David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, and Estonia. His latest book is Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. He is currently working on a project in collaboration with James Fearon on civil wars in the past half-century. From that project, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" has appeared in the American Political Science Review. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar is a professor and Deane F. Johnson faculty scholar at Stanford Law School, the co-director of CISAC, professor (by courtesy) of political science, a faculty affiliate of CDDRL, and a senior fellow at FSI. A member of the Stanford faculty since 2001, he has served in the Obama and Clinton Administrations, testified before lawmakers, and has an extensive record of involvement in public service. His research and teaching focus on administrative law, executive power, and how organizations implement critical regulatory, public safety, migration, and international security responsibilities in a changing world. In July 2010, the President appointed him to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs.  He also serves on the Department of Education’s National Commission on Educational Equity and Excellence, and the Department of State’s Advisory Sub-Committee on Economic Sanctions. 

From early 2009 through the summer of 2010, he was on leave from Stanford serving as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House. In this capacity, he led the Domestic Policy Council’s work on criminal justice and drug policy, public health and food safety, regulatory reform, borders and immigration, civil rights, and rural and agricultural policy. Among other issues, Cuéllar worked on stricter food safety standards, the FDA’s regulatory science initiative, expanding support for local law enforcement and community-based crime prevention, enhancing regulatory transparency, and strengthening border coordination and immigrant integration. He negotiated provisions of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and the Food Safety Modernization Act, and represented the Domestic Policy Council in the development of the first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review.

Before working at the White House, he co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition’s Immigration Policy Working Group. During the second term of the Clinton Administration, he worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Enforcement, where he focused on countering financial crime, improving border coordination, and enhancing anti-corruption measures.

He has collaborated with or served on the board of several civil society organizations, including the Haas Center for Public Service, the Constitution Project, and the American Constitution Society. He has co-chaired the Regulatory Policy Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, and served on the Silicon Valley Blue Ribbon Task Force on Aviation Security. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.

After graduating from Calexico High School in California’s Imperial Valley, he received an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford. He clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

About the Topic: Osama bin Laden’s demise was merely one sensational moment in the first decade of America’s shadow war, the transformation of the national security apparatus into a machine calibrated for man-hunting operations. Beyond the “big wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, America has pursued its enemies with killer robots and special operations troops, sent privateers on assassination missions and to set up clandestine spying networks, and relied on mercurial dictators, unreliable foreign intelligence services and ragtag proxy armies. A new military-intelligence complex has emerged: the soldiers have become spies and spies have become soldiers.

The CIA, created as a Cold War espionage service, is now more than ever a paramilitary agency ordered by the White House to kill off America’s enemies: from the sustained bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan and the deserts of Yemen and North Africa, to the simmering clan wars in Somalia. For its part, the Pentagon has turned into the CIA, dramatically expanding spying missions in the dark spaces of U.S. foreign policy.

About the Speaker: Mark Mazzetti is a national security correspondent for The New York Times, based in the newspaper's Washington DC bureau. In 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the intensifying violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Washington's response, and he has numerous other major journalism awards including the George Polk Award (with colleague Dexter Filkins) and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for defense reporting. Mazzetti has also written for the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and The Economist.

Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are used throughout the industrial infrastructure and military applications. These systems are designed to be highly reliable and safe, but were not designed to be cyber secure. Moreover, many of these systems do not even have cyber logging or forensics. Consequently, these systems, which constitute the “soft underbelly” of the American economy and defense, can enable a “cyber Pearl Harbor” to occur without having the capability of even knowing the impacts were cyber-induced. Stuxnet and Aurora have demonstrated that cyber can be used as a weapon to damage or destroy engineering equipment and systems.

To date, there have been more than 225 actual control system cyber incidents worldwide affecting electric power, water, chemicals, pipelines, manufacturing, mass transit, and even aircraft. Most of the incidents have been unintentional. Selected unintentional incidents will be addressed at the ICS Cyber Security Conference (http://www.icscybersecurityconference.com/). However, there have been a number of targeted cyber attacks. The Stanford presentation will focus on Stuxnet and Aurora. It will address the lack of air-gaps, insecureable legacy ICSs, lack of cyber forensics, and cultural issues between IT and Operations that can enable these attacks to occur and evade detection.

Joseph Weiss is an industry expert on control systems and electronic security of control systems, with more than 35 years of experience in the energy industry. Mr. Weiss spent more than 14 years at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) where he led a variety of programs including the Nuclear Plant Instrumentation and Diagnostics Program, the Fossil Plant Instrumentation & Controls Program, the Y2K Embedded Systems Program and, the cyber security for digital control systems. As Technical Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure Security (EIS) Program, he provided technical and outreach leadership for the energy industry's critical infrastructure protection (CIP) program. He was responsible for developing many utility industry security primers and implementation guidelines. He was also the EPRI Exploratory Research lead on instrumentation, controls, and communications.

This study quantifies worldwide health effects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident on 11 March 2011. Effects are quantified with a 3-D global atmospheric model driven by emission estimates and evaluated against daily worldwide Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) measurements and observed deposition rates. Inhalation exposure, ground-level external exposure, and atmospheric external exposure pathways of radioactive iodine-131, cesium-137, and cesium-134 released from Fukushima are accounted for using a linear no-threshold (LNT) model of human exposure. Exposure due to ingestion of contaminated food and water is estimated by extrapolation. We estimate an additional 130 (15–1100) cancer-related mortalities and 180 (24–1800) cancer-related morbidities incorporating uncertainties associated with the exposure–dose and dose–response models used in the study. Sensitivities to emission rates, gas to particulate I-131 partitioning, and the mandatory evacuation radius around the plant may increase upper bound mortalities and morbidities to 1300 and 2500, respectively. Radiation exposure to workers at the plant is projected to result in 2 to 12 morbidities. An additional 600 mortalities have been reported due to mandatory evacuations. A hypothetical accident at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, USA with identical emissions to Fukushima may cause 25% more mortalities than Fukushima despite California having one fourth the local population density, due to differing meteorological conditions.

Mark Z. Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering with distinction, an A.B. in Economics with distinction, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, in 1988. He received an M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences in 1991 and a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences in 1994 from UCLA. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1994. His work relates to the development and application of numerical models to understand better the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution and the analysis of renewable energy resources. He has published two textbooks of two editions each and ~130 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. He received the 2005 American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award for “significant contributions to modeling aerosol chemistry and to understanding the role of soot and other carbon particles on climate.” He has served on the Energy Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.

Fifty years ago, the Soviet Union and the United States stood on the brink of nuclear war. For thirteen days in October 1962, people around the world held their breath and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. This distinguished panel will discuss and debate the crisis from the perspectives of Moscow and Washington, and consider what history has taught us since those thirteen days in 1962.

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