SUGG: Can you describe for us - since 1995, and make reference to that event if you'd like, but since 1995, have the circumstances in Russia, with their military, with their command and control apparatus, radars, etcetera - describe what condition these things are in today, four or five years later from when that dangerous incident took place?

ADM. TURNER: There are two reasons why the situation today is more dangerous that it was in 1995 and the Norwegian incident. The first is that the Russians simply have not been putting any more money into the maintenance of their warning systems, their missile systems and so on. They are deteriorating and they're more fragile then ever.

The second and one that is not being noticed much is that the Russians are repeatedly telling us publicly that their nuclear establishment is deteriorating, they are not replacing it, and therefore, they are inexorably going to drop in the numbers of nuclear weapons they have available to them. The Chairman of the Duma's Defense Committee several weeks ago predicted that by 2007, they would have only one-fourth to one-sixth the number of nuclear warheads on line that we do, one-fourth to one-sixth. That's dangerous. What do they do? They feel vulnerable. It's not true, but they think we might do a surprise attack and try to disable them totally. Their counter to that is to go to hair trigger alert so they can launch before our attack impacts on them. That is very dangerous. You put that in the circumstances of Norway in 1995 and President Yeltsin might not have hesitated. He might have launched. So it's very dangerous.

SUGG: Do you see it as a danger sort of in the abstract kind of arms control way or do you see this as a material danger to the Americans of miscalculation of attack? Could you sort of put it in less arms control speak, but something that an average person could relate to? I mean are we in material danger from a miscalculation and accidental attack?

TURNER: Yes. We're not in danger, in my opinion, of a massive attack like we had worry about during the cold war. But if they go to Yeltsin and say, "Our warning system tells us that they're coming at us," and it is really not true because the warning system has broken down and is giving them false indicators, he may well launch something. And if it's one nuclear detonation on our soil, that's a catastrophe, let alone a thousand or something like that. But their arsenal is going to be reduced in size, so will the threat be reduced, but nonetheless, we don't want one, we don't want ten. It's not just a couple of bombs, it's a major catastrophe for the country.

SUGG: Can you kind of paint a picture of what the conditions are in Russian command and control, sort of from what you've learned in your research and your understanding of how these militaries work? I mean what is it that's sort of breaking down? Is it radars without fuel, electricity, is it tubes, is it low computers?

TURNER: One of the things is that some of their early warning radar systems are no longer under their control because they were in components of the Soviet Union that are not now part of Russia, so therefore, they don't have the capabilities they once had. Beyond that, they just do not have money to keep maintaining and refurbishing and replacing these systems and therefore, they're just becoming ineffective.

SUGG: Do you know off hand if the Russian commander, say at a missile field or in a submarine, could respond to an attack today, could respond to the perception of an attack on his own, without, say, the kind of interlocking and fair safe systems that we're familiar with here in the United States?

TURNER: I don't think I'm expert enough to address that.

SUGG: Okay.

TURNER: And you've got Bruce Blair.

SUGG: Sure.

TURNER: You're going to get him, I'm sure.

SUGG: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Summarize, then, from your perspective as a military person and an intelligence expert, summarize what is the greater danger now, with emphasis on accident, rather than sort of willful hostilities.

TURNER: Well, the danger is, first of all, mistakes, miscalculation, that they misinterpret something that's going on somewhere and they deliberately launch a nuclear weapon or several.

The second is they lose control of themselves, the whole system breaks down. I mean Russia is disintegrating. It's entirely possible that these weapons will now be under control of the provincial governors, not the central government. And now we're in a different world. I mean these people are not probably sophisticated and who knows what they will do?

A third problem is accidents. When you have weapons of this magnitude that are deteriorating, they can deteriorate to the point where they launch accidentally or something. I mean you've got to be worried about this. You've got to be worried they may detonate on their own soil and then if it detonates in Siberia, what will the people in Moscow think? Maybe we did it? I mean you just cannot afford one nuclear detonation in the world anywhere, in my opinion, without tremendous risk to everybody.

SUGG: So it seems like you're painting a picture of an enormous potential for confusion and miscalculation. It seems traditional arms control is sort of a stepwise and prolonged process to talk about levels and delivery systems and stuff. What do you see as the most useful immediate way to address this confusion and potential chaos?

TURNER: Very straightforward, it's a process I call strategic escrow. It's a form of de-alerting both the Russian and American nuclear forces. You take a thousand warheads off of missiles in the United States today and you move them maybe 300 miles away, so they can't just go back overnight. You ask the Russians to put observers on that storage site where you've put the thousand warheads. They can count what went in, they can count if anything went out.

You don't need detailed verification procedures that take years to negotiate in a treaty. What you hope is the Russians then take a thousand off and put our observers on them. A lot of people think they will not, but I say they have to. It's the only quick way to avoid their having one-fourth to one-sixth the number of warheads on line that we have maybe eight or ten years from now, because of the decline inexorably of the size of their force due to the lack of maintenance. So then we have a process going. We do another thousand, they do another thousand. I mean from today's numbers, we can be down into hundreds in a matter of, in my opinion, four or five years if we do this. And the most urgent thing for the United States today is to get the Russian nuclear arsenal off alert, get it down to as few of these as possible.

And my ultimate objective is to get every nuclear warhead in the world in escrow so nobody can pull the trigger today, but if somebody cheats, like Saddam Hussein, and decides to threaten the world because he's got the nuclear weapons that he shouldn't, then you still have the warheads in escrow and you can bring them back and say, "Saddam, you've got ten, but we just have recombined a hundred, and therefore you have no advantage. In fact, you're very vulnerable if you decide to continue threatening or using nuclear weapons."

SUGG: Would you walk us through sort of a practical account of how that process would begin? In other words, do you get to strategic escrow in one giant step or do you get there incrementally, through phase de-alerting kind of a thing?

TURNER: The big step is for the president of the United States to say, "I want to leave a heritage in the nuclear field. And there's no way I can do that by pushing the START II Treaty," or the START III Treaty. I mean those treaties, first of all, they're phony, they say we're going to 3,500 warheads. It's really, if you look at the fine print, 10,000 warheads. It isn't until 2007. Then we talk about going to 2,500 warheads in the next treaty, called START III, Well, maybe that'll really be 7,500 instead of 2,500 or some such number, and it'll be 20 I don't know what. It's too small, it's too slow. Nobody can really say, "I've achieved something," just because they got another treaty enacted.

So I think we ought to try to persuade Mr. Clinton to take a unilateral step of taking these thousand warheads off and putting them in storage.

Two points. George Bush did this in 1991. He took most of our tactical nuclear weapons and moved them away from their forward deployed positions and brought them back to the United States. In nine days, Gorbachev did the same thing. The moves that those presidents made eight years ago are still in place, the world is safer because of it.

But secondly, there's no risk whatsoever for Mr. Clinton doing this because we still have the warheads. And we're no worse of if we have only five or six thousand warheads on missiles tomorrow, instead of six or seven thousand. We don't know what to do with the extra thousand. So we can take this initial step at utterly no risk to the country.

Now what we hope, that the moment is propitious for Mr. Yeltsin to want to leave a legacy and for him to respond, recognizing, as we've discussed, that they need to find a way to get us down, because they're going down, whether they want it or not. So I think we have a window of opportunity in the next 18 months to try to get these two lame duck presidents to move dramatically in this direction. There's no way Mr. Clinton could do that without getting the Congress, at least the Senate, reasonably behind him, and that would not be easy.

SUGG: Could I ask you to address just the back end of that last comment, which was very good? In other words, the Russians, just by dint of their circumstances, are going to make deep reductions in their nuclear forces, so there's an opportunity of this. Speak to that directly, mention the window of opportunity in the next 18 months, and then also talk about how the Congress will have to get involved. What is it about the circumstances with the - what do we want to call them, the sort of de facto reductions in Russian forces that represents an opportunity for arms control progress to you?

TURNER: Well, the Russians have acknowledged openly for the last twelve months, and we have known it and predicted it for much more than that, particularly an expert on this, Bruce Blair, over at Brookings Institution, that their nuclear forces are inexorably declining. They've built their nuclear weapons to last about fifteen years. It's been eight years now since they've, in effect, replaced any of them, so they're declining, they're wearing out. We build ours for about forty years because we plan to keep refurbishing them as we go along. So they have predicted that in another eight years or so, they will have only one-fourth to one-sixth the number of viable, unable nuclear warheads that we will have. That's a very dangerous situation. They will have to go to hair trigger alert from fear that we might try to overwhelm them. They will go to extending the lives of these 15-year weapons and a dangerous situation could exist if they've got something on line that's short circuits in it and such forth. You just can't afford that kind of thing.

So we're much in a marvelous situation today that we need to find a way to match them going down, to avoid these dangerous tensions that could develop, and to alleviate the dangers that these excessive numbers of nuclear weapons provide to the whole world.

We will be irresponsible as a nation when history looks back on us in a hundred years if we don't seize that opportunity to take the nuclear threat that hangs over us all and reduce it. Now you can argue whether we should go down to a 1000 or 500 or 200 or zero and there are reasonable arguments there. But we're not even anywhere close to any of those.

And so I'm saying let's use strategic escrow as a way of getting us down to where we can now grapple with what do we want as a stable, long-term position for mankind, humankind. And that is something that we haven't really addressed. The arms control community is not looking past about a thousand warheads each, they're just so hopeful that we can get there, and that doesn't do much for us. A thousand warheads will spoil your whole afternoon in Washington, DC. A thousand warheads is so much more than it would take to put this country past what I call a point of non-discovery, not a point where we would be exterminated, a point where our society would never again be the same. It would take so long to recover from an attack of just a hundred warhead or two hundred that our society would be entirely different. The economy would be different, probably agrarian for a long time to come. The society would be different, probably not democratic, because we would have such a crisis on our hands that the government would have to step in and order people around. Social change. I mean how about mothers fighting for non-contaminated milk? I mean the society would not be the gentle, democratic, open society that it is today.

So we've got to get into our heads that we just have gone so far in excess with the numbers of these weapons and strategic escrow, in my opinion, is the only way to reduce them quickly.

SUGG: Do you see any potential - how do you address critics that say that it would be difficult to reconstitute. How do you address the critics of this program, whether it's strategic escrow or de-alerting, those who say, "You ratchet us back from a hair trigger or you take us back from alert status, you know, you're really asking us to make ourselves more vulnerable," which is a tough sell?

TURNER: You have to start with the fact that equal numbers have never been important in the nuclear sphere. We raced with the Russians for twenty or thirty years because they were catching up with us and so we tried to stay ahead. Well, they didn't want to be behind, so they tried to catch up with us. And we got to this ridiculous situation that there were 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world between the United States and Russia. 70,000 Hiroshimas? Come on, that is just unthinkable.

What you need in nuclear weapons is enough assured capability to retaliate to any nuclear attack, that it will put that other country past a point of non-recovery, past the point where it'll be ever the same again. And they will know that and therefore, they will be deterred from attacking you. And if they're not deterred, well, it doesn't do you any good to kill them twice. All you need to do is kill them once to put them past recovery, once.

So we don't have to be able to reconstitute quickly, that's a total fiction. That's a perversion of nuclear strategy by transporting to a conventional military strategy. Yes, if he has a thousand tanks and you've got 2,000, you've got an advantage. Yes, if you've got 50 airplanes in the air and he's only got ten, you've got an advantage. With nuclear weapons, you get nothing for having a great numerical advantage because they are so powerful that their utility drops off very quickly, you just don't know what to do with any more. As President Eisenhower said, you'll be bouncing the rubble around.

SUGG: Explain again for laymen like myself why the Russians' vulnerability makes us unsafe. That seems on the surface sort of counterintuitive. Why is that their feeling unsafe is really a dangerous predicament for us?

TURNER: If you and I are walking down the street and we see somebody coming at us and we think he's going to stab us in the back or something, we might decide to strike first. I'm trying to make a comparison.

If the Russians think we're going to strike them first because we've got this numerical advantage, they have to do something to compensate. The best they can do is to sit there with their fingers on the trigger, because if they have early warning systems, there's 30 minutes between our missiles launching - I'm oversimplifying, but - and their impacting. In that 30 minutes, they can counter launch, we have not had an opportunity yet to destroy them. But you have to be very ready. You have to be ready at the president's level, you have to be ready at the commander of the strategic forces level, you've got to be ready at the sergeant's level of whoever presses the button. That's dangerous because you make mistakes.

We've talked about the alert the Russians went to in 1995, when there was a missile launched off of Norway into space as a scientific probe and they thought it might be coming towards them. We've had other situations.

President's Carter national security adviser was awakened one night at 3:00 o'clock in the morning and told that there were several thousand missiles coming at us across the Pacific Ocean. It turned out it was a total mistake. A training tape had been put into the machine and rather than - the thing turned out to the real warning system. But the president's adviser was close to waking him up.

So we can't afford to let them feel that vulnerable. This has been part of the strategic deterrence now from almost the very beginning. You don't want your opponent feeling vulnerable and possibly taking ill-considered, rash actions.

SUGG: Okay, I think we're close to the end. I just wanted to ask one other question. I mean is it your sense that the Russians are acknowledging that they are going to be forced to be on a hair trigger? I mean do you see there a sort of reciprocal gesture? Are they saying openly, have they demonstrated that if we don't lower our numbers of weapons and go off alert or analogous sorts of things, they will be forced to do this? Is thee evidence the Russians are thinking this way?

TURNER: I have not heard them articulate this. They are articulating that they will be at a level of one-fourth to one-sixth of ours. I'm hypothesizing that this is one of several things they could do to compensate for that. It seems like the most obvious one, it seems like the easiest one. And I can't imagine that if we got to where they saw this situation was really going to develop, that is that we had not found a way to bring ours down and a disparity developed on the nature of a fourth or a sixth, I can't imagine they would not turn in this direction.