Failing to renew the New START arms control treaty with Russia “is not a wise direction of travel,” said Rose Gottemoeller, a former Deputy Secretary General of NATO who ranked as one of President Barack Obama’s top nuclear security experts. 

She knows better than most. Gottemoeller was the chief US negotiator at the Moscow and Geneva talks where details of the treaty were hammered out between 2009 and 2010. Officially ratified a year later, New START limited both the United States and Russia to seven hundred delivery vehicles and just over double that count in total warheads, and was reinforced with a stringent verification process to closely monitor each country’s compliance. 

Read the rest at National Interest

Just days before the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bulletin hosted a global webinar featuring Scott Sagan, Bulletin SASB member and Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; Allen Weiner, director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law; led by Sara Kutchesfahani, director of N Square DC Hub.

Watch at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States used the most powerful weapons developed until that time to attack the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because the atomic bombings caused such extraordinary damage amid an already-disrupted wartime Japan, the number of people who died as a direct result of the attack can’t be pinpointed. Initial US military estimates placed the immediate death toll at 70,000 in Hiroshima and 40,000 in Nagasaki. Later independent estimates suggest that 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and 70,000 were killed in Nagasaki.

Read the rest at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

In 2018, Russian scientist Vladimir Shmakov walked past the doors of the library for the Physics and Mathematics department at the Russian Federal Nuclear Center for Technical Physics (VNIITF). A display of new books caught his attention. It included a two-volume set of Doomed to Cooperate, and on the cover was a photograph he took in 1992.

Read the rest at Los Alamos Daily Post

Watch the conversation at Bridging the Gap

The archival record makes clear that killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; destruction of military targets and war industry was a secondary goal and one that “legitimized” the intentional destruction of a city in the minds of some participants. The atomic bomb was detonated over the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. There could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons in future scenarios in which many American soldiers’ lives are at risk and there is no guarantee that a future US president would follow the law of armed conflict. That is why the United States needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance and presidents who care about law and justice in war.

Read the rest at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Jason Reinhardt was leading a multi-lab effort within Sandia National Laboratories to improve the United States’ ability to detect and prevent illegal nuclear material from entering the country.

A senior member of Sandia’s technical staff at that time, Reinhardt would explain the technical dimensions of his work to policy experts and inevitably hear the same questions: “How do I understand the risk?” or “How do I compare the different risks involved?”

Reinhardt wanted to know more about the discipline of risk analysis so, in 2011, he returned to Stanford (where he’d earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2005) to pursue a PhD in Management Science and Engineering, with Prof. M. E. Paté-Cornell, the department’s founding chair, as his advisor. He focused on creating a systematic and risk analytic look at the technical and political components of nuclear deterrence.

Reinhardt also worked with Siegfried Hecker, a professor in Management Science and Engineering who was then the Science Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Hecker introduced Reinhardt to his CISAC colleagues and encouraged him to attend the weekly seminars where political scientists, historians and diplomats presented their ideas on critical international issues.

“CISAC was one of the places where policy-inclined technical people could sort of bathe in policy discussions for a while,” Reinhardt said. “I use that terminology, really just soak in it.”

In the seminars, lectures and other events, Reinhardt studied how policy experts thought and talked. “I came over there and started listening,” he said. “Oh, that’s what the debate’s really about. I’m a lab geek, I thought it was a technical problem.”

If the problem were strictly technical, Reinhardt would have been able to speak with authority. He had no trouble discussing probability distributions, modeling approaches and complicated mathematical equations with other science-minded souls. But nuclear deterrence demands collaboration across academic disciplines—the hard sciences as well as political theory, international relations, and economics—and Reinhardt wanted policy makers to see the full picture and understand his ideas and their implications for policy.

“CISAC was a bootcamp of how to interact in the policy world, how to understand how that world thinks and acts,” Reinhardt said.

While pursuing his PhD, Reinhardt accepted a pre-doctoral fellowship at CISAC and enjoyed exploring this new world. But, an engineer by training, he also wanted to dig into a project where he could flex his technical skills while sitting elbow-to-elbow with political scientists, international relations experts and other policy wonks.

Hecker, an internationally-recognized expert in nuclear security and a former director of Los Alamos National Labs, understood the desire and had the solution. Hecker had been working with the Russian government for years, beginning after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1989, to secure Russian nuclear assets. For nearly as long, he’d also been working with the Chinese government to make sure their nuclear assets did not fall into the wrong hands.

Siegfried Hecker presenting to American and Chinese national security scholars.

Hecker invited Reinhardt to join the project at the Stanford Center at Peking University, a mini-campus that serves as a bridge across the Pacific for faculty and students from Stanford’s seven schools.

“Jason was just superb,” Hecker said of Reinhardt. “When you combine his Sandia background with his work with Eisabeth Pate-Cornell at MS&E, you have some of the world’s leading expertise in systems analysis which means a very methodical, engineering look at how you make decisions under complex environments.” 

In China, Reinhardt teamed with Larry Brandt and Leonard Connell, who were both CISAC affiliates and risk analysts at Sandia, to create a course that applied a systems analysis approach to nuclear terrorism. They ran the exercise with Chinese professionals to explore the probability of terrorists obtaining and transporting nuclear materials.

“We had a proper seat to learn how Track II interactions between countries are done,” Reinhardt said. 

Jason Reinhardt giving talk at SCPKU on systems approach to verification of North Korea’s Nuclear program in Beijing, Oct. 2019.

Hecker, Reinhardt and the others traveled back and forth to China a few times a year—until COVID stopped international trips—to share their knowledge and deepen the understanding of the risks. The experience energized Reinhardt.

“Where else are you going to get that?” he asked. “I was able to sit down and have a technical analytic discussion about a nuclear issue with Chinese researchers who are thinking about the same thing.”

On Stanford’s campus, Reinhardt often found himself in equally intense conversations with CISAC faculty and international security experts like former Secretary of Defense William Perry, Scott Sagan, a leading authority on the politics of nuclear risk, and Martha Crenshaw, who is among the world’s top experts in terrorism.

Reinhardt also observed courses like “International Security in a Changing World,” which Crenshaw co-taught with Amy Zegart, a political scientist who advised the Clinton and Bush Administrations on foreign policy, national security and intelligence. 

When he returned to Sandia, with the wealth of international experience and a newly minted PhD, Reinhardt was quickly promoted to a role where he oversees 20-some people who focus on risk analysis around cyber threats to critical infrastructure in the US.

“Essentially, I build methodology for people to think about really nasty problems from a risk perspective in a national security sphere,” he said. “I’ve worked on that for nuclear weapons, for deterrence, and now for cyber stuff.”

Reinhardt also spends time educating colleagues so individuals on either side of the tech/policy divide can talk to one another. And he’s engaging with Purdue University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, through Sandia’s Academic Alliance, to help propose a new course, learning from those he observed at Stanford such as the one Crenshaw and Zegart taught.

When Reinhardt reflects on his time at CISAC, he says it didn’t convert him from a technical expert into a policy expert as much as it introduced him to their world and allowed him to be more effective working within it.

“Because of the fellowship, you’re going to understand how policy people think and you’re going to understand their world enough that you can actually talk to them,” Reinhardt said. “And hopefully, if you do your job right, they’ll start to understand the technical world so that they can talk to you.”

The Stanford Center at Peking University.

This is the first in an on-going series of profiles of CISAC pre- and post-doctoral fellows.

Seventy-five years ago, before 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, Los Alamos scientists successfully conducted the world’s first nuclear weapons test. The test, which physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer named "Trinity" after a line from a poem by John Donne, altered the course of World War II, changed the way scientific discoveries are pursued, and cemented the relationship between science and national security.

Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for over three decades and served as director for nearly 12 of those years. He joined CISAC in 2005 and served as the Center’s Science Co-director from 2007 – 2012.

In a video produced by Los Alamos to commemorate the historic events of 1945, Hecker reflects on the meaning of that moment. Here, Hecker answers questions to place those events into context of today’s national security landscape and his current work.

As you say in the video, the Trinity project brought scientists from all over the world to Los Alamos and asked them to collaborate on the most sensitive project for the American government. At the time, that must have seemed radical, but did multidisciplinary, international collaboration become the norm?

 It may seem odd, but it would be more difficult today than it was then. The U.S. was at war and concerned about Hitler’s Germany winning the race to the atomic bomb. It was actually the Brits that tried to convince President Roosevelt to mount a major effort to build the bomb. It was Europe that was the center of great physics at the time and it was Hitler who caused many of the best scientists to flee Europe and come to the United States – we welcomed them with open arms. We had the industrial capacity to mount such an enormous enterprise and did not have the enemy at our doorstep. But we needed their scientific skills and could not have developed the bomb in 27 months without them. Unfortunately, today we have retreated to more of a bunker mentality and are not as welcoming as we were then. For that matter, we’re not as welcoming as we were in 1956, when America allowed me to immigrate from Austria.  

The scientists involved in this project had the agility to switch designs as they made new discoveries. Could you describe the type of talent and skills that allowed them to pursue new ideas so quickly?

Success of the Manhattan Project is typically viewed as the work of physicists. But it was really an incredible array of talent – spanning physics, chemistry, mathematics, computing, engineering, materials and others, that allowed it to deal with surprises like the gun-assembly not working with plutonium. That collaboration also allowed the team to redirect its energy when they found out that although plutonium may have been the physicist’s dream, it was an engineering nightmare. The metallurgists found a fix by adding a bit of gallium as I explain in the video. Understanding why that’s so occupied a good part of my scientific life at Los Alamos.

How does your time at Los Alamos National Laboratory relate to the work you do now with students and pre- and post-doctoral fellows at CISAC?

Once the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, I turned much of my attention to working with the Russian nuclear establishment to mitigate the new nuclear dangers resulting from the political chaos. My Russian nuclear colleagues and I captured twenty-plus years of collaboration in our book Doomed to Cooperate. It turned out that CISAC became a great place for me to continue this work in 2005 and to expand it to the other nuclear countries around the world. Once at Stanford, I found that one of the most rewarding things I could do was to teach and work with students and post-docs. That’s what I continue to do today in what we call Young Professionals Nuclear Forums. We bring together around a dozen young Americans to work with their counterparts in Russia on nuclear challenges. We do the same with Chinese and American young professionals.

Since its founding, CISAC has always had two directors—one with a science background and the other from the social sciences. As both a former director of CISAC and Los Alamos, can you explain how an academic center like CISAC, with that kind of combined leadership, can help to prepare the next generation of thinkers in international security?

That’s one of the things that attracted me to CISAC. From CISAC’s founding days of John Lewis (political science) and Sid Drell (physics), the Center has tackled problems at the intersection of the natural and social sciences. And, that’s where the hard problems lie. By focusing on the challenges that arise at this intersection, CISAC can help to educate the next generation of national security specialists to tackle the world’s difficult problems. It’s a great place to be if you are interested in international security.

Watch The Science of Trinity