Some theorists of modernization have influentially claimed that successful "late industrialization" led by developmental states creates economies too complex, social structures too differentiated, and (middle-class-dominated) civil societies too politically conscious for non-democratic rule to be sustained.  Probably nowhere has this argument-that democratic transitions are driven by economic growth-been more celebrated than in Northeast and Southeast Asia (Pacific Asia).  South Korea and Taiwan, having democratized only after substantial industrialization, seem to fit the narrative well.  Prof. Thompson will argue, however, that "late democratizers" have been the exception rather than the rule.  Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand democratized much earlier in the developmental process, before high per capita incomes were achieved.  Malaysia and especially Singapore are more wealthy than they are democratic.  The communist "converts" to developmentalism, China and Vietnam, are aiming for authoritarian versions of modernity.  "Late democratization" via modernization is only one scenario.  The experiences of Pacific Asia support Barrington Moore's thesis that there are other "paths to the modern world." 

Mark R. Thompson is a professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.  A Chicago native, he took his first degree in religious studies at Brown University followed by postgraduate work at Cambridge University and the University of the Philippines.  Fascinated by Philippine “people power,” he wrote his dissertation at Yale University on the anti-Marcos struggle (Yale University Press, 1996). After moving to Germany, he witnessed popular uprisings in East Germany and Eastern Europe, inspiring him to conceptualize “democratic revolutions” in essays later published as a book (Routledge, 2004).  He is in residence at Stanford from February through April 2009.

Abstract: A political history of nuclear weapons: where they came from, the surprising ways in which the technology spread, who is likely to acquire them next and why.

Tom Reed is a former Secretary of the Air Force. He has also served as Director of National Reconnaissance, as a special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy, and as a consultant to the Director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Reed graduated first in his class from Cornell University with a degree in engineering and an ROTC commission into the U.S. Air Force. He began his professional career at the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles during the 1950s, the years of Sputnik and the missile gap. He earned his graduate degree from the University of Southern California and then moved on to Lawrence Livermore where he designed two thermonuclear devices fired over the Pacific in the Dominic test series of 1962.

On leaving Livermore, Reed started and ran a successful high-tech company making superconductors. He soon developed an interest in politics, and in 1966 became the northern California chair of Ronald Reagan's first gubernatorial race. He served as chief of personnel in the Governor's first administration and in 1970 assumed full responsibility for Governor Reagan's re-election campaign as the statewide chair and campaign director.

In 1973 Reed was recruited to manage certain intelligence projects at the Pentagon in connection with the Yom Kippur War then raging in the Mideast. Later that year he became director of information systems, developing a worldwide military command and control system, and then, in 1976, became Secretary of the Air Force. During the Reagan years Reed served as the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Policy. A principal project there was his authorship of National Security Decision Directive 32, signed by President Reagan in May 1982, which became the roadmap for prevailing and ending the Cold War.

Reed left Washington in 1983 to return to managing his business. Throughout the Soviet collapse Reed continued to advise the Joint Strategic Planning Staff (in Omaha) on policy and intelligence matters.

Reed was born in New York City. His first book, At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War (2004, Ballantine Books), delved into the lives of those who fought and ended the Cold War without a nuclear shot being fired.  His more recent book, Nuclear Express, notes that "since the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have fallen into less well-manicured hands."  Nuclear Express was co-authored with Danny Stillman who served, for thirteen years, as director of technical intelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Tom lives in the wine country, north of San Francisco, with his wife Kay. 

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David E. Sanger covers the White House for The New York Times and is one of the newspaper's senior writers. In a 24-year career at the paper, he has reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, covering a wide variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation, Asian affairs and, for the past five years, the arc of the Bush presidency. Twice he has been a member of Times reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize. Sanger's new book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (Harmony, 2009), is an examination of the challenges that the tumultuous events of the past eight years have created for the new president.

Before covering the White House, Mr. Sanger specialized in the confluence of economic and foreign policy, and wrote extensively on how issues of national wealth and competitiveness have come to redefine the relationships between the United States and its major allies. As a correspondent and then bureau chief in Tokyo for six years, he covered Japan's rise as the world's second largest economic power, and then its humbling recession. He also filed frequently from Southeast Asia, and wrote many of the first stories about North Korea's secret nuclear weapons program in the 1990's. He continues to cover proliferation issues from Washington.

Leaving Asia in 1994, he took up the position of chief Washington economic correspondent, and covered a series of global economic upheavals, from Mexico to the Asian economic crisis. He was named a senior writer in March, 1999, and White House correspondent later that year.

Mr. Sanger joined the Times in the Business Day section, specializing in the computer industry and high-technology trade. In 1986 he played a major role in the team that investigated the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, writing the first stories about what the space agency knew about the potential flaws in the shuttle's design and revealing that engineers had raised objections to launching the shuttle. The team won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He was a member of another Pulitzer-winner team that wrote about the struggles within the Clinton Administration over controlling exports to China.

In 2004, Mr. Sanger was the co-recipient of the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting for his coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises. He also won the Aldo Beckman prize for coverage of the presidency, awarded by the White House Correspondent's Association. The previous year he won another of the association's major prizes, the Merriman Smith Memorial Award, for coverage of the emergence of a new national security strategy for the United States. In 2004 he and four other colleagues also shared the American Society of Newspaper Editor's top award for deadline writing, for team coverage of the Columbia disaster.

Mr. Sanger appears regularly on public affairs and news shows. Twice a week he delivers the Washington Report on WQXR, the radio station of the Times. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.

Born in 1960 in White Plains, N.Y.,  Mr. Sanger was educated in the public school system there and graduated magna cum laude in government from Harvard College in 1982.

Abstract: The expected increasing world energy demand makes it necessary for us to seriously and urgently study the questions of global warming due to greenhouse gas effect emissions and the depletion of fossil resources. This clearly means producing more energy, while emitting a minimum amount of CO2, and keeping the costs under control and acceptable for the user.

A growing number of prospective studies thus envision that nuclear energy, because it is carbon-free, will play an important and essential role in the world energy mix of the 21^st century.

However, the increased use of nuclear power to generate electricity brings with it, threats to regional and global security - specifically, increased risks of nuclear weapon proliferation and nuclear terrorism: nuclear power reactors inevitably produce plutonium as a by-product, plutonium that could be used by countries or terrorist groups to fabricate nuclear weapons. Several states still have not signed the NPT, while others have not clarified their real intentions.

Even though this aspect should by no means be neglected, the issue of nuclear energy expansion should be examined globally, accounting for the context, the current needs, as well as all kinds of concerns.

The context is the one described above, characterized by growing energy demand and climate change: nuclear energy is unanimously recognized as a solution well adapted to such a context. Its overall assets are numerous, it is a clean and competitive source of energy, which has very good safety records, with more improvements to come, it contributes to security of energy supply. All these assets should not be swept away for reasons solely linked to proliferation concerns. As a matter of fact, intensive works are being carried out, to improve even more nuclear energy's track record, by ensuring its sustainability: waste minimisation, increased safety, competitiveness, economy of uranium resources, resistance to nuclear proliferation, and application to fields wider than shear electricity production.

Jacques Bouchard is Special Adviser to the Chairman of the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). In 2006, he was appointed Chairman of the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) for 3 years.

Born in 1939, Jacques Bouchard holds an engineering degree from the "Ecole Centrale de Paris", and specialized in reactor physics.

Mr. Bouchard joined the CEA in 1964 and became Head of the Experimental Physics unit in 1973, then head of the Nuclear Engineering Department in 1975. In that capacity, the work he conducted was mainly in support of pressurized water reactor technology, and he also led studies in physics for fuel cycle applications.

In 1982, he became head of the Fast Neutron Reactor Department in Cadarache. In 1990, he was appointed head of the CEA's Nuclear Reactor Division, then, from 1994 to 2000, he became the Director of CEA's military application division.

From 2000 to 2004, he was in charge of the entire nuclear energy sector in CEA.

Since 2005, he is Special Adviser to the Chairman of the CEA.

Jacques Bouchard was also the President of the French Nuclear Energy Society from 2001 to 2003 and professor at the reknown "Ecole des Mines de Paris". He has serve on the board of directors of several companies working in the nuclear field, and he is member of many advisory committees to national and international nuclear organizations.

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This seminar will feature two presentations: an attempt to evaluate the impact of health policy under a decade of progressive governments in Korea; and an investigation into the health and economic well-being of the elderly in Korea. The presenters will be Dr. Byongho Tchoe, a 2008-09 visiting scholar at Stanford University, and Dr. Young Kyung Do, the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in the Asia Health Policy Program at Stanford.

Korea achieved universal health care coverage in 1989 only twelve years after the introduction of social health insurance under an authoritarian government. In 1992 a civil government won the presidential election. Consistent with a conservative ideology oriented toward market principles and globalization, that government emphasized competitive principles in health care policy. However, at the end of 1997 in the face of economic crisis, the progressive party won the Korean presidential election; their health emphasized strengthening equity, redistribution, and regulation of providers’ rent seeking behavior. Under successive progressive governments from 1998 to 2007, ambitious health policy reforms integrated insurers, separated prescribing from dispensing, reformed provider payment, expanded benefits coverage, increased medical-aid enrollees, and increased the role of government providers in the health care market. But in the election of 2007, they were defeated by a conservative party, which insists that competition among insurers and providers will enhance efficiency and quality in health care, and stresses consumer choice and responsibility.

Dr. Tchoe's talk will attempt to evaluate impact of health care policy under a decade of progressive governments in Korea. Although equity in both access to care and financial responsibility appear to be enhanced, there is controversy about whether the policies were cost-effective or improved health, and what will happen as the new government repeals regulations in the health care market. The return of economic crisis also brings renewed urgency to debates of economic and social policy.

Byongho Tchoe is a 2008-09 visiting scholar at Stanford University. After working at the Korea Development Institute from 1983 to 1995, he took up his current post with the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. He has been influential in formulating health and social policy in Korea, having served as an advisor to the minister of health and social welfare and participated in many task forces and committees. In 2007, he was awarded a National Medal in honor of 30 years achievement related to Korea’s National Health Insurance. He has published many articles and books and served as president of the Korean Association of Health Economics and Policy and as vice president of the Korea Association of Social Security. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from Seoul National University and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Georgia.

Young Kyung Do is the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Asia Health Policy Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. He completed his Ph.D. in health policy and administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health in August 2008. He has also earned M.D. and Master of Public Health degrees from Seoul National University (in 1997 and 2003, respectively). He earned board certification in preventive medicine from the Korean Medical Association in 2004. He received the First Prize Award in the Graduate Student Paper Competition in the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study Conference in 2007. He also is the recipient of the Harry T. Phillips Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Doctoral Student from the UNC Department of Health Policy and Administration in 2007. In May 2008, he was selected as a New Investigator in Global Health by the Global Health Council.