Erin Baggott Carter, a CISAC fellow during 2014-16, recently published a Washington Post op-ed on the Chinese media coverage of the current U.S. presidential election. This is a result of CISAC's increased focus on requiring and helping all CISAC fellows publish an op-ed based on their academic research. Carter is now an assistant professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Click here to read the entire op-ed, with charts and additional links. Below is the written portion:

Erin Baggott Carter

How do the 2016 U.S. elections appear outside the United States? The state-controlled Russian media clearly leans toward Republican nominee Donald Trump, who appears to admire President Vladimir Putin.

But what about China’s state-controlled media? Given Trump’s frequent references to China as a major cause of U.S. job losses — and his promises to get tough on trade pacts — one might expect harsh reporting on Trump.

To test this theory, I scraped China’s leading state-affiliated print news media from May 1 to Oct. 24, looking for references to the two candidates and automatically coding whether nearby words indicated a positive or a negative tone. This exercise shows that official Chinese-language media leans somewhat toward “Hillary” (as the Democratic candidate is referred to in China) in terms of favorable mentions.

Early this summer, Chinese state media covered Trump far more often than Hillary Clinton. But by this fall, the volume of coverage was nearly equal. There has been very little coverage of trade policies or economic implications for China. Instead, Chinese reporting tends to focus on scandals and missteps. This does not reflect a typical “horse-race” view of elections. Instead, as my ongoing research shows and some journalists point out, Chinese propaganda likes to emphasize the flaws of democracy as a political system.

The graph below shows the volume of coverage for both candidates. In early May, state-run newspapers mentioned Trump five times as often as they mentioned Clinton. This imbalance has steadily declined. Currently, the candidates are mentioned with nearly identical frequency.

The next graph shows the editorial tone of coverage of Trump and Clinton. Since May, Chinese propaganda has consistently covered Clinton more favorably, although both candidates have become slightly less popular over time. Clinton’s favorability rating started at 92 percent in May and declined to 77 percent in late October. Trump’s favorability rating started at 79 percent in May and declined to 71 percent in late October.

China’s state-run newspapers have said relatively little about the candidates’ policies and their implications for U.S.-China relations. Instead, coverage has focused on scandals: Clinton’s deleted emails and Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, his tax returns, and his relationships with women.

Excluding generic campaign words and filler words, the most commonly used words about Clinton include “email,”  “investigation,” “Russia,” “FBI,” “lawsuit,” “Clinton Foundation,” “scandal,” “husband,” and “women.” The most commonly used words about  Trump include “Russia,” “Putin,” “intraparty,” “criticism,”  “immigrants,” “tax payments,” “slander,” “New York,” “magnate,” “women” and “real estate.”

Why is Clinton getting better coverage?

China’s preference for Clinton over Trump is notable for two reasons. First, China has a tepid relationshipwith Clinton. In her first visit to Beijing in 1995, she refused to meet with senior leaders and criticized Chinese human rights practices, neither of which endeared her to her hosts. As secretary of state, she implemented the Obama administration’s strategy of rebalancing toward Asia, which many in China interpreted as a move toward containment. After Clinton left the State Department, the China Daily wrote that she “always spoke with a unipolar voice and never appeared interested in the answers she got.”

Second, it takes a lot for Chinese leaders to take China-bashing from U.S. presidential candidates seriously. They learned from Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that U.S. presidents rarely enact the anti-China campaign platforms that help carry them to victory. For instance, as Mitt Romney ramped up his criticism of Chinese trade practices in 2012, China’s Global Times speculated, “Is Romney’s toughness toward China just a scam? … His soft stance is only a matter of time.”

These two facts speak to the depths of Chinese concern about a Trump presidency. Despite China’s historical antipathy toward Clinton and willingness to countenance tough campaign rhetoric, Chinese propaganda still favors Clinton over Trump.

This is important because the American media has recently speculated that China, like Russia, may prefer a Trump presidency because it would lead the United States to withdraw from the world. Although there are doubtless some in the 88 million-member Chinese Communist Party who hold this view, China is far more integrated into the American financial system than Russia is and has commensurately larger stakes in U.S. economic stability.

For instance, as the U.S. financial sector was unraveling in September 2008, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson asked China not to sell Treasury bonds. China agreed, Paulson tells us in his memoirs, even though Russia invited China to weaken the American economy by dumping bonds in concert.

Now, as was the case eight years ago, when forced to choose between global stability and relative gains over the United States, Chinese leaders prefer global stability. Although Trump offers China the enticing possibility of American withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific sphere, Chinese leaders have begrudgingly cast their lot with the devil they know. This is evident from the propaganda they control, which favors Clinton over Trump.

The coordinated cyber attack that crippled parts of the internet on Friday highlighted key policy problems, a Stanford cybersecurity scholar said.And while the problems were clear, there are no easy solutions, said Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyberpolicy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. A research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lin serves on the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity.

Beginning early Friday morning, several major websites including Twitter and Amazon went down for most of the day, and many other sites were inaccessible. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating what is described as a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack. The attacks mainly focused on Dyn, one of the companies that run the internet’s domain name system (DNS).

The following is an interview with Lin:

What happened on Oct. 21?

It was a distributed denial-of-service attack on a major internet services provider. The company operates much of the internet’s infrastructure. It’s not a consumer-facing company, but is in between the user and a company like, say, Amazon. These attacks centered on the domain name system (DNS), which is the service that translates something like stanford.edu into a numerical IP address. People remember Amazon.com, but they don’t remember the numerical IP address (which is actually where a company like Dyn sends web users going to a site like Amazon). What a DOS attack involves is the flooding of this (Dyn) company’s servers with millions of fake requests from sources for service to go to those web sites. Being forced to process all these requests, the company can’t service real people trying to use web sites. On Friday, the millions of sources making these requests appear to have been part of the Internet of Things.

What is the Internet of Things, and how did it factor into the cyberattack?

In this case, they weren’t, by and large, products like your computer or mine, but were mostly smaller things like surveillance cameras, baby monitors and home routers [everyday objects that have network connectivity to the internet]. What makes these things particularly vulnerable is that they are small, they don’t have much computational power in them, and they don’t include many, if any, security features. In fact, a Chinese company just admitted that it didn’t pay enough attention to security, and they recommend users do some things to improve security. But they shipped their products without paying much attention to security, and that’s why this was a vulnerability.

What new public policies could lessen the likelihood of this happening again?

The primary policy recommendation is that we need policy that encourages – or mandates, depending on how strong you want to be about it – at least minimal security measures for devices that connect to the internet, even Internet of Things devices. How you actually promote, encourage or incentivize that without a legal mandate is problematic, however, because nobody quite knows what the market will accept. Also, if you’re going to force manufacturers to pay attention to security, you’re going to reduce the rate of innovation for these products. Then there’s the question of who’s going to buy them, because the unsecure ones will probably be cheaper. The fundamental problem here is that guys who use the Internet of Things, like surveillance cameras, will find those cameras work perfectly fine, even if they were compromised. So they don’t care about security. They have no incentive to do so. Why should they pay more to protect me?

Does this show that our November election is even more vulnerable to hacking?

At this point, it looks unrelated … But I don’t know, it is all just speculation.

Herb Lin's research interests focus on policy-related dimensions of cybersecurity and cyberspace, especially regarding the use of offensive operations in cyberspace as instruments of national policy. In addition to his Stanford positions, he is chief scientist, emeritus, for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies. Prior to this, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. To learn more, read Lin's "An Evolving Research Agenda in Cyber Policy and Security."

MEDIA CONTACTS

Herbert Lin, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 497-8600, herbert.s.lin@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Jeff Decker knows what war can do to a person. He lived it for four deployments, as an Army special operations squad leader in Iraq and Afghanistan who twice earned the Army Commendation Medal for valorous conduct in combat.

Decker, who now serves as a research assistant in Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation under Joe Felter, is the founder of March on Veteran, an organization that supports veterans suffering from mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. March on Veteran is a free, online program available to any former member of the military.

Decker joined CISAC in September, about a year after he launched March on Veteran. Felter, a special forces veteran, is a senior research scholar who studies counterinsurgencies, terrorism and political violence for CISAC.

Decker, after his military service, struggled with the transition to civilian life due to the anger, anxiety, chronic pain, and sleeplessness that PTSD caused. On top of this, he did not have access to a Veteran Affairs treatment facility. That’s when the native of Buffalo, N.Y. turned to self-educating himself on mental health treatments available to veterans.

“When I studied for my doctorate in Australia, I cobbled together a mental health program to help myself. Now I’m sharing that and making those resources available to other veterans with the same needs,” said Decker, who earned his doctorate in international relations from Bond University, where he wrote his dissertation “Enhancing the Effectiveness of Private Military Contractors.”

So far, about 83 veterans have begun March on Veteran’s pilot program, which is a web-based and self-directed study. Decker handles almost all of the human contact. He is currently expanding the program to incorporate the veteran-to-veteran peer element with the help of other veteran volunteers.

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March on Veteran is, as Decker calls it, “support for veterans by veterans.” It is a recovery program personalized to one’s particular needs and is provided by people who have lived experience. It is not affiliated with any government organization like the VA or Department of Defense to maintain the veteran’s confidentiality. Veterans can access the program or sign-up to meet other veterans online.

“This program focuses on trying to help veterans reach their personal goals instead of focusing on ‘fixing’ them,” Decker said. “We are all about improving veteran quality of life, and a big part of that is connecting with other veterans.”

With Felter, Decker will be mostly working on his Hacking for Defense class project, which uses startup methodology to innovate and find solutions for critical challenges facing America’s defense and intelligence agencies.

Before arriving on campus, Decker conducted national security and international affairs research as a RAND Corporation summer associate for two summers in Washington, D.C.

The consequences of state collapse anywhere in the world can be devastating and destabilizing for neighboring and even distant countries.

The complexity of each situation demands a tailored response, according to Stanford scholars embarking on a new American Academy Arts & Sciences project to identify the best policy responses to failing states embroiled in civil wars.

A failed state is that whose political or economic system has become so weak that the government is no longer in control. Such instability has already threatened or affected Syria, Libya, Yemen and other polities.

The project, Civil Wars, Violence and International Responses, is led by Stanford’s Karl Eikenberry and Stephen Krasner. Eikenberry is a faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. Krasner is a faculty member in the political science department and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Relations and Hoover Institution.

Other Stanford scholars involved include Francis Fukuyama and Steve Stedman of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, political scientist James Fearon; Paul Wise of the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research; and Michele Barry, the senior associate dean for global health at the medical school.

The effort will culminate in a two-volume issue in AAAS’s journal Dædalus. On Nov. 2-4, the academy will hold an authors’ workshop in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss journal content.

Different approaches

In an interview, Eikenberry said the problematic U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan make it clear that different approaches must be used for different countries.

“The robust counterinsurgency campaign that the U.S. employed for periods of time in both Afghanistan and Iraq was premised on the viability of the standard development model that aims to put countries on the path to economic well-being and consolidated democracy,” he said.

However, such an approach assumes that decision makers in those states have the same objectives as the intervening states, which typically seek to improve the lives of people in those countries, said Eikenbery. Prior to serving as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 until 2011, Eikenberry had a 35-year career in the U.S. Army, retiring in 2009 with the rank of lieutenant general.

As Krasner points out, when intervention occurs, the hope is that improvements in one area – such as the quality of elections, rule of law, economic growth, or military recognition of civilian authority – would lead to improvements in other areas, according to Eikenberry.

But opposition and a constrained sense of “limited opportunities” can arise to thwart a well-meaning intervention, Eikenberry said.

He added, “Information asymmetries and the absence of mutually compatible interests between national and external elites, make it impossible to put target countries on a rapid path to prosperity and consolidated democracy. External actors must have much more modest goals.”

Syrian consequences

As for the case of Syria, Eikenberry noted that such civil wars can actually become more lethal and dangerous to global order than inter-state conflicts.

These types of conflicts like that in Syria tend to escalate into high levels of violence because of the costs that the losing parties believe they will incur, he said.

“This in turn leads to state fragmentation and the possibility of transnational groups with international ambitions getting involved,” he said. “Civil wars can result in an enormous number of civilian casualties, which generates large scale refugee flows” and puts huge pressure on neighboring states.

Eikenberry said Syria is being “internationalized by entangling regional and great powers in proxy wars,” which is exacerbating that conflict beyond Syria and throughout the greater Middle East. As for the immediate, direct threat to the U.S., that debate still continues, he added. 

On that note, one project goal is to assess risks to other countries that may emanate from civil wars and protracted intrastate violence like that in Syria, Eikenberry said. He and his colleagues will examine the effects of  international terrorism, massive displacements of people, proxy wars that escalate to interstate warfare, criminal organizations that displace governments, and pandemics. 

Policy implications

Eikenberry is hopeful the project influences policy and practice toward countries experiencing civil war and violence.

“Facilitating dialogue among a variety of constituencies with knowledge on the dynamics and impact of civil wars that might not normally or directly interact, including government and military officials, human rights organizations, academic and scholarly experts, and the media, will be one outcome of the project,” he said.

The idea is to allow “new ideas to emerge” regarding how to handle such states, as well as methods of applying such findings, he said.

“Exploring ways to create stability and more lasting peace, taking into consideration voices from academic and practical fields, should prove valuable to the policy community,” Eikenberry said.

Following publication of the volumes, the project will convene international workshops aimed at developing better regional perspectives. Such outreach activities will provide the feedback for the publication of another AAAS paper aimed at informing U.S. and international policy and research on the subject. A series of roundtable discussions in Washington is also planned.

Hurtling through space at nearly five miles per second, astronaut and Stanford alumna Kate Rubins, PhD, peered at her home planet some 220 miles below and picked up a microphone.

Back on Earth, in a packed lecture hall in Stanford Medicine’s Li Ka Shing Center last Thursday, an audience eagerly awaited an afternoon Q&A with Rubins, one of three astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station.

Soon Rubins’ smiling face filled two video screens and moderator David Relman, co-director for Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, kicked off the event. Relman is  a professor of medicine and of microbiology & immunology and Rubins’ former thesis co-advisor (along with Pat Brown, MD, PhD, now CEO of Impossible Foods).

Since this was no ordinary conversation, Relman explained how we’d talk with Rubins via the feed connecting the ISS to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas to Stanford Medicine.

“Here’s the plan for the next 30 minutes while Kate travels about a third of the way around our planet,” Relman said. “I’ll provide a brief background of Kate’s work and then I’ll open this up to questions. Remember, we can see and hear Kate, but she can only hear you.”

“Kate spent a significant fraction of her graduate career in a spacesuit,” Relman began. “She studied smallpox and Ebola (which required the ‘spacesuit’) and developed the first model of smallpox.”

After receiving a doctorate in cancer biology from Stanford in 2006, Kate became a Whitehead Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT (in 2008) NASA issued a call for applications for the astronaut program, and Rubins told Relman of her childhood dream to travel into space. “She asked if I would provide a letter of recommendation,” Relman said. “It was one of the easiest letters I’ve ever written.”

In 2009, NASA selected Rubins from thousands of applicants and she began training. “Scientists are trained to fly and pilots are trained to be scientists,” Rubins said. On July 6, 2016, she became the 60th woman in space, and has conducted two spacewalks since then. Here is a sampling of Thursday’s Q&A.

Relman: What are the most important questions in the life sciences that you and NASA seek to answer at ISS?

ISS has been orbiting Earth for [nearly] 16 years. When it was first launched it was clean. Then we put humans and all of their microbes in it. I think we are going to be able to look at that [DNA] in a new way with some of the sequencing technologies we’ve just demonstrated.

The second thing I’m incredibly fascinated by is fluids. I’m in freefall… that does fascinating things to fluids… All of biology is related to fluids so I think [investigating] what’s going on in everything from a microliter up to a human being is incredibly fascinating. We’ve just started to scratch the surface of this.

Question from the audience: What do you think are the biological challenges of colonization on Mars?

I think we are moving towards living on Mars. The Space Station is an example of one of our first steps towards that goal. We have environmental life support onboard that recycles 90 percent of our water. … We take our coffee in the morning and we turn it into tomorrow’s coffee, as we often say up here. … We do the same thing with air … we are making our own atmosphere up here. It’s a giant experiment about how you can take a completely closed module, put humans in it and do all the things they need to survive.

Relman: Looking back at your days at Stanford and graduate school, is there something you think helped prepare you for what you are doing now?

Getting the chance to be at Stanford, to do work there, to train under you and Pat and all of the associated mentors, friends and colleagues there taught me to be a scientist. I put this to use every day. It’s pretty fun to be a scientist in space, but it’s also incredibly fun to be a scientist on earth.

“Thank you for everything,” Relman said. “Signing off from Earth!”

Rubins grinned and flipped upside down saying, “I’m going to sign off upside down, because I can.”

Holly MacCormick wrote this story for Scope, a Stanford Medicine publication.

When Harold Trinkunas joined CISAC in September, it was like coming home again.

Trinkunas will serve in the concomitant role of senior research scholar and associate director for research. One of the nation’s leading Latin America experts, he comes to CISAC from the Brookings Institution, where he was the Charles W. Robinson Chair and senior fellow as well as director of the Latin America Initiative in the Foreign Policy program.

“This is a great opportunity to work in collaborative ways with exceptional scholars around some very important themes in today’s world,” Trinkunas said, noting the urgency of such issues as risks posed emerging technology, the future of the global order, and international security.

CISAC co-directors Amy Zegart and David Relman wrote in their introduction of Trinkunas that his “leadership will continue to advance the center's mission of training the next generation of international security specialists; developing original policy-relevant scholarship; and extending our outreach to global policymakers to improve the peace and security of our world.”

Evolving global realities

Born and raised in Venezuela, Trinkunas earned his doctorate in political science from Stanford University in 1999 and has been a predoctoral fellow and later a visiting professor at CISAC.  His first exposure to CISAC took place when he served as a teaching assistant to Scott Sagan in 1992.

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Through the years, CISAC has evolved and adjusted its focus to reflect the global security realities, Trinkunas said. “CISAC has successfully adapted to the changing times since its inception.” Research at CISAC spans such topics, including biosecurity and global health, terrorism, cybersecurity, governance, and nuclear risk and cooperation, to name a few.

Trinkunas is looking forward to the mentoring aspect of working with predocs and postdocs while tapping into the CISAC alumni network to open doors for those rising scholars.

“The Center has developed so many positive connections to scholars, policymakers, foundations, and civil society and the private sector more broadly, both in this country and around the word. One of my goals will be to build on those relationships in a way that’s rewarding for all parties,” said Trinkunas, who also served as an associate professor and chair of the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Security and governance

His newest book, Aspirational Power: Brazil's Long Road to Global Influence, co-authored with David Mares of UC San Digo, was published this summer by Brookings Institution Press. 

Trinkunas is especially interested in the intersections of security and governance. In his research, he has examined civil-military relations, ungoverned spaces, terrorist financing, emerging power dynamics, and global governance.

“Latin America is the part of the world that I know most about,” he said, adding that the region particularly stands out due to the decreasing number of wars and conflicts between states over the past few decades, even as problems of criminal violence have become more salient.

Part of the reason for region-wide stability, Trinkunas explained, is that democratization led many elected leaders to de-emphasize the role of military responses to interstate disputes in an effort to reduce the importance of the armed forces in domestic politics.

In a region with a history of military dictatorship, many democratic leaders saw their own armed forces as a more significant threat to their permanence in power than their neighbors’ militaries, he said.

In addition, the U.S. foreign policy toward the region has tended to become less interventionist over time and has focused instead on minimizing the use of force as a solution to interstate disputes in the region. Recent efforts to normalize of the U.S.-Cuba relationship are a reflection of this trend, Trinkunas added.

CISAC's William J. Perry created a free, public 10-week course for people to learn more about the looming dangers of nuclear catastrophe. His new MOOC, developed with the support of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, offers a chance to take that message to a much larger audience.

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today is an online course (a "MOOC") taught by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry and a team of international experts. 

“I believe that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the cold war,” said Perry, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on why America should dismantle its ICBM missile systems.

Because the continued risk of nuclear catastrophe isn’t widely recognized, Perry believes, “our nuclear policies don’t reflect the danger. So I’ve set off on a mission to educate people on how serious the problem is. Only then can we develop the policies that are appropriate for the danger we face.” 

The course offers participants the chance to ask questions and participate in discussions via an online forum, which Perry and his fellow experts will address during weekly video chats. Each week, Perry will be joined in conversation by top thinkers, including CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, David Holloway and Siegfried Hecker, Scott D. Sagan, and Philip Taubman. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, will also participate. Outside experts include Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, nuclear negotiator James Goodby, former Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Andre Kokoshin, and Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Learn more about "Living at the Nuclear Brink" in this story or watch a video. Register for the course here. It is now open for enrollment and begins Oct. 4.  

The CISAC lecture series, "Security Matters," surveyed the most pressing security issues facing the world today. Topics include cybersecurity, nuclear proliferation, insurgency and intervention, terrorism, biosecurity, lessons learned from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis – as well as the future of U.S. leadership in the world.

The lectures come almost entirely from the 2014 winter term of International Security (PS114S), co-taught by intelligence expert and CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and terrorism authority Martha Crenshaw co-taught the Security Matters class in 2015. (Zegart recently co-wrote a journal paper on why the U.S. might adjust its national security approach in light of a changing international order.)

“This series is the first in what we hope will be a continuing experiment of new modes and methods to enhance our education mission,” said Zegart. “We have two goals in mind: The first is to expand CISAC's reach in educating the world about international security issues. The second is to innovate inside our Stanford classrooms.”

Martin Hellman is not your average cryptography pioneer.

Hellman, who is known for his invention of public key cryptography (along with Whitfield Duffie and Ralph Merkle), has a life’s journey to share in story form, one that weaves together the most complex global flashpoints of our age with the deeply personal of any age. He and his wife’s new book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet, spans far and wide, covering nuclear risks in North Korea, Iran, and America’s Middle Eastern wars.

But that is not all. He and his wife Dorothie Hellman open up about their marital struggles to show how they eventually reached a point of harmony and true love for each other. As Martin Hellman sees it, conflict in the international and interpersonal arenas has much in common.

“You can’t separate nuclear war from conventional war and conventional war from personal war,” he said in an interview. Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.  

Just as he and Dorothie (self-acknowledged polar opposites) often butted heads during the first 10 or 15 years of marriage, nations too navigate dangerously outmoded “maps” to protect their national security and interests. Yet these “maps” are soon outdated, whether on the global stage or in the home. Hellman said, however, that differences of opinion, which revolve around fights to prove who is “right,” could instead be transformed into opportunities to learn from one another – and to expand peace in the world.

“You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and greater peace in the world, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them,” he said.

Cultivating inner, outer peace

He said that society only truly changes based on individual changes, so he calls for action in how people live their everyday lives. When countries fail to respect each other – and ignore the influence of history on those countries – then conflict is more likely, and it is similar to a person disrespecting another.

“You will see an immediate payoff as your relationships flower,” he wrote in the book. “The small impact that each of us can have on changing the world does not feel concrete enough to most people, but seeing progress in your personal relationships is very concrete.”

That dedication to unconditional love, he said, is the way that individuals can become models for what is needed globally.

And the time is now, he suggests, for such change if our living generations are to leave a more peaceful world for those who follow us. From Afghanistan to Cuba, Russia, Iraq to North Korea and beyond, the countries of the world need a journey of healing and reconciliation, as he writes in the book.

Today, the stakes could not be higher, Hellman noted. Long-running strategies like nuclear deterrence are risky and illogical – over time, given probability theory and the chances of mistake or malice, they won’t work.

“The United States thinks it’s a superpower, but how can we be when Russia or China could destroy us in less than a hour?” he said. “How is that being a superpower?”

As William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Stanford professor emeritus at CISAC, said on behalf of the Hellmans’ book, “The struggle for interpersonal dominance can lead to the end of a marriage, but the struggle for geopolitical dominance can lead to the end of civilization.”

The back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle has become the Achilles Heel of nuclear power, as CISAC’s Rodney Ewing writes in this new article. After more than 50 years of effort, no operating nuclear waste repositories exist in the U.S. for the spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants – or for the high-level waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel. It is time to compare and evaluate the different strategies for nuclear disposal. Read more.