Chapter

The Future of Social Science & National Security Project

Soviet Collapse and Nuclear Dangers: Harvard and the Nunn-Lugar Program

The story of an academic study of nuclear risks that had a direct impact on American policy and helped prevent a disastrous nuclear outcome

By Steven E. Miller

Defense Policy & Posture

October 20, 2023

In late 1991, a small research group at Harvard, responding to momentous developments in a Soviet Union, produced a monograph that addressed the nuclear implications of a possible disintegration of the Soviet state. It sought to provide a comprehensive analysis of the risks, the implications for American interests, and the options for minimizing dangers and promoting desirable outcomes. It argued that a priority goal of American security policy should be to influence the nuclear outcome in the collapsing Soviet Union, to do whatever possible to push the results in desirable directions.

Presentations of this analysis, initially to Senators Nunn and Lugar and later to a wider group of influential Senators, led almost immediately to Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 (known as the Nunn-Lugar program) which echoed the diagnosis and prescriptions offered in Soviet Nuclear Fission and resulted in a policy that invested billions of US dollars to enhance the safety and security of Soviet nuclear capabilities and assets. In this case, an academic study that analyzed risks and offered recommendations for policy came to have a direct and significant impact on the course of US policy as the Soviet Union met its end.

Much academic work on international relations is, not surprisingly, quite academic, particularly if it is aimed at a scholarly audience and motivated by the aspiration to achieve scholarly advancement. It may also be that the growing professionalization of the academic field of international relations, with an emphasis on theory and methods, has led increasingly to output that is largely irrelevant to policy.¹ It is probably to be expected that such work does not often result in policy impact. There are, furthermore, impediments to influence even for work that is intentionally policy-oriented. A huge, sprawling policy apparatus in Washington, comprised of countless departments, agencies, players, interagency deliberations, White House managers, and Congressional committees, egos, and interventions, operates in its own universe according to its own rules and conventions. This policy-making system is not short of ideas or inputs. Its deliberations and outcomes are not easily shaped even by most of those who operate within the system. Academic outsiders are not likely to have an easy time penetrating this world.

On the other hand, the American system is permeable. As Hans Morgenthau once wrote, “The formation of American foreign policy is characterized by a diffusion so extreme as to border on chaos. The determination of American foreign policy is subject to a multitude of influences….”² This can include academic influences, though when and how this happens may not be easily predictable or demonstrable. There is a broad sense in which ideas can emerge out of the academy, gain wider circulation in the national discourse, and come to influence policy for good or ill. Paul Musgrave likens some such episodes to “lab leaks” – which can involve the escape of sometimes “faulty ideas” from the “nuanced and cautious world of the academic seminar” – and worries that academic ponderings can come to cause or justify bad policies. ³ But this notion of “ideas in the wild” is a vague and indirect version of academic influence on policy. Is more direct policy engagement possible? The longstanding and much-discussed issue of a “gap” between policy and scholarship reflects a concern that such engagement is not easily accomplished. Others argue, on the contrary, that the prospects for involvement in or influence on policy are good and improving. Daniel Drezner writes, for example, that “there are far more opportunities for public engagement and public policy analysis than there were 30 years ago. Universities remain keen on ‘impact,’ and someone returning to the academy after a 30-year absence would be surprised at how much the gap has been bridged between the academy and the policymaking community.”⁴ There are, in addition, occasional examples of academic impact that suggest that relevance is possible, even if rare or difficult.

Here is the story of one such example. In late 1991, a small research group at Harvard, responding to momentous developments in the Soviet Union, produced a monograph that addressed the nuclear implications of a possible disintegration of the Soviet state. ⁵ Its diagnosis of risks and recommendations for policy came to have a direct and significant impact on the course of US policy as the Soviet Union met its end. One case cannot resolve the debate about whether academic relevance is waxing or waning, but perhaps we can learn a little something about the factors that allow for academic influence.

The Context

On August 19, 1991, a group of disaffected senior Soviet leaders and military officers launched a coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, reflecting their alarm at his attempt to reform the Soviet Union. Several tumultuous days ensued, with Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea, violence in the heart of Moscow, and confusion about what was happening and who held the reins of power. The coup quickly fizzled, and Gorbachev resumed power, remaining briefly in office though unable to halt the Soviet Union’s rapid gallop to disintegration several months hence. The coup attempt, however, put the spotlight on an issue that had been increasingly troubling over the previous year as the Soviet Union more and more came to be marked by internal instability: What was the status of Moscow’s vast nuclear arsenal? And who had controlled the nuclear weapons during the period of the coup? Given the enormous scale of Soviet nuclear capability and the fact that its nuclear forces were directed primarily at the United States, this was an issue with huge implications for American security.

In public, the administration of President George H.W. Bush offered reassuring claims in the aftermath of the coup, suggesting that no nuclear threats or problematic actions had been detected. As the New York Times reported, “Bush Administration officials sought today to play down reports that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had lost control of Soviet nuclear forces during this week’s coup, but they expressed some concerns about the long-term stability of Moscow’s vast nuclear arsenal.”⁶ At Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA), we had just formed a small research group intending to work on nuclear policy issues. We reacted strongly to this characterization. The reassurances, though perhaps understandable as an effort to calm public fears, seemed inadequate and unwarranted (and in fact, even the Bush Administration made a major move to address nuclear worries, calling on September 28, 1991, for a series of significant cuts in nuclear forces and major modifications of nuclear policy, measures that were quickly reciprocated by Gorbachev).⁷ The stability of the Soviet nuclear arsenal during what looked increasingly like the death throes of a multiethnic empire, on the other hand, seemed like a large and urgent problem worthy of more than “some concern” – particularly as the crisis in the Moscow intensified and the Soviet Union lurched toward some unknown but messy end. Coincidentally, at just that time we were in the midst of planning our research agenda for the coming academic year. Prompted by this unfolding crisis, we resolved to dive into the set of issues occasioned by the Soviet Union’s possession of a large and diverse collection of nuclear assets.

We were soon seized by the immediacy of the problem. As it turned out, in the late summer and fall of 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union was happening before our eyes with stunning suddenness. This represented something unprecedented: the disintegration of a nuclear-armed empire – one that possessed the world’s largest inventory of nuclear weapons (numbering in the tens of thousands) and the world’s most extensive infrastructure for producing weapons-usable nuclear materials and manufacturing nuclear weapons. We set out to think through the implications for American security if this nuclear empire came apart at the seams. In short order, we grew so alarmed by the ominous possibilities that we put aside other projects and gave priority to producing as quickly as possible an analysis of American interests in the fate of the Soviet nuclear empire. Over a four-month period in late 1991, we wrote, published, and distributed a monograph that sought to provide a comprehensive analysis of the risks, the implications for American interests, and the options for minimizing dangers and promoting desirable outcomes.⁸

The collapse of the Soviet Union, we came to argue, would produce three categories of nuclear worry for the United States. First was a loss of control of nuclear weapons by coherent and appropriate central authority, leading to increased risk of unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons. It was not self-evident that nuclear assets would remain in prudent hands or that responsible custodianship of Soviet nuclear capabilities would remain possible in a scenario that involved the disintegration of the state.⁹

Second, Soviet nuclear weapons and Soviet nuclear infrastructure were scattered throughout the territory of the Soviet Union.¹⁰ Nuclear weapons had been removed from the three Baltic states, which had been the earliest to assert claims of independence. But all the other twelve Soviet republics had strategic and/or tactical nuclear weapons deployed within their territory and some of them possessed fragments of nuclear infrastructure – test sites, weapons labs, delivery system production facilities – as well. This raised the possibility that if the Soviet Union splintered into newly independent states, those successor states would, in a sense, be born nuclear. More than four decades into the nuclear age, only nine nuclear-armed states had emerged, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union seemed to hold potential for producing as many as a dozen more. To be sure, most of the Soviet republics possessed neither a full and coherent nuclear infrastructure nor independent access to command and control of the nuclear weapons on their territory and some of the emerging entities denied appetite for nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, they were in a position to exercise a sovereign claim to the weapons and delivery systems contained within their borders (as Ukraine, for example, subsequently did) and this represented a breathtaking shortcut to nuclear weapons capability. If multiple nuclear successor states were to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union, this would have damaging, if not calamitous, implications for the nonproliferation regime, long regarded as a key American interest. Furthermore, the inherited nuclear weapons capabilities, including intercontinental delivery systems in some Soviet republics, had been designed, intended, and targeted largely for use against the United States – a reality that increased the risks to the United States of this particular path to nuclear proliferation.

Third, the Soviet nuclear complex included not only many thousands of nuclear weapons but also huge inventories of weapons-usable fissile material and a large number of nuclear experts. The Soviet Union was a closed society with highly effective and ferocious internal policing, so there was little concern about the security of its nuclear holdings when the state was functioning. But now that the state was failing, perhaps imploding, there was apprehension that the Soviet custodial system for nuclear assets might rupture, possibly allowing weapons, the materials to make them, and the expertise needed to build them, to spread around the world in a nuclear black market that could be exploited by malign actors (whether states or terrorists). Alarm about the so-called “loose nukes” problem heightened as state capacity weakened because the Soviet approach to protecting its nuclear facilities and assets had rested upon the closed nature of the society, the authoritarian nature of the state, and the ubiquity of its internal policing – all of which were being undermined, if not disappearing, with the waning of state power in Moscow. The entire nonproliferation regime is built around the technological chokepoint that it is difficult to manufacture the fissile nuclear material necessary for a bomb, but this chokepoint would become dramatically less significant if nuclear weapons or large quantities of nuclear material leaked out of the Soviet nuclear complex and became available for purchase by aspiring proliferators – perhaps accompanied by expertise that would allow the fissile material to be effectively utilized. Efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation could be seriously weakened if the loose nukes threat were not effectively addressed.

As we saw it, then, three huge nuclear dangers loomed as the Soviet Union disintegrated. If things went badly in one or more of these three contexts, the consequences would be extremely damaging to the interests of the United States and extremely troubling to the world at large. The United States, accordingly, had a profound interest in the fate of what came to be described as the Soviet nuclear legacy. This implied that a priority goal of American security policy should be to influence the nuclear outcome in the collapsing Soviet Union, and to do whatever possible to push the results in desirable directions. Moreover, this was not a distant challenge or a hypothetical consideration, but a set of risks that were arising immediately and required action immediately. As we urged in the conclusion of our study, “We emphasize that the pace and profundity of the events taking place in the Soviet Union call for uncommon wisdom and agility by policymakers. Actions are needed now….”¹¹

These conclusions were not universally accepted, however, and others had different perceptions about the urgency of the situation, the outcomes to be preferred, and the steps that should be taken to protect American interests. Commenting on the nuclear worries induced by the internal struggles of the Soviet Union, for example, one of the leading American scholars of the Soviet military, MIT’s Stephen Meyer, insisted, “It’s all bullshit, completely.” He dismissed fears that nuclear weapons might fall into unauthorized hands as “a non-issue.”¹² The possibility that the collapse of the Soviet Union might produce multiple nuclear-armed successor states was viewed in some quarters as more positive than negative, or even as desirable: newly independent states would have the ultimate protection for their sovereignty and Moscow, with centuries of imperial impulses embedded in its national psyche, would be inhibited by nuclear neighbors – arguably in the interests of both the post-Soviet states and the United States. For successor states, Graham Allison pointed out, “a nuclear deterrent appeared to be the best guarantor of independent survival and security.”¹³ It was a mistake of American policy, wrote prominent scholar John Mearsheimer, to pressure Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons because they constituted “the only reliable deterrent” to the inevitable Russian threat – a proposition that has revived recently in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.¹⁴ Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that the sovereign independence of Ukraine was more important to American interests than denuclearization.¹⁵ And while there was little objection to the proposition that Soviet nuclear assets should be made as safe and secure as possible, skeptics suggested that the loose nukes threat was exaggerated and, in particular, that concerns about nuclear terrorism deriving from leakage of weapons or materials out of the Soviet nuclear complex were overblown – particularly in light of Russian assertions that they were capable of effective nuclear custodianship.¹⁶ Nuclear terrorism is not, as one analysis put it, “the core problem.”¹⁷ In a later essay, one of the most outspoken and articulate of the skeptics, John Mueller, summarized the doubt that there was a problem here in need of a solution: “Although there has been great worry about terrorists illicitly stealing or purchasing a nuclear weapon, it seems likely that neither “loose nukes” nor a market in illicit nuclear materials exists.”¹⁸ In short, it might seem, especially in retrospect, that the nuclear challenges raised by Soviet collapse were obvious and that the responses chosen were inevitable, but in fact other arguments and outcomes were possible. Indeed, in the unsettled and chaotic circumstances of the early 1990s a strikingly wide range of views about nuclear dangers and possible remedies were evident.

The Policy Connection

Nor was the issue absent from the policy discussion in Washington. In fact, Congressman Les Aspin and Senator Sam Nunn had led an effort in Congress late in the summer of 1991 to allocate one billion dollars intended to promote stability in the Soviet Union in order, as Nunn put it, to ward off “a potential breakdown in control of Soviet nuclear weapons and nuclear know-how.” There was clear recognition in at least some quarters in Washington that the United States had a stake in the fate of Soviet nuclear assets. The effort was abandoned in November 1991, however, due to a lack of enthusiasm by the Bush Administration and Congressional aversion to foreign aid in general and assistance to the long-time Soviet adversary in particular.¹⁹ Indeed, the Nunn-Aspin initiative had aroused what was described as “fierce” bipartisan opposition in Congress.²⁰ In addition, some in the Bush Administration were publicly critical of the idea, which Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney disparaged as “foolish.”²¹ On November 13, 1991, Nunn and Aspin withdrew their proposed legislation, halting the attempt to use US taxpayer dollars to try to ameliorate nuclear dangers in a dying Soviet Union. Supporters of the Nunn-Aspin approach held out little hope that additional such efforts would fare better.

It is here that the Harvard group enters the story. By mid-November 1991, our monograph, Soviet Nuclear Fission, had been printed and delivered. With the assent of our foundation supporter, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, we purchased and immediately distributed hundreds of copies – to colleagues, journalists, Congressional offices, and relevant executive branch officials. One of the recipients was the then-president of the Carnegie Corporation, Dr. David Hamburg. Disturbed by the analysis in Soviet Nuclear Fission, Hamburg arranged a meeting that brought together Ash Carter, the leader of our small research group, with Senators Nunn and Lugar (a meeting that also included John Steinbruner and William Perry, frequent collaborators with Carter). On November 19, 1991 – less than a week after the failure of the Nunn-Aspin legislation – the group gathered in Nunn’s office and Carter provided a briefing on the Harvard report.²²

Carter’s summary of Soviet Nuclear Fission, as Nunn would describe it, “outlined in an analytical and scholarly format the dangers of nuclear command, control, and stability in an unstable Soviet Union.”²³ Nunn’s aide, Richard Combs, who attended this meeting, relates that the report was “carefully reasoned and profoundly disturbing: political and economic instability in the Soviet Union could have grave consequences for the safety and security of Moscow’s nuclear arsenal, particularly if the Soviet Union divided into autonomous republics.”²⁴ Carter’s analysis recommended a program to assist Moscow in the secure management of its nuclear empire. Nunn and Lugar were impressed and reacted immediately. “The impact of the November 19 meeting was instantaneous,” Bernstein and Wood comment.²⁵ Nunn and Lugar agreed to work together to address the nuclear dangers attending the dissolution of the Soviet Union. They assigned their aides to commence at once with the drafting of legislation that would allocate US funds to the task of minimizing the risk of nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. Ash Carter was drawn into this drafting exercise. The requisite bill would soon exist. Nunn saw Carter’s description of the Harvard report as “the major conceptual foundation of the Nunn-Lugar legislation.”²⁶

There remained, however, the problem of finding the necessary support for this initiative in Congress. The similarly motivated Nunn-Aspin proposal had met with failure less than a week earlier. There appeared to be widespread skepticism among lawmakers about the idea of providing aid to the hated and feared Soviet Union, even if the rationale was to promote nuclear stability. As one official involved in implementing the Nunn-Lugar program pointed out, their approach was “unprecedented,” it required “cooperation of the most unusual sort” with the former adversary, and acceptance depended on “breaking down patterns of thought and behavior entrenched during decades of hostility.”²⁷ This was not the most propitious setting for a new proposal that sought, in effect, to revisit a revised version of the already spurned Nunn-Aspin legislation.

Determined to proceed nevertheless, Nunn and Lugar set up a second briefing for Ash Carter, this time to a wider group of Senate colleagues. In the interim, copies of Soviet Nuclear Fission were distributed on Capitol Hill.²⁸ On November 21, 1991, Carter met with a bipartisan group of 16 senior members of the Senate, including chairmen of relevant committees, and repeated his account of the potential nuclear dangers in the collapsing Soviet Union. This event seems to have changed the chemistry of the issue in Congress. In their account of this episode, Nunn and Lugar report that “Once acquainted with Carter’s analysis, these colleagues agreed that US domestic political hostility to Soviet aid paled in comparison to the dangers in question.”²⁹ Moving quickly, Nunn and Lugar assembled 24 bipartisan co-sponsors, won over key figures such as Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole, and pushed to bring the bill to a rapid vote. On November 25, 1991, less than two weeks after the demise of Nunn-Aspin, the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 was passed by the Senate by a vote of 86-8; it was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on December 12, 1991. This was, Nunn and Lugar later commented, “the most dramatic reversal of opinion they had ever experienced in the Senate.”³⁰

The content of the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 echoed the diagnosis and prescriptions offered in Soviet Nuclear Fission. It highlighted the three categories of danger: unauthorized use, nuclear leakage, and possible proliferation. It committed the United States to facilitate the safe and secure handling of Soviet nuclear assets and to assist in the prevention of nuclear proliferation. The legislation launched a program of cooperation and assistance that persisted for a quarter of a century, resulted in billions of dollars being invested efforts to enhance the safety and security of nuclear assets in the former Soviet Union, and is credited with playing a significant role in containing nuclear dangers in the former Soviet Union.³¹ Nunn and Lugar themselves judged that the program “amassed an impressive list of accomplishments.”³² What might have happened had the program never materialized cannot be known, but we do know that a lot of effort was put into preventing nuclear disasters that, in the event, did not happen.

Sources of Impact

The story recounted here represents one focused instance in which academic work had an immediate and demonstrable impact on policy. This is a case that is at odds with the widespread concern about the relevance of scholarship in the realm of national security.³³ How can we account for what appears to be an unusual case?

Access to Difference-Makers

The impact of this academic analysis was obviously in large part a consequence of having had direct access to figures who were in a position to play influential roles in the policy process. Moreover, Senators Nunn and Lugar offered several advantages as interlocutors. First, they represented a bipartisan pair, which reduced the likelihood that the issue would be defined by and caught up in the battles between the political parties. Second, on nuclear policy issues, both were highly respected opinion leaders within their own caucus and hence had the ability to bring along multiple supporters from their own side. Third, they brought genuine interest in and expertise to nuclear issues, meaning that they were receptive to the analysis and arguments of an academic study and had the capacity to fully grasp the issues. Finally, it is probably meaningful that Nunn and Lugar were legislators with considerable capacity for independent action, rather than executive branch officials needing to navigate the bureaucracy, beholden to the interagency process, and constrained by official policy and by the inclinations of the White House (which was, by all accounts, at best indifferent to this issue). In short, it was not only access but access to a particularly apposite pair of influential figures that allowed Soviet Nuclear Fission to be the catalyst for a major policy initiative.

Direct Involvement in the Policy Process

A corollary of the point about access is that Ash Carter was drawn into the drafting of the legislation that led to the Nunn-Lugar program. It appears that Nunn and Lugar were resolved to move forward after the initial meeting with Carter on November 19 and they certainly possessed staff capable of writing the bill without outside assistance, so Carter’s involvement was probably unnecessary. Nevertheless, this was certainly useful in ensuring the imprint of the Harvard study on the ensuing legislative outcome.

Fortuitous Timing

Soviet Nuclear Fission was composed with urgent heat by a small team that had persuaded itself, if no one else, that truly momentous risks were immediately in play, with significant jeopardy to American interests and security. A moment came when we had to consider how to proceed with the draft that, with enormous collective effort, we had produced in the span of a few months. There was no question that taking the time to produce another, revised draft would produce a product that was more polished, better footnoted, and with patience, perhaps would be published at some future point by a highly reputable press. Motivated by the immediacy of the issue, without hesitation, we chose instead to proceed with the draft as it was and opted to self-publish by engaging a printer who promised the rapid production of the monograph. Thus it was that in mid-November 1991 boxes and boxes of Soviet Nuclear Fission were stacked in the library of our Center as the Soviet Union expired, and the monograph was widely distributed in the couple of weeks before the December 1, 1991 referendum on independence in Ukraine that was the death certificate of the Soviet Union.³⁴ As the crisis in the Soviet Union reached this crescendo, the world watched with rapt attention and the possible implications of this seismic shift attracted intense scrutiny. It was at this moment, in this fraught and anxious environment, that Soviet Nuclear Fission found its audience and its impact – whereas earlier good work on similar topics had not appeared in such receptive and reinforcing circumstances.³⁵

It seems certain that had the monograph appeared a few months, or perhaps even a few weeks, later it would have missed this moment and been much less visible and impactful. As Michael Krepon commented in his reconstruction of the story, this study was “perfectly timed.”³⁶ Similarly, Senator Nunn later observed, “This was a timely study….”³⁷

Open Policy Space

Most policy deliberations and debates represent the latest chapters of long stories. Such discussions are shaped by entrenched positions, vested interests, ideological predispositions, partisan contestation, and public posturing. The room for intellectual maneuver and policy innovation is inevitably circumscribed in such well-defined terrain; the participants in well-rehearsed policy debates will typically have staked out their claims and will have their preferred policy choices. It is still possible for academic work to have weight in the policy fight, but the landscape is already substantially demarcated. The situation in the last months of 1991(and for some time thereafter) was markedly different. The bipolar order was disappearing, a nuclear-armed superpower was disintegrating, a “New World Order” (as President George H.W. Bush styled it) was being born. All this was happening with shocking speed, unexpected and unprecedented. It was becoming apparent that there was a need to rethink foreign policy in fundamental ways. In this rapidly moving environment, the questions were new, the challenges unfamiliar, the opportunities and dangers not clearly in view, priorities not yet established, the path ahead unclear, and policy responses were still being improvised. Many formerly settled verities were now open questions, and consequently, there was room to help set the agenda, establish priorities, and advocate new (and sometimes previously unthinkable) policies – such as deep nuclear collaboration with the former adversary, including the investment of American funds in Soviet nuclear facilities! Soviet Nuclear Fission appeared in this hospitable environment, with the policy terrain quite open and much of the policy community in search of answers suitable to the emerging world. This context, no doubt, helped the monograph to make an impression.

High Stakes

It was possible to command attention and help to motivate action because there was a persuasive case that America’s national security interests would be profoundly affected by the fate of the Soviet nuclear empire. This was not just another humdrum issue to be handled in a routine way in the context of normal policies and processes. Rather, what was by far the largest threat to American security – the Soviet nuclear arsenal – was increasingly situated in an unstable environment in the midst of a disintegrating state, which meant that prudent and responsible nuclear stewardship could not be assured and the ultimate disposition of nuclear assets was uncertain and potentially extremely detrimental. It was this worrisome circumstance that grabbed some key players – notably but not only Nunn and Lugar – and made them receptive to the analysis in Soviet Nuclear Fission. When they set out in November 1991 to offer public justification of their new initiative, for example, Nunn and Lugar emphasized the “grave threat” posed by Soviet nuclear capabilities, urged that “the danger is clear,” and rejected the idea that their perspective was “overly alarming.”³⁸

The Character of the Work

Finally, it is probably germane to note that the work in question emerged from a research center at the Kennedy School of Government, a graduate school of public policy – a setting devoted to policy analysis and engagement rather than the furtherance of academic political science. The project was chosen precisely because the issue was thought to be urgent and deserving of high priority on the immediate policy agenda and there was an explicit effort to think through policy options that would further American interests and minimize the potential damage to the international order. Indeed, the monograph was in part a call for, and a justification of, policy action and it made the case for assertive American involvement in shaping the fate of the Soviet nuclear empire. Much academic work may be, to borrow a line quoted by Michael Desch, “too narrow, too specialized and methodological, and too removed from politics.”³⁹ Soviet Nuclear Fission was a product from the other end of the substantive spectrum, explicitly policy-oriented and avowedly aiming for policy impact. However anomalous this case may be relative to the broad trend toward academic irrelevance that Desch portrays, it does suggest that it is possible to produce policy-relevant work if one sets out to do so and that under some (perhaps rare) conditions it is possible for such work to have actual policy impact.

Conclusions from an Anomalous Case

There is much in this story that is inconsistent with common academic life and practice. The incentive structure for scholars generally favors enduring theoretical, sophisticated methodological, or analytical scholarly work much more than entanglement in current events and ongoing policy debates. Young scholars are encouraged to keep their noses to the academic grindstone and focus on the all-important tenure decision. If you want to get full credit for your work, you don’t operate as a team and produce co-authored works. In many academic settings, the lone scholar is more the norm, and collaborative work – which in our case allowed a division of labor that contributed speed and momentum to our project – is uncommon. During teaching semesters, faculty will often not have the time or the flexibility to respond to pressing policy issues. The most valuable publication outlets, in terms of career advancement, generally involve months if not years of review and revision before publication, which makes timely interventions in immediate policy challenges literally impossible for those focused on building their list of peer-reviewed publications. The barriers to policy influence do not reside only in policy circles in Washington DC. Moreover, it cannot be assumed that university-based projects will have the opportunity to put their analyses and conclusions directly to figures in a position to act on them if persuaded.

Nevertheless, if academic work is to be more than a self-referential, self-contained game, then it must at least sometimes aim to influence and improve policies and outcomes, drawing on the analysis and understanding that derive from deep study of the issues. If this is properly understood to be one of the essential purposes of the academic enterprise in the field of international security, then it follows that policy-relevant work should be valued and rewarded – creating an incentive structure for scholars that facilitates rather than discourages such work. Such an ethos already exists in a number of academic settings (especially but not only in public policy programs) and ought to be encouraged more broadly.

Individual scholars, especially those with well-established careers, have considerable license to choose the topics, the timing, and the targets for their work. They can elect to tackle topics that are germane to the policy issues of the day and calibrate the timing of their work so as to be relevant to current policy discussions. The rise of well-curated and visible web-based publications means that timely, often almost immediate, appearance of written work is available. It is perfectly normal that academic work is often aimed at academic audiences, but it is still realistic and appropriate – and in fact, desirable – for some portion of a scholar’s portfolio to target the policy community, and to seek to contribute to a current policy debate. Indeed, it is possible across time to build relationships with actors in the policy process – career officials, Congressional Staff, and so on. There is often a considerable degree of receptivity in such groups if one makes the effort to reach out to such audiences.⁴⁰ One thing is certain: direct policy impact is unlikely to occur if no effort is made to achieve it. Impact may depend not only on effort, but also on circumstance and luck, but the effort is necessary and some of the factors that could lead to influence are in the scholar’s control.

Though policy influence may be difficult and direct impact may be rare, evidence of the porousness of the policy process exists. Sometimes the influence is indirect and ideational: theories and ideas spread through the community and come to shape or influence how decision-makers see and act in the world. The ideas of Thomas Schelling and other scholars about coercion, for example, influenced US policy in Vietnam – an instance in which a logical and coherent set of ideas didn’t work very well in practice.⁴¹ Scholars and researchers had an outsized impact on thinking about nuclear strategy and nuclear policy, with many of the core ideas and important policy prescriptions emerging from university-based experts and their colleagues at think tanks like the RAND Corporation.⁴² Bernard Brodie’s very early foundational work on nuclear deterrence, for example, was done at Yale. The evolution of issues such as nuclear testing and ballistic missile defense was influenced by academic specialists and their ongoing informal dialogue with Soviet counterparts.⁴³ But there are also examples of much more direct and focused academic imprints on policy, of the sort that the Nunn-Lugar case exemplifies. In the realms of nuclear terrorism and related questions of the security of fissile material, specific policy suggestions – for example, the idea of a four-year global effort to secure all fissile material – issuing from scholars like Matthew Bunn have been taken up by government officials and turned into policy.⁴⁴

In November 1991, an academic study of the nuclear risks attending the collapse of the Soviet Union deflected American policy onto a path that may have helped to prevent a disastrous nuclear outcome. It is hard to imagine a more worthwhile consequence of an academic project.

About the Author

Steven E. Miller is Director of the International Security Program in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the scholarly journal, International Security, and co-editor of the International Security Program’s book series, BCSIA Studies in International Security (which is published by The MIT Press). Previously, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Stockholm, Sweden and he taught Defense and Arms Control Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Miller is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he has long been a member of (and formerly chaired) the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS). He is active in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international scholarly association based in Rome. He is co-chair of the U.S. Pugwash Committee, a member of the Council of International Pugwash, and Chair of the Executive Committee of International Pugwash. Miller has written extensively on nuclear weapons issues, US security policy, and US foreign policy. He has written or coauthored: Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union (1991); Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Fissile Material and Nuclear Weapons (1996); War with Iraq: Costs, Consequences, Alternatives (2002); Nuclear Collisions: Discord, Reform, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime (2012); and Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age: Nuclear Weapons in a Changing Global Order (2019). He is co-author of several reports on the Iran nuclear crisis, including The Iran Nuclear Deal: A Definitive Guide (2015) and The Iran Nuclear Archive: Impressions and Implications (2019). Miller is also editor or co-editor of more than two dozen books, including The Next Great War? The Roots of World War I and the Risk of US-China Conflict (2014).

Notes

1
This is a major theme in Michael C. Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
2
Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Corruption of Patriotism,” in Hans J. Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 306.
3
Paul Musgrave, “Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks,” Foreign Policy, July 3, 2021. See also Ido Oren’s response to Musgrave: “The Leakage Between Political Science and Policy Goes Both Ways,” Duck of Minerva, September 1, 2021.
4
Daniel Drezner, “International Relations Theory In the Past 30 Years,” Washington Post, September 30, 20201.
5
I was a member of this group, along with my colleagues Ash Carter, Kurt Campbell, and Charles Zraket. I was involved in much of the story that follows but have documented this account using published sources so as not to rely on memory.
6
Patrick E. Tyler, “After the Coup, Troubling Question: Whose Finger was on the Nuclear Trigger?,” New York Times, August 24, 1991.
7
For a thorough account of what came to be known as the reciprocal unilateral initiatives that resulted in significant changes in the respective nuclear postures of the two sides, see Susan J. Koch, The Presidential Nuclear Initiatives of 1991-1992, Case Study Series No. 5, Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 2012).
8
Kurt M. Campbell, Ashton B. Carter, Steven E. Miller, and Charles A. Zraket, Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union, (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, November 1991). For a distilled and updated version of the analysis, see Steven E. Miller, “Western Diplomacy and the Soviet Nuclear Legacy,” Survival, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 3-27.
9
There were some indications that even in Moscow there was concern about whether nuclear weapons would remain in “friendly hands” in the event of civil strife in the USSR. See, for example, George Lardner Jr., “Soviets Are Concerned About Security of Their Nuclear Arms, Webster Says,”
Washington Post, May 31, 1991.
10
See, for example, Robert Norris and William N. Arkin, “Nuclear Notebook: Where the Weapons Are,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Vol. 47, No. 9 (November 1991), pp. 48-49. There was particular concern about the wide geographic distribution of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons because they were thought more vulnerable to theft than strategic weapons, a large fraction of which were housed in concrete silos designed to withstand nuclear attack. See George N. Lewis, “The Future of US Nonstrategic Forces,” in Michele A. Flournoy, ed., Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War: Guidelines for US Policy, (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), pp. 110-113.
11
Soviet Nuclear Fission, p. 118.
12
Meyer is quoted in David C. Morrison, “Loose Soviet Nukes: A Mountain or a Molehill?,” Arms Control Today, April 1991, pp. 15, 19.
13
Graham T. Allison, What Happened to the Soviet Superpower’s Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Discussion Paper 2012-4, 2012, p. 4.
14
John J. Mearsheimer, “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993. For the contrary view, see Steven E. Miller, “The Case Against a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 67-80.
15
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs, March-April 1994. Mariana Budjeryn also notes that “Some in Washington were inclined to entertain the idea of a nuclear Ukraine.” See “The Breach: Ukraine’s Territorial Integrity and the Budapest Memorandum,” Issue Brief No. 3, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.
16
On the Russian perspective, see, for example, Dmitri Trenin, “Russia and the Future of Nuclear Policy,” in Burkard Schmitt, ed., Nuclear Weapons: A New Great Debate, Chaillot Papers No. 48, (West European Union Institute for Security Studies, July 2001), p. 121, where Trenin summarizes the first post-Cold War decade as follows: “In the decade of tumultuous, often chaotic, post-Communist transformation, the nuclear arsenals have been kept intact and under control. There has been relatively little theft of nuclear materials.”
17
Karl-Heinz Kamp, “Nuclear Terrorism is Not the Core Problem,” Survival, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter 1998), pp. 168-171.
18
John Mueller, “The Atomic Terrorist?,” paper for the International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, April 30, 2009, as available at https://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/icnnd.pdf. This is a subset of Mueller’s more general skepticism about the importance of nuclear issues. See his Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
19
See Robert Burns, “Nunn, Aspin Withdraw Soviet Aid Proposal,” Associated Press, November 13, 1991, (https://apnews.com/article/d580e9dc13cd16394e88e747b6abf943) from which the Nunn quote is drawn. See also Eric Schmitt, “Moscow Aid Plan Dying in Congress,” New York Times, November 13, 1993.
20
The story is told, and the characterization is found, in Frank Leith Jones, “Dismantling the Soviet Threat: Senator Sam Nunn and the Problem of ‘Loose Nukes’,” Federal History Journal, No. 11, 2019, p. 25. Another account of the Nunn-Aspin proposal is provided in Paul I. Bernstein and Jason D. Wood, The Origins of Nunn-Lugar and Cooperative Threat Reduction, Case Study No. 3, Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Defense University, April 2010, pp. 4-6. Hoffman, The Dead Hand, also notes the indifference of the Bush Administration and describes the “firestorm” of opposition to Nunn-Aspin.
21
Cheney is quoted in Bernstein and Wood, The Origins of Nunn-Lugar and Cooperative Threat Reduction, p. 4.
22
This event and the subsequent evolution of the story are very well documented. See, for example, Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America, (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), pp. 70-73; Ashton B. Carter, “Origins of the Nunn-Lugar Program,” Paper for the Presidential Conference on William Jefferson Clinton, Hofstra University, November 10-12, 2005, available at https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/hofstra_presidential_conference_presentation_november2005.pdf; Sam Nunn and Richard G. Lugar, “The Nunn-Lugar Initiative: Cooperative Denuclearization in the Former Soviet Union,” in Allen E. Goodman, ed., The Diplomatic Record, 1992-1993, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995); Richard Coombs, “US Domestic Politics and the Nunn-Lugar Program,” in John M. Shields and William C. Potter, eds., Dismantling the Cold War: US and NIS Perspectives on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 41-60). Michael Krepon interviewed key players in this drama to buttress his account in Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021) pp. 311-315. Similarly, Jones, “Dismantling the Soviet Threat,” draws on oral histories and interviews as well as the published accounts by protagonists. David E. Hoffman provides a full account in The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy, (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 379-401, emphasizing more than other reconstructions the influence on Senator Nunn of Russian connections. Also relevant is Sara Z. Kutchesfahani, Politics and the Bomb: The Role of Experts in the Creation of Cooperative Nonproliferation Agreements, (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 82-123.
23
Senator Sam Nunn, “Changing Threats in the Post-Cold War World,” in Shields and Potter, Dismantling the Cold War, p. xvii.
24
Combs, “US Domestic Politics and the Nunn-Lugar Program,” p.
25
Bernstein and Wood, The Origins of Nunn-Lugar and Cooperative Threat Reduction, p. 7. See also Jones, in “Dismantling the Soviet Threat,” p. 28: “The impact of the briefing was immediate.”
26
Joseph P. Harahan, With Courage and Persistence: Eliminating and Securing Weapons of Mass Destruction with the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs, DTRA History Series, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, US Department of Defense, 2014, p. 17
27
Gloria Duffy, “Cooperative Threat Reduction in Perspective,” in Shields and Potter, Dismantling the Cold War, p. 24.
28
Krepon, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace, p. 315.
29
Nunn and Lugar, “The Nunn-Lugar Initiative,” p. 144.
30
Bernstein and Wood, The Origins of Nunn-Lugar and Cooperative Threat Reduction, p. 8.
31
For a concise overview of the impact of the Nunn-Lugar program, see Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, “Fact Sheet: The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program,” March 29, 2022. For extremely detailed assessments of progress and shortfalls in cooperative threat reduction, consult the series of annual reports undertaken for a number of years by Matthew Bunn, beginning with The Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control Warheads and Fissile Material, Harvard Project on Managing the Atom/Carnegie Endowment Nonproliferation Project, April 2000.
32
From their forward in Harahan, With Courage and Persistence p. v. Harahan provides a several hundred-page overview of the program and its impact.
33
See Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant.
34
See, for example, John-Thor Dahlburg, “Ukraine Votes to Quit Soviet Union,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1991
35
We were certainly not alone in tacking the nuclear implications of a Soviet collapse. Bruce Blair had been particularly active on this topic and we drew upon and acknowledged his work. See for example his September 1991 Senate testimony, “Soviet Nuclear Weapons Control During the August 1991 Coup Attempt,” Command and Control of Soviet Nuclear Weapons: Dangers and Opportunities Arising from the August Revolution, Testimony before the European Affairs Subcommittee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, September 24, 1991, (Washington DC: USGPO, 1992). Similarly, Frank von Hippel was another expert deeply engaged with this issue at that time. He provides an account of some of his involvement in this crisis in Frank von Hippel and Tomoko Kurokawa, “Citizen Scientist: Frank von Hippel’s Adventures in Nuclear Arms Control (Part 4) – Soviet Nuclear Transparency, the Collapse, and After,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, Vol. 3 (2020), pp. 101-131. William Potter, then and now one of the leading experts on Soviet and Russian nuclear activities, also deserves mention for his efforts to address the dimensions of the Soviet nuclear disintegration. See, for example, William Potter, “Russia’s Nuclear Entrepreneurs,” New York Times, November 7, 1991. Blair, von Hippel, Potter, and others contributed to a collective effort to draw attention to this set of issues and propose policy responses, and many of these colleagues also provided us with feedback when we convened a workshop to review the draft of our manuscript. Soviet Nuclear Fission stands out in part because it was at the right place at the right time.
36
Krepon, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace, p. 315.
37
Nunn, “Changing Threats in the Post-Cold War World,” p. xvii.
38
These phrases are from the op-ed they published shortly after meeting with Ash Carter: Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, “Dismantling the Soviet Arsenal,” Washington Post, November 22, 1991.
39
Desch, Cult of the Irrelevant, p. 210, quoting an assessment by the American Political Science Association of its journal.
40
I make this point having participated in dozens of Congressional briefings as a participant in the Congressional outreach program of the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A brief description of this effort and the broader project of which it is a part is available at https://www.amacad.org/project/promoting-dialogue-arms-control-disarmament.
41
See, for example, Wallace J. Thies, When Governments Collide: Coercion and Diplomacy in the Vietnam Conflict, 1964-1968, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), especially pp. 7-15, which discusses academic analysis of the manipulation of pain for purposes of compelence and the echoes of this work in the Johnson Administration’s strategy for coercing North Vietnam.
42
A story vividly recounted in Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).
43
See, as one example, Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), which finds that ideas developed outside of government and discussed in informal settings had a large effect even on Soviet policy.
44
See Matthew Bunn and Nickolas Roth, “The Past and Potential Role of Civil Society in Nuclear Security,”
CN-278-586, International Conference on Nuclear Security: Sustaining and Strengthening Efforts, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, Austria, February 10- 14, 2020, especially pp. 2-4, which recounts this story and others and provides additional citations.

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