Steven Starr, nuclear war expert and UN presenter, warns that U.S. ($1T) and Russian ($700B) arsenals—now nearly equal at 1,643 vs. 1,642 launch-ready missiles—threaten global collapse: a 300-warhead exchange could kill 75% of both nations’ populations, triggering decade-long nuclear winter. Even India-Pakistan’s 100-bomb conflict risks famine for 2 billion via sunlight-blocking soot, while EMP strikes could melt down 60 U.S. reactors, poisoning regions for centuries. "Dead Hand" systems and unchecked presidential authority ensure no oversight, yet leaders dismiss existential risks like suppressed Belarus Chernobyl studies. Starr calls willful ignorance criminal, urging action through ICAN and PSR to avert Carl Sagan’s feared self-annihilation. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, so I do have a little bit of news for you.
Volkswagen.
Volkswagen's commercial vehicles and cars from its Spanish unit seat are among the 11 million apparently fitted with a diesel engine that can cheat on emissions tests.
This is really, really, really bad news for Volkswagen.
Edward Snowden, who has confounded, that's an interesting word, confounded U.S. officials since his abrupt departure from the country two years ago with a whole bunch of classified stuff, has just found a new megaphone.
He has found Twitter.
And so he started following the NSA on Twitter.
I'm sorry.
And he sent out a tweet which just said, can you hear me now?
Well, let's see.
In about an hour after he said, can you hear me now?
185,000 followers jumped on board.
And then six hours later, he was up to 625,000 followers.
So I guess we can hear him now.
unidentified
Oh, that must have made them really, really, really, really angry.
And then number two, also available at artbell.com.
You know, I don't put stuff up there unless it's really good.
Did the Pope have some kind of extra audience?
Well, something was watching.
Something was up there.
Something that looks to me like a blob that somebody might have created with Photoshop, but it's not.
It's a real picture.
It's gigantic.
It's mysterious.
And it's drifting over the city at distinctly unballoon-like speeds with unplane-like maneuvers.
Maybe it was watching the Pope, and, you know, when he was there, that's how somebody caught it with a camera.
Or a lot of people caught it, I guess.
Okay, let me repeat what I said, and that is if you have children in the room, please get them out.
We're going to be discussing global thermonuclear war.
About, I read this yesterday, I'm going to read it again and more of it.
About 24 years after the end of the Cold War, Russia and the U.S. seem to be engaged in a nuclear arms race once again that could have disastrous consequences.
The United States is announcing it's about to do a trillion-dollar upgrade of its nukes.
Imagine what you can do with a trillion dollars.
Now, the Russians are going to modernize their weapons, of course, because it's a new race, right?
So they will spend up to $700 billion.
Actually, we said $1.3 trillion total earlier on Facebook.
It's $1.7 trillion.
My God.
What's more, Russia-deployed nuclear capacity has overtaken that of the U.S., so we are behind for the first time since 2000.
Russia has 1,643 nuclear missiles ready to launch.
The U.S. has 1,642.
Not surprisingly, all of them Aimed at Russia.
You know, I thought we re-aimed our missiles to the water.
So I guess that one's off, huh?
Both countries have been upgrading their active nuclear arsenals since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
Oh, great.
The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates the U.S. has over 7,000 nuclear warheads compared to more than 8,000 warheads in Russia.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says the two countries possess 93% of the totality of the global nuclear stockpile.
$1.7 trillion.
All right, coming up next, Stephen Starr, MT, ASCB, BB, MPH, graduated from the School of Health Professions at the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1985.
He subsequently worked as a medical technologist over a period of 27 years at a number of hospitals.
He is currently the director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri.
Stephen is an associate member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Mr. Starr is also an expert on the environmental consequences of nuclear war and in 2011 made an address to the UN General Assembly describing the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear war and what it poses to all nations and peoples.
He has made presentations to ministry officials, parliamentarians, universities, citizens, and students from all around the world.
He specializes in making technical scientific information understandable to all audiences, which will be a good thing for this night because this is a tough subject.
Stephen, I have been reading and I just sort of read a little bit of what's been going on.
There's so much going on right now that is scary.
I lived through the Cold War.
I'm 70 years old.
I was in the Air Force, Stephen, on the day that we decided if we were going to mix it up with Russia over Cuba or the Soviet Union at that time over Cuba.
And I was working in a hospital at Amarillo Air Force Base in Texas.
And I'm the guy who got to go, you know, we were a B-52 base.
And I was the guy who got to go over and answer the line that raised the DEF CON level into the world of scare.
You know, there's still almost 2,000 launch-ready nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that the U.S. and Russia have that in the course of this conversation could be launched.
It only takes less than two minutes for them to be launched and to be on their way.
I think Eastside, you know, we have our ballistic missile defense system that's being deployed through NATO, and there's a lot of evidence that it may not work as advertised unless you perhaps switch out the kinetic warheads for nuclear warheads, which is something that's not discussed but is considered by Russian war planners.
But all these things are really all being done in the process of ignoring the scientific predictions of the existential threat of nuclear war.
You know, the kinetic warheads, they call them hit to kill.
These things go about 17,000 miles per hour.
So it's like hitting a bullet with a bullet.
But if you swap that out for a nuclear detonation, then you expand your kill radius to the point where it's more like one or two kilometers or a mile or so.
But I've talked to Dr. Ted Pastel, who's written about this.
He's at MIT.
And he said that there's always a countermeasure available, that the warheads have decoys included with them these days, both U.S. and Russian warheads.
You could probably spread the decoys out further.
Once you get into these sort of arms races, it's almost impossible to stop them.
That's why they actually were wise enough to create the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which George W. Bush withdrew from not that long ago.
Well, you know, the thing is, there's a political spin that comes out on each side, the U.S. and Russian.
And, you know, there's technical details about all this that could be argued.
But it's sort of like counting how many angels can sit on the head of a pin.
You know, we get lost in these arguments about who has the most missiles and who has the most warheads.
In a sense, we treat nuclear weapons as we did conventional weapons.
But even this is, I think, I have a class that I teach at the University of Missouri, and I ask my students about this, like, why do you think we developed, we got to the point where we had something like 70,000 nuclear weapons in 1986.
But we have studies that show that 300 strategic warheads, if you detonate those, they'll kill 75% of the people in the United States and Russia.
So how could we manage to create 70,000 warheads?
It really was.
They called it mad, which made more sense than mutual assured destruction.
It was insane.
But I think there's a failure to grasp the fact that grasp the essential nature of nuclear war and the existential threat that it poses to human beings.
Yeah, I'm lucky enough to teach a class at the University of Missouri on nuclear weapons.
It's one of the few classes there are in the United States, which is another problem.
You know, after the Soviet Union collapsed, pretty much all nuclear education, what little there was, dropped out of our high schools and even colleges.
So the students that come into my class don't even know the difference between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb.
Sometimes I feel like Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of guy.
But I honestly believe that if ordinary Americans, the non-technical audiences, had any idea that the nuclear arsenal that the U.S. and Russia has represent a self-destruct mechanism for the human race, that they wouldn't tolerate it.
But we cannot get the leaders of our countries or any of the nuclear weapon states to publicly acknowledge or discuss this fact.
And there's very precise scientific predictions and studies that have been made in the last seven or eight years that quantify this, that make it, that spell it out about how this would happen.
It's supposed to be one of the best ones in Columbia.
It's supposed to have good public schools in it.
It was 100 years old.
It didn't have air conditioning.
They have to close it when it gets too hot.
I mean, there's just such a disconnect between the reality of what we're doing with our public school systems and our infrastructure and our health care as opposed to the enormous military budgets that go out virtually unattended every year.
Actually, there's very the transparency is not what it should be.
The people that provide the numbers that I'll give you are experts and they have contacts, but the governments don't really readily give this out anymore.
It's getting harder and harder to get very accurate information.
But historically, we know that right about now there's something between 15 and 16,000 intact nuclear weapons in the world in a global nuclear arsenal.
And the U.S. and Russia probably have, they have 15 out of the 16,000, let's say.
And you mentioned that 93% in your opening.
That's about right.
So that's why it's so important to focus on the U.S. and Russia, because first of all, the country that comes in next is France with 300.
And so there's orders of so many more times greater numbers that the U.S. and Russia have compared to anybody else.
That's where you have to start.
Now, if you look at what the weapons are, we each have, U.S. and Russia each have approximately 2,000 nuclear weapons that are deployed for immediate use.
So a lot of them are kept in reserve.
But 2,000 weapons each would be more than enough to wipe out the human race.
I had heard years ago that by mutual agreement, I was always in real doubt about this, but by mutual agreement, we had both retargeted all of our ICBMs into the water, into the ocean.
You know, the scientists have tried to discuss these studies that are, they're called peer-reviewed studies.
They're the best studies that can be done in science.
They publish them and they're criticized by all the best scientists in the world.
And if they can't find anything wrong with it, then they go into a journal.
And these have been out there for seven or eight years, and they predict that even what you would call a successful first strike, let's say that the U.S. launched and destroyed every Russian strategic nuclear weapon, every nuclear weapon that could be launched against the United States, well, the environmental consequences of that successful first strike would cause everybody in the United States to starve to death, along with everybody else in the world.
So it's a self-destruct mechanism for the human race.
The scientist wrote an article called Self-Assured Destruction, which you would compare that to mutual assured.
Well, the mechanism is that nuclear weapons are really like a piece of the sun when they detonate.
And this goes for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, which was 15,000 tons of TNT explosive equivalent, to average, say, Russian strategic warhead that has 800,000 tons of TNT.
That's what's normal today.
But both of those will, when the fireball they create, the surface of that fireball is hotter than the surface of the sun.
So what happens then, if that's detonated over or above a city, it will ignite everything within a radius.
The 15 kiloton weapon sets three to five square miles on fire instantly.
The 800 kiloton warhead will set 90 to 152 square miles on fire instantly.
And all these, what happens is there's fire set over this whole area.
It's a mass fire.
And within 10 to 15 minutes, it coalesces.
They all join together to form a single gigantic fire.
In the center of the fire, there's like a chimney effect that rises up, and it creates hurricane-force winds that blow towards the center of the fire.
So it'll actually be strong enough to uproot trees and pull into the fire.
And anyone in the fire zone, in a matter of minutes, the air temperature is good above the boiling temperature of water.
And we first saw a mass fire like this in Dresden and Hamburg and Stuttgart during World War II when the British firebombed the German cities.
Oh, yes.
And they weren't even able to go into those cities for quite a few days in tracked vehicles.
It was too hot.
And even anybody that was in a deep shelter suffocated or baked, basically.
I mean, it's horrible, but it's true.
And so then we firebombed Tokyo, for example, with conventional firebombs like Napalm.
100,000 Japanese died in that raid.
And then we went on to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So we basically crossed the moral threshold for blowing up, burning cities up.
So if you think about what a nuclear war is, if you think of like one 800-kiloton warhead with 150 square miles on fire, then you multiply that times hundreds or thousands, all within an hour's space of time.
All those fires create enormous amounts of smoke and soot.
The scientists have predicted that a U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear war would produce somewhere between 50 and 180 million tons of smoke.
This smoke will quickly rise above cloud level, which means it can't be rained out.
And once it gets into the stratosphere, there are high winds.
In a matter of 10 to 14 days, that smoke will completely encircle the Earth and engulf the Earth in a global stratospheric smoke layer.
And this layer will do two things.
Well, basically, it absorbs and blocks the sunlight.
By absorbing it, it heats up the stratosphere, which destroys the protective ozone layer.
And by blocking that sun, it prevents warming sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth.
And that, in a matter of a week, will produce temperatures colder than they were at the height of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago.
And the end result is that for one to three years, the temperatures in Central North America and Eurasia will be below freezing every day.
You said if both arsenals were used, let's say we just surprised Russia and decapitated them only, and they didn't have an opportunity really to strike back at us.
What have you got then?
Do we still have, because you were describing nuclear winter, right?
It was Fat Man was Nagasaki, and Little Boy was Hiroshima.
There you go.
And the Hiroshima bomb is estimated, there's different estimates, but let's just say 15,000 tons of TNT explosive equivalent.
They have to compare it to something, so they compare it to TNT, but a nuclear detonation is really different, fundamentally different than a high-explosive chemical detonation for a couple of reasons.
The stellar temperatures it produces literally a couple hundred million degrees centigrade at the instant of detonation at the center of the fireball.
You know, there's an article on my website by Professor Lynn Eaton called City on Fire.
She points out that actually the U.S. military has significantly underestimated the destructive capabilities of their own nuclear weapons because they don't really consider thermal effects or the effects of fire, which I was describing earlier.
But you asked about the explosive power.
So it's 15,000 tons of TNT, and when that's detonated, it will ignite fires simultaneously over an area of about three to five square miles.
And that's opposed to the modern, they call them strategic nuclear weapons.
These are the weapons that are possessed by the five recognized nuclear weapon states.
But the smallest, I hate to use the word small, but the smallest yield or explosive power of a strategic weapon is 100,000 tons of TNT.
And the U.S. ICBMs usually have somewhere between 300,000 tons of TNT to 475,000 tons of TNT.
The Russian ones are generally a little bit bigger.
They're about 800,000 tons of TNT.
Our bombers, our nuclear bombers, can carry a nuclear gravity bomb, the B-83, that has 1.3 million tons of TNT explosive power.
The kilotons means 1,000 tons, so 15 kilotons, Hiroshima.
But, you know, I mean, after hydrogen bombs were invented in the early 1950s, it wasn't all that long before American bombers were carrying multi-megaton weapons around.
That was, you know, you probably remember, I mean, in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the average warhead size, you know, it's usually 2 or 3 million tons of TNT.
China still has, I think their warheads are believed to be about 3 million tons of TNT explosive power.
They don't have a lot of missiles that can hit the U.S., but they have some.
And just like every other nuclear weapon state, they're modernizing their arsenals.
You know, the design of nuclear weapons, the difference between the atomic bomb, then they came up with the hydrogen bomb.
And the first hydrogen bombs were enormous, and they stayed that way for a long time.
In the 1980s and 90s, they actually started making them smaller in explosive power, but this was primarily because they were able to put them on the top of ballistic missiles, and they came up with multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles.
So you can put, say, 10 warheads on one missile.
So they're generally, the strategic weapons now range in the hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT explosive power, but some are over a million.
And I really have, I have no doubt that both the United States and Russia still have some multi-megaton weapons that they keep somewhere in case they need them.
We still have 4,000 or 5,000 weapons that are, they call them scheduled for dismantlement.
So they actually don't go into the totals that the United States puts out as far as how many weapons we have.
They'll announce that we have 4,000 weapons, but then they don't mention that there's 4,000 that are still basically in the same condition they were a few years ago and maybe in the same place.
Well, you know, if you want to get into the calculations, if you set off a number of smaller warheads over an area, you actually create more blast damage and just as big a thermal effects as one big warhead.
Military planners tend to focus on blasts, which is because they want to, you know, and so that's why a city like New York, well, Washington, D.C. would be a good example.
They might target at, what, say, 40 warheads, where actually one of these 800 kiloton warheads would be more than enough to set the whole city and way beyond in the suburbs on fire.
Yeah, it's a, you know, they calculate these firestorms based on average weather conditions, but even under the very worst weather conditions, for 800 kiloton warhead, you're going to have about 90 square miles where you're going to have a certain fire zone.
But on average weather conditions, it's more like about 150 square miles, and it can be more than that on an exceptionally clear day.
So on my website, I focus on fire because, as we mentioned earlier, the fire is what creates the smoke, and the smoke gets up into the stratosphere and can block the sunlight and create these ice age weather conditions on Earth that eliminate the ability to grow food crops for years.
Well, there's actually new studies that are being done.
I keep in touch with my friends, the scientists, and it looks like it could be 20 years even.
But I mean, the global grain reserves right now are maybe enough for a couple of months.
But you mentioned, I think, at some point, India and Pakistan.
Well, they have a big nuclear arms race going on there now.
But what they produce initially, at least, are atomic bomb-sized weapons.
They have about 200 operational atomic bombs, the 15-kiloton or 15,000-ton size.
So the scientists did a study on a war with 100 of those being detonated in their cities, and they found they predicted about 5 million tons of smoke would get into the stratosphere.
That would be enough to block about 10% of the sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth for at least three or four years, maybe seven.
And the smoke would stay up there for longer than 10.
This would cause enough of a decrease in crop production that it would, it's predicted that up to 2 billion people would starve to death just from an India-Pakistan.
Well, it seems, Professor, we once lived in a world where MAD was, you know, sort of the operational mutual assured destruction stopped everything from happening.
Now, I wonder if nuclear war might be possible on a smaller scale.
I know this is what they toy with, these ideas they toy with, these games, as it were, war games.
The fact that we have launch-ready nuclear weapons that can be launched even in the course of this conversation, it's been like that for years, so there's sort of a false sense of security.
What worries me these days, a couple things.
Here in the United States, I'm worried because there seems to be a general lack of knowledge and understanding about the consequences of nuclear war.
And there's also some, appears to me to be an idea that we can just threaten the Russians and they'll back down.
So what happens if they don't or our militaries come into direct contact?
As far as India and Pakistan, you know, they're right on each other's border.
If they launch a nuclear weapon, a ballistic missile, it'll detonate in a matter of a minute or two or less, you know.
So they don't even have really early warning systems.
Like we've constructed these early warning systems because since we're on the opposite sides of the planet, it gives us enough time to detect the launch and then pass the warning up to the president.
And then he can decide whether he wants to launch a retaliatory strike based just on early warning system data.
And if that's wrong, then he's actually launching a preemptive nuclear strike.
But all of these things, and I've written about this, I just said an article in the Bullets of Atomic Scientists today about launching before or after the detonation of a nuclear weapon based on early warning systems.
But the problem is that this is, we're talking, when we get into those sorts of discussions, we're avoiding the real issue that's never discussed, and that's the environmental consequences of nuclear war.
That has never been discussed by any of the nuclear weapons states in a public way, and it's avoided.
Well, you know, if you want to look at a scenario like that, and historically, famine has been caused not just by lack of food, but also by scarce, you know, the rising prices and the inability to purchase and then the restriction of exports.
I think that if there was a war in India and Pakistan where nuclear weapons were detonated and this global stratospheric smoke layer was produced and it was quite clear that the, you know, like for example, you wouldn't be able to grow wheat in Canada for a few years, then the exporting countries that grow grain would probably say, okay, that's it.
We're not sending anything overseas.
We've got to keep this for ourselves.
So all the populations that are dependent on imported foods, especially grains, are going to just be SOL.
So that's, first of all, there's about a billion people right now that live on the edge of starvation.
And Dr. Ira Helpin from Physicians for Social Responsibility, I'm actually a senior scientist with them too.
He wrote a couple of papers that shows that if you reduce the caloric intake of somebody who's already starving by just even 10 or 15 percent over the course of a year, they're going to starve to death.
And we're looking at 10 to 20 percent reductions for sure in the rice and the corn crops in China and the United States and even worse further north.
So I think if you're a prepper, it kind of depends what you're preparing for.
Anyway, again, I want to come back to this scenario.
And I know you don't like any scenario that involves nuclear weapons.
Nobody would.
But this particular one, India and Pakistan, let's say they really let it loose.
Somebody in North America, let's say in Ohio, I don't know, what effects would that person in Ohio have to live with over any number of months or years?
Well, I can give you some pretty good answers to that.
The scientists that did these studies, they compared it to, you know, there was a volcanic eruption, the largest one in the last 500 years called Mount Tambura.
And the summer that followed that eruption was called, well, it was called the Year Without Summer.
That was actually when they wrote the novel Frankenstein.
But there was killing, in North America, there were killing frosts every month of the year in June, July, and August in New England.
And there was famine in England, in Europe.
There wasn't much of a density of population in the United States, and there was enough wildlife and everything.
I don't think there was famine here, but so they predict that the cold that would follow the sort of war that you're describing between India and Pakistan would actually be twice as cold.
It would be colder than it's been in the last 1,000 years, would be the average surface temperatures.
Well, you're going to have a really severe winter.
As far as food, well, you know, who knows?
The United States, a lot of things have changed here in the last 10 or 20 or 30 years, and we're really dependent on so many different types of imports that would have been sort of a joke if we thought about it in the 1970s and 60s.
I don't know.
Our whole infrastructure is very fragile in terms of there's a couple days worth of food, maybe a week's worth at the most in our grocery stores.
So if something breaks down under those circumstances, then we're going to be in trouble.
I don't know.
I don't think it's going to be below freezing every day here.
It's not going to be that cold.
It's not going to be literally colder than ice age weather, but it's going to be damn cold, and I suspect food's going to be scarce.
But when you get into a situation with nuclear war and global famine, I think that just totally destabilizes the international relations.
Of course.
Who knows what that would lead to?
So when you try to make predictions on that, it's kind of...
Well, radiation is something that, you know, it's funny because I don't talk about it quite so much with, because once you can kill everybody with the climatic consequences, with, you know, cold where you can't grow food.
But radiation is a big, that's sort of, it's almost, you can do a whole show on that.
It depends on what gets targeted in a nuclear war.
You know, our nuclear power plants now, we have over 100 in the United States, and on site they store about five to ten sets of used fuel rods that they've been removed over the course.
And these, they call them spent fuel pools.
They're like swimming pools where they have to be kept underwater because of the intense radioactivity, which also produces a lot of heat that has to be removed.
Professor Stephen Starr is my guest, and here I come again, Professor.
I'm in Ohio, and Pakistan decides to decapitate the other side.
And so they get into a full-fledged war.
I'm going to probably be able to survive if I'm a prepper, if I've got food.
It's going to get cold.
And I know that people who speak, people like you who speak in front of whoever it would be, don't even like to talk about nuclear exchanges that would be survivable because you don't want them at all, right?
Part of it is because, you know, I have a habit of trying not to make predictions that I'm not, you know, it's a scientific approach where you don't say what you can't prove.
But I think your description of what the post-war scenario is like is accurate.
And I mean, I think it would be a nightmare.
It would be really cold, and it wouldn't just be for a year.
This would be like 10 years without summer almost.
It would be colder than it's been in the last thousand years.
And that 100 atomic bombs that were detonated in that war have about, you know, maybe even less than 1% of the explosive power of the weapons that the United States and Russia have ready to launch.
Well, it wouldn't be a mutual assured destruction in their case because they have like 10 atomic bombs or so.
But, you know, at the moment.
Yeah, but all these arsenals are getting bigger.
Even India and Pakistan at some point are going to start producing thermonuclear weapons, strategic nuclear weapons, instead of just atomic bombs.
So there's got to be a point where people, well, actually there is a point.
There's a thing called the Austrian Pledge.
There was a meeting in Austria, and 113 nations have signed this request.
They're trying to get a conference together, but they're calling for the banning of nuclear weapons in the same way that chemical and biological weapons would be banned.
And then the ban after a ban, of course, there would be an elimination.
And guess what?
Guess who's against that?
The five nuclear weapon states.
Oh, no, no, we don't need that.
This is disruptive of our process.
We want to stick with the nonproliferation treaty because that's doing just fine.
But it's been 50 years since that was signed.
And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the nuclear weapons states are busy modernizing their arsenals.
As you mentioned, a trillion dollars to build.
We're rebuilding our entire nuclear weapons manufacturing complex in the United States is what's going to happen.
In Kansas City here in Missouri, they just are finishing this gigantic hundred millions of dollars going into a facility that builds all the non-nuclear components, but that's about 80% of the bomb.
And it was the biggest construction project in Missouri.
And I thought, you know, there's really something wrong with our society when our biggest project is to build a new nuclear weapons plant.
I started talking about nuclear power plants in the U.S., and maybe I really wasn't answering your question there.
As far as the radiation from that exchange, I think there would be a lot of it.
If you detonate a weapon on the surface as opposed into the air, you get like a really nasty fallout.
But what happens there is those sorts of fallout from that gets rained out and spread more regionally than globally.
You have to have about a 100-kiloton weapon for the fireball to go above the trophosphere or where the weather takes place up into the stratosphere where it's above cloud level and it can't get rained out.
That's where the term fallout came from.
We had all these big, you know, in the South Pacific, we detonated all those hydrogen bombs and they were enormous.
You know, the largest one was 15 million tons of TNT.
And there's no such thing as a clean nuclear fission.
Anytime you split an atom, you produce a lot of radioactive byproducts.
And most of these, like the cesium-137 and strontium-90, haven't really existed during the entire time complex life has evolved and developed.
And so it's new to us.
And that's one of the things I think that's been ignored or almost suppressed.
And they focus a lot on external doses of radiation.
But another, equally or even more important is if this stuff gets into the biosphere, these long-lived radioisotopes like cesium-137, and it gets into your foodstuffs, and then you eat it, you ingest it or inhale it, it causes other diseases besides leukemia and cancer.
I spent a year helping to translate a study that was done in Belarus, that was done after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up.
And about 25% of Belarus was seriously contaminated.
And the most predominant radioisotope is cesium-137.
And it gets into everything.
Even the wood, when they burn firewood for heating and cooking, it turns their chimneys into like small nuclear reactors, you know.
But the children there are really sick.
Only less than 10% of the children in these contaminated areas are considered to be healthy.
And the study that I got translated was done over a nine-year period.
They examined 100,000 children, and they did thousands of human tissue samples done from autopsies of children and infants that had died in these areas.
And they found that the seizium concentrates in the endocrine tissues as well as the heart, the pancreas, the spleen.
And this led to all sorts of problems like heart attack, stroke, hypertension.
They call it Chernobyl heart.
It's something that these kids have.
If they don't have an operation, they die.
But after the scientist made this presentation, he went home and he presented to the parliament in Belarus.
He went home, the police came and kicked his door and they arrested him.
They went to his medical institute and destroyed all his archived slides and samples from nine years' worth of research, and they put him in a prison camp for six years.
So this information hasn't been made public.
I presented it at the New York Academy of Medicine about a year, a little over a year ago.
But if you go to the EPA website and you look at CZ-137, they say it's uniformly distributed in the body.
Well, it's not true.
But again, the nuclear industry has so much influence and power that they dispute all this, of course.
And they say the sort of doses that these children are exposed to pose no threat to human health.
So there's a real fundamental argument going on here.
But these are the health physicists that are trained by the nuclear industry.
They have their own safety standards they develop.
And these health physicists actually aren't doctors.
They have no real training in medicine.
But they dispute what the scientists and doctors are saying.
And, you know, they still have an area that's an exclusion zone.
But they say, well, we're opening that up.
They're trying to make it scrape off enough dirt so people can drive into these cities that they wash their roofs off on and pretend like it's safe.
But I don't think we know.
That's the worst thing about all this.
All the atmospheric weapons tests.
You know, we detonated 100 atomic bombs in the deserts of New Mexico.
And I honestly think that is the largest environmental disaster in American history.
They kept all the fallout secret from people.
They didn't even know what was happening.
So all of the combination of that has raised amounts of ionizing radiation to much higher than, you know, there really wasn't background levels until we started detonating nuclear weapons.
And we don't know what the long-term genetic consequences of this stuff is.
I think that it could lead to all sorts of genetic diseases that maybe are just starting to appear now.
Yeah, I mean, traditionally, that's what war is all about.
You know, you want to conquer the other country and take advantage of their wealth and their people.
That's the problem with nuclear war.
Besides the fact that we'll all starve to death afterwards, you know, the contamination and destruction from these weapons goes beyond time and space.
We're talking, you know, it transcends, it'll last for centuries or millennia.
And they really are.
They're not precise weapons.
If you look at the weapons that NATO has, for example, when you were mentioning those in your introduction, I think the B-61 bomb that the U.S. is actually, it's actually a new nuclear weapon that we're creating.
It has a, they call it dial a yield, a variability yield, where it goes from 300 tons or 0.3 kilotons of TNT up to 50,000 tons.
There's different mods or models.
There's some that actually go up to 170,000 tons.
But these weapons, they're guided weapons, and so they can be used very precisely.
But it makes them more, what they would call usable.
And so therefore, it makes it more likely that they will be used.
There's this whole psyche of, well, we have to have a credible threat.
And in order to make our threat believable, we have to have weapons that it looks like we would use them.
But, you know, we're backing ourselves into a corner where someday, what happens if we do have to use them?
You know, there's then you go from, then you actually start a nuclear war.
And if you're fighting with somebody that has nuclear weapons, like Russia, they have plenty of, you know, weapons like that, battlefield weapons they call them, or tactical.
And they can respond in kind.
And all the war games that were ever done with NATO, for example, during the Cold War, once they crossed, they called it the nuclear firebreak, once they went from using conventional high-explosive weapons to nuclear, it was only a matter of time before it escalated into just a complete nuclear war, Holocaust.
Yes, how quickly do you feel that that threshold would be...
Let's say that Putin decides that he wants what they had, the old Soviet Union, and they begin moving into state after state after state, attempting to reform what they had.
Now, to some degree, NATO, I guess, would at some point step in, but boy, oh boy, when you start talking about it in real life, understanding what would happen if we stepped in, we would be probably really cautious.
And I don't know how many countries would fall before we decided we would step in.
And once we did, even a small exchange, artillery, for example, they have nuclear weapons that can be fired by artillery, right?
But we certainly have plenty of what we would call tactical nuclear weapons.
You know, you don't even have to get to a situation where you're imagining that Russia would invade.
The U.S. has moved something like 700 tanks.
We're in the process of moving enough to arm a mechanized division to Poland and the Baltic states.
That's right.
And what if Russia was doing that to the United States?
What if they were moving a mechanized division to Mexico?
How would we react?
Putin's under a lot of pressure to react to these sorts of things.
If you remember their Victory Day parade that they had the anniversary, 70th anniversary of them defeating the Nazis in World War II, and the Western leaders in Obama decided not to go to Moscow, right?
But at the same time, what was going on was in Estonia, NATO was having a war game with something like 15,000 troops and planes and tanks from nine member states, which is 150 miles away from Russia's second largest city, St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad in World War II, where they had 800,000 people die when the Nazis surrounded it.
You know, the total, the Russians had 27 million people that died in World War II.
We had 400,000, 414,000 or something like that.
So it's a big deal.
You know, when you start doing stuff on their border, I worry that when we pile up these forces, even in the Cold War, American forces were, the closest they were to Russia were in West Germany.
They were never on the Russian border.
So we're actually in a more dangerous situation now than we were then, in my opinion.
I've read some different scenarios where they think North Korea has so much artillery that's in range of Seoul that they could actually almost destroy the city without a nuclear weapon.
And they could reserve their nuclear weapons for the harbors, for example, to prevent troops from coming in.
Good point.
There's a lot of...
There might be as many people killed in that as, there might be 10 or 20 or 50 million people killed in a nuclear war with that.
But it's still, I don't think you have to have the like 100, say the 100 detonations that we talked about in India and Pakistan before you create this global smoke layer.
So there is sort of a threshold for the whole nuclear winter process, but it hasn't really been defined as such.
Professor, what do we know about North Korea's bombs?
We have monitored any number of and I've heard mixed things, you know, like it was a partial dud or in other words, what do we think we know about where they are?
Well, any country that develops nuclear weapons begins by developing what we sort of like we did with an atomic bomb, a relatively simple bomb.
You know, if you have highly enriched uranium and you can slam two pieces together, that's the very simplest one.
We didn't even test that before we dropped the first one in Hiroshima because we knew it would work.
If you make it from plutonium, which is what the North Koreans have done because they had a reactor and they irradiate the fuel rods, they produce the plutonium that way.
They extract it.
Then it's harder to make an atomic bomb from plutonium because you have to, because of the nature of plutonium, you have to implode it.
That was an invention in the Manhattan Project.
They actually had to create concentrically placed explosive charges on the exterior.
They had something the size of, say, a grapefruit that they made into the size of a walnut by exploding everything on the outside.
And then that creates fission.
So that's why the North Koreans have to test their weapons to make sure they work.
I've never tried to offer political solutions for a lot of problems.
My goal has been to explain the existential threat that these weapons pose and hope that's enough of a motivation factor to try to lead to some constructive.
Well, you know, when you talk about building a nuclear weapon, there's a number of things that people don't usually appreciate.
When you enrich uranium, which means that you're increasing the concentration of the isotope U-235, that's only, you know, about seven-tenths of 1% existing uranium.
When you get up to a 20% enrichment, you actually can create, it's called weapons usable.
You can make a weapon from that, but it's so big you couldn't make it into a bomb or put it on a missile.
It's not what they call deliverable.
So the process of weaponization, of getting higher enrichments is how you move to make a weapon or a warhead that you could put on a missile.
I think that the impression I got is that Iran was fairly close to getting like a 20% enrichment on a lot of their uranium, but I don't, you know, after that, it's just you read one report or another, like you said, you don't really know.
Well, you know, what's amazed me, my biggest frustration, and if your listeners want to, something I'd suggest that they try to accomplish, we can't get the leaders of the nuclear weapon states.
We can't get Obama to meet with these scientists.
He can't get his advisors to meet with the scientists to discuss their studies.
They just want to say, hey, look, we've done this remarkable research with state-of-the-art computers, and it's been evaluated all around the world by the world's best scientists.
And this is what's going to happen if you have a nuclear war.
There has to be, somebody has to have enough guts to get out on the world stage.
I think it has to be one of the leaders of the nuclear weapons state and say, look, you know, we're having all these problems getting along and everything.
But what we have to talk about and what we have to understand is that if we have a nuclear war, we're going to kill not only everybody in our nations, but everybody else on the planet.
And, you know, the other nations around the world are actually coming to grips with this, and that's why you can have an Austrian pledge with 113 nations calling for banning nuclear weapons.
But, you know, the nuclear weapon states are resisting this.
That's what really troubles me is that here in my own country, we can't even get a hearing.
And these guys are the best scientists in the world.
They're not doing this on the back of an envelope.
They're doing it in their National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Colorado Boulder, Rutgers.
I actually, you know, I was a nuclear engineer when I first went into school, but I sort of had a process of realization where I thought, you know, I don't want to do that.
It was a long time ago, admittedly, back in the 70s, when they were pretty much stopping building reactors.
But regardless, I looked at the problems with nuclear waste and the nuclear weapons, and it just didn't feel right.
So I went into biological sciences.
But, you know, I have some friends, like you said, I've got a good friend, Greg Mello, out in New Mexico.
They have a Los Alamos study group.
And he, you know, he talks to a lot of the people that work there and, you know, the weapons designers.
And so, and these aren't, these aren't like, I don't know.
I don't consider them evil, you know, bad people, but I do think that where do we, somebody has to say this is enough.
You know, somebody has to come to grips with the fact that we just can't keep doing this.
Well, you know, some of the people I have spoken to, there was a former commander of the Strategic Air Command, Lee Butler, and there's a few other military guys that I've met with that have all rejected nuclear weapons and nuclear war.
And, you know, some of them do it because they just say, well, there's no military utility in it.
We can't use these weapons, you know, because if we do...
So just from that sort of pragmatic military viewpoint, and the concern that they have is that the younger generations now are sort of becoming accustomed to them.
I was going to sort of jump ahead to if we do have a full exchange with Russia, something I consider really possible, unfortunately, either getting started by accident or on purpose.
And we haven't even discussed the accident part of it.
I want to get to that.
But if we did have the full exchange, not that I guess we would be around to observe the effects, but what do the models say would happen to our atmosphere and the magnetic field that protects us anyway?
Well, the models that I've been referring to primarily focus on what would happen as a result of the nuclear firestorms that producing tens of billions of tons of smoke that rise above cloud level and the stratosphere blocks sunlight and blocks 70% of the sunlight in the northern hemisphere for 10 years.
So if you were standing in a field in Ohio, you were talking about Ohio earlier, and it was midday, if it was a little bit of a cloudy day, it would be about like standing outside at midnight on a full moon.
That's how dark it would be.
So that's why it would be below freezing every day for one to three years.
You know, I thought you were going to ask about electromagnetic pulse.
I don't know what the predictions are for the electromagnetic layer.
The studies that I've looked at don't really consider that.
But the presentation I made at the New York Academy of Medicine this year, I did talk about what would happen if the grid went down for a long time and we had enough EMP from weapons that would cause all the nuclear power plants to melt down in the United States.
So that could be something we might want to talk about.
Well, you know, it really wouldn't take very many.
I think that's part of the reason why they worry about nations getting any nuclear weapons.
You know, if you have a relatively high-yield weapon, it can knock out tens of thousands of square miles worth of all, you know, anything with a transistor in it, would melt down basically the control panels at nuclear power plants.
I think that they would detonate those several hundred miles high.
They have, you know, I'm sure they figured all this out.
The Russians actually tested, we did a few tests ourselves before they had the atmospheric test ban treaty.
They detonated one over the Pacific and it knocked out the power in Honolulu.
But there was a study that was done about electromagnetic pulse congressional study, and I got a copy of it, but I don't know if they had a classified version or not, but I was really very disappointed to see that they didn't address what would happen to nuclear power plants.
And so I did talk, you know, Arne Gunderson, I bet.
He's like really former, he's a nuclear engineer that really knows his stuff.
I've talked to him about it.
He said that one high-altitude nuclear detonation over the east coast of the United States could knock out like 60 nuclear power plants.
And what would happen was that the reactors would melt down, and then also the spent fuel pools that I'd mentioned earlier, that have five to ten times more radioactivity, long-lived radioactivity than the cores do, they would boil off.
Once the cooling stops, the water heats up and will boil.
And when it gets down to the point where the rods are exposed to steam or air, then those rods will rupture.
And if they've been removed recently enough from the reactor core, they'll burn.
And that would release an enormous amount of radioactivity.
Nuclear power plants produce a lot more of the long-lived isotopes than nuclear detonations do.
For example, one nuclear spent fuel pool has more cesium-137 in it than all the atmospheric weapons tests combined released, over a thousand tests.
And we have 100 of those pools scattered around the United States.
When I did my studies on this, I was looking at the there's an exclusion map of around the destroyed Chernobyl power plant.
There's about 1,100 square miles, where they call it a radioactive exclusion zone where people aren't allowed to live.
And when I was looking at the map one day, I realized that the key for that map was based on how much cesium-137 was in the soil.
And they described that in terms of Beckrolls.
And I'm not going to give, but what it amounted to was that less than about 1.2 grams of cesium-137 contain enough radioactivity to make a square mile uninhabitable for a couple centuries.
An American dime weighs, you know, like just two or three grams.
I think it's 2.7 grams.
So less than half the weight of a dime of cesium-137, if you make that into an aerosol or a smoke and spread it over a square mile, you can't live there for 100 years.
And so the average spent fuel pool in the United States has close to 2,000 pounds of cesium-137 in each pool.
So, and see, cesium is a very volatile element.
It's almost like mercury.
So around 700 degrees, it actually turns into a gas.
And, you know, these rods are hot.
The reason they're so radioactive, the radioactivity creates heat.
And if they lose the cooling and they're exposed to air, once they get up to about 700 degrees, the cesium inside the rod becomes a gas and starts to expand.
It'll cause the rod to rupture.
And that's why, like at Fukushima, for example, so much cesium was released because when all those fuel rods, the reactors melted down, it released all the cesium.
it went up into the air and the winds blew it around and then it rained out.
And so there's, Yeah, there'd be 50 or 60 plants that could melt down just from one bomb.
It might be academic because at that point we would consider that to be an act of war and we would be in a nuclear conflict almost instantly, wouldn't we?
But there's just as an aside too, I'd like to point out to your listeners that a huge solar flare, like the one they had at 1849, I think it was a Carrington value.
If we had anything similar to that today, it would destroy all the really large transformers around the United States that support the grid.
And the grid would be down for six months to maybe a couple years.
So that's another issue with all these spent fuel pools.
It's not nuclear war, but it's something that we ought to worry about.
So that's another reason why I'm not really a big fan of nuclear power.
I see that in my opinion, that's something that we need to address immediately.
We have to get the spent fuel out of these swimming pools and into at least interim storage.
Okay, well, maybe some people might resent that, but it's always out of sight, out of mind.
And there is a place, for example, in Finland, it's called Ancalo, where they're building the only real scientific approach to nuclear waste storage.
It's about seven miles deep.
It's going to take them over a century to build it.
It's enough to store their waste from four or five nuclear reactors.
There's a movie called Into Eternity that your listeners might want to watch on YouTube.
And what's really amazing about that is it gets you start to think about how long the stuff has to be isolated from the biosphere.
We're talking like a million years.
I don't think we should make any industrial toxins that last that long, that are that toxic at an atomic or molecular level.
So if you have an accident at a wind tower, you know, for wind energy, you know, it might kill a couple of towers if the turbine, a couple of cows if the tower falls over, but we don't have to worry about evacuating the entire state.
But, I mean, my goodness, if they're sitting up there on satellites, now you're talking about, I don't know that there'd be any warning at all, would there?
But I could tell you about our, they call it depressed trajectories.
You know, if they fire from a submarine-launched ballistic missile off the coast, you can use a trajectory that's not typical, like it goes up and this way up and comes down.
Then you can shorten the flight time and make it really hard to detect.
And that's the problem.
You know, we have the system, they call it, the article I wrote that was published in the Bolshevik Atomic Scientist today was about the dangers of launch on warning.
And once the U.S. and Russia constructed these early warning systems on each side, and they basically kind of hooked them up to their national command authority, you know, the president, and then the ICBMs that we have in our silos, the buried underground, they got crews sitting there 24-7 waiting for a launch order.
Yeah, but that all gets back to the military mindset of essentially thinking about these almost like we did with conventional weapons and ignoring the scientific consequences of their use to the environment.
Because if somebody launches a large nuclear strike, we're cooked.
And so if we retaliate, we'll make it worse.
But that's the reason why we're advocating that, first of all, we stand these weapons down so that you can't launch them before, or at the very least, you would not launch a strike before a nuclear detonation confirms that the strike has occurred.
I mean, let me, for a moment, make you the president, which I know you don't want to be, but you now have your military coming to you, President Starr, and saying they've launched.
The other side has launched your orders, Mr. President.
Well, I would say that if I was, I suppose if I had not been president long enough to arrange for the weapons to be stood down, I would say we will not launch unless there's confirmation of the attack, because there's been more than one occasion where there have been false warnings of attack.
They rolled the lids back off the silos.
That happened in 1985 when they had a faulty computer chip at NORAD.
And it signaled that a massive Soviet strike was underway when, in fact, it was just a 50-cent computer chip that had gone bad.
But see, they stopped, you know, I wrote about this some years ago, but they stopped publicizing this information.
But we do know that in 1995, for example, the Russians sent a letter to say, yeah, well, actually, it was Norway.
And they sent a letter to Russia and said, we're going to have a launch of a missile.
It's a weather satellite.
Well, they didn't get it.
And so when this missile was launched, it appeared to the Russians that it was from a U.S. submarine launched ballistic missile.
And they went to full alert.
You know, they had their nuclear briefcases open, and they were ready to launch a retaliatory strike, because there's some scenarios that involve a single weapon using EMP, say, over Moscow, that would disable their communication systems.
So it was plausible to them that even though it was one missile, it could be a prelude to a nuclear attack.
But again, we're not told about all the false alerts and things that they have.
We're just reassured that don't worry, we're in control and everything's fine.
This sort of clampdown in the media ever since the Cold War has ended, I mean, there was plenty during the Cold War, but since, with it now being even more dangerous and there is so little education of the kind that we're doing tonight actually out there, what's up with that?
Well, I do appreciate the fact that you're willing to have me on your show and discuss this subject because it's really important.
The reason I teach a course at the university is because I thought, well, where do you start?
If we have an uninformed public, then eventually the leaders that we elect are uninformed too.
And that's what I see.
There was Global Zero was interviewing a number of the people on the Armed Forces Committee, and none of them knew how many nuclear weapons the United States had.
Yeah, you know, when was the last time people even observed a nuclear weapon that meeting?
I'm not saying we should have one so they could watch, but I'm not convinced that people fully understand.
You can look at the numbers and all this, but do they really know?
And there's another issue that's never discussed that I think we should mention is that how does the ability of the president to launch a nuclear attack, how does that mix with our whole idea of limitation of powers and the War Resolution Act of 1973, where the president is not supposed to be able to declare war?
I've got a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney in 2008, and he said, the president of the U.S. is now, for 50 years, is filed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen.
He doesn't have to check with anybody.
He doesn't have to call Congress.
He doesn't have to check with the courts.
And that's the truth.
That's the way it is.
So that, to me, what that means is we have a small, very, you know, one person or at least a very small group of political and military leaders that have the ability to launch a nuclear war that we have nothing to say about.
But both, no matter where Obama goes or Putin goes, there's somebody in the background with a nuclear suitcase that allows them to give the permission order to launch a nuclear strike.
And it only takes 15 to 30 seconds to give that order.
And they call Minutemen missiles that for a reason, because it only takes two or three minutes for them to launch.
There's some new stuff in the calling this show world, and we'll get to that.
The public number for you to call if you would like to speak or have a question for Professor Starr.
Public number is area code 952-225-5278.
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Once again, 775-285-5800.
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But before we get to the phones, and they're coming up shortly, Professor, welcome back.
A good question would be, if the Earth did endure a full exchange between the U.S. and Russia, how long might it take, or would it ever recover and be habitable again?
Well, I think from what I can understand myself, what would happen was most, it would be like a mass extinction event, similar to when the best example is when meteorites hit the Earth.
And that was when the dinosaurs were wiped out about 66 billion years ago.
They know that an asteroid, a metallic asteroid about six miles in diameter, hit the Yucatan Peninsula.
And when it hit, it threw up enough heated material into the, that when it came down, it actually heated the upper atmosphere to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, created temperatures at surface level about 600 degrees, 700 degrees.
It set all the forests of the world on fire.
And they call that impact winter.
It was so dark that you could have held your hand in front of your face and you wouldn't have seen it.
But that's worse than what a nuclear war would do in terms of the atmospheric effects.
But the result was that like 70% of all the species on Earth got wiped out.
And no animals larger than probably a squirrel lived.
So we're looking at something that's analogous to that.
And I think the sad thing is the people that are in charge need to understand that they can't go live in a shelter underground for 10 or 20 years and expect to come out.
If you're in an environment where there's very few, if any, animals left and the forests have been destroyed, that's not really habitable when you're at the top of the food chain.
So that's why I think we have to look at this as, we have to somehow come to grips with this as a species problem.
And we have to think of nuclear war as a mass extinction event as opposed to, you know, we talk about destroying civilization and all that.
Well, those sorts of catastrophes are almost incomprehensible, but yet they're still survivable.
But extinction is quite permanent by definition.
And that's why I think, that's why I resent when we get feedback from the White House saying, you know, we went, I didn't, but some of the people in a group I work with, PSR, went and talked to John Holdren, Obama's advisor, shortly after Obama was first elected.
And they were told that, well, we think that if the prompt effects of nuclear war don't prevent war from happening, then the long-term effects aren't really that important.
Well, they certainly are important.
For example, if you live in a country that's not involved in the war, it's not even in the target area, but all your people are going to starve to death as a result.
And, you know, if you actually, if we have a war where they bomb all the nuclear power plants and put immense amounts of this long-lived radioactive, you know, ionizing radiation into the atmosphere, and God only knows what that happens.
That to me is almost unthinkable.
But what we're talking about really with the studies that we talk about with the smoke and the blocking, the light and the cold, there would be a lesser degree of light being blocked in the southern hemisphere, but they predict like 35 to 40 percent.
But still, there's going to be such a global cooling effect that for all practical purposes, it won't matter.
It might not be quite as dark and not quite as cold, but you still won't be able to grow any food.
And, you know, I asked one of the scientists about this, and they said, well, you know, there may be some people at the equator that might survive.
But, you know, I have an article in the Federation of American Scientists that's going to be published this month called Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction.
And the point I try to make is that I don't think it's worth getting into an academic debate about whether or not all the people would be killed.
But just the fact that there's a good chance that they would be, to me, is enough, that that should be a fairly powerful, enough of a motivation to at least publicly acknowledge and discuss this.
The nuclear weapon states won't do it.
None of their leaders will come out and talk about any of this stuff.
They just want to talk about the deterrent and nuclear war deters.
But in order to have deterrence, all sites have to remain rational.
They have to fear death.
That doesn't seem like it's going to be the case forever.
And, you know, I think the real issue I see is that everything is wired.
So, you know, when we had the Cuban Missile Crisis that you mentioned earlier, we didn't have launch-ready nuclear weapons at that time and all these things hooked up that we could launch, you know, 2,000 strategic warheads in a matter of, you know, less than 15 minutes.
But we do now.
And things can happen so fast.
You put these forces in Europe on Russia's border and a jet plane can overfly and a missile can go off.
And things can happen quickly.
And both the U.S. and Russia have operated on what they call the counter-force military doctrine for decades.
And what that does is it tasks the military to destroy the other side.
In the event of war, the military's mission is to destroy the other side's nuclear forces before they can be used to destroy you.
So once war starts, all the calculations change.
Then you get into the fog of war, and then what happens?
It's too fast.
Everything's hooked up.
So the last thing we needed to do is to keep pounding our chests and threatening.
And I don't see any simple way around it except by just getting, let's cut to the chase, get some leader to come out and say, look, if we have a war, we're all going to die, and we really need to talk about this.
Well, you know, I really am referring, my concern is with the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals because they've got 15 out of the 16,000 weapons on the planet.
And, you know, who knows?
I admit a lot of people say, yeah, yeah, right.
You know, wishful thinking.
But I don't really know any other way to approach this.
don't have a political solution to every problem.
I don't think it's...
You have to have some kind of Trump card.
And to me, this is it.
It's like, well, if we have a war, everybody dies.
Mutual assured destruction is really self-assured destruction.
Even with our successful first strike, we're going to die.
You know, if the Vatican and the Pope, they can get behind nuclear disarmament.
It helps when you get that sort of dialogue going.
And, you know, another thing that has not made the news big time, but at the American, the International Red Cross has come out strongly in favor of banning and eliminating nuclear weapons.
The MCOS hasn't joined in because of political pressure, but they certainly, International has made it, come on record for it.
I don't think there are, although I would say that I have no way to know that they're not.
I think that they don't really have to keep them in space because they have so many ready to go here on Earth that they can hit any target they want on Earth at least, at the very most, an hour, and most of the time, 30 minutes or less.
And that's part of the reason when they talk about moving nuclear weapons to Europe.
You know, this is all a political thing.
Although it's dangerous, because if you put forward-based nuclear weapons, say, in NATO countries, then you make them, in a sense, not only easier to use, but they're also more at risk for terrorism and threat.
It's a bad idea.
And you can still hit any target you want with a U.S. Trident sub can carry up to 200 warheads, you know, that are independently targetable.
Under the START Treaty, they supposedly carry less.
But just one sub has enough warheads to take out every major city in Russia or whatever.
And they also have outfitted some of these subs to carry conventional warheads.
I mean, I'm not sure what our national technical capability is, but I'm sure they monitor, you know, each side always monitors their launches and stuff.
The Russians, in the 1990s, it was a mess over there.
And at this point, they have lost almost most of their early warning system capability from satellites, just ground-based.
So they're putting it back up, I believe.
But I don't know, you know, the U.S., even though the military moans and groans about, you know, not having enough funds and everything, we've constantly modernized our arsenal, you know, and these weapons are, if they were that dangerous or unsafe, we'd certainly...
They are, I don't think...
But in terms of military thinking, when they complain about a weapon being unreliable, what they're talking about is not whether or not it will detonate, but they're worried about the explosive power being within a few percent of what they want it to be, because that goes into their calculations for blasts and all that.
I just want to ask your guest, isn't it true that Russia, both Russia and the United States both have the way Russia is called dead end, which is the automatic retaliatory system?
In case no one is alive, he will retaliate automatically.
I knew one of the guys, his name was Colonel Valeri Yarinich.
I wrote an article with him and worked together with him.
He actually helped design that.
It went into operation around 1985.
And Valeri passed away a couple years ago, but he had told me that as far as he knew, it was still in operation.
It's called Perimeter, or the Dead Hand is the nickname.
It's called the Dead Hand, which, as your caller suggests, is designed in the event that there's a decapitating first strike.
There's a surprise attack that kills everybody in Moscow and prevents them from issuing a launch order.
There's a command module that's about 60 miles away from Moscow that there's a couple of guys or officers that sit there.
And Colonel Urenich wrote about this in his book.
He said there's a couple criteria that has to be done.
First, there has to be an early warning from the National Command Authority that an attack is imminent.
Then there has to be a complete loss of communication.
And they have a lot of redundant.
They have radio, they have satellite, they have fiber optic, all sorts of.
They've never ever, he told me in the history of their strategic rocket forces, lost communication with, you know, this.
But so they would lose communication, and then almost simultaneously they would have nuclear detonation detectors that are optic and seismic and radiological.
And if all these criteria are met in a very precise timeframe that corresponds with the warning of attack, then they launch, they're called emergency communication rockets.
These rockets, after they take off, they broadcast a signal that overrides all human interference.
It just automatically launches any surviving nuclear forces.
You know, from a military standpoint, they said, well, this is good because it prevents us from launching on warning, on just electronic signals if it's a false warning of attack.
But, you know, I always wondered what would happen if something went wrong with one of the rockets.
Just the fact that that means that there has to be radio signals or frequencies that can be broadcast that can launch nuclear weapons, I don't find that reassuring.
KI4LWA, and I've listened to you for over 10 years, and the reason I know is I just renewed my ham radio license, so I entirely blame my joy in the hobby on you because you always spoke of it, and that's what got me in the hobby.
Well, if 10 meters ever comes back, I'll be there.
Do you have a question for my guest?
unidentified
Yes, sir, I do.
Good evening, Stephen.
Love the conversation.
It's one of those that's just so deep it's hard to know where to start swimming.
But I guess what came to me, I've got a quick comment, a question and a comment.
My question, Stephen, is with all the, I just think the Middle East is still probably the place this stuff might happen, but with the portable suitcase nukes, different things like that, if you think there's ever been a detonation that we haven't heard about, the tactical nukes, all that stuff is probably over in that theater.
And how many of those do you think are out there rolling around and possibly could go off?
And then my hope is, Art for the World, is that maybe if we can last a few more years, that the particle beam weapons, and that's what I think might be in space, honestly, is like that video of the space shuttle when that thing shot up and the number was to.
So I'm hoping that our technology will make these things obsolete someday.
And they tested them over, I guess, in the Atlantic with the help of Israel.
And, you know, the only way to detect something like that was with a satellite, and because people aren't going to see that, I guess your guest may be referring more to a detonation that took place that, you know, that there would be visible destruction.
You know, I'm getting pretty cynical about almost all the news and things that we hear now because I honestly think we get so much propaganda rather than facts.
A lot of the facts are being omitted.
But, you know, there's a lot of technical capability out there to register radioactivity.
And that even goes along with, say, trying to clandestinely manufacture nuclear weapons.
It's amazing what they can detect in the atmosphere of radionuclides if somebody's got sensitive equipment.
So I've always thought that, you know, there's enough, even though a lot of these scientists are linked to the government, the government might tell them, don't release any information.
There's still people that have equipment that monitor that.
I honestly think if there was a nuclear detonation, you would be able to detect it from atmospheric radiation as well as the site.
That enormous explosion they just had in Tianjin in China, that was literally, that was like between five and ten kilotons from what I can see with this blast calculation.
But when you miniaturize a nuclear weapon to that extent, it's actually a very technical process.
It's nothing at all like putting together an atomic bomb.
The first atomic bomb was just basically a cannon barrel with two highly enriched pieces of uranium that they fired one through the barrel into the other.
But when you try to miniaturize a nuclear weapon, it's very complex.
And the experts that I've read about said that over time they degrade.
And it would be, the first reports I read about that were in the late 90s.
I think it was Alexander Lebed.
It was a Russian guy that announced this.
But even if it was true that they weren't able to keep track of them, my opinion is if anybody really got their hands on one of those, they probably would have used it.
I think if a terrorist organization or somebody gets a nuclear weapon, they're not going to just sit around and say, well, let's wait until a really good time.
I think the Russians said that they'd made something like 90 or 100.
Lebed said that they could only find 50 or 60 of them.
So, you know, who the hell knows?
But, you know, there's a lot of things that are even, to me, are scarier.
The Soviets had nuclear materials scattered all over the place.
In Kazakhstan, they were working on nuclear rocket engines.
And they had enough, you know, uranium and plutonium down there to make 60 atomic bombs.
And we went in, the United States went in and got a lot of that out with the help.
You know, that was back when we were actually kind of working with the Russians.
But it's really, I swear to God, it's just amazing that we haven't had a bomb go off somewhere.
It really is.
There's so much highly enriched uranium that's out there that's been manufactured that it's just really a miracle that we haven't had it put together and used in a bomb someplace.
My question, sir, actually, I read an article a couple of months back.
I believe they asked a Russian defense minister.
It was just a basic scenario that the Russians said they would drop a nuclear weapon into, I believe it was Yellowstone National Park, since it is an active volcano, and that would basically just disrupt the United States, breaking it half.
I don't know if that's, you know, if that's a scenario that we're talking about.
You know, I'm sorry, I'm not, but I'd like to read it.
unidentified
Okay, he's a professor of politics at Ohio State University.
He argues, or at least he tries to reassure us, that the states so far and the future ones, such as maybe Iran, who may be getting nuclear weapons, will soon find out that, like the military people you mentioned earlier, that there's really nothing you can really accomplish with them if you actually use them.
Well, unless you're dedicated, I guess he's not hearing me, unless you're dedicated to the destruction of a nation like Israel, unless you're actually dedicated to doing that, and then there would be something you could do with them, right?
You know, let me say that there was a general in India that made a comment about, you know, they said, well, which nation got invaded?
Was it North Korea or Iraq?
So there is a perception out there that having nuclear weapons, if you're a small nation, might provide you with a means to escape invasion.
In a sense, it's sort of like a six-shooter in the Old West.
And that's why Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry published some articles in the New York Times a number of years ago.
They actually called for the abolition of nuclear weapons because their perception was that the United States was so far ahead with its conventional weapons that nobody would ever be able, you know, the small nations can't even think about catching up.
But the way they can kind of equalize the situation is to build some atomic bombs.
Well, you have to do more than just write letters and join organizations.
That's the first step.
But I think it's time for, you know, what gets attention these days?
You have to do something.
You know, you have to, so there used to be protests and even those, when we had a million people in Washington, D.C. in 1982.
But that was back when we had more of an educated public.
You know, I'm not sure if we have time to educate the whole public about this, but it's my hope that at least pressure can be brought upon the leadership to continue If they know about this danger and they refuse to act on it, they turn their heads.
If it's more convenient to keep your nuclear weapons than it is to discuss the fact that they can destroy human existence, then that's a criminal act.
It would be called willful blindness.
And people have to be willing to call that out.
There's some point in your life where you have to decide if you're going to do something.
You can say, well, geez, that really was a terrible show I heard, and I'd like to do something about it.
If you just forget about it, then that's not a solution.
You've got to be willing to go beyond that.
But it does, you know, we've got now, we have Twitter, we have the Internet, and things can go viral.
You know, people can get information across at lightning-like speed around the world.
So there's a capacity to educate and learn that never existed before.
Well, I believe Carl Sagan talked about that one time, and he said that he had a theory that once a civilization became intelligent enough to create nuclear power that it was more likely to self-destruct.
And that's the reason why we didn't wind up communicating with many others.
But I listened to a National Press Club conference not too long ago where there were quite a few hard-bitten military guys and Air Force pilots.
And they came forward with a lot of data showing their interactions with UFOs.
And, you know, I'm not going to rule out a lot of possibilities that are out there.
But whatever it takes for us to consider ourselves a species, you know, if it takes a disease, you know, that threatens to wipe out humanity, or if it takes a spaceship to land and we realize we're not the only life force, well, whatever it takes, it's okay with me if we can come to grips with the fact that the nuclear weapons that we have amount to a self-destruct mechanism for the human race.
Well, I think there have been studies to show that that could cause a lot of problems.
You know, maybe the biggest problem is not recognized.
The spent fuel pools that I mentioned that are each reactor stores all their used fuel rods on site in like a stainless steel lined swimming pool.
It's about 40 feet deep, the size of a tennis court.
A lot of the buildings that house those are just like concrete blocks.
They're like the buildings that would house chemical, you know, they're not a heavy duty, they're not built to the same standards like a containment vessel.
And a plane crashing into that could easily cause a massive release of radioactivity if it destroyed the cooling system on the pool or breached the pool and allowed the cooling water to be released.
Okay, well, I understand that in Fukushima, what really was their undoing was the fact that the diesel generators that had to be maintained, and they did have them, were down below ground.
You know, you can scram a nuclear power plant and shut down the fission, but there's still an enormous amount of heat that's still there that's going to, you have to keep cooling the core.
And when they lost all the off-site power, too, and their cooling systems that were, you know, flooded, they lost the ability to cool the reactor core.
And so they melted.
And honestly, the Japanese knew damn well that all of those reactors had melted down within the first couple of days of the accident.
They actually watched a cloud of radioactivity travel over Japan.
It even went over Tokyo.
And they didn't warn anybody.
I mean, it reminded me of when they had the nuclear weapons test in the United States and didn't warn people not to drink the milk and all that.
So, yeah.
Sorry, we get on a little bit of rant there, but that just knows it makes me mad whenever I see those sorts of things happening.
I remember back in the 80s, I worked for a large station in Las Vegas, KWN, and I would have to go on the air every now and then and say, people in precarious positions and, you know, window washers and all those kinds of people, please be aware that in 10 minutes or 15 minutes, whatever it was, there's going to be a detonation at the test site.
I was going to say, fortunately for us and unfortunately for Utah, that's the direction it went.
Gwen on Skype, you're on the air.
unidentified
Good morning, gentlemen.
Good morning.
Okay, if we say that hypothetically for argument's sake that city busters are passe, what about things like diable yield neutron micronukes or cobalt-60 dirty bombs or depleted uranium munitions?
We still have plenty of ways to mess things up.
But especially the dialable yield neutron tactical nuclear weapons, what do you think about that?
Well, the variable yield or dial yield weapons, you know, those would be like the B-61 weapons that we have a couple of hundred, I think 180 of those deployed over in Europe now at six or seven different NATO bases.
I don't know if any, I'm not aware that any have actually been used, but keep in mind that there's a difference.
When you talk about a nuclear detonation, that means like on a sagad, you know, fission and fireball.
That's different than a dirty bomb is a conventional bomb that spreads, blows radioactive substance apart and can contaminate an area.
DU weapons are, they're a radiological weapon, depleted uranium.
They don't have a nuclear detonation, but when they fire them, about up to 70% of the round actually burns when it strikes a target, and it releases microparticles of uranium that can be inhaled and ingested very easily.
So all these weapons are, I don't know, you know, the radioactivity I think is a really vicious kind of problem to create, to leave in an environment.
And I think it really should be considered a criminal.
Professor Raymond sends the following by computer.
Art, if nuclear warheads are not cycled out after so many years, the danger is they can have electronic malfunctions, and that includes the final guidance in the MERV warheads, non-detonation, and early detonation.
Well, you know, they have a schedule where they refurbish plutonium pits.
The plutonium itself is considered to be stable for like about a century or so.
But Pantex, they will, you know, they take weapons apart and they will refurbish.
There's a schedule for that sort of thing.
I don't, you know, I think that the United States has maintained, spent enough money to maintain its weapons that there's really very little doubt about, there may be some questions at some point about how, what the total yield would be if it's going to be as accurate or quite as precise as they would like, but there's no doubt that they'll work.
I've read about what they call it, a Faraday cage and that sorts of things you can use to protect for EMP.
And, you know, who knows?
If it really comes down to it, who knows what will happen.
But it just, my friend Colonel Yurinich always used to say, you know, he said, remember, he says, our weapons are guaranteed.
It was kind of a chilling thing.
But I just, I think that they put so much time and effort into this.
There's a good chance that some of them won't work, and there's a good chance that some of them wouldn't be launched because people would disobey orders.
But the hell of it is, is that there's still enough of them out there.
You know, like with one Trident sub, if they launched all their missiles and they have independently targeted warheads, there'd be at least 90 to up to 200 warheads that could hit a target.
We have 12 subs like that.
And so there's not a shortage of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. and Russia, the U.S. has 7,000, Russia has maybe 8,000.
But all it takes really is a few hundred strategic weapons to destroy every city.
There's only 200 or 300 cities in the United States and Russia that have populations of greater than 250,000 or so.
And there's thousands of nuclear warheads.
So even though they've dismantled, there was 70,000 or so in 1986.
They've gotten rid of two-thirds or three-quarters.
They've dismantled the weapons.
They actually have kept the plutonium pits.
So that's another reason why we don't need to make more pits.
They've got 30,000 in storage right now.
But even at that, what they didn't know all along, they didn't know these scientific studies that predicted that the environmental consequences of nuclear war are so severe that it basically wrecks a biosphere.
It leaves Earth uninhabitable long enough where most people and animals probably wouldn't survive.
Yeah, I just wanted to say, I assume that all of these generals and such and all of these government aides that are all in charge of this nuclear football and all this nuclear ordinance, I would assume generally that they're part of the old guard from the 50s, 60s, 70s.
And so I wanted to ask, with spending over a trillion dollars to redo the nuclear arsenal, is this one of the biggest retirement sort of pension scandals we've ever seen since the F-22 scandal with Lockheed Martin?
Well, I think that that's an interesting way to look at it.
But the point is that Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex back in the 1950s.
He sure did.
And this is what we see.
It's well and alive and thriving.
I thought when you were asking your question, you were going to ask whether or not these generals and all these people were aware of the information that I've been talking about.
And I want to say emphatically that as far as I can tell, they're not.
I've had a couple.
I worked at the United Nations and testified working with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Chile at a number in Geneva and New York about the effects of nuclear weapons.
And I was able to question a couple of times representatives.
The best example was when there was a joint presentation of the U.S. and Russia made a joint presentation in 2010 at the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference about the new START Treaty.
And I had a pass, so I got in and I sat down, and they didn't know who the hell I was.
I think I sat with France Plicard in front of me.
So they took my question, and I'm sure they didn't like it.
But they had the chief negotiators of START from the U.S. and Russia there.
It was Rose Goatmüller and Anatoly Antonov.
And so I asked both of them, I said, are you aware of the recent studies that predict that the detonation of just a fraction of your strategic nuclear weapons would create like a global nuclear famine that caused most people on the planet to starve?
And they both said, oh, no, we're not familiar with those.
Professor, I can only hope that this show, which is recorded, believe me, will be passed around and that a lot of people will get to hear it before it's too late.