Stanford University

CISAC's Siegfried Hecker testifies before Senate Appropriations Committee

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Siegfried S. Hecker
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Siegfried Hecker testified April 30, 2008, about the importance of expanding the cooperative threat reduction programs to counter the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons capability. A formal written statement is also available: Hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development

Thank you Chairman Dorgan, Senator Domenici and distinguished members of the Committee for giving me the opportunity to comment on the National Nuclear Security Administration's Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation programs and its 2009 budget request. I have a written statement that I would like to submit for the record.

This morning I will summarize the three main points in my statement. My opinions have been shaped by 34 years at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and nearly 20 years of practicing nonproliferation with my feet on the ground in places like Russia, China, India, North Korea and Kazakhstan.  Much of this I have done with the strong support and encouragement of Senator Domenici.

1) The proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons capability is growing. Today, we face a nuclear threat in North Korea, nuclear ambitions in Iran, a nuclear puzzle in Syria, recently nuclear-armed states in Pakistan and India, and an improved, but not satisfactory, nuclear security situation in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union. The danger of nuclear terrorism is real. This is not a fight the United States can win alone. We cannot simply push the dangers beyond our borders. It is imperative to forge effective global partnerships to combat the threat of nuclear terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Meeting these challenges requires diplomatic initiative and technical cooperation. The United States must lead international diplomacy and DOE/NNSA must provide technical leadership and capabilities. The NNSA has done a commendable job in nuclear threat reduction and combating nuclear proliferation. However, funds to support these activities are not commensurate with the magnitude or the urgency of the threat.

2) CTR began with Nunn-Lugar followed by Nunn-Lugar-Domenici legislation directed at the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. We must stay engaged with Russia and the other states of the Soviet Union. Much progress has been made, but more needs to be done. We have to change the nature of the partnership to one in which Russia carries more of the burden.

We should expand the cooperative reduction programs aggressively to other countries that require technical or financial assistance. The nuclear threat exists wherever nuclear materials exist. These materials cannot be eliminated, but they can be secured and safeguarded. We should more strongly support the International Atomic Energy Agency and provide more support to countries that try to implement UNSCR 1540 to prevent nuclear terrorism, for example.

We should enlist other nations such as China, India, and for that matter, Russia, to build a strong global partnership to prevent proliferation and combat nuclear terrorism. China and India have for the most part sat on the sidelines while the U.S. has led the fight. Russia has not engaged commensurate with its nuclear status. These efforts are particularly important if nuclear energy is to experience a real renaissance.

3) The hallmark of all of these efforts must be technology, partnership and in-country presence. The DOE/NNSA has in its laboratories the principal nuclear expertise in this country. It should be applauded for sending its technical experts around the world, often in very difficult situations (I met up with the DOE team in North Korea on a bitterly cold February day). However, both for structural reasons and budgetary shortfalls, that technical talent is slowing fading away. We do not have in place the necessary personnel recruitment or the working environment in the laboratories or the pipeline of students in our universities to replenish that talent. I strongly support the NNSA's Next Generation Safeguards Initiative, which is aimed at tackling this problem.

Mr. Chairman, when I first visited Russia's secret cities in 1992 shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, I feared that its collapse may trigger a nuclear catastrophe. The fact that nothing really terrible has happened in the intervening 16 years is in great part due to the DOE/NNSA programs that your are considering today. We must now be just as innovative and creative to deal with the changing nuclear threat today.

In my statement I also mention the implications of my recent trips to North Korea and to India. However, since I am out of time, I will need to leave those for your questions.

Thank you for your attention.

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The Transatlantic Link: Repairing EU-USA Relations

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As President 1999-2007, Dr. Vike-Freiberga has been instrumental in achieving Latvia's membership in the European Union and NATO. She is active in international politics, was named Special Envoy to the Secretary General on United Nations reform and was official candidate for UN Secretary General in 2006.

Born 1937 in Riga, Latvia, Vaira Vike and her family fled the country in 1945 to escape the Soviet occupation and became refugees in Germany and Morocco. After arriving in Canada in 1954, she obtained a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto and her Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1965 from McGill University in Montreal. She speaks Latvian, English, French, German and Spanish.

Dr. Vike-Freiberga has been Professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, president of various Canadian professional and scholarly associations, incl. Académie I of the Royal Society of Canada, Vice-Chairman, Science Council of Canada, Chair, Human Factors Panel, NATO Science Program. She is member of the Council of Women World Leaders.

She has published ten books and numerous articles, essays and book chapters in addition to her extensive speaking engagements. Dr. Vike-Freiberga has received many highest Orders of Merit, medals and awards including the 2005 Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought for her advocacy of social issues, moral values, European historical dialogue and democracy, and the 2006 Walter-Hallstein Prize for discourse on the identity and future of the EU.

Since July 1960, Dr. Vike-Freiberga has been married to Imants Freibergs, Professor of Informatics at the University of Quebec in Montreal and since 2001 President of the Latvian Information and Communication Technologies Association.

This seminar is jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

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Dr. Vaira Vike-Freiberga President (former), Latvia Speaker
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Scott Sagan elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

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CISAC's Co-Director Scott D. Sagan, professor of political science, is one of 190 new fellows and 22 foreign honorary members elected this year to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers. Sagan and Harvard's Steve Miller jointly direct a new initiative sponsored by the Academy to identify ways to manage the global spread of nuclear energy without a concurrent increase in nuclear weapons proliferation or nuclear terrorism.

CISAC's Co-Director Scott Sagan, professor of political science, is one of 190 new fellows and 22 foreign honorary members elected this year to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers. 

Sagan and Harvard's Steve Miller jointly direct a new initiative sponsored by the Academy to identify ways to manage the global spread of nuclear energy without a concurrent increase in nuclear weapons proliferation or nuclear terrorism.

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Pavel Podvig receives Szilard Award

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Pavel Podvig and Anatoli Diakov, professor of physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), have been awarded the American Physical Society's (APS) Leo Szilard Lectureship Award "for establishing a center for scientific study of arms control, for landmark analyses, and for courage in supporting open discussion of international security in Russia." Since 1991, Diakov has directed MIPT's Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies.

Before coming to Stanford in 2004, Podvig worked at MIPT's Center for Arms Control Studies. In 1988, he graduated from MIPT with a physics degree and, in 1990, he helped Diyakov establish the center as Russia's first independent research organization dedicated to analysis of technical issues related to arms control and disarmament. Podvig's work at the center included research on the technical and political aspects of missile defense, early-warning, command and control, and the U.S.-Russian arms control process. In that role, Podvig had an opportunity to work with the leading technical groups in the United States at MIT and Princeton. In Moscow, he led a major research project and edited the book, "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces" (MIT Press, 2001), which is considered the definitive source on Russia's strategic forces. In 2004, Podvig earned a doctorate in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Since 2001, he has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists." Since 2006, he has been a member of the APS Committee on International Freedom of Scientists and was appointed committee chair in 2008.

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Appointment of the inaugural Koret Fellow in Korean Studies Program

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The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is pleased to announce that General (ret.) Byung Kwan Kim will join the Center for the 2008-2009 academic year as the first recipient of the Koret Fellowship in the Center’s Korean Studies Program.

General Kim’s expertise in security affairs will be a significant asset to the policy-oriented research activities of our center,” said Professor Gi-Wook Shin, the Center’s director.
While at the Center, General Kim will lead a research project on Korean Peninsula security, including organizing a policy-related conference that will bring Koreans, Americans, and potentially others from the region together to engage in high-level discussions aimed at producing a report for the policymaking community.

The Koret Fellowship, generously funded by the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, was established to bring leading professionals in Asia and the United States to Stanford to conduct research on contemporary U.S.-Korean relations, with the broad aim of fostering greater understanding and closer ties between the two countries.

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Abrams: Presidency too demanding to not have upper age limit for candidates

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Herbert L. Abrams, CISAC member-in-residence and Stanford professor of radiology, emeritus, looks at the issue of a presidential candidate's age and its effect on decision-making.

In the 1996 presidential election, the age of Sen. Robert Dole, who at 73 was the oldest man ever to run for the office, was a substantive issue. Although he was thought to be in good general health, his right kidney had been removed, his remaining left kidney had stones, his electrocardiograms in 1980 and 1981 were abnormal, he had pre-cancerous colonic polyps removed in 1985, and he had undergone a radical prostatectomy for cancer in 1991.

He had smoked for many years and had a family history of heart disease, aneurysm, emphysema and cancer. In 2004, which would have been the last year of a second term if he had won, he had hip replacement surgery followed by a brain hemorrhage.

After the election, Richard Brody, a political scientist at Stanford, and I, in an extensive study of the media coverage at the time (published in 1998 in the Political Science Quarterly,) found that allusions to Dole's age were common, but with only occasional comments on its potential consequences. The impact of aging and ill health on the cognitive capacities essential for an effective presidency was poorly conveyed to the American public.

Hence, more than 60 percent of respondents to surveys were not concerned about Dole's age. Among those for whom age was an important consideration, four times as many voters believed that Dole's age would hamper him as president. That group of the electorate was far more likely to vote for Clinton.

The issue of age is with us once more with Senator John McCain's run for the office. James Reston, the great New York Times journalist of the last century, believed that younger presidents might be more resistant to the stresses of the job. "It is not responsible in this violent age to pick candidates for the presidency from men in their 60s," he wrote.

How would he have reacted to a president who would be 72 at his inauguration and 80 years old in the last year of a second term? The question is a fair one because McCain, if elected, would be the oldest person to be inaugurated in our history. While the Constitution endorsed age discrimination by setting 35 years as the youngest age of a president, it established no upper age limit, perhaps because life expectancy was so much shorter in 1787 than in 2008. When we choose presidents 65 or older, we must grapple with the possibility that they may be unable to fulfill the 208-week-long contractual obligation implicit in their candidacy.

Dominating the illnesses that affect the elderly are heart disease, stroke, cancer, infection, hip fractures, the complications of major surgery and dementia. Heart attacks are frequently accompanied by anxiety, depression, impaired concentration and problems with sleep. Following a stroke, depression, anxiety and emotional lability characterize many patients. A major sequel of surgery is confusion severe enough to impede one's ability to think clearly. The many drugs that the elderly use have significant side effects and may produce cognitive changes.

Dole and McCain supporters may respond, "Why worry about it when the institutional constraints guard us from irrational behavior in the White House?" Because the inherent risks are too great. As Sen. McCain said in a recent interview, "I understand that my age would be a factor at any time."

The term "cognition" refers to the interaction of mental processes that produce human thought. Under its rubric come such faculties as concentration, attention, inventiveness, intuition, memory, foresight, abstract and logical thought. All are applicable to meaningful decision-making, and many are essential when time is short and tensions high. The elderly are more sluggish at processing and retrieving information from short- and long-term memory. There is a 60 percent slowing in the rate of memory search between the ages of 20 and 50 years.

To be sure, both the health problems and the memory changes are unevenly distributed among the population. But why take a chance? Why push the odds and run for the most demanding job in the western hemisphere at an age when illness abounds, memory suffers and energy flags? This is the period when the elderly need their afternoon nap and the absent-minded become more so.

Clearly, some great leaders have functioned well beyond the age of 70. But the presidency is a position that is uniquely and awesomely demanding, extending well beyond thoughtful, meditative policy decisions. It includes many large and pressing operational components, interacting with the White House staff, the cabinet, the Congress, the media, the public, the international community and many elements within the political party system. It is a stressful, power-packed, exhausting job, requiring stamina and energy during long days, weeks and months. It may involve rapid responses to emergencies and crises, with decisions based on a level of accelerated information retrieval and processing that elderly presidents may lack.

Those for whom Dole's age was important and who voted for Clinton in 1996 understood the increased likelihood of illness: in comparison to men aged 45 to 54 years, those aged 75 to 84 years are 34 times more likely to die of stroke, 17 times more likely to die of heart disease, and 12 times more likely to die of malignancy. Nineteen percent of those between 75 and 84 years and almost half over 85 are affected with Alzheimer's disease. While older Americans might have thought that an older person such as Dole would best represent their interests, they were also profoundly aware of their own fragility as they moved along in their seventies.

The media have an obligation to the public. If age affects the quality and duration of a president's performance, as it does, the national interest is best served by making certain that the public is well informed. Thus far, attention to McCain's age has focused on the importance of his choice for vice president. By this time, the media should have demanded and obtained the most recent medical data from McCain.

Dole made public his medical record in detail when he ran. McCain did so in 1999, but has not released the results of a recent comprehensive examination. The voters deserve no less from him, from Clinton, and from Obama. Certainly McCain will want his physicians to inform the voters on the status of his malignant melanomas, diagnosed on four occasions, one more serious than the others.

The Congress also has an obligation. An upper limit on the age of candidates could be achieved by passing a Congressional resolution. This would represent a powerful deterrent to seniors who wish to run and to politicians who would like to nominate them, while leaving the Constitution intact. Madison and Hamilton, who understood the wisdom of a lower limit 200 years ago (when emergency decisions were rarely required) would appreciate the deference to the radically different, complex, interconnected world that we live in today.

An upper limit of 60 to 65 would recognize that the presidency is too demanding - physically, intellectually, psychologically, and emotionally - to place the burden on the shoulders of a senior citizen.

Herbert L. Abrams is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and a member-in-residence of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is the author of "The President Has Been Shot: Disability, Confusion and the 25th Amendment" (1992, WW Norton Inc.) and has written about presidential disability and its impact on decision-making.

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China's Power and What It Means for America

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How might one think about Chinese power, its dimensions, its effects, and its implications for change in the United States and elsewhere? Dr. David M. Lampton will put China's current trajectory and its conceptions of power in their historical contexts, discuss how China's neighbors are responding to the PRC's growing strength, and explore the vulnerabilities and uncertainties that lie ahead not only for China but the outside world.  
 
Dr. Lampton's work is based on interviews in China, in countries along the PRC's long periphery, and in the United States, as well as extensive documentary research. His book, The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds, was just published by the University of California Press. 

David M. Lampton, Dean of Faculty, is George and Sadie Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Senior International Advisor on China for the law firm of Akin Gump. Before assuming the post at SAIS in December 1997, he was president of the National Committee on United States-China Relations in New York City for a decade. Dr. Lampton is the author of numerous books and articles on Chinese domestic and foreign affairs. His most recent book is, The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (University of California Press, 2008), and his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, The China Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other venues academic and popular. Earlier books and edited volumes include: Same Bed, Different Dreams: Managing U.S.-China Relations, 1989-2000 (University of California Press, 2001) and (editor) The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform (Stanford University Press, 2001).

Lampton received his PhD and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University and has lived in the Peoples Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies and is consultant to the Aspen Institute's Congressional Program, the Kettering Foundation, and various corporations and government agencies.

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David M. Lampton George and Sadie Hyman Professor and Director of China Studies Speaker the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
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Oksenberg Conference

The Strategic Impact of Ballistic Missile Defense in Northeast Asia

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In the past, debates regarding the strategic impact of ballistic missile defense were largely theoretical because few systems were ever deployed. This is no longer the case. Today, the United States has begun to deploy BMD systems against short, intermediate and long-range ballistic missiles. Moreover, many of these systems are either transportable or mobile (e.g., the PAC-3, THAAD and Aegis BMD systems) and, hence, can be deployed to protect US allies and US forces overseas. In addition, some foreign governments have expressed interest in deploying such systems, notably Japan. Japan's interest in ballistic missile defense has moved beyond joint research and development and is entering the deployment phase. This raises the issue of the strategic impact of regional BMD systems in Northeast Asia, in particular, whether US/Japanese BMD systems will be effective against emerging North Korean ballistic missile threats and, if so, what impact these BMD systems might have on Chinese ballistic missile capabilities. This seminar will delve into the military/technical capability of regional BMD systems and provide a preliminary assessment of their strategic impact.

Dean Wilkening directs the Science Program at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and spent 13 years at the RAND Corporation prior to coming to Stanford in 1996. His major research interests have been nuclear strategy and policy, arms control, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, ballistic missile defense, and conventional force modernization. His most recent research focuses on ballistic missile defense and biological terrorism. His work on missile defense focuses on the broad strategic and political implications of deploying national and theater missile defenses, in particular, the impact of theater missile defense in Northeast Asia, and the technical feasibility of boost-phase interceptors for national and theater missile defense. His work on biological weapons focuses on understanding the scientific and technical uncertainties associated with predicting the outcome of hypothetical airborne biological weapon attacks, with the aim of devising more effective civil defenses, and a reanalysis of the accidental anthrax release in 1979 from a Russian military compound in Sverdlovsk with the aim of improving our understanding of the human effects of inhalation anthrax.

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Newsweek: Victor looks at problems with Mexico's national oil company, effect on oil markets

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David G. Victor
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David G. Victor is a professor at Stanford Law School and directs the Freeman Spogli Institute's Program on Energy & Sustainable Development; he is also adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

What to do about Mexico's oil company, Pemex, may seem like a parochial issue of interest only to Mexicans and a few oil industry executives. But the matter should be of concern to anybody who is wondering when oil will come down off its near-record highs.

Pemex generates two fifth's of the Mexican government's income and is a lucrative employer, but it is ailing from neglect. For years the government has milked Pemex of cash without giving it the wherewithal to invest in and develop new sources of oil. When President Felipe Calderon proposed last week to reform Pemex and encourage more private investment in oil exploration and refining, his leftist opponents shut down the country's legislature in protest. Pemex, they claimed, is a cherished national treasure that must not be pushed into private hands.

Mexico is hardly the only country that treats its state oil companies as ATMs for governments, unions, cronies and others who siphon the rich benefits for themselves. A large fraction of the world's oil patch is struggling with the problem that bedevils Calderon: how to make state-owned oil companies (which control about three quarters of the world's oil reserves) more effective at finding and producing oil. Veneuzuela's oil output is flagging. Russia's state-owned gas company, Gazprom, is on the edge of a steep decline in production. And in different ways many of the world's state-owned oil companies are struggling to keep pace with rising demand. Simply privatizing them is politically difficult, and thus most of the world's oil-rich governments are struggling to find ways to make state enterprises perform better.

Even among state oil companies, Pemex's performance is notably poor. Used as a cash cow for the government, Pemex has never been able to keep enough of its profits to invest in exploration and better technology, the lifeblood of the best oil companies. Until a few years ago, Pemex invested essentially nothing in looking for new oil fields. It relied, instead, on the aging Cantarell field, which was discovered in the 1970s not by Pemex but by fisherman who were angry that the seeping oil was fouling their nets and assumed that Pemex was to blame. Pemex brought the massive field online with relatively simple technology. A scheme in the late 1990s extended the life of the field, but that effort has run out of steam. On the back of Cantarell's decline, total output from Pemex is sliding; some even worry that Mexico could become a net importer of oil in the next decade or two. They're probably wrong, but even the idea makes people nervous.

At times over the last few decades (including today) Pemex has been blessed with a dream team of smart managers, but even they have not been able to reverse the tide of red ink. That's because the company's troubles run so deep that even the best management can't fix them. Indeed, the most striking thing about Calderon's proposed reforms is that they don't go nearly far enough to make Pemex a responsive company, even though they are on the outer edge of what's probably politically feasible in Mexico.

For example, Calderon proposes a new system of "citizen bonds" that will help bring capital to the company (and because they would be owned by the public, these bonds would help blunt the legal block to any reform—Mexico's Constitution requires that its hydrocarbons be owned by the people). Money alone, though, won't reverse Pemex's fortunes. Part of the problem is that risk taking, which is essential to success in oil, is strongly discouraged. My colleagues at Stanford, in a study released last week, have shown that a system of tough laws that control procurement make managers wary of projects that could fail. Although such laws are designed to help stamp out corruption, a noble goal, they are administered by parts of the Mexican government that know little about the risky nature of the oil business.

Pemex's ability to control its own investment capital is probably more important to its success than anything else. The firm, though, has been hobbled because the government keeps all profits for use in the federal budget and the finance ministry has the final word on all Pemex investments. Solving that problem would require distancing government from the oil company. Given that the government is dependent on Pemex cash, that is politically risky. In fact, the real foundation for Calderon's reforms announced last week actually happened long ago when he first took office and spearheaded an effort to change Mexico's tax system. Much of the Mexican economy doesn't pay taxes to the government, which explains why its need for cash from Pemex is particularly desperate. Those tax reforms, however, are too modest to make a fundamental difference in the government's dependence on Pemex.

Calderon's reforms seem unlikely to solve the politically hardest task: reigning in the Pemex workers' union, which favors projects that generate jobs and benefits for its members. The union is well-connected to Mexico's left-leaning political parties, which helps explain why those same parties are so wary of "privatization." In fact, Calderon's proposals would not privatize the companies, but the union and the left know that cry will rally the people to prevent change.

Elsewhere in the world a thicket of similar, interlocking problems loom over the oil patch. Kuwait has a procurement system much like Mexico's, with a similarly perverse effect on the incentives for workers in that country's oil company to take risks and perform at world standard. Even in Brazil, whose state oil company is one of the best performing, has a hard time keeping the government at bay when it comes to taxing oil output. Two massive new oil finds over the last six months have kindled discussions in Brazil about raising the tax rate and channeling ever more of the oil output for government purposes. In Venezuela, where Chavez has taken a good oil company and run it into the ground, the burden of public projects is so great that the oil company can no longer focus on actually producing oil efficiently, and production is in decline.

The odds are that Calderon will make some reforms but won't transform Pemex. And that outcome, multiplied through state-owned oil companies around the world, suggests that oil output will increase only sluggishly. With demand still strong, oil prices are set to stay high for some time.

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