In this op-ed, CISAC's Richard Rhodes argues that public health, a discipline that organizes science-based systems of surveillance and prevention, has been primarily responsible for controlling the effects of infectious disease. A similar campaign around public safety could help end the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons. Such a push would help create unity in common security and a fundamental transformation in relationships between nations, Rhodes argues.

Today, at the other end of the long trek down the glacier of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has seemingly calved off and fallen into the sea. In 2007, the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project found that 12 countries rated the growing gap between rich and poor as the greatest danger to the world. HIV/AIDS led the list (or tied) in 16 countries, religious and ethnic hatred in another 12. Pollution was identified as the greatest menace in 19 countries, while substantial majorities in 25 countries thought global warming was a "very serious" problem. Only nine countries considered the spread of nuclear weapons to be the greatest danger to the world.

The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in 2005. This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material.

"The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World War II.

"The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."

It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message.

Richard Butler, the former chairman of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and the last chairman of UNSCOM, often makes the point that the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons. People don't always understand what he means. He means that it is the weapons themselves that are the problem, not the values of the entities that control them. U.S. nuclear weapons are just as potentially dangerous to the world as, say, North Korean nuclear weapons. More, I would say, since we have greater numbers of them and have not hesitated to brandish them--even to use them--when we thought it in our interest to do so.

That the problem with nuclear weapons is nuclear weapons may seem counterintuitive, but two centuries ago governments began to think that way about disease, with untold benefits to humanity as a result. Epidemic disease had been conceived in normative terms, as an act of God for which states bore no responsibility. The change that came when disease began to be conceived as a phenomenon of nature without a metaphysical superstructure, a public health problem, a problem for government and a measure of government's success, was revolutionary. More lives were saved, and spared, with public health measures in the twentieth century in the United States alone than were lost throughout the world in all of the twentieth century's wars.

As my Scottish friend Gil Elliot wrote in his seminal book Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, "[These lives] are not saved by accident or goodwill. Human life is daily deliberately protected from nature by accepted practices of hygiene and medical care, by the control of living conditions and the guidance of human relationships. Mortality statistics are constantly examined to see if the causes of death reveal any areas needing special attention. Because of the success of these practices, the area of public death has, in advanced societies, been taken over by man-made death--once an insignificant or 'merged' part of the spectrum, now almost the whole.

"When politicians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigor in destroying it, they seem to feel they are indicating some mysterious paradox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and secured by the forces of reason; the other has not. The pioneers of public health did not change nature, or men, but adjusted the active relationship of men to certain aspects of nature so that the relationship became one of watchful and healthy respect. In doing so they had to contend with and struggle against the suspicious opposition of those who believed that to interfere with nature was sinful, and even that disease and plague were the result of something sinful in the nature of man himself."

Elliot goes on to compare what he calls "public death," meaning biological death, death from disease, to man-made death: "[I do not wish] to claim mystical authority for the comparison I have made between two kinds of public death--that which results from disease and that which we call man-made. The irreducible virtue of the analogy is that the problem of man-made death, like that of disease, can be tackled only by reason. It contains the same elements as the problem of disease--the need to locate the sources of the pest, to devise preventive measures, and to maintain systematic vigilance in their execution. But it is a much wider problem, and for obvious reasons cannot be dealt with by scientific methods to the same extent as can disease."

To advance the cause of public health it was necessary to depoliticize disease, to remove it from the realm of value and install it in the realm of fact. Today we have advanced to the point where international cooperation toward the prevention, control, and even elimination of disease is possible among nations that hardly cooperate with each other in any other way. No one any longer considers disease a political issue, except to the extent that its control measures a nation's quality of life, and only modern primitives consider it a judgment of God.

In 1999, for the first time in human history, infectious diseases no longer ranked first among causes of death worldwide. Public health, a discipline which organizes science-based systems of surveillance and prevention, was primarily responsible for that millennial change in human mortality. One-half of all the increases in life expectancy in recorded history occurred within the twentieth century. Most of the worldwide increase was accomplished in the first half of the century, and it was almost entirely the result of public health measures directed to primary prevention. Better nutrition, sewage treatment, water purification, the pasteurization of milk, and the immunization of children extended human life--not surgeons cutting or doctors dispensing pills.

Public health is medicine's greatest success story and a powerful model for a parallel discipline, which I propose to call public safety.

Where nuclear weapons--the largest-scale instruments of man-made death--are concerned, the elements of that discipline of public safety have already begun to assemble themselves: materials control and accounting, cooperative threat reduction, security guarantees, agreements and treaties, surveillance and inspection, sanctions, forceful disarming if all else fails.

Reducing and finally eliminating the world's increasingly vestigial nuclear arsenals may be delayed by extremists of the right or the left, as progress was stalled during the George W. Bush administration by rigid Manichaean ideologues who imagined that there might be good nuclear powers and evil nuclear powers and sought to disarm only those they considered evil. Nuclear weapons operate beyond good and evil. They destroy without discrimination or mercy: Whether one lives or dies in their operation is entirely a question of distance from ground zero. In Elliot's eloquent words, they create nations of the dead, and collectively have the capacity to create a world of the dead. But as Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist and philosopher, was the first to realize, the complement of that utter destructiveness must then be unity in common security, just as it was with smallpox, a fundamental transformation in relationships between nations, nondiscrimination in unity not on the dark side but by the light of day.

Violence originates in vulnerability brutalized: It is vulnerability's corruption, but also its revenge. "Perhaps everything terrible," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, "is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." As we extend our commitment to common security, as we work to master man-made death, we will need to recognize that terrible helplessness and relieve it--in others, but also in ourselves.

In 2009-2010, the Program on Human Rights will partner with FCE and DLCL to launch part 2 of the Contemporary History and the Future of Memory series by adding "Reconciliation" to the mission.  This series will examine scholarly and institutional efforts to create new national narratives that walk the fine line between before and after, memory and truth, compensation and reconciliation, justice and peace. Some work examines communities ravaged by colonialism and the great harm that colonial and post-colonial economic and social disparities cause.   The extent of external intervention creates discontinuities and dislocation, making it harder for people to claim an historical narrative that feels fully authentic.  Another response is to set up truth-seeking institutions such as truth commissions. Historical examples of truth commissions in South Africa, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Morocco inform more current initiatives in Canada, Cambodia, Colombia, Kenya, and the United States.  While this range of economic, social, political and legal modalities all seek to explain difficult pasts to present communities, it is not yet clear which approach yields greater truth, friendship, reconciliation and community healing.  The "History, Memory, and Reconciliation" series will explore these issues.

The series will have its first event in February 2010. Multiple international scholars are invited.  

Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam was published by Stanford University Press in November 2009. But the story behind the book dates back five years to November 2004. It was then that Donald K. Emmerson and Daniel M. Varisco agreed to disagree.

Emmerson spoke on "Islamism: What Is to Be Said and Done?" (video link and discussion) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC on 30 November 2009.

Varisco, a Hofstra University anthropologist with expertise on Islam and the Middle East, had invited Emmerson to join a panel on "Islam and Political Violence: The ‘Ismhouse' of Language" at the 2004 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association.

Emmerson was pleased to accept. Not since graduating from high school in Beirut had he lived in the Middle East. He had specialized instead on Indonesia, famously known as having more Muslims than any other country, yet spatially and spiritually peripheral to the Middle Eastern locations of Mecca, Medina, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Emmerson relished the chance to interact with experts whose knowledge of Muslim societies had been acquired mainly in Arab settings. He also shared Varisco's interest in discussing the controversial and contested meanings of the words "Islamism" and "Islamist." Since 9/11 these terms had become increasingly common in English-language discourse on Islam, Muslims, and violence by Muslims claiming to be acting in the name of their religion.

On the panel, before some two hundred MESA attendees, Varisco and Emmerson politely disagreed. Varisco argued that "Islamism" and "Islamist" were invidious terms that falsely linked Islam to terrorism. For the sake of consideration and accuracy, he said, they should not be used. Without advocating self-censorship, he defended his refusal to use "Islamism" or "Islamist" in his own writing and teaching.

"Inventing Islamism: The Violence of Rhetoric" is the title of Varisco's MESA paper as it appears in the book. "Why," he asks, "do we need a term that uniquely brands Muslims as terrorists rather than just calling them terrorists and militants, the way we could easily do for followers of any religion or any ideology? As scholars and students of religion, should we not be doing all we can to refute the notion that Islam is intrinsically more violent than other religions?" (Islamism, p. 33.)

Emmerson agreed with Varisco that the terms "Islamism" and "Islamist" were often used to conflate Islam, Muslims, and violence. But Emmerson argued that the words were not so uniformly and falsely invidious as to warrant their deletion. In his view, in addition to referencing radical views and acts, the terms usefully named a variety of mostly peaceful ways of expressing and advancing subjective interpretations of Islam in public life. Phrases such as "democratic Islamism" and "moderate Islamists," hr argued, were already fairly common in scholarship and the media. His chapter is entitled, accordingly, "Inclusive Islamism: The Utility of Diversity."

After the session at MESA, Varisco, Emmerson, and copanelist Richard C. Martin, an Islamic studies professor at Emory University, spoke of someday turning the discussion into a book. Busy with other projects, they postponed this one, but eventually took it up again as an experiment with an unusual format: As a neutral party, Martin (with the later addition of one of his graduate students, Abbas Barzegar) would edit the book, which would open with chapters by Emmerson and Varisco stating their views. Scholars of Islam from around the world would be invited to comment briefly on the dispute. More than a dozen experts in or from the Middle East, North Africa, North America, and Southeast Asia contributed remarks, which fill the middle of the book. Varisco and Emmerson end the volume with chapters that update and extend their respective arguments in response to each other's and the commentators' views.

An anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for Stanford University Press suggested that Islamism as a phenomenon was on the decline, implying that the relevance of Islamism would follow suit. In Emmerson's opinion, this may not happen soon. Juxtapositions of Islam, Muslims, and violence continue to occur in a range of Muslim-majority countries. At the same time, a great variety of Muslim leaders and organizations committed to peace, dialogue, and democracy continue to demonstrate the civility of Islam as they understand it. This rich spectrum of motives and associations will continue to challenge analysts around the world -- scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike.

Is Islam a religion of peace? War? Neither? Both? In the case of those Muslims who do carry out acts of violence or intolerance in the name of Islam, should their claims to have been motivated by religious imperatives be accepted as true, rejected as false, or bracketed as subjective? How considerate and how accurate is it to assert that any Muslim who engages in terrorism must not be a true Muslim? What is a "true Muslim"? By whose standards?

Is it appropriate to argue, with Emmerson, that to speak of "Islamic terrorism" wrongly and hurtfully implies that terrorism is intrinsic to Islam as a religion, whereas the notion of "Islamist terrorism" merely links such violence to one among many possible ways of interpreting Islam as an ideology? Or should these distinctions about words be ignored in favor of actions, including possible revisions of American policy, that can help to diminish the incidence of supposedly religious violence, whatever its actual nature may be?

In months and years to come, Muslims accused of having planned or committed violence against American targets will be judged in a series of civilian and military trials here in the United States. The defendants will likely include high-profile individuals such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, charged with plotting 9/11, and Nidal Malik Hassan, accused of the November 2009 rampage at Fort Hood. Some of the accused may admit responsibility for acts of violence and portray what they did as required by Islam. Some may accuse the US government of waging war against Islam. Some may claim innocence, or attribute what they did to personal reasons unrelated to religion. Stimulated by these proceedings, commentators on the Internet, in the press, and on talk shows can be expected to debate "Islamic terrorism" versus "Islamophobia."

Quite apart from whether fresh acts of terror occur, interest in the questions that Islamism features seems, at least to Emmerson, unlikely to decrease.

November 9, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For most, the historic event has come to symbolize the end of the Cold War, but for the Germans living there then and now, 1989 represents a turning point in an era that continues to shape their culture. Modern European historian and Stanford history professor James J. Sheehan and Amir Eshel, a Stanford professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, reflect on the consequences of this important anniversary through their distinct research perspectives. Professor Eshel is Director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research focuses include German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. Professor Sheehan has written widely on the history of Germany, including the relationship between aesthetic ideas, cultural institutions, and museum architecture in nineteenth century Germany. His most recent book, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe, considers problems in European international history.

Which facets of Cold War history do you find most compelling?

JS: A great deal of work has been done on the origins of the Cold War, but I am more interested in two other questions: Why did it last so long? and Why did it end when (and how) it did? The Cold War could have ended (along with a great deal else) if there had been a military conflict between the superpowers. And while there were some close calls, this did not happen. Instead, there were a number of proxy wars that created a great deal of damage in their immediate environments, but did not lead to a U.S.-Soviet war. Why not? In large measure, I think, because both sides created and sustained a stable order in Europe, the one part of the world where their land armies faced one another.

The Cold War ended, and ended peacefully, when Gorbachev decided to allow this European order to collapse. He based this decision on an extraordinary miscalculation: that the Soviet regime could survive in a new Europe, taking advantage of Western Europe's economic resources and dynamism without abandoning the Communist Party's leading role in the state. By the time it was clear that would not happen, it was too late to go back. The Cold War ended the way most wars end, with the defeat of one side, a largely peaceful defeat to be sure, but a defeat nonetheless.

AE: I am fascinated by those cases in which people living under totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe stood up against their oppressors, often knowing that their own political actions were bound to fail. The cases of the 1953 uprising in the GDR, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring will always inspire us and force us to acknowledge that even in situations that seem to exclude human agency, individuals and groups can exercise their ability to act and their wish to live freely.

Why is it valuable to examine how both the rise and fall of the Wall impacted culture in Germany and even throughout Europe?

JS: Obviously the Wall shaped East German culture and, to some extent, continues to do so. I am less convinced that the Wall was of central importance for the West. Many West Germans tended to forget about the East, the possibilities of unification seemed remote, the attractions of Western Europe much more compelling. A major impact of the Wall's fall on both Germanies was to reveal how far they had grown apart.Many West Germans tended to forget about the East, the possibilities of unification seemed remote, the attractions of Western Europe much more compelling. A major impact of the Wall's fall on both Germanies was to reveal how far they had grown apart.

AE: It’s valuable because the building of the Wall was not only the result of the communist regime’s will to stop the flight of its own people to the West but also the result of the West’s inability to effectively counter what is now universally acknowledged as an unbearable crime. The Wall is a lesson in the history of tyranny but also in the inability to face up to tyrants. The mistakes of those who allowed the Wall to be built may be repeated in the future. Learning what happened before, during and after the building of the Wall in 1961 may help us avoid the emergence of similar repressive artifacts in the future.

The fall of the Wall, on the other hand, gives us many lessons regarding the ability of political actors – on both sides of the East-West divide – to overcome, by way of decisive actions, decades-long tyranny.

How do you approach such a far-reaching era of history in a research project?

JS: It is important to see the end of the Cold War in the light of long-range trends, especially changes in global economic institutions. At the same time, we should try to understand the human impact of these events. In her recent book on 1989, Mary Elise Sarotte describes how East Germans fleeing to the West in the fall of 1989 threw away their Eastern currencies as they reached the border. It seems to me that this episode captures the intersection of deep structural transformations and immediate human experience. Money, including the physical appearance of East German coins, the "welcome money" given to East German arrivals in the West, and of course, the 1-1 exchange of East for West Marks, had an extraordinary symbolic and practical significance for this story.

AE: I study the ways in which literature and the arts reflect on the past. In the case of postwar German literature, the past consists of the two totalitarian regimes that dominated Germany in the twentieth century: Nazism and Communism. It is to a significant extent by way of revisiting the past, I believe, that cultures and socio-political institutions evolve. In telling and retelling what occurred in Europe during the twentieth century, postwar German literature (one of my main subjects of interest) made a substantial contribution to the creation of the modern, progressive Germany we know today.

Could you describe examples of how the Wall, and what it represented, influenced German cultural and aesthetic works created during its existence?

JS: East Germany had a vibrant literary culture and produced a great many novels that reflect the experience of the Wall. I especially admire Christa Wolf's Divided Heaven. Her career illustrates both the accomplishments and the limitations of culture in a society like the GDR. Since 1989, there has been a great deal of work reflecting on the meaning of the Wall. I just read Uwe Tellkamp's novel, Der Turm, which is set in and around Dresden in the late 1980s. It is a remarkable book in many ways, a sprawling family saga as well as a sharp political portrait of the regime's last days.

AE: The Wall played a crucial role in the writing of such significant writers as Christa Wolf (of the former GDR) and Peter Schneider (of the Federal Republic of Germany). In novels such as Divided Heaven (1963), Wolf gave us a lasting image of life in the shadow of the Wall. In The Wall Jumper, Schneider made the absurdity of an edifice such as the Wall painfully tangible. Yet, a novel like Ian McEwan’s The Innocent makes it clear that the Wall and the division of Germany also left a significant mark on European literature as such. In recent years, films like "The Lives of Others" began exploring the meaning of the East-West divide and the lasting impact of European totalitarian regimes on the lives of individuals and societies.

During the course of your work what kind of evidence have you encountered that illustrates how the Wall impacted the legacy of European Jews?

JS: East and West Germany dealt with the legacy of Nazism--and the meaning of the Holocaust--in quite different ways. East and West Germany dealt with the legacy of Nazism--and the meaning of the Holocaust--in quite different ways. In the GDR, Nazism was seen as a particularly toxic form of fascism, that is, an expression of capitalism's structural crisis. From this perspective, the racial dimensions of Nazism did not seem central: there was, for instance, very little about the Holocaust in the exhibitions on Nazism in the old East German museum of German History. Like the museum itself, this view of Nazism is now largely gone.

AE: The Jewish community of both the GDR and the Federal Republic was rather small when the Wall was built. While the Federal Republic accepted early on the German responsibility for Nazism, the GDR regarded itself as representing the legacy of the ‘better Germany’ that is of the German left. This has been as many scholars have since claimed, the foundational myth of the GDR. In the decades following the building of the Wall, the issue for German-Jewish relations was less the East-West divide and more finding ways to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust, acknowledging the crimes of the Nazis and developing a German-Jewish dialogue based on mutual respect and different memories. However, one of the most significant contemporary German-Jewish authors is Barbara Honigmann, who in her writing also reflects on what it meant for her and others like her to grow up and come to age as a Jew in the GDR.

From the perspective of your research, what do you feel are the most lasting implications of the Berlin Wall today?

JS: In the euphoric days after the fall of the Wall, many people underestimated the material and spiritual difficulties of unification. It is not surprising that, after 40 years apart, the two Germanies have only slowly grown together. Like parts of the American south after the Civil War, parts of the old GDR have a nostalgic view of the "good old days" before 1989. This has an impact on German culture, especially in Berlin. A more lasting implication is the Left Party, a somewhat improbable alliance of Western German leftwing Social Democrats and the former East German Party of Democratic Socialism.

AE: The Wall will always remain a symbol of tyranny. It will also continue to remind us what fantasies about a ‘perfect’ human society such as those that guided the Soviet Union and the GDR may end up producing: endless human misery and the creation of enclosed, repressive political systems.

Do you believe there’s still more to learn from this transformative period of history?

JS: Historians always believe there is more to learn. In the case of 1989, I think one lesson is how often history surprises us. No one expected the Wall to fall so suddenly and so peacefully, just as no one expected the Soviet Union to collapse with such speed. Nor has the post-Cold War world turned out quite the way many people expected.

AE: Absolutely. The learning about the nature and the challenges of totalitarian thought and totalitarian regimes has just begun. Contemporary totalitarian regimes across the globe such as Iran, Syria, Myanmar or North Korea make the study of the Wall and how we—those living in open societies may react to them—crucial for the freedom of millions who suffer by those regimes. The study of the Wall and of such regimes may also prove crucial for our survival given the fact that these regimes strive to acquire deadly military capacities.