The Carnegie Corporation of New York has awarded the MIT Defense and Arms Control Studies Program (DACS) a two-year grant of $900,000. The award will provide general support for the program, which trains graduate students, conducts research and offers public service on international security topics. DACS is part of the MIT Center for International Studies.
Professor Harvey M. Sapolsky of political science, DACS director, said the Carnegie grant will help support work on four major topics: controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the role professors play in the promotion of peace, the political and managerial lessons of the Cold War, and the opportunities and limitations of American humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions in the post-Cold War era.
"The Carnegie award is crucial to our efforts to understand how the end of the Cold War confrontation can lead to security and stability throughout the world," he said. "We value Carnegie's interest in our work and its leadership in promoting international peace."
The DACS Program has an interdisciplinary faculty of 10, about 35 graduate student affiliates (mostly PhD candidates) and 12 visitors, including four US military fellows and researchers from Israel and India. The program sponsors three seminar series, four conferences series and nine working groups. Its research publications include Breakthroughs and the MIT Security Conference series.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 30, 1997.