Pacifists may argue that it is a bad choice to do weapons work at all. William Perry, Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, would probably argue that by leaving this job to others, the results could be far worse. Would we suspect that someone who spent his entire career in the defense industry, first as a private contractor and then as a government official, would be nuclear weapons’ biggest critic? Yet, in a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal, Perry’s name appeared along with former Secretaries of State George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, and Senate arms expert Sam Nunn, calling for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
On Flesh (November 2016)
