PRESS RELEASE

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Former Defense Sec. Perry: Stop this ‘Damn Nuclear Race’

Dec. 29, 2015 (EIRNS)—Former Secretary of Defense William Perry’s warnings against the danger of nuclear war are featured by Sputnik on the occasion of the publishing of his new memoir, "My Journey at the Nuclear Brink." Perry, who played a key role in the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, reports that, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was secretly summoned to Washington to analyze intelligence on Soviet weapons in Cuba.

"Every day that I went to the analysis center I thought would be my last day on Earth," he writes in his book. He says he believed then, and still believes, that the world avoided a nuclear holocaust as much by good luck as by good management.

Perry was also a Defense Department official in 1979, at the time of the "3 A.M. phone call," a false warning of a Soviet missile launch against the United States. He said that was one of many experiences throughout the Cold War and beyond that, to have given him a "unique and chilling vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security; they now endanger it." Perry supports abolition of the remaining US ICBM force and is opposed to the development and production of a new nuclear cruise missile for the U.S. bomber force.

Perry looks at Russia’s modernization of its nuclear forces, and U.S. plans to spend billions to do the same, and sees irrational nuclear competition.

"I see an imperative to stop this damn nuclear race before it gets under way again, not just for the cost, but for the danger it puts all of us in,"

he said.