This Stanford news release describes research by CISAC's Scott Sagan on American public opinion toward the use of nuclear weapons during wartime. He found that views on nuclear weapons usage has not fundamentally changed since 1945, and many people would support the use of such weapons to kill millions of civilians if the U.S. found itself in a similar wartime situation. Sagan and his co-author used a survey experiment to recreate the situation that the United States faced in 1945 in the Hiroshima nuclear bombing with a hypothetical American war with Iran today.

The results showed little support for the so-called “nuclear taboo” thesis, or that the principle of “noncombatant immunity” – civilian protection from such weapons – has become a deeply held norm in America. The conclusions are stark and disturbing, Sagan said.

“These findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war,” wrote Sagan and his co-author, Benjamin Valentino, a Dartmouth College professor of government.

This story by Elisabeth Eaves in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists includes an interview with CISAC's Siegfried Hecker on the North Korea situation: 

In July, North Korea tested its longest-range ballistic missiles yet, putting it closer than ever to having a nuclear weapon that could strike the US mainland. But that is not actually our most urgent problem, says Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who has visited North Korea seven times and toured its nuclear facilities. While North Korea is bent on extending its nuclear strike range, it can already hit Japan and South Korea. With US politicians calling for military action against the North, and a general escalation of belligerent rhetoric on both sides, it is entirely possible that we will stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. In this in-depth interview, Hecker calls on Washington to talk to Pyongyang—not to negotiate or make concessions, but to avert disaster. 

BAS: North Korea tested 24 missiles in 2016 and has tested nearly 20 so far this year. What is distinctive about the two it tested in July?

SH: The missile tests on July 4th and 28th were the first that had intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capabilities. They were intentionally launched at lofted angles, most likely so they wouldn’t overfly Japan. According to the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s state news outlet, the most recent Hwasong-14 missile reached an altitude of 3,725 kilometers (2,315 miles) and flew a distance of 998 kilometers (620 miles) for 47 minutes before landing in the water off the Korean peninsula's east coast, close to Japan. If launched on a maximum-range trajectory the missile could travel more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles), giving it the ability to reach much of the US mainland. 

BAS: Do these test launches indicate that North Korea has mastered ICBMs?

SH: I think not yet, but these two tests demonstrate substantial progress and most likely mean they will be able to master the technology in the next year or two. The North Koreans have very cleverly combined various missile stages and rocket engines to get this far, but a reliable, accurate ICBM will require more testing. In addition, it is not clear whether they have sufficiently mastered reentry vehicles, which are needed to house the nuclear warhead on an ICBM. Advanced reentry vehicles and mechanisms to defeat missile defense systems may still be five or so years away. However, make no mistake, North Korea is working in all of these directions. 

BAS: Why are intercontinental ballistic missiles—ICBMs—so important, from North Korea’s point of view? 

SH: Pyongyang’s fears of US military intervention have surely grown with the dire warnings coming from US political leaders during the past several months. Pyongyang is determined to develop an effective deterrent to keep the United States out. It apparently views being able to threaten the US mainland with a nuclear counterstrike as the ultimate deterrent. It also likely has a political goal, to get Washington to the table on what Pyongyang would see as a more equal basis. 

BAS: We last spoke in May about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and the technical challenges it faces—among them, making a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on a missile, and a weapon that can survive the extreme conditions involved during launch, flight, and re-entry into the atmosphere. Have North Korea’s technical capabilities changed since then?

SH: I think the warhead is still the least developed part of North Korea’s plans for nuclear ICBMs. It must survive such extreme conditions, and it must detonate above the target by design. It can’t accidentally detonate on launch or burn up during reentry. North Korea likely made some of the key measurements required to define those extreme conditions during the two July tests, but I can’t imagine it has learned enough to confidently make a warhead that is small and light enough and sufficiently robust to survive. 

Achieving these goals is very demanding and takes time, particularly because warheads contain materials such as plutonium, highly enriched uranium, high explosives, and the like. These are not your ordinary industrial materials. 

BAS: Does North Korea have sufficient plutonium or highly enriched uranium to serve as fuel for nuclear weapons?

SH: This is one of its greatest limitations. It has very little plutonium and likely not yet a large amount of highly enriched uranium. For plutonium particularly, its small 20-to-40 kilogram inventory must be shared among several purposes: experiments required to understand the world’s most complex element, nuclear tests to certify the weapon’s design, and stock for the arsenal. To put North Korea’s plutonium inventory in perspective, the Soviet Union and United States at one time had inventories in excess of 100,000 kilograms each, and China is believed to have an inventory of roughly 2,000 kilograms. Estimates of North Korea’s highly enriched uranium inventory are highly uncertain, but are likely in the 200 to 450 kilogram range, which, combined with its plutonium inventory, may be sufficient for 20 to 25 nuclear weapons. 

Moreover, North Korea has conducted only five nuclear tests and we do not know if these used plutonium or highly enriched uranium for bomb fuel. During one of my seven visits to North Korea, the scientific director of their nuclear center told me that the first two devices used plutonium. During my last visit in November 2010, I was shown a modern centrifuge facility that had just begun operation. Based on that visit, I believe that North Korea most likely also used plutonium for the February 2013 test, but may have used highly enriched uranium for the two tests in 2016. 

Plutonium is a better bomb fuel, although its temperamental properties make it difficult to use reliably. Nevertheless, it would be preferred for making a weapon small enough to mount on an ICBM. Highly enriched uranium is more forgiving from an engineering point of view, but it is more difficult to miniaturize the warhead. North Korea has much more experience in uranium metallurgy than plutonium metallurgy because natural uranium metal is used to fuel its nuclear reactor. However, their overall experience with both materials in nuclear warheads is very limited.

BAS: In May you said you thought five nuclear tests spaced over ten years has likely allowed North Korea to miniaturize a nuclear warhead. Is that at odds with what you now believe?

SH: No. I was then referring to miniaturizing warheads for shorter-range missiles that could reach all of South Korea and Japan. The shorter range allows for much bigger warhead payloads and poses fewer challenges. Uranium could more easily be used for bomb fuel in such warheads. North Korea had no ICBM rocket experience until the two tests in July. Now we are talking about ICBMs, which have much more stringent warhead requirements. Miniaturizing a warhead sufficiently to fit on an ICBM will take more time and tests. 

BAS: Last week, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called for discussions with North Korea, although the State Department then appeared to walk back the call for unconditional dialogue. You’ve expressed that dialogue is essential. Why now, and what do you think it could accomplish?

SH: There is an urgent reason to talk to Pyongyang now: to avoid a nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula. The greatest North Korean threat we face is not from a nuclear-tipped missile hitting the US mainland, but from Washington stumbling into an inadvertent nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. US Senator Lindsey Graham said last week, “There is a military option: to destroy North Korea’s nuclear program and North Korea itself. He’s not going to allow—President Trump—the ability of this madman [Kim Jong-un] to have a missile that could hit America.” 

I do not think that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is a madman. We can’t even call him unpredictable any more—he says he will launch missiles, then he does. The madman rhetoric only flames the panic we see in this country because it makes Kim Jong-un appear undeterrable, and I don’t believe that to be the case. He is not suicidal. Nevertheless, it is possible that in his drive to reach the US mainland to achieve a greater balance with the United States, Kim could miscalculate where the line actually is and trigger a response from Washington that could lead to war. The problem is that we know nothing about Kim Jong-un and the military leaders that control his arsenal. It’s time to talk and find out. 

BAS: Both Senator Graham and former State Department official John Bolton spoke of pursuing a military option against North Korea last week. In May you said war would be a disaster. Why is it still being considered an option?

SH: Talk of war is dangerous and irresponsible. It would have catastrophic consequences for Northeast Asia and the world. Military action could slow the North’s program, but not eliminate it. Threats of war, moreover, only make the North redouble efforts to hold the United States at risk. And they greatly exacerbate the greatest risk of all: an inadvertent war on the Korean peninsula with the potential for hundreds of thousands of deaths, including thousands of American citizens. Unfortunately, some American leaders believe that if there is a war, keeping it on the Korean peninsula will keep us safe. I maintain that a nuclear war anywhere will have catastrophic consequences for America. 

BAS: Can you tell us more about what you think dialogue should look like? How do you convince skeptics who think there should be no negotiating with such a belligerent power?

SH: The crisis on the Korean peninsula is so urgent that President Trump should send a small team of senior military and diplomatic leaders to talk to Pyongyang. They must try to come to a common understanding that a nuclear war will inflict unacceptable damage to both sides, so must not be fought, and that a conventional conflict would pose a high risk of escalating to a nuclear war, so must likewise not be fought. 

This sort of dialogue might resemble the one between US President Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Geneva in 1955, which US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev re-affirmed at a Geneva summit in 1985. They agreed that a nuclear war cannot be won, so a nuclear war must not be fought.

The United States and Soviet Union deterred each other through mutually assured destruction. A similar state is achievable with regard to North Korea. Joint US-South Korean conventional forces combined with overwhelming US nuclear forces can assure the North’s destruction. Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal combined with its conventional artillery and chemical weapons can inflict unacceptable damage to South Korea, Japan, and regional US assets. Although the tradeoff is asymmetric—that is, assured annihilation versus unacceptable damage—I believe it will deter both sides from military aggression. 

BAS: So are you recommending negotiations?

SH: No, the time is not yet ripe for renewed negotiations. Talking is not a reward or a concession to Pyongyang and should not be construed as signaling acceptance of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Talking is a necessary step to re-establishing critical links of communication to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. We must first come to the basic understanding that a nuclear conflict must be avoided. The need to communicate is sufficiently urgent that talks must start without preconditions. 

BAS: What else could talks accomplish?

SH: They would provide an opportunity to impress upon Pyongyang that ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons is an awesome responsibility. These two issues are becoming more challenging as Pyongyang strives to make its nuclear arsenal more combat-ready. A nuclear-weapon accident in the North would be disastrous, as would a struggle to control the North’s nuclear weapons in the case of attempted regime change from within or without. 

The talks should also cover the need for mechanisms to avoid misunderstanding, miscalculation, or misinterpretation of actions that could lead to conflict and potential escalation to the nuclear level. In simplest terms, Washington should convey that it is deterred from attacking the North, but not from defending the United States or its allies. It should reiterate that any attack on South Korea or Japan, be it with conventional, chemical, or nuclear weapons, will bring a devastating retaliatory response upon North Korea.

The US delegation could also reinforce Secretary of State Tillerson’s message, that the United States is not aiming to threaten or replace the North Korea regime and is prepared to assure the security it seeks. 

Also, the talks should underline to Pyongyang that any export of nuclear technologies or weapons know-how is unacceptable, and that Pyongyang should not imagine such exports or transfers can be hidden. 

Finally, talks should emphasize that these are talks, not negotiations. The exchange may lay the foundation for a return to diplomatic dialogue on denuclearization and normalization, particularly if Washington listens as well as talks. But that is not what this initial contact should be.

BAS: But won’t any talks be construed as Washington having blinked first and recognized North Korea as a nuclear-armed state?

SH: Washington can acknowledge that Pyongyang possesses nuclear weapons—which is the reality—while also reiterating that it will not accept Pyongyang as a nuclear weapon state. Washington can make clear that it intends to pursue the eventual denuclearization and normalization of the Korean peninsula—goals that North Korea publicly signed on to in 1992, 2000, and 2005. Letting today’s state of affairs persist because we are overly concerned about “blinking” will only make a bad situation more dangerous. 

BAS: The US president has been very critical of China for not doing more to prevent North Korea’s missile and nuclear testing. Is it realistic to think China can control the North’s actions in this way? What do you think the proper role of China is here?

SH: The Obama administration pressured China and it didn’t work. The Trump administration similarly had its hopes pinned on China to pressure Pyongyang, and it won’t work either. We need to understand China’s national interest: It does not want to see Pyongyang armed with nuclear weapons, but it is not willing to bring the regime to its knees to stop it. Quite frankly, Beijing views Washington’s belligerence toward North Korea as the main driver of Pyongyang’s accelerating nuclear weapon program. 

Nevertheless, on Saturday, the two July ICBM launches prompted China to back the most stringent UN Security Council sanctions to date. Chinese state media followed with a statement that said North Korea had to be punished for its missile tests—although on Monday it said the United States must reign in its "moral arrogance over North Korea.”

BAS: What do you fear could happen in the near future if we stay on the current track? Basically, what about this whole situation most keeps you up at night? 

SH: That North Korea continues to make its nuclear arsenal more combat-ready and threatening to the US mainland, and that Washington declares this behavior a red line. And that the provocative rhetoric on both sides fuels more misunderstandings and miscalculations, which trigger a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula.

In this podcast with the Carnegie Council, CISAC's Scott Sagan says that major changes must be made if U.S. nuclear war plans are to conform to the principles of just war doctrine and the law of armed conflict. He proposes a new doctrine: "the nuclear necessity principle." In sum, the U.S. will not use nuclear weapons against any target that could be reliably destroyed by conventional means.

In 2016, Sagan co-authored an op-ed in The Washington Post on this topic: "It is time to turn nuclear common sense into national policy. A declaration that the United States would never use nuclear weapons when conventional weapons could destroy the target could reduce the number of nuclear weapons we need for legitimate deterrence purposes. Placing conventional weapons at the center of debates about the future of deterrence would also help focus the policy discussion on plausible scenarios with realistic plans for the use of U.S. military power. And it would more faithfully honor the just-war principles of distinction, necessity and proportionality, by placing them at the heart of our deterrence and security policies, where our highest ideals belong."

Renowned scholars Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards joined Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation this summer.

Hecht was named the Frank Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security, and Edwards is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security. Until recently, Hecht and Edwards taught at the University of Michigan. They boost CISAC’s faculty prowess on nuclear, climate, and computer issues, and in the more general domain of science, technology and society.

Hecht: nuclear perspectives

Hecht also will serve as a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and as a professor in Stanford’s Department of History. She taught at the University of Michigan for the past 18 years, where she was director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and associate director of the African Studies Center, among other highlights.

Before joining the University of Michigan, she taught at Stanford from 1991 to 1998. Hecht has been a visiting scholar at universities in Africa, Europe and Australia.

Hecht has written two award-winning books on nuclear issues: Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012), which offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order, and The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (1998 & 2009), which explores how complex relationships among technology and politics shaped early French nuclear policy.

Among other issues, Hecht studies the wastes produced by nuclear development. “Scholars and policymakers have long focused on the what-if scenarios of nuclear war,” she said. “But it’s equally vital to understand the environmental and human security damage that has actually occurred during seven-plus decades of nuclear weapons and power.”

Hecht’s teaching addresses such concerns on a global level. Her research focuses on Africa, long left out of nuclear histories.

In any given year of the Cold War, mines in Africa provided between 20 and 50 percent of the capitalist world’s uranium, including much of the material for nuclear weapons in the U.S., France and Britain. These sites continue to produce toxic and radioactive contamination in South Africa, Namibia, Gabon, Niger, and elsewhere, said Hecht. They pose significant security concerns at the local, regional, and global levels.

Studying these sites also offers a window onto the Anthropocene, a concept now used by natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists to describe how human activity has affected the Earth’s geological and biophysical properties, Hecht said.

“In order for the concept to have real planetary significance, we must see it from a variety of perspectives – including those originating in African societies and environments, which are on the front lines of global climate change and other environmental catastrophes,” she said.

The CISAC opportunity gives Hecht the chance to extend her scholarly research into the world of policy in the U.S. She’s already made these inroads into the French policy community by, for example, serving on several advisory boards, including for the Andra, France’s national radioactive waste management agency.

Hecht earned a doctorate in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania (1992), and a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT (1986).

Edwards: knowledge and information infrastructures

Edwards, a professor in University of Michigan’s School of Information and history department, studies the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science.

“I’m interested in how we know what we know about climate change,” Edwards said in an interview.

After this spring’s U.S. retreat from the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, Edwards has seen heightened interest in how knowledge about climate change is created, conveyed, disputed, and used. He is keenly intrigued by the “historical trajectory of knowledge infrastructures,” and how they unfold in the Anthropocene era.

He also plans to work on a nuclear security project with CISAC’s William J. Perry and Scott Sagan on the legality of nuclear war. Modern climate models show that the climatic effects (“nuclear winter”) of even a relatively small nuclear war could be severe enough to affect noncombatant nations worldwide, he noted.

“So, we are asking, is it even legal to start a nuclear war?” he said.

In the year ahead, Edwards will be co-teaching a course on “averting near-term human extinction” and undertaking another on “techno-metabolism.” The latter concerns how human technological systems, much like biological organisms, consume energy and materials and excrete waste — but unlike ecosystems, obtain most energy from unrenewable fossil sources and fail to recycle wastes.

At Michigan, he served as the director of the university’s Science, Technology & Society Program. His award-winning books include A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (2010) and The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996).

Edwards also previously taught at Stanford, from 1992 to 1998. He earned a doctorate in the history of consciousness at UC Santa Cruz (1988) and a bachelor’s degree in language and mind at Wesleyan University (1980).

Hecht and Edwards met in 1992 while co-teaching a course in Stanford’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society. They have taught together many times since then, most notably inaugurating a course on nuclear and climate catastrophes at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). They have also co-authored several essays, including an article on the technopolitics of apartheid and its opponents, which appeared in the leading Journal of Southern African Studies.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

Published in the journal Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, this new article by Siegfried Hecker and Paul C. White below is based on content in Hecker's 2016 book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers:

“Nuclear weapons stink when taken apart,” a Russian nuclear weapons engineer told his audience. The year was 2000, and he spoke to a group of Russian and American experts who were attending a workshop in Sarov, the Russian Los Alamos, on how to safely dismantle nuclear weapons. The engineer was right: Nuclear weapons being disassembled smell like rotten eggs or a high-school chemistry lab gone bad. They can contain high explosives, organic substances, uranium, plutonium, and many other materials. Over the years, these materials interact, outgas, corrode, and are subject to irradiation, producing a foul smell. Hardly anyone outside the room would have had any reason to be aware of this, so the engineer’s words inspired knowing nods, and acted like a wink or a secret handshake: The Russian and American nuclear scientists in the room shared a common bond.

It was a strange phenomenon. Until just 10 years previously, the experts’ respective governments had been adversaries. But Russian and American nuclear scientists shared ties that no one else in the world could appreciate. Working far apart, they and their forebears had ushered into existence the world’s most destructive weapon, the atom bomb. They had worked to improve it, manage it, and make sure it was reliable. Now, they were trying to keep nuclear weapons safe from accidents and secure against theft and sabotage as the two superpowers downsized their arsenals. The scientists and engineers knew something that few others understood: That the most dangerous time in a typical nuclear weapon’s life cycle is not when it is being created, transported, or readied for launch. Rather, it is when it is being taken apart. Corrosion, changes in the sensitivity of chemical high explosives, outgassing of various compounds, radiation damage, and dimensional changes all challenge the skills of weapons engineers and scientists. The experts in the room might once have been one another’s opponents in some sense, but many on each side had intimate knowledge of weapons disassembly—who else could better understand what their counterparts were going through? 

An urgent problem

The story of how the United States and Russia worked together to address weapons safety had begun years before, and represents a remarkable tale of once-mortal-adversaries cooperating on matters that took them right to the edges of their respective countries’ most sensitive nuclear secrets.

It started with the disastrous Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in April 1986. After briefly denying it had occurred, Moscow reached out to the international nuclear community for help mitigating the tragic consequences. Washington assisted quickly and effectively. Years later, Russian nuclear weapon scientists told their American counterparts (including the authors of this column) that the Chernobyl accident had happened because the Soviet Union was isolated. That is, Russian nuclear reactor designers, engineers, and operators had not had the opportunity to learn from their international peers. The weapon scientists assured us that the safety of nuclear bombs had always been much more rigorous. Yet the memory of the Chernobyl tragedy, and the enormous increase in the number of weapons being moved and disassembled, made Russian nuclear scientists keen to discuss concerns and safety practices with American counterparts.

The end of the Cold War all but eliminated immediate fears of a nuclear war. In an ironic twist of fate, though, it dramatically increased the risk of nuclear accidents and the potential for theft or diversion of nuclear weapons and materials. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia had to transport unprecedented numbers of weapons from former Soviet republics to Russia for dismantlement. No one was as sharply aware of the risks as Russia’s nuclear weapons personnel.

In the wake of the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives launched by George H.W. Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev in September and October of 1991, which promised transparency and dialogue on safe warhead transportation and storage, the Russians gave voice to their concerns. In Washington in November 1991, Viktor N. Mikhailov, later Russia’s minister of atomic energy, specifically requested help with weapon safety and security, as well as help storing the huge excess of fissile material that would result from the accelerated dismantlement of his country’s nuclear stockpile. The US Congress responded to these requests promptly by way of the Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction legislation.

The scope and timing of the Nunn-Lugar efforts matched the urgency of Russian requests. To deal with security concerns related to the surge in warhead transportation, the United States cooperated to develop accident-resistant transportation containers. It provided armored Kevlar blankets to shield warheads and warhead containers from terrorist bullets, and smart rail cars that enabled secure monitoring of warhead shipments. Washington also helped meet the new storage requirements (resulting from increased dismantlement rates) by providing containers and technical and financial support for the construction of a state-of-the-art fissile material storage facility at the Mayak site in Russia.

These Nunn-Lugar-sponsored efforts, managed by the US Defense Department and supported by the US national nuclear labs, were a good beginning, but the Russian nuclear weapons experts wanted to do more to mitigate the dangers. The extraordinary number of nuclear weapons returning from the field and waiting to be disassembled included some past their certified lifetime. During one of the first meetings of Russian and American nuclear experts at Los Alamos in December 1992, Rady I. Ilkaev, the deputy scientific director of the Russian national nuclear lab VNIIEF, proposed direct, unclassified consultations on nuclear weapon safety.

The Russians not only sought bilateral technical cooperation, but also believed that Russian-American teamwork would demonstrate an unparalleled level of transparency about nuclear safety, which would help reassure their own citizens and a worried world that remembered the Chernobyl tragedy all too well.

Ilkaev and his Russian colleagues took advantage of the lab-to-lab scientific collaborations that blossomed during the early 1990s to explore much closer cooperation on safety—an approach that resonated strongly with their US lab counterparts. Yet no government agreements were in place to allow such cooperation. So two tracks were pursued in parallel: The governments prepared for formal negotiations, while simultaneously allowing the labs to exchange sensitive but unclassified nuclear-weapon safety and security concerns and practices. This sharing took the form of symposia called the Security Technology Exchanges. 

Four such symposia were held between October 1993 and March 1994, two in each country, at which American and Russian scientists, engineers, and government officials compared experiences on a range of topics. Subjects included analyzing nuclear risk; mitigating risks posed by hazardous materials; understanding the response of engineered systems to abnormal environments; and communicating the content of technical documents. 

One of the most important topics discussed in these symposia and later exchanges was human reliability. The economic and political crisis resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union severely strained one of the foundations of nuclear weapon safety: people. One of the authors of this piece (Paul C. White) recalls that at a July 1993 planning meeting in Ekaterinburg, his Russian counterpart asked, “What do you do when you can no longer count on people to do what they’re supposed to do—to obey the rules?” Although the Russians’ confidence in the loyalty and patriotism of their nuclear workers remained high, they expressed concern that the fraying of the decades-old system of authority could give rise to insider threats.

A mutual strategic interest

These symposia opened doors, established a foundation for building trust, and nurtured professional and personal friendships that endure to this day. They also helped pave the way for government negotiations on the Weapons Safety and Security Exchange agreement, or WSSX, which the US energy secretary and Russian minister of atomic energy signed in December 1994. It entered into force in June 1995. 

In a March 1996 directive, US President Bill Clinton stated that cooperation on weapons safety and security was necessary to facilitate other US policy objectives, such as getting Russia to agree and comply with a true zero-yield Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Clinton authorized lab-to-lab collaboration between the three Russian and three US nuclear weapons labs, with the goal of sustaining the scientific competence of those responsible for the two countries’ respective nuclear stockpiles. His statement was remarkable for declaring that maintaining the expertise of Russian nuclear weapons scientists—America’s Cold War adversaries—was now a US strategic interest.

Although WSSX was an agreement between governments, the nuclear labs provided the driving energy and remained the centers of engagement for all related activities. Over the life of the agreement, which was renewed for five years in 2000, the two sides organized dozens of technical interactions, including symposia, joint studies, workshops, and exchanges of technical papers. The participants completed more than 100 collaborative projects on far-reaching and mutually beneficial topics. Among them were projects on accident response, responding to wildfires near nuclear facilities, and safety during warhead dismantlement. When Americans shared their experience of using a well-known industrial solvent—DMSO, or dimethyl sulfoxide—instead of mechanical methods to remove high explosives that had bonded to metal weapon parts, a Russian participant stood up and declared, “you have just given us a gift!” Such “gifts” were exchanged reciprocally to improve warhead disassembly on both sides.

The discussions on responding to wildfires would also prove mutually beneficial. It wasn’t just technical staff from Los Alamos and Sarov who got to participate in exchange visits. So, too, did the fire departments of the two cities. In May 2000, Los Alamos experienced a devastating fire that burned more than 400 residences and 30 percent of the lab’s real estate, and threatened facilities that housed high explosives, plutonium, and tritium. In 2010, Sarov had to battle a peat fire at the boundary of its nuclear complex. Los Alamos experienced another serious wildfire in 2011. 

The WSSX exchanges allowed experts to learn new ways of looking at similar problems, unquestionably benefiting each country’s handling of the safety and security of its nuclear weaponry. In the book Doomed to Cooperate, one Russian nuclear safety expert said the exchanges led his country to adopt new federal regulations on nuclear weapons safety and emergency response. 

Sadly, the WSSX agreement was not extended in 2005. The end of this remarkable period of cooperation came at the hands of governments, not scientists. Washington imposed more legal and bureaucratic strictures on joint projects, and veered away from prioritizing nuclear safety to promote an agenda of arms control and transparency. Moscow became increasingly resistant to the presence of US technical personnel at its nuclear facilities. During the last three years, as relations between the US and Russian governments have seriously deteriorated, virtually all nuclear cooperation has ended.

Nuclear safety has become more challenging as the designers and engineers who developed the weapons in today’s arsenals retire, and the experience of nuclear testing fades into distant memory. The older generation has passed on as much experience as possible to the younger engineers—particularly the idea that ensuring nuclear safety is a never-ending job. The WSSX projects demonstrated that cooperation has great safety benefits, and can be accomplished without jeopardizing either side’s nuclear secrets. The scientists and engineers on both sides are prepared to resume cooperation. The bonds they forged endure, reflecting a unique like-mindedness, a sort of simpatico professional relationship (or sympatiya in Russian) that helped make scientific engagement such a success and the world a safer place.

CISAC senior fellow Scott Sagan co-authored the following article with Benjamin A. Valentino, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College. They write that it's time to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons after the United Nations recently voted to permanently ban nuclear weapons. The essay was published July 16 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

On July 7, almost 72 years after the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert, 122 nations voted at the United Nations headquarters in New York to permanently ban nuclear weapons under international law. None of the nine states that possess nuclear weapons even attended the negotiations. The Netherlands was the sole NATO member to participate, and it cast the sole no vote. The ban treaty will be open for signatures from all UN member states beginning in September and will officially enter into force after 50 states have accepted it.

With not a single nuclear weapons state signing up as a member, even the treaty’s strongest proponents acknowledge that it is a largely an aspirational document designed to promote disarmament by delegitimizing nuclear weapons. “Weapons that are outlawed are increasingly seen as illegitimate, losing their political status and, along with it, the resources for their production, modernization, and retention” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has claimed. The treaty does not really “outlaw” or make nuclear weapons “illegal” under international law, however, because any state that is not a member of the treaty is not bound by its terms. Indeed, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement following the vote: “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it. Therefore, there will be no change in the legal obligations on our countries with respect to nuclear weapons. For example, we would not accept any claim that this treaty reflects or in any way contributes to the development of customary international law.”

The treaty, however, does stand as a symbol of missed opportunities. The energy, organization, and genuine passion that eventually resulted in the ban treaty were assets that might have been used to address dangerous realities about nuclear weapons that are too often ignored: the human costs of clean-up of waste sites and production facilities and the potential for nuclear winter or other environmental effects. These issues were front and center agenda items for the “humanitarian impact” movement that spawned the treaty and in the movement’s early meetings, but these critical concerns were sidelined as the push for a nuclear ban gathered steam. All that remains of these original objectives is a short section in the treaty (Article 6) requiring parties to the convention to remediate any environmental contamination caused by the use, production, or testing of nuclear weapons and to assist people who may have suffered harm from them. But since the nuclear weapons states have not signed the treaty, they are not under pressure to address these problems.

Since nuclear weapons will be with us for many years to come, it is critical that we work now to minimize the risks they pose to humanity. Proponents of the ban treaty were right to criticize the nuclear weapons states for sometimes failing to live up to their pledge under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” But that progress has been slow because states still rely on nuclear weapons for deterrence and because it has been difficult for states to imagine a way that global nuclear disarmament could be verified and enforced. The ban treaty does nothing to address these disarmament dilemmas.

International concerns about reducing the risks of accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons or to minimizing the past and future environmental impact of nuclear weapons infrastructure ought to be relatively easy to address. No country, after all, wants to suffer a nuclear accident (particularly since it would most likely occur on its own soil), or to leave their weapons vulnerable to theft or unauthorized use. Nor does any state wish to see its natural environment spoiled or the health of its citizens undermined, either by its own nuclear material or by contamination from a nuclear-armed neighbor.

There are good reasons to believe that these kinds of concerns represent the most pressing threats presented by nuclear weapons today. The United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to catastrophic nuclear accidents on multiple occasions during the Cold War. Although the safety of US nuclear weapons has improved in many respects, reports of serious mismanagement and lax security at nuclear sites continue. The United States spends between $5 billion and $6 billion a year on environmental restoration and waste management related to its nuclear weapons program and has paid out over $15 billion in compensation to nuclear weapons workers and “downwinders” exposed to radiation from early atmospheric tests. The total costs of the cleanup in the United States are estimated to eventually reach $347 billion—much more than the costs of producing the weapons in the first place.

All of these problems, unfortunately, are far worse in most other nuclear weapons states, where weapons safety technology, security procedures, and environmental protections lag far behind American standards. Cooperative efforts to address these problems are something that all states, both with and without nuclear weapons, should have been able to agree upon. The decision to use the momentum generated by concern for these humanitarian impacts to push instead for a divisive and ultimately ineffective ban, therefore, was a missed opening to make meaningful progress to reducing these hidden risks posed by nuclear weapons.

Proponents of the ban treaty nevertheless argue that by cementing the prohibition on nuclear weapons in international law they will intensify the stigma against nuclear weapons, discouraging new states from building them and eventually pressuring existing nuclear powers to disarm. “By stigmatizing nuclear weapons—declaring them unacceptable and immoral for all—the international community can start demanding and pressuring the nuclear-armed states and their military alliances to deliver what they’ve actually promised: a world free of nuclear weapons,” Beatrice Fihn, the executive director of ICAN, has written.

We see several serious problems with this approach.

First, the ethical and legal foundation for the treaty’s stigmatization of nuclear weapons is fundamentally flawed. The treaty explicitly notes that “any use of nuclear weapons would be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict” since the use of such weapons would invariably violate the Geneva Convention’s “rule of distinction, the prohibition against indiscriminate attacks, the rules on proportionality and precautions in attack, the prohibition on the use of weapons of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering, and the rules for the protection of the natural environment.” In fact, it is conceivable that nuclear weapons could be used in a manner consistent with international law and these principles of just war doctrine. For example it is possible that, in 2001, the use of a low yield nuclear weapon against the remote, deeply buried Al Qaeda caves in Tora Bora might have met the legal criteria of necessity and proportionality. If Al Qaeda had been preparing a WMD there, as some suspected, the legal case might have been even stronger. In our opinion, using nuclear weapons in that situation would have been exceptionally imprudent—ending the 70-year old tradition of the non-use of nuclear weapons would have set a precedent that could encourage others to use nuclear weapons in less discriminating ways— but it probably would not have been illegal. Although the list of scenarios in which the use of nuclear weapons might be legal and ethical is not long, a complete ban on the possession of nuclear weapons is simply not supported by reference to existing international law.

Second, the ban is likely counterproductive when it comes to increasing compliance with existing laws of war. The United States had already been moving in recent years to help bring its nuclear doctrine in line with international law. The official US Nuclear Employment Guidance rules now state explicitly that “the United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects” with nuclear weapons and that “all plans must be consistent with the fundamental principles of the Law of Armed Conflict” including the “principles of distinction and proportionality.” A debate (see here and here) has begun in the United States about how best to ensure that the US armed forces properly implement this guidance. The humanitarian impact movement could have focused on pressuring other states to adopt similar restrictions in targeting policies, but if possession itself is outlawed, discussions regarding the ethics and legality of nuclear use doctrine are no longer possible.

Finally, there is simply no evidence to suggest that the ban’s approach to stigmatizing nuclear weapons will be an effective path to disarmament. Research on compliance with norms and laws ranging from tax evasion and other illegal behaviors, to excessive drinking, and on to energy conservation shows that one of the strongest predictors of compliance is an individual’s belief about the probability that others in the appropriate reference group will also comply. In the case of the ban, all nuclear weapons states know that the rate of compliance among other nuclear weapons states is zero. Such a ban, therefore, might ultimately do more to undermine the gradual and step-by-step disarmament norm rather than strengthen it.

This highlights another opportunity missed by the ban movement: the opportunity to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Public education is vital to addressing nuclear dangers because proponents of the ban may have overestimated the degree to which an anti-nuclear norm has taken root. Public opinion polls do show high levels of opposition to nuclear use and strong support for the principle of nuclear disarmament, even among nuclear states. For example, a 2008 poll of 21 countries found that majorities (or a plurality in the case of Pakistan) favored an international agreement in which “all countries with nuclear weapons would be required to eliminate them according to a timetable. All other countries would be required not to develop them. All countries … would be monitored to make sure they are following the agreement.” Seventy-seven percent of Americans, 86 percent of French, and 81 percent of Britons favored the agreement. Polls like this, however, almost never provide subjects with specific information about the scenarios in which nuclear weapons might be used or whether and how a disarmament treaty might be enforced. In the United States, where the most extensive polling on nuclear issues has been conducted, a separate poll found that only 25 percent of Americans agreed that “the total elimination of all nuclear weapons is possible,” and in another poll only six percent agreed that “nuclear weapons are morally wrong, and the United States should proceed to eliminate its arsenal whether or not others follow our lead.”

Our own public opinion research shows that significant majorities of the American public are willing to use nuclear weapons first when they are perceived as providing significant advantages over conventional weapons or when they might save large numbers of American soldiers’ lives by eliminating the need for a bloody ground war. We found similar results in a public opinion survey in India in 2015. Support for nuclear use in both countries remained high even when respondents were reminded that nuclear weapons were estimated to kill tens of thousands of civilians or more. These findings suggest that we cannot count on grassroots, mass public campaigns to pressure the governments of nuclear weapons states to disarm. Instead, we need to better educate the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons and how they might undermine rather than guarantee the safety of nations. Ironically, that was exactly what the humanitarian impact movement initially set out to do.

CISAC co-director Amy Zegart wrote this July 11 essay in The Atlantic on what the Donald Trump Jr. emails mean:

Line by ugly line, Donald J. Trump Jr.’s emails with British-born former tabloid reporter and Russian intermediary Rob Goldstone are now plastered on The New York Times website. They reveal an astounding set of communications. Goldstone promises incriminating information about Hillary Clinton that could be used in the campaign—with the Kremlin’s backing. Junior’s response should have been to speed dial the FBI. Instead, he writes three little words with big, big consequences: “I love it.”

It’s quite a turn for the First Son. Just a few months ago, The New York Times gave him a fawning spread replete with woodsy photos. Now his association with dirt doesn’t look quite so good.

My three big takeaways from this breaking story:

1) The key word in The New York Times piece is “flurry.” There isn’t one email exchange. There are many. Trump Jr.’s email “dump” will not be the end of the story. Instead, as Churchill once said, it’s just the end of the beginning. Investigators and journalists will be following the email trail.

2) Even the emails released so far paint a damning portrait. The “we didn’t know better, we’re just amateurs” defense with respect to foreign policy—which the White House has been using to this point—will not hold up. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended the now-infamous June 9, 2016 meeting with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Manafort is no neophyte in this world. He has worked on multiple Republican presidential campaigns over decades. What’s more, the red line, whether it’s a legal or political one, is: “Thou shalt not work with foreign powers to gain advantage in a U.S. election.” As former FBI director Jim Comey would put it, there is no fuzz on this whatsoever. Even if the foreign power involved were the Brits and not the Russians, meeting with a foreign government to get opposition dirt for a U.S. presidential election is wrong and probably illegal.

3) It is telling that every new piece of hard information major newspapers have reported recently about the Russian meddling in the 2016 election—every single one—supports the Intelligence Community’s conclusions about it. In January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the community's assessment that “Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election,” and that he and his government “aspired to help president-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.” The reporting has yet to implicate Putin himself, but Goldstone’s email citing a Russian official’s offer to “provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia,” as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump” is the clearest public evidence yet of the IC’s conclusion. And the emails were released by Trump Jr. himself—right before The New York Times posted them.

We need to stop saying of the intelligence community—as Donald Trump Sr. has encouraged—“These are the people who brought us Iraq WMD” and start saying, “These are the same people who found bin Laden.” In fact, Donald Trump Jr. proudly displays an American flag signed by members of SEAL Team Six—the unit that took out bin Laden—in his office. Junior should have thought harder about the kind of intel that helped the SEALs succeed—and what it might mean for his father.

Amy Zegart is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Professor of Political Science, by courtesy. She is also the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and directs the Cyber Policy Program. She is a contributing editor to The Atlantic.

On July 7, the William J. Perry Project issued the following statement from CISAC's William J. Perry regarding the adoption of the UN Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, which was approved by the UN on the same day: 

"The new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is an important step towards delegitimizing nuclear war as an acceptable risk of modern civilization. Though the treaty will not have the power to eliminate existing nuclear weapons, it provides a vision of a safer world, one that will require great purpose, persistence, and patience to make a reality. Nuclear catastrophe is one of the greatest existential threats facing society today, and we must dream in equal measure in order to imagine a world without these terrible weapons."

The UN treaty places a strong moral imperative against possessing nuclear weapons and gives a voice to some 130 non-nuclear weapons states who are equally affected by the existential risk of nuclear weapons. There is no one solution to this global threat, and there is much more work to be done beyond this treaty to reduce this risk. I call on nuclear-armed states to step up their participation in the fight against the nuclear threat by securing the eight remaining ratifications to enact the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, extending the New START agreement, continuing the critical work of the Nuclear Security Summits, and avoiding the unnecessary risk posed by introducing destabilizing new nuclear weapons. My hope is that this treaty will mark a sea change towards global support for the abolition of nuclear weapons. This global threat requires unified global action."

Read more about the treaty here.

William J. Perry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, recently joined other nuclear and diplomatic experts in writing a letter to President Trump urging diplomatic talks with North Korea; wrote a Politico op-ed on how to make a deal with North Korea; and delivered the 2017 Barnett-Oksenberg Lecture on issues between China and the United States. Perry is the director of the Preventive Defense Project at CISAC.

CISAC's Rodney Ewing and co-author Allison Macfarlane explain in this commentary article in Science magazine how the U.S. can overcome major obstacles to its current nuclear waste program. They note, "Nuclear facilities, whether for disposal or interim storage, take decades to plan, license, and build. Moreover, sustained opposition to a nuclear facility can prevail, simply because opponents only need to succeed occasionally to derail large, complicated projects. The United States needs a strategy that can persist over decades, not just until the next election." Read more.

The CISAC Fellowship Program is training and educating the next generation of thought leaders and policy makers in international security.

Our fellows spend the academic year engaged in research and writing, and participate in seminars and collaborate with faculty and researchers. Every summer, many complete their fellowships and move on to new career endeavors. For the 2016-17 academic year, CISAC hosted 21 fellows (the center has 399 former fellows).

Some of our fellows, in their own words, explain what they will be doing next:

Andreas Lutsch

Having spent two years as a nuclear security postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, I return to my home institution, the Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Germany. As a historian of late modern history, I do so in great gratitude for an excellent and abundantly rich scholarly experience at Stanford. Once I am back in Germany, I will publish my first book early next year, the manuscript of which I finalized at CISAC. I will also proceed to publish the manuscript of my second book, which I wrote entirely at Stanford. And I will move towards the pursuit of the so-called “habilitation,” which is required (in Germany) to qualify for a position as a full professor in my home country. 

It is not easy to put into a few words how much my CISAC experience has helped me with making progress at a crucial juncture of my career. CISAC fellowships offered me a transformative opportunity to make my research more rigorous, to think more creatively and more carefully, to appreciate interdisciplinary approaches in addressing complex problems, to improve my teaching abilities, and to establish relationships with leading scholars and specialists, which I hope will be long-lasting ties to communities at CISAC, Stanford, and the U.S.

Anna Péczeli

I have a tenured position at my institute in Hungary so I will move home in August and get back to teaching and research.

My CISAC experience was amazing, from the beginning I felt that I was part of a community here. I got much useful feedback on my research, and I really feel that my work improved in quality and I became a better researcher. I learned a lot about how to present my ideas so that it would be relevant for policy makers, and my fellowship opened new doors for me. I am grateful for this opportunity, and I am certain that I will continue to be an active member of the CISAC community wherever I go.

Eric Min

During the 2017-2018 academic year, I will remain at CISAC. As a social sciences postdoctoral fellow, I will study how international actors and third parties utilize diplomacy to manage and resolve interstate conflicts. This builds upon my broader research agenda, which uses new quantitative data and statistical methods to analyze the strategic logic of negotiations during war. 

Given that I came from a predominantly social science background, my year at CISAC was invaluable in helping me to understand the policymaking world and how my research could more effectively communicate the technicalities of my research to a broader informed yet general audience. I also learned about what kinds of pressing questions concern policymakers, which I will use to shape my future work. I look forward to meeting another group of diverse and knowledgeable individuals next year. 

Jennifer L. Erickson

This fall, I will return to my regular life at Boston College, where I am an associate professor of political science and international studies. In the upcoming academic year, I will continue to work on the research I worked on at CISAC on new weapons and the laws and norms of war and the nuclear weapons portion of my project in particular. I will also teach two sections of the Introduction to International Studies for BC undergraduates and the Field Seminar in International Politics for BC graduate students. In the fall, I also look forward to being affiliated with the Security Studies Program at MIT. 

CISAC has been a tremendous source of academic support for my research. Not only has it given me time and resources to do research and write, but it has also introduced me to new colleagues, who have generously provided insights and expertise that have improved that research. It also made it possible for me to attend events like a conference on New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology, and War at the Air Force Academy in April 2017, the Military Immersion Map Exercise at RAND in May 2017, and the UN Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons in June 2017.

These experiences, as well as all of the opportunities to attend events and meet people at CISAC itself, will continue to shape how I think about my research and teaching and have helped me build new professional networks for the long term.

Cameron Tracy

In the next academic year, I will be a postdoc in Stanford’s Department of Geological Sciences. There, I will continue my work on the role of geologic disposal (burial) of weapons plutonium in the global arms control and disarmament regimes. I will also conduct scientific research on the manner in which nuclear materials change in response to their environments. For example, I am currently starting a project in which I attempt to determine the conditions in which uranium-bearing materials have been stored by studying the oxidation and hydration of their surfaces. This could help to determine the provenance of smuggled uranium that has been interdicted by law enforcement or security authorities. 

My fellowship at CISAC has allowed me to translate my scientific skills to the policy realm, and to greatly expand the impact of my work. I have long been interested in science policy, but lacked the resources, connections, and experience necessary to effectively analyze critical issues and to communicate the results to both scholarly and governmental audiences. Through interactions with CISAC’s resident policy experts, I learned about the role that technical analysis can play in the policymaking process.

While my transition to policy-relevant work is ongoing, my efforts have already yielded some impact on international policy, with an Australian Royal Commission report citing my work on quantifying the long-term risks associated with the burial of nuclear materials. I expect that the valuable experience and mentorship I received over the course of my CISAC fellowship will continue to inform and enhance my work at the interface of nuclear science and policy.

Jooeun Kim

I will become the Jill Hopper Memorial Fellow at Georgetown University and will be teaching a course, the History and Politics of Nuclear Proliferation, in spring 2018. From August this year, I will be a visiting scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. CISAC provided me with amazing resources. I loved my intellectually stimulating meetings with my mentor Scott Sagan and other amazing scholars who opened their office doors to me. CISAC is an ‘intellectual candy store.’ I am grateful to everyone there for creating such a special environment.

Andrea Gilli

Starting July 1, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where I will keep working on my research about technology and international security.

The CISAC experience helped my career in three main ways. First, CISAC is a fantastic academic environment where young researchers can deal with leading scholars in a plurality of fields: the constant interactions between different views and expertise represent a unique source of intellectual growth that has helped me develop new ideas and identify new questions in my field.

Second, CISAC's activities and professional growth initiatives help fellows gain the skills and acquire the knowledge to succeed not only as an academic but also, more broadly, as public intellectual. CISAC has helped me improve my understanding of policy dynamics as well as my capacity to present to non-experts the findings of my research. Third, CISAC's "be-good" motto combined with its strong mentorship provides fellows with a perfect working environment.

Eva C. Uribe

This fall, I will be starting my position as a systems research analyst at Sandia National Lab. For my research here at CISAC, I have taken a broad, holistic look at the proliferation impact of the thorium fuel cycle. Therefore, CISAC has given me valuable experience in thinking through difficult problems using a systematic, top-down approach, which is a skill that I will take with me to my next position.

Accepting a postdoctoral fellowship with CISAC was an unconventional career move for me, personally. I got my doctorate in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2016. Most of my peers in the chemistry department went on to conduct postdoctoral research at another university, a national lab, or in industry. A few made the leap into science policy fellowships in Washington, D.C. For me, CISAC provided a happy compromise between these two options. It allowed me the freedom to continue conducting technical research (albeit outside the chemistry lab), while still exploring the policy implications of my research.

My experience at CISAC helped my career progression in two ways. First, through targeted workshops, reading groups, and less formal daily interactions, CISAC provided me with the opportunity to view my research and interests from a different lens, that of the policymaker.  It was interesting to see my fellow fellows, of all academic backgrounds, struggling with how to translate the finer points of their academic research into policy-relevant media. I learned a lot from their experiences and challenges. The second way that CISAC has helped my career progression was through exposure to others who have done this transition successfully. This was achieved through fantastic seminar series, as well as through daily interaction with faculty and fellows here at CISAC. Speaking with people who have worked at high levels in Washington, D.C. made me realize that I would prefer to continue doing policy-relevant academic and technical research in nuclear science, rather than to transition to policy completely.

Fellowship information

Current fellowship opportunities at CISAC include: 

•  Social Sciences or Humanities International Security Fellowship

•  Natural Sciences or Engineering International Security Fellowship

•  Cybersecurity and International Security Fellowship

•  Law and International Security Fellowship

•  Nuclear Security Fellowship

•  William J. Perry Fellowship in International Security

For more information about CISAC fellowships, email cisacfellowship@stanford.edu.