Valerie Plame Wilson on Countdown to Zero, Public Life and Instant Legend
Now, as a public figure, you have a much different platform from which to attack and approach these issues--
I know! If there's any upside to all this stuff that happened to me, it's that I get to speak about these sorts of things that I care so deeply about. I mean, yeah -- I wish none of it had happened. I would be overseas right now in a covert capacity working on counter-proliferation issues, living there with my family. But that chapter ended, and that's no longer a possibility.
Are you comfortable as a public figure? With being on that platform?
Well, yeah. We have moved away from Washington; we're very happy where we are in Santa Fe. We've rebuilt our family life. But because this was something I cared about so much... Everyone in the movie has their own niche. I could add my voice in a way that I thought was meaningful.
You're also something of a pop-culture legend. You've got feature films about you, you're in this documentary, there's at least one song written about you--
I did hear that! By the Decemberists.
And maybe even more!
I want an action figure. That's what I want.
That could probably be arranged.
I want to give those out as party favors.
How do you feel about that part of your profile?
I have just tried to choose things carefully that I put my energy and my time into. I have 10-year-old twins. The most important thing is that I raise my children well. If I fail at that, everything else I do doesn't matter a whit. So I choose carefully. I'm working on a fictional book. I have Fair Game coming out. I work at the Santa Fe Institute. All of these things are things I didn't plan, but when they came to me, I gave it a great deal of thought: "How much do I want to throw myself into this?"
Do you think these developments in any way trivialize the extremely dangerous work that your former colleagues are still doing?
I hope not, because I always speak of them with a great deal of respect and affection. As I say, they're toiling away there, and if anything, I hope to disabuse the whole Hollywood notion of what CIA work is. It's not lone-wolf, it's not rogue elements, and I'll do whatever I can do to shed light on the fact that these are really good people working to try to make the world safe and better.
What was your take on the recent Russian "spy" drama here in the States?
Well, I was a little bit baffled because it appears that much of the information -- if not all -- that they were passing to their handlers was information that three clicks on Google would get you. We are deep into the Internet age now! This is just my speculation, but perhaps this was a program that was begun under the Cold War, and bureaucratic inertia just allowed it to tick over for these many years. They put a lot of resources into this, and yet the payoff was really marginal.
I often sincerely wonder if the Cold War ever ended.
Just because the Cold War ended, it doesn't obviate the need for espionage and for intelligence. Every leader -- here in the United States and elsewhere -- needs confidential information. They need a wide array of information, from which we hope he or she will make wise policy decisions. And part of that mix is going to be confidential information. I'm a strong believer in a robust intelligence community. Right now, I'm not sure ours is as effective or as robust as it should be.
Why is that?
Well, Dana Priest [and William Arkin] in the Washington Post just started a series about how bloated and how outsourced and how frankly ineffectual our intelligence community has become. I have yet to read it in depth, but I agree with what I've seen and I look forward to the whole series.
Yet, when the United States and Russia still possess the vast majority of the world's nuclear arsenal--
96 percent.
Doesn't that at least psychically prolong the Cold War? Or is that a different war altogether?
I think that paradigm is no longer operative. And that's why those who have seen the movie understand that we're in an ironic situation where for so many of the nations that are nuclear powers, nuclear weapons are no longer deterrents in the way that they were. The genie is out of the bottle, and proliferation makes the chances of terrorists getting a hold of these terrible weapons much more likely. It has completely shifted.
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Excellent interview. I have her husband's book, but have never heard her point of view/voice.
No surprise the new 'Countdown to Zero' disarmament documentary omits life-saving strategies from their agenda of banning nukes, like advocating public Civil Defense, to try and better survive nukes in the meantime. The disarmament movement for decades has hyped that with nukes; all will die or it will be so bad you'll wish you had. Most have bought into it, now thinking it futile, bordering on lunacy, to try to learn how to survive a nuclear blast and radioactive fallout. In a tragic irony, the disarmament movement has rendered millions of American families even more vulnerable to perishing from nukes in the future. For instance, most now ridicule 'duck & cover', but for the vast majority, not right at 'ground zero' and already gone, the blast wave will be delayed in arriving after the flash, like lightening & thunder, anywhere from a fraction of a second up to 20 seconds, or more.
Today, without 'duck & cover' training, everyone at work, home, and your children at school, will impulsively rush to the nearest windows to see what that 'bright flash' was, just-in-time to be shredded by the glass imploding inward from that delayed blast wave. They'd never been taught that even in the open, just laying flat, reduces by eight-fold the chances of being hit by debris from that brief, 3-second, tornado strength blast.
Then, later, before the radioactive fallout can hurt them, most downwind won't know to move perpendicular away from the drift of the fallout to get out from under it before it even arrives. And, for those who can't evacuate in time, few know how quick & easy it is to throw together an expedient fallout shelter, to safely wait out the radioactive fallout as it loses 99% of its lethal intensity in the first 48 hours.
The greatest tragedy of that horrific loss of life, when nukes come to America, will be that most families had needlessly perished, out of ignorance of how easily they might have avoided becoming additional casualties, all because they were duped that it was futile to ever try to learn how to beforehand.
The disarmament movement's sincere supporters, just wanting a world safe from nukes, will discover those unintended consequences to be inconvenient truths of the worst kind.
The Good News About Nuclear Destruction! at http://www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm dispels those deadly myths of nuclear un-survivability, empowering American families to then better survive nukes. For as long as nukes exist, these life-saving insights are essential to every families survival!