Jeffrey R. Cooper is an SAIC Technical Fellow, Vice President for Technology, and Chief Science Officer of SAIC Strategies, Simulation & Training Business Unit at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He received his undergraduate and graduate education at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professorial Lecturer in Arms Control and Defense Analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition to long-standing focus on strategic analysis and military transformation, his core interest is using information to improve intelligence analysis, decision making, C2, and operational effectiveness in order to enhance U.S. national security. Cooper served in a range of senior government positions, including White House Staff and Assistant to the Secretary of Energy.

For the past several years, Cooper's focus has been largely on intelligence matters, with particular emphasis on analytic failures and methods to improve all-source analysis capabilities. Most recently, he chaired the Panel on Unexpected Threats for the DNI's Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR). Cooper was a Professional Staff Member of the Presidential Commission on Future Intelligence Capabilities (Silberman-Robb Commission) and has been actively involved in work on the Revolution in Intelligence Affairs and Intelligence Transformation. His monograph on "Curing Analytic Pathologies" will be published shortly by CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.

For almost 20 years the Energy Department has been investigating and developing Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the site for a deep underground repository to accept spent fuel from all the power reactors and high level waste left over from bomb programs. The future of US nuclear energy is widely thought to be tied to the success of the project. In 2002 Congress gave DOE the green light to take the next step to submit an NRC license application demonstrating compliance with applicable standards. DOE promised such an application in December 2004. It delayed and delayed and now DOE no longer has a date for submitting an NRC application, but it will be no earlier than 2008.

What's holding it up? What is the history of the project? What are its technical and managerial and legal problems? What has been the effect of Nevada's opposition? How will recent project changes and the administration's new nuclear policy (GNEP) affect Yucca Mountain? What are the prospects for project licensing and completion? Is Yucca Mountain the only option for dealing with the country's spent fuel?

Dr. Victor Gilinsky is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant on energy. He has been active on proliferation issues for many years, going back to his early work at RAND in Santa Monica, California. He joined RAND soon after receiving a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1961. In 1971 he moved to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C., where he was assistant director for policy and program review. From 1973 to 1975, he was head of the RAND Physical Sciences Department. From 1975 to 1984, he served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), having been appointed by President Gerald Ford and reappointed by President Jimmy Carter. During his NRC tenure, Dr Gilinsky was heavily involved in nuclear-export issues. In 1982 he received Caltech's Distinguished Alumnus Award.

One of the fundamental challenges facing the United States Department of Homeland Security is the determination of what is critical in critical infrastructure systems such as water, Internet, power, energy, and transportation. Current practice is focused on single-point security audits of things like power plants, airport terminals, and refineries. But this approach does not identify the most vital components of any infrastructure which leads to an inadequate strategy and wasted funding. We show that single-point audits lead to the wrong conclusions and do not provide sufficient national security relative to the effort and money being spent. Instead, we propose an approach similar to social network analysis whereby a critical infrastructure is modeled as a network and then analyzed to identify the critical nodes and links. We present models and software to analyze such networks to obtain optimal resource allocation such that network risk is minimized. In the parlance of network science, our approach extends the theory of scale free networks to incorporate damage estimates for nodes and links. By exploiting the structure inherent in a network, we are able to allocate resources in the most optimal manner, which leads to a fundamentally different strategy than currently practiced.

Rudolph Darken is the Director of the Institute for Modeling, and Simulation (MOVES) and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He is the Chair of the MOVES Curriculum Committee and is also the Associate Director for Research for the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His personal research has been primarily focused on human factors and training using virtual environments and computer gaming media with emphasis on navigation and wayfinding in large-scale virtual worlds. He is a Senior Editor of PRESENCE Journal, the MIT Press journal of teleoperators and virtual environments. He received his B.S. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990 and his M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from The George Washington University in 1993 and 1995, respectively.

Ted Lewis is Professor of Computer Science and Academic Associate of the Homeland Security curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School. He served as Sr. Vice President of Eastman Kodak Company, President and CEO of DaimlerChrysler Research, North America, Editor-in-Chief (twice) of IEEE Computer magazine and IEEE Software magazine, and has authored more than 100 papers and 30 books over the past 35 years on subjects ranging from software engineering, parallel processing, to hi-tech business. Currently, he teaches the Critical Infrastructure Protection course at NPS and does research in the application of network science to strategy and policy questions for the US Department of Homeland Security. Dr. Lewis' textbook, "Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation" will be published by John Wiley & Sons, in April 2006.

The disarmament euphoria of the first post-Cold War years has been replaced with enhanced attention to nuclear weapons. In the place of traditional missions assigned to nuclear weapons during the Cold War, new ones have emerged or became relatively more prominent--limited use in primarily conventional conflicts. The enhanced role of nuclear weapons is likely a result of the emergence of a new international system following the hiatus of the post-Cold War period. With the end of the Cold War, the primary mission of nuclear weapons, mutual strategic deterrence of two opposing poles of the international system, largely exhausted itself, leading to hopes that nuclear weapons would lose relevance. The disarmament momentum has, however, largely exhausted itself, at least in its traditional forms and priorities, as the emerging new international system is giving rise to threats and challenges that seem to require a "nuclear response". The emergence of a new, limited-use mission assigned to nuclear weapons increases the likelihood of actual use of nuclear weapons. The increase is modest--perhaps from effectively zero in the last years of the Cold War to maybe 2-3 percent in the future--but an increase nonetheless.

Nikolai Sokov is a senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1981 and subsequently worked at the Institute of USA and Canadian Studies and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow. From 1987-92 he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union and Russia, dealing with nuclear arms control; he participated in START I and START II negotiations as well as in a number of summit and ministerial meetings. Sokov has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (1996) and a Soviet equivalent of a Ph.D. (Candidate of Historical Sciences degree) from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (1986). Sokov has published extensively on international security and arms control; he is the author of "Russian Strategic Modernization: Past and Future" (Rowman and Littlefield in 2000) and co-author and co-editor of the first college-level textbook on nuclear nonproliferation regime in Russian (PIT-Center, 2000 and 2002).