ABOUT THE TOPIC: No country was as devastated by the Cold War as Afghanistan, yet the historical understanding of how the global conflict came to Kabul remains tentative, generally limited to studies that begin in the late 1970s.  Scholars have generally treated the American role in pre-invasion Afghanistan as minimal, or have seamlessly connected Kabul's half-turn toward Moscow in the mid-1950s with the 1979 invasion.  Extensive research, however, demonstrates the profound impact Americans had in mid-century Afghanistan.  Based on multinational research, this paper will explore how Americans helped to bring the Cold War to the mountain kingdom in the early 1950s.  While the Truman administration considered Afghanistan marginal and strategically indefensible, a fateful combination of local initiative, misperception, and ideology helped to add the kingdom to the roster of Cold War battlegrounds, where it would remain until the conflict's end.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Robert Rakove is a lecturer for the International Relations Program.  He studies the modern history of U.S. foreign relations, paying particular attention to the Cold War in the Third World.  He received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2008, and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World.  He is presently at work on a history of the U.S.-Afghan relationship in the decades before the Soviet invasion.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: The intellectual history of nuclear arms control has largely been written as a history of ideas, untethered from personal biography and social context. This paper reinterprets the early history of arms control thought by placing it within a community of disarmament advocates, located mainly in the Boston area, during the late 1950s. Arms control thought was not simply a functional response to external developments in Cold War politics or the technology of nuclear weapons. Local and contingent factors, too, shaped its history. In particular, the idea of "stability" was contested within the early arms control community. As opposed to the static stability of deterrence preferred by strategic analysts, Jerome Wiesner—a control systems engineer and cyberneticist by training, and a participant in the Boston disarmament group—proposed to stabilize and correct the arms race through comprehensive arms control systems and processes of long-term dynamic feedback.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Benjamin Wilson is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, and a doctoral student in MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. He is writing a dissertation on the history of the community of nuclear arms control experts in the United States during the Cold War. The dissertation examines the evolving relationships between arms control intellectuals, the state, and the wider nuclear disarmament movement in a variety of settings—university-based research and defense consulting, Congressional advising, and within private foundations and specialized non-governmental arms control organizations. He holds master's degrees in physics from Yale University and the University of Toronto, and a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Saskatchewan.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Why was nuclear war deemed unwinnable in the United States? Pace conventional wisdom, the truth was not self-evident. The determination that nuclear weapons were useful in a negative sense (deterring conflict), but not a positive sense (pursuing victory), became axiomatic in the Kennedy Years. Standard accounts explaining how a nuclear taboo arose highlight policymakers’ and thought leaders’ moral revulsion toward great loss of human life. This paper looks at studies of post-attack environments to argue that economic and ecological considerations were of equal if not decisive importance. The core question was how to protect and conserve the natural foundations of an advanced industrial state according to the tenets of modernization theory. Economists and ecologists thus clashed because of incompatible methods and political competition. Their collective inability to deliver concrete recommendations for overcoming an all-out thermonuclear attack reinforced a gathering international norm that the possession and use of nuclear weapons merited legal circumscriptions and prohibitions. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Jonathan Hunt is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-2014. He was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2012-2013, and received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2013. His dissertation, “Into the Bargain: The Triumph and Tragedy of Nuclear Internationalism during the mid-Cold War, 1958-1970,” examined how decolonization, the meanings of nuclear power, discord in Cold War alliances, and a schism in internationalist thought shaped how a burgeoning international community brought order to the Nuclear Age. Jonathan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Plan II Honors Liberal Arts; History; and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. In 2011, he was a residential fellow at the George F. Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and, in 2012, at the Security and Sustainability Program of the International Green Cross in Washington, DC. He was also a Dwight D. Eisenhower/Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellow for 2012-2013. He has published in Passport, Not Even Past, The Huffington Post, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Barton J. Bernstein is Professor Emeritus of History at Stanford University. He was Professor of History at Stanford from 1965-2012. Additionally, he was previously Co-Chair of the International Relations Program and the International Policy Studies Program. Professor Bernstein received his PhD in History from Harvard University and his BA from Queens College. He has taught extensively at Stanford; in the past, his courses have included: The United States Since 1945; The Politics and Ethics of Modern Science and Technology; and Decision Making in International Crisis: The A-Bomb, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Professor Bernstein has published extensively in numerous academic journals, and his books include: The Truman Administration: A Documentary History; Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History; Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration; and Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations.

About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had for the legal world order.

About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society, military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014 under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War. Her talk is based on this latest research.

About the Topic: Recent revelations indicate the extent to which the government has used data-mining as a tool for surveillance, and the lengths to which it used official secrecy to conceal the scope and nature of its activities, all in the name of national security. What if data-mining could also be a tool for citizens to ensure government accountability? This talk will describe new research using computational methods to explore large corpora of declassified documents. It includes efforts to detect unstudied events, identify topics deemed particularly sensitive, and measure how official secrecy shapes the official record. This work is still exploratory in nature, and the challenges to be overcome are political and ethical, and not just technical. But it is already clear that computational methods will be essential if the government is to adopt a more enlightened, risk-management approach to official secrecy.

About the Speaker: Matthew Connelly’s work seeks to offer new, more productive ways to think about the history – and future – of world politics. He works with computer scientists and statisticians to try to uncover the scope and nature of official secrecy, and venture predictions about what a fuller accounting might reveal about major global threats. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History; The International Journal of Middle East Studies and The American Historical Review, and published commentary for The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: James Cameron, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, completed his PhD in July 2013 at the University of Cambridge. James is very interested in the contribution history can make to informing today’s debates on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Russian relations. After completing his master’s in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, he was a business consultant specializing in the former Soviet Union. 

His dissertation, “The Development of United States Anti-Ballistic Missile Policy, 1961-1972”, used the transformation of the American anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon as a prism through which to examine changing patterns of presidential nuclear leadership during this period. Employing both new American and Russian sources, the thesis shows how successive occupants of the Oval Office and their most trusted advisers managed the tension between their publicly articulated nuclear strategies and their inner convictions regarding the utility of nuclear weapons during this pivotal decade of the Cold War.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Richard Nixon did not believe in mutual assured destruction. Yet he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which enshrined MAD as a central fact of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear balance. Conversely his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, publicly defended American nuclear superiority and pushed ahead with ABM, despite their private skepticism regarding the utility of both and desire to moderate the arms race. Employing newly available evidence from declassified telephone recordings and documents, this paper attempts to account for this contradiction. It does so by placing the perpetual presidential struggle to reconcile private convictions with public demands at the center of the emergence of assured destruction and the limitation of ABM as elements of U.S.-Soviet détente through strategic arms control.