 The U.S. Institute of Peace is very pleased to welcome you to this bipartisan congressional dialogue, a signature USIP initiative. We are honored to have with us today two congressional foreign policy leaders, Congressman Jeff Fortenberry and Congressman Bill Foster, to discuss nuclear security. This is an important and necessary discussion. For years, the United States and our allies have been safeguarded from the dangers of nuclear war by a carefully negotiated arms control framework. This framework is now under serious and increasing pressure. This pressure is coming from multiple directions. These include emerging technologies and specifically cyber, hypersonic capabilities, space weapons, drones and artificial intelligence. These pressures also include the steps Russia is taking to modernize its army and nuclear capabilities and China's rapid buildup of its strategic nuclear arsenal. And we can't lose sight of the fact that the U.S. is facing new nuclear dangers from other parts of the world, including North Korea. Congressman Foster and Fortenberry are uniquely poised to tackle these issues. Congressman Foster, who represents the 11th district in Illinois, has a PhD in physics and brings a rigorous scientific perspective to nuclear policy issues. Congressman Fortenberry represents Nebraska's first district, which is home to Offit Air Force Base for a U.S. strategic command, which is responsible for command and control of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal is based. Congressman Fortenberry and Foster currently co-chair the Congressional Nuclear Security Working Group, a bipartisan congressional caucus that Congressman Fortenberry founded in 2008. This caucus is dedicated to raising awareness and facilitating engagement on the urgent threats posed by the prospects of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Congressman Fortenberry, Congressman Foster, thank you for being with us today. We're honored to start our discussion by inviting Congressman Foster to offer introductory remarks. These will be followed by Congressman Fortenberry, and after that, we'll have a moderated discussion. We invite everyone to join the conversation today on Twitter using the hashtag BipartisanUSIP. Congressman Foster, may we invite you to take the floor. Shirley, I assume I'm audible and visible here. Okay, I will assume that was a yes. As was mentioned, I'm Congressman Bill Foster. I sometimes introduce myself as saying I represent 100% of the strategic reserve of physicists in the United States Congress. I worked for almost 25 years at Fermi National Accelerator Lab, building giant particle accelerators and scientific detectors. We were smashing protons and antiprotons together to make particles that have not been around since the Big Bang. Our laboratory was always very proud. The founding director was Robert Wilson, who worked on the Manhattan Project. The moment the war was over, he famously turned in his security clearance and devoted the rest of his life to peaceful science. But like all physicists, I share some residual guilt over physicists and scientists knowing sin because of what we brought forth onto the world. And it is, I think, the duty of every physicist and really every scientist to spend part of his career trying to make the world a safer place. And that's one of the many reasons that I'm really pleased that Representative Fortenberry has been such a strong leader in originating this caucus and in leading it. There are a couple of moments when the partisan divisions that we all suffer under just melt away. But one of them was when I was taken out in Representative Fortenberry's district, Strategic Air Command, where they play the rehearsal tapes of the opening shots of a nuclear war, the opening salvos, and the decision table that has to be made by the president and the decision tools and the timelines. And anyone, any member of Congress realizing that they have even partial control over trying to make that horrific scenario a little bit safer has to take their job seriously. The other time that it really took my breath away was, you know, one of the many things I do is I'm the co-chair of the National Laboratories Caucus. And so we take bipartisan delegations, Republicans and Democrats, together to visit the national labs. Now, many of these labs are only scientific labs. Some of them do both science work and weapons work. And when you visit the weapons laboratories, they will take you into the room where you see our nuclear weapons taken apart. And you ask the experts the details of how these work. And you're struck by the incredible amount of effort of brilliant people that have gone into designing and building weapons that have the potential of destroying the world. And you realize that no matter what party you're from, you have to do something to make it less probable that these get used. Anyway, I'm also very concerned at the lack of thought that goes into this among members of Congress these days. You know, I've probably spent part of my life before Congress thinking about it just because of being a physicist. But even the basic concepts, like the idea that there are destabilizing weapons, that if you own this weapon, it makes you less safe, that these fundamental concepts of nuclear deterrence are unknown to most members of Congress. And so I feel one of my duties is to try to do what I can to get the concepts of deterrence better understood so we can apply them rationally in our policies. Anyway, I look forward to the questions from the pre-prepared questions and those coming in from the audience. And happy to turn it over, I guess, back to you or to Representative Fortenberry. Representative Foster, thank you for being very candid with us about your motivations and the views that you bring to this job. May we ask Representative Fortenberry for his introductory reflections as well? Well, thank you so much, at least, for coordinating this event today and for the Institute of Peace's interest in this. Let me go off script for a moment and commend my colleague, Bill Foster. He obviously has deep intellectual acumen and scientific precision in the way in which he understands and can articulate the details of this space. And at the same time, a mark of intellect, a mark of brilliance, is to take that complex and make it presentable and simple. So Bill straddles both of those worlds and just has my utmost respect. So it's a pleasure to be with him in co-chairing the Nuclear Security Working Group. You know, because I represent strategic command, but on a deeper reason, have basically in my own interior worried about some of the things that Bill just said, that do we really deeply think, as elected leaders, about the possibility of what this would look like if one of these weapons exploded? We all have the experience of 9-11. You see what the damage of one plane in a building brought. A number of years ago when I was new in Congress, I was on a panel with former Defense Secretary Schlesinger. And it dawned on me then that this was a person who was shepherding our nuclear stockpile, our defense posture and deterrence during the really ugliest parts, perhaps, of the Cold War. And it also dawned on me, my goodness, that torch gets passed, that baton has to be passed. And I'm sitting next to this old, wise leader who's no longer with us. So, again, it was part of the early motivation I had to try to think how to answer the question that Bill just raised. How do we attend to these existential questions that nobody seems to have the time for, that there is no constituency for, and yet if something happens, everything will change. They're complex, they're difficult, it's hard to stare in the face and get the mind around them. And therefore, we push it off and assume there's somebody of experts. We sort of have this hope, kind of a hope based in a stupor that this just won't happen, can't happen. And so we don't apply a sort of the rigorous analysis in time necessary to do the fundamental thing to keep America safe and the world safe, assuring that, of course, our deterrent is vibrant and strong because the purpose of them is to prevent their use, but at the same time, thinking about ways in which we can reduce the possibility of their use even more rigorously to as close to zero as possible, particularly given the gravity if one of these went off. A couple of other points. I was one time in a significant piece of military infrastructure, if you will. Let me put it that way. And I was talking to the crew and I walked to the back of this particular piece of military infrastructure, and there was a roll of duct tape sitting there. And I looked at one of the crew members, I said, duct tape, even here, the handyman secret weapon, even here. So it does speak on a deeper reason to the deeper issues that we grapple with because of the necessity to have a strong deterrent to guarantee both deliverability and efficacy. And that means modernization, particularly giving the age of these systems. While we modernize, though, we keep tethered to the idea that this is about deterrence and continue to reach for what Representative Foster was saying, new ways to make that deterrence and probability of use as close to zero as possible. Of course, the complementary dynamic of this is diplomacy and dialogue, which, again, in a political context, sometimes gets very difficult because situations arise. And the first thing, the impulse of the Congress or administration is to cut off talks, to cut off conversation, to issue sanctions. And of course, these are all tools to try to change behavior. But if you're not in dialogue at all about the most dangerous systems that are out there, you're actually violating a principle that Ronald Reagan embraced, for instance, on my side of the aisle, that somehow, some way, you have to remain tethered so that there is the possibility of rationality and dialogue with the hope that you can build some trust so that you continue to have the right kinds of negotiations to, again, either through treaty or advanced understanding, reduce the numbers of weapons, the expenditures for weapons, and again, the probability of use to zero. Just simply build up to assure, again, mutual destruction again is a deterrent and necessary, but it has to be complimented with this other less hard science that is so necessary to keep us safe. In this regard, again, one of the focuses that I've had is command and control communications modernization, which strategic command is leading the way on, particularly with some innovations using the best of the private sector. I don't want to go into that much detail, but at the same time, I wanted you all to know that this is the next phase. It's not just about assuring the efficacy of the weapons through modernization. Also, that command and control and communications component is absolutely essential. So I look forward to the questions as well today, and thank you so much for coordinating the event. Congressman, thank you for your introductory reflections and for talking about what has motivated you to engage in this most critical part of our security and foreign policy. I think one of the questions that many of us are interested in your views on is why Representative Foster, a Democrat, Representative Fortenberry, a Republican, are approaching these sets of questions in a bipartisan way. We know that many of the issues which are facing us as a country are being addressed from a partisan position, but you've chosen to address this through bipartisanship, and we'd be very interested in your reflections on why you think that is the best approach for promoting a rational nuclear policy. Representative Foster, may we ask for your first set of reflections on that point? Sure. Well, the short answer is it's too important to be left to the normal partisan warfare. One of the things that democracy doesn't deal with well is low probability, high consequence risks. In politics, the calculation is always, how will this affect the next election? And nuclear war is unlikely to affect the next election. If it happens, it will have a pretty dramatic effect, but it's unlikely, and so it's not really a high priority on the political chattering classes list of things. I've wondered about this whole point myself, because we find about very many important things, and this is somehow not on it. The other thing is that it's not clear what the answer to a lot of these are, and you have to sit quietly and think deeply for a long time to come to a considered opinion, and that doesn't go well on Twitter. And so that the way that we converse in sound bites is not the right way to do this. Twitter and just social media and a lot of getting sound bites on the evening news, what you're trying to do is you're trying to trigger primitive emotional reflexes in your audience, rather than actually on the thoughtful reasoned response. And so it's... I don't have an answer. I don't have a fix for the situation, but that's my analysis of why it is what it is. Representative Fortenberry. Well, as Bill was giving his answer, I'm reflecting on the time that we had at Strategic Command, and of course it's in my neighborhood, so I'm there frequently, but when we were there, I wasn't thinking about Bill as a Democrat and me as a Republican, and again, the next soundbite in which I can leverage some potential political outcome from the meeting. I might have to tell people I was doing that. I was thinking of Bill as a scientific expert and trying to listen critically as to leverage his expertise because there is a solidarity in thinking. I mean, if we are irrational people, we're going to shed political philosophical differences and again, get the mind around these existential things because at best everybody's threatened, or at worst everybody's threatened. At best, we ought to be doing this for the sake of goodness, for the sake of the real reasons that we are in public service, which is to keep people safe, to provide the conditions for societal and human flourishing. So this is, I mean, it's like the political construct is so absent in this space and rightfully so. I mean, Bill can't tell me if Admiral Richards, who runs Strategic Command, is a Democrat or Republican. He can't tell me that. I can't tell you that he's a Democrat or a Republican. But when I walk out of those meetings, I feel safer because he's got absolute command of the details of all this and a scenario analysis, which is replete with the depth of understanding that makes you very confident that in spite of the many challenges, we're on top of this. So it's one of the things that does transcend partisan divide. Now, it creeps in when you're talking about modernization, expenditures, new weapons systems. One of the things that concerns me, frankly, is miniaturization. And we have legacy systems that are huge and expensive. And could they be undermined in a second by peculiarities of some kind of cyber dynamic that we haven't thought about or some miniaturized version of something that explodes that you just can't guard against. And these are harsh realities. So it's just no politics enters into that. Representative Fortenberry, you touched on the issue of maintaining our nuclear stockpile and also started to reflect on the process of modernizing our stockpile. I know that there are discussions going on right now in Congress about these issues. May we ask how you both see this, both maintaining our existing nuclear stockpile and modernizing for necessary? Congressman Foster, may we ask for your reflections on that point? Well, I'm struck by how little the basic physics has changed in the last 60 years. We still cannot stop intercontinental ballistic missiles. There are studies going back to the 1960s that look at the feasibility of missile defense and say that does not have a chance. And those you can take all the arguments that were presented back then are active now. The politics moves around on that, but the physics doesn't and the basic analysis of the feasibility. It does have an effect because our adversaries have to contemplate the possibility that there will be a change in what's known about the physics and all of a sudden it will be possible. They build up larger arsenals in response to, for example, missile defense systems. And so we have to guard against that, against doing things that inadvertently make us less safe by encouraging our adversaries to build up larger arsenals. And you have to look at the different classes of threats. There are sort of nuclear terrorism where one city will be wiped out by one bomb that kills potentially millions of people but does not end the world. You then have a limited nuclear exchange and then you have all-out nuclear war where essentially everybody on earth will not survive. There has been changes in that last thing in the last 15 years that if you look at the analyses of nuclear winter that took place back in the 80s and you repeat them with modern climate models we're unfortunately much more sensitive to those. And so even what we used to consider a limited nuclear exchange has the potential to wipe out essentially all life on earth by triggering a nuclear winter event with a smaller exchange than we thought of previously. So there are issues like that but the arguments haven't changed and the basic physics hasn't changed since the 1950s. Representative Formberry. Representative Foster alluded to dynamically both had somewhat recently being in very close proximity to these very weapons themselves in the interior portions of them. And looking at the basic science and the basic technology because I live in the neighborhood of strategic command for a very long time I've been briefed on aging weapons systems. So the military's understandable response is if we are as policymakers are choosing to have the military properly equipped for a real deterrent we have to have the highest level of assurance that this deterrent is physically workable, that the aging process hasn't deteriorated to the point that we have probability of unreliability. So that's hard science and we tend to focus on things that we can measure. Hard science. So I've supported modernization but I have not let go of the needed desire to delve into and wait into the harder questions of what are what is the are the multiple layers of deterrence that we need to engage in to assure that yes the mechanics the technical aspects of this the physics of this are workable but we are still working toward the probability of use as close to zero as possible. And there they're related questions would in a certain sense process separate. And we tend to give the first one a lot of attention because again it's numbers and it's physics we can measure that stuff. The second one is harder and so that art or science or art and science is perhaps more of where I tend to focus and where the nuclear security working group is generally focused and again involves relationships and diplomacy leveraging technology to force relationships and take diplomacy sometimes. But I think we can do that much more robustly honestly. Congressman you've both talked about the deterrence that's necessary as part of the overall nuclear strategy and we know that our adversaries Russia China others are looking themselves very carefully at these kinds of questions and I think many of us are alarmed that Russia and China are both modernizing their nuclear weapons and capabilities. I think what many of us would would benefit from your insights on is what you think is the best path forward for ensuring that the United States is equipped to address the challenges that are being posed by China to address the challenges that are being proposed to us by Russia's modernization. Representative Foster. Well you have to look at each class of modernization separately. For example if I were to learn that some of our adversaries were modernizing their command and control electronics you know I would say oh thank goodness because you know there have been in the past some really irresponsible you know failures. If you look at places where we've come close in the past some of those have to do with delegating things to individual humans and not and having you know all the risks associated with a small number of humans making that decision and then there are also sort of technical failures where you've gotten either a failure of the command or a failure of the information coming in where it looked like you are under attack when you're not and so these can be prevented by a lot of work on the on the control systems and so I am a fan of modernizing those they are by and large testable in advance with some exceptions they are they're testable with non-nuclear tests and various other ways and so those those make you safer. I think modernizing in the sense of increasing the number or or throw weight of your arsenal it does not I think you know that has already been saturated for decades and I think it's a mistake to to imagine that having more overkill actually makes you any safer at all. They're also destabilizing weapons and on that list I would add hypersonics just imagine that you see you know steerable reentry vehicles is the way I think about them you know which are an old technology frankly that we have in the past chosen not to develop and if you think of what's the situation if you're in charge of strategic air command and you see a single missile coming over the north pole heading for you if you know that the Russians where probably came from have deployed and have operable of steerable reentry vehicles you you have to tell the president that that could be it looks like it's heading for Omaha but in fact it's steerable and it could hit Washington it could hit San Francisco or anywhere in between and and so that if you know that the Russians have not deployed of steerable reentry vehicles deployed and tested them then you can say no it's heading for Omaha okay it's not going to be pretty but we're not we're going to lose you know a major city in the country sorry I didn't mean to say that but it's but you understand what I'm saying that it's not there's a limit a limit to that if it's aimed at our missile silos and not our big cities that's a much different situation and so that's an one of many examples of weapons that if you own it it makes you less safe if the Russians choose to or the Chinese choose to do that then we will have to respond more aggressively in scenarios where we in the past could have just depended on physics to to make more transparent an attack which in all likelihood is a mistaken attack. Representative Fortenberry. Let me touch on the China component of this for a moment so and again there's a lot of complexities here two decades or so back there was a desire to try to invite China through normalization of trade into a trajectory that allowed its ascent into the community of responsible community of nations as if you will a few years ago Secretary Pompeo was before my subcommittee on appropriation state foreign operations and I asked him I said how much does China give away in humanitarian aid and I I'd never seen Secretary Pompeo stomped for an answer and he I interrupted I said listen it's a hypothetical I don't need I don't need any precise answer he said I think it's probably as close pretty close to zero and I said well certainly in other words what we created through this infectious loss for profiteering is a shift of manufacturing into a place that has very lax labor standards and environmental standards and the deeper question here though is a build-up of societal resources that's been taken in this sort of odd hybrid capitalistic communistic system and plowed into another form of rising nationalism they're they're guided by this idea of economic nationalism in a very controlling government apparatus around the idea of human rights and freedom and all that to for again this version of of Chinese dignity there's some consideration of course by past scarring of foreign domination and humiliation and I understand that but again the new way forward now is this instead of just an economic nationalistic model there is a build-up of military and seemingly much more aggressive intentionality so they make the stuff we buy the stuff they have our cash we run up debt they buy our debt this is a well shift of our assets into the hands of people that now so how do we respond rather than thinking and rethinking the underlying conditions oh we better build some more carriers or some systems to confront the the Chinese threat so or the impossibility of an emerging Chinese ship the threat I should say it's even so peculiar and again I don't have great detail on this so forgive me if I've got some of the details wrong but there was a financial instrument in which invest which was led in our own country in which investors could actually help underwrite the build the building of a Chinese military warship I mean it's gotten to this point of absurdity so why do we go over here and build up our military for a potential confrontation or at least a deterrence with a military that's being underwritten by our very economy in peculiar trading arrangement in other words the 20-year idea that the we're going to outsource morality to the market and the market is going to teach people that they have to have a level of responsibility in order to properly ascend on the world stage didn't work or it hasn't worked so far so I get particularly wound up about this because I just I just again it goes back to what you can measure so we can measure military build up but it's harder to get underneath while we're in this space in the first place and so I it's just hard for me to watch and it's again China didn't have to go this route and it is seemingly and so now we've got this third dynamic emerging very aggressively as they build up their nuclear weapons capacity with a lot of unfamiliarity to us about their own command and controls and and such and honestly I thought it would it was an appropriate idea to try to bring the Chinese to the table in the last round in negotiations with the with the Russians it would send the message to them that yes we agree you're a serious you you need to be treated seriously on the world stage but you also need to act with great responsibility and and this is this strange middle ground we're in right now with them yeah I guess my take on the situation with China is that that was that was a calculated bet that we lost and if you look at following World War two you know we had we had you know Germany Japan you know Korea other countries with no real history of democracy and what we did is that we we offered them access to the US markets with the understanding that they would over time become free democratic countries in the case of Germany Japan you know Korea and other countries that worked spectacularly well China in the 1990s took two or three steps along that path and then unfortunately retreated and now they're they're using you know one of the most frightening things is the way they're using technology and government to enable government surveillance and gentle nudges toward ultra nationalism among particularly the youth in China and so it there's been a real bifurcation in the paths chosen by by our former enemies in in World War two and and China now Russia did the same thing you know it took one or two steps toward becoming an open free democracy and and turn back they they've had economic problems related to that but you know it hasn't been a success either one of my biggest worries in this is there's also been a blurring you know for a long time we had a clean separation between we will never go to war with Russia because it could escalate and now you see Russia you know what they did in the Crimea and so on you can see what the Chinese are threatening to do with Taiwan and so on and so and you're seeing other places in the world where countries are using their nuclear umbrella to to sort of allow them to proceed with smaller scale conventional wars in ways that you know in the height of the cold war would have been too scary to contemplate and this is a very worrisome trend as well please can i give you so much of nuclear diplomacy in the cold war yeah please so i i have five children and my fourth daughter's car is a 200,000 mile vehicle worked fine but i'd push the tires as far as i could push them so i went to the shop the other day and i said look it's got 200,000 miles give me the cheap tires and he said $480 i said where are those made he said china i said where are the american tires i said over here i'll give them to you for $580 i said put the american tires on it you know i mean sometimes it comes down to little decisions like that and i get it that that demand that demand assumes capacity on everybody to do that i'm glad i was able to but not everybody can but look at that differential right there and there's reasons for that and it's lacks environmental standards and lacks labor standards but we just keep listening and thinking it's all about this abstract notion of trade which lifts all boats there's real attending consequences to not thinking through the dynamics of underwriting a country who is intent on a military buildup and who is not ascending to again a responsible place in the international community just go read uh president g's last speech i mean what if a u.s president said that we will bash your heads against the steel wall can you imagine so we we have to be very sober about this and i i really appreciate bill's observation as well that it actually gives significant cover for conventional war as well and this leads us to the point about nuclear diplomacy for much of the cold war our nuclear diplomatic strategy was based upon transparency with the former soviet union we know however that in the case of china they believe that being opaque is actually part of their deterrent strategy they've also said they've been very open about this we don't want to participate in trilateral discussions between the united states and russia we want to stay out of that but if you take these factors into account it it poses a very big problem for us you know how do we promote nuclear diplomacy within this context you know what can we do to build trust is there anything what can we do to open communication channels is there anything between the united states russia and china representative fostered well you know that's a yeah that's a tough one look at to my knowledge um i don't think we've ever offered china a co-equal endpoint with russia and ourselves in terms of nuclear weapons and i think they see themselves as as co-equal all right and so we have to understand what our real position is you know are we willing to accept an endpoint where the whole world you know the three major powers if you will have a significantly smaller number of nuclear weapons but they're equal is that an acceptable endpoint to us or not um and and there are differences in the geography you know russia is at a big disadvantage just because how close the the frontier is to their capital where where the huge advantage i think it was near the end of the uh cold war when someone observed that russia was completely surrounded by hostile communist countries and and so china has there are very few of china's neighbors that view it in a very friendly way because of a long history and so that's an advantage that we have uh over the you know over both of those countries and so that their defense their perceived defense needs will be different and it makes it it makes it tough trying to understand if we can really accept a co-equal endpoint and we also have to come up with a policy on the lesser nuclear powers because if we if we want an endpoint where we for example everyone has the number of nuclear weapons that china has today which is a very credible very credible arsenal capable of killing most people on earth and if if we're happy with an endpoint where it's even reduced to that level then we have to talk seriously about countries you know like pakistan india israel uh you know that at least have um designs on very large arsenals that have a similar capability of wiping out a large fraction of people on earth and and we have to understand whether there is some proportionality between your military needs and the size of your population or your economic strength is that a principle that that should be upheld as we hopefully start ramping down these things are how how that works and you know it's been observed that china that russian's economy is i think right now a little bit smaller than italy's okay and does that what does that mean if you use economic strength as as it certainly scales your ability to produce nuclear weapons but whether it scales your justification for processing them is a different question representative form very well i think bill gave a great answer i think this this is a new day that has emerged and so we don't have clarity on the very question that you you just asked um again are there other pressure points in terms of both the the economic equation whereby we rebuild our own manufacturing start to return home whereby we demand equalization of systems before we enter into trade agreements environmental systems labor systems so that there is fair and competition if you will that should be beneficial to both peoples versus an unlevel playing field and and on and on i mean i think there might be alternative pathways to force the hand to some sort of new posture by the chinese but bill's point is exactly right what are what are we going to accept first i mean they're they're unlikely because they don't have to accept have to accept third position and they're looking at it going what are the consequences to us of continuing this march toward expansive arsenals and expansive throwaway then there's another underlying question here okay well you know japan's an advanced country technologically so south korea um you know these for countries like that these things aren't that hard to make and if china want to make a calculation like that that well are they secretly doing something or are they willing to break with what has traditionally been the nuclear protective umbrella posture of the united states and know their own way in light of these emerging chinese threats that should if there's a rationality here make china think yeah i think in the past we have we the united states has burned political capital to to intercede with japan korea and taiwan and stopping relatively advanced nuclear weapons programs i think that is that is fairly public at this point that that's happened in the past and so um you know trying to understand if you look at the polling in korea for example it's sort of frightening and in japan when they look at the threat from north korea and you know it is not irrational and you look at some recent statements about the uncertainty of the us nuclear umbrella that have been made by senior leaders in the united states you know it is not irrational for a segment of the of the south korean public to think that they might be safer with a nuclear arsenal and that's represented for it very it's out there and the very capable of doing it police i'll add one more thing i i think when you're looking at strategic problems in terms of the the tenderness of place that pakistani india dynamic has always been pointed to as the one that is a more likely scenario of some sort of explosion and yet at the same time you've seen a few years back when there was the the terrorist incident in india it did not trigger the worst-case scenario so even there where the the difficulties are run very deep and the animus is very deep there was capacity to pull back from that escalating to that point even though there still was a lot of saber rattling so they're in a small hopefulness but again that's a tender spot right there um that it's also a situation where the control systems are not right not up to the standards of the russians and the us and so they're they're they're risked there that single rogue actors could trigger a nuclear incident there and and so i would i would applaud if i learned that that both of those countries were upgrading the security of their control systems we have a question that's come into us that asks about your role as the co-chairs of the congressional nuclear security working group and the question is what are your goals as the leaders of this group what do you hope to achieve senator foster congressman foster senator well i i should refer to the founder of the group um jeff is voting you in deserves the credit well well yeah well insulting us both by calling us senators is something that's you know that we're not going to be okay with for a long time but the well look at one of our one of my goals is to just raise awareness you know that the thing you're struggling with is attention deficit disorder in this in this body that we have to think about so many things for such a brief period of time that we tend to skip over really tough problems where there isn't a snap answer you know if you can look at something for five minutes come out with a good policy and make a nice tweet on it you know your staff is all on board with that but if you say we are going to have to spend a lot of time looking at a hard problem that may not have a solution in our lifetimes what's the political gain on that um and so i think you know one of one of the things that actually has helped that coven has helped is an appreciation of the fact we have to deal with low probability events and make contingency plans that you know for a long time pandemics were yeah yeah it's on the list of things that might happen but probably won't and now it's happened and so you can't argue that things like bioterror are not worth worrying about a lot ahead of time and nuclear terrors on that list as well yeah probably representative for them very you know when you called representative foster senator i was chuckling to myself i probably shouldn't say this but you know we refer to them as the country club and we're the truck stop so go into the different chambers there's a very different atmosphere that i think it's kind of reflective of what i just said but it so we call ourselves the people's house for a particular reason we're very proximate of the people and have to go prove that every two years so there's a certain pride in being called representative so that's why we both both chuckled but the i a couple of reasons the founding and you know one of which is in reading an earlier nuclear posture review you you know 90 pages on development of systems upgrade of systems one page on non-proliferation so the issue of non-proliferation isn't talked about as as much now and then there's a complex web of which which does work but it's a complex web of entities and government that's a bit informal that focuses on this with working with the working group but i had to really work hard to unpack who's doing what in government in that regard so one of the purposes of the group was was that intention the other is what bill alluded to we're busy and there is no constituency for this so if there's no political outcome i mean the reality is you can't spend all day long on this because even though the gravity of it might should necessitate a lot more attention it's just does anyone care and not many people do it's too remote from the person who's trying to get gas in their car and get the kids to school and on it just it's too remote so therefore it is very understandable so one of the reasons for founding the group was again to try to figure out are there constituencies out there that would lend themselves to critical thinking and help us but also kind of create some preconditions for more active member involvement in other words it would be noted by constituents and in the previous era there were more groups out there that actually attended to this because it was a sort of a deeper level of societal worry about this and there's just not so i don't know if i if we've succeeded in that regard i think we keep that hope alive in this regard one thing practical that we've done is create a fellows program macawther foundation has been underwriting that through george washington university and again back to work my resources constrained we've got 17 people here and a lot of that is devoted to helping constituents with social security and and tax issues and other things a very limited space for uh you know kind of critical policy thinking 90 percent of which goes toward dealing with what others agendas have been put in front of you and so just to create some space for members to empower them to to think in this regard um so congress is doing its its duty the third component is what i said earlier um recognizing i had some responsibility i believe to to pick up a mantle here led by very serious thinkers in previous eras uh senator sam nunn has become a friend for instance and we talk occasionally um but to stand in the shoes of people like that who who at one time did have the political space because this was so serious but also had courage and great leadership acumen to steer us through some very difficult periods i felt motivated by them as well um representative foster we have a question that came up from a reference that you made to the role of the national labs and we'd be very interested in your reflections on the role of these labs very often although they are a critical part of our overall architecture they're not included in nuclear security and policy discussions would you like to see that changing of so how well they are very very valuable resources to policymakers uh you saw that in the congressional debates over the iran nuclear deal you know part of that was a political question of where you think there was a chance that uh that iran would go politically over the next decade if we gave them some concessions in various areas and that was that had nothing to do with science but there was also a very important part of the iran deal which was the representation that the white house made that there would be a one-year breakout time that if iran you know kept to the terms of the deal and then subsequently decided nope nope we're out of here we're going to go for a bomb that we would have a one-year period between the time that they kicked the inspectors out and started producing fissile material and the time they would have the material for their first um you know their first nuclear weapon and that is a very technical question you have to look at all the different pathways to nuclear weapons of which unfortunately there are many and so i found it very valuable to be able to go to the experts of the national lab and say okay what if the iranians try this what if they try that what if they you know will under all circumstances will it be one year before before they can actually think about producing their first weapon and you know got good answers and those those experts were called in from you know four different national labs and so it's very valuable to have experts like that um you know because the the details matter and and even purely diplomatic deals whether or not a deal is enforceable or not when we were talking about denuclearizing north korea when it looked like there might be an agreement then there was a very interesting set of discussions about okay what sort of inspection regime do you need to really convince yourself that north korea has not you know they may have gotten rid of all their factories and how do we convince ourselves they don't have some small number of nuclear weapons hidden away in a cave in an abandoned mine in north korea and you know what what sort of technical capabilities might be necessary there and so you know it's very valuable to have the the national lab scientists or scientists and they even the ones that mainly do weapons all have side projects that keep them happy as you know as scientists you look at the the wonderful things that have been done at the national ignition facility a lot of that is done by people who whether that's you know that's their part-time job their main job is is doing nuclear weapons but they have a really interesting physics program and it's one of the reasons i'm a big backer of significant scientific efforts inside the nuclear weapons labs um representative fortenberry we have a an interesting question and i think it comes from the response you you shared with it just a few minutes earlier when you were talking about in a sense receiving the baton bearing the mantle that others had carried before you to provide leadership rational leadership on nuclear security policy and that the question i think must come from a young person who says if i want to be involved in the future in shaping the course of nuclear policy in the us what should i be studying now what would your answer be well i'd get an english degree first and then go get a masters in physics i think maybe that's be a happy medium it's a kind of an inside joke here because i i'm i'm i'm worried about our ability to have an understanding of communication skills combined with technical skills um let me let me kind of wedge that question into bill's answer too about national labs i i think uh look there's plenty of internships and fellowships around the nuclear security working group has a fellowship brook is sitting here with me she has a phd in this and came to us through the civilian side um but has worked on the military side so i do think it's a niche area clearly anything that is technical nature like that and that is analytically hard like chemistry or physics combined with the art skills like english like economics in the in an arts program i'll tell you i was a i was going to be a scientist so to speak and i went all the way through most of the science curriculum and midway through my junior year i just had an epiphany and a talk with myself and i just couldn't do it anymore through an act of the will it just wasn't my thing i was able to switch everything over to economics and then life took on more of a pathway consistent with my own self um but i holistic education i think is the the way i want to put this that has a very strong emphasis on an understanding of philosophy and anthropology the nature of the person the nature of the community that has an understanding of the hard science of learning how to write and communicate combined with the analytical sciences that force one to really really think something that has that spectrum of options in it is really really beneficial and i think i before we're done me and bill and i are done with all this we we do have to address that question which i think i've failed on or i haven't achieved as aggressively is to to to create that next body of something that allows young people to plug into this space that then shows them the pathway of opportunity this is very fragmented now and and has diminished um i think there's very very high demand brook can assure me of this in fact i've heard it from stratcom about science majors being pulled in very early into the military that's correct didn't we hear that at stratcom recently uh so there's lots of lots of opportunity there but uh it's a good question and one that i'm going to have to and then i know and i don't i think i don't really feel like i've done enough in that regard and so at least why don't you help me with that representative foster any thoughts on what students should be studying if this is an area that they want to engage in well to that list i would add psychology and you know if you just contemplate how much you learn about the behavior of of other primates about about human behavior by studying the behavior of other primates you know there's what i guess it was in foreign affairs of maybe a year or year and a half ago a just wonderful article that compared what it was this is your brain on nationalism and talked about the behavior of chimpanzees you know troops of chimpanzees and it just you know they go on border patrols and kill invaders that wander in you know this sort of behavior that just are frighteningly human and so just understanding that that to some extent you know we are machines and you can learn about the failure modes of those machines in our decision-making you know the what the cantamans book on thinking fast and thinking slow that really resonated with me and trying to understand what the decision-making is in the in the human brain because ultimately you know when a nuclear launch is sensed their human brain is going to has about 15 minutes if you're lucky to make that decision of whether or not you're going to you know respond and annihilate the world or not yeah um and so you have to understand that um and and then i i you know when i look around people ask me well don't you want more scientists i actually want more engineers because engineers have a mandate to make systems that work you know that's you know physicists can go dream up parallel universes and all sorts of fun stuff like this and we can make measurements that are unlikely to be interesting but you could win you a Nobel Prize whereas engineers have to build systems that work reliably and i think the nuclear deterrence of mechanisms that we have in place are not a reliable machine that will that guarantee the long-term survival of our species and that we have to be put a lot more of sort of mechanistic thought into aligning interest to make sure that um every de-escalation path is incentive in in the systems we put in place can i give one more thought on that please wait there's there's two questions can we do it ought we do it we spend a lot of time on can we do it which brings us to the end of this conversation and in many ways it allows us to circle back to to two very striking very central points one of the very striking points was the the reflection that this the most important of all diplomatic and foreign and security policy issues is the one that has the most complicated almost opaque constituency right and that's a fundamental dilemma that is uncomfortable but wholly true and the the second key moral issue that we've touched on in a number of ways is we have the capability to destroy ourselves we have the systems that could help us to manage that threat but could also propel that threat and we have a moral obligation through the leadership of representatives and senators and the administration to make sure that that doesn't happen and as a final question i think all of us would like to ask you do you have confidence that is great power competition becomes more intense as more regional powers accrue nuclear capabilities that we will steer the study course that we've steered for the last 75 years do you have confidence that we can do that as a final set of reflections representative foster well one of the things that gives me more confidence than i would otherwise have just looking at the facts are the connections between scientists that that have you know been established you know the the chinese scientists that i know and have worked with are decent human beings all right and and the russian scientists that i came to know now even at the end of the world of the cold war and and afterwards you know they are decent human beings that were put in a very uncomfortable box and one of the things that made that was a stabilizing influence was the fact that scientists continue to work together you know the um the for example the large accelerator labs uh cern the the nuclear lab in in switzerland was just a den of spies but it was also an opportunity for um for us to get to know the russians that really knew stuff then you know when you when you worked on experiments with russian groups of russian collaborators one of the collaborators was the kgb guy and you kind of knew who they were and you you know occasionally go out drinking with them and but it was actually stabilizing and one of the the things that i'm trying to do in congress is to to try to steer some us assistance in a to a project called sesame which is a synchrotron light source that's being built on the outskirts of amand jordan by an international collaboration that includes israel and includes iran and everyone in between and really um and has enthusiastic backing from the scientists there because they care about the science and i think it will stabilize the whole situation in the mid east if we have more visibility into the scientific operations of all the countries involved and so i i am i'm worried that some of the reactions to covet are to detach our scientific collaborations with countries that we're not friends with i think that is a step backwards we have to look at the risks you know straight in their face but we shouldn't be shy about strengthening the scientific collaborations representative forberry final reflections two one is a quick story so i own a 1963 ford f100 short bed step side john deere green three on the tree pickup truck and i hope i've painted it a good picture because if you're thinking that's really cool it is cool so i brought it over to mechanic shop recently there was a i had to get a tire change i i realized there was a car show going on i said why don't you guys invite me so i left my truck out there left it running i said you guys watch over this now these were people from a diverse way of backgrounds and i just walked away from my truck with it running i said you guys watch it while i go inside i don't know who they were they were absolutely united around one thing fascination with that cool cool pickup truck so maybe builds on to something here that you know there's a science or other things but when you're when you tend to have a common ground or a common interest with things that excite and enable community without ever even focusing on community you actually achieve what you're trying to achieve the reality is the world is screaming for meaning and if we're going to answer that question in the 21st century where we can all kill one another almost equally now or will soon be able to it centers around one philosophical proposition human dignity every person matters no person no thing should ever be thrown away and so with if we are to create holistic systems that are supportive and nurturing that set people on the right pathway that empower them to use their their best gifts in respect and dialogue and solidarity with others and economics is a part of that social types of functions are a part of that development entrepreneurship scientific inquiry are parts of that then what we do is we reduce the possibility of twisted forms of nationalism that can perversely motivate some to some abstract in in the nature of settling scores or or or reopening old wounds or just simply can what's the German word shut in Freud taking joy and someone else's suffering and these are all dynamics of human nature that's a that's a reality so it's a it's a hard question but again I believe the 21st century architecture for stabilization peace and a healthy prosperity centers on that one proposition human dignity Congressman Foster congressman important very thank you very much for being with us today most of all thank you for your principle leadership within congress on this the most important of of all issues and gentlemen I look forward to meeting you at the truck stop cup of coffee is on me thank you both very much for being with us and thank you to everyone for joining us for this conversation