Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Almighty 20160828

Curator of the weekly reading series here. We are here with some we have great authors here and we have great readers like yourselves and i appreciate you coming together for a fantastic evening. Before we get started, lets turn off our cell phones or the ringer at least. If you want to do the social media thing you are welcome to do so. I want to let you know that dan will be signing books after the reading and we have copies of almighty for sail in the corner. Please stick around and support this hardworking author right behind me. I am going to send around our mailing list so if you are not on the list, please, sign up. It is the best way to find out what is happening here and we have lots of great stuff. Please circulate that around the room. Cspan is here filming for booktv so if you are curious about why we have the video camera. That is what is going on. We are excited and hopefully you can tell your friends who are not here to catch the broadcast at another time. Next week we are off and we are off during all of august in fact. Please check your inboxes for emails about that. Now, on to tonights main event. I am honored to be hosting dan zak at the half king. Dan is the important author of the important book about living with our Nuclear Arsenal. He is a reporter for the Washington Post. He has written on a wide variety of topics, news stories, narratives and profiles on mobile national and foreign assignments he is from buffalo, new york and lives in washington, d. C. He will be in conversation with helen young tonight who is a documentary filmmaker and Emmy Award Winning tv producer who is in production on the documentary nuclear in security insecurity. Without further ado, please, give them a warm welcome. Hi, ellen. Hi, dan. How are you . Good. Lets start at the beginning. What motivated you to write this book . Guest it was actually happenstance. While she was working on this piece, three peace activists broke into this weapon facility in east tennessee. That story didnt really fit into what she was reporting on but she thought someone should write about it. So it made its way to me. I am a general assignment teacher writer at the Washington Post so i write on a range of topics and it came to me and seemed like a curious, weird story. As i starred to report on that started and educate myself on the topics to tell the story in a responsible way, i realized it was a far larger story to tell, more context needed than a normal feature story for a newspaper would allow. And i think what motivated me initially was how much i didnt know about it. You could say a sense of guilt is what fueled me and i knew something about the u. S. Nuclear arsenal and what we have done with them and what we are doing now or plan to do in the future. We thought maybe there were people in that society who could benefit from him and the contact and this interesting story. Tell us more about what y12 is . It is a very importance place in america. Sure. The facility they broke into is called the y12 National Security complex. It sounds like it is doing useful things which some could say it is doing useful things. It is the site which we enriched all of the uranium for the bomb that was dropped almost 71 years ago. It was a facility created to enrich uranium. It has been in support of the arsenal. They have done machine work for Nuclear Weapons there. They no longer enrich uranium but they store it. Can everyone hear, helen . The facility they were actually able to reach is a very important one; right . Yeah. It is called the highly enriched uranium storage. It is what we use in atomic bombs. Hundreds of tons. The exact amount is classified. But a lot of people say it is the greatest stockpile of missile material on the planet. It is a pretty important and dangerous building. The three people who were really at the heart of your film, the three activists, we begin the bock with a dramatic scene of them preparing to undertake the action. Lets talk about who these three people are. Sure. The three activists that the book focuses on is mr. Meagan, michael wally, and greg board. They are all lifelong christians and peace activists. One of them is 86 and going strong. Born and raised in manhattan, during the depression and grew up going to columbia university. She became a catholic sisters with the sisters of the holy child jesus and spent 40 years teaching in africa. Building schools, teaching biology and in nigeria. When she retired from her work in africa she came back to the u. S. And decided to break into one of the most secure facilities on the planet and the other two, a vietnam veteran who did two tours and lived in washington for 20 years now at the catholic worker house in washington. And greg is from iowa and he is a longtime antinuclear activist who committed actions like this before and the intrepintre intrepid acts of civil disobedience. He deserves multiple years in prison n for these actions. The three came together and decided this was the site to do and the three of them hiked over the ridge in the middle of the night four years ago this weekend actually. It was shocking that other countries bring their Nuclear Materials for safe keeping. As you detail in the book, there were four separate congressional hearings held to get to the bottom of how an 82yearold catholic nun could trespass on the to facility. When story broke, a tremendous amount of interest in getting to the bottom on how this could happen. There were four congressional hearings and you did a lot of great reporting on what went wrong on july 28th, 2012 there that allowed this to happen. What did go wrong . Guest everything that could go wrong up to a point went wrong. This is a site that is run by private contractors. The department of energy, not only the custodian of warheads not deployed, meaning not on a missile or submarines. The contractors that run the site there was a culture of complacency at the site. It was a site that was dealing with a thousand plus false alarm a day caused by foliage and the wind and when these three activists broke in they were breaking into a site that was so used to the alarms going off it didnt really matter they were going off even in the middle of the night. Despite the alarm going off showed intrusion they were dismissed because of this culture that was used to false alarms. That is the main reason. It came out the Security Camera that was supposed to cover the area where they were intruding was not working. In fact, there were multiple cameras around the area that were not working. So, you know, kind of this was setup to happen. Wasnt it true the cameras were not working for six months or so . There was a maintenance backlog. Cameras not being fixed and the false alarm issue not being taken care of. I think no one thought anything like this would happen. So you know everything got lost in the paperwork and bureaucraci bureaucracies. So the site was very lapse in security monitoring. Host give us a sense of how serious of a Security Breach this was . What happened if this was not a group of pacifist but a group of terrorists . There are some people who say just outside the building if they had wanted to cause mayhem they could have brought conventional forces with them, blown a hole in the wall of the facility, stolen highly enriched uranium and i have to stress the chances of the scenario are small but if you get two formed chunks of uranium and drop it from six feet on another chunk of enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. The chances are slim but you could argue the chances of an 82yearold nun breaking in the scenario was rare too. So that was the situation there. This building was designed to withstand the impact of a jet. So whether or not a terrorist could have an explosion that could get into the building that is unlikely. For myself, i will ask you it was unlikely these people got as far as they did. I think one has to think about those nightmare scenario. Even on a less serious level or magnitude, break into the site could have caused harm to the activists. People could have gotten killed. They cut their way through fences through to a zone of the facility where lethal force is authorized meaning the guard force could have shot them dead and there is a sign saying if you are are in here that is going to happen. That is a different nightmare scenario that is going to happen. Lets broad n the subject a little bit and talk about Nuclear Weapons in general because you give this comprehensive analysis of the whole issue. How many Nuclear Weapons are in the world . And how many in the United States . All told, there is about 15,000 Nuclear Weapons on the planet right now. But of course they are divided into weapons that are awaiting dismantlement or weapons that are deployed and not deployed. Total is 15,000. Right now as we speak the u. S. Has about 2,000 Nuclear Weapons that are deployed meaning they are sitting on the tops of missiles ready to fly both in the upper plains region of the United States in north dakota, montana, nebraska, wyoming and colorado and in submarines patrolling the pacific and atlantic. The closest one from new york . Depends on where the submarines are in the atlantic. Nuclear war heads . No. They manufacture and dock submar submarines. Host what is the system in the u. S. For securing our Nuclear Weapons . You have done great reporting about the contractors versus the federal government overseers. The we be and the department of evil. Talk about that. Guest when Nuclear Weapons are not on a missile or bomber or in submarine they are the custody of the department of energy which i didnt know. I thought they dealt with the power grid, Renewable Energy and all of that. But one of their Main Missions is Nuclear Weapons and nuclear material. As has been the case for many decades and this is true of a lot of governments. We hire federal contractors to do this highly specialized work. There are plenty of department of energy sites around the country that belong to the doe but are run by forprofit corporations who kind of police themselves and do their own oversight and cut corners because of the for profit associati associations. I would argue if you dont want to cut corners it is protecting this type of material. This is a system in place. Either the management and operation of the sites or the security force, the manpower force, is there to do security. Right. And you also detail because of the way it is setup with the contractors and managers there are glaring cases of waste and inefficiency. Case in point a new facility going up at y12. Tell us about that. So they knew there was a site that was running behind schedule and constructing the facility was wane the u. S. Was reinvesting in its Nuclear Arsenal which they object to so they said we will break into the site to bring attention to the site that was originally three million then it went to 6 million and now theys it might be 20 million. It has been tens of millions of dollars on the design phase of this facility before they realized they had designed ceilings that were too short for the machinery. There has been no penalty for the contractors. These activists who broke into the building say we should not be building these buildings because we dont need state of the art facilities for weapons we should be getting rid of. You say originally the cost was supposed to be 600,000 to a billion in 2005 and it grew to 19 billion and found out the ceiling was 13 feet too low and that design defect cost Something Like half a million. I think more than that. Yeah, plenty of people use that as a way to criticize this contract system. If you have forprofit contractors running the show without prop oversight these mistakes will be made and they will continue to collect their fee. Speaking about money. The United States is about to make a Huge Investment in this Nuclear Arsenal. Tell us about that. So we are long past due for ref ref refurbishing things. The missiles, aircrafts, submarines, that kind of thing. The last time we did a wholesale recapitalization and modernization of these weapons was in the 80s. So if we are going to continue to poses them they have to a, work, and b, be secure. That is what the government is saying. There was an estimate saying we would spent 1 trillion over the next 30 years to do that. To make mew submarines, new bombers, new missiles, and refurbish warheads. And a lot of people think that is an absurd amount. That if we pledged to get rid of them which we did when we signed the nonprolific treaty nine years ago. The Committee Spending that much over the years is not a goodfaith move. There is plenty of people including exofficials in washington who say this is an absurd amount. There is a better way to do it. Do we need to be able to deliver weapons my sea, by air, by land. Can we go down to just subm submarines . Can we get rid of some and meet the quote unquote security objectives. I dont think Nuclear Weapons get a lot of press but if they do the money gets through to people who are not otherwise paying attention. I was going to ask you we just got through the primary season and are in the middle of a president ial campaign and havent heard much about the trillion dollar potential investment. Why do you think that is . I think it is a for a couple reasons. The framework of a president ial campaign we revert to whose finger is on the button. As a society and culture, we recognize the preeminent power we poses. Ultimately the Nuclear Weapons are essentially under the control of one person, had commander and chief, the soul authorizer of the use of them. We may not talk in detail but when we talk about candidates why talk about are we comfortable with this person having their finger on the button but there is no button. It is are these two candidates trump has said, and it will be no surprise, it was somewhat contradictory, he said Nuclear Weapons are a horrible idea but he said at the same time maybe south korea should have their own, maybe japan should have their own which flies in the face of many decades of nonproliferation ideology. In a way he has made some people Start Talking about it because of the somewhat inflammitory rhetoric. I heard Hillary Clinton being asked do you think we should spend a trillion on the Nuclear Weapon program and she said that doesnt make sense, i would have to think about it. That is the only time i think someone directly asked her in front of a camera. I will say the official democratic platform arrived at last week, or i think last week, said that we will maintain. This as a long answer. But i think there is three reasons we dont really talk about it as a culture anymore. I was born in 1983. I dont remember the cold war. When the u. S. Was eyetoeye with the soviet union it mattered more. I did not have that kind of experience growing up. I think that is one reason. There are multiple generous generations who were not raised in a culture where you could be annihilated at any minute. That is one thing. The other is what these weapons can do is so amiss but it is also abstract. They have not been demonstrated in many decades. They have not been used in combat in 71 years. They havent been detonated. And the third and final reason, and i think this is the wall i ran into and maybe you did, too, it is a highly technical, complicated, classified realm. It is not an easy topic to really understand and to get information from. It has been like that you have to fight your way through a lot of secretive information and jargon. The language and vocabulary used to talk about Nuclear Weapons makes it opaque and them like machines. So i think, you know, these two ignore or are easy to not be exposed to. Yeah, i do think there has been some study that i think the crowd share fund commissioned a study to look at why people are not engaged on this issue. And one of the points that was raised is people are paralyzed by it. As you pointed out, the issue is so immense that they think someone at a higher pay grade deal with it. And they found some video games use Nuclear Weapons like using a weapon to zap your enemy is looked on positively in some instances. I think you have look at movies that came out during the cold war Nuclear Weapons were terrible. You think about the day after and dr. Strange love and after the cold war Nuclear Weapons in entertainment and poplar culture uses this narrative they are more of a plot device than anyone. One other thing i think that is important and this is a nonscientific conclusion i came to myself and that is i think every generation has enough brain space, and we are talking about being paralyzed, has enough to grapple with one existential issue at a time. With my generation it is Climate Change and feeling we are moving past the point of no return. I think that is enough to think about. And if you want to throw on top of that the fact that actually we could dinstantly or slowly. And the last thing i will say about that is you talk about people letting the government take care of it but plenty of people in Congress Just have no idea. I forgot who did this but in one of the nonprofits who works with Nuclear Weapons found politicians on the streets of capitol hill and say how many Nuclear Weapons do we have and the answer is we are not right. These are elected officials in charge of funding these arsenals but not sure how many we have. Well one thing that most of us do know is that the number of Nuclear Weapons dropped dramatically since the cold war. At the height of the cold war, we had Something Like 60,000. 70,000, i think. My question is this we have a reduced stockpile has the cost of maintaining that stockpile dropped with the numbers . It has not. It has gone up. The volume of warheads went down, the cost to maintain them and modernize them has gone up which i think would concern any normal tax paying citizen. There is a lot of great work by nonproliferation folks in and out of the government to decrease these number of warheads on the planet. That is really good and important work. The u. S. Government is fond of saying we have reduced our stockpile from 85 . That is good work being done. But right now because of the modernization program, the trillion dollars, the warheads we have, we are making them better, more precise, and more customizable. So you could say that, you know, even though the number has gone down, the capability of them is being more and more refined. So you could argue that the work is continuing at a pace even though there is this 85 reduction in the total stockpile. Lets talk a little bit about the capability of modern day Nuclear Weapons. You give an interesting example of the bomb in hiroshma and how many missile material was used in that bomb. If you compare to an ak20, the bombs that dropped there killed 160,000 people in one fell swoop used 141 pounds of agu and only two pounds actually under went fission. Compare that to modern day Nuclear Weapons. How powerful are they. Sure. And you know, the bomb that fell there had that total mount of highly enriched uranium and the amount that underwent fission was two pounds. You need that uranium. But the most powerful Nuclear Warhead we have now is 22 times more powerful than the one dropped there. We have weapons that can do that 20 times over. And far more powerful weapons, too. We detonated weapons in the pacific that were a thousands times the power of the bombs dropped in japan. We used to have far, far greater in terms of yield Nuclear Weapons. I just want to pick up on the climate issue. We talked about how so many people are engaged in that today. In the bock you in the book you make a connection about climb change and connection to potential nuclear war. Lets talk about that. The example used in the book is india and pakistan. The comments growing of the Nuclear Arsenal and they are not good friends historically and have territory between them that is disputed. And the person i spoke in the book is talking about the melting of glaciers and the availability of fresh water and the health of agriculture and there is an occasion to fight over food and water in that area that marks a conventional military exchange that could escalate into a nuclear exchange. They are quite a few that say that if a hundred Nuclear Weapons are exchanged in this regional warfare in india and pakistan it could kill two billion people. Not just because of the detonation but the soot and debris thrown into atmosphere. There are people making noise reminding people that even though two countries might exchange Nuclear Weapons it affects the only continent and we should treat it as much. So that could lead to conflict, leading to Nuclear Conflict and it could be done for everyone. Arent the scientists saying a regional war between pakistan and india create an ice age . Yes, it is what carl sagon talked about. You setup a hundred wars and have billions at risk because of the atmosphere. Throughout the book there is a theme of secrecy and you talk about the Manhattan Project which was secret since we were trying to create a bomb and meet the nazis to the bomb. The level of secrecy was intense. You talk about the High School Girls hired to work there and operate the machinery and thought they were making ice cream every time they turned the instructor . The system of classifying information started during the Manhattan Project. There was actually the secrecy of that that motivated the frame. Growing up in morning side heights, she lived in a Building Full of columbia fis cyst working on this. She recalls talking about someones father working on something he cannot talk to his wife and children about. And she remembered thinking anything secretive live that must not be a good thing. That motivated her from the getgo. The u. S. Has been more open and transparent sense then. We do a decent job being transparent about our stockpile numbers, our policy of using them or not using them, but it is getting information is like pulling teeth. I had to file my share of freedom information requests to get information from the department of energy and one in particular i filled, i filled it in 2013, i think, or maybe 2014, it took two years to get a response and you know, i was asking for a document and i thought this is great. Took two years but i got it. It was a hundred pages and single one was blacked out. That illustrates the bureaucracies of it and that there is still information withheld today including in a city that was fabricated to support this facility. It is called had secret city. It is still a place where, you know, jumping ahead to these activi activists going to trial doing jury selection and part of thoot is figure out if the jurors have connection to the site, like family working there, they cannot be part of the jury. I was there for jury selection and do you have anyone connected to working at this site and i said yes, my father and lunk worked there and they would say what do they do and they would say not i am sure. So it is still secretive and that was the motivating factor for the sister. This shouldnt be a secret. Host lets go back to sister meagan, and greg and mike. The action they took that night was a cloud share action. Tell us what thought is . This action is an intrepid, screening of resilliant. They decided what was necessary to call public attention to Nuclear Weapons was breaking into these facilities. The first such action was just before reagan was elected in 1980. And there have been a dozen since 1980. The one i tell in the book was the most recent in 2012. The idea was take the words of the book of isaiah and transform devices of war and devices of peace was really the manit mantra they were trying to, and this is the word they used, in flesh the words of god. It was symbolic but literally as well. They brought sledge hammers not trying to get into the building but chipping away at the foundation of the building because they believed the words of isaiah was something people should be doing in real life. In their mind, that was the place that manufacturers bombs and this was the latest in the movement which began in 1980. In my film, i have two actions i look at, both the one in dans book and dans book is about sister meagan, and an earlier one that occurred in 2009 at the largest and most important Nuclear Weapon space in the United States,. It is a transnuclear Submarine Base near seattle that has an estimated 1300 warheads and five activi activists, all over the age of 60 including catholic nun and prius in their 80s broke base and got where the weapons were stored and that inspired sister meagan. That is kind of how it works. Where make this heavy handed point in the book. It is a Chain Reaction among the people. A Nuclear Reaction is a Chain Reaction among atoms and far outpaces the size of an atom. You know, you could look at people the same way. Individual actions can cause other individuals to take action. Sister Ann Montgomery was in Washington State in 2009 and sister meagan was at the trial in tacoma, washington and said this was amazing and i have to do it myself and went a couple years later and did. In both cases, the trial in tacoma and knoxville, they tried to raise the same defense and were shutdown in both cases. The action, the breaking into a place is one part. The other part is the actual trial. I think i can safely say on behalf of these activists it is important to try to get these hues into a court of law because they believe they are or in accordance with the higher law and the u. S. Is doing something illegal by posessing, deploying and potentially using these weapons. So they try to use the justification clause. That they had to act because they were a citizen in a country that was committing an International War crime. They bring up something called the [inaudib [inaudib [inaudib [inaudib [inaudible] defense where they had to act. But they believe they are complying with law by doing these illegal things. That it is their duty as citizens to object and they believe it is rooted in the nerve principle crafted after the third reich. That if your country is doing something illegal you should stand up and object. Interestingly enough. Ramsey clark testified in both pretrial hearings in both cases and the people on the west coast, in my film, there is a Nuclear Submarine captain who talks about how he feels now he is retired after being in the navy for 30 years that using one of these weapons does violate International Humanitarian law or the law of foreign conflict because weapons cannot be contained. They cannot discriminate between combatants and noncombatants. They destroy the environment and are disproportionatlly horrible. It is interesting you ban the lesser weapons of mass destruction but you dont ban the most destructive. And you are right. The lack of being able to control what these weapons do in time and space. As i mentioned earlier, you can have two countries that exchange Nuclear Weapons and it is affects the civilians and people outside of the country and one might argue disrupt the law of the war. So they should be illegal under national law. Okay. I want to move a little bit closer to modern times. President obama gave that same speech in prague in 2009 where he committed the world to pursue a World Without Nuclear Weapons and many think that got him a noble peace prize. How do you feel about this . President obama has had Nuclear Weapons on this brain since college. He went to columbia and he wrote his senior thesis on Nuclear Weapons and the soviet union and nonproliferation and when he got to the Senate Decades later he was interested and traveled with other senators to russia, former soviet states, and you could tell he was concerned about the protection of missile material. So, you know, he chose as the topic of the first speech in 2009 that we should be seeking the peace and security of a World Without Nuclear Weapons. And he won the peace prize for his work in Nuclear Weapons. Within a year in order to get the new start treaty ratified with russia he had to essentially endorse this modernization plan otherwise the senate, who was republican controlled, would not ratify the treaty. He said if you ratify this i will say yes, we should reinvest. For someone who seems so peaceminded and aware of what f Nuclear Weapons can do he presided over the commission to recommit to that. At the same time, he looks like he is going to be the first president since reagan not to have another nation of the world join the nuclear club and a lot of people give them credit for the iran deal which we can talk about till the cows come home and the good and bad but it is designed and appears to be working in terms of preventing iran from getting a Nuclear Weapon which is the time beforehand. There are a lot of people that think that is a great idea. He has also hosted four Nuclear Security summits designed to bring leaders of the world to conferences and talk about securing materials. So he has done a lot as president to keep the world somewhat focused on this and you know, at the same time, a lot of people including activists say it doesnt mean anything because you are endorsing and oversaw this recommitment to these weapons that they believe we should be getting rid of. I think you talk to most people and they say it was mixed but better than a president who wasnt paying any attention at all. You know . How much time do we have . So in the book, dan, you travel to the Marshall Islands. You talk about a lawsuit that is now underway. Lets talk about the islands first. Yeah, i mention we used to do testing in the pacific. We did that in the Marshall Islands which is an island nation between hawaii, australia and japan. For 12 years we did all of our bi, Nuclear Testing there because it was so remote, off peoples radar. If you were to parcel out the power, the total power of these weapons we detonated there, it was the equivalent lnt of setting off 1. 6 bombs in hiroshma every day for 12 years. That is hard to wrap your head around. We were testing weapons of such size the light from the explosion was seen thousands of miles away. Fallouts was detected in cattle in tennessee from these explosions. We did that for 12 years. You would imagine that was not very good for the people who happened to be living there. A couple years ago the islands decided to sue the u. S. And tno for compensation because we paid that saying we are sorry, here is money. But they filled this lawsuit on principle and they said, you know, we are pretty unique in the world because we have felt what nuclear war feels like. And they have. These detonations. And they said we believe this there is a moral authority to sue for treaty noncompliance. The treaty in the late 1960s said in exchange for nations not pursuing their own weapons Nuclear Armed states will get rid of theirs. The grand bargain. That has not happen. We have reduced stockpiles but not reached total agreement. So they said enough is enough. We will cause a stink. Get publicity and awareness. And also on principle we will file these lawsuits and every Nuclear Armed association and marshall justice. I brought it into by book because i think it is und undertold. I dont remember learning about it in school and was floored by the testing they did. There are alleging the u. S. Violated the treaty. The u. S. Is noncompliant with the pledge and that is why we are breaking into the and the Marshall Islands thought the same thing. They are not in good faith disarming so we will sue them. I saw a connective tissue with this. Right. That brings us to the treaty you just brought up. The Nuclear Nonproliferation treaty which is the treaty that made this grand bargain. The Nuclear Weapon states promised to give up their weapons in exchange for the nonNuclear Weapons not developing theirs. And every fives years it is review and last year was the review conference which you covered. You write in the book, you take us inside the review conference and you describe it as a carnival of diplomats and agitators assembling together in a building. The treaty has been around for decades but every five years everyone gets together to review the progress, how are we doing, reaching the goals we set for ourselves. This was in may of last year. And at the same time, we have the Marshall Island delegation there and the activists who are outside the European Union trying to move it forward and agitate. And you know, there were twofold of this review conference. One is to assess progress and one is to come up with a list of action items to further the treaty. That was the goal of this. And the goal was to write a dock. That prescribed what is done in the future. You only can make the stopping if every single delegation, and there is 191 National Delegations and everyone has to agree. If there is one country that objects it is scrapped and you have to wait another five years to have an official todo list. In may, it kind of fell apart. At the end observation it, the u. S. , and canada, objects and said we cannot sign off on this. There was a cliff hanger regarding a Nuclear Weapon free zone in the middle east . Yeah and this gets wonky. There were countries that wanted to put language in the document saying we need to establish a Nuclear Weapons free zone in the middle east. This was the next step. We needed to come in with a Nuclear Weapon free zone in the middle east and countries like egypt were leading the charge saying we want to start that process to abide in that region and they wanted to do it really, really fast. The problem with that is israel has Nuclear Weapons. The u. S. As a strong ally with israel. It was other middle eastern nations wanting in and allies of israel saying all regional actors have to be at the table for this and if that is not the case we are not in agreement. There is a todo list on getting rid of the Nuclear Weapons. The treaty has been languishing. Activi activists and officials, you know, this was the chance to take concrete steps forward. There is a new movement. I think it as an it 17 cou 12 countries signed the humanitarian pledge. Tell us what that is . There are countries that are sick of the u. S. Foot dragging essentially saying no country should have Nuclear Weapons but but we need for our securities and they see that and say they will never get rid of it. This was written down with the official white house policy, papa para phrasing but as long as Nuclear Weapons exist we will maintain a stock of them. There is a movement these countries saying we waited long enough, 40 plus years after the treaty was done, so we are going to organize a convention and ban them. Get together a hundred plus nations and say these weapons are not to be possessed because they are in violation of the treaty. So that is the goal of this movement that started in a couple days. These countries are working and might sign the treaty and say it doesnt matter if the u. S. Or russia isnt here we say they are banned and hope the nucleararmed states catch up. Dan, thank you very much. [applause] questions . When you spoke this as a political question. If you were to ask every political leader in the world are you against Nuclear Weapons most of them would say they are horrible except north korea who likes them. But given the fact that there is always one you gave a good answer but i want to see how you get the process started . If he has it, we have to have it. So that conundrum. Right. The question is how do you get rid of them if, you know, the policy is well someone else has it, we have to have it. And i dont know the answer to that. If i did i would get a peace prize. You know, i dont know. I dont know what it would take. The pentagon said we can reduce the mount of deployed Nuclear Weapons by a third and meet our security or military objectives but we will not get rid of them unless russia does the same thing. And i think that encapsulates this conundrum. I think it would take a move like a president saying russia is not going to work with me, so we dont need them, and in good faith we getting rid of one third of our deployed stockpile. The problem is the president does that and then congress doesnt provide the funding. So the president can say we are getting rid of these but congress doesnt fund it. Every single u. S. President has talked about how Nuclear Weapons are the worst thing in the world. You have obama saying we feed the peace and security of a World Without Nuclear Weapons but almost every single president made a decision to grow the arsenal, improve the arsenal in some way. So, i dont know how you break that. But it does seem to be something that is a conundrum that is inherited by each president. I tried for years to get an interview with president obama because i want to know what it is like to be in that position of authority and how to compromise with what you believe in. Everything about his life says he would love to get rid of these weapons but when you reach that position of authority it becomes harder and i would love for him to put in that frustration. I can only imagine he is very frustrated. How do you resolve it . No one but it is endemic to the office of the president. Helen, do you want to talk . I think there are verification systems that are being worked on that would give assurance to the fact no one is cheating. I know jim nuns group is working on that. The former Armed Services Committee Chairman who heads up the nuclear thread initiative. They are working on building a verification process so that if lets say country x is reducing their stock pile by, i dont know, a hundred weapons, you can actually verify that. I think you are saying how can you get rid of weapons and then you would be left without them. China but i do feel that the United States leads the world, i believe. I think the point that a lot of people dont miss is we have our weapons pointed at russia but they have their weapons pointed at us, too. So it is in our interest, and experts have told me this, too, it is in our interest to lower the number. Because if we take the initial step then the russians will follow through because we have more than enough weapons to blow the world up several times over. I think the weapons on the submarines, i think that weapons is 30 times the bomb in japan. Just one of those bombs dropping would kill 1. 5 Million People in one fell swoop. We are talking about weapons that are magnitudes time more powerful than the ones dropped in japan. I think the United States can lead on this as it has in so many other areas. You know, i do believe this reduction is good but as dan pointed out, after 45 years, a lot of these countries that have been patiently waiting were the Nuclear Weapons state to fulfill their promise are becoming impatient and justifiable so. I think a varication regime can be established that would give assurances to the countries that reduce weapons that it is going on. Has sanders said something . I feel it has been und underdiscussed in the campaign. Any other questions . You talked about the challenges face. [inaudible question] the question is we had a Million People in the mark in new york and is that possible today . If you ask me today, i would say it is possible but i follow state Department Official to europe is year and a half ago to one of these conferences on the humanitarian impact of Nuclear Weapons and this was a conference that had multiple government officials in it from Different Countries and a lot of young people especially young europeans. There were thousands talking about the impacts these weapons would if used. I have not detected that kind of interest and momentum in the u. S. But it certainly exists abroad. Those conferences yielded this movement of countries that have signed on to eventually have some kind of convention. I dont think is necessarily marching on central park but getting partner counries together to establish a ban that establishes a norm that can be used to essentially shame the u. S. By saying we have this ban now. You are way behind the times and making the world less safe. Is there going to be a huge mark . Probably not. But there is this movement that is happening. The spark in 2010 by a norwegian official and a Nongovernmental Organization called the International Campaign to abolish Nuclear Weapons. It was government officials, act this back and remind people what these can actually do and what their purpose is which is to kill massive amounts of people. So conferences came about and they talked about what happened and from those conferences came this movement and from this movement might come a ban. So it is a Chain Reaction of starting small and growing into the something with a massive impact. I think the biggest problem i i seen on this issue is lack of public awareness. It is not on their radar. I think that if there could be a movement that you, you know, reverse, that would really, you know, stir politicians on but it is not there right now. Januarying we have time for one more question i think i am wondering if you can draw the connection between the conversation around Nuclear Weapons and the conversation around Nuclear Energy especially we have seen with a few years ago in japan with fukushima and the trajectory of the dangers of that and how that sparked many conversations around the damage Nuclear Weapons can cause. I deliberately focused on weapons for the book because i didnt want to book to be 1200 pages long and i got flack from activists who say they are connected and you need to talk about both at the same time. But as a nonactivist and just a curious citizen i wanted to focus for brevity sake on the side of Nuclear Energy that is designed to kill people. You could argue Nuclear Energy used in a power plant is designed to help people and a hot say that is not the case and the effects are harmful but the intent is a little more of a gray area than weapons supposed to annihilate citizens. For the sake of the story i would focus on weapons. This goes with the title of the book. I titled with almighty because after the first atomic test ever, 71 years ago this month in new mexico, and i quote the gentlemen in the book, he said and i will paraphrase, now we have powers and humanity has powers for the almighty. And a constant source of concern and theme for the book is human beings are frail. They make mistakes. Human beings involved, nothing is a hundred percent, anything created by human beings is not a hundred percent. It has flaws. Any machine breaks down. Anything can go wrong. That is kind of where i say Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Weapons, and this force that is so godlike being controlled by man and man creation, you should not be surprised when something goes wrong. I think that is the question we have to ask ourselves; is it worth that risk . Is it worth every generations having a fukushima . Is it worth continuing to push our luck with act ivisactivists volve involving Nuclear Weapons . That is what i come back to. Human beings can build faulty machines and do we think the risk or harm when they malfunction worth the good they can do . I dont know if you have done any thinking about this, helen. Not really. I know in the third world example where the energy needs are great Nuclear Energy is looked upon something that is mng hawaii use but the african nations are against Nuclear Weapons. I just focused on Nuclear Weapon. Gl i think you brought up a good point of something that could animate young people. They are animated by protecting the environment and this could bring attention to that. Both Nuclear Energy and weapons have weights. That is harmful for many years. And regardless of if you are having the material for electricity or the military it has affects that will out last us. We are essentially giving to the future generations to deal with. I think despite not focusing on it. I think that connection with the environment and Nuclear Power could be an animating force for young people. Thank you. Every weekend, booktv brings you 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on cspan2. Keep watching for more television for serious readers. Next, on booktvs after wards, ann coulter makes the case on why donald trump should be the next president. She is in talk with tucker carlson