Fellows will arrive at Stanford in July to begin the three-week academic training program taught by Stanford faculty, policymakers and thought-leaders in the technology sector.

Image

Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is proud to announce the 2017 class of Draper Hills Summer Fellows, which is composed of 28 leaders – selected from among hundreds of applications – advancing democratic development in some of the most challenging corners of the world.

In Bahrain, Burma, Rwanda and Sudan our fellows are working on peace-building initiatives to create more tolerant and inclusive societies. Judges and lawyers are holding government and criminals accountable and reforming the rule of law in Argentina, Guatemala and the Philippines. Gender rights activists are creating new tools and programs to protect the safety and freedom of women and girls in India, Kuwait and Papua New Guinea.

In Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Serbia and Ukraine, our fellows are serving inside the government as members of Parliament and senior civil servants to advance reform and new policy agendas. Business leaders in Jordan and India launched initiatives to support more inclusive economic growth and social development.

CDDRL is excited to launch another powerful network of leaders determined to advance change in their communities. They will emerge with new tools, frameworks and connections to enhance their work and deepen their impact on democratic reform.

The 2017 class will mark the 13th cohort of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program and the fellows will join the Omidyar Network Leadership Forum, an alumni community of over 300 alumni in 75 countries worldwide.

This is the eighth and last in a series of interviews by the Korea Times on North Korea. CISAC's Siegfried Hecker is featured in this story below by Kim Jae-kyoung:

NK estimated to have ability to produce 7 nuclear bombs a year

By Kim Jae-kyoung

A world-renowned nuclear scientist said that U.S. President Donald Trump must to talk to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by sending an envoy to Pyongyang to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.

"I believe the first talks should be bilateral and informal by a presidential envoy talking directly to Kim Jong-un," said Siegfried S. Hecker, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, in an interview.

"I believe both Seoul and Beijing would support such talks. These talks may then also help to build the foundation for renewed multilateral negotiations, which, first and foremost must involve South Korea, as well as China," he added.

Hecker, the co-director of CISAC from 2007 to 2012, has visited North Korea several times to assess the plutonium program at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center since 2004.

He stressed that it is most important to convey the message that nuclear weapons cannot be used under any circumstances.

"There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. Any explosion of a nuclear device on the Korean Peninsula is a catastrophe of indescribable proportions," he said.

The internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security said that the Trump administration and the new South Korean government face the challenge of avoiding a nuclear detonation on the Korean Peninsula.

He believes that such an incident could result from a miscalculation or overconfidence by the Kim Jong-un regime as well as an accident with the nuclear weapons in the North.

"A conventional confrontation may turn nuclear with an inexperienced leader in charge," he said. "Or, in the case of instability in the North, who will control the nuclear weapons? These are serious concerns that must be addressed now," he added.

Hecker, who served as the director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, from 1986 to 1997, estimated that North Korea, although he is uncertain, may have sufficient material for 20 to 25 nuclear weapons.

NK's nuclear capabilities evolving 

He explained that the size of its nuclear arsenal depends primarily on how much plutonium and highly enriched uranium North Korea has produced.

"The sophistication of the arsenal depends primarily on nuclear testing. With five nuclear tests conducted over 10 years, North Korea is likely able to produce nuclear devices small enough to fit on missiles that can reach all of South Korea and Japan," he said.

He also estimated that the totalitarian country can produce sufficient plutonium and highly enriched uranium for six to seven bombs per year.

"However, all estimates are uncertain because we know little about the North's capacity to produce highly enriched uranium since it is not possible to monitor such facilities from afar," he said.

In his view, the world does not have to accept the reclusive country as a "nuclear weapons state," but it must be treated as a country with a nuclear arsenal.

"Whether we like it or not, North Korea is a country with nuclear weapons," he said. "The final aim is to have a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, but that will take time. It will have to be done in sequence of halt, roll back and then eliminate."

However, Hecker dismissed North Korea's claim that it has the capability to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) all the way to the U.S. mainland.

"I do not believe North Korea is capable of reaching the U.S. mainland with a nuclear-tipped missile today. It is working on developing such a capability, but it will likely take another five years or so," he said.

Hecker explained that it has not demonstrated all the aspects of necessary rocket technology or the ability to make a nuclear warhead small enough to be able to survive atmospheric reentry.

"Besides, to actually launch a nuclear warhead on an ICBM you must have complete confidence that it will not blow up on the launch pad," he added. "They cannot have such confidence based on their missile launch history."

When one thinks of the casualties of war, it is easy to imagine severed limbs, bullet holes, shrapnel, perhaps even sarin gas or Agent Orange. But in a recent Daedalus essay, Paul Wise argues that the most damaging health impacts of war are often indirect. Losing access to food supplies, medication and electricity can kill more people than battle itself. In this video by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Wise, a professor of pediatrics and Stanford Health Policy core faculty member, explains how fatal the indirect costs of war can be.

Read More

While the United States has no peers in conventional military power, it is especially vulnerable – as a free and democratic society – to cyber misinformation campaigns, a Stanford scholar says.

Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar for cyberpolicy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), is the co-author of a new draft working paper that spells out the perilous risks facing democratic, wired-up countries around the world.

America’s adversaries are seeking “asymmetric” methods for social disruption, rather than direct military conflict, Lin said.

“Cyber warfare is one asymmetric counter to Western (and especially U.S.) military advantages that depend on the use of cyberspace,” wrote Lin and his co-author Jackie Kerr, a research fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This new type of cyber aggression is aimed at winning – and confusing – hearts and minds, the very control centers of human existence, Lin said.

As a result, “information/influence warfare and manipulation,” or IIWAM as Lin describes it, poses profound implications for Western democracies, even though much of it may not be illegal under international law. This approach is based on the deliberate use of information by one party on an adversary to confuse, mislead, and ultimately to influence the choices and decisions that the adversary makes.

A recent example in point would be the 2016 Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election and the surge of so-called “fake news.”

Lin points out that while misinformation campaigns are not new, the technology to spread it far and wide globally is. He noted that the patron saint of distorting reality for war-like purposes is Sun Tzu, who wrote that, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

While traditional cyber attacks typically hit hard targets like computer systems, cyber “influence” campaigns are conducted over longer periods of time and rely on soft power – propaganda, persuasion, culture, social forces, confusion and deception, Lin said. 

Words and images

How does it work? Lin explains:

“Victory is achieved by A when A succeeds changing B’s political goals so that they are aligned with those of A.  But such alignment is not the result of B’s 'capitulation' or B’s loss of the ability to resist – on the contrary, B (the losing side) is openly willing.”  That is, such victory shares the focus on subverting the opponent’s will, though not on destroying his military forces.

The ammunition in these cyberspace battles are “words and images,” the kind that persuade, inform, mislead, and deceive so that the adversary cannot respond militarily. In the example of a “fake news” story, they often take place below legal thresholds of “use of force” or “armed attack,” and at least in an international legal sense, do not trigger a military response.

The target is the “adversary’s perceptions,” which reside in the “cognitive dimension of the information environment.” In other words, such cyber warfare focuses on “damaging knowledge, truth, and confidence, rather than physical or digital artifacts,” according to Lin. It is the “brain-space.”

Additionally, IIWAM injects fear, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt into the adversary’s decision making processes, he added.  Success is defined as altering such perceptions so the target makes choices favoring the aggressor.

“Sowing chaos and confusion is thus essentially operational preparation of the information battlefield – shaping actions that make the information environment more favorable for actual operations should they become necessary,” the researchers wrote.

These cyber manipulations often prey upon cognitive and emotional biases present in the psychological and mental makeup of human beings, Lin said. 

For example, media channels such as Fox News play to “confirmation bias” for individuals with a right-of-center orientation, and similarly for MSNBC for those with a left-of-center, orientation, he wrote. Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

Countering misinformation

“Naming and shaming” is probably ineffective against many nation states conducting cyber disinformation campaigns, Lin said. And the idea that a government like the U.S. can quickly respond to misinformation created in the private sphere is unlikely to be effective as well.

What, then, might work? Lin suggests new tactics are needed, as no existing approach seems adequate. For example, Facebook is deploying a new protocol for its users to flag questionable news sites.  Google has banned fake news web sites from using its online advertising service. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shut down accounts that they determine are promoting terrorist content.  He noted that a recent Facebook letter from CEO Mark Zuckerberg states that, “Our approach will focus less on banning misinformation and more on surfacing additional perspectives and information, including that fact checkers dispute an item's accuracy.”

But such measures are unlikely to stem the “rising tide of misinformation conveyed” through cyber warfare, Lin said, because they mostly require users to do additional mental work.  

Wired world riskier

Today’s Internet-driven Western world offers countless opportunities for cyber influence mischief, Lin wrote.

“Democracy has rested on an underlying foundation of an enlightened, informed populace engaging in rational debate and argument to sort out truth from fiction and half-truth in an attempt to produce the best possible policy and political outcomes,” Lin wrote.

Cyber manipulators have exploited an arguable gap between ideals and reality in democratic systems – “rendered it much more questionable” – through the tremendous reach and speed of misinformation, he said. Many countries cannot deal with the onslaught of such focused efforts. This serves to make the democratic process look weak and unstable in the eyes of its citizens. The same dynamic does not apply equally around the world.

“Cyber weapons pose a greater threat to nations that are more advanced users of information technology than to less-developed nations,” Lin wrote.

He said that less developed or authoritarian countries do not have much Internet infrastructure or that wield control over expression – North Korea is an example.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Herbert Lin, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 497-8600, herbert.s.lin@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu