ABOUT THE TOPIC: No country was as devastated by the Cold War as Afghanistan, yet the historical understanding of how the global conflict came to Kabul remains tentative, generally limited to studies that begin in the late 1970s. Scholars have generally treated the American role in pre-invasion Afghanistan as minimal, or have seamlessly connected Kabul's half-turn toward Moscow in the mid-1950s with the 1979 invasion. Extensive research, however, demonstrates the profound impact Americans had in mid-century Afghanistan. Based on multinational research, this paper will explore how Americans helped to bring the Cold War to the mountain kingdom in the early 1950s. While the Truman administration considered Afghanistan marginal and strategically indefensible, a fateful combination of local initiative, misperception, and ideology helped to add the kingdom to the roster of Cold War battlegrounds, where it would remain until the conflict's end.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Robert Rakove is a lecturer for the International Relations Program. He studies the modern history of U.S. foreign relations, paying particular attention to the Cold War in the Third World. He received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2008, and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. He is presently at work on a history of the U.S.-Afghan relationship in the decades before the Soviet invasion.
Robert Rakove is a historian who studies U.S. foreign relations, focusing particularly on the Cold War era. He is a lecturer in Stanford University's Program in International Relations, and has previously taught at Colgate University and Old Dominion University. His first book, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. He completed his second book, Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan before the Soviet Invasion, a study of the U.S.-Afghan relationship and the Cold War in the Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion and was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. He received his doctorate in History in 2008 from the University of Virginia, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University, at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre, and at the Hoover Institution.
The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC) addresses critical challenges to international security through methodologically rigorous, evidence-based analyses of insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence. The project is comprised of leading scholars from across the country from a variety of academic disciplines. ESOC aims to empower high quality of conflict analysis by creating and maintaining a repository of micro-level data across multiple conflict cases and making these data available to a broader community of scholars and policy analysts.
William J. Perry was only 18 when he found himself surrounded by death, a young U.S. Army mapping specialist in Japan during the Army of Occupation. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II had just come to an end.
“The vast ruins that once had been the great city of Tokyo – nothing, nothing had prepared me for such utter devastation that was wrought by massive waves of firebombing rained down by American bomber attacks,” said Perry, who was then shipped off to the island of Okinawa in the aftermath of the last great battle of WWII.
More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in that closing battle of 1945, codenamed Operation Iceberg.
“Not a single building was left standing; the island was a moonscape denuded of trees and vegetation,” Perry told a rapt audience during a recent speech. “The smell of death was still lingering.”
The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs.
“It had taken multiple strikes by thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of high explosive bombs to lay waste to Tokyo,” he recalls. “The same had been done to Hiroshima and then to Nagasaki with just one plane – and just one bomb. Just one bomb.
“The unleashing of this colossal force indelibly shaped my life in ways that I have now come to see more clearly,” said Perry, who would go on to become the 19th secretary of defense. “It was a transforming experience. In many ways – I grew up from it.”
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform. Photo Credit: U.S. Army
Now, nearly seven decades later, the 86-year-old Perry has come full circle. His new winter course will take students back to his fateful days in Japan after the United States became the first – and last – nation to use atomic weapons. He’ll go through the Cold War, the arms race and expanding nuclear arsenals, and today’s potential threats of nuclear terrorism and regional wars provoked by North Korea, Iran or South Asia.
Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today (IPS 249) – to serve as the backdrop for an online course at Stanford next year – concludes with the declaration Perry made in 2007: The world must rid itself entirely of nuclear weapons. And students will get a primer on how to get involved in organizations that are working on just that.
“They did not live through the Cold War, so they were never exposed to the dangers and therefore it doesn’t exist to them; it’s just not in their world,” Perry said of millennial and younger students. “I want to make them aware of what the dangers were and how those dangers have evolved.”
Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, both Democrats, joined former Republican Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger in launching a series of OpEds in The Wall Street Journal (the first in 2007) that went viral. Together they outlined how nations could work together toward a world without nuclear weapons.
“I think I have some responsibility since I helped build those weapons – and I think that time is running out,” Perry said in an interview.
Perry helped shore up the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, procuring nuclear weapons delivery systems for the Carter administration. Later, as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton, his priority became the dismantling of nuclear weapons around the world.
Taubman, a consulting professor at CISAC, will guest lecturer in Perry’s class, along with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway, Martha Crenshaw and Scott Sagan. Other speakers are expected to include Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Andrei Kokoshin, deputy of the Russian State Duma; Ashton B. Carter, who just stepped down as deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Joeseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.
The world is far from banning the bomb. According to the Ploughshares Fund, an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons remain in the global stockpile, the majority of which are in Russia and the United States.
President Barack Obama declared shortly after taking office in his first foreign policy speech in Prague that because the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons, Washington “has a moral responsibility to act.”
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace
and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said back in May 2009.
Perry – a senior fellow at CISAC who received his BS and MS from Stanford and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics – laments the regression of the movement to dismantle the nuclear legacy of the Cold War.
Obama has so far not acted on his pledge in his contentious second term, as China and Russia expand their stockpiles. North Korea and Iran are attempting to build nuclear weapons and India and Pakistan are building more fissile material. The U.S. Senate still has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the U.S. and Russia have not moved forward on a follow-up to the New START Treaty.
Perry recognizes that the issue is slipping from the public conscience, particularly among young people. So he’s putting his name and experience behind a Stanford Online course slated to go live next year. It will correspond with the release of his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” and will take a more documentary approach, weaving together key moments in Perry’s career with lectures, archival footage and interviews and conversations between Perry and his colleagues and counterparts.
"Bill Perry has had a remarkable career and this project draws on his unparalleled experience over a pivotal period in history," said John Mitchell, vice provost for online learning. "We hope his brilliant reflections will be useful to everyone with an interest in the topic, and to teachers and students everywhere."
At the heart of his winter course, online class and memoir are what Perry calls the five great lessons he learned in the nuclear age. The first four are grim remnants of what he witnessed over the years: the destructive nature of the atomic bombs on Japan; his mathematical calculations about the number of deaths from nuclear warfare; his work for the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and one pre-dawn call in 1978 from the North American Aerospace Defense Command saying there were 200 missiles headed toward the United States from the Soviet Union. That turned out to be a false, but terrifying alarm.
His fifth final lesson is hopeful, if not cautionary. It goes like this:
As secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, Perry oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and the United States and helped the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to go entirely non-nuclear. In that mission, he often visited Pervomaysk in the Ukraine, which was once the Soviet Union’s largest ICBM site, with 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States.
On his final trip to Pervomaysk in 1996, he joined the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers to plant sunflowers where those missiles had once stood.
“So reducing the danger of nuclear weapons is not a fantasy; it has been done,” Perry said. “I will not accept that it cannot be done. I shall do everything I can to ensure nuclear weapons will never again be used – because I believe time is not on our side.”
Nipah virus lives in large fruit bats in South and Southeast Asia. When people become infected with Nipah virus over half of them die. Nipah virus can also be transmitted from person to person. This talk will describe how this bat virus occasionally infects human populations and causes outbreaks through person-to-person transmission. It will explore the risk of a global pandemic of Nipah virus and consider appropriate policy responses.
Speaker bio:
Stephen Luby is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine; Deputy Director for Research at the Center for Global Health Innovation; Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Dr. Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. Dr. Luby earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan for 5 years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death. Immediately prior to his current appointment, Dr. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrheal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. Dr. Luby was seconded from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and was the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.
Dr. Luby's research has focused on clarifying the burden of several communicable diseases in low income countries and developing and evaluating practical strategies to mitigate their impact. He is currently exploring circumstances where economic and political forces encourage environmental degradation that exerts substantial disease burden in low income countries, with a view to developing and evaluating interventions.
CISAC Central Conference Room
Stephen Luby
Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment; Sr. Fellow, Freeman Spogli Inst. for International Studies; Research Deputy Director for the Stanford Univ. Center for Innovation in Global Health; Prof. of Medicine, Infectious Diseases
Speaker
Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2013): USAID and the UN's World Food Program have proposed strategies for allocating ready-to-use (therapeutic and supplementary) foods to children in developing countries. Analysis is needed to investigate whether there are better alternatives. We use a longitudinal data set of 5657 children from Bwamanda to construct a statistical model that tracks each child's height and weight throughout the first five years of life. We embed this model into an optimization framework that chooses which individual children should receive food based on a child's sex, age, height and weight, to minimize the mean number of disability-adjusted life years per child subject to a budget constraint. Our proposed policy compares favorably to those proposed by the aid groups. Time permitting, we will also discuss a recent analysis of a nutrition program in Guatemala that quantifies the age dependence in the impact of supplementary food, and develops a food allocation policy that exploits this age dependence and reduces child stunting.
India: Motivated by India's nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess 12 similarity scores (for 10 fingerprints and two irises) between a resident's biometric images at enrollment and his biometric images during his first verification. At subsequent verifications, we allow individualized strategies based on these 12 scores: we acquire a subset of the 12 images, get new scores for this subset that quantify the similarity to the corresponding enrollment images, and use the likelihood ratio to decide whether a resident is genuine or an imposter. Compared to the policy currently used in India, our proposed policy provides a five-log (i.e., 100,000-fold) reduction in the false reject rate while only increasing the mean delay from 31 to 38 seconds.
A full speaker bio is available on CISAC's website.
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015
(650) 724-1676
(650) 725-0468
0
lwein@stanford.edu
Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science
CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member
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PhD
Lawrence Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. After getting a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1988, he spent 14 years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the DEC Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science. His research interests include mathematical models in operations management, medicine and biology.
Since 2001, he has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on an emergency response to a smallpox attack, an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and an analysis of a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?", and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.
For his homeland security research, Wein has received several awards from the International Federation of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), including the Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the INFORMS President’s Award for contributions to society, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best research publication, and the George E. Kimball Medal. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
The recent events in Chelyabinsk serve as a reminder that while rare, encounters with near-Earth objects (NEOs) can have significant consequences for humanity. Understanding and mitigating the risks posed by asteroids is important to the scientific and policy-making communities as observation and mitigation missions are considered. Qualitative and quantitative studies have been done to assess such risks, and some reasonable point estimates have been proposed. However, due to the low probability/high consequence nature of asteroid risks, these measures provide limited actionable insights and may even lead to false confidence when interpreted inappropriately. Project Fox aims to provide a probabilistic model that evaluates the collective threat from asteroids events by evaluating the full distributions over consequences. Results of initial modeling efforts show that the catastrophic risks from asteroid impacts are significant, and that the majority of risk for global effects resulting from NEO impacts is attributable to a range of diameters smaller (and more frequent) than previously known.
Speaker bio:
Jason C. Reinhardt is a national security systems analyst, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Risk Analysis, focusing on nuclear weapons arsenal management. Specifically, he is developing quantitative risk models to examine the trade-offs faced by nuclear armed nations in the process of disarmament. He is also pursuing research aimed at modeling and quantifying the catastrophic risks posed by near earth asteroid encounters. Other research interests include game theoretic applications to risk analysis and management, as well as adversary models. While at CISAC, he hopes to engage subject matter and policy experts to strengthen his modeling and analysis of nuclear weapon arsenal risk.
Prior to beginning his current studies, Jason managed a group of experts at Sandia National Laboratories that focused on technical studies to guide policy and decision makers across government. He joined Sandia National Laboratories in August of 2002, and has worked on a diverse set of projects both as an engineer and as an analyst, including the development of instrumentation for in-situ atmospheric measurement, embedded systems design, borders security analyses, and nuclear counter-terrorism strategy development.
He has worked extensively with the Department of Homeland Security on nuclear matters, and has also worked with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and within the national laboratory enterprise on a diverse array of national security projects. He has participated in the planning and hosting of international conferences and engagements, briefed congressional representatives, and served as a subject-matter expert on the topics of border security and nuclear and radiological defense.
Jason holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Purdue School of Electrical Engineering at Indianapolis, and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Jason C. Reinhardt is a national security systems analyst, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Risk Analysis from Stanford University’s Department of Management Science and Engineering Engineering Risk Research Group, focusing on nuclear weapons arsenal management. Specifically, he is developing quantitative risk models to examine the trade-offs faced by nuclear armed nations in the process of disarmament. He is also pursuing research aimed at modeling and quantifying the catastrophic risks posed by near earth asteroid encounters. Other research interests include game theoretic applications to risk analysis and management, as well as adversary models. While at CISAC, he hopes to engage subject matter and policy experts to strengthen his modeling and analysis of nuclear weapon arsenal risk.
Prior to beginning his current studies, Jason managed a group of experts at Sandia National Laboratories that focused on technical studies to guide policy and decision makers across government. He joined Sandia National Laboratories in August of 2002, and has worked on a diverse set of projects both as an engineer and as an analyst, including the development of instrumentation for in-situ atmospheric measurement, embedded systems design, borders security analyses, and nuclear counter-terrorism strategy development.
He has worked extensively with the Department of Homeland Security on nuclear matters, and has also worked with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and within the national laboratory enterprise on a diverse array of national security projects. He has participated in the planning and hosting of international conferences and engagements, briefed congressional representatives, and served as a subject-matter expert on the topics of border security and nuclear and radiological defense.
Jason holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Purdue School of Electrical Engineering at Indianapolis, and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
What if scientists engineer a virus that could help doctors design vaccines to prevent a global pandemic – but a blueprint of that very virus gets into the hands of terrorists who use it to build a biological weapon?
Should – and can – governments step in to mandate controls on such bioengineering? Or is it more effective to rely on the private sector to police itself and develop potentially life-saving biotechnologies without the shackles and bureaucracy of big government?
It’s a classic dual-use dilemma.
These are among the public policy questions Megan Palmer will tackle as an incoming More information on the Perry Fellowship. She intends to research the complex governance challenges accompanying increased access to biotechnology and how countries are directing their innovation and security strategies to favor centralized or distributed control of access to information and materials.
“Developments in biotechnology have been heralded as fueling an industrial revolution in the life sciences with significant economic potential,” said Palmer, who received her PhD in bioengineering from MIT. “Yet biotechnology can both pose and mitigate key security concerns, such as bioweapons development vs. deterrence and preparedness.”
Eikenberry is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan who led the civilian surge directed by President Obama from 2009 to 2011. Roberts, until recently, was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
“Karl, Megan and Brad are an exceptional trio, with expertise ranging from counterinsurgency to nuclear weapons to biosecurity,” said Amy Zegart, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation. “We are delighted that they will be joining the CISAC community and enhancing our efforts to tackle the world's most important security challenges."
Policy Scholars
Perry fellows reside at CISAC for a year of policy-relevant research on international security issues. They join other distinguished scientists, social scientists and engineers who collaborate on security problems that cannot be solved within any single field of study. The fellowship was established to honor Perry, the 19th U.S. secretary of defense and former CISAC co-director, and to recognize his leadership in the cause of peace.
Eikenberry will focus on foreign interventions and counterinsurgency doctrine, as well as U.S.-Asia Pacific strategy and the rise of China and the future of NATO. He will also write and talk about the state of the humanities and social sciences in the United States.
Eikenberry, who has master’s degrees from Harvard in East Asian Studies and Stanford in political science, has become a vocal advocate for the humanities, which are on the wane as students turn toward computer science, technology and engineering. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he also earned an interpreter’s certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office and has an advanced degree in Chinese history from Nanjing University in China.
Karl Eikenberry
Eikenberry wants students to know that his humanities and social sciences education underpinned a long and meaningful career as an Army officer, diplomat and scholar.
“The humanities and social sciences help us understand the complex historical, geographic, economic, social, cultural and political roots of conflict, and they enable us to better consider the consequences of our policy decisions,” he said.
Roberts intends to explore the question of how to balance efforts to sustain an effective deterrent for the 21st century with efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.
“Each U.S. president since the end of the Cold War has emphasized the importance of adapting the U.S. nuclear deterrent away from Cold War requirements and toward the future,” Roberts said. “But what does that mean in practice?”
Perry was a tenacious Cold War proponent of nuclear weapons as deterrence. Today, he is a supporter of Global Zero – the movement for a world without nuclear weapons. But how to get there has been a point of contention fueling CISAC research for years.
“How do we balance the effort to sustain an effective deterrent for 21st century purposes with the effort to reduce the number and role of nuclear weapons, while encouraging others to join us in taking steps toward the elimination of nuclear weapons?” Roberts said.
Roberts, who first worked with Perry in 2008 when the former secretary of defense chaired the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, said the fellowship would provide him the opportunity to develop his thinking on the issue of nuclear strategy and write a “short book for a broad audience.”
Palmer, who was previously a CISAC affiliate while doing postdoctoral studies in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford, will assess how public sector investments and government regulations related to genetic engineering are legitimized in terms of their prospective economic benefits and national security tradeoffs.
“It’s the intersection of biology and technology and how one navigates public policy,” she said. “How do you think about the changing landscape of power and politics as it becomes increasingly easier to engineer biology? It poses all sorts of complex governance challenges.”
Teachers and Mentors
CISAC’s mission is also to teach and mentor the next generation of security scholars and the three fellows meet that mandate.
Eikenberry will co-lead CISAC’s annual undergraduate honors college in Washington, D.C., in which a dozen seniors meet with politicians, journalists, military analysts, lobbyists and experts from the leading private and government agencies in the nation’s capital. The former general will continue as a pre-major advisor for six undergraduates.
Brad Roberts
Roberts is also looking forward to getting back to an academic environment.
“The fellowship also enables me to return to a significant mentoring role with students, for which there was very little time in government,” he said.
Before joining the government in 2009, Roberts worked full-time at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Va., and served for 15 years as an adjunct professor in the graduate school of international studies at George Washington University. He has also mentored young analysts in the United States and abroad under the auspices of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“In the nuclear policy community, I am part of a bridging generation – not a founding cold warrior but also not of the generation that has no memory of the Cold War – and I am enthusiastic for the opportunity to work with younger scholars to build expertise needed for the future,” Roberts said
Palmer directs policy-related activities at Synberc site, a synthetic biology research consortium of UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Stanford, Harvard and MIT. She is also a judge for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, where 200 undergraduate teams from around the world design and build living organisms over the course of a summer.
“Because biology is by nature globally distributed, it is critical to train the generation of practitioners to work together to develop best practices that can be diffused across organizations – and borders,” she said.
Counterinsurgency strategy, as applied in Afghanistan, rested on the assumption that it was feasible for the U.S. military to protect the Afghan population, that foreign aid could make the Afghan government more accountable, and that the Karzai administration shared U.S. goals. But all three assumptions turned out to be spectacularly incorrect.
The counterinsurgency plan in Afghanistan hinged on the assumption that the U.S. military could protect the population, that foreign aid could make the Afghan government more accountable, and that the Karzai administration shared U.S. goals. In an article published by Foreign Affairs, Karl Eikenberry – the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC – explains why all three assumptions were "spectacularly incorrect."
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Karl Eikenberry, left, meets with then-Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, Dec. 7, 2009.
CISAC's Sig Hecker talks to one of India's most respected newspapers, The Hindu, about why he admires India's nuclear energy program. India's world-class nuclear researchers can still learn many lessons from the Fukushima nuclear crisis, particularly in fostering a culture of safety. The world's largest democracy must demonstrate to its citizens that nuclear power is safe and sustainable in order to pursue its ambitious energy program.
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The undergound tunnel being built to connect the Fast-Breeder Nuclear Reactor to the sea, at the Kalpakkam Nuclear Complex, India, January 2013.
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.
