Former U.S. Defense Secretary Explains Why Nuclear Holocaust Is Now Likely – but still can’t help being economic with truth about causes

PERRY: 8:33 When the Cold War ended, I believed that we no longer had to take that risk [nuclear annihilation] so I put all my energy into efforts to dismantle the deadly nuclear legacy of the Cold War. During my period as the Secretary of Defense in the 90s, I oversaw the dismantlement of 8,000 nuclear weapons evenly divided between the United States and the former Soviet Union. And I thought then that we were well on our way to putting behind us this deadly existential threat, But that was not to be.
Today, inexplicably to me, we’re recreating the geopolitical hostility of the Cold War, and we’re rebuilding the nuclear dangers. … We are doing this without any serious public discussion or any real understanding of the consequences of these actions. We are sleepwalking into a new Cold War, and there’s very real danger that we will blunder into a nuclear war.
If we are to prevent this catastrophe, the public must understand what is happening. … I’m going to justify these assertions by first looking back at the Cold War and explaining how we averted disaster then, and then I will compare it with our present situation.
10:25 When I lecture about the Cold War in my class at Stanford, a student will often ask me, ‘What led us to build 70,000 nuclear weapons? Why were that many weapons needed for deterrence? Wouldn’t a thousand have been more than enough?’ And I patiently explain that our nuclear policy was built on the assumption that the Soviet Union was planning to strike us with a surprise attack, a bolt out of the blue, which we affectionately called a BOOB, a bolt out of the blue. We assumed that the Soviet Union believed that if they could destroy 90% of our weapons in a surprise attack, we would then surrender, and they would then have conquered the world.
Based on that premise, we believed that we had to build a significant excess of weapons so that enough of them would survive a first strike to still conduct our retaliatory strikes of deterrence, and then, just to be sure, we built 50% more. The Soviet Union, seeing what we were building, would assume that we must be planning a surprise attack. So they built enough weapons to survive that attack, and then, just to be sure, 50% more. And those assumptions led to an ever-escalating arms race.
Before that insanity stopped, the United States and the Soviet Union combined had reached the obscene and absurd level of 70,000 nuclear weapons.
I believe that the Cold War arms race was built on a faulty premise, that in fact neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were planning to conduct a surprise attack on the other. The real danger, and this was a very real danger during the Cold War, was that we would blunder into a nuclear war. Indeed, we came very close to a civilization-ending war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. …
I was there during that crisis, and I will never forget it. I was part of a small team that worked all day analyzing the intelligence data collected that day, and by midnight, we prepared two reports for President Kennedy’s brief the next morning. So, I knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, every morning when I went into the analysis center I believed would be my last day on Earth.
After the crisis, President Kennedy said he thought there’s about one chance in three of the Cuban Missile Crisis ending in a nuclear catastrophe — not very good odds when the end of civilization was at the other end of it. But, I have to say that I believe that Kennedy’s statement was optimistic. He did not know, as we now know, that the Soviet Union had already placed tactical nuclear weapons on the island, and that they were fully operational.
And if Kennedy had accepted the unanimous recommendation of his Joint Chiefs of Staff to invade Cuba with a conventional military force, our troops would have been decimated on the beachhead by tactical nuclear weapons and a general nuclear war would surely have followed.
14:10 The miscalculations of Soviet and American leaders almost led to a nuclear holocaust. And I believe that we avoided that catastrophe as much by good luck as by good management.
Also during the Cold War we faced the risk of an accidental nuclear war, if our missile attack warning system experienced a false alarm. How likely was that? During the Cold War, there were three such false alarms in the United States and at least two that I know about in the Soviet Union. That averages to be about one every eight years. I personally experienced one of those false alarms, and it changed forever my way of thinking about nuclear dangers.
It occurred in October of 1979, when I was the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Awoken from a sound sleep at 3 o’clock in the morning, as I sleepily put the phone to my ears, the voice on the other end identified himself as the watch officer for the North American Air Defense Command. The general got right to the point: he told me that his computers were showing 200 ICBMs on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States.
For one heart-stopping moment, I thought we were about to experience the holocaust that we had narrowly avoided during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the general quickly explained they had already concluded there was a false alarm. He was calling me to help him determine what had gone wrong with his computer.
There were actually two separate false alarms during the period I was undersecretary. The most dangerous occurred one night when the computer operators changed shifts, and the new operators mistakenly instead of putting in the operating tape put in a training tape. The training tape, of course, was designed to look like a realistic attack scenario. It was human error. That is, our system, with all of its safety features, was still vulnerable to a single person potentially bringing about the end of our civilization. Two things saved the world from that fate.
First one was the watch officer that night was exceptionally thoughtful and responsible, for which we can all be thankful.
And second the context for the [supposed] attack was benign. There were no international incidents under way that made a Soviet attack especially plausible. But what if that false alarm had occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or during one of our Mideast crises when we had our forces on high alert? In that context, the watch officer surely would have passed the alarm on to the President, who, after being awoken at 3 o’clock in the morning, would have less than ten minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs before they were destroyed in their silos.
17:30 Had he ordered the launch, there would be no way of recalling the missiles or destroying them in flight; the President would have accidentally started a global nuclear war.
Well, that was then. What about now? I have written that I believe that the likelihood of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe today is actually greater than it was during the Cold War. … Why do I believe that? Because the United States and Russia today are confronting each other with a hostility that is recreating the geopolitical dangers of the Cld War, and because the United States and Russia are rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenals, there’s recreating the military dangers of the Cold War.
So, today, we are still vulnerable to blundering into a nuclear war if we have a crisis with Russia comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And when I consider the possibility of another false alarm, I notice humans will err again. Machines will malfunction again. And so we will have another false alarm.
Even in the face of this, Russia and the United States still today have a policy of launch on warning. And both Russia and the United States are building new ICBMs to replace the ones built during the Cold War.
That means ultimately the future of civilization will depend on the judgment of an anonymous watch officer and the judgment and the temperament of the American President or the Russian President, who have the sole authority to launch a nuclear attack.
19:40 Beyond those dangers, which are comparable to the dangers we faced during the Cold War, there are two dangers that did not exist during the Cold War.
The first of them is a regional nuclear war, Pakistan, India, North Korea today, have large numbers of nuclear weapons. Pakistan and India have more than a hundred each, and North Korea has 20 and building.
Beyond that there is danger of a nuclear terror attack, which is the nuclear danger we face today I consider the most likely. …
So [if people ask me what we can do to avert the disaster], I start by telling them that we will never take the actions needed to avert a nuclear disaster until our public understands just how great the danger is. We do not now have the political will to act in reducing nuclear dangers, because we do not understand fully how real and how great those dangers are.
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21:55 To deal with the nuclear dangers we face, we need first of all to have a creative energetic education program that is as effective and as robust as the education in climate change, and I am doing what I can to promote such education. But this is a daunting problem, such a daunting problem it’s tempting to throw up one’s hands. Indeed, many have asked me, how can one person make a significant impact on a problem so great. My response is, I am one person. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. Indeed, I am devoting the remainder of my career to doing what I can to educate the public on nuclear dangers. And I think we are beginning to get some traction on this problem.
I do this with a hope, if we succeed in our education task, others will pick up the task of political action. …