Weigh impacts using expected value—magnitude times probability is possible for policy makers and balances thinking which solves errors.

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.”