Abstract: Once limited by concerns about its technological feasibility, affordability and destabilizing potential, today, missile defense is becoming a multinational enterprise deployed on a global scale. The 21st century renaissance of missile defense technology has been powered by the belief that the capability to defend against ballistic missiles will reduce nuclear risks in the post-cold-war era. The assumptions that underpin this conclusion are challenged by a shift in the international security environment – the re-emergence of Russia, a major nuclear power, as a regional threat to the United States and its European allies. Both Cold War and more recent scholarship cannot fully explain contemporary dynamics. I will provide an overview of the current U.S., NATO and Russian missile defense programs and discuss their strategic, operational and technical dimensions. I will explain why we need a new understanding of the relationship between missile defense and nuclear weapons in the current strategic environment.

About the Speaker: Ivanka Barzashka is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC. Her research focuses on how ballistic missile defense (BMD) affects nuclear risks in the changing strategic environment. She is concurrently a researcher at the Department of War Studies of King’s College London (KCL). As a visiting scholar at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Barzashka examined options for Bulgarian active participation in NATO’s BMD system, for which she did fieldwork at NATO’s Joint Forces Training Center in Poland. She also assessed technical options for BMD cooperation between NATO and Russia in collaboration with American, European and Russian scientists. Barzashka continued that project at the Centre for Science and Security Studies at KCL, where she developed a physics-based model for assessing BMD effectiveness for policy applications.

Abstract: Numerous polls show that U.S. public approval of Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has declined significantly since 1945. Scholars and pundits have suggested that this is a sign of the emergence of a “nuclear taboo.”  Such polls, however, do not force respondents to contemplate the tradeoff the U.S. government believed it faced in 1945: choosing between the use of nuclear weapons and a ground invasion of Japan to end the Pacific War. This paper reports on survey experiments recreating that kind of a tradeoff in a hypothetical war with Iran. In order to avoid a ground assault on Tehran that was predicted to kill 20,000 American soldiers, 60% of the U.S. public approved of an atomic attack on an Iranian city that would kill 100,000 civilians and 60% approved of an atomic attack that would kill 2,000,000 civilians. Sixty-seven percent preferred a conventional bombing attack that was estimated to kill 100,000 Iranian civilians. Moreover, the prospect of killing more noncombatants appeared to trigger beliefs in retribution and complicity, as a way of justifying the decisions. Our findings suggest that U.S. public support for the principle of noncombatant immunity is shallow. 

About the Speaker: Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Project Chair for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Initiative on New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology, and War and as Senior Advisor for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Global Nuclear Future Initiative. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1984 to 1985, he served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan 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: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000) with Peter R. Lavoy and James L. Wirtz; the editor of Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2009); and co-editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus, On the Global Nuclear Future (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010), with Steven E. Miller. Sagan’s recent publications include “A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament” in Nature (July 2012); “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons” with Daryl G. Press and Benjamin A. Valentino in the American Political Science Review (February 2013); and, with Matthew Bunn, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences occasional paper, “A Worst Practices Guide to Insider Threats: Lessons from Past Mistakes” (2014).

Sagan was the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015 and the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award in 2013. 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. 

Abstract: Why do states acquire nuclear weapons? Existing theories of nuclear proliferation fail to account for the impact of bargaining on the process---i.e., credible agreements exist in which rival states make sufficient concessions to convince the potential rising state not to proliferate. I show the existence of that range of settlements and the robustness of the inefficiency puzzle and then provide two main explanations as to why states proliferate anyway. First, if the would-be proliferator expects to lose the ability to construct nuclear weapons in the future, the states face a commitment problem: the rival state would like to promise to continue providing concessions into the future but will renege once proliferation is no longer an option. And second, if the proliferator's rival faces some sort of uncertainty---whether regarding the potential proliferator's ability to go nuclear or regarding its previous proliferation activity---the optimal offer can entail positive probability of nuclear investment. However, the nonproliferation regime's mission to increase the cost of building often leads to Pareto improvement. Put differently, rising states sometimes benefit directly by making their nuclear options more costly.

About the Speaker: William Spaniel received a PhD in international relations, formal theory, and quantitative methodology from the University of Rochester in 2015. His research investigates the credibility of nuclear agreements in the absence of verifiable compliance. As a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC for 2015-2016, he is working on the potentially perverse effects of nuclear safeguards. His publications have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, International Interactions, and The Journal of Theoretical Politics.

Abstract: The nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran moved the International Atomic Energy Agency to the center of public attention. Based on multi-archival research and oral history interviews, this talk will look into the early history of the IAEA’s nuclear inspectorate. The foundations of today’s safeguards system were laid in the mid-1950s, when a group of twelve nations negotiated the Statute of the IAEA. In the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union abandoned its formerly critical stance on nuclear safeguards. Following the entry-into-force of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) comprehensive safeguards were introduced. The control of diversion was at the heart of the IAEA’s early safeguards system, while it neglected other aspects of the proliferation problem, such as the distribution of dual-use technology and related knowledge, or the development of clandestine nuclear programs. It was not lack of knowledge or imagination, but the complex technical, political, and legal background that was the reason for this limitation.

About the Speaker: Elisabeth Roehrlich is a senior researcher and project director at the University of Vienna’s Department of Contemporary History, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. She received her PhD. in History from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and held fellowships at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., and Monash South Africa. Her research focuses on the history of international relations and the evolution of the global nuclear order. She is the author of a prize-winning book about the former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky (Kreisky’s Außenpolitik, Vienna University Press, 2009), and her work on the IAEA has been published or is forthcoming in journals such the IAEA Bulletin and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Roehrlich has been awarded funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and the Austrian Central Bank to support her research on the IAEA.