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Admiral Cecil D. Haney, a native of Washington, D.C. is a 1978 graduate of the United States Naval Academy.
His career as a submariner includes assignments aboard USS John C. Calhoun (SSBN 630), USS Frank Cable (AS 40), USS Hyman G. Rickover (SSN 709), USS Asheville (SSN 758), and Submarine Squadron 8, culminating in command of USS Honolulu (SSN 718).
Subsequent fleet command assignments include Submarine Squadron 1 from June 2002 to July 2004, and Submarine Group 2 from October 2006 to March 2008.
Admiral Haney's shore duty tours include administrative assistant for enlisted affairs at Naval Reactors; congressional appropriations liaison officer for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Comptroller); Deputy Chief of Staff of Plans, Policies and Requirements, U.S. Pacific Fleet (N5N8); Director, Submarine Warfare Division (N87); Director, Naval Warfare Integration Group (N00X); Deputy Commander, U.S. Strategic Command and recently Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Admiral Haney holds Master's degrees in Engineering Acoustics and System Technology from the Naval Post Graduate School, and a Master's degree in National Security Strategy from the National Defense University.
Admiral Haney's decorations include the Navy Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Defense Superior Service Medal (two awards), Legion of Merit (four awards), Navy Commendation Medal (three awards), Navy Achievement Medal (two awards), and various campaign and unit awards. In addition, he was the 1998 Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale Leadership Award recipient.
Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Admiral Cecil D. Haney
Commander
Speaker
USSTRATCOM
CISAC's Siegfried Hecker is working on a book about his 20-year collaboration with Russian nuclear scientists.
In this New York Times "Room for Debate" commentary, he argues that abandoning cooperation between Moscow and Washington will diminish security and exacerbate other common concerns, such as nuclear terrorism and proliferation. And in this NPR All Things Considered interview, the former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory says there has been extraordinary cooperation between American and Russian scientists in securing loose nuclear materials and upgrading former Soviet nuclear test sites. But the United States is making it harder for Russian scientists to get visas to come here - and Moscow likewise is not cooperating.
"Hopefully, the book will demonstrate to both governments it was absolutely essential for us to work together over these past 20 years - and that we're not done," Hecker tells NPR's Michele Keleman. Yet, Hecker concedes, this cooperation has all but ended in the wake of the disputes over Ukraine and Crimea.
And you can read about Hecker's two-decade collaboration with his Russian counterparts in this story.
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President Barack Obama, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a plenary session during the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Beijing, Nov. 11, 2014.
Siegfried Hecker, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Research Professor of Management Science and Engineering, has been awarded the National Academy of Engineering's Arthur M. Bueche Award "for contributions to nuclear science and engineering and for service to the nation through nuclear diplomacy."
The award recognizes an engineer who has shown dedication in science and technology, as well as active involvement in determining U.S. science and technology policy. Bueche was a world-renowned chemist who helped pioneer engineered plastics at General Electric Research and led one of the most innovative industrial research centers in the world.
"He was also an astute student of science and technology policy and one of our country's most effective advisors," Hecker said of Bueche upon accepting the award on Sept. 28 during the NAE's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Hecker, CISAC co-director from 2007-2012, is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security.
Hecker talked about the significance of working with Russian scientists at the end of the Cold War and what he has learned during his 49 trips to the former Soviet states.
"The bottom line is that 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nothing really terrible has happened in the Russian nuclear complex - contrary to the expectations of most people in the West," said Hecker, who is currently working on a book about his diplomacy with Russia. "Critical to the success of our cooperation was what Bueche called the `international bonding' that technology provides."
But he noted that the relationship between Moscow and Washington are worse than at any time since the Gorbachev era. While he and his Russian colleagues have made great progress together over the last two decades, that their work is far from done.
"Indeed, the need for scientists and engineers to cooperate internationally is more important than ever. It is especially important in all things nuclear," he told the audience. "Since nuclear energy can electrify the world or destroy the world, the consequences of doing things right or doing them wrong are enormous. What we have learned over the years is that nuclear cooperation is essential - it promotes the benefits of nuclear energy - be it electricity, nuclear medicine or research. Nuclear isolation breeds suspicion and conflict."
Hecker noted he has also visited nuclear facilities and developed relationships with key scientists and engineers in the UK, France, China, India, North and South Korea, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and has held substantive discussions with nuclear specialists from Pakistan and Iran.
"Dialogue and cooperation are essential," he said. "The same holds true for other major societal issues such as energy, climate change, water and natural resources, infectious diseases, the future of the Internet. These challenges are truly international, and solutions are often prevented by political and ideological differences. That is why institutions like the NAE and the National Academies are crucial."
CISAC Stanford University Encina Hall, E210 Stanford CA 94305-6165
(650) 724-5687
614-961-9670
0
dtraven@stanford.edu
MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow
david_traven.jpg
PhD
David Traven joined CISAC as a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow in July 2014. He received his PhD. in Political Science at Ohio State University in 2013. From January 2013 to June 2014 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College. His research examines the evolution of the law and ethics of war in international relations, and he is particularly interested in understanding how moral cognition and emotion shape the creation of norms that protect the victims of armed conflict, especially civilians. Dr. Traven is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how moral intuitions influence the creation and the effectiveness of the norms of war across cultures.
Among the technologies that transformed the 20th-century, none has cast a longer and darker shadow than the atomic bomb. Even since Sidney Drell and John Lewis founded the Center for International Security and Arms Control in 1983, scholars at CISAC have grappled with how these tools of war have altered global diplomacy and defense.
Current and former CISAC fellows recently took part in a conversation about the state of nuclear studies, which has bridged academia, the public sphere and the halls of power. In a joint forum for H-Diplo and the International Security Studies Forum, which curate book reviews and disciplinary debates for international historians and international security scholars, respectively, as well as the Monkey Cage, where The Washington Post publishes rigorous analysis on political topics, a cohort of historians and political scientists debated the claims and methods that are animating the study of nuclear subjects today.
Recent publications by early career political scientists and the occurrence of what CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan terms “two nuclear renaissances,” prompted the discussions. Since 1991, historians who work on subjects such as nuclear power, crises, proliferation, compellence, and deterrence have vastly expanded the documentary record (nearly always declassified) upon which our collective knowledge rests by mining archives throughout the world. Their efforts have been curated and made available by organizations such as the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Concurrently, political scientists have taken advantage of the prodigious computational power and advanced statistical tools that have revolutionized scientific inquiry to generate important new research and insights using large-N quantitative analysis as well as survey methodology.
Two recent articles in International Organizations, a prominent journal of political science and international relations, one authored by former CISAC fellow Matthew Kroenig and another coauthored by former CISAC fellow Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, endeavor to draw inferences about what leads one state or another to emerge victorious from an international crisis when one or both sides possess nuclear weapons. Intriguingly, though they ask slightly different questions, they come to divergent conclusions. Kroenig contends that crisis outcomes are co-determined by nuclear superiority and “the balance of resolve” (i.e. which side has higher political stakes). Sechser and Fuhrmann, on the other hand, find that nuclear weapons generally fail to furnish a “credible threat,” making them weak tools with which to compel adversaries.
Francis J. Gavin, the Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT, takes issue with the methodological approach of both articles in a response piece, entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk About Nuclear Weapons,” which grew into a joint H-Diplo/ISSF forum featuring an introduction by Sagan, responses by the two articles’ various authors (individually and collectively), an exposition by former CISAC honors student and current Duke University professor Hal Brands on the importance of archives for studying nuclear politics; an “apology” for quantitative methods in the political sciences by UCSD Professor Erik Gartzke; and a explication of how “large-N methods” can be used and abused when studying nuclear subjects by one of last year’s Stanton Faculty Fellows at CISAC and Gavin’s colleague at MIT, Vipin Narang.
The forum inspired another round of responses on H-Diplo, including a number by former and current fellows at CISAC. Gavin reprises some of his arguments in a response to the forum while also underscoring the professional and institutional stakes at issue. UCLA historian Marc Trachtenberg, Columbia political scientist Robert Jervis, and U.S. Naval War College strategic thinker Tom Nichols also weigh in on when nuclear weapons matter and how scholars can go about figuring out why and how they do.
As the current MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC and forthcoming Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at RAND Corporation, I call attention to the power of ideas and how social scientists embed themselves in the subjects they study. Jayita Sarkar, a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center explores how empirical work on case studies of technological assistance and proliferation such as that of France and India call into doubt some findings by political scientists who employ statistical methods. Lastly, former CISAC postdoctoral fellow Benoît Pelopidas, now a professor at the University of Bristol, probes the ethical responsibility of intellectuals and whether scholars ought to serve the policymaking community, or the broader public, when they conceptualize and perform their work.
Pelopidas’ essay points to a core concern about the policy implications of nuclear-security scholarship, which a third group of distinguished panelists delved into for a symposium in TheWashington Post. The forum, posted on the Monkey Cage, features thoughts from Yale Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexandre Debs, Duke Professor of Political Science and former Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council Staff Peter Feaver, Georgetown Associate Professor of Political Science and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl, and Matthew Connelly, who will join CISAC this year as the inaugural Hazy Senior Fellow in International Security and Professor of History at Stanford University.
Gavin concludes his introduction to the Monkey Cage symposium by reflecting on how the current generation of scholars has taken up the baton from those who participated in the “golden age” of nuclear-security scholarship after World War II:
If brilliant minds like Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, and Albert Wohlstetter could not settle these issues during their time at RAND, we certainly don’t expect to here. At best, we can inspire much needed debate and broaden this crucial conversation. What we do hope to emulate, however, is the earlier generation’s rigorous, interdisciplinary questioning and exchange, while always keeping an eye on how our ideas can help decision-makers better understand and make responsible decisions about these fearsome weapons.
The Center for International Security and Cooperation is gratified that so many of its affiliates—current and former—are contributing to this revival of scholarly interest in how the nuclear revolution has shaped global affairs. We look forward to our nuclear scholars—past, present, and future—continuing to enrich these vital interdisciplinary debates.
CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Jonathan Hunt was a Nuclear Fellow at CISAC from 2012-2014.
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CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
About the Topic: Four decades of Soviet nuclear testing left behind a legacy of radioactive contamination in a sizable area of contemporary Kazakhstan. My research examines the social consequences and lasting implications of this on local populations living in a village of Koyan. Taking the 1949-1989 Soviet atomic weapons program and the secretive Cold War context as my starting point, I investigate local understandings of health and livelihood on a landscape marred by atomic testing and one continuously inhabited by rural Kazakhs for generations. I demonstrate that since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the advent of free market reforms in Kazakhstan a new kind of post-socialist identity has appeared. Furthermore, in order to navigate this post-Soviet social order and cultural marginalization, people in Koyan have “embraced” nuclear pollution as something natural in their environment. Specifically, they see their own survival as proof that they have evolved to fit a radioactive ecosystem. My Kazakh colleagues say “clean air is our death,” meaning that moving away from these damaged ecosystems will kill them. Emerging strategies for survival reflect a new social order in Kazakhstan: that order embraces a nuclear future by agreeing to accept funding to become a Global Nuclear Fuel Bank and a dumping ground for much of the West’s toxic waste, while at the same time publicly lamenting its Soviet nuclear past. I address how people in Koyan have learned to engage with the nuclear test site’s past, present state practices, scientific expertise and authority, and how health, suffering, and notions of well-being constitute a new post-socialist identity.
About the Speaker: Magdalena Stawkowski received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation, “Radioactive Knowledge: State Control of Scientific Information in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan,” is based on sixteen months of field work in the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site region and is an ethnographic account of the local understandings of health, livelihood, and suffering among rural ethnic Kazakh communities. In it, Magdalena traces the lesser-known history of the Soviet nuclear program from the perspective of people who were most affected by its military-industrial complex, exploring how they cope with their own present-day toxic environments. She is a recipient of an award for outstanding contribution to the anti-nuclear movement by Olzhas Suleimenov, the Ambassador of Kazakhstan to UNESCO, Kazakh poet, and the founder of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Anti-Nuclear Movement in Kazakhstan. Magdalena’s recent co-authored article appeared in the Journal of the History of Biology and is titled “James V. Neel and Yuri E. Dubrova: Cold War Debates and the Genetic Effects of Low Dose Radiation.”
The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just before 18-year-old William J. Perry landed in Japan during the War of Occupation as a mapping specialist. He saw the devastation left behind by American firebombers on Tokyo and Okinawa.
The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs. He would go on to devote his life to understanding, procuring and then trying to dismantle those weapons.
But that was seven decades back. And many young Americans today believe the threat of nuclear weapons waned alongside the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis.
So as faculty at Stanford and the Center for International Security and Cooperation evolve with the digital age by taking their lessons online, one of the university’s oldest professors is also adapting to online teaching in an effort to reach the youngest audience, urging them to take on the no-nukes mantle that he’s held for many years.
“The issue is so important to me that I tried all sorts of approaches from books and courses and lectures and conferences to try to get my contemporaries and the generations behind me engaged – all with limited success,” says the 86-year-old Perry, a CISAC faculty member and the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at the center’s parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
“First – which is a sine qua non – they must become seriously concerned that there is a nuclear danger, which most of these kids don’t understand at all,” said Perry. “Secondly, we want to convince them that there is something they can actually do about it.”
To reach those students, he believes he must go digital. So Perry – who co-teaches with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker the popular Stanford course, “Technology and National Security” – began to map out a classroom course that would be videotaped and serve as a pilot for an online class that would be free and open to the public.
That course, “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today” included lectures by some of the best people working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation today. Among those who will be highlighted in the online course are Perry and Hecker; Joe Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Stanford nuclear historian David Holloway; Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan; and Ploughshares Fund president, Joseph Cirincione.
The Perry Project will produce short-segment videos highlighting key information and stories from the course, packaging them in an online course available in multiple platforms and possibly offered by the university.
Perry used his personal journey as a young soldier during WWII, a mathematician and later a developer of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for the Carter administration – and then trying to dismantle those weapons as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton.
“I’m not doing this simply because I want to put a notch on my belt, to say that I’ve done a MOOC,” Perry said. “I’m doing it because I really want to get across to hundreds of thousands of young people.”
Last summer, he launched the Perry Project by inviting a dozen high school and college students to campus for a nuclear weapons boot camp so that they could take back to campus the message that nuclear annihilation is still a real, contemporary possibility.
He asked them: How do I get through to your generation?
“They said, `We don’t get our information by books or even by television, we get it through social media and YouTube, the various social media platforms. And you want to make the message relevant and relatively compact,’” he recalls.
Perry listened. “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today” is in production now and a short-segment pilot video should be made available in the fall.
And lectures from CISAC's signature course, “International Security in a Changing World” (PS114S) will soon go up on YouTube as lecture modules entitled, “Security Matters.”
“Online learning offers a way to expand CISAC's reach to new audiences, geographies, and generations,” says CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, who has co-taught the popular course for the past few years with CISAC’s Martha Crenshaw.
“At the same time, the PS114 online modules will give us a living lecture library so that future Stanford students can compare faculty lectures on similar topics across time – learning, for example, how Martha Crenshaw assessed the terrorist threat in 2010 vs. 2015,” Zegart said.
Guest lecturers whose presentations will be included for the YouTube package include:
Jack Snyder of Columbia University: Democratization and Violence
Francis Fukuyama of Stanford: The Changing Nature of Power
Zegart: Understanding Policy Decisions: The Cuban Missile Crisis
Scott Sagan of CISAC: The Nuclear Revolution; and Why Do States Build/Forego Nuclear Weapons?
Abbas Milani, director of Iran Studies at Stanford: Historical Perspective on Iran
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller: the FBI’s Transformation Post 9/11
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.) and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan: The War in Afghanistan and the Future of Central Asia
Jane Holl Lute, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security: Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity
Perry: Security Issues in Russia, Yesterday and Today
Brad Roberts: former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy: Ensuring a (Nuclear) Deterrence Strategy that is Effective for 21st Century Challenges
CISAC Co-Director David Relman: Doomsday Viruses
And lectures at CISAC’s Cybersecurity Boot Camp for senior congressional aids will also be videotaped and packaged for YouTube and online consumption later this year.
“We are excited to enter into this phase of experimentation to see what works, what doesn't, and how we can further CISAC's teaching mission both here at Stanford and around the world,” Zegart said.
About the Topic: Large scientific and technological advances in many European countries and the establishment of the European technology platform IGD-TP have increased our understanding of how to construct, exploit, and close a future geological repository and how to reduce uncertainties in demonstrating its long term safety. Essentially all major safety analyses have demonstrated that the risk of disposal will be of little consequence. Particularly durable confinement is assured in clay formations as is foreseen for disposal in France, Switzerland and Belgium, but strong confinement can also be realized in more water permeable granite formation by very effective engineered barrier system like those foreseen in Sweden and Finland. Still, there is not yet an operating geologic repository for highly radioactive waste worldwide. The first geological European repositories are expected to accept spent fuel, high-level waste in 2025. Yet there remains substantial public concern.
Professor Grambow will lay out the current state of the art safety case, focusing mainly on the scientific programs, the ongoing planning of repository construction and the public debate in France, a country with one of the largest nuclear energy programs worldwide.
About the Speaker: Bernd Grambow is a Professor of excellence at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France. He graduated at the Frei Universität Berlin, worked for one year at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Washington State), followed by research positions in Hahn Meitner Institute Berlin and Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe. He currently holds the Chair on nuclear waste disposal in Nantes and is head of the Subatech laboratory on high energy nuclear physics and radiochemistry, a mixed research unit between the CNRS-IN2P3, the Ecole des Mines of Nantes and the University of Nantes. Coordinator of various European projects and former director of the national CNRS-academic/industrial research network NEEDS “nuclear: environment, energy, waste, society”, his areas of scientific expertise are radiochemistry, nuclear waste disposal science, geochemical modeling, radionuclide migration in the environment, chemical thermodynamics, and dynamics of solid/liquid interfaces. He has published 143 peer-reviewed research papers. In 2008 he received the Grand Prix Ivan Pechès of the French Academie of Science and in 2014 he became Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Radioactive waste disposal in European clay formations: science, safety and society
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E203
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
(650) 725-8641
0
rewing1@stanford.edu
1946-2024
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security
Professor of Geological Sciences
rodewingheadshot2014.jpg
MS, PhD
Rod Ewing was the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. He was also the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he had faculty appointments in the Departments of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering. He was a Regents' Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997. Ewing received a B.S. degree in geology from Texas Christian University (1968, summa cum laude) and M.S. (l972) and Ph.D. (l974, with distinction) degrees from Stanford University where he held an NSF Fellowship. His graduate studies focused on an esoteric group of minerals, metamict Nb-Ta-Ti oxides, which are unusual because they have become amorphous due to radiation damage caused by the presence of radioactive elements. Over the past thirty years, the early study of these unusual minerals has blossomed into a broadly-based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials. In 2001, the work on radiation-resistant ceramics was recognized by the DOE, Office of Science – Decades of Discovery as one of the top 101 innovations during the previous 25 years. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal.
He was the author or co-author of over 750 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He had published widely in mineralogy, geochemistry, materials science, nuclear materials, physics and chemistry in over 100 different ISI journals. He was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium. He was a Founding Editor of the magazine, Elements, which is now supported by 17 earth science societies. He was a Principal Editor for Nano LIFE, an interdisciplinary journal focused on collaboration between physical and medical scientists. In 2014, he was named a Founding Executive Editor of Geochemical Perspective Letters and appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of Applied Physics Reviews.
Ewing had received the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1997 and 2002, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2006, the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006, a Honorary Doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007, the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2015, Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geoscience Institute, 2015, the Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association in 2015, the Distinguished Public Service Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2019, and was a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was also a fellow of the Geological Society of America, Mineralogical Society of America, Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society, American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Materials Research Society. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.
He was president of the Mineralogical Society of America (2002) and the International Union of Materials Research Societies (1997-1998). He was the President of the American Geoscience Institute (2018). Ewing had served on the Board of Directors of the Geochemical Society, the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
He was co-editor of and a contributing author of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (North-Holland Physics, Amsterdam, 1988) and Uncertainty Underground – Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press, 2006). Professor Ewing had served on thirteen National Research Council committees and board for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that have reviewed issues related to nuclear waste and nuclear weapons. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for ongoing and integrated technical review of DOE activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste; he stepped down from the Board in 2017.
Abstract: What happens to the foreign policies of states when they acquire nuclear weapons? Despite its critical importance, this question has been understudied. This paper offers a new typology of the effects of nuclear weapons on foreign policy, and hypothesizes the circumstances in which these effects might be observed. I distinguish between five conceptually distinct foreign policy behaviors—aggression, expansion, independence,bolstering and steadfastness—-and show theoretically how nuclear acquisition may facilitate each of these behaviors. The typology therefore allows scholars to move beyond simple claims of "nuclear emboldenment," and allows for more nuanced predictions and empirical examinations of the ways in which nuclear weapons affect the foreign policies of current and future nuclear states. I demonstrate the utility of this typology using a "hard" case: the United Kingdom. I show that the acquisition of a deliverable nuclear capability in 1955 significantly affected British foreign policy. Britain did not use its nuclear weapons for aggression or expansion, instead seeking to use its nuclear weapons to maintain its forward conventional posture at lower cost and thus postpone retrenchment. However, Britain did use its nuclear weapons to bolster its junior allies in the Middle East, Far East and Europe, and to exhibit greater independence from the United States and greater steadfastness in responding to challenges to its position-—most dramatically during the 1956 Suez crisis.
About the Speaker: Mark Bell is a PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT and a research fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. His research examines issues relating to the causes and consequences of nuclear proliferation, U.S. and British foreign policy, and international relations theory, and has been funded by organizations including the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Tobin Project. He holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, and a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from St. Anne's College, Oxford University.
Beyond Emboldenment: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons on State Foreign Policy
Abstract: This book project is the first historical study of the postwar Soviet civil defense program, and an innovative comparative account of American and Soviet civil defense. It offers a comparative institutional history of the superpowers’ civil defense drawing on previously unexamined Soviet and American archival sources. It offers findings that challenge common assumptions about the logic driving the two nations’ potentially apocalyptic nuclear flirtation, such as that that a mutual recognition that nuclear war would be suicidal prevented the leaders of the two superpowers from embracing civil defense. In actuality, Moscow and Washington developed their civil defense policies in accordance with domestic political concerns, sometimes in direct contradiction to their declared strategic doctrines or military planning. The strange history of Cold War civil defense shows that the superpowers made their nuclear weapons policies as the result of power struggles between different institutions pursuing their own narrow self-interests, with results that imperiled the survival of civilization itself.
About the Speaker: Edward Geist received his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina in May 2013. Previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the RAND Corporation in Washington DC, he is a native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His research interests include emergency management in nuclear disasters, Soviet politics and culture, and the history of nuclear power and weapons. His dissertation, a comparative study of Soviet and U.S. civil defense during the Cold War, draws upon previously unexamined archival sources to examine the similarities and differences in how the two superpowers faced the dilemmas of the nuclear age. Edward is also interested in the potential uses of simulation and modelling for historians and is developing a piece using these techniques to explore the potential historical implications of the the U.S. and Soviet Union's use of qualitatively different technical assumptions to model strategic nuclear exchanges. A previous recipient of fellowships from Fulbright-Hays and American Councils to conduct research in Moscow and Kyiv, he has published articles in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Russian Review, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Encina Hall (2nd Floor)
Edward Geist
MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD
CISAC
CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer to teach online class on surveillance.
