Former CIA Director Adm. Stansfield Turner brought his crusade for a radical reduction in nuclear weapons to Los Alamos National Laboratory and northern New Mexicoon Wednesday. Reiterating many of the points he has made in more than 100 speeches over the last three years, and which he has detailed in his 1997 book, "Caging the Nuclear Genie – An American Challenge for Global Security," Turner argued that the world is at a crossroads and the time is ripe for a new approach. Nuclear strategy is in disarray now, he said. "We don’t have a target. We don’t have a philosophy." After 30 years of effort, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the Russians are not moving fast enough, he said. "START II is on the table, but not ratified, and not going to be ratified. The two sides are just beginning to talk about START III, for which the Joint Chiefs of Staff is proposing a reduction in nuclear weapons to 2,000.

"Why do we need 2,000?" he asked

Turner’s suggestion is for the U.S. to seize this moment of Russian weakness and receptivity and to recognize that current nuclear reduction efforts are too slow, while the risks are too great. He has proposed that we immediately start putting nuclear weapons into "escrow." The U.S. could start by taking 1,000 weapons and moving them away from launch sites. Russian observers could be invited to verify the removal, and we would "hope" that they reciprocate. "It is very easy to verify what goes in and out."

The "escrow" process is necessary because, apart from the glacial pace of negotiating and implementing reduction treaties, the dismantling of nuclear weapons is so slow, he said. Even if they were taken to the Pantex plant in Texas, they would simply be placed in a queue. With 32,500 nuclear weapons in our current arsenal, even unilateral reductions would be inconsequential. But the symbolic intent that would be demonstrated by leading the world towards meaningful reduction could begin to tug the nations of the world away from the nuclear brink and the fateful disaster that awaits us along any other course.

In time, said Turner, a "condominium" of the eight nuclear powers could be organized, all with observers, to prevent cheating and to guarantee a diplomatic process that could pressure a rogue power like Iraq, against suicidal behavior. In Turner’s modest solution, no more than 200 nuclear weapons are needed for security by the United States in the near term. That is still a fraction of the 1,500 weapons President Bush indicated during his campaign that he would seek to maintain in readiness. "We have to recognize that people are deterred with three, eight or 10 ICBM’s."  "What would it take to deter the United States?" he asked. "The threat of one nuclear detonation." He added, "It would be no consolation to be dead once, if we’ve killed them two or three times over."

Similarly, for retaliatory purposes, 100 nuclear weapons would be more than enough to disable any enemy permanently, he said, a far cry from the 6,000 targets designated in the former Soviet Union, now Russia.

Turner also advocates that the United States renounce the principal of "first strike," the threat of using nuclear weapons for preemptive purposes. "Why start?" he said, when all odds favor waiting out even the most threatening situations. Turner’s speech to laboratory employees was only about a half-hour, but another 45 minutes were devoted to a question-and-answer session with the people he acknowledged as the experts.

"I am not going to try to tell you about nuclear weapons," he said at the outset, "other than the political" ramifications. One question drew out Turner on the Bush administration initiative to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense (ABM) treaty, which many have seen as potentially destabilizing and fueling an even larger nuclear build-up. Turner’s answer was that "the ABM was an anachronism from 1972," when a heated race was on with the Soviet Union and neither side wanted a race.

"Our allies say we should not build an anti-ballistic defense," Turner said. But that is a selfish argument which is based on the fear that if America is not vulnerable, it will not worry about Europe.

"We do not like to be vulnerable," Turner said, citing the nation’s bomber defense of the 1950s and ’60s and the missile defenses of the ’70s. "For centuries we have lived behind an ocean defense. Let’s get on with it. We’re going to do it, and we should do it. Offenses have never prevailed forever."

Several people in the audience expressed their agreement with Turner’s ideas.

One person asked how his views had changed and why.  Turner recalled early in his career, as a rear-admiral serving in the Mediterranean, that, like many senior officers, he knew very little about nuclear matters.

"Most of us had no reason to get into it," he said. One day he asked his pilots to bring in their target folder and discovered that in case of nuclear war they were assigned to take out a bridge in Bulgaria. The pilots showed him an aerial photo of the area, but the bridge was too small to be seen. That, he said, was a turning point, when he began to realize that there were too many nuclear weapons in the world.