Stanford University

Nuclear policy

Rodney Ewing Awarded Campbell, Roebling and IMA Medals

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

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.

Hero Image
rod ewing cisac headshot
Rodney Ewing, Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Rod Searcey
All News button
1

Siegfried Hecker Joins his “Metallurgical Heroes” with ASM International Honorary Membership

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

CISAC senior fellow Siegfried Hecker has been awarded an honorary membership by ASM International – one of the most prestigious awards from the world’s largest association of materials scientists and engineers who study and work with metals.

The ASM International board of trustees cited professor Hecker “for scientific enlightenment of Plutonium technology; for leadership of Los Alamos National Laboratory and for leadership in international control of nuclear arms.”

Hecker said he was proud to join a list of honorees that included many of his “old metallurgical heroes,” including Arden Bemet (former director of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and Thomas Edison (inventor of the phonograph, movie camera and light bulb) who was awarded an honorary membership in 1929.

ASM International established its honorary membership award in 1919 to recognize “truly outstanding individuals who have significantly furthered the purposes of the Society through an evidenced appreciation of the importance of the science of materials and through distinguished service to the materials science and engineering profession and the progress of mankind.”

Hecker was also invited this week to deliver the Alpha Sigma Mu International Professional Honor Society for Materials Science and Engineering distinguished lecture in Columbus, Ohio, where he recounted highlights from his storied career, from his time as a student at Ohio’s Case Institute of Technology, rising up the ranks to become director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, leading cleanup efforts at Russia’s former nuclear test site Semipalatinsk, and his current track-two diplomacy and nuclear non-proliferation initiatives with scientists from Russia, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

He concluded his lecture expressing the hope that scientists would use nuclear power to contribute to global peace and prosperity, rather than create war and disaster.

Hero Image
14899483315 30dbb791b6 k Rod Searcey
All News button
1

The International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Safeguards, 1953-1971

-

Abstract: The nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran moved the International Atomic Energy Agency to the center of public attention. Based on multi-archival research and oral history interviews, this talk will look into the early history of the IAEA’s nuclear inspectorate. The foundations of today’s safeguards system were laid in the mid-1950s, when a group of twelve nations negotiated the Statute of the IAEA. In the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union abandoned its formerly critical stance on nuclear safeguards. Following the entry-into-force of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) comprehensive safeguards were introduced. The control of diversion was at the heart of the IAEA’s early safeguards system, while it neglected other aspects of the proliferation problem, such as the distribution of dual-use technology and related knowledge, or the development of clandestine nuclear programs. It was not lack of knowledge or imagination, but the complex technical, political, and legal background that was the reason for this limitation.

About the Speaker: Elisabeth Roehrlich is a senior researcher and project director at the University of Vienna’s Department of Contemporary History, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. She received her PhD. in History from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and held fellowships at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., and Monash South Africa. Her research focuses on the history of international relations and the evolution of the global nuclear order. She is the author of a prize-winning book about the former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky (Kreisky’s Außenpolitik, Vienna University Press, 2009), and her work on the IAEA has been published or is forthcoming in journals such the IAEA Bulletin and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Roehrlich has been awarded funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and the Austrian Central Bank to support her research on the IAEA.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Safeguards, 1953-1971
Download pdf
Elisabeth Roehrlich Director IAEA History Research Project, University of Vienna
Seminars

The Prague Agenda after the Iran Deal

-

Abstract: President Obama’s Prague Agenda – moving toward a world without nuclear weapons – has been stalled for several years, due to the downturn in U.S.-Russian relations, Congressional opposition to arms control, and stalemate and division within the multilateral disarmament community. Will the Iran nuclear agreement provide an impetus for reviving elements of the Prague Agenda, such as efforts to advance regional arms control in the Middle East and strengthen the non-proliferation regime, or – as some critics contend - will the Iran deal increase long term pressures for further nuclear proliferation in the Middle East? Dr. Samore will address these and other questions concerning the implications of the Iran nuclear agreement for broader nonproliferation and disarmament efforts. 

About the Speaker: As of February 2013, Dr. Gary Samore is the Executive Director for Research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and member of the advisory board for United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), a non-profit organization that seeks to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.  He served for four years as President Obama’s White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), including as U.S. Sherpa for the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, D.C. and the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, Korea.  As WMD Coordinator, he served as the principal advisor to the President on all matters relating to arms control and the prevention of weapons of mass destruction proliferation and WMD terrorism, and coordinated United States government activities, initiatives, and programs to prevent proliferation and WMD terrorism and promote international arms control efforts.

Dr. Samore was a National Science Foundation Fellow at Harvard University, where he received his MA and PhD in government in 1984.  While at Harvard, he was a pre-doctoral fellow at what was then the Harvard Center for Science and International Affairs, later to become the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Gary Samore Executive Director for Research, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Harvard University
Seminars
Directors' Seminar Series

What do past nonproliferation failures say about the Iran nuclear agreement?

Paragraphs

The history of nonproliferation failures in Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are reviewed in the light of the nuclear agreement with Iran. The paper shows that the circumstances in each case are special and not comparable to the situation in the Iranian case. Thus, while the Iran agreement has some weaknesses, past nonproliferation failures should not be considered predictive of a future failure in this case. But there are lessons to be learned from such failures that should inform U.S. nonproliferation policy generally.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Authors
Leonard Weiss
External Purchase Links
External URL

Was There a German Nuclear Question? A Critical Reappraisal

-

Abstract: Many scholars contend that there was a specific German nuclear question. To them, asking the question “Was there a German nuclear question?” may be surprising and odd. In their view, there is no question that Bonn actively sought to transform non-nuclear West Germany into an atomic power and that Bonn had the capability to do it. This view is related to the late 1950s and early 1960s in particular. Most accounts do not address the question whether the postulated objective of Bonn’s nuclear policy remained the same throughout the 1960s. Furthermore, this narrative has led many scholars to believe that the German nuclear question came to an end when West Germany acceded to the NPT by signing the treaty in late 1969 after a change of government which heralded the beginning of Bonn’s ‘New Ostpolitik’. I will present a different narrative. Based on an historical approach and on new archival material, I will reappraise this complicated topic by introducing the analytical concept of West Germany’s limited nuclear revisionism. Thereby, I will postulate that the NPT had no nonproliferation effect regarding West Germany. And I will propose another understanding of the question whether there was a German nuclear question.

About the Speaker: Andreas Lutsch is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. In August 2015 he received his Doctor of Philosophy in history at the University of Mainz, Germany. His dissertation offers a new interpretation of West Germany’s nuclear policy during the 1960s and 1970s - from the controversy about the Non-Proliferation Treaty since the early 1960s until the agreement on NATO’s dual track decision in 1979. The dissertation is based on printed and edited sources and on multi-archival research in Germany, the U.S., the UK and Belgium, thus making use of recently declassified files. Besides completing the book manuscript, Andreas is engaged in a research project on the historical management of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence regarding NATO Europe. Andreas analyzes whether, why and to what extent mechanisms of nuclear consultation were important as tools of extended deterrence management. A previous research fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany, Andreas is an Assistant Professor (on leave in the academic year 2015-16) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He organized three workshops for PhD students and postdocs and is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP).

 

Was There a German Nuclear Question? A Critical Reappraisal
Download pdf
Was There a German Nuclear Question? A Critical Reappraisal
Download pdf
Andreas Lutsch Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow CISAC
Seminars

Nuclear command-and-control in the Millenials era

-

Abstract: Peter Hayes will talk about the risk of nuclear war and complexity. In a February 2015 report (Peter Hayes, "Nuclear command-and-control in the Millenials era", NAPSNet Special Reports, February 17, 2015, http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/nuclear-command-and…), he stated that “very few leaders or even strategic scholars pay attention to the new complexity of the operating environment in which national nuclear command-and-control systems operate, or the new characteristics of the command-and-control systems and their supporting CISR systems that may contribute to the problem of loss-of-control and rapid escalation to nuclear war.”

“Today, the underlying ground is moving beneath the feet of nuclear-armed states. The enormous flow across borders of people, containers, and information, and the growth of connectivity between cities, corporations, and communities across borders, is recasting the essential nature of security itself to a networked flux of events and circumstances that no agency or state can control. The meta-system of nuclear command-and control systems has emerged in this new post-modern human condition.” The report can be accessed here.

About the speaker: Peter Hayes is Honorary Professor, Center for International Security Studies, Sydney University, Australia and Director, Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, California. He works at the nexus of security, environment and energy policy problems. Best known for innovative cooperative engagement strategies in North Korea, he has developed techniques at Nautilus Institute for seeking near-term solutions to global security and sustainability problems and applied them in East Asia, Australia, and South Asia. Dr. Hayes has worked for many international organizations including UN Development Programme, Asian Development Bank, and Global Environment Facility. He was founding director of the Environment Liaison Centre in Kenya in 1975. He has traveled, lived, and worked in Asia, North America, Europe and Africa.

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

 

Peter Hayes Director Speaker Nautilus Institute
Seminars

Deterrence and Enforcement in a World Free of Nuclear Weapons (chapter)

Paragraphs

Drawn from the third in a series of conferences at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on the nuclear legacy of the cold war, this report examines the importance of deterrence, from its critical function in the cold war to its current role. Although deterrence will not disappear, current and future threats to international security will present relatively fewer situations in which nuclear weapons will play the dominant role they did during the cold war.

The authors highlight the ways in which deterrence has been shaped by surrounding conditions and circumstances. They look at the prospective reliability of deterrence as a tool of statecraft in the emerging international environment. And they examine the challenges of "weaponless deterrence": developing approaches to nuclear deterrence that rely not on the actual, but rather on the potential existence of nuclear weapons. In addition, they look at the ongoing debates over "de-alerting" (slowing down the capability for immediate launch and rapid nuclear escalation), the role of arms control, and the practical considerations related to verification and compliance.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Hoover Institution Press
Authors
David Holloway
External URL

Nuclear Weapons and the Escalation of the Cold War, 1945-1962 (chapter)

Paragraphs

Nuclear weapons are so central to the history of the Cold War that it can be difficult to disentangle the two. Did nuclear weapons cause the Cold War? Did they contribute to its escalation? Did they help to keep the Cold War “cold”? We should also ask how the Cold War shaped the development of atomic energy. Was the nuclear-arms race a product of Cold War tension rather than its cause?

The atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War:

The nuclear age began before the Cold War. During World War II, three countries decided to build the atomic bomb: Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Britain put its own work aside and joined the Manhattan Project as a junior partner in 1943. The Soviet effort was small before August 1945. The British and American projects were driven by the fear of a German atomic bomb, but Germany decided in 1942 not to make a serious effort to build the bomb. In an extraordinary display of scientific and industrial might, the United States made two bombs ready for use by August 1945. Germany was defeated by then, but President Harry S. Truman decided to use the bomb against Japan.

The decision to use the atomic bomb has been a matter of intense controversy. Did Truman decide to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order, as he claimed, to end the war with Japan without further loss of American lives? Or did he drop the bombs in order to intimidate the Soviet Union, without really needing them to bring the war to an end? His primary purpose was surely to force Japan to surrender, but he also believed that the bomb would help him in his dealings with Iosif V. Stalin. That latter consideration was secondary, but it confirmed his decision. Whatever Truman’s motives, Stalin regarded the use of the bomb as an anti-Soviet move, designed to deprive the Soviet Union of strategic gains in the Far East and more generally to give the United States the upper hand in defining the postwar settlement. On August 20, 1945, two weeks to the day after Hiroshima, Stalin signed a decree setting up a Special Committee on the Atomic Bomb, under the chairmanship of Lavrentii P. Beriia. The Soviet project was now a crash program.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Authors
David Holloway
External URL

Stanford Experts Assess Iran Nuclear Deal

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

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.

19067549804 85591212aa o
The negotiations were a diplomatic balancing act, with serious consequences for both sides of the negotiations if they failed to reach an agreement.

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.”

Hero Image
19663913956 8ed26a22fe o
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks with Hossein Fereydoun, the brother of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif before announcing a historic nuclear agreement to reporters in Vienna, Austria.
U.S. State Department
All News button
1
Subscribe to Nuclear policy