blog about your conversations with great minds i'm joined by stephanie cooke expert on nuclear energy and the use of nuclear weapons and the author of in mortal hands a cautionary history of the nuclear age stephanie what provoked you or what motivated you i asked earlier about your interest in nuclear power and nuclear weapons that was fascinating story why this book now well. i'll tell you the the the actual trigger for the book was what was going on with the first gulf war in one thousand nine hundred one and i felt very frustrated. in the ensuing years that people were expressing so much surprise that we discovered this huge weapons program in iraq and that the made in usa stamp was on some of the equipment

we were finding there was a lot of stuff that had come from europe and this was a result of our close relationship with the iraqis during the eighty's and our willingness to look the other way when they were do questionable dual use exports and so on and so forth but you know there's only so many times you can explain this to people at dinner parties or whatever so you sort of say well you know i had one very good friend in london who had written a book about oppenheimer about the moral of a novel called america's children is a very very good novel about his moral conflict and we talked endlessly about it and he said you know you've got to write about this people don't understand this you got to write about the relationship because all of this flows out of the trade in the civilian nuclear and history the fact that he has has got all this stuff and that we had you know pakistan going nuclear and several other countries and but then. then as i got into the book and i thought more about it i thought you know how i do this and i thought i have to write about the relationship between the

military and civilian sides of nuclear power because they're they're very in extra could be linked in their link through the fuel cycle as i think i explained earlier . you talked about a risk but my understanding is that you have to enrich uranium up your own three percent for nuclear power plant and over ninety percent for a bomb that's a real significant difference is the fuel cycle different for the two you know how quickly interchangeable was you know you just reconfigure the plant and just you just run it through more times to put it simply he want you use the same equipment exact same equipment it's the same technology you just reconfigure it differently and it doesn't take that long to do it. but the other thing that that was a kind of big elephant in the room for me is that i felt that i always felt this talking to people about nonproliferation policy during the eighty's especially i had a conversation with somebody from india who said well do you think it's fair that you have nuclear weapons and i never thought about that i just thought well we have

them and that's the way the world is and where the big big cap on the block and that's it but actually the more i thought of it the more i thought we have never discussed in this country in my lifetime we have never had a serious national conversation about our relationship to this whole enterprise to the whole nuclear thing not just civilian nuclear power but our weapons establishment which in one nine hundred ninety six the authors of atomic got it said it cost us five point five trillion dollars and it's going to cost us something like one hundred seventy five billion over the next ten years i mean i was at the bulletin of atomic scientists say clock. symposium earlier this year and there was a wonderful speaker who i'm sure you've heard of called elaine scar and she pointed out something that really really sort of blew my mind she said you know we have fourteen ohio class nuclear submarines each of which has enough firepower to decimate a continent and i checked this and i believe she's right there's only seven continents

how much do we need is only six that are occupied right right side where you have your table. you need an ice breaker for the other so so this is scary and accidents happen maybe accidents are happening as we speak on these that we've never heard of we don't know you know we do know that there's been multiple accidents of strategic air command planes in the air mid flight collisions where they have and they only care or carry thermonuclear weapons as far as i know so we have nuclear bombs in the air all the time i don't know whether we still have them in all of the time but in in the nineteen eighties there was an incident i believe it was the one nine hundred eighty s. over palmer a spain very famous incident where to where we were refueling in flight and. the planes caught fire and the four bombs dropped to the ground this happened again in

greenland and fool this is happening we're going to dozen times where these kind of accidents happen for a while they couldn't find one of the bombs but anyway there was radiation spread all over the ground around this poor little village in spain and massive clean up after a. year but they didn't they they just scattered some of the stuff that was around it wasn't like a nuclear explosion but they scattered the contents of some of the stuff around so there had to be a cleanup and this wasn't but the thing is one of the apart from wanting the public to know about this apart from hoping this book would get traction and would become a focal point for discussion about these issues because they are complicated i wanted to make it accessible and easy for people to read and understand and grapple with and it is you. thank you but i want i wanted to talk about this this relationship between the two sides and i wanted to talk about the secrecy and the zealotry and i wanted to talk about. you know where we go from

here how we can we get to zero is that are we as a country somebody who wants to be represented that this is our way of defending ourselves that we carry around this capability for planetary destruction i have a real problem with this i i have a real problem that we we go to the international courts and combat efforts to declare nuclear weapons illegal and immoral and against. all concepts of human rights because they are after all weapons of mass destruction and the more we keep them here and use them as a bar that anybody else has to reach to be as powerful as we have as long as we have them we send that message to the rest of the world how can we not expect other countries to want to get there too you know there was that moment when ronald reagan and some of suggested this was his early alzheimer's when he sat down with

bush up and said let's just go to zero and call let's do it and it was like we almost got there and then. got in the way the whole bunch of it but you know star wars in particular and. what's it going to take it's going to take a tremendous amount of courage but most of all it's going to take public awareness i think that the public in the united states to the extent they ever think about nuclear weapons which why would you it's kind of an uncomfortable area to go to you sort of have a vague sense that maybe they give us security in fact they probably don't but this is something that needs to be talked about more they probably don't because you know you can go around and muscle yourself around the world and say i've got them on the on the aircraft carriers i've got them on the planes and i've got them in submarines. but are you going to use them and if you do use them what happens so are they real power and don't think attracted bad feelings to the united states is

there i see it suggest in my book and it's probably too short of a conversation to go there now but is there an indirect link even between the way we have behaved in successive wars where there's always been talk by some crazy guy in the military that we should use nuclear weapons that if you look into it far enough you'll see there's always been somebody that says we should do it. two you know things that have happened to us that we don't like i mean when you when you walk around and you're in you're the big guy on the block and you use this to project your power i think there's consequences. and how does you talk about time in the spectrum of power through the fuel cycle this is the anniversary of fukushima and beyond with the relationship between. power and nuclear power and nuclear weapons in that context in the kind of scientific political context. what's the future of nuclear power states are are we risk of

a fukushima or unknowable here and what should we do about it you know we're always first of all let's let's go back to work and the swedish nobel laureate said i think probably back in the sixty's or seventy's he said acts of god are not permitted it's nuclear energy that applies to fukushima and that's for sure but also acts of human fallibility are not permitted and i address this in my book because fowler the fallibility is evident in any industry but in nuclear industry you can't afford to be found. for me yeah you know i mean there's a long list of people you know going around with a candle as well as in catching and fukushima yes there was a there was a tsunami but there was a human error there's human error was putting the diesel generators in the basements and then they have a blackout and then they have a loss of coolant and they have a meltdown multiple meltdowns you know i wrote an article. shortly after fukushima

at somebodies request about the possibility of accidents in the united states and i said everybody's obsessed about the possibility of perth quakes in the united states but remember this a million different ways that a nuclear accident can happen these are very very complex machines they look clean when you look at them and you just picture the day you see the dome and you think that's clean energy look underneath the dome it's very very complex and miles and miles of. wiring thick concrete very complicated machinery and instrumentation and so a million things can go wrong and lots of things do in little ways all the time i read about it every week you know and if too many things go wrong and the industry has never been able to sequence all the things that could to put all the sequences together that could go wrong because there's so many of them. so what should we do with nuclear power in the last two minutes or year for which well i think that we particularly when we think about overseas that promoting nuclear power will come

with a cost because you are promoting. virtual bomb making capability when you when you promote when you send technology that way secondly in the united states i think we should go in a different direction i think that we already are going in a different direction i mean the head of exelon john breaux has said he doesn't want to build another nuclear power plant right now because natural gas prices are so low. in nuclear power is too expensive he says it's also dangerous i don't know whether. how he feels about. alternatives i'm told but i mean the way they're going is towards more alternatives i think the french are going in this direction the germans certainly are i believe there's indications the swiss are many other countries are and i don't want to get left behind on that score i'm not worried about getting left behind on the nuclear thing because i think it's kind of old world technology in a way sort of the nineteenth century technology century his call center was oil

twenty centuries nuclear twenty first century it will be new. and reconfiguring the grid is going to be very important worker it's a smart grids and our choices of energy will determine a lot about how we configure the grid so that's that's something to think about but i think that we should look and the reason i wrote this apart from getting this discussion about weapons going is to look at all of nuclear dangers safety. proliferation waste we still have no place to put waste of though hopefully we're moving towards a solution and and when you couple all this with human fallibility and very very complicated technology you have a recipe for disaster for the discussion stephanie thanks so much you're welcome thank you to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. coming up

after the break today is international women's day with a focus on helping women avoid poverty and hunger across the globe on how as a hollywood star championing these causes and working to prevent social justice. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old and just you know lived through. i mean sex and i am going to get a friend that i love crab and hip hop is a manuscript. that he was kind of yesterday's. i'm very proud of the world with its place.

you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so bleak you think you understand it and then you glimpse 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 .

that is international women's day a day devoted to recognizing the significant economic and other contributions that women have made a political social achievements of women around the world the united nations is designated the theme for this day years international women's day as empowering rural women and hunger and poverty earlier i said downward to true champions of these causes actors kristen davis oxfam president ray authorizer take a look. both for joining me today or for letting me join you thanks for coming it's not our christian first tell us a little bit about how you got affiliated with oxfam what what was your. you know

what brought you into this somebody who lives in a world there's no you know no need for that you're europe wealthy for your interest or all but all the things that everybody thinks this is what i need in life and yet you're doing considerable a lot of effort going into this thing a nonprofit rob thank you well i think two things my parents both volunteered the whole time that i was growing up for assorted things i grew up in south carolina so there was a lot of interesting things that you could be trying to improve there so i had a good examples from them and i was a donor before i before i actually met anyone from oxfam because i was impressed with their response to the tsunami and the fact that they stayed in the area and they were focused on helping the people who'd been affected regain their livelihoods and then you know the other aid organizations had left and that they were still there trying to help the people get up on their feet and i thought that's really great so i went on my first trip and i was so inspired and i feel

like i get more out of it than i give and i love love it i love my travels i feel like i'm i just learned so much every time i go and i'm always inspired by what we see it must be difficult for the first time that you confront a renewal showing you one. not just party doesn't mean any of the word people dying in front of you or on the verge or. this past summer i happened to be in tanzania meeting some women farmers one of which is here tonight in d.c. and the drought was unfolding in the heart of africa and we were it was kind of just rapidly happening and we were so close that we thought we should really go and see and now was pretty shocking it was the most the most extreme dire situation i had been in and. it's still shocking to think that that kind of thing can happen

even with the best of intentions from so many people around the world that something so strange can happen where so many children are dying and you feel very helpless but we were there oxfam was there and many other n.g.o.s were there on the ground and so i was i felt like i was you know i was happy to be part of trying to help oxfam. international women's day what's the connection here and we're going to be a conference meeting here well i mean oxfam is an organization that i think many years ago realized that you know women are critical to really positive development outcomes and so we've been centered on the whole issue of women and gender as a kind of a sort of piece of what we do for literally probably two decades now. and we just find that international women's day is a great moment to sort of celebrate what women do and actually also to press for reforms that would actually enable women to do more in fact in those societies where women are empowered population stabilize and rates poverty is reduced one of

if workable with telus for your take on those issues we have partners on the ground in all the places that we work that understand the cultural issues and kind of advise us in terms of what's it doing we've also seen so many so many elements that we have a program that i was part of in ethiopia with the widows who we. supplied them with new goats a different type of go to seems very simple but these were women who had no voice in their community at all and then because of these goats and then the goats multiply and they can sell the goats and the goats have milked it feed their children and they suddenly had a voice in their community and they were listened to and that's what we would hear over and over again when we would visit the successful programs is you know this is giving us a voice and we've helped to make this change that we saw we need it seems that. you know going beyond just feeding people is like you know we all have to get we as

there are thirty forty years ago the focus of her life was feeding people and now you are both getting very sophisticated about how do you create a situation where it's not just here some food and other problems even worse. later we have a lot of different kind of avenues of of attack and i also feel like in terms of the female experience. you know sometimes i think it's taken for granted that there is a quality and then there really isn't and you know in some countries it's really strange and in some countries like our own we have panels of older white men discussing our reproductive rights and so it's just really nice to have you know seventy women who are successful in their own right come together to go and lobby for women around the world exciting.

your take my take is your chance to send in your questions comments rants and observations about and we talk about here in the big picture or during my radio show our first comments a night comes from an anonymous caller on our viewer rant like here's his suggestion on how to pay for a possible war with a ramp. i have a suggestion if they write agree to war with iran and i think they should put on the paper with a declaration. that would increase taxes for two hundred fifty thousand dollars faves. it's pay for you want it. if you put it takes plain as a table to pay for that war there were three wars. amen and no more media the sanitizes wars and no more media that turns wars into basically video games and let's let's actually started draft doesn't have to be an entirely military draft we

can do it like most of the developed countries in the world do work after high school you spent a year of volunteer work if you were going to hospital you can join the army and then after that you get free college and and no outs so if everybody's in and nobody's out. it can work before we get to the last comments and i you know we broadcast into half a billion homes in over one hundred countries around the world and we want to hear from all of you that's why we've created our big picture world map and our goal is to receive a comment from every country in the world go to our message boards and tom arbonne dot com or visit our tom hartman facebook page post a comment and let us know where in the world your commenting from tonight we're debuting our first international comment it is from coming to us from the united kingdom supposed to this comment about austerity on the tamari dot com message board thanks for having economist richard wolfe on the big picture last night talking about austerity here in the u.k. our economy is going downhill because of our austerity economic policies and things

are looking pretty bad or not as dramatically as in greece absolute right so what has happened you know it's so amazing cameron came into power the conservative government and he said we're going to grow the economy we're going to reduce unemployment going to make everything better the way we're going to do it is by austerity by cutting the size of government laying people off cutting back on unemployment benefits those kinds of things and those are going to suck money out of the economy and then expect the economy to grow it's like saying we're going to grow some plants by not giving them any water it makes absolutely no sense it doesn't work in the u.k. is not working in greece and frankly it doesn't work here either. enough is enough it's time to stop criticizing rush limbaugh and start trying to protect rush in fact we shouldn't just protect rush we should be protecting all

middle aged men across the nation luckily ohio state senator nina turner is introducing legislation to do just that to protect rush limbaugh and the male race from the unknown dangers of a reptile dysfunction medications as senator turner recently wrote in an e-mail to her colleagues i will be introducing a bill to address an issue that has gone on addressed for far too long the diligence with which men in state legislatures across the nation have considered the fragile health and feeble minds of women has prompted me to reflect on the welfare of the more powerful breed them this legislation will take strong steps to protect men from the harmful effects of p.d.e. five inhibitors eighty five inhibitors are prescribed to men who are experiencing symptoms of male impotence and carry serious side effects such as priapism hearing loss and vision loss such medication should be considered with the utmost concern

and question and that and senator wants to make sure that men know what they're getting themselves into and take all the necessary precautions before deciding to take drugs like viagra already know that russia has a history with by a group was detained with the drug back in two thousand and six at the palm beach international airport on his way back from the dominican republic so rush this legislation a prize specifically to you and really we're looking out for your best interest just like your i'm sure looking out for the best interests of women across america with your thoughts on contraceptives. so if the senator's legislation becomes law there will be just a few precautionary hoops that you russian men will have to jump through to get iti medication the future again this is for your protection. first your doctor will need to receive a sworn affidavit from at least one sex partner confirming that you are indeed impotent not not workin down here you know rush is now on his fourth wife so it

shouldn't be too much of a problem to get them next your doctor will need to perform a psychological screening to make sure that the dysfunction problem is indeed. physical and mental that's because of the real reason why you can't get it up is due to torture thoughts insecurities and healed emotional wounds and by a group one help but you'll still get the dangerous side effects again this is precautionary to protect you once it's been established that the problem is a malfunctioning penis then your doctor will conduct a full cardiac stress test and counsel you on the side effects of taking erectile dysfunction drugs and the dangers of engaging in sex you'll also have to undergo counseling and other non-medical options to treaty including celibacy for just not have sex provinces not have sex right and finally for your own good your doctor will write up a full report explaining the rationale for prescribing e.g. medication to you and that report will be placed in your personal medical records

for life to be used by all future doctors and nurses just so they know how to better treat you in the future got it. now i know this may all seem a little invasive but rush this is really for your own protection in fact a full proper logical prostate examination may be necessary in the future as an extra precautionary step and just to make sure that you're using by a great it's prescribed manner you might have to be videotaped having sex and have that videotape posted online for all of us to watch. and second about never mind the point is never been working out for the best medical interests of women for so long it's trying to work out for ourselves and we should be thankful that there are state senators like nina turner willing to do just that. that's it for the big picture tonight please note that my daily radio show will be moving from noon to three pm at three to six pm starting monday march twelfth and don't forget democracy begins when you show up when you participate get out there and occupy

something get out there and get active tag your it says. download the official. jogging phone the i pod touch from the i.q. stops to. lunch on life on the good. video on demand. keys and my old calls and says feeds now in the palm of your.

world. series technology innovation called the list of elements from around russia we've got the future of coverage. so.