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North Korean Ballistic Missiles and US Missile Defense

By Theodore A. Postol¹, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

March 3, 2018

Since before the early 1990s North Korea has been steadily building a capability in liquid propellant ballistic missile systems. The bulk of these systems are land-based and utilize Russian liquid propellant rocket motor and guidance technologies from the 1950s to late 1960s.

In addition to this stable of varied liquid propellant ballistic missiles, North Korea is suddenly in the process of developing a completely new kind of ballistic missile capability - the solid propellant KN-11 submarine launched ballistic missile.

The KN-11 uses ballistic missile technologies that are completely different from those associated with liquid propellant ballistic missiles. The sudden appearance of the KN-11 during the last few years has led to a significant mystery about where this new and distinctly different rocket technology came from. There can be absolutely no doubt that these technologies were acquired from outside of North Korea, but their source remains unknown in the public record.

The significance of the KN-11 is that North Korea will eventually be able to deploy submarine launched ballistic missiles that will have the capacity to attack South Korea and Japan from 360° of azimuth. This capability will completely eliminate even the speculative pretext that ballistic missile defenses will have any realistic capabilities against such North Korean missiles.

Even if the current ballistic missile defenses that the United States is building were to work as claimed, the need to defend against all azimuth ballistic missiles will require an extensive expansion of the number of detection and tracking radars in the defense-system. It will also require an even more extensive expansion of the number of interceptors and launch sites. Proliferated interceptor sites will be essential to place interceptors close enough to defended areas so as to allow them to achieve intercept points before the arrival of submarine-based ballistic missiles. The overall expansion of ballistic missile defenses required against all azimuth ballistic missile attack, both in theory and practice, will drive the cost of any defense system based on practical technologies well beyond anything that even the United States could afford.

The second worrisome area of North Korean ballistic missile development are liquid propellant ballistic missiles with ICBM ranges and payloads. North Korea has been developing liquid propellant ballistic missiles for nearly thirty years and their Russian-made components have been used with great ingenuity by North Korean rocket engineers. However, starting in mid-2017 North Korean ballistic missiles with ICBM ranges and payloads, and a variety of technologies needed to implement them, have appeared suddenly, as if from nowhere.

North Korean rocket engineers are unquestionably deeply knowledgeable about Russian rocket motors and related components, and they have demonstrated that they can creatively use these components and related materials to fabricate rockets from components that were intended for different purposes.

In order to understand the character of the North Korean rocket engineering establishment, it is important to appreciate the critical role that culture plays in professional organizations. The genealogy and soul of the North Korean establishment of rocket engineers is almost certainly entirely derived from the Russian expertise that was attracted to North Korea during the catastrophic economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Although the North Korean rocket engineering establishment today was initially established by Russian engineers and scientists, it is almost certain that by now it has many homegrown North Koreans who have absorbed the innovative engineering culture brought by these Russian engineers.

A striking example of the creativity of North Korean engineers is the Kwangmyoungseong Satellite launch vehicle. It has a first stage that uses a cluster of four Russian Nodong rocket motors, which are basically closely related to the SCUD-B rocket motor. The Nodong motor is roughly twice the size and weight of the SCUD-B rocket motor and generates roughly twice the thrust.

Another exceptional example of rocket design innovation was the Taepodong-1, which was only flown once in 1998. The Taepodong-1 had a second stage that used a variable thrust rocket motor, probably from the SA-5 strategic long-range surface-to-air missile, housed in a SCUD airframe. Without the substitution of an SA-5 variable thrust rocket motor for the SCUD-B motor that would normally be used in the SCUD airframe, it would have not been possible for North Korea to control and fly the third stage—most likely adapted from the Russian SS-21 solid propellant tactical ballistic missile—for injection of a satellite payload into orbit.

These innovations in the Taepodong-1 indicate a strikingly creative use of rocket technologies intended for other purposes. Yet in spite of this, essentially every significant innovation in North Korea’s liquid propellant rocket systems utilizes components from Russian rocket technologies.

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Comments on “The New Era of Nuclear Arsenal Vulnerability” by Lieber and Press, Physics & Society, January 2018

Frank von Hippel¹*, 30 December 2017

“In the Cold War, we always thought that the danger was that the Soviet Union was going to conduct a surprise attack as a bolt out of the blue; and all of our policies, all of our weapons programs, and so on were based on responding to that. But that was never the threat. The threat was always that we would blunder into a nuclear war, and that threat was almost realized in the Cuban missile crisis.”

– William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, Arms Control Today, December 2017, p. 43.

Lieber and Press’ article is the latest in a long series that started in 2006 with “The end of MAD” in International Security, which was summarized in Foreign Affairs under the title, “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”. In that second article, the authors declared “Russia's leaders can no longer count on a survivable nuclear deterrent [and] China's nuclear arsenal is even more vulnerable to a U.S. attack.”

This argument for the credibility of a bolt-out-of-the-blue U.S. nuclear first strike on non-alert Chinese or Russian nuclear forces, with millions of fatalities inevitably resulting, was shocking and resulted in a number of rebuttals – perhaps most thoroughly in an article by Bruce Blair and Yali Chen in China Security, a journal aimed at a Chinese as well as American audience.¹

A decade later, in Physics and Society, Lieber and Press talk more cautiously about a trend toward vulnerability for Russia and China – perhaps because both countries are modernizing their nuclear forces and Russia is deploying a larger share of its ballistic missile submarines at sea and mobile land-based missiles in the field, making them less vulnerable.

In the jargon of nuclear-weapons policy analysts, what is being discussed are “counterforce” techniques for attacking an adversary’s nuclear missiles and bombers before they can be launched. Arms controllers have for 50 years warned about the dangers of the U.S. military’s pursuit of counterforce capabilities against Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons. George Rathjens wrote an excellent article on the subject in Scientific American in 1969, “The Dynamics of the Arms Race.” When the Reagan Administration proposed adding 10,000 accurate counterforce warheads on U.S. ballistic and cruise missiles in the early 1980s, it caused so much alarm that a grass-roots movement to “freeze” the nuclear arms race rose in response and helped end the Cold War.²

Lieber and Press’ efforts to publicize the vulnerability of Russia’s and China’s nuclear forces to a U.S. bolt-out-of-the-blue attack makes arms controllers nervous because such assertions feed the paranoia of worst-case analysts in those countries and increases the danger of accidental nuclear war.

In his book, The Doomsday Machine, Daniel Ellsberg recounts how, in the midst of the 1961 crisis over U.S. access to West Berlin, the Kennedy Administration communicated to the Soviet Union that new U.S. photographic satellites had discovered that the U.S. was way ahead of the Soviet Union in deploying intercontinental nuclear ballistic – an obvious counterforce threat.³ This drove Khrushchev to the desperate stratagem of secretly sending medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Cuba within range of the United States, triggering an extraordinarily serious nuclear crisis.

Counterforce drives a number of dangerous dynamics. One is that it is used to justify large nuclear forces. As we are learning again with North Korea, it would take only a few warheads to gravely wound a large nuclear-weapon state but many to target its nuclear missiles, the airports to which it might disperse its nuclear-armed bombers, its command centers and communications systems and its nuclear-weapon production and storage sites.

The demands for more warheads made in the name of counterforce during the Cold War led to even larger target lists. The U.S. nuclear target list for 1959 contained a total of 4609 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) for nuclear weapons including 178 in Moscow. Of the targets in Moscow, 3 were military and command headquarters, 8 related to radio and television transmission, 10 were military storage areas, 14 related to the electrical grid, 16 were aircraft body and engine factories, 18 related to liquid fuel storage and production, 33 were railroad yards and shops, and the remaining 90 ranged from factories producing agricultural equipment to antibiotics. There were similarly 145 DGZs for Leningrad, 68 in East Berlin, 39 in Warsaw and 18 in Beijing. In each of these cities, there was even one DGZ labeled simply “population”.⁴ In 1961, Ellsberg contrived to get the new Kennedy White House to ask the Strategic Air Command how many people its Single Integrated Operations Plan would kill. To his surprise, they had an estimate, 600 million – or, as Ellsberg describes it, “100 Holocausts.”⁵

A second perverse and dangerous consequence of nuclear counterforce is that it provides an incentive to launch on warning before the counterforce attack arrives. Although the commanders of U.S. strategic nuclear forces deny that this is a “hair-trigger posture,” it is. The U.S. and Russian early warning systems have given false warnings of incoming attacks many times. Publicly-known cases on the U.S. side include a technician playing a training tape without informing the staff of the U.S. early-warning center and a faulty computer chip.⁶ On the Soviet side, in 1983, the early-warning system misinterpreted the reflection of sunlight off the top of clouds as plumes from U.S. intercontinental missiles rising from their silos in the Great Plains⁷ and, in 1995, a scientific rocket launched from an island off Norway was mistaken for a Trident II nuclear missile launched from a U.S. ballistic-missile submarine.⁸

Because the flight time of a ballistic missile from Russia to the U.S. is about 30 minutes and the flight time from the North Atlantic off Norway to Moscow is about 10 minutes, any decision on launch on warning must be made in a matter of minutes. Since we are still here, it appears that to date all false nuclear alarms have either been identified as such within this period or decisions were made to ignore them. But can we expect our luck to hold indefinitely?

Thus, Lieber and Press have spot-lighted a serious concern for any U.S. adversary with nuclear weapons: the possibility that a U.S. President might opt for in a surprise attack to try to knock out its nuclear deterrent. At a time of worsening tensions with Russia, the idea that a bolt-out-of-the blue attack by the U.S. on Russia’s nuclear forces is thinkable could make false alarms from Russia’s inadequate early warning system more credible and increase the probability of Russia’s hair trigger going off. China does not yet have an early warning system and has therefore not been in a position to adopt a launch-on-warning posture. But it is concerned about the possibility of a U.S. first strikes and this concern is being exacerbated by the U.S. drive to build a ballistic missile defense – nominally against North Korea. Perhaps in response, China has been building up the number of its missiles that can reach the United States, making the already difficult two-body problem of negotiating further reductions with Russia into a much more difficult three-body problem.

In the view of many arms-controllers, the United States and the world would be safer if we changed our policy to no first use, abandoned the options of launch on warning and nuclear preemption, and decided that no single person will have the unfettered power to launch U.S. nuclear weapons.

President Obama’s failure to institute any of these changes demonstrates, however, that they will not happen in the absence of a powerful public movement. North Korea’s increasingly credible nuclear threats and the Trump Administration’s threats of preventative nuclear war may, for the first time since the 1980s, have created the conditions for such a movement.

In the past, American physicists have played an important role in educating their fellow citizens about the dangers from nuclear weapons and how those dangers might be reduced. I have written this in the hope that some members of the next generations of physicists will read it and carry on this noble tradition.

References

* Frank N. von Hippel is a senior research scientist and Professor of Public and International Affairs emeritus at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. During 1993-4, he served as Assistant Director for National Security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was awarded the Forum on Physics and Society’s Leo Szilard Lectureship in 2010.

¹ Bruce G. Blair and Chen Yali, “The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy,” China Security, Autumn 2006, pp. 51–77, https://www.issuelab.org/resources/436/436.pdf.

² Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Trans-national Movement to End the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 1999).

³ Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) chapter 10.

⁴ “U.S. Cold War Nuclear Target Lists Declassified for First Time,” https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/. As of this writing, this was the only declassified target list.

⁵ The Doomsday Machine, Prologue.

⁶ Recent False Alerts from the Nation’s Missile Attack Warning System, U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1980.

⁷ Colin Freeman, “How did one grumpy Russian halt Armageddon?” The Telegraph, 11 May 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-man-who-saved-the-world/nuclear-war-true-story/.

⁸ Geoffrey Forden, Pavel Podvig and Theodore Postol, “False alarm, nuclear danger,” IEEE Spectrum, March 2000, pp. 31-39.

North Korean Nuclear Capabilities and U.S. Foreign Policy

Mark S. Bell

Over the course of 2017, North Korea’s nuclear program made giant leaps forward. While North Korea first tested nuclear weapons in 2006, the nuclear tests it conducted during its first decade as a nuclear power were unimpressive: its first four nuclear tests failed to achieve a yield larger than 15 kilotons, substantially smaller than the 25 kiloton yield the United States achieved in 1945 with the plutonium device dropped on Nagasaki. North Korea’s achievements in 2017, however, should leave little doubt that North Korea is now a full member of the nuclear club. A nuclear test in September 2017 with a yield of around 150 kilotons demonstrated that North Korea has mastered the ability to produce sophisticated, high yield nuclear weapons (either a two-stage thermonuclear weapon or a boosted fission weapon). Its missile tests during 2017 were equally impressive, showcasing the ability to launch a genuinely intercontinental capability that could reach any major American city.

North Korea, in short, now has the capability to hold the cities of the United States (and its allies in Asia) at risk with powerful nuclear weapons. Policymakers in the United States must reckon with these capabilities and get used to the constraints they impose on U.S. foreign policy. As much as American policymakers might want to wish away North Korea’s capabilities, or to play down North Korean capabilities, it is better to adjust the sails than to hope the wind disappears.

Today, North Korea benefits from nuclear weapons and this necessarily imposes constraints on U.S. foreign policy in the region. It is often said that nuclear weapons offer little beyond the ability to deter. In fact, precisely because they deter attack, nuclear weapons also act as a shield that reduces the risks and costs of pursuing a host of other foreign policy behaviors. Nuclear weapons can facilitate a range of objectives that states of all stripes may find attractive. Possessing nuclear weapons can allow states to act more independently of allies, engage in aggression, expand their position and influence, reinforce and strengthen alliances, or stand more firmly in defense of the status quo. States with nuclear weapons are aware of these benefits and use nuclear weapons to pursue them. This applies as much to democratic states committed to the status quo as it does to authoritarian or revisionist states.

Consider the case of Britain. A declining, status quo state when it acquired nuclear weapons in the 1950s, Britain was increasingly dependent on the United States for its security, facing growing challenges to its role as the preeminent power in the Middle East, while its commitments to allies were becoming increasingly uncredible. What did it do when it acquired nuclear weapons? Britain used nuclear commitments instead of conventional military commitments (which it could no longer afford) to reassure allies that were increasingly skeptical of Britain’s ability to come to their aid. Similarly, Britain’s nuclear weapons reduced the risks of acting more independently of the United States and of using military force to resist challenges to its position in the Middle East.

Or consider America’s own experience with nuclear weapons. In the aftermath of World War II, a newly nuclear United States put in place a globe-spanning network of alliances and military bases and embraced a forward-leaning posture wholly at odds with its prior history of avoiding entangling alliances and staying out of European conflicts. In the words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, this amounted to a “revolution” in U.S. foreign policy. And it occurred while the United States simultaneously demobilized its armed forces in the aftermath of World War II. Nuclear weapons allowed the United States to resolve the contradiction between expanding its commitments and reducing its ability to meet those commitments through conventional military means. With its nuclear arsenal, the United States could maintain (and take on) alliance commitments around the world without deploying the conventional military forces that would previously have been needed to make such commitments credible. Similarly, holding a nuclear monopoly allowed the United States to engage in more active and belligerent diplomacy in response to perceived Soviet aggression and misbehavior, despite the Soviet conventional military advantage in Europe. In the words of a 1948 National Security Council report: “[I]f Western Europe is to enjoy any feeling of security at the present time…it is in large degree because the atomic bomb, under American trusteeship, offers the present major counterbalance to the ever-present threat of the Soviet military power.”

Today, North Korea is taking advantage of its nuclear weapons, just as past nuclear states have done. North Korea faces serious military threats from South Korea and the United States. South Korea is vastly more economically powerful and has the support of the most powerful state the world has ever known. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States—unconstrained by the absence of another superpower—has shown a repeated inclination to pursue regime change around the world, labelled North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil,” imposed punishing sanctions on North Korea, and kept tens of thousands of forces stationed in the region. What are the political priorities for countries that face these sorts of threats? States in this position would generally like to weaken their adversaries’ alliances, resist their coercion and encroachment, keep them as far from core territory as possible, retain the ability to threaten them, and be able to tolerate higher levels of escalation in crises. While states in a more benign environment face fewer constraints and so can pursue a wider range of goals, states facing serious threats must seek to improve their position against the threat. Nuclear weapons help them do so.

More specifically, North Korea would like to be able to stop the United States from flying military aircraft close to its territory (particularly the B-1B Lancer flights from Guam) and weaken the U.S.-South Korean alliance. It would like to show that Washington’s threats of regime change or military intervention on the Korean peninsula are empty talk, and demonstrate that the United States is unable to shoot down its missiles. And North Korea may want to be able to more credibly threaten military action against South Korea. All of these make good strategic sense for North Korea as it seeks to reduce the threats it faces and strengthen its position on the Korean peninsula in the face of massive American and South Korean conventional military superiority.

How do North Korean nuclear weapons help it achieve these goals? By raising the dangers of escalation, North Korea seeks to drive wedges between the United States and South Korea and raise fears of alliance “decoupling,” as well as to make it riskier for the United States to fly planes close to its airspace or engage militarily on the Korean peninsula. North Korea launches missiles, daring the United States to try (and quite likely fail) to shoot them down; it refuses to back down when challenged; and it raises the possibility of more provocative nuclear tests, such as an atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific Ocean.

These actions are predictable, because they advance North Korean national interests. But they are also dangerous, raising the risk of escalation. This is a feature, not a bug, of North Korean strategy. Raising escalation risks is exactly how North Korea hopes to convince the United States to back off and, therefore, to improve its position on the Korean peninsula. And in the process of such escalation, North Korea might be entirely rational to use nuclear weapons first if things got bad enough: threatening the limited first use of nuclear weapons is a tried and tested strategy that allows states that are outmatched in conventional military power to deter stronger states. Pakistan uses this strategy today to deter Indian attacks, and the United States used it during the Cold War in its efforts to deter the Red Army from invading Western Europe. This risk is exacerbated by the particular way in which the United States fights conventional wars. Any U.S. military operation against North Korea would likely begin with attacks against North Korean Command and Control systems that would threaten North Korea’s ability to use its nuclear weapons and raising the imperative for North Korea to “use them or lose them.”

Any serious policy demands a dose of reality. Denuclearization and regime change are no longer achievable without risking tens (and potentially hundreds) of thousands of American lives. North Korea has nuclear weapons, benefits from having them, and has no interest in giving them up. Denying this reality is not only delusional, but in fact encourages North Korea to take more belligerent actions, accelerate its nuclear program further, demonstrate its capabilities more clearly, and further exacerbate the spiral of escalation.

A better approach would be to seek limited concessions from North Korea in exchange for limited concessions by the United States. For example, North Korea might agree to eschew missile tests over the territory of South Korea and Japan, if the United States limited flights of B1-B bombers close to North Korean territory. Such a deal would acknowledge that North Korea’s capabilities impose constraints on U.S. foreign policy and grant North Korea benefits. At the same time, it reduces the risks of miscalculations or accidental escalation, diminishing North Korean fears of a surprise attack by the United States that could trigger incentives for North Korea to use nuclear weapons, and lending some stability to U.S.-North Korean relations. And if North Korea violated the deal, the U.S. could easily resume those flights.

North Korean nuclear weapons constrain the United States and its foreign policy in the region. But this does not mean the United States has to acquiesce to every North Korean provocation. Nuclear weapons might be useful, but they do not grant states free rein in international politics. During the Cold War, the United States accepted that it was not feasible to persuade the Soviet Union to give up its nuclear weapons, but this did not mean accepting every Soviet act that went against U.S. interests. Rather, it constrained what the United States could achieve because it had to recognize the reality of Soviet nuclear weapons and the benefits they provided to the Soviet Union. Today, denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is not a plausible goal, but the United States can nonetheless likely deter North Korea from taking the actions it worries most about, including an invasion of South Korea.

There are no free lunches in international politics. If the United States wants North Korea to constrain its nuclear program, it will need to offer North Korea something in exchange. And if the United States tries to pursue regime change or denuclearize North Korea by force, it must accept that North Korean nuclear capabilities allow it to force the United States to pay a high price for doing so.

Mark S. Bell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on nuclear weapons and proliferation, international relations theory, and U.S. and British foreign policy. His writings and research are available at www.markbell.org.

Reference

1 This draws on “North Korea Benefits from Nuclear Weapons. Get Used to It,” War on the Rocks, October 2, 2017, available at: https://warontherocks.com/2017/10/north-korea-benefits-from-nuclear-weapons-get-used-to-it/. For the research underpinning these arguments, see Mark S. Bell, “Beyond Emboldenment: How Acquiring Nuclear Weapons Can Affect Foreign Policy,” International Security, vol. 40, no. 1 (Summer 2015): 87-119; Mark S. Bell, “Nuclear Opportunism: A Theory of How States Use Nuclear Weapons in International Politics,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 2017.

Why Undergraduates Can Improve Physics Through Policy

Riley Troyer

A physics undergraduate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a 2017 Mather Science Policy Intern

The AIP Mather Science Policy Internship, is a program funded by Dr. John Mather, the 2006 physics Nobel Laureate and current Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Each summer, two physics students are paid a stipend to work as interns for a congressional office in D.C. The Society of Physics Students (SPS) organizes the internship as part of its summer intern program. Over the summer, the Mather interns work fulltime on Capitol Hill and participate in a variety of activities alongside the other SPS interns. The office duties depend on the individual but can be anything from answering phone calls to helping organize hearings. The Mather internship is a great opportunity for students interested in science policy to learn more about the field and potentially jumpstart a career.

During the summer of 2017, I had the opportunity of a lifetime. I was accepted as a Mather intern and travelled to Washington D.C., all the way from Fairbanks, Alaska. Yes, I know, for many people working in Congress is closer to their version of hell, but for myself, it was something I had dreamed about. I am part of a group of undergraduates who are interested in both physics and politics. From my experience, this group is a lot larger than many people realize and it is growing. Unfortunately, there are very few opportunities and very little information for undergraduates interested in science policy. I want to help change that by showing, through my experience, how big of a difference we can have by getting involved with policymaking and why there should be more opportunities like the Mather internship.

First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I’m a pretty “standard” physics student, a white male who started working toward a college degree right after high school. I bet you’ve never heard that story before. To make it a little more interesting, I’m studying at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and was born and raised here, amid natural phenomena which first got me interested in physics. For example, the Aurora is a common occurrence, and we usually experience the point of homogeneous nucleation at least once a year. That’s when at -40 (pick your temperature scale) water vapor can no longer exist in the atmosphere and spontaneously forms into ice fog.

A few years ago my reasons for studying physics started to change. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, probably related to the 2016 election, but I realized that science policy was an actual profession. I was intrigued. Call me cliché, but I’ve always wanted to use physics to improve the world to the greatest extent possible. National policy seemed like something that could have a big impact. I also enjoyed explaining physics and working with other people. I started looking for opportunities. There were a few, but unfortunately, most were unpaid or for graduate students. The AIP Mather Science Policy Internship, which was through the Society of Physics Students summer internship program was really the only good option. I applied, and as you’ve probably guessed, I was selected for one of the two positions. After a long and intense process, I got a position working for the majority side of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. This was exciting, as the Mather internship had never placed someone in either a majority committee or in the Senate.

If it’s been awhile since your last government class, committees are the policy workhorses of Congress. They review nearly all the bills that are introduced in their area of expertise. While Senators form the committee, it is the staff that does most of the work. Everything from crafting legislation and marking up current bills, to organizing hearings (events where experts speak directly to the Senators about a specific topic). The Senate and House committees are separate, and each committee is split into the majority and minority sides. The other Mather Intern was working for the minority side of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

My experience working for the committee was nothing but great. The chair of the committee is Senator Lisa Murkowski, from Alaska. While I don’t agree with all of her positions, I think she is very reasonable and makes decisions with her constituents in mind. This attitude transferred directly into the committee atmosphere and the entire staff was excellent to work with.

So, I had a position as an intern in Congress, but what exactly did I do, and did it matter that I was a physics major? The answer to the second question is a definite yes. As I worked on various tasks for the committee, I found my physics education invaluable. One of my first duties involved summarizing some current high-energy physics projects including DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment). I had arrived in the committee office about the same time that the budget request from the Trump Administration had been released. Naturally, the staff was interested in what was contained in the request, in particular for the Department of Energy (DOE), which puts a significant amount of funding towards high-energy physics.

As the summer progressed, I continuously used the skills from my physics major. Energy storage was a subject that the committee staff wanted to know more about. Systems like pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal storage, and batteries. The staff didn’t have time to research this themselves, but I had a technical background, so they gave me the job. I spent a large portion of the summer researching energy storage and explaining the technical ins and outs to a mainly non-scientific audience. In the end, I authored a 15 page report on the issue to help educate the committee staff members.

The report was my largest project, but I also helped with various side tasks. Number crunching in excel, collecting signatures, and staffing the front office, among other typical intern tasks. I’ll admit, my physics skills didn’t directly apply to many of these, however, I never once felt like I was in over my head. Working in the Senate certainly wasn’t easy, but I found that the challenges and stresses of a physics degree had more than prepared me for this work. In fact, this is something I thought a lot about. I believe physics undergraduates interested in policy are perfect candidates for congressional staff positions. Unfortunately, it can be a challenging area to get into, in part because there are very few opportunities for us to explore it.

In the coming years, I would like to see more of the professional physics societies invest in undergraduate internships in policy. Spending a summer on Capitol Hill, I didn’t see as many staffers with scientific backgrounds as I would have liked. I believe that physics students can offer a solution to this problem and improve science awareness in Congress. More internships would allow more students to get their foot in the door for potential careers. If I decide to pursue a career in policy I know that my internship will make getting a job much easier. Getting a job on Capitol Hill often hinges on connections, inside knowledge, and prior experience, all of which I gained from the summer.

I know that quite a few organizations offer science policy fellowships, but from what I can tell, these are exclusively for graduate or postgraduate students. There is certainly a place for fellowships, but I think undergraduates can make just as big of an impact. In regard to congressional staff positions, the earlier you start the better. In addition, the necessary skills don’t extend past the skills of a typical physics undergraduate.

I was surprised this summer by how much power and influence staff members have over policy. Almost all of the Senators statements, questions, briefings, etc. were written and prepared by staff members, the people I was working with. In my opinion, more science policy internships will lead to more scientifically literate people working in Congress. Because of how much power staff members have, I believe that more physics backgrounds in Congress will lead to an increase in funding for the sciences.

Undergraduate physics students can make a huge difference in science policy. We have the skills and knowledge, we have the interest and drive, all that we need is a little help getting started.

I would also like to give an enormous thank you to Dr. John Mather. It was his generous donation that supports this internship and allowed me to have this amazing opportunity.

If you are interested in hearing more about my summer experience, I kept a weekly blog as part of the internship. You can find it here: https://www.spsnational.org/programs/internships/2017/riley-troyer

Rntroyer@alaska.edu

Innovations in High School Science and Mathematics Classrooms

Mary Beth Dittrich

It’s an exciting time to be a high school science or math teacher. The classroom that we knew growing up is slowing fading into the shadows. Taking notes on a boring lecture is being replaced with video lessons, interactive projects, and group inquiry and investigation. As I reflect on my 15 years of teaching math, I have never been so encouraged by the future.

I teach at Carondelet High School—an all-girls, Catholic high school about 40 miles east of San Francisco. In our over-50 year history we have seen a dramatic change in the role of women in society and the work place. Employers who once sought out women for primarily support roles are now actively hiring them for top positions. Carondelet is addressing these changes in our world with new courses and new ways to teach them.

Here are some of the innovative changes we have adopted in the past four years.

Physics 9
Four years ago we instituted a “physics first” program for our ninth graders. Using the Active Physics text, we introduced our girls to a hands-on, investigative physics curriculum. It is an algebra-based program in which they study units on motion, electricity, waves, and light. Each unit begins with a discussion of “what do you see” and “what do you wonder” about a presented situation. These discussions are followed up with more classical physics experiments that combine continued observation and questioning with data collection and hypotheses. Only after completing these activities are they presented with the physical laws that govern what they have discovered.

In the beginning this approach was challenging. Our students were used to be spoon-fed the content. They had little experience in observing, questioning, wondering, and drawing their own conclusions. Many were frustrated with the experiments. They didn’t know where they were going or how they were going to get there. “Just tell me the answer,” was a common plea. Our teachers did not relent and as the year continued students grew accustomed to the process and learned the observation and reasoning skills that they would need in other courses.

Freshman physics is followed by chemistry in the sophomore year and biology junior year. Our life science teachers particularly favor this sequence of courses as it allows more time for the development of students’ reasoning skills before studying biological systems.

One of the reasons we adopted this program was to have our students study science earlier in their high school careers and to encourage them to study more science. As a result 68% of our seniors have chosen to take a fourth science course (this is beyond the three-year graduation requirement). Several have even chosen to double up in their junior or senior year and will graduate with five years of science. Their course choices include AP-level Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Environmental Science, and Computer Principles, as well as Anatomy and Physiology, Marine Biology, Biotechnology, and Forensic Science.

Flipped Mathematics Classroom
The same year the science department instituted its changes, the math department decided to “flip” all of our Algebra 1 classes. The flipped classroom model takes what was traditionally done in class (lecture and direct instruction) and moves it to the home. Then what was traditionally considered homework (typically practice problems from the textbook) is now completed in the classroom. For their homework students watch and take notes on a teacher-produced video posted on YouTube. Students are then encouraged to communicate to their teacher their understanding of and any questions about the lesson. Currently we are using the EDpuzzle app to facilitate this conversation. When students arrive in class the next day, they are ready to engage with the material and to begin work on the traditional practice problems. The classroom environment becomes student-centered. The focus in class is on students practicing and producing work, not the teacher teaching the concepts in front of the class while the students listen. This model allows the teacher to monitor students more closely and to provide additional support to struggling students.

We strongly encourage our students to work in groups—to talk about the problems and their approaches to solving them. Our math classrooms are ringed with whiteboards. Students enjoy tackling challenging problems collaboratively at the board. It gets them up out of their desks working together. This also provides them the opportunity to see and comment on each other’s work.

Our parents have wholeheartedly endorsed our approach. They are happy that they are no longer burdened by late night homework help and tears over confusing concepts. They appreciate the fact that their daughters are more responsible for and in control of their own math learning.

While this model has worked effectively for the past few years, it has had its limitations. All students still progress through the material at the same teacher-led pace. Some are anxious to move faster bored by a repeat of their eighth grade math course. While others needing a slower pace get left behind never completely mastering the concepts. As well, we felt the need to incorporate more practical application (word) problems that are the reason behind why we do math in the first place. This has led us to a total rethinking of our Algebra 1 program and eventually Geometry and Algebra 2.

Redesigned Algebra 1 Curriculum
In the 2018-2019 school year we will be rolling out a completely redesigned Algebra 1 curriculum. We will remove remedial and honors distinctions from our existing courses and enroll all ninth grade students not taking Geometry into a self-paced, personalized mastery Algebra 1 program. Students will be working collaboratively in fluid groups as they self-pace through the curriculum. They will have the ability to spend more time on topics if needed or can advance at a faster pace potentially completing the Algebra curriculum in less than one year and continuing on to Geometry. Students will also be able to self-select and honors distinction.

The number of rote, out-of-context exercises will be limited. Students will complete just enough of these to show mastery. They will then move on to practical, cross-curricular application problems solved collaboratively in a group. The unit will culminate in a topic challenge (a multi-faceted application) and an assessment (test).

We have purposely removed the traditional textbook and language such as “chapters,” “sections,” and “problems.” Currently very few students see a relationship between what they just did in the current chapter to what they will be doing in the next. Too often they learn the material for the test without seeing its connection to the whole of mathematics or to life outside of school. We want to provide them with challenging, deep and inter-connected math tasks that allow them to struggle, persevere, discover and grow.

As I said earlier, we will begin this program next school year. As such, we are still in the planning process. It is a daunting, yet exciting, task to completely reshape a mathematics program. A colleague in the English department recently asked me, “What if it doesn’t work?”—to which I replied, “It will. We will make it work.” That’s exactly the attitude we want our students to have.

A New Mindset
Underlying our curriculum changes, particularly in the math department, is the desire to create and nurture in our students a growth mindset. The concept of a growth mindset was put forth by Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2006 and applied to mathematics education by Jo Boaler in her book Mathematical Mindsets, 2016. A person with a growth mindset believes she can learn anything with enough hard work and perseverance. Her potential is limitless. She embraces challenge. She sees failure as an opportunity to grow and feedback as constructive.

Contrast this with a fixed mindset which says that we were born with certain talents and abilities. Our abilities are unchanging and our potential for growth is limited. Unfortunately this is the fixed mindset math education that most of our students received in their first eight years of schooling with its focus on rote memorization, speed, and problems solved in a vacuum. This system clearly defined who was good at math and who wasn’t. Ability groups pigeon-holed students further reinforcing a fixed mindset which told them you will always struggle with math. Because of this, too many of our students, and unfortunately their parents as well, believe that they don’t have a “math brain” and therefore will never be “good” at math. This is why our math department has embraced the growth mindset and share these insights with our students on a daily basis.

My colleagues in the math department and I love both mathematics and teaching. We want to convey this passion for math to our students. We want them to realize that anyone can master mathematics. We want them to see the importance of determination and grit. We want them to know that their brains can grow. We want them to take their time and think deeply about a problem. We want them to struggle to understand how and why something works the way it does—how it applies to different situations. We want our students to see that math is beautiful, creative, and surrounding them. It is patterns and shapes and colors. It is so much more than equations and solutions—so much more than they ever saw in school.

Why?
I recently saw a sweatshirt that said, “Innovate or Die.” While it momentarily took me off guard, I do believe it. The world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years—and it isn’t going to stop changing. Neither should the way we teach our young people. A continual review and updating of our teaching practices is imperative. Our students need to be ready for a world and a job market that doesn’t yet exist. They will need skills we can’t even imagine. To be ready for this future our students need teachers today that are forward-thinking—teachers who embrace and welcome the changes ahead. They need teachers who are willing to try new methods, to take chances, to be passionate and bold. As I said above, it is an exciting time to be a high school science or math teacher.

Mary Beth Dittrich has been teaching math at her alma mater Carondelet High School in Concord, CA for the past 15 years. Previous to that she taught Religious Studies and served as the school's Dean of Students and Academic Advisor. She and her husband Tom, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, live in Danville, CA.