this very week. 1945 led to the end of the second world war. 1961, the berlin wall was put up in the middle of august. in 1964 the talking gulf incident which led to the major escalation incident in vietnam took place with the prague spring was in the with czechoslovakia as it was known then was invaded by linda brezhnev's order and soviet tanks were rolling down the streets of prague. in 1981 and event, what -- lech walesa started the movement. in 1990 so, start he should have 19, not 18 provinces so he moved into kuwait. in in 1991 just to make sure that we could round things out, that was the revolution in russia that brought down gorbachev's government, short-lived one and, of course, the revolutionaries in turn a few days later were upended. nothing ever happens in august, sort of like the old greta garbo movie 80 years ago, grand hotel, nothing ever happens, you know. so we can all relax and enjoy the rest of the summer. that said what i'd like to do today, very briefly, talk about what i wrote the book and what it aims to do. and then pick up three of the more pressing problems, talk about them a bit, then wind up with overall some of the things that are particularly in this movement towards global nuclear the. i decided -- nuclear zero. i decided the process of writing this book, because it occurred to me that there was an opportunity that i don't believe had really existed in decades. what strategists had in the nea generation after the end of the second world war had to sort of gas at, -- had to guess at. what would happen if this, and if that? now, another half-century having passed since the cuban missile crisis there's enough historical experience to enable us to look at the fundamental problems that nuclear weapons had posed in the two-thirds century they had been part of since they changed the world forever. the first explosion in new mexico. and, therefore, we can take an integrated look at these problems of high level look, to help into were necessary for illustration, but presented and integration set of problems and what lessons we can learn from them. and there is an umbrella lesson, 12 lesson at the end, that i come up with which is that the fundamental thrust of nuclear policy is to avoid what i call the apocalyptic trinity. the apocalyptic trinity is that of genocide, suicide and surrender. you want want to have non-apocalyptic choices. i'll return to that a couple times during my remarks, but there's also may be a 13th lesson which is never write a book with more than three lessons. [laughter] but in any event with that, i want to pick out three areas from what i covered and talk about some of the illustrated problems there that are particularly pressing. and then turned to the umbrella problem as it were, nuclear zero. i'm hoping that the book by the way it's of use to lehman, laypersons, also to a lot of policymakers who have had experience, and even of some use perhaps here and there, but specifically i try to bring this to the general public in a way that i think really hasn't been possible before because now we've got concrete examples to illustrate things which rather than talk about abstractions. so i would say the three problems i'm going to focus on today are the problem iran poses, the problem that india and pakistan have posed. iran being the problem of the revolutionary state in pursuit of nuclear weapons. the problem with pakistan and indian being energy as a springboard for giving nuclear weapons. and the third one, specialist call a small power vulnerability as evidenced by what is called electromagnetic pulse. i'll talk about that when we get to it. and implications for missile defense. and then from then i will move on to conclude. in the case of iran which i think we can say is every now again in the notes, and i saw just yesterday a story about will it deliver an october surprise. the fundamental problem here is a possibility of a cuban missile crisis in the middle east. and to understand this we briefly go back to what nikita khrushchev had in mind. khrushchev in 1961, in june with president kennedy, the enemy, and he pushed kennedy around the kennedy himself said later he really beat me up. he decided that kennedy was not up to it, and kennedy said what about the possibility of, paraphrasing that having the transcript in front of me, what about the possibility of miscalculation? we have to be careful. and christians of miscalculation, miscalculation, i don't want to hear this word miscalculation. i'm tired of hearing it. so in 1961, khrushchev decided partly, mainly because of the summit that he could push can be a little further. so what he did was, working with the east german leader, they begin the berlin wall which was a flat violation of the 1945-four power agreement which gave occupying power to all four powers. on the second huge drop in a sober of 1962 which many of us lived through. i was 15. all of the jocular conversation on the school bus at that time was considerably more subdued for a couple of weeks but it was very real, to which we didn't find out until much later how close we came to nuclear war. and then what we come at the kennedy and khrushchev realized right off the bat that there was a possibility that this thing could get out of him. khrushchev had suspected kennedy as khrushchev told his son, sergei, he said he will make more of a fuss and then agree. that was not nikita khrushchev's best calculation. a few leaders after coming up years after the he decided made one too many miscalculations. and what happened there was that at the same time, and this was jeffrey goldberg interviewed fidel castro, a couple years ago, and castro admitted that he had wanted the first strike against the tyranny. and at the time, -- against the united states. if this happens, do you know what is going to happen to your island? it is going to disappear and you with it. castro still wanted him to go ahead. it is also reported about 20 years later, castro renewed the request on moscow so didn't have this conversation before? so now you look at the situations in the mideast today. you have iran, and if iran goes nuclear you are going to have already the saudis have said that, publicly said they are prepared to go nuclear to several other gulf states to buy bombs. pick the phone up, and by a few. how many petrodollars do you offer how many bombs? nevermind this bit about a 20 year program. you just take the bombs and you put them underneath the aircraft, all those american f-15s m-16s, and you don't have to have a fancy safety devices because they won't have time to figure that stuff out. now you've got close proximity, hundreds of miles away in some cases, with supersonic jets, small countries with the small number of nuclear weapons can obliterate them. and very little communication. there was no hotline in 1962. that was bad enough when soviets one to send a message to the ambassador wanted to send it to moscow. they gave it to western union and you hope the kid didn't stop to see his girlfriend on the way to the office. so it was very much a catch as catch can. go before by people with nuclear weapons and they're all work and have no margin for error. the permutations are very, very scary, to say the least. so ultimately the only resolution of this is to stop iran from getting nuclear weapons and the revolutionist it is not going to honor any agreement it makes to advance me. you have to get regime change, and preferably brought about from within. but the lesson out of this, broader lesson is a revolutionary powers come you can't negotiate away revolutionary power position. you have to defeat them. in 1962 though we saw the consequence of miscalculation. and you can easily have one here. so war may come about not by design, but all it takes is one mideast castro is ready to have one in some of the pronouncements of ahmadinejad, the president or the supreme guide and they may not be reading from the same hymn book we are, to say the least. now, with regard to the india and pakistan, what you learned is that civilian nuclear energy is just next to a nuclear capability. and here's some of the arithmetic of nuclear proliferation. you look first at three and a half% -- 3.5% enriched uranium power in the reactor and you say okay, weapons grade, full weapons grade is 93.5%. so they're not that far along. actually it can be shown arithmetic arithmetic with them and i show this in the book, i don't want to go through arithmetic because we don't have even that gets to be -- is relatively simple when you see it on paper. you've done 80%, not 18, but 80% of the separation work separating the uranium you want, uranium-235 isotope from the rest of it, when you've gotten to 3.5% to when you get to 20%, 19.75, which is medical great research, you have done 97% of the separation work. that one just very quickly, if one out of every 140 adams is the isotope you will, when you get down to one out of five which is where your medical research grade is, you've got rid of almost all of these that 97% or 96% of the separation has been done. you've gotten rid of 135 unwanted adams. you are just about there. and there are a couple of rules that relate to this. and i guess i unconsciously channeled herman cain. my rules, i don't have 9-9-9. i have 11-one-one, and 10-10-10. there's a lot of rounding in here, 10, 20, 30% of it all gets too the in and its are nothing but it's a lot easier to remember than 15,248, 1782 and so on. and the first one, the 11-one 11-one-one, is the timeline. it takes approximately 11 months and can these calculations are in the book, 11 months to go from here rating or to 3.5% enriched uranium. it then takes about a month to go from enriched commercial to medical grade, about a week to go for medical grade to weapons grade, and about a day to put the weapon together. and i do sake and device -- the niger sake fat man device was assembled in less than 24 hours. so that's one. another one is 10-10-10, the materials equation but if you start with 15 metric tons of uranium and you're going to wind up after going through three with 15 kilograms of enriched uranium, start off with the iranian or, and that's enough to fuel a reasonably well-designed uranium weapons are so you go through 10 fold reduction to go from uranium ore, the uranium for nuclear power. you go through another 10 fold reduction you get to medical grade and 10 -- third 10 fold reduction and then you have your fuel for a bomb. there's a couple of other kinds of things that give you an idea of what you're doing with your. i'm sorry, the fourth one in that is the difference between a crudely designed uranium bomb which needs about 60 kilograms, 140 or so pounds, of enriched uranium to a plutonium bomb -- the estimates lower than six kilograms but that's a conservative one. there are estimates that are for an even lower. and that's where well-designed plutonium bomb. so you've got these fundamental metrics you are working with. another one, and this one is sort of a good news-bad news thing. the bad news of course in the goodness. and that is that if you have a crude nuclear device, actually it could pre-detonate and most of the yield would be gone. in any sequence of doubling, and what you're doing when you get -- i don't want to go into -- there is more of it in the book, but basically what happens is you are splitting the atoms you are more than doubling the neutron count. these neutrons that are going to be ones that are going to be bombarding the nuclei. you go to a bunch of doubling and it's been like this thing on the chessboard where the king puts one piece of wheat on the first one, you know, by the time the first 32, this kingdom is fine, he is broke long before he gets to the end of it. the last four doublings in any sequence, released 95% of the energy. if you haven't -- the first release 1% of the energy. the next in release 4%, gucci to five, and then you get 95 at the end, half of it in the last doubling. so that sounds like if you have a bomb that pre-detonate, you're done, right? we don't have to worry. well, here's the bad news. the bomb that destroyed the world trade center -- sorry, that went off in the crotch of the world trade center in 1993 was about two-thirds at the time of conventional explosives. at 1% of a hiroshima level bomb come which is 14 kilotons, you are releasing 200 times the energy of that bomb that had been placed better would have toppled one tower into another. in other words, it's going to be a terrible mess and there are a lot of terrorists out there who say they don't need a royals -- rolls-royce. this is something that also pertains to iran. as well of the concept. they're talking to iran doesn't have a missile that can put this on yet. and that's true. and we don't know, their rocketry is doing much better than north korea. north korea they have to go back to rocket can't, which is not distressing in the slightest. in the case, however, the iranians they're having pretty good success. and that comes down to miniaturizing your warhead enough so it will fit inside a missile nosecone or any bomb that is not too heavy to be carried by an aircraft, or if you really advanced, a small number of nations are, inside an artillery shell your you can attack on the battlefield. but what have we been talking about since 9/11? hasn't the whole focus been what has been called an and a questis law of bad usage, the unconventional threats. issued state funds orthodox or nontraditional would be more a little more precise. is the bomb in a shipping container? it's the bomb inside a van. that bomb does not have to be a well-designed device that is compact and advanced enough to sit inside a missile warhead. it can be a crude device of the erosion of on tight but we didn't test because we knew it would work. south africa built a half dozen of them in the '80s. they never tested them. they know those things work. and you put that inside a van and you set it off, or put it in a shipping container and you set it off in a port. so why are we looking we talk about iran about weapons capability when a device, and devices used to indicate something that can now be weaponizing to fit on a missile, on a warhead or show or something like that. when that is part of the threat. if a bomb goes off in manhattan harbor, a hero she must size, killed a few hundred thousand people, we may not even have the signature but we don't have a signature for necessary and iranian bomb so how will we know where to retaliate? and so that has to become and that's a much shorter time will line and when you put on a missile. so when the administration talks about that it makes me nervous. the focus of what we've been talking about since 9/11 is something quite different. the third want to talk about briefly electromagnetic pulse. again, i don't want to repeat details of the text, but basically you set off a nuclear weapon at high altitude, and paradoxically for this purpose, i noted in the text, it is suited in a hydrogen bomb. and you set it off after let's say 300 miles over kansas and it is possible in a worst-case that the infrastructure of the continental united states, rate is 1470 miles at that altitude according to a congressional report, or take out our electronic infrastructure and would be catapulted back short order, to what life was like before thomas edison. well, that our disputes on this. some people say maybe only 20 or 30%. it would be a huge event and also another possibility. jim woolsey came up with this one, the talk, i heard jim speak in the spring. he said what do you do you're one have one of these geomagnetic storms and we had one as powerful as the one in 1859, it could zip out the entire infrastructure. so he says how do you negotiate with the sun? for those who want to negotiate the latest threat. but with the iran threat, missile defense and if properly deployed, can enable us to shoot down a small attack of this kind. the current generation missile defense, not designed to shoot down a trajectory that goes up like this, but rather midcourse. so we would have to work on it but should have a picket fence to try to prevent a catastrophic strike. at the same time when just a few billion dollars, we can get back up the electrical systems. right now it could be several years before major transformers are brought back online. so the lesson out of this is that catastrophic vulnerability, low number catastrophic vulnerability is something you should never permit if you can avoid. and, of course, i did mention at the end of the india-pakistan but it was implied in what i said, the lesson there is civilian energy is right next door to a nuclear weapons program in terms of putting it together, especially if you're not trying to get an elegantly designed device. which brings me to nuclear zero. and the administration floated earlier this year a proposal to cut as low to 300 weapons from where we are now. and the administration said well you know, we haven't decided but these are trial balloons as we call them in washington. now, this is based upon among other things a believe that all you need is a small number of weapons. well, here are the problems with it. it. personal use and everyone else thinks like you. this is what is called mirror imaging in trade. but look at what happened in 1973. when 11 years after the cuban missile crisis that was a mideast war, the yom kippur war went on for about three weeks in october. and toward the end of it, brezhnev opportunistically and improvisational he decided to try and see if he could introduce soviet troops in the middle east. he sent down transport planes. they were going to fly in to the airspace. we warned them not to. our naval ships were eyeball to eyeball with the russian fleet. and then the transcript that was released about 10 years ago by henry kissinger in a book called crises, conversation with richard nixon, president nixon says to them, you know we were close to nuclear confrontation today. now, what had changed since 1962 was that american superiority had shrunk. the russians were five years from passing us in numbers of nuclear weapons. but they already were feeling, earlier in 1970, leonid brezhnev had told the party conference in prague that by 1985 the correlation of forces will have shifted irreversibly into something save and will be able to work our will. that did not prove to be much better forecast the crew chefs in 1961. but the point is it is a what you think these weapons met or the nuclear balance will change. it's an operational question. if one or more parties to a crisis think that it matters, and behave different as a result of changes, they matter to at minimum it raises the risk in a crisis. at maximum and occurred as the 1973, it could cause a crisis to end differently. so we look at china and we are assuming that china is not at the time of the huge military buildup, the biggest since the soviet 25 your buildup in the '60s, '70s and early '80s. in china which in question is pushing dominance in the western pacific, that if this is good at a low number of weapons, they have more weapons than us, they may change their behavior in a crisis. and it doesn't matter whether we think it should matter or not. have an abstract debate of what is been called at times nuclear doctrine, it doesn't matter. if they think differently and act on, that will change the way the crisis unfolds and every will increase the risk of war. so with this in mind, bear in mind that people who we worry about the most outgoing, not going to fall your example as you reduce it. it will make their weapons more valuable. we don't have the ability to have any idea to verify how many weapons in countries the size of china or russia. we couldn't even find before -- after the gulf war and before the second iraq war, what could it find all the wmd