FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
‘Expensive, prone to obsolescence, and lacking in credibility as a deterrent’: US attitudes to the UK’s independent nuclear capabilities, and McNamara’s Ann Arbor speech of June 1962 revisited
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), and After 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.
Cécile earned her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in France in 2003 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. Her research interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric, the relations between cultural, literary, and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema, and contemporary French literature. Cécile's most recent book, Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste [Marine Le Pen taken to her words. Decoding the new national front discourse], co-authored with Stephanie Wahnich, examines the rhetoric used by the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and compares it to that of her father and former National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Casual observation of far right politics in France suggests that there has been a significant change in the National Front program following the 2011 leadership change to Marine Le Pen from Jean-Marie Le Pen and his 2015 ouster from the party. Marine Le Pen has taken great efforts to distance herself from her father, who infamously and repeatedly characterized gas chambers as "a detail in the history of World War II." The party has also enjoyed increasing electoral support in recent years. Against this backdrop, the book examines two fundamental questions: what is Marine Le Pen actually saying, and why does her speech resonate with French society today? To answer these questions, Alduy and Wahnich have analyzed over 500 speeches given by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen. This analysis reveals that there is significant continuity between the political agenda and ideological content of the Le Pens. In contrast with her father's blatantly radical speech, however, the younger Le Pen employs careful phraseology, replete with allusions, ambiguities, and double entendres, in order to "de-demonize" the party and make its platform appear more palatable to a modern French audience. In spite of programmatic continuity, this rhetorical rebranding appears to have facilitated greater electoral support for the National Front. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots has received significant media coverage, including a feature in 
Camilla is an anthropologist who is interested in using network analysis to examine the social arrangements "mega-sites" - large settlements that originated with small, settled hunter-gatherer communities - during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and Pottery Neolithic periods. In her current research, Camilla is evaluating these social arrangements with new evidence from Çatalhöyük, a dense agglomeration of mudbrick houses occupied for 1,400 years and located in modern-day Turkey. Approximately the size of a town, Çatalhöyük lacks many of the characteristics of a modern town, including specialized areas, communal buildings, and centralized functions. Moreover, the spatial arrangement differs significantly from other PPNB settlements. In summer 2015, Camilla conducted field research, partially funded by The Europe Center, at the site of Çatalhöyük. During her four weeks at the site, she explored ways of modeling the site's networks by collecting data focused on patterns of similarity of material culture features. This data will be used to examine the site's internal organization as well as the arrangements of social relationships therein. In addition, she spent time studying some of the recently-excavated buildings, using architectural features to study ties among entities.
The Europe Center is pleased to introduce to you Lina Eriksson, a Fulbright Scholar who is visiting Stanford University from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Lina holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. She is broadly interested in the politics of natural disasters. In her dissertation, entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics, Lina examines the electoral effects of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Storm Gudrun on Swedish parliamentary elections. Part of this research, forthcoming in Electoral Studies, finds that the Swedish Social Democratic Party's poor crisis response to Storm Gudrun resulted in a significant decrease in support for the Social Democratic Party in the affected regions, leading to the largest change in partisan support in Swedish history. We invite you to visit our 
