The Center for International Security and Cooperation is a center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
A confluence of events has presented the Russian Federation and the United States with an unusual opportunity to transform their relationship.
The unfortunate reality is that trust is at an exceedingly low level between the elites and publics of both nations. Building that trust requires a leap of faith that they can work together on the most difficult issues. The determination to drive such trust-building on a vexing issue was behind the decision of senior Americans and Russians brought together by the EastWest Institute in 2007 to explore if collaboration was possible on the issue of Iran's ballistic missile and nuclear program. Following a tough yet civil private debate in Moscow, the participants - including on the American side General (ret.) James L. Jones, Ambassador Henry Crumpton, and General (ret.) Lance Lord, and a senior Russian delegation led by Presidential Representative Ambassador Anatoly Safonov - agreed that EWI should convene leading scientists from both states to take up the Iran issue and make it the subject of the fi rst JTA - Joint Threat Assessment. It would be an attempt to see if the top scientists and experts of the two states could agree on the nature of the threat posed by Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program. Our debate in Moscow demonstrated that there was no easy agreement on Iran's intentions. A great cloud of ‘smoke' hung over the policy communities of both nations - a mixing of emotions and unsubstantiated reports with facts and policies. There was no dialogue. Instead the issue generated independent monologues fraught with suspicion and distrust. The decision to move forward with a JTA was a risky one. There was no assurance that it could be done.
Indeed, most outside experts told us that the task was impossible. Relations between Russia and the United States had deteriorated to a nadir not seen in decades. Among the major causes for the severe decline were the rushed ballistic missile defense agreements between the United States and Poland and between the United States and the Czech Republic to deploy assets in these European countries to counter a potential Iranian nuclear and missile threat. The United States government viewed this as a defensive move. Was Iran developing a capacity to hit Europe? How long would it take? The Russian government countered that the ballistic missile defense deployment near its borders was surely directed against Russia - an offensive move. Russian leaders and experts dismissed the idea that Iran currently possessed an offensive ballistic missile program capable of striking Europe. The sixteen Americans and Russians who sat around that Track 2 table back in 2007 in Moscow could have stopped at that impasse - but they did not. They agreed that the heart of the issue did not start with either the United States or with Russia but rather with the need to decipher the threat - what were Iran's technical capabilities? Could the two sides analyze and come to an agreement on the nature of the threat through a joint threat assessment?
Russia and the United States have been in dispute over the timeframe involved for Iran to acquire nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, on the means needed to prevent that from happening, and - in the worst case that it cannot be prevented - the military operational responses available to both sides to defend against Iran's potential use of nuclear armed missiles. It was agreed that only after capabilities are ascertained can productive political conversations about motives and policy responses follow. Therein lay the mandate for the two teams of scientists, who worked independently and in a series of joint meetings that more often than not lasted well into the night.
Though the Iranian nuclear program has been the subject of detailed forensic public analyses, much less detailed attention has been paid, in public at least, to the Iranian missile program. Claims and counterclaims abound and defy easy understanding by the non-specialist. This report aims to fi ll that gap by providing a detailed examination of Iranian nuclear and missile capabilities. When might Iran be capable of deploying nuclear warheads? Assuming that Iran can develop that capability, would the proposed missile defenses be able intercept Iranian missiles? What are the possibilities of U.S.-Russian cooperation in this area? These are the vital questions that this report examines and makes its assessments.
Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is on sabbatical in 2008-09. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons(Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000.
His recent articles include "How to Keep the Bomb From Iran," in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2006); "The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969" co-written by Jeremi Suri and published in International Security in spring 2003; and "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Will More Nuclear Security Forces Produce More Nuclear Security?" published in Risk Analysis in 2004. The first piece warns against "proliferation fatalism" and "deterrence optimism" to argue that the United States should work to prevent Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons by addressing the security concerns that are likely motivators for Iran's nuclear ambitions. The International Security piece looks into the events surrounding a secret nuclear alert ordered by President Nixon to determine how effective the alert was at achieving the president's goal of forcing negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War. It also questions many of the assumptions made about nuclear signaling and discusses the dangers of new nuclear powers using this technique. Sagan's article on redundancy in Risk Analysis won Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies 2003 Best Paper in Political Violence prize. In this article, Sagan looks at how we should think about nuclear security and the emerging terrorist threat, specifically whether more nuclear facility security personnel increases our safety. His article, "Realism, Ethics, and Weapons of Mass Destruction" appears in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail Hashmi and Steven Lee. In addition to these works, Sagan is also finishing a collection of essays for a book tentatively entitled Inside Nuclear South Asia.
Gareth Evans has been since January 2000 President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (Crisis Group), the independent global non-governmental organisation with nearly 140 full-time staff on five continents which works, through field-based analysis and high-level policy advocacy, to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Born in 1944, he went to Melbourne High School, and holds first class honours degrees in Law from Melbourne University (BA, LLB (Hons)) and in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University (MA). Evans was one of Australia's longest serving Foreign Ministers, best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, bringing to a conclusion the international Chemical Weapons Convention, founding the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and initiating the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.
He was Australian Humanist of the Year in 1990, won the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994 for his work on Cambodia, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001, and was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Laws by Melbourne University in 2002 and Carleton University in 2005. In 2000-2001 he was co-chair, with Mohamed Sahnoun, of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the Government of Canada, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. He was a member of the of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility was published in December 2004; the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix which reported in June 2006; the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, sponsored by Sweden and France and chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, which reported in September 2006, and the Independent Commission on the Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond, which reported in May 2008. In June 2008 he was appointed to co-chair (with former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi) the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. He had previously served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, co-chaired by Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg (1994-97), and is currently a member of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide.
Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000. May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971. May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards. His current research interests are in the area of nuclear and terrorism, energy, security and environment, and the relation of nuclear weapons and foreign policy.
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Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000.
May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971.
May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the International Institute on Strategic Studies, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards.
His current research interests are nuclear weapons policy in the US and in other countries; nuclear terrorism; nuclear and other forms of energy and their impact on the environment, health and safety and security; the use of statistics and mathematical models in the public sphere.
May is continuing work on creating a secure future for civilian nuclear applications. In October 2007, May hosted an international workshop on how the nuclear weapon states can help rebuild the consensus underlying the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Proceedings and a summary report are available online or by email request. May also chaired a technical working group on nuclear forensics. The final report is available online.
In April 2007, May in cooperation with former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Professor Ashton Carter of Harvard hosted a workshop on what would have to be done to be ready for a terrorist nuclear detonation. The report is available online at the Preventive Defense Project. A summary, titled, "The Day After: Action Following a Nuclear Blast in a U.S. City," was published fall 2007 in Washington Quarterly and is available online.
Recent work also includes a study of nuclear postures in several countries (2007 - 2009); an article on nuclear disarmament and one on tactical nuclear weapons; and a report with Kate Marvel for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on possible game changers in the nuclear energy industry.
Reading is available in the publications shelf (located on the left hand side of CISAC's main reception area) in a limited number of hard copies.
Charli Carpenter joined the Department of Political Science at University of Massachusetts-Amherst in Fall 2008, after teaching for four years at University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Her teaching and research interests include national security ethics, the laws of war, transnational advocacy networks, gender and political violence, war crimes, comparative genocide studies, humanitarian affairs and the role of information technology in human security. She has a particular interest in the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security. She is the author of Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians, and the editor of Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones. She has also published numerous articles in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Security Dialogue and Human Rights Quarterly and has served as a consultant for the United Nations. Dr. Carpenter's current research focuses on global agenda-setting, investigating why certain issues but not others end up on the human security agenda. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she is directing a project on Transnational Advocacy Networks. In addition to teaching and research, Dr. Carpenter spends her time raising two future members of the American electorate, surfing, snowboarding, and rambling about international politics at Duck of Minerva and asymmetric warfare at Complex Terrain Lab.
Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.
He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.
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Management Science and Engineering Professor Siegfried S. Hecker, an expert on nuclear weapons, recently returned from a visit to North Korea, where he frequently checks on the country's denuclearization process. Hecker has researched extensively in fields of plutonium science-he served as director of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 through 1997, and remains an emeritus director to the Laboratory. Through a series of Track Two, non-governmental, non-official visits to North Korea, Hecker has worked closely with the previous and current administration's North Korean negotiations team. The Daily spoke with Hecker about his experiences in the country, and his insight into nuclear issues in North Korea and elsewhere.
The Stanford Daily (SD): This is your sixth visit to North Korea. You made one each year from 2004 to 2009. How is this trip different from the previous ones? Any change in North Korean society, diplomacy?
Siegfried Hecker (SH): We visited North Korea from Tuesday, Feb. 24 to Saturday, Feb. 28, and first of all it was quite a relief from Beijing in that the air was quite clear and that the weather was beautiful. In Beijing, it went day to day from being smoggy to being almost impossibly smoggy. So the first thing that we found when we got off at Pyongyang, was the relief of having reasonably clean air.
Even though it was in February and still quite cold, the greatest impression left is that Pyongyang and the people just looked more prosperous this time than I have seen them look in the past. There were more cars on the road; there were more tractors, especially when we got off into the countryside. The people were better dressed.
Particularly, one of the things I look for is color. Years ago, North Korea, like the Soviet Union, was all drab, gray and black. Now you see lots of colors; lots of down jackets, for example, on little children and women with bright colors from yellow to green to red. There was more construction in Pyongyang. We've seen many cranes working on the ground.
All the way around, while some people believed that North Korea and its economy is sinking, we've actually seen it rising and looking better than we've seen in the past. I would say this is the starkest observation of how it struck differently as the previous times.
[Diplomatically,] we've seen a change of attitude since October 2006, when they conducted a nuclear test. Even though, by technical standards, that nuclear test was of limited success, politically for them it was very successful. So the principal attitude change is one of greater confidence on their part. They now tell us, you must deal with us as a nuclear weapon state. We have demonstrated that we have nuclear weapons. We've tested a nuclear weapon, and so we expect to be treated as a state that has nuclear weapons. That confidence will most likely harden their negotiating position. Then, of course, they're also still trying to get a sense of what the new administration will do. They are entering the negotiations with a new administration from what they considered to be a position of strength.
SD: How is North Korea's disablement process of its nuclear facilities going?
SH: In July 2007, they stopped operations and began disabling the nuclear facilities. When I was there almost exactly one year ago, they showed me the nuclear facilities, allowed me to take photographs of the nuclear facilities to demonstrate that they are disabling those facilities that produce the bomb fuel-the plutonium. Disabling the facilities means making it more difficult to restart. They have finished most of the disablement actions, but still need to complete the unloading of the fuel from the nuclear reactor.
They made the decision last year to slow down the unloading because the other parties did not meet their obligations of providing heavy fuel oil or equivalent energy aid. At this point, Japan and South Korea have not finished their obligations, so the slow-down continues.
If the other parties complete their obligations, then I believe North Korea is prepared to complete the disablement. However, the next important step is to dismantle the facilities-that is, take them apart. The terms of that dismantlement have not yet been negotiated. Subsequently, they will need to give up their nuclear weapons. That seems a long way off now based on their comments.
SD: In one of your reports, you discussed the idea of a scientific fingerprint that could deter North Korea from exporting its plutonium. This is very interesting. Can the method have wider use?
SH: One of the concerns with North Korea would be the possibility of them selling or exporting plutonium or nuclear technologies. We know enough about the North Korean plutonium that we have what you call a scientific fingerprint. The makeup of plutonium is determined by the type of reactor and by how long it was in the reactor. We know that about the North Korean plutonium so we can identify North Korea's plutonium. This should be a deterrent for North Korea ever exporting its plutonium because we would know it came from North Korea.
We, of course, don't know whether or not North Korea would ever want to sell its plutonium, but just in case, the fingerprint represents a deterrent. This fingerprinting of plutonium is not as useful for plutonium from the rest of the world, because there are so many different types of reactors and we know less about their fuels and operating schedules.
SD: Do you think the example of North Korea contributes much to a solution of nuclear problems in other regions-for example, Iran?
SH: Right now, the second nuclear hot spot is Iran, and the difference between North Korea and Iran is that North Korea has declared its nuclear program now to be a weapon's program and has demonstrated that at least it can detonate a nuclear device, even though it wasn't fully successful. Iran, I believe, is developing an option for nuclear weapons but under the umbrella of doing it strictly for civilian purposes. They say, "We're not a nuclear weapon state and we have no intention of developing nuclear weapons," but they are continuing to put most of the capabilities in place should they decide to build weapons.
The dividing line between military and civilian is a very fine line, so North Korea and Iran are two very different problems. However, those countries certainly watch each other and look at the diplomatic responses during each other's negotiations.
SD: Are you advising anyone in the new administration?
SH: We work very closely with the U.S. government on this, although our visits are strictly track two visits, which means non-governmental, non-official visits. I don't go as an official, but rather as a Stanford University employee. In the past, we worked very closely with the previous North Korean negotiations team led by Ambassador Christopher Hill. We have now begun to work with the new team that is just being put in place.
SD: During your visits, you met with North Korean officials in education, public health, and explored possibilities of cooperation in these areas. How do you envision these future exchanges?
SH: We met with officials from the ministry of education and one of the economic universities to discuss potential cooperation in educational and technology exchange. In the past, we have also met with officials from the health ministry. So, in addition to working the nuclear issues, we're very interested in trying to engage the North Korean community in a broader set of activities than simply nuclear, and technology is one of those. They're very interested in material science, biotechnology, information technology, and so we explored the possibility of exchange visits and particularly having some Stanford professors go to North Korea and lecture on those topics.
SD: What classes do you currently teach at Stanford? How do you like being a professor at Stanford?
SH: I have a terrific time-that's one of the reasons why I'm at Stanford. The two classes that I teach are both Management Science and Engineering classes. They both focus on the intersection of technology and policy. One is a very large class, MSE 193/293, that Professor William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and I teach together. We cover everything from history of technology and warfare to modern times and what the current challenges are in the security arena. Both Prof. Perry and I try to teach that in the spirit of our own experiences in these areas. It's a very, very large class-over 200 students.
Then I teach a course by myself in spring that's exactly the opposite. It's a sophomore seminar, MSE93Q, and I have approximately 16 students. The title is "Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Terrorism," and in essence, it's everything nuclear. So I cover in that 10 weeks the whole nuclear problem. I try to get students to understand the basics of nuclear technology and how that interfaces with the policy issue of nuclear weapons, energy, proliferation and terrorism. We cover topics such as: If you develop nuclear energy, why do you have to be concerned about nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation? What is the connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons? That's what we cover in 10 weeks' time, and I've enjoyed the interaction with students immensely.
SD: What do you aim to teach students in the classroom and outside?
SH: Particularly, I want students to understand the intersections of technology and policy. The nuclear field is a very good one to do that because you must understand the basics of nuclear technology to make good policy. And we also now have 60 years of very rich history of the interplay of those two in so many different countries and so many different ways. For example, in both of my classes the students have to write policy papers that show they have at least a basic understanding of the technology, even though they may be social science, political science, international relations majors, but I want them to understand the difference between plutonium and uranium, between fission and fusion, between weapons and energy. That's what I like to be able to contribute to the University.
What I like about the students is how truly interested and dedicated they are and how experienced so many of them are in the international arena. In addition, what's also fascinating is that we have students from all over the world. Whether it is a physics major from Palestine, or somebody who grew up in Iran, Pakistan, India or in China, Vietnam, Africa, they bring a totally different outlook on the world to the table, which then of course helps the rest of the students to understand that this world is much more than just about the United States of America, and Stanford is a great place to do it.
The Obama administration seems ready to resuscitate relations with Russia, including by renewing nuclear-arms-reduction talks. Even before the inaugural parade wound down, the White House Web site offered up a list of ambitious nuclear policy goals, with everything from making bomb-making materials more secure to the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.
That's welcome news, but for such goals to be realized, the White House will need to be prepared to reimagine and reshape the nuclear era and, against strong opposition, break free from cold war thinking and better address the threats America faces today.
George W. Bush actually started down this road. He reached an agreement with the Kremlin in 2002 to cut the number of operational strategic warheads on each side to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the year 2012, a two-thirds reduction. Washington is likely to reach that goal ahead of schedule. President Bush's efforts were propelled by the Nuclear Posture Review - a periodic reassessment of nuclear forces and policies - in December 2001. While still grounded in the belief that nuclear weapons are the silver bullets of American defense, the review let a little daylight into the nuclear bunker by acknowledging that nuclear-weapons policy had to be readjusted to deal with rapidly changing threats. Soon, however, the president's initiatives were overshadowed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his administration's absorption with the threat of terrorism and the gradual breakdown in relations with Russia.
President Bush's agreement with Moscow, which was built upon weapons reductions made by Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, is President Obama's starting point. But rather than settle for the next level - 1,000 active weapons seems to be the likely goal - the White House should reconsider the entire superstructure of nuclear-weapons strategy. This won't be easy. The mandarins of the nuclear establishment remain enthralled by elaborate deterrence theories premised on the notion that the ultimate defense against a variety of military threats is a bristling nuclear arsenal.
It's true that America's nuclear weapons still offer the hope of deterring attacks from countries like North Korea and, if it soon goes nuclear, Iran. But it is hard to imagine how they would dissuade a band of elusive, stateless terrorists from making a nuclear bomb and detonating it in New York, Washington or Los Angeles.
One provocative road map for moving away from nuclear deterrence comes from a quartet of cold war leaders - Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former secretaries of state; William Perry, a former secretary of defense; and Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Two years ago, they bridged their ideological differences to call, improbably, for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and they proposed a series of interim steps to reduce nuclear dangers, stop the spread of bomb-making materials and lay the groundwork for a nuclear-free world.
Even the quartet recognizes that "getting to zero" will be exceedingly difficult. But the issue today isn't whether the elimination of nuclear weapons is feasible. That's a distant goal.
An achievable immediate goal should be to cut the United States' and Russia's nuclear stockpiles down to the bare minimum of operational warheads needed to backstop conventional forces. As long as these two countries have far and away the most nuclear weapons, Washington looks hypocritical when it lectures other nations about the size of their arsenals or their efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
There's reasonable disagreement among experts about the minimum number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia should maintain. The more emphasis you put on nuclear deterrence, the more potent you think the arsenal should be. And the more you want to engage the world in arms reduction and prevent proliferation, the more you consider radical cuts. To bring the number down below 1,000 would require determined presidential leadership.
The president's determination will be measured by how effectively he makes the case for Senate ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Leading scientists say that technological advances over the past decade have erased doubts about whether an international monitoring system can detect and locate underground tests outlawed by the treaty. The scientists also say that the United States has the technical expertise and tools to maintain the effectiveness of its nuclear weapons without underground testing, as has been successfully demonstrated since the United States stopped testing in 1992.
Ratification of the test-ban treaty would help build momentum for a 2010 review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the increasingly frail 1968 accord aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and eventually eliminating them. American leadership is essential to reinvigorating the treaty and buttressing nonproliferation efforts. The best way to avoid nuclear terrorism is to prevent terrorists from acquiring the highly enriched uranium needed to make the simplest nuclear bomb.
Listening to the discussion at a recent nuclear-weapons conference in Washington, I felt as though I had slipped back in time to the cold war and its arcane, often surreal debates about waging nuclear war and the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. It's heartening to see President Obama and his national-security team promising to elevate nuclear-weapons policy and free it from the shibboleths of cold war nuclear theology. Now they must put their words into action.
Thomas Fingar, a prominent intelligence expert and China scholar who served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, has joined FSI Stanford effective January 2009. Fingar served on the Stanford staff for a decade after completing his PhD in political science here in 1977 and now returns as the 2008-2009 Payne Distinguished Lecturer. At the expiration of that appointment in December of 2009, he will become the inaugural Oksenberg Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at FSI.
"We are thrilled to welcome Tom Fingar back to Stanford," said FSI Director Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. "His experience and commanding knowledge of international security and intelligence issues - from contemporary China and Iran to the risks of nuclear proliferation and terrorism using weapons of mass destruction - will be of enormous benefit to our faculty, the students who will be our next generation of leaders, and the wider Stanford community."
FSI's Payne Distinguished Lectureship, named for Frank and Arthur Payne, annually presents to the larger Stanford community prominent speakers chosen for their international reputation as leaders, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, a broad grasp of a given field, and the capacity to articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges. Previous Payne lecturers have included Alejandro Toledo, Peter Piot, David Heymann, Joschka Fischer, Sir David Manning, Mohamed ElBaradei, Jorge Castaneda, Sadaka Ogata, Josef Joffe, and Bill Bradley.
While serving as the Payne Lecturer, Fingar will deliver three public lectures to the Stanford community. He will reside in FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), co-directed by nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and political scientist Scott D. Sagan, with Lynn Eden serving as acting co-director while Sagan is on sabbatical this year. "Stanford is fortunate to have a scholar-practitioner of Tom Fingar's stature engaging in our multidisciplinary efforts to address the complex security issues currently facing the international community," Hecker said.
A prominent China scholar who has published dozens of books and articles on Chinese politics and policymaking, Fingar will become the inaugural Oksenberg Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at FSI in 2010, based at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). The Shorenstein center is world renowned for its work on contemporary political, economic, and security issues in Northeast Asia and houses the Asia-Pacific Scholars Program, which supports graduate students engaged in Asia-related studies.
Fingar has had a distinguished career in public service. He was assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) and principal advisor to the secretary on intelligence issues from July 2004 until May 2005, when he was named Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. While at the State Department, he also served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Research (2003-04 and 2000-01), Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (2001-03), Deputy Assistant Secretary for Analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89).
Between 1975 and 1986, Fingar held a number of positions at Stanford, including senior research associate at CISAC and director of the university's U.S.-China Relations program, which ultimately, with other units, became Shorenstein APARC. He has also served as a consultant to many U.S. government agencies and private sector organizations.
Fingar holds a BA in government and history from Cornell and an MA and PhD from Stanford in political science. He will offer his first 2009 Payne distinguished lecture on March 11, 2009 from 4:30 - 6:00 pm in FSI's Bechtel Conference Center, 616 Serra Street. The address is free and open to the public.
Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.
He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.
Emilie Hafner-Burton is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at Princeton University and an affiliate at CISAC, as well as a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School. Formerly she was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC and an associated fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She was at Oxford University as a Postdoctoral Research Prize Fellow, Nuffield College, and Senior Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme. She writes and teaches on international organization, international political economy, the global governance of gender, social network analysis, design and selection of international regimes, international human rights law and policy, war and economic sanctions, non-proliferation policy, and quantitative and qualitative research design. Her dissertation, Globalizing Human Rights? How Preferential Trade Agreements Shape Government Repression, 1972-2000, won the American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for Best Dissertation in International Relations, Law and Politics for 2004-2005, as well as the Best Dissertation in Human Rights Prize for 2003-2004. Her articles are published or forthcoming in International Organization, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Feminist Legal Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Peace Research. PhD. Wisconsin.
Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. He is co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He joined the Stanford faculty in July 1999, after previously teaching at the University of Arizona, MIT, and Yale. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences three times, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna twice. Powell has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, the Helsinki School of Economics, and Copenhagen Business School, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He is a U.S. editor for Research Policy, and has been a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Gabrielle Hecht is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her first book, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT 1998), won awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology. The French translation appeared with La Découverte in 2004, and MIT will publish a new English-language edition in 2009. Her current project, entitled Uranium from Africa and the Power of Nuclear Things, draws on archival and field work conducted in Africa, Europe, and North America. Focusing especially on Gabon, Madagascar, South Africa, Namibia, and Niger, this project examines uranium mining in these places and the flow of uranium from these places. It argues that the view from Africa transforms our understanding of the "nuclear" as a political, technological, and occupational category, as well as our perspective on the transnational power of nuclear things.
Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.
He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room