of a nuclear arms race and weaponization of space.
And from Carleton University, Trevor Finley,
former arms control diplomat and international affairs expert.
He's now leading a major new Canadian study
into nuclear proliferation and the benefits and risks of nuclear energy.
Welcome to you both.
I'd like to start not where we so commonly do now with nuclear proliferation so much,
but with that old story, going back to the former arms race between the great powers.
We still, as we've just seen, have thousands of nuclear weapons
in the Russian and United States arsenal, not to mention British, French, Chinese.
John Polanyi, I mean, we ignore these surely at our peril now.
Well, it's hard to keep on thinking of really dreadful things.
And so, yes, we have forgotten that there are 27,000, as best anybody knows, nuclear weapons.
95% of them are in the hands of United States, principally Russia,
a very large possessor of nuclear weapons.
But it's coming back to people's attention because of nuclear proliferation,
and they are really starting to take this matter seriously again.
I mean, there were rumors this, not rumors, there were fears this summer of even a reignited Cold War.
Is the talk coming back more and more along the lines of it's a very uncertain, unpredictable world out there?
Well, I think that should send shivers down our spines, but it's not the principal thing.
The principal thing is that there are a lot of nations that want to have independent sources of non-polluting power,
and I think independence is written larger in their minds even than the non-polluting aspect.
But both of those are driving them towards the nuclear power option, and that is, I think, an alarming development.
Trevor Finlay, there were efforts, in fact, ongoing efforts by the United States and Russia
to bring down the number of their nuclear weapons to, I think, around 2,000.
What progress has been made in that area? They're still way above that target, are they not?
There has been some progress made, but the agreement you're talking about, the Moscow agreement,
really didn't provide any way of verifying that these cuts were being carried out,
and they also permitted both sides, Russia and the United States, to actually store their nuclear weapons instead of destroying them.
So in some senses we haven't moved beyond that old era of suspicion in the Cold War,
and what ideally should be happening is there's verifiable cuts that the entire world can see are happening,
and this also has an impact on countries which may be looking to acquire nuclear weapons.
If they can be convinced that the two former superpowers are cutting their large arsenals,
they'll be more likely to go along with the idea of nuclear arms control for everybody.
But when you say verifiable, Trevor, what do we know now?
How much do we know about where the Russians store their weapons, under what conditions,
exactly how many they have, and the same question for the United States.
How much does the public really know?
Well, we do know rough numbers, which is probably the essential thing until you get down to extremely low numbers.
Ironically, we know something more of the Russian program now because the United States and other countries
have been attempting to help Russia dismantle its Cold War nuclear arsenal,
and the Russians as a result have been required to tell us more about their arsenals.
But there are still huge question marks, even about the extent of nuclear material produced during the Cold War,
that we still don't have the answers to.
So one of the requirements for the future is for nuclear transparency,
for there to be more data released on exactly what was produced during the Cold War
in terms of both material and numbers.
That would be a very good starting point.
I could just break in there. I mean, I think that verification is important,
but it isn't the big stumbling block.
I mean, the greatest disarmament that has occurred, which, I don't know,
more or less halved the number of nuclear weapons down to this towering number of 27,000,
but that happened not because of a breakthrough in verification,
but because suddenly there was a will to do it.
It was the end of the Cold War.
Gorbachev and Reagan were talking to each other, and disarmament followed.
And so it is the will that is lacking, not the verification.
That's all I would underscore.
Trevor, what about the will? Have you seen it rise or fall in recent years?
Well, it's simply been static. I think that's the problem.
Both Russia and the United States have taken their eyes off this problem
while they've been dealing with other things like terrorism.
Governments apparently only have a certain limited attention span to pay to these matters.
And so this is really something of a sleeper story,
that we still have thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert.
That's the most alarming point.
These nuclear weapons aren't necessarily in storage to be then mated on a missile and launched.
They are ready to launch.
And when you consider that the United States is supposed to have had
a much improved relationship with Russia after the end of the Cold War,
it is incredible that these weapons should still be pointed at
what is supposedly no longer an enemy of the West.
I think one figure is 1,500 nuclear warheads operational, as you say, ready to launch.
24 hours a day, around the clock.
That's an understatement, I think.
It's about double that that are on higher alert between Russia and the United States.
And this is 20 years after the end of the Cold War
that we haven't even had the will to de-alert these missiles
is a shocking indictment of our failure of imagination
and I think failure of morality, because these are disgusting weapons.
One, they're capable of killing a million people by incineration and indiscriminately.
And the networks of these weapons, and it's not just in the United States and Russia,
British, French, Chinese, many other countries, Israel have them.
They rely upon systems, and surely if the last couple of months have reminded us yet again of anything,
it's how things can go terribly wrong in any system.
That's the worrying thing.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was the most recent person to make that point,
a Republican and not somebody who you'd expect to get in this debate.
He said, you know, everything goes wrong.
Do we really think that we can survive for the rest of time
with thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons ready to go?
Trevor, you mentioned something in passing though,
not in passing, but a point you made of the nuclear materials.
We don't even know how much has come out of the weapons that were made
by the tens of thousands since the Second World War.
Yes, exactly.
How big a problem is that, storage and just counting the materials up in number?
Well, it's even worse than that.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, we not only had no idea of how much material there was
and where it was stored, but the storages we did know about were often insecure.
Personnel were no longer being paid, and so of course they were prone to seizing material illicitly,
smuggling it out of the country.
There's a whole danger of what's called loose nuclear material,
which to some extent we've tried to get grips with,
but the latest reports show from Russia that the problem still isn't under control
and have properly secured nuclear material in that part of the world.
As we know, the borders of the former Soviet Union have been rather porous.
There are a whole raft of new independent states with poorly administered governments, poor customs.
The great fear is, of course, that some of this material has got out of Russia
or the former Soviet territory and is now being smuggled through various illicit networks.
Of course, terrorists would be very interested in this nuclear material,
depending on whether it's bomb-grade or otherwise.
I just wanted to underscore the point that I made earlier,
which is that if there were a will, there would be a way.
I mean, one shouldn't think from everything Trevor says is right,
but one shouldn't think that one cannot find these things.
One can find tiny traces of radioactive material,
and in fact the International Atomic Energy Authority did
when Saddam Hussein was cheating in the 90s,
and he stopped cheating because he found out he was being exposed and humiliated.
So the job can be done, but there has to be a sufficient incentive to do it.
I think in the minds of both Trevor and myself, the incentive is there in spades,
but that's not a general perception.
It's a fascinating and very alarming subject.
We're going to come back to it and look at other areas of the nuclear reality.
We'll be right back after this.
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A worsening global economy
need help navigating these stormy economic waters.
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CBC News Sunday night, tonight at 9, on CBC News World.
Welcome back to our discussion about nuclear risk today
with John Polanyi here in studio
and Trevor Finlay in Ottawa.
We were talking about the big powers
and still the Russians, the US,
and there are thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons
still in their arsenal.
Bring me up to date on the big fear now on nuclear proliferation.
John Polanyi, is it getting worse, the fear?
Well, I think it's getting worse.
Is it getting worse, the fear?
Well, we've been asleep at the controls
and what is waking people up,
such as, for example, Henry Kissinger,
who now is loudly saying in the Wall Street Journal,
ban the bomb, which is the right thing to say,
is the fact that there are many countries
that have their eyes on the nuclear power option.
And the nuclear power option,
unless it is well regulated,
and we aren't in a state to regulate it at the moment,
we don't have the laws, we don't have the will,
we don't have the tradition,
unless it's well regulated,
can easily lead to additional nuclear powers.
And that way lies disaster.
Trevor Finlay, what about control?
What about inspection?
What about international pressure?
Is that weaker now than it was a few years ago, or is it changing?
I don't think it is weaker,
particularly in reference to the nuclear weapon question.
We have a whole international safeguard system
run by the International Atomic Energy Agency,
and that has been improved vastly
since we discovered that Iraq had come very close
to acquiring a nuclear weapon.
The difficulty is that in areas of safety and security,
there is no similar inspection system.
So we have an inspection system for preventing states acquiring nuclear weapons,
but when it comes to the safety and security
of their nuclear reactors and material,
we don't have a similar compulsory regime.
So it's very worrying in terms of this so-called nuclear energy revival,
and one has to ask the question,
how do we strengthen those international regimes
to make sure that this isn't leading us into further nuclear disaster?
Canada used to play quite a big role.
Is it still active in trying to deter proliferation?
If it is, I haven't heard about it, no.
I mean, recently the nuclear suppliers group, which Canada helped found 40 years ago,
agreed to provide nuclear equipment, nuclear reactors and so on, to India,
despite the fact that India is not subject to the inspections that Trevor is just talking about.
In other words, and Canada didn't object,
Canada is therefore a part of a move which is blowing holes
in what remains of the non-proliferation treaty.
I just add to what Trevor said that the reason that there is no compulsory inspection of nuclear facilities
is because the legitimacy is lacking to compel countries to allow it,
and the legitimacy will only come from the nuclear have powers starting on the path to disarmament.
And of course, I sound like a cracked record because I've been saying this, and doubtless Trevor too, for years,
but the fact is that others are saying it, others of much greater note than me,
and there is now a movement which realizes that this is like a cancer.
Unless you cut it out, it'll spread.
Trevor?
Yes, I agree, and we've seen real-life cases in terms of Iran and North Korea who've challenged the system
and unfortunately got away with it,
and this should give encouragement to others who think they may also be able to do the same.
One worrying aspect about the acquisition of a nuclear energy program
is that it may be seen by some countries as a hedge for future nuclear weapons development,
and there's some notion that Gulf states, for instance, in the Middle East,
because of the Iran situation, will be looking to acquire nuclear energy
just to keep in the back pocket, if you like, the idea that someday they may too seek to acquire nuclear weapons.
So the whole system is in danger of running away with itself unless we have further controls on this.
How worried are you both about the trickle-down threat to the point where it's not even a question of a nuclear warhead,
but a dirty bomb now could be constructed from stolen or bought nuclear materials?
Dirty bombs are relatively easy to acquire. You just need the fissionable material.
It doesn't even need to be highly radioactive.
You combine it with a conventional explosive like a car bomb, and you can terrify people.
It's a weapon of terror, and if you detonated such a thing in an urban area,
you would create social and economic chaos. That would be the intention of doing that.
But that's quite a different league from nuclear weapons, which is by far the more dangerous type of weapon,
and for that you need high-enriched uranium or plutonium, which you can acquire through a peaceful nuclear program,
depending on how it's run.
So you have dangers both in terms of nuclear weapons and so-called dirty bombs or radiological weapons.
We only have about a minute left, and this is alarming stuff, but a good wake-up call, a really good wake-up call.
John Polanyi, you've spent so many years in this area fighting for nuclear sanity.
Did you ever get really depressed that it's going round and round in circles, and we're back to almost where we were?
Well, what we're talking about is a historic change of behavior, and you don't expect that to happen even in one lifetime.
When I entered this debate, it was to go to Moscow in 1960, I have to admit,
to discuss whether we could stop the nuclear arms race at 200 nuclear weapons on either side.
Well, the change in history, I think, will come and has to come,
because it's so evident that we can't just stumble on with thousands of nuclear weapons and no nuclear war.
John Polanyi, I want to thank you very much, and Trevor Finlay from Ottawa, thank you too for joining us.
Very interesting, alarming discussion.
And we'll be right back with a word about next week's program.
Do what is necessary when he thinks he has to do it.
John Polanyi and Trevor Finlay, the showdown between Biden and Obama on The Passionate Eye, tonight at 10 on CBC NewsWorld.
For everything you need to compete this season, there's MasterCard.
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Nothing stays the same.
The concern is deepening tonight.
This is where the attack actually began.
Some breaking news out of the White House this morning.
The balance of power has shifted.
Welcome back.
Next week, a look inside the dark and powerful vice presidency of Dick Cheney.
A man who redefined his office and who accumulated vast power.
So much that he guided many of George Bush's decisions after 9-11.
Including the invasion of Iraq and the war on terror.
We'll show my interview with Barton Gellman, author of an intriguing new biography of Cheney,
which covers his peak in power and later fall from grace.
You write at one stage, Cheney's most troubling quality was a sense of mission so acute
that it drove him to seek power without limit.
His indifference to public opinion verged on contempt.
It's hard to think of another American politician quite like him in dismissing polls, dismissing the public,
but being absolutely focused on his objectives.
I mean, what was his key worldview?
What was his great driving force?
Well, you know, you called him a politician and the thing about him is you could also see Cheney as an anti-politician.
As a man who does not believe in, does not feel he's got any particular facility for the idea of marshaling public opinion.
He's very good at persuading like-minded thinkers in private,
but he's driven by a belief that he understands mortal threats to the United States that other people don't understand as well.
And then he knows what has to be done.
He's got the experience, he has probed deeply, he's studied the questions.
And if you really want to understand what happened these last eight years, you have to give Dick Cheney his principles.
He's not accumulating power for his own sake.
He is accumulating power because he feels an urgency toward the public interest as he understands it.
And that can have quite big consequences for good or ill.
I also invite you to check out our new improved website, cbc.ca slash our world,
where you will be able to click and watch our programs online.
Use it to email us as well.
I'm Brian Stewart.
For all of us at Our World, thanks for watching.
We'll see you next weekend.
MUSIC
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This is CBC News. I'm Andrew Nichols.
Here's what's making news right now.
MUSIC
I would not categorically rule out a deficit.
Red ink rising.
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty tells CBC Ottawa's budget surplus may soon disappear.
The fallout from the credit crunch is far from over,
but Canada is well positioned to emerge from the looming downturn.
A dwindling few.
U.S. presidential candidates sprint to the finish,
crisscrossing key battleground states.
Polls show Barack Obama well in front.
You're going to be up very, very late on election night.
John McCain urges Republicans to keep fighting.
He says his campaign is closing the gap.
Just let me go, baby.
Jennifer Hudson's sister Julia pleads for her 7-year-old son.
Police have her ex-husband in custody as they investigate the murders
of Hudson's mother and brother.
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That's what's making news.
Up next, the Fifth Estate.
MUSIC
The Fifth Estate.
MUSIC
This is a story about obsession, one of the legacies of violent crime.
MUSIC
It was an unsolved murder, a crime so savage that it left a permanent stain upon a city,
marooned a family in the impotence of victimhood until now.
MUSIC
I know we're going to do it.
We'd break girls?
Absolutely.
How many theories do you have for what happened that night?
We have a good four theories.
We truly believe that the killer or killers are out there,
and with these theories going to the police with them,
they have been just amazed at what we have dug up.
There's an open debate on whether or not society is more or less violent than it used to be,
whether murder rates are up or down.
Good evening. I'm Lyndon McIntyre. Welcome to the Fifth Estate.
There is general agreement that any senseless act of violence
alters people, families, sometimes whole communities.
Such a crime in Saskatoon nearly half a century ago reverberates today.
The calls for resolution, closure, justice for the victim never really ceased.
Now those demands have found an unconventional, if not surprising, voice from within the victim's family.
We make a light note of it. It's not as though sad from back when,
but now we want to turn it around and say no, this was wrongly done,
and us girls are going out to help find the murder of our Alex.
The image of the victim still haunts anyone familiar with her story.
It happened here in Saskatoon in a time when murder still seemed to be exceptional.
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