EPIIC's 25th Anniversary Colloquium: Our Nuclear Age

 “I have felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our trouble--this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

-- Freeman Dyson, theoretical physicist and mathematician

Against the backdrop of the arc of nuclear history from the race for the atomic bomb and the secrecy and espionage of the Manhattan Project to President Obama’s 2010 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review and Nuclear Security Summit, the 25th Anniversary EPIIC colloquium is exploring our global nuclear future.

Nine countries currently control 23,000 nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, the superpowers amassed nuclear arsenals containing the explosive power of one million Hiroshimas.  More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. and Russia still have a combined total of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. One Hiroshima-size weapon alone, detonated in London’s Trafalgar Square in the middle of a workday would cause an estimated 115,000 fatalities and 149,000 injuries.  A regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to 20 million local fatalities and more than one billion global fatalities from the direct impact on the world’s atmosphere and agricultural supply.

The class has been looking at the history of arms control regimes, the threat posed by both declining and rising nuclear states, the dilemma of science in the service of military objectives, concerns over temptations of preemptive strikes and preventive war, the proclaimed “nuclear renaissance” and the building of new nuclear energy plants, the relevance and ethics of deterrence thinking, the feasibility and desirability of Global Zero, and the political, diplomatic, civil and military complexities of proliferation case studies, including Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea.

The fall semester has brought a broad range of experts to the class, including:

• Graham Allison, Director of Harvard's major Center for Science and International Affairs, for three decades he has been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy with a special interest in nuclear weapons, terrorism, and decision-making

• Bruce Blair, Co-founder and Co-coordinator of Global Zero, an international non-partisan group of 200 world leaders dedicated to achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons

• Amb. Stephen Bosworth, Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University since 2001 and also U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy. He served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea from November 1997-February 2001.

• Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government as well as Co-Principal Investigator for the Project on Managing the Atom and Co-Principal Investigator for the Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, and Deployment (ERD3) Policy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

• Joseph Cirincione, President of the Ploughshares Fund and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, he served previously as senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress and as director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International

• Avner Cohen, the author of The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb and Israel and the Bomb

• Ola Dahlman, former Adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, from 1969-94, a member of the Swedish delegation in the Test Ban Negotiations at the Conference of Disarmament and its predecessors

• Paul Hughes, Senior Program Officer for the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention of the United States Institute of Peace

• Amb. William Luers, former President of the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA), he had a 31-year career in the Foreign Service and served as U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia (1983-1986) and Venezuela (1978-1982)

• Steven E. Miller, Director of the International Security Program, Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal, International Security, and also co-editor of the International Security Program's book series, Belfer Center Studies in International Security – all at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School

• Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and formerly the Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy

• Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT

• William Tobey, Senior Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and most recently the Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration

• Jim Walsh, an expert in international security and a Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP)

Please see the colloquium’s full syllabus for more information.

One of this year’s INSPIRE Fellows, Pervez Hoodbhoy, was also the guest lecturer for EPIIC’s annual weekend immersion with Outward Bound.  A Mayer Award recipient and symposium panelist from last year, Hoodbhoy was a great resource on nuclear politics in South Asia throughout his month long stay at the IGL.

Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear and high energy physics, as well as chairman, at the department of physics, Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He remains an active physicist who often lectures at US and European research laboratories and universities. Hoodbhoy received the Baker Award for Electronics and the Abdus Salam Prize for Mathematics. Over a period of 25 years, Hoodbhoy created and anchored a series of television programs that dissected the problems of Pakistan’s education system, and two other series aimed at bringing scientific concepts to ordinary members of the public. He is the author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, now in seven languages. Also in 2003, Hoodbhoy was invited to the Pugwash Council. He is a sponsor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a member of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists.

The students are now completing their deliberations on the symposium (February 24-27, 2011) and preparing for winter research.  One aspect of their winter plans will include developing a topic for a briefing paper that will be reviewed by Paul Hughes, a senior program officer with the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the US Institute of Peace.  Hughes is the director of USIP's Nonproliferation and Arms Control Program, having previously served as the executive director of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel and the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.  From the papers submitted, Hughes will select several students to present on the symposium’s Friday night panel with former US Secretary of Defense William Perry and Rose Gottemoeller, Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in US Department of State.