My Journey at The Nuclear Brink.

• Author: McMillan, Stuart
• Position: Book review

MY JOURNEY AT THE NUCLEAR BRINK

Author: William J. Perry Published by: Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2015, 234pp, $US24.95.

At first pondering a paradox lies at the heart of this book. William Perry, secretary of defense in Bill Clintons presidency, was always a defence and security insider. His work within private industry was funded by the defence budget and at other times he worked within the Defense Department. He was sometimes described as one of the Cold Warriors. He would thus seem an unlikely advocate for the abolition of nuclear weaponry among all nations. Nevertheless, that is what he is and his book puts the case for a world without nuclear weapons in plain but forceful words.

The very fact that he has been secretary of defense, and an under-secretary of defense, and been intimately involved with nuclear weapons has, however, given him a vantage point to know that their use could bring about a world catastrophe. It has given his book an immediacy and authenticity that is rare to the extent of being almost unparalleled.

Perrys 'journey did not involve a sudden point of conversion to a different outlook but was consistent throughout his career. As a young soldier he saw the devastation brought about in Japan from the one atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the other on Nagasaki, and that experience and knowledge stayed with him. He trained in mathematics and technology, a background that took him into a defence firm, then into one of his own founding. He became a high-level security adviser to the United States government, served as under-secretary of defense for research and engineering during the Carter administration and as secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997.

He formed the view that there was no real defence against nuclear weapons, and that nuclear weaponry had the potential to destroy all of civilisation. Even when he was secretary of defense, and thereby charged with the responsibility of maintaining the United States' nuclear arsenal, he oversaw the development of equipment, including the stealth bomber, intended to avoid the use of nuclear weapons. In 2007 Perry signed an op-ed article to the Wall Street Journal with two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and a United States senator with an impressive defence background, Sam Nunn, arguing for the abolition of nuclear weapons world-wide. Perry and Nunn are Democrats. Shultz, whose name is well-known to New Zealanders because he was...