The Program on Science and Global Security Marks 50 Years of Nuclear Disarmament Efforts

Fifty years ago, India alerted the world there was a new player in the atomic arms race with its first nuclear weapons test, code-named Smiling Buddha. That same year, two Princeton University scientists launched something new, now known as the Program on Science and Global Security (SGS). The project had a bold agenda: to confront the nuclear threat worldwide by advancing nuclear-arms control and ending the development and deployment of the world’s deadliest weapons. 

Through decades of research, policy outreach, education, and training, SGS has pursued its goal of a world free of nuclear weapons. Its beneficiaries have been policymakers, politicians, activists, media, the general public, and countless Princeton students. 

Global in its Aspirations 

Since 1998, SGS has gathered South Asian physicists to discuss the South Asian nuclear-arm race. From left: A.H. Nayyar, M.V. Ramana, Ramamurthi Ragaraman and Zia Mian.

SGS began when two public-interest-oriented researchers met in 1974. Frank von Hippel, a theoretical physicist specializing in elementary particles, had arrived in New Jersey from Stanford, where his students’ opposition to the Vietnam War had turned his thoughts toward the need to challenge U.S. policies and push them toward peaceful paths. 

“My grandfather had been in the Manhattan Project, so I was interested in nuclear-weapons policy growing up,” said von Hippel. “I thought I had to become a famous physicist before anybody would listen to me. I didn’t know how to contribute until I met Hal Feiveson and saw that he was chewing on an interesting problem.” 

Physicist Hal Feiveson *72 had impressed von Hippel with his work at the U.S. State Department to create the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an international agreement limiting the development and spread of the bomb and establishing a binding obligation to achieve nuclear disarmament. 

Feiveson and von Hippel pressed their cause, urging public scrutiny of U.S. nuclear-weapon and nuclear-energy policies, and recruiting and training an array of young science, engineering, and policy experts. 

SGS co-founder Frank von Hipple (shown here in 1978) is traveling less than in the past, such as when he visited Moscow to brief Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear weapons test ban. But he is still researching, writomg and working with promising new talent such as Sébastien Philippe, whom he considers a leader of SGS' third generation.

They advocated for the Nuclear Freeze movement by publishing in scholarly journals and, in 1982, joined a million other activists (and a busload of other Princetonians) in New York’s Central Park to call for nuclear disarmament and an end to the Cold War. They founded the peer-reviewed research journal Science and Global Security in 1989 and traveled to Moscow to meet with members of the Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat. 

Feiveson, now senior research scientist emeritus, and von Hippel, senior research scientist and professor emeritus, co-directed SGS until 2006. Christopher Chyba, professor of astrophysics and international affairs, directed the program until 2016. Since then, it has been led by Zia Mian, a physicist, and Alexander Glaser, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and international affairs. 

Global in its Influence 

Nuclear threats and risks have ebbed and flowed during the last half-century. Though there are now over 12,000 nuclear weapons, down from 60,000 at the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear nations has increased to nine: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. 

During the last 50 years, SGS has accomplished significant achievements for the disarmament cause. Its work in the 1980s with Soviet scientists contributed to the end of nuclear testing by the superpowers, substantial bilateral reductions in nuclear weapons, and the unilateral reduction of Soviet heavy weapons in Central Europe. In the 1990s, SGS introduced its Project on Peace and Security in South Asia, bringing together Indian and Pakistani physicists to address the South Asian nuclear arms race. 

Alexander Glaser and Sébastian Philippe have collaborated on a novel way to verify the authenticity of nuclear weapons.

Building on early work by von Hippel, Glaser and his students have pioneered theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches to reconstruct historical uranium enrichment and plutonium production in nuclear weapons programs, holding countries accountable as part of future disarmament processes. He has also developed partnerships, including with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Their efforts include innovative methods to inspect sensitive nuclear-weapon facilities, as well as the use of robots and virtual reality to measure nuclear warheads without revealing classified design information. 

SGS also embraces the role of global citizen scientists, said Mian: “We engage with researchers in academia, government officials in the U.S. and other countries, with nongovernmental organizations around the world, and have given many briefings at the United Nations.” For him, SGS seeks, “to engage and inform nuclear policy debates and decision making everywhere and have ordinary people be an informed part of the decision making.” 

SGS co-founder Harold Feiveson (shown here in 1978), has focused some work on ways to dismantle the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

With an eye to this future, since 2020, SGS has recruited young scientists and engineers from around the world to the annual Princeton School on Science and Global Security. The school is the latest iteration of a U.S./Russian initiative von Hippel began with a Soviet scientist to train the next generation to “learn about nuclear weapons issues together and see themselves as part of one community addressing a shared danger,” said Mian. 

Sébastien Philippe, a French SGS research scholar, runs attention-grabbing collaborations with investigative journalists. In 2019, the group acquired a declassified archive of documents from the French government. Philippe used it to independently reconstruct, for the first time, the impact of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, the exposure of the local population and the contamination of the environment. The resulting book, Toxique, said Philippe, led the president of France to make an apology in Tahiti, to open all French archives related to nuclear testing, to improve compensation to nuclear test victims and to clean up remaining pollution. 

Philippe, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now studies the effects of nuclear war and nuclear testing and the impacts of U.S. plans to modernize its nuclear weapons. 

From Science and Policy to Art and Culture 

Since 2020, SGS has hosted a training program of engineers and scientists from around the world to learn about nuclear threats and remediation. Shown here is the 2023 group, comprising 17 students from seven countries with SGS staff.

Turning technical and policy research and findings into storytelling and art has become a key tool in the SGS strategy. On the Morning You Wake (to the End of the World), a virtual reality film developed at SGS by Glaser and doctoral student Tamara Patton, is based on the January 2018 incident “where everybody in Hawaii was falsely told by the alert system that there were incoming missiles from North Korea,” explained Glaser. “There was complete panic.” Glaser served as executive producer and provided technical advice for the film. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, won a jury award at SXSW later that year, and has been exhibited around the world. 

A traveling art exhibition, Shadows and Ashes: The Perils of Nuclear Weapons, developed by SGS in 2017, explains the danger nuclear weapons pose. Plan A, the exhibit’s animated short film, shows the stages of war escalating between the United States and Russia using realistic nuclear-force postures, targets, and fatality estimates. SGS projected there would be more than 90 million people killed and injured within the first few hours of the conflict. 

Plan A also was part of the fall SGS 50-year anniversary exhibition, Close Encounters, Facing the Bomb in a New Nuclear Age, which features an immersive multimedia installation, the bomb, created by Eric Schlosser ’81 and Smriti Keshari, and material by SGS on current nuclear threats. 

The anniversary celebration will continue throughout the spring semester and include the launch of von Hippel’s memoir and a reunion of SGS researchers from its first 50 years. “It will be a chance to reflect on our work, learn some lessons and assess the challenges ahead,” said Mian.