The purpose of this presentation is to indicate possible ways in which nuclear power plant (NPP) projects and possibly related nuclear fuel cycle facilities (should there be any) could be subverted to hide and clandestinely support nuclear weapons development programs. The discussion here is generic in nature; however, special applicability to the newly emerging nuclear programs in the Middle East is noted. The speaker's purpose is not to provide a ‘cookbook' for would-be proliferators on how to utilize NPP projects to support clandestine weapons development programs, but rather to provide indication to the nonproliferation-minded as to what to look for and guard against when a number of new NPP projects are initiated within a short time frame in a region with limited past nuclear experience as a direct response to the Iranian quest for ‘nuclear power'. This is not to imply that there are nefarious intents behind the sudden desire to acquire nuclear power capabilities by several countries that are mostly well endowed with oil and natural gas resources. My intent here is rather to provide a general assessment on how such NPP projects might be utilized, should their national owners decide to do so in situations of "supreme national interest', as a guise for clandestine nuclear weapons programs.

Chaim Braun is a CISAC consulting professor specializing in issues related to nuclear power economics and fuel supply, and nuclear nonproliferation. At CISAC, Braun pioneered the concept of proliferation rings dealing with the implications of the A.Q. Khan nuclear technology smuggling ring, the concept of the Energy Security Initiative (ESI), and the re-evaluation of nuclear fuel supply assurance measures, including nuclear fuel lease and take-back.

Braun, currently, is working on an analysis of new nuclear power plant prospects in the Middle East, and the potential for nuclear proliferation from prospective nuclear plants in industrializing countries. He also works on extensions of nuclear fuel supply assurance concepts to regional fuel enrichment plants operated on a ‘black box' mode, particularly as applied to the South Asian, Central Asian and South American regions.

Previously, Braun worked at CISAC on a study of safeguarding the Agreed Framework in North Korea, was the co-leader of a NATO Study of Terrorist Threats to Nuclear Power Plants, led CISAC's Summer Study on Terrorist Threats to Research Reactors and, most recently, chaired a working group on the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, as a part of a CISAC summer study on Nuclear Power Expansion and Nonproliferation Implications.

Braun is a member of the World Nuclear Association (WNA) committees on Nuclear Economics and Assured Fuel Supplies. He is a permanent lecturer at the World Nuclear University's (WNU) One-Week Courses. Braun was a member of the Near-Term Deployment and the Economic Cross-Cut Working Groups of the Department of Energy (DOE) Generation IV Roadmap study. He conducted several nuclear economics-related studies for the DOE Nuclear Energy Office, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the Non-Proliferation Trust International, and other organizations.

Before joining CISAC, Braun worked as a member of Bechtel Power Corporation's Nuclear Management Group, and led studies on power plant performance and economics used to support maintenance services. He also managed nuclear marketing in East Asia and Eastern Europe. Prior to that, Braun worked at United Engineers and Constructors (UE&C), EPRI and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).

Abstract: This talk discusses the evolution of nuclear deterrence in the post-Cold War and Post-911 environment.  An examination of the historic role of deterrence and past trends in stockpile composition are discussed, and the concept of a capability-based deterrent and the implications for stockpile size, the nuclear weapons complex, and science are examined.  The role of both complex- and stockpile-transformation in enabling a capability-based deterrent is evaluated

Dr. Martz has been with Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years.  He is an authority on plutonium chemistry and metallurgy, and has lead various elements of the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos including the group responsible for pit activities, the program examining materials aging in the stockpile, leadership of the weapon design division, and most recently, was head of the New Mexico team in the recent Reliable Replacement Warhead Design study.

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Reading is available in the publications shelf (located on the left hand side of CISAC's main reception area) in a limited number of hard copies.

Charli Carpenter joined the Department of Political Science at University of Massachusetts-Amherst in Fall 2008, after teaching for four years at University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Her teaching and research interests include national security ethics, the laws of war, transnational advocacy networks, gender and political violence, war crimes, comparative genocide studies, humanitarian affairs and the role of information technology in human security. She has a particular interest in the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security. She is the author of Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians, and the editor of Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones. She has also published numerous articles in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Security Dialogue and Human Rights Quarterly and has served as a consultant for the United Nations. Dr. Carpenter's current research focuses on global agenda-setting, investigating why certain issues but not others end up on the human security agenda. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she is directing a project on Transnational Advocacy Networks. In addition to teaching and research, Dr. Carpenter spends her time raising two future members of the American electorate, surfing, snowboarding, and rambling about international politics at Duck of Minerva and asymmetric warfare at Complex Terrain Lab. 

Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University. 

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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).

Ariel (Eli) Levite is a nonresident senior associate in the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment. He is a member of the Israeli Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee on Arms Control and Regional Security and a member of the board of directors of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies. Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Levite was the Principal Deputy Director General for Policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Levite also served as the deputy national security advisor for defense policy and was head of the Bureau of International Security and Arms Control in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. In September 2000, Levite took a two year sabbatical from the Israeli civil service to work as a visiting fellow and project co-leader of the "Discriminate Force" Project as the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. Before his government service, Levite worked for five years as a senior research associate and head of the project on Israeli security at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Levite has taught courses on security studies and political science at Tel Aviv University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Davis.