Spring Conference: Seeking Dissent

By Mark Jansson
 

The 2010 PONI Conference Series will commence on April 8 – 9 here at CSIS. This year’s series presents an excellent opportunity to surface new ideas and analyses that may improve our ability to address key issues during what will inevitably be a pivotal year for U.S. nuclear policy and the worldwide effort to prevent nuclear proliferation. Those who haven’t done so already are invited to visit the event web page and to check out the call for presentations. The purpose of this post is to simply re-issue the invitation and to encourage readers to forward the invitation to others who may be interested in attending or perhaps delivering a presentation.

The need for new thinking and vigorous discussion is indeed pressing. By now most of the PONI blog readers will have seen an announcements for the nuclear security fellowships at RAND, Harvard, IISS, Stanford and CFR. These are truly timely and appropriate investments made in the name of a man, Frank Stanton, who was tapped by President Eisenhower to serve as part of the “Eisenhower Ten” group of state administrators that would take over the functions of government in the event of a catastrophic emergency, specifically a nuclear war that decapitated the government – an ominous possibility that nearly came to pass during his successor’s term in office.

As these fellowships were being announced, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt published a short piece on a possible renaissance in academic thinking on nuclear issues. He reflects, with lament, on the dip in interest in nuclear weapons issues since the end of the Cold War. In his view, this occurred in part because “there hasn't been that much new to say about the subject; the essential features of deterrence theory are well-established by now, and the infeasibility of any sort of ‘nuclear war’ seems to be pretty well-understood.”

The Stanton Foundation’s nuclear security fellowships are evidence of the fact that there are in fact plenty of new things to say – not just about deterrence, but about a wide range of challenges ahead in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and their use. There are many reasons to be hopeful that the Stanton fellowships will indeed help stimulate increased interest in nuclear issues in academia. We need academics to help policymakers gain insight and perspective on a host of nuclear issues that are sometimes debated with reliance on euphemisms and jargon-laden axioms that do little to help resolve underlying dilemmas or advance thinking on the matter at-hand.

Chris wrote previously on the important roles of academics in advancing thinking and informing policy on nuclear issues. And some will recall Doug Shaw’s article in the bulletin last March identifying four key tensions that we need new scholarship, starting with a renewed emphasis on these issues in institutes of higher learning, to help us work through as we pursue the parallel long-term goals of global security and global nuclear disarmament.  The timing definitely seems right for academia to step up.

But academics can’t do it alone. For one thing, while we need in-depth research and analysis to frame our approach to a growing list of big nuclear challenges, we also need insights from people who are already working in response to these challenges and can provide an insider’s perspective. Moreover, even academics working from outside the enterprise can (maybe subconsciously) work or write their way into ruts, where high fluency with the terminology and intimate familiarity with the frame of reference constrain the ability to create new constructs leading to stronger theory and better practical policy solutions.

This is why PONI continues to encourage the contributions of young scholars to the debate and give them an opportunity to share and discuss their ideas directly with their target audience. Young experts, namely those who are well-versed on issues related to nuclear strategy and policy but still flexible enough in their thinking to integrate new ideas and question long-held assumptions, have an important role to play in moving the debate the forward. The conference series exists as a standing challenge to them to develop and submit their insights on how to approach the array of complex and interlocking nuclear issues we face now and will face in the future. Graduate students, junior faculty at universities and young professionals in the field often generate insights that escape their more senior counterparts, and too often these insights are left unsaid or unpublished.

We have benefitted from the surge of task force reports have provided academics, nuclear policymakers, wonks and technical experts with a wealth of information and insight that will be a valuable resource for a number of issues, and the Comprehensive Framework database is a great research tool for sorting through the findings of these studies. However, we should be wary of allowing substantive debate over these issues be reduced to a fight over which political viewpoint is more strongly supported by task force findings. We ignore these reports at our peril, but letting their authors do all of our thinking for us would be even worse.

This year, as in years past, the conference series will seek to feature new ideas that will challenge assumptions, raise questions about approaches to nuclear strategy and preventing proliferation, consider political as well as technical challenges, and provoke discussion among conference participants. We are interested in hearing from experts (particularly but not exclusively young experts) with backgrounds in all of the social science fields and also from technical experts with insights to share on the state of the art in nuclear technologies and security science.

With the negotiation of a new arms reductions treaty with Russia in the works and soon-to-be completed, the Nuclear Posture Review due in March, the NPT Review Conference coming up in May, and important ongoing developments in the Middle East and East Asia, now is not the time to idle passively as developments unfold; now is the time for the future leaders in the field to contribute their ideas on what is taking place and what our next steps should be. We need creative ideas to help answer the big questions and perhaps change what we’re doing, but we also need simple ideas to help us pragmatically and perhaps do what we’re already doing a little bit better.

The technology to build a nuclear weapon is 70 years old; the idea of nuclear deterrence is even older. As the nuclear complex undergoes transformation, so too should our thinking on what our nuclear future should look like. We are looking forward to resuming the discussion on April 8 – 9 and continuing it throughout 2010.

Don’t hesitate to contact me at mjansson@csis.org if you have questions about the conference series or other PONI events.