Former US defence secretary William J Perry, one of America’s wise men on national security, delivered an arresting message last week: We’re about to find ourselves in a new nuclear arms race.
“The danger of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than during the Cold War,” Perry said.
The danger stems not only from terrorist groups like Islamic State, which would gladly steal or buy nuclear material on the black market, but also from the huge nuclear arsenals the US, Russia and other big powers maintain more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
Those nuclear forces are bigger than they need to be - almost 16,000 warheads in all. And they still include hundreds of missiles on hair-trigger alert.
“We’ve avoided a catastrophe more by good luck than by good management,” Perry told a meeting at the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank.
In 2007, Perry joined with former senator Sam Nunn and former secretaries of state Henry A Kissinger and George P Shultz - two Democrats, two Republicans - to urge that the US make the abolition of nuclear weapons a formal goal. President Barack Obama embraced the idea, negotiating a treaty with Russia to cut both countries’ arsenals.
But since that 2010 pact, progress toward nuclear disarmament has virtually stopped. Both Russia and the US have launched expensive plans to modernise their nuclear forces, reaffirming the weapons’ central role in national security.
So Perry is trying to revive a proposal that a handful of arms control advocates have floated in previous years: The US should eliminate all of its 400-plus land-based nuclear missiles.
For decades, US nuclear strategy has relied on a “triad” of weapons platforms: land-based missiles or ICBMs, manned bombers and submarines.
The basic idea was redundancy: If one system was knocked out by an enemy, the others would still be available.
Over the years, however, US nuclear submarines have become virtually undetectable. Stealth bombers are difficult for opponents to find, as well.
The land-based missiles, by contrast, are more vulnerable. They’re stuck in one place. Their locations are known to the Russians and other potential enemies.
That means they face a dilemma known as “use it or lose it”. If an apparent attack against US missile bases is detected, officials will have only a few minutes to decide whether to launch the missiles in response, or lose them.
And that makes them susceptible to false alarms - which actually occurred several times in both the US and Russia during the Cold War. (Luckily, officers realized that their radar was malfunctioning.)
That vulnerability is still there. “The way to solve it is simply to eliminate the ICBMs,” Perry said.
It’s an unorthodox suggestion, and there are counter-arguments, of course - mainly that ICBMs provide insurance if an adversary somehow knocked out every submarine and every bomber.
But the doctrine sometimes sounds more like force of habit.
“It has worked for us for decades,” Air Force Secretary Deborah James told a congressional committee last month. “The ICBMs are considered responsive, the sea-launched are considered survivable, and the bombers ... are flexible.”
I think Perry has the better argument. The case for keeping land-based missiles is weak. The danger they present is real.
But what I’d mostly like to see is a serious debate on these issues among the candidates for president.
Senator Bernie Sanders has said he thinks the modernisation plan is a waste of money. Hillary Clinton has suggested that she’s worried about the cost, but hasn’t taken a firm position. Senator Ted Cruz has said he wants to spend more money on defence, including nuclear weapons.
And Donald Trump? When conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump for his position on the nuclear triad last year, the businessman was flummoxed.
“For me, nuclear is just the power,” Trump replied. “The devastation is very important to me.”
We deserve better answers. It’s a matter of survival.

- Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send him e-mail at doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com