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 your have appeared in a variety of publications including reader's digest the international herald tribune a g.q. magazine said he first began her reporting clear in one nine hundred seventy seven at the associated press and later moved to london where she covered the chernobyl disaster for business week she return to the united states in two thousand and four to complete her most recent book in mortal hands a crushing or a history of the nuclear age currently stephanie is the editor of nuclear intelligence weekly part of me and talk energy intelligence group stephanie brilliant work 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 rip reportorial point well if and 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 and i said well how did you get into this b

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 signif

cooking breakfast. >> stephanie: mr. vice president, thank you for the plug for stephanie miller comedy tour.ad and goldwater's party. do you recognize this version of the republican party? >> no, i don't. it is hard to take the partisanship out of it. i served with your dad's running mate, barry goldwater. my father did as well. during the last few years of his time in the senate, barry goldwater and i served on the armed services committee together. he was such a warm and friendly guy and a very smart guy. my dad was friends with him too. of course, president kennedy was prepared to have debates all over the country with senator goldwater. >> stephanie: they liked each other very much. i liked him very much as a person. he was a very kind and smart guy. he would not recognize today's republican party. and let me be quick to add that there are many, many rank and file republicans who are upset over the direction of today's republican party. up until now many of them have been reluctant to speak out and offer some encouragement to get back into sort of a mainstream conservatism instead of thi