ABOUT THE TOPIC: Why was nuclear war deemed unwinnable in the United States? Pace conventional wisdom, the truth was not self-evident. The determination that nuclear weapons were useful in a negative sense (deterring conflict), but not a positive sense (pursuing victory), became axiomatic in the Kennedy Years. Standard accounts explaining how a nuclear taboo arose highlight policymakers’ and thought leaders’ moral revulsion toward great loss of human life. This paper looks at studies of post-attack environments to argue that economic and ecological considerations were of equal if not decisive importance. The core question was how to protect and conserve the natural foundations of an advanced industrial state according to the tenets of modernization theory. Economists and ecologists thus clashed because of incompatible methods and political competition. Their collective inability to deliver concrete recommendations for overcoming an all-out thermonuclear attack reinforced a gathering international norm that the possession and use of nuclear weapons merited legal circumscriptions and prohibitions.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Jonathan Hunt is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-2014. He was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2012-2013, and received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2013. His dissertation, “Into the Bargain: The Triumph and Tragedy of Nuclear Internationalism during the mid-Cold War, 1958-1970,” examined how decolonization, the meanings of nuclear power, discord in Cold War alliances, and a schism in internationalist thought shaped how a burgeoning international community brought order to the Nuclear Age. Jonathan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Plan II Honors Liberal Arts; History; and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. In 2011, he was a residential fellow at the George F. Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and, in 2012, at the Security and Sustainability Program of the International Green Cross in Washington, DC. He was also a Dwight D. Eisenhower/Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellow for 2012-2013. He has published in Passport, Not Even Past, The Huffington Post, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
CISAC Conference Room
Jonathan Hunt
MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow
Speaker
Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia’s 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994 (the “Russian Mortality Crisis”). Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol- related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper investigates a different explanation: the demise of the 1985-1988 Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign. We use archival sources to build a new oblast-year data set spanning 1970-2000 and find that:
The campaign was associated with substantially fewer campaign year deaths,
Oblasts with larger reductions in alcohol consumption and mortality during the campaign experienced larger transition era increases, and
Other former Soviet states and Eastern European countries exhibit similar mortality patterns commensurate with their campaign exposure.
The campaign’s end explains between 32% and 49% of the mortality crisis, suggesting that Russia’s transition to capitalism and democracy was not as lethal as commonly suggested.
Kim Jong-il once declared he would transform North Korea into a "great and powerful country" by 2012, apparently believing that nuclear weapons would compel the international community to engage on his terms. With no such prospect in sight, North Korea faces a multitude of intractable problems. Will North Koreans accept his son as their leader, and will he embrace new thinking to solve the country's problems? Why do North Korean leaders resist reform of an economic system that impoverishes the people? Can a country so dependent on outside help continue to defy the international community?
In Troubled Transition, leading international experts examine these dilemmas, offering new insights into how a troubled North Korea may evolve in light of the ways other command economies and totalitarian states--from the Soviet Union and East Germany to Vietnam and China--have transitioned.
The publication of Troubled Transition was made possible by the generosity of the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, CA.
William J. Perry was only 18 when he found himself surrounded by death, a young U.S. Army mapping specialist in Japan during the Army of Occupation. The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II had just come to an end.
“The vast ruins that once had been the great city of Tokyo – nothing, nothing had prepared me for such utter devastation that was wrought by massive waves of firebombing rained down by American bomber attacks,” said Perry, who was then shipped off to the island of Okinawa in the aftermath of the last great battle of WWII.
More than 200,000 soldiers and civilians had been killed in that closing battle of 1945, codenamed Operation Iceberg.
“Not a single building was left standing; the island was a moonscape denuded of trees and vegetation,” Perry told a rapt audience during a recent speech. “The smell of death was still lingering.”
The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs.
“It had taken multiple strikes by thousands of bombers and tens of thousands of high explosive bombs to lay waste to Tokyo,” he recalls. “The same had been done to Hiroshima and then to Nagasaki with just one plane – and just one bomb. Just one bomb.
“The unleashing of this colossal force indelibly shaped my life in ways that I have now come to see more clearly,” said Perry, who would go on to become the 19th secretary of defense. “It was a transforming experience. In many ways – I grew up from it.”
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform. Photo Credit: U.S. Army
Now, nearly seven decades later, the 86-year-old Perry has come full circle. His new winter course will take students back to his fateful days in Japan after the United States became the first – and last – nation to use atomic weapons. He’ll go through the Cold War, the arms race and expanding nuclear arsenals, and today’s potential threats of nuclear terrorism and regional wars provoked by North Korea, Iran or South Asia.
Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today (IPS 249) – to serve as the backdrop for an online course at Stanford next year – concludes with the declaration Perry made in 2007: The world must rid itself entirely of nuclear weapons. And students will get a primer on how to get involved in organizations that are working on just that.
“They did not live through the Cold War, so they were never exposed to the dangers and therefore it doesn’t exist to them; it’s just not in their world,” Perry said of millennial and younger students. “I want to make them aware of what the dangers were and how those dangers have evolved.”
Perry and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, both Democrats, joined former Republican Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger in launching a series of OpEds in The Wall Street Journal (the first in 2007) that went viral. Together they outlined how nations could work together toward a world without nuclear weapons.
“I think I have some responsibility since I helped build those weapons – and I think that time is running out,” Perry said in an interview.
Perry helped shore up the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, procuring nuclear weapons delivery systems for the Carter administration. Later, as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton, his priority became the dismantling of nuclear weapons around the world.
Taubman, a consulting professor at CISAC, will guest lecturer in Perry’s class, along with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker, David Holloway, Martha Crenshaw and Scott Sagan. Other speakers are expected to include Shultz, a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Andrei Kokoshin, deputy of the Russian State Duma; Ashton B. Carter, who just stepped down as deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Joeseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund.
The world is far from banning the bomb. According to the Ploughshares Fund, an estimated 17,300 nuclear weapons remain in the global stockpile, the majority of which are in Russia and the United States.
President Barack Obama declared shortly after taking office in his first foreign policy speech in Prague that because the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons, Washington “has a moral responsibility to act.”
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction, America’s commitment to seek the peace
and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama said back in May 2009.
Perry – a senior fellow at CISAC who received his BS and MS from Stanford and a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, all in mathematics – laments the regression of the movement to dismantle the nuclear legacy of the Cold War.
Obama has so far not acted on his pledge in his contentious second term, as China and Russia expand their stockpiles. North Korea and Iran are attempting to build nuclear weapons and India and Pakistan are building more fissile material. The U.S. Senate still has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the U.S. and Russia have not moved forward on a follow-up to the New START Treaty.
Perry recognizes that the issue is slipping from the public conscience, particularly among young people. So he’s putting his name and experience behind a Stanford Online course slated to go live next year. It will correspond with the release of his memoir, “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink” and will take a more documentary approach, weaving together key moments in Perry’s career with lectures, archival footage and interviews and conversations between Perry and his colleagues and counterparts.
"Bill Perry has had a remarkable career and this project draws on his unparalleled experience over a pivotal period in history," said John Mitchell, vice provost for online learning. "We hope his brilliant reflections will be useful to everyone with an interest in the topic, and to teachers and students everywhere."
At the heart of his winter course, online class and memoir are what Perry calls the five great lessons he learned in the nuclear age. The first four are grim remnants of what he witnessed over the years: the destructive nature of the atomic bombs on Japan; his mathematical calculations about the number of deaths from nuclear warfare; his work for the CIA during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and one pre-dawn call in 1978 from the North American Aerospace Defense Command saying there were 200 missiles headed toward the United States from the Soviet Union. That turned out to be a false, but terrifying alarm.
His fifth final lesson is hopeful, if not cautionary. It goes like this:
As secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, Perry oversaw the dismantling of 8,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and the United States and helped the former Soviet states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus to go entirely non-nuclear. In that mission, he often visited Pervomaysk in the Ukraine, which was once the Soviet Union’s largest ICBM site, with 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States.
On his final trip to Pervomaysk in 1996, he joined the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers to plant sunflowers where those missiles had once stood.
“So reducing the danger of nuclear weapons is not a fantasy; it has been done,” Perry said. “I will not accept that it cannot be done. I shall do everything I can to ensure nuclear weapons will never again be used – because I believe time is not on our side.”
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.
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.
Professor Gold will make a presentation that is part of a larger book project that applies the theory of fields as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam to the remaking of Taiwan since the end of martial law in 1987. He argues that political democratization is only one part of the larger dispersal of all forms of power (what Bourdieu terms “capital”) away from the tight centralized control of the mainlander—dominated KMT to broader segments of Taiwan’s society. This talk will look at this process of the breakdown and reconstruction of the old order of various fields, in particular the political, economic and cultural fields, and the effect of this on the overarching field of power.
Speaker Bio:
Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, whose executive office is at Berkeley and teaching program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his B.A. in Chinese Studies from Oberlin College, and M.A. in Regional Studies – East Asia and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. He taught English at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He was in the first group of U.S. government-sponsored students to study in China, spending a year at Shanghai’s Fudan University from 1979-1980. Prof Gold’s research has examined numerous topics on the societies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These include: youth; guanxi; urban private entrepreneurs (getihu); non-governmental organizations; popular culture; and social and political change. He is very active in civil society in the United States, currently serving on the boards of several organizations such as the Asia Society of Northern California, International Technological University, Teach for China, and the East Bay College Fund. His books include State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, and the co-edited volumes Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature ofGuanxi, The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, and Laid-Off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment With Chinese Characteristics.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: James Cameron, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, completed his PhD in July 2013 at the University of Cambridge. James is very interested in the contribution history can make to informing today’s debates on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Russian relations. After completing his master’s in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, he was a business consultant specializing in the former Soviet Union.
His dissertation, “The Development of United States Anti-Ballistic Missile Policy, 1961-1972”, used the transformation of the American anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon as a prism through which to examine changing patterns of presidential nuclear leadership during this period. Employing both new American and Russian sources, the thesis shows how successive occupants of the Oval Office and their most trusted advisers managed the tension between their publicly articulated nuclear strategies and their inner convictions regarding the utility of nuclear weapons during this pivotal decade of the Cold War.
ABOUT THE TOPIC: Richard Nixon did not believe in mutual assured destruction. Yet he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which enshrined MAD as a central fact of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear balance. Conversely his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, publicly defended American nuclear superiority and pushed ahead with ABM, despite their private skepticism regarding the utility of both and desire to moderate the arms race. Employing newly available evidence from declassified telephone recordings and documents, this paper attempts to account for this contradiction. It does so by placing the perpetual presidential struggle to reconcile private convictions with public demands at the center of the emergence of assured destruction and the limitation of ABM as elements of U.S.-Soviet détente through strategic arms control.
CISAC Conference Room
James Cameron
Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC
Speaker
Barton J. Bernstein
Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Stanford University
Commentator
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Daniel Altman is a Stanton Nuclear Security predoctoral fellow at CISAC for the 2013-2014 academic year. He is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at MIT and a meber of the MIT Security Studies program.
His dissertation, “Red Lines and Faits Accomplis in Interstate Coercion and Crisis,” offers a framework for explaining crisis behavior and outcomes that differs from the conventional wisdom. The traditional way to understand crises is to suppose that policymakers think primarily in the form of the question, “How can we convince the other side that we are willing to fight in order to get them to back down?” This dissertation instead approaches crises as if states ask themselves, “What can we get away with unilaterally taking without starting a war?” The result is a theory of coercive conflict that explains why “vulnerable” red lines with any of four characteristics elicit faits accomplis, result in crisis defeats for the states setting them, and make war more likely. It tests this theory against the conventional wisdom with case studies of the 1948-1949 Berlin Blockade Crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as a quantitative analysis of interstate crises from 1918 to 2007 which makes use of original data on red lines and faits accomplis.
Daniel is working on several additional research projects on topics which include misperception as a cause of war, trade as a cause of peace, and the use of preventive force against nuclear programs.
ABOUT THE TOPIC: “Red Lines and Faits Accomplis in Interstate Coercion and Crisis” offers a framework for explaining crisis behavior and outcomes that differs from the conventional wisdom. The traditional way to understand crises is to suppose that policymakers think primarily in the form of the question, “How can we convince the other side that we are willing to fight in order to get them to back down?” This dissertation instead approaches crises as if states ask themselves, “What can we get away with unilaterally taking without starting a war?” The result is a theory of coercive conflict that explains why “vulnerable” red lines with any of four characteristics elicit faits accomplis, result in crisis defeats for the states setting them, and make war more likely. This theory is tested against the conventional wisdom with case studies of the 1948-1949 Berlin Blockade Crisis and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as a quantitative analysis of interstate crises from 1918 to 2007 which makes use of original data on red lines and faits accomplis.
CISAC Conference Room
Daniel Altman
Stanton Nuclear Security Predoctoral Fellow
Speaker
CISAC
Kenneth A. Schultz
Professor of Political Science, Stanford; CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member
Commentator
William J. Perry in 1945 in his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform.
