>> rose: welcome to the program. one of the revolutions in this country right now moving at break neck speed is the genetic revolution. we talked this evening with siddartha mukherjee. he's written a new book the gene, an intimate history. >> the book begins with my own history, my own family's history of mental illness. schizophrenia and bipolar disorder affects more than one generation in my family. one of my finding questions is what is it, what is that thing that crosses over generations. why isn't everyone affected. why are only some members affected. and then the third strand, which is probably very very topical is that during this period of time we had begun to invent technology to read and write the human genome. this was surprising the felicity

with which, the fidelity which we can change this human generation was surprising to me. >> rose: we conclude with cyber warfare and talk to alex gibney the filmmaker and david sanger the "new york times" national security correspondent about a new film from alex gibney called zero days. >> so many people refuse to talk to me about it and refuse to admit their role in the operation. and this is after the race was blown. we now know that the u.s. and frankly israel were responsible for this attack. i want to talk about the attack. i didn't have to know the code for the attack but nobody will engage on this issue. it's also relentlessly secret and no one will engage on the issue why it's so secret. >> rose: a conversation about the future. first about the genetic revolution and then about cyber warfare possibilities when we continue.

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: the mapping of human genome in 2003 created as many questions as it answered, how much of the human experience is determined by the environment. what happens when we learn to read and write our own genetic information. is biology destiny. a new book seeks to answer these fundamental or life defining questions. it is called the gene an intimate history. joining me now is the book's

author siddartha mukherjee. he is a physician, he's a scientist, he's a writer. in 2011, he won the pulitzer prize for his biography of cancer, the emperor of all maladies. i'm pleased to have him back at this table. welcome. >> thank you so much. >> rose: what drove you to this. you are an enencologist by training. >> this came out of three strands if you will. the first strand is professional. i'm an oncologist. cancer's a genetic disease and i was watching in the period of time since i've written emperor the word of cancer being redefined by genetics. we were sequencing cancer genomes in greater and deeper ways. i mean it was powerful. number one. number two, which is the idea that it's also a very personal story. the book begins with my own history, my own family's history of mental illness.

schizophrenia and bipolar disorder affect more than one generation in high family. the question of, the defining question is what is it. what is that thing that crosses over generations. why isn't everyone affected. why are only some members affected. and then the third strand, which is probably very very topical is that during this period of time we had begun to invent technology that is said to read and right the human genome. and that was praising to me, the felicity with which the fidelity which we could do this, change genetic information was totally surprising to me. so this came together in the book. >> rose: did you decide you want to go into medicine. >> i knew distantly. i was interested in biology, cell biology. i was studying cells, i was interested in viruses. it was a time when we're discovering new things about cancer. you know, this was the early

1990's. and then all of a sudden, it became clear and clearer to me that what i had to do was to be a physician, a physician scientist. >> rose: if you're making the choices again, would you make the same choices based on what you know now. based on how you know the world's exploded and changed and evolved. >> i would, yes, i would. i find myself in medicine is the profession remains so dynamic partly because it's become so science driven. so much of it has become. i mean of course there's the humanist ic part of it. i write about it. but you know the capacity to understand the genetic information just to give you one example has really changed our practice of medicine and i'm enjoying it. i find it exhilarating and i think most doctor scientists are relating. >> rose: tell us about the

definition of a gene and a definition of a genome. >> so, a gene, well first thing is interesting is the definition is changing. but the gene used to be a unit of information that moves from cell to cell or from parent to offspring that defines a particular series of traits, a feature. now we know that, you know, one gene can define more than one feature. we also know that one feature can be defined by more than one gene. but it is really a unit of biological information. that's the simplest way to think about it. it's the unit of biological information. a genome, the best way to describe a genome is to make an analogy. the genome is the encyclopedia of all the genes we possess of humans, tell the gene when to turn on and off. some of the enough in between some we know the function of and some we don't know the function of. but it's an encyclopedia. what's amazing, and that's part

of the reason for writing this book, if it was really an encyclopedia if you imagine it as an object, it would be 66 full sets of the encyclopedia britannica. we would be sit in this room and every inch of this wall would be volumes of the encyclopedia britannica. if you open one of them it would read actgctgc. and what's astonishing is that your embryonic cells can take that encyclopedia that's your genome and build you and me with our similarities and differences. and that's what's astonishing. that's what's astonishing to me about that. that code, you know, written three billion letters just four alphabets, actg can create ultimately through processes we're beginning to understand,

the complexity of you and me. and altering that code. >> rose: see that's the point isn't it. that's where the future is. en i say we the community ofly scientists. in the last five to ten years charlie, we've discovered ways to alter the human genetic code within the fidelity, with the efficiency and the accuracy that wouldn't exist, just hadn't existed. i mean, i'll tell you -- >> rose: repeat the words, fidelity, accuracy. >> and efficiency. but fidelity we mean again reminding us again 66 sets of the enencyclopedia britannica. you can go find one volume, volume 17 of set four open up that volume, find one word in it, actgcc and change that last c into a g. now you could say well what does that mean. that last g could be the code that say increases your risk to

have autism. or that last g could be one of the nucleotides that increases your risks to have a certain form of cancer. so, that is the kind of again, fidelity accuracy, efficiency, that we're trying to understand. and of course, the question is, i mean can we use this technology in a way that's responsible. it is technology that is to me at least, comparable to the greatest tech -- technologies that we have that's fundamental to human history. the capacity to read and write genomes, i know as a cancer geneticist as someone who sees cancer patients every week, the capacity to read and write genomes changes who we are. changes the conception of who we are as human beings. >> rose: and so what are the implications of that in terms of if someone can use it not just for good but for bad.

>> well the words good and bad are the words that are on the table right now. what is good. i mean on one hand of course we could use these technologies to do amazing things. cure diseases. i mean you know, outside, this book doesn't talk about the biosphere but of course there are several books about changing crock, changing pests. you can have a dramatic impact not only on human beings and the biosphere but you can imagine transformative things, you can cure diseases with it. you can do gene therapy. the bad is, you know, will someone use it to enhance the way the human genome looks right now. >> rose: build some kind of new order. >> try to build a different kind of human being, different kind of organism, different kind of

crop that will change the way, that will change our relationship with the biosphere, change the relationship with have with ourselves. in the case of humans, they're still strong in this country, they're strong constraints on this. this isn't sort of free for all technology. it's relatively complicated. you can't sit in your garage and change the human genome. it's complicated technology. what's important is the pieces are all there. the in principle all the pieces are there and that's what makes it a definable. we need to have the vocabulary to be able to ask the question, you know, what should we do next. >> rose: do we need rules and regulations. >> absolutely, we need rules and regulations. >> rose: coming from government. advised by science. >> advised by science and patients and family and you and me. this is not something that will be figured out in the laboratory somewhere. this is not something that we

will figure out the questions. and i hope the book raises these questions clearly. but the questions are so fundamental. who are we. what defines us. what's normal. when are, what are the boundaries of normalcy which is abnormal see. what if you could read. i'll give you a particular example. we've now had technologies to be able to read the genomes of eggs or embryos before they are implemented. preimplantation genetic diagnosis. so you can read the genome, you can sequence the genome. and what if i told an individual human being that their future unborn child carried a risk of a lethal disease, fatal disease but only by 10%. 90% the chances to be perfectly fine because obviously genes don't determine biology doesn't determine destiny. genes interact etcetera etcetera. what if i told you i now have

that information that there's a 10% risk. what would you do with that information. how would you act on that information. it gets to the question of who we are, what do we think we are. what risks are we willing to take. >> rose: and that choice will be up to the individual to make that choice. >> that choice. it should be up to the individual to make that choice but on the other hand of course the technologies that are being invented are being invented as a community. we are inventing technologies altogether to try to figure out how to advise, how to think about that number 10%. i mean what if i increase that number to 20%, you know. is there a magic threshold where all of a sudden if i were to say to you again as a parented that the -- parented that the risk of your child have been a neuro degenerative disease 35% as a child how would you act on that information. this information is reading the genome. this is what reading the genome

means. we haven't been able to do it in a particular, you know it's not as if we can prepare a report card that gives grades but we are beginning to prepare report cards that give probabilities. it's like reading a report card of probabilities. >> rose: how much of it is used now? >> well, for mono genic diseases, and by that i mean single genes, and there's a high degree of penetrants. if you have that gene mutation or gene variation you will likely have that disease. >> rose: what takes the high probability. is there a number that makes high probability. >> it just depends on the kind of gene it is and kind of interaction it is. i'll give you an example. a -- disease. we've had programs in hospitals for a while that screens you for that disease. not you but your children for that disease.

down syndrome is another example. ultimately it's a genetic syndrome. it's a extra chromosome but you can sample as you know, you can sample tissue. and again those are examples where as i said the pen transae very high. as a society, if the disease is a suffering is great enough we've decided that's okay to do. we've made that decision. the question now as we read the genome in more deep ways as we read individual genomes in more deep ways are we entering arenas where the moral uncertainties are so great we don't know what to do, we need to have a conversation about. >> rose: is there an urgency to have a conversation. >> there's an absolute urgency to have a conversation. just to give you a couple examples. in about four or five weeks before i finished writing the

book, in china there was an attempt to make a genetic, define genetic change in making an embryo. now these were non-viable embryos, they were chosen. so there were some natural limits to the experiments. you couldn't have carried out this experiment but it was nonetheless an experiment that was formed and the chinese performed an experiment. >> rose: what was the result of the experiment. >> so again, early days they found that when they used these techniques, they found there were lots of errors. they often, they didn't hit the right gene. the efficiency was lower than they had probably expected. again remember fidelity accuracy efficiency, those were not at the level that was expected. but those seemed to be technical challenges. >> rose: and those seemed to be the kinds of problem that trial and error. >> that's right, trial and ear. if you read the major scientific jurndle, every week there are

more and more reports about how the technology is improved, the accuracy is improving. more and more you can go into that one volume, volume 7 edition 6 of the encyclopedia and change one word and find the rest of the enencyclopedia is untouched. there's an urgency about it. i was telling you earlier, that experiment generates over night, i think, 1500 comments in the "new york times" asking questions. >> rose: from the first new article. >> from that first new article. >> rose: 1500 over night. >> yes. i read them the next morning, i don't know how quickly they came. but the astonishing thing was the range of opinion. it ranged from some people saying if the chinese are doing this, we have to. we have to start. to there are absolute moral constraints in the west that allow us obviously not to stop

any intervention. >> rose: what do you think of the idea that if, that you can't stop science. there's always someone who wants to push every frontier and they will not be reigned in by any government or ethical considerations. >> i think that's an overblown fear. i think we visited these fears before with recombinant dna. i was a student with paul burg one of the inventors. paul and i spoke yesterday on the phone. and he was a great mentor, has been a great friend. obviously this technology was invented not only by him but several people, you know, added to the technology. and paul won a nobel prize for this invention. but as many of us remember, he was one of the organizers along with several other people of a

large convention. i talk about that meeting in which they put a moratorium on being able to, you know, snip and paste pieces of dna. they had invented technologies taking a viral gene with a rabbit gene or cow gene and put it in a bacterial cell. because the code is universal, the thing, the machine would start ticking as it were as if nothing had happened. so there's that one example. there's a famous example as you know the atomic, about the atomic bomb and the famous viard letter in which again there are powerful limits being played. this is not garage technology yet. i don't believe it will become garage technology. there's always a question will there be a hacker movement. will there be a hacker movement that will come and you know start making human or genetic changes in animals or pets or

crops. i personally don't think that's going to be the case and i think the regulations will have to be strong. >> rose: you don't think it's going to be the case because? because it's not a garage technology. >> for one. there are some natural thresholds. you can't just do it. >> rose: at the same time i've always been influenced by the notion in history, a lot of smart people. >> that's absolutely true and people are getting smarter. >> rose: they do a lot of dangerous things. >> there is a danger, yes. there's absolutely a danger. there's absolutely the danger and that's why i think we need the vocabulary. that is why this conversation can't be a conversation that's happening in the medical board room alone or in a laboratory alone or in a closed circuit universe alone. you need to participate, i need to participate, we need to figure out what we can do with it because like the atom, this

is technology that fundamentally changes the conception of technology itself. it is one of those kinds of parts of technology. >> rose: is it possible that we are approaching the time that we can in a sense create a disease-free perfect human. >> no. i think what we now know about genes is -- >> rose: what does perfect and disease-free mean. >> yes, first of all what does perfect and disease-free mean. disease intersects with environment. there's a strong -- >> rose: biology is not destiny. >> no but it plays a powerful role in destiny. as you're pointing out, the question that we're being asked to ask ourselves is what does perfect mean. i mean you know, evolution creates by virtue of, you know,

its processes creates organisms that are adapted to particular circumstances. if you change the circumstances, what was sickness in one circumstance becomes illness in another circumstance. a hairless man in the antarctica is fit in one sense and ill in another. so the question of what perfect means is always changing. of course there are some diseases where, you know, under no circumstances can we imagine that there will be sickness. they are devastating diseases. >> rose: so success has been found when you can identify one gene much more difficult if they are multiple genes. >> typical human diseases are multiple genes. >> rose: especially cancer. >> especially cancer. >> rose: so where are we in cancer today. put on your oncology hat and your gene hat. we all know about immunotherapy. we now know at duke university using polar vaccine.

brain disease. we know biden has a moon shot, this sort of moon shot. to eliminate as much cancer as possible. we've made dramatic with more knowledge of genetics and human genome with more knowledge and more powerful technology. >> yes. >> rose: and within increasing sense of shared information, although biden speaks about the silos that exist in this word. >> he does and he's right about most. >> rose: it's not a sharing of information because everybody's in their own race. >> yes. >> rose: were we, though, in terms of cancer getting back to your other question. >> it's an important because it's a contiguous hat. these are contiguous questions. let me tell you about immunotherapy. i'll give you two examples. one, the idea that cancers could resist being killed by the

immune system through by activating certain genetic pathways is an idea that came out of genetics. so here again you have an example in which cancers can create a kind of cloak around themselves. so that the immune system can't really recognize that cancer and then kill the cancer as a kind of object or cell that's growing in the wrong place at the wrong time. that cloak as it were is really a genetic cloak. it is through genes, it is through by toggling with genes that cancers do this. that's one great example of how genetics is illuminating and it continues to illuminate how cancer therapies work. that's one example. you heard about these amazing trials which you put in t cells, modified immune cells. guess what you're putting in that. putting in genes that would now allow these t cells that previously couldn't recognize and eat up your cancer or cell

your cans you're putting in genes. so in tack it is gene therapy. these t cell trials are nothing but a modified are form of gene therapy. they build on the shoulders of gene therapy trials many of which fail in the 1980's and 1990's, these are their results. >> rose: it's really interesting, i'm going to take one quick tangent. with the mapping of human genome, we all thought a brave new world is upon us. and it didn't happen that fast. gene therapies, there were failures, there were accidents, but it seems to me now that it's back on its feet so to speak. >> much of it is become, you're absolutely right. >> rose: and acceleration. >> yes. i agree with that. and what's interesting about it, and i talk a little bit about the failures as the famous case and we have to read that case because we need to know what happened there in order to know what to do next and whatnot to do next. but much of what happened in the 1990's and the early 2000's were

lessons, moral lessons, genetic lessons, biochemical lessons, medical lessons we're now realizing. remember 2003 is barely 13 years ago. you know, we expected, the public expected boom the human genome project, we would map the human genome, we'd know all the sequence of those and boom new therapies would coming down that's barely 13 years ago and we're realizing that experiment in which we're putting in genes into t cells and into immune cells to eat up cancers, that is gene therapy. the polio various is gene therapy. these are all gene therapies, genetic fits at the core not only of cells not only of our cells but of all these new therapies we're trying to invent. >> rose: the phenomena expressed by nih and francis collins, generally what you find inside often is that the first ten years is much slower than

you expected after discovery. and then explodes. and the back end is much more productive than you ever imagined. >> that's correct. and that's going on right now. >> rose: all of a sudden there's an explosion of possibility. >> that's absolutely what we're seeing. >> rose: have you mapped, i would assume yes but you don't have to tell me. have you mapped your own human genome because of what you know about schizophrenia in your family. >> i have decided not to. i have decided not to because -- >> rose: you don't want to know. >> partly i don't want to know and we know in particular there's no one single gene. there are usually multiple genes. there are variants that are different so there's some ifs, ands or buts but for the most part. and number two i'm not sure if i had the information, what i would do with it. i mean, would i then have, would i change the way i think about my own children. you know, i have two daughters. i mean you know, it seems to me

that you enter an arena where some of the questions are unanswerable currently. ten years from today when we know these risks more concretely we know how they intersect with the environment, we understand to what extent any one disease is genetic. i might change my mind, i might change my mind. but for now no, i have not. and it was a tough but concrete decision. >> rose: made alone? >> made, no, not made alone. it involved my family. >> rose: that's what i was going to ask you. >> it involved my family. but made and spoken about publicly. i've said it publicly. >> rose: to -- the perils 1906 to 1985 and 1906 to 1983 who experienced them.

who is she. >> she's a very important person in this story. kerry buck was one of the first women in the united states to be sterilized because sleeves -- she was thought to carry a mental illness. there's a progression in this book of eugenics of the idea that we can make better human beings. we talked about perfection and the crest for perfection. and of course there's a story in this booker of you know, when eugenic was invented in 1910 by darwin's cousin, many people in the united kingdom thought it was a very good idea. this was the way to move the human race forward. you get better smart, better looking, smarter human beings, very progressive idea. there's a meeting and folks like you know alexander graham bell and winston churchill, people signed on. then it metastasizes to the united states where from

selective breeding it turns to selective sterilization. let's sterilize people so they cannot have babies and kerry buck was one of the first women to be sterilized because it was thought she was carrying a gene for mental illness. the supreme court mandated, the case climbed to the court, the supreme court mandated and oliver wendall holmes said three generations of imbeciles is enough. the great moderate is saying three generations of imbecile is enough. kerry buck was sterilized. she was born the same year as my grandmother and died within a few years and in fact died sort of as the human genome project was being launched. so she was a reminder. and of course you know then the item metastasizes again of course in nazi germany where it become the nasty genetics not just sterilization but extermination.

and now, this brings us full circle, we are entering an era of personalized eugenics where there's no state mandate, no sterilation or extermination we are entering an era where you ask me to sequence your genome and what would you do with that information. that too has a eugenic code. >> rose: it's personal. >> it's personal and not mandated. it's a moral question. obviously you're not external noting people by putting them in gas chambers as was the case with eugenics in the 1930's and 1940's. >> rose: there's no perfect answer for anybody. ie it really is a personal decision. you made a margin decision. >> it is a personal decision. >> rose: people who know there's a certain risk may make a different decision. >> absolutely they might make a different decision. >> rose: and it's so new.

>> and it's so new. and also the decisions are shrouded in uncertainties and it's not as if no one is going to give you. you remember you know remember what eventually became a cult hit where you're given a kind of report card but it's a report card in -- it will become that and you will become that. what this gives us is a report card of unknowabilities. >> rose: i have a trend and i'm interesting in talking more about it. he is in his 40's, enormously

wealthy, successful and childless. not married has chosen to have two children. >> yes. >> rose: he chose who would carry the baby. he chose the egg donor and he chose among possibilities. >> yes. >> rose: and he used as much as he knew about the genetic information to make his choice. >> you're asking incredibly important question about what it means. what would happen if as we enter the era of personalize eugenics as we enter the era of personalizing reading the genetic code, what if there was a price attached to it. would we now start creating a multiclass system in which some were more able to choose because they could afford it and others were not able to choose because

they can't afford it. again, far away possibilities for things like height or intelligence. partly because these you know are, there's no simple genetic code for this, as i said, in cases like this combinations of, you know, genes, environment chance. we don't even know how to define some of these parameters very accurately. so but on the other hand elimination of some diseases, we're getting to that place. we're getting to the place where you could reduce the risk for, you could choose a gene variance where there's a reduced risk for alzheimer's disease in the distant future. so you're asking a question whether if these technologies were offered and if they were, to have a price tag attached to them, would we start creating genetic classes. of course this has been explored in books, in the 1910's and

1920's. they are being in works of fiction which are now being less and less seem like works of fiction. >> rose: as it always is. the book is called gene an intimate history. siddartha mukherjee the emperor of all maladies about conference. this is an extraordinary book and it's an important book and it's an interesting read to understand really who we are and how we are changing. thank you for coming. >> thank you. thanks for having me. >> rose: back in a moment. stay with us. >> rose: cyber warfare has become a crucial tactic in modern military strategy. zero days is the newest documentary from filmmaker alex gibney. it tells the story of a self replicating computer virus the u.s. and israel released to destroy a key part of iranian nuclear facility. it is clear and positively

terrifying at times. here is a trailer for the film. >> why can't we talk more openly and publicly about it. >> before we even get started. i don't know and if i did we wouldn't talk about it anyway. something as simple and innocuous as this becomes a challenge for all of us to maintain our infrastructure system. this contains the virus. >> passing industrial control. is this something coming after the homeland. you get up in the morning and turn off your alarm and make coffee. >> power plant, power grid. >> and pump gas. >> communication. >> and use the atm, you've touched industrial control systems. it's what powers our lives. >> most of these systems are relatively easy for sophisticated hacker to get into. >> the security experts who are setting it really think it requires the resources of a nation's base.

>> we wouldn't know if it would turn off electricity plants around the world or shutting things down or launching an attack. >> it was launching centrifuges and leaving no trace. >> how to be involved. >> fine. >> it went beyond all worse nightmares. >> this is not your ordinary, this is something bigger. >> it turned against its creator and now everyone is in this game. >> this is august 1945. somebody just used a new weapon and this weapon will not be put back in the box.

>> this is a small part of a much larger mission. >> rose: alex gibney is here and david sanger national security correspondent for the "new york times." i'm pleased to have them both here at this stay. we've been talking about stuck nets for a while. this is a whole range of curiosity. >> it's something called secrets wiki leaks and the producer of that film reminded me about the stuck net story. i had seen it peripherally reading about it in the "new york times." and it seems to me a story that needed a deeper dive at least in terms there had been no film about it so i got interested in it and started on. >> rose: you placed a phone call to david and said we should talk. >> we should talk, yes.

>> he showed up one day we met at a coffee shop about two blocks from the whitehouse. he read confront and conceal which is a book i had written came out four years ago and it was really about obama's first time but opens with this sort of almost made for movie scene in which leon panetta head of the cia comes down to the situation room to explain to president obama this worm they had put in the iranian centrifuges had done something gotten out and was spreading around the world. so suddenly the code was in the hands of the iranians, the russians, the chinese and everybody else. and it was the panic that came from that that actually gave me the thread that happened 2010 to do two years investigation that led back to the story of how president bush and then president obama secretly took this weapon and made the first

use of the cyber weapon by one major state against another in an act that previously you could only have done by sending in saboteurs who were bombing. >> rose: it is the new battlefield for warfare. >> i think it is. it's now regarding an entirely new domain. >> rose: you can shut down the infrastructure of a country you can do not only grievous damage to the way people exist but also the financial infrastructure and everything else. >> and military infrastructure. >> rose: and hospitals and everything else. >> that's right. so this has been starting in bits and pieces. i mean some of the sources that we talked to and of course you know some of the work david has done. i mean it started real in the iraq war and has been proceeding more and more. recently finally michael rogers from the nsa acknowledged we're using it in the consent against isis. >> rose: i know that. he told me and others in

interviews, how are they doing it. >> well what he has, what mr. rodgers has done what admiral rodgers has done is explain they are using it to go after the computer system that isis uses. this is the first terrorist group that's sophisticated about using computer systems. what they're not talking about what they've done with computers that are connected to real life machinery which is really what this is about. so for a long time people have gone in to computers, terrorists or nation states to do surveillance. sometimes they've gone in to manipulate new data. you begin to do what alex has portrayed so well and so graphically i think in the film and what we can't do in the "new york times" on the front page or in a book which is sort of

explain to people how changing code begins to change the entire world around you. it shuts down centrifuges, it causes explosions. but what else it does, charlie, it gives states a way to influence other states without going to war. i mean people use the phrase cyber war but the ways we see it used most recently have been attacks that walk right up to the level that would lead to a military response but not quite get there. so we believe it was the russians who shut down the power system in ukraine in december. the iranians attacked, north koreans attacked sony. something short of a bomber showing up at your capital.

>> it may have crossed the line but because a bomber wasn't responsible but instead it was a piece of code somehow it doesn't trigger the same reaction. a number of lawyers told me if the iranian had launched a similar kind of attack stuxnet on the united states that would be a target on critical infrastructure at a time of peace. >> think of the sony case. think of instead of sending code to melt down 70% of sony pictures entertainment pictures over a film called the interview. if they fought their way through the traffic for half a day and stuck tnt under the computer center at sony and blown it sky high. it would have done about the same damage, maybe a little bit less. but it probably would have resulted in military response because it would have felt like an attack on the united states.

instead, they got some pretty mild economic sanctions and it led product to question whether or not we even have the right structure to go respond to these kinds of attacks. >> rose: are we getting the right structure. >> very slowly charlie. this is something that i think alex has done so well in the film. it's very hard to design a deterrent to this kind of thing. if you are not willing to talk about what your capability is. the united states has spent billions of dollars. u.s. cyber command those who came to talk to you, about the runs, part of its runs alongside the national security agency. and yet because the united states has never acknowledged stuxnet at olympic games or any other cyber operations they've done, they can't get into a discussion about how you deter other countries from attacking us. >> rose: because they don't exactly -- take a look at this. this is you in the film.

here is david discussing how he discovered the stuxnet code. >> the emergence of the code is what put me on alert that an attack was under way. and because of the covert nature of the operation, not only were official governments spokesmen unable to talk about it, they didn't even know about it. eventually the more i dug into it, the more i began to find individuals who had been involved in some piece of it or who had witnessed some piece of it. and that meant talking to americans, talking to israels, talking to europeans because what was obviously the first biggest and most sophisticated example of a state or two states using a cyber weapon. >> rose: what questions did you not answer in this documentary?

>> well. >> rose: could you not find parts of the story. >> i think one of the mess frustrating parts of the story riffing off what david said they refuse to talk to me about it or refuse to discuss their role in the operation. this is after the operation was blown and we now know the u.s. was real was responsible for this attack. i want to talk about the attack. i did not have to know the code for the attack but nobody will engage on this issue. it's also relentlessly secret and nobody will engage on the issue why it's so secret. that was maybe one of the most frustrating aspects of the film and ultimately one of the things the film became about. >> rose: right. for example you told the hollywood reporter back in february, the level of secrecy shocked me because this is a big deal. we're talking about a potential global cyber war. and our leaders aren't even talking about this. >> that's right. we can't get them to have a

discussion because it's all secret. and for something that could be an existential threat for us because we have so much to lose we are deeply enter connected. our computers are so sophisticated. one of the reasons the ukrainian came back on is because they're old school, they have buttons that you push on and off. >> rose: so where is this going. >> charlie, i think where this is going is that not only major nation states have access to it but smaller nation states do. and then eventually non--we hae never seen anything for olympic gains or the banking system here to the saudis. that day will come because the

talent isn't very expensive. people do a lot of analogies between cyber and nuclear and most of them don't work. a nuclear weapon goes off, you are killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of people. a cyber weapon goes off, you could imagine a situation with mass casualties but we haven't seen one yet and probably you're just taking yourself back a few decades. but one area where the nuclear analogy does work goes just to what alex was just saying before. after hiroshima, after we had generals who want to use the atomic bomb in korea, first the koreans and the chinese. >> rose: douglass macarthur. >> right. after you had generals who were advising president kennedy during the missile crises to go have a nuclear war with the soviets at the time. we ended up having a big debate

in the united states about how we want to use and control nuclear weapons. how henry kissinger got his start among others. and we had it even though all of the details of nuclear weapons where you kept them, how you use them, how you connect, that was all secret. that's what we need to have in cyber. it's possible to have the debate about how you want to control this, whether you want to use it without revealing every single secret about what you're doing with it. and we haven't managed to do that yet. we've done it a bit with drones but we haven't with cyber. >> rose: what's interesting about hearing you say that we need to have a debate about this. at the same time we are now have serious questions raised about privacy and encryption and all because of what happened with the apple phone. there are these constant huge questions that we're saying we have to have a debate. that it's a question that ought to be talked about, people don't

understand the consequences. we don't have those debates. >> no we're not. encryption came the closest because everybody's got an apple phone sitting there and they understand that. and it was interesting that the government -- >> rose: maybe they will. >> maybe they will ultimately. the government started by saying look we need a way in. and didn't have an answer to the question. once you created a way in, you've created a way in for the chinese and the russians and everybody else. >> it's the same issue with cyber war. because one of the things that when we talk about cyber war, cyber weapons one of the things hayden former director of the cia, these come out of the war and one of the mechanisms is spying on people. but once you get into a network you also have the ability through that technology to then attack. but the getting in is like opening trapdoors all over the place. so we have put implants waiting

for some day in the future when we might attack. but we're not the only ones doing it. the chinese are doing it, the russians are doing, the iranians are doing it. so lying in wait all over the world are these trapdoors in which critical infrastructure is already attached to weapons waiting to launch. >> rose: is this one of those cases, you referred to this in an interview, you have to approach it with a certain simple curiosity. you got to basically say i don't know the answers. what's going on here. >> that's my approach always. my job is to be columbo. i'm the rumplet trench coat going in and asking the right questions. the one was bethany mick clean who wrote smartest guys in the room. she asked the question of enron which nobody else was willing to ask is how exactly does enron make its money. >> rose: yes, exactly.

where are we now in terms of cyber warfare in terms of where we're not just in terms of discovering what others can do and looking at what we did with the israels in terms of the iranians. where is the conflict and who is smart at it. who is best at it? what should we be fearing most. how do we protect against it, all those questions. >> i think the united states is probably still the best. when i did a foreign policy interview with donald trump he said that he thought the u.s. was very weak at it. but you look at some of his hotels, they've all been hit at various points and some of them probably by nation states we don't know entirely who but perhaps just by criminals. russia and china are very good. china used to attack us broadly and steal all the intellectual property they possibly could. president obama reached an agreement with president xi last september and we've seen some fall off in the volume of

chinese activity buzz they've gotten much more sophisticated. the russians are incredible sophisticated and it looks like in the attack on the dnc, democratic national committee which was simply as far as we can tell an espionage attack. it had none of the sophistication of what you see in alex's film. that that was two competing russian intelligence agencies. neither one which knew the other one was all attacking the dnc. what it tells you we're not only seeing competition among states but within states to show their own bosses that they're the best at this. the difficulty is that nuclear is really hard to get at. you need uranium or plutonium. you're out of luck. all you need is money. what you need for cyber warfare is some really unique prarms and you can buy them fairly cheap.

the north kreantz who can't make a lightbulb can take down a movie studio and an infrastructure. >> rose: did they buy them or send them outside to get an education. >> both, both. they seem to operate a lot from chie know, maybe some from southeast ashu as well. so you can move around. and you can hide where it's coming from. so you know, used to be you'd go into a big cave in colorado, you could see where the missiles were being launched from. when the "new york times" get attacked a few years ago by chinese attackers, in fact some of my colleagues wrote about how the prime minister's family was profiting from his name. it looked for a while like the attack was coming from a university in the southern united states. it looked that way because universities have lots of broadband and they're usually fairly open because you want universities to be open. and so they're easy for attackers to go route their attacks through.

so the key to this, and i think what comes through in the documentary so well is, if you don't solve the problem with attribution, knowing where every attack is coming from which to some degree requires redesigning the internet. you won't solve this problem. >> rose: thank you david. >> thank you. >> rose: thank you alex. >> thank you. >> rose: thank you for joining us. see you next time. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide.

>> announcer: the following kqed production was produced in high definition. >> the beef torta was out of this world. >> i actually don't discriminate against pizza. >> this is a temple to -- >> we couldn't see it, and we couldn't hear it. >> like, "whoa! i'm actually in san francisco?" >> this is amazing! [ laughter ] bring me more.