occur. i guess that's more of a point than a question. >> one vision that comes to mind, an old friend named ted olson, because the thing that got created that followed him around for a number of years was an independent counsel statute, which was eequally nud and absurd to us in terms of structure of allocation of power and what we got was two olc alums dividing in that opinion. one is justice scalia, as you know in dissent, saying in a formal manner to assign prosecutorial authority outside the executive branch is quintessentially a violation of the separation of powers and our other alum, your old boss, the chief -- late chief justice said, no, we'll just have to wait and see if he's really adversely effected by the assignment of executive power outside of the executive branch. and maybe we should ask a few subsequent presidents as to how well that worked out. >> can i just make one ten-seconds point?

>> ten seconds. i yield the ten seconds. >> the grace of the chief was the infrequency and the small number of people the statue applied. the reason this is a different situation is because there's no limiting principle. in one instance you have a limited intrusion of congress into the plenary authority of executive branch. here you have unlimited intrusion of article ii into planning authority of article i. >> i think we can see now, this is not a partisan issue. this is a constitutional issue that candeehnquist and scalia. it's wonderful to hear great lawyers talk about it. thank you all for attending. let me ask for a warm round of applause for our lawyers.

coming up live today on booktv.org, david brock, founder and ce oerks of "media matters." he'll examine the career. mr. brock contends that mr. ales, former consultant for richard nixon and george w. bush brought an agenda to fox news when hired in 1996. the author will speak at politics and pros book store in washington, d.c. and we'll have that live streaming on our website. booktv.org. here on c-span 3, rick santorum

wraps up come paining in michigan ahead of the state's requirement tomorrow. he will be at the heritage christian academy at kalamazoo and you can watch live coverage governor bobby jindal is scheduled to reveal he's proposal for balancing the state budget today. a budget $900 million in the red. in shreveport now, 73 degrees at the airport. 38 in menden. you're listening to shreveport news and weather station news radio 710. >> this weekend, book tv and american history tv explore the history and literary culture of shreveport, louisiana. saturday starting at noon eastern on book tv, author gary joyner on the union army's failure of louisiana "from one damn blunder from beginning to end." and then a look at the over 200,000 books of john smith

nobel collection housed at the lsu shreveport archives. and walking tour of shreveport with neil johnson and on america history tv on c-span 3 sunday at 5:00 p.m. eastern from barksdale air force base and a history of the b-52 bomber and visit the founding father's autograph collection at louisiana state exhibit museum. from the pioneer heritage center, medical treatment and medicine during the civil war. shreveport, louisiana, this weekend on c-span2 and 3. there are millions of these americans who are willing to sacrifice for change, but they want to do it without being threatened. and they want to do it peacefully. they are the non-violent majority, black and white, who are for change without violence. these are the people whose voice i want to be. >> as candidates campaign for president this year, we look

back at 14 men who ran for the office and lost. go to our website c-span.org/thecontenders to see video of the contenders who had a lasting impact. >> can you remember in the depression, those of you who are my age, when times are really hard and we left the doors unlocked? now we have the most violent crime-ridden society in the industrialized world. now, i can't live with that. can you live with that? >> c-span.org/thecontenders. this is c-span 3 be politics and public affairs programming throughout the week, and every weekend 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs at our websites. and you can join in the conversation on social med sites. > discusses u.s. ballistic missile defense plans and potential threats from

iran. speakers include former police department officials, physicists and m.i.t. professor. the conversation took place at the university of california in berkeley and is about two hours. >> this fascinating seminar. this seminar is one of the series that we sponsor on the rubric of the harold smith seminar series which focuses on u.s. defense policies with emphasis on the controlling management of nuclear weapons. and this is the third year of the series. and we've had numerous distinguished experts come here to speak about the matter p and the reason that they come is because of the person for whom the series is named. dr. harold smith, who i'm going to invite up here in a minute.

and harold holds the appointment of visiting scholar with the governmental studies and also i believe distinguished resident scholar at golden school of public policy. at berkeley, he was professor here and chair of the department of nuclear energy before moving on to work first in the private sector and then within government where he was the assistant secretary of the department of the defense with responsibilities in this nuclear proliferation area. he has many others honors. i'm just going to mention two. one is fellow of the american physical society and the second, which i love to announce, is commanin honor of france. so without further adieu, harold?

>> i should say that we are -- have the privilege of being recorded by c-span, which is why i wore probably the wrong colored tie, but anyway, we are going to be on c-span. >> friends and colleagues, the texas today is from robert frost's poem "the mending wall." i'm going to quote from it. before i build a wall, i would ask to know what i was walling in or walling out and to whom i would like to give offense. in the poem frost was already too late, the wall had been built. it was simply being repaired. and we are too late today to ask

these questions about today's wall, namely ballistic missile defense. it already exists, the united states has unilaterally withdrawn from the abm treaty, interceptors have been placed in alaska to defend against north korea, the obama administration is negotiating in a european missile defense to defend against iran, which indeed is, quote, like to give offense, end quote, to russia and it already has. something there is that doesn't love a wall, but that's not the subject today. the subject is where should we go from here? not how or why did we get here. among the pressing questions will be what is the obama ballistic missile defense approach and how does it defer from the bush policy? is the current u.s. und strategy

based on sound technical principles? what are the likely international ramifications of the obama administration's approach to missile defense, particularly in europe? to address this question we have three talented and highly qualified experts. to my immediate left is michael not, recently returned from the post in the obama administration as assistant secretary of defense for global security. on my far right dean wilkining and form area technical director of stansell sisak. the doctor has published and spoken widely on bmd. and in the middle is professors theodore postal, professor of science, technology, and national security at m.i.t.

ted has also published and spoken widely on this subject. each will speak for about 15 to 20 minutes. hopefully without interruption, unless there's an absolute fit of brilliance that grips, one of us, myself included. this will be followed by 30 minutes of clarification among the speakers where the goal, unlike the recent presidential debates, will be to inform the audience, not to disparage the speaker. then will will be time for q and a, questions and answers, from the audience. and i will renumerate the ground rules for that at the appropriate time. with that, i turn to michael nott for the first talk. michael? >> thank you very much, harold. glad to be back to discuss some

of these issues. my assignment this afternoon is to give you a bit of an overview of the policy approach of the administration to missile defense that led to the publ dags of the missile defense review report in early 2010, why i advocated what it did and a little bit about what's sense. and then my colleagues brought a lot of detail on the technological issues, pros and cons, of the systems. i was tempted to spend a little bit giving background about the subject but harold basically said, don't do that. so just to say that there has always been -- well, there's been a debate for decades about the wisdom of missile defense, putting aside the technical

fisibility. in simple terms, if you and i both had missile, offense ive missiles, that could destroy each other, and each of us was confident our missiles could get through, even if we were struck first, then we would havecom some sort of position of strategic stability through missile deterrence. but supposing in that situation i started to build missile defenses while still retaining my offensive capability. you could plausably construe that as an offensive measure, thinking that i was building a missile defense to degrade your retaliatory attack after i struck use first. so in the '60 tz u.s. went through a long period of time to explain to our soviet colleagues why we thought missile defense was not stabilizing, was

destabilizing. and the soviets had built a missile defense system around moscow, and it still is there. anyway, the abm treaty was assigned and limited both the u.s. and soviets to two sites. this ultimately went away, as harold said, 30 years later under the bush administration. there is a clause and prenational interest clause which permits either side to withdraw after sufficient notice. we did that. we didn't illegally abrogate the treaty, we legally with drew. but it led to increased tensions with the russians. and when -- now i'll skip further. sdi under reagan which was a huge effort that was proven to be tech logically infeesable. there was a shift under george h.w. bush and more so under clinton where i served as arms control negotiators on theater

missile defense. we can talk more about that if you like, what happened and why it wasn't a lot of progress with the russians on that. when president obama came into office he requested a review of the entire program. the politics, the policy, the technical capabilities, future plans, and we were also under con strastraints because congre basically mandated that the administration provide them with a report on our approach with an ear. this has actually been the first comprehensive review of all aspects of our programs into a published, unclassified open report. and this came out in february 2010. it's on the web. ballistic missile defense review report. anybody can read it. when we came into office, what we inherited was a proposal from

the george w. bush administration to put some interceptors, ten interceptors, in poland. and a radar, a sophisticated radar in the czech republic. and assorted other capabilities and it was basically justified as an attempt to deter or necessarily to degrade an iranian attack on european targets. but it did provoke the russians who saw this as kind of a toe in the water leading to a capability that could degrade their strategic retaliatory capability. now, many times under clinton, under george w. bush, and under president obama, senior americans have met with the russians, have given detailed power point presentations and other kinds of discussions to demonstrate, i think, very persuasively that there's no way that these systems could

seriously degrade a russian attack, not that we want the russians to attack. we want the russians to feel comfortable that the retaliatory capability is not threatened. remember, if you have ten interceptors and works perfectly. if you attack it with 11 missiles, you're going to win. so you can overwhelm the system. you can confuse the system with chaff and declaws of various kinds. you can blind the radars. you can now use cyber against the communication systems. there are many things you can do to try to defense an abm system. and art out that, i think, by my colleagues. the administration decided, after many meetings, consultations, memos, and other activities and consulting with

many experts of a variety of persuasions, to modify the approach. and what was -- what was proved by the president was the european phase adaptive approach, epaa, european phase adaptive approach. what that entails was a group of interceptors placed in different places, some of which were yet to be determined, and some radars that were enter connected. that could defeat what we saw as a growing missile threat, particularly from iran, but against other potential threats against european targets. the polls and the checks had never actually approved the bush plan. their governments had nominally approved it but their

legislators never essentially ratified the agreements. so there was nothing actually in concrete that would have made clear that we could have even implemented the bush plan. but we chose to diversify the post folio, so to speak, to look at a number of different ways to busine base these missile, including at sea, not just on land. and to do something a little bit like this in northeast asia with japanese and south korean colleagues, to meet north korean threat. i should add that there was not just a military and sort of technical objective involved in this decision. there were other aspects, other dimensions, other motivations of the decision. one was, hopefully, to essentially deter the adversary. we didn't want to use this stuff. we didn't want to just have it there so when the war started we could use it.

in fact, we hope never to use it. the plan was to demonstrate credibly to other creditably to other militaries that they would pay a high price launching such an effort an it was not likely to achieve their military objectives. deterrents was a key policy motivation. at the same time there was a motivation of assurance and reinsurance of allies. nato is now 28 members. i remember as a kid it was 12 and 16, now it's 28. i had the privilege and opportunity to share the nato high-level group while i was in government, which is the group that oversee snait weaponato we policy. i met in brussels with every member of nato, except for french who do not participate in the high-level group. 27 out of 28.

with the french we met privately. as can you imagine, with any group of 28, this had tremendous originality. if you're in poland on the edge of the russian border with the history you've had with russia, have you one view about the need for these systems. if you're in spain on the beach, you have a different view. it's not easy to come to a kind on what to do. but overall there was very strong support among the nato members to go forward with what the u.s. proposed. they thought it was important to reassure the public and officials that the u.s. would be there especially at a time when president obama is advocating reduction of nuclear weapons, the nuclear guarantee has been

the cornerstone of the nato alliance since 1949. so here in a way a third angle in defense policy motivatedness. this is a nonnuclear dimension to alliance cohesion that's fully consistent with the president's approach to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons without in any way leading to an unraveling of our align with nato, japanese, koreans, whatever. it's also been, although it's not in the form of a treaty, extensive collaboration with israel on this. israel has a growing sophisticated arrow missile defense system intended to deal with threats in their neighborhood. there's a lot of collaboration with the israelis in terms of technology, radar, interfaces, strate strategy, intelligence gathering and so forth. turkey, which was originally not

that interested in supporting this project ultimately now has agreed. romania is going to be a base for some intercepters. poland and the czech republic will each play a role. there as lot of multi-lateral support for this among many key u.s. allies. we've run into a problem is that -- not that these issues are totally resolved. it's an ongoing alliance management issue, but i'd say it seems quite manageable. basically at sea in international waters we don't need anybody's approval there. where we've run into a problem is with russia and china. by all accounts, by everything we seem to know, the senior analyst in the strategic rocket force is the russian federation have persuaded leadership that what we are proposing,

particularly what we're proposing down the line, because this is called a phase adaptive approach, this is a decade long program with some new systems coming on board by 2020. you'll probably see a lot of this with my colleague. the so-called sm-32, which is quite advance freddie what we have now. we don't have that now. the russians extrapolating the capabilities they think we're doing to have believe it will pose a threat to their deterrent. we have been engaged with them in missile defense cooperation talks led by under-secretary of state who use to represent international labs here in contra costa county. she's been negotiating for quite some time since the spring of 2009 until now. they haven't reached agreement. in fact, unfortunately president

medvedev made a statement not too long ago saying they have not bought fruit, the russians are very concerned. they feel if there's not an agreement to share more data, operational activity, they want to be involved in operations, which is a bit of a problem for us, the russians themselves might withdraw from the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty with president obama they just signed last year. we have a lot of work to do with russia. i should add, i think i've already gone almost as long as i need to. there's another dimension to the motivation here. doesn't lead us to withdraw the bush plan but there's a russia improvement aspect to this strategy. namely you may know if you follow this that as early as spring of 2009, president obama and vice president biden have

spoken about russia reset strategy. when we came in, russia was very bad, invade in '08, russians were upset about nato, clinton administration, upset, wide variety of -- very upset with the withdrawal, even if it was legally fine. and part of the obama approach has been to improve relations with russia, not to just be a good guy and get along better but for very concrete objectives. because on the nuclear side, the american position under obama is that the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other country and their use by terrorists, nuclear terrorism is now, in fact, the top threat, top security threat to the united states. it's not the threat of 3,000 entry vehicle exchange with the

russians or doing this with the chinese, it's the fact nuclear weapons will be acquired by the united states, more hands with nuclear weapons likelihood they will be used in south asia or middle east or east asia or that they will be stolen, obtained in some way by nongovernment groups, some of whom have, as we saw through 9/11, willingness to die in support of their goals. so the obama objective has been to bring the russians and chinese more closely aligned with our view that we've got to stop that threat. in order to do that, we need to have persuasive arguments and tangible measures we've taken which will be in their interest. so we wanted very much to do a variety of things so they would support sanctions against iran, which we've had trouble getting them to support. the chinese case as well, there have been issues with them.

more cooperation in the united front against north korea, which has also been a challenge. but improving relations with russia has been at least at the table in how we sought to deploy -- proposed to deploy the weapons systems and radar's associated capabilities. yet we're still struggling with that. it's not resolved. with china, they are also making a somewhat similar argument, that they have a smaller force. although their actual force is actually not known. there's been some very revelatory articles. the plans, deployment plans are not known. the chinese are also saying that ringing russia and china with

missile defenses couple u.s. forces and couple with strike capabilities, these will be new long-range missiles with conventional weapons but super accurate that could attack point targets like sillos and radars and other hard to get targets. this poses a threat to them as well. that's why the nuclear postural view we propose strategic stability talks, get issues on the table, have sustained dialogue and discussion, present data, have them present counter-arguments and hopefully reach some agreement. you know if you're a student of this sort of thing with the soviet union going way back to the cold war, there were meetings in nova scotia with scientists in 1960. the first agreement we really had with the soviet union that mattered was 1972,