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.

David Relman, a Stanford microbiologist and professor of infectious diseases, has taken up the mantle as CISAC co-director alongside Stanford law professor Tino Cuéllar, both of whom intend to broaden the center’s research in biosecurity and the life sciences.

Relman, the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine and chief of infectious disease at the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System, has advised the U.S. government about pathogen diversity, dual-use technology and biosecurity. He also is the current president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

“The appointment of a life scientist who focuses on infectious diseases and biosecurity is an innovative step for our work in international security and cooperation,” said Gerhard Casper, president emeritus of Stanford University and director of CISAC’s umbrella organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Relman succeeds Siegfried S. Hecker, a nuclear scientist and director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was the CISAC co-director since 2007. One of the world’s foremost experts on plutonium, nuclear weapons and nonproliferation, Hecker is on sabbatical in New Mexico and the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. He is working on a book about his historic efforts to foster collaboration between U.S. and Russian nuclear labs, as well as traveling to meet his nonproliferation counterparts in parts of Europe and Russia.

Hecker will return to CISAC this summer to resume his teaching in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, as well as his writing and research as a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI.

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Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation that promotes “real and permanent good in this world,” has awarded a $1 million grant to CISAC to fund research and training on international peace and security projects over the next two years. 

Specific areas of focus include research on strengthening communities in Afghanistan through collaborative civilian-military operations, several projects on improving nuclear security, and a study of community policing interventions to increase public safety and stability in rural Kenya. 

“The breadth and extent of Carnegie’s support will be crucial in advancing CISAC’s research and teaching to help build a safer world,” said CISAC Co-Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. 

As part of a project funded in part by the Carnegie Grant, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at FSI and the School of Engineering and a CISAC faculty member, and Siegfried S. Hecker – former CISAC co-director and professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering – will travel, consult and write on issues of nuclear security in Russia and China. Their goal is to increase technical cooperation between national nuclear laboratories in the United States and Russia. They will also pursue Track II dialogue with Pakistan to promote stability in South Asia.  

“It is crucial to promote cooperation with Russia and China on nuclear issues, both in terms of superpower relations and preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism around the world,” Hecker said. “Bill Perry and I will continue to use our broad network of contacts to promote common approaches to reducing global nuclear risks.” 

Also in the area of nuclear security, Lynn Eden, CISAC senior research scholar and associate director for research, will take a hard look at the conflicting U.S. nuclear weapons strategy and policy for her project, “Vanishing Death: What do we do when we plan to fight a nuclear war?” Eden will focus on nuclear war planning and draw out the implications for future nuclear policies, including achieving a world free of nuclear weapons. She intends to publish her research with the goal of better informing the American public about the paradoxes and contradictions of U.S. nuclear weapons policy. 

“A historically informed public will be in a far better position to democratically participate in nuclear weapons policy debates, including questions of reducing the role and size of global nuclear weapons arsenals,” Eden said. 

The Carnegie grant also will enable CISAC senior research scholar Joseph Felter, a retired U.S. Army colonel, to assess and compare the effectiveness of counterinsurgency strategies and operations in the Philippines and Afghanistan. The 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, Felter has reported to the nation’s senior military officers and intends to generate a number of policy scenarios to be incorporated by the military. 

“CISAC brings scientists and engineers together with social scientists, government officials, military officers, and business leaders to collaboratively analyze some of the world’s most pressing security problems,” said Carnegie Corporation’s Patricia Moore Nicholas, project manager of the International Program.  “The original thinking and proposed solutions that emerge from these collaborations will help address a series of enduring and emerging challenges.” 

The funding for the project in Kenya will allow James D. Fearon, the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a CISAC affiliated faculty member to study the security sectors in Kenya, and then to use this research as a basis for developing effective strategies for peace building in other states in transition.

An American of Indian descent is focused on the economic impasse between New Delhi and Islamabad and a Polish immigrant is fascinated by the Soviet-era biological weapons program. A young woman from Taiwan wonders whether historical memory is fueling nationalism in China, and a Bahraini is investigating the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in his part of the world. Yet another intends to run for public office. 

All this – and they’ve yet to graduate. 

This year’s 12 honors students at the Center for International Security and Cooperation – Stanford seniors drawn to public policy and international affairs – represent the best of what the university offers: diversity, a passion for learning outside the classroom and a determination to make an impact once they venture out into the world. 

Even two weeks in Washington, D.C., did little to dissuade them from potential careers in public policy. They met with dozens of politicians, journalists, military analysts, lobbyists and experts from the leading private organizations and government agencies in the nation’s capital. While congratulated on their ambitions, the students were cautioned that Washington has become a brutal and highly divisive place to work. 

“You gravitate toward public policy and you’re likely to become a leader,” former U.S. Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Virginia, told the students at a meeting in the Beaux Art landmark that has housed the American Red Cross since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

 Robb listened to their thesis topics, offered advice and contacts, and took questions about world policy and events. He then joined the chorus of others inside the beltway lamenting the poisonous partisan politics of Capitol Hill. 

“It’s just toxic,” said Robb, who now promotes common ground between Democrats and Republicans as a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center. “You just can’t get anything done. I think we’ll have a lame duck session in Congress and nothing will happen until March. Then, a full-scale depression next spring – and I think the markets will crash.” 

The students had heard likeminded pessimism earlier that day from Walter Pincus, who covers intelligence, security and foreign policy for The Washington Post. He said PR and TV now run Congress because candidates consistently worry about how their comments on camera will be used against them in their next re-election campaign. 

“Politics are totally polarized in a way I’ve never seen before,” said Pincus, who teaches a seminar about government and the media in the Stanford-in-Washington program. Compounding the misery, he said, is the nearly $1 billion spent on political ads trashing opposing candidates in the exhaustive presidential campaign. 

“We go off and tell the rest of the world they ought to have elections, but our elections have become a PR operation,” Pincus said. “So – that’s my happy view of the world.” 

The students laughed nervously. That evening, they chatted in front of the White House about all the negativity they had heard that day. Some seemed spooked. Others made that clarion call of each new generation: It’s our turn to make things right. 

“I believe that each of us has a duty and responsibility to do what is right, what is just, and to move the world – our country and our community – at least one step forward to make each day brighter than the last,” said David Hoyt, an international relations major who aspires to public office. “And I believe that students in CISAC, by coming together and addressing these … pressing issues of our time, are starting that process.” 

The Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies at CISAC is a competitive program in which 12 seniors are chosen from among all Stanford majors to spend their final year investigating a global security issue. They are mentored and attend seminars and classes taught by CISAC faculty and researchers and present a thesis at the end of the year. They come to think of Encina Hall as a place where their ideas count.

“I always thought of CISAC as my intellectual home at Stanford,” said Jane Esberg, an honors student from the class of 2009 who is now at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and intends to pursue her Ph.D. in political science. “It was the first place where I felt like everybody thought about things that I really cared about. They never really treated me like a student – they always treated me like a colleague.”

Martha Crenshaw, a Senior Fellow at CISAC and its umbrella, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, is an expert on political terrorism and has directed the Honors Program for three years. She co-teaches s weekly honors seminar with Joe Felter, a senior research scholar at CISAC and retired U.S. Army colonel and Special Forces officer.  

“It’s a special pleasure to work with a small group of very talented and imaginative students who have such diverse interests,” Crenshaw said. 

The Washington leg of the program, known as Honors College, takes place in the two weeks before the academic year begins. The students also visit national battlefields to reconstruct war policy; a private tour of the National Portrait Gallery allows them to recount U.S. history through the individuals who shaped the great American story. 

The two weeks also helps them bond and unveil their thesis topics. 

“The secret of the honors program is the interaction,” Tom Fingar, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at FSI, told the students on their first night. They had gathered in a hotel conference room for the inaugural hashing out of their theses – some of which would change dramatically after two weeks of feedback in Washington. 

“You are going to be one another's most valuable critics,” said Fingar, an East Asia expert and former chairman of the National Intelligence Council who spent 23 years in the U.S. government. “In the end, this is your product, but your product that is informed by a collaborative process.” 

Fingar has been escorting the students around Washington since the program's inception in 2000. His years in intelligence and at the White House and State Department opened doors to counterterrorism and intelligence officials at State, the National Security Council, Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The students also met those who strive for public policy toward peace and reconciliation, at the Eurasia Group, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Amnesty International and the Stimson Center. 

The students got an earful on how to operate if they gravitate toward capital careers and were encouraged to take time before determining what they wanted to do with their professional lives. 

“I quickly realized that I don’t like doing law,” said Matthew Rojansky, a Stanford Law School grad who is deputy director of the Russia-Eurasia Program at Carnegie, when asked about the benefits of law school. “Don’t jump into it with any uncertainty or reservations. Take time after school. You guys have a lot of options in your lives.” 

The next day, the students met national security and terrorism correspondents at The New York Times. They asked the reporters about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya, the covert use drones, and whether cyberwarfare is the next big security challenge. 

“The CISAC honors students are an amazingly talented group that we look forward to meeting every year,” said Eric Schmitt, who covers terrorism and national security for the Times and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. “As journalists working in Washington, we’re able to give them insights from the front lines on the policies and politics of their research topics.”