The 12th Joseph Rotblat Lecture at the Hay Festival, held on 2 June 2016 in cooperation with WMD Awareness, featured William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defence Secretary on ‘My Journey at the Nuclear Brink’, in conversation with Nik Gowing.
Perry explained the development of his thinking on weaponry and security from the Cuban Missile Crisis to crafting a defence strategy in the Carter Administration to offset the Soviets’ numeric superiority in conventional forces. He presided over the dismantling of more than 8,000 nuclear weapons in the Clinton Administration, and his creation in 2007 (with George Shultz, Sam Nunn and Henry Kissinger) of the Nuclear Security Project to articulate “a vision of a world free from nuclear weapons and to lay out the urgent steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers”.