RK - That's the military industrial complex.
WW - Yep, and they make big bucks off of nuclear weapons and they lobby Congress hard about those nuclear weapons. Sending them a message is probably worth doing.
RK - What's also interesting is that it lists the companies that offer mutual funds and investments that are invested in nuclear weapons. That includes AIG, Morgan Stanley, New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, Oppenheimer Fund, PNC Bancorp, and State Farm, and State Street. You know -
WW - The question you want to ask yourself is: if you're investing money with people who are investing in nuclear weapons corporations, don't you effectively own a nuclear weapon? You own a part of a nuclear weapon. The question you have to ask yourself is, "Do I want to own a nuclear weapon? Do I want to be financially responsible for part of this complex of weapons? Is this a way that I want to be involved the United States?"
RK - Humanity - The world. Yeah that's a good point. So I want to go back the military issue. You said that a lot of military people after they leave the military, they're actually able to say what they really think. Which is really screwed up too that they really can't say what they think. But when they get out of the military they don't like nuclear weapons. Why do you think that is?
WW - So the best example is Lee Butler. Lee Butler was the commander of Strategic Air Command--the Air Force's nuclear weapons arm and he became the first commander of the STRATCOM which is all the nuclear forces of the Navy, Air Force combined. He told me - I was sitting in his kitchen - and he's very intense and quite likeable. He said, "Every month in the middle of the night or during a meeting or whatever, someone would show up and say, 'Sir, you have to come down to the big room now.' They would go down to the command center and they whisk you down there really fast and you look at the big board and there is an attack scenario up on the big board. There's four thousand missiles headed towards the United States or whatever the scenario is for the exercise that day. They give you a book because everything you do is scripted because they're sure it's going to be so emotional that you've got to be reading from a script or else you won't get it right. They put you on the phone with the president of the United States or whoever is playing the president for this exercise and the president says, "General, what is the situation?" And you say, "My President, this is happening and this is happening." And then you say, "Mr. President, what are your orders?" And he says, "General, what do you recommend?" And Butler said that in the 32 months that he was Commander, it was always the same. The attack was designed in such a way that you always had to respond with MAO4. This is the early 1990s. There were four major attack options (MAO). MAO1 was leadership, MAO2 was leadership plus military, MAO3 - Major Attack Option 3 was leadership, military, and economy. And MAO4 - which was the one they always fixed it so you had to recommend that - was leadership, military, economy, and civilian population. So for 32 months, once a month, Lee Butler had to live through the imaginary experience of recommending to the president that 120 million Russians and various other nationalities be killed in 30 minutes. And he said invariably the president, or whoever was playing the president for that exercise, after you recommended whatever you recommended, would say, "Alright. That's what we'll do." So that in affect Butler was making the decision. He was choosing to kill all those millions of people. And for some people maybe that's not a problem but for Lee Butler when he came out of the military, he worked as hard as he could to do something about nuclear weapons. And I think there are a group of military people who have that experience. They get close to nuclear weapons, they think about the reality of it, and it's so obviously wrong that they feel they have to do something. I've completely forgotten what your question was because that Butler story gets me every time. He's so--
RK - My question was, "Why do the military feel that nuclear weapons are bad?" You told me it's not only Lee Butler it's a lot of generals and a lot of military people don't like nuclear weapons at all.
WW - Well the reason is - this is easy - their clumsy. You want to destroy a building in a city (and I would estimate that 95 percent of all targets in war are building size or smaller.) You want to destroy a building in a city you've got to destroy three quarters of the city to do it, if you use a nuclear weapon. Say you're the Russians and you want to do a limited strike on the US--just missile silos, sub bases, and air bases. Two US physicist constructed this imaginary attack scenario in 1976 by Soviet forces on just nuclear targets. Surgical. Carefully circumscribed. The result? 20 million people die because of all the radiation poisoning downwind. Even when you try to use nuclear weapons in a carefully controlled, limited way they blunder across the landscape and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Military guys are brought up being told that they are more ethical than the regular civil population. They don't kill civilians, they fight by the rules, they are honorable, they wear the uniform with pride. And then to be told that they're going to use weapons that are going to kill 90 thousand innocent civilians. I think just rubs most of them the wrong way. Some of them not. But--you know the whole trend in warfare is towards smaller, more precise, more accurate weapons, little tiny drones. I use this slide in my presentation of a little 4 inch drone called the Black Hornet Nano. It's got a little camera in the nose and it flies around the battlefield and you can see what's going on. It seems to me that is what the future looks like. Tiny little smart vehicles that can shoot somebody with a tiny little shot of poison or I don't know. Maybe it's something that knocks them out and disables them while you capture them. These seventy year old clumsy, blundering weapons: they just seem like dinosaurs. They seem like an evolutionary dead end in terms of weapons development.
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