so i think the first thing to start with here really is what motivated this book at this time why now why after all of these years come out with a book warning everyone about that was a seventy one copying was in sixty nine and same time that i was copying those pages i was copying everything else in my top secret safe in my office in red wings that i in many cases was the only one authorized to included the pentagon papers themselves but most of what i copy really had to do with my years of work on command control of nuclear weapons and devising nuclear war plans as a consultant from the rand corporation and then part of the time as an employee of the defense department sixty four and my intention was to put that all out after the pentagon papers had had their trial or their trials several were scheduled on that actually i was put on trial for copying the pentagon papers there was another grand jury going on in austin at the same time for the distribution of the pentagon papers which i would have been involved in which by the way did focus on indicting neil sheehan and head big smith and other journalists would people say now that no journalist has yet been indicted that's true but it's not true that they've never thought of indicting a journalist before nixon did have that in mind  nine or seventy one that event then i would put out the material on the pending on the nuclear and just briefly why that didn't happen then i give it to my brother for safekeeping he had put all the material i'd given him he didn't know what it was specially into a it was in a cardboard box and put it in a large green carpet bag and put it in his compost heap and he moved it to a trash dump which was just in time because the neighbors said the f b i were poking that compost heap the next day a three moved it with long flexible runs so he had it under a green stole from there in the terry town trash heap dump to markets location in a bluff on the side of a road and while i was on trial in seventy one and that continued seventy three tropical storm dorian came a small hurricane and scattered the trash dump all over the landscape the stove itself was blown apart by about one hundred yards they couldn't tell where to begin the bluff went down the side of the hill and my brother and a friend of his spent weekends for a year on i was in trial trying to recover that garbage bag story forty five years ago and i always felt a baby looked like a schlemiel basically headed lost these documents and we didn't have the documents to shows that it was no nothing much to be gained by just telling that story and i just tell it in passing now in the book partly in answer to the question you're raised why now the fact is that the other part of cancer is i did what i could to transcribe for my lawyers what a five hundred page transcript of what i'd worked on in the pentagon that might come up during the trial and i use that as a basis for submission to my publisher at that time in the editor's ed this book would sell fourteen hundred copies and they said well that's one for every member of congress that's all right you know some other people were going to have control and said no that means we wouldn't publish it and really several other times i've run into the same same result essentially this time i just went ahead and decided well do it myself if i have to this book was turned down by seventeen publishers on commercial grounds no one wants to read about nuclear war period which i've heard from other people for a long time in fact and earlier agent had told me he wouldn't represent me on a book about nuclear weapons nuclear war so we'll see it is true that i am rewarded now by the presence of donald trump in the white house which is his focus people on that problem for the first time in many years so there's a silver lining to anything even the end of the world here in terms of sales i hope you will read the book that's the point of it  and all of it including something that no one is good commented on actually even in the reviews i've gotten good reviews but they hadn't any have commented on the fact that he spent a fair amount of time in the last part of the book telling about strategic bombing in world war two because i've always thought it's not possible to imagine to believe credit the nature of our strategic war planning on nuclear war planning without knowing it roots in the firebombing of world war two about which most americans know almost nothing anymore and that this is a pretty additional analogy but you'll see it probably come up in the evening any more than japanese know a lot about the ra act of terrorism in human history and by terrorism i mean the deliberate killing massacring of civilians non combatants are not threatening anybody for a political purpose killing civilians for political purposes what is the largest single night of terrorism in human history let me see live don't be modest to me see how many hands oh it's almost more than i might have expected let me just take one what was that what would you say what could you know hiroshima and i that's a good guess ok but it's not the  general curtis lemay had two hours to teach it bombing in the pacific use the results of months and years of experimentation with killing civilians by fire with burning people to death thirty eight thousand according to the best records in the city then when mike's ninth and tenth just after dressed in which was mainly british operations dresden along with u s participation on the second day sent his fire bombers in at low altitude loaded with incendiary bombs and burned to death between eighty and one hundred twenty thousand people in one night and they did not die will i won't it may even be worth going into a little bit what that means but there's no question about it what we did was we brought the ovens to the or in their shelters in their homes and killed about one hundred thousand people one night i think had that not been done and then imitated in each of the next sixty four cities in population of japan but they never got a fire one for killing about nine hundred thousand civilians before hiroshima and nagasaki japan say ok now that i've said it have i jog your memory card many people now remember having heard of that bombing ok perhaps twenty or so roughly yeah but for twenty that's it's part of thirty part of our history that the japanese know pretty well but we don't and the fact is that having done that there really was no decision to be made about hiroshima in the moral nature or strategic nature people search for what was the reason what was the overpowering overwhelming reason that led people to drop this bomb once it had been developed and the answer was there was no decision to be raided none was raised the issue was raised we did with one bomb what we've been trying to do success sometimes successfully every night for five months we've spent that time killing as many civilians japanese as we could night by night except they never again got a big fire storm going which is another story we have to get back to but that's as they say i felt that was quite an important part of the book obviously a general curtis lemay who is a very famous air force general who is known for his to be a character to say the least what do you think it was the moral switch that allowed the united states to participate in these sorts of fire bombings or trying to engender these sorts of fire bombings and then emerging from that as world war two is often of course seen in the american imagination and memory as the good war and so i'm wondering if you think that it's impossible for there to be moral strategic bombing is it is it impossible for there to be a moral strategic bombing well look people ask right now whether it's possible to have a nuclear war that doesn't violate humanitarian law international humanitarian law and as the that's would would really have threatened very few civilians would have been aimed at aggressors in kuwait would have killed and probably been fairly effective in doing that you know i'm son's school as we approached the gulf war and one nine hundred ninety one and it had been a lot of publicity that the iraqis were masters of field fortifications so called field intrenchments during the iran war with iran which we had supported both sides actually encouraged saddam to attack or iran and then given targeting information to each side against the other including  materials for poison gas in some cases so we've sort of been deeply involved in that when even before we sent our troops over but in the rand iraq war i'd been a marine  in vietnam where i was a civilian and i walked with troops area having had this training to what i was doing in the field and saw a combat up there fairly close so i had that experience low level experience when i saw  against those fortifications and as a former infantry officer in peacetime but also would been in vietnam it made my blood run cold to think of how it would be like world war one you know there were let's go over the top man into the bible wire and against the machine guns and the artillery coming down and just suicidal and i actually i felt very very dismayed at the thought that we were going to attack those positions head on and in fact what actually happened was that they had planned to do that but instead schwarzkopf devised what they call the hail mary maneuver they move people very far flanking the other side and  them from the other side thirty didn't make a frontal attack on the end what just came into my head because it it relates to the subject of this evening i think a great deal is this fact he did have a device for dealing with the troops in the trenches they bulldoze the trenches with huge bulldozers and they bury the people alive and they weak americans did that that was a tactic i action it's something humans are capable of being heartless like toward other humans to a degree that we just deny to ourselves it's a denial it's not part of our identity that humans act this way in warfare and not only in warfare but in warfare in particular and one way of summing it up i've said for a long time when we say say ties in with what we're dealing with here is how do people come to make plans for killing and we haven't really got to skip the killing micha say vast numbers of other civilians and i'm saying historically americans have become almost addicted to bombing because we thought of ourselves as having i should say the air force thinks of itself as having won a war second world war with bombing not germany it took troops on the ground to do it in germany but it because they could see right away how do you justify our large air force after the war when you can do the job with three hundred bombers with one blow over and that that worried them as a matter of fact but nazis did it they did it in the london blitz st terror bombing but people in the r a f had long been waiting for the ability to use their bombers in just that fashion and they found the german  operational reasons they couldn't fly during the day to any of them shot got shut down and british bombers they weren't able to fly high enough and have enough they didn't have enough armor they were getting shot down they had to go at night at night you couldn't pick out you were asking  were well actually the british discovered they had to go in at night and going at night it was hard to find the right time the right city which you couldn't take a target meaningfully less than a city or in particular the built up parts of the city and to get the most effective used in simply areas where the a wherever it landed the fire could spread to closely packed housing and so forth eventually the u s picked up that tactic for much the same operational reasons hard to bomb through clouds of bad weather radar wasn't good enough and so forth so by the time of tokyo than we were when they took on what his superiors want which was fire bombing that would in seem it would burn to death as many people as possible and i used to think i was fourteen fourteen at that point that we didn't know they were really doing that but i was very struck and it's in the book i reproduce the headlines from the first page of a rather astonishing not only did time magazine at the time say i remember this phrase of it in the book last night general curtis lamaze firebirds demonstrated that properly kindled japanese cities would burn like autumn leaves well the cities of course the cities of people  but even so i didn't see a number attached to that ship and think except that in may when they went over again they put in over estimate of how many were killed on this second wave of attacks in tokyo and the headline in the new york times which i wasn't reading and in detroit the headline was one million killed that was a subheading not a big study something just one million killed and in fact they didn't describe in the text till almost the end of the article no protest no questions raised in congress no nothing you know they didn't kill a million on that occasion anything close to it but they were able to say that saying we had to come in as you know a certain sense had become to pranged simply both the bombers and the people who accepted this and we talked about  so one of the really interesting things that you bring up in the book is how these actions especially during world war two were justified by arguing either that not the nazis in this case but that the japanese imperial existential threat to the united states and to western democracy and therefore if we wanted to defeat an enemy we would have to adopt aspects of terror bombing and basically tactics that were understood to be against democratic tradition but what's so interesting and you talk about this in the book is how this sort of ideology was very neatly assimilated into the logic of the early cold war so i was wondering as someone who lived through it and who decided to work for the rand corporation and the one nine hundred fifty s which was a think tank very much dedicated to fighting the cold war why did you at the time view the soviet union as and an axis tensile threat that was analogous to nazi germany and imperial japan it makes sense a little bit with you're talking about stalin but stalin dies in march of fifty three so how come after march fifty three everyone still seems to think that the soviet union is nazi germany reincarnated to some degree and this really i think a really critical intellectual underpinning for strategic bombing for the development of all these nuclear war plans and really for the arms race so i'm curious one why did you at that time make that intellectual different kinds of work and how we got out of it is another story but in part because the labor movement was retrenched in the course of the cold war it was kind of swallowed up the the democrats over and they pretty much deprive one of us of most of his backing in forty eight by repeated and saying that only communists would back him well that was not at all true in forty seven forty eight he was extremely popular but by the by the time they'd finished demonizing him others had dropped away and pretty much coming to us were his core of support at that point but i came to believe by the way might that my own brother who was a very leftist ignoring the realities of what was going on in the east in europe at that very time and i was very impressed by the berlin blockade looking back on it it's extraordinary to think a good fifteen when the war ended  h fourteen and sort of fourteen when the war ended but during the war you know the red stuff the wonderful things about the bravery which was realistic actually on the eastern front in russia in the book they were our allies very much so but it's rather extraordinary to think that three years after the war ended americans in mass myself very much included and i was seventeen were determined to stand with the brave berliners against his tyranny you know they were now our allies and we were curtis le may actually this is that the best action of his life probably was in charge of the airlift which was bringing in even cold in airplanes for the people of berlin the switch was to perceive as you say stalin as good and after forty nine a hitler armed with nuclear weapons but in the forty eight we had the monopoly of nuclear weapons we sent truman sent b twenty nine twenty nine but i was known as the atomic bomb or which had dropped the bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki sent them over to britain for the first time with a lot of publicity and love a women symbolizing it all of a was the symbol of using nuclear weapons and we were sending nuclear bombers over there to assure the russians that if they stopped our air supply which they could easily do because berlin was a hundred miles inside what it was inside east germany their air could have played in it easily harassed interfered with our air of persians they didn't do that for fear that that would start a nuclear war by who by us now whether in fact our nuclear threats were critical or not truman believed they were and even general marshall who was very stable admirable personally in most respects came to believe that the nuclear threat had enabled us to keep hold of early and as a freedom as a free city europe so that the nuclear threat had succeeded in that there's i'm saying once you believe that the threat is work you tend to use it again but in my case and everybody's it wasn't that hard to imagine that we had another hitler here which is what we were here because it was little question but that the people of east europe were being held captive down in effect against i put it this way the book the reality of that was this stalin was as ruthless as hitler it's not perfect in terms of body counts he probably killed more people than hitler and killed more communists than hitler did and that's not it the irony revolt that was what happened we're hearing about ukraine now in their relations with russia ukraine in the early thirty's had been left to starve by the tens of millions but actually what amounted to more than ten million people starved so you couldn't get more ruthless to develop but then the way to hitler wasn't so stalin dies in fifty three yes in fifty three but the why were they holding down all of east europe other than to take over europe as a whole as a base unless we stop well there was an answer and show now how far  broad denial can be and how deep it is at that of spirit idea the russians had been invaded by germany twice in the same century and then it was no issue more critical in their minds and we knew it than to keep from being invaded another time from germany and not to go through the whole history as i now understand it but from it in a perspective entirely different from what i killed throughout the cold war their motives which is put this is a hypothesis a hypothesis that was not in my mind at that time that their grip on east europe was to assure that germany if it was going to be rearmed by the west which it was would be divided and would confront a buffer heavy buffer zone before they could do anything to russia for they could do anything to russia can i have to say this may sound is stunning but i just put it to i don't think it ever occurred to anybody i knew of to think of tyranny and it was a genuine tyranny of the russians the soviets in east europe as being defensive which they thought of it almost exclusively rightly or wrongly as being defensive that was not in our heads at all the difference is between thinking whether climate right now is man made in some degree you know the climate changes or not and you know if you believe one thing it's almost hard to put yourself in this and some of it at least here is an issue where that particular division is in the public domain people know there's a controversy about it to say the least there was no controversy about this at the time or at leats in the in the congress in the attack i mean these entirely candidly unions which are almost had come to be by forty eight forty nine fifty purged of left wing elements and were entirely cold warriors and so everywhere you turned actually for advice you've got this idea that we are holding back and expansionist power and what i was about to say was the ruthlessness was not exaggerated upton went over my manuscript so carefully that i really feel i can't be blamed for any remaining errors they say in the book i've always wanted to say that in the book but it's true in this case and i don't i don't see how they can a good conscience escape responsibility for any remaining errors but up one thing though that you did say was that i had played the devil's game and then i had made a great change about nuclear weapons now i would always have said and i would still say right now my attitudes toward nuclear weapons did not actually change very much in the course of my life as i say in the book and i won't go repeated here but i was  happened to be in a minority of americans and i won't tell the reasons why who was very dismayed and made very uneasy in english by the by when i was fourteen years old and i never really change that attitude even though later i was working on war plans how could that be and the answer is the same way not to give myself airs here i'm talking about a fourteen year old boy a twenty year old to compare myself with say to leo szilard or  leader shared the nobel peace prize as representing the international physicians for prevention of could what joseph wrote but they worked on the manhattan project because they were sure that they were in a race with this with the russians germans who had after all actually discovered fission first achieved it and then explained it to germans and it was every reason to think that in a theoretical way at least they were ahead of war because the purpose during the war was to sure if possible that there would be no nuclear war that the germans would not have a monopoly of nuclear weapons which they thought of as and as an ultimate  anyone known to me i've studied is quite a bit i don't remember ever reading somebody who was to the right wing of hitler and his little more militaristic certainly not his generals but he was telling them thirty seven of those never in them and thirty nine his plans for expansion and that was not because everybody realizes you karim doesn't expand you know they're in deep trouble no that was hitler who got it in part from obrecht also for the chill politician resistance to that because of threats they were making against provide straight blackmail if you don't let us in gary was saying to the president of czechoslovakia  our bombers will burn prior to the ground let me assure you we have laid on very generously on this nothing will remain in pride and when the haka finally signed the agreement allowing germans to come into the rest of czechoslovakia he said to his foreign minister our people will curse us forever but we have saved their lives he said ok so that blackmail actually worked in thirty eight the war wasn't on thirty nine wasn't on yet september first thirty nine and the basic inhibition they came up with is we can't do this in less than four or five years and hitler was very impatient a factor of his of his character and what we in historical events and he had it had to be now had to be now in one of the world are fast so he didn't pursue nuclear energy what if instead he had convinced him that he should delay this for several years until we have the what then followed since he didn't have it was that we had the monopoly we were supposed to we were facing somebody was holding down east europe the same way hipper had held on east europe a much ok look very similar there and the idea that they wanted that they wanted the west but it is an elegy very much to something right now there's a number of analogies right simply by just being next door to it speaking the same language same background same relatives everything and be enormously freer and richer so that north korea has to  nail down every type of communication to keep their people from understanding big the difference is between north korea and south korea and that they all that with koreans know from one way or another that south koreans have it somewhat better but they don't know they have no comparison at all to this well west berlin was the same way west berlin was a rich subsidized very subsidized and rich free city in the midst of a tyranny w walked into by the russians and that was to threaten to peer war well we did that in forty eight with the p twenty nine s now actually the b twenty nine as we first sent over were not configured for meaning what meaning in here i was involved in some of the planning in the kibitzing role primarily was him i mean my main field but the idea was well we sent troops him if they try to blockade if they stop those troops we send a bigger brigade you know test it and if they stop those armed conflict and what does that mean there were twenty two soviet armored divisions within that part of germany  there was no way in the world we could force our way into berlin to give them access and what if they stopped their access this time as well and so you couldn't hold a player we would use tactical nuclear weapons ok but by this time the russians had hundreds and hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons and medium range weapons they could obliterate europe this is before they got i c b m s even  and but they could wipe out europe what we were threatening was the threat of insane action the threat of as zeros in vietnam destroying the village in order to save it literally sacrificing europe in order to keep her limb from being occupied now that's a threat of an insane action and it's tempting to say it's an insane policy and actually i will say that but at the time you could also say you know it's a threat of an insane action of a suicidal decide election and it can work and it did work and nothing else would have  so that's where we were then now we move up to however i would say to have threatened a sexually what we didn't thought of not as nuclear winter not of on the side we didn't know that was in the cards yet but we did know total annihilation of your asian europe and asia and within a few years the u s as well ok that's a threat for the place and if it were i would say insane immoral to prepare that to rely on that but what's the alternative the alternative was to find some other way of providing for the security of europe thinks that it was needed for example you could spending on the ability to destroy life in the northern hemisphere in order to do that but that was not even races of us of them we just make the threat now move up to what's happening right now north korea feels that we intend regime change there right regime change has been in the minds of the white house democrat and republican for a generation we exercise invasion annually of north korea with south korean forces and we're doing it last month exercising the invasion of north korea wheat exercise and prepare for and we deploy special forces units openly described as meant to assassinate kim jong un and quote decapitate the regime but this little fat one little rocket man has his paranoid fantasy that he might be under some threat from the u s just because we do stuff like that it just you know what to do with him so he feels that he needs to turned against his attack which we are constantly exercising and he has for reasons that will go through all the history but he acquired nuclear weapons but they only have the range to annihilate south korea and large parts of japan what you might say that should be pretty deterrent it would deter me except that we have lindsey graham now the confident of the president who has now said repeatedly on television that him course of golfing conversations on weekends that mara lago with president trump he said he said face to face to me and i agree with him remember the casualties will all be over there i repeat thousands will die but they won't be over there they won't be over here ok now statements like that in the pres give kim jong un the feeling that his deterrent isn't fully adequate against this administration and that he must have the ability to kill americans as well i lived through analogy to this that is found that he was going to lose the one ally that he had in the world cuba that had not become communist through soviet troops going into it they had even a sentimental attachment to cuba if we had gone into cuba they could have walked into berlin and kennedy had that very much in his mind if we invade cuba as he was exercising during one thousand nine hundred eighty two the biggest exercises we have done since world war two against a bit fickle dictator named sac castro spelled backwards as as christophe noticed and castro said i used to decided to put missiles in range of the us by sending them to cuba and by the way no americans to speak of outside the cia in the white house going to handful in the pentagon were aware that we were preparing invasion plans and were attempting to assess to me kestrel with the help of the mafia under both eisenhower and kennedy and to some degree under johnson later so we didn't know that but they knew th so they were responding to that in a fit of and we're looking right now at a country can john that is faced with what is no longer covert absolutely opened in intentions and efforts to overthrow them though how much can you sympathize with north korea tearing this murderous regime a dictatorship closed couldn't be worse particularly expansionist a threat to the up their existing fission atom bombs which they regard as the only deterrent to the death of kim jong un and in the end his regime is not feasible and trouble is saying that as a condition negotiations right now which is not possible kim thinks he would be crazy to give up those weapons and that's not the kind of crazy he is the kind he is crazy it seems planning for forty years pretty much the same plans we had and today's news is in the wall street journal notes were willing to pay war but someone gave me a copy that our plans that we're now considering under each arm mcmaster the special security advisor is quote to give the north koreans a bloody nose to show them that we are determined we really do want them to give up their nuclear weapons and to show that we hit their missile sites we get command control we do something else the chance of that actually ending hostilities is as close to zero as anything could be  nothing is quite zero come to that that's very close to zero that's not going to happen both sides in other words are under the crazy impression that it's better for them to go first and second  if they're convinced that war is coming or it trumps case that it's the only way of getting rid of their nuclear weapons he might do it and actually he's not wrong about this there is weather way no weather military solution let me quote one of my favorite authorities steven bannan who has been saying throughout before he was fired there is no military solution in korea one of the reasons he was fired well when he's right he's right it's possible to be both crazy and smart in the same head in fact it happens all the time and so trump on the other hand if he really believes that he can or a charm investor he can give the north koreans a bloody nose and it will stop there it's crazy and ok the theme of my book is as it expressed in an earlier form of the title a chronicle of madness that the nuclear epoch has been one in which very widely leaderships in in both science have entertained have believed have  crazy beliefs as to what was possible what was necessary and what was justified and they've been allowed to do that to a large extent just as republicans would say we'll go along happening in new york right now and in boston it's a no no no climate change well likewise our military planning for nuclear war has been based on the idea sort of well if we have to carry this out