Thanks for joining us today. I am tom called, director of the center for International Security and cooperation at stanford and am also a senior fellow at the institute for International Studies at stanford and we are honored to have William Perry and tom collina to discusstheir brandnew book. You can see the title on the slide at your screen. The button the new Nuclear Arms Race and president ial power which puts readers at the front row and offers policy descriptions for a safer future. As many know doctor perry served as the 19th us secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration and is a worldrenowned expert on national security, defense policy, arms control and has a long history here at stanford. He is a senior fellow at fsi and the Hoover Institution and was codirector of fsis center for International Security and cooperation from 1988 to 93 and completed his bachelors and masters degree at stanford which is impressive to me because i didnt get into stanford as an undergraduate or graduate and he is now the michael and barbara Professor Emeritus at stanford so its great to reconnect with you today mister secretary and we also are thrilled to have doctor perrys coauthor tom collina the director of policy at plowshares fund. He has 30 years of experience in Nuclear Weapons, missiledefense and nonproliferation issues and has held a senior position at the plowshares association and the center for science and International Security. Hes been involved in efforts to end nuclear testing, extend the nonnuclear proliferation treaty and the start treaty and tom has a degree in International Relations from cornell but we wont hold that against you. Now is a pretty good school too. Please im pleased to introduce my colleague and a good friendrose. He is fsis distinguished lecturer at seatac and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to standard she was deputy secretary general of nato from 2016 to 2019 and prior to that he served five years in undersecretary for arms control and International Security at the Us Department so heres what we have planned. Secretary parry and tom will offer remarks giving an overview of the arguments in the book and then rose will join in conversation to ask a few questions. We will then save about 20 minutes or so at the end you do q a from the audience and it looks like we have about 140 folks and climbing so if you want to submit a question please do so by going to the bottom of your resume screen and clicking on the q abutton. And i will collect the questions and feed them to our authors after rose has completed her questioning of them so without further delay ill handed over to secretary parry and to tom to give us a sense for their book. I will kick us off and thank you for those introductions and rose, its great to be her with you as well. Its an honor and privilege to share this virtual stage with you and thank you for organizing and of course its also been a great honor for me to write this book with bill parry called the button which comes out this month and a little background, we plan the timing for three reasons which wont be a surprise any of you. Next month july 16 marks the 75th anniversary of the bomb, the First Nuclear test trinity test. August marks the 75th anniversary of the roche yuma nagasaki bombings and this november we will choose our next president. These events create a historic opportunity to debate the future of Us Nuclear Policy. Now that weve had the bomb for 75 years, what should the next president do to reduce the risk of nuclear war and thats what this book is really about. Im going to run through these slides and if the Technology Gods are with me it will all go smoothly. So far so good. Let me put the book in the context ofthe current moment. We are of course in a National Crisis with these three dimensions, public health, the economy, Racial Injustice and on top of that we have a leadership vacuum in washington. To truly move beyond this crisis we feel its the status quo in us policy must change. Specifically the coronavirus shows us defense policy is been focused on the wrong threats. Were spending too much on outdated cold war scenarios, rape our military conflict with russia and china and not enough on the true existential threats we face today. And then ask, im change and nuclear war. Raising unemployment and systemic racial inequalities show that weve been investing too much informational defense and not enough in building a Strong Economy and just society. Despite spending 700 billion a year on defense any americans simply do notfeel safe. As Martin Luther king junior warned in 1967, the nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of socialuplift is approaching spiritual death and i would agree with him. Getting back to the issues at hand Nuclear Weapons in particular have no role to play in addressing the more serious threats we face. In fact Nuclear Weapons we find make those threats even worse so lets unpack this a bit. Wed like to start with this photo because it tends to focus the mind. Here is President Trump with the infamous footballcarried by the military aid by their. A briefcase contains everything the president needs to start anuclear war. This isliterally how close we are to nuclear war every day , every minute right now. President trump can start an attack , order and attack on his own authority with no Second Opinions. No input from congress or the secretary of defense are needed. We dont mean to single out President Trump here. Of course his impulsiveness and disregard for Expert Opinion might highlight these concerns in the current moment but we want to be sure all president s make mistakes. All our human and that is why we strongly feel no single human should control the future ofhumanity. We the American People choose to give president s this absolute power. Why . Why do we choose to live so close to the brink ofdisaster . This is one of the main themes of the book and we think its because Us Nuclear Policy is focused on the wrong threats. So lets get to the central arguments. The central arguments we make in the book is that us policy is focused on the wrong threat of a surprise attack from russia. Such an attack is highly unlikely for the simple reason such an attack would mean the utter destruction of both sides and yet Us Nuclear Policy has been based on this threat fordecades. So the problem here is that this is taken threat assessment undermines us security by driving policies that increase the risk of blundering into nuclear warby mistake. He could start a nuclear war in response to a false alarm. One of the greatest dangers in the world and we simply dont need to do this. We must move away from quick launch policies and instead give the president more decision time by limiting nuclear use to second strike deterrent only missions. So bill, turning to you. You of course had a front row seat to the arms race met with soviet and then russian officialsmany times. My challenge our key assertion here that a bowl from the blue from russia is not a realistic threat. What would you say to them . Id say they are wrong. When i was secretary of defense i met many times with all the key officials in the russian government. The president , minister of defense, minister of state and several decades since then ive continue to meet with hundreds of russians to what we call track two of diplomacy. Id say with great confidence the russians are not stupid. The russians are not suicidal. Therefore we are focused on the wrong threat. Both out of the blue first strike is not realistic but what is realistic is we might blunder into a nuclear war. Thank you. And as we are given the book, this perceived threat of a bolt from the blue drives military requirements that we must be able to launch Nuclear Weapons at all times within minutes and that in turn drives these three dangerouspolicies. The president as we mentioned has Sole Authority to launch Nuclear Weaponswithin minutes. He needs no Second Opinion or oversight. Second the president can order a first strike and is not limited to retaliation and most americans do not realize that. And third, the president can launch hundreds of landbased Ballistic Missiles on warning of attack and does not need to wait for proof of attack. And one of the main things we do in the book is to show how dangerous this domination of policies are and bill, please give us your sense of why these policies are so dangerous. Standing out in the danger is the possibility of a false alarm. To me thats not a theoretical threat. Weve had six false alarms that i know of. One of them i personally experienced and is graven in my memory. When i was undersecretary of defense during the cold war i got a phone call at 3 00 in the morning from the generals of north american air command and the first thing he told me was his computers were showing excellent icbms on the way from the soviet union to the United States. I immediately woke up. But happily the general quickly added he had concluded it was a false alarm and he was calling me to help me assess why his computers had gone wrong. As it turned out it took us several days to find out. It was a computer chip malfunction, very simple, very cheap chip and at other times, other times it can be either a testing failure or a human failure but there is a realistic possibility that happened six times in the past, it will happen again. Every time you tell that story i find it chilling so thank you very much. Expand on the dangers of Civil Authority for a minute. In 1963, this week in 1963 resident kennedy gave a feminist speech where he warned we could stumble into nuclear war due to accident or miscalculation or madness and we spent quite a bit of time in the book going through those various scenarios. Bill, could you walk us through how this might happen . First of all the president might have Bad Information and a classic example of that is president kennedy on cuba where all his military advisers are recommending a military attack on cuba. Had our troops landed on the beach head they would have been met and decimated on the beach head by the tactical Nuclear Weapons. We did not know, resident kennedy did not know that while the russians did not yet have the mediumrange missiles operational they did have tactical Nuclear Weapons there and they were operational and would have been used. In addition we can have an unstable climate. President trump might be a classic example but hes not the only one. During the last few months of nixons presidency he was a heavy drinker and not in full control of himself to much of the time to the extent that his secretary of defense and state were concerned and jims lessons are actually tried to intervene with the military to tell them not to respond if they got a call from the president but of course that was anillegal order and its unlikely the military would have followed it. And president reagan during the last few months of his presidency we did not know it at the time but he was in the early stages of alzheimers disease and weve already talked about we can have a false alarm and as serious as that danger has been in the past even greater today with thepresence of cyber warfare. All these say that we could start a nuclear war by blundering into nuclear war and that what should drive us policy and what we can do to prevent the possibility of blunderinginto a nuclear war , not focus on the old cold war under thethreat of the first strike. Thank you very much so lets move into what weve proposed forsolutions. The president can and must reorient Nuclear Policy away from a russian surprise attack to preventing accidental war. And we lay out a number of recommendations and primarily the three we will now discuss and bill, if you could walk usthrough those. The first recommendation is to end president ial Sole Authority. Weve had Sole Authority because we believe it was necessary that the president be able to respond in minutes , five or six minutes and as weve already discussed that is susceptible to leading us intocatastrophic war through a false alarm. The marquee moon bill tending in congress after that purpose and no probably probability at all of being passed this year but its a good prospect the next year and we should all get behind supporting that. Secondly we should establish a no first use policy for the United States. Each president has considered that and somehow come to the brink of deciding it but in each case they backed off. This time lets push it through and again theres a war and smith bill pending in the congress that will not pass but we can have an opportunity, another crack at it next year and finally we should phase out icbms. They are accidents waiting to happen. Iq. Im going to summarize and close this out so we can get to roses questions and audiencequestions. So Nuclear Weapons clearly are the president s weapon and every four years he have a chance to change Us Nuclear Policy. The current National Crisis we are in is creating we feel all once in a Generation Opportunity to rethink our fundamental approach to national security. These weapons are so out of step with reality that it is doing us more harm than good. As currently configured our atomic arsenal magnifies the dangers we face from the most likely threat, blundering into nuclear war by mistake so the next president can and must bring Us Nuclear Policy into the 21stcentury. We are pretty realistic. We know this will be hard. Up against 75 years of validating thinking and 50 billion industry. History tells us major change like this and only happen if led from the top by the president. But importantly with public support and public pressure to deliver on promises made. So we are looking to educate the next president and the public like you so thank you very much. For listening and if youre at all interested in buying the book please go to ben bella books. Com and if you use the code button 30 we get 30 percent off. Thanks tom and ive already tried to do button 50 and button 75 and it didnt give me 50 or 75 percent off. Rose, over to you. Thank you very much colin, i have my own copy of thebook right here and i have to tell you its a wonderful book. I read it over the last couple of days to prepare for this question and it really is good reading so youll learn a lot. So i really commend the authors for turning out something about Nuclear Weapons that is eminently readable. My job is to lead a classified chat and it seems strange in the middle of june to lead a fireside chat but im going to ask our authors a couple of tough questions and see what they have to say about. Right up front, bill and tom ill ask the two of you and you too can decide whether you both want to answer or whether one of you will take the lead so does that sound okay . Okay. My first question is the russians have just put out a new president ial decree over a week ago. Also outline the release policy resting solely on president ial decisionmaking authority, the president of course being president putin. As one analyst put it successfully and i quote, new first, so later and what did you say to president putin based on what you learned in your book. I would say theyre making the same mistake that we have made. Were moving backwards, not forward and the russian analyst who says new first and calm later, great statement. What hes contemplating is that they knew and then we knew and what hes talking about so boldly is the destruction ofcivilization. If i could just add i think bill is exactly right. And to say that my experience from what ive read about this, the russian situation is even more dire than ours. Russian president has even less time to make a decision about retaliation once they get notice of an incoming attack which could be a false alarm so the situation is even more dire in russia and it is here and we need to help russia away from Sole Authority and launch on warrants. I can see that would be an extraordinarilyinteresting conversation ,discussion , negotiation and also a complex and difficult one. Let me move on to my second question. Your book focuses on Us Russian Nuclear relationships which has long been based on the notion of first strike facility. Interestingly there was a policy that youre recommending second use retaliation as you call it the book as has long been the basis ofchinese Nuclear Doctrine. Now however the chinese team to be shifting to capabilities such as icbms and sl bms that would appear to be moving them in a first strike direction rather than use a short retaliation. So my question is how would you incentivize the us and russia to move to a second strike approach, secure second strike approach while getting the