PITTSBURGH _ As a kid growing up in Butler, Pa., William Perry used to deliver the now-defunct Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph ("It was doing fine when I was there," he said, upon learning it shuttered in 1960). A graduate of Carnegie Tech, he launched a career in military electronics and consulted on Russia's nuclear intentions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later became President Bill Clinton's secretary of Defense, helping to secure nuclear weapons in the disintegrating Soviet Union.
But Perry worries that the use of nuclear weapons is more likely than it was during the Cold War _ even as Americans worry about it less. President-elect Donald Trump, for one, has spoken causally about nuclear proliferation and undertaking a new nuclear arms race.
So at age 89, he is once again spreading the news, warning of dangers all too familiar to Sun-Telly readers over a half-century ago. "When you live through a Cuban Missile Crisis up close," he recently told the online magazine Politico, "you do understand how dangerous it is, and you believe you should do everything you could possibly do to (avoid) going back."
Through his William J. Perry Project, Perry seeks to educate Americans about these threats, using online courses and a five-minute video that imagines a terrorist cell detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington, D.C., killing 80,000 people instantly and threatening the collapse of American society.
