political programming every week and every weekend, 48 hours of people and ooechblts telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs on our websites and you can join in the conversation on social media sites. coming up, a conference on nuclear programs and policies around the world. we start with a look at u.s.-russia nuclear weapons programs followed by a panel discussion on preventing a nuclear armed iran. and later, a state department official discusses nonproliferation policy. wisconsin voters go to the polls tomorrow to decide between republican governor scott walker and the democratic mayor of milwaukee, tom barrett. mr. walker is facing a recall election two years into his term. they debated last week and you can see that final debate tuesday morning at 6:00 a.m. eastern on cspan.

a former white house negotiator for the new start treaty said he's pessimistic about the next round of talks between the u.s. and russia. speaking earlier today, he also rejected report that is budgetary concerns drove the obama administration's plans for maintaining the arsenal. this is a little over an hour. >> good morning, everyone. if you could find your seats, we're about to get started. i'm the director of the independent nongovernmental arms control situation and i want to welcome everyone to our annual 2012 meeting.

i want to thank those of you watching online and cspan. and before we get started, i'd like to remind everybody to turn off your cellular devices. we remain committed to providing information and ideas to address those security challenges posed by the world's most dangerous weapons. nuclear, biological, chemical and certain conventional weapons. as our many members here today know, a monthly journal arms control today is the key resource for ideas and analysis and interviews with key policymakers on a range of issues and our staff turnouts on regular basis issue opinion pieces, background papers and reports on a rage of topics and they're available and our ability to do this depends on our individual members and subscribers to the arms control

today and if you're not a member or a subscriber, i would encourage you to consider doing so. but today's event on meeting the next challenges on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament is one of the many events we host each year on arms control and issues. with support and assistance from the gold foundation, we brought today a very distinguished set of speakers from all around the world. our panel this morning will address two of the most pressing arms control challenges we face today. first, dancing for the fogras to reduce the number of the world's global tok pile of weapons and second, advancing effective diplomatic solutions to prevent the spread of weapons to additional states such as iraq. to close out the conference, we're honored to have secretary

of state over security. she was lead negotiator for the 2010 strategic arms reduction treaty and will give us the obama administration's view on recent progress and the next steps. members of the association are welcome to join us at 3:45 in the afternoon for an informal decision on organizational and program priorities and then at 5:00 p.m., we invite friends and colleagues of the late stanley rezor and former aca board chairman who passed away this past week. so, to our first panel today, which will focus on the next phase of u.s.-russian nuclear reductions after you start the summit in chicago. we're at a very important

junction on this issue. in 2009, president obama pledged to and i quote, put an end to outdated cold war thinking by reducing the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and in 120, the u.2010 the u.s. and russia completed negotiations on the treaty and in 2010, the administration completed a review that -- deter nuclear tax and the u.s. and our allies and our partners, unquote. the president then directed a study on how to implement that strategy and that is due to be completed soon. back in march in south korea, president obama said quote that study is still underway, but even though we have more to do, we can already say with confidence that we have more nuclear weapons than -- unquote. the nuclear review study will

have far reaching implications for u.s. nuclear policy for u.s. and russia nuclear reductions and also, how we can reduce the enormous cost of u.s. nuclear arsenal which according to a new simpson center study published is at least $31 billion a year. so to explore these and other issues, we're pleased to have three distinguished speakers. we have kirk jameson, he severed as deputy commander of u.s. strategic command before retiring in 1996 after more than three decades of active service. he's an active member of the consensus for american security apt the american security project. and he will give us his thoughts on -- that have just introduced. 2009, 2010 on the national security staff and office of

vice president biden. he's now deputy director at the james martin center for studies and john is going to give us his thoughts and views on the path and options for pursuing further reductions. we're also very pleased to have with us trine flockhart, who will provide us with a european perspective on the recently completed defense and posture review issued at the recent nato summit and also, her thoughts on possible steps for dealing with the leftover tactical nuclear arsenals of the united states and europe as well as russia and after their opening remarks, we'll take your questions and we'll have discussion and so i welcome you to the meeting.

>> thank you very much. it's a real pleasure to be here. i note from the smattering of gray hair and talk of some reunions that most of you have lived through a good portion of the cold war and some of you probably are saying what was the cold war. it's also very reassuring to me that among all of you, i'm probably the least expert of what goes on inside the beltway. i call myself an operator. by some strange occurrence of events, i ended up going through the cold war in positions that gave me i think a unique window on to the operational side of thipgs and in that sense, the urgency of finding a new way in this 21st century. i know it's not lost on any of

us here that we're, we're in spite of what i saw on occasion up close and personal, close calls during the cold war. we are this morning and have somehow escaped a nuclear exchange and there were close calls, so i think something that the citizen needs to keep in mind that these things are an ongoing struggle to control the dangers of nuclear weapons. as a young lieutenant sitting nuclear alert, i stared at ten green lights each one of those lights represent iing an enormo

amount of destruction and practices hundreds of times the excuse and release of those nuclear weapons. we did that and my neighbors were flying nuclear airborne alert in b-52s on occasion. that wasn't a constant thing in those days. but it was, it was frequent and the nuclear subs were sat sea. we have an enormous destructive capability and i think i was not unique in those days, they were men. now, that's a generic term. those people controlling those and contemplating as we inventoried the execution plans.

the consequences of actually executing. i thought about that many, many times. and of course, it was heightened by movies such as seven days in may and dr. strangelove and many of you lived through every bit of that. the fact is, we are extremely fortunate. later as commander in the 9180s, my units were receiving new platforms. platforms that were capable of carrying more nuclear weapons at such a rapid rate that we often thought of it in terms of cat in the caster oil. you had to have one searching, one covering and one going ond one covering up. it was really an accelerated period. and the dialogue of deterrents in those days was there is no escape for the enemy.

and if we go to war, r they will suffer and people did talk about winning a nuclear war in spite of the fact that the consequences would be so extreme as to make winning kind of a ludicrous term. i did know in those days that i and my crew member, all of the people that i just described, would follow orders and if the president said go under the extremely tight constraints of president would have to make a decision like that, they would carry out the orders. there's no doubt in my mind. but the enemy of those days is gone. it no longer exists. this is a new time. the soviet union with its massive capabilities, no longer

exists. the deterrents calculus that has been with us, maybe as long as pointless are some of the art periods were exited in those days, no longer applies or it shouldn't. we don't have that massive capability of the soviet union and the ideology that was to dominate us. if people argue that exists, they're wrong. we need to convince them it's not the same. so 21st century determines in my mind has much to do with our conventional capabcapabilities, emerging technologies and a russia that is bound with us. in a carefully negotiated treaty

to reduce and verify these weapons. and i remember when we were concerned with new start ratification, that my growing concern and that of many of my fellow retired, my grandson says retarded, general officers, flag officers, was the period of time that we no longer had very capable inspectors on the ground in russia was extended, that the ability to gather data was extended, was being extended to the point where it didn't make sense. this process of arms control that i give such a create to people way back.

say wait a minute, making the row bow bounce is no exception. few people that i include myself as one of, had the opportunity to review the war plan all the way and to look at individual targets antd to see what we were doing with the production of our development capabilities. but the u.s. and russia do hold 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. i think with my experience with the russians, and i have had a considerable amount, that we really understand how much the operational utility of nuclear weapons has been overstated and we need to somehow preserve this arms control process.

the good work that's been done in verification and data exchange that the secretary governor will talk about today. so our good fortune that we made it to june 120 in my mind. the revised calculus of der ternts that we talk about needs to be fleshed out. it's not really i don't think going to be a civilian audience that knows this, but there's much to highlight in dialogue with the american people and with our elected officials. i hope that it can be nonpartisan. i'm still hopeful that the political process will allow this preservation of a long developed arms control approach to continue. and that clearly, a new

deterrent count will allow us and the russians to secure and posture our nuclear weapons with further reductions and less danger. i'm confidence we can do that. i would say as we whereupupdate thinking, i don't at all go away from what reagan said about trust but verify and i think we continue to put big emphasis on verify as we expand not only the decision of our -- and the nuclear holders in the world and the issue of proliferation. thank you very much.

>> thank you. now, to jon for your perspectives on nuclear weapons in a changed world. thanks for being here. >> thank you very much for inviting me. thank you all for coming. of course, i would have been happy to accept the invitation just having been locked inside the white house but i got my real start this this field at the arms control association. i attended the meeting in 1990 when spurnlgen announced they would be creating a position, which i got. because i was the least expensive candidate and it's been downhill ever since. i spent the last three years in the white house working as the president's advisers on nuclear issues and really fortunate for that experience, but for a nuclear waft like myself, to be given that access and understand for the first time, really what goes into all of these different

questions that we're dealing with as the general knows very, very well, the minutia really can overwhelm you, but you have to understand it before tackling the larger questions, calculus and stability. not to worry about single shot kill probability and change ratios, but to really understand the thinking of different services and different constituents before you pick a number at say where you're feeling you should come out and i think one thing i would like people to take away is that the administration's been very careful l to take the advice more of us were given years ago, which is don't tell the operators how to operate. don't say, we only need four submarines at sea. what we had the opportunity to do with a tremendously open process involving state department, defense department services, intelligence, department of energy for the production, uniform military is to picture the big questions laid out in the president's strategy documents.

the nuclear posture review. where do we want to go? what are the threats we're trying to address globally and then try to figure out what are the questions that nuclear weapons are necessary for, flipping them to move the other questions out of the nuclear reach. because as a president has said many times, he and i argue correctly, believes that it is very much in the security interest to reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons and more expanded and more aggressive policy. one that would recognize has as much and probably more of a bearing on our security position than sort of the political mentality of nuclear parody with russia. so, i'm sure many of you are pretty -- on those documents with npr, but i would encourage you to go back and look at those, particularly the criteria because those are very much the criteria of the events how many

isms do you think we should have to ensure survival for submarines? or which countries need to be on the targets list and which need to drop off? or do you immediate to cross target in order to achieve these goals? those five questions are the ones that got to us. throughout this process and the vice president was very much involved in this, is is to understand that regardless of what number you come out at, if that is one or a million and one, you're still going to need a nuclear complex capable of supporting the maintenance of that capability. if it's one, you still need a bunch of scientists and engineers that can take it apart p. you're still going to need production facilities that can build back up or the very least dismantle the weapons we're

dealing with and that's another issue that i'll touch briefly on about needing to get to this bipartisan consensus. but i don't think anybody's going to get to a consensus on anything this washington, but to a general agreement on whether we need more or less nuclear weapons, there's a certain amount of investment necessary for the complex. i don't mean every bell and whistle. everybody throughout the process from the head of msa to omb understand that there's the perfect and then there's the necessary and there's a whole bunch of cutting that's going to go on at the top, but you're still going to need some level of investment in order to maintain any kind of nuke her activity. so for many of the people this this room that are concerned about those issues, some of whom called me over the past three years to tell me make sure you do this and have you thought about that. you should take heart in the sense that we were wrestling with the same questions you talk about now.

how many nuclear weapons are really necessary to deter enemies and reassure friends and what does deterrence mean in the 21st century and how does that compare with 20 or 30 years ago. still pretty much a reflection. stan norris and others have written about this, talking about the different category sets. we wrestles a lot with how can we reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons in ways that not on ensure our security, but advance it. for those that watch this, new start was about a lot of things. about getting the verification capabilities back on the ground in russia and providing that insight into what's going on. but it was also very much about the review conference coming up,

about needing to refocus the international community's attention on iran and not to allow this gap in u.s.-russian arms control to become a distraction from what everybody reck nices as the next step of security challenges. we also dealt with how do deal with the ageing of the nuclear triad and how much is that going to cost us. we didn't let number, either the level of nuclear weaponry or how much money we had available drive the system, but we had to be aware of what it was going to cost to limit these things in a bucket constrained environment, but as we got through this process and after we looked at what the strategy needed to be, then we talked about numbers. i know people have read a lot of

reporting. that's not true. i can tell you because i helped write that part of the guidance. if there are reporters here in the room, i'd be happy to talk with you afterwards. so, in terms of what's going to come out and my expectation is that this is going to be rolled out in the next several weeks or a month or two. i am not sure how it's going to be rolled out. in terms o the way it's going to impact on the future of arms control negotiations, i'll tell you plainly that i argued against a rollout that included a number because i favor a new set of negotiated reductions with russia and think that if you come out with a number, you're opening yourself up to giving away your negotiating position. so i argued strongly inside that we should talk about what the framework is, what the strategy is. but leave the numbers in hopes that we could get russia to come down to a lower number.

i am a pessimist when it comes to what's going to come over the next year or two over negotiated reductions. i wish that weren't the case, but i think the thinking's is same. in this issue, senator kyl and i agr agree. knowing that we can go lower, that we don't need to be spending money in the nuclear complex that we need to be spending in other areas, i don't want to delay that process because the general was alluding to, it's clear that unlike the cold war when it was the soviet union, their conventional capability and the risk of conflict that was the threat. today, it's the threat itself. nobody, very r few people reasonably believe we're going to have a nuclear conflict because of some decision to preempt the united states of their nuclear capability. where as during the cold war,

very reasonable people actually worried if there's instability, this might be a real risk. today, most people recognize if there's a nuclear exchange, it's going to be because of miscalculation or accident and that's the threat we have to address. if we can go to lower number, then great. that's a much better world, but i don't want to delay that day when we're addressing this challenge. in large part because i don't think russia's prepared to go to much lower numbers. quite frankly, they're already below the new start numbers, so they might be willing to have some adjustment, but if we want to break the back on cold war thinking, we have to go to much lower numbers. i think this will be my second to last point that and this mrks is administration guilty of this. we talk as if the strategy has

changed. we rid the nightmare of nuclear war from our grandchildren's dreams. we still size our capabilities to fight nuclear wars. we call it deterrence, but we're still sizing our forces, make sure we can blow up a whole lot of what other enemies might need to fight us and that's nuclear war fighting. what we need is a force that's fundamentally sized and based on deterrence. that number is much, much lower than what it takes to blow up a lot of stuff many foreign countries. at least for the united states' perspective and in russia and china, that number is very, very low and i would say that number is more than one, but less than 20, that the united states deterred by the reasonable threat that 20 nuclear weapons can land on u.s. soil. therefore, the numbers need to come way down. as long as it's secure and

reliab reliable, we're still able to persue. frankly, the idea we need to go down some sort of parody or reduchovnies is also outdated. reasonable minds could argue if there was a 20, 30, 40% delta in what russia had or we had, china had or what the europeans had, then you could argue that somebody might get in their head that now is the time. to lead putin to say now is our opportunity? just my personal view, but one set of arguments went very much into debate. last point and that's again on the nuclear complex.