Stanford University

Film: "Fog of War"

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The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film, directed by Errol Morris, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003) and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003).

Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts McNamara's life, from his birth during the First World War remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to his being employed as Secretary of Defense and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of defense, despite limited military experience.

According to Morris, hearing McNamara raise all of these ethical issues and questions about a war which most of us see as morally unambiguous is very, very powerful. What Morris especially liked about the film was that it proved it was possible to make a movie about events – events that are removed from us by 40, 50, 60 years but which are very much about today. Many of the issues that McNamara is talking about in the movie are relevant to what's going on right now, and there's this surreal sense that nothing has changed.

» Watch the trailer.

Faculty talk back led by Scott Sagan (Co-Director of Center for International Security and Cooperation / Political Science, Stanford)

Annenberg Auditorium, 435 Lasuen Mall
Stanford University

Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2715 (650) 723-0089
0
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education  
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
rsd25_073_1160a_1.jpg PhD

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 “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “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.     

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Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

Who Should Fight? The Ethics of the Draft

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  • Should citizens be required to serve their country by fighting for it?
  • Do we think differently about the decision to go to war when only a small number of citizens will fight it?
  • Do volunteer armies and draft armies fight differently in combat?

This panel discussion focuses on the draft versus the volunteer army in the U.S. Our distinguished panelists examine "who should fight" in a democracy, focusing on the ethical dimension of a state's system of military service.

Panelists are:

David Kennedy (History, Emeritus, Stanford). Kennedy's scholarly focus is on the integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. A prolific historian, he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in History for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was a 1981 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History for Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which uses the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system.

Eliot Cohen (Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies). Cohen's work focuses on diplomacy, international relations, irregular warfare, military history, military power and strategy, as well as strategic and security issues. He has served as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He also directed the U.S. Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey.

Jean Bethke Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago). Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Elshtain writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations. Elshtain has authored many books including Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times' notable book for 1995); and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.

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Oak Lounge

David Kennedy History, Emeritus Speaker Stanford
Eliot Cohen Strategic Studies Speaker Johns Hopkins
Jean Bethke Elshtain Social and Political Ethics Speaker University of Chicago Divinity School

Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2715 (650) 723-0089
0
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education  
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
rsd25_073_1160a_1.jpg PhD

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 “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “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.     

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Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

The Ethics of Violence in War

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Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race; and The Twilight of the Bomb (Aug 2010). Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation Program in International Peace and Security and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

In addition, Rhodes has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series. He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford.

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Richard Rhodes Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb Speaker
Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

The Changing Face of Photojournalism, The Changing Face of War

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Susie Linfield is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press). She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays on politics and culture have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times, Dissent, the Nation, Guernica, Bookforum, Salmagundi, and the Boston Review. For six years she was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and she was formerly an editor at American Film, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post.

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Susie Linfield Director of Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program Speaker NYC
Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

Film: "War Photographer"

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War Photographer is director Christian Frei's 2001 film that followed photojournalist James Nachtwey. Natchtwey started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico in 1976 and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

The film received an Academy Award Nomination for "Best Documentary Feature" and won twelve International Filmfestivals.

Annenberg Auditorium

Brendan Fay Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

Kate Marvel named 2010-2011 Perry Fellow

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Kate Marvel has been named the second annual Perry Fellow for the 2010-2011 academic year.

The Perry Fellowship honors an early or mid-career researcher from the United States or abroad with a record of "outstanding work in natural science, engineering or mathematics...who is dedicated to solving international security problems." Marvel, 29, will spend the year at CISAC conducting research on two projects, Understanding the Regional Consequences of Global Climate Change and Game Changers for Nuclear Energy.

"I'm very honored to be recognized," said Marvel, "but truly all of my colleagues would be deserving of this fellowship. I look forward to working with them as my research progresses over the next year."

Marvel spent the past year at CISAC as a postdoctoral fellow after studying at the University of Cambridge where she received her PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. In addition to researching her project, Modeling Distributed Electric Grids, Marvel co-chaired CISAC's weekly Thursday research seminar with Lynn Eden.

Marvel holds a BA in physics and astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley and has worked at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California, and the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in South Africa.   She is active in outreach work and has lectured in settings as diverse as a community center in Lesotho, a physics institute in Tehran, and the Secret Garden Party Festival in the UK.

William J. Perry and the Perry Fellowship
Perry earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from Stanford in 1949 and 1950, and a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University. He went on to found the Silicon Valley electronics company ESL, build a venture capital company and pursue a distinguished career in public service. At the heart of Perry's work is a commitment to bring the rigors of science to international security issues. The William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford University will pursue this commitment.

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This figure represents possible 21st century increases in summer temperatures, showing the greatest rises (in red) in particular regions.

Image data from the World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP's) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) multi-model dataset. Bias-corrected and spatially downscaled climate projections derived from CMIP3 data and served at: http://gdo-dcp.ucllnl.org/downscaled_cmip3_projections/, described by Maurer et al (2007)
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Mariano-Florentino Cuellar to be appointed to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States

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President Barack Obama announced his intent to appoint CISAC's Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, an expert on federal regulatory policy, public safety, and international security, to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent agency of the United States government charged with improving the efficiency and fairness of federal agencies.

Professor Cuéllar, who is both a CISAC faculty member and the Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, recently returned from a leave of absence he took to serve as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House Domestic Policy Council. Among other issues, Cuéllar worked on improving food safety and public health policy, expanding support to state and local law enforcement, enhancing transparency in the regulatory process, and strengthening border coordination and immigrant integration. He negotiated key provisions of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and represented the Domestic Policy Council in the development of the first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. Earlier, Cuéllar co-chaired the Obama Transition's Immigration Policy Committee and served as a Treasury official in the Clinton Administration.

As part of the ACUS Council, Cuéllar will join leading lawyers such as former U.S. court of appeals judge Patricia Wald and former solicitor general Ted Olson in overseeing the work of ACUS and setting its priorities. With the appointment to the ACUS Council, Cuéllar will draw upon his scholarly expertise in how institutions manage complex regulatory challenges as well as his experience in government.

"At a time when our country faces such enormous challenges, it is especially important for agencies to safeguard the rights of the public, cut waste, and deliver value to the American people," said Cuéllar. "I am honored by this appointment and by the chance to work on these critical issues."

Established by statute in 1964, the Administrative Conference of the United States has played an important role in promoting improvements in the efficiency and fairness in the way federal agencies conduct regulatory programs. ACUS has been on hiatus for the past 14 years, but has been revived by Congress with support from a broad range of lawyers, scholars, and judges, including Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer.

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North Korea's Choice: Bombs Over Electricity

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Nuclear power and nuclear weapons have a common technological foundation. In pursuit of a civilian fuel cycle-making fuel, building reactors to burn the fuel, and dealing with nuclear waste, which might include extracting some valuable by-products of spent reactor fuel-a nation can develop the capability of producing the material necessary for a bomb, either highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Under civilian cover, North Korea developed a fuel cycle ideally suited to harboring a latent capability for weapons production. In fact, although the country now has the bomb, it does not have much of a nuclear arsenal or any nuclear-generated electricity.

In the 1970s, South Korea was also interested in the bomb, but it gave up those aspirations and, with international assistance, turned its nuclear focus to civilian energy. Today the South Korean nuclear power industry provides nearly 40 percent of the country's electricity, and South Korea is in a position to become a major international exporter of nuclear power plants. The factors that led North Korea to build the bomb and those that led South Korea to forsake it can be instructive for the United States in formulating a policy to restrain Iran's nuclear weapon ambitions, although the political situation there is dramatically different.

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The Bridge
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Siegfried S. Hecker
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