Many of you know doctor parry was the nineteenth secretary of defense in the clinton administration, a world renowned expert on us foreign policy, National Security, defense policy, arms control and long and distinguished history at stanford. A senior fellow at fsi and the Hoover Institution and codirector of National Security cooperation from 19881993 and bachelors and masters degrees in mathematics at stanford which is impressive to me because i didnt get through as a graduate student. Michael and barbara, Professor Emeritus at stanford, great to reconnect with you, and we also are thrilled to have doctor parrys coauthor here, tom z. Collina. He has 30 years of washington dc experience in nonproliferation issues and senior position at the arms Patrol Association and institute for science and interNational Security. And nuclear testing, with the new start treaty and a degree in International Relations from cornell but we wont hold that against you. I am pleased to introduce my colleague and good friend rose mueller. A Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to stanford was deputy secretarygeneral of nato 20162019 and prior to that served five years as undersecretary an arms control and National Security at the state department. Here is what we have planned. They will each offer some remarks for an overview and rose will join in conversation. At the end to do q and a from the audience, looks like we have 142 folks and climbing please do so by doing to the bottom of your zoom screen in the queue and a button and i will collect the question and feed them to our authors after rose completed her questioning. Without further delay, i will hand it to secretary parry. I will kick us off, thank you for those introductions, great to be with you as well. It is an honor and privilege to share this virtual stage with you and thank you for organizing, and honor to write this book with bill parry, the book comes out this month, the button thee new Nuclear Arms Race and president ial power from truman to trump. We plan the timing for three reasons which wont surprise anybody, july 16th marks the 70 fifth anniversary of the bomb, the First Nuclear test, trinity test. August marks the 72 anniversary of the hiroshima and nagasaki bombings and we will choose our next president. These events create a historic opportunity to debate the future of Us Nuclear Policy. Now that we have had the bomb for 75 years, lived with the bomb this long, what should the next president do to reduce the risk of nuclear war, that is what this book is about. I will run through the slides and if the Technology Gods are with me, okay, great. Let me put the book in the context of the current moment, we are in a National Crisis of 3 dimensions, public health, economy, Racial Injustice. We have a leadership vacuum in washington. To truly move beyond this crisis, the status quo and us policy must change specifically the coronavirus shows how us defense policy has been focused on the wrong threats. We are spending too much in outdated cold war scenarios like military conflict with russia and china and not enough on the true existential threat we face today, pandemics, Climate Change and nuclear war. Raging unemployment and systemic racial inequality show that we have been investing too much in traditional defense and not enough to build a Strong Economy in a just society, despite spending 700 billion a year on defense Many Americans simply do not feel safe. As Martin Luther king jr. Warned the nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death and i would agree. Back to the issues at hand, Nuclear Weapons in particular have no role to play in addressing the most serious threat we face. In fact Nuclear Weapons, we find, make those threats even worse. So lets unpack this. We would like to start with this photo, here is donald trump the infamous football carried by the military aid right behind him. The briefcase contains everything the president needs to start a nuclear war. This is how close we are to nuclear war every day, every minute right now. Donald trump can start an attack, order an attack on his own authority with no Second Opinions, no input from congress or the secretary of defense i needed. We dont mean to single out donald trump here, of course his impulsiveness and disregard for Expert Opinion might highlight these concerns in the current moment but we want to be clear that all president s make mistakes, all are human and that is why we feel no single human should control the future of humanity yet we the American People choose to give president s of this absolute power. Why do we live so close to the brink of disaster . This is one of the main themes of the book because Us Nuclear Policy is focused on the wrong threat. 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. Us Nuclear Policy has been based on this threat for decades so the big problem here is this mistaken threat assessment undermines us security by driving policies that increase the risk of blundering into nuclear war by mistake. Starting a nuclear war in response to a false alarm. One of the greatest dangers, 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 deterrence only missions. So turning to you, bill, you had a front row seat to the arms race and met with soviet and russian officials many times. Some might challenge our key assertion here that a bolt from the blue from russia is not a realistic thread. What would you say . I would say they are wrong. When i was secretary of defense i met many times with key officials in the russian government, the minister of defense in the minister of state and several decades since i continued to meet with hundreds of russians. One thing i can say with great confidence. The russians are not stupid. The russians are not suicidal and we are focused on a balls out of the blue, first strike is not realistic. What is realistic is we might blunder into a nuclear war. Thank you. As we argue in the book this perceived threat of a bolt from the blue drives the military requirements, we must be ready to launch Nuclear Weapons at all times within minutes and that drives these three dangerous policies. First the president has Sole Authority to launch Nuclear Weapons within minutes with 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. Third, the president can launch hundreds of landbased ballistic missiles, icbms on warning of attack and does not need to wait for proof of attack. One of the main things we do in the book is show how dangerous this combination of policies are, please give us your sense of why these policies are so dangerous . Particularly standing out is the possibility of a false alarm. That is not a theoretical did. Weve had 6 false alarms that i know of, one of them i personally experienced when i was the under secretary of defense during the cold war i got a phone call at 3 00 in the morning from generals of north american air command. The first thing he told me was his computers were showing 600 icbms on the way from the soviet union to the United States. Happily the general quickly added that he had concluded it was a false alarm. He was calling me to have me assess why his computers are gone wrong. It turned out it was a computer chip malfunction. Very simple very cheap chip. Other times we had false alarms could be technical failure or human failure but a realistic possibility that happened 6 times in the past and will happen again. Every time you tell that story i find it chilling so thank you very much. Lets expand on the dangers of Sole Authority. In 1963, this week in 1963 president kennedy gave a famous speech where he wants we could stumble into nuclear war due to accident or miscalculation or madness and spent a bit of time in the book going through those various scenarios. Walk us through how this might happen . The president might have bad information. A classic example is president kennedy on cuba where all his military advisors were recommending a military attack on cuba. Had our troops landed on the beach they would have been met and decimated by the tactical Nuclear Weapons. We did not know that while the russians did not yet have mediumrange missiles operational they did have tactical Nuclear Weapons that were operational and would have been used. In addition to that and unstable donald trump might be a classic example of that but hes not the only one. In the last few months of president nixons presidency he was a heavy drinker and not in full control of himself most of the time, the secretary of state was deeply concerned, the secretary of defense jim solicitor tried to intervene and tell him not to respond if they got a call from the president but that was an illegal order and unlikely the military would have followed it and then president reagan in the last few months of his presidency was in the early stages of alzheimers disease and finally as we talked about we can have a false alarm and as serious as the danger is it is greater today with the presence of cyber warfare. That we could start a nuclear war by blundering into nuclear war, that should drive us policy, how to prevent the possibility of blundering into nuclear war, not focus on the old cold war, unrealistic threat of the first strike. Thank you very much. Lets propose solutions. 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, primarily the 3 we now discussed. The recommendation is to end president ial authority. We believed it was necessary for the president to be able to respond in 5 or 6 minutes. As we discussed, that is leading us to a catastrophic war through false alarm. The bill that is in congress is for that purpose, no probability at all of being passed this year. Theres a good prospect for the next year and we should all get behind supporting that bill next year. Secondly, we should establish, the new president should establish no first use policy for the United States. Each president has come to the close to the brink of deciding it. This time lets push it through. There is a war and smith bill pending in Congress Today that will not pass but we could have an opportunity, another crack at it next year and finally we should phase out icbms they are accidents waiting to happen. Thank you very much. Im going to summarize and close this out to get to roses questions and audience questions, Nuclear Weapons are the president s weapons, every four years we have a chance to change Nuclear Policy. The current National Crisis is creating a once in a Generation Opportunity to rethink our approach to National Security. The weapons are so out of step with reality that is doing us more harm than good. Is 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. We are up against 75 years of outdated thinking of the 50 billion industry. History tells us major change can 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 interested in buying the book please go to beenbellabooks. Com and get 30 off. Thank you. Ive tried to do but and 50 and button 75 and it didnt give me 50 or 75 off the book, just 30. Rose, over to you. I have my own copyright here. It is a wonderful book. I spent a couple days trying to prepare for this session and it really grips you. Really good reading and learned a lot. I commend the authors for turning out something about Nuclear Weapons that is eminently readable. My job is to lead a fireside chat which seems strange in the middle of june but i will ask our authors tough questions and see what they have to say. I will ask you two if you both want to answer if one of you will take the lead. Does that sound okay . My first question is the russians have put out a president ial decree a week ago, with their release policy resting on president ial decisionmaking authority, the president being president Vladimir Putin. As one rational analyst put it succinctly and i quote, new first, phone later. What would you say to the russians or Vladimir Putin based on what you learned . I would say they are making the same mistake we made, we are moving backwards and the russian analyst, a great statement but hes not considering they knew first and we nuke. What hes talking about so boldly is the destruction of civilization. Bill is exactly right, to say in my experience from what i read about this the russians situation is even more dire than ours. The russian president has less time to make a decision about retaliation once they get notice of an incoming attack so the situation is even more dire in russia than it is here and we need to help russia move away from Sole Authority first used to launch on warning. I can see that would be an extraordinarily interesting conversation, also a complex one. Let me move on to my second question. The book focuses on Us Russian Nuclear relationship which was long based on the notion of first strike capability. The policy you are recommending, has long been the basis of Chinese Nuclear doctrine. Now, however, they are shifting to capabilities like icbms that would appear to be moving them in the first strike direction rather than second use assured retaliation. How would you incentivize the us and russia to move to a second strike approach, secure second strike approach while getting the chinese to stay where they are, both countries having an active Modernization Program with the chinese building submarines and icbms in the russians monitoring their nuclear triad. What would you say . How to keep the chinese where they are with that approach and how do we get the us and russia incentivized to move in that direction . I will start on this and you can jump in. We need to be careful not to equate china and russia but us and russia have 20 times the Nuclear Arsenal so we need to keep that in mind. The way to incentivize china is to reduce the danger, to incentivize china, reduce the danger to us we need to reduce the danger to them. We should match chinas pledge on no first use his work with them by taking weapons off of their. That is where i would start. What do you think . I think trump did it just right. Very good. Both of you recommend the Nuclear Reduction talks with russia could start with the proposal president obama made in berlin in 2013 for one third further reduction in operationally deployed warheads below the new start treaty levels of 1550 deployed warheads. That is the easiest and fastest way to get Nuclear Reduction to the level of thousands warheads. I have heard some say that because the russians and chinese have Nuclear Weapons systems that are modernizing as i said a moment ago we cant readers and illuminate anymore. We need to build up and produce more warheads. What would you say to that . Test of our warheads come from Nuclear Weapons systems, is not whether we are able to or hit up the russians. The test is deterrence, not a numbers game. Interesting question. If we reduce our forces would it combine the incentive, we cannot be sure but during the cold war we increase, they increase, follow the leader approach. Interesting to see if we can reverse the trend. Now way of knowing that. This logic of always building more as we get into the arms race where we build 30,000 Nuclear Weapons and it is expensive and dangerous and as long as we have enough to deter russia and china then at is enough and any more is wasteful. The country has real needs on covid19 response on the economy in response to Racial Injustice so we dont have money to burn so we sh