Rodney Ewing was elected to the National Academy of Engineering this week.

Ewing, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, was recognized for his research on “the long-term behavior of complex ceramic materials to assess their suitability for engineered nuclear waste sequestration.” He is a professor of geological sciences at Stanford.

Membership in the academy is one of the highest academic distinctions in the field of engineering. It honors outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to engineering literature” and “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education," according to the NAE.

The academy also honored two other Stanford professors: Andrea Goldsmith, professor of engineering, and Leonidas Guibas, professor of computer science. The three Stanford scholars among 84 new members joining NAE this year. In total, the academy has 2,281 members including 249 foreign members. The newly elected class will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the academy's annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 8, 2017. 

Click here to read a Stanford News Service story on the selections of Ewing and his colleagues to the National Academy of Engineering.

Published in the journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, this column by Seigfried Hecker below is based on content in his 2016 book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers:

On February 23, 1992, less than two months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, I landed on the tarmac in Sarov, a city the government had removed from maps to keep secret its status as a nuclear weapons center. I was then director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and­­ accompanied by two senior scientists from my own lab plus three colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The six of us were about to walk through the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear bomb, the technological and intellectual powerhouse behind the sophisticated arsenal that had been pointed at our country for the previous 40 years.

Shockingly, after an hour-long flight from Moscow, we stepped out of the Aeroflot turboprop into the open arms of our Russian hosts: Yuli Borisovich Khariton, the scientific leader of the Soviet nuclear program, and other senior lab staff who had waited in the chilly wind to welcome us. Just as remarkable was the fact that this wasn’t the first time we met our Russian counterparts. Two weeks earlier, directors of the Russian nuclear weapons labs, VNIIEF in Sarov and VNIITF in Snezhinsk, had for the first time in history set foot in our labs in Livermore and Los Alamos. This exchange of visits a quarter century ago marked a new turn in relations between the world’s two nuclear weapons superpowers.

The road to Sarov

Our first meeting on Russian soil would have been deemed improbable just a few months earlier. The encounter on the Sarov tarmac grew out of both persistence by determined individuals and larger historical forces. As the Soviet Union scrambled to adjust domestic and international policy in the face of mounting economic and social challenges in the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reached across the political divide to US President Ronald Reagan to take steps toward nuclear disarmament. One such step was the Joint Verification Experiment of 1988, in which the Soviet Union and the United States asked their nuclear weapons scientists to conduct parallel nuclear-explosion yield measurements at testing grounds in Nevada and Semipalatinsk, located in what is now Kazakhstan. The experiment helped overcome a stumbling block related to verification procedures needed to ratify the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT). The 1988 nuclear tests enabled the two sides to sign a new ratification protocol in Geneva in June 1990, and the TTBT entered into force in December 1990.

As history would have it, an unintended outcome of the TTBT ratification effort proved to be the most momentous. Viktor Mikhailov, head of the Soviet team that took part in the Joint Verification Experiment and later Russian minister of atomic energy, was right when he said that “the main result of the Joint Verification Experiment was not the development of procedures and extent of nuclear test monitoring of the joint development of technical verification means, but the chance for interpersonal communications with the American nuclear physicists.”

Indeed, it was working side by side at each other’s test sites that gave rise to deep-rooted affinity and built trust. Over the years, we had only caught glimpses of our Soviet nuclear scientist counterparts at a few international conferences where they disguised their institutional affiliations, saying they were part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was through months of collaboration at our test sites that the contours of their true home institutions—the nuclear weapons labs VNIIEF and VNIITF—began to emerge. As we would discover eventually, these Soviet labs were remarkably similar to our own. We realized that in addition to nuclear weapons work, they were conducting outstanding fundamental science. We became consumed with curiosity to learn more about it first-hand. The Russians were curious about our work as well.

We were all interested in cooperation, but the Russians even more so because they sensed before we did just how dramatically the Soviet Union was changing. Lev D. Ryabev, who headed the atomic ministry at the time, told me years later that Russian nuclear weapons scientists were so eager to work with their American counterparts because “we arrived in the nuclear century all in one boat—movement by any one will affect everyone. We were doomed to work together.”

It was during a 1990 trip to Moscow by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore lab scientists for technical discussions supporting the Geneva test ban talks that Mikhailov extended an impromptu invitation to visit the USSR’s secret nuclear city Sarov (then called Arzamas-16) for the first time.

The American scientists returned with specific proposals from the VNIIEF director and his senior scientists for collaboration with the US labs, along with an invitation to Lawrence Livermore Director John Nuckolls and me to visit the secret Russian cities.

Convinced by my Los Alamos colleagues that this was a great opportunity to collaborate scientifically in important areas of research, I tried a number of avenues in Washington to get approval for exploring potential cooperation. I got little traction until the second half of 1991, after the Soviet Union had begun to disintegrate. As it did so, President George H.W. Bush became concerned that brain drain from the Soviet nuclear complex could lead to the spread of knowledge about how to build these weapons of mass destruction.

Driven by that concern, US Energy Secretary James D. Watkins approved my request for the laboratory directors’ exchange visits, and two months after Gorbachev’s formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, we entered the surreal world of the Soviet Los Alamos.

A tradition worth sustaining 

Our visits to Sarov and Snezhinsk shattered our Cold War preconceptions of the Soviet nuclear program. We were particularly impressed by the depth of scientific talent. Although they lacked modern computers and electronics, their computational achievements were remarkable, and their experimental facilities were innovative and functional. We found the scientists’ dedication to their mission deeply patriotic, and their attention to nuclear weapons safety reassuring. During our briefings and tours, Russian scientists described leading-edge research in the fundamental science that underpinned their nuclear weapons program. The visits convinced me that our US nuclear labs should collaborate with their Russian counterparts, not only to help solve immediate problems like proliferation and loose nukes, but also because in doing so we would benefit scientifically.

Our Russian colleagues were prepared with proposals for cooperation in a surprisingly broad range of areas. During a daylong session in Chief Weapon Designer Boris Litvinov’s office in Snezhinsk, watched by portraits of Lenin and Igor Kurchatov, one of the fathers of the Soviet Bomb, we hammered out a protocol for cooperation that we would take back to our governments. We came up with a long list problems we wanted to work on together. It included enhancing the security and safety of nuclear weapons during reduction and dismantlement; preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons knowledge; promoting the conversion and diversification of nuclear facilities; preventing non-nuclear states and terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons; developing joint mechanisms for emergency response; enhancing the safety of nuclear arsenals; preventing unauthorized use of remaining weapons; and promoting protection and cleanup of the environment at nuclear weapons facilities.

It turned out that we scientists were far ahead of what the US government was prepared to authorize at the time. We heard that when members of the National Security Council staff, which coordinated interagency government issues with Russia, received a copy of the protocol, they declared it did not exist and threw it in the waste paper basket. However, Nuckolls and I presented the protocol to Watkins and received approval to proceed, though only in fundamental science cooperation.

By May 1992, even though the US Energy and State Departments had only agreed to general principles, the former had provided us with the necessary financial support and the latter with the required permissions for travel to Russia. Just as importantly, we had defined what we wanted to do first in the collaboration we called lab-to-lab. We planned for joint experiments in high-energy-density physics and conferences on computer modeling and simulation.

In spite of the initial US government concerns, we would eventually end up cooperating in almost all the areas outlined in the initial protocol. A spirit of collaboration prevailed for nearly a quarter century, and was essential to successfully mitigating the dangers resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, that cooperation has all but come to an end during the past few years as relations between Moscow and Washington have soured. But the benefits of future cooperation are potentially enormous, as a new report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative makes clear. The US and Russian governments, as well as the two countries’ scientists, should seize any opportunities that arise to rekindle nuclear cooperation.

Stanford University has expressed its views on the recent executive order on immigration, and is offering resources for students who could be affected. News accounts indicate that as many as 17,000 students across the country fall into this category. On Jan. 27, President Trump signed an executive order restricting travel to the United States of people from seven largely Muslim countries -- Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, said CISAC's "mission is generating knowledge to build a safer world. We bring scholars, ideas from everywhere. And always will."

Looking ahead, Stanford is planning campus events and initiatives on this issue. Some information already to note: 

• Stanford launched a new website on immigration issues for students and scholars. This includes centralized campus information about international travel guidance and other information. Stanford will continue to add content to this site.

• A letter to the campus community from Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, provost John Etchemendy, and incoming provost Persis Drell affirming the university's support for international students. "As events unfold, the university intends to continue vigorously advocating before Congress, the Executive Branch, and beyond for policies consistent with its commitment to members of our community who are international, undocumented and those who are impacted by the recent executive order."

Russia’s desire to be a great power, nuclear deterrence and naval strategies are the reasons behind its rapid Arctic military build-up, a Stanford expert says.

The issue is complicated. “There are three basic drivers: military-strategic calculations, economic development, and domestic objectives,” said Katarzyna Zysk, a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Zysk has a forthcoming paper on this topic to be published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. Last year, she presented her findings at the conference, "The Russian Military in Contemporary Perspective," held by the American Foreign Policy Council. She also discussed her research at the Hoover Institution's Arctic Security Initiative meeting in November 2016. 

Putin’s foreign policy

Despite claims it would not do so, Russia since 2012 in particular has embarked on a large-scale military modernization in the Arctic across basically all defense branches, with a special focus on the air and maritime domain, Zysk said.

“The military ambitions have expanded with the more nationalist and isolationist turn in Russian policies after (Vladimir) Putin’s return as president in May 2012,” said Zysk, an associate professor at the Norwegian Defence University College who specializes in Russia’s security and defense policies.

In 2014, Russia decided to deploy military forces along the entire Russian Arctic coast, from Murmansk to Chukotka, and on permanent basis. A modernization effort is underway, too.

This trend has deepened the asymmetry of power between Russia’s forces and those of other countries in the region, such as the United States, Zysk said.

“The Arctic contributes to maintaining Russia’s great power status, which has been one of the main driving forces behind Putin’s foreign policy in recent years,” she said.

‘Startling’ military build-up

The Arctic appears as one of the most stable Russian border regions, which makes the rapid defense build-up by a Russian government with a slowing economy quite perplexing to many observers, noted Zysk.

Apart from the economy, she explains the military strategies involved:

“Russia has revived the Cold War ‘Bastion’ concept in the Barents Sea: In case of conflict, the Northern Fleet’s task is to form maritime areas closed to penetration for enemy naval forces, where Russia would deploy strategic submarines and maintain control. In the areas further south, Russia would seek to deny control for potential adversaries. It also gives Russia a possibility to attack an enemy’s sea lines of communication,” she said.

On top of this, Russia’s modernization efforts are focused on modernizing its nuclear deterrent, including building fourth-generation strategic submarines of the Borei class: three are completed, and five are under different stages of construction, according to Zysk.

Russia is also building new attack submarines, as well as new frigates and corvettes, though the shipbuilding industry is struggling with delivering these on time, she added.

Also, the Artic provides Russia a strategic gateway to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Zysk said, which is important given that Russia’s naval forces are separated between four theaters of operations – the Pacific, the Arctic-Atlantic, the Baltic and the Black Sea.

As a result of climate change, Russia may be able to more freely move its warships between its main bases along the Northern Sea Route, she added.

“Importantly, the forces in the Arctic are not going to stay only in the Arctic. With the increased mobility, the military units can be transferred rapidly to support Russia military operations in other regions, as we have observed in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has used a brigade deployed in the High North. The trend is likely to continue, also because Russia’s military capabilities remain limited, despite the ongoing modernization,” she said.

Perceived threats

Russia considers that if it engaged in conflict with other great powers, such as the United States, the Arctic would be a major target, Zysk said. Russia has also rehearsed scenarios when the biggest part of the Russian Navy based in the Arctic, the Northern Fleet, would be activated during conflicts escalating in other regions. That’s a reason for the strengthening of its defenses in the region.

“In the Russian assessment, an aerial attack from the Arctic region may pose military threats to the entire Russian territory. In particular, however, Russia is concerned about the sea-based nuclear deterrent deployed in the Arctic. As a result, Russia has devoted a strong focus to increasing air defense and air control across the Arctic,” she said.

Apart from threats from state actors, environmental accidents, trafficking, terrorist attacks on industrial infrastructure or increased foreign intelligence also make the Arctic, in Russia’s view, a vulnerable territory. Finally, the issue of Russia’s vast energy reserves and other rich natural resources in the Arctic are another factor. The development of the Arctic is seen as one of the solutions to what ails the Russian economy.

Zysk said, “Since the early 2000s, the Russian political and military leadership has systematically argued that there will be an acute shortage of energy resources worldwide, which may lead to a conflict, and that the West, led by the United States, may attempt to seize Russia’s oil and gas.”

While this assessment is controversial, Zysk points to statements by the top Russian political and military leadership, including Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, that suggests the Russian leadership believes such scenario may occur by 2030.

“It may also explain some of the military investments in the region, such as reactivating 13 military airfields across the Arctic, paratroopers’ exercises and amphibious landing operations along the Northern Sea Route,” she said.

In addition, the Arctic holds a symbolically important place in Russia’s history and national identity, according to Zysk.

“Displays of military strength, accompanied by rhetoric that portrays Russia as the Arctic superpower, resonate well with the Russian public, especially in communities where feelings of nationalism and isolationism run deep,” she said.

As a result of the military modernization, she added, Russia is today better prepared to participate in complex military operations than a decade ago, especially in joint operations, strategic mobility and rapid deployments.

“Russia’s ability to limit or deny access and control various parts of the Arctic has increased accordingly,” Zysk said.

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MEDIA CONTACTS

Katarzyna Zysk, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 723-6840, kzysk@ifs.mil.no

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “doomsday clock” moved 30 seconds forward to 2 and a half minutes to midnight. The closer the minute hand gets to midnight, the closer the bulletin predicts humankind is to destroying itself. The symbolic clock was created in 1947 when Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer (the father of the U.S. nuclear program) founded the publication.

The following experts from the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies offered these perspectives:

William J. Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), said: "Last year the Doomsday clock was set at 3 minutes to midnight, the closest it has been to global 'midnight' since the iciest days of the Cold War. This ominous pronouncement reflected my own fears that we were now in greater danger of nuclear catastrophe than we were during the Cold War, with the growing threat of nuclear terrorism, the continued risk of accidents and miscalculation, and the possibility of regional nuclear war and continued nuclear proliferation around the world."

He added, "Today the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that we have moved closer to global catastrophe, for the first time setting the clock 30 seconds ahead to 2 and a half minutes to midnight, approaching a time not seen since the United States and Soviet Russia first developed the H-bomb. We must heed this dire warning as a call to action. There are concrete steps that we can take to reduce the risk of nuclear annihilation, but we must start today."

Siegfried Hecker, the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and senior fellow at CISAC, said, "The bulletin’s keepers of the clock made the correct call to move the clock 30 seconds closer to midnight. The disregard for fact-based analysis of issues such as global climate change during the recent presidential campaign is truly alarming. However, my immediate concerns focus on the world having become a more dangerous nuclear place."

He said, "Developments in North Korea top the list: 2016 was a very bad year as Pyongyang greatly expanded its nuclear complex to increase the size of its arsenal to perhaps as many as 20 to 25 weapons, conducted two more nuclear tests to enhance the sophistication of its weapons, and launched two dozen missile tests. All of this while Washington cut all communications with a regime about which we know so little, while continuing the failed policies of sanctions and leaning on China to solve the problem."

"Confrontation," Hecker said, "has replaced cooperation between Russia and the United States. For the first time since the end of the Cold War the specter of a nuclear arms race was raised in 2016. President Putin put the finishing touches on suspending or terminating most of the cooperative nuclear threat reduction programs with the United States. Nuclear safety and security concerns appear to have taken a back seat to nuclear saber rattling and cyber attacks."

He noted, "Tensions between China and the United States have increased substantially over Beijing’s more muscular role in international affairs, particularly with its actions in the South China Sea. Moreover, tensions over Taiwan prompted by President Trump’s comments about the One-China policy renew the possibility of conflict."

"South Asia has inched closer to potential nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan. India’s expanding economy and its concerns about Chinese military expansion has prompted it to strengthening its nuclear arsenal by moving toward a full triad – land, air and sea-based nuclear weapons. Pakistan, its much smaller and weaker neighbor, feels increasingly threatened by India’s expanding military. It has moved to what is called a posture of full-spectrum nuclear deterrence, which includes very dangerous tactical battlefield nuclear weapons that lower the nuclear threshold," Hecker said.

"Preventing and responding to potential acts of nuclear terrorism require close international cooperation. Unfortunately, all signs point in the opposite direction at a time when the atrocities perpetrated by terrorists are increasing. Greatest among these pullbacks was President Putin’s decision not to participate in the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit held in Washington, DC. With President Obama’s tenure having ended, this very effective collaborative international effort is now in limbo," he said.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Chaney Kourouniotis, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations: (6650) 724-9842, chaney.kourouniotis@stanford.edu

Space is more important than ever for the security of the United States, but it’s almost like the Wild West in terms of behavior, a top general said today.

Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, spoke Jan. 24 at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His talk was titled, “U.S. Strategic Command Perspectives on Deterrence and Assurance.”

Hyten said, “Space is fundamental to every single military operation that occurs on the planet today.” He added that “there is no such thing as a war in space,” because it would affect all realms of human existence, due to the satellite systems. Hyten advocates “strategic deterrence” and “norms of behavior” across space as well as land, water and cyberspace.

Otherwise, rivals like China and Russia will only threaten U.S. interests in space and wreak havoc for humanity below, he said. Most of contemporary life depends on systems connected to space.

Hyten also addressed other topics, including recent proposals by some to upgrade the country’s missile defense systems.

“You just don’t snap your fingers and build a state-of-the-art anything overnight,” Hyten said, adding that he has not yet spoken to Trump administration officials about the issue. “We need a powerful military,” but a severe budget crunch makes “reasonable solutions” more likely than expensive and unrealistic ones.

On the upgrade front, Hyten said he favors a long-range strike missile system to replace existing cruise missiles; a better air-to-air missile for the Air Force; and an improved missile defense ground base interceptor.

‘Critically dependent’

From satellites to global-positioning systems (GPS), space has transformed human life – and the military – in the 21st century, Hyten said. In terms of defining "space," the U.S. designates people who travel above an altitude of 50 miles as astronauts.

As the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, Hyten oversees the control of U.S. strategic forces, providing options for the president and secretary of defense. In particular, this command is charged with space operations (such as military satellites), information operations (such as information warfare), missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, global strike and strategic deterrence (the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and combating weapons of mass destruction.

Hyten explained that every drone, fighter jet, bomber, ship and soldier is “critically dependent” on space to conduct their own operations. All cell phones use space, and the GPS command systems overall are managed at Strategic Command, he said.

“No soldier has to worry about what’s over the next hill,” he said, describing GPS capabilities, which have fundamentally transformed humanity’s way of life.

Space needs to be available for exploration, he said.

“I watch what goes on in space, and I worry about us destroying that environment for future generations.” He said that too many drifting objects and debris exist – about 22,000 right now. A recent Chinese satellite interception created a couple thousand more debris objects that now circle about the Earth at various altitudes and pose the risk of striking satellites.

“We track every object in space” now, Hyten said, urging “international norms of behavior in space.”

He added, “We have to deter bad behavior on space. We have to deter war in space. It’s bad for everybody. We could trash that forever.”

But now rivals like China and Russia are building weapons to deploy in the lower levels of space. “How do we prevent this? It’s bigger than a space problem,” he said.

Deterring conflict in the cyber, nuclear and space realms is the strategic deterrence goal of the 21st century, Hyten said.

“The best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war,” he said.

Hyten believes the U.S. needs a fundamentally different debate about deterrence. And it all starts with nuclear weapons.

“In my deepest heart, I wish I didn’t have to worry about nuclear weapons,” he said. Hyten described his job as “pretty sobering, it’s not easy.”

But he also noted the mass violence of the world prior to 1945 when the first atomic bomb was used. Roughly 80 million people died from 1939 to 1945 during World War II. Consider that in the 10-plus years of the Vietnam War, 58,000 Americans were killed. That’s equivalent to two days of deaths in WWII, he said.

In a world without nuclear weapons, a rise in conventional warfare would produce great numbers of mass casualties, Hyten said. About war, he said, “Once you see it up close, no human will ever want to experience it.”

Though America has “crazy enemies” right now, in many ways the world is more safe than during WWII, Hyten said. The irony is that nuclear weapons deterrence has kept us from the type of mass killings known in events like WWII. But the U.S. must know how to use its nuclear deterrence effectively.

Looking ahead, Hyten said the U.S. needs to think about space as a potential war environment. An attack in space might not mean a response in space, but on the Earth.

Hyten describes space as the domain that people look up at it and still dream about. “I love to look at the stars,” but said he wants to make sure he’s not looking up at junk orbiting in the atmosphere.

‘Space geek’

Hyten has served in the Air Force for 35 years. He originally wanted to be an astronaut, but his eyesight was too bad. He got a waiver, and graduated Harvard in 1981 with an engineering degree on a ROTC scholarship. He entered the Air Force thinking he would only do four years. But then he had a close-up view of what a young Air Force officer could find in the last frontier of space as satellites and military space science were booming.

“God, I love space,” he said.

In introducing Hyten, Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, described him as a person of unwavering dedication and profound insights who understands the gravity of situations. “A self-described space geek,” she said.

Hyten lauded CISAC for its research and educational work on national security, and said he enjoyed being around people willing to test out new ideas and discuss potential solutions for vexing problems.

Earlier in the day on campus, Hyten met with William J. Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at CISAC; George Shultz, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; and Condoleezza Rice, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Hoover Institution.

General Hyten was nominated for reassignment to head the U.S. Strategic Command on Sept. 8, 2016. He commanded Air Force Space Command from 2014 to 2016.

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MEDIA CONTACTS

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Improving the U.S.-China relationship is a focus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

CISAC continued this tradition in co-sponsoring the 8th Sino-U.S. Security Relations and Cooperation Conference in Beijing from Dec. 14-15, 2016. The conference was hosted and co-sponsored by the Foreign Ministry's China Institute of International Studies (CIIS).

Ambassador Su Ge, president of CIIS, attended the conference and delivered an opening remark. FSI’s Thomas Fingar and Teng Jianqun from CIIS chaired the conference.

Fingar said, “Although held at a time of uncertainty about the future of U.S.-China relations, the conference included constructive exchanges on strategic stability, obstacles to cooperation in space, and other sensitive topics.”

He added, “The exchanges were frank and constructive because they built on the foundation of understanding and trust developed through years-long exchanges between CISAC and CIIS. In the next phase, small teams of American and Chinese experts will develop joint blueprints to enhance understanding of issues critical for nuclear stability and space cooperation.”

CISAC co-founder John W. Lewis has been active for many years encouraging and supporting better ties between the U.S. and China. He is an expert on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, China's nuclear weapons program, U.S. policy toward Korea and health security issues in northeast Asia.

During this most recent Beijing conference, scholars and security experts from both the U.S. and China held in-depth discussions on topics including cybersecurity, outer space cooperation, maritime dispute management, missile defense, grey zone cooperation, and China-U.S. nuclear issues.

The American attendees included scholars from CISAC (Fingar, Brad Roberts, and Joseph Torigian); Brad Roberts, director, Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Major General Roger W. Burg, former commander, 20th Air Force; Vice Admiral Michael Connor (retired), U.S. Navy; Lieutenant General Susan J. Helms (retired), U.S. Air Force general and former NASA astronaut; Lieutenant General James M. Kowalski (retired), U.S. Air Force general; Steven M. Benner,chief, Strategy and Campaign Division, U.S. Strategic Command, among others.

The Chinese experts came from a variety of institutions – CIIS, China Academy of Engineering Physics, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Rocket Force, Rocket Force College, China Defense Science and Technology Information Center, PLA Navy Academy of Military Science, PLA South Command, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Renmin University of China, National Defense University, Tsinghua University, etc. 

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The story below -- "Bill Perry is Terrified. Why Aren't You" -- appeared in Politico Magazine on Jan 6. The writers were John F. Harris and Bryan Bender. William Perry also wrote this Washington Post op-ed on why America needs creative diplomacy now to avoid a nuclear catastrophe with North Korea, which is quickly accelerating its ICMB capabilities to launch nuclear warheads.

At 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?

Perry’s hypothesis for the disconnect is that much of the population, especially that rising portion with no clear memories of the first Cold War, is suffering from a deficit of comprehension. Even a single nuclear explosion in a major city would represent an abrupt and possibly irreversible turn in modern life, upending the global economy, forcing every open society to suspend traditional liberties and remake itself into a security state. “The political, economic and social consequences are beyond what people understand,” Perry says. And yet many people place this scenario in roughly the same category as the meteor strike that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs—frightening, to be sure, but something of an abstraction.

So Perry regards his last great contribution of a 65-year career as a crusade to stimulate the public imagination—to share the vivid details of his own nightmares. He is doing so in a recent memoir, in a busy public speaking schedule, in half-empty hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, and increasingly with an online presence aimed especially at young people. He has enlisted the help of his 28-year-old granddaughter to figure out how to engage a new generation, including through a series of virtual lecturesknown as a MOOC, or massive open online course.

He is eagerly signing up for “Ask Me Anything” chats on Reddit, in which some people still confuse him with William “The Refrigerator” Perry of NFL fame. He posts his ruminations on YouTube, where they give Katy Perry no run for her money, even as the most popular are closing in on 100,000 views. 

One of the nightmare scenarios Perry invokes most often is designed to roust policymakers who live and work in the nation’s capital. The terrorists would need enriched uranium. Due to the elaborate and highly industrial nature of production, hard to conceal from surveillance, fissile material is still hard to come by—but, alas, far from impossible. Once it is procured, with help from conspirators in a poorly secured overseas commercial power centrifuge facility, the rest of the plot as Perry imagines it is no great technological or logistical feat. The mechanics of building a crude nuclear device are easily within the reach of well-educated and well-funded militants. The crate would arrive at Dulles International Airport, disguised as agricultural freight. The truck bomb that detonates on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol instantly kills the president, vice president, House speaker, and 80,000 others.

Where exactly is your office? Your house? And then, as Perry spins it forward, how credible would you find the warnings, soon delivered to news networks, that five more bombs are set to explode in unnamed U.S. cities, once a week for the next month, unless all U.S. military personnel overseas are withdrawn immediately?

If this particular scenario does not resonate with you, Perry can easily rattle off a long roster of others—a regional war that escalates into a nuclear exchange, a miscalculation between Moscow and Washington, a computer glitch at the exact wrong moment. They are all ilks of the same theme—the dimly understood threat that the science of the 20th century is set to collide with the destructive passions of the 21st. 

“We’re going back to the kind of dangers we had during the Cold War,” Perry said. “I really thought in 1990, 1991, 1992, that we left those behind us. We’re starting to re-invent them. We and the Russians and others don’t understand that what we’re doing is re-creating those dangers—or maybe they don’t remember the dangers. For younger people, they didn’t live through those dangers. But when you live through a Cuban Missile Crisis up close and you live through a false alarm up close, you do understand how dangerous it is, and you believe you should do everything you could possibly do to [avoid] going back.”

***

For people who follow the national security priesthood, the dire scenarios are all the more alarming for who is delivering them. Through his long years in government Perry invariably impressed colleagues as the calmest person in the room, relentlessly rational, such that people who did not know him well—his love of music and literature and travel—regarded his as a purely analytical mind, emotion subordinated to logic and duty.

Starting in the 1950s as a technology executive and entrepreneur in some of the most secretive precincts of the defense industry, he gradually took on a series of high-level government assignments that gave him one of the most quietly influential careers of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Fifteen years before serving as Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, Perry was the Pentagon official in charge of weapons research during the Carter administration. It was from this perch that he may have had his most far-reaching impact, and left him in some circles as a legendary figure. He used his office to give an essential push to two ideas that transformed warfare over the next generation decisively to American advantage. One idea was stealth technology, which allowed U.S. warplanes to fly over enemy territory undetected. The other was precision-guided munitions, which allowed U.S. bombs to land with near-perfect accuracy.

During the Clinton years, Perry so prized his privacy that he initially turned down the job of Defense secretary—changing his mind only after Clinton and Al Gore pleaded with him that the news media scrutiny wouldn’t be so bad.

The reputation he built over a life in the public sphere is starkly at odds with this latest highly impassioned chapter of Perry’s career. Harold Brown, who also is 89, first recruited Perry into government, and was Perry’s boss while serving as Defense secretary in the Carter years. “No one would have thought of Bill Perry as a crusader,” he says. “But he is on a crusade.”

Lee Perry, his wife of nearly 70 years, is living in an elder care facility, her once buoyant presence now lost to dementia. Perry himself, lucid as ever, has seen his physical frame become frail and stooped. Rather than slowing his schedule, he has accelerated his travels to plead with people to awaken to the danger. A trip to Washington includes a dinner with national security reporters and testimony on Capitol Hill. Back home in California, he’s at the Google campus to prod engineers to contemplate that their world may not last long enough for their dreams of technology riches to come true. He’s created an advocacy group, the William J. Perry project, devoted to public education about nuclear weapons. He’s enlisted both his granddaughter and his 64-year-old daughter, Robin Perry, in the cause.

But if his profile is rising, his style is essentially unchanged. He is a man known for self-effacement, trying to shape an era known for relentless self-promotion, a voice of quiet precision in a time of devil-take-the-hindmost bombast. The rational approach to problem-solving that propelled his career and won him adherents and friends in both political parties and even among some of America’s erstwhile enemies remains his guide—in this case, by endeavoring to calculate the possibilities and probabilities of a terrorist attack, regional nuclear war, or horrible miscalculation with Russia.

“I want to be very clear,” he said. “I do not think it is a probability this year or next year or anytime in the foreseeable future. But the consequence is so great, we have to take it seriously. And there are things to greatly lower those possibilities that we’re simply not doing.”

***

Perry really did not expect he would have to write this chapter of his public life. His official career closed with what seemed then an unambiguous sense of mission accomplished. By the time he arrived in the Pentagon’s top job in 1994, the Cold War was over, and the main item on the nuclear agenda seemed to be cleaning up no-longer-needed arsenals. As defense secretary, Perry stood with his Russian counterpart, Pavel Grachev, as they jointly blew up missile silos in the former Soviet Union and tilled sunflower seeds in the dirt. 

“I finally thought by the end of the ‘80s we lived through this horrible experience and it’s behind us,” Perry said. “When I was secretary, I fully believed it was behind us.”

After leaving the Pentagon, he accepted an assignment from Clinton to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear development program—and seemed agonizingly close to a breakthrough as the last days of the president’s term expired.

Now, he sees his grandchildren inheriting a planet possibly more dangerous than it was during his public career. No one could doubt that the Sept. 11 terrorists would have gladly used nuclear bombs instead of airplanes if they had had them, and it seems only a matter of time until they try. Instead of a retreating threat in North Korea, that fanatical regime now possesses as many as eight nuclear bombs, and is just one member of a growing nuclear club. Far from a new partnership with Russia, Vladimir Putin has given old antagonisms a malevolent new face. American policymakers talk of spending up to $1 trillion to modernize the nuclear arsenal. And now comes Donald Trump with a long trail of statements effectively shrugging his shoulders about a world newly bristling with bombs and people with reasons to use them.

Perry knew Hillary Clinton well professionally, and says he admired both her and Bill Clinton for their professional judgment though he was never a personal intimate of either. He was prescient before the election in expressing skepticism about how voters would respond to the dynastic premise of the Clinton campaign—a healthy democracy should grow new voices—but was as surprised as everyone else on Election Day. Donald Trump was not the voice he was looking for, to put it mildly, but he has responded to the Trump cyclone with modulated restraint. Perry said he assumes his most truculent rhetoric isn’t serious, the utterances of a man who assumed his words were for political effect only and had no real consequences.

Now that they do, Perry is hoping to serve as a kind of ambassador to rationality. He said he is hoping for audiences soon, with Trump if the incoming president will see him, and certainly Trump’s national security team, which includes several people Perry knows, including Defense Secretary nominee James Mattis.

There is little doubt the message if the meeting comes. “We are starting a new Cold War,” he says. “We seem to be sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race. … We and the Russians and others don’t understand what we are doing.”

“I am not suggesting that this Cold War and this arms race is identical to the old one,” Perry added. “But in many ways, it is just as bad, just as dangerous. And totally unnecessary.”

***

Perry had been brooding over the question for a year. It was in the early 1950s, he was still in his 20s, and the subject was partial differential equations—the topic of his Ph.D. thesis. A particular problem had been absorbing him, day in and day out, hours and hours on end. Then, out of nowhere, a light came on.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, and it was all there,” Perry recalled. “It was all there, and I got out of bed and sat down. The next two or three hours, I wrote my thesis, and from the first word I wrote down, I never doubted what the last word was going to be: It was a magic moment.”

The story is a reminder of something definitional about Bill Perry. Before he became in recent years an apostle of disarmament, before he sat atop the nation’s war-making apparatus in the 1990s, before he was the executive of a defense contractor specializing in the most complex arenas of Cold War surveillance in the 1960s, he was a young man in love with mathematics.

In those days, Perry had planned on a career as a math professor. His attraction to math was not merely practical, in the way that engineers or architects rely on math. The appeal was just as much aesthetic, in ways that people who are not numbers people—political life tends to be dominated by word people—cannot easily comprehend. To Perry’s mind, there was a purity to math, a beauty to the patterns and relationships, that was not unlike music. Math for Perry represented analytical discipline, a way of achieving mastery not only over numerical problems but any hard problem, by breaking it down into essential parts, distilling complexity into simplicity.

This trait was why Pentagon reporters in the 1990s liked spending time around Perry. When most public officials are asked a question, one studies the transcript later to decipher a succession of starts and stalls, sentence fragments and ellipses, that cumulatively convey an impressionistic sense of mind but no clear fixed meaning. Perry’s sentences, by contrast, always cut with surgical precision. It was one reason Clinton White House officials often held their breath when he gave interviews—Perry might make news by being clear on subjects, such as ethnic warfare in the Balkans or a nuclear showdown in North Korea, that the West Wing preferred to try to fog over.

“I’ve never been able to attack a policy problem with a mathematical formula,” he recalled, “but I have always believed that the rigorous way of thinking about a problem was good. It separated the fact from the bullshit, and that’s very important sometimes, to separate what you can from what you would hope you can do.”

Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to reduce the risk. 

And just how high is the risk? The answer of course is ultimately unknowable. Perry’s point, though, is that it’s a hell of a lot higher than you think.

Perry invites his listeners to consider all the various scenarios that might lead to a nuclear event. “Mathematically speaking, you add those all together in one year it is still just a possibility, not a probability,” he reckons. “But then you go out ten, twenty years and each time this possibility repeats itself, and then it starts to become a probability. How much time we have to get those possibility numbers lower, I don’t know. But sooner or later the odds are going to get us, I am afraid.”

***

Almost uniquely among living Americans, Bill Perry has actually faced down the prospect of nuclear war before—twice.

In the fall of 1962, Bill Perry was 35, father of five young children, living in the Bay Area and serving as director of Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories—driving his station wagon to recitals in between studying missile trajectories and the radius of nuclear detonations. 

Where he resided was not then called Silicon Valley, but the exuberance and spirit of creative possibility we now associate with the region was already evident. The giants then were Bill Hewlett and David Packard, men Perry deeply admired and wished to emulate in his own business career. The innovation engine at that time, however, was not consumer technology; it was the government’s appetite for advantage in a mortal struggle against a powerful Soviet foe. Perry was known as a star in the highly complex field of weapons surveillance and interpretation.

So it was not a surprise, one bright October day, for Perry to get a call from Albert “Bud” Wheelon, a friend at the Central Intelligence Agency. Wheelon said he wanted Perry in Washington for a consultation. Perry said he’d juggle his schedule and be there the next week.

“No,” Wheelon responded. “I need to see you right away.”

Perry caught the red-eye from San Francisco, and went straight to the CIA, where he was handed photographs whose meaning was instantly clear to him. They were of Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba. For the next couple weeks, Perry would stay up past midnight each evening poring over the latest reconnaissance photos and help write the analysis that senior officials would present the next morning to President Kennedy.

Perry experienced the crisis partly as ordinary citizen, hearing Kennedy on television draw an unambiguous line against Soviet missiles in this hemisphere and promising that any attack would be met with “a full retaliatory response.” But he possessed context, about the capabilities of weapons and the daily state of play in the crisis, that gave him a vantage point superior to that of all but perhaps a few dozen people.

“I was part of a small team—six or eight people,” he recounted of those days 54 years earlier. “Half of them technical experts, half of them intelligence analysts, or photo interpreters. It was a minor role but I was seeing all the information coming in. I thought every day when I went back to the hotel it was the last day of my life because I knew exactly what nuclear weapons could do. I knew it was not just a lot of people getting killed. It was the end of civilization and I thought it was about to happen.”

It was years later that Perry, like other more senior participants in the crisis, learned how right that appraisal was. Nuclear bombs weren’t only heading toward Cuba on Soviet ships, as Kennedy believed and announced to Americans at the time. Some of them were already there, and local commanders had been given authority to use them if Americans launched a preemptive raid on Cuba, as Kennedy was being urged, goaded even, by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay and other military commanders. At the same time, Soviet submarines were armed and one commander had been on the verge of launching them until other officers on the vessel talked him out of it. Either event would have in turn sent U.S. missiles flying. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis recounting is one of the dramatic peaks in “My Journey on the Nuclear Brink,” the memoir Perry published last fall. It is a book laced with other close calls—like November 9, 1979, when Perry was awakened in the middle of the night by a watch officer at the North American Aerospace and Defense Command (NORAD) reporting that his computers showed 200 Soviet missiles in flight toward the United States. For a frozen moment, Perry thought: This is it—This is how it ends.

The watch officer soon set him at ease. It was a computer error, and he was calling to see whether Perry, the technology expert, had any explanation. It took a couple days to discover the low-tech answer: Someone had carelessly left a crisis-simulation training tape in the computer. All was well. But what if this blunder had happened in the middle of a real crisis, with leaders in Washington and Moscow already on high alert? The inescapable conclusion was the same as it was in 1962: The world skirting nuclear Armageddon as much by good luck as by skilled crisis management.

Perry is part of a distinct cohort in American history, one that didn’t come home with the large-living ethos of the World War II generation, but took responsibility for cleaning up the world that the war bequeathed. He was a 14-year-old in Butler, Pennsylvania when he heard the news of the Pearl Harbor attack in a friend’s living room, and had the disappointed realization that the war might be over by the time he was old enough to fight in it. That turned out to be true—he was just shy of 18 at war’s end—a fact that places Perry in what demographers have called the “Silent Generation,” too young for one war but already middle-aged by the time college campuses erupted over Vietnam. Like many in his generation, Perry was not so much silent as deeply dutiful, with an understated style that served as a genial, dry-witted exterior to a life in which success was defined by how faithfully one met his responsibilities.

Perry said he became aware, first gradually and over time profoundly, of the surreal contradictions of his professional life. His work—first at Sylvania and then at ESL, a highly successful defense contracting firm he co-founded in 1963—was relentlessly logical, analyzing Soviet threats and intentions and coming up with rational responses to deter them. But each rational move was part of a supremely irrational dynamic—“mutually assured destruction”—that placed the threat of massive casualties at the heart of America’s basic strategic thinking. It was the kind of framework in which policymakers could accept that a mere 25 million people dead was good news. Also the kind that in one year alone led the United States to produce 8,000 nuclear bombs. By the end, the Cold War left the planet with about 70,000 bombs (a total that is now down to about 15,500).

“I think probably everybody who was involved in nuclear weapons in those days would see the two sides of it,” Perry recalls, “the logic of deterrence and the madness of deterrence, and there was no mistake, I think, that the acronym was MAD.”

***

Perry has been at the forefront of a movement that he considers the sane and only alternative, and he has joined forces with other leading Cold Warriors who in another era would likely have derided their vision as naïve. In January 2007, he was a co-author of a remarkable commentary that ran on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It was signed also by two former secretaries of state, George Schulz and Henry Kissinger and by Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee—all leading military hawks and foreign policy realists who came together to argue for something radical: that the goal of U.S. policy should be not merely the reduction and control of atomic arms, it should be the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons.

This sounded like gauzy utopianism, especially bizarre coming from supremely pragmatic men. But Perry and the others always made clear they were describing a long-term ideal, one that would only be achieved through a series of more incremental steps. The vision was stirring enough that it was endorsed by President Obama in his opening weeks in office, in a March 2009 address in Prague.

In retrospect, Obama’s speech may have been the high point for the vision of abolition. “A huge amount of progress was made,” recalled Shultz, now 93. “Now it is going in the other direction.” 

“We have less danger of an all-out war with Russia,” in Nunn’s view. “But we have more danger of some type of accident, miscalculation, cyber interference, a terrorist group getting a nuclear weapon. It requires a lot more attention than world leaders are giving it.” Perry’s goal now is much more defensive than it was just a few years ago—halting what has become inexorable momentum toward reviving Cold War assumptions about the central role of nukes in national security. 

More recently he’s added yet another recruit to his cause: California Governor Jerry Brown. Brown, now 78, met Perry a year ago, after deciding that he wanted to devote his remaining time in public service mainly to what he sees as civilization’s two existential issues, climate change and nuclear weapons. Brown said he became fixated on spreading Perry’s message after reading his memoir: He recently gave a copy to President Obama and is trying to bend the ear of others with influence in Washington.

If Bill Perry has a gift for understatement, Brown has a gift for the theatrical. In an interview at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, he wonders why everyone is not paying attention to his new friend and his warnings for mankind.

“He is at the brink! At the brink! Not WAS at the brink—IS at the brink,” Brown exclaimed. “But no one else is.”

A California governor can have more influence, at least indirectly, than one might think, due to the state’s outsized role in policy debates and the fact that the University of California’s Board of Regents helps manage some of the nation’s top weapons laboratories, which study and design nuclear weapons. Brown, who was a vocal critic in the 1980s of what he called America's "nuclear addiction," reviewed Perry's recent memoir in the New York Review of Books, and said he is determined to help his new friend spread his message. 

“Everybody is, 'we are not at the brink,' and we have this guy Perry who says we are. It is the thesis that is being ignored."

Even if more influential people wake up to Perry’s message—a nuclear event is more likely and will be more terrible than you realize—a hard questions remains: Now what?

This is where Perry’s pragmatism comes back into play. The smartest move, he thinks, is to eliminate the riskiest part of the system. If we can’t eliminate all nukes, Perry argues, we could at least eliminate one leg of the so-called nuclear triad, intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are especially prone to an accidental nuclear war, if they are launched by accident or due to miscalculation by a leader operating with only minutes to spare. Nuclear weapons carried by submarines beneath the sea or aboard bomber planes, he argues, are logically more than enough to deter Russia.

The problem, he knows, is that logic is not necessarily the prevailing force in political debates. Psychology is, and this seems to be dictating not merely that we deter a Russian military force that is modernizing its weapons but that we have a force that is self-evidently superior to them.

It is an argument that strikes Perry as drearily familiar to the old days. Which leads him the conclusion that the only long-term way out is to persuade a younger generation to make a different choice.

His granddaughter, Lisa Perry, is precisely in the cohort he needs to reach. At first she had some uncomfortable news for her grandfather: Not many in her generation thought much about the issue. 

“The more I learned from him about nuclear weapons the more concerned I was that my generation had this massive and dangerous blind spot in our understanding of the world,” she said in an interview. “Nuclear weapons are the biggest public health issue I can think of.”

But she has not lost hope that their efforts can make a difference, and today she has put her graduate studies in public health on hold to work full time for the Perry Project as its social media and web manager. “It can be easy to get discouraged about being able to do anything to change our course,” she said. “But the good news is that nuclear weapons are actually something that we as humans can control...but first we need to start the conversation.”

It was with her help that Perry went on Reddit to field questions ranging from how his PhD in mathematics prepared him to what young people need to understand.

“As a 90s baby I never lived in the Cold War era,” wrote one participant, with the Reddit username BobinForApples. “What is one thing today's generations will never understand about life during the Cold War?”

Perry’s answered, as SecDef19: “Because you were born in the 1990s, you did not experience the daily terror of ‘duck and cover’ drills as my children did. Therefore the appropriate fear of nuclear weapons is not part of your heritage, but the danger is just as real now as it was then. It will be up to your generation to develop the policies to deal with the deadly nuclear legacy that is still very much with us.”

For the former defense secretary, the task now is to finally—belatedly—prove Einstein wrong. The physicist said in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

In Perry’s view the only way to avoid it is by directly contemplating catastrophe—and doing so face to face with the world’s largest nuclear power, Russia, as he recently did in a forum in Luxembourg with several like-minded Russians he says are brave enough to speak out about nuclear dangers in the era of Putin.

“We could solve it,” he said. “When you’re a prophet of doom, what keeps you going is not just prophesizing doom but saying there are things we do to avoid that doom. That’s where the optimism is.”

John Harris is Politico’s editor-in-chief and author of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House.

(Click here for the story from the New York Times)

Sidney D. Drell, a physicist who served for nearly half a century as a top adviser to the United States government on military technology and arms control, died on Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Persis Drell.

Dr. Drell combined groundbreaking work in particle physics — he was deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, for nearly 30 years — with a career in Washington as a technical adviser and defense intellectual.

In 2000, he was given the Enrico Fermi Award for his life’s work, and in 2013, President Obama presented him with the National Medal of Science for his contributions to physics and his service to the government.

Beginning in 1960, as the Cold War heated up, Dr. Drell served on a succession of advisory groups that helped advance the technology of nuclear detection and shape the policy of nuclear deterrence.

As a founding member of the Jason defense advisory group, a panel of defense scientists, he helped develop the McNamara Line, a barrier that was intended to halt the infiltration of soldiers and weapons into South Vietnam from the north through a system that combined electronic surveillance with mines and troop concentrations at strategic points.

Dr. Drell was a strong proponent of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. “I believed that given the Soviet empire, its stated goals and existence, we had to deter them,” he said in an interview for “The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb” (2012), a book by Philip Taubman, a former reporter and editor for The New York Times.

“We had to be clear,” he added. “These are not weapons we want to use, but they have to know that should they monkey around with us, they had to expect we’re going to use them against them, and at a degree that’s unacceptable to them.”

At the same time, he was a leading advocate of arms control and a critic of major projects such as the MX missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Reagan administration program also known as Star Wars.

Dr. Drell was recruited as a consultant for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency soon after its creation in 1961 and served as a director of the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation) at Stanford University in the 1980s. In 2006, he and George P. Shultz, the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, founded a program at the Hoover Institution to propose practical steps to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“In dealing with terrorists or rogue governments, nuclear deterrence doesn’t mean anything — the value has gone,” he told the website In Menlo in 2012. “Yet the danger of the material getting into evil hands has gone up. So what are existing nuclear arms deterring now? In this era, I argue that nuclear weapons are irrelevant as a deterrence.”

Sidney David Drell was born on Sept. 13, 1926, in Atlantic City, to Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire. His father, Tully, was a pharmacist. His mother, the former Rose White, was a teacher.

He was admitted to Princeton at 16 and earned a degree in physics in 1946. At the University of Illinois, he obtained a master’s degree in physics in 1947 and a doctorate in 1949.

After teaching at Stanford for two years, he joined the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left in 1956 to work under Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

As an academic, Dr. Drell specialized in quantum electrodynamics, which describes the interactions between light and matter, and quantum chromodynamics, which explores subatomic particles like quarks and gluons.

He and Tung-Mow Yan, a research associate at the accelerator center, formulated a key concept in particle physics when they explained what happens when a quark in one particle collides with an antiquark in a second particle, an annihilating confrontation that yields an electron and a positron. The sequence of events became known as the Drell-Yan process.

Dr. Drell was the author of “Electromagnetic Structure of Nucleons” (1961) and, with the theoretical physicist James D. Bjorken, wrote the textbooks “Relativistic Quantum Mechanics” (1964) and “Relativistic Quantum Fields” (1965).

As the head of the theory group at the accelerator center, which gathered leading scientists to discuss nuclear science, he found himself in demand as a technical adviser on defense and security.

In 1960, Dr. Drell was invited to join an advisory group led by Charles H. Townes, the father of the laser. His task was to see whether orbiting infrared sensors could detect a Soviet intercontinental missile launch by picking up a heat reading from the missile’s exhaust plume. Additionally, he had to determine whether the Soviet Union could nullify the sensors by exploding a nuclear device in the atmosphere before the main launch.

After he and his team judged such an explosion impractical, the Defense Department went ahead with plans to develop the Missile Defense Alarm System.

He later served on the Land Panel, which developed a new system for taking high-resolution, wide-range photographs from spy satellites.

During the Vietnam War, Dr. Drell’s service on the President’s Science Advisory Committee under Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, and his role as a shadow adviser to Henry A. Kissinger, damaged his academic reputation as opinion turned against American policy. Increasingly, he found himself fending off attacks in public forums.

“Call it entrapment, commitment or whatever, but I have remained actively involved in technical national security work for the United States,” he told Mr. Taubman.

After the war, he emerged as a leading thinker on arms control and disarmament, which he addressed in numerous books and papers, including “Facing the Threat of Nuclear Weapons” (1983), “The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment” (1985), “In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control” (1993) and “The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons” (2003).

In addition to his daughter Persis, who directed Stanford’s accelerator laboratory for five years, he is survived by his wife of 64 years, the former Harriet Stainback; another daughter, Joanna Drell; a son, Daniel, and three grandchildren.