i think this is an important time to pay attention to the potential use the dangers of the potential use of nuclear weapons my next guest is an expert on the interplay of politics and science and most notably the history of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power bill what was a senior analyst at the government accounting office the investigative arm of congress and before serving in this post he was a journalist for three decades writing for newsweek the observer being a washington correspondent for the bulletin of atomic scientists he's published in the atlantic the economist the scientific american and the smithsonian just to name a few welcome bill l why did you personally take up the interests in the decision making and planning around the atomic bomb well i think as a journalist with a background in  politics i was interested in the intersection of science and politics and there's nothing like atomic energy to combine the two nuclear power and nuclear weapons and i think the science of nuclear weapons which began in one nine hundred thirty nine forty forty one with an arms race against germany have continued to dominate the whole political and social and historical situation and to see how science and politics interact tell they affect one another is something that's fascinated me my whole career i'm interested in talking with you now because of your work in writing about the conversations that happened among scientists including leo's a large and you've written a play with a colleague peter cook rain and peaches and i'm talking to you because many people are expressing concern about our nuclear weapons situation right now so do you have any concerns right now when does your plate go into anything that will give us insights i think the situation with nuclear weapons has probably never been worse i mean we came close to using nuclear weapons during the cuban missile crisis but i think they situation now is quite different from what happened during and after world war two i think we had a race with germany in the early  s although ironically the same month that germany quit the arms race we scaled up and handed it over to the army that was june of one nine hundred forty two but we were afraid that the germans ha the bomb until probably late one nine hundred forty four one way discovered that they in fact if not even a fence to having a nuclear chain reaction after the war it was so large fear and  that of other scientists that we should try to have international control of nuclear weapons because of a fear of an arms race with russia of course that's just what happened and then the  number of warheads in the power of war has just escalated of through the one nine hundred forty s and fifty's and sixty's until one point we had something like sixty thousand nuclear warheads between us  the soviet union we're now down to about four thousand each which may sound reassuring but even using half of those could destroy life on this planet so we're not out of the shadow of nuclear weapons by any i think the play uranium plus peaches shows the first time the scientists tried to control the weapon that they had created understandably a lot of the scientists were refugees from hitler's uranium what split or fission and this gave the scientists assurance that the element that might actually make nuclear weapons was indeed identified this scared people like leo szilard to the point where he went to his friend albert einstein and warned him about nuclear chain reactions and nuclear weapons and drafted a letter to president franklin roosevelt which led to the m project which allowed us over the course of the war to pills and use two bombs on japan but the scientists were more concerned i think about what would happen after the war if we use this against japan which did not have nuclear weapons we were really trying to build a deterrent weapon against the germans and i think the arms race after the war was also one of deterrence they called a mutually assured destruction or man which meant that no side would dare use these weapons because they knew that the retaliation would be complete so nuclear weapons in that sense for several decades were actually a deterrent and they gave us some sense of stability well the reason i'm especially concerned now is that there's no symmetrical deterrence that we can really to a country like north korea or a country like pakistan or a country like israel might use new their nuclear weapons and some point that is totally unpredictable and asymmetrical another fear of course is the terrorists get a hold of a nuclear bomb and then they deliver it to the u s not necessarily with a missile or even an airplane or perhaps even in the whole of a cargo ship now robert oppenheimer who was the scientist who directed the los alamos laboratory where they designed and made the first bombs was asked after the war well what's the most effective weapon for controlling nuclear weapons and he said all you need is a screwdriver by that he meant that  holder of any ship was wooden packing kit crepes could contain an explosive all nuclear weapon and you'd have to open every case in order to find out whether or not  detectors for some radioactive materials but not all ships are scanned and not all detectors work all the time so we're still having i think now in a very unpredictable way with nuclear weapons whereas the cold war for all its terror was at least predictable and you might even say rational i think it's important to have this discussion because i think that there was much in the sixty's there was much conversation about the danger most people who grew up in that time had a sense of how horrible this could be but the current generation hasn't really been exposed to the  dangers they may have an abstract understanding but i think it's important when we hear political figures now threatening to use that we understand how truly dangerous this is i think the nuclear weapons are are terrible for two reasons one is that they're so destructive that the weapons now in the hands of the soviets and the american this sorry the russians and the americans are hundreds of times more powerful than the weapons that destroyed nagasaki and hiroshima and one hundred forty five is almost unimaginable and sense nuclear weapons have not been tested sense the nine hundred sixty s above ground people haven't even seen nuclear explosions to see what the effects are i think you're absolutely right that a lot of people think they're like other weapons or rockets or something and they have no conception of just what the destruction will be from even a single nuclear weapon in the one nine hundred fifty s we had duck and cover we had the notion that we could be attacked by the soviet union and people i think were was more fearful of nuclear annihilation i think that  concept or the idea that terrorists would get hold of a nuclear weapon hasn't really registered with a lot of people because they have never seen the effect of it except photos of hiroshima and nagasaki have never seen the effect of a nuclear weapon on a city and to that extent i think if people are now talking in this government about tactical nuclear weapons as if they're just things that you lob around the battlefield why the whole terror of nuclear weapons is diminished so i think we are facing a real challenge of educating the public to just how destructive one or two of these things could be it's the it's a strange situation where we sort of believe that science will always have a solution to whatever problem there is and yet we also have people who just are sort of anti science at the sametime but is there any hope for a scientific resolution of this problem i don't think so though maybe i think you are you might be  mixing science with technology a sense that scientists using scientific principles designed these things but it was engineers who actually built up the idea of deterrence seems to have worked in the sense that it scared both sides into the notion of never using these things for fear of automatic retaliation there is some hope in the technology of anti missile defense but this has been proven to be really  s has had an end time national news anti missile defense program for decades now and they've tested a number of these things says if you're going to shoot down one missile with another and most of the tests have been serious failures it's not an easy i think to hit one missile against another especially if the warheads include decoys so you might be hitting a decoys enough the incoming missile technology is frankly not ready to assure that an incoming missile it to the united states would be hit with the outgoing missile that would take it down i think the only hope here is that they have what they called a boost phase attack where you have missiles say they are afraid of north korea launching a missile against the united states all around north korea you have ships and submarines that have missiles that could hit any launch as soon as it starts to rise and before it gets into the trajectory where is falling back to earth this seems to be the most reliable way that you might stop a missile attack and but there's no assurance that technology would come up with a reliable anti missile system again it isn't just missiles that we should worry about  perhaps bombers and perhaps even cargo ships if it comes to a country trying to blow up one of our cities well let's let's go back a bit into where you spent a number of years with your play going around the country what is the nature of the conversation play well this is a play that takes its one act play takes place may twenty eight hundred forty five and i'll back up a bit by mentioning leo szilard again since he's one of the three characters so large relied on einstein to to his mailbox and einstein sent many letters in so large behalf to president franklin roosevelt in march of one nine hundred forty five so large it was convinced the germany did not have the bomb of the if we tried to use it it were only set off an arms race with then our ally the soviet union so he got another letter from einstein to franklin roosevelt saying you should talk to dr solarte about post war control of their work well f d r died before the letter arrived when so lard took that letter to the truman white house he was sent carolina may twenty eighth one hundred forty five took an overnight train from washington along with him was a nobel laureate chemistry harold yuri who had figured out how to separate uranium which we used successfully in the here assume a bomb and so here are two scientists who made the bomb and want to stop it meeting the politician who can't wait to use it that politician is james f burns he was a congressman from south carolina a senator from south carolina then franklin roosevelt put him on the supreme court and then he took them off the supreme court to make him assistant president working in the white house to run a war mobilization there was a cover story in one hundred forty two one life magazine showing burns as the assistant president it was assumed that burns would become the nominee for a vice president segregationist attitudes of burns the southern democrats turned off a lot of the people at the convention and harry truman became the compromise candidate for vice president so when president roosevelt died in april one thousand nine hundred five it was harry truman who became president now jimmy burns had been his mentor in the senate jimmy burns had been the first person to tell him about nuclear weapons one of this after truman was sworn in and burns was truman's hand picked man on the committee the interim committee deciding whether and how to use the atomic bomb so the scientists who really met somebody who is probably her son and five as the person deciding on atomic policy towards the end of world war two well this is a confrontation between the scientists and burns and burns ridicules them as being naive burns complains about spending two billion dollars and not telling congress so he's very political he also knows that he's about to become secretary of state he's afraid that the russians need to be made more manageable because of their aggression in eastern europe so we have here political and diplomatic reasons for and against using the bomb i think that this is the first of many examples where the scientists tried to take back what they had created but with very little success in the end was there was their heart about not to saki and hiroshima right after the bomb was dropped or the bombs were dropped all it was it was assumed that this was a new form of warfare and conservatives and liberals and and people almost universally condemned the possibility of destroying cities with with this power on the other hand the bomb became the winning weapon because coincidentally it happened to be used at the end of the war but a lot of and a lot of people believe we won the war because of the bomb i don't happen to agree with that position and i think that it was more coincidental that the bomb was used at the same time  the big justification and it's comes out in the play for using the bomb is to prevent loss of life from a necessary invasion of japan but the first invasion of the south island wasn't planned until november of one nine hundred forty five and the invasion of the main island was going to be in march of one nine hundred forty six so why did we use the only two bombs we had you know august well it seems to me and a lot of scholars that the soviet union comes into this equation the soviet union was our ally in europe fighting nasty germany but to avoid a two front war stalin had a a non aggression pact with japan so we we were fighting japan and then the british allies were fighting japan but state that sentence again three months after three months three months after the germany surrendered stalin declared war on japan no burns was afraid that stalin would get in  kill and divide up the spoils that there would be a north and south to pay and just as there was a north and south korea he wanted to use the bomb before august eighth meeting before  soviet union became our ally against japan so there's that tension diplomatic tension behind when and how quickly we used the bomb it's interesting to me that i think truman was swept up declare war on japan on august eighth or three months after germany just surrendered which turned out to be aug eighth everybody remembers a couple of dates but not all the dates they remember august when the soviet union declared war on japan and the other is august tenth when president truman saw the first reports of hiroshima and decided an order to do we should not ship the third bomb to the pacific without his specific orders and this to me was the first time truman really got a chance to decide about the bomb and he said he didn't like the idea of killing all those kids so he had seen a destructive the bomb was and he didn't want to use it again without his specific authorization this is an interesting point because i think that we have always assumed that the president has absolute power over how these weapons are used and in the case of truman seemed to me that he was somebody who was almost blind sided by the fact that as bomb would house showed him the destruction of hiroshima on the tenth of august the orders were also written to be used as ready and truman assumed that these were going to be military targets when he discovered that they were cities like any other he was horrified and ordered that no third bomb would be shipped at that point we would have a bomb ready about every ten days you know i get it we're going to have to have longer conversations because i have now this is opened up a whole bunch of questions but i think we have to get to the core of you right now is your commitment to peace you  very involved in an organization called kinetics rights which is where i got to meet you in here so your writing your motivation for continuing the play can you tell me what drives you to make sure seen i think the notion that science and politics are interdependent and that individual scientists and individual politicians can sway human events  w although harold your ian lee osa lard couldn't dissuade james if burns from pushing to use this weapon as soon as we could they could later right of petition to the secretary of war urging a demonstration and they failed there but they kept trying so large then had a titian to the president to consider the moral implications of using a bomb one hundred fifty five manhattan project scientists sign that and after the war even though they didn't stop the bombing of the japanese cities  at the time they then lobbied successfully to take the bomb out of the hands of the army and put it in a civilian atomic energy commission so they did have a limited success they had limited success talking to scientists from different countries and working out arms control agreements and working out test bands and other things so while the scientists had effectively lost control of this weapon they  were able to i think moderate its effects so i think the idea that one or two individuals can sit down with one or two other powerful people and have some effect  is what gives us we hope some assurance that these weapons will never be used again is there anything you'd like to add to that i've not asked you about think the fear that we have of nuclear weapons is real i hope we never have to see another city destroyed by nuclear weapons and i think that this sooner we recognize them for the terrible things they are as opposed to being bargaining chips or threats or tactical  weapons i think the sooner we'll continue to cut the number of warheads that are available but there are already thousands more than we need and there doesn't seem in this