Drell Lecture Recording: NA

Drell Lecture Transcript:

Speaker's Biography: Thom Shanker is the national security and foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. He joined the Times in 1997 and began covering the Pentagon in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks. Previously, Shanker was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. From 1992 to 1995, as the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, he covered the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the departure of American, British, French, and Russian forces from Berlin; and emerging cases of nuclear smuggling in Central Europe.

Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, specializing in strategic studies and international law. He has written on foreign policy, military affairs, and the intelligence community for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and American Journalism Review.

Noah Richmond (speaker) is a CISAC Zukerman Fellow and a Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation fellow. His research has focused on the structure and management of the U.S. officer corps, organizing the U.S. military for new domains of warfare including space and cyberspace, and ballistic missile defense. His current research focuses on international, supra-national, and national control regimes for dual-use technologies. Most recently he co-chaired the working group on new domains of warfare for the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Study conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Richmond has previously consulted for the Institute for Defense Analyses, RAND, and Strategic Decisions Group. He received his BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS in engineering-economic systems and operations research from Stanford, and a PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford. Richmond is currently a law student at Stanford Law School (class of 2008), where his studies focus on intellectual property and international trade.

David Elliott (respondent) was staff director for science and technology at the National Security Council (NCS) and then vice president at SAIC and SRI. At NCS his portfolio included export control matters, which included the international coordination of our policy. During his time at NCS, major emphases emerged on civilian nuclear issues after the Indian nuclear test and on computer technology as its importance became evident. At CISAC he has contributed to work in cyber security and information technology. Elliott received his BS in physics from Stanford University and both his MS and PhD in experimental high energy physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph H. Felter (speaker), a career Special Forces and Foreign Area Officer, is the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and an instructor in the U. S. Military Academy's terrorism studies program. His military experience includes service as a platoon leader with the 75th Ranger Regiment and as a Special Forces operational detachment-alpha and company commander in the 1st Special Forces Group. As a military attaché in Manila, he planned and coordinated combined efforts to develop the counter terrorist capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Felter is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, earned a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received his PhD in political science from Stanford University. His dissertation assesses the impact that variation in quality and structures of state internal security forces has on efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism.

David Patel (respondent) is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at both CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, and terrorism. He will be joining the faculty in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2007. His current work focuses on U.S. military compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. His research on the topic has been published in Foreign Affairs ("How We Fight," November/December 2006) and International Security ("Rules of Engagement: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq," forthcoming). His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in March 2006, and related articles have appeared in International Security and the Journal of International Affairs. From January 2005 to August 2006, Kahl was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow conducting research on Law of War issues at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he worked in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He has also been a consultant for the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. He received his BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his PhD from Columbia University in 2000. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American studies).

Eric Heginbotham, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, has joined the Pacific Council on International Policy, as a non-resident fellow focused on East Asian political and security issues. Among the projects he will carry out is a monograph on the triangular relationship among the United States, China and Japan. Heginbotham earlier served as a senior fellow of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and has also been a visiting faculty member of Boston College's political science department. He speaks Japanese and Chinese and lived in Asia for more than 10 years. Heginbotham received a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently completed a book manuscript on civil-military relations in East Asia, Crossed Swords: Divided Militaries and Politics in East Asia, and has published articles on Japanese and Chinese foreign policy in Foreign Affairs, International Security, and the National Interest, as well as chapters in several edited books.

Dara Kay Cohen is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University and was a fellow and research assistant at CISAC in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006. Her research at CISAC involved studying the politics of national security; she examined the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, how security issues have affected congressional elections and co-wrote a paper with Jacob N. Shapiro on the failure of the homeland security alert system. Her current dissertation research focuses on the use of sexual violence during civil wars, and she spend last summer in Sierra Leone conducting initial field work. She previously worked at the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section and at the u.S. Embassy in London on terrorist financing issues. She received her a.B. in political science and philosophy with honors from Brown University in 2001.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, with a PhD in political science from Stanford as well as a law degree from Yale, focuses his scholarship on how organizations cope with the legal responsibility for managing complex criminal justice, regulatory, and international security problems. He has published the leading academic paper on the operation of federal money laundering laws, and one of the most exhaustive empirical case studies of public participation in regulatory rulemaking proceedings. Recent projects address the role of criminal enforcement in managing transnational threats, the physical safety of refugee communities in the developing world, legislative and budgetary dynamics affecting the federal Department of Homeland Security, and the impact of bureaucratic structure on how institutions implement legal mandates. Professor Cuéllar is an affiliated faculty member at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a member of the Executive committee for the Stanford International Initiative. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, he served as senior advisor to the u.S. Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Bary R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at the university. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1993 to 1994. Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy. Weingast is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2006 recipient of the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science. He received the Heinz Eulau Award for Best paper from the American Political Science Review in 1987. With Charles Stewart, he received the Award for Best Paper n Political History b the American Political Science Association in 1994 and again in 1998. He is also the recipient, along with Kenneth Schultz, of the Franklin L. Burdette Award for Best paper Presented at the 1994 Political Science Association Meeting.

Paul Stockton is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focus son how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangement.s Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Nuclear fuel supply assurance is a long-term issue that has been studied in various venues since the beginning of the nuclear area. This topic has recently gained greater urgency with various countries now embarking on their own nuclear power programs and considering construction of their own fuel cycle facilities, including enrichment plants, to provide for their own fuel. Some of these fuel facilities could however be diverted for weapons material production within clandestine military programs. In this context the assured provision of internationally supplied nuclear fuel and fuel supply guarantees are meant to discourage new nuclear countries from developing domestic sensitive fuel cycle facilities. An IAEA initiative on this topic has culminated in a September 2006 IAEA Special Event Seminar held in conjunction with the 50th General Conference. Eleven different proposals for instituting fuel supply assurance arrangements were presented (some prior to and some during) the meeting. Noted among them was the NTI proposal that included a commitment from Warren Buffet to contribute 50 Million Dollars towards the purchase of a Uranium stockpile that would form the basis of a Nuclear Fuel Bank to be managed by the IAEA.

In this presentation I will review and comment on the recent supply assurance proposals made. I will discuss technical and institutional issues I have raised in reviewing these proposals, and I will rank all the proposals based on their ease of implementation and contribution to nonproliferation.

Chaim Braun is a CISAC science fellow working on issues of nuclear power and nonproliferation. Prior to his Stanford position, Braun worked in various technical and management positions in Altos Management Partners, Bechtel Power Corporation, United Engineers and Constructors, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). While at CISAC Chaim authored papers with Chris Chyba on "Proliferation Rings" and with Mike May on "International Regime for Fresh Fuel Supply and Spent Fuel Disposal." He also co-authored two chapters in the CISAC book , U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today's Threats, made numerous technical presentations, and was instrumental in bringing to CISAC the research project on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540.