The horror of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has become an inescapable part of childhood in Japan. For Toshihiro Higuchi – a CISAC fellow who this last academic year focused on the political risks and fallout of nuclear weapons – it started with comic books and pencil sales for victims of the American bombs.

“For me, like every kid in Japan, the discourse about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was always familiar – from reading graphic books about the hell-like aftermath to joining a donation drive at school for victim relief,” said Higuchi, a historian and postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. “I remember that I was fascinated by the sheer power of nuclear weapons, and how that power overshadows everything else about war and conflict.”

That fascination with the political and social fallout of nuclear weapons and the complexities of nuclear energy is what drives the six nuclear fellows at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. The fellows – funded by grants from the Stanton Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation – spend their time at Stanford conducting research to build public engagement and shape government policy.

“I have great respect for scientists who can apply their knowledge not just to advance their field, but to use their skills to more directly improve policy,” said Robert Forrest, a physicist examining the role of nuclear reactors driven by particle accelerators. “In some small way, I hope to eventually be one of them. Nuclear issues present not only a fascinating and profound set of problems, but I feel a sort of responsibility toward them as a physicist.”

Seminars, mentorships with Stanford scholars and some of the world’s thought-leaders on nuclear science and policy, as well as annual visits to national laboratories, military bases and security conferences enhance the decades-old CISAC nuclear fellowship program.

“I got properly interested in nuclear weapons on a CISAC trip to the Nevada Test Site,” said John Downer, a Stanton postdoctoral fellow who focuses on the risks of nuclear power. “It’s one thing to read about atomic bombs; it’s another to stand on the edge of a giant crater in the desert.”

 

 

 

Lynn Eden, CISAC’s associate director for research, recently led the center’s postdoctoral fellows to the two-day Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in La Vista, Neb., in which top military brass, academics and policymakers gathered to discuss nuclear deterrence in the emerging international security environment.

“Panelists had very different ideas about the role of nuclear weapons now and in the future,” said Eden, author of the groundbreaking book, Whole World on Fire, which explores how the U.S. government has underestimated the potential damage of nuclear detonations. “I have to say, the Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, Nunn vision of a world without nuclear weapons was not at the top of the agenda.”

Eden was referring to the watershed editorial in the Wall Street Journal co-authored by the four Cold War veterans, who are now advocating for a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. The heft of their credentials and the passion behind their argument enabled President Barack Obama to call for the same, and be honored with a Nobel.

Eden said many of Strategic Command’s responsibilities regarding nuclear war planning have not changed under the Obama administration, but the thinking of their top officers has. U.S. Air Force Gen. Robert Kehler, the commander of Strategic Command, met privately with the CISAC fellows. “None of our questions surprised him, and his answers were extremely thoughtful,” she said. 

The March 11, 2011, earthquake in Japan and subsequent tsunami and nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant gave the fellows rich, real-world lessons about the human and environmental costs of nuclear energy gone wrong. The worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl meltdown of 1986 galvanized Stanford scholars across the campus to study the cause and effects of the Japanese tragedy.  

“As someone who is interested in technological risk, I think there is no technological sphere where the stakes are higher and the knowledge more political than in nuclear power – except maybe in nuclear weapons,” Downer said. “The way formal reports and journalistic accounts construe nuclear disasters and radioactive fallout is often terrifyingly misleading. I think I can contribute something by helping restructure debates about nuclear risks.”

In keeping with CISAC’s mission, the fellows are encouraged to engage in pubic debate by drawing out the policy relevance of an issue. They publish in scholarly journals and write academic papers, as well as blog and submit op-eds and editorials to online sites.  Forrest, for example, had a commentary on Huffington Post that urged Congress to maintain federal funding for scientific research and development.

Benoît Pelopidas, a postdoctoral nuclear fellow from France, ran a Friday evening film series this last academic year, highlighting such traditional films as the Kurosawa classic “I Live in Fear” – about a Japanese man whose fear of another nuclear bomb drives him to insanity – to the recent South African science fiction thrilled, “District 9,” which explores strands of xenophobia and social segregation behind national security.

“At Stanford, I found a real interdisciplinary community interested in nuclear issues and unexpected access to policymakers,” Pelopidas said, including former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Ambassador James Goodby, senior fellows at CISAC’s neighboring Hoover Institution who called on him to write a paper about the future of nuclear deterrence. “This helped me appreciate the value of interdisciplinary research in the nuclear discourse – to create opportunities for change.”

What’s next for the six fellows:

• Edward Blandford: University of New Mexico, assistant professor of nuclear engineering in the Department of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering
• Alexandre Debs: Yale University, assistant professor of political science
• John Downer: University of Bristol, U.K., assistant professor of risk and resilience in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
• Robert Forrest: Continues his research at CISAC into the role of particle accelerators in a nuclear-powered future
• Toshihiro Higuchi: University of Wisconsin-Madison, an ACLS/Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of the History of Science
• Benoît Pelopidas: University of Bristol, U.K., assistant professor of international relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies

KEDO’s profile on the North Korean landscape was unmistakable, its impact on Pyongyang profound. Yet real knowledge and understanding about the organization in public and official circles in South Korea, Japan, and the United States was terribly thin at the beginning, and remains so to this day. As a result, the lessons learned from KEDO's decade-long experience working with the North Koreans have been largely misunderstood.

In an interview with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization, Co-Director and nuclear expert Sig Hecker explains why a U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty helps national security. He also discusses stockpile stewardship and how the U.S. nuclear arsenal is safe, secure, and reliable without nuclear tests.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry has been awarded a William J. Perry Fellowship in International Security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), where he will continue to address emerging security challenges facing the United States.

Ambassador Eikenberry has an ambitious agenda for the coming academic year, which includes teaching and mentoring students, public speaking and working closely with former Secretary of Defense William Perry. He also will take part in activities at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), such as the new China and the World research initiative.

“It’s a lifetime honor to receive the Perry Fellowship,” says Eikenberry. “I can’t think of an American in modern times who has better exemplified inspirational commitment to public service than Dr. William Perry. And I can’t think of a better institute of higher learning to be associated with than Stanford University.”

Ambassador Eikenberry has been at Stanford since September 2011 as the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer and is an affiliated faculty member for CISAC, APARC and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), as well as research affiliate at the Europe Center – all policy research centers within Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies.

Before coming to Stanford, Ambassador Eikenberry led the civilian surge directed by President Obama from 2009 to 2011 in an effort to reverse the momentum gained by insurgents, and set the conditions for a transition to Afghanistan sovereignty. He retired from his 35-year military career in April 2009 with the rank of U.S. Army Lieutenant General after posts including commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne and ranger infantry units in the United States, as well as Korea, Italy and as the Commander of the American-led Coalition Forces from 2005-2007.

"Karl Eikenberry's record of public service amply demonstrates his unique qualities, not only as a leader of the American military at a challenging time, but as a strategic thinker and an insightful diplomat,” says CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “He has a rare understanding of the profound challenges facing our world, and has been a tremendous asset to CISAC and Stanford.”

Ambassador Eikenberry’s research areas include U.S. strategy in the Asia-Pacific region; China’s evolving security strategy; the United States and NATO; the future of the U.S. military; Washington’s policies in Central and South Asia; and assessing the risks of military intervention.

The fellowship was established to honor Perry, the 19^th U.S. secretary of defense and former CISAC co-director, and to recognize his leadership in the cause of peace. Perry is co-director of the Preventive Defense Project and the Nuclear Risk Reduction Initiative at CISAC and is an expert on U.S. foreign policy, national security and arms control. Perry Fellows spend a year at CISAC conducting policy-relevant research on international security issues. They join other distinguished scientists, social and political scientists and engineers who work together on problems that cannot be solved within a single field of study.

Ambassador Eikenberry is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He earned an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office while studying at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense Chinese Language School in Hong Kong, and has an Advanced Degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China.

He’s been a presidential adviser, academic administrator, scholar and mentor.
But listening to those who best know Coit Blacker talk about his professional achievements is to hear people describe a close friend nearly everyone calls “Chip.”

“One of the reasons Chip has been so successful as a leader is that he is simply a good guy,” said Condoleezza Rice, who first met Blacker at Stanford in the early 1980s – long before she would become the university’s provost and later serve as President George W. Bush’s secretary of state.

“Great leaders are first and foremost good people,” Rice said.

After a decade leading Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Blacker is stepping down from the position on Aug. 31. He will be succeeded by President Emeritus Gerhard Casper.

Following a yearlong sabbatical, Blacker plans to return to campus and continue teaching about foreign policy – a topic he mastered through academic research and as President Bill Clinton’s special assistant for national security affairs and senior director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council.

Reading letters written by Clinton, former national security adviser Sandy Berger and Michael McFaul – the U.S. ambassador to Russia and FSI senior fellow who studied closely with Blacker – Rice capped a lineup of colleagues, students and donors who honored the departing director during a farewell reception held June 14 at the Cantor Arts Center.

“Under your directorship, the institute has enhanced its status as one of the globe’s most prominent and influential centers for the study of international relations,” Clinton wrote. “The institute’s research is helping us move toward a more stable, sustainable and equitable world in this age of interdependence. In addition to your devotion to Stanford, I will always be grateful for your outstanding work at the National Security Council during my presidency.”

Nearly 20 years before joining the Clinton administration in 1995, Blacker arrived at Stanford as a postdoctoral fellow in the university's Arms Control and Disarmament Program. He lectured and taught through the 1980s, becoming a popular professor known for working closely with his students.

“I saw in him a mentor who not only excelled in his field, but did so with intellectual fortitude, integrity, and a deep-seeded sense of service to which I only hoped I could aspire,” said Theo Milonopoulos, a former student of Blacker’s who is now a Fulbright Scholar at King’s College London.

In 1991, Blacker became a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies – the precursor to FSI. He was appointed as the institute’s deputy director in 1998, and took over as director five years later.

Under Blacker’s tenure, FSI expanded its number of research centers from four to seven, and grew its faculty from 21 to 32 professors. The institute’s endowment is nearly $200 million, up from $122 million in 2002.

“FSI has really become the jewel in the crown of Stanford’s interdisciplinary institutes under Chip’s leadership,” said Ann Arvin, Stanford’s dean of research. “I hesitate to say how many times I have advised others to just ask Chip how they do it at FSI – whatever `it’ may be.”

Continuing to move between the academic and political worlds, Blacker advised Vice President Al Gore on foreign policy issues during the 2000 presidential race.

Back at Stanford a year later, he was awarded the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for undergraduate teaching, and was named the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in 2002.

Even surrounded by faculty at Stanford, Blacker was never far from policymakers in Washington and working abroad. In a letter read by Rice, McFaul wrote directly to his old teacher.

“You have been and remain one of my most important mentors,” McFaul wrote. “I have not made a single decision in my professional career without first seeking your advice.”

“Chip has had a distinguished career – not just as a scholar, not just as a teacher – but of course as a policymaker,” Rice said. “It is that wonderful sensibility for what policymakers need and listen to that helps him to translate Stanford and its great research for the policy world.”

In 2005, Blacker was instrumental in securing a $50 million naming gift from Brad Freeman and Ronald Spogli, partners in a private equity investment firm.

“We believed very much in the guiding principal of interdisciplinary research which is at the core of FSI today,” said Spogli, a former U.S. ambassador to Italy and San Marino. “But the most important reason that we made our gift is Chip Blacker. We believed in Chip as the leader who would be able to take FSI to a new and greater level.”

Much of Blacker’s success has revolved around his development and support of FSI’s faculty. Stephen Krasner, FSI’s deputy director who has worked with Blacker for about 20 years, praised his friend and colleague for fostering an environment where researchers are eager to collaborate and share ideas.

“From the outside – when Chip does these things – they all look flawless, effortless, perfectly organized, well structured,” Krasner said. “From the inside, you can see how astute, wise and generous Chip has been in developing FSI and its faculty and activities.”

 

The president, surrounded by his Cabinet members and senior national security and foreign policy advisors, appears grim as he declares: “This is certainly the greatest crisis I’ve ever faced as a president.”

He has ordered the deployment of U.S. forces into Syrian territory to protect civilians and establish safe zones. His Cabinet must now determine whether to order a pre-emptive strike against Syrian troops on word from the CIA that the Bashar al-Assad regime appears ready to use chemical and biological weapons stored in underground bunkers east of Damascus.

After a military briefing by the commander of CENTCOM, the president cautions those assembled at the classified briefing: “Remember, history will judge us, in part, by how thoroughly we discuss all the options today.”

With imagined top-secret memorandums from the CIA and the White House – as well as the real-deal Obama Nuclear Posture Review – some 20 Stanford undergraduate and law students dressed in suits and armed with laptops and position papers spend three hours debating the merits of an attack on Syrian forces.

Scott Sagan, a political science professor and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), plays Obama in the class co-taught by Allen Weiner, director of the Center on International Conflict and Negotiation at the Law School.

The Ethics and Law of War class presents law and political science students with some of the political, legal and moral consequences of war. For their final simulation, they must stay in character, grill one another as policymakers and world leaders might do behind closed doors – and then defend their final decisions.

“Instead of simply learning abstract just-war theory or international law doctrine, the simulations encourage students to apply what they've learned to real problems,” says Weiner, once a legal adviser at the State Department. “This provides for much deeper awareness of the subject matter and richer appreciation of the nuances and complexities.

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Scott Sagan as President Obama

 

Ethics & War

The class grew out of Stanford’s hugely successful, two-year War & Ethics lecture series, which concluded last month. Philosophers, writers, journalists, historians, social scientists, human rights activists and policy makers came together several times a month to grapple with the complex ethical equations of war. Co-sponsored by a dozen centers and departments across campus, the series drew big names and big crowds.

Vietnam War veterans and award winning authors Tobias Wolff – a Stanford English professor – and Tim O’Brien told a sold-out audience that writing about war was both therapeutic and heartbreaking. O’Brien was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Things They Carried,” a harrowing string of stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.

How do you write about war? “You do it sentence by sentence, line by line, character by character, even syllable by syllable,’ O’Brien told a mesmerized audience. “You dive into that wreck and try to salvage something.”

Journalist Sebastian Junger spoke at the screening of  “Restrepo,” his documentary about the Afghanistan War. Stanford students and faculty performed in George Packer’s play, “Betrayed,” which illuminated the U.S. abandonment of young Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives for Washington during the Iraq War. For the final event, Debra Satz, a philosophy professor and director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Sagan, and Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force general who now leads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, debated the future ethical challenges of war.

Sagan, an expert in nuclear policy and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction who worked at the Pentagon and was a consultant to the Secretary of Defense, said the lecture series enriched his students by forcing them to pay attention and question the moral and legal underpinnings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I was stretched, intellectually, by this series,” he said. “It encouraged me to read and discuss both fiction and philosophy that raises the same ethical issues – from a very different perspective – that we analyze in political science.”

Back to class

Weiner, as stand-in for Vice President Joe Biden, tells those assembled they must consider that within 24 hours, 6,000 American troops will be in danger. The CIA has a “high degree of confidence” that Assad has ordered the removal of the chemical weapons from the underground bunkers and transport trucks have been spotted at the sights.

“As we head into an election cycle, the difficulties of the decision that we make today will be placed under even greater scrutiny,” Weiner says.

That decision will be to make one of these hard choices:

• The U.S. military withdraws its troops and avoids a military confrontation, but risks further civilian deaths and the condemnation of Arab Spring allies;
• Obama orders conventional airstrikes against Syrian troops, which could lead to thousands of inadvertent civilian casualties;
• Washington takes extraordinary measures and uses nuclear weapons to destroy the underground storage bunkers for its weapons of mass destruction. This last option likely would eliminate any chance of Syrian troops using chemical weapons, but it would open a Pandora’s box for the Nobel Peace Prize president who has pledged to work toward a nuclear-free world.

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U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong as CENTCOM Commander Gen. James Mattis

The students know Americans are weary of war after the WMD fiasco in Iraq and a decade-long war in Afghanistan, both of which have claimed countless lives and a trillion-plus in taxpayer dollars. Their decision – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, among others – is weighted by the concern that Americans likely won’t re-elect a president who drags them into another costly warm, and by the fear that a successful president cannot let American troops be exposed to deadly chemical attacks.

The mock military briefing by Gen. James Mattis – played by visiting CISAC military fellow, U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong, himself a commander in Afghanistan – lays out the risks and probabilities of casualties under each scenario.

A student asks Luong which military option he would recommend.

The general prevaricates: “I’m a military guy; I tend to lean toward success and then I also consider civilian casualties. But I’m also very concerned about putting my soldiers at risk.”

Clinton, voiced by international policy student Micaela Hellman-Tincher, says she’s concerned about mission creep. “Consider the international implications of us entering into conflict,” she says.

The fake Samantha Power of the National Security Council, played by Ashley Rhoades, urges diplomatic measures and a stand-down from military conflict. “I’m not advocating in any way for inaction,” she says. “There are several diplomatic solutions. We ask that you give us 24 hours to be able to work on these diplomatic options and multilateral diplomacy.”

Such as what? Such as calling on Moscow to mediate or seeking a U.N. envoy.

The legal team from the law school lays out their arguments for why a preventive strike would be illegal under certain conventions; while a pre-emptive strike based on imminent and unavoidable threats of attack might be permissible.

Then Stanford law student Alex Weber – playing Avril Haines, legal advisor to the National Security Council – addresses the elephant in the room: the nuclear option.

“If you use a nuclear weapon, regardless of whether the Syrians use chemical weapons against our troops, you are, as Colin Powell said in the 1991 Gulf War, opening a Pandora’s Box, particularly because Syria has no nuclear weapon,” Weber says. “You are the nuclear nonproliferation president. There is a psychological button that you push that will prompt the media to take the ethical debate to new levels.”

In the end, consensus appears to be growing around an immediate preventive strike against the storage bunkers using conventional forces. The Cabinet knows this could lead to deaths on both sides, but allowing the Syrians to use chemical weapons could lead to even more.

“You can’t cut and run, Mr. President,” insists student Torry Castellano, playing White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew.

Obama says he will take their advice under advisement and all rise as he leaves the war room.

 

More photos of the student simulation are available at CISAC's Facebook page.