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Dec. 15, 2003 - Art Bell

02:49:27

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Nuclear Scenarios - Michio Kaku

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	So, let's get started.
	From the high desert and the great American Southwest Individual.
	Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the great cosmos and all the time zones they're in, because we cover them all.
	This is that great, great, great, great program called Coast to Coast AM.
	And in for George tonight, thank you George and the network, I'm Art Bell.
	George taking care of a little bit of business tonight, getting a needed day off at the same time that the big guy will be back tomorrow night.
	Well, for those of you who had an opportunity to listen on the weekend, you know I... Oh, wait a minute.
	First things first.
	We have new affiliates.
	Two new affiliates to welcome to the network.
	W-I-N-K, 1240 AM.
	And W-N-O-G, 1270 AM.
	Both in Fort Myers, Florida.
	Glad to have you on board as Coast to Coast grows like an out-of-control weed.
	Now...
	If you have an opportunity to listen during the weekend, you know I was having a pitched battle with a computer.
	I mean, this turned into something personal, folks.
	My wife's 98 machine simply wouldn't print using Netscape, and it was driving me crazy.
	Everything else printed, you know.
	These are all the newest programs, by the way.
	7.1, Netscape, and all the newest everything.
	Everything else would print, but not Netscape.
	Well, you know how it is, those of you who work with computers.
	This turned into something really personal with me.
	And I asked for suggestions, and actually a couple of them did the trick.
	I won!
	So thank you all, those who sent me email messages.
	It turned out to be a combination, actually, of two things.
	One was a little executable file called Spool32 in Windows System.
	Now, look, and I appreciate all the suggestions about Mozilla and about why are you using it anyway.
	Well, this is my wife's computer now.
	It's not mine.
	If it was mine, I'd have wiped the system and put in, you know, XP Pro, whatever.
	But it's her computer, and these are very personal things, computers, and so I didn't want to have to do anything to it.
	Nor did she wish me to, except to get it running right.
	So, finally, and then also, I went to the HP site, downloaded the appropriate driver for the 990CSE, the printer, and it was a special driver.
	This is really interesting.
	You see, I made the mistake of using the CD they sent me.
	It was a special driver.
	And it was a special driver for Windows 98, second edition, anybody using a parallel cable.
	Well, that's what we're doing.
	And so, all that together, and Bam!
	It started working!
	It was... I mean, I had worked on this thing, folks, for 18 hours straight.
	And whether or not you ever get into a battle with a computer, you've probably been in battles with things like that.
	And it was such a great victory.
	I came to bed, I don't know, 5, 5.30 in the morning, whatever it was, and I woke my wife up and I said, Hon, I did it!
	I did it!
	I won!
	I said if I die tonight, my soul can rest in peace.
	I mean, imagine passing away and having something, you know, right in the middle of a battle like that, right?
	But no.
	I won.
	So I feel so good about that, I really do.
	Hey listen, the webcam position for tonight's program shifted.
	Just prior to the program, my little cat, Our little cat, Yeti, had decided he wanted to get into the radio room, and nothing was going to stop him.
	So if you hear his little head banging on the door, he'd do it till he got a concussion.
	He's trying to get in this room.
	Well, obviously, when Dad is broadcasting, cats just have to stay out there.
	Well, he doesn't understand that at all, and he just throws his little body in lines, and he wants to be in here with me.
	That's tough.
	Anyway, there's a picture of him on the webcam, and it's over on the right-hand side near tonight's guest.
	You'll see it, rather than over on the left where you have usually found it.
	All right, well, what's going on?
	We're going to be in open lines this hour, in a very short while, Tim Russert.
	You know Tim Russert, right?
	From the news, Tim Russert, news guy.
	He had a dream apparently the other night prior to Saddam Hussein being captured and uh... Tim Russert mentioned this publicly I guess for Tim a mistake because Matt Drudge had a show the other night in which he had a guest and they referred to the fact that Tim Russert admitted he had a dream about Saddam Hussein being captured and uh...
	I guess the guest, whoever it was, mentioned, well, maybe he ought to do an hour or two on Art Bell.
	And then Matt Drudge wondered aloud, I guess, if he also might have visions about Mars.
	And, you know, ha ha ha ha, very funny.
	Well, I'll tell you what, good for you, Tim Russert.
	And to those who can't do anything but laugh about this kind of thing, a pox on you.
	Because people do have precognitive dreams.
	And if they keep their mouth closed about it, and whatever else in the paranormal, if people just don't talk about it, then that's why people like this do all the laughing about it.
	Well, you shouldn't laugh so hard, and Tim Russert, I think you had guts to come out and talk about that fact.
	It probably was a precognitive dream, and Mr. Russert, anytime you want to come on the program, you are more than welcome.
	President Bush promises a fair public trial for Saddam Hussein, but also said he's a torturer and a killer and can't be trusted to tell interrogators the truth about his weapons of mass destruction or attacks against Americans in Iraq.
	Asked if Saddam Now, that sounds like a yes to me.
	Wouldn't you say?
	I have my own views.
	and this is a brutal dictator." Now that sounds like a yes to me.
	Wouldn't you say? I have my own views, meaning, oh yeah, he should be turned into dog food.
	As-Salamu alaykum. Hussein has apparently declined to tell his interrogators that his regime had weapons of mass
	destruction and ties to al-Qaeda.
	U.S.
	officials said on Monday that he's greeted his initial interrogation with a discussion and the questioning only on the condition of anonymity.
	I guess we're getting all of this.
	Some of the responses are regarded as an attempt to rationalize and justify his actions.
	Well, I wonder how we're asking.
	Now, earlier tonight I saw a report that we would not even so much as use a truth serum with Sinanam while asking questions, and gee, I don't see the problem with that.
	Flu shots!
	The government on Monday announced the purchase of 375,000 flu shots for adults Scrambling to ease vaccine shortages in what is turning out to be a very harsh flu season.
	In addition, the Health and Human Services Department apparently negotiated a deal that will let state and local health departments buy up to 3 million doses of the nasal mist, flu mist, at 20 bucks a dose.
	A discount price.
	more in a moment when president bush delivers a speech recognizing the first
	heavier than air powered flight december seventeenth
	well that's almost honest right It is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with that etc.
	return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence on the moon.
	If he does that, it's going to mean that he has decided the United States should once again become a space-faring nation.
	For more than 30 years, America's manned space program has limited itself to lowly Earth orbits.
	Indeed, everyone under the age of 31, more than 125 million Americans were born since America last set foot on the moon.
	That's a sobering stat.
	The speech will come at a time.
	When events are converging to force some important decisions about the future of American efforts in space, China has put a man in orbit, plans a launch of three Spino-nauts together, and has announced its own lunar program.
	Chinese are going to the moon.
	The space shuttle is grounded.
	Its smaller sibling, the orbital space plane, may not be built.
	The International Space Station, behind schedule, over budget, and of limited utility, has been scaled back post-Columbia.
	The content of the speech does not appear to be, in doubt, the only question.
	Timing?
	While those who have formulated it argued it should be delivered on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight, there exists a slight possibility it'll all be held for the State of the Union.
	In fact, we actually thought he might give that speech tonight.
	Which, of course, he did not.
	And I was going to have Richard C. Hoagland on, but poor Richard is a victim of the flu.
	And I must say, hearing him on the telephone is enough to, I don't know, put yourself in a bubble or something.
	It's been going weeks on Richard now, and so even had the President given the speech, Richard would not have been able to come on this night.
	This is the following, so you know, is from Nova, KLVX.
	Listen to this.
	Like the plot of a sci-fi B-type movie, something weird is happening deep underground, where the constant spin of Earth's liquid metallic core generates an invisible magnetic force field that shields us, all of us, our planet, from harmful radiation in space.
	That's right!
	This could be the core, right?
	Sounds like the beginning to the core.
	Gradually, the field is growing weaker.
	Could we be heading for a demagnetized doomsday that will leave us defenseless against the lethal effects of solar wind and cosmic rays, magnetic storm, looks into our potentially unsettling magnetic future?
	Whoa!
	If that's not the core, I don't know what is.
	Scientists studying the problem are now looking everywhere from Mars, which suffered a magnetic crisis of their own about four billion years ago, and of course That left them without a magnetic field, an appreciable atmosphere, and a lot of other stuff.
	I mean, it just really changed Mars, right?
	Flash to the University of Maryland, where a team headed by physicist Dan Lathrop has recreated the molten iron dynamo at Earth's core by using 240 pounds of highly explosive molten sodium.
	Ho ho ho!
	The most visible signs of Earth's magnetic field are auroras, which are caused by charged particles from space interacting with the atmosphere as they flow into the north and south magnetic poles.
	But, the warning signs of a declining field are more subtle than that, though they are evident in an everyday clay dish, and every clay dish that was ever fired.
	Now, you see, that's very interesting because when they fire a clay dish, the current state of Earth's magnetic field has a big part in designing how it's going to come out.
	So, in other words, they can look at these spun clay dishes and they can tell you what the magnetic field on Earth has been like.
	They examine pots from prehistory to modern times.
	Geologist John Shaw of the University of Liverpool, England has discovered just how really dramatically the field has changed when we plot the results from ceramics, he notes, we see a rapid fall as we come toward the present day.
	The rate of change is higher over the last 300 years than it has been for any time in the past 5,000 years!
	It's going from a strong field down to a weak field, and it's doing so very quickly.
	That was a quote.
	Now, doesn't that sound like the core, the movie, the core?
	For some reason, the center of the Earth begins to, you know, change.
	It begins, it stops.
	Literally, it's rotation.
	The Earth's magnetic field falls to zero.
	And then the real trouble begins, because of course then we have no protection from the sun, and in the movie The Core, the scientist held up a peach pit, and sort of let it get on, actually set it on fire, and he was in front of all this giant panel of scientists, and he said, this is our Earth.
	Now watch.
	And the whole thing just flared up and was nothing more than...
	than a burned-out cinder.
	Of course, that would be the end of all humanity, every living thing, an organism on Earth.
	And that was the core, if you will, the center of that movie.
	It was a fascinating movie.
	If you get an opportunity, you might want to rent it.
	I'm just sort of intrigued at how science fiction so closely seems to be followed by reality.
	Scary stuff.
	Speaking of which, here's a nice one.
	Melting ice will swamp capitals.
	Measures to fight global warming will have to be at least four times stronger than the Kyoto Protocol.
	Now remember the Kyoto Protocol is one we wouldn't agree to, right?
	Because we thought it was too drastic?
	Well, to change what's coming, we'd have to have something four times as strong pass.
	If we are to avoid the melting of the polar ice caps, Inundating central London and many of our world's biggest cities concludes a new official report.
	The report by a German, that's right, German government body says that even if it is fully implemented, the protocol will only have a, quote, marginal attenuating effect, end quote, on the climate change.
	But last week, even this was thrown into doubt amid contradictory signals from the Russian government as to whether it will allow the treaty to even come into effect.
	Global warming already kills 150,000 people a year worldwide, and the rate of climate change is soon likely to exceed anything the planet has seen in the last million years, says that report produced by the German Advisory Council on Global Change.
	For a meeting of the world's environmental ministers to consider the future of the treaty in Milan this week while it's already underway.
	Obviously, the global climate change, and it's going to become very rapid, and they know it.
	And there may be a... You know, it may be true that there's really not a damn thing we can do about it anyway.
	And so, in a way, perhaps we should not fall to our government's position, which was not to even, you know, put their John Hancock on the Kyoto Treaty, because if there's nothing we can be done, why undermine and ruin our economy trying to change something that we can't change anyway?
	That's kind of a bleak way of looking at it, but it is one way of looking at it, and perhaps, in some ways, a very practical way of looking at it.
	I have urged in the past that we prepare at least to some degree, and I've not changed my mind there.
	I think that in a short amount of time, indeed, the areas where certain things can be grown, well, they're going to change and you're not going to be able to grow those things there anymore.
	And so you're going to geographically have to shift the breadbasket areas of the world if you want to survive.
	And that kind of planning we should be doing.
	But the climate change, it may be coming as fast as the movie all about it, May 28th, called The Day After Tomorrow.
	You're going to want to check that out.
	Again, a concern there that reality seems to be a racing right now with the release date of the movie.
	Hopefully it'll all hold together, but the signs are pretty dire out there, no question about it.
	U.S.
	astronaut Ed Lau, who spent six months on the International Space Station, still has no idea what caused the mysterious flashes of light that he saw.
	He was studying the Earth's aurora from space.
	This is an interesting story.
	He spent about 100 hours watching the northern and southern lights while on the ISS, so he's familiar with the way they look from space.
	But on July 11th, September Very different.
	Flashes as bright as the brightest stars!
	But they lasted only a second or so.
	The Russian fellow astronaut also saw them on one occasion, who is familiar with flashes from cosmic dust and meteors, but says, these weren't from a satellite, nor were they space junk.
	He checked weather maps, which showed no lightning storms in the vicinity.
	So, it looks like science is discovering something yet again new.
	So many flashes and interactions between Earth and above the upper atmosphere that we've been discovering lately.
	It's absolutely amazing what we've been finding out lately.
	Things we just didn't previously know.
	These giant spikes and sprites shooting out from Earth Speaking of things we don't know about, coming up in the next hour is Professor Michio Kaku, and he is clearly, I think, the successor to Carl Sagan.
	He is a first-class theoretical physicist who can explain things that others cannot in rough layman terms, I think, that allow the average person to comprehend some very complicated type theoretical physics.
	I mean, it's not an easy topic to be sure.
	Theoretical physics is wonderful.
	It's like a wonderland, but it's real.
	And breaking that down for people like ourselves, and I really appreciate his talent for being able to do that, I think does qualify Dr. Michio Kaku clearly as the next Carl Sagan for the American people.
	He's an incredible man.
	He'll be coming at the top of the hour.
	In the meantime, I'm preparing to open the lines.
	Unscreened, open line, rip them, tear them, anything happens.
	Talk Radio's coming right up.
	stay seated please I'm going to sing a song for you
	I'm going to sing a song for you When you need a smile to help a shadow get away
	You'll come to me, baby, you'll see I'm about to break, baby, the stone that held me through
	the night I'm about to break in my life, there's always left to make
	I'm about to do Who's gonna love you, love you? Who's gonna love you like
	me do?
	Who's gonna love you, love you? Who's gonna love you?
	Who's gonna love you?
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-5033.
	line is area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free
	at 800-825-5033. From west of the Rockies, call Art at 800-618-8255.
	International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country Sprint Access
	number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
	It certainly is.
	Belling in with the big guy, George, who'll be back tomorrow night taking care of a little bit of business, folks.
	Usually I have a guest Ross open, but my guest Ross open has the old phone numbers on it, so... So there you have it.
	Here for George.
	Hey, listen!
	I have a little bit of sympathy with this guy, even though he obviously went way, way overboard in what he did.
	Call it spam rage if you want to.
	A Silicon Valley computer programmer.
	Has been put in cuffs for threatening to torture and kill employees of a company he blames for bombarding his computer with web ads promising to enlarge his organ.
	In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made Road Rage famous, Charles Boorer, 44, was arrested Thursday, I think last, and released on a $75,000 bond for repeated threats to the staff of an unnamed Canadian company Between May and July, according to the U.S.
	Attorney's Office for Northern California, a boer apparently threatened to send a package full of anthrax bores to the company to disable an employee with a bullet, and then torture him with a power drill and ice pick, and hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their email list.
	He was bombarded with these ads.
	Well, his words, quote, here's what happened.
	I go to their websites and start complaining to them.
	Would you please, please, please stop bothering me, he said.
	It just sort of escalated and I sort of lost my cool at that point, end quote.
	Booer of Sunnyvale now faces up to five years in the pokey and a $250,000 fine with a preliminary hearing scheduled for next month.
	He, by the way, doesn't own any guns or have access to anthrax or anything like that.
	He was just He was... It was spam rage.
	And I must say, I understand.
	What is it with this organ resizing stuff?
	Patches and creams and... It's like one out of every ten or twenty emails.
	Why is that suddenly the spam rage for everybody?
	I don't get it.
	What's the big deal?
	There's no way to even talk about this story without Entendre that probably ought not be there.
	But you get the... It's easily one out of ten or twenty.
	I mean, why that particular product instead of so many others that they could be spamming about?
	Huh?
	I don't get it.
	Alright, let's do as promised and turn to the telephones and all of you.
	Wild Card Line, you are on the air.
	Good evening.
	Hello?
	This is Nick of L.A.
	Hello, Nick of L.A.
	Yell at your phone.
	I kind of can't hear you too well there, buddy, so... Can you hear me now?
	I would help if you just get right up there and really talk it up.
	Can you hear me now?
	I hear you.
	Okay, this concerns a program that was on for one hour a week ago Saturday.
	They had a very colorful character who was a professional poker player.
	Oh, Amarillo Slim!
	Yes, and he talked at length about the bed of if you could eat a quail a day for 30 days.
	Yeah, a quail a day.
	I've never quite understood what it is about quail that you could not continue to consume, but apparently it's... I have a little background.
	I just happen to remember it in the back of my head that there was someone else who made that challenge, and it was God Himself in the book of Numbers, chapter 11.
	Well, I know, but he wasn't betting money.
	I mean, God.
	No, he wasn't betting money, but he said he will have meat to eat.
	But you heard the way it got solved, right?
	I mean, the guy came up with a pair of twins, and so he'd have one twin eat three quail, and then the other twin would eat three quail, and maybe it was a little underhanded, but he won.
	Right, right.
	But in the Book of Numbers, the interesting history is that the people complained.
	They had quail to eat when they first left Egypt, but then for a whole year they didn't
	have any and they complained, wailing at the doorways to their tents.
	God said, you will have meat to eat, not for two days, not for ten, not for twenty, but
	for thirty days.
	But it will come out your nostrils and will make you sick.
	So that's kind of like a little background there on quail.
	And also just one more comment, I have in front of me a book I found at the Yardsale
	called Superstrings, a Theory of Everything from 1988.
	You might ask Michikaku if he thinks that book is a good book for the public.
	It was published in 1980.
	It's probably, you know, a lot more been discovered since then by Davies and Brown with editors.
	All right.
	All right.
	Thank you very much.
	I appreciate it.
	And of course, String Theory, Super String Theory.
	Well, actually, Dr. Kaku is a mandatory reading for college physics students around the world.
	And he is the co-founder of String Theory.
	I mean, when you talk to Dr. Kaku, you are really perusing a fertile mind.
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Hello, Art.
	Yes.
	I've got a favor to ask.
	A favor?
	Yeah.
	At the top of the hour, would you ask your guest about the speed of the Earth's core?
	Well, you know what, I don't think they actually know the speed of the Earth's core, but I will ask.
	Okay, good.
	Now the question I have for you, Mark, in your many interviews with the good Father Martin, has he ever brought up the topic of the book that he wrote, Windswept House?
	Of course.
	How could I interview him that many times and not talk about his book?
	That's a fantastic book.
	Yes, I know.
	Yeah, there'd be no way to interview Father Martin and not talk about that.
	Father Martin was one of those individuals in life that I became very close to Father Martin in more than just the programs that I did here on the air.
	Father Martin told me things that I still have not shared with you because I was asked by Father Martin not to.
	He was a complex Fascinating individual.
	What a loss to have Father Martin gone.
	And by the way, the manner of his death is still, in my mind, rather unsettled.
	And I always worried for him in that regard, but just a little emphasis mark there for you.
	The manner of his death, I'm not at all Settled in my mind about it, I guess, would be the best way to put it.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, Art.
	Hi.
	This is Ann from Radio.
	Hey, Ann.
	Hi, I was looking up some research at the library today, and I just came across your book, The Depending Global Superstar.
	Yes, ma'am.
	So I checked it out.
	So I'm going to check it out and read it.
	Okay, the thing I was researching was, I was curious about the earth oil and what function it serves to it, and what without it can we expect?
	I don't really hear too much about... Let's take those one at a time.
	You're curious about... What oil, you know, what function within the earth does it serve and what happens when it's not there anymore?
	The consequences?
	That's an interesting question, isn't it?
	In other words, I'm sure in nature it does serve some... Is that something?
	Maybe it's like, you know, the planet's lubricant, you see?
	Yeah, maybe it's like a lubricant.
	Maybe when we take all the oil out, then the core will stop spinning, you know?
	It could be.
	Okay, another thing I wanted to mention was that on a Discovery Channel, or one of these channels, about two and a half years ago, I watched a program about the sun and the solar flares, the activity and so forth.
	And at the very end of the program it was talking about that they were going to send some kind of a bomb and shoot the sun with it to see what reaction they were going to get.
	And my friend and I just looked at each other and we could not believe it that they were going to pull this one off.
	Well, there have been some pretty crazy things proposed.
	I mean, for example, they proposed You know, the global warming thing is real.
	So NASA had an idea to move the Earth.
	See, they'd move the Earth further away from the Sun, and then when the Sun cooled down again, they'd move the Earth back.
	Now, you're going to love how it was proposed that this be done.
	They would take a very, very, very large asteroid, And point it almost at Earth.
	Just put it in a trajectory so it would just skim the atmosphere of Earth.
	And that would be enough to move the Earth out of its present orbit to a cooler location in space.
	And then, to get back again, they'd take another asteroid and fire it real near Earth to move us back where we're supposed to be.
	Now, somehow, of course, one tiny miscalculation and we're all dead.
	Um, miscalculation going the other way, and it'll spin us out past Jupiter, and good luck to us.
	Either way, this is something they thought up and actually considered.
	So they think about some pretty crazy stuff.
	Okay, are my still on?
	I beg your pardon?
	Yeah, I just wanted to mention one more thing, please.
	Yeah?
	And that's about a dream.
	Well, I mean, I get these dreams, you know, lots of dreams, since we're talking about dreams.
	I've had dreams of, like, walking behind, you know, some people in underground tunnels, you know, on hillside, and the person in front of me turns around and says, or, you know, yells out, she's not one of us, you know?
	But I mean, I've had dreams, uh, one of the dreams that really bothered me was a dream where, um, like our neighborhoods here, like there's an invasion, like a military operation, where they just come in and start shooting away at everybody.
	And I just couldn't believe it was happening here in the United States.
	And I've also had a dream of the, um, the earth shaking, and the sky, um, Well, I mean, look, dreams are perhaps just random firing of synapses sometimes, but other times they are precognitive.
	And again, I'm dragged back to Tim Russert.
	Congratulations to you, Tim Russert, for having the internal fortitude to come forward, despite what it might do to your reputation, and say, look, you did have a dream that appeared to be precognitive about Saddam being caught, and lo and behold, he was caught.
	And so, poor Tim Russert's getting laughed at right now for that.
	Well, shame on those who would laugh.
	Shame.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Yeah, hi.
	Hi.
	What is your first name?
	Mike.
	Mike!
	And where are you, Mike?
	L.A.
	I beg your pardon?
	L.A.
	L.A., okay.
	What's up?
	Well, you were talking about Malachi Martin, right?
	Yes, uh-huh.
	I happen to be a layman who is a Roman Catholic, and I am a Roman Catholic exorcist.
	You are?
	Yes.
	When you spoke to Malachi Martin one of those five times, I called in and spoke to him for a few moments and told him about laymen doing it.
	He was not aware of it, and I explained to him what I was doing, how I was doing it, and he said, well, why not?
	I remember that call, actually.
	Yeah, and there's not one in ten million Catholics that know that lay Catholics can do exorcisms, because it was hidden in the year 220.
	The knowledge of it was hidden in the year 220.
	Well, yeah, I mean lay people can do it, sure.
	And it's very simple.
	You don't have to use a ritual.
	You can say, Jesus Christ, God the Son, command your demons to depart from me, and say my memory, or my imagination, or my health, or my wealth, or my My family, my children, whatever.
	And you can just repeat that mentally, or you can say it out loud, or you can sing in the shower.
	The point is that if every Catholic layman who was confirmed, and it's a sacrament of confirmation that gives you the power to do it, knew about this, do you know that there would be no crime in the United States?
	You could stop all the crime.
	I've gone to criminal areas, where it was heavy crime areas, and done exorcisms, and have broken down the criminal activity.
	Well, alright, sure.
	I suppose if all the demons were exorcised, then there'd be nobody left to do the evil that is so rampant out there right now.
	And Father Martin did say that the speed with which evil is increasing in the world is frightening indeed, and that was some time ago.
	He was referring to about an 800% increase in New York alone.
	And it seems to be on the increase everywhere, so hmm.
	That fellow might have something.
	First time caller line, you are on the air.
	Hello.
	Hey, how's it going?
	It's going all right.
	Turn your radio off, please.
	Okay.
	Yes, that's first.
	And you're on a cell phone, obviously.
	Where are you?
	I'm in Houston, Texas.
	Houston, all right.
	And my name is Garrett.
	It's what?
	Garrett.
	Okay, Dick.
	Garrett with a G. Garrett.
	Yes, sir.
	Okay.
	Is this on?
	I'm the only one here.
	How you doing, man?
	Okay.
	I just wanted to kind of ask you about, you know, everybody's all glad about this Saddam thing and everybody's pretty happy, but I just kind of want to question about the extremists who were very devoted to Saddam.
	Yes.
	And how the outcome of this may affect the rest of their lives and our lives.
	Well, you know, I don't know if you saw today, there was a video of course of a lot of the people in the Tikrit area who were loyalists and they were not out celebrating and shooting in the air.
	They were not happy campers at all.
	So I'm guessing that Saddam spread a lot of A lot of money around in his hometown, and so he had a lot of pretty loyal friends there.
	I mean, that's where the money got spread.
	He was from Crete, so the extra monies went to Crete, and they had good roads and good living conditions, and he took care of his own, so they're not so happy.
	Because I kind of think about, and this will be the last thing I'll say, like, you can remove a queen from an ant bed, but, you know, you've still got all the ants.
	So, I don't know.
	But it was good talking to you, man.
	I had a dream last night I talked to you.
	So that's pretty cool.
	Well, see, there you are.
	You and Tim Russert.
	Thanks.
	Have a good night, man.
	All right, see you later.
	Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Oh, hi.
	Hello?
	Hello.
	It's yet another cell phone, ladies and gentlemen.
	Oh, hey, Art.
	How's it going?
	It's going all right.
	Where are you?
	Portland, Oregon.
	1190 KX.
	Indeed so.
	And you're on a cell phone in a vehicle, right?
	Yeah, I'm in a gasoline truck going to pick up some jet fuel.
	A gasoline... Oh, going to get jet fuel, huh?
	Yeah, Eugene Airport.
	Yeah, well that's... How do you feel about hauling cargo like that?
	I've been doing it for seven years.
	I haven't had a problem with anybody chasing me down or trying to hijack me yet.
	Well, I was thinking more about the volatility of what you're carrying.
	Well, you remember what William Donaldson said?
	Actually, I do, yes.
	It's not as flammable as everyone thinks it is.
	That's a good point.
	Alright, well anyway, what's up?
	Hey, do you remember about at least four years ago you interviewed some tree sitters?
	Frodo, I think his name was.
	That's correct.
	In Fall Creek, Oregon?
	That's correct, yes.
	I went up there a couple years ago and they all took off.
	I guess they saved that area.
	Yes, actually many times they are victorious.
	They sit in trees and nobody's willing to cut it down and it does work.
	Yeah, that's kind of cool.
	I got a girlfriend out of that deal.
	You got a girlfriend out of the deal?
	Yeah, kind of.
	Was she a tree girl?
	Yeah.
	She was actually, had been in a tree and she came down and then you married her?
	Uh, well, not exactly that way.
	Uh, she fell out like an apple.
	No, um, I didn't actually meet her there.
	I ended up meeting her somewhere else.
	It turns out she was up there about the same time I went to go.
	But anyway, the bottom line is now she's your wife.
	No, she's already, um... Girlfriend.
	Well, I don't know.
	She took off for a while, so we're kind of sort of seeing each other now.
	I don't know, it's not really a...
	Not much of a relationship anymore.
	We're still friends, I guess.
	Wow.
	So she was only a short-lived girlfriend?
	Yeah.
	You can say that.
	I see.
	Well, maybe the leaves are brighter, you know.
	I've got a question for you to ask.
	What's his name?
	Michio Kaku?
	Yes, that would be his name.
	I've always had this theory that the stars are a lot closer than scientists think they are.
	Really?
	Yeah, maybe we could... I don't know, have you ever asked Richard Hoagland what our sun looks like from the orbit of Pluto?
	No, I don't think I have.
	Someone told me it looks a lot like Venus.
	I mean, if you were to go out another two or three... Oh, yeah, sure.
	It would get smaller and dimmer, and it might even get down to... Well, I'm not sure it'd get all the way down to just a Venus, but...
	I'm sure it would be considerably dimmer.
	You bet.
	All right, anyway, thank you very much for the call.
	Take care.
	Have a good week.
	It is, hey, it is the beginning of a week, isn't it?
	I'm Art Bell, in for George.
	We'll be back tomorrow night.
	He's taking care of a little business.
	Coming up next, one of the most brilliant minds in the world.
	He's got something that moves my soul, and she knows I love to love her.
	Want to time travel?
	Go back to past Joe's on Stringlink.
	sign up online at coast to coast AM dot com the
	the the
	the To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east to the Rockies, call toll free 800-825-5033.
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	his area code 775-727-1222. To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free
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	pressing option 5, and dialing toll free 800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the
	Internet, this is Code Red.
	This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. It is, and you're about to be presented with,
	for your consideration, one of the greatest minds in the world today, Dr. Michio Kaku.
	He is an internationally recognized authority in theoretical physics and the environment.
	He holds the Henry Summitt Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has lectured around the world, and his PhD-level textbooks are, in fact, required reading at many of the top physics labs worldwide.
	Graduated from Harvard in 1968, summa cum laude, number one in his physics class.
	At that, received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1972.
	Held a lectureship at Princeton University in 73, then joined the faculty at the City University of New York, where he has been a professor of theoretical physics for now 25 years.
	His goal is to help complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.
	That would be a single equation, perhaps no longer than one inch, like your thumb.
	A little shorter, actually, which will unify all the fundamental forces in the universe.
	coming up in just a moment well first of all uh... doctor cargo welcome to the program
	Glad to be back, Art.
	Oh, it's so nice to have you here.
	It really is.
	It's always just a blast.
	Before we get into what we're going to talk about, I've got a couple of listener kind of questions that I'd like to try and pummel you with and just see what your reaction is.
	We've talked about quantum this and quantum that on the show a lot of times, and so this listener wants to know from you if a quantum bomb Always thinking about stuff blowing up, right?
	But if a quantum bomb would be theoretically possible, and if it is, as this listener suggests, that it would be of such a magnitude that it would collapse all dimensions around us and create what he calls an infinite chain reaction, that's pretty scary.
	I mean, is such a thing even possible?
	Well, you know, quantum mechanics is basically the theory of the atom, otherwise known as atomic physics or nuclear physics.
	And we already use quantum mechanics to create the atomic bomb.
	The atomic bomb is a direct consequence, not only of E equals mc squared, but of the quantum theory, devised in the 1920s and 1930s.
	So in that sense, the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are quantum bombs.
	However, this person is trying to hint that perhaps there's a bomb that could shatter space and time itself.
	That's right, yes.
	And at the present time, we know of no such thing.
	Even a black hole, for example, which would contain perhaps the largest concentration of energy in our sector of a galaxy, even a black hole does not set off a chain reaction.
	Now, remember that Einstein himself, back in the 1920s, speculated that E equals mc2 may be able to make a bomb.
	But he didn't understand the chain reaction process back in the 1920s.
	That allows you to magnify a very tiny amount of energy into a bomb.
	Now even though we have black holes, in fact we've now seen about a few hundred of them with the Hubble Space Telescope, And perhaps hundreds of thousands with the Chandra X-ray telescope.
	We know of no mechanism that can create a chain reaction.
	That is one black hole setting up another black hole setting up another black hole.
	So I think for the present time, we have to rest assured that there's no such thing as a quantum bomb.
	However, an antimatter bomb, that would be perhaps the largest source of energy release that you could create with With modern technology, perhaps 100, 200 years in the future.
	Can we even speculate on what would happen if somebody set off an antimatter bomb?
	We could speculate.
	A teaspoon of antimatter combined with ordinary matter would give you up to 100% energy efficient conversion.
	And that would be enough to blow any modern city off the face of the earth.
	If you had antimatter, for example, the size of a good house or an apartment house, That'd be enough perhaps to crack the Earth in half.
	So then, let me ask you this, antimatter, suppose we had a teaspoon of it, would we then concoct it into a bomb, physically following the design of the current bomb, where you've got two balls of plutonium and you smash them together, right?
	At a very high speed.
	Well, if you had antimatter and matter, Would you do essentially the same thing, just suddenly bring the two together?
	And before I can even ask that, how would you contain the antimatter in anything to thrust it toward the matter?
	Yeah, well there's a difference.
	With ordinary atomic bombs, you need critical mass.
	This is what Hitler did not understand back in the 1930s and early 40s.
	He did not understand one number which could have determined the fate of World War II.
	One number?
	That one number is the amount of uranium, or plutonium, Necessary to sustain a chain reaction.
	Today we know that it is about 20 pounds of uranium and perhaps half that of plutonium.
	But Hitler didn't know that number.
	He thought it may be tons of enriched uranium.
	So he shelved the atomic bomb project and instead went for the V-2 project and the V-1, that is, the ballistic missile and the cruise missile.
	So luckily, Hitler did not know that number, or else he may have tried to have a crash program to build the atomic bomb.
	How did we figure out that number?
	Well, we, on the other hand, had reactors, and we could play with certain amounts of plutonium, and we knew the rate, the cross-section, the rate at which uranium fissions.
	That's what the Germans did not know.
	They did not know what is called the effective cross-section.
	Werner Heisenberg, the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, He was the one who essentially goofed.
	The debriefing after 1945, when the Allies captured Werner Heisenberg, the debriefing papers have now been pretty much declassified.
	You can read them.
	And we realized that when he was debriefed after being captured, Heisenberg did not know that number.
	The first thing he asked was, what was the size of the carrier of the hiroshima bomb for thinking he asked
	he didn't know whether with the ship or not when he was told that it would be
	twenty nine bomber he knew the fight of the bomb bay
	and therefore he estimated the fight of the bomb and then mentally he worked backwards
	iraq backwards in his mind as he was being interrogated to figure out what the the neutron cross sections were for
	the atomic bomb he feared that he did not know the answer he goofed
	as a little late but we said we gave him the answer in the interrogation
	That's right.
	Once we told him the size of the Hiroshima bomb, being the genius that he was, he mentally computed backwards, he thought a gigantic ship would be required to deliver an apartment-sized atomic bomb on an enemy.
	He didn't realize that an atomic bomb, the plutonium and uranium, is basically the size of your fist.
	Now, an antimatter bomb does not have critical mass.
	Any amount of antimatter would instantly combine and release enormous amounts of energy.
	Well, how can it even theoretically exist on Earth where everything is virtually matter and whatever you try to contain it with would be matter?
	Yeah, that's the problem.
	Right now we can create beams of antiprotons in a vacuum and then combine them with anti-electrons coming from a radioactive source called sodium-22.
	And we get anti-hydrogen.
	So this has been done in the laboratory.
	We have actually created small quantities of anti-hydrogen gas.
	If the anti-hydrogen gas combines with ordinary matter, then of course it, you know, immediately annihilates.
	However, these are infinitesimal quantities.
	You would have to do this in outer space.
	In outer space, you would have to have a laboratory sufficient to create beams of these things, which would not interact with matter.
	But then, you know, you would have to put it into a bottle of some sort, a container, so that you don't blow yourself up before the bomb does.
	With plutonium, you do this by having subcritical masses, or subcritical pieces of uranium.
	The Hiroshima bomb, for example, basically looked like Pac-Man.
	A large piece of uranium with a pie piece taken out, and you shot the pie piece into the larger assembly, and the subcritical pieces went supercritical.
	So that's how the Hiroshima bomb worked.
	I basically looked at a gun principle based on shooting a Pac-Man pie piece into the larger Pac-Man.
	But however, an anti-matter bomb simply would disintegrate as soon as you form it.
	Do you remember in, what was it, Fat Man and Little Boy or whatever it was, the movie about the making of the bomb?
	That's right.
	Do you remember that scene in the lab where somehow they made a mistake and they got, and I guess this is all a true
	story, and they got critical masses too close together?
	That's right.
	And away she went, and he was radiation poisoned, died a terrible death, and all the rest of it in the making of the bomb.
	Well, was that essentially what we're talking about here, the size of the mass and how close it gets and all that?
	That's right.
	Two people were actually blown apart and were killed at Los Alamos.
	One was killed one month after the bombing of Nagasaki.
	They had the plutonium on a tabletop, believe it or not.
	They had the atomic bombs... How much of it, Doctor?
	Again, about the size of your fist.
	They had two hemispheres of plutonium, and Harry Daglian, a 26-year-old worker, walked into the room where they had this atomic bomb sitting on a tabletop, and he tripped.
	He tripped, and his shoulder hit the tungsten carbide, which was surrounding the plutonium.
	The tungsten carbide fell into this mass, reflected the neutrons, concentrated the neutrons, And critical mass was attained right in his face.
	So we have to realize that a small atomic bomb went off right in front of Harry Daglian's face.
	Well, there was an actual physical explosion, because they didn't show that, of course, in the movie.
	They just showed the radiation going off scale and stuff.
	Was there actually any physical, notable reaction, or was it all radiation?
	It was all radiation.
	There was a blue flash of light called Cerenkov radiation.
	Oh, there was?
	There was a blinding blue flash of light called Cerenkov radiation of neutrons.
	Harry Daglin was hit with about 5,000 rads of radiation.
	Wow.
	That is an enormous amount of radiation.
	Ten times what's necessary to kill you.
	He got a tremendous dose of radiation and he died in the Los Alamos Hospital within a matter of days to weeks.
	I assume he He knew he was a dead man walking?
	That's right.
	He didn't feel a thing.
	He didn't feel a thing.
	Even though every cell in his body was being ripped apart.
	Except intellectually, he could read the meters.
	That's right.
	He lost consciousness after about an hour or so.
	And then his body basically disintegrated.
	Radiation burns all over his body.
	There are autopsy reports published of this, which I have.
	Huge blisters occurred over his body.
	And then just a few months later, believe it or not, in 1946, Lewis Slotin, a physicist, was blown apart in the same way.
	He had two hemispheres of plutonium on a tabletop.
	He had an atomic bomb on the tabletop with a screwdriver.
	The screwdriver would bring these two hemispheres closer and closer and closer together.
	A Geiger counter needle would go off scale and then he would Untwist, unscrew the two hemispheres.
	This is called tickling the dragon's tail.
	Slowly with a screwdriver, bringing two subcritical pieces of plutonium, which could detonate as an atomic bomb.
	In fact, as far as we know, that same mass of plutonium was in fact detonated in the Pacific.
	That actually could have happened on the tabletop?
	Now, it was always my understanding from, again, from the movies, where else would I get it?
	That you had to create a TNT type or level explosion to slam these two pieces?
	That's if you want to release 20,000 tons of TNT.
	If you just want to set off criticality, that is, have a blinding blue flash and basically fry anybody in the room, you could do that by bringing them together with a screwdriver.
	All right.
	The next question would be, Didn't they, at that time, understand enough of the theory to understand what they were doing to themselves?
	Potentially?
	I mean, they had to know?
	They considered themselves hot rodders.
	They were pushing the laws of physics.
	They were making measurements.
	And when Slotin realized that he had turned the screw too many times, and the Geiger counter needle went off scale, he lunged forward with his bare hands.
	With his bare hands, he separated the two plutonium hemispheres, and he took the entire brunt of the atomic bomb in his chest.
	Oh my God.
	And he was, again, hit with about 5,000 rads of radiation.
	He, too, pretty much disintegrated with enormous burns over his body at the Los Alamos Hospital.
	Professor, he wouldn't have been informed enough about the tail tickling to not do this?
	Well, this was an accident.
	He knew that if you brought the two hemispheres too close together, the neutrons would hop across, and subcritical mass would become supercritical.
	However, he never expected that he would make a mistake.
	It was the beryllium cup reflector.
	He made a mistake with regards to turning the screw too much with the reflector.
	Too many neutrons were going back and forth between the two hemispheres fissioning the plutonium atom, and it went supercritical in its case.
	Believe it or not, seven Americans have been literally blown apart in supercriticality accidents.
	Seven Americans?
	Seven Americans.
	You often hear that no one's ever died in a nuclear accident.
	That's baloney, huh?
	Which is baloney, because I have the autopsies of many of these individuals.
	We physicists study these things, because we have to understand What happens when reactors blow up, and what happens when bombs explode in your face?
	And again, these same hemispheres of plutonium apparently were detonated in the Pacific as an atomic bomb.
	Sure, but again, back in the lab, Professor, how wide a geographic swath of the kind of radiation that killed them was created?
	In other words, people in the same room, people in adjacent rooms, or could it have been much worse Getting them closer together, something that would, for example, would have killed everybody on the base that they were experimenting.
	Well, luckily, both incidences had the plutonium coming together very slowly.
	One because of the heating of the tungsten carbide block, and the second because a screwdriver was turned too much.
	Yes.
	And so in the room, there were several people watching this demonstration by Louis Slotin.
	Each of them got a pretty hefty dose of radiation, but all of them survived, except for Louis Slotin himself, who, as I said, disintegrated in the hospital.
	But the other individuals got a heavy dose of radiation, but there were no side effects.
	They were far enough from the plutonium so that they survived.
	When I was a graduate student, by the way, in physics, we heard rumors about this incident.
	And we were told that in the first week, the first row died.
	In the second week, the second row died.
	In the third week, the third row died.
	According to the Inveress Square Law.
	That's not true.
	I looked up the report, and the only person who died was Louis Slotin in this second incident.
	However, you know, the military is quite careless with regards to plutonium.
	They often wash large quantities of plutonium waste in pipes, and sometimes they have criticality in the walls of the building.
	Really?
	I was shocked at the White Building at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
	You can actually look up the file, where critical mass was attained in the wall.
	Wow!
	And people walking in and out were hit with a fair amount of radiation as liquid.
	In and out went critical and went out of critical and in and out of critical over a period of hours.
	But still in all, people doing that kind of work are required, are they not, to wear badges that would have reflected the dose they were getting, wouldn't they?
	Well, believe it or not, in order to reconstruct the dose, they put a donkey in that same room.
	And they had the donkey be exposed to critical mass from the wall to calculate Exactly how much radiation the workers got.
	This is how careless.
	You'd be shocked when you read the files.
	But again, they weren't wearing dosimeters?
	Some of them were, some of them weren't.
	And it was not, you know, it was again wartime security and post-war security.
	People were very lax about these kinds of things.
	Well, I mean, like, for example, in 1961, in Idaho, there was a worker who removed, manually removed, a control rod out of the SL-1 reactor, the Stationary Low Power Reactor Unit-1, and the reactor went supercritical, right under his feet, and the reactor exploded.
	I've never heard any of this!
	Yeah, this is Idaho Falls, Idaho, January 1961.
	Three workers were blown apart when the reactor went supercritical.
	Forget the meltdown.
	We're talking about a small bomb going off right under the feet of Mr. John Burns, who was shot through the ceiling.
	The explosion was so great that the control rod went right through his body and impaled his body on the ceiling of the reactor.
	Oh my God!
	I haven't heard any of this.
	Professor, hold on.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	I haven't heard any of this.
	Have you all?
	Have you heard these stories before?
	I certainly haven't.
	Aye, aye, aye.
	What a beginning.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Romeo and Juliet, forty thousand men a-waving every day.
	Romeo and Juliet, forty thousand men a-waving every day.
	Don't feel the Reaper, in the end of the line. Don't feel the Reaper, baby I'm not a man.
	To talk with Art Bell, call the Wild Card Line at area code 775-727-1295.
	The first time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
	To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll free at 800-825-8000.
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	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM.
	With Art Bell.
	It is.
	And I've loved this song ever since the movie, The Stand.
	Remember the first couple of minutes of the movie, The Stand, when there was the biological big oops?
	And they played this piece of music as an opening.
	I thought it was superb.
	And there are so many places where it fits into a show just like this.
	Good evening.
	I'm Artford George.
	My guest is Professor Michio Kaku.
	And Professor, let's go right back to this incident.
	I'm just curious as I can be why anybody would march into a reactor room, grab a rod, and pull it out.
	I mean, what would drive a person to do that in the first place?
	Well, Mr. John Burns, back in January of 1961, was sitting on top of the stationary low-power reactor Unit 1, operated by the United States Navy, and he was told never, ever remove central control rod number 9 more than 6 inches.
	Right.
	Because if you remove the control rod, which regulates the chain reaction, dampens the chain reaction, If you remove central control rod number nine more than six inches, the reactor would go supercritical, and it would in fact explode.
	That seems like an extremely serious warning.
	That's right.
	You would get supercriticality, heating would occur, water would boil, and the boiling water would then create a steam explosion which would blow the whole thing apart.
	Very bad.
	Yes.
	Well, that's what happened.
	Reconstructions of the accident show that he tampered with central control rod number nine and removed it two feet.
	Do we have any idea why he would do something with such a strong warning attached to it?
	Why would he do that?
	Well, first of all, we have to realize that reactors will blow up under certain conditions.
	It's often stated that reactors do not blow up like Hiroshima bombs.
	No, they don't blow up like Hiroshima bombs, but they do blow up, like Chernobyl, like SL-1.
	It'll explode, steam explosion, hydrogen gas explosion, created by supercraticality, will blow a reactor and blow the roof right off.
	Gotcha.
	There are two theories.
	The dominant theory is that he slipped.
	He was making routine repairs, and he slipped.
	It was New Year's.
	It was right after New Year's.
	He was probably a little tipsy, and he ...removed the rod, and then slipped, and it jerked two feet out of the reactor, blowing him to pieces.
	I mean, it shot him right to the ceiling of the reactor.
	He was impaled.
	Yeah, you said he was impaled by the rod itself, and it hit the ceiling.
	Well, then what?
	Then, reactor crews, safety crews, went into the reactor site to find out what happened.
	They found that radiation levels were about a thousand rounds an hour.
	500 rads will kill you.
	It was 1,000 rads an hour.
	Just a few minutes in that site, you would get already the year's maximum dose of radiation.
	Right.
	And they found two dead bodies on the ground, and they looked for the third.
	They made repeated entrances into the reactor looking for the third.
	Finally, according to the report, one of the workers looked up and saw the third body, John Burns, impaled on the ceiling.
	Now, there is a second theory.
	that uh... proponents of nuclear power like to make and that is that he was john burns was involved in a love
	triangle and that he wanted to commit uh... suicide and therefore
	blow one of the other rival also the kingdom come
	and so he was apparently distraught and blue himself and his co-workers that
	were his rival uh... to bet using nuclear power plant to do it
	The point I'm raising is that...
	Do you favor one theory over the other, by the way?
	Well, it was New Year's.
	It was January 2nd at 9 o'clock at night.
	And it was possible he was still suffering a hangover from New Year's.
	And so it's certainly possible that he could have slipped and set the whole thing into motion.
	But, you know, we have to realize that nuclear power plants can become unstable.
	They don't simply melt like Three Mile Island.
	They can explode like Chernobyl.
	They can explode like the SL-1.
	And they can go supercritical, and that supercriticality accidents are more common than you realize.
	Well, alright, here's one from Ray C., who is able to fast blast me in a little computer message while I'm doing the show, from Wasilla, Alaska, who says, Hey Art, ask Dr. Kaku about the day we almost lost Detroit when the only commercial fast breeder reactor, a Fermi One, built in the U.S., partially melted.
	Is that true?
	That's right.
	This was kept hush-hush in the 1960s, but Three Mile Island was not our first meltdown.
	Our first meltdown was Fermi One, operated by Detroit Edison.
	Really?
	And it was a 2% core melt.
	2% of the core melted.
	I have pictures of the core showing melted rods of uranium dripping fuel down to the bottom.
	Yikes!
	I didn't even know we had any active breeder reactors.
	which today would be considered a criminal to operate.
	These are very unstable reactors.
	They operate on highly enriched uranium, 20% enriched uranium.
	I didn't even know we had any active breeder reactors.
	I thought that was just...
	Or if we did, they were lab experiments ongoing, not anything full-scale running.
	No, it was a commercial breeder reactor.
	A commercial?
	Everyone wants to forget because it melted and created a catastrophe, a potential catastrophe.
	Dummy!
	I hadn't even heard about it.
	Again, I thought it was only in the lab where I would see scientific reports every now and then.
	Aha!
	We have created this kind of reaction, or it can be created, but to have a full-scale model operating, I had no idea.
	Today it would be considered criminal.
	If anyone tried to make a commercial breeder reactor, they're very unstable.
	The very first breeder reactor, the EBR-1, actually melted back in the 1950s.
	It was one of the first major melts of a nuclear reactor.
	They were able to stabilize it about one second before it would have exploded.
	Well, right!
	Then in the 60s, they had a commercial, not an experimental, a commercial reactor.
	Well, how did that happen?
	I mean, how did we get a commercial reactor?
	If it's something that's not even safe in the lab, for God's sakes, how could it get built as a commercial reactor?
	Well, they were cowboys in those days.
	Man, I guess.
	Yeah, they thought they were pushing the envelope.
	They were the cowboys that were going to tame the atoms.
	Well, yeah, but if you can't contain this thing in the lab, how can you build something commercially based on what?
	Well, you can't, but they did.
	Detroit Edison built a sodium coolant.
	Sodium is quite volatile.
	They used not water, but sodium.
	What happened was a piece of zirconium, a piece of metal about the size of a beer can,
	became dislodged in the cooling system, jammed the cooling system.
	The reactor overheated as a consequence and began to melt.
	And then radiation alarms were sent off.
	They immediately stopped the chain reaction.
	And for days, they were wondering what is the state of a melted core?
	They had never seen a commercial reactor with a melted core before.
	And so they simply crossed their fingers.
	They literally crossed their fingers and hoped it wouldn't become supercritical.
	It was 20% enriched, highly enriched uranium.
	Today we use only 3% enriched uranium, by the way.
	The bomb is 90% enriched.
	Could it have gone?
	It might have gone.
	There was speculation.
	That's why they brought, they flew in top flight scientists to try to recreate how much melted fuel there was in that reactor to see whether the melted fuel would Well, would this fast blast be overdramatic the day we almost lost Detroit, or could it have been that bad?
	It could have been bad because of two things.
	One, melting could have started up again, in which case you would have a sodium explosion, which is quite volatile.
	Sodium will explode on contact with water.
	A sodium explosion, which would rip the whole reactor apart, or a small bomb.
	That is, supercriticality would be attained with melted fuel, and then it would heat up, and then again another sodium explosion to rip the reactor apart.
	Anyway, what they did was, they got a long tube, and they sent it into the reactor with a small TV camera attached to the end of it.
	They photographed the bottom.
	Right.
	This is the first time they've ever done this, by the way.
	Everything was by the seat of your pants.
	I guess.
	They had never done this before.
	Shooting a TV camera right into the core of a melted reactor.
	And, you know, there were evacuation plans to evacuate large portions of Detroit.
	It was a sodium explosion.
	Were they telling the people of Detroit what was going on at the time?
	They heard nothing.
	I got the file from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission years ago.
	And there was a letter from the Union, the United Auto Workers Union, saying that some of the Union brothers have heard that there was a massive incident at the reactor.
	Could you clarify?
	And the answer is also there in the file.
	The answer is that nothing happened.
	And yet we had America's first meltdown back in the mid-1960s.
	A commercial reactor that spun out of control, in which case Portions of Detroit may have had to be evacuated.
	Uh-huh.
	And you could visit Fermi One today, by the way.
	What kind of heat was developed in a breeder reactor situation?
	Breeder reactors is called hard nuclear.
	The hardest of the nuclear reactors are breeder reactors.
	They operate on very enriched fuel.
	That's why the Japanese and the French are getting so much criticism, because they ship breeder fuel by ships.
	Someone could hijack the fuel and conceivably build a small bomb out of the fuel.
	The fuel is highly enriched.
	Like I said, Fermi was 20% enriched.
	An atomic bomb is 90% enriched.
	Commercial reactors are 3% enriched.
	And so, they ship highly enriched plutonium in a reactor and uranium fuel rods by boat.
	And so, Greenpeace and many environmentalists have stated that this is a disaster waiting to happen if someone hijacks a shipment of breathing fuel.
	In the United States, it was cancelled.
	The Clinch River was an experimental breeder reactor built after the commercial one melted.
	How many breeder reactors operate in the world?
	Well, in the United States, Clinch River was cancelled by President Carter.
	He cancelled Clinch River, realizing that It was very experimental.
	Two breeders had melted.
	The first one, EBR1, melted in the 50s.
	The second one, a commercial one, melted in the 60s.
	Yes.
	And Jimmy Carter then said, enough is enough.
	Enough, but also not here.
	But I mean worldwide.
	Well, the French had the Phoenix, a breeder reactor.
	And in fact, there was one misguided environmentalist who aimed a bazooka at the Phoenix, just to show how vulnerable the Phoenix reactor and the Super Phoenix are due to terrorism and because the fuel is highly
	enriched, they're shipped right through commercial lanes and people are very afraid that
	these reactors could get out of control. In Japan it's the Monju, in France it's the
	Phoenix, and again, these operate on highly enriched fuel and they can in fact sustain supercriticality
	accidents rather easily.
	So there are two of them?
	Several that are in the commercial domain.
	Other small countries may be doing this experimentally, but those are the two most famous.
	The Super Phoenix in France and the Manju in Japan.
	That's amazing.
	I had no idea these things were going on.
	I thought it was all just in the lab, that there was not commercial application yet for breeders.
	I don't know why I believe that, but I did.
	Well, the one in Japan is still, of course, ongoing.
	However, the point here is that these guys are hot rodders.
	They're cowboys.
	And they build these damn things that they want to commercialize and put them in people's backyards.
	Even though basic meltdown and basic supercriticality tests have not been done on these reactors.
	You know, airplanes are crashed.
	We have lots of experience on crashed airplanes.
	We have very little experience on crashed reactors.
	Right.
	And as a consequence, when one of these reactors spin out of control, it's the seat of your pants.
	Actually, I've seen a couple of 60 Minutes pieces on Chernobyl, and They're pretty grim.
	I mean, they built this sarcophagus around it, and that appears to be, according to reports I've seen, deteriorating.
	And I've heard some pretty grim things.
	Every time it rains, every time it rains in Kiev, water seeps into the concrete sarcophagus and moderates the neutrons, as they're called.
	And you can actually see radiation levels rise.
	It's actually a working Reactor in totally melted form, rising and falling with the rainfall.
	What's the deal with Chernobyl?
	I mean, how long are we going to have to deal with this damn mess anyway?
	Perhaps centuries.
	And you know, it's still melting.
	It hasn't stopped at all.
	The laws of physics keep on going.
	I understand.
	Very hot core.
	It's melting to the concrete.
	And at a certain point, it'll go right to the concrete.
	Then what?
	And then it'll hit groundwater.
	And then, you know, there's the concern that it could cause a steam explosion.
	And like I said, you can actually see neutron levels rise every time it rains and water seeps into the into the sarcophagus.
	The geometry of the core is unknown.
	We do not know what the geometry of the core is.
	So just like at Fermi 1, we have melted fuel in an unknown geometrical configuration.
	If it concentrates, if it concentrates in one area, you could have supercriticality, not like a Hiroshima bomb, but more like what happened to Lewis Slotin and the Harry Daglian in 45 and 46.
	And then you would have heating, then perhaps a steam explosion, which will blow the whole thing apart.
	And so this is something that is still of concern, that reactor is unstable.
	All right.
	Assuming it does go on and melt down, I'm speaking now of Chernobyl, to the groundwater and you get a steam explosion, what kind of magnitude and results from that would we expect?
	This would be catastrophic in the sense that all the fission products, all the waste, the nuclear waste, would then be shot into the sky.
	And then it's fine dust.
	The winds would then blow it downwind and contaminate large areas.
	Now, the greatest nuclear accident of all time, before Chernobyl, actually took place in Russia in the 1950s.
	In fact, in the Ural Mountains, it was the greatest nuclear catastrophe of all time.
	And it, too, was hushed up.
	By the way, all these accidents have been hushed up.
	What happened there?
	Well, in the area called Khrushchev, near the village of Kozly, there was a plutonium dump.
	Stalin had all the excess plutonium from the nuclear program dumped into this one site.
	And apparently, again, supercriticality was achieved and boiling occurred within the plutonium dump.
	And an explosion took place which blew the lid, blew the lid right off the container.
	And plutonium in liquid aerosol form shot into the atmosphere.
	And the CIA knew that a big one had happened in Russia, because all of a sudden in the literature... I remember muted reports of this.
	The CIA was on to it.
	What happened was, in the journals, scientific journals, The Russians were all of a sudden writing reports about the transport of plutonium through, you know, aqueous environments.
	Yes.
	That is, contaminated lakes.
	Right.
	And people said, why would the Russians contaminate their own lakes with plutonium?
	This is outrageous.
	And so the CIA said either it was a bomb that went off accidentally, a reactor that went crazy, or a waste dump accident.
	And, you know, after the Soviet Union broke apart, the files became declassified.
	And we know now that it was a waste dump accident.
	This was the mother of all nuclear accidents before Chernobyl.
	About 20,000 curies of radiation were lofted into the atmosphere as a consequence.
	Even today, when railroads go past that area, the conductors would put the shade down so you can't see what's outside.
	Whole villages had to be evacuated.
	If you look at the census charts, all of a sudden certain villages just disappear off the census chart in that area.
	So we know it was a big one.
	We know that quite a bit of radiation went into the atmosphere.
	And Roy Medvedev, a Russian dissident, actually wrote a book.
	Do we have any idea how many people were actually killed, evacuated, and never to be used again in our lifetime?
	Probably tens of thousands were evacuated out of that area and were contaminated.
	How many died, we don't know.
	I imagine now that the files are being declassified in Russia, That probably we can get a more detailed estimate of how many people died as a consequence of the Cushton accident.
	Certainly we would want that kind of information, wouldn't we?
	That's right.
	And by the way, England at about the same time sustained its first big nuclear accident, which was totally hushed up in England.
	This was the wind scale, pile number one in the 1950s.
	It was actually very much like the Chernobyl accident.
	It was carbon-moderated.
	The carbon caught on fire, and you had a uranium-carbon fire in the center of a nuclear power plant in Windscale, England.
	They'd never seen this before.
	A reactor actually inflamed.
	The workers shot hose water, hose water directly into the core of a nuclear power plant.
	This is unbelievable.
	I mean, you have to read the files to believe it.
	A huge explosion took place.
	Gigantic amounts of gas was lost in the air.
	I'm sure.
	And the Queen's scientists tracked that radioactive cloud sailing over the English Channel.
	And they classified the whole thing.
	Only the Queen of England.
	She was the only civilian to be aware of this accident.
	Professor, rest for a moment.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	Just totally blown away would be the way I would describe this last hour.
	Some of it I had heard a little bit about.
	But almost everything we had this last hour I had no idea about.
	Did you?
	Absolutely incredible stuff!
	Well, from an incredible guy.
	Professor Michio Kaku is my guest from the high desert in the middle of the night, the right time.
	This is Coast to Coast AM.
	I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you.
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	The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky Are also on the faces of people going by
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	I hear fingers growl.
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	There's times when you just sort of let that one go and soak it in, and the times when you're talking about things like this.
	on the internet Ross this is Costa Costa AM with Art Bell yeah I wanted to
	squeeze in a little bit about that record there's times when you just sort
	of let that one go and soak it in and the times when you're talking about
	things like this this is incredible stuff stuff I've never heard I'm sure
	many of you have never heard and I guess something you want to take make note of
	because of course it's all absolutely true and then let that go toward shaping
	your feeling about things nuclear I guess and nuclear power and i'm going to ask professor kaku about uh... some
	sensitive stuff as if we already haven't covered that in a moment
	the real beauty of talk radio uh... the real core of talk radio is is the fact
	that a lot of times you'll do a talk show tonight is a perfect example
	and have uh... all sorts things uh... lined up to talk about and then because
	you get off on a certain tangent that just happens in an unrehearsed way
	down the road you go that you weren't even ready for I love it.
	Here once again is Professor Kaku.
	Professor, I've interviewed you now many times, and I've come to my own conclusion, it's not very hard, that you are not... Let's see, how can I best put this?
	You might even be an anti-nuclear activist at heart.
	Is that fair?
	I mean, you had a chance to build the bomb, get in on building new and better and bigger bombs, and I know you turned it down.
	And you didn't go into that side of the work where you so easily could have.
	And I have a very strong sense that you're pretty anti-nuclear.
	Is that fair?
	Well, let me explain.
	Edward Teller, who recently passed away, was the primary guiding influence when I was in high school and college.
	And I got to know the family quite well.
	And I got to know his politics and his thinking quite well.
	And as you mentioned, he even offered me a position to design hydrogen warheads.
	Yes.
	And his position was that nuclear power is potentially unstable.
	It does not belong on the surface of the Earth.
	It belongs underground.
	So he thought that because nuclear power plants run so unstable, because you could have supercriticality, meltdowns, bubbles, and three-mile islands, They should be placed underground, so if there was an explosion, you simply put a manhole cover on it and walk away from it.
	Well, out of curiosity, Professor, why don't we do that?
	Well, actually, believe it or not, Con Edison here in New York City, I'm in Manhattan right now, wanted to build a nuclear power plant in Queens, right opposite the United Nations, in the heart of New York City.
	And when the old Atomic Energy Commission said, over our dead body, will you build a nuclear power plant in the center of New York City, Cornelius reapplied, saying, we'll put it underground.
	We'll have an underground nuclear power plant in the center of New York City.
	It would be called the Ravenswood Nuclear Power Plant, right opposite the United Nations.
	So all the delegates from around the world would throw open the blinds and see the gigantic cooling towers of a commercial nuclear power plant opposite the United Nations.
	Now, the point I'm raising is that even Teller, who, of course, unleashed the power of the hydrogen bomb, who was certainly aware of the potential of nuclear energy, realized that, hey, this is potentially unstable, and an accident could really ruin commercial nuclear energy.
	And that's what his position was, that he was pro-nuclear, but that the only thing which could kill commercial nuclear power would be a horrible accident.
	And that's why he thought of putting them underground.
	However, as you can suspect, the cost would be enormous.
	You would have to excavate the entire nuclear facility and to place it underground.
	It'd be prohibitively expensive.
	But for me, it really impressed upon me the fact that even though we physicists uncork the genie and release the genie out of the bottle, sometimes this genie is unstable.
	And sometimes You know, we're too overconfident.
	We think we know the technology, and then, boom, it spirals out of control.
	And that really is a humbling experience, realizing that this technology is unfinished.
	It's an unfinished technology.
	The question is whether we should finish it or not.
	It could be very expensive to finish this technology.
	We still don't know what to do with nuclear waste.
	Yucca Mountains in your neck of the woods, Well, we have nuclear waste to be stored near Las Vegas.
	Well, no woods here, but it's in my neck, all right.
	Right.
	That's a big problem.
	What are we going to do with all this nuclear waste?
	All right.
	You know, I mean, is that a yes?
	I would say that I'm critical of nuclear energy.
	Yes.
	OK.
	Fair enough.
	You, I believe, are of Oriental ancestry, are you not?
	Japanese, perhaps?
	That's right.
	Kaku sounds Japanese.
	What happened, Professor, in Japan, what the United States did at the end of the war in Japan, does that in any way, do you think that your position on nuclear power is shaped by what happened in Japan?
	I don't think so, in the sense that I went the other way.
	I thought that any technology that was that powerful, any technology that could flatten the city within a microsecond, Should have enormous benefits for the rest of the world.
	So when I was very young, I was quite enamored of nuclear technology.
	You know, I built an atom smasher when I was in high school.
	And I assembled 400 pounds of transformer steel.
	I wound 22 miles of copper wire on the football field.
	And I created a 2.3 million electron volt betatron electronic accelerator.
	Didn't that disturb people?
	Well, every time I plugged it in, I would blow out every circuit breaker in the house and all the lights would dim.
	And my poor mother, you know, she probably said to herself, why couldn't I have a son who plays basketball?
	Maybe if I buy him a baseball, he'll find something doable.
	And she once said, for God's sake, why can't you find a Japanese girl?
	What's wrong with them building these machines in the garage?
	Was your mom first generation Japanese?
	Well, she was actually, my father and mother were actually in the relocation camps, the concentration camps in California during World War II.
	Okay, then I double my question down.
	I mean, a history like that, Professor, I didn't know that history of you, but I suspected a possibility.
	And when you really dig deep, there's got to be a part of you that all of that comes home to shape.
	Well, my parents, first of all, were citizens of the United States.
	My parents were born in California.
	My grandfather was in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
	He was part of the cleanup operation during the earthquake.
	But even if you are citizens, You could be still arrested.
	Oh, you know, we apologize for those.
	And then and then we paid money.
	And do you know what?
	We didn't change the ability of a president to be able to do it again.
	Did you know that?
	Yeah, but it's still on the books.
	Yeah, it's still on the books.
	The Facts and the Karen Act.
	That's right.
	It's still on the books.
	The Supreme Court has never touched that.
	It's a minefield.
	Right.
	It's still on the books, basically.
	Exactly right.
	Something for people to know.
	It could be done again.
	It's kind of sobering.
	Within a matter of months, 100,000 people just shipped off to racetracks and then to these camps.
	You bet.
	And all of that, somehow, Professor, all of that has got to shape you.
	Yes.
	However, when I was young, like I said, I was very much pro-nuclear.
	Because this was the nuclear age, Atoms for Peace was what everyone was talking about.
	I personally wanted to go to the extreme in the sense of working on Einstein's Unified Field Theory.
	I mean, that to me was the ultimate atomic physics Um, but I was, you know, very much pro-nuclear in those days.
	But then I began, as a graduate student, I began to have doubts about the technology.
	And what fed those?
	In other words, what began those doubts?
	Well, I began to hear about these incidents.
	I began to hear about the fatalities, even though we were told no one had ever died in a nuclear accident.
	And I was just a graduate student.
	I had heard that, you know, bombs had essentially gone out of control.
	I had heard that workers had been blown up, you know, seven of them.
	I've been blown up in in super criticality accidents and then when I became a professor I have access to files
	You know, I can get the files now So I begin to realize there was this whole hidden history
	that nuclear power plants are quite unstable unless you are very very careful and
	It's an unforgiving technology. Well one mistake and it blows up in your face. Well
	All right. Suppose I made the argument I will because I'm devil's advocate every now and then but look here in
	Nevada, we built a great big dam During the building of that dam to create electricity for
	Southern California now and Southern, Nevada Well, gee, you know, a lot of people died in the building of that dam.
	So accidents do happen.
	When you're dealing with the creation of large projects and energy, a certain amount of accidents do happen, period.
	I mean, people fell into that as a concrete tomb and died, and I forget how many died, but a substantial number.
	So, what about factoring that in?
	Well, the difference is that if a nuclear power plant spins out of control, you can lose an entire city.
	The government did a computer study of reactors like Indian Point, located about 20 miles north of where I'm sitting right now.
	And a big accident at Indian Points 2 and 3 would cause about $300 billion in property damage, would literally obliterate the entire New York area.
	And there are 20 million people that live within 50 miles of that nuclear power plant.
	And in some sense, if you take a look at the cold accounting of the numbers, It is perhaps the most dangerous commercial machine on the planet Earth.
	And that was in 1980 dollars.
	In 2003 dollars, that would probably be in excess of a trillion dollars, property damage, if those reactors ever went up in smoke.
	And if anyone today were to ask the government permission to site a nuclear power plant so close to New York City, they would say, you're out of your mind!
	There's no way we're going to site a nuclear power plant that close to a city.
	And yet, here we are.
	We have Zion very close to Chicago.
	We have Indian Point very close to New York City.
	And now we know, the public knows, after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that these reactors are potentially unstable.
	And yet, we were building these things so close to New York City.
	And like I said, in the early 60s, they wanted to put a nuclear power plant in the center of New York City, in Ravenswood, Queens.
	Right next to Archie Bunker territory.
	What do you think we ought to be doing?
	In other words, if you could reshape America and the world's policy on the peaceful uses of nuclear power, how would you have it set up?
	Well, I think we should first of all admit that the Atoms for Peace program let the cat out of the bag.
	I'm a physicist.
	There's no law of physics really separating commercial from weapons technology.
	It's the same technology.
	You just increase the enrichment level from 3% to 90%.
	That's it.
	That's the difference.
	The Indians discovered this.
	That's why they detonated their first bomb in the 1970s using an experimental can-do reactor.
	They took this Atoms for Peace program, which was never designed to make bombs, but the physics is the same.
	The Indians were not stupid.
	They surreptitiously refined the nuclear waste, and they detonated their first bomb in the 1970s.
	That's true.
	And now we have this technology proliferating all over the place.
	Take a look at North Korea.
	North Korea has uranium technology, which shocked us.
	We didn't think they had uranium technology.
	And where did they get it?
	The New York Times said they got it from Pakistan.
	Well, where did Pakistan get this Uranian technology from?
	Essentially from Germany and the United States.
	We allowed that technology to flood into Pakistan during the Afghan war, when Ronald Reagan was opposing the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and he wanted a billion dollars a day to go to the Afghan rebels.
	Well, that's okay, but what happened was, The Pakistanis wanted something in exchange.
	So you're saying we are the proliferators?
	Believe it or not.
	Well, I do.
	It's hard to believe, but when you really get your hands around it, the United States winked at Pakistan, and Pakistan winks at North Korea, and then we're shocked when North Korea comes up with uranium enrichment technology.
	There was a day when that would have shocked me, but I'm sorry, I'm way past that.
	You know, ever since the tests on Pregnant women and the tests on the American public and radiation testing and all that was admitted to.
	It's hard to get shocked after all of that.
	Right.
	And so this Atoms for Peace program, I tell you, you know, a lot of countries are not stupid.
	They know there is almost no difference between weapons technology and commercial technology except the enrichment level, which, of course, affects the chemistry a bit.
	But it's basically the enrichment level that you want.
	And the Iranians, believe it or not, are absolutely correct in stating that all they want is commercially available technology from Russia.
	And President Clinton was the first American president to admit that commercial technology, which is legally available, can be used to make atomic bombs.
	And the Iranians were saying, now wait a minute, we obey the letter of the law.
	You set the rules.
	You made the rules.
	The West made the rules.
	We follow the rules.
	And yeah, the Iranians apparently want to build an atomic bomb, and they're using commercial technology to do it.
	So I think we have to recognize the Atoms for Peace program was inherently flawed.
	In fact, just last week, the director of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency said so much.
	He said it's fundamentally flawed.
	Well, I think we're going to have to do some hard-nosed negotiation with the Iranians, with the North Koreans, to make sure that they don't proliferate their bomb-making capabilities.
	But I think we have to realize that smaller nations, and eventually terrorists, Eventually, small nation states that are working with terrorists may get access to some of this technology.
	That's really frightening.
	Take a look at Russia.
	You have weapons-grade fuel just lying on the floor sometimes in Russia.
	No one really knows how much uranium-enriched fuel was processed in Russia because the commissars used to always overproduce weapons-grade uranium.
	And meet the quotas.
	And then, of course, during a rainy day, they can take this extra fuel out of the closet and make their quota, right?
	Sure.
	Well, no one knows how much uranium fuel is in the closet.
	There are no accountings for this, because the commissars were very careful in, you know, squirreling away uranium fuel for a rainy day.
	Well, that rainy day never came.
	The Soviet Union broke apart, and who knows how much uranium, enriched uranium, the Russians really have.
	They themselves don't really know.
	And that's frightening, when I talked to some bomb scientists who went to Russia, and they told me that they were shaken when they realized that even the Russians don't know how much uranium fuel is floating around.
	So, you know, this is the price we paid for going into the peaceful atom.
	You know, after a lecture like this, I'm tempted to ask you about your old scales.
	Remember Type 0, Type 1, Type 2, Type 3?
	That's right.
	I mean, it's a little depressing listening to what you just said, if you fully grasp it.
	And it would seem to me that if I were to ask you now, our chances of making it to, what is it, a full Type 1?
	Type 1.
	Yeah, Type 1.
	Our chances have got to be really bad!
	Well, we are embarking, as I mentioned before on this show, on the greatest transition in all of human history.
	The transition from Type 0 to Type 1.
	And it's taken us humans 100,000 years, ever since modern humans emerged, to reach this stage of being on the threshold of Type I. And we could blow it.
	We could easily blow it, because of designer germs, because of designer nuclear weapons, and because of designer chemicals.
	Well, how optimistic are you?
	Or pessimistic, really?
	Cutting to the chase.
	Well, you know, at the height of the Cold War, it was really frightening at the height of the Cold War.
	You have to put things into perspective.
	You know, there were war plans on both sides for preemptive strikes.
	The United States, the archives of the National, well, many of these war plans are not declassified.
	Well, all right.
	And if you look at them, they're very frightening.
	They're first-strike war plans.
	Let's actually talk about that.
	I'd like to talk about first strike when we get back.
	What a program!
	Professor Michio Kaku is my guest, and if it gets any better than this with clock radio, I certainly don't know how.
	From the high desert in the middle of the night, this is Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Good morning!
	What will you do when you're lonely?
	Oh, I'm waiting by your side. You've been rough, I've rushed you home. You know it's just your foolishness. Yeah.
	If only you believed, like I believe, we could ride. If only you believed, if only you believed in miracles, so
	would I.
	I might have to move heaven and earth to prove a deep and good thing. So we're making love. It's hard, love is hard.
	There's really nothing we can do. You know it, you know it.
	If we won't, you know, you know, we could exist on the stars.
	It'd be so easy.
	Oh, we gotta do it.
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	From coast to coast, and worldwide on the Internet, this is Coast to Coast AM, with Art Bell.
	Good evening, everybody.
	I am Art Bell.
	Actually, for George tonight.
	He'll be back tomorrow night.
	And Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest, and this is absolutely riveting stuff.
	First strike, huh?
	Do you believe in miracles?
	Well, we got through the Cold War without either side resorting to a first strike.
	That's almost a miracle, isn't it?
	It's clearly the unthinkable.
	It's clearly the unthinkable.
	Really, it clearly is the unthinkable.
	Both sides apparently had first strike plans That's right.
	up on the table during all those terrible years that i live through
	i got under my desk at school and put my hands over my at my neck
	i knew how to protect myself from a bomb by god but i did do that they did have us do it remember that
	campaign uh... professor that's right
	and uh... now that it's uh...
	in so many decades after those horrible years a lot of this information is being declassified both from russia
	and the What do we know?
	We know they became awfully close.
	They were hotheads, arguing for a preemptive strike.
	We know that in 1948, as early as then, during the Berlin Crisis, the Secretary of Defense, Forrestal, was arguing for a first strike to execute Operation Broiler.
	Operation Broiler was the plan for a preemptive nuclear first strike on Russia.
	In 1948, with a fleet of old bombers dropping what is called a Mark III atomic bomb on Russia.
	Well, what would we have done?
	Would we have hit military targets, obviously?
	And beyond that, were there plans to hit civilian targets?
	Well, the plans list the cities.
	In fact, again, if you go to the National Archives, you can get these plans.
	In the fifties, the most elaborate plan was called Operation Off-Tackle.
	All the cities were listed.
	It basically says that within six hours, the Soviet Union would cease to exist as a functioning nation.
	All the major cities would be obliterated.
	And in 1954, there were hotheads within the Joint Chiefs arguing for a preemptive strike.
	And of course, during the Kennedy administration, people were shocked when they found out that at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, They were hotheads again, arguing for a preemptive first strike.
	I wonder how close to getting their ideas accepted they got.
	Well, we know from the transcripts now, that have been gradually leaked out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that Kennedy put his foot down and overruled some of the hotheads in his own administration, who were saying that, you know, it's either now or never.
	Finally, the moment of truth has come.
	Eisenhower had to deal with the same thing in 1954.
	There was a subcommittee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff arguing for a preemptive first strike on Russia in 1954.
	All right, wouldn't all these plans, Professor, have the likelihood of the outcome?
	How many million would be dead?
	How long the geography would be unlivable?
	And then, of course, there would be a certain amount of retaliation, without question.
	They'd have launched against us, or launched whatever they could have, Did these plans include the possibility of so much success that they literally wouldn't be able to launch back against us?
	Well, and again, Russia probably also had similar plans, who knows for sure.
	I'm sure.
	But the point you raise is that, yes, in 1954, when Eisenhower was presented the option of initiating Operation Off-Tackle, They estimated that 735 bombers hitting the radar screens simultaneously on the Soviet Union's radar screens, that in six hours they would have total victory.
	That the Russians may be able to get maybe one bison or a few bear bombers off the ground and cause some havoc maybe in Europe, but they wouldn't be able to hit the United States.
	But they argue that after 54, the bison and bear bombers would be able to hit the United States.
	And the window would close after 1954.
	Were they right?
	Well, what happened was Eisenhower, very interestingly enough, organized a study group called the Solarium to investigate whether or not this talk of the hotheads was correct or not.
	And the conclusion was, believe it or not, there was no Star Wars in 1954.
	There was no way to shoot down the bison or bear bomber.
	Right.
	As the report mentioned, even Cuban biplanes could reach Florida.
	So in other words, all these plans had assumed that the Russians could not retaliate.
	But after 54, they had the bison and bear and they could hit the United States.
	And so that window was rapidly closing.
	And after 54, the window closed.
	It meant that we were now two scorpions in a bottle.
	You strike me, I strike you, and we both die in the bottle.
	But before 54, it was basically the United States' option of nuclear first strike.
	So they were right.
	After 54, the window closed.
	I've got that.
	But prior to that, they were right.
	They could have, at that point, struck.
	Well, that's what the hotheads in the Eisenhower administration were arguing.
	John Foster Dulles was arguing that we should hit Red China during the Komoyamatsu episode.
	There would be many today who would say, we should have.
	Well, it would be chaos.
	Now we know that it would have set off nuclear winter, by the way, if you hit Russia with 735 bombers, dropping an enormous amount of megatonnage.
	It would not only have sent nuclear fallout over the United States, it would have blackened out the sun.
	And for what period of time with what consequences?
	Nuclear winter, I've always been curious about it.
	What do you really mean for how long?
	What effect on the planet?
	Would we, in the United States, after attacking Russia like that, living through a nuclear winter, would we survive?
	Well, first of all, the dinosaurs were killed off, perhaps in a matter of maybe eight months to a year, because the comet or meteor hit the Yucatan of Mexico 65 million years ago, lofting several cubic miles of dirt into the air, blocking out sunlight.
	Effectively a nuclear winner.
	That's right.
	And Carl Sagan had estimated that perhaps 100 megatons, very little, a tiny fraction of our arsenal.
	100 megatons.
	In fact, we were thinking of dropping 100 megatons of Moscow alone.
	100 megatons would be enough to destabilize the atmosphere.
	Now, the Pentagon did its own study to rebut Carl Sagan, in all fairness.
	They stated that you would not have a total nuclear winter, you would have nuclear autumn, said the Pentagon.
	In other words, crops would fail, mass famine, many, many millions of people would die, but humanity would survive.
	Just with 100 megatons?
	A hundred megatons, which is like the tip of your finger in terms of the total arsenal.
	Sure.
	We had 30,000 atomic and hydrogen bombs at the height of the Cold War, and the Russians did too.
	That's 60,000 nuclear weapons.
	And we've been reducing ours at what sort of rate?
	What percentage do we have left of what we had at the height?
	Well, you know, the strategic bombs have been regulated by arms agreements.
	And so we're now down to the thousand, about 5,000 range.
	So it's come down from 30,000 at the height to 5,000 now.
	But that's strategic.
	We also have small tactical bombs.
	May I ask a tough question?
	Yeah, go ahead.
	There's going to be a level of criticality as we continue to reduce the number of weapons on each side.
	At what point, Professor, does it become In the minds of somebody out there, survivable.
	In other words, aren't we better having large numbers that would mean suicidal, catastrophic end for all?
	Isn't it almost better that way than reducing the number to the point where somebody might consider it now something that could be done that would be something less than suicidal?
	Well, in the movie Dr. Strangelove, you remember that there was a doomsday machine that would, if the United States struck, then Russia would destroy the entire human race.
	Oh, how I remember, yes.
	Well, that doomsday machine does exist.
	It does?
	It is nuclear winter, in the sense that anyone that strikes first with a strategic arsenal would set off nuclear winter, which again would plunge humanity to the brink of the Stone Age Famine would break out, food riots, hundreds of millions would die.
	Worldwide.
	It would be worldwide.
	Worldwide.
	And so any nation that, either Russia or the United States, that entertains this possibility would plunge the world into nuclear winter.
	Well alright, let's use the government's calculation of nuclear fall, you said.
	Even if their estimation is true, then how many more megatons to get from fall to winter?
	Oh yeah, well, again, these people were estimating 100 megatons.
	And our arsenal is measured in thousands.
	You realize that a typical bomb is one megaton.
	Typical bomb.
	Right.
	And we had 30,000 tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.
	So we had not just 100 megatons, but thousands of megatons to spare.
	And so in case of a full-scale war, then all computer programs would say that, yeah, you're talking about something like would kill the dinosaurs.
	And so you are talking about something that could inflict not just, you know, growing areas and farmland, but the entire population of the earth.
	So the human race itself could face extinction if a sizable fraction of these weapons were set off.
	So it's very sobering.
	So I think the alternative is to negotiate and bring down these numbers.
	Right now we're in the thousands.
	I guess what I was asking, though, Professor, is wouldn't there be a level of danger when it got too low?
	Do you follow me?
	If it sounds psychology that it's suicidal, and that's why it hasn't happened yet, then bringing it to the point where it might be slightly less than suicidal wouldn't be bright, necessarily, would it?
	Well, Robert McNamara, the late Secretary of Defense, advocated something called minimal deterrence.
	that is maybe like a hundred warheads so each side would have a hundred warheads
	uh... sufficient to perhaps destroy the earth via nuclear winter
	and uh... that would then bring us down to uh... you know fairly low level of
	nuclear bombs but sufficient again to cause havoc with the atmosphere and have a kind of planet earth
	Now that, of course, lets the cat out of the bag.
	These weapons are for political purposes.
	They're to threaten people.
	Yes.
	They're to control conventional crises.
	Yes.
	So like a poker game.
	A nuclear winter, I mean, the first strike is a royal flush.
	But it's part of the continuum.
	So I think we have to realize that the military does not see any big difference between conventional and nuclear.
	Nuclear is just the royal flush.
	That's all to them.
	And politicians view this as a weapon of coercion.
	Now, the average American doesn't think that way.
	The average American just says, well, they hit us.
	We hit them back.
	Period.
	That's it.
	End of story.
	We're John Wayne.
	We never get angry.
	We always fire second.
	They don't realize that nuclear weapons, in some sense, are used every day to threaten, like a poker game, basically, to threaten an enemy with a royal flush and to create uncertainty in the minds of an adversary.
	That's why at the beginning of the Gulf War, for example, the first Gulf War, back in 1991, Music Magazine had a big spread laying out the nuclear option, interviewing senior military officials of the first Bush administration, laying out the nuclear option on Iraq.
	Can I post a question to you, please?
	Let me put you in a position for a moment of being advisor to the President.
	And suppose the President received information that Russia was secretly planning a first strike against us.
	No doubt about it, it was going to happen.
	Would you counsel a President to, in that situation, initiate a first strike yourself before the Russians hit us, knowing full well they absolutely were going to hit us, or would you say, no, Mr. President, Something's got to be left of the human race.
	Don't do it.
	Well, I would say that whoever said there's a hundred percent certainty that the Russians are planning a first strike is probably out of his mind.
	Because Russia is in a very sad state, economically speaking.
	Their economy is in free fall.
	Absolutely.
	And they can barely keep the arsenal they have intact.
	They cannot keep bomb scientists In Russia.
	I was in Russia several years ago and some bomb scientists came up to me and asked me whether or not I could offer them a job.
	I could have hired, right on the spot, several top Russian bomb scientists.
	That's how bad it was.
	I know it's awful.
	I've been there myself.
	It is really awful, no question about it.
	But still... I would counsel the President that whoever said it's 100% certainty that Russia is preparing for a strike is out of his mind.
	Out of his mind.
	You don't think there could have been, as they spiraled down economically, there was that use-it-or-lose-it minute for them or so?
	Had to be, right?
	Well, yeah, there is a use-it-or-lose-it psychology among weaponeers.
	Yes, sir.
	If you wait too long, then they hit you with a first strike and you have nothing left for a second strike.
	Exactly.
	This is called counterforce calculus.
	The calculus of nuclear warfare.
	But yeah, what was the question now?
	The question was, if you couldn't give that answer, in other words, if there was solid, absolute intelligence that you were going to get hit first, could you and would you counsel Aaron for a strike?
	Just if you had to push yourself into that scenario and couldn't give that that answer?
	I mean, it was obvious they were about to strike us.
	Would would you counsel to strike them first or would is your Morality and ethics and thinking go well beyond our borders and just around the world, so you'd answer for the world, not for the U.S.
	Well, what I would do is, again, we're talking, I guess, in the fifties, because now, of course, it's not credible, but in the fifties it was credible.
	Yes, sir, okay.
	People did look at this scenario very carefully.
	I would get on the hotline and say that if you launch your first strike, it's the end of humanity.
	Whether or not I strike second is irrelevant.
	The atmosphere will be destabilized.
	There'll be mass famine throughout the Earth.
	Humanity will be flung thousands of years into the past.
	Yes.
	And we'll fight World War IV with rocks.
	Yes.
	As Einstein used to say.
	So I would get on the hotline and tell my counterpart, or recommend that the President talk to his counterpart, and say that this is madness because he's not going to benefit.
	Every ruler wants to work in his benefit for his country.
	And it's not in the benefit of an adversary's country to, you know, go back to the Stone Age.
	But that's what we're talking about.
	So, apparently both sides have obviously, did obviously, realized that.
	They came very close, I tell you, man.
	On certain occasions in the fifties, they came very close.
	With people like Curtis LeMay later telling people publicly, yes, they came extremely close with people like him arguing for a first strike.
	Uh, well, I know from today's perspective, uh, it's very easy to look back and, you know, I guess vision, you know, it's 2020 and all that when looking in reverse.
	But at the time, at the time, I mean, there were rational arguments perhaps that, or they would have sounded rational.
	That's right.
	That's why in 1954, the recommendation was made for a preemptive first strike through a subcommittee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because they said explicitly, you wait any longer.
	And it's too late.
	It's too late.
	The Russians will have operational counterforce capability with the Bison and Bear.
	That's a damn powerful argument, and it would take quite a leader to say no.
	And it took Eisenhower.
	Eisenhower looked at the results of Solarium.
	And he cancelled.
	He cancelled all these recommendations from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
	And I think it was the wisdom of Eisenhower, believe it or not, who quietly shelved these plans.
	There was no Star Wars.
	There was no way to shoot down the Bison and Bear Bomber.
	That's why, of course, some people still want to create Star Wars, so they can shoot down the... In the end, the only thing that kept us from nuclear war was self-interest.
	That's it.
	Self-interest.
	I think Eisenhower realized that the window had closed.
	It had just closed in 1954 with the operational bison and bear bombers of the Russians that could hit Washington, D.C.
	with a few atomic bombs.
	Oh, my goodness.
	That's how close it came.
	Luckily, we made it, but by the skin of our teeth, I think.
	Another really hard question for you, Professor, would be If you were in a position to give the other side, you know, the little bit of help they need to help close that door and prevent what otherwise would happen, would you do such a thing in the interest of the world?
	Otherwise called spying, I suppose, but... Well, I think it's in the interest of everybody to wind down the crisis rather than accelerate and proliferate.
	You bet, you bet.
	Wind it down rather than accelerate it.
	Professor, hold tight.
	And I'm signing some circuits today It's frantic, oh
	My whole life spins into a frenzy Roll, ride along by the wind
	Roll, down a spin I gave you love, I thought that we
	Had made it to the top I gave you all I had to give
	But I didn't have to stop You're blowing off sky high
	By telling me a lie Without a reason why
	You're blowing off sky high Wanna take a ride?
	To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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	This is quite a program, no question about it.
	Red hot.
	Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest.
	800-893-0903. From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM
	with Art Bell.
	It is indeed, and this one is really out of control. This is quite a program, no question
	about it. Red hot. Dr. Michio Kaku is my guest. A lot of unplanned dialogue, but absolutely
	fascinating this morning. More of it coming along in a moment.
	Thank you.
	You know, I've been so fascinated with all of this that I haven't done what's fair, and somebody gives us something like, we're getting tonight, he's written some books he sure does deserve an opportunity to plug the heck out of them.
	Professor, your books, and they're generally available, and after people have heard you like this, they're definitely gonna want your books, so...
	Which ones would you recommend?
	Well, the book that is a primer on the unified field theory and all this excitement that is generated is Hyperspace.
	It was the bestseller and I highly recommend that.
	There's another book called Beyond Einstein, which also talks about particle physics and the quantum theory and also string theory.
	Then, for those people interested in the future, there's a book I wrote called Visions.
	Assuming we have one.
	On my website, you can see descriptions of all these books, mkaku.org, m-k-a-k-u dot org, and we have over 30 million hits on that website, thanks to you, of course.
	I have two books coming out next year.
	In April, I have a modern biography of Albert Einstein, In Time for the Centennial.
	The Centennial of Relativity is 2005.
	Two hundred years of E equals MC squared.
	You've really been busy.
	That's right.
	So, in April, a modern biography of Einstein called Einstein's Cosmos, totally re-evaluating the legacy of the man.
	And of course, 2005 is the 100th year anniversary.
	Can you lay a couple of highlights of that on us?
	I mean, a modern biography of Einstein.
	What is it we know today?
	What outstanding facts about Einstein do we know today that rewrite what we thought we knew?
	Well, if you read all the biographies of the man, all of them state that after 1925, he was over the hill, no more ideas.
	And that he spent all his time working for peace, but scientifically he was washed up by 1925.
	Not so, huh?
	Not so.
	If you take a look at modern history today with satellites, we now have satellites that can prove all the conjectures that Einstein made in the 1930s and 40s that could not be verified without satellites.
	Gravity wave detectors, for example, from colliding black holes.
	Black holes themselves have now been detected with the Hubble Space Telescope.
	That's right.
	X-ray telescope.
	Not to mention Einstein rings.
	That is, the distortion of distant starlight so that light from a distant galaxy looks like a ring rather than like a dot.
	Not to mention the fact that Nobel Prizes have been given for scientists who've investigated crumbs.
	Crumbs off Einstein's table.
	Like Bose-Einstein Condensates won several Nobel Prizes for individuals.
	All of which was predicted by Albert Einstein.
	And of course he spent the later decades of his life searching for the Unified Field Theory.
	And that of course is now the dominant theme within my field, Theoretical Physics.
	It's a gold rush.
	If you're young and ambitious, you want to crack the Unified Field Theory.
	I'm curious about something with regard to Einstein.
	for young people who can crack the biggest problem of all time.
	I'm curious about something with regard to Einstein.
	Don't you suppose, professor, there was a moment when Einstein said to himself, before
	he let anybody know about anything, he said, you know, Look, I understand in my own mind that what I am about to do is the equivalent of handing a four-year-old child a cherry bomb and a lit match.
	Do you suppose, and with his intellect, he still handed us the cherry bomb and the match.
	I mean, he really did.
	And there had to be that moment for him.
	Well, it happened in stages.
	First of all, he knew it was a cherry bomb, but he did not have the match.
	And originally, he thought the match was impossible.
	And in the 1920s, journalists would always ask him about E equals mc squared and whether a bomb could be made.
	And you know, as you point out, yeah, it is a cherry bomb.
	It's there, but there's no match.
	And what shocked him was that the match was finally created in the late 30s with the chain reaction.
	Einstein never thought that there could be a chain reaction that could then set off.
	He made one reference to a chain reaction, by the way.
	So then he didn't really fully understand the implications of his early work at that moment.
	Well, he knew that a bomb could be made if you could have this match, and he toyed with the idea of a chain reaction.
	There's one quote where he actually says that perhaps there's some way to magnify the minute energy contained within a nucleus, but he didn't know the steps.
	I wish to do this.
	And that, of course, was done by Otto Hahn and Liz Meitler in the late 1930s, giving us the possibility of critical mass.
	So with Einstein, he knew that there was potential to release enormous amounts of energy.
	He suspected that the stars got their energy this way.
	So it was possible to unleash this energy.
	Just look at the sun.
	Just look at the galaxy.
	So he knew that nature unleashes this technology.
	He didn't think that on Earth you could unleash the power of the sun.
	Now we know, of course, that an atomic bomb is nothing but a piece of the sun placed on the Earth.
	So Einstein suspected that this was the secret of the stars, but he had no way of lighting the match.
	Now we know how to light the match, and that's caused all this problem.
	So he couldn't see that far ahead, simply put.
	Michael from Kansas City has a really good question.
	Since we've been on this bomb topic, this is a really good one.
	Whatever happened to the neutron bomb?
	Now, the neutron bomb would have changed everything.
	Or shouldn't it have?
	Do we have neutron bombs?
	Do we still have them?
	They killed without blowing stuff up, right?
	Yeah, people call them the landlord's bomb.
	It's a clever way to evict the tenants without damaging your building.
	How effective would that bomb, or is that bomb?
	I mean, could you destroy an entire, just kill everything in a city without touching, blowing anything up?
	Okay, let's talk about bombs through generations.
	The first generation atomic bombs were huge, gigantic devices that were so big They could barely fit in the bomb bay of a B-52 bomber.
	Those are first-generation bombs.
	Yes.
	Second-generation bombs are small MIRVs.
	You can put ten of them in the nose cone of an MX missile.
	Right.
	These are called second-generation bombs.
	Small bombs.
	They're about three feet tall, two and a half feet tall.
	Third-generation bombs are designer bombs.
	And they are now slowly being devised and talked about.
	In fact, the Bush administration wants to allocate money now for the third generation.
	Third generation bombs are designer bombs.
	They are specifically designed for various purposes.
	To be used in the desert, to be used underground, to be used in outer space, to be used in the jungle.
	Different designs of bombs for different purposes.
	These are called third generation.
	The neutron bomb is a two and a half generation bomb.
	It's between the second and third generation.
	It's often called a two and a half generation bomb.
	And, as I mentioned, in 1991, I get a copy of Music Magazine in January, February that year, just before the outbreak of hostilities.
	Music Magazine interviewed several senior Pentagon officials and they laid out the options.
	The neutron bomb was an option.
	First, they would hit Baghdad with the electromagnetic pulse.
	A bomb would be detonated over Baghdad.
	The pulse, the shockwave from the bomb would wipe out all the electronics.
	Wiping out their surface-to-air missile defense system.
	You're not talking about, or are you talking about, actually, a very large bomb detonated very high?
	That's right.
	A conventional hydrogen bomb detonated over Baghdad, which would cause a shockwave.
	How far over Baghdad?
	Oh, you would have to do it several miles above the city, or else it would create heat and devastation, but the shockwave You know, the United States did this back in the 1960s.
	They sent a Thor missile up into space and detonated a hydrogen bomb in space.
	And much to our shock, it created a shockwave which wiped out communications to some degree between San Francisco and Tokyo.
	It set off burglar alarms all over Hawaii.
	And then we realized a new phenomenon had been discovered, the electromagnetic pulse.
	We had never seen that before.
	And the military had suddenly realized that in case of a real war, if they had detonated that bomb, we would have wiped out our own satellites.
	Yes.
	We would have blinded ourselves with the electromagnetic pulse.
	So anyway, the Music Magazine article lays out that first you hit Baghdad with an electromagnetic pulse weapon.
	Right.
	Then you would hit conventional troop emplacements with a neutron bomb.
	The neutron bomb would then be used against conventional troop emplacements.
	I'm trying to get a sense of the scope of a neutron bomb.
	How wide an area could it virtually sterilize?
	It's a small atomic bomb, about a kiloton's worth, while the Hiroshima bomb was maybe 10 times that, 10, 15 times bigger than that.
	So it's a sub-Hiroshima type bomb that does emit heat, does emit blast, but it's minimal compared to what a Hiroshima bomb emits.
	How big of a blast?
	Oh, it'd be quite devastating if you hit a modern city.
	You'd do considerable damage to the downtown area.
	Not much more, but you'd knock out a large portion of the downtown area.
	And then beyond that, the radiation effects?
	Much less.
	Much less.
	Because most of the radiation is in neutrons.
	So, this would be used against troop emplacements.
	If you have a concentrated number of troops, you'd hit them with a neutron bomb, and that's a kiloton of power.
	I realized that in the Iraqi war, that many people saw on their TV screens, we were talking about a thousand pound bomb, or two thousand pound bomb.
	Now we're talking about kilotons of TNT.
	Actually, there were several orders of magnitude.
	They were talking about tens of thousands of pounds, I believe, that are equivalent to, in TNT, really a crazy giant figure.
	The MOAB, Mother of All Bombs, or something?
	Yeah, the Mother of All Bombs is, again, in the ton range.
	However, a nuclear weapon would be in the kiloton, thousand ton range.
	We're talking about a thousand times more than the Mother of All Bombs.
	So, the neutron bomb packs a much bigger wallop than the Mother of All Bombs.
	Somehow, I always had it in my head that the neutron bomb virtually didn't even go boom.
	It just Did this incredible radiation thing?
	Uh, no.
	No, huh?
	It's basically a stripped-on hydrogen bomb.
	A hydrogen bomb has three layers.
	A fission layer in the center and then...
	We're talking about an extra uranium, I mean lithium deuteride surrounding that, and then surrounding that is another layer of uranium.
	Well then this breaks a giant myth, because the myth always was the neutron bomb was a totally clean thing to do and all.
	Well, it's quite messy.
	Quite messy.
	It has blast, it has heat, it has everything.
	It has all the bad stuff of a regular bomb, except a lot of the radiation is in neutron form.
	So instead of a three-layer bomb, it's a two-layer bomb.
	You strip off the last uranium layer of a hydrogen bomb, and you get a neutron bomb, basically.
	Wonderful.
	So a neutron bomb is a stripped-down hydrogen bomb.
	So it does create blast.
	It does create lots of problems.
	And the Europeans hated it, because it was to be used on their cities.
	It was to be used on troop emplacement near cities.
	And so the Europeans realized there'd be nothing left of Europe if the neutron bomb was set off.
	So the neutron bomb still exists, and Hopefully it'll never be used in warfare, but it is a two-and-a-half generation bomb, because the third generation bombs are earth penetrators, and they're designed to detonate underground.
	And, you know, like I said, the Bush administration has already placed it in the budget.
	That is to kill underground bunkers, that kind of thing?
	Yeah, to collapse, basically to bury people that are underground in bunkers.
	The North Koreans, of course, are definitely afraid of that, because Most of their leadership is placed underground.
	That's right.
	And so I think that's probably one reason why the Bush administration is developing for these things, specifically to threaten the leadership of North Korea, which is basically underground.
	These are third generation bombs, designer bombs, to be used in outer space as Star Wars, to be used on the ground as neutron bombs, and to be used underground as nuclear earth penetrators.
	There are those, Professor, who say that President Reagan's threat of Star Wars brought down communism or, you know, that's unfair, I guess, was at least a fairly large factor.
	In the final collapse.
	Do you buy into that?
	Well, Ronald Reagan was once interviewed by a journalist who asked him a question, you know, spinning Russia into a depression.
	That's always been the right-wing strategy, spinning Russia into a depression.
	We build a bomb, they build a bomb.
	Yes.
	Well, the journalist asked, won't this backfire on the United States?
	Won't we be plunged into depression?
	And, you know, the president thought for a while, and then he said, maybe, but they'll bust first.
	Well, they bust first.
	And we could very well bust second.
	So it was very clear, I think, from Reagan's own quote, that he knew it was a game of chicken, that they were going to be spending themselves under depression.
	We're spending ourselves under depression.
	And who wins is the one who busts second.
	So Russia busts first.
	Their commissars He mistakenly thought that security meant building more bombs, which meant less potatoes on people's dinner plates.
	Well, here's what I always wondered about, Professor.
	Russia, really, because it was kind of a failed economic plan, they could only continue to thrive by continuing to eat up territory.
	Take more territory.
	If you've got a system that's not producing a profit, you've got to keep... That's the only way you can do it, is take more territory.
	And it got to the point, I guess, where they couldn't do that without a suicidal act, but still there must have been that moment of horrid consideration on the part of the communists when they realized their system couldn't expand at all because of the threat that they faced of extinction.
	They couldn't do that, but then again they had all these weapons and if ever there was going to be a time to use them, a dark Well, I think that the problem is the opposite.
	when they would make the decision to use them that would come somewhere in there just before they went
	belly up economically and said we quit
	well i think that the problem is the opposite to the problem with the
	soviet union with stagnation the the capitalism is quite vibrant
	back so vibrant that uh... you know it does uh... inequity
	But the Soviet system creates the opposite, stability.
	Stability is a point of stagnation.
	So it's not the expansion, it's the stagnation that was always the worry.
	And in order to get out of that stagnation, you have to have technology, new ideas, and entrepreneurial spirit, as Ronald Reagan would say.
	Yes.
	And they lacked that.
	In fact, it got worse because they built so many bombs to catch up to the United States.
	Now, their economy was about a third of the U.S.
	economy, and they were trying to match our weapons.
	Sure.
	And that was the right-wing strategy, to lure the Russians to take potato off the dinner tables and To build weapons like the SS-18, the SS-20, to match the MX.
	Well, that's why I kind of asked you, do you think Star Wars was the final trumping hand and the straw that broke the commies back?
	No, I don't think so.
	Or at least part of it.
	Well, I think what did them in was their own shortsightedness into thinking that security meant building more bombs.
	You know, the United States always led in building bombs.
	Every bomb was initiated first by the United States, first, second, third generation, all three generations.
	Sure.
	First initiated by the United States.
	Yes.
	The Russians should have said, OK, we stop.
	We have enough bombs to kill everybody, so we should stop and then put more potato on people's dinner table.
	But they didn't.
	They just kept building SS-18s, SS-20s.
	had to match the mx it's a match the minimum three and uh... it destabilize their system
	so i think they've done themselves and the self-inflicted to a certain degree
	still at coming at the appropriate moments are more star wars must have
	caused a lot of generals in russia to throw up their hands and uh... you
	know along with the politicians who knew they couldn't afford anymore and there
	was that moment there
	i'd know the world the russian generals themselves said that their response to a Star Wars will be to simply
	pierce it.
	In other words, overwhelm it.
	Let's say 50% of your weapons will get past a Star Wars shield.
	And that argument was made strongly here as well.
	And it's very cheap.
	You put chaff, you put tinfoil in your nose cone.
	And that tinfoil, you know, fools the enemy's radar.
	You know, that was done during World War II, with jet planes releasing tinfoil to fool radar.
	You could do that in the nuclear age.
	And, you know, how cheap is tinfoil?
	How cheap are Mylar balloons to use radar?
	Pennies!
	Pennies to overwhelm a multi-billion dollar radar system.
	And so the Russians said explicitly that you build Star Wars and we'll put more decoys in our warheads, more chaff, more tinfoil, which got pennies, and we'll pierce, we'll pierce the Star Wars shield.
	So I think what did them in was they tried to compete with the United States militarily, which was, I think, a big mistake.
	It bankrupted them.
	Yes, it did.
	Well, anyway, it happened.
	At least it happened.
	All right, Professor, hold on.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	When we get back, we'll try and switch gears, because this freight train's been really running in the bomb direction.
	Stuff I've never heard before.
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	This entire program this morning could be a primer for those who didn't know a lot of things.
	Didn't know what could have happened, almost happened, and in a lot of cases this morning, did happen.
	Here's a question out of left field for Dr. Kaku, just changing directions slightly, concerning The time travel paradox of returning to the past and killing one's grandfather?
	People like yourself, Doctor, currently, I guess, believe the solution would be the creation of multiple universes.
	I would respectfully suggest that this violates the law of parsimony.
	It is not the simplest solution to the problem.
	Instead, creation of an entire universe, not instead, but creation of an entire new universe is an inefficient solution.
	I'm reading an email here.
	Has no one ever suggested a different perspective?
	What if each person instead carries with him or her their own, in essence, model universe?
	Personal relationships would be interactions and changes in a point of contact of each person's model universe.
	In this solution, there'd be one universe for each sentient being, which would interact and change the universes of other sentient beings, other realities, Such as mountains, oceans, planets, and stars would be jointly shared by each person's model universe.
	In this solution, the crime, murder of the grandfather would instantly cause DNA changes in the murdering grandson and his father, possibly several other offspring of the grandfather.
	This problem could get pretty messy, but it would respectfully suggest it's a far better solution, this emailer thinks, than creating a whole new universe out of nothing.
	Okay, there are two major solutions to what happens when you kill your parents before you're born.
	Right.
	The other approach is advocated by physicist Igor Novikov.
	The Russian school believes that there's something called causality protection.
	Something prevents you from pulling the trigger as you point the gun to your parents before you're born.
	It just couldn't happen, is what he's saying.
	He's saying that there's some kind of law of physics, which he cannot elucidate in detail.
	He also says that you cannot walk on the ceiling.
	You may want to walk on the ceiling.
	Free will says, I want to walk on the ceiling.
	But there's a law, a physical law that prevents you from walking on the ceiling called the law of gravity.
	So he would like to postulate that yes, there must be a physical law of some sort.
	Preventing you from pulling the trigger of the gun pointed at your parents before you're born.
	And he doesn't know quite what this thing is.
	He just calls it causality protection hypothesis.
	However, I tend to think that perhaps that interpretation is wrong, because even inanimate matter, you know, forget sentient beings, inanimate matter can also create paradoxes.
	Let's say I get a machine gun, and I simply sent it back into the past.
	And give it to Alexander the Great's enemies.
	And you know, just inanimate matter going back to the past, given to Darius the Great, the Persian, would allow him to destroy Alexander the Great's troops, in which case we'd all be speaking a Persian right now, rather than a European language.
	So even inanimate matter, forget sentient beings, even inanimate matter can create time travel paradoxes.
	So that's why I believe that even though some people think the many-worlds interpretation has too much excess baggage, it is one of the dominant interpretations of the quantum theory.
	So many Nobel laureates, Steve Weinberg, Murray Gell-Mann, these are giants in physics, Nobel laureates, who say that yes, some version of many-worlds theory is probably what is really happening.
	And we just live in one branch, one branch of this much larger tree And it does mean that there's another universe where Elvis is still alive.
	There's another universe where, you know, aliens are walking the street.
	When do you think, Professor, that we might, what is the right word I guess I'm searching for, verify the existence of one of these alternate universes, actually manage to, in some manner, perhaps even interact with it, communicate, watch it, monitor it, do something with it, anything at all?
	I mean, is that in our future?
	Well, that's the subject of my next book after Einstein Cosmos comes out.
	That book is called Parallel Worlds.
	It's going through final editing right now, and it'll come out perhaps a full year from now.
	Incredible.
	And in Parallel Worlds, I ask that very question.
	If there is a multiverse, and all the data points to a multiverse now.
	The WMAP satellite came out in February with the Precise age of the universe.
	The universe is 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus 1%.
	And the leading theory that fits that data is something called inflation.
	And inflation, in turn, is based upon a multiverse of universes, bubbles forming constantly, so that our universes coexist with other bubbles.
	And even as we speak, big bangs have been taking place.
	And then the question is, what about leaving our bubble?
	The WMAP satellite in February released data that indicates that we're all going to freeze to death trillions of years from now.
	Yes.
	And it is kind of depressing, but sooner or later everything runs down.
	Not nearly so depressing as the first, I don't know, couple and a half hours of the show we've just done.
	Actually, that says to me, don't worry about freezing to death because you're not going to make it.
	I mean, I'm a brutal odds guy, and as I listen to you, the chance of us getting through this proliferation without it all coming down around our heads, it's pretty slim.
	Yeah, but I think the way to deal with all these depressing facts is action.
	You know, I mean, Einstein, many of the great giants of the age, Niels Bohr, others, said we must translate our knowledge into action.
	So, they circulated petitions.
	They're trying to do that on the other side, too, you know.
	To translate their ideas into... That's right.
	So, again, you know, history belongs to those people who can seize the initiative, and I think it's a good thing that all the citizens of this country get activated to participate in the electoral process, to get energized, and, you know, make your statement felt at the voting booth.
	And I think that we should have an agenda that does put forth a future where we have a future.
	By the way, speaking of agendas and something a little more cheerful, we were going to have a program tonight where we were going to talk about the future of outer space, for example.
	The President is about to make a big speech.
	Rumor, all rumor is that he's going to announce the U.S.
	going back into space, you know, going to the moon or maybe even a base on the moon for going to Mars and all kinds of stuff that he might say.
	Anniversary of the Wright Brothers.
	And so I did want to get a word or two from you on how you feel about all this.
	Well, first of all, I think we should have a permanent moon base.
	However, I think it should be robotic.
	We left the moon, we went there, scored a touchdown, came back with our football, and just left the moon there.
	I think we should have a permanent presence on the moon.
	Why robotic?
	Because it'd be cheap, wouldn't be dangerous, we would be able to do ten times more things, because they're ten times cheaper, they don't have to come back, they don't require life support, and we should have these things on the moon.
	If you saw the movie 2001, of course, the whole movie is prefaced on the idea that there are uncharted areas of the moon, you know, talking about previous visitations from aliens.
	Absolutely.
	And, like I said, I believe that if aliens had ever gone past our solar system, the most likely place for them to have a base, or had a base, is the moon.
	Do you think there's a fair chance we actually might uncover Some sort of robotic obelisk, if we dig around enough on the moon?
	I can't rule it out.
	It is the most mathematically efficient way to explore the solar system.
	Forget Captain Kirk.
	The self-replicating von Neumann probes on the moon would be the ideal place to colonize and investigate the galaxy.
	Because, you know, enterprises and Captain Kirk's are very expensive and there are very few of them.
	But self-replicating robotic probes self-replicate.
	They live off the land.
	You don't have to do anything.
	They simply replicate and explore other moons.
	And our moon is ideal because it circles a planet that has liquid water.
	Liquid water is a universal solvent.
	And any alien that came through our solar system millions, billions of years ago would have picked out our Earth as the possible mother of life in the future.
	And they would have left a probe on the moon.
	Waiting for us.
	Let me ask you a question about that probe.
	Let's say we find one, Professor.
	All right?
	Now, I take you back years to a moment where we actually transmitted from Arecibo, using the wonderful giant dish at Arecibo, we transmitted a very short transmission to go scorching out in way past everything to whatever life might be out there.
	We did fire one transmission in one direction, and after that, professor they said you're not doing it anymore
	and the reason you're not going to do it anymore they were serious about this is
	we don't know what the consequences would be of our message getting received and maybe you know somebody will receive
	it and maybe we won't be so happy about the fact that they did
	in other words they might not be friendly so they look at us and say lunch
	you or whatever Yes, and so now we've got an obelisk on the moon.
	Would you recommend going ahead, for example, and uncovering that obelisk, giving it an opportunity, as it did in 2001, to make a transmission that suddenly alarms our presence, or would you advise against it?
	What a moment of choice that one would be.
	Well, first of all, the object's probably been there for millions of years.
	Yes.
	And in other words, it's been sending reports all along about the status of carbon-based life forms on a planet that has liquid water.
	So you're figuring they're watching already?
	They're probably watching already, and they're probably a great distance away, so they're not going to be able to come visit us anytime soon.
	However, it does mean that we have to realize that we're probably not alone in the universe, that the moon is the most likely place Or a visitation.
	Sure.
	And that if we go back to the moon, I think that should be in the back of the mind of anyone who wants to set up a permanent moon base.
	Right.
	Let's say it is.
	And let's say you discover the obelisk, Professor.
	Yeah, there are huge parts of the moon that are totally unexplored.
	Would you recommend digging it up and activating it?
	In other words, what kind of calculation, as a physicist, scientist, would you make about the nature of the people we would eventually meet as a result of what we were about to do?
	Well, in the movie, an astronaut touches the obelisk and it sends a message to the home planet.
	That's right.
	That, you know, like a screaming message, right?
	That's right.
	I would suspect that we should first just analyze it to see what kinds of technologies are involved.
	For example, nanotechnology.
	It's probably not very big, in which case they've probably been able to harness nanotechnology millions of years ago.
	And that's why these things could be quite small and is probably capable of self-replication.
	And so it's probably quite sophisticated and the moon is very stable,
	stable for, you know, three, four billion years.
	So an obelisk like this would be stable for an extended period of time.
	And it's probably already been sending messages.
	But, you know, we don't want to activate it unnecessarily, because we don't know their intentions.
	There you are.
	I was wondering if you would recommend extreme caution in that regard.
	Extreme caution, yes.
	What kind of debates would there be about the merit of activation?
	You know, we send radio and television to outer space.
	We send Beavis and Butthead into outer space.
	And any intelligent being that picks up Beavis and Butthead would wonder whether there's any intelligent life worth contacting.
	You and I are on the way out there right now.
	Right.
	And so I think, however, that any intelligent being Realizing that a planet with liquid water would be an ideal arena to create autocatalytic molecules called DNA, I would be quite curious and have, you know, regular reports.
	So, this obelisk has been sending reports.
	Yes.
	So, I don't think we have to fear it.
	They would have been here causing havoc years before then.
	So then, scientifically, you would conclude that if they wanted to dispose of us in some unsavory manner, that would have already occurred.
	That's right.
	However, that's why I think that a permanent moon base would actually be a good idea.
	Not only would we know more about the origin of the moon, the solar system, solar storms.
	We had a huge solar storm just last month.
	Oh, it was incredible!
	It wiped out two satellites.
	Incredible!
	By the way, we've only got a few moments, but a comment on the recent spate of Outrageous solar activity!
	I mean, you know, in a part of the cycle where there's no way this should be happening.
	I'm not saying it can't happen, but almost no way we should be getting super flares.
	Yeah, this is the biggest in 150 years.
	You have to go back to 1850-something or other.
	That storm was so big, by the way, that telegraph lines activated all by themselves, without any electricity.
	It actually induced electricity to send telegraph signals.
	Right.
	That's how powerful it was back then.
	Right.
	The storm luckily missed us.
	The sunspot was pointing the wrong direction.
	As the sun spins, this one sunspot was ejecting all this solar flares and radiation into outer space.
	Luckily, it was pointed the wrong way, and so we missed the bullet.
	If that bullet had hit, it could have destroyed a good fraction of the satellites.
	Your TV screen would have been wiped out, your radio transmission, the internet, probably all would have gone.
	God, the end of civilization as we know it.
	And power lines would have been, power surges and power lines.
	It would have been very messy had that solar flare hit us.
	And it just goes to show you that we don't know that much about the sun.
	Sunspot cycles are 11 years, of course, but we're in the middle of the sunspot cycle.
	We were not due for another... Oh, I know.
	I'm so fascinated, Professor, that I sit with the one-minute X-ray chart.
	During that time, I just sat with the one-minute X-ray chart up on my screen, and there were a couple of times I went right through the roof.
	I mean, as the vertical line would start and go shooting up past the high X category, I started going, oh my God, this is really, really, really serious.
	And I was talking to a bunch of people, friends on Ham Radio about it, and It was quite a time, and it may not be over.
	Any guesses, Professor, what's going on with our son?
	Well, this caught a lot of people by surprise.
	We categorize these by the letter X, and so we give them numbers, and this was almost off-scale.
	And if you take a look at the last 150 years... It actually was off-scale.
	There have only been like three other incidents that even came close, but the biggest one was 150 years ago.
	So this is definitely one of the big ones.
	And, you know, it just grazed us.
	And like I said, it knocked out two satellites, knocked out communications in certain areas.
	But do you think we could be entering a period of time with some strange unnatural output of the sun?
	In other words, I guess I'm asking, could it be perhaps not over yet?
	Well, it's not over yet.
	There was another mini storm just two weeks ago, another aftershock.
	Yes.
	And these sunspots do rotate around the sun.
	You know, the sun flips its north pole and south pole every 11 years, and the flipping of the pole is from the shockwave, and the shockwave creates the aurora borealis and the southern lights and the northern lights every 11 years.
	But this was kind of unexpected, because this should be a quiet time for the sun, and it just goes to show you that the sun has a lot of tricks that we didn't quite anticipate.
	And not to mention that the Earth's magnetic field is also beginning to decay.
	Well, you know I meant to mention that, too.
	I just registered it.
	It's 100% in the last century.
	Yeah, much more.
	And then they're saying it could accelerate, too, and really accelerate.
	Yeah, if the Earth's magnetic field were to go kaput, and like I said, it's dropped 10% already just in the last century, it would be quite dangerous.
	There'd be lots of radiation coming down from the Sun.
	We're almost talking the movie Korra here.
	Yeah, however, we're not talking about destabilizing the center of the Earth.
	Magnetic field down, sun up, not good.
	Yeah, and it could also mean that the poles may shift again.
	You know, the magnetic poles have shifted in the past.
	If you go to Hawaii and simply dig in the lava flows, you can actually see the magnetic pointing that was frozen in time many millions of years ago.
	That's also possibly not good.
	Yeah, so the poles could migrate, or the poles could gradually damp.
	This is all quite speculative.
	No one really knows for sure.
	But we do know that the Earth's magnetic field is dropping to a degree.
	And yeah, within centuries to millennia, maybe it'll go to zero.
	And on that note, Professor, we're out of time.
	I could go on forever.
	It's great to talk to you, and I'll look forward to doing it the next time.
	But we're out of time.
	We're out of time.
	Professor, thank you.
	My pleasure.
	Anytime.
	Good night.
	Here's Crystal.
	She's got all just exactly the right words to take us out of here.
	See you next time, or next weekend, whichever comes sooner.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Good night!
	Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky This magical journey will take us on a ride
	Filled with belonging, searching for the truth We make it till tomorrow
	Will the sun shine on you?

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