gwen: ripple effects from japan to libya and everywhere in between as the world works with the fallout from uprising and disaster. tonight on "washington week." >> ample warning was given qaddafi needed to stop his campaign of oppression or be held accountable. gwen: as muammar qaddafi closes in on rebels, the world community reacts. >> i urge you to immediately cease-fire and work with the resolution. >> the violence must stop, the killing must stop and the people of libya must be protected and have the opportunity to express themselves freely. gwen: will can do you havey he

-- will qaddafi lose his grip? are we on the brink of all-out war? while on the other side of the world, japan copes with a disaster of biblical proportions. after the quake. after the flood. now nuclear fallout. >> there's no water in the spent fuel pool and we believe radiation levels are extremely high. gwen: how japan's calamity could affect us all. covering the week, tom gjelten of npr, coral davenport of "national journal" and david wessel of "the wall street journal." >> award-winning reporting and analysis, covering history as it happens. live from our nation's capital, this is "washington week." produced in association with "national journal." corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by -- >> this rock has never stood

still. since 1875, we've been there for our clients through good times and bad. when their needs changed, we were there to meet them. through the years from insurance to investment management to real estate to retirement solutions, we've delved new ideas for the financial challenges ahead. this rock has never stood still and that's one thing that will never change. prudential. >> corporate funding is also provided by boeing. norfolk southern. additional funding is provided by the annenberg foundation, the corporation for public broadcasting, and by contributions to pbs stations from viewers like you. thank you. >> once again, live from washington, moderator gwen ifill. gwen: good evening. all eyes tonight are on libyan leader muammar qaddafi but a

coalition of nations with a tough new u.n. resolution behind it is promising to do more than just watch. president obama and british prime minister david cameron each made that clear today. >> now, once more, muammar qaddafi has a choice. the resolution that passed lays out very clear conditions that must be met. these terms are not subject to negotiation. if qaddafi does not comply with the resolution, the international community will impose consequences. and the resolution will be enforced through military action. >> our forces will join an international operation to enforce the resolution if qaddafi fails to comply with its demand he end the tax on civilians. the defense secretary and i have now instructed the chief of defense staff to work urgently with our allies to put in place the ropet military measures to enforce the resolution including a no-fly

zone. gwen: appropriate military measures, tom, what does that mean? >> it means air strikes, it means bombing, it could mean cruise missiles, anything but boots on the ground. the resolution specifically precludes a foreign military occupation force but short of an invasion, you could see some really robust measures. two things to keep in mind. this resolution was not for a nowitzki -- for a no-fly zone but is much broader. a no-fly zone would make action to take out his aircraft, whatever. but if qaddafi were to attack on the ground with tanks or artillery or r.p.g.'s, this resolution would authorize attacks against those tanks. it's broader, it's for the protection of civilians. that's the first thing. the second point to keep in mind is that a cease-fire will not be enough. of course we heard today the libyans are willing to stop military operations and enact an immediate cease-fire but all

the governments behind this, britain, france, the united states, some of the arab governments put out a joint statement link today, the one president obama referred to, specifying very particular things that the qaddafi regime has to do in order to forestall military action. >> and yet just this time last week all the signals coming from the obama administration was even a no-fly zone, even that would be too risky and too much. secretary gates of the pentagon made it clear. what changed? >> what changed was what president obama said changed was that they were looking at the possible massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians. so clearly the violence behind qaddafi's counterattack was much more severe. the other thing is the prospect of qaddafi actually winning and beating back, there is a fear this itself would create a precedent in the middle east and embolden authoritarian leaders, tyrants there to take much more violent measures and that could have -- you know, we

began with this very peaceful movement, the jasmine resolution in tunisia and the movement in egypt but since then we've seen these movements become much more violent and there was a fear if this were allowed to run it its course we could see the middle east blow up. >> wouldn't it have been more effective to take this on earlier before the rebels were on the run? >> it certainly would have been more effective and saved a lot of lives but the fact is only last weekend did the administration get the arab league to endorse a no-fly zone and it's been very important to this administration that this not be seen as a u.s. operation. so there really was a need from their point of view to build up enough international political support so that the united states could say -- stay if not in the background, at least sort of on the sidelines. >> and the president in his press conference, i thought it was striking to list the things that we're not going to do. we're not going to deploy

ground troops. we're not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal. what's with all this not, not, not stuff? >> there's a lot of ambiguity. he did say we're not going to employ a ground force which is prohibited by the u.n. resolution as well. he also said the goal of the operation will not go beyond protecting civilians. but at the same time, he said qaddafi has lost the legitimacy to lead. and you had secretary clinton and you had the french government also saying that the logical result of this operation will be that the qaddafi regime is overthrown. so they've certainly injected -- gwen: a logical result, but is that the goal? they've now set out a goal they have to push him out of office. they can't stop short of that. >> you know, and i think that they are assuming that the qaddafi regime is not going to comply with these demands. gwen: there's evidence already of that. >> in fact, susan rice, the u.n. ambassador, the ambassador at the u.n. has already said that the qaddafi government is

not in compliance with the cease-fire demand. so if you see this kind of strong, robust military action, you know, there may be a feeling that that in itself will topple the qaddafi government. remember, 1991 the iraqi invasion of kuwait, when tanks were going back to iraq with airpower alone, we're able to wipe out entire tank columns. the airpower here is pretty stunning in what it can do. >> are we going to arm the rebels? >> that is a question for lawyers. it looks to me like the cease-fire and the arms embargo would apply to everyone. but the state department, the obama administration is taking the position that in fact that option is not off the table, that it does not specifically bar them from arming the rebels and there's a suggestion here that if these moves are not enough, that that can be sort of the next step. gwen: timing. hillary clinton is going back

to paris this weekend and having just returned from the region and is meeting with our allies who have signed on to this u.n. resolution. does that mean we can expect to see bombs drop any time soon? >> i think the fact ambassador rice said they're already not in compliance would suggest you'd want to act fairly quickly. the problem is that the i'm -- imposing a no-fly zone is a complicated thing and takes a command and control operation to be set up and the fact the united states is not doing this unilaterally means you have to divvy up the responsibilities and find out who's going to do command and control? who's going to do the tulare operations, the combat operations? who's going to do refueling or suppression of the radar? so there's a lot of planning that has to go into this. so as long as qaddafi does not send tanks to benghazi or in some other way really continue attacks on civilians, i think we're likely to see this kind

of play out over a day or two. >> can you tell us what's going on in bahrain and yemen and how it fits in as well? >> i said these revolutions have taken a different course. yemen which is a u.s. ally, up to 46 people shot down in the square there today and a couple hundred people injured. it's hard to see how the president of yemen can survive this. but the problem is that's a u.s. ally and it's a country where al qaeda is strong and the u.s. is very nervous about that and in bahrain, a similar thing, what began as a democratic uprising has turned into a sectarian uprising of shi'ia versus sunni, very bad news for the middle east. gwen: thank you, tom. now we move on to japan which is still reeling from the one-two-three punch heard around the world. as search rescue and relief continue for the victims of last week's earthquake and tsunami. engineers and scientists are

keeping a worried eye on the severely damaged nuclear plants along the decimated northeast coast. >> this is a catastrophe. we know the prior-to events at three-mile island, chernobyl had consequences but what we're seeing unfold in japan is on a much greater scale. gwen: as the crisis seemed to deepen with each passing day, there were more new questions than new answers about the extent of the damage. we'll try to tackle some of them tonight. coral, starting right now, welcome to "washington week." >> thank you. gwen: starting now, what do we know and what don't we know? >> we know japan's nuclear safety agency today elevated the risk assessment of the situation from a four to a five on a scale of seven. seven is a chernobyl level disaster. five is a three-mile island level disaster. but already energy secretary steven chu and other u.s. officials said this disaster has clearly far surpassed

three-mile island. we know that there is water running out that has drained or completely drained both from the reactors and the spent fuel containers. we know that if the spent fuel pools are completely drained, then that will lead to a radioactive fire that could spread radioactive material and could definitely lead to deaths and that's what the level five warning tells us. what we don't know is how much the water has drained. this is one of the many points on which there's a lot of conflicting information. the u.s., nuclear regulatory commission says their data shows -- gwen: all gone. >> the water drained completely, from japanese officials we're hearing no, that's not the case. we understand the japanese soldiers are trying to refill those spent fuel pools, are

telling us that water is refilling. from the u.s. we're hearing there are leaks, that the water is draining. so this is really highlighted. there's so much that we still don't know. gwen: david, we look at this and we realize there are ripple effects which go beyond what's just wrong with this particular plant. it goes across the whole world. what are we watching? >> i think the first thing to remember is as soon as you talk about the dollars and cents you want to pause and say it's a human tragedy. gwen: of amazing proportions. >> communities wiped out and may never be rebuilt. on the economic side, japan is not as important to the world economy, not as important as it was a few years ago. 6% of the world's economy. china is now a bigger economy. so it does not seem to be creating a new global recession. but globalization has meant these very global supply chains, and it's really illustrating how that works. yesterday general motors had to suspend production of pickup

trucks in louisiana and today suspended protect of some plants in europe. renault is suspending production of cars in south korea because the parts come from there. one of the people on "washington week" told me before we started the show that some of the tapes that you get from sony are not arriving. auto parts and electronic components are something japan produces and they supply very much to the rest of the world. i think the other thing is it goes beyond these kind of tangible things. gwen: right. >> this is a time of great anxiety in the world markets and people's minds and businessmen's planning. libya, europe could be in debt situation and now this. i think this generalized anxiety could be a real problem for the world economy. it could exceed some shortage of this or that plan. >> i've got a question for both of you. do we know yet how bad the disaster will be and how bad the economic consequences of those disasters scenarios are?

i was wondering, for example, if there is a worst case scenario in the area around the nuclear power plant becomes uninhabitable, how important is that and what would that do to the japanese economy and what's the chances of that happening? >> officials are very reluctant certainly to say how exactly this might unfold. clearly, we're seeing soldiers and the japanese working -- the workers working as hard as they can on the ground to prevent the absolute worst case scenario. the worst case scenario probably wouldn't be as bad as a chernobyl in part because this plant is constructed much better. the damage isn't as bad. but it does seem that we could certainly -- we could see a large number of deaths and illness. gwen: also, we didn't know until years after chernobyl and years after three-mile island how extensive the damage was, isn't that right? >> that's true. so it's very hard -- you know, i've been asking that question to experts every day this week.

no one wants to say exactly what it might look like. >> i think that's one of the things that's so frightening about this. initially the economists likened it to the kobe earthquake in 1995 and took heart japan, a rich country and resilient society recovered from that relatively quickly, faster than experts expected. but now they're saying oh, my gosh, this thing might not be over yet. it's like a horror movie and you don't know when it's going to end. so the possibility some pieces of the thing are uninhabitable and the possibility large parts of the japanese electric production system will be out of commission for a long time. honda said today they may not be able to restart their plant and it's not even close to the thing, until may. >> and ports. >> and ports. and not to mention a political system that's not in the greatest shape. i think what's scarier here is we're now beginning to see the worst case scenario might be a little more likely than we thought when it first happened. gwen: so what we have here is

the recurring question is, can it happen here? people look at our nuclear industry, such as it is, which is a couple -- at least a hundred or more plants online. and people -- look what the president said this week, i want to check it all out and launch an investigation. do we have any idea of the answer to that question? >> it's unlikely that we will see a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami here in the united states. but, you know, clearly that -- clearly anything can happen. we do see that now. and there are nuclear reactors and sites that store nuclear waste in areas that are near fault lines. for example, in diablo county in california. so the first thing that the president is going to do, he has said we need to review all of the safety, all of the regulations, we've already seen the union of concerned scientists came out this week

with a report citing concerns about existing safety regulations at some power plants. so certainly this is likely to put a freeze or a delay, even if not through policy or legislation, but simply through public anxiety on any kind of new power plant construction for a number of years. >> and i think that's a significant development because the president was on the cusp of turning to nuclear power as a way to reduce our dependence on imported oil and a way to deal with global warming. gwen: or deep ocean drilling. >> right. so now you see the situation where we don't really have a clear energy strategy, nor do we have any clear way to deal with global warming because nuclear was a big part of that. gwen: that was the clean energy solution. >> and i don't think it matters what the experts say. it's hard for me to imagine we'll be building five nuclear power plants. >> so that will mean we'll be using more oil and oil prices

will go up and that has proven already to be a destabilizing development. gwen: speaking of libya. >> yeah. >> we'll actually see the fuel that will probably replace nuclear power in the u.s. and japan is natural gas. oil -- nuclear power produces electricity, oil is a transportation fuel. but we will almost certainly -- both in the u.s. and around the world, we've seen calls for halts or freezes on nuclear power in switzerland, in china, in germany and austria. gwen: you made the point in your story, something i didn't see widely reported, there hasn't been a new nuclear plant that's gone on line in this country since 1979, three-mile island. >> three-mile island. gwen: it's hard to imagine that will jump-start that industry in that way. >> in expectation in the past couple years, this idea of the nuclear renaissance but what that was really vigger -- triggered by was there would be a climate change policy, a

policy that put a price on carbon emissions and made it more expensive to produce energy with fossil fuels. in that economic reality, nuclear power would become more economically viable. we've seen that fossil fuel -- climate change legislation failed in congress. we're not going to see a climate change law any time in the near future. and within the industry, people were saying that nuclear renaissance already was not going to happen. it was becoming -- nuclear power is so expensive and without that switch in the economics, it was already freezing and slowing down. and this is clearly -- it's also going to just raise the price, the liability, the insurance, the new regulations are all going to send the price even higher and wall street isn't comfortable with that. >> i have an economic question, david, is it true -- do we know yet the cost of this? it's like around $200 billion. is it true that the economic cost of this tragedy, this disaster is much less than the

economic cost of the financial crisis was to the economy of japan? >> i hadn't thought of it that way. >> in terms of the lost wealth. >> japan really didn't get hit very hard by the economic crisis because they had already put their banks into the toilet once, so they hadn't yet got to the point they were making these crazy loans. so many of the results. but they took a big hit after the financial crisis. i think the difference is that as hard as it is to recover from a financial crisis and you lose all this wealth, it's all kind of money, intangible stuff. what makes this so frightening is you see these reports it will be good for the japanese economy in the long run because it will increase growth because they'll have to employ all these people in reconstruction. >> that's some kind of a stimulus. >> that has to do with the way we account for the stuff. we've destroyed an enormous amount of infrastructure and housing and public safety stuff in japan, and so now they're going to have to spend a lot of

money to rebuild it to get back to where they were before. gwen: that's what we're going to be watching for in the next couple weeks after we get over the enormity of just the tragedy itself. thank you, everybody. both of these stories are far from over. keep up with daily developments online and on the air at the pbs newshour. we have to leave you a few minutes early to give you the chance to support the local stations that in turn support us. but our conversation will continue online. find the washington week webcast extra at pbs.org and see you around the table next week on "washington week." good night. >> "washington week" was produced by weta which is solely responsible for its content. captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- >> funding for "washington week" is provided by -- >> we know why we're here. >> to give our war fighters every advantage. >> to deliver technologies that

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