Hotter Than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Scott Horton interviews Daniel Ellsberg, Seymour Hersh, Gar Alperovitz, Hans Kristensen, Joe Cirincione and more. by Scott Horton

Author:Scott Horton [Horton, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781733647366
Publisher: The Libertarian Institute
Published: 2022-07-09T05:00:00+00:00

Lt. General Robert G. Gard, Jr.: Loose Nukes and Iran’s Program

April 15, 2010

Scott Horton: Our guest on the show today is retired Lieutenant General Robert G. Gard, Jr. He’s the Chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. We talked to him a couple of weeks ago about possible consequences of war with Iran, and now it’s time to catch up on nuclear policy. We’ve got a New START Treaty with Russia, we have Iran news, and we also have the Summit on Nuclear Security where Barack Obama sat at the head of the table the other day. Welcome back to the show, General Gard. How are you doing this morning?

Robert G. Gard, Jr.: Pleased to be here.

Horton: Let’s start with this Summit on Nuclear Security. Almost every leader and every country was invited to this thing. What did they accomplish?

Gard: Well, I think what was done was to raise the realization among many of the leaders worldwide of the dangers of an attack by terrorists with a nuclear explosive device. This has not seemed real to many people, and we’ve tended to treat this in a routine way instead of giving it the priority it deserves.

Horton: How much priority do you think that does deserve? The idea that a stateless group could get together an actual fissionable nuclear weapon and set it off in the United States, do you think that is a pretty big danger?

Gard: I would say it is a relatively low priority, but it is not only possible—over time it could become probable, unless we secure the fissile materials that they could use to fashion a nuclear explosive device.

Horton: There’s a guy named Richard Mayberry who’s a financial prognosticator with a newsletter, and he’s been pretty good. He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union back in 1985 or ’86, and his prediction is that at some point, somebody is going to nuke Washington. If it’s not a nation state like Russia or China, it would be a terrorist group, because you can’t just go around the world making millions and millions and millions of people want to kill you without some of them actually doing it at some point. He wasn’t necessarily saying that Ayman al-Zawahiri is going to do it or something like that, but rather as a matter of probability. Here we have a world with thousands of nuclear weapons, and here we have a world with millions of people who have reasons to take revenge on the United States.

Gard: Yes, and the problem is that there is enough loose plutonium and highly enriched uranium, some of which is not secured very well at all. Should terrorists get their hands on it, it would be extremely difficult to intercept it if they tried to move it into one of our ports or across our borders and explode it in this country. So what we must do, and what the summit was all about, was to secure that material at its source and make it much more difficult for terrorists to buy or steal any of it.

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