balloon named newt gingrich who isn't on the campaign trail but in an expensive restaurant in washington and anti-contraception forum and rick santorum is barely competing between two guys that seem to come from monty python. >> good to have you with us. rachel maddow show starts right now. i know you have a super exclusive, beyond exclusive interview coming up. >> we do. we have been looking forward to breaking for a long time. a special report tonight, ed. thanks, man. >> i'm glued. >> thank you to you at home for joining us this hour for what is a rachel maddow special report. i have taken three days off in the last three months. i got the stomach flu on super bowl sound i missed the day after that i spent last wednesday at the state department and doing reporting on what is going on in afghanistan right now. if and how plans for the war might be in flux. there was one other day i have taken off.

>> thank you so you for sticking around with us tonight. rachel is on assignment. >> question mark, right. tonight i get to tell you where i was on that assignment. this is an exclusive report, which means we get to put up the little thing that says exclusive. do we have that? thank you. this is an exclusive report. we are breaking news that nobody else has and frankly it is good news. it starts here. president eisenhower en hower. every liberal's favorite eisenhower moment is the farewell address where he coins the phrase military industrial complex and he explains how the defense industry threatened to overwhelm the rest of what we want and need as a country. my favorite eisenhower speech has not been that last one, but one of his first big ones the adams for peace speech that he gave in his first year in office. president eisenhower en hower talked about the united states having an arsenal of weapons that could essentially destroy the world. and then, as now we were the

only country to have used an atomic weapon in hiroshima and nagasaki but it was clear it wasn't just us anymore. the soviet union had a number of successful tests. so president eisenhower en hower in the adams for peace speech talked about the hopeless finality that two atomic cole lassie are doomed to eye each other indefinitely across a troubling world. he talked about the acceptance of the probability of civilization destroyed the anail nighlation of the irreplaceable heritage of man chiend handed down from generation to generation. >> condemnation of man kind to begin all over again. the age-old effort from safagery toward decency and right and justice it. >> is not often that presidents talk this deep, right, talk about the united states not wanting to drive the human race back to the stone ages or the desire of our country not to be

recorded in history as one of the great destroyers. but that is what eisenhower said outloud in the adams for peace speech. it was amazing and it was awful. it was awful because what eisenhower announced in that speech was a plan to make nukes, not just a thing that could end the world, but a positive thing, too. we went from being a country that kept nuclear information so secret that as vice president harry truman didn't even know we had the bomb until fdr died. truman had to become president before anyone told him we had the bomb. we went a country so possessive of our nuclear advantage we wanted to be the only ones in the world not only with nuclear weapons but nuclear power and we were going to buy all the uranium to make that so. under my beloved president eisenhower en hower we went from that possessive, keep the genie in the bottle country to a country that exported nuclear technology all over the world. that's what adams for peace was

about. nuclear technology and nuclear material. it was supposed to be for peaceful purposes, just for energy. but science tisk industrial technology that we exported around the globe is what ech eventually israel, india and pakistan turned in to full-fledged nuclear weapons programs. what started as us having nuclear weapons and then us in the sovt yoen and us, the soviet union, brits, french and chinese and then the us, the soviets brit, french, chinese, israel and pakistan and during the bush administration we added north korea too. this is who in the world has nuclear weapons. let's add an outline around iran. even though iran says they neither have or want them there are international concerns that they are working on having nuclear weapons but may be close to that. if this is the world of nuclear weapons, look at this big

picture. take a step back from this. what do you notice about this? there are whole swaths of the world with no nuclear weapons in them and -- why is that? why are there no nuclear weapons in all of africa? in all of south america? that's oun on purpose. it is not that they didn't have the option. south africa under apartheid made nuclear weapons but gave them up voluntarily. the cuban missile crisis was a worry about soviet missiles moved to cue bau but starting in '67 swaths of the world declared themselves nuclear free zones. they wouldn't have them or let other countries put them there. it was central and south america and the caribbean. in '85 the south pacific including australia. in '92 mongolia. in '95 southeast asia. in 96 it was all of africa. in 2006, it was parts of central

asia, the stans, kazakhstan, uzbekistan, all together when you look at those places it is two-thirds of all of the countries in the world. including vinchly the southern hemisphere agreeing to be nuclear weapons free, which is awesome. but here's the problem. just because you don't have nuclear weapons doesn't mean you don't have nuclear material all over the place. in part, because we shipped it all over the place. thanks, ike. we set up nuclear research reactors all over the place. i love you president eisenhower en hower but man what a mess. we sent highly enriched uranium and the technology to use it in reactors which is the same technology you need for nuclear weapons we sent it all over the globe. on a globe, where a nuclear explosion is the highest aspiration of the lowest human life forms where there is a black market in nuclear material where highly enriched uranium

could make a dirt bomb or terrorist like the world has never seen but the world has nightmares about all the time. it is a big freaking problem there is loose nuclear material all over the world. there aren't nuclear weapons all over the world but the means to make them are there and stealable in all sorts of places you do not want them to be. quote, to get the materials needed to build a bomb terrorists would l not necessarily go where there is the most material. they will go where the material is most vulnerable. that makes global nuclear security only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. so said the nuclear threat initiative. it is this person's job, that person standing with me in the ridiculous suit, this person's job to go get nuclear material all over the earth and lock it down. you pay that person's salary. would you like to meet her? you are about to. the national nuclear security administration locks down loose nuclear material around the globe on behalf of the united states of america.

we have taken on that responsibility partly because we have an interest in there not being nuclear terrorism in the world. but part of us taking on this responsibility here is a lot of the loose nuclear material that is out in the world initially came from us. it came from the united states in the first place. and so, today's big news, remember that ike gave that adams for peace speech in 1953, three years later, mexicans formed a nuclear energy commission. that commission became mexico's national institute for nuclear research and that is where i went on assignment last month when ezra filled in for me that night because that is where mexico keeps its highly enriched uranium. mexico has taken good care of it but highly enriched uranium is terrorist holy grail, the black market smuggling prize to end

all black market smuggling prizes and if someone did steal it there is not like there are any viable smuggling routes between mexico and the united states, are there? as of today i can report in the entire nation of mexico there is no longer any highly enriched uranium because our government, working with mexico and canada too we just removed it. it is like a spy movie how we did it. we're in mexico city now. we are going to teluca. we are in rush hour so it might be an hour and a quarter or a day. >> hopefully not a day. probably around an hour and a half i would guess. >> plenty for me to plum the depths of what we are doing here with you. are you still the director of the former soviet union at nsa. >> yes, i am. >> why are we in mexico? >> good question. it has to do with the way our office is ork newsed. i'm the coordinator for all of our removal activities

regardless of location, ukraine, mexico, chile it doesn't matter. my office is in charge. >> everywhere the nsa is collecting nuclear material, you are in charge of the logistics. >> that's correct. >> can you tell people what you do? like when you leave to do something like this, where does your family think you are going. >> my family in general knows the location of where i am going. it is not classified where i am going but the operation and details of the operation. >> what should people understand about the difference between what we think of as nuclear power reactors and research reactors? >> the biggest difference is the material itself. the material that is used to power a nuclear power plant is only enriched to three to four percent of u-235. it is not material that they could use to make a nuclear weapon 20% or greater. the research reactors have much higher enrichments of materials. the reactor we are going to

today the material is 70% enriched. some are higher than that. >> research reactors tend to be smaller in scale but have scarier stuff. >> exactly. the material is much smaller. so it is easier to transport. a usual reactor fuel rod is something you could pick up and walk off on your own. >> it is not so radioactive that you are going to -- >> not if it is put in a reactor. if it is in an operating research reactor and irradiated you would not pick up and walk off with it unless you are crazy because you will die. >> something that comes out of a nuclear reactor, something that has spent fuel, if it is so radioactive that grabbing hold of it kills you it self protects. it makes it less stealable. but fresh fuel that hasn't been put through that process that is more portable and much more smuggleable. >> more attractive target. >> why would mexico be happy to get rid of their highly enriched

uranium? obviously it is a risk to them that it falls in the wrong hands as much as any other country that might be worried it would be smuggled out of mexico. presumably they had a reactor producing producing uranium for a reason. why would they be willing to see that converted? >> well, a lot of it is because there's been this push an international effort for all of them to convert from if agu to low enriched uranium. there is nothing they can use it for. it is material in a pond with no disposition pathway but they have to secure. by getting rid of the material it reduce the threat level at the site and they can reduce their cost to secure the material, as well. >> the part of it that seems clear to me is you don't want to have this expensive, dangerous useless thing on your hands. that's a reason you should be willing to convert your reactor so it doesn't produce highly

enrichment uranium before. >> it may have higher performance than now. >> the united states is doing that. >> the united states is doing through the atomic energy agency. >> so we're paying for it? >> we are paying for it. >> the mexico is not a nuclear weapons state but having a research raervegt and having power started in the mid-50s. when the united states under eisenhower was actively promoting the spread of nuclear know how and technology and not for proliferation, not for weapons but civilian uses. right in the sweet spot for what we were trying to do, spread that around the world. is that the other side of that? we let that genie out of the bottle. india, pakistan and israel took advantage of that and became nuclear weapons states after we spread that know-how around the world. that wasn't the intention but one thing that happened an now we are worried about nuclear terrorism so we are trying to recontain it, trying to put it

back in the box? >> that's exactly what we are trying to do. >> 50 years later. >> 50 years later. >> do you curse eisenhower's name. >> i would never do that. i love my job. >> i got to say i have been an ike fan. this infuriates me. >> in hindsight it was not our best decision. >> yeah. it was a beautiful idea, oh, we have these horrible weapons that can destroy the world. let's use that terrible destructive power and it will be just as positive if we use it for something other than weapon. >> perhaps overly trusting. >> one thing that even the united states has had difficulty with and countries around the world, every country in the world has had to consider this is the corruptibility of people working at every level of the nuclear structure. like if you have got great gates and guys standing at them but if the guy with the gun is bribed, the overall level of corruption

and suspect blgt of people at every level, presumably that is affected by the general sense of lawlessness and the strengths of the institutions in the country. >> we take that in to consideration when we install security upgrades. it is a two-person rule to get near the material. one person will never have the key and pass code to the get in to a vault. it requires two. >> is that true in the u.s., too. >> yes. >> we try to instill rules that will prevent one person from being able to get to the material. be that as it may, no security system is perfect. you can reduce but not eliminate risk which which is why it is important to get rid of the material. not just protect it in place. >> that means protecting it in mexico in this case. which is not exactly war-torn somalia but mexico has its share of hurly-burly. particularly the organized crime violence of the drug cartels tied to the industry of smuggling in to the united states of america. i asked the united states

ambassador to mexico if that is part of the reason to breathe easier about mexico cleaning out all of its nuclear material. a lot of americans think about the political situation in mexico right now. they worry about the drug cartel and organized crime. people who are experts on these subjects don't seem to be worried that cartels are trying to get their hands on this stuff. what were the risks and benefits of the united states of this being done? >> i think this is part of a world-wide program. that's what we are talking about. it waunt worry that the stuff in mexico, the heu was going to fall in to bad hands but a global commitment to take this dangerous stuff and try to lower the levels all over the world. and the mexicans are participating in that process. >> is there a connection, in your mind, or in the united states calculations of the interest here between this

nuclear material and its security and all of the other things that are able to be smuggled over the u.s.-mexico border whether it is illegal migration, drugs, whether it is other things that are able to cross the border that aren't supposed to be able to. is that part of the worry? >> what i can say is the commitment and moving ahead with it is because of a global problem. second we are working closely with the mexicans on ways to improve security to help them build stronger law enforcements and judicial institutions, to build a 21st search ary border that is more secure and allows more people and commerce to go across it at the same time. but this program was not tied in to that. this program was part of this global effort at the last nuclear security summit to take and get commitments to reduce the levels of heu around the world. >> estimates vary depending on

who you are asking but roughly you can say it takes maybe 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon. they are not that hard to make. since the nuclear summit in 2010 where 40 countries agreed we would try as a globe to lock up all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years, since then more than 1,000 kilograms of nuclear material has been locked down. that's enough for hundreds of bombs but ton none of that material as of today is in mexico anymore. we have more ahead. >> today's shipment means that when this is completed, at this reactor we are going to today, there will be no more highly enriched uranium. >> we are removing fresh material. the spent material will be departing one week later by boat and then mex ke will be cleaned out. >> by this is on tv. >> by the time this is on tv

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our exclusive report on the elimination of nuclear material south of the u.s. border continues next. next is the part with the amazing taupe yar. you think i'm kidding. ohhh my head, ohhh. [ speaking in japanese ] yeah, do you have anything for a headache... like excedrin, ohhh, bayer aspirin...

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cuban missile crisis when the latin american countries decided they were going to be a nuclear weapons free zone, which is a huge part of the earth, they had options. think didn't have to do that. mexico is the country that led it, right. mexico is the depository country for the treaty and decided to champion that . even against initial resistance but that's why there is this huge swath of the earth that doesn't have nuclear weapons at all. and nicely the nuclear weapon states have agreed not to bomb. >> that is nice. >> nice part of the treaty. >> the nice thing about with this being completed pretty much every country below the united states will have only very small amounts of highly enriched uranium left. chile has been cleaned out. brazil only has a few grams. argentina has some we are downgrading because we couldn't bring it to the united states. once me mexico is cleaned out

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we are just pulling in to the mexico's national nuclear institute is where all the heu will be packed and hipped out. they are converting the reactor from highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium so that all of the heu, both the fuel that

would go to the reactor and the irradiated stuff in the reactor that is irradiated and very hot and you don't want to be near all of that stuff is leaving 0en this trip today. what they are doing today and next week. there's a lot of men with guns. there's also a lot of topiary. that appears to be a duck. >> a duck or small bird or something. >> i would say a water fowl. >> they take their topiaries very seriously. >> they do. i wonder what they run their hedge trimmers on. >> hopefully leu. >> among the jobs of people that work at the facility are keeping safe from terrorists, mexico's national stock of the highly enriched uranium, also making sure the rej hedges are trimmed

in the shapes of ducks and snakes in the name of the facility and making sure they don't get overgrown. that's a turtle. you have to keep the topiary tiptop. that's a duck. the world is come mex, coordinated place. that's some sort of bird. on this operation to get rid all all of mexico's weapons material, the movement of the uranium is just as complex and interrelated. the reactor has been run on highly enriched uranium so it takes highly enriched uranium fuel which is port able and stealable and desirable on the nuclear terrorist black market and that fuel goes to the reactor. in the reactor it is hugely radioactive and therefore more dangerous. it gets irradiated. by getting so dangerous it is less portable and stealable and will kile kill you if you are around it. the aagreement reached in 2010 was that mexico would change this reactor. so instead it will now use just

low-enriched your ram yum and has less potential to be used in a weapons context. three things in motion, the united states brought mexico low enriched uranium to use their reactor. the u.s. took away on this enormous c-17 here the fresh highly enriched uranium that mexico had that hasn't been through the reactor yet. highly stealable, not that dangerous but the u.s. took away mexico's highly enriched uranium that had been through the reactor already. this is the really radioactive super dangerous to handle stuff than that went by ship. that kind of thing cannot travel by plane. watch this. >> so why is the fresh fuel, which is the last pot, not irradiated fuel, why is that leaving by plane and the spent fuel, the more hot stuff leaving by ship? >> for two with reasons.

the fresh material because it is a more attractive target we'd like to get it out of the country as soon as possible. >> it is more attractive because it is the thing that you could more easily weaponize. >> right. you can easily pick it up on your own because it is not radioactive and easy to turn in to a nuclear weapon. the spent fuel, there's not a certified package that allows the transport of spent fuel by plane. >> certified package. >> we do not have a pack thaj has gone through the necessary testing to the give everybody enough confidence that you can put the material on a plane and if there were an incident that the package would not be breached. >> in case of a plane crash. i got ya. so it can't -- >> it can't go by plane. >> okay. there isn't anything in it that is strong and safe enough to guarantee that it won't crack open in a plane crash. >> not in a plane crash. >> not in the world or not in the united states. >> not in the united states.

we recently kplooep completed a certification to have cast that is certified for russia. >> it is certified for russia but not for us. >> how did you certify it? >> it is a long process. it takes a year and a half, two years to do a certification. you are taking part the cast and putting it on a plane. they need to do a scenario whereby they would figure out the impact if the plane crashed with the cast on the plane. we didn't want to rent a plane and put the cast on it and crash it. that didn't make sense. >> have a dummy flying it. >> wouldn't be smart. so the russians came up with a deseen where they built a rocket pad. they put a rocket on the back of the cast and sent it off by rocket until it crashed and then they were able to look at the impact of the crash of the cast and determine there was no breach and therefore the cast could possibly. >> they literally strapped a rocket. >> that's my understanding.

i was not witness to it. >> so -- >> sounds right. >> it is an art and a science. >> also a sitcom sometimes. >> doctor luis is the research director for mexico's research raekt and the head of affairs for the latin america research agency. >> what is in there? >> -- you can remotely handle some of the -- >> oh, wow because they are highly radioactive you can manipulate and then if you want to move the samples and take them and so on. all remotely. and then we produce the samples so it can be tested like this one. >> can i do that? >> yes, sure.

>> can i move that. >> like this. >> oh, yeah. okay. now i know what i want to be in my next life. >> this is like space technology. >> i feel like i'm part robot. >> yeah. >> very cool. i can turn it like that. it has full range of motion and a clamp like that. i would grab something in this but i'm not going to. >> these two steel doors also should we have any accident reactive material is released, instead of going out of the building it is always inside. this is always -- >> this is part of containment? >> it is part of containment. this is the control room. this is the reactor console.

this reactor is a reactor with a pool with about eight meters of water. >> just plain water. >> it is plain water. >> okay. >> it is just the water is for two purposes. first to cool the reactor. secondly, to stop radiation and be able to work along the reactor. >> so the water is a barrier. >> exactly. >> radiation interacts with the atoms of the water and stop the radiation. it is like the shielding of all the volume of water. >> the reactor is at the bottom? >> the reactor is right at the bottom of it. you can see down inside there are holes where the fuel elements go. you can see the other side of the reactor. you can see those holes. when a reactor is working, the only thing that you see is bluish light. that is produced when radiation goes through water and then you

get very intensive blue lights. >> can you look at it or is it dangerous? >> no. you can look at it. by the time it comes out here it is -- right at the core you can see it. but here you don't get any radiation. >> even in nuclear research reactors, you need a shop vac. every work site, all around the world, there's a shop vac. i don't care if it is a nuclear reactor. you still need one. >> once it is transported, it will be done immediately. >> very fast. >> put in there. and be sent and shipped immediately. so there is no risk of anybody getting hands on this. at the moment, just empty containers. >> is all of the fresh, all of it is going to fit in those. >> all in that. >> are these sealed by the iea. >> yes. >> can i see what the seal looks like? >> yes. let's go.

i was talking to the iaea director general, after i finished interviewing him he said make sure you see the seals. >> you have the seal and the seal twice. >> i see. okay. >> so when it gets back to the united states, we take the iaea seals off and mail them back to the iaea and that ensures nothing has been tampered with in the transportation route. >> y 12 is an american facility. >> yeah. >> i think i thought the seals were going to be locks. i thought they were going to be big intense physical barrier. >> the seals themselves are intended to show that no one has tampered with the packages since they were packaged. >> if you open this up this would have to come off. >> that's when you know this is a problem but it is not

necessarily ended to prevent access. that's what the bolts are from. >> the empty one has no iaea seals. >> no. >> these are the same puppies that will be on the plane with us tomorrow? >> yeah. these are the same casts that will be on the plane tomorrow. >> puppies is the word. >> puppies would be cuter. >> right. less radioactive. you know how when you have a package for what you are going to send, like, you know, postal service or ups or whatever, this is from the nuclear research facility we are at right now in mexico to oak ridge, tennessee, just in case it gets lost along the way it has a return aez address. i wouldn't want to handle the postage but it is there. >> what we had to do for this operation, given the complexity of the leu and heu removal, we had to bring a specialized forklift on this military c-17

plane. this forklift played a key role because we had to unload 40 assemblies of low enriched uranium and then load the highly enriched uranium on to the military aircraft. we could not have done that using just the equipment in mexico and in order to make sure we did it efficiently we had to bring our own forklift here as part of this classified operation. >> what now happens to the fresh highly enriched uranium, which is on board this c-17 with us now? when we land, where does it go? and how long does it take to get where it needs to be? >> when we land, we'll transfer it to a truck, and move it to the y-12 national nuclear security complex. >> at what point do you sort of breathe a sigh of relief? what is the thing that happens where you feel like now i can take a nap? >> in the last bit of material, all the heu, in this case is delivered both to idaho and to

y-12. >> december 2009, libya was giving up the very last of its material, right, and that was about five kilograms of spent highly enriched uranium, which is what is being transported from the mexico site, as well. when the revolution happened in libya, gadhafi eventually fell and was killed, did you breathe the biggest sigh of relief ever in the entire government. did you just feel like i can't believe there's no more nuclear material there anymore and i am so happy i could cry? >> many of us felt that way. when we were watching the events unfold in libya, it was just, you know, stunning to the us what the risk might have been had we not been able to finish removing the material. i had -- i have had similar feelings about iraq. i worked in iraq in 2003 and

2004 setting up some of our nonproliferation programs there from the state department and one of the early things that the department of energy did, at that point with the u.s. military, was to secure radid logical sources. imagine what the sources may have been and there were thousands. >> what kind of radioactive material was it? >> it was a lot of different sources that were used from everything from lightning rods to medical treatments. you put two or three of these in each ied and you would have a dirty bomb every time an ied went off. >> today is the ninth anniversary of the u.s. invasion of iraq in 2003. the war started because pancreatic president bush said that iraq had weapons of mass destruction which wasn't true and an active program to make nuclear weapons which also wasn't true. that doesn't mean there wasn't nuclear material in iraq.

a lot of countries all over the world have nuclear material. once we invaded iraq under false pretensions, while we were looking for those supposed weapons that didn't really exist there, the u.s. energy department did, by the way, lock down all of the loose nuclear material in iraq. and then we went on having a war there for another eight years. thank god they did it. in the context of a war that even bush administration officials are calling, quote, a mistake, the biggest strategic error since vietnam, locking down loose nuclear material in iran is something we are glad to have done. when candidates talk about getting rid of the department of energy because it doesn't do anything useful, what they are asking you to judge is whether you think locking up loose nuclears around the world is a useful thing. because that's what they do. they have removed all weapons news usable nuclear material from the can country of mexico which is next door. more ahead. we'll be right back.

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in our nuclear reactors in mexico. can you decipher this mess. >> it is unfortunately in spanish. if it were in english, i am sure i would know what it all says. >> this is actually heartening. so if you are a kid in science class, at some noint your educational career in the united states and thinking when is this stuff ever going to be used in real life, even if i am a scientist we will be doing everything on computers. we will never use these stupid chalk boards. why do i have to write it out on chalk boards guess what n the middle of the nuclear research facility chalk board and the scientist who is bad has to clean the erasers. >> exactly. i see a few symbols i recognize from math class. >> i recognize a few symbols from sororities or... we make it pink ! with these 4g lte tablets, you can do business at lightning-fast speeds. we'll take all the strawberries, dave. you got it, kid.

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we have exclusive footage here of the arrival in the united states of the last highly enriched uranium in mexico. as you can see it is arriving at night. the flight that you saw earlier, the c-17, that took the uranium fuel rods that had not been in mexico's research reactor that were therefore safe to handle but the super radioactive stuff that can kill you the stuff in the reactor, we do not allow that on planes. that goes in multiton steel casts that get loaded to a shipping container and hoisted

by a giant crane. the uranium in mexico got trucked over land to the port of ver ra cruz and hoisted to a ship and sailed north to the u.s. where it has been safely down blended them reason these missions do not get disclosed until the material is rendered safe if nib anyone is going after the nuclear material to steal it and that's what you worry about here, the people may try that when the material is in motion and while it is being moved. as of today, we can report the nation of mexico has been cleaned out of nuclear material. head of the nuclear security administration who was on that c-17 flying the last freshly highly enriched uranium to the united states and the man responsible for this function of the united states government is joining me. nice to see you. >> great to be back. >> first, i have explained a lot about this in the last it will le bit of the show. tell me what i got wrong. i'm sure i messed something up. >> i think you got it exactly

right. these are complicated missions. it requires ten agencies, between two countries, international atomic agencying was involved, multiple agencies within both governments so you can imagine the coordination of pulling this all together. that's why -- it is not something you say we will do this next month and make it happen. it takes years of planning and the summit is what was the catalyst to get us going. >> they were working on clearing weapons usable material out before the summit. has the pace picked up? >> tremendously. put in terms of numbers and give us a sense. we started in the mid-'90s, 13 years ago before the first summit. during that time we got a lot 0 done. we worked in 13 countries, cleared out highly enriched uranium in 13 country and took care of 2500 kilograms of material. that is 13 years. in the last two years we have

taken care of 1,000 kilograms and cleared out material in seven country and the next two years another seven country and another 1,000 kilo grms. a four-fold increase in pace and that's what vision gets you, that's what leadership gets you. that's what determination and focus gets you and that's what we have with the nuclear security summit and the president's declaration on four years in locking down material. it is wonderful. we do it with our international partners. >> in terms of the nuclear security summit you were just discussing was from april of 2010. president obama gave the prague speech in 2009 and a year later the 47-nation summit. the next one, the two-year followup is next week. >> next week. >> even more countries will be involved there. is it just checking on pacing to see if we are on track to lock up all vulnerable material or will it be nd about rtant to ge progress report and a

recommitment. we want to have a recommitment of all of our countries together bringing in a few more international organizations. the iaea will be actively involved in working with on this because they are a key part of this. it will be left to be determined to the leaders of these countries to determine whether we want to add more commitments, if you will, on top of this. we have our work cut out for us. we have a big job in the next year and a half and it is not over until it is over. after a year and a half we have to make sure the security upgrades stay in place. >> the director general of the national atomic energy agency was there when i was there and i asked him whether or not the disaster at puck sheem ma changed the way countries around the world think of safety of nuclear power and security. you think of those spent fuel rods in those reactors in fukishima and that's all i could

think of when i looked at the research reactor which are well taken care of, but has that changed the urgency or who cares about it or the list of prior y priorities in this field. >> it goes to show that this is something we need to manage. we need to do it in a deliberate way and we need to do it together. therefore, i like attention on this topic. i think the right kind of attention on nuclear security is the thing that we want. this is what we get with these security summits. we get this kind of attention at the highest levels of government. that's what brings government organizations within the united states government together. we know the president wants this. we are working together to go make it happen. >> tom d' dg agostino, thank you for helping mooe me and my team to get close enough to cover this story and thank you for your time. >> absolutely. >> nice to see you again. >> like wise. >> i like that we pais pay his salary. the late oens the trayvon

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initiate, bill, and track work in real time. you can't live under a dome in minnesota, that's why there's guys like me. [ male announcer ] it's a network of possibilities -- helping you do what you do... even better. ♪ we have been report i ingbreaking news tonight that mexico has officially die vested itself of all weapons usable nuclear material. a secret operation to the united states for disposel and gown gloinding the country's entire stock mile of highly enriched uranium. there's more posted at maddow blog.com including an interview with the director of the international atomic agency. and how we find things that is made of scrap metal that nobody knew was radioactive and wasn't supposed to be. tomorrow we will have coverage of the illinois primary.