CISAC's William J. Perry created a free, public 10-week course for people to learn more about the looming dangers of nuclear catastrophe. His new MOOC, developed with the support of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, offers a chance to take that message to a much larger audience.

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today is an online course (a "MOOC") taught by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry and a team of international experts. 

“I believe that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the cold war,” said Perry, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on why America should dismantle its ICBM missile systems.

Because the continued risk of nuclear catastrophe isn’t widely recognized, Perry believes, “our nuclear policies don’t reflect the danger. So I’ve set off on a mission to educate people on how serious the problem is. Only then can we develop the policies that are appropriate for the danger we face.” 

The course offers participants the chance to ask questions and participate in discussions via an online forum, which Perry and his fellow experts will address during weekly video chats. Each week, Perry will be joined in conversation by top thinkers, including CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, David Holloway and Siegfried Hecker, Scott D. Sagan, and Philip Taubman. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, will also participate. Outside experts include Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, nuclear negotiator James Goodby, former Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Andre Kokoshin, and Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Learn more about "Living at the Nuclear Brink" in this story or watch a video. Register for the course here. It is now open for enrollment and begins Oct. 4.  

Many people dread dealing with health insurance. Choosing the right plan, navigating benefits and understanding premiums, copays and deductibles can leave you frustrated and confused. Even in economic research, health insurance markets pose some of the most challenging questions.

But Maria Polyakova, a faculty fellow at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, is motivated to find the answers.

Intrigued by the shifting dynamics of the industry and inspired partly by her own experience of finding health care coverage during graduate school, Polyakova has joined a small group of health economists who are at the forefront of examining the increasing complexities surrounding the provision of medical insurance.

Changes under the Affordable Care Act have deepened the connection between public and private players, Polyakova says. There’s a rise in health care plans that are publicly funded but privately run. And many people using public plans, like Medicare, are supplementing their coverage with private add-on insurance.

The intertwined relationship raises a host of policy challenges, which Polyakova outlines in this detailed policy brief.

“We're moving toward this world where we think competition in health insurance is good because that somehow increases efficiencies and provides consumers with choices that they like,” Polyakova says. “But on the other hand, there has been a lot of debate on whether health insurance is the right place to have choice.”

Polyakova, an assistant professor of health research and policy at the School of Medicine, joined Stanford in 2014. Her ongoing economic research looks at the impact of government policies in social insurance  on consumer behavior, insurer behavior and market outcomes, including risk protection and redistribution.

By investigating the design of health insurance systems, Polyakova’s work could inform policymakers on the extent the government should facilitate competition among insurers that are providing social insurance benefits, or the steps public and private insurers can take to reduce risks and costs for consumers. Her early forays have gained recognition.

For her doctoral thesis on Medicare Part D — the prescription drug component of the federal health insurance program — Polyakova won the 2015 Ernst-Meyer Prize, which recognizes original research about risk and health insurance economics. She also received the John Heinz Dissertation Award from the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2015.

Her findings included evidence of substantial inertia among enrollees, despite significant changes in about 40 plans under Medicare Part D.

“If no one actually ever reacts to changes in products,” Polyakova says, “it could defeat the purpose of having competition.”

Polyakova continues to drill into details where answers may lie. Her empirical research in progress ranges from examining new ways of calculating risk to the effects of word choice in insurance plan descriptions.

“Policies are labeled silver, gold, platinum — theoretically to simplify the plans. But in reality, those simplifications may lead people to choose plans that are not the best for them,” she says. “Assessing the implications of their choices for the overall efficiency of the health insurance system is tricky”

The health care system appeared much more straightforward in Germany, where she worked for a year after graduating in 2008 from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics.

Then while attending graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Polyakova went through the hassles of figuring out the health insurance system and how insurers reimburse medical providers. She recalls thinking, “Why is this so complicated?”

Polyakova turned her focus to health economics after taking some courses with MIT Professor Amy Finkelstein, a pioneer in the field who became Polyakova’s primary advisor.

“It was very contagious,” Polyakova says.

The CISAC lecture series, "Security Matters," surveyed the most pressing security issues facing the world today. Topics include cybersecurity, nuclear proliferation, insurgency and intervention, terrorism, biosecurity, lessons learned from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis – as well as the future of U.S. leadership in the world.

The lectures come almost entirely from the 2014 winter term of International Security (PS114S), co-taught by intelligence expert and CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and terrorism authority Martha Crenshaw co-taught the Security Matters class in 2015. (Zegart recently co-wrote a journal paper on why the U.S. might adjust its national security approach in light of a changing international order.)

“This series is the first in what we hope will be a continuing experiment of new modes and methods to enhance our education mission,” said Zegart. “We have two goals in mind: The first is to expand CISAC's reach in educating the world about international security issues. The second is to innovate inside our Stanford classrooms.”

Martin Hellman is not your average cryptography pioneer.

Hellman, who is known for his invention of public key cryptography (along with Whitfield Duffie and Ralph Merkle), has a life’s journey to share in story form, one that weaves together the most complex global flashpoints of our age with the deeply personal of any age. He and his wife’s new book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet, spans far and wide, covering nuclear risks in North Korea, Iran, and America’s Middle Eastern wars.

But that is not all. He and his wife Dorothie Hellman open up about their marital struggles to show how they eventually reached a point of harmony and true love for each other. As Martin Hellman sees it, conflict in the international and interpersonal arenas has much in common.

“You can’t separate nuclear war from conventional war and conventional war from personal war,” he said in an interview. Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.  

Just as he and Dorothie (self-acknowledged polar opposites) often butted heads during the first 10 or 15 years of marriage, nations too navigate dangerously outmoded “maps” to protect their national security and interests. Yet these “maps” are soon outdated, whether on the global stage or in the home. Hellman said, however, that differences of opinion, which revolve around fights to prove who is “right,” could instead be transformed into opportunities to learn from one another – and to expand peace in the world.

“You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and greater peace in the world, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them,” he said.

Cultivating inner, outer peace

He said that society only truly changes based on individual changes, so he calls for action in how people live their everyday lives. When countries fail to respect each other – and ignore the influence of history on those countries – then conflict is more likely, and it is similar to a person disrespecting another.

“You will see an immediate payoff as your relationships flower,” he wrote in the book. “The small impact that each of us can have on changing the world does not feel concrete enough to most people, but seeing progress in your personal relationships is very concrete.”

That dedication to unconditional love, he said, is the way that individuals can become models for what is needed globally.

And the time is now, he suggests, for such change if our living generations are to leave a more peaceful world for those who follow us. From Afghanistan to Cuba, Russia, Iraq to North Korea and beyond, the countries of the world need a journey of healing and reconciliation, as he writes in the book.

Today, the stakes could not be higher, Hellman noted. Long-running strategies like nuclear deterrence are risky and illogical – over time, given probability theory and the chances of mistake or malice, they won’t work.

“The United States thinks it’s a superpower, but how can we be when Russia or China could destroy us in less than a hour?” he said. “How is that being a superpower?”

As William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Stanford professor emeritus at CISAC, said on behalf of the Hellmans’ book, “The struggle for interpersonal dominance can lead to the end of a marriage, but the struggle for geopolitical dominance can lead to the end of civilization.”

The back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle has become the Achilles Heel of nuclear power, as CISAC’s Rodney Ewing writes in this new article. After more than 50 years of effort, no operating nuclear waste repositories exist in the U.S. for the spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants – or for the high-level waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel. It is time to compare and evaluate the different strategies for nuclear disposal. Read more.

With each passing day, computer hacking against countries, organizations and people is forcing the subject of cybersecurity to the top of national security agendas.

An estimated 42.8 million cyber attacks will take place this year, according to experts. Scaling up to meet this challenge is why more than 140 people from science, politics, business and the military attended the fourth annual Cyber Security Summit at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) on Sept. 19-20.

The Munich Security Conference and Deutsche Telekom sponsored the event. CISAC is in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Participants delved deep into issues associated with today’s online world, including how to balance privacy and civil liberties with the need for intelligence, for example. Discussions ranged on questions such as:

• What will the future of warfare look like – human soldiers or killer robots?

• How do we ensure that technological progress does not escape human control?

• What are the biggest challenges combatting the online activities of groups like the Islamic State?

• What are the possible cyberspace conflicts between the U.S., Russia and China?

• Are countries ready for cyber attacks against key infrastructure such as energy, water and utilities, or the U.S. election system, for example?

Electoral impact

In a talk on cyber attacks and the U.S. elections, panelists discussed how such electoral manipulation in the ongoing presidential campaign might happen, and what could be done about it. While it was noted that foreign adversaries could undermine the American public’s confidence in its election system, one expert pointed out that it’s unlikely to occur undetected on a widespread basis.

Credibility is now the battlefield, one panelist said. If hacking occurs, how will an election be validated? The track record shows that Russian has attempted to influence elections in Eastern Europe, so hacking into U.S. political entities is their way to sow doubt among voters.

The economic costs of cyber attacks – $400 to $500 billion a year was one participant’s estimate – and “cyberspace norms” were other issues explored. Countries and companies are grappling with the losses associated with these incursions, and with how – and who – should set the rules for the “digital game.”

On encryption, questions in one discussion revolved around how the public and private sectors can resolve such issues, how far data privacy could be compromised for effective intelligence work, and vice versa.

Online jihadism was another subject. The conference panelists talked about which tools are most effective in countering jihadist propaganda and recruitment on the Internet. Also, the need for Europe and the U.S. to work together on such fronts was mentioned.

CISAC and FSI participants included Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Martin Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering; among others. Other attendees hailed from U.S. and European Union agencies and businesses, and local Silicon Valley companies.

Zegart said a collaborative spirit and drive for innovation characterizes Stanford. “In the past three years, we have built an exciting program dedicated to educating current and future cyber leaders, producing policy-driven knowledge, and convening leaders across sectors and borders,” she wrote in the program guide.

McFaul, in his opening statement, noted the origins of CISAC – it was created when there was a different technological concern – nuclear materials. Then, scientists and social scientists at CISAC got together to work on nuclear proliferation. Today, the threat is cyber attacks, and CISAC is confronting this challenge. He said the scariest briefing he had in his ambassador position at the U.S. Department of State was on cybersecurity.

For his discussion on terrorism, Hellman brought pages of pro-encryption quotes from government officials. He suggested end-to-end encryption was good for Americans.

Crossing borders

The Munich Security Conference is considered to be the most important informal meeting on security policy. Outside speakers included Michael Cherthoff, former secretary of Homeland Security; Jane Holl Lute, the under secretary general for the United Nations; and Christopher Painter, coordinator for cyber issues at the U.S. Department of State.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the chair of the Munich Security Conference, said at the press conference that, “cybersecurity has over the last few years evolved to be one of the most indispensable agenda items.”

The “quest for rules” in cyberspace, he noted, is overwhelmingly difficult and vitally important.

Thomas Kremer, board member for co-sponsor Deutsche Telekom AG, said, “cyber attacks don’t accept national borders.” Cybersecurity has become a global issue, he explained, with ramifications for countries, companies and everyday people.

He added, “Our chances to fight cyber crime are far better when we collaborate.”

Stanford and CISAC are at the forefront of the national discussion on cybersecurity. The university launched the Stanford Cyber Initiative; hosted President Obama’s cybersecurity summit and defense secretary Ashton Carter’s unveiling of a new U.S. cyber strategy; and CISAC and the Hoover Institution have teamed up in recent years for media roundtables and Congressional bootcamps on cybersecurity.

Finally, CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter and other experts held Hacking for Defense & Diplomacy class for educators and sponsors on Sept. 7-9. (See the final class presentations here). In spring 2016, they held the first such class to train students in cybersecurity for defense purposes. Steve Blank, a consulting associate professor in the Stanford School of Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, helped develop the class. This fall, they will prototype a Hacking for Diplomacy course at Stanford.

Click here for the Munich Security Conference’s agenda for this event and a list of participants.