From the film’s website: ‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates ‘Human Terrain Systems’, a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.

Following the screening, James Der Derian (the film's Co-Director and Executive Producer) will discuss the film with the audience.

For more information about the film, please visit the Human Terrain website. 

The life sciences have many examples of where research results and technologies can be used for good, but also for bad purposes. Because such scenarios are so common, it is critical to identify that research which is particularly bad and would be classified as dual use research of concern (DURC). Attributes that might result in a DURC designation include how immediate a threat it represents, the magnitude of the threat, the availability of safeguards to defend against its nefarious use and its relative risk to benefits ratio. Several policy forums have studied this problem and the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) is currently the official U.S. government advisory group for DURC policy. Recently, NSABB was asked to review two manuscripts that reported adaptation of the high-path avian influenza virus H5N1 to transmission in a mammalian model. This virus rarely infects humans but when it does, it has catastrophic consequences with ~60% mortality. The board weighed the risks and the benefits of the work and recommended that the papers not be published as written, but only in a highly redacted form that would prevent the rapid and direct replication of the work. NSABB also argued for a communication pause so that the consequences of these papers and this research focus be evaluated by a broad cross section of science, public health and society. The US government accepted these recommendations and the two journals (Science and Nature) have thus far not published the papers. Multiple additional forums are planned to discuss the issues and recommendations. The future for policy development in the area of pathogen research and DURC will be shaped by these recommendations and subsequent activities.

About the speakers:

Dr. Paul Keim holds the E. Raymond and Ruth Cowden Endowed Chair in Microbiology at Northern Arizona University (NAU), where he is also a Regents Professor of Biology. In addition, he directs the Pathogen Genomics Division at The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Both institutions are based in Flagstaff, Arizona. His biological interests span many types of organisms and microbes, but revolve around genetic diversity and its organization in populations and species. This necessarily has involved systematic and phylogenetic analyses to understand how observable genetic diversity is based upon past evolutionary processes. Biodefense programs have capitalized upon his approach of using genomic analysis to understand bacterial pathogen populations for microbial forensics and molecular epidemiological analyses. His laboratory was heavily involved in analysis of evidentiary material from the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks. He has published extensively on the evolution and population genetics of Bacillus anthracis, Yersinia pestis, Francisella tularensis, Burkholderia pseudomallei, Burkholderia mallei, Brucella spp., and Coxiella burnetii. Recently, these same principles have been applied to other public health-related and clinically important pathogens such as S. aureus and E. coli. In all, he has published over 230 scientific or policy papers. Dr. Keim received his B.S. in Biology and Chemistry from Northern Arizona University in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Botany in 1981 from the University of Kansas. Dr. Keim has previously served on the editorial boards of Crop Science and Molecular Breeding; he currently serves on the editorial boards of Infection Genetics and Evolution, Investigative Genetics, and Biotechniques.

Dr. David Relman is a professor of medicine – infectious diseases, and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford. He joined CISAC as an affiliated faculty member in November 2011. He is also chief, Infectious Diseases Section, at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. Among his other activities, Dr. Relman currently serves as Vice-President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Chair of the U.S. National Academies of Science Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats, and member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. He received a S.B. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977) and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School Medicine (1982).

This seminar is based on a recently published article that reviews the history of the September 22, 1979 double flash recorded by the VELA satellite and concludes that the flash was an Israeli nuclear test assisted by South Africa. The work of a government panel created at the time to determine the cause of the flash is discussed as is the author's own involvement in the issue.

About the speaker:

Leonard Weiss is an affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He is also a national advisory board member of the Center for Arms control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He began his professional career as a PhD researcher in mathematical system theory at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. This was followed by tenured professorships in applied mathematics and electrical engineering at Brown University and the University of Maryland. During this period he published widely in the applied mathematics literature. In 1976 he received a Congressional Science Fellowship that resulted in a career change. For more than two decades he worked for Senator John Glenn as the staff director of both the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation and the Committee on Governmental Affairs. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 and legislation that created the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. In addition, he led notable investigations of the nuclear programs of India and Pakistan. Since retiring from the Senate staff in 1999, he has published numerous articles on nonproliferation issues for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and the Nonproliferation Review. His current research interests include an assessment of the impact on the nonproliferation regime of nuclear trade with non-signers of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and more generally the relationship of energy security concerns with nonproliferation.

July 10, 2011 was a milestone in history, marking twenty years since South Africa acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).  To this day, South Africa remains the only country to have produced and assembled nuclear weapons and to have later relinquished that arsenal.  Moreover, that denuclearization came without any direct external intervention, and involved opening-up the former top secret program to international scrutiny, voluntarily, beyond that required by the NPT.  While each example of nuclear weapons proliferation has a unique history and basis, South Africa is a particularly instructive exemplar as a result of its unprecedented rollback. That rollback provided sufficient transparency for clear insights into:

1) Why a nation might seek to acquire nuclear weapons,
2) What tactics might a nation employ to conceal the existence of nuclear weapons program under a “Peaceful” nuclear program umbrella,
3) What strategies might a nation consider with respect to the potential use of such weapons, and
4) Why a nation might choose to renounce its nuclear weapons.

This seminar will focus upon a few less reported, but nonetheless salient, aspects of the South African nuclear weapons program pertinent to the monitoring and assessment of the capabilities and intent of other threshold nations whose nuclear programs remain suspect (despite having been repeatedly declared as being solely for only peaceful purposes).  They include object lessons derived from the various efforts that the minority-ruled government of South Africa took to conceal its nuclear program from external discovery, and to ensure sufficient ambiguity to allow that program to progress unabated, despite externally imposed restraints and sanctions, (and only up until termination was self-imposed through internal decision making). The lessons thus learned also provide an objective basis for comparison and assessment of alternative intents represented by the various capabilities, activities, and statements associated with those of contemporary nuclear threshold states exhibiting similar ambiguity.

About the speaker:

Frank Pabian is the Senior Geospatial Information Analyst at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Global Security Directorate and a visiting scholar at CISAC. Frank has nearly 40 years in the nuclear nonproliferation and satellite imagery analysis fields including 30 years with US National Laboratories. During 1996-1998, he served as Nuclear Chief Inspector for the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) during ground inspections in Iraq, focusing primarily on equipment/materials “Hide Sites”, and “Capable Sites” that were deemed potentially associated with weapons of mass destruction development and/or production.

His responsibilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory include “Rest-of-World” infrastructure analysis involving the exploitation of all-source information, particularly commercial satellite imagery in combination with openly available geospatial tools for visualization. Frank has published in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals on the use of commercial satellite imagery for treaty verification and monitoring, and his work has been featured on magazine covers and in textbooks for training in the nonproliferation and intelligence professions. Frank is a recipient of the US Intelligence Community Seal Medallion (gold medal) for “sustained superior performance” for Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty verification support to the IAEA during South Africa’s denuclearization, and for associated discoveries derived from original analysis of all-source, including open source, information. Frank is also a “Certified Mapping Scientist, Remote Sensing” with the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASP&RS).

About the topic: When democracy returned to Pakistan, Americans and Pakistanis had high expectations of an improved partnership. Those expectations have not been met: The events of 2011 were hard on both sides, and pushed the relationship to a series of dangerous crises. What can we expect in 2012 and beyond, not only in bilateral ties, but in the plans both countries have for regional stability in South Asia?

About the Speaker: Cameron Munter was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan on October 6, 2010. Prior to his nomination, Ambassador Munter completed his tour of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. He served there first as Political-Military Minister-Counselor in 2009, then as Deputy Chief of Mission for the first half of 2010. He served as Ambassador in Belgrade from 2007 to 2009.

In 2006, he led the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul, Iraq. He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Prague from 2005 to 2007 and in Warsaw from 2002 to 2005. Before these assignments, in Washington, he was Director for Central Europe at the National Security Council (1999-2001), Executive Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State (1998-1999), Director of the Northern European Initiative (1998), and Chief of Staff in the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office (1997-1998). His other domestic assignments include: Country Director for Czechoslovakia at the Department of State (1989-1991), and Dean Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (1991).

This talk presents an unconventional look at the creation of a deadly barrier between East and West Germany.  It reveals how the Iron Curtain was not simply imposed by communism, but had been emerging haphazardly in both East and West long before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.  From the end of the Third Reich, ad hoc enforcement of the tenuous border between the two Germanys led to the creation of difference where there was no difference, institutionalization of violence among neighbors, popular participation in a system that was deeply unpopular--and people normalizing a monstrosity in their midst.

Edith Sheffer is assistant professor of Modern European History at Stanford. Edith Sheffer came to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008 and joined the History Department faculty in 2010.  She recently completed Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, and was the winner of the 2011 Fraenkel Prize, awarded by the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History, London. 

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center (TEC), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Department of German Studies

Event Summary

Professor Sheffer's presentation includes a social history of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. She examines the process by which culturally homogenous populations internalized ideas of difference, and erected arbitrary physical and mental borders accordingly. She argues that the Iron Curtain was a "wall of the mind" reinforced not only by Communist authorities but by the everyday actions of ordinary Germans. 

Professor Sheffer first outlines her recent book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain. Drawing on archives, news stories, and personal interviews with people from East and West Germany, she argues that the Berlin Wall was simply a visible manifestation of an existing rift within the country that had been building for 16 years.  She examines the process of institutionalization of difference, by which people living in a once-cohesive community with no stark religious or cultural differences began to view those on the opposite side of an arbitrary border as "other." Professor Sheffer offers several explanations for why Germans largely accepted the divide, including the gradual internalization by individual citizens, on both sides of the wall, of what Sheffer describes as "the living wall" and a "wall in the head formed by a wall on the ground."  The fact that the wall was a structural response to a social set of conflicts can explain why it both went up and came down so quickly, as the result of many small steps and individual actions.