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. 

The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just before 18-year-old William J. Perry landed in Japan during the War of Occupation as a mapping specialist. He saw the devastation left behind by American firebombers on Tokyo and Okinawa.

The young man quickly understood the staggering magnitude of difference in the destruction caused by traditional firepower and these new atomic bombs. He would go on to devote his life to understanding, procuring and then trying to dismantle those weapons.

But that was seven decades back. And many young Americans today believe the threat of nuclear weapons waned alongside the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis.

So as faculty at Stanford and the Center for International Security and Cooperation evolve with the digital age by taking their lessons online, one of the university’s oldest professors is also adapting to online teaching in an effort to reach the youngest audience, urging them to take on the no-nukes mantle that he’s held for many years.

“The issue is so important to me that I tried all sorts of approaches from books and courses and lectures and conferences to try to get my contemporaries and the generations behind me engaged – all with limited success,” says the 86-year-old Perry, a CISAC faculty member and the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at the center’s parent organization, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

“First – which is a sine qua non – they must become seriously concerned that there is a nuclear danger, which most of these kids don’t understand at all,” said Perry. “Secondly, we want to convince them that there is something they can actually do about it.”

To reach those students, he believes he must go digital. So Perry – who co-teaches with CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker the popular Stanford course, “Technology and National Security” – began to map out a classroom course that would be videotaped and serve as a pilot for an online class that would be free and open to the public.

That course, “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday & Today” included lectures by some of the best people working in the field of nuclear nonproliferation today. Among those who will be highlighted in the online course are Perry and Hecker; Joe Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Stanford nuclear historian David Holloway; Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan; and Ploughshares Fund president, Joseph Cirincione.

The Perry Project will produce short-segment videos highlighting key information and stories from the course, packaging them in an online course available in multiple platforms and possibly offered by the university.

Perry used his personal journey as a young soldier during WWII, a mathematician and later a developer of weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal as undersecretary of defense for the Carter administration – and then trying to dismantle those weapons as secretary of defense for President Bill Clinton.

“I’m not doing this simply because I want to put a notch on my belt, to say that I’ve done a MOOC,” Perry said. “I’m doing it because I really want to get across to hundreds of thousands of young people.”

Last summer, he launched the Perry Project by inviting a dozen high school and college students to campus for a nuclear weapons boot camp so that they could take back to campus the message that nuclear annihilation is still a real, contemporary possibility.

He asked them: How do I get through to your generation?

“They said, `We don’t get our information by books or even by television, we get it through social media and YouTube, the various social media platforms. And you want to make the message relevant and relatively compact,’” he recalls.

Perry listened. “Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today” is in production now and a short-segment pilot video should be made available in the fall.

Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer to teach online class on surveillance.

CISAC is turning to other forms on online learning, as well.

Cybersecurity fellow Jonathan Mayer is teaching an online course in surveillance law.

And lectures from CISAC's signature course, “International Security in a Changing World” (PS114S) will soon go up on YouTube as lecture modules entitled, “Security Matters.”

“Online learning offers a way to expand CISAC's reach to new audiences, geographies, and generations,” says CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart, who has co-taught the popular course for the past few years with CISAC’s Martha Crenshaw.

“At the same time, the PS114 online modules will give us a living lecture library so that future Stanford students can compare faculty lectures on similar topics across time – learning, for example, how Martha Crenshaw assessed the terrorist threat in 2010 vs. 2015,” Zegart said.

Guest lecturers whose presentations will be included for the YouTube package include:

• Jack Snyder of Columbia University: Democratization and Violence
• Francis Fukuyama of Stanford: The Changing Nature of Power
• Zegart: Understanding Policy Decisions: The Cuban Missile Crisis
• Scott Sagan of CISAC: The Nuclear Revolution; and Why Do States Build/Forego Nuclear Weapons?
• Abbas Milani, director of Iran Studies at Stanford: Historical Perspective on Iran
• Former FBI Director Robert Mueller: the FBI’s Transformation Post 9/11
• U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry (Ret.) and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan: The War in Afghanistan and the Future of Central Asia
• Jane Holl Lute, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security: Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity
• Perry: Security Issues in Russia, Yesterday and Today
• Brad Roberts: former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy: Ensuring a (Nuclear) Deterrence Strategy that is Effective for 21^st Century Challenges
• CISAC Co-Director David Relman: Doomsday Viruses

And lectures at CISAC’s Cybersecurity Boot Camp for senior congressional aids will also be videotaped and packaged for YouTube and online consumption later this year.

“We are excited to enter into this phase of experimentation to see what works, what doesn't, and how we can further CISAC's teaching mission both here at Stanford and around the world,” Zegart said.

MANILA, Philippines – When Victor Corpus was an idealistic young military officer, he turned on his country to join the communist New People’s Army. He headed for the mountains and would face years of armed struggle, imprisonment and then a sentence to death.

What made the highly trained Philippine Army first lieutenant lead a bold raid to capture the weapons from his own armory at the Philippine Military Academy – one that would go on to make him a living legend and lead to a movie about his life?

“It was my realization that our society at that time was structured like a pyramid, where the wealth of the nation is controlled by about 100 families on top, where less than 1 percent of the population controls everything,” recalls Corpus, who is now 70.

When the Army ordered the 26-year-old officer and his soldiers to train the private militia of a wealthy warlord in the northern Philippines, a trigger was pulled.

“If you are a member of the Armed Forces and you realize that you are just being used as an instrument of the elite, to preserve and protect their interests, it makes you want to rise up and fight for what you believe are the true interests of the people,” he said.

“That is what made me go to the rebel side.”

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It’s still a factor that makes young Filipino men and women pick up arms today: The gap between rich and poor, the government corruption, the dynasties that still rule the impoverished countryside.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks reinforced the U.S. commitment to build the capacity of the Philippine military to prevent their country from becoming a haven for extremists who might use the country to stage and plot another attack against United States’ interests.  

Felter helped the Philippine Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) set up the country’s first counterterrorist unit. That elite Light Reaction Battalion has now been expanded to a regiment of 1,500 soldiers. Felter traveled to the Philippines in February to receive a medal in honor of his work in establishing this force.

His work with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a military attaché, and dozens of trips back since, allowed him to get behind the scenes and make friends in the military and government. Those close relationships provided him unprecedented access to thousands of sensitive documents chronicling in micro-level detail the history of Philippine military and government efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism in the field.

“All counterinsurgency is local,” says Felter. “You need to study it at the local level to really understand it. And the Philippines is like a Petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time.”

Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his Stanford Ph.D. dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency in this conflict prone country. After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisors – Stanford political science professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.

“This comprehensive conflict dataset, when it becomes public later this year, is going to be the Holy Grail of  micro-level conflict data,” Felter says. “It promises to be an unprecedented resource for scholars and policy analysts studying the foundations and dynamics of conflict. It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before.”

They also hope to help journalists do a better job of analyzing conflict.

Jim Gomez, the AP’s chief correspondent in the Philippines, says there is little access to detailed data about the conflicts he has been covering for two decades.

“There is a natural contradiction between military, police, intelligence and other security agencies which, by nature, operate in secrecy,” says Gomez, who has been on the front lines of many battles in his homeland. “The database is one step toward satisfying the need of journalists to be able to write stories with more accurate and in-depth detail and context. It allows for better comparative analysis and can give insights to emerging patterns like those found in the southern Philippines. Better access to information, to my mind, is always a boon to better security policies.”

CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.

Felter coordinated with senior leaders in the Armed Forces of the Philippines to gain approval to access and code the unclassified details from tens of thousands of individual conflict episodes reported by Philippine military units in the field dating back to 1975. Most of data were gleaned from the original hand-typed records maintained by the Philippine Army. Felter worked with contacts in the Philippine military to build a team of military and civilian coders to scan and input data from the only existing copies of these original incident reports.

In 2009 – while a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution prior to his final deployment in Afghanistan – Felter invited his colleague, Navy veteran Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to join him as ESOC’s co-director. Shapiro and Felter were graduate school classmates and worked together at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center where the vision for ESOC was first articulated. Felter and Shapiro formally established the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project and began to build comprehensive databases on multiple political conflict cases around the world.

Eli Berman, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, joined the team soon after. Today he is research director for international security studies at University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of economics at UC San Diego.

“I'm fascinated by how economic development is best achieved in places where property and people are insecure. Unfortunately, that's true of many Philippines communities,” Berman said. “Joe is the perfect partner for that research. He brings insights that come from years of thoughtful experience and local knowledge. The team he has assembled and the data they bring are a joy to work with.”

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ESOC members also include David Laitin, James Fearon and Jeremy Weinstein, all from Stanford’s political science department, as well as affiliates and a growing cadre of current and former post-doctoral fellows.

The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project website was launched last year. It highlights some of the key initial findings from ongoing data collection efforts in the Philippines as well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews. Ultimately, nearly all of the releasable data Felter is compiling on the Philippines case will be made available via the ESOC website. The non-digitize materials such as hardcopy records and taped interviews will be housed in the Hoover Institution’s Library and Archives.

“This will be the gold standard for micro-level conflict data. The planets aligned for us in many cases,” Felter said. The team also has had unprecedented access to data sources in Iraq and to some degree from Afghanistan, Columbia, and Mexico.

“What’s unique about ESOC is that we’re trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we’ve studied,” says Shapiro. “On Iraq, for example, the ESOC website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics, and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources, and all the files ESOC members have used in their research on Iraq.”

Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to ESOC as a resource for data on Iraq “because it’s so useful to have everything in one place.”

The West Point Connection

Many of these documents, some dating back to 1975, were withering in the heat and humidity of an old building at army headquarters before Felter and his Philippine military team arrived to scan and record them.

Felter’s chief Filipino partner in compiling and analyzing the data is another West Point grad, Lt. Col. Dennis Eclarin, an Army Scout Ranger commander who led many of the counterinsurgency missions that he would later come to analyze. Eclarin conducted 1,500 hours of videotaped interviews with rebels who gave up their arms and surrendered.

Eclarin recalls being a lieutenant fresh out of West Point and negotiating the surrender of 20 communist rebels.

“I got the chance to interview the rebel commander of this very elite group, against whom I had been fighting in 2000, and when I interviewed him he said: `You know what? If you had just given us one water buffalo each, we would not have been fighting you, we would have just gone out and tilled our land,’” Eclarin recalls.

He would go on to interview hundreds of rebels and their commanders, such as the Islamic militant chief who talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men’s belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side.

There was the Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money for the communists and the young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.
Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.

“The interviews and the coding has changed me – and it’s changed the perception of the Armed Forces, too,” Eclarin says. “We just appreciate data; we see it in a new light. We were just thinking short term, but the data allows us to look long-term and more strategically. Where are the hot zones we must avoid? What time of day are they likely to attack?”

Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.

“One time I was coding and was amazed to see the records of some of our comrades who had been ambushed and killed,” Agustin says. “Being a member of the Scout Rangers and seeing those who are missing – you hurt. But you must push through because you’re giving them a voice. They gave their lives for the Army, they sacrificed their lives for their families – and we are going to give them a voice.”

Erwin Olario, a civilian and the lead coder of Eclarin’s team, says the data is agnostic.

“We don’t take sides; we’re not out to prove anything. But, hey, if we could possibly contribute to bringing about peace one day – that would be something.”

The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012, to make sure it’s accurate and cleaned of classified details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter’s ongoing book projects and multiple journal articles, including a recent article in the American Economic Review entitled, “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.”

Denis Eclarin and Joe Felter at a military ceremony outside Manila on Feb. 8, 2014. ©John Tronco



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Development and Civil Conflict

Another of Felter’s longtime Filipina friends is Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, cabinet secretary for the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development. They go back to 1997, when the two were classmates working on their master’s in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

The two caught up on classmate gossip during a recent meeting in her Manila office. She was on a rare break from her work in the south, where Typhoon Haiyan had claimed more than 6,200 lives in November.

Soliman tells Felter she used a study based on ESOC data to help demonstrate the efficacy of her department’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. This flagship development program attempts to reduce poverty by giving cash to families falling under poverty thresholds, conditional on enrolling kids in school and getting them regular medical checkups and vaccines.

Soliman and her staff used the study conducted by Felter – and Benjamin Crost at the University of Illinois and Patrick B. Johnston at the RAND Corporation – in which they took an existing World Bank experiment in the Philippines that separated villages into those that would receive the cash transfers and those that would not. The scholars incorporated measures of violence from the ESOC data to estimate the effect of the CCT program on conflict intensity. They found cash transfers caused a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents and, using their data on local insurgent influence, they determined the program significantly reduced insurgent influence in the villages that received the cash transfers compared with those that did not.

“Your results were very, very important and it had such a strong impact with the legislators, and in particular the budget, because they saw the program is not just about education and health,” Corazon tells Felter. “They saw it even has impact on peace and security.”

“That’s just great,” Felter says. “That’s what motivates our team to engage in this type of work and really what you want to hear. It’s such a privilege for us to support you in this capacity.”

A Rebel’s Redemption

Felter led the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan, reporting directly to Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petaeus, before becoming a senior research scholar at CISAC and retiring from the military in 2012.

While he misses his time on active duty and the sense of purpose that comes with serving in combat, he believes his ESOC research will make a difference and have an impact in stabilizing conflict areas and setting conditions for development and governance efforts to be effective.

“In the last decade, the United States and the international community have devoted tens of billions of dollars towards rebuilding social and political order in troubled countries,” Shapiro says. “Thousands of families today are mourning loved ones lost in those efforts. ESOC is devoted to learning from that experience, and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all do a better job helping such places in the future.”

Traveling back to the Philippines often to meet with Eclarin and his coders keeps him tied to the men and women who are on the ground. And close to old colleagues such as Corpus, who was pardoned by President Corazon Aquino and went on to become the nation’s head of intelligence.

“Here’s the irony: The intelligence service was one of the organizations that was running after me, and then I was eventually assigned to head this very organization. Only in the Philippines,” says Corpus, whose counterinsurgency plan drafted in 1989 was hugely successful.

The communist New People’s Army is estimated to have approximately 5,000 rebels today, down from its high of 26,000 in the mid-1980s. And the government signed a hard-sought peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in last spring, which grants the Muslim areas of the southern Mindanao region greater political autonomy.

Still, many don’t believe the accord will hold and separatists from Moro National Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyef Group continue to threaten stability in the south.

“As long as the root forces remain – the income gap between the rich and the poor – there will always be rebellion,” says Corpus.

This study conducted by professors Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato (IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca), Kenneth Scheve (Stanford University) and David Stasavage (New York University) is the first systematic examination of the determinents of military mobilization over a very long time period. Looking at a new data set from thirteen great powers between 1600 and 2000, the authors argue that changes in transportation and communication technology were the most important factors influencing the size of armies.

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