#  Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons: Is it Legal? Is it Constitutional? Is it Just? 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 4, 2017** 

 09:00AM - 05:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Harvard Science Center**  



 

 



 

 Nuclear weapons strategy in the United States is designed around “presidential first use,” an arrangement that enables one man, the president, to kill and maim many millions of people in a single afternoon. What legal or philosophical principle differentiates the moral harm or moral wrong that would be attributed to a terrorist, non-state actor or hacker who delivered a nuclear weapon from a presidential launch of a nuclear weapon? The conference will bring together international and constitutional scholars and statesmen to examine the nature of presidential first use in the United States, as well as parallel arrangements in the other eight nuclear states.

 To register for the conference, visit: <http://masspeaceaction.org/event/presidential-first-use/>

###  Speakers

 **Bruce Ackerman**  
Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale Law School

 **Kennette Benedict**  
Former Executive Director of *Bulletin of Atomic Scientists*; University of Chicago

 **Bruce Blair**  
Former Missile Launch Officer; Princeton University

 **Sissela Bok**   
Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Harvard School of Public Health

 **Rosa Brooks**  
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

 **John Burroughs**  
Director, the United Nations Office of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms

 **Hugh Gusterson**  
Professor of International Affairs and Anthropology, The George Washington University

 **Jim McGovern**  
Congressman for the 2nd District of Massachusetts

 **Zia Mian**  
Co-director of the Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University

 **William Perry**  
Former US Secretary of Defense (1994-1997); Stanford University

###  Conference Co-Chairs

 **Elaine Scarry**  
Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University

 **Jonathan King**  
Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 Cosponsored with Harvard’s Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, Mass Peace Action, Mass Peace Action Education Fund, American Friends Service Committee, Council for A Livable World, Future of Life Institute, World beyond War, Union of Concerned Scientists, and *Boston Review*.



 

 



 

 

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