Management because these are the most dangerous machines ever built. And i think the subject has fallen off their radar quite a bit since the end of the cold war. Host lets talk about the story. You are telling a story about the ground up. You chose the whistle explosion. Why that particular explosion rather than any other incidents you like in the book lacks guest my interest i spent time in the 04 writing my book for the resignation and one of the officers told me the story of the accident. He had been in the Missile Launch crew and i thought of an extraordinary story. I had never heard of it. I could not believe what happened. And the more i learned about it, the more it seemed like it was a very good way to look at these much larger themes about the Nuclear Weapons about our strategy for using them and the management of them. It is a story that is a seemingly trivial event someone drops the toole that leads to a potential catastrophe. The dropping of the tool damages the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile and creates a situation the missile might explode. And in this case it had been the most powerful Nuclear Warhead the United States has ever deployed on a ballistic missile. So it was quite a story. And originally, i thought the book would be relatively short. And i was just going to tell that story. But the more i learned the story got bigger and bigger because the effort to make the weapons safe during the accident. And another narrative about the effort to control them from the command and control point of view. I hate to turn the tables on you but where where you when the missile exploded and what do you remember . Host i remember the explosion but i was in the government and i didnt have any of responsibility for it. But the risk of Nuclear Accidents has been something that ive read about for many years of my career. Lets explore a little bit sort of what you have learned about those risks because in the case of the titan for example and in the cases of all of these other mishaps, no Nuclear Weapon has exploded. No Nuclear Weapon has detonated. Some Nuclear Weapons have exploded and spread plutonium, which is not a good thing but not as bad as a destination detonation. Its a critique of the weapons but at the same time, it recognizes that enormous technical ingenuity, great Organizational Skills and a huge amount of personal courage and bravery are responsible for the fact that weve never had an Accidental Nuclear detonation. So you think its and there is luck. If you think about the fact that weve manufactured about 70,000 Nuclear Weapons and weve never had one detonate accidentally that is incredible management. Weve never lost one. Thats an incredible inventory control. Weve never lost one to other people. But in this business anything less than perfect is unacceptable. There is no question that we have come close to having the destination on american soil. And the damascus accident is only one of the incidents. Another accident ive read about was the b52 bomber that broke apart in North Carolina just a few days after john f. Kennedys inauguration. And that came very close. Host we agree we want it to be 100 . Guest i think enormous praise and credit must go to the designers. It must go to the ordinary servicemen who i really try to write about at length. Theres been hundreds of books written about the Nuclear Weapons and very few of them are written about the management and people that risk their lives and lost their lives trying to prevent the nuclear catastrophes. At the same time there is an inherent risk in having the Nuclear Weapons that are capable of being used quickly. And as long as the weapons are maintained in that status, theres going to be a possibility that one going off when its not supposed to. Host you show the history to make the weapons themselves safer. And you can talk about the fact that in the past many of them are what we call alert and ready to come quickly but lots has changed since the end of the cold war and you are the first to say that. So do you think that its hard to judge but how worried should lady today about the possibility of a Nuclear Accident . Guest there is no question the weapons the United States have today are far more safe than the ones in the 1950s and even through the 1980s. One of the narratives of the book is the effort to improve the safety of the weapons. And one in particular the became Vice President of the National Laboratory and who devoted his career to the safety problems with a weapon and would be nice to think that he was a huge leak supported by the various security bureaucracies in doing that. But there was a real battle and those that believe in the need for safe Nuclear Weapons. But theyre always was this inherent contradiction between the military demands and having weapons immediately available and reliable and the more civilian need to not have them detonate on american soil. Getting back to todays within, the weapons themselves are much safer. Since the 1980s i do have some concerns about the contemporary management. In 2007, half a dozen Nuclear Weapons were loaded inadvertently on to an airplane. Was flown across the United States. That set on the of roadway intended in the theres half a dozen Nuclear Weapons that nobody knew were missing for a day and a half. In which the Standard Operating Procedures and even the common sense were ignored. The people that we move to the weapons from the bunker would check to see if there are Nuclear Weapons. There were security guys that were never checked to see if there were Nuclear Weapons on board. The crew that loaded the weapon never looked to see. The pilots never checked and in that case they could argue the system worked. Terrorists didnt get the weapons and officers didnt get the weapons. But you shouldnt have fixed Nuclear Weapons that dont need to be signed for and that cant be accounted for four a day and a half. Just this year, just this year two of them have been found to have serious safety violations and the commanders have been relieved of the command. Of the third has a few years ago lost the occasion with an entire squadron thats 50 missiles. They werent sure why it happened. It turned out to be a mechanical fault but its not good to be able to communicate the missiles for an hour and a raised the possibility that the command and control system might be vulnerable to further attacks. So a lot of the problems i write about in the book had been addressed. But to say the command and control issues have been solved with Something Like the command and control which is a process its never fully achieved to read the Safety Record is perfect until its not. Host there are still risks as long as you have Nuclear Weapons. And the difference is from the past to the president have to do with the ways in which the dangers have arisen and some of those are not as difficult as in the past. And clearly that if read arsenals that is the United States and russia are different in terms of their safety. If you ask me i would tell you like to stay awake worrying about pakistan and india and their Nuclear Arsenals. But we think its important to make those differences not to say there are not problems. I dont think anybody says there couldnt be put to understand the nature of the problems. I try to make that point clear in the book. We invent this technology and have experience more than any other nation and the safety mechanism and our kinetic control mechanisms are superior to those in any of the nation. Host but they are not necessarily perfect. Guest than what i was going to say is given those facts, which i think is true, its quite sobering that challenges that we face and the problems that we face. And at the end of the book, i look at the rate of industrial accidents and other countries as a measure of the proficiencies dealing with the complex technologies, and i worry about pakistan and india and north korea. Are you an inspector that became familiar with the design for the Nuclear Weapon, which was never actually built but he would be worried it might detonate if it was capable and that might be an exaggeration but these are very complicated machines and we dont want them to go wrong. I couldnt agree with you more. You are an Investigative Reporter and an Award Winning Investigative Reporter. And ive been thinking about that sort of protection and it seems to be more and more a lost art. Do you agree is your profession coming out of business, and second, why do you continue to be an Investigative Reporter . I think the need for the profession may be greater now in this country than has been in the hundred years. And the ability to practice the profession and be paid to do with is probably the worst that its been in a hundred years. The first things newspapers tend to cut our their investigative reporting units. The sort of investigation and i spent six years on this book. But the investigative reports take weeks, months. They can be legally liable the issues and as newspapers have cut back, the Investigative Reporters are probably the first to go and the celebrity gossip columnist may be the last to go so it is an endangered art but in a democracy at think it is an essentials. My background academically is history so i tried to combine the sort of investigative reporting in a contemporary implication of what im writing about and the background and trying to we look at history that maybe hasnt been fully explored. And i think this book combines that few host to show yourself to be a good historian along the way. Guest thank you very much. You know a thing or two about the subject. Host if you are an Investigative Reporter when you want to happen from the other side of the book. So in the thinking that he would probably want to see some changes potentially some attention to it let me grace you if i can with the sec to the defense calls you in and says okay, tell me what you want me to do given what you now understand about command and control United States Nuclear Arsenal. What me preface that by saying i tried very hard not to write the wilentz or diatribes and the books i write to dont and with a point by point political program. I do the best i can to allow the fact is as i see them to speak for themselves to write in as koln of the tone as possible so that my persona and my cleverness and ideology isnt at the forefront. I take subjects i think are very important and the Mainstream Media may not be addressing and particularly to take very powerful the institutions that are secretive and provide information to the public so that decisions can be made on the basis of information and not on the basis of misinformation. And im not necessarily even talking about the pentagon. Im just as easily talking about mcdonalds and other marketing versus the reality of how they procure their food. But for me, Nuclear Weapons is the subject of existential one portents, and the book is just to remind people and provoke the dialogue not to impose my point of view. Having said that host i cant imagine then you have a few thoughts . Guest i do. Having said that, the secretary of defense were he to call me and ask for my life which is about as likely as a meteor streaking the building i would say the first thing that we need to do immediately is spare no expense in the management of the Nuclear Weapons that we currently have. Make sure that those that work with them are trained to the max. Make sure they have the testing equipment they need. Right now some of the testing equipment that we have dates back to the 1970s and really invests in that infrastructure immediately. High morale and people that are compensated. They are the very best officers encouraged to enter the Nuclear Field as opposed to the Nuclear Field particularly in the air force right now in a career that ended those are things that we could do within a few years. And the bigger sense, i am a great believer that the fewer weapons possessed by fewer countries is better and safer not just in terms of accidents, but in the potential of a nuclear war. So, we would have arms control agreements that are bilateral that in the United States and soviet union and now with russia that i think we need to find a way to engage the other Nuclear Powers in our control pilat i could go all of on all kinds of other specific things. But one of the important things about bill ploch it is it is a very unsettling subject. But having spent six years investigating it, i am not overwhelmed with the doom and gloom. I dont think that any of this is hopeless. If i thought that there was i wouldnt bother to write the book host i want to come back to the riding of the book but just in a few words i was trying to capture the femur. Thats one of the things i try to do so i want to try one on you on this point. It might be good people, very Dangerous Things and a bureaucracy that you cannot trust. Guest i say good people, well intended, patriotic, Dangerous Things, and peoples behavior in bureaucracy is not always the best behavior. Someone recently i read the basic law rule of success in a bureaucracy is that it is better to be wrong than to be alone. And what one of the engineers had people that i wrote about who is a true hero, he is right about the problems with our Nuclear Weapons. But he had to pay a price. He had to be a form in peoples sides and his career hve gone a lot farther if he hadnt ruffled feathers constantly trying to push for the Nuclear Weapons safety. Another fundamental theme i think in the book is that we are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at managing them. Its just hard to anticipate what can go wrong, how it might go wrong, and if it is an automobile that breaks down, that is unfortunate. If it is an airliner that has some unanticipated mechanical flaw, that this tragic for those passengers. But with a Nuclear Weapon if it goes wrong, the potential impact is almost unimaginable. And thats why we have to be extra vigilant with these technologies. Host lets take a short break host we will disagree on that. Lets take a short break and then come back. Host you talk throughout the book about the people. Youve been talking about the folks that you got to know along the way, but im kind of interested in your story that is kind of in very personal terms of what it was like to write this book, to get that in the morning, go to the computer to get the documents, talk to people so tell us your story. Guest it was an extraordinary challenge for me but it was also endlessly fascinating. Nuclear weapons are their greatest nationalsecurity risk to the United States and in the most important weapons in the arsenal. For those two reasons its a very difficult to get information about the subject. So i relied on documents that others obtained in the freedom of information act, the National Security archive is a nonprofit based in washington, d. C. That has done a terrific job of assembling such documents in an archived those were useful to me. Ive got documents through the freedom of information act, myself. It took a long time to get them. Host so they write you back or they dont write you back . Guest you write and they dont write you back. It took me a couple of years but i reached out to people that had a firsthand experience in dealing with Nuclear Weapons and many books have been written about Nuclear Weapons but most of them had been written by Manhattan Project physicists or about those people at the National Security advisers had written memoirs but very few books had been written about the day in and day out management of the Nuclear Arsenal by the people that do eight. So i really reached out to the former members of the Missile Launch cruise, technicians, the bomb squad technicians who if their job was to render a Nuclear Weapon. And the stories they had to tell were absolutely fascinating and this history was amazing to me. I studied Nuclear Strategy as an undergraduate. I felt like i was very familiar compared to other people about Nuclear Weapons and yet this Research Made me realize i was profoundly ignorant. So much of this information has only been available since the end of the cold war and i think in the decade after the cold war ended and maybe even still people havent wanted to think about it because there was a relief the war ended without bloodshed but a lot of important details and information has been released and this book is my intent to get some of that out there to the public. Host do you think you have the information that you need to understand it . Did you get all of the documents that you would have wished to have . I say that this book like all manmade things is in perfect. And i tried. I really tried. I felt like i had some very crucial people who were helpful in different areas. By spending time with people who served in the cruise, by spending time with people in the maintenance crews and the weapons designers never just one, but a group so that i felt like i had this sense, i feel confident that the central arguments of the book are accurate. Almost all of the facts are accurate. I tried. I dont rely on unnamed sources. Any fact or assertion that i make in the book there is a source in the document that inevitably, i did make mistakes. I wish i knew what they were and i would love for the readers to point them out to me. But host the book is now being published some people will have a chance. Guest was their anything and that you found . Host probably didnt go into every word but generally i do agree with your history. I think some people might say perhaps you didnt provide a big enough context that is a quick review through the history but nothing struck me along the way guest so you might challenge interpretation or my own view on a broad historical issue that you didnt find any factual error that jumped out at you . Host actually i didnt but i also didnt look at every note. But your reader will find that kind of note keeping in terms of what it is that youre saying, and i think thats a real contribution. But shifting from the notes and the hundred pages of notes and back to the story of the titan explosion, they are going to make a movie of it . Guest i have no plans to do that. Host youve made movies before guest remember the day to believe me was hard enough host about the story, not the whole book. Guest but just and again, just putting together that story when i contacted the air force, they told me that all the copies of the accident report had been destroyed and that they couldnt give me a copy of it and it turns out that the handful of copies still but i had to find it in a University Library in kansas. So, quite honestly the complexity of the subject to get as much perspective as possible, so i tell the accident from the point of view of the one that dropped the tool, who were in the command headquarters in nebraska, i try to tell as many perspectives as possible. There was so complicated to do. But the movie of the book i will leave to someone else. It is an extraordinary story of great personal heroism. Host who were your heros i was going to have to talk about the fellow from the lab guest from the laboratory i would single out William Stephens who was a safety engineer who did some pioneering work in trying to figure out how to make sure Nuclear Weapons wont detonate an abnormal environments like a he was a Vice President of the sea in diego National Laboratory who as i said earlier really risked his career for years to champion making our weapons safer and you would never build a weapon in the United States today without the mechanisms that these gentlemen fought for years ago. But then ordinary servicemen White Matthew arnold, who was an explosive for the net demolition technician, the guys like that who trained to walk over to Nuclear Weapons that were damaged and diffuse them. I write about people like greg and jeff kennedy who were repairmen he essentially who put on protective gear and went into a missile silo on the verge of explosion in order to try to prevent this muscle from exploding when it had a powerful form of Nuclear Weapon on top of it. Again and again, there is another Nuclear Weapons accident and its gotten very little attention that was a very dangerous one in north dakota for the b52 bomber caught on fire with Hydrogen Bombs and eight shortrange missiles that had Nuclear Warheads and the fire was being fed by a fuel pump. It was extraordinary that they were the wind blowing the flames away from the fuselage of the bomber said that the weapons were not yet in danger. But they realized the paint was beginning to booster on the skin of the bomber and they had to do something and theres a fire man named timothy griffith, wife, small children. He puts on his protective gear and climbs onto a burning bomber, gets into the cockpit to try to figure out how to turn off the fuel pump and when he pulls the switch the fire goes out like the burner on the stove going out. Now, that is true heroism. And there were so many stories of that even on of routine airborne alert flights that didnt have an accident. I mean, the pilots and crews putting their life at risk on a daily basis in this country during the cold war, and i think that their service and their heroism hasnt been recognized and acknowledged in the same way the veterans of the vietnam war and they have a memorial and the Second World War and people died. And people were injured during the cold war in order to prevent a nuclear war as part of the process of deterrence but also in handling Nuclear Weapons accidents. And so i try to honor the sacrifice of some of these people in the book and tell us will use of people who i admire. Host so back to some of the things you find you are somewhat critical about and that goes to a continuing theme about secrecy in the government. Its actually a theme that i share with usa problem and so im kind of wondering going back looking across this what theyre you see secrecy as inherent in the government thats just something i think is a fact of life. People are going to be secretive and covered up or do you think it is something that could possibly change . Guest the secrecy that we had during the cold war actually endangered us more than a protected us. In looking at the Nuclear Weapons issue, there was such intense compartmentalized secrecy within the government, not only keeping secrets from the public about within the government that the people who were designing the Nuclear Weapons didnt know how the Armed Services were handling those weapons in the field, and the Armed Services didnt know some of the safety issues with the weapons they were flying around and transporting so the risk of a catastrophic accident was actually made worse by some of that secrecy. The document that i got from the freedom of information act that was 200 pages, a list of accidents and incidents with Nuclear Weapons i showed to these weapons designers, these were the people designing our Nuclear Weapons. And they had never been able to see some of these incidents as which were relevant to what they were doing in their design. Whats ironic in terms of the secrecy is throughout the cold war there is no question the soviet union knew more about our Nuclear Weapon than the American People dead. And that is absurd. I do think that there are things that must be kept secret. And in my book i did everything i could not to have anything whatsoever in my book that could scare the National Security and i had the old book read by someone with a very high security clearance, an expert in Nuclear Weapons, not a member of the government because i didnt want anything in the book that could threaten the National Security. Having said that and having gotten some of the documents through the freedom of defamation act again and again overwhelmingly what had been excised, with the census had been eliminated was not information, it was information that was going to threaten embarrassment of the National Security bureaucracy. So i would say that we need many fewer secrets much more closely held. When you have that many secrets like we do now and that many people with security clearances like we do now, you have the potential for Chelsea Manning or ber snowden to have access to revealed. Host as you suggested some secrets are important to be kept to a very small number and other secrets are not and bureaucracies and governments tend not to want to show off mistakes or problems. So that takes me back a bit to this is a sort of fact of life. This is the way we ought to see our government but i dont think that you would agree. Guest there have been periods in history when theres been greater disclosure and where things have been held much closer and i cant stress enough that the sort of secrecy endangers us more than that protect us. In the book i go through a number of examples of which publicity of the accidents actually lead to important safety changes being made. In the research for this book and i obtained documents that had been heavily censored but with 50 or 60yearsold. The soviet union no longer exists. I had no desire to reveal the specific design details that would help anyone in pakistan or india to design a better weapon but we need to know this history because we need to have a thriving democracy in which fundamental decisions about the National Security should be made by the American People and representatives, not by a small group of policy makers acting in secret which is so much of the Nuclear Weapons policy that has been made that way. Host we could have a longer conversation about that but lets go back to the people part that i havent turned you out much in terms of your own working on this book so lets come back a little bit to that we did you do a single draft . Did you kind of produce lots of draft . How did you go about your work for the book . Guest iowa an unusual in that i dont have any research assistance. I dont even have an assistant that may have also contributed to why the book took six years. I immersed myself not in thousands but in tens of thousands of pages of documents. And i didnt read every word of every page, but with the search technologies that you now have you can just blow through an enormous amount of material. What i was doing is looking for in little pieces that might be within the congressional testimony, that might be within documents that have been released through the freedom of information act. I interviewed hundreds of people and i read as many books as i could on the subject. Host were people willing to talk to you easily . Guest some of them yes and some of them know. Most of the hard work a great bulk of the hard work went into the of research and then went into the structuring of the book because i had a wonderful writing teacher that said if you put everything you know about a subject into a you write you dont know anything enough about it and you should leave out 99 of what you know. But that 99 is in between every line that you write. Its sort of like this book is sort of the tip of the iceberg of what i read and what i learned. And as a result, the struggle was one july include, what do i cut out. And i try to weave these different stories out. So the research in the book and coming out with structure and the outline was the most difficult part. Some of the writing was hard because i tried to have a writing style the was very clear and simple. Its much easier to write one complicated sentence but this subject matter particularly of the military issues was so full of jargon and acronyms and Nuclear Weapons are very complicated things so the struggle in writing it was hell do might take these complex issues and write about them simply and clearly without jargon . And there was a challenge. But it didnt go through a fixed drafts. The version that is published this host pretty much your draft. Guest i cut some, but its pretty much what i set out to do and some one could argue well you shouldnt have set out to do that or whatever, but it turned out how i set out to make it. Host let me take you to the last couple of pages because i did get to the last couple of pages, and i am intrigued by your description of watching the launch as sort of the labor you got really interested in thus laureate in the whole subject. So tell us about that experience guest one of the great things about not becoming a professional historian and about being a journalist is that i actually get to see things happen as opposed to just writing about things to be one of the experiences that i had professionally was watching the launch of the missile from the remarkably close range. The officer that was my hosts had never stood up close to a missile while it was being launched and we had our farepak in case there was a problem with its missile and some of the toxic fumes. The reason i was doing this is that i spent time at the air force looking into the future of warfare and space and that is a lot of people in the air force Space Command served in the Missile Crews during the cold war and that is when i heard the story. So i heard the story fairly recently and it was purely coincidental that i was getting to see the same missile being launched. Thankfully not with a Nuclear Warhead but with a weather satellite. Host because they took them down once we didnt need them any longer. Guest they were actually very reliable if you had months to plan the launch. Not when you had to keep them sitting in a silo fully fuelled at any rate. I had this extraordinary experience of growing at going up in the tower the evening before and going right up to the missile and been close enough to touch it. Its like standing next to a huge silver tinsel rebuilding. And the next day i was standing there on the hill remarkably close when it took off and it was loud and you felt the heat and was extraordinary to see this building rise of in this kind and fly at a very fast. I was there along the Central Coast of california at the air force base and you could still see it when it was over mexico. And it happened quite quickly. And in watching the launch, i realized in a very deep and visceral way that all of these things that i had heard about the cold war and these rockets and missiles part of me thinks well thats never going to happen. This is all stuff you read about. And it became very real and i saw in that moment these things work. They really do. In some ways it is unfortunate and this is something that a weapons designer said to me who used to be the head of the lab. He said every world leader should be gathered in one place and forced to watch the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. Because herald agnew has and it leaves an impression. And i dont want to see one of these things detonated, but the last time the United States detonated a Nuclear Weapon in the atmosphere was 1962. 51 years ago. That means the youngest person to have seen one of these things detonate probably in the early 70s. And the awesome power and the destructiveness of these weapons cannot be conveyed by youtube videos or written accounts. So seeing the Missile Launch isnt like see Nuclear Weapon detonate. But there was a pretty powerful experience. And it in many ways encouraged me to start this process that took years of writing this book and getting it into the world. Host so those that did experience the explosions are a very different generation as you just suggested and we are even though you mention in your book and i can still remember being told to get under the best and all those sort of drills that were a part of the 50s. But to those that actually began this nuclear age and one of the things that surprised me that i looked at it as a historian as well is there was a real debate about the Nuclear Weapons at the end of the Second World War that is what we should do about them or with them. So i dont know whether you want to talk a little about that. Its history but its an interesting time in which we, the United States had folks suggesting that we give them up. Guest absolutely. And i think that president obama s speech in 2009 calling for the abolition of Nuclear Weapons, which seems like such a radical idea actually harkens back to that moment in 1945, 1946. This is a generation that saw tens of millions of civilians killed. The estimates of very. Host not just from Nuclear Weapons but guest and the Second World War great cities were devastated and there was a great belief firstly to end the war, not have any more world wars. And after the destruction of hiroshima and the real conviction the world that entered a new phase and that these weapons must be banned. So it wasnt just radical philosophers in the United States, it was some of the more top military officials. And the command officers who talk openly about the possibility of abolishing the Nuclear Weapons and putting them under some form of International Control and the growing rivalry between the United States and the soviet union and the behavior in Eastern Europe and the threat to the freedom of europe need that an impossibility. Host there were those that suggest we would preempt so it went to the other extreme so there was a debate. Lets come back to the president and kind of how we see into the future. We dont have much more time. It just a couple more things than you want to kind of bring out of the book. Are there any people you want to sort of talk about . Guest one of the themes in the book is that again and again, there is a feeling of things flipping out of control. There were all these different rivalries throughout the cold war not just the ones between the United States and the soviet union, but between the different Armed Services in the United States each one seeking access to its own Nuclear Weapons of rivalries between the weapons laboratories. There were civilian military disputes over who would control Nuclear Weapons and going back to what we said at the beginning. Very well intended people, genuinely patriotic trying to protect the United States with different visions of how it would be best done. But these were very stressful decisions to be made and the margin of error was very slim and questions of whether we should try to protect berlin and the different crisis that we had. With that precipitate a world war . So one of the things i write about again and again our civilians who think they are experts on Nuclear Weapons and experts on our nuclear war fighting strategies finally getting into the positions of power and being amazed when they get access to every single integrated Operational Plan which was the Nuclear War Plan and its a recurring theme whether its john f. Kennedys advisers who had come who had written all kinds of theoretical works on the nuclear war and then when they actually saw the targeting and saw the number of weapons that would be used and when they saw the fact that this plan once it had begun it couldnt be stopped they were stunned. But then years later Henry Kissinger who made his career as a Nuclear Weapons strategist becomes with the National Security adviser and is amazed at how distracted and how powerful host then he begins to put more flexibility into those plans. Guest he does everything he can yet there is an ongoing tension that lasted really into the administration of george h. W. Bush between the civilians in the department of defense who want to give control over nuclear war fighting strategy and targeting and the officers in an omaha who actually control it through their computers and who set up the war plan and they had a good argument themselves. The scene for example of a civilian interference during the vietnam war that had been a fiasco and the air force tilt quite sincerely its up to the civilian leadership to tell us when to go to war but then when we have to fight the war we are the experts. So it wasnt really until the end of the cold war that you had civilians in the First Bush Administration making crucial decisions about the targeting and execution of the Nuclear War Plan and that is pretty extraordinary. Host said that leads back to the secrecy that you are describing as not only describing the secrets for the American Public but also within the bureaucracy itself. Do you think things are better now . Guest when Henry Kissinger went to the air force base for the headquarters of the Strategic Command to get a briefing on the Nuclear War Planas again he is the National Security advisor and expert on the Nuclear Weapons and the details of the plan were deliberately hidden from him i actually think that there are internal air force memos that mentioned that they are not telling him everything. Host so we actually see an improvement of least in that. Lets come back to the sort of fundamental question about the Nuclear Accidents and into the future. So i am hearing you say that we need to still pay a lot of attention to the possibility. Guest we need to pay a lot of attention coming and we need to spare no expense. We can argue about how many missiles we need, how many bombers we need, but if we are going to have missiles and bombers, the need to be well maintained, they need to be the very latest that you can buy. Right now the bulk of the Nuclear Bomber force is as old as i am. I am 54. We have i think 100 Nuclear Capable bombers. Host theyve been upgraded and modernized guest we are talking about the b52 bomber that was designed right after the Second World War for High Altitude bombing and its got all kind of new electronics and avionics and Weapons Systems that they havent built a b52 since 1962 and on minuteman three the complexs themselves are more than half a century old and this isnt a pleas for building hundreds of new bombers and missiles but the attention to the infrastructure particularly to the commanding infrastructure of the nuclear forces. And i am concerned about that with the cutbacks that weve had not just because of the sequester but also looking for places to cut the Nuclear Enterprise as they call it i think hasnt gotten enough attention. I think it has and then kind of a prestigious role particularly in the air force and we need to Pay Attention to it. It is just a practical concern of mine. Host unfortunately the time is running out but i wanted to say that you have found in the subject of Nuclear Accidents and incredibly important subject. You have given us the history of at least access to the history that we needed to know and you have told a really good story. Thank you very much. Guest thank you very much. Coming from someone that knows the field that is a high compliment. Host good luck. That was after words book tv program of which authors or interviewed by journalists, Public Policy makers, legislators and others familiar with their material. After words airs every weekend at 10 p. M. On saturday, 12 and 9 p. M. On monday and 12 a. M. On monday. You can also watch on line. Go to booktv. Org and click on to after words on the upper right side of the page. The plant in writing this book as a scientist is that given these realities, the impact of the drugs have on social policy, on race and on our culture is often times distorted by the lack of evidence based thinking that instead people rely on anecdotes or on fever rather than on the fact. Is that the heart and soul of the book . One of the things that has been troubling me for many years is that drugs have been used as scapegoats whenever there are social problems and so forth we use them as scapegoats. The problem for me is that people that look like me often scapegoat it more than other folks and as a scientist who knows the facts about the drugs, that is very disturbing. I would think as a black person would be very disturbing. Thats what i mean. So lets stop for a second day and try to understand something that is race related in this regard in which you say is just. When you look of the 1980s and the crack cocaine use people identify this as a black Community Problem but in fact more white people use crack than blacks and similarly, more blacks went to jail, arrested for crack use than whites even though more whites were using the drugs. How do you explain that . Guest i explained by its kind of simple. The short answer is racism and this is and new. When i say racism, i mean that what we do is we put our Police Resources in communities of color primarily black communities and to do can easily get people come catch people doing something illegal. No matter what. I drive my car for example i sometimes pass the speed limit and that is an illegal activity. Now if they want they can give me a ticket but that doesnt happen because the resources are not where i met most of the time. I hang out on the upper west side. But if you want to catch people doing crimes, you put your Police Resources in those communities and thats whats happened. This isnt new. One of the things like the crack cocaine king its important to know that like in the early 1900s, cocaine was used by a wide number of americans and cocacola for a sample. It was in a number of products. Now, there was concern when black people started to use cocaine for example the New York Times ran an article in 1914 about black folks being the new southern mannes but black cocaine was the new southern. And the way that cocaine most talkedabout or black people being under the influence was talked about was that it caused them to be more murderous. It caused them to rape white women and be unaffected by bullets. All this nonsense was going on then and its going on now although the language has been tempered but they are such easy scapegoats because much of the population dont use drugs. You cant say these things about alcohol even though alcohol this
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