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.

                                                                                                CyperusMedia.com

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.”

Thomas Fingar and former CISAC Visiting Scholar Fan Jishe write that the U.S.-China relationship is stronger and more interdependent than ever, but mutual suspicion and distrust persists. Four decades of stability have taught Beijing and Washington how to manage their relationship, particularly in managing issues where they cannot compromise. 

Nuclear energy is an essential engine that has helped to power South Korea’s industrialization and economic miracle. South Korea has become a world leader in both the domestic utilization of nuclear energy and its export potential. That journey began 40 years ago with the U.S.–South Korea Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (the so-called 123 Agreement). 

Despite its meteoric rise in nuclear power, South Korea faces serious challenges: It must demonstrate that nuclear power remains safe; that the government can convince the public to accept interim spent fuel storage and long-term geologic disposal; and that its choices of nuclear fuel cycle technologies do not compound global nuclear proliferation concerns. 

Because South Korea’s ascendency in nuclear power was built on close cooperation with American companies and was initially based on American technologies, its nuclear fuel-cycle choices remain in large part dependent on U.S. concurrence. 

The extent of U.S. control and influence of South Korea’s nuclear choices is the crux of the current negotiations for the renewal of the 40-year old agreement, which has been extended for two years until 2016. The position of the U.S. government appears to have been forged primarily on the pillar of nonproliferation. South Korea, on the other hand, views energy security, competitiveness of the industry, and its national security as equally important. The politics and symbolism of the negotiations appear to have obscured a rational analysis of South Korea’s nuclear future and its cooperation with the United States. 

A team of researchers led by me and others here at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) collaborated with a team from South Korea’s East Asia Institute, led by Professor Ha Young-Sun. Together we co-wrote a report, designed to look at these issues from both South Korean and American points of view.  

The CISAC team stepped back from the political stalemate and analyzed South Korea’s nuclear future based primarily on technical and economic considerations, but informed by the political situation. It conducted a TEP (technical, economic and political) analysis of the entire fuel cycle, which includes the front end (uranium mining and conversion; enrichment), the middle (fuel fabrication; reactor fabrication and construction; spent fuel storage) and back end (fuel reprocessing; spent fuel disposal; high-level waste disposal).

South Korea’s strategy of building a nuclear industry by focusing on the middle of the fuel cycle during the past several decades was brilliantly conceived and executed. Its nuclear industry is now among the best in the world. However, South Korea is advised to move to the construction of a centralized, away-from-reactor, dry-cask storage capability as quickly as possible. The TEP analysis finds it inadvisable for South Korea to pursue domestic enrichment in the short term because of the low technical and economic benefits, the ready global availability of enrichment services, and the substantial political downsides of pursuing such an option. In the longer term, if South Korea finds it needs enrichment capabilities as a hedge against supply disruption, large price fluctuations, or to enhance its reactor export potential, then it should pursue these strictly through international cooperative ventures.

South Korea’s strategy of building a nuclear industry by focusing on the middle of the fuel cycle during the past several decades was brilliantly conceived and executed."

 The TEP analysis also indicates that reprocessing spent fuel, either by the conventional PUREX process or by pyroprocessing, is not critical to South Korea’s short-term domestic program or its export market. Even if pyroprocessing can be shown to be technically and economically viable, its commercial development cannot be achieved rapidly enough to deal with South Korea’s near-term spent fuel accumulation problem. Moreover, the deployment of pyroprocessing faces considerable U.S. opposition. 

The best short-term option is to continue a robust pyroprocessing research program, preferably in cooperation with the United States as it is currently envisioned in the 10-year joint R&D program. In the longer term, the best prospects for the application of pyroprocessing are as a part of a fast reactor development program. The South Korean research team believes that pyroprocessing is an economically attractive alternative even for their current once-through fuel cycle; that is, it need not await the development of fast reactors because of the high cost of spent-fuel storage and eventual disposition in South Korea. 

Regardless of future fuel cycle choices, it is essential for South Korea to take immediate actions to restore the public’s trust in the nuclear industry. The government must deal resolutely with the industry’s alleged corruption problems and strengthen the government’s regulatory organizations dealing with all aspects of South Korea’s nuclear industry, as well as instill greater transparency and attention to quality matters in the Korean nuclear industry. This issue is closely tied to nuclear safety, which must remain the nuclear industry’s highest priority. 

Although the prospective terms for renewing the 123 Agreement were not a direct part of this study, we offer some overarching observations. First, the renewal should strive to develop a South Korea–U.S. partnership that reflects the enormous progress made in South Korea’s economic, political and industrial standing in the world since 1974. 

Second, Washington should not insist on the so-called nonproliferation “gold standard” adopted for the United Arab Emirates, in which countries developing nuclear energy pledge not to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium. Instead, the United States should strive for a criteria-based standard that better reflects a country’s technical, political, regulatory, and industrial capacity, as well as its nonproliferation record. 

Third, the agreement should not be constrained by the North Korean nuclear problem. Pyongyang has clearly violated the letter and the spirit of the 1992 North-South agreement. The nature of South Korea’s civilian nuclear capabilities has little, if any, influence on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. 

Finally, we should not allow the controversies over the terms of renewal for the 123 Agreement to overshadow what we view as the most important domestic and international consequence of South Korea’s meteoric rise as an industrial and nuclear energy power: It has emerged as a model state for future nuclear power aspirants by focusing on the middle of the nuclear fuel cycle. 

Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at CISAC, writes in this commentary for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that North Korea's decision to restart its 5-megawatt nuclear reactor is a big step back for denuclearization.

"The most likely technical scenario is that the North Koreans will operate the restarted 5-megawatt reactor for two years with a full load of 8,000 fuel rods, cool this spent fuel and extract roughly 10 to 12 kilograms of plutnoium within three years," he writes.

Therefore, he expects Pyongyang to gain one bomb's worth of plutonium a year.

Academics from American, European and Asian universities came together September 19th and 20th to present their research on the large-scale movements of people, and engage in a multidisciplinary exchange of ideas and perspectives.  This installment of the Europe Center - University of Vienna bi-annual series of conferences and workshops was held on the Stanford campus and co-sponsored by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

For the agenda, please visit the event website Migration and Integration: Global and Local Dimensions.

CISAC's Nick Hansen and Jeffrey Lewis have revealed new satellite imagery that indicates North Korea is likely restarting is nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. Pyongyang committed to shut down the nuclear site in 2007.

Hansen and Lewis concluded in a story on the popular blog about North Korea, Jeff Lewis on BBC: North Korea's Yongbyon reactor 'nearing operation', that white steam seen from an electrical power building on Aug. 31 indicates that the electrical system is about to come online. Energy is generated from the heat released by the nuclear reactor, which uses steam to power turbines. 

Lewis spoke with the BBC, commenting that: "The reactor looks like it either is or will within a matter of days be fully operational, and as soon as that happens, it will start producing plutonium." He also added that this development could increase North Korea's bargaining power in negotiations, and add a sense of urgency to issues on the Korean peninsula.