Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium Series

The Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium Series brings leading experts to Stanford to share new research in an integrated, ten-lecture series on global food and nutrition policy. The series follows on the success of the two-year Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series that concluded in May 2013. We thank Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn for their generous support of the symposium series, in honor of Phillip Falcon.

Social Science Seminar: Scott Charney

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CISAC Central Conference Room, 2d floor

Scott Charney Corporate Vice President , Trustworthy Computing Group Speaker Microsoft
Scott Charney Corporate Vice President, Trustworthy Computing Speaker Microsoft Corporation
Seminars

When Nuclear Umbrellas Work: Assurance and Deterrence through Costly Signaling

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Abstract: During the Cold War, doubts over the credibility of the US commitment to defend Western Europe led Great Britain and France to develop their own nuclear capabilities, despite their inclusion under the US "nuclear umbrella". In other instances the US nuclear umbrella appears to have been much more credible. For example, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea did not pursue nuclear weapons, in large part because of their alliances with the US. Why did the US commitment to defend Europe lack sufficient credibility, while its commitment to defend Asia seemed more effective? This paper develops one answer to this puzzle by exploring how the institutional design of nuclear umbrellas may affect its credibility. I posit that nuclear security commitments are more likely to be perceived as credible when they include costly reliability-enhancing provisions, such as greater precision in when alliance obligations apply, issue-linkages, and increased military institutionalization. In the empirical section of the paper, I demonstrate three observable implications of this logic that are consistent with a client state feeling more assured. I show that more precise and institutionalized alliances between a nuclear weapons state and non-nuclear client state are strongly associated with (i) lower defense spending in the client state, (ii) a lower likelihood that a client state will pursue its own nuclear weapon, and (iii) fewer alliance commitments held by the client state. These results have important implications for how policymakers and analysts evaluate the consequences of nuclear policy choices.

About the Speaker: Neil Narang is a Stanton Junior Faculty Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, he served as the Director of the Public Policy and Nuclear Threats (PPNT) Program at the University of California Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC)and as a Nonproliferation Policy Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. 

When Nuclear Umbrellas Work: Signaling Credibility in Security Commitments through Alliance Design*
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CISAC Central Conference Room, 2nd floor

Neil Narang Stanton Nuclear Security Junior Faculty Fellow, CISAC; Assistant Professor of Political Science Speaker University of California - Santa Barbara
Seminars

Does Terrorism Work? The Case of the Provisional IRA

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About the Speaker: Richard English is the Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations, and Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on political violence and terrorism, Irish and British politics and history, and the history and politics of nationalism and the state. His books include Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (which won the 2003 UK Political Studies Association Politics Book of the Year Award),Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (which won the 2007 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, and the 2007 Political Studies Association of Ireland Book Prize), and Terrorism: How to Respond (OUP, 2009). His latest book, Modern War: A Very Short Introduction, is published by Oxford University Press. Professor English's current research project is for another OUP book, Does Terrorism Work? A History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Richard English is in residence as an International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center this April and was nominated by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI)

 

 

About the Topic: Debates on the effectiveness of terrorism have become prominent in recent years, across a spectrum running from declarations that terrorism represents a deeply ineffective means of pursuing political change, to equally assertive arguments that terrorism works all too frequently. In this talk, Richard English reflects on why the question is important, why it has so far proved extremely difficult to answer in persuasive fashion, how we might better frame our reflections on the subject in future, and on what might be gleaned from deep consideration of the emergence, armed struggle, and eventual departure from the stage of one of the world's most sustainedly serious terrorist organizations - the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

CISAC Conference Room

Richard English Wardlaw Professor of Politics in the School of International Relations Speaker University of St Andrews
Seminars

Health and National Security: A Contemporary Collision of Cultures

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CISAC Central Conference Room, 2nd floor

Ken Bernard Former Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense Speaker

David Relman

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E209
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor
Professor of Medicine
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
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David A. Relman, M.D., is the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University, and Chief of Infectious Diseases at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto, California. He is also Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford, and served as science co-director at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford from 2013-2017. He is currently director of a new Biosecurity Initiative at FSI.

Relman was an early pioneer in the modern study of the human indigenous microbiota. Most recently, his work has focused on human microbial community assembly, and community stability and resilience in the face of disturbance. Ecological theory and predictions are tested in clinical studies with multiple approaches for characterizing the human microbiome. Previous work included the development of molecular methods for identifying novel microbial pathogens, and the subsequent identification of several historically important microbial disease agents. One of his papers was selected as “one of the 50 most important publications of the past century” by the American Society for Microbiology.

Dr. Relman received an S.B. (Biology) from MIT, M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1994. He served as vice-chair of the NAS Committee that reviewed the science performed as part of the FBI investigation of the 2001 Anthrax Letters, as a member of the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity, and as President of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He is currently a member of the Intelligence Community Studies Board and the Committee on Science, Technology and the Law, both at the National Academies of Science. He has received an NIH Pioneer Award, an NIH Transformative Research Award, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2011.

Stanford Health Policy Affiliate
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David Relman Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor, Departments of Medicine and of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford School of Medicine; CISAC Co-Director; FSI Senior Fellow; Stanford Health Policy Affiliate Moderator
Seminars

Spent Fuel Storage in China - A Comprehensive Study

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Rob Forrest is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. He joined CISAC in 2011. His research focuses on the role of particle accelerators in the future nuclear fuel cycle, specifically on the feasibility of Accelerator Driven Systems (ADS) in sub-critical reactor designs and the transmutation of nuclear waste. 

Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.
Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he preformed a search for signs of a hypothetical theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory working with the Klystrons that supply the RF power to the accelerator. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for the NASA EarthKam project.

 

CISAC Conference Room

Robert Forrest

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Affiliate
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Rob Forrest is currently a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories where his research interests include nuclear power, cybersecurity, and nonproliferation. As a member of the systems research group, he specializes in data driven methods and analysis to inform policy  for national security.

As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.

Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.

Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA. 

 

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Robert Forrest Postdoctoral Science Fellow, CISAC Speaker

Siegfried S. Hecker

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-6468 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Research Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
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Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.

Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.

Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.

Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

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Siegfried Hecker Professor (Research), Management Science and Engineering; FSI and CISAC Senior Fellow Moderator
Seminars

Optimization, resilience, and risk for distributed satellite systems

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Abstract: The start of the 21st century has included multiple demonstrations of national capabilities to disrupt or destroy satellites. Kinetic anti-satellite weapons, in particular, can create debris with long-term consequences for all space actors. The United States relies on satellites for a broad array of civil, scientific, and national security capabilities. There are several possible ways for the U.S. to help build a more secure environment in Earth-orbit, and manage future risks to space systems. This talk will focus on a technical option that can be pursued unilaterally by the U.S.: the use of distributed satellite architectures for certain critical sensing capabilities. This talk will provide some context for space security in 2014, describe existing frameworks for quantifying risk to satellite constellations, and present a framework for analyzing satellite architecture choices for systems like weather and strategic warning satellites.

About the Speaker: Matt Daniels is an engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center, a predoctoral fellow at CISAC, and a Ph.D. candidate in decision and risk analysis at Stanford. He joined CISAC as a predoctoral fellow in September 2012. At Stanford, Matt's research is in dynamic programming models of distributed satellite constellations. His work focuses on developing probabilistic models to assess the viability of constellations of small, networked satellites for scientific and national security missions. At NASA Ames, Matt is an engineer in the Mission Design Center and works with the Office of the Director on international technical collaborations. He has helped create NASA-DARPA partnerships on new space projects and has been a member of NASA delegations to Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

 

CISAC Central Conference Room, 2nd floor

Matthew Daniels Predoctoral Science Fellow, CISAC Speaker
Seminars
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