August 1, 2018
The following is an excerpt from the Monterey Herald.
Monterey >> The United States and Russia are closer to a nuclear exchange than at any time since the Cold War, warned former Defense Secretary William Perry recently at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey.
Former Defense Secretary William Perry was one of the guests at he James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey on Tuesday. (Eduardo M. Fujii/CNS)
Perry, who served two terms during President Bill Clinton’s administration, made the statement during a Tuesday luncheon capping off a three-day workshop attended by nuclear experts, Gov. Jerry Brown, Congressman Jimmy Panetta and a significant Russian delegation that included officials from the Center for Energy and Security – the Russian counterpart to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies – and Inga Yumasheva, a member of the Russian Duma, the equivalent of the U.S. Congress.
The danger, Perry said, is not from increasing antagonism between the countries, although that exists, rather because the two countries are “void of a two-way dialogue.”
“Even during the depth of the Cold War we did not lack the dialogue we lack today,” Perry said.
The workshop took particular aim at the recent Singapore and Helsinki summits attend by North Korea and Russia respectively. William Potter, the director of the nonproliferation center, said it was difficult for experts to gauge what progress, if any, came from the summits.
“There was so little transparency on the U.S. side,” he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump spent roughly 90 minutes alone in a room with only translators but neither supplied the public with details of the discussion and, according to Potter, it is not apparent that even senior members of the U.S. government are well informed about what transpired.
“The administration was not forthcoming.”
Potter gave an example of bilateral cooperation in 1977 when both the U.S. and Russia cooperated to thwart a secret South African nuclear weapons program.
There was nuclear nonproliferation cooperation then that is lacking today, Potter said. “It appears the summits were a missed opportunity” to restore nonproliferation cooperation.
Continue reading at the Monterey Herald.
