>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> A man I have the honor of introducing today needs little introduction to a literary crowd such as this. With 23 books to his name Richard Rhodes is among the most prolific authors here today. His best known work maybe the making of the atomic bomb for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in non fiction, a National Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and it was the first volume in a series about the makings of the nuclear age, a project that has absorbed him for more than 20 years. His new book for which he is on a book tour at the moment is the fourth and final volume in that epic series The Twilight of the Bombs. It examines the civilization's changes brought about by nuclear technology in the post cold war years, the securing of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal, the first Iraq war and the lead up to the second, the prospects for nuclear abolition and an issue that I think preoccupies us all here today the risk of nuclear terrorism but when I mentioned to one of my colleagues that I'd be introducing Richard Rhodes he said, "Aha! The nuclear bomb guy." Many of you probably think of him that way but take a quick spin through a list of his published works and you'll see what a diverse and accomplished author he is. He has written about dogs and of course of horses, two of my favorite subjects, about greeting cards and cannibalism, about sex and soy beans, and he's done it in the Rolling Stone and the Journal of Chemical Education, in Playboy and of course in the pages of the Washington Post. Among his 23 published books are 4 works of fiction, a personal memoir and a biography. He's been host and correspondent for public TV's Frontline and he's written at least one play Reykjavik based on the historic 1986 summit in Iceland between Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Most of what he's written is what I would call nonfiction and what he I think has another term for and I'm going to ask him to elucidate that for us a little bit. Let me invite him to explain it and tell us more about the Twilight of the Bombs and also for anybody who would like hear more from him he will be speaking and signing books at Politics and Prose tonight at 6 o'clock so please invite your friends along to that too. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you very much. It seems really appropriate to follow Henry because he was talking about Leo Szilard and of course the making of the atomic bomb begins with the day Leo in 1933 walked across the street in London and thought of the idea of a nuclear chain reaction that kind of started this whole story moving forward. This last volume that I've just published--let's see, here is at least the front, there's a wonderful bomb test winding around the back and I think it will be the last, picks up the story at the end of the Cold War just before the collapse of the Soviet Union and it's metastases into four nuclear powers instead of one nuclear power which was a great challenge to our government and our diplomats and carries it forward to approximately the present. Perhaps the turning point or the ending point being President Obama's historic speech at Prague in the spring of 2009 when he announced it as official US Government policy to move toward the complete elimination of all nuclear weapons. A dream that had--yeah. [ Applause ] >> A dream that had also been a theme of President Ronald Reagan's life who he had indeed since the end of the second world war have been puzzling over the question of how you could get rid of nuclear weapons but he turned to a technological solution to the problem. So in my play where Robert Oppenheimer comes back to life from the dead to--because they needed a character who could stand outside the story and comment on it and of course Robert Oppenheimer being Robert Oppenheimer as it is he steps on stage he takes over the play but be that as it may, at some point Oppenheimer says to Reagan well, but you know, you are trying to solve a problem that's a political problem with a technological solution and then Reagan says to him well isn't that what your bombs were anyway? And he was right, he is right. We got into this business during the war because we feared that the Germans had a considerable lead, we continued it because we were frightened of the Soviet Union's capabilities and we continue it after the end of the cold war with considerable difficulty in rationalizing why we still need so many nuclear weapons in our arsenal. So I picked up the story at that point and deal with the serious problems we had in trying to put the nuclear genie that had--was now spread across 4 countries not only Russia but also Belarus and Kazakhstan and Ukraine, how we convince over the next 5 years those countries other than Russia to send their arsenals back to Russia to sign a nuclear nonproliferation treaty and become non-nuclear states and that's quite a story in itself. But there was so much more going on, the image that I opened the book with is the sentence, when the ice broke on the river of history at the end of the Cold War and because the world had been so polarized for the previous 40 or 50 years it's true that in a sense everything came loose and each individual nation state had to think about finding or adjusting it's relationship to the rest of the world. And I think that accounts for the diminished fifth of new third world nuclear powers, a very few of them but certainly North Korea and Iraq--I'm sorry, and Pakistan that emerged after the end of the Cold War as those countries tried to figure out where they were and what their relationship would be with the new world that was no longer bipolar but was now multi polar, multi lateral. One of the things that I write about and that I think you will enjoy in this new book was the inspections in Iraq after the first Gulf War. You remember that President Bush the first elicited an argument about an Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program as one reason for that war. It turns out that the reason he did so was that he was concerned that after we cleared the Iraqis out of Kuwait it might not be possible in terms of international politics to justify continuing into Iraq and reducing the scale of Iraq's military forces which was the plan. Therefore, he had to invent, which he did, an Iraqi Nuclear Program, we did not know there was such a thing at the time. There were hints but no real evidence so imagine everyone's surprise after that very brief war when it turned out there were in deed Iraqi nuclear facilities under development all over the country, a very large scale program that in some ways corresponded to the Manhattan Project here in this country and that they were trying different methods for enriching uranium and so forth. The stories that I heard from David Kay and Bob Gallucci who were the two Americans who led those inspections for the IAEA and for the United Nations were wonderful cops and robber stories among other things because our guys with some kind of broken down UN land rovers were chasing the Iraqis around their own country. In particular we had hints that they were using an old World War II technology to enrich uranium which is called Cyclotron or electromagnetic isotope separation that involved magnet cores that weighed 60 tons and were about 15 feet in diameter. They were big discuss-shaped soft iron cores for the big magnets that would separate the different isotopes of uranium and enrich it thereby. The Iraqis were loading these huge magnet cores onto tank transporters which are huge flatbed trucks and as we came in the front door in our land rovers we, the inspectors, they were driving out the back door of the base with these magnet cores on big trucks. So Bob and David talked about chasing around, being fired into the air by the Iraqis, because they were trying to get television footage of this equipment to prove that they had seen it. >> And of course eventually tracking down the materials and either removing them from their country or destroying them by blowing them up. You remember the days when the team was stuck in a parking lot outside the Department of Agriculture in downtown Baghdad because as they--Kay told me they had found down in a basement room of the Department of Agriculture the actual plans for an Iraqi bomb. And they were determined to get those documents out of that building and in fact by the time the parking lots standoff occurred the documents were already gone. I asked David Kay how they snuck them out and he said, well we had these great Kiwi medics who were helping us out. He said, I had a guy on my team who had the worst case of diarrhea I'd ever seen and he had to be taken out and the Iraqis agreed to let him go, he said so we gave the documents to the Kiwis they stuffed them in their shirt and carried the stretcher out the door and the documents were safe but they didn't want to tell the Iraqis that, the Iraqis weren't prepared to let them go until they gave up the documents and so for 4 days they stood in that parking lot unsure of their fate. This has its comic side but it was very serious business. Their lifeline to the outside world was a 1991 type satellite telephone and they were on that phone the first of the four days nonstop for 23 hours to CNN and any other news media that as the satellite or as the earth turned they were able to hit different time zones and they continued their radio broadcasting. But at 23rd hour approximately there was a break and they hung up the phone Kay said and it immediately rang and Kay picked it up and it was the operator in London who said you've been on the phone now for 23 hours we don't know what you're doing but we need a credit card [laughter]. And Kay said I told them, well, you're not getting my damn credit card but--he said but let me tell you what's happening here. So he explained to the operator among other things that their--the reception on the satellite was kind of weak and the signal varied a lot and the operator said well let me get back to you, I'll call you back, and about 30 minutes later the phone rang and the operator came on and he said now that we understand what this is about we're going to move the satellite for you. [Laughter] And they could maintain that link until the Iraqis finally gave up and they were allowed to leave. [ Pause ] >> The book also deals with the crisis with North Korea in 1994. I think it's not generally known how very close to a second Korean War we came at that time. You'll recall that the North Koreans had built a reactor at Yongbyon north of Seoul and had been negotiating back and forth again with Bob Gallucci. Bob Gallucci seems to have been the indispensable man in the '90s. He's now the president of the McArthur Foundation so, in some ways he's still indispensable but some glitches had come up and the Iraqis basically pulled out and were talking about going ahead and taking the plutonium from their one reactor, taking the uranium, the fuel, and extracting the plutonium and making their first bombs. This became very close to a war scale crisis within the Clinton administration because we were threatening to impose increasing sanctions on the North Koreans as you may recall, we were threatening to turn Seoul into a sea of fire. In fact, Gallucci told me that we were within a day or two of war and that we were just about to evacuate the American Embassy and all the other embassies in Seoul which as he understood it would have been a signal to the North Koreans that war was about to come and that they probably would have moved preemptively to attack Seoul had that happened. General Locke who was in charge of our forces in Korea around this time told President Clinton that we could win the war with North Korea but that the cost would be a million and a trillion and the president said what does that mean? And General Locke said a million South Korean lives and a trillion dollars extracted from the South Korean economy because of the destruction of that war. So those were the stakes. And you'll recall that Jimmy Carter much to President Clinton's disgust stepped forward and went as a private citizen to North Korea and settled things down with Kim Il-sung. Then Bob Gallucci went back to his business of negotiating with the North Koreans. Kim Il-sung died almost immediately and his son came to power. Negotiations went forward very successfully but didn't quite finish the job by the end of the Clinton administration. Madeleine Albright went to North Korea, I believe, in December even after the election and President Clinton was prepared to go himself but because that election of the year 2000 was mooted he didn't feel he should leave the country. And then when the Bush administration came in they had a very different attitude toward North Korea and things kind of fell apart after that. But that million and a trillion just reminds you, reminds me certainly of how many times since the beginning of the Cold War and even since the end of the cold war we have come very close to at least a large scale conventional war, if not indeed some kind of nuclear exchange in the world. So I looked later in the book at the question of how can we resolve this dilemma if we feel nuclear weapons in some sense are important to our security but if we feel we'd be more secure if there were none in the world and indeed we would. In fact one of the problems with getting rid of nuclear weapons is that the United States would be relatively speaking even more powerful with conventional forces only given our enormous capacity compared to other countries than it is now when even small states such as North Korea can effectively stand us off with a small nuclear capability. If there's any reason why Iran might be moving toward a nuclear capability that and Israel's capability are certainly two of the reasons. There is a commission in 1996 called by the Australian Prime Minister called the Canberra Commission. Richard Butler the Ambassador from Australia for Nuclear Issues and Nuclear Disarmament told me that the most important thing he felt came out of that commission of international leaders on this subject was what he calls the axiom of proliferation. For him this is the bottom line of the whole question of who has nuclear weapons. Who should have them or how we should get rid of them. And it goes like this. So long as any state has nuclear weapons other states will seek to acquire them. That means that ultimately if you want a world safe from nuclear weapons everyone has to give them up. That's an immensely complicated problem obviously, sometimes I think saying we have to all disarm our nuclear weapons is like saying we have to settle world peace then we won't need them anymore. It's almost that complicated. But it is there as a fundamental fact which President Obama paraphrased in his Prague speech by saying which is really kind of the next step in this series of axioms, if we believe that the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable then in some way we are admitting to ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable. We've dodged that bullet now since 1949, since the Soviet Union became the second state to acquire a nuclear arsenal. But how much longer will we be so lucky? How many times since those first days have we been within a hairs breadth of a nuclear exchange? I have cited in my works the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Able Archer event in Europe in 1983 when the Soviets thought we might be preparing to attack them and seriously considered striking us first. But I've talked to people who should be in a position to know in our government who have said oh yeah those too, but you know, there were a lot more that haven't' come to light yet. So we really have been quite lucky. Getting rid of nuclear weapons is going to mean ultimately dealing with conflicts situations that are thorny indeed. >> Most of all Israel, North Korea, Iran, and in my mind the country that is going to be the hardest nut to crack, the hardest and most difficult place to convince to give up it's nuclear arsenals, our country, the United States. We started all these, we maintained all these for whatever reasons, good or bad or indifferent, a lot of I think the Cold War had to do with domestic politics not with relations with the Soviet Union, you can read about that in this book as well. But the fact is we're the ones who I think will have the greatest difficulty. And one of the reasons is a simple practical fact. We spend about 50 billion dollars a year maintaining a nuclear arsenal that is basically utterly useless except as a display of potential force. That's a lot of money, it supports a lot of people and industries and I think it's going to be difficult indeed to wind all that down. Yes? Thank you. So let me just quickly end. There's much more in the book including and I won't give you the details you'll have to read it, including the real reason we went to war with Iraq the second time. Which I will just say had to do with anthrax not with nuclear weapons. At the end, I come back to the question how do we do this? And I look at a model that I've written about before that I'm sure you've read in my books before but it seems to me as a fundamental model for how you live in a world without nuclear weapons and that is the model of the public health system. We lived once with a kind of universal scourge which was epidemic disease and the--a few reformers and then later medical doctors and researchers found fairly straightforward ways to identify the source of a disease, to isolate the carriers of a disease and in a few cases in this--in the 20th century even to begin the process of eliminating disease, small pox, most of all which most of us don't even think anymore. Polio, the elimination is almost complete today. There has been no polio in the western hemisphere since 1991. And the states that still have polio cases are not surprisingly the ones that have the least infrastructure and the least support. So I discussed at some length that analogy and I think you might find it interesting to look at and think about because we have a success story where millions upon millions of lives were saved and are still safe because of some fairly straight forward ways of thinking about--of relating to the natural world differently from the way we related before. I think the same thing is possible with manmade death as with biologic death but manmade debt is actually a harder problem because people and their motives and their needs, their expectation and their fears are all involved. So let me stop there and take any questions or comments you have. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Yes? >> At the dawn of the atomic age some people thought the genie could be stopped and others thought it was inevitable, just a matter of time. Do you think it could have been stopped and what do you think people will think another 100 years out? How do you think this will evolve that thinking over time? >> Could they have kept the genie pushed down in the bottle or was the development of nuclear weapons inevitable? You know, I always quote something Robert Oppenheimer once said that I think speaks exactly to this question. He said the deep things in science are not found because they are useful. They were found because it was possible to find them. Nuclear fission was an inevitable outcome of the studies of the nucleus of the atom of the atom that began in the early years of the 20th century. You reach a certain point and you inevitably find nuclear fission. Once nuclear fission was found--and I say inevitable because scientists all over the world when they got the word that 2 German radio chemists that identified this amazing new reaction scientists all over the world kicked themselves. They understood that they've been seeing it in their labs but because they hadn't thought through what was going on they hadn't identified what it was. And I mean really, I've talked to a number of them who were just sick for a couple of days after this huge discovery was made that they missed just because they didn't think it through. So, it inevitably came along and the idea that this was some sort of falsity and bargain on the part of the scientist that they all could have gone off in a room somewhere up in a mountain top and said, oh let's not do this, is simply absurd. There it was and the reaction was so fiercely exothermic, so much energy out for so little energy in. And in the context of the discovery having been made nine months before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe inevitably people would think of the possibility of a bomb. Now what followed from that and the nuclear arms raise those inevitably were political decisions made for many different kinds of reasons. I think fundamentally, at least at the beginning, from deep fears that the only defense against these weapons which the scientists recognized as early as 1939 would be similar arsenal and the threat of retaliation. That kept it going for a long time. So I think that's a full answer to that question. Yes? >> Yes. A lot of people don't know there was this genius--genius, genius in Meredith Gardner and he broke the indecipherable ciphers that the Soviet's used and this is called the VENONA messages. >> Oh yes, right. >> Into 30s and to 40s and he broke them in the 50s and if you read the VENONA messages I think you will find some justification as to why we have atomic bombs [laughter] but the second thing is in the VENONA messages I always knew, every one that knew that [inaudible], green glass, definitely as the Rosenberg and Julia state they didn't have access to the atomic secrets. A man that did that was messaged--a young American called Ted Hall, Theodore Hall and yet he immigrated to the United States--England. >> In England, yeah. >> He was a Cambridge professor and he died old age. He was never put to death or anything. >> Right. >> And he gave the Soviets most of the usable secrets. >> That's correct. >> Can you comment on both of those two things? >> Yeah, I think, you know, it's always puzzled me why Ted Hall was allowed to live out his life. I think that suggest that he had new things or had documents or something that our government security people didn't want to see released, that's usually why people aren't touched. But the larger question, I'll just speak to it with an anecdote, could the Soviets have build an atomic bomb within the timeframe that they did about the same time it took us without the secrets that were passed to them by their spies? And I corresponded with this Soviet Robert Oppenheimer a man named [inaudible] in the last years of his life by the new thing e-mail back in the early '90s. And he pointed out that by 1947 they had worked out a bomb design that would be half as heavy, half as big and twice as powerful as our first bomb as our Nagasaki bomb. And I said why didn't you do--build that one instead of building a copy of ours? And he said because Lavrentiy Beria who was the monster who ran the Gulag system and was also in charge of their bomb program had said to them with great contempt, I don't give a damn what you think is a workable design. Build me the American bomb I know it works. He said it was worth our lives so we built the American bomb that's what my government wanted. But then I noticed in looking at the list of their tests their second bomb test was of a bomb that was about half the size and twice the yield of our Nagasaki bomb. So they built theirs next after they've fulfilled the political requirements that were there for them to deal with. Sir? >> Do you believe that Iran has any interest in a nuclear power program or is it just solely a nuclear weapons program? >> You know I think there's--I think it's--there's ample of reason to believe that Iran is following basically the path that Israel followed. The sort of bomb in the basement not acknowledged that we are building such a thing or have built such a thing. It was a very successful path for Israel, still is in many ways to this day. It leaves an ambiguity there about their relationship to being a nuclear power, even though everyone knows they are a nuclear power. So that seems to me what Iran is doing but it's been progressing very slowly which isn't just the technological problems, although there are plenty of those. Arguably what they are doing is as North Korea has been doing in a much more blatant way trying to use their capabilities as a negotiating tool to find some settlement with the United Stats in particular. North Korea, without question, and you will read this in the books several chapters may surprise you amazingly about North Korea's reasons for developing nuclear weapons. >> Primarily it was because during the Korean War we systematically, strategically bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age just as Curtis LeMay had threatened to do. We particularly destroyed all of their hydroelectric dams as well as a lot of dams that controlled the flood control for their rice fields. I mean it's a horrible story. We killed several million North Korean civilians with strategic bombing just as we had done against Japan during the Second World War with perhaps more justification in that case. Under those circumstances the main goal of Kim Il-sung for many years thereafter was to get an alliance with the United States that would allow North Korea to rebuild an electrical capacity probably based on nuclear power. And it has been for that purpose down through the years with other things thrown in needless to say the presence of American nuclear weapons in South Korea, the long standing conflict between North and South Korea basically a long standing Civil War. All that's been there, but underneath it all, and you'll hear it every time you hear about what the North Koreans are bringing to the negotiating table, they want an electrical supply. I mean, that's kind of where we still are. When Bob Gallucci negotiated the deal with them for two nuclear power reactors of western design that the South Koreans would supply, I said why did you give them that? He said that's what they wanted. And of course, they would be under international control and all those things but--so it's not always what one reads in the papers that these are crazy people and so forth. There really is a practical reason why North Korea would like get a head start on becoming a country like its cousins of the South. They were actually economically better off than South Korea until the late 1970's and it was then that they decided they needed a program of nuclear development which may or may not include a bomb. Eventually it did include a bomb. Do we have any time left? >> Time, it's over time. >> Thanks so much. [ Applause ]