major global nuclear powers are billett up there are still is once again sparking fears of a new nuclear arms race. how serious is the danger well i asked matthew bunn the former white house advisor on science and technology policy and co-principal investigator from the belfer center on managing the. washington. control process with strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty. and. nuclear weapon threats. sure destruction still a powerful deterrent. dragged into a new arms race and will close the door and disarmament for good. thank you very much for being with us. on our program so let's stop the. new

start treaty. that's going to expire in two thousand and twenty one trump on many occasions has said it's one side bet treaty do you feel like it's dad and what would that mean for the global security. sue unfortunately i think there is a real danger that the whole structure of the u.s. russian negotiated nuclear restraint that sort of regulated the nuclear arms competition for the last half century may collapse we are in a situation right now where we do have the new start treaty in place the two sides have just finished complying with all of its limits as of early february. there are inspections still taking place that's one of the only ways in which the nuclear stablish mintz of our two countries are still talking to each other and working together but in its current form it expires in early two thousand and twenty one

both countries are charging the other with file ations or various other arms agreements. and. given the very poor relations with countries it would be very difficult to get the two thirds approval needed under the u.s. constitution for a new treaty in the senate until some of those issues were resolved especially the charges of past violations and so it's quite possible the treaty will just expire and not be replaced so we need to be thinking about how can we. are there non treaty approaches where we can regulate this situation without creating the kind of danger that are completely unregulated competition so from your response i gather that you pretty much feel like the treaty is done at this point so we need to find other ways to regulate or. i think so the treaty in and of

itself. ludes an option for a five year extension. reportedly president putin raised that idea with president trump and president trump wasn't too interested but i think that was very shortly after president trump had come to office he was thinking oh it's an obama treaty it must be better. i think the time gets closer and. you know people like the secretary of defense and the secretary of state begin explaining to the president the dangers involved in having no treaty and place to me it makes a lot of sense to think about extending it for another five years i mean whatever is going on right now and in terms of start new start treaty sort of brings this cognitive dissonance because back in february russia and united states are still meeting they were acquirements right to reduce weapons and then you have almost at

the same time americans modifying the nuclear posture review calling for expanding their nuclear arsenal followed by putting in speech with their new nuclear rockets i mean how does that go together sue first of all the american nuclear posture review i think while it does introduce. changes mostly it endorses what was already laid out in the obama administration which is mostly just replacing aging weapons systems so we have. intercontinental ballistic missiles on land that were bought decades ago and would just be replaced same numbers you know just new or shady or versions we have submarines that are getting so old that eventually the metal of the submarines won't be able to handle the changes and pressure of going up and going down so we need new submarines and so we'll just replace them with pretty similar submarines you know the bombers. are

very old we have with the bombers were using today in the u.s. nuclear arsenal there are pilots whose fathers flew exactly the same. almost all of those bombers are at least as old as i am. so these are these are aging aircraft they were built in the in the sixty's so they need to be replaced what n.p.r. does is it also suggests well maybe we should have some lou yield nuclear weapons that it wouldn't be such a dramatic step to use. and the argument is that we need that for better deterrence in a conflict with russia or with north korea or what have you. i think that that may increase nuclear danger by making it easier to make the decision to use

nuclear weapons that's what i was getting the word tactical could actually politicians in washington to think that it's maybe ok or not that bad to use nukes well to be fair both united states and russia have had nuclear weapons for decades and russia has a much much larger stock nuclear weapons than the united states does just the right now united states is talking about spending one point two trillion dollars over the thirty years to try to develop new tactical low yield will know the one point two trillion is for the whole thing and it's mostly for the you know the newer shiny or versions of the same old same old what was remarkable in the russian side is putin's speech with a level of presidential nuclear saber rattling that we really haven't seen maybe ever in the nuclear age but certainly not since khrushchev. with these videos of weapons after weapon after weapon now none of those with perhaps one exception i

would argue pose any new fundamental threats to the strategic balance there fundamentally the united states and russia are have been for decades to scorpions in a bottle each capable of destroying the other but only at the price of being destroyed itself and putin said well these weapons will overcome u.s. missile defenses u.s. missile defenses were totally ineffective against russian forces already so they'll be more effective against russian forces so it really doesn't change the fundamental picture of the strategic balance. sorry. you were saying the. united states have been like this two scorpions and can do great harm but it would mean that they're destroying themselves as well and that's what james mattis is saying that having low yield nukes actually means that america would have to choose

between surrender and suicide. to. in principle the idea of the low yield dukes is to respond in kind to russian early use of nuclear weapons. the united states perceives at least that russia has been developing and practicing a doctrine of using a few nuclear weapons relatively early in our conflict to scare off nato forces to say to nato in essence you know we're taking this very seriously you better stop or things are going to get very. and you know the states wanted to have some ability to respond in a similar way that wouldn't one hopes escalate to higher levels but i my own belief is that the moment you cross the nuclear threshold you have this danger of going to

large scale nuclear war and potentially destroy civilization even this whole thing of this is alice a comes to terence i mean you believe more nukes a habit more usable nuclear weapons you have more danger of nuclear war there and so what you're saying i believe that the people advocating it genuinely believe that it will be helpful for deterrence i have my doubts i think that it will make nuclear weapons somewhat easier for a president to decide to use and therefore potentially increase the risk that that choice will get made at some point in the future. but i think the thing i worry about most really is not that the thing i worry about most is inadvertent escalation in a crisis you know there's some crisis somewhere in the world that involves us and russia. and. you know one side does something the other side does something it

thinks is roughly equal back the other side seize it. more there are cyber attacks going back and forth each way confusing everything and things just escalate and get out of control we saw in the cuban missile crisis how many mistakes small things things that the leaders didn't intend it all happened in the moment of crisis and that's really what i worry about so i think getting back to military to military dialogues which haven't really been happening. building up the confidence building measures that can help tip down. in a crisis would be very important as well as maintaining the structure of arms control clear security cooperation has been halted since twenty fourteen. and something i've been working on trying to fix but so far no successfully but i think it's even possible to talk about reviving that at this point with everything that's

going on so yes i think it's possible because it's really a very technical subject and the technical people in both countries have a lot of respect for each other and. that the people on the other side have interesting ideas that they would benefit from sharing. i think that on the russian side and i frankly i think this is a correct view they think that nuclear cooperation ought to be not just about security but should be as ross out of officials put it comprehensive that it ought to include cooperation on a new future nuclear energy ideas on nuclear safety on nuclear science and on nuclear security i think we will never go back to the way nuclear security cooperation was before and we don't have to because the way it was before was for

a time when russia was sort of you know still. recovering from the soviet collapse needed a lot of help on the research well you know u.s. money going to build a better security system. sites and so on that's not really needed anymore what's needed now is it is an exchange of best practices and ideas among technical experts on both sides and i remain hopeful that we will be able to get that going again at least and in two ways i think it benefits both sides security and the world security i think it's a danger to the world and to each of our countries that the world's biggest nuclear establishments with the most nuclear experts are just not talking to each other yeah i mean those are the two biggest guarantors i mean who would guarantee that sort of security if both sides are pretty much you know announcing arms race

well the reality is nobody can guarantee. another country's nuclear security in the sense of security for nuclear material or a nuclear weapon being stolen or something each country has to provide that itself it's not like there was ever cooperation where there were you know u.s. guards guarding russian sites or russian guards guarding us sites or the like that but we can do that. job better if we talk to each other that's what i'm saying press are going to take a short break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to professor matthew bunn we'll talk more about the nuclear threats that russia and america are facing today stay with us.

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then we're back with professor matthew bunn professor you mentioned earlier touring our talk that cuban missile crisis was a perfect example of how dangerous things they get will like little mistakes probably and to that alongside mistakes there's also like the. fact that there is no respect maybe or curiosity to understand each other's perception of the world which are quite different i have to say i mean when medicare i was talking to putin just recently and she was like you know you're pretty much starting the new arms race he was like no it's george w. bush who started in two thousand and two when he withdrew from the ballistic missile treaty and actually built a missile defense system so that's the way he says the world right that americans

have something to respond in return and then you know right now you have russians that are saying that i know that americans the two hundred nuclear bombs that are stored in here up ever since the world war two. i know that they. used to be a lot of war yeah i know that americans are great so you know russians lab are always saying hey you know we see these as a clear violation of nonproliferation principles do you think these worries do you think these concerns are justified. su it is certainly correct from the russian point of view that the united states ripped up the any ballistic missile treaty i regretted that i opposed the actually my first book was on why they plastic missile treaty was a still a good thing for us. obviously that book to win the day was not the seller. was not a best. now honestly u.s.

missile defenses have to first approximation no capability against russian nuclear forces we have about fifty that doesn't really matter you know and they're right it's all about the perceptions of the west and sas and it's about the perception of what it what direction it may be going in the future because it's only on our strategic long that long in the future. so as i say we do need to regulate these things and we do need to understand each other's perspectives as you were saying one of the crucial moments in the cuban missile crisis came when there were two communications from the soviet side. almost at the same time one of them very threatening and angry and one of the much more. compromising and fortunately for the world one of kennedy's staffers was a former ambassador. who knew khrushchev very well and sort of said to kennedy

why don't we just ignore the one we don't like and respond to the one we do like and i think that if we offered this and that to khrushchev that would be enough to convince him to back down and that turned out to be what caused the crisis to be resolved so if there hadn't been a person at that moment that the president was willing to listen to you need a president with good judgment and a close advisor with real empathy for the other side and the situation they were in . i'm not sure we have either of those things and either washington or moscow right now. that concerns me what about the two hundred nuclear bombs that want to be upgraded in europe do you see why russia could be concerned about this well of course russia and the soviet union before it was been concerned it isn't a violation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty my father actually was one of the key negotiators of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. he reports fought over

this subject at considerable length for and ultimately agreed on a compromise that allowed the u.s. nuclear weapons to remain in europe the reality is that the upgrade that's being done is i mean they're just delivered bombs they're going to be delivered bombs that will last longer basically there's a few modest improvements but it really makes absolutely no difference to the threat to russia overall so how can this issue be resolved once again a different world views different perceptions they were sent back and forth nuclear developments between u.s. and russia really mean that global known for inflation i mean seeing how the biggest guarantor. that those two countries are about to expand nuclear are shareware i still don't understand where the authority to stop the spread of nukes will come from. well let me clarify the noise there are russia nor the united

states at the moment is proposing to actually expand its nuclear arsenal there are still limited by new start terms of the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons russia we believe has been expanding its tactical nuclear arsenal a bit but not very substantially. so both sides i think will have our arsenal of moral as the same size as the arsenal so they have. both sides are still dismantling some of the older. weapons that they hadn't gotten around to dismantling yet in the past. still has a couple of thousand in the queue waiting to be dismantled. so it's not really a question of building up the numbers it's a question of changing types and capabilities. and i think we need to be spending more time sitting down together talking to each other

actually engaging in real discussions of strategic stability and the different ways that russia sees it and the united states sees it and specific things that you know we can agree to to address the concerns on each side but i think in order for that to happen we could give you an american perspective russia really needs to stop meddling in the u.s. electoral process because that has succeeded and you know you do the democrats and the republicans in the united states sensually everyone except the president other states and the russian shiri that i haven't seen for many years you know the russian first backed in on that and not even government perspective but anyway i sure would tell you you know you need to show me that proves i don't believe in secretary says i don't really in my own secret services let alone cia and then you know why should i believe american war and a russian word because when cia was. w m d's existed in iraq turned out to be bogus

so why not show you show me the proof that we actually model the russian perspective there's a lot of proof so facebook has details of lowered you know hundreds of russian controlled accounts that were fostering increased polarization sort of hitting on issues that would try to divide americans and try to push people toward the republicans. twitter has revealed a lot of the same and then there's a lot of classified evidence there's really no dispute among any. serious person in the u.s. national security establishment that that happened and is continuing to happen it's ongoing in the united states right now and then you know i'm just playing devil's advocate here but another argument that an average russian on t.v. no americans had a medal in so many elections alone in the world you know why why when we come up to

you and why is it so annoying and that is a fact and i think it would be a good idea for the united states and russia to agree at a top level neither of us are going to do this to each other i just want to talk about north korea shortly because it's really hot topic i mean with everything that's going on right now this crisis raised the question of japan and south korea actually getting their own nukes i mean at this point it's obvious that the north has it probably not never going to give it up so with this current configuration does this mean that the region it's going to get more nukes to the reality is north korea's had nuclear weapons for over a decade now and so for south korea japan taiwan have made i think the correct decision not to build nuclear weapons of their own i think north korea's program creates additional dangers and more dangers as a perceived as further but again the things i worry about most are not that you

know kim jong un or for that matter donald trump are going to wake up one day and said put today would be a great day to use nuclear weapons but rather that there would be some crisis that would escalate in a series of back and forth exchanges to the point where nuclear weapons would end up getting used to you might imagine that in an initial crisis for example that the north koreans might use some of their conventionally armed blistered missiles to attack us air bases or something like that and that might provoke the united states and the south koreans to think well they're using their missiles we'd better start destroying those missiles and then the north koreans would be faced with. but sometimes known as a use them or lose them situation and might use nuclear weapons to try to scare us off. their variety of really dangerous scenario i think there too there is a real need to take the possibility of negotiation seriously to not attempt to

get you know everything you can possibly imagine out of the negotiations but to take a realistic step by step approach starting with freezing testing freezing for their production of more nuclear weapons and so on. and to focus also. confidence building measures military to military exchanges and sell and to try to reduce the dangers of this sort of inadvertent getting out of control in a crisis so according to gallup most of the americans think that north korea's nuclear program is the biggest threat to america right now just the fact of having that gene to play with that well we have a lot of threats to america right now i think many of them are internal to ourselves and that we're tearing ourselves apart politically so we know states have to figure out how to function as a democracy again. which we're not doing

a very good job of right now but i do think it's a serious danger from north korea it has reminded americans that the nuclear danger didn't go away when the soviet union went away i think russians remember that that was true throughout the intervening period but i think a lot of americans sort of forgot about nuclear danger. though that north korea has nuclear weapons and increasingly missiles that can reach the united states americans are sort of waking up and saying. wait that nuclear danger could apply to meet i mean i've had people calling me from san francisco or los angeles saying should i get my family and my kids out of town. and there haven't been you know americans genuinely afraid about nuclear weapons like that for a while they were in the eighty's but not for a while. well thanks a lot for this wonderful interview and for this inside or show the best thank you

for that are you ok we managed to find some way to saner and more stable relationship between our countries. thanks. small seemed wrong all wrong just don't call. me old if you get to shape out these days become educated and gain from an equal betrayal. when so many find themselves worlds apart we choose to look for common ground.

what politicians do something to. put themselves on the line to get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president or injury. or somehow want to reach back to the right to be close this is what the forest tree in the morning can people get. interested always in the waters of my colleagues. there should. i. was lucky to. have. gone. to the.

breaking news this hour a musket fire rips through a shopping center in the russian city of camera fifty three people are so far confirmed dead including many children. you just push through that. pop up. menu for diplomacy but you send. chilling messages appear on social media the children are trapped in a different place. among the dead where mother and daughter are forty five years old and the father. when he came in there today he had health issues with his heart when he got the news about his family.