living under a bridge. and i was very wrong although it is in those communities there are plenty of people at the top of the social economic ladder as well. >> good evening i am tony clark and i am glad you are here tonight. i was excited to get our author tonight because with his topic of "the bomb" it brought back memories for me. when i was in high school i would debate and the topic was nuclear weapons and we all read about the thermonuclear war. it was a big deal at the time.

so now, to go back and listen to what has happened to weapons from truman to trump is really remarkable. all from the midwest and college thinking he would be a literature major but watergate changed him to political science and then he went on to graduate school at mit and it was international relations and nuclear strategy. then he moved to washington with the house of representatives house policy advisor but you know government work, he decided that wasn't for him so then he left and wrote the widely acclaimed book of armageddon.

and t then spent time at the boston globe because they were looking for experts inn defense he stayed there 20 years as bureau chief in moscow, bureau chief in new york city. and by the end of 2002 started writing stories and has written for previous books before tonight what i am really excited to have is our guest fred kaplan and his book "the bomb". [applause] thanks for coming out. just said my first book was 1983 about the small group of defense intellectuals that invented the concept of nuclear deterrence and were

fighting i didn't think i would write anymore about nuclear war 50 years later the cold war was over. there are some people in this audience who haven't thought much about nuclear weapons or war over 30 years. some of you might never have thought of it at all until a couple of years of ago. and then you will remember on august 8, 2017 president trump came out of the golf club in new jersey and said north korea if they keep making threatening noises launching missile test i will rain down like the earth is never seen before. he didn't say if north korea attacked us or invade south korea he said if they develop the capabilities to attack us. and that is completely different than everybody started to get very nervous

about nuclear war all of a sudden and it struckk me now might be a time to go back and look as much time has passed gobetween hiroshima with the weather one - - wizards of armageddon ande now, but if i look back into the archives it is kind of interesting because nothing had been declassified like president kennedy or johnson what they thought or said about nuclear war. now a lot of things even through reagan or carter i did quite a bit of research at the carter library and i interviewed a lot of people. so this book focuses more on the decision-makers the bomb is the protagonist that rises over everything and the

subtitle president generals in the super history is how various presidents have a crisis and there's more than what people think that the nuclear options have been seriouslyy contemplated and how they have been dealt with these issues and dilemmas and what they came upp with. so i will give a brief history of that tonight. that started toward b the end of world war ii commander of the 2t bomber commander at the time to be addressed by the head of the army air force the spring of 1945 with the war on the pacific when will thatt be over?

so took the problem back to the staff with the calculations how many more square miles of territory how long does it take the bombers to getio there? they said december 1st because that is when we bombed every square mile of japan. so this is the philosophy of war. so what happened in the meantime onn august 6, two atom bombs dropped and then shortly after that with the strategic air command in omaha which controls the nuclear weapons. and they translated the bomb everything philosophy to a much more destructive bomb he was verytr charismatic smoked a

ciga cigar, and by the end of the fifties, the first single integrated operational plan it was the war plan of the united states that the soviet union says attack west germany occupy west berlin even if they didn't use nuclear weapons but even if they just crossed with the fruit few troops united states word unleash the entire arsenal against every target and the soviet union the satellite nations of eastern europe and china even though they were not involved in the war 285 million people. so this was approved by the joint chiefs of staff and

eisenhower was a cheapskate and didn't want to spend a lot of money on conventional arms and so he came up with the philosophy of massive retaliation anywhere the russians go we respond in a manner of our own treatment that statement of policy and classified documents that any armed conflict between the united states and the soviet union would begin with the use of the nuclear weapons that wasn't like eisenhower was a bloodthirsty maniac but we thought any war would go nuclear and it was inevitable and then to realize they had to deter a war from happening in the first place in the way to do that was killed the soviets in no uncertain terms

and that would deter things. they had their own nuclear arsenal so this became a policy of suicide so we responded by blowing up the soviet union and that is when certain strategist first of all thinking maybe we should have conventional weapons but they also thought about limited nuclear war that may be a four war starts we can drop some weapons on the military forces and then strike back we will take those you have left.

the other people that came up with this idea had serious doubts if this was possible. they had to bet on it. and that was a small chance so president kennedy comes into office with the situation with the blowup, everything. this is the crisis in berlin so now we are taking overer berlin. and then west berlin was 100 miles inside east germany a y place no freedom of democracy no way the russians decided to occupy west berlin

because we could fight with conventional weapons so they unleashed everything in they are now declassify these discussions some of them are on teeth - - tape some are transcripts discussing, this. the idea is they came up with four phases. phase number one let's send out a patrol. number two send out of italian. phase three, we will do psalm intimidation bottleneck the ships and sanctions the united nations will pass a resolution to condemn that and then there

were three divisions if we shoot off one nuclear weapon and then to use tactical nuclear weapons. and then it was all out war. so what is the chance that would escalate to foresee wright away? and by the way those are people among kennedy's advisers who saw they could only go to nuclear weapons we shouldn't bother to build conventional weapons because that might convince khrushchev we are willing to use them with our credibility and power was to convince him we are willing to use nuclearen weapons that is the essence of the defense policy at the time

that this would be catastrophic and clever in the short run but russians were way ahead of us and missiles but then we started to put photo reconnaissance and it turns out the soviet union was rebelieved to have 200 to 300 it turns out they had for. kennedy had the deputy secretary give the speech he was intending to give at the business roundtable in virginia and then to announce there is noth missile gap in that khrushchev was exploiting this and boasted we are churning out the icbms w like

sausages so this was to tell him we know you are bluffing. even if you launched a first strike with overwhelming superiority, and then khrushchev did a 15 make a ton hydrogen bomb and then he realizes now united states really was planning to launch a strike on the soviet union and now he knew that kennedy knew he had nothing. so what did he do? he put missiles in cuba. so that's like having icbm. but the aircraft prevented

them to discover that and then think about the crisis there is still a lot of myth this is 1962. there are still a lot of myth written about the cuban missile crisis. because kennedy secretly tapes all 13 days of meetings with his advisers you can listen and order them from the kennedy library and read the transcript transcripts. the myth is to go eyeball to eyeball with the russians but another myth on the friday night that khrushchev came out withd the deal we will take missiles out of cuba if you promise not to do anything in cuba as we know he promised to assassinate castro so then he comes up with another deal and

says we will take the missiles out of cuba if you take your similar missiles out of turkey. the myth was he took the tufriday night proposal and ignore the saturday night from one - - saturday morning proposal that's not what happened the proposal comes in saturdayda morning. kennedy says on the tapes this seems like a fair trade. everybody around the table not just the generals, everybody, bobby kennedy, robert mcnamara, all naof them say this will and nato and humiliate the turks and destroy the credibility. the plan was if we launch era

tax from the missiles from cuba and kennedy says we were going too invade cuba three days after that. and to see what we are looking at with the invasion now the russians are down this bill is on the table it will not be a good war. so kennedy called seven people into his office. and on the condition that he told the seven people in fact don't ever talk about this ever. and he perpetrated the myth that he ignored saturday and went with friday. this is the cold war. it look like he had made a deal with khrushchev and would

be in big trouble. one of the seven people he did not tell was vice president lyndon johnson. and then to go eyeball to eyeball that this is a tragedy that wen continue this lie so after the cuban missile crisis kennedy is looking at the defense budget with mcnamara and chairman of the joint chiefs especially around nuclear weapons and kennedy said i don't know why we spend so much money on w nuclear weapons i would not have been

deterred by that and that if deterrence fails and say yes that will pay for more than 40 weapons. and then to blow everything up. and as many others have put it and then try to do something to draw to a conclusion that kennedy wasn't comfortable and said we have to and the cold

war. and in june 1963 that it's a beautiful speech. looking up one - - look it up calling for the end of the cold war. the soviet press reprinted the speech in its entirety. and khrushchev embraced it as he told the ambassadors from thea us the best president sends roosevelt and then kennedy was assassinated and then khrushchev one year later s d that 1964 is where it begins.

so various presidents with the war plan try to institute the plan to make things limited but one thing i discovered is that secretary of defense with signed statements that would escalate with the attack in people of omaha paid no attention they would always be written into the guidance to the extent it does not compromise military objectives but it did compromise military objectives. so this is the all out plan until the administration

starting with reagan and ending with george h.w. bush reagan turns out to be morei interestingg character in a good way and in a weird way. first of all reagan was a nuclear abolitionist why he was so keen on the star wars defensive shield so every missile coming your way would make it obsolete two or three people believe that's of the program was actually about. he is doing incredibly provocative things the first year the cia is doing currently provocative things then he gets wins they take this seriously that we are trying to launch a first strike he said he is horrified that's not what he meant we

need to talk to them. that we need to dial this back. by the time that happens gorbachev is the head of theof soviet union and they meet for the first time in 1985 in geneva so they decided to take a walk that is just the two of them and their translators. and at one point reagan says if the united states were attacked by aliens of the united states would russia come to our defense the gorbachev says absolutely and reagan says i feel the same way about you then they come back to the conference room george schultz secretary of the state not privy to this conversation with later in his book now all of a sudden the tomosphere was completely different they were smiling and joking like old friends

and thatat started the pivot to what became the end of the cold war and then a couple years later he gave a speech to the un general assembly and then :-colon powell which was that if we are attacked by aliens from outer space the conflicts would seem trivial by comparison. this is kind of nutty but there's something to it. that they are talking about catastrophic things and weapons of masst. destruction maybe this is the way to do it. so while reagan was doing this something else was going on subterranean world. a civilian and the pentagon

named frank miller and when dick cheney became secretary of defense. he was very different then for what he was as vice president. he had a briefingef from omaha so he derailed all the doctrines written by the secretary of defense with a limited nuclear often's restraining use. and then he goes to cheney and says i don't understand what is going on. and then to go deep so those people in omaha and the went deeper than any civilian ever has. and that level of overkill is astonishing. . . . . and then td

something even more profound, more disturbing. at that point, bush was negotiating the strategic arms reduction treaty and the contact if we reduce the number of weapons could you still perform your mission and the senior officer said we don't really ask that question. what we do is we take the

weapons that we are given and assigned them to the targets on the list, so in other words, at no point in the actual operational level with how this is being handled, at no point had anybodypo been asking how my of these things do we need to detour or fight a nuclear war, how many do we really needed to accomplish the objective. they -open-curly-brace are all hearing that says 10,000 weapons people thought he was joking or maybe he wasn't too bright but that's how this worked.

and another thing let's say one of the objectives was to destroy the army the way jack interpreted this they destroyed the factories when the tanks were built. they destroyed when they were right and the mines. then i also destroy the grocery store where you buy the food and then also the roads between all of these. ten if you think it is a rational objective you don't

need to do all of this. at the time we had about 10,000 nuclear weapons that were able to get the union but it was 5,888. he wanted to put it a up his license plate as a joke and we don't need to attack the targets it goes down to about 3,000 so by the time bush negotiated they were in a place that they accepted it but we don't need any more of this and it continued when obama was present it was very similar they went back over every target and they were able to cut it down by

another one third and the people that worked on the study told mo sometimes that meant twice instead of four or five times because we were involved in negotiations for the new treaty with russia and and by the way president obama agreed a. of the joint chiefs of staff agreed we can cut one third with no harm to the national securi security. one thing that did come out off the exercise is that the limited nuclear options as they were

called simply became feasible. we had a plan where some were 20 senuclear weapons. this was another example of howf insane everything was before. they asked somebody in the defense intelligence agency to examine the early warning radar. could the radar detect and separate until it becomes one big blob. the.

no matter the option if it's a limited option or whatever, icbm, launched missiles and bombers all had to be involved, it was like a bureaucratic no one wanted to be left out of any option. in some cases it would arrive hours after and yet the people on the other side are supposed to see this as a limited attack. so that's kind of where we are at. talking about the nuclear weapons as a deterring wide range of threats and for

launching the nuclear weapons those have been around forever. they've been the kind of subterranean river bend going on under our noses that we know nothing about and obama tried to change some of it. one thing running through my book is that every president before now when they confronted a crisis that is involved thinking seriously about the use of nuclear weapons and the divisors have gone through the scenario andgh made them reasonable in some cases, the president, they fall in burst themselves and the logic and the consequences and this is

documented. they decided at the end this is going toe end in catastrophe and to scramble out of here as fast as possible and figure ht a diplomatic solution to the crisis. the. one thing we have learned in the last year or so they don't seem to be terribly eager to get involved or trapped in a dynamic that can take you to a war and so there was a set of hearings.

dorset is to have a consultation and so forth. when it was kind of confirmed that that was the case and at one point in the hearing it's interesting they said let's cut through the rhetoric. then at the end of the hearing,

the senate doesn't do anything and one of the people testifying was a retired general who had recently been the commander. how the president could launch a first strike if you are facing an attack or thinking about a

first strike you want to change the rules, fine. but he didn't want them to do is to create serious doubts, public doubt about the reliability and the legitimacy and that's what the hearing is a. they created a legislature and the judiciary and articles for impeachment. if you think about it it is a little strange especially with a few incidents where we've almost got in there. why hasn't there been a nuclear war, why isn't anybody using nuclear weapons since august of 1945? if you'd gone back and if you go back in time c. 1947 n and saidn all this time nobody has used nuclear weapons i think people would lock you up to the.

another three, there is then good luck and a couple of cases where on the air defense they see a false reading into the trajectory of the false missiles coming over the horizon and they decided to be a false reading. that's happened a few times a.

so far but one reason i wrote this book is as i said the the president avoidepresidents but s actually immersed themselves in they didn't just decide i'm not going there. i dug deep. now we'll take your questions. there's a microphone that will be passed around. the. india iraqi battalion i don't know about what classified what

i won't maket any comments but one is the prevalence of the tactical nuclear weapons spread where they were and secondly what was left after the deal even though some were removed. we have thousands of nuclear weapons and on ships. when jimmy cartere became president 700,000 nuclear weapons in europe and some of them are short range and some of them were half a kiloton george

h. w. bush unilaterally got rid of a lot of these weapons and most were military officers. they were not allowed to talk because they didn't want to nuclear weapons it's interesting when obama became president, one of the first big speakers talked about reducing the nuclear weapons and national security policies and there was an ambassador to nato ato the time

this is rejected by the national security council including secretary of state hillary clinton so you don't do the unilateral and requested yelts yeltsin. so we still have 50 of these things which can be loaded onto the bombers in turkey and its placenta plus an ally of these days and somebody did go off to check out the security and they seemed to be locked up pretty well just because it takes possession doesn't mean that you can use it but there are people all over the world.

it was too bad we didn't take those bombs out of turkey. i was looking at the big picture $1.3 trillion a year and the people who make the decisions always say you think of people came from another planet they might think if we look at the va hospital, i saw a lot of people who were suffering through had been asked for, injured and that is the same speed nobody is really concerned.

i thought you were going to ask a question about the draft. what ended in the vietnam war was the draft. webinar on the armed forces and i don't know how you couldn't haveow little gene or jack going off to war and they say something like 1% of the population is in the military now, and a lot of t those are regionally focused, places like georgia especially. maybe it was spread out and maybe my kids who live in new york there would be more marching in the streets. i do think short of some

transformation in world politics the likes and scope of which can hardly even be imagined now, i think we are kind of stuck with these things. kim jong, trump thinks he signed a contract to get rid of nuclear weapons. this one-page agreement, statement, says both sides agreed to work towards the denuclearization of the korean peninsula and the officials have been saying their interpretation of this calling for the end of him and other things, nuclear weapons capable of striking anywhere in the peninsula whichh was one of our weapons. if you or i were the head of north korea and in other words the survival and perpetuation of the regime, and no avail when we get rid of it. but the only thing we have is

the only thing that gives us any leverage and makes people pay any attention to us and keeps people from invading uson at al. and he looks around and sees okay, he got rid of nuclear weapons, now he's dead. saddam hussein got rid of his into the israelis took him out, he's dead. iranians actually started to get rid of their nuclear weapons into the international inspectors were saying they were actually doing it and trump pulled out of the treaty so why- should i get rid of any of my nuclear weapons? we need to stop doing our own nuclear i weapons. everybody kind of knows that

every other, then the argument is i have to do this, to back. if you want to do deterrence you don't need very many but what is the deterrence fails, what happens even among the countries that have a lot of nuclear weapons and you say okay i can't just blow up everything because that isn't credible. i need limited options so that it's critical that to do that i need to have plans and weapons to do this and before youan know it, the concept of credible nuclear deterrent and war fighting kind of converges and they become the same thing and that's what i call the rabbit hole they kind of stumble in and see the implications and realize this is a catastrophe.

but againn unless people come from outer space or nuclear war and the senses i just don't see getting rid of them as an option into the world that we inhabit. >> are we so far removed from the horrors of nuclear war because they were so long ago that the public doesn't understand what nuclear war would mean?

it's the equivalent of 8,000. between 90 to 450 kilotons. and the idea is they've been declaring in some of their doctrine and having some of the exercises where they use low yield nuclear weapons and the theory is well. first of all hel how do they doh that, we have a lot of low yield weapons on the bombers but the idea of talking about w the load

yield weapon, it is almost as if they were thinking of the war like two masters of a chessboard like mike meehan is here and ate bishop is there whereas you might not know anything going on. communications will be blown up, satellites might be shot down. you don't know if the weapon you fired at the target actually went off or if it is still there or not. can you still talk with your commanders much less the one you need to negotiate with to end the war there is an exchange. they are talking about the moderator said.

the moderator is that i'm not being pejorative i just want to make it clear we are not talking about firecrackers. that use of this low yield. and yet because it is so slow and it's enveloped in this fine tuned exchange strategy you can kid yourself into thinking it's

a small, not terribly harmful when in fact it may not be any of those things. >> can you compare the low yield that were those deployed? >> some of them are smaller into some of them are bigger but this would be fired from a sub marine but also has missiles aimed at russia. as they see it coming over the horizon there is low yield flashing everybody's getting on the phone saying don't worry. we would appreciate if you would respond to us. maybe, that is the illusion. >> are they close enough today

to reach russian territory? >> britain and france have their own independent nuclear arsena arsenals. except for the 150 bomber weapons we don't have tactical nuclear weapons anymore. we got rid of them. that's the thing about this i would ask those in the pentagon where are these things aimed? some people tell me targets inside of russia.

and then someone saithen someone president. >> i think that i will end on that. is there reason to be optimistic or pessimistic about the future with all of these nuclear>> weapons? >> all of the nuclear weapons. we have a lot fewer. when trump first became president and they were concerned they didn'ttt understd and they brought them to the joint chiefs of staff and pentagon. parts of the meeting had been july 2017. you might have read this in the new book a stable genius where he starts yelling at the generals telling them they are losers and there's another moment he shows a chart nuclear

weapons over the ages and the peak was 1969 where they send 22,000 now we have less than one and so this was meant to signify the value of arms control treaties and new stability in the world and so forth. .. >> and says why can't i have

as many nuclear weapons? with this cavalier attitude. it shows it has nothing to do with national security needs but he brought up again in another meeting to feel insulted or insecure or something that he cannot have as many nuclear weapons as richard b nixon had. >> the book is called "the bomb" fred will be signing copies in the lobby. we have more you can purchase. [applause] ur program guide for

more information. >>