University Place Presents Jeremi Suri, "Nuclear Weapons and the History of Modern America" 7/21/2010  UP 459   cc >> Welcome to University Place. I'm Norman Gilliland. The American monopoly on nuclear weapons did not last very long. In 1945 when Harry Truman became president of the United States, Joseph Stalin already knew more about the American nuclear program than he did. And by 1949 the Soviet Union had a nuclear bomb of its own. By 1964 China had become the second communist power to have nuclear weapons and the fifth nuclear power in the world. Clearly, very quickly, nuclear weapons became a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and also had an effect on domestic thinking as well. And they became the major trump card in late 19th century global politics. We'll find out how it all happened and where we stand today from UW Madison historian Jeremi Suri. Welcome to University Place. 

>> Thank you for having me here. I'm glad to be here. >> Why is it so important today with nuclear weapons really pretty much no longer a big trump card for the major players? >> Well, the uses of nuclear weapons have certainly changed and the threats have certainly changed, but the way we think about these weapons draws upon the experience of the last four or five decades, in large part because thankfully these weapons have not been used in war except for, as we'll talk about, at the end of World War II. So therefore our knowledge of those weapons is really based upon perception, based upon study and based upon what people think happened in the past which will help them explain how these weapons might or might not be useful in the future. So it's a case, really quite unique, of a weapon system that's restructured the world but a weapon system that hasn't been used so we rely upon supposition much more than use and understanding. >> And does the history really begin at this place, Los Alamos? >> It really does. Los Alamos is an extraordinarily interesting place and moment in American history because it's the first major American government project designed to bring scientists and technical experts together on a scale never before for the purpose of producing a weapon for war. And it becomes, in many ways, the model for future big science projects, many of which we see on our campus here in Madison and elsewhere. And it also becomes a model for producing power in the international system because the bombs that are produced changed American's place in the world. >> Let's start with FDR. 

Obviously he knew something about this project and approved of it. How much did he know? >> Well, like everyone of his generation, especially those without a scientific education in great depth, he didn't really understand much about the physics or much about the implications of the science, but he did understand that there was the capability of using the power of the atom to produce destruction on a scale that had not been produced before. Einstein and others had explained that to him. And FDR also understood that other countries that perhaps had more advanced military scientific establishments, like Nazi Germany, were pursuing weapons of this kind. So what he understood was, this was something where the United States had to master the technology before its enemies as part of the war fighting effort. >> There was sort of a disparity there, wasn't there, in the technology that Nazi Germany had with rockets versus what the United States had? >> Absolutely. The Nazis, particularly under the leadership of scientist Wernher von Braun, had really taken the lead in producing unmanned delivery vehicles for aerial bombs. And they had used these in the Battle of Britain, they had used them continually during World War II, and they had an advantage there. They also had one of the most sophisticated science establishments in the world, and they had spent about a decade by the mid-1940s connecting that scientific establishment with war fighting. So in many ways they were more advanced. 

But they had two disadvantages that played to America's favor in this competition, we might say. One was the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. They forced out a lot of great scientists. That's how Einstein and Oppenheimer and others are in the United States. Second, the Nazi regime was so centralized that in fact it allowed less space for innovation. The Los Alamos project, what's so unique about it is it does bring all those scientists together. But FDR does not seek to micromanage them. Leslie Groves from the army is put in charge of the project, but even Groves is not micromanaging daily activities. They're told, work on this, figure out how to do it but find your own path. It's a very American enterprise. 

It's not monitored as deeply as the German project is or as the Soviet project is. And, of course, this is also why the American project ultimately is more open to spies. >> So how much did foreign powers know about the Los Alamos project? >> They'd infiltrated quite considerably. And they had it in a variety of forms. There were people like Klaus Fuchs and others, Klaus Fuchs was a German-born nuclear scientist who was working for the Soviets. But then there were many other scientists who were not American-born, and some were American-born, who saw themselves as part of a larger international cooperative framework of scientists who wanted to share their information. What we have to remember, Norman, is these were scientists who came of age before World War II at a time when science was what we call economics today, an international market. And they didn't like the restrictions on knowledge. It got in the way of their work. And so many of them broke the classified restrictions, not because they were pro-Soviet or pro-Nazi but because they felt this is what scientists should do. 

And so for that reason in particular, the Soviets got two big advantages from the espionage, we might call it. One, they learned about a lot of the mistakes that were made in Los Alamos. So they didn't have to make the same mistakes. >> So they did get detailed information? >> They did on things that didn't work. And secondly, they got inclinations of the things that were being tried. They didn't get a plan for an atomic bomb, but they were saved from making a lot of the mistakes that would have taken longer to produce a bomb on their side. >> Now how do you keep something as big as a mushroom cloud secret once you've tested it? >> Well, it's very hard. But we do have to remember there were no satellites then, there were no overhead reconaissance. The ability for monitor ground tremors, which is the way we monitored these sorts of things even through the 1950s, was very limited at the time. And Los Alamos was chosen in part because it was a relatively deserted corner of New Mexico. 

So it was impossible, yes, to keep this completely secret. But it's not like the world today where people are watching from overhead with Google Maps all the time. >> Much harder today. Code named? >> Trinity. >> And it looked like this. And if you look very closely at the bottom of this picture you actually see tiny little things that are trees, that's how big this cloud is. >> It's extraordinary. Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer, who oversees the scientists of the project, famously before the tests says there's a not insignificant chance that this test will destroy the atmosphere but we must go forward anyway. >> Take a chance on that. >> That's right. 

>> So, obviously, the test was a success. Was there a degree of surprise when they actually saw the physical result? >> Yes. Almost all the scientists were in awe. They were not surprised that it worked. These were very confident men, mostly men, there were some women as well. But actually just the sight of it, this image, imagine standing there and watching this and feeling the blast. It's not even so much that the size amazed them but to see it is different than to think about it. >> Well, yes, when you say seeing the blast, how protected were they? >> Not very much at all. They just stood out and watched it for the most part. >> Which is inconceivable now. 

>> It is. That went on through the 1950s, as we'll see in some of the other cases that we describe. There were civilians in place, kept some distance from the blast, but actually watching it with their naked eye. >> Now there's a weapon that obviously couldn't have been used until the United States was pretty close to Japan. >> Correct. Which, when this test occurs, which is late July 1945, the United States is actually in control of Japanese air space. So as soon as the bomb is tested, as soon as they can build a few more and get them on planes, it could be dropped on Japan. And that's pretty much what happens. Truman gives the order to use the bombs when necessary. >> And it's still under debate today as to how necessary it was to drop the bomb. 

Were the Japanese going to surrender? And if they weren't going to surrender, what would have been the loss to allied forces? >> Well, this is the big question that's always asked. It's a great question. It's very hard to predict when a society will surrender. By the summer of 1945 the Japanese islands had lost control of their air space, their population was starving, it was clear they were not going to win the war, it was clear that at best they were going to be isolated forever or for quite a long time, but they didn't give up. And we have pretty clear evidence that the cabinet, almost universally, wanted to keep fighting as did the emperor. So it's hard to predict when they would have broken. Societies are more resilient than economists tell us. They're more resilient then anyone would expect. And so it's very hard to predict. The strategic bombing survey that goes in afterwards, led in fact by Curtis LeMay, Paul Nitze, John Kenneth Galbraith. 

>> Right, a more traditional bombing than LeMay specialized in. >> Exactly. They argued that the Japanese would have surrendered by the end of '45. But there's no way of knowing, that's just a guess. I think what we have to do is put ourselves in Harry Truman's shoes. He's inherited the presidency. The war is over soon after he inherits the presidency in Europe, but it's lingering it Asia. And the casualty rate is going up, not down. That's really important. The January '45 American occupation and attack of Okinawa is indicative of this. 

There are hardly any prisoners of war taken because every Japanese pretty much fights to the last person. And the supposition, I think the fair supposition, is that an attack on the Japanese mainland, which would have been required to force the surrender of Japan under conventional circumstances, would have required and brought on tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American deaths and would have been a prolonged operation. You're in war against a society where you're fighting to the death, and you have this weapon that you don't fully understand, you know it's a little bit stronger than other things, it's almost impossible, it seems to me, to imagine not using it in those circumstances. We can say now it created problems down the line that we wish had not been created, but that was not what Harry Truman was thinking about. >> And there were literally square miles of time of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities being leveled by those bombings that were choreographed by Curtis LeMay. >> The conventional bombings. >> Not considered effective enough. >> Well, it depends again what you consider effective. More Japanese die from the conventional bombing of Tokyo than die in any of the nuclear blasts, even if you factor in the long-term radiation exposure. Because Tokyo, like most Japanese cities, was largely made of wood and we dropped incendiary bombs which created fire balls through those cities. 

So there was enormous destruction there, but the Japanese continued to fight on. Now, maybe they would have surrendered a few weeks later, maybe they wouldn't have. We don't know. But if you're president and you want to end a war and you have these weapons available in this context, it's hard to imagine not using them. >> What kind of eyewitness accounts do we have of that first bomb drop? >> Well, the Hiroshima bomb of August 6, 1945, we have a number of accounts. The most searing and enduring is of course John Hersey's famous book, Hiroshima, which actually began as a series of New Yorker articles. I think actually the original article took up the whole New Yorker. And the first-hand accounts are quite extraordinary. The destruction is less than what the Japanese had suffered again with conventional bombings, but it seemed so concentrated. And immediately it was evident that certain things were different. 

People's hair began to fall out. The heat that was created was on a different scale. I would say that that period of summer of '45, August '45, is a period of shock and uncertainty about this. People really don't know what it is. And that might be the scariest thing about it. >> How many people know that the American monopoly is not likely to hold? >> Well, that's a good question. I think first of all in early August '45 that's not the thought. The thought is about getting the war over with. The person who I think thinks most about this is Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, he had been Hoover's Secretary of State. He'd grown up fighting Indians on horseback in the 19th century. 

>> It's hard to imagine, isn't it? >> It is. And he's the one who knows more about this project in the cabinet than anyone else. He's the one who had overseen it really for Roosevelt as well. Stimson comes to believe that there is a natural tendency toward rivalry between powers with new weapons, and that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Soviets are going to try to develop one. And so Stimson pushes very quickly, along with a number of others, to try to create some mechanism, international mechanism, for controlling these weapons for the beginnings of arms control. And what the United States proposes at the United Nations famously in what was originally called the Acheson-Lilienthal Plan, named for Dean Acheson and David Lilienthal, later the Baruch Plan, presented by Bernard Baruch, was a plan for basically saying that the material used to make these weapons will be held internationally. So countries could not produce their own weapons. The problem is the United States already had them, the Soviets didn't. There was no way the Soviets were going to agree to that. >> There were for a short time, an episode's worth, there was a radio program series called The Fifth Horseman whose sole purpose was to advocate the United Nations' control of nuclear weapons, and their first program narrated by and acted by Henry Fonda was from the viewpoint of American POWs in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped and the experience that they went through as they wandered through the streets of what had been Hiroshima. 

>> Absolutely, absolutely. It's quite interesting, many of the American soldiers who are on the ground then they have this very mixed reaction. Horror at the destruction, but Paul Fussell was one of the many who says he was horrified by it but thank God for the atomic bomb. It saved them from possibly having to fight street to street in Tokyo. That doesn't excuse the moral implications of it but it does put it in that war context. Many Americans like Henry Fonda wanted to see the bomb not become a new source of international rivalry after the war. But the problem was the United States already had it. And almost no one said the United States should give it up. So it's easy to argue that the other side shouldn't get it when you already have it. >> I suppose if you, what would you want to call them, open-minded Americans were advocating somehow the UN control or some kind of international control of nuclear weapons which sounds like a tough assignment anyway. 

>> It's a very tough assignment to think how that would have worked. And, again, let's not apologize for the Soviets but let's see it from their point of view. The United Nations was pretty much controlled by the United States at that point. In fact, the security council really, Winston Churchill famously said, was four votes for the US because it was the US, Great Britain, France and the nationalist China. So the Soviets felt, you're going to put the United Nations in charge of this, that's not really an objective force. It's very hard, Norman, to find objective international institutions for something as important as a nuclear bomb in the international system. >> So what was the Soviet strategy vis-a-vis nuclear weapons? >> The Soviet strategy, we know a lot about it from research in the last 10 to 15 years. It's one case where we've really learned a lot. Soviet strategy was to develop these as quickly as possible. Stalin felt under pressure. 

He felt weak after the war already. The Soviets had lost 30 million people. And so his strategy was to produce as soon as he can, and after the United States had produced its A-bombs and after the Soviet Union in 1949 tested its first atomic bomb, Stalin seamlessly argued and pushed the Soviet Union to develop a more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb, thermonuclear weapon. So the Soviets were already embarking on that project as the United States was debating whether it should or shouldn't, in fact. >> And the Soviets always adhered to that, whenever the United States was testing, throughout the '50s and '60s, a nuclear weapon, the Soviets always had the bigger one. >> That's right. >> If the United States had, say, a 15 megaton, the Soviets would drop a 50 megaton test. >> Right. This was a pathology in the Soviet system. It always wanted to show it could do everything the United States did bigger. 

My favorite, it's a side note story, is the gymnasium at Yale, which is one of the ugliest gymnasiums in the world. It's a huge gymnasium, it looks like a church. It's the biggest one in the United States. The Soviets came and measured it and built one just a little bit larger for the 1980 Olympics. That's the pathology of the Soviet system. And it carried over, as you said so rightly, to nuclear testing, horribly so. >> Even though there couldn't have been much of a strategic or tactical advantage to a large weapon that would be dropped on a single target. >> Well, that's what people came to recognize by the mid-1950s. Early on what we have to remember is this is such a new weapon, it's so uncertain in how it's used, not just in terms of the weapon itself but how it will be delivered, that there's a lot of uncertainty in the late '40s and the 1950s, and the Soviet approach is to just build as big and as much as they can. >> And they're testing these where? >> They test them in central Asia, predominately. 

They test a few near the Pacific coast, but mostly in areas where there are relatively few white Russians. And in areas that are sparsely settled and areas that are difficult for the United States to surveil. >> But these are little harder to conceal than they would become later? >> Yes. And the main way the United States comes to monitor tests from the late '40s on, is by using ground sensors in Europe to sense tremors because the weapons produce a simulated earthquake in a sense. >> At what point did the nuclear powers start announcing their tests? >> They begin announcing, actually, in the early 1950s. And there are two reasons why they begin announcing. One is it's a show of power and is a kind of rivalry, as you said, as to who will test the more sophisticated larger weapon. And they also announce because by the early 1950s knowledge about radiation is growing, and the idea is to say these are safe tests, we're testing to show we're strong but we don't want to harm anyone. And so you start moving people out of the area. So people never get as close in the 1950s as they did to those initial tests we talked about in New Mexico and elsewhere. 

>> Do they get far enough away in a place like Bikini? >> Well they don't. And Bikini is a really interesting moment, I think, for a lot of reasons. The test is March 1, 1954. It's the largest above ground test the United States ever conducted, and there's a reason for that. The test turned out to be twice as large as Americans expected. So they had cordoned off the area around the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, but in fact many of the people in what was considered the safe area were exposed to the blast. Most tragically, a group of Japanese fishermen on the Lucky Dragon boat, and they returned to Japan with radiation sickness. And so here, once again, the Japanese, now our friends, now our allies in '54, have been infected by this. The bomb scares Churchill and Eisenhower. They have correspondence about it that one can read, and they're scared by how large this weapon is becoming. 

It actually destroys land. Part of the Bikini Atoll disappears. The territory is changed as a consequence. >> You can see the map impact, the bomb impact on that map in the upper right hand corner. >> That's right. And so even though it becomes a cutesy name for bathing suit, it's actually a horrifying moment for the very figures who came through World War II, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, and believed there should be something different after the war. And it's the beginning of a very serious antinuclear movement in the west, in Great Britain, the United States and Europe, a movement that argues that we've gone too far. We shouldn't be building these necessarily. >> Well, what's the strategy of a nuclear, antinuclear demonstration scheme in the west? How much good does it do if the Soviets aren't playing along? >> Well, two arguments are made, and one of the most important groups that early on pioneers this is the Committee on Nuclear Defense, Committee on Nuclear Disarmament, excuse me, in Great Britain and stage a number of major marches. One is from Aldermaston, which was a nuclear facility in Great Britain, to London in 1958. 

And what the Aldermaston marchers, what the CND argues is that in fact these weapons are becoming self-defeating. We don't need anymore. They argue that by 1958 there's enough for there to be mutually assured destruction. Why do we need to show that we can build more or show that we can build bigger ones? >> So they are just objecting not to the weapons themselves necessarily that are already stockpiled, but rather to the arms race. >> Well, that's the first argument they make. They say let's stop building more. Then their second argument is that these weapons are actually making it harder to negotiate political agreements. Because people stick their feet in the mud and don't negotiate and instead build weapons. We should start negotiating our problems and negotiating down the number of weapons as a consequence. That's what they argue. 

The CND, the Committee on Nuclear Disarmament, in Great Britain becomes inspirational for a number of antinuclear movements in the United States. Including, in Wisconsin, you see large numbers of young people, in particular at universities, and large numbers of scientists beginning to mobilize against what they see as a flawed nuclear policy. And those antinuclear movements in conjunction with the civil rights movement in the United States precede the Vietnam War and contribute significantly to what we all know of in the second half of the 1960s as this period of great protest and unrest. >> Part of the tests of the '50s, the Bikini bomb for example and the ones that the Soviets are testing in the '50s, how do those compare with the, what, 15 kilotons that were dropped on Hiroshima? >> On many, many scales larger. I think the Bikini test is more than 10 times larger. These are in many larger scales in terms of the blast, in terms of the heat, and in terms of the radioactive effect. First of all, they're thermonuclear weapons. And secondly they're much larger. And the paradox is that by the 1960s they're also becoming miniaturized. Which is how you get them on intercontinental ballistic missiles and things of that sort. 

So they are smaller, more powerful, much, much more deadly. I think the Bikini test is more than 10 Hiroshima bombs. >> Where is the impetus for an above ground test hiatus or halt come from? >> Well, it begins in the late 1950s with the antinuclear activism and the sense that the very testing of the weapons is too dangerous because of the radiation it created. And so initially the United States and Soviet Union, unilaterally, declare moratorium as a way of showing goodwill. But then by 1963 Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiate what becomes a Limited Test Ban Treaty in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's made into a treaty for two reasons. One, so there's some stability so there's not constant rivalry over this. But second, the real reason is they're trying to stop the Chinese from developing a nuclear weapon. >> The Russians are. >> And the US. 

Both are. Kennedy has a plan in '62 to possibly militarily take out the Chinese nuclear facility in -- in central Asian part of China and is contemporary Sanjiang. And the Soviets say no. The Soviets will, in the late '60s, argue to do that. But both the United States and the Soviet Union are concerned about China developing a nuclear capability. And so the Limited Test Ban Treaty is designed to make it harder for China and any other state to develop nuclear capabilities because it makes it harder to test. >> So at what point do we start to see we have these three powers, essentially, during the Cold War, but France and Britain would line up with the United States pretty squarely in a confrontation with either of the other two countries, at what point do we see in this Cold War then sort of a --, if not a detente, between the United States and the Soviet Union? Is it brought about by China's nuclear power? >> Some would argue that in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the realization by Kennedy and Khrushchev, and they exchange letters about this, about how dangerous the world has become, how close they feel they've come to the worst nightmare of Armageddon, and the sense that these weapons are getting larger, so large that they're not even useful, and public pressures at home which are also beginning to be felt in the Soviet Union as well, this is the beginning of Andrei Sakharov and other scientists in the Soviet Union. >> A Soviet dissident physicist. >> Exactly. The creator of the Soviet H-bomb who becomes a leading critic of it, similar to Oppenheimer in the United States. 

>> He wrote a lengthy and detailed autobiography in which he takes issue with Soviet policy. >> Exactly. A wonderful, still worthwhile read, in fact. All of these pressures come to bear after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And you could argue it's the beginning of a realization that in fact there's a mutual interest in not getting rid of nuclear weapons but in tamping down the competition, making it more stable, creating rules and perhaps limiting future competition. This is what is called, at the time, arms control which is different from disarmament. >> How close did the United States and the Soviet Union come to pushing the button? >> Not very close, but that should not necessarily make us feel better about things. There is almost no moment, there is no moment that I can think of when it appears as if either side is really serious about possibly even getting close to that. What I think is really more dangerous, looking back at it, are the things that could have brought us inadvertently. Many decisions about war and things of that sort don't happen by accident, but they don't happen out of specific intention. 

World War I is the greatest example of that. None of the powers in Europe actually wanted a war. Every one of them wanted a quick victory. And there are a number of moments when a small usage of a nuclear weapon was contemplated, not the full scale, and that could have had enormous implications. We don't know what would have happened. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviets delegated authority over tactical nuclear weapons that could reach American soil to local commanders. >> Russian commanders in Cuba. >> In Cuba. So the United States, if it had launched an air attack on Cuba before the blockade and the negotiations, as Curtis LeMay and others have argued, those commanders, those Russian commanders, might have retaliated with a nuclear weapon. It's hard to know how we would have responded to that. 

>> We should add that that whole nuclear crisis or the Cuban Missile Crisis came about because the United States aerial reconnaisance indicated the presence of Russian missile silos being built in Cuba which, of course, would be within 90 miles of Key West. >> Right, exactly. And so the scary thing for me, Norman, is not that at some point there was a crazy leader who was going to push the button, but more that there were small things happening that could have triggered the beginnings of what would have been a difficult conflict to control. One of the things that made the Cold War stable was after Nagasaki, after August 9th, 1945, a nuclear weapon was never used again in war. We don't know what would have happened if one had been used, especially if it had been used and it was uncertain what the intention was and what was going to come next. Imagine if a Russian commander in October '62, in response to an American aerial attack conventionally, had launched a small nuclear weapon on Key West, how would the United States have responded? Would Kennedy have just stayed non-nuclear then? We don't know. And things could have escalated very well. Rational decision-makers often do things that look rational but produce irrational outcomes. And that's why nuclear weapons, I think, are very scary. >> Because you have quite a blend, a mix of motives and personalities involved in any kind of crisis. 

>> Sure. And we all know this in our own lives as well. When we react to circumstances, we react that might serve short-term interest but produce long-term problems. >> It was many years, at least 20 years, I think, before it was known how we actually got out of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a compromise that Kennedy struck with Khrushchev. >> Actually almost 30 years before that was revealed. One of the things that Nixon and Kissinger did in the early 1970s was they tried to assert a little more control over this process. Now, they also threatened to use nuclear weapons a little more because they wanted to try to push the Soviets to help us in Vietnam and elsewhere. So they played the threatening game, but they also tried to control the process by creating certain rules of the game from managing crises. And that's much of what detente was about, the effort to, first of all, through the SALT process, Strategic Arms Limitations Talks, to create limits on future construction through the ABM Treaty to limit the ability to defend your own territory against nuclear attack, that way discouraging anyone from thinking they could launch an attack and not be destroyed in response. And this was largely Kissinger's thinking and the thinking of many other experts at the time. 

In a nuclear world you needed more rules to regulate this, to make sure things didn't go into a dangerous direction as they had in October 1962. >> Up through the '60s, I suppose though, or maybe a little later, it was still a kind of a two-part conflict, wasn't it? In other words, two sides. It was communist versus noncommunist, let's say. But then you start getting other players in there. When does Israel get the bomb? >> Well, Israel develops its weapon in the late '60s, early 1970s. Actually, they're helped along by the French. The United States is actually against it. It's the French who build the Dimona reactor in Israel that produces the Israeli bomb. Interestingly, it's Yitzhak Rabin who negotiates the agreement, the secret agreement, with the French. Politics makes strange bedfellows, doesn't it? >> Yes. 

>> But the Israelis have a very small capability at that point. The Indians develop a partial capability for a time. The Brazilians and the Argentineans are working on a capability. >> It makes you wonder why. The Indians because of their big rivalry with Pakistan. >> Right. The Brazilians and Argentineans because of their rivalry with each other. The Taiwanese talk about it for a while. What you see by the 1960s is actually what one would have expected. Which is more states, especially in a world that's fragmenting to some extent, is you have newly independent countries, new rivalries emerging, new smaller states beginning to develop and use this technology that's becoming more and more available, at least in terms of knowledge, to many societies. 

One of the studies done by the United States in the mid-1960s predicts that there will be 20 nuclear powers by the end of the 1970s. That study scares American and Soviet leaders, part of your point, Norman, about them seeing a mutual interest. And that's the motivation behind the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is negotiated in 1968 and signed in 1969 and put into power then in the early 1970s. And the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty basically restricts all signees from developing new nuclear programs if they don't already have one. In return, the existing acknowledged nuclear powers who are part of the treaty, and not all of them are, they agree to reduce their arsenals and they agree to help with providing civilian nuclear energy. Basically you can have access to energy but not access to weapons. One big controversy is... >> How do you check it, for one thing. >> How do you verify it, absolutely. And second, did the big powers keep their agreement to reduce their arsenals? >> And how do we know that they did? Assuming that they did. 

We hear about Soviet inspectors coming to the United States and vice versa. >> It's hard to verify, but on the other hand it gets harder and harder to hide things. One of the great stabilizing forces in the Cold War, hopefully it still stabilizes the world today but we'll have to see years from now, is the advent of satellite technology. Because what satellites do is they provide a way to monitor within a society pretty effectively. >> By the early '60s we have that. >> That's right, by 1960 the first American satellite goes up, Voyager, I think. And what the satellites do is they provide a basis for some degree of confidence that we know what other countries are doing. You can't know for certain but you can see resources being amassed. You can see new projects being begun and it provides a bit of a better way of monitoring what's going on. >> How is the Soviet economy doing in this arms race that's still in effect in the '70s? >> Sure. 

Well, it's an enormous tax on the Soviet economy, as it is on the American economy, but it's a much greater tax on the Soviet economy. The United States is spending on its military generally less than 8% of its GNP. As large and bloated as I believe our military becomes, our GNP is so large and it's growing through the late 1960s so fast that we have a lot of resources. And under Lyndon Johnson's presidency until the worst years of the Vietnam War, he's able to give us guns and butter. More antipoverty programs and more war in Vietnam. He can't do that forever. The Soviets, their economy is not growing at the same pace. They're not getting the same efficiencies. They tended to use older technology and more of it. So they had certain advantages. 

Their missiles were bigger. They were not as miniature as ours so they could put more warheads on them. But they were bigger missiles and they were getting fewer cost efficiencies as well. So by some estimates they were spending as much as a third of their economy. >> A third, as opposed to maybe a 12th of ours. >> Exactly. And a 12th of ours is a 12th of an economy that's also two to three times larger than theirs. So it's an enormous tax on their economy. Khrushchev recognizes this. That's one of the reasons Khrushchev wants to build missiles because he thinks they'll be more cost effective. 

And the man who really recognizes this and tries to move forward with it is Mikhail Gorbachev because Gorbachev, in trying to reform this system, in trying to make the economy perform better when the economy is in one of its worst points in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Gorbachev basically argues they've got to cut military expenditures. How do they do that? Well, you need real nuclear disarmament with the US, and you need better international relations so you can spend the money at home. And that's one of the key sources for Soviet reform right there. >> Coincidental that Gorbachev was one of the first if not the first Soviet leader who wasn't a World War II veteran? >> That's very significant. It's incredibly significant because at two levels. One, he was not a believer that war was inevitable. Those who came out of World War II were because in some ways it seemed to verify Lenin and Marx's predictions. The capitalist powers would attack the communist powers and then go to war against themselves. And both things were happening. Nazi Germany is a capitalist power and Japan is a capitalist power were attacking communists and attacking other capitalist powers. 

And also, those who came of age in that generation, as George Kennan pointed out famously in his famous X article, they had recognized that the war was also their source of life. Gave them a legitimacy to the system. The Soviet Union could claim it had won the war. It had proven it could succeed. And they didn't want to give up on that. Gorbachev didn't buy into either of those two things. He did not think war was inevitable, and he did not think that war was necessary for the survival of the Soviet regime. He was, as many biographers have written, he was a true believer in a way that Khrushchev really wasn't. He really believed that the system could be reformed and made to work. The problem with Stalin, and Khrushchev had said this too, that Stalin had made the system repressive. 

Stalin had made it dictatorial, but if they went to this alternative vision of a Bukharin, of a Lenin in his earlier years, the system could work. And that's what he tried to do. >> What do we see, then, as political pressure, popular pressure, in the west by the time we get into the era of detente, the late '70s, early '80s? >> Well, one of the problems with detente that Ronald Reagan made a career on, in a sense, was that detente basically said we will create rules of the game in Kissinger's terms that will stabilize the international system. Well, Ronald Reagan said this is not acceptable. Because what it's doing is it's giving a lease on life to the Soviets. And to some extent he was right. The Soviets could punch above their weight if we said that their having an equal or slightly larger arsenal of nuclear weapons made them equal to us. Even though they were not equal. And to some extent that is what Kissinger was doing. Kissinger was saying that we need to have a world of stable rules and stable relationships. 

Reagan said that's not acceptable. And Reagan came to power very much, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, especially after the Iran hostage crisis, saying look what happens when we don't stand strong. And so Reagan's argument was that the United States should now win the arms race, that we should outpace the Soviets, we should start building again. He talks about building not just a larger nuclear arsenal, a 600 ship Navy, for example. >> Were those two events really related to Soviet plans for world domination or even nuclear supremacy? I mean, certainly not the Iran hostage crisis or even the invasion of Afghanistan. >> Well, we know from a fair amount of research the Soviets were actually very reluctant to invade Afghanistan. But we also do know that they felt in the late 1970s that the United States was in decline and that they could take advantage of that. That doesn't mean that they were bent on immediate world domination, but they thought the world was going their way as a defecting a KGB official puts it in his memoirs. They thought that after Vietnam the United States looked like it was going down hill. And of course it looked like that to many Americans at the time. 

>> So true. >> And so Reagan, reacting to that, and many others around him, some of who were former democrats in fact, said, we need to stand strong again. Or as Rambo said, we need to let ourselves win this time. And Rambo was a kind of iconic Reagan image. >> All those images come up in Hollywood about him, don't they? >> They do. And so I remember the Rocky movies when Rocky knocks out the Russian boxer, and everybody stands up and cheers. >> Subtle symbolism there. >> And so what happened was Reagan argued we need to stand strong again and we need to play to our strength which is our ability to out-produce the Soviet Union and to be technologically more innovative. >> And to outspend them. >> And to outspend them. 

And so Reagan begins that process, and quite frankly, and we forget this now in the aura that hangs around Reagan in retrospect, this scares a lot of people. Many believe he's a madman. And there are significant marches and demonstrations in the United States in the early 1908s, people forget this. It's interesting. They remember the late '60s. In the early 1980s one of the largest demonstrations that ever occurred in New York City was an antinuclear march in Central Park in 1982. I think that's the image that we actually have up here. >> During the Reagan administration. >> It's extraordinary. A number of states pass nuclear freeze resolutions. 

Which, of course, are nonbinding, but they're resolutions calling upon the United States to stop building nuclear weapons. State legislatures and state referenda passed those. There are bills in Congress about this. And by 1982 even many former experts in government start to embrace the nuclear freeze. George Kennan, the author of Containment, Robert McNamara. >> Who was one of the big architects of the Vietnam War. >> George Bundy as well. And then in 1983 a number of seminal books is written by Carl Sagan. There are a number of other figures, Jonathan Shell and others, Carl Sagan writes of what he calls nuclear winter. And nuclear winter is, Sagan is a scientist's evidence and description of how even a small set of nuclear blasts would actually destroy the atmosphere, coming back to Oppenheimer's worry. 

>> So would destroy the "victor" or the sender as well as the victim. >> Exactly. Would make it impossible to survive. And the science is disputed to this day, but it scares a lot of people. Sagan basically says, in his cheery voice, that we cannot go around pretending that we can win a nuclear war. And he accuses Reagan of trying to do that. By 1983, Reagan, despite the turn around in the American economy and despite some evidence of popularity, is quite concerned that he is seen as an unstable leader. And in the 1984 presidential election, his advisers, and we know this from their memoirs, his advisers basically tell him that the one point he's weak on is this, that he has to show that he's not crazy, that he's actually not going to take the world to nuclear war. Now, it's a complicated reaction Reagan has because for Reagan all the tough talk was serious, and his talk of strategic defense initiative was serious as well. But we also know Reagan wanted to negotiate from the start. 

Reagan believed that you negotiate from strength. He believed the United States was too weak in the 1970s to negotiate, it had to create self-confidence and strength. The problem is, of course, if you make yourself seem so strong, doesn't that make it hard for the other side to negotiate with you. >> Until they catch up. >> And it was impossible in that sense. So Reagan is in this difficult position. But what he does is tone down the rhetoric in 1984 about defeating the Soviets in response to Carl Sagan and others. >> An evil empire. >> An evil empire which is a March '83 speech. He does not use that phrase again in 1984. 

And he increases his public rhetoric about wanting to negotiate with the Soviets. He famously, in his January 1984 State of the Union address, in his own writing, adds a story to the state of the union, as Reagan liked to do, he liked to add stories, about John and Sally and Evan and Anya, four made up people. And he says if they could just get together, these families, they would work out their differences, why can't we? To Reagan's credit we now have evidence, we have the letters, he was sending letters to Soviet leaders from 1981 asking for negotiations. He sent letters to Brezhnev, he sent letters to Chernenko and Andropov. As he comments in his memoirs, the problem that Reagan had is the Soviet leaders kept dying. >> They tended to choose very old ones, and they didn't have much durability. >> Right, they were all veterans from the second world war who were dying off demographically. But the other issue, really, and this is something Reagan didn't grapple with until '84, '85, when you are using these incredibly powerful weapons and the images around them to make yourself seem strong and to project power, it makes the other side feel sometimes too weak to negotiate. You always want to negotiate from strength, but you can't negotiate from dictatorial dominance. And Reagan was pushing for that too much. 

I think he backs down, and then Gorbachev arrives on the scene in 1985 committed to reforming and reducing the Soviet military establishment. And Reagan and Gorbachev develop really an extraordinary relationship. It reminds us that even in a world of nuclear weapons, personalities and leaders matter. And I want to just stress that point. We can focus so much upon the weapons and the science that we forget that politics is still about human beings. >> Well, Reagan got to the point where, and I'm not sure that he might have been ahead of the curve here in his own advisers, at one point when he was talking about the strategic defense initiative, and actually referred to the possibility of sharing the technology with the Soviets, and some reporter says, huh, and he says well, why not? >> Right. There's that moment. There are a number of these moments. It's in Reykjavik in 1986 where he's sitting with Gorbachev by a fireplace, and the two of them, Gorbachev and Reagan, start talking about eliminating all nuclear weapons. And their advisers are just horrified. 

They're not even in the room. There are images of them pressing their noses up against the glass to try to get in there. Reagan and Gorbachev were interesting characters. Gorbachev was an intellectual. He was someone who had gone to the best schools, he was brought from the provinces to go to Moscow State University. Trained as a communist party ideologue and intellectual. >> And here we're seeing him with Bush I. We'll get to that in a minute. >> Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. But he was also someone who liked to try to think outside the box and make quick decisions. 

And he was egotistical enough to think that he could do that. Reagan was not an intellectual. Reagan did not buy into a lot of the sophisticated analysis about nuclear weapons. Reagan believed in some very simple things but they were his beliefs. And he believed in the end that a peace would actually come from a negotiated end to nuclear rivalry and an actual reduction in nuclear weapons. He actually believed in that. And he actually believed that strategic defense initiative would actually be a way to do that. His advisers didn't believe that but he believed that. >> And very, very expensive program. >> Very expensive program but he believed it was worth it, he believe it could happen. 

And so these two men were willing to talk about what other leaders wouldn't talk about, and even though they never actually agreed to reduce all nuclear weapons, and in fact the reductions they agreed to were pretty minimal, nonetheless, it changed the way the Cold War operated, it changed the place of nuclear weapons because now you had, by the second half of the 1980s, two major leaders from the two big rivals working together to reduce their nuclear arsenals. And I love this image, Norman, because this is when Reagan and Gorbachev in December 1988 meet on Governors Island. There's vice president George Herbert Walker Bush, who at that point is also president-elect. It's a wonderful image. We have an account of the discussions. It's clear that Reagan and Gorbachev are friends. They trust one another. Gorbachev had just come to New York and agreed to reduce the United Nations 500,000 forces from Soviet military, 50,000 in Europe, unilaterally. >> Unprecedented. >> Unprecedented. 

>> 1986, how big an effect does the nuclear accident at the reactor Chernobyl have on Soviet thinking and world thinking? >> It's huge. It's huge. First of all, it's our worst nightmare. Here, Three Mile Island in the United States was a serious accident, but it didn't create major death and destruction in any way. Here you have a large part of the Ukraine and Belarus that become contaminated and uninhabitable as a consequence. You have something that affects radiation levels in milk almost immediately throughout Europe. >> Kills children. >> That's right. And the graphite reactor that they used at Chernobyl was actually a model that was used elsewhere. It could happen elsewhere. 

It reminded people of the horrors and the dangers of these weapons and this material. And it also showed the dark side of Gorbachev, one has to say, because his initial urge was to cover it up. >> It's kind of a traditional Soviet response, though. >> And so I think in the long run, many Soviet historians have argued, that it's the beginning of Gorbachev losing creditability very early on. >> Which he did somewhat dramatically, didn't he? >> Yeah. By 1988, in this image here, he's more popular in the United States than he is in Russia. >> And remains so today. >> That's correct. That's correct. And so it had a huge impact on Reagan because it confirmed Reagan's desire to get away from a nuclear world. 

Neither of these men, Gorbachev or Reagan, bought into the argument that a world of mutually assured destruction would be a stable world in the way Kissinger believed that. Kissinger believed if you created a world of mutually assured destruction where both sides could destroy each other, they knew it and there were rules of the game, it would be stable. >> As long as everything was under control. >> Exactly, as long as the right people were in control. Reagan and Gorbachev didn't believe that. They wanted to move away from a nuclear world for economic reasons, for political reasons, for ideological reasons. And it was that urge more than anything else, I would argue, Norman, that brought the Cold War to an end. It was a change in attitude. >> Any argument, though, to the suggestion that Reagan simply spent his way out of the Cold War? Out-spent the Soviet Union? They couldn't afford to keep up? >> That argument is like the argument that the Japanese would have surrendered if we hadn't dropped the atomic bomb. We were outspending the Soviet Union. 

They couldn't compete with us forever unless their economy found somehow some wellspring of growth. But they didn't have to end the Cold War then. They could have actually acted belligerently. I would argue historically societies that feel economically pressured usually react in a belligerent way. Gorbachev chose not to. And that was not inevitable. Even in 1988, even where this image is here at Governors Island, he could have, at that point, this is before the Berlin Wall falls, this is before the revolutions in eastern Europe the next year, he could have put down. If he wanted to send Soviet tanks in he could have stopped that. The same way Brezhnev did in '68 in Prague and elsewhere. But he chose not to. 

And that's really important. And I'm not saying it was all because of him. I'm saying it was because of his relationship with Reagan and a new view of nuclear weapons. If nuclear weapons were at the start of the Cold War, a new view of them at the end of the Cold War made the end of the Cold War possible. >> With the end of the Cold War, the break up of the Soviet Union, late '80s, early '90s, the nuclear chemistry of politics changes significantly, doesn't it? >> Absolutely. I think what happens then is you now have less danger, and we should recognize this, that we're going to blow up the world tomorrow. >> We may blow up little pieces of it. >> And that's it. Power becomes more fragmented. Power becomes more pluralistic. 

Which is to say there are more entities out there that can bring damage upon others, not on the scale that the United States and the Soviet Union would have during the Cold War. But they can still do that and now they can do that with less restriction. And so you do then go to the world that Americans had predicted in the mid-'60s of more nuclear states. That had been kept under control by the US and the Soviet Union. Now you see more of that development and now a testing of an Indian bomb, the Indians had kept their bomb largely untested. Pakistanis respond. Israel's arsenal grows. There's talk of, for a while, the South Koreans developing an arsenal. Most significantly, North Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation. And these are big problems. 

I see why countries want nuclear weapons, but it creates arms races within regions that are not going to as stable as the US/Russian relationship was. >> Well, if you look at the situation in Iran or North Korea, either one, today, you don't see or at least on the surface, the level of concern in Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union, Russia, or China in providing sanctions of some kind that will prevent the further development of nuclear material. The Iranians continue to insist theirs is for purposes of peaceful use only which nobody else buys that. And certainly North Korea you wouldn't believe anything that they would say on the face of it. >> Well, I think the Russians and the Chinese agree in opposing, in general, nuclear proliferation in these societies. But they don't want to use pressure for reasons that have to do with their own economic interests in these societies. In the case of North Korea, the Chinese fear is actually that North Korea will collapse, and they'll have a huge refugee problem. And the Russians and the Chinese are perhaps a little bit too optimistic that a small nuclear arsenal in these states won't be as horrible as it could be. I think it's very dangerous, not because the leaders irrational, especially in Iran, and there's question will North Korea. But in the case of Iran, I think Iran has very good reasons for a nuclear weapon. 

They're in a really tough neighborhood. And the Iranians have an arsenal. I think most people, most Americans, if they were the leader of Iran would want a nuclear weapon too. But I think what's significant is... >> Try to balance Israel, for example. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And also there are now more than a dozen US air bases right on Iranian borders. So this is a very tough neighborhood to be in. They have reason to feel insecure. 

So they have rational reasons to do this. But the problem is if they develop a program, which they are, there's going to be an urge then for other countries in the region. And you go down a slippery slope very quickly. This did not happen during the Cold War because it was a largely, as you said Norman, bipolar world. It was a world that was largely structured for better or for worse around two major powers with a few others. In a world that's less structured in that way, where power is more pluralistic, there's much greater danger of more states developing these weapons without proper safety precautions, getting into conflicts where these weapons might come out and be used. Let's take a very realistic scenario with India and Pakistan. This is the one that the US government worries about all the time. India could just overrun Pakistan conventionally. Let's say that starts to happen for whatever reason because of an assassination attempt, because of a terrorist attack in Bombay again by Pakistanis, they've already done this. 

The Indians react really strongly. Pakistan is on the verge of collapse. It's not inconceivable that the Pakistanis at the ISA, their interservice agency, would actually use nuclear weapons against India. How would India react? And how would China react? These are very realistic scenarios. >> And this is considering the current regime in Pakistan. The, I gather, bulk of American concern in Afghanistan has to do with if Afghanistan is so unstable might not Pakistan be destabilized and have nuclear weapons at the same time. >> Absolutely. It's a very grave worry. There are a lot of problems with what we're doing in Afghanistan. Maybe we should be there, maybe we shouldn't, but the alternative of allowing the Taliban to come back in power in the southern part of Afghanistan and exerting more influence in Pakistan should not make anyone sleep well at night. 

Maybe there's nothing we can do about it, but it raises these very serious worries, and again in the last five years the Pakistanis or groups within Pakistan with Pakistani government support have launched major terrorist attacks on India. There are reasons to believe that India might react more seriously with a conventional retaliation that could put Pakistan in a position where it has few other choices than to use its nuclear arsenal. That's a very dangerous scenario. >> So, if you look at where we stand today with nuclear weapons, is there any kind of a blanket approach that would somehow minimize the likelihood of a nuclear weapon being used by any possessor? >> Well, I think this is a point where we should be optimistic. We've said a lot of sort of scary things in this show. But I think there's a realization by democrats and republicans in the United States, and by many of our allies, that the world needs to be made less nuclear, not more nuclear and that it has to be done not just by telling other states to reduce their weapons but by the states that have these weapons reducing them as well. And I give personally enormous credit to a bipartisan group in the US that's come around to this. This is former Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz, former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State James Baker, and a variety of others have come to embrace what they call the zero option. It's really Reagan's old position of actually really trying to reduce the weapons but without trying to threaten people in the short-run with them. And President Obama has actually adopted that position. 

It doesn't mean we're ever going to get in the near future down to zero weapons in the US, and maybe we shouldn't, but there's no reason why we couldn't have an arsenal of 1500 rather than 3500 warheads. And why we couldn't reduce the number of delivery vehicles. And in doing that, in making those reductions ourselves, providing incentives for other societies to do the same and creating more restrictions on the ways in which nuclear material circulates and can be used. I don't think we're ever going to be able eliminate the possibility of a state like North Korea that's willing to starve its population and develop a nuclear from doing that. We can make it harder. We can create more of a consensus for international reaction against that. It's a long process, but any kind of diplomatic solution always takes a long time. >> So what would be an incentive for a state like Iran, as you say, that lives in a tough neighborhood that's clearly on the path to developing a nuclear weapon and presumably some kind of delivery system to go with it? >> This incentive would be that they would be the outcasts of the world if they do this. That would be even worse. In essence, what we know in the end worked with South Africa, often despite contrary American policy, which is that states don't like to be made outcasts. 

There's economic costs to that, there's political costs, there's social and cultural costs. Right now the Iranians think, and they're probably right, they could develop a nuclear weapon and the United States will get angry, Great Britain will get angry, but in fact, just as you said, the Russians and the Chinese will continue to work with them and they won't suffer too much. But if they really think that there is a strong, strong moral, cultural, political, social, economic prohibition on this, that really raises the costs. And then they have to ask themselves, are they willing to deal with a security dilemma that they face? Are they really willing to go down this route or are there other routes they would prefer to go down? We need to change the incentive structure in that way. And I think this is possible with a country like Iran. North Korea, maybe not. Iran is a very dynamic society. It has a horrible set of leaders, but it has a very young population. A population that doesn't want to be isolated from the word. >> And much more informed populations in almost all cases today with communication being so instantaneous and so pervasive. 

>> That's right. And just think of the Twitter videos that were coming out of Iran. Again, this is not true to North Korea. You're always going to have problems like that too. But we shouldn't aggregate all these cases together. And one of the things the international community should be doing is working on developing mechanisms for addressing the real concern states have but also making it clear that the nuclear option which might seem like the right option is actually going to have higher costs than the alternatives. >> You willing to go to Washington if called upon? >> My wife would kill me if I did. She loves living in Madison. She doesn't want to go to Washington. No, once in while I talk to people in Washington, but I love being a scholar and being able to say what I think and not have to deal with the consequences if I'm wrong. 

>> Luxuries of academia. >> It is, it is. >> My guest has been Jeremi Suri. A pleasure having you with me today as always, Jeremi. >> It's my pleasure, thank you. >> I'm Norman Gilliland, thanks for joining us for University Place.