you've been very very busy and welcome very much and thanks for the opportunity my pleasure and welcome welcome to you in the audience is a pleasure to welcome to the program richard l garwin and he will is a scientist and he's been for a very long time we're going to talk from the i b m company and he's also been an advisor or consultant on many issues including nuclear program technology and new scientific questions and technology in general to the united states government and other major institutions the understands technology and particularly nuclear is c has a degree in physics and he's a major figures far as the world is concerned terms of understanding some of the major problems of technological and opportunities of technological development and mr gard dr i would thank you really very much for coming and great pleasure and honor welcome to the program could i wonder if you might share with me if you could with the audience your old background weighed into it as it were where you were born and raised that sort of thing and then we could talk some about the major technological questions and questions of energy and so forth but your own background born and raised education if you would please i was born in cleveland ohio  the case what's now case western reserve university was k school of applied science when i entered it was case institute of technology when i left i guess rather than made a change while you were there chicago twenty two or something like oh no when i went to the university i was the university of chicago for my ph d at one thousand nine hundred and nineteen and then i received the ph d two years later and you'd taken an undergraduate degree in physics you would move very quickly through the electricity i mean things are moving so quickly now the technological development but you were encouraged in that and then you went at nineteen you were studying with firm at that time yes that's very kind of course when i st heard about nuclear energy in in august with the dropping of the you weren't aware of it in the family tell king or anything of that or you were thinking physics then as a high school student or something or no no because the people who were in the program for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons it was all classified and they really didn't talk and so when realised that there was energy locked up in the i don't know but what was known then you know a great man of physics in england said anybody who says that you can get were interested in physics there would have been some knowledge of the structure of the physics of adam and that sort of thing that was generally part of your understanding and what got you involved in fair that you went to physics you could have studied  was my father after he stopped teaching high school he was still a motion picture projectionist so he opened a small company with his brother and sold and repaired sound equipment and movie equipment for industry and and and high schools and universities so he had a shop behind the garage in our suburban home back you can do things you know experiment with and i learned how to deal with these things and made some innovations myself so it was easy and  i liked it and i really didn't want to have to work for anybody that i see was probably wasn't very good with people and so i like the lab and yes now seem to be the way to go science and through from the electronics and that kind of yeah like my professors in college at case one did in the worst way for me to go into mathematics but i was really more interested in doing things with my hands than i was in thinking things through mathematics is very important to physics could solve only five or six problems but he could convert any other problem into one of those problems so he was extremely good in how placed and understood everything he needed to understand in mathematics is the basis for the sciences  a british functionary and but i used to have lunch every day with the folks on the physics faculty and mathematics faculty at columbia university because i've been an adjunct professor of physics if at all what i had been doing with them because their research capability or that it was attractive to you in terms of that activity that government activity or i don't you know were there aren't thirty there that there weren't there in the private sector what i just liked doing it and i thought i could help the country and that which was being done there was not being done within the private sector and i know they were making nuclear weapons oh it's almost nd so i could help with the design of nuclear weapons with the innovation in an experiment to prove that the radiation implosion would work and instead i decided that the best way to show it would work would be to build a full scale hydrogen bomb so i designed it in detail and it was tested  so you work in the government had to do with your interest in atomic energy and the development of the systems that we understand from atomic physics well i was interested in helping the government do whatever it wanted to do so long as it was legal and most of the things that the government dyes are legal yeah most of the things they are legal yeah that's right it did you know robert opened i'm or not very well i met him half a dozen times did you have any qualms about the as he did all right mr einstein as i understand was upset when used and i began to do that in one thousand nine hundred and fifty three or fifty four had earlier but it's a very interesting story if you look on my website yes i have it's very rich there's a lot there and i get to talk november well because i think april of two thousand and five and that was forty years after oppenheimer gave a talk in november of two thousand nine hundred and forty five you had to travel to a joint meeting of the american philosophical society and the national academy of sciences and he said you know i know you want me to tell you about nuclear weapons and i wish i could because there's fascinating material there not so much new physics he said but new techniques  can't because of classification yeah but he said very strangely that if if there were a conflict between two nuclear armed states that these weapons would be used by classical super which might be a cylinder a metre or two meters in diameter liquid heavy hydrogen that would do terry and you know some meters long and that really doesn't work for reasons that became more and more apparent that with designs that's know how but i mean the question was their objection in the early stages before chicago well partly it was about that this week well not and was their case that when they did that there were some people who thought it was going to burn up the right because it has unlimited potential power and could destroy whole civilizations ok that's good they say that in a manhattan but you were not there you know that time but the manhattan early days and they did you know it wasn't tested in chicago where there are people taking the stand that we should not be pursuing this avenue even though that letter from my time went to mr roosevelt and so forth but or was there ever a question at a moral level you know i'm teaching a parody making the atomic bomb you know if there was i wasn't he had a minor program but he did not have really competent scientists and didn't and they probably did the right thing you know from the nazi point of view in not pursuing it because it would have diverted enormous resources and forty five dollars that the nuclear weapon was about to be tested in mexico that it might ignite thermonuclear reactions in the atmosphere teller thought yeah yeah hans beta showed that this could not be and it's often quoted but never had any probability of happening but teller did tell or actually think that or when he thought it and he said he was a serious vents fellow that was an extremely cover person you know but as he said you know he has lots of ideas ninety percent of them are not good ideas and have the other ten percent maybe only one percent were there were three yeah that's kind of funny because the question comes up and then it's interesting because i don't know exactly how much you get into biology and that sort of thing you've got such a resume it's just it's an ending and you've done so much work but i mean we get to a point now we're at a point now where we have a unique capability as a species extend our consciousness into the environment in the form of technological extensions of it i don't think many creatures can do that and you know we make tools and we have shelves to put the mine in books too and how one another worked with green on that i think and he had a picture of the shock wave of the big bang only two hundred and twenty thousand years after the big bang fourteen billion seven hundred million years ago and they got one that's going to be in place around ninety two thousand and eleven that's going to take a photograph of the shock build and build build on things that we have built kind of we can we could whether we will be able to do so in the future depends on the survival of civilization and that's not guaranteed there are real problems you not the least of which is nuclear weapons yes that's a very big one and you written consulted with the government and also responsible people as well as anybody i can see and we want to get to that but the thing is i'm wondering if they get to that point and we existential like if you go into biology you have you have quantitative change within a sort of what a steady state system and then there is what at least stephen jay gould eldridge said there's a thing where you have this kind of thing and that strips it goes back two hundred thousand years or not or do you ever ruminate on that kind of thing or what do you think and i asked that against asking the question i could put to you i did the other night is it an excess stench of if the weapons that have now of all we've been protected in a gestating situation for two hundred thousand years within the context of history if their weapon systems that are evolving ever more sophisticated ever more destructive in terms of their capability evermore  we got to a point where if by some guns of august crazy notion like the st world war with syria or something that those weapons were just unleashed they exist in the world if they were unleashed and they were all nuclear thermonuclear chemical and a spasm of hatred they were all unleashed is it possible we reached a point where it could be modeled after a model that it would mean the end of our species or not it wouldn't be the end of the going without some sort of an alteration in the way things are whatever would cause that to happen are we going to reach the point and when we will be able to know within modeling of what degrees  certainty and probability and so forth that we now have a capability of destroying our species with the weapons that do exist is that on the drawing board and you know i always that's something that cosmically is never going to be able to or we're never going to arrive at that level you know i don't care much more about the civilization than i do about the species you do that's an interesting statement on the species would seem to me to be we've been ok that's interesting to me that's mentioned to me but whether what i'm getting at is is this the time when people are proud in saying that since the nd century or any time in history as i'm sitting around cro magnon caves that this is the most interesting time are we have a time of a qualitative transformation in the evolutionary process or not you think we're not in evolution i don't think you know i think you know we can look at had only a few years in technology ok and it's possible that  the civilization by a vast nuclear exchange and that's less and less likely because the soviet union doesn't exist anymore russia still has ten thousand dollars or more nuclear weapons and so does the united states and if we exchanged those we would lose the entire countries and and down the ozone layer and a lot of other things even worse would be some of the some of the contagious diseases  and those might happen spontaneously or they might happen by the use of biological weapons that have been stockpiled and people make more and more advanced biological weapons even though there is a treaty banning biological weapons but research and progress goes on in those fields as well as in thermo know that well it is essentially dual purpose for the biological weapons because the more you understand about plain old ivory like small smallpox yes indeed terrible nine hundred and eighty we had flu and emic that did in a great number of people in this country and there's synergies between the various weapon systems just sort of stressing that weapon systems that we're following and are we going to have any sense of purpose to be human existence let's say or to biological existence apacs by human appearance how do we put the human expression into the broader evolution of the universe itself or consciousness or these things that don't you know our concern or well that's more philosophical that writing is my bent right ok there are no ordinary person doesn't think about such things very much kids do and he skins do we have learned makes very good and should lead us but what's happening is that we have these enormous capabilities now and things change so rapidly and people's views and their power we have empowered the individual with the internet we have empowered the an individual unfortunately with plastic explosives and suicide belts and the combination of the two and so we have a lot of very angry people and we have even some people who for reasons of religion or ethnicity are more interested in seeing other people dead than themselves alive and now that they have such individual power a very serious problem if they have that individual power and if they the thing is in a certain evolutionary sense we couldn't do it in the nd world war for instance we could fire bomb leipzig they could bomb london we could do that but we were in a certain sense important at a certain level because i noticed civilization goes on even though we were doing our best to kill each other as best we could full tilt boogie and all the technological but we were  certain sense impotent to do even a civilization wrecking thing that's we were able to come out of it we're not at a point we're not at a point now where that process would go into a entropy or some sort of tailspin that is the problem is that we have six billion people heading for japan and we have exhausted the high grade resources in the world and that's ok so long as we can use our technology to get metals and other essentials and recycle we can but the technology makes it possible to do this at affordable cost ok if we were depending upon finding them high grade deposits someplace and we would be in very poor shape and we could not support the number of people we have transportation systems that are essential to people survival otherwise you wouldn't be able to have food entering the city and i guess this can be disrupted for instance during the great depression in the  problem wasn't that we couldn't grow food problem was a distribution problem people couldn't be employed to grow the food and they couldn't get it to the city because their there weren't artificial systems market systems subsidies that would enable this to happen and we were committed to a system we're going to come to the massive economic design in this since there are political design through labor there is a value that are going to distribute income to people by their job by their labor contribution to for instance the pharmaceutical companies were quoted recently in the new york times as saying vaccines have been undervalued well that really means that they're not going to sell them anymore for how much they cost to make  all cost included but it's reasonable profit no they're going to sell them at how much cost you avoid by not getting sick with the disease that the vaccine prevents and that would be fine if there were a competitive vaccine suppliers song all have the same idea but with the long times involved and the biggest expenses involved in in trials field trials it makes it very difficult to have a truly competitive market into nano technology nine hundred and sixty five dollars yeah i was director of applied research yes i b s research division and one of the st things i did was to make a decision that had been hanging for a while i bought a memory bank one memory bank for the itself but many many people now innovate in the old days there were thousands of people who could do programming and they were doing machine language programming or assembly language programming and now there are is there are application programs you don't need to do programming everybody uses spread sheets or word processors or whatever and all they need to new really know to know is what they want to do they don't have to know the national security and thank you was that thank you yeah and other quarters been in physics particle physics condensed matter physics with helium superconductors and such like gravity waves and about the other quarter has been in technology of various kinds so i have i think forty five u s patents in communications and computers and five hundred pages or something right something i mean real real papers some of coming strong now and fighter aircraft and submarines and many things like that not to mention early on the hydrogen bomb right right what do you think is the future of atomic energy i see james  forth and others are saying that they we have a question mr gore you are aware of has the inconvenient truth and the fact of global warming and these kind of things these these are all things you've studied and advised on and so forth what do you think is the state of things so far is atomic energy lovelock there's a great deal of opposition to it because of waste material and that kind of thing and a fear of radiation is sought by the general society what do you think is the future of atomic energy in meeting the electric needs of our grid or the world's deciding well the united states gets about twenty percent of its electricity from i clear power and the world about seventeen percent and you know who you could get that up a good deal we have about three hundred full size power reactors in the world one hundred and three in the united states and we have how many in the three hundred in the world today and france has a high percentage of electricity from france gets eighty percent as you need to i mean other hand you don't want to burn a lot more coal most of our electrical power comes from coal and that spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere it's pretty well controlled in sulfur oxide would be for coal well said about double the price of our electricity because they don't have a competitive market over there it's because they don't have it's own government operate all those couldn't those operators of that thing have a competitive thing t it's not inherent in the atomic technology that it's overwhelmingly expensive because no plant or equipment or maintenance or uranium or anything you know they produce i just don't know they produce at about the same cost as we do they sell for more money because they have a monopoly they're going to have difficulty maintaining that because there's a question of import from the rest of europe yeah because france is not big on cogeneration it isn't having big industry make it's only like tricity because they need heat and they can get the actress city essentially freeze they can sell it on the market and they can to a limited extent ship here actress city from one country to another have you all so i'm talking about expanding from three hundred world reactors to three thousand or even one thousand that's a very big jump and i don't worry about the waste i have a couple of books that people can find on my website you know and the books go into great detail about the technology and nuclear power and i wonder where princeton and books yeah you've written books back in the seventy's i would nuclear weapon the world politics nuclear policy power issues and choices energy the next twenty years you site you're well advised to get in touch with what i was saying is that if you go to one thousand reactors which would handle all of the world's energy by nuclear power of course you couldn't do that because of  habit is transported take a long time to convert that to you got tricity as a primary source or to hydrogen from nuclear power but if you did that then the one thousand dollars reactors at about two hundred dollars tons of natural as we need unfortunately so can other people and disposition of the waste that's not a problem it's not a problem we have a problem we have a political problem little problem being who is on the side of what  to avoid that and maybe even a couple one hundred years we can repackage the stuff and move it to a wet repository down below the ocean sure my so you're not dissuaded by the waste disposal you know what should be happening right now is that i'll go to transfer i should be transferring the waste from the swimming pool storage at the reactors where it's stored in thirty foot deep pools to to provide cooling and to keep the radiation from escaping says transfer the nuclear waste to the spent fuel rods from the swimming pool storage into dry casks to really they have to rely on others that's right and it's really a good thing to do so there's general agreement on that our government really needs to move so and ultimately i'm in favor i'm totally opposed to the global nuclear energy partnership that the department of energy and the president announced in february two thousand that's right and the fuel that fed into the reactor is four or five percent you have you to through thirty five made in richmond plants and we make ours by gases diffusion same as we did during world war two most of the other people make the by centrifuges that have been much in the news cost centrifuges centrifuges cost more but they cost much less to run and overall it costs about one hundred dollars per separative work unit and from each reactor each year and about two hundred kilograms a th of a ton put tony him and its sister isotopes the so called minor actinides now there's some energy in that and if you recycle it into the light water reactors you're displacing about twenty percent of the uranium that would otherwise have been needed and i see and that means it's a cost money to isolate the put on him and to natural uranium has been about eighty dollars per kilogram not eight hundred dollars so this recycle reprocess and recycle is not justified at all in saving of uranium the french have reprocess times as big three times as big and would cost sixty billion dollars and that's a big hit and that's where i learned that's what dirksen would have called real money and that's right and that's that's why i'm against it besides it's less safe and more proliferation prone then simply the once through cycle so when somebody can show me that recycle is cheaper than the owner then they can show me that a breeder reactor is cheaper than a light water reactor breeder fusion we will have breeder reactors have them automatically either by the writers now or they're not in commission or when they're all out of commission except for a small one in japan joya reactor there is a breeder that grams a fraction of a time i think would spew the radioactivity break the containment once i went as a layman and i've always heard and i'm very mild adult life is that it's going to be soon a decade or so we're going to have fusion and when we get to fusion it's going to be unlimited totally pollution free unlimited energy and fusion is the secret of the universe or something that it's i used to hear that when i was twenty and it's going to come in twenty years and i'm still come what's the future what's there polled up what's the prospect for our getting too few years in and then what about alternative things gets older and all these other things but this atomic thing do you encourage research toward the fusion solution and where do we stand in terms of that we have a big pretty big program we're putting probably more money into fusion than is economically justified and there are two approaches inertial confinement fusion that is tiny tiny hydrogen fermion stability and that means that the little orbits of electrons spiraling around the magnetic field because the magnetic field is not uniform i say because it gets fundamentally weaker toward the outside than it drifts so the electrons all drift and they take the ions with them so that doesn't work at all then there were two approaches lyman spitzer and the man who brought us the space telescope invented the so called stellar radar he said no  and let's turn it over and one part of it let's make a kind of pretzel and now if you follow a magnetic field line of forests around here then of course it can't be on the inside in both halves the ones on the inside it's on the outside means it looks like a mobius strip yeah exactly and so there's no drift there can be other instabilities so there were two lines of approach once once the stellar rater with this twisty things and some of them have have been built  but it's not a very nice configuration and then there was the token back russian contribution which does the same thing but you take a fat bagel and now in addition to the silent way that you wind around it to make the main guiding field you have some heavy current carrying bars that go around and they cause the lines of force to twist so the line of force that was on the outside after a while ends up on the inside which is the most promising line and nothing that's all just hogwash hogwash but we do have a program and in ten years such a large thing will be operating it's an international program being built in france  say that they were saving your rainy and that's why they planned to recycle but they only say that because they have no native resources energy resources in this way they have energy independence but no they have only twenty percent less dependence on  otherwise had ice and they would be much farther forward if they had concentrated on breeder reactors now they have france japan has a full sized breeder reactor mungiu that's been down for a couple of years for a sodium leak  france build a a full size breeder reactor super phoenix that worked on and off a couple percent of the time and has since been disassembled and gone back to a greenfield site they still have a breeder and will know but we will know that it is not economical in my opinion yeah and there will be required future inventions to make it economically that's one of the surprises about the time we live in because something who they thought it was going to take a one thousand years to dollars a year on that yeah but we should spend it better and we should be spending about three billion dollars a year and get money from the other industrialized countries because that builds find that issue to provide and that he should  that's what we should spend our money on but we're not doing and i said the likelihood of having a terrorist nuclear explosion not a dirty bomb but a real nuclear explosion thousands of tons of t n t equivalent you know western come down now you would have a one thousand buildings come down and in my one thousand nine hundred and two paper nuclear and biological mega terrorism on my website i figure a couple one hundred thousand people would be killed but for reasons of concentration we might close the borders we might destroy our own society human ate the distribution system that feeds us all three because a th percent of the people were killed and we don't have to do that we have to count on that happening sometimes even though we try as hard as possible to prevent it happening so that's what we have to really take seriously in any point in trying to think about creating a world situation where people do not have such deep seeded bitter fighting instincts so that we would have a liberation or a transformation in a positive sense rather than staving off you know i think that's what i said in answer to the question  to start thinking i way of thinking and realizing we have the means of taking that into our hands a new capability thank you very much for all your many contributions it's really been a pride of what you can buy your site you say the site again would you while i'm talking ok page one the