Art Bell welcomes Dr. Michio Kaku to discuss nuclear risks, from the 1950s Kushtin plutonium dump (20,000 curies released) to Cold War first-strike plans like Operation Broiler, canceled after Eisenhower’s realization of retaliation impossibility. Kaku debunks speculative "quantum bombs" but warns of antimatter weapons (theoretical in 100–200 years) and nuclear winter from even partial arsenal detonations, now reduced to ~5,000 warheads. He critiques Atoms for Peace, which fueled proliferation, and defends the many-worlds interpretation, citing Nobel laureates and WMAP satellite data confirming a multiverse. Concluding, Kaku urges activism over despair, linking solar anomalies—like the 1859 Carrington Event—to Earth’s weakening magnetic field, while advocating cautious robotic moon bases to study potential extraterrestrial probes amid geopolitical and cosmic uncertainties. [Automatically generated summary]
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 and whines, 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 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 Russard admitted he had a dream about Saddam Hussein being captured.
And 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, very funny.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Good for you, Tim Russard.
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.
We shouldn't laugh so hard.
And Tim Russard, I think he 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 should face the death penalty, the president said, quote, I have my personal views, and this is a brutal dictator, end quote.
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 Saddam 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 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 Sinaam 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.
When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the first heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17th, well, that's almost upon us, right?
It is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed spaceflight.
With that, et cetera, a 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 man-space program has limited itself to lowly Earth-urbits.
Indeed, everyone under the age of 31, more than 1.2, 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 Sino-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 contend 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 4 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.
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 the spun clay dishes and they can tell you what the magnetic field on Earth has been like.
Well, 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 of the movie?
The core?
For some reason, the center of the Earth begins to change.
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 a burned out cinder.
Of course, that would be the end of all humanity, every living thing and 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?
But 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 bread basket 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.
I'm going to want to check that out.
Again, a concern there that reality seems to be erasing 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 24th, and October 12th, Lou saw something 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.
Lou 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 that 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. Mitrio 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 is coming right up.
Stay seated, please.
unidentified
Stay seated, please.
Stay seated, please.
To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Filling in for the big guy, George, who will 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 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 Boer, 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.
Boer apparently threatened to send a package full of anthrax borers 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.
She 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.
Boer 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 And I must say, I understand what is it with this organ resizing stuff patches and creams and hunt.
It's like one out of every 10 or 20 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 the story without andre that probably ought not be there but you get the I mean, why that particular product instead of so many others that they could be spamming about?
I've never quite understood what it is about quail that you could not continue to consume, I just happened to remember it in the back of my head that there was someone else who made that challenge.
unidentified
And it was God himself in the book of Numbers, chapter 11.
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 eat three quail, and maybe it was a little underhanded, but he won.
unidentified
Right, right.
But in the Book of Numbers, an interesting history was 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.
And God said, you will have meat to eat, not for two days, not for ten, not for 20, but for thirty days.
But it will come out your nostrils and will make you sick.
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 go on.
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.
Maybe when we take all the oil out, then the core will stop spinning.
unidentified
It could be.
Okay, another thing I wanted to mention was that on a Discovery Channel, 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.
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, a lot to dream since we're talking about dreams.
I've had dreams of like walking behind, you know, some people in underground tunnels, you know, on hillsides, and the person in front of me turns around and says, you know, girls are, she's not one of us, you know?
Well, I mean, I've had dreams, one of the dreams that really bothered me was a dream where 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 earth shaking in the sky darkening.
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, hey, 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.
You can say, Jesus Christ, God the Son, commands you demons to depart from me and say my memory or my imagination or my health or my wealth or my family, my children, whatever.
And you can just repeat that mentally or you can say it out loud or you can sing it in the shower.
The point is that if every Catholic layman who was confirmed, and it's the 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.
I just wanted to kind of ask you about, you know, everybody's all glad about the Saddam thing, and everybody's pretty happy.
But I just kind of want a question about the extremists who were very devoted to Saddam and how the outcome of this may affect the rest of their lives and our lives.
There was a video, of course, of a lot of the people in the Crete 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 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.
unidentified
Because I kind of think about it, and this will be the last thing I'll say, like, you can remove a queen from an ant bed, but, you know, you still got all the ants.
So I don't know.
But it was good to talk to you, man.
I had a dream last night I talked to you, so that's pretty cool.
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 Summit Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has lectured round the world, and his PhD-level textbooks are, in fact, required reading at many of the top physics labs worldwide.
Dr. Kaku graduated from Harvard in 1968, Summa Kum Laud, number one in his physics class at that, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1972, held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973, 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.
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 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.
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 the 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 mc squared 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 Chandrum X-ray telescope, we know of no mechanism that can create a chain reaction.
That is one black hole setting off another black hole setting off 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 modern technology perhaps 100, 200 years in the future.
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.
Would we then concoct it into a bomb physically following the design of the current bomb where you've got two balls of what, a 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?
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 shelled the atomic bomb project and instead went for the V2 project and the V1, that is the ballistic missile and the cruise missiles.
So luckily, Hitler did not know that number, or else he may have tried to have a crash program to build the atomic bomb.
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, of the famous Heisenberg Incertainty Principle, 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 realize 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?
That was the first thing he asked.
He didn't know whether it was a ship or not.
When he was told that it was a B-29 bomber, he knew the size of the bomb bay, and therefore he estimated the size of the bomb, and then mentally he worked backwards.
He worked backwards in his mind as he was being interrogated to figure out what the neutron cross-sections were for the atomic bomb.
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 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.
Basically, a gun principle based on shooting a Pac-Man pie piece into the larger Pac-Man.
However, an antimatter 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?
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.
That actually could have happened on the tabletop.
Now, it was always my understanding, 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.
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.
And when Slotin realized that he had turned the screw too many times and the Geiger counter needle went off scale, he lunged forward and 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.
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, for example, would have killed everybody on the base that they were experimenting?
Well, luckily, both incidences had the ratonium coming together very slowly.
One because of the heating of the punctuation carbide block, and the second because a screwdriver was turned too much.
And so in the room, there were several people watching this demonstration by Lewis Slaughtin.
Each of them got a pretty hefty dose of radiation, but all of them survived, except for Lewis Slaughtin 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 Inverse Square law.
That's not true.
I looked up the report, and the only person who died was Lewis Slotten 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 you have criticality in the walls of the building.
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, went in critical, 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.
And it was not, you know, it was, again, wartime security and people, I mean, post-war security.
People were very lax about these kinds of things.
And, well, I mean, like, for example, in 1961 in Idaho, there was a worker who removed, manually removed the control rod out of the SL-1 reactor, the stationary low-power reactor unit one.
And the reactor went super critical right under his feet.
It is, and I've loved this song ever since the movie was stand.
Remember the first couple of minutes of the movie of the stand when there was the biological big and they played this piece of music as an opening, and I thought it was super.
And there are so many places where it fits into a show just like this.
Because if you remove the control rod, which regulates the chain reaction, dampens the chain reaction, if you remove central control rod number 9 more than 6 inches, the reactor would go supercritical, and it would, in fact, explode.
Then reactor crews, safety crews went into the reactor site to find out what happened.
They found that radiation levels were about 1,000 rads 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.
And they found two dead bodies on the ground, and they looked for the third.
They made repeated entrants 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 proponents of nuclear power like to make, and that is that John Burns was involved in a low triangle and that he wanted to commit suicide and therefore blow one of the other rivals also of the kingdom come.
And so he was apparently distraught and blew himself and his co-workers that were his rival to bits, using nuclear power plants to do it.
The point I'm raising is that...
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, all right, 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, Fermi 1, built in the U.S., partially melted.
we didn't even know we had any active breeder reactors i thought that was just No, it was a commercial breeder reactor, which everyone wants to forget because it melted and created a catastrophe, a potential catastrophe.
Dumb me, 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.
What happened was a piece of zirconium, a piece of metal about the size of a beer can, became dislodged in a 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.
That's why 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 combine to give you critical mass.
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 like 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, a long tube, and they sent it into the reactor with a small TV camera attached to the end of it.
They photographed at the bottom.
This is the first time they've ever done this, by the way.
I got the file from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission years ago, and there was a letter from the union, the United Autoworkers 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, oh, 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.
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 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.
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.
And then, you know, there's a 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 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 Slotten 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.
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?
Well, in the area called Kushtin, near the village of Kazli, 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 a 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.
That's right.
The CIA was onto it.
What happened was in the journals, scientific journals, the Russians were all of a sudden writing reports about the transport of plutonium through aqueous environments.
That is, contaminated lakes.
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 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.
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 more detailed estimate of how many people died as a consequence of the Cushtin accident.
Well, from an incredible guy, Professor Michiro Kaku is my guest from the high desert in the middle of the night, the right time.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
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And I think to myself, What a wonderful blue brightness dark and I think to myself What
wonderful world.
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky, are also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands, saying how can you do?
They're really saying I love you.
I hear players growl.
I love you.
must be more much more than I 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 from west to the Rockies call ART at 800-618-8255 You know 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 Ross.
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 are 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 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 has if we already haven't covered that in a moment or The real beauty of talk radio, the real core of talk radio, is the fact that a lot of times you'll do a talk show tonight as a perfect example and have all sorts of things lined up to talk about.
And then because you get off on a certain tangent that just happens in an unrehearsed way, down a 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 even 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.
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.
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 were 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, 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, Con Edison reapplied saying, we'll put it underground.
We'll have an underground nuclear power plant in the center of New York City.
It was to 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, you know, 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 where we have nuclear waste to be stored near Las Vegas.
Does 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.
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 beta electron accelerator in the garage.
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.
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, well, 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.
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.
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.
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, no, 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 yes, 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, that this old architecture of Atoms for Peace was a big mistake in some sense.
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.
And 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?
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 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 atoms.
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 Talk Radio, I certainly don't know how.
From the high desert in the middle of the night, this is Coast Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
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good morning
You believe I was just like, believe that God believes God.
Only you believe in miracles So would I Might have to move How the hell is You would be there So we're making love Nothing's apart Nothing's apart And there's really nothing we can't do You know we could You know we could If we want
You know we could We could exist on the stars If it's so easy Oh my dear You're hitting everything Dude talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
And now that it's in so many decades after those horrible years, a lot of this information is being declassified, both from Russia and the United States.
They were hotheads arguing for a preemptive strike.
We know that in 1948, 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.
In fact, again, if you go to the National Archives, you can get these plans.
In the 50s, the most elaborate plan was called Operation Off Tackle.
All the cities were listed.
And 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, there were hotheads again arguing for a preemptive first strike.
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 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 Chief of Staff arguing for a preemptive first strike on Russia in 1954.
But the point you raise is that, yes, in 1954, when Eisenhower was presented the option of initiating Operation Oftakl, 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 argued that after 1954, the bison and bear bombers would be able to hit the United States, and the window would close after 1954.
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.
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 1954, 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.
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 megatonage, it would not only have sent nuclear fallout over the United States, it would have blackened out the sun.
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.
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, you know, if the United States struck, then Russia would destroy the entire human race.
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 free.
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's sound 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 100 warheads.
So each side would have 100 warheads sufficient to perhaps destroy the Earth via nuclear winter.
And that would then bring us down to a fairly low level of nuclear bombs, but sufficient, again, to cause havoc with the atmosphere and havoc on the planet Earth.
Now, that, of course, lets the cat out of the bag.
These weapons are for political purposes.
They're to threaten people.
They're to control conventional crises.
So like a poker game.
A nuclear winter, I mean, the first strike is a royal flush, but it's part of a 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, to 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 91, NUSIC 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.
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, under that, 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.
You don't think there could have been, well, I mean, but there could have been as they spiraled down economically, there was that use-it-or-lose-it minute for them or so.
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 our own first strike?
Just if you had to push yourself into that scenario and couldn't give that answer, I mean, it was obvious they were about to strike us, would you counsel to strike them first?
Or is your morality and ethics and thinking go well beyond our borders and just around the world?
And people did look at the 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.
And we'll fight World War IV with rocks, 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 go back to the Stone Age.
I tell you, man, on certain occasions in the 50s, it came very close with people like Curtis LeMay later telling people publicly, yes, it came extremely close with people like him arguing for a first strike.
Well, I know from today's perspective, it's very easy to look back and 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, or they would have sounded rational.
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.
I think Eisenhower realized that the window had closed, had just closed in 54 with the operational bison and bear bombers of the Russians that could hit Washington, D.C. with a few atomic bombs.
Another really hard question for you, Professor, would be if you were in a position to give the other side 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?
Well, if you read all the biographies of the man, all of them say that after 1925, he was over the hill, no more ideas, and that he spent all his time working for peace.
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 and the Chandra 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.
There's a bunch of Nobel Prizes waiting 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.
Yes.
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.
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.
Second-generation bombs are small MERVs.
You can put 10 of them in the nose cone of an MX missile.
These are called second-generation bombs.
Small bombs that are 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-gener bomb.
And as I mentioned, in 1991, get a copy of Music Magazine in January or February that year, just before the outbreak of hostilities, Music Magazine interviewed several senior Pentagon officials and they laid out the option.
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.
They were talking about tens of thousands of pounds, I believe, or equivalent to NTNT, really a crazy giant figure, the Moab mother of all bombs or something.
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.
And so I think that's probably one reason why the Bush administration is for these things specifically to threaten the leadership of North Korea, which is basically underground.
So 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 and bunker busters.
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.
Well, Ronald Reagan was once interviewed by a journalist who asked him a question.
You know, spending Russia into a depression, that's always been the right-wing strategy, spending Russia into a depression.
We build a bomb, they build a bomb.
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 into depression.
We're spending ourselves into a depression.
And who wins is the one who busts second.
So Russia busts first.
Their commissars 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 territory if you've got a system that's not producing a profit you got to keep 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.
So 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, psychologically disturbed moment when they would make the decision to use them, that would have come somewhere in there just before they went belly up economically and said, we quit.
In fact, so vibrant that it does cause inequities.
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 had to have technology, new ideas, and entrepreneurial spirit, as Ronald Reagan would say.
And they lacked that.
In fact, it got worse because they built so many bombs to catch up to the United States.
Their economy was about a third, a third of the U.S. economy.
And they were trying to match our weapons.
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.
Still, coming at the appropriate moment, Star Wars must have caused a lot of generals in Russia to throw up their hands, along with the politicians who knew they couldn't afford anymore, and there was that moment there.
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 costs 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.
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.
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I'm excited, many young ladies, made him disabled, better at me.
Here's a question out of Leffield 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, Dr. 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 the 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.
The other approach Is advocated by physicist Igor Novokov.
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.
Now, it just couldn't happen, is what 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 enemy.
And, you know, just inanimate matter going back into 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 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 Gelman, these are giants in physics, Nobel laureates, who say that, yeah, 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?
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.
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 to you know i translate their ideas in the So again, 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 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.
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.
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, talking about previous visitations from aliens.
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.
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 to 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.
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, and 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.
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?
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?
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 would be quite curious and have regular reports.
So this envelope has been sending reports, so I don't think we have to fear it.
They would have been here causing havoc years before it hit.
Oh, by the way, yes, 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.
Oh, you 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?