American deterrence, though traditionally centered on the nuclear triad, is becoming ever more integrated and dependent on other technologies in space and the cyber world, Admiral Cecil D. Haney, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told a Stanford audience.

Haney, appointed to lead USSTRATCOM by President Barack Obama last year, made a daylong visit to Stanford on Tuesday, holding seminars and private meetings with faculty, scholars and students at the Hoover Institution and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. His seminar at CISAC focused on strategic deterrence in the 21st century.

Admiral Haney has made it USSTRATCOM’s goal, in accordance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the 2010 START Treaty, to reduce America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. But he sees a world where maintaining a deterrent is still necessary.

“As we work to continue our nation’s goal of reducing the role of our nation’s nuclear weapons, we find other nations not only modernizing their strategic capabilities but also promoting them,” he said. Russia, Iran, and China attracted particular concern. Haney declined to estimate how much the U.S. can reduce its stockpile without hurting its deterrent posture.

While the nuclear triad is still the foundation of American deterrence, space and cyberspace technology are now fully integrated with nuclear platforms, making cyber and space security indispensable.

“Deterrence is more than just the triad,” said Haney. “We are highly dependent on space capabilities, more so than ever before. Space is fully integrated in our joint military operations as well as in our commercial and civil infrastructure. But space today is contested, congested, and competitive.” 

Haney said there are more than 20,000 softball-sized objects orbiting Earth.

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“Only about 1,000 of those objects are satellites, the rest is debris, increasing threats to our operational satellites as they travel at speeds exceeding 17,000 mph,” he said. The Joint Space Operation Center receives an average of 30 collision alerts per day.

Damage to some of our satellites could have devastating impacts on our economy, communications and infrastructure. Rival nations also pose space security challenges.

According to the U.S. government, China recently tested an anti-satellite missile. This follows a 2007 test when China successfully destroyed one of its satellites, and consequently created a cloud of debris that still poses a threat to international satellites.

“Keeping assured access to the space domain is a full-time job,” Haney said.

Likewise cybersecurity. America’s increasing reliance on cyberspace for both military and civilian purposes has created security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by both state and non-state actors. Haney cited the recent attacks on J.P. Morgan and Sony, Russia and China’s attacks on regional rivals, and non-state terror groups.

“We have benefited enormously from advanced computer capabilities, but it has opened up threat access to our critical infrastructure,“ Haney said. “As we confront terrorist groups we all know that they are not only using cyber for recruiting and messaging – but also to seek weapons of mass destruction.”

In a Q&A session after his talk during the CISAC seminar, a variety of concerns were raised about the USSTRACOM mission, including triad modernization, the ongoing personnel issues that have been in the news, and missile defense.

FSI Senior Fellow Scott Sagan asked about the recent spate of personnel problems at U.S. nuclear silos. Haney said a full review of personnel and procedures, ordered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, was completed and changes have been enacted.

“We are trying to positively reinforce our workforce and I am getting a lot of positive feedback from operators,” Haney said. “We are having monthly conversations that include operational officers. When I visit sites I don’t just meet with commanders, I have meals with smaller groups of lower-ranking personnel.”

Haney previously served as commander of the Pacific Fleet. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has personal experience with America’s nuclear deterrent as he served in submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles, which, in addition to land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and strategic bombers, make up part of the United States’ nuclear triad.

USSTRATCOM is one of nine unified commands that have control of forces from all four branches of the U.S. military. The command’s well-known responsibility is command and control of America’s nuclear arsenal, a role it inherited from the Cold War-era Strategic Air Command. Since its establishment in 1992, USSTRATCOM has been assigned additional responsibilities, most notably cyberspace and outer space.

You can listen to the audio of his presentation here.

Joshua Alvarez was a CISAC Honors Student during the 2011-2012 academic year.

Siegfried Hecker, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Research Professor of Management Science and Engineering, has been awarded the National Academy of Engineering's Arthur M. Bueche Award "for contributions to nuclear science and engineering and for service to the nation through nuclear diplomacy."

The award recognizes an engineer who has shown dedication in science and technology, as well as active involvement in determining U.S. science and technology policy. Bueche was a world-renowned chemist who helped pioneer engineered plastics at General Electric Research and led one of the most innovative industrial research centers in the world.

"He was also an astute student of science and technology policy and one of our country's most effective advisors," Hecker said of Bueche upon accepting the award on Sept. 28 during the NAE's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Hecker,  CISAC co-director from 2007-2012, is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security.

You can read the NAE's full announcement here.

Hecker talked about the significance of working with Russian scientists at the end of the Cold War and what he has learned during his 49 trips to the former Soviet states.

"The bottom line is that 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nothing really terrible has happened in the Russian nuclear complex - contrary to the expectations of most people in the West," said Hecker, who is currently working on a book about his diplomacy with Russia. "Critical to the success of our cooperation was what Bueche called the `international bonding' that technology provides."

But he noted that the relationship between Moscow and Washington are worse than at any time since the Gorbachev era. While he and his Russian colleagues have made great progress together over the last two decades, that their work is far from done.

"Indeed, the need for scientists and engineers to cooperate internationally is more important than ever. It is especially important in all things nuclear," he told the audience. "Since nuclear energy can electrify the world or destroy the world, the consequences of doing things right or doing them wrong are enormous. What we have learned over the years is that nuclear cooperation is essential - it promotes the benefits of nuclear energy - be it electricity, nuclear medicine or research. Nuclear isolation breeds suspicion and conflict."

Hecker noted he has also visited nuclear facilities and developed relationships with key scientists and engineers in the UK, France, China, India, North and South Korea, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and has held substantive discussions with nuclear specialists from Pakistan and Iran.

"Dialogue and cooperation are essential," he said. "The same holds true for other major societal issues such as energy, climate change, water and natural resources, infectious diseases, the future of the Internet. These challenges are truly international, and solutions are often prevented by political and ideological differences. That is why institutions like the NAE and the National Academies are crucial."

Among the technologies that transformed the 20^th-century, none has cast a longer and darker shadow than the atomic bomb. Even since Sidney Drell and John Lewis founded the Center for International Security and Arms Control in 1983, scholars at CISAC have grappled with how these tools of war have altered global diplomacy and defense.

Current and former CISAC fellows recently took part in a conversation about the state of nuclear studies, which has bridged academia, the public sphere and the halls of power. In a joint forum for H-Diplo and the International Security Studies Forum, which curate book reviews and disciplinary debates for international historians and international security scholars, respectively, as well as the Monkey Cage, where The Washington Post publishes rigorous analysis on political topics, a cohort of historians and political scientists debated the claims and methods that are animating the study of nuclear subjects today.

Recent publications by early career political scientists and the occurrence of what CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan terms “two nuclear renaissances,” prompted the discussions. Since 1991, historians who work on subjects such as nuclear power, crises, proliferation, compellence, and deterrence have vastly expanded the documentary record (nearly always declassified) upon which our collective knowledge rests by mining archives throughout the world. Their efforts have been curated and made available by organizations such as the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Concurrently, political scientists have taken advantage of the prodigious computational power and advanced statistical tools that have revolutionized scientific inquiry to generate important new research and insights using large-N quantitative analysis as well as survey methodology.

Two recent articles in International Organizations, a prominent journal of political science and international relations, one authored by former CISAC fellow Matthew Kroenig and another coauthored by former CISAC fellow Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, endeavor to draw inferences about what leads one state or another to emerge victorious from an international crisis when one or both sides possess nuclear weapons. Intriguingly, though they ask slightly different questions, they come to divergent conclusions. Kroenig contends that crisis outcomes are co-determined by nuclear superiority and “the balance of resolve” (i.e. which side has higher political stakes). Sechser and Fuhrmann, on the other hand, find that nuclear weapons generally fail to furnish a “credible threat,” making them weak tools with which to compel adversaries.

Francis J. Gavin, the Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT, takes issue with the methodological approach of both articles in a response piece, entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk About Nuclear Weapons,” which grew into a joint H-Diplo/ISSF forum featuring an introduction by Sagan, responses by the two articles’ various authors (individually and collectively), an exposition by former CISAC honors student and current Duke University professor Hal Brands on the importance of archives for studying nuclear politics; an “apology” for quantitative methods in the political sciences by UCSD Professor Erik Gartzke; and a explication of how “large-N methods” can be used and abused when studying nuclear subjects by one of last year’s Stanton Faculty Fellows at CISAC and Gavin’s colleague at MIT, Vipin Narang.

The forum inspired another round of responses on H-Diplo, including a number by former and current fellows at CISAC. Gavin reprises some of his arguments in a response to the forum while also underscoring the professional and institutional stakes at issue. UCLA historian Marc Trachtenberg, Columbia political scientist Robert Jervis, and U.S. Naval War College strategic thinker Tom Nichols also weigh in on when nuclear weapons matter and how scholars can go about figuring out why and how they do.

As the current MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC and forthcoming Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at RAND Corporation, I call attention to the power of ideas and how social scientists embed themselves in the subjects they study. Jayita Sarkar, a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center explores how empirical work on case studies of technological assistance and proliferation such as that of France and India call into doubt some findings by political scientists who employ statistical methods. Lastly, former CISAC postdoctoral fellow Benoît Pelopidas, now a professor at the University of Bristol, probes the ethical responsibility of intellectuals and whether scholars ought to serve the policymaking community, or the broader public, when they conceptualize and perform their work.

Pelopidas’ essay points to a core concern about the policy implications of nuclear-security scholarship, which a third group of distinguished panelists delved into for a symposium in The Washington Post. The forum, posted on the Monkey Cage, features thoughts from Yale Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexandre Debs, Duke Professor of Political Science and former Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council Staff Peter Feaver, Georgetown Associate Professor of Political Science and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl, and Matthew Connelly, who will join CISAC this year as the inaugural Hazy Senior Fellow in International Security and Professor of History at Stanford University.

Gavin concludes his introduction to the Monkey Cage symposium by reflecting on how the current generation of scholars has taken up the baton from those who participated in the “golden age” of nuclear-security scholarship after World War II:

If brilliant minds like Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, and Albert Wohlstetter could not settle these issues during their time at RAND, we certainly don’t expect to here. At best, we can inspire much needed debate and broaden this crucial conversation. What we do hope to emulate, however, is the earlier generation’s rigorous, interdisciplinary questioning and exchange, while always keeping an eye on how our ideas can help decision-makers better understand and make responsible decisions about these fearsome weapons.

The Center for International Security and Cooperation is gratified that so many of its affiliates—current and former—are contributing to this revival of scholarly interest in how the nuclear revolution has shaped global affairs. We look forward to our nuclear scholars—past, present, and future—continuing to enrich these vital interdisciplinary debates.

CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Jonathan Hunt was a Nuclear Fellow at CISAC from 2012-2014.