MR. ADAM KEIPER: Welcome to the Ethics and Public Policy Center. My name is Adam Keiper and I’m the Managing Editor of The New Atlantis, EPPC’s journal about the social, political, and ethical implications of advancing science and technology.

A few housekeeping notes before we begin today’s event. There are a number of other projects here at the Ethics and Public Policy Center which may be of interest to you, particularly given your interest in this topic today, including the South Asian Studies and Religious Nationalism and the Islam and American Democracy. You can get more information on both those programs by visiting our website, www.eppc.org where, hopefully, you will also add yourself to our mailing list.

We are having today’s discussion recorded and transcribed. A full transcript will appear online in about a day or so, and an edited version will appear in the next issue of The New Atlantis. So, for the sake of the recording, I request that, if you have a cell phone -- or any other beeper or ringer or tweeter -- please turn it off now, both for the sake of the recording and for courteousness for our guests.

This is the first in a series of roundtables held by EPPC’s program on Science, Technology, and Society to bring together experts, sit them down, and have them discuss a subject of great importance.

There are few subjects of greater importance than the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The problem of proliferation in 2004 is profoundly different than it was just a decade ago when all the talk was about rogue states, for in the post-9/11 environment, the problem of proliferation is intertwined with the war on terrorism.

Here is how Dick Cheney put it less than a week ago, speaking at Fudan University in China. He said, "Today we know that the peace and stability that all civilized nations seek are under threat, as new and grave dangers continue to gather. In nations around the globe, terror networks have plotted against civilized people and have grown bolder in their destructive ambitions. And in this age of rapid technological advance, we face the prospect that deadly weapons might fall into the hands of terrorists. The ultimate threat is that these problems -- terrorism and proliferation -- may one day come together in a sudden, catastrophic attack by terrorists armed with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons."

The Vice President then continued, "The spread of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are a direct challenge to every nation that seeks to build a more open, stable, and prosperous world. Controlling the spread of terrible weapons is one of the most urgent priorities of our new century. We have no alternative but to act with all the diligence, and more, of the rogue states and terrorists who wish to acquire such weapons for the threat they pose to innocent people."

So, to discuss that threat, we’ve assembled three leading experts on the subject of proliferation. First is Tom Cochran, the Director of the Nuclear Program at The Natural Resources Defense Council, where he holds the Wade Greene Chair for Nuclear Policy. Mr. Cochran some years ago initiated a nuclear weapons data book project and a U.S./Soviet nuclear weapons verification project, which was a four-year collaboration between his organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The goal was to demonstrate that a low threshold nuclear test band treaty could be verified. And that work brought awards, both to him and to his organization, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and from the American Physical Society. Mr. Cochran has been a member of numerous government advisory committees, and has written and spoken widely on the subject we’ll be discussing today.

As has our next speaker, George Perkovich, the Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before coming to Carnegie in early 2002, he was Deputy Director for Programs and Director of the Secure World Program of the W. Alton Jones Foundation. And before that, he worked for Senator Biden. As I mentioned, Mr. Perkovich has written widely on proliferation, and one of his most recent publications is a report out from Carnegie in January of this year -- he co-authored it -- "WMDs in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," one of the central conclusions of which was, "Iraq’s WMD program represented a long-term threat that could not be ignored. They did not, however, pose an immediate threat to the United States, to the region, or to global security."

And our final speaker will be Henry Sokolski. He is the Executive Director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of World Politics. He served from 1989 to 1993 as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Paul Wolfowitz, and he received the Secretary of Defense’s medal for Outstanding Public Service. Prior to his appointment there, he worked in the Secretary’s Office of Net Assessment on Proliferation Issues. He was the editor of the 1996 book, Fighting Proliferation: New Concerns for the ‘90s, and more recently, in early 2001, the author of Best of Intentions: America’s Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation.

Here’s how today’s discussion is going to work. Each of the speakers will come up to the lectern and give a presentation, around 15 minutes or so. After that, we’ll have some discussion at the table between the three speakers, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A.

As I said before, the event is being recorded, so if you’d wait for me to approach you doing my best Oprah imitation with a microphone before beginning your question, I’d appreciate it. Thank you very much. Tom Cochran.

MR. TOM COCHRAN: Well, this subject is really too big for any of us -- or the three of us -- to cover in a -- in a short period of time, and so I’m just going to focus on one aspect of it. And maybe we can come back after the three of us have finished and talk about other aspects.

In the proliferation business, there’s the issue of non-weapon states acquiring nuclear weapons, which is the traditional way we’ve thought about proliferation. And more recently, there’s the issue of non-state entities acquiring nuclear weapons, usually presented as terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

With respect to weapons of mass destruction, you know, there are chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. I don’t think chemical weapons are in the same league with biological or nuclear weapons, and probably shouldn’t be so categorized. The biological weapons I don’t think really are even in the same category as nuclear weapons.

So, I’m going to focus solely on the issue of nuclear weapons being acquired by non-state threats or terrorists. And here, one is usually talking about a terrorist organization acquiring some sort of fissile material and making a crude nuclear device, either out of plutonium or highly enriched uranium. I think Henry will probably talk at some length about the problems we have globally on making sure they don’t acquire plutonium, so I’m going to focus on the highly enriched uranium aspect.

The summer before the anniversary of 9/11, I loaned ABC News 15 pounds of depleted uranium. Fifteen pounds of uranium is 20 times as dense as water or a Coca Cola or a Dr. Pepper. And so 15 pounds will fit in this can.

And the uranium was put in a small shielded container, which you’ll see, and ABC News took it over to Vienna, hauled it by train through Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and into Turkey, and then put it in a cargo container and shipped it back to New York City. The cargo container was identified by Homeland Security as something they ought to look at, so they screened it, missed the uranium, and the uranium went over and was stored at a pier under the Brooklyn Bridge.

And so ABC ran a piece on the anniversary and sort of embarrassed the senior Homeland Security officials, I thought with the wrong message. The message -- the right message was that there’s no way you’re going to detect either depleted uranium or highly enriched uranium at the borders and, therefore, you needed a different -- the government needed a different strategy to round it up at the sources. And we have programs to do that, but they’re not given sufficient priority.

Well, a year later, ABC ran the same test again. This time they took the same source of uranium to Jakarta -- and this was 10 days after they blew up a hotel in Jakarta -- and shipped it back in a cargo container through Long Beach. Once again, Homeland -- the Customs and Border Protection pulled the container to image it and assess it with radiation detectors. And once again, they missed it. And this time, when ABC got -- well, I’ll just -- I’ll just run this tape. This is a four-minute tape, so it won’t take very long, but -- .

MR. PETER JENNINGS: Tonight, there was a very controversial ABC News investigation. Last year, ABC’s Brian Ross, to test security at the nation’s ports, sent a shipment of radioactive, but not dangerous, uranium from Turkey to New York City and it was never detected. This year, to see if things had improved, Brian and his team sent a shipment from Indonesia to Los Angeles. Here’s his report on what happened.

MR. BRIAN ROSS: For a second year, U.S. Customs screeners have failed to detect a shipment in a container from overseas that nuclear weapons experts says they should have; 15 pounds of depleted uranium. Depleted uranium is harmless. Scientists say it would give off much the same signature as weapons grade uranium packed the same way, shielded by lead.

MR. COCHRAN: If you’re unable to detect this, you would be unable to detect the radiation signature from the highly enriched uranium.

MR. ROSS: The ABC News investigation began in Jakarta, Indonesia, the site of two recent deadly bombings tied to Al Qaeda.

MR. GRAHAM ALLISON: I’d say that shipments from Jakarta would seem to me to be particularly worrisome.

MR. ROSS: In Jakarta, we put our uranium in a suitcase, then packed in a teak truck, and quickly found a company willing to send a shipping container to the U.S. with almost no questions asked. No one from the Indonesian or U.S. Government inspected it there either; not what Homeland Security officials envision when the talk of added vigilance overseas to protect American ports.

MR. TOM RIDGE: And that’s why we build security measures that begin thousands of miles away, long before a container is first loaded on a ship.

MR. ROSS: If anyone in Jakarta had opened our shipment, they would have clearly seen it was harmless depleted uranium belonging to ABC News.

SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D-CA): This is a case in point which establishes the soft underbelly of national security and homeland defense in the United States.

MR. ROSS: Three weeks after leaving Indonesia, the ship carrying the ABC News container pulled into the Port of Los Angeles. It was targeted for screening because it came from Jakarta. But Homeland Security inspectors, using their best scanning equipment, like this device, did not detect the depleted uranium inside. Yet, Homeland Security officials claim they passed the test with flying colors.

MR. ASA HUTCHINSON: We targeted it. We inspected it. We confirmed that it was not of a danger to America.

MR. ROSS: But our container left the port without being opened, the only way scientists say screeners could know whether the material inside was harmless or a danger to America. Within minutes, it was on the 110 freeway moving through the heart of downtown Los Angeles. And Homeland Security officials did not learn what had happened until hours later, after our truck driver, whom we told we were from ABC News, became nervous and authorities were notified.

MR. ALLISON: The test that you put to them, which looks to me to be a fair test, they failed.

MR. ROSS: The government reaction has been to investigate ABC News. Agents were dispatched at midnight to our Los Angeles Bureau, where they demanded the material and threatened to file criminal charges against ABC personnel.

MR. ROSS: Did you think that I was a terrorist?

MR. HUTCHINSON: I think you’re a news reporter that is trying to carry out a hoax on our inspectors.

MR. ROSS: Call it a hoax or a test, the fact is, the security system at the ports failed once again. Peter, officials say there is help on the way, that hundreds of new radiation detection devices -- new and improved they say -- are to be ordered this month in place, and they say they’ll be able to detect even the kind of material that we sent.

MR. COCHRAN: Well, here are the detectors that they’ve ordered. These are basically large plastic scintillation counters and you count gamma rays. And if you count -- if a sufficient number of counts above the normal background levels, it’ll set off an alarm. You preset the alarm and then you go in and inspect the container. The problem is, those will detect -- and there are also some detectors in here for detecting neutrons. So, if you -- to look for plutonium.

But, the problem is, these detectors while they will detect a lot of different types of radioactive sources, particularly a number of types of dirty bomb materials, and they will -- should be able to detect significant quantities of plutonium, they won’t detect highly enriched uranium because highly enriched uranium, when shielded with just a -- like an eighth of an inch of lead shielding -- and put in the center of the cargo container, just gives off too little radiation.

Here, you see a calculation of the radiation from the 15 pounds of depleted uranium. And also, had it been highly enriched uranium, there’s a bunch in the distance. And if you get out 200 centimeters or 2 meters away, the radiation is almost 2 orders of magnitude below background. And so you’re not going to see this on a meter that’s registering counts above -- above background.

So, the U.S. government should just say, "You know, in the case of highly enriched uranium, the science is against us. There’s no way we can detect it coming across the border. Therefore, we need a different type of program to prevent people from importing either highly enriched uranium or weapons made with highly enriched uranium and using them in the United States."

And there are sort of two categories of sources of highly enriched uranium. There are the weapons programs around the world of which there are what, eight or so? I’ve forgotten the number -- the five original, plus Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea -- so, there are nine, I guess.

The other sources are naval reactors, primarily the United States, UK, France and Russia. And finally, there are about 100 research and test reactors, commercial civil reactors. So, there’s a fair amount of highly enriched uranium in the commercial sector and in the nuclear R&D sector. And that’s a -- probably the most likely source of people stealing highly enriched uranium.

In my view, if it were to be stolen, it would either -- it’s most likely to come either from a Russian research facility, where the -- where the security’s inadequate, or it’s going to come from the Pakistani weapons program, where I don’t have great faith that the people -- somebody in that program would not be willing to divert that material.

So, my message here is very simple. If you believe that terrorists’ use of weapons of mass destruction are the greatest threat to the United States, then the most important national security initiative is to round up highly enriched uranium around the world immediately. We have programs in place to do that, but they are a low priority.

I’ll stop there. I have other things I can show, but I think we’ll benefit from the other speakers first.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Perkovich.

MR. GEORGE PERKOVICH: Thanks, Tom. I just want to endorse the proposition that Tom laid before you and it’s something we’re emphasizing in a project where the Carnegie Endowment are working on now on a new nonproliferation strategy that -- to the extent that nuclear terrorism is a foremost challenge, then the strategic objective, or at least a key strategic objective, is the one that he laid out, and conceptually it’s very, very clear. It’s clearer than most challenges in life.

You’ve got highly enriched uranium around the world. There’s a relatively finite quantity of it. It’s possible to identify where it all is. Once that is done, the objective is very clear, which is just to go out and round it up and secure it. It’s largely a question -- it’s a doable proposition if one is really focused upon it, and so, that’s what makes it kind of exceptional in a way. It’s not as messy a problem as a lot of the ones that we work one.

What I thought I’d do is briefly kind of give an overview of where I think the nuclear nonproliferation challenge and a way to think about it and approach it that goes beyond the way that we have pursued it for the last 30 odd years, since the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was negotiated in 1968.

The core problem is that stopping the spread of nuclear weapons requires more international teamwork than the Bush Administration has achieved and more international resolve than the Clinton Administration could muster. And we have to understand that nuclear weapons and the material and know-how, some of what Tom alluded to, are problems wherever they exist, not just in two or three evil states. So, while it’s fine to focus on bad actors, that doesn’t solve the problem for the reasons that Tom identified.

You can change the regime in Iraq. You can change the regime in another one or two countries, and you’re still going to have a lot of this material, and you’re still going to have the potential that your friend today, Pakistan for example, could be a source of proliferation problem tomorrow; or Egypt. Pick your country. It’s possible, and so you have to focus on the materials and the weapons, as well as the actors.

The other thing that is really clear is that the U.S. cannot defeat these threats alone, or even with a small coalition of the willing. We need cooperation from at least dozens of diverse states to broaden, toughen, and enforce nonproliferation rules. You can’t really solve this problem, for example, if China and Russia are not constructive partners; France, the UK. But then, you also have to include Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Africa, Sweden. These are all states that have had nuclear capability, that still have some nuclear capability, that have seats at the table that are influential when you’re negotiating the rules that we then want to enforce internationally. There are people that have to cooperative in the enforcement that we’re talking about, whether it’s border controls, whether it’s U.N. resolutions to go invade another country, whether it’s sanctions; you can’t do it alone. You need actors like that.

And because these states, many of them are democracies, they must be persuaded to strengthen the nonproliferation rules even though it will raise the burden, the cost of enforcement to them. It will cost them more money. It will cause them to have to reorganize themselves bureaucratically, and if you’re coming to a point where you’re considering coercion, whether in the form of sanctions or military force, it may cost them in terms of lost economic opportunities or people -- the Spanish in Iraq as an example. That’s a kind of enforcement activity you can envision. To mobilize people to do that is a challenge. They will want things in exchange. And especially the states that have given up nuclear weapons will want to know that the stronger rules we’re advocating and the stronger enforcement will actually enhance their security, and also the fairness of the international order. And again, we see this problem in especially in democracies in the last few years.

That we counted on Turkey, for example, to have the fourth division to be able to move into Iraq. The Turkish Parliament rejected that. We have difficulties with South Korea now in terms of basing forces there. We have problems with Germany that come from domestic politics and their perception of the U.S., and the basic problem being that people want to know that the tougher rules we’re advocating, the stronger enforcement we’re advocating, will not only advantage us and the other powerful, but also will constrain us to follow the same rules. And this is a problem that leaders of other countries may not be so focused on, but their people will be.

People tend to react, populations tends to react on a basic sense of fairness, and a basic disposition to another state, whereas leaders might make closer calculations of national interest. And you see this in the whole series of Pew polls and other polls that have been done recently in terms of basic attitudes towards the United States, and the willingness of people to cooperate with us on tough enforcement.

So, I think the way, or a way that we need to address this, both the strengthening of the rules, but also the strengthening of the commitment to enforce them, is to think in terms of universal compliance with nonproliferation rules and norms. And compliance there means more than signatures on treaties, or declarations of intent. And in the past, for decades, people focused on getting folks to sign up to treaties and we didn’t focus enough on actual compliance with those treaties, and that’s one of those things that the Bush Administration, especially, has done and they should be commended for that, is to focus on compliance. Treaties are only as good as the compliance with them.

Now, universal means that all actors must comply with the rules that apply to them. So, it includes not only states that join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but it also has to include the three states that decided not to join, and individuals and corporations. So, the universal and nonproliferation regime we set up and that we have until now is based entirely on states that voluntarily joined. That won’t suffice in the world that we’re living in now. You need a universal regime that applies to everybody, including those that didn’t sign the treaties to join.

Again, you’re going to have to offer incentives and inducements for people to support that change, that very strong ratcheting up of this system. The U.S., again, to its credit and the other members of the permanent five on the Security Council, are in the midst of an exercise to do just this.

Some of you may have seen the story in The Washington Post today. There is a U.N. Security Council Resolution whose basic purpose is to develop laws and rules that would deal with what happened out of Pakistan and the terror -- the non-state actor problem. It would apply obligations to every country to develop and enforce laws that would prohibit the transfer and other forms of assistance involved in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

So what, for example, was happening out of Pakistan, the provision of designs for nuclear weapons, centrifuge components and so on, that was not necessarily illegal internationally. It didn’t violate Pakistani law, and so the object here is to establish, actually, that anywhere in the world this would -- this would be forbidden. The resolution goes on beyond that. It’s also done under Chapter 7 of the Security Council, which is very important in that Chapter 7 obligates all states to then follow the enforcement that will be required, whether it’s sanctions or force.

Now, this is exactly what should be done and the Administration should be commended and the other Security Council partners should be commended for this. But what’s interesting is there’s a strong resistance now to passing this resolution. Pakistan, Germany, Brazil, South Africa are opposing it, and again, their arguments are interesting and point to this problem that I alluded to in terms of giving incentives. Pakistan’s resistance is primarily that it would prohibit the kinds of things that were happening in Pakistan. They worry very much that it would give the U.N. or any state like the U.S. a greater lever to come into Pakistan and impose sanctions and other kinds of punitive measures against Pakistan.

Other states also worry about this infringement on their sovereignty. They argue that this is the Security Council, in essence, legislating so that rather than national legislatures, each coming up with their own ideas, there’s a template, the Security Council say, basically, under penalty of enforcement, everybody’s got to pass laws that conform to these basic standards. Some people say, "Wait a minute. That’s not the way the world’s supposed to work."

And then others are saying, some of these same states are saying, "All this is fine and you’re focusing on getting non-state actors and everything else, but where is the disarmament commitment?" The original bargain in nonproliferation was that nobody’s supposed to have these weapons. You’re allowed -- the U.S. and others are allowed to have nuclear weapons, but it’s temporary. Where’s your commitment? Where’s that being strengthened to actually get rid of these things? And so they want more equity.

I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but clearly there’s a -- there’s a challenge that the U.S. and the other five permanent members of the Security Council have, who also possess nuclear weapons. And the challenge is, for those who possess nuclear weapons and are key to writing these rules, to convince everybody that the new rules don’t just advantage the nuclear weapon holders, but actually will advantage everybody, including those who’ve given up nuclear weapons. And so, that challenge is an enormous one.

Now, there are other steps that the Security Council, or other national entities like that International Atomic Energy Agency, are going to have to take to, again, broaden and intensify the rules on nonproliferation. I won’t go into them here. There are some proposals. Henry’s developed a number of these proposals. The government of France is developing them, and some of them are reflected in President Bush’s speech of February, a major nonproliferation speech, which again, pointed in very promising directions of what needs to be done.

Let me close by coming to the topic that much of the world wants the U.S. and the other weapon states to do more on, and which we don’t like to talk about here. And that’s the question of, we’ve made a commitment to totally eliminate nuclear arsenals. That is a commitment under the Nonproliferation Treaty. It’s been reaffirmed in 1995 and in 2000, in international negotiations. It’s an international commitment. And the problem is that many in the world don’t think we and China and Russia and others take this commitment seriously. And at the same time, many national security officials in the nuclear weapon states think we shouldn’t take it seriously. And so, there is this conflict where much of the world is feeling that this bargain is coming apart.

And what I would suggest is that no state has ever actually done a close analysis of what it would take to eliminate nuclear arsenals. And so, that what we ought to do now in this process is require the eight states that possess nuclear weapons today, to submit white papers, whether to the IAEA or the General Assembly, analyzing in their view what it would take for them to eliminate nuclear weapons. What kind of security conditions would have to be created? What other actors in the world would have to do? What kind of verification would be required, so that you had any confidence that the last weapons around you were also removed?

Big question, how would nuclear power exist or be able to exist in a world without nuclear weapons? Because if you needed enrichment capability to fuel nuclear power plants and states had given up their last weapon, the possibility that these fuel plants could be diverted for one weapon, one secret weapon, would be such an enormous threat if you had -- if you had zero, that you have to ask, "How would -- how would people allow the ongoing use of nuclear power?" And if that were problematic, how does that affect the developing world and others who want nuclear disarmament, but also want nuclear power.

None of these issues have been systematically addressed, and the argument would be that as a way to forward the international discussion, demonstrate seriousness on the part of the weapon states, but also require the advocates of disarmament to stop relying on slogans and, actually, to be serious about it. This kind of assessment ought to be required as a submission by each of the eight nuclear weapon states to demonstrate that they take this commitment at least seriously enough to study it. Let me stop there.

MR. HENRY SOKOLSKI: My name’s Henry Sokolski. I’m with the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. I think the two papers that I distributed, I guess the gist of them is, now for the bad news. There’s a way to think about the spread of nuclear weapons and the possible use of them that would make the terrorists’ attack against an American city possibly look as though it was what in the Cold War they would describe as "lesser included threat." That would be one that if you could deal with the Soviet Union during the Cold War you didn’t have to worry about North Korea because it, North Korea, was a lesser included threat. You could deal with it easily if you could deal with the bigger threat, and that was the Soviet Union.

Roughly, the title for my talk today is, "Nuclear 1914: The Next Big Worry." I think, roughly, if you’ve seen -- have any of you seen the speech or presentation by George Schultz on the importance of states in a world that might have terrorists that would use terrible weapons? Have any of you seen this? I recommend it. I think they -- Schultz’s presentation or argument can be found in the Wall Street Journal opinion page, but he’s presented a number of places. And his argument, I think, is a very, very seductive one and one that deserves much more discussion and debate, or focus, by all parts of the political spectrum. And what he argues is that states must be held accountable. States must be made powerful. States, and the state system after all, is what’s coming under attack, particularly with the prospect of nuclear terrorism. And that, unless states are strong enough, we will not win against the War on Terror.

I kind of like that argument, because it puts things in a perspective that’s serious, that is to say something that we claim we’re concerned about, which is the power of the United States, is at stake if you believe this argument in a way that losing a city and trying to detect things, which is a very tough things to do. It’s serious, but it’s very tough to the point where I’m not sure we’re cut out for that line of work.

Now, before I go any further, let me try to answer the five questions that this conference was dedicated to try to answer, briefly, in the light of what it is that I’m arguing in this paper, which you can read and is much more accurate then anything I could orally present anyway.

First question, what has the recent revelations from AQ Khan taught us about the channels of proliferation and the network connecting Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Malaysia and others? I guess the first thing it teaches us is, it always pays to act on first indications. We knew about some of the key actors here, not weeks ago, not years ago, decades ago. We did not pursue what we knew. One of the books that I can recommend, which has a very racy title, which I also recommend for you to think about, is a book called The Islamic Bomb.

And it turns out I had to remind someone from The Financial Times, a fellow named Steven Fidler, who produced an article about three weeks ago showing that the names in this book, names that were published in 1980, were still present in a fashion with regard to the latest Khan network. First names had changed, because the fathers died and passed the business on to their sons. Last names remain the same. To my knowledge, these people who were engaged in the activities of helping Pakistan secure the means to make its bombs, and then worked with Mr. Khan to help him distribute this knowledge, were not pressed upon particularly by the authorities, all those many 25 years. So, that’s the first thing.

The second thing that we’ve learned is that the price lines, timelines, manpower lines, and requirements associated with making a nuclear weapon now have come way down to the point where we no longer have the luxury of acting upon complete intelligence. Never did, but now, even less so. I can go into that in more detail, but won’t.

Which poses a greater proliferation threat, rogue regimes or terrorist groups? Well, I guess, until we get rid of rogue regimes, the answer is both, and I think George’s point until the end of history is realized in a happy way, a lot of the problem lies in some of the states that provide the means to make these things. That would include us and our friends.

What lessons are there in Libya’s recent conversion? Well, sometimes it pays to set your standards high, something we don’t normally do because we have some conflicting interest. By the way, every time we set our standards high and act on first indications, we have a success story and there are many. We just don’t generally do that, because a lot of these cases that deal with nuclear proliferation involve countries that we have a conflicting interest with.

There’s Russia. Well, we want to make believe Russia’s a great place, or China is a friend, and that other countries are allies. And so, don’t press too quickly and don’t press too hard. That is the route of mischief and trouble and, I think, we’ve seen this over and over again, and I don’t even have to get into naming names. I’m sure your head will be filled with possible ideas on this, if you’re familiar with just recent news.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Bush policy? Well, we’ve heard about enforcement. They get an "A" for enforcement and that’s terribly important. I think this Administration more so than perhaps any other has made people actually worry about whether they’re compliant. That’s different, and absolutely critical for there to be an future in this line of business, nonproliferation.

Where are they weak? Nuclear power, somebody has put something in the water. I see there’s someone here today from the White House. Take this back. Ronald Regan really should still be a hero. I think he was and is a hero and not just for Republicans, but for Americans. And one of the things that he did and he did right was argue, and forcefully, that the U.S. federal government should not be spending money on commercialization projects. That’s code for corporate subsidies for projects that ought to be privately funded, but aren’t because they can’t make a nickel. This is different than research.

Boy, do we need to wire brush our budget! It will not meet that standard by a long shot, and it ought to, and conservatives and liberals ought to get to work on that. Last time I checked, we don’t have so much money we can’t save some, and there are a lot of things that are very expensive and very dangerous and very unnecessary in the energy budget. For some reason, we are not focusing on that. We should, particularly as Republicans.

Also, there’s this probably too great an emphasis on making distinctions between friends and enemies with regard to nonproliferation rules in this Administration. It’s okay up to a point, but I think the more we do it, the tougher it is ever to get any kind of rule that’s enforceable over the long haul. The Clinton Administration did this out of other motives. We had one rule for North Korea, one rule for Iran. That’s to say, we helped them build light water reactors in North Korea, but we were against anyone building them in Iran. I think that’s instructive, and certainly, as Republicans, I know we made a great deal of hay out of that.

Well, so we need to be careful ourselves. I think when we say that people ought to sign up to certain rules with regard to the nuclear suppliers group, we ought to then take China, for example, who says they want to become a member and say, "Well, live up to the rules." Instead, they immediately show that they are not interested in doing that by pledging they want to sell reactors to Pakistan, which with all due respect to the representative of -- well, is he here still? No, well, it’s a problem. Pakistan is a problem. It’s not such a clean case. Could -- I think arguably it’s the worst proliferators right now and, certainly, arguably ever.

So, to allow China to make these sales in violation of the rules of the nuclear suppliers group and not say anything seems odd, especially since the next thing we’re doing is trying to sell subsidized reactor design work to China. That kind of inattention to detail. Also, how we’re treating Brazil right now. It just undermines an awful lot of the important good work that’s being done on the enforcement front. So, I would hope that would stop.

How might proposals presented before the United Nations be improved? I think we have to recognize that the U.N. and the IAEA are weak sisters, and in weak sisters in this respect, they are very loath to be decisive. It takes a lot, even more than it takes to get Congress to do something to get these bodies to make a decisive move. A good example is, the IAEA finally after a decade said that North Korea was in violation of the NPT. That resolution has been sitting at the U.N. since February of 2002. Now, some of that’s due to the United States, but an awful lot of it is due to Russia and China, and even more of it has to do with the gestalt of the U.N., which is, if there’s an argument against doing something, let’s not do it.

I think, therefore, it would be very smart to recognize this natural characteristic of the U.N. and of the IAEA, and leverage that knowledge. How would you do that? Well, if you knew it was hard for a body to make a decisive decision, maybe you should reach agreements about very minimal things that we would do until and unless they were able to make a decisive decision about certain things. Like, can we say clearly that someone is in full compliance? If they can’t, then, it follows a certain minimal things should be done by members of the U.N. with regard to the country that cannot clearly be found in full compliance.

Now, having answered those question, I’m going to stop because if you read the paper, it’ll be refreshing and different than what I’ve said and I’d like to get to the Q&As. I think everyone does.

MR. KEIPER: While you’re up there, can you actually explain some of these hand-drawn pictures that appear at the end of the -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- Oh, well -- .

MR. KEIPER: -- If you don’t have a copy of his comments, we’ve got a copy over here, and they’re followed by some -- some what look like useful illustrations. So, if you’d be willing to explain them for a minute?

MR. SOKOLSKI: Well, I always love the trying to get a picture of some idea. The thesis of this paper, which you can read, is that on two fronts it’s quite likely that there might be a big war or a nuclear attack, because states, including the United States, might not on the one hand, share the kind of information they need to with one another to catch networks that are spreading nuclear technology, or to track down nuclear terrorists, themselves, who either have already exploded a device or are planning to do so.

Now, we have some indications that that stinginess in sharing is in play. We do have the problem of Pakistan, having difficulty giving access to Mr. Khan, not being very forthright about what might have happened in the past. We have the problem of Brazil now, who has hidden much of the source identity information with regard to its centrifuges and has only recently said that it might agree to allow inspectors to come in, undoubtedly after they’ve taken care of some serial numbers, filing them off, and getting rid of information that might tell us where they got their centrifuges from.

That suggests that as more countries get nuclear ready, or get nuclear weapons, they’re going to behave much more like these two examples. That’s not good news. That means that the nuclear terrorists have, perhaps, an upper hand. The other example, of course, gets to these charts and that is, well, what about how countries would behave towards one another as more countries become, I call them, "nuclear ready," or have nuclear weapons.

I guess the back page is the most fun. I mean you see something that looks simple, gets a little more complex, and then as one person pointed out, the last chart looks like a ball of yarn. The first one is a depiction, crude, but a depiction of the Cold War in which there was one critical strategic military balance. And mostly, countries phoned Moscow or Washington before they started a war; mostly. Not in every case. I’m told there have been over a hundred wars, by the way, during the Cold Ward period, only two of which have been approved by the U.N.

Now, the second one is kind of interesting. That’s sort of today. Here, you have 21 possible strategic relationships. I guess that doesn’t sound too bad. What we have here are organizations or entities that have nuclear weapons, and what we’ve done to kind of deal with the uncertainty that this might produce (because if they were independent nuclear weapon states, things could get very nerve wracking), what we’ve done in the United States, generally, is made these countries non-NATO allies or strategic partners.

Now, that’s pretty good, as long as the United States is the biggest country with the most conventional capability in the world, it sort of works. I guess China is a question mark? I don’t know. I couldn’t quite call it a strategic partner or a non-NATO ally, but we’re working on that. I fully expect another six or eight years they’ll be a strategic partner, too.

Now, if you add to these 21 possible strategic relationships these other countries as nuclear ready in let’s say, oh, 10 or more years, you then get a 136 chances for strategic miscalculation. The previous charts, I think, indicate why. I tried to depict the Congress of Vienna. This is really academic stuff. You’re -- .

MR. KEIPER: -- I’m almost regretting having asked.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Well, exactly! This second one is 1914, where you did have alliances, but they were very loose and they encouraged action rather than contain it. That’s not that different from where we may be heading if other countries, say like China, become -- and India become stronger countries, and that’s what you want to avoid as well. So, that’s what the charts are about.

MR. KEIPER: Excellent! Thanks.

Thanks to all three of you. Before we start our discussion, I’d like to remind everybody that as we talk if you can speak into the mikes that would be great, since this is being recorded. And Mr. Cochran, it’s been hinted to me that maybe the rest of your slides have some useful or interesting things on them, including apparently a scene of San Francisco in bad condition. Is that right?

MR. COCHRAN: Well, you really ought to -- those who are interested have to be sectioned (?). I can give you sort of a world tour of nuclear sites, but it doesn’t have a lot of policy behind it, so unless we want to talk about these various places. So, I would suggest we -- .

MR. KEIPER: -- Well, okay. While you’re by the microphone then, let me ask you a question raised by Mr. Perkovich’s about the matter of how the world would handle nuclear energy if we had a regime in place where nuclear weapons weren’t out there. That is to say, how do we deal with the matter of nations that want to have nuclear power and ensure that they don’t become weapon states?

MR. COCHRAN: Well, there’s no simple solution. In the United States on the issue of nuclear power, we should recognize, at least for the time being, nuclear power, new nuclear plants are uneconomical. So, we -- as Henry said, we shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing their construction.

It isn’t going to make them economical if, as the Department of Energy is proposing, that we -- and as Domenici had in his energy plan that was filibustered -- we offer the industry these huge billion dollar subsidies to build new plants. If you build four new plants, you’ll have 108 plants instead of 104 and you won’t be any better off in terms of global warming and other issues.

On the international front, there are only a few places, countries where there’s really a real market for new nuclear plants. I would say realistically what the United States should be doing is insisting on the closed fuel cycle and adamantly oppose any reprocessing globally, which is grossly uneconomic, and should oppose construction of enrichment plants in non-weapon states.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Sokolski, you wanted to address that?

MR. SOKOLSKI: I actually would go further. Again, I think the invisible hand of Adam Smith suggests, at a minimum, we should be demanding of ourselves and everyone else that they actually compete any large nuclear project with safer alternatives. I mean, people who are building research reactors need to get a telephone book and make some phone calls. There is a surfeit of research reactor capacity in this world. There is no reason to be building your own, unless -- unless in the case of a large research reactor -- I’m not talking about small ones that can’t produce a bomb’s worth in anything but many, many decades -- unless, of course, you’re hedging your bets -- .

Similarly, it seems to me that anytime you have a large reactor you have fresh fuel coming in and you have spent fuel coming out, and you always have something in the reactor that’s cooking, that could be -- all of which can be made into bomb material relatively quickly if there is a covert research -- excuse me, reprocessing or enrichment line somewhere. And we know that we’re not very good at finding covert reprocessing or enrichment lines. We know about the ones we know about, but we also know we don’t know about a fair number in North Korea, I’m thinking in particular, where they are, for example.

That then suggests that we need to use this standard of -- of free market competition even with regard to reactors. That unless countries open up bidding for let’s say a certain amount of power requirement and just let the market indicate what are the alternatives and what they cost, that project should be viewed very suspiciously.

On top of that, of course, what Tom is talking about and what the President of the United States is talking about, is long overdue and that is, no new additional reprocessing or enrichment, if only because there is a pause, and we will use this pause of probably the next 20 to 40 years to find out everything about global warming, everything about the merits and demerits of hydrogen and how to make it. We have the time to actually get this right. Let’s not rush to get it wrong.

MR. COCHRAN: Just to go back to your earlier question, we did a calculation of what would just a terrorist HEU weapon do, and for San Francisco, we just arbitrarily put one at the corner of Market and Powell (?), and as the April average weather condition fallout pattern, the inner circle sort of quarter mile circle, you would get pretty much total destruction. The fallout pattern in this case goes -- let’s see if I can flip over here -- blows primarily over the Bay, and so, the consequences are smaller than they would be for other wind conditions. But in -- for a one kiloton device you’re getting sort of 35,000 casualties, which is about half of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You need to -- you should recognize that there is a big difference between a terrorist ground burst and the weapons that were exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that those weapons, the fire -- they were exploded at altitude and the fireball didn’t touch the ground, so you don’t get any local fallout. And, whereas this is more likely to be a ground burst.

We did a similar calculation, a one-kiloton device at Pier 1, which is 100 yards from the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side, and we did this for that ABC News broadcast a year earlier. And ABC taped it all, but decided not to run it, because it would scare the New Yorkers to death. It was -- there, the casualties were comparable to Nagasaki or Hiroshima with the wind blowing sort of up the East River.

So, a terrorist weapon, ground burst weapon in a sort of well-located in terms of population density, will do the same damage or comparable amount of damage as the weapons we dropped on Japan. So, this is a -- you shouldn’t just think of these terrorists’ use of nuclear materials as sort of small potatoes. This is in the tactical nuclear weapon variety of old U.S. artillery shells in terms of lethality.

MR. KEIPER: Can I ask, what’s the lesson to draw from the ABC News investigations that you did? Is it just that our inspections at the ports are currently insufficient, or is it that, as you came close to suggesting at the end of your remarks, they’ll never be sufficient to protect us and that we shouldn’t keep investing in these gamma ray detectors?

MR. COCHRAN: No -- I don’t. The detection systems being put in place, which you know are going to be quite expensive to get sort of full coverage of borders and seaports, will detect a wide variety of dirty bomb type materials, and probably they will be pretty good at detecting plutonium. Now, there are other ways to beat the system. I mean we import marijuana regularly from a variety of places undetected, and we smuggle people across the borders on a regular basis. So, you can beat the system in any case, but they have independent utility for detecting radioactive materials. They just do not detect the type of radioactivity -- the radioactive material that represents the greatest threat to the United States, and that is, terrorists’ use of highly enriched uranium. They just won’t work, so we need something else.

Now, we’ve had a program in the federal government called the RERTR Program (Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactors). It was started by the Carter Administration. It’s been poking along, but it’s a -- was a voluntary program. It’s -- we -- this Administration started a similar program with the Russians to go after highly enriched uranium in Russian reactors and Russian reactors exported abroad. And there is a program with the Russians to try to round up this -- the RTGs, the radioactive batteries that we used in particularly along the northern -- the Artic Coast of Russia. These were -- you may recall there were a couple of these things that were stolen by some people in the Ukraine, but were caught. These people were caught.

The programs exist. They just -- if you’re going to spend $10 billion a year at Fort Greeley, why aren’t you spending -- giving the same attention to intercepting highly enriched uranium, to rounding it up. We’re just not -- it’s just a -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- Tom, in all fairness, it’s worse than that isn’t it? I mean, as someone who likes missile defense you see. Well, okay, we differ, but oddly enough, where we agree we don’t focus enough energy on. We are going to be spending roughly $6 billion plus dollars -- .

MR. COCHRAN: Fort Greeley.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Yes. Well, fine. You need one of Savannah River for the MOX facility.

MR. COCHRAN: Right.

MR. SOKOLSKI: I don’t know why you don’t put that up there. You’re -- .

MR. COCHRAN: -- I’m going to get some money from you and put that up there.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Well, you don’t need money from me. You just need a different slide, a different audience. There is a program now where we are increasing the accessibility, certainly if we do it in Russia, of bomb material; some 8,500 crude bombs’-worth of plutonium, and we’re spending money on that? You could take that money, unplug it, and use it and have more than enough left over to do many, many other things that you probably want to do.

MR. COCHRAN: I’m in total agreement with you. I mean, I -- the U.S. Government is running a number of programs that are counterproductive to the real threat to the United States. They’re exacerbating it. One of them is the MOX program, which is designed to eliminate 34 tons of Russian plutonium, but that’s only 15 percent of their inventory, and it’ll be done over a period of multi-decades, if they could ever get the program started which -- and they’ve spent ten years without any success of starting the program in Russia. And if they started it, they would simply in that 40-year period be introducing new nodes where one can steal plutonium. So, it’s -- it’s -- there are better alternatives than the Russian MOX program. We have U.S. MOX program solely to -- so that there’s a parallel effort to encourage the Russians to do something we shouldn’t be doing.

MR. KEIPER: One more question before we go to the audience. Mr. Perkovich, you -- you mentioned that President Bush maybe has had insufficient teamwork in terms of fighting the battles of proliferation, but the Clintons -- the Clinton years were years of insufficient resolve. Could you talk about that a little more? How would you characterize the fight against proliferation in the 1990s, especially with the perspective we have today, say, you know, North Korea?

MR. PERKOVICH: Well, North Korea has proved the devil both to the Clinton and the Bush Administrations, and their approaches have been somewhat similar. But I think in the ’90s, you know, Pakistan is an example, where the Clinton Administration -- the first Bush Administration imposed sanctions on Pakistan in October of 1990 for nonproliferation after, basically, five years of looking the other way as they were building nuclear weapons for reasons that Henry alluded to and other priorities.

So there were sanctions throughout the 1990s on Pakistan, but that’s one of the traps of sanctions. These are congressionally mandated, which is -- at that point, then people said, "Well, we’re doing everything we can, we’ve got the sanctions on." And they weren’t working the problem. And the Clinton administration didn’t continue to work the problem as it should have. The A.Q. Khan network was out, starting to sell things, and my sense is there just wasn’t enough attention on that effort, that problem, in pushing for enforcement. They pushed hard privately on China to enforce better its nonproliferation obligations, but again there were lots of conflicting interests regard China -- so you don’t push so hard because you’re going to get something from them. Same with Russia.

This is -- this happens with every administration, but it -- but I would say that the Clinton Administration didn’t put as much priority on nonproliferation in its dealing with Russia, China, Pakistan and others, as it -- as it perhaps should have and could have. The Bush Administration, especially Under Secretary Bolton, you know, has been very kind of adamant on -- on focusing this issue. But, the problem there has been that it’s been selective.

So he’s taken a dive on Pakistan. He’s taken a dive on Syria, and arguably Egypt, because they’re under the same issue. There’s tradeoffs. We need them to help in Iraq. We need them to help patrol the Gaza Strip, if -- if Sharon’s pulling out. The Egyptians were counting on them coming in. We can’t hammer them on proliferation if we’re begging them to come in and -- and cover Sharon’s trail.

So you make that calculation. But in general, Undersecretary Bolton has been adamant. The problem is it’s been done in a way and in a context where nobody else particularly wants to follow us for lots of -- of reasons, of style, tone, domestic politics. You know, if you go out and travel around, the U.S. is a lightning rod. I mean, you go to places and people -- . You know, I come in, I get attacked for being part of the Bush Administration when I travel, and Henry can laugh.

MR. SOKOLSKI: It’s gotten that bad?

MR. PERKOVICH: I mean, you know, I mean it truly is. You talk about nonproliferation, people put their finger in your chest and they’re saying, "You people aren’t coming and knocking down our doors." I go, you know, "That wasn’t me." And they say, "No, no. Forget it. I know what you want to do. You guys want come knock down doors."

And so, this is part of the problem of you got to build support. People have to be willing to do what we’re asking them to do -- as we’re finding out in Iraq and other places -- and that’s where you’ve got to then marry-up, have real dedication to enforcement with a manner of building legitimacy and support for what it is you’re trying to do. And it’s well -- Bob Kagan’s written about it. It’s, you know, not rocket science.

MR. KEIPER: Let’s get some questions from the audience first.

MR. ERIC COHEN: Eric Cohen, Ethics and Public Policy. Henry and George, you guys both focused on what we should -- for the most part anyway -- what we should do to try to stop or curb the proliferation problem. I wonder if I might get you to speculate not on what we should do, but what’s likely to happen. The ball of yarn is sort of depressing.

But, given what you know about the sort of technological realities of making and trying to track weapons, given the sort of political fault lines of the world, the people that want to attack us, in the powerful ways that they can, and given Americans’ intelligence capabilities, or lack thereof, I wonder if you might speculate on how likely attack is, what’s the best realistic -- what’s the most realistic best case scenario as you see it looking ahead? And what’s the realistic worst case scenario as you see it looking ahead?

MR. SOKOLSKI: Okay. The worst I’ve tried to paint here, not only with the pictures, but in the text, and that is about 60 kilograms of highly enriched uranium is dropped 10 feet into one piece of 70 -- 60 kilograms is dropped into the other portion and you get a kiloton yield. San Francisco goes. And the whole world watches and asks whether or not the United States is up to pushing back on this event so that it doesn’t happen again. And it does happen again.

Roughly, you know, the first sacking of Rome wasn’t the problem; it was the second sacking, because then everybody knew, oh, my God, you can get away with it. And then the empire fell apart. And there’s an expression, from Hillel, so that men shouldn’t "...swallow each other whole." That’s what would happen.

Also, I give you some state scenarios where not being attentive to what’s going on in the margins of nuclear ready activities in Saudi Arabia or Taiwan, and couple of other places, you get the United States drawn into a war except, this time, the ammunition is nuclear. That is quite possible. That’s what the "Nuclear 1914" is about, an assassin starting a major military competition that lasts for 70 years and wipes out several hundreds of millions of people. It’s possible. That was what the 20th Century was. Except, we didn’t have the means to kill enough people; now, we will.

Now, the best. Somehow, without a nuclear explosion -- and I’m very skeptical that this possible. I think that we’re going to have to have a nuclear explosion to see whether we’re up to this. Somehow, the United States and some of its closest friends are able to convince people that they’re serious about rounding up the hue, about stopping the subsidies that make material more available, about disciplining the system with regard to enforcement, such that a third pillar of international relations is established.

I think we’re familiar with the first two pillars of modern international relations. The first was freedom of the seas and commerce. There is a common international usage that gave rise or came -- it was reflected by that pillar. It’s called piracy, anti-piracy common usage. Which means that any of us here need not have any script to stop a pirate. We can do this without having clear, legal script. We’re all empowered as citizens of the world to stop pirates. I don’t whether you know this but, if you’re ever out cruising and you suspect a pirate, you’re empowered. Okay?

The same thing applies to the second pillar. By the way, this explains a good number of wars, to keep freedom at sea, or at least we argued this. The First World War we got in because our neutrality was violated.

The second pillar, roughly -- I don’t have the right words to express it, but I think you’ll know what I mean -- the humane treatment of people. Roughly, this explains sort of our case against fascists and communists. Lincoln’s case more or less against ultimately slavery. And it has a common usage. You and I also, any place, any time, we see someone being enslaved are empowered to act.

We need a third one. And this is what I’ve argued and what I believe John Bolton has taken onboard. That third pillar is the illicit trade -- particularly of nuclear weapons related materials -- should be considered out of bounds. And even, if necessary, the cause for war, which is actually sort of roughly what we said we were doing, right, with regard to Iraq and why we put our foot down so hard in the case of Libya. And why we’d probably have to be pretty tough with regard to North Korea and Iran. That’s your optimistic case.

But boy, we have a distance to go. You’ll notice in my testimony I come up with seven other ideas. The average bureaucrat would faint reading those things. But, those are the minimal things that we’d have to do.

MR. COCHRAN: How do you square your last requirement with a policy of the United States to retain 10,000 nuclear weapons?

MR. SOKOLSKI: Okay. It’s a reasonable question. First of all, I think we’re not retaining 10,000 so much as some of them are in reserve, and so that’s an issue. But, the number deployed does continue to decline.

The short answer it seems to me is that like -- well, you have to keep tabs on the neighborhood. If the neighborhood becomes a world full of Australias and Canadas, I don’t see any problem any more than Ronald Reagan or Mr. Truman saw a problem with total disarmament with regard to nuclear weapons. If, however, the world continues to be attracted to having these or getting them on the ready, there is a problem, and it’s nothing that getting rid of our weapons unilaterally is going to solve.

But, there’s no question in mind, and I have actually made arguments and proposals in this Heritage Lecture that our reliance on these weapons is declining, and we ought to cash in with regard to some restraints that would be reasonable on ourselves that would be very helpful to place on the Pakistans, the Israels and the Indias.

And one of them, I think, is no redeployment of nuclear weapons in peacetime on other countries’ soil. We needed to do this before we had the technology and we’ve put a lot of them in Europe and other places. I think we ought to get out of that business. And we are, anyway. We’re leaving Europe. We’re not going to leave the weapons there, so -- .

MR. COHEN: I’d like to get George on this, but one quick follow-up.

Do you, Henry, foresee any strategic use of American nuclear weapons?

MR. SOKOLSKI: Sure. When we get dragged into a war. When someone starts firing them at us. I’ve always been impressed that civilians are very attracted to do things that don’t make military sense.

I set up one of the first war games where nuclear weapons were used in a marine setting, and the first things civilians wanted to do was retaliate in large numbers. I would assume that that urge would still be there. Under some circumstances, it’s conceivable to me that nuclear weapons use might make some military sense, but it’s a sorry business. And the inclination generally of our military is to stay clear of it because they can see generally much better war scenarios without it, if they are properly prepared with precision strike.

MR. COCHRAN: I want to show -- I want to show a few figures here.

This is our U.S. Naval Strategic Submarine Base at Bangor. And I just show this to give you some visual view of the nuclear capacity of the United States.

This is the Delta Pier. Here are two strategic submarines, one in dry dock and one along side the pier. We did a calculation which you can get off the web, and I will refer you to -- I will simply suggest you email me and we will send you this URL and the password and so forth, and you can get the -- you can tour around and see what the Russian nuclear weapons program looks like. And it’s not too different from the U.S. program.

But, we did calculations of what just an exchange would be between the U.S. and Russia. If -- the calculation was what would a -- a major attack option against the Russian nuclear assets with a withhold on cities look like and it’s about 17 million casualties on the average. His particular worst case scenario for one particular missiles feel, results in Russia -- the way the wind blows over Moscow -- and so it would take out Moscow and, in this case, the casualties from this 60 targets alone would be comparable -- would get you to the same bay.

You can hold at risk the one-third of the Russian population if you change the targeting. This is not something necessarily proposed, but just to give you an idea of the lethality of the assets. If you took one of those submarines, just one, loaded it with W-88 warheads and from the Atlantic targeted the 192 most populated areas in Russia on -- east of the -- west of the Urals, you could hold at risk 50 million people, a third of the Russian population. So you don’t need 10,000 nuclear weapons. I mean, you need a few hundred nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes.

Henry says these 10,000 are just sort of -- a lot of them in reserve. Well, here are some of them. If you flew into Las Vegas, over in this area is the Nellis Air Force Base right here, and Sam’s Town Racetrack, and over here is the -- one of the Air Forces’ depots for nuclear weapons. Row upon row upon row of bunkers of nuclear weapons. There’s a similar site like that at Bangor for the Navy weapons on the Pacific coast. We just go inland a little bit and you see, not only the strategic submarine warheads, but the nuclear cruise missiles and torpedoes and so forth.

MR. KEIPER: And the argument that you’re making in showing these is just that we have too many nukes?

MR. COCHRAN: We have too many nukes. We should get -- you know, we should negotiate them away with Russia. It’s crazy to have Russian nuclear weapons on alert with the -- with Russian nuclear forces that are just not, in my judgment, are not people you’d like to have managing nuclear weapons. I mean, they’re just not -- they’re not putting the money and the manpower into -- into operating those programs safely. And yet, we keep thousands of nuclear weapons on alert solely to target their nuclear weapons infrastructure. And we should just get -- negotiate those away. And if we don’t negotiate those away, I don’t see any way you’re going to solve these problems with India and Pakistan and North Korea and the like.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Perkovich, did you want to answer Eric’s question?

MR. PERKOVICH: Yeah. I mean, I think this exchange has been very -- very useful and I’d -- to me, because you can spin out all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios. To me, kind of in the current moment, the pivotal question is Iran in the sense that, if you can -- if collectively in the EU -- the three EU states -- France, UK and Germany -- are gonna have to take the lead on this in many ways, but the U.S. can help.

If you can persuade or compel Iran to give up permanently its fuel cycle capability and the acquisition of fuel cycle capability, and thereby come close -- I mean, Henry will have a caveat -- but make real significant progress in demonstrating to yourself and the world that Iran is not acquiring nuclear weapons any more, and that you tackled that problem, followed on the success of Libya and so on, I think you can create a dynamic internationally that says this problem -- that the system can handle this problem. When it gets challenged or if somebody gets caught, there’s a way, there’s a discipline to actually enforce the rules and roll back the threat. And then you can extrapolate that out and it’s a very important development in international politics.

Conversely, precisely because Iran has gotten caught, unlike North Korea, before it acquired nuclear weapons or before Iran acquired what we think could be nuclear weapons, it got caught, the light got shone on it. The cop aimed and said, "Freeze!" And if they kind of laugh and walk away and keep doing what they were doing and get away with that, that implication internationally is, I would argue, profoundly negative. And so it really is this -- this pivotal case, I think.

Now, the metaphor breaks down because it isn’t clear that shooting Iran right now in the spotlight actually will solve the problem in terms of what happens to the cop who shoots him, which could be the U.S. There are lots of really bad things that could happen at that moment, because the use of force is not so feasible in Iran right now. And so it’s more complicated than the metaphor, but the problem is essentially that. That we can’t tolerate their getting away with this.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Isn’t there a more modest formulation other than -- I always call it the "bomb and grovel shuffle," where you go from hugging, you know, really skin-pocked, knee-capping nasty people -- who are not going to give their weapons up by the way -- or, you’re threatening to do something which you really don’t want to do and nobody wants you to do and you’re not going to do, which is bomb.

Wouldn’t it make some sense, given the sound points you’ve made, to simply shoot for a more modest point and that is it would be useful if you could get anyone to follow Libya’s example -- by the way, I recommend we focus on Algeria because I think that’s more doable -- and then perhaps with that, you’ve got the momentum to do another of other things in the region. On the one hand.

And on the other hand, if Iran does give you a Bronx cheer -- which looks likely by the way; they’re doing it; they’ve been doing it -- you do need to think about how to set some kind of example with regard to the others that’s convincing so that they don’t follow in pursuit. I don’t know that that requires bombing.

MR. PERKOVICH: Oh, no, and I agree. I mean, I -- and we’ve talked about it some and we tend to agree on this.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Right.

MR. PERKOVICH: I mean, there’s a range of things you can do that -- that kind of meet Henry’s criteria. I’m not as convinced that if you did those things, you actually couldn’t solve the Iran problem either. In other words, I’m not prepared to give up on the Iran problem. But, there are these things that you can do, you know, which include various forms of sanctions, changing the rules so that, you know, nobody can withdraw from the NPT without, you know, kind of -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- Well, and also just simply eliminating what Iran will do once people think it has nuclear weapons, or if you get them. They’ll shake down the neighborhood, just like Iraq did financially. Say we’d like you to invest in our government directly from your government. And that’s how Iraq operated for 10 years. That’s how we got all that Saudi money, for example.

They will probably try to make it look as though they have control of the Straits of Hormuz and we should not blink right now. I think -- ideal time to be pushing a Montreal convention, much like this operative in the Straits of Dardanelles near Constantinople. Why? Because it will put Iran off its diplomatic game if you start working those things now. Those are the things they think they can solve by being nuclear ready. We should deprive them of that right off.

MR. KEIPER: Okay, some more questions from the audience. First Mr. Costopoulos and then we’ll get this gentleman from Congresswoman Harris’s office.

MR. PHIL COSTOPOULOS: Thanks. I just -- I’m Phil Costopoulos from the National Endowment for Democracy. I just wonder how much leverage you’re gonna have with actors like Iran and North Korea if you basically let it be known that force is off the table. What if they -- what if we don’t really know why they want them? Rafsanjani has said publicly he wants nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Maybe he really means it. Maybe the North Koreans just want nuclear weapons so they can sell them to retain their regime. Maybe there’s no incentive, no sanction that will make them give them up. Then what do we do?

Secondly -- my second question is, on the question of our nuclear weapons, it’s pretty clear that U.S. defense policy is moving in the direction of extremely fast, unmanned aircraft that are going to be nuclear capable, in all likelihood carrying small nuclear weapons, micro-nukes. That hasn’t been mentioned yet. I’d like to know what the panel thinks about -- about that. In other words, it sounds like we’re shaping a weapons arsenal to respond to things like a terrorist attack on more and more American cities, something other than a MIRV ICBM.

MR. SOKOLSKI: I think the more you study this, the more fun it gets, okay? You’re -- you really want to take a look at the unmanned TRIM (sp) Program, which has been banging around for 35 years. And that’s when you put steel rods on an ICBM.

Now, if you want to penetrate concrete and destroy something, you can do it. Don’t need a nuclear weapon. Don’t need a special program to take old weapons and make them perform less robustly and then put a hard casing around it, which is what our advanced concepts program is. The TRIM Program. Well, why is not the TRIM Program being pursued as much as it should? For the same reason that the small nuclear weapons are a problem.

Do you remember the debate of the -- I guess it was the ‘60s -- called the RS-70 bomber debate? It was very instructive. We were going to build a high altitude bomber -- .

MR. COSTOPOULOS: -- That was the (inaudible).

MR. SOKOLSKI: Well, in one of its manifestations, it had that name.

MR. COSTOPOULOS: The XB-70 Valkyrie.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Right. And it was going to roam the Russian countryside looking for targets! Because, guess what? It couldn’t find -- and we didn’t know where to aim our nuclear weapons. That program got killed. That problem arises today with small nuclear weapons, assuming that they could work, go through the concrete, but you didn’t have the TRIM Program. You have a bigger problem, which is you have to know where these targets are. And until you do, it’s very hard to figure out what the requirement is. And when you do have that information, there are other ways to destroy those targets.

MR. COCHRAN: I think you’re -- I would take issue with you on your description of what we’re doing with respect to small nuclear weapons. And perhaps you’re referring to the program to develop bunker busters or -- .

MR. COSTOPOULOS: -- Yes.

MR. COCHRAN: Okay. Well, let me clarify -- or attempt to clarify a couple of things. One, we’re not developing small nuclear weapons to go after terrorists, as you -- .

MR. COSTOPOULOS: -- No, I (inaudible).

MR. COCHRAN: All right. There is an issue about developing bunker busters to go after deeply buried underground hardened targets. There are a couple of things -- a couple of problems. One is having adequate intelligence to identify the target and who’s in it. And we saw the problem with attacking the opening -- cruise missile attack on Saddam and he wasn’t there.

The second is hitting the right place in the under -- you know, getting -- getting the -- the missile warhead at the right location. I would refer you to an article by Michael May, former Director of -- what, Livermore? That you can get off the Stanford website.

Thirdly, it’s not small nuclear weapons that are the bunker busters, it’s big nuclear weapons. And you can do -- you can do the calculations. We’ve done the calculations parametrically, looking at essentially how far down your kill capability is as a function of yield and what the fallout implications are. And you -- you actually increase the fallout as you penetrate.

These things are not going to penetrate more than a few meters into the ground in any case, and it’s -- and the objective is to get better coupling into the ground, get more energy into the ground. And as you go deeper into the ground, as long as you’re limiting yourself to less than a few tens of meters, you’re actually throwing up more debris and your fallout actually increases. So, the -- the collateral effects are going to be worse. And then you’re not going to get the deep underground bunkers in any case, so -- .

What the U.S. is really doing is taking an existing earth-penetrator warhead and repackaging it for a different delivery capability. But, I don’t think there’s anything there that justifies resuming production of a new robust earth-penetrator or testing a new design or anything, which would be counterproductive to a number of these other issues.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Perkovich?

MR. PERKOVICH: Just real briefly. I mean, I think just to pick up on this conversation, I think if the U.S. continues to pursue that program, its capacity to rally others on the enforcement and strengthening of the rules becomes zero. This is the single most glaring evidence of U.S. noncompliance with rules that anybody could adduce. And so getting, you know, followership -- which is what we want with our leadership -- becomes very difficult if this program advances.

MR. SOKOLSKI: You know, wait, wait, wait. Do you really want to argue -- I mean, I think the point is well enough taken, but the way you formulate it, it strikes me as actually factually incorrect. It undermines your -- the strength of your argument, and that is that you’re saying something illegal has happened if we hold on to nuclear weapons. That is just untenable.

MR. PERKOVICH: I didn’t say hold on to nuclear weapons. I said that there is a common definition that’s been agreed through years and years of negotiations with the NPT that ending the arms race, which was a clause in the treaty, includes not developing a new generation of nuclear weapons. That’s the interpretation politically.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Well, that’s maybe the -- .

MR. PERKOVICH: -- Political, and you know it.

MR. SOKOLSKI: It is not illegal.

MR. PERKOVICH: No, it’s a political argument -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- Okay. All right -- .

MR. PERKOVICH: -- That we’ll be seen as noncompliant.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Then we -- as long as you preface it that a lot of people think that we ought to, fine.

MR. PERKOVICH: You’re right. I’m saying it’s a political determination of what’s compliant or not. We’re trying to get people to comply with this, which are sometimes subject -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- Not a legal -- not a legal requirement.

MR. PERKOVICH: No, but it’s the same discussion of Article 1.

MR. COSTOPOULOS: (Inaudible) you’re saying we should suspend efforts to change our arsenal to basically (inaudible).

MR. PERKOVICH: It isn’t a moral point, it’s a political reality that we need other people to work with us now. And if politically they’re not going to for these reasons, it’s not worth it to us, given the technical and other alternatives that we have, is not a good political trade-off. But, it’s a political argument.

But on the Iran thing and force, I would love there to be a great military option on or in Iran. It would make everything a lot easier in terms of what it is we’re trying to accomplish. I just analytically don’t quite see it. The leverage we thought we had in Iraq, with the 140,000 guys there, became Iran’s leverage on us. Those guys are now targets. All right?

So, the discuss in Iran when you monitor it has changed over the last few months as things have gotten worse in Iraq. At first, they were very nervous that we were coming to get them next. Now, they’re kind of looking and saying the U.S. Army is spent. There is no more army. You know, they’re keeping guys there. And they have moved and Hezbollah has moved people into Iraq that can target U.S. forces. And so I think that option, if it ever existed, unfortunately has been minimized. And I wish we did have a military option.

MR. SOKOLSKI: But the general point that you are making I think is sound And certainly has been demonstrated and exploited by this Administration. And that is that, if you do take military action and actually hurt or eliminate a regime that is toying with weapons activities that are in defiance of the rules, it has enormous political capital impact in sobering up others.

Now, I think the point is, is if you take a look at the case of Iran, the easy stuff, if it ever existed, isn’t present any longer because we did not act on first indications over 20 years ago. We waited. And now there are just too many things. So, the easy options aren’t there.

People talk about regime change. Not so easy, but the military thing, not so easy either.

MR. COCHRAN: I just don’t -- I don’t think a military option in Iran is even credible. I mean -- I -- you know, after Iraq, I just -- the idea that we’re going to -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- Our stomach is a bit full.

MR. COCHRAN: Yeah. I mean the real -- I mean, Iran -- if there’s any country that could make an argument for a nuclear deterrent, it’s Iran.

MR. SOKOLSKI: No. No -- .

MR. COCHRAN: -- It’s surrounded by Israel, Russia, Pakistan. And then you have the U.S. calling them the "Axis of Evil."

MR. SOKOLSKI: Yes, but in all fairness, they started the program when Israel was an ally. The United States was an ally. Pakistan didn’t have a program.

MR. COCHRAN: I’m not defending their program. I’m just saying they -- that the -- I was going to finish by saying the best leverage we have over Iran is the fact that they signed the NPT and they have an international obligation not to pursue nuclear weapons.

And so, our policy should be to, one, of using the -- it should be an international approach through the IAEA to -- and through sanctions and put economic sanctions on Iran and not on -- and not waiving this military option in front of them. I think that would be counterproductive.

MR. KEIPER: Okay. There are several more questions from the audience. It’s 2 p.m., but I’d like to go over 10 or 15 minutes, if that’s all right with everyone. Several more questions from the audience and, hopefully, also we’ll get the writers in the audience who may have questions, give them a chance as well.

I’d like to ask a question on behalf of the two staffers from Congresswoman Harris’s office. They had to leave, but, the question they were going to ask, which I’d love for each of you to answer in say a minute or less if you can, is -- being good congressional staffers, they want to know what legislative suggestions you might have, congressional priorities, appropriations type solutions. Any suggestions that you have? I’d just like to go down the line.

Mr. Cochran, anything?

MR. COCHRAN: Well, I understand Diane Feinstein has introduced a bill related to going after the loose, highly enriched uranium. I think the bill is not strong enough, but I think they should support that effort and try to strengthen that bill.

I think they should terminate the Department of Energy’s Generation IV and Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiatives Program, at least the international components of those.

I think they should cancel the MOX Program, the -- as Henry Sokolski suggested. I think they should -- that Congress should ask -- have a sense of the Congress -- for it to ask the Administration to go back and reopen negotiations with the Russians over reductions of the -- on a bilateral basis -- of the stockpiles of the United States and Russia.

And I think, you know, I think they should beef up this program to return highly enriched uranium, to eliminate that as an article of commerce.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Perkovich, quickly.

MR. PERKOVICH: I mean, I think all of those were great suggestions. I’m trying to think of -- .

MR. COCHRAN: -- George is going to write a report here in a month. It’s going to lay out all the things they should be doing.

MR. PERKOVICH: But I -- it doesn’t focus that much on Congress.

I mean, I think there’s general funding questions that, you know, for example, that, you know, the development on new nuclear weapons. I think it doesn’t make sense so they could strike that.

But, Henry talked about (inaudible) more elements in the budget that don’t make sense. To the extent that the Energy Department’s budget has appropriation to subsidize destruction of nuclear power plants, I think that doesn’t make -- doesn’t make sense. And a lot of the sanctions legislation could be cleaned up.

But, we don’t know -- with Libya for example. Libya’s come clean but it isn’t clear how we -- how quickly we can remove the sanctions on Libya as they go through all the things that we want them to do. This is very important also in sending a signal to Iran, that if you did do this as Libya has done, then the promised benefits actually will accrue and won’t get hung up as for example has happened with Russia where we still have the Jackson-Vanik sanctions on Russia that were written in 1971. And where we -- the President promised Putin that we’d remove those sanctions. They still haven’t been removed. And so, you want to clean out the debris when people do comply. So Congress can help on that.

MR. KEIPER: And Mr. Sokolski, what can Congress do?

MR. SOKOLSKI: No new rules until they enforce the ones that they haven’t enforced. There are Libya, Iran sanctions, ILSA, that have not even been evoked. They haven’t even held a hearing on it. In the case of Russia, who has been targeted for having helped Iran and a number of other countries. There are rules with regard to investment in Iran that could be triggered.

So, I would say enforce includes holding hearings. And if they’re not even holding hearings about rules that they’ve passed and aren’t enforcing, then they don’t get to make any new ones. They should be held to that.

The second thing is spend less. Take a bite out of crime. Unplug some of these dumb projects. And don’t lay down more money to subsidize reactors that wouldn’t otherwise be funded by the private sector, big demonstration projects, like the hydrogen reactor. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do R&D, but not big commercial sized projects.

And you surely shouldn’t pass waivers to allow even friends like Canada to get highly enriched uranium if they don’t absolutely need it, and they don’t absolutely need it. More along those lines.

MR. KEIPER: Great. Next question from the audience.

MS. SEEMA SIROHI: Seema Sirohi from Outlook India. I was wondering if you had any ideas about the future of nonproliferation treaty and how -- if there are any ways to include India, Pakistan, Israel in some sort of a mechanism? Because clearly, they’re not going to roll back.

From this discussion today, I was struck by the fact how -- how few times you even mentioned the case of Pakistan. Your -- you focus now on Iran, so you already moved on -- .

MR. SOKOLSKI: -- I’m trying to be polite. I’m trying to be polite. It’s in the paper, actually. It’s not so polite in the paper.

MS. SIROHI: So, I’m just struck by that, that perhaps, as George says, there’s like a lot of things to take care of before this somewhat militaristic approach to nonproliferation, which is to go and attack or to impose more rules.

MR. SOKOLSKI: Just impose the rules we’ve got. We haven’t imposed the rules we’ve got for so long. And so people are so used to no rules being enforced that, when you do, it’s militaristic because they didn’t think that they signed up to anything they’d have to comply with.

Now, in the case of India, Israel and Pakistan, I don’t recommend that you reward them for being outside of the -- out of the club by saying, oh, well, one-time waiver. Come on in. Because, it won’t be a one-time waiver. There’ll be other candidates later.

But, there is something that I noticed. I talked with a political counselor from Pakistan and it was a very interesting conversation. I bet you -- I don’t know -- that if the Indian counselor was there and the Israeli Counselor -- maybe not the Israeli counselor because they haven’t quite admitted they have weapons -- they would probably agree as well.

And what I said is, what if the United States should put some obligation on itself, like we won’t retransfer weapons to anyone’s soil in peacetime. And it’s not -- it’s not a requirement of the NPT, you know. We’re allowed to do that. Would you agree to join us in that? And the impression I got was that was exciting.

Well, we could lay down a few other rules while we’re in the same neighborhood. I mean, you don’t transfer highly enriched uranium or weapons usable materials unless it’s for the purpose of making them less accessible, you know? Well, certainly that’s not a problem for us. Wouldn’t you agree? It’s not absolutely required by the NPT.

I think then you also can include people who are in the NPT to agree to these things. I think you want to go in that direction. But, I would not somehow, you know, take the integrity of the NPT -- as little as there is -- and make it less by trying to get you guys somehow in.

MR. PERKOVICH: I agree entirely. And this piece that we’re working on, you look at it and say, look, you don’t solve a problem -- we have a problem right now. There’s two categories in the world, people who have nuclear weapons and people who don’t have them, and there’s tension between those categories. And you don’t solve that problem by creating a third category of another set of states that have nuclear weapons and then kind of building options for them.

Basically, India, Israel, Pakistan didn’t violate the NPT or other rules that exist in the time, so their possession of nuclear weapons is tolerable in the sense that we’re not going to go and use military force or go to the Security Council and get enforcement to compel them to give up their nuclear weapons. That’s not realistic. It’s not even -- and they’re not in violation of anything that would warrant that kind of enforcement. We ought to be explicit about that. We’ve never been explicit about that. We ought to be explicit.

And in return, rather than rewards like India seeks, you know, getting nuclear reactors and stuff, which makes no sense to me. But, in return what they get is the same set of obligations that apply to the other states that have nuclear weapons. In other words, guess what? I mean, Henry’s saying no transfer. That’s right. The same obligations now to move towards disarmament. The same obligations on, you know, moratoria on testing. That you basically say this is your citizenship obligation now that we’re tolerating and not coming after your nuclear weapons. But -- so, toleration, but no reward.

MR. SOKOLSKI: I have never used the word "toleration," but okay.

MR. KEIPER: Next.

MR. NISAR CHAUDHRY: I am Dr. Nisar Chaudhry. I’m the President of the Pakistan-American League. My question is based on the U.S. Administration’s policies towards South Asia in the past.

The U.S. Administration already said nuclear nonproliferation is the centerpiece of their policy objectives in South Asia. Sanctions were in place, as Henry was saying that they were not enforced. But they were in place and at least most of them were enforced, and still, look what happened to the centerpiece.

What I am saying is, the question is, that those -- both those countries now think that automatically they have, as if they have met the criterion, to become a member of the nuclear club. So they have fulfilled their criterion now that -- as if entitled to become members of the nuclear club and they don’t talk anything short of it, both of them.

What is something different the U.S. Administration (inaudible) should have done that this thing should have not happened in South Asia? And what are the lessons we have learned? Does U.S.A. -- then we talked of Iran -- does U.S.A. have the capacity and the ability to act unilaterally to stop this thing? In absence of committed allies, committed Europe completely with U.S.A..

War will not be a solution. With how many countries? Because these weapons are there and the nuclear states are there. And as (inaudible) said, that U.S.A. should -- and be world leaders. The nuclear club should set examples and start denuclearizing. Maybe that -- that may help and prove more fruitful.

I would like to have the take of each one of you on this please.

MR. SOKOLSKI: I’m very fond of an Indian-Pakistani story. And since I see there’s an Indian and a Pakistani I can’t resist! You’ll find this very amusing. In fact, so disturbing that if I was an Indian or a Pakistani confronted with the problems that you’re confronted with, I would complain and blame someone else, too.

Essentially, I was at the National Defense University -- George, you were there. You can attest to whether this is a correct portrayal of the story.

MR. PERKOVICH: All right.

MR. SOKOLSKI: The Indian representative in the audience -- he was from the military -- got up and said, "I’d like to reassure my Pakistani brethren" -- there were some Pakistanis there -- "that, although India does not have a no-first-use policy, they should not take from that that we will not use conventional force when necessary to defend the interests of India." And then he sat down.

A Pakistani then got up and said, "Well, let me reassure my Indian brethren that we do not have a no-first-use policy and we will not be deterred either."

At this point, everything that the two Americans -- that was George and myself -- had to say really was not terribly interesting as compared to this little exchange. Because, if you think about that, it’s enough to keep you up late at night! You don’t even need to get to the United States.

In the end, these weapons, particularly in the beginning, are really a very nervous bargain. I say this as someone who was taught by Albert Wohlstetter, one of the great masterminds of nuclear strategy, who lectured us on why Israel had made a mistake in trying to get nuclear weapons. I mean, he was very tough.

Now, I can’t persuade you of this, but my guess is there will be -- it’ll be easier to persuade folks of these points over time. And it doesn’t really matter that someone else has them; it still will be true that these things are not gonna make you necessarily very safe. And certainly, we are saddled with it right now trying to figure out what to do with ours to make sure that they’re of some use or if -- at least of not of some use, of no danger to us.

MR. COCHRAN: Well, we’ve done a calculation -- each of your country -- each country has a few dozen nuclear warheads and they’re in the 10-20 kiloton range. There’s a scenario calculated with the U.S. government model that (inaudible) the nuclear weapons, your atmospheric data and the U.S. estimates of population density in Pakistan and India.

And if you two -- if your two countries go to war, have a scenario like that of a few dozen nuclear weapons, you’re gonna kill 30 million people or so, or 40 million, 20 million, whatever; but tens of millions of people. I mean, it’s for you to work it out. I think it’s in both of your -- both countries’ interest to eliminate that possibility by eliminating those weapons. But, it’s not gonna be done from the U.S.

MR. PERKOVICH: Yeah, I mean, I agree with what both Henry and Tom said. I mean, my sense -- and actually, Henry may disagree on this part. My sense is, you know, over time there wasn’t -- that there wasn’t anything the U.S. could have done realistically that would have eliminated Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability so that, at some point, whether it’s today or, you know, you wouldn’t have gotten to the point in all likelihood, and that’s because it’s related to what India’s done, which is related to what China’s done, you know.

But, where we are today -- because the other points that they made -- in this exchange that Henry talk about, the determination not to be deterred in both sides is very dangerous and natural. And so that the way out, I don’t think is going to be to focus on nuclear weapons and arms control and stuff. It’s gonna have to be that both countries have to convince each other that they accept the territorial status quo. That’s what nuclear weapons mean, basically, is that adversaries have to give up the idea of taking the other guy’s territory, because that’s the kind of threat that -- if anything will do it -- that’s the kind of threat that would lead somebody to use nuclear weapons and then you’re committed to respond.

So the only way out of this is to accept the territorial status quo. And then you can work back from that and, if you convince each other that you don’t want each other’s territory, then at some point you can convince each other you don’t need these weapons.

What the boils down to right now, for the moment, is Kashmir. And India basically accepts the territorial status quo in Kashmir, and I think Pakistan is in the process of figuring out whether it can accept the territorial status quo, that it’s not gonna take the part of Kashmir

 that India controls and India is not gonna take part that Pakistan controls.

And I think the issue is now, how do you convince the Pakistani people to accept a leadership that might formalize that understanding? All right? So it becomes a domestic political problem of preparing to accept the status quo territorially. And that that’s what the focus of people like the U.S. and others should be on, how do we make that process easier?

MS. SIROHI: What about China? India and China have been (inaudible) disputes that I think people in Washington keep forgetting about. And those are very big (inaudible) and in political discord.

MR. PERKOVICH: I wasn’t talking -- Seema, first of all, India and China making progress in their territorial dispute within a -- .

MS. SIROHI: -- (Inaudible) -- .

MR. PERKOVICH: -- No, no. And a lot of the discussion on New Delhi is within a year they’re going to have an agreement on their boundary, first of all, between India and China.

MR. SOKOLSKI: But can you just concede the point that, once you get in this game, withdrawal is not that easy. It’s not impossible, but it is very tough. And this is one of the reasons why, when you get into the game, just simply pressing on the accelerator may not be much of a solution either.

MR. COCHRAN: I would -- I would argue that the arguments you should take back to your respective countries is that you should negotiate a freeze on production because you both have -- the difference in the numbers are not so big that they make a strategic difference.

You could have a freeze on production. You could have the data exchange. You could have verification of the data exchange. This is in a step-by-step process. And you could essentially freeze the situation as it is today and put the weapons in storage locations, where they could be bilaterally monitored to ensure that they’re not being rolled out by the other side. And freeze the new production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. And that’s certainly within the capability of the two countries, and you could do that independently of whatever you’re doing to resolve the Kashmir problem. But, that would be my recommendation.

MR. SOKOLSKI: By the way, there’s a third dimension that never gets talked about because, actually, non-proliferation tends to be sort of captured by a certain end of political spectrum. And that is, there’s a tremendous amount of focus on nuclear weapons and, you know, who’s got them, who doesn’t, how to get rid of them.

But, there needs to be more candor about what we did during the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. There was a certain form of commercial nuclear materialism. It was called Atoms for Peace. And you don’t hear too many Pakistani’s or Indians complain about this form of imperialism, but it has saddled both of them incredibly inefficient, highly caste-like bureaucracies dedicated to stealing money from the taxpayer to produce electricity -- very inefficiently -- because it’s somehow related to the weapons complex. Someone should be complaining about what we did to you on that front a bit more. I never hear it.

MR. KEIPER: We’re gonna have to close up. In order to answer -- let’s have one last question. Mr. Burnham, did you have a question? No. Okay.

So what we’re gonna do is, I’ll ask a question from Claudia Winkler and Tim Shah has a question and we’ll just ask them all at once and then, if you could answer that, along with any closing comments you have, that’ll be great.

Ms. Winkler’s question was, one of the panelists had mentioned earlier the next generation nuclear weapons that were being developed and she would like to know what the status of that was, how firm that was, where we were going with that. And Tim Shah’s question, to close out, was about missile defense, I think?

MR. TIMOTHY SHAH: Yes. I was just curious maybe to have one person comment on what the implications of the aggressive pursuit of missile defense has for all of this. That hasn’t come up in discussion.

MR. KEIPER: So, if you could answer those two questions, Mr. Cochran, Mr. Perkovich and Mr. Sokolski. First, next generation nukes and then missile defense and any other closing comments you have, and then we’ll call it a day.

MR. COCHRAN: Well, the United States has a robust nuclear weapons R&D program. It’s now funded at about -- in today’s dollars -- at about -- it’s 50 percent larger than it was on average during the Cold War period from 1948 to 1990. And in that period, we were building new weapons, retiring and testing them, which we’re not doing with -- ostensibly just maintaining the safety and reliability of them.

The -- there is a R&D on new weapon designs that’s supposed to be -- the laboratories are permitted to do a search, but not get into the engineering development to actually deploy the weapons or test the weapons. At the same time, there are -- there are advisors and people in the weapons community who would like to remove this sort of impediment called the "Moratorium on Nuclear Testing," so they’re accelerating the test readiness program.

There is this sort of generalized design work going on on bunker busters but, again, it’s not a -- there’s a very shaky political restriction that prohibits them from actually fielding those, unless the Administration goes back to the Congress.

So -- and I think the supporters in the Congress have basically given the laboratories a blank check, and they’ve gone out and ordered the newest and most biggest and the most expensive of every piece of hardware they had. I’m kind of overstating it, but -- . You know, you get -- if you go on the NRDC website, we just put -- Chris Paine just put out a report on sort of four big multi-billion dollar waste of taxpayers’ money within the stewardship program. And you can read that report and make a judgment for yourself about what’s going on.

And we’re spending, what, $10 billion or something on that order a year on missile defense on the technology that -- it would be easy to defeat if you -- if you’re smart enough to build a three-stage ICBM and put a nuclear warhead on top of it. If you’re smart enough to put out the mylar balloons and other decoys to defeat the systems that are going into Fort Greely. My own view is there are other ways to deliver nuclear weapons that are -- so even if that system worked, it wouldn’t solve the problem we have with North Korea.

But, the system that’s going in this summer is really designed to -- against the North Korea threat. And, you know, I would just bring it in by boat rather than by missile.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Perkovich.

MR. PERKOVICH: Yeah, I don’t have anything to add on the U.S. nuclear programs. But, to reinforce a broader point from -- and Henry alluded to it and from my own studies, which is that we have a problem and it becomes a universal problem and that is that the organizations within states that produce nuclear weapons become very, very powerful within their state. So the Indians nuclear establishment is immensely powerful and influential and unaccountable in India. The French nuclear establishment. The Russian nuclear establishment -- practically a state within a state -- they got their own banks, they got -- I mean, they’ve been doing all sorts of utterly uncontrollable things -- A.Q. Khan, go down the list.

It’s not reasonable to think ours is much different -- and I don’t mean in the sense of criminality. I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting in terms of interest, desire to do exciting things, draw on revenue without really being scrutinized. They get more than -- more accountable activities tend to get. And then they become very difficult for civilian authorities to control.

And they say, you know what? I know you want this, but we’re going to have to stop it because we have these other equities out here and they’re very, very powerful. And so, it’s not just in the U.S. You have to think about what happens here and it’s replicating in these other establishments.

On missile defense, I’ll only just say I talked with an Indian official who was very influential in having the Indian government respond early in the Bush Administration and embrace missile defense. I was curious. I said, "Well, you know, what was the thinking?" He said, "Well, we analyzed it. We know it’s never gonna work." So, there’s no technology that actually is going to have strategic significance.

But, there’s a lot of money there and there’s going be a lot of code-writing and we’re really good at code-writing and IT. And also, the Americans are always saying, you Indians have to show you’re prepared to do something with us as partners, to show you’re our partners. And so we decided, well, it isn’t going to physically real. It could be good money and jobs for our IT guys and we’ll get credit for being your partner on something; let’s embrace it. It’s harmless and we get benefits. That’s not a terrible thing. I mean, you know, but it doesn’t solve all of my concerns.

MR. KEIPER: Mr. Sokolski?

MR. SOKOLSKI: After listening to this, you can well imagine how skeptical I am of folks who come rushing forward to solve our nuclear proliferation problems by urging us to give more money to organizations to work together, like Minatom, DOE, next will be the Pakistani Atomic Energy Commission. The idea that, by giving more money to these kinds of organizations to work together to solve something related to the problems they’ve created, is really something you would think common sense would dictate against. But, this seems to be the prevalent solution over the last 10, 15 years to deal with these things. And that tells you something about the pathology.

With regard to missile defense, I guess I’m not as convinced I know what will work and won’t work in the future, you know. I mean, I think this is pretty accurate for right now. But, that aside, there is something we need to be careful about. Missile defense technology is also very useful in doing computational targeting and materials related work, to say nothing of propulsion.

The -- in battle management. The idea that simply sharing this kind of technology pell-mell will make everything better ignores that. And it seems to me, how you share this matters a great deal. If it’s turnkey systems, better than simply inviting people like the Atoms for Peace Program over to get educated about how to do everything.

Also, it seems to me that, politically and militarily, we’ve got to be very careful that we don’t go lopsided in helping one of the countries, Pakistan or India, more than the other in a way that excites the humors. And this is not, therefore, a bolt-on panacea, but rather a new challenge which, if managed properly -- I like the idea that they’re doing code; that’s okay; that’s a plus -- but if you don’t manage it properly, you can make things more dangerous. And so you have to be very thoughtful about this and I think we’re up to that if we think about it up front, I thin