Stanford University

Governance

FSI's research on the origins, character and consequences of government institutions spans continents and academic disciplines. The institute’s senior fellows and their colleagues across Stanford examine the principles of public administration and implementation. Their work focuses on how maternal health care is delivered in rural China, how public action can create wealth and eliminate poverty, and why U.S. immigration reform keeps stalling. 

FSI’s work includes comparative studies of how institutions help resolve policy and societal issues. Scholars aim to clearly define and make sense of the rule of law, examining how it is invoked and applied around the world. 

FSI researchers also investigate government services – trying to understand and measure how they work, whom they serve and how good they are. They assess energy services aimed at helping the poorest people around the world and explore public opinion on torture policies. The Children in Crisis project addresses how child health interventions interact with political reform. Specific research on governance, organizations and security capitalizes on FSI's longstanding interests and looks at how governance and organizational issues affect a nation’s ability to address security and international cooperation.

Transitions 2009 conference to focus on action plan for President-elect Obama

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America's standing in the world has been damaged by eight years of unilateralism and it must cooperate with rising powers to tackle emerging transnational threats, according to a major research project to be unveiled Thursday, Nov. 13, at a conference hosted by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

The directors of "Managing Global Insecurity Project (MGI)" (MGI) from Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), New York University and the Brookings Institution will use the conference to present their "plan for action" for the next U.S. president.

"President-elect Obama should take advantage of the current financial crisis and the goodwill engendered by his election to reestablish American leadership, and use it to rebuild international order," said CISAC's Stephen J. Stedman. "Part of that is to recalibrate international institutions to reflect today's distribution of power. If you could find a way for constructive engagement between the G-7 and Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa-that reflects the reality of world power today-you could actually animate a lot of cooperation."

Stedman, Bruce Jones from New York University's Center on International Cooperation and Carlos Pascual from Brookings will discuss concrete actions for the incoming administration to restore American credibility, galvanize action against transnational threats ranging from global warming to nuclear proliferation and rejuvenate international institutions such as the United Nations.

"You find in American foreign policy a blanket dismissal of international institutions, especially regarding security," Stedman said. "But if you eliminate them, you don't have a prayer of recreating the kind of cooperation that exists in the U.N. There actually is a pretty good basis of cooperation on which to build."

The nonpartisan project also will be presented Nov. 20 at a high-profile event at the Brookings Institution that will feature leaders such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Brookings President Strobe Talbott. That in turn will take place on the heels of the upcoming G-20 emergency summit to discuss measures to stave off a global recession and give a greater voice to developing nations. MGI's "plan for action" includes a series of policy papers on hot-button topics such as economic security.

"The big thing we talk about is if you institutionalize cooperation with the existing and rising powers you can hope to build a common understanding of shared long-term interests," Jones said. "If you approach issues only through the lens of the hottest crises, you will find different interests in the very short term on how [problems] are handled."

Transitions 2009

The 20-month-long project, which incorporated feedback and direction from nonpartisan U.S. and international advisory boards, dovetails closely with the theme of FSI's fourth annual conference: "Transitions 2009."

"There has rarely been a moment more fraught with danger and opportunity, as new administrations in the United States and abroad face the interlocking challenges of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, hunger, soaring food prices, pandemic disease, energy security, an assertive Russia and the grave implications of failed and failing states," FSI Director Coit D. Blacker said. "This conference will examine what we need to do to prepare our own citizens for the formidable challenges we face and America's own evolving role in the world."

Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow, will deliver the conference's keynote address, titled, "Beyond the West? New Administrations in the United States and Europe Face the Challenge of a Multi-Polar World."

Blacker, who served in the first Clinton administration; Stephen D. Krasner, who worked in the current Bush administration; medical Professor Alan M. Garber; and Stanford President Emeritus Gerhard Casper will open the conference with a reflection on the past and future and the watershed moment presented by Obama's presidency. The conference also will include breakout sessions with FSI faculty such as "Rethinking the War on Terror," led by Martha Crenshaw of CISAC; "Toward Regional Security in Northeast Asia," chaired by former Ambassador Michael J. Armacost, acting director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; and "Is African Society in Transition?" led by economist Roz Naylor of the Program on Food Security and the Environment.

Long-term security

For MGI project leaders Stedman, Jones and Pascual, the zeitgeist of the moment is America's relationship with the emerging powers. "The good news from an American perspective is, despite the financial crisis, despite everything else, sober leadership in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere understand, in the immediate term, there is no alternative to American leadership, as long as [it] is geared toward cooperation and not 'do as you please-ism,'" Jones said. "On the other side, the financial crisis highlights that U.S. foreign policy has to come to terms with the fact that it does not have the power to dictate outcomes. It has to build cooperation with emerging powers, with international institutions, into the front burner of American foreign policy." More broadly, international cooperation must be built on what Stedman calls the principle of "responsible sovereignty," the notion that sovereignty entails obligations and duties toward other states as well as to one's own citizens.

In addition to MGI's "plan for action," the three men have coauthored Power and Responsibility: International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats, to be published in 2009. The book criticizes both the Bush and Clinton administrations for failing to take advantage of the moment of U.S. dominance after the fall of the Soviet Union to build enduring cooperative structures. "We're in a much tougher position than we were five years ago and 10 years ago," Jones said. "There still is an opportunity, but time is getting away from us."

If revitalizing international cooperation fails, Jones said, transnational threats will gain the upper hand. "We will not be able to come to terms with climate change, transnational terrorism, spreading nuclear proliferation," he said. "U.S. national security and global security will deteriorate. [We] have a moment of opportunity to do this now."

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Rethinking Nuclear Latency: When is a State a Virtual Nuclear Weapons Power?

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Abstract:  Scholars and policy-makers, when seeking to predict the future of nuclear proliferation, often refer to "nuclear capable states," or "latent nuclear weapons states," or "virtual nuclear powers."  There is consensus, however, about what such terms mean or how to measure a state's "nuclear latency," a condition that leads to widespread miscommunication and misunderstanding in the field.  This talk reviews alternative methods for measuring "nuclear latency" in the political science and technical literatures. It provides historical evidence of the wide range of time-lines for different states to move from one state of nuclear weapons development to more advanced states of development and identifies a set of political factors (including organizational competency, ambivalent political leadership, different arsenal size ambitions) that can influence the time-lags that states experience in their nuclear weapons programs. 

Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is on sabbatical in 2008-09. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000.

His recent articles include "How to Keep the Bomb From Iran," in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2006); "The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969" co-written by Jeremi Suri and published in International Security in spring 2003; and "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Will More Nuclear Security Forces Produce More Nuclear Security?" published in Risk Analysis in 2004. The first piece warns against "proliferation fatalism" and "deterrence optimism" to argue that the United States should work to prevent Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons by addressing the security concerns that are likely motivators for Iran's nuclear ambitions. The International Security piece looks into the events surrounding a secret nuclear alert ordered by President Nixon to determine how effective the alert was at achieving the president's goal of forcing negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War. It also questions many of the assumptions made about nuclear signaling and discusses the dangers of new nuclear powers using this technique. Sagan's article on redundancy in Risk Analysis won Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies 2003 Best Paper in Political Violence prize. In this article, Sagan looks at how we should think about nuclear security and the emerging terrorist threat, specifically whether more nuclear facility security personnel increases our safety. His article, "Realism, Ethics, and Weapons of Mass Destruction" appears in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail Hashmi and Steven Lee. In addition to these works, Sagan is also finishing a collection of essays for a book tentatively entitled Inside Nuclear South Asia.

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Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
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The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
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Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan 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.     

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Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making

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Rose McDermott is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University.  She is currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Experimental Social Psychology, both from Stanford University. She held a National Institute on Drug Abuse Post Doctoral Fellowship in Substance Abuse Treatment Outcome Research at the San Francisco VA through the University of San Francisco Psychiatry Department.  Professor McDermott has also held fellowships at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, both at Harvard University. Professor McDermott's main area of research concerns political psychology in international relations. She is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press, 1998), Political Psychology in International Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2004), and Presidential Illness, Leadership and Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She is co-editor of Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Science Research, with Rawi Abdelal, Yoshiko Herrera, and Alastair Iain Johnson (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

She has written numerous articles and book chapters on experimentation, the impact of emotion on decision making, social identity, and evolutionary and neuroscientific models of political science.  She is currently involved in a series of projects investigating the endogenous sources of aggression, and a book project on pandemic disease.

Herbert Abrams is a professor of radiology, emeritus, at the Stanford School of Medicine and a member-in-residence at CISAC, where he directs the Project on Disabled Leadership. He was Professor and Director of Diagnostic Radiology at Stanford from 1960 to 1967, and was then appointed and served as Philip H. Cook Professor and Chairman of Radiology at Harvard University from 1967 to 1985. He returned to Stanford in 1985 as Professor of Radiology in order to spend most of his time in research in CISAC. Dr. Abrams' present focus is on presidential disability and its potential impact on decision making.

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Rose McDermott Visiting Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara Speaker
Herbert Abrams Professor of Radiology, Emeritus and CISAC Member-in-Residence Commentator
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Barack Obama's missile defense challenge

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Pavel Podvig
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A new administration means a new opportunity to forge a U.S.-Russian missile defense cooperative in Europe. Getting there won't be easy, but it's not impossible.

What a difference eight years makes. Following the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a new disarmament initiative that called for reducing U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals to 1,500 warheads apiece. Although that statement was basically ignored--at the time, Washington was embroiled in the recount saga--Putin's proposal remained the official Russian position on disarmament in subsequent years.

Fast-forward to this recent president election. Instead of calling for reductions in nuclear weapons in the aftermath of Barack Obama's victory, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened to move short-range ballistic missiles to the Kaliningrad region if Obama proceeds with installing missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. Thus, he quickly presented Obama with his first major foreign policy test--how to handle the issue of missile defense in Europe, the biggest irritant in U.S.-Russian relations. He also seemed determined to demonstrate that Russia is going to be a difficult and capricious partner for the new U.S. administration.

So far, the Obama team has shown great care in dealing with the thorny issue of missile defense in Europe. During the campaign, they deliberately avoided making any critical statements on the European system to avoid alienating Polish voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania. And now that the election is over, we're hearing that they're telling the eager Polish government that their general position on missile defense--it should be deployed only "when the technology is proved to be workable"--applies to the European part of the system as well. This isn't good news for missile defense in Europe, since its technology is "workable" only in a narrow sense, if at all.

Of course, this story is far from over. If the Obama administration decides not to deploy interceptors and radar in Europe, it opens itself to a charge of yielding to Russian pressure--especially from Republicans, for whom missile defense is a signature issue. The plan to deploy missile defense in Europe also has supporters in Poland and the Czech Republic; both governments seem to believe that the presence of U.S. personnel on their soil would provide them a security guarantee far stronger than NATO membership. Finally, Russia isn't exactly interested in seeing the issue disappear: The system presents no threat whatsoever, but the controversy allows the Kremlin to score lots of rhetorical points.

Finding a solution that calms the waters and satisfies everyone won't be easy. But it's not impossible either. One thing the new administration must avoid is getting into a discussion with Russia about whether Washington has the right to deploy its military facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, or whether Russia should have the right to veto such a decision. While a legitimate discussion, we know that it's not going to get us anywhere.

Therefore, we need to take the dispute in a different direction. Instead of arguing about the terms and conditions of missile defense deployment, Washington should accept Moscow's standing offer to use its early warning radars in Armavir and Gabala to build elements of a joint monitoring system. The offer still seems to be on the table, although Russia has been far less enthusiastic about it since the United States made clear that this joint system wouldn't replace the missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The problem with those sites might seem serious, but it can be solved. A year ago, Washington considered delaying the actual deployment of the interceptors until the ballistic missile threat from Iran (or maybe some other country) becomes evident. Moscow seemed interested, but the United States withdrew the offer. It certainly could be revived now. And I believe such a compromise would satisfy missile defense supporters and skeptics alike and also buy the necessary time to make the issue less sensitive politically. History shows us that once controversy dissipates, legitimate questions can be asked about effectiveness and cost--and on these counts, the current U.S. plan for missile defense in Europe fails in any sober, independent assessment.

What would remain then is a joint U.S.-Russian project in which both countries would work together to monitor missile tests and satellite launches. It's hard to think of a better legacy of the current missile defense dispute.

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Sarah Chayes discusses life in Taliban-resurgent Afghanistan

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Although Iraq dominates the headlines, the situation in Afghanistan may be more decisive to longterm international security, said Sarah Chayes, who has lived in the country since 2001 after covering the last stand of the Taliban for National Public Radio (NPR).

Chayes, an American who directs Arghand, a cooperative in Kandahar that produces soap from local plants and fruits as an alternative to opium production, spent Wednesday, Nov. 5, at Stanford. During several talks with CISAC faculty, staff, students and donors she discussed regional security, the future of democracy in Afghanistan and the stresses of everyday life in the ancient city of Kandahar, where she lives and where civilians must carry firearms to protect themselves. 

Chayes strongly criticized efforts to negotiate with the Taliban, which has fought a protracted guerilla war against the Afghan government since 2004. The extremist movement ruled the country from 1996 to 2001, when the Northern Alliance and NATO forces removed its leaders from power. "There is no intrinsic support from the population for the Taliban," Chayes said. "The Taliban want all, they understand they won't get all so they are trying to get what they can. Negotiating with the Taliban [offers] zero benefit."

Instead, according to Chayes, Afghanistan needs to experience the "real substance of democracy," not simply elections. It also needs a surge of non-military volunteers trained to mentor leaders working in civil society. "Thirty years of combat undoes a lot of structure" in society, she said. "People get things done as fast as possible because they might be shot in the next 50 seconds."

Chayes is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban. In 2006, she was awarded The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' inaugural Ruth Adams Award for her work explaining the impact of U.S. policy on Afghanistan after 9/11. The prize recognizes journalists who translate complex issues of peace and security into everyday language and images. Chayes left NPR in 2002 to help rebuild Afghanistan. Initially, she served as field director for Afghans for Civil Society, a non-profit founded by the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. She founded Arghand in May 2005.

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Evidence from Imagery: The Iran and Syrian Nuclear Programs - An Open & Shut Case?

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Abstract: In this age of increasing "Global Transparency," commercial satellite imagery has now made it possible for anyone to remotely peer "over the fence" and view what heretofore had been otherwise impossible...clandestine nuclear facilities (most significantly, those capable of producing fissile material suitable for use in nuclear weapons). The synergistic combination of readily available tools: personal computers, the internet, three-dimensional virtual globe visualization applications such as Google Earth, and high resolution commercial satellite imagery has gone beyond what anyone could have imaged just a few years ago. The downside of all this is that those who want to keep their clandestine nuclear facilities and associated activities from being either detected, identified, and/or monitored, are becoming more adept in their use of camouflage, concealment, and deception.

Iran is one such case where it has followed a steep learning curve of adapting to the threat that overhead observation can pose. After repeated dissident group revelations about Iran's clandestine nuclear facilities, together with confirming media broadcast of commercial satellite images of those facilities followed by verification inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); the government of Iran has become increasingly aware of this threat and gone to greater and greater lengths to try and defeat it. Iran's cover-up tactics have improved with time...from concealed infrastructure and false cover stories (Natanz)...to refurbishment and sanitization of facilities following removal of incriminating equipment (Kalaye Electric and Lashkar Abad), to the wholesale razing of facilities together with the removal of dirt and vegetation to defeat IAEA forensic environmental sampling (Lavizan).

While the international community continues to debate the issue of whether or not Iran's nuclear program is purely peaceful in nature (helping it to stay an "open case"), Iran is defiantly pursuing its goal of fissile material production. Syria, on the other hand (evidently together with North Korea), was also quite aware of the overhead observation threat, taking great pains to conceal its plutonium production reactor at Al-Kibar. Syria disguised the true function of the facility by employing minimal site security (no fences or guard towers), having minimal support infrastructure (with non visible powerlines and only buried water lines), not installing a telltale reactor ventilation stack or cooling tower, hiding the reactor building in a ravine (terrain masking), and finally camouflaging the facility with a false façade to make it appear as a byzantine fortress. Nonetheless, despite all those steps, a leak of ground-level reactor construction and interior photographs, which formed the basis for the subsequent bombing of the facility by Israel, successfully thwarted that effort (the "closed case?"). Rather than confessing the truth about al-Kibar, the Syrian government rushed to remove all traces of the destroyed reactor and supplant it with a new larger footprint building for as yet unknown purposes while continuing to claim it was previously only a disused military warehouse. The IAEA asked d Syria for permission to inspect not only the Al-Kibar site, but reportedly up to three other sites thought to be associated with it. The Syrians refused access to all but the now heavily sanitized Al-Kibar location. We must now all await the IAEA report on the findings of that singular onsite inspection.

Frank Pabian is a Senior Nonproliferation Infrastructure Analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who has over 35 years experience in the nuclear nonproliferation field including six years with the Office of Imagery Analysis and 18 years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "Z" Division.  Frank also served as a Chief Inspector for the IAEA during UN inspections in Iraq from 1996-1998 focusing on "Capable Sites." In December 2002, Frank served as one of the first US nuclear inspectors back in Iraq with UN/IAEA. While at Los Alamos, Frank has developed and presented commercial satellite imagery based briefings on foreign clandestine nuclear facilities to the International Nuclear Suppliers Group, the IAEA, NATO, and the Foreign Ministries of China and India on behalf of the NNSA and STATE.

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Frank Pabian International Research, Analysis, and Development Work Force, LANL Speaker
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Lawrence Wein awarded 2008 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize

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Lawrence M. Wein, CISAC faculty member, has been awarded the 2008 Frederick W. Lanchester Prize by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The prize is given for the best written contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English in the last three years.

Wein, a professor at the Graduate School of Business, was awarded the prize for a series of papers, including, "The Last Line of Defense: Designing Radiation Detection-Interdiction Systems to Protect Cities from a Nuclear Attack."

Wein's work opened up an important new area, homeland security, for the application of Operations Research. The work analyzes risks associated with four main national threats: border security, nuclear weapons at ports and large cities, anthrax- and smallpox-based attacks and food supply attacks, and it offers important policy recommendations for dealing with these risks. According to the award citation, Wein's research developed creative, original and detailed models for evaluating alternative methods of protection in these four areas. "The analysis used a range of methods including optimization, game theory, stochastic models, statistics and differential equations. Wein's research sets a high standard for future work on not only problems of security but public problems in general, and in communicating results of operations research to the general public," the citation stated."

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A Silver Lining to the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal

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"Without a doubt, the U.S.-India nuclear deal presents a serious challenge to the NPT. But it also presents an opportunity to strengthening the regime and its most important, relevant elements."

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Pavel Podvig
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Iranian Strategy in Iraq: Politics and "Other Means"

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Iran has a robust program to exert influence in Iraq in order to limit American power‐projection capability in the Middle East, ensure the Iraqi government does not pose a threat to Iran, and build a reliable platform for projecting influence further abroad. Iran has two primary modes of influence. First, and most importantly, it projects political influence by leveraging close historical relationships with several Shi'a organizations in Iraq: the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), the Badr organization, and the Dawah political party. Second, Iran uses the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Qods Force (QF) to provide aid in the form of paramilitary training, weapons, and equipment to various Iraqi militant groups, including Moqtada al‐Sadr's Jaysh al‐Mahdi (JAM) and the Special Group Criminals (SGCs). Iran also projects influence through economic initiatives and various religious programs. Iranian influence in Iraq is inevitable, and some of it is legal and constructive. Nonetheless, Iranian policy in Iraq is also duplicitous. Iran publicly calls for stability while subverting Iraq's government and illegally sponsoring anti‐government militias.

Although Iran publicly protested the U.S.‐led invasion of Iraq in 2003, its agents and allies initially cooperated with U.S. forces. Iraqi refugee groups with deep ties to Iran participated in U.S.‐sponsored pre‐invasion conferences, and Iran urged its surrogates to assist U.S. forces and position themselves to seize power through the electoral process. Yet even as its political allies came to power in Baghdad with U.S. backing, Iran began supporting anti‐government, anti‐coalition militia movements typified by JAM and, later, the SGCs. The two‐tracked strategy offered Iran unique levers to increase violence in Iraq and then to benefit when violence subsided. Another advantage has been that, intentionally or not, Iran's two‐pronged approach obscured the importance of Iran's political influence in Iraq by focusing the international media and U.S. policymakers on Iran's lethal aid to militia groups.

Iran has achieved three major accomplishments in Iraq. First, the unstable security situation and political opposition means the U.S. is not in a position to use Iraq as a platform for targeting Iran. Second, Iran's political allies have secured high‐ranking positions in the Iraqi government. Third, the Iraqi constitution calls for a highly federalized state. Iran values a decentralized Iraq because it will be less capable of projecting power, and because Iran is primarily concerned with Iraq's southern, oil‐rich, Shi'a‐dominated provinces. Iran believes that increased southern autonomy will leave those provinces more open to Iranian influence. Iran's successes in Iraq are not all a function of its own efforts. For example, a democratic Iraq will almost certainly be highly federalized because of the power of Iraqi Kurds to distance themselves from the Iraqi government, and because of increasingly heated sectarian divisions that can be mitigated by devolving power to regional governments.

Iran's effort to manipulate Iraqi surrogates predates the 2003 U.S. military operations. During the 1980s and 1990s, Iran helped organize and finance ISCI's predecessor, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and its Badr Corps Militia. It also worked closely with elements of the Islamic Dawah Party and helped train and fund its militant wing. Before 2003, the Badr Corps served as Iran's most important action arm inside Iraq, and was considered an official component of the IRGC‐QF. Badr received training and weapons from the IRGC‐QF and Lebanese Hizballah to attack both the Iraqi regime and the Mujahidin‐e Khalq Organization (MKO), an Iranian terrorist group. Numerous senior individuals in the Badr Corps during the 1990s play critical logistical roles funneling weapons to militants in Iraq today, including Abu Mustafa al‐Sheibani-the first major Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) smuggler-and Abu Mahdi al‐Muhandis, the terrorist and former Badr Corps commander who was elected to the Iraqi parliament before fleeing to Iran. In some cases, these people had direct ties to current Iraqi politicians, including Hadi al‐Ameri, who was al‐Muhandis' Chief of Staff.

Iran's support for Iraqi refugee groups in the 1980s and 1990s has important consequences today. The refugee groups often disagreed over how closely to associate with the Iranian regime. SCIRI was most closely linked to Iran's clerical regime, going so far as to recognize Ayatollah Khomeini's doctrine of guardianship of the jurist-velayat‐e faqih-which implied Ayatollah Khomeini was their Supreme Leader. The Dawah party, however, was bitterly split over velayat‐e faqih. Meanwhile, many Shi'a that remained in Iraq grew resentful of the Iraqi refugees that pontificated about Saddam's regime without facing its brutality firsthand. Most supported Iran's religious government but rejected velayat‐e faqih. The political and doctrinal disagreements were often reflected in debates about which religious figures to follow. SCIRI was led by Ayatollah Baqir al‐Hakim, while many Dawah supporters and Iraqis still in Iraq supported Ayatollahs from the al‐Sadr family. These divisions laid the groundwork for contemporary divisions between the establishment ISCI and Dawah parties in Baghdad and the anti‐establishment Sadrist movement.

Despite its successes, Iran faces numerous hurdles projecting influence in Iraq. Many Iraqis-including Shi'a-despise ISCI, Iran's primary political ally, precisely because of its close relationship with Iran. In 2007, ISCI took its current name and abandoned the title Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had implied a closer relationship with Tehran. ISCI also publicly stated that Grand Ayatollah Ali al‐Sistani is its most important religious influence-thereby distancing the organization from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, whom it had previously considered supreme. Meanwhile, Iran's militia allies in Iraq tend to oppose Iranian political influence there. Moqtada al‐Sadr and others are willing to accept Iranian training and weapons to pursue their political, religious, and criminal aims, but they remain hostile to Iranian political influence and thus are unreliable allies.

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Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
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Thomas Isaacs

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Tom is Co-Principal Investigator for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) Developing Spent Fuel Strategies (DSFS) project coordinating international cooperation on issues at the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle with emphasis on spent fuel management and disposal in Pacific Rim countries. Participants include senior nuclear officials from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Canada, and the United States.

Tom advises national nuclear waste programs on facility siting, communications, stakeholder engagement, and public trust and confidence. He has worked with the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) for 15 years.

Tom was recently named as the Chair of the recently formed Experts Team to support Southern California Edison  at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Previously Tom was a Consulting Professor at CISAC, lead advisor to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, Member of the National Academy of Sciences Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board, Director of Planning at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and long time senior executive at the Department of Energy where he led the siting of Yucca Mountain as the nation’s candidate site for a geologic repository.

He has degrees in Engineering, Applied Physics, and Chemical Engineering from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.

 

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