Emily Meierding is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Chicago Department of Political Science. Her dissertation examines the role of natural resources in interstate conflict and cooperation. She is a participant in the Center for International Studies' Project on Environmental Conflict at the University of Chicago.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Recent publications include "Iraq's Civil War" (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007), "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States" (International Security, Spring 2004), and "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," (APSR, February 2003). Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her Doctoral Degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Abstract:  Scholars and policy-makers, when seeking to predict the future of nuclear proliferation, often refer to "nuclear capable states," or "latent nuclear weapons states," or "virtual nuclear powers."  There is consensus, however, about what such terms mean or how to measure a state's "nuclear latency," a condition that leads to widespread miscommunication and misunderstanding in the field.  This talk reviews alternative methods for measuring "nuclear latency" in the political science and technical literatures. It provides historical evidence of the wide range of time-lines for different states to move from one state of nuclear weapons development to more advanced states of development and identifies a set of political factors (including organizational competency, ambivalent political leadership, different arsenal size ambitions) that can influence the time-lags that states experience in their nuclear weapons programs. 

Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is on sabbatical in 2008-09. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons(Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000.

His recent articles include "How to Keep the Bomb From Iran," in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2006); "The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969" co-written by Jeremi Suri and published in International Security in spring 2003; and "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Will More Nuclear Security Forces Produce More Nuclear Security?" published in Risk Analysis in 2004. The first piece warns against "proliferation fatalism" and "deterrence optimism" to argue that the United States should work to prevent Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons by addressing the security concerns that are likely motivators for Iran's nuclear ambitions. The International Security piece looks into the events surrounding a secret nuclear alert ordered by President Nixon to determine how effective the alert was at achieving the president's goal of forcing negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War. It also questions many of the assumptions made about nuclear signaling and discusses the dangers of new nuclear powers using this technique. Sagan's article on redundancy in Risk Analysis won Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies 2003 Best Paper in Political Violence prize. In this article, Sagan looks at how we should think about nuclear security and the emerging terrorist threat, specifically whether more nuclear facility security personnel increases our safety. His article, "Realism, Ethics, and Weapons of Mass Destruction" appears in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail Hashmi and Steven Lee. In addition to these works, Sagan is also finishing a collection of essays for a book tentatively entitled Inside Nuclear South Asia.

Rose McDermott is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University.  She is currently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Experimental Social Psychology, both from Stanford University. She held a National Institute on Drug Abuse Post Doctoral Fellowship in Substance Abuse Treatment Outcome Research at the San Francisco VA through the University of San Francisco Psychiatry Department.  Professor McDermott has also held fellowships at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, both at Harvard University. Professor McDermott's main area of research concerns political psychology in international relations. She is the author of Risk Taking in International Relations: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press, 1998), Political Psychology in International Relations (University of Michigan Press, 2004), and Presidential Illness, Leadership and Decision Making (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She is co-editor of Measuring Identity: A Guide for Social Science Research, with Rawi Abdelal, Yoshiko Herrera, and Alastair Iain Johnson (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

She has written numerous articles and book chapters on experimentation, the impact of emotion on decision making, social identity, and evolutionary and neuroscientific models of political science.  She is currently involved in a series of projects investigating the endogenous sources of aggression, and a book project on pandemic disease.

Herbert Abrams is a professor of radiology, emeritus, at the Stanford School of Medicine and a member-in-residence at CISAC, where he directs the Project on Disabled Leadership. He was Professor and Director of Diagnostic Radiology at Stanford from 1960 to 1967, and was then appointed and served as Philip H. Cook Professor and Chairman of Radiology at Harvard University from 1967 to 1985. He returned to Stanford in 1985 as Professor of Radiology in order to spend most of his time in research in CISAC. Dr. Abrams' present focus is on presidential disability and its potential impact on decision making.