He broke the news to the world that North Korea had built a modern uranium enrichment plant. He’s helped the Russians secure their vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. And Stanford students routinely rank him as one of their favorite professors. 

Siegfried Hecker, one of he world’s top nuclear scientists and co-teacher of the popular course, “Technology and National Security,” has completed his five-year tenure as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Though Hecker is stepping down from the leadership role, he’s not walking away.

“He’s not going anywhere,” emphasized his successor, Stanford microbiologist and biosecurity specialist, David Relman, as he opened a seminar in Hecker’s honor on Feb. 25. The panel discussion, “Three Hard Cases: Iran, North Korea and Pakistan” featured Scott Sagan, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Abbas Milani, Robert Carlin and Feroz Khan.

“He’ll be back this summer with his infectious energy and unswerving dedication for which he is so well known,” Relman said.

Hecker, 69, is taking a sabbatical in New Mexico – where he was director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than a decade before coming to Stanford – and then at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, run by the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He’ll continue work on his book about his historic efforts to foster collaboration between U.S.-Russian nuclear labs and do some travel to meet his nonproliferation counterparts in other parts of the world.

“CISAC is part of my heart and soul now,” Hecker told a reception in his honor after the seminar. “Los Alamos was in my blood and bones. Today, Stanford is part of that too.”

Hecker will return to CISAC this summer to resume his writing and research projects as a senior fellow at CISAC and its umbrella, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He’ll head back to the classroom as well.

“What I found out is that teaching is so much harder than just giving a lecture, because you really have to pay attention to what the students have actually absorbed,” Hecker said. “You need to be able to communicate with each and every one of them.”

Among the many national honors that Hecker has received over the years, the one he treasures most is the 2010 Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an honor voted on by the students.

Lauren Cipriano, a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Science and Engineering, has been Hecker’s teaching assistant for four years. She noted his class co-taught with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – also a senior FSI fellow and CISAC faculty member – is routinely attended by hundreds of students and rated among the best.

“He shares his own stories of how developing personal relationships with Russian nuclear scientists in the wake of the Cold War helped overcome diplomatic challenges, and how he continues those efforts today in Russia and North Korea to make the world a safer place,” she said in her reception toast. “Sig also has a scary ability to predict the future. Several times our policy paper assignments have nearly come true.”

One of those dramatic examples unfolded in 2010. While the students were writing a paper about how they would respond to the discovery that North Korea had established a uranium enrichment facility, Sig was traveling to Pyongyang.

“Our students were some of the first to hear the stunning news of the uranium enrichment facilities the North Koreans revealed to him on his trip,” she said. “The students couldn’t have been more excited to feel like insiders in the national security policy arena.”

Hecker said he is particularly proud of the bright young scientists who have come through as CISAC fellows during his tenure.

“I think we’ve been able to build a really strong science component to support CISAC’s mission of building a safer world,” Hecker said. “We’ve been able to attract a lot of very good young scientists and then send them on to good careers from here.”

He said that working with these pre- and postdoctoral fellows and visiting faculty and scholars from the life sciences and political sciences “has helped me to better understand how important it is to bring the technical and social sciences together when looking at problems of international security.”

Hecker, who moved to the United States with his family from Austria when he was a boy, received his Ph.D. in metallurgy from Case Western Reserve University and began his professional career as a senior research metallurgist with the General Motors Research Laboratories in 1970. He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1973, became its director in 1986 and served for more than a decade.

Hecker came to CISAC in 2005 as a visiting professor, having been recruited by Sagan, who was then the social science co-director of CISAC.

“Sig first became involved with CISAC when he was still at Los Alamos, through participating in our Track II nuclear diplomacy efforts with John Lewis in North Korea and with me in a Five Nations project meeting in Thailand,” recalled Sagan. The Five Nations Project on Asian Regional Security and Economic Development focused on new challenges to nuclear nonproliferation by the U.S., China, Russia, India and Pakistan.

“I first broached the possibility of his coming to Stanford as a visiting professor when he and I were in the back seat of a taxi in Bangkok after giving a joint lecture at the Royal Thai Military Academy,” in July 2004, Sagan said. “He has been a stellar leader and now that he is stepping down from administrative responsibilities, he will have even more time to be involved in CISAC’s nuclear nonproliferation activities around the globe."

CISAC co-director, Tino Cuéllar, called himself a “charter member of the national federation of the Sig Hecker fan club.”

“In his eventful, five-year tenure, Sig has been an extraordinary leader,” Cuéllar said. “He’s been a visionary about its future, an endlessly enthusiastic supporter of its varied missions and a role model of excellence combined with the collegiality that CISAC prizes so dearly.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday urged Stanford students to become global citizens, working together beyond borders for peace, security and a common prosperity.

"You may come from the United States or Korea, Japan or elsewhere, Arab countries, but you're now part of a global family," Ban said to a crowded auditorium during his campus visit. "Therefore, it's very important to raise your capacity as global citizens. Only then, I think we can say, we're living in a very harmoniously prosperous world."

Despite a troubling tally of crises around the world, Ban was hopeful about the future, and said he gains inspiration from the younger generation.

"Everything my life has taught me points to the power of international solidarity to overcome any obstacle," he said.

Ban's speech, sponsored by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, kicked off a series of events celebrating the 30th anniversary of the center.

Ban was introduced by former Secretary of Defense William Perry, an FSI senior fellow, who lauded Ban for his work on women's rights, climate change, nuclear disarmament and gay rights.

Ban told the audience that the world was undergoing massive changes and outlined three ways to navigate the transition: sustainable development, empowering young people and women, and pursuing dignity and democracy.

"The level and degree of global change that we face today is far more profound than at any other period in my adult lifetime," he said.

"We have no time to lose," he added later.

California, he said, has led on clean air legislation, creating a cap-and-trade law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"I am convinced national and state action can spur progress in global negotiations, creating a virtuous cycle," he said.

"Syria is in a death spiral," he said. He cited the toll the conflict has taken on Syria's citizens and surrounding countries since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011. More than 60,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed. Hundreds of thousands more have been displaced.

Ban spoke at Stanford as a hostage crisis also unfolded in the region.

In retaliation for military action by France in the West African nation of Mali, Islamist extremists in Algeria took several hostages at an international gas field Thursday. News organizations reported that the kidnappers and some hostages were killed in a raid by the Algerian government.

Ban spoke of the efforts by the United Nations to counter terrorism in Mali, where Islamist rebels last year took control in the north in the chaos following a military coup that ousted the elected government of President Amadou Toumani Touré.

"We must continue to work for peace," Ban said. "Our hard work cannot be reversed, especially for women and young people."

With half the world's population under the age of 25, Ban said the international community must support and empower that group.

Ban also said that fighting for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities was important in advancing peace and prosperity around the world.

"I have learned to speak out for one essential reason," he said. "Lives and fundamental values are at stake."

Ban told the students to harness a spirit of hope as they confront the challenges of the world.

For him, he said, that spirit was sparked by a visit to California decades ago. He reflected on an eight-day visit to the state in 1962, when he stayed with a family, the Pattersons, in Novato on a trip sponsored by the Red Cross.

"In many ways, I still carry the same energy and enthusiasm and sense of wonder that I did when I first landed on Miss Patterson's doorstep half a century ago," he said.

"I came back knowing what I wanted to do with my life and for my country," he said.

Ban said he still keeps in touch with his host, his "American mom," 95-year-old Libba Patterson, who was in the audience and stood to applause.

"It was here in California," he reflected to the students, "that I first felt I could grab the stars from the sky."

Joseph Felter, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, spent much of his military career in areas impacted by insurgency and civil war, gaining firsthand knowledge about the complex nature of threat environments. Later, as a Stanford Ph.D. student in political science, Felter was struck by the significant barriers confronting scholars conducting research on the dynamics of politically motivated violence and conflict. 

Prior to deploying to Afghanistan in late 2009, Felter joined forces with Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to build a team of researchers and establish the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC). They wanted to make conflict analysis easier for academic colleagues and create mechanisms that would allow them to share their results with military and government decision-makers. 

They spent the last four years building a team of scholars from across multiple universities committed to conducting high-quality, evidence-based conflict research. The team developed an open-source website devoted to compiling micro-data and analysis on insurgency, civil war and other politically motivated violence around the world. The site launched this week, with the stated goal of “empowering the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security.” 

The U.S. government and its allies produce massive amounts of data for their internal use, ranging from public opinion surveys and administrative tracking data on spending, to detailed incident reports on conflict. But this information is rarely made available outside official channels.

The site hopes to empower the nation’s best minds with the quality of data and information needed to address some of the most enduring and pressing challenges to international security." - Felter

“Consequently, military commanders and government policymakers are denied a significant pool of expertise, and outside scholars lose the potential to better support national security priorities,” said Felter, former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and commander of the International Security Assistance Force’s Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan, reporting directly to both U.S. Army Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus. 

The independent research by the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project is supported in part by a variety of research grants including a substantial one from the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Initiative, administered through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego and the Hoover Institution at Stanford have provided critical resources and archival support. Private supporters include the Palo Alto-based data analysis software company, Palantir Technologies, which made a significant donation of software licenses for use by ESOC researchers. 

Felter said the website is designed to make it easier for other conflict scholars to do the kind of research that can make for better decisions and more efficient allocation of resources by military leaders and civilian policymakers, thereby enhancing security and good governance worldwide. 

“Decisions of great consequence are made by leaders of operational units in the field and by government decision-makers, based on the best information and analysis available to them at the time,” Felter said. “I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases. We hope this website and the data it makes available to the broader scholarly community can help inform important decisions and policymaking.” 

The ESOC website supports three of ESOC’s core objectives:

• To answer key analytical questions for policymakers and those on the ground in insecure areas to help them manage conflicts and respond to security threats;

• To harness the expertise of leading scholars and provide them with the detailed sub-national data required to provide cutting-edge analytical support to policymakers at government agencies and non-governmental organizations;

• And to maintain a repository of quality data across multiple cases of conflict and make these data available to a broad community of scholars, policy analysts and military strategists.

"One of the critical barriers to getting more top-notch research done on policy-relevant problems in the areas of security and development is the huge investment it takes to build data on areas experiencing or emerging from conflict,” said Shapiro, a Navy veteran who teaches at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. 

“The ESOC website is designed to dramatically lower that barrier by making available a broad range of data which took our team years to develop,” he said. “In doing so, we hope to promote careful empirical work on how to reduce conflict, rebuild order, and apply scarce aid and security resources more effectively." 

The site is devoted to data on Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Pakistan, Philippines and Vietnam, with more countries to be added in coming years. There are hundreds of maps, geographical, demographic and socioeconomic data files, links to publications and university databases and other materials related to the study of conflict. 

Felter said that as a result of their research, ESOC members have uncovered significant new findings, some of which has been shared with decision-makers in the field. “In Afghanistan, for example, we were able to provide empirical evidence that conflict episodes resulting in civilian casualties led to an increase in attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. These findings were briefed to senior leaders in the International Security and Assistance Force as well as to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” 

“I’ve advised senior leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan and can attest that more and better data-driven analysis is in great demand. The stakes are high; literally life and death in some cases." - Felter 

 They also were able to facilitate the release of data on insurgent attacks and aid spending in Iraq to test theories on what led to the dramatic reduction in violence in 2007. With aid spending, they found that the use of impromptu humanitarian relief projects could help gain popular support and cooperation, leading to a reduction in insurgent violence, but that large-scale aid projects could have the opposite effect. 

"Four years ago, practitioners would ask us how to best implement development projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other conflict zones. We could only shrug,” said Eli Berman, a UC San Diego economics professor, research director for international security at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and ESOC member. “Today, we can confidently give advice based on solid evidence: projects are likely to be violence-reducing if they are modest – say less than $50,000 – secure from destruction and extortion, informed by development experts and conditional on government forces controlling the territory.” 

Felter and Shapiro hope that new discoveries by ESOC researchers and by scholars working with micro-conflict data made available by ESOC can help shape American counterinsurgency doctrine as it evolves going forward.

“ESOC works collaboratively with other institutions dedicated to making data available to the scholarly community, such as West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, where ESOC researchers are engaged in a  new joint project  building data from recently released documents from the Iraqi insurgency,” Felter said.

Other ESOC members include:

• James D. Fearon, Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

• David D. Laitin, the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

• Jeremy M. Weinstein, Associate Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He serves as director of the Center for African Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member at CISAC and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law