By Jess Hobart

Special to the Gazette

Vice President Al Gore kicked off the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs' two-day Inaugural Symposium last weekend. Speaking to a packed ARCO Forum audience of students, faculty, and Symposium guests, the Vice President compared the seriousness of the global warming threat for the 21st century to the threat of nuclear weapons in this century. He underscored the magnitude of the climate change threat by charting the growth of CO2 emissions over the last 2,000 years, noting that until the last century there was virtually no growth in emissions. In the last 100 years, emissions have increased by 150 percent, with accelerating growth expected for the future.

Gore's global warming message did not fall on deaf ears. Global climate disruption is one of the areas in which Belfer Center researchers lead the field. John Holdren, chair of the Center's Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, and Robert Stavins, chair of its Environment and Natural Resources Program, have played a major role in briefing the President, Cabinet officials, and their senior deputies on the subject this year.

A lively question-and-answer session followed Gore's presentation, with a final query put by a Harvard undergraduate: "If you were a student and could ask a question of Chinese President Jiang Zemin tomorrow, what would you ask?" The Vice President paused, then answered: "When you were a student during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, you felt that your freedom of communication was suppressed to the point where you were not free to say what was really on your mind. Can you draw upon that personal experience to understand the feelings of students exactly that age today in China who may disagree with this policy or that pursued by the current government, and feel that they don't have the freedom to say what's on their minds?"

Weekend of Thoughtful Discussion

Gore's speech launched a weekend of discussion on issues ranging from the Middle East peace process to megaterrorism, U.S.-China relations to the economic underpinnings of environmental policy. The question for the weekend was: What are the most important challenges to American security and well-being in the quarter-century ahead? The objective was to help enlighten, inform, and shape the post-Cold War research agenda of the newly renamed and reinvigorated Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The conversation was joined by 200 present and former high-level government officials, strategists, and thinkers, including current and former Cabinet officials from the Defense, State, Treasury, and Energy departments, the CIA, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Security Council.

Senators Honored for Nuclear Arsenal Work

Friday evening, after Gore's speech, Kennedy School Professor Ashton Carter and Belfer Center Director Graham Allison honored Sen. Richard Lugar and former Sen. Sam Nunn for their roles in securing the post-Soviet nuclear arsenal, work that Allison called "the most significant congressional achievement in national security affairs since the dawn of the nuclear age; an instance of congressional leaders standing up and taking action."

Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Gen. Jack Sheehan, and Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. all saluted Nunn and Lugar for their vision and leadership. Letters from Secretary of Defense William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and President Bill Clinton commended Senators Nunn and Lugar for their efforts. The senators were generous in their praise of the Center's works, identifying the Center book, Soviet Nuclear Fission, as the analytical catalyst for their legislation.

After dinner and a performance by Harvard's Din and Tonics, Sen. Pete Domenici offered a number of hard truths about the necessity for the U.S. to pursue civilian nuclear power as the best source of environmentally friendly energy for the U.S. and the world. He also urged sharp reductions in nuclear weapons stockpiles, so long as no new nuclear threat looms on the horizon. His remarks sparked a wide-ranging discussion that drew in Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, former hydrogen bomb designer Dick Garwin, and energy deregulation analyst and Kennedy School Professor Bill Hogan, among others.

A Saturday breakfast session featured Deputy National Security Adviser Jim Steinberg on "The China Question." Fairbank Center Director Ezra Vogel joined in the conversation before leaving for the airport to greet Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

Ambassador Robert Blackwill led a session on the Middle East in which Gen. Scowcroft and Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland delivered a stinging critique of the U.S. policy of "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq. Abdullah Toukan, King Hussein of Jordan's science adviser, and Belfer Center analyst Shai Feldman led a no-holds-barred discussion of the future of the Middle East peace process.

In a concurrent session on the environment and the economy, Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, Mary Gade, director of Illinois' EPA, Kathleen McGinty, chair of the President's Council on Environmental Quality, and Paul Portney, president of Resources for the Future, emphasized the many ways in which environmental quality and economic growth are perceived to be (and have been) in conflict, and called for technological innovation that will achieve environmental quality at the lowest cost to our economy.

In a panel on the press and U.S. foreign policy, Marvin Kalb, director of the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, asked panelists: "What is the responsibility of the press in covering foreign affairs?" As he moves from being State Department spokesman to Ambassador to Greece, Nicholas Burns ventured an extremely candid condemnation of CBS, NBC, and ABC television networks and the national news magazines, whom he said have "opted out of foreign news coverage. They have not seriously reported on what the U.S. does and ought to do in the

world." News organizations, he said, must not cover only what Americans want to know about, but what they must know about. He commended CNN, newspapers, and National Public Radio for their efforts to provide thoughtful coverage of international news.

In a panel discussion on "The Energy/Climate Challenge," current government officials, Timothy Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs; Ernest Moniz, undersecretary of energy; and Charles Curtis, former deputy secretary of energy, spoke openly about the challenges facing the United States as it enters the Kyoto Conference. They emphasized that the key relationships to watch will be U.S.-EU and U.S.-China. The panelists highlighted the gulf between the fossil fuel industry's view that strict controls on greenhouse gases will smother the U.S. economy, and the view of the departments of Energy and State that climate change will have disastrous results and that starting on a path to avoid it has trivial if any economic impacts if done correctly.

John Deutch, former director of the CIA, Robert Gallucci, former BCSIA fellow and current dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger faced off about the threat of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in a panel on "Megaterrorism." One key point of agreement was Bob Gallucci's proposition that the threat of one or more nuclear weapons being detonated on American soil has actually increased since the end of the Cold War. They also agreed that the current U.S. policy is "waiting for a nuclear wakeup call." Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons control has been an enduring focus of the Belfer Center's research.

At the closing lunch the question was "Is a coherent U.S. foreign policy possible?" James Schlesinger argued no -- because "domestic constituencies, most notably ethnic groups, have acquired excessive influence over our foreign policy. . . . It can scarcely be said that we have a foreign policy at all." Former OMB Director Richard Darman mostly agreed, arguing that a populist foreign policy is an almost inevitable consequence of current American politics and culture. On the other hand, former Undersecretary of State Bob

Zoellick argued that a coherent U.S. foreign policy is not only possible,

but should be in the President's job description.

Now in its 24th year, the renamed and reendowed Belfer Center is the hub of the Kennedy School of Government's research, teaching, and training in international security affairs, environmental and resource issues, and science and technology policy. The Center's mission is to provide leadership in advancing policy-relevant knowledge about the most important challenges of international security and other critical issues where science, technology, and international affairs intersect. BCSIA's leadership begins with the recognition of science and technology as driving forces transforming threats and opportunities in international affairs.

The heart of BCSIA is its resident research community of more than 100 scholars: Harvard faculty, analysts, practitioners and each year a new group of research fellows. The Center houses four distinct, but interactive research programs: the International Security Program; the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program; the Environment and Natural Resources Program; and the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project.