GARWIN: Yes, I am Richard Garwin, Senior Fellow for science and technology at the Council for Foreign Relations in New York. I have been in nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons testing, and arms control now for a long time - 45 years.

INTERVIEWER: That is a long time. Now last year, something that happened that woke a lot of people up. India and Pakistan blew up a bomb. What where you doing when that happened? Where you listening to the radio, where you at home? How did you first hear about the India/ Pakistan explosion?

GARWIN: Well last year at that time I was a member of the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the ballistic missile threat to the United States. So, I do believe I was at CIA head quarters when we got word of the Indian explosions. It really was a very foolish thing for India to do because India and Pakistan had had nuclear weapons for quite awhile. India had had a nuclear test in 1974 and by doing this they legitimized Pakistan's testing of nuclear weapons within two weeks.

INTERVIEWER: So where you sitting at your desk and the phone rang? How did you first hear or what was your reaction when you first heard it?

GARWIN: I didn't think it was very good of India to have done that and I expected trouble in South Asia. Unlike the U.S./Soviet confrontation for many decades, they have real conflicts there. They share a border, there are Indians killing Pakistanis every day and it's all too likely they will actually use those nuclear weapons and cause terrible amount of death and suffering.

INTERVIEWER: The way the news cycle came about, people saw the India leadership come into power saying that they wanted to be at the table, and some people say they sort of blew their way in. What is your reaction to that? Was that - were people expecting that to happen or hoping that it wasn't?

GARWIN: I think people hoped it wouldn't happen. They certainly weren't expecting it as the press says, the satellites were busy elsewhere instead of monitoring the India test site as well as they could. So, it was a considerable failure of intelligence. But as far as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is concerned, the partial monitoring system detected the test just fine and that is all it is supposed to do. It is not supposed to give warning of the test.

INTERVIEWER: What did that explosion - what impact did the blasts have on the movement to ratify the CTBT? Did it re-invigorate it? Did it focus it again? From your perspective, what did those tests do for the CTBT today?

GARWIN: People who are against the CTBT said "look here, it isn't any good and this proves it." People who are in favor in it said this is showing how much we need a comprehensive test ban treaty and if we had the full monitoring system we would have done even better. But in fact, if we had a CTBT we would have inspection rights and these countries would never have tested.

CTBT ratification is a very peculiar thing. The treaty enters into force only when 44 states, those with reactors, have signed and ratified it. And in fact India complains the treaty was designed against him because they are really the only hold out. If India would sign and ratify, Pakistan would certainly do so, and in fact Pakistan will probably ratify the CTBT anyhow. And North Korea will do it to, whether or not they mean it is another question...

INTERVIEWER: yeah, When you answer the question, please include the question in the answer. Can you do that again?

GARWIN: People who are favoring CTBT said this shows how much we need it because those countries would not have tested had the CTBT entered into force, those who oppose CTBT said this proves they won't abide by it because the treaty is irrelevant.

INTERVIEWER: And when you went on to talk about the other countries as far as India, that was a really cool as well, if you could elaborate along those lines as well.

GARWIN: The CTBT enters into force only when 44 countries have signed and ratified, all the countries with nuclear weapons potential, that is with reactors or enrichment. And India maintains this provision in the CTBT was directed against India and so as a matter of principal refused to sign. I think actually, paradoxaly, the India/Pakistan test make it easier for India to sign the CTBT and I think it's pretty likely that they will do so by the end of 1999. So, given that India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, given that India actually diminished its status in the world by testing. I think this is not a terribly outcome if it comes to pass.

INTERVIEWER: What is CTBT, what is its goals, how is it related to these tests?

GARWIN: President Eisenhower characterized the CTBT as the greatest disappointment of his administration or any administration, that is the failure to achieve one. And President Clinton as the hardest sought - President Clinton characterized the CTBT as the longest sought, hardest fought, arms control measure. It is part of the whole set of arms controls measure to limit the nuclear danger to the United States. And that's why the United States has been so active in pushing it over the years. I was involved myself in the 1950's and the 1960's in the run up to the CTBT and it's just a shame we did not achieve it during the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administration.

The philosophy is that if you have nuclear weapons and you do not test, you can't develop new weapons. A country could make a primitive nuclear weapon, after all the one we use to destroy Nag-Hiroshima had never been tested, they could make a primitive nuclear weapon like that. But they can't make a thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb, without testing. And an country like the United States which have very big stockpiles and advanced stockpiles would be foolish to try to develop and put in stockpile a weapons without testing it. So it keeps new countries from acquiring advanced nuclear weapons, it keeps the nuclear powers from improving their stockpile so it is a good bargain for everybody.

INTERVIEWER: Why hasn't the senate ratified the CTBT?

GARWIN: The Senate unfortunately, now controlled by Republicans, feels that whatever the administration does is undesirable. So, it's largely politics. In fact some of the nuclear weapon - in fact some of those who favor nuclear weapons look only at the inhibition that the CTBT would put on U.S. activities. Indeed, we can develop new nuclear weapons, different characteristics. But indeed, we can maintain, perfectly well, our stockpile of existing types of nuclear weapons, reliable and secure forever because we will be able to re-manufacture, we will be able to conduct non-explosive tests to make sure that the weapons will work if needed.

So in part it's antipathy to arms control, many people have never seen an arms control treaty that they liked, and they do not realize that it's a good bargain for the United States, because although it puts a crimp in some of our activities, it puts a much larger barrier in the way of other people in either acquiring their first nuclear weapons, makes it less legitimate to do so, and in improving their stockpile. So we no longer have to worry that Russia is going to develop nuclear weapon pumped x-ray lasers that might be useful in strategic defense. That kind of race is gone forever so long as there is a comprehensive test ban treaty.

INTERVIEWER: Some people say that since we are signatory if we don't ratify we will be obligated to CTBT but we will not be able to send over inspection teams and participate in decommissioning of certain facilities. So the no man's land we are in now is actually a hindrance for U.S. security interests. The argument was if we sign and ratify it, we can be involved in those inspections. Can you describe what it will mean if we don't ratify the CTBT?

GARWIN: If we don't ratify the CTBT, it won't enter into force and so we have a full-fledged international monitoring system, we won't have the detection capability we would otherwise have to detect low-level nuclear explosions anywhere in the world. But it won't enter into force at all, so there would not be on-sight inspections such as are called for under the CTBT, that can not be avoided. So, that's the main thing.

Furthermore if we don't ratify we will involved in the preliminary activities before it enters into force and it will set a very bad example. Unfortunately, the Senate is playing politics instead of considering each of these treaties on its merits, they are insisting that the president provide certain amendments of the ABM treaty before the senate will consider the CTBT, I think that's a terrible example, I think each of these undertakings should be considered on its merits. And to have a treaty that binds India and Pakistan from improving their nuclear weapons would be a good thing. They have a long ways to go in making a nuclear stockpile and this would really inhibit their doing so.

INTERVIEWER: Does the congressional opposition reflect public opinion?

GARWIN: The public is very much behind the CTBT. As are the nuclear weapons laboratories. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't some people in the weapons laboratories who would like the freedom to test. And I think this is very shortsighted on their part because they consider only the impediment it puts on our program and not at all the impediment it puts in other peoples programs. Some of them don't know about the other people's programs, some of them dismiss this by saying they will cheat, that once the United States ratifies the CTBT and it enters into force, we will never test again even when other people may violate the treaty.

INTERVIEWER: How does it make you feel to see a treaty that would reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons? What would you say to people about the importance of this time?

GARWIN: Human ingenuity has created nuclear weapons, and human ingenuity is trying to control these weapons. The non-proliferation treaty which is in force for 20 years and it definitely is very important but it needs to be buttressed by the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty to prevent further extension of the 2000 or more explosions that have taken place under ground and in the atmosphere. So, I welcome this. I think it is really important.

The astonishing thing about nuclear weaponry is not only were nuclear weapons a meaningful enhancement of conventional weapons and the hydrogen bomb a further thousand fold enhancement, but that we built so many of them. We never believed that we would have a need for more than a few hundred or a thousand weapons, and yet at its peak, the United States had 33,000 nuclear weapons. And each of those was on the order of half a megaton compared to a hundredth of a megaton for the nuclear weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It's not that the U.S. was the greatest threat to peace and survival. The Soviet Union had 45,000 nuclear weapons at its peak, and we need to be - we need to be avid, to be more energetic to getting rid of these weapons even though many of them are no longer in our active stockpile. The U.S. probably has more than 10,000 nuclear warheads and the Russians more than 20,000 nuclear warheads - we don't need all those, we need to limit their numbers, we need to dismantle them and take their fissile material and put it either to productive use in nuclear reactors or, for the plutonium, bury it safely underground.

INTERVIEWER: Are CTBT and BMD linked?

GARWIN: I think there is no substantive linkage between Ballistic Missile Defense, that is BMD, and the ABM treaty of 1972 and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We have perfectly good warheads for destroying targets for penetrating Ballistic Missile Defenses if they should be built on the other side. And the Russians have perfectly good warheads for doing the job against ours. And in fact, the kind of Ballistic Missile Defense we are proposing to build doesn't use nuclear warheads for the interceptors and doesn't need nuclear warheads to penetrate it either. So this is just a political linkage, its people who have political power who are using it, in my opinion, not to favor the national security of the United States. Each of these treaties ought to be considered on its merits.

INTERVIEWER: Briefly describe the stockpile stewardship program and your faith in it. Because it seems with computer simulations we can test our weapons with explode weapons, and they seem to be a very reliable way to test our weapons.

GARWIN: When I was working in Los Alamos in the 1950's and the 1960's I had a lot to do with the design of nuclear weapons and with building hydrogen bombs and also worked out a good many of the techniques that had been used over the years in above ground tests and the underground tests.

INTERVIEWER: Now...

GARWIN: Very rarely did we take a nuclear weapon from the stockpile and test it to make sure that it worked. We did this with new production nuclear weapons in production verification tests to make sure that the production line weapons, like your car that came off the assembly line works the car in development, or the nuclear weapon in development testing worked. But all of our weapons have been tested, and they have been tested not only for performance but they have been tested for safety. And a nuclear weapon must be detonated at two or more points in order to give a nuclear yield otherwise it wouldn't be safe. And every nuclear weapons has been tested at what we believe is the most vulnerable single point to insure that it does not give a significant nuclear yield. So we don't need to do that kind of development or one point safety test.

INTERVIEWER: Could you talk about stockpile stewardship?

GARWIN: Now instead of having nuclear tests, we have to maintain our nuclear weapons without them. But we never used the nuclear tests to maintain the nuclear weapons. What we do is to take 11 weapons of each type that's in the inventory and we inspect them carefully, we disassemble them, one we take apart, we sacrifice it all the way down to the fissile core, the plutonium 235 core of the primary and we make sure that it meets the original specifications. So, this gives us a lot of information and if there is anything going on we have a lot of warning before it affects much of the stockpile.

And so we change things, we change a lot of things in the stockpile, but most of these can be verified without a nuclear test, we can change the fusing system, the radar fuse. But that's never tested in underground nuclear test, you test it by dropping dummy bombs, you test it on the bench, and that is as much as we ever did when we had the availability of tests.

There are other things that we test, and things in fact that can not be modified without having a nuclear test, those we must re-manufacture. And so if we find that the plutonium in the primary after 40 or 50 years begins to creep, we would re-manufacture that primary to the exactly same specifications. We may have some ideas as to how to make it better, but it would not be advisable to make major changes like that.

Now, to my mind what the Stockpile Stewardship program does is to provide first, better inspection capability, further warning if something is going wrong. Things will go wrong, things will decay. So we know that we will have to change the explosives, we'll know maybe 5 years ahead of time compared to actually taking the explosive out and detonating it and seeing that it doesn't work quite so well in shadow graft pictures.

Some of the other aspects of Stockpile stewardship, intensive computation are just there, in my opinion for two reason, first, to validate tiny changes that you might make so that people who might have to authorize these changes will have better confidence that they are not significant. And the other purpose, which is not usually talked about but is explicitly stated by the President, is to maintain the competence of the people involved. For two reasons: one to keep them sharp and alert to the effects of the changes so they will not make changes that will damage our stockpile and second, in case the CTBT era comes to an end so we can develop and re-manufacture new nuclear weapons. And so, a lot of the stockpile stewardship program that I support is for the purpose of maintaining the competence in the nuclear weapon laboratories.

Some people oppose the stewardship program - they say that $4.5 million a year is too much, and of course I am wanting to save money as much as the next person, in fact more for anybody who knows me. But it is not too much if it maintains a viable stockpile and if it maintains support for the CTBT. So I think it is just about right.

Can we develop new types of nuclear weapons under the CTBT with the Stockpile Stewardship Program? Of course, people hope just the way that they design 777 airplanes or automobiles now without ever having done a mock assembly and they mostly go together and work, so they want to modernize the nuclear weapons development and production process so when they make nuclear weapons again of brand new types, after CTBT fails, which I hope it does not, then they will have a modern way of doing it. And so they can bring new graduates into this program and not have them go into dusty old work rooms where they have paint brushes and chisels for assembling new nuclear weapons. Now, that hasn't been that way since 1945 - 1947 so that is somewhat of an exaggeration. So, they want to modernize things they will not be able to make new types of nuclear weapons, advanced capabilities, under CTBT.

INTERVIEWER: Could you talk about the Cimarron tests?

GARWIN: There's a series of underground so-called subcritical tests from which we are learning a lot, in fact we're learning a lot more under the Stockpile Stewardship Program, the science based stockpile stewardship program about our nuclear weapons than we learned than when we were just set up underground and do diagnostic tests.

One whole set of such subcritical tests is oriented toward finding out more about plutonium. Our nuclear weapons contain a hollow shell of plutonium within high explosive and at the time of a nuclear explosion, hydrogen gas, deuterium and tritium gas has been injected into this hollow shell of plutonium, the explosive is detonated, the hollow shell implodes so that it becomes not only metal, but metal of double density, and the nuclear reaction starts, it heats the hydrogen very hot, there is a nuclear fusion that takes place, the fusion causes neutrons that go into the plutonium, the plutonium then is so-called boosted, so the level of neutrons and the level of energy release is increased ten fold or so by means of this boosting reaction.

First tested in 1951, I was involved in the early tests, I've been involved in analyzing for the government the so-called subcritical tests. In the subcritical tests, you don't have a full shell of plutonium, in fact you may just have a little flat plate like a silver dollar, backed by explosives but you would like to see really what happens to that metal surface as it comes of in gas, not into hydrogen necessarily in the tests, but into air or inert gas. And that's the sort of thing involved to look at fresh plutonium in this way, and finding machine surfaces and rough surfaces to look at aged plutonium and to understand more about these things. They're called subcritical tests because they do not become critical, there absolutely is no nuclear reaction possible, there is not nuclear reaction which has been initiate by the injection of neutrons, they are totally irrelevant, they're (inaudible) that happens to be done to the plutonium which is a matter of interest.

.... megatons of yield compared to the 500 kilotons, half megaton that was the largest fission bomb. This was a scientific challenge and a national security activity. Whether it was necessary, I don't know, but we were working 6 days at Los Alamos and had the highest priority. I worked with the greats in nuclear physics: Enrico Ferme, who created the first nuclear chain reaction and then helped to build the atomic bomb, with Hans Betta who was head of the theoretical project at Los Alamos and then again beginning in 1950 the theoretical program to design the hydrogen bomb. And we lost Enrico Ferme at the age of 19 - at the age of 53 in 1954 but Hans Betta is still going strong at the age of 93 and his highest priority and mine is to reduce the nuclear danger to mankind, to improve the national security of the United States by controlling and vastly reducing these nuclear weapons that we helped to bring into the world.

So instead of the more than 10,000 nuclear weapons that we have now, the 33,000 hydrogen bombs we had in the past, if we could get them down to a 1000, and have a pause there so the people of the world could see that is more than enough and see perhaps their way clear to reducing their numbers to dozens or perhaps ultimately to zero. That would be a wonderful achievement, so I hope for Hans Betta's next birthday that he can be presented with a Comprehensive Test Ban treaty that has been ratified by the United States and all of the other necessary countries of the world.

INTERVIEWER: What would it mean if the U.S. does not ratify the CTBT?

GARWIN: If the United States does not ratify the CTBT this year I think that most of the other countries will not either of the necessary 44. It will certainly not enter into force, the non-proliferation treaty which binds a lot more countries than the CTBT, most countries can't work on nuclear weapons at all because they are members of the non-proliferation treaty. So the survival of the NPT itself would be in peril. And those people who oppose the CTBT or delay indefinitely its ratification will bear a heavy burden for the dismantling of the arms control regimes which improve U.S. national security by limiting the threat at its source. It's a lot easier to counter nuclear weapons before they are created that to have to counter after they have been smuggled in, detonated in our harbor, or sent by a missile or an aircraft to our shores.

INTERVIEWER: Critics say that we are deluding ourselves into thinking the CTBT is something we want. What do you have to say to that?

GARWIN: When you're able to find a bargain, you ought to take advantage of that. And the CTBT is a great bargain for the United States. Now it's one of those bargains that benefit just about everybody. I think that it's not only scepticism but cynicism that says that the United States is too stupid to recognize a bargain when it sees one.

Further more, other countries, of course, will do things that are in their national interests. And most countries have freely signed the NPT and will sign the CTBT because they see that their national interest is advanced more by limiting the nuclear weapons possession by their neighbors and by other countries in the world than it is by possessing nuclear weapons themselves.

Now, I think that the United States ought to offer negative security guarantees, not to use nuclear weapons against countries that don't have nuclear weapons, and we ought to offer positive security guarantees so that a country is not disadvantaged by not having nuclear weapons so the United States and other nuclear powers could provide perhaps through the United Nations nuclear weapons in support to any country that has been struck by nuclear weapons. But those are independent, we can argue about that. The fact is that all the countries in the world except the United States are almost surely going to ratify the CTBT this year. The United States can not stand aside and say, "no, countries should have the right to nuclear weapons just because we have nuclear weapons."

INTERVIEWER: Is the appropriate coalition of interested parties moving in the right direction now?

GARWIN: The general public favors CTBT but they may not be totally informed. More significant, are the high ranking military, people who can speak freely because they've left their former post who support the CTBT. And the lab directors who are required to certify the stockpile and go beyond that say that they think we can maintain the stockpile reliable and safe under a CTBT. And of course, the United States has the option in case we are not able to maintain our stockpile of opting out. This has been explicit, the laboratory directors have said it, more importantly the President has said.

And the adjacent group of consultants to which I belong and which analyze the adequacy of the science based stockpile stewardship program emphasize that this is not necessarily forever. It's forever if it works, and if other people abide by it, but if it doesn't work, then of course we will have to abandon it. So I think that it is a little short of liableace to suggest that the officials who head our nuclear laboratory don't mean it, are not being honest, when they say they can do what they say they can do.

INTERVIEWER: In your simplest terms, can you describe what CTBT is, and this is why it matters.

GARWIN: The reason the United States should want a CTBT is to inhibit the creation of new nuclear powers, new nations with lots of nuclear weapons, or even a few nuclear weapons. And to limit the advance of nuclear weaponry in countries that have already a good many of them like India and Pakistan. Now we can afford a CTBT, it doesn't cost us more than to test, but our nuclear weapons we can maintain as long as we need them, we can maintain them reliable and safe.

A nuclear weapon has a lot of parts, many of them, almost all of them, can be tested without a nuclear explosion and that's what the Stockpile Stewardship Program is for. It's to test all those non-nuclear parts, it's to analyze and understand their behavior, it's to replace them when they don't work. And it's to get information on the possible degrading of the parts that can not be tested.

For instance, you can not test the solid rocket propellent in a rocket that's going to be fired. It's never been tested, and yet we rely on them. The plutonium core in a nuclear weapon that is going to be used in war has never been tested, it can't be tested. But by sampling we can see whether the sisters and brothers of those plutonium cores work, not by setting them off but by taking them apart and making sure they are still in good shape. And if they're not then the science based stockpile stewardship program gives us the means to re-manufacture to original specifications so we can be sure they work.

So, we want to improve our security by reducing the number of nuclear weapons, weapons states in the world, and by maintaining our nuclear weapons reliable and safe for as long as we need them.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a favorite antidote to tell us?

GARWIN: I wish you had asked earlier, it takes awhile to think of these things.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us what it was like working with Enrico Ferme and Hans Betta?

GARWIN: I worked several summers at Los Alamos with Enrico Ferme who had created the first nuclear chain reaction and played an essential role at Los Alamos in creating the first Atomic bomb. He was an extremely capable person but very unassuming and he would work in my office, we shared an office, with Stan Ulum, mathematician at Los Alamos, they were working on understanding possible hydrogen bombs. In those days they used a hand calculator, electrically driven, mechanical calculator -- You would punch in the numbers on the keyboard, on this rank of ten by ten and, both numbers, and stand back and let it grind away and write down the answer.

So Ferme would write these things on a spread sheet, accountants spread sheet, in order to solve the equations for the burning of a cylinder of heavy hydrogen of deuterium. Then after he had done a couple of rows they would call in their computer who was a young woman, Miriam Caldwell, and she would take the spread sheet and fill it out overnight. So in the morning Ferme and Ulum would look at the numbers, they would graph them, they would decide what other case the computer should work on. So that was how it was then.

Even long afterwards, even 20 years ago when most of the nuclear weapons we have in our stockpile were designed the computers that were used were not as powerful as the PC that you're likely to have on your desk top. So it's really important that we limit the access of the people to the plutonium to the uranium and to the ability to test in order that more of these nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon powers not be created.

Now Enrico Ferme died in 1954, he was only 53 years old. I visited him on his deathbed and he asked me what I was doing, so I told him what I was doing in physics, and that I was looking into ways of limiting nuclear weapons and he said that he wished he had paid more attention to that. He wished he'd put more time into limitation of nuclear weaponry. So I think that had he lived he would have spent these last 40 years working on limiting nuclear weapons that he had done so much to bring into the world.

INTERVIEWER: Is there anything else that you want to mention?

GARWIN: I don't think it's right to demonize people who work on nuclear weapons. It's an honorable job, it's an exciting job, and I would encourage people to be involved in the Stockpile Stewardship program. And I think that people in other countries who work on nuclear weapons for the most part are doing their jobs as they see it. But it's up to the publics and to the decision makers, and the opinion leaders to understand that is their responsibility to see what nuclear weapons can do, to limit their numbers, to keep them safely, and to look out for the national security and the international security by keeping these destructive forces to a minimum.