I dont believe it. It makes no sense.
"There is something so strange."
"Perhaps you could suggest some fantastic explanation. "
"Could'nt it be this sort of thing"
He turned the drawing round.
"Yes," she said, "That is what I mean."
This was the first explanation of the splitting the atom.
Robert Oppenheimer said: "Impossible."
But within 15 minutes he decided it was real.
He realised it would release some great amount of energy,
That you could generate power
and make bombs.
Within one week, on Oppenheimer's black board
There was a drawing of the bomb.
Enrico Fermi stood in his office
and looked out of Manhattan.
He kept his hand to the size of a tennis balll.
"A little bomb like that" He said
"And it would all disappear."
Countdown To Zero
There is no doubt in my mind
if the terrorists had acquired a nuclear weapon,
They would not have hasitated to use it.
SoI guess the question is:
Could They Ever Get One?
Al-Qaida is determined to acquire nuclear weapons
and use them if they get them.
In the early 90's
they tried to buy highly enriched uranium in Sudan
They got scammed
Just prior to the 9/11 attacks
we do know that Osama bin Laden and his lieutinent Zawahiri
sat down with two Pakistani nuclear scientists
and discussed nuclear weapons.
Before releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway
the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo
attempted to acquire a nuclear bomb in Russia.
They bought a sheet farm in Australia
to mine uranium to build their own bomb.
The objective of Al-Qaeda is:
is to kill 4 million Americans including two million children
This is in his calculations,
the..which is required to balance the scales of justice.
He takes various incidents
from Shatila to the war in Iraq,
and counts up the bodycount and says
"Thats how many people we owe: 4 million. "
You are not going to get 4 million people killed by
hijacking airplanes and crashing them into buildings.
Actually, I am not that worried about nuclear weapons.
Its not one of my main worries.
Isnt everyone worried about nuclear weapons?
There are all concerned nuclear war?
Thats a stupid answer, no
I don't know. Its never been something that I actually had to think
in my everyday life.
It might get on your conscience and maybe then disappears
I do not think anybody is going to use in this day and age
it is ridiculous to even think about it.
What can you do? Nothing.
At the end of the day a small button and there is going to be a big mess at the end of that
Somebody is going to make a mistake one day and we are all going to suffer for it.
There are three ways to acquire a nuclear weapon:
You could steal a bomb,
You could buy a bomb
and you could build a bomb.
Of all the things I've learned after 9/11, about terrorism iintent
the most startling discovery for me personally
was realising they were trying to build a bomb.
The hardest part of making a nuclear bomb
is getting the material,
highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
Many countries have these materials,
and often they are poorly guarded
But if I were a terrorist
intending to build a nuclear bomb,
and i wanted to blow up a major city
I would look to the countries of the former Soviet Union.
There have been many cases involving the theft
of highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
And every time there has been a black market ceasure
of stolen HEU or plutonium
andthey were able to track to its source
It came from Russia.
There was a case at a Russian naval base in the early 1990s.
One of the naval personel told a relative of his where the highly enriched uranium at this place was
This relative walked through a gapping hole and a security fence
walked upto what you and i would consider to be a tool shaft
snapped the lock with an iron bar.
He set off no alarm. It was not detected at all.
The Russian military prosecutor in that case said, quote:
"Potatoes were guarded better ".
At a facility called Luch,
where they fabricate fuel made from highly enriched uranium,
there was a worker there who knew that as long as the output
was within about 3 percent of the input
they figured it was normal loses to waste and they didnt bother to investigate.
So he kept stealing small amounts
of highly enriched uranium
day after day, over a long period of time.
Eventually he stole a kilogram and a half
of 90% of highly enriched uranium
He set off no alarms. Noone noticed.
He had friends who were making their living
stealing car batteries.
And they said:
"Maybe the guy in Moscow who buys or is still in car batteries
"will Buy your stolen uranium . "
So they went down to the train station together,
and the police came in and arrested the car battery thieves
and he got arrested along with them Thats the only way he was ever caught .
We have cases in which people from the Russian nuclear arsenal
were sellling material and they were captured
We have cases in which people from Russian nuclear labs
were selling materials they was captured.
Almost all of those cases
until the material was seized
and had never been noticed to have been missing.
All the black market seizures that I am ware of were serendepetous
They were caught by luck.
So we dont know weather it is the iceberg or the tip of the iceberg.
Once you have managed to acquire highly enriched uranium,
you need to smuggle it out of the country
Georgia is located along Russia's southern border
and things like highly enriched uranium
could be smuggled from such a place
by Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran,
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and so on so forth.
The Georgians invented a so called man of Turkish nationality
who said he was a Muslim and
representing a serious organization.
Oleg Khintsagov believed he was selling
highly enriched uranium
to make an atomic weapon to terrorists
If a truck driver can get hold of it,
a small time husler
who just wants to become a rich guy
imagine what professionals could have done
Real professionals with an ideology,
with an agenda with brains
Once you have moved the highly enriched uranium,
you could use any number of ports
in the Middle East or the Mediterranean
to ship the HEU to your destination.
smuggling highly enriched Uranium
into the United States, is pretty straight forward
lead pipe will shield the HEU.
The detector would have be within a few inches
to pick up any radiation.
And then hide it amongst everyday goods
A hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium
is smaller than a football.
It would fit in a 6 pack beer cans
100 000 shipping containers go to the united states everyday
Every way the drugs come to new york city
would be the same way you would imagine highly enriched uranium coming.
If you have any doubt about the ability of al-Qaeda
to bring highly enriched uranium into the U.S.
They could always hide it a bale of marijuana.
Terrorism is just one threat
the deliberate threat.
There is also the unintentional threat
of a nuclear detonation
by accident,by error or by misjudgment.
We like to think that the U.S. military
or other military who are controlling nuclear weapons
are perfect organizations , they will never fail .
We expect them to have 100% reliability.
But even the well-disciplined,
very professional U.S military
made serious serious mistakes with nuclear weapons.
An atomic bomb breaks loose from a mounting shakle
in a B-47 jet over Florence, South Carolina,
causing a sensational freak accident.
A B-52 bomber was loaded with nuclear weapons by mistake
An American airplane flew 1500 miles across the nation we are told,
with six nuclear warheads on aboard.
And nobody knew. not the aircraft crew,
not the commanders on ground.
we have had B-52's explode in the air
during refueling mission
causing 4 thermonuclear weapons
to fall onto the Spain territory and into the Mediterranean.
A B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons
crashed near U.S Air Force space in Greenland,
scattering deadly plutonium over the icecap.
In 1960, a BOMARC air defence missile exploded,
melting a nuclear warhead.
In 1968, the USS Scorpion sank
400 miles southwest of Azores.
Nuclear weapons on board were never found.
A B-47 bomber disappeared over the Mediterranean.
Nuclear weapons on board were never located.
In 1959, an aircraft crashed near Whidbey Island, Washington.
The nuclear debt charges
were not recovered.
Skyhawk's strike aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon
rolled off an aircraft carrier in the Sea of Japan
The weapon was never recovered.
There are many ways in which efforts
to make a system more reliable
actually backfire and make it less reliable
Sometimes we had a redundant system.
and backup systems
so that if one fails, another can take its place.
But complexity is the enemy of reliability.
Because as you add system is making more complex
because its harder to understand all the potential interactions.
Its that unlikely bizzare interaction
where one person interacts with another in a way that wasnt anticipated
or one backup system interacts with another
in ways that you cant figure out ahead of time
and therefore cant plan around
Those are what cause the problems
In 1961, a B-52 broke apart in midair
over Goldsboro, North Carolina
causing two nuclear bombs to fall
One parachute functioned properly,
and that bomb survived with minor damage
The other parachute failed to open When that bomb hit
five of six safety devices malfuntioned
A single switch prevented a nuclear explosion.
When i worked in the Pentagon
i believed that the likelyhood of a nuclear weapons accident
in the United States occuring was very low
I still believe that
But low probablity events happen
they happen all the time.
There's a first time in history for every event.
Eventually those low probablity events will occur
No! That supposed to happen?
Like there is probably every country in the world today
How many countries do i think have nuclear weapons?
- List them? - China.
I dont think i suckup for this.
- UK. may be
America i'm guessing
Oh. Oh. Us Oh I .. that was a given
- France. - Germany?
- Australia? - Canada? I do not think Canada
- No, not Japan. - There's more. I know there's more.
Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia.
All other countries. They are not telling us. They have them
- Afghanistan? - North Korea?
- North Korea. -Do they?Ok, North Korea.
Who knows?Who knows exactly?
I think that's it.Yeah
After the United States detonated. the first atomic bomb
in the New Mexico desert
nuclear technology began to spread
and other countries began to acquire
their own nuclear bombs.
Great credit is due for this mighty British achievement
for it seems that by the possession of such deadly weapons peace can be maintained
in this troubled world
At Reggane, deep in the Sahara
France goes forward with the detonation
of her first atomic bomb.
The explosion carries France a step forward
towards the dream of General. de Gaulle towards national glory restored .
This is a giagantic success of Mao Tse-Tung's thought.
Our nations first nuclear test
surpasses the levels of the first nuclear tests
of the United States, Britain and France.
Their criminal intent to block and prevent our nations
people from nuclear weapons
have been thoroughly smashed
Pakistan, which has often went to war with India,
might now have to join the once select nuclear community
in self defense and warned:
"numbers in the nuclear club will not stop at six"
One Prime Minister of Pakistan said
Pakistan would build a nuclear weapon
even if it meant that the people would have to eat grass
"We will make the bomb even if we have to eat grass. "
In Karachi, they poured into the streets
pulling the symbol of the power they were celebrating.
The bomb has become a source of national pride.
thought there was a jubliation in the streets of Pakistan.
The first time we achieved something
which places us in the ranks
of very very few countries of the world.
We were proud of our scientists,
we were proud of our capabilities,
we were proud of our strength.
The people thought that :
"Now let India do anything to Pakistan.
"Let's see what they do."
I had North Korean officials say to me
a lesson they took away from the toppling of Saddam Hussein was that
Saddam was ousted because he didnt have a bomb
They were not going to let the same thing happen to Kim Jong-Il.
Therefore,they needed to have a bomb.
North Korea has feared of disappearing
into what the communists used to call the "dustbin of history,"
like all their other communist friends and they see the nukes
as the one thing that makes them the country
that is taken seriously by the U.S and the other big players in the neighbourhood
Every country has enemies.
Every country can use self defense
as a rationale for acquiring nuclear weapons.
But if every country does so
it is a much more dangerous world.
When we see something that is technically sweet,
you do it .
That is the way it was the atomic bomb.
The father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer
gave some frank answers to some important questions in 1947.
I have been asked whether in the years to come will it be
pssible to kill 40 million American people
in the 20 largest American towns
by the use of atomic bombs
in a single night.
I am afraid that the answer to that question is yes.
I have been asked whether there is hope for the naions security
In keeping secrets some of the knowledge
which has gone into the making of the bombs.
I am afraid there is no such hope
A nuclear weapon in a sense is the most
simple configuration of nuclear material
that you can imagine You just bring together
certain quantity of fissile material
highly enriched uranium or plutonium
and if you do it right it will explode.
The design of the first atomic bomb
was a very deep secret
In fact that was a time when people didnt even know
whether a bomb was possible.
Now the making of the atom bomb has become much easier.
Those who say that building a nuclear weapon is easy
They are very wrong
Those who say building a crude device is very difficult
They are more wrong
Do you agree with that statement?
I wont comment on that statement - Okay, Alright
People from the U.S Nuclear laboratory were
testified to a classified section to the Congress
and they said it would be possible make a nuclear bomb
with all parts being Commercially available
except from the actual nuclear material
Senator Biden asked
the heads of the three weapons labs:
Is it possible?"Is it really possible that the terrorists could do this? "
They said "yes."
They said:"This is something that we test our graduate students from time to time.
"We take two students who havnt been prepared for doing this"
We tell them: "See if you can make a bomb that would work. "
"And on the whole most of them passed this test"
Biden said: "Prove it"
And so they went and made a nuclear bomb,
with everything other than the nuclear material,
from commercial parts.
They actually brought it in to the classified hearing room in the Senate.
Typically, an implosion bomb would have something like a
25 kg of uranium,which is about the size of a grapefruit.
If, lets say, between 70 and a 100 kg of HEU
is available,
then the design is not a major factor.
It would not be very efficient.
it would not use all the uranium that was used in it.
and yet it would be enough to level a city
During my 10 years as prime minister,
what i really noticed was that
it was actually the threat of the proliferation,
the fact that these weapons could fall
into other peoples hands
That was the thing that troubled me,
that kept me awake at night.
In the capital, Islamabad,
word hit the streets in early afternoon:
Another nuclear device tested successfully.
As Pakistan celebrated,
the public hailed AQ Khan as the father of the Islamic bomb.
In 1974, AQ Khan was working at a company
that was developing a brand new process of enriching uranium
He stole their designs and took the list of all the suppliers.
At the end of the day he is not really a master scientist
but he is a master smuggler and a master organizer.
He knows how to get the pieces out of the countries
and how to find stuff and buy stuff
There was this whole plan to start an operation setup
by the intelligence services, by the army and by Dr. Khan
Restrictions were placed Sanctions were placed.
But somehow the pakistanis got around that
and the formal help actually came from India's enemy- China
China gave a blueprint of a nuclear bomb to Pakistan.
Around early 1980s,
Khan makes contact with the Iranians,
who were very interested in getting a bomb
but clearly dont have the scientific or industrial capacity
to do it themselves
And thus he starts on a a commercial enterprise.
Khan has got a full marketing regime laid out
brochures and videos tapes that offers nuclear wares
It extremely lucrative business
He had extensive contacts, networks,
and he didnt much care about who the ultimate client was going to be
He contacted Iran North Korea, Libya,
but he didnt just give them the technologies
He also took the bomb designs that the Pakistanis had
and threw those in as a sweetner
He gave them 24/7 technology support .
Got a problem? Call 1-800-AQKHAN.
It was a full service operation
The U.S. intelligence began to focus on AQ Khan
in the late 1990s.
The homerun was in December 2003 with Libya.
The CIA and British Intelligence
essentially caught the Khan network red handed
Selling a full scale nuclear weapon to Libya.
If it wasnt for AQ Khan,
Libya never would have got the centrifuges
but that they have thankfully today given up
If it wasnt for AQ Khan,
there wouldnt be an Iranian nuclear program
Iran is the tip of the spear
It's the big problem that we have to solve.
They promised not to build nuclear weapons,
but the problem is that the very same centrifugals
very same factory that can enrich uranium
to low quantities for nuclear fuel
can enrich it to high quantities
for nuclear weapons.
So the question is: Do you trust Iran?
By their own admission they have deceived inspectors
about their nuclear activities for 17 years.
Without question Iran is trying to get a nuclear bomb.
They have made that very clear,
despite their promises that they are only pursuing
civil and peaceful objectives for their nuclear program.
They are really good They are trying to bring things in
that can be used for their nuclear program
The Iranians have worked very hard
to hiding and disguising their facilities
Many of their facilities are in crowded urban areas
underground, extremely well protected
from any sort of aerial bombing
If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons capability
the impact is across the whole of the the region
We will get a whole set of other countries
deciding they have got to acquire nuclear weapons capability
Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt ...
the rivals of the Iranian Shite state
would match their capabilities and would go from the Middle East
with one nuclear armed nation Israel
to one with three, four or five nuclear armed nations
They are surrounded by very unstable regimes and countries .
If Iran acquires everything it needs,
without doubt pieces of that become more readily available
to terrorist organizations like Hamas.
The risk that you have today
with regimes like Iran or North Korea
is they are prepared to start trading
that nuclear weapons capability and technology.
The Pakistanis had the nuclear know how.
they didnt have a delivery system.
The North Koreans had the missile,
and didnt have the nuclear know how
So there was a natural convergence of interests here
The North Koreans have a long track record of
selling military technology and missiles to
the Syrians,to the Iranians, to the Iraqis, Pakistanis.
They dont really have any other exports.
Daily life is very real
Food is in short supply
you drive around the capital,Pyongyang, at night
and its basically dark.
There is a famous satellite photo
that shows the Korean peninsula.
and in the south, we see all these lights,
and then its just black
we are still dealing with his years
of unchecked activities and contacts
and its really a genie out of the bottle
that cannot be easily put back
We spend billions of dollars
putting in radiation detectors
but highly enriched uranium
is easily shielded
If you are depending on portal monitors
to defend a city against a nuclear detonation,
You have done far too much too late
Nuclear weapons
dont have to be exactly on target.
Close is good enough.
If a terrorist thinks that the portal monitor
might detect weapon, they set it off in the port.
highly enriched uranium is easy to smuggle
the radiation is very weak.
The detectors that we are putting in place now
would have no chance of detecting
HEU in a cargo container.
The signature of highly enriched uranium is so slight
that they would have to set the monitors very high
to detect it,and so they are getting
thousands of false alarms every day.
Toilets, will set it off china
Ceramics, stones like granites,
lot of biological materials like tobacco, some algae,
televisions ,the old style televisions,
kitty litter,lot of chemical products,
and well other stuff also
You wants to smuggle a bomb into the United States?
Ship it in a truck with a kitty litter
No one would ever find it
They are great for really radioactive stuff,
like cesium or something
that might be used in a "dirty bomb."
But for the stuff that you would use to make a nuclear bomb
that would incenerate the heart of a major city
they are not gonna detect that.
Robert Oppenheimer in 1946, he appeared in a
closed door session of the Senate,
and one of the senators asked him
if nuclear terrorism was a potential threat.
He said "Of course"
"Terrorists could bring a bomb into New York City
"And destroy the city."
Somebody asked him : "How would you stop it?"
He said: "With a screwdriver,
"To open up every container that comes into this city. "
Once you have smuggled the highly enriched uranium
into the U.S.you would need a place to build the bomb.
The bomb could be built right in the target city.
The hard part was what we did in 1945.
The hard part is doing it the first time.
This is no longer a conceptual challenge There is no trick.
There is no magic that needs to be figured out
It's really just an engineering challenge
It's definitely not rocket science.
The rocket science is more difficult.
you can make a very simple weapon,
a so called gun type weapon
which was the one used in Hiroshima
It was so simple we didnt even test it before we dropped it
It is essentially just a gun barrel.
with a target and you can projectile, and you propel the projectile into the target.
you will need an artillary gun
to fire a one piece of HEU in the other,
which would be bolted onto the muscle of the gun
The military sells these things as surplus,
but they sell them to save it
You would have to make the gun capable of shooting again
and you would want to test fire the gun to make sure that
that it fired the projectile at the right speed.
This is the only thing that you would need to do off-site.
you would need a group of people ...
lets say,between 15 to 20 to 25,
who would be knowledgable in particular aspects
of weapons designs of explosives.
Two or three people to do the machining,
two or three people to work on the gun
two or three people to work on electronics,
People who are experts in ballistics
People who know something about nuclear physics.
you just need the machinist and metallar
just to make the pieces into the right shapes and make sure they fit together
Ordinary explosives and detonators
maybe some electronic equipment.
You can go online
and easily find the blade for $ 10,000.
you could find the furnace for about $ 50,000.
And you can even find the surplus recoilless rifle
probably also for $ 10,000.
More than 90% of the effort in the Manhattan Project
was making the nuclear material
to make the nuclear bomb.
If you can get hold of that nuclear material,
then it doesnt take a Manhattan Project to make a bomb.
If the circumstances are right,
acquiring a complete bomb
may be easier than building one
In Algeria, in 1961,
officers within the French millitary rebelled
and tried to seize a nuclear weapon.
As the rebels closed in
the weapon was detonated in a degraded explosion
to prevent it from falling into the hands of the rebelling officers.
The Japanese death terror cult, Aum Shinrikyo,
attemted to buy a nuclear bomb from the Soviet Union.
They had a lot of resources,
We are talking well over billion dollars of assets.
and secondly they had tremendous access. At one point,
the group had more members in Russia in the former Soviet Union than they had in Japan
In 1994, a senior leader made eight trips to Russia
His personal notebook included a shopping list
for buying a nuclear warhead for $ 15 million.
A perfectly secure nuclear weapon
is also a perfectly unusable one
So here one has this paradox between security and usability
Where is the worlds most dangerous place right now?
mu money it is Pakistan.
you have got an unstable government,
plus enough material for up to a 100 nuclear weapons,
plus Osama bin Laden in the country.
What we have seen over the last two or three years
has been a spiral that has been going downwards
Destabilization,the spread of the Taliban,
the spread of radicalism, the collapse of the economy.
So could there be a cornals coup in Pakistan
by Islamic radicals within the military
and then could nuclear weapons be at risk?
What happens if that country destablises?
What happens if the army splits?
Who gets the weapons?
Who gets the material for the weapons?
Who gets the scientists who know how to build the weapons?
There is no such thing as perfect command and control over the nuclear weapons,
even in the sophasticated of the arsenals.
from the levels of the presidents gone down
there are human weaknesses, technical problems
deficiencies and vulnerabilities.
I was the launch officer for Minuteman missiles.
and I spent three years in Montana in a hole
in an undergorund launch control centre
I was one of the guys responsible for
for getting these missiles off ground
in one minute. we didnt call them "Minuteman missiles" for nothing.
When I was serving in the Air Force as the launch officer,
there was a device in the launch control centre
into which 12 digits had to be dialed in
in order to unlock the missiles for firing
This had been installed under Robert McNamara
over the objections of the Strategic Air Command
Since they couldnt prevent the panel from being installed
the StrategicAir Command in Omaha
had set these codes to zero
and we all knew it.
That was the secret unlock code
for firing our missiles:
12 zeros.
In fact, in our launch check list
we had to ensure that the unlock code
was set to al zeros before we completed
the launch sequence.
This changed in 1977
when they started using actual codes.
But until then, I and one other crew member
could have actually formatted a launch order
a completely valid launch order
and transmitted it to the entire American stratergic arsenal.
Looks like we are in a shooting war
Oh hell.Oh the russians have got it?
i think: Thats what i have been told
just came in on the red phone.
My orders are toseal this base tight and thats what i mean to do, seal it tight
Now I want you to transmit Plan R
"R" for "Robert" to the wing.
- Plan "R",for "Robert". - Is it that bad, sir?
looks like its pretty hairy - Yes, sir.
I remember watching "Dr. Strangelove"
and thinking they had it all wrong.
You dont need to be a general.
We were only lieutenants, but we could have started
World War III just as easily as Gal. Jack Ripper.
We could have triggered implementation
of the U.S. nuclear war plan
involving thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons
fired at the Soviet Union and China.
Standby Message followed
Alpha, Tango, Golf, Reamer.
The life of a watch officer
is really Pavlovian.
You have been trained and conditioned so thoroughly
you kind of march up a long step into a very well rehearsed script
thats written by check lists.
Step 1: All keys inserted.
Roger
We would jump up unlock our safe
take out codes
Check the codes against the mesage
and then proceed through a launch check list that
takes about one minute to carry an armour
Lets enable the missiles. Key program activated.
All in flight. BF all. Unlock code inserted.
Standby...
Unlock code inserted.
enable Its enabled.
At the end of that process to turn the keys
and launch upto 50 missiles at Soviet Union and / or China.
Today, the position of United States and Russia
is exactly the same as it was during the Cold War.
So if the orders came down,during now
20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
It would take about two minutes
to launch all of the US nuclear ballistic missiles
their tunnels in central U.S.
out of their tubes in the midwest
It would time for the Russians to do the same thing
and then it would take another 10 to 12 minutes
for everything else thats on
launch ready alert to be fired
So that within 15 minutes
all the forces on the launch ready alert
would be in the air in their flight to the other side of the planet.
2000 bombs
strategic nuclear weapons, very high yield.
And they could kill
over a 100 million Russians and Americans
within 30 minutes.
When we are working on nuclear apps control
i found myself in a briefing in the Pentagon with a colonel
we had a short exchange about this
and in this context of this exchange he said:
"But I do not understand what would be such a big deal"
"If there was a nuclear exchange"
"Only about 500 million people would die.
"Life would go on afterwards."
And I can remember having a feeling like Woody Allen
and recall
"I'm sorry i have got an appointment back on planet earth"
I dont think that anyone really knows
how many nuclear weapons there are on the planet today.
- I have a ... - Does anyone know?
May be thousands,i dont know Far more than I know.
6000.
I do not know. 15 000.
- 20 000. - 50 000?
- 100 000. - 500 000.
There is enough firepower
on a US nuclear sub
to annihilate probably half the planet.
I have heard people say that we have enough
nuclear weapons to create a new sun.
I think couple to eliminate this city.
Do you know how many are there?
We estimate that there are about 23 000 nuclear weapons in the world still.
The good news is there used to be 60 000.
So we have cut those arsenals by more than half.
But we, the United States, still has about
1,500 hydrogen bombs
on missiles poised for launch
in 50 minutes or less.
The really bad news is that the Russians have the same.
If the Russians fired missiles at the United States
the first warning would come from satellites,
and they could detect the flame from the booster rocket
within seconds,
easily within a minute.
Suddenly, this early warning hub in the United States
would become very frenzy to try figure out
whether this is a false alam or whether this is a real attack
and determine this in 60 seconds.
The President would receive a briefing
from the duty officer
at Strategic Command Headquaters
That briefing of the President
of his response options and their consequences
has to be delievered in as little as 30 seconds
The president normally
would have no more than 12 minutes to make a decision,
and maybe its little as 10 seconds.
I knew that if the Soviets did launch an attack,
that it would take 26 minutes for an ICBM to leave russian soil
and land in Washington or New York.
And I had that much time to decide how to respond.
And the timeline was very short
We had just a few minutes to make a decision
how to respond at what level of intensity.
Somewhere before the 10th minute
the order to execute would be issued
The Strategic Air Command probably would be airbourne by then
just as a precaution.
There might be a Presidential evacuation
so that the president would survive an attack on Washington
But I know of cases in which the President
chose not to be evacuated
And roughly by the 28th minute, at the latest,
those of us not evacuated
would be dead.
For us it was a kind of suicide duty
Any missile landing within half a mile of our location
would probably have killed us
If we had survived the attack,
we were supposed to go to a randezvous farm
Our air will only 24 hours,
So we go out through an escape
which was filled with sand
We would have to release the bolts on cover and let the sand fall through
and then crawl up the tube
Our tube came up the parking lot
so we would have to break through asphalt to get out
The randevous point be
50 or 100 kms away and we would have to walk.
Disnt really matter though
Everyone knew that the radiation would kill us quickly anyway
and you would never make it to the rendezvous
In 1995, Pete Sampras won the U.S. Open and Wimbledon.
George Clooney made his first big movie
A bomb destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma city
OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder.
And we also came close
to an accidental nuclear missiles launch.
On January 25, 1995,
the United States launched a rocket from Norway
to study the northern hights
We told the Russians that we were gonna launch that rocket
but somebody must have forgot how to pass word on it
When they picked up the 4 stages of this rocket
they initially interpreted this as 4 warheads
from a U.S nuclear submarine
which we often station off the coast of Norway
possibly directed at Moscow.
That fit exactly the characteristics
of the beginning of a nuclear strike
One missile, coming over exploding in the atmosphere
and sending out an electromagnetic pulse
that would fry all the electronics
radar surveillance, Computers in the country to be attacked,
followed by an onslought of nuclear weapons
And for the first in the nuclear age,
the Russians actually opened up the nuclear football
They went to President Yeltsin,
they opened up the command and launch codes, the button,
put on the desk and said: "We are under attack."
Boris Yeltsin was basically given 5 minutes to decide what to do.
Fortunately, Yeltsin wasnt drunk
and he didnt believe what the military was telling him.
He said: "There must be some mistake."
Both the U.S. and Russia guide their nuclear response
with a doctrine called "Launch on Warning"
It is the policy if you believe that you are under attack
you are supposed to launch the missiles. you dont wait for them to land.
According to Russian military doctrine
Boris Yeltsin should have launched all out nuclear attack
on the United States that morning.
We do not know what happened in the Kremlin.
All we know is that he didnt.
There have been a no. of false alarms during the Cold War.
We have had ocassions where the rising moon
was interpreted to be a Russian ICBMs attack.
A flock of geese was thought to be bombers.
A training tape was slipped into a computer
at our command and control headquarters at NORAD
Everyone involved thought
there was an actual attack underway.
A tape was inserted into the early warning hub in Colorado
that simulated a large scale Soviet nuclear attack.
And no one realised that it was just a training tape
until the U.S had gone into this sort of frenzy
check list procedure
to prepare for nuclear war.
Airborne command posts, actually,in some cases, took off.
The Presidents dooms day plane
actually left its base in preparation
for an incoming Soviet strike.
Senator Charles Percy
happened to be there at the time
and said there was absolute panic.
Another false alarm
was caused by a computer
chip malfuntion that generated
indications of large scale Soviet attack
We raised the alert levels.
Crews took launch codes out of their safes.
Inserted the keys into the launch switches.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken up in the middle of the night
with the assured instruction
that a nuclear attack is underway
and that he had to go wakeup President Carter.
There was 8 minutes worth of
nuclear launch preparations
that were triggered by malfunctioning
computer chip that costs less than a dollar.
And having missiles on hair trigger is an accident waiting to happen.
As Fermi said about the physics:
"What isnt forbidden is compulsory,''
it will eventually happen.
There is nothing that makes the launch of nuclear weapons impossible
If the probability isnt zero, it will happen.
Right now the world has a policy
that is based heavily on technology
you keep something secret and you call it a day
But secrecy has half life. Things leak out
Centrifuges happen to be the technology that is going to change the game.
They are going to democratize the process of building nuclear weapons.
Uranium exists everywhere on Earth.
Its more common than tin.
99.3% of all uranium is uranium 238,
isotope that can not be used for nuclear weapons.
except 0.7% that you need to separate out
A centrifuge Its basically a tube.
It spins the uranium in gas form
and pushes the heavier atoms towards the wall.
and the lighter atoms from the center.
And you can skin off the light atoms
You do this over and over again.
Many dozens of times,
and eventually you purify it to a level that you can use it as a bomb
The common risk in them is they are very complicated.
Technologies that take countries decades to build
and the highest achievements. But the fact is,
is that the centrifuges are 1950's technology.
And this is 2010.
Enriching uranium is still beyond the reach of the individual.
It is a logistics feat, requiring thousands of centrifuges
working for months or years.
But highly enriched uranium
is now within the grasp of nearly any country.
And once you have the HEU making a crude bomb is easy
We're not just dicussing limits
on a further increase of nuclear weapons.
We seek instead to reduce their numbers.
We seek total elimination one day
of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.
Happy New Year, man.
Happy New Year.
I love you all.
In the first millionth of a second ,
the fireball is 500 feet across
Within 10 seconds, it would grow to over 1 mile
The temperature would rise to 20 million degrees Fahrenhiet
hotter than the surface of the sun
The blast would generate winds in excess of 650 miles an hour
Forces of that magnitude can destroy anything
that people can build.
Strongest Buildings would be reduced to rubble.
Tens of square blocks would just be melted, would just be evaporated
Everything would be vaporized: the buildings,the cars,
the trees,the people, the upper level of earth itself
There were 76 000 buildings in Hiroshima.
70 000 of them were destroyed.
The hospitals,the fire stations
the communications equipment; the military installations.
Everything just flattened.
In the first 5 to 6 miles,
virtually everyone in that 5 mile radius is going to die.
Somewhere between 3&4 million people
dead immediately in the first 5 miles
If you are lucky enough to be 8 or 9 miles away from the blast,
then you would experience it as blast effects Windows being shattered
It would shatter every window and turn it to hundreds of missiles
flying outwards from the center of the explosion,
at speeds more than 100 miles per hour
After the blast, Its the firestorm that would combust everything
Everything flammable would burn
paper, cardboard, cloth, heating oil,
gasoline. Everything would burn.
Whole blocks would catch fire.
Hundreds of thousands of fires would turn
into a giant firestorm 11 miles across.
Everything catches fire There just will be no air to breathe.
All the oxygen would be consumed and everyone would die.
It is useless to talk about the way you die because you are burned to death
or because you have been blown to bits by the blast
Anyone looking in the direction of the nuclear explosion they will be blinded.
The lungs would be ruptured by the pressure or the eardrums would be ruptured by the pressure.
crush injuries from buildings falling,
broken bones thrown in the air against the buildings
Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions
would die from the fallout.
The body does have a repair rate for radiation
but the doses are so heavy and coming so quickly
that it would overwhelm the body's repair mechanism
The 450 to 70 RAD dose kills you
because of white cells or blood cells
or you will go into seasures or immediate coma
and you will die within a matter of minutes or hours.
Most of the doctors are going to be dead most of the nurses are going to be dead.
Most of the hospitals are going to be destroyed.
Huge number of casualties and no medical equipment.
They will be a need for antibiotics.
tens of units of blood per person.
There wont be any electrical power
Vast amounts of intravenous fluids
to sustain people that have been burned,just burned.
You couldnt treat all the burn victims.
And there comes a certain point the casualties become so high
its pointless to try to make any sense out of it.
The doctor in the Red Cross Hospital
who turns into an automaton,
And that's what desended on the physicians and nurses
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Someone would surely claim they had 10 more
that were already hidden somewhere
and then start setting them off and blast
unless they meet their demands.
Every other big city is gonna wonder
-whether they might be a target. - Pulic panic,
the people fleeing major cities
You could forget about the rules of search and seizure.
You are gonna have to be searching everywhere
You could forget about civil liberties when people realize
a whole city was just destroyed.
Take the Bill of Rights,you put it on a shelf
and you might never see it again.
People would be demanding draconian measures
to make sure that another city didnt go up.
Some people laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu Scripture,
the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu ...
trying to persuade the prince
he should do his duty
and to impress him,
takes on his multiarmed form
and says:
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. "
Every man, woman and child
lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles,
hanging by the slenderest of threads,
capable of being cut at any moment
by accident, or miscalculation or by madness.
. The weapons of war must be abolished
before they abolish us.
The Cuban Missile Crisis
endanger the very existence of our nation.
Wecame that close to nuclear war.
Neither the Soviet nor we, the US
intended to put our nation at risk.
And the next time we may not be so lucky
They kill by the millions.
They kill in numbers that the human imaginations
simply cannot comprehend.
I asked: "Well we have nuclear weapons to prevent their use. "
we now know that we live in a world in which,
if we possession, if any one possesses,
they will be used.
I dont see any good that a nuclear weapon could be a threat to the world.
In my opinion, you can forget them.
I think they should be destroyed.
I think we are better off without them.
Theres a 183 countries in the world that do not have nuclear weapons.
Many of these countries could have nuclear weapons.
They have chosen not to have them.
We have decided to take al 180 degrees turn in South Africa
When I became President
I was then informed that we have completed six devices
more or less comparable to the bombs which were actually used at Hiroshima.
I indicated that i would like us to stop this program
and to become part of the mainstream world again
The only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism
is to eliminate all nuclear weapons in all countries.
We have got to ensure that never once the terrorists suceed
in detonating a nuclear weapon.
You think about nuclear security
its all about the material
The simple physical fact is that if you dont have fissile material ...
either highly enriched uranium or plutonium for example ...
you cannot have a nuclear weapon.
The focus is all about material.
Stop making new material.
Secure the material where you know it is around the world
And make sure that you detect the illicit transfer of material.
And then start getting rid of the material that you have
Today in the world we have about 1,700 tons of HEU.
So that's enough material for around the order of 50 to100 thousand weapons
to really create a truely
international system for these facilities.
International Fuel banks
or International reprocessing centers...
that would be a mauch safer world
We havnt lost an ounce of gold from Fort Knox.
We shouldnt lose an ounce of plutonium
or highly enriched uranium.
During the Cold War,
I believed in the value of nuclear weapons
to detter an attack.
20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
there is no excuse any longer for keeping nuclear weapons
on launch ready laert
We can remove all of the warheads on our missiles ,
share our safe guards technology
and establish a joint warning center
to ensure Nuclear war cannot happen by mistake.
When I came into government in the early '1980s,
the idea that within about10 years, both sides would have agreed
to have 50% reduction in their Nuclear weapons
would have sounded absurd. But we achieved it.
That means a reduction of more than 5,000 nuclear warheads a piece
We have gone almost 20 years now
without really any demonstrative steps
to nuclear reductions
This has to be a step by step process
That's how we did it with chemical weapons.
These weapons are now taboo.
The Soviet Union imploded when I was Sec of State
and we actually got an enforceable treaty
where we goot Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine
to give up their nuclear weapons.
All countries in the world have to sign
a legally binding,
intrusively verifiable agreement
to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The choice we face is eliminate nuclear weapons
or live in a world with 25 or 30 nuclear powers.
We can do this
There has to be a
carefully orchestrated process of reductions
The United States and Russia,
with 96% of the worlds nuclear weapons have to lead the way
We start in a world where there are 23,000 nuclear weapons.
The very first step is to cut those arsenals dramatically
in the United States and Russia.
Once you get down to low hundreds in the world
then you have built up the confidence and the mechanisms
to ensure that you can verify this process
so that we can get rid of the last one
- None. - Should be zero.
I say zero.
- Never - We'd rather not have them. I think
- None. - Zero.
No nuclear weapons. Zero.
- Zero. - Zero.
No country should have them.
The ultimate number is none. Ideally will be zero
- Zero nuclear weapons. - Zero. Zero.
We have taken important steps forward
to increase nuclear security
and to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
This starts with the reduction
of our own nuclear arsenals.
This legally binding treaty will be completed this year.
The arms control agreements we negotiated
between the United States and the Soviet Union ...
You think these were independent initiatives
taken by governments,
but the fact is that public opinion
had a big role to play in the process
- President Kennedy,
After he passed the limited test ban treaty
and whenever he mentioned it on the stump afterwards he
got thunderous applause. And he quote:
"If I had known that it was so popular,
"I would have done it a long time ago. "
The elimination of nuclear weapons
has not yet been agreed to by political leaders of the world.
It's a revolutionary idea, but they can be eliminated.
We have to change our way of thinking.
And if we cant change our way of thinking,
we wont survive. Its that simple
I have changed my way of thinking
and millions and millions of other people are changing their thinking
And, frankly, if you have never changed your mind about something,
I .. pinch yourself You maybe dead.
Subtitles by: Aatif