Abstract: On 13 February 2016, in a widely-reported interview for the BBC, Ashton Carter, the US Secretary of Defense, made clear that the US Government supported the maintenance and renewal of Britain’s strategic nuclear deterrent force of Trident submarines. According to Carter, Trident enabled Britain to ‘continue to play that outsized role on the world stage that it does because of its moral standing and its historical standing.’ However, during the early 1960s, attitudes in Washington to the UK’s independent nuclear capabilities were altogether different. This paper will begin with a re-examination of Robert McNamara’s famous address at Ann Arbor in June 1962 when he openly criticised the existence of independent allied nuclear forces. Using new evidence, it will chart the background to the speech, the reception it was accorded, and how it helped to intensify tensions in Anglo-American relations when the Skybolt missile system was cancelled by the US at the end of the same year. The paper will also show how by the end of the Johnson administration, and the tenure of McNamara’s period as Secretary of Defense, the US had become reconciled to the continued existence of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and even begun to take steps to assist with its improvement.
About the Speaker: Matthew Jones is Professor of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science. After receiving his DPhil from St Antony's College, Oxford, he was appointed to a Lectureship in the History Department at Royal Holloway, University of London in 1994, and subsequently promoted to Reader in International History before moving to the University of Nottingham in 2004, and then to the LSE in 2013. His interests span post-war British and US foreign policy, nuclear history, and the histories of empire and decolonization in South East Asia. His books include Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (Macmillan, 1996), Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002), andAfter Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965, (CUP, 2010). In 2008, Jones was commissioned by the Cabinet Office to write a two-volume official history of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent, covering the period between 1945 and 1982, the first volume of which has now been completed.
Matthew Jones
Professor of International History
Speaker
London School of Economics and Political Science
Seventeen faculty members and researchers from Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies were hosted at U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) Headquarters in Hawaii for an intensive orientation on Feb. 4-5. The visit aimed to advance collaboration and to offer a deeper understanding of USPACOM’s operations to Stanford scholars who study international security and Asia.
Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., Commander of USPACOM, together with his commanders and staff, welcomed the delegation. Harris’s meeting with Stanford faculty is the second in recent months. The USPACOM visit and earlier speech at Stanford Center at Peking University are part of a series of activities driven by the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative. Led by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the Initiative seeks to provide constructive interaction between academic and governmental experts on the many and diverse security challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region.
“Engaging deeply in conversations with those who are on the frontlines is incredibly valuable,” said trip participant Coit Blacker, FSI senior fellow and professor of international studies. “This is especially true for academics who focus much of their attention thinking about the prospects for international peace and security but not necessarily considering their direct application on a military-level.”
Top: (Left) The Stanford delegation watches a demonstration of a 2-minute drill. / (Right) Karen Eggleston boards a UH-60 Blackhawk helpcopter enroute to the Lightning Academy with her colleagues. Bottom:The delegation takes a group photo on-site.
On the first day, FSI scholars spoke with military officers about the command’s strategies and challenges it faces, such as population aging and sovereignty disputes over the South China Sea. Discussions were followed with a tour of USS Michael Murphy, a guided missile destroyer which routinely conducts operations in the Western Pacific including the South China Sea.
Karen Eggleston, FSI senior fellow and director of the Asia Health Policy Program, was one of the discussants on the USPACOM trip. Her research focuses on health policy in Asia, specifically the effects of demographic change and urbanization.
“As a health economist, the visit yielded for me a behind-the-scenes sense of how members of the military respond to pandemics and humanitarian situations, and of the ongoing dialogue with their counterparts in Asian nations,” Eggleston said. “I think that kind of military-to-military engagement provides an area rich with questions and best practices that could in some ways be shared as a model among other nations.”
Other activities on the first day included a briefing by the U.S. Pacific Fleet command, informal presentations and dialogue between the Stanford participants and the USPACOM staff, and working with senior leaders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces command.
On the second day, the group visited the U.S. Army’s installation at Schofield Barracks. There, they observed a command post simulation and field exercise including units of the 25th Infantry Division. Graduates from the U.S. Army’s jungle survival training school also shared their impressions of applying lessons in the field. Researchers from the Asia-Pacific Center for Strategic Studies (APCSS) joined the Stanford delegation later in the day. Both sides discussed research outcomes and avenues for future exchanges. The day concluded with an extensive tour of USS Mississippi, a Virginia-class attack submarine. FSI has long engaged military officers through a senior military fellows program. Started in 2009 by the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the program remains active today with five fellows conducting research at Stanford.
Lt. Col. Jose Sumangil, a 2015-16 U.S. Air Force Senior Military Fellow, participated in the Stanford delegation at USPACOM.
“The trip was an excellent opportunity to showcase how the U.S. ‘rebalance to Asia’ strategy is implemented on a day-to-day basis – for example, providing a look into the decision-making process that could occur should a situation arise in the South China Sea,” Sumangil said. “It’s incredibly important to build this kind of understanding among experts studying Asia, and I think we helped do that here.”
USPACOM is one of the largest U.S. military commands with four major service components (U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Army Pacific, U.S. Marine Forces); it is tasked with protecting U.S. people and interests, and enhancing stability in the Asia-Pacific Region.
Hero Image
A Stanford delegation of 17 faculty members and researchers visited U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) Headquarters in Hawaii, Feb. 4-5, 2016.
Stanford researchers working with the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program in San Diego have discovered a startling variety of newly-recognized bacteria living inside the highly trained dolphins that the Navy uses to protect its ships and submarines, find submerged sea mines and detect underwater intruders. They found similar types of bacteria in wild dolphins as well.
“About three quarters of the bacterial species we found in the dolphins’ mouths are completely new to us,” said David Relman, Stanford professor of microbiology and medicine, and co-author of a paper published in the journal Nature Communications on Wednesday.
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
These previously unknown bacteria represent “whole new realms of life,” according to Relman.
“Bacteria are among the most well-studied microbes, so it was surprising to discover the degree to which the kinds of bacteria we found were types that have never been described,” he said. “What novelty means is not just new names of species, families, classes or phyla…there’s reason to believe that along with this taxonomic novelty, there’s functional novelty.”
The U.S. Navy has been training dolphins and sea lions to carry out defensive military missions from their bases in San Diego and elsewhere since the early 1960s.
Over the years, it has also funded scientific research and become the single largest contributor to the scientific literature on marine mammals, producing more than 800 publications, according to the Navy.
Relman started working with the Navy more than 15 years ago to identify bacteria suspected of causing stomach ulcers in their dolphins.
His latest project to catalog the bacterial communities (or microbiota) living inside the dolphins began when the Navy asked him to help develop a probiotic bacterial strain that could keep their dolphins healthy, or help sick dolphins get better.
Navy trainers took regular swabs from the dolphins’ mouths and rectal areas, using what looked like a Q-tip, and shipped the samples to Stanford on dry ice for analysis.
Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.
They also collected samples of the air the dolphins exhaled from their blowholes (known as “chuff”) onto sterile filter paper, as well as samples of their gastric juices using a tube that the dolphins would swallow on command, and for comparison, bacteria from the surrounding water.
The study found a similar amount of diversity and novelty in bacterial samples taken from wild dolphins living in Sarasota Bay off the west coast of Florida, although there were slight differences in the bacteria from the dolphins’ mouths.
Relman said he hoped to develop a profile of the normal microbial communities in healthy dolphins and other marine mammals, so that scientists could detect any early change that might signify an imminent disease, or health problems caused by climate change and ocean warming.
“There’s a lot of concern about the changing conditions of the oceans and what the impact could be on the health of wild marine mammals,” Relman said. “We would love to be able to develop a diagnostic test that would tell us when marine mammals are beginning to suffer from the ill effects of a change in their environment.”
The research could help solve other mysteries, such as how dolphins digest their food, even though they swallow fish whole without chewing them.
The key could be a unique bacterial group that’s also been identified in an endangered species of freshwater dolphins living in China’s Yangtze River, said Elisabeth Bik, a research associate at the Stanford Department of Medicine and lead author on the paper.
“It’s a very intriguing bacterial group that nobody has seen before in any other terrestrial animal group,” said Bik. “I would really love to know more about those bacteria and sequence their genomes to understand more about their functional capacity.”
Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.
The study also examined oral, gastric and rectal samples from the Navy’s trained sea lions.
“The sea lions and dolphins are kept at the same facility, they’re fed exactly the same fish, and they’re swimming in the same water…but they’re very, very different in terms of microbiota,” Bik said.
Unlike dolphins, sea lions share many common types of bacteria with their terrestrial cousins.
“Sea lions weren’t that different from other carnivores like dogs and cats,” Bik said. “They’re evolutionarily related to them, and their microbiota looks very similar to those animals. But dolphins don’t really have a terrestrial mammal that’s closely related, and their microbiota looks very different from anything else that people have seen.”
Relman said his team was planning on expanding their study to include other marine mammals such as sea otters, killer whales, baleen whales, grey whales, harbor seals, elephant seals and manatees. Their purpose, in part, is to understand how life in the sea, over the millions of years since the return of mammals, may have shaped the structure of their microbial communities and the roles they play in marine mammal health.
They’re already working to analyze more than 80 samples of killer whale stool that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has gathered with the help of specially trained sniffer dogs, which stand on the bow of their boats and point to fresh killer whale feces before it sinks.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is contributing samples from the sea otters and seals it studies as part of its conservation, ecological, and monitoring programs.
And the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, which is the West Coast’s largest rescue and rehabilitation facility for marine mammals, is sending samples from the seals in its care.
Relman said the research could help scientists begin to answer fundamental questions about life in the ocean.
“Marine mammals remain one of the more poorly understood habitats for studying microbial life, and there would be lots of reasons for thinking that these are important environments to study, in part because of the relevance for the health of these marine mammals, but also because they represent a view into what it means to live in the sea and the nature of our relationship with this vast aspect of our environment,” Relman said.
Collaborators and co-authors on this study included Stephanie Venn-Watson and Kevin Carlin from the National Marine Mammal Foundation, and Eric Jensen from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, in San Diego.
Hero Image
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples. | National Marine Mammal Foundation
Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia is the first attempt to explore how the tumultuous years between 1931 and 1953 have been recreated and renegotiated in cinema. This period saw traumatic conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War, and the Korean War, and pivotal events such as the Rape of Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of which left a lasting imprint on East Asia and the world. By bringing together a variety of specialists in the cinemas of East Asia and offering divergent yet complementary perspectives, the book explores how the legacies of war have been reimagined through the lens of film.
This turbulent era opened with the Mukden Incident of 1931, which signaled a new page in Japanese militaristic aggression in East Asia, and culminated with the Korean War (1950–1953), a protracted conflict that broke out in the wake of Japan's post–World War II withdrawal from Korea. Divided Lenses explores how the intervening decades have continued to shape politics and popular culture throughout East Asia and the world. Essays in part I examine historical trends at work in various "national" cinemas, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Those in part 2 focus on specific themes such as comfort women in Chinese film, the Nanjing Massacre, or nationalism, and how they have been depicted or renegotiated in contemporary films. Of particular interest are contributions drawing from other forms of screen culture, such as television and video games.
In a piece in The Atlantic, FSI Senior Fellow Larry Diamond argues that to defeat ISIS, America must unite and revisit the core principles of freedom from which it was created. With a surge of illiberal populism spreading throughout the US and Europe, Diamond urges American leaders to reexamine the country's sense of purpose and not degrade freedom in the pursuit for security.
This book is a counter to the conventional wisdom that the United States can and should do more to reduce both the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategies and the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal. That conventional wisdom, argues Brad Roberts in The Case for Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, has not been informed by the experience of the United States since the Cold War in trying to adapt deterrence to a changed world or of the Obama administration to create the conditions that would allow further significant changes to U.S. nuclear policy and posture. A CISAC affiliate, Roberts served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy during the first Obama administration. He wrote the book, which draws heavily on his experience in government, during his time as a consulting professor and William J. Perry fellow at CISAC in 2014. To purchase the book, please visit: http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=26137
Why did you write this book?
My main purpose was to reclaim the middle in the U.S. nuclear policy debate. As in so much of the rest of our national political life, the middle has disappeared from this particular debate, leaving two deeply antagonistic camps to dominate it. One favors more disarmament now, while the other sees many enduring roles for U.S. nuclear weapons. The division didn’t matter so long as the United States could live off the investments of the Cold War. It can no longer do so, as old weapons and delivery systems age out and expensive decisions must be made. A coherent and centrist approach is needed to guide national choices, and this book attempts to fill that gap.
What is your main argument?
That the conditions do not now exist for the United States to safely take additional steps to further reduce the number and role of U.S. nuclear weapons. The Obama administration set out a strategy for creating those conditions in 2009, and the results have been disappointing. Russia has rejected further arms control. China has rejected further transparency. Others have refused to join an international consensus against nuclear weapons. This experience must temper enthusiasm for the disarmament project. The conditions do not exist and are not proximate.
What is the case against nuclear weapons? And why do you think the case for nuclear weapons is more compelling?
The case against nuclear weapons has been made on many grounds: historical (‘these are nothing more than cold war relics’), moral (‘their use in war would violate the laws of war so deterrence is immoral as well’), and prudential (‘we can’t prove that deterrence works but we can prove that these are dangerous weapons’). The case for nuclear weapons derives first and foremost from the role the United States wants to play in the world—as a security guarantor to others and a projector of power to promote stability and our values. In today’s world, without nuclear weapons, the United States could not play that role.
Can you ever imagine a scenario where the U.S. would need to use nuclear weapons again?
We don't have nuclear weapons to fight and win wars with them; we have nuclear weapons to ensure they are never used against us or our allies—in other words, for deterrence. The President would only consider the employment of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances when the vital interests of the United States or an ally are at risk. Though extreme, such circumstances are not implausible. The cold-war vintage bolt-from-the-blue major strike isn’t the potential problem today; rather, the problem is a regional conflict that goes badly for an adversary who then tries to escalate his way out of failed aggression against a U.S. ally. At least three nuclear-armed potential adversaries have now long studied the common problem they face: deterring and defeating a conventionally-superior nuclear-armed major power and its allies. They have developed theories of victory built around nuclear coercion, blackmail, and brinksmanship, aimed at breaking the will of the United States and its allies, including with limited nuclear strikes to demonstrate their resolve. Our deterrence strategy requires that we have an effective ability to respond and that the threat to employ it in the circumstances they create is credible. Moreover, let us distinguish the verb “employ” from “use.” U.S. nuclear weapons are used every day to cast a shadow of doubt over the thinking of potential challengers to U.S. interests and to assure our allies.
President Obama set out a vision for a world free of nuclear weapons at a speech in Prague in April, 2009. Does your book contradict the President’s strategic vision?
President Obama is a pragmatist and this was reflected in the Prague speech. In 2009, we took some steps to reduce the role and number of nuclear weapons and set out a plan for working with others to create the conditions for further reductions. But so long as nuclear weapons remain, the President is committed to ensuring that nuclear deterrence remains effective. Toward that end, the administration has expended considerable time, energy, and money. This is the story of that effort and a distillation of key lessons.
Abstract: Iran under Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi undertook one of the most ambitious nuclear programs of any non-nuclear weapon state in the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1970s. Despite the Shah’s Cold War alliance with the United States, the emerging global nonproliferation order became a zone of contestation in U.S.-Iran relations. This paper is a condensed version of chapter two of this dissertation, covering U.S.-Iran nuclear cooperation agreements under the Nixon and Ford administrations, which explores the Shah's struggle to obtain Western nuclear technology, the ultimately unsuccessful U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, and the United States' efforts to use these negotiations to redefine the Nonproliferation Treaty.
About the Speaker: Farzan Sabet is Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Doctoral Mobility Fellowship for the 2015-2016 academic year. He is a doctoral candidate in international history at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, researching the Iranian nuclear program under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi and its evolving relationship with the global nonproliferation regime during the 1970s. His dissertation is based on multi-archival research in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Canada and combines diplomatic history with nonproliferation studies. He is affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP)
Farzan is also a co-founder and managing editor at IranPolitik.com, which focuses on key issues in Iranian foreign policy and domestic politics today. His work on Iranian politics has appeared in The Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog, The Atlantic, and War on the Rocks, among other outlets.
Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow
CISAC, Stanford University
Abstract: The 1995 launch of a sounding rocket from Andoya in Norway allegedly misinterpreted as an attack in Russia and the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 1962 have one thing in common: they have both been referred to as "the closest we came to nuclear war." The 1962 crisis has mostly been studied from an American perspective due to the availability of documentary evidence and of the Kennedy tapes, until the 1990s when Cuba and the Soviet Union were given a voice, with the rest of the world still largely absent from the understanding of the event. The 1995 close call has been controversial and is remembered in conflicting ways: an alarmist and an untroubled one.
In this presentation, I will offer new findings on those two cases, based on previously untapped primary sources on the experience of and threat perception during the so-called "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 13 countries worldwide and on an oral history workshop I organized in London for the 20th anniversary of the 1995 "Black Brant event", which gathered for the first time Norwegian, American and Russian participants in the event. By focusing on those two events as exemplary cases of near use of nuclear weapons, I will outline a research program on such cases and its implication for social sciences and for the teaching of post-1945 world history to the next generations.
About the Speaker: Benoît Pelopidas is a CISAC affiliate and lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol. He was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2011-2012 academic year.
He received his Ph. D. in political science from Sciences Po (Paris) and the University of Geneva in 2010 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in 2010-2011. Since 2005, he has been teaching international relations at Sciences Po (Paris), the University of Geneva and the Monterey Institute of International Studies (Graduate School of International Policy and Management).
In 2010, he won the "outstanding student essay prize" from the Doreen and Jim McElvany Nonproliferation Essay Competition and in 2011, he was awarded the "Best Graduate Paper 2010" from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. Also in 2011, he won the SNIS Award 2010 for the Best Thesis in International Studies from the Swiss Network for International Studies. A book based on his dissertation is forthcoming in French by Sciences Po University Press.
He published When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power Politics in the US and Russia (with Didier Chaudet and Florent Parmentier; Ashgate, 2009) as well as articles in The Nonproliferation Review, the European Journal of Social Sciences, the Swiss Political Science Review, and the French Yearbook of International Relations. His research focuses on epistemic communities in international security, renunciation of nuclear weapons as a historical possibility, the uses of nuclear history and memory and French nuclear policies.
Lecturer in International Relations at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Crop yield gap (Yg) can be disaggregated into two components: (i) one that is consistent across years and is, therefore, attributable to persistent factors that limit yields, and (ii) a second that varies from year to year due to inconsistent constraints on yields. Quantifying relative contributions of persistent and non-persistent factors to overall Yg, and identifying their underpinning causes, can help identify sound interventions to narrow current Yg and estimate magnitude of likely impact. The objective of this study was to apply this analytical framework to quantify the contribution of persistent factors to current Yg in high-yield irrigated maize systems in western US Corn Belt and identify some of the underpinning explanatory factors. We used a database containing producer yields collected during 10 years (2004–2013) from ca. 3000 irrigated fields in three regions of the state of Nebraska (USA). Yield potential was estimated for each region-year using a crop simulation model and actual weather and management data. Yg was calculated for each field-year as the difference between simulated yield potential and field yield. Two independent sources of field yield data were used: (i) producer-reported yields, and (ii) estimated yields using a combined satellite-crop model approach that does not rely on actual yield data. In each year (hereafter called ‘ranking years’), fields were grouped into ‘small’ and ‘large’ Yg categories. For a given category, Yg persistence was calculated by comparing mean Yg estimated for ranking years against mean Yg calculated, for the same group of fields, for the rest of the years. Explanatory factors for persistent Yg were assessed. Yg persistence ranged between ca. 30% and 50% across regions, with higher persistence in regions with heterogeneous soils. Estimates of Yg size and persistence based on producer-reported yields and satellite-model approach were in reasonable agreement, though the latter approach consistently underestimated Yg size and persistence. Small Yg category exhibited a higher frequency of fields with favorable soils and soybean-maize rotation and greater N fertilizer and irrigation inputs relative to the large Yg category. Remarkably, despite higher applied inputs, efficiencies in the use of N fertilizer, irrigation, and solar radiation were much higher in fields exhibiting small Yg. The framework implemented in this study can be applied to any cropping system for which a reasonable number of field-year yield and management data are available.
A U.S. Navy dolphin opens its mouth for a swab to collect bacterial samples.
Stanford researchers analyzed oral, rectal and gastric samples from the U.S. Navy's dolphins and sea lions, as well as samples from the dolphins' blowholes and the surrounding water.
Zak, a 375-pound California sea lion, shows his teeth during a training swim. Zak has been trained to locate swimmers near piers, ships, and other objects in the water considered suspicious and a possible threat to military forces in the area.
