In this Wall Street Journal commentary by William J. Perry and George P. Shultz, the Stanford scholars argue that Russia has completely ignored the Budapest Memorandums on Security Assurances of 1994. They say Russia has taken Crimea and is actively stirring trouble in the eastern part of that country, a blatant violation of solemn vows.

The commentary can be read here.

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.

Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer to teach online class on surveillance.

CISAC is turning to other forms on online learning, as well.

Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer is teaching an online course in surveillance law.

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 21^st 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.

In this week's Politico, David Remnick has written a lengthy piece about former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul's rocky tenure in Moscow, as Vladir Putin came back into power as president and U.S.-Russia relations began to deteriorate.

Michael A. McFaul, a FSI senior fellow and CISAC affiliated faculty member, writes in this Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law that while the U.S. and Europe maintain pressure on Putin through sanctions, the West also needs to get serious about strengthening Ukraine.

"So far, Ukrainians have done more to thwart Mr. Putin than any action by outside powers," says McFaul. "The West can likewise do more to help the Kiev government win hearts and minds in eastern Ukraine."

And in a Politico magazine piece by McFaul earlier this week, he argues that Putin today sees a path to glory that does not involve democratic governance and ignores international norms.

"Putin dreams of comparisons with Peter the Great or the Catherine the Great," writes McFaul, who was ambassador in Moscow from January 2012 until this February, when he returned to Stanford as a political science professor at FSI's New Yorker.

"But if we judge him by his ability to achieve even his own stated goals, his record is not so great. He has achieved some objectives aimed at restoring Russia to the position of global greatness he believes it deserves, but failed at achieving those most important to him. And the future looks even darker."

CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart writes in The American Interest that the United States should be concerned about both a strong and rising China, as well as a weak and unstable one. But perhaps most troubling of all, she writes, is the uncertainty about which scenario will eventually play out – and Washington’s strategic orientation toward Europe and the Middle East.

“Today opinions range between nervous hope that everything will turn out all right to outright fear that things will be worse than we can possibly imagine,” she says. “Part of the fear stems from the fact that that the U.S. and China are both literally and figuratively worlds apart, with vastly different political and cultural histories.”

Regardless of these vast differences and uncertainties in China, Zegart argues, Asia will be the most important strategic region for American national security in the 21^st century.

Former President George W. Bush met with Stanford students for an hourlong conversation that touched on many of the defining moments and policies of his presidency.

In a relaxed and sometimes self-deprecating exchange on May 5, Bush talked about the limits of congressional power and his relationships and personal diplomacy with other world leaders. His tone was more serious when discussing what he described as universal desires for freedom, his military strategies following 9/11, and his commitment to addressing Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, director of the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, moderated the session. Stanford President John Hennessy and Condoleezza Rice – Bush’s secretary of state and national security adviser who has returned to teaching political science and business at Stanford – joined the conversation.

"FSI has a terrific track record of convening leaders at Stanford, from the head of the International Monetary Fund to prime ministers and presidents,” Cuéllar said. “On this occasion, we wanted our students to have an opportunity for a candid conversation with one of the key policymakers of the early 21^st century, and we think such experiences will further prepare them for leadership in a complex world."

About 30 students were invited to the session at Encina Hall, but they didn’t know they were meeting Bush until the 43^rd president walked into the room.

“I suspect he misses this sort of engagement,” said Gregory Schweizer, a second-year law school student who was part of the discussion that also covered immigration reform, national education policies and the Edward Snowden affair.

“The media always portrays him as being disengaged from current affairs,” Schweizer said. “But I’m impressed with how interested and engaged he still is.”

Along with representatives from Stanford Law School, other students were invited from the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies. Honors students from FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law also joined the conversation.

Bush’s visit was arranged with the help of  Brad Freeman, a former university trustee and Ronald Spogli, who is currently on Stanford's board of trustees. Freeman and Spogli are longtime friends of the former president and philanthropists who donated a naming gift to FSI in 2005. Bush appointed Spogli as ambassador to Italy in 2005 and as ambassador to San Marino a year later. 

Stanford has a tradition of hosting current and former heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – both of whom visited in 2010.