Plutonium (Pu) and highly enriched uranium (HEU), the fissile material that is the sine qua non of nuclear weapons, manifest fingerprints that are unique to the manufacturing processes employed in their creation. Such fingerprints are not as clear as those made famous by the FBI for decades, or as DNA is today, but they are fingerprints, nonetheless. The technical challenge is to develop the processes that will link, beyond reasonable doubt, the fissile material to its manufacturer. If the technical challenges can be met, political challenges lay beyond and must be resolved before the civilized world can be assured that the fissile material that generates a nuclear explosion can be traced to its source, but if it can, many benefits to society will result. Among these are deterrence of potential suppliers, credible delay in reacting to nuclear terrorism, and international cooperation of the highest sort.

Harold Smith holds the appointment of distinguished visiting scholar and professor with the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), where he focuses on the impact of technology on foreign and defense policy. In 1993, Smith served as assistant to the scretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs during the Clinton administration. In 1960 he joined the faculty of UCB where he retired as professor and chairman of the Department of Applied Science in 1976. Smith was awarded a White House Fellowship in 1966 and was assigned as a special assistant to the secretary of defense. Since that time, he has served as an advisor to numerous governmental boards on national security policy. Of particular note are his chairmanship of the Vulnerability Task Force of the Defense Science Board and a special study for (then) Secretary of Defense Schlesinger on the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS); i.e. the Smith Report. He has published in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, and Arms Control Today. He received his PhD in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bill Dunlop is currently a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and has held numerous positions during his career there, including serving as the project manager for strategic missile and defensive weapons systems, the program manager for the development of the W87 warhead for the MX missile, and the program manager for earth penetrator weapons. From 1985 until 1990 he was the division leader overseeing work on thermonuclear weapons development. From January 1994 until December 1995, he served as the technical advisor to the U.S. ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament. The principal activity during this period in the Conference on Disarmament was the negotiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. After his return from Geneva, Dunlop resumed the leadership of the Arms Control and Treaty Verification Program, which later was renamed the Proliferation Prevention and Arms Control (PPAC) Program. He continues to work part-time at LLNL where he is involved cargo security issues and defense activities. Dunlop received his BA in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MS in physics and his PhD in nuclear physics from the Univesity of California, Los Angeles.

Over five years since 9/11, the United States is still struggling to define the nature of the terrorist challenge it faces let alone fully comprehend it. As a consequence, the United States and its partners in the "global war on terror" still lack a comprehensive strategy for responding to the challenge. Drawing on a growing area of social science research relating to "social contagion" phenomena, the challenge posed by "Islamist militancy" will be assessed using the principles and practices of epidemiology. A new more promising strategy emerges as a consequence.

Paul B. Stares is vice president of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and director of its Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. He currently focuses on northeast Asian security issues, U.S. post-conflict stability operations, and counterterrorism policy. He has authored or edited nine books in addition to numerous book chapters, articles, and op-eds in leading U.S. and European newspapers. In 2006, Stares led the Iraq Study Groups Strategic Environment Expert Working Group.

Prior to joining USIP in 2002, Stares was associate director and senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. From 1996 to 2000 he worked in Japan, first as a senior research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs and then as director of studies at the Japan Center for International Exchange. At various times, Stares has been a senior fellow and research associate in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution as well as a NATO fellow, a scholar-in-residence at the MacArthur Foundation Moscow Office, a Rockefeller International Relations Fellow, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

He has also held academic posts at the University of Sussex and the University of Lancaster in Great Britain, where he received his PhD.

Biological forensics has made considerable strides in the past decade, in part, due to advances in DNA analysis and, in part, due to advances other microscopic diagnostic techniques such as atomic force microscopy to analyze structural properties of microorganisms and secondary-ion mass spectrometry to analyze the chemical constituents of microorganisms. This talk will cover recent advances in the field of microbial forensics with application to potential bioterror attacks, excluding investigations that currently are ongoing.

Paul Jackson is the forensics group leader within the Biosciences Directorate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and, prior to that, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Jackson is currently a member of the FBI Working Group for Forensic Analysis of Microbial Evidence. His past research has involved analyses of anthrax samples from the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, Russia, and the 2001 anthrax letter attacks in the United States. His current research focuses on genetic typing methods applied to biological toxins such as Ricin. He received his BS from the University of Washington and his PhD from the University of Utah.

The speaker will describe his experiences over ten years of developing a comprehensive program to engage the formerly top secret Soviet biological weapons complex through joint scientific research and disease surveillance. He will also discuss how lessons learned can be applied to potential new efforts to reduce global threats of bioterrorism and potential pandemics.

Andrew Weber is the adviser for cooperative threat reduction policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His responsibilities include developing and overseeing CTR biological threat reduction programs in the former Soviet Union, and nuclear and chemical weapons threat reduction projects in Central Asia. Before coming to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 1996, Weber served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Kazakhstan, and Hong Kong. Weber holds an MSFS degree from Georgetown University and a BA from Cornell University. He speaks Russian. Weber is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Graduate School of Foreign Service.

Justin Hastings is a fifth-year PhD student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in East and Southeast Asian politics, nuclear weapons policy, and nontraditional security issues. He has been a Boren Graduate Fellow, and a Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellow with UC's Institute on Global Cooperation and Conflict. In 2005 he was a visiting associate at the Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore. During the course of his graduate studies he has worked in the Department of Defense on East Asian security issues, and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on nonproliferation issues. He has an MA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in public and international affairs from Princeton University.

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.

Ron E. Hassner (speaker) is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies and a CISAC affiliate. 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. Professor Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-3. In 2003-4 he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University.

Gail Lapidus (respondent) is a senior fellow emerita at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Lapidus is also professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chair of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies from 1985 to 1994. A specialist on Soviet society, politics and foreign policy, she has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995), From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Soviet System in Crisis, with Alexander Dallin (Westview, 1992), and Women in Soviet Society (University of California Press, 1979). A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.