Professor wins award for nuclear insight


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USC Dornsife Associate Professor of International Relations Jacques Hymans was awarded the University of Louisville’s 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

Only four Grawemeyer awards are given annually, recognizing work in education, world order, music composition and psychology. Each winner also receives $100,000. Hymans is being recognized for his progressive book, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians and Proliferation. The book has also received the American Political Science Association’s 2013 Don K. Price Award and the National Academy for Public Administration’s Louis Brownlow Award.

“I’m very grateful and pleased that the book seems to be striking a chord,” Hymans told USC News. “For years, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the world is on the verge of a generalized nuclear free-for-all … overreactions to a phantom threat can be extremely costly.”

Hymans’ book discusses the challenges that developing nations face in building successful nuclear programs and emphasizes their high rate of failure. According to the book, the leaders of these developing nations have unrealistically high expectations for the development of successful nuclear weapons and for how much time this process will take. Hymans argues these factors have implications for how the United States should negotiate with these countries, such as Iran, because the conversations are perhaps not as immediately threatening as the developing nations’ leaders make them appear. Hymans’s book brings to light an exaggeration of the nuclear power developing nations hold and helps disillusion the “nightmare scenario.”

“Negotiate with care, but also with confidence,” Hymans told USC News. “Even if the current talks break down, an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout is not imminent. At the same time, if there is a reasonable deal on the table, take it.”

Hymans is already a recognized author for his 2006 book, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions and Foreign Policy, which received the International Society of Political Psychology’s Alexander L. George Book Award and the Mershon Center’s Edgar S. Furniss Book Award. He plans to continue his research on the effects of nuclear efforts. Currently, he is researching how the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear disaster in Japan has affected the country politically, a project funded by a Mellon Fellowship.

 

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