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Graham Allison

Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; Douglas Dillon Professor of Government; Faculty Chair, Dubai Initiative

Member of the Board

Contact:
Telephone: (617) 496-6099
Fax: (617)-495-8963
Email: graham_allison@harvard.edu

Experience

Director of Harvard's major Center for Science and International Affairs, Graham Allison has for three decades been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy with a special interest in terrorism. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, Dr. Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal." This resulted in the safe return of more than 12,000 tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics and the complete elimination of more than 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads previously targeted at the United States and left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus when the Soviet Union disappeared.

As Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Dr. Allison has assembled a team of more than two dozen leading scholars and practitioners of national security to analyze terrorism in its multiple dimensions. Products include: Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy (1996), America's Achilles Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack (1998), Catastrophic Terrorism (1998), and others. 

Dr. Allison's latest book, Nuclear Terrorism: the Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, was published in 2004, is now in its third printing, and was selected by The New York Times as one of the "100 most notable books of 2004."  It presents a strategy for preventing nuclear terrorism organized under a doctrine of "Three Nos:" no loose nukes; no new nascent nukes; and no new nuclear weapons states.

A 1995 Washington Post op-ed by Dr. Allison warned that: "In the absence of a determined program of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism before this decade is out." Dr. Allison was the organizer of the Commission on America's National Interests (1996 and  2000) that included leading Senators and national security specialists from across the country (former Senator Sam Nunn, Senators John McCain, Bob Graham, and Pat Roberts, Condoleezza Rice, Richard Armitage, Robert Ellsworth, and others). The Commission's work highlighted the threat of mega-terrorism as a major challenge to U.S. national interest. Senator Roberts credited the work of the Commission as inspiration in his creating a Subcommittee on Emerging Threats of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At the initial session of that Subcommittee on March 11, 1999, he warned that there is "a real opportunity for a handful of zealots to wreak havoc on a scale that hitherto only armies could obtain. Targets will be selected for their symbolic value, like the World Trade Center in the heart of Manhattan, because terrorists need to escalate their attacks, making each more spectacular and horrific than its predecessor." Dr. Allison is also a leading analyst of Russia and its transformation to democracy and market economy as well as an authority on the threat of loose nukes and weapons of mass destruction. He is the author of a dozen books, hundreds of articles in the foremost journals and newspapers and is a sought-after speaker and commentator. Dr. Allison's seminal book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, first published in 1971, and significantly revised and re-issued in 1999, ranks among the bestsellers in political science with more than 400,000 copies in print.

Dr. Allison was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was educated at Davidson College; Harvard College (B.A., Magna Cum Laude, in History); Oxford University (B.A. and M.A., First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics); and Harvard University (Ph.D. in Political Science).

Case Studies:

ISP-202 -- Iran

ISP-202 -- Energy and Climate