Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Nuclear fuel supply assurance is a long-term issue that has been studied in various venues since the beginning of the nuclear area. This topic has recently gained greater urgency with various countries now embarking on their own nuclear power programs and considering construction of their own fuel cycle facilities, including enrichment plants, to provide for their own fuel. Some of these fuel facilities could however be diverted for weapons material production within clandestine military programs. In this context the assured provision of internationally supplied nuclear fuel and fuel supply guarantees are meant to discourage new nuclear countries from developing domestic sensitive fuel cycle facilities. An IAEA initiative on this topic has culminated in a September 2006 IAEA Special Event Seminar held in conjunction with the 50th General Conference. Eleven different proposals for instituting fuel supply assurance arrangements were presented (some prior to and some during) the meeting. Noted among them was the NTI proposal that included a commitment from Warren Buffet to contribute 50 Million Dollars towards the purchase of a Uranium stockpile that would form the basis of a Nuclear Fuel Bank to be managed by the IAEA.

In this presentation I will review and comment on the recent supply assurance proposals made. I will discuss technical and institutional issues I have raised in reviewing these proposals, and I will rank all the proposals based on their ease of implementation and contribution to nonproliferation.

Chaim Braun is a CISAC science fellow working on issues of nuclear power and nonproliferation. Prior to his Stanford position, Braun worked in various technical and management positions in Altos Management Partners, Bechtel Power Corporation, United Engineers and Constructors, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). While at CISAC Chaim authored papers with Chris Chyba on "Proliferation Rings" and with Mike May on "International Regime for Fresh Fuel Supply and Spent Fuel Disposal." He also co-authored two chapters in the CISAC book , U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today's Threats, made numerous technical presentations, and was instrumental in bringing to CISAC the research project on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540.

Bioterrorism is a growing threat. While the U.S. government has spent considerable sums on programs designed to protect the United States from a biological attack, no clear strategy has been articulated to guide planning and expenditures. This talk will present the outlines of a coherent strategy for coping with bioterrorism that includes diplomacy, deterrence and defense, with the emphasis on defense.

Dean Wilkening directs the Science Program at CISAC. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and spent 13 years at the RAND Corporation prior to coming to Stanford in 1996. His major research interests have been nuclear strategy and policy, arms control, the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, ballistic missile defense, and conventional force modernization. His most recent research focuses on ballistic missile defense and biological terrorism. His work on missile defense focuses on the broad strategic and political implications of deploying national and theater missile defenses, in particular, the impact of theater missile defense in Northeast Asia, and the technical feasibility of boost-phase interceptors for national and theater missile defense. His work on biological weapons focuses on understanding the scientific and technical uncertainties associated with predicting the outcome of hypothetical airborne biological weapon attacks, with the aim of devising more effective civil defenses, and a reanalysis of the accidental anthrax release in 1979 from a Russian military compound in Sverdlovsk with the aim of improving our understanding of the human effects of inhalation anthrax.

This is a Special Seminar within the CDDRL Taiwan Democracy Program (co-sponsored with Shorenstein APARC).

Tang Fei was the first premier of Republic of China on Taiwan under the current Chen Shui-bian Government in 2000. Before he was appointed premier, Tang served as minister of national defense (1999-2000), chairman (1998) and vice chairman (1995-98) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander-in-chief of the Air Force. He also served overseas as a deputy military attaché to the United States (1972-75) and as chief military attaché to South Africa (1979-82).

Premier Tang was a visiting scholar with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 2002.

In this special seminar, Premier Tang will address the internal conflicts and external challenges that Taiwan has faced since power transition in 2000.

Josef Joffe is the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution and is publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.

Joffe's areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, international security policy, European-American relations, Europe and Germany, and the Middle East.

His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide number of publications including the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Weekly Standard, and the Prospect. Additionally, his scholarly work has appeared in many books and in journals such as Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, International Security, and Foreign Policy as well as in professional journals in Germany, Britain, and France.

Joffe is currently an adjunct professor of political science at Stanford, where he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer in 1999-2000. He also is a distinguished fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In 1990-91, he taught at Harvard, where he is also an associate of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. He was a visiting lecturer in 2002 at Dartmouth College and in 1998 at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He was a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins (School of Advanced International Studies) in 1982-1984. He has taught at the University of Munich and the Salzburg Seminar.

His most recent book is Überpower: The Imperial Temptation in American Foreign Policy.

Reared in Berlin, Joffe obtained his Ph.D. degree in government from Harvard.

http://www.hoover.org/bios/joffe

Event Synopsis:

Professor Joffe opens his talk with two movie quotes, "With great power comes great responsibility" from Spiderman, and "If you build it, they will come" from Field of Dreams. Both quotes, he explains, relate to the idea of modern American hegemony. The United States must concern itself with policies and institutions that promote its own interests and those of others, and by doing so will attract international support and cooperation as it did in the "golden age" of American-led institutions such as NATO. This era ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, following which the United States has seen its legitimacy decline lower than ever, even while accumulating unprecedented military power. The void left by the Soviet Union has unbalanced the global power structure and caused other countries to turn against the aggressive policies of the new single hegemon, the United States, in situations like the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush.  Professor Joffe describes the role that America's "imperial temptation" played in its invasion of Iraq, causing a further decline in America’s global legitimacy, a crumbling of international support, and an unwitting boon to Ahmadinejad's regime in Iran, which Joffe considers to be the real threat and which essentially had its "dirty work" of removing Saddam Hussein from power done for it by the United States. Joffe urges the U.S. to think strategically about how collaboration with other countries can help rebuild mutually beneficial institutions and bolster U.S. legitimacy, rather than approaching its role in the world ideologically, treating other nations with contempt and turning them against the U.S.

A discussion session included such questions as: What has the role of American exceptionalism played in the events of the last decade? Was the outcome of the most recent Iraq war inevitable, or was it a result of bad policies and poor handling by the U.S. government? How can a country go so wrong as the US has (in pursuing the "wrong war, in the wrong country, at wrong time" as Joffe describes)? To what extent has the de-legitimization of the US been caused by its policy toward Israel? What should the U.S. approach now be toward Iran?

Lawrence F. Kaplan is senior editor at The New Republic, where he writes about U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. At this seminar, he will discuss military operations in Iraq, the implications for politics here at home, and competing explanations for what went wrong. On this last point, the speaker hopes to engage in a dialogue with the audience.

Recently, former senior officials of South Korean President Roh's own administration have expressed serious concern about his approach to North Korea and to the alliance with the U.S. Mr. Straub will examine the prospects for the U.S.-South Korean alliance, especially in light of major differences between the two governments over how to deal with North Korea. He will also explain the origins and the nature of anti-Americanism in South Korea today, and offer his views on how the U.S. and South Korea could put their alliance on a sounder footing.

David Straub retired from the U.S. Department of State in 2006 as a Senior Foreign Service Officer after a 30-year career focused on Northeast Asian affairs. He worked over 12 years on Korean affairs, first arriving in Seoul in 1979, just months before the assassination of President Park Chung Hee. He served as head of the political section at the U.S. embassy in Seoul from 1999 to 2002 during popular protests against the U.S., and played a key working-level role in the Six-Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear program as the State Department's Korea country desk director from 2002 to 2004.

Straub's final assignment was as the State Department's Japan country desk director in 2004, when he was co-leader of the U.S. delegation to talks with Japan on the realignment of the U.S.-Japan alliance and of U.S. military bases in Japan. He currently works as a consultant with Northeast Asia Associates, and lectures on U.S.-Korean relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is fluent in Korean, Japanese, and German.