Re Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Thomas Leavitt <thomas () thomasleavitt org>
> Date: January 6, 2017 at 7:04:46 PM EST
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?
>
> Dave,
>
> I suspect that more millennials than you'd expect are concretely worried about this. Late last year, I sat on our 
> porch with my younger daughter (21 years of age), and had a conversation with her (that she initiated) about the 
> dramatic difference in the tone and topics of coverage between domestic and international media in general, and in 
> particular about the conflict between Russia and the U.S. In that conversation, she stated that she was glad to be 
> moving to New Orleans, *because that would be a primary target in a nuclear exchange*, and that being utterly 
> annihilated was vastly preferable to dealing the the fallout afterhand (as she would have to do in Santa Cruz, CA 
> where I now live).
>
>  This is truly a conversation I never envisioned having with my children, I thought that ghost was dead and buried in 
> the 1980s by Reagan and Gorbachev. As a child of the late Cold War, I still instinctively glance at the horizon when 
> the AM radio in my car cuts out suddenly, but other than that, until the recent round of Russophobia in the 
> Presidential campaign and Trump / Putin's bellicosity (I do find it odd that somehow Putin and Trump can be portrayed 
> as close buddies while simultaneously ramping up nuclear tensions), it has been essentially absent from my 
> consciousness. Not any more. ... and I really don't understand why. Neither Russia nor China have a fraction of our 
> military capacity or ability to project force across the globe... China's one carrier is a retread with near zero 
> operational experience, and Russia's one carrier needs to be accompanied by a tugboat in order to avoid being 
> stranded at sea. We routinely send out task forces whose total force projection capacity is in excess of either 
> nation's entire functional naval capacity.
>
>  What has changed so fundamentally that we're now re-enmeshed in this lunacy? I'm baffled.
>
> Regards,
> Thomas Leavitt
>
>
>
> > On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 8:46 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Begin forwarded message:
> >
> > > From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> > > Date: January 6, 2017 at 10:34:46 AM EST
> > > To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> > > Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?
> > > Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
> > >
> > > Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren’t You?
> > > How an 89-year-old cold warrior became America’s nuclear conscience.
> > > By JOHN F. HARRIS and BRYAN BENDER
> > > Jan 6 2017
> > > <http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/william-perry-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-214604>
> > >
> > > t this naked moment in the American experiment, when many people perceive civilization on the verge of blowing up 
> > > in some metaphorical sense, there is an elderly man in California hoping to seize your attention about another 
> > > possibility.
> > >
> > > It is that civilization is on the verge of blowing up in a non-metaphorical sense. 
> > >
> > > William J. Perry is 89 now, at the tail end of one of his generation’s 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.”
> > >
> > > His life’s work, most of it highly classified, was nuclear weapons—how to maximize the fearsome deterrent power of 
> > > the U.S. arsenal, how to minimize the possibility that the old Soviet arsenal would obliterate the United States 
> > > and much of the planet along the way. Perry played a supporting role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which he 
> > > went back to his Washington hotel room each night, fearing he had only hours left to live. He later founded his own 
> > > successful defense firm, helped revolutionize the American way of high-tech war, and honed his diplomatic skills 
> > > seeking common ground on security issues with the Soviets and Chinese—all culminating as head of the Pentagon in 
> > > the early years after the end of the Cold War.
> > >
> > > 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 suddenly—insanely, by Perry’s estimate—once 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 
> > > bombs—people 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 there’s one other difference from the Cold War: Americans no longer think about the threat every day.
> > >
> > > Nuclear war isn’t 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 it’s easy for them to imagine it’s still quietly fading into history. The problem is, it’s 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 isn’t everyone as terrified as he is?
> > >
> > > [snip]
> > >
> > > Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
> >
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