FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.
Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Siegfried S. Hecker
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
0
shecker@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Research Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
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.
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Seminars
The Moral Wounds of War: The War Within
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Drell Lecture Recording: NA
Drell Lecture Transcript: NA
Speaker's Biography: The author of the acclaimed The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers provides a unique analysis of the moral weight of warfare through the lenses of philosophy and psychology.
Oak Lounge
Nancy Sherman
Professor of Philosophy
Speaker
Georgetown University
Lectures
Performance of Trimpin's Drama, The Gurs Zyklus
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The Gurs Zyklus, performance of Trimpin's stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.From the astonishing mind of MacArthur "Genius Award"- winning inventor and sound sculptor, Trimpin: A stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.
Combining live performance with kinetic sculpture, and world history with personal biography, The Gurs Zyklus ("Gurs Cycle") represents the fruits of a lifetime of curiosity, investigation, inspired tinkering, and riveting invention on the part of Trimpin, the brilliant artist of one name and no definable genre.
As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp.
These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, weave together in a stage performance truly like no other: Vocalists sing and speak texts drawn from the Rosenberg letters into "fire organs" of Trimpin's invention. Projections of historic images from Gurs meld with film from Trimpin's own retracing of the journey by train to the camp. The music of Nancarrow meets sounds derived from bark patterns of the trees near Gurs-among the last living "witnesses" to the camp's dark history. Throughout, Gurs Zyklus offers a novel perspective on an important story now at the edges of living memory, as well as a stage experience that is immersive and deeply moving.
POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION with Trimpin and Jenny Bilfield.
This event is sponsored by Stanford Lively Arts.
For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website.
Stanford Memorial Auditorium
551 Serra Mall
Stanford Univeristy
Stanford, CA 94305
Seminars
Trimpin in Conversation with Mark Gonnerman
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Trimpin discusses his year-long Stanford residency and his new work which combines kinetic musical sculpture with emotionally-powerful WWII history.
As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp. These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, come together in a unique multimedia stage performance, The Gurs Zyklus, that will be presented by Stanford Lively Arts on Saturday, May 14.
This event is sponsored by the Aurora Forum.
For more information, please visit Stanford's Ethics and War Series webstie.
Pigott Theater
551 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA
Trimpin
MacArthur "Genius Award" winning inventor and sound sculptor
Speaker
Paul DeMarinis
Speaker
Department of Art, Stanford University
Mark Gonnerman
Director, Aurora Forum
Moderator
Stanford University
Seminars
Film: "Fog of War"
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The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film, directed by Errol Morris, won the
Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003) and the Independent
Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003).
Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings,
and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts McNamara's life, from his birth during the First World War
remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as
a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's
president, to his being employed as Secretary of Defense and the Cuban
Missile Crisis, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense
secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's
brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of
defense, despite limited military experience.
According to Morris, hearing McNamara raise all of these ethical issues and questions about a war which most of us see as morally unambiguous is very, very powerful. What Morris especially liked about the film was that it proved it was possible to make a movie about events – events that are removed from us by 40, 50, 60 years but which are very much about today. Many of the issues that McNamara is talking about in the movie are relevant to what's going on right now, and there's this surreal sense that nothing has changed.
Faculty talk back led by Scott Sagan (Co-Director of Center for International Security and Cooperation / Political Science, Stanford)
Annenberg Auditorium, 435 Lasuen Mall
Stanford University
Scott D. Sagan
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
0
ssagan@stanford.edu
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he previously served as the social science co-director. He is the Inaugural Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellow for Nuclear Ethics and Security at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (2026-2027). Sagan also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Former co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
CV
Document
sagan_cv_sept_2026.pdf
(338.49 KB)
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Seminars
Who Should Fight? The Ethics of the Draft
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- Should citizens be required to serve their country by fighting for it?
- Do we think differently about the decision to go to war when only a small number of citizens will fight it?
- Do volunteer armies and draft armies fight differently in combat?
This panel discussion focuses on the draft versus the volunteer army in the U.S. Our distinguished panelists examine "who should fight" in a democracy, focusing on the ethical dimension of a state's system of military service.
Panelists are:
David Kennedy (History, Emeritus, Stanford). Kennedy's scholarly focus is on the integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. A prolific historian, he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in History for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was a 1981 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History for Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which uses the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system.
Eliot Cohen (Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies). Cohen's work focuses on diplomacy, international relations, irregular warfare, military history, military power and strategy, as well as strategic and security issues. He has served as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He also directed the U.S. Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey.
Jean Bethke Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago). Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Elshtain writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations. Elshtain has authored many books including Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times' notable book for 1995); and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.
Oak Lounge
David Kennedy
History, Emeritus
Speaker
Stanford
Eliot Cohen
Strategic Studies
Speaker
Johns Hopkins
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Social and Political Ethics
Speaker
University of Chicago Divinity School
Scott D. Sagan
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
0
ssagan@stanford.edu
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he previously served as the social science co-director. He is the Inaugural Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellow for Nuclear Ethics and Security at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (2026-2027). Sagan also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Former co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
CV
Document
sagan_cv_sept_2026.pdf
(338.49 KB)
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Seminars
The Ethics of Violence in War
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Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race; and The Twilight of the Bomb (Aug 2010).
Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing,
including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation,
the MacArthur Foundation Program in International Peace and Security
and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
In addition, Rhodes has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a
host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series. He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford.
Annenberg Auditorium
Richard Rhodes
Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Speaker
Seminars
The Changing Face of Photojournalism, The Changing Face of War
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Susie Linfield is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press). She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays on politics and culture have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times, Dissent, the Nation, Guernica, Bookforum, Salmagundi, and the Boston Review. For six years she was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and she was formerly an editor at American Film, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post.
Bldg 320 Room 105
Susie Linfield
Director of Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program
Speaker
NYC
Seminars
Film: "War Photographer"
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War Photographer is director Christian Frei's 2001 film that followed photojournalist James Nachtwey.
Natchtwey started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico in
1976 and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance
magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil
strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since
then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and
critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays
in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza,
Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the
Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia,
Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.
The film received an Academy Award Nomination for "Best Documentary Feature" and won twelve International Filmfestivals.
Annenberg Auditorium
Brendan Fay
Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities
Speaker
Stanford University
Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)
The Bowen H. McCoy Center for Ethics in Society ran a year-long symposium series over the 2010-11 academic year entitled Ethics and War. The symposium series featured philosophers, writers, lawyers, historians, social scientists, human rights activists, and policy makers who have grappled with the hard moral questions raised by war.