Professor Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Harvard University and former Director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the Harvard University Asia Center
Professor Qin Hui, Professor of History, Tsinghua University
Professor Andrew Walder, Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor, Department of Sociology, Stanford University
Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Time: 10:15 am – 12:00 pm
Venue: Stanford Center at Peking University, Langrun Yuan, Peking University
Language: Chinese/English simultaneous translation will be provided.
Deng Xiaoping, one of the most important figures in modern Chinese history, was instrumental in China’s economic reconstruction following the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s. As the architect of China’s post-Mao path of economic reform and opening to the outside world, his legacy continues to shape the country’s present and future. Ezra Vogel, Henry Ford II Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Harvard University and former Director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the Harvard University Asia Center, will talk about Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, which has just been published in Chinese. Professor Qin Hui, a leading historian and public intellectual will join Professor Vogel in a dialogue on “The Deng Xiaopeng Era: Historical Transformation and the Shaping of China’s Present and Future”. The event will be moderated by Professor Andrew Walder, Stanford University Professor of Sociology and specialist on modern Chinese society and politics.
David Straub, associate director of Korean Studies Program, joined Ploughshares Fund Executive Director Philip Yun on April 8 for a town hall discussion in San Francisco on the recent North Korean threats. The panel was held at the Commonwealth Club, the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum, and moderated by Gloria Duffy, the President and CEO of the Commonwealth Club.
The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is looking forward to an exciting quarter with a continued focus on human trafficking and human rights education. We encourage you to read our newsletter below to learn more about our exciting courses, research initiatives, and new staff on board for the spring quarter.
Human Trafficking:
PHR Director Helen Stacy is co-teaching Human Trafficking: Historical, Legal, and Medical Perspectives, an interdisciplinary course that was developed over the last year in consultation with Faculty College. The course will explore all forms of human trafficking including labor and sex trafficking, child soldiers and organ harvesting. Professor Stacy’s office hours this quarter are Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 – 4 p.m. at Encina Hall, room C148.
PHR has launched a new research project on human trafficking in Asia. The project started over spring break and was rolled out at Stanford’s campus in Beijing, China. The new research project will focus on cross border trafficking between Burma, Thailand and China. Look out for more news of this exciting new project in the weeks to come.
Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship: PHR has selected four undergraduate fellows at Stanford who will complete internships this summer in Bihar, India (human trafficking education); Ahmedabad, India (the Self Employed Women’s Association-SEWA); Guatemala (KidsAlive International); and Amman, Jordan (Visualizing Justice). The fellows are currently preparing for their summer positions. Look out for more details on our newest Human Rights Fellows next week!
Stanford Human Rights Education Inititative (SHREI), a partnership with International Comparative Area studies and Stanford Program in Inter-Cultural Education continues this quarter, with the community college fellows preparing their lesson plans. This year’s topics are human trafficking and the media. For more information please click here.
New Faces at PHR: The program is excited to welcome Jessie Brunner as the new PHR assistant, carrying out many of the tasks previously undertaken by Nadejda Marques, who departed PHR at the end of Winter quarter. Following her undergraduate studies in journalism and Spanish at U.C. Berkeley, Brunner spent six years in the professional arena, first as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and then in public relations/marketing for two nonprofit organizations. She came to Stanford University this fall to undertake her master’s degree in international policy studies, concentrating in global justice. Her professional pursuits have long been coupled with passionate activism in the arenas of human rights advocacy, conflict resolution in Israel, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and poverty reduction. Brunner was an active participant in the winter quarter’s Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series: The International Criminal Court: The Next Decade. Brunner recently returned from a study trip to Rwanda where she delved into issues of human rights, governance, and economic development through meetings with government officials, NGOs, and the business community.
“The recent news of General Bosco Ntaganda’s surrender to the International Criminal Court where he is standing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity certainly urges reflection on last quarter’s Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Speaker Series, in which students and community members alike heard from renowned experts both within and outside the Court,” said Brunner.
Brunner can be contacted at jbrunner@stanford.edu. She will hold office hours on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12 – 2 p.m. at Encina Hall, room C148.
For the latest in human rights news and to learn more about exciting events on campus, please follow us on Facebook.
We’re looking forward to engaging and interacting with you during the spring quarter!
Tension between Pyongyang and allies the United States and South Korea has mounted in recent weeks since North Korea's February nuclear test. Shorenstein APARC experts weigh in on the possibility of conflict.
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A soldier stands guard in front of the Unha-3 (Milky Way 3) rocket sitting on a launch pad at the West Sea Satellite Launch Site, during a guided media tour by North Korean authorities in the northwest of Pyongyang April 8, 2012. | REUTERS/Bobby Yip
On June 6 and 7, the Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) of SPRIE at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, in cooperation with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) of the Stanford School of Engineering, will present the 5th Annual Academic Conference on Japanese Entrepreneurship at the Huang Engineering Center at Stanford University. The theme of the conference is "Entrepreneurial Policy, Outcomes, and Strategies in Japan: Lessons for the Rest of the World". We invite papers, as in past years, from the fields of management, strategy, organizations, sociology, political science and economics to be submitted to this conference, which will be attended by scholars from Japan, the United States, and Europe.
Consul General Hiroshi Inomata will give the opening address.
The following scholars will deliver keynote speeches:
Hugh Patrick, Columbia University Tom Byers, Stanford University Tina Seelig, Stanford University
The following scholars will present papers:
Christina Ahmadjian, Hitotsubashi University Serguey Braguinsky, Carnegie-Mellon University Steven Casper, Keck Graduate Institute, Claremont Colleges Joseph Cheng, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Robert Cole, UC Berkeley Charles Eesley, Stanford University George Foster, Stanford University Masayo Fujimoto, Doshisha University Kathryn Ibata-Ahrens, DePaul University Martin Kenney, UC Davis Robert Kneller, Tokyo University Masahiro Kotosaka, Oxford University Kazuyuki Motohashi, Tokyo University Renee Rottner, New York University Ulrike Schaede, UC San Diego Kay Shimizu, Columbia University Janet Smith, Claremont-McKenna University Richard Smith, UC Riverside
The following are confirmed discussants:
Charla Griffy-Brown, Pepperdine University Richard Dasher, Stanford University Robert Eberhart, Stanford University Kathleen Eisenhart, Stanford University Nobuhiko Hibara, WASEDA Business School Glenn Hoetker, University of Arizona Takeo Hoshi, Stanford University Riitta Katila, Stanford University Christine Isakson, Stanford University Joachim Lyon, Stanford University Tammy Madsen, Santa Clara University William F. Miller, Stanford University Tom Roehl, Washington University Steve Vogel, UC Berkeley Dan Wang, Stanford University Jennifer Wooley, Santa Clara University
The following practitioner and financial supporter will give short talks:
Mike Alfant, CEO Fusion Systems, President ACCJ
STAJE applies the principles of entrepreneurship to the academic domain by creating opportunities for innovative, creative and multidisciplinary approaches to research on contemporary Japan. During this conference we will present high quality contributions on issues related to entrepreneurship, institutions, and Japan such as empirical studies, case studies, political and social institutional studies in Japan, and new research methodology including experimental design.
Ryan Crocker is the first Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale University 2012-2013. Born in Spokane, Washington, he grew up in an Air Force family, attending schools in Morocco, Canada and Turkey, as well as the U.S. He received a B.A. in English in 1971 and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 2001 from Whitman College (Washington). He also holds an honorary Doctor of National Security Affairs from the National Defense University (2010) and honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Gonzaga University (2009) and Seton Hall University (2012). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the Association of American Ambassadors.
He retired from the Foreign Service in April 2009 after a career of over 37 years but was recalled to active duty by President Obama to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan in 2011. He has served as U.S. Ambassador six times: Afghanistan (2011-2012), Iraq (2007-2009), Pakistan (2004-2007), Syria (1998-2001), Kuwait (1994-1997), and Lebanon (1990-1993). He has also served as the International Affairs Advisor at the National War College, where he joined the faculty in 2003. From May to August 2003, he was in Baghdad as the first Director of Governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs from August 2001 to May 2003. Since joining the Foreign Service in 1971, he also has had assignments in Iran, Qatar, Iraq and Egypt, as well as Washington. He was assigned to the American Embassy in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the bombings of the embassy and the Marine barracks in 1983.
Ambassador Crocker received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 2009. His other awards include the Presidential Distinguished and Meritorious Service Awards, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award (2008 and 2012), the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service (1997 and 2008) and for Distinguished Public Service (2012), the Award for Valor and the American Foreign Service Association Rivkin Award for creative dissent. He received the National Clandestine Service’s Donovan Award in 2009 and the Director of Central Intelligence’s Director’s Award in 2012. In 2011, he was awarded the Marshall Medal by the Association of the United States Army. In January 2002, he was sent to Afghanistan to reopen the American Embassy in Kabul. He subsequently received the Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award for “exceptional courage and leadership” in Afghanistan. In September 2004, President Bush conferred on him the personal rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the Foreign Service. In May 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the establishment of the Ryan C. Crocker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Expeditionary Diplomacy. In July 2012, he was named an Honorary Marine, the 75th civilian so honored in the 237 year history of the Corps.
[Co-sponsored by CISAC, CREEES, Center for South Asia, Stanford Humanities Center, and the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence, supported by the President's Fund, CCSRE, Religious Studies, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies]
Bechtel Conference Center
Ryan Crocker
2012-2013 Kissinger Senior Fellow, Yale University; Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon
Speaker
North Korea announced on April 2 that it would restart its nuclear facilities, including its 5-megawatt-electric (5-MWe) nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, north of the capital, which had been disabled and mothballed since an agreement in October 2007.
Pronouncements from Pyongyang during the past few weeks have been ominous, including threatening the United States and South Korea with pre-emptive nuclear attacks. On April 2, 2013, a spokesman for North Korea’s General Department of Atomic Energy told the Korean Central News Agency that at the March 2013 plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea: “A new strategic line was laid down on simultaneously pushing forward economic construction and the building of nuclear armed forces.”
The pronouncement continued: “The field of atomic energy is faced with heavy tasks for making a positive contribution to solving the acute shortage of electricity by developing the self-reliant nuclear power industry and for bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity until the world is denuclearized.”
We ask Stanford Professor Siegfried S. Hecker – former CISAC co-director and now a senior fellow at CISAC and the Freeman Spogli Institute – to weigh in. Hecker has been invited seven times to North Korea and he made international headlines when he returned from his last trip in November 2010 and announced the isolated North Asia nation had built a modern uranium enrichment facility.
Q: How concerned should we be about North Korea’s announcement that it will restart all its nuclear facilities? Does this fundamentally change the threat imposed by Pyongyang?
Hecker: It does not immediately change the threat, but it really complicates the long-term picture. This announcement indicates that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is severely limited by a lack of fissile materials, plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU) to fuel its bombs. Despite its recent threats, North Korea does not yet have much of a nuclear arsenal because it lacks fissile materials and has limited nuclear testing experience. In the long term, it’s important to keep it that way; otherwise North Korea will pose a much more serious threat. So, it is important that they don’t produce more fissile materials and don’t conduct more nuclear tests. The Kim Jong Un regime has already threatened to conduct more tests and with this announcement they are telling the world that they are going to make more bomb fuel. I should add that they also need more bomb fuel to conduct more nuclear tests.
Q: What do you make of the previous threats to launch an all-out nuclear war against the United States and South Korea? Does North Korea have the technical means to do so?
Hecker: I don’t believe North Korea has the capacity to attack the United States with nuclear weapons mounted on missiles, and won’t for many years. Its ability to target and strike South Korea is also very limited. And even if Pyongyang had the technical means, why would the regime want to launch a nuclear attack when it fully knows that any use of nuclear weapons would result in a devastating military response and would spell the end of the regime? Nevertheless, this is an uneasy situation with a potential for miscalculations from a young and untested leader.
Hecker spoke about North Korea with Christiane Amanpour on CNN, April 2, 2013.
Q: The Kim Jong Un regime has reiterated and apparently put into law that North Korea will not give up its nuclear arsenal. Does the current announcement really make things that much worse?
Hecker: I have previously stated that North Korea has the bomb, but not yet much of an arsenal. It has been clear for some time that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons, so what we should have focused on is to make sure things don’t get worse. I have stated it as the three No’s: no more bombs, no better bombs and no export. We don’t know much about North Korea’s nuclear exports, but that potential is a serious concern. Pyongyang took a step toward better bombs with its successful Feb. 12 nuclear test, although it still has little test experience. The current announcement demonstrates that they will now redouble efforts to get more bombs by increasing their capacity to make plutonium and HEU. It won’t happen quickly because these are time-consuming efforts – but it bodes ill for the future.
Q: Let’s look at the technical issues of the latest announcement. What do you think Pyongyang means by “readjusting and restarting all the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon?
Hecker: The restarting is easy to decipher: They plan to take the 5-MWe gas-graphite plutonium production reactor out of mothballs and bring the plutonium reprocessing facility back into operation. The “readjusting” comment is less clear. It may mean that they will reconfigure the uranium enrichment facility they showed to John Lewis, Bob Carlin and me in 2010 from making low enriched uranium (LEU at 3 to 5 percent for reactor fuel) to making highly enriched uranium (HEU at 90 percent for bomb fuel).
Q: What did you learn about the 5-MWe reactor during your November 2010 visit to Yongbyon? Will they really be able to restart it?
Hecker: Lewis, Carlin and I were shown the beginning of the construction of the small experimental light-water reactor. The containment structure was just going up. I pointed to the 5-MWe reactor right next door and asked the chief engineer of the reactor, "What about the 5-MWe gas-graphite reactor?" He replied: “We have it in standby mode.” I told him that people in the West claim it is beyond hope to restart. He chuckled and said, "Yes, I know, that's what they also said in 2003, and they were wrong then as well." The reactor had been mothballed since 1994 as part of the Agreed Framework. The North Koreans restarted it in 2003 without much of a problem and ran two more campaigns to make plutonium.
Q: Is there any indication that they actually have an HEU bomb?
Hecker: We really don’t know. To the best of our knowledge, the first two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009 used plutonium for the bomb fuel. We do not know what was used in the most recent test on Feb. 12. It could have been either HEU or plutonium. It would not surprise me if they have been pursuing both paths to the bomb; that’s what the United States did during the Manhattan Project.
Q: Will we know when they restart the reactor?
Hecker: Yes, using satellite imagery we should be able to see the steam plume from the cooling tower as soon as they rebuild and restart it.
Q: Didn’t North Korea also have a 50-MWe reactor under construction? What happened to that?
Hecker: As part of the Agreed Framework in 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze the operation of the 5-MWe reactor and the construction of its bigger cousins, a 50-MWe reactor in Yongbyon and a 200-MWe reactor in Taecheon. We saw the 50-MWe reactor in 2004 and were told that they were evaluating what it would take to get it restarted. During later visits we were told and saw for ourselves that it was not salvageable. We were told the same was true for the Taecheon reactor. The North Koreans had been willing to trade these two gas-graphite reactors for the KEDO light-water reactors that the United States, South Korea and Japan had agreed to build at Sinpo. However, the deal fell apart when the Agreed Framework was terminated in 2003.
Q: What would it take to restart the 5-MWe reactor? And how much plutonium could it make?
Hecker: The reactor has been in standby since July 2007. In June 2008, as a good-will gesture to Washington (and a reputed fee of $2.5 million from the U.S., according to North Korean officials), Pyongyang blew up the cooling tower. In addition, based on our previous visits, we concluded that they also needed to do additional work to prepare the fresh 8,000 fuel rods required to restart the reactor. If they restart the reactor, which I estimate will take them at least six months, they can produce about 6 kilograms of plutonium (roughly one bomb’s worth) per year. What they may do is to run the reactor for two to four years, withdraw the spent fuel, let it cool for six months to a year, and then reprocess the fuel to extract the plutonium. In other words, from the time they restart the reactor, it would take roughly three to four years before they could harvest another 12 kilograms of plutonium. The bottom line is that this is a slow process.
Q: How difficult would it be for North Korea to adjust its centrifuge facility to make HEU? And, if they did, how much HEU can they make?
Hecker: Not very difficult. It just requires reconfiguration of the various centrifuge cascades and adjusting operational procedures. That could be done very rapidly. They most likely had everything prepared in case they ever wanted to make this move. If they reconfigure, then based on our estimates, they could make roughly 40 kilograms of HEU annually in that facility – enough for one or two HEU bombs a year.
Q: How big is North Korea’s plutonium stockpile?
Hecker: After our 2010 visit, I estimated that they had 24 to 42 kilograms of plutonium, roughly enough for four to eight bombs. If the 2013 nuclear test used plutonium, then they may have 5 or 6 kilograms less now. Because they have so little plutonium, I believed that they might have turned to uranium enrichment to develop the HEU path to the bomb as an alternative.
Q: Could you explain what you see as North Korea's capabilities in regard to putting nuclear warheads on short-, medium-, and long-range missiles?
North Korea has conducted only three nuclear tests. The 2006 test was partially successful; the 2009 and 2013 tests likely were fully successful. With so few tests, the North Korean ability to miniaturize nuclear warheads to fit on its missiles is severely limited. After the first two tests, I did not believe North Korea had sufficient test experience to miniaturize a nuclear warhead to fit on any of its missiles. I believed the nuclear devices tested were likely primitive -- on the order of the Nagasaki device, which weighed roughly 5,000 kilograms. Official North Korea news outlets implied they were more advanced, and some Western analysts agreed. I stated that they needed additional nuclear tests to miniaturize.
Q: After the test in February, Pyongyang announced that it had successfully tested a smaller and lighter nuclear device. North Korean news media also specifically stated that this was unlike the first two, confirming that the earlier tests involved primitive devices. The Kim Jong Un regime followed the claim of having smaller and lighter warheads with threats of launching nuclear-tipped missiles against the United States and South Korea.
My colleague, CISAC Affiliate Nick Hansen, and I do not believe that the North Koreans have the capability to miniaturize a warhead to fit on a long-range missile that can reach the United States because the weight and size limits are prohibitive for them. They have insufficient nuclear test experience. Although last December they were able to launch a satellite into space, it is much more difficult to develop a warhead, fit it into a reentry body, and have it survive the enormous mechanical and thermal stresses of reentry on its way to a target. In April 2012, Pyongyang paraded a road-mobile long-range missile we call the KN-08. It may have been designed to reach as far as Alaska and the US West Coast, but to our knowledge it has never been test fired. There is some evidence that the first-stage engine may have been tested last year and early this year at the Sohae (Tongchang) launch site on North Korea's West Coast. North Korea would need a lot more missile tests as well as more nuclear tests to present a serious long-range threat.
