Judging Freedom - NO NUCLEAR WAR: A Call for Reason [Live Event] - National Press Club (Part 1 of 3)

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

NO NUCLEAR WAR: A Call for Reason [Live Event] - National Press ClubSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Operation Dawn was four questions that I was asking the American voters. Simply, what would you do to save democracy, to save America, to save the world through your vote in November? Basically, to say no to nuclear war. Because at that point in time, not a single candidate was talking about the danger of nuclear war. It's as if the conflict between the United States and Russia didn't exist. Well, my daughters were very scared. This video, by the way, was a song written by my daughter, the twin daughters. The illustrations were done by my other daughter and her fiancee, sort of a replication of the drawings they did did as children you know their father it's

tough to be the father or the child of a weapons inspector because he comes home full of doom and gloom and it scared them and they were scared to death about the danger of nuclear war so they created this artificial world where that allowed them to escape. And this video captured that. And it's what motivates me to do what I do, saving the lives of my children, saving the lives of your children, saving the lives of all the innocent people in America and around the world whose existence is threatened by the imminent danger of nuclear war. Now, Operation Dawn was not a one-time event. We had other events. We had a very successful panel discussion in New York City, and we had another successful event in November. But now now here we are this is a continuation of this why because we are on the cusp of a nuclear war with russia the danger of a nuclear conflict today is greater than it has been

at any time in our history there are people who say well scott what about the cuban missile crisis a the nuclear arsenals of the united States and the Soviet Union in 1962, pale in comparison to the nuclear arsenals that exist today, both in destructive power, deliverability, et cetera. Simply put, back then we could destroy a continent or two. Today we destroy the entire world. But the thing that's missing is that back then, we were talking to our adversaries. We were having conversations.

Khrushchev was speaking to Kennedy, either directly or indirectly. Ambassadors were talking to one another. Today, because of the Biden administration's orders, there is no viable dialogue with the Russian Federation as we are lurching towards a nuclear conflict, one that will destroy life as we know it on the planet. Now, we're going to get to this in just a second. I don't want to steal Dr. Postel's thunder here. But the danger is manifested in a number of ways, and one of it is the sense of helplessness we get as americans i don't know

if um you've been watching what's been happening in washington dc lately uh on november 20th there was a gathering by the center of strategic and international studies they invited rear admiral thomas buchanan he's the j5 director Director of Plans and Operations for the Strategic Command. That is the combatant command that does nuclear war fighting. They're the ones ready to fight the war. And he gave a keynote address, but he also answered questions. And I believe it was the second question asked by the moderator dealt with the risk of nuclear war. And he, of course, started off with the standard, nobody wants to fight a nuclear war, right? Nobody wants to fight it. But he's the guy who writes the nuclear war

plan. And then he turned and he said, but we are ready to fight a nuclear war. We are ready to engage with the Russians in a nuclear exchange, he called it, as if that somehow diminished this destructive reality of a nuclear war. But that's not the part that scared me, because every iteration of strategic command in the history of the nuclear force in the United States has been prepared to fight a nuclear war. That's their job. They're prepared to fight it.

But if you recall back in the, you know, Ronald Reagan, when he was talking with Gorbachev, they agreed that nuclear wars cannot be won. Therefore, they should never be fought. So what Rear Admiral Buchanan said afterwards is not only that the United States is prepared to fight a nuclear war, they are prepared to win a nuclear war. And the methodology of victory, while vague, was that we would, after we won, prevailed in this nuclear conflict, we would retain sufficient nuclear weapons capacity so that we could deter other nuclear adversaries. In this day and age of nuclear parity, where the last remaining arms control treaty, New START, gives roughly 1,550 nuclear deliverable systems to each side,

how do you win a war? He said, you don't want to use all your nuclear weapons to win. You have to have some left over. But if you have some left over, how do you destroy much with reduced? And the answer is in the plans that he has written. Nuclear preemption, the preemptive use of nuclear power so that we can maximize destructive capacity, eliminate as much of the retaliatory capacity of the enemy, and still retain sufficient nuclear strike capability to deter other people. Nuclear preemption. It is part of the Biden administration's nuclear posture, which was published in 2022, and it's been incorporated in the latest iteration of the presidential nuclear employment guidance, that is telling strategic command how to fight the war.

So nuclear preemption is how we are going to have a nuclear engagement with the Russians that we win. Now, I don't know if there's representatives of the Russian embassy here today, but yeah, I just told you, we're going to nuke you first. But you know that. That's why you're so upset with what's going on with the ATAKOMS missiles. ATAKOMS is not a nuclear-capable missile. It's a tactical missile. It's an American-made system that's been provided to the Ukrainians, and Ukrainians have used it to attack targets inside Russia. The problem is Ukraine can't do that on their own.

In order to do these targeting, Ukraine has to receive intelligence information from the United States that's put together by specific targeting teams within the Department of Defense. That means that we are planning the attack against Russia. Then we have to provide the communications capacity so that the system can guide itself to the target and communicate with satellites. Again, American satellites, American guidance, American encryption. It's an American missile being facilitated for its launch by the United States of America, and the only thing Ukrainian about it is the finger that pushes the launch button. And the Russians have rightfully said that this constitutes an act of war against Russia. Legally, it does.

One other thing I want to leave you right now, whether it's official or not, America is at war with Russia. We are fighting a hot war with Russia as we speak because attack missiles are being launched against Russia, and that can't happen without American permission and American facilitation. Now, why would the Russians equate that danger to something that could lead to a nuclear war? Because preemption. One of the concerns that the Russians have is that the United States and NATO will initiate strategic preemption with

conventional preemption, that is to use conventional weapons like ATAKOMs, Storm Shadow, SCALP, to initiate an attack, follow that up with a nuclear preemptive attack to decapitate Russian capabilities. So every time we fire an ATAKOMs missile, the Russians have to say, is this it? Has the balloon gone up? And so they have adjusted their nuclear posture to lower the threshold so that they say, if a nuclear power provides conventional strike capability to a non-nuclear power, and that non-nuclear power uses that to strike Russia, that meets the threshold requirement for Russian release of nuclear weapons in response. But the Russian nuclear planners also have to say, if America is getting ready to launch a nuclear preemptive attack against us, the only way we can prevail is to preempt the preemption,

which means they have to be prepared to launch a nuclear preemptive attack. And that's where we are today, ladies and gentlemen. That's where we are today, ladies and gentlemen. That's where we are. I was losing sleep. I couldn't sleep for months because of this problem going through my head. No matter how I crunched the numbers, we ended up in a nuclear war. On Thursday, though, I went to Congress. I went there in the company of Medea Benjamin and her fantastic colleagues. And we met with representatives and we met with their staff. And on Thursday night, I slept like a baby. Why? Because the problem is difficult.

We know that. But what we found out is there are members of Congress who are aware of this issue. There is actually a bill that has been written and put on the floor to the Foreign Affairs Committee identifying the TACMs as the issue. Other members of Congress are preparing letters to go, and we're putting more pressure on Congress. We have the ability now to get Congress maybe to do something, not to stop the Biden administration. They're not going to stop, but maybe to put pressure on the incoming Trump administration to take some action. So that's why we're here today. We're going to have three panels. The first panel is going to be about nuclear war. The goal of this panel is to scare you to death, not irresponsibly, but based on the reality of the situation we face.

The second panel is to try to engender some hope, but it'll be frustrating because we're going to be talking about what can be done to get the Biden administration to stop carrying out an active war against Russia. Let me talk about that real quick. We spoke to a representative who I, we have to respect the discretion of the talk. I said, you know, it's my understanding the U.S. intelligence community is briefing Congress and the White House that the Russians are bluffing. And that's why Biden has gone forward so aggressively. And he said why Biden has gone forward so aggressively. And he said, no, I had that briefing. That's not what they said. They said the Russians aren't bluffing, but the Biden administration is ready to have that nuclear war. And this is after an election where the American people said no to escalation in Ukraine and no to nuclear war with

Russia. The Biden administration is acting in a manner that totally deviates from the will of the people. This is the dangerous situation. So how can we get Congress to do something to reverse this? The third panel is going to be how can we take that same desperate need for intervention and apply it to what I call MAGA-MAHA. MAGA is, of course, Make America Great Again, Donald Trump's movement. MAHA is Make America Healthy Again, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s movement. They came together, unlikely comrades. They've now unified to make America great and healthy again, apparently. But don't belittle it, because the moment RFK Jr. joined the Trump team,

Operation Dawn, that effort we kicked off back in September, we reached out and I asked them to do something, to get the Trump campaign to make a statement. I made that same request to every single campaign out there, Jill Stein's campaign, Kamala Harris's campaign, and now I made it to the Trump campaign. They did it. RFK Jr. and Donald Trump Jr. wrote an op-ed piece that was published on The Hill, where it said,

we need to stop the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, and we need to make sure we prevent a nuclear war. Ladies and gentlemen, this effort works. This effort works, but we can't rest on our laurels. We have to continue to be aggressive in making sure that we the people do what we can to put pressure on the decision makers so they make the right decisions so that we get to see Christmas, so that we get to celebrate New Year's, so they get to live year after year after year. So again, thank you very much for coming. Now what I'm going to do is introduce our first panel. This panel is designed to scare you, as I said. We have two distinguished fear mongers. Dr. Theodore Postel, he is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a weapons expert. He used to

advise the director of naval operations, I believe, about strategic nuclear war planning. I have known him over the course of the last three decades. He first came to my radar when he said that the American Patriot missiles weren't shooting down Iraqi Scud missiles. And of course, everybody said, pa, you're wrong. He was right. And today he's right about a lot of things. And he's going to talk to you about the dangers of nuclear weapons. And unfortunately, he's right again. We also have Colonel Larry Wilkerson. Colonel Larry Wilkerson has a distinguished career in the United States Army. Helicopter pilot in Vietnam, flew 086 Cayuses, I believe was the helicopter. And then he went on to a career that eventually brought him into Washington, D.C. He was the chief of staff or a senior advisor to Colin Powell.

And Colin Powell was a national security advisor to Ronald Reagan. And I thought it was from 1989 to 1993. So we had some crossover, not that you knew me, but Colin Powell was the National Security Advisor when the INF Treaty was signed and played a role. And then Colin Powell went on to be the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. Larry was with him there. And then when Colin Powell went on to become the Secretary of State, Larry Wilkins became the Chief of Staff for this. This is a man who knows Washington, D.C. inside and out at the highest levels, and he's going to talk about, well, I'll let him talk what he's going to talk about, but first of all, I'd like to turn the floor to

Theodore Postol, and sir, scare him. Well, I hope what I'll do is just simply tell you the truth. I'm certain that if I do my job properly, you will be scared. So anybody who understands what I'm talking about will be scared. Do we have the slides being projected yet? I can't see behind me. Yes. Okay. Since our concern during this panel is the possibility of an escalation to an unwanted nuclear war with Russia,

Scott and I and Larry agreed that we wanted to brief the audience first about the effects of a single nuclear detonation on Washington. It's on a scale that you can begin to comprehend. The problem with nuclear weapons effects is they're on such a large scale that it's very hard from human experience to conceptualize what's actually happening. What I'm gonna focus on is the effects of a single 800 kiloton nuclear detonation over Washington. And why don't we put up actually slide three, if you can. And the, a single Sarmat long-range missile, Russian long-range missile, or an SS-18 carries 10 of these missiles. So we're only talking about one-tenth of the payload of a single missile. The Russian military command has about 400 of these that can be launched

within minutes of a command, so they're very quickly launchable. Incidentally, they have to be because they are under threat from American ballistic missiles, which would have a very high probability of destroying these missiles in their silos before they could be launched. The Russians are fully aware of this, and I do not know directly, but I can assure you from my own experience as a nuclear planner in the United States that they have taken what they judge to be the most appropriate measures to assure that these missiles can be launched on short warning if need be. And this is a danger in itself, that the launch times are highly compressed. The Russians can also launch about 1,600 kiloton bombs from land and submarine launched ballistic missiles. I can talk about those in a question and answer period, but they

are very close to as damaging as the 800 kiloton warhead because nuclear weapons effects scale slowly with yield. So let me focus first on the bomb of 800 kilotons, which is shown to you on the screen here. What you're seeing now is the fireball, since the bomb is intentionally detonated at an altitude of about one mile over the city. It'll be clear shortly why the choice of one mile. It doesn't have to be that, and it could be detonated at the ground or at another height of burst, but it's a reasonable guess. And when the detonation occurs,

an enormous amount of energy is released in a few hundredths of millions of seconds into a very small volume within the nuclear weapon itself. And because there's so much energy, the temperature goes up during the period of peak energy output to about 100 million degrees kelvin the center of the sun is about 20 million degrees kelvin so you can imagine how intense the environment is during this very short interval of out of output the energy radiates from this tiny volume of space, mostly in the form of X-rays, very short wavelength light, electromagnetic energy. And the X-rays are absorbed by air.

So because they're absorbed by air, they quickly go out at the speed of light, and they will heat a small volume of air, about 300 feet in diameter, to a temperature of about a million degrees. So we have cooled within a millionth of a second to a ball of just a million degrees, if that just a million means nothing to you. And this mass of air, which has not even moved at this point because it's happened so fast,

begins to expand violently at about a million miles per hour. So it acts like a fast-moving piston on the surrounding cooler air, compressing the air into a shockwave of enormous power and extent. So the fireball, when it reaches its maximum, which is shown here in this diagram, is about, radiates about at a temperature of about 8,000 degrees Kelvin. And the surface of the sun is about 2,000 degrees Kelvin. So it's hotter than the surface of the sun. And in fact, this fireball is radiating light and heat at a rate probably two and a half times, well, two and a half times, determined by physics, two and a half times the

equivalent area of the fireball, the equivalent area of the surface of the sun that's covered by the fireball. So since the sun is 90 million miles away and the fireball is only a few miles from the surface of the earth, it can set fires at fantastic ranges, in this case about six to seven miles from the detonation point. And the fires, as I'll show you shortly, are what generate the enormous amount of damage. Most people are focused on the blast pressure. The blast is almost irrelevant. And if you take the fires into account, you would find that the number of prompt deaths from a nuclear explosion of this kind of yield will easily, easily be three or four times larger than what

the Joint Chiefs of Staff would tell you when they briefed you if you were the President of the United States. We still, we do not include the effects of the fireball. We are focused on blast, which is minimal, almost non-existent relative to the fireball. In the diagram, you see a kind of smudging of the ground below. That's because the ground is going to explosively disintegrate due to the enormous amount of light and heat from the fireball. So for example, if you were underneath the detonation point where, of course, the brightness of the fireball is going to be most extreme, literally surfaces like asphalt would explosively evaporate, causing shockwaves of their own. I mean, that's how enormously intense

the light and heat from the fireball would be if we go to the next slide We see that the when the fireball reaches its maximum diameter It's basically it's got about 1% the density of air inside it and the pressure from this very hot air Is roughly equal to the pressure of the air around it. So the compressed shockwave from the earlier rapidly expanding fireball expands as a shockwave. And in the next diagram, we see why the one-mile altitude might be chosen. If we go to slide five, what happens is the shock wave, the primary shock wave will reach the ground and you'll get a secondary shock generated by reflection off the

ground. And at the junction between the secondary and the primary shock, you get an adding of the overpressure from the two different shocks. Basically, in this case, a doubling of the overpressure. So you can extend the range at which the blast is most damaging. It's kind of an irrelevancy, I want to underscore because the the real uh effects of the of the fireball are it sets fires over vast range now if we look at slide six I've just inserted a diagram of the uh expanding well-known mushroom cloud everybody who's grown up under the nuclear threat knows this um uh this this phenomenon and um this is like 30 or 40 seconds after the so it's a long time you know half a minute more than half a minute the fireball will have risen to an altitude of maybe two, three miles. It'll be rising at about 100 miles per hour, 150 miles per hour. But what ultimately happens, as shown in slide seven,

is the fireball will continue to buoyantly rise until after maybe 10 or 12 minutes, it reaches the bottom of the stratosphere at about 12 miles altitude. And earlier in the process, it is sucking air behind it. So if you were on the ground at a range of maybe a couple of miles and lived through the initial shock, you wouldn't be living long after that, but somehow survive the initial shock you wouldn't be living long after that but somehow survive the initial shock you would experience a blast wave a more lower high pressure but but longer in extent pulling pulling in pushing in toward the detonation point in other words first the shock wave comes out knocks things down and then it starts

sucking in pulling things into the um into the fireball direction into the ground zero direction in the next slide i show you the area that would be set on fire the reddish area the yellow areas the area almost certainly that would be on fire, but the reddish areas absolutely, without doubt, would be on fire. And it's important to understand that the area on fire, the size of the area on fire, in addition to the amount of combustible material on the ground, determines the intensity of the firestorm that will be created by this mass fire.

Just a very simple way of thinking of it. I'll choose the next slide, please. What happens is if I have a pancake on fire, so there's a tremendous amount of energy per unit area being generated by just combustion, and nothing to do with the nuclear weapon except it's fire. But it's covering an area of maybe 150 square miles, because that's how much is on fire simultaneously.

Now, if you just do a thought experiment and double the radius of this area, of this pancake that's on fire, the area that's combusting goes up by a factor of the square, four, while the perimeter only goes up by a factor of the radius, by r. So you can see how the area on fire, the larger the area, the more intense the winds into the fire zone are going to be.

And we know from experience, we have actual computer models we have now done, now that we have more modern technologies, that the air temperature in this fire zone will be well above the boiling point of water and the wind speeds on the ground so we're talking in the streets will be hurricane force or more so this is not if you're worried about blast this is the last thing you should be worried about if we just look for a second at the only historical data we have let's look at slide 10 this is a photograph from the sky of of Nagasaki prior to the atomic bombing there and the full width of the photographs about a mile it's a small area relative to the area that would be completely destroyed by the higher-yield weapon,

which would be 150 square miles, not a few square miles. But what I find useful about this photograph is it's close enough to give you a feeling of, you know, that this is a city. You know, it's not so far away that everything is smudged out. The next photograph shows you what that area looked like after the attack. And this is kind of an understatement of what you would see if in the target area from this 800 kiloton warhead. So I'll close with two images that will be shocking, but I'm not showing them to you just because I want to shock you. I want to tell you, explain to you why these weapons are different.

So I'm emphasizing the fire. In the next slide, you see a man in the street. This is a man who died in the street in Hamburg from a much less intense hostile environment from a firestorm initiated in 1943 in a mass fire raid. It's just fire that did it. A large area was set on fire simultaneously. The wind speeds were well into hurricane force. The man, understandably, chose to try to run, and, of course, he just went out into the air.

Clothes were burnt off him. He was overcome immediately. There were lots of bodies found like this. And for those who made the devil's choice of staying in a shelter, you can see the next slide, the shelters became superheated, turned into ovens. In this particular case, carbon dioxide from partially burned upper sections of the buildings filtered in, but these people would have been roasted anyway. And this was the kind of bodies which, incidentally, they would disintegrate into ash once the shelters were opened up now I'll end with one other comment and that enormous cloud

that I showed you earlier one minute after that cloud has been formed by stabilized will be a couple of minutes stabilizing, the radioactivity in that cloud is about a million times larger than the radioactivity released at Chernobyl at that particular moment, one minute. The radioactivity diminishes tremendously, very fast. So at one hour, it would be 5,000 or 10,000 times greater

than what was released at Chernobyl. And one day, it'll still be 100 times greater. So those materials are going to be falling out of the cloud. That's a phenomenon called fallout. And that's going to create an additional hazard many, many miles, 50, 100 miles downwind, as well as in the target area as well. So this is just a very brief explanation of what could occur if a single weapon out of thousands were detonated over Washington. I'll stop here. Those of you who would like a slide deck,

which would be more comprehensive because I've selected, you know, just a few slides for time limitations, just write me a little note at postal, P-O-S-T-O-L, at MIT.edu. And I'll be happy to send you a slide deck with all the latest and greatest pictures about what happens when a nuclear attack occurs. I'll need a couple of days to do it, because I'm still traveling. But feel free to just write me.

I'll be happy to send it to you. Thanks. I just want to, first of all thank you very much for for that uh i don't feel very good and um you shouldn't either before we move on i just want to remind you that rear admiral thomas buchanan glibly said that the Biden administration is ready as we speak to engage in a nuclear exchange with Russia where that weapon will be used. The Biden administration is willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of Americans for what? And now that leads me to the question to Colonel Wilkerson. Sir, you've been in government. We've had nuclear weapons for a long time now, since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis. We had some other crisis, but we have never used nuclear weapons in anger.

Now we have an administration that says they're ready to use these weapons in anger. What has kept us from using nuclear weapons and what is different about today that makes the probable use? That's my word. I don't want to put words in your mouth. But the probable use of nuclear weapons, a reality is, can you articulate the difference between then and now? Yeah, let me give you a little history first. I know you know it, Scott, but I find increasingly that a lot of Americans don't. And this came home to me as a professor for 16 years at the College of William & Mary with my very bright students and at the George Washington University here with equally bright students for six years,

they had no idea that things like a pamphlet, a DA-numbered pamphlet, Department of Army-numbered pamphlet with a foreword in it by Lyndon Baines Johnson ever existed. I would hand it out to them and let them look at it. It instructed you on how to build a bomb shelter in your backyard. It instructed you on how to stock that bomb shelter, water, food, and other things. And it instructed you very detail-wise in how to establish emergency procedures for you and your family in order to follow the signals that would come out, hopefully, and you would be able to evacuate your home and go into your bomb shelter. They looked at it in askance. They couldn't believe that their government had

put something like that out. I tell you that, I reiterate that just to tell you how ignorant we are today, as opposed to how knowledgeable we became over the length and breadth of the Cold War. Now, I was born in 1945. By the time I was a sentient human being, if you will, I had to listen to my father, who had served in World War II as a B-17 guy over Europe, and was thoroughly fed up with that, so he transferred to the army it was the army air force then it wasn't very difficult to do and he was in the army national guard in south carolina he commanded a rifle company in the army national guard well i remember his concern expressed to my mother about going to korea um and i got a you know as an eight-year-old, I sort of had an interest in

these things. And as I passed through my high school years and so forth, I paid a lot of attention to them. All to say that we were increasingly very aware in this country and became critically aware, I think, by the time of the first Reagan administration, that we could disappear and that we needed to have truly good leadership in order to prevent that. And if we had any empathy at all for the rest of the world to prevent the destruction of the world, because it was becoming increasingly clear from scientific studies and analysis, some of which you've heard here, that the human race probably would not survive a general exchange of nuclear weapons. And as Scott has pointed out, they're even more powerful today. If you saw the movie Oppenheimer, I fully believe that Oppenheimer was as much

concerned with what was going to come out of Manhattan, not at Los Alamos, but with Edward Teller and others pumping the reasons, for example, what was going to come out eventually, which has indeed come out. Much more powerful weapons, weapons that can destroy the planet. Maybe not push it off its axis and send it spiraling into the sun four billion years early, but certainly do enough damage to limit our ability to live here, maybe foreclose it altogether. Just the nuclear winter alone, we found an analysis

from a strike of medium number of missiles between India and Pakistan, and we did this because in 2002, they came very close to doing it, would probably cause a nuclear winter because of the drift of the clouds that would affect farming in the United States all across the West in some of the most prolific states and maybe even cause a dramatic food shortage. Just a small exchange between nuclear weapons states, India and Pakistan. I reiterate all that just to tell you that today we are talking to no one.

Throughout the far more serious, in my mind, crisis over Berlin in 1961, when they built the Schrammauer, the Wall of Shame, we were on the verge of nuclear war, and it was existential for the Soviet Union. The German Democratic Republic, the GDR, East Germany, was disappearing. 10,000 people a week were crossing into West Germany. 200,000 crossed into West Germany in that year. They were disappearing. That was existential for Moscow, and they were going to go to nuclear war

with us. There was no question in General Bruce Clark's mind, who was then commanding the army over there, turned his tanks around. They were parked in the concern with the gun facing in. He went out immediately and said, turn your tanks around, have the gun passing out. Oh, by the way, upload your basic load in your tanks now. It was a serious moment, and it took a lot of talk, and it had a lot of talk between almost everyone involved on both sides. And what we finally agreed to do, and the archives are finally reflecting this in some respects, you can find them at the George Washington University National Archives group, we actually acquiesced in the building of the wall. And I say acquiesced,

we didn't help, we didn't pour concrete or put a wire up, but that 140 140 150 kilometer ventral wall we just stood and watched it go up we didn't do anything about it because we knew that was the only solution to the problem so when ronald reagan went and said mr gorbachev tear down that wall he was telling to tear down the wall we helped him build we knew we had to do that and then along came cub came Cuba, as Scott said, and it was much more dramatic, much shorter time frame, 13 days. Adlai Stevenson showing the pictures up at the UN and the crisis that resulted. And it was very serious there. I'm not trying to downplay it. But we've been here before, but we talked.

We talked. And we prevented it. Now, fast forward. April 10th, 2001. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are trying to take over the United States government. Despite the inexperienced man sitting in the Oval, they knew they were really the executive power for the United States. One of the things the vice president wanted to do immediately was to start a war or get as close to a Cold War, is a better way to put it, as possible with China. That was the ripe target to do it. Voila, all of a sudden, an EP-3, which is a very slow, lumbering naval reconnaissance plane,

is flying south of Hanan Island, one of the most militarized places in China. And it strays a little close to Hanan Island, and this had been happening for weeks, and we had told the commander out there to cut it back a little bit. We knew something was going to happen. The Chinese Air Force came up to bounce our plane and scare it to death. And one of their very best pilots, in fact, he was later told to be their very best fighter pilot, he really got a kick out of, you know, making the cockpit in the EP-3 turn brown, is the way they put it. So he did an afterburner up right in front of the cockpit of the EP-3,

going, you know, maybe 160 knots, something like that. He's going about 700 knots, and he's in full afterburner. He clips his wing on the front of the EP-3. He's dead. He goes down in the South China Sea. He's dead. The EP-3 is so crippled it has to land on Hainan Island. Much secret gear on that plane.

The crew is not able to destroy it all in time before the Chinese security people get out there and surround the plane. So we've got an emergency, a real emergency, just what Dick and Don were looking for. Colin Powell gets on his cell phone, cell phone, mind you, calls the Chinese party, leadership party, which is traveling in South America. He gets Xi Jinping on the line, not Xi Jinping. Jesus, I just lost his name. No, the man who knew more about North America than anybody in China. He's dead now. Anyway, really bright man, spoke fluent English.

He gets him on the line, and he apprises the Chinese leadership party of the crisis that's just occurred in the South China Sea. They haven't got word yet. So within 24 hours, Powell has fixed it. He fixed it simply by they agreed to a communique that would be in Chinese, and we agreed to one that would be in English. And in the Chinese one, they would not apologize, in the English when they would, and vice versa. And it was all solved. Now, the story continues in that we sent Admiral Joe Pruer, four-star admiral, former ambassador to China for us, very good man. We sent him to sort of do obeisance, you know, to apologize sincerely

and sort of get the thing back on even keel again. The Chinese were very, very receptive to Joe Brewer. And they said, OK, if you'll tell your Pentagon to send an equivalent rank emissary, we'll give you the plane back. Rumsfeld sent a Navy junior grade lieutenant. The Chinese chopped the plane up in pieces and sent it back to the Pentagon cash on delivery, as you might imagine. My point there is that we averted a serious crisis by talking. Later, George Tenet would come over and chew on Powell for about five

minutes in his office for using his cell phone to talk to diplomats across the world. Powell let him chew for a moment and then said, get out of here, George. I'm not going to even accuse you of letting the NSA monitor my telephone calls. I bet you have transcripts, which George did. I'm doing diplomacy and I'll damn well use the cell phone if I have to to do diplomacy, and if it's an emergency, I'll do it every damn time. And he was sincere about it. And when he talked to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian, yes, he was the Russian foreign minister then too. Actually, I guess he was.

Yeah, he was the foreign minister then. Not the ambassador. He was the foreign minister, I think. Maybe he was the ambassador. At any rate, he liked Sergei, and Sergei liked him, and they talked all the time. They talked about personal things. They talked about families. They talked about their countries. They talked about Perestroika and Glasnost and all the things that Gorbachev had brought and Yeltsin at that time and how much Yeltsin drank, silly all the time. They talked about everything in the

world to talk about, and they talked about serious diplomatic issues. We are doing none of that today. I had lunch along with three or four other people with the Russian ambassador several months ago. In fact, it was almost a year ago. At the time, he was shooting vodka so fast I knew he was concerned. He must have had six in the lobby where we had the reception and then another 10 at lunch. So as we he didn't didn't deter him a bit. He gave a great sock. As we were leaving, I walked up to his aide and I said, can I approach the ambassador for a question and a comment by myself? He said, well, certainly, certainly. So I walked up to Antonoff and I asked him how it was going. He said, they won't talk to me.

I don't even talk to anyone in your government. Well, he's gone now and they haven't put an ambassador back in Washington for seven months. And I made a query and he said, well, why should we put our best man there or anyone there? Well, they used to put their best person here, as you might imagine, because they won't talk to us. So we're not sending an ambassador. All to say the most important component of stopping what Dr. Postol dramatically and graphically gave you a presentation about is non-existent now, non-existent. There is a mandate in the Biden administration that no one talks to Russia. The only exception I've been able to discover that makes any difference is Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, who has a channel to his counterpart or someone like him in Russia with whom he can talk in an emergency, and they do

from time to time talk. That's the most important missing ingredient today, and it makes absolutely no sense, and it makes me want to put Joe Biden behind bars. It is absolutely absurd. And at the same time that Powell would talk to Sergei all the time and on his cell phone, he would talk to the Chinese ambassador. He didn't like him as much, but he would talk to him. The main reason was because he didn't do small talk and Powell thought small talk was an instrumental part of good diplomacy. Because if you don't have empathy for the other person's position, how the hell can you do good diplomacy?

And you don't establish some sort of empathy either way unless you can talk to one another in a more or less friendly, personal fashion. And that's why the cell phone was so important to Powell, because it had become the instrument of communication in the world, as all of you well know. The last point I'd like to make is this. Just what was demonstrated here for a moment or two by the expert in the power of these weapons. And I hope I have given you a little insight into in terms of the past and the present and how different they are. And I should

have chronicled also Scott's point about we, we the empire, the American empire, have single-handedly eliminated every nuclear weapons treaty that we devised during the Cold War painstakingly, carefully, and with great reason to do so on both sides. We've destroyed them all, every single one of them, including the most dangerous of all, the INF Treaty in terms of the weaponry, because that weaponry is the kind that Scott was talking about. It's the kind that's easy to move, easy to hide, and easy to shoot. It's that intermediate force that's the most dangerous and appeals to people like me in the military

as being just another military weapon with a lot more striking power. So it's a very dangerous weapon and we're proliferating those again now, and we have no treaty whatsoever. So if you want to wake up tomorrow morning to a mushroom cloud or two or three or 5,000, let your government continue on its present path. And I have to say I take exception to some people that say because I've done a lot of studying of the people he's apparently going to appoint to principal cabinet positions, and him himself in his first four years.

And I don't think there's relief coming with this particular individual, certainly not from the people he's putting in cabinet positions. So this is not going to relieve itself anytime soon. In my view, it's going to get worse. And I could finish, I won't, I've taken too long already, but I could finish by telling you how I think I could design for you a very, very believable, credible, not incredible at all scenario where we and our poodle in London march ourselves into a nuclear war in Ukraine with very logical steps taken along the way that in mass, in total, would be utter illogic. The one thing that's mitigating against that right now, I should say militating against it,

is what I really predicted about six or seven months ago. NATO's falling apart. If you've checked Germany lately, it's not just Slovakia and Hungary. France is falling apart. I doubt Macron is going to survive, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens, how they consolidate any kind of government. France always has a problem with that, especially when this sort of situation occurs, because they don't have the kind of constitutional fabric to push this situation into a place where they can fix it. They just have to fix it some way. And Germany is falling apart because we did Nord Stream and because their economy is collapsing.

And Schultz is very short term. Raise my right hand, put it on the Bible, guarantee you that. So it's falling apart except for our poodle in London and basically us. And we're going to get to the point where it's a matter, and this is horrible to say, it's a matter of Joe Biden's pride or Donald Trump's pride or the collective conglomerate of our government's pride, and we're going to do something really stupid. And I take exception to what Scott said.

I know he didn't mean to say it the way he said it. We did use nuclear weapons in anger twice in 1945, and we will be the one who uses them first again in the 21st century, guaranteed. Okay, well, I have a quick follow-up questions, and I'm going to, in the interest of time, I'm going to compress them. It's a challenge that Colonel Wilkerson's aware of before, but I'm going to start off with Ted. You just scared everybody hopefully to death with that large nuclear explosion. When I read the literature, for instance, what Donald Trump did when he was president, we created a new category of weapons called usable nuclear weapons, low-yield nuclear weapons, a W76-2, a low-yield weapon that goes on the Trident missile on the Ohio-class submarine. We have a new B61 gravity bomb.

And these take up the terminology, they call them usable nukes, as if we can use them and win and prevail. So here's my challenge to you. You're somewhere in Washington, D.C., and for whatever reason, you enter an elevator and the decision maker for the United States enters the elevator with you. Now, I don't know if that's going to be Joe Biden, and I'm not being too facetious here. I personally think that Anthony Blinken is calling a lot of these shots regarding Ukraine and the use of nuclear weapons. So I'm going to say it's Anthony Blinken. The Secretary of State arrives, and it's just you two. And the elevator's going up. You're getting off at the same floor. You got three-minute elevator pitch. How do you convince

Tony Blinken that there's no such thing as usable nukes, that you can't win a nuclear war and a nuclear war should never be fought? Because he's ready to use usable nukes, fight a nuclear war, and he believes they're going to be fought. The elevator door is shut. The clock's running. 30-second elevator pitch. Dr. Postal. I don't think it's possible. I think this is a man who doesn't listen. I don't think he thinks, in fact. I mean, when you look at his behavior as Secretary of State, we don't like you trading with Russia, so stop. I mean, like the Chinese don't really take that seriously. go take your 18-year-olds as they come out of high school and throw them into the meat grinder that is what is left of the Ukrainian army after it has been slaughtered

and sacrifice those young innocent people along with the innocent people you've already sacrificed. I don't know what you say to a man like this. I'm just, but Larry has more experience about these things. I'm going to give Larry a different challenge. So we're going to start off with your answer, which is a very good— First thing I would tell Tony Blinken is he's the worst Secretary of State you've ever had. That wouldn't get me very far, but what Theodore Postol is saying is this is hopeless, that we have people in charge who are incapable of carrying out the kind of intellectual exercise to understand the insanity of that which they have wrought and left to their own devices.

We are all going to die. This is why I couldn't sleep at night for a long time, ladies and gentlemen. It's this reality as you run the numbers and you look at the people involved. In 1983, NATO ran an exercise called Able Archer. It was actually reforged. There's an aspect to this, which was Able Archer, which is a nuclear command post exercise. Long story short, we were going to test the release of nuclear weapons. It was just supposed to be an exercise, but the Soviets were monitoring the deployment of troops, the deployment of aircraft, and now this nuclear test. And the Soviets believed that we were actually getting ready to launch a nuclear preemptive strike. So the Soviets responded by

putting their nuclear forces on alert, putting aircraft with nuclear weapons on strip alert. The SS-20 missiles were put on full combat alert. putting aircraft with nuclear weapons on strip alert. The SS-20 missiles were put on full combat alert. We were this close to going to war. We were supposed to have a guest here today, Mel Goodman, from a former CIA analyst. Unfortunately, Mel is sick and couldn't make it today. But Mel was going to talk about Abel Archer and what he did to help save the world, that he jumped over a Robert Gates who is his boss? When he tried to say hey guys if this exercise goes on we're gonna have a nuclear war

And Gates said don't worry about it Russians will never do that Soviets never do that He jumped over with the Casey who was the director of the CIA who briefed Ronald Reagan and the exercise was stopped a couple days Short and because they didn't want to send the wrong signal and we lived but it now here's the thing because we don't want to spend our whole life rolling dice like this do we know we need sir I'm gonna put you on an imaginary airplane that's going to Europe and for whatever reason it landed in Moscow and you got off the airplane they said you can't leave till tomorrow. We're taking you to a hotel. And you come into the hotel lobby.

There you are at the elevator. It opens up. You get in to go all the way to the top. And Vladimir Putin steps in. And it shuts. And you're there with Vladimir Putin. Given what Theodore Postol just said, that Tony Blinken's not functional, this government is insane, we're preparing to fight a new...

How do you convince, in 30 seconds, Vladimir Putin not to launch a preemptive strike against us, not to think America's trying to destroy him? How do we convince Vladimir Putin, as I like to say, to steal that line from Jerry Maguire, help me help you? What appeal would you make to Vladimir Putin to tell the Russians, give us a chance? I think I'd have to say something like, I appreciate your situation. I understand how you may look at it. I understand how dour and dire it looks to you, how existential it looks to you.

But I don't think you're a man, and I've listened to you, and I've listened to your foreign minister at length. I don't think you want to destroy the world. So how about just a reaction rather than a preemption? Okay. I like the answer, but it still scares the hell out of me. Yeah, it scares the hell out of me too. And Putin would probably say, no.

That was the purpose of this panel. The purpose of this panel with these two fine gentlemen was to be real. And this is the point I want to lead as we close this panel. This was as real as it gets. This is why I couldn't sleep at night. This is why I still have trouble sleeping at night, because this is reality. This is the hard, cold facts of where we are today with a system that is ready to fight a nuclear exchange with the Russians to win, and they aren't using the tools that we normally use to stop this sourcing, the communication that Colonel Wilkerson talked about. So now that I've made life hopeless for you, we're going to bring an end to this panel. I'd like everybody to give applause to Theodore Postle and Colonel Wilkerson.

And then we're going to see if we can inject some hope into this situation.