Although we recognize that our world leaders need to know the difference between Shiite and Sunni, we often assume that they don't need to understand the difference between a plutonium bomb and a dirty bomb. Good scientific advice is necessary but not sufficient; our leaders need to understand the technology.  In our high tech world, poor understanding has led to poor decisions in everything from nuclear waste storage to addressing global warming.   I'll illustrate this by touching on key scientific aspects of four broad subjects: terrorism and counterterrorism; energy; nukes (weapons and power sources); and climate change.  These are topics covered in my course at Berkeley, and in my recent book, "Physics for Future Presidents." (Norton, 2008).

Richard A. Muller is known for his broad range of achievements, in fields ranging from particle physics to geophysics, applied physics, astrophysics, physics education, and climate change. His skill at explaining science to non-scientists was honed over decades of advising top business and government leaders. His course, titled "Physics for Future Presidents", was voted by the study body to be the "Best Class at Berkeley."

Muller graduated from Columbia College in New York, and went to graduate school at Berkeley, where he studied under (soon to be) Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez. After he earned his Ph.D. (in particle physics) he instigated a series of innovative physics projects, including a study of the cosmic microwave radiation, about which he wrote a Scientific American Article in 1978, and which eventually led to a Nobel Prize for his protege, George Smoot.  He developed a new way to measure radioisotopes (called "Accelerator Mass Spectrometry"), now one of the most widely used techniques in the world for radioisotope tracing in medicine and dating for geology.  He coined the name "Nemesis" for a star that he and his colleagues suggested is orbiting the sun at great distance.  He created a supernova search program at Berkeley; his graduate student Saul Perlmutter eventually took over the project, and became the co-discoverer of the dark energy.  Muller has published major papers on the analysis of lunar soil, adaptive optics, paleoclimate, reversals of the Earth's magnetic field, and analysis of cycles in the fossil record.  He has over 130 published papers, eight books, and four patents.

His most recent book, "Physics for Future Presidents," was published by Norton in 2008.  He hopes it will influence our new president.

His achievements have been honored by many awards, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" prize, the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, the Texas Instruments Founders Prize.  He was named by Newsweek Magazine in 1989 as one of the top 25 innovators in the United States in all fields.  He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the California Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Muller's primary work in recent years has been in climate change, energy independence, alternative energy, and high-tech innovation.  He was a Jason consultant to the the US Government on national security issues for 34 years, and is now a technology consultant for several companies.

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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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Dr. Thomas Fingar is Payne Distinguished Lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Dr. Fingar served previously as Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (2001-2003), Deputy Assistant Secretary for Analysis (1994-2000), Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-1994), and Chief of the China Division (1986-1989). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including Senior Research Associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control. Dr. Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (A.B. in Government and History, 1968), and Stanford University (M.A., 1969 and Ph.D., 1977 both in Political Science).

Thomas Fingar, the 2009 Payne Distinguished Lecturer and former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, will give the first 2009 Payne Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, March 11, 2009, 4:30 pm in the Bechtel Conference Center, 616 Serra Street.

The theme for the 2009 series is Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence and National Security.  Dr. Fingar's first lecture is titled "Myths, Fears, and Expectations."  Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies and Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will introduce the lecture, which is free and open to the public.

Dr. Thomas Fingar is Payne Distinguished Lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

Dr. Fingar served previously as Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (2001-2003), Deputy Assistant Secretary for Analysis (1994-2000), Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-1994), and Chief of the China Division (1986-1989). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including Senior Research Associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control. Dr. Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (A.B. in Government and History, 1968), and Stanford University (M.A., 1969 and Ph.D., 1977 both in Political Science).

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking; a broad, practical grasp of a given field; and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.