The Battle of Chernobyl

(Russian/Ukraine/USA, 2006; dir. Thomas Johnson; 93 min.)

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm (*NEW TIME*)
Cubberly Auditorium

Free and open to the public 

On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian city of Pripyat exploded and began spewing radioactive smoke and gas. More than 40,000 residents in the immediate area were exposed to fallout a hundred times greater than that from the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Based on top-secret government documents that came to light only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1999, The Battle of Chernobyl reveals a systematic cover-up of the true scope of the disaster, including the possibility of a secondary explosion of the still-smoldering magma, whose radioactive clouds would have rendered Europe uninhabitable.

Co-sponsored by the School of Education, Crothers Global Citizenship, Stanford Continuing Studies, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Stanford Film Society

For more information, visit the CREEES Event Website.

Bruce Jones will present on the World Bank's 2011 World Development Report, on "Conflict, Security and Development." The report, which is the World Bank's flagship annual research product, reviews and challenges previous Bank findings on the causes of conflict and fragility; provides new research findings on strategies for recovery from conflict and violence; and sets out a series of directions for national policy and international institutional reform. Dr. Jones will brief on these, as well as on the politics of research and implementation at the World Bank and the UN.

Dr. Bruce Jones is director and senior fellow of the NYU Center on International Cooperation, and senior fellow and director of the Managing Global Insecurity Program at the Brookings Institution. Currently, his is also the Senior External Advisor for the World Bank's Development Report (WDR) on Conflict, Security and Development. Jones will provide an overview and account of the WDR and will be joined by Dr. Francis Fukuyama who will participate as a discussant on the topic.

In March 2010, Jones was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General as a member of the Senior Advisory Group to guide the Review of International Civilian Capacities.
Dr. Jones’ research focuses on US policy on global order and transnational threats; on multilateral institutions in peace and security issues; on the role of the United Nations in conflict management and international security; and on global peacekeeping, post-conflict operations and fragile state engagements.

Prior to assuming the Directorship of the Center, Dr. Jones served in several capacities at the United Nations. He was Senior Advisor in the Office of the Secretary-General during the UN reform effort leading up to the World Summit 2005, and in the same period was Acting Secretary of the Secretary-General’s Policy Committee. In 2004-2005, he was Deputy Research Director of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. From 2000-2002 he was Special Assistant to the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East peace process; and held assignments in the UN Interim Mission in Kosovo, and in the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.  

Dr. Jones has been interviewed by or cited in US and international media, including the New York Times, LA Times, Globe and Mail, BBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, and Al Jazeera.
Dr. Jones holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics; and was Hamburg Fellow in Conflict Prevention at Stanford University. He is co-author with Carlos Pascual and Stephen Stedman of Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats (Brookings Press, 2009); co-editor with Shepard Forman of Cooperating for Peace and Security (Cambridge University Press, 2009); author of Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failures; Series Editor of the Annual Review of Global Peace Operations (Lynne Reinner) and author of several book chapters and journal articles on US strategy, global order, the Middle East, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, and strategic coordination.

He is Consulting Professor at Stanford University, Adjunct Faculty at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service, and Professor by Courtesy at the NYU Department of Politics.

Matthias Englert is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and a PhD student at the department of physics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His research during his stay at CISAC focuses primarily on the technology of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, the implications of their use for the nonproliferation regime, and on technical and political measures to manage proliferation risks.

Englert has participated in projects investigating technical aspects of the concept of proliferation resistance with topics including the conversion of research reactors, uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges, reducing plutonium stockpiles with reactor-based options,  spallation neutron sources and fusion power plants. Additional research topics have included fissile material stockpiles, fuel-cycles and accelerator driven systems.

Although a substantial part of his professional work recently has been technical he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies. Research interests include the dispute about Article IV of the NPT, the future development of the NPT regime, possibilities for a nuclear weapons-free world, preventive arms control, and the history and development of proliferation relevant programs. By studying contemporary theory in philosophy through the interaction of science, technology and society, Englert has acquired analytical tools to reflect on approaches describing or addressing the problem of ambivalent technology.

Englert is a vice speaker of the working group Physics and Disarmament of the German Physical Society (DPG) and a board member of the  German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and Security (FONAS).

Brenna Marea Powell is a 7th year PhD candidate in the department of Government at Harvard University, and a doctoral fellow at the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. She received her AB from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research interests include inequality, civil conflict and political violence in divided societies. Her three-article dissertation research explores the role of political institutions in redefining ethno-racial boundaries and social hierarchy. This includes work on post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland, racial policy in Brazil, and the politics of ethno-racial classification in the United States.

Jan Stupl's research concerns the current developments in laser technology regarding a possible application of lasers as an anti-satellite weapon (ASAT), as well as the proliferation of ballistic missiles. The research on laser ASATs focuses on damage mechanisms, the potential sources and countries of origin of laser ASATs and ways to curb their international proliferation. Regarding missiles, Stupl is interested in the methods which are used to acquire ballistic missiles and possible ways to control this process.

Before coming to CISAC, Jan was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His PhD dissertation was a physics-based analysis of future of High Energy Lasers and their application for missile defense and focused on the Airborne Laser missile defense system. This work was jointly supervised by the IFSH, the Institute of Laser and System Technologies at Hamburg University of Technology and the physics department of Hamburg University, where he earned his PhD in 2008. Stupl's interest in security policy and international politics was fuelled by an internship at the United Nations in New York in 2003.

In this seminar, Stupl will discuss a ground-based laser system that uses radiation pressure to prevent collisions between debris objects in space. He will discuss the importance of avoiding such collisions, which can result in a runaway chain-reaction, increasing the number of fragments and hence the risk to active satellites dramatically.