Robert McNamara

Thank you Jane for those very warm words of welcome. She stated I can sit here and if you all can hear me, I think I will do that. She mentioned I went into the Defense Department with some hesitation and she is absolutely correct. I kept saying to President Kennedy that I was unqualified, I think I was right but anyway he had a perfect comeback. He said at one point, well you know Bob I don't know any school for Presidents either. That rather took the wind out of my sails. In any event it was a marvelous experience, all kinds of problems you can imagine what being a child of the president, Secretary of Defense would have been during the Vietnam war. I had two children at Stanford at that time, I see Burt Nav here in front of me. He was a guy that really was responsible for advancing the World Bank while I was there. He was a famous Stanford swimmer, and then a Rhodes scholar, and then was part of the Bretton Woods agreement that established the Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the end of World War II, and he was with me at the bank. We were there together the entire 13 years I was there. But in any event what I started to say was it was a problem for the children of Secretary of Defense at that time. One of the Stanford professors, who will go unnamed, allegedly led an attack on the office of Dean of Engineering to burn it and dig catch them back who was an Attorney General at that time and my son were both students there and neither one of us has ever had the courage to ask our sons whether they were part of the that attack. But, I am rather inclined to think they both were. In any event, in any event, that's not we want to talk about. I want to start by telling you something you already know but it bears repeating: you are damn lucky to have Jane Wales out here. I can think of 10 senior jobs in Washington which she could do better than their current incumbents. In any event Jane we are delighted to be together again. At the risk of appearing both simplistic and provocative, I want to say that if I were asked to characterize the current US and NATO Nuclear Weapons Policies and Procedures, I would say they were immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, very very dangerous in terms of the risk of accidental or inadvertent use of these nuclear weapons, and destructive with the non-proliferation regime that has served us so well for over 50 years. And of the remaining 25 minutes or so of my introductory remarks, I will try to substantiate those charges. . As we talk we in the US have deployed about 6000 strategic nuclear warheads and Russia has about the same force. On average, each of our US warheads has a destructive power 20 times that of the Hiroshima bomb, and of the 6000 warheads deployed, 2000 are deployed on what's called a hair trigger alert, they are ready to be launched on 15 minute warning. Now the US has never endorsed what is known as the policy of no first use .We didn't do so during my 7 years of secretary and it hasn't been done since, and therefore we have been and we are today prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons by decision of one man and it is the decision of only one man, the President, against either a nuclear or non-nuclear opponent, whenever we believe its in our interest to do so. And in a moment I will try to emphasize to you that it will be only the decision of one man. There will very likely be no time for others to participate in such a decision and yet that decision puts at risk, literally puts at risk the survival of nations including our own. For decades the US nuclear forces have been sufficiently strong to absorb a first strike and then inflict unacceptable damage on our opponents, the launchers of the strike. But we have also maintained a capability to launch on warning, to reduce the number of our weapons that would be destroyed by an opponent's first strike. Our force can be launched while the opponents warheads are in flight, but to do that no more than 15 minutes can be allowed to receive the warning, determine whether its valid, consider the alternative responses, determine when to recommend to the President, get in touch with the President, recommend it to him, allow him time to decide whether to pursue that course or another, and then transmit the instructions to the launch sites. 15 minutes. And, to make that possible a commander of the US strategic forces has carried with him a secure telephone no matter where he went 24 hours a day, anywhere in the world, 365 days a year, the telephone of the commander whose headquarters have been in Omaha Nebraska was linked to the underground command post of the North American Defense Command in Colorado and to the President wherever the President happens to be 24 a day anywhere in the world 365 days a year. The President always has at his hand what is known as the football--that's the briefcase carried for him by a US military officer. It carries the codes the electronic codes, no warhead that we have can be launched, no strategic warhead that we have can be armed, without the insertion of an electronic code. These are what are called the Permissive Action Links that we introduced in the middle 60s to ensure that we have control over the arming of the warheads. So the commander's orders have been to answer that telephone that he carries with him 24 hours a day anywhere in the world, 365 days, answer that telephone by the end of the third ring, and if it rings and if he is informed that a nuclear attack of anti ballistic missiles appears under way he is allowed two or three minutes to determine whether the warning is valid, and while I was secretary in 7 years we had many many false warnings and I noticed a few months ago the Russians had a false warning of warheads coming from Sweden. Thank God it turned out to be false. But, this is common. There are a hundred different ways in which the warnings have been turned out to be false, and he is allowed two or three minutes to decide whether that warning is valid. And then, he is given about 10 minutes to determine how we should respond, and to recommend, to locate the President, to recommend to him how to respond and permit the President to discuss the situation, this is a 10 minutes to determine what to recommend, to locate the President, to allow the President to decide what to do and discuss the situation with whomever the president wishes, presumably the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the secretary of defense. And then, within that same time period to transmit the President's decision to the commander of the strategic forces who would pass it along to launch sites. Now the President's option in this limited period of time will be essentially, 2 options, would be essentially to, he could decide to ride out the attack. We have enough warheads so that we can absorb the incoming strike. This was true during the cold war. It is true today. The only force today that would cause us any difficulty in absorbing the strike would be Russia's force but we can fail to respond on warning, absorb the incoming strike, survive with sufficient weapons to be sure that we can destroy enough Soviet, Russian forces, I should say, to inflict what we call unacceptable damage on them. And they know that. And its very very important in this equation of deterrents that this be known by both sides and they do know it. We have to maintain a capability to do that. That's why those procedures is set up. Now the President what happens as I say is essentially 2 options: one is to withhold, which is certainly what I would recommend. Digress a moment, I remember sitting down with both presidents Kennedy and Johnson in a very very secret situations and saying to each of them sequence over 40 years under no circumstances should you ever, ever, ever initiate the launch. To hell with this launch on warning stuff. You can absorb the strike and you don't have to, and maybe it's a false warning, and maybe you can avoid nuclear war by absorbing it. The worse that can happen to you is you loose a few more of these weapons, and he said, "Well how should I respond if the military recommend this and I said, "Suppose General LeMay calls you and says, "Mr. President we have (LeMay was Chief of the Air Staff at that time) if he by the way you may think some of the words I will say now and later about the missile crisis are critical of LeMay, I don't mean them that way, I served alongside of him, under him and over him at various times during World War II and later. He was without question the ablest combat commander I met at any service Army, Navy , Marine Corps., Air. Anyhow, Kennedy said, "Well suppose LeMay says, "Mr. President" calls me on the telephone and says, "Mr. President we have information that the first warheads of the attacks have landed in South Carolina." "Request authority to implement strategic option number one." Which will be all out response. Kennedy says, "How shall I reply?" I said, "Mr. President you just tell him, thank you for calling, get your cap, pick up McNamara, and come over and we will talk about it." LeMay says, "You are out of your mind Mr. President." "By the time I get there, there won't be any White House." And Kennedy said, "Well it may be possible, you have been persuading me, Bob has recommended that we keep that damn airplane up there, overhead 24 hours a day, ready to respond, with the military officer ready to respond so all of us were killed we can still attack and the Soviets know that 's there and that's part of the deterrent, so there is no need for me to do this, so get off your tail and get over here and that's what we will do. And furthermore General, I will tell you what we are going to do when you get here. We are going to get in that other airplane you maintain which is for me to fly anywhere world anytime, and we are going to fly down to South Carolina, you and Bob and me, and we are going to fly over that place, we will see exactly what happened and then we are still not going to do a damn thing until I get in touch with Khrushchev. He was the then Soviet Leader and we are going to ask him what in the hell he thought he was doing and what's he going to do next. He said, "Mr. President, you are out of your mind." Now the reason LeMay said that was, and the reason he was thought to be Dr. Strangelove is he believed, and not without some reason, he believed that we were going to have to fight a nuclear war with Soviet Union without any question. And the best time to fight it was when we had the greatest advantage. My belief was we ought to try to avoid it and the best way to avoid it was to not to have any automatic response. So this is a long digression but I make it because this whole situation we are in today is so bizarre that it is beyond belief. As a matter of fact an average American doesn't know it. But I told you about that procedure, isn't well known. I wasn't sure the procedure was still in effect It's a procedure that was in effect while I was secretary and whatever that was 40 years ago. But I called the person who today knows this much or anybody knows about the procedure very very tightly-held. And he said, "Yes it is." So that's the situation we are in today. It's very very dangerous. And the American public should know that. We will talk a little more about that later. I tried while I was secretary to make some changes in the procedure where I made a few. We introduced these Permissive Action Links to make it impossible with the warhead to be armed, much less launched, but armed without the input from the President. And, we added options to the war plans that the President had to choose from if he were going to launch. I wish we could have done more, but we were in the midst of the cold war and our options were limited. We and our allies faced a strong Soviet Warsaw pact conventional threat and many of the allies felt that a nuclear first use policy was necessary for the sake of deterrents and here, I'm not at all sure that was true, but that was a common belief . What is shocking is that today, over a decade after the end of the cold war, the basic US nuclear policy has not changed, to take fully into account the reduction of the Soviet threat, and to make US or the other states' nuclear use far less likely in the future, and a minimum as I will mention again a little later, we should follow the recommendation of General Lee Butler who for years was the Commander of the Strategic Air Command, who has stated unequivocally that we ought to get rid of this launch on warning policy, remove all the strategic nuclear weapons from hair trigger alert. That's the minimum we ought to do and as you will see I think we should go far beyond that. We haven't even begun to move in either directions. Now, before moving further I should take a moment to remind you of the very destructive power of these weapons. I have often said, not facetiously, that I believe that every leader, political leader of nuclear power, should be forced to be present at a nuclear detonation. It would introduce an understanding of reality into the decision making process. An example of the power of the nuclear weapons, now in US inventories and Russian inventories, was made by the group group that won the noble peace prize the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and that group states, that for example, at ground zero, the point of detonation, the effects of one megaton explosion, we have many, many dozens as a matter of fact of one megaton bombs or missiles in our inventory as do Russia. The detonation of a one megaton weapon would create a crater 300 feet deep, 1200 feet diameter within one second. The atmosphere would ignite into a fireball more than half a mile in diameter and the surface of that fireball would radiate nearly 3 times the light and heat of a comparable area of the surface of the sun. And all life below that fireball would be extinguished in seconds within 1 to 3 miles, within a radius of 1 to 3 miles of detonation point the flash and heat from such an explosion would radiate outward at the speed of light which would then cause instantaneous severe burns, a blast wave of compressed air would follow reaching a distance of about 3 miles in 12 seconds and from the blast wave alone most buildings would collapse, factories and residential buildings, and debris carried by the winds would have reached 250 miles an hour, would inflict lethal injuries throughout the area. At least 50 percent of the people within that radius would die immediately, prior to any injuries from radiation or developing firestorms. We just don't know, we don't recall, we never are confronted with the dangers, and we have 6000 of these things deployed, 2000 on hair trigger alert, and the Russians have the same, and we are the target of the Russians and Russia is the target of ours. And now we say we don't target Russia. Well, in a sense we don't. The new war plans in the cold war are somewhat different from the old but the weapons can be retargeted in less than 60 seconds, so who else we are going to shoot these 6000 at. That's absurd. And we should remember that our knowledge of the effects of nuclear weapons is not entirely hypothetical. The nuclear weapons with roughly one-seventieth of the power of that one megaton bomb, I was just describing, was used by the US against Japan in August 1945. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima killed nearly a 140,000 people immediately and about 200,000 people over all died from radiation effects and burns and so on, and later a similar-sized bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and the description of the effect of that bomb dropped on Nagasaki is horrifying. The mayor of Nagasaki at the time testified before the International Court of Justice about what it did. If you have any doubt about what the effects of these weapons is, for God's sake read his testimony. I have it, I wont take your time with that. Now why did so many civilians had to die? Because the civilians made up nearly a 100 percent of the victims of Hiroshima-Nagasaki were, what's called, co-located with bases of Japanese military-industrial capability. And thus their annihilation, while not precisely the objective of our targeting of the bombs, was an inevitable result of the choice of those targets. It's worth noting in this regard that at one point during the cold war it is said that the US had tens, tens of nuclear warheads targeted on Moscow alone, each one of which could have done what I described a moment ago. Now why did we have so many on Moscow, not to kill the people there, although that was the obvious end result, but they were targeted because of the command and control facilities and the military targets that were located there And therefore the statement that our nuclear forces, this is a common statement often made, our nuclear forces do not target population per se is totally misleading in the sense that so called collateral damage in large nuclear strikes would include tens of millions of innocent civilians there. Now what's the military purpose of nuclear weapons, what's the military utility of nuclear weapons? You are not going to believe what I'm about to say so, let's start with the assumption you don't believe it and you put questions to me during the Q & Answer period and I will try answer your doubts. During the 40 years that I have been working on these issues. In the 40 years that I have worked on issues related to US and NATO nuclear strategy and war plans, I have never seen a piece of paper that outlined a plan for the US initiating the use of our weapons with benefits to the US. Never have I seen a piece of paper, and I don't believe any of you have ever seen a piece of paper, or ever will see a piece of paper that outlines how we could initiate a nuclear strike with benefits to the US. Now I have made that statement on many many occasions. I remember one or two audiences that included the defense ministers and senior NATO military officials, it's never been refuted. I remember one meeting in Norway, a meeting of defense ministers chaired by the Norwegian defense minister, and attended by the retired SAC Air, Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, an extremely bright, able US officer, and I made that statement in front of them, neither one of them refuted it. There isn't any way in which we can initiate the use of nuclear weapons against any opponent with benefits to our selves. To do it against a nuclear opponent is suicidal, and we have faced that issue of suicide in the Cuban missile crisis, and when we faced it I will tell you what President Kennedy said, if you are interested, to initiate it against a non nuclear opponent is militarily unnecessary, morally repugnant, and politically indefensible. In 1983, I published an article in foreign affairs. I wanted to read you the last paragraphs. Having spent 7 years as Secretary of Defense dealing with the problems unleashed by the initial nuclear chain reaction 40 years ago, I am very disturbed about our fiscal deficit, I am very disturbed about the size of our military budget, but I believe that the President's first responsibility is the security of the nation, I don't believe we can avoid serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize and until we base all our military plans, defense budgets, weapons deployments, arms negotiations, on this recognition that nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever. They are totally useless except only to deter one's opponent from using them. At that time in long private conversations as I mentioned earlier with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, I recommended, without qualification, that they never initiate under any circumstances the use of nuclear weapons, and I believe they accepted my recommendations. Now that was my belief when I wrote the article in 1983, it's my belief today. Now do we pay a price other than in financial terms, which doesn't bother me particularly, I am very disturbed about our fiscal deficit, I am very disturbed about the size of our military budget, but I believe that the President's first responsibility is the security of the nation, I believe we can afford whatever is necessary to ensure that security, I don't believe we need a military budget of 400 odd billion which is our budget today to achieve that purpose. That's a different issue. In any event, my point is I'm not opposed to nuclear weapons because of the financial price. That's not the point. There is another price we pay, and that's the risk, to me an unacceptable risk, of the use of weapons either through accidents or result of misjudgment and miscalculation in times of crisis. You cannot understand unless you have been there, unless you have been through it how human beings are affected by crises at the same time that they possess nuclear weapons. It is an extra ordinary dangerous combination and I will have more than a word to say on that in a moment. Now senior Russian officials today, both political and military, have stated that due to lack of financial resources the Russian nuclear arsenal is increasingly at risk of accidents, theft, serious malfunction in its command and control systems, and I believe those statements. The command and control systems are very very complex. They require extensive maintenance, management, all which cost money, and I'm absolutely positive that the Russians are right when they say they are not spending the money and their command and control systems therefore are not fully reliable. But we are the target of the weapons that are controlled by those unreliable command and control systems. As for the risk of inadvertent use of the weapons under crisis, the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated, as I implied, that the US and the Soviet Union and indeed much of the rest of the world came within a hairs breadth of nuclear disaster in October 1962, about 40, 43 years ago as a result of misinformation and misjudgment. The crisis came to head on Saturday, October 27, 1962. At that time the quarantine which President Kennedy had initiated a few days earlier, I think it was Wednesday of that week, if I remember correctly, appeared to be a failure. It had been introduced in order to force Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, to remove the missiles that we had photographs of, on the soil of Cuba, remove them from Cuba, hoping that would reduce risk of nuclear attack to the US. And, at that time, we are talking about Saturday afternoon, October 27 1962, the CIA stated they didn't believe that the warheads for those missiles we had photographs of, the warheads, they believed had not yet arrived. They thought the first batch was due on a ship named the Pultava within 2 or 3 days, and therefore at 4 p.m. on that day, Saturday October 27, 62, the Joint Chiefs recommended that we attack Cuba with a huge air attack about, 1080 sorties in the first days air attack, larger than any single days strike on Kosovo, and then we follow that with a land and sea invasion using a 180,000 troops that have been mobilized with the necessary shipping and were held ready to launch in South East US ports. Had Khrushchev not publicly, on the day after Sunday, October 28, 1962 , announced publicly that he was going to remove the missiles, and by the way at the time he announced he was so uncertain, he was so fearful that war would start , so uncertain whether he could get his announcement through, it took normally about 6 hours from the time he decided something to write it, to .totranslated into English, to encode it and send it, encoded to the Russian ambassador in Washington, and the Russian ambassador delivered it to the White House, about 6 hours. Khrushchev was afraid we would start the war in the mean time, so as he was writing the message stating he was going to withdraw the missiles he sent an officer to the public radio transmitter transmitter in the heart of Moscow, and he said hold that transmitter open I have got a message. We learned of his decision in a sense to end the war over the public radio transmitter. That's how close he thought we were to nuclear war at that time. Now, I'm going to skip a part here but I just want to tell you we didn't know for 29 years, until January 1992, that at 4.30 in the afternoon of Saturday, October 27 1962, when the CIA said they believed there were no nuclear warheads on the soil of Cuba, and when the Chief said therefore Mr. President if you think we are going to have to attack to force those missiles out of Cuba, we have got to do it before those warheads arrive, 2 or 3 days. We didn't know for 29 years that at that specific moment of time, 4:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon October, there were a 170 nuclear warheads on the soil of Cuba, about roughly 90 for the missiles targeted on the US East Coast, putting at risk about 90 million Americans, and about 80 available for use against tactical weapons, available for use against an invasion force. And we were still learning, as recently as 2002-2003, we are still learning about that. I attended a meeting, it might have been in 2004, I think it was 2003 in Cuba, at which there were present two sets of people, one we many of you saw "Thirteen Days", I think it was in that movie, you saw the US navy on the quarantine line forcing a Soviet submarine to surface. We used a depth charge to force it to the surface because on the quarantine line we had US destroyers, The Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy, named after the President's brother and others, and these Soviets subs were looking around, and we were fearful they would launch and try to attack the US navy vessels so we forced this sub to the surface. We didn't learn until, what year it was, until 2003 or 2004 that that sub was one of four of a brigade that had sailed from the Soviet Union to the quarantine line. Each one of the four submarines carried at least one torpedo that was nuclear-armed and the commanders of those subs had capability and authority to launch when they thought it desirable. And we didn't learn until the years rolled later that those Subs were often out of contact with their headquarters, and this I can understand, we have had and presumably still have same problem with Polaris submarines, because of the sea conditions, atmospheric conditions and others, they are sometimes out of communication with their commanders and those submarines were sailing around the world tracking US ships for 4 days after Khrushchev announced the end of the war, withdrawal of missiles because they were not in contact with them. And we didn't learn until a year later, by this time, I don't know what it was, 2004 or 2005 at another meeting in Cuba, when I spoke to the commander of the shore batteries, the Soviet shore batteries in Cuba, they are held there to attack a US invasion force, we didn't learn even then that he had shells for those shore batteries that had nuclear warheads. And this, I want to stress to you, you can't eliminate this lack of information, lack of accuracy, in all of our discussion of intelligence problems, which we were having, the 9/11 report, all these other discussion we have in the papers everyday are all very important. We do need to improve our intelligence. No question about that. But inteligence is never perfect and you got understand that. I see Tom Blossom here who ran Bank of America as well of The World Bank for many years. Sort of nodding his head. I was about to say to Tom, this common to business decision making, the facts we think are facts, they're not always perfect. And you'll need to build in your decision making, and God knows you'll need to build it to your military decision making, particularly any decisions related to the use of nuclear weapons, an error factor -- you may be in error. and we sure as hell were in error in, uh, in October 22nd 1962 when we did not believe that the Soviets and Cuba had a nuclear capability. They did have. If we'd gone ahead based on our erroneous intelligence or our erroneous judgment, it wasn't the fault of the intelligence people, they are never perfect, you, it's the responsibility of the decision makers to build in an error factor. Intelligence people are not likely to do it. Hopefully they should. I noticed today that, a very interesting sentence in one of the articles today in the New York Times saying that "Well, intelligence estimates in the future should introduce an error factor." They should say we have 90 percent capability, or 90 percent confidence, or 40 percent confidence in this estimate, and I think that's well. But whatever it is when you're dealing with nuclear force you better introduce or recognize you don't have all the facts, because if you make a mistake you're going to destroy nations, including our own. And let me quickly go to what I think is the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis. We haven't learned it, and it became apparent to me at one point, if it hadn't been before, when uh, we received this information about the Soviets having 170 nuclear warheads on the soil and the CIA thought there were none. And a meeting chaired by Castro in Cuba and our information was given by a ranking Soviet Commander, General Grubokov who had been Commander of the Warsaw Pack Forces, the highest command post the Soviets had. And when we heard it I couldn't believe it. Uh, Castro and I had a controversy because I wasn't sure I'd understood, Grubokov was speaking in Russian and there were translators, I thought maybe the translators had got it wrong so to Castro you got to stop the meeting, I've got a Soviet specialist here with the State Department I want him to translate for me. We're gonna sit Grubokov aside, and make damn sure I understand it. Castro thought I was trying to exclude him from the discussion; he got quite angry with me. Finally I turned to him and said look, uh I got three questions for you Mr. Castro. First, did you know the nuclear warheads were in Cuba? Secondly, if you did, uh would you have recommended to Krushchev that he used those in place of an invasion, and thirdly if you had recommended that and an invasion had taken place, how did you think the U.S. would respond? And what might have been the implications for your nation, for the world. And Castro said this, and these are his words, "Now we started from the assumption if there was an invasion of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt, we were certain of that. We'd be forced to pay the price, we'd disappear. Would I be ready to use the weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to use the weapons." Now later I learned on that Thursday, before the Saturday I spoke of Castro had indeed had sent a cable to Krushchev stating that if there were an invasion Castro wanted Kreshchev to initiate the use of the warheads. " If Mr. McNamara and Mr. Kennedy had been in our place and their country had been invaded, or about to occupied, I believe they would have used nuclear weapons." Now I hope Kennedy and I would not have had made as Castro suggested we would. His decision applied to his country would have destroyed Cuba. And had we responded in a similar way the damage to our lives and our countries would have been disastrous. But human beings are fallible. We know we all make mistakes. Just look at that situation in Iraq a day or two ago when the car taking the Italian journalists and the, uh, Italian in fact CIA counterpart was fired upon and the ranking, uh, CIA Italian intelligence officer was killed. Human being are fallible, we know we all make mistakes. In our daily lives, mistakes are costly. But, we try to learn from them. Uhthey, weconventional wisdom is "don't make the same mistake twice." Well, maybe we make it two or three times, but we don't make it five. (Laughter) Uh, and let me tell ya, we do make it two or three and when you examine what happened in Afghanistan, we killed the wedding party. In, uhAfghanistan and I think it was Afghanistan again, we the U.S. fired upon Canadian soldiers. This is, it's impossible in wartime to avoid this. We had the ablest military in the world, there's no question in my mind about it. But, human beings have limited capabilities to deal with unknown variables. And, military operations are much more complex than civilian operations. They're more variables, less known about how they respond to, uh, to variances and variances related to those variables. You're going to make mistakes. You'd better write that down. And, uh, and then try to make as few as possible. Butin conventional war mistakes kill thousands, tens of thousands. They don't destroy nations. In nuclear war, you make one mistake under certain circumstances; you're going to destroy nations. And, that's the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis. The answer is, we ultimately have to get rid of these weapons, or reduce them to such a degree that there is no risk of destruction of nations. I'll talk a little more about that at the end. That sounds, pie in the skytotally, uh, unwise, radical, not worth listening to. That's the answer. If you don't believe it, think about it. And if you do believe it, ask how it's going to be done. We're not on the way to doing that. As long as we're not on the way to doing that, we're on the way to a nuclear catastrophe. And I'll have a little more to say about that in a few minutes. Now there's a very, very interesting and important set of moral and legal considerations in connection with all of this. I'm going to skip over that in time to permit us to get into it. But, there's a Catholic, and I'm not a Catholic there's a Catholic Bishops Report. A U.S. Catholic Bishops Report done in the mid to late eighties, directed by a man named Bryne Hehir. Uh, some of you who may have been from Harvard I am, I was a faculty there for time. Harvard's a Protestant, essentially a Protestant institution. They got into a hell of a mess a few years ago. There was no way out of it other than to turn to a Catholic to become head of their Divinity School. And the man they chose was Bryne Hehir, who was this man who wrote theerr, directed the report for the Catholic Bishops. It's a superb report, I urge you all to look at it some time. Now let me turn very briefly to President Bush's, uh, Nuclear Force Policy. Uh, the administration published their policy in February '62 '62 in the form of a nuclear policy review that had been mandated by congress. And it established the broad outline of U.S. nuclear strategy and nuclear force levels for the next ten years and beyond. The review has received very little attention in the media and that's unfortunate because it increases the emphasis that'll place in the future on, uh, strategic offensive nuclear weapons. And it deserves very close, uh, public scrutiny. In addition to projecting the deployment of large numbers of strategic nuclear weapons