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Sept. 29, 2015 - Art Bell

02:22:52

Art Bell MITD - Steven Starr Nuclear War

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	From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening, good
	morning, good afternoon, wherever in the globe you may be.
	All those time zones, and each and every one covered like a blanket by this program, Midnight in the Desert.
	And it's gonna be a very midnight-y program tonight, to be sure.
	You got any kids in the room?
	Get them out of the room.
	They don't need to hear this.
	The rules of this program are simple.
	No bad language.
	And only one call per show.
	Unless you're annoying and then you can't call at all.
	Alright, so I do have a little bit of news for you.
	Ah, 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.
	The CEO has already received her news.
	the whole company may be toast.
	Kind of a shame, huh?
	.
	Missed the little bug.
	And then there is this, 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.
	Oh, that must have made them really, really, really, really angry.
	That's all I can say.
	Really angry.
	Can you imagine?
	Inside the NSM.
	Sorry, NSM.
	Not really.
	I'm not laughing at you.
	I'm laughing, hopefully, with you.
	Not at you.
	All right.
	Now, in news of the other, I've got two, I think, really cool things.
	One demands an explanation from RCH who follows this program.
	It is a Mars picture.
	Now Richard really needs to look at this.
	Are you hearing me, Richard?
	You really need to look at this and tell us what this is.
	Alright?
	It is taken by the rover from Hillside on September 25th.
	It's on Artbell.com.
	I suggest you go up there right now.
	I swear It looks like a creature.
	It looks a lot like a creature, actually.
	This is taken from Mars, and it looks like an alien.
	So, and it's a real picture.
	It's no BS here.
	A real picture.
	Take a look at it.
	You tell me.
	Artbell.com.
	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 un-balloon-like speeds with un-plane-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.
	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.
	seemed 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 dollars.
	I actually said 1.3 trillion total earlier on Facebook.
	It's 1.7 Trillion dollars.
	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.
	nuclear missiles ready to launch the US has 1642 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 arsenal 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 dollars.
	Alright, coming up next, Stephen Starr, M.T., A.S.C.B., B.B., M.P.H., graduated from the School of Health Professions at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1985.
	He subsequently worked as a medical technologist over 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.
	I told you, get the kids out of the room.
	That's the third and last warning.
	Coming up next, Stephen Starr.
	I'm Art Bell and this is Midnight.
	I'm Art Bell.
	This is Midnight in the Desert with your host Hart Bell.
	Now, here's Hart.
	Here I am.
	All right.
	Here comes Stephen Starr.
	Stephen, I would like to welcome you to Midnight in the Desert.
	It's going to be a rough one.
	It's a pleasure to be on your show.
	Good to have you.
	We have never spoken, right?
	Right.
	Okay.
	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 DEFCON level.
	Really?
	Into the world of scare, really scary.
	Yes, yep, yep, I was.
	Well, I was doing duck and cover drills at the elementary school in St.
	Louis County, where I lived.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	And I think that actually left a big impression on me.
	It had an effect that partially led me to where I am today.
	I remember seeing that phone ring, and of course, I was aware of the ongoing crisis with Cuba.
	You couldn't avoid it.
	It was everywhere.
	But when that phone went, And boy, you really know it when it goes.
	My blood just ran cold.
	I thought, this is it.
	Well, it almost was.
	And frankly, it was a miracle that it wasn't.
	And again, it's a miracle that there hasn't been a nuclear detonation somewhere, or a nuclear war for that matter, since 1960s.
	We've had plenty of opportunities for that.
	We have, and I guess we've probably been closer than we know.
	Or that, you know, the public knows.
	We remain closer than the public knows.
	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 in only less than two minutes for them to be launched and to be on their way.
	And they would be here how quickly?
	If they're launched from a submarine off the coast of the U.S.
	or, you know, off of Russia, then it would take 9 to 10 minutes.
	Otherwise, from the Montana or the Ural Mountains, it takes about 30 minutes for them to make their flight.
	The Russians are saying they now have technology that would make it impossible for us to intercept their ICBM should a war begin.
	Do you believe them?
	Well, I don't want to test it.
	No.
	I think each side, 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 They're all being done in the process of ignoring the scientific predictions of the existential threat of nuclear war.
	So I take it that if you replace a kinetic weapon with a nuclear warhead, then you only have to be close?
	Yes, that's right.
	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, you know, it's more like one or two kilometers or a mile or so.
	But I've talked to Dr. Ted Possil, who's written about this.
	He's at MIT, and he You know, he said that there's always a countermeasure available.
	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, it also looks like the Test Ban Treaty is about to go up, poor choice of phrase, in smoke any minute now.
	I guess the Russians are breaking it by testing some cruise missiles, nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and so I guess it's going to go away?
	Well, you know, the thing is, there's a political spin that comes out on each side, 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.
	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.
	I have a class that I teach at the University of Missouri, and I ask my students about this.
	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 essential nature of nuclear war and the existential threat that it poses to human beings.
	So actually you're a professor, Stephen Starr, really, right?
	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.
	I guess in some ways, Stephen, that's a bad thing.
	And in some ways, maybe it's a good thing, because if they're ever used in NOS, Well, maybe I'm naive.
	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 That the nuclear arsenal of 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.
	There's very precise scientific predictions and studies Well, you know, before we even get deeply into this, we're about to spend a trillion dollars here in the U.S.
	on upgrading our nuclear arsenal.
	A trillion dollars!
	A trillion dollars!
	Do you know how nice our interstates would be if we devoted even a little portion of a trillion to the interstates?
	My God!
	That's right.
	You know, my kids went to an elementary school.
	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.
	You know, I mean, there's just such a disconnect between the reality of what we're doing with our Our public school systems, and our infrastructure, and our health care, as opposed to the enormous military budgets that go out virtually, you know, unattended every year.
	It's rubber-stamped.
	Yeah?
	All right.
	Well, anyway, what is the exact extent of the current global nuclear arsenal?
	And by the way, Professor, you don't have any classified information that you could mistakenly give away here, do you?
	Oh no, you know, it's not necessary to have that.
	Actually, 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 15 out of the 16,000, let's say.
	And you mentioned that, 93% in your opening.
	let's say. And you mentioned that 93% in your opening that that's about right. So
	that's why it's so important to focus on the US and Russia because first of all
	you know that the country that comes in next is France with 300
	And so there's orders of so many more times greater numbers that the US and Russia have compared to anybody else.
	That's where you have to start.
	Now, if you look at what What the weapons are, we each have, the 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.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	And of these, the U.S.
	and Russia each have about 1,000 strategic nuclear weapons.
	They call them launch-ready.
	They're ballistic.
	missiles that are armed with nuclear warheads, they can be launched in 2 to 15 minutes.
	And once they're launched, they can't be recalled.
	And as you mentioned earlier, it takes 30 minutes to as little as 9 to 10 minutes for them to reach their targets.
	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.
	Yes, you know, that was a kind of a PR ploy that Clinton and Yeltsin had.
	Clinton repeated it quite a bit during one of his election campaigns.
	But the reality of nuclear targeting is that it takes about 10 seconds to re-target a warhead.
	You know, all these missiles are hooked up to computers.
	So, you know, it was a meaningless agreement.
	The only way to really change this is to stand down these weapons.
	Make it first so that they can't be launched within a few minutes.
	I do.
	I do.
	but better to let's dismantle them you know take the warheads off the missiles
	uh... we have to start thinking of this as this problem for our species
	all i do i do i think of it as a problem for our species well the people in charge don't i think i think they
	they're so caught up in the moment uh...
	The scientists have tried to discuss these studies.
	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, you know, 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.
	Right.
	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.
	It's actually all along it's been self-assured.
	Slow down a little bit.
	You said even if we had a successful first launch against Russia, that we would starve to death.
	How does that happen?
	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 3 to 5 square miles on fire instantly.
	The 800 kiloton warhead will set 90 to 152 square miles on fire instantly.
	And 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's good above the boiling temperature of water.
	And, you know, 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.
	Um, and, you know, they weren't even able to go into those cities for quite a few days and track the 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 burning cities up.
	So if you think about what a nuclear war is, if you think of 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 US-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.
	All summer?
	Yeah, all year, every single day of the year, and then it will stay cold for so long that it will eliminate growing seasons for at least 10 years, maybe 20.
	Alright, let's back up just a little bit.
	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?
	Yes.
	And we would still have nuclear winter.
	There might be, let's just say there's 50 million tons of smoke instead of 180 million.
	Right.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's still going to be below freezing every day for at least a year, and there won't be any growing seasons for at least 10 years.
	All right.
	Hold it right there, Steven.
	We're going to take a break.
	I told you to get the kids out of the room, didn't I?
	From the high desert, this is Midnight in the Desert.
	All of time is on the clock.
	Cup Part disappear into the potter's ground.
	When the man Phones are not open yet.
	My guest is Professor Stephen Starr, and we are discussing nuclear war.
	tomorrow's business is midnight in the desert with part of the to call the show
	dial one nine five two all parts of one nine five two two two five fifty two
	seventy eight don't uh...
	don't call yet bones are not open yet
	i guess his professors steven star and we are discussing nuclear war
	global thermal nuclear
	and uh...
	So let's get back to it.
	So, Professor, let's go back for a second.
	I hate to do this, but a little more education on the size of these things.
	The one dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what was it, Little Man, Big Boy?
	Let's see, 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.
	You have to compare it to something, so they compare it to TNT, but you know, a nuclear detonation is It's really different, fundamentally different than a high-explosive chemical detonation for a couple of reasons.
	You know, the stellar temperatures it produces, literally a couple hundred million degrees centigrade at the instant of detonation at the center of the fireball.
	So in other words, that's actually not been a completely accurate description of the power of the weapon at all.
	Right.
	There's an article on my website by Professor Lynn Eaton called City on Fire.
	She points out that actually the US military is 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.
	Yes.
	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 3 to 5 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 1,000 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 have, can carry a nuclear gravity bomb, the B83, that has 1.3 million tons of TNT explosive power.
	What, one?
	Excuse me?
	Yeah, well, they call those megatons.
	The kilotons means a thousand 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 they're, you know, they're just like every other nuclear weapon state, they're modernizing their arsenals.
	Just a little bit of trivia, if there is such a thing in the subject.
	I believe that we accidentally dropped two nuclear weapons on North Carolina.
	There was an accident, a B-52.
	Well, the end result was that back then they carried these multi-megaton gravity bombs.
	A couple of them got loose and went down.
	They have what they call permissive action links.
	They're basically a safety device that are built into each weapon, at least the United States has.
	And they have to be triggered sequentially in order for the bomb to go off.
	There's usually like a series of, say, six or seven.
	And on one of the bombs, there was only one left.
	All the others had been triggered.
	We would have had probably, you know, we would have had millions of tons of explosive power going off there.
	The fallout would have gone all the way to New York City.
	It probably would have killed most of the people in North Carolina.
	So one more five volt little signal and it would have been as you described.
	Right.
	And, you know, there's other accidents that we don't know about.
	Before we leave that one, what I heard was that they retrieved one of those weapons and one of them they didn't.
	There actually is one that is in the ocean, off the coast.
	And I don't really find that very reassuring.
	If you know about World War I, they're still digging up artillery shells.
	They're corroded on the outside, but they're fine on the inside.
	But I don't know, you know, but I mean, there are nuclear bombs scattered around the bottom of the ocean.
	There have been some that have fallen off aircraft carriers, off the coast of Japan, rolled off a deck.
	You know, it's a hell of a mess, really.
	Yes.
	Alright, so, we have hydrogen bombs now, and these are the ones, well, for example, like the B83, right?
	That would be a hydrogen bomb, would yield up to, what, 1.3 million?
	Yes.
	The design of nuclear weapons.
	The difference between the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb.
	The first hydrogen bombs were enormous and they stayed that way for a long time.
	In the 1980s and 90s they started making them Smaller in explosive power, but that's just primarily because they were able to put them on the top of ballistic missiles, and they came up with the multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, so you can put, say, ten 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 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 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,
	maybe in the same place.
	So they schedule them for dismantlement.
	So I call it disarmament by semantics.
	So in a way, multiple warheads are just a way of doing more with less, sort of.
	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 of thermal effects as one big warhead.
	Military planners tend to focus on blast, which is because they want to, you know, and so that's why a city like New York or, well, Washington, D.C.
	would be a good example.
	they might target it with 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.
	A hundred and some odd miles, right?
	They calculate these fire storms based on average weather conditions, but even under
	the very worst weather conditions for an 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.
	Assuming a full exchange, how long would a nuclear winter 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 know, you mentioned, I think, at some point, India and Pakistan.
	Well, they have a big nuclear arms race going on there now.
	Um, 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 a hundred of those being detonated in their cities.
	Right.
	And they found, they predicted about five million tons of smoke would get into the stratosphere.
	That would be enough to block about ten percent 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 ten.
	This would Because enough of a decrease in crop production that it's predicted that up to two billion people would starve to death just from an India-Pakistan.
	Actually, India and Pakistan have been right up to the brink any number of times, right?
	That's right, yes.
	That's true.
	And they're not getting along all that well right now, from what I read.
	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.
	Is it possible?
	Is a smaller nuclear exchange survivable?
	Well, you know, it's not survivable if you happen to be in the target area.
	No, of course not.
	But I would say that any war is possible.
	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, it 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 did an article in the Bullets of Atomic Scientists today about launching before or after the detonation of a nuclear weapon, you know, based on early warning systems.
	The problem is that 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 weapon states in a public way, and it's avoided.
	Well, I want to give the preppers a small reason to continue to prep.
	This is a small reason.
	Relatively, now, if there was an exchange between India and Pakistan, things would be bad.
	But, if you're prepared, survivable, I take it, in North America.
	Well, you know, if you want to look at a scenario like that, historically famine has been caused Uh, not just by lack of food, but also by scarce 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, OK, 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 Halpin from Physicians for Social Responsibility.
	I'm actually a senior scientist with them, too.
	He wrote a couple of papers that shows that, you know, 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.
	Right.
	And we're looking at 10% to 20% 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.
	I don't think there's anything wrong.
	I'm into self-sufficiency myself.
	I live out on a small farm.
	I have apple trees.
	I have a photovoltaic electric system.
	But I like that, and I think it makes sense if people need to do that in general these days.
	I'm with you all the way.
	I've got solar panels.
	I've got generators.
	On and on and on.
	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 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 Tambora.
	Oh, Tambora.
	Yeah, 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, you know.
	But there was, they were killing, in North America, they were killing frost 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.
	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.
	And that's quite cold!
	So, wait a minute, I'm in Ohio.
	How am I doing?
	Well, you're going to have a really severe winter.
	As far as food, well, 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 it 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.
	There's a couple days worth of food, maybe a week's worth at the most in our grocery stores.
	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 and who knows what that would lead to.
	So when you try to make Predictions on that, it's kind of... That's another conversation, but I mean, if I'm in Ohio, and I'm a prepper, I probably would survive the effects of that, or... Yeah, I would, as long as it doesn't lead to a larger nuclear war, but, you know, you might want to have a fair amount of food on hand, you know, like the Mennonites or the Amish, and keep a year's worth of food, that's not a bad idea.
	What about the radiation, Professor?
	Well, radiation is a...
	Something that, you know, it's funny because we don't, 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, um, that's, that's sort of, um, it's almost you could do a whole show on that.
	It depends on what gets targeted in a nuclear war.
	You know, our power, nuclear power plants now, We have over 100 in the United States, and on-site they store about, you know, 5 to 10 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 keep, they have to be kept underwater because of the intense radioactivity, which also produces a lot of heat that has to be removed.
	Not so friendly if they get out of the water, right?
	Right.
	All right, Professor, hold tight right there.
	We'll come back to my Ohio example if we can in a moment.
	I think scientists like this really actually don't like to discuss the possibility of something, that's the right word, that could be survived.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	I'm coming to you at the speed of light in the darkness.
	This is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
	Now, here's Art.
	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'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?
	Well, you know, there's a lot of truth in that.
	Part of it is because I have a habit of trying not to make predictions.
	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.
	I mean, I think it would be a nightmare.
	It would be really cold, and it wouldn't just be for a year.
	It would be like ten years without summer, almost.
	It would be colder than it's been in the last thousand years.
	Now, this is only India and Pakistan, right?
	Right.
	And that hundred atomic bombs that were detonated in that war Well, we once, Professor, lived in an era where MAD was operational.
	You know, it was a suicide to even consider it.
	But now we've got countries like North Korea.
	in russia have no ready to launch uh... and it's only takes two to fifteen
	minutes well we want professor lived in an era where mad was operational you
	know it was the suicide to uh...
	to even consider it but now we've got countries like
	north korea north korea's interesting because
	they probably are suicidal Or at least the leadership may well be suicidal.
	And so we can't depend on good old mad so much anymore, can we?
	Right.
	Well, it wouldn't be a mutual assured destruction in their case because they have like ten atomic bombs or so.
	At the moment.
	Yeah, but all these arsenals are getting bigger.
	Even India and Pakistan At some point, they're going to start producing thermonuclear weapons, strategic nuclear weapons, instead of just atomic bombs.
	So, you know, 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 A 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'd be an elimination.
	And guess what?
	Guess who's against that?
	The five nuclear weapons states.
	Oh, no, no, this is, we don't need that.
	This is disruptive of our process.
	And we want to stick with a non-proliferation treaty.
	You know, because that's doing just fine.
	But, you know, it's been 50 years since that was signed, and it doesn't take, you know, a rocket scientist to see that the nuclear weapons states are busy modernizing their arsenals.
	As you mentioned, you know, a trillion dollars to build, you know, 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, you know, hundred millions of dollars going into a uh... facility that bill it builds all the non-nuclear components for that's about eighty percent of the bomb as the biggest construction project in missouri and i i thought you know there's really something wrong with our society when that's the best when our biggest project is to build a new nuclear weapons plant back to uh... pakistan for a moment right indian pakistan uh... assuming they had a full exchange little me in ohio
	Radiation.
	We didn't really get there.
	I started talking about nuclear power plants in the U.S.
	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 to the air, you get a really nasty fall.
	But what happens there is those sorts of The fallout from that gets rained out and spread more regionally than globally.
	Okay.
	You have to have about a hundred kiloton weapon for the fireball to go above the troposphere 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.
	Wow.
	And so those fireballs went into the stratosphere, and it only takes about two weeks for the wind to blow it all the way around the planet.
	When you have a nuclear detonation, you create literally hundreds of different types of radioactive isotopes or elements.
	But most of them have very short, they self-destruct in a very short matter of time.
	They call it a half-life.
	But there's some that don't.
	And those, particularly, it's strontium-90, and that gets into your bones and your teeth.
	And cesium-137 that gets into your organ systems and tissues.
	Those have 30-year half-lives.
	And then, of course, there's uranium and plutonium.
	Most of the bombs have plutonium pits.
	And even the very most efficient bomb doesn't have all the plutonium fission.
	A lot of it is blasted into microparticles.
	Is there any such thing as a clean bomb?
	No.
	They all produce...
	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's really, it's been ignored or almost suppressed.
	They focused a lot on external doses of radiation, but 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 know, and 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.
	Oh, yes.
	And about 25% of Belarus was seriously contaminated, and the most predominant radioisotope was cesium-137.
	And it gets into everything.
	Even the wood, when they burn firewood for heating and cooking, it turns their chimneys into small nuclear reactors.
	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 It 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 cesium 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.
	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 Uh, about a year, a little over a year ago.
	And, um, but you know, it's, if you go to the EPA website and you look at season 137, they say it's uniformly distributed in the body.
	Well, it's not true.
	But, um, you know, again, the nuclear industry has so much influence and power That they, you know, they dispute all this, of course.
	And they say the sort of doses that these children are supposed 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.
	I see.
	Well, the recent nuclear accident in Japan.
	I believe there was some 137 distributed to some fairly wide degree.
	Right, that was what my presentation at the New York Academy of Medicine was about, was the massive contamination of Japan with cesium-137.
	What are going to be the effects down the line of that?
	Well, the nuclear industry will tell you none.
	They'll say, oh, there's no big deal.
	And 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 the roofs off on and pretend like it's safe.
	But I don't think they, I don't think we know.
	You know, that's the worst thing about all this.
	All the atmospheric weapons tests.
	You know, we detonated a hundred atomic bombs in the deserts of New Mexico.
	And I honestly think that's the largest environmental disaster in American history.
	They kept all the fallout secret from people.
	They didn't even know what was happening.
	But, so all of the combination of that has raised the 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 we don't know what the long-term genetic consequences of this stuff is okay, and that's I think that it could lead to all sorts of Genetic diseases that you know maybe you're just starting to appear now sure I get computer messages as we do the program mark asks could you please ask about the effects and Even explain if you can a neutron bomb a neutron weapon sure well, it's designed you know neutrons are
	Atomic particles that are found in the nucleus of the atom, and when atoms break apart or fission in a nuclear chain reaction, neutrons are, you know, sprayed out.
	So they have a weapon that's designed to sort of minimize the blast and maximize the radiation effects of neutrons.
	So it kills the people, but it doesn't destroy as much of the property as it would otherwise.
	But it's...
	You know, it's certainly a weapon of mass destruction and genocide, really.
	Well, I guess in a war that would be a big potential goal, wouldn't it?
	I mean, you want to destroy your enemy, but you want the physical assets, if possible.
	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.
	I mean, 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, you know, beyond time and space.
	We're talking, you know, it transcends, it'll last for centuries or, you know, millennia, and they really are, they're not precise weapons.
	If you look at the weapons that NATO has, for example, you were mentioning those in your Introduction, I think, the B61 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 variable 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 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?
	Then you actually start a nuclear war.
	And if you're fighting with somebody that has nuclear weapons, like Russia, They have plenty of 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 a 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, a holocaust.
	I wonder if our leaders know that?
	Yes, how quickly do you feel that that threshold would be?
	Let's just have an example here.
	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.
	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?
	Well, the Russians do.
	We did.
	I'm not sure if we still have those or not, but we certainly have plenty of what we would call tactical nuclear weapons.
	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.
	What if Russia was doing that to the United States?
	What if they were moving a mechanized division to Mexico?
	Well, how would we react?
	You know, 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 you know, the Western leaders and 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.
	Right.
	Which was called Leningrad in World War II, where they had 800,000 people die when the Nazis surrounded it.
	The Russians had 27 million people that died in World War II.
	We had 400,000.
	414,000 or something like that.
	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, at 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 think the same.
	In a way, it's much more dangerous than it was then.
	And then you throw in all of these other unknowns like, you know, the Koreas I'm not so sure about what's going to happen in the Middle East, but probably nothing good.
	So it could begin in all kinds of places.
	Let's go to Korea, because they seem, right now anyway, the craziest.
	That leader over there, that little guy, is likely to decide that, okay, suicide it is.
	And so we launch.
	I'm sure the first to go would be Seoul.
	Seoul is so close to the border.
	There's a lot of scenarios there.
	I've read some different scenarios.
	I 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.
	There's a lot of, but I, you know, I don't, um, the thing that differs about when you talk about North Korea, there would be, it would be a nightmare.
	There might be as many people killed in that as, you know, 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 a hundred say the hundred 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 that produce the plutonium that way, they extract it, then it's harder to make an atomic bomb from plutonium 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.
	Do they work?
	Well, they do work.
	Although, the first ones, if they don't produce a whole 15 kiloton detonation, maybe they produce one or two kilotons.
	And they call that a fizzle.
	But a thousand tons of TNT going off in a city with radioactivity is not anything that would be a minor problem.
	I think that it's quite clear that they have the equivalent of atomic bombs now.
	None of the, you know, both India, Pakistan and North Korea, they're all, they all still have the sort of the atomic bomb type weapons.
	They haven't gotten to the strategic, the hydrogen bomb or the thermonuclear weapons that have the hundred kiloton or megaton yields.
	But they, you know, they may.
	I mean, it's just a matter of time.
	And that's one of the things that we have to come to grips with.
	Moreover, they are developing launch vehicles that are starting to be effective.
	So, you know, I don't know.
	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... Okay, Professor, we just had a big brouhaha about Iran.
	Now, do you have any knowledge about how close Iran is?
	I mean, the Israelis say one thing, we perhaps say another, Iran says another.
	I wonder how close they really are to a nuclear weapon.
	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 7 tenths of 1% normal in the normal 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 a 20% enrichment on a lot of their uranium.
	I don't, you know, after that it's just you read one report or another, like you said, you don't really know.
	Right, I heard they might have a thousand centrifuges going, something like that.
	Yes, well, they create a cascade of centrifuges.
	In order to separate uranium-235 from 238, it's the same element, so you can't use a chemical process.
	So they make it into a gas, uranium hexafluoride, And then they spin the gas in a centrifuge, and so over time, the heavier isotope will sink further towards the bottom, and the lighter will rise to the top.
	And then they actually send this through a series of thousands of centrifuges.
	So by the time it gets towards the last ones, it's actually getting enough of an enrichment or a concentration of the U-235 that it can be extracted.
	There are other ways to do it, but that's been the way that I think that Iran has approached it.
	I have interviewed any number of theoretical physicists like Dr. Michio Kaku.
	I'm sure you've heard that name.
	Oh, sure.
	And I asked him at one point what he thought our chances were, you know, as a human race, of not destroying ourselves with these weapons.
	And he said less than 1%.
	Yeah.
	Well, I hope he's wrong.
	I do, too.
	You know, I think if we keep going the way we are, then, you know, I might have to, you know, say he's right.
	But I... my, um... Well, that's it.
	See, things are not getting better.
	They're getting worse.
	They're getting more dangerous.
	That's what I see.
	Well, you know, what's amazed me, my biggest frustration, and, you know, 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 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, you know, and so there's, it's, you know, you're like, that's what, that's what really troubles me, is that here in my own country, you can't even get a hearing, you know, and these are, these guys are the best scientists in the world.
	They're not They're not doing this on the back of an envelope, you know, they're doing it in their National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Colorado Boulder, Rutgers, you know, it's not, they aren't amateurs.
	Professor Kaku was invited to work on nuclear weapons and declined.
	And I wonder how, I mean, surely some of the people you know I have worked on nuclear weapons, and I wonder how they can rationalize that in their minds, knowing what they're doing.
	Well, you're right.
	I mean, I think there is a rationalization.
	I can't really speak for anybody else.
	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 of nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and it just didn't feel right.
	So I went into biological sciences.
	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.
	Yes.
	And he, you know, he talks to a lot of the people that work there.
	And, you know, 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 Somebody has to say this is enough.
	Somebody has to come to grips with the fact that we just can't keep doing this.
	Well, have you ever actually spoken to one of these men about the morality of what they're doing?
	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, they reach, and the concern that they have is
	that the younger generations now are sort of becoming accustomed to them.
	They're not really... I mean, when you think about it... Professor, we're at a break point.
	I'm sorry.
	And when we come back, I want to talk about our atmosphere and our magnetic field, should we have a full exchange of nuclear weapons.
	I'm Art Bell.
	I can see her lying back in her satin dress, in a room where you do what you don't confess.
	Some day you better take care of her.
	I can hear it calling in the air tonight, all I want.
	And I've been waiting for you sooner for all my life.
	Not yet.
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	My guest is Professor Stephen Starr.
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	Not yet. Not yet.
	My guest is Professor Stephen Starr.
	And a lot of people are asking, why would I do this show?
	And my answer is because nobody else will.
	I'm I'm telling you, we have forgotten what little we knew about the effects of nuclear war.
	Or perhaps never knew at all.
	So, Professor, welcome back.
	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 did 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 fire storms that are producing tens of billions of tons of smoke that rise above cloud level into the stratosphere.
	It 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, 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'll get to it.
	Yeah, you know, I'm not quite sure.
	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, you know, 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.
	Yes, well, let's back into that.
	I'm well familiar with the EMP at a small level.
	I'm a ham operator.
	I've got 13 towers up on my property.
	I know that when a storm comes over, I definitely feel the The facts of the MP when I get close strikes.
	However, this is a whole different matter.
	Now, in order to disable North America, America, let's say, how many nuclear weapons detonated way up there would it take?
	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 air.
	Anything with a transistor in it would melt down basically the control panels of nuclear power plants.
	How high, Professor?
	Pardon me?
	How high?
	I think that they would detonate those several hundred miles high.
	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.
	There was a study that was done about an 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 what I can, what I did talk, you know Arne Gunderson, I bet he's like really a former, he's a nuclear engineer that really knows his stuff.
	Yes, sir.
	I've talked to him about it.
	He said that, you know, 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 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. Right. And that
	would release an enormous amount of radioactivity. Just one
	you know 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, you know, over a thousand tests.
	And so, and we have a hundred 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, or 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 describe that in terms of becquerels, and I'm not going to give, but what it amounted to was that Less than, about 1.2 grams of cesium-137 contained in enough radioactivity can 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 it into an aerosol or a smoke and spread it over a square mile, you can't live there for a hundred years.
	My God.
	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.
	So, you're telling me it would take only one large bomb over the East Coast, and all our plants would melt down?
	Yeah, like there'd be 50 or 60 plants that could melt down just from one bomb.
	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?
	I guess so.
	I assume that with a weapon like that they could track it.
	Just as an aside, I'd like to point out to your listeners that A huge solar flare, like the one they had in 1849, I think it was at Carrington.
	Carrington, about, yeah.
	They, you know, 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 we would, the grid would be down for six months to, you know, maybe a couple years.
	Sure.
	So that's another issue with all these spent fuel pools.
	It's not nuclear war, but, you know, 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.
	They want to move it a few miles from me if they can.
	I think she should put it in the basement of the White House, you know.
	Ah, yeah, well.
	Okay, well maybe some people might resent that, but you know, it's always out of sight, out of mind.
	There is a place, for example, in Finland, it's called Ankalo, where they're building The only real scientific approach to nuclear waste storage is 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.
	What's really amazing about that is it gets you to start to think about how long the stuff has to be isolated from the biosphere.
	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.
	If you have an accident at a wind tower for wind energy, you might kill a couple of cows if the tower falls over.
	We don't have to worry about evacuating the entire state.
	Well, I understand you're not really commenting on politics, but hasn't Fukushima essentially done the job for you and stopped it?
	You mean?
	New plants.
	Well, I think what's happened is that nuclear power is not economical.
	Even gas-fired plants that they're building Safe.
	Safe.
	Are you there, Professor?
	I think we just lost him.
	No, I'm sorry.
	That was my fault.
	Can you hear me now?
	Oh, you are there.
	these older plants are starting to shut them down. I think the industry is dying. They
	keep trying to come up with new designs to convince everybody that it's safe.
	Safe. Are you there, Professor? I think we just lost him.
	Oh, I'm sorry. That was my fault. Can you hear me now?
	You are there. Okay. Let me use the opportunity to throw a question at you that has come in
	on the computer as well.
	Charles says, how many nuclear weapons are there in outer space?
	Well, if there are any, nobody admits to it.
	But that's a problem.
	We're moving towards an arms race in space.
	But I think, as far as I know, nobody's got stations out there with weapons mounted on them.
	Well, there sure would be a good reason to have them up there.
	We actually planned to put them on the moon at one point.
	That was a long time ago.
	Well, the moon, that would be too much warning.
	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?
	Well, that's a good question.
	But what I could tell you about are, 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 way up and comes down.
	Then you can shorten the flight time and make it really hard to detect.
	And that's the problem.
	The article I wrote that was published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists today was about the dangers of launch on warning.
	And once the US and Russia constructed these early warning systems, We have to launch on warning, don't we?
	Well, I don't think so.
	But in reality?
	Well, what if it's a false warning?
	What if it's a false warning of attack?
	ICBMs that we have in our silos buried underground. They got crews sitting there 24-7 waiting for a launch order.
	We have to launch on warning, don't we?
	Well, I don't think so.
	But in reality? Well, what if it's a false warning? What if it's a false warning of attack?
	Oh, well, that would be an accident.
	Yeah, that would be... then our our retaliatory strike would actually be a preemptive nuclear strike.
	My point is, with the effect of these weapons, you have to launch on warning.
	Once you have made up your mind, the other side has launched, it's use them or lose them, right?
	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 you can't launch them, or at the very least, you would not launch a strike before a nuclear detonation confirms that the strike has occurred.
	Professor, it would be too late.
	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 us lids back off the silos.
	That happened in 1985, even 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, 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.
	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.
	All right.
	Professor, I am curious.
	This sort of clampdown in the media uh... ever since the cold war has ended i mean there was plenty during the cold war but 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 us on your show have me on your show and discuss this subject because it's it's really important and uh... i uh...
	You know, the reason I teach a course at the university is because I thought, well, where do you start?
	You know, if we have an uninformed public, then eventually the leaders that we elect are uninformed, too.
	And that's what I see.
	You know, 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.
	At some point, the unthinkable will eventually become thinkable.
	Yeah, you know, when was the last time people even observed a nuclear weapon?
	I'm not saying we should have one so they could watch, but I'm not convinced that, you know, people fully understand.
	You can look at the numbers and all this.
	But do they really know?
	And, you know, 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, you know, the War Resolution Act of 1973 where the President's 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 followed 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, 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.
	So, even for an object that would end the world, we use the sports analogy.
	Yeah, right.
	That's right.
	And the Russians have the same thing.
	They call it Shiget.
	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.
	All right.
	All right, Professor.
	Hang tight.
	And we will begin to open the lines, and I'll give you some of that stuff as we get back.
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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?
	And if so, how long?
	Well, I think, from what I can understand myself, what would happen was, it would be like a mass extinction event, similar to when, the best example is when the 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 6 miles in diameter, hit the Yucatan Peninsula, And when it hit, it threw up enough heated material into the, uh, that when it came down, it actually, uh, 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, uh, it was, uh, they call it 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 was, that's worse than what a nuclear war would do in terms of 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 forests have been destroyed, you're not, that's not really habitable when you're at the top of the food chain.
	So, I think, 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.
	Well, those sorts of catastrophes are almost incomprehensible, but yet, They're still survivable, but extinction is quite permanent by definition.
	It is, yes.
	And that's why I resent when we get feedback from the White House saying, 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.
	Yeah, what was going to actually be my next question, you recall the movie On the Beach, right?
	Of course.
	Yes, actually I spoke in Melbourne.
	Really?
	On Hiroshima Day.
	Somebody came up and talked to me about that.
	Yeah, so I always wondered, was it realistic in that the southern hemisphere, Would not be extinguished immediately, however, the eventual effects would, would get them, and essentially that movie was within the realm of... That movie focused on radioactivity, basically.
	That's right.
	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 means.
	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 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 sides have to remain rational.
	They have to fear death.
	That doesn't seem like it's going to be the case forever.
	That is our modern problem.
	We have ISIS, which by the way is in the midst of trying to get hold of a nuclear weapon.
	We have North Korea.
	They both seem like very, by our standards, completely irrational groups that want to bring on Armageddon.
	Right.
	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, 2000 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, you know, both the U.S.
	and Russia have operated in what they call a counterforce 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.
	The last thing we needed to do was to keep pounding our chests and threatening and I don't see any simple way around it except by just getting, you know, 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.
	And explain it in other ways.
	But that's the rational approach, and it would work with rational nations.
	Well, my concern is with the US and Russian strategic arsenals.
	They've got 15 out of the 16,000 weapons on the planet.
	I admit, a lot of people say, yeah, right, wishful thinking, but I don't really know any other way to approach this.
	I don't have a political solution to every problem.
	You have to get above that.
	You have to have some kind of trump card.
	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 a successful first strike, we're going to die.
	So what do we do about it?
	I don't know.
	I guess the only winning way is not to play.
	Right.
	Remember that line?
	I think it was.
	Good evening, Professor Paupin.
	Hello.
	A strange game.
	The only winning move is not to play.
	I remember that.
	That War Games movie, right?
	That's right.
	That's correct, yes.
	Let's, very quickly, Omaha, Nebraska.
	By the way, you'd be one of the first to go there in Omaha.
	Thank you very much.
	You're probably right.
	That leads into my comment that you both were referring to.
	About 15, 20 years ago, we had a Governor, Frank Morrison, Who was our governor at the time of the missile crisis, and I had the opportunity to visit with him basically on his deathbed.
	And we talked and visited about a lot of things, and I asked him, what's some of the most noteworthy or some scary things that happened that you recall as a governor?
	And he related that he came within one day of completely quarantining the state during that missile crisis.
	Really?
	Anyway, it's documented.
	I mean, I've seen... What would the purpose of quarantine have been in that case?
	Well, basically because of all the testing that was done in Nevada and the airstream that was carrying all the fallout this way.
	And anyway, that was kind of... Oh, I see.
	You're talking back to the above-ground testing days here in Nevada, yes?
	Yes.
	Yes, and there was... I know there's been tests of...
	the effects in the state of cancer related things because of that.
	Anyway, that was just one comment to make.
	The other thing I wanted to ask your guest, by the way, this is a phenomenal interview
	tonight.
	Thank you Art and your guest.
	He's from the University of Missouri, correct?
	Yes sir.
	Anyway, I'm curious if you know of a Nebraskan that used to teach down there by the name
	of John Neihart.
	Yes sir.
	He was in the English department.
	He's noted for the book Black Elk Steep.
	Well, I know exactly who you're talking about.
	I never had the privilege of meeting him, but I've actually listened to some of his recorded lectures.
	Yeah, he recorded the music of Black Elk, but those are two of the most Peace-loving, peace-seeking men that I knew.
	Just one last thing.
	I think that Pope's comments recently could be... He made reference in one of the talks so often to, we need to enter into a conversation.
	Yeah, we need to enter into a conversation, alright.
	I think that's a good point about the Pope.
	You know, the Vatican and the Pope, they can get behind nuclear disarmament.
	It helps when you get that sort of dialogue going.
	Yeah, another thing that has not made the news big time, but the international Red Cross has come out strongly in favor of banning and eliminating nuclear weapons.
	The MCross hasn't joined in because of political pressure, but the international has certainly come on record for it.
	I'll be darned.
	Back to something we discussed, sort of, a little while ago.
	If I were to ask you to guess Just a guess, Professor, about whether there are nuclear weapons in space.
	What would your guess have to be?
	I don't think there are, although I would say that, you know, 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.
	They can hit any target they want on Earth in at least, at the very most, an hour, and most of the time 30 minutes or less.
	Usually, if we can do something, we do it.
	And I'll leave it at that.
	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.
	Well, under the START Treaty, they supposedly carry less, but, you know, just one sub has enough warheads to take out every major city in Russia, or, you know, whatever.
	And they also have outfitted some of these subs to carry conventional warheads, or cruise missiles.
	There's not a need to put weapons in some cases.
	Nevertheless, let me try this.
	The Russians had a nuclear weapon in space.
	Would we know that?
	I don't know.
	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.
	In the 1990s, it was a mess over there.
	At this point, they have lost almost most of their early warning system capability from satellites, just ground-based.
	They're putting it back up, I believe.
	The U.S., even though the military moans and groans about not having enough funds and everything, we've constantly modernized our arsenal.
	These weapons are, if they were that dangerous or unsafe, we'd certainly... I don't see how a nuclear weapon can be considered safe in the first place, 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.
	Okay, Sergio on Skype, you're on the air.
	Uh, yes.
	Good evening, Art.
	I'm not hearing you very well.
	You're going to have to get very close to the microphone of whatever you're talking into.
	Uh, yes.
	Good evening.
	Is that better?
	Better.
	Uh, yes.
	Uh, good evening.
	Uh, great subject.
	Uh, long time listener to you.
	Uh, very interesting, uh, subject tonight.
	I just want to ask your guests, uh, is it true that, uh, Russia, both Russia and the United States both have the, uh, what in Russia is called a dead end, which is the automatic, uh, Good question.
	Very good question.
	Yes.
	You know, it's interesting.
	I knew one of the guys, his name was Colonel Valery Yarinich.
	I wrote an article with him and worked together with him.
	He actually helped design that.
	It went into operation around 1985.
	And Valery passed away a couple years ago, but he had told me that as far as he knew, it was still an operation.
	It's called Perimeter, or the Dead Hand is the nickname.
	It's called the Dead Hand, which, as your caller suggests, it's 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 Uranich 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 things.
	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 time frame 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.
	Gene, good thing nothing can go wrong with that.
	Yeah.
	Well, I never found it very reassuring, 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.
	That, I don't find that reassuring.
	And nor do I. On my first time caller line, you are on the air.
	Hi, good evening.
	Art, this is Howard in Virginia.
	How are you?
	I'm fine, Howard.
	Thank you.
	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 and the hobby on you, because you always spoke of it, and that's what got me in the hobby.
	Well, thank you.
	Quick question that you can answer when you get a second is where you hang out on HF if you do these days.
	I'd love to make a contact sometime.
	Well, if 10 meters ever comes back, I'll be there.
	Do you have a question for my guest?
	Yes, sir, I do.
	Good evening, Stephen.
	I love the conversation.
	It's one of those that's just so deep, it's hard to know where to start swimming.
	I've got a quick 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.
	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.
	How many of those 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, Yes.
	Thank you very much.
	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...
	Yes.
	So I'm hoping that our technology will make these things obsolete someday but that's it.
	Thanks so much, I love your show and I'm glad you're back.
	Thank you very much.
	Alright, so do you think there's ever been a detonation, kind of a hard question, that
	we've not detected?
	Well, you know, there was... what came to mind was when it's believed that South Africa
	had developed nuclear weapons.
	Oh yes.
	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, because people aren't going to see that.
	I guess your guest may be referring more to a detonation that took place 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, you know.
	That enormous explosion they just had in Tianjin in China.
	Right.
	That was literally, that was like between 5 and 10 kilotons from what I can see with this blast calculator.
	Really?
	Enormous!
	But I don't think it was nuclear because I think you would have, there would have been enough fallout from that that it just wouldn't, you can't hide that.
	You know, there's always, if you produce ionizing radiation, nuclear detonation, you just, you can't hide it.
	Okay, suitcase nukes.
	Well, you know, the suitcase noose... Is it real?
	I've studied that.
	You know, they did exist.
	They were manufactured.
	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.
	You know, 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.
	The experts that I've read about said that over time they degrade.
	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.
	They're going to shoot that thing off.
	How many do you think were made?
	I think the Russians said that they'd made something like 90 or 100.
	I mean, 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 material scattered all over the place, in Kazakhstan, They were working on nuclear rocket engines.
	They had enough uranium and plutonium down there to make 60 atomic bombs.
	The United States went in and got a lot of that out with the help.
	That was back when we were actually working with the Russians.
	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, you know, it's really a miracle that we haven't had it put together and used in a bomb someplace.
	Okay.
	Down to Houston, Texas.
	First time caller.
	Hi.
	Hey, good evening.
	Man, I just... I can't believe I'm online, actually.
	I just have a question.
	Are you listening, sir?
	I've got a question.
	Are you listening online?
	Yes, sir, definitely.
	Okay.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Well, yes, sir.
	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.
	Well, if they did that, it would be an act of war, and then we would have global thermonuclear war.
	that's a scenario that...
	Well, it would be... if they did that, it would be an act of war, and then we would have
	global thermonuclear war.
	Right, Professor?
	Yeah, that's true.
	I read that same report, and I even discussed it with a friend of mine who had done some studies on it.
	he said that the effect that they're predicting is somewhat debatable,
	talking about dropping weapons off the coast of California.
	You know what scared me about that is It's just that there's military guys on each side.
	We have extremists in all the nations, and the Russians have ultra-nationalists.
	They'd like to start a war right now.
	We have people like that in the U.S.
	too, but I worry that... Putin may be pictured as a really bad guy, but there's honestly a lot worse.
	We could wind up with somebody a lot worse than him if we're not careful.
	This is true.
	All right, let's see, I think it's Felton, California, is that correct?
	Yeah, hi, this is Tom in Santa Cruz.
	Yes, Tom.
	I wanted to ask Professor Starr, are you familiar with a book by John Mueller, who happens to be my cousin, called Atomic Obsession?
	You know, I'm sorry, I'm not, but I'd like to read it.
	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, 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 in less than less than a third unless you're dedicated to
	your i guess he's not hear me unless you're dedicated to the destruction of a nation like
	israel unless you're actually dedicated to that
	and then there would be something you could do with them right
	Bye.
	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 Shultz, 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 is so far ahead
	with this conventional weapons
	the nobody ever deal with you know this small nations can even think about
	catching up but the way they can kind of equalize the situation is to
	build some atomic bombs
	well it's a great way to get foreign aid yeah
	but the most of roared The mouse roared, indeed.
	But it actually is a great way to get foreign aid.
	Yeah.
	Would we really be looking at North Korea the way we do, and providing food and other things for them if they didn't have nuclear weapons?
	I think the answer to that is a very, very, very clear no way.
	So, yeah, that's a reason to try and get them.
	Hold on, Professor.
	We're at the bottom of the hour.
	Take a deep breath.
	Not to everybody.
	Take a deep breath.
	And we'll be back.
	This is Midnight in the Desert.
	Possibly for humanity.
	It's 2 a.m.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the figure is gone.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the figure is gone.
	It's 2 a.m.
	and the figure is gone.
	It's 2 a.m.
	We're gonna get the buzz of the world And I'm next, if I'm ever taking a chance
	Midnight in the Desert doesn't screen calls We trust you.
	But remember, the NSA.
	Well, you know.
	To call the show, please dial 1-952-225-5278.
	That's 1-952-CALL-ART.
	Yeah, lines are all jammed.
	Um, very, very interesting show.
	And by the way, uh, late news is Ed Snowden did talk to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
	Which I find kind of intriguing.
	We're gonna have Neil on.
	In the not very distant future.
	That's right, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
	So, that's one.
	Now if I could just talk to Ed Snowden.
	Let me go way off reservation here and ask you, Professor.
	You followed, I'm sure, the story of Edward Snowden, yes?
	Yes.
	The country seems more or less evenly split on what he did.
	How do you feel about it?
	Well, I think that he's somebody that should be considered a hero.
	You know, that he was trying to expose clearly corrupt things that were going on in the government.
	Unconstitutional things.
	Yeah, if people remember what the Constitution is.
	Barely.
	Barely, and that's what tonight's show is all about.
	It's been systematically destroyed, unfortunately.
	People don't remember the Constitution, they don't remember What really could happen, you know, with these weapons?
	And that's why we're doing what we're doing tonight.
	Right.
	Well, the Constitution is really was designed to protect the people from the government.
	And so we seem to have lost that protection.
	We seem to have.
	Let's go to Colorado Springs, I think.
	Hello.
	Yes.
	Thank you, Art, for doing this show tonight.
	This is Kevin in Colorado Springs.
	I guess the ultimate question I have is, what can be done to stop this?
	Boy, that is, you're right about that.
	It is the ultimate question.
	Professor?
	Well, maybe my solution is too simplistic.
	On an individual level, I would recommend people to first consider joining, you know, look around and join an organization you feel comfortable with.
	I like the Nuclear AIDS Peace Foundation.
	You can join the Physicians for Social Responsibility.
	You don't have to be a physician or a healthcare professional.
	There's the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICANN.
	A lot of really young people are really into that organization.
	That's a good start because you need to be a little bit educated on this.
	I don't think your solution is too simplistic.
	I just think that, I'm sorry to say, but I think it's dated.
	Right.
	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...
	There used to be protests, but when we had a million people in Washington D.C.
	in 1982, that was back when we had more of an educated public.
	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... Because, you know, I consider it a form of criminal negligence on the part of leaders.
	If they know about this danger and they refuse to act on it, they turn their heads.
	You know, it's more convenient to keep your nuclear weapons than it is to discuss the fact that they could destroy human existence.
	Everything.
	Then, you know, 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 we've got now, we have Twitter, we have the internet, and things can go viral.
	Okay, well, again, I just consider it a little bit dated, Professor.
	around the world.
	So there's a capacity to educate and learn that never existed before.
	OK, well, again, I just consider it a little bit dated, professor.
	In other words, unfortunately, your solution depends on rational people.
	And we seem to have moved into a, all right, let me try another approach.
	I frequently talk about interesting things like aliens or life on other planets or something, and you know, to date, we've actually not detected the presence of any other intelligent life anywhere, despite listening really hard.
	Isn't it possible that life eventually 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.
	I'm not... I listened to a National Press Club conference not too long ago, where there were quite a few, like, 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 mean, I don't... I'm not going to rule out a lot of possibilities that are out there, I think.
	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 the grips with the fact that the the
	nuclear weapons that we have amount to a self-destruct mechanism for the human race
	All right. Um, let's go to flip on Skype. Hi Hello I
	Had a quick question for mr. Stark What would happen if somebody were to hijack a commercial
	airliner and crash it into a nuclear power plant?
	Yeah, that's a good question.
	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 or 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.
	A plane crashing into that could easily cause, you know, a massive release of radioactivity if it destroyed the cooling system on the 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, and so of course they flooded, so no power.
	That's right.
	There's another thing, too.
	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.
	You have to keep cooling the core.
	And when they lost all the off-site power, too, and their cooling systems that were 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.
	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.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, I would get on a little bit of rant there, but it still 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, K to WN, 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 Uh, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it was, there's going to be a detonation at the test site.
	And sure enough, there would be a detonation.
	And when there was, we would rock back and forth.
	The building would go back and forth.
	Oh, yes.
	Yes, yes.
	I was around for that.
	A lot of those underground tests actually vented.
	Oh, yes.
	And produced huge amounts of radioactivity.
	The cancer rates there in Utah were just astronomical.
	I was going to say, fortunately for us and unfortunately for Utah, that's the direction it went.
	Glenn on Skype, you're on the air.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Good morning.
	Okay, if we say that, hypothetically, for argument's sake, that city busters are passé, what about things like dial-able yield, neutron micro-nukes, or cobalt-60 dirty bombs, or depleted uranium munitions?
	We used to have plenty of ways.
	Uh, to mess things up.
	But especially the Dialable Yield Neutron Tactical Nuclear Weapons.
	What do you think about that?
	Have we seen them used even, perhaps?
	Um, well, the Variable Yield or Dial Yield weapons, uh, you know, those would be like the B61 weapons that, uh, we have a couple hundred, I think 180 of those deployed over in, uh, 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 cigar, you know, fission and fireball and That's different.
	A dirty bomb is a conventional bomb that blows radioactive substance apart and can contaminate an area.
	The DEU weapons are a radiological weapon, depleted uranium.
	They don't have a nuclear detonation, but when they fire them, 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... 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.
	It should be banned.
	We certainly shouldn't be using DU weapons.
	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. The Demon Core incident went critical.
	Well, you know, they have a schedule where they refurbish plutonium pits.
	Plutonium itself is considered to be stable for like about a century or so,
	but TANTEX, they will, you know, they take weapons apart and they
	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.
	Okay, let's go to Mount Pleasant.
	Hello.
	Yes, Art.
	Yes.
	This is Wade in Tennessee, and I don't believe you want call signs on there, but I am a ham, and I've got a question for you and Steven.
	All right.
	Okay, well, actually, two real quick ones.
	First of all, going back to EMPs, I know our transistorized radios would be fried, but what about the tube-type radios?
	That's number one.
	Number two... Okay, well let's start with number one.
	Tube-type radios, sir, would survive, but whether there'd be anybody to run them or not is another question.
	Okay.
	The second one.
	Art, you know we have go boxes and emergency kits and so forth.
	If the radios were in the cases, not hooked to an antenna and not hooked to a power source, do you think the transistorized radios would survive?
	Good question.
	Very good question, actually.
	Could you protect?
	I guess it would depend on how close the detonation was.
	Yeah, I'd say so.
	I haven't done a lot of calculations.
	I 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'll happen, but it just, uh, my friend Colonel Uranich always used to say, you know, he said, remember, he says, our weapons are guaranteed.
	It was kind of a chilling thing, but, um, 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, um, 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.
	And we have, you know, 12 subs like that.
	And so it's, there's not a shortage of nuclear weapons in the U.S.
	and Russia.
	The U.S.
	has 7,000, Russia has maybe 8,000.
	Uh, but all it takes really is a few hundred strategic weapons to destroy, like, every city.
	There's only two or three hundred cities in the United States and Russia that have populations of greater than, like, 250,000 or so.
	And there's thousands of nuclear warheads.
	Um, even though they've dismantled, there was 70,000 or so in 1986.
	They've gotten rid of two-thirds or three-quarters of them.
	They've dismantled the weapons.
	They've actually kept the plutonium pits, so that's another reason why we don't need to make more pits.
	They've got, you know, 30,000 in storage right now.
	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 the biosphere.
	It leaves Earth uninhabitable long enough where most people and animals probably wouldn't survive.
	Or want to.
	Very quickly on Skype, hello?
	Oh, hello there, Art.
	Good evening.
	Good evening.
	I just wanted to make a little comment and a bit of a more lighthearted question, considering the nature of tonight's talk.
	Very quickly.
	Which is very informative, by the way.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, I just wanted to say...
	Well, 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 Uh, scandals we've ever seen since the F-22 scandal with Lockheed Martin.
	Professor?
	Well, I think that's an interesting way to look at it, you know, but the point is that it's, uh, it's a, you know, Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex back in the 1950s.
	He sure did.
	And, you know, this is what we see.
	It's well and alive and thriving.
	Um, you know, I thought when you were asking your question, you were going to ask if 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, and a number in Geneva and New York about the effects of nuclear weapons.
	And I was able to question a couple of times representatives of the best example was when there was a joint presentation of the US and Russia made a joint presentation in 2010 at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference about the New START Treaty.
	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 the France placard 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 Goatmuller 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.
	My goodness.
	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.
	We've got to go.
	Show's over.
	Thanks so much for having me on.
	I really do appreciate it.
	Thank you for coming on and scaring us to death.
	Have a great night, Professor.
	You too.
	Thank you.
	Take care.
	Well, as I mentioned earlier, I know this was not easy stuff, but it's about time that somebody did it.

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