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.

Appeared in Stanford Report, December 8, 2014.

German studies professor Adrian Daub examines the social mores of 19th-century Europe through a study of "four-handed monsters" - when the hands of two layers intermingled on the same piano.  It was a phenomenon that both fascinated and repelled.  

In 19th-century Europe – long before LPs, CDs or mp3s – there were only two ways to listen to, say, the latest Beethoven symphony: either you were lucky enough to hear it performed at the local concert hall, or you played it at home yourself.

Not with a full orchestra, of course, but in a piano transcription, an arrangement that compressed symphonic violins, oboes and tubas onto a single keyboard score. And, to really mimic the range of a whole orchestra, amateurs played "four-handed," with two pianists sitting side-by-side.

These close-contact duets took off among the nascent middle class. Historian Edward Cone dubbed the players "four-handed monsters," both for the style's raging popularity and for its scandalous stigma.

"Piano four hands represented a safe space in which touching and nearness were permitted or even desired – something that was unusual at the time," said Adrian Daub, associate professor of German studies and affiliated faculty of The Europe Center at Stanford

Daub takes Cone's descriptor as the title of his new book exploring this largely forgotten phenomenon, Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture.

Four-hand playing "bridged the divide between serious musicians and total amateurs," Daub said.

"This was a welcome vehicle for the greatest composers of the 19th century and at the same time it was the much-maligned party game – the equivalent of Twister – for the 'philistine' bourgeois."

Using a range of musical and literary sources, Daub's study is the first to examine the cultural valences of this strikingly intimate tradition.

Drawing from novels, memoirs and letters, Daub's survey reveals, for instance, how 19th-century anxieties surrounding creativity, industrialization, sex, virtue and politics were exercised through the act of four-hand piano playing.

Daub's previous research projects, one on Richard Wagner and sexuality, and another on the metaphysics of marriage in the 19th century, put him in a unique position to examine the phenomenon of four-hand playing and how "the dangers and the utopian promises it seemed to make … tell us much about the 19th century."

As Daub put it, "it's almost incredible how much people were able to read into what to modern eyes seems a pretty harmless pursuit." Whether this was a fear of moral dissoluteness or a "promise of a better way of engaging with the other sex or other people more generally," four-hand playing "was asked to do a lot, far more than comparable modes of performance."

Heather Hadlock, associate professor of music at Stanford, sees Daub's study as an important contribution to music scholarship. "Until recently, transcriptions and arrangements were dismissed as having little artistic value or historical significance," Hadlock said.

Daub's study, however, is the first step toward rectifying this oversight, revealing how four-hand piano duets in the 19th century resounded far beyond the parlor.

Romantic undertones

As pianos became increasingly affordable over the course of the century, more and more middle-class families made the instrument a centerpiece of domestic life. While solo piano playing never went out of style, the increased musical range and social interaction offered by four-hand playing caught on.

"Four-hand arrangements became the standard vehicle for the private, or semi-private, consumption of music of all kinds," said Daub. "Symphonies, operas, chamber music, dance music and so on, from trivial waltzes to apocalyptic Mahler symphonies."

"The collaboration of four hands across the whole range of the modern piano allowed two players to reproduce virtually any repertoire within the privacy of the home," said Stanford music Professor Thomas Grey.

Well-versed in both music and literature, Daub amassed a staggering number of allusions to four-hand playing from 19th-century sources. He also collected references from four-hand practitioners and mined digital databases.

From William Thackeray to Charles Dickens to Thomas Mann, four-hand playing makes appearances in famous novels of the period.

Even the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote on – and composed – four-hand pieces, saying that they "may be taken as a divining rod for a good marriage."

Cumulatively, Daub said, these "short, often banal episodes are transformed into fleeting glimpses of a larger phenomenon, which in itself was too quotidian and ubiquitous to merit discussion in its own day."

In large part, Daub said, the popularity of the activity was driven by the romantic undertones of four-hand playing.

Daub quotes the composer Robert Schumann, for instance, who reported, "a four-hand piece allows us reveries together with our beloved, provided she plays the piano."

"Togetherness on the keyboard was to become a symbol for togetherness in marriage," Daub said.

Forced intimacy

Four-hand playing, though, also had a dark side: the erotic possibilities created when fingers touched, bodies sidled and harmony was made.

Composers, well aware of the situation, took advantage of the forced intimacy by crafting pieces that caused the hands to overlap and interlock, generating as much contact as possible.

Daub quotes novelist William Thackeray, who wrote of a "pretty little duet à quatre mains, where the hands cross over, and hop up and down the keys, and the heads get so close, so close. Oh, duets. Oh, regrets."

At the same time, literary treatments of four-hand playing projected notions of propriety and virtue. Daub cites a telling passage in Dickens's David Copperfield to comment on how four-hand piano playing reflected such social mores.

The novel's eponymous narrator, watching a recital by two young women, begins to rethink his opinion of one's moral standing:

"The innocent beauty of her face was not as innocent to me as it had been; I mistrusted the natural grace and charm of her manner; and when I looked at Agnes by her side, and thought how good and true Agnes was, suspicions arose within me that it was an ill-assorted friendship."

In Daub's reading, the narrator's shifting perceptions of his beloved is mediated by watching her play four-hand piano, the music laying bare her "true" character.

Four-hand playing also emerged as a potent political symbol because of the collaboration and unity inherent in the practice.

Music scholar Hans Moldenhauer, writing in 1950 after having been exiled from Nazi Germany, looked back at four-hand playing wistfully: "Dictatorial practices have no place in [four-hand] pianism."

Daub comments on the writer's "clear sense that four-hand piano playing doesn't allow for a Führer principle." For Moldenhauer, there was something beautifully communal about the four-hand "republic."

But by the time Moldenhauer extolled its virtues, the practice was quickly losing popularity. The practice continues today (all of the Stanford scholars quoted in this article are four-hand players), but people no longer attach as much interest to it.

Still, Daub, who has attended a number of four-hand concerts, says that seeing two people at one keyboard "instills a surprising sense of intimacy."

"What other mode of performance has the onlooker asking themselves: 'Should I be watching this?'"

Nate Sloan is a doctoral candidate in musicology and writes about the humanities at Stanford.

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Gerhard Casper, president emeritus of Stanford and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, has been appointed president of the American Academy in Berlin.

Casper's appointment was announced Wednesday by the academy board of trustees. He will assume his duties in Berlin in July 2015. He will be the first president-in-residence in the academy's history. In an email to Stanford friends and colleagues, Casper said his appointment "will be limited in time."

Among those making the announcement was former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a founding chairman of the American Academy, who said, "Gerhard Casper, whose leadership at Stanford University I greatly admired, is an inspired choice."

The academy was founded under the leadership of Kissinger; the late Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and to Germany; and Richard von Weizsäcker, former president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Casper served on the academy board from 2000 to 2009.

The American Academy in Berlin, established in 1994, is a center for advanced study and, according to Casper, "has become a significant contributor to intellectual exchange between the United States and Germany."

Casper said, "The institution makes it possible for American scholars from various disciplines and for artists to spend time in Berlin to pursue their work. At the same time, the Academy has come to play a noticeable role in public life, especially as concerns U.S.-German relations."

Casper served as Stanford's ninth president from 1992 to 2000. He joined Stanford after having served as provost and dean of the Law School at the University of Chicago.

Casper grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and studied law at the
 universities of Freiburg and Hamburg. He attended Yale Law School, where he obtained his Master of Laws degree in 1962. He returned to Freiburg, where he earned his doctorate in 1964. In the fall of 1964, he immigrated to the United States, and spent two years as an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Chicago faculty.