Scott Sagan

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Scott Douglas Sagan is a professor of political science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He graduated from Oberlin College (B.A. in Government, 1977) and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1983. His dissertation was a critique of modern deterrence theory. He is known for his research on the organizations managing nuclear weapons and published on the subject in The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993). Bruce G. Blair writes, "Scott Sagan's book [The Limits of Safety] is nothing less than a tour de force.... It is by far the most carefully researched and painstaking study of nuclear weapons safety ever written." He also is one of the leading pessimist scholars about nuclear proliferation, and his co-authored book with Kenneth Waltz, "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed", is widely read and cited in the literature on nuclear weapons. Sagan writes in the book, "the United States and the Soviet Union survived the cold war and did not use their massive nuclear-weapons arsenals during the period's repeated crises. This should be a cause of celebration and wonder; it should not be an excuse for inaction with either arms control or nonproliferation policies."

Sagan is a consultant to numerous government agencies and national laboratories. Sagan has won three teaching awards for his undergraduate lecture courses at Stanford: the International Studies Association’s 2008 Deborah Misty Gerner Innovative Teaching Award, Stanford University’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and Stanford University's 1996 Laurance and Naomi Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching.