this very week. 1945 led to the end of the second world war. 1961, the berlin wall was put up in the middle of august. in 1964 the talking gulf incident which led to the major escalation incident in vietnam took place with the prague spring was in the with czechoslovakia as it was known then was invaded by linda brezhnev's order and soviet tanks were rolling down the streets of prague. in 1981 and event, what -- lech walesa started the movement. in 1990 so, start he should have 19, not 18 provinces so he moved into kuwait. in in 1991 just to make sure that we could round things out, that was the revolution in russia that brought down gorbachev's government, short-lived one and, of course, the revolutionaries in turn a few days later were upended. nothing ever happens in august, sort of like the old greta garbo movie 80 years ago, grand hotel, nothing ever happens, you know. so we can all relax and enjoy the rest of the summer. that said what i'd like to do today, very briefly, talk about what i wrote the book and what it aims to do. and then pick up three of the more pressing problems, talk about them a bit, then wind up with overall some of the things that are particularly in this movement towards global nuclear the. i decided -- nuclear zero. i decided the process of writing this book, because it occurred to me that there was an opportunity that i don't believe had really existed in decades. what strategists had in the nea generation after the end of the second world war had to sort of gas at, -- had to guess at. what would happen if this, and if that? now, another half-century having passed since the cuban missile crisis there's enough historical experience to enable us to look at the fundamental problems that nuclear weapons had posed in the two-thirds century they had been part of since they changed the world forever. the first explosion in new mexico. and, therefore, we can take an integrated look at these problems of high level look, to help into were necessary for illustration, but presented and integration set of problems and what lessons we can learn from them. and there is an umbrella lesson, 12 lesson at the end, that i come up with which is that the fundamental thrust of nuclear policy is to avoid what i call the apocalyptic trinity. the apocalyptic trinity is that of genocide, suicide and surrender. you want want to have non-apocalyptic choices. i'll return to that a couple times during my remarks, but there's also may be a 13th lesson which is never write a book with more than three lessons. [laughter] but in any event with that, i want to pick out three areas from what i covered and talk about some of the illustrated problems there that are particularly pressing. and then turned to the umbrella problem as it were, nuclear zero. i'm hoping that the book by the way it's of use to lehman, laypersons, also to a lot of policymakers who have had experience, and even of some use perhaps here and there, but specifically i try to bring this to the general public in a way that i think really hasn't been possible before because now we've got concrete examples to illustrate things which rather than talk about abstractions. so i would say the three problems i'm going to focus on today are the problem iran poses, the problem that india and pakistan have posed. iran being the problem of the revolutionary state in pursuit of nuclear weapons. the problem with pakistan and indian being energy as a springboard for giving nuclear weapons. and the third one, specialist call a small power vulnerability as evidenced by what is called electromagnetic pulse. i'll talk about that when we get to it. and implications for missile defense. and then from then i will move on to conclude. in the case of iran which i think we can say is every now again in the notes, and i saw just yesterday a story about will it deliver an october surprise. the fundamental problem here is a possibility of a cuban missile crisis in the middle east. and to understand this we briefly go back to what nikita khrushchev had in mind. khrushchev in 1961, in june with president kennedy, the enemy, and he pushed kennedy around the kennedy himself said later he really beat me up. he decided that kennedy was not up to it, and kennedy said what about the possibility of, paraphrasing that having the transcript in front of me, what about the possibility of miscalculation? we have to be careful. and christians of miscalculation, miscalculation, i don't want to hear this word miscalculation. i'm tired of hearing it. so in 1961, khrushchev decided partly, mainly because of the summit that he could push can be a little further. so what he did was, working with the east german leader, they begin the berlin wall which was a flat violation of the 1945-four power agreement which gave occupying power to all four powers. on the second huge drop in a sober of 1962 which many of us lived through. i was 15. all of the jocular conversation on the school bus at that time was considerably more subdued for a couple of weeks but it was very real, to which we didn't find out until much later how close we came to nuclear war. and then what we come at the kennedy and khrushchev realized right off the bat that there was a possibility that this thing could get out of him. khrushchev had suspected kennedy as khrushchev told his son, sergei, he said he will make more of a fuss and then agree. that was not nikita khrushchev's best calculation. a few leaders after coming up years after the he decided made one too many miscalculations. and what happened there was that at the same time, and this was jeffrey goldberg interviewed fidel castro, a couple years ago, and castro admitted that he had wanted the first strike against the tyranny. and at the time, -- against the united states. if this happens, do you know what is going to happen to your island? it is going to disappear and you with it. castro still wanted him to go ahead. it is also reported about 20 years later, castro renewed the request on moscow so didn't have this conversation before? so now you look at the situations in the mideast today. you have iran, and if iran goes nuclear you are going to have already the saudis have said that, publicly said they are prepared to go nuclear to several other gulf states to buy bombs. pick the phone up, and by a few. how many petrodollars do you offer how many bombs? nevermind this bit about a 20 year program. you just take the bombs and you put them underneath the aircraft, all those american f-15s m-16s, and you don't have to have a fancy safety devices because they won't have time to figure that stuff out. now you've got close proximity, hundreds of miles away in some cases, with supersonic jets, small countries with the small number of nuclear weapons can obliterate them. and very little communication. there was no hotline in 1962. that was bad enough when soviets one to send a message to the ambassador wanted to send it to moscow. they gave it to western union and you hope the kid didn't stop to see his girlfriend on the way to the office. so it was very much a catch as catch can. go before by people with nuclear weapons and they're all work and have no margin for error. the permutations are very, very scary, to say the least. so ultimately the only resolution of this is to stop iran from getting nuclear weapons and the revolutionist it is not going to honor any agreement it makes to advance me. you have to get regime change, and preferably brought about from within. but the lesson out of this, broader lesson is a revolutionary powers come you can't negotiate away revolutionary power position. you have to defeat them. in 1962 though we saw the consequence of miscalculation. and you can easily have one here. so war may come about not by design, but all it takes is one mideast castro is ready to have one in some of the pronouncements of ahmadinejad, the president or the supreme guide and they may not be reading from the same hymn book we are, to say the least. now, with regard to the india and pakistan, what you learned is that civilian nuclear energy is just next to a nuclear capability. and here's some of the arithmetic of nuclear proliferation. you look first at three and a half% -- 3.5% enriched uranium power in the reactor and you say okay, weapons grade, full weapons grade is 93.5%. so they're not that far along. actually it can be shown arithmetic arithmetic with them and i show this in the book, i don't want to go through arithmetic because we don't have even that gets to be -- is relatively simple when you see it on paper. you've done 80%, not 18, but 80% of the separation work separating the uranium you want, uranium-235 isotope from the rest of it, when you've gotten to 3.5% to when you get to 20%, 19.75, which is medical great research, you have done 97% of the separation work. that one just very quickly, if one out of every 140 adams is the isotope you will, when you get down to one out of five which is where your medical research grade is, you've got rid of almost all of these that 97% or 96% of the separation has been done. you've gotten rid of 135 unwanted adams. you are just about there. and there are a couple of rules that relate to this. and i guess i unconsciously channeled herman cain. my rules, i don't have 9-9-9. i have 11-one-one, and 10-10-10. there's a lot of rounding in here, 10, 20, 30% of it all gets too the in and its are nothing but it's a lot easier to remember than 15,248, 1782 and so on. and the first one, the 11-one 11-one-one, is the timeline. it takes approximately 11 months and can these calculations are in the book, 11 months to go from here rating or to 3.5% enriched uranium. it then takes about a month to go from enriched commercial to medical grade, about a week to go for medical grade to weapons grade, and about a day to put the weapon together. and i do sake and device -- the niger sake fat man device was assembled in less than 24 hours. so that's one. another one is 10-10-10, the materials equation but if you start with 15 metric tons of uranium and you're going to wind up after going through three with 15 kilograms of enriched uranium, start off with the iranian or, and that's enough to fuel a reasonably well-designed uranium weapons are so you go through 10 fold reduction to go from uranium ore, the uranium for nuclear power. you go through another 10 fold reduction you get to medical grade and 10 -- third 10 fold reduction and then you have your fuel for a bomb. there's a couple of other kinds of things that give you an idea of what you're doing with your. i'm sorry, the fourth one in that is the difference between a crudely designed uranium bomb which needs about 60 kilograms, 140 or so pounds, of enriched uranium to a plutonium bomb -- the estimates lower than six kilograms but that's a conservative one. there are estimates that are for an even lower. and that's where well-designed plutonium bomb. so you've got these fundamental metrics you are working with. another one, and this one is sort of a good news-bad news thing. the bad news of course in the goodness. and that is that if you have a crude nuclear device, actually it could pre-detonate and most of the yield would be gone. in any sequence of doubling, and what you're doing when you get -- i don't want to go into -- there is more of it in the book, but basically what happens is you are splitting the atoms you are more than doubling the neutron count. these neutrons that are going to be ones that are going to be bombarding the nuclei. you go to a bunch of doubling and it's been like this thing on the chessboard where the king puts one piece of wheat on the first one, you know, by the time the first 32, this kingdom is fine, he is broke long before he gets to the end of it. the last four doublings in any sequence, released 95% of the energy. if you haven't -- the first release 1% of the energy. the next in release 4%, gucci to five, and then you get 95 at the end, half of it in the last doubling. so that sounds like if you have a bomb that pre-detonate, you're done, right? we don't have to worry. well, here's the bad news. the bomb that destroyed the world trade center -- sorry, that went off in the crotch of the world trade center in 1993 was about two-thirds at the time of conventional explosives. at 1% of a hiroshima level bomb come which is 14 kilotons, you are releasing 200 times the energy of that bomb that had been placed better would have toppled one tower into another. in other words, it's going to be a terrible mess and there are a lot of terrorists out there who say they don't need a royals -- rolls-royce. this is something that also pertains to iran. as well of the concept. they're talking to iran doesn't have a missile that can put this on yet. and that's true. and we don't know, their rocketry is doing much better than north korea. north korea they have to go back to rocket can't, which is not distressing in the slightest. in the case, however, the iranians they're having pretty good success. and that comes down to miniaturizing your warhead enough so it will fit inside a missile nosecone or any bomb that is not too heavy to be carried by an aircraft, or if you really advanced, a small number of nations are, inside an artillery shell your you can attack on the battlefield. but what have we been talking about since 9/11? hasn't the whole focus been what has been called an and a questis law of bad usage, the unconventional threats. issued state funds orthodox or nontraditional would be more a little more precise. is the bomb in a shipping container? it's the bomb inside a van. that bomb does not have to be a well-designed device that is compact and advanced enough to sit inside a missile warhead. it can be a crude device of the erosion of on tight but we didn't test because we knew it would work. south africa built a half dozen of them in the '80s. they never tested them. they know those things work. and you put that inside a van and you set it off, or put it in a shipping container and you set it off in a port. so why are we looking we talk about iran about weapons capability when a device, and devices used to indicate something that can now be weaponizing to fit on a missile, on a warhead or show or something like that. when that is part of the threat. if a bomb goes off in manhattan harbor, a hero she must size, killed a few hundred thousand people, we may not even have the signature but we don't have a signature for necessary and iranian bomb so how will we know where to retaliate? and so that has to become and that's a much shorter time will line and when you put on a missile. so when the administration talks about that it makes me nervous. the focus of what we've been talking about since 9/11 is something quite different. the third want to talk about briefly electromagnetic pulse. again, i don't want to repeat details of the text, but basically you set off a nuclear weapon at high altitude, and paradoxically for this purpose, i noted in the text, it is suited in a hydrogen bomb. and you set it off after let's say 300 miles over kansas and it is possible in a worst-case that the infrastructure of the continental united states, rate is 1470 miles at that altitude according to a congressional report, or take out our electronic infrastructure and would be catapulted back short order, to what life was like before thomas edison. well, that our disputes on this. some people say maybe only 20 or 30%. it would be a huge event and also another possibility. jim woolsey came up with this one, the talk, i heard jim speak in the spring. he said what do you do you're one have one of these geomagnetic storms and we had one as powerful as the one in 1859, it could zip out the entire infrastructure. so he says how do you negotiate with the sun? for those who want to negotiate the latest threat. but with the iran threat, missile defense and if properly deployed, can enable us to shoot down a small attack of this kind. the current generation missile defense, not designed to shoot down a trajectory that goes up like this, but rather midcourse. so we would have to work on it but should have a picket fence to try to prevent a catastrophic strike. at the same time when just a few billion dollars, we can get back up the electrical systems. right now it could be several years before major transformers are brought back online. so the lesson out of this is that catastrophic vulnerability, low number catastrophic vulnerability is something you should never permit if you can avoid. and, of course, i did mention at the end of the india-pakistan but it was implied in what i said, the lesson there is civilian energy is right next door to a nuclear weapons program in terms of putting it together, especially if you're not trying to get an elegantly designed device. which brings me to nuclear zero. and the administration floated earlier this year a proposal to cut as low to 300 weapons from where we are now. and the administration said well you know, we haven't decided but these are trial balloons as we call them in washington. now, this is based upon among other things a believe that all you need is a small number of weapons. well, here are the problems with it. it. personal use and everyone else thinks like you. this is what is called mirror imaging in trade. but look at what happened in 1973. when 11 years after the cuban missile crisis that was a mideast war, the yom kippur war went on for about three weeks in october. and toward the end of it, brezhnev opportunistically and improvisational he decided to try and see if he could introduce soviet troops in the middle east. he sent down transport planes. they were going to fly in to the airspace. we warned them not to. our naval ships were eyeball to eyeball with the russian fleet. and then the transcript that was released about 10 years ago by henry kissinger in a book called crises, conversation with richard nixon, president nixon says to them, you know we were close to nuclear confrontation today. now, what had changed since 1962 was that american superiority had shrunk. the russians were five years from passing us in numbers of nuclear weapons. but they already were feeling, earlier in 1970, leonid brezhnev had told the party conference in prague that by 1985 the correlation of forces will have shifted irreversibly into something save and will be able to work our will. that did not prove to be much better forecast the crew chefs in 1961. but the point is it is a what you think these weapons met or the nuclear balance will change. it's an operational question. if one or more parties to a crisis think that it matters, and behave different as a result of changes, they matter to at minimum it raises the risk in a crisis. at maximum and occurred as the 1973, it could cause a crisis to end differently. so we look at china and we are assuming that china is not at the time of the huge military buildup, the biggest since the soviet 25 your buildup in the '60s, '70s and early '80s. in china which in question is pushing dominance in the western pacific, that if this is good at a low number of weapons, they have more weapons than us, they may change their behavior in a crisis. and it doesn't matter whether we think it should matter or not. have an abstract debate of what is been called at times nuclear doctrine, it doesn't matter. if they think differently and act on, that will change the way the crisis unfolds and every will increase the risk of war. so with this in mind, bear in mind that people who we worry about the most outgoing, not going to fall your example as you reduce it. it will make their weapons more valuable. we don't have the ability to have any idea to verify how many weapons in countries the size of china or russia. we couldn't even find before -- after the gulf war and before the second iraq war, what could it find all the wmd we were looking for. we had to have defectors help us. these things are hard to do. the end of the second iraqi freedom we found 12 of jet planes buried in the sand. you very cruise missiles all mile down. so we don't have any ability to find stuff. it is a breakout we don't have a substitute for nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons were one of the things that have deterred a major full scale war, though you had major regional conflicts like the non-parsable in the middle east. we don't have a substitute. some of the prominent former secretaries of state are pushing the idea of nuclear zero, make it quite clear that they're looking for any future and a lot of things have to be in place before we do this. but it's possible that popular opinion could as it has happened from time to time stampede governments to do things they are not ready to do. for example, one time it was for the better, and that was to end atmospheric testing and it was popular outrage over some of the early tests and their aftereffects. and the worry about them, that led to the indie of atmospheric testing. on the other hand, the europeans who we had promised to put neutron weapons, neutron bombs stop the russian tanks and helmut schmidt had put his administration, and carter refers to under pressure. it was a propaganda campaign mounted against it. popular opinion can stampede governments if they're not able to explain conventionally why we shouldn't do something. nuclear zero does have a warmth to it. but the risk of prematurely going to zero and find yourself with the worst countries in the world producing formally hidden weapons is the problem of the clandestine casualty, which is called by herman kahn, is something we better keep in mind. and until we have a solution to that problem, rushing towards nuclear zero could prove to be catastrophic. i will close with this. two things. one, on the downside and in one thing on the outside. the downside is that it appears the risk of some sort of nuclear mute is going. and if that threshold is crossed, it may not be possible to change the world again irrevocably, and it may not be possible to go back to maybe permanently worse off. the administration does not appear to be fully alive to this risk. it is not doing everything it can to stop iran, as one example. we can go into that and the question. if you would like, but at the end of the second world war, at least fought by most policymakers, probably most members of the public and certainly most of the scientists worked on the manhattan project that it was inevitable that within a decade, virtually inevitable that we would be in a nuclear war. it didn't happen. so depart from churchill, never give in. we have to continually work, pedal to the medal in every way we can so that we can prevent this catastrophe from happening and avoid not only suicide or genocide, but also surrendered. we don't want to be in that position. we don't want to be in a position where with a half a million million -- a half million americans died, and attack that will kill millions. and all out attack on iran will kill maybe 50 million. i do think frankly that unless billions of dead americans and american president would do that. but hope is you don't want to be in that position in the first place. avoiding an apocalyptic option. and with that i think it's a good enough times in to stop now be delighted to answer questions. and i'll ask steve is a sharper eye than me to pick people out thank you. [applause] >> i hope you're all feeling cheery. we are going to take questions. is there a question? >> john, i think this really important, this book came out at this point. and if nothing else that people are aware of nothing else, it's that this topic of nuclear strategy has been dropped as a major theme in american public policy. since the reagan era. when people were bold to sleep thinking that we have solved this and moved on. and now it's back. the emp has not been solved apparently, that threat has not been resolved and we don't know what we are doing with iran. and so i think it's important to get people recovering the vocabulary and language are even talking about this. it's not taught anymore. nuclear strategy is not taught at universities. we don't have programs on us i think that's the most important thing you've done with the publication of this book. i want to ask you specifically about the most immediate threat which is iran. it takes so little time to come to the development of a crude bomb. haven't they done it? and does anybody know? they are talking bravely about annihilating israel, doing various other things, but why haven't they moved if they're that far along? and it's so easy? >> well, it isn't easy, but on the other hand, part of the problem is that even with all the inspections, we don't know exactly how far they are a long. they could theoretically at least on the amount of, it would be in short order by some calculations, before the end of this year have enough material on hand to assemble a crude weapon. and if that's the case, they could assemble one without testing and we wouldn't know. and the only hope i have on that is that from iran's standpoint it is more beneficial to them to test like north korea did, and immediately put the world on notice we have something. mind you, north korea's test was a classic case of one of those designers embarrassment that yielded less than a kiloton and it would be laughed for eternity. but already there was more circumspection indeed with north korea. just think what iran did last year, when it is believed not nuclear, and i'm assuming they're not simply because i believe it is in their interest to test. that i detest atmospherically. they can set off one end will pick up the signature seismically, the signatures are different from an earthquake. an earthquake you get tremors in advance and then you get a big shake and did you get chambers the with a nuclear device you go like this, you get a big kaboom and it goes back like this and nothing happens. so you can find those things and certainly from their standpoint it would be of interest to do so. but a year ago we -- october wasn't a something, or november, where they're going to set off a bomb in a georgetown restaurant and try to kill the saudi ambassador and some unnamed georgetown restaurant. i took that personally because living in d.c. i go to restaurants in georgetown. and so they also talked about putting something in front of the saudi embassy. i took that even more personally because i cross -- i live across the street from the saudi embassy. there's no scenario under which the structural slightly be standing. talking about something a just a few hundred yards away, it's like a truck bomb going off or something. so they were ready to do that, even when they were not on what we know are a nuclear state. now, they could do that and it's a guess what? we are nuclear. you don't believe us? trias. at the bottom line is -- tribe us. we should not be negotiated with them at all. they have a record of using negotiation to install for decades. what we want to do is put all your sanctions pressure on now, the highest level of financial and energy and refining -- 60% of the oil has to be refined outside the country. you choke them off because if you don't do that, they have time to adjust to each new level of sanctions like gradual escalation in the non, and it makes no sense to do it this way. when sanctions were first proposed on iran back in 2003, they did not have a compatible railway system with russia. a few years later they did. we give them time. this is not a good thing. there's a long list of what the international atomic energy agency has discovered, and i won't do the folders but a few things, they will tell you what the program is about. this mind you, iaea inspections are not designed to catch cheaters. but what do they catch? they're working on a neutron initiator which is way to emit extra neutrons to start a nuclear explosion ripped they're working on building internet continental -- anaconda choke ballistic missile but they're not doing it to deliver medical supplies 5000 miles. and there are various other components, specialty components that are identified as nuclear weapons why would you want a high altitude trigger, and electrical trigger that works at high altitudes. the kind of things use a nuclear device. so we should conclude, and nevermind it's about whether the other weapons capability, a nuclear capability could be the device that goes in a truck. they are working on it on every evidence that we can see. and, therefore, we need to act very soon. if they don't i think israel, 50/50 will act and probably before the election. [inaudible] >> that's very soon. and the reason, israel is likely to is because of what i call the to hand and so the schizophrenic policy of this administration. obama's people point all the time look at the unprecedented cooperation and missile defense and other things, and it is unprecedented. well, it's president because the bush administration beforehand had begun that ratcheting up of cooperation between the israeli defense forces after 9/11. that cooperation is a two-way street. the israelis have designed equipment that is saved to the american lives in afghanistan. and, indeed, self sealing bandages, it's one of the reasons it saves lives of people who have been hit, improved wound healing. it's a two-way thing. they're constantly talking. swapping tactics, things about drones. so a lot of good things there. but what the right and give if the defense, the left can't have diplomacy takes away. pressure to free sub, something the palestinians have never asked for, israel was told to negotiate from the 19 -- were called by the imagination 1967 borders which of the 1949 cease-fire lines which are not borders. and the palestinians immediately adopted that. so the news a series of breach in the spring about a possible israeli strike showing up in "the new york times." and some of them were traced to officials in the administration. and there were things about an israeli strike, there were things about well, israel make it hell. they wouldn't be used before the strike but if you had a plane crippled in the attack, might be able to land, that kind of thing and that immediately was frozen out the there's a series of orchestrated leaks. i won't go down the full list, and so the israelis withdrew their assurance that they've given last year that they would notify the administration before striking. you have all these leaks in the paper. does anybody think they can keep a secret? so and there are other leaks involving other things. the administration has done with the israelis look at, you see british and al qaeda operating potential. they had a mole high a. that's how we found one of the guys to do. and by bragging that we had done that, we had to extricate the agent before he was found which apparently we did. but the british were not happy. so the long and the short of it is they fear i think i'm it's also famous that prime minister netanyahu and barack obama don't claim any joint vacations anytime in the foreseeable future, and so i think they're looking at pre-november 6. and the reason for that is after the november 6 if obama wins, he's unbound, no one has to worry about reelection. and i think frankly for that real line that is most likely to be one the israelis are looking at, they knew that ron is going to win, and if they were confident they can wait for 2013 they would rather do that in the u.s. would probably joining. but that's a chance i don't think they feel are necessary can take so they're going to take a fresh look at any early october, the plans are in place and they have a higher opinion of chances of success than the obama administration has, or other quarters. >> i'm skiba gilleland, one of the board members here, and an engineer at apple a that of expertise in commercial nuclear power. i think it's important to understand, and i don't think you're saying this, but it's important to understand that in order to destroy israel, or even tel aviv for that matter, it's going to take multiple thermonuclear weapons, and none of these terrorists and regimes have the capability of delivering anything on that scale up its i think the worst case scenario is going to be some cheesy science project dirty bomb or something with low yield that you float into the seattle harbor or whatever on a container ship, or something like tel aviv harbor or whatever. so there's no like destroy the world scenario that's likely, in my opinion, with any of these terrorist regimes. and i think it's important for people who don't understand nuclear weapons to know that, to realize that. so the thing that occurred to me was you said, you were saying that if we had such a thing happened, like a hiroshima type weapon go off in one of the harbors or something like that, we wouldn't know at the time it's too late to know how to respond, where do you respond. so i guess my question would be, that's still the case now, how do we know where to respond? i guess other than iran and korea, how do we know even how to begin to respond now i we think these guys are develop their science project weapons? >> let me take the last part first. we have nuclear forensics for certain countries. we know the signatures of the weapons. russia, former soviet union, those weapons with signatures. chinese weapons, we have signatures for french weapons. with signatures from british weapons, not that we think they are likely. we have signatures -- we have some on india-pakistan, some advanced sampling techniques. i'm not expert on just how much you can get out of the underground explosion, but there may be some things that the into the atmosphere, small quantities you may be able to have some. and if there are, maybe we even have a little bit out of north korea, but we don't with iran. the second thing is, take thermonuclear weapons. a single hiroshima weapon will, if dropped in an air burst, will have a radius what they call the five psi circle, five pounds per square inch. of roughly radius would be roughly, let's say a half-mile going around, so it's a mile in diameter. and while he wouldn't destroy all the cities if you have three or four of us going off in tel aviv, three or four of those going off, and you might have air burst and also ground bursts, and to do that because you want the ground bursts to kick up, unicom countless thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive material, which would be highly lethal in the immediate area of the most intense radioactivity police within the first couple of weeks. as you get further along, it's less dangerous but you could have very easily a few hundred thousand fatalities. a country the size of israel, let's just put that in perspective of the united states. let's assume by the way that they need -- athlete jerusalem alone or if they think they have enough actually to hit west jerusalem, they will. i might add if i were the palestinians i would be a little nervous. i don't know if i have enough faith in iranian -- that they might not land in the right place. but if you have that and you have, let's say 100 or 200,000 in each of those two cities, three or 400,000, we have about 45 times the population as israel. so if you had, say, 200,000 dead from two or three bombs, you are looking at, or even we will go over and say 100,000. you are looking at 9 million, 200,000 israeli day. you're looking at 9 million american casualties for our country which has 45 or so times their -- 40 times, 8 million. the total be lost in all the wars going back to the revolution is something along the lines of two or 3 million macs or something. actually that may include wounded. i once saw the number but it's not coming. it's a lot less. and what the impact of that would be on the jewish state, so it wouldn't literally lay everything to waste but it would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. and, of course, then if you're talking about the gulf states, they are very vulnerable, too. there's not a large number of cities in kuwait that would be targets. the bottom line is we have to take the threat very seriously. i might add that the pakistanis are working on thermonuclear weapon and have weapons of mass enough to put in short-range artillery missiles, 25, 30-mile range missiles, 40 miles or something. this seems like a popgun but it tells you their design work is very advanced. so i would be very worried. i think the effect on israel will be catastrophic. it will be an echo of the holocaust, and, of course, the threats they could explode elsewhere. so even high school design weapons, that was one of my points, they can make a terrible mess and we really need to focus on stopping them before they get there. >> i can't evaluate your technical competence which i believe to skip, but i think you might be vulnerable on your kind of human, the human factor of how you see human nature in terms of making decisions as to whether how to use. and i want to return to your for dell example with jeffrey goldberg, can't go to exact because i think it's just perhaps a little different reading in terms of rationality, irrationality purpose and so forth. goldberg said i mentioned a cache of the letter he wrote to khrushchev, the soviet premier at the height of the crisis in which he recommended that the soviets consider launching a nuclear strike against the u.s., then the americans attacked cuba, invoking the legal right of self-defense. i asked him, at a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend the soviets bombed a u.s. does what you recommend still seems logical now? be answered after i see what i see, and knowing what i know now, it wasn't worth it at all. so this could be read in the following way, far from being a cold-blooded first strike it was the action of a desperate man who felt threatened, who later on when he looks at it afterwards and sees the crazy things one does when one feels this kind of pressure, thanks, as you said later, this raises questions about nuclear weapons as being much more likely to be launched in a rational pressure in tense situation as opposed to concrete attempts to attain rational political objectives. it's not a tool for rational policy. it's something is released in a climate. at least that's the way one could read that section. castro hasn't changed. he's still a marxist. >> well first of all, what has changed is his attitude about his own actions within the context of the crisis. >> i avoid calling him -- now thinks he is crazy. i use the term fanatic. he did renew the request which was reported in the 1980s. the thing is that even in response to an invasion of this island, the idea of unleashing a huge nuclear holocaust that would bring down, that would result in more than 100 million people killed just so he could preserve his rule, of course this island would have been obliterated the same time, that i would want to hold that up to some rational decision making but if we look at the middle east today, the supreme guy who was the supreme authority of present in iran is not someone i would want to trust with nuclear decision, or for that matter -- [talking over each other] >> i'm not saying -- you are using the word rational and irrational but i don't even bother with those terms because i don't want to get into it. what i want to do is say that i think that we have reason to believe that how many and people like ahmadinejad and others who think like they may decide to use nuclear weapons whether you want to make cultural, how can we say this theology is a rational, it doesn't matter to me. the point is there some people love fewer inhibitions that using nuclear weapons. khrushchev and kennedy thought to pull back anyone khrushchev realize he found a should the meaning of the word miscalculation. castro did not take that view. and that, we have to worry about that and you're in the middle east where you have famously rough neighborhood where people don't trust each other at all, or you don't have a superpower sponsor who could restrain, as khrushchev did, in 1962, who could restrain a surrogate. a client. so the point is that you do not want to have the stuff spread. ideally you don't want to spread anywhere but you certain to want to give it to the kinds of people who run the country like iran. it's not going to make the world a safe place and we should do everything possible to see that they did not. -- that they do not. >> how do you evaluate the possibility of cyber attacks by the nazis and its allies like the one that disrupted the centrifuges we heard about in the past, as a tactic? >> well, certainly anything we can do in cyber, where we have more skills than the iranians to come and the -- there are reports of others around besides the stuxnet that they found. anything that you can do a certain a good thing. the question is have they gotten to the point where we're running out of time but if this were six, seven years ago, eight years ago, doing these things and yet that much more time, maybe you could continue to buy more time. it's getting to the point now where most people believe this will be so decided one way or another within the next year. cyber may not suffice, may not suffice to do it but certainly anything we can do, whether it's in sanctions or cyberattacks, or working to try and -- the rebels, the green movement inside iran, which we unfortunately abandoned what was foreseen at the time by many people, i think no special credit, lots of people said this. there's no chance they will give it. they been working on it for a quarter of the century. and we had the opportunity with the regime off-balance to maybe bring it down. you don't know how it would have turned out but what you try to do in a situation like this is to get some of the guns to switch sides. we didn't give them a reason to. and so they're able to brutally suppress the green movement. had we publicly sided with them, announced we are working with them, ratcheted sanctions up to 100% of what we could do then, instantly putting them in economic extremists, and make quite clear that if you rise up we will be with you. we might have succeeded in this once what might've been a once in a generation opportunity to bring this down. now perhaps we'll get another chance if assad falls. i could help re-energize the green movement. it would be a huge defeat for iran and also for russia and hezbollah. and that is the ultimate solution. in the meantime you certainly deployed every weapon you have, and cyber is one of them. we are a lot better at it than there. you think of three kinds of broadly speaking, look at cyberattacks, free commerce. one is to try for you to try to take down networks, whether it's a communications network, for example, take down, shut down your to mutations, financial or something. the other two ways depend on the networks working. one is to use your communications networks to launch an attack against another network ideological grid. so use it as a point. and a third is to use it for content, and this is where the islamists have considerable confidence in radicalizing people over the internet with radical oriented islamic content. so we have an edge in the first two areas. we have the us and the israelis. most skilled people elsewhere on this, probably by governments behind russia and china are very good at that stuff. and that will come into any confrontation we have with them. content, they are more skilled at using than we are but we should certainly use whatever weapons we can. >> thank you, john. that's give john a hand. 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