The Button
“Our nuclear weapons policy is obsolete and dangerous. I know, I helped to design it. And we have to change it before it is too late. That’s why I wrote this book.”
America is one “push of a button” away from nuclear war—a decision that rests solely in the hands of the president. Without waiting for approval from Congress or even the secretary of defense, the president can unleash America’s nuclear arsenal, ending civilization as we know it.
For decades, glitches and slipups have threatened to trigger nuclear winter: misinformation, false alarms, unstable presidents, and now cyberattacks. And a new nuclear arms race has begun, threatening us all.
From authors William J. Perry, who served as secretary of defense in the Clinton administration and undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in the Carter administration, and Tom Z. Collina, the director of policy at Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation in Washington, DC, The Button recounts the terrifying history of nuclear launch authority, from the faulty 46-cent microchip that nearly caused World War III to President Trump’s tweet about his “much bigger & more powerful” button.
Perry and Collina share their firsthand experience on the front lines of the nation’s nuclear history and provide illuminating interviews with former president Bill Clinton, former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, congressman Adam Smith, Nobel Peace Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, senior Obama administration officials, and many others. Written in an accessible and authoritative voice, The Button delivers a powerful condemnation against leaving explosive power this devastating under any one person’s thumb and outlines a prescription for a safer and saner future.
available June 2020
Tom Collina and William Perry Introduce their new book
“The gravest security threat of our time is the danger of a nuclear weapon being detonated in one of our cities.”
- William J. Perry
My journey at the nuclear brink
My Journey at the Nuclear Brink outlines William Perry’s career spent working to keep the world safe from a nuclear catastrophe. It tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era, his role in trying to shape and contain it, and how his thinking has changed about the threat these weapons pose
In a remarkable career, Perry has dealt firsthand with the changing nuclear threat. Decades of experience and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options have given Perry a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons endanger our security rather than securing it.
This book traces his thought process as he journeys from the Cuban Missile Crisis, to crafting a defense strategy in the Carter Administration to offset the Soviets' numeric superiority in conventional forces, to presiding over the dismantling of more than 8,000 nuclear weapons in the Clinton Administration, and to his creation in 2007, with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and Henry Kissinger, of the Nuclear Security Project to articulate their vision of a world free from nuclear weapons and to lay out the urgent steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers.
Now available in Russian, Korean, Chinese, and English Audiobook
