♪ Christiane: hello, everyone and welcome to "Amanpour and Company" here's what's coming up.

>> legal barreling towards a hot war, not just a Cold War.

Christiane: Biden and G-7 allies me in Japan.

California's former governor tells me why U.S.-China policy needs to cool down and avoid catastrophe.

Also ahead.

>> The weapons that the suspect utilized was an AR 15.

Christiane: guns, not drugs are America's top concerns.

We drill down about the weapons terrifying the United States.

Plus -- >> Truman didn't want to believe what he was about to do.

>> a moment that will change the world.

Author of road to talks to Walter Isaacson about the shock waves nearly 80 years after dropping the atomic bomb.

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Christiane: welcome to the program, I'm Christiane Amanpour in New York.

It's hard to keep track of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he crisscrosses the globe nonstop on a blitz to shore up military and economic support for what could be a counteroffensive.

Today it the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia.

Next up, Japan were Ukraine's chart of the -- top of the agenda of the G7 summit.

President Biden agreed to support a joint effort to train Ukrainian pilots on modern fighter jets.

For President Biden and friends, there's another country looming large on the doorstep and that's China.

The dilemma, how to deliver a unified response to the increasing assertiveness and how to engage.

former Governor Jerry Brown founded the climate Institute at Berkeley University and he tells me it is tricky doing business with Beijing, but he worries the Washington Hawks might be going down a dangerous path of no return.

Governor Brown, welcome back to our program.

Gov.

brown: thank you, glad to be here.

Christiane: you have said recently that you are very concerned about the United States barreling down the road towards a full-blown Cold War.

Tell me exactly what you mean by that and what are the consequences?

Gov.

Brown: I think we are barreling towards a hot war, not just a Cold War, whether that's in a year or two or three years, the forces are being set in motion of deep, pervasive hostility and it makes no sense.

Yes, China is very different, the Communist Party is different than our Democratic Republican party upper -- operation.

Nevertheless, the imperatives of planetary danger, global danger, the economy, nuclear proliferation, Chuck -- climate change, the advances in artificial intelligence, the bio threats, all these things mean the U.S. and China must collaborate.

It doesn't mean that they are not very different.

The level of negativity coming out of Washington, and reciprocated and stimulated in China is alarming and it's escalating.

We have to call it a reverse in this trajectory of a very negative relationship.

It wasn't true a few years ago, it doesn't have to be true now.

It's very dangerous.

I think the people in Washington are acting in a very way that's very unconscious of the dangers they are helping to co-create.

Christiane: as this G7 summit is occurring on China's doorstep, the doomsday clock, which always has been an indicator of how close one is to the maximum disaster, is showing right now an unprecedented 90 seconds to midnight.

So, just using that image as a focus, what would you do to rollback this tension and try to reset relations with this huge superpower?

Gov.

Brown: it's real simple.

Not simple in execution, but simple in concept and to begin.

The president of China and the president of the United States have to talk.

Not through zoom, but in person.

Not for an hour, but for several days.

The difficulties and the differences are so great that they have to be explored and worked through in a sufficient amount of time and they can't be done by lesser folk.

In China, President Xi is the top.

He calls the shots and he only wants to talk to President Biden.

Of course they have to bring in their close confidantes, but they have to initiate a discussion.

Obama and President she met -- President she -- xi met in Palm Springs and everything has gone worse.

I really think people in Washington don't realize the risk.

Yes the Communist Party is a problem, but hot war is a thousand times worse as will be climate change in the next 20 to 30 years, as will be artificial intelligence, as will be nuclear blunder that is building up as well.

So yes, the doomsday clock is a minute and a half before doomsday.

So it's time for Biden, his assistance, Congress, as well as China and their people to get together.

Not that they will agree, just hardheaded talk like Nixon and mousy tongue -- like Nixon and others.

If it hasn't been done very soon, the world will suffer grievously.

Christiane: it's really interesting you bring up Nixon, no political ally or friend of yours, yet you do pay tribute to the type of diplomacy and the hardest and most difficult cases, which right now seems to be impossible.

As you said there are hawks all over the place, including in the Democratic Party, who seemed to be pushing this Democratic president down this road.

Everybody seems to not want to be soft on China.

And this is what you have said.

The notion that we can scare China and push them around or contained them and suppress their growth and development is utter folly, but it does seem to be widespread.

At what point do you think, because we do know, for instance, there is talk about Secretary Blinken going, the commerce secretary, the Treasury Secretary Yellen, that President Biden is preparing to send them all to reopen some dialogue.

Gov.

Brown: that's fine, unfortunately the Chinese aren't listening at this particular moment.

I think there is indications that there will be a breakthrough in conversations will begin, but look at what just happens, a balloon.

We got spy satellites, they have spy satellites, why was that the occasion to cancel a visit by the American Secretary of State to China?

It indicates it isn't important enough.

I will say, and I've talked to a lot of astute China thinkers, nothing is more important than talking with China, working through our profound differences.

It can be done.

The Communist Party was far more dangerous and hostile back then, than the Communist Party under Xi Xiping.

Why aren't we talking?

There is a miasma in Washington, and arrogance, a hoop wrist that doesn't understand the nature of the threat.

This is not a high school football game, this is a global environment where powerful countries can kill hundreds and millions if they get to the point of a war.

That is the number one thing that must be avoided.

I don't hear that, this is a time for cooperation as well as competition.

I hear about great power of competition, I don't hear the word great power cooperation.

Either we learn to cooperate or we will perish.

I have no doubt about it.

Christiane: you said there are things in China we find horrendous, not everything we have done has been around us, so we ought to have humility.

The West is concerned about China supporting Russia more than trying to end Russia's war in Ukraine.

Talk to me about the notion of making peace and having diplomacy with your enemies and competitors rather than your friends.

Gov.

Brown: I distinguish what I call crackpot realism, which is what I see now in Washington, and planetary realism.

We can't treat China as a separated object that we can change and coerced and push around and persuade at our own will.

We are locked on this planet earth in a very highly dependent relationship on the environment, on weapons, on biological threats, on artificial intelligence, on nuclear weapons.

We are tied together and have to find a way to live together.

There is no option other than utter destruction -- destruction.

If one understands that them without minimizing the disagreements, there will be ways that people can find the president of China and the president of the United States can work together, can find areas of cooperation because we have common interest.

We have common threats, common vulnerabilities, therefore they lead to a common interest that we should be working on.

Instead, all I hear is competition, conflict, enemy, adversary.

It really is shortsighted and scary.

Christiane: is it going to get worse in the upcoming presidential campaign as everybody competes to pre--- competes to be the strongest?

We understand Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida will throw his hat in the rain may be in the next week.

He's had a bit of a contra tall with your own governor in California, Governor Newsom, particularly over what he calls in wet is being described as the culture wars and what he calls a woke virus.

Let me play a soundbite and I want you to react to this.

>> to motivating this philosophically is what I call the woke mind virus.

It's a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.

It represents an attack on merit and achievement, and it constitutes a war on the truth.

Don't tell me that babies are born racist, don't tell me that men can get pregnant.

That is not true and I will not accept that as being true.

Christiane: Governor Newsom responded by saying, welcome to the real freedom state and saying, you will get smoked by Trump, his liberalism in a crisis and what matters right now in terms of this Republican /Democratic face-off?

Gov.

Brown: you can say liberalism is in a crisis, you could say America is in a crisis and you could say the world is in a crisis, so what to do about it.

As I listen to that tape that you played, woke virus Marxists cultural something or other.

That's hyperbolic nonsense.

It's almost a cartoon of issues that are out there, but are to be respondent in an adult, thoughtful manner.

That was pure demagoguery playing to the cheap seats of the Republican primary.

And that takes us nowhere.

Yes, there is crazy stuff going on, but just to invent names and throw them at people, that's not the American way.

Unless our two parties can grow up and work together.

In this case, the Republicans are way over and they are picking on stuff that, some is kind of crazy in my mind on the Democratic side, but the response is not to exaggerate it and compounded, but the find avenues of collaboration.

We have to do that domestically and internationally.

If we can't, we are in big trouble.

Christiane: it looks like domestically the polls are increasingly opposite and there doesn't seem to be any -- just look at the debt crisis, that may be resolved, the debt ceiling.

But in the other terms, especially in campaigning, do you think that President Biden has a good shot at this next election?

Who do you think would be the best for him to be pitted against in the general?

Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or anybody else?

Gov.

Brown: I think President Biden has a very good chance if President Trump is the competitor.

I do know, from long experience, when your poll ratings are in the low 40's for not months, but years, that's a very tall mountain to climb.

Nevertheless, we are in very unusual times.

It looks like Trump will get the nomination.

I think Biden can pull it off.

I'm not sure.

As far as what other possible candidates there are, I won't speculate on that.

I would say that when my father ran for governor, there was a mayor of San Francisco that they were afraid of and they wanted Ronald Reagan to be the opponent.

Ronald wait -- Ronald Reagan was the opponent and he won by one million votes feeding my father in 1966.

So I'm very weary of saying who the Republican opponent should be.

I think we need the strongest Democratic campaign imaginable.

Christiane: the eldest state's woman from your stay, Senator Dianne Feinstein, is undergoing some medical issues and causing some alarm with some of her reactions" to the press.

It's a very sensitive issue.

What do you think she should do?

Do you think she should retire?

Gov.

Brown: right now her votes are crucial.

She has the cap need to participate as a senator.

She is a lot better off than Orrin Hatch were and no one gave them trouble.

The Republicans will not allow a substitute for Dianne Feinstein on the committee.

Even if she were to leave and resign, it's not clear they will allow that person to be on the judiciary committee.

There a real challenge that is exacerbated by the Republican policies that are very insensitive and I think completely intolerable.

But Feinstein has what it takes to participate over the next several months.

It's a serious matter, please tragedies happen.

This is not the first time we've seen many in the recent decades in the U.S. Senate.

Christiane: can I go back to another issue of substance regarding China?

One of the topics Secretary Blinken had planned to address before the trip was scrapped was the flow of chemicals to China that were used in the illegal manufacturing of Sentinel.

We have the stat which says government data out yesterday revealed nearly 110,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States last year, 2022.

And back in 2018 you vetoed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco to open the nation's first supervised drug injection site.

Where are we now on this?

Is that Vito still a reasonable one?

How should the Fentanyl crisis be dealt with?

Gov.

Brown: I certainly don't think the Fentanyl crisis will be dealt with by the government, providing nice places for people to inject Fentanyl, and if the government doesn't supply the Fentanyl itself, then the addicts will have to steal it, to get the money.

Because they don't otherwise work, at least most of them.

We have a crisis and it's something we have to work out with China and Mexico but also the United States.

Right now, the opiates are permitted in many big cities.

I think the mayors have to take a more enlightened view, strict, but also compassionate in the sense that treatment is available, shelter is permitted.

The specter of people camping out in the streets of San Francisco is not a good one.

I think it should be a call to wake up and take more serious action and stopping the opioid crisis.

Not easy all over America, in Texas, New York, and Florida.

It's a real dilemma of this modern developed society.

Christiane: Governor Brown, thank you very much.

Gov.

Brown: thank you.

Christiane: that opioid epidemic is giving way to gun violence at the top of Americans public health concerns.

Even some foreign countries are given -- are giving their citizens traveling here a shooting advisory.

On Monday, an 18-year-old with an AR 15 killed three people in New Mexico.

After a spat of recent killings, like in Missouri, the 16-year-old was shot when he went to the wrong house to pick up his brothers.

In New York, Kaelin was killed after her car turned into the wrong driveway.

In Texas, two cheerleaders were shot when they got into the wrong car after practice.

And yet, passing any significant gun law still seems to be an unachievable task in the United States, unlike a host of other nations overseas that have reacted swiftly to mass shootings.

My next guests won't stop trying in the United States.

Ryan Bussey is a former insider in the gun industry who is now working for sensible gun control.

Kelly Sampson is the director of racial justice at Brady United against gun violence.

Welcome overview to the program.

Can I just start with Serbia where in the last month there were two mass shootings and at least a dozen people killed, including children.

There have been really big protests against gun violence, including today, we've got incredible pictures.

But it just took two shootings for Serbia to act swiftly.

The United States has done nothing despite 200 this year.

So, Ryan Bussey, from your perspective as a former insider in the gun industry, what is it going to take and why is this still such an extraordinary difficult situation?

Ryan: Thank you for having me on , I don't know exactly what it's going to take.

I think we are not likely to see here, and in many ways I don't want to see this sort of reactionary, over-the-top actions that you might see in a country like Serbia.

That being said, a freedom like owning guns, which we have in America, I hunt and shoot with my boys, I would like to continue that.

I value the right to self-defense.

I think it's pretty obvious that we cannot maintain that sort of immensely powerful freedom and big nor immensely powerful responsibilities either through social norm or legislation at the same time.

There is a messy space of governments this is the case him we have far too much focus on one and far too much on another and have to focus on fixing it.

Christiane: first to you Kelly Sampson, Drew crony and is how Ryan describes wet foreign countries of duns.

Basically the president said general disarmament.

There's a amnesty program for illegal weapons.

The moratorium on new weapons permit, review of current gun licenses and psychological background checks.

And also we've seen in the Passow it's happened in Australia, New Zealand and the U.K., is that to Ciccone and Dexter Conine.

-- Draconian.

>> Despite the gun industry spewed version of what Americans want, Americans want background checks.

Americans want the assurance that people who will misuse guns don't have the opportunity to misuse them.

There's a lot of support for background checks for assault weapons bands.

The problem is that there is a small coterie of individuals who are supposed to represent us but who are more concerned with representing the gun lobby.

Christiane: we've heard a lot of reporting about problems within the Biggest organization, the NRA, and as Kelly says, there's so much popular support for sensible gun control.

44% of people say they know someone who's been shot.

How come the gun lobby, the NRA still has that much power?

>> I want to say, I agree with Kelly on the background checks.

This is a policy that has polled well above 80% for over 25 years and yet hasn't passed.

This leads into the answer about the NRA and it is the NRA we can from its high point as an organization.

Perhaps there is this all or nothing that they infected our politics with, I think not.

Just look at background checks if you don't believe me.

This should pass, he pulls at 5%.

That means a huge number of Republicans also support background checks, yet it doesn't.

Why is that?

I think it's because the NRA forced the central being of the right side of our politics, the radical right side of our politics, a central being of that side of the house is guns, radicalize gun thing.

So, you can have asbestos chipping off that beam all day long and have 85% of the people agree it will give us cancer but the right side of the aisle says don't touch that beam, the whole thing will crumble.

I think that's what the radical right has made and formed up by the NRA.

That's the radicalize's slice on the right in its various -- very dangerous.

It not only threatens our lives but threatens our democracy.

Christiane: listen to what Ryan Bussey says.

I think he said 85%, including Republican think there needs to be certain controls, how does, in a democracy, then a minority hold sway on something as big and as deadly as this?

>> part of it has to do, when talking about a federal level, it's a structural issue.

You have the Senate where a small group can hold sway over what the majority wants.

Similarly, you have issues around the way the courts are set up.

That being said, we have seen a change at Brady over the past decade or so where now you are having more and more people animated about gun violence and preventing it.

We started to see over the past decade, states passing laws.

Last year the federal government passed the bipartisan safer community act, which is the first federal law in 30 years.

Things are changing but what we need is the cultural change at the ground level where the everyday Americans who care, and they may say, I'm a Republican and I care, but as more and more of those people take care and make it into action, then we can push to overcome that small minority.

Christiane: again, the question is, how does one do that.

Apparently in COVID there was a massive increase in the sales and purchases of guns.

It looks like Americans bought 60 million guns during the pandemic and ownership rose from a third of U.S. households to almost half.

Why would that be -- and again, I know that you live in Montana, you are a proud gun owner, responsible one, it's for hunting, etc., what happened in the COVID pandemic?

>> the truth is, in the NRA stumbled onto this 25 years ago, one of the most effective motivators for humans, both politically and in gun purchases is the use of fear.

The NRA hasn't been exceptionally good at both creating and stoking irrational fears about things.

In COVID everybody had all kinds of fears.

We didn't know what tomorrow would look like.

Racial fears were stoked.

We had George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, none of us will remember a more tumultuous time than in and around 2020.

Just in that one year in 12 months we had 22 million new guns sold in the United States.

When fear is used as a senior irrational motivator to purchase guns, you will have a bunch of ugly, dangerous effects because it's not a healthy, rational decision and that's what happens.

Christiane: let's point away from these mass shootings and get these terrible statistics that the majority of people who are killed in the United States are killed not in mass shootings but handgun, suicide, in other things like that.

That's a whole another epidemic that we don't really see, but that's a huge number of people.

Again, is that just what this country will live with?

>> Absolutely not.

And I would point to Brady has a poke -- program and in family fire we reach out to gun owners to talk about things like safe storage to help save lives.

But to go back to what Ryan was talking about in terms of fear, there is a lie the gun industry has been perfecting and perpetuating for decades where they tell people that the only thing that will keep you safe is not the rule of law, but a gun, and they downplay the risk of bringing a gun into your home, which is that gun is more likely to be used against you or someone at home will use it against themselves rather than the fantasy that they create, which is, with this gun you can take on stranger danger.

The suicide issue is an example of the reality of what it looks like when you have a gun in your home.

Which is that it ends up being a risk to you and your family.

That's not to say that people own guns, it's that people need to know the risks and understand the responsibilities associated with it.

We are working to make sure that if people bring a gun into their home, that their conscience of the risk, they practice safe storage and make a sober and clear decision about having a weapon.

The idea that a gun will keep you and your family safe does not line up with the statistics or the reality of what we know about firearms in the home.

Christiane: I come from the U.K. and there are special storage places that hunters or anybody with guns have to have in their houses and they are checked regularly, they are locked and checked regularly by security people, by the police.

So you're saying there should be more of that period.

What about these laws?

In our introduction to you we talked about the stand your ground laws, essentially the three instances in which people were killed being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Is that a law that has any chance of any kind of bipartisan effort that could end it, or is it a law that is still very popular amongst the majority of people?

>> I think the stand your ground laws are sort of indicative of our out of balance situation right now.

If we are going to be a country, we now have 415 million or so guns in the United States.

I think everybody who drives up and down the roads every day sees a lot of vehicles.

We have about 200 67 million vehicles.

If you think you have a lot of cars, there's 150 million more cars than guns -- guns and cars.

If we will have that in society it cannot be without proper restriction.

It cannot be without proper social norms.

At the same time we've increase this gun ownership and gun sales, many states have actually reduced the level of permitting a requirement to learn safe storage or require safe storage.

Our arrows are going in the wrong direction both ways, we can't be a democracy that functions with this sort of freedom and reduce regulation at the same time.

We should not be shocked that this things happen, whether it's Ralph or a young girl in North Albany.

It's going to happen.

We have to figure out a way to govern ourselves.

Christiane: I think that is what is so extraordinary about it, especially as we head into a presidential campaign.

The idea of how to govern ourselves and how to be a society where everybody has their rights, including as you have written a book called, I think it's called the right not to be shot.

You argue that that is a constitutional counterweight to gun rights laws like stand your ground.

But that's not making any inroads, except, as you say, with the general public that not with the politicians.

What more does the public have to do?

They've done their marches, they have the vigils, the tragedies of what happens in schools and workplaces in sports places that get mowed down like this.

That constitutional right seems yet not to be able to punch through the other one of the Second Amendment.

>> I think there is a tension here.

One thing that we've seen that keeps us going is, we live in a country where we have the federal system, then we have the state and local system.

The federal system has been challenging but where we see progress from the challenge -- from the public marching is from the states.

In the past five years or so, so many states like Virginia, places you when not think of, have passed gun laws in response to the popular up swell of support.

To answer your question in terms of what the public needs to do, we have to put ourselves here for the long haul.

One of the things I think about is my own heritage.

I'm a black woman.

So I am sitting here today an attorney because I am descendant of people who had all the odds against them.

You want to talk about being written into the Constitution as 3/5 of a person but they cap marching, they kept resisting and they kept amending change and they got it.

I think when it comes to gun violence prevention, we will need a similar attitude where despite the odds, we have to keep pushing because we are making progress, we need more progress, but the bipartisan safer communities act as an example of a way in which we can get things done, but it will take determination and it will take us not giving up, not getting discouraged and continuing to push on and fight.

I wish I could snap my fingers and change this because people are dying, children are dying, but we can't, we have to keep pushing and changing and we are making progress, it just needs to happen faster.

Christiane: let me end by asking Ryan because Kelly talks about children and the young generations and future generations.

Your own sons I read, and I'm fascinated, let me get this straight, they have taken up a lawsuit in terms of their right not to be effective -- affected negatively by the climate.

This is happening in Montana.

Do you see any link between that kind of citizen action and even gun control?

>> I actually do.

Thank you, I'm very proud of my boys.

They are part of 16 kids in Montana who will go to court to fight for their climate rights.

There is a portion of our Constitution that says every citizen has a right to a clean and healthful environment and my boys are part of 16 kids fighting for that.

But I think it's very indicative, this class of citizens coming up, my oldest son is 18, my youngest is 15, they have lost patience with us, with our nation, with inaction on things that are important and I've warned people many times that if we do not fix this, these kids will fix it, and they have little patience.

Whether it's on climate, whether on reproductive rights, whether on gun stuff.

My kids hunt and shoot and owned guns and shoot and trap and skeet and yet they have lost patience with being in lockdown drills in school.

Christiane: I think that so hopeful, both of you have talked about how the younger generation are going to have to fix this and are motivated to do so.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you for joining us.

Christiane: Hiroshima, the side of the G7 summit is the most powerful reminder of the total catastrophe of nuclear weapons, which are often bounded about as a legitimate battlefield weapon.

In his new book, Evan Thomas concludes the United States had no other option them to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.

It is controversial as he tells Walter Isaacson.

>> Welcome back to the show.

Your book comes out this week and it's about the decisions that led to the dropping of the Adam bomb in Hiroshima.

It sort of a reminder about why we shouldn't put statesmen in that position.

Tell me about the G7 meeting in Hiroshima and what it means to you.

>> I hope it's a reminder to the statesmen there that they never want to back themselves into the corner we were in in August of 1945, when really, there was no choice but to use these terrible weapons.

I know there's been a lot of argument over the years, but in my book I made a compelling case that they would not surrender.

To end this terrible, terrible war we had to use, not one, but two nuclear weapons and that was a terrible thing for the world and for the people who had to use them.

Never recovered from it.

I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the agonies they went through as they face this moral and political dilemma about when they use these things and when it's a good choice.

>> your book's theme is moral ambiguity.

We live in an age of twitter when nothing is morally ambiguous.

People leap to one side of the other and we see it even in foreign policy, even when China.

Are you worried we are marching down a path where we are putting people into a position that it's more likely the bomb would be used again?

>> yes, we live in this world of moral righteousness.

When people have twitter debates or debates on the Internet or anywhere, I'm right, you're wrong.

Not only are you wrong, you are morally inferior to me or my group.

And that's a bad culture we are in.

You can see it play out on the world stage.

Putin is a crazy moralist.

It's a twisted Russian morality, but I'm moral, and the other side is evil, and he's backing himself into a corner where he may have to act on that to save his own crazy notions of his own morality.

Even more dangerous is the corner we are getting into a CHINA.

China is building missile fields as we speak.

We thought we were out of the nuclear age.

The Chinese are building fields and we will be back into a scary standoff with another nuclear armed power.

I hope that we take lessons from the past about why it's not simple, it's not I'm right, you're wrong, but the statesmen have to work together to avoid getting to the brink.

>> We aren't even having nuclear arms talks with the Chinese and the Russians have pulled out of most of the nuclear arms agreements that we talked about.

Is that an example of the fact that everybody has gotten onto a righteous high horse that they are not able to do the normal things that people expected after Hiroshima, preventing this bomb from being used again.

>> the rhetoric is high horse.

If you read what Putin says were with the Chinese says, it's all add your prompt.

It's way out there in denouncing us as being wicked and evil.

You hope they may be talking that way but behind the scenes there are diplomats who are having realistic discussions with them.

There's a little sign, Ambassador Nick Burns was recently in China and there is an opening here for the world.

And that is in Ukraine.

If the Chinese could only persuade Russians to stand down, and if the United States, by the same token, could help Ukraine stand down, we could find a diplomatic ending to a war in which people are otherwise backing themselves into a situation where Putin could use a nuke.

There's a little glimmer of hope to me that statesmen could be -- and find a way out.

It doesn't help if you are posturing about how you are moral.

>> you say it's possible Vladimir Putin could use a nuclear weapon.

What do you think could drive him to that and what could he be doing?

>> if he feels he's losing and he could be deposed himself, and he has no other choice but to use a nuke, I think it's a horrific choice and I think the Chinese would try to talk him out of it, but it's possible, his rhetoric is crazy and he likes to rattle the nuclear weapon.

Rattle the nuclear SABR.

They do it all the time.

And they are always making references to say, the United States, you did it first.

You did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not us, so he's trying to morally back foot us.

So, in the real world, and I hope Putin reads my book because in the real world these decisions are difficult, they are not ideological.

We did use those weapons but we use them only after we realized that there was no other choice.

There's a movie coming out called Oppenheimer and there's a scene, which they probably will have in the movie, where after we drop the bomb, the scientist who helped create the Autumn bomb -- Adam bomb comes into President Harry Truman's oval office and says, I have blood on my hands and Truman kicks him out and says, I don't want to see that crybaby ever again.

Truman was posturing a little bit when he was doing that, but the is, you have to make terrible decisions and live with them.

My book is about people who had to live with terrible decisions.

>> with Biden going to Hiroshima in the Oppenheimer movie coming out, we are all reminded of these things again in one thing that Oppenheimer said as he was agonizing after the bomb was used, is possibly the use of the bomb would make sure we never used it again, tell me about that line of thinking.

>> Oppenheimer's own scientists were appalled by what they were about to do and Oppenheimer calmed them down by saying, if we use this thing, it will be so horrific that we will never do it again.

War will be over.

For a long time it looked like he was wrong about that, we had a huge arms race, but actually there was a taboo.

The people who use those weapons were shocked by it.

I wrote a book about President Eisenhower and he was determined never to use those weapons again.

I fear that with a passage of a half a century, more 70 years now, people forget how terrible they are, they are terrible.

The average ICBM nuclear warhead is 100 times more powerful than the atom bomb that fell on Hiroshima, 100 times or 200 times.

Hiroshima is taken out of midtown Manhattan.

In H-bomb is all five boroughs.

It's the whole thing.

The nuclear taboo work for a very long time, partly because statesmen did avoid pressing the button and there was arms control.

We need to get back into a world in which we are talking to each other about arms control and how incredibly dangerous these things are.

But I fear we forget.

>> You say people's memories are fading, is this going to be a spur to say, let's make sure we get back into arms control and other discussions?

>> the whole reason statesmen meet is that have off the record conversations so they are just yelling at each other through their spokesman.

I hope they talk about it because it has immediate relevance.

Ukraine has to be resolved before Putin fires off one of these things and then write over the horizon the fate of Taiwan is bringing the United States and China into a nuclear standoff.

If we fight China over Taiwan, there's a very good chance we will use missiles against the Chinese mainland and China will want to use missiles against our mainland.

This is not a nice 19 central C battle, this is an intercontinental battle.

That runs the risk of using nuclear weapons.

We've been there in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we need to live -- relive that history to remember how terrible it was, what a close thing it was.

That's another thing people don't realize.

We almost used a third bomb.

In my book I read about Harry Truman told the British ambassador they were running out of time and they would use a third bomb on Tokyo.

People don't realize that.

That's how close it was.

There was a coup d'état attempt in the Imperial Palace on the last night to try to disrupt the surrender.

People forget about that, but that's how close it came to us using a third weapon and they were planning for a sixth, seventh.

They were planning to drop bombs all along.

We don't want to be in that position.

>> your book has great insight reporting about major players.

Colonel Stimson, who was secretary of but mainly inside the Japanese Imperial court.

Tell me what you learned there.

>> the Japanese were determined to die.

After we had dropped to atom bombs on them there's a meeting in the supreme war Council, the guys who run Japan, and the Minister of war says, one and it be wonderful to die like cherry blossoms, the whole nation.

There's a deadlock.

They can't decide.

Finally the Emperor, partly because he's afraid there's an atom bomb about to drop on him, he puts an end to it.

It takes another five days, there is a coup attempts.

Cultures can go mad and the Japanese culture, at that time, did go mad.

Fortunately there were human beings involved and I read about it, Japanese Foreign Minister, nobody has ever heard of him, he was sentenced as a war criminal to 20 years, but he saved millions of lives because he was a human being.

He read German philosophers and he was a humanist and he saw that we had to surrender -- they, the Japanese had to surrender and he persuaded the Emperor.

He says, I agree with the Foreign Minister and he ends it.

But it took that kind of human courage, humanistic courage from somebody who read history, who was the Japanese Foreign Minister but he's anti-Nazi and he wanted to bring back the Germany of the 19th century.

Fortunately, there were just enough people like that in the Japanese government to end the war otherwise it would've gone on and on and millions would've died.

>> the other great interesting character in your book is hammering -- Henry Stimson, who is humanist and a realist to trying to balance realism and idealism.

Tell me about his conflicts.

>> that is American foreign policy in a nutshell.

We are not imperialists, we believe in democracy and human rights, but to make that work you have to use power.

You have to be a realist and an idealist.

He was the godfather of American foreign policy all through the Cold War.

That combination of trying to do the right thing and spread democracy, but at the same time realizing you had to exercise power and not back away from hard challenges.

Henry Kissinger understood that, but the guy who started that was a guy name Henry Stimson and he was 77 years old.

This is in my book, on the day he shows Truman the photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima, he has a heart attack.

A month later, when he tries to get arms control going, he has another heart attack.

He can't sleep.

This is not something he's, Bout, this is tearing him up inside because there is a conflict between realism and idealism.

It's hard to do both.

>> what role did self-denial and misinformation play in the decisions leading up to the dropping of the bomb.

>> we like to think when people make a tough decision they have a full and considered debate, that's not the way it really works.

There's a lot of denial and people not wanting to know.

On the night that Harry Truman gave the decision to drop the atom bomb he wrote in his diary, I have instructed the Secretary of War to choose a purely military targets so that we kill soldiers and not women and children.

Nonsense.

The bomb was aimed at the heart of your Shema but Truman didn't want to believe what he was about to do.

It's human.

People just have a hard time facing what they are doing, but he did it.

He did give the order.

He may have had some denial in his diary, but he made the tough decision.

>> was he right?

>> yes.

>> your book takes on what was called the revisionist school of history, which among other things said we were wrong to drop the atom bomb.

We could've won the bore without dropping the bomb, we did it to scare pressure off and we had artillery or -- all teary or motive.

Explained to me why the revision was wrong?

>> the people who drop the bomb didn't want to drop it, but it assumes Japanese would be willing to defend -- Surrender.

The facts are otherwise.

I know there's some reading Japanese diaries in the record, and I spent a lot of time sucking to the grandsons of my heroes.

>> and they give you some of the dialogue.

>> is just obvious from the contemporaneous record, not later, but what was happening at the time that the Japanese were not going to surrender.

It took to bombs and very nearly took a third.

>> one of the things that history does as we revise it, is that it does remind us, at least it should remind us of the moral ambiguities.

That we can't be sure about everything.

To what extent is your book intended in a way to talk about the importance of understanding moral ambiguity.

>> 100%?

If we go back and read history, the history of writing, history you've written, is full of moral ambiguity.

It's really black-and-white.

Look at Lincoln.

What was he doing?

He did a very difficult thing and freeing the slaves.

For not moral ambiguity to free the slaves, but everything surrounding it was incredibly complex and 5149 decision close calls.

That's the real world.

Our country made a virtue of this in the foreign policy.

We were nearly purely realists nor will we purely idealistic and lovey-dovey about human rights.

It can't be just one of the just one or the other, that's why Henry cannot sleep at night.

I'm sure Joe Biden doesn't sleep very well.

Maybe we don't want them to sleep well, we want them to stay up.

These are hard questions.

Let's be honest about what they are going through.

>> Evan Thomas, thank you for joining us again.

Christiane: finally tonight, what the novelist has gone through, he has receive the courage a word from Penn -- award from Penn America in his first public appearance since the horrific stabbing that left him blinded in one eye.

He dedicated the award to the people that came to his rescue and he left the audience with this poignant message.

>> tenor is him must not terrorize us.

Violence must not deter us.

As the old Marxists used to say , the struggle goes on.

Christiane: a wise and courageous person.

That is it.

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