A lasting legacy of the Cold War is the continued existence of weapons of mass destruction--uniquely, nuclear arms. The context in which they exist has been drastically changed in the realm of international politics. Father Hehir will probe the changed context of proliferation, as he addresses the continuing ethical and strategic challenges inherited from the past and now reshaped in this century.

Drell Lecture Recording: NA

Drell Lecture Transcript: 

Speaker's Biography: J. Bryan Hehir is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University and the Secretary for Social Services and the President of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston. Father Hehir's research focuses on ethics and foreign policy, and the role of religion on world politics and in American society. His writings include The Moral Measurement of War: A Tradition of Continuity and Change and Military Intervention and National Sovereignty.

Paul Stockton is the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and is director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Stockton is the editor of Homeland Security (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2005). His research has appeared in Political Science Quarterly, International Security and Strategic Survey. He is co-editor of Reconstituting America's Defense: America's New National Security Strategy (1992). Stockton has also published an Adelphi Paper and has contributed chapters to a number of books, including James Lindsay and Randall Ripley, eds., U.S. Foreign Policy After the Cold War (1997). Stockton received a BA summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1976 and a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1986. He served from 1986-1989 as legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Stockton was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship for 1989-1990 by CISAC. In August 1990, he joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of the NPS Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of the NPS School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

How do you stop a terrorist?

You can work hard: Post men and equipment at every street corner, every port, every bay, every slip of beach, every straight stretch of asphalt long enough to land a plane.

You will spend billions, and your lines will be thin. All you've done is build the "impregnable" Atlantic Sea Wall--which the Allies punched through in hours on D-Day.

You've got to work smarter, not harder.

The opening line of the Oscar-winning movie A Beautiful Mind is "Mathematicians won the war." During World War II, the mathematics underlying cryptography played an important role in military planning.

Thereafter came a new kind of war. After the first frosts descended in the Soviet East, perhaps $2 billion were spent in the development of Game Theory.

Now again we face a new kind of war. And we need a new kind of mathematics to fight it.

Since 2001, tremendous amounts of information have been gathered regarding terrorist cells and individuals potentially planning future attacks. There is now a pressing need to develop new mathematical and computational techniques to assist in the analysis of this information, both to quantify future threats and to quantify the effectiveness of counterterrorism operations and strategies. Concepts and techniques from mathematics--specifically, from Lattice Theory and Reflexive Theory--have already been applied to counterterrorism and homeland security problems. The following is a partial list of such problems.

1. Strategies for disrupting terrorist cells

2. Data analysis of terrorist activity

3. Border penetration and security

4. Terrorist cell formation

Jonathan Farley is a CISAC science fellow and a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. His work focuses on applying lattice theory and other branches of mathematics to problems in counterterrorism and homeland security.

In 2001-2002 he was one of four Americans to win a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award to the United Kingdom. In the calendar years 2003 and 2004 he taught as a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 he received the Harvard Foundation's Distinguished Scientist of the Year Award, a medal presented on behalf of the president of Harvard University for "outstanding achievements and contributions in the field of mathematics." The City of Cambridge, Mass., declared March 19, 2004, to be "Dr. Jonathan David Farley Day."

He obtained his doctorate in mathematics from Oxford University in 1995, after winning Oxford's highest mathematics awards, the Senior Mathematical Prize and Johnson University Prize, in 1994. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1991 with the second highest average in his graduating class.

Farley's work includes the solution of a problem posed by universal algebraist George Gratzer that remained unsolved for 34 years, and the solution (published in 2005) of a problem posed in 1981 by MIT mathematics professor Richard Stanley.

Barbara Olshansky is Director Counsel of the Global Justice Initiative and Deputy Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Barbara's current docket at the Center for Constitutional Rights includes class action lawsuits concerning international human rights; immigrants' rights; race discrimination in employment, education, the environment, and public health; and prisoners' rights. Barbara recently co-authored two books: the most recent, entitled America's Disappeared, discusses the plight of America's "war on terror" detainees; and the second, entitled Against War With Iraq, analyzes the international law ramifications of the U.S. decision to pursue a military campaign in Iraq.

Barbara has also written two other books: Democracy Detained, discussing America's secret practices used in the "war on terror," and Secret Trials and Executions, assessing the military commissions scheduled for Guantánamo detainees. Stanford Law School recently named her 2005 Public Interest Lawyer of the Year.

Lt. Gen. Bruce A. Wright is Commander, U.S. Forces Japan, and Commander, 5th Air Force, Yokota Air Base, Japan. In these two command positions he is the senior U.S. military representative in Japan and commander of U.S. Air Force units in Japan respectively.

The general received his commission upon graduation from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1973 and served as an instructor pilot early in his career. He has held command at all levels -- fighter squadron, group, wing and major command. Prior to assuming his current position, he was Vice Commander, Air Combat Command, with headquarters at Langley Air Force Base, Va., and Air Component Commander for U.S. Joint Forces Command and U.S. Northern Command. A command pilot, General Wright has more than 3,200 flying hours, principally in fighter aircraft, including 65 F-16 combat missions flown during operations Desert Storm, Provide Comfort and Deny Flight.

Michele Mason will discuss her work that examines competing portrayals of "manliness" and "manhood" set in or associated with Hokkaido during the Meiji period. Focusing on representations of the tondenhei farming militia, nature and the colonial project and the shûjikan prison system in Hokkaido, she argues that powerful rhetorical modes deployed in the appropriation of the island played a crucial role in the construction of imperial ideology, the modern military, Japanese subjects and national identity. Her project reconsiders Hokkaido's ambivalent colonial status and its naturalized yet marginal position in the nation, as well as highlights the significance of gender, and specifically masculinity, in shaping modern Japan.

Michele Mason is a postdoctoral fellow in Japanese studies at FSI. Currently she is investigating little known stories about Hokkaido by Kôda Rohan, Hoshino Tenchi, Tayama Katai in addition to canonized works such as Kunikida Doppo's Meat and Potatoes. She received a B.A. in Linguistics and Japanese from the University of Oregon (Eugene), an M.A. in modern Japanese literature from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in modern Japanese literature with an emphasis on cultural studies from the University of California, Irvine.