Nuclear energy production today and in the near future will still be dominated by light-water reactors and therefore there will be a continued need for uranium enrichment. There is currently a focused attention on gas centrifuge enrichment. Gas centrifuge technology is much cheaper and efficient, but also poses a greater security concern, than the former gas diffusion technology.

In order to address the increased security concerns, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is planning and implementing strengthened safeguards procedures involving an increased reliance on continuous and remote monitoring technologies, and environmental sampling. The IAEA is also promoting multilateral enrichment centers as an additional avenue to enhance international security. Much of the current enrichment industry today already involves international partnerships such as between the US and European companies, or the tripartite agreement between Russia, China and the IAEA.

In order for safeguards and multilateral approaches to be viable and effective, they need to be accepted by industry, operators, states and the regulatory agencies. This talk will address how strengthened safeguards could be implemented while accommodating potentially conflicting interests such as: the protection of proprietary information, transparency in monitoring, applicability in multilateral arrangements, cost-effectiveness, and the ultimate goal of ensuring that enrichment activities remain peaceful.

Elena Rodriguez-Vieitez is a postdoctoral science fellow at CISAC, Stanford. Her research concerns proliferation risks associated with the global expansion of nuclear power. She received her PhD in nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation focused on nuclear physics experimental work conducted at cyclotron facilities at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Michigan State University, where she analyzed nuclear structure and fragmentation reaction data of neutron-rich unstable nuclei. As a nuclear engineering graduate student, she collaborated on a Department of Energy research project on radioactive waste transmutation in molten-salt reactors, where she modeled actinide transmutation efficiency and evaluated proliferation and environmental risks. As a graduate student, Rodriguez-Vieitez was also a research associate on public policy and nuclear threats at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Prior to her PhD studies, she was an intern at the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Radioactive Waste Management in Washington, DC.

Abstract
We will present our observations from a visit to India’s nuclear facilities and several think tanks during March 2008. We will comment on India’s nuclear research programs, nuclear energy development, and the implications for the proposed U.S.-India nuclear deal and for scientific collaboration between our countries. We visited the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research (IGCAR) in Kalpakkam, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Trombay, had detailed discussions with the top leadership of the India Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), and also visited several institutes in Bangalore and Chennai to discuss nuclear energy and nuclear nonproliferation.

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 former CISAC Co-Director Chris Chyba on nuclear proliferation rings.

Siegfried Hecker is a professor (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, a senior fellow at FSI, and co-director of CISAC. He is also an emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hecker's research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapon policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. Over the past 15 years, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. His current interests include the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan, North Korea, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran. Hecker works closely with the Russian Academy of Sciences and is actively involved with the U.S. National Academies, serving on the National Academy of Engineering Council and its International Programs Committee, as chair of the Committee on Counterterrorism Challenges for Russia and the United States, and as a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control Nonproliferation Panel.

China’s 11 January 2007 test of a sophisticated anti-satellite weapon has caused a great deal of concern with some analysts predicting the start of an arms race in space while others have tried to minimize its significance. Using the pattern of debris created by the test, this talk will describe the weapon’s capabilities: including it being a hit-to-kill weapon, its most likely mass, and guidance and control capabilities, and its ability to attack satellites at all altitudes; its limitations: it uses visible light and not infrared, deep-space attacks will be severely limited by available launch pads, and the long warning time such an attack would give the US. The talk will also report on the results of a “war game” of an all out Chinese attack on US space assets. The bottom line of that analysis indicates that not only could the US ride out such an attack but it could avoid loosing any of its strategically important communications or navigation satellites.

Geoffrey Forden has been at MIT since 2000 where his research includes the analysis of Russian and Chinese space systems as well as trying to understand how proliferators acquire the know-how and industrial infrastructure to produce weapons of mass destruction. In 2002-2003, Dr. Forden spent a year on leave from MIT serving as the first Chief of Multidiscipline Analysis Section for UNMOVIC, the UN agency responsible for verifying and monitoring the dismantlement of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Prior to coming to MIT, he was a strategic weapons analyst in the National Security Division of the Congressional Budget Office after having spent a year at CISAC as a Science Fellow, a time he still looks back upon as a very happy and productive experience. Dr. Forden holds a PhD in physics.

The world’s energy infrastructure stands on the brink of a major revolution. Much of the large power generation infrastructure in the industrialized world will need replacement over the next two to three decades while in the developing world, including China and India, it will be installed for the first time. Concurrently, the risks of climate change and unprecedented high prices for oil and natural gas are transforming the economic and ethical incentives for alternative energy sources leading to growth of nuclear and renewables, including solar, wind, biofuels and geothermal technologies. The transition from today’s energy systems, based on fossil fuels, to a future decarbonized or carbon-neutral infrastructure is a socio-technical problem of global dimensions, but one for which there is no accepted solution, either at the international, national, or regional levels.

This talk describes a novel methodology to understand global energy systems and their evolution. We are incorporating state-of-the-art open tools in information science and technology (Google, Google Earth, Wikis, Content Management Systems, etc.) to create a global real time observatory for energy infrastructure, generation, and consumption. The observatory will establish and update geographical and temporally referenced records and analyses of the historical, current, and evolving global energy systems, the energy end-use of individuals, and their associated environmental impacts. Changes over time in energy production, use, and infrastructure will be identified and correlated to drivers, such as demographics, economic policies, incentives, taxes, and costs of energy production by various technologies. As time permits Dr. Gupta will show, using Google Earth, existing data on power generation infrastructure in three countries (South Africa, India and the USA) and highlight examples of unanticipated crisis (South Africa), environment (USA) and exponential growth (India). Finally Dr. Gupta will comment on how/why trust and transparency created by democratization of information that such a system would provide could motivate cooperation, provide a framework for compliance and monitoring of global treaties, and precipitate action towards carbon-neutral systems.

Rajan Gupta is the leader of the Elementary Particles and Field Theory group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Laboratory fellow.  He came to the USA in 1975 after obtaining his Masters in Physics from Delhi University, India, and earned his PhD in Theoretical Physics from The California Institute of Technology in 1982. The main thrust of his research is to understand the fundamental theories of elementary particle interactions, in particular the interactions of quarks and gluons and the properties hadrons composed of them. In addition, he uses modeling and simulations to study Biological and Statistical Mechanics systems, and to push the envelope of High Performance Computing. Starting in 1998 his interests broadened into the areas of health, education, development and energy security. He is currently carrying out an integrated systems analysis of global energy systems. In 2000 Dr. Gupta started the forum “International Security in the new Millennium” at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its goals are to understand global issues dealing with societal and security challenges.

"Sunshine" policy, named after one of Aesop's fables, has been the catch phrase of South Korea's appeasement policy toward North Korea to stimulate and restructure the already collapsed North Korean economy and eventually to convert North Korea to a more conciliatory and cooperative state.

After 10 years of shining the sunlight on North Korea, however, evidences that those self-imposed goals have been achieved are rather scarce. This suggests that, from the beginning, the basic premises of Sunshine policy must have been fatally incongruous with the reality: North Korea should not have been portrayed as an innocent traveler leisurely walking down the street. Or, perhaps, the policy toward North Korea should have pursued more serious goals than just stripping a man of his coat.

In this talk, Dr. Park proposes an alternative to the "Sunshine vs North Wind", and discusses the policy implications of his proposal.

For the past 14 years, Dr. Jongkyu Park has worked on various macroeconomic policy issues of Korean economy including economic forecasts, monetary policy, inflation, budget deficit, exchange rate, savings rate, population aging, real estate bubble, and Japan's economic slowdown and revival. He received B.A. in Economics from Seoul National University in Korea, M.S. in Statistics from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University.

It is often said that domestic politics in Japan revolves around public spending, yet one of the state's most powerful instruments for financing policy has virtually escaped notice: the Fiscal Investment Loan Program (FILP). In contrast to a budget, FILP mobilizes savings for state-directed lending and investment, providing the Japanese state with a mechanism to ‘spend' without taxation. After introducing FILP, this presentation will explain how the government used the program to manage its larger fiscal policy and the consequences of this choice.

Gene Park is a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC for 2007-2008. Park is currently working on a book that analyzes how a large government system for mobilizing and allocating financial capital, the Fiscal Investment Loan Program, has influenced budget politics and the internal coalitional dynamics within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

His work has appeared in the journals Governance and Asian Survey, and he co-authored an article for the edited volume, The State after Statism (Harvard University Press). Dr. Park received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Japan. He has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance's Policy Research Institute and Sophia University in Tokyo.

Dr. Park completed his PhD in 2007 in political science at University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a masters degree in city and regional planning from Berkeley, and a BA in philosophy from Swarthmore College.

Major economic reforms are often politically difficult.  They may cause pain to voters and provoke unrest.  They may be opposed by politicians whose time horizons are shortened by electoral cycles.  They may collide with the established ideology and long-standing practices of an entrenched ruling party.  They may be resisted by bureaucrats who fear change, and by vested interests with stakes in the status quo.  Obstacles to major economic reform can be daunting in democratic and autocratic polities alike. 

And yet, somehow, past leaders of today's Asian dragons did manage to get away with critical and creative economic reforms.  Sly political foxes nudged their countries onto high-growth paths toward global renown as economic dragons.  What lessons can be learned from their experiences?  Are tactics that worked in authoritarian systems applicable to democratic ones, and vice versa?  Can one identify a set of stratagems that would amount to an equivalent, for economic reformers, of the advice Machiavelli gave political princes? 

Arroyo will recount the crafty political maneuvers used by leaders of economic reform in Asia during these pivotal eras:  China under Deng Xiaoping; India in the 1990s; Thailand under General Prem Tinsulanonda; Vietnam's Doi Moi; South Korea under Park Chung Hee; Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad; and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.  Arroyo's remarks will be drawn from the paper he has been writing at Stanford on "The Political Economy of Successful Reform: Asian Stratagems," which he describes as "a playbook of useful maneuvers for economic reformers."

Dennis Arroyo is presently on leave from his government post as a director of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines.  He has held consultancies with the World Bank, the United Nations, and the survey research firm Social Weather Stations, and has written widely on socioeconomic topics.  His critique of the Philippine development plan won a mass media award for "best analysis."  He has degrees in economics from the University of the Philippines.  

This talk will examine the evolution of Japanese attitudes and policy toward the Korean peninsula.

The legacy of Japan's occupation; divisions in Japan's Korean community and the spillover into Japanese domestic politics; the impact of the abduction issue and the North Korean nuclear and missile programs on Japanese attitudes toward Pyongyang will be looked at. The current state of relations, with a focus on the divisions between Tokyo and Washington on how to proceed, will also be discussed.

Ambassador Deming joined the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins Universtiy in September 2005, after a 38 year career in the Foreign Service. His last overseas post was as Ambassador to Tunisia from 2000 to 2003. Prior to that, he served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (June 1998 to August 2000). He was Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from December 1997. From October 1997 to December 1997, he was the East Asian and Pacific Affairs Bureau’s Senior Advisor to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Ambassador Deming has spent much of his career dealing with Japanese affairs, having served in Japan as Charge d’Affaires, ad interim, from December 1996 to September 1997, and as Deputy Chief of Mission from October 1993 to December 1996. From September 1991 to August 1993, Amb. Deming was Director of the Office of Japanese Affairs in Washington. He served as Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at the American Embassy in Tokyo from August 1987 to July 1991. From 1985 to 1986, Amb. Deming was detailed to the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, DC.

He received his M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and B.A. from Rollins College.