Topics:

"Ballistic Missile Defense"

Dean Wilkening will cover work in progress concerning regional assessments of the strategic impact of ballistic missile defenses. The nature of the problem and analytic tools to assess the impact will be discussed, along with preliminary results for the impact of American and Japanese missile defense deployments in North East Asia.

"Research Reactors and Non-Proliferation"

Bekhzod Yuldashev will present a short review of the utilization of research reactors and present status of research reactor programs. The related non-proliferation aspects of existing and future research will also be discussed.

The CISAC Fellows Forum showcases some of the vitally important work that has been accomplished at CISAC this year. Moderated by Scott Sagan, CISAC co-director, three scholars represent the promising work of CISAC fellows:

David Patel

Postdoctoral Fellow

"Islam, Identity, and Electoral Outcomes in Iraq"

Why has a cohesive national Shiite political identity emerged in Iraq while Sunni Arabs remain fractured? What does the United States need to understand about how differences between Shiite and Sunni clerical networks influence electoral successes?

David Patel's work focuses on questions of religious organizations and collective action in the Middle East. In fall 2007, he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Jacob Shapiro

"Mis-overestimating Terrorism: The Problems Terrorists Face and How to Make Them Worse"

Terrorist organizations face substantial internal challenges which make them vulnerable to government action. Careful counter terrorism strategies can exploit these organizational pathologies.

Jacob Shapiro is a graduate student in political science at Stanford University and a CISAC predoctoral fellow. His research focuses on the economic forces that motivate terrorist organizations and the organizational challenges that these groups face.

Rebecca Slayton

"Technology Limited: How Scientists Do and Don't Influence U.S. Defense Policy"

In the United States, high technology is a favorite solution to national security problems. But how do we know when complex technology has reached its limits? The rancorous debate over missile defense shows how experts use science to authoritatively frame options and thus influence the making of defense policy.

Rebecca Slayton is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Slayton's research examines the relationships between technocrats, academia, and the media.

On April 28, 2004, the United Nations Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, unanimously passed UNSC 1540. The resolution "decided that all States shall refrain from providing any form of support to non-state actors" attempting to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction, "adopt and enforce appropriate effective laws" to that effect, and "take and enforce effective measures to "prevent the proliferation of" WMD. To carry out its part of this mandate, the UNSC established and renewed a Committee, which has mainly and usefully assisted States in adopting "appropriate effective laws." This study, in collaboration with Committee members, has focused on implementation mechanisms and indicators of performance in border and exports controls, securing materiel and facilities, and adapting controls to State needs. We conclude that the most meaningful measures of implementation need to be more broadly adopted and that the 1540 Committee needs a more extensive staff in order to extend its role to disseminate States' experience with those measures. We also conclude that mechanisms need to be developed to facilitate information sharing between the Committee and the private sector.

Michael May is a professor emeritus (research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000. May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971. May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards. His current research interests are in the area of nuclear and terrorism, energy, security and environment, and the relation of nuclear weapons and foreign policy.

Chaim Braun is a vice president of Altos Management Partners, Inc., and a CISAC science fellow and affiliate. He is a member of the Near-Term Deployment and the Economic Cross-Cut Working Groups of the Department of Energy (DOE) Generation IV Roadmap study. He conducted several nuclear economics-related studies for the DOE Nuclear Energy Office, the Energy Information Administration, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Non-Proliferation Trust International, and others. Braun has worked as a member of Bechtel Power Corporation's Nuclear Management Group, and led studies on power plant performance and economics used to support maintenance services. Braun has worked on a study of safeguarding the Agreed Framework in North Korea, he was the co-leader of a NATO Study of Terrorist Threats to Nuclear Power Plants, led CISAC's Summer Study on Terrorist Threats to Research Reactors, and most recently co-authored an article with CISAC Co-Director Chris Chyba on nuclear proliferation rings. His research project this year is entitled "The Energy Security Initiative and a Nuclear Fuel Cycle Center: Two Enhancement Options for the Current Non-Proliferation Regime."

Allen Weiner is an associate professor of law (teaching) at the Stanford Law School, as well as the inaugural Warren Christopher Professor of the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy, a chair held jointly by FSI and the Stanford Law School. He is also an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His expertise is in the field of public international law and the foreign relations law of the United States. His work focuses on the effect of positive international law rules on the conduct of foreign relations and other implications for the behavior of states, courts (both national and international), and other international actors. Current research interests focus on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He teaches courses in public international law and international criminal law at Stanford Law School. Before coming to Stanford, Weiner served for 12 years as a career attorney in the U.S. Department of State. He served in the Office of the Legal Adviser in Washington, D.C. (1990-1996) and at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague (1996-2001), most recently as legal counselor, in which capacity he served as the U.S. Government's principal day-to-day interlocutor with the international legal institutions in The Hague, including the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. He received a BA from Harvard College and a JD from Stanford Law School.

Roger Speed is a physicist formerly with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and now an affiliate of CISAC. He has also worked at the National Academy of Sciences, at R&D Associates, and, as a Peace Fellow, at the Hoover Institution, where he wrote a book on strategic nuclear policy. He has served on a number of defense-related committees, including ones for the Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the American Physical Society, the U.S. Navy (Non-Acoustic ASW Panel), the National Academy of Sciences, and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Organization. He has conducted a broad range of national security studies for the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and Central Intelligence Agency in such areas as arms control, strategic deterrence, nuclear war, ballistic missile defense, nuclear weapons safety, and the survivability of strategic systems.

During the strategic modernization program that the Soviet Union undertook in the 1970s, it deployed a large number of multiple-warhead ballistic missiles. This deployment raised concerns in the United States about vulnerability of its land-based missile force and was one of the factors that contributed to the military buildup that the United States undertook in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The newly available documents that contain evidence of the Soviet missile programs demonstrate that the "window of vulnerability" did not exist and provide some insight into the Soviet modernization program.

Pavel Podvig joined CISAC as a research associate in 2004. Before that he was a researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He worked as a visiting researcher with the Security Studies Program at MIT and with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and he taught physics in MIPT's General Physics Department for more than ten years.

Podvig graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, with a degree in physics. In 2004 he received a PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

His research has focused on technical and political issues of missile defense, space security, U.S.-Russian relations, structure and capabilities of the Russian strategic forces, and nuclear nonproliferation. He was the head of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces research project and the editor of a book of the same title, which is considered a definitive source of information on Russian strategic forces.

Sonja Schmid (speaker) is a social science research associate at Stanford University. Having received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, she is now a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and affiliated with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford. Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. She is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. In addition, she is involved in an international research project on Cold War Technopolitics and Colonialism, where she works on Soviet technology transfer to Central and Eastern Europe. Her research interests also include risk communication, and the popularization of science and technology, subjects on which she has published in the past.

Rebecca Slayton (respondent) is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program at Stanford University and a CISAC affiliate. In 2004-2005 she was a CISAC science fellow. Her research examines how technical judgments are generated, taken up, and given significance in international security contexts. She is currently working on a book which uses the history of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program to study the relationships between and among technology, expertise, and the media. Portions of this work have been published in journals such as History and Technology and have been presented at academic conferences. As a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she recently completed an NSF-funded project entitled Public Science: Discourse about the Strategic Defense Initiative, 1983-1988. As a physical chemist, she developed ultrafast laser experiments in condensed matter systems and published several articles in physics journals. She also received the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship in 2000, and has worked as a science journalist for a daily paper and for Physical Review Focus. She earned her doctorate in chemistry from Harvard University in 2002.