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.

U.S. Senator John McCain told a select group of Stanford undergraduate students that technological innovation had created both unparalleled opportunities for the United States as well as new national security risks, during a visit to Silicon Valley this week.

“This has changed the world,” Senator McCain told the students as he held up his smart phone.

“This is the biggest change in our ability to inform and educate than any invention since the printing press.”

However, McCain told students that he believed the United States needed to develop a clearer policy for responding to cyber attacks from foreign nations.

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“The people who are doing these cyber attacks have to realize that the costs will be higher than the benefits of the attack. Everybody has to know that there will be a price to pay for it.”

McCain called on the students, who included several computer science majors, to step up and defend the United States in cyber space.

“I would call on the people here to help us develop defensive capabilities, and frankly, offensive capabilities,” McCain said.

In the wide-ranging conversation, McCain fielded questions from students and shared his views on the conflict in Syria, the Iran nuclear deal, Russia’s imperial ambitions and the pullout of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“I study international security, and I feel that his dedication to national security and to veterans have been fundamental, and it was an honor to meet him and hear him talk about these issues,” said Chelsea Green.

The forty students who met with McCain were selected for their special interest in international affairs and politics, and included representatives from the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s honors program, Hoover Institution National Security Mentees and Stanford in Government student group.

International relations major Kayla Bonstrom said she was excited to meet the Senator from her home state of Arizona.

“He was very easy to talk to,” she said.

Bonstrom said McCain’s casual style, which included the occasional joke, helped put the students at ease.

“It was nice to see him in a different setting.”

Mathematical and computation science major Varun Gupta said he was touched by the empathy McCain showed when he shared his experiences visiting refugee camps in war zones.

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“It was really great to see the more human side.”

Other students were also impressed by McCain’s sincerity.

“He seems to sincerely believe in all of his views,” said Alexa Andaya, a political science major.

“You can tell when he says something he’s genuine about it.”

Matt Nussbaum, another political science major, said that while he disagreed with many of McCain’s hawkish positions on national security, he welcomed the opportunity to hear the opinions of such a seasoned veteran of foreign policy.

“A lot of times, we’re looking at the academic side of things, and I think that’s very interesting, but Senator McCain and other policy makers use the theory to create policy, so it’s useful to see what they think, how they think and why they think that way,” Nussbaum said.

McCain ended his talk by urging the students to get more involved in politics, whether they were “Democrat or Republican, libertarian or vegetarian.”

He told them that he believed the next presidential election was going to be the most important decision point for the country since 1980, when Republican Ronald Regan defeated Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter.

“Pick the cause that you want to support, pick the candidate you want to support, and be engaged,” he said.

“It’s your future. You’re the ones that are going to live with the person that you choose to be president of the United States.”

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.”

Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter praised two Stanford luminaries during his Pentagon policy speech on cybersecurity. He gave the annual Drell Lecture for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. The lecture is named for theoretical physicist and arms control expert Sidney Drell, the center’s co-founder, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Drell and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – a FSI senior fellow and consulting professor at CISAC – were both mentors to Carter. Drell could not attend due to illness and Perry was in the audience. Here are the comments Carter made about the two men who had such a significant impact on his life:

Thank you, Dr. Hennessy, for that introduction. And thanks to all my many friends and colleagues here at Stanford for the opportunity to be with you today. It’s a special privilege for me to give the Sidney Drell Lecture, and I need to tell you why.

I began my career in elementary particle physics, and the classic textbook in relativistic quantum field theory was Bjorken and Drell, entitled Relativistic Quantum Fields, which described the first of what are known as gauge field theories, namely quantum electrodynamics. Here is my copy of Bjorken and Drell, with my hand marking in the margins.

For my doctorate in theoretical physics, I worked on quantum chromodynamics, a gauge field theory of the force by which quarks are held together to make sub-nuclear particles. And at Oxford University’s department of theoretical physics, the external thesis examiner for my doctorate was none other than Sidney Drell.

When I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in subsequent years as a post-doc, I remember sitting on the porch of the rambling ranch house right here on the Stanford campus that Sid and Harriet Drell lived in. As post-docs tend to do, I would hang around their house at dinnertime hoping that Harriet would invite me in to dinner, which she usually did. Sometimes their daughter Persis would be there, who is now, of course, the dean of engineering here at Stanford University.

A few years later, Sid was assisting the assembly of a team of scientists for the U.S. Congress on a topic that preoccupied Cold War Washington at the time: how to base the ten-warhead MX intercontinental ballistic missile so that it could not be destroyed in a first strike by 3,000 equivalent megatons of Soviet throw-weight atop their SS-18 missile. He recommended that I join this team. Sid Drell as an inspiration to all those who worked in those years to control the danger of nuclear weapons. This was the beginning of my involvement in national security affairs.

About that time, I got to meet then-Under Secretary of Defense in charge of technology and procurement for the Department of Defense. He impressed me with how lucid and logical he was, and how well he applied technical thinking to national security problems. That Under Secretary was of course William Perry, who is also present here today, and who later because Deputy Secretary of Defense and finally Secretary of Defense in a progression that I have followed some 20 years later. Bill has been a major figure in my life, including standing in for my father at my wedding.

So I thank both Sid Drell and Bill Perry, and many, many other colleagues and friends here at CISAC, at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the hoover Institution, and in the engineering faculty. I especially thank everyone for their warm welcome for me as a visitor earlier this academic year. Not quite two months into it, on a fateful Monday morning in November, though, duty called. And I found myself nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Defense. 

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Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter unveiled the Pentagon’s new cybersecurity strategy before a Stanford audience Thursday, saying the United States would defend the nation using cyber warfare and calling for a renewed partnership with Silicon Valley.

Carter, the first sitting secretary of defense to speak on the Stanford campus in two decades, warned cyber criminals that Washington considers a cyber attack against the homeland or American businesses and citizens like any other threat to national security.

“Adversaries should know that our preference for deterrence and our defensive posture don’t diminish our willingness to use cyber options if necessary,” he told the audience at CEMEX Auditorium. “And when we do take action – defensive or otherwise, conventionally or in cyberspace – we operate under rules of engagement that comply with domestic and international law.”

Carter, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics, has strong ties to technology. He knows that as he takes the helm at the Pentagon, digital innovators and cyber criminals are trying to outpace one another at breakneck speeds. A strong partnership between military strategist and technologists would establish an unbeatable pact, he said.

The secretary was a senior partner at Global Technology Partners, where he advised major investment firms on technology and defense. He acknowledges the boundless transformation of technology and the opportunities and prosperity that it has brought to all sectors of American society.

But, he added: “The same Internet that enables Wikipedia also allows terrorists to learn how to build a bomb. And the same technologies we use to target cruise missiles and jam enemy air defenses can be used against our own forces – and they’re now available to the highest bidder.”

This is why, he said, the Pentagon must rebuild the bridge between Washington and Silicon Valley. “Renewing our partnership is the only way we can do this right.” Carter was building on President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity policies outlined by the president at the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford earlier this year. 

Carter was the Payne distinguished visitor at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution until he was sworn in as the 25th secretary of defense in February.

Carter’s speech was delivered as the annual Drell Lecture for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

The lecture is named for theoretical physicist and arms control expert Sidney Drell, the center’s co-founder, a senior fellow at Hoover and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Drell and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – a FSI senior fellow and consulting professor at CISAC – were both mentors to Carter and he thanked them at length before his formal policy speech. (Read here.)

"Secretary Carter is the first sitting secretary of defense to speak in Silicon Valley in 20 years," said CISAC Co-Director and Hoover senior fellow Amy Zegart, who led a Q&A session with Carter at the end of his talk. "This was an historic day, with the unveiling of DoD's new cyber strategy, and we are honored that Stanford could play a part. Cybersecurity is one of the toughest international security challenges of our time, and we are dedicated to playing a leading role in bringing together policymakers, scholars, and industry leaders to develop the new technologies, talent, and ideas that our nation requires."

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As Carter was speaking, the Department of Defense released online its new cyber strategy based on three primary missions: To defend the Pentagon’s networks; to defend the United States and its interests against cyber attacks of “significant consequences”; and to provide integrated cyber capabilities to support military operations and contingency plans.

“The cyber threat against U.S. interests is increasing in severity and sophistication,” Carter said. “While the North Korean cyber attack on Sony was the most destructive on a U.S. entity so far, this threat affects us all. Just as Russia and China have advanced cyber capabilities and strategies ranging from stealthy network penetration to intellectual property theft, criminal and terrorist networks are also increasing their cyber operations. Low-cost and global proliferation of malware have lowered barriers to entry and made it easier for smaller malicious actors to strike in cyberspace.”

The cyber strategy calls for a 6,200-strong Cyber Mission Force of military, civilian and defense contractors, with 133 cyber protection and combat teams in action by 2018.

“These are the talented individuals who hunt down intruders, red-team our networks and perform the forensics that help keep our systems secure,” Carter said.

And the Pentagon is creating a new “point of partnership” in the Silicon Valley called the Defense Innovation Unit X.

“The first-of-its-kind unit will be staffed by an elite team of active-duty and civilian personnel, plus key people from the Reserves, where some of our best technical talent resides,” he said, adding the unit would scout for breakthrough and emerging technologies and potentially help startups find new ways to work with the military.

The Pentagon will establish a branch of the U.S. Digital Service, the outgrowth of the technical team that helped rescue the beleaguered healthcare.gov site, which collapsed when the Affordable Care Act was implemented.

Herb Lin, a senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at CISAC and a research fellow at Hoover, said the concept was particularly noteworthy. “He’s asking technologists to take a tour of duty helping the DoD by working on some important technical problems. I heartily endorse this vision.”

Lin said the new DoD cyber strategy that was released online is also notable for its openness about the role of the Pentagon’s offensive cyber capabilities.

“It’s been an open secret for a long time that DoD has these capabilities, but by discussing them more forthrightly than any defense secretary has done before, Dr. Carter has done a real public service,” Lin said. “And the announcement of the new strategy will spark much needed conversations among policymakers and researchers about what should be done with these capabilities.”

Lin – chief scientist for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies before coming to Stanford earlier this year – was also impressed by how open Carter was about wanting to repair relations with Silicon Valley. Those have been frosty at best since the Edward Snowden revelations.

“That will be a hard task, but you have to start somewhere, and Carter is quite tech-savvy, so if anyone can make headway, he can,” Lin said.

The secretary was slated to visit Facebook after his speech and meet with tech leaders on Friday. Not only does he hope to make amends, but to enlist their support in countering the threat of cyber attacks and ensuring the military has the technology it needs.

Carter revealed that earlier this year, sensors that guard the Pentagon’s unclassified networks detected what they believed were Russian hackers. After investigating, they discovered an old vulnerability in one of the DoD’s legacy networks that hadn’t been patched. But they caught it and kicked off the hackers within 24 hours.

He said the incident had not been made public until now.

“Shining a bright light on such intrusions can eventually benefit us all, government and business alike,” he said. “As secretary of defense, I believe that we at the Pentagon must be open, and think, as I like to say, outside our five-sided box.”

After his speech, the secretary took questions from the Stanford and Twitter audiences in a session moderated by Zegart.

One of those questions from Twitter asked why young Stanford computer scientists or technologists from the valley would want to join the cyber teams at the Pentagon.

“Because we have the most exciting problems you can have in technology,” he said. “And they’re consequential – they matter.”

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All Photos by Rod Searcey.

A sustainable future is within reach, but it won’t prevent the world from experiencing the potentially catastrophic environmental and political consequences of climate change and environmental degradation, former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told a Stanford audience.

Chu, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and served as the energy secretary under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, held a seminar at CISAC on Tuesday on climate change, sustainability and security.

The consequences of the damage wrought by unsustainable resource depletion and air pollution will manifest in a hotter, more dangerous world, said the Stanford physics professor.

Average global temperatures have skyrocketed past normal levels since the Industrial Revolution and have plateaued in the last few months at the highest points in history. Chu said the plateau is likely due to it taking a long time for the lower depths of the oceans to warm up.

“There is a built-in time delay between committing damage, which we’ve already done, and feeling the true consequences. All we can say is that temperatures are likely to climb again, we just don’t know when – could be 50 to 100 years – and by how much,” said Chu.

Even if the world were to stop using coal, oil, and natural gas today, he said, it would not stop the oncoming consequences. “It’s like a long-time chain-smoker who stops smoking. Stopping does not necessarily prevent the occurrence of lung cancer.”

Chu said the battle between scientists and the tobacco industry in the 20th century is analogous to today’s conflict between scientists and the energy industries.

“A lot of what you hear from the incumbent energy industries and their representatives are the same kinds of arguments that the tobacco industry made when the science showing the harm cigarettes caused came out,” said Chu.

Ironically, the same science showing the damage cigarettes cause to health can be used to demonstrate the hazards of air pollution today.

Chu noted that a recent study found that for every 10 micrograms of pollution per cubic meter, the chances of contracting lung cancer increases 36 percent. This lends alarming perspective to pollution in places such as China and India.

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The U.S. Embassy in Beijing tracks air pollution levels daily.

“The average level of air pollution was 194 micrograms per cubic meter. So it’s possible that breathing the average air in Beijing is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” he said. “Even if it’s a third of that, it’s still really bad. But again, there is going to be a lag time between now and a possible rash of deaths by lung cancer.

In addition to causing large-scale health crises, global warming and environmental degradation may exacerbate, or even cause, potential conflicts between countries.

“I think water insecurity concerns me more than even rising sea levels,” said Chu, noting that today’s conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are exacerbated by water insecurity.

“India is already nervous that China will direct water runoff from the Himalayas to water-starved Northern China and away from India or Bangladesh, which are also water-starved,” he said. “India is also concerned that millions of Bangladeshis could become environmental refugees and start streaming into India.”

Chu recalled that when he was energy secretary, one of his biggest climate-change allies was the Department of Defense

“They will be the ones called on to help with those stresses and they see serious geopolitical risks due to climate change,” he said.

Despite the dangers ahead, Chu is optimistic about great strides in sustainable technology.

Chu and some of his colleagues studied a phenomenon that may bode well for creating a more environmentally friendly economy: putting efficiency standards on electronic appliances, which eventually could lead to a decline in the cost of appliances.

In addition to economical energy standards, new and cheaper green energy technology is within sight. Chu is working with Stanford Professor Yi Cui on creating a lithium-sulfur battery that may be significantly lighter than the current electric batteries used by cars such as Tesla and charge 200 miles in 10 minutes.

Additionally, wind energy is set to become cheaper than natural gas. Chu said that in the Midwest, where the wind is best and cheapest, contracts are selling anywhere between 2.5 and 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. If you build a new natural gas plant, it would be about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“To be fair, wind does have the benefit of a production tax credit and if you take that away, wind would be somewhere around 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. But I think within the next dozen years wind will, on its own, be cheaper than natural gas,” he said.

Solar is even more surprising, said Chu. In July 2008, contracts were going for 18 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Texas in 2014, two contracts were signed one for 5 cents and the other for 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar has the advantage of being scalable and the amount of solar resources available around the world is substantial.

“There’s plenty of solar energy available to power the entire world several times over,” he said.

Nonetheless, public policy nudges are still needed.

“There is still no serious discussion in the U.S. about creating a national grid with long distance transmission lines, which will be necessary for a sustainable future. But before that can happen, the campaign by incumbent industries to discredit and doubt climate science has to be defeated.”