This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, November 12, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Overstating the threat posed why nuclear weapons has been around a long time,

but has been recycled in the form of the overblown threat

of nuclear material in the hands of terrorists.

John Mueller is author of the new book Atomic Obsession, Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda.

We spoke after a forum for the book October 29th.

Threat exaggeration, it was pointed out in the forum today is essentially costless.

I don't necessarily agree with that, but it's certainly

relatively costless to the person doing the exaggerating.

There are real costs, but... to the person doing the exaggerating.

There are real costs, but from a political perspective,

it's hard to tie those costs to the threat exaggeration itself, which of course redounds to the benefit of the

exaggerator.

How do you evaluate that?

I mean, it's got to be maddening to some degree to know that that occurs, that people's higher minds don't take over

and say, well, let's talk this down a little bit.

What you have to do is a sensible cost benefit type of analysis and it's just simply

not done.

There's no reason why some of those costs can't be estimated.

And if you're spending huge amounts of money for a threat which is extremely

improbable, then the question is couldn't you be spending that money on something

...