Modernizing Nuclear Systems
Overview:
Grace Farley has served as a member of a global security team that includes the Directors of President Obama’s National Security Council and former leadership at the Pentagon and Department of Defense. Within the position, she led the communication strategies for confidential programs on artificial intelligence, nuclear prevention, and cybersecurity.
To broaden public awareness while translating the value proposition of the organization, Farley developed and served as the Executive Producer for a podcast focused on emerging threats at the nexus of technology and global security.
Based off of a confidential discussion held at the Hoover Institution, Farley developed an additional series focused on one of the most complex systems in the world today – the modernization of nuclear command and control systems and its increasingly complicated future.
This weekly series takes you straight to the experts, across multiple sectors to include top leadership from Google, the CIA, the Pentagon discussing a global overview of strategic stability and NC3 systems.
Segment Guests:
Dr. Paul Bracken - Professor at Yale University, former visiting scholar at the CIA - Grand Tactics and the Thin Skin of Civilization
Dr. John Harvey - Former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs
Dr. Eric Grosse - Google’s Former Vice President of Security and Privacy Engineering
Rear Admiral John Gower - Assistant Chief of Defense in the UK Ministry of Defense. Former Senior MoD Policy Officer for the UK NC3, and the Cabinet Office of the Prime Minster
Dr. Paul K. Davis - Adjunct Principal Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Former Senior Executive in the Office of the Secretary of Defense
Dr. Vipin Narang - Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT and a member of MIT’s Security Studies Program. Ph.D. from the Department of Government, Harvard University
Dr. Ron Schouten - Director of the Law & Psychiatry Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Served as an expert witness in both civil and criminal matters (9/11, FBI, Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attacks).
Dr. Daryl G. Press - Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, author of Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats. Co-founder of the annual Strategic Forces Analysis Bootcamp
Dr. Jon R. Lindsay - Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto
Elsa Kania - Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the CNAS.
Dr. Nancy Leveson - Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a professor of Engineering Systems at MIT
Dr. Avner Cohen - Professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies
Dr. Feroz Hassan Khan - Research Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
Dr. Fiona Cunningham - CISAC Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for International Security and Cooperation
Dr. Alex Wellerstein - A Historian of Science and Nuclear Weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology
Formal Summary - The Fourth Leg, NC3 Systems and Strategic Stability, A Global Overview:
Nuclear command, control, and communications systems urgently require modernization. How will advanced technologies impact NC3, what emergent properties can we anticipate, and where are collaborative opportunities?
The very nature of NC3 (nuclear command, control and communications) faces urgent challenges, but there has been no unclassified benchmarking since the 1980s of what the recent US STRATCOM Commander calls the "fourth leg of the triad". To address this gap and the emerging issues associated with modernization of global NC3 systems, multiple partners hosted multi-sector discussions at a two-day gathering at the Hoover Institution on January 22 to 23, 2019. It featured intense discussion based on over 30 readings and presentations by practitioners, academics, experts and opinion-makers in the field with specific skills-sets.
A standout feature of the gathering was the cross-section of participants who would otherwise not typically converge, confined as they are to their specialist fields (nuclear, political, history, law, engineering, computer science, security, etc.). The gathering sought to engage, interrogate and identify pathways and approaches to the challenges of NC3 from multiple, varying perspectives.
The workshop was conducted under the operating protocols of the Chatham House rule, and the conveners of the workshop were Technology for Global Security, the Preventive Defense Project (Stanford University), and the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability. In partnership with Nautilus, Technology for Global Security will be releasing weekly reports and interviews based off of the discussions held during the workshop.