About the Event: For decades now, the use of ionizing radiation technologies in medicine has been to treat diseases and save lives. There is, however, an association of potential risk if the sealed radioactive source in such a device originates from a nuclide such as cobalt-60 and is handled maliciously. Deeply embedded human health challenges in treating diseases such as cancer in challenging environments also increase the complexity of this risk. While ionizing radiation technologies are available in multiple modalities, the non-source-based radiation technology tends to face greater difficulties with adoption in developing countries due to barriers associated with operation. Given these challenges, cancer patients in the developing world may only have access to one treatment modality in the form of a radioactive-isotope-based medical device that is easy to operate but poses as a potential security risk and clinically less customizable for treatment. As such, there is a growing intersection between security and health due to the variability of two major types of ionizing radiation technologies used for cancer treatment. While both technology modalities are used widely, there are known disparities in low-resource environments regarding the management and use of source-based and non-source-based technologies, requiring further investigation and problem-solving.   

About the Speaker: Pallabi M. Chakrabarti is a staff member at the Sandia National Laboratories Livermore, California campus and supports the International Nuclear/Radiological Security program office. She currently coordinates activities related to the security of radioactive materials across a diverse set of partners including international and domestic government officials, other US government laboratories, NGOs, industry, and academia. Through her role, Pallabi also provides recommendations and develops innovative methods and approaches to enhancing awareness of radioactive material security.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In Trafficking Data, Aynne Kokas looks at how technology firms in the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have exploited government policy (and the lack thereof) to gather information on citizens. Kokas argues that US government leadership failures, Silicon Valley's disruption fetish, and Wall Street's addiction to growth have fueled China's technological gold rush. DrawIn turn, American complacency yields an unprecedented opportunity for Chinese firms to gather data in the United States and quietly send it back to China, and by extension, to the Chinese government. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the US and China and a large trove of corporate and policy documents, Trafficking Data explains how China is fast becoming the global leader in internet governance and policy, and thus of the data that defines our public and private lives.

About the Speaker: Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, the director of the UVA East Asia Center, and an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Hollywood Made China (University of California Press, 2017) is Kokas’ multiple-award-winning first book. Her newest book is Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Her writing and commentary have appeared globally in more than 50 countries and 15 languages. In the United States, her research and writing appear regularly in media outlets including CNBC, NPR’s Marketplace, The Washington Post, and Wired. She has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the U.S. International Trade Commission.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: 

In The Fragile Balance of Terror, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables.

The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger.

The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott D. Sagan, brings together a diverse collection of rigorous and creative scholars who analyze how the nuclear landscape is changing for the worse. Scholars, pundits, and policymakers who think that the spread of nuclear weapons can create stable forms of nuclear deterrence in the future will be forced to think again. The volume was produced under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences project “Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age”, co-chaired by CISAC Director Scott D. Sagan.

About the Speakers:

Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She works in the areas of political psychology.  She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has also taught at Cornell and UCSB.   She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences twice. She is the author of five books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over two hundred academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines encompassing topics such as American foreign and defense policy, experimentation, national security intelligence, gender, social identity, cybersecurity, emotion and decision-making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.

Amy Zegart is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Science by courtesy at Stanford University. She is also the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She specializes in U.S. intelligence, cybersecurity, emerging technologies and national security, and global political risk management.

The author of five books, Zegart’s award-winning research includes the bestseller Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton, 2022); Bytes, Bombs, and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (Brookings, 2019), co-edited with Herb Lin; Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity (Twelve, 2018), co-authored with Condoleezza Rice; and the leading academic study of intelligence failures before 9/11 – Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton 2007).  Her op-eds and essays have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Politico, the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and elsewhere. 

Zegart has been featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. She served on the Clinton administration’s National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy adviser to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. She has also testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and advises senior officials on intelligence, homeland security, and cybersecurity matters.

Previously, Zegart served as co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, founding co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program, and chief academic officer of the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Stanford, she was Professor of Public Policy at UCLA and a McKinsey & Company consultant.

She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, the American Political Science Association’s Leonard D. White Dissertation Prize, and research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Hewlett Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Zegart received an A.B. in East Asian studies magna cum laude from Harvard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. She serves on the board of directors of Kratos Defense & Security Solutions (KTOS) and the Capital Group. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 raised fears of the world’s single largest wave of nuclear proliferation in history, when the Soviet Union’s enormous nuclear arsenal found itself on the territory of not one but four newly sovereign states: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Of those only one nuclear successor would emerge: Russia. The other three ultimately decided to join the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons as non-nuclear-weapon states and proceeded to disarm. Of the three, Ukraine followed the most contested path to nuclear renunciation, becoming a serious proliferation concern but in the end negotiating a deal that included security assurances from nuclear states, Russia among them. Inheriting the Bomb is a story of why Ukraine decided to give up its nuclear weapons and how it shaped the post-Soviet security settlement. As Russia’s war against Ukraine rages on, the causes and consequence of Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament gain new relevance and urgency.  

About the Speaker: Mariana Budjeryn is a Senior Research Associate with the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. She is the author of a new book Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (2022, Johns Hopkins University Press). Formerly, she held appointments of a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MTA, and a visiting professor at Tufts University and Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Mariana’s research and analytical contributions appeared in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Nonproliferation Review, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, War on the Rocks, and in the publications of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she is a Global Fellow. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-sponsored with The World House Project at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law

About the Event: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche was once so famous he handed out the Best Picture award at the 1951 Oscars. In this talk, Kal Raustiala, author of The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire explores Bunche’s extraordinary life and career, from professor of political science at Howard to the OSS, State Department, and eventually the UN, his professional home for 25 years. Bunche was a world class mediator and arguably the father of modern peacekeeping. But he was also a Black man in the very white world of diplomacy, who during the Cold War stood at the center of the one of the world’s great historical revolutions: the postwar decolonization of much of Africa and Asia.

About the Speaker: Kal Raustiala is the Promise Institute Distinguished Professor of Comparative and International Law at UCLA Law School, Professor at the UCLA International Institute, and Director of the UCLA Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations. From 2012-2015 he served as UCLA’s Associate Vice Provost for International Studies and Faculty Director of the International Education Office.

Professor Raustiala's research focuses on international law, international relations, and intellectual property. His recent publications include “The Fight Against China’s Bribe Machine,” Foreign Affairs, October 2021 (with Nicolas Barile); “Faster Fashion: The Piracy Paradox and its Perils,” 39 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, (Spring 2021)(with Christopher Sprigman); “NGOs in International Treatymaking,” in Duncan Hollis, ed, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2020); “ Hollywood is Running Out of Villains,” Foreign Affairs, August 2020; “Innovation in the Information Age: The United States, China, and the Struggle Over Intellectual Property in the 21st Century,” 58 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (June 2020); and “The Second Digital Disruption: Streaming and the Dawn of Data-Driven Creativity,” NYU Law Review (2019, (with Christopher Sprigman). His books include Global Governance in a World of Change (Michael Barnett, Jon Pevehouse, and Kal Raustiala, eds, Cambridge University Press, 2021); Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (Oxford, 2009); and The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford, 2012) (with Christopher Sprigman), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. His biography of the late UN diplomat, civil rights advocate, and UCLA alum Ralph Bunche, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, will be published in late 2022 by Oxford University Press.

In 2016 Professor Raustiala was elected Vice President of the American Society of International Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, Princeton University, the University of Chicago Law School, Melbourne University in Australia, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2016, he was the Yong Shook Lin Visiting Professor of Intellectual Property at the National University of Singapore. A graduate of Duke University, Professor Raustiala holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Raustiala was a research fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution, a Peccei Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems, and an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University. A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Raustiala has served on the editorial boards of International Organization and the American Journal of International Law and is a frequent media contributor whose writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New Republic, the New Yorker, Wired, Slate, the International Herald Tribune and Le Monde. Along with Catherine Amirfar of Debevoise & Plimpton, he is co-host of the American Society of International Law’s International Law Behind the Headlines podcast.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: How “global” is the global far-right? In the past two decades, groups and individuals associated with the far-right have planned or carried out violence in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Sweden, and New Zealand, among other countries. These far-right actors harbor nativist and isolationist views, so we might expect them to operate independently and unconnected from other extremist actors abroad. However, this is not what we observe. Far-right extremists are surprisingly interconnected, both within and across countries. Drawing on original data collected for the Mapping Militants Project, we explore the types of ties that bind the largely decentralized global far-right and assess the potential trajectory of the transnational threat posed by these actors. We argue that traditional counterterrorism practices must be adjusted to address the unique challenges posed by far-right extremists. 

About the Speakers:

Martha Crenshaw is a senior fellow emerita at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, and professor emerita in the Department of Government at Wesleyan University.  Her first article on terrorism was published in 1972 while she was a graduate student at the University of Virginia. A Guggenheim Fellow and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, she has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences.  Publications include Countering Terrorism with Gary LaFree (Brookings Institution Press, 2017) and “Rethinking Transnational Terrorism:  An Integrated Approach,” United States Institute of Peace Peaceworks Report, 2020.  She is a Principal Investigator with NCITE, and was formerly a Principal Investigator with START, also a DHS Center of Excellence at the University of Maryland.  She is also the director of the Mapping Militants Project, currently supported by NCITE.    

Iris Malone is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University. Dr. Malone's research agenda includes two projects, which tend to entail the use of machine learning methods. First, she focuses on the causes of terrorism and insurgency. This project entails research on patterns of militant formation and organizational behavior. Second, she focuses on how states identify and respond to emerging militant threats. This project entails research on threat assessment, conflict forecasting, and state-sponsored terrorism.

Kaitlyn (Katy) Robinson is an America in the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University. Her research examines how international and organizational politics influence civil war. She seeks to explain variation in how non-state armed groups organize, build relationships with foreign states, and carry out violence in armed conflict. She is a researcher on the Mapping Militants Project, which aims to document the organization, behavior, and relationships of armed groups across several different conflicts. Kaitlyn received her PhD and MA in Political Science from Stanford University and her BA in Political Science and History from the University of Michigan. Before graduate school, she worked at U.S. Department of Defense in the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-sponsored with Stanford University Libraries

About the Event: Join us for an engaging conversation with the Ambassador of Estonia to the U.S. Kristjan Prikk, Rose Gottemoeller, and Steven Pifer, who will discuss Russia's war in Ukraine - what's at stake and what we should do about it.
Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine has brought about the most serious reassessment of the European security realities since the end of the Cold War. The epic clash of political wills, the magnitude of military operations, and the scale of atrocities against the Ukrainian people are beyond anything Europe has seen since World War II. The past nine months have forced many to reassess what is possible and impossible in international security A.D. 2022. What is this war about, after all? What's at stake in this – to paraphrase former British PM Chamberlain – "quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom most Americans know nothing?" What should be the lessons for U.S. strategists and policymakers? What are the wider implications for U.S. national security interests, particularly those related to the Indo-Pacific? How has the Alliance supported Ukraine since the war started? What should the end of this war look like and how to get there?

All these questions are relevant and should be carefully weighed with current information from the war as well as historic perspective and regional knowledge in mind.

About the Speakers: 

Estonia's Ambassador to the U.S. Mr. Kristjan Prikk started his mission in Washington, D.C. in May 2021. He is a graduate of the USA Army War College and has served as the National Security Coordinator to the Prime Minister. Prior to arriving in D.C., he was the Permanent Secretary of the Estonian Ministry of Defense. Among his previous assignments are two other tours in Washington as an Estonian diplomat and work on NATO-Russia and NATO-Ukraine topics at a time when these relationships were considerably less charged than today.

Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining Stanford, Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO's adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. 

Steven Pifer is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation as well as a non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. He was a William J. Perry Fellow at the center from 2018-2022 and a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin from January-May 2021. Pifer's research focuses on nuclear arms control, Ukraine, Russia, and European security. A retired Foreign Service officer, Pifer's more than 25 years with the State Department focused on U.S. relations with the former Soviet Union and Europe, as well as arms control and security issues, and included service as the third US ambassador to Ukraine.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted in arms control talks with Russia that a follow-on agreement to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) should cover all nuclear weapons and that such an agreement should focus on the nuclear warheads themselves. This would represent a significant change from previous agreements, which focused on delivery vehicles, such as missiles. The United States has been particularly interested in potential limits on nonstrategic nuclear warheads (NSNW). Such weapons have never been subject to an arms control agreement. Because Russia possesses an advantage in the number of such weapons, the US Senate has insisted that negotiators include them in a future agreement, making their inclusion necessary if such an accord is to win Senate approval and ultimately be ratified by Washington. In the wake of Russian nuclear threats in the Ukraine conflict, such demands can only be expected to grow if and when US and Russian negotiators return to the negotiating table.

Such an agreement will face major negotiating and implementation challenges—not only between Washington and Moscow, but also between Washington and NATO European allies. That is because the US side of such an agreement would primarily affect an estimated 100 US B61 gravity bombs deployed at European bases in NATO countries. Yet, these allies have not played a substantive role in US-Russian arms control negotiations since the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was completed in the 1980s; inspections under the treaty ended in 2001.1 As a result, many of these allies and NATO officials have recognized the need to “do their homework” so they can be prepared to engage in substantive consultations with the United States during negotiation of such a treaty and to implement it once it enters into force.

To stimulate this process, four NATO allies (Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway) and one NATO partner (Sweden) funded a research team led by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and former NATO Deputy Secretary General and New START lead negotiator Rose Gottemoeller. The research focused on the negotiating, policy, legal, and technical issues that allies will likely have to address to reach such an accord. The research team also carried out a series of interviews to understand the views in NATO states on such an agreement and to gauge the constraints they could be expected to face in the process. The interviews and the primary drafting of the report occurred before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the report was first presented at a conference on “Maintaining Strategic Stability amid a Detoriorating European Security Environment” in Copenhagen in May. Mr. Pomper will discuss the paper and ongoing efforts to build Allied capacity to tackle these issues. 

In addition, prior to this paper US and allied research on verification measures for NSNW had largely focused on scientific and technical tools to conduct on-site inspections. The research team developed an original and unique methodology for a data exchange employing historic stockpile data and taking advantage of past US-Russian cooperation and cryptography. This data exchange would serve as the critical backbone for other verification measures, no matter the type of warhead or the type of agreement (freeze, limitation, or reduction). As Mr Moon will explain, his technical team with support from colleagues at Stanford and the State Department Verification Fund is now preparing a proof-of-concept demonstration of this approach and then will develop the framework for a full verification protocol. 

About the Speakers: 

Miles A. Pomper is currently leading a project to build NATO capacity for addressing deterrence, arms, control and verification issues, supported by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden as well as a parallel technical project funded by the U.S. State Department.  He is the lead author of Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe co-authored by Rose Gottemoeller, Bill Moon, and other leading experts. Miles is a Senior Fellow at the Washington, DC, office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. He has authored or co-authored several other reports and book chapters on nonstrategic nuclear warheads, arms control, and deterrence in Europe, including Ensuring Deterrence Against Russia: The View from NATO States (2015). He is also the author or co-author of dozens of other reports and book chapters on nuclear arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and nuclear and radiological terrorism. He is the former editor of Arms Control Today, the former lead foreign-policy reporter for the Capitol Hill publication CQ Weekly, and a former diplomat with the US Information Agency. He holds master's degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and in journalism from Northwestern University and a B.A. in history from Columbia. 

William M. Moon is currently the technical lead on a project to build NATO capacity for addressing deterrence, arms, control and verification issues, supported by Denmark, Germany, and Sweden as well as a parallel technical project funded by the U.S. State Department.  He is a co-author of Everything Counts: Building a Control Regime for Nonstrategic Nuclear Warheads in Europe co-authored by Miles Pomper, Rose Gottemoeller, and other leading experts. Bill is a Non-resident Fellow at the Stimson Center and an Independent Consultant.  He has authored a series of reports on nuclear security and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program based on his experiences leading the CTR Global Nuclear Security program for over 25 years at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.  He holds master's degrees in international affairs from Columbia University and in Resourcing National Security from the National Defense University, and a B.A. in Government and Russian Studies from Hamilton College.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: A panel discussion convened in partnership with the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, University of San Francisco, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, and the World House Project, Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, Stanford University.

About the Speakers:

Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as Chairman of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

Clayborne Carson, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History, emeritus, at Stanford University, has devoted his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the human rights movements inspired by King, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and other visionaries. His award-winning first book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, was published in 1981 and remains the definitive study of the courageous activists and organizers who challenged the strongholds of segregation. In 1985, Mrs. Coretta Scott King chose Dr. Carson to edit and publish a definitive, multi-volume edition of her late husband’s speeches, sermons, correspondence, publications, and unpublished writings. In addition to publishing numerous other books and scholarly articles, Carson has also reached broader audiences as a senior advisor to the Eyes on the Prize series and his contributions to more than two dozen subsequent documentaries. After launching the online Liberation Curriculum for K-12 students, Carson founded Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute in 2005 to disseminate King-related educational resources to a global audience. After retiring as the King Institute’s Director, Carson has continued his online educational efforts by establishing The World House Project to collaborate with other human rights advocates to realize King's vision of a global community in which all people can "learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”

Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining Stanford Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism.  Prior to NATO, she served for nearly five years as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U.S. Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief U.S. negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation.

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: In this seminar, energy and natural resources sector policies of the three former communist countries in Asia - Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan - in close geographic proximity to Russia and China will be considered. There are similarities in the nature of transition from communist regime to democratic societies in these three states, although major differences in social and cultural issues exist. The reliance on energy in neighboring countries Russia and China as well as export of raw materials to these markets have major influence on specific policy agenda. Particular attention is given to energy minerals and trade balance and imbalance thereof. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Undraa Agvaanluvsan currently serves as the president of Mitchell Foundation for Arts and Sciences. She is also an Asia21 fellow of the Asia Society and co-chair of Mongolia chapter of the Women Corporate Directors, a global organization of women serving in public and private corporate boards. During 2021-22, she served on the WCD Global Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. Dr. Undraa Agvaanluvsan is a former Member of Parliament of Mongolia and the chair of the Parliamentary subcommittee on Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to being elected as a legislator, she served as an Ambassador-at-large in charge of nuclear security issues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia, where she worked on nuclear energy and fuel cycle, uranium and rareearth minerals development policy. She is a nuclear physicist by training, obtained her PhD at North Carolina State University, USA and diploma in High Energy Physics at the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. She conducted research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, USA and taught energy policy at International Policy Studies Program at Stanford University, where she was a Science fellow and visiting professor at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. She published more than 90 papers, conference proceedings, and articles on neutron and proton induced nuclear reactions, the nuclear level density and radiative strength functions, quantum chaos and the Random Matrix Theory, including its application to the modeling of electric-grid resilience.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.