MR. SAPIENZA: During the Cold War, obviously people were very concerned about the threat of nuclear war, but in the post Cold War era, it's -- it's somewhat fallen off the scope for a lot of Americans. Why -- why do you think that is -- why do you think that's happened?

Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER: There's a euphoria in our country today and that's good. It's good that we can pay attention to other problems like social problems and racial problems and economic problems of one sort and another. But, the nuclear problem has not gone away because the Cold War has ended. What the American public does not understand today is that there are thirty-seven thousand nuclear warheads out there in the world somewhere this afternoon. And that's just unacceptable in terms of our long term security. But I think we also do not understand is that during the Cold War, we were very worried about a holocaust between us and the Soviet Union. But the probability of that was pretty low because we understood it was suicidal to start a nuclear war with a country that was as heavily armed as the Soviet Union or they with us.

Today, though, the problem has changed and the India/Pakistan tests are an indicator that the world is moving towards the proliferation of these weapons to other countries. That could mean that while it wouldn't be a holocaust, it might be a small number of nuclear weapons, but the probability of their being used could be greater than it was during the Cold War. I would suggest that any use of even one nuclear weapon will change the whole complexion of world relations. If we go to bed at night not knowing which city might be incinerated tomorrow, it's a different kind of a life. If the threat of nuclear weapons on the use of nuclear weapons becomes a part of the relations between the nations of the world, we're going to be in a different situation. We don't want to be there. We don't want to leave that kind of a world for our children and grand children.

MR. SAPIENZA: Well, how can we reduce these dangers, then, if they are present?

Adm. TURNER: Well, we have to continue with the processes we've been using for fifty or, no, for thirty-some years, the treaty processes and we have a treaty on the books right now that hasn't been ratified by either the Russian [Duma] or our Senate. And it's a good treaty but it's not nearly good enough. We've got to supplement. Treaties go very, very slowly. The American public does not understand that if this current treaty called Start Two is in fact enacted by the Duma and by the Senate, it will leave the United States with ten thousand nuclear warheads ten years from now. That's totally unacceptable.

I propose a process called Strategic Escrow which would supplement, complement, the Start process. Tomorrow morning, either Mr. Clinton or Mr. Yeltsin would take a thousand nuclear warheads, move them from their missiles, maybe a couple hundred miles away and put them in storage and let the other side put observers there to count what went in and if anything came out. We don't need a Treaty. You know what a missile warhead is. We count it as it goes in and we keep it there. Then, we go back and forth. We do a thousand. They do a thousand. They do a thousand. We do a thousand. In a matter of a very few years, we could be down to the hundreds where we'd have to bring in the British, French, Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Israelis and we then try to get the world to a position where there are zero nuclear warheads married to, mated to their delivery vehicles. Nobody's sitting there on hair trigger alert. They haven't destroyed them. We want that to happen in time. But we've got a big step in that direction. But most of all, we've told the world, "Look, there is a new norm out there. These weapons are not here to be used. They're only here to keep others from using them. We hope we'll be able to get rid of them someday, but in the meantime, we have this pile in escrow over here where nobody's tempted to use it quickly.

MR. SAPIENZA: What inspired this notion?

Adm. TURNER: I came to this idea of strategic escrow, I think, in large measure because of my experience in negotiating the Salt II Treaty in the 1978 time frame during the Carter Administration. I was responsible as Director of Central Intelligence, for advising the Senate and the President on how well we could check on that treaty if we enacted it, how well we could know if the Soviet Union were cheating. I found myself having to tell the Senate that we could check on them by a hundred warheads. If they cheated by that much, we would know it. This was at a time when the Soviets had forty thousand warheads, a hundred made no difference. But, because it was a treaty, we had to go through that.

I recently wrote a book called Caging the Nuclear Genie in which I tried to formulate why we got where we got to which was thirty-two thousand nuclear warheads in the United States alone, and a doctrine that we would use these any time we felt like it, a doctrine that makes it hard for us to tell other countries of the world, "You shouldn't have them." It invites proliferation of them. And therefore, I was looking for a way to get those numbers down, to get that first use doctrine eliminated, but that didn't require a treaty that was going to take forever because we have an urgent problem now in the post Cold War world. If there's proliferation, once it starts it cascades.

If the Iraqis did get a nuclear weapon -- and they were close in 1991 when we went into their country by force -- the Iranians have to have one. If they both have one, the Saudi Arabians are going to want one and on it goes. So, I think there's an urgency here. And originally, I came up with the idea that we would just destroy a thousand warheads and then invite the Russians to do the same. It really is a perfectly good plan because we have so many more than we need right now that if we did a thousand and the Russians didn't come along, we certainly wouldn't be in any problem whatsoever. We've still got fifteen thousand of them in our arsenals, so that's not a problem. But I realized it was politically very difficult to sell unilateral disarmament. I, then, curiously asked myself if we did try to destroy a thousand nuclear warheads tomorrow, what would actually happen? Well, those warheads would all be shipped to a place called Pantex, Texas, where we disassemble nuclear warheads. And they would sit in a line down there behind several thousand warheads that are already waiting to be destroyed under other provisions. And therefore, we wouldn't really be destroying them, we would only be putting them in escrow.

So, this idea of escrow arose from the fact that it is the only practical thing we can do today unless we build another couple of Pantexes which we're not very likely to do. And so, it was an effort to supplement, to complement the very slow treaty process that brought me to strategic escrow.

STEVE SAPIENZA: Now, this concept of strategic escrow, you mentioned, relies on having, you know, basically keeping tabs on what the other guys doing. This, you know, will be observers, obviously intelligence plays a role here. How important is intelligence in the -- in the -- in the post Cold War era looking at -- or in preventing proliferation and also aiding in these arms control reduction treaties. It seemed to get a little bit of a black eye -- intelligence got a bit of a black eye with the recent India/Pakistan tests. But, you know, do you think it's still -- plays a main role -- a big role.

Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER: Intelligence will be very important in making any kind of move towards lesser nuclear weapons. There's going to be a residual fear in all countries that somebody's cheating and somebody's going to get an advantage. It happens to be my thesis that until you get to very, very low numbers, there isn't any great danger of cheating, particularly because the United States will keep a couple of submarines out there until the very last. And they are virtually invulnerable and therefore will always be able to retaliate with an overwhelming force no matter what.

When you get down to the last hundred or fifty or twenty, yes, you're going to have to have a lot of caution to make people comfortable and that's where intelligence will be very important, but that's only one par of it. But I don't really worry about that last hundred at this point. We're so far from it that if through strategic escrow we could get the world down to where everybody had a hundred warheads left and all the rest were in escrow, we'd be so much better off than today and then we could grapple with that last hundred in a way that would make us feel comfortable.

STEVE SAPIENZA: You mentioned three, uh, three issues or three thesis, doctrine that we need to overcome a way of thinking in the military, in the command structure. What are -- briefly, what are those three things and why do we need to overcome them?

Admiral STANSFIELD TURNER: Well, both civilians and military people have followed three erroneous theorems about nuclear weapons now for some fifty years. The first is it's important to have about the same number as anybody else. This is true with tanks and aircraft and battleships or whatever in many cases. It's not true with nuclear weapons because after you've used a certain number -- and you can pick a number -- the usefulness just drops off. What more can you destroy? So, we've got to rid ourselves of that frightful concern that we might be 10 percent or 20 percent less than the Russians. Secondly, we've had a doctrine since 1952 that the United States would be willing to use nuclear weapons first if we thought it in our national interest to do so.

We pledged this to our European allies in NATO that we would use nuclear weapons to defend them if we were losing a conventional war in Europe. That's a loser. And no president's used nuclear weapons in fifty-three years even though we lost in Vietnam. And in my opinion, no president will. If you read what President Kennedy said in the Cuban Missile Crisis, he backed away right smartly. If you read what Colon Powell wrote in his memoir about looking at nuclear weapons as a tactical devise in the Gulf War, he said, it unnerved him. So, we ought to get that out of our system. It's a loser because the chances of getting some form of retaliation -- nuclear, biological, chemical, terrorism, if you use a nuclear weapon, is too great. And our country will not do something as disproportionate as a nuclear weapon against some Third World country that has done something that offends us would be.

The third false theorem is that maybe we would be vulnerable to a surprise attack in which all of our nuclear weapons would be eliminated by Russia overnight. It's absolutely insane. First of all we have those submarines out there at sea and the Russians don't know where they are, so there's no way they can eliminate them. But even if they could, in warfare, nothing goes perfectly. And therefore, even if they launched a massive attack on us, they wouldn't knock out everything. We would still have enough to devastate their country and that will deter them from starting such a war.

There's a residual feeling that you do have to have numbers of these weapons to be safe. And that's just not true. It's been grossly exaggerated. A few of them is enough to keep anybody from attacking you. The Russians don't want to lose Moscow and St. Petersburg and three or four other cities in order to try to accomplish something by attacking us. There's also a resistance that comes from a feeling that we have a haymaker in our hip pocket here that could get us out of some kind of trouble. Maybe it's because we're losing a war. Well, we lost in Vietnam. Well, maybe this is what we want to have as a last resort. We haven't been able to use it as a last resort. It isn't that kind of a weapon. And therefore, we don't need to worry about having this -- this form of last resort.

MR. SAPIENZA: You, you know, coming up with the strategic escrow idea -- also talking earlier where you said just take -- back in the seventies where you said why don't we just take a thousand and just make the first move, get rid of them -- why do you feel so strongly that the United States should be the first -- should be the country to take the first step?

Adm. TURNER: No. I would like to clarify. I don't think the United States has to be the first country. In fact, I think it would be preferable if Russia would do it because it's a kind of a dramatic thing Mr. Yeltsin might want to do and secondly, he has more authority as a president than does President Clinton. I mean, we're more hamstrung in our democracy than they are in their incipient Democracy. And therefore, it would be easier for him to call up his strategic commander tomorrow morning and say, take a thousand and move them. President Clinton would have complaints from the Senate and so on that he'd have to grapple with, so either one could do it. Very frankly, I think the way to do it is you talk to MR. Yeltsin behind the scenes and say, "If I do it first, will you follow immediately?" and vice versa so that neither one gets out in -- in front.

MR. SAPIENZA: What are two -- this is the last question -- what are two or three immediate, concrete steps that the U.S. could take to lead the rest of the world toward the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.

Adm. TURNER: The two most important steps are just start a strategic escrow process and we could do that by putting some weapons in storage away from their delivery vehicles. The second is to simply make a declaration that we will never be the first to use these. That doesn't eliminate our using them if somebody attacks us or our allies or friends around the world with nuclear weapons, but it does say, "We understand that these are not a proportionate kind of response to the sorts of problems that we're likely to have with conventional weapons."

MR. SAPIENZA: I just want to follow up on that. What about people who say, "Let's assume we started taking down our nuclear arsenal, brought it down to a very low level? What do you say to people who might suggest that -- that might invite conventional warfare or instability in different places around the world?

Adm. TURNER: One cannot gainsay the argument that the existence of nuclear weapons may have prevented the super powers from engaging in conventional war during the Cold War -- can't prove that it did, but it's a possibility. But it's too dangerous a way to try to prevent conventional war today. There's just too much risk involved in keeping these weapons for that purpose.

And I believe that particularly now in this post-Cold War world, the United States has such a dominance of conventional military power, that we have some window of opportunity here. Call it ten years but I think it's more like twenty years before there's going to be a major conventional opponent, and let's use that window. Let's try during that time, to see if we can get these nuclear weapons safely onto the sidelines and yet maintain our basic national security with conventional force. And I think we can do that and I think we miss a tremendous opportunity for the United States but more for all human kind if we don't attempt to do that.

MR. SAPIENZA: All right. Great, Admiral.

Adm. TURNER: Thank you.