If provoked, many Americans might well back nuclear attacks on foes like Iran and al Qaeda, according to new collaborative research from CISAC senior fellow Scott Sagan and Dartmouth professor Benjamin Valentino.
You can read more about their latest public opinion polling data, and its implications for the debate surrounding President Obama's upcoming visit to Hiroshima, in a column they co-authored for the Wall Street Journal.
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Candles and paper lanterns float on the Motoyasu River in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome at the Peace Memorial Park, in memory of the victims of the bomb on the 62nd anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, on August 6, 2007 in Hiroshima. Japan.
The U.S. government has invested $1.4 billion in HIV prevention programs that promote sexual abstinence and marital fidelity, but there is no evidence that these programs have been effective at changing sexual behavior and reducing HIV risk, according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study.
Since 2004, the U.S. President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, has supported local initiatives that encourage men and women to limit their number of sexual partners and delay their first sexual experience and, in the process, help to reduce the number of teen pregnancies. However, in a study of nearly 500,000 individuals in 22 countries, the researchers could not find any evidence that these initiatives had an impact on changing individual behavior.
Although PEPFAR has been gradually reducing its support for abstinence and fidelity programs, the researchers suggest that the remaining $50 million or so in annual funding for such programs could have greater health benefits if spent on effective HIV prevention methods. Their findings were published online May 2 and in the May issue of Health Affairs.
“Overall we were not able to detect any population-level benefit from this program,” said Nathan Lo, a Stanford MD/PhD student and lead author of the study. “We did not detect any effect of PEPFAR funding on the number of sexual partners or upon the age of sexual intercourse. And we did not detect any effect on the proportion of teen pregnancy.
“We believe funding should be considered for programs that have a stronger evidence basis,” he added.
A Human Cost
Senior author Eran Bendavid, MD, said the ineffective use of these funds has a human cost because it diverts money away from other valuable, risk-reduction efforts, such as male circumcision and methods to prevent transmission from mothers to their children.
“Spending money and having no effect is a pretty costly thing because the money could be used elsewhere to save lives,” said Bendavid, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford and a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy.
PEPFAR was launched in 2004 by President George W. Bush with a five-year, $15 billion investment in global AIDS treatment and prevention in 15 countries. The program has had some demonstrated success: A 2012 study by Bendavid showed that it had reduced mortality rates and saved 740,000 lives in nine of the targeted countries between 2004 and 2008.
However, the program’s initial requirement that one-third of the prevention funds be dedicated to abstinence and “be faithful” programs has been highly controversial. Critics questioned whether this approach could work and argued that focusing only on these methods would deprive people of information on other potentially lifesaving options, such as condom use, male circumcision and ways to prevent mother-to-child transmission, and divert resources from these and other proven prevention measures.
Abstinence, Faithfulness Funding Continues
In 2008, when President Barack Obama came into office, the one-third requirement was eliminated, but U.S. funds continued to flow to abstinence and “be faithful” programs, albeit at lower levels. In 2008, $260 million was committed to these programs, but by 2013 by that figure had fallen to $45 million.
Spending money and having no effect is a pretty costly thing because the money could be used elsewhere to save lives.
Although PEPFAR continues to fund abstinence and faithfulness programs as part of its broader behavior-based prevention efforts, there is no routine evaluation of the success of these programs. “We hope our work will emphasize the difficulty in changing sexual behavior and the need to measure the impact of these programs if they are going to continue to be funded,” Lo said.
While many in the medical community were critical of the abstinence-fidelity component, no one had ever analyzed its real-world impact, Lo said. When he presented the results of the study in February at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infection, he received rousing applause from the scientists in the audience, some of whom came to the microphone to congratulate him on the work.
To measure the program’s effectiveness, Lo and his colleagues used data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, a detailed database with individual and household statistics related to population, health, HIV and nutrition. The scientists reviewed the records of nearly 500,000 men and women in 14 of the PEPFAR-targeted countries in sub-Saharan Africa that received funds for abstinence-fidelity programs and eight non-PEPFAR nations in the region. They compared changes in risk behaviors between individuals who were living in countries with U.S.-funded programs and those who were not.
The scientists included data from 1998 through 2013 so they could measure changes before and after the program began. They also controlled for country differences, including gross domestic product, HIV prevalence and contraceptive prevalence, and for individuals’ ages, education, whether they lived in an urban or rural environment, and wealth. All of the individuals in the study were younger than 30.
Number of Sexual Partners
In one measure, the scientists looked at the number of sexual partners reported by individuals in the previous year. Among the 345,000 women studied, they found essentially no difference in the number of sexual partners among those living in PEPFAR-supported countries compared with those living in areas not reached by PEPFAR programs. The same was true for the more than 132,000 men in the study.
Changing sexual behavior is not an easy thing. These are very personal decisions.
The researchers also looked at the age of first sexual intercourse among 178,000 women and more than 71,000 men. Among women, they found a slightly later age of intercourse among women living in PEPFAR countries versus those in non-PEPFAR countries, but the difference was slight — fewer than four months — and not statistically significant. Again, no difference was found among the men.
Finally, they examined teenage pregnancy rates among a total of 27,000 women in both PEPFAR-funded and nonfunded countries and found no difference in rates between the two.
Bendavid noted that, in any setting, it is difficult to change sexual behavior. For instance, a 2012 federal Centers for Disease Control analysis of U.S.-based abstinence programs found they had little impact in altering high-risk sexual practices in this country.
“Changing sexual behavior is not an easy thing,” Bendavid said. “These are very personal decisions. When individuals make decisions about sex, they are not typically thinking about the billboard they may have seen or the guy who came by the village and said they should wait until marriage. Behavioral change is much more complicated than that.”
Level of Education
The one factor that the researchers found to be clearly related to sexual behavior, particularly in women, was education level. Women with at least a primary school education had much lower rates of high-risk sexual behavior than those with no formal education, they found.
“One would expect that women who are educated have more agency and the means to know what behaviors are high-risk,” Bendavid said. “We found a pretty strong association.”
The researchers concluded that the “study contributes to the growing body of evidence that abstinence and faithfulness campaigns may not reduce high-risk sexual behaviors and supports the importance of investing in alternative evidence-based programs for HIV prevention in the developing world.”
The authors noted that PEPFAR representatives have been open to discussing these findings and the implications for funding decisions regarding HIV prevention programs.
Stanford medical student Anita Lowe was also a co-author of the study.
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Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to deal with the problem of overcommitment abroad. How does his record compare with earlier cases? Can the past help us understand the foreign policy debate of 2016? Can it tell us how, when—and whether—today’s retrenchment will end?
Stephen Sestanovich is a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (Knopf 2014).
From 1997 to 2001, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union. In previous government assignments, he was senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He has also worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ambassador Sestanovich received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University. He has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Event co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Please join us for the upcoming Payne Distinguished Lecture, “NATIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT," with R. Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The lecture will take place on Friday, April 29 at 12 noon in the Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall. Please RSVP to Scott Nelson at snelson@stanford.edu.
There is a general consensus that institutions do matter in development. Rule of law, property rights enforcement and participatory political institutions are necessary conditions for implementing market-oriented policies such as financial liberalization, trade openness, and increasing private sector involvement. There is also an alternative argument suggesting that integration to the global market has an impact on domestic institutions. Yet there is still little attention given to how institutions are evolving in the developing world in the context of an integrated world market. Specifically, do institutions evolve as a given economy becomes more integrated in the global markets or do they remain unchanged? Also, how do they change and what are the key determinants of this change? In answering these questions, this talk examines the different experiences of liberalization in the Arab World. It investigates the impact of trade and capital flows on different types of institutions. It also addresses the role of existing institutions in the success or failure of these experiences of economic liberalization.
Speaker Bio:
Samer Atallah is an Assistant Professor of economics at the School of Business of the American University in Cairo since 2011.He was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago Center in Paris during the winter of 2014.
He has earned his PhD and Masters of Arts in economics from McGill University. The title of his PhD thesis is “Essays on resource-dependent economies: Political economy and strategic behavior”. He also holds a Masters of Science from University of California at Berkeley.
His research interests are in development economics and political economy. His research work in development economics covers intergenerational mobility, education policy and quantitative analysis of household surveys. His research also covers game theory applications on the political economy of democratization and quantitative analysis of election results.
He is a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum and a member of the Canadian Economics Association and the Middle East Economic Association.
This event is co-sponosred by the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.
Ground Floor Conference Rm E008 Encina Hall 616 Serra St. Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of Business of the American University in Cairo
When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.
But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.
"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.
Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.
Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."
Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.
The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.
Stanford foreign policy experts discussed flashpoints around the world at an OpenXChange event this week.
Three of Stanford's most seasoned international affairs experts discussed foreign policy and diplomacy – and practiced a bit of it on stage, too – as they tackled the topics of refugees, Russia and other politically thorny issues at a campus forum March 1.
The event, "When the World Is Aflame," featured Condoleezza Rice, a Stanford political science professor and former U.S. secretary of state; Michael McFaul, director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and former U.S. ambassador to Russia; and Jeremy Weinstein, a Stanford political science professor and former director for the National Security Council.
Janine Zacharia, a Stanford visiting lecturer in communication and former Jerusalem bureau chief and Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post, was the moderator.
The event was hosted by OpenXChange, a campus initiative to provide a forum for students and community members to focus on today's societal challenges.
"So you were resetting some of my policy?" Rice half-jokingly interjected, as McFaul discussed the objectives behind the U.S. trade talks with Russia a few years ago.
"It was not about making friends with the Russians – I want to make that clear," McFaul continued after the laughter in the audience died down. "And it wasn't that we needed to correct the wrongs from the previous period," he said, casting a quick glance over at Rice. "The Russians had an interest in giving the Iranians a nuclear weapon. Our answer was, no, and let's work with them to prevent that."
A series of trade sanctions with Russia were eventually accomplished, but as it turns out, McFaul noted, the political environment has since changed with Russia's aggression in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria.
Today's conflict in Syria was laid about four years ago, the panelists agreed, when the United States decided to aid the rebels and not overtly attack the current regime.
"There were reasons our president and others did not go down that path, but it was an invitation to others to play games in that environment," Weinstein said. "What their endgame is, we don't know."
Rice added that Russian President Vladimir Putin "does not mind countries that basically don't function." As such, "a stable, functioning Syria was never his definition of success."
Zacharia asked, "Are you saying we have yielded the endgame to the Russians in Syria? There is nothing we can do? And we're playing defense?"
"Yes," Rice answered.
"Wait, there is no endgame," McFaul said. "It's not that we yielded the endgame."
"Right," Rice replied.
Though the panelists' opinions differed at times, the trio of political science professors agreed on many points, including that international order is being tested, and that the refugee crisis is an overwhelming problem – one that the United States should help resolve.
"I'm a firm believer that America has a moral obligation to take [refugees]," Rice said. "But let's remember that we have to have a way to take them that is actually going to work within the system."
"We have a humanitarian architecture that simply isn't up to the task," Weinstein said. Securing congressional funding to reform the system will be a challenge.
What's more problematic, McFaul added, is that the current political rhetoric about how the United States should handle refugees is "based on fear."
"We're not having a rational debate about this in my opinion," McFaul said. "We have to fill the debate with empirical facts instead."
Public fears will continue as long as extreme Islamic State terrorist groups remain influential, "inspiring lone wolves like [those] in San Bernardino," Rice said, referring to the December 2015 terrorist attack there that killed 14 and injured 22 people.
"Somebody has got to defeat ISIS in its crib," Rice said. "They march in columns; they don't hide in caves like al-Qaeda. If CBS News can find them, then the American military can find them."
The tougher challenge, however, will be the task of influencing sectarian politics and creating a more stable state in the long term, Weinstein said.
Stanford – with its cache of expertise – should strive to shape the national dialogue with concrete facts and analyses, McFaul said. Inspiring students and giving them the foundational tools to become the new generation of policy leaders is also part of that, he said. Adding a course on Russian politics would also be an improvement, he said.
Weinstein is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Rice, a former Stanford provost, is the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The panelists urged students to gain a deep knowledge of the areas and issues they care about.
"Know your facts," Rice emphasized.
"When you're making policy decisions at the table, the people who understand these places and understand the political dynamics – those are the people whose voices are second to none around the table," Weinstein said.
"And we need to get you prepared for that in a more robust way," McFaul said, inviting students to pass any ideas about this to him.
In terms of career choices, "there's nothing greater" than public service, he said. "Sometimes I would get goose pimples when I could stand in front of Russians with the American flag behind me, representing the United States of America."
At the March 1st Stanford OpenXChange event, “When the World is Aflame,” FSI Director and Senior Fellow, Michael McFaul challenged students and the campus community to get informed and get involved with global issues that they are passionate about. As a response to overwhelming interest, we present ways to get engaged on the Syrian Refugee Crisis, and refugees worldwide. The most important way to get involved is to know something. Educate yourself about the situation. Read the news, know the push and pull factors, and know the role that your government, international NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, and your community play in supporting refugees around the world.
How big is the current global refugee crisis?
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that as of 2015, there are 14.4 million refugees around the world, and an additional 32.3 million internally displaced people (IDP) living within the borders of their own countries. The total number of displaced people worldwide is the highest it has been since the end of World War II. At 4.8 million people, Syrian refugees make up one third of the total global refugees right now. However, large numbers of refugees are forced to move because of conflicts, ethnic persecution and climate change around the world, including large numbers from war in Afghanistan and the horn of Africa, criminal violence in Central America, ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia, and rising sea levels on the Pacific Islands.
What has caused the surge in refugees from Syria?
Refugees don’t choose to leave. Syrians are fleeing a complex civil uprising and oppressive government actions. Taking the time to understand the root causes of this crisis is one of the most valuable things you can do. This is as simple as reading the news. For background on the Syrian civil war, check out summary pieces from international news organizations, such as “The story of the conflict” from the BBC, “The confused person’s guide to the Syrian Civil War” from the Atlantic, or “The war in Syria explained in five minutes” from the Guardian. Additionally, writer Jackie Roche and cartoonist/illustrator Audrey Quinn created a short graphic novel on “Syria’s Climate Conflict.” Explore the related articles!
Where do refugees go?
Many refugees do not have a passport or legal travel document and cannot obtain one from their government. Unable to board a plane, they flee their country of origin over land or water. As a result, almost half (1.8 million) of Syria’s refugees currently reside in neighboring Turkey, and over a million more in tiny Lebanon, where one fifth of the country’s population is now from Syria. The UNHCR maintains robust statistical datasets on these trends.
On October 8, 2015, President Obama put out a call to #AidRefugees. There are many ways, both great and small, that you can take up that call to action right here on campus. Get involved with one of the on-campus organizations engaged in advocacy. Enroll in a course on refugees. Attend an event on the refugee crisis. Donate to an international organization working with refugees. Volunteer for a Bay Area non-profit serving refugee communities. Learn about technological innovations that are improving the lives of displaced people. Organize a discussion group in your dorm or community. Write a letter to your congressperson. Tell people about the issue. We have provided a list of links below to help you get involved.
A shadowy terror group smuggles a crude nuclear bomb into the United States, then detonates it right in the heart of Washington D.C., setting off a 15 kiloton explosion.
Eighty thousand Americans are killed instantly, including the president, vice president and most of the members of Congress, and more than a hundred thousand more are seriously wounded.
News outlets are soon broadcasting a message they’ve all received from a group claiming responsibility.
It says there are five more bombs hidden in five different cities across the America, and one bomb will be set off each week for the next five weeks unless all American troops based overseas are ordered to immediately return to the U.S. homeland.
The nation is thrown into chaos, as millions scramble to flee the cities, clogging roads and choking telecommunications systems.
The stock market crashes, before trading is halted altogether.
Martial law is declared, amid widespread looting and violence.
That was just one of the nightmare scenarios for a potential nuclear disaster that former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry vividly described as he delivered the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s annual Drell Lecture on Wednesday.
“My bottom line is that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War,” Perry said.
Most people were “blissfully unaware” of the danger that simmering conflicts in geopolitical flash points around the globe – including Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan – could easily turn nuclear, Perry told the Stanford audience.
A new nuclear arms race with Russia
Perry said he had tried to foster closer cooperation between the U.S. and Russia when he headed the Pentagon during the mid ‘90s and helped oversee the joint dismantling of four thousand nuclear weapons.
“When I left the Pentagon, I believed we were well on the way to ending forever that Cold War enmity, but that was not to be,” he said.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
Since then, relations between the West and Russia have soured badly, prompting Russia to modernize its nuclear arsenal and assume a more aggressive nuclear posture.
“They’re well advanced in rebuilding their Cold War nuclear arsenal, and it is Putin’s stated first priority,” Perry said.
“And they have dropped their former policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, and replaced it with a policy that says nuclear weapons will be their weapon of choice if they are threatened.”
While Perry said he believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not want to engage in a military conflict with NATO forces, he said he was concerned about the possibility of Russia making a strategic miscalculation and stumbling into a conflict where they might resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
“If they did that there’s no way of predicting or controlling the escalation that would follow thereafter,” Perry said.
Chinese economic problems increasing tensions
In Asia, a slowing Chinese economy could exacerbate domestic political tensions over issues such as wealth inequality and pollution, and encourage Chinese leaders to divert attention from problems at home by focusing on enemies abroad.
“China has had more than 10 percent growth now for almost three decades, but I think there’s trouble ahead,” Perry said.
“The time-proven safety valve for any government that’s in trouble is ultra-nationalism, which in the case of China translates into anti-Americanism and anti-Japanese.”
China has seen a major growth in military expenditures over the last decade, and it has used that investment to build a blue water navy and develop effective anti-ship missiles designed to drive the U.S. Navy hundreds of miles back from the Chinese coastline.
One potential flash point for a conflict between China and the U.S. are the artificial islands that China has been building in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
“In a sense, China is regarding the South China Sea as a domestic lake, and we regard it and most other countries regard it as international waters, so their actions have been challenged by the U.S. Navy and will continue to be challenged,” Perry said.
North Korea’s growing nuclear threat
Meanwhile, China’s neighbor North Korea has continued to defy the international community and conducted another nuclear test in January.
“North Korea is today building a nuclear arsenal, and I would say clearly it’s of the highest priority in their government, and they have adopted outrageous rhetoric about how they might use those nuclear weapons,” Perry said.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
North Korea followed up its latest nuclear test with a satellite launch earlier this month – an important step towards developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten the United States mainland.
“These missiles today have only conventional warheads that are of no significant concern, but they are developing nuclear warheads,” Perry said.
“They already have developed a nuclear bomb, and the latest test, as well as tests to come, will be designed to perfect a bomb small enough and compact enough and durable enough to fit into a warhead. If they succeed in doing that, then the bluster will become a real threat.”
Perry said he hoped China and the United States could combine forces and adopt a “carrot and stick” diplomatic approach to force North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program – with the United States offering aid and international recognition, and China threatening to cut off supplies of food and aid.
He said he expected to see “more acting out” from the North Korean regime in the coming months, in the form of further nuclear and rocket tests.
Like it or not, the Iran deal is the only deal we’ll get
The landmark deal reached last year, where Iran agree to curtail its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions, was a better resolution than Perry had expected to the negotiations, but it has met with significant resistance from groups he described as “strange bedfellows.”
“The opposition in Israel and the United States opposed the deal because they fear it will allow Iran to get a bomb,” Perry said.
“Whereas the opposition in Iran opposed the deal because they fear it will prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Both cannot be right.”
Many Republican presidential hopefuls have publicly stated on the campaign trail that they would withdraw from the deal if they got elected to the White House, but Perry said that would be a strategic mistake.
“The opposition in the United States has a simple formula – we should withdraw from the deal, we should reinstate sanctions, and we should renegotiate a better deal,” Perry said.
“Let me be as blunt as I can, this is a pure fantasy. There is not the remotest possibility that the sanction could be reapplied if the United States withdraws from this deal, because the day we withdraw from the deal, our allies are gone, the sanctions are gone, there will be no renegotiations without sanctions, so this deal, like it or not, is the only deal we will ever get.”
Another “Mumbai” attack could spark regional nuclear war
Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan have more than a hundred nuclear weapons on each side, as well as the missiles to deliver them, and a conventional military conflict between them could quickly escalate into a regional nuclear war, Perry said.
Another large-scale terror attack, like the coordinated assault in Mumbai that killed more than 163 people in 2008, could lead India to retaliate militarily against Pakistan (which India blames for encouraging the terror groups operating in Pakistani territory).
Perry said he was concerned that Pakistan would then use tactical nuclear weapons against invading Indian troops, and that India might then respond with a nuclear attack of its own on Pakistan.
“So this is the nightmare scenario of how a regional nuclear war could start,” Perry said.
“A nightmare that would involve literally tens of millions of deaths, along with the possibility of stimulating a nuclear winter that would cause widespread tragedies all over the planet.”
A ray of hope
Despite all the potential for nuclear disaster in the current geopolitical environment, Perry said he was still hopeful that nuclear catastrophe could be avoided.
"While much of my talk today has a doomsday ring to it, that truly is not who I am,” Perry said.
“I’m basically an optimist. When I see a cloud, I look for a ray to shine through that cloud.”
One important step toward reducing the nuclear threat would be improving relations between the U.S. and Russia, he said.
“My ray of sunshine, my hope, is I believe we can still reverse the slide in U.S. Russia relations, he said.
“We must begin that by restoring civil dialog. We must restore cooperation between the United States and Russia in areas where we have mutual interest…If we succeed in doing that, then we can work to stop and reverse the drift to a greater and greater dependence on nuclear weapons.”
Perry ended his speech by urging the audience to keep striving to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons.
“We must pursue our ideals in order to keep alive our hope – hope for a safer world for our children and for our grandchildren,” he said.
Hero Image
William J. Perry answers questions from the audience during the annual Drell Lecture at Stanford, as CISAC co-director David Relman (right) looks on.
Samer Atallah is an Assistant Professor of economics at the School of Business of the American University in Cairo since 2011.He was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago Center in Paris during the winter of 2014.
William J. Perry shares a video depicting the threat of nuclear terrorism with a Stanford audience.
William J. Perry delivers the Drell Lecture in an address entitled "A National Security Walk Around the World."
