Peddling Peril: Tavis Smiley interviews David Albright

Television commentator Tavis Smiley talks to physicist David Albright about his new book, Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies.  Albright is founder and president of the  Institute for Science and International Security, which has received years of support from Ploughshares Fund.  In answer to Smiley's question about who exactly is peddling peril, Albright answers, "It's a complicated process and it's largely gone unappreciated in this sense. A country like Iran does not build nuclear weapons on its own. It can't build the facilities. So it actually has to go out and acquire both the know-how, the secret knowledge, and that it did by going to Pakistan and getting that. It also goes out and shops Europe, the United States, Japan for machine tools, industrial equipment, materials that it would then use to build the facilities that would allow it to make nuclear explosive material and nuclear weapons."   Smiley asks if Albright thinks the world is getting less safe by the day. It's not as dangerous as it was at the height of the Cold War, says Albright, "but the risk of a nuclear weapon going off is not decreasing, and we need to work harder to try to ferret out and reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism.  We need to find better ways to disrupt the this illicit nuclear trade that's arming our enemies. I think we can do it, but it's going to take some very concerted work on our part to try to better detect these illicit trade networks and then to disrupt them."