.. >> an early review of my book calls it annoyingly convincing. i'm not sure i'm trying to be

convincing. [laughter] >> so maybe you'll be annoyed or convinced or none or hopefully both. the book is designed -- during the course of publishing history, there have been a large number of books that have been effective cures for insomnia. in this case, this may be the first book written that that's the author's intention. the book is designed to put you to sleep, not because it's boring. but concerns about atomic weapons have been so prevalent. for example, it's defense secretary robert gates. every senior leader when you are asked what keeps you awake, it's the thought of a terrorist ending up with a wepons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear. this is fbi director robert

muller. he utters the words nuclear devicen he clenches his teeth. at one point when he's discussing the possibly, he lifting his left eyebrow like a arrow in mid flight. a former investigator, has similar problems, astartly. he knows more with each passing minutes that we are blind that al qaeda is looking for uranium. there's a lot out there. as little as 35 pounds to build a hiroshima bomb. that's why he doesn't sleep and he hasn't touched his corn muffin. okay. well, what i'd like to do is if my book is successful, we'll have a lot more sleep going on in washington. therefore, i hope better decision making. if that happens, i intend to take full credit for it.

what i like to do is talk about several aspects which are in the book. we'll have time for questions afterwards, some of these are more in depth. it hit me from other angles. the basic ones is that nuclear ones have not been very important. and they are not very significant historically. and there's spread is not terribly important. and nuclear terrorist are very unlikely to get them. let me try to explain some of those. to begin with, nuclear weapons have been awesome, but hardly apocalyptic. their power has been very commonly exaggerated. for example, this is a picture of hiroshima. another picture there. a lot of devastation. but spencer, a historian of his era talking about, when you say nuclear bomb, everybody thinks of the end of the world. so what i'm concerned about is

it i think it has consequences that people basically just sort of -- their minds stops at the atomic bomb like it is. it obviously wasn't the end of the world. this is hiroshima the memorial, and this is what hiroshima looks like now. i think the nuclear weapons are destructive. obviously the most destructive weapon that's ever been invented. one bomb is not the end of the world. nonetheless, you have people that give you a couple of examples of the kind of exaggeration that's been out there. jay robert oppenheimer was asked if three or four men could smuggle atomic bomb, could they blow up new york? he said yes. if you take the kind of nuclear bombs that existed and blew them up on the ground, the amount of damage you do with the bomb would be you would blow up

essentially 1% of new york. now so he says you can blow up new york. he's exaggerated by a factor of 100. i don't want to say it wouldn't be catastrophic, what i'm arguing the factor of 100 by somebody who should know better strikes me as a bad idea. a similar argument was made in nature recently. this is a big scientific magazine in england. just earlier this year in january 2009, the editorial says even a fizzle of a highly-enriched uranium device would take out most of manhattan. this device would be the kind of bombs that have been exploded and tested so far by north korea. if one of those was set off in the middle of central park, it would not destroy any buildings

on the periphery. if thyme square, it'd do a lot of damage. sort of the idea of whole world comes to an end, all of manhattan is basic nonsense. there's also the argument that has the huge social effect. george, director of the central intelligence agency said this in his recent book. if they manage to talk about terrorist, if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud, they will make history. such an event would put al qaeda on par with super powers. in other words if they come up with one tiny bombs, that's the same as the country that has 10,000 of them. they make good bin laden's threat to destroy the united states. if a bomb goes off in peoria

obvious columbus, ohio, that'd be a bad thing. but the idea of the rest of the country would fall apart, everybody starves to death or something strikes me as ridiculous kind of exaggeration. these people are never questioned about that. as this kind of hyperventilating has been taking place now for decades. i'm trying to -- i tried to put that into context. i do want to stress that nuclear weapons are terrible. they can kill lots of people. it's just that one bomb like that isn't the end of the planet. and we'd had years and years of that. okay. let me talk a little bit about the exstraplation that's gone beyond that. not only to nuclear weapons, but now they are in a new category as wepons of mass destruction. these are -- 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 bush administration and in the clinton administration. so what has happened is the nuclear weapons which definitely are wepons of mass destruction was in there. but also added were biological -- chemical weapons and biological weapons. both of which are probably not wepons of mass destruction. chemical weapons basically are extraordinary difficult to control. they are almost incapable of committing mass destruction. a single one. a lot of them potentially could. but no single one could. in world war one, it represented about 10 of the deaths by a nuclear weapon. some biological weapons could be quite -- you know, kills tens or hundreds of thousands of people. but for the most part they are extremely hard to control. the japanese terrorist group tried to develop a biological weapon, set off several of

them. not only didn't they kill anybody, but no one even noticed. beyond that, there's also been radiological weapons are added to the list. radiological are most likely formed for terrorist in particular, they are basically incapable of killing anybody. what they could do -- if there's an explosion to disburse the radioactivity, then somebody might be killed by the explosion. but it would be in the relatively small area. radioact i have background radiation would go up some. such that if you follow the fairly conventional categories, what would happen if you stayed in that place for 40 years nonstop, your chance of getting cancer would go up by one tenth of 1%. that's not a wepons of mass destruction. it'd be more convenience.

the danger could be that somebody could set off a dirty bomb in an nfl stadium and panic to get away. they have 40 years to get away. okay. that's a bad thing. walk away. but no one ever basically says that. in addition, there's been now legally a definition on the books now of wepons of mass destruction which includes hand grenades, war muskets, now you know why the shot was heard around the world. it was a wepons of mass destruction. also bombs bursting in air by robert key, those would be wepons of mass destruction. you have exaggeration on top of exaggeration. there is one thing which is important for the rest of my case. is that in some reports, at least the first three types, nuclear, chemical, and biological ones have a similarity.

they are very messy on the battlefield. you obviously increase the radiation and you want to take over the battlefield after you won it. that complicates things big time. they have the thing that they can blow back on you. you also have to wear the horrible gas masks. in case the biological weapons would be contaminated. it takes a long time to make sure the area is safe. from the battlefield, you want to hit the enemy and take over, all three have this kind of disadvantage. okay. let me turn to the next. the question is: how much consequence have nuclear weapons been since world war ii? and it seems to me they've been very little historical consequence and have not been necessary to present a major conflict in europe. the big argument has been that without nuclear weapons there would be a war, particularly in europe, and world war iii would

have happened. that's churchill, he said after the world emerged a curious paradox. with the result that safety will become a sturdy trial of terror. and another way of putting that, is this, much more bluntly, that if -- if counterto fact, nuclear weapons had never been invented, then what this says, the people running the world were so incautious about the loss of human life, so incompetent or simply so students that they could not have been helped plunging into a major worse if the worst they could have expected was the kind of da strove they had just recently experienced. the point is that without nuclear weapons, the united states and soviet union if they got into a war wouldn't have

worry about nuclear. they'd only have to worry about world war ii. it seems to me, the deterrent was pretty good. the world has been run by world war ii in either the same or who tried to prevent world war ii, they thought it would be worse about world war i. it gave them no pleasure to find that out. the idea that these people would therefore casually stumble into a war that would be as bad or worse than world war ii is just absurd it seems to me. in addition, i do think that there has been -- there was one -- the two powers, one was substantially anti-status quo. which was the communist side. however, they never, ever had the idea of advancing communist revolution through hitlerian oppression. they wanted to submerge countries, encourage class warfare and civil war and a so

forth. but nuclear weapons had no rev advance in those cases. basically, what they wanted to do was advance the revolution in that manner. and documents from after the cold war confirmed that would have been quite obviously during the cold war, that there never was any real interest on their part in getting into any kind of major war with the west. which would look anything remotely like world war ii during which they lost 20 million lives. 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 in the technical talent. there never seem to have been militarily compelling reasons to use them. quite a part from any moral problems and so forth, the question is what good have the nuclear weapons done the processors?

one good that have been argued that it deterred the war. i've already discussed that. deterred world war iii. but in other wars, whenever anybody has considered using them, korea or vietnam or afghanistan or whatever, they hardly come up, because there's no good reason to use them. there aren't good targets. korea was relatively smaller in number, they wanted to save them for the big war in western europe. in many respects, when you start thinking about it, you see it's very difficult to see good reasons for them. collin powell is joint chairman of the chief of staff did a study. he sort of looked at it. can we use nuclear weapons in this war? is there -- from a strictly military stand point to do serious damage to just one armored division would require considerable number of stall

tactical weapons. if i had any doubts before, this report clenched them. basically, if you are going to have to hit tanks, it's much easier and better to do with conventional weapons. there's no reason to use nuclear. they have no value. the weapons have not been -- the countries that have the weapons, they couldn't figure out a good reason to use them. albert einstein is very famous for having made this statement. he's famous for a lot of things, of course. one of them is making this statement. the atom has changed everything, expect our way of thinking. in my view, he has it exactly wrong. atom has changed everything but our way of thinking. they have had a very limited substantive impact, and they

have a tremendous influence on our agonies, obsessions, inspiring desperate rhetoric extravagant theorizing, and in that aspect, i don't think they've been important. and my favorite quote is from dwight eisenhower. he said we are piling up because we do not know what else stood to provide for our security. in other words, he basically didn't think that russians were very likely to do anything that would involve the world war iii type thing. he went along with the massive increases of expenditures. they continue to spend. the -- someone has calculated that during the cold war, the united states alone spent enough money on nuclear weapons and the ways to deliver them to purchase

everything in the country for the land. or maybe it's somewhat less than that. anyone a huge amount. what did come out is what i call -- the historian robert johnson has called nuclear metaphysics. over the course of the decades, a bunch of people sat around to think about various ways you might manipulate nuclear weapons in various ways. reentry vehicles, multiple video cameras, multiple targetable reentry vehicles, and a whole bunch of other things that came in on very times and concepts, and so forth. particularly dealing with the issue of deterrence. and the central posture in this was something they called m.a.d., mutual assured destruction. having enough weapons such as both sides would be deterred

from attacking each other. essentially, there was nothing to deter. they didn't have the slightest interest of getting into a nuclear world. so consequently, the whole enterprise was basically words, 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 -- nuclear weapons have been far slower than predicted. because the weapons did not generally convey much advantage to the possessor. in the 60s a wrote an article in which a lot of people are worrying about countries with nuclear weapons, particularly china. for example, john kennedy was saying i'm haunting by 1970 there may be 10 nuclear powers instead of 4.

by 1975 there might be 15 or 20. i see the possibly in the '70s for the president in having to face a world in which 15, 20, or 25 countries might have this. he said this repeatedly in the early '60s as he ran for president and as he was. he was hardly unusual in that. there are lots of people. that simply did not come true. there's been a few countries, but very few countries that have picked up nuclear weapons. i did this article in which i thought i'd look at canada as a nuclear power. so canada could have been the second nuclear power. it was part of the manhattan project, had reactors and so forth. the canadians never took it seriously. why didn't they? the british were building it, the french were, why not the canadians. they had the capacity. and in many respects, they didn't see the value. just a waste of money. it didn't fit into their image

as a country. moseley, i think that's what's happened. when they look at nuclear weapons, what they decided is they are too much work. there's no gain from them. and you get a little bit maybe in prestige or self-inflated ego. maybe somebody who wants to deter may feel more comfortable about that. unless you have some pressing issue like that, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to develop them at all. i think that's most countries. and you get this list of 20 or 25 country that is are going to include, canada and belgium and poland and italy. most of those countries haven't talked about it seriously. you think that's why the proliferation has been so slow. nonetheless, the chief united nations weapon 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 now very much alive. either we're going to move to nuclear disarmament or 20 or 30 countries with nuclear weapons. who knows, italy, belgium, sweden. if we do that to me, this is the beginning of the end of our civilluation. so this thing is very much still there. the gill patrick report talks about the world is fast approaching a point of no return in the prospects of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. if we don't get a real halt to it, there's going to be the massive proliferation. we can read through the rest. let me move on to the next. a guy named willstall, basically saying it will hold. he was wrong in 1965, 1995, but 2005, now he's right. well, we are stilling waiting on that.

it's just been very slow. and we've had constantly things like this. about nuclear cascades, tipping points, point of no return, they have basically not taken place. when china got a bomb, everything thought india would have to get one. they did, but it was 35 years later. that's the slowest cascade in the history of the universe. but the kind of stuff is still there. it's all over washington. we're at books about the tipping point. it's still there. so the fact that it has been disproved repeatedly for decades, for half a century doesn't seem to have slowed very many people down. okay. part of this was they already sort of discussed, but let me go into it a little bit more now. it's the issue about building a nuclear weapon for your country.

the economic cost-creating it and failure to appreciate it has led 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. it took pakistan 28 years to develop a nuclear capacity. they went into it saying we're going to get it even if we have to eat grass. finally they made enough sacrifices and were able to come up with the weapons. of course, pakistan is pretty sophisticated country technologically, it took them a long time. rather more typical is what happened in libia. qadhafi, the dictator decided he wanted to have some weapons. so there's the ego thing. which is one of the reasons why countries sometimes get it. and in 2003, he finally gave up

arguing it's too costly. he says they are not interested in it. but whatever. anyway, when the u.n. inspector went to libia, he found qadhafi had sent $100 million trying to get pieces of the bomb to put together. a lot of the stuff was still in the packing boxes. they hadn't opened it. this is the way he puts it, it was the preparatory stage of developing a capability that would move it to acquire a nuclear weapon. that is saying it was preparing to develop a capability to move. so my question is how's that's different from being sound aa sleep. another aspect of nuclear proliferation has been unimportant. this has been some, of course. the nuclear diffusion has fived to have limited or perhaps, inper spectable consequences.

so what? the biggest thing on this is going back to john kennedy about china. china is the ultimate growth. in 1964, 1963, 1964, it was moving towards a nuclear base. people were extraordinarily warned about it. it would use the weapons or use them for nuclear back mail or so forth. he was very alarmed about this. he was in the vast majority. saying it was likely to be historically the most significant in the 1960s. actually, probably the most historically significant and worst was john kennedy's decision to escalate the war in vietnam. in part largely to deal with what he saw as the common threat coming from china. and john mccone is the head of the central intelligence agency at the time, unless it is led by an alliance, it is almost inevitable. so the question is what has

happened with the china bomb? answer: nothing. they've wasted a certain amount of money. they built bombs, and said from the beginning they would not use them first. they built far fewer than they could. clearly if they wanted to, they could have ha lot more. they hardly even talk about it. in fact, a lot of people don't know that china is the nuclear power. we talk about the olympics, they are building a lot of tv sets. no one says, yeah, they have nukes too. they moseley sat in silos or ware houses in various places. it hasn't had much significance, anything expect in causing a certain amount of alarm among various other countries. okay. nuclear proliferation next point, well, not necessarily undesirable does not prove to be

a major danger. it follows with what i'm saying. it happens, too bad. they'll be wasting a lot of money and effort. it's not likely to be a big deal. there aren't a whole lot of countries anxious to jump in to waste their money on the silly weapons. it's not likely to accelerate. the -- on the other hand, strong efforts, particularly since the end of the cold war, 20 years ago, they keep rogue states from obtaining nuclear weapons and counterproductive and have far more deathed that have been inflicted by all wepons of mass destruction in all of history. the chief case in this is iraq. the concern was that saddam hussein got nuclear weapons or even weapons of mass destruction like gas chemical weapons as he already knew how to make because he used them in the war against iran. if he got the weapons that the world would come to an end. he'd dominate the middle east.

the whole idea, basically, they are still getting the argument with iran. somehow, if saddam hussein had a wepons of mass destruction or a nuclear weapon, that he would sort of ravel his rocket. and everybody would say anybody you want. i want to take over my country, anything. no one is really examined that argument, that he'd dominate the middle east. he didn't control his whole country even. only a shard. he didn't trust his own military which he would use to so-called dominate the middle east. so the -- but there was never strong efforts on the part of the united states and other countries to try to deal with the threat. during the 1990s, there was a major effort to using sanctions against iraq. and during the war -- of course there's been anti-proliferation war against iraq in 2003.

the deaths that were caused by sanks probably run into the hundreds of thousands. they were not cause -- not the soul but necessary cause of hundreds of deaths in iraq. far more died in hiroshima and nagasaki put together. it's still going on. during the war -- during the sanctions rather, they were asked the very simple question. adam we have heard that half a million children have dieded. it is for the the sanction. that estimate is almost certainly quite too high. a lot of people have died. i mean that's more chilled than dying in hiroshima, is the price worth it. it's not saddam is a nice guy. it's not should we do something about saddam.

we have done this. a lot of people have died. is it worth it? good question. the only time that i know that it came up. madame then said, i think the price is worth it. i checked to see if anybody picked that up. i did a search. and no newspaper any place picked this up. they said we have the ambassador saying we've killed half a million peep in iraq and it's worth it. shouldn't we talk about that? never got talked about. the number is almost certainly too high. but she didn't argue about the number. what we have had is anti-proliferation 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 high priority, if they don't get nuclear

weapons, that's fine with me. if we can browbeat them into not doing so, terrific. it should be topped with a higher one. avoiding policies that can lead to tens of hundreds of thousands of people of the worst-case scenario fantasies. if saddam had gotten nuclear weapons, he could have been detained or deterred. they would probably join an alliance to oppose them as they did when he invaded kuwait. that's not a desire of development. but killing lots of people to stop to worry about what he might do, strikes me as a bad policy. let me turn to the final topic which is nuclear terrorism. which is really keeping people awake. and what i'd like to argue is that the likelihood that terrorist would be able to build or acquire atomic bomb is banishingly small.

that's what banishingly small looks like. [laughter] >> okay. let the me took first of all at how a terrorist might get a bomb. 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 most analyst think is the least likely is they be given a bomb by a nuclear state that already has it. crazy state. the problem from this stand point is that the bomb, first place, the bombs are very expensive and difficult to make. and giving some of the precious cargo to a group you can't control who might end up blowing it up in your own territory is not exactly wise. furthermore, if you give the bombs, there's a good chance that the bomb will be discovered before they set it off. obviously it will be discovered if they do set it off. through policy process of nuclear forensics, it's very likely to figure out where the bomb came from. therefore, you're on the spot.

so the idea that a bomb would be given by a state, even a very flakey state, is very remote. unless they are totally suicidal. second technique would be to steal a bomb. bomb exists, lose nukes. it's not clear there are any lose nukes anywhere that we've had rumors about this for over 10 years. supposeedly osama bin laden purchased them in 1998, supposedly. he apparently has those bombs some place. they are in his garden. and he goes out and polishes them off. but the stealing after bomb is very tricky. bauds if you steal it, you have to be able to set it off. the bombs have safety devices on them. in case of pakistan, the comes are in two pieces in two places p you have to steal both places, know how to put them together

and set them off. the number of people now how to set off the bomb in a unauthorized manner. even the designers and people who maintain don't know how to set them off. that's very safety. if you steal a bomb, you have to know how to do it. they have devices to blow them up if you tamper with them. basically, what you are likely to be left with is a 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. almost everybody agrees that's essentially possible for the substate group. making this material, which is highly enriched uranium is extraordinary difficult task and takes basically a state. a terrorist group almost certainly can't do that. what they could be is make a bomb with other material. they find the material, they put it together, and they make it

into a bomb. okay. so the bomb they would make then would be basically a -- it would be a very crude one. so we're talking about making a bomb that's really driven. it would be large one unsafe, unreliable, and unefficient. fact of the matter is nay cut corners and try to do it as easily and cheaply as possible. they are not worried about hurting themselves when they are putting together radiation and so forth. okay. what i did was -- to work this out, i have 40 chapters basically working on this on the book. and what i did was i sort of went through. i did a narration. i sort of wrote, what would you have to do if you are a terrorist. you have to do this and this and this and so forth. then when i was threw, i went threw and tried to make a list of hurdles that you'd have to go

through to be successful. you'd have to do this and this and this. like bull letted. and lull et -- bulleted list. when i was through, i had 25. i said 25 is too big of a number. so i went back and jammed them down to 20. that was hard. that was a good exercise. i'm not very comfortable with it. i think there should be more. let's say there's 20 steps. i won't have time to go through all of this. let me give you the 20 steps so i can look at them if you want. i tried to make each of them fairly independent. what i tried to do is make them sort of discreet and the thing to stress 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 detail. but let me -- i'd be glad to later if you want. let me just sort of stress two things about this.

particularly from a social science stand point, our search stands out. one is you have to trust criminals. you can get this material, you have to find some guy that knows where it is. you have to subvert him. disgruntled russian physicist. he has to deliver it to you. so he's a criminal. or you have other criminals help you steal it it or whatever. the problem is the criminals is they are good at extortion. once they know what you are doing, they are likely to keep boosting their price. $1 million, no, $3 million, no. once you got them the stuff and you have stolen uranium and trying to get them out of the country, they know what you've done. forever, they should lead the police, who are going to be alerted by this to your area. and they are going to -- they are going to -- they have vital information. so forth what the logical thing

to do if your a terrorist is to kill them. on the other hand, they are criminals and they probably think about that themselves. they are probably going to go to the authority. the clowns came around and said, hey, do you have uranium. i played a long for a while. you can pick them up any time. you get 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 with these guys hanging around waiting for jobs and jaying anybody here now how to make an atomic bomb. you have to get a top physicist who have a wife, a reputation, and is being watched assiduously by pakistani intelligence. then they have to be there for a year or more making the bomb in the place of istanbul or whatever you have set up the shop.

no one must notice. okay. we always have them in the slum. or we always have -- you know, it's just a very common thing. and also local criminals must not say something weird is going on there. and the police, of course, video camera alerted by the threat of the uranium. it's very difficult to put these together. says steven younger, the former head of the weapons development. he goes into quite blank difficulties of doing this for anybody, including a substate group. then you have to get through the country. you have to get somebody to receive it. they have to be able to deliver it and set it off. there's 20 of these. what i did is an exercise. i said, okay. everybody says each of these when they discuss this, each of these steps is difficult, but not impossible. i agree. none of them is impossible. but they are difficult. okay. let's not say they are difficult. let's say there's a 50/50 chance of being successful at each

step. that's not difficult. but it's a pretty good chance. so if there are -- if there are 20 steps and there's a 50/50 chance, your chance of being successful is about one in a million. really realistically, but still very gracious assumption, let's assume there's one chance of three in being successful. and many of the barriers are much, much less likely than that. your chance of being successful is about one in three and a half billion. if our terrorist, read my book. you begin to start thinking maybe this isn't such -- a world's greatest idea. so the -- also been the case -- i won't have time to go into this now. but al qaeda's capacity and probably it's desire to obtain atomic weapons have been inflated. if you look at the evidence in their interest, it has been really quite limited. there's -- these are some of the

things on this. but i won't go into. there's places where there's been certain cases that they have some interest. it's very amateurish. there was no evidence that al qaeda had any nuclear weapons program. nothing real. they gave these interview that is you can see there. that was just as about were being forced to leave afghanistan. they were 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. it was budgeted between two and $4,000. this isn't a big thing. okay. let me conclude them. we can have some time for questions now. whatever their impact, nuclear weapons have been -- had best the limited effect on history. they have been a substantial waste of money and effort, have

not been appeals to most state that is do not have them, and are out of reach for terrorists and are unlikely to shape much of our future. so let me end on that and suggest you can sleep well. thank you. [laughter] [applause] >> questions? >> to you have any idea how many

times it been tried? >> well, the romanians tried. but beyond that. nobody really tried. they had one in the subway and were killed 11 people. then they were shut down. i don't want to atrilies the 11 deaths. it was that was the progress. the interest of al qaeda has been, you know, they may have tried to get some uranium at one time. they -- and they had some. in the training camps, in afghanistan, people took a course in explosives. so when they got in, they found a bunch of notebooks that these guys have had. it's very explosive chemicals and so forth. the last page was nuclear

weapon. of that was like the last lecture. they had one lecture on how to make a nuclear bomb. it was all stuff that you can get off the internet. it was just standard. people say that must mean they want to get one. maybe. as far as activity, there was no real effort to do it. osama bin laden seems to not have been interested in it. it doesn't make sense from the terrorist stand point. the drill i've been through is sort of suggest 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 and guns and so forth. and so i think they'd moseley, and as far as they've done anything, relied on much more conventional and understandable and much more reliable kind of weaponry. yes, sir? >> who do you think would be the comic session let's say by 2020? do you think there'll be a

clarified thinking, a rethinking, another problem that's even bigger than this that we'll be focusing on. what do you think? >> i'm not sure. the question is about the atomic obsession be in 2020? i suspect it'll still be there. i think it's built in. my book is trying to deflate or put in reasonable context the 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 an issue that's related to what you are saying also. it's that when big problems go away, other problems bet elevated. when the cold war went away, people said what are we afraid of now? so what they did, nuclear proliferation became a much bigger deal or terrorism or you may remember japan. japan was going to take over the

world by buying, you know, i call the flash. japan buys pearl harbor. there was a period where we thought japan was going to take over the world. there's always things that you can sort of grasp and pull up. you say nuclear weapon, everybody thinks the end of the world. and, you know, the chapter in my book, i was questioning if i should write it. i'm the first person that's said bombs are like this. they are not like that. one bomb doesn't destroy an economy. one bomb doesn't destroy new york city. and that's out there in the literature. because there's various place that can calculate how big the bomb would be. no one has said in a stained manner put that in real context. people now it. bomb people know it.

but i decided i really needed it to fit in. i kept looking for somebody else who had said it. so i could hide behind them. moseley i couldn't do that. so they -- it's also like 9/11, basically. 9/11, i wrote this book called overblown. trying to put 9/11 in context or al qaeda and so forth. but it's just very hard. you know whereby people just understandably, of course, are were much exercised by that. >> i'd like to defend. i would like to say a couple of things. i would like to defend that it's paid to pay this big stuff. i don't blame you, sir. i would take the mouth of your country. the second thing, i would say, there is a way. because look at the two that dramatic cases of the moment. we are not preventing india from having, we are helping india of having atomic weapons.

why are we helping? but in the case of korea or north korea and iran we want the opposite. why? >> because of the case of north korea, that's one of disstabilizing the regimes. it's having them spend like crazy on this. in a way there is a purpose. it's one of destroying the local economy. they are starving the people. you saw what happens in iran. people are in the streets. they are not happy with the way that the economy has been running. the fact that the spending all of the their money on atomic weapons. these are the same things that have happened to the soviet union. the best thing they could do is not feed the people or house their people or prevent them from drinking, but it was building atomic weapons. even in your days. so in a way, it has a purpose.

it may be diabolical. it may be cynical. you know, destroy income regime. let them in a way i'm reaching the same conclusion. let them or maybe we should abstract them to build more. so they are self-destructing. >> yeah, well, let me. i disagree with your conclusion. i think you are giving him too much credit for cleverness. the effort has been trying to get them to not build. in the case of north korea, it's worst. they are spending so much money on the military generally, including nuclear weapons. it's not clear, of course, if iran is even going to try to get nuclear weapons. they said they definitely do not want to get them if they are bombed by israel or something that might change. but it is a big expense. and places like qadhafi went through that for a while and decided it was just very expensive.

the uranium program recently, they don't work. but the idea is what we are tieing to do is we're trying to do a favor to iran. don't waste your money on those stupid weapons. in some respect, i think that's a good thing. what i'm against is killing people to try to do a favor for them in some respects. you could make a case that spending a a lot of money to missiles as opposed to conventional weapons makes a country less safe because it's wasting a lot of money that it could spend on other weapons. even the case of israel, 10% of the budget spent on nuclear weapons. well, what good has it done? that industry problems with hamas and hezbollah. would they be better off if their military budget was so solve% higher or something. -- 10% higher or something. they have the case under control. you can make an argument that

that's been a waste for them. they don't seem to have gained anything from it. >> yeah, a couple of yeahs. one are you suggesting that, for example, if hitler had somehow gotten the bomb before -- and not the united states during world war ii that there would have been no consequences? that's one question. secondly, both obama as well as kissinger have articulated a vision after nuclear free world. in your judgment, how doable is it? can we put the genie back in the bottle? untrain, develop a system for testing cheating that could lead to that sort of vision? >> yeah, the case of the hitler question, what i 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. one reason for getting nuclear weapons, you might say, and i say this in the back, is to hedge against the possibility of the rise of another diabolical, extremely clever, very lucky monster like hitler. i don't see that on the horizon and so forth. and saddam hussein is not in that category. but you might want to, that seems reasonable to me. i'm not saying they wouldn't make any difference. not likely they will, but it could. to the second question, i'm not sure that you need agreement. first place you are going to have the argument, we have to have some in case of the horrible thing happening. obviously if you get rid of nuclear weapons, you'll never get rid of the ability too make them and the knowledge so that in some sense they are still

there in the some kind of virtual state. but i think the best way to get nuclear weapons is to let them rest in peace. the -- let me give you an example. after -- in the early century, there was a cold war between the united states and british canada. there was an arm's race in everything else. the british built the elaborate canal system for military purposes. then about 1872 or so, the tensions went away. and so did the arms. the forts are still there. they are now museums. the the canal has become the worldest wiggest skating. there was never another agreement. they just went away. to the agree, that's what's been happening since the end of the world war. they have decided the number of nuclear weapons they have on hand. they still have 20, a couple

thousand. but less than before. some of that has been done by agreement. and some have been done. if you don't have agreements, countries are more willing to get rid of the weapons. if they get rid of them because they don't think they need them and they find out they are wrong, they can build them back up. they are free to do so. if you have ab agreement, they are going to be very careful about making sure that they have -- that they don't reduce too far. consequently, weapons are likely to go away better if you don't have agreement than if you do. the same with france. france has reduced it's nuclear weapons by down to about 20 to 30% than it had at the end of world war. why they have any, a problem that you might want to explore in some phd dissertation. they still have a couple hundreds. 300 or something like that.

but they've reduced them enormously. i think that's likely to happen. if tensions chemogoing on and more and more -- keep going on and more and more they cost more money, they will probably gradually diminish in number as has been happening. that might happen if there is not an agreement rather than if there is. >> they come into our countries so freely, drugs, so somebody might very easily get somebody into country in that way. what are your thoughts on these kinds of things? >> well, yeah, people talk about the technology movie. >> i don't know enough about technology to know how hard it is. >> well, the knowledge of the chemical weapons is well known. what's impressive is there's been no use of chemical weapons

any real magnitude in the holy iraq war. a couple of weapons have been laced with chlorine that had no effect. they just tend to be pretty complicated and hard to -- hard to develop. and very costly. and not very valuable. compared to old fashions things like bullets and shrapnel. people argue that with nuclear weapons you can get a bomb. if you can get -- if you want to get good praises, if you want to get a nuclear weapon, just put it inside a bail of marijuana. but it's really a -- and that is something too. that's not affair comparison. drug dealers know a lot of drugs are going to be caught.

they get that build into business. they are going to lose half of the stuff that gets in and make enough money from the second half. in the case of the weapon, you can't have 50%. you have to get the whole thing in. it's like smuggling in a rem brant, you can't only do half. it's a whole different kind of process to me. [inaudible question] >> the biology went through 14 revolutions. biological weapons still don't make much sense. same with chemistry. these are not new weapons.

these are old weapons. biological weapons, and, you know, the british tried to use smallpox against american indians and things like that. the term warfare and so forth is not new. it doesn't seem to work very well or be sufficiently useful from a strictly military stand point, apart from a moral one. what's also happening is better ways to defend. there's certainly improvements in safety techniques for the securing these kinds of weapons. which is also part of technology . i don't think -- it's also something to keep an eye on. okay. thanks very much. [ala :