Abstract: Scholars know quite a lot about U.S. nuclear war planning from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War. We know a great deal about how nuclear deterrence was and is supposed to work. We know much less about how officers and others understood the circumstances and consequences if deterrence had failed and these plans had been used in war. What was it like to make very specific and workable plans for a war that, in President Ronald Reagan’s words, “cannot be won and must never be fought”—but nonetheless—might have been fought? This is a problem of understanding how organizations build complex technical and logistical routines, and how people in these organizations understood and made sense of the possibility that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons would be used. How did war planners imagine the circumstances? The scenarios of what might ensue? The consequences? It is one thing to say the whole situation was a paradox, or a conundrum; it is another to understand the many meanings of this situation for those involved. Explanation hinges on how people in organizations make plans, develop scenarios, and tell stories.

About the Speaker: Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

Abstract: In the early morning hours of March 28, 1979, began a series of events that led to a partial meltdown of the reactor core at Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the worst accident in the history of the commercial nuclear power industry in the United States. Catalyzed by this event, the industry leadership formed an independent oversight entity, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, resourced its technical staffing, and ceded significant authorities to it in the areas of operational oversight, training and accreditation, the sharing of operational experience and provision of assistance to plants in need. As the former President and CEO of INPO, Admiral Ellis will discuss the requirements for effective self-regulation, specifically, and consider the issues surrounding broader employment of the concept.

About the Speaker: James O. Ellis Jr. is an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a CISAC Affiliate. He retired as president and chief executive officer of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), a self-regulatory nonprofit located in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 18, 2012. In 2004, Admiral Ellis completed a thirty-nine-year US Navy career as commander of the United States Strategic Command. In this role, he was responsible for the global command and control of US strategic and space forces. 

His sea service included carrier-based tours with three fighter squadrons and command of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. His shore assignments included commander in chief, US Naval Forces, Europe, and Allied Forces, Southern Europe, where he led United States and NATO forces in combat and humanitarian operations during the 1999 Kosovo crisis. 

Ellis holds two masters’ degrees in aerospace engineering and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.