Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?

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

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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