rise of another diabolical extremely clever, very lucky monster like hitler someplace. i don't see any of the little hitlers aren't in that category. but that seems reasonable to me. i'm not saying they couldn't make any difference but as far as i can see they haven't and it seems very unlikely they will but they could.

in terms of the zero option, with schultz, et cetera, i don't -- i mean, i'm not sure that you need agreements -- first place, you're going to have the argument i just made, you've got to have some in case of that really horrible thing really happening and also obviously if you get rid of nuclear weapons you'll never get rid of the ability to make them and the knowledge to make them so in some sense they're still there maybe in the kind of virtual state. but i think basically the best way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to let them rest in peace. let me give you an example. after -- in the early 19th century there was a cold war between the united states and british canada. and there's an arms control agreement about warships on the great lakes and there was an arms race and everything like forks and the british built this elaborate canal system for military purposes and in 1872 or so the tensions went away and so

did the arms. the forts are still there but they're not museums and the canal has become the world's biggest skating rink. in other words, and there's never another agreement they went away. to a agree that's been happening since the end of the cold war. the united states and soviet union have massively decreased the nuclear weapons they had on hand. they still have 10 to 20,000 and it's not down to zero. some have been done by agreement but much of it has been just done. and i think basically if you don't have agreements, countries are more willing to get rid of the weapons because if they get rid of them just because they don't think they need them anymore and they find out they're wrong, then they can build them back up again. they're free to do so because they're not constrained. if you have an agreement they are going to be careful making sure that they don't reduce too far. and so consequently weapons are likely to go away better if you don't have agreement than you do. the same with france.

france has reduced its nuclear weapons arsenal down about about 20 to 30% of what it had at the end of the cold war. why france has any nuclear weapons would be an interesting question. a problem that you might want to explore in some impenetrable ph.d. disstation but they have a couple hundred or 300 or something like that. but they've reduced them enormously. and i think that's likely to happen. that if tensions keep going on and more and more people see that, you know, they cost money to maintain and so forth, that they will probably gradually diminish in number as has been happening and that might happen most efficaciously if there is not an agreement rather than if there is. >> drugs come in to our country so frequently that we can't keep them out. we don't seem to watch our courts very much so somebody

might rather easily get something into our country in that way. what are your thoughts on these kinds of things? >> well, yeah, people talk about that. the technology growing. >> and i don't know enough about technology to know how hard it is to make chemical and biological. >> there's a knowledge, obviously, of the chemical weapons is pretty well known. they were used extensively in world war ii and saddam hussein's iraq had them. what's impressive there's been no use of chemical weapons of any real magnitude in the holy iraq war. there were some laced with chlorine with no effect. they tend to be pretty complicated and hard to develop. and very costly. and not very valuable. compared to old fashion things like bows and shrapnel. in terms of the porousness of the border. if you get a bomb -- if you can get -- if you want to get a phrase is if you want to get a

nuclear weapon into the united states just put it inside a bale of marijuana. and there's something to that. but that's not really a fair comparison because drug dealers know that a lot of their drugs are going to be caught. in fact, the argument -- it's not quite clear how much is caught but maybe 20 to 70%, someplace in that they get that built into the profit and built that into the business even though they will move half of the stuff that get in they'll make enough money from the other half that it will be successful. in the case of nuclear weapon you can't have 50%, you know, you got to get the whole thing in. so it's an extraordinarily difficult thing when you're dealing with, you know, precious things like smuggling in a rembrandt. you can't smuggle part of it the rembrandt and the other part i can sell. it's a whole different kind of process. [inaudible]

>> the question about gains in technology, there's been gains in technology. in the case of biology it's been around for a long and it's still very difficult to weaponize biological weapons. 20th century biology went through 14 revolutions. and still biological weapons still don't make very much sense. the same with chemistry essentially and the same sort of things. these are not new weapons and these are not old weapons, biological weapons the british tried to use smallpox, you know, against american indians and things like that. germ warfare is not new. it just doesn't seem to work so well. to be sufficiently useful from a military standpoint but apart from a moral one. nuclear weapons are more common. but what's also happening is better ways to defend against these things are also going up. there are certainly improvements in safety techniques for securing these kinds of weapons, which is also part of the

growing technology. so i don't see it as a major danger, though, to be something okay. thanks very much. [applause] >> john mueller is a political professor. his other books include "overblown" and "and why we believe them" and the remnants of war. mo

>> ladies and gentlemen, welcome. i'm delighted to see you all here at the british embassy and also a special welcome to harold evans and tina brown. we at the embassy are delighted to be participating in the launch of harry's book. the book covers -- and i started reading it. the book covers a huge amount of ground from harry's childhood north of england and for a time -- you won't know this, you were living? in eckels a few hundred yards where julia lived. then on to his professional career as a journalist, editor, publisher and author. but this isn't just another autobiography.

this is also a biography of the newspaper industry over many, many significant decades. and the book describes that almost industrial process of producing a newspaper over really the best part of the last century. now, all that in one way vanished but the book is decidedly not an obituary for print journalism. mark twain said i'm not an editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that god will not make me one. [laughter] harold evans is 14-year tenure as the editor of the sunday times and for a year as the editor of the daily times of london. produced work of really extraordinarily high standard. in 2001, journalists named him the greatest british newspaper editor of all times. [laughter]

>> heçgz championed what yesterday's review of the book in the "new york times" called a crusading style of journalism in which he and his paper afflicted the guilty and championed the innocent. and people of my generation who got interested in national and international politics very often did so because of the sunday times, because of its flair, it's cultural leadership and its investigative zeal. but this is also a transwhether i can story. harold evans first encounter with americans was during the second world war in manchester and his fellowship in 1956 and began a lifelong association and he and tina have lived here for nearly 30 years. although tina doesn't remember it, junior and i were her contemporaries at oxford and she had a knack of stopping the traffic there just as she's done here ever since. harry's american career took him to "u.s. news and world report,"

a number of other top publications to random house and from publishing to writing including the award-winning the american century. now, you harry and tina are both american citizens. i'm not holding that against you. but you retain extraordinarily close links with the u.k. this embassy and i wish the book a great success. it's a remarkable story. so ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming sir harold evans. [applause] >> i just got to adjust -- i can't be elevated so i have to lower this. thank you so much for those excellent words. it's always good to come back to britain which is where we are. and not to go through the formalities of proving who i am which happens is when you go through any security.

the lucky -- nigel is so lucky because he's lived very close to me. and he's lucky because we never met. [laughter] >> because who knows, tina, what might have happened if i met the gorgeous julia who became a scientist and like me, ended up in the united states. tonight really it should be a celebration. not of me, frankly, but of reporting. that's what my book is about. it's about what newspapers could achieve. not what an editor can achieve. but what the reporters on the ground can achieve. that's why i'm particularly honored tonight to have ben bradley here who represents journalism at his best. and many other excellent reporters here.

i'm also glad, of course, that we are here with the synthesis, i think, of remarkable quality about what's best going on at the moment because few people, apart from me, read every wvdsp. so celebrating reporting means actually -- which all of us know what reporting is, as is said news is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress. everything else is advertising. [laughter] >> and, in fact, of course those who are in journalism will know the truth of this. when i was writing this book i wasn't really -- i did get nostalgic. what pushed me along especially in times when people are

questioning the value of print and what it might do. and what i was able to achieve was not by me. it was by these reporters. so when when we were campaigning for the victims who were born without arms and very often without arms and legs on government-approved prescription and we won the great battle against the drug companies and against the attorney general in my beloved britain, i'm still a dual citizenship but i don't know if that will make life difficult for me but we were able to do that. because the reporters in question actually studied the chemistry of the drug. and i remember going along with the offices of the insight group and seeing the molecular structure and frankly nobody done it. nobody had looked at how the disaster occurred. ralph nader, who's here tonight, was a tremendous supporter in that campaign. and a lot of people were supportive in all these

campaigns. the dc10 air disaster. largest air crash in the world at the time. congress began to investigate. they got bored. so the truth about what happened to create that terrible disaster was left to the press. and i'm proud of what we reporters on that particular story did. or take another one. i'm sure i said nigel never knew kim. and exposing that great cover-up and the damage he did and the lives that he lost was extremely tricky. and i want to say again that was a question of reporting. now, straight reporting is very important. and investigative journalism is only an aspect of it. but it's a very difficult form. and in the sunday times we found a team was a great way to do it.

and one of the things that i'm very proud the paper was to achieve was to bring some kind of understanding of the history and the currencies of what was happening in northern ireland. and john barry who's here tonight, the head of the team working through some of the most difficult circumstances ever and produced a fantastic book and report. when i was prosecuted by the ira, of which i was for suggesting that some of the members were stealing money, i had to go to belfast. and most unfortunately the guys who were escorting me took a wrong turn. so get down but it reminded what the reporters were doing on the spot every day. so that's what we're here to celebrate at tonight. just in a time and i've seen it happen more and more where really good is being squeezed

out of existence often by meat heads i call them -- people with more -- who think the newspapers are a great way to make a lot of money as it was and isn't any longer and just know that a reporter or a newspaper were going for that. so it's very -- i think we have to keep reminding everybody journalism is not dead. the delivery of the vehicle will change and so it must change. so that's very important. and i've always been very grateful that my publisher gave me the time to try to set out what a newspaper can do. not just the sunday times. what good newspapers can do. we have here tonight a very distinguished man whom i knew in the 1960s and he went back to bengal and created a wonderful publishing empire, television and investigation. so again absolutely central to

the conduct of indian democracy is the press. so what we3÷l drink tonight, l drink to reporting and thank you very much indeed for all of you for coming tonight. [applause] >> thank you. thank you. >> this was a portion of a book tv program. you can view the entire program and many other book tv programs online. go to booktv.org. type the name of the author or book into the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire theram. recently on book tv box or the featured video box to find recent and featured programs.

>> we're here with leslie sanchez the author of the book "you've come a long way maybe." ms. sanchez you're an analyst on cnn during the 2008 presidential election. who is the most powerful woman in politics right now? >> by far you would have to say secretary of state hillary clinton. not only are her approval ratings incredibly high. but she's also proven to be a very powerful leader nationally. she's had a few missteps but for somebody who used to be so polarizing and so much political baggage it's really astounding to see her progression and the admiration that both conservatives and democrats have for her.

>> it leads me to the 2008 election. and the effects on women during the election. how has it changed on the way a woman could be perceived on the president. >> if you go back and look back at the pervasive sexism that was in the media. it was not a reason why one candidate won or another lost. but it really was -- it was something that i believe set women back for years. and until we talk about it and talk about how women dealt with conflict and competition and what the ground rules are for women entering politics, i don't think we can really advance to the level that we want to. >> the cover of your book, you have sarah palin and you have michelle obama and you have hillary clinton. we talked about the hillary clinton. do you want to talk about the other two parties in the story. >> everybody wants to talk about this sarah palin. she has come to this polarizing force. what's fascinating about her is she has filled a void in

republican leadership. she's able to carry a lot of weight on issues like she did when she brought up the issue of death panels in the healthcare debate. she raises a tremendous amount of money with her pax and she endorses candidates and to her benefit it leads to kind of a surge in support. she wields a tremendous amount of power but she's cheering for one side of the stadium. she's not appealing to moderates and independents. she has a lot of challenges. michelle obama is stretching the boundaries of what it is to be a first lady. she's a modern woman. very adept at being a mother as well as being a first lady to champion causes. and i think she's going to improve the role of women overall in terms of her professional nature. she was a working mom before she ever came to the white house. it's a different experience. i look forward to seeing where she takes it. >> is there a woman out there

right now who you see as the next politician, presidential nominee? >> as a woman it's hard to say, you know, the natural person to look at -- whether you'd think four years or eight years down the line would be somebody like secretary of state hillary clinton. on the republican side, i think we're going to have other women kind of moving up the channels. you're seeing women run for governorships which tends to be a way station for the presidency. it's a little too early to tell. but the fact is they have to build substantial credentials. they have to do public service and they have to be somewhat sophisticated in terms of dealing with the media. ...