About the Event: The talk will feature the 2022 volume, Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima (Routledge), and its three co-editors, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (U. Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne), Soraya Boudia (U. Paris Cité), and Kyoko Sato (Stanford). The book provides unique post-Fukushima reflections on nuclear history and politics from a long-term and transnational perspective, asking how nuclear technology has shaped the world we live in and how we have come to live with it and the peril it presents. A product of sustained, multi-year and interdisciplinary intellectual exchange among scholars on nuclear technology from different disciplinary (e.g., history, anthropology, STS, philosophy, nuclear sciences) and national (e.g., US, Japan, France) backgrounds, the volume tackles the global nuclear history backwards: how Fukushima shed new light on past efforts to spread and control nuclear technology. Through examining the politics of knowledge, technical innovation, and narratives, as well as the development of international standards and governance frameworks, it explores how we have managed nuclear violence and disasters, envisioned a bright future with the nuclear technology, and trivialized and normalized threats from the nuclear. The volume covers a variety of empirical cases, including the relationships between the expertise on radiation’s health effects and aids for a-bomb survivors in Japan; the development of films to capture nuclear tests and exposures; colonialist and imperialist contexts that dictated the legal status of Micronesia as a test site; rhetoric of “nuclear apartheid”; the constitutive roles of institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and networks to monitor radioactive contamination; a conceptual shift in transnational nuclear waste management; different paradigms in global governance of nuclear hazards; implications of the influx of Western medicine for child survivors of Chernobyl; the tension and co-existence of catastrophic and optimistic visions of nuclear future; and emerging practices to memorialize Fukushima and other nuclear disasters. Chapter authors include leading scholars of nuclear history and politics such as Joseph Masco (Chicago), Kate Brown (MIT), John Krige (Georgia Tech), Angela Creager (Princeton), and Maria Rentetzi (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), and up-and-coming new researchers.

We believe that the volume contributes new insights on how we have come to where we are with nuclear technology, and this event will offer an opportunity for promising and meaningful discussion relevant to the preservation of human future — especially given the current energy crisis and the global nuclear order destabilized by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

About the Speakers:

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a manuscript to examine Japan’s nuclear history through the dynamics among global and national governance approaches, transnational development of expertise on radiation, and civil society mobilization. She is also part of a project that compares Covid-19 policy responses in East Asia. She has published in journals including Science, Technology and Human Values; East Asian Science, Technology and Society; Theory and Society; and Journal of Science and Technology Studies (in Japanese) and book chapters on the Fukushima disaster in English and Japanese.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, philosopher and historian of science is emeritus professor at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She is a member of the French Academy of Technology and of several ethics committees. She was the 2021 Sarton Medalist of the History of Science Society and the recipient of the Dexter Award for outstanding achievements in the History of Chemistry from ACS in 1994.  Her most recent publications include Temps-paysage. Pour une écologie des crises (2021) and Between Nature and Society. Biographies of Materials (2022).

Soraya Boudia is an STS scholar and professor of sociology at the Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the relationship between science and politics in the global environmental issues. She has extensively worked on the history of nuclear risks and toxicants governance. She has published with N. Jas, Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World (Berghann, 2014), and with A. N. H. Creager, S. Frickel, E. Henry, N. Jas, C. Reinhardt, J. A. Roberts, Residues, Rethinking Chemical Environment (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is currently co-leading a national French research initiative on risk and crisis initiative on risk and crisis.

About the Discussants:

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

Dan Zimmer completed his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research focuses on the implications that anthropogenic existential risk (x-risk) poses for some of the foundational categories of Western political thought, paying particular attention to the historical dimension of ongoing engagement and avoidance with the subject. His doctoral dissertation examined how the political debates inspired by the thermonuclear fallout crisis of the 1950s came to be reformulated in light of the growing public preoccupation with ecological x-risks such as global warming and nuclear winter beginning in the 1980s. His research at Stanford seeks to bring this historical analysis up to the present by tracking how the contemporary study of x-risk came to be formalized in the early 2000s in response to growing concerns about the prospect of machine superintelligence. Previously, Dan spent a year as a Boren Fellow studying the tactics used by the Gezi Park protestors in Istanbul, Turkey.

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About the Event: What explains the use of different strategies of counterproliferation? Drawing on her new book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation, Rachel Whitlark will explore the use of preventive military force as a counter-proliferation strategy by the United States and Israel against a variety of adversaries pursuing nuclear weapons. Discussing a new book project, she will also examine the use of targeted assassination of nuclear scientists as a counter-proliferation strategy and its potential consequences.

About the Speaker: Rachel Whitlark is an Associate Professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security as well as a fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University. Whitlark has previously been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She was also a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard and a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. 

Whitlark's interests lie within international security and foreign-policy decision-making, with a focus on the role of the individual executive in foreign and security policy, as well as on nuclear technology, nuclear proliferation, and counter-proliferation. She has regional interests in the Middle East and East Asia. Her book, All Options on the Table: Leaders, Preventive War, and Nuclear Proliferation, was published with Cornell University Press’s Studies in Security Affairs Series and investigates the use of preventive military force as a counter-proliferation strategy, drawing on archival research conducted at multiple U.S. Presidential Libraries. 

She has published in Security Studies, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, International Studies Perspectives, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Survival, among other outlets. Her research has been funded by, among others, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Stanton Foundation, and a variety of Presidential library foundations.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)

About the Event: Today public key cryptography provides the primary basis for secure communication over the internet, enabling e-commerce, secure software updates, online work, government services, and much more. But public key cryptography has not always been widely available; for many decades, the U.S. government monopolized cryptography by keeping it highly classified. By inventing public key cryptography in the mid-1970s, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman helped make cryptography widely accessible. In 2015 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Diffie and Hellman the Turing Award, computer science’s highest honor, for their work on public key cryptography. ACM has published a new book, Democratizing Cryptography contextualizing the invention of public key cryptography and explaining its significance.  In this book launch event, a distinguished panel of experts will discuss the past and present significance of public key cryptography, in dialogue with Diffie and Hellman. Time will be reserved for audience questions and discussion.

About the Speakers: 

Andrei Broder is a distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he was a research fellow and vice president of computational advertising for Yahoo!, and before that, the vice president of research for AltaVista. He has also worked for IBM Research as a distinguished engineer and was CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.

Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy at The Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University. Landau has written four books, including with Whitfield Diffie, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption (MIT Press, rev. ed. 2007). Landau has testified before Congress, written for the Washington Post, Science, and Scientific American, and frequently appears on NPR and BBC. Landau has been a senior staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University. She received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, was a 2010-2011 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, was inducted into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame in 2015 and into the Information System Security Association Hall of Fame in 2018

John Markoff is an award-winning author and journalist. From 1998 until 2017, he was a reporter at The New York Times. He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism and an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting as part of a New York Times project on labor and automation. In 2007, he was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization’s highest honor. He is an affiliate of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Center Artificial Institute. He is also a research affiliate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences or CASBS, participating in projects focusing on the future of work and artificial intelligence. He is currently researching a biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Rebecca Slayton is Associate Professor, jointly in the Science & Technology Studies Department and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, both at Cornell University. She is also a 2022-23 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research examines the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count, shows how the rise of computing reshaped perceptions of the promise and risks of missile defense, and won the 2015 Computer History Museum Prize. Slayton’s second book, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair.

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About the Event: Authoritarian regimes have sought to broadcast their power and influence—and it often seems that there is a pattern of autocratic diffusion, the “Illiberal International.” The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, has been the darling of the American Right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to fund and influence anti-democratic politics in Europe and elsewhere.  Yet such diffusion has often been limited—and this talk explores the political and institutional reasons why there are limits to such influence. 

About the Speaker: Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor in the Department of Political Science, the director of the Europe Center, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford. Her research focuses on religion and politics, authoritarian political parties and their successors, and the historical development of the state. She is the author of four books: Redeeming the Communist Past: The Regeneration of Communist Successor Parties; Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Development in Post-Communist Europe; Nations Under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Politics; and Sacred Foundations: The religious and medieval origins of the European State. She is the recipient of the Carnegie and Guggenheim Fellowships. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Nations and international organizations increasingly turned to sanctions as a coercive policy tool against other countries to influence their behavior without relying on the use of force. Sanctions are the most common nonviolent geopolitical tool, and their use is expanding with explosive frequency. However, decades of health research on sanctions plead for the cessation of this tool because of the widespread human suffering caused by certain types of sanctions.

Dr. Ruth Gibson considers sanctions as the equivalent of a chemotherapy drug––one that should be planned, titrated, and continually evaluated to determine if the treatment is having the intended consequence or killing off essential functioning for sustaining life.

The goal in this work is to improve human health, minimize humanitarian harm, and design systems for monitoring sanctions that are realistic for use by the United Nations and the main sanction-sending nation-states.

This talk presents the developments of Stanford Medicine’s work with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop an analytic system capable of assessing the potential and actual humanitarian effects of sanctions in different international settings. For the last three decades UN monitors and lawyers have called for the development of a universal system of agreed-upon metrics for human health. A team of scholars and doctors at Stanford Medicine is responsible for guiding the developments related to human health, specifically maternal and child health. There is an urgent need for a framework that would allow both sanctioning countries and international monitors to foresee and document the impacts of specific sanctions on human rights, including health, so that those impacts can be avoided or mitigated. Dr. Gibson will outline how we are designing the maternal and child health system of indictors for monitoring sanction regimes.

The goal of the question-and-answer period is to actively debate and brainstorm how to improve this work to balance preservation of human rights with the strategic goals of the US Department of State.

Dr. Gibson welcomes input from diverse communities and academic disciplines at Stanford and looks forward to the discussion.

About the Speaker: Ruth Gibson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford Medicine. She is cross appointed by courtesy as a postdoctoral trainee at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spoli Institute. She is supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, the most prestigious postdoctoral award given by the Government of Canada to future global leaders in medicine, engineering, and the humanities. Ruth spent ten years living abroad doing humanitarian and global health work in eight countries on five continents, focusing on fragile nations struggling with poverty, human rights abuses, and civil conflict. She then completed her PhD in Global Health and Strategic Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she was named a Killam Laureate, Canada’s highest honor for doctoral scholars. She is currently working with the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to develop a universal system of monitoring to assess the impacts of unilateral sanctions on human rights. Ruth, Prof. Paul Wise, and Senior Associate Dean of Global Health Michele Barry are leading the maternal and child health component of this project. Ruth is co-PI on a SEED grant investigating the impact of humanitarian aid sanctions on maternal and child health. Ruth is also a research affiliate with the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, where she is assisting Dr. Daryn Reicherter with the preparation of expert reports on the mental health impacts of war crimes for the International Criminal Court. Her research is funded by the Center for Innovation in Global Health and the Maternal and Child Health Research Institute at Stanford Medicine.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: One of the most consistent critiques of the Anthropocene among humanities scholars has been that its putative Anthropos ignores difference to encompass all human beings universally in terms of their essential human nature. Trace the conceptual history of the term, however, and it quickly becomes clear that the Anthropos of the Anthropocene takes shape as not simply a sly return of Enlightenment Man (with all of his characteristic hierarchies and exclusions), but something far stranger. This talk works backwards from Paul Crutzen’s public introduction of the term in 2000 through the Earth System science of the 1980s and the systems ecology of the 1960s, to contend that the conceptual precursors of the Anthropocene arose in the crucible of the 1950s. It was there that the unprecedented possibility of ‘universal death’ by thermonuclear weapons fused with the new science of cybernetics to produce a paradigmatically distinct approach to conceiving human beings in their totality. Born under the shadow of its own extinction, the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene does not seek to define what all human beings essentially are (as Enlightenment Man did), but to account for what it is that all human beings collectively do. Rather than claim that this is inherently better or worse, the talk concludes by arguing that this approach to human universality is categorically different, introducing new kinds of conceptual and political challenges that urgently warrant being treated on their own terms.

About the Speaker: Dan Zimmer is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, where he researches the challenges that anthropogenic existential threats pose for the foundations of Western political thought. He holds a PhD in political science from Cornell University.
 

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About the Event: Why do states pursue chemical and biological weapons (CBW), despite their limited strategic utility and their prohibition (during some time periods) under international law? Utilizing original quantitative data, I find that internal threats to a state’s governing regime, while of- ten neglected in theories of arming and weapons proliferation, play a significant role in driving states’ choices to pursue chemical and biological weapons. Regimes may pursue CBW in response to two types of domestic threats: coup risk, and the risk of domestic rebellion or civil conflict. In particular, I find that governing regimes facing increases in the risk of a coup may be more likely to initiate chemical and biological weapons programs, and that regimes experiencing domestic unrest may be more likely to begin pursuing chemical weapons. I also examine evidence for external security pathways motivating weapons pursuit, and find that proliferators treat biological weapons more like other ‘strategic weapons’ than they do chemical weapons. These findings have important implications for counterproliferation policy, deterrence, and our theoretical understanding of arming and arms racing.

About the Speaker: Miriam Barnum completed her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). Her research is focused on understanding the motivations and constraints that shape states’ arming choices. In her book project, she examines the role that internal security threats play in driving choices between nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons pursuit options. Other ongoing projects relate to arming choices more generally, international conflict, and nonproliferation and arms control, with a focus on applying computational measurement models to enhance our understanding of these substantive areas.

While pursuing her Ph.D., Miriam was a US-Asia Grand Strategy predoctoral fellow at USC's Korean Studies Institute, and Director of Data Science for the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab. Before coming to USC, she worked as a research assistant in the National Security Office at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: This book project is about the history, politics, and law of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal after World War II—the Asian counterpart to Nuremberg. From 1946 to 1948, the victorious Allies put on trial the senior leadership of Imperial Japan, including former prime ministers, generals, and admirals, for war crimes from Nanjing to Bataan. The project considers the Tokyo trial as a defining political event in the making of modern Asia, spanning the democratization of Japan, impending Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, decolonization in India and elsewhere, and the onset of the Cold War.

About the Speaker: Gary Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, is the author of The Blood Telegram (Knopf), Freedom’s Battle (Knopf), and Stay the Hand of Vengeance (Princeton). The Blood Telegram was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won book awards from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, the Lionel Gelber Prize, the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature, and other awards. He has written articles for Ethics, International Security, Philosophy and Public Affairs, The Yale Journal of International Law, and other journals. A former reporter for The Economist, he writes often for The New York Times.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: There is a currently a great deal of momentum behind the integration of AI enabled technologies into the U.S. military. This includes desires to leverage the technology for purposes of command and control. Efforts, such as the Department of Defense’s Joint All Domain Command and Control, are predicated on dreams of AI and machine learning enabling U.S. commanders to make better decisions at a faster pace. However, this ongoing incorporation of AI into military decision-making processes promises to delegate elements of decision-making away from humans. This phenomenon challenges long-standing military traditions emphasizing the heroic archetype of the ‘decisive’, ‘intuitive’, and ‘audacious’ commander. As such, Ian Reynolds' research seeks to address how, in the face of these competing perspectives, did the prospect of delegating decisions in war to ‘intelligent machines’ gain its current momentum? He argues that this puzzle is resolved through particular visions of war that emerge in the post-WWII era, specifically related to the themes of speed and knowledge in American military thought. Reynolds' research investigates shifts in how members of the U.S. defense architecture conceive of and prioritize speed and knowledge and their relationship to war, suggesting that these changes serve as a form of ‘cultural resources’ in debates over the merits of AI related to command decisions. His findings point to the ways in which shared beliefs about how militaries should fight wars link to visions of technological capacity, having practical implications for important military practices such as command.  

About the Speaker: Ian Reynolds is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow as Stanford CISAC and HAI as well as a PhD Candidate at American University, School of International Service. His broad research interests focus on the intersection of science and politics as well as digital technologies and international security. More specifically, his dissertation work explores the history and cultural politics of artificial intelligence and its relationship to military command and control practices in the United States.

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About the Event: Political science emerged as a response to the challenges of imperial administration and the demands of colonial rule. While not all political scientists were colonial cheerleaders, their thinking was nevertheless framed by colonial assumptions that influence the study of politics to this day.

This book offers students a lens through which to decolonize the main themes and issues of political science - from human nature, rights, and citizenship, to development and global justice. Not content with revealing the colonial legacies that still inform the discipline, the book also introduces students to a wide range of intellectual resources from the (post)colonial world that will help them think through the same themes and issues more expansively.

Decolonizing Politics is a much-needed critical guide for students of political science. It shifts the study of political science from the centers of power to its margins, where the majority of humanity lives. Ultimately, the book argues that those who occupy the margins are not powerless. Rather, marginal positions might afford a deeper understanding of politics than can be provided by mainstream approaches.

About the Speaker: Robbie Shilliam is Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He is most recently author of Decolonizing Politics (Polity, 2021). His forthcoming book is entitled Move Outta Babylon: Rastafari Reason, Black Marxism and the Struggle for Global Justice (Penguin/Random House, 2024).

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.