HIROSHIMA, Japan – Keijiro Matsushima was in eighth grade, sitting at his school desk next to a window facing the sea. He recalled looking out at the sky the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, drawn to the sound of American B-29 bombers flying over his island.

Much of the Japanese population was starving. “They were so beautiful and I was so hungry that they looked like silver pancakes to me,” he said of the bombers overhead.

Matsushima figured it was a routine reconnaissance mission and turned back to his books.

Second later, he was hit by the blast. He felt the shockwave, then the wave of heat. He was forced to close his eyes when hit by a surge of blinding, orange light.

“The whole world turned into a sunset world,” he said. He covered his ears and jumped under his desk. Though his school was destroyed, a standing stairwell protected his desk.

Today, the 84-year-old retired schoolteacher is one of the storied hibakusha, the Japanese word for “explosion-affected person,” or survivors of the atomic bombs dropped by the B-29 bombers 68 years ago this week. Their average age is 78 and they have spent decades enduring discrimination and prejudice on top of their heartache 

Matsushima was addressing two dozen international scholars and policymakers at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, including a delegation from Stanford University collaborating with the city in its efforts to become an international symbol of peace.

“Seeing the Hiroshima museum and meeting with a hibakusha was a moving reminder of the importance of moving as far and as fast as we safely can toward a world without nuclear weapons,” said Scott Sagan, a Stanford political science professor and a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and its umbrella organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Matsushima sat in a classroom in the basement of the museum, seated before a map that laid out the hypocenter of the explosion. He was stoic in his narrative about events that day and often referred to himself as a “lucky boy.”

“It was a very bad war,” he said. “We didn’t know that at the time, and it continued on, a very long war. It just got worse and worse.”

Born in Hiroshima in 1929, Matsushima saw the militarization of his native city as he grew up. He remembers hearing optimistic statements about the grand Japanese success at Pearl Harbor, the surprise attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, which resulted in the U.S. declaration of war on the Empire of Japan.

The pressure on Japanese civilians mounted as the war prolonged; rationing of food, water and electricity took its toll on morale. By 1944, the U.S. had conquered several strategic Pacific islands, built airbases and began bombing Japanese cities.

As the Manhattan Project progressed, meetings of the Military Targeting Committee in 1945 designated certain Japanese cities as likely targets to test the new atomic device, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Enola Gay dropped the 4-ton atomic bomb on Hiroshima and half the city vanished, along with 70,000 to 80,000 lives, or a third of the populace.

Though Matsushima was in a classroom of 70 middle-school pupils, he remembers absolute silence after the “big noise.” He was relatively lucky; his school was on the outskirts of the blast radius, several kilometers from the hypocenter.

Though lacerated by glass and rubble, his bones were unbroken and he was able to walk. He helped a wounded classmate to a rescue truck – a young boy whom he would later learn had also survived.

“I think I should have tried rescuing others, but I was a 16-year-old, selfish young boy and I just wanted to leave the city as soon as possible,” Matsushima said with regret.

His mother had left Hiroshima a few months earlier to stay with her in-laws in the surrounding hills. Matsushima walked across the burning city, where tens of thousands of people lay wounded and pleading for help, for water, or for their gods. He walked all night until he arrived at his grandparents’ home.

The atomic bombings in Hiroshima and three days later in Nagasaki claimed between 150,000 and 240,000 lives. The bombs – dubbed Little Boy and Fat Man – would leave thousands more suffering from severe burns, radiation sickness and cancer.

Few cities in history are as closely associated with single, punctuating event than Hiroshima is with the bomb. The metropolis of 1.7 million people has been rebuilt in the last 68 years, its homes refurbished and its port revitalized.

Yet for generations, the city has been known as ground zero. Local leaders are trying to reinvent the city’s image as a beacon for global zero – the elimination of nuclear weapons.

“Policymakers of the world, how long will you remain imprisoned by distrust and animosity?”  Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui, himself the son of a hibakusha, asked in his annual peace declaration on Tuesday. “Do you honestly believe you can continue to maintain national security by rattling your sabers? Please come to Hiroshima. Encounter the spirit of the hibakusha. Look squarely at the future of the human family without being trapped in the past, and make the decision to shift to a system of security based on trust and dialogue.”

Sagan, one of the nation’s leading scholars on nuclear proliferation and safety, advocates for global nuclear disarmament as a member of the Hiroshima for Global Peace Task Force. He has worked closely for years with Hiroshima Prefecture Gov. Hidehiko Yuzaki in an effort to reach global zero.

“Our hope is that by hosting international conferences and research workshops, Hiroshima can turn from being the memorial site of the deadly ground zero to being the catalyst for moving to a world without nuclear weapons,” Sagan said.

In this photo on August 10, 1945, a mother and her son received a boiled rice ball from an emergency relief party. One mile southeast of Ground Zero, Nagasaki, August 10, 1945. Photo Credit: National Archives and Records Administration

 The visit to Hiroshima in late June by the Stanford delegation also included Francesca Giovannini, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC; Michael May, a CISAC faculty member and director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Edward Blandford, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of New Mexico and a former nuclear fellow at CISAC.

They were attending the conference, Learning from Fukushima, sponsored by the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, CISAC, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Hiroshima for Global Peace Project.

It brought together American and Japanese nuclear power and nonproliferation specialists as well as nuclear experts from Southeast Asia. They examined the regional implications of nuclear safety and regional security after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

A devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, prompting a nuclear meltdown and the release of radioactive materials from the plant.

Conference delegates listened to Matsushima’s story and met with Mayor Matsui and other city officials to discuss the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Global Nuclear Future Initiative, which Sagan co-chairs with Steven Miller from Harvard. It offers technical and safety advice to countries that are developing nuclear power programs, while examining the regional and global implications.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the region’s most binding economic and political force, has long been proud of Southeast Asia’s status as a nuclear weapons-free zone. Vietnam, however, is changing that dynamic as it has commissioned several reactors from Russia, the first of which is expected to go online in 2020.

Scholars from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia attended a panel to discuss proliferation, security and competition in the region and whether a nuclear-powered Vietnam would change the delicate balance of ASEAN.

Giovannini, who is also the program coordinator of the Global Nuclear Future Initiative, said her first visit to Hiroshima was spellbinding. The contrast between the vibrant, modern city and the heavy sorrow of its history was palpable. She said the narrative by Matsushima brought the 30-member delegation to silence.

“He was able to bring to life his memory, his past, and the history of the bombing through personal details that allowed us to picture vividly that little boy as he moved through what he called a ghost town,” Giovannini said.

She recalled someone asked Matsushima if he harbored enmity toward the United States.

“No,” he replied, and then smiled. “To move forward – one must forgive.”

Reed Jobs is a Stanford senior majoring in history and a CISAC honors student who traveled with the Stanford delegation to Hiroshima. His honors thesis will focus on the historical study of preventive warfare.

CISAC's Sig Hecker talks to one of India's most respected newspapers, The Hindu, about why he admires India's nuclear energy program. India's world-class nuclear researchers can still learn many lessons from the Fukushima nuclear crisis, particularly in fostering a culture of safety. The world's largest democracy must demonstrate to its citizens that nuclear power is safe and sustainable in order to pursue its ambitious energy program.

While many of her fellow Stanford grads will be taking internships in Washington or high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley, Flora Wang is heading off the beaten path.

The 2013 CISAC honors student who majored in international relations will study gender equality as a Fulbright Research Scholar in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, home of the terracotta warriors and the eastern terminus of the fabled Silk Road.

Wang, who did her honors thesis at the Center for International Security and Cooperation on Chinese cyber nationalism and the Sino-Japanese relationship, will spend the next academic year studying the country’s marriage reform laws and how they impact women and their roles in society.

She will be mentored by Professor Wenhua Shan, founding dean of the School of Law at Xi’an Jiaotong University and an expert in international and comparative law.

Flora is one of 16 Stanford affiliates to be awarded a Fulbright for research and teaching abroad during the coming academic year. Her work will target the 2003 revision of China’s 1950 Marriage Law.

The Taiwanese-American said she turned toward Chinese women’s issues during her last months as a CISAC honors student because she believes the empowerment of women in the world’s most populous country is critical to international security.

“Women’s rights in the PRC really started with Mao, who made that now-iconic statement: `Women hold up half the sky,’” Wang said.

“The topic of marriage legal reform is connected to the state’s stability and security,” she added. “Both gender equality and the development of a fair and just legal system are indicators of a country’s progress and modernization.”

The rights of Chinese women have been evolving dramatically since the early days of modern China. The 1950 Marriage Law, instituted less than a year after Mao Zedong established the communist People’s Republic of China, laid the groundwork for women’s equality in marriage. In theory, it restricted common practices such as concubines, female infanticide and arranged marriages.

A Chinese marriage poster from 1953 that reads, "In marriage, keep an eye on your own interests and return radiant after registration."

A Chinese marriage poster from 1953 that reads, ''In marriage, keep an eye on your own interests and return radiant after registration.'' Photo Credit: Wu Dezu (Landsberger collection)

Amendments to the Marriage Law over the past 60 years – with the last in 2003 – have served as a legal yardstick for measuring progress in women’s rights in the eyes of the Chinese government. Wang will be among the first scholars to bring recent developments to an international audience; she hopes to publish her findings.  

Wang spent her senior year at Stanford working on her honors thesis with Consulting Professor Tom Fingar, an expert on U.S.-China relations and intelligence, and Professor Andrew Walder, a specialist in conflict, stability and change in communist regimes. Both are senior fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, CISAC’s parent organization.

“Through the CISAC honors college and our visits to places like the Pentagon and think tanks, I realized how important the relationship between the U.S. and China – as an emerging global power – is for the future of international security,” she said.

CISAC honors students spend two weeks in Washington, D.C., before their senior year for briefings and consultations with politicians and think tanks, government agencies such as the State Department and Homeland Security, as well as journalists at The New York Times and Washington Post.

Wang’s thesis looked at whether the rise of cyber nationalism accompanied by the rapid development of cyberspace in China has threatened Communist Party rule.

Her in-depth, 146-page document provides a rare analysis of Chinese online nationalism from March 2008 to December 2012.

Wang, whose grandfather was born in China, said that growing up in Taiwan sparked her interest in women’s issues.

“While Taiwan is very advanced, gender inequality is still very prevalent,” she said. “I still remember that our local library had a banner that said, `Boys and girls are just as equal,’ and thinking: If the government thinks it’s necessary to put up such a banner, that’s a powerful testament to the difficulty women face in societies still strongly affected by Confucian values.”

“When I interned at the International Labor Organization in Beijing through a Stanford in Government fellowship, I was able to visit China for the first time,” she said. “I had the opportunity to work on a project relating to maternity law reform in China … so when I was thinking of applying for the Fulbright I naturally turned to studying women’s issues from a legal perspective in China.”

Flora’s project will take advantage of the Marriage Law’s “barometer” effect in marriage reform. Her work will use marriage reform as a case study on the Chinese government’s reaction to the increasingly international character of Chinese society.

Most of the academic work on the 2003 revision to the Marriage Law has been closed to international scholars. Wang’s Fulbright project will use an array of research methods to open up these issues to an English-speaking audience.

Her affiliation with Professor Shan at Xi’an Jiaotong University will permit her to take law school classes and work in the university’s archives. Her association with Shan also will allow her to observe divorce court proceedings, giving her a rare, first-hand look at how today’s courts interpret the 2003 marriage reform.

She will conduct interviews with family lawyers and observe the outreach programs of the Shaanxi Women’s Federation, a government organization dedicated to family and marriage counseling in the province.

“I’m not sure where the Fulbright will take me, but in a perfect world I would love to attend law school,” Wang said. “And I definitely plan to continue being involved with women’s rights and promoting further understanding between China and the U.S.”

Many resource dependent states have to varying degrees, failed to provide for the welfare of their own populations, could threaten global energy markets, and could pose security risks for the United States and other countries.  Many are in Africa, but also Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan), Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Burma, East Timor), and South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador) Some have only recently become – or are about to become – significant resource exporters.  Many have histories of conflict and poor governance.  The recent boom and decline in commodity prices – the largest price shock since the 1970s – will almost certainly cause them special difficulties.  The growing role of India and China, as commodity importers and investors, makes the policy landscape even more challenging.

We believe there is much the new administration can learn from both academic research, and recent global initiatives, about how to address the challenge of poorly governed states that are dependent on oil, gas, and mineral exports.  Over the last eight years there has been a wealth of new research on the special problems that resource dependence can cause in low-income countries – including violent conflict, authoritarian rule, economic volatility, and disappointing growth.  The better we understand the causes of these problems, the more we can learn about how to mitigate them.

There has also been a new set of policy initiatives to address these issues: the Kimberley Process, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the World Bank’s new “EITI plus plus,” Norway’s Oil for Development initiative, and the incipient Resource Charter.  NGOs have played an important role in most of these initiatives; key players include Global Witness, the Publish What You Pay campaign, the Revenue Watch Institute, Oxfam America, and an extensive network of civil society organizations in the resource-rich countries themselves.

Some of these initiatives have been remarkably successful.  The campaign against ‘blood diamonds,’ through the Kimberley Process, has reduced the trade in illicit diamonds to a fraction of its former level, and may have helped curtail conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.  Many other initiatives are so new they have not been have not been carefully evaluated.

This workshop is designed to bring together people in the academic and policy worlds to identify lessons from this research, and from these policy initiatives, that can inform US policy towards resource-dependent poorly states in the new administration.

One often forgets the battlefields that CISAC military fellows leave behind.

They come to Stanford to spend an academic year doing research and mentoring students. They throw off their uniforms and put on their jeans to engage with scholars across the campus. One rarely gets a bird’s-eye view of what life is like for them out in the field, much less in actual combat with a hostile, thinking enemy.

But one Afghanistan War documentary gives viewers a rare look at what one CISAC military fellow, U.S.  Army Col. J.B. Vowell, does in his real job: fight Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents while trying to keep his soldiers alive.

A rough cut of the “"The Hornet's Nest"” was recently screened on campus for Stanford faculty and staff, war veterans and military fellows from CISAC and the Hoover Institution. Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, a CISAC faculty member, introduced the film and called the battle footage “remarkable.”

“The Hornet’s Nest” is about the soldiers – the survivors, their commanders, and those who lost their lives – in Operation Strong Eagle III, a battalion air assault in 2011 to seize insurgent-controlled strongholds along the Pakistan border. Their mission was to open up opportunities for local governance to reach Afghans under Taliban control.

The film is also about a father-and-son broadcast team who would document the assault, as well as the respect and shared risk between the soldiers and the embedded journalists.

Vowell is seen preparing his troops for what would become one of the deadliest confrontations with the Taliban in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. The region is dubbed the “heart of darkness” as it’s considered the world’s most dangerous terrain for U.S. forces. Its steep mountainsides are dotted with caves used by insurgents for easy ambush.

“They don’t know what’s about to hit them,” Vowell says of the Taliban as he preps his No Slack Battalion of the 101^st Airborne. “That will teach them to shoot at my soldiers.”

It is March 29, 2011, and Vowell is conducting the final rehearsal for Operation Strong Eagle III. The mission is to clear the area of insurgents and lay the groundwork for an incoming platoon that would attempt to assassinate Taliban leader Qari Zia Rahman.

“This is his home. This is his sanctuary,” Vowell tells his men. “No one has ever dared to go in there. You think this is going to cause a ruckus? I think so.”

What follows is the largest battle the battalion has seen since Vietnam. Over nine days, Vowell’s battalion tried to fight their way into these villages – and viewers are taken along for a harrowing, 90-minute ride. The men are pinned down on rugged mountaintops and in abandoned mud-and-brick compounds, exhausted but inching forward to rescue their fallen and keep on fighting.

The footage was taken with hand-held cameras by veteran broadcast correspondent Mike Boettcher and his rookie son, Carlos. Viewers witness the first father-son team embedded with the U.S. military rekindle a relationship that had become strained.

“I was just a face in a box,” Boettcher says, referring to his more than three decades of combat work overseas, typically missing his son’s milestones as he grew up. “In the bottom of my heart I knew that Carlos was adrift and I felt that I had let Carlos down.”

When Carlos asks his father if he can join him in Afghanistan, Boettcher figures he can teach him how to work a camera under fire. You see Carlos go from a baby-faced young man to an earnest reporter practicing his on-air dispatches during his yearlong embed. He trudges up one hill as bullets whiz by and then you hear him go down and see the camera go still.

“The one thing I could not let happen was to let my son die,” Boettcher says. “I thought I had lost my son; that I had lost my chance to be a father.”

But, he adds: “We had landed in the hornet’s nest; this was command and control for the Taliban right there in that valley. And they were going to make us pay.”

Carlos survives, eventually goes back to ABC News headquarters in New York and becomes a producer for the broadcast network. The two would winner an Emmy for their coverage.

Viewers also get to know the soldiers of Strong Eagle III, making it particularly hard when you learn six of them have been killed. You see one soldier with a beautiful smile joking with his buddies before he is killed; the soldier who had tried to save him laments he should have run faster down the hill toward the fallen man.

The film ends with sorrowful coverage of the memorial devoted to the six that was conducted in Afghanistan days after the battle.  Soldiers kiss the helmets of the fallen; officers kneel, bow their heads and cry.

CISAC military fellow and U.S. Army Col. J.B. Vowell in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2011. Photo Credit: Justin Roberts

“Everything has a cost in combat and it’s hard to know that the orders you gave cost some men their lives,” Vowell says when asked by an audience member at the Stanford screening how he deals with the death of his own men.

Regardless of one’s political beliefs about the second-longest war in American history, after Vietnam, the footage reminds viewers that this largely forgotten war has been fought – and covered – with tremendous bravery.

Nearly 3,000 American and allied troops have been killed in the war, launched to avenge the deaths of nearly 3,000 civilians in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As many as 17,500 Afghan civilians have lost their lives; two dozen journalists have been killed covering the conflict.

“We felt like we needed to leave behind some kind of historical document … and great commanders like JB embraced having the cameras there,” Boettcher says, sitting on Stanford’s Cemex Auditorium stage with Vowell and co-director David Salzberg. “They wanted the stories of their men and women told. Americans must know that there is a cost to be paid; it’s being paid every day.”

An audience member asks Vowell if his men resented having to protect the journalists.

He says his troops took no more precautions to protect the father-son team than they did one another. It took time for the soldiers to embrace the Boettchers, but once they realized they had not just parachuted in for one or two stories, they became part of the battalion.

“Folks like me in uniform just have a visceral reaction against the media, as it’s usually a bad story when they show up,” he says. “The journalists who are better are the ones who share the risk with soldiers. It’s not a camaraderie thing; it’s a respect thing. And if they’re willing to be in there, not just be there for a day or two, but to really be there – that gains respect of soldiers and they trusted Mike to tell their story.”

Vowell spent the academic year making recommendations for the strategy, mission and force structure in Afghanistan after combat troops are withdrawn next year. His project was submitted to the U. S. Army War College and Perry served as his faculty adviser.

CISAC’s other military fellows this academic year were U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Pye and U.S. Army Col. Daniel S. Hurlbut.

“It has been a tremendous opportunity for me to spend a year with CISAC and focus on strategic and policy issues relevant to U.S. national security”, says Vowell.  “I had the opportunity to tell the Army’s story of the last 12 years in Afghanistan as well as research the best policy recommendation for our way ahead in the region. Only CISAC could afford me that opportunity to combine my experiences with the best cross-disciplined faculty in the nation to further my research. I know I will be better able to serve my command in the future with the 101^st Airborne Division as a result.”

Vowell assumes command of the 3^rd Brigade Combat Team, 101^st Airborne Division on Aug. 1 and is likely to do another tour in Afghanistan next year.

Co-director Salzberg spends much of his time traveling the country organizing private screenings for Gold Star families – those who have lost service members on the battlefield – and preparing the documentary for a nationwide release on Veteran’s Day.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time and have worked on a lot of different films,” says Salzberg, a veteran documentary and feature film director and producer of such films as “The Perfect Game” and “La Source.”

“Sometimes you have an opportunity to do something that is more important than a film,” Salzberg said. “If you talk to these young men and women who serve, they really just want the public to know what they’re going through. They don’t want a parade or a medal. We wanted to show that – and we are honored that these guys let us into their lives.”