Cover Story Perry (far right) listens as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (center) comments at a Stanford University symposium, along with former Secretary of State George Shultz (second from left) and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn (second from right). The quartet sometimes refer to themselves as the nuclear-disarmament “Gang of Four.”
Rod Searcey
years in the past, but Perry, who turned 84 in October, is nonetheless engaged in its aftermath: the danger still remaining in massive U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles and the clamor by countries and rogue military groups to make more of them. Pervomaysk turned out to be a guidepost on a long journey Perry continues to travel. He is now a Stanford professor with joint appointments at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the School of Engineering, as well as being a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The mission is
more personal now, maybe even bigger: to facilitate worldwide nuclear disarmament. It is a path he has shared most recently with three well-known partners: former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and former U.S. Senator and national security expert Sam Nunn.
Courtesy of William and Lee Perry
Courtesy of William and Lee Perry
deadly legacy lived on. Over the next three years, Perry worked tirelessly to reduce and eliminate as many as possible of the thousands of nuclear weapons the U.S. and the former Soviet Union had stockpiled. And when he left office in 1997, Perry said he believed the United States and rest of the world were moving in the right direction — towards nuclear disarmament. Since then, he has become less sure, worried by a broadly emerging proliferation of nuclear weapons and growing access to the ingredients for making them. The Cold War may be 20
At left: Perry (center) is flanked by then-Secretary of State Warren Minor Christopher (left) and U.S. Army General John Malchase David Shalikashvili, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (right). Perry, a strong believer in coordinated diplomatic and military policies between the U.S. military and its foreign counterparts, traveled extensively during his tenure as secretary of defense. Above: Perry appears in a mid-1960s Electromagnetic Systems Labs (ESL) brochure taken at the firm’s Fabian Way headquarters in south Palo Alto. Perry co-founded and was chief executive officer of ESL until 1977.
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student prodigy, Perry left high school early to study at Carnegie Tech, where he completed three semesters before enlisting in the Army (continued on next page)
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