The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) honored top students of the 2016 Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) and Stanford e-Japan (Spring Session) at “Japan–U.S. Day”—an event held at Stanford University on August 9, 2016. The RSP honorees were Pierce Lowary (Highland Park High School, Dallas, Texas), Sarah Ohta (Polytechnic High School, Pasadena, California), and Risako Yang (Castilleja School, Palo Alto, California), and the Stanford e-Japan honorees were Miyu Hayashi (Takada High School, Mie Prefecture) and Minoru Takeuchi (Senior High School at Otsuka, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo).

Japan–U.S. Day began with opening remarks by the Honorable Jun Yamada, Consul General of Japan in San Francisco. Praising the honorees and their fellow students for their dedication to the study of U.S.–Japan relations, Consul General Yamada noted, “The U.S.–Japan relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world today,” and underscored the importance of programs such as the RSP and Stanford e-Japan in engaging youth in the study of this critical relationship.

Stanford e-Japan Instructor Waka Takahashi Brown and RSP Instructor Naomi Funahashi presented overviews of the two programs to the audience of over 50 people, which included Ambassador Michael Armacost (former U.S. Ambassador to Japan), Consul Akira Ichioka (Director, Japan Information and Cultural Center, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco), Professor Indra Levy (Stanford University), Professor Emeritus Daniel Okimoto (Stanford University), and Maiko Tamagawa (Advisor for Educational Affairs, Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco).

The students were recognized by Brown and Funahashi for their overall coursework performance, which included research essays. They articulately presented their research that focused on topics ranging from legacies of World War II and security issues to urban planning in Japan, longevity, and non-profit organizations, and they adroitly addressed questions from the audience.

[[{"fid":"223802","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"Ambassador Armacost chats with student honoree, Minoru Takeuchi","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"Rylan Sekiguchi","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto"},"type":"media","attributes":{"width":"870","style":"padding: 6px; float: left; width: 420px; height: 267px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]This year marked the first time that a joint RSP/Stanford e-Japan event was held to honor students. Reflecting on the event, Funahashi commented, “It was a great opportunity to recognize the impressive work of young U.S.–Japan scholars. And seeing them engage in cross-cultural dialogue in person after months of online interaction was a real treat.” Brown agreed, adding, “For my students, having the opportunity to interact with peers from the United States was one of the highlights of the program. To see all the RSP and Stanford e-Japan award winners honored at the same event was extremely rewarding and gave me great hope for the future of U.S.–Japan relations.” The audience seemed to feel similarly. “It was wonderful seeing the American and Japanese students interact with one another,” said Ambassador Armacost. “Their remarks were thoughtful and articulate. It was a model of timely educational exchange.”

SPICE has received numerous grants in support of the RSP (since its inception in 2003) from the United States-Japan Foundation, the Center for Global Partnership (The Japan Foundation), and the Japan Fund, which is administered by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Stanford e-Japan (since its inception in 2015) has been supported by a grant from the United States-Japan Foundation.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the worry in the West was what would happen to that country’s thousands of nuclear weapons. Would “loose” nukes fall into the hands of terrorists, rogue states, criminals – and plunge the world into a nuclear nightmare?

Fortunately, scientists and technical experts in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union rolled up their sleeves to manage and contain the nuclear problem in the dissolving Communist country.

One of the leaders in this relationship was Stanford engineering professor Siegfried Hecker, who served as a director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory before coming to Stanford as a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is a world-renowned expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security.

Hecker cited one 1992 meeting with Russian scientists in Moscow who were clearly concerned about the risks. In his new book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers, Hecker quoted one Russian expert as saying, “We now need to be concerned about terrorism.”

Earning both scientific and political trust was a key, said Hecker, also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The Russians were proud of their scientific accomplishments and highly competent in the nuclear business – and they sought to show this to the Americans scientists, who became very confident in their Russian counterparts’ technical capabilities as they learned more about their nuclear complex and toured the labs.

Economic collapse, political turmoil

But the nuclear experts faced an immense problem. The Soviets had about 39,000 nuclear weapons in their country and in Eastern Europe and about 1.5 million kilograms of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (the fuel for nuclear bombs), Hecker said. Consider that the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 was only six kilograms of plutonium, he added. Meanwhile, the U.S. had about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the early 1990s.

Hecker and the rest of the Americans were deeply concerned about the one million-plus Russians who worked in nuclear facilities. Many faced severe financial pressure in an imploding society and thus constituted a huge potential security risk.

“The challenge that Russia faced with its economy collapsing was enormous,” he said in an interview.

The Russian scientists, Hecker said, were motivated to act responsibly because they realized the awful destruction that a single nuclear bomb could wreak. Hecker noted that one Russian scientist told him, “We arrived in the nuclear century all in one boat, and a movement by anyone will affect everyone.” Hecker noted, “Therefore, you know, we were doomed to work together to cooperate.”

All of this depended on the two governments involved easing nuclear tensions while allowing the scientists to collaborate. In short order, the scientists developed mutual respect and trust to address the loose nukes scenario.

The George H.W. Bush administration launched nuclear initiatives to put the Russian government at ease. For example, it took the nuclear weapons off U.S. Navy surface ships and some of its nuclear weapons off alert to allow the Russians to do the same. The U.S. Congress passed the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation, which helped fund some of the loose nuke containment efforts.

While those were positive measures, Hecker said, it was ultimately the cooperation among scientists, what they called lab-to-lab-cooperation, that allowed the two former superpower enemies to “get past the sensitivity barriers” and make “the world a safer place.”

Since the end of the Cold War, no significant nuclear event has occurred as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its nuclear complex, Hecker noted.

Lesson: cooperation counts

One lesson from it all, Hecker said, is that government policymakers need to understand that scientists and engineers can work together and make progress toward solving difficult, dangerous problems.

“We don’t want to lose the next generation from understanding what can actually be done by working together,” he said.  “So, we want to demonstrate to them, Look, this is what was done when the scientists were interested and enthusiastic and when the government gave us enough room to be able to do that.”

Hecker said this scientific cooperation extended to several thousand scientists and engineers at the Russian sites and at U.S. nuclear labs – primarily the three defense labs: Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national laboratories. Many technical exchanges and visits between scientists in Russia and the United States took place.

He recalled visiting some of the nuclear sites in Russian cities shrouded by mystery. “These cities were so secret, they didn’t even appear on Soviet maps.”

Change of threat

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the nature of the nuclear threat changed, Hecker said. The threat before was one of mutual annihilation, but now the threat changed to what would happen if nuclear assets were lost, stolen or somehow evaded the control of the government.

“From an American perspective we referred to these as the ‘four loose nuclear dangers,'” he said.

This included securing the loose nukes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; preventing nuclear materials or bomb fuel from getting into the wrong hands; the human element involving the people who worked in the Soviet nuclear complex; and finally, the “loose exports” problem of someone trying to sell nuclear materials or technical components to overseas groups like terrorists or rogue nations.

For Hecker, this is not just an American story. It is about a selfless reconciliation with a longtime enemy for the greater global good, a relationship not corrupted by ideological or nationalistic differences, but one reflective of mutual interests of the highest order.

“The primary reason,” he said, “why we didn’t have a nuclear catastrophe was the Russian nuclear workers and the Russian nuclear officials. Their dedication, their professionalism, their patriotism for their country was so strong that it carried them through these times in the 1990s when they often didn’t get paid for six months at a time … The nuclear complex did its job through the most trying times. And it was a time when the U.S. government took crucial conciliatory measures with the new Russian Federation and gave us scientists the support to help make the world a safer place.”

In the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama, the Mosbacher director of CDDRL, analyzes the rising tide of populism as represented by the current candidates for the US Presidential elections. According to Fukuyama, the real story of the election is that American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and economic stagnation experienced by most of the population. 

Click here to read the full article. 

Could out of pocket drug costs be responsible for pandemics? In this Public Health Perspectives article, Marcella Alsan discusses how copayments for antibiotics can cause people in poor areas to turn to unregulated markets.

On May 26, 2016, researchers at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center reported the first case of what they called a “truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.” By now, the story has been well-covered in the media: a month earlier, a 49 year old woman walked into a clinic in Pennsylvania with what seemed to be a urinary tract infection. But tests revealed something far scarier—both for her and public health officials. The strain of E. Coli that infiltrated her body has a gene that makes it bulletproof to colistin, the so-called last resort antibiotic.

Most have pinned the blame for the impending doom of a “post-antibiotic world” on the overuse of antibiotics and a lack of new ones in the development pipeline. But there’s another superbug incubator that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: poverty.

Last month at the IMF meeting in Washington, D.C., UK Chancellor George Osborne warned about the potentially devastating human and economic cost of antimicrobial resistance. He called for “the world’s governments and industry leaders to work together in radical new ways.” But Gerry Bloom, a physician and economist at the Institute for Development Studies, argued that any measures to stop overuse and concoct new drugs must be “complemented by investments in measures to ensure universal access to effective antibiotic treatment of common infections.”

“In many countries, poor people obtain these drugs in unregulated markets,” Bloom said. “They often take a partial course and the products may be sub-standard. This increases the risk of resistance.”

For at least fifteen years, we’ve known about these socioeconomic origins of antimicrobial resistance. Other studies have revealed problems with mislabeled or expired or counterfeit drugs. But the clearest link between poverty and the rise of antimicrobial resistance is that poor people may not see a qualified health care provider or complete a course of quality antibiotics. Instead, they might turn to unregulated markets for substandard drugs.

But why do people resort to unregulated markets or take drugs that aren’t that great if they are available? Marcella Alsan, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine who studies the relationship between socioeconomic disparities and infectious diseases, led a study that answered this question. In last October’s Lancet Infectious Diseases, Alsan and her colleagues showed that it might have a lot to do with requiring copayments in the public sector. To show this, they analyzed the WHO’s 2014 Antibacterial Resistance Global Surveillance report with an eye toward the usual suspects, such as antibiotic consumption and antibiotic-flooded livestock.

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On May 27, 2016, President Obama will become the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima. In light of this historic visit, SPICE hosted a webinar on May 23, 2016, which featured the talk, “Beneath the Mushroom Cloud,” by Clifton Truman Daniel, grandson of President Harry S. Truman and author of Growing Up with My Grandfather: Memories of Harry S Truman. Following a question and answer period with Mr. Daniel, SPICE staff shared classroom resources (Sadako’s Paper Cranes and Lessons of Peace and Divided Memories) that introduced diverse perspectives on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

RELATED CLASSROOM RESOURCES

Hiroshima: Perspectives of the Atomic Bombing
Divided Memories: Comparing History Textbooks
Examining Long-term Radiation Effects
Nuclear Tipping Point (video)
Sadako's Paper Cranes and Lessons of Peace
Reflections from an Atomic Bomb Survivor (video)

This webinar is being offered in collaboration with the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, which is funded by the Freeman Foundation. The NCTA is a multi-year initiative to encourage and facilitate teaching and learning about East Asia in elementary and secondary schools nationwide.

If provoked, many Americans might well back nuclear attacks on foes like Iran and al Qaeda, according to new collaborative research from CISAC senior fellow Scott Sagan and Dartmouth professor Benjamin Valentino.

You can read more about their latest public opinion polling data, and its implications for the debate surrounding President Obama's upcoming visit to Hiroshima, in a column they co-authored for the Wall Street Journal.