0 soviet union, including in kazakhstan. the official post-soviet line was, don't worry, all these nuclear sites are taken care of, they're all under guard. we don't need any help. we've taken care of all of that stuff. so dr. siegfried hecker, this guy from los alamos you see on the right there, he goes out to kazakhstan alone and he goes to that test site. and when he's there, he sends back to his friends in the united states this picture. this is how that site with all the plutonium laying around was being guarded. see the traffic barriers there that are just left up, all the more convenient to drive up and down that road. the little house there covered in graffiti, it is supposed to be a guard post, but it is abandoned. there is nobody working there. that's how well-guarded that site was. what was happening on that site, amid total economic collapse in the region, was that people had started raiding that nuclear test site for scrap metal. and it wasn't just individual guys breaking in in the night and like stealing manhole covers, like happens in some places here at home, even now. they were scavenging this site on an industrial scale, using excavators and bulldozers, doing everything they could to dismantle that place to find anything they could sell. they dug these long trenches with heavy machinery because those trenches contained copper cable for the phone lines between the testing sites and the control rooms and they wanted that copper cable. they dug around in those tunnels, they dug around in those bore holes filled with super pure plutonium. and who knows if they knew it was there. but imagine what it would mean for the world, for enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear weapons to have been openly for sale on the scrap markets of eastern kazakhstan. know anybody who might want to buy enough plutonium to make dozens of nuclear weapons? so american scientists visiting that site in the late 1990s kind of freaked out. and they came back to washington to say, this has to be taken care of. one of the people who helped them get approval in washington to take action about this was the guy with the amazing hair who just got confirmed to be our new energy secretary. he at the time was an undersecretary in the department of energy under bill clinton and he and bill clinton and the energy department and the defense department and in the senate, sam nunn and dick lugar, all of these somewhat low-profile but concerned americans looked at this situation, at what used to be the biggest nuclear testing site in russia and they said, we realize this is not in our country, but we've got to do something here. we can help. we feel a responsibility to help. we can help, so let's get this stuff locked down. and thus started an american-funded, joint american/russian secret mission to lock down that site. to lock down all that plutonium, to make it unscavengeable. not to make everything all right by all of kazakhstan, or even by this whole big polluted terrifying cold war leftover site, but at least to secure the plutonium. highly enriched uranium taken out of that country, so it wouldn't end up on the black market and turn into a nuclear bomb or a dirty bomb somewhere down the road. we do this kind of work of locking down all this dangerous stuff all over the world. it is an international problem, but it is one that has our name on it. and not because it's our fault, not because we caused this problem, but because we have taken the lead role in fixing it. american exceptionalism, yes, on this issue, we have shown exceptional world leadership. and it had redounded to our own safety and to the safety of the world. and it is not exactly the same thing with chemical weapons as compared to nuclear weapons, but it is close. turns out we are particularly great at destroying chemical weapons. in part because we've had so much practice. we had so many chemical weapons that we have destroyed that we've gotten good at it. president richard nixon is the one who stopped us making chemical weapons back in 1969, but before he stopped is us making them, we developed quite an arsenal. tens of thousands of tons of vx and sarin and mustard gas. we started finally destroying it all in the 1990s, in places like johnston atoll and in aniston, alabama, and at the aberdeen proving ground in maryland, at the pine bluff arsenal. we are still in the process of destroying our chemical weapons in pueblo, colorado, and at a facility at the bluegrass army depot in richmond, kentucky. the local press there noted this week that they are handling vx munitions that are so dangerous that, quote, a drop of vx the size of george washington's eye on a quarter is enough to kill a healthy 180-pound man within seconds. between that and sarin, bluegrass kentucky, alone, you've got 433 tons of that terrifying stuff stored there in preparation for it being destroyed. there's another 90 tons of blistering mustard gas. our national arsenal of this stuff was huge. there was a ton of it, but it is now mostly destroyed. it has taken a long time to destroy it, but it is now mostly gone. the only country that had as much as us, even more than us, was the soviet union. but the process of getting rid of this stuff, whether it's over there or over here or anywhere else in the world, where the stocks have been eliminated, is a known process. it is knowable and it is known. we have experience with it. it is being done. it is underway. and like with nuclear materials and loose nukes and nuclear contamination, this is very touchy stuff. and people don't necessarily always want these stories told, but it is doable. it is technically feasible. once it is politically possible, it is technically possible. you just put one foot in front of the other. it's a process. you can get there. and syria started that process today. sending a letter to the united nations, asking to become the world's latest signatory to the chemical weapons convention. and that starts a timetable, where once they sign, they've got 30 days to declare to the united nations, all of their stocks of chemical weapons. once they are declared, there's another time frame in which those weapons have to be inspected. trained chemical weapons inspectors, who have done this in all the countries that have gotten rid of their chemical weapons, trained inspectors will go to the declared sites and essentially do an audit. they compare what they find at those sites to what has been declared. and then this is the really interesting part. other countries who are members of this convention can then consult their own intelligence about what they think syria's got, and they can pipe up if they think there are other sites that ought to be inspected that syria has left off its list. signing a convention, signing an international compact like this country is essentially telling each other we are all in this together. and part of what you are agreeing to when you agree to sign on to that is that the other countries who are signed on to this convention with you, they can ask for challenge inspections, if they think you've got chemical weapons at some site that you haven't owned up to. they can say, i want a challenge inspection at that site. there's never actually been a challenge inspection in the whole history of enforcing this thing on chemical weapons, but there could be one here. we're on new ground here. can the goal in syria be reached? and the obama administration has been saying for the last three weeks, since that alleged gas attack outside damascus, that its main goal, its immediate goal, is to stop any further use of chemical weapons in syria. regardless of the long-term challenges here, is that short-term goal of stopping syria from using chemical weapons, is that short-term goal already achieved? based in part on what happened today? joining us now is ben rhodes. he's a deputy national security adviser for president obama. mr. rhodes, thank you very much for being here tonight. it's nice to have you here. >> good to be with you, rachel. >> so a lot of the focus right now, a lot of the commentary on what's happening in this diplomatic push is how hard it's going to be to make sure that syria does this, that they actually secure their whole chemical arsenal. what's your reaction to that worry and that criticism? >> well, i think it is a concern. what we've seen in the last three weeks is progress that could not have been anticipated before we raised the profile of this issue on august 21st. syria had not even acknowledged that it had stockpiles of chemical weapons. now not only have they done that, they've signaled their interest in joining the chemical weapons convention. what we need to see, though, is that there is a verifiable process that is established, so not only do we have their words and their commitments, but there's a sequence of actions that are set up, so these weapons can move under international control and be destroyed through a technical process, that we'll have to negotiate with russia and the u.n. and other countries, as you indicated in your opening remarks. so there's a good prospect here that we can achieve our objective, but it's going to be a difficult process to implement. what i will say, though, is with syria invested in this process and with russia, their principal ally invested in it, we frankly think at the very least, it's a deterrent on the use of chemical weapons by assad, which would have been the objective of any military action that the president has been contemplating over the last several weeks. >> can you tell us if there's been any discussion or if there is likely to be any discussion about the united states and russia acting in concert in syria, to secure those weapons in much the same way that american and russian scientists and american and russian regulators have worked to lock down other dangerous weapons and nuclear materials around the world? >> well, i wouldn't want to speculate about the possibility of americans actually going into syria for this. i don't think that that's something that we're looking at at this point. what is true, though, is that in geneva, where secretary kerry is meeting with foreign minister lavrov of russia, we've brought a significant technical team with experts from across the u.s. government to meet with their russian counterparts and beginning to discuss exactly the challenge you identified. which is, how do we create an accounting of this chemical weapons stockpile, how do we set up a process whereby those weapons can be brought under control and destroyed. so there's a lot of technical discussions that have to take place, and that's starting with us and russia and geneva, even as we also have a track in the united nations, where we're working for a resolution that will set up a verifiable process, that will allow us to track whether the assad regime is meeting its commitments. those two tracks will take place in parallel, the technical discussion about how you do this, and the political discussion about how you get a resolution to the united nations that holds syria to account in following through on their commitments. >> ben, we have seen from the white house, sort of explanation about how this option came about, i think trying to dispel the notion that it dropped out of the sky, that it was something the russians cooked up on their own, that it was in relation to an offhand comment that john kerry really didn't mean. and there's been an explanation from the white house that essentially this was a long time coming. this was something the president himself had been advancing in contacts directly with vladimir putin and there had been other discussions about this between ours and the russian government. what can you tell us about the timing about when this option first started to seem real? and did it factor at all into the president asking congress to weigh in on the prospect of military strikes? was he buying time to let the diplomatic effort go ahead, even then? >> well, first of all, i was with the president in los cabos at the g-20 last year, where he met with president putin. that is the first time we engaged them in this discussion, and said this might be an area where we might work together to secure chemical weapons stockpiles given our concerns. we did not get a lot of response from the russians in terms of interest in cooperating with us on the issue. they noted their concerns, but it really didn't seem to get traction. it's been a regular part of our dialogue with them. but it wasn't really until st. petersburg at the recent g-20 meeting after august 21st attack, where the russians indicated the seriousness about this. and president putin spoke to president obama at that summit. they met on the margins the for about 20 to 30 minutes, and he raised the prospect of potentially pursuing this course of action, to get those chemical weapons under international control. now we've been skeptical in the past about whether or not russia would follow through on that type of commitment. i think what made us take this more seriously is when they put out a statement from the foreign minister, indicating that, number one, these had to be put under international control. number two, syria would have to come into the chemical weapons convention. and number three, the weapons would ultimately have to be destroyed. and that was a credible proposal that the russians made, and that's what provided the opening for us to pursue this. with respect to congress, the president took that decision to congress, because he felt like it was important for the nation to debate these issues. at the same time, we also understood that that would create more space for us to await the u.n. inspectors' report that is forthcoming probably next week, about what they found happened in those damascus suburbs on august 21st, and also to continue to work this issue internationally, so we could build broader support for an effort to hold the syrian regime accountable. but what we have now is essentially an opening to resolve this diplomatically. and it's old-fashioned coercive diplomacy, rachel, where you have a military threat that has prompted this kind of action. because the only thing that's changed from one year ago to los cabos is that you had the threat of military action from the united states. and that seems to have changed the calculus of both president putin and the obama assad regime. >> ben, thank you very much for being with us tonight. we have a heck of time getting anybody from the white house to talk to us on tv, so i'm particularly grateleful that you're here tonight. >> happy to be here, rachel. i am gob smacked to report of the return of jesse helms to the american political realm tonight and it's not for a good reason. that story is coming up. owered . you raise her spirits. we tackled your shoulder pain. you make him rookie 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