Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. Robert Saladini: Well, good afternoon,
and welcome to the Library of Congress.
My name is Robert Saladini.
I'm the program officer for the Library's Office
of Scholarly Programs and John W. Kluge Center, where we host some
of the world's most preeminent scholars in the pursuit of knowledge
and of the human condition.
Among those currently in residence here is Dr. Mary Palevsky [spelled
phonetically], the moderator of today's panel discussion,
which we are calling "Building the Bomb, Fearing It's Use:
Nuclear Scientists, Social Responsibility,
and Arms Control 1946-1996."
Dr. Palevsky is the first Black Mountain Institute here
at the Library, and I will encourage you to go
to your favorite web browser to find out more
about the Black Mountain Institute, but I will tell you
that it is an international center at the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas which is dedicated to advancing literary
and cross-cultural dialogue.
Through public dialogue, residential fellowships,
and publishing initiatives, Black Mountain provides a cultural lens
through which today's most pressing issues can be addressed
and evaluated.
We ask the scholars who are in residence here at the Kluge Center
to give some public presentation
of their work near the end of their stay.
When Dr. Palevsky suggested moderating a panel discussion
in order to get some new insights on her continuing work,
I jumped at the opportunity not only because of her scholarship
and the interest that her topic might generate,
but because of the great success she has had as an interviewer
and as an adept oral historian.
Some of you know Mary Palevsky as the author of "Atomic Fragments:
A Daughters Questions", a book that explores the moral legacy
of the bomb in the life of its creators,
among whom were her own mother and father, who worked at Los Alamos
on the Manhattan Project during the last years of World War II.
Although their efforts helped end the war, feelings of regret
and remorse were not absent in the Palevsky family,
especially as her parents grew older.
In "Atomic Fragments", Mary Palevsky interviewed others who were involved
in the development of the bomb to see how they felt in retrospect.
From 2003 to 2006, Dr. Palevsky directed the Nevada Test Site Oral
History Project at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
The archive is comprised of many hours of interviews,
half of them conducted by Dr. Palevsky herself,
with people involved in the U.S. Cold War nuclear testing program,
as well as with those affected by this testing.
You may want to visit the site yourself.
Again, go to your browser and you will find it.
Dr. Palevsky has also consulted on a number
of other oral history projects on science
in the United States and in Japan.
She was the subject of the documentary "Memories
of the Trinity Bomb", for which she also conducted interviews
with several Manhattan Project scientists.
It appeared on Japanese television during the 56th anniversary
of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As I said earlier, this is a panel discussion,
but you will have an opportunity to ask questions.
In other words, you'll be part of the panel later on.
Now I would like to turn this over to our moderator
who will introduce our distinguished guest panelists to you.
Please join me in welcoming them and our moderator, Dr. Mary Palevsky.
[applause] Mary Palevsky: Thank you very much, Robert,
for that very generous introduction, and welcome, everybody.
I would like to thank Dr. Caroline Brown, director of the Kluge Center
and the Library's Office of Scholarly Programs,
Program Manager Robert Saladini, and Special Assistant
to the Director Mary Lou Reker for their support in organizing
and presenting this panel.
I had remarked to them on the number of fine scholars
of the nuclear age here in Washington, D.C. and that one
of the benefits of my fellowship has been the opportunity to meet
and discuss my work with them, and that it would be worthwhile
to get some of them together for an open conversation at the Library.
Caroline, Robert, and Mary Lou were all wonderfully supportive
of this idea, and so today I'm publically advancing my research by,
forgive me, exploring the stacks of some of the best brains in town.
Our panelists will not be presenting papers, however,
but answering questions I have prepared for them.
So this is how it's going to work: I'll introduce them;
then I'll provide a little more background on my own work,
and preface each question to them individually with some context.
In between each questions, I will present --
provide examples from my recent research.
Then I will open the conversation among the four of us,
so hold your questions for each of you until I say "go",
and then I will open the conversation to all of us.
I have compiled a brief bibliography that, I guess, was passed out.
If you didn't get a copy, let me know at the end.
This is very brief.
If I left anybody's book off, I apologize.
I mostly have books there, not any articles,
to give you some background on what we're talking about.
And before I begin to introduce the panel,
I would just like to dedicate this even to the memory
of Dr. Herbert F. York, Manhattan Project scientist
and government ambassador and scholar of the nuclear age,
who died a week ago at age 87.   And I know I speak for all of us

when I say how important Herb was to our own work.
Now, to the introductions.   Hugh Gusterson is an anthropologist

at George Mason University whose interests include the culture
of nuclear weapons scientists and anti-nuclear activists.
He's the author of "Nuclear Rights: A Weapons Laboratory at the End
of the Cold War" and also "People of the Bomb".
He co-edited "Cultures of Insecurity"
and writes a monthly online column
for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
And make sure I've got this right, Hugh; your current book is
about the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.
Is that correct?
Hugh Gusterson: [inaudible] Mary Palevsky: Thank you so much.
William Lanouette is the author of "Genius in the Shadows" --
there's Bill at the end --
a biography of Leo Szilard, the man behind the bomb.
A writer and public policy analyst,
Bill has covered nuclear issues since 1969.
He served as a senior analyst for science and energy issues
at the GAO from 1991 to 2006.
He is the coauthor of "Uranium and Peaches",
a play about the May 1945 meeting between Szilard and James F. Byrnes
to argue the fate of atomic weapons.
And Martin J. Sherwin is professor of American History
at Tufts University and university professor at George Mason.
He is the author of "A World Destroyed:
Hiroshima and Its Legacies".
In 2006, he and coauthor won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography
for "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy
of J. Robert Oppenheimer".
His current book project is "Gambling With Armageddon:
The Military, the Hawks, and the Long,
Straight Road to the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1945-1963".
And here at the Library's manuscript division,
scholars can study Martin J. Sherwin Collection
of J. Robert Oppenheimer material, 1910-2006.
And I'm really honored to be -- to have you three competent
and erudite gentlemen on this panel with me today.
So, a little more background on my own work is now in order.
I came to my vocation as a writer and a scholar of the nuclear age
at midlife, after a completely different career path.
My parents, who had been young scientists working
on the Manhattan Project, had recently died,
causing me to reexamine my own life and work.
I began my doctoral studies, and then, in the 1990s,
the country began to prepare to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of the end of World War II, including the 50th anniversary
of the creation, testing, and use of the atomic bomb
on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The public debates in the press echoed my private questions,
questions that had been in the background
of my mind since childhood.   My parents met and worked

at the Manhattan Project metallurgical laboratory
at the University of Chicago, where Enrico Ferme and his colleagues,
notably Leo Szilard, achieved the first controlled nuclear chain
reaction on December 2, 1942.
My father, who you see in the slide, was an electrical engineer,
and my mother, with a degree in physics from the University
of Chicago, worked in optics.
Let me just get my papers straight here.
Toward the end of the war, they transferred to Los Alamos,
where many of the world's greatest living physicists,
under Oppenheimer's leadership, were creating
and would soon test the world's first atomic weapon.
My mother worked in the photographic group
which produced the now-famous images
of the first atomic explosion, Trinity, July 16, 1945.
And this looks like a big bubble on the horizon,
but it's actually the Trinity fireball,
as you can see, at 0.16 seconds.   And this is Trinity at 15 seconds.

That's a little light, but you can see.
I like this slide, because you can actually look closely;
you can see the desert floor in the front.
After the atomic bombings of Japan, my father vowed he would never work
on weapons again and went on to a long career
as an experimental nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory
on Long Island, where I was raised.
Now fast forward to 1994 when I began oral history interviews
with surviving atomic scientists, beginning with Nobel laureate
and arms control advocate, the late Hans Bethe.
Out of 30 interviews, my conversations
from seven are the basis for my book
"Atomic Fragments: A Daughter's Questions".
And here's a photograph of me at ground zero in 2001,
taken during the filming of "Memories of the Trinity Bomb".
Now, the interviews I conducted for "Atomic Fragments" and "Memories
of the Trinity Bomb" can be characterized
as elite oral histories done with leading public figures.
Interviews for the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project,
which I directed between 2003 and 2008,
are what oral historians sometimes call more democratic oral histories.
So, it included elites, national lab directors, physicists,
cabinet-level officials, but also these more democratic histories
with test site laborers, atomic veterans, downwinders made ill
by fallout, local communities and ranchers,
antinuclear activists including Native American tribal leaders,
and that's just to mention a few.
And with that, I will now turn to some background for my question
for Bill Lanouette regarding the atomic scientists' early thinking
about arms control.
Now, as recent developments show, North Korea's nuclear test,
Iran's nuclear program, concerns about the safety
of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal,
some of what we're not going to be talking about.
Elements of this history will seem eerily familiar 65 years later.
The atomic scientists' thinking about the bomb beyond the context
of World War II began to evolve well before the summer of 1945,
before Trinity, before Hiroshima, and before Nagasaki.
And here we have a slide from the Library's prints
and photographs division of Hiroshima in 1946.
A reading of this history reveals a set of complex,
interlocking assumptions.
There's not time to review all of them today,
but I will mention the June 11, 1945 Franck Report,
which Szilard had a role in writing and signed.
Remember, Trinity would be a month later, and the bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki several months later on August 6th and 9th.
The report linked a demonstration to compel the Japanese to surrender
with postwar international control of atomic weapons.
And I quote from the report, "The best possible atmosphere
for the achievement
of an international agreement could be achieved if America could say
to the world, 'You see what sort of weapon we had but did not use?
We are ready to renounce its use in the future if other nations join us
in this renunciation and agree to the establishment
of an efficient international control.'"
And Leo Szilard is also famous for his petition to the president,
asking that the bomb be demonstrated to compel the Japanese to surrender.
Now, not all atomic scientists agree on the linkage
between the demonstration and postwar international control.
In fact, Oppenheimer and Bethe, both postwar advocates --
very powerful postwar advocates --
of international control opposed a wartime demonstration.
One of the most meaningful conversations I had with Bethe
about his thesis that the bombing of Hiroshima
and the world's postwar understanding
of the weapon's unprecedented power,
destructive power, were essentially linked.
Bethe put it this way, "Hiroshima was the right decision.
Hiroshima cannot be repeated."
Oppenheimer's statement of December 5, 1945,
before the 79th Congress' hearing, before the special committee
on atomic energy opened with a concise argument.
I'm going to quote just small pieces of it.
"There are and there will be no specific countermeasures
to atomic weapons.
The prospects seem poor for any adequate military defense.
Today, all nations, all peoples have an overriding community of interest
in the prevention of atomic warfare.
There would thus seem to be good reason for attempting to establish
in the international control of atomic armament those patterns
of confidence, collaboration, and good faith which,
in a wider application, must form the basis of peace."
But during the questioning before the committee, Senator Johnson
of Colorado challenged Oppenheimer, foreshadowing events that were
to come, and this is a bit of what Johnson said.
"I think that our scientists, instead of entering
into the political arena and deciding what should be done
on this question as a political gesture,
should be devoting their efforts to finding
out what could be done scientifically.
If there is no defense, they should be developing one.
That is their job."
Remember, this is immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, as the senators struggled with the aid
of a specially prepared primer on atomic energy to come to some kind
of understanding of what the new weapon could possibly mean.
The scientists' testimony shows them attempting to explain
to the senators the magnitude of the change
that the atomic bomb represents in world affairs.
A central theme of much of the testimony is
that there is no defense against nuclear weapons.
Therefore, international treaties with means to verify
that nations were compliant would be the only way
to significantly reduce the threat the bomb brought to human history.
And just quickly, some
of the questions the senators asked the atomic scientists will sound
familiar, and I'm going to paraphrase.
So see if you recognize any of this from current debates.
"How many years will it take other nations
to figure out how to make a bomb?"
In 1945, we had a monopoly on the secret,
and the question was about the Soviets.
"If we have an international treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons
and a country claims to be using atomic energy for civilian purposes,
how would inspectors then be able to tell if that nation decided
to convert to military applications?
How long would it take to make such a conversion?
What if a nation is purposefully hiding their weapons?
Then what can inspectors do?"
And another piece of the postwar puzzle was the question
of whether atomic energy should be under civilian or military control,
and how that decision -- which was made early on for civilian control,
with some caveats, by the way -- how that decision would affect efforts
under international control.
So, now with that lead-up, Bill, can you talk about your understanding
of the pieces of this puzzle, and more broadly,
whether you think the failure
to achieve postwar international control of atomic energy --
and we did fail to achieve that -- was a failure of diplomacy?
Or was it a failure of the atomic scientists to understand the world
as it really was and their actual roles in it?
Male Speaker: That's exactly the question you got
on your Ph.D. exam, right?
[laughter] Bill Lanouette: I wrote my Ph.D.
on something entirely different.
But, well, I think it was certainly a failure of diplomacy if you look
at the way the Russians stalled in the United Nations after 1946,
when an international control scheme was put forward.
But in terms of the scientists and their practicality,
I think they were probably more prescient
than we might give them credit for.
They were just a little too late or a little too disorganized
to have a decisive impact.
In fact, they wasted pretty much a year
from 1945-1946 disputing among themselves
as to whether they should worry
about having civilian control of atomic energy.
Leo Szilard and others thought it was essential.
No one would trust us in an international agreement
if the military was running the program, so they worked essentially
from the fall of 1945 to the summer of 1946 to try to assure
that there was a civilian program for the atomic energy research
and also for any weapons research.
Now, Robert Oppenheimer and others thought that was a waste of time.
We need to build very quickly so that we can get other countries
to start working on things.
And by the spring of '46, Oppenheimer had worked
on the Atchison-Lilienthal program,
which became the program we sent to the United Nations.
But to back up a bit, I think the scientists were very practically
worried about the diplomatic result from the very beginning.
Leo Szilard thought up the chain reaction in 1933.
He co-designed the first reactor with Fermi in 1939,
and then went off with his friend Albert Einstein,
who was in a cottage on Long Island, and warned him and told him
about the dangers of atomic energy.
Einstein's reaction was, "I hadn't thought of that at all."
And he hadn't.
But anyway, they decided first to write a letter to the queen
of the Belgians, because that's someone
that Einstein happened to know personally.
And then they thought, "Well,
we should probably also warn the State Department."
And then, over the next couple of weeks, they finally said, "By golly,
we've got to write a letter to the president."
So they were thinking already, at the very beginning,
about the international implications,
in that case the uranium that the Belgians controlled
and how the Germans might want to get it.
After that, the Manhattan Project eventually began, but by 1943
or '44 -- certainly by '44 --
Szilard, who was always very prescient and looking
about 10 years ahead, started worrying
about international control.
He came here to Washington to the Carnegie Institution
and just bent the ear of Vannevar Bush,
who was then the civilian head of the program.
And in part through Szilard's lobbying, he got Bush
and James Conan to think about international control.
In the fall of '44, they turned to President Roosevelt and said,
"We have to think about some international control scheme."
So, people at the highest levels of government were talking about this.
In addition, Neil Szboar, the Nobel laureate
who had great international stature, tried to talk to Winston Churchill
and to Franklin Roosevelt during the war about international control,
was generally rebuffed in both places.
But the fact I want to make -- the point I want to make, I think,
is that this was a concept people recognized needed to be done.
The Franck Report in the spring
of 1945 advocated international control.
In May of '45, Szilard visited James Byrnes, who was Truman's man
on the bomb, about to be secretary of state, argued with him
for international control.
And in 1946, a book -- this is from the library collection;
this is an original -- "One World or None" was put out with the idea
that if we don't have some kind of international agreement,
that nuclear war is going to destroy the planet.
Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Harold Yuri [spelled phonetically],
Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, Walter Lippmann, all signed this --
all did articles for this very forward-looking publication warning
the public about the need for international control.
The scientists, I think, were very successful at getting the ear
of Congress, to begin with.
I remember Bernie Feld, who was a colleague of Szilard's, saying,
"We walked into the Senate, and we said, 'We're from Los Alamos,
and we have something to say', and doors would open."
I mean, and these guys were really very well respected.
But I think where they really lost the effort was
where the administration itself wasn't pushing international control
very hard, and especially James Byrnes, the secretary of defense.
There may have been a proposal before the UN,
but Byrnes was not a strong advocate of international control.
And in conclusion to this question, I'd have to say
that the scientists did the best they could,
but they had formidable opponents both within the administration
and from the Soviet Union.
Mary Palevsky: Okay, then I have a little follow-up for you.
You were on a panel when I first came that you kindly invited me
to when I first came to town, at the Carnegie Institute for Science,
called "Revisiting Reykjavik", which I think was -- the theme was --
you can tell me what the theme was.
My impression of the theme was just this idea --
well, it was about Reykjavik, Reagan at Reykjavik, but it was also
about this notion of international control
and how it's played out over the years.
And there were some really fabulous papers, yours included,
and then a gentleman stood up with a Russian accent and said,
"You American historians don't have the whole picture
because you're not taking into account Stalin."
And he had a very strong accent and he was very lively and animated,
and so I wanted to make sure that I actually understood him correctly.
And so during lunch, I went over and I said, "Do I understand
that you're saying that the American historians, when they look
at the failure of international control from our side,
don't take into account Stalin?"
And he said, "That's exactly what I'm saying, that Stalin would --
Stalin was such an evil man, and people don't sort of take
that into the calculus of whether he would have,
in any world, agreed to anything.
Even though the Baruch Plan was criticized in the United Nations
for perhaps causing the Soviets to be less willing
than they might have been to sign it.
So, what are your thoughts on that?
Bill Lanouette: Well, let me paraphrase what Leo Szilard thought
about it, because he was in the thick of things.
He thought that if we used the bomb unannounced
and we surprised the Russians with the bomb, that they would want one,
of course, the way we wanted one
when we thought the Germans were ahead of us.
There's probably no way that Stalin could join in any kind
of arrangement unless we gave up more than we were willing to give
up in the way of inspections and other things.
Szilard's characterization, which I would agree with,
is that Stalin wanted his own bomb as soon as he knew
that there was one and he certainly wasn't somebody who was going
to settle for a diplomatic arrangement.
Now, what's interesting to me is Szilard's own change of heart.
In 1944, he thought that the bomb probably had to be used --
even when he realized Germany was being defeated --
probably had to be used to shock the world into what would be some kind
of a super agreement, an alliance between the Soviet Union,
Great Britain, and the United States to that would put a control
on everything and control all the uranium
and control all the technology.
So he thought, in effect, that while the bomb probably wouldn't be needed
to end the war, it would be essential to create the peace.
And then by the spring of '45 he thought that was nonsense and no,
we just shouldn't use it at all and it's a terrible weapon
and the best thing we should do is just demonstrate the bomb.
That's something he articulated both to Secretary Byrnes
and the Franck Committee.
So, I'd have to say that Stalin was probably so single-minded
that he would have in no case, I think,
gone along with the international control.
But in part, it's because of the way we created the bomb
and kept it secret from him and then used it by surprise.
He thought -- probably thought, "These are not allies
that I can trust in any arrangement like this."
There were also tensions right after the war over Eastern Europe,
and there was the fear of a similar tension in the Orient
over the spoils of the Japanese war,
and so Stalin was a very uncomfortable figure.
I think Marty Sherman, who's written about the origins of the Cold War,
can answer this more precisely than I've been able to.
Mary Palevsky: I remember --
I just want to comment that I remember -- and I'm not sure.
I don't think I have this in the book,
and I'm not sure what interview it was, but I was talking
to the late Phillip Morrison, a Manhattan Project scientist
and a really deep thinker about these -- what this history meant,
over at MIT at his office.
And he said he thought the only thing would --
maybe if we had just given them an entire weapon.
We should just have given them a bomb,
and then there would have been the trust
that was needed to move forward.
But this was, you know, 1997 or something, many, many years later.
Bill Lanouette: [inaudible] was noted for his internationalism,
the sharing of knowledge, and so the secrecy which was imposed first
by the scientists and then by the government was something
that was very uncomfortable to a lot of scientists, and they thought
that the secret of the bomb and this knowledge should be shared so that
if everyone had it, they were on an equal footing for an agreement.
Mary Palevsky: I just wanted to mention --
I had planned to do this at the beginning,
but our guest came a little late.
I did want to acknowledge that we have with us in the audience
over here the mayor of Bikini Atoll, Alson Kelen --
I hope that I have your name right, pronounced right, Mr. Kelen --
and the Bikini liaison, Jack Niedenthal.

These really distinguished guests were brought
by a man I've actually never met, just emailed with,
Jonathon Weisgal [spelled phonetically],
and although I've been studying Nevada, Nevada testing,
clearly there's a strong connection between the testing that took place
in Nevada and testing in the Pacific,
which I refer to here only generally.
So forgive me if I don't tell the whole story, but I did want
to acknowledge your presence, gentlemen.


Okay, so we're going to move on to the next question,
which will be to Marty Sherman, but I'm going to give you some --
a little bit of history and background here before we go there.
We did not achieve international control,
nor have we experienced all-out nuclear war
as the atomic scientists feared in the fall of 1945 -- yet.
And we're only talking about not even 70 years
of history here, aren't we?
Instead, though, in that interim, we got another kind
of nuclear war carried out at test sites around the globe in the case
of the United States testing program,
primarily in the Marshall Islands and the Nevada Test Site.
And here's a slide from the Library's collection,
and here I have to acknowledge my colleague Zach Schrag for being
up there at Princeton Photographs with me and taking some shots
of some of these pictures for me a couple of weeks ago.
This is Kwajalein,
and the photograph was taken before the first postwar tests at Bikini.
So in 1945, I would say that no one had imagined 106 tests
that would be conducted in the Pacific.
The Bikini people had to move in order for these tests to take place.

And there's a shot of one of the first tests.
Nor did they imagine Nevada, where over a 40-year period,
100 nuclear tests were conducted in the atmosphere and 828 underground.
And so today, many retired test site workers claim
that they are the unsung warriors of a major battlefield of the Cold War.
And the Western Shoshone people,
on whose traditional territory the test site sits in Nevada,
call their homeland the most bombed place on earth.
And here you see subsidence craters from underground nuclear tests.
Here's some atomic maneuvers that took place in Nevada in 1952.
Those are Marines on a simulated atomic battlefield.
And that's another view of Nevada.
So, paralleling the atomic scientists' postwar transition
to reality, during the test site oral history project,
it was important to document how people who served
in World War II came to be involved in nuclear testing, that transition
from World War II to the nuclear testing regime.
So whenever I interviewed someone who looked a certain age,
I figured out a way to politely ask what they did during the war.
I have lots of examples of this in the test site oral history project,
and I have some little bookmarks here if you want to check those out.
But I will give you one example, and this is he,
Raymond Harbert [spelled phonetically], born in 1922,
served in the Army in Italy during the war.
During an interview -- and you can see this clip
on the project Web site --
Ray describes going from the conventional weapons during World
War II to seeing his first test, the 15-megaton 1954 Bravo test.
Now, 15 megatons is close to 1,000 times, 1,000 times the size
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   Here's a shot of Bravo.

To paraphrase Ray, World War II's weapons were "peashooters" compared
to Bravo, and he's not exaggerating there.
Bravo was larger than expected due to a lithium reaction
that the physicists had failed to calculate.
And I did interview Los Alamos physicist Benjamin Divin [spelled
phonetically], one of the device's designers, and had a chance to talk
to him about how this happened.
I won't go into the science now, or the meteorology,
but that's an important question, and Bravo did go
up into the stratosphere.   So, with the hydrogen bomb,

I move to the background of my question to Marty.
The hydrogen bomb -- just a little quick lesson here --
also called the super or thermonuclear bomb,
represented another profound change in the world of weapons.
The difference between the atomic bomb
and the hydrogen bomb is not only how they make the explosion --
one is based on nuclear fission reaction,
the other fission causing a fusion reaction --
but it is that the hydrogen bomb can be limitless in size.
During the Manhattan Project, scientists knew
that this super bomb was theoretically possible,
and even then it was Edward Teller's particular interest.
The debate among scientists advising government about whether
to pursue this research was intense, and the outcome
of that debate had a profound outcome in the individual lives
of scientists, those involved in the testing of these weapons,
the victims of its fallout, and for the arms race.
In 2004, the late Herb York gave a lecture
at UC San Diego discussing eight physicists: Oppenheimer, Bethe,
Teller, Lawrence, Fermi, I.I.
Robbie [spelled phonetically], John Wheeler, and John Von Neumann.
He explained how similar they were in many essential elements
of their lives and then said, "The big difference between them was
that four of them thought the hydrogen bomb was a good idea,
and four of them thought it was a terrible idea.
It wasn't some abstract idea off on the side
that they happened to be interested in.
The issue was central to their lives,
and yet they differed entirely in their conclusions about it.
To me, that's an interesting conundrum, why these very similar,
very smart people come down on opposite sides on one
of the central issues of their lives."
Let me say that again.
"Why did these very similar, very smart people come
down on opposite sides of one of the central issues of their lives?"
And I would add -- that's a close quote -- Mary is going to add:
one of the central issues of our age.
So, my question for you, Marty, is about any insights you might have
about the history these men lived and made or about any
of them specifically that could provide clues to Herb's question.
And adding to that: could it be argued
that one group was socially responsible and the other not?
And if so, which would be which?   That's a question I'd never ask

in an oral history interview, a compound question.
Marty Sherman: Well, that's a very interesting question,
because it has no answer that a historian can provide.
That is to say, I can't use my skills as a historian,
bringing evidence to bear on argument
to explain the inner workings of the minds of these eight people.
My fellow colleague Kye Burton [spelled phonetically] and I tried
that with one person, Robert Oppenheimer, and I will tell you,
we think we got a lot of things right.
But you know, sometimes some
of us don't know what our spouses are thinking,
why they make decisions, and we've lived
with many of them for a long time.
So the answer is -- the best answer is, I think,
because they were human, and human beings react
to stimuli differently depending on their experiences,
on their perspective, et cetera.
But I think the question -- I'm glad you asked me that question,
because it ties in a lot of different things.
I mean, first of all, it brings up Herb York,
to whom this conference panel is dedicated.
And Herb wrote -- who really was a great man --
who really became a great man, I want to say.
He evolved from a rather narrowly focused scientist who worked
at the Lawrence -- Lawrence Radiation Lab and was not thinking
about the consequences of what he did to a man
who wrote three important books, the title of two, at least,
give you a sense of his view of the world.
"Building Bombs, Talking Peace" related
to his science work and his diplomatic work.
"Race to Oblivion" was an analysis
of America's nuclear weapons program.
And then the book that's most relevant to the question,
"The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb",
that's really the best book on the hydrogen bomb itself in terms
of really getting to the meat of the issue as quickly as possible.

Why did they think differently?
Although Herb argues in this message that Mary's referring
to that these men had very similar experiences and backgrounds,
I think I would probably argue with him, because their real backgrounds,
that is their childhood and the formative years of their lives
where they came to sort of a subliminal understanding
of the world and how it worked, I think was very, very different.
Oppenheimer, for example, born in the United States
to wealthy parents, a product of the ethical culture school which,
I think, was absolutely critical in developing his [unintelligible].
And someone like Edward Teller, who was born in Hungary,
experiencing terrible government,
the Nazi threat, and so on and so forth.
These are not people who, on all issues,
are likely to come out at the same place.
And beginnings are very important here.
For example, Mary raised the question of the senator's comment
to Oppenheimer and saying, in effect,
"You should only be telling us about science.
You should not be considering moral issues or consequences.
That's not a scientist's job."
Well, that is a really weird point of view in my view.
I mean, are scientists some special breed of citizen who are not allowed
to talk about the consequences of their work?
I mean, don't we expect doctors and lawyers to think
about the consequences of what they do, and policemen and firemen
and soldiers and professors, and so on and so forth?
So, that senator and a lot of the people who criticized the decisions
of the general advisory committee to the Atomic Energy Commission
that came out against the hydrogen bomb, criticized them
as interjecting science --
interjecting values into their scientific decisions.
I think it's a false argument.
The point is that the values on the other side
of the argument were just different.
The values there were more bombs are good for America, and therefore,
whatever is good for America is good for the world.

So, we have these debates all the time,
and of course we have this debate --
are about to enter this debate with the Supreme Court nominee


Values form the lens through which we see the world,
and how we apply -- how we focus that lens
and how we use it is absolutely critical
in understanding how people work.   Am I going on too long?

Mary Palevsky: Nope.   Marty Sherman: Just tell me to stop.

My wife does that all the time, so it's perfectly okay.
I'm used to it.
Mary Palevsky: [inaudible] timekeeper
over there, you just keep going.   Marty Sherman: Okay, and I want

to say one other thing connecting the decision to use the atomic bomb
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the hydrogen bomb decision.

First impressions are absolutely critical.
First decisions are absolutely critical.
Leo Szilard changed his mind, we are told, between 1944 and 1945
about the consequences of using a bomb.
At first he thought it would be best for this bomb to be used
so the world -- it could demonstrate
to the world how terrible a weapon we have discovered
and shocking the world into the need for some kind of condominium,
some kind of an agreement that would suppress this weapon.
What if his new view had been followed
and we didn't use it at all.
Now, Secretary of War Henry Stimson had argued to Truman,
or had stated to Truman, on April 23 -- April 25, 1945 in a memorandum,
saying "We have invented a weapon
that can destroy civilization or save civilization."

It is that extraordinary of a device.
If that weapon had not been used and the postwar period had therefore led
to a Congressional investigation,
how could we then spend two billion dollars,
have a weapon ready to use on August 1?
And in my view, the war would have ended anyway without using it,
but that's an argument for some other time perhaps.
The war ended without an invasion, and Stimson had
to appear before Congress and explain himself.
How could you not use that weapon, when it was ready,
against the Japanese, who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor
and did what they did to American prisoners
of war, and so on and so forth?
And Stimson would have said, "This is a weapon
that could destroy civilization or save civilization.
It is a weapon like no other.
It is a weapon that the values of our country demand
that we not use unless it was absolutely necessary,
and it wasn't absolutely necessary."
Now, that ties into the question that was -- that Bill was asked:
would Stalin have made the incredible sacrifices that had
to be made within the Soviet Union --
the money, the other military options, the starvation
that was caused by the commitment to catch up to the United States
in nuclear weapons as quickly as possible?
I did a documentary film with someone in the late '90s
on Stalin's bomb maker, Igor Kurchatov, and it's quite clear
that it was the use of the bomb.   A recent book by Vladisav Zubok --

he'd gotten into the documents -- reinforces that.
It was the use of the bomb that led Stalin
to build nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.
Because they were not just invented, but we announced
that these were weapons for war.
And from Stalin's point of view, who knew the Japanese were defeated
since the Japanese were trying to get him to mediate between Japan
and the United States to work out surrender terms
that the Japanese could accept.
We use these to demonstrate those bombs, from Stalin's point
of view, against the Russians.   Of course he rushed to build a bomb.

From his point of view, we had announced that next
in line if he didn't behave.
If we had invented this thing and had refused to use
and said our country doesn't use this kind of a weapon,
would the whole world have been different?
Would the whole history of the postwar period been different?
Probably not in the sense that there would have been no tension
between the United States and the Soviet Union and all
of that; there would have been.
But the nuclear weapon would not have played the role
that it played as we knew it.   It would have had a much lesser role

in the history from 1945 to whenever.
And the hydrogen bomb decision, I don't think,
would have been an issue in 1949 at all.

Mary Pelovski: Thank you very much, Marty.
Now I'm going to provide some background that will lead us
up to my question for Hugh Gusterson, and this has primarily
to do with protest and test-ban treaties.
So, nuclear tests, as Marty has pointed out, were conducted
within the larger context of the arms race,
domestic politics, and treaty negotiations.
Here's the first -- so I'm particularly interested in protests
at the test site because I had a chance
to interview a lot of these folks.
So, test-band negotiations and public protests both played a role
in the working of the Nevada Test Site.
Radioactive fallout brought worldwide protest,
but the first protest at the test site was this one, August 6, 1957,
the 12th anniversary of Hiroshima.
And I had the chance to interview Dorothy Charlow [spelled
phonetically], who served as the secretary for the group
that staged this first protest.   They were pacifists.

You can read about it in the New York Times from that day.
And this is a slide that Dorothy gave the project.
So, one of the guys under the tent --
or several of the guys under the tent are now getting ready to cross
over the line into the Nevada Test Site and be arrested.
So, a quick timeline is in order, because I have to get us
up to 1996 and Hugh's question.   That was '57.

There was a moratorium on testing between '58 and '61,
and with the 1963 limited test-ban treaty, testing moved underground,
and the once-potent symbol of nuclear weapons,
the mushroom cloud, was buried.
But nuclear testing continued, evolving at an incredible pace.
Los Alamos and Livermore scientists conducted elaborate experiments
at the bottom of deep shafts at the end of long tunnels in Nevada.
Here, some miners, who I actually know, in a tunnel called N-tunnel,
shoring up a tunnel for a nuclear test.
And the Department of Defense used these tunnels
to determine the effects of nuclear weapons on all kinds
of military hardware, on satellites, and submarines.

So there were tunnel test, and there were test
at the bottom of deep shafts.
That's what this illustrates, and these giant craters
on either side are the subsidence craters that happen
when an underground nuclear test caves in
and causes the earth to go down.
So this is going to be the next one detonated.
The charge to the weapons labs designing these tests was not one
atom out in the conducting of underground tests:
you had to keep everything underground, no fallout.
And the most spectacular failure of this was December 18, 1970,
a test called Baneberry that ran into some fault lines,
and the 10 kiloton explosion vented into the atmosphere.
It was not until the late 1970s that organized,
ongoing protests came to the test site.
And at the center of this activism were Las Vegas-based Franciscan
priests and nuns.
So in a run up to this, this is an actual sign
on a highway near Mercury, Nevada.
It's opened up when there's going to be a protest.
Over the years, travel to protest in the desert in Nevada became a form
of religious pilgrimage, and being in the desert called to mind
to the protestors Christ's temptation, St. Anthony,
and the Egyptian desert fathers,
and some of these protests talk about that.
There is something called the nuclear Stations of the Cross
that were enacted by protestors.   And to broaden this context,

the Western Shoshone people claimed test site land as theirs
under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley,
and other Southwester tribes affected
by the federal nuclear weapons complex raised the problem
of environmental justice in the West -- and I will add here, of course,
also the question of environmental justice in the Pacific.
And this is the renowned,
now-deceased Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney,
the older man centered in that picture,
with whom we had the opportunity
to do several interviews with before he died.
In 1992, the United States entered into a nuclear weapons moratorium
under what is known as the Hatfield-Exxon-Mitchell Amendment.
Then we have the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty
that President Clinton signed but the Senate has not ratified.
Nonetheless, the moratorium has, for us, remained in place.
Subcritical tests are now conducted deep
in tunnels at the Nevada Test Site.
I've actually had the chance to be in some of those tunnels.
And you'll notice at the back -- I don't have a pointer --
but you see a sign on the back of Corbin Harney's head.
The whole sign must say something against subcritical testing.
So, speaking with these people has caused me to wonder
about the relationship between public protest,
particularly local grassroots activism,
and what actually took place in the laboratories and in Washington.
Was the weapons scientists' social responsibility for the bomb
in the postwar period slowly replaced by dependency on it
for well-paying, challenging work?
At the same time, we have the Federation
of the American Scientists, Pugwash,
the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other groups.
So, Hugh, as you discuss in the draft chapter you sent me --
so kindly sent me a draft chapter of your book; it's terrific --
Frank von Hippel, himself an important citizen scientist,
has defined three phases of the test ban debate, beginning in 1950.
Three phases of the test ban debate, beginning in 1950.
Looking at von Hippel's thesis, how would you describe the interplay
between anti-nuclear movements, the labs, and policymakers?
And I have another compound question, a no-no.
To what degree do you think grassroots movement had a real pol
-- impact on policy regarding the test ban?
And please feel free to comment on whether you think the U.S. might be
in a fourth post-testing phase and your understanding
of where the laboratories are, vis--vis the need for testing,
which was once central during the Cold War to nuclear weapons design,
nuclear effects, a deterrent, and stockpile safety.
I'm sorry, Hugh, you came at the end [inaudible] Hugh Gusterson:
[inaudible] half an hour.
Actually, before I answer this question,
maybe I could tell a brief little anecdote in relation
to the question Monty got about why different scientists fall
out in different directions in the ban and on arms control.
When I was a graduate student in anthropology and I was sent
out to Lawrence Livermore Lab
to study nuclear weapons design [unintelligible] protestors
protesting the lab.
A psychology professor at Harvard University gave me an authoritarian
personality testing kit to take into the field with me, and she told me
that I should administer this little authoritarian personality testing
kit to weapons scientists and to anti-nuclear activists.
And she told me that I would find
that all the weapons scientists had authoritarian personalities
and all the anti-nuclear activists had
anti-authoritarian personalities.
So, being an obedient student, I wasted a week
of my life administering this test to people,
and I found that they all had anti-authoritarian personalities.
[laughter] Male Speaker: I thought you were going to say the opposite.
Male Speaker: [inaudible] Hugh Gusterson:
She claimed to have an anti-authoritarian personality.
Okay, to the question I've been assigned --
and I'm mainly going to talk about it reference to the end
of nuclear testing, '92 to '96, rather than the earlier period
in the '60s, because the earlier period I'm working on right now.
I interviewed a lot of people both at the grassroots out in California,
Nevada Test Site, Los Alamos, but also in Washington, D.C. to try
and figure out how nuclear testing came to an end.
And I should say, we talk about protestors
and the anti-nuclear movement.
The anti-nuclear movement itself is very ecologically complicated,
if you will.
It has its own complex social ecology,
and there are at least two kinds of splits I can think of.
If you go outside of D.C., out to places like the area
in northern California and northern New Mexico and so on ,
you'll find that there is a divide between groups that are committed
to direct action -- and the slides you show here are really
from the direct action side of the movement.
These are the people who believe in committing civil disobedience
as a method of bearing witness and of protesting, bearing witness
to what they see as the evil of nuclear weapons.
But on the other hand, especially in the '80s, there were groups
that thought civil disobedience was disreputable.
They wanted nothing to do with it.
So the nuclear freeze campaign, for example was more
of a citizens' lobbying campaign, and they didn't get along well
with the kind of people who went and protested the Livermore Lab.
But then you have a division, I think, between the people
out in the provinces
who are protesting local nuclear weapons facilities
and then the groups in Washington, D.C., like the Union
of Concerned Scientists, the Physicians
for Social Responsibility, and so on, who are very focused
on persuading people in Congress.
And often the Washington groups and the provincial groups,
there's some tension there as well.   At this moment in time, for example,

the provincial groups think it's a waste of time to lobby
for CTBT ratification; they're just not interested.
They think the movement should move on and focus on other things,
whereas the Washington groups are quite interested in that.
So, with that as a background,
what effect did this complex social ecology of protestors
and protest groups have on the decision
to finally end nuclear testing in the early 1990s?
It's a very complicated question.
And in reflecting on it, I found my mind being drawn to a comparison
with the civil rights movement and the passage
of civil rights legislation.
And I think if you think about the civil rights movement --
I'm not an expert in that -- it seems reasonably obvious to me
that there is a very clear, direct connection between people protesting
on the Mall, getting hosed down by sheriffs in Alabama,
committing civil disobedience at lunch counters and so on.
There's a clear and direct connection between that
and the passage of civil rights legislation.
And I don't think, much as I wish it could be otherwise,
I don't think I can make that same kind of argument
about anti-nuclear activists that you can see between the protests
and the end of nuclear testing.
The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s had certainly peaked by 1984,
when Ronald Reagan was reelected by a handy margin,
despite the opposition to his reelection by that movement.
You could argue that its highest point was actually in 1982
with the UN nuclear disarmament conference in New York,
when one million people showed up to bear witness to the arms race
and the need to end the arms race.
Certainly by 1989, that mass anti-nuclear movement
of the 1980s had largely burned itself out,
and all that was left were a few pockets of dedicated individuals
and the Washington pressure groups.
So, the nuclear weapons complex, I think,
by the end of the Cold War could have taken the attitude
that they'd succeeded in riding out the nuclear movement,
that this was yesterday's movement and they could carry
on with business as usual.
Now, that is not what happened, and why is that.
I think one of the obvious things that one has to mention is
that with the end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991,
between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, the nuclear weapons complex lost much of its raison d'tre.
I happened to be at the Lawrence Livermore Lab a lot in those years,
and I found that nuclear weapons scientists really weren't quite sure
what their raison d'tre was anymore, and they would tell stories
about how maybe the Soviet Union would come back,
the arms race would reignite.
But it was clear that there was no need for new nuclear weapons.
And so it wasn't clear why you had nuclear weapons labs
and why you had a need for nuclear testing.
On the other hand, with the end of the Cold War,
both the administration of G.H.W. Bush
and then President Clinton were very concerned
about nuclear proliferation, so a subsidence of concern
about the Russians getting ahead and a new concern about countries
like Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and so on acquiring nuclear weapons.
And so you could see a sort of structural shift in the world
and a new urgency for a nuclear test-ban treaty.
There was no good reason to keep testing nuclear weapons in terms
of designing new ones, and there was increase in concern
that if the United States and other nuclear powers kept testing nuclear
weapons, it would give countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea
to mount their own nuclear weapons program.
And the incoming Clinton administration
in 1992 was particularly concerned that looming
on the horizon was the 1995 Nonproliferation Treaty
Review Conference.
This was a conference where all the signatures
to the Nonproliferation Treaty had to decide whether
to indefinitely extend the Nonproliferation Treaty or whether
to only extend it for five years and then have another review conference.
And it was clear by 1992 that a lot of the third world countries
that had signed the Nonproliferation Treaty felt
that they had kept their side of the bargain and the United States
and the other official nuclear powers had not kept their side
of the bargain, specifically Article 6
of the Nonproliferation Treaty committed the United States
and the other four official nuclear powers -- Russia, China, Britain,
and France -- to a cessation of the arms race at an early date --
that's the exact wording of Article 6 --
and to prompt negotiations on general and complete disarmament.
That was signed in 1968, ratified in 1970.
The U.S. and the other nuclear powers kept merrily testing nuclear
weapons and stockpiling thousands more of them after they had ratified
that wording, and so by 1992, many countries
in the world were really fed up with it and felt that it was really time
for the U.S. and the other nuclear powers to show that they were going
to honor their side of the bargain.
So people in the Clinton administration felt
that there was a need to make a good faith gesture,
that Article 6 mattered to the U.S., and that good faith gesture was seen
to ne the Nonproliferation -- the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.
So, if you asked why testing ended, I think you would have to say
that this broad shift
in the structural context was the most important factor.
Now, in the early '90s, I spent a lot of time interviewing some
of the senior decision makers in Congress
and in the national security [unintelligible],
people like Hazlo Leery, the secretary of energy, Bill Perry,
the secretary of defense, leaders of the national security council,
Tom Graham, the head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
the nuclear weapons labs directors and so on.
And what I found in talking to them about the thought process they went
through in bargaining over the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.
If you talk to them about how they came to the positions they came to,
they don't say, "Well, the Livermore action group had mounted such
and such a protest" or "The Los Alamos study group had published a
new report.   That's just not on their horizon.

They're calculus is just very much an inside-the-beltway calculus,
and it makes me very sad to say this.
I think it's a very sad statement about American democracy,
that you can have one million people show up to an anti-nuclear rally
in New York, you can have 5,000 people show up to get arrested
at Lawrence Livermore Lab, and it barely impinges on the consciousness
of the decision makers in Washington.
But it is a sad truth when I talked to them about that calculus.
They really weren't paying attention to those kinds of people.
They were mainly engaged in jockeying with other agencies,
making deals with other agencies,
and thinking about the diplomatic deals that the Russians,
the Chinese, the British, and the French were taking.
So, does this mean that the protest movement had no effect whatsoever?
I don't think so, but I think that the impact
of the protest movement was sort of indirect and filtered,
and so therefore it becomes harder to finger it precisely.
I think the main contribution of the anti-nuclear movement was
in changing the background situation, the background discourse,
rather than in precisely applying pressure at key decision points
in that process of ending nuclear testing.
So, let me specify four ways
in which I think the anti-nuclear movement did actually have maybe a
delayed impact, but an impact nonetheless.
First of all, I think the nuclear freeze campaign, in particular,
profoundly shifted the national discourse
on nuclear weapons in the 1980s.
With slogans and bumper stickers like "End the Race" or one
of my favorites, that picture
of a whale that's saying "Save the Humans".

They made the nuclear arms race a problem
in a way it had not been a problem before.
They forced the people in the national security state
to justify why it was, in fact,
safe to be stockpiling thousands of nuclear weapons.
They shifted, if you like, the default question from
"Why shouldn't we have nuclear weapons?"
to "Why should we have nuclear weapons?"
So, what had been naturalized, what had been taken for granted,
common sense, at the beginning of the 1980s,
by the end of the 1980s was no longer so much so as movie stars,
politicians, people like that relentlessly questioned the safety
of the nuclear arms race.
So, by the end of the 1980s, more and more the onus was
on explaining why we needed to end it.
And so one of the key moments, I think,
in ending the nuclear arms race is an even that I bet almost none
of you in this room knows anything about.
One of the key people in ending the nuclear arms race was the
conservative Democratic senator James Exon, from Nebraska.
And in the early 1990s, James Exon went
to the Nevada nuclear test site, and he saw the Sedan crater,
an enormous crater left behind by a peaceful nuclear explosion.
And people who knew Exon tell me he had an epiphany
that changed his life, to look into that crater, and he came back
to Washington, and he said we have to end the arms race.
He saw the immensity of what a nuclear weapon can do.
Well, I wonder if James Exon had gone to Nevada and looked
into the Sedan crater in 1976.
Would it have had that effect on him?
People have an inner life that is in some very complicated,
mysterious way connected to a collective discourse.
And -- this is a question I'm throwing out, I guess --
whether the nuclear freeze campaign and the anti-nuclear protests
of the 1980s in some way made possible that epiphany
that James Exon experienced in the early 1990s when he looked
into that crater and said, "This is insanity.
We have to do something about this."
He came back to Washington, and he really catalyzed discussions
in the Senate that led to the passage
of the Exon-Mitchell-Hatfield amendments to the Energy
and Water Appropriation Bill that forced the moratorium
on nuclear testing in 1992.
So, that's the first thing: changing of the discourse.
And I'll speed up here, because I'm taking some time.
Secondly, Mikhail Gorbachev; Mikhail Gorbachev leveraged the process
of ending the nuclear arms race.
He talked relentlessly about the dangers of the arms race,
and he declared a series of unilateral moratoria
on nuclear testing that applied increasing pressure
to the United States to reciprocate.
It's hard for me to believe Gorbachev would have existed
as the kind of political leader he was in the absence
of an anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. and in Western Europe
with which he was in dialogue.
And I want to be careful how I phrase this so I don't make it sound
as if the anti-nuclear movement was a sort of Soviet fifth column,
but there was a sense in which Mikhail Gorbachev
and the anti-nuclear movements of Western Europe
and the United States worked in concert with one another, I think,
to ratchet up the pressure to end the arms race.
Thirdly, members of Congress; I'm thinking of senators like Hatfield,
Kennedy, Mitchell, and Exon; members of the House like Ed Markey
and Dante Fascell, who all applied pressure at key moments
to end nuclear testing in the early 1990s.
The anti-nuclear movement was raising money for them.
The anti-nuclear movement created a context in their districts
and nationwide, where it became possible for them to be committed
to what turned out to be a long struggle.
And then finally -- and this will turn out to be very speculative
on my part -- there're the labs.
When I arrived at Lawrence Livermore as a graduate student to try
and understand nuclear weapons scientists,
a few years before I got there in 1982, there was one day
when lab scientists came to work and they found 5,000 people trying
to block them from getting into work.
Five thousand people -- some of them nuns, priests,
even a Methodist bishop, many of them dressed
as clowns holding big puppets --
putting their bodies down in the road in front of their cars,
being dragged away by policemen and holding up signs saying
"Livermore: America's Auschwitz".
You wonder what it does to people, to come to work
and have people accusing you of working at America's Auschwitz,
to see people willing to risk, you know, being run over by your car
to keep you from getting to work.
And it didn't just happen once; it happened year after year after year.
I've spoken to the directors of the weapons labs in the early 1990s,
when they had to decide how hard to fight Bill Clinton
to bring back nuclear testing, and one of the things that struck me is
that they really didn't fight that hard.
They didn't fight as hard as their predecessors did in the 1970s.
Sieg Hecker, the director of Los Alamos at the time, he said to me,
"We knew the writing was on the wall.
We knew that testing was going to come to an end."
Well, how did he know that?
You know, you wonder what that experience of having to drive
around people's bodies to get into work does to people
and what shifts those scientists may not have been aware
of themselves was brought about by some mysterious alchemy
by the protestors.
And I'll leave that as sort of a speculative question
as much as a definitive answer.
Mary Palevsky: Okay, thank you so much.
Let me just turn this back on.
Okay, so I think we'll take -- we're scheduled to go to round four --
take a deep breath, we have a little more to go --
and I think we'll open it up to discuss any things that you all want
to say to each other and then fairly quickly open it
up to questions from the audience.
Male Speaker: Yeah, I'd like to comment
on Hugh's excellent presentation but say that, I think,
if I understood you correctly, you got the bottom line wrong.
It seemed to me that the second part of your presentation argued
against the conclusion you presented at the front of your presentation
that public protest didn't matter all that much.
I had jotted down before you mentioned freeze movement;


If you meant to say that public protest didn't do it all,
I totally agree with you, of course,
but I don't think a lot would have happened without public protest.
I mean, this is a country,
and I think like most countries whose foreign policy emerges
from the political culture in which it lives.
It also is related, of course, to world affairs,
but how exactly you respond to world affairs depends a lot
on what is going on at home.
The most obvious example is before World War II,
the debate between the isolationists and the interventionists.
Roosevelt had to move very gingerly -- who was an interventionist --
because there was just too much isolationist sentiment,
by his judgment.
Reagan had to deploy every Catholic in his cabinet in order
to combat the Catholic Church's protest against --
which was part of the popular movement -- and so on.
And there's a book coming out that I hope you'll review
by Larry Wittner called "Confronting the Bomb",
which is a single-volume compilation -- or condensation, really --
of a three-volume work he did
on popular anti-nuclear protest movements around the world --
not just in the United States, around the world --
between 1945 and sometime in the 1990s,
I think, the last volume ends.
So, I don't know, maybe I got what you said wrong,
but I wanted to respond to that.
I guess I want to leave it partly for people in the audience
to reach their own conclusion on this.
And I certainly don't want to be heard to be saying
that the anti-nuclear movement had no effect at all.
I do think, though that if you'd had the same movement
and the Cold War had not ended, if Gorbachev had failed much earlier
and been replaced in a coup and the Cold War had resumed, I find it hard
to imagine that we would be in a world
without nuclear testing right now.
I think that shift in the broader structural context
of the Cold War was key.
And if you talk to members of the first Clinton cabinet
and key senators and you ask what's on their mind,
it's clear that they are increasingly concerned
that countries like Mexico and Malaysia and so on are making a lot
of noise about the 1995 Nonproliferation Treaty review
conference, and they're worried what will appease countries like that,
who are increasingly talking
about the Nonproliferation Treaty being a dishonored bargain.
And so, I mean, you could imagine
that the anti-nuclear movement might have achieved other kinds
of outcome --
not the long-sought-after end of nuclear testing, which was sort
of the gold standard of success for the anti-nuclear movement.
You could imagine there would have been dramatic reductions
in the number of tests per year or reductions in the stockpile,
and the American people would have been told, "Well, that's enough.
We'll go on testing, but we'll only have 5,000 nuclear weapons instead
of 25,000.   And we won't do so many test,

and we'll take the tactical nuclear weapons off the ships."
and so on.
But instead, they got what they'd sought, the holy grail
of arms control, the Test-Ban Treaty.
And I think some of that shift in international context.

Male Speaker: The question of nuclear testing,
I'm reminded of Leo Szilard's contrarian attitude.
Mary Palevsky: Comment on that.
Male Speaker: Leo Szilard was asked, when there was quite a bit
of protest in the '50s and Linus Pauling and others were concerned
about the fallout from nuclear tests,
whether we should ban nuclear tests, and Szilard's answer was, "Oh, no.
We should continue nuclear tests.   We should test them all."

Mary Palevsky: Now, I -- when --
when I read that, I wondered if you could say --
do you have any insight -- maybe no evidence,
but do you have any insight into why that was so?
It sort of reminded me of Edward Teller's, which was:
we are scientists; we try everything;
nothing is off the table.
Was it that kind of thing, do you think?
Male Speaker: I think it was that he wanted
to abolish them by just using them up.
Mary Palevsky: Oh, test them all.   I didn't get the joke.

Male Speaker: Every last one, yes.
Mary Palevsky: Okay, now I was dense.
Male Speaker: Szilard was conferring,
and his friend Hans Bethe said you never really knew
when Szilard was serious and when he wasn't.
He wrote a short story called "My Trial as a War Criminal" in 1947,
in which he said that he and Secretary Byrnes and Oppenheimer
and Truman would all be tried by the world as war criminals.
He said it in part with tongue in cheek, but when he talked
to student groups, he said, "The reason there's
such a turnout tonight is people are fascinated with mass murderers,"
and he did internalize this quite a bit.
The story "My Trial as a War Criminal" was published in 1961
in a book that Victor Ridamski [spelled phonetically] translated
for his colleague Andre Sakharov [spelled phonetically].
And according to Odamski [spelled phonetically],
I have Richard Groves to thank for this story.
Odamski translated this for Sakharov, and Sakharov,
thinking about himself as a war criminal, in fact turned him
around to become a peace activist and an anti-nuclear activist.
So, among the scientists themselves, I think there's pressure.
You mentioned Pugwash in 1957, the scientists met for the first time
in Pugwash, Nova Scotia and started talking
to one another about arms control.
An interesting thing happened that fall.
One of the founders was Bertrand Russell.
And they had a meeting.
"Well, okay, we've had a meeting now.
What should we do?"
And Russell wanted to make the Pugwash movement
and national movement like the Ban the Bomb that were going
on in England at the time.
And Szilard attended that session and said, "No, we're most effective
if we work behind the scenes, and we should do that."
And it was his influence, according to Joseph Rotblat,
who later led the Pugwash conferences,
that keeping it behind the scenes and allowing scientists
to talk directly and then talk
to their governments was something you could do in addition
to having protests and mass movements.
So, I think it probably took both and both approaches
for the effects that were successful.
Male Speaker: And then Szilard was also the founder of the Council
for a Livable World, which -- Male Speaker: Exactly,
he came here to Washington in 1961 with the Kennedy administration
to lobby "with the sweet voice of reason" he said,
for arms control agreements.   And he could get almost nowhere.

He knew Jerome Wiesner [spelled phonetically] the science advisor.
He knew enough people in the government,
but they just weren't listening to him.
So, he decided, he said, "Well, how can I get their attention?"
And he said, "Well, we have to pass arms control treaties."
Treaties are passed by the Senate; every state has two votes.
So, if you elect senators who are favorable towards arms control,
then you can build up a constituency that will pass these treaties.
Well, some senators come cheaper than others.
If you elect senators from a non-populist state
like South Dakota, then they're a lot cheaper
than senators from Pennsylvania.
So, he decided to create the Council for a Livable World,
which is still a very successful political action committee,
to elect people who were disposed toward arms control,
and his first candidate that he was successful
with was Senator George McGovern.
And the Council's been going on ever since behind the scenes,
electing people to Congress who are disposed to arms control.
Mary Palevsky: Okay, well I think with that --
if it's okay with you gentlemen --
we should open this up to the audience and some questions.
Okay. You've been tapped: Jeff Alexander:
Could I just ask a factual question first,
whether Professor Gusterson --
Male Speaker: If you could identify yourself.
Jeff Alexander: Jeff Alexander, I'm a Kluge fellow.
I'm a sociologist.
The factual question is: is the arms race over?
You said that it was over, but I thought that there was still a lot
of engineering and preservation and that some other nations
like China were working on space arm and we are matching them
and going ahead and all that.   So, that's just a factual question.

The other, I'd like to pose to all of you or any
of you is a devil's advocate position.
I'd just like your answers to it, because I'm interested myself.
That is that this panel begins with the question to Professor Lanouette
about Stalin and whether his presence prevented --
made it necessary for us to use the bomb.
And it ended with the debate over whether arms control,
or the end of the arms race,
happened because of the peace movement or the end of the Cold War,
which could be interpreted as the defeat of the Soviet Union
or the surrender of Stalin's errors.   So this puts the question

onto whether having a powerful enemy compels science,
compels arms producers simply to go to the edge.
Now, there was a more sociological question.
In other words, if we have -- or political --
if we have profound enemies in an advanced, industrial, atomic age,
how could there not be armament up to the level of science?
And isn't it a fact that the scientists thought we had
to disarm not to have a nuclear holocaust,
but it was actually mutually assured destruction --
MAD, as we called it in the freeze days --
that prevented the earth so far from being at war.
Male Speaker: Well, you've outdone Mary in the complexity
of that question, but I'll try to pull at least part of it.
First of all, I think the U.S.
/Soviet arms race has probably ended.
And there are promising further reductions in the works,
but certainly the nuclear arms race has not ended,
and other countries are still interested in developing them
because they see some prestige or some other advantage
or some leverage that is in quite a bit of dispute
as to whether the bomb is a positive or negative force.
As far as the question of Stalin's reaction,
I think it's probably the same as our reaction
when we thought the Germans were working hard for the bomb.
And it's ironic that in June of 1942, when we turned
over our project from some of these bumbling academics to the U.S. Army
and created the Manhattan Project, that was the same month
that the Germans decided, well, they didn't really have much success
and the war would be over before they could actually create this.
They thought they were winning at the time.
And so they shut down their program just
about the time that we ramped ours up.
Well, if we had known that, I think the fear that drove us
to create the bomb and use it
in such a hurry might have been avoided.
Those are my answers to part of your questions.
Hugh: I was given the factual question
of whether the arms race is over.
I'm not sure it's a factual question.
It's partly a matter of opinion.   But I'll say the U.S.

/Russian/Chinese nuclear arms race is largely over.
I think about it like a human body that's being put in the deep freeze.
And so maybe the vital functions are still ticking over,
but at a much slower kind of rate.
So when you end nuclear testing, you don't make it impossible
to improve nuclear weapons in any way at all.
And I'll give you an example.
In the mid-1990s, the nuclear weapons complex reengineered the B61
gravity bomb.
They didn't change what weapons designers call the physics package
at all, so the nuclear component remained unchanged.
But they put a new nosecone with a special penetrating capability,
so the weapon taken as an ensemble, once you'd attached that new sort
of nosecone to it, had a new capability
that the original B61 did not have before the B61 mod 11 came along.
You know, there are all sorts of switches of components
that the weapons complex has undertake, but the arms race
of the Cold War involved retiring one weapon and replacing it
with weapon that had a high yield or was smaller
so that you could put more of them on a missile
that could spray the enemy with neutrons, all those kinds
of improvements are off the table now
with the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.
And I should say -- I mean, we're speaking
about the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty as if it's a great triumph
for liberal arms controllers and for protestors.
But one of the reasons that we have the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty is
that if you're a coldblooded realist who wants
to preserve American military dominance throughout the world,
the Test-Ban Treaty is arguably a very attractive thing
because it makes it harder for other countries to catch up to you.
You know, if the Indians can't test anymore,
they have some nuclear weapons, but they're not going to be able
to optimize them further without nuclear testing.
And it makes it harder for other countries
to cross the nuclear threshold if they can't test a nuclear weapon.
So, what makes a Test-Ban Treaty appealing
to liberals also arguably makes it to sort of realists in the Pentagon
and the National Security Council, which is that it makes it hard
to more than very small sort
of micro-improvements of nuclear weapons.
Male Speaker: The gold standard
for the anti-nuclear movement is not the Test-Ban Treaty,
it's nuclear abolition.
And the most interesting thing that has happened in the last four
or five years is that the sort of realist regals --
people like Henry Kissinger, William Perry, the former Secretary
of Defense, former Secretary of State George Schultz,
and Senator Sam Nunn, a great nuclear advocate when he was
in the Senate -- have gathered together,
or gathered together some years ago at the Hoover Institution
in Palo Alto, did a study of nuclear policy globally,
and came to the conclusion which they published several times
in the Wall Street Journal and as a bigger report,
arguing that the United States should reverse its traditional
policy since 1945 and lead a movement
to abolish nuclear weapons globally because they're much more
of a danger to us than they are an advantage to us for all kinds
of reasons that were implied in what Hugh said,
in the current world situation with the Cold War having ended.
That's a very important sea change among an important segment
of American national security types.
What difference that's going to make, you know, I don't know.
But it certainly makes it possible to think about over the next decade
or two that some kind of transformation of the existence
of nuclear weapons in the world today can come about.
And so President Obama gives a speech in Prague saying
that nuclear abolition is a goal, but then he says "perhaps not
in my lifetime", which was not a welcome aside.
But nevertheless, it's the first time an American president said
that publically.
Now, at Reykjavik, Reagan said it publically to Mikhail Gorbachev,
and that was an important moment,
not because it moved anything anywhere,
but because it became known.
And it is part of the history of all of this, and it is an element
of surprise, and shock, and of hope, according to what your view is
on the role of nuclear weapons.
Mary Palevsky: Well, I think in the interest
of getting more questions in,
I'll just say that that's a really interesting question, Jeff,
and you're making me think about that, and we'll talk about it later
so we can get some questions from the audience.
Right here, yes.
Jonathon Weisgal: Hi, Jonathon Weisgal with Bikini Atoll.
Would the three of you comment --
you know, we heard a lot about Stalin and Gorbachev --
and until, Marty, you just spoke,
we hadn't really heard much about U.S. presidents.
I'm interested in the views of various presidents
on the topics you've been talking about.
I was struck, after the Bravo shot
when Japan almost broke diplomatic relations with the United States,
this did have a big impact on Eisenhower.
But it's more of a general question.
Which presidents -- and I'm thinking more of the '50s and '60s --
did get involved in these issues, and how did they come out?
Is it not ironic that the one president you've talked about --
Reagan, who we think of as a conservative --
came out in a counterintuitive way on some of these issues?
So, what impact did U.S. presidents have on your questions
that you all have been researching?   Male Speaker: Well, first of all,

Jonathon Weisgal has written a very important book on the effect
of nuclear testing on the Marshalese.
And we've corresponded over the years, didn't we?
But we've never met.
So I'm delighted that you're here and that we're going
to have a chance to meet.
Every president has had to confront nuclear weapons
in a very serious way from Truman -- well, even Roosevelt did,
but his impact wasn't felt during -- after the war.
Truman, all the way through.
The only one who really took on publically the effort
to seriously transform American nuclear policy was Carter,
and he wasn't successful at all.
Nuclear weapons were just such a huge and significant part
of the national security landscape as it built up very quickly
after the Korean War, during the Eisenhower administration
that it almost became untouchable.
I mean, one of the reasons Stevenson was so unsuccessful
as a candidate was his anti-nuclear position.
Even if he had been running against someone other
than this mythic hero Eisenhower, if he had had a chance of winning,
let's say, in 1952 or '56 against someone, I think his position
on nuclear weapons, given the political culture
in the United States by that time, would have doomed him
and made it impossible for him to succeed.

So, I don't think any president -- and Clinton, in some ways,
was the biggest disappointment of all, because he really had a chance,
given the end of the Cold War and all the points that you made,
but he didn't take that on.
It was just, politically, too high a mountain to climb,
and he would have had to expend too much political capital,
I think he believed.
Male Speaker: I just want to observe that it's an irony
that the Test-Ban Treaty was signed by Bill Clinton, who,
I think as Marty was suggesting, probably had less interest
in nuclear weapons than any other recent U.S. president.
I've spoken to many senior officials in the Clinton administration
for the book I'm writing, and the picture I get is
that he largely delegate nuclear weapons policy
to people beneath him.
And there was one point where he was brought in to break a deadlock
about whether the Test-Ban Treaty would be zero-yield test ban
or whether it would allow small tests.
But on the whole, he wasn't particularly interested.
I want to also just mention a brief anecdote.
The people at the labs pay a lot of attention
to whether the U.S. president cares about them and what they do,
and many people at Livermore tell me
that JFK was their favorite president
for what may strike you as an odd reason.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, he asked to see a nuclear weapon.
He wanted to see inside it to see what it was
that he had almost had to use.
And they told me that he was the only U.S. president
that had ever asked to see how a bomb worked.
Male Speaker: I would just say that as long as there's public perception
that nuclear weapons are useful -- and there is the widespread belief
that it ended World War II -- then presidents are really running
against the grain if they're trying to say that they're not useful.
And I can think of very few instances when a president has tried
to say -- they do say that the threat
of proliferation is a big thing, but to say that the nuclear arsenal is,
in fact, a liability is not something
that someone is power has said, to my knowledge.'
Mary Palevsky: I realize -- let me just make one comment, Jonathon.
Because I realized when you asked that question
that I had actually dropped somehow, when I was getting ready
for this paragraph I had, about an interview I did --
I don't know if you know him, Mitch Chikunima [spelled phonetically].
He's a physicist in Japan.
When I was in Japan I interviewed him.
And he had been a young man in the war -- this is an anecdote.
This doesn't have anything to do with your question,
but it's to the question of Japan and Bravo.
He had been a teenager during the war.
His father was a general.
He said that the mood in Japan was sort of an acceptance
of the atomic bombings, an acceptance of the defeat,
and it was Bravo that really brought the consciousness of nuclear weapons
and what they were to the Japanese,
of course because of the unfortunate Dragon fishing boat,
but also because of the plight of the Marshalese from the fallout.
So, I thought that was sort of a surprise to me
and actually a surprise to some of my Japanese colleagues
who are my age, postwar babies.   Okay, that side.

Okay what do we have?   Do we have one here?

Yeah. TD: Hi, thank you.   Tad Daily is my name.

I'm with the group International Physicians Preventing Nuclear War.
You're right, Marty Sherman -- Sherwin --
nuclear abolition is our gold standard.
And Hugh Gusterson, perhaps it's a small point,
but I'd just like to point out, the Nobel Committee has
on at least two occasions recognized the anti-nuclear movement:
in 1985 my group won the Nobel Peace Prize,
and then in '95 it was Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Committee.
But this is not my question; it's an historical question.
It's almost never recalled that the UN charter is a
pre-nuclear document.   It was exactly six weeks.

It was signed, sealed, and delivered in San Francisco on June 26,
six weeks before the bomb became known to the world on August 6.
And I came across a statement on this fact
by no less than John Foster Dulles.   August 27, 1953, the New York Times.

He is, of course, secretary of state at this time.
He had been -- I'm not sure what capacity, but he had been a member
of our delegation to San Francisco eight years earlier.
And here's what Dulles said --
I think I can do this quote from memory --
"As one who was at San Francisco, I can attest that if we had known
that the immeasurable power of the atom was
about to be unleashed upon the world, the provisions in the charter
for disarmament and enforcement would have been far more emphatic
and realistic."
And so I guess I wonder if you know anything about that
or if you have any observations about that.
If he is remotely correct, it seems to me an immense historical tragedy.
If perhaps the charter had been signed six weeks
after Hiroshima instead of six weeks before,
maybe it would have contained a lot of the kinds of provisions
in the Franck Report and the Baruch Plan.
Who knows?
Maybe we would have put the genie back in the bottle right away.
Male Speaker: There was quite a bit of concern among the scientists,
including Szilard about informing the secretary of state
and informing the delegates to San Francisco that we had this weapon.
As far as he could figure out, within the government,
the people in San Francisco representing the U.S. had no idea
about the bomb.
And one of the things that he was trying to do was to influence,
for example, James Byrnes,
to say that we should inform our negotiators that this is
about to become a reality.
And then, I think, also after the war, the role of the UN was
in such -- had such power for the scientists.
They really thought that with one world or none --
and world government might be able to control this weapon,
and so there was an awful lot of faith in the UN afterward.
And as you point out, if the control mechanisms had been stronger,
that may have contributed to a different outcome.
But within the Manhattan Project, Robert Wilson, who --
Mary Palevsky: Well, I was going to say -- Male Speaker: --
Mary has written about, had a discussion,
and maybe you could talk about that.
We were concerned inside the Manhattan Project that the people
in San Francisco didn't know what was coming.
Mary Palevsky: Just real briefly, as Robert -- this is in the book,
but I have to cast my mind back now.
It -- I think the name of the -- he calls a meeting.
Robert Wilson is a brilliant but sort of junior physicist.
So, this is Los Alamos and Szilard is in Chicago.
The implications of the gadget, the something of the gadget --
and the gadget is -- Marty Sherwin: [inaudible] Mary Palevsky:
The implications -- thank you, Marty.
The implications of the gadget -- he calls this meeting.
And he's saying at this meeting, you know, "Should we stop here" --
I think this is after the German defeat is known --
"and bring this knowledge to the UN before it's used?"
So, it's interesting that this is happening at Los Alamos as well.
And people had a lot of faith, I think, in what the UN might be able
to do, even after the bomb was --
Male Speaker: I want to say two quick things about it.
You know, number one, the argument that it was important
that the world know, that UN people know about the bomb
and its possibility of destroying civilization, as Simpson put it,
was used as a rationalization for using the bomb.
And Oppenheimer argued that.
Mary Palevsky: [inaudible] Male Speaker: Yeah, a lot of them did.
If we keep it secret, the world must not know how we transform
international relations to deal with this discovery.
So that's one.   So it cut both ways.

The second thing is that the Atchison-Lilienthal Report
of February 1946, which Oppenheimer developed,
which became the Baruch Plan, was an attempt to fix up the deficiencies
in the UN charter, which had been created, you know,
before we lived in the nuclear age.
The transformation of the Atchison-Lilienthal Report
from February '46 to what was presented in June '46 by Baruch,
they were two very different kinds of documents.
When Oppenheimer and Vennevar Bush and others read the document
that Baruch had created out of the Atchison-Lilienthal Report,
they agreed "we're doomed."   That's what he said.

Mary Palevsky: This gentleman here has been raising his hand,
so let's do that, and then we'll go back there,
and then I think we'll probably [inaudible].
Jonathan Medalia: Hi, I'm Jonathan Medalia
with Congressional Research Service.
I have just a few observations that maybe you'd want to comment on.
One is, as far as Congress is concerned,
I think there is less interest in nuclear weapons now
than there was during the Cold War, for a couple of obvious reasons.
One is that nuclear weapons are less salient now than they were then,
and the other is that a lot of members -- I'm sure most --
of Congress have been elected since the end of the Cold War.
A second point I'd make is that there's a political asymmetry
between members of Congress who support
and who oppose nuclear weapons.
My sense, based on a couple of debates
like the robust nuclear earth penetrator in the RRW,
is that members who support "new" nuclear weapons -- new in quotes --
don't get a lot of support from their constituencies,
whereas members who oppose them do get support
from their constituencies.
And a third point I'd make is a tension between a couple
of the gold standards that the panel mentioned,
namely between the CTBT and Zero.
It may be, for example, that there would have
to be some compromises made in order to get the CTBT through the Senate,
compromises that would basically maintain the nuclear forces
at some level.   So, I throw that open to you.

Thanks. Male Speaker: Well,
I think that those are all interesting observations.
I think that, from my perspective,
whatever progress can be made is worth taking.
The CTBT is really important, and -- but so is nuclear abolition.
And one of the great dangers of nuclear weapons
that people have been talking about since 9/11 especially is falling
into the hands of terrorists.
Well, if there are no nuclear weapons in the world
and there are no nuclear laboratories making nuclear weapons
and so on, there's much less of a chance of nuclear weapons falling
into the hands of terrorists.   So, there's a very good argument.

On the other hand, from the point of view of North Korea and Iran --
which, unfortunately, are on the first pages
of newspapers these days --
the possession of nuclear weapons is very, very attractive
for exactly the reasons that the United States explained
when it developed mutually assured destruction, which a member
of the audience mentioned.
We are in a terrible bind, and we have to get out of it.
First of all, we have to wean our culture away from the idea --
I think the false idea -- that nuclear weapons are important
for our military security.
But I suppose that's the center of the debate.
And then we have to figure out another form of security
that can reasonably replace nuclear weapons for all
of these other countries that want nuclear weapons
for the reasons we taught them to want them.
We have a very, very heavy responsibility,
and it's a big agenda.
And unfortunately, there are a few other things
that the current administration has to deal with.
And, you know, the fact that you correctly pointed out,
that Bill Clinton was not that interested, relatively speaking,
in nuclear weapons, is really a good lesson in point.
I mean, we all know he was one of the smartest presidents
up until Obama [laughter] the United States has ever had.
He was certainly capable of understanding the importance
of dealing with these things, but they were just there.
And they had been there for 60 years, and there were
so many other things he wanted to deal with that interested him
that were more -- that were problems that engage him, so he let it go.
We have come simply to -- even Bill Clinton --
to just accept nuclear weapons as, you know, sometimes it rains
and sometimes it snows and sometimes the sun comes out.
And we just live with these things.
And I think that is one of the most dangerous things
that has happened over the last 60 years.
Male Speaker: A couple of very brief comments.
In terms of the Congressional calculus,
Tip O'Neill said all politics is local.
You know, if you're a congressman from Massachusetts,
there's more kudos in opposing the reliable replacement warhead.
If you represent Oak Ridge, TN,
you may have a different kind of calculus.
And in terms of an asymmetry as we go
into the CTBT ratification debates in the Senate, it seems to me
that it's safer for a senator to oppose ratification at the moment,
to say, "I need to be persuaded.
I'm not going to vote to ratify this unless you give me a good reason why
I should."
So, for the fence-sitters, the default position is not to ratify,
you know, come to me and persuade me.
Asymmetry actually seems to work the other way in that particular debate.
And one thing about the Zero debate --
I'm going back to a fragment of your original question
that I never answered, which is "Have we moved into a fourth period
in Frank von Hippel's scheme?"   I think we're moving into a period

where the United States is increasingly obsessed
with the threat of terrorism, and so you figure the cost and benefits
of nuclear weapons very differently when the main enemy
on the horizon is Al Qaeda rather than the Soviet Union,
and the danger you fear is an entity that controls no territory
against which you can threaten retaliation.
They could smuggle a nuclear weapon into Washington,
D.C. or New York and vaporize them.
And so, you start to see the benefits of completely getting rid
of nuclear weapons much more in that environment.
And, I would say, a hydrogen bomb designer
who I won't name once told me he'd become an abolitionist,
and I said, "Why?"
And he said, "Because in a world without nuclear weapons,
the United States would have uncontested military dominance.
We can do what we want everywhere."   And so there is a sort

of conservative abolitionist argument too.

Female Speaker: [inaudible] Ingrid Drake: My name is Ingrid Drake.
I'm an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO,
and we spend a lot of time making sure that the Department
of Energy is holding its contractors accountable.
And that's the question I have for you all.
DoE is about 90 percent contractor at this point,
and all of the labs are privately run.
Bechtel last year had record revenues.
And what do you think those scientists would have thought
knowing that the testing and the weapons and the design are all
in the hands of those who could stand to make a profit
at that enterprise and how you think that's affected the culture
of the labs and kind of going forward from where we are now.
Male Speaker: I'll give you a quick answer.
Maybe this is a heretical position, but I really don't think it matters
who runs the labs, whether it's the University of California or Bechtel.
They run themselves.
You know, all through the '90s there were all these scandals,
and people in Congress beat up on the University of California
for not managing the labs better.   Well, the managed them in name only.

The labs really ran themselves, and they continue to run themselves.
So, the only reason that the shift
in the management contract really matters is
that the labs are no longer tax exempt,
as they were when they were run by the University of California.
And that has translated, effectively, into a huge budget cut,
because out of the same budget they now have to pay taxes.
And there've been huge layoffs at the labs, so morale has diminished.
So I find it interesting that this Republican administration has
devastated morale at nuclear weapons labs by shifting the contract.
Mary Palevsky: I'll just say really quick that one of the things
that is interesting to see historically is --
and this is not an answer to your question --
but just the rise of the contractors has been an interesting thing
to observe, starting with the weapons testing in '50 and '51.
Herb York said, you know, when they first went to Nevada,
when Livermore went, they didn't have the ability
to do a lot of things.
So, the contractors come in to build roads,
and Rico [spelled phonetically],
which was the big contractor before Bechtel,
just grows from this fairly small company from New Mexico to huge.
And so I think the rise
of the contractors is interesting historically.
I couldn't tell you -- I mean, Hugh has given his definitive answer,
but I think that it's a good question because this is something
that happens in testing in order to support the testing.
Huge contractors make great wealth through the years of testing.
I think that's probably all we have.
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of the Library of Congress.
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