As postelection activism surges across the country, one issue that seems persistently upstaged has particular resonance at Stanford. That concern is the heightened menace of nuclear weapons in an age of terrorism. Many experts now conclude that the long-standing doctrine of deterrence—the notion that the catastrophic power of such weapons safeguards against their use by those who possess them—no longer applies. And some of the most seasoned, influential and outspoken voices on the subject are based on campus. They work in various ways to combat public apathy and to reduce, if not erase, the risk of nuclear obliteration.
News of Sidney Drell’s death in late December reminded us of that mission. The eminent physicist and longtime deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center also served for decades as a technical adviser on national nuclear policy. As his obituaries noted, he strove for arms control even as he subscribed to deterrence during the Cold War. More recently, he asserted that nuclear weapons are futile as a deterrent against rogue actors. (The threat of so-called mutually assured destruction holds little sway with a suicidal adversary.)
In his remembrance of Drell, Philip Taubman, ’70, recalls how shared convictions about the nuclear threat and human rights were integral to Drell’s close friendship with the Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and with George Shultz, a Hoover Institution colleague and former secretary of state.
Shultz’s drive for a nuclear weapons-free world led him to team up with Stanford emeritus professor William Perry, ’49, MS ’50 (former defense secretary), Henry Kissinger (former secretary of state) and former senator Sam Nunn to create the Nuclear Security Project in 2007. This nonpartisan statesmen’s quartet has made its case in Wall Street Journal op-eds, in the feature film Nuclear Tipping Point, and in conference rooms, lecture halls and conversations with policymakers.
Perry recently started another project with his book My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (2015), a free online course and a robust web presence.
The times seem ripe for the wake-up call these and other Stanford thinkers provide. Political science professor Scott Sagan has written widely on nuclear weapons and served as a national defense consultant. His provocative Wall Street Journal piece last May titled “Would the U.S. Drop the Bomb Again?” reported that surveys he undertook in 2013 and 2015 showed that “When facing our worst foes, a sizable segment of the American public feels an attraction to our most destructive weapons, not an aversion” and that “Today, as in 1945, the U.S. public is unlikely to hold back a president who might consider using nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.”
This issue’s op-ed column, Consider This, also relates to world security, but in an unconventional way. Cybersecurity expert and emeritus professor Martin Hellman, MS ’67, PhD ’69, launched a campaign in 2007 calling for scientists to quantify the threat of nuclear disaster through risk analysis, as an antidote to polarized views about deterrence. Now he and his wife have written a book that proposes achieving world peace in the same way they restored marital harmony; an excerpt is here. It speaks to another pressing topic: U.S.-Russia relations.
Kevin Cool is on leave. He will resume his column next issue.
