The president, surrounded by his Cabinet members and senior national security and foreign policy advisors, appears grim as he declares: “This is certainly the greatest crisis I’ve ever faced as a president.”

He has ordered the deployment of U.S. forces into Syrian territory to protect civilians and establish safe zones. His Cabinet must now determine whether to order a pre-emptive strike against Syrian troops on word from the CIA that the Bashar al-Assad regime appears ready to use chemical and biological weapons stored in underground bunkers east of Damascus.

After a military briefing by the commander of CENTCOM, the president cautions those assembled at the classified briefing: “Remember, history will judge us, in part, by how thoroughly we discuss all the options today.”

With imagined top-secret memorandums from the CIA and the White House – as well as the real-deal Obama Nuclear Posture Review – some 20 Stanford undergraduate and law students dressed in suits and armed with laptops and position papers spend three hours debating the merits of an attack on Syrian forces.

Scott Sagan, a political science professor and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), plays Obama in the class co-taught by Allen Weiner, director of the Center on International Conflict and Negotiation at the Law School.

The Ethics and Law of War class presents law and political science students with some of the political, legal and moral consequences of war. For their final simulation, they must stay in character, grill one another as policymakers and world leaders might do behind closed doors – and then defend their final decisions.

“Instead of simply learning abstract just-war theory or international law doctrine, the simulations encourage students to apply what they've learned to real problems,” says Weiner, once a legal adviser at the State Department. “This provides for much deeper awareness of the subject matter and richer appreciation of the nuances and complexities.

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Scott Sagan as President Obama

Ethics & War

The class grew out of Stanford’s hugely successful, two-year War & Ethics lecture series, which concluded last month. Philosophers, writers, journalists, historians, social scientists, human rights activists and policy makers came together several times a month to grapple with the complex ethical equations of war. Co-sponsored by a dozen centers and departments across campus, the series drew big names and big crowds.

Vietnam War veterans and award winning authors Tobias Wolff – a Stanford English professor – and Tim O’Brien told a sold-out audience that writing about war was both therapeutic and heartbreaking. O’Brien was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “The Things They Carried,” a harrowing string of stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.

How do you write about war? “You do it sentence by sentence, line by line, character by character, even syllable by syllable,’ O’Brien told a mesmerized audience. “You dive into that wreck and try to salvage something.”

Journalist Sebastian Junger spoke at the screening of  “Restrepo,” his documentary about the Afghanistan War. Stanford students and faculty performed in George Packer’s play, “Betrayed,” which illuminated the U.S. abandonment of young Iraqi interpreters who risked their lives for Washington during the Iraq War. For the final event, Debra Satz, a philosophy professor and director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Sagan, and Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force general who now leads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University, debated the future ethical challenges of war.

Sagan, an expert in nuclear policy and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction who worked at the Pentagon and was a consultant to the Secretary of Defense, said the lecture series enriched his students by forcing them to pay attention and question the moral and legal underpinnings of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I was stretched, intellectually, by this series,” he said. “It encouraged me to read and discuss both fiction and philosophy that raises the same ethical issues – from a very different perspective – that we analyze in political science.”

Back to class

Weiner, as stand-in for Vice President Joe Biden, tells those assembled they must consider that within 24 hours, 6,000 American troops will be in danger. The CIA has a “high degree of confidence” that Assad has ordered the removal of the chemical weapons from the underground bunkers and transport trucks have been spotted at the sights.

“As we head into an election cycle, the difficulties of the decision that we make today will be placed under even greater scrutiny,” Weiner says.

That decision will be to make one of these hard choices:

• The U.S. military withdraws its troops and avoids a military confrontation, but risks further civilian deaths and the condemnation of Arab Spring allies;
• Obama orders conventional airstrikes against Syrian troops, which could lead to thousands of inadvertent civilian casualties;
• Washington takes extraordinary measures and uses nuclear weapons to destroy the underground storage bunkers for its weapons of mass destruction. This last option likely would eliminate any chance of Syrian troops using chemical weapons, but it would open a Pandora’s box for the Nobel Peace Prize president who has pledged to work toward a nuclear-free world.

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U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong as CENTCOM Commander Gen. James Mattis

The students know Americans are weary of war after the WMD fiasco in Iraq and a decade-long war in Afghanistan, both of which have claimed countless lives and a trillion-plus in taxpayer dollars. Their decision – as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, among others – is weighted by the concern that Americans likely won’t re-elect a president who drags them into another costly warm, and by the fear that a successful president cannot let American troops be exposed to deadly chemical attacks.

The mock military briefing by Gen. James Mattis – played by visiting CISAC military fellow, U.S. Army Col. Viet Luong, himself a commander in Afghanistan – lays out the risks and probabilities of casualties under each scenario.

A student asks Luong which military option he would recommend.

The general prevaricates: “I’m a military guy; I tend to lean toward success and then I also consider civilian casualties. But I’m also very concerned about putting my soldiers at risk.”

Clinton, voiced by international policy student Micaela Hellman-Tincher, says she’s concerned about mission creep. “Consider the international implications of us entering into conflict,” she says.

The fake Samantha Power of the National Security Council, played by Ashley Rhoades, urges diplomatic measures and a stand-down from military conflict. “I’m not advocating in any way for inaction,” she says. “There are several diplomatic solutions. We ask that you give us 24 hours to be able to work on these diplomatic options and multilateral diplomacy.”

Such as what? Such as calling on Moscow to mediate or seeking a U.N. envoy.

The legal team from the law school lays out their arguments for why a preventive strike would be illegal under certain conventions; while a pre-emptive strike based on imminent and unavoidable threats of attack might be permissible.

Then Stanford law student Alex Weber – playing Avril Haines, legal advisor to the National Security Council – addresses the elephant in the room: the nuclear option.

“If you use a nuclear weapon, regardless of whether the Syrians use chemical weapons against our troops, you are, as Colin Powell said in the 1991 Gulf War, opening a Pandora’s Box, particularly because Syria has no nuclear weapon,” Weber says. “You are the nuclear nonproliferation president. There is a psychological button that you push that will prompt the media to take the ethical debate to new levels.”

In the end, consensus appears to be growing around an immediate preventive strike against the storage bunkers using conventional forces. The Cabinet knows this could lead to deaths on both sides, but allowing the Syrians to use chemical weapons could lead to even more.

“You can’t cut and run, Mr. President,” insists student Torry Castellano, playing White House Chief of Staff Jacob Lew.

Obama says he will take their advice under advisement and all rise as he leaves the war room.

More photos of the student simulation are available at CISAC's Facebook page.

The National Security Archive recently released a history of U.S. nuclear policy featuring CISAC's Lynn Eden, David Holloway, and Scott D. Sagan. The 2005 film, produced by Sandia National Laboratories, covers the years 1945 to 2004.

Stanford seniors Jaclyn Tandler and Varun Sivaram have been awarded the The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and The William J. Perry Prize, respectively, for their theses on France's nuclear export policy and the U.S. military's approach to solar energy.

Both recipients are members of the Center for International Security and Cooperation's Undergraduate Honors Program in International Security Studies.

Tandler, an international relations major, wrote "Let Them Eat Yellow Cake: Understanding the History of France's Sensitive Nuclear Export Policy." After graduating from Stanford, she will begin work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a junior fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program.

Sivaram, an engineering physics and international relations major, wrote "Sunny Side Up: Characterizing the U.S. Military's Approach to Solar Energy Policy." He will be attending Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship next year, studying toward a PhD in physics.

The Firestone Medal recognizes the top 10 percent of all honors theses in social science, science, and engineering. The Perry Prize is awarded to a student for excellence in policy-relevant research in international security studies. 

President Obama's vision of a "world free of nuclear weapons" -- first enunciated in Prague in April 2009 -- has been derided by his critics as a utopian fantasy that will have no influence on the nuclear strategies of other nations.

But in a special issue of The Nonproliferation Review, entitled Arms, Disarmament, and Influence: International Responses to the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, 13 prominent researchers from around the world examined foreign governments' policy responses to Obama's 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the landmark document published a year and a day after his Prague speech.

They found that many nations, though not all, had been "strongly influenced by Washington's post-Prague policy and nuclear posture developments," which reduced the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national strategy, and assured non-nuclear nations that the U.S. would never use nuclear arms against them provided they remained in compliance with their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Indeed, the 11 case studies presented "demonstrate that U.S. pronouncements and actions influenced bureaucratic infighting and domestic debates inside a number of important foreign governments, and that some of these governments have adjusted their own policies and actions accordingly."

Read the full report here.

See a presentation about the report here, or listen to a different one here.

Read CISAC co-director Scott Sagan's essay on "Obama's Disarming Influence" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  

Read Thomas Fingar's essay on "How China Views U.S. Policy" in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 

Highlights:

* Russia adopted a nuclear doctrine that was considerably more moderated than it would have been had the United States not pushed ahead with its own policy changes. In the run up to the April 2010 publication of the NPR, Washington "reset" relations with Russia, ended the deployment of missile defense components in Poland and the Czech Republic, and resumed the disarmament negotiations that ultimately led to the ratification of the New START treaty. As a result of this process, and continuous consultation with Russia about the NPR, Moscow narrowed the role of nuclear weapons in its policy and the range of circumstances in which it would consider using them. (page 39)

* "The most important short-term success of Obama's nuclear weapons policy," along with the "Prague Spirit," has been to halt the erosion of the NPT. "Obama's policies helped extract a minimum positive result from the 2010 NPT Review Conference, a favorable outcome compared to the chaos that his predecessor's representatives had created at the 2005 conference." The Obama policy was welcomed as a positive development, which allowed "key players, such as Egypt and Brazil, to strive for compromise, and others, such as Russia and China, not to block it." (page 219)

* The U.S. effort to encourage other governments to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their policy was successful in the United Kingdom, which adopted a nuclear posture that was very similar to that to the U.S. (page 238)

* Due in large part to the Obama policy, some of the non-nuclear weapons states in NATO began to push for the removal of sub-strategic nuclear weapons from Europe. At the November 2010 NATO summit, members agreed to a new Strategic Concept that called for negotiations with Russia and a linkage between the reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons in NATO Europe to comparable reductions in western Russia. (page 238)

* Obama's new nuclear doctrine was a driving force behind a May 2010 agreement among 189 nations at the Nonproliferation Review Conference to a set of disarmament objectives and steps to reinforce the nuclear non-proliferation regime. (page 238)

* The Obama disarmament initiatives encouraged Indonesia's decision to begin the process of ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. (page 238)

* China continues to view Washington's nuclear doctrine with suspicion. Although Beijing viewed the 2010 NPR favorably compared to its 2001 predecessor, it still found serious cause for concern. This is partly the result of timing: the NPR came out amid a period of rising tension between U.S. and China. It also reflected a tendency among Chinese leaders to view virtually all U.S. doctrine and actions as part of a concerted effort to constrain its rise. In this view, the NPR would foster comparisons between nuclear decreases in Russia and the U.S., and increases in China, and be used as leverage to force Beijing to engage in an expensive conventional arms race. In keeping with this China-centric view, Chinese officials were also concerned about the U.S. military's continued development of missile defense capabilities. (page 243)

* Many non-nuclear weapons states--such as Egypt, Brazil, and South Africa--emphasize their opposition to any constraints being placed on their right to enjoy the benefits of civilian nuclear energy. Some of their opposition is "due to post-colonial sensitivity about any apparent inequality in the terms of international agreements that divide the world into 'haves' and 'have-nots.'" Others are engaged in bargaining, waiting to see what nuclear-weapons states will do regarding disarmament before offering to accept more constraints on nuclear technology development. Some governments also appear to be engaged in "hedging behavior--protecting their ability to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium" to be closer to acquiring nuclear weapons in the future, should they choose to do so. This may be disappointing for Washington policymakers, but it should not be surprising. After all, the U.S. employs a similar "hedging strategy" in its management of its own nuclear stockpile. As a result, it is imperative to begin discussions of how to reduce the danger of both kinds of nuclear hedging behavior. (page 255)

* The Obama administration must continue "to ensure there is consistency and discipline in the messages" emanating from the military and the government bureaucracy. Some foreign governments viewed the NPR's guarantees as mere rhetoric. "Such a skeptical view is encouraged whenever a senior US military officer makes statements that reflect a lack of understanding or lack of discipline regarding nuclear use policy." Even after the NPR was released, a top U.S. general insisted that the United States had not altered its "calculated ambiguity" policy. (page 258)

The special issue of the Nonproliferation Review was coordinated by Scott D. Sagan, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and Jane Vaynman, a PhD candidate at the Department of Government at Harvard University, and a National Security Studies Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. The journal is published by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and it is edited by Stephen Schwartz.

Authors:

Irma Argüello is founder and chair of the NPSGlobal Foundation, a private nonprofit initiative that focuses on improving global security and reducing risks stemming from WMD proliferation.

Ralph A. Cossa is President of the Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu. He is senior editor of the Forum's quarterly electronic journal, Comparative Connections. 

Ambassador Nabil Fahmy is the founding Dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo. He is also the Chair of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies' Middle East Project.

Thomas Fingar is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow and Senior Scholar in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

Brad Glosserman is Executive Director of the Pacific Forum CSIS in Honolulu. Mr. Glosserman is co-editor of Comparative Connections, the Pacific Forum's quarterly electronic journal, and writes, along with Ralph Cossa, the regional review.

S. Paul Kapur is associate professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a faculty affiliate at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Mustafa Kibaroglu is an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University.

Michael Krepon is the co-founder of the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank specializing in national and international security problems. 

Harald Müller is executive director of Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and Professor at International Relations at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Pavel Podvig is an independent analyst based in Geneva, Switzerland, where he manages the research project Russian Nuclear Forces.

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He also serves as the co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Science's Global Nuclear Future Initiative.

Scott Snyder is Director of the Center for U.S.-Korea Policy at The Asia Foundation, Senior Associate at Pacific Forum CSIS, and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Korean Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jane Vaynman is a PhD candidate at the Department of Government at Harvard University and a National Security Studies Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

^{The Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), is an interdisciplinary university-based research and training center addressing some of the world's most difficult security problems with policy-relevant solutions. The Center is committed to scholarly research and to giving independent advice to governments and international organizations.}