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.
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.
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804797146 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 276 |
| File size: | 43 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
My Journey at the Nuclear Brink
By William J. Perry
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 William J. PerryAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9714-6
CHAPTER 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 1962
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 ban 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 three photo interpreters. The teams worked independently for about six hours, after which each reported its findings to the other team for critique. We were trying to determine critical information about the Soviet missiles being deployed: How many and what type were they? How soon would they be operational? When would the nuclear warheads be mated to the missiles?
By midnight, we began preparing our joint written report for Wheelon, who was often with us for the last few hours to participate in the critiques. Early the next morning, Wheelon presented his report, based on our photo analysis and other data, such as communications intelligence, to President Kennedy and his executive team for Cuba. Wheelon left the meeting after the presentation, but CIA director John McCone would remain for a discussion on how to respond to the latest developments.
We quickly determined the types of missiles and their range and payload, by correlating what we were seeing in Cuba with what we had seen on the missile test ranges in the Soviet Union. So we knew that the missiles were nuclear- capable with ranges that allowed them to target much of the United States. Within a few days our teams had concluded that some of the missiles were only a few weeks from being operational.
When I was not in the back room analyzing intelligence data, I was watching the political drama unfold on television, with President Kennedy ordering our navy to stop Soviet ships from crossing a designated line and the Soviet ships continuing to steam toward it. What was at stake was spelled out in unambiguous terms by the president in his speech to the American people, with its stark warning that a nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be met with "a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union."
I understood exactly what a "full retaliatory response" meant. In the decade before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I had been studying nuclear scenarios and their consequences. Indeed, every day that I went to the analysis center I thought would be my last day on earth.
I was a participant in this unfolding drama at the nuclear brink, but a bit player without firsthand knowledge of the discussions taking place at the president's daily team meetings. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and others have written extensively about them, and it is particularly sobering to know that the president was being advised by his military leaders to conduct an attack on Cuba. We can only speculate what their advice would have been had they known that many of the nuclear warheads to be carried by the 162 missiles we had identified in Cuba were already on the island, contrary to our assessments.
Although the Cuban Missile Crisis ended without war, I believed then, and still believe, that the world avoided a nuclear holocaust as much by good luck as by good management.
All I have learned since has reinforced that belief. Looking back with the knowledge we now have of the actual conditions, I can see even more clearly the great danger that events would spin out of control and engulf the world in a catastrophic nuclear war. For example, we now know that the Soviet ships approaching our blockade of Cuba had submarine escorts, and that the Soviet submarines were armed with nuclear torpedoes. Because of the difficulties in communicating with a submarine, the commanders had been given the authority to fire nuclear torpedoes without authorization from Moscow. Only years after the crisis did we learn that one of the Soviet commanders had seriously considered firing one of his nuclear torpedoes at an American destroyer that was trying to force him to surface. He was dissuaded from doing so only by the other officers on the submarine.
Equally sobering was the realization that there were incidents not directly related to the showdown in Cuba that could have led to an immediate escalation to war. At the height of the crisis, an American reconnaissance plane, flying a long-scheduled mission, wandered off course and flew into the Soviet Union. Soviet air defense misread this as an American bomber and immediately scrambled attack aircraft. An American airbase in Alaska, in turn, scrambled fighter aircraft armed with nuclear-tipped missiles to protect the American reconnaissance plane.
Fortunately, the American aircraft commander, having blundered into Soviet airspace, discovered his error and flew out before any intercepts occurred. At about the same time, an American ICBM was launched from Vandenberg Air Base. This was a routine test launch that nobody thought to reschedule, but it could easily have been misinterpreted by the Soviets.
For the decade preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis I had been working to assess the threat from Soviet nuclear weapons and sensed a pervasive tension mounting in the last two years. What if a direct and immediate military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union should arise? In the nuclear era, a military confrontation would be an unrivaled nightmare, a moment for which there was no previous experience to provide guidance for a resolution that could prevent a nuclear catastrophe. At stake was civilization itself.
During those eight days in October, I lived just such a nightmare.
After the crisis abated, many American news reports trumpeted US "triumphalism," crowing that Khrushchev had "blinked." This popular and insular thinking was specious, not only because Khrushchev's decision to back down spared the world from an unprecedented catastrophe, but because of the unintended consequence of the crisis: although it took a while to become apparent, the Cuban Missile Crisis accelerated the nuclear arms race already underway between the United States and the USSR.
In 1964, possibly because he had been forced to back down in Cuba, Khrushchev was replaced with Leonid Brezhnev and (initially) Alexei Kosygin. Brezhnev vowed that the Soviet Union would never again be at a nuclear disadvantage and accelerated the secretive Soviet ICBM and nuclear programs.
American defense officials, at first self-satisfied at the "victory," soon had to raise the already high priority on technical intelligence gathering because of the rapidly increasing scope and sophistication of the Soviet missile and space program. While defense laboratories like mine prospered, their positive business growth was directly tied to the increased danger to our country and the world, a dichotomy that would come to haunt those of us in the industry.
When we look back it is clear that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a signature event in the history of the nuclear era. Its most unforgettable and shattering aspect is the historic enormity of what was at stake: the Cuban Missile Crisis arguably took us to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. Often in that incomparably dangerous crisis, US decision-makers' knowledge was imperfect, and sometimes just wrong.
There is a surreal quality to some of the thinking during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, old modes of thinking clearly at odds with the new realities of the nuclear weapons era: many advisors on both sides wanting to rush us into war; the representation of the crisis in the media as a drama of "winning" and "losing"; political approval of the leaders on both sides seemingly based on their willingness to start a war; and in the aftermath, the decision not to cooperate in reducing arms and tension — which would have been rational after such a close call — but rather to reinvigorate the arms race.
For the moment, the world had avoided a nuclear holocaust. But in the longer run — at least as seemed evident in the breathing room after that narrow escape — the Cuban Missile Crisis signaled a heightening risk. And after my almost unimaginable eight days in the fall of 1962, no other path seemed to beckon to me but one that led into the heart of the challenge to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons.
For me the Cuban Missile Crisis was a summoning that would eventually lead me from industry and the invention of modern high-tech spying on the Soviet nuclear arsenal; to leadership in the Pentagon in modernizing US conventional and strategic forces to shore up and maintain nuclear deterrence; to the later pursuit of cooperative international programs to reduce nuclear weapons through legislation, global diplomacy, and advocacy.
CHAPTER 2A Fire in the Sky
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
— Albert Einstein; 23 May 1946
How is it that I was summoned to Washington to analyze intelligence data during the Cuban Missile Crisis? My journey at the nuclear brink actually began well before the crisis, on an infamous Sunday in 1941, four years before the first atomic bomb was dropped. These were the first stirrings that would lead me to a life encompassing military service, development of Cold War reconnaissance systems, government service, university teaching, and diplomacy — much of it focused on the goal of reducing the nuclear threat. I could not, of course, foresee this path on that distant Sunday. I could not know that I would be coming of age at the pivotal point when mankind created a weapon whose power radically altered the human condition. I could not know that meeting the challenge from that unprecedented threat to civilization itself would become my abiding concern.
That historic Sunday came just after I turned fourteen. I was visiting a friend in his Butler, Pennsylvania, home when his brother rushed in, shouting, "We are at war with Japan! They just bombed Pearl Harbor!" War with Japan had been brewing for more than a year, and many radio commentators had predicted its imminence. My fourteen-year-old response was immediate: I wanted to serve in the war as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, but I feared that the war would be over before I was old enough — and that is just what happened.
On my seventeenth birthday in October 1944, I drove to Pittsburgh, passed the exams for the Army Air Cadet program, and was sworn in. I was sent home to await an opening, which the army thought would occur in about six months. In anticipation, I left high school early so I could complete a few semesters of college before being called up. In May 1945, just as I was finishing my first semester at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon), the army discontinued the Air Cadet program and I was given an honorable discharge, despite never having served a day of active duty. I finished two more semesters, after which, now eighteen, I enlisted in the Army Engineers. The army trained me in map- making and assigned me to the Army of Occupation of Japan, where I was sent to a base outside Tokyo for training.
Nothing I had read about the war prepared me for the massive devastation I would see in Tokyo. This once great city was decimated — virtually every building made of wood was destroyed by firebomb attacks. Survivors were living in vast wastes of fused rubble, existing on meager rations provided by the Occupation Forces.
After two months of training, our company boarded an LST landing ship bound for Okinawa to make high-precision topographic maps of the island. Okinawa was the site of the last great battle of World War I, and the fighting had been unimaginably bloody. Almost 200,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians died. The American casualties, far fewer, were still terrible, many of them the result of kamikaze (suicide) attacks.
I will never forget what I saw on our arrival at the port of Naha, the capital of Okinawa. Not a building was standing in what had been a thriving city. The survivors were living in tents or the rubble of buildings, and "the lush tropical landscape was turned into a vast field of mud, lead, decay, and maggots." A memorial to the dead, the Cornerstone of Peace, erected at the site of the final battle in Mabuni, lists the more than 240,000 names of the known dead from that fierce and awful battle.
In Tokyo, and later in Naha, I saw through my young eyes the unprecedented devastation of modern war. I was witness to a wartime violence of historic proportions, and it was a transformational experience. This devastation had been rendered by thousands of bombers in hundreds of raids; a comparable devastation had been inflicted on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki by just one bomb. I understood in a profound and visceral way that our new and unimaginable capacity to inflict horror and ruin had changed everything.
Bearing witness to this destructive power irrevocably shaped my life. It impressed on me that our world faced an enormous, never-before-seen danger in the nuclear age: not only the ruin of cities, as happened many times in World War I, but the end of our civilization. I came to understand what Einstein meant when he said, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything," and was haunted by his concluding words: "save our modes of thinking." But my thinking was already beginning to change.
I completed my tour in the army in June 1947. Although the images of destruction stayed with me, I was ready to put the war years behind me. I looked to the postwar promise of a peaceful and thriving new world and was eager to resume building my young adult life. I returned to school and rekindled my relationship with Lee Green, my high school sweetheart, and on 29 December 1947 we took our marriage vows in the living room of Lee's family home. Though deeply in love, I had no way of knowing then the profound influence this lifelong union would have on my life. We have shared an enduring love and a strong partnership that has sustained each of us through many challenges.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Journey at the Nuclear Brink by William J. Perry. Copyright © 2015 William J. Perry. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
1. The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Nuclear Nightmare2. 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 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
13. Dismantling Nuclear Weapons and the Legacy of Nunn-Lugar
14. The Crisis with North Korea: Containing a 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 Unity
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. The Fall of Security Ties with Russia
22. The North Korean Policy Review: Triumph and Tragedy
23. Fiasco in Iraq: Then and Now
24. Former Cold Warrior Offer New Vision
25. The Way Forward: Hope for a World Without Nuclear Weapons