On May 5, 2006, Brazil officially inaugurated a plant that will produce enriched uranium to supply the country's two nuclear power reactors. Brazilian officials have claimed that providing domestic enrichment services will account for savings to the national nuclear industry. This work is a preliminary evaluation of the economic relevance of the Brazilian enrichment program, taking into account cost of production and the market price for uranium enrichment.

Belkis Cabrera-Palmer is a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Physics form Syracuse University in May 2005. Her research interest comprises the study of energy resources in Latin America, and this year she has focused on the role of nuclear power in electricity generation in Brazil. Her current research project is entitled "On the Uranium Enrichment Program in Brazil", and aims to evaluate the economic relevance a national enrichment program has in Brazil's nuclear industry.

Nearly all male adults illegally crossing the US-Mexico border, most of whom are Mexicans, are seeking employment, although a few may be terrorists. We are particularly interested in the impact of immigration strategies on the probability for an OTM (Other than Mexican) terrorist to enter the country, which is based on four models: (a) Discrete Choice Model, (b) Border Apprehension Model, (c) DRO (Detention and Removal Operations) Model, and (d) Illegal Wage Model.

These four models explain the inter-relationship among four key variables -- crossing rate, apprehension probability, removal probability, and illegal wage, which are also affected by other factors, such as detention policy, DRO beds, work site enforcement and legalization policy.

Model (a) introduces a combination of the multinomial-logit model with backward recurrence; model (b) is mainly based on the data we have and the previous research work; model (c) is a 2-class priority queueing analysis with inhomogeneous incoming rate; and model (d) includes some economic theory. Numerical results and discussions are given based on the model parameters existing or estimated from the data provided.

Yifan Liu is currently a CISAC science fellow, and Ph.D. student in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. His Ph.D. dissertation, under the supervision of Lawrence Wein at the Graduate school of Business, uses operation research methods to construct mathematical models for homeland security issues, and solve these models both analytically and numerically.

Sonja Schmid is a social science research associate at Stanford University. Having received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University, she is now a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and affiliated with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford. Her research has focused on understanding complex decision-making processes at the interface between science, technology, and the state in the Cold War Soviet context, and is based on extensive archival research and narrative interviews with nuclear energy specialists in Russia. She is currently working on a book about reactor design choices and the development of the civilian nuclear industry in the Soviet Union. In addition, she is involved in an international research project on Cold War Technopolitics and Colonialism, where she works on Soviet technology transfer to Central and Eastern Europe. Her research interests also include risk communication, and the popularization of science and technology, subjects on which she has published in the past.

The United Nations Secretariat--the main part of the UN bureaucracy directly under the Secretary-General--has arguably changed or been challenged more than any other part of the UN system in recent years, with more and more mandates and rising expectations. Though much attention has been given to the reform of the Security Council, and though Washington has made UN 'management reform' a core pillar of its UN policy since the Oil-for-Food scandal, the UN Secretariat has nevertheless proved singularly impervious to even the common sense suggestions for improvement. In many ways, there is a greater gap today than at any time in the past between what the Secretariat does, what it's meant to do, and the capacity it has. Why has improvement been so difficult and what have been the recurrent mistakes of UN reform efforts? With the election of a new Secretary-General due in late 2006, can we think about the UN bureaucracy in a different and more practical way?

Thant Myint-U is a visiting senior fellow at the International Peace Academy. He is also a senior advisor to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council and a Fellow of the Cambridge University Centre for History and Economics.

From 2000-2006 he worked in the United Nations Secretariat, first for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and then for the Department of Political Affairs (DPA). From 2004-5 he was Chief of DPA's Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Political and in 2005-6 he was a Senior Political Officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. In 2004 he was also a member of the Secretariat of the Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

Thant Myint-U has also served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, with UNTAC in Cambodia in 1992-3 and with UNPROFOR and UNMIBH in the former Yugoslavia from 1994-6. In 1994 he was the UN's senior spokesman in Sarajavo.

From 1994-1999 Thant Myint-U was a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where he researched and taught Asian and British imperial history. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1988, his master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1992 and his PhD in history from Cambridge University in 1996.

He is the author of several published and broadcast works, including two books: The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps: Remembering Burma's Past (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006 forthcoming).

David Hafemeister is a Science Fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (2005-6). He is also Professor (emeritus) of Physics at California Polytechnic State University. He spent a dozen years in Washington as Professional Staff Member, Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Governmental Affairs (1990-93 on arms control treaties at the end of the Cold War), Science Advisor to Senator John Glenn (1975-77), Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State Benson and Deputy-Under Secretary Nye (1977-78), Visiting Scientist in the State Department's Office of Nuclear Proliferation Policy (1979), the Office of Strategic Nuclear Policy (1987) and Study Director at the National Academy of Sciences (2000-02). He also held appointments at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and the Lawrence-Berkeley, Argonne and Los Alamos national laboratories. He was Chair of the APS Forum on Physics and Society (1985-6) and the APS Panel on Public Affairs (1996-7). He has written/edited ten books and 140 articles and was awarded the APS Szilard award in 1996.

Jacob N. Shapiro is a graduate student in political science at Stanford University and a homeland security fellow at CISAC. He is also an associate at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy and teaches on terrorist financing at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research focuses on the organizational dynamics of terrorist groups. His current projects use economic and sociological organization theory to examine the interactions between individual motivations and organizational structure in covert groups. As a Naval Reserve officer he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Warfare Development Command. Prior to attending Stanford, he served on active duty at Special Boat Team 20 and onboard the USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968). He received his BA with honors in political science from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Ronald F. Lehman II is Director of the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ron also is Chairman of the Governing Board of the International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow. . He serves on the State Department Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board (ACNAB) and as a member of the Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee (TRAC). Previously, he was the Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and has served in the Defense Department as Assistant Secretary, in the State Department as U.S. Chief Negotiator on Strategic Offensive Arms (START), and in the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

Tuan H. Nguyen is the Herbert York Fellow in the Center for Global Security Research at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the Forensic Science Center in the Chemistry and Materials Science Directorate at Livermore. Dr. Nguyen has been an Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at California State University, East Bay. He received his BS in biochemistry and a PhD in organic chemistry.