Stanford University

Collaborating on biotech policy

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In this new article, Megan Palmer, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, talks about the different ways that the FBI is collaborating with the biotech community in order to be prepared to respond to an emerging biological threat. One of them is by reaching out to student bioengineers at programs like the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition. The purpose of that event is to demonstrate how synthetic biology can be used to address pressing global issues.

As the article states, whether it’s an accidental outbreak or a biological attack, the FBI seeks to create a culture of trust and transparency with the biotech community. Palmer discussed this topic recently at the Biofabricate conference for synthetic biology and design in New York City.

As Palmer noted, biological attacks are a historical reality. In 1984, cult members poisoned patrons of 10 salad bars in Oregon with salmonella, sickening more than 750 people. And in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 attacks, anthrax spores that were mailed to newsrooms and government offices killed five people. While other incidents may have simply failed, it seems prudent to prepare for future attacks that could be even more deadlier.

Enter the FBI's foreay into the biotech community. Collaboartion between the public and private sectors is increasing in this area. As Palmer said, examples exist of iGEM students acting as "white hat biohackers" to help biotech companies detect weaknesses in their systems that  all in collaboration with the FBI, Palmer says. 

“There’s the overall sense that the government has acknowledged that it is not necessarily the center of influence in technological development,” Palmer told the publication. “We’re going to start seeing many more examples of partnerships between the government and the private sector where you wouldn't have necessarily expected them before. People should be willing to give them a chance.” 

To Palmer, the key to the collaboration is open communication. She reports progress with the FBI and biotech community on this front. Palmer herself asks the FBI questions about its involvement and interest in biotech dangers. So far, they have “been willing to have more of those conversations,” she said. The true test will come when the relationship is finally tested by what Palmer describes as a “triggering event,” either a situation where there is reason to believe a biotech has occurred or one in which the FBI is prying a bit too much into the lives of biologists. Palmer said that if the relationship doesn’t withstand this type of challenge, the trust between the FBI and the community would weaken, and communication would break down.

Follow CISAC on Twitter at @StanfordCISAC and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

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Close up image of human hand holding test tube. CISAC's Megan Palmer explains in a new article how the FBI is collaborating with the biotech community in order to be prepared to respond to an emerging biological threat.
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Analyzing the future U.S.-Russia relationship

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Reality stands in the way of a quickly transformed U.S.-Russia relationship, Stanford historian Norman Naimark said. Naimark, an expert in Russian history and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), anticipates that "strategic constraints" will set in for the incoming Trump administration as it begins to understand some of the fundamental differences between Moscow and Washington.

The relationship between the two longtime global rivals may not change as fast or dramatically as some suggest, Naimark said. In fact, “deals” may be harder to make with the Putin regime in Russian than Trump anticipates.

CISAC recently interviewed Naimark on the subject of future U.S.-Russia ties:

How might the election of Donald Trump change the U.S.-Russia relationship?

There are many important things we do not yet know about the future Trump administration. How will his foreign policy team reflect (or not) the views of the Republican establishment, including the vice president, on issues towards Russia? How wedded is Trump to his campaign rhetoric and promises about Russia? How influential will the new president be in the making of foreign policy, when his interests and self-proclaimed competence clearly relate to domestic issues? How ready will the Trump administration be to reverse long-standing U.S. treaty and alliance obligations, both formal and informal?

Answers to those questions would help us assess the range of possibilities for any changes in Russian-American relations, which are presently worse than at any time since the beginning of the 1980s, the period of what some call the “second Cold War.” If Hillary Clinton had won the election, one could have been fairly certain that relations would have continued at their present parlous, if steady state, with both sides taking actions to undermine the other, while criticizing the other’s motives. Some commentators have suggested that the Trump victory opens a door for concessions on the part of the Americans – on Crimea, on Ukraine, on Syria, on sanctions, on NATO troops in the eastern member nations – that might encourage Putin to respond accordingly, improving the tone and content of Russian-American relations.

But I would caution against thinking that this will come fast, if it comes at all, or that the impact will be groundbreaking or of significant duration. There are some fundamental differences between Moscow and Washington that reflect deep and abiding issues. For example, both look at Russia’s “sphere of influence” from opposite perspectives: while Putin seeks to expand and consolidate it, the U.S. follows a revived containment policy. “Deals” may be harder to make with Russia under these circumstances than Trump anticipates.

If U.S. foreign policy establishment generally holds skeptical views of the Putin regime, how difficult will it be for Trump to strike off on his own in reshaping the relationship?

The history of American foreign policy since the Second World War has demonstrated that the president and his immediate advisors can have enormous influence on the flow of events. Again, nothing happens at once, independent of a cumbersome process of formulating and executing policy changes. But profound shifts do happen and they can alter the trajectory of American foreign policy. Still it is important to remember that Putin’s determined anti-American stance has Russian domestic political determinants that will impede change, even if President-elect Trump initiates steps to improve the character of the relationship.

What are the biggest flashpoints or challenges between Russia and the U.S.?

Ukraine, Syria, and the lifting of sanctions are probably at the top of the list, though the recent slippage of the arms control regime is a matter of great concern. The problems associated with Ukraine – both the issue of the illegal annexation of Crimea and the Russian destabilization of and military interference in Donbass – have been “handed off” by Washington to the Europeans in general and Germany, with Angela Merkel in the lead, in specific.

The Minsk II sanctions are a European initiative to get the Russians to conform to international norms on a Ukrainian settlement. Trump could hardly make a deal with Putin about Ukraine without serious European input.

Syria is different, though the constraints here also seem extremely difficult to overcome, given the U.S.’ principled opposition to strengthening Assad in power. Secretary of State John Kerry’s dogged attempts to come to an agreement with the Russians about Syria involved, as best we know, a number of important American concessions. Though both the United States and the Russian Federation are deeply hostile to ISIS, and it makes sense for both to join forces to attack the terrorist entity, the maintenance of the Assad regime would be very hard for the U.S. foreign policy and military establishment to accept.

Why does Putin seemingly think Trump is better for Russia than Hillary Clinton would have been?

Some of it is personal: Trump and Putin have said positive things about one another, though these exchanges were based in part on a mistranslation of a supposed compliment to Trump by Putin. Trump has been more conciliatory about dictators and has explicitly promised better relations with Russia. But the issues go deeper. Trump has indicated that he would reduce the United States’ support of NATO and reevaluate U.S. support of Ukrainian interests, both of which would weaken the American position in Europe, one of Moscow’s major foreign policy goals.

The Russian president also welcomes Trump’s readiness to recalibrate American involvement in Syria. Meanwhile, Clinton was seen as having tried to undermine Putin’s election to the Russian presidency in 2012 and as supporting an aggressive democratization program in Russia. She is the personification for him of the liberal, internationalist, and interventionist wing of the Washington foreign policy establishment that advocates, in his view, the Americanization of the international order.

With this said, Putin is surely nervous about Trump’s inconsistencies and volatility, which could exacerbate rather than calm Russian-American tensions.

What does history tell us about the U.S.-Russia relationship and what may happen in the future?

Since the beginning of the Cold War (some might argue since the Russian Revolution, almost a century ago), the relationship between the U.S. and Russia has been fraught with deep tensions and mutual hostility. The Cold War was a very dangerous period of relations, when proxy wars, dramatic international crises, and the potential use of nuclear weapons dominated the relationship. One of the major disappointments of the post-Cold War period is the unsuccessful integration of the Russian Federation in the international system as a force for peace and stability. Putin is an important part of the story. But there are also deep historical and structural reasons for this problem and they will not be solved by the waving of an American president’s magic wand. Though both countries are changing, we may have to wait a good long while for the Putin-era enmity to disappear.

Naimark is also the Donald Andrews Whittier Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the history department, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and an affiliated faculty fellow at the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He recently published a new book, Genocide: A World History.

Follow CISAC on Twitter at @StanfordCISAC and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/StanfordCISAC.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Norman Naimark, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 723-2674, naimark@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

 
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Photo of a gala concert held in Red Square to mark the 70th anniversary of the former Soviet Union's role in WWII. Stanford scholar Norman Naimark said that "strategic constraints" will set in for the incoming Trump administration as it begins to understand some of the fundamental differences between Moscow and Russia.
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Checks on the next president's foreign policy

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Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC, wrote the following op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Donald Trump’s stunning win has made many wonder: Just how dangerous could a Trump foreign policy be? There are plenty of reasons to be afraid, very afraid.

Trump knows almost nothing about national security but says his own top adviser would be himself. He has said he might use nuclear weapons against the Islamic State and would abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our Asia-Pacific allies unless they paid more — as though alliances are a two-bit mafia protection racket rather than an enduring source of American power projection across the globe. He doesn’t know what the U.S. nuclear triad is (it’s the cornerstone of our deterrence against total nuclear war), and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t know.

He dismisses U.S. intelligence reports attributing election hacking to the Russian government as “public relations.” And his Twitter trigger fingers have alarmed many about putting a man with so little obvious self-control anywhere near the U.S. nuclear codes. Three reasons, however, suggest that a Trump foreign policy might not be the doomsday scenario that many fear.

The first is the heavy burden of office. All presidents feel it. Campaigning is one thing, governing is another. Candidate Jimmy Carter railed against the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1976 presidential campaign and vowed to declaw it. President Carter did the opposite, embracing covert operations and declaring in his 1981 State of the Union message that, “Our national interests are critically dependent on a strong and effective intelligence capability.” Nothing is more sobering than seeing, up close, every day, what dangers confront the United States and threaten our vital interests. The campaign trail is exhilarating. The Oval Office is exhausting. Leading the most powerful country on Earth is an awesome responsibility that every president feels. That’s why they seem to age in dog years. 

The second check on recklessness is Congress. To be sure, presidents have far more unilateral powers when it comes to foreign policy than domestic policy. But Congress still matters. Congress controls the purse and oversees the executive branch — often times, not so well. But in moments of crisis, Congress does weigh in because voters back home demand it. Congressional pressure — and the prospect that Congress would cut off funding — finally pushed President Richard Nixon to end the Vietnam War. National Security Agency surveillance was dramatically reformed when Congress passed the USA Freedom Act in 2015. CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders ended when Congress’ Church committee investigation uncovered them and said, “enough.” To be sure, Republicans will again control the House and Senate come January. But the one thing that instantly unites all Republicans and Democrats is protecting their own power against an overreaching executive.

The third check is bureaucracy. American intelligence and military officials are professionals. They are trained to do their jobs regardless of who’s in power. While there are always exceptions (I’m thinking of you, FBI Director James Comey), the men and women who work at the tip of the spear of our national security establishment put country first. At the CIA, speaking truth to power is a cherished value. In the Pentagon, refusing to follow an unlawful order is deeply inculcated. These are not slogans on hats. These are the creeds by which our national security professionals live, and die. Spend any time at Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, Neb., where there’s a red clock on the wall counting the time in seconds to nuclear impact on the operations center, and you’ll know just how real these values are. 

Implementing policy is harder than most people think. It takes time, it takes approvals, it takes organizational gears to grind, it takes coordination across agencies, it takes bureaucratic infighting and political maneuvering, and it often takes a bevy of lawyers. Every president complains that the process is far too cumbersome. Presidents issue plenty of orders that are not carried out quickly, or ever. Agendas are always long. Time is always short. Events often intervene. And concerned bureaucracies can wait it out while the president’s four-year term ticks away.

In the summer of 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower was running for president, Harry Truman famously captured just how hard it is to make change. Imagining how Eisenhower would handle the presidency, Truman remarked, “He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike — it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” 

Let’s hope so.

 

 

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Checks on Trump's foreign policy
The CIA symbol is shown on the floor of the CIA Headquarters. The CIA is one of the government agencies that president-elect Donald Trump would find to be a check on any reckless national security decisions or actions, according to Stanford political scientist Amy Zegart.
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**Cancelled** President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: The Future of Europe

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**This event has been cancelled.**

This event is co-sponsored by: The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Europe Center, The Hoover Institution, Stanford Global Studies, The French and Italian Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and The Stanford Humanities Center.

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Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing Panelist Former President of the French Republic (1974 - 1981)

Christophe Crombez

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-0249 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center
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Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.

Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.

Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.

Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.

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Senior Research Scholar Panelist The Europe Center

Peter Koudijs

Knight Management Center
Stanford University
655 Knight Way
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Peter Koudijs is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches History of Financial Crises in the MBA program. He joined the GSB in August 2011. Peter received a Bachelor’s degree, cum laude, in Economics from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He earned a PhD degree, summa cum laude, in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011. Peter has obtained various grants and fellowships from the European Union, the Economic History Association and different Dutch and Spanish scholarship programs.
 

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Europe and the Global Economy

Although each nation in Europe retains its distinct cultural, social and political identity, the region as a whole is among the world’s most economically integrated zones. The open movement of goods, services, capital, people, and pollutants that we observe today was not, however, inevitable; instead, it was contested, challenged, and reversed at many points in the past.

European Governance

The governance of Europe has constantly been reimagined, debated, and revolutionized. The Europe Center promotes scholarly, interdisciplinary research on the social, political, and economic processes, both historical and contemporary, that have driven the evolution of governance in Europe.

Class examines diplomacy, global challenges

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Stanford students are applying lean start-up techniques to some of the world’s most difficult foreign policy issues.

The fall 2016 quarter class, Hacking for Diplomacy: Tackling Foreign Policy Challenges with the Lean Launchpad, is a first-of-its-kind course for studying statecraft, created as a reflection of the best that Stanford and Silicon Valley offers in the way of pioneering paradigms. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-taught by Joe Felter, a senior researcher at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). It is based on the Lean LaunchPad methodology, created by course designer Steve Blank, a Stanford lecturer and entrepreneur.

The teaching team also includes Jeremy Weinstein, a political science professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute; Zvika Krieger, the U.S. Department of State's Representative to Silicon Valley; and Steve Weinstein, the CEO of MovieLabs.

'Breaking free'

The class is based on cultivating ideas and imagination, breaking free of the traditional “business plan” approach to rolling out new products and solutions. In the case of diplomacy, the lean start-up method is fast and flexible above all. It has three key principles based on concepts such as "mission model canvas," "beneficiary development," and "agile engineering,” according to Felter, also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“The first principle is accepting that any proposed solution to a problem whether in the commercial world or public sector is initially just a set of untested hypotheses – at best informed guesses – as to what may solve the needs of a customer or beneficiary,” said Felter.

Regarding beneficiary development, he said, experiential learning is central.

“There are no answers to complex challenges ‘inside the building,’ if you will, and students must ‘get out of the building’ to find out –in as intimate detail as possible – the various pains and gains experienced by the various beneficiaries, stakeholders and end users that must be addressed to find viable and deployable solutions to their problems,” Felter said.

The last principle, “agile development,” is based on the view that proposed solutions are generated and constantly updated through a collecting of data and feedback. This in turn, Felter explained, is rapidly tested and new solutions are designed based this iterative process.

Overall, he noted, the core idea is that entrepreneurs are everywhere, and that lean startup principles favor experimentation over elaborate planning, offering a faster way to get a desired product or solution to market.

Real-world instruction

In the class, student teams analyze real-world foreign policy challenges. They then use lean startup principles to find new approaches to seemingly intractable or very complex problems that have bedeviled the foreign policy world. The teams actually work with mentors and officials in the U.S. State Department and other civilian agencies and private companies.

Each week, the teams present their findings (“product”) to a panel of faculty and mentors, who will critique their solutions. The outcomes will range, as they vary from problem to problem. Examples include human rights, food security, refuges and labor recruitment, and mosquito disease threats, among others.

On Oct. 10, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the class. “Brilliant minds are applying technology to world’s toughest problems. Their perspective will inform,” Kerry tweeted after the class.

Kerry’s State Department gave the students seven challenges to address – human trafficking, avoiding space collisions, tracking nuclear devices, and countering violent extremism. The students will explore and analyze these issues through the rest of the quarter.

One student, Kaya Tilev, later asked Kerry what the students should be striving for to make their “solutions” a reality for national policymakers.

Kerry said, “Well, you’re doing it. You’re in it. You’re in the program. And I have absolute confidence if you come up with a viable solution it is going to be implemented, adopted, and institutionalized.”

Zvika Krieger, the state department official, told the students that Kerry was impressed with them and the class.

“He (Kerry) brought up our class in all of his meetings that day, including at a lunch with the CEOs/founders of Google, Airbnb, and Lyft; in a podcast interview with Wired magazine, and in remarks at the Internet Association's conference,” Krieger wrote in an email to them.

Global flashpoints are proliferating around the globe – the Syrian War, conflict and civil wars across the Middle East and in parts of Africa; the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction by states and non-state groups; the most significant flow of refugees since World War II; North Korea nuclear testing; Russian adventurism on its borders; China’s forays into the South China Sea; and a changing climate.

In other words, there is no shortage of thorny problems for young minds to solve as they embark on their careers.

‘Hungry to apply their energy’

Jeremy Weinstein, the political science professor, described the students as “hungry to apply their energy and talents to real-world problems, and to use hands-on experiences as a way of accelerating their learning.”

The class taps into that motivation by bringing together data scientists, engineers, and social scientist, he noted. In the end, the idea is for students to learn how to “innovate inside government.”

Weinstein is optimistic that this class – and a stronger connection between the State Department and Stanford’s technical and policy expertise – can drive more innovation inside government.

“Technology can play a critical role in addressing many of today’s foreign policy challenges, and this class is one new way for senior U.S. officials to tap into the passion, creativity and talent of Silicon Valley,” he said.

Hacking for defense

Last year, Felter and Blank also led a Hacking for Defense class based on the same lean start-up principles. Hacking for Diplomacy is co-listed as both an International Policy Studies and a Management Science and Engineering course – it counts for international relations and political science majors as well.

Blank, a consulting associate professor in engineering, told the Stanford News Service in a recent story that he seeks to cultivate in students a passion for giving back to society and their world.

“We’re going to create a network of entrepreneurial students who understand the diplomatic, policy and national security problems facing the country and get them engaged in partnership with islands of innovation in the Department of State,” said Blank, who also wrote about the new hacking for Diplomacy course in the Huffington Post.

“Teams must take these products out to the real world and ask potential users for feedback,” he noted.

 

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The new Stanford class, "Hacking for Diplomacy," gives students the opportunity to analyze global challenges and apply "lean start-up" methods to solving them. On Oct. 10, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the class, which is co-taught by CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter.
Courtesy of Zvika Krieger
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Nuclear cooperation essential

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CISAC nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker earlier this year released a book, Doomed to Cooperate, about how American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers. Physics Today and Arms Control Today recently ran reviews on the work. Below is a Nov. 1 article that Hecker wrote on this subject for Russia Matters:

By Siegfried S. Hecker

Recalling why U.S.-Russian nuclear cooperation was essential during the late 1980s, Russia’s then-First Deputy Minister of Atomic Energy Lev D. Ryabev said: “We arrived in the nuclear century all in one boat—a movement by any one will affect everyone… [Russian and American nuclear scientists] were doomed to work on these things together, which pushed us toward cooperation.”

Russia mattered then and it matters now. Today, like 30 years ago, the size of its nuclear program—namely its nuclear weapons, facilities, materials, experts—and its safety, security and environmental challenges are rivaled only by the United States. They dwarf all others in the world combined.

The dangerous difference between then and now is that the hard-won cooperation that amazingly prevented nuclear weapons, materials and technologies from spilling out of the disintegrating Soviet empire and into the hands of actors bent on deploying them has been replaced with animosity, tension and a freeze on substantive collaboration. Within the past month two U.S.-Russian agreements—on plutonium disposition and on cooperation in nuclear- and energy-related scientific research and development—have been suspended. Another one—on conversion of Russian research reactors—has been terminated altogether. Meanwhile, officials in Europe and the United States have tracked a number of disturbing activities suggesting that the Islamic State and its sympathizers may be pursuing nuclear and radiological terrorism as the group has been pushed on the defensive.

I must add that Russia also matters to me personally: It has been inextricably intertwined with my life. I was born during World War II in Europe. My father, a conscript in the German army, never returned from the Russian front. I grew up in post-war Austria, which until 1955 was under divided Allied and Soviet occupation. In 1956, I immigrated to the United States with my mother and siblings.

For the first 20 years after I received my bachelor’s degree in metallurgy and materials science from Case Institute of Technology in 1965, Russia also mattered because I spent most of that time employed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Our job was to deter the Soviet Union, which was in intense ideological, economic and military competition with the United States.

I became director of the laboratory in 1986 shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev took over leadership of the Soviet Union and dramatically changed geopolitics with his outreach to U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the West. At the end of 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent states. Remarkably and unexpectedly, the Cold War was over.

Mutually assured destruction was replaced by an acknowledgement of mutual nuclear interdependency. The West, rather than being threatened by the enormous nuclear might in the hands of Soviet leaders, was now threatened by Russia’s weakness and the potential for its new government to lose control of the nuclear assets it had inherited from the Soviet Union. The safety and security of Russia’s nuclear assets—its tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, over a million kilograms of fissile materials, a huge nuclear infrastructure and some one million employees of the once-powerful Soviet nuclear establishment—posed an unprecedented risk for Russia and the world.

Fortunately, collaboration replaced confrontation 25 years ago. President George H.W. Bush reached across the political divide to lend a helping hand during times of Soviet political and economic chaos to help Moscow manage its huge nuclear complex. Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar pioneered the visionary landmark Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation (appropriately called Nunn-Lugar) to provide rationale and financial support to that helping hand. The nongovernmental community—led by academics at U.S. universities, foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, groups such as the Federation of American Scientists, the U.S. National Academies and the Natural Resource Defense Council—paved the way by reaching out to courageous Soviet/Russian organizations, such as its Academy of Sciences and other leading thinkers.

The role of the American and Russian nuclear weapons laboratories changed as well. They had become acquainted during the 1988 Joint Verification Experiment, underground nuclear tests conducted at each other’s nuclear test sites with on-site monitoring by the other side to develop confidence in nuclear test verification so as to facilitate ratification of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which had lingered unratified since its signing in 1974. That acquaintance and subsequent interactions at the Geneva TTBT negotiations prompted both sides, but led by the Russian nuclear weapons scientists, to push their governments to allow scientific collaboration between former adversaries.

In February 1992, less than two months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington and Moscow approved exchange visits of the directors of their nuclear weapon design laboratories: Vladimir Belugin, director of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center VNIIEF, and Vladimir Nechai, director of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center VNIITF, visited the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories; John Nuckolls, director of LLNL, and I, director of LANL, visited the formerly secret cities of Sarov and Snezhinsk, home to VNIIEF and VNIITF, respectively.

Those visits marked the beginning of a remarkable period spanning more than two decades of scientific and technical nuclear cooperation that we called lab-to-lab cooperation—the story told in a book called “Doomed to Cooperate” by dozens of Russian and American scientists, engineers and officials. The book demonstrates how the camaraderie and the interpersonal relationships among the scientists and engineers helped them overcome the radically different views of the nuclear challenges as seen by the two governments.

To the U.S. government, Russia’s nuclear complex was considered an inheritance from hell: the danger of loose nukes, loose nuclear materials, loose nuclear experts and loose nuclear exports. The Russian government considered its nuclear complex part of its salvation in that it would provide a basis to help the country achieve a competitive, modern industrial base and economy. In “Doomed to Cooperate,” we, the scientists and engineers, describe how we confronted the unprecedented safety and security challenges, and how we collaborated to discover new science and help Russia’s vastly oversized nuclear workforce use their talents in civilian and commercial pursuits.

Russia’s nuclear complex has mattered enormously over the past 25 years. It has survived the four nuclear dangers mentioned above to a large extent because of the Russian nuclear community’s dedication, professionalism and patriotism—and their ability to persevere during difficult times. But it also had the benefit of innovative U.S. government programs, collaborations championed by U.S. NGOs and the many hundreds of nuclear lab-to-lab collaborations. These efforts helped the huge Soviet nuclear complex transition those in Russia and several other former Soviet republics in a safe and secure manner.

Unfortunately, whereas a convergence of our governments’ interests immediately following the end of the Cold War allowed for innovative nuclear cooperation, growing political differences during the past 10 to 15 years have done the opposite. The current differences over Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria have all but brought meaningful nuclear collaboration to an end.

Yet, Russia continues to matter—and cooperation between Moscow and Washington on common nuclear challenges is essential. They must take steps to reverse what appears to be a return to an arms race and potential nuclear confrontation. They must continue to share experiences and best practices to keep their huge nuclear complexes safe and secure. Although Russia has made enormous improvements in these areas, lessons from the United States nuclear complex demonstrate that this job is never done. Together, Moscow and Washington have a greater stake than anyone in ensuring that the nuclear nonproliferation regime is strengthened rather than crippled. And more than anyone in the world they have a responsibility to join their technical, professional and military talents to help the world avoid nuclear terrorism.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: Russia matters; nuclear cooperation is essential; isolation invites catastrophe.

 

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CISAC nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker, second from the right, says that American and Russian scientists need to work together on averting nuclear dangers – as they have done so in the past.
Courtesy of Siegfried Hecker
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Reformations: Stanford CMEMS Primary Source Symposium (Day 3 of 3)

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The third annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium commemorates the 500th anniversary of the so-called Protestant Reformation by reflecting broadly on social, institutional, political, and intellectual re-formations from 600-1600 and across the world.  The symposium will take place over 3 days, Nov. 10-12. 

For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium

 

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Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.

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