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We examine two interrelated questions. How and where do we need to deploy nuclear detection portals in the real world? On the basis of which physical techniques should we design the technology to use in these portals? Today's national initiatives like the 9/11 Commission Act for scanning 100% of cargo at foreign ports of origin may be useful for interception of smuggled materials that are already assumed to be in transit -- by simply creating a roadblock for smuggling on high traffic routes, this does not get us any closer to dissuading adversaries from attacking by other means. Today's programs ignore the options (loopholes) within reach of the adversary that use alternative routes or countermeasures the attacker can employ against the detection technology. Loopholes can come as technical countermeasures usable against today's technology like passive gamma detection (shielding, fractionation) or against future technology like cosmic muon detection (dispersion, spreading). Loopholes may also be present in the form of transportation pathways not secured by any detection technology (private jets, sailboats, luxury cruise ships, and so on). In this talk, we discuss transportation loopholes and technical countermeasures in planned US initiatives using drive-thru nuclear detection portals for intercepting uranium. In addition to well-known countermeasures like shielding, we identify a novel countermeasure to cosmic muon detection based on horizontal spreading or dispersion. We show how to integrate passive gamma, neutron, muon, and active neutron detection techniques to make reliable detection portals (RDPs) invulnerable to simple countermeasures. We show where RDPs would need to be deployed around metropolitan areas and military bases to complement the national border, quantify how many RDPs would be required based on traffic flows, and define RDP specifications.

Devabhaktuni Srikrishna
’s publications and patents have spanned quantum computing, parallel computing, wireless data communications, and nuclear detection. He holds a BS in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology and an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was formerly Chief Technology Officer and a Founder of Tropos Networks (2000-2007). Tropos develops and manufactures wireless mesh routers for creating Wi-Fi service across metro areas currently operating in over 500 cities worldwide.

Thomas A. Tisch is a private high tech investor with operating and venture capital experience. In his career, he served as a partner at Portola Venture Fund, an initial investor in 3Com, and Software Publishing Corp and later at MBW Management where his investments included Netrix, Stratacom and Stac Electronics. Among operating roles, he was I instrumental in Etrade pioneering Internet brokerage as Vice President of Trade*Plus as it was known then. Mr. Tisch holds a BS in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (1961), an MS EE from Stanford University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Narasimha Chari is the Founder and Chief Architect of Tropos Networks where he has been responsible for developing Tropos Networks' core intellectual property, including the design and development of the company's wireless networking and routing protocols. Among other honors, Mr. Chari was recognized by MIT Technology Review magazine in 2005 as one of the Top 35 Innovators under the age of 35. He has performed research, published papers and disclosed patents in a variety of areas of mathematics, physics, wireless networking and nuclear detection. Mr. Chari holds a BS in Mathematics and Economics from the California Institute of Technology and an AM in Physics from Harvard University.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Devabhaktuni Srikrishna Speaker
Thomas A. Tisch Speaker
Narasimha Chari Speaker
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Politicians around the world are in vigorous agreement on the critical importance of "energy security." And yet useful definitions of the term are scarce, as is the recognition that "energy security" means different things to different people. Americans focus most on the risks of imported oil, Europeans on their dependence on Russian natural gas. Less commonly considered in the industrialized world is what energy security means to emerging powers like China and India, desperately poor countries in Africa and South Asia, or even major energy exporters like Russia or states in the Persian Gulf. By making explicit these many "faces" of energy security, we can begin a more useful debate on how to make the global energy economy more robust for all players. This talk will suggest some frameworks for thinking about energy security from both consumer and producer sides, and then explore specific cases in developing and transition economies -- in particular, the perspectives of China as a major importer of oil and Russia as a major exporter of natural gas.

Mark Thurber is Research Program Manager at PESD, where he oversees all aspects of the Program's research and is also directly responsible for research on low-income energy services. Before coming to PESD, Dr. Thurber worked in high-tech industry, focusing on volume manufacturing operations in Mexico, China, and Malaysia. This work included a multi-year assignment in Guadalajara developing local technological capability in precision manufacturing measurements. Dr. Thurber holds a PhD from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering (Thermosciences) and a BSE from Princeton University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a certificate from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His academic research has included engineering studies of gas-phase laser diagnostics as well as policy analyses of technology management in the developing world and power plant emissions reductions strategies in the United States.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Mark C. Thurber Speaker
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A major type of policy response to climate change is mitigating carbon emissions by putting an explicit or implicit price on carbon. While such policies have many attractive features and ought to be implemented as part of any climate protection regime, there are strong arguments for going beyond so-called "market based" instruments in attacking the climate change problem. One such argument is that even with a price on carbon, the private sector will systematically under invest in developing new low- or non-carbon emitting energy technologies from a societal point of view. This talk will briefly review the arguments for public support of advanced energy technology Research and Development (R&D) and then try to answer another set of challenges that emerge when it is decided to go beyond market forces by providing public support for energy technology R&D. In that case, the most fundamental questions to be addressed are how much to spend on R&D and what to spend it on.

John P. Weyant is Professor of Management Science and Engineering, a Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University. Established in 1976, the EMF conducts model comparison studies on major energy/environmental policy issues by convening international working groups of leading experts on mathematical modeling and policy development. Prof. Weyant earned a BS/MS in Aeronautical Engineering and Astronautics, MS degrees in Engineering Management and in Operations Research and Statistics all from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a PhD in Management Science with minors in Economics, Operations Research, and Organization Theory from University of California at Berkeley. He also was also a National Science Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. His current research focuses on analysis of global climate change policy options, energy technology assessment, and models for strategic planning.

Weyant has been a convening lead author or lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for chapters on integrated assessment, greenhouse gas mitigation, integrated climate impacts, and sustainable development, and most recently served as a review editor for the climate change mitigation working group of the IPCC's assessment report number four. He has been active in the U.S. debate on climate change policy through the Department of State, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. In California, he is a member of the California Air Resources Board's Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee (ETAAC) which is charged with making recommendations for implementing AB 32, The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

John Weyant Speaker
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There is a consensus that we humans will need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases substantially in this century if we are to avoid unacceptable modifications to climate and the biogeochemistry of the ocean. Hence the important question is: how are we to do that? The challenge, to change the world's energy systems, is a huge one, and there is no single, simple solution to it. We need to improve energy efficiency dramatically, move increasingly to use of energy resources that have low or zero net emissions of greenhouse gases (solar energy, some biofuels, wind, nuclear power, geothermal power, ...) or to the extent that carbon stays in the fuel mix, capture and store an increasing fraction of the CO2 that results. In addition, we will need research to create new energy conversion options for the future. This talk reviews possible pathways for substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Lynn Orr is the Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering and Director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. He served as Dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford from 1994 to 2002. He joined Stanford in 1985. Previously, he was employed by the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, Shell Development Company in Houston, and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Boards of Directors of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Franklin M. Orr Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor of Petroleum Engineering, Professor, by courtesy, in Chemical Engineering and Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, FSI senior fellow by courtesy Speaker Stanford University
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Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (speaker), 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 Under Secretary for Enforcement and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

David M. Kennedy (discussant) 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).

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar Speaker
David Kennedy Speaker
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Topics:

"Ballistic Missile Defense"

Dean Wilkening will cover work in progress concerning regional assessments of the strategic impact of ballistic missile defenses. The nature of the problem and analytic tools to assess the impact will be discussed, along with preliminary results for the impact of American and Japanese missile defense deployments in North East Asia.

"Research Reactors and Non-Proliferation"

Bekhzod Yuldashev will present a short review of the utilization of research reactors and present status of research reactor programs. The related non-proliferation aspects of existing and future research will also be discussed.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Dean Wilkening Speaker
Bekhzod Yuldashev Speaker
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Ron E. Hassner (speaker) is an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley. He returns to CISAC as a visiting professor, having served as predoctoral fellow from 2000 to 2003. His research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. His publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and political-religious mobilization and the role of national symbols in conflict.

Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-2003. In 2003-2004 he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University. He is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies.

Jacob Shapiro (discussant) is a CISAC postdoctoral fellow. His primary research interest is the organization of terrorism and insurgency. His other research interests include international relations, organization theory, and security policy. Shapiro's ongoing projects study the balance between secrecy and openness in counterterrorism, the impact of international human rights law on democracies' foreign policy, the causes of militant recruitment in Islamic countries, and the relationship between public goods provision and insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. His research has been published in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and a number of edited volumes. Shapiro is a Harmony Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy. As a Naval Reserve officer he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Warfare Development Command. He served on active duty at Special Boat Team 20 and onboard the USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968). He holds a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University and a BA in political science from the University of Michigan.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Ron Hassner Speaker
Jacob Shapiro Speaker
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Philip G. Roeder (Ph. D. Harvard University, 1978) is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. A specialist on the politics of the Soviet successor states, Roeder has focused his recent research on the design of political institutions for countries torn apart by secessionist movements. He is the author of Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton) and Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics (Princeton). He is the co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton) and co-editor of Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy After Civil Wars (Cornell). His articles have appeared in such journals as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, and International Studies Quarterly. He is currently working on two longer-term projects:

  1. Alternatives to Independence (What are the consequences of various institutional arrangements designed to avoid granting independence to secessionists?) and
  2. The Tenacity of the Nation-State (Why do states almost never relinquish sovereignty willingly?)

CISAC Conference Room

Philip Roeder Professor of Political Science Speaker University of California, San Diego
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Jacob Shapiro (speaker) is a CISAC postdoctoral fellow. His primary research interest is the organization of terrorism and insurgency. His other research interests include international relations, organization theory, and security policy. Shapiro's ongoing projects study the balance between secrecy and openness in counterterrorism, the impact of international human rights law on democracies' foreign policy, the causes of militant recruitment in Islamic countries, and the relationship between public goods provision and insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. His research has been published in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and a number of edited volumes. Shapiro is a Harmony Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy. As a Naval Reserve officer he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Warfare Development Command. He served on active duty at Special Boat Team 20 and onboard the USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968). He holds a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University and a BA in political science from the University of Michigan.

Jeremy Weinstein (discussant) is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Center for Global Development, where he directed the bi-partisan Commission on Weak States and US National Security. While working on his PhD, with funding from the Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Sheldon Fellowship, and the World Bank, he conducted hundreds of interviews with rebel combatants and civilians in both Africa and Latin America for his forthcoming book, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. He has also worked on the National Security Council staff; served as a visiting scholar at the World Bank; was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and received a research fellowship in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. He received his BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and his MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Jeremy Weinstein Speaker
Jacob N. Shapiro Speaker
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Jeanne Mager Stellman (speaker) has just recently joined the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health at SUNY-Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn N.Y as Professor and Director of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences. She had been a member of the faculty of the School of Public Health at Columbia University since 1981 and directed the General Public Health track. Stellman is actively engaged in research on herbicides in Vietnam and was director of a multimillion dollar study for the National Academy of Science to develop exposure methodologies for epidemiological studies of military herbicides. She and her husband, Steven D. Stellman, are collaborating on several follow-up studies and, with National Library of Medicine support, she is now creating a website on Vietnam that uses the geographic information system they developed to make it accessible to researchers around the world. The Stellmans are the recipient of The American Legion's Distinguished Service Medal because of their ongoing research and assistance to veterans. In addition, Stellman is now heavily engaged in research and policy in the aftermath of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. She served on the EPA's Technical Advisory Panel for WTC Cleanup and is a consultant to the Mt. Sinai WTC Medical Monitoring program, where she is co-directing research on the mental health and well-being of the first responders. Stellman served as Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety, 4th edition (1998). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was named one of Ms. Magazine's "80 women to watch in the 80's." She has written several books, many monographs and chapters and peer-reviewed publications.

Lynn Eden (discussant) is associate director for research/senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Not in residence

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rsd15_078_0365a.jpg PhD

Lynn Eden is a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus. She was a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation until January 2016, as well as was Associate Director for Research. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

CV
Lynn Eden Speaker
Jeanne Stellman Professor of Clinical Health Policy and Management, Mailman School of Public Health Speaker Columbia University
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