An interesting and long article I wanted to share:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/william-perry-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-214604
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/william-perry-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-214604
William J. Perry is 89 now, at the tail end of one of his generations most illustrious careers in national security. By all rights, the former U.S. secretary of Defense, a trained mathematician who served or advised nearly every administration since Eisenhower, should be filling out the remainder of his years in quiet reflection on his achievements. Instead, he has set out on an urgent pilgrimage.
Bill Perry has become, he says with a rueful smile, a prophet of doom.
Nuclear bombs are an area of expertise Perry had assumed would be largely obsolete by now, seven decades after Hiroshima, a quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the flickering light of his own life. Instead, nukes are suddenlyinsanely, by Perrys estimateonce again a contemporary nightmare, and an emphatically ascendant one. At the dawn of 2017, there is a Russian president making bellicose boasts about his modernized arsenal. There is an American president-elect who breezily free-associates on Twitter about starting a new nuclear arms race. Decades of cooperation between the two nations on arms control is nearly at a standstill. And, unlike the original Cold War, this time there is a world of busy fanatics excited by the prospect of a planet with more bombspeople who have already demonstrated the desire to slaughter many thousands of people in an instant, and are zealously pursuing ever more deadly means to do so.
And theres one other difference from the Cold War: Americans no longer think about the threat every day.
Nuclear war isnt the subtext of popular movies, or novels; disarmament has fallen far from the top of the policy priority list. The largest upcoming generation, the millennials, were raised in a time when the problem felt largely solved, and its easy for them to imagine its still quietly fading into history. The problem is, its no longer fading. Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War, Perry said in an interview in his Stanford office, and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.
It is a turn of events that has an old man newly obsessed with a question: Why isnt everyone as terrified as he is?
Perrys hypothesis for the disconnect is that much of the population, especially that rising portion with no clear memories of the first Cold War, is suffering from a deficit of comprehension. Even a single nuclear explosion in a major city would represent an abrupt and possibly irreversible turn in modern life, upending the global economy, forcing every open society to suspend traditional liberties and remake itself into a security state. The political, economic and social consequences are beyond what people understand, Perry says. And yet many people place this scenario in roughly the same category as the meteor strike that supposedly wiped out the dinosaursfrightening, to be sure, but something of an abstraction.
One of the nightmare scenarios Perry invokes most often is designed to roust policymakers who live and work in the nations capital. The terrorists would need enriched uranium. Due to the elaborate and highly industrial nature of production, hard to conceal from surveillance, fissile material is still hard to come bybut, alas, far from impossible. Once it is procured, with help from conspirators in a poorly secured overseas commercial power centrifuge facility, the rest of the plot as Perry imagines it is no great technological or logistical feat. The mechanics of building a crude nuclear device are easily within the reach of well-educated and well-funded militants. The crate would arrive at Dulles International Airport, disguised as agricultural freight. The truck bomb that detonates on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol instantly kills the president, vice president, House speaker, and 80,000 others.
If this particular scenario does not resonate with you, Perry can easily rattle off a long roster of othersa regional war that escalates into a nuclear exchange, a miscalculation between Moscow and Washington, a computer glitch at the exact wrong moment. They are all ilks of the same themethe dimly understood threat that the science of the 20th century is set to collide with the destructive passions of the 21st.
The Cuban Missile Crisis recounting is one of the dramatic peaks in My Journey on the Nuclear Brink, the memoir Perry published last fall. It is a book laced with other close callslike November 9, 1979, when Perry was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at the North American Aerospace and Defense Command (NORAD) reporting that his computers showed 200 Soviet missiles in flight toward the United States. For a frozen moment, Perry thought: This is itThis is how it ends.
The watch officer soon set him at ease. It was a computer error, and he was calling to see whether Perry, the technology expert, had any explanation. It took a couple days to discover the low-tech answer: Someone had carelessly left a crisis-simulation training tape in the computer. All was well. But what if this blunder had happened in the middle of a real crisis, with leaders in Washington and Moscow already on high alert? The inescapable conclusion was the same as it was in 1962: The world skirting nuclear Armageddon as much by good luck as by skilled crisis management.
Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of expected value. That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perrys lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk.
His granddaughter, Lisa Perry, is precisely in the cohort he needs to reach. At first she had some uncomfortable news for her grandfather: Not many in her generation thought much about the issue.
The more I learned from him about nuclear weapons the more concerned I was that my generation had this massive and dangerous blind spot in our understanding of the world, she said in an interview. Nuclear weapons are the biggest public health issue I can think of.
Perrys answered, as SecDef19: Because you were born in the 1990s, you did not experience the daily terror of duck and cover drills as my children did. Therefore the appropriate fear of nuclear weapons is not part of your heritage, but the danger is just as real now as it was then. It will be up to your generation to develop the policies to deal with the deadly nuclear legacy that is still very much with us.
For the former defense secretary, the task now is to finallybelatedlyprove Einstein wrong. The physicist said in 1946: The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
In Perrys view the only way to avoid it is by directly contemplating catastropheand doing so face to face with the worlds largest nuclear power, Russia, as he recently did in a forum in Luxembourg with several like-minded Russians he says are brave enough to speak out about nuclear dangers in the era of Putin.
We could solve it, he said. When youre a prophet of doom, what keeps you going is not just prophesizing doom but saying there are things we do to avoid that doom. Thats where the optimism is.
