For the first time in the history of the Leonard M. Rieser Award, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists gave an honorable mention. The honor goes to Ivan Andriushin, Cecilia Eiroa-Lledo, Patricia Schuster, and Evgenii Varseev for their essay “Nuclear power and global climate change.”  (Photo is of the authors.)

This essay, written by an a team of two Russian and two American young researchers sprung from a collaboration under the umbrella of the U.S.-Russia Young Professionals Nuclear Forum (YPNF), a project established by CISAC’s Siegfried Hecker to encourage dialogue on critical nuclear issues between the younger generations of nuclear engineers and scholars in the US and Russia.

The essay that received the Rieser honorable mention was one of a series of articles born out of the YPNF program. “Their articles are of interest because they represent the views of some of the younger generation of professionals working together across cultural and disciplinary divides,” said Hecker.  “We were particularly struck by the following comment in their essay reflects on the perceived urgency of the task at hand: ‘We are the first generation that is experiencing the dramatic effects of global climate change and likely the last that can do something about it.” 

Since its first meeting in 2016, the YPNF meets alternatively in Moscow and Stanford, with its agenda designed to promote an open-minded approach to consideration of technical and political challenges presented by the use of nuclear power in energy production and in the military realm. The participants represent not only two different countries, each a world leader in nuclear scholarship, research, and technology expertise, but also a range of disciplines from nuclear engineering to particle physics to international relations to anthropology. 

On the 4th YPNF in Moscow in November 2018, one forum exercise was on The Future of Global Nuclear Power. It was designed to have the young professionals take a close look at the benefits and challenges facing nuclear power globally and to examine and debate the role that nuclear power should play globally in this century. The backdrop for the discussion was the trend of the declining share of electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the world electricity. In the past few years, it dropped to only 11% of global electricity in spite of increasing concerns about the impact of burning fossil fuels on global climate change. This exercise was the start of the winning essay.

Read the Rest at Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

The sixth Young Professional Nuclear Forum (YPNF6), sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI), was held at MEPhI, Moscow, on November 4-7, 2019.

The mission of the forums is to foster collaboration between young professionals from Russia and the United States in the nuclear power and nonproliferation fields. The forum allows them to discuss and evaluate pressing global nuclear issues during times that the two governments are not cooperating and are not in serious dialogue. In recent years, the two governments have severely restricted opportunities and venues that previously used to be open to experienced nuclear professionals on both sides to cooperate with each other.  The benefits of nuclear cooperation were clearly demonstrated in hundreds of mutually beneficial collaborative projects by Russian and American nuclear professionals during the breakup of the Soviet Union and in the 20-plus years that followed.

These forums allow Stanford University and MEPhI to prepare the next generation to help rejuvenate cooperation once the governments realize that cooperation in the nuclear arena is essential. The young professionals participating in these meetings are upper level undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, young faculty and junior specialists. They are the new generation who will be stepping in to solve the mounting challenges including nuclear security, nonproliferation, nuclear disarmament and how to mitigate the effects of climate change and toxic pollution of the planet.

The November 2019 meeting included two and a half days of lectures and group work on two exercises – one on a “World free of nuclear weapons” and the second on “The impact of nuclear accidents on the future of nuclear power.”

Most young professionals acknowledged – or came to realize – the enormity and complexity of Nuclear Zero as both a study area and a goal. At the same time, many noted that this very complexity provoked deeper thinking and the discussion opened new perspectives, especially for those on the engineering side. The young professionals also realized that they share more common ground on the issue of Global Zero than one might have thought.

The feedback on the nuclear accidents exercise also showed several notable takeaways. The aspects that appealed to the young professionals were: the comparative approach that pushed them to look beyond the known facts into similarities and specifics across the three accident cases; a perspective that integrated the technical, social, and cultural angles; and such examination being directly relevant to improved safety of nuclear energy, the objective close to heart to many of them who see their future as nuclear professionals.

It is also interesting that in this exercise the young professionals noted differences of perspective and opinion rather than similarities. As has been the case in all previous forums, these differences were valued and accepted as leading to a richer, more productive, discussions.

Their reports were sufficiently impressive that we have decided to follow the model of YPNF4 and have the young professionals turn the six short articles to be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We have the go-ahead from the editor of the Bulletin.

In addition to the working sessions, the forum provided the opportunity for personal interaction and connections. The young professionals rated their overall satisfaction of the meeting as 8.6 out of 10 expressed a strong preference to stay engaged between the forums working on collaborative projects.

On the whole, the response to the 6^th YPNF seems to show a growing engagement and sense of ownership by the young professionals on both sides. The forum presented various opportunities for the young professionals to learn about issues, each other, and each other’s countries. Young professionals approached many of the senior experts individually with questions both within and beyond the Forum discussion areas and exchanged contacts for future interaction.

The forum was supported by MEPhI, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation.

The science of cyber risk looks at a broad spectrum of risks across a variety of digital platforms. Often though, the work done within the field is limited by a failure to explore the knowledge of other fields, such as behavioral science, economics, law, management science, and political science. In a new Science Magazine article, “Cyber Risk Research Impeded by Disciplinary Barriers,” cyber risk experts and researchers at Stanford University make a compelling case for the importance of a cross-disciplinary approach. Gregory Falco, security researcher at the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and lead author of the paper, talked recently with the Cyber Policy Center about the need for a holistic approach, both within the study of cyber risk, and at a company level when an attack occurs.

CPC: Your recent perspective paper in Science Magazine highlights the issue of terminology when it comes to how organizations and institutions define a cyber attack. Why is it so important to have consistent naming when we are talking about cyber risk?

Falco: With any scientific discipline or field, there is a language for engaging with other experts. If there’s no consistent language or at least dialect for communication around cyber risk, it’s difficult to engage with scholars from different disciplines. For example: The phrase “cyber event” is contested and the threshold for what an organization considers to be a cyber event varies substantially. Some organizations consider someone pinging their network as a cyber event, others only consider something a cyber event once an intrusion has been publicly disclosed. So there’s a disparity when comparing metrics of cyber events from organization to organization because of the different thresholds of what’s considered an event.

CPC: We’ve all been sent one of those emails letting us know our data may have been compromised and your paper points out it’s nearly impossible to put foolproof protections into place; attacks are inevitable. Given that, how should companies weigh the various ways they can protect themselves?

Falco: The first exercise each organization should go through when they decide to be serious about cyber risk is to prioritize their assets. What is business critical? What is safety critical? Then, like all other risks, a cost-benefit analysis must be done for each asset based on its priority. If the asset is safety-critical, then resources should be allocated to help protect that asset or at least ensure its resilience. Trade-offs are inevitable, no company has unlimited resources. But starting with an understanding of where the priorities are, is critical.

CPC: In companies, cyber security often falls entirely to the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Your paper argues that’s shortsighted. What is gained when a company takes a more holistic approach?

Falco: Distributing responsibility across the organization catalyzes a security culture. A security culture is one where there is a constant vigilance or at least broad awareness of cybersecurity concerns throughout the organization. Fostering a security culture is often suggested as a mechanism to help reduce cyber risk in organizations. The problem with not distributing responsibility is that when something happens, it’s too easy to resort to finger-pointing at the CISO, and that’s counterproductive. Efforts after an attack should be on responding and being resilient, not finding the scapegoat.

CPC: Cyber risk largely focuses on prevention, but your paper argues that it’s what happens after an attack in that needs greater attention. Why is that?

Falco: Every organization will be attacked. However organizations can differentiate themselves from a cyber risk standpoint by appropriately managing the situation after an attack. Some of the most significant damages to organizations can be reputational if communication after an attack is unclear or botched. Poor communication after an attack can result in major regulatory fines or valuation adjustments as seen in cases like Yahoo and that can have major business implications. Communications aren’t the only important element of post-attack response. A thorough post-mortem of the organization’s response to the attack can be an important learning experience and a way to plan for future attacks.

CPC: Protecting against cyber attacks and the losses that go with them can obviously be costly for companies. You make a case for collaboration among different fields, say among data scientists and economists. How can that be encouraged?

Falco: We argue that cross-disciplinary collaboration rarely happens organically. Therefore, we call on funding agencies like the NSF or DARPA to specify a preference for cross disciplinary research when funding cyber risk projects. Typically, this isn’t currently a feature of calls for proposals, but for cyber risk programs it should be. We encourage researchers to explore cyber risk questions at the margins of their discipline. Those questions may lend themselves to potential overlap with other disciplines and foster a starting point for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

For more on these topics, see a full list of recent publications from the Cyber Policy Center and the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance.

"Ideologically, today’s autocrats are a more motley and pragmatic crew. They generally claim to be market friendly, but mainly they are crony capitalists, who, like Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, and Erdogan in Turkey, are first concerned with enriching themselves, their families, and their parties and support networks. Increasingly, they raise a common flag of cultural conservatism, denouncing the moral license and weakness of the “the liberal West” while advancing a virulent antiliberal agenda based on nationalism and religion," writes Larry Diamond. Read here. 

Of all of the countries in the world attempting a transition to democracy, Francis Fukuyama thinks that Ukraine is the most promising.

“The election of [Volodymyr] Zelensky and the new parliament is just a miracle,” Fukuyama told Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast. “Can you imagine, a country getting rid of two-thirds of its parliament and starting over with new people, many of whom are under 35 years old?” 



Ukraine is at a crossroads of sorts, said Fukuyama, who is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI, and the director of both the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program. On one hand, the country could use this opportunity to transition into a successful reformist government, or its efforts could fail and the government could collapse. 

It doesn’t help that Ukraine’s relationships with foreign allies are not as strong as they once were, he told McFaul.

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“The United States had been their strongest ally, but now there’s a president in the White House who doesn’t particularly like them,” he explained. “I think Germany and France are also both weakening in their support for Ukraine’s independence, so [Ukraine is] in a really tough spot.”

Before Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, Fukuyama said he actually thought the country would be among the least likely to liberalize in the way that it has. One important factor in Ukraine’s success has been the exercise of broad individual and political freedoms —  for example, Ukraine’s press has stayed active throughout the years and the country boasts many investigative journalists, he said.

“In a way, it’s a very free and open society with lots of creativity,” Fukuyama noted. “You can criticize the government. I actually think [Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has stimulated Ukrainian nationalism — I think it made citizens realize that they actually do have something to lose.”

[Ready to dive deeper? Read “Small Battle in a Big War: The Post-Maidan Transformation of the National Bank of Ukraine”]

Fukuyama has been interested in Ukraine for a while now — he’s visited the country six times over the past five years. During his most recent trip in November 2019, he taught a crash-course in policymaking to 50 of Ukraine’s members of parliament. With an average age of 41, it’s the country’s youngest parliament ever elected, and many of the newest members have no previous political experience.

He described his time with the young Ukraianian members as inspiring, adding that they want to see a genuine democracy, and to eliminate corruption in their country.

“It does seem to me that we who live in democracies owe it to the people of Ukraine to support them,” Fukuyama said. “Because if they fail, it’s going to have repercussions way beyond Ukraine.” 

Related: Listen to Fukuyama explain “identity politics,” where it comes from and how it will shape the future of our society, on a previous episode of World Class.

The Democrats are facing a dilemma: If they defend democratic norms by acting to remove President Trump from office, they risk getting dragged into a polarizing style of politics that works to his political advantage. Read here.

Our Francis Fukuyama and UELP alumni, Sergii Leshchenko (Draper Hills Summer Fellow 2017) and Oleksandra Ustinova (Ukrainian emerging leaders 2018-9), are feat inMichelle Goldberg's NYT opinion piece "The Beacon Has Gone Out: What Trump & Giuliani Have Wrought." Read here.