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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the best of Coast to Coast podcast.

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Speaker 1: Become a Coast Insider to hear the rest of this

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Speaker 1: fascinating conversation, and check out recent shows featuring guests discussing

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Speaker 1: instances of telepathy and psychic phenomena happening in dreams, the

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Speaker 1: mysterious crop circle phenomenon, and what numerology suggests maybe in

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Speaker 1: store for the rest of this year and beyond. Head

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Speaker 1: on over to Coast to Coast a um dot com

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Speaker 1: and sign up for Coast Insider to start listening. Now,

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Speaker 1: here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeart Radio.

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Speaker 1: For the next couple of hours, we are going to

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Speaker 1: be talking about a subject that is extremely timely and

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Speaker 1: extremely scary. It's called and Into the Fire. Robert Gleason

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Speaker 1: has dedicated nearly thirty years to researching the threat of

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Speaker 1: nuclear terrorism and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. He has

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Speaker 1: been featured in the History Channel special Profits of Doom.

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Speaker 1: He has also had an extremely long and exceptionally six

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Speaker 1: acessful career as an acquisition's editor in New York City Publishing.

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Speaker 1: For the past twenty eight plus years, he's worked at

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Speaker 1: Tour Forge Books where he is an executive editor, and

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Speaker 1: I should probably say my editor for several of our

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Speaker 1: books here at Coast to Coast Robert Gleason back on

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast, Hello there, Bob George. It's great. It's

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Speaker 1: great to be talking to you again. I'm looking forward

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Speaker 1: to this and I gotta tell you, I cannot think

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Speaker 1: of a more timely time period to talk about this

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Speaker 1: possibility and the dangers of a nuclear apocalypse than right now.

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Speaker 1: These are scary time spot. Yeah, and even now like

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Speaker 1: in Pakistan that there there's been half a dozen nuclear

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Speaker 1: facilities that the terrorists have gone in and blown them

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Speaker 1: up in Pakistan, those facilities are very heavily fortified by

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Speaker 1: the military. That people don't understand that our our facilities

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Speaker 1: are for our nuclear storage sites, a big nuclear plants,

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Speaker 1: that they're there. You know that they're secured by rhine

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Speaker 1: coops in some cases elderly rehne coops. We don't have

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Speaker 1: the military security in our basis like Pakistan. In Pakistan,

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Speaker 1: as I said, had a half a dozen blown up.

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Speaker 1: And if they do it there, they'll do it here.

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Speaker 1: If you blow up a nuke facility, what happens, Oh,

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Speaker 1: it's in in my novel And Into the Fire, I

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Speaker 1: dramatized that in considerable length that there's a couple of

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Speaker 1: different kinds of facilities. One is one is a nuclear

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Speaker 1: power plant, and the nuclear power plants have very little security.

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Speaker 1: And one of the plants that I go in and

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Speaker 1: I melt down as a sort of like Indian Point,

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Speaker 1: which is only thirty miles from from New York City.

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Speaker 1: One of the things we learned from the Fukasa Fukushima

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Speaker 1: melt down is it's it's shockingly easy to melt down

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Speaker 1: a nuclear power plant, whereas in in in my novel

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Speaker 1: End Into the Fire, I have I do have some

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Speaker 1: terrorists go into the control room and list the fuel

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Speaker 1: rods up out of the cooling water and then they

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Speaker 1: burst into flame. But but also that in the United States,

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Speaker 1: we don't know where to store the nuclear waste, the

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Speaker 1: spent fuel rods, so we we build big pools around

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Speaker 1: the around the interspersed throughout the nuclear power plants, and

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Speaker 1: we just keep the spent fuel rods, the nuclear waste

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Speaker 1: in these pools, which we have to have water constantly,

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Speaker 1: certainly circular, and to put to cool them down. So

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Speaker 1: all you have to do if you want to melt

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Speaker 1: down Indian point, there's just blow up the cooling pumps,

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Speaker 1: which is what happened at Fukushima that they they the

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Speaker 1: tsunami knocked out the cooling pumps, so all the water

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Speaker 1: that was cooling the rods, it all boiled away and

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Speaker 1: then everything burst into flames and went critical. Now that happens,

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Speaker 1: you you get you're going to have a terminal radioactivity

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Speaker 1: for two hundred and fifty thousand years. Now we've got something.

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Speaker 1: We've got some people that will probably write us tonight

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Speaker 1: and say, why are you giving the terrorists tips? They

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Speaker 1: already know this. Oh they had They had a guy

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Speaker 1: named the abdual Cutter Khan a Q Khan, who is

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Speaker 1: the father of the father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program.

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Speaker 1: And he he taught them infinitely more that he created

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Speaker 1: the program. He taught them infinitely more than I could teacher.

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Speaker 1: Didn't He also give the Iranians new capabilities. In the

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Speaker 1: North Koreans. Yeah, he sold it to everybody, George, he

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Speaker 1: sold it to the North Koreans and the North Koreans

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Speaker 1: aren't aren't even Muslim. Where is he now? He was

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Speaker 1: in jail or under house arrest or something like he

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Speaker 1: was under house arrest. But he's, you know, acknowledged to

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Speaker 1: be a hero of Pakistan and wow, he's they nothing nothing,

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Speaker 1: nothing serious happened to him. He's really he's he's like

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Speaker 1: one of them. He's one of the national heroes over there.

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Speaker 1: When you talk about nuclear terrorism, what are the possibilities

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Speaker 1: that you're talking about? You just talked about taking over

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Speaker 1: a nuke plant, a power plant? What else? Uh, one

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Speaker 1: of the things I have and end into the fire

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Speaker 1: that I have some some terrorists nuke the State of

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Speaker 1: the Union address. What's scary about that is that you

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Speaker 1: have everybody in the government, You have the entire government

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Speaker 1: in the Capitol building. And I figured out how to

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Speaker 1: get my terrorists figure out how to get a nuke

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Speaker 1: right onto the doorstep of the Capitol building and the

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Speaker 1: you don't have to see, you know, whether they succeed

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Speaker 1: in doing it. But if that happened, that you'd have

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Speaker 1: no more government left. And in fact, General Tommy Franks,

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Speaker 1: who was the general in charge of you know, Operation

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Speaker 1: Iraqi Freedom back in three when he retired, he gave

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Speaker 1: a speech and he said his gravest fear would be

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Speaker 1: that if there was a nuclear terrorist attack in the

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Speaker 1: United States, it would be the end of our democratic government.

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Speaker 1: That for instance, in Germany when they had the Reichstag fire,

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Speaker 1: which was probably perpetrated by Hitler himself, that that became

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Speaker 1: the pretext for for for a military takeover of the

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Speaker 1: of of Germany. That the that these kinds of Vladimir

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Speaker 1: Putin got dictatorial control over Russia by and it's pretty

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Speaker 1: clear that the KGB, now the FPS did it. That

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Speaker 1: they blew up four blocks of apartment complexes in three

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Speaker 1: different cities, including including Moscow, and that that became the

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Speaker 1: great terror that that unleashed on Russia. Russia became the

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Speaker 1: basis for for a Putin assuming dictatorial power, and the

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Speaker 1: democracies are very fragile. Republics are very fragile. We don't,

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Speaker 1: you know, we take ours, the permanence of our government

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Speaker 1: for granted. But that would probably be the greatest single

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Speaker 1: consequence of a nuclear terrorist attack. Bob, there was a

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Speaker 1: Russian general his last name was Lunav who claims that

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Speaker 1: they were suitcase nukes planted in the United States. Now

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Speaker 1: that was years ago. Nothing's happened, happened yet, But do

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Speaker 1: terrorists or or or does anybody have the capability of

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Speaker 1: making a suitcase nuke. Yeah, it would be very heavy.

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Speaker 1: You would have to have some very heavy shoulder straps

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Speaker 1: that we had, of course, uh, a backpack nuke called

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Speaker 1: Davy Crockett back in the fifties, and of course we

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Speaker 1: were capable of miniaturizing that stuff a lot more. Um.

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Speaker 1: One of the problems with those things, and we quickly

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Speaker 1: realized that with Davy Crockett, the backpack nuke, that it's

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Speaker 1: very hard to control something like that. They're too small,

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Speaker 1: you know, that the people could be selling your own troops,

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Speaker 1: could be selling them on the black market. And they

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Speaker 1: realized as soon as they built some of these things,

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Speaker 1: the Pentagon realized they could not control them. And so

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Speaker 1: it's yeah, that's a that's a double edged sword. That's

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Speaker 1: a that kind of nuke would be you know, it

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Speaker 1: could be as much much of a threat to you,

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Speaker 1: is it as as as it would be to the

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Speaker 1: you know, to the enemy. Would you even be able

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Speaker 1: to detect if something like that was in the country. Uh, Well, actually,

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Speaker 1: the thing that we're gonna get a lot of phone calls.

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Speaker 1: You know, I speak a lot on the subject. I've

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Speaker 1: spoken at Harvard five times on the on the subject

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Speaker 1: and unclear terrorism and always we're gonna get phone calls

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Speaker 1: on this. But bomb grade plutonium, bomb grade highlight enriched ubanium,

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Speaker 1: it gives off almost entirely alpha rays that they that

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Speaker 1: you have to have gamma raise other kinds of race

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Speaker 1: to for for a radiation detector to really pick it up. Now,

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Speaker 1: you would want to have, you know, a little shielding.

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Speaker 1: They've often said, if you wanted to smuggle um nuclear

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Speaker 1: bomb field plutonium or highland rich duburanium, you'd probably want

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Speaker 1: to do it on a container ship. One way to

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Speaker 1: do it would be inside a container ship filled with

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Speaker 1: with toilets, and you could hide the bomb field toilet

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Speaker 1: case and the porcelin would totally block any kind of

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Speaker 1: radiation that came out. But you can, it's not widely

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Speaker 1: understood stood. You can pick up UH bomb grade platonium

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Speaker 1: or how I intercht your raium with your bare hands.

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Speaker 1: Now it would be hot, but the skin will block

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Speaker 1: the alpha raise. If you have a cut on your

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Speaker 1: hand and it gets into the bloodstream, you'll die. If

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Speaker 1: you inhale it, you'll you might die. The stuff will

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Speaker 1: be poisonous, but the skin ought to block the you could,

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Speaker 1: you could put some of it into your pocket and

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Speaker 1: walk through a you know, an airport detector. We saw

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Speaker 1: what happened during Night eleven. Tragically we lost three thousand people.

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Speaker 1: We've been watching the terrorism in England over the past

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Speaker 1: month and a half two months where they've had three

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Speaker 1: little episodes, but it has taken some lives. And what

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Speaker 1: it does is it disrupts people more than anything. We're

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Speaker 1: talking about something much bigger than that, aren't we. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: among other things that you get, uh, you get a

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Speaker 1: couple of nuclear terrorist attacks. If you know, if a

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Speaker 1: country has two of these things, and these things, they

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Speaker 1: don't leave any DNA, they don't leave fingerprints, and unless

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Speaker 1: somebody was stupid enough to come out and admit they

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Speaker 1: did it, in all likelihood, you wouldn't know who set

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Speaker 1: the nuke off. You would not know who KNU the

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Speaker 1: Wall Street or the U N or whatever the You

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Speaker 1: couldn't retaliate. Who do you retaliate against. William Cohen, who

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Speaker 1: had been one of Clinton's defense secretaries, wrote a very

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Speaker 1: good novel called him The Blink of an Eye, in

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Speaker 1: which a nuke goes off in Savannah, Georgia, and he

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Speaker 1: traces because he was in He was a senator for

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Speaker 1: three years, and he was in the Defense Department. He

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Speaker 1: traces in great detail all the machinations and contortions. So

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Speaker 1: the government has to go through trying to figure out

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Speaker 1: who set the nun off, and they really they finally

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Speaker 1: do at the end, but it's it's it's not like

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Speaker 1: anything anybody he thought that would be a very in

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Speaker 1: the greatest likelihood would be somebody took out Chicago or

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Speaker 1: New York, New York City or something. All likelihood, you'd

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Speaker 1: probably never find out who did it, among other things.

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Speaker 1: You would have to worry about an innocent nation getting framed.

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Speaker 1: Somebody creates the illusion that somebody else took him out,

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Speaker 1: which which would which could, by the way, if it

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Speaker 1: was done, if it was really done with really evil intent,

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Speaker 1: that that actually could create a global armor Gadon Listen

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Speaker 1: to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one

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Speaker 1: a m. Eastern and go to Coast to Coast am

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