 You can put that on your belt. Okay, ladies and gentlemen. Sam, you're right here. Okay, folks, while we're getting organized, let me just say thank you all for coming. We are delighted to have you with us. My name is John Hammery. I'm the president here at CSS, and we are fortunate to be partnered with our very good friends at the Sheeper School of Journalism down at Texas Christian University. We've been doing this series now. We do about one a month, and it's turned out to be one of the most popular things that we do, and it's really because we're able to use Bob Sheeper in his remarkable capacity to draw people that want to be with him and talk about important issues, and we're very fortunate that way. Bob is very generous with his time, and of course we want to put together some of the most timely and interesting topics for all of you, and this is going to be a very interesting discussion tonight. We're on the front end of a big nuclear debate. We haven't had one in Washington for probably 15 years, and we're going to have Rip Roar in one here in the next couple of years, I think, and these are people that have probably done more to get this shaped and going than anybody, and I'll let Bob explain all that. I do want to give all of you a little advance notice that we're going to, on the 2nd of March, we have our next session, and it's going to be Bob Sheeper interviewing David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos. Now won't that be interesting? The three openers, you know, on Sunday morning. I think that's going to be a fascinating session. Bob, welcome. Thank you so much for doing this, and let me turn it to you. Thank you very much, Dr. Hambry, and thank you again on behalf of Texas Christian University and the Journalism School there. We have three people from TCU here today. You can tell the TCU people because they're wearing the purple ties. David Willock, who's the chairman of the College of Communications, Larry Lauer over there, who is the vice chancellor of TCU, and John Tisdale, who is professor at the journalism school. So this is a great thing for TCU, and we really appreciate it. The best thing about having a distinguished panel is you don't have to spend a lot of time on introduction. So I'm going to be brief because all of you know who these people are. I would just say this about Sam Nunn. I've been a reporter in Washington for over 50 years. In all that time, I always found Sam Nunn to be the single most effective legislator that I came in contact with. I didn't think he was that old. And that's the best part, is the way he has been able to hold his age. Bob was here when I got here. I was. He's also a fine person, as is the person on this side of me, George Schultz, who I must say is, meets every definition of a fine public servant. Here is someone who held four cabinet level positions. Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State. In all of those positions, he gave his country good judgment, good sense, and maintained a good sense of humor. Even when, and I was on this trip with him as Secretary of State, you'll remember this, Mr. Secretary. We went into bond, and when all the press got off the plane, the members of the U.S. Embassy Press Office gave us each a press kit that said, official visit of Secretary of State Charles Schultz. Don't I wish. And I still have it, Mr. Secretary. One of my favorite souvenirs. Sid Drill is a senior fellow at Hoover Institution and advisor on nuclear matters to various administrations. For 40 years, he is truly an authority on nuclear matters, large and small. David Sanger said to me that Sid Drill probably is cleared for more classified information than any single person that he knows. And David knows a few, which brings me to Mr. Sanger over here, who is the Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times, a English language newspaper that is read here in Washington by the elites. David did not go to TCU, but he went to Harvard, which for many of us at TCU was their backup school, David. But we're so proud that you could be with us today. The subject we're going to talk about today is the big one. It is a very big one, and it's going to be at the front of this administration's agenda. It's on the front of the world's agenda. And that is, what do we do about nuclear weapons? Back in 2000, Senator Nahn, along with Secretary Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and William Perry, authored an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in which they said we should begin taking steps to a nuclear free world. And I just want to ask both of you, we'll just start with you, Senator Nahn, since you are the Chairman of CSIS. Is that feasible? Is it possible? Is it just a fairy tale? Is it something to say, gosh, we wish we could do this, but this is never going to happen? How did four men who have dealt with this for so long come to the conclusion that, yes, it was something that we should at least be talking about? Bob, the four of us, George and Henry and Bill Perry and myself, we all went through the Cold War and we all supported deterrence and we all supported a strong national security, including a strong nuclear posture, because we felt that nuclear weapons then were a deterrent to every type of war, including conventional war, but we're in a different set of circumstances now and the world hasn't adjusted. First of all, we've got terrorists who are willing to give up their own lives. There's nothing particularly new about that except the intensity of it and us being the target is new and unpleasant, but we've had terrorists for a long time, but what we haven't had is loose nuclear material in large quantities, large enough quantities to make Obama the size of Hiroshima, and what we haven't also had is the know-how, the technology which we thought was a monopoly of states for many, many years, is no longer a monopoly of states. People that get a supply, a decent supply, a small amount, but enough to make a nuclear weapon of highly enriched uranium can figure out if they get a couple of physicists working with them and people who know something about the technology and that's not impossible, it's not a piece of cake, I don't want to make it sound real easy, but the know-how is spread all over the world now and so the combination of nuclear material spread around the world, know-how, and terrorists who would use it if they had an opportunity is a fundamentally different equation. The other thing is fundamentally different and I call it the shaping of a perfect storm is that the nuclear industry is making a renaissance. Now I happen to support nuclear power based on safety and security and reliability. It has to be part of the answer, not the whole answer, but part of the answer on the carbon problem, but the nonproliferation treaty provides that every country that wants to gain peaceful nuclear technology has the right to do so. The Iranians are claiming that is their right to go into enrichment. The problem is if you can enrich or low enrich uranium to burn legitimately in power plants, you can also enrich the same technology and take it right up the scale to high enrich uranium. So those are all things that are happening now and we're on the verge of a proliferation of enrichment. So the bottom line is we are in a fundamentally different position that we were in during the Cold War. We have other countries that now have nuclear weapons. We have a number of them who may seek nuclear weapons and deterrence as we visualize it during the Cold War, primarily between the Soviet Union and the United States, is no longer the only equation. It's part of it but it's not the only equation. So I came to the conclusion slowly but surely and George Shultz and Sid Drell and Bill Perry and Henry Kissinger came from different directions but to the same general conclusion that we had to change directions and we had to get countries around the globe to work with us. We're in a race between cooperation and catastrophe here. Without cooperation we're never going to get the steps that we need to take to protect our own citizens. And without the vision of a world that at some point ultimately will not have nuclear weapons we're going to get the cooperation we need. So the steps are absolutely essential for our national security. The cooperation is absolutely essential for the steps and the vision is absolutely essential for the basic cooperation we need. That's why we came to a fundamentally different conclusion than we had during the Cold War. Are we headed to a world that is more likely a nuclear weapon will be exploded than back during the Cold War? The way we're going now with proliferation spreading it's more and more likely. Sam has a great image which I'll repeat not as well as he does it but he says think of yourself on the side of a mountain. The top of the mountain is a world free of nuclear weapons. Here's nice and clear up there. We can't even see it from where we are. The bottom of the mountain is a world where more and more countries have nuclear weapons which means more and more fissile material is around. You have plenty of non-deterrent people as Sam said. So at the bottom of the mountain is a world where it's almost certain that nuclear weapons are going to wind up going off in some cities. So we need to turn around and start going up the mountain and we just have to do that and we need to do it with determination to get to the mountain top. And as at least as I see it the way we've tried to formulate this and the book that's passed out has important papers on the subject is to say the vision of where we need to go causes you to think about how you're going to get there and then you start identifying the things you can do and when you look at them well they're difficult but they're doable. It's not impossible, you can do them. And then that gives confidence if these are steps that you can take that you can get there. So there is an interaction here. It's also the case I think that every step identified when you take it makes the world safer. So we really have to get on to this thing. I've been struck in working on this at the difference in which way our op-eds have been received with Reykjavik time. I sat there with Ronald Ergen and Hoppe House for a couple of days with Caleb Gorbachev and Edward Chepernotzi and we talked about eliminating nuclear weapons. I get back to Washington and Margaret Thatcher comes right over. She summons me to the British ambassador's residence. Remember, she always carried a little handbag with stiff handbag. Well, there's a verb in the British language to be handbagged. And I got handbagged. I mean, I really got handbagged. He said, George, how could you sit there and allow the president to talk about getting rid of nuclear weapons? I said, Margaret, he's the president. I said, yes, but you're supposed to be the one with his feet on the ground. But Margaret, I agree with him. But her reaction was very much the way people around town reacted. They were all devotees of deterrents and they couldn't imagine a world other than that. Ronald Ergen had a long conviction about this. He thought it was immoral. There's a book coming out, I don't know when, a couple of months or so. It's entitled, Ergen's Secret War. And it's an amazing book because it traces through the long period of his convictions about this and the way he thought about it and worked at it and so on. It's really an extraordinary book. But at any rate, after this op-ed was released, I might say we put this together first. Sid Drell and I got it going at the Hoover Institution. We didn't have any money to have a conference and finally we got a little money out of the director and we got a little more of this conference off the ground. And after the op-ed was published, two foundations said, would you need any money? We'd like to give you some money for this. So we had enough money to do some more. But the reaction was entirely different. I don't mean that everybody reacted, yes, yes, yes. But it was almost as though it was a wake-up call. People have gone to sleep on this subject and it's getting out of control. So we have to get going on it. I want to get to you in a minute, but I want to go back to the center of none because I remember you also were a little taken aback by what was going on at Rackavik. How did you come to have a different view of all this? Well, I didn't have a handbag. I might have joined Margaret Thatcher at that stage. But what I always felt is that I said in a speech on the floor after being debriefed by George, by the way, George, as usual, was the one who was always accurate about what actually had happened. There was a lot of confusion about what had happened at Rackavik and there were a lot of stories floating around. And I think George, without any doubt, was the one who had it pegged. But once I figured out what had happened, I made a talk and talked about the fact that the nuclear weapons were our way of preventing conventional war because the conventional war, in my view, would have been heavily tilted toward the Soviet Union because we had the preponderance of tanks and artillery tubes and manpower and so forth with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. And so I was concerned about getting the cart in front of the horse because I felt we ought to concentrate on the conventional side which would lead to the nuclear. But I went back and re-read that speech the other day and it did raise those questions. No doubt about it, Bob. And at the end of that speech I said, I do believe in the dream of a world without nuclear weapons. I'm not trying to quote precisely, but we have to get the conventional balance right. And you notice one of the steps in here because the other countries now, some other countries, including Russia, feel that they are in the position now that we were in then, that they are a disadvantage. So you have to work hard on regional balance and you have to work hard on the insecurity that countries feel about their own defenses. You have to work hard in regions like India and Pakistan. Where Pakistan feels that nuclear weapons prevent India from dominating with a conventional weapon. You have to work hard with Russia in dealing with them, not only a missile defense, but you have to put things like NATO expansion on the table. You have to discuss those things with them, not give them a veto, but discuss those things. You have to work hard on the Middle East situation where Israel is certainly going to give up there whatever they may have. They don't make that clear, but they're not going to give things up to some balance of peace in that region with a two-stage solution and a lot more stability than they have now and a lot more assurance. So all of those things have to be done. It's not just nuclear. The steps have to be worked one by one. We have to, as George said, we have to first stop going down the mountain and then try to find base camp and once we get to base camp together with others then we head up the mountain. But it's going to take an awful lot of work. It has to be addressed, not simply the nuclear. What is the first thing we ought to do? If you were going to draw up a list of things. Well, in my view, we have to restart a strategic dialogue with the Russians because between us we have more than 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world and we've got to get our act together and get an agreement on what we're going to follow the START Treaty with which is going to expire within a year. It has the only verification procedures that are in effect now. That goes out of business. We have no means of verifying limits. And we have to settle some other events like where and how we're going to work cooperatively, as we said, on an ABM system. So when we get to low levels it might be effective against a rogue threat coming. So I think getting that dialogue started is very important. Then the most difficult immediate challenge is the spread of nuclear energy. Because according to the Nonproliferation Treaty the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy is due to all signatories of the treaty. That means they will, like Iran right now, be developing enrichment capacity. And it's a simple fact that if you can enrich uranium to the low percentage needed to run a light-water reactor you have more than what it and to make enough uranium to power a reactor of reasonable scale. You have enough capacity to also make highly enriched uranium enough to make a bomb. So that's an immediate problem that hits the commercial world as well as the arm control world. You know, I said that David Sanger said you had more classified information than anybody he knew of. As far as I know, David has no clearances for classified information, but he seems to know a lot of things. He proves you don't need clearances to know something. I'm just going to give a little plug for David's book. This is a fascinating book, especially what he has to say about Iran and what's going on in Iran right now and what the United States is trying to do about it. It's called The Inheritance, the world Obama confronts and the challenges to American power. Bob, can I say one thing? Chet Crocker is here in the audience and Chet wrote with George an inspiration, a terrific paper on the diplomacy of what has to occur in the direction we're talking about. It's absolutely terrific and it shows you the complexity of the parts that I was talking about and things have to be addressed. Any of you in the audience who are interested in the diplomatic side of this and the challenges in that regard would do well to read Chet's papers. Maybe we'll get him to ask a question here in a minute. Let me ask David, you did a lot of work and a lot of it is in this book about what's going on in Iran right now and what are they trying to do? Are they trying to build a nuclear weapon? Well, I guess where I came out at the end of the work on the book was trying to get the capability to build a weapon and that may be all they need because as Sid just said if you can show that you can do the enrichment that's the hardest part of this entire operation. There was some intelligence which came out in the National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007 that suggested that they suspended their work on the design of the weapon but almost everybody who I interviewed on that even those who believed the intelligence in the NIE and there was some vigorous debate on that said, look, once they have the enriched uranium they can do the high enrichment in a matter of months they can do the weapons design in a matter of months and in the nuclear age that we're in a sort of second nuclear age you don't need to have the arsenal to have the kind of power that comes with that and so that gets to just what Senator Nunn raised which is if we spread nuclear power around you could have a number of countries that have that capability without having a weapon now some of them have it now and we don't worry about it Japan has had this capability for years on end you don't see people complaining about that but in Iran's case and certainly in the case of North Korea which did drop out of the treaty you've got a case where if they don't actually build the weapon they certainly can export the technology and you know probably the scariest event we've seen in recent times was the construction of that reactor in Syria with North Korean health that the Israelis dismantled for them overnight one night in September of 2007 but that showed you that you could go on for years proliferating the technology and helping a country move along without detection I'd like to have those on David said about Japan's capability but look at the diplomacy that people are taking on with respect to North Korea you have to go to China what do you go to China with? I should think you say to them I don't know what they're doing but I should think you say to them look if North Korea has a nuclear weapon on the end of a ballistic missile they've already flown ballistic missiles over Japan what do you think Japan is going to do? they're just going to sit there? the worst nightmare of China must be a nuclear-armed Japan so it shows on the one hand the dangers of breakout if these things start alarming people and on the other hand the kinds of things as a diplomatic process to persuade people to do something important about these matters and that was exactly the argument that President Bush used with the Chinese when he was trying to get them to lean on North Korea the other trick they used was they discussed with the Chinese extraordinary safety standards and then showed them a little map of if there's a meltdown at Yongjiang where that plume of radioactive material goes right over Chinese territory that got the Chinese a lot more interested in it let me just ask you about the diplomacy here because it seems to me all of this fits in with what role NATO is going to play NATO expansion somebody here has talked about we have to have the cooperation of Russia what do we want Russia to do? what is the most important thing we can do to have them see this our way and the two of us see it in the same way it seems to me from the standpoint of diplomacy we don't want to get ourselves in a position where there's an American initiative and we go around trying to sign people up to it that's not the right way to proceed and Chet brings that out very nicely we somehow want to have this emerge as a global initiative and everybody has a stake in it and we're willing to give leadership to go around and so on but it should be something that people see very much in their advantage and that's beginning to happen we finished a second conference and we sat around Sam and said Henry and Bill and I and others said you know we should have a conference in some other country and talk to people from other countries and out of the blue came an invitation from the Norwegians and they said if you'll bring your act to Oslo we'd like to have a conference so we went we had 29 countries there all the countries with nuclear weapons and it was a great response a wonderful conference one of the interesting thing was this is weapons oriented people that came the nuclear fuel cycle was not much on the agenda but it kept coming up and coming up and coming up this is on the minds of anybody who thinks about nuclear weapons so let's get going on diplomacy to get control of the nuclear fuel cycle I would say that that's enormously important the fuel cycle working with Russia on that is actually got to be one of the top priorities and they have made a very good proposal on that the Russians have a facility at Angarsk and they're basically saying we're going to control the technology but any country that wants to buy into it has an equity partner into this enrichment facility and they would be able to get material they'd be able to make a profit if there's a profit they're able to do so I mean they made that proposal to the Iranians the Iranians said no as I read it they didn't say hell no and if we basically get any solution with the Iranians then I think it's going to have to be along some line like that the other feature of the enrichment trying to stop the proliferation of enrichment facilities is to adopt the general premise that we aim in the long run to have everybody who enriches under international inspection that includes us but we've got to be willing to do things if we want others to do things we cannot basically tell people to stop smoking while we're chain smoking ourselves that's Director Al Baraday has said that over and over and I think it's a good analogy so enriching material has got to be internationally controlled and I think to the extent we can prevent new countries from getting enrichment I think it's a great great help on that our organization with Warren Buffett's support has proposed a fuel bank he put up fifty million dollars and basically made available to the IAEA they would set all the rules internationally that fuel bank if matched two to one will come into operation if the IAEA decides to do it it would be a backup supply facility so that if the market forces were inadequate countries would be assured they'd have a fuel supply we've got to take away the excuse of countries to develop their own enrichment facility otherwise it's going to be hard to control this nightmare another point with Russia is if we could have a breakthrough and this is tough, it's hard it would slow it down but in my view we have time and should take time to view this strategically we have an opportunity to work with Russia on ballistic missile defense if we could begin working with Russia on ballistic missile defense because they would no longer view the deployments in Poland and Czech Republic as a threat to them it would open up the door also to work on something else that I think is enormously important and that is getting nuclear weapons off hatchery or alert we still have thousands on prompt launch just like we did in the Cold War they still have thousands it facilitates all sorts of accidents miscalculations we've been very good during the Cold War and they were good in terms of preventing accidents miscalculations but we were also very lucky and they were very lucky we had all sorts of incidents during the Cold War and you take a continuing prompt launch policy by the United States and Russia and you add to it India and Pakistan you add to it other countries in the world that have nuclear weapons and you add to it Iran and North Korea and you've got yourself a real nightmare there Russia on ballistic missile defense is enormously important the third thing is you can't surround Russia by taking everybody into NATO except Russia and expect them to react any way other than hospital now I have favored taking in new democracies in the European community and so forth but when you look at Georgia on the map and you look at Ukraine on the map and you say are we going to be able to work with Russia on nuclear weapons and work with them to help us on the Iranian problem and other problems if we basically take those countries into NATO right now against that protest Russia has to at some point be a part of the Euro-Atlantic security arrangement not necessarily NATO but they've got to be included we cannot expect them to cooperate if we continue down the line the last two administrations have moved then there was another very important idea that came up at the Oslo meeting that Georgia referred to with the fuel cycle there are a lot of skeptics who say that the goal of zero is unattainable it's so difficult not real of those 29 nations there one point was foremost in their mind if you want us to cooperate with you on controlling proliferation and making progress you have to accept the point that we're not going to do that in a two-tier world you have to accept the vision that all nations are headed toward this goal and that's why it's so important that even though it seems like a very difficult challenge we stay with this vision and work to as Sam said without the vision we're not going to get the steps and the countries made that explicit you have to agree we're headed toward zero no two-tier world when I ask a question in the course of talking to the Bush administration about your proposal the answer I got back was first they argued that President Bush had brought down a number of nuclear weapons through the Moscow 3D somewhat significantly in 2002 of course it was very little done by the administration after that time the question I kept asking as I was doing interviews with the book was why not what it kept you from doing this and the answer I got back was that they couldn't imagine the situation with the Russians getting down to a level below 1200 or 1300 US weapons because to go lower than that say to a Chinese 300 or 400 you would end up setting a target so low that other countries would feel an incentive to come out and match the United States not only would you make China an equivalent power but the Iranians would say well we could get to 300 or 400 the Pakistanis who already had 100 or more would be able to get to 300 or 400 so I was just wondering how you would answer the critique that came from the Bush administration though I don't think at any point did they stand up and publicly criticize your proposal well I can tell you what I would say I would say first of all do you have any idea what one nuclear weapon will do let alone 2000 one of the kind that Sid can describe to you now they are much more powerful than the ones in Japan they would incinerate Washington DC or New York City these are weapons with awesome power and if one of them went off in a major city somewhere basically it would shut the world down it would be so horrific so when you talk about getting 2000 weapons aimed at each other it's an inconceivable amount but then it seems to me that dramatizes the importance of having a goal of going to zero this is where we want to go we don't want to go down to 200 and stop or something we want to go to zero and this is the way you can do it by taking these kinds of steps and by being willing to work at it let me tell a little story just for fun on this business of collaborating with the Russians on missile defense at the end of the Reykjavik meeting we'd also talked about getting rid of ballistic missiles as well as we were big time radicals there and meeting in a Soviet position that always been to try to get the strategic defense initiative eliminated so Gorbachev says to Reagan at the end he said Mr. President if we get rid of ballistic missiles why do you need a defense against them and Reagan said because people know how to make them and they'll always be some rogue nation that they get them and you and I will both be happy that we have an ability to defend ourselves and whatever we get up we'll share it with you we'll work with you and Gorbachev said Mr. President you won't even share milk technology with us well that was the atmosphere of the Cold War days that was true but I think it's different now and it's got to be different if we're going to get anywhere we'll go to some questions in the audience if we make a round just one comment on David's David's question the other countries involved in the negotiations to begin with US and Russia are going to have to move out first no country like China France or Great Britain or other countries are going to reduce their weapons when we are thousands and they are hundreds but you have to anticipate that they have to be brought into it it has to be a joint venture not just US and Russia and they have to agree at the very least they're not going to increase while we're decreasing so you've got to calibrate all of that into it and at some point we have all countries we have the strongest conventional forces in the world so we basically have if you look at our military we have basically less need for targeting nuclear weapons than a lot of other countries so we have to take all of this into account as we're talking about it but China for instance I haven't been briefed lately on it the guy who's got all the classified briefings could probably tell us but it used to be that China did not really upload their missiles in a prompt launch position now if the United States and Russia continue the way we are then China is going to move in that position and when China gets into a prompt launch position it's not going to be very stabilizing so when people say I can't visualize how you ever get to the top of the mountain ask them this question can you visualize how we can have 10-15 countries with nuclear weapons, terrorists running around with nuclear materials loose know-how proliferating and not have nuclear explosions I can't because it's going to happen and when it happens the world is going to change and it's not going to change for the better so yes it's a very tough job but we've got to tackle it we've got to head in that direction said how likely is it that a terrorist could get his or her hands on a nuclear weapon and where would be the most likely place well first of all there's still enough material enriched uranium for uranium bombs or plutonium not under tight control around the world to make hundreds if not thousands of bombs the harvardan people keep track of this and then Lugar legislation and then the global threat reduction initiative worldwide is being pushed ahead but as many others have said that ought to have a very high priority to get control on that material once a organization has uranium enriched uranium they can make a bomb just like we did to drop on Hiroshima that was a uranium gun type bomb none of this fancy implosion business simple gun type bomb inefficient but you see what it did to Hiroshima we dropped it it had never been tested that's the most immediate danger we take a little bit more of a plutonium bomb that you have to implode with but the uranium one enrichment that's the lurking the Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium bomb and that had been tested that's a long time ago but that had been tested in Palomagordo before we dropped it that's available uranium is easier what about bombs that are already made how is the security in Russia for example well since I'm still recovering from Erdogan's cruise missiles flying from Minot Air Base down on Louisiana in this country I don't really know what to say I thought we had done better than that it's discipline and commitment the military in Russia we think isn't good control but it's never good enough the strategic nuclear weapons the ones that could basically fly across the oceans and hit us are certainly better control than any others the tactical nuclear weapons the battlefield short range nuclear weapons which the Russians still have we worry a lot about those remember one of the Russian generals who later died in the helicopter basically said that a number of those were missing and of course the Russians denied that but the battlefield nuclear weapons are part of the missing agenda we really that needs to be up front with Russian we need to figure out how to get rid of all those battlefield weapons they are terrorist dreams so those are not as secured in my view as a strategic weapons the third part is the nuclear materials and they are much less secured than others and it's not just Russia it's countries all over Russia is much better shape than they were 10 years ago in nuclear materials much better shape well I think that I'd put that right at the top of the list of dangers not only because of nuclear materials and nuclear know-how but because of possible instability in the country and that's the ultimate danger one of the points here is Sam starts putting things at the top of the list everything is at the top of the list there are lots of things to do and really the point is that if this gets going and there seems to be a momentum building if this gets going it's a daunting diplomatic challenge there is a huge amount of work to be done so Secretary Clinton I'm sure will be asking Congress for appropriations to expand to be able to deal with a better and better team and it's also quite obvious that people who are quote diplomats are not going to be effective unless they are accompanied by scientists you've got to have people who understand this from the inside out along with you to appreciate effectively so that's another skill that's going to have to get going we have a big diplomatic task ahead we have a very distinguished audience today I'd like to Congresswoman Jane Harmon is here right on the front row Max Cappelman would any of you like to ask a question Chet Crocker is here we've already mentioned him and if not one of you then we'd like to take some other questions and there's the mic right here Jane it wouldn't be a member of Congress if you didn't have a question here I wouldn't be a member of Congress if I didn't speak no I think this is absolutely fascinating and a huge reminder of the recent history that many in Congress don't even know anything about I just wanted to add to the stew dirty bombs which are much easier to put together you could take some material out of a radiology machine at a hospital and blow it up in a window with two sticks of dynamite and the half life of some of that stuff could be 30 years and you would contaminate two square kilometers of Manhattan or something like that I think that's extremely likely obviously it is not as horrific as the stories you're telling about what modern weapons can do but I just wanted to ask what it is and what strategies we could use against some of that because I think if you ask the question Bob of what could really happen what's likely to happen or what's possible to happen I think the dirty bomb scenario is much much easier than any of the rest of this I would agree with that I think that is most likely in fact I think we're very fortunate it hadn't happened so far unless the public is better prepared for it than they are now and if I were in the nuclear power business I'd be very worried about the psychological repercussions from the dirty bomb going off because of the feeling around the world that all nuclear materials are unsafe I think it's a real danger the only answer that I have is every country has to secure their radiological material I think we need to do a better job in our country we can't just point at other people there's a UN resolution that has passed charging every country with that responsibility one of the things we could do with Russia I felt is to have U.S. and Russian scientists and military people working together offer themselves to other countries that might need our expertise to secure their materials because we've worked together for the last 15 16 years so it's very important we stood up an organization our foundation did it's not the only answer to the problem I don't want to pretend it is but it could help call the World Institute of Nuclear Security the organization that we funded is now in Vienna we have a director we're about to get an international board it's job will be to invite every entity that has nuclear material whether it's a hospital or whatever the facility agriculture use food purification to join and begin working on best practices and peer reviews all over the world we do that on the safety side it's reasonable and 3 mile island but doing it on the security side is equally important said did you want to add to that I'll just add a sentence the greatest damage done by a dirty bomb is the high explosive it's not casualties it's psychological and economic damage but it's very likely alright yes may I add to that there's also denial of space you block off you know gold finger talking off the US gold stocks in Fort Knox Kentucky but my question is quite different Senator Nan you talked about the missing tactical weapons one thing about missing tactical of tactical weapons is their shelf life would you comment on that and before I finish I might add two more things one is should Russia be a part of NATO then we can have the Russian lines of communication to Afghanistan they're well developed they were supporting 110,000 troops there for many years and lastly that nuclear disarmament being from India has always been a highlight of the government of India before it even became independent alright let's try to get through that first one there I think it was a mistake years ago to exclude implicitly and explicitly in some cases Russia from being a part of some type of security alliance it may not be NATO it may be a broader umbrella that NATO is a part of so I think Russia ought to be part of an Atlantic Euro security alliance and if it's not that may be too specific a term if it's not it's going to be very hard to deal with Russia on these major issues one of the things that we seem to have a difficulty with in this country is distinguishing between the vital and the vivid things that are vivid get a lot of attention things that are vital sometimes get almost no attention and it's vital that we have a relationship with Russia I must say it's vital for them too it's not a one way street and we're not going to give them veto and things we're not going to say we need you so you can do what you want they need us also to be part of the western world interesting economic speed that Putin just made in Davos the headlines were the criticism of the US as they would be but he had a lot of interesting things to say about the world economic situation very interesting speech so yes I think we need to work with Russia and we need to broaden the concept I don't think Russia would want to be a part of NATO I don't think there's any chance they will be an early part of NATO but they should be part of a discussion about European security I think that's absolutely essential on tactical nuclear weapons and so forth we have what we call permissive action links where weapons that basically in our inventory in the main part you have to have a code and if you try code two or three times it doesn't work they basically self destruct in the sense that they cannot be operated it would be to the advantage of the world of every country that had weapons had power devices now I think I'm sure we have worked with other countries on that in some cases our friends I'm sure we've had some discussions with countries like India and Pakistan the level of trust is probably not sufficient for US technology to be used in all those cases but it's certainly in our interest now the non-proliferation treaty interpreted by some as blocking that kind of cooperation I don't think that's the right interpretation but if it is we need to take another look at it because even if a country is not part of the non-proliferation treaty they've got nuclear weapons we want them to have some type of device whether it's their technology or whether it's with our system alright let's try to if we could make the questions a little shorter it would be great so we can get to more with the Union of Concerned Scientists the Obama administration is required to do a nuclear posture review by the end of this year I think this is going to be a very important look at nuclear politics look at these questions would you agree that there have been two of these earlier by Clinton and by Bush that were not dramatic in the changes they recommended would you recommend that they make more changes in this posture or dramatic along with what you're talking about particularly a question of should Obama say going in that the posture review should have this as a preface the only role for nuclear weapons as the deterrent that's it full stop and make that the basis of the policy going forward for the posture review President Obama has innovated with something he has a website White House and posted on it under the heading of foreign policy is a statement that says I can't quote it exactly but something like Obama and Biden will seek to have a world free nuclear weapons this is a hard job or something like that and we'll have to take these kinds of steps very consistent with the sort of steps that are outlined here and it seems to me if they since they are in that posture not if they're there they put it out publicly that that's a posture we're in and then a lot flows from that and a lot flows from that with other countries flows from that in terms of what you can expect the United States to try to do so I think it's a good posture to go into the non-proliferation review I think also if we can get into this position we'll be better off on the non-proliferation issue the way we are now we're sort of against other people getting nuclear weapons and we're sitting there with lots of them so we're trying to prevent things we're just in a negative position probably a lot of people are going to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday and any football coach will tell you that the best defense is a good offense so if we can get into the position that President Obama seems to be getting us into we'll be on the offense there's something we're for and then lots more things are possible once you're in that position and if you have action going on the nuclear fuel cycle for example that's really there and doing something you can go to Iran as a diplomatic matter and say okay so this is for peaceful purposes put it into this international pool with everybody else and have it supervised and manned in many respects by people from the international that's what's going on so I think an awful lot of positive things flow from getting yourself in the position of saying my goal is a world free of nuclear weapons and I'm going to work for it let's go here thanks Brian Bender with the Boston Globe Sid mentioned the cooperative threat reduction program Nunluger can you just give a couple of specifics of what you think the US government the Obama administration needs to do immediately to has set out to be a goal of securing that nuclear material that currently exists or nuclear weapons material in four years it's taken about 15 years to secure about half of it if my estimates are right how do you do it in four years is it possible what do you need to do immediately two or three things I think it can be done in four years and I think you have to I think you one thing I would suggest they do is take a look at what the Bush administration has done and they've done a lot there's been a lot done every administration basically has the tendency to say nothing was done until we arrived but there have been a lot of things that have been done and on the Nunluger program the administration they were lukewarm toward it to begin with but they really got behind it and then they developed the global threat reduction initiative which Sid alluded to a minute ago that's working with Russia we put a lot of money up about the Department of Energy of the Soviet Union that was furnished to countries all over the world by the United States and by the Soviet Union there's a whole list of countries that we're trying to bring that material back from with the cooperation of Russia that would go back to Russia and be blended down we have a whole list of countries that we're trying to bring that material back from but the baseline of the GTR program and the Nunluger program is not nearly broad enough beyond that baseline that's not included in the original goals and that needs to be viewed so a partnership with Russia here but a partnership with a lot of other countries is absolutely essential not a amount of money alone it's money but it's also a lot of hard work and a lot of work with countries that have nuclear materials that don't want to give them up the direction that George is talking about the vision and the steps if the United States were to be a Catholic, there's to be hearings there's some legitimate concerns but they can be addressed but if we were to ratify the Comprehensive Test Man Treaty it would make an enormous difference psychologically in the world and it would make cooperation not automatic but it would make it a lot more likely to happen in all of these areas let me, we'll have one more question from the audience and then I want to just go around and let everybody say something they'd like to say in closing my name is Jennifer Nepper and I'm here on behalf of Dr. Freddie Clay who had a question he wanted me to ask do you think the top of the mountain would require a fundamental change in the world order to prevent serious violations of this abolition of nuclear weapons would a world government be necessary would a United Nations with a nuclear armed Victorian Guard what would the end state have to look like to prevent these violations you certainly would want to have assurance that you have a method of detecting any cheating and you had a clear sure to happen way of dealing with that cheating and I don't think that necessarily means a world government or something but it means that you have a clear regime that people agree to that's going to see to it that we continue to have a world free of nuclear weapons and that's one of the kind of tasks that you have to address yourself to and figure out how you're going to do that and get people to collaborate you can think of things immediately but that's one of the great diplomatic tasks just to say again you could not accomplish that if I were charged with negotiating that I couldn't do it if I didn't have SID and people like that who understand the the technicalities of this and the scientific aspects of it whatever it will well we are getting close to the end I want to give each of you a chance sometimes I'm happy to say we're getting close to the end today I'm really sorry because it's been fascinating discussion but SID what's the most important thing what's the most important thought you'd like to leave this group with today I sort of copped out at this point I'm a physicist and I rely on Einstein when he said it's true verification needs if we get down to small numbers we have to verify that there's no hidden material or no hidden and disassembled warhead that we don't know about at the level of the accuracy requires greater the level of trust we're going to have to create among countries all countries that they're going to allow a degree of transparency as to what's going on in their countries is beyond anything and these are very difficult problems I mean and they go together I can't give you a verification scheme that's going to work without an enormous trust but people have to realize what a dangerous treadmill we're on now starting going down as Sam has said and a world with many nuclear nations doesn't want a Cuban missile crisis for example and you look at the close calls in the Cold War when it was just one adversary it was a bipolar world it was simple and clear it was much more complex, much more dangerous the technology's out there and so we just have to understand we have to work at this problem we have to succeed because the alternative is unacceptable but it's a formidable diplomatic job and when I listen to Chet Crocker and people like this talk I realize how easy physics is David I mean it what strikes me about the problem as we've been describing it today is that we've got two issues that are operating on two very different clocks the long term issue that Secretary Shultz and a non-pressure drill raised today of how you get down to zero and what stages you go to and obviously that is a multi year generational effort and then with the states that we are most concerned about now with Iran with North Korea different kind of problem with Pakistan and India and with states that were fearful could get a weapon if Iran for example made progress we're working on a much shorter clock where President Obama is going to have to make decisions probably within a year or two on Iran if he is going to stop them from getting that capability we may be too late already on North Korea after their nuclear test and so to add to the political complexity that Sid laid out here you've got to somehow convince the American people how you have one set of policies for the short term clock and another for the longer term and I think you've made the argument here today which may well be right that they're reinforcing it we're coming down we may get into a situation where we're in at least a diplomatic confrontation and perhaps something worse with some of these countries that are seeking a new capability and I'm not sure that the new administration yet has sort of gotten their minds around how you handle both that short term and longer term plan I think we have to work at this with a sense of urgency and no doubt it will take a long time but I don't think we should keep saying that I think we should say this is an important problem and we see things that we have to do so let's get going and do them and if we do that I think maybe we'd be surprised at how much could get accomplished and if people around the world saw that somehow the leaders of the world are able to take on a difficult subject they really begin to do something constructive about it that's going to make everybody safer they may say gee the world looks pretty good after all and maybe we can do some other things and get some encouragement out of that I might just do one little plug here as we talked our little group about what can we do we're not government we're just guys out there trying to be helpful we thought well one thing we can do is look at these steps and try to get the most professional scientifically trained people we can find to address themselves to each of these steps and then convene very knowledgeable people distribute these papers ahead of time and discuss them intensely and then have them revise their papers in the light of the discussion and the book that you have is the result of that and the thinner one by Chet Crocker is the same process with respect to the diplomatic side so we've tried to give the president and his advisors if they decide they really want to get going something to look at to get started with these are the things steps you need to take these are considerations about them by people who are really knowledgeable and here are some people who are willing to work with you to help do this and move this ball along so if anybody here has a chance to get in and see the president why don't you give him a copy of that book all right, Senator Don you want to take her on home here my final thought would be that I think the main thing that has happened out of these Wall Street Journal articles is that with Wilson, with Kissinger and Bill Perry myself people who've gone through the Cold War, Sid Drell, Max Campelman many other people in fact 60%, something like 65% of all the living national security advisors Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense have signed up for this it's not just us, it's a lot of very strong people Democrats and Republicans we've got a big consensus we've had four of the top leading former statesmen in Germany just pinned an op-ed piece on this subject endorsing this approach and so same thing in England and so there is some momentum but the main thing that's been done so far I think and the thing that will pay the most dividend is I think it made the political ground and intellectual ground safe for young people who will be dealing with this problem to really tackle it and that's happening all over and around the globe a lot of bright young people are saying hey this is something that's going to affect our generation these old guys have talked about it now we're going to really try to do something about it I have a sense of urgency about it as George said and one way that I approach this whole thing intellectually and have for a long time is asking myself the question if there was a nuclear explosion and one of the great cities in America went up in smoke and hundreds of thousands of people were killed and the world was traumatized the economic system was basically shut down because of lack of confidence one of the things we would wish we had done to prevent it and then once you make that list and you say why aren't we doing them now and let's get started and that's what we're trying to do but it'll take some time but we've unleashed I think a lot of creativity out there with people a lot smarter than I am that are going to be tackling this business we have a base camp study going on we have a verification study going on we've got a lot of bright people working on it so by and large I think that we're going to have a lot of progress on this this point I'm reasonably optimistic in a very troubled world well thank you very much gentlemen on behalf of CSIS and T.C. 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