Andy Richter Hunts for Laughs with 'Andy Barker'

DATE March 21 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Joseph Cirincione, "Bomb Scare," on the threat of
nuclear war, US diplomatic tactics with Iran and North Korea,
terrorism, and the disposal of weapons-grade materials
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

In his new book "Bomb Scare," my guest Joseph Cirincione writes about the
history and future of nuclear weapons. We invited him to talk about the
nuclear crises with Iran and North Korea and how they've been handled by the
Bush administration. Cirincione is the vice president for national security
at the Center for American Progress and teaches at the Georgetown University
School of Foreign Service. He's the former director for nonproliferation at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has served on the
professional staff of the House Armed Services Committee.

Joseph Cirincione, welcome back to FRESH AIR. This month you published a
paper called "Contain and Engage: A New Strategy for Resolving the Nuclear
Crisis with Iran," and in that paper you wrote we have five policy options
now, and I'll just like run through what you say those five options are. One
is maintain the status quo of muddling through. Two, nonmilitary efforts to
replace the current regime. Three, military attacks on known Iranian nuclear
facilities. Four, a grand bargain. Five, decisive diplomacy to roll back
Iran's nuclear programs. You reject all of those options with the exception
of a grand bargain with Iran and decisive diplomacy to roll back Iran's
nuclear programs, and then you end up eliminating the grand bargain, too.
What do you mean by a grand bargain and why do you eliminate that one, as
well?

Mr. JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: Well, you know, the grand bargain is proposed by
several people that say, `Look, the only way to solve the Iranian problem is
to put all of the issues on the table and negotiate a comprehensive deal,
including changing Iran's position on Israel, which of course is crucial to
ending their support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and from the Iranian point of
view, you know, resolving some of the issues that came out of the 1979
revolution.

The problem with that is that it puts too much baggage on the cart at this
point. I don't believe that either government in Tehran or in Washington is
ready for this kind of approach, and it hinges on resolving all these issues
at once rather than concentrating on the most important issue, which right now
is their nuclear program. That's the thing we have to stop right now. And I
believe you can do that, that there's room for compromise now with the help of
our allies, not a US-Iran one-on-one death match, but a comprehensive approach
that involves our allies, including Iran's allies, in convincing them that
they have to turn away from this nuclear program. And they will do that if
they have a sense that not only will this nuclear program be resolved but some
of these other issues can then be resolved down the road. That's the way to
approach it, step by step in a much more practical, pragmatic way.

GROSS: So what do you think decisive diplomacy would look like? What are
some of the carrots and sticks you think could be on the table?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: We've seen some of this already in the way we've dealt with
Libya and now in the negotiations with North Korea, where we're actually
having direct negotiations, and we're basically saying to these countries, and
we should say to Iran, that we will satisfy your security concerns if you
satisfy ours. We will end our efforts to overthrow your regime if you end
those programs that are threatening us. And by the way, if you do that, there
are substantial economic and political benefits that will flow to you. In
other words, convince them that their future is more secure, more profitable
without nuclear weapons than it is with nuclear weapons.

GROSS: So how would we do that? What would we offer them?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: In the beginning, we would sit down with Iran and talk about
how to freeze their nuclear operations right now, the uranium enrichment
capabilities, and we would then suspend temporarily our sanctions against
them. That would have an immediate and dramatic impact on Iran's economy. We
would then talk about ways that Iran could be assured that they could go ahead
with nuclear power--that is, building reactors--as long as we set up
mechanisms where the fuel for those reactors was supplied outside the country.
They didn't have the capability to make the fuel themselves. Most countries
don't have that capability. Most countries--and there are over 40 with
nuclear reactors--buy it from the five or six countries that already produce
it, and we could set up an international arrangement that the Iranians could
make sure that they have a guaranteed supply. It couldn't be cut off because
one country decides they don't want to sell it to Iran anymore.

And in return, we would start moving towards a process of normalization of
relations. Now, this is the hard part for some Americans, particularly some
in the administration: At the end of this road, we would be recognizing the
Islamic republic of Iran. We would establish an embassy in Tehran. Tehran
would have an embassy in the United States. We would normalize our relations.
We would be accepting this regime as it is and then we would work on these
other issues that we have issues with, but they're the same issues we have
with other countries. We have issues with Egypt and Pakistan, our allies,
over their democracy, their human rights, their foreign policy. We would
recognize that this is what happens. Countries differ over these policies.
We're not going to solve them all. But most importantly, we would resolve the
nuclear question first.

GROSS: Let me ask what may sound like a dumb question. Why does it benefit
Iran for us to recognize them? Like, what do they get from that?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Well, one thing Iran wants is to be--is to have access to
the world economy. They want to have the Western markets and Western
investment that they need to modernize their economy. They are rich in a
couple of natural resources, oil and natural gas, but have a relatively basic
industrial operation right now, and they need that kind of investment to, one,
modernize their oil exploration, oil extraction industries, their gas refining
industries, to modernize their auto production industries, and to open up
trade that will allow them to develop exports other than oil, natural gas,
carpets and pistachios, which is all they export right now, and prosper as a
nation.

Here's a basic fact you should know about Iran: The Iranian economy, because
of the population boom, needs to create about 800,000 jobs a year. It's
creating about 400,000 right now. That means there is a growing cohort of
young unemployed people. That is a very dangerous situation for any country.
That's what the Iranian regime needs to reverse, and they can't reverse it
without access to world markets. That's the big carrot that we have to offer
Iran, the big prize for them.

GROSS: Do you think the Bush administration is planning to attack either
Iraq's nuclear facilities or to try to overthrow the Ahmadinejad government?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: I think the chances of this go up and down, month by month,
almost week by week, but currently I think there's about--there's a relatively
low chance of that, maybe 15 percent chance that we would actually start a war
with Iran, but that could change. And the reason is that there's always been
this factional struggle inside the administration over which way to go.

So you have some people, I would include Vice President Cheney in that, who
believe that the only solution is to overthrow the Iranian regime, and you see
this point of view expressed weekly in the neoconservative press, the writings
of Bill Kristol in The Weekly Standard or Charles Krauthammer in the
Washington Post, or Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times, writings coming out of
the American Enterprise Institute. All of them say, `We have to start a war
with Iran. We have to attack Iran.' So that point of view is reflected in
some in the administration. Right now, I would say that's a minority view,
and that the military is against this overwhelmingly, the State Department is
against this, the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has no interest in
this--and that's a dramatic turn from his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who
was more in favor of this option--and the US is so bogged down in Iraq, I
think, we're not likely to do it.

However, the problem is that you see these moves taking place, deploying
aircraft carrier battle groups to the Gulf, Patriot missiles to the Gulf,
which are only useful against Iran's missiles, have nothing to do with the
insurgency or the civil war we're fighting. This kind--arrests of Iranian
diplomats inside Iraq. These kind of provocative actions can raise the
tensions in the region so that we might have a situation where some incident
happens, some spark. The next time we try to arrest Iranians, they resist,
and there's a firefight between US and Iranian forces. Or an Iranian patrol
boat strays too close to a US task force and is shot up. These kinds of--this
kind of spark could provoke conflict, so there's still that concern. I'm
still worried this, but a deliberate war, a deliberate attack with Iran, right
now I'd give that a fairly low probability.

GROSS: Now, Russia told Iran this week that it will withhold nuclear fuel for
Iran's power plant unless Iran complies with UN demands to suspend its uranium
enrichment program. How do you interpret this ultimatum?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: This is one of the great benefits of a multilateral approach
to these problems. It's not just the US demanding that Iran end this program.
It's, first, the entire UN Security Council, which is united in this demand,
and most importantly, allies of Iran are telling it this. Russia is the main
commercial partner with Iran. They are making several billion dollars in
constructing the nuclear power facility in Bushir and they are under contract
to supply the fuel for that facility, which is supposed to open up in the
spring of this year. They're now saying, `We're not going to give you the
fuel. We're not going to allow you to go ahead with this nuclear power
program unless you stop the enrichment facilities that have given all of us
concern.' That is a huge lever that we now have over Iran, and it's only made
possible because the skillful diplomacy of the last several months that has
kept Russia in this mix, that has kept the UN Security Council united. It's
paying dividends now.

GROSS: Who's behind that skillful diplomacy?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: You've got to give credit to the State Department, to
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. You didn't see this kind of work when
John Bolton was there. We got some of it, but it's really Condoleezza Rice
that's pushed it over the edge, that's prevented--some in the administration
wanted to go further. They wanted a stronger, tougher sanctions resolution
with more teeth, and I understand that. But by compromising, by having a
relatively weak sanctions resolution that hits 10 companies, 12 individuals
for example, you were able to keep everybody on board. So you kept China and
Russia on board, and then when Iran didn't comply, you were able this week to
get another sanctions resolution and these supporting actions that you're now
seeing. This is powerful stuff. This is what people mean by decisive
diplomacy, or even coercive diplomacy: forcing Iran into a corner, letting it
know it doesn't have any options here. But then here's the trick: You have
to give them a way out. You have to open the door. You have to let them know
there's a solution to this where they can save face and, in fact, prosper as
long as they move in a more cooperative direction and end their
confrontational approach.

GROSS: What would that doorway out be?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Thee doorway out would be a diplomatically arranged set of
negotiations where Iran, for example, declares that it's ready to start
talking without preconditions but it's understood that the day negotiations
start, they will suspend their uranium enrichment operations. At that point,
the US could join the talks because it's met the US demand, and then at the
same time, the UN Security Council suspends its sanctions again Iran, giving
Iran what would be seen as a victory and the leaders can trump it as a
victory, and this, what the Europeans called dual suspension, you know,
accomplishes what both sides want. The suspensions ends for Iran, the uranium
enrichment program ends for us.

And then you start a series of step by step negotiations that could lead to a
recognition that Iran has a right to enrich uranium, but the promise not to
actually exercise that right. That is not to open up those facilities again
for an extended period of time--people talk about 10 years or so--until Iran
has established, or re-established, trust that it can do this, and we have an
opportunity to perhaps find another way for Iran, a multinational facility in
the region that Iran could participate in that could make this fuel rather
than have a national facility on their own territory. There's a lot of other
doors then open up at that point. It's important to get them into that
process and get the talks going.

GROSS: Now, you credit skillful diplomacy with the fact that Russia gave an
ultimatum to Iran. Is the ultimatum, in part, though, because Iran owes
Russia money?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: One--you know, people like to think that all these things
are resolved in a very high level, that they're resolved--involve statements
of principles on one side or the other, but you know, money plays a big part
in US weapons decisions, on other countries' diplomatic decisions, and that
does seem to be playing a role here. Iran is in a credit crunch, partially
because of the sanctions, some imposed by the UN, some imposed unilaterally by
the US that has caused investors' confidence in Iran to collapse so people
aren't putting money into Iran. This has caused a market slowdown in the
Iranian economy, a plummet of its stock market, and it means that Iran hasn't
had the cash to pay Russia for the work that Russia's doing, and that's part
of the reason Russia's now holding up the fuel rights. So it's never a pure
mix of a secret deal cooked up between the US and Russia, or Russia operating
with the purest of motives. Several things are going on here. One is
diplomacy, one is just business.

GROSS: My guest is Joseph Cirincione, vice president for national security at
the Center for American Progress and author of the new book "Bomb Scare: The
History and Future of Nuclear Weapons." We'll talk more after a break. This
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Joseph Cirincione and he's the
author of the new book "Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear
Weapons." He's the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American
Progress.

Let's talk a little bit about North Korea. Where does North Korea stand in
stopping its nuclear program, under pressure from the United States and other
countries.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: We've made a lot of progress in just the past few months.
We've gotten talks going again. We've gotten North Korea to suspend its
program, so it's not testing nuclear weapons anymore. Remember, they tested a
nuclear weapon on October 9th of last year. And the talks look promising.
Both sides have started to make compromises. Nothing's going to be easy about
this, but it looks like we're on a road where we can at least freeze the North
Korean program going back to the basic arrangement of the 1990s under the
Clinton administration, and quite possibly achieve President Bush's goal of a
complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of this program.

GROSS: Last October North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon, which used
plutonium, and the Bush administration has accused North Korea of also
pursuing a secret program to create a bomb using enriched uranium, and it was
the threat of enriched uranium that, I think, really escalated the showdown
with North Korea. Now, intelligence officers are saying there really are
serious doubts about how far that uranium enrichment program has actually
come. Why is uranium--is uranium more of a threat than a plutonium-enriched
bomb?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: No, not really. They're the two different routes to a
nuclear weapon. We pursued both during the Manhattan project. The only two
ways to make a bomb are either to enrich uranium to weapons grade, and that
involves, currently, centrifuges--that's what Iran is doing--and we had a
similar program in 1940s; or you generate plutonium in a reactor and then
separate it out, and that's what North Korea did. We also did that. So the
two bombs are roughly equal and neither one is actually more, sort of, deadly
than the other. You get the same yield from either uranium or plutonium bomb.
People use different considerations of what they can actually get their hands
on.

GROSS: So why was the idea that North Korea was pursuing a uranium
program--considered such a threat, knowing that they were already doing
plutonium?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Well, we could do a whole show just on this. In fact, I
just wrote an article on this that went up on the foreign policy Web site this
week called "We Got Tubed--Again." And the issue was that American officials
discovered in the late 1990s and then early 2000 that it appeared that North
Korea was importing some centrifuges from the A.Q. Khan black market. This
is the Pakistan scientist who sold centrifuges to Libya, Iran, and now it
appears to North Korean, and we had pretty good evidence that they had about
20 centrifuges--nowhere near what they would need for a real program but an
indication of some interest--and this would be a violation of the agreement
where they agreed to freeze all their nuclear weapons activities.

But then we thought that we detected the sale of aluminium tubes, same issue
that came up in war with Iraq. In fact, it was at the same period, 2002,
where we were saying that aluminum tubes imported by Saddam Hussein were a
sign of his intent to build programs that officials were saying the same about
North Korea.

It now turns out that that evidence was a lot sketchier than we realized. We
know that was the case with Iraq and now it appears that way with North Korea
again, that the same individuals who cherry picked the intelligence and
exaggerated the issue in order to justify a war with Iraq cherry picked the
intelligence and exaggerated an issue in order to tear up the agreement with
North Korea, walk out of the talks and end discussions. And the issue would
be, if this was true, if they really were, as the CIA then said in their
estimate, constructing a uranium enrichment plant that could be ready by
mid-decade and producing one to two bombs a day--a year, rather--that could be
an extremely serious program. On the other hand, if it was just sort of
cheating on the edges, fiddling around with 20 centrifuges, that's something
that could be much more easily stopped.

The North Koreans, in fact, when confronted with this evidence, agreed to roll
all this into negotiations and they would suspend this and make this part of a
general resolution. It was the US side who walked out, decided that
negotiations were no longer useful, and ended any process of stopping North
Korea's program. North Korea responded by opening up its reactor, producing
more plutonium, producing more bombs, and then testing one on October 9th of
last year.

GROSS: So you're saying that North Korea made more progress on its nuclear
weapons program as a result of the cherry picking of intelligence on their
weapons program?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Because Bush administration officials used exaggerated and
misleading intelligence to end an agreement with North Korea, North Korea was
able to quadruple its supply of plutonium, actually test a nuclear weapon, and
threaten a nuclear arms race in northeast Asia. By walking away from the
negotiations, the Bush administration vastly increased the threat that we face
from North Korea. We're now trying to walk back.

GROSS: You're saying we're walking toward the same kind of agreement that the
Bush administration rejected before?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Yes.

GROSS: That we're working hard to get back to where we were?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: We're now watching a process in the Bush administration of
the pendulum swinging back, of these hardline, overthrow-regime strategies,
having proven their failure, having proven that they make matters worse, being
rejected by others in the administration, and the president now walking back
to sort of recapture what we could have had at a much cheaper price three,
four years earlier.

GROSS: Joseph Cirincione is the author of the new book "Bomb Scare: The
History and Future of Nuclear Weapons. He's the vice president for National
Security at the Center for American Progress and teaches at Georgetown
University. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross
and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Joseph Cirincione,
author of the new book "Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear
Weapons." He's the vice president for national security at the Center for
American Progress and the former director for Nonproliferation at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. We've been talking about the nuclear
crises with Iran and North Korea.

The British parliament recently voted to spend $40 billion to create a new
generation of nuclear submarines to carry Trident missiles. So how does that
look, do you think, to be developing a new nuclear program at a time when
England and the United States are trying to pressure Iran and North Korea to
stop theirs?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: The British decision is a major step backwards. There is no
real military justification for Great Britain having several hundred nuclear
weapons. They don't need them for their security. There's no real mission
for these weapons. It's really, you know, a matter of prestige and pride,
sort of clinging to the remnants of great power status. You know, when you
look at why countries acquire nuclear weapons--and I go into this in the
book--the two top reasons are power--to secure their own territorial integrity
or project their power in the region--and prestige, which is largely the
reason, for example, France acquired nuclear weapons in the 1960s or India
exploded a nuclear bomb in 1998. And you see that prestige factor operating
here with the United Kingdom. `We're a great power,' they're saying. `We
have nuclear weapons.' That is a terrible message to be sending to the rest of
the world. How are you going to convince other countries not to take this
shortcut to great power status if the countries with the weapons keep
insisting that they're absolutely essential to their national security.

The same is true for us. How are you going to convince other countries they
shouldn't have one nuclear weapon when the most powerful military power the
world has ever seen insists that it needs 10,000 nuclear weapons for its
security. If we need them, why don't they? If we see these as adding to our
prestige, why shouldn't other countries? So you can't ultimately solve the
problem of proliferation of other countries getting weapons if you're not
willing to confront your own addiction to these weapons. You can't get your
kids to stop smoking if you have a two-pack-a-day habit; you both have to quit
together.

GROSS: When you look at the possibility of detonating a nuclear weapon, large
or small, do you think that that possibility comes most from terrorists?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Absolutely. And the reason is that there is a large supply
of nuclear weapons and nuclear material in the world, and now we have the
addition of messianic or apocalyptic terrorist groups, who, unlike most
terrorist groups, would actually seek mass destruction, would actually seek to
kill large numbers of civilians. And we know they're trying to get this
material. The 9/11 Commission report documented a case of Osama bin Laden
spending one and a half million dollars to buy what he thought was highly
enriched uranium, bomb material. It turned out to be a scam; he bought
radioactive junk. We know Osama bin Laden met, right before 9/11, with three
or four Pakistani scientists. They came to his training camps in Afghanistan,
nuclear scientists engaged in their Pakistani nuclear program. We just
recently had a case of a former technician from the country of Georgia selling
highly enriched uranium to what he thought was a terrorist group. Turned out
to be a sting operation by the Georgian authorities, but he had two kilograms
of this stuff. This was the real stuff, weapons grade. You need about 20, 25
kilograms to build a bomb, but he had, you know, a good chunk of that ready to
sell.

This is a real problem, a real threat. We no longer worry about the fate of
the earth, in Jonathan Schell's phrase from his 1980s book about a global
thermonuclear war that will destroy the planet. That was the great threat of
the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s. But now we do worry about the fate of
our cities, about a single terrorist group, getting the materials that they
need, or getting a weapon itself, smuggling it into a US port or airfield and
detonating it. It just takes one bomb to destroy a city.

GROSS: Now, you, who really believe in negotiations with countries like Iran
and North Korea about their nuclear programs, do you believe that negotiations
could be at all effective with extremist terrorist groups who, as you say,
have apocalyptic visions and would be happy to see mass destruction?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: No. You have to have a completely different approach, and
the key is to get at the supply. Fortunately, there's a limited amount of
this material. There's still, oh, I think we estimate about 1500 tons of this
material in the world, but we know where almost all of it is. And here's the
better news: We have programs that are designed to go out and secure that,
lock it up tighter than it currently is and eliminate large portions of it.
People may not realize that we have a program, for example, to buy back highly
enriched uranium from Russia. We've bought 500 tons of the stuff already. We
then blend it down with natural uranium, turn it into fuel rods, and put it in
our nuclear reactors so about one in every 10 light bulbs in the United States
right now is powered by material that used to be in Russian warheads. Now,
that's material that the terrorists can no longer get. We're eliminating it.

We have programs to do all this. The problem is, they're proceeding at a
snail's pace. But if you were to accelerate these programs, if you would fund
them at, say, triple the right--right now we spend about a billion dollars a
year doing this, or about what we spend every three and a half days in Iraq,
if you were to triple that and put a senior official, say, a deputy national
security adviser in the White House in charge of this, you could virtually
eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism within the next four years. In
fact, I'm waiting for a presidential candidate to realize this and take this
issue up. I think it would be enormously popular.

So we know how to deal with nuclear terrorism and it doesn't have anything to
do with convincing the terrorists or negotiating with the terrorists. It
involves stopping them from getting the material in the first place. As Sam
Nunn says, `Every step after the terrorists can get the material is easier for
them to carry out and harder for us to stop.' That's why the struggle against
nuclear terrorism, as President Bush says, really does have to take place over
there so that we don't have to deal with it over here. You have to go to
where the supplies are, secure and eliminate those supplies, and then we can
virtually eliminate the threat of nuclear terrorism in a very short time.

GROSS: Where are the supplies?

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Well, most of the supplies right now are in the states of
the former Soviet Union, a lot in Russia, and our programs have secured about
half those materials so far. The bad news is we haven't secured the other
half. But they're also in research reactors that we and the Russians
sprinkled around the globe during the Atoms for Peace days when we thought
that nuclear power was the energy source of the future and electricity would
be so cheap we wouldn't even have to meter it. At least that's what nuclear
power witnesses told Congress in the 1950s.

And we spread these little research reactors little around. Unfortunately, a
lot of them used as fuel highly enriched uranium, same stuff as bomb material,
and there's not about 100 reactors in 40 countries that still have highly
enriched uranium--many of them enough to make one, two or half dozen bombs.
So we have a program in place, it's called the global threat reduction
initiative, started by the Bush administration, that goes out to these
facilities, and for about two billion dollars a pop, we either shut down the
reactor or we replace it with low enriched uranium, convert it to a different
type of reactor. Everybody's happy with that deal. The trouble is we're only
doing about five or six conversions a year and, at the current pace, it will
take us until 2020, 2030 to finish the job. We have to take that program and
accelerate it so we get to the uranium in Vietnam, for example, before Osama
bin Laden does.

GROSS: I have a nuclear energy question for you. The image of nuclear energy
seems to have really improved recently. Instead of it being seen largely as a
very dangerous source of energy for a lot of people who were its critics, it's
seen now as a good alternative to relying on foreign oil. And I really am
curious about your perspective on the relative safety and the relative, you
know, merits or problems of nuclear energy.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: Well, I have to admit, I've softened on nuclear energy for
the same reasons others have, but the threat of global warming is so serious,
and when you look at what you have to do, it's hard to see how you stop global
warming without having nuclear power in the mix somewhere. The trouble is
that nuclear power creates its own set of problems, and the industry still
haven't resolved the four fundamental problems it has. And those involve
cost: extremely expensive, especially without government subsidies; safety:
if something goes wrong with a nuclear reactor, you have a much bigger problem
than if your coal plant stops working; proliferation: that is, how do you
stop countries from making the fuel for these reactors, which is--and using
that same equipment to make bombs, for their military; and finally, waste:
Where do you put the stuff? This has not been solved in 62 years. We still
don't know what to do with the waste.

I just came back from Nevada. I was talking out there about the book, and I'm
telling you, the people in Nevada do not want to open up Yucca Mountain, which
is the solution for our waste problem, where we're supposed to take all the
waste in the 103 reactors that we have and ship it all to Nevada and bury it
in the desert. They're saying, `Oh no you're not.' And I got to believe that.
I got to believe that this state's going to stop that Yucca Mountain. And if
that does, that means you basically, it's like a sewer backing up. Everything
backs all the way up to your local reactor, which is still--which has been
sitting on these spent fuel rods and now has no place to put them. I don't
know how you solve that problem. So there's a lot of issues with nuclear
energy that have to be resolved before it's really going to be part of the
global warming solution.

GROSS: Joseph Cirincione, thank you so much for coming back to FRESH AIR.

Mr. CIRINCIONE: It's my pleasure. It's an honor to be on your show. Thank
you for having me, Terry.

GROSS: Joseph Cirincione is the author of the new book "Bomb Scare: The
History and Future of Nuclear Weapons." He's the vice president for national
security at the Center for American Progress.

Coming up, Conan O'Brien's former sidekick Andy Richter is starring in a new
sitcom. Richter will talk about it with our TV critic David Bianculli after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: David Bianculli talks with Andy Richter about his new
sitcom, "Andy Barker PI," and his career since "Late Night"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Andy Richter left his role as Conan O'Brien's sidekick on "Late Night" in 2000
to act in movies and on TV. He had a couple of sitcoms that didn't last long.
Now he's back with a new sitcom that's very funny and has a great team behind
it. It was co-created by Conan O'Brien and former "Late Night" head writer,
Jonathan Groff. It's called "Andy Barker PI" and airs Thursday nights on NBC.

Richter plays an accountant named Andy Barker who leaves his job at a big firm
to open his own office in a suburban strip mall. He's unable to get his own
clients until one day when a mysterious Russian woman comes into his office
thinking he's the previous tenant, a crusty private detective. The woman
hands Andy an envelope full of cash and asks him to find her husband. Because
Andy needs the money, he takes on the case and embarks on a dual career as a
private eye and certified public accountant.

His partner in crime solving is Simon, the guy who managed the video store
below him. Simon, played by Tony Hale, is constantly pointing out the
parallels between their case and movie plots. In this scene from the pilot,
Andy and Simon chase down a couple of thugs to a dark warehouse and confront
them. Andy and Simon are soon surprised when the mysterious Russian woman who
hired Andy walks in and joins the thugs. One of the thugs has his arm in his
jacket, where he appears to have a gun pointed at Andy and Simon.

(Soundbite of "Andy Barker PI")

Mr. ANDY RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) Hello, fellahs.

Unidentified Actor #1: Who's this?

Unidentified Actor #2: (Foreign language spoken).

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) Actually, I'm Andy Barker, an accountant.

Mr. TONY HALE: (as Simon) I'm Simon. I manage a video store.

Mr. HALE: (as Simon) (Unintelligible).

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) Simon...

Mr. HALE: (as Simon) You know. Michael and...(unintelligible)...come out of
the hospital and they don't have guns so they put their fingers in their
pockets so it intimates...(unintelligible)...man.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HALE: (as Simon) This guy's not carrying a gun.

(Soundbite of gunshot)

Mr. HALE: (as Simon) I made a mistake.

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) OK. That was pretty scary and a little bit
rude, so to make it up to us, why don't you just let Mr. Karensky go?

Ms. INGRID COREE: (As Real Nadia) Oh, but we went to so much trouble to find
him.

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) You. Boy, do I have a bone to pick with you.
You lied to me. And I'm no expert on your particular business model, but do
you even own this warehouse?

Ms. COREE: (As Real Nadia) No.

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) So you're renting. Well, you're throwing your
money away.

Mr. HALE: (as Simon) Andy...

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) Or else you're squatting, which is always...

Ms. COREE: (As Real Nadia): Beat them to death.

(End of soundbite)

DAVID BIANCULLI:

That was from "Andy Barker PI," on NBC. My guest is Andy Richter, the star of
that show. What tone are you guys going for with this comedy?

Mr. RICHTER: I've been saying, and this is at least--this is what I want it
to be--I want it to sort of be a Quinn Martin comedy, kind of like if "The
Streets of San Francisco" had jokes, and that's--well, you know, it is sort of
a hybrid of a show in that it's a comedy but it also--there's just kind of the
classic "Barnaby Jones," "Ironsides," you know. Name any number of them,
detective shows, where there is a crime that needs to be solved, in this case
in a half an hour. It's secondary to the comedy.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. RICHTER: But it definitely--we definitely want to have that feel, and
with the music we don't want it to just be pure nostalgia or purely
referential, but I did sort of want there to be sort of the bongos and flute
music...

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm...

Mr. RICHTER: You know, something that does have a bit of an anachronistic
feel.

BIANCULLI: Now, you're shooting single camera, and you've been in a lot of
movies, but what are the benefits of shooting single camera when you're trying
to make this type of comedy?

Mr. RICHTER: It's a lot easier to set a tone. It's a lot easier to do a
story that is transportational, you know, that has some sort of effect of
taking you somewhere else, because when you're in front of an audience, it's
hard to belive you're anywhere other than on a soundstage in front of an
audience, and it just wouldn't work to have a bunch of laughter going on
throughout a show like this. You need to be able, I think, to suspend your
disbelief somewhat. And I also think that you need--with a show like this,
it's very dependent on--you know, it's not just set up, joke, set up, joke,
it's, you know, there are jokes, but they're a little more subtle, and many of
them are dependent upon pacing...

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. RICHTER: ...and one of the things that I actually find frustrating about
working in a multicamera sitcom on a set in front of an audience is that the
audience is the one--they are the ones with their foot on the accelerator in
terms of the pacing of a scene, that you have to hold for their laughter. You
can't just kind of plough through and make the pacing your own. They're in
control, and I just--I don't--maybe I'm a control freak. I don't like to
share that responsibility. I like for us to be able to do it in the editing
room and, you know, be able to do multiple takes and--I mean, I'm--multicamera
sitcoms, too, tend to breed a lack of discipline, and it's very hard to avoid
grandstanding or really, you know, slicing the ham extra thick when you've got
an audience of people really ready to laugh at you. It's almost impossible to
resist that urge.

BIANCULLI: Andy, the six episodes of your series were actually available on
nbc.com to watch in their entirety before the series premiered on the network.

Mr. RICHTER: Mm-hmm. They're there right now.

BIANCULLI: I don't know that this has ever been done before with a network
show. Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing?

Mr. RICHTER: You know, I don't really know. They told me this was going to
happen and some people have said, `Wow, what a wonderful way to sort of stir
up interest in the show.' And then other people have said, `Oh, it seems like
they just can't win.' Like it's a loss leader, like they can't wait to get rid
of it.

But I think the main thing is is that the network's working, you know, putting
things on the Internet and, in network speak, trying to monetize them. Nobody
exactly knows what's going to happen or what the best thing to do is. It's
such a new thing for all of them, so they're willing to try everything and
anything. And in this particular case, I think it is good because it allows
people--you know, this is a new show that we can't afford to be too precious
with it and too withholding of it. It's better to share it and get people
interested in it because I think if people watch it and they don't like it,
they wouldn't--you know, we would have only had them for one episode on the TV
anyway, and if they watch it and like it, I think they'll want to see it on TV
because it's still, thank God, it's not a completely pleasant experience to
watch something on a computer screen.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm. Well, one other thing is that the good news is that you
have a six-week run on Thursday night in a year where NBC has really done a
lot of challenging, interesting, quality comedies and built a little
following.

Mr. RICHTER: Yeah.

BIANCULLI: The bad news is it's opposite "Gray's Anatomy" and "CSI."

Mr. RICHTER: Right. But those shows--aren't people really starting--it's
about over for those shows.

BIANCULLI: You timed your premiere right when you knew that "Gray's" was
showing repeat...

Mr. RICHTER: Right when interest was waning. They're just going to be like,
`This is just--you know what, I've had enough with the medical stuff, the
crime stuff. I'm looking for someone'...

BIANCULLI: We need more CPAs.

Mr. RICHTER: Yeah, more CPAs on TV. More someone like, as it said in Daily
Variety, someone who's bland and doughy. That's--in an otherwise wonderful
review they had to point out that I'm bland and doughy.

BIANCULLI: But I don't think you're bland and I don't even think you're
doughy. I think you look...

Mr. RICHTER: Oh, well, thank you.

BIANCULLI: ...fit on this show.

Mr. RICHTER: Well, thank you very much.

BIANCULLI: What was your fitness program?

Mr. RICHTER: I called our executive producer and I said, `Why didn't you
tell me I was bland and doughy? We could have done something. There are
filters they can put in the camera.' My fitness regimen was to go to work,
because every day it seemed like I was running from someone shooting me or,
you know, someone was trying to kill me with a rake, so it was a lot of, you
know--there was a lot of running, a lot of running. More sprinting than I've
done in the last 20 years.

GROSS: We'll hear more from Andy Richter and our TV critic David Bianculli
after a break.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Let's get back to our TV critic David Bianculli's interview with Andy
Richter about his new NBC sitcom, "Andy Barker PI."

BIANCULLI: Let me finally just ask you some questions about "Late Night,"
which is where most people saw you for the first time and saw you for several
years as the right hand man to Conan O'Brien. What exactly made you decide
that enough was enough there?

Mr. RICHTER: Oh, there wasn't any one thing. I had always known at some
point that I was going to have to leave. I did not want to be Ed McMahon, and
there isn't anything against--I in absolutely no way mean that as an insult to
Ed McMahon...

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. RICHTER: ...but I set out to be a comedic actor, not a broadcaster. I
didn't want to be a broadcast personality. I wasn't really that interested,
as a profession, in being Andy Richter. I wanted to be--you know, wear wigs
and moustaches and talk with funny accents and do pratfalls, so I always knew
from the beginning that because this was slightly--you know, that show is
Conan's dream come true, and for me it was just a great--no, not "just"--but
it was a great job and a wonderful experience and probably will always be the
best thing that ever happened to me careerwise.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. RICHTER: But it was always kind of going to be a side trip at some
point, because I had started out trying to be a comedic actor, a character
actor in comedies. I had--and I was already on that path when the Conan show
happened, so I just had sort of the sense that it would be wonderful to work
on that and get the experience and get the notoriety and then at some point
get off before people thought of me as nothing but a sidekick or that I would
never be anything but a sidekick.

BIANCULLI: Hm.

Mr. RICHTER: That it would become--I felt that there would be a point at
which it would be impossible for people to think of me as anything but that.
And it was already difficult. When I was--did "Andy Richter Controls the
Universe," we had our first table read, which is, you know, the first actually
public performance...

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. RICHTER: ... of the script, and one of the really higher-ups at
Paramount came up to me afterwards and said, `Wow, you can really act.' You
know, and I just felt like, `Well, what were you paying me for? You know?'
But then I had to remember, well, this is a town full of singers who can't
sing, and writers who can't write. So I guess it's not that farfetched to
hire an actor who can't act.

BIANCULLI: But I guess it was a determination you would have hoped they would
have made before they gave you the series.

Mr. RICHTER: Precisely. I mean, you know, if I couldn't have acted, it
would have been all the more lucky for me that they didn't make the decision
beforehand, but I think it took people--you know, there were a number of
people who were like, `Isn't he that sidekick guy?' as if that was all that I
could do, so I felt like I was going to have to--like I knew there was going
to be a point when I'd have to hop off the train.

BIANCULLI: And then finally, now that Conan is in line to get the actual
"Tonight Show"...

Mr. RICHTER: Mm-hmm.

BIANCULLI: You could have, had you stayed, actually been Ed McMahon...

Mr. RICHTER: Yeah.

BIANCULLI: Not just a postmodern Ed McMahon.

Mr. RICHTER: Yeah.

BIANCULLI: You've already said that, you know, that didn't interest you
because of the other things that you wanted to do in terms of writing and
performing, but further in your career, or in--I mean, is this something that
you and Conan have ever talked about or that you have thought about, about
perhaps, given that it is "The Tonight Show," going back, even if for a while?

Mr. RICHTER: No. No.

BIANCULLI: Well, that sort of ends any further speculation on that point.

Mr. RICHTER: I mean, you know, Jonathan Groff and I have joked that it--that
the "Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" is our retirement plan.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

Mr. RICHTER: You know, it's our safety net. Should we fall through every
other showbiz crack, we'll land there, you know, even if it's just, you know,
writing the jokes about a middle-aged Britney Spears, we'll be there..

BIANCULLI: It's not a shabby plan B, you know?

Mr. RICHTER: No, it's not bad at all.

BIANCULLI: All right, well, listen. Andy Richter, thank you very much for
being on FRESH AIR.

Mr. RICHTER: Thank you, David.

GROSS: That was our TV critic David Bianculli interviewing Andy Richter about
his new sitcom, "Andy Barker PI," which airs Thursday nights on NBC. We'll
close with another scene from the show featuring Andy talking to his wife.
I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "Andy Barker PI")

Ms. AMY FARRINGTON: (As Ruth Barker) Andy, you could have been killed,
running around in back alleyways in the middle of the night like a crazy man.

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) I know.

Ms. FARRINGTON: (As Ruth Barker) Might I remind you that you are an
accountant who has a meeting tomorrow with Ron Davies?

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) I know. It's just figuring the whole thing
out, finding Nikolai. I enjoyed it. It was a rush.

Ms. FARRINGTON: (As Ruth Barker) Andy, are you doing pot?

Mr. RICHTER: (as Andy Barker) You know that feeling that I get when I hit
the equals sign on the calculator and the number on the calculator is the same
number that's on the worksheet? It felt like that, honey.

(End of soundbite)
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.