for lifting or maybe i'm going to play at nordstrom but i'm not playing carnegie hall, that is obvious. [laughter] so i had the following conversation with my parents that if you find yourself in this position remember this, mom and dad, i'm changing my major. what are you changing your major two? i don't know. estimate yet on what to do with your life? it's my life. it's our money. find a major. [laughter] and i tried english literature. i hated it. i tried state and local government. my little project in state and local government class was to interview the water manager of denver, the single most boring man that leggitt met. [laughter] i thought that's not it, then i wandered into a course of international policy and was a man named joseph cornell, madeleine albright's father to be he taught me about diplomacy and things that are national and

soviet, the soviet union and all of a sudden i know what i wanted to do. i went home and i told my parents i want to be a soviet specialist. fortunately they didn't say what is a nice black girl from birmingham talking about being a soviet specialist? they just said to go for it so there's a couple important lessons in their for young folks like you. first of all, nobody is so confident that day at your age or even older that they are just sure they are going to be great and turn out to be terrific at what they do. when people are that confident there is something wrong with them, all right? [laughter] second, you need to find what you are passionate about, not just what you like, but what you are passionate about. what is really interesting to you? and you have a long time to do that. you have a couple more years of high school and then you've got a college so you have time to find out.

>> i graduate next year to a >> than you are ahead of the game already. >> you still have time to read i was a junior in college before i found out, so go to college, go to school, take some classes, try things that are hard for you, not easy for you. if you are good at math, learn to write. if you're good at writing, take matt. you will find what it is that interests you. >> when you were a kid did you have the mind set? >> i'm not sure you do know what you want to do. at my age i knew what i wanted to do but it's not what i'm doing. [laughter] my point is take your time, don't plan every step, try to get good at what you do and then when you have done that and when you are doing something great, you will realize that it came because you give yourself time to learn what your passionate at doing. by we, it may not be something people would look at you and say that's what she ought to do.

there is no earthly reason i ought to be soviet specialist from birmingham alabama, okay? you're welcome. >> any more questions? >> my name is hannah and my question is are you going to plan to run for office again? [laughter] no. i actually never was even in my high school student council. did you run for student council? she won the presidency twice, i knew it. i was never -- never ran for anything and probably won't. i left public service. i'm very involved in cable education, very involved with

the boys and girls clubs. probably will get more involved with my cousin and the work that she's doing it because i care a lot about those issues and the state of california and where we are going that is the public service and i was the secretary of state, there is no better job. >> ladies and gentlemen, would you please help me thank the absolutely wonderful condoleezza rice. [applause] >> condoleezza rice served as united states secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 and as the national security adviser from 2001 to cause a fight. she is currently a senior fellow with the hoover institution. for more information, visit hoover.org. from the national museum of nuclear science, pulitzer

prize-winning author richard rhodes discusses nuclear disarmament in the post cold war age. this is a little more of an hour. [applause] >> thank you very much. i have been on a book tour for about a month and a half now, so at this point i can't hear out of my last year. my speech may be ragged and i will do my very best. this case it is a wonderful certainly most americans who are about these issues and the technology. i am going to use some slides just as a kind of background. some of it will be familiar to you. so i want to pick up the story of the nuclear age of this last

volume does at the end of the cold war. i think during the end of the cold war as a kind of extended version of the cleanup process various countries responded in various and interesting ways to the end of the superpower positioned which polarized the world i think the first sentence of the book begins when the iceberg on the river of history at the end of the cold war and there was a sense of a lot of different individual national issues coming to some resolution or reaching a point they could be reopened because the country a wonder how to align themselves the rigidly with the soviet

union. one of the most remarkable evens was the discovery that a announcement by south africa by the 1993 it had built and was working on the seventh world war to the gun violence but as a result of the end of the cold war, to dismantle those weapons to put them away. the story as most do turn out to be considerably more complicated than that. indeed, south africa had built a number of little bombs, but they had also prepared themselves to use those weapons. these are naturally be exteriors that they have manufactured in case they were actually needed. their program was at least as

the announce it officially that they were concerned about the 45,000 to the mercenary troops in angola to the north and south africa during the latter years of the cold war. they were concerned they might invade south africa. if so then they wanted some leverage with other countries particularly the united states to get some support and billing this invasion. the plan was they will tell the united states we have nuclear weapons and of the united states wasn't responsive to that, then the what test one underground as if we were not responsive to that and then they would prepare to use one as a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. although it is rather bizarre to think about it's not so

different from effort over the years to use potential and the nuclear arsenal as bargaining chips in the alliance in the united states. at the same time there is considerable evidence in south africa had actually begun at least planning to work full-scale development of a nuclear capability that would include not only world war ii bombs but also an implosion and treaty bombs and some original work. the treaty is it ties south africa to the early work during the middle years of the cold war by israel and i think it is ample evidence of an israeli cast of about a couple time artillery rockets in the south

ocean about 1200 miles southeast of cape town on a couple of little islands that belong to south africa and that are shrouded in fog and clouds more than 250 days a year. the question is what is south africa's part to allow the israelis to stage of one of its ports and it's closed in the purpose of time when the test was believed to take place. you i'm sure are familiar with all of the science that were picked up around the world that there had indeed been a test not only did the satellites which have been presented as somehow feeling and inadequate somehow detected a classic double flash from a nuclear explosion. but there were other signs as well. there were hydrophones recording, there were sheep in new zealand with 131 and a

number of others. there was a large flash from south arctic from the japanese station which had antarctic. they're really was a test. besides some unknown support is a certain amount of treaty and that fact alone makes it clear that they were working on these world war ii type of bombs. in any case, with the end of the cold war this is my point. the cuban troops went on from angola, south africa by then had become an international pariah and didn't like being in that situation, and this is perhaps an ugly side of the decision to eliminate the arsenal they didn't want to turned nuclear weapons over to the black african government that was

about to replace the white apartheid government so they not only destroyed the weapons they also destroyed all the documentation of the engineering papers and so forth there by the hope of preventing any further development of a nuclear arsenal and in your country. they still represent the first controlled nuclear arsenal that is voluntarily decided to eliminate it. and in that sense they deserve all credit with it. been there was a fascinating story to me the iaea and the groups in iraq after the first gulf war and the teams are standing on the soft iron core of a calutron system electromagnetic separation system that the iraqi had

decided to develop as a way of getting around the export constraints that have been imposed on them are around the world that is a surprise to everybody. some of you may have been involved in this effort. it was so surprising and i tell you this story just because the my small contribution to iraq david and trying to expand the number of inspectors what it was took out his copy of the making of the atomic bomb and opened it to the diagram and the descriptions and they would know what to look for. when i got to the iraqi military base when they had had a tip that there might be calutron

magnets somewhere, the iraqi is would be loading these 64-ton magnets on the back of the tank transporters 40 or 50 at a time and or not the back of the basin our guys were coming in the front with a kind of broken down land rover that the united nations had supplied them with their inspection work. gallucci told me handing out with a video camera video taping the trucks with their batons and their other calutron parts roaring off into the desert ahead of them is the iraqi firing into the air to scare them off and it really was the kind of copps and robert or cowboys and indians -- cops and robbers or cowboys and indians. most interesting was david story when they had the government building in downtown baghdad of

the ticket they looked somewhere in that building they would find the iraqi plan for the bomb and it would be the smoking gun they needed to prove what they were telling them were in fact working on a weapons. they searched the building pretty thoroughly and was very clear that everything had been scrubbed but as they were working their way down to the building the happened to go back to the back of a narrow hall in the basement and opened the door and found a little room that the iraqi cleanup crew had messed and there among all but the documents david said it was the first thing i pulled out of the pile was a six month report that included a detailed engineering drawing of the implosion device. ..

but we were determined that we weren't going to leave the building as we had to do previously on a couple of inspections without the documents in our possession. now part of the secret is he had already shipped them out. he said, we had a colonel on the team who had the worst case of she said i have ever seen and we had to get into a hospital to get them rehydrated. the iraqi -- he said seven then we had these key we mean of course new zealand medics who were tough smart guys so he said i just that the document into

the colonel shirt and he lay down on the gurney and they carried him out and everything was fine. that document went to a german transport plane at the international airport the same day and flew off to new york. nevertheless, they were still stuck in the party not because they weren't going to give away the fact that the document severity gone and they had many other documents as well. the satellite phone with their one link to the world and their one hope they would survive this operation. so after about 23 hours of the first day nonstop kay said we hung it up for a moment and it immediately rang. he said i picked it up and it was the operator in london and the operator said, we don't know what you are doing that you have been on this phone for 23 hours, but we are going to need a credit card. [laughter]

and kay said, i told him, and kay is a very smart man. he said i told him well you are not going to get my danged credit card he said that let me tell you what is going on here and he told them. one of the things he said was a recession really isn't very good we are just, the signal cuts in and out. we can't maintain they can match and we would like to maintain and the operator said, maybe we can help you with that. i will call you back in half an hour. so 30 minutes later the phone rang. j. picked it up in the operator said we want to help you with your situation. we are going to move the satellite. so he had a good connection through those four days and it was one of the lifelines for that. as you know of course once you think about this process as the first compulsory inspection, something that i think we probably will be one ultimate

component of many world where nuclear weapons have been eliminated because if someone decided to cheat and all else failed one of the things that would be possible to do with the to invade that country. that is basically what we did with iraq. the withdrawal of all of our ground-launched tactical nukes was withdrawal to the united states, was another step that went on in terms of cohort cleanup particularly important in terms of north korea, because north korea was fully aware that there were lots of american nukes in south korea and by removing them that began a process that will culminate at the end of the decade in almost resolution of the major conflicts between the united states and north korea. in fact let me just run through that story quickly because it is

quite a dramatic story and i tell it at some length in the book. as you know, we were negotiating with north korea all through the '90s about its reactor at yongbyon, a reactor that we were increasingly convinced, will we knew it was breeding plutonium and we were increasingly convinced that the north koreans might be preparing to extract the plutonium from spent fuels and make weapons and of course that was the process they were on. this culminated in 1994 in a very close call for another war with north korea. bob galuchi who was negotiating with the north koreans at that time told me, he said i can't seem to convince everybody, anybody how close we were to a war with north korea. he said we were just about to evacuate the u.s. embassy in seoul and that would have been a

clear signal to the north koreans that we were preparing to attack them or at least attack yongbyon which was the first phase of the war. now, president clinton already had a discussion with general gary luck who was in charge of u.s. forces in korea. lockett come back to washington to say to the president a few months prior to the close call that we could win a war with north korea at at that the cost would be 1,000,001,000,000,000,000. president clinton said, meaning what? he said 1 million south korean lives and a trillion dollars from their economy because of the destruction and the disruption. so those were the stakes and they were pretty terrible stakes. but clinton had kind of backed himself into a corner. it was going to be a series of ratcheted up restrictions on north korea and north korea's

to turn seoul in south korea to a sea of flames. you probably remember that phrase. both sides were kind of ratcheting up into a conflict that neither side seemed to have a way to pull back from. it was just at that point that former president jimmy carter decided he had better step in and he took advantage of the fact that for the previous three years he had an invitation from the north koreans every year to come to their country, and so he went and within 24 hours had been able to negotiate a stand down on that side. galuchi by now was back in washington actually at the white house with clinton and his immediate people discussing what the next step is going to be. carter called from north korea. the call came into the white

house. the secretary came into the room and said it is north korea, it is president carter so president clinton of course stood up to take the call. then she said no, he is calling bob galuchi. [laughter] galuchi said i didn't exactly crawl out of the room on all fours. and of course the resolution was good and the outcome was that galuchi went back to negotiating with the north koreans. what they wanted was a couple of power reactors. they were happy to have them under international control and all of that, but during the korean war, we had general lemay and the strategic air command had systematically firebombed north korea almost literally as he said back in the stone age. we had killed more than 2 million north korean civilians. had blown up all of their power dense, 57% of their electrical

supply which was hydroelectric. they were still after all these years having tried first with the soviet union and now trying with the united states hoping to get a renewed electrical supply for their country. it sounds like a lot less than it maybe should have been bought i asked galuchi why would you go to north korea to nuclear reactors? his answer was, that was what they wanted. that was the deal and other the terms of the deal that would have forked out. but there were delays. finally secretary of state madeleine albright went to north korea the last month of the clinton administration in 1999. president clinton was just about to go himself and the election was then mooted by the question of whether george bush or al gore had been elected. clinton didn't feel he could leave the country when there was

a constitutional crisis and it all fell apart. and when the george w. bush administration came in, they seem to have had is a basic policy rule whatever clinton did, do the opposite. but they found that was probably at most a laboratory scale investigation in north korea of uranium enrichment and that became a pretext for basically throwing out all of the agreed framework that galuchi had previously negotiated. things went downhill from there and now finally it looks like they might be coming back uphill a little bit but not without north korea taking the step of becoming a nuclear power which is pretty sad and tragic. you know about these points, the limitations on the two sides arsenals.

the amazing story of three countries which were major nuclear powers as a result of the dissolution of the soviet union, deciding, not deciding that finally agreeing after u.s. efforts to negotiate with them that they would give up their nuclear arsenals, moved the bombs and missiles to russia the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. i am standing on the right to this picture. the man on the left was the first head of state of the new country of belarus. his wife and he were both nuclear physicist very much affected by chernobyl. 75% of the fallout from chernobyl fell on belarus and he told me he immediately contacted moscow and asked if they could break out the potassium iodine tablets in the bomb shelters to give to the children to protect

their thyroid from the iodine 131 fallout and the response from moscow was comrade, are you a fool? we don't want to start a riot. just shut up about it. don't talk about it. they even at one point confiscated the instruments are that some of the belarusian scientists were using to measure the radioactivity of the fallout. so he wasn't -- i asked him why he so easily give up the nuclear arsenal that consisted of 81 missiles, not to take out of europe and north america. he said because they came with russian soldiers attached so he wanted them out of the country. the only thing belarus took from the united states was some support for the actual transit transit -- transportation process to move them out. kazakhstan negotiator little more but they got rid of their missiles. ukraine was really the sticking

point, country that had sufficient and justifiable suspicions of russia's intentions in their direction but eventually there a process or oppression coercion and united states encouragement and support they also in 1996 signed the non-proliferation treaty. then there is the story that some of you probably took an active part in which was the effort by our left here to connect with their counterparts in the former soviet union, people who had been living in secret cities and living very well, cities behind barbed wire suddenly with no visible means of support. suddenly facing the fact that they might well be moved out of of -- the effort then was to encourage them through the scientific and human people-to-people exchanges that los alamos and other labs arranged to be willing to

discuss what else they might do and that of course tied in with the nunn-lugar program, congress that finally came up increasingly with support through the other years of the '90s and saw them through that really terrible transition time. this is one the director of los alamos, the tall man on the right, is just about to shake hands with the oppenheimer of the soviet union and the director. when their hands met, clara time he spoke beautiful english from the years of ernest rutherford at cambridge actually working side-by-side with robert oppenheimer although they apparently never really knew each other. he said i have been waiting for this moment for 40 years. it was a top job convincing the other nations who were signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that

they should permanently extend the treaty. the treaty has been set up with a 25 year breakpoint in 1970 when it came into effect because a number of nonnuclear powers were understandably suspicious of the nuclear powers commitment to actually eliminate their nuclear weapons. as a result and like most treaties, this treaty was set up with an up-or-down vote on its permanent extension 25 years after it came into power which would have been 1995. it was a very questionable issue with the outside of the '90s whether or not the treaty was going to be permanently extended and it was important to us and to everyone that it be permanently extended. however much the superpowers played games about it. so tom grann who is the u.s. ambassador and at one time and active head of the arms control and disarmament agency decided

that he would first like go to the capital of all the countries that were in any doubt whatsoever about siting and negotiating with their leaders. he spent the next two or three years on the road doing just that and was able by 1995 to have turned the tide and the treaty was permanently extended with however and rightly so, samore requirements in terms of nuclear powers meeting their part of the bargain. but it was, as you know, nuclear non-proliferation treaty wasn't anything that protected the world from having 25 for 30 or even 40 nuclear powers instead of denying that we have today. the comprehensive test ban treaty was another part of all of this and i won't say much more about it than that except that of course when it finally came up for ratification in the

senate in 1999 the republican right has managed to maneuver things around so that it got a simple majority of the senate vote much lets two-thirds that it needed and as of today has still not been ratified. i suspect it it is on president obama's list down the road but for now fortunately the united states still observes the terms of the agreement and provides funds for the very elaborate program of international investigation that has been installed around the world to track any possible nuclear test and indeed i think it was one of the first to identify the first north korean test. so with that said, it is interesting to look at what all of this cohort costs us. these are numbers i have converted to $2010 so that the

full impact is there. i think the most important number to me is the cost of our nuclear weapons and delivery systems. $7.8 trillion as the cold war total, 18.5 trillion which carl sagan famously said, in other words, everything in the unitedd states except land. i think we should ask ourselves whether we really needed to spend that much money. it is interesting to see what we didn't do because of that expense among others. the american society of civil engineers puts out an annual report card on u.s. civil infrastructure. this is the most recent one they published in 2009. it is slightly better than another when i looked at from 2005 but it is not very good.

we know the united states is in pretty bad repair. we know it because bridges fall down and highways are torn and schools don't work very well, the buildings i mean. we have a major major investment that has been forgone for many years, partly because of the cost of the cold war and the nuclear arsenals that went with it. so the society of civil engineers estimate is that it would take about $2.2 trillion to bring us back up to a good standard. then there is another question and i really don't need to tell this audience that, but i will just say briefly, sometimes they think to most americans it seems these issues are no longer on the table. i know that there are plenty of americans who believe if we eliminated our nuclear arsenal at the end of the cold war, which sounds ill-informed, but is in fact i think informed by a

gut instinct of the cold war was the reason for the arms race and that with the closure of the cold war, why would we need to maintain a large nuclear arsenal anymore? that i think is the logic behind that misunderstanding. but the truth is, even a small regional nuclear war would have worldscale dramatic effects. the same group of scientists which worked out the model of nuclear winter is back in the 1970s and 80s more recently took the much more sophisticated climate models that have been developed to look at climate change and re-estimated their global warming estimates and found that indeed global warming from a full scale soviet-american nuclear exchange would have been worse than their earlier estimates indicate.

but they were also interested in asking the question what would a small regional nuclear war due to the rest of the world? so they looked at 115-kiloton, in other words hiroshima sized nuclear weapons exchange between india and pakistan and they assumed that those weapons would necessarily be exploded over cities, and they then calculated so we are talking about 150 -- we are talking about 1.5 megatons even though we have weapons or had weapons that were larger than that individual weapon. but many people don't understand that the main effect of a nuclear explosion is a mass fire, not radiation and not glass and not -- and i just throw in the photograph, the exhibit photograph of the hiroshima mass fire to make that

point. most of the people who died in hiroshima or nagasaki died from fire. they didn't die from blaster radiation. unfortunately my graph does not animate for us but if they did do so, it would see a little black speck emerge between india and pakistan and slowly grow into a gray haze that would cost about a three-month period spread out across the entire world. the estimates that the scientists came up with was that there would be about a two to 3-degree annual reduction in average world temperature as a result of that small nuclear, regional nuclear war. two to 3 degrees doesn't sound like much either but it is enough to produce hard freezes in july and their estimate was that there would be prompt -- of

about 20 million people. and delayed deaths from starvation among people who live on the edge of starvation now around the world, of about 2 billion. so, we are still very much engaged in the issues that are related to nuclear weapons and nuclear arsenals. 1 billion, sorry. i gave the wrong number for starvation. and i just listed the largest cities here in terms of numbers of people because we are still in a world where even a small nuclear weapon could produce mass casualties. numbers far beyond most national disasters in the history of our species. here are today's inventories. i think we are going to see this

go down very rapidly with in fact -- a column on the right is an indication after the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty comes into effect where arsenals will be reduced. 5883 weapons is still in a for all of these in fact that i have been describing to be part of the risk that we all lived with. and i should just add comment again i'm not telling you anything you don't know that we have come to a different place now with the potential for subnational groups to acquire or even perhaps make if they can get the nuclear materials terrorist weapons. we have come to a place where deterrence as it was classically described isn't going to work anymore. there is nothing that osama bin laden and his group that i know

of holds that would be at risk other than the caves of tora bora if they decided to set up a nuclear weapon in the middle of new york city. i think one of the reasons we invaded iraq is the second goal for which i will talk about in a moment, rather like the drunk who lost his wallet on the dark street. i would look forward under the streetlight because he could see there and he couldn't see other places. i don't mean that to be insulting of the president but it is pretty clear that one of the main reasons for invading iraq in 2003 was to send a message to whomever was involved in these efforts, subnational groups. so i want to talk for a moment about the efforts that have been made since the end of the cold war toward thinking about limiting and indeed even eliminating the physical nuclear weapons and the world.

richard butler, the ambassador from australia who had been active in nuclear elimination efforts since the late '80s fished chaired a commission that was called by the australian prime minister in 1995. it was a group of people from many different walks of life of distinction around the world, generals and beatniks and everybody in between. and above their many conclusions, the one that richard was proudest of and felt was the most important thing that came from that effort was what he called the -- up proliferation which is a fundamental rule. my most fundamental rule was niels bohr's remarked in 1944 to franklin roosevelt that the air in an entirely new situation that could not be resolved by war.

in other words, nuclear weapons introduced a condition to the world where the solution to problems have to be diplomatic. it couldn't be the result of a successful war unless it was a war against a nonnuclear power and even that would be compromised by those very alliances that i was talking about at the outset of this talk. that is my basic fundamental principle about this whole issue but, this axiom in a way follows from that because deterrence operates on the principle that if you have nuclear weapons sufficiently guarded and protected and you are attacked by a country that has nuclear weapons or threatened to be you can threaten and returned to attack them because neither side wants to be destroyed. that is not a victory. so therefore it followed the commission and as long as any country has nuclear weapons

others will seek to acquire them. that is the axiom of proliferation. president obama in his speech in prague in early 2009 when he, shortly after he was inaugurated as president added a kind of the corollary. if we believe that the set of nuclear nuclear weapons is inevitable than in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable. i say that because i think it has been much too easy to believe that the status quo that was so hard-earned on the part of many others around the world, the status quo of deterrence, is somehow going to be a perpetual state. by tina technology doesn't work that way. machines aren't that reliable. people change their minds. situations and circumstances

change as well. that is why i think president obama's corollary follows clearly as long as they're a nuclear weapons in the world the possibility exists of their news and indeed their probability exists that there used. more certain now than when the cold war established two sides that manage to find ways to cooperate across the cold war in many different ways. that is the kind of story that is never really been told but it is true. even our negotiations with the trying to at least know what the other side was doing. against the idea of deterrence helmut schmidt and his people in germany and the middle of the cold war, looking for a way to

resolve the dispute that had led to the division of their country into east and west formulated the idea of common security. i think of this again as an outgrowth of the idea that as long as we are in a new situation it can't be resolved by war. the germans took the idea of common security to the russians, agreed with the russians to sign a treaty that would make permanent the existing borders of states in europe, meaning west germany agrees to the division of itself into two parts. but they did that believing that was the first step toward a negotiated resolution of their differences and of course they turned out to be right. no longer against each other but only with each other show we be secure. and this was then formulated more elaborately by a commission headed by the prime minister of

sweden who was assassinated several years later with the commission at the u.n.. all states, even the most powerful are dependent on the and on the good sense and restraint of other nations even the ideological and political opponents have a shared interest in survival. in the long run no nation can basic security on on the insecurity of others. i don't know of a clear statement of the basic and fundamental problem that has to move to a situation where there are no physical nuclear weapons. the steps towards nuclear abolition i will pose briefly because i'm sure you are all very familiar with them. but to me, they are less important right now than for us to rethink now that the cold war is long over what is the function of nuclear weapons? is there some way to have good

parts of the protection that nuclear weapons afforded us for decades and decades without the risks that are inherent in the maintenance of fallible machines by fallible human beings? i think the answer to that in the longer run is going to be what some have called virtual deterrence, what some have called too late deterrence, but what basically means, as long as you and people like you with knowledge of how to build and maintain nuclear arsenals, maintain that knowledge it is possible to think of a situation in the world where there are no physical weapons around. you could think of it as a kind of reverse process of threats. if you take the warhead off of a icbm and put it in the next silo

it will take perhaps three hours to put it back on and launch the missile at three hours instead of 30 minutes. if you move at 60 miles down the road, and maybe it takes a day. if you take the weapons apart and store their part separately as india and pakistan do today, precisely so they don't have to stay stay for strike capability from the other side, then you have wartime. what is the time good for? of time is good for trying to find some other way to resolve the dispute. you can walk that back as far as you like. i would say walk it back six months to a time when the materials are available, perhaps even the parts that the weapons have to be assembled and certified and inserted onto their delivery system and so forth. in that situation there is always of course the risk of someone deciding to break out. and i think back to the

remarkable document that of robert oppenheimer and the other members of the lilienthal commission assembled, put together and work worked out in 1946 which was then kind of botched by bernard baruch and changed around when he presented it to the united nations. what oppenheimer -- baruch at one point asked oppenheimer where's your army? so many chiefs, how are you going to stop that? there is no provision here for any importance and oppenheimer'd building a nuclear weapon that would enact of war. and that means every other country who was party to the agreement would necessarily be threatened and concerned. and presumably would proceed step-by-step from negotiations to coercive negotiations to perhaps conventional invasion as with iraq in 1991.

but oppenheimer pointed out at at the ultimate.if all else fails the other countries involved could always reconstitute their nuclear arsenals as well and under those circumstances, we would only be back to where we are right now so it is not so implausible i think or idealistic as i think plans for the elimination of weapons must often seem especially to those of you who have worked on them and have been involved in them for all these years. the question really is why would anybody want to go there? why would anybody take the risk? i think that has to be surrounded with all of the steps that i posted it on the previous light and this one so that there is a very high level of conflict that nobody is going to cheat on the agreement. furthermore and i think this is

a point that often escapes lay people including myself, that is treaties aren't normally negotiated with the idea you were going to cheat on them. they are normally negotiated because all sides feel that they have value, that they get security and under those circumstances it is not easy to imagine a situation where someone would try to break out. but if they did, the fact that delayed deterrence would be there in the background as long as we maintain a nuclear infrastructure of people and equipment that would make it possible to reconstitute an arsenal. for me, this is the bottom line. it is not simply a statement of niels bohr. it is based on a very fundamental fact. when it became possible, when it became possible to release the

energy locked in the nucleus of the atom all the systems that have been set up of international politics that were based on the assumption that national sovereignty could be defended with conventional forces fell to the wayside. it no longer became possible to maintain national sovereignty by going to war because war became as the phrase was all those years, suicidal. under those circumstances, it says if nuclear energy shorted out the limited amount of energy available for conventional weapons and move the whole political system over to a different place, we are still in the middle of beginning to work out the consequences of this

discovery, this formulation and we haven't made that much progress. but if you look for example at the number of nuclear tests over the last 60 years, there is a japanese artist who put together an animated slide, and map of the world and it shows each nuclear test. it is absolutely fascinating. it runs 15 minutes. the middle of the cold war is just a symphony of sound. it becomes clear very quickly that there was something like the communication going on at this very rate of nuclear explosions between the united states in the soviet union. it drops off dramatically in 1991 and then there are just a few and then finally in 2006 there are a couple in north korea and then just silence

after that. that is to me a deep graphic version of what has been going on. all of this and now we are down to hear. the question really is, where do we go from here? i know you are all involved in that question and i hope the answer is we go to someplace that is safer and more secure where negotiation to the extent that it can replace his threats. those would seem to me to be the ideal places to go. but that is for me the end of 30 years of work. i've written my last nuclear volume. i've caught up with the present. i will have to wait another decade before there is another book to right. i hope i live so long. but in the meantime i think i want to say, as i have said to this audience before, thank you for your dedication and commitment. doing something that is morally

complicated very much so and i'm something this nation asked you to do, not always a think for the best of reasons. but there it was in there you were and you did as we all know a superb job. the fact is no nuclear weapons have exploded by accident since 1945. soso, thank you very much. [applause] so, questions and comments. we can do a little bit of that. >> take a moment for whoever would like to ask a question. please stand. if you would raise your hand and decide who he would like to have the question from. >> do you want to wait for the mic?

>> do the israeli store their weapons separately also? >> i can't hear you. >> any idea of the israelis store their weapons or whereever they have got them are they stored separately? >> no, i don't know, no. there is a certain amount of knowledge but not very much about the israeli arsenals. i've seen it differ by as much as 80 weapons to 300 weapons. it is pretty clear that they work -- i think that is why but how they are stored i have no idea. thank you. sir. bring the mic. >> there is another corollary to the one you are talking about, a proliferation force and that is the overwhelming conventional superiority causes a to a country he doesn't have the money to counter that to get a nuclear weapon so we are in kind

to the contrary in the u.s. where we are documented to have overwhelming conventional superiority and that is a roadblock to my. >> to comment have to do with overwhelming conventional superiority. i'm sure you are aware that the united states would be relatively more dominant in a john nuclear world than we are now. one of the things that is a threat to the united states even from a small country would be nuclear weapons but that is not at all true when we are talking about conventional weapons. so it seems clear to me as i have tried to think about how you move where we are to where i'm says jestingly might go but the united states is going to be asked to reduce its conventional capabilities. it is the sheer mass of military force that we have assembled and that is going to be very called the kitty because we are also going to be asked to eliminate our nuclear weapons. i don't imagine this is all

going to happen tomorrow or take place very easily. is going to depend very much on how much it makes sense to people, practical, conventional, defensive, security sense to live in a world without the threat of these weapons of immense destructive capacity. we will see. sir. >> and some sense though haven't nuclear weapons sort of kept -- after all countries which have a nuclear arsenal have they ever really gone to war with each other and what might happen in india and pakistan with the soviet union so there is an argument that mutual assured destruction does in fact work in some sense. >> the question is how much nuclear weapons in fact kept piece. you know there is no question i

think at a deep existential level, the level of debt fear the deterrence has worked but if you look at deterrence is a theory which elaborately developed by what i call the nuclear mandarin during the high years of the cold war, we accepted defeat in vietnam. the russians accepted defeat in afghanistan rather than escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. they were not weapons -- deterrence didn't work at the level of coercion very much but it certainly coerce the two superpowers. but unfortunately and this is why the so-called four horsemen, george soros, bill man and henry kissinger back in 2006 on the 30th anniversary of reykjavík got together and decided to start an effort to move towards eliminating nuclear weapons, there is now the real

possibility and i think it is going to be an increasing possibility in the future that subnational groups can get their hands on some sort of nuclear weapons and in that circumstance deterrent seemingly has no value at all. under those circumstances what could we threaten such a group with? the only thing we could do was hope we are able to apprehend them and stop them before they set off whatever device they develop. from the point of view of the four horsemen and i mention that because my opinion is my opinion but that those men at least had major experience of government. they saw that change as millennial. that is very important and reason to move as quickly as possible.

>> do you really think the iaea and the u.n. are capable of brokering a deal diplomatically to remove nuclear weapons? if they can't, who is going to do it and how do we do it? >> the activities that have been a part of the nuclear test ban treaty treaty have involved the development of systems of surveillance and inspection all over the world and i think it is in that context. i don't imagine that the u.n. can viably serve that function under the security council's present formulation. richard butler for example has proposed a new special security council for nuclear issues where they would be no veto. that would be vital because the veto has been of course the spoiler through many occasions

since the u.n. was formed in 1945. but they iaea has the capability the u.n. didn't do a bad job in iraq under somewhat limited circumstances and again i have to say and i know this is really hard for people to buy, but countries don't sign treaties with the express intention of cheating on them. nor is it immediately obvious to me what a country that secretly built a few nukes would really be able to do to the rest of the world anyway. they could make a mess, no question but what exactly would their threat be and what would be its basis and have long could they expected to operate for other countries responded in ways that would be painful to them? i mean it to me as part of the evidence that we are at a very

early point in seeking this that kind of question is valid and it is immediately obvious how you answer but we do have a lot of beginnings all over the place. the news leader -- nuclear test ban treaty is one of them and the test ban treaty particularly with all of its, with all of its international program of surveillance and inspection. the home the development that some of you probably are involved and to develop nuclear forensics of nuclear materials do turn up in the wrong places in the wrong hands one can identify where they came from. that has been one of our threats in north korea. if a bomb goes off and we know it came from you it will be ps if you were the one who set it off. you know we had to invent a huge infrastructure after 1945 to deal with the fact of nuclear

weapons in the world. we are going to have to invent another huge infrastructure to deal with the idea of a world where there are no nuclear weapons. it is sort of a mirror image of the other anyway. but in some ways very similar. i don't mean to sound pie-in-the-sky because i'm not. i understand this is going to be a hard, hard problem in the question is always going to be will it be worth it for enough countries to make it move? come to the mic. >> richard, you mentioned the 30th anniversary of reykjavík. do you think that the world situation is related to nuclear weapons would be different if the results of the reykjavík meeting had been different? >> the question is what the world be a different place right now with nuclear weapons if reykjavík had been a success? i was fascinated with the reykjavík summit. i got my hands on not only the american transcripts but also

the russian and i had the russian transcript translated because i don't read that language and i put them side-by-side. one of the things i discovered is what are supposed to be raw primary documents had already been fixed up a little bit. there was great concern on the part of president reagan's advisers that he not be depicted as offering to eliminate nuclear weapons and that which is kind of cut out of the transcript. and within the russian transcript and not surprisingly the russian transcript was a verbatim stenographic report. whoever was make in that record did not want to be shown when he got home to moscow as having been remiss or having left anything out. he was afraid of that obviously so here were these two documents. i wrote a play which had ratings of the country of the reykjavík summit which i hope we'll get a production one of these days summer. it still needs some work but i was so struck by the inherent

drama of these two leaders, both in 10. i mean president reagan was a nuclear abolitionist from 1945 on. there was a little known fact for most of his life, but he saw it as his most important goal as president. again the people around him in the white house that he was a fool. they just didn't listen to him when he talked about this. the problem for him was, he couldn't see what we would do about a cheater. if some country decided to cheat on on elimination, a world without nuclear weapons how could you deal with that? and the answer he came up with was a technological solution to the problem, and courage -- so when he came to the summit at reykjavík president gorbachev's old goal was to at least cut nuclear arsenals and ideally

begin to eliminate them because he wanted that piece of the soviet budget to go into supporting and improving the lives of the soviet people. gorbachev was a very unusual leader. he was a farmer's son. he grew up on a collective farm. he won a four-year scholarship to the best university in russia, moscow university, by combining more read than the summer of the 17 year than any other teenager in the whole soviet union. he got a lennon medal for it which he always said afterwards was the best metal he had on his chest. he was summoned to came from a totally different place than the city slickers in moscow who were generally part of the soviet hierarchy and one of the things he discovered early on was with the possible exception of nikita khrushchev no premier had told the military-industrial complex know now you can have all you

want. they basically rubberstamped whatever the military-industrial complex asked for and what was left over when to these people as it were. when those people came into his office his response was are you planning to attack the united states comrades because if you aren't get out of my office. nevertheless, when he came to reykjavík he had been given a limit to his negotiating toward eliminating nuclear weapons and that was president reagan had to give up sti. that is mohammad and the mountain i'm afraid but in the background he made such a perfect villain in the play was richard perle. at a crucial moment on the last day of the negotiations, president reagan said well, maybe we should take this deal and george shultz said mr. president, we can work it

out in geneva down the road. this is the best deal i have seen in 25 years of negotiating with the soviets. take the deal. as the president pulls his advisers around the room became to richard perle and richard perle knowing exactly where to stick in in the knife said mr. president, it will destroy sei. and the result was president reagan said i can't make the deal. they went away unhappy but is gorbachev realized at the end of the summit and as he said at the press conference, this was not a failure. this was a success. we agreed to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons, medium range missiles in europe and it is the beginning of something that will continue. arbatov brought, and security to the table. president reagan brought sti and there was sadly not quite as much as there might've been. however i will add this. people who are in government on our side have said to me more

than once, if you think president reagan or president gorbachev could have gone back to their capital with a deal like that and gotten anywhere with it at all you are crazy. there were vested interests on both sides which certainly would have thought any such agreement so therefore who knows what they would have accomplished? it didn't quite happen but it certainly makes a. >> ladies and gents and let's give a big round of applause to richard. [applause] >> richard rhodes is the author of over 20 books and his book the making of the atom bomb was a recipient of the pulitzer prize in nonfiction and the national book award for nonfiction. mr. rhodes is the host correspondent of public television's american experience

and "frontline." for more information visit to richard rhodes.com. >> we or hear the national press club talking with spencer abraham about his book, like that. can you tell us what some of the solutions are to her and she cries you detail in the book? >> i will, and energy secretary i watch what i felt was working and we have a real energy challenge facing america going forward and i think first we need to increase dramatically the role nuclear energy place here in the united states. right now does 20% of our power and i think it should be 30% by 2030. we also need to increase the role of renewable energy here in the united states.

right now it is wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, these were nobles that are only 2% of our energy. we really need them to be much much higher so we need to support that effort. i am a conservative so i believe in conservation one of the things we would also need to do is to find ways to improve our energy efficiency so that we don't demand as much as right now is projected to be the case. >> and what do we do about the argument to keep costs down in terms of incorporating other energy sources? >> that is certainly a challenge and i think though that most of these are costs which we should be willing to bear. i think first of all the private sector should and canada will play an active role in applying these new forms of energy. but i think there is a role for the federal government to encourage them as well. i think in the last couple of years we have seen some progress

along these lines but it is going to take a lot more at least given right now what looks like the demand-side only in the united states and the rest of the world. if we don't do what we are going to see prices for energy skyrocketed. we are going to see america at the mercy of producing countries who are exporting to us our energy and they can put us in a politically difficult position and of course if we don't address these issues we will have growing environmental challenges as well. so what the book tries to show is the pathway forward to address all of those and fortunately i think there is but it will take will and tough decisions. we have been a little bit unwilling to make those tough decisions in the last few years. >> do you tackle how to change i guess public perspective and their perception of what we should do and being more cooperative? >> well it is a good.. one of the real impediments to what we need to do an energy is

what they call the knot in my backyard, the nimby syndrome. the one thing i found his energy secretary did matter what type of energy project you were talking about our energy infrastructure deployment, there was tremendous resistance because people didn't want it anywhere near them. they wanted lots of energy. they wanted cheap energy but they didn't want anybody to either make it or use it around them. and you can't do that. at the end of the day we have to as a country we have to sort of be grownups about this and say yes it would be terrific if we could have all the energy facility somewhere else but we need them to be deployed on a broad basis. i do address that in the book. i don't profess to have a solution to convincing americans that they ought to do this but i think the more we explained to them the consequences of not allowing projects to go forward th