This talk reviews three decades of Indian nuclear decision-making. It argues that India’s slow pace of weaponization in the face of Pakistani nuclearization and Sino- Pakistani nuclear cooperation in the 1980s, the slack in building an institutional capacity to wield nuclear weapons after they came into existence in the 1990s, and the reluctant attempts at developing an operational arsenal even after formally claiming nuclear power status and almost going to war with a nuclear Pakistan in the last decade, constitute puzzling behavior. Existing proliferation models explain facets of Indian nuclear behavior. However, they don’t explain it in its totality. The different facets of Indian nuclear decision making in the last three decades can be collapsed into a single dependent variable: the lag in strategic decision-making. This talk operationalizes the concept of ‘lag’, critically reviews existing explanations of Indian nuclear behavior, and offers an alternative framework for understanding Indian nuclear decision-making.

Gaurav Kampani is a sixth year doctoral student at Cornell University's Department of Government. His major and minor fields are International Relations and Comparative Politics. Kampani's research interests cover international security and focus on the relationship between domestic institutions and strategic policy, military strategy, operations planning, and weapons development.

Kampani's dissertation project studies Indian civil-military institutions and nuclear weapons-related operational practices in the decade prior 1998 and the decade since.

Between 1998-2005, Kampani worked on South Asia-related nuclear and missile proliferation issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey CA.

John Downer received his MA/MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University, his MA in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh, and his doctorate in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His dissertation was on "The Burden of Proof: Regulating Ultra-High Reliability in Civil Aviation." Downer then worked at the London School of Economics' Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR), where he began re-working his dissertation for publication as a book titled "Black Box/Check Box: Assessing Critical Technologies" (forthcoming from MIT Press's Inside Technology series). Downer brings the sociology of knowledge to bear on discourses about technology policy and governance, taking insights from a close empirical study of technological knowledge-production-the US Federal Aviation Administration's assessment of new aircraft designs-and drawing out implications for broader questions about risk and governance in a world of pacemakers and nuclear power-stations. At CISAC, Downer is exploring the sociology and epistemology of failure and its implications for the governance of nuclear technologies.

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

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

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