a human judgment. >> that's why you don't want such short warning and decision time where things become automatic. there was a david hoffman book that talked about the dooms day machine. it was posturing a situation which he believed which was real where you got down to the last few minutes and human beings were left out of the equation. humans took over. we want to move away from it and not let it ever get to that point. >> let's spend a few minutes talking about the initiative that these men have launched. if you follow nuclear weapons issues, you know that after reichovich when the leaders talked about eliminating nuclear weapons, that thought sort of receded and it did not really come back into much discussion

until the op-ed piece that these three men and henry kissinger wrote in the "wall street journal" in 2007. coming from the history that these gentlemen have. two republicans and two democrats. you have an unusual bipartisan agreement or non-partisan agreement as secretary schultz sometimes says. really put this back into discussion and gave it a credibility that it previously had not had. at least not for many years. president obama has essentially made the nuclear agenda of these gentlemen the nuclear agenda of the obama administration. so, i'm interested to know and i think people here -- >> it is important to point out that during the campaign, both senator obama and senator mccain, candidates, endorsed our

issue. it wasn't an issue in the campaign. >> i think people would be interested to know two things. what do you all plan to do in coming months to keep your initiative moving? and secondly, what can people like those who have come out this evening to hear about this and think about it, what can they do to deal with these issues and reduce the threats that we face? let me start this with senator nunn. >> on the question of what the public can do, i think we have a couple of film out that i think -- you can get them on our web site. last best chance is the film about nuclear terrorism. "nuclear tipping point" is one where we are discussing like we are tonight with henry kissinger. those are available on the nti.org web site.

i think the public needs to get familiar with these issues as hard as it is to think about. you need to talk to your congress members and senators about them. when arms control agreements come up, you usually only have a small number of people weighing in. the public needs to weigh in on these things. they are very, very important. in terms of very briefly what our nuclear threat initiative organization would do and john and debra and others are here from the organization. we have set up an organization in vienna called world institute and security. it is basically a non-governmental organization. we have over 500 members. it is a best practices peer review on handling nuclear material. in addition, we already talked about the fuel bank. warren buffett put up money. it is now in a back up.

people do not feel the need to go into enrichment. the more enrichment, the more problems we have. i have been sponsored by the foundation where a former ambassador to the u.s. and worked with a number of issues about dealing with the russians in a way that would make europe a much more of a peaceful, less milita militaryized community. if we can cooperate with russia on the ballistic missiles enforcement. we also have discussed at lengths in the group and endorsed the decision-war time concept. not just for strategic weapons,

but tactical battle field nuclear weapons. the elephant in the room for the russians is nato. nato expansion. that causes them all sorts of anxiety. but for the europeans, the elephant in the room is the posture of the russian forces located far too close to their border. there is a lot to discuss here if we want to move in the right direction. those are just a few of the things that we are involved in. they are all part of the steps that we outlined in the first "wall street journal" article. >> secretary schultz. >> i think there are three c categories of things we can work on. number one is developing ideas about the subject that are going to be potentially useful. to think them through and publish them to put them out there. in the process, identify people who are really expert and are

willing to pitch in and help. you offer these up to the government. that is something we have been doing. you mentioned deterance. we developed a lot about that subject. the second thing that you can do and all three of us take part in it. you can do a certain amount of what is called track two work. we mentioned the india/pakistan conference that we had. we were all involved in the group that at one point met a lot back and forth with the chinese. sometimes people who were in government know something about how it works and have access to people in the government, but can have a little more relaxed open discussion than if you are in the government and you have to watch every word that you

say. so you can do things of that kind. and then third, we can take on activities that try to spread consciousness of the problem and in support for doing something about it. for example, we had inquiries of the evangelical community. a group came to hoover and stanford. bill and i met with them. it had some impact on the evangelical community. for example, they provided two letters toward the end of the last election campaign. one was to be presented to whoever won. the letters were identical. some supported the other guy. if you get behind this, we'll all support you. try to generate support. then the catholic bishops.

a bishop recently made an impressive speech on behalf of the holy see. we want to work with people like that and provide them with information and encourage that kind of consciousness and to try to get into the political atmosphere. this is something you really have to pay attention to and do something about. you talk to the church people. bill swing, a lot of you know bill here in san francisco. he has this united religion initiative. millions of people all over the world. the nuclear project is one of his projects. so, make that kind of an effort. >> some of you here may have noticed that the three partners here are somewhat beyond conventional age of retirement.

you may be asking yourself, how will you keep the momentum going on this? how will you pass the baton on to others? >> and who will you pass it to? >> we have tonight in this audience, joan ralfing and others in the audience and people in the administration, ash carter, ben sherwood. all of whom, to me, represent the next generation coming along. beyond that, i teach a class every year at stanford. about 300 students in the class. each year, about eight or ten come up and say i want to get into this field. we do everything we can to encourage and bring them along. we have three generations represented here. the ones sitting on the stage. some sitting in the audience and the students at stanford and other universities who are being inspired to follow-up. we have two generations waiting

to pick up that baton. >> i think charlotte schultz put this question to her husband in a very succint way when ywe wer on the way to berlin. she turned to him and she said, george, when are you going to get some young people to work on this? to which secretary schultz said, we have madeleine albright and colin powell. >> no, i said i'm young. [ laughter ] >> so, at any rate, let me bring this evening to a close. i think this is appropriate to read something at the very end here that involves secretary

perry. >> is this a book for sale? and will you sign copies of it? >> yes and yes. i'm describing at the very end here secretary perry who teaches a class at stanford as he describes. as he ends one of the classes, he said to his students, i was auditing this course a couple of years ago and i was working on the book research and i wrote down the words he used at the end of this. he said my generation was responsible for building up this fearsome nuclear arsenal. my generation has now started the task of dismantling it. we will not be able to finish this task so we willia have to pass the baton on to your generation. finally, i guess i have the gavel from gloria, so i will bring the meeting to an end.

i'm sorry we have run out of time for further questions. thank you all for the really wonderful questions you sent here. i'm sorry i could not cite more of them. i tried, as i said, to consolidate the themes in a way to bring the issues into the discussion. so our thanks to secretaries schultz and perry and senator nunn. i also want to thank the audience as well as the radio and television audience. today's program has been held in association with plow shares fund as well as stanford university center for international security and cooperation and the freedom institute for international studies. i want to remind our audience, this is my favorite line of the evening. copies of "the partnership" are on sale in the back of the room. i will be pleased to sign them. i'm philip taubman.

now this meeting of the commonwealth club of california, the place where you are in the know, is adjourned. [ applause ] coming up next here on c-span 3, a look at the 2013 national nuclear administration

budget. then navy secretary ray mabus addresses the conference. then a campaign rally with congress member and candidate ron paul in idaho falls, idaho. i know in washington it is very popular to want to create a cyber security organization to oversee this. i think that is just folly. >> the adversaries we are dealing with today are becoming more sophisticated. >> how real is the threat? cyber security executives bill conner and robert dix. the communicators tonight on c-span 2. on washington journal tomorrow morning, the president of the business round table, john eengler.

tom zeller looks at the america's poor and middle class. and andrew weiss will discuss how the election of russian president vladimir putin will affect relations with the united states and russia. washington journal is live on c-span every day at 7:00 a.m. eastern. tomorrow, our live coverage of the american/israel conference continues. speakers include rick santorum, mitt romney and newt gingrich. coverage starts on c-span 3. next, a look at the 2013 national nuclear safety administration budget. this is about 35 minutes. >> every monday morning at 9:15 eastern time is our featured segment "your money."

that is when we put the spotlight on the federal program on who is involved and how much it costs. we look at the agency that secures nuclear weapons and materials. our guest is todd jacobson. he is a senior reporter. >> thanks for having me. >> what is the mission of the national nuclear safety administration? we hear so much about agencies. >> there are several parts of the mission. the main part is protecting and maintaining the warheads. that is probably about half of what they do. then the other part is kind of the -- two other parts i should say. the nonproliferation part that is in charge of securing nuclear material around the world. so they go to various countries, upgrading security and making

sure other countries material cannot get into terrorists. sometimes material in risky situations. then another component. the naval reactors. the reactors that power our submarines or nuclear submarines. they are in charge of the upkeep and maintenance on that. a three-fold mission on that. >> what has to be done to upkeep and maintain nuclear weapons? >> it is not just something you put on a shelf and leave. there is a whole codray of scientists that constantly study them. they answer different questions. we are in an era where we cannot test our nuclear weapons. there has been a moratorium since the early '90s. a lot of experiments below the nuclear threshold to make sure what we have is safe and secure

if, god forbid, they ever have to be used. there are various sites around the country that are in charge of examining the weapons that we have every year. they take apart some of them. a very part of them to make sure nothing is going wrong. i'm -- i don't have clearance, but what i'm told is they make sure there is no rust, for instance or there is nothing happening. it is a lit chemistry experiment sitting on a shelf. problems do pop up. those are classified. they answer different questions about them. >> do we still build nuclear weapons? >> no new nuclear weapons. what we do is we maintain what we have and they refurbish them. there is an effort right now to refurbish a warhead that goes on

submarine launched ballistic missiles to add security features to add modern technology to it. it is not a new nuclear weapon in the sense of missions or a higher yield or lower yield. it is a weapon in the existing stockpile that they bring in and they just add modern features to it. not changing what it does, but in a lot of cases, make it safer. that will be going on for decades. we are at a point where our cold war nuclear weapons are aging. you know, what they say is -- what the officials at nsa is the stockpile is the oldest it has been in decades. that's really the focus right now. upgrading things and making sure everything is safe and security. >> todd jacobson. he covers the agency that is the national nuclear safety administration. the nnsa.

we are talking about its funding. this is "your money" segment. the obama administration is asking for $11 billion for fiscal year 2013. tell us how the budget of that y ask for, they have asked to be $7.6 billion for the weapons program which is what i talked about where they're doing the upkeep on the weapons. they're bringing in weapons to look at. they call that surveillance so they're taking them apart. that also supports the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories. there's three of them in california and los alamos, new mexico and in albuquerque, new mexico. there's a whole cadre of scientists there that, you know, are constantly studying the things that's a large portion of the budget. 2. -- i think $2.5 billion goes to the nonproliferation account. approximately $1 billion goes to naval reactors. there's a lot of sub programs. you know, there's a program that's about $500 million a year where it's called the global

threat reduction initiative where they're going around to different places in the world and securing things. i mentioned that earlier. for instance, a couple of years ago they were in chile taking some highly enriched uranium. which is potentially a security threat, so they were taking that highly enriched uranium, bringing it back to the united states where we can take it care of it safely. so there happened to be an earthquake that happened during the whole operation, so it was a little dicey. but there's a whole bunch of logistics that have to go maybe into making sure it's safe and making sure no one knows kind of ahead of time. there's no security threats. so that's a big part of what the nonproliferation groups does. >> and going overseas to deal with the nuclear weapons, why are the u.s. taxpayers paying to clean up the nukes? >> that's common criticism of why are we paying for the

things, but i think the whole goal of the last three or four administrations is to kind of, you know, take a leadership role in all of this. you know, it does become a concern of ours if russian nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons in, you know, pakistan aren't secured. because, you know, the likelihood of a terrorist getting ahold of it increases and there's a risk for us of -- of a nuclear weapon potentially being detonated in one of our cities. that's why there's been programs, like the nonproliferation program. there's a program in the department of defense that does the same thing. and they have, you know, done a ton of work to secure specifically in russia, make sure everything is physical is security and making sure it's up to par. like we have in this country. it's really a responsible approach to, you know, kind of securing the nuclear weapons around the world. if we weren't doing that, you'd wonder who would be doing it. that's kind of why, you know, we

have been proactive on that front. >> michael from jackson, ohio. good morning. >> good morning, mr. jacobson. there were persistent reports during and after the cold war that the russians prepositioned small nuclear weapons inside the united states. assuming those weapons were actually in good condition, i was wondering if you'd care to venture an opinion on the viability now? >> well, i'm not aware of any of those reports. but i mean, i would say -- so i'm really -- it's hard to answer that question. i don't know of any russian weapons being stored in the u.s., i guess sleeper weapons. but if they were story -- stored, i think there would be safety issue, reliability issues. so i guess your question is whether they would actually go off if they wanted them to. i'm not a scientist so i can't answer that. but i mean, if they have been dormant for 20 years i think

there would be some issues with that. >> shelby, orlando, florida, good morning. shelby, are you with us? >> caller: yes, hi, i'm sorry. well, you did answer my original question but i had another question. it's really hard to find information about you guys online, mr. jacobson. >> by you guys, who do you mean? he's a senior reporter but we're talking about the nuclear administration. >> caller: i mean the nuclear administration. but my question is the environmental concerns. are they being stored? is there any waste that people need to worry about? what happens when we don't want the weapons anymore, what do we do with this? >> well, as you probably know there's a large effort from the administration to kind of draw down our stockpile.

so with that you're seeing reduced numbers so there is obviously nuclear weapons that are being dismantled. there's a very large queue of weapons waiting to be dismantled. kind of what happens with that, there's a plant in amarillo, texas and they're taken apart there. you know, the various radioactive parts. the uranium is secondary. they're taken apart and it's one of the most ultra secure facilities around the world. with that effort, there's kind of a separate nonproliferation effort to use the plutonium pits. they're building a mixed oxide facility which is being built down in south carolina. what that will do is use the plutonium that was in the nuclear weapons, turn it into a commercial nuclear fuel that will be burned at some nuclear power plants around the country.

so it's kind of taking what was once taking nuclear weapons and converting it into something for a totally different purpose. on the environmental concerns, there's a whole separate part of the department of energy that's in charge of the clean-up of the cold war nuclear stockpile that's a $5 billion or $6 billion endeavor itself. aside from the eight main sites that i cover and that i -- and that maintain our weapons there's various sites around the nation that are really trying to be cleaned up. so that's a decades long effort as well. and a pretty expensive one. >> todd jacobson, tell us about the monitor, the website is exchangemonitor.com. >> yeah. we're an independent newsletter. we're mainly read by congress. we're mainly read by, you know, folks in the industry. we're read by arms control groups. we don't take a side on this. we're completely nonpartisan.

and what we try to do is be a voice, an objective voice covering the issues. i pore over budget documents, i go over reports, gao reports and really try to get to the heart of what our nuclear weapons policy is. what our stock people, you know, is like right now. so it's a difficult issue because it's unlike a lot of the department of energy programs there's a lot of classified information. but there quite a bit that you can kind of get, so you can get a sense of what's going on. >> mike tweets in, does it cost more to maintain or dispose of nukes? >> it costs more to -- well, it's kind of a tough question because we have to maintain our stockpile. you can't just kind of get rid of the war heads that we have. but if you were to dispose of them, it would be cheaper. but, you know, president obama has been at the forefront of kind of pushing an arms control

agenda that, you know, sees an end result of a vision of, you know, world free of nuclear weapons. at the same time, he's said that's not going to happen overnight or probably not in his lifetime. in the meantime you have to kind of make sure what you have is safe. you can't say carte blanche we'll get rid of the nuclear weapon, it will be cheaper because the rest of the world isn't thinking that way. so in the meantime, we're going to have nuclear weapons and we have to spend -- the thinking is and this is the president that's said, you know, he sees a vision free of nuclear weapons down the road. we still have to spend money to make sure that what we have is safe and reliable. >> jeff joins us from the democrats line from clear water, florida. >> caller: yes, in regards to -- i'm just curious about what your opinion is as far as any -- no matter what the party affiliation, what would cause opposition to safety of not just

today in the present moment, but in the future generations? what portion of our society would oppose being that we live in such a fragile society as far as anything could happen. >> jeff, what are you asking? >> caller: my point is why would anyone question monies that are being allocated in regards to our future safety? whether it's nuclear weapons, terrorist threats, et cetera, et cetera? >> jeff, do you see that allocation of funds for future safety coming into play when we're talking about disarmament and drawing down? >> caller: as an entity, i think it's a very rational reason for spending. >> okay. >> so i think his point is