Paul N. Edwards of CISAC has been appointed as a lead author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the scientific organization supporting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  Organized by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, the IPCC’s reports provide the scientific underpinnings for the international climate negotiations that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

The IPCC reviews the state of the science of climate change every 5-7 years. Its Sixth Assessment Report—to which Edwards will contribute--will be completed in 2021. Edwards will serve as lead author for four years to develop, review, and complete the assessment.

Through his appointment, Edwards becomes the first social scientist to serve as a lead author in Working Group 1, which assesses the physical science of climate change. The other two working groups deal with impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (Working Group 2) and mitigation of climate change (Working Group 3).  Edwards will travel to Guangzhou, China, next week for the first meeting of lead author—a trip for which he has purchased carbon offsets.

Paul N. Edwards is William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, as well as Professor of Information and History at the University of Michigan. At Stanford, his teaching includes courses in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies and the Program in Science, Technology & Society. His research focuses on the history, politics, and culture of knowledge and information infrastructures. He focuses especially on environmental security, including climate change, Anthropocene risks, and nuclear winter.

Edwards’s book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010), a history of the meteorological information infrastructure, received the Computer Museum History Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the Louis J. Battan Award from the American Meteorological Society, and other prizes. The Economist magazine named A Vast Machine a Book of the Year in 2010. Edwards’s book The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (MIT Press, 1996) — a study of the mutual shaping of computers, military strategy, and the cognitive sciences from 1945-1990 — won honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Edwards is also co-editor of Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001) and Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles.

In March 2011, a post-earthquake tsunami triggered nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions and the release of radioactive materials from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The Fukushima disaster has been called the most significant nuclear incident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Professor Rodney C. Ewing, Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and co-director at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), as a member of a team of Japanese researchers, today published a report on the details of what exactly — at the particle level — was released into the air after the disaster.

In the discussion that follows, Ewing explains the team’s findings and why they are important for health and environmental safety.

Why did you decide to study the Fukushima disaster?

The Fukishima Daiichi event surprised me. I now teach a freshman seminar on this event. I am particularly interested to understand why the accident occurred and what the long-term impact will be on the environment. This research paper reflects my interest in answering these questions.

We’ve heard lots about possible health effects from contaminated water after the Fukushima disaster, but less about particulates in the air. What did you find?

During the core melt-down events at Fukushima Daiichi, radioactivity was released as fine particulates that traveled in the air, sometime for distances of tens of kilometers, and settled onto the surrounding countryside.

In order to understand the health risk, it is very important to understand the form and chemistry of these particulates.

Recently, in a previous paper we have described a new type of particulate that is Cs-rich (some Cs isotopes are highly radioactive). The highly radioactive Cs-rich particles formed in the reactor by condensation from a silica-rich vapor, formed from the melting of core and concrete structures. In this paper, we describe the first identification of fragments of the melted core that were entrapped by the Cs-particles and transported away from the reactor site, some 4 kilometers. This is an important discovery because this provides us with samples of the fuel and melted core.

This is a special contribution because it uses very advanced electron microscopy techniques that allow for imaging of individual atoms or clusters of atoms. This advanced technique is required because the particles are so small — nanometers in size.

How did you come to work with your collaborators in Japan?

I have had long standing collaborations with Japanese scientists for decades. The lead researcher for the group, Professor Satoshi Utusunomiya, was once a member of my research group when I was at the University of Michigan. We have always collaborated on topics that involve radioactive materials and the use of electron microscopy. This collaboration is an entirely natural outgrowth of previous collaborations.

What, if any, policy recommendations would you suggest based on your findings?

The most direct result would be to design monitoring systems so that we have a good record of released particulates. Also, we need to push the development of advanced analytical techniques so that these particulates can be quickly identified and characterized.

The Center for International Security and Cooperation now has more than 46 podcasts, dating all the way back to Oct. 19, 2016. Listen to them on the CISAC page on the iTunes website. Simply mouse over the title and click play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to CISAC podcasts. Seminars and events at CISAC are routinely audiotaped for use as podcasts. Also, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations offers the World Class podcast series, featuring scholars and experts from FSI, CISAC and beyond.

CISAC co-director Amy Zegart wrote the following essay in the Oct. 25 online edition of The Atlantic:

Pity the professionals. In the past month, President Trump has sideswiped certification of the Iran nuclear deal, sandbagged his own secretary of state’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea, and even provoked the ever-careful Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Bob Corker, to uncork his deepest fears in a series of bombshell interviews. “The volatility, is you know, to anyone who has been around, is to a degree alarming,” Corker told the Times earlier this month, revealing that many in the administration were working overtime to keep the president from “the path to World War III.” He doubled down on those comments a few weeks later, declaring that Trump, among other things, was “taking us on a path to combat” with North Korea and should “leave it to the professionals for a while.”

The professionals sure have their hands full. So far, the Trump Doctrine in foreign policy appears to consist of three elements: baiting adversaries, rattling allies, and scaring the crap out of Congress. The administration has injected strategic instability into world politics, undermining alliances and institutions, hastening bad trends, and igniting festering crises across the globe. “America first” looks increasingly like “America alone.” The indispensable nation is becoming the unreliable one. Even without a nuclear disaster, the damage inflicted by the Trump presidency won’t be undone for years, if ever.

But it’s also important to understand that today’s foreign-policy challenges— whether it’s Iran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East, North Korea’s breakneck nuclear breakout, China’s rise, Russia’s nihilism, Europe’s populism and fragmentation, Syria’s civil war, or transnational terrorism and cyber threats—did not start with Trump. This is the most challenging foreign-policy environment any White House has confronted in modern history.

Three swirling complexities explain why.

Threat complexity

Take a look at any of the annual threat assessments issued by the Director of National Intelligence over the past few years. They will make your head spin. They are filled with rising states, declining states, weak states, rogue states, terrorists, hackers, and more. Bad actors don’t just threaten physical space these days. Adversaries are working on ways to cripple America in cyberspace and even outer space—by compromising all those satellite systems on which its digital society depends. In this threat landscape, the number, identity, magnitude, and velocity of dangers facing America are all wildly uncertain. Exactly how many principal adversaries does the United States have? Who are they and what do they want? What could they do to us? How are these threats changing and how can we keep up without spending ourselves into oblivion or leaving ourselves vulnerable to other nasty surprises? These are fundamental questions. There are no consensus answers. Uncertainty is what fuels America’s foreign-policy anxieties today.

The Cold War was different. Then, certainty was what fueled American foreign-policy anxieties. It was clear to all that the U.S. faced a single principal adversary. The Soviet Union had territory on a map and soldiers in uniforms. Thanks to U.S. intelligence, Soviet intentions and capabilities were fairly well understood. The threat landscape was deadly but slower-moving: Communists never met a five-year plan they didn’t like. And while superpower nuclear dangers were terrifying, they were also constraining in a helpful but insane sort of way. In 1961, President Kennedy invoked the specter of a “nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads” over the earth. Every American foreign-policy decision had to consider the question: What would Moscow think of that? Today, the nuclear sword of Damocles is still hanging—indeed, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all successfully tested nuclear devices since 1961—but no singular threat guides U.S. foreign policy as the Soviet Union once did.

Organizational complexity

As threats have grown more complex, organizational arrangements to deal with them have, too. Coordinating Soviet policy was one thing. Developing coherent U.S. foreign policy in the face of so much uncertainty across so many issues is quite another. Little wonder special advisers, envoys, commissions, boards, initiatives, czars, and new agencies have been growing like mushrooms. This may not sound so bad. But it is. Every new agency or czar or special arrangement says, “the regular process here ain’t working.” The crux of the problem is that bureaucracies are notoriously hard to kill or change. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that bureaucracy is the closest thing to immortal life on earth. Whenever a crisis hits, the natural response is to add a new organization and stir. But if today’s chief challenge is developing coherent, coordinated policy in the face of complexity, creating more organizations to coordinate doesn’t get you very far. Over time, the whole bureaucratic universe just keeps growing bigger, filled with obsolete organizations alongside new organizations; fragmented jurisdictions, overlapping jurisdictions, and unclear jurisdictions; and silos so specialized that nobody can see across all the key issues easily.

Cognitive complexity

Humans are not superhuman. Research finds that most people can remember at most seven items at a time, fewer as they grow older. Even the biggest brains have limits. In 2001, Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins noticed that highly trained medical teams at the university’s medical center were screwing up insertions of central line catheters, causing infections in critically ill patients at alarming rates. Why? Because they often forgot one of just five simple steps (like washing their hands) before starting the procedure. (Pronovost instituted a checklist that has since become widely used and is credited with saving thousands of lives.)

In foreign policy, too, the stakes are high and humans are frequently overloaded by complexity, resulting in catastrophic errors that nobody ever intended. One of the chief findings of the 9/11 Commission, for example, was that many inside the FBI simply didn’t know or couldn’t remember all the legal requirements and rules for sharing intelligence and law-enforcement information. Even the Bureau’s own 1995 guidelines were “almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied,” the commission concluded. As a result, clues to the terror plot emerged weeks before 9/11 but were marooned in different parts of the bureaucracy.

In 1935, an advanced bomber nicknamed “the Flying Fortress” crashed during a test flight. The Army Air Corps investigation found that the machine worked fine. The problem was the human. The airplane was so sophisticated, flying required the pilot to remember too many things, and he forgot one of them: unlocking the rudder and elevator controls during takeoff. It was “too much airplane for one man to fly,” one reporter later wrote. That crash sparked the invention of pilot checklists which have been used for nearly a century, transforming global aviation.

U.S. foreign policy is becoming too much airplane for one person to fly. “The professionals” surrounding Trump—Secretaries James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, Chief of Staff John Kelly, National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, and others—are trying to keep the whole thing from crashing with a pilot who has never flown before. Let’s hope they can.

America’s approach to the world is a complicated mess, for reasons that predate the current president.

Amy Zegart is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and professor of political science, by courtesy. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Cyber Policy Program. She wrote this essay as a contributing editor to The Atlantic.

Deep policy discussions between journalists and top Stanford scholars highlighted a recent media roundtable at the Hoover Institution.

The event drew about 30 members of the national media from a variety of print and broadcast outlets, including CNN, CBS, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and Politico.  The two-day media roundtable on Oct. 15-16 was titled, “Outside the Beltway.”

Over the course of the two-day conference, participants engaged in robust discussions with Hoover Institution fellows and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies scholars, including former U.S. Secretary of State and Hoover and FSI senior fellow Condoleeza Rice, who kicked off the event with a foreign policy conversation.

Drones and cybersecurity, for example, were topics of conversation for Amy Zegart and Herb Lin from the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Drones and new warfare

Zegart said, “New technology is being used in ways never imagined ... The question is, could drones be next?”

Drones are possible “coercion tools,” more effective than people would believe, Zegart said. “We need to figure out how the logic works with coercion, in regard to states.”

How do you get others to back down without a fight? You need to issue a costly threat, she said. For example, “trip-wire” forces of more than 20,000 in South Korea represent such a credible threat to North Korea. “Low-cost is low credibility,” or “cheap talk,” on the other hand.

Drones lower the cost of coercion, Zegart said. One point is that such strikes have huge public support, as the risk of U.S. casualties are very low, according to polls – 62 percent favor such drone strikes.

Zegart said drones could shift the “relative costs” of war and are better able to sustain military action over a lengthy time frame. They also affect the “psychology of punishment.” Hovering over a target for long periods of time, decapitation strikes against regime leaders, and the constant state of “near-ambush” changes the character of war and for a military campaign to stay the course.

“Certainty of punishment is a very powerful way to change the behavior of the adversary,” moreso than “severity of punishment, said Zegart, who has affirmed these conclusions through surveys with foreign military officers. That research also showed that domestic political support for military reaction is the most popular reason for making threats credible. But a deeper dive into such issues is urged, she added.

“We’re really behind the curve in figuring out how to make military threats credible in the world,” said Zegart. “Lots of questions remain.”

Hacking, information attacks

Lin spoke about the recent Equifax data hacking, among other topics.

He said, “The harm we all feel is both tangible and intangible” in regard to such hacks. In other words, there is both material threat and a peace of mind threat, he explained.

The “Internet-of-Things” is another looming problem, Lin said. In the future, liability issues will factor into how all these devices are connected and who is responsible in case of misdeeds, he said.

In the case of health care, confidentiality is a critical societal goal, but hacking creates numerous scenarios: “Would you prefer your blood type posted online or changed in your medical records,” Lin said, explaining the different ways information misuse may affect people.

On the global security front, “cyber war” takes advantage of the flaws of information technology (IT), and “information warfare” takes advantage of the virtues of IT, he noted. Such efforts begin to level the playing field between international actors and agencies.

“You give large megaphones to small players,” Lin said.

In Russia, information warfare is actually studied as a theory of warfare. And the results show that it works – it’s easier to destroy democratic  values online than create or reinforce them, Lin said. For example, Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elect stoked political polarization in America.

One media member asked Lin how the U.S. could prevent Russia from using cyber and information warfare in upcoming U.S. elections.

Lin said, “It’s not clear to me that the U.S. government is really going to be willing to do anything,” but some public pressure may move entities like media companies to respond more effectively.

And Zegart noted, “The Russians are still here.” They are present right now in any number of settings, from social media to traditional media and in public spheres, for example, she said.

“Attacking brains” was how Zegart described Russia’s goal. For American social media companies, she suggested, “Think about battleground states” and focus on “triaging” these areas.

WWII, Russia

The media also heard presentations from Hoover's Kori Schake on defense policy; Hoover's Victor Davis Hanson on “The Second World Wars,” his new book; Hoover's Michael Auslin on the Asian century; Hoover and FSI's Michael McFaul discussed the U.S-Russia relationship; and Hoover and FSI's Larry Diamond on democracy in the world order.

McFaul spoke about the hot spots in the relationship between the U.S. and Russian governments, his time as the U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, and his suggested approaches to today’s engagement with Russia. He noted how Russia's President Vladimir Putin has prevailed on many recent occasions against the best interests of the U.S. One instance is Syria and how complicated that issue was for foreign policy makers during his tenure.

"The objective we sought to achieve -- the end of the civil war -- our policies did not achieve," said McFaul, who urges stronger U.S. action against Russian cyber attacks on the U.S. electoral process, now and into the future.

Hanson said that people today often fail to appreciate the deadly scope of the WWII conflict. For example, he pointed out that more people died in that conflict than any in human history, with 27,000 people dying every day in WWII. It was also the first time that more civilians were killed than soldiers. Of all the six major powers involved in the conflict, Japan killed about 10 people for every person they lost.

Lessons from WWII? “Things change very quickly in a war,” Hanson said. In 1942, it looked like the Axis powers had the upper hand; the next year, the Allies were surging. Also, a country should rely on a formidable deterrence strategy to discourage would-be attackers.

Once you lose it, “deterrence is very, very hard to recapture,” Hanson said.

MEDIA CONTACTS:

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

At 90, William J. Perry has seen a lot in this world.

Maybe, in fact, too much. When it comes to nuclear warfare and annihilation, few people alive have contemplated such tragic outcomes quite like Perry, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a former U.S. secretary of defense, and one of the world’s top nuclear weapons experts.

Perry, who becomes a nonagenarian on Oct. 11, has been called America’s “nuclear conscience.” He has sometimes referred to himself as a “prophet of doom,” and certainly not in a congratulatory sense, but more as a scientist on a mission. A brilliant mathematician who's worked with nearly every administration since Eisenhower, Perry's been up-close to nuclear weapons and near-miss crises for the last several decades.

Today, Perry is devoted to education on the subject of nuclear weapons – he understands exactly how much horror they would wreak on humanity and beyond.

And while no one would call Perry a crusader type (he is pragmatic, modest and private), there’s no doubt he’s on an energetic crusade for a nuclear-free world. Reaching young minds – those who will inherit the leadership of this world – is his calculus in the formula of world peace.

So, Perry reaches out in ways that resonant with youth. Last year created a series of virtual lectures, "Living at the Nuclear Brink," known as a MOOC, or massive open online course. His new online course, "The Threat of Nuclear Terrorism," launches Oct. 17.  

“Nuclear weapons may seem like 20th century history, but the choices we make about these weapons in the 21st century will decide your future in truly fundamental ways,” Perry wrote in the earlier course's introduction.

Conversations with conscience

An engineer and policy maker, Perry has academic affiliations that range widely across the Stanford campus. He is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus), a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's always in demand for a panel discussion or speaker event.

On Nov. 1, he's the featured subject of a CISAC event, "A Conversation with William J. Perry: Assessing Nuclear Risk in a New Era." That talk will include a Perry discussion with CISAC co-director Amy Zegart and another panel discussion, led by CISAC co-director Rod Ewing, with scholars Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway and Scott Sagan.

Perry's been known to participate in “Ask Me Anything” chats on Reddit, a place popular with youth. He connects with all types of audiences, conveying in direct encounters the exact nature of the nuclear dangers now facing civilization, and what can be done to reduce those dangers. This mission to educate led him to write a memoir, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, all the while giving countless media interviews and delivering major speeches before major think tanks, nongovernmental organizations and policymakers.

One core Perry message is that U.S. foreign policies do not reflect the existing danger of nuclear threats -- the reason is that this risk isn’t widely recognized across society. And young people need to understand this dynamic that creates a distorted, too complacent view of a very real nuclear weapons problem throughout the world.

Perry, with the help of both his daughter, Robin Perry, his son, David Perry, granddaughter, Lisa Perry, and grandson Patrick Allen, established the William J. Perry Project, which informs the public about the role of nuclear weapons in today's world, while urging the elimination of these weapons.

It’s a family on a mission, and the Perrys believe the only way to avoid nuclear war is by directly contemplating the scenario in a personal, direct sense through learning and education.

"We're really just out there trying to reach a generation that isn't engaged on this issue right now," said Lisa Perry in an article on the Perry Project web site. She is the digital media manager for the project. "It's something we learned in history class. There was no conversation about what's happening now."

As her grandfather explained, "The dangers will never go away as long as we have nuclear weapons. But we should take every action to lower the dangers, and I think it can be done."

Early entrepreneurship days

Perry was born in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, in 1927, the year that Charles Lindbergh completed the first solo flight across the Atlantic.

As a child, Perry fell in love with math. Math for him represented analytical discipline and the beauty of overcoming challenge. By solving math problems, one can master not only numerical problems, but other seemingly all-too difficult challenges. The key, as Perry discovered, was breaking down the larger problem into smaller parts. This evolved complexity into simplicity, which is more easily understood. Perry went on to cultivate this problem-solving mindset the rest of his life.

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After his military service, Perry received his B.S. (1949) and M.A. (1950) degrees from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University in 1957. He chose a career in defense electronics, and became one of the Silicon Valley’s early entrepreneurs, founding a company that pioneered digital technologies to analyze the Soviet nuclear missile arsenal. And so, he was often asked to counsel the federal government on national security.

In October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, Perry received an urgent request from the U.S. government to help analyze U-2 photos of the Soviet installation of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Perry later recollected that he thought the world could end during that crisis, and that those days might well be his last.

From 1977 to 1981 during the Carter administration, Perry served as the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, where he oversaw weapon systems and research. After leaving the Pentagon in 1981 to work in the private sector, Perry became a Stanford engineering professor and a co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

He was the co-director of CISAC from 1988 to 1993. Today, he is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor emeritus at Stanford, with a joint appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the School of Engineering. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton tapped Perry to become the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense. However, it was not so easy for the White House to recruit him.

Perry treasured his privacy so much that he originally turned down the job of defense secretary. Only when Clinton and Al Gore assured him that his family’s privacy could be maintained, he finally accepted the offer. With the Cold War having ended a fear years earlier, he found it would become a historic time to serve as America’s defense secretary.

Years later he recalled standing with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts as their teams destroyed missile silos in the former Soviet Union. By the end of the 1980s, Perry thought the world had survived the horrific prospect of nuclear annihilation – and that it was behind everyone, left in the ashes of the Cold War.

Not so fast. Welcome to 2017.

Beyond doomsday

Today, Perry believes, the world is arguably more dangerous than ever before. His view is supported by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which announced in January 2017 that the Doomsday clock now stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, suggesting that existential threats now pose a greater danger to humanity than they have at any time since the height of the Cold War.

In fact, in 2016, Perry warned that the Doomsday clock should stand at five minutes to midnight for nuclear war – but only one minute to midnight for the threat of nuclear terrorism. He said during that press conference that the clock now issued a “more dangerous, more ominous forecast than two thirds of the years during the Cold War.”

As a result, Perry’s profile has risen higher than ever as the world confronts increasingly unsettling nuclear threats like a war between the U.S. and North Korea, reckless nuclear rhetoric by state leaders, and the possibility that terrorists may use nukes.

On North Korea in particular, Perry has urged a return to deterrence on the part of the United States:

“The threat to use nuclear weapons has always been tied to deterrence or extended deterrence; historical U.S. policy is that the use of nuclear weapons would only be in response to the first use of nuclear weapons against the United States or an ally covered by our extended deterrence,” he said in a statement.

With North Korea, Perry notes that the U.S. should not make empty threats, because empty threats weaken America’s credibility and reduce the ability to actually take strong action. “As Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Speak softly but carry a big stick,’” he said.

During the early Cold War, he said, when the Soviets used “shrill” language, U.S. presidents like Eisenhower merely responded in tempered, moderate tones. “Just as in those tense times, today’s crisis also calls for measured language,” Perry said.

On top of this, Perry said the U.S. and Russians seem to be “sleepwalking into this new nuclear arms race,” and that while a new Cold War and arms race may look different than the prior one in U.S.-Soviet history, they are both dangerous and “totally unnecessary.”

Whether on the North Korean peninsula or elsewhere, a miscalculation could be catastrophic, Perry warns. That’s one reason he joined other former "Cold Warriors" like George Schulz, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2007. They argued that the goal of U.S. nuclear policy should be not merely the reduction and control of atomic arms, but the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons everywhere.

What type of world does Perry dream about in his brightest visions? One without nuclear weapons. He believes collective humanity must “delegitimize” nuclear war as an acceptable risk of modern civilization. A safer world, one that requires great purpose, persistence, and patience to make a reality, is possible, if people understand the threats and take action to reduce them, Perry has said.

“This global threat requires unified global action,” Perry wrote in July 2017 in support of a new United Nations treaty banning the use of nuclear weapons.

Education and knowledge – that’s how Perry believes humanity can safely evolve past its nuclear phase.

MEDIA CONTACT:

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