A rapidly evolving nuclear landscape poses major challenges and opportunities for the United States. The most critical of these issues include the growing threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, the renaissance of civilian nuclear power, and the pressing need to renew the country’s aging intellectual infrastructure of specialists equipped to address America’s nuclear weapons policies.
The Public Policy and Nuclear Threats course is designed to cover important issues in U.S. nuclear strategy and policy, supported by an understanding of the scientific foundations of this policy. This course aims to give participants the knowledge and analytic tools to contribute to the debate on future U.S. nuclear policy.
The course features lectures, discussions, debates and mini-workshops on a wide range of issues. Participants will attend talks by distinguished researchers, academics, policy officials, and operational specialists from the University of California system and other leading universities, the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and federal government agencies dealing with nuclear policy, threat, detection, and safeguard issues.
Topics addressed in the workshop include:
Past and future of civilian nuclear power
| Deterrence theory |
| U.S. nuclear policy |
Technical and policy issues in the U.S. nuclear stockpile |
| Nuclear weapon design and delivery systems |
The demand for nuclear proliferation |
The international nonproliferation regime
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Attribution science and nuclear forensics |
| Counterproliferation strategies |
Nuclear terrorism |
| Safeguards systems, technologies and issues |
Major power nuclear strategies and doctrines |
U.S. National Nuclear Strategy |
Nuclear proliferation concerns on the Korean Peninsula, Iran, and the Middle East |
| U.S. deterrence policy |
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For more information about any aspect of the program, please email igcc-recruiting@ucsd.edu.
This year, participants have the unique opportunity to stay in San Diego for two synergistic
activities, the Nuclear Proliferation Pathways Conference, August 3–4, 2009
and the Project on Nuclear Issues Summer Conference, August 6–7, 2009.
The Nuclear Proliferation Pathways Conference, August 3-4, 2009
This event brings together top academic and governmental experts to review state-of-the-art analysis on illicit proliferation networks. Now in its fi fth year, the focus of this year’s meeting is Asia. Major topics will include continuing procurement for state WMD programs; lessons learned from the AQ Khan network; status and effectiveness of the Proliferation Security Initiative; and the potential overlap between networks involved in proliferation and terrorism. This conference is organized by the Naval Postgraduate School and sponsored by the Advanced Systems and Concepts Office of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Additional information will be posted at http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/events/.
The Project on Nuclear Issues Summer Conference, August 6–7, 2009
The Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI), an initiative of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, aims to build and sustain a networked community of young nuclear experts from the military, the national laboratories, industry, academia, and the policy community. PONI’s 2009 summer conference will be held in San Diego in conjunction with PPNT and will feature panels on nuclear issues corresponding to the 2009 research agenda, which focuses on the following four areas: 1) Sustaining Infrastructure Capacities and Competence; 2) Nuclear Posture and Key Issues for the 2009 Nuclear Posture Review; 3) Proliferation and Nuclear Terrorism; and 4) Nuclear Arms Reductions, Control and Disarmament. For more information on this conference please contact Mark Jannson (mjansson@csis.org) or visit http://www.csis.org/isp/poni/.
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