Events at Reed

How do well-balanced U.S. military officers collectively explain to themselves what it means to draw up large-scale “real” plans to execute nuclear war? What are the organizational processes that enable them to work at the edge of hypothetical death? How do officers understand their mission, and how do they focus their attention? What can and cannot be said? 

Lynn Eden is an affiliate of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She was a senior research scholar and Associate Director for Research at CISAC until January 2016. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the department of history at Carnegie Mellon. In the area of international security, Eden focuses on U.S. foreign policy and nuclear history; science & technology studies; and organizations, including routines, learning from history, humor, and storytelling. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates. She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History, which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club. Eden’s book, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation won the American Sociological Association’s 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology. 

Sponsored by the Elizabeth C. Ducey Political Science Lecture Fund. For more information on the series, visit their website.