well i'm john martin of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture and it's the republican battle on super tuesday progressive's suffered a major defeat for them because senator joins us tonight about where his fight for progressive causes may take him next also as we approach the one year anniversary of the fukushima disaster the people of japan continue to suffer from their nation's nuclear folly how can we prevent nuclear disasters from ravaging america the way they have japan and ukraine with the meltdowns. and chernobyl and and it's

a daily take our ohio state senator is doing such a sweet job of looking out for the medical interests of rush limbaugh. you need to know this since one nine hundred ninety seven congressman dennis kucinich has represented the tenth district of ohio in the united states house of representatives so why then did he have to compete in a democratic primary in the ninth district of ohio this last tuesday it's because ohio lost two congressional seats the last census was taken in with the republicans in charge of redistricting they got rid of congressman because that is tenth district forcing him to run against another democrat congresswoman marcy kaptur and what was mostly heard ninth district unfortunately congressman because something has to stay in congress came up short on tuesday that means for the first time in fifteen years the people of ohio will not be represented by caught by dennis kucinich a true champion for the middle class and one of the strongest voices for peace

around the world so what does losing one of its most progressive members mean for the democratic party and for america and where does congress and senate go next here to share some insights on those questions congressman dennis kucinich himself the representative of ohio. district welcome congressman. there is so much going on in the world that i'd love to get your opinions on first of all any any thoughts or comments that you just want to make about you know the race the process the redistricting the republican dirty tricks there's a lot of people watching right now. reversals in their life who have had their own defeats and what i've learned through political career where i've lost eight elections. is that if you personally are you don't quit now you are going back and that's why i threw my career in congress defeat then has never had any power over me and that's enabled me to stand up and speak out so in a way losing further empowers you to be able to take the next step to be aggressive

in speaking out on behalf of the truth it reminds me of a of abraham lincoln who lost a bunch of elections. but also the the old i guess it's a cliche but cliches are cliche because the truth you know every time it's a closes another opens and you thoughts on what might be opening or wide open well . one of my wife my wife and i have a favorite poem that there's a line at it it's that on my heart as open as the sky and i take you that whatever the universe has it's awaiting me to defeat was part of it so i not only accepted but i welcome what lies ahead in the meantime the commitments that i have will remain unchanged and i intend to continue to be very active and try and pushing back against this talk of war and the effort to take it's going to war against iran in making sure we get our economy moving take care of things here at

home. taking care of their constituents in the district finishing the work the right sort of if you were just sharing with me before we went on the air this story leon panetta is now talking about yet for ready to strike iran. what you know this is like what three days after the president said hey wait a minute the star wars you know they're coming out of but after mitt romney wrote the op ed basically in the russian post saying iran was building a new which is the opposite of what our all sixteen of the u.s. intelligence agencies say you know obama kind of slapped him down for that now leon panetta is device that we need to understand what's going on here now there is political pressure coming from republican presidential candidates with the exception of ron paul. to go to war against iran. in that political climate we also are seeing oil prices moving up because of the talk right now with which worse of the benefit of the republicans actually it does but also you have the president

giving a speech they pack saying stop this loose talk of war and as you point out in the internet are now saying well you know we're getting ready to strike if we have to i think what's happening is the administration is sending two different signals they're sending a signal to israel don't you launch an attack because if it's necessary we will it may or may not be true and on the other hand they're sending a message to iran look this iteration serious if there's some more you can do to make some concessions you should do it so this is but in this game that nations play. there's always the x. factor which is the unknown that some party could take a step that could plunge us into a war because when you start preparing for war it makes war a little bit easier and that party sometimes is in your own backyard we learned when the l.b.j. tapes came out two half years ago that horrible tape of richard of lyndon johnson talking everett dirksen saying sixty eight saying he had

a peace deal with the south vietnamese and he said the cia wire subset found a nixon campaign telling the south vietnamese don't go to paris don't cut the deal we'll give you a better deal if you wait until after the election and he said every person ever this is treason i can't let the american people know but this is treason and never says yes it is i'll try to stop nixon but he could and you know there are tens of thousands of people millions of your i mean you could see the. predecessor conditions rencontre the hostages. were released after president reagan took what is are the minute he put him up so you know we know that there are always other political concerns going on but i just want to go back to something from. we have a type of thinking that keeps this into work. when when you think that war is inevitable that creates momentum for war their work becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and it's the kind of thinking that we have to be careful

of when we see that the united states is that war anywhere around the world we so choose you know is at war and we'll be at war no we have to stop that this is going to destroy our nation well we're already shifting priorities away from domestic spending into feeding the war machine must stop all the pentagon budget has tripled since ninety seven i think it was nine hundred ninety eight or nine the first time you and i met here in washington d.c. and you were kicking off an effort to create a department of peace and you know i thought that's a brilliant mean you know brilliant idea of this department of defense used to call the pro war these people are afraid of iraq but we when you look at the violence which is attended not only in our international affairs but perhaps more particularly more significantly you're here at home we have to challenge this idea that violence is as american as apple pie that violence is inevitable why then is taste not inevitable and if violence is

a learned response socially why then cannot peace be a learned response to potential aggression on an on and interpersonal level as well as an international level so what i propose. and that which is in legislation that i introduced regulator congress is the idea of creating a permanent structure in our government that aims at the mess the violence spousal abuse child abuse violence in the school gang violence gun violence racial violence violence against gays police community questions and use that as a basis to rework our social compact in this country not engineering but give people some opportunities for assistance to show that there's another way to respond to situation teach children peace giving peace sharing mutual. and you looking at the other person as an aspect of oneself and then that's not a domestic and then an international level the president is equipped with advisors who would show ways to avert conflict instead of getting into them it's it's really

and it's something that we should be doing and we talk politics a little bit ok ok in massachusetts elizabeth warren was on and then karl rove's pac came out with some money for the r. and c. came up with some money and they ran a whole bunch of real slasher ads taking the you know kind of the rock throwing tiny contingent of. the occupy movement conflating her with it and taking a quote from her that was surely a political metaphor yes i've thrown some rocks in my life and making that you know how they ended up in the and now she's down scott brown is back up it's like they're they're preparing for november and now in this post citizens united world i heard from another member of congress this was. three years ago it was right after citizens united he said that a lobbyist and come to him and said we've got about five hundred thousand dollars to spend in your district we can use it to build you up or destroy it which which

would you prefer and i mean that kind of real hardball is his genuinely being played which are well and it's the inversion of meaning it's right is wrong wrong it's right true it's false and false it's true or well what about this and what we have to do is get private money out of our elections that's why you're going to do is to a constitutional amendment that would say. public financing only no private money whatsoever then you can have the hope of government a public interest right now we have an auction called congress and policy goes to the highest bidder and he's attack ads are part of preparing the. electorate for a kind of sql o's self-contained event which an election is i compare it's a decent snow globes to shake them up in its nose then when the election's over people don't know what happened things settle down to what passes for normal in our society and they forget about the things that drove their passions for the moment

it's a very manipulative thing which is profoundly anti-democratic small detail or absolutely in the in the two minutes or so we have what do you think what do you see as the major issues that we confront as a nation and as a species our desire for for for water the militarism that's poisoning our country the. good the attack on our civil liberties the assumption of executives that they can take power of life and death over individual citizens these are this is all part and parcel of a society that is losing its constitutional moorings and so we need to assert what we're about as a nation we need to start taking care of things here at home all the money that we spend on these wars if you can imagine what if instead we had spent them on rebuilding our educational system making it possible for every young person to go to college if we spent it on health care for all creating jobs making sure that no

american would would be without a home shoring up social security and medicare we could have the shining city on a hill instead of a country going to hell it's absolutely true and the senate today the keystone pipeline fell just for four votes short but a bunch of about ten democrats have. order for this thing this is just another symptom of a broader congress well it's another symptom of the extraordinary influence of oil interests i mean there was a study for all to see that said that the oil interests would extract another four billion dollars from american consumers if the keystone pipeline went through that gas prices in our country will actually go up because a reallocation of supply and demand so for the manipulation that's why the oil has extraordinary influence when you think about how they're using oil leases that land it belongs to the people of the united states and then we get the privilege of buying oil from them going to jack up prices and they then help to frustrate the

development of alternative energy sources oh and telling us that this is the way it has to be no it's not the way it has to be on that thanks a lot congressman congressman john kasich thank you so much. coming up after the break as we approach the one year anniversary of the fukushima disaster the people of japan continue to suffer nuclear power be made safer should we just work to end it all together so such a disaster happens here. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and she told the truth. i think that since i am an old can of friends that i was proud and hip hop music and . she was kind of yesterday.

i'm very proud of the role that it's played. in the. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so silly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you saw. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

this sunday will mark the one year anniversary of the beginning of the fukushima nuclear disaster and a year on that disaster continues to devastate the people and the nation of japan towns and cities within miles of the fukushima plant are still covered in a fine layer of radioactive dust and even turned into a nuclear wasteland devoid of life those lucky enough to have survived the

earthquake and tsunami are now battling radiation poisoning and the probability of cancer and birth of folks has hundreds of thousands of people across the world for her to commemorate the tragedy over the course of the next month we need to ask ourselves is nuclear power really worth enduring such a horrible and deadly disaster will there ever be a way to make nuclear power a safe form of energy. we need to move away from it altogether but we have a special edition of conversations of great minds between stephanie cook stephanie is one of the world's top reporters and authors on the issue of nuclear energy and the use in history of nuclear weapons and is a real industry insider articles on nuclear topics of of your have appeared in a variety of publications including reader's digest the international herald tribune a g.q. magazine jeffrey first began her reporting career in one nine hundred seventy seven the associated press and later moved to london where she covered the chernobyl disaster for business week should return to the united states in two thousand and four to complete her most recent book in mortal hands

a cautionary history of the nuclear age currently stephanie is the editor of nuclear intelligence weekly part of the entire energy intelligence group stephanie brilliant book and thank you for joining us tonight thank you for having great to have us with you i'm curious just at a personal level what sparked your interest in nuclear issues that took you to the point where you've become one of the one of the experts around the world on this at least from a real reportorial point of well if if i go way back to when i started in one nine hundred eighty. i was at a conference in mexico city on nonproliferation when i hardly understood the meaning of the word let alone being able to pronounce it and i met a frenchman called bertrand goldsmith who was one of the distinguished guests surrounded by acolytes and he invited me to sit next to him at lunch much to the chagrin of all the people that surrounded him because i was sort of a little nobody. but i asked him you know thinking what should i ask this man i

suppose well how did you get into this business and he said i separated radium isotopes from mary cary and right away my my my hair stood on end because of course i had read about her and her discovery of radium and how she. and her well as a child you don't read this in children's biography she was a heroine of mine not so much now after i read grown up biography biographies of her when i was researching my book yeah she lost a child in five months you know a baby and she her daughter died of radiation poisoning as to cheesy but. you know i thought my goodness you know when you're when you're growing up and you're reading about people like mary curie you're thinking they're so far back in the past and here you're sitting next to a man who actually knew her she only died in one thousand nine hundred four so that was one thing and then the other was talking to a man at that conference i took him aside and i said by the way mostly men were at

these conferences so i was sort of the odd person out plus i was young and so anyway and. i said to this man what's this all about and he said we're talking about the war and peace issues of our day and i said that's interesting and so you know it sort of planted a seed i think i still was on a steep learning curve i thought reactors were reactors and bombs were bombs i didn't understand that there was a relationship between the two and a very close one and what is there. with that so that's a whole. separate area that i that i got into in that i learned as i went along which is that the fuel cycle which is starting from uranium in the ground to processing it and putting it through an enrichment plant like the kind they have been iran is necessary to produce the fuel you need for a power reactor but it's also the process that you go through in order to produce

fuel for weapons you can use an enrichment plant to produce weapons for. highly enriched uranium and then if you put the fuel in a reactor and irradiated and then take it out and put it in a chemical separation plant called a reprocessing plant you get plutonium and then you have a plutonium. but for a minute getting back to this this conference and my my the appeal of nuclear it wasn't the industry it wasn't the business end of it it was that i sensed even then that there was this enormous secrecy surrounding everything people were very reluctant to tell me anything and there was also this sort of. a feeling of zealotry and i remember particularly this one man near mr goldsmith whose name was in congress. because he was very tall who would wax on about plutonium which i hardly understood what that was either but the way he said

plutonium only almost in religious tones i was mesmerized i would just sit there listening to him waiting for him to pronounce again so i could hear him say it but i thought what is this and i i thought i must be imagining it but as more time went on i realized that there really is a kind of mythical aspect to nuclear energy on both sides there's a mythical aspect on the civilian side with people thinking it was going to be the answer to our all our problems it was going to solve the world's energy problems and on the weapons side. it's even more alluring it's the power it's the incontrovertibly power that you know you will be the one that controls the world this is what people sort of dreamed up this is why saddam hussein did what he did this is why khadafi did what he did and why the north koreans are making their people starve so they can have nuclear weapons it's it's very very powerful so all of this becomes kind of yeah it becomes sort of magnetizing not in a very good way not a very positive way but you want to explore and you want to find out more so that

this leads on to i interviewed somebody some years ago when you were teller and who suggested the whole atoms for peace thing came out of this wrenching guilt that these men felt who had been involved in the manhattan project because they had vaporized several hundred thousand people injured and of the product of their work and the only way that they felt they could redeem themselves some consciously some unconsciously but this was the thread that seemed to run through it was by using this technology to save lives to create power that could power hospitals yes you know. radiation and medicine things like that. is that your sense of it and if so has that been lost and it's just been turned into a business and and if so has it been turned into a toxic business there's an element of that still. it's fed through the

the industry's. well how they advertise themselves and how they they put themselves forward that they and you still hear this that it's clean energy that it's going to save them it is that we know that that's that's a myth that it's been created by more more advertising people but. the the atoms for peace is more complicated than that there definitely was guilt and there was always a dream by the way going back to mary series times and if you could tap into this energy which really was an amazing discovery you could have all these wonderful peaceful uses they didn't really understand where you would go with this but there was always the dream that this would be beneficial to mankind and you know there are a lot of well meaning people and always have been in the nuclear industry it's kind of. it is it is and i say that with with you know. some of them are not all of them but but one the weapon really the origins of atoms

for peace under eisenhower was a need to find a happy message to give the public while you increased your weapons stockpile and it was really a p.r. campaign from top to bottom where they got a man from time life who operate during the war they use they fanned out to all the media and used it. to bash adly to promote the idea of peaceful nuclear energy. and. it flowed everything flowed from there this this is a very very. and you know by the way although the language that you hear associated with so-called peaceful nuclear energy it used to be oppenheimer called it either dangerous nuclear activities or safe and he made a distinction that wording was dropped for obvious reasons and then now they go to peaceful or or you know i remember as a kid the. the power company in lansing michigan you know they had some

poison issue in that they have actually come from one of the drilling and we were we were told this was in the fifty's and early sixty's we were told that. eventually within a within a decade or so our electricity would be free and every couple months we gather up all the light bulbs in the house and take them down to the power company and then they'd exchange them for free you know get free libraries because eventually electricity would be free and you know you need to use more electricity and. what happened to that i mean. i must say i never had that experience of well it certainly didn't prove too cheap to meter and that quote by the way was it will one day be said one day it will prove too cheap to meter it's never proven to be cheap to meter in fact now the reason that the renaissance in the united states isn't taking off it's partly because we have an abundance of natural gas but it's just pricing itself out of the market. yeah it's costing somewhere between six and ten

billion dollars the plants and you know utility men are not stupid they don't want i mean they know they understand there's a lot of hassle factor associated with nuclear energy some of them are still very much for it and we do have one project proceeding in georgia paid for by the rate payers ahead of the plant being built. but. slick were you ever your cover that it didn't used to be allowed because you know they they have no guarantee they will get the money back if the plant for some reason it's never built never produces any. power i mean normally the way utilities operate is you don't pay ahead and you pay for what you get and the germans look at those they want to build a couple more nuclear plants and so they did the solar panel thing and thought you know what's what's generated gigawatt it was a couple of nuclear power plants generated ten nuclear power plants worth of solar power exactly the germans it's a very very interesting situation going on in europe my colleague and i was just written about it this week so i just come fresh from editing his story but. germany

is is not only very vociferously anti nuclear in its own country it's now pushing other countries around its borders to not do nuclear including france and poland and czechoslovakia and saying you know we're on your border if you have an accident we get hurt by this i lived there were insurable right and he said no and you know it isn't just about fukushima it's fukushima plus chernobyl because the whole european landmass and i was living in england at the time and got. you know there were pockets very high pockets all over europe when i wrote the book and the northwest of england still had farms under quarantine from chernobyl so this left a strong impression i think particularly the germans. it's really quite remarkable and you know how how do. you know what was real to talk about this is

going to play out i'm sure we'll be right back after the break more of tonight's conversations with great minds stephanie cutter. if you just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old i want to tell the truth. i confess and i am a total get of friends that i love rap and hip hop is a latin phrase. but it was kind of a big yesterday. i'm very proud of the role without consumers as a place. you

know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then he lives something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture . for.