Abstract: The quotation in the title is taken from the memoirs of Boris Chertok, a leading Soviet missile designer.  In my talk I will examine significant shifts in Soviet thinking about nuclear war and military strategy in the 1960s and 1970s and discuss some of the implications of those shifts for strategic stability in the 1980s.  I will also explore the influence of the McNamara Pentagon on Soviet military strategy and Soviet thinking about deterrence and war-fighting.    

Speaker bio: 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. 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.

Since joining the Stanford faculty in 1986 -- first as a professor of political science and later (in 1996) as a professor of history as well -- Holloway has served as chair and co-chair of the International Relations Program (1989-1991), and as associate dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences (1997-1998). Before coming to Stanford, he taught at the University of Lancaster (1967-1970) and the University of Edinburgh (1970-1986). Born in Dublin, Ireland, he received his undergraduate degree in modern languages and literature, and his PhD in social and political sciences, both from Cambridge University.

Abstract: The Berkeley Applied Nuclear Physics Program leads developments of new concepts and technologies to address challenges in fundamental physics, medicine, nuclear security, and safety. Recent progress in radiation detection and imaging combined with advances in computer vision and data processing enable unprecedented capabilities in the detection, mapping, and visualization of radiological and nuclear materials in complex environments. We have developed a new concept called 3-D Scene Data Fusion, which fuses contextual and radiation data to produce 3-D maps of radioactive sources in real-time. We have deployed this capability in unmanned and manned configurations in different locations including evacuated communities and at the Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture. While these technologies are necessary to better respond to accidents now and in the future, we need to ensure that the data provided can be understood by all stakeholders, including communities exposed to the risk of detrimental effects. We have established the Berkeley Institute for Resilient Communities to address this need by combining research, education, and communities in an international, multi-disciplinary, and multi-cultural context. Important components of these activities are the Radwatch and DoseNet programs which provide the basis for our communications. As an example, DoseNet aims at establishing a sustainable multi-sensor high-school network enabling students across the world to learn important concepts in science and engineering and what is normal in our world.

Speaker bio: Dr. Kai Vetter is Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and Faculty Senior Scientist and Head of the Applied Nuclear Physics program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His main research interests are in the development and demonstration of new concepts and technologies in radiation detection to address some of the outstanding challenges in fundamental sciences, nuclear security, and health.

Prof. Vetter is director of Institute for Resilient Communities that was established in 2015 to address the need to better integrate advancements in sciences and technologies with communities through education and outreach locally and globally. He initiated and still leads the Berkeley Radwatch and DoseNet activities with the goal to engage high and middle schools in performing environmental measurements employing fundamental science and engineering concepts and to expand across regions, nations, and cultures.

He has authored and co-authored about 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals and is fellow of the American Physical Society. He received Presidential Citations from the American Nuclear Society twice, for his engagement in Fukushima through measurements and enhancing community resilience.

Abstract: What are the consequences of the emergence of robotics, big data, and artificial intelligence for international politics? Are these new technologies going to promote instability and conflict, as many warn, or are they going to reinforce U.S. military primacy? In particular, will China be able to gain and eventually exploit the unfolding technological revolution - the so-called Second Machine age - or are such concerns exaggerated? The literature in political science and international relations theory has either largely neglected technology and technological innovation, or simply assumed that technology is a substitute for labor that reduces countries' constraints to go to war. Drawing from the scholarship in economics and management, in this article we look at technology in terms of a set complements and nodes-in-the-network. Thus, while technological innovation reduces the prices of some goods or tasks, it simultaneously makes their complementary assets more difficult to procure (through an increase in the demand). The resulting distributional effects, we argue, explain why actors will benefit unevenly from technological change. We test our theoretical insights by looking at seapower in the first and in the emerging second machine age: respectively, the time of the steam engine, steel hulls, quick-firing long-range guns and the telegraph; as well as the unfolding era of neural networks, fast processors and real-time communications. Our preliminary empirical results corroborate our framework, namely that the effects of technological change are much more complex than the literature acknowledges and highlights the challenges countries will have to face in the military realm during the second machine age.

Speaker bios: Andrea Gilli is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Harvard University and a former Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation of Stanford University. Andrea has conducted research for several organizations, including the European Union Institute for Security Studies, RUSI in London and the Office of Net Assessment of the U.S. Department of Defense. He holds a Ph.D. in social and political science from the European University Institute, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. from the University of Turin.

Mauro Gilli is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies of ETH-Zurich (Switzerland). During the academic year 2015-16, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding of Dartmouth College. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University, an MA from SAIS-Johns Hopkins and a B.A. from the University of Turin.

Abstract: Over the past decade, fears about the decline of the United States relative to other countries (especially China) have become a prominent feature of American political discourse. While anxiety about losing power on the world stage has been a recurrent phenomenon in the United States since the 1950s, the present bout of pessimism – combining reactions to the disastrous Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and most recently the rise of Donald Trump – makes this the deepest and most serious crisis of confidence in postwar American history. This project explores the domestic political and strategic consequences of anxiety about lost or eroding national status by combining insights from social theory and social psychology. I use evidence from historical cases of decline (including Spain after 1898, France after 1945 and the United Kingdom after 1945) as well as survey experiments to investigate hypotheses about the heterogenous ways in which different individuals and groups react to relative national decline, and how these responses combine to influence the declining state’s politics and foreign policy. 

Speaker bio: Steven Ward is a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC for the year 2017-2018 and an Assistant Professor in the Government Department at Cornell University. He holds an MA in Security Studies and a PhD in Government from Georgetown University. He is the author of Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Security Studies and International Studies Quarterly.

- This event is offered as a joint sponsorship with the Hoover Institution - 

Abstract: Russia’s interference in our election was part of an ongoing campaign to undermine democracy and its institutions. America’s justice system is already under fire from Russian propaganda. What else should we anticipate and what should we be doing about it?

Speaker bio: Suzanne E. Spaulding is senior adviser to the homeland security program and international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) where she leads the Project on Countering Adversary Attacks on America’s Justice System. This effort is focused on assessing and countering Russian activities that can undermine public faith and confidence in the justice system as an essential pillar of democracy. She is also on the boards of Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy Project and George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, and is a member of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group. Ms. Spaulding was the Under Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure protection. She also served in the General Counsel’s office at CIA and as chief counsel for both Senate and House intelligence committees. She has been a lawyer and consultant in private practice, including Security Counsel for the Business Roundtable, and chaired the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security. 

Abstract: The conventional international approach to post-conflict intervention has fallen short of expectations despite the enormous resources devoted to the endeavor. In this talk, Naazneen H. Barma will offer her original analysis of the underlying problem, arguing that while international peacebuilders aim to build effective and legitimate government, post-conflict elites co-opt process-focused interventions to serve their own very different political ends. She will present the core findings of her book, The Peacebuilding Puzzle, which develops a historical institutionalist approach to understanding peacebuilding. Through a comparative analysis of UN peace operations in Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan, she will illustrate how competing international and domestic visions of post-conflict political order shape outcomes at three critical peacebuilding phases: the peace settlement; the transformative peace operation; and the aftermath of intervention. The central implication emerging from this study is that international peacebuilders must abandon the notion that post-conflict institutions can be designed and transplanted in whole cloth. Barma will conclude the talk with suggestions for a more incremental and adaptive approach to better achieve robust political order in post-conflict countries.

Speaker bio: Naazneen H. Barma is Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. Her research and teaching focus on peacebuilding and political order, the political economy of development, and natural resource governance, with a regional specialization in East Asia and the Pacific. Her most recent book, The Peacebuilding Puzzle (Cambridge University Press 2017), argues that international peace operations fall short of achieving the modern political order sought in post-conflict countries because the interventions empower domestic elites to attain their own political ends. Barma received her PhD and MA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and her MA in International Policy Studies and BA in International Relations and Economics from Stanford University. From 2007–2010, she was a Young Professional and Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank, where she conducted political economy analysis and worked on operational dimensions of governance and institutional reform in the East Asia Pacific Region. Barma is a founding member and co-director of Bridging the Gap, an initiative devoted to enhancing the policy impact of contemporary international affairs scholarship. 

Abstract: This talk will explore the historical roots of the modern concept of identity, and how it plays out in contemporary nationalism, Islamism, populism, and liberal multiculturalism.  It will be based on my forthcoming book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September 2018.

Abstract: Humans and natural ecosystems are exposed to toxic metals from many sources and following many exposure pathways. In this seminar, Dr. Blum will explain how small variations in the isotopic compositions of lead and mercury are created and how they can be used to unravel many of the mysteries of the exposure of these metals to people and ecosystems.

Speaker bio: Joel Blum holds the MacArthur and Keeler Professorships in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan. He earned his B.A. from CWRU, M.S. from the University of Alaska, and Ph.D. from Caltech. Professor Blum’s research focuses on the sources, fate, and cycling of metals and on the application of stable and radiogenic isotopes across earth sciences, chemistry and ecology. He has studied topics that include granite petrogenesis, ore deposits, meteorites, impacts, soils, forest nutrient cycling, hydrogeochemistry, terrestrial and aquatic foodwebs, animal migration, atmospheric chemistry and chemical oceanography. Blum is a past editor of Chemical Geology and Elementa and is currently the editor of the American Chemical Society’s journal Earth and Space Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Geochemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, and the AAAS. He was awarded the Patterson Medal of the Geochemical Society for his work on the application of mercury isotopes in the environment. 

Abstract: China’s participation in venture deals financing is at a record level of 10-16% of all venture deals (2015-2017) and has grown quite rapidly in the past seven years.  Technologies where Chinese firms are investing are foundational to future innovation:  artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, augmented/virtual reality, robotics and blockchain technology. Moreover, since these technologies are dual use--designed for commercial use but also equally applicable for military applications, these are some of the same technologies of interest to the U.S. Defense Department.  

Investing is itself only a piece of a larger story of massive technology transfer from the U.S. to China. China has a long-term, systematic effort to attain global leadership in many industries, partly by transferring leading-edge technologies from around the world.

U.S. military superiority since World War II has relied on both U.S. economic scale and technological superiority. If we allow China access to these same technologies concurrently, then not only may we lose our technological superiority but we may even be facilitating China’s technological superiority. 

Speaker bio: Michael Brown is a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow in the U.S. Defense Department. He is the co-author of a Pentagon study on China’s participation in the U.S. venture ecosystem which served as key input for the proposed Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) being reviewed with bipartisan support by both the House and Senate.

Michael is the former CEO of Symantec Corporation, the global leader in cybersecurity and the world’s 10th largest software company with revenues of $4 billion and more than 10,000 employees worldwide. During his tenure as CEO, Michael led a turnaround as the company developed a new strategy focusing on its security business.

Michael is the former Chairman & CEO of Quantum, a leader in the computer storage industry specializing in backup and archiving products. After leaving Quantum, Michael served as Chairman of EqualLogic, a storage array company. 

He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Berklee College of Music in Boston, received his BA degree in economics from Harvard University in 1980 and his MBA degree from Stanford University in 1984.