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Sept. 29, 2015 - Art Bell

02:22:52

Art Bell MITD - Steven Starr Nuclear War

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35:57

steven starr

01:31:28

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Speaker	Time	Text
art bell ▲ ● ▼		American video good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever in the globe you may be on those time zones.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Everyone comes like a blanket by this program.
unidentified		Midnight in the desert.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it's going to be a very midnighty program tonight, to be sure.
		You've got to make 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.
unidentified		And only one call per show.
unidentified		Unless you're annoying and then you can't call at all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so I do have a little bit of news for you.
		Volkswagen.
		Volkswagen's commercial vehicles and cars from its Spanish unit seat are among the 11 million apparently fitted with a diesel engine that can cheat on emissions tests.
		This is really, really, really bad news for Volkswagen.
		The CEO has already received her news.
		The whole company may be toast.
unidentified		The whole company may be toast.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Oh, that must have made them really, really, really, really angry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's all I can say.
		Really angry.
		Can you imagine?
		Inside the NSA.
		I'm sorry, NSA.
		I'm 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.
		All right?
		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.
unidentified		It looks a lot, lot like a creature, actually.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 unballoon-like speeds with unplane-like maneuvers.
		Maybe it was watching the Pope, and, you know, when he was there, that's how somebody caught it with a camera.
		Or a lot of people caught it, I guess.
		Okay, let me repeat what I said, and that is if you have children in the room, please get them out.
		We're going to be discussing global thermonuclear war.
		About, I read this yesterday, I'm going to read it again and more of it.
		About 24 years after the end of the Cold War, Russia and the U.S. seem to be engaged in a nuclear arms race once again that could have disastrous consequences.
		The United States is announcing it's about to do a trillion-dollar upgrade of its nukes.
		Imagine what you can do with a trillion dollars.
		Now, the Russians are going to modernize their weapons, of course, because it's a new race, right?
		So they will spend up to $700 billion.
		Actually, we said $1.3 trillion total earlier on Facebook.
		It's $1.7 trillion.
		My God.
		What's more, Russia-deployed nuclear capacity has overtaken that of the U.S., so we are behind for the first time since 2000.
		Russia has 1,643 nuclear missiles ready to launch.
		The U.S. has 1,642.
		Not surprisingly, all of them Aimed at Russia.
		You know, I thought we re-aimed our missiles to the water.
		So I guess that one's off, huh?
		Both countries have been upgrading their active nuclear arsenals since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
		Oh, great.
		The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates the U.S. has over 7,000 nuclear warheads compared to more than 8,000 warheads in Russia.
		The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says the two countries possess 93% of the totality of the global nuclear stockpile.
		$1.7 trillion.
		All right, coming up next, Stephen Starr, MT, ASCB, BB, MPH, graduated from the School of Health Professions at the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1985.
		He subsequently worked as a medical technologist over a period of 27 years at a number of hospitals.
		He is currently the director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri.
		Stephen is an associate member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
		Mr. Starr is also an expert on the environmental consequences of nuclear war and in 2011 made an address to the UN General Assembly describing the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear war and what it poses to all nations and peoples.
		He has made presentations to ministry officials, parliamentarians, universities, citizens, and students from all around the world.
		He specializes in making technical scientific information understandable to all audiences, which will be a good thing for this night because this is a tough subject.
unidentified		I told you, get the kids out of the room.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the third and last warning.
		Coming up next, Stephen Starr.
		I'm Art Bell, and this is Midnight.
unidentified		Midnight.
		We'll be right back.
		From the part of the Dark Matter Digital Network, this is Midnight in the Desert with your host, Art Bell.
		Now, here's Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Here I am.
		Well, 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.
unidentified		Yep.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		It's a pleasure to be on your show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good to have you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We have never spoken, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 DEF CON level into the world of scare.
		Really scary.
		Yes, yep, yep, I was.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was doing duck and cover drills at the elementary school in St. Louis County where I lived.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Okay.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And I think that actually left a big impression on me.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		It had an effect that kind of partially led me to where I am today.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember seeing that phone ring, and of course, I was aware of the ongoing crisis, you know, 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.
unidentified		I thought, this is it.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, it almost was.
		And, you know, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We have, and I guess we've probably been closer than we know, or that, you know, the public knows.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		We remain closer than the public knows.
		You know, there's still almost 2,000 launch-ready nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that the U.S. and Russia have that in the course of this conversation could be launched.
		It only takes less than two minutes for them to be launched and to be on their way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And they would be here, how quickly?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		If they're launched from a submarine off the coast of the U.S. or off of Russia, then it would take nine to ten minutes.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Otherwise, from the Montana or the Ural Mountains, it takes about 30 minutes for them to make their flight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The Russians are saying they now have technology that would make it impossible for us to intercept their ICBM should a war begin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe them?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't want to test it.
		No.
		I think Eastside, you know, we have our ballistic missile defense system that's being deployed through NATO, and there's a lot of evidence that it may not work as advertised unless you perhaps switch out the kinetic warheads for nuclear warheads, which is something that's not discussed but is considered by Russian war planners.
		But all these things are really all being done in the process of ignoring the scientific predictions of the existential threat of nuclear war.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So I take it that if you replace a kinetic weapon with a nuclear warhead, then you only have to be close.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 it's more like one or two kilometers or a mile or so.
		But I've talked to Dr. Ted Pastel, who's written about this.
		He's at MIT.
		And he said that there's always a countermeasure available, that the warheads have decoys included with them these days, both U.S. and Russian warheads.
		You could probably spread the decoys out further.
		Once you get into these sort of arms races, it's almost impossible to stop them.
		That's why they actually were wise enough to create the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which George W. Bush withdrew from not that long ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 and nuclear-armed cruise missiles.
		And so I guess is it going to go away?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, the thing is, there's a political spin that comes out on each side, the U.S. and Russian.
		And, you know, there's technical details about all this that could be argued.
		But it's sort of like counting how many angels can sit on the head of a pin.
		You know, we get lost in these arguments about who has the most missiles and who has the most warheads.
		In a sense, we treat nuclear weapons as we did conventional weapons.
		But even this is, I think, I have a class that I teach at the University of Missouri, and I ask my students about this, like, why do you think we developed, we got to the point where we had something like 70,000 nuclear weapons in 1986.
		But we have studies that show that 300 strategic warheads, if you detonate those, they'll kill 75% of the people in the United States and Russia.
		So how could we manage to create 70,000 warheads?
		It really was.
		They called it mad, which made more sense than mutual assured destruction.
		It was insane.
		But I think there's a failure to grasp the fact that grasp the essential nature of nuclear war and the existential threat that it poses to human beings.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So actually, you're a professor, Stephen Starr, really, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess in some ways, Stephen, that's a bad thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And in some ways, maybe it's a good thing because if they're ever used in NAS, well, I just don't think it's...
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Sometimes I feel like Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of guy.
		But I honestly believe that if ordinary Americans, the non-technical audiences, had any idea that the nuclear arsenal that the U.S. and Russia has represent a self-destruct mechanism for the human race, that they wouldn't tolerate it.
		But we cannot get the leaders of our countries or any of the nuclear weapon states to publicly acknowledge or discuss this fact.
		And there's very precise scientific predictions and studies that have been made in the last seven or eight years that quantify this, that make it, that spell it out about how this would happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I mean, there's just such a disconnect between the reality of what we're doing with our public school systems and our infrastructure and our health care as opposed to the enormous military budgets that go out virtually unattended every year.
		This rubber stamped.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
		You know, it's not necessary to have that.
		Actually, there's very the transparency is not what it should be.
		The people that provide the numbers that I'll give you are experts and they have contacts, but the governments don't really readily give this out anymore.
		It's getting harder and harder to get very accurate information.
		But historically, we know that right about now there's something between 15 and 16,000 intact nuclear weapons in the world in a global nuclear arsenal.
		And the U.S. and Russia probably have, they have 15 out of the 16,000, let's say.
		And you mentioned that 93% in your opening.
		That's about right.
		So that's why it's so important to focus on the U.S. and Russia, because first of all, the country that comes in next is France with 300.
		And so there's orders of so many more times greater numbers that the U.S. and Russia have compared to anybody else.
		That's where you have to start.
		Now, if you look at what the weapons are, we each have, U.S. and Russia each have approximately 2,000 nuclear weapons that are deployed for immediate use.
		So a lot of them are kept in reserve.
		But 2,000 weapons each would be more than enough to wipe out the human race.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And of these, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yes, you know, that was kind of a PR ploy that Clinton and Yelson had.
		Clinton repeated it quite a bit during one of his military campaigns.
		But the reality of nuclear targeting is that it takes about 10 seconds to retarget 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.
		And then, but better, just let's dismantle them, you know, take the warheads off the missiles.
		We have to start thinking of this as a problem for our species.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I do.
unidentified		I do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think of it as a problem for our species.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, the people in charge don't, I think.
		I think they're so caught up in the moment.
		You know, the scientists have tried to discuss these studies that are, they're called peer-reviewed studies.
		They're the best studies that can be done in science.
		They publish them and they're criticized by all the best scientists in the world.
		And if they can't find anything wrong with it, then they go into a journal.
		And these have been out there for seven or eight years, and they predict that even what you would call a successful first strike, let's say that the U.S. launched and destroyed every Russian strategic nuclear weapon, every nuclear weapon that could be launched against the United States, well, the environmental consequences of that successful first strike would cause everybody in the United States to starve to death, along with everybody else in the world.
		So it's a self-destruct mechanism for the human race.
		The scientist wrote an article called Self-Assured Destruction, which you would compare that to mutual assured.
		It's actually all along it's been self-assured.
unidentified		A little bit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, the mechanism is that nuclear weapons are really like a piece of the sun when they detonate.
		And this goes for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, which was 15,000 tons of TNT explosive equivalent, to average, say, Russian strategic warhead that has 800,000 tons of TNT.
		That's what's normal today.
		But both of those will, when the fireball they create, the surface of that fireball is hotter than the surface of the sun.
		So what happens then, if that's detonated over or above a city, it will ignite everything within a radius.
		The 15 kiloton weapon sets three to five square miles on fire instantly.
		The 800 kiloton warhead will set 90 to 152 square miles on fire instantly.
		And all these, what happens is there's fire set over this whole area.
		It's a mass fire.
		And within 10 to 15 minutes, it coalesces.
		They all join together to form a single gigantic fire.
		In the center of the fire, there's like a chimney effect that rises up, and it creates hurricane-force winds that blow towards the center of the fire.
		So it'll actually be strong enough to uproot trees and pull into the fire.
		And anyone in the fire zone, in a matter of minutes, the air temperature is good above the boiling temperature of water.
		And we first saw a mass fire like this in Dresden and Hamburg and Stuttgart during World War II when the British firebombed the German cities.
		Oh, yes.
		And they weren't even able to go into those cities for quite a few days in tracked vehicles.
		It was too hot.
		And even anybody that was in a deep shelter suffocated or baked, basically.
		I mean, it's horrible, but it's true.
		And so then we firebombed Tokyo, for example, with conventional firebombs like Napalm.
		100,000 Japanese died in that raid.
		And then we went on to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
		So we basically crossed the moral threshold for blowing up, burning cities up.
		So if you think about what a nuclear war is, if you think of like one 800-kiloton warhead with 150 square miles on fire, then you multiply that times hundreds or thousands, all within an hour's space of time.
		All those fires create enormous amounts of smoke and soot.
		The scientists have predicted that a U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear war would produce somewhere between 50 and 180 million tons of smoke.
		This smoke will quickly rise above cloud level, which means it can't be rained out.
		And once it gets into the stratosphere, there are high winds.
		In a matter of 10 to 14 days, that smoke will completely encircle the Earth and engulf the Earth in a global stratospheric smoke layer.
		And this layer will do two things.
		Well, basically, it absorbs and blocks the sunlight.
		By absorbing it, it heats up the stratosphere, which destroys the protective ozone layer.
		And by blocking that sun, it prevents warming sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth.
		And that, in a matter of a week, will produce temperatures colder than they were at the height of the last ice age, 18,000 years ago.
		And the end result is that for one to three years, the temperatures in Central North America and Eurasia will be below freezing every day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All summer.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, all year, every single day of the year.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And then it will stay cold for so long that it will eliminate growing seasons for at least 10 years, maybe 20.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, 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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, hold it right there, Stephen.
		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.
unidentified		All our time has come.
		We'll be right back.
		Come or disappear into the butter's ground when the man comes around.
		Taking you from today into tomorrow.
		This is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell to call the show.
		Dial 1-952-CALLART.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't call yet.
		Phones are not open yet.
		My guest is Professor Stephen Starr, and we are discussing nuclear war.
unidentified		Global thermonuclear war.
unidentified		And so let's get back to it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Let's see.
		It was Fat Man was Nagasaki, and Little Boy was Hiroshima.
		There you go.
		And the Hiroshima bomb is estimated, there's different estimates, but let's just say 15,000 tons of TNT explosive equivalent.
		They have to compare it to something, so they compare it to TNT, but a nuclear detonation is really different, fundamentally different than a high-explosive chemical detonation for a couple of reasons.
		The stellar temperatures it produces literally a couple hundred million degrees centigrade at the instant of detonation at the center of the fireball.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in other words, that's actually not been a completely accurate description of the power of the weapon at all.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		You know, there's an article on my website by Professor Lynn Eaton called City on Fire.
		She points out that actually the U.S. military has significantly underestimated the destructive capabilities of their own nuclear weapons because they don't really consider thermal effects or the effects of fire, which I was describing earlier.
		But you asked about the explosive power.
		So it's 15,000 tons of TNT, and when that's detonated, it will ignite fires simultaneously over an area of about three to five square miles.
		And that's opposed to the modern, they call them strategic nuclear weapons.
		These are the weapons that are possessed by the five recognized nuclear weapon states.
		But the smallest, I hate to use the word small, but the smallest yield or explosive power of a strategic weapon is 100,000 tons of TNT.
		And the U.S. ICBMs usually have somewhere between 300,000 tons of TNT to 475,000 tons of TNT.
		The Russian ones are generally a little bit bigger.
		They're about 800,000 tons of TNT.
		Our bombers, our nuclear bombers, can carry a nuclear gravity bomb, the B-83, that has 1.3 million tons of TNT explosive power.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What, one?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Excuse me?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, they call those megatons.
		The kilotons means 1,000 tons, so 15 kilotons, Hiroshima.
		But, you know, I mean, after hydrogen bombs were invented in the early 1950s, it wasn't all that long before American bombers were carrying multi-megaton weapons around.
		That was, you know, you probably remember, I mean, in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the average warhead size, you know, it's usually 2 or 3 million tons of TNT.
		China still has, I think their warheads are believed to be about 3 million tons of TNT explosive power.
		They don't have a lot of missiles that can hit the U.S., but they have some.
		And just like every other nuclear weapon state, they're modernizing their arsenals.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just a little bit of trivia, if there is such a thing in the subject.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I believe that we accidentally dropped two nuclear weapons on North Carolina.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And there was an accident, a B-52 was back then they carried these multi-megaton gravity bombs.
		And 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.
		So 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So one more five-bolt little signal, and it would have been as you describe it.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, there's other accidents that we don't know about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, before we leave that one, what I heard was that they retrieved one of those weapons, and one of them they didn't.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 that they're corroded on the outside, but they're fine on the inside.
		I don't 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 that rolled off the deck.
		You know, it's a hell of a mess, really.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		All right.
		So we have hydrogen bombs now, and these are the ones, well, for example, like the B-83, right?
		That would be a hydrogen bomb with yields up to, what, 1.3 million?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		You know, the design of nuclear weapons, the difference between the atomic bomb, then they came up with the hydrogen bomb.
		And the first hydrogen bombs were enormous, and they stayed that way for a long time.
		In the 1980s and 90s, they actually started making them smaller in explosive power, but this was primarily because they were able to put them on the top of ballistic missiles, and they came up with multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles.
		So you can put, say, 10 warheads on one missile.
		So they're generally, the strategic weapons now range in the hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT explosive power, but some are over a million.
		And I really have, I have no doubt that both the United States and Russia still have some multi-megaton weapons that they keep somewhere in case they need them.
		We still have 4,000 or 5,000 weapons that are, they call them scheduled for dismantlement.
		So they actually don't go into the totals that the United States puts out as far as how many weapons we have.
		They'll announce that we have 4,000 weapons, but then they don't mention that there's 4,000 that are still basically in the same condition they were a few years ago and maybe in the same place.
		So they schedule them for dismantlement.
		So I call that disarmament by semantics.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So in a way, multiple warheads are just a way of doing more with less, sort of.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, if you want to get into the calculations, if you set off a number of smaller warheads over an area, you actually create more blast damage and just as big a thermal effects as one big warhead.
		Military planners tend to focus on blasts, which is because they want to, you know, and so that's why a city like New York, well, Washington, D.C. would be a good example.
		They might target at, what, say, 40 warheads, where actually one of these 800 kiloton warheads would be more than enough to set the whole city and way beyond in the suburbs on fire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		100 and some odd miles, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's a, you know, they calculate these firestorms based on average weather conditions, but even under the very worst weather conditions, for 800 kiloton warhead, you're going to have about 90 square miles where you're going to have a certain fire zone.
		But on average weather conditions, it's more like about 150 square miles, and it can be more than that on an exceptionally clear day.
		So on my website, I focus on fire because, as we mentioned earlier, the fire is what creates the smoke, and the smoke gets up into the stratosphere and can block the sunlight and create these ice age weather conditions on Earth that eliminate the ability to grow food crops for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Assuming a full exchange, how long would a nuclear winter take?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's actually new studies that are being done.
		I keep in touch with my friends, the scientists, and it looks like it could be 20 years even.
		But I mean, the global grain reserves right now are maybe enough for a couple of months.
		But you mentioned, I think, at some point, India and Pakistan.
		Well, they have a big nuclear arms race going on there now.
		But what they produce initially, at least, are atomic bomb-sized weapons.
		They have about 200 operational atomic bombs, the 15-kiloton or 15,000-ton size.
		So the scientists did a study on a war with 100 of those being detonated in their cities, and they found they predicted about 5 million tons of smoke would get into the stratosphere.
		That would be enough to block about 10% of the sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth for at least three or four years, maybe seven.
		And the smoke would stay up there for longer than 10.
		This would cause enough of a decrease in crop production that it would, it's predicted that up to 2 billion people would starve to death just from an India-Pakistan.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Actually, India and Pakistan have been right up to the brink any number of times, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		That's right, yes, that's true.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And they're not getting along all that well right now, from what I read.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, it's not survivable if you happen to be in the target area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, of course not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Of course not.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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, appears to me to be an idea that we can just threaten the Russians and they'll back down.
		So what happens if they don't or our militaries come into direct contact?
		As far as India and Pakistan, you know, they're right on each other's border.
		If they launch a nuclear weapon, a ballistic missile, it'll detonate in a matter of a minute or two or less, you know.
		So they don't even have really early warning systems.
		Like we've constructed these early warning systems because since we're on the opposite sides of the planet, it gives us enough time to detect the launch and then pass the warning up to the president.
		And then he can decide whether he wants to launch a retaliatory strike based just on early warning system data.
		And if that's wrong, then he's actually launching a preemptive nuclear strike.
		But all of these things, and I've written about this, I just said an article in the Bullets of Atomic Scientists today about launching before or after the detonation of a nuclear weapon based on early warning systems.
		But the problem is that this is, we're talking, when we get into those sorts of discussions, we're avoiding the real issue that's never discussed, and that's the environmental consequences of nuclear war.
		That has never been discussed by any of the nuclear weapons states in a public way, and it's avoided.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I want to give the preppers a small reason to continue to prep.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is a small reason.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Sure, sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Relatively, now, if there was an exchange between India and Pakistan, things would be bad.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But if you're prepared, survivable, I take it, in North America.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, if you want to look at a scenario like that, and historically, famine has been caused not just by lack of food, but also by scarce, you know, the rising prices and the inability to purchase and then the restriction of exports.
		I think that if there was a war in India and Pakistan where nuclear weapons were detonated and this global stratospheric smoke layer was produced and it was quite clear that the, you know, like for example, you wouldn't be able to grow wheat in Canada for a few years, then the exporting countries that grow grain would probably say, okay, that's it.
		We're not sending anything overseas.
		We've got to keep this for ourselves.
		So all the populations that are dependent on imported foods, especially grains, are going to just be SOL.
		So that's, first of all, there's about a billion people right now that live on the edge of starvation.
		And Dr. Ira Helpin from Physicians for Social Responsibility, I'm actually a senior scientist with them too.
		He wrote a couple of papers that shows that if you reduce the caloric intake of somebody who's already starving by just even 10 or 15 percent over the course of a year, they're going to starve to death.
		And we're looking at 10 to 20 percent reductions for sure in the rice and the corn crops in China and the United States and even worse further north.
		So I think if you're a prepper, it kind of depends what you're preparing for.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't think there's anything wrong.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 we, you know, people need to do that in general these days.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm with you all the way.
		I've got solar panels.
		I've got generators on and on and on.
		Anyway, again, I want to come back to this scenario.
		And I know you don't like any scenario that involves nuclear weapons.
		Nobody would.
		But this particular one, India and Pakistan, let's say they really let it loose.
		Somebody in North America, let's say in Ohio, I don't know, what effects would that person in Ohio have to live with over any number of months or years?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I can give you some pretty good answers to that.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		The scientists that did these studies, they compared it to, you know, there was a volcanic eruption, the largest one in the last 500 years called Mount Tambura.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mount Tambura.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
		But there was killing, in North America, there were killing frosts every month of the year in June, July, and August in New England.
		And there was famine in England, in Europe.
		There wasn't much of a density of population in the United States, and there was enough wildlife and everything.
		I don't think there was famine here, but so they predict that the cold that would follow the sort of war that you're describing between India and Pakistan would actually be twice as cold.
		It would be colder than it's been in the last 1,000 years, would be the average surface temperatures.
		And that's quite cold.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, wait a minute.
		I'm in Ohio.
		How am I doing?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're going to have a really severe winter.
		As far as food, well, you know, who knows?
		The United States, a lot of things have changed here in the last 10 or 20 or 30 years, and we're really dependent on so many different types of imports that would have been sort of a joke if we thought about it in the 1970s and 60s.
		I don't know.
		Our whole infrastructure is very fragile in terms of there's a couple days worth of food, maybe a week's worth at the most in our grocery stores.
		So if something breaks down under those circumstances, then we're going to be in trouble.
		I don't know.
		I don't think it's going to be below freezing every day here.
		It's not going to be that cold.
		It's not going to be literally colder than ice age weather, but it's going to be damn cold, and I suspect food's going to be scarce.
		But when you get into a situation with nuclear war and global famine, I think that just totally destabilizes the international relations.
		Of course.
		Who knows what that would lead to?
		So when you try to make predictions on that, it's kind of...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I mean, if I'm in Ohio and I'm a prepper, I probably would survive the effects of that.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, 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 Men and Icha, the Amish, and keep a year's worth of food.
		It's not a bad thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the radiation, Professor?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, radiation is something that, you know, it's funny because I don't talk about it quite so much with, because once you can kill everybody with the climatic consequences, with, you know, cold where you can't grow food.
		But radiation is a big, that's sort of, it's almost, you can do a whole show on that.
		It depends on what gets targeted in a nuclear war.
		You know, our nuclear power plants now, we have over 100 in the United States, and on site they store about five to ten sets of used fuel rods that they've been removed over the course.
		And these, they call them spent fuel pools.
		They're like swimming pools where they have to be kept underwater because of the intense radioactivity, which also produces a lot of heat that has to be removed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not so friendly if they get out of the water, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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, what's the right word, that could be survived.
		I'm Mark Fettel.
unidentified		Music Music
		By telling me the lie without a reason why Golden Lost I'm to you at the speed of light in the darkness, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
		Now, here's Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor Stephen Starr is my guest, and here I come again, Professor.
		I'm in Ohio, and Pakistan decides to decapitate the other side.
		And so they get into a full-fledged war.
		I'm going to probably be able to survive if I'm a prepper, if I've got food.
		It's going to get cold.
		And I know that people who speak, people like you who speak in front of whoever it would be, don't even like to talk about nuclear exchanges that would be survivable because you don't want them at all, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, there's a lot of truth in that.
		Part of it is because, you know, I have a habit of trying not to make predictions that I'm not, you know, it's a scientific approach where you don't say what you can't prove.
		But I think your description of what the post-war scenario is like is accurate.
		And I mean, I think it would be a nightmare.
		It would be really cold, and it wouldn't just be for a year.
		This would be like 10 years without summer almost.
		It would be colder than it's been in the last thousand years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, this is only India and Pakistan, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And that 100 atomic bombs that were detonated in that war have about, you know, maybe even less than 1% of the explosive power of the weapons that the United States and Russia have ready to launch.
		It only takes 2 to 15 minutes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we once, Professor, lived in an era where MAD was operational.
		You know, it was just suicide to even consider it.
		But now we've got countries like North Korea.
		North Korea is 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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, it wouldn't be a mutual assured destruction in their case because they have like 10 atomic bombs or so.
		But, you know, at the moment.
		Yeah, but all these arsenals are getting bigger.
		Even India and Pakistan at some point are going to start producing thermonuclear weapons, strategic nuclear weapons, instead of just atomic bombs.
		So there's got to be a point where people, well, actually there is a point.
		There's a thing called the Austrian Pledge.
		There was a meeting in Austria, and 113 nations have signed this request.
		They're trying to get a conference together, but they're calling for the banning of nuclear weapons in the same way that chemical and biological weapons would be banned.
		And then the ban after a ban, of course, there would be an elimination.
		And guess what?
		Guess who's against that?
		The five nuclear weapon states.
		Oh, no, no, we don't need that.
		This is disruptive of our process.
		We want to stick with the nonproliferation treaty because that's doing just fine.
		But it's been 50 years since that was signed.
		And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the nuclear weapons states are busy modernizing their arsenals.
		As you mentioned, a trillion dollars to build.
		We're rebuilding our entire nuclear weapons manufacturing complex in the United States is what's going to happen.
		In Kansas City here in Missouri, they just are finishing this gigantic hundred millions of dollars going into a facility that builds all the non-nuclear components, but that's about 80% of the bomb.
		And it was the biggest construction project in Missouri.
		And I thought, you know, there's really something wrong with our society when our biggest project is to build a new nuclear weapons plant.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Back to Pakistan for a moment.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indian Pakistan.
		Assuming they had a full exchange, Little Mean, Ohio.
		Radiation.
		We didn't really get there.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		No, yeah, I sort of sidetracked.
		I started talking about nuclear power plants in the U.S., and maybe I really wasn't answering your question there.
		As far as the radiation from that exchange, I think there would be a lot of it.
		If you detonate a weapon on the surface as opposed into the air, you get like a really nasty fallout.
		But what happens there is those sorts of fallout from that gets rained out and spread more regionally than globally.
		You have to have about a 100-kiloton weapon for the fireball to go above the trophosphere or where the weather takes place up into the stratosphere where it's above cloud level and it can't get rained out.
		That's where the term fallout came from.
		We had all these big, you know, in the South Pacific, we detonated all those hydrogen bombs and they were enormous.
		You know, the largest one was 15 million tons of TNT.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
		When you detonate, most of the bombs had plutonium pits.
		And even the very most efficient bomb doesn't have all the plutonium fission.
		A lot of it's blasted into microparticles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there any such thing as a clean bomb?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		No.
		They all produce.
		And there's no such thing as a clean nuclear fission.
		Anytime you split an atom, you produce a lot of radioactive byproducts.
		And most of these, like the cesium-137 and strontium-90, haven't really existed during the entire time complex life has evolved and developed.
		And so it's new to us.
		And that's one of the things I think that's been ignored or almost suppressed.
		And they focus a lot on external doses of radiation.
		But another, equally or even more important is if this stuff gets into the biosphere, these long-lived radioisotopes like cesium-137, and it gets into your foodstuffs, and then you eat it, you ingest it or inhale it, it causes other diseases besides leukemia and cancer.
		I spent a year helping to translate a study that was done in Belarus, that was done after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up.
		And about 25% of Belarus was seriously contaminated.
		And the most predominant radioisotope is cesium-137.
		And it gets into everything.
		Even the wood, when they burn firewood for heating and cooking, it turns their chimneys into like small nuclear reactors, you know.
		But the children there are really sick.
		Only less than 10% of the children in these contaminated areas are considered to be healthy.
		And the study that I got translated was done over a nine-year period.
		They examined 100,000 children, and they did thousands of human tissue samples done from autopsies of children and infants that had died in these areas.
		And they found that the seizium concentrates in the endocrine tissues as well as the heart, the pancreas, the spleen.
		And this led to all sorts of problems like heart attack, stroke, hypertension.
		They call it Chernobyl heart.
		It's something that these kids have.
		If they don't have an operation, they die.
		But after the scientist made this presentation, he went home and he presented to the parliament in Belarus.
		He went home, the police came and kicked his door and they arrested him.
		They went to his medical institute and destroyed all his archived slides and samples from nine years' worth of research, and they put him in a prison camp for six years.
		So this information hasn't been made public.
		I presented it at the New York Academy of Medicine about a year, a little over a year ago.
		But if you go to the EPA website and you look at CZ-137, they say it's uniformly distributed in the body.
		Well, it's not true.
		But again, the nuclear industry has so much influence and power that they dispute all this, of course.
		And they say the sort of doses that these children are exposed to pose no threat to human health.
		So there's a real fundamental argument going on here.
		But these are the health physicists that are trained by the nuclear industry.
		They have their own safety standards they develop.
		And these health physicists actually aren't doctors.
		They have no real training in medicine.
		But they dispute what the scientists and doctors are saying.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, the recent nuclear accident in Japan, I believe there was some 137 distributed to some fairly wide degree.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		That was what my presentation at the New York Academy of Medicine was about, was the massive contamination of Japan with cesium-137.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What are going to be the effects downline of that?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, the nuclear industry will tell you none.
		They'll say, oh, there's no big deal.
		And, you know, they still have an area that's an exclusion zone.
		But they say, well, we're opening that up.
		They're trying to make it scrape off enough dirt so people can drive into these cities that they wash their roofs off on and pretend like it's safe.
		But I don't think we know.
		That's the worst thing about all this.
		All the atmospheric weapons tests.
		You know, we detonated 100 atomic bombs in the deserts of New Mexico.
		And I honestly think that is the largest environmental disaster in American history.
		They kept all the fallout secret from people.
		They didn't even know what was happening.
		So all of the combination of that has raised amounts of ionizing radiation to much higher than, you know, there really wasn't background levels until we started detonating nuclear weapons.
		And we don't know what the long-term genetic consequences of this stuff is.
		I think that it could lead to all sorts of genetic diseases that maybe are just starting to appear now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I guess in a war that would be a big potential goal, wouldn't it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you want to destroy your enemy, but you want the physical assets, if possible.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, traditionally, that's what war is all about.
		You know, you want to conquer the other country and take advantage of their wealth and their people.
		That's the problem with nuclear war.
		Besides the fact that we'll all starve to death afterwards, you know, the contamination and destruction from these weapons goes beyond time and space.
		We're talking, you know, it transcends, it'll last for centuries or millennia.
		And they really are.
		They're not precise weapons.
		If you look at the weapons that NATO has, for example, when you were mentioning those in your introduction, I think the B-61 bomb that the U.S. is actually, it's actually a new nuclear weapon that we're creating.
		It has a, they call it dial a yield, a variability yield, where it goes from 300 tons or 0.3 kilotons of TNT up to 50,000 tons.
		There's different mods or models.
		There's some that actually go up to 170,000 tons.
		But these weapons, they're guided weapons, and so they can be used very precisely.
		But it makes them more, what they would call usable.
		And so therefore, it makes it more likely that they will be used.
		There's this whole psyche of, well, we have to have a credible threat.
		And in order to make our threat believable, we have to have weapons that it looks like we would use them.
		But, you know, we're backing ourselves into a corner where someday, what happens if we do have to use them?
		You know, there's then you go from, then you actually start a nuclear war.
		And if you're fighting with somebody that has nuclear weapons, like Russia, they have plenty of, you know, weapons like that, battlefield weapons they call them, or tactical.
		And they can respond in kind.
		And all the war games that were ever done with NATO, for example, during the Cold War, once they crossed, they called it the nuclear firebreak, once they went from using conventional high-explosive weapons to nuclear, it was only a matter of time before it escalated into just a complete nuclear war, Holocaust.
unidentified		So I wonder if our leaders know that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, how quickly do you feel that that threshold would be...
		Let's say that Putin decides that he wants what they had, the old Soviet Union, and they begin moving into state after state after state, attempting to reform what they had.
		Now, to some degree, NATO, I guess, would at some point step in, but boy, oh boy, when you start talking about it in real life, understanding what would happen if we stepped in, we would be probably really cautious.
		And I don't know how many countries would fall before we decided we would step in.
		And once we did, even a small exchange, artillery, for example, they have nuclear weapons that can be fired by artillery, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 know, you don't even have to get to a situation where you're imagining that Russia would invade.
		The U.S. has moved something like 700 tanks.
		We're in the process of moving enough to arm a mechanized division to Poland and the Baltic states.
		That's right.
		And what if Russia was doing that to the United States?
		What if they were moving a mechanized division to Mexico?
		How would we react?
		Putin's under a lot of pressure to react to these sorts of things.
		If you remember their Victory Day parade that they had the anniversary, 70th anniversary of them defeating the Nazis in World War II, and the Western leaders in Obama decided not to go to Moscow, right?
		But at the same time, what was going on was in Estonia, NATO was having a war game with something like 15,000 troops and planes and tanks from nine member states, which is 150 miles away from Russia's second largest city, St. Petersburg, which was called Leningrad in World War II, where they had 800,000 people die when the Nazis surrounded it.
		You know, the total, the Russians had 27 million people that died in World War II.
		We had 400,000, 414,000 or something like that.
		So it's a big deal.
		You know, when you start doing stuff on their border, I worry that when we pile up these forces, even in the Cold War, American forces were, the closest they were to Russia were in West Germany.
		They were never on the Russian border.
		So we're actually in a more dangerous situation now than we were then, in my opinion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I thought.
		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.
		And I'm sure the first to go would be Seoul.
		Seoul is so close to the border.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot of scenarios there.
		I've read some different scenarios where they think North Korea has so much artillery that's in range of Seoul that they could actually almost destroy the city without a nuclear weapon.
		And they could reserve their nuclear weapons for the harbors, for example, to prevent troops from coming in.
		Good point.
		There's a lot of...
		There might be as many people killed in that as, there might be 10 or 20 or 50 million people killed in a nuclear war with that.
		But it's still, I don't think you have to have the like 100, say the 100 detonations that we talked about in India and Pakistan before you create this global smoke layer.
		So there is sort of a threshold for the whole nuclear winter process, but it hasn't really been defined as such.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, what do we know about North Korea's bombs?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, any country that develops nuclear weapons begins by developing what we sort of like we did with an atomic bomb, a relatively simple bomb.
		You know, if you have highly enriched uranium and you can slam two pieces together, that's the very simplest one.
		We didn't even test that before we dropped the first one in Hiroshima because we knew it would work.
		If you make it from plutonium, which is what the North Koreans have done because they had a reactor and they irradiate the fuel rods, they produce the plutonium that way.
		They extract it.
		Then it's harder to make an atomic bomb from plutonium because you have to, because of the nature of plutonium, you have to implode it.
		That was an invention in the Manhattan Project.
		They actually had to create concentrically placed explosive charges on the exterior.
		They had something the size of, say, a grapefruit that they made into the size of a walnut by exploding everything on the outside.
		And then that creates fission.
		So that's why the North Koreans have to test their weapons to make sure they work.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do they work?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, I'm sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do they work?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 1,000 tons of TNT going off in a city is certainly, with radioactivity, it's not anything that would be a minor problem.
		But they don't, I think that it's quite clear that they have the equivalent of atomic bombs now.
		Both India, Pakistan, and North Korea, they all still have the atomic bomb type weapons.
		They haven't gotten to the strategic, the hydrogen bomb or the thermonuclear weapons that have the 100 kiloton or megaton yields.
		But 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Moreover, they are developing launch vehicles that are starting to be effective.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, when you talk about building a nuclear weapon, there's a number of things that people don't usually appreciate.
		When you enrich uranium, which means that you're increasing the concentration of the isotope U-235, that's only, you know, about seven-tenths of 1% existing uranium.
		When you get up to a 20% enrichment, you actually can create, it's called weapons usable.
		You can make a weapon from that, but it's so big you couldn't make it into a bomb or put it on a missile.
		It's not what they call deliverable.
		So the process of weaponization, of getting higher enrichments is how you move to make a weapon or a warhead that you could put on a missile.
		I think that the impression I got is that Iran was fairly close to getting like a 20% enrichment on a lot of their uranium, but I don't, you know, after that, it's just you read one report or another, like you said, you don't really know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I heard they might have a thousand centrifuges going, something like that.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
		So there are other ways to do it, but that's been the way that I think that Iran has approached it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have interviewed any number of theoretical physicists like Dr. Michio Kaku.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you've heard that name.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Oh, sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And he said less than 1%.
unidentified		Yeah.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I hope he's wrong.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do too.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You know, I think if we keep going the way we are, then, you know, I might have to say he's right.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		But my biggest thing is that.
unidentified		Well, that's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		See, things are not getting better.
		They're getting worse.
		They're getting more dangerous.
		That's what I see.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, what's amazed me, my biggest frustration, and if your listeners want to, something I'd suggest that they try to accomplish, we can't get the leaders of the nuclear weapon states.
		We can't get Obama to meet with these scientists.
		He can't get his advisors to meet with the scientists to discuss their studies.
		They just want to say, hey, look, we've done this remarkable research with state-of-the-art computers, and it's been evaluated all around the world by the world's best scientists.
		And this is what's going to happen if you have a nuclear war.
		There has to be, somebody has to have enough guts to get out on the world stage.
		I think it has to be one of the leaders of the nuclear weapons state and say, look, you know, we're having all these problems getting along and everything.
		But what we have to talk about and what we have to understand is that if we have a nuclear war, we're going to kill not only everybody in our nations, but everybody else on the planet.
		And, you know, the other nations around the world are actually coming to grips with this, and that's why you can have an Austrian pledge with 113 nations calling for banning nuclear weapons.
		But, you know, the nuclear weapon states are resisting this.
		That's what really troubles me is that here in my own country, we can't even get a hearing.
		And these guys are the best scientists in the world.
		They're not doing this on the back of an envelope.
		They're doing it in their National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Colorado Boulder, Rutgers.
		They aren't amateurs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor Kaku was invited to work on nuclear weapons and declined.
		And I wonder how, I mean, surely some of the people you know have worked on nuclear weapons.
		And I wonder how they can rationalize that in their minds, knowing what they're doing.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 with nuclear waste and the nuclear weapons, and it just didn't feel right.
		So I went into biological sciences.
		But, you know, I have some friends, like you said, I've got a good friend, Greg Mello, out in New Mexico.
		They have a Los Alamos study group.
		And he, you know, he talks to a lot of the people that work there and, you know, the weapons designers.
		And so, and these aren't, these aren't like, I don't know.
		I don't consider them evil, you know, bad people, but I do think that where do we, somebody has to say this is enough.
		You know, somebody has to come to grips with the fact that we just can't keep doing this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, have you ever actually spoken to one of these men about the morality of what they're doing?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, some of the people I have spoken to, there was a former commander of the Strategic Air Command, Lee Butler, and there's a few other military guys that I've met with that have all rejected nuclear weapons and nuclear war.
		And, you know, some of them do it because they just say, well, there's no military utility in it.
		We can't use these weapons, you know, because if we do...
		So just from that sort of pragmatic military viewpoint, and the concern that they have is that the younger generations now are sort of becoming accustomed to them.
		They're not really...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		I'm Art Bell.
		I can see you lying back in your settings, in a room where you do what you don't confess.
		Somewhere you better take it.
		I can hear you calling the air tonight.
		Hold on.
		And I've been waiting for someone for my life.
		Hold on.
		Wanna take a ride from the high desert and the great American Southwest?
		This is Midnight in the Desert, exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
		To call the show, dial 1-952-CAL ART.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not yet.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Not yet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 telling you, we have forgotten what little we knew about the effects of nuclear war.
		Or perhaps ever knew at all.
unidentified		So, Professor, welcome back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was going to sort of jump ahead to if we do have a full exchange with Russia, something I consider really possible, unfortunately, either getting started by accident or on purpose.
		And we haven't even discussed the accident part of it.
		I want to get to that.
		But if we did have the full exchange, not that I guess we would be around to observe the effects, but what do the models say would happen to our atmosphere and the magnetic field that protects us anyway?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, the models that I've been referring to primarily focus on what would happen as a result of the nuclear firestorms that producing tens of billions of tons of smoke that rise above cloud level and the stratosphere blocks sunlight and blocks 70% of the sunlight in the northern hemisphere for 10 years.
		So if you were standing in a field in Ohio, you were talking about Ohio earlier, and it was midday, if it was a little bit of a cloudy day, it would be about like standing outside at midnight on a full moon.
		That's how dark it would be.
		So that's why it would be below freezing every day for one to three years.
		You know, I thought you were going to ask about electromagnetic pulse.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'll get to it.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 effects of EMP when I get to 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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, it really wouldn't take very many.
		I think that's part of the reason why they worry about nations getting any nuclear weapons.
		You know, if you have a relatively high-yield weapon, it can knock out tens of thousands of square miles worth of all, you know, anything with a transistor in it, would melt down basically the control panels at nuclear power plants.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How high, Professor?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How high?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I think that they would detonate those several hundred miles high.
		They have, you know, I'm sure they figured all this out.
		The Russians actually tested, we did a few tests ourselves before they had the atmospheric test ban treaty.
		They detonated one over the Pacific and it knocked out the power in Honolulu.
		But there was a study that was done about electromagnetic pulse congressional study, and I got a copy of it, but I don't know if they had a classified version or not, but I was really very disappointed to see that they didn't address what would happen to nuclear power plants.
		And so I did talk, you know, Arne Gunderson, I bet.
		He's like really former, he's a nuclear engineer that really knows his stuff.
		I've talked to him about it.
		He said that one high-altitude nuclear detonation over the east coast of the United States could knock out like 60 nuclear power plants.
		And what would happen was that the reactors would melt down, and then also the spent fuel pools that I'd mentioned earlier, that have five to ten times more radioactivity, long-lived radioactivity than the cores do, they would boil off.
		Once the cooling stops, the water heats up and will boil.
		And when it gets down to the point where the rods are exposed to steam or air, then those rods will rupture.
		And if they've been removed recently enough from the reactor core, they'll burn.
		And that would release an enormous amount of radioactivity.
		Nuclear power plants produce a lot more of the long-lived isotopes than nuclear detonations do.
		For example, one nuclear spent fuel pool has more cesium-137 in it than all the atmospheric weapons tests combined released, over a thousand tests.
		And we have 100 of those pools scattered around the United States.
		When I did my studies on this, I was looking at the there's an exclusion map of around the destroyed Chernobyl power plant.
		There's about 1,100 square miles, where they call it a radioactive exclusion zone where people aren't allowed to live.
		And when I was looking at the map one day, I realized that the key for that map was based on how much cesium-137 was in the soil.
		And they described that in terms of Beckrolls.
		And I'm not going to give, but what it amounted to was that less than about 1.2 grams of cesium-137 contain enough radioactivity to make a square mile uninhabitable for a couple centuries.
		An American dime weighs, you know, like just two or three grams.
		I think it's 2.7 grams.
		So less than half the weight of a dime of cesium-137, if you make that into an aerosol or a smoke and spread it over a square mile, you can't live there for 100 years.
		And so the average spent fuel pool in the United States has close to 2,000 pounds of cesium-137 in each pool.
		So, and see, cesium is a very volatile element.
		It's almost like mercury.
		So around 700 degrees, it actually turns into a gas.
		And, you know, these rods are hot.
		The reason they're so radioactive, the radioactivity creates heat.
		And if they lose the cooling and they're exposed to air, once they get up to about 700 degrees, the cesium inside the rod becomes a gas and starts to expand.
		It'll cause the rod to rupture.
		And that's why, like at Fukushima, for example, so much cesium was released because when all those fuel rods, the reactors melted down, it released all the cesium.
		it went up into the air and the winds blew it around and then it rained out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so there's, Yeah, there'd be 50 or 60 plants that could melt down just from one bomb.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It might be academic because at that point we would consider that to be an act of war and we would be in a nuclear conflict almost instantly, wouldn't we?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I guess so.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I assume that with a weapon like that they could track it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		But there's just as an aside too, I'd like to point out to your listeners that a huge solar flare, like the one they had at 1849, I think it was a Carrington value.
		If we had anything similar to that today, it would destroy all the really large transformers around the United States that support the grid.
		And the grid would be down for six months to maybe a couple years.
		So that's another issue with all these spent fuel pools.
		It's not nuclear war, but it's something that we ought to worry about.
		So that's another reason why I'm not really a big fan of nuclear power.
		I see that in my opinion, that's something that we need to address immediately.
		We have to get the spent fuel out of these swimming pools and into at least interim storage.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now they want to move it a few miles from me if they can.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I think you should put it in the basement of the White House, you know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ah, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, maybe some people might resent that, but it's always out of sight, out of mind.
		And there is a place, for example, in Finland, it's called Ancalo, where they're building the only real scientific approach to nuclear waste storage.
		It's about seven miles deep.
		It's going to take them over a century to build it.
		It's enough to store their waste from four or five nuclear reactors.
		There's a movie called Into Eternity that your listeners might want to watch on YouTube.
		And what's really amazing about that is it gets you start to think about how long the stuff has to be isolated from the biosphere.
		We're talking like a million years.
		I don't think we should make any industrial toxins that last that long, that are that toxic at an atomic or molecular level.
		So if you have an accident at a wind tower, you know, for wind energy, you know, it might kill a couple of towers if the turbine, a couple of cows if the tower falls over, but we don't have to worry about evacuating the entire state.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I understand you're not really commenting on politics, but hasn't Fukushima essentially done the job for you and stopped it?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You mean new plants?
		Well, I think what's happened is that nuclear power is just not economical.
		Even gas-fired plants that they're building are more efficient and they make more money, basically.
		So these older plants, they're 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you there, Professor?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think we just lost him.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm sorry.
		That was my fault.
		Can you hear me now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there sure would be a good reason to have them up there.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		They used to talk about, we originally, we actually planned to put them on the moon at one point.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		That was a long time ago.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, the moon, that would be too much warning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's a good question.
		But I could tell you about our, they call it depressed trajectories.
		You know, if they fire from a submarine-launched ballistic missile off the coast, you can use a trajectory that's not typical, like it goes up and this way up and comes down.
		Then you can shorten the flight time and make it really hard to detect.
		And that's the problem.
		You know, we have the system, they call it, the article I wrote that was published in the Bolshevik Atomic Scientist today was about the dangers of launch on warning.
		And once the U.S. and Russia constructed these early warning systems on each side, and they basically kind of hooked them up to their national command authority, you know, the president, and then the ICBMs that we have in our silos, the buried underground, they got crews sitting there 24-7 waiting for a launch order.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We have to launch on warning, don't we?
unidentified		Well, I don't think so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But in reality.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, what if it's a false warning?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		What if it's a false warning of attack?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, that would be an accident.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that would be...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My point is with the effect of these weapons, you have to launch on warning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Once you have made up your mind, the other side has launched, it's use them or lose them, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that all gets back to the military mindset of essentially thinking about these almost like we did with conventional weapons and ignoring the scientific consequences of their use to the environment.
		Because if somebody launches a large nuclear strike, we're cooked.
		And so if we retaliate, we'll make it worse.
		But that's the reason why we're advocating that, first of all, we stand these weapons down so that you can't launch them before, or at the very least, you would not launch a strike before a nuclear detonation confirms that the strike has occurred.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I would say that if I was, I suppose if I had not been president long enough to arrange for the weapons to be stood down, I would say we will not launch unless there's confirmation of the attack, because there's been more than one occasion where there have been false warnings of attack.
		They rolled the lids back off the silos.
		That happened in 1985 when they had a faulty computer chip at NORAD.
		And it signaled that a massive Soviet strike was underway when, in fact, it was just a 50-cent computer chip that had gone bad.
		But see, they stopped, you know, I wrote about this some years ago, but they stopped publicizing this information.
		But we do know that in 1995, for example, the Russians sent a letter to say, yeah, well, actually, it was Norway.
		And they sent a letter to Russia and said, we're going to have a launch of a missile.
		It's a weather satellite.
		Well, they didn't get it.
		And so when this missile was launched, it appeared to the Russians that it was from a U.S. submarine launched ballistic missile.
		And they went to full alert.
		You know, they had their nuclear briefcases open, and they were ready to launch a retaliatory strike, because there's some scenarios that involve a single weapon using EMP, say, over Moscow, that would disable their communication systems.
		So it was plausible to them that even though it was one missile, it could be a prelude to a nuclear attack.
		But again, we're not told about all the false alerts and things that they have.
		We're just reassured that don't worry, we're in control and everything's fine.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor, I am curious.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This sort of clampdown in the media ever since the Cold War has ended, I mean, there was plenty during the Cold War, but since, with it now being even more dangerous and there is so little education of the kind that we're doing tonight actually out there, what's up with that?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I do appreciate the fact that you're willing to have me on your show and discuss this subject because it's really important.
		The reason I teach a course at the university is because I thought, well, where do you start?
		If we have an uninformed public, then eventually the leaders that we elect are uninformed too.
		And that's what I see.
		There was Global Zero was interviewing a number of the people on the Armed Forces Committee, and none of them knew how many nuclear weapons the United States had.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At some point, the unthinkable will eventually become thinkable.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you know, when was the last time people even observed a nuclear weapon that meeting?
		I'm not saying we should have one so they could watch, but I'm not convinced that people fully understand.
		You can look at the numbers and all this, but do they really know?
		And there's another issue that's never discussed that I think we should mention is that how does the ability of the president to launch a nuclear attack, how does that mix with our whole idea of limitation of powers and the War Resolution Act of 1973, where the president is not supposed to be able to declare war?
		I've got a quote from Vice President Dick Cheney in 2008, and he said, the president of the U.S. is now, for 50 years, is filed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S. He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen.
		He doesn't have to check with anybody.
		He doesn't have to call Congress.
		He doesn't have to check with the courts.
		And that's the truth.
		That's the way it is.
		So that, to me, what that means is we have a small, very, you know, one person or at least a very small group of political and military leaders that have the ability to launch a nuclear war that we have nothing to say about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So even for an object that would end the world, we use the sports analogy.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
		That's right.
		And the Russians have the same thing.
		They call it chaget.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		You're listening to Midnight in the Desert.
unidentified		Absolutely nothing.
		Say it again, y'all.
		Wrong.
		Good luck, y'all.
		What is it?
		Good luck, boy.
		Absolutely.
		Listen to me.
		Remember, when calling midnight in the desert, let the phone ring until answered.
		These calls are unscreened for your listening pleasure.
		Call 1-952-CALLART.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right, let me roll through it.
		There's some new stuff in the calling this show world, and we'll get to that.
		The public number for you to call if you would like to speak or have a question for Professor Starr.
		Public number is area code 952-225-5278.
		That's 952-225-5278.
		Then we're going to do something a little different, if I can find it.
		We're going to initiate, we did this last night in the last hour of the show, and I want to do it again.
		I want to open a first-time caller line.
		If you have never called the show, I've got a new number for you.
		Only if you've never called the show.
		Area code 775-285-5800.
		Once again, 775-285-5800.
		Only if you have never called the show.
		And then, of course, as you know, you can reach us on Skype as well, North America at MITD51 and the rest of the world at MITD55.
		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think from what I can understand myself, what would happen was most, it would be like a mass extinction event, similar to when the best example is when meteorites hit the Earth.
		And that was when the dinosaurs were wiped out about 66 billion years ago.
		They know that an asteroid, a metallic asteroid about six miles in diameter, hit the Yucatan Peninsula.
		And when it hit, it threw up enough heated material into the, that when it came down, it actually heated the upper atmosphere to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, created temperatures at surface level about 600 degrees, 700 degrees.
		It set all the forests of the world on fire.
		And they call that impact winter.
		It was so dark that you could have held your hand in front of your face and you wouldn't have seen it.
		But that's worse than what a nuclear war would do in terms of the atmospheric effects.
		But the result was that like 70% of all the species on Earth got wiped out.
		And no animals larger than probably a squirrel lived.
		So we're looking at something that's analogous to that.
		And I think the sad thing is the people that are in charge need to understand that they can't go live in a shelter underground for 10 or 20 years and expect to come out.
		If you're in an environment where there's very few, if any, animals left and the forests have been destroyed, that's not really habitable when you're at the top of the food chain.
		So that's why I think we have to look at this as, we have to somehow come to grips with this as a species problem.
		And we have to think of nuclear war as a mass extinction event as opposed to, you know, we talk about destroying civilization and all that.
		Well, those sorts of catastrophes are almost incomprehensible, but yet they're still survivable.
		But extinction is quite permanent by definition.
		And that's why I think, that's why I resent when we get feedback from the White House saying, you know, we went, I didn't, but some of the people in a group I work with, PSR, went and talked to John Holdren, Obama's advisor, shortly after Obama was first elected.
		And they were told that, well, we think that if the prompt effects of nuclear war don't prevent war from happening, then the long-term effects aren't really that important.
		Well, they certainly are important.
		For example, if you live in a country that's not involved in the war, it's not even in the target area, but all your people are going to starve to death as a result.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what was going to actually be my next question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You recall the movie On the Beach, right, of course?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Actually, I spoke in Melbourne on Hiroshima Day.
		And somebody came up and talked to me about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 activity.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		It was a little focused on radioactivity, basically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, if you actually, if we have a war where they bomb all the nuclear power plants and put immense amounts of this long-lived radioactive, you know, ionizing radiation into the atmosphere, and God only knows what that happens.
		That to me is almost unthinkable.
		But what we're talking about really with the studies that we talk about with the smoke and the blocking, the light and the cold, there would be a lesser degree of light being blocked in the southern hemisphere, but they predict like 35 to 40 percent.
		But still, there's going to be such a global cooling effect that for all practical purposes, it won't matter.
		It might not be quite as dark and not quite as cold, but you still won't be able to grow any food.
		And, you know, I asked one of the scientists about this, and they said, well, you know, there may be some people at the equator that might survive.
		But, you know, I have an article in the Federation of American Scientists that's going to be published this month called Nuclear War, Nuclear Winter, and Human Extinction.
		And the point I try to make is that I don't think it's worth getting into an academic debate about whether or not all the people would be killed.
		But just the fact that there's a good chance that they would be, to me, is enough, that that should be a fairly powerful, enough of a motivation to at least publicly acknowledge and discuss this.
		The nuclear weapon states won't do it.
		None of their leaders will come out and talk about any of this stuff.
		They just want to talk about the deterrent and nuclear war deters.
		But in order to have deterrence, all sites have to remain rational.
		They have to fear death.
		That doesn't seem like it's going to be the case forever.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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, 2,000 strategic warheads in a matter of, you know, less than 15 minutes.
		But we do now.
		And things can happen so fast.
		You put these forces in Europe on Russia's border and a jet plane can overfly and a missile can go off.
		And things can happen quickly.
		And both the U.S. and Russia have operated on what they call the counter-force military doctrine for decades.
		And what that does is it tasks the military to destroy the other side.
		In the event of war, the military's mission is to destroy the other side's nuclear forces before they can be used to destroy you.
		So once war starts, all the calculations change.
		Then you get into the fog of war, and then what happens?
		It's too fast.
		Everything's hooked up.
		So the last thing we needed to do is to keep pounding our chests and threatening.
		And I don't see any simple way around it except by just getting, let's cut to the chase, get some leader to come out and say, look, if we have a war, we're all going to die, and we really need to talk about this.
		And explaining that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but that's the rational approach, and it would work with rational nations.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, I really am referring, my concern is with the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals because they've got 15 out of the 16,000 weapons on the planet.
		And, you know, who knows?
		I admit a lot of people say, yeah, yeah, right.
		You know, wishful thinking.
		But I don't really know any other way to approach this.
		don't have a political solution to every problem.
		I don't think it's...
		You have to have some kind of Trump card.
		And to me, this is it.
		It's like, well, if we have a war, everybody dies.
		Mutual assured destruction is really self-assured destruction.
		Even with our successful first strike, we're going to die.
		So what do we do about it?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I guess the only winning way is not to play.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You remember that line?
		I think it was good evening, Professor Poppin.
		Hello.
		A strange game.
		The only winning move is not to play.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I remember that.
		That War Games movie, right?
		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's correct, yes.
		Very quickly, Omaha, Nebraska.
		By the way, you'd be one of the first to go there in Omaha.
unidentified		Thank you very much.
		You're probably right.
		That kind of leads into my comment that you're both 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.
		And anyway, it's documented.
		I mean, I've seen...
		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 long.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're talking back the above-ground testing days here in Nevada, yes.
unidentified		Yes.
		Yes.
		And there was, I know there's been tests of the effects in the state of cancer-related things because of that.
		So 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.
		But he's from the University of Missouri, correct?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Anyway, I'm curious if you know of a Nebraskan that used to teach down there by the name of John Nyhart.
		He was in the English department.
		He's noted for the book Black Elk Steve.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know exactly who you're talking about.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I never had the privilege of meeting him, but I've actually listened to some of his recorded lectures.
unidentified		Yeah, he recorded the vision of Black Elk.
		But those are two of the most peace-loving, peace-seeking men that I knew.
		But, you know, just with the Supreme Court of the earth and stuff.
		But just one last thing.
		I think the Pope's comments recently could be, you made reference to one of the talks so often to we need to enter into conversation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we need to enter into a conversation, all right.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I think that's a good point about the Pope.
		You know, if the Vatican and the Pope, they can get behind nuclear disarmament.
		It helps when you get that sort of dialogue going.
		And, you know, another thing that has not made the news big time, but at the American, the International Red Cross has come out strongly in favor of banning and eliminating nuclear weapons.
		The MCOS hasn't joined in because of political pressure, but they certainly, International has made it, come on record for it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I don't think there are, although I would say that I have no way to know that they're not.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I think that they don't really have to keep them in space because they have so many ready to go here on Earth that they can hit any target they want on Earth at least, at the very most, an hour, and most of the time, 30 minutes or less.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Usually, if we can do something, we do it.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And I'll leave it at that.
		And that's part of the reason when they talk about moving nuclear weapons to Europe.
		You know, this is all a political thing.
		Although it's dangerous, because if you put forward-based nuclear weapons, say, in NATO countries, then you make them, in a sense, not only easier to use, but they're also more at risk for terrorism and threat.
		It's a bad idea.
		And you can still hit any target you want with a U.S. Trident sub can carry up to 200 warheads, you know, that are independently targetable.
		Under the START Treaty, they supposedly carry less.
		But just one sub has enough warheads to take out every major city in Russia or whatever.
		And they also have outfitted some of these subs to carry conventional warheads.
		Or cruise missiles.
unidentified		Let me try.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nevertheless, let me try this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If the Russians had a nuclear weapon in space, would we know that?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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.
		The Russians, in the 1990s, it was a mess over there.
		And at this point, they have lost almost most of their early warning system capability from satellites, just ground-based.
		So they're putting it back up, I believe.
		But I don't know, you know, the U.S., even though the military moans and groans about, you know, not having enough funds and everything, we've constantly modernized our arsenal, you know, and these weapons are, if they were that dangerous or unsafe, we'd certainly...
		They are, I don't think...
		But in terms of military thinking, when they complain about a weapon being unreliable, what they're talking about is not whether or not it will detonate, but they're worried about the explosive power being within a few percent of what they want it to be, because that goes into their calculations for blasts and all that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Sergio on Skype, you're on the air.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good evening, Arg.
		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.
unidentified		Yes, good evening.
unidentified		Is that better?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Better.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		Good evening.
		Great subject.
		Long time listener to you.
		Very interesting subject tonight.
		I just want to ask your guest, isn't it true that Russia, both Russia and the United States both have the way Russia is called dead end, which is the automatic retaliatory system?
		In case no one is alive, he will retaliate automatically.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very good question.
unidentified		Yes.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's interesting.
		I knew one of the guys, his name was Colonel Valeri Yarinich.
		I wrote an article with him and worked together with him.
		He actually helped design that.
		It went into operation around 1985.
		And Valeri passed away a couple years ago, but he had told me that as far as he knew, it was still in operation.
		It's called Perimeter, or the Dead Hand is the nickname.
		It's called the Dead Hand, which, as your caller suggests, is designed in the event that there's a decapitating first strike.
		There's a surprise attack that kills everybody in Moscow and prevents them from issuing a launch order.
		There's a command module that's about 60 miles away from Moscow that there's a couple of guys or officers that sit there.
		And Colonel Urenich wrote about this in his book.
		He said there's a couple criteria that has to be done.
		First, there has to be an early warning from the National Command Authority that an attack is imminent.
		Then there has to be a complete loss of communication.
		And they have a lot of redundant.
		They have radio, they have satellite, they have fiber optic, all sorts of.
		They've never ever, he told me in the history of their strategic rocket forces, lost communication with, you know, this.
		But so they would lose communication, and then almost simultaneously they would have nuclear detonation detectors that are optic and seismic and radiological.
		And if all these criteria are met in a very precise timeframe that corresponds with the warning of attack, then they launch, they're called emergency communication rockets.
		These rockets, after they take off, they broadcast a signal that overrides all human interference.
		It just automatically launches any surviving nuclear forces.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		good thing nothing can go wrong with that.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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, I don't find that reassuring.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And nor do I. On my first time caller line, you are on the air.
unidentified		Hi, good evening, Art.
		This is Howard in Virginia.
		How are you?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm fine, Howard.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		KI4LWA, and I've listened to you for over 10 years, and the reason I know is I just renewed my ham radio license, so I entirely blame my joy in the hobby on you because you always spoke of it, and that's what got me in the hobby.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Quick question that you can answer when you get a second is where you hang out on HF if you do these days.
unidentified		I'd love to make a contact sometime.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if 10 meters ever comes back, I'll be there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you have a question for my guest?
unidentified		Yes, sir, I do.
		Good evening, Stephen.
		Love the conversation.
		It's one of those that's just so deep it's hard to know where to start swimming.
		But I guess what came to me, I've got a quick comment, a question and a comment.
		My question, Stephen, is with all the, I just think the Middle East is still probably the place this stuff might happen, but with the portable suitcase nukes, different things like that, if you think there's ever been a detonation that we haven't heard about, the tactical nukes, all that stuff is probably over in that theater.
		And how many of those do you think are out there rolling around and possibly could go off?
		And then my hope is, Art for the World, is that maybe if we can last a few more years, that the particle beam weapons, and that's what I think might be in space, honestly, is like that video of the space shuttle when that thing shot up and the number was to.
		So I'm hoping that our technology will make these things obsolete someday.
		But that's it.
		Thanks so much.
		I love your show, and I'm glad you're back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much.
		All right, so do you think there's ever been a detonation?
		Kind of a hard question that we've not detected.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, there was what came to mind was when it's believed that South Africa had developed nuclear weapons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		And they tested them over, I guess, in the Atlantic with the help of Israel.
		And, you know, the only way to detect something like that was with a satellite, and because people aren't going to see that, I guess your guest may be referring more to a detonation that took place that, you know, that there would be visible destruction.
		You know, I'm getting pretty cynical about almost all the news and things that we hear now because I honestly think we get so much propaganda rather than facts.
		A lot of the facts are being omitted.
		But, you know, there's a lot of technical capability out there to register radioactivity.
		And that even goes along with, say, trying to clandestinely manufacture nuclear weapons.
		It's amazing what they can detect in the atmosphere of radionuclides if somebody's got sensitive equipment.
		So I've always thought that, you know, there's enough, even though a lot of these scientists are linked to the government, the government might tell them, don't release any information.
		There's still people that have equipment that monitor that.
		I honestly think if there was a nuclear detonation, you would be able to detect it from atmospheric radiation as well as the site.
		That enormous explosion they just had in Tianjin in China, that was literally, that was like between five and ten kilotons from what I can see with this blast calculation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Enormous.
		But I don't think it was nuclear because I think there would have been enough fallout from that that it just would, you can't hide that.
		You know, there's always, if you produce ionizing radiation and nuclear detonation, you just can't hide it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Suitcase nukes.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, the suitcase nukes...
		I've studied that.
		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.
		The first atomic bomb was just basically a cannon barrel with two highly enriched pieces of uranium that they fired one through the barrel into the other.
		But when you try to miniaturize a nuclear weapon, it's very complex.
		And the experts that I've read about said that over time they degrade.
		And it would be, the first reports I read about that were in the late 90s.
		I think it was Alexander Lebed.
		It was a Russian guy that announced this.
		But even if it was true that they weren't able to keep track of them, my opinion is if anybody really got their hands on one of those, they probably would have used it.
		I think if a terrorist organization or somebody gets a nuclear weapon, they're not going to just sit around and say, well, let's wait until a really good time.
		They're going to shoot that thing off.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How many do you think were made?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I think the Russians said that they'd made something like 90 or 100.
		Lebed said that they could only find 50 or 60 of them.
		So, you know, who the hell knows?
		But, you know, there's a lot of things that are even, to me, are scarier.
		The Soviets had nuclear materials scattered all over the place.
		In Kazakhstan, they were working on nuclear rocket engines.
		And they had enough, you know, uranium and plutonium down there to make 60 atomic bombs.
		And we went in, the United States went in and got a lot of that out with the help.
		You know, that was back when we were actually kind of working with the Russians.
		But it's really, I swear to God, it's just amazing that we haven't had a bomb go off somewhere.
		It really is.
		There's so much highly enriched uranium that's out there that's been manufactured that it's just really a miracle that we haven't had it put together and used in a bomb someplace.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Down to Houston, Texas.
		First time caller.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hey, good evening.
		Man, just, I can't believe I'm online, actually.
		I just have a question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you listening, sir?
		I've got a question.
		Are you listening online?
unidentified		Yes, sir, definitely.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, go ahead.
unidentified		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, and that would basically just disrupt the United States, breaking it half.
		I don't know if that's, you know, if that's a scenario that we're talking about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it would be, if they did that, it would be an act of war, and then we would have global thermonuclear war.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, Professor?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's true.
		You know, 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.
		But, you know, there's it.
		You know what scared me about that?
		It's just that there's military guys on each side.
		You know, we have extremists in all the nations, and the Russians have ultra-nationalists that they would like to start a war right now.
		We have people like that in the U.S., too.
		But, you know, 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is true.
		All right, let's see.
		I think it's Felton, California.
		Is that correct?
unidentified		Yeah, hi, this is Tom of 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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You know, I'm sorry, I'm not, but I'd like to read it.
unidentified		Okay, he's a professor of politics at Ohio State University.
unidentified		He argues, or at least he tries to reassure us, that the states so far and the future ones, such as maybe Iran, who may be getting nuclear weapons, will soon find out that, like the military people you mentioned earlier, that there's really nothing you can really accomplish with them if you actually use them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, unless you're dedicated, I guess he's not hearing me, unless you're dedicated to the destruction of a nation like Israel, unless you're actually dedicated to doing that, and then there would be something you could do with them, right?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You know, let me say that there was a general in India that made a comment about, you know, they said, well, which nation got invaded?
		Was it North Korea or Iraq?
		So there is a perception out there that having nuclear weapons, if you're a small nation, might provide you with a means to escape invasion.
		In a sense, it's sort of like a six-shooter in the Old West.
		And that's why Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry published some articles in the New York Times a number of years ago.
		They actually called for the abolition of nuclear weapons because their perception was that the United States was so far ahead with its conventional weapons that nobody would ever be able, you know, the small nations can't even think about catching up.
		But the way they can kind of equalize the situation is to build some atomic bombs.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's a great way to get foreign aid.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		The mouse that roared.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The mouse that roared, indeed.
		But it actually is a great way to get foreign aid.
		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.
		In fact, everybody, take a deep breath.
unidentified		And we'll be back.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is midnight in the desert.
unidentified		possibly for humanity.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, lines are all jammed.
		Very, very interesting show.
		And by the way, late news is Ed Snowden did talk to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
		Which I find kind of intriguing.
		We're going to 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?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The country seems more or less evenly split on what he did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you feel about it?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that he's somebody that should be considered a hero.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You know, that he was trying to expose clearly corrupt things that were going on in the government.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Unconstitutional things.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, if people remember what the Constitution is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Barely.
		Barely.
		And that's what tonight's show is all about.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		It's systematically destroyed, unfortunately.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		People don't remember the Constitution.
		They don't remember what really could happen with these weapons.
		And that's why we're doing what we're doing tonight.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, the Constitution was designed to protect the people from the government.
		And so we seem to have lost that protection.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We seem to have.
		Let's go to Colorado Springs, I think.
		Hello.
unidentified		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Boy, that is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're right about that.
unidentified		It is the ultimate question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, maybe my solution is too simplistic.
		On an individual level, I would recommend people to first consider joining.
		Look around and join an organization you feel comfortable with.
		I like the Nuclear AIDS Peace Foundation.
		You can join Physicians for Social Responsibility.
		You don't have to be a physician or a healthcare professional.
		There's 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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think your solution is too simplistic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I just think that, I'm sorry to say, but I think it's dated.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		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, so there used to be protests and even those, when we had a million people in Washington, D.C. in 1982.
		But that was back when we had more of an educated public.
		You know, I'm not sure if we have time to educate the whole public about this, but it's my hope that at least pressure can be brought upon the leadership to continue If they know about this danger and they refuse to act on it, they turn their heads.
		If it's more convenient to keep your nuclear weapons than it is to discuss the fact that they can destroy human existence, then that's a criminal act.
		It would be called willful blindness.
		And people have to be willing to call that out.
		There's some point in your life where you have to decide if you're going to do something.
		You can say, well, geez, that really was a terrible show I heard, and I'd like to do something about it.
		If you just forget about it, then that's not a solution.
		You've got to be willing to go beyond that.
		But it does, you know, we've got now, we have Twitter, we have the Internet, and things can go viral.
		You know, people can get information across at lightning-like speed around the world.
		So there's a capacity to educate and learn that never existed before.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, 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...
		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 is absolutely self-destructive?
		It would certainly account for a lack of any signals so far.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I believe Carl Sagan talked about that one time, and he said that he had a theory that once a civilization became intelligent enough to create nuclear power that it was more likely to self-destruct.
		And that's the reason why we didn't wind up communicating with many others.
		But I listened to a National Press Club conference not too long ago where there were quite a few hard-bitten military guys and Air Force pilots.
		And they came forward with a lot of data showing their interactions with UFOs.
		And, you know, I'm not going to rule out a lot of possibilities that are out there.
		But whatever it takes for us to consider ourselves a species, you know, if it takes a disease, you know, that threatens to wipe out humanity, or if it takes a spaceship to land and we realize we're not the only life force, well, whatever it takes, it's okay with me if we can come to grips with the fact that the nuclear weapons that we have amount to a self-destruct mechanism for the human race.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's go to Flip on Skype.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello, Mark.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		I had a quick question for Mr. Starr.
unidentified		What would happen if somebody were to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into a nuclear power plant?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think there have been studies to show that that could cause a lot of problems.
		You know, maybe the biggest problem is not recognized.
		The spent fuel pools that I mentioned that are each reactor stores all their used fuel rods on site in like a stainless steel lined swimming pool.
		It's about 40 feet deep, the size of a tennis court.
		A lot of the buildings that house those are just like concrete blocks.
		They're like the buildings that would house chemical, you know, they're not a heavy duty, they're not built to the same standards like a containment vessel.
		And a plane crashing into that could easily cause a massive release of radioactivity if it destroyed the cooling system on the pool or breached the pool and allowed the cooling water to be released.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, I understand that in Fukushima, what really was their undoing was the fact that the diesel generators that had to be maintained, and they did have them, were down below ground.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so, of course, they flooded, so no power.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Well, there's another thing, too.
		You know, you can scram a nuclear power plant and shut down the fission, but there's still an enormous amount of heat that's still there that's going to, you have to keep cooling the core.
		And when they lost all the off-site power, too, and their cooling systems that were, you know, flooded, they lost the ability to cool the reactor core.
		And so they melted.
		And honestly, the Japanese knew damn well that all of those reactors had melted down within the first couple of days of the accident.
		They actually watched a cloud of radioactivity travel over Japan.
		It even went over Tokyo.
		And they didn't warn anybody.
		I mean, it reminded me of when they had the nuclear weapons test in the United States and didn't warn people not to drink the milk and all that.
		So, yeah.
		Sorry, we get on a little bit of rant there, but that just knows it makes me mad whenever I see those sorts of things happening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I remember back in the 80s, I worked for a large station in Las Vegas, KWN, and I would have to go on the air every now and then and say, people in precarious positions and, you know, window washers and all those kinds of people, please be aware that in 10 minutes or 15 minutes, whatever it was, there's going to be a detonation at the test site.
		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.
unidentified		I was around for that.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		A lot of those underground tests actually vented and released huge amounts of radioactivity.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		The cancer rates there in Utah were just astronomical.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was going to say, fortunately for us and unfortunately for Utah, that's the direction it went.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gwen on Skype, you're on the air.
unidentified		Good morning, gentlemen.
		Good morning.
		Okay, if we say that hypothetically for argument's sake that city busters are passe, what about things like diable yield neutron micronukes or cobalt-60 dirty bombs or depleted uranium munitions?
		We still have plenty of ways to mess things up.
		But especially the dialable yield neutron tactical nuclear weapons, what do you think about that?
		Have we seen them used even, perhaps?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, the variable yield or dial yield weapons, you know, those would be like the B-61 weapons that we have a couple of hundred, I think 180 of those deployed over in Europe now at six or seven different NATO bases.
		I don't know if any, I'm not aware that any have actually been used, but keep in mind that there's a difference.
		When you talk about a nuclear detonation, that means like on a sagad, you know, fission and fireball.
		That's different than a dirty bomb is a conventional bomb that spreads, blows radioactive substance apart and can contaminate an area.
		DU weapons are, they're a radiological weapon, depleted uranium.
		They don't have a nuclear detonation, but when they fire them, about up to 70% of the round actually burns when it strikes a target, and it releases microparticles of uranium that can be inhaled and ingested very easily.
		So all these weapons are, I don't know, you know, the radioactivity I think is a really vicious kind of problem to create, to leave in an environment.
		And I think it really should be considered a criminal.
		It should be banned.
		We certainly shouldn't be using DU weapons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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 Corps incident went critical.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, they have a schedule where they refurbish plutonium pits.
		The plutonium itself is considered to be stable for like about a century or so.
		But Pantex, they will, you know, they take weapons apart and they will refurbish.
		There's a schedule for that sort of thing.
		I don't, you know, I think that the United States has maintained, spent enough money to maintain its weapons that there's really very little doubt about, there may be some questions at some point about how, what the total yield would be if it's going to be as accurate or quite as precise as they would like, but there's no doubt that they'll work.
		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's go to Mount Pleasant.
unidentified		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 Stephen.
		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.
		And number two, simple.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, let's start with number one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tube-type radios, sir, would survive, but whether there'd be anybody to run them or not is another question.
unidentified		Okay.
		The second one, you know, we have gold 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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good question.
		Very good question, actually.
		So could you protect, I guess it would depend on how close the detonation was.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'd say so.
		I haven't done a lot of calculations.
		I've read about what they call it, a Faraday cage and that sorts of things you can use to protect for EMP.
		And, you know, who knows?
		If it really comes down to it, who knows what will happen.
		But it just, my friend Colonel Yurinich always used to say, you know, he said, remember, he says, our weapons are guaranteed.
		It was kind of a chilling thing.
		But I just, I think that they put so much time and effort into this.
		There's a good chance that some of them won't work, and there's a good chance that some of them wouldn't be launched because people would disobey orders.
		But the hell of it is, is that there's still enough of them out there.
		You know, like with one Trident sub, if they launched all their missiles and they have independently targeted warheads, there'd be at least 90 to up to 200 warheads that could hit a target.
		We have 12 subs like that.
		And so there's not a shortage of nuclear weapons.
		The U.S. and Russia, the U.S. has 7,000, Russia has maybe 8,000.
		But all it takes really is a few hundred strategic weapons to destroy every city.
		There's only 200 or 300 cities in the United States and Russia that have populations of greater than 250,000 or so.
		And there's thousands of nuclear warheads.
		So even though they've dismantled, there was 70,000 or so in 1986.
		They've gotten rid of two-thirds or three-quarters.
		They've dismantled the weapons.
		They actually have kept the plutonium pits.
		So that's another reason why we don't need to make more pits.
		They've got 30,000 in storage right now.
		But even at that, what they didn't know all along, they didn't know these scientific studies that predicted that the environmental consequences of nuclear war are so severe that it basically wrecks a biosphere.
		It leaves Earth uninhabitable long enough where most people and animals probably wouldn't survive.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or want to.
		Very quickly on Skype.
		Hello?
unidentified		Oh, hello there, Art.
unidentified		Good evening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good evening.
unidentified		I just wanted to make a little comment and a bit of a more light-hearted question, considering the nature of tonight's talk.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Very quickly.
unidentified		Very informative, by the way.
		Thank you.
		Yeah, I just wanted to say, I assume that all of these generals and such and all of these government aides that are all in charge of this nuclear football and all this nuclear ordinance, I would assume generally that they're part of the old guard from the 50s, 60s, 70s.
		And so I wanted to ask, with spending over a trillion dollars to redo the nuclear arsenal, is this one of the biggest retirement sort of pension scandals we've ever seen since the F-22 scandal with Lockheed Martin?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Professor?
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that that's an interesting way to look at it.
		But the point is that Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex back in the 1950s.
		He sure did.
		And this is what we see.
		It's well and alive and thriving.
		I thought when you were asking your question, you were going to ask whether or not these generals and all these people were aware of the information that I've been talking about.
		And I want to say emphatically that as far as I can tell, they're not.
		I've had a couple.
		I worked at the United Nations and testified working with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Chile at a number in Geneva and New York about the effects of nuclear weapons.
		And I was able to question a couple of times representatives.
		The best example was when there was a joint presentation of the U.S. and Russia made a joint presentation in 2010 at the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference about the new START Treaty.
		And I had a pass, so I got in and I sat down, and they didn't know who the hell I was.
		I think I sat with France Plicard in front of me.
		So they took my question, and I'm sure they didn't like it.
		But they had the chief negotiators of START from the U.S. and Russia there.
		It was Rose Goatmüller and Anatoly Antonov.
		And so I asked both of them, I said, are you aware of the recent studies that predict that the detonation of just a fraction of your strategic nuclear weapons would create like a global nuclear famine that caused most people on the planet to starve?
		And they both said, oh, no, we're not familiar with those.
unidentified		My goodness.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		The show's over.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Thanks so much for having me on.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		I really do appreciate it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for coming on and scaring us to death.
unidentified		Have a great night, Professor.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		You too.
steven starr ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Take care.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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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