pieces. this is his wife -- [inaudible] he was saving the world. and this is jamie's room. james stayed in this room, the years he worked and this is one piece we know did belong to him. when he was a young report eater the columbus dispatch, and he had a collection of my life and hard times and he writes about incident that happen to him. in columbus, one of the funny stories that the day the dam brock. testifies a serious flood that took a life of and caused a lot of problems. we he took the humorous sides. that's one of the humorous tales talk about panic the people in three, four, five mileses away from the flood running down the street screaming we're going die. go east, go east.

he had many of the experiences and wrote with the dispatch on the play. james is one of the great, you know, local boys that made good. that pride really brought people to restore the house and having it open not only is it now open for touring just to talk about him. we have a writing academy which children can sign up for saturday mornings. we have camp programs. we bring in authors, adults, we have adult writing classes. he as a witter has given a chance to make columbus a center for great writing and remembering great writers like james. >> for more on booktv recent visit to columbus, ohio and other cities on c-span local content vehicle tour. visit c-span.org/local content. you're watching booktv. john talking about the threat of nuclear weapon the today and discusses what can done to safe

guard against the ultimate catastrophe. this is about an hour. [applause] >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining me today. i don't have some chair for you, i'm afraid. i was thinking how to spend this speech and wasn't it nice fft fine english historian who must have been thinking the same thing to write something in the day's "the wall street journal" opinion case for me and the tight of it is "it's always prepare for the cataclysm. we think of august as a month, everybody at the beach. we sort of chilling out in the heavily political season, enjoying life, and for those events in washington, congress is in recess, which generally speaking it meanses a lot of

lobbyist leave town. it's a nice time. alabama drew roberts wanted to bring us back to a little historical reality along with the peaceful events that occurred, in august of 1914, world war i began. on the last day of august 1949, hitler are decided to invade poland. in 1945, the two atomic bombs in the very weak 1945 lead to the end of the second world war. in 1961, the berlin wall was put up in the month of august. in 166, the gulf incident. vietnam took place in 1947 be the disek of the progress spring was ended as disek was invaded.

and tafnging were 0 rolling down the vote. in 1918 an event not as [inaudible] and in 1990, saddam hussein he decide he should have 19 not 18 prove ens. moved in to cue wait in the zenned of august. and 1990 to make sure we can round things out, that was the revolution in russia, that brought down the gorbachev's government. it was a short lived one. and of course the revolutionaries in turn a few days later. nothing happened in august from the movie eighthty years ago. nothing ever happens. we can relax and enjoy the rest of the summer.

that said, what i'd like to do today is very brieflyiy read the book and what i used to do and pick out of the three more pressing problems. talk about them and wind up overall some of the things in the movement toward global nuclear zero. i decided three years ago to begin a process of writing this book. because it occurred to me that there was an that i don't belief had reallyist existed in earlier decades. what strategieses had in the immediate generation after the end of the second world war had to get that. had to imagine stereos in the ab tract. would what happened if this and

that >> now another half century having passed since the cue baseball missile crisis there's enough historical experience to enable us to look at the fundamental problems that posed in the century today. since they changed rule forever. lesson at the end that i come up with which is that the fundamental thus of nuclear policy is to avoid what i call the apop lek tick trinity.

it is that of genocides suicide or surrender. you always want to have nonchoices. i'll return to that a couple of times to during my remarks. it may be a 13th lesson which is never write a book with more than three lessons. [laughter] but in any event, with that, i wanted to pick out three areas from what i cover. and talk about some of the illustrated problems there in the particularly pressing. and then turn to the umbrella problem as it were with nuclear zero. i'm hoping that the book, by the way, is of use to laymen layperson is also to a lot of policy makers who haven't had experience -- some use perhaps here and there and those that have. it's spoaskly try to bring this to the general public in a way that i think hasn't been possible before because now we

have concrete examples to illustrate things rather than talk about abstractions. so i would say that three problems i'm going to focus on today are the problem iran poses, the problem that indian and pakistan have posed, or iran being the problem of the revolutionary state, and pursuit of nuclear weapons. the problem with pakistan and indian being civilian energy by a spring board of getting to nuclear weapons, and the third one specialize problem of small power vulnerability as every dayed by what is called the electromagnetic. i'll talk about that and get to it. and the implications from missile defense. and then from then i'll move on. in the case of iran, which i think question say this is every now and then in the news, and i

-- [inaudible] the problem here is the possibility of a cuban missile crisis in to understand as we go back to what crew shove had in mind. in 1961, met in june with president kennedy in have a mean that. kennedy said lightered, he beat me up. he decided that kennedy was not up to it -- i don't want to hear the word miscalculation. i'm tired of hearing it.

in 1961, crew shove decided partly mainly because of the summit, that he would push kennedy a little further. what he did was working with the east german leader, they began to build wall. which was a violation of the agreement then. which gave full access to all parties. we saw the second shoe drop in october of 1962, which many lived through. i was 15 years old. the jocular conversation open the school bus at that time was a comfortable -- [inaudible] we didn't find out until much later how close we came to nuclear war. and then who we saw there was kennedy released right after the

bat there was a possibility to get off the hand. he told his son the young missile leader he side, okay, hill make a fuss and a fuss and agree. that was not that nikita east best calculation. they decided he made one stopple miscalculations and what happened there was that at the same time, and this was jeffrey goldberg interviewed fidel castro, a couple of years ago, and castro admitted he ordered a first strike against the united states. and at the time, the moscow, the gist of the conversation moscow had with him was if we happens do you know what is going to your island? it is going to disappear and

with you. castro wanted them go ahead. it is also reported that about twenty years later, castro knew the request and didn't we have the conversation before? you look at the situation in the mideast today. you have iran, and if iran goes nuclear, your going to have already the saudis said they would publicly said they. prepared. who picked the phone up [inaudible] to pakistan and biofuel. how many dollars do you want for how many barrels and never mind the bit about the tweptd-year program. you take the barrels and put them underneath the aircraft, the 159 and 16 tion and you don't have to have fancy safety devices and things. they wopt have time to figure that out. now you have close proximity

hundred of miles away in some cases, supersonic jets in bases that may be viely vulnerable app small number of nuclear weapons can destroy them. very little communication. [inaudible] you to hope the kid didn't stop to see the girlfriend on the way to the office. it was very much catch and catch then. if you have four or five people with nuclear weapons and they were worried and have no margin for error, the permutations very, very scary to say the least. so ultimately the only resolution is stop them from getting weapons of mass destruction and they are not going honor if i agreement it makes to abandon them. you have to get regime change.

and preivel brought about from within. get positive regime change. the broader lesson is revolutionary powers you component negotiate a way with revolutionary powers position. you have to defeat them. in 1961, we saw the consequence of miscalculation. you can have one here. war may come about not by design. but all it takes is one mideast castro who is ready to have one. you heard some of the pronouncements of and they may not be reading from the same handbook. regard to india and pakistan, what you learn there is that civilian nuclear energy is just next to a nuclear capability. and here is some of the matt of

nuclear proliferation. you look first at 3.5% in mixed you rabe yum. you said on okay full weapons grade is 93.5%. so they're not that far along. actually, it you can be shown. i show it in the book. i don't to go through it with you. it gets to me go. it's relatively simple when you see it on paper. you have done 80%, not 18, but 0eu% of the separation work of separating uranium you want. from the 28. when vow the 3.5%. when you get 20% 19 and three quarter dhs is million-grade research. you have 97% of the separation

work. so that is very quickly, if one other -- 10 at toms is the isotope you want. when you get down to one out of five, the medical research grade, you have gotten rid of almost all of these. so you 97 percent and 96 percent of the separation is done. you have gotten rid of 135 unwanted at toms. you're just about there. and there are a couple of rules that relate to this. and i guess i unconsciously channeled herman cain i have 11-11. and 10-10-10. if gets there about at end. it's bar math. it's easier to remember than 15 rkdz 348 and so on. the first one, the 11-1-1-1.

it is the timeline. it takes productionly 11 months. and be the calculations are in the book. 11 months to go from you uranium war to 3.5% of enriched uranium. it takes about a month to go from enriched commercial to medical grade. about a week to go from medical grade to weapons grade, about a day to put the weapon together. the device was assembled on the island in less than 24 hours. so that's one. another one is 10-10-10 inspect is the materials equation. if you start with 15 metro tones you uranium. grow through interraces with 15 kilograms of enriched uranium and start out with the uranium

ore and that's enough to fuel a reasonable well designed uranium weapon. so grow through a tenfold reduction to go from uranium war to you rain yum for nuclear power. you go to another tenfold redoux get mm grade. and another one and you have the fuel bought. now there a couple of other kinds of things that give you an idea what you're deal canning with here. i'm sorry. the fourth 10. the fourth 10 in that is the defense defeat a crudely designed uranium bomb which means about 60 gill grams. 010 or so pounds of enriched uranium, to a bomb -- there are estimates lower than six gill grams.

that's a conservative one. there are estimates that are four even lower. that's for a well-designed bomb. so you've got these fundament metrics which you're working with. another one, and this is a good news/bad news thing. the bad news is worse that night good news. that is if you have a crude nuclear device, actually, it would predetonate and you most of the year will be gone. in any sei consequences what you're doing when you get -- i don't deposit in to more of it in the book. basically what happened is that as you're splitting the at toms you're more than doubling neutron count and these neutrons that are are going the ones that are going to be bombarding more of them. you go through doubles. it's like the thing 0 the chest board. the king puts one piece of wheat on the first one with and, you

know, raise to the challenge. by the time of the first, the kingdom is fine. the last four doubles in any sequence at least 55% of the energy. if you have 84 sequence. the first 70 release 1% of the energy. the next ten released 4%. get to the five. and then you get 95% of the energy. half of it in the last doubling. so that sounds like if you gate bomb that predetained. no. it's done. we strong to worry. well, here's the bad news. the bomb that destroyed the world trade center or i'm sorry that went off in the garage of the world trade center in 1993, which was about two third of a ton of conventional explosive. at 1% of a hero she ma level bomb which is 14 kill stones.

you're realizing 1 2-00 times the energy of the bomb that had it been placed better would have toppled one tower in to another. in other words it's the going to be a terrible mess. there a lot of terrorist who say they don't need a -- [inaudible] this is something that pertains to iran. as well as other context. talking about iran hasn't got a missile they put it on yet. that's true. the rocket try is doing better than north korea. it may have go back to rocket try camp. it's not distress me in the slightest. and with the case, however, the iranians they're having good success. and that comes down to miniaturizing your warhead enough so it'll fit inside a missile nose or a bop. it's not too heavy to be carried by an aircraft on or if you're

advance a small number of nations or inside an artillery shell for the use on the tactical battle field. what have we been talking about since 9/11? hasn't been the focus been what has been called an aggression law of bad use since the unconventional threat. you should say undorkts and nontraditional is little more precise. is the bomb in the shipping contain ensure it's the bomb inside a van. that bomb does not have to be a well-designed device that is has exact and advanced now have fit inside a mussel warhead. it can be a crude gun trigger device that we didn't test because we knew it would work. south africa built a half dozen of them in the '0eu. they never tested it. you put it inside a van and set it off or put if had a shipping container, and you set it off in a port.

so why are we looking when we talk about iran weapon capability when a device and device is used in -- to indicate something that can be weaponized to fit on a missile or a warhead or a shell or something like that. that is a part of the threat. if a bomb goes off in manhattan harbor, a japan size bomb that kills a few hundred thousand people. we may not have a signature. if it's not testing we don't have a signature for an iranian bomb. how do we know where to retaliate? and so that has to be -- that's a shorter time line than getting to where you put it on a miss. l. it when the administration talk abouts that it makes me nervous. the focus we've been talking about since 9/11 is something different. the third one to talk about briefly is electromagnetic

pulse. you set off a hot nuclear weapon at high altitude, and paradoxy for the purpose, as i note in the text, the atomic bomb is better suited than a high do jen bomb. you set it off at let's say 300 miles other kansas. it's possible in a worse case that the infrastructure of the united rated for 1470 miles could take down the electronic infrastructure. and we would be catapulted back to what life was like before thomas edson. well, there are disputes on this. some people say maybe only 20 or 30 percent. it would be a huge event, and there's also another possibility, a jim came up with? one the talk i heard jim speak in the spring. he said what do you do if you

have one of the geomagnetic solar storms and we had one as powerful as 1859 it could get out the entire infrastructure. how do you negotiate for those who want to negotiate away the threat? but at least iranian threat of missile defense can properly deployed can enable us shoot down a small attack of the kind. the current generation of the missile definitely is not designed to shoot down a trajectory that goes up like this but rather in a mid course. so we'd have to work on. you'd a picketed fen to try and prevent a catastrophic strike at this time we invest a few billion dollars. it ask be search years before the major transformers are brought back online. the lesson is catastrophic

vulnerable is something you should never permit if you can avoid it. of course, i didn't mention at the end of the india/pakistan it was implied what i said, the lesson is civilian energy right next door to a nuclear weapon program in putting it together ease especially if you're not designing a elegant device. when brings me to nuclear zero. the administration floated? year a proposal to cut as low as 300 weapons from where we are now. and the administration said, well, you know, this we haven't decided. these are trial as we call them in washington. now this is based upon among other things the blood vessel -- bailiff that all you need is a small number of weapons. here are the problems with that. first of all you will assume

everyone thinks like you inspect is called my are images in the trade. look what happened in 1973 eleven years after the cuban missile crisis. the war went on in october. toward the end of it, the opportunistic decided to try and see if he could introduce society yef troops in the middle east. he sent down transport planes. they were going fly in to the air sparse. they warned them. they eye ball to eye ball with the rush shall be fleet. in the transcript reallotsed about ten years ago by hebe i are kissinger a conversation with richard nixon. nixon says to him we were close a nuclear confrontation ped what changed since 1962, american

superiority had slunk. the russians for five years in passing us in numbers of nuclear weapons but they already were felling it. earlier in 1973 general secretary told a party conference in 1955, the correlation of forces will shift in the soviet union favor and will be able to work the wealth. it didn't prove to be better forecast than 1961, but the point is it isn't whether you think the weapons matter of a nuclear balance or changes that matter. it's an operational question. you have one or more parties to a crisis think that it matters, and behave differently as a result of changes, they matter. at minimum it raises the risk in a crisis. at max -- it can cause the crisis to end differently. so what we look at china, and we are assuming that china is not

at the time of huge military buildup, the biggest since the soviet in twenty-five years buildup in '60, '70s and '70s. they are pushing from the dominance in western pacific, if they see us go down to a low number of wop, they have more weapons than us. hay may change their behavior in a crisis. it doesn't matter why we think it should matter or not to have a debate of an abstract debate of what has been called a times nuclear threology, whatever you want to call a nuclear doctrine. it doesn't matter. it they think durchtly and act on it. it could change the way the crisis unfold. it could increase the risk of war. bear in mind that the people who worry about the most, are going not going follow your example as you reduce -- it would make their weapons more valuable. and how we don't have the ability to have any idea to

verify how many weapons exist in countries the size of china or russia. we couldn't even find after the gulf war and before the second iraqi war. we couldn't all the wmd we were looking for. we had to have help. these things are hard to do. the end of the second iraq i can freedom we found 12 jet planes buried in the sand. ..

for example that was to end -- and it was popular outrage over some of the early testing or after effects, and the worry about them that led to the testing. on the other hand, the europeand to support the so-called neutron weapon, neutron bomb to stop russian tanks and hellman schmidt had state his administration on it and carter reversed it under pressure. there was a proper and that campaign marred -- mounted against it.

nuclear zero does have a -- but the risks of prematurely going to zero and finding yourself with the worst countries in the world producing formerly hidden weapons is the problem of the clandestine casualty as recalled by the great strategist herman cahn is something we had better keep in mind and until we have a solution to that problem, rushing towards nuclear zero could prove to be catastrophic. and i will close with this. two things. one on the downside and then one on the upside. the downside is that their piece to be a risk of some sort of nuclear abuse and that is growing, and it if that threshold is crossed it may not be possible to change the world again irrevocably and it may not be possible to go back to

permanently worse off. the administration does not appear to be fully aligned to this risk. it's not doing everything he can to stop iran is one example and we a week and going to bed in the question. mcafee would like but we can be sure that at the end of the second world war it was thought by most policymakers and probably most member of the public and most of the scientist who worked on a manhattan project that it was inevitable that within a decade are virtually inevitable that we would be in a nuclear war. it didn't happen. we have to continually work pedal to the metal and every weekend so we can prevent this catastrophe from happening and avoid not only suicide or genocide, but also surrender. we don't want to be in that position. we don't want to be in a position where with a half a million americans dead an

american president has to decide, do i want to unleash against iran or some other country if we are able to establish an attack that will kill millions, and all out attack on iran would kill maybe $50 million -- 50 million within 30 days. i don't think frankly that unless there were nearly a million dead americans and american president could do that but the whole point is you don't want to be in that position in the first place. is avoiding the options and always preserving something short of that. and with that, i think this is as good enough time as any to stop and i would be delighted to answer questions and i will ask steve who has a sharper eye than me to pick people out. [applause] thank you. >> i hope you are all feeling cheery. [laughter] we are going to take questions and we will hand the microphone around so if there are

questions. it's really important that this book came out at this point and if nothing else, if people are aware ofothing else, it's that this topic of nuclear strategy has been dropped as a major theme in american public publicity since the reagan era when people were lulled to sleep thinking that we had solved this and had moved on. and now it's back. the emp has not been solved apparently and that threat has not been solved and we don't know what we are doing with iran. so i think it's important to get people for covering the vocabulary and the language or even talking about this. it's not taught anymore. nuclear strategy is not taught at universities and we don't have programs up it so i think that's the most important thing you have done with the publication of this book. i want to ask you specifically

about the most immediate threat which is iran. it takes so little time to come to the development of a crude bomb. haven't they done it and does anybody know? they are talking briefly about annihilating israel and doing various other things, but why haven't they moved it if they -- and if it's so easy? >> well, it isn't easy but on the other hand part of the problem is that even with all the inspections, we don't know exactly how far they are a long. they could theoretically at least on the amount of, it would be in short order by some calculations before the end of this year having enough material on hand to assemble a crude weapon. if that is the case, they could

assemble one without testing it and we wouldn't know. the only hope i have on that is that from an iran standpoint it is more beneficial to them to test like north korea did and immediately, we put the world on notice that we have something. north korea's was a classic case of one of those designer embarrassments that yielded less than a kiloton and was laughed at as the designed for eternity but already there was more circumspection dealing with north korea. just think what iran did last year when it is believed not to be nuclear and i'm assuming not simply because i believe it's in their interest to test. they don't have to test that. they can set off one annual and pick up pickup the signature seismically. those signatures are different from an earthquake because with an earthquake you get tremors in advance and then you get a big

shake and then you get tremors afterwards. a nuclear device, you bid -- get a big kaboom and then nothing happened so you can find those things. and certainly from their standpoint it would be in their interest to do so. yuriko in the fall of october was it or something or november where they were going to set off a bomb in a georgetown restaurant and that would kill the saudi ambassador and some prominent unnamed georgetown restaurant. i took that one a little extra personally because living in d.c. i -- in a georgetown and so they also talked about putting something in front of the saudi embassy and i took that even more personally because i live across the street from the saudi embassy. there are no scenarios if a bomb of any power goes off their in which destruction is likely to be standing. talking about something that's just a few hundred yards away like a truck bomb or something.

so they were ready to do that, even when they were not on what we know a nuclear state. now they could do that and then say hey s. what we are nuclear. you don't believe us? try us. but the bottom line is that we right now should not be negotiating with them at all. they have an efficient record of using negotiation to stalk for more than it decade. like charlie brown in the football until the end of time. what you want to do is put sanctions the highest level of financial and energy and refining the 60% of their oil has to be refined outside of the country. you choke them off because if you don't do that, they have time to adjust to each new level of sanctions like by gradual escalation in vietnam. it makes no sense to do it this way. when sanctions were first

proposed on iran back in 2003, they did not have a compatible railway system with russia. a few years later they did. we gave them time. time. this is not a good thing. there's a long list of what the atomic energy agency has discovered and it won't do the full list but a few things that tell you what their program is about. this mind you iaea inspections are not designed to catch cheating. but what do they catch? they're working on a neutron initiator which is a way to emit extra neutrons to start a nuclear explosion. they're working on building intercontinental ballistic missiles for which there is no known commercial application. they are not doing it to deliver medical supplies 5000 miles and there are various other components, specialty compounds that are identified with nuclear weapons. why would you want a

high-altitude trigger, electrical trigger that works at high altitude the kind of thing that is used in nuclear devices? they wanted airburst. so we should conclude the nevermind is about whether they have a weapons capability. nuclear capability could be a device that goes in a truck. they're working on it on heavy evidence that we can see and therefore, we need to ask very soon. if we don't act better than 50/50 is real-world act before the election. yeah that is very soon and i think the reason frankly israel is likely to us because of what i call the two-handed schizophrenic policy of this administration. obama's people point out the time to look at the unprecedented defense cooperation and missile defense as being traditional and it is unprecedented.

the bush administration beforehand had begun that ratcheting up of cooperation between the israeli defense forces after 9/11. that cooperation is a two-way street. the israelis have designed equipment that would save american lives in afghanistan. and indeed, the self-healing bandages is one of the reasons -- is saved lives of the people i've been hit so it is a two-way thing. they are constantly talking. swapping tech picks, things about drones. so a lot of good things here but what the right hand giveth with defense the left-hand diplomatic diplomacy takes away, something the palestinians had never asked to through nonnegotiable demand. we were told we should negotiate what were called by the 1967 borders which are the 1949 cease-fire lines that are not

borders and the palestinians immediately adopted that. so, then there was a series of leaks in the spring about a possible israeli strike showing up in "the new york times" and some of them were traced to officials and administration. there were things about an israeli strike would not work. there were things about well, israel may get help from azerbaijan. if you had a plane crippled in the attack, you might be able to land there, that kind of thing and that immediately would throw them out. it was a series of orchestrated leaks and i won't go down the whole list. and so the israelis withdrew their assurance that they had given last year that they would notify the administration before striking. you have all these leagues in the paper. does anybody think they can keep a secret? there are other leaks involving other things that the administration is done. the israelis see british al

qaeda. they had a mole high up and that is how we found it. i don't know if it was -- or one of the others. his but breaking we have done that way to extricate the agent before he was found which apparently we did that the british were not happy. so the long in the short of it is that they fear i think and you know it's also famous that prime minister netanyahu and barack obama don't plan any joint vacations anytime in the foreseeable future. and so, i think they're looking at pre-november 6 in the reason for that is after november 6 if obama wins, he is no longer having to work -- worry about re-election and frankly that is the line that is most likely to be the one that the israelis are looking at. if they were confident they could wait until 2013 they would rather do that because in the u.s. would probably join in.

but, that is a chance i don't think they feel they necessarily can take so they are going to take a fresh look i think of it earlier over. their plans are in place and they have a higher opinion of their chance of success than neal bombeck administration has, or other corridors. >> i am skip gilleland. i'm one of the board members here at discover institute and i'm an engineer and i have a little bit of expertise in commercial nuclear power. i think it's important to understand, and i don't think you are saying this but it's important to understand that in order to destroy israel brief in tel aviv for that matter, it's going to take multiple

thermonuclear weapons and none of these terrorist regimes have the capability of developing or delivering anything on that scale, so i think the worst case scenario is going to be some shady science project 30 bomb -- 30 bomb with a low yield that you thrown to the seattle harbor or wherever in a container ship or something like that or a tel aviv harbor or wherever. so there is no destroy the world scenario that is likely in my opinion with any of these terrorist regimes and i think it's important for people that don't understand nuclear weapons to realize that. so, the thing that occurred to me was you are saying that if we had such a thing happened like a hiroshima like little boy weapon go off in one of the harpers or something like that we wouldn't know and at that time it's too

late to know how to respond. where do you respond? so i guess my question would be, is that still the case now? how do we know where to respond? so i guess other than iran or korea how do we know it even how to begin to respond now while he think these guys are developing their science project weapon? >> left and take the last part first. we have nuclear forensics for certain countries. we know the signatures of the weapons of russia, the former soviet union, those weapons we have signatures of chinese weapons. we have signatures for french weapons. we have signatures for british weapons, not that we think they are likely to use. we have signatures, we may have some on india, pakistan from some advanced sampling techniques. i am not expert on just how much you can get out of an underground explosion but there may be something that gets into

the atmosphere, small quantities and you may be able to have some and if there are maybe we even have a little bit out of north korea. that we don't with iran. the second thing is, a single hiroshima weapon well if dropped in an air burst, it will have a radiance, what they called the five psi circle, five pounds per square inch, of roughly, the radius would be roughly let's say a half mile going around so it's a mile in diameter. and while you wouldn't destroy all of the city if you had three or four of those going off in tel aviv, three or four of those going off in haifa, and you might have air burst and also ground bursts. if you do that you want a groundbirch that will kick up countless thousands, hundreds of

thousands of tons of radioactive material, which would the highly lethal in the immediate area. the most intense radioactivity within the first couple of weeks. as you get further along, it's less dangerous but you could have very easily a few hundred thousand fatalities. in a country the size of israel, let's put in that intent perspective of the united states. let's assume that they leave jerusalem alone or if they think they have enough accuracy to hit west jerusalem alone they will if it doesn't hit somewhere else. i might add if i were the palestinians i would be a little nervous. i don't know that i have enough faith in the iranian rockets fired if they were fired by rockets that they might not land in the right place but if you have that and you have let's say 100 or 200,000 in each of those two cities, you have three or

400,000. we have about 45 times the population of israel so if you had say 200,000 dead from two or three bombs in several in those cities. you are looking at, or even say 100,000. you are looking at 9 million, with 200,000 israeli dead. you are looking at 9 million american casualties where our country would have 45 -- 40 times. the total we have lost in all the wars going back to the revolution is something along the lines of two or 3 million max or something and it may actually include the wounded. i once saw the number but it's a lot less than 8 million. and what the impact of that would the on the jewish state. so wouldn't literally lay everything to waste but it would be a catastrophe of

unprecedented magnitude and of course then you you would be talking about the gulf states. they are very vulnerable to and not a large number of cities in kuwait that would be targeted. the bottom line is, we have to take threats very seriously. i might add that the pakistanis are working on a thermonuclear weapon and they have weapons advanced enough to put an in short-range artillery missiles, missiles rather but 25, 30-mile range missiles, 40 miles or something. this seems like a popgun but it tells you their design work is very advanced. so i would be very worried. i think the effect on israel would be catastrophic. it would be viewed as an echo of the holocaust and of course the threats that they could explode elsewhere. so, even high school designed weapons, that was one of my points. they can make a terrible mess and we really need to focus on

stopping them before they get there. >> i can evaluate with technical confidence, which i will leave that i think you might be vulnerable on your kind of human factor about how you see human nature in terms of making decisions as to how you use them and i want to return to your fidelity and the with jeffrey goldberg interview that quoted exactly because i think it's suggest perhaps a little different reading of rationality, air rationality and purpose and so forth. goldberg said castro, the letter you wrote to khrushchev the soviet premier at the height of the crisis. in which he recommended that the soviets consider launching a nuclear strike against the u.s.

if the americans attack cuba, invoking the legal right of self-defense. i asked him at a certain point seems logical for you to recommend the soviets. does what you recommend still seem logical now text the answer, after i've seen what i have seen in knowing what i don't now it was not worth it at all. so, this could be read in the following way. far from being a cold-blooded first try, and it was the action of a desperate man who felt threatened, who later on when he looks at it afterwards and sees the crazy things one does when one feels this kind of pressure things as he said later, this raises questions about nuclear weapons as being much more likely to be launched in a rational pressure and intent situation as opposed to concrete attempts to attain rational political objectives.

it's not a tool for rational policy. at something that is -- at least that is the way one could read that. castro has not changed. he is still a marxist. >> well you know first of all between then and now, but what has changed is the attitude about his own actions within the crisis. >> i avoid calling him a rational. no one thinks castor is crazy. i use the term fanatic about what is a question between rational and irrational. he did renew the request in the 1980s. the thing is, that even in the response to the invasion of his island the it idf unleashing a nuclear holocaust that would result in more than 100 million people killed just that he could preserve his island of course would have been obliterated at the same time, that i wouldn't want to hold that up as a model

of rational decision-making. if we look at the middle east today the supreme guide who is the supreme authority at present in iran is not someone i would want to trust with a nuclear decision or for that matter -- >> it's not rational decision-making. >> i'm not saying -- i don't even bother with those terms because i don't want to get into that. what i want to do is say that i think we have reason to believe that ali khamenei and people like ahmadinejad and people who think like them may decide to use nuclear weapons. if you want to make a cultural comment, this is their theology and how can we say their theology is rational in this and that, it doesn't matter to me. the point is there are people who have -- khrushchev and kennedy thought to pull back

immediately with khrushchev realized if i'm interested the meaning of the word miscalculation. castro did not take that feeling. we have to worry about that when you're in the middle east when you have a rough neighborhood where people don't trust each other at all, where you don't have the superpower sponsor you could restrain, as khrushchev did, in 1962. who could restrain a surrogate so a client. so, the point is that you do not want to have this stuff spread and ideally you don't want to spread anyway but he certainly don't want to give it to the kind of people who run a country like iran. it's not going to make the world a safer place and we should do everything possible to see that they do not. >> how do you evaluate the

possibility of defensive cyberattacks by the united states with allies like the one that disrupted the centrifuges we heard about in the past as a tactic in dealing with this? >> well certainly anything we can do in cyber, where we have more skills than the iranians and the iranians have more skills and their reportedly others around. anything that you can do is certainly a good thing. the question is have we gotten to the point where we are running out of time to ask if this were six or seven years ago, eight years ago they were doing these things and you had that much more time maybe you could continue to buy more time but getting to the point now fair where most people believe this will be decided one way or another within the next year. cybermay not suffice but certainly anything we can do whether it's in sanctions or

cyberattacks are working to try to -- the ripple regime, the green movement inside iran, which we unfortunately abandoned in what was foreseen at the time by many people -- i take no special credit. lots of people said there's no chance they're going to give it up. they been working on it for a quarter-century, of course they're not. we have had the opportunity with the regime off balance to maybe bring that down. we don't know how it would have turned out that what you try to do in a situation like that is get some of the guns to switch sides. we didn't give them reason to so they were able to brutally stress the green movement. had we publicly sided with them and announced we were working with them, ratcheted sanctions up to 100% of what we could do then, instantly putting them in economic extreme and make quite clear that if you rise up we will be with you, we might have

succeeded and what might've been a once in a generation opportunity to bring them down. perhaps we'll get another chance. if syria's assad falls it could help reenergize the green movement and it would be huge for iran in also hezbollah. that assailed from a solution but in the meantime you said they deploy every weapon you have and cyberis one of them. in terms of cybercom me think of three kinds roughly speaking and look at cyberattacks. one is to try to take down networks. whether it's a communications network or for example to take down, shut down your committee cage and your financial networks or something. the other two ways depend on the networks working. one is to use your communications network to launch an attack against another as an electrical grid. and the third is to use it for content. and this is where the islamists

have considerable confidence in radicalizing people over the internet with radical oriented islamist content. so, we have an age in the first two areas. we have the israelis, the most skilled people elsewhere, probably the government behind russia and china are very good at that stuff. that will come into any confrontation we have with them. ..

on may 3nd 2011 in pakistan. the book, "no easy day" a first-hand account of the mission that killed bin laden and is already ranked number one on amazon.com. in response to the account, pentagon has threat end legal actions claiming the author is in violation of nondisclosure agreements he signed. they plan to go ahead with the release. with more information visit our westbound booktv.org. >> here's a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. the atlantic journal book festival will take place august

31st through zenned 2nd. then the florida heritage book festival and writers conference will be in cont august teen the weekend of september 15. on september 22 and 23rd kirk land washington will hold the northwest book event. it will feature doesn'ts of dozens of appearances. also the weekends of september 22nd, booktv will be live from the national mall in washington, d.c., for the national book festival. be sure to check book booktv.org. please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area and we'll add them to our list. e-mail us at booktv at c-span.org. a conversation with andrew welsh is next on booktv.

he talked about during the recent visit to columbus, ohio. the book "hide rid at home." domestic terrorism trials that started in the city. >> on august 6, 2002, the three men who had known each other for a couple of years at the local mosque got together. they basically went out for coffee at the caribou cafe coffee house. it was ten months affiliate after the war in afghanistan had begun, at the time there was a lot of reports about the civilian casualties in that war. these three were upset about that. and they just started talking about sort what they could do to enact revenge or if they could do something about this and send a message, what would they do? they threw out an idea about the hoover dam, and christopher paul, who was with them, thought it was a good idea but maybe there was something else.

and then the third man, who was a smol began immigrant to columbus, he said what he thought would be a good thing to do is shoot up a shopping mall. maybe that would sent the right kind of message. the meeting, which was kind of a casual meeting, again, they were just sort of tossing out ideas. it became extremely significant to the three cases. the following year, investigators came across eyeman faris. he was origin i are from cans my immigranted to the united states. he's been in columbus five or six years by then. authors came across the name during an investigation of another guy who was a immigrant to baltimore and he was associated with klieg mohamed. they came across the notion that faris may have been asked to

check 0 out the brooklyn bridge, see what it would take to bring the brooklyn bridge down. it's obviously after the 9/11 athats. he actually visited afghanistan. he'd been to the camps some of the terrorism training camps. met weathered and mohamed and the fbi was interested in him. faris was questioned beginning in mar of 2003. and during the interviews with faris, he mentioned the conversation they had with and the idea of shooting up a shopping mall. and also the name of christopher paul, the third man at this coffee shop came up. authorities started to piece it together and eventually in a sort of slow domino effect, the three were arrested and charged. so faris, the pakistan immigrant

was ultimately pleaded guilty to two chargeses of terrorism-related crimes. he pleaded guilty in a secret closed deal in may in virginia. may of 2003. the idea was that he had a lot to have offer the government and he might be able to get a reduction in the sentence based orb the information he could provide. unfortunately the case leaked, and government was forced to publicize his conviction that june. and at that point, everything went to heck. he was upset. he lost the bargaining chip. they were extremely interested in the somali immigrant. he ran a cell phone shop and had a family. they were tracking him and became more and more concerned about the shopping mall threat. the situation we were in thin, is here's somebody who may a throw away comment about shooting up a shopping mall,

unbenortheast what that lead to is government agents spent weeks searching every mall in columbus at midnight. they would descend on malls with search teams, s.w.a.t. teams looking for anything maybe he was going to set off bomb. and so there's something a little bit comical about this notion that there might be bombs sitting in the pretty luxury shopping malls. the government couldn't take anything for granted. one throw away remarking lead to the massive outpouring of investigation. meanwhile the fbi was having a huge debate in washington with immigration authority. can we arrest the guy. on what basis? we don't have a warrant yet. there's a legal fight in washington and eventually the decision was made to arrest him

the day after thanksgiving, first of all on immigration charges. and then ultimately after about three days of nonstop questioning, he acknowledged the conversation that had been at the coffee shop and ultimately he was charged. he was on the way to morning prayers when he was arrested. the family didn't see him again for six months. he actually wasn't charged for another, gosh, almost eight months. so a lot of us in columbus remembered eyeman faris. we didn't realize there was another case pending in april 2004. the third guy in the trio, in some ways is maybe the most fascinating. he grew up in worthington, which is a suburb of columbus. it's one of the oldest, in fact older than columbus. he was one of a small number of african-americans in the suburb. he grew up in a pretty close family. went to ohio state university,

he underwent a convention to islam and became radicalized. it was the soviets were in afghanistan and there was a lot of concern among muslims about the atrocities the soviets were carrying out. ultimately paul changed his name,. he went to afghanistan, like a lot of -- they called him the afghan era. muslims from around the world who went to afghanistan to join the fight. he was over there, he became really radicalized. ultimately returned to columbus, he married a pakistan woman born in england. he changed his name again to christopher paul. nobody knows exactly idea. the assumption he wanted a more american-sounding name. something that might distract people from who he might be or what he might be up to. he stayed in columbus but stayed

in close contact with terrorist cells in germany. he traveled to germany and at some point, he crossed paths with people who had direct contact with the 9/11 hijackers. there's no evidence he had anything to do. he was on the close circles. through the decade of the 2000 with, he was here, he was living a quiet life. but at the same time, he was still involved with the radical notions and radical people. the fbi took a long time to arrest him. all three were charged essentially with what's known as material support prosecution. so the terrorism law that was seriously beefed up after 9/11, and this law has been used widely. it charges you with providing support to terrorists, with controversial about it it it doesn't necessarily mean you did anything.

you didn't commit a terrorist act. you provided aid, supplies, money, sometimes even yourself as a foot soldier in the cause of terrorism. christopher paul would be someone you consider a very passionate ideological person. also, i think, probably a pretty honorable person hep really didn't fight the prosecution at all. he -- there were a few court filings. certainlily he agreed to plead guilty almost immediately. he refused to testify or offer any information that might help them. so he's now in federal prison serving a 20 years prison. the somali received a light sentence because the evidence against him was probably pretty thin. he's actually scheduled to be released in summer of 2012. his problem he's not a u.s. citizens, and somali is still not a functioning government. part of his sentence was to be

deported it's unclear if can happen. eye man faris was never tried. he went back and forth with the fbi and government prosecutors. he essentially struck a deal and the deal was that he would plead guilty to two of these material support charges in exchange for the continued cooperation. and he agreed to this, there's a full transcript of his plea hearings where he agrees to. it's only later after he got cold feet after the case became public and he had nothing. he wasn't worth anything to the government anymore. at that point, there was a long court battle with him where he tried to withdrawal his plea, and troyed to have the conviction thrown out. ultimately he lost on pretty much every level. he is also serving a twenty-year prison sentence. he's in the federal supermax in colorado. some of the cell mates are like

robert handson, the infamous fbi spy and the unany bomber. these are pretty good examples what the government was trying to do after 9/11. they were under enormous pressure because of the attacks, obviously, to make sure that nothing like this happened again. this material support statute they used had existed before 9/11, but it was beefed up and added to, i think the prosecution's point out that the government felt it had to go after every lead no matter how miner it might have seemed in the end. leftthere's a lot of people who think that it was a stretch to go after abdi for mouthing off for shoot up a shopping mall in a coffee mall when she's

shooting the breeze with friends. i think what it shows is the complete change in the government's approach to investigating and prosecuting. john ashcroft, the form attorneyer general made it clear when he began to change the rules of investigative engagement. we are no longer to start in the rubble of a terrorist explosion. we're -- our job now is to prevent those types of things. and in the prosecution's of eye man faris, christopher paul, that's clearly what you saw. they were going after people who had not done anything violent in the sen of committing an act. they wanted to go after the people to stop something from happening. i think these are probably of the best really good examples of them trying to do that. when i set tout do the book, one of the first things i wanted do was basically illustrate how

this was a -- there was a national story that happened to unfold in ohio. you know, when people look in my book, i hope they don't think of it as an ohio story. this is a national story that. happened to take place in ohio. in columbus, ohio, booktv took tours of several important literary sites with the help of the local affiliate cable. the coverage of the events continues now. >> hi. i'm eric. i'm the associate cure raters for rare books and man scripts here. we're here at the january and jack crai ton special collection breeding room. we share with a couple of other divisions of the ohio state university library special collection library. i'm here to talk to you today a little bit about art collections

which are rather expansive and give you a sense of what kind of thing we have by highlights a few examples of things i administratorly like. some of them are random off the coast selections. >> the first item i'd like to talk about today is what i like to describe as my white whale. this the horn bi bible. it's probably and my very biased 3.7 one of the most substantial and beautiful items we have in the rare books and manuscripts collection. what it is is an example of an early 13th century transitional bible. what i mean by that prior to the 13th century mid evil bibles did not look like bibles as we think of them today. they tended to be in the larger volume, large pages than this. and they to have a complete bible, you likely would have had a bible in a multivolume set.

usually anywhere between six to twenty or even more volumes. in the early 13th century, however, a number of intellectual and cultural changes were happened in europe that necessitated the creation of in a new type of bible and the hornbibible is a result of that. what happened put things very simply is that you had the emergence of the universities, and you had the emergence of the fraternal orders or the dominicans. and one let's take the universities first. with the rise of the universities, the bible became essentially the core textbook for all fiends of study. what they needed in that case when a lot of people are trying to used same text is something that is standard or standard as possible during a period in which we do not have the mechanical reproduction of books. everything is being written by hand. what happened in the early

12th century they sort to develop new ways of the packaging the bible. it starts to go in to a single volume. so you consistent ordering in the order of the books with the binal. beginning with genesis and ending with apock lis and other things begin to happen. certain facets of the early mid evil bible start to fall out. for instance, if you look at this leaf here, you can see all of the colored and roman numerals. the ruin candidated roman numerals. this is called can pitch will list. it's outlined chapter numbers. and the early mid evil period in the early 13th century what happened is these old numbers start to fall out of fashion and the bible rechapterred, so to speak. if we look at this leaf, we can see an example of this happening in the bible itself. these colored numbers, these ruin candidated numbers in the

margin are the old traditional chapter numbers. however, we can see that these have been crossed out likely by either inker and then the new chapter numbers in this case chapter 51 has been chaptered to 2er. we have another revision in early pencil. what's going here the traditional chapter numbers are givings away to the 13th century style number of ordering the chapter of the bieblg. bible. certain these these are the same numbers we see now when we look at the bible today. the bible is significant for a number of reasons. it was created -- we don't know exactly when sometime 1210 and 1220. is t survived until 1821. it was broken apart by the purchaser immediately. the leaves were distributed for tax purposes, and sold off piece

by piece. sometime in early 1980 ohio state university came in to possession through donation of roughly 150 to 160 of these leaves and over the last few years, it has become what somewhat of an obsession for me to try to piece together as many pieces as possible. we're now sitting at approximately 181 leaves out an original 440 here at ohio state. these two, i should say, are newest editions. this leaf features saint james. we acquired this one in april and the one next to it with the gorgeous vine work p we aqired in may and what trying to do is reconstruct the bible not because we have a lot. it would be a nice thing do for all intents and purposes the

different changes we see working in the man script institute what we could biological terms a missing link. it's a fundamental step. it's an extremely important witness to the text yule production of the bible and i would encourage anyone if these look tbar please get in touch with ohio state. you may have one on the wall. it's a late 14th century cope from circa 1375 of bernard. what this essentially is a legendary or collection of saints leaves. the text itself while significant wasn't that popular and the within we're showing it you today is not because the words happen to say because the little guy right here. and this is an original mid self

bookmark. as you can see, still bound in to the original binding, it's an original late 14th century binding in deer skin. and what's significant about this. i don't have an exact sen phis for you. there are an extremely low number of the bookmarks that survive. most that sur do survive do not exist in the original books. they survive as single independent units. they're not on strings or bound in to the text. this is a significant and fun object for more reasons than the fact it's extremely rare. this is what i really like to call an example of mid evil hyper text. books, as you can see, looking a the layout can be hard read in the middle ages. so you tightly packed contest densed the text. the colors are punctuation. modern punkuation systems didn't

develop until the late 16th century. mid evil reader and writers would employ the different colors. inspite of any sort of help the colors could give, however, the whole process of reading one of the books could be difficult. they created other tomorrows of readers aid. this bookmark is an example. i'll show you how it work right now. it's like any modern bound bookmark we can think of today. it's on a string. you lay the string in and it will mark the page opening. however, you'll notice there are four colums of text. well, this would be -- [inaudible] the first, second, third, and fourth columns. if you take the bookmark, you'll notice one it has a drawing on it. and ink drawing and you'll notice it spins. on the back, you have four words

written. [inaudible] we'll drop this one and mark it here. now, what this is telling us is reader is on the fourth column. not the first, second, third, but on the fourth column. we have two steps, page opening, column marker. i'm not going do this it's extremely fragile. you notice the knot here. it is a news of a sort. it would allow you to move the bookmark up and down the string. and that would allow you to then not only mark the page opening and the column but the exact position within the column you had stopped reading. so the very creative way that mid evil people developed in order to help them navigate their way through the text. there other examples. but this one is probably the rarest one we have here at ohio state, and it's a very popular

feature of the late 14th century manuscript. i'm sure most of you know martin luther. considered the father of the modern church. all of the branches. and potted history of martin luther in the barest possible terms. the 1517 martin luther hammered his 95 thesis on the church door in wittenberg, and this essentially starts what is going become a raging fire storm in the landscape across europe. needless to say, the powers do not like luther's challenge of north in particular challenging the whole system of indulgeses why people could buy time off for perking story and buy forgiveness for the sins. there's a lot of back and forth between martin luther and the catholic church between the next two to three years. he participates in a number of

-- and really no common ground is being met and then in 1520 he essentially begins what becomes the final breaking between the knew protestant movement. he issues three texts. ohio state has the -- as i mentioned earlier the harrold collection. the grim collection scintds of over 600 different titles. we're probably approaching close to 700 if not more at this stage. it chronicals every aspect of the german reformation. they are extremely lucky to have what could be considered to have the three cortex of the early movement. these were all written by martin luther in 15120. this first text was august 15, 20 this is luther's dress to the christian nobility of the german nation. in the book he lays out a doctrine that will become one of the foundational tenants prod

sentism. that was a notion of priesthood of believers. basically in quick terms what the doctrine dictates is that your personal relationship with god need not be mediated by a priest. this charge is all christians to actually take their own salvation in their own hands. the second book the cappivity of the church. and this was probably luther's most antagonistic text of the year 1520. it was issued in august or excuse me october 1520, and in this the martin luther essentially attacks the sacrament tal structure of the catholic church. he pays particular attention to redefining the understanding of the eucharist or the lord's super. baptism and the tents.

most this is the first printed occurrence of luther actually calling the pope in this case, pope leo the x the antichrist. there's no going back from that point. the third text is november 1520, and this on the freedom of the christian man. and in this text, we have nice little early portrait of luther. we basically see luther saying that the faithful christian does not believe in god and does not love god because he is compelled, rather, it's a free and willing demonstration of love and free and willing pursuit of charity and right living simply because you love god not because you are compelled to love god. for more information on booktv recent visit to columbus, ohio and other visits on c-span local content streak tour, visit c-span.org/local content.

here's a look at books being published this week. in mortality the late christopher chronicals the battle with canner and how he dealt with facing death. recounts the experiences serving as the united nations secretary general in "interventions" a life in war and peace. industrially politician danny dan nonpresents the thoughts on relations between israel and the u.s. in "israel; the world to prevail." recounts the career of former federal reserve chair. in thurman's america history professor at emery university cron corral the life and career from the late republican senator in south carolina. historian exams the personal relationship between bill and