An analysis of India's evolving approach to ballistic missile defense and the militarization of space.
From Conversations with History- Institute of International Studies, University of California at Berkeley
Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Siegfried S. Hecker, former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for a discussion of scientists, the national laboratories, and the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Hecker traces his career in material sciences, describes the evolution of his intellectual focus, and recalls his leadership of Los Alamos. He then traces the changes in the international security environment in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union discussing the response of the U.S. and the weapons laboratories to the momentous events that created a qualitatively different set of security challenges. Hecker then analyzes the threats posed by terrorist organizations, the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and the challenges for U.S. policy in assessing the motivation and capabilities of Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the political and technical dimensions of the international security landscape.
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.
Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.
Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.
Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.
Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.
In a wide-ranging interview, CISAC co-director Scott Sagan discusses his career in political science, and his interests in nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, South Asia, and more.
About the Speaker: Kaitlin Shilling has spent most of her career working in the non-governmental sector in post-crisis development. At Stanford, she now researches post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design. Before beginning her PhD at Stanford, Shilling spent over a year and a half working for DAI, a development consulting company, on two USAID-funded projects in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. She began as the Director of Finance and Operations for the Afghanistan Immediate Needs Project, and then moved to the Alternative Livelihoods Project to run the Gender and Micro-Enterprise Department. Her work on both of these projects involved collaborating with other NGOs, donors, and UN agencies working in the region. Before moving to Afghanistan, Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group. As part of the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group, she worked on projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia.
Before moving to Afghanistan, Ms. Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group at DAI. Ms. Shilling's work included projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia, in addition to writing proposals to win new business. While at Stanford, Kaitlin will pursue research relating to post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
This talk reviews three decades of Indian nuclear decision-making. It argues that India’s slow pace of weaponization in the face of Pakistani nuclearization and Sino- Pakistani nuclear cooperation in the 1980s, the slack in building an institutional capacity to wield nuclear weapons after they came into existence in the 1990s, and the reluctant attempts at developing an operational arsenal even after formally claiming nuclear power status and almost going to war with a nuclear Pakistan in the last decade, constitute puzzling behavior. Existing proliferation models explain facets of Indian nuclear behavior. However, they don’t explain it in its totality. The different facets of Indian nuclear decision making in the last three decades can be collapsed into a single dependent variable: the lag in strategic decision-making. This talk operationalizes the concept of ‘lag’, critically reviews existing explanations of Indian nuclear behavior, and offers an alternative framework for understanding Indian nuclear decision-making.
Gaurav Kampani is a sixth year doctoral student at Cornell University's Department of Government. His major and minor fields are International Relations and Comparative Politics. Kampani's research interests cover international security and focus on the relationship between domestic institutions and strategic policy, military strategy, operations planning, and weapons development.
Kampani's dissertation project studies Indian civil-military institutions and nuclear weapons-related operational practices in the decade prior 1998 and the decade since.
Between 1998-2005, Kampani worked on South Asia-related nuclear and missile proliferation issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey CA.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
As Japan's troubles continue, CISAC's Thomas Isaacs discusses the future of the nuclear industry.
CISAC: My understanding is that Three Mile Island set back the industry because afterward there was no appetite for building new reactors.
Thomas Isaacs: It's not clear that it was Three Mile Island. It was certainly in that time frame. Others would say it was a combination of a reduction in the demand for electricity at that time and the emergence of alternative energy sources that were less expensive to get started. You saw less of an appetite not just because of the concern about Three Mile Island -- although that was probably a contributing factor -- but because it just no longer made sense to build new, huge, expensive power plants, particularly nuclear power plants.
CISAC: Experts now say that what's going on in Japan is worse than Three Mile Island. If so, how might that affect the building of nuclear reactors in the future?
Isaacs: The effects are probably unknown and unknowable now. We'll need to have a much better idea of what actually transpires, and how it is handled by the Japanese. We'll also have to see what the consequences are and what the perceived consequences are, and the ability of the Japanese government and utilities to generate a sense of confidence, which is lacking right now. All of that will have an effect and it will be different for a variety of countries, but it's hard to speculate. My own assumption is that in countries where there is more of a national, organized effort to build nuclear, principally in places like China and India, you might not see as much effect as you might see in countries where nuclear has been much more of a controversial issue, and where the public has much more engagement in the decision-making process. In emerging countries that now have no or very few plants, you might see much more controversy.
CISAC: What about regulation? Might there be more regulation, both here and in China, India, and elsewhere?
Isaacs: I think we don't know that yet either. You would hope that people would view this as a sobering event -- an opportunity to learn lessons for the future. As a result of Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl we have organizations like the World Association of Nuclear Operators, who come together from all over the world to share lessons learned. This will be an example of a place where you would hope they will take this very seriously -- I'm sure they will -- and they will ask very searching questions about whether our regulations or anybody's regulations are appropriate given what we've experienced. There's no question that the track record for U.S. reactors has been outstanding and getting better over the last 20 to 30 years. Should that lead to a sense of comfort? No. It should lead to a sense that we've always had an obligation to ask ourselves if we're doing everything that makes sense, and we can continue to learn from experience and improve.
CISAC: The issue of nuclear waste is important in this country and elsewhere. How might it fit into what we're seeing in Japan right now?
Isaacs: There is spent nuclear fuel, which is a waste form if it's not reprocessed. That's what would ultimately go into the repository, and that potentially is one of the problems that's causing the release of radioactivity at some of these plants. More broadly, you need to feel confident you know how to handle waste, both in the short term and in the very long term, because it is potentially hazardous for geologic time periods. Most people who work in that business believe that disposing of it in a geologic repository, in a stable geologic formation that has the right characteristics, is a very fine way to solve that problem, and pretty much every country that has decided to move toward nuclear waste disposal has chosen that approach. But from a societal point of view and a political point of view, it's a very tough problem. It's not just the science and technology problem.
One critical element of the laws of war is a concept known as "belligerent privilege," which stipulates that combatants may legally kill other combatants but may not target civilians. What, then, does a soldier do about the fact that in modern warfare it can be extraordinarily difficult to tell the difference?
Terrorists often choose to move undetected through the ranks of civilian populations. They hide in plain sight by wearing civilian clothes rather than uniforms or distinctive emblems. "They may be farmers by day and fighters by night," said David Luban, a Georgetown professor of law and philosophy, at an event that was part of the Ethics and War series. What's more, civilians may offer food and shelter to enemy soldiers - do they in the process become combatants? And what, finally, should the soldier do about civilians who are being used as a shield to protect combatants?
These are tricky questions. Luban said the phrasing of the Geneva Convention leaves open the possibility that soldiers may legally target civilians in a conflict zone. Article 48 says the military must discriminate between civilians and combatants at all times. Yet Article 51 notes that civilians shall only enjoy full protection in times of conflict "unless and for such times as they take a direct part in hostilities."
Efforts to clarify these issues have proved to be "highly dangerous," said Luban. In 2009, the Obama administration made a change in the Military Commissions Act to label anyone who materially supports hostilities against the U.S. as an "unprivileged enemy belligerent." As a result, civilians who tacitly support an enemy regime or terrorist organization may be lawfully targeted. Unfortunately, the amendment drew no distinction between those who did so voluntarily and those who did so involuntarily. It other words, a civilian actively helping a terrorist might be construed to be a combatant. But less clear, said Luban, is how the U.S. government would consider an Afghan woman who under duress shelters members of the Taliban.
The lack of consensus, he said, has led to widespread confusion within the military. One soldier told Luban that he didn't "think anyone has worked out what to do when civilians take on certain risks by assisting the enemy," or what to do when "soldiers and civilians are indistinguishable."
It is equally difficult to know how far the military is obligated to go to protect innocent civilians. It is often left to the discretion of an individual solider or unit to make that call, and often in a split second. Luban cited one well-known example in which one British soldier, Frank Richards, was ordered to throw bombs into cellars to target German soldiers during the First World War. When Richards chose to issue a warning cry to alert civilians in hiding, he lost a key advantage over his enemy.
The attitude toward civilians is very different today, Luban said. The unspoken sentiment among soldiers is that "we'll not lose another life for these people." But they are wrong to think this way. Luban cited recent studies that indicate it is in the best interests of soldiers to protect the innocent. Brigades that actively try to prevent civilian casualties tend to take the fewest casualties in their own ranks. "If you're careless in protecting civilians," he argued, "you're careless in everything."
The key, Luban said, is establishing clear boundaries. Wars are inevitable, and no matter how compelling the moral arguments, he argued, "the states that ratify treaties like the Geneva Convention will never accept rules that ruin their own military effectiveness." However, the issues surrounding civilians in war zones must be addressed to ensure that soldiers are not left with a dangerous incoherence. Ultimately, he said, "we need analytic clarity."
Abstract:
This paper describes a risk analysis approach for assessing the progress of another country's nuclear weapons program over time. To handle the dynamics inherent to nuclear weapons development, we embed a semi-Markov decision process into a Bayesian network. The Bayesian network accounts for distributions on the time to transition between possible states of the nuclear weapons program. Our approach enables analysis of the country's nuclear weapons program decisions by identifying how each decision maker would direct the program given the domestic, international, and security influences affecting the country. We demonstrate the model with a case study of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
