This is John Bachelor, conversation with my colleague Henry Sikalsky, the Executive Director of Non-proliferation Policy Education Center, about the moment in the Cold War when the utopian theories of the atomic bomb, the atomic weapons, atoms for war and atoms for peace, the moment that that turned into war, war, war thinking all the time.

The depths of the Cold War, the mutually assured destruction policy, the counter-force and

counter-value theories.

All of that happened as Henry describes it.

It was also the author of the Non-proliferation Treaty that

is part of the conversation here in the 21st century.

When Adams for Peace turned into War War, and has been ever since right now the reawakening of the nuclear arsenal for the

United States and Russia, the building of the nuclear arsenal for the People's

Republic of China and elsewhere.

Henry Sikowski, more of this tonight.

Yeah, I think there is actually.

There was a guy named Ambassador James Wonsworth who was really a man who was a civil servant.

He read the literature of academics and came to the conclusion that the basis of the

Adam's Peace program which was well we need to divert production in Russia so they don't have enough nuclear material to get, I don't know,

several hundred or a thousand bombs that would wipe out a hundred American cities.

Was a very mistaken way to look at the nuclear threat.

And he said, you know, just one weapon diverted from any of these plants or that goes off in an accident would be a disaster. You don't need to imagine that you

need a hundred, several hundred or several thousand before you get a strategic result.

That was in around 1956 and it helped propel thinking the effort to negotiate what eventually came in the nuclear

nonproliferation treaty that was finalized in 68.

I'd say that was the beginning of at least some recognition that there's a problem here that if you divert even one

bombs worth from any facility, military, civil, and it's fired in anger, you could be in tremendous, tremendous trouble.

...