little boy was the bomb they dropped on hiroshima. that was a uranium bomb. but the one they dropped on nagasaki, that one was called fat man, and it was plutonium. it was plutonium from hanford. hanford very quickly grew to become one of the largest nuclear facilities in the world. it had nine reactors. it employed tens of thousands of people. and it created plutonium for nuclear bombs throughout the cold war. in 1988 the government shut down hanford. the department of energy switched from the nukes building business to the nukes cleaning up business. there are billions of gallons of waste at hanford. and cleaning it up has not gone all that well. as the "seattle times" put it earlier this year, some of the hottest radioactive waste from hanford was funneled into concrete and carbon-steel tanks that today are decades past their projected life span. some have spontaneously heated up or burped explosive gases. 67 are suspected to have leaked. at least a million gallons of radioactive goo has spilled into the ground and is working its way to the columbia river.

and even by august 1945, when the bombs were dropped on hiroshima, it will still be essentially a lab project. it was not a big investor project of the kind at the manhattan project was. the manhattan project employs 120,000 people at its peak during the war. it is really two weeks after herschel made -- hiroshima stalinist signs a decree that creates a committee on the atomic bomb, which is turned into a crash program. there was in the 998's a dispute between the physics community and the intelligence community in russia, where kgb people were saying this it was we who built the bomb. the physicists said it was good to get the intelligence, but you have to be a good physicist to understand how to put it together. the first soviet bomb is the copy of the bomb dropped on nagasaki. may i address the second? i think the first question -- i do think that john paul ii played an absolutely critical role, and indeed, poland craig a critical role in the ending of the soviet union. i recently read the politburo minutes for a meeting in december 1981, just a few days before martial law was impo

>> it only takes a piece of that highly enriched uranium about the size of a volleyball to create a hiroshima-style explosion. >> retired air force colonel randy larson founded the institute for homeland security. he said more focus needs to be placed on highly enriched uranium that's unaccounted for, particularly in the former soviet union that he says is easy to shield from detection. >> the best way to protect our country and our family from nuclear terrorism is to locate, lock down, and eliminate loose nuclear material. >> meanwhile, the tsa says it continues to take steps to strengthen security, and that includes, it says, a pilot program to focus more intensive screening on cargo that it knows very little about. >> pretty scary stuff, mary, thanks for that report. we'll take a quick break. we'll be right back. nyquil: you know i relieve coughs, sneezing, fevers? tylenol: me, too. and nasal congestion. nyquil:what? tissue box (whispering): he said nasal congestion... nyquil: i heard him. anncr vo: tylenol cold multi-symptom nighttime relieves nasal congestion... nyquil cold & flu doesn't. [ ma

the point that the johnson campaign exaggerated, the impact of using these huge hiroshima bombs was a total exaggeration. he was an air force man. he knew what low yield meant and what it would do. and my question is what was wrong with the term low yield that i believe i only heard it once or twice. >> rick, you wrote about that in the book. >> yeah, i actually talked to one of the physicists that designed some of those low yield nuclear weapons. he said it was absolutely insane to believe that you could contain the explosions from those weapons. so i'm not so sure that it's true. >> i want to comment, only because dick muser brought this up. we grew up in the same neighborhood over by 25th drive north of thomas road. in about 1950 through 1954, that period, my father would wake me and my brothers up at 4:00 in the morning on a couple of occasions. we would go up on to the roof of our house and sit facing north. my dad had his watch and he would tell us there's one minute, 30 seconds. and we would see nuclear atomic bombs explode at the test sites aboveground, nuclear bombs exploding