Rodney Ewing, senior CISAC fellow and Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security, has been honored with three prestigious awards in the geological and mineralogical sciences.

Ewing will receive two medals at the Geological Society of America’s next annual meeting in Baltimore at the end of this month: the Ian Campbell Medal for Superlative Service to the Geosciences from the American Institute of Geosciences, and the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for scientific eminence.

He is being recognized for his groundbreaking research on nuclear materials and his contributions to nuclear waste management.

“Rod Ewing is a modern mineral scientist at the top of his field who has excelled in both science and service,” according to the citation for the Campbell Medal.

“Dr. Ewing has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of radiation damage in minerals and the design of waste forms for high-level nuclear waste. And he continues to have a major impact on the policies underlying nuclear waste management in the United States.”

The international impact of professor Ewing’s research into nuclear waste storage is also being recognized with the IMA Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association, which will be awarded at a meeting in Rimini, Italy next September.

Today’s landmark deal between six world powers and Iran, which would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions, was an important step toward stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb.

However, the key challenge for the international community will be making sure Iran keeps its part of the bargain, according to Stanford experts.

“Both sides have made a series of compromises that will help Iran’s economy in exchange for constraining its nuclear capabilities – and that’s a deal worth making, in my view,” said Scott Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“Iran will still have a technical capability to develop nuclear weapons, given the technology and materials that they have, but under this deal it will both take them a much longer period of time and would require them to take actions that would be easily discerned by the International Atomic Energy Agency, so it constrains their break-out capabilities in important ways.”

[[{"fid":"219719","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"title":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","width":"870","style":"width: 400px; height: 266px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]The U.S.-led negotiations also included fellow United Nations Security Council members Britain, China, France, and Russia, as well as Germany – a group known collectively as as the "P5+1."

Sig Hecker, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the nuclear deal was “hard-won and is better than any other reasonably achievable alternative.”

“Iran agreed to considerably greater restrictions on its program than what I thought was possible before the Joint Plan of Action was signed in November 2013,” said Hecker.

Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law, called it the “least bad deal” for both Iran and the international community.

“Nobody gets everything they want,” Milani said. “Every side gets some of what they want.”

Under the deal, Iran would be allowed to continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes in its energy and health industries.

But it would have to reduce the number of its centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, and cut its stockpile of low enriched uranium down from more than 20 thousand pounds to about 660 pounds.

“Reducing that stockpile actually lengthens the breakout time more than any other measure,” said Hecker.

These limits were designed to increase the “breakout time” it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon from the current two to three months, to one year over a period of the next 10 years.

The agreement still faces a series of political hurdles before it gets implemented, and will face tough scrutiny from a Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, as well as the parliaments of European countries that were parties to the talks.

“I think it’s going to be hard for the U.S. Congress and [European] parliaments to kill the deal and be perceived as the ones who would rather have a war than give diplomacy a chance,” said Thomas Fingar, distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

[[{"fid":"219720","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"The Iranian delegation attend the final plenary session in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"title":"The Iranian delegation attend the final plenary session in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","width":"870","style":"width: 400px; height: 268px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]If the deal survives the inevitable political challenges, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will be responsible for confirming that Iran is living up to its obligations.

“The key is going to be the effectiveness of the verification procedures and IAEA access,” Fingar said.

“There’s an element of trust, but a far more important part is the rigorous verification protocols.”

As soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran is abiding by the terms of the agreement, economic sanctions can be lifted.

Sagan warned that the international community should not be surprised if Iran pushed the limits of the agreement, and should be ready to reimpose economic sanctions if Iran violated the deal.

“We should anticipate that Iranian opponents to the agreement will try to stretch it and do things that are potential violations and that we have to call them on that, and not treat every problem that we see as unexpected,” said Sagan.

“We should anticipate such problems and be ready, if necessary, to reimpose sanctions. Having the ability to reimpose sanctions is the best way to deter the Iranians from engaging in such violations.”

But Hecker said the international community should focus on incentivizing Iran.

“The best hope is to make the civilian nuclear path so appealing – and then successful – that Tehran will not want to risk the political and economic consequences of that success by pursuing the bomb option,” he said.

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Iran faced the threat of military action if it continued to press forward with its nuclear program.

While Russia and China had both signaled that they were likely to abandon the sanctions regime if talks fell apart.

One of the key challenges to reaching an agreement was “finding a language that would allow both parties to declare victory”, according to Milani.

“Iran has clearly made some very substantive concessions, but Iran has also been allowed to keep enough of its infrastructure so that it can declare at least partial victory for the domestic political audience."

Now the scramble is on in Tehran to claim credit for the deal.

Reformists, led by current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, hope it will strengthen their hand as they head into the next election.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives believe it could give them the edge in the battle to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader.

“They understand that whoever gets the credit for this will be in a much better position to determine the future leadership and future direction of Iran’s foreign policy,” said Milani.

It’s too early to tell what impact the agreement might have on Iran’s foreign policy, which is often at odds with U.S. interests in hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. But Sagan said today’s deal was an important step in making sure that future conflicts with Iran don’t go nuclear.

“Hopefully those disagreements will be played out without the shadow of nuclear weapons hanging over the future, and that’s a good thing.”

U.S. Navy Adm. Cecil D. Haney, the U.S. Strategic Command commander, hosted CISAC Co-Directors David Relman and Amy Zegart as well as CISAC faculty and fellows at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska on March 30-31, 2015, to promote military-to-university cooperation and innovation, and provide a better understanding of USSTRATCOM’s global missions.

The visit follows Haney’s trip to Stanford last year, during which he held seminars and private meetings with faculty, scholars and students to discuss strategic deterrence in the 21st century. Those discussions focused on reducing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile while maintaining an effective deterrent, the integration of space and cyberspace in nuclear platforms and the congested, contested and competitive operating environment in space.

“Developing and maintaining partnerships with security experts from the private sector and academic institutions like CISAC enables USSTRATCOM to view the strategic environment from a different perspective and adjust our decision calculous accordingly,” Haney said. “We are excited about this unique opportunity to exchange ideas and share information with this prestigious organization.” 

Haney opened the discussions by presenting a command mission brief, in which he described USSTRATCOM’s nine Unified Command Plan-assigned missions, his priorities as commander and his ongoing effort to build enduring relationships with partner organizations to exchange ideas and confront the broad range of global strategic challenges.

Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said getting to see and experience how USSTRATCOM operates first-hand was “an eye opener.”

“It’s one thing to think about deterrence, it’s another to live it,” she said. “When you go to each other’s neighborhoods, you gain a better understanding of where each side is coming from … and that’s enormously important to us in how we think about deterrence and what we can do to help USSTRATCOM and its mission.”

“These kinds of exchanges have cascade effects on young people; how they think about civil-military relations [and] how they understand what our military is doing,” she added.

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The delegation also received a tour of USSTRATCOM’s global operations center and held discussions with subject matter experts on strategic deterrence, cyber responsibility and nuclear modernization.

“As a cybersecurity fellow, it was fascinating to visit the global operations center and the battle deck to see the role that cybersecurity and information technology plays in the strategic deterrence mission,” said Andreas Kuehn, a CISAC pre-doctoral cybersecurity fellow from Switzerland. “At CISAC, we often discuss deterrence from a theoretical perspective, so it was very insightful to hear from people who work in [this field] and see how they deal with deterrence in an operational manner.”

The two-day visit concluded with an open discussion, during which CISAC and USSTRATCOM members discussed the most effective means to share information, plan future engagements and continue working to build on the mutually beneficial relationship between the two organizations.

“Sometimes people talk [about strategic issues] in the abstract and it becomes difficult to understand what is happening on the ground and in the real world,” Kuehn said. “I think [USSTRATCOM] took extra steps to keep the conversations open and concrete.”

USSTRATCOM is one of nine Department of Defense unified combatant commands charged with strategic deterrence, space operations, cyberspace operations, joint electronic warfare, global strike, missile defense, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, combating weapons of mass destruction, and analysis and targeting.

Retired Pakistani Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai told an audience of some 50 South Asia and nuclear experts at Stanford that India and Pakistan need a joint strategic vision to attain permanent peace and economic stability on the Subcontinent.

Kidwai, addressing a CISAC seminar on March 30, 2015, said the enmity between India and Pakistan - born from the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 that effectively divided Hindus and Muslims into two separate nations - will never be resolved until people are brought out of abject poverty.

"The obvious is not sinking into our regional calculations," he said. "The obvious is the elephant in the room: sustained socioeconomic progress."

More than 22 percent of Pakistan's 196 million people are living in poverty and 46 percent of its rural population falls below the global poverty line, according ot the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

"Conflict resolution without socioeconomic progress will never work," said Kidwai, who is one of the most decorated generals in Pakistan. "There is no running away from this stark reality. For 68 years we have blustered and blundered our way through solutions, leaving 1.5 billion people condemned to hunger, filth and squalor."

He offered hope, in that there are two relatively new, democratically elected leaders now leading the nuclear-armed neighbors, which have gone to war three times since partition. Narendra Modi became India's 15th prime minister last year; Pakistan elected a new president, Nawaz Sharif, the year before that. They represent two political parties with strong elctroal mandates.

"We are waiting for the two leaderships to grasp, sit together, explore conflict resolution and go for it in a manner that all partners on all sides win," Kidwai said. "It needs vision, statesmanship and guts."

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Kidwai is advisor to Pakistan's National Command Authority and was the inaugural director general of the country's Strategic Plans Division, which he headed for 15 years. He conceived and executed Islamabad's nuclear policy and deterrence doctrines. He also is the architect of Pakistan's civilian nuclear energy and space programs.

Kidwai, who was hosted by CISAC's Siegfried Hecker, told the Stanford audience that he wanted to dispel what he called "two fallacious counter-narratives that have taken root in our neighborhood."

The first, he said, is that Pakistan supports and conducts terrorism inside India. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" he said, adding that the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 were not backed by Islamabad. On that day, 10 Pakistani men associated with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 164 people during four days of attacks throughout the city. India has repeatedly accused Islamabad of supporting the terrorists; Islamabad said non-state actors were responsible for the attacks.

"Terrorism is not a Pakistani invention," he said. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" 

The second myth, he said, is that the Pakistani military purposely keeps tensions at a high boil in an effort to boost its defense budget.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "The Pakistan Army is all for an equitable, just and ordinary peace with India. We recognize that war is not an option."

Kidwai believes the presence of nuclear weapons in South Asia is a stabilizing force and that any new peace initiatives lay with India. 

India conducted its first "peaceful" nuclear explosion, code-named "Smiling Buddha," in May of 1974; it would then conduct five nuclear tests in May 1998. Seventeen days after the first of those tests, Islamabad announced that it had detonated six nuclear devices, which happened to match the Indian total.

Today, India is believed to have between 90 and 110 nuclear warheads; Pakistan has between 100 to 120, according to the Arms Control Association.

Kidwai said the tried-and-tested concept of Mutually Assured Destruction has maintained a tenuous truce between the two nations. MAD follows the theory of deterrence, where the threat of using nuclear weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons.

He considered the concept of space for limited conventional war highly problematic and explained that Pakistan opted to develop a variety of short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons as a defensive deterrence response to what he called an aggressive Indian doctrine.

Kidwai assured the Stanford audience that Pakistan's nuclear weapons were safe, secure and under complete institutional and professional control. 

"For the last 15 years, Pakistan has taken its nuclear security obligations very seriously," he said. "We have invested heavily in terms of money, manpower, weapons and preparedness."

Kidwai was challenged about the deterrence utility of tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons compared to the increased security and safety risks of their potential deployment. Although Kidwai made a convincing case for improved security of Pakistan's nuclear assets during his tenure at the Strategic Plans Division, concerns were nevertheless expressed because of Pakistan's challenging internal security environment.

You can listen to the audio file of his talk here.

Stanford political science professor Scott Sagan, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, has been honored with a prestigious award from the National Academy of Sciences for his pioneering work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation.

“Sagan's work has become an integral part of the nuclear debate in the United States and overseas,” the NAS said in a statement. “He has shown, for example, that a government's decision to pursue nuclear weapons can be prompted not only by national security concerns but also because of domestic political interests, parochial bureaucratic infighting, or concerns about international prestige.”

The William and Katherine Estes Award recognizes research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances the understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war. Sagan and other NAS award winners will be honored in a ceremony on April 26 during the academy’s 152nd annual meeting.

The academy noted that Sagan has developed theories about why different types of political regimes behave differently once they acquire “the bomb.”

“Sagan and his colleagues have also investigated U.S. public attitudes about nuclear weapons and found that few Americans actually believe that there is a taboo against their use in conflicts,” the NAS said. “The possession of nuclear weapons also raises the risk of nuclear weapons accidents, and Sagan has shown that even though there has never been an accidental nuclear war, there have been many more close-calls and near-accidents than was previously known.”

Sagan and co-authors Daryl G. Press and Benjamin A. Valentino, examined the taboos, traditions and non-use of nuclear weapons in this article in the American Political Science Review. He continues to work on an original survey experiment that examines the public attitudes about the “unthinkable” use of the nuclear bomb.

Siegfried Hecker – one of the world’s leading experts on plutonium science and a senior fellow at FSI – said that he has learned greatly from Sagan over the years as colleagues and former co-directors of CISAC. The two represent the center’s foundational spirit of combing the social and hard sciences to build a safer world.  

“The beauty of Scott’s work is that he has combined rigorous political science thinking with a practical knowledge of the limits of humans and organizations to deal with the complexities and dangers of nuclear weapons,” Hecker said. “Scott’s work has convinced me that there is real science in the political science of nuclear weapons. It is appropriate that this honor comes from the National Academy of Sciences.”

Sagan said he is honored to follow in the footsteps of previous recipients of the William and Katherine Estes Award, calling them “some of my intellectual heroes.”

Among those who have won the award are Thomas C. Schelling, Alexander L. George, Robert Jervis, Robert Powell and Graham Allison.

Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, called Sagan's honor a "well-deserved recognition of a scholar who has illuminated the intersection of organizational behavior and nuclear danger."

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science and provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.