i want to talk to you tonight about nuclear war this is not an easy thing to talk about or for you to listen to and i very much appreciate your coming out on a sunday evening to hear what i have to say there was a time just a few decades ago when all of us understood the danger posed by nuclear weapons millions of people around the world were actively engaged in a campaign to eliminate these weapons and to prevent nuclear war and the reality of nuclear weaponry the danger posed to human survival was deeply understood by all these people by many millions more who weren't active that period of activity of activism was enormously important it led to real changes in public policy it put enormous pressure on the governments of the soviet union and the united states and played a critical role in changing the nuclear policies that were in place at that time i think a lot of us who are active then wary to times that we we were being alarmist that we were unnecessarily burdening people with fears about how dangerous nuclear weapons were it  turns out that we weren't that the things that we said then were not only true but we probably despite our efforts to get it right we're underestimating the full magnitude of the danger and it turns out that the work that we did then in motivating to pressure their governments was critically important in his memoir as gorbachev specifically references the work done by physicians in the meetings that he had with members of i p p and w in fundamentally changing his understanding of the danger posed by nuclear weapons and leading him to undertake the series of initiatives which he launched in the mid one nine hundred eighty s which the united states eventually joined and which led to the end of the cold war arms race and help bring about the end of the cold war itself this is an immense achievement of citizen activism and one which we urgently need to recreate today because the problem is that when the cold war ended we all of us began to act as though these weapons had gone away they should have they were built for the most part to fight the cold war and when the cold war ended any rationale for their existence ended at that point but the weapons didn't go away and in fact there are today about fifteen thousand nuclear warheads in the world about ninety five percent are in the arsenals of the united states and russia the rest are shared by seven other nuclear weapon states united the united kingdom france china india pakistan israel and north korea and these weapons continue to pose really an existential threat to human survival there are three dimensions of the nuclear threat that i want to talk to you about tonight and let me go through them each sequentially first is the possibility the problem that we face that there might be an act of nuclear terrorism to the extent that people talk about nuclear weapons at all this is what they tend to focus on and there's some reason for that this is a real serious problem we know that terrorist groups specifically al qaeda have been trying for at least twenty five years to obtain nuclear materials we know that there are fully assembled nuclear arsenal nuclear weapons in the arsenals of pakistan and probably still in russia that are not optimally guarded and are potentially subject theft and we know that there are about two thousand tons of fissile material  plutonium highly enriched uranium stored in more than forty countries around the world much of it with very little security and it only takes a few pounds of either one of these materials to make a nuclear weapon that's the hard part getting the plutonium or the highly rich  once you have that it's relatively easy to make a crude nuclear device you can go online and read directions on how to do this and so there is a real concern that terrorists might obtain either a weapon or the fissile material to build their own and use this and the effects of this would be quite catastrophic there's been a number of studies about this or the paper that i published in the british medical journal in two thousand and two shortly after september eleventh looked at a scenario where a terrorist group built   crude bomb about the size of the hiroshima bomb and basically mailed it to the united states put it on a cargo ship and programmed it to detonate as it approached the pier in in manhattan under th scenario much of the explosive force is dissipated over the over the water in new york harbor but even so this explosion kills about forty four thousand people outright from the blast of the fire and another ten thousand people are exposed to lethal doses of radiation emanating from the bomb at the moment of detonation in addition about a million and a half people are exposed to significant levels of radioactive fallout this is a ground level burst it generates a great deal of local fallout and it's carried by prevailing westerly winds over manhattan queens brooklyn long island and very densely populated areas but a million and a half people get exposed of these about two hundred fifty thousand people receive lethal doses of radiation if they are not promptly evacuated or sheltered and the fact is that not the new york or any other city in the united states has in place a plan to evacuate or shelter in place any significant number of people and so the death toll from this terrorist attack on new york written probably be in the range of about three hundred thousand people and to put that into perspective during all of world war two about four hundred forty thousand americans were killed and that was over the four years of the war this would be in about a week's time the economic disruption caused by this is literally incalculable there was a study done about fifteen years ago looking at a similar scenario that assumed that the economic damage would be in the range of a trillion dollars in that scenario the bomb went off in new york harbor but not in manhattan across the river on the jersey side of the harbor i think that that study was a tremendous under estimate of what would happen for one thing if the bomb went off a manhattan we're talking about some of the most valuable real estate in the world but even more important than the destruction of property in manhattan is the effect on the global economy i mean wall street would be shut down the economic financial markets around the world would shut down the day after the attack on september eleventh the markets fell you know more than fifteen percent after something like this we would expect the markets probably to collapse in addition there to be a complete disruption of international trade ports around the world would close themselves out of fear that they might be the next target of a terrorist attack of this sort again we saw this after september eleventh when airline traffic was suspended for weeks and i think the same thing would happen to two shipping traffic after an attack of this sort and the ripple effect throughout the global economy would probably be many trillions of dollars an attack like this would also have a profound effect on the way we live subsequently civil rights as we know them i think we just go out the door faced with the theory that there would might be another attack using nuclear weapons i think all of us would tolerate a degree of intrusive our lives that is just unacceptable and imaginable today but it would be the new norm and so there is good reason to be concerned about a nuclear terrorist attack but we have to understand this is the least of the dangers that we face  next step up in level of concern is the possibility of a limited nuclear war between smaller nuclear weapons states and the model which is attractive the most attention the most concern is the possibility of a war between india and pakistan these countries have gone to war three times since their independence from britain in the late forty's they've come close to war on two more occasions there is daily fighting between india and pakistan at the  and there have been a couple of incidents in the last fifteen years when a terrorist attack directed against india and believed to have originated from groups based in pakistan led to military mobilization on both sides you know the current situation in south asia is that the indian conventional forces are much much stronger than much smaller pakistan's army and in response to that the pakistanis have developed a military doctrine that says that they will resort to the use of nuclear weapons that if indeed the conventional forces appear to be poised to score a major victory against pakistan in a ground war pakistan will introduce the use of nuclear weapons and will do it fairly early on in the conflict  and so it's worth looking at what would happen if these countries use the nuclear arsenals we have looked extensively at a scenario that is quite conservative it assumes that india and pakistan each use about fifty hiroshima size bombs against the other country now their current arsenals are about one hundred twenty weapons in the pakistani arsenal and about one hundred in the indeed arsenal many of them are two to three times larger than the russian a bomb so our scenario is very conservative in terms of the assumptions that it makes about how extensive the fighting would be the consequences in south asia are unbelievably catastrophic twenty to thirty million people in our study are killed in the first week by the explosions by the fire by the local radiation but and again to put this into perspective using the world war two analogy in all of world war two worldwide about fifty million people died that was over eight years from the first japanese incursion in manchuria in thirty seven to the end of the war and forty five we'd see a similar number of deaths on the same order of magnitude occurring in the in the course of less than one week under the conditions of a war in south asia but these direct  effects are only a small part of the story the problem is that one hundred hiroshima sized bombs detonated over cities produce about six and a half million tons of such that gets lost into the upper atmosphere and again we've  conservative study assuming that only five million tons of soap were generated what that does is to block out sunlight across the planet and it drops global temperatures on average one point three degrees centigrade and it's a temperature drop that persists according to the most recent studies that we've done for up to twenty five years to put this in perspective over the last hundred thirty years the global warming which so much demands our attention has accounted for a rise in temperature of about seven tenths of a degree so this could be an anomaly twice as large or occurring in three days and in the interior regions of the major continents the temperature drop would be much greater than the one point three degree global average the concern here is that this decrease when the temperature was cooler in the air less water evaporates from the ocean to fall back as precipitation as a result of all of these factors there would be a significant decline in food production worldwide we have studie far corn production here in the united states the world's largest corn producer and corn rice and wheat production in china the world's largest producer of of wheat and and rice and the effects are just catastrophic here in the united states corn production is down about twelve percent for a decade in china rice production goes down about seventeen percent for a decade we production goes down thirty one percent for decade corporate action was down about fifteen percent these are decreases in food production which are not something which the world can absorb at this point world grain reserves at this moment in time amount to only about eighty days worth of consumption there's enough food stored to feed the planet for eighty days and this would be a totally inadequate buffer in the event of a dramatic decrease in food production that lasted not for single season but for a decade or more in addition right now at this moment there about seven hundred ninety five million people in the world who are malnourished they get on average about seven hundred calories a day which is just enough to maintain their body mass and let them do a little bit of work to grow food or to gather food these people cannot tolerate a further decline in their food consumption they're also about three hundred million people who live in countries where the average nutrition today is quite good but where much of the food is imported and in the world after a limited nuclear war with the kind of declines in food production that we will see there will not be international commerce in food grain exporting countries today's grain exporting countries will suspend their exports in order to be able to feed their own people so these additional three hundred million people living in countries like japan south korea taiwan most of the countries in the middle east north africa they too will face starvation and finally there are about a billion people in china who are relatively well maer well nourished today who live in a country which gro of its own food but in a country which will see huge decreases in food production and these billion people have not shared in the economic prosperity that the rest of the chinese population has seen over the last two to three decades we've concluded that these people also would be a great risk and so worldwide we're talking about something like two billion people who'd be at risk of starvation in the aftermath of this limited war taking place in one small localized region of the planet the death of two billion people is an event unprecedented in human history it's about a third of the human race  would have to expect that an event of this magnitude would lead to the end of modern civilization there has never been a civilization in human history that has withstood a shock anywheres near this magnitude and there's no reason to think that we would either  the international economic order that we all depend on would collapse and we would lapse into something probably quite similar to the dark ages and this is some of that could happen to swell we're sitting here tonight as i mentioned before there's fighting every day between india and pakistan that's the second form of nuclear danger that we need to worry about and i talked about the scenario of the produces this nuclear famine i talked about one hundred hiroshima sized bombs it's not just the indian and pakistani arsenals that can produce this effect each u s trident submarine carries ninety six warheads not one hundred but ninety six each of these is ten to fifty times more powerful than the russian a bomb that means that each trident submarine and produces this same nuclear famine scenario the united states has fourteen of them eight of them are based right here across the water at bangor each one of these submarines can cause this global catastrophe we have it's only a third of our nuclear arsenal we also have land based missiles and we have bombers that carry cruise missiles and gravity bombs and the russians are still has the same insane level of overkill capacity so let us consider the greatest nuclear threat we face the possibility of war between the united states and russia you know for the last twenty five years we've been told we don't need to worry about this the united states and russia are not enemies anymore there is no possibility of war i was told by the undersecretary of state for disarmament as recently as a year and a half ago that the united states simply does not consider the possibility of war with russia well in the intervening year and a half events in syria and especially vents in ukraine have given the light to the assurances that we have received since the end of the cold war that we don't need to worry about this possibility it is clear i think to most observers that military conflict between the united states and russia is indeed possible and that if that occurs it is quite possible this will escalate to the use of nuclear weapons has been frightening to agree of nuclear saber rattling on both sides since the ukraine crisis president putin has been particularly guilty of this threatening to use nuclear weapons over the conflict there warning that his country can reduce united states to nuclear ashes the united states for its part has conducted military exercises very close to the russian border with forces that were advertised as being nuclear capable it is a very frightening situation so let's look at what would happen if those weapons get used and i want to start by describing to you the effects a modern day attack on a single city were i think most of us familiar with images of hiroshima wiped flat in the phrase of doctors you know the red cross observer on the scene by the bomb there that city like seattle would probably be attacked given the number of strategic targets around the city by ten to twelve maybe fifteen warheads each of which in the range of ten to thirty times more powerful than the bomb which destroyed hiroshima it's a little bit difficult for me to describe all these bombs going off at once so i want to use a model of a single explosion i'm going to use the model of a single twenty megaton explosion the megatonnage here is slightly larger than would actually be deployed against seattle but the destruction i'm going to describe is actually less than we would see it fifteen smaller bombs were distributed more evenly over the entire metropolitan area but i think the model is adequate to give us an idea of what we're talking about within a thousandth of a second of the detonation of this bomb a fireball would form reaching up to two miles in every direction for miles across within this area the temperature would rise to twenty million degrees fahrenheit which is hotter than the surface of the sun and everything would be vaporized the buildings the trees the people the upper level of the earth itself would simply disappear a distance of four miles in every direction the explosion would generate winds greater than six hundred miles per hour and blast pressure is greater than twenty five pounds per square inch mechanical forces of this magnitude can destroy anything that human beings can build to a distance of six miles in every direction the heat would be so intense that automobiles would melt into a distance of sixteen miles in every direction the heat would still be so intense that everything flammable would burn buildings cloth would plastic heating oil gasoline it would all ignite hundreds of thousands of fires which over the next half hour would coalesce into a giant firestorm thirty two miles across covering over eight hundred square miles within this entire area the temperature would rise to fourteen hundred degrees fahrenheit all of the oxygen would be consumed and every living thing would die in the case of seattle we're talking about some three million people in the case of a large city like new york the death toll would be fifteen million people in a half an hour and if this attack were part of a general war between the united states and russia the same level of destruction would be visited on every major city in both countries and if nato were drawn into the conflict most of the great cities of europe and canada as well a study which we published in two thousand and two showed that if only three hundred warheads in the russian arsenal got through to urban targets in the united states something between seventy five one hundred million people would die in the first half hour in addition the entire economic infrastructure the country would be destroyed everything that we depend on you know we we require an intact society to meet our needs we don't grow our own food w gatherers and that intact infrastructure would simply vanish there'd be no banking system there'd be no internet they'd be no electricity grid there'd be no no public health system there be no food distribution system no fuel distribution and in the months following this attack it is probable that the vast majority of the american and russian population would die from starvation from exposure the subsequent winter from radiation poisoning from epidemic disease several hundred million people dead as the direct effects of this war but again as was the case with the scenario in south asia it's the climate effects that are really catastrophic the war in south asia puts about six and a half million tons of said into the upper atmosphere a war between the united states and russia using just the weapons that will still be available to both countries when the new start treaty is completely implemented in two thousand seventeen that war puts one hundred fifty million tonnes into the upper atmosphere and it drops temperatures across the planet not one point three degrees centigrade but eight degrees centigrade in the interior regions of north america and you're asia the temperatures drop twenty five to thirty degrees centigrade they have been there have not been temperatures on this planet that cold since the coldest point in the last ice age about eighteen thousand years ago in the northern hemisphere there would be at least two and probably three years without a single day for frost that means the temperature would go below freezing for at least some point of every day and that means that the ecosystems which evolved in the northern hemisphere would collapse because it be no spring no summer no ability for the plants to grow for the trees to leaf out vast numbers of species would become extinct food production in the northern hemisphere would stop completely the vast majority of the human race would starve to death and it is possible that we would become extinct as a species now this is a danger which we face every day this is not just some scenario i've cooked up to ruin your evening even if we don't stumble into a war in ukraine or in syria there is the ever present possibility that there will be a war by accident we know of at least five occasions since nine hundred seventy nine when either moscow or washington prepared to launch a nuclear war in the mistaken belief that it itself was already under attack by the other side the most recent of these took place in the that we know about in one thousand nine hundred five a full five years after the end of the cold war and on that occasion the norwegian government launched a missile to study the northern lights they informed people in moscow that this was taking place somebody in moscow made a mistake and didn't pass the information on to russian military radar and when this fourth stage rocket was picked up by russian radar screens it was misinterpreted as four warheads tracking towards moscow and interpreted to be the first wave of it decapitating nato strike against russia for the only time that we know about during the nuclear weapons era the console it's called the nuclear football the console that the soviet leadership carries at all times to respond to nuclear attack was activated it was two o'clock in the yeltsin was wakened up and he was giving a range of options on how to deal with a situation they went from doing nothing and waiting things out to launching a full scale nuclear attack against the united states which at that point back in  which involved about four thousand warheads should have launched world war three that day according to existing russian nuclear doctrine both russia and the united states then and now operate under a doctrine called launch on warning which holds that if you believe that you are subject to an incoming nuclear attack you launch your own weapons before they are destroyed on the ground we don't know what happened in the kremlin that morning yeltsin is you may recall was a very sick man he had heart problems he was on steroids at times and he also was alcoholic who was incapacitated by his drinking for days at a time is literally possible that he was simply too drunk to make a decision that morning and that's why we're here today although we know is that the soviet leadership the russian leadership rather decided that morning to wait and see what happened and after a few minutes it was clear that these blips on the radar screen were not heading towards moscow and so the danger past january twenty fifth  five was a perfectly normal good day there was no crisis anyplace in the world that should have led to fighting between the united states and russia let alone to world war three it was at a time that is much safer than the present moment india and pakistan had not tested their nuclear weapons yet north korea had not developed its nuclear weapons yet september eleventh hadn't taken place the united states had not launched these terrible destabilizing wars in the middle east conditions between the united states and russia were dramatically better than they are today and yet we came within minutes of launching a nuclear war and the conditions in terms of the technical systems which existed at that time which allowed this near disaster have not changed in any significant way since then the same kind of accident on a computer could take place today the difference is that given the increased level of tension between the united states and russia the chances are even greater that whichever side thought it was under attack would in fact launch a counterattack rather than sitting back and waiting and in addition to this potential threat we are now told by military leaders that there is another dimension to the computer problem which is that terrorists could potentially hack into a command and control computers and cause the launch of a nuclear weapon missile in either the russian of the u s arsenal the almost certainly triggering a nuclear war so this is a real and present danger something which should be occupying our attention all the time but it's important to understand that while this is the future that will be if we don't take action it is not the future that must be nuclear weapons are not a force of nature they're not an act of god we have built these with our own hands and we know how to take them apart we've dismantled over fifty thousand nuclear warheads since the height of the cold war we know how to do this the only thing that's lacking is the political will and fortunately on that ground there is some very hopeful news over the last few years a movement has started led by the non nuclear weapon states to make the nuclear weapon states honor their responsibilities and negotiate the abolition of their weapons it's a movement which i think is inspired a great deal by the physicians movement and by the red cross in particular in two thousand and ten yakob kellenberger then president of the red cross give a very important speech in geneva to the diplomatic corps in which he indicated that while the red cross had always supposed nuclear weapons it was now going to make their abolition a key focus of its work internationally and the next year two thousand and eleven when the red cross movement held its bi annual meeting there was a unanimous vote by every single red cross red crescent society in the world to call  nuclear weapons and to begin a worldwide educational campaign about what they refer to as the humanitarian impact of nuclear war what we doctors have called the medical consequences of nuclear war for the last three decades unfortunately american red cross has chosen not to be involved in this campaign but in many countries around the world the red cross is doing extraordinarily effective work educating people about how dangerous the situation is their work in turn inspired the non nuclear weapon states many of them to take up this issue and over the last several years there have been a series of extraordinary governmental conferences focused on the humanitarian impact of nuclear war the first was an os low in march of two thousand and thirteen that brought together one hundred twenty countries it was actively boycotted by the united states and the other four members of the un security council the five permanent members who are all the major nuclear powers u s russia china britain and france despite that boycott perhaps in part because of that boycott which underlined the urgency of non nuclear weapon states providing leadership in the congress was a tremendous success and led to a follow up meeting a year later in mexico it which over one hundred thirty countries attended and again spent several days examining what would happen if these weapons are actually used and what therefore needs to be done the final meeting shown on the slide took place in vienna in december of two thousand and fourteen one hundred fifty eight countries attended this time more than three countries three quarters of the countries in the world and this time the united states and great britain did attend although they mainly played a spoiler role at the meeting despite their efforts the meeting ended with an inspiring call by the austrian government to close the gap in international law which does not prohibit does not ban the possession of nuclear weapons all other indiscriminate weapons are banned under international law chemical weapons biological weapons cluster bombs landmines they're all defined as being too inhumane to indiscriminate in their effect to be tolerated and yet nuclear weapons the most dangerous weapons of all are not explicitly banned and so the austrian said we need to close this gap in international law and ban these weapons as a way of putting pressure on the nuclear weapons states to actually eliminate their arsenals so for this pledge that's been called the humanitarian pledge has been endorsed by over one hundred forty countries and had a vote at the un general assembly last fall an open ended working group was established to meet in geneva to figure out how to in fact close the legal gap the working group had its first meeting last  month its second and most important substantive meeting will take place the first two weeks of may again the united states is boycotting this event but the one hundred plus countries who are there are engaging in a serious conversation about it what steps should take place next and what is almost certain to emerge is a call for a new treaty which bans nuclear weapons and defines their possession as being illegal and brands the countries which continue to hold on to these weapons as rogue states states that exist in violation of international law there's not been a movement of this magnitude in the international community since the cold war and it is terribly important that we do whatever we can to support this initiative physicians for social responsibility and our global federation i p p and w have in the last four or five years created a global network an umbrella group called the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons which now involves over four hundred fifty had an enormous impact it has been responsible for bringing many countries into the fold getting many countries to endorse the pledge and to attend these the meeting in geneva and it is i think an enormously positive and hopeful development now on the flip side on the negative side is the continued intransigence of the united states and the other nuclear weapon states far from conceding the need to get rid of these weapons all nine of the nuclear weapon states are currently engaged in active plans to modernize the nuclear arsenals the case of the united states it is estimated that we will be spending if we don't change the policy we will be spending a trillion dollars over the next thirty years to rebuild every single component of our nuclear arsenal the submarines the land based missiles the strategic bombers and the weapons that they carry this modernization plan is quite simply utterly incompatible with our treaty obligation to negotiate the abolition of our nuclear arsenal and that is the great debate that is needs to take place in this country are we going to modernize our arsenals or cost of a trillion dollars and pledge ourselves to continue lying on nuclear  weapons in some way or are we going to choose the opposite path and work towards their abolition it is a great disappointment that in this presidential election year this debate is not taking place it's part of our job to make sure that it does i think we have to understand the enormity of the moment that we are in right now it is truly a turning point on the one hand we have the most important disarmament initiatives in a generation on the other hand we have plans to utterly defeat the aims of that movement by building a new nuclear arsenal and it is a very stark choice that we face and depending on the choice that we take i think all else will follow we have acted as though we can continue to maintain nuclear arsenals and have the world that we know continue i would argue that simply isn't possible we have been spectacularly lucky over the last seventy years that there has not been a nuclear war and we have to we have to recognize that we are here today because we've been lucky reliance  continued good luck is simply not an acceptable policy for the future we have to understand that if these weapons continue to exist it is only a matter of time until they're used and that if they're used they're going to destroy everything that we hold precious i think there are three reasons why we have not acted more decisively to get rid of these weapons and let me just screw through them very quickly first there is the general disbelief th can actually happen none of us really in our hearts believe that nuclear war can take place we look at the world we live in every day and we just can't imagine it being destroyed in the way that it will but if you look around the history of the last hundred years we see many many examples of communities who thought that their existence couldn't be threatened they were utterly destroyed by war and we're no different and we have to understand that and we have to figure out how to convince the rest of our citizens and our leaders that in fact this is what's going to happen if we don't take action secondly i think we don't begin to understand how bad the use of nuclear weapons would be and there's a whole extensive you know literature and discography and filmography of apocalyptic stories and tales and we've all seen them and we all kind of have some idea of how horrible the future might look but we don't really get it we still sort of imagine that somehow it won't be quite that horrible and so the information that i was presenting earlier i think is terribly important to get out people need to understand just how bad these weapons aren't just how complete the destruction will be and third we have to deal with the fact that for many people there is still the notion that somehow or other nuclear weapons protect us they make us more secure i think it's easy to understand where this false idea comes from throughout much of human history stronger weapons did tend to make us safer you know if you walking down a street and some person who you think is potentially an enemy is coming towards you with a big stick if you have an even bigger stick you're a little bit safer the trouble is that with nuclear weapons that logic just doesn't apply anymore these are not weapons which make us secure the use of our own nuclear weapons will destroy us there are suicide bombs and our thinking hasn't caught up with that we still view them as potential potential instruments of our safety and security and we have to get beyond that and again i think the key to that goes back to the second point i was making a minute ago it goes back to the need for to fully understand what's going to happen if these weapons are used there are leaders in nuclear weapons states who truly believe that they can use their nuclear arsenal and achieve some desirable outcome and don't understand that if they use a nuclear weapons they will be relegating their own country to destruction so we need to deal with these three obstacles that stand in the way and we need to create a movement as we had back in the one nine hundred eighty s that puts pressure on our leaders and we need to talk directly to the leadership and ask them to do what they're supposed to do provide leadership on this issue because they're not at this point  are we going to be successful i can't promise that we will it's not at all clear to me that we're going to survive this crisis what i can say is if we don't try nuclear war is going to be our fate and i can also say is that we have every reason to believe that if we work very hard we can change things because we've done it once before in the one nine hundred eighty s we were marching towards nuclear war and we stopped that and we saved the world and we can and must do that again when i talk to college audiences or high school audiences i always invoke the lord of the ring because everybody is pretty familiar with this story at this point  think it's instructive you know nuclear weapons are the closest we've ever come on this planet to building a ring of power and the desperate struggle to rid our planet of these weapons is every bit as heroic every bit as grand and every bit as dangerous as the struggle to rid middle earth of the ring of power the only real difference is that the fellowship of the ring involve just a handful of people and elves and our fellowship really requires the involvement of all of us no one of us can do this job by ourself but each one of us needs to do that part of the job which is ours to do and that's the challenge before all of us  when i speak to audiences i always feel a little bit of guilt because by telling people who may not have known about this stuff before by talking about this i put a real burden on their shoulders and i've done that to you all tonight and if you weren't previously aware of this information once you know about the danger we face you have a responsibility to take action you know if you see somebody fall down in the street you can't just walk over them you have to help pick them up if you know that your planet is in danger you have to take action about this and that's a great burden and it's a burden that's not going to go away until we get rid of these weapons but i also think that this responsibility is a great gift every one of us wants to have a worthwhile life we want to something good with our life and we've been given the opportunity to save the world which is a very good thing to do so i think the challenge for all of us is to take on this burden to do what we can to eliminate these weapons to build a movement  succeed and at the end of our lives to be able to look back and say in honesty we helped to save the world thanks  and the last slide is one which i meant to put up as i was closing this is what it's all about these the millions of children around the world can't save the world they depend on us to do it so we have some time for any comments that people might have or any questions that people might have i wonder if we could turn up the house lights and turn off the lights the shining in my face first question about president obama i don't have a clue what's going on in this man's head at prague in two thousand and nine he said that he sought the security of the world free of nuclear weapons and he negotiated a very important treaty with the russians right after that to cut the size of our arsenal significantly a very like to go further but three russians and the republicans are the obstacle i don't think that's true anymore i think the obama administration is part of the obstacle as well because they have made it clear that they do not seek a world free of nuclear weapons that like previous administrations and like the governments of the other nuclear weapons states they view nuclear weapons still as an important component of national power which they're not willing to give up and i think that's really the unfortunate bottom line it's a weird phenomenon that we see all the time where people who are in power suffer from the illusion that they can control these weapons and use them to secure national ins that they so that they seek to secure when they leave power they often undergo this amazing conversion and there are scores of former military leaders and people like henry kissinger architect of our nuclear policy is not in power anymore he's terrified of nuclear war and thinks need to get rid of all the nuclear weapons i mean this is a long list of these people and the way power seduces these people believe does go back to the lord of the ring i guess when you're wearing the ring you think that you can use it social networks and we need to figure out how to mobilize them to amplify our voice the information that i presented tonight is generally not known anymore there's a whole generation that's grown up since the end of the cold war that was never taught anything about nuclear weapons word but that's what they're ignorant about this they simply don't know what nuclear weapons will do there is you know people of my generation who knew this stuff well in the eighty's for the most part we've all forgotten it because you know it's been a long time since this has been an object of public discourse so i think the first thing that we need to do is to educate people we need to get this information about the enormity of this danger out to the general population to our decision makers and how we do this each one of us depends on what our situation is if you are part of a some kind of civic group or a church group local p s or chapter here has many people who speak about this issue and would be happy to revive speakers to basically any venue that is available if you have connections with our political leadership sit down and talk with them about it if you belong to groups that might take a position about this you know again churches have for the most part most church groups nationally have taken a position about nuclear war strongly in favor of the abolition of these weapons but aren't acting on those positions so you know if you belong to a church agitate within your church for the church as an organization to be more active we've done a lot of work with rotary clubs around the world rotary is after the red cross the largest angio in the world and we're trying to encourage rotary to take a position about this and whatever whenever connections you have used that if you have if you're of my age but you know younger people ask the younger people to show you how to use social media so you can get your views out that way as well i mean the good news about nuclear weapons in terms of being able to get rid of them is as opposed to climate change which requires very very extensive changes in the whole economy the nuclear industry is a very tiny industry and we could eliminate it with a minimal national economic impact the problem is that that small segment the economy is highly organized and has a very vested interest in maintaining the flow of dollars to the labs and so there is a very  organized financial constituency that is actively working to promote this very crazy plan to spend a trillion dollars and it's not just the lapps it's also the weapons producers and the big aerospace companies that will be making the you know the missiles in the submarines and so on so as has been the case with so many aspects of our of our political culture over the last several decades the public discourse has been terribly corrupted by the influence of money here and we just have to recognize that that there is a small but very wealthy very entrenched interest that is trying to keep us on the path of nuclear weapons  and we're going to have to oppose that even before the privatization of the labs there was always the problem the aerospace companies which were you know that the perfect defense system was one which had components built built or assembled in each of the fifty states so that there was always a lobby for every congressman's district to keep that plan going to matter how stupid it was or how much it even undermined our national security and the back well at the moment i think the effort is being focused on the new cruise missile the long range standoff cruise missile which has been sort of the ngo community that works on this is kind of targeted that as the place to try to chip away a piece of the modernization but i kind of think in some ways well that's a reasonable thing to do it's a very limited approach we can't afford to have you know a series of tiny battles over each different weapon system what we need to have and what we need to create is a national debate about this are we going to go ahead with this whole crazy modernization plan or are we going to move in a different direction and it's interesting i was talking to resentments and over dinner tonight in a sense this month station plan has given us a real opportunity because it's been very hard to initiate a national debate about nuclear weapons policy but by proposing this enormous expenditure the government in a sense is doing just that they're initiating this and so i think it's for us to try to frame this as that choice it's not just this weapon or that weapon it's due respect and a trillion dollars and commit ourselves to maintaining a nuclear arsenal for the next fifty or sixty years a path which will almost certainly use lead to nuclear weapon use nuclear war or do we commit ourselves as a country to working for the abolition of these weapons and i think that's that's the debate that we want to have but in terms of the specific weapon system that is probably going to be the focus of attention it's the long range standoff cruise missile and the reason for that is that it's seen very much as a war fighting weapon this is not a deterrent weapon this is something you use to attack another country and the feeling is that this is a very destabilizing weapon that that tends to make the other side much more nervous and much more likely to use its nuclear weapons early on as careers both a huge problem and i think also unfortunately huge distraction from the real problem and it's both of these things at the same time let me just talk about the distraction part first because i think one of the problems is is that whenever we try to raise the need to get rid of nuclear weapons with the administration with many parts of the public what they come back is about what about korea what about a previously until last fall what about iran and while these are real problems both of them  as i think the information i presented just makes clear the real issue is that the arsenals that exist already in the major nuclear weapons states including the smaller ones like india or pakistan having said that north korea is a real problem it is a very unstable regime which we don't understand well which we seem to have very little ability to influence which probably has built a small number of nuclear weapons we're not sure exactly what they have and if it's something they can actually deliver as opposed to burying in the ground and blowing up but probably they are getting to a point where they're going to be able to have a deliverable nuclear weapon and even if it doesn't threaten the united states directly and it may but at the moment we don't think it does it is certainly very real threat to south korea  japan and it is driving forces in both of those countries which are advocating for those countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals as a counter to the north korean weapons program so it threatens not only  to potentially lead to short term military catastrophe but also to spur a whole new arms race in northeast asia involving countries like japan which have made a real point of not developing nuclear weapons although they clearly have the ability to do so very rapidly if they want to how do we deal with north korea i have no idea i mean this is way outside my area of expertise i foresee it appears to be outside the expertise of everybody and i don't think anybody has a plan of what to do about this regime right now and i think that the the bottom line takeaway i take from the north korean situation is just too that it emphasizes the inherent instability of a situation in which nuclear technology is allowed to proliferate the north koreans built their weapon from what was supposed to be a civilian reactor to produce electricity and they have made very clearly the point that any nuclear power plant is potentially usable through relevant nuclear weapons and the current us policy of promoting the export of nuclear reactors all around the world is directly at all odds with our national security interest of preventing the for the proliferation of nuclear weapons but i fortunately i don't have a good answer at all to the question you're raising about what we do about this current situation in north korea i don't think india pakistan is a distraction i think india pakistan is  existential threat to human survival i think i think we we ignore the situation south asia at great peril that you're quite right i think what you're saying though which is that in pakistan they're not going to move to get rid of their arsenals unless israel leadership in the united states and you know you can trace the train back the pakistanis built their arsenal because the indian arsenal the unions built their arsenal because the chinese arsenal the chinese built their arsenal because the u s arsenal and so in that sense you know that that's that's where this all comes from and the u s needs along with everybody else in the world to understand the grave threat that the that the situation south asia poses to all of us israel and pakistan and north korea i think are going to be the three most difficult countries to deal with in this whole situation we talk about nuclear weapons as being a deterrent in fact none of the other nuclear weapons states really view the nuclear arsenals as a deterrent they view them as  extensions of national power these three countries do view themselves as facing existential threats either to the country in the case of pakistan and israel or to the regime in the case of north korea and they view their nuclear weapons as something of a hedge against those threats so i think to get these these three states to abandon the nuclear arsenals is going to require significant work on the local security issues that they face i just the the the governments the regime in north korea has got to feel that it is not threatened by external overthrow and pakistan and israel have to feel secure that their national survival is not at stake before they going to give up their arsenals and that's going to be that's going to be part of this process and obviously these are both very difficult situations very complicated situations and it speaks to how complicated the process is going to be of getting rid of these weapons but again it's going to start with leadership from the united states i think is the largest power in the world one of the two great nuclear powers and the only one that's likely to provide leadership on this and so we have a special responsibility here to get our government to take action and then part of that action is going to have to be figuring out how to unravel the situation in kashmir and the other issues between nuclear program was in terms of what motivated it its existence was profoundly destabilizing and it almost certainly had they proceed to develop nuclear weapons or if they do in the future saudi arabia turkey egypt will almost certainly follow suit and it's interesting that these countries have not felt so threatened by the israeli arsenal that they've built nuclear weapons they do feel that threatened by the iranian arsenal that's something we simply have to after acknowledges as a fact in the middle east situation that for ten years that's an enormous accomplishment because it gives us lots of room to work in iran as you know as a country were sixty percent of the population is under twenty five much of the youth in iran do not have a strong allegiance to the current regime and there's reason to hope that that will be political evolution in iran and that ten years from now we'll be dealing with a country that is less likely to develop nuclear weapons when this deal expires so i think it's a huge positive step as to what deals the administration might have made to get domestic support but i really don't know clearly to get you know support for the new start treaty the administration concluded a really horrible bargain that has led to the c modernization plans so i certainly open to the idea that they may have been behind the deal behind closed door deals made with the lab personnel to get their support for this but i don't know about it first you know directly