 Welcome, viewers, to Channel 17, Center for Media and Democracy here in Burlington, Vermont. This is the ongoing series, Nuclear Free Future Conversation. I'm your host, Margaret Harrington, and welcome everybody to this discussion today with Dr. John Ruer. Welcome back, Dr. Ruer, to our program. You've been here before and talking about the nuclear arms race, and now we have the topic set before us today. The new nuclear arms race, national security or insecurity? So, taking from the top, Dr, what about the bulletin of atomic scientists who set the doomsday clock forward to two minutes to midnight? What does this mean? Thank you for having me, Margaret. This is a topic that's very dear to my heart because I think it impacts our future more immediately than almost any other issue that we face today. So the bulletin of the atomic scientists was a publication and a group of people that started with the very scientists who created the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project for use in World War II. And it didn't take them long to realize they had let a genie out of the bottle that really terrified them and realized the implications for our future if we continued to make these weapons. Many of them had regrets. Not all, but many had regrets that they had done it in the first place. So in 1947, they began to publish this bulletin and they developed this doomsday clock. The idea was to give their professional scientific opinion, as the real experts in these weapons, how much danger they posed to our survival at any given point in time. So that clock has been yearly changed, how many minutes toward midnight, and has waxed and waned according to their professional assessment of the danger that we face from nuclear weapons. Last year, they moved it up to the most it had been in over 20 years. And this year again, because of the threats they see, they moved it up to two minutes to midnight. It's only been that close one other time in history the very year, 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union both up to the anti from the small atomic weapons of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disasters to the thermonuclear weapons that are hundreds to thousands of times stronger. And why is it this year? What are the reasons why they're pushing the clock forward? Well, they're really worried about the attitude, the cultural attitude, both the United States and the other nuclear powers that seems to be moving away from eliminating these weapons that everybody has agreed to all long needs to happen. And to starting a new arms race by building new weapons, modernizing the ones we have, and worst of all, making them more usable. And therefore likely to be used in any of the conflicts that are going on. Meanwhile, those conflicts are getting worse. With India and Pakistan, two nuclear arm powers now threaten each other and having regular border skirmishes. And North Korea, of course, in 2017 testing nuclear missiles and its first thermonuclear weapon, the first hydrogen bomb that puts it in the league with the big boys in the nuclear club and can threaten the United States. And mostly what we hear are the verbal threats between North Korea and President Trump. And so to know what the background is that is, but this isn't a background, this is up front, right? That there is a buildup of nuclear weapons on all sides. That's right, North Korea is the latest addition, the ninth member of the nuclear club, and has its weapons because after agreeing with all the other non-nuclear weapons, not to build them in return for the promise that the nuclear weapons states would eliminate their nuclear weapons in due time. At the time everybody signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. When realizing that the nuclear powers weren't very fast about disarming, decided to withdraw from that treaty and build nuclear weapons, which has succeeded in doing. Which treaty is that, and which countries withdrew from the treaty? The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which went into effect in 1970, was the promise between the five nuclear powers at the time and the rest of the world that no one would develop new nuclear weapons if the nuclear states worked on getting rid of theirs. Since then, four other nations have acquired nuclear weapons and several had them and eliminated them. The latest is North Korea, which has decided to withdraw from the treaty and build its own nuclear weapons, thinking it needs them for its self-defense. So of course the United States is still going, abiding by the treaty. Depends on how you interpret it. Article 6 of the treaty says that the states will work in very efficient fashion to eliminate nuclear weapons, allotting the 1.2 or 5 trillion dollars that we just allotted to modernize them. To me, doesn't sound like much of an effort to get rid of them. So on paper, the United States is still ascribing to this treaty. But in action, it's another story, and it's a frightening story. It is a frightening story. And there's a document that's produced every so many years by the United States government called the Nuclear Poster Review, which is an assessment of how many weapons we have, how many we need, what their purpose is. And that document has always contained an element of, yes, we're still working on getting rid of these. And while the latest one published by the Trump administration still has a sentence in there about, yes, we want to get rid of them, there's nothing else in that document that suggests that we're headed in that direction at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite. In addition to modernizing all the weapons in the delivery systems that we've had up until now, they want to introduce new weapons. For example, small tactical nuclear weapons for the use of submarines. See, before submarines, which one of the three delivery systems, right? We have submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles from silos in the ground and strategic air bombers. The subs have always had strategic weapons. That is, weapons large enough to take out whole cities that were never intended to be used, but intended as deterrents. You hurt us in any way, you're goner, and that theoretically keeps them from attacking or whatever. But now they want to put weapons small enough that could be used in a battlefield situation, and that makes them more usable. The word they use in the posture review is flexibility, which is very frightening to those of us who know in intimate detail what those weapons will do. And so, meanwhile, we have the nuclear submarines in strategically placed all around the world. Well, the Navy won't tell you where they are at any one time, but there's a couple of big bases. The largest is, I think, in Washington State and Norfolk. The two largest, but then the Soviets, the Chinese, the French, the British all have nuclear-equipped submarines. Is it important to know that the Soviets and the Chinese may have been developing more nuclear weapons before the United States got on board this policy? Is that true, or is it important to know that they were the ones who did instigate this? Instigate the latest buildup? Yes, the latest. Oh, I think you'll hear accusations on both sides. The point is, all those countries have a signed treaty, that Article VI of the Non-Polarization Treaty, it says they'll get rid of them, and no one is at this point. The possible exception of Great Britain may not be modernizing as fast. At least they're having public discussions about whether they should or not in the public square or something we're not having here. There's no discussion about whether this trillion and a quarter dollars is worth it, given all the other security needs, how these weapons can't protect us from 21st century threats. And continue? So you'd think there'd be more public discussion about this? Yeah. Well, Doctor, why do you think that there is such apathy about this? Most of us, we see this and we say, okay, it's just proceeding as usual, and there's nothing to worry about because there hasn't been another bomb dropped in 70 years or more. Yes, well, I think for young people, they have no awareness of what these weapons are. I talked, I was lobbying recently about this in Washington, D.C., and a young front office staff of a U.S. Congressperson, I asked them how many nuclear weapons they thought there were in the world, and they said 500,000. I've asked other people that age, and they say five or 10. So the ignorance about this is enormous, and that's simply a reflection that it hasn't been covered by the media. It's just a fact. And I'm sure the people that are making these hundreds of billions of dollars building these weapons really probably don't want it discussed a whole lot. But it's not been a news item for young people. So the misinformation is enormous. Now for the older folks who know about these weapons and the UNI who got under our desks in grade school, and I can remember measuring the walls of my house to see how long I can survive fallout radiation, have that jolt so that when we see these pictures, that brings back a memory. It doesn't for young people. So it's our job to bring them up to snuff, I think, on talking about what it means if these weapons are used in a small or a big way. Now when you talk about people constantly going back to the argument, and I've seen this as the top level of the State Department to people in the street. Oh, of course they're safe. They've proven themselves safe over 70 years. Look, we used them intentionally against Japan. They saved us an invasion maybe. And look how safe they are since. But, and this is where education comes in, if you look at the mistakes that near misses, there have been 32 broken arrows where the United States Pentagon agrees they lost or accidentally fired a nuclear missile that wasn't intended 37 times. That's the ones they admit to. It says nothing about what the Soviets did. And there have been seven near Armageddon's where a launch on one side or the other by Russia, the United States, would have started an all out nuclear exchange, which would have ended civilization and caused misery like we've never seen before. I hope that people will begin to learn about these and we do have an opportunity to do that as we'll talk about later in the show with this upcoming series of films about nuclear weapons. But here's the way I look at people who say we'll look they're safe. As a doctor, I counseled people many times about risky behaviors, like whether you smoked or whether you didn't wear your seatbelt. Things that I saw the results of poor behavior in the emergency department, the lung disease and the terrible smash faces and the deaths and so forth from the car accidents. But the longer people do those behaviors, the thing I was guilty of was not riding on my bicycle with a helmet. I was 35 before one of my colleagues said, John, that's really dumb. So now I ride with one. But because you don't get hurt during those things or you don't get the cancer or you don't get the COPD, the longer you go, oh, this must be benign, right? It's normal human, that's the way the brain thinks. Well, it reminds me of us as if we were turkeys. An egg hatches, a turkey is born. Its human caretakers give it food and incubator and they nurture it. And every week that goes by, that turkey has to feel better about life. It's growing, it's healthy, it's being fed and watered. And as the weeks go by, it's like, oh, life is good. Who knows if turkeys are having discussions about whether their human caretakers has the best interest in mind. But even if they did, they would probably win the argument that life is good. And so their confidence level with time goes up and up and up until Thanksgiving day. It's gone. And this is what really gets me is if nuclear weapons are launched tomorrow and most of our cities are destroyed, nobody looking at the history of what you'll see in these movies will look back and say, well, that was a shock. It'll say, of course, how could they not see that coming? And that's the point I want to get. Why be turkeys? Well, John, you mentioned the movies and tell us about the week long movies, the showings on nuclear issues. Yes. Right here in Burlington. Right, so at the urging of me as a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility who wants to educate people about this, the Peace and Justice Center here has arranged for the showing of five different movies and six different locales next week, starting Tuesday through Saturday evenings and one Sunday afternoon in different venues, each with a different topic. So there'll be the movie Threads, for example, shown at the University of Vermont on Tuesday, which is a tough to watch movie, but it's the most realistic picture of what a nuclear exchange would mean for a given place. It's a story of Britain being attacked in the 1980s and it's very sobering, tough to watch, but everybody should see it just so you can make a decision. Do you want these weapons in the world existing that can do this? And they can do it in an hour's time on any given day. And then there are uplifting movies, like on Wednesday, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is sponsoring a movie about how the peace movement has dealt with this in the past and particularly the wonderful things we did by changing Ronald Reagan's mind from coming into office, he signed an order about explicitly how we would beat the Soviet Union in a nuclear war and three years later in a state of union speech after much education, he said we can't win one, it'll never be fought and became the greatest disarmament advocate of all time. We need to do that again. These movies are powerful for that. Then there's some documentaries about accidents and terrorism and then there's one very uplifting almost fantasy but not as unrealistic as you might think about how some sports players actually made a difference in reducing nuclear weapons called Amazing Grace and Chuck, a really fun movie to watch. And please, if you watch Threads, make sure you watch that one too so you won't feel so bad and have hope. So hope, how can we have hope in the face of this nuclear escalation of this machine that is just going forward into... This threatened... There's just so much money in this. It's so many jobs for so many people and people don't know the fact that money in military industries like this creates so many fewer jobs than doing anything else, including not taxing people in the first place. You'd have a lot more jobs without those military expenditures but the money is there. People don't wanna lose their jobs. They don't understand the realities of these weapons. So the hope comes from people changing their minds and we did it before. Like I said, in the 1980s, we were as close as ever to an all-out nuclear exchange and we reversed the whole thing. When people say, oh, you'll never get rid of them. Now that they're there, how could you ever get rid of them? How could you trust that the other guys are getting rid of them? Almost nobody knows that we went from 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world to less than 15,000 now. Does anybody listening feel less safe because we have fewer ones? Just continue that trend. For having to say it's 122 nations in the world last summer. I was at the UN, signed a treaty, agreed on a treaty to just eliminate these, to make them illegal as a major step toward getting rid of them. We can join the rest of the world. The non-nuclear nations are tired of the nuclear bullies having the weapons all the time and they're demanding that they get rid of them. We can support that. We can call on our congresspeople. We have some of the most progressive minds in Congress with our congressional delegation who signed on to some bills limiting nuclear expenditures a little bit, limiting the power of the present to unilaterally start a nuclear war, trying to make it illegal to start even a conventional war against North Korea, preemptive strike without congressional approval. These are all in the books. Our leaders are more progressive far and away than most in the country. But we need them to, this is really existential threat stuff. This could happen like the scientists that the bulletin say anytime. There were two minutes to midnight. And if it goes off, nobody's gonna be surprised. That to me suggests that we ought to ask these guys to take more of a leadership role in opposing this modernization of the nuclear arsenal. And we have this great example because the military budget right now has two trillion dollar programs that we could debate more. One is the nuclear weapons built up in the modernization and the other is the F-35. So there's this fighter plane, the most expensive single weapon system ever built and it's gonna cost over a trillion dollars too. In fact, we've spent I think close to $400 billion to have a few hundred of these flying planes of questionable value. And if the country says yes, we absolutely need them, great, but if we don't. And here, after fighting that for eight years, losing every battle to try to eliminate those planes coming to the airport in Burlington, they've resurrected the movement again and now there's gonna be on March 6th a ballot where the city of Burlington voters, not the city council gets to vote whether they want that plane here with all its noise and medical consequences of which there are many. And remember that it's a nuclear capable aircraft. And while it's unlikely to have nuclear weapons at the airport in Burlington because its range is so limited it couldn't deliver them anywhere you can imagine it using, these will be, if used in action, maybe flown to Guam where they'll pick up the nuclear weapons and drop them on North Korea to start the whole mess or whatever. So it's all related, but we have hope because this tough little group of people in Burlington is gonna bring this issue despite everybody including their own congressional reps fighting in them at every step of the way. They're still saying we can make a difference as people. And with the nukes we've done it before it's time to do it again. So plenty of reason for hope. We're still here. Yes, and could you speak to that? Like why after 70 years of this turmoil and this reality, I mean it seems that to me like a question of what is reality? This is the reality what you're talking about. And a lot of us are living in a place that is unreal like in a, well for an old fashioned term it's like a fool's paradise that we are in. That it's not clicking with us that this is what's happening or that we do have any power to stop this progress. You know that's really Margaret what he gets down to. And we've all been educated to think that the powers that be are just too powerful to us and we don't have a say. But the fact is we do and history shows it. We can make a difference. And on an issue this important it's worth putting the time into. And the biggest motivator really is the education. You know when I gave these talks back in the 1980s there weren't too many people who would give me an hour or an hour and a half or watch these films and come away thinking exactly the way they had before. Not everybody, some people say well that's a risk but it's worth taking and they can respect that. But the overwhelming majority of people once they see the reality of this in great detail most of them will say yeah let's not go there. And as soon as the people say let's not go there it disappears. Are you saying that the power of truth is a true power and that things can change with that? Of course, of course. See the belief in deterrence that these weapons keep us safe is really based on well believing like turkeys that they're safe because they're well fed until that day when they're not. And I don't understand how folks can say they'll never be used when every weapon system that wasn't eliminated in history has been used. And even if you say well we have all these safeguards in place again you should watch these movies to see how close those safeguards have come to doing it all in. I said this on the other show, General Lee Butler who commanded all the ICBMs all the strategic bombers and all the submarines at one time in 1980s recently wrote a book on his deathbed practically saying it was all a mistake and it's only by luck and divine intervention that we haven't eliminated ourselves. That's the guy on the inside who knew everything about these weapons. I looking at it from the outside came to the same conclusion and was very affirmed when I heard that this year at the United Nations. It's almost magical thinking that somehow we can build something, threaten to use it and never actually use it. In gaming theory anything that's probability is not zero will happen if given enough time. That's just a mathematical fact. And there's nobody on the earth I've ever heard say that it's a zero chance these things will be used by accident. So you're approaching the issue with a logic, right? Well from every angle, mathematical logic, common sense, morality, and hopefully with the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons it'll actually become illegal to have these things and that'll give a boost to the cultural resistance to what we inherently know as a dumb idea. And in closing for this short interview, doctor could you talk about that treaty to abolish nuclear weapons and the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and what impact that is having on the powers that be today? Right, so the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons which works hand in hand with physicians for social responsibility and the international physicians for the prevention of nuclear war, some of their founding members. I remain on those mailing lists and every day I see something exciting going on in some country around the world, including Iran and places you would never dream of with ordinary people pushing their governments, pushing their parliamentarians and their congresspeople, educating people about these. There's a peace boat, large cruise ship that part of the year goes around educating people about nuclear war mostly through the efforts of the Hibakasha, the survivors who are getting very old now from Hiroshima and Japan. And they will be coming to Burlington in September. We'll have a big educational program where we get the benefit of these wise old folks who lived through what we're trying to prevent. So all of these things are pathways to hope. Yes. As we can see. And could you have some closing remarks now for our program today? Well, it's clear that governments under the influence of weapons manufacturers are not by themselves going to eliminate these silly weapons, the F-35 or really anything else without pressure from the people. And if we believe we have any semblance of democracy left, we have to know that we do have the power to change our government's mind. We've done it before and we can do it again. So I would just ask not to feel hopeless but to do the minimum, whatever your life allows you to do to push back against these things, do it. Educate people, invite speakers from ICANN or speakers from PSR, show these movies, get and watch these movies. Anytime you get a venue talking about it, most human beings that I know make the right decision once they know enough. And meanwhile, this movie festival starts. Next Tuesday. Okay, could you, next, okay, we have the, we have a flyer that shows the. That'll be up on the. Yeah, that'll be on the screen. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon. Okay, well thank you very much for talking with me today and lifting us into a greater reality about what's going on and please come back to talk to us again. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you so much. Thank you viewers.