My Journey at the Nuclear Brink

By William Perry

My Journey at the Nuclear Brink is a continuation of William J. Perry's efforts to keep the world safe from a nuclear catastrophe. It tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era, his role in trying to shape and contain it, and how his thinking has changed about the threat these weapons pose.

In a remarkable career, Perry has dealt firsthand with the changing nuclear threat. Decades of experience and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options have given Perry a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons endanger our security rather than securing it.

This book traces his thought process as he journeys from the Cuban Missile Crisis, to crafting a defense strategy in the Carter Administration to offset the Soviets' numeric superiority in conventional forces, to presiding over the dismantling of more than 8,000 nuclear weapons in the Clinton Administration, and to his creation in 2007, with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and Henry Kissinger, of the Nuclear Security Project to articulate their vision of a world free from nuclear weapons and to lay out the urgent steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Release date: Nov 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9780804797146

Book preview

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2015 by William J. Perry. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Perry, William James, author.

My journey at the nuclear brink / William J. Perry.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9681-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-9712-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Nuclear weapons—Government policy—United States—History.   2. Nuclear arms control—United States—History.   3. United States—Military policy.   4. Perry, William James, 1927–.   I. Title.

UA23.P4655   2015

355.02'17092—dc23

2015020251

ISBN 978-0-8047-9714-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/14 Minion.

MY JOURNEY at the NUCLEAR BRINK

WILLIAM J. PERRY

STANFORD SECURITY STUDIES

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

To my loving wife of sixty-eight years,

LEONILLA GREEN PERRY,

and to our children, grandchildren, and

great-grandchild who have given me

the best of all reasons to continue

my work to ensure that nuclear weapons

are never used again

Contents

Foreword by George P. Shultz

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1. The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Nuclear Nightmare

2. A Fire in the Sky

3. The Rise of the Soviet Missile Threat and the Race for Data to Understand It

4. An Original Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and the Advance of Spy Technology

5. A Call to Serve

6. Implementing the Offset Strategy and the Emergence of Stealth Technology

7. Buildup of the US Nuclear Force

8. Nuclear Alerts, Arms Control, and Missed Opportunities in Nonproliferation

9. The Undersecretary as a Diplomat

10. Back in Civilian Life: The Cold War Ends, but the Nuclear Journey Continues

11. A Return to Washington: The New Challenge of Loose Nukes and the Lurching Reform of Defense Acquisition

12. I Become Secretary of Defense

Color Plates

13. Dismantling Nuclear Weapons and Building the Legacy of Nunn-Lugar

14. The Crisis with North Korea: Containing an Emerging Nuclear State

15. Ratifying Start II and Battling over the Test Ban Treaty

16. NATO, Peacekeeping in Bosnia, and the Rise of Security Ties with Russia

17. The Immaculate Invasion of Haiti and Forging Ties for Western Hemispheric Security

18. The Iron Logic between Military Capability and Quality of Life

19. A Farewell to Arms

20. The Fall of Security Ties with Russia

21. Seeking Common Ground with China, India, Pakistan, and Iran

22. The North Korean Policy Review: Triumph and Tragedy

23. Fiasco in Iraq: Then and Now

24. The Nuclear Security Project: Former Cold Warriors Offer a New Vision

25. A Way Forward: Hope for a World without Nuclear Weapons

Notes

Index

Foreword by George P. Shultz

Throughout his life and work, William Perry has distinguished himself as a man of high intelligence, absolute integrity, rare vision, remarkable accomplishment, and an unwavering sense of humanity. Evidence of these attributes is vividly apparent in the gripping stories contained in this memoir chronicling Bill’s extraordinary efforts, over the course of his illustrious career, to reduce the nuclear threat.

Bill’s engagement in the issue of nuclear security began in the mid-1940s when, as a soldier in the US Army of Occupation in Japan, he witnessed the massive devastation in the aftermath of World War II. Following his service in Japan, he became a high-level national security adviser to the US government and participated in the development of reconnaissance technology that could detect Cold War nuclear threats. During the Carter administration, Bill served as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. He worked to shore up deterrence of the Soviet Union by offsetting their numerical advantage in conventional forces through the development of stealth and other force-multiplying high-technology systems still in effective use today by our military (his offset strategy).

As secretary of defense under President Clinton, and in his subsequent Track 2 diplomacy work, Bill developed a successful negotiating style that combined incisive analysis, an ability to balance diverse security concerns, and effective persuasiveness. Bill used these diplomatic skills to establish military alliances with former adversaries in the post–Cold War era; an example is the Partnership for Peace in Europe. He succeeded in facilitating the Nunn-Lugar program to remove holdover nuclear arsenals from new republics after the Soviet Union broke apart. Bill also brought about international arms control initiatives and security arrangements for nuclear materials, vital steps on the road toward achieving nuclear security.

I have had the pleasure of working closely with Bill and being inspired by him in our shared effort to achieve better control over nuclear weapons and fissile material. In the past decade, together with Sid Drell, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, we have convened a number of important conferences and have written numerous opinion pieces that have received worldwide attention. Phil Taubman described our efforts in his book The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (2012). We have emphasized the importance of the steps that must be taken on the road toward our ultimate goal of nuclear security. Sam Nunn’s image of a mountain captures our idea. At the mountain’s peak is a world free of nuclear weapons. At its base is a world where many countries possess nuclear weapons and where the fissile material to make bombs is often loosely guarded. In this world, there is a high probability that a nuclear weapon will be detonated at some time, wreaking unimaginable consequences. We have tried to put ourselves on a path to reach the mountaintop and, until recently, progress was being made.

The end of the Cold War produced an atmosphere that led to massive reductions in weapons, so today the world’s nuclear weapons stockpile is less than one-third of the number in existence at the time of the 1986 Reykjavik meeting between President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. But now instability has returned, and we are threatened once again by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Our joint efforts and Bill’s personal commitment to counter this threat continue, with particular emphasis on educating young people on the dangers of nuclear weapons and ways to prevent their use. In addition to Bill’s innovative nuclear security program for students at Stanford University, he has instituted an online course in order to spread the message to a vast audience of youth around the globe.

Bill’s journey, so vibrantly recorded in this book, goes on as he works aggressively to stem the tide of nuclear weapons and guide the world onto a constructive path once again. Ever at his side in this quest is his wife, Lee. The wisdom that behind every great man there is a great woman is exemplified in the loving, productive partnership that Bill and Lee share. Lee has steadfastly supported Bill on his journey, at the same time accomplishing significant goals of her own. The military services awarded her a medal for her efforts to improve the quality of life for US military families, and—recognizing her tireless work to improve standards in an Albanian military hospital—the president of Albania conferred upon Lee the Mother Teresa Medal.

At every stage of his career, Bill has demonstrated his dedication to the welfare of members of the US armed forces. He began his military service as an enlisted man, so his concern for the well-being of every soldier—and every soldier’s family—is personal. He acknowledges the iron logic between military capability and quality of life and agrees wholeheartedly with Sergeant Major Richard Kidd’s counsel to Take care of your troops and they will take care of you. Anyone who has served in the military, as I have in the Marine Corps, knows that the troops must come first.

George P. Shultz. Light at 11B: Joseph Garappolo and Christian Pease, with permission.

Bill’s deep-seated commitment to improving the quality of life for military families is illustrated by the actions he took after observing that the level of military housing, particularly for families, was in dire need of improvement. As Bill set about assessing the issue of military housing, he was fortunate to have an additional pair of eyes and ears; while he was visiting the troops, his wife, Lee, was talking to servicemen’s spouses. The result of their work was an ingenious and novel public-private partnership, authorized by Congress in 1996, that dramatically upgraded, and continues to maintain, the quality of military housing.

Such breakthroughs were surely on President Clinton’s mind when, in the January 1997 Farewell ceremony for Bill, he awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom and said, Bill Perry may well be recorded as the most productive, effective secretary of defense the United States ever had.

General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, offered this assessment of this extraordinary public servant:

Yes, he is a man of vast talent. Yes, he is a man of enormous energy and infectious enthusiasm. Yes, he is a man of great caring for those who wear our nation’s uniform for their families. But he is first and foremost a man of unshakable character. He is a man who will do what is right, no matter what the price.

Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Perry, who has dedicated his life’s journey to national security. It is a journey that he continues to pursue with expertise, energy, and unquenchable enthusiasm.

George P. Shultz

Preface

The gravest security threat of our time is the danger of a nuclear weapon being detonated in one of our cities. That is my nuclear nightmare, born of long and deep experience, and it could unfold as follows . . .

A small, secret group operating in a covert section of a commercial power centrifuge facility enriches 30 kg of uranium to a level sufficient for a nuclear bomb.

The group transports this enriched uranium to a nearby covert facility. Over the next two months, the technical team there uses the enriched uranium to assemble a crude nuclear bomb, installs it in a large packing crate marked agricultural equipment, and transports the packing crate to a nearby airfield.

A transport airplane with markings of a civilian airline flies the crate to an international airport and shipping hub, where the crate is transferred to a freight aircraft headed for Washington, DC.

The freight aircraft lands at Washington’s Dulles International Airport and the crate is delivered to a warehouse in the southeast part of the District.

The bomb is removed from the crate and loaded onto a delivery truck.

A suicide bomber drives the truck to a location on Pennsylvania Avenue midway between the Capitol (where Congress is in session) and the White House and at 11:00 a.m. triggers the detonator.

The bomb explodes with a power of 15 kilotons. The White House, the Capitol, and all buildings in between are destroyed. There are 80,000 instant deaths, including the president, the vice president, the speaker of the House, and the 320 members of Congress present when the detonation occurs. There are more than 100,000 seriously wounded and virtually no medical facilities available to treat them. Telecommunication facilities in Washington, including most cell phone relay towers, are inoperative. CNN, which shows videos of the devastation in Washington, reports that they have received a message claiming that five more bombs are hidden in five different US cities, and one will be set off each week for the next five weeks unless all American troops based overseas are ordered to return immediately to the United States. Within ten minutes the stock market drops precipitously and all trading is halted. The nation is hurled into panic as people begin to stream out of major cities. Manufacturing nationwide comes to a halt.

The nation is further faced with a constitutional crisis. The presidency has devolved to the Senate’s president pro tem, who, when the detonation occurs, is being treated at the Mayo Clinic for pancreatic cancer and is not able to return to Washington, which is now under martial law. The secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom were testifying to the House Armed Services Committee on their recent budget request, are also killed in the blast. . . .

We can hardly bear to imagine the catastrophic outcome of this hypothetical scenario—and yet we must. This example is only illustrative; the same end would result if a terror group bought or stole a nuclear bomb from North Korea or Pakistan, or stole fissile material from a poorly guarded reactor in one of the countries that still have highly enriched uranium or plutonium in insufficiently guarded facilities.

The danger of a nuclear bomb being detonated in one of our cities is all too real. And yet, while this catastrophe would result in a hundred times the casualties of 9-11, it is only dimly perceived by the public and not well understood. As a result, our present actions are incommensurate with the tragic consequences that would result from even a small-scale nuclear attack.

This book is one effort to inform the public of the grave dangers we face, and to encourage actions that could greatly reduce those dangers. I tell the story of my own conversion to a life with a compelling, overriding objective—to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again.

My special experience has kept me acutely aware of nuclear dangers and contemplating the almost unthinkable consequence of a nuclear war. A lifetime in which I had firsthand experience and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options has given me what may be a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security—they now endanger it. I believe it is imperative to share what I, as an insider, know and understand about these dangers, and what I think must be done to keep future generations safe from nuclear dangers that are growing greater every year.

All through the years of the Cold War and the massive buildup of nuclear arsenals, the world faced the prospect of a nuclear holocaust either through miscalculation or accident. These dangers were never theoretical to me. My work as an analyst in the Cuban Missile Crisis and later my experiences in three high-level positions in the Defense Department kept me in close contact with those fearsome possibilities every day.

Although nuclear dangers receded when the Cold War ended, they have now returned in a new and alarming guise. Since the turn of the century, the relationship between the United States and Russia has become increasingly tense. Russia, whose conventional forces are considerably weaker than those of the United States and NATO countries, depends on nuclear forces for its security. Feeling threatened by the expansion of NATO to its borders and by the deployment of an American missile defense system in Eastern Europe, Russia has resorted to increasingly hostile rhetoric. And it is backing up this rhetoric by embarking on a major upgrade of its nuclear forces—a new generation of missiles, bombers, and submarines, as well as a new generation of nuclear bombs for those delivery systems. Most ominously, it has renounced its no first use policy and proclaimed that it is prepared to use nuclear weapons against any threat that it perceives, whether or not it is nuclear. It is increasingly worrisome that Russia, through a serious miscalculation, could confront a contingency where it believed that its security depended on initiating the use of nuclear weapons.

Beyond that growing danger, we face two new nuclear dangers largely absent from the Cold War era: a regional nuclear war, between India and Pakistan, for example; and a nuclear terror attack, as was illustrated in the preceding nightmare scenario.

The reality of a nuclear terror threat was brought home to me by an experience in 1996, during my last year as secretary of defense. A truck bomb was detonated near one of our airmen’s dormitories (Khobar Towers) in Saudi Arabia. Nineteen airmen were killed in the blast, but hundreds would have been killed if the attacker had been able to get his truck closer to the dormitory (as happened in a 1983 attack in Lebanon that killed 220 Marines). The United States did not know who had perpetrated this attack, but we understood that its purpose was to force us to move our troops out of the country, as the US had done earlier in response to the Lebanon bombing.

I believed that our mission in Saudi Arabia was important and that it would be a serious mistake to pull out under that kind of pressure. So with cooperation and support from Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, we moved the US airbase to a remote location where we could achieve our mission but still ensure the safety of our troops. I released a public statement announcing the move, declaring that our new base would be heavily defended and that no terror group would keep us from accomplishing our mission in Saudi Arabia.

A response to my press release was posted on the Internet by a shadowy figure named Osama Bin Laden, who called for a jihad against American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and directed a bizarre and threatening poem to me:

Oh William, tomorrow you will be informed

As to which young man will face your swaggering brother

A youngster enters the midst of battle, smiling, and

Retreats with his spearhead stained with blood.¹

Five years later, on 11 September 2001, the world learned much more about Bin Laden, and I came to understand the full significance of his message to me. As analysts intensified their studies of Al Qaeda, Bin Laden’s terror group, they learned that part of their declared mission was to kill not just thousands of Americans (as they did on 9-11) but millions, and that they had made serious efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon. I do not doubt that if Al Qaeda had succeeded in acquiring a nuclear weapon, they would have used it against Americans.

A nuclear nightmare such as I have dramatized could become a tragic reality if we do not take the necessary preventive actions now. These actions are well understood, but they will not be taken until the public engages in these issues. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink explains these dangers and describes the actions that could greatly mitigate them.

I remain hopeful that we can change the increasingly dangerous course we are on and offer my best counsel on how to do so. The public’s will to act on such recommendations can only come from a deeper understanding of just how real and imminent the danger is.

William J. Perry

Acknowledgments

The events I relate in this book form a selective memoir about coming of age in the nuclear era, my role in trying to shape and contain it, and how my thinking changed about the threat these weapons pose today. In this decades-long journey I have had the remarkable good fortune to have enjoyed the lifelong love and support of my wife, Lee, and to have worked alongside many extraordinary men and women who have shared my commitment to make the world a safer place. I am indebted to all of them, and especially to those who have helped me realize my goal of publishing this book.

To support the publication of this memoir and educational materials deriving from it, I formed the William J. Perry Project, under the sponsorship of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). Their top leadership team—Sam Nunn, Joan Rohlfing, and Deborah Rosenblum—have supported my vision for the Project from the start, providing encouragement, fiscal stewardship, and access to their knowledgeable and highly competent staff. The Project would never have seen the light of day without significant private support from the founding co-sponsors, including Douglas C. Grissom, Elizabeth Holmes, Ta-lin and Joyce Hsu, Fred Iseman, Pitch and Cathie Johnson, Joseph Kampf, Jeong and Cindi Kim, Marshall Medoff, and Mark L. Perry and Melanie Peña. I am very grateful for their generosity.

Another primary Project partner is Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). They have provided office space, daily access to distinguished security experts, and an atmosphere of collegiality and shared purpose. My special thanks to Tino Cuellar, Michael McFaul, Amy Zegart, David Relman, and Lynn Eden.

Stanford further aided the Project’s educational goals by supporting the pilot of a new course based on the lessons in this book so that we could develop online education materials. Stanford professors and scholars participating included Martha Crenshaw, James Goodby, Sig Hecker, David Holloway, Ravi Patel, Scott Sagan, George Shultz, and Phil Taubman. Guest lecturers from outside Stanford included Ash Carter, Joe Cirincione, Andre Kokoshin, and Joe Martz.

I wrote this book from memory. Even after forty, fifty, and sixty years, certain stories remain as vivid as if they had just happened. But I know better than to rely solely on my memory and am immensely grateful to those who supported this memoir with their time, expertise, recollections, fact checking, editing, and literary counsel.

The following people, all of whom played significant roles in my career and all of whom I call friends, agreed to be interviewed, providing perspective and corroboration on details in key events described in the book. They include Ash Carter, Sid Drell, Lew Franklin, Joshua Gotbaum, Paul Kaminski, Paul Kern, Michael Lippitz, Sam Nunn, George Shultz, Larry K Smith, Jeffrey Starr, and the late Albert Bud Wheelon. I am fortunate to have been able to collaborate with such wise and dedicated people.

I am grateful to Mark Langerman, chief of the Pentagon’s Office of Security Review, for his guidance and help in shepherding my manuscript expeditiously through security review.

Four superb young military officers each contributed substantially to fact checking and source citation while earning their graduate degrees at Stanford: 2nd Lt. Robert Kaye, Ens. Taylor Newman, Ens. Joshua David Wagner, and Ens. Thomas Dowd. Judging from the fine work these top academy graduates did at Stanford, our military is in good hands.

Early in the Project, we convened an undergraduate student advisory board to research messaging about the dangers of nuclear weapons and to make recommendations about how to engage their generation in these issues. They inspired the development of our online education program. My thanks to each of them for their passion and commitment to our initiative: Claire Colberg, Isabella Gabrosky, Jared Greenspan, Taylor Grossman, Daniel Khalessi, Hayden Padgett, Camille Pease, Raquel Saxe, Sahil Shah, and Pia Ulrich.

I am especially grateful to the Project staff for their winning combination of skill, hard work, creativity, and commitment to educating and engaging the public on the dangers of nuclear weapons: Deborah C. Gordon, Christian G. Pease, David C. Perry, and Robin L. Perry. Special thanks go to Robin, who served as director as well as editor of this book. I never could have come this far without her patience, wisdom, and editorial skills.

Cindi King and Mark L. Perry offered critical legal guidance. Amy Rennert, Phil Taubman, Lynn Eden, and David Holloway provided invaluable publishing and editorial advice. I am grateful to Geoffrey Burn at Stanford University Press for believing in the value of this book, to John Feneron for expertly managing it through production, and to Martin Hanft for his incisive copyediting.

Finally, my deep thanks to Al Clarkson, a former colleague at ESL and long-time friend, who as it happens is also a novelist and skilled in all things literary. Al has been at my side from the first fledgling draft, quietly providing feedback to Robin and me, and gently steering us to a better book through his commentary, sense of narrative, and substantive editing. Between Al and Robin, I couldn’t have asked for a better editorial team to shepherd the book through its many iterations.

W.J.P.

Abbreviations

1

The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Nuclear Nightmare

It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.

—President John F. Kennedy, nationwide broadcast, 22 October 1962¹

My phone rang on a beautiful fall day in 1962, just a week after I had celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday. I was the director of Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories, which pioneered in sophisticated electronic reconnaissance systems directed at Soviet nuclear weapons systems. I was living with my wife, Lee, and our five children in a beautiful home in Palo Alto, California, near the picturesque San Francisco Bay. Life was good. But it was about to be turned upside-down.

The phone call was from Albert Bud Wheelon, my colleague on high-level government panels to assess Soviet nuclear capabilities. Wheelon, also in his thirties, was the youngest-ever head of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, as well as chairman of the Guided Missile and Astronautics Intelligence Committee (GMAIC), an expert group reviewing all intelligence on the Soviet missile and space programs. He asked me to fly to Washington to consult with him, and I told him that I would rearrange my schedule and fly back the following week. No, he said, I need to see you right away. His sense of urgency alarmed me. Our country was deep in a spiraling nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, which just the previous year had broken the nuclear test moratorium to detonate their monster 50-megaton bomb. I took the night flight to Washington, DC, and met him the next morning.

Without a word of explanation he showed me photos of what I quickly recognized as Soviet missiles in Cuba. My instant reaction was dread. It was all too clear that this deployment could be the catalyst to trigger a nuclear exchange between the United States and the USSR. My study of nuclear effects told me that such an exchange could bring about the end of civilization.

For the next eight days I worked intensively with a small team analyzing data collected each day to make a report delivered by the director of the CIA to President John F. Kennedy. Every morning US tactical reconnaissance aircraft conducted low-level flights over Cuba and took high-resolution pictures of known and suspected missile and weapons sites. After the aircraft returned to Florida, the film was flown by military transport to Eastman Kodak in upstate New York, for rapid processing. By late afternoon the processed film was flown to our analysis center, located deep within the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where analysts pored over it.

I was on one of two analysis teams, each made up of two technical analysts and