William J. Perry was only 18 when he found himself surrounded by death, a young U.S. Army mapping specialist in Japan during the Army of Occupation. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II had just come to an end. 

“The vast ruins that once had been the great city of Tokyo – nothing, nothing had prepared me for such utter devastation that was wrought by massive waves of firebombing rained down by American bomber attacks,” said Perry, who was then shipped off to the island of Okinawa in the aftermath of the last great battle of WWII.

More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in that closing battle of 1945, codenamed Operation Iceberg. 

“Not a single building was left standing; the island was a moonscape denuded of trees and vegetation,” Perry told a rapt audience during a recent speech. “The smell of death was still lingering.” 

The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs.

 “It had taken multiple strikes by thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of high explosive bombs to lay waste to Tokyo,” he recalls. “The same had been done to Hiroshima and then to Nagasaki with just one plane – and just one bomb. Just one bomb. 

“The unleashing of this colossal force indelibly shaped my life in ways that I have now come to see more clearly,” said Perry, who would go on to become the 19^th secretary of defense. “It was a transforming experience. In many ways – I grew up from it.” 

William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.

William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.  Photo Credit: U.S. Army

Now, nearly seven decades later, the 86-year-old Perry has come full circle. His new winter course will take students back to his fateful days in Japan after the United States became the first – and last – nation to use atomic weapons. He’ll go through the Cold War, the arms race and expanding nuclear arsenals, and today’s potential threats of nuclear terrorism and regional wars provoked by North Korea, Iran or South Asia. 

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today (IPS 249) – to serve as the backdrop for an online course at Stanford next year – concludes with the declaration Perry made in 2007: The world must rid itself entirely of nuclear weapons. And students will get a primer on how to get involved in organizations that are working on just that. 

“They did not live through the Cold War, so they were never exposed to the dangers and therefore it doesn’t exist to them; it’s just not in their world,” Perry said of millennial and younger students. “I want to make them aware of what the dangers were and how those dangers have evolved.”

Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, both Democrats, joined former Republican Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger in launching a series of OpEds in The Wall Street Journal (the first in 2007) that went viral. Together they outlined how nations could work together toward a world without nuclear weapons.

“I think I have some responsibility since I helped build those weapons – and I think that time is running out,” Perry said in an interview. 

Perry helped shore up the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, procuring nuclear weapons delivery systems for the Carter administration. Later, as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton, his priority became the dismantling of nuclear weapons around the world. 

Today, he works on the Nuclear Security Project along with Shultz, Kissinger and Nunn. Former New York Times correspondent Philip Taubman documents their bipartisan alliance in the book, “The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb.” That fifth cold warrior is Sidney Drell, the renowned Stanford physicist and co-founder of CISAC. 

Taubman, a consulting professor at CISAC, will guest lecturer in Perry’s class, along with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway, Martha Crenshaw and Scott Sagan. Other speakers are expected to include Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Andrei Kokoshin, deputy of the Russian State Duma; Ashton B. Carter, who just stepped down as deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Joeseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.

The world is far from banning the bomb. According to the Ploughshares Fund, an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons remain in the global stockpile, the majority of which are in Russia and the United States.

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President Barack Obama declared shortly after taking office in his first foreign policy speech in Prague that because the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons, Washington “has a moral responsibility to act.” 

“So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace

and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said back in May 2009. 

Perry – a senior fellow at CISAC who received his BS and MS from Stanford and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics – laments the regression of the movement to dismantle the nuclear legacy of the Cold War. 

Obama has so far not acted on his pledge in his contentious second term, as China and Russia expand their stockpiles. North Korea and Iran are attempting to build nuclear weapons and India and Pakistan are building more fissile material. The U.S. Senate still has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the U.S. and Russia have not moved forward on a follow-up to the New START Treaty. 

Perry recognizes that the issue is slipping from the public conscience, particularly among young people. So he’s putting his name and experience behind a Stanford Online course slated to go live next year. It will correspond with the release of his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” and will take a more documentary approach, weaving together key moments in Perry’s career with lectures, archival footage and interviews and conversations between Perry and his colleagues and counterparts. 

"Bill Perry has had a remarkable career and this project draws on his unparalleled experience over a pivotal period in history," said John Mitchell, vice provost for online learning. "We hope his brilliant reflections will be useful to everyone with an interest in the topic, and to teachers and students everywhere." 

At the heart of his winter course, online class and memoir are what Perry calls the five great lessons he learned in the nuclear age. The first four are grim remnants of what he witnessed over the years: the destructive nature of the atomic bombs on Japan; his mathematical calculations about the number of deaths from nuclear warfare; his work for the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and one pre-dawn call in 1978 from the North American Aerospace Defense Command saying there were 200 missiles headed toward the United States from the Soviet Union. That turned out to be a false, but terrifying alarm. 

His fifth final lesson is hopeful, if not cautionary. It goes like this: 

As secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, Perry oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and the United States and helped the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to go entirely non-nuclear. In that mission, he often visited Pervomaysk in the Ukraine, which was once the Soviet Union’s largest ICBM site, with 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States. 

On his final trip to Pervomaysk in 1996, he joined the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers to plant sunflowers where those missiles had once stood. 

“So reducing the danger of nuclear weapons is not a fantasy; it has been done,” Perry said. “I will not accept that it cannot be done. I shall do everything I can to ensure nuclear weapons will never again be used – because I believe time is not on our side.”

Ben Rudolph was an ambitious computer science major planning to remain in Silicon Valley and join one of the many start-ups eager for young Stanford grads. But in his senior year he took a class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities,” which knocked him off his path and got him thinking about how to use that ambition for the greater good.

The class was co-taught by Tino Cuéllar, a Stanford Law School professor and director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Cuéllar led the class while co-director of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), which had just launched a collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The agency was looking for innovative ideas to support and protect the more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people around the world.

When Rudolph graduated in June, he turned down offers in local tech firms and headed to Geneva as an intern for UNHCR’s nascent innovation lab. He joined Stanford alumna and CISAC faithful, Alice Bosley, in the small office with a big mission: to aid refugees by driving innovation using the latest tools of technology. 

“I get to make a difference in the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in the world: refugees,” said Rudolph, a 23-year-old from Naperville, Ill., who came to Stanford on a gymnastics scholarship. “And I love that I get to meet such a diverse group of people with wildly different opinions about so many things.” 

Rudolph has now joined UNHCR Innovation full time and has traveled to Ecuador to pilot one of his projects and to Thailand for an innovation workshop. On a recent trip to Esmeraldas on the northwestern coast of Ecuador, he tested out an SMS program that would help displaced people get information from the UNHCR and its partner organizations. 

Bosley, the associate operations officer at UNHCR Innovation, first joined the U.N. as an intern speechwriter at the Permanent Mission of East Timor to the United Nations in New York. She was visiting some CISAC colleagues in the spring of 2012 when she learned about the burgeoning collaboration between the center and UNHCR. She volunteered for the project and became an intern with the newly formed UNHCR Innovation team, where she was later offered a full-time position.

Alice Bosley crossing a river near the Dollo Ado UNHCR refugee camp in Ethiopia.

“UNHCR Innovation is my dream job; I am constantly traveling to new and interesting locations to work on projects and I’m able to support some of the most creative and impressive people in the organization,” said Bosley, 25, who graduated in 2011 with a degree in international relations. “It’s challenging and sometimes overwhelming. But I wouldn’t pick anything else to do at this point in my life.” 

Rudolph and Bosley are models of the CISAC mission: to train the next generation of experts who will make the world a safer place. While not entrenched in the policy arena or at the forefront of arms control or Track II diplomacy, they are quietly, doggedly fulfilling the CISAC pledge to improve lives around the world. 

"One of CISAC's greatest strengths over the years has been its record of attracting enormously talented students and fellows from a diverse array of disciplines and giving them a chance to work on problems that affect lives around the world,” said Cuéllar. 

The UNHCR came to Cuéllar in early 2012 asking to collaborate. That initial request has led to an array of projects across campus and around the world. Cuéllar last year co-taught the class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities,” with Leslie Witt of the Palo Alto-based global design firm IDEO. That class in turn led to research trips in Ethiopia and Rwanda with UNHCR and the International Rescue Committee to test out some of the student projects to improve food security, communications, camp design and an SMS platform that Rudolph later tested with the innovation lab. 

“Ben and Alice were attracted to the refugee project because of its focus on improving conditions for forced migrants,” said Cuéllar. “Both of them are brimming with intellectual curiosity, ability, and dedication, so it's no surprise that UNHCR has put them at the center of its innovation work." 

The collaboration now extends far beyond CISAC. Cuéllar, CISAC visiting professor Jim Hathaway of the University of Michigan Law School, Roland Hsu of the Stanford Humanities Center and the NGO Asylum Access are convening a winter quarter working group on refugee rights. Stanford faculty will come from many departments to talk about the tension between providing emergency care and protecting refugee rights. 

CISAC led the UNHCR to the Stanford Geospatial Center, where students are working on four mapping projects to help refugees, including an interactive map that displays the density for refugees seeking shelter in that conflict. 

“Working with the UNHCR was truly a unique experience for us,” said Patricia Carbajales, geospatial manager at the Branner Earth Sciences Library who linked the students with the UNHCR advisers in Geneva and field offices around the world. “The students were completely engaged, understanding the importance that their projects had for UNHCR and, most importantly, for the refugees themselves.” 

The popularity of the projects has led to a new class in the spring, “GIS for Good: Applications for GIS for International Development and Humanitarian Relief.” 

Cuéllar and Elizabeth Gardner, associate director for partnerships and special projects at FSI, are working with UNHCR architects and the New York-based Ennead Architects Lab to develop new tools to expedite the complex process of laying out new refugee camps. 

Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service and the student-led Stanford in Government is making moves to permanently place interns or postgraduate fellows at UNHCR. FSI Senior Fellow Paul Wise, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford’s School of Medicine, will mentor that intern in the coming year. 

Meanwhile, out in the field, Rudolph doesn’t know if his UNHCR experience has forever changed his career path. He may come back to the valley and pick up where he left off; he may continue his humanitarian work. 

Either way, he says, “This work has really opened me up to a world of problems that are so vast it’s hard to grasp. It will be forever difficult to go back to my ignorant bliss.”

Ben Rudolph, center, with Sudanese refugees in a UNHCR refugee camp in Ethiopia, March 2013.

CISAC's William J. Perry was conferred the Department of Defense's Medal for Distinguished Public Service (Silver Palm) in recognition of 16 years of groundbreaking work in national and international security issues after serving as the 19th secretary of defense.

In a public statement, the Pentagon hailed Perry's commitment to U.S. national security, including his work on advising the Defense Policy Board and members of Congress; his Track II diplomacy work as director of the Preventive Defense Project; and his efforts to advance regional security in the Western Hemisphere as co-chair of the North American Forum. "The distinctive accomplishments of Dr. Perry reflect great credit upon himself an the Department of Defense," his citation read.

The award was presented by Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on Dec. 3. Carter praised Perry's work, saying the following: "Bill Perry advised and supported me on nearly every issue of consequence during my tenure - from developing and fielding some of our most agile and innovative new systems to increasing our Department's buying power. I cannot think of a more a deserving individual to receive the Department's highest public service award."

CISAC Senior Fellow Siegfried Hecker and the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI) have launched a website to chronicle more than 20 years of nuclear collaboration between the Russian Federation and the United States.

This collaboration culminated in a conference in June 2013 on Russia-US nuclear cooperation. The website documents presentations, participants, and news from the conference in both English and Russian. Work from this conference will continue to strengthen the partnership between the two countries.