September 15 – Hungary Closes Its Borders to Refugees; North Korea Ready to Face the US With “Nuclear Weapons Anytime”; California’s Snowpack the Worst in 500 Years

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with Hungary’s closure of its border with Serbia leaving thousands of migrants on their way to Germany stranded. Kim Lane Scheppele, a Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and University Center for Human Values at Princeton University joins us to discuss Hungary’s declaration of a state of crisis and the bottleneck it is creating in Serbia that Serbia’s Foreign Minister said was “unacceptable” while its Labor Minister warned the situation could “spiral out of control. We also look into Hungary’s plans to add to its 109 mile razor wire fence with Serbia, with an additional fence along its eastern border with Romania.

Part 2

Then we look into the latest threats by North Korea warning it is ready to face U.S. hostility with “nuclear weapons any time” and was improving its nuclear weapons in “quality and quantity”. Charles Armstrong, a Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University and author of “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World 1950 – 1990” joins us to discuss the significance of the re-starting of the reactor at Yongbyon that could make one bomb’s worth of plutonium per year.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Valerie Trouet, a Paleoclimatologist at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona. She is the lead author of a new study in Nature Climate Change that finds that California’s Sierra Nevada snowpack is the lowest in 500 years, pointing to the extreme character of last year’s hottest winter and the prolonged drought that is feeding the wildfires now ravaging the state.