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CISAC, Russian nuclear institute launch joint website

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CISAC Senior Fellow Siegfried Hecker and the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI) have launched a website to chronicle more than 20 years of nuclear collaboration between the Russian Federation and the United States.

This collaboration culminated in a conference in June 2013 on Russia-US nuclear cooperation. The website documents presentations, participants, and news from the conference in both English and Russian. Work from this conference will continue to strengthen the partnership between the two countries. 

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Detention and release of Palo Alto retiree by North Korea prompts media interest – APARC scholars offer expertise

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Reports of the detention and eventual release by North Korean authorities of an 85-year-old Palo Alto retiree, Merrill Newman, spurred a wave of media interest. Newman, a Korean War veteran, had decided to go on a tour of North Korea, apparently in part to revisit the place where he had served more than 60 years ago.

He was accompanied by a fellow retiree, Bob Hamrdla, also a Palo Alto resident. According to accounts provided by Hamrdla, Newman was taken off the plane as he was leaving the country after a nine-day tour. During his detention, Newman was videotaped reading an apology, in which he accepted responsibility for “hostile acts” and requested forgiveness.

After 42 days in custody, Newman was released and arrived back in the United States on Dec. 7. Newman was greeted by his family and spoke briefly to reporters, recognizing the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang for securing his release, before heading home. The full details that led to Newman’s detention still remain unclear.

Both local and national media rushed to understand these events, first reported in detail by the San Jose Mercury News (Nov. 20). Reporters sought out expertise at Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, speaking to Associate Director for Research Daniel Sneider and to Korean Studies Program Associate Director David Straub, who both have long experience with Korea and have been frequently cited as experts.

Sneider was cited in newspaper reports in the San Jose Mercury News (Nov. 20) and the Los Angeles Times; was interviewed on local radio, and also interviewed for broadcast on the evening news programs of the CBS, ABC and NBC networks local affiliates. Straub was quoted by NK News, a leading agency specializing in coverage of North Korea, also cited by the Washington Post. Most recently, Sneider was cited in the San Jose Mercury News (Dec. 7) upon the confirmation of Newman’s release.

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A Postscript to the 1943 Cairo Conference: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Chinese Dilemma

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 Abstract:

That the Cairo Conference has been overshadowed by the wartime summits at Teheran and Yalta is understandable given the start of the Cold War in Europe almost immediately after the German surrender in May 1945. To understand the collapse of relations between the Anglo-American allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, it is important to look at the conferences at Teheran and Yalta, the interactions between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, the understandings they reached, and their misunderstandings. That said, the Cairo Conference also marked an important turning point in the relations between the allies in the war against Japan: China, Great Britain, and the United States, the consequences of which were critical to the defeat of Japan and the post-war order in East Asia.

The interaction of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang in Cairo is every bit as compelling from a human interest perspective as the interplay between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Teheran and Yalta, albeit less studied, and offers a sobering reminder of what can happen when policy is made at the very highest level by individuals who know relatively little about the culture of their partners and are not able to separate myths and stereotypes from realities. Summit conferences may make for good theater, but do not necessarily result in good policies as an examination of the Cairo Conference reveals.

Each of the parties at the Cairo Conference came with their own agendas, frequently contradictory. Generalissimo and Madame Chiang hoped to obtain a commitment to make the China-Burma-India theater of war the focal point in the war against Japan, a matter not only of strategic importance to them but also of poetic justice. They also sought to redress grievances against Japan and Great Britain in the post-war era. Roosevelt hoped to buoy the ego and spirits of Chiang and to insure that the Kuomintang regime would not make a separate peace with Japan thus allowing the Japanese to redeploy the nearly one million troops they had stationed in China. Churchill had no real interest in meeting with Chiang and his wife at Cairo at all, but felt obliged to humor Roosevelt and to make sure that no agreements would be reached in Cairo that would in any way prejudice British colonial interests in Southeast Asia in the post-war era. Given these conflicting agendas, it is no wonder that none of the participants would be satisfied with the results of their labors in Cairo.

 

Speaker Bio:

Ronald Heiferman is Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, and a Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University. He has also taught at Connecticut College and the City University of New York. Dr. Heiferman was educated at Yale and New York University (Ph.D.). Professor Heiferman has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including Flying Tigers (New York: Ballantine, 1971), World War II (London: Hamlyn, 1973), Wars of the Twentieth Century (London: Hamlyn, 1974), The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan (New York: Military Press, 1981), the Rand-McNally Encyclopedia of World II (New York: Rand-McNally, 1978), and The Cairo Conference of 1943: Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang (McFarland, 2011). His latest book, The Chinese Idyll of Franklin D. Roosevelt, will be published in 2014. Professor Heiferman was a Yale-Lilly Fellow in 1978, a Yale-Mellon Fellow in 1984, and has also been the recipient of five National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships: Duke University (1974), University of Chicago (1977), Stanford University (1980), Harvard University (1987), and the University of Texas (1991).

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Ronald Heiferman Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program Speaker Quinnipiac University
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Two technical projects in international humanitarian innovation: Africa and India

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Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2013): USAID and the UN's World Food Program have proposed strategies for allocating ready-to-use (therapeutic and supplementary) foods to children in developing countries. Analysis is needed to investigate whether there are better alternatives. We use a longitudinal data set of 5657 children from Bwamanda to construct a statistical model that tracks each child's height and weight  throughout the first five years of life. We embed this model into an optimization framework that chooses which individual children should receive food based on a child's sex, age, height and weight, to minimize the mean number of disability-adjusted life years per child subject to a budget constraint. Our proposed policy compares favorably to those proposed by the aid groups. Time permitting, we will also discuss a recent analysis of a nutrition program in Guatemala that quantifies the age dependence in the impact of supplementary food, and develops a food allocation policy that exploits this age dependence and reduces child stunting.

India: Motivated by India's nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess 12 similarity scores (for 10 fingerprints and two irises) between a resident's biometric images at enrollment and his biometric images during his first verification. At subsequent verifications, we allow individualized strategies based on these 12 scores: we acquire a subset of the 12 images, get new scores for this subset that quantify the similarity to the corresponding enrollment images, and use the likelihood ratio to decide whether a resident is genuine or an imposter. Compared to the policy currently used in India, our proposed policy provides a five-log (i.e., 100,000-fold) reduction in the false reject rate while only increasing the mean delay from 31 to 38 seconds.

A full speaker bio is available on CISAC's website. 

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Lawrence M. Wein

Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5015

(650) 724-1676 (650) 725-0468
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Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science
CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member
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Lawrence Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. After getting a PhD in Operations Research from Stanford University in 1988, he spent 14 years at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he was the DEC Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science. His research interests include mathematical models in operations management, medicine and biology.

Since 2001, he has analyzed a variety of homeland security problems. His homeland security work includes four papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on an emergency response to a smallpox attack, an emergency response to an anthrax attack, a biometric analysis of the US-VISIT Program, and an analysis of a bioterror attack on the milk supply. He has also published the Washington Post op-ed "Unready for Anthrax" (2003) and the New York Times op-ed "Got Toxic Milk?", and has written papers on port security, indoor remediation after an anthrax attack, and the detention and removal of illegal aliens.

For his homeland security research, Wein has received several awards from the International Federation of Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), including the Koopman Prize for the best paper in military operations research, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the INFORMS President’s Award for contributions to society, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize for best research publication, and the George E. Kimball Medal. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009.   

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Lawrence Wein Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science; CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member Speaker
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Encounter 2013: An Evening with Korean Authors Kim In-suk and Kang Yŏng-suk

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The Korea Colloquium on History and Culture

 

Authors Kim In-suk and Kang Yŏng-suk and translator Bruce Fulton will appear at several American universities in November 2013 for a series of bilingual readings and discussions.  The tour begins at Stanford University and also includes literary events at Claremont McKenna College, the University of Wisconsin, and Brigham Young University, and in New York City.  During these visits the American reading public will have the opportunity to meet two of contemporary Korea’s most prominent fiction writers, hear samples of their works read in Korean and in English translation, engage in a dialog with the writers, and purchase copies of the authors’ works in translation.
 
Kim In-suk (김인숙) was born in 1963 in Seoul and studied journalism at Yonsei University.  A published writer at the age of 19, she issued her first story collection, Bloodline, in 1983, and her first novel, Flowers of Fire, in 1985.  She is the recipient of the 2003 Yi Sang Literature Prize for “Sea and Butterfly,” and the 2005 Hanguk ilbo Literature Prize for The Long Road, one of the very few Korean fictional works involving the Korean diasporic experience in Australia. Today, building on a three-decade career in letters, she is one of Korea’s senior writers, but an author whose literary sensibility and wide-ranging world view belie her age. Her most recent works are the story collection So Long, Elena, for which she received the 2009 Tongin Literature Prize; the historical novel Sohyŏn (2010); and the novel Could You Lose Your Mind? (2011), which conflates natural and human disaster.  She is represented in English in Koreana; the novella The Long Road (2010), the anthology Reading Korea: 12 Contemporary Stories (2008), and in an ASIA Bilingual Edition of her story “Stab.”.
 
Kang Yŏng-suk (강영숙) was born in 1966 in Ch’unch’ŏn, Kangwŏn Province, and studied creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts.  Since her debut in 1998 she has issued half a dozen story collections and novels and garnered several literary awards, including the 2006 Hanguk ilbo Literature Prize for her first novel, Rina, and the 2011 Kim Yu-jŏng Literature Prize.  In 2009 she took part in the University of Iowa International Writing Program.  Her 2011 story collection The Night He Lifts Weights, honored with a Book-of-the-Year award from the Korean Library Association, is strongly colored by urban noir, the stories set in locales within and without Korea.  She is represented in English translation in Azalea 4.
 
Bruce Fulton is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction, including the award-winning women’s anthologies Words of Farewell: Stories by Korean Women Writers (Seal Press, 1989) and Wayfarer: New Writing by Korean Women (Women in Translation, 1997), and with Marshall R. Pihl, Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction, rev. and exp. ed. (M.E. Sharpe, 2007).  The Fultons’ most recent translations are River of Fire: Stories by O Chŏnghŭi (Columbia University Press, 2012) and How in Heaven’s Name: A Novel of World War II by Cho Chŏngnae (MerwinAsia 2012).  The Fultons have received several awards and fellowships for their translations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the first ever given for a translation from the Korean; and a residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the first ever awarded to translators from any Asian language.  Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia.
 
The International Communication Foundation (ICF), primary sponsor of Encounter 2013, was inaugurated in April 1982 as a non-profit foundation under the Ministry of Culture and Public Information. The ICF contributes to globalization through promotion of international exchange while supporting research and publication activities that introduce Korean culture to the world.  Since 1997 it has offered Korean Literature Translation Fellowships to graduate students translating from Korean into English, Russian, and Chinese.  ICF endowments created the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia and the Sunshik Min Fund at Harvard University for the translation and publication of Korean literature.  Since 1999 the ICF has provided major funding for annual author tours of North America, introducing many of contemporary Korea’s most important fiction writers to North American readers.
 

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Kim In-suk author Speaker
Kang Yŏng-suk author Speaker
Bruce Fulton translator Speaker
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The Korea Colloquium on History and Culture

Former FBI director to bolster security research at Stanford

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Robert Mueller became director of the FBI one week before 9/11 and spent the next 12 years adding global terrorists to the agency’s most-wanted list of gangsters, kidnappers and bank robbers – and aggressively hunting them down.

Now, two months after leaving the job that allowed him to transform the FBI and focus its agents more on counterterrorism and emerging threats like cyber crimes, Mueller will work closely with Stanford scholars to better understand the challenges and issues surrounding international security and online networks.

At the invitation of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Law School, Mueller will spend the current academic year as a consulting professor and the Arthur and Frank Payne Distinguished Lecturer.

He will also visit the Haas Center for Public Service and meet with students to discuss leadership and service around cybersecurity, and work through FSI to train and mentor undergraduate students.

"I look forward to working with the students and faculty of Stanford to address critical issues of the day, including counterterrorism, cybersecurity and shepherding institutions through transition,” Mueller said. “Having worked on these issues as FBI director over the last several years, I hope to pass on the lessons I have learned to those who will be our leaders of tomorrow.  For my part, I hope to gain fresh insight and new thoughts and ideas for the challenges our country continues to face."  

Mueller will make several visits to Stanford, spending about 30 days on campus during the academic year. His first visit comes next week, and will be marked by his delivery of the Payne lecture on Nov. 15. The public talk will focus on the FBI’s role in safeguarding national security. It will be held at 4:30 p.m. at the Koret-Taube Conference Center in the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building.

“Bob Mueller is an extraordinary public servant who will bring an enormously important perspective to some of the most complex security issues in the world,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “We’re excited that he can help shape our research agenda on cybersecurity and other security issues.”

Mueller will spend the year working with FSI and Stanford Law School scholars to develop research agendas on emerging issues in international security. He will hold graduate seminars and deliver a major lecture at the law school and work with students and fellows at the Haas Center, the law school and the Graduate School of Business. He will also mentor honors students at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

"Robert Mueller has been a federal prosecutor and the nation’s leading law enforcement official during very difficult times.  We are thrilled he will be interacting with our students and faculty because he has much to teach us,” said M. Elizabeth Magill, dean of the law school. "His unique perspective on the intersection of law and international security will be tremendously beneficial to our community.  We are delighted to welcome Director Mueller back to Stanford Law School."

As the FBI’s chief, Mueller created a dedicated cybersecurity squad in each of its field offices and dedicated about 1,000 agents and analysts to fight Web-based crimes. At Stanford, he will bring together academics and practitioners with an eye toward creating an unofficial diplomacy dialogue.

“Should a terrorist utilize cyber capabilities to undertake an attack, it could be devastating,” he said just before leaving the FBI in September. “We have to be prepared.”

Mueller received a bachelor’s from Princeton in 1966 and a master’s in international relations from New York University a year later. He fought in Vietnam as a Marine, leading a rifle platoon and earning the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. After leaving the military, Mueller enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School and received his law degree in 1973.

He began his law career as a litigator in San Francisco, and in 1976 began a 12-year career serving in United States Attorney’s offices in San Francisco and Boston focusing on financial fraud, terrorist and public corruption cases. He worked for two law firms before returning to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., where he was a senior homicide investigator.

He was named U.S. Attorney in San Francisco in 1998, and held that job until President George W. Bush tapped him to lead the FBI. His first day on the job was Sept. 4, 2001.

“When I first came on board, I thought I had a fair idea of what to expect,” Mueller said during his farewell ceremony at the FBI ‘s headquarters in Washington “But the September 11 attacks altered every expectation.”

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Spytainment: Fake spies influence perception of real intelligence

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A visit to CIA headquarters is nothing like Jack Bauer's CTU: the entrance has no retina or fingerprint scans. Agents do not look like Hollywood stars. 

"In fact, the place has something of a shabby post office feel," CISAC co-director Amy Zegart told nearly 200 Stanford alumni attending her "Class Without Quizzes" during alumni weekend. 

But shows such as "Homeland," "Blacklist" and "24," with the fictitious operative Jack Bauer, have dramatically changed Americans' perception of our intelligence agencies, Zegart told the class. 

Zegart, who is also associate director of academic affairs at the Hoover Institution, says the proliferation of  “spytainment” has skyrocketed in the last 15 years. Spy genre novelists Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy have sold 300 million books in the last 15 years, nearly one for every American. 

Spy-themed video games have gone from a $2 billion industry in 1996 to one of $16 billion in 2011. Spy movies have made the top-10 grossing U.S. film list every year since 2000. 

"Don't get me wrong," said Zegart, one of the country's leading intelligence experts. "I'm married to a Hollywood screenwriter and love being transported to an imaginary world where congressional oversight works and spies always look like Daniel Craig." 

Amy Zegart

Amy Zegart 
Photo Credit: Caleb Rau

But, she added, the blurring of fact and fiction makes for great entertainment at a hidden cost: “Americans are steeped in misperceptions about what intelligence agencies actually do – and misplaced expectations about how well they can do it.” 

Zegart and Hoover research fellow Marshall Erwin commissioned a YouGov National Poll in early October about public attitudes toward national intelligence. They found that many Americans don't really understand what our intelligence agencies do. 

When asked specifically about the National Security Agency, they found: 

  • About one-third believes NSA officials are responsible for interrogating terrorist detainees. They aren't.
  • About one-third thinks the NSA conducts operations to kill terrorists They don't.
  • Nearly 39% of those polled believe metadata – the information collected as part of its bulk phone records program – includes content of phone calls. It doesn’t.
  • Nearly half of those polled did not know that the NSA breaks foreign codes, even though that’s been one of its core missions since its founding in 1952 and why the NSA employs more mathematicians than any other U.S. organization.
  • Frequent wathers of spy TV (43%) are more likely to approve of government collection of telephone and Internet data than infrequent watchers (29%).

The finding that got the biggest laugh and loudest groan: While 43 percent of Americans could correctly name James Clapper as the director of national intelligence, 74 percent could identify Miley Cyrus as the young woman who created a global stir when she twerked on nationwide TV.

You can learn more about the poll in this video and their recent VIDEO: Is Spy-Themed Entertainment Affecting Public Opinion on Torture?, as well as in this Lawfare Blog posting and Walter Pincus column in the Washington Post.

The YouGov poll of 1,000 randomly selected people was conducted Oct. 5-7 with a margin of error of +/- 4.3.

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