legislation in west virginia to overtorn the mine safety after that last disaster, the effort to overturn mining safety regulations funded by the koch brothers. have in the book a page with 53 different organizations, a lot of them, by the way, research centers on college campuses around the country all for the purpose of disputing the existence of global warming and fighting to do away with any government regulations that would have anything to do with climate control. ..

i'm sure rick scott is in there. supreme court justices, scalia, thomas, alito, they have all been there to these meetings. and this one, the book cannot about a month or so ago. they raised $100 million in one weekend. the thing about that, if you look at the super packs for romney in santorum and ron paul and newt gingrich up and tell

super tuesday, we had spent a total for all the candid it's of $53 million. and in that one weekend a raised $100 million. so they are huge. they're out there, and it will say and do anything. of course it is a lot easier for them now censuses united because you have not only grazed on the the corporate money, but you don't have to report which corporations are paying which bills. they also could not do it without the assistance of the nation's media, and that is what drives me crazy. >> you can watch this and other programs online at book tv. you're watching book tv. now, the threat of nuclear weapons today and discusses what can be done to safeguard against the ultimate catastrophe. this is about an hour.

[applause] >> good afternoon, ladies gentlemen. thank you for joining me today. although i don't have. [indiscernible] i was thinking how to start the speech. write something in today's "wall street journal" opinion page for me. the title of it is, it's always prepare for the cataclysms. we all think of august as a month or everybody is at the beach. sort of even in this heavily political season. just enjoying life. for those of us in washington, congress is in recess. generally speaking it means a lot of lobbyists leave town. a lot more traffic, and nice time. so wanted to bring this back to a historical reality.

over the last century among the peaceful events that have occurred, in august of 1914, world war one began. on the last day of august 1939 and decided to invade poland and a state. 1945 the two atomic bombs in the week of 1945 led to the end of the second world war. in 1961 the berlin wall was put up in the middle of august. in 1964 the tonkin gulf incident which led to the major escalation of vietnam took place. 1968 with the proxy bring ended when czechoslovakia was invaded. soviet tanks were rolling down the streets of prague. in 1981 they started the polish

solidarity movement. and in 1990 set down decided he should have 19, not 18 provinces and moved into kuwait on the second of august. in 1991 just to make sure that we could run things out, the revolution in russia that brought down gorbachev's government. a short-lived one. then, of course, the revolutionaries who in turn a few days later were up in the. nothing ever happens in august, sort of like an old greg harbaugh movie from 80 years ago. nothing ever happens. so we can all relax and enjoy the rest of the summer. that said, what of like to do today is very briefly talk about why i wrote the book and what it aims to do and then pick out

three of the more pressing problems, talk about them a bit and then wind up with overall some of the things that are particularly in this movement toward global nuclear zero. i decided three years ago to begin the process of writing this book because it occurred to me that there was an opportunity that i don't believe have really existed in earlier decades. what strategists had in the immediate generation after the end of the second world war had to sort of guess at, had to imagine a scenario, what would happen if this and if that. now another half century having passed since the cuban missile crisis, there is enough historical experience to enable us to look at the fundamental

problems that nuclear weapons opposed in the two-thirds century that they have been part and says the change the world forever. and so the first explosion in new mexico. and therefore we could take an integrated look at these problems delving into the details were necessary. but present an integrated and coherent set of problems and less is that we learn from them. and there is an umbrella lesson, to help us at the end. i come up with the fundamental thrust of nuclear policy is to avoid what i call the apocalyptic trinity. you always want to have not

apocalyptic choices. all return to that a couple of times. a 13th lesson. never write a book with more than three lessons. in any event with that of one of the pickup three areas from what i cover. tucker was among the rows to the problems there that are particularly pressing. turn to the unbilled -- umbrella problem. i'm hoping that the book, by the way is of use. specifically i tried to bring this to the general public in a way that i think really hasn't been possible. so i would say, the three

problems and going to focus on to their the problem being posed by iran, the problem that india and pakistan have proposed. pursuing nuclear weapons. the problem with pakistan and india being civilian energy as a springboard for getting to nuclear weapons. and the third one, the specialist problem of small power vulnerability as evidenced by what is called electromagnetic pulse of a mile talk about double b2. and the implications for missile defense. and from there will move on. in the case of ron which i think we can say is every now and then in the news, and as saws just yesterday the story about the a october surprise. the fundamental problem here is

the possibility of a cuban missile price of -- crisis in the middle east. to understand this, we briefly go back. in 1961, in june with president kennedy in vienna. pushed kennedy around. kennedy himself said later, you really beat me up. he decided that kennedy was not up to it. kennedy said, well, what about the possibility of paraphrasing not having the transcript in front of me, the possibility of miscalculation. you have to be careful. khrushchev said this calculation, i don't want to hear this word. on tired of hearing it. so in 1961 crest of decided, partly , mainly because of the summit that

he could push kennedy a little further. but he did was working with the east german leader did began the berlin wall which was a flat violation of the 19,454th power agreement which gave full access to all for occupying parties. the second shoe dropped in october of 1962, which many of us lived through. i was 15 years old. the conversation on the school bus at that time was a considerable worst thing for a couple of weeks. it was very real, which treated and find out until much later how close we came to nuclear war and then what we -- we saw there was that kennedy and khrushchev realize threat of the back that there's a possibility that this would get out of hand. khrushchev told his son who was.

[indiscernible] , he said and make a fuss, and make more of a fuss and then agree. that was not his best calculation. a few years after, a couple years after that they decided they had made one too many miscalculations. what happened there was that at the same time, and this was jeffrey goldberg interviewed fidel castro a couple of years ago. castro admitted that he had once the first track is the a states. the time moscow, if this happens, do you know what's going to have been seeing violence? been deleted trying to disappear, and you with the. castro still waters and to go ahead. he also reported that about 20 years later castro remove the

request and moscow apparently said, did we have this conversation before? so now we look at the situation in the mideast today. you know, you have iran. and if iran goes nuclear, we are going to have the saudis said said that there would publicly say they're prepared to go nuclear. you pick the phone up. saudis and pakistan reason biofuel. how many hours c-span2. and never mind this bit. you just take the bonds and put them on any the aircraft. american f15 and 16. and you don't have to have fancy safety devices. it won't have time to figure that stuff out. now you have in close proximity, hundreds of miles away in some cases these supersonic jets in bases that may be highly

vulnerable, small countries are even a small number of nuclear weapons can effectively obliterate them. in very look communication in 1962 that was bad enough. the one to send a message. they give it to western union. yet to help the kid did stop to see his car from where the office. so it was very much catch as catch can. for five people within their weapons. they're all worried and have no margin for error. the permutations are very, very scary to say the least. so ultimately the resolution of this is to stop iran from duke -- getting nuclear-weapons. not going to honor any agreement it makes to abandon them commander going to have to get regime change and preferably brought about from within, positive regime change, but the

broader lesson is that revolutionary powers, you can negotiate away revolutionary power. you have to defeat them. in 1962 this of the consequence of the speculation. you can easily have won here. so they can about not by design. but all it takes is one caster who is ready. you heard some of the pronouncements. they may not be reading from the same handbook we are. now, with regard to let india and pakistan, what there is the civilian nuclear energy is just next to a nuclear capability. you look first to at three and a half% enriched uranium power

reactor and say, well, okay. full weapons-grade is 93 and a half%. so not that far along. actually, they show this in the book. adelle want to go through arithmetic. it gets -- it's relatively simple when you see it on paper. you've done 80 percent, not 18, but a 0% of the separation mark of separating the uranium you want from the rest of the. you again to three &. when you get to 20%, 19 and three-quarters, which is medical research, you've done 97 percent of the separation mark. so that one very quickly, if one out of every 140 evans is the assistant you what, when you get

down to one of five which is when the medical research greatest, you've got to read of almost all of these 97% or 96% of the separation. you've gotten rid of 135 on one of adams'. do just about there. there are a couple of rules that relate to this. i guess i unconsciously channeled herman cain because my rule, i don't have a 9-9-9, 11- 11-1-1-1 and 10-10-10-10 to read a lot of rounding in here. ten, 20, 30 percent, but it all comes about a the end. it's a lot easier to remember than 15,248, dozens of other native to a salon. and in the first one, a 11- 11-1-1-1, the timeline. takes impartially 11 months, 11

wants to go from uranium ore to three and a half percent enriched uranium. about a week to go for medical great to weapons grade and abetted data put the weapon to gather. so that's one. if you start with 16 metric tons of uranium, the indigo 33 iterations, 15 kilograms of interest uranium, start out with the uranium ore. that's enough to fuel a reasonably well designed uranium weapon. so you go through a tenfold

reduction to go from uranium or to a uranium for nuclear power. you go through another tenfold reduction ticket to medical great command the third tenfold reduction , you have in bomb. a couple of other kinds of things that give you an idea of what it dealing with. i'm sorry. the fourth ten in that is the difference between a crudely designed uranium bomb which needs about 60 kgs, 140 you're so pounds of enriched uranium to a plutonium bomb. there are estimates lower than 6 kilograms, but that's a conservative one. estimates that are lower. and that's for well-designed plutonium.

you have these fundamental metrics that you're working with. of the one. sort of a kid is bad news thing. if give a crude nuclear device. most of the year will be gone. in the sequence of doubling, what you're doing, more than in the buck. basically what happened is the split peas adams, you more than double the neutron count. these neutrons a going to be once they're going to the lombard and the nuclei and bombarding. you go through a bunch of dublin. it sort of like on the chessboard with the king puts one piece on the first. brought one before the did the end of that.

the last four doublings in any sequence released 95 percent of the energy. the first 70 release 1% of the energy. the next ten release 4%. five. and then you get 95 percent of the annual energy. his the batman's. the bomb that destroyed the world trade center -- i'm sorry, that went off in the garage of the world trade center in 1993 was about two-thirds of a ton of conventional explosive and 1% of hiroshima which is 14 kilotons, you're releasing 200 tons the energy of the palm that had it been placed better would have toppled one tower into another. in other words, is going to be a

terrible mess. a lot of terrorists out there who would say you don't need a rolls-royce. a jalopy will do. the last thing, and this is something that pertains to ron. as well other context. talking about, iran does numbness of the input this on, and that's true. we don't know. it during much better the mockery of. north korea might have to go back. the case with the iranians, success. that comes down to militarizing your warhead enough so it will fit inside a missile nose cone or in a bomb that's not too heavy carried by aircraft. if you really advance, inside an artillery shell.

what we've been talking about since september 11, hasn't the whole focus been what's been called aggressive lot of bad usage, the in conventional threat. unorthodox to nontraditional be little more precise. you don't conflate conventional coal lessons. the shipping container, the bomb inside a van. that bond does not have to be a well designed device. compact and advanced enough to fit inside a missile warhead. it can be accrued can trigger device that we didn't even test as we knew will work. south africa built a half-dozen of them in the 80's you put that inside a van. he said it off. you put in a shipping container and @booktv off in the port. so why are we looking, talk about iran, weapons capability when a device, and device is

used to indicate something that cannot be a weapon nice to fit on a missile, were hit to more sheller something like that. when that is a part of the threat. if a bomb goes off in manhattan harbor, hiroshima, kills a few hundred thousand people between may not even have the signature. so how are we going to know where retaliate? said that has to be, and that is a much shorter time line. the administration talks about that, it makes me nervous. the focus of what we've been talking about is something quite different. the third one that we talk about briefly is electromagnetic pulse. want to repeat details from the text, but basically he set off a nuclear weapon and high-altitude

paradoxically for this purpose, as i know in the text, an atomic bomb is better suited than hydrogen bomb. we set off at 300 miles over kansas. it's possible in a worst-case but the infrastructure of the con in the united states, the radius of 1470 miles at that altitude according to a congressional report could take down our electronic infrastructure, and we would be catapulted back in short order to what life was like before thomas edison. there are disputes on what some people say maybe only 20 to 30%. it will be huge and. also another possibility, he came up with this one, the talk to her him speak in the spring. well, what do you do if you have one of these geomagnetic solar storms? if we had one as powerful as the one in 18598 can destroy the

entire infrastructure. honeyed -- howdy negotiate with the sun? but at least to the iranian threat, missile defense can if properly deployed enable us to shoot down a small attack. the current generation of missile defense is not designed to shoot down a trajectory that goes up like this, but rather they have to work on it, but you have a picket fence to try to prevent a catastrophic strike. the same time we invest a few billion dollars and can get backups the electrical systems. right now but could be several years before major transformers are back on line. so the lesson of this is that the catastrophic vulnerability, low numbers of catastrophic vulnerability is something you should never be made if you can avoid it. of course i did not mention at the end, india pakistan.

it was implied. civilian energy is right next door to a nuclear weapons program in terms of putting it together, especially if your not trying to get an elegantly designed device which brings me to nuclear zero. the administration floated earlier this year and a proposal to cut as low as 300 weapons from where we are now. and the administration said, well, we have not decided, but these are trial balloons, as we call them in washington. now, this is based upon, among other things to my belief that all you need is small number of weapons. well, here the problems of that. first of all, you assume everyone else thinks lucky. this is what's called mirror imaging. look what happened in 1973 when

11 years after the cuban missile crisis there was a mideast war that went on for about three weeks in october. and toward the end of the kid is that it's rnc fet introduced soviet troops in the middle east. he said down transport planes and will fly and the airspace. in the transcript that was released about ten years ago, the conversation with richard nixon, we were close to a nuclear confrontation today. american superiority has shrunk. for five years from passing.

irreversibly in the soviet union , the beetle to work. that did not prove to be much better forecast the 1961. but the point is, whether you think these weapons mater, the nuclear balance, the changes matter. it's an operational question. of one or more parties to a crisis think that it matters nba differently as a result of changes, the matter. at minimum it raises the risk in a crisis. at maximum if could cause the crisis to end differently. so when we look at china and we are assuming that china is not at the time a huge military buildup, the biggest since the

80's, china was unquestionably as pushing for dominance in the western pacific that if they see as go down to a low number of weapons they have more weapons of mass. they may change their behavior in a crisis. it doesn't matter whether we think it should not. have a debate, an abstract debate of what has been called at times nuclear theology, whether you want to call it, new treaty on nuclear doctrine. if they think differently and act on it that will change the way the crisis unfolds and it could very well increase the risk of war. so with this in mind, bear in mind that the people who worry about the most are not trying to follow your example as you reduce it. make their weapons more voluble. 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 will rule looking for. we had have defectors oprah's. these things are hard to do. the end of the second iraqi freedom, we found 12 jet planes. the sand. barry cruise missiles a mile down. so we don't have any ability to find the stuff. if there's a break and we don't have a substitute for nuclear-weapons. nuclear-weapons for one of the things that deterred and major full-scale war. major regional conflicts. and we don't have a substitute. and some of these prominent former secretaries of state and defense are pushing the idea of a nuclear zero make it quite clear that they're looking for in the future and a lot of things have to be in place before do this. it's possible that popular opinion could, as has happened from time to time, stampedes

governments to do things and are ready to do. for example, one time was for the better, that was to end the atmosphere of testing. it was popular outrage over some of the early tests or after a facts. and you worry about them, they led to the ending of the atmospheric testing. on the other hand, the europeans , we had promised to appoint a so-called neutron weapon, neutron bomb to stop the russian tank. staked his administration on it. carter reversed it under pressure. a propaganda campaign. popular opinion can stampede governments of their not able to explain convincingly why we should do something. nuclear zero does have a want to . but the risks of prematurely going to zero and finding

yourself with the worst countries in the world for producing formally hidden weapons, the problem of the clandestine process that was called by the grace strategist, and so we have a solution to the problem rushing toward nuclear zero could prove to be catastrophic. i close with this. two things. one on the downside and then one thing on the upside. the downside is, it appears that the risk of some sort of nuclear use is growing. and if that threshold was crossed you may not be -- it may not be possible to change again. in a possible to go back. you may be permanently worse off. the of ministration does not appear to be fully alive to this risk. it is not doing everything it can to stop iran as one example.

we can go into that if you like. but we could be sitting at the end of the second world war it was thought by most policy makers, probably most members of the public and certainly most of the scientists that it was inevitable within the decade or virtually inevitable the arubia nuclear war. it did not happen. so never given on this one. we have to continually work, pedal to the metal in every way we can so that we can prevent this catastrophe from happening and avoid not only suicide or genocide but also surrender. we don't want to be in a position. we don't want to be in the position where with a half million americans, an american president has to decide whether or want to unleash against a run or some other country if we're able to establish an attack that will kill millions.

an all-out attack on iran would come in the 50 million which is the total for the entire second world war. i don't think frankly that millions of americans, an american president could do that. the whole point is you don't want to be in that situation. avoiding apocalyptic options, preserving something short. with pat, i think this is as good enough time as any to stop the bill be delighted to answer questions. a live steve who has a sharper eye then me the people down. >> i hope you're all feeling cheery. we will take questions. is there a question? >> i think this really important that this book came out at this point. if nothing else, if people are

aware of nothing else, if that this topic of nuclear strategy has been dropped as a major theme in american public policy. since the reagan era when people were loyal to sleep thinking of reinstalled this and moved on. now it's back. the mp has not been solved apparently. that threat is not been solved and we don't know what we're doing. and so i think it is important to get people recovering the vocabulary and a language for even talking about this. it's not talk any more in universities. i think that is the most important thing you've done with the publication of this book. i want to ask you specifically about the most immediate threat. iran takes so little time to come to of the development of a

crude. why haven't they done it? does anybody know? they're talking bravely about annihilating as well, doing various other things. why haven't they moved to have that far along and 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 their hourlong. they could theoretically at least, less some calculations before the end of this year have enough material on hand to assemble a crude weapon. if that's the case they could assemble one without testing. the only hope i have is that from the arena standpoint it is more beneficial to them to test

like north korea did. immediately we put the world on notice. we have something. north korea's test was a classic case of one of those designers. using less than a dilettante. but already there was more circumspection in dealing with north korea. look at what a round of last year. it was believed not to be nuclear. i'm assuming they're not simply because i believe it is in their interest to test. they don't have to test atmospherically. they can set off one. we will pick up the signature seismically. the sixers are different from an earthquake because an earthquake you get termers in advance and then a big shake . within a clear device you go like this, but the boom and then it goes back. so you can find those things. certainly from their standpoint

it would be in their interest to do so, but a year ago we expose the plot in the fall of october something. there were going to set off a bomb in a georgetown restaurant in an effort to kill the saudi ambassador in some prominent and named georgetown restaurant. at check out one a little extra personally because living in d.c., go to restaurants in georgetown. so they also talked about putting something in front of the saudi embassy. i took that even more personally because i live across st. there are no scenarios with a bomb of any power going off there in which the structure is likely to be standing. were talking about something just a few hundred yards away. it's like a truck bomb going off so there were ready to do that even when there were not on what we know in nuclear state. they could do that and then say,

hey, guess what. our nuclear. but the bottom line is that right now should not be negotiating with the metal. they have a consistent record of using negotiations to stall. for more than a decade. what you want to do is put all your sanctions pressure on now, the highest level of financial and energy and refining, 60 percent of the oil has to be refined outside the country. each of them off because if you don't do that they have time to adjust to each new level of sanctions, gradual escalation in vietnam. it makes no sense to do it this way. when sanctions were first proposed back in 2003 did not have a compatible railway system with russia. a few years later they did. we give them time.

i went through the full list. a few things that tell you what the program was about. mind you, iaea inspections are not designed to catch cheating. their parking and a neutron initiators which is a way to in an extra newtowns. they're working on building intercontinental ballistic missiles for which there is no known commercial application. and not doing it to deliver medical supplies 5,000 miles. there are various other components that are identified with nuclear-weapons. why would you want a high altitude trigger the works at high altitude just the kind of thing used in nuclear devices. we should conclude and never

mind this about when they have a weapons capability, and their capability could be the device because the track. they're working on it on every evidence that we can see. therefore we need to act very soon. if we don't, as terrell probably will act before the election. >> that is very soon. >> yes. and i think the reason frankly that israel is likely to is because of what i call the two handed instead of schizophrenic policy of this administration, obama's people point all the time, look at the unprecedented defense cooperation and missile defense and other things. it is unprecedented. its president to because the bush a administration before and had begun that a ratcheting up of cooperation. that cooperation is a two-way

street. the israelis have designed equipment that is saving american lives afghanistan. in the self ceiling bandages is one of the reasons lie seven saved. two-way thing. swapping tactics, things about drones. a lot of good things. what the white hand giveth the left-hand takes away. israel is pressured to pre settlement. negotiate from the -- the administration, 1967, the 1949 cease-fire lines. and the palestinians. some then there was a series of leaks in the spring about a possible israeli strike showing

up in the new york times. things about the israeli strike that would not work. there were things about, well, israel might get some help. it would not be used before the strike, but if you have a plan crippled. you might be able to land there, that kind of thing. that immediately was frozen out. series of orchestrated leaks. i won't go down the full list. and so the israelis withdrew their assurance that they had given last year that there were notified by the ministers and before striking. you have all these leaks in the paper. does anyone think they can keep the secrets? so there were other leaks involving of the things that the administration has done. the israelis look and see a british mall in outside it, rich in peninsula. a mall-up. that's how we found one of the guys we killed.

by brad knew we had done that we had to extricate the age before he was found which apparently we did. the long and short of it is that they fear. and some i think they're looking at pre november 6th commander reason for that is after november 6th if obama wins he's unbound and does not to worry about reelection. i think, frankly, that israel, what's most likely to be the line the israelis are looking at . there would rather do that because the u.s. and probably join in. but that's the chance i don't think they feel they necessarily can take, so take a fresh look in early october, they have a

higher opinion of their chances of success than the obama administration has. >> and skip thailand, one of the board members here. i'm an engineer, and have a little bit of expertise in commercial that their power. i think it is important to understand, and i don't think you're saying this, but it's important to understand that in order to destroy israel or even tel aviv or for that matter it's going to take multiple to monitor weapons. none of these terrorist regimes have the capability of developing or delivering anything on a scale, so i think the worst case scenario is

killing to be some cheesy science project dirty bomber something with low yield they you flow into the seattle harbor all were never on a container ship or something like that. 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 it clear weapons to know that, to realize that. the thing that occurred to me cayuse said you were seeing that if we had such a thing happen like at hiroshima little boy weapon goff and one of the harbors is something like that, we would know. at that point it's too late to nine respond. where do you respond? so i guess my question of the is that still the case now?

had a we know where to respond other than iran or career, how do we know even how to begin to respond now while we think these guys a developing their science project opened? >> let me take the last part first. we have nuclear for and six for certain countries. we know the signatures of the weapons of russia, the former soviet union, those weapons. we have signatures for chinese weapons, signatures for french weapons. we have signatures from british weapons. not that we think they're likely. we have signatures, may have some on india, pakistan from some advance sampling techniques and not an expert on just how much you can get out of an underground explosion as opposed to an atmospheric explosion, but there may be some things that get into the atmosphere. small quantities. and if there are, maybe we even have a little bit out of north korea.

but we don't with iran. the second thing is, nuclear weapons, we -- a single here's jim wanted well, if trapped in an airburst, have a radius of what they call a five psi circle. 5 pounds per square inch. of roughly -- the radius would be roughly a half mile going around. a mile in diameter. and while you would not destroy all the cities if you have three or four of those going out until of these, three or four of those going off to a you might have airbursts in ground bursts. you do that because you want to grounders to cut countless thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive material which would be highly veto in the immediate area. the most intense radioactivity

released his with in the first day, first couple of weeks. as you get further along its less dangerous, but you could have very easily the few hundred thousand fatalities in a country the size of israel. let's just put that in perspective to the united states. let's assume that they think they have enough accuracy to it west jerusalem and it does in it somewhere else. i might add if i was a palestinian, i would be a little nervous. i don't know if i have enough faith in the iranian rockets that they might not land in the wrong place. but if you have that and you have let's say one under 200,000 in each of those two cities among three or 400,000, we have about 45 times the population of zero. so if you had 200,000 dead from

two or three bombs in the city's , you're looking at or even will go well and save 100,000. let's just use -- you're looking at 9 million, 200,000 israeli dead, you're looking at 9 million american casualties for our country which has 45 or so times the popular. the revolution, it's something along lines of two or 3 million. it may even include. it's a lot less than a million. what the impact of that would be. so it would not literally lay everything to waste, but it would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. of course then you're talking about the gulf states. they're very vulnerable. to large number of cities and kuwait would be targets.

the bottom line is we have to take the threat very seriously. the pakistanis are working on it. they have the weapons advanced enough to put in sure range artillery vessels of 25, 30-mile range missiles vests. it seems like a pop gun, but it tells you the design work is very entranced. i'd be worried. at think the effect on israel would be catastrophic. it would be viewed as an echo of the holocaust. 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 your technical competence, but i think you might be vulnerable on your human factor, how you see human nature in terms of making decisions as to whether how to use them. and i want to return to your example with jeffrey goldberg interviewing. at think it suggests the little different reading in terms of rationality can irrationality, purposes of fourth. goldberg says to my mentioned to castro the letter he 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 attacked cuba, invoking the legal right of self-defense. i asked him, at a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend the soviets on the

u.s. is what you recommend still seem logical? cancer, after seeing what i've seen in knowing what i know now, it was not worth of all. this could be read the following way, far from being a cold blooded first strike 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, thing says he says later, this raises questions about nuclear weapons has been much more likely to be launched in a rational situation as opposed to concrete attempts to attain rational political objectives. it is not a tool for rational policy. it is something that is released at least that's the way one could read that. castro has not changed.

he still marxist. >> between then and now -- >> but what has changed is his attitude about his own actions within the contest. >> i'd avoid calling him irrational because no way things castro's crazy. i use the term fanatic. the question about was rational and irrational. and he renewed the request as reported by the dead hand in the 1980's. the thing is, even in response to an invasion of the island the idea of unleashing a nuclear holocaust that will bring down -- that would result in more than 100 million people killed to so he could preserve his island would have been obliterated. i would not want to hold that up as a model of rational decision making. if elected the middle east today , the supreme guide, the

supreme a foray -- supreme authority at present in the wrong, it's not someone not want to trust with a nuclear decision or for that matter -- >> irrational decision. >> i'm not saying. you're using the word rational and irrational. i don't even bother with those terms because i don't want to get in the being a doctor. what i want to do is say that i think that we have reason to believe the people that think like that may decide to use nuclear weapons. this is the theology. how can you say it's irrational, it doesn't matter. the point is, there were some people who have fewer inhibitions about using nuclear weapons. khrushchev and kennedy felt the pull back immediately when he realized he finally understood the meaning of the word miscalculation. castro did not take that. that is, we have to worry about that commander in the middle

east for you have a famously rough neighborhood where people don't trust each other and all. you don't have a superpower sponsor her could restrain. h'm so the point is he did not t to have the stuff spread. ideally you don't want to spread anywhere, but @booktv don't want to give it to the kind of people who run a country like iran. it will make the world a safer place. to everything possible to see that they do not. >> how did you evaluate the possibility of offensive cyber attacks by the united states and its allies like the one that disrupted the centrifuges we heard about in the past as a tactic in dealing with this?

>> certainly anything that we can do in cyber where we have more skills than iran and the israelis have more skills than the iranians and their report is to mothers around the sons the people they found. anything the you can do is serve a good thing. the question is, have begun to the point where we're running out of time? of this for 67 years ago, eight years ago there were during his things. he had that much more time. maybe you could buy more time. it's getting to the point now where most people believe this will be decided one way or another within the next year. in cyber, it may not suffice to do it, but it's certainly anything that we can do, whether it's in sanctions or cyber attacks all working to try and resuscitate the regime, the rebels, the green movement inside iran which would be

unfortunately abandoned, foreseen at the time by many people. at take no for a special credit. lots of people said there is no chance there going to give it up. of course they aren't. we had the opportunity with the regime of balance to maybe bring them around. you don't know how it would have turned out, but you try to get some of the guns to switch sides. we did give them a reason to. and so we were able to broadly suppress the green movement. had we publicly sided with them, and after working with them, ratcheted sanctions up to 100 percent of all we could do then, instantly putting them in economic extremist and make quite clear that if you rise up we will be with you, we might have succeeded in what one -- what might have been a once in a generation opportunity. perhaps will get another chance in syria.