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Sidney D. Drell, a physicist who served for nearly half a century as a top adviser to the United States government on military technology and arms control, died on Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Persis Drell.

Dr. Drell combined groundbreaking work in particle physics — he was deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, now the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, for nearly 30 years — with a career in Washington as a technical adviser and defense intellectual.

In 2000, he was given the Enrico Fermi Award for his life’s work, and in 2013, President Obama presented him with the National Medal of Science for his contributions to physics and his service to the government.

Beginning in 1960, as the Cold War heated up, Dr. Drell served on a succession of advisory groups that helped advance the technology of nuclear detection and shape the policy of nuclear deterrence.

As a founding member of the Jason defense advisory group, a panel of defense scientists, he helped develop the McNamara Line, a barrier that was intended to halt the infiltration of soldiers and weapons into South Vietnam from the north through a system that combined electronic surveillance with mines and troop concentrations at strategic points.

Dr. Drell was a strong proponent of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. “I believed that given the Soviet empire, its stated goals and existence, we had to deter them,” he said in an interview for “The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb” (2012), a book by Philip Taubman, a former reporter and editor for The New York Times.

“We had to be clear,” he added. “These are not weapons we want to use, but they have to know that should they monkey around with us, they had to expect we’re going to use them against them, and at a degree that’s unacceptable to them.”

At the same time, he was a leading advocate of arms control and a critic of major projects such as the MX missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Reagan administration program also known as Star Wars.

Dr. Drell was recruited as a consultant for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency soon after its creation in 1961 and served as a director of the Center for International Security and Arms Control (now the Center for International Security and Cooperation) at Stanford University in the 1980s. In 2006, he and George P. Shultz, the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, founded a program at the Hoover Institution to propose practical steps to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

“In dealing with terrorists or rogue governments, nuclear deterrence doesn’t mean anything — the value has gone,” he told the website In Menlo in 2012. “Yet the danger of the material getting into evil hands has gone up. So what are existing nuclear arms deterring now? In this era, I argue that nuclear weapons are irrelevant as a deterrence.”

Sidney David Drell was born on Sept. 13, 1926, in Atlantic City, to Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire. His father, Tully, was a pharmacist. His mother, the former Rose White, was a teacher.

He was admitted to Princeton at 16 and earned a degree in physics in 1946. At the University of Illinois, he obtained a master’s degree in physics in 1947 and a doctorate in 1949.

After teaching at Stanford for two years, he joined the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left in 1956 to work under Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

As an academic, Dr. Drell specialized in quantum electrodynamics, which describes the interactions between light and matter, and quantum chromodynamics, which explores subatomic particles like quarks and gluons.

He and Tung-Mow Yan, a research associate at the accelerator center, formulated a key concept in particle physics when they explained what happens when a quark in one particle collides with an antiquark in a second particle, an annihilating confrontation that yields an electron and a positron. The sequence of events became known as the Drell-Yan process.

Dr. Drell was the author of “Electromagnetic Structure of Nucleons” (1961) and, with the theoretical physicist James D. Bjorken, wrote the textbooks “Relativistic Quantum Mechanics” (1964) and “Relativistic Quantum Fields” (1965).

As the head of the theory group at the accelerator center, which gathered leading scientists to discuss nuclear science, he found himself in demand as a technical adviser on defense and security.

In 1960, Dr. Drell was invited to join an advisory group led by Charles H. Townes, the father of the laser. His task was to see whether orbiting infrared sensors could detect a Soviet intercontinental missile launch by picking up a heat reading from the missile’s exhaust plume. Additionally, he had to determine whether the Soviet Union could nullify the sensors by exploding a nuclear device in the atmosphere before the main launch.

After he and his team judged such an explosion impractical, the Defense Department went ahead with plans to develop the Missile Defense Alarm System.

He later served on the Land Panel, which developed a new system for taking high-resolution, wide-range photographs from spy satellites.

During the Vietnam War, Dr. Drell’s service on the President’s Science Advisory Committee under Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, and his role as a shadow adviser to Henry A. Kissinger, damaged his academic reputation as opinion turned against American policy. Increasingly, he found himself fending off attacks in public forums.

“Call it entrapment, commitment or whatever, but I have remained actively involved in technical national security work for the United States,” he told Mr. Taubman.

After the war, he emerged as a leading thinker on arms control and disarmament, which he addressed in numerous books and papers, including “Facing the Threat of Nuclear Weapons” (1983), “The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment” (1985), “In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control” (1993) and “The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons” (2003).

In addition to his daughter Persis, who directed Stanford’s accelerator laboratory for five years, he is survived by his wife of 64 years, the former Harriet Stainback; another daughter, Joanna Drell; a son, Daniel, and three grandchildren.

The health gap between rich and poor children in developing countires is staggeringly high, but Assistant Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid found that it is shrinking. In his pilot project, "Empirical Evidence on Wealth Inequality and Health in Developing Countries," Bendavid discovered that since the mid-2000s, life expectancies for children under five are starting to converge. How can we continue to close the gap? Watch to find out.

Drones are unlikely to radically change relationships between countries, according to a new study.

And while the U.S. will not always be an exclusive leader in this technology, the possibility exists that drones can actually help keep the peace in some situations, the researchers wrote.

One of the co-authors, political scientist Matt Fuhrmann, is a visiting associate professor at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

In an email interview, Fuhrmann explained that drones are most useful for counterterrorism operations where the risk of them being shot down is very small. However, he noted, most situations in world politics are not like this.

“Current-generation drones are vulnerable to enemy air defenses, in part because they fly relatively slow. It is therefore difficult to employ this technology against another government, making drones mostly unhelpful for military deterrence or coercive diplomacy in an interstate context,” Fuhrmann said.

“Drones, then, are unlikely to dramatically transform interstate relations the way that technologies such as nuclear weapons did,” he added. 

Fuhrmann points out, however, that drone technology is changing quickly. “Technological advancements – for example, the development of swarming platforms, where a large number of drones fly together in formation – could make drones more transformative in the future.”

U.S. drone monopoly fading

Since November 2001, when the U.S. launched its first drone strike in Afghanistan, its drone strikes have grown in both geographic scope and number, extending to Pakistan in 2004 and Somalia in 2007, and increasing from about 50 total counterterrorism strikes from 2001 to 2008 to about 450 from 2009 to 2014.

Though the U.S. is the most prolific user of combat drones, other countries have used them as well – Iraq, Israel, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom. Almost a dozen countries, including China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, reportedly now possess armed drones, and many others – such as India – are racing to acquire them.

“To whatever extent a U.S. monopoly on cutting-edge drones existed, it is over,” wrote Fuhrmann and the others. Drones are a high priority in military investment for many states now and into the near future.

Few drones, Fuhrmann said, are as capable as the U.S. Reaper, which can remain in the air for many hours, has an operational range of more than 1,000 miles, and is linked to an advanced communications network.

“Countries such as Iraq are unlikely to successfully field Reaper-like drones in the near future, but that could change over time,” he said.

How should the U.S. respond to rising drone interest around the world? Fuhrmann said that an increase in drones is inevitable, but that does not mean that the technology will severely undermine American strategic interests.

“The global spread of militarily useful UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) could affect U.S. national security, but in more limited ways than the alarmist view suggests – namely, by lowering barriers to the use of force domestically or in uncontested airspace,” they added.

While technological advancements will likely make some drones more deadly for combat use in regions of conflict, they will also enable drone usage in a much broader array of missions than counterterrorism strikes.

Domestic usage likely

Apart from interstate relationships, one concern is that states might internally use drones for domestic political reasons, Fuhrmann said.

“Drones give a leader more centralized control over the use of military force, making the technology attractive to leaders who distrust the military. Autocratic leaders, therefore, are drawn to drones because they may be useful for domestic control or, potentially, repression,” he said.

Fuhrman said that many of the states pursuing armed drones today are dictators.

“While we often assume that democracies crave drone technology, since it eliminates the possibility that the pilot would be killed if the aircraft is shot down, we should not forget that autocrats have their own unique reasons to seek this technology,” he said.

Norms and nations

The use of armed drones also raises important ethical dilemmas. What will become the “norms” or standards of behavior by states when using drones?

The U.S. can help shape such global norms for drone use if it opens up its own processes, Fuhrmann said.

“More transparency by the United States concerning its decision-making process for drone strikes could give it more credibility in seeking to convince other countries to use their newly acquired drone capabilities in ways that comply with international law,” he and his co-authors stated.

Right now, the norms regarding drones are murky, Fuhrmann said.

“Are drones just like any other technology, like tanks, that is part of a modern military? When is it acceptable to carry out drone strikes? What happens when a drone is shot down? We do not yet have clear answers,” he said

In regard to technologies such as naval warships, nuclear weapons and chemical weapons, the international community has sought to clarify norms through international agreements about what is “appropriate,” Fuhrmann said.

“Doing something along these lines for drones through a treaty or an informal agreement might help identify clearer standards, and the United States could play a key role towards that end,” he said.

Keeping the peace

Fuhrmann said that while people think of drones as “destabilizing,” they may offer stabilizing benefits as well. Drones equipped with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities can provide states with valuable information about an adversary in real-time.

“These drones could therefore reduce uncertainty along contested borders or in other areas where they are less vulnerable to shoot-down,” he said. “Because uncertainty about an adversary’s intentions or military maneuvers can be a source of conflict, drones may promote peace to some degree.”

The title of the study was “Separating Fact from Fiction in the Debate over Drone Proliferation.” It was published in the journal International Security. Other co-authors include Michael C. Horowitz from the University of Pennsylvania and Sarah Kreps from Cornell University.

Follow CISAC on Twitter at @StanfordCISAC and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Matthew Fuhrmann, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 723-0337, mcfuhrmann@gmail.com

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

In this new article, Megan Palmer, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, talks about the different ways that the FBI is collaborating with the biotech community in order to be prepared to respond to an emerging biological threat. One of them is by reaching out to student bioengineers at programs like the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition. The purpose of that event is to demonstrate how synthetic biology can be used to address pressing global issues.

As the article states, whether it’s an accidental outbreak or a biological attack, the FBI seeks to create a culture of trust and transparency with the biotech community. Palmer discussed this topic recently at the Biofabricate conference for synthetic biology and design in New York City.

As Palmer noted, biological attacks are a historical reality. In 1984, cult members poisoned patrons of 10 salad bars in Oregon with salmonella, sickening more than 750 people. And in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 attacks, anthrax spores that were mailed to newsrooms and government offices killed five people. While other incidents may have simply failed, it seems prudent to prepare for future attacks that could be even more deadlier.

Enter the FBI's foreay into the biotech community. Collaboartion between the public and private sectors is increasing in this area. As Palmer said, examples exist of iGEM students acting as "white hat biohackers" to help biotech companies detect weaknesses in their systems that  all in collaboration with the FBI, Palmer says. 

“There’s the overall sense that the government has acknowledged that it is not necessarily the center of influence in technological development,” Palmer told the publication. “We’re going to start seeing many more examples of partnerships between the government and the private sector where you wouldn't have necessarily expected them before. People should be willing to give them a chance.” 

To Palmer, the key to the collaboration is open communication. She reports progress with the FBI and biotech community on this front. Palmer herself asks the FBI questions about its involvement and interest in biotech dangers. So far, they have “been willing to have more of those conversations,” she said. The true test will come when the relationship is finally tested by what Palmer describes as a “triggering event,” either a situation where there is reason to believe a biotech has occurred or one in which the FBI is prying a bit too much into the lives of biologists. Palmer said that if the relationship doesn’t withstand this type of challenge, the trust between the FBI and the community would weaken, and communication would break down.

Follow CISAC on Twitter at @StanfordCISAC and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

Stanford students are applying lean start-up techniques to some of the world’s most difficult foreign policy issues.

The fall 2016 quarter class, Hacking for Diplomacy: Tackling Foreign Policy Challenges with the Lean Launchpad, is a first-of-its-kind course for studying statecraft, created as a reflection of the best that Stanford and Silicon Valley offers in the way of pioneering paradigms. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-taught by Joe Felter, a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). It is based on the Lean LaunchPad methodology, created by course designer Steve Blank, a Stanford lecturer and entrepreneur.

The teaching team also includes Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Zvika Krieger, the U.S. Department of State's Representative to Silicon Valley; and Steve Weinstein, the CEO of MovieLabs.

'Breaking free'

The class is based on cultivating ideas and imagination, breaking free of the traditional “business plan” approach to rolling out new products and solutions. In the case of diplomacy, the lean start-up method is fast and flexible above all. It has three key principles based on concepts such as "mission model canvas," "beneficiary development," and "agile engineering,” according to Felter, also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“The first principle is accepting that any proposed solution to a problem whether in the commercial world or public sector is initially just a set of untested hypotheses – at best informed guesses – as to what may solve the needs of a customer or beneficiary,” said Felter.

Regarding beneficiary development, he said, experiential learning is central.

“There are no answers to complex challenges ‘inside the building,’ if you will, and students must ‘get out of the building’ to find out –in as intimate detail as possible – the various pains and gains experienced by the various beneficiaries, stakeholders and end users that must be addressed to find viable and deployable solutions to their problems,” Felter said.

The last principle, “agile development,” is based on the view that proposed solutions are generated and constantly updated through a collecting of data and feedback. This in turn, Felter explained, is rapidly tested and new solutions are designed based this iterative process.

Overall, he noted, the core idea is that entrepreneurs are everywhere, and that lean startup principles favor experimentation over elaborate planning, offering a faster way to get a desired product or solution to market.

Real-world instruction

In the class, student teams analyze real-world foreign policy challenges. They then use lean startup principles to find new approaches to seemingly intractable or very complex problems that have bedeviled the foreign policy world. The teams actually work with mentors and officials in the U.S. State Department and other civilian agencies and private companies.

Each week, the teams present their findings (“product”) to a panel of faculty and mentors, who will critique their solutions. The outcomes will range, as they vary from problem to problem. Examples include human rights, food security, refuges and labor recruitment, and mosquito disease threats, among others.

On Oct. 10, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the class. “Brilliant minds are applying technology to world’s toughest problems. Their perspective will inform,” Kerry tweeted after the class.

Kerry’s State Department gave the students seven challenges to address – human trafficking, avoiding space collisions, tracking nuclear devices, and countering violent extremism. The students will explore and analyze these issues through the rest of the quarter.

One student, Kaya Tilev, later asked Kerry what the students should be striving for to make their “solutions” a reality for national policymakers.

Kerry said, “Well, you’re doing it. You’re in it. You’re in the program. And I have absolute confidence if you come up with a viable solution it is going to be implemented, adopted, and institutionalized.”

Zvika Krieger, the state department official, told the students that Kerry was impressed with them and the class.

“He (Kerry) brought up our class in all of his meetings that day, including at a lunch with the CEOs/founders of Google, Airbnb, and Lyft; in a podcast interview with Wired magazine, and in remarks at the Internet Association's conference,” Krieger wrote in an email to them.

Global flashpoints are proliferating around the globe – the Syrian War, conflict and civil wars across the Middle East and in parts of Africa; the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and non-state groups; the most significant flow of refugees since World War II; North Korea nuclear testing; Russian adventurism on its borders; China’s forays into the South China Sea; and a changing climate.

In other words, there is no shortage of thorny problems for young minds to solve as they embark on their careers.

‘Hungry to apply their energy’

Jeremy Weinstein, the political science professor, described the students as “hungry to apply their energy and talents to real-world problems, and to use hands-on experiences as a way of accelerating their learning.”

The class taps into that motivation by bringing together data scientists, engineers, and social scientist, he noted. In the end, the idea is for students to learn how to “innovate inside government.”

Weinstein is optimistic that this class – and a stronger connection between the State Department and Stanford’s technical and policy expertise – can drive more innovation inside government.

“Technology can play a critical role in addressing many of today’s foreign policy challenges, and this class is one new way for senior U.S. officials to tap into the passion, creativity and talent of Silicon Valley,” he said.

Hacking for defense

Last year, Felter and Blank also led a Hacking for Defense class based on the same lean start-up principles. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-listed as both an International Policy Studies and a Management Science and Engineering course – it counts for international relations and political science majors as well.

Blank, a consulting associate professor in engineering, told the Stanford News Service in a recent story that he seeks to cultivate in students a passion for giving back to society and their world.

“We’re going to create a network of entrepreneurial students who understand the diplomatic, policy and national security problems facing the country and get them engaged in partnership with islands of innovation in the Department of State,” said Blank, who also wrote about the new hacking for Diplomacy course in the Huffington Post.

“Teams must take these products out to the real world and ask potential users for feedback,” he noted.

Stanford researchers have determined that more than 15 million children are living in high-mortality hotspots across 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, where death rates remain stubbornly high despite progress elsewhere within those countries.

The study, published online Oct. 25 in The Lancet Global Health, is the first to record and analyze local-level mortality variations across a large swath of Sub-Saharan Africa.

These hotspots may remain hidden even as many countries are on track to achieve one of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals: reducing the mortality rate of children under 5 to 25 per 1,000 by 2030. National averages are typically used for tracking child mortality trends, allowing left-behind regions within countries to remain out of sight — until now.

The senior author of the study is Eran Bendavid, MD, MS, an assistant professor of medicine and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy. The lead author is Marshall Burke, PhD, an assistant professor of Earth System Science and a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

Decline in under-5 mortality rate

The authors note that the ongoing decline in under-5 mortality worldwide ranks among the most significant public and population health successes of the past 30 years. Deaths of children under the age of 5 years have fallen from nearly 13 million a year in 1990 to fewer than 6 million a year in 2015, even as the world’s under-5 population grew by nearly 100 million children, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

“However, the amount of variability underlying this broad global progress is substantial,” the authors wrote.

“Mortality numbers are typically tracked at the national level, with the assumption that national differences between countries, such as government spending on health, are what determine progress against mortality,” Bendavid said. “The goal of our work was to understand whether national-level mortality statistics were hiding important variation at the more local level — and then to use this information to shed light on broader mortality trends.”

The authors used data from 82 U.S. Agency for International Development surveys in 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, including information on the location and timing of 3.24 million births and 393,685 deaths of children under 5, to develop high-resolution spatial maps of under-5 mortality from the 1980s through the 2000s.

Using this database, the authors found that local-level factors, such as climate and malaria exposure, were predictive of overall patterns, while national-level factors were relatively poor predictors of child mortality.

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Temperature, malaria exposure, civil conflict

“We didn’t see jumps in mortality at country borders, which is what you’d expect if national differences really determined mortality,” said co-author Sam Heft-Neal, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Earth System Science. “But we saw a strong relationship between local-level factors and mortality.”

For example, he said, one standard deviation increase in temperature above the local average was related to a 16-percent higher child mortality rate. Local malaria exposure and recent civil conflict were also predictive of mortality.

The authors found that 23 percent of the children in their study countries live in mortality hotspots — places where mortality rates are not declining fast enough to meet the targets of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. The majority of these live in just two countries: Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In only three countries do fewer than 5 percent of children live in hotspots: Benin, Namibia and Tanzania.

As part of the research, the authors have established a high-resolution mortality database with local-level mortality data spanning the last three decades to provide “new opportunities for a deeper understanding of the role that environmental, economic, or political conditions play in shaping mortality outcomes.”  The database, available at http://fsedata.stanford.edu, is an open-source tool for health and environmental researchers, child-health experts and policymakers.

“Our hope is that the creation of a high-resolution mortality database will provide other researchers new opportunities for deeper understanding of the role that environmental, economic or political conditions play in shaping mortality outcomes,” said Bendavid.  “These data could also improve the targeting of aid to areas where it is most needed.”

The research was supported by a grant from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.