Siegfried Hecker won a national award this week from the American Association for State and Local History for his book, Doomed to Cooperate. Subtitled "How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Great Post–Cold War Nuclear Dangers," the work tells the story of nuclear scientists from two former enemy nations who reached across political, geographic and cultural divides to solve the new nuclear threats that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

The two-volume set, edited by Hecker, a CISAC senior fellow and Los Alamos National Laboratory director emeritus, describes the lab-to-lab collaboration involving more than 100 scientists and leaders through papers, vignettes, and interviews. The book illustrates the challenges they faced, the friendships resulting from the collaborations, and the team's ultimate success in rendering Russian's nuclear materials and facilities safe for the world.

In a press release, Trina Nelson Thomas, the association's awards chair and director, said, “The Leadership in History Awards is AASLH’s highest distinction and the winners represent the best in the field."  

The American Association for State and Local History's awards program was initiated in 1945 to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history throughout the United States. More information is available in this article in the Los Alamos Daily Post.

CISAC's co-director Amy Zegart wrote this essay, "James Comey's 'Shock and Awe' Testimony," for The Atlantic in its June 8 edition and was also quoted in this Stanford News Service article:

Imagine that two years ago, you sequestered a jury of 12 Americans, kept them in a news-free zone, and brought them today to hear former FBI Director James Comey testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Chances are that all of them—no matter what their political beliefs—would be stunned and outraged.

From the perspective of one of these Americans, Comey dropped bombshell after bombshell: The Russians are mucking around in American democratic elections, trying to change how we think, how we act, how we vote—and they will be back. The attorney general cannot be trusted to ensure impartial enforcement of the law. The president fired the FBI director and then lied about why he did it. Yet by the time Comey said these things in an open hearing, all of it was old news. It should have been more shocking than it was, but on some level, Americans were used to it.

Some historical context here is important. Only one FBI Director has ever been fired since J. Edgar Hoover took the job back in 1924: William Sessions, who was sacked by President Bill Clinton in 1993 after the Justice Department's own Office of Professional Responsibility found so many severe ethical lapses, they filled a 161-page report. It included schemes to avoid paying taxes, using government funds to build an expensive home fence that actually reduced the security of the property, using FBI resources for personal purposes, and involving his wife, Alice, in bureau management in “entirely inappropriate” ways. Comey, by contrast, was fired by President Trump for doing his job. Big difference. One was miscarrying justice and abusing power; the other was carrying out justice and speaking truth to power.

Similarly, the only episode in recent history approximating the cloud hanging over the attorney general’s office occurred during the Watergate scandal. That attorney general chose to resign rather than fire White House special prosecutor Archibald Cox and impede an investigation reaching into the White House. This attorney general, by contrast, appears to be implicated in an investigation that reaches into the White House.

Finally, never in American history has a foreign power so deliberately, powerfully, and maliciously tried to distort the cornerstone of American democracy. Comey sent this point home in the hearing, declaring, “There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. … It is a high confidence judgment of the entire intelligence community. ... It's not a close call.”

Comey’s testimony delivered a “shock and awe” campaign, FBI-style: calm, cautious, and candid, at once stoic and relatable. It was as though Comey were trying to reach through our television sets and shake the body politic into our collective senses.

And yet, his shock and awe testimony may not shock and awe for long. The biggest story of the day is how unlikely this is to remain the biggest story. In all likelihood, after the Twittersphere dies down, partisans will retreat to their respective corners and business as usual will return to Washington.

Why?

Because of something called the “normalization of deviance:” the more frequently exceptional things happen, the less we think of them as exceptional.  Over time, we become desensitized to events that fall far outside the normal range—often with disastrous consequences. The space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986 despite previous shuttle launches that revealed O-ring seals in the shuttle’s rocket boosters were cracking in cold weather. They shouldn’t have been cracking at all. But NASA “normalized” the poor performance of O-rings as acceptable and okayed the launch, even with record low temperatures forecast for liftoff. Seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, were killed.

We experience the normalization of deviance in daily life, too. Ever hear a funny noise in your car? The first time, it seems alarming. After living with it for a few days, however, you think it must not be so serious after all. You tell yourself the car seems to be running just fine. You grow accustomed to the noise. After a while you don’t notice it anymore. And maybe the car really is fine. Or maybe the funny noise is an indication that the car is about to experience a catastrophic breakdown (which is what happened to me one night, when I assumed a strange noise in my car was really nothing, until the car broke down on the freeway, at night, in Los Angeles, “without warning.”)

The Trump era has brought the normalization of deviance to politics. In four short months, this administration’s national-security advisor has had to resign in disgrace for lying about his contacts with Russians and now faces possible criminal charges. The attorney general is so tainted by his own Russian-related activities that he has had to recuse himself from the bureau’s investigation of Russian-related activities. And the FBI director, who by law serves a 10-year term precisely to ensure independence from the president, was fired by the president because he was independent. This is bizarro world. Any one of these events would in normal times be enough to bring down a president. And yet senators today were talking about whether President Trump’s exact words to Jim Comey constituted a hope, a wish, an order, a directive, a threat, or as one senator characterized it, simply a “light touch” approach.

Comey was right about one thing: The Russians “are coming after America.” They may not have to. In this era of normalized deviance, we are defeating ourselves.

Read Amy Zegart's comments and those from other Stanford faculty in this Stanford News Service article.

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University announced today that it has launched the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi). GDPi’s mission is to help develop governance norms for the global digital ecosystem that reinforce democratic values, universal human rights and the rule of law. It will serve as a multi-stakeholder collaboration hub at Stanford for technologists, governments, civil society and the private sector actors. GDPi will identify and incubate global policy and governance innovations that enhance freedom, security and trust in the digital realm. 

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Japan is an increasingly divided country between elites and the public as it grapples with whether it should acquire nuclear weapons itself and not rely on America’s protection, a Stanford scholar found.

Sayuri Romei, a political scientist and predoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has a new working paper that describes how Japanese society is grappling with its nuclear future. Romei researches the U.S.-Japan relationship, nuclear security, nationalism and identity in East Asia.

“The shift in the Japanese nuclear debate at the turn of the 21st century did not stem directly from a willingness to deter the new and urgent looming military threats, but was rather the result of a very limited security role that collapsed after the end of the Cold War, and took the shape of a disoriented and shaky Japanese identity,” she wrote.

Japan, a country that suffered two nuclear bombs in WWII, has a well-justified historical “nuclear allergy” that long restrained nuclear weapons ambitions, Romei said. But today, internal questions about Japan’s national sense of identity is causing elites to reconsider the nuclear military option.

She said it’s true that the tone in that debate has been changing in recent years as Japan’s security landscape changes – North Korea and China are building up their nuclear and conventional military programs. On top of this, when the Cold War ended in 1991, the “nuclear umbrella” that the U.S. afforded Japan became “theoretically less justified in an evolving security context,” as Romei describes it. Japan, in turn, sought reassurance from the U.S. that it would not abandon her.

Rethinking Japan's security

Yet the turn of the 21^st century is hardly the first time that Japanese elites have discussed a nuclear option, or that they have felt a sense of mistrust towards their ally, she said. Rather than a break from the past, Japanese elites’ behavior suggests a continuity in their thinking:

“It would therefore be more correct to talk of a renaissance of the nuclear debate, rather than an erosion of the nuclear taboo,” Romei said.

What is new in today’s nuclear statements, however, is the increasing intertwining between rethinking security identity issues, a rising nationalism, and a more challenging regional environment, she said.

Along with the necessity to rethink Japan’s security arrangement, pre-WWII nostalgia and nationalism have been growing in Japan as Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's constitutional reforms are being enacted, Romei said. And so, some top officials are reevaluating Japan's nuclear policy in favor of a more self-sufficient approach that fits their increasingly nationalist mood.

“The line between the rethinking of a Japanese security identity and pushing a nationalist agenda into the current nuclear policy is very thin,” wrote Romei.

No longer do Japanese nationalists wish to be perceived as the “faithful dog” in the U.S-Japan alliance, as they resent the “lack of a healthy postwar nationalism,” she said. Restarting some of the country’s nuclear power plants after the Fukushima Daiichi accident was even described by one leading Japanese politician as the first step toward the country acquiring nuclear weapons of its own, she added.

Though some Japanese scholars argue that Japan has been preparing for the acquisition of nuclear weapons since the end of WWII, Romei said that the link between the two sides of the nuclear coin was never really visible in Japan: indeed, the government has historically succeeded in making a sharp distinction between nuclear power for peaceful vs. military purposes.

‘Still very sensitive’

One well-known trait of Japan’s nuclear history is that Japan has a strong popular peace and anti-nuclear movement with public opinion polls set against acquiring nuclear weapons, Romei said. Peace, security, and nuclear matters are in fact deeply linked in postwar Japanese history.

“The constant and consistent work of peace associations and the massive organized demonstrations against Prime Minister Abe’s security reform plans that took place across Japan during the entire summer in 2015 are a relevant sign that public opinion is still very sensitive to a change of pace,” she wrote.

But public opinion and elite opinion “do not speak the same language and are heading in different directions,” she wrote. Elites – political  and  thought leaders, for example – continue to allude to a nuclear option for Japan to defend itself unilaterally, with or without the American nuclear umbrella.

“This sudden proliferation of nuclear statements among Japanese elites  in 2002 has been directly linked by Japan watchers to the break out of the second North Korean nuclear crisis and the rapid buildup of China’s military capabilities,” Romei said.

Trusting America?

But those external threats, she said, are actually used as a “pretext to solve a more deep-rooted and long-standing anxiety that stems from Japan’s own unsuccessful quest for a less reactive, and more proactive post-Cold War identity,” Romei noted.

The level of trust that Japanese elites feel towards their American ally is an important leitmotiv in the country’s nuclear debate, she said.

While during the Cold War U.S. credibility was mainly linked to Japan’s limited role as an ally in a bipolar era, after the collapse of this system Japanese elites slowly began their quest for a new identity, thus questioning and changing the meaning of the U.S.-Japan alliance, Roemi said. Furthermore, the first decade of the 21^st century brought about a new nationalist layer that complicates the issue of trust in the ally by adding a populist tone to the domestic nuclear debate.

Romei believes that if the gap in elite-public opinion continues to widen, Japan’s longstanding “nuclear allergy” could be overwhelmed as the government – not necessarily by design – gradually creates the political and cultural conditions that seemingly justify building nuclear weapons, Romei said.

“The turn of the century brought a new strategic environment in which Japan was forced to question its own post-Cold War identity, without eventually succeeding in an actual change,” she wrote.

Romei urges a careful monitoring of Japan’s nuclear debate moving forward – the major political shift in the U.S. caused by the November 2016 presidential elections is a key reason. America’s future political direction will ultimately affect Japan’s sense of identity by easing the questioning of the U.S.-Japan security arrangement.

While the study of the Japanese nuclear debate cannot necessarily offer a prediction of the country’s future nuclear policy choices, it can serve as an important tool to gauge the evolution of Japan’s own perception of its role in the current world order, she said.

Romei is a nuclear security predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2016-2017 and a doctoral candidate in international relations at Roma Tre University in Rome, Italy. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between Japan’s nuclear mentality and its identity evolution in the post-WWII era. 

MEDIA CONTACTS:

Sayuri Romei, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-5364, sromei@stanford.edu

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