nunn/luger program, ukrainians didn't want to give up their weapons without giving some economic benefit, and highly enriched uranium is worth money. you can convert it into nuclear fuel, you burn it in nuclear powerpoints. the deal made in the 1990s, we would work with russia to get the weapons back from those countries in russia. they would blend down the uranium into low enriched uraniums, we would buy it over 20 years. we're still in the middle of that program, 15 years into it. and right now, 20% of our electricity in america comes from nuclear power. 50% of that material that we burn today in america's nuclear power plants comes from highly enriched europe yum aimed in the form of bombs at us in the cold war. so by definition, 10% of america's electricity represent

in the biblical phrase, swords that have been turned into fire shafts. so we have worked with russia, other countries. and countries do have a mutual stake. the other encouraging thing is, and president obama deserves some credit for this one. two years ago, he had a summit conference on nuclear material in washington, d.c. over 40 heads of state came. and some of those countries are beginning to blend down and get rid of the highly enriched uranium, which is enormously important. there is a follow-up conference next month in seoul, south korea, where again they're going to get heads of state, not people below that level to get together to talk about securing nuclear material. so while we've got some avalanches coming down the mountain in the name of iran and north korea, we also have made significant progress in the last 20 years. and i think we ought to be encouraged by that while we are very alert to the huge, huge dangers. >> well, one of the things i realized as i was researching the book is that during the cold

war, both the united states and the soviet union had programs to spread highly enriched uranium around the world. president eisenhower called it atoms for peace. these were programs intended to give allies or prospective allies research reactors and the fuel with which to operate them. it was part of the arrivel al re between the united states and soviet union. by the time the two nations were done distributing this highly enriched uranium, ten tons of it had been distributed around the world to literally dozens of nations. and we're now working frantically to try to roll up that highly enriched uranium and get it secured and then blended down as senator nunn just said, because it does not take a lot of bomb grade, highly enriched uranium to make a crude but powerful nuclear weapon.

a number of the questions, and i'm sorry, not to read more specific questions, but i will in a minute read one. quite a few of them deal with the question of our present nuclear arsenal, and the russian nuclear arsenal and the whole question of nuclear deterrence. which is something these men have spent a lifetime thinking about, working on, and continue to work on it today. and the question -- one of the questions that kind of captures this, i think, comes from the audience. and it goes as follows. robert mcnamara said 100 nuclear weapons is enough for u.s. deterrence. did you agree? and if so, why do we still have thousands? so secretary peri, do you want to tackle that first? >> yes, i do agree.

that hundreds are enough deterrence, provided they're deployed in a safe and secure manner, which is not easy, but we could do that. it seems to be very hard to come down from the absurd levels we had during the cold war. tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. we have gotten down to 1,500 deployed nuclear weapons on each side now. that still is grossly more than is needed. and at the moment, as we speak, the -- administration is going through a study where they could make a dramatic cut in those nuclear weapons. i think it's a very ominous and unwelcome sign that the -- somebody leaked that study that one of the options being considered is going down to 300. as the low level. and he leaked that, because he thought he could provoke a negative response to that, which, indeed, happened. part of the negative response came from the fact it was suggested that this going down

to 300 was going to be done laterally rather than through negotiations, where i believe the study was set up to determine america's negotiating position for the next round of cuts with the russians. but i think the big reason we're not going down to 100 is that we do want to go down, arm in arm with the russians, and i think they place a very high value on nuclear weapons, well beyond where we do, because that's about all they have left. we believe we can defend our country adequately with our conventional forces. the soviets -- the russians today do not believe that. so they think that their nuclear weapons and lots of them are what allow them to maintain their security. so the single biggest practical problem i think to getting down from where we are now, several,000, down to several hundred, is overcoming the russian resistance.

that due to the very symmetry between ourselves and the security today. >> phillip, bill said something very important. it's not simply the numbers. i think we pay sometimes too much attention to the numbers. we need to make nuclear weapons less relevant in our own plans and so do the russians. and we need to find ways to do that together. it's also important that whatever number you have, are secure. bill said that. you don't want to put all your weapons in one pile and have them vulnerable. you've got to have survivability. you don't want to tempt someone to go first. we need to find ways and broad concepts so neither russia nor the united states believes we're going to be subject to a decapitation attack. we don't want anyone to have the feeling they're going to use their weapons or lose them. it's a very unstable world when you do that. you also want to make sure, as the united states and russia come down, as we are, that the other countries don't go up. so you don't want us coming down

and other countries going up. so the other countries have to get involved at this -- at this next stage, in my opinion. so i think we ought to concentrate on themes that go far beyond numbers. if you make nuclear weapons less relevant, if you take away on both sides, u.s. and russia, as well as other countries, the fear of a surprise short warning decapitation attack, then you basically begin to have numbers that can come down because the weapons are less relevant and people have less fears and apprehensions. i believe that we need to have a whole concept of thinking about warning and decision time, at least between the major powers, at least in europe, not simply on nuclear weapons, but also on conventional. fears and apprehensions drive an awful lot of force posture. we need to get military to military discussions on a broad theme of increasing warning and decision time across the spectrum, particularly beginning in europe. >> i want to come back to that

in a minute. but just a brief announcement for people who will be listening to this on the radio. you're listening to the commonwealth club of california radio program. and our speakers today are former u.s. secretary of state george schultz. former u.s. secretary of defense, william perry. and former senator sam nunn. they are discussing how to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. i'm phillip tabman. so to -- just to continue on deterren deterrence, again, this was a theme in a lot of your questions. secretary schultz, when you were with ronald reagan in 1986 to meet with mikhail gorbachev, the united states and soviet union together had a total of about 70,000 nuclear warheads. enough to destroy planet earth, essentially. today we -- united states has

5,000. the russians have more than that. when you were in rake vick, you talked about eliminating nuclear weapons all together. but a lot of people ask, how can we risk giving up nuclear weapons? aren't they very important in preserving the peace? >> actually, they haven't been as good a deterrent as they seem to be cracked up to be. think in the cold war of the things that nuclear weapons did not deter. didn't deter the soviets from going in and crushing hungary back in 1956. didn't deter them from squashing prague spring. didn't deter them from creating the conditions that led to the berlin airlift. didn't deter them from encouraging the korean war. didn't deter them from invading afghanistan. so an awful lot happened.

and why did not nuclear -- not deter? because there is a kind of realization that it's very unlikely they'll be used. so that says to me, deterrence is a pretty good concept. you want to use deterrence to create a situation where somebody doesn't attack you. it's better than having a war. so we don't want nuclear to steal the concept. and it's sort of done that. and we need to get our brains out and thinking of other ways to deter. it's a very widely used concept. for instance, i remember when i became secretary of treasury, and the commissioner of internal revenue came to see me. he reported to me. and he said, we have the largest voluntary tax compliance system in the world. i said, really? he said, yes, of course. we do. i said, in other words, there's

deterrence. somebody may be watching. but it's a very widely used con accept september. and i don't want we want to have the word nuclear steal it. >> but senator nunn, if i may follow up on that briefly with you, how do you reassure people that if nuclear weapons are eliminated, there won't be some kind of breakout country that will either secretly keep nuclear weapons or make them covertly, and then we'll all wake up one day and instead of being the world's greatest nuclear power, we will be threatened by a puny nuclear power with a handelful of nuclear weapons? >> well, phillip, i think that's a very good question, there are a lot of people who have thought through the end game. we're so far from the end game right now, it's hard to visualize getting to the top of the mountain. i call the top of the mountain

where you would have no nuclear weapons. we really can't see the top of the mountain now. it's fogged in. and we've got some avalanches coming down the mountain. i think we've got to strive to get to base camp, and getting to base camp is going to require countries going together to base camp. if we get to base camp, which would require a lot of steps beyond where we are now, would require dealing with north korea, would require dealing with iran, it would require dealing with securing nuclear material all over the globe. it would require a comprehensive test man treaty ratification by all countries. it would require a lot of those things. the world is going to look different then if we did all that. it's going to require the ability to verify, verification is all-important. it's going to require political will to enforce, which we're going to find out about, with iran and north korea over the next couple years. all of those things have to happen before we get to base camp. then if we get to base camp at some point, it may not be in my lifetime, it will probably be in

george's. but if we get there, the world is going to look different. so what we're not -- we're not talking about in this book we call "the partnership", and phillip does a beautiful job of ex complaining the whole concept in ways people can understand. on page 140, he's got in there about my high school basketball career. but it's very short. he should have spent more time. but if we get to base camp, then we really are going to be looking at a different kind of world. so the way i visualize a world without nuclear weapons is not today's world, simply subtracting nuclear weapons. we've got to change a awful lot of things in the world. we've got to build trust with the russians. we've got to have some bridges built with discussions, a lot of military-to-military discussions with our friends in china that have a lot of things happen. but these things are goals, and the way i view where we're heading, we have all sorts of steps we need to take now. securing nuclear materials, we

have talked about that. a lot of steps to protect america today. we're not going to be able to take those steps unless we have cooperation. you can't do this unilaterally. we're not going to get cooperation without the world knowing that we're heading to the top of the mountain. we're not saying we're the only ones that are going to have nuclear weapons. we're not saying to the world, quit smoking while we chain smoke. that doesn't work anymore. may work during the cold war. when i say we, it's got to be more than just the united states. we've got to move up the mountain with other countries too. this is not a unilateral exercise. now, the end game, when we get there, there are going to be a lot of things that people have to consider. we always are going to have the ability to reconstruct nuclear weapons. you may have a period of years or even decades where you have a small number of nuclear weapons that are in some type of reserve. there are a lot of things we've got to think about. it's not too soon to begin thinking about them now. but we're not going to get to the stage where we let a terrorist group or one renegade

country go out and get ten nuclear weapons and blackmail the world. that's not going to happen. that's not in the cards. we'll find ways to make absolutely sure not only that it cannot happen, but that the whole world and community would be united on that point. >> i know secretary schultz wants to make a comment, but for -- here's a factoid about senator nunn i'm sure none of you know. he led his high school team to the state championship in georgia. he was a point guard. he scored 28 points in that championship game. >> his real name is sam lin. >> except i wasn't smart enough to go to harvard. but that was back in the era where you could be short and slow, and i was both. >> secretary schultz, who, by the way, was a pretty fair football player at princeton

before he ripped out his knew. >> i wanted to emphasize the importance of the interaction between the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and the steps you need to take to get there. because having the vision is really important. it causes people to say how can we possibly get there? what are the things we have to do? and then you start identifying things that are doable, that you need to do. and as you identify them, gradually that gives the vision a greater sense of reality. so there is an interactive process. and without the vision, i don't think you would get the attention to the steps that even we're getting today. >> here's an interesting question. there are, by the way, many, many interesting questions here. i wish he we could do justice to all of them. but i think this one opens the

door to a conversation about some of the other issues that concern these gentlemen today. in terms of nuclear threats. and this is a question from the audience. nuke fukushima showed that complex systems can fail in unexpected ways. have we had any close calls, i assume on nuclear weapons issues, and can you discuss any of them? i think this is a subject dear to the heart of both secretary approxima approximate perry and senatornu senatornunn. >> we've had quite a few close calls during the cold war. some of them were close calls where the weapons themselves, where the issue we had -- we used to carry nuclear bombs around and bombers and flew patrols. and more than once those bombers crashed with nuclear bombs on them. we never had a nuclear de

detonati detonation, but it was a very risky business. that was one area. and second we would have, and you would document them in your book, several false alarms, two of which i was personally familiar with, where i got called in the middle of the night telling me that the computers are showing 200 missiles on their way from the soviet union to the united states. this really gets your attention. and so living through a few false alarms like that makes you a true believer on the real danger. to me, nuclear weapon -- the danger of nuclear weapons was never an academic consideration. i lived with it, and it's very real. today, those dangers are reduced, i think. but new dangers are developing, as we have been talking about. of the danger of a nuclear terrorism probably being number one on the list today. >> we've had several close calls that i know about. bill knows about more than i do.

but you wonder, what scenario is it that would require the u.s. or russia to have 1,500 to 2,000 warheads on what amounts to two or three minutes alert? what is it today in a period 20 years after the end of the cold war that prevents us from being able to assure the president of the united states and the president of russia, for that matter, and i would include other countries in that too, that they have at least an hour, two hours, to make up their mind whether to basically pull the trigger or give the order to pull the trigger to blow up a great portion of god's universe. we shouldn't be in that posture. and to those who sayel well, these are tough problems, one of the things you realize when you get into these discussions is that basically, no matter how dangerous the status quo is, if you've been living with it a long time, anything that talks about changing it looks like, to

some people, that it may be creating a difficulty. well, we got to think through these things. are we going to be in this posture forever? are we on a nuclear tiger that we can never did he say mount without being eaten alive? i don't think so. i think mankind is not bound to that kind of fate. one example that i've heard about from a russian friend was back in belgrade. now, this wasn't close to a nuclear war, but it just shows you why warning time is important. this is when we were bombing belgrade and the russians were furious about it, and my friend happened to be sitting or standing at a cocktail party next to a very high-level russian -- well, president at that stage. president yeltsin. and obviously he was reported to occasionally have a few libations. to say the least. well, his generals came in and told him that the americans were bombing belgrade, and he basically told the general in

charge to go on full nuclear alert. now, when you go on full nuclear alert, that doesn't mean you're going to fire your weapons. it means, though, that everybody in the world -- is going to be focused on that. the united states would know that -- we go on alert. and then you get a fwlok flock of geese on the radar screen and who knows what's going to happen. those are not the conditions you want to allow to happen. we can do better than that. and we certainly don't want to get down to the situation where you have -- we need to increase the warning time. let's hypothetically say that it's 30 minutes now, 20 minutes and the president gets down to four or five minutes to make a decision. we need to increase that to an hour. and we need to do it for the russians, too. we need to have military-to-military discussions about how we can geoff give our presidents more warning time and decision time. and once we get to an hour, we ought to get to two hours on both sides and then twelve hours and then a week and then a month. and at some point, nuclear weapons become res less

relevant. that's the way we ought to be aiming. is it easy, no. will it make a lot of military discussions, yes. will it take a lot of good, imaginative, creative thought, yes. will it take cooperation, yes. can it be done unilaterally, no. it's got to be done together. that's the direction we ought to be moving in. we shouldn't plague our children and grandchildren with mounting this nuclear tiger 30 or 40 years from now. even 10, 20 years from now. >> secretary schultz, you had a comment? >> we're dealing with a very peculiar risk, whether we're talking about nuclear power plants or nuclear weapons. of course, a weapon is -- presents much more catastrophic type problems. but it's a peculiar kind of risk, because it says, here is a risk with a very, very low probability of occurrence. but if it occurs, the consequences are horrendous. so how do you handle risks like that?

i think you must impose the highest imaginable standards of safety. and that sounds easy, but it isn't. because there are pressures all the time. and i think -- i'm just surmising from what i've heard about. particularly in the early stages of our weapons program. people want to get the weapons out. and so there was a tendency to cut corners. and that's a natural thing. but when you have such high-consequence problems, it's not the thing to do. in the case of nuclear power plants, obviously people trying to keep their costs under control. safety costs you something. so there's attention there. but at least, as i see it, the tension has always got to be resolved in favor of safety. because the consequences are so high when something goes wrong. >> phillip, one part at the end of my story, the russian general that was told to go on alert

ignored it. fortunately, we have generals many times that are smarter than some of our civilian leadership. >> and the general that called me on the 200 missiles on the way had already decided when he called me that this was a false alarm. he had made the judgment. we do not have a system -- we didn't then, we don't now. which is automatic. it has human intervention and human judgment. and all of the cases that i've been aware of when false alarms -- human being made the right judgment. but that's the kind of a thread we're hanging on. a human judgment. >> and that's why you don't want such short warning and decision time where things become automatic. you know, there was a -- david hoffman book that basically talked about the doom's day machine. and it was basically posturing on a situation which he believed was real, where you got down to the last few minutes, and human beings were left out of the

equation. that stage, the machines took over. we got to move -- if that's accurate, 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. and if you follow nuclear weapons issues, you know that after rake o-vick in which president reagan and soviet leader gorbachev 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 that appeared in "the wall street journal" in 2007. and coming from men with the history that these gentlemen have, two republicans also and two democrats, so you have an unusual bipartisan agreement or nonpartisan agreement, as

secretary schultz sometimes says. really put this back into discussion. and gave it a credibility that it had previously not had, at least not for many years. and president obama has essentially made the nuclear agenda of these gentlemen the nuclear agenda of obama administration. so i'm interested to know, and i think people here -- >> i think it's important to point out that during the campaign, both senator obama, candidate, and senator mccain, candidate, endorsed our initiative. so it wasn't an issue in the campaign. and to the extent we can, we would like to keep it that way. >> right. so i think people would be interested to know two things. one, 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 help reduce the threats that we face? so let me start this with senator nunn. >> on the question of what the public can do, i think we've got a couple of film out that i think would -- you can get them free on our website. last best chance is a hy hypothetical film about nuclear terrorism, and nuclear tipping point is one where all of us discuss these issues as we're doing tonight with henry kissinger being there too. so those are available on the nti.org or dot-com website. you need to basically talk to your congressmen and senators about them. and when arms control agreements come up, usually you have only a small number of people weighing in. the public needs to weigh in on these things. because they are very, very important. in terms of very briefly what

our nuclear threat initiative organization would do, and john and deborah and others here from that organization, we have set up an organization in vienna called world and student nuclear security. it's basically a nongovernmental organization. we have now over 500 members, and it's best practices peer review on how to handle nuclear material. any entity handling nuclear material can join that organization. in addition, and we've already talked about the fuel bank, warren buffett put up $50 million, matched $100 million by the world. it's now in the process of being set up as a back-up fuel supply, so countries do not feel the need to go into enrichment, because the more they enrich, the more problems we have. i have just been involved in a two-year project sponsored by the carnegie endowment, where the former foreign minister of russia and wolf gangis inger, former german ambassador, we have worked with europeans,

russians and the united states on a number of issues about dealing with the russians in a way that would make europe a much more of a peaceful, less militarized community. we dealt with ballistic missile defense, which is enormously important. if we can cooperate with the russians, depending that cooperation makes a huge difference in what happens to our offense forces. you can't separate offense and defense anymore than you can repeal gravity. endorsed the warning and decision time concept, not simply for strategic weapons, but also for conventional weapons and tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. the elephant in the room for the russians is nato. nato expansion. that causes them all sorts of anxieties. but for the europeans and east europeans, the elephant in the room of the tactical nuclear weapons by russia, and the posture of the russian forces still located