Johan Bergenäs is a researcher in the Washington, DC office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Most recently he contributed to the CNS-UN Institute for Disarmament Research report on the role of regional organizations in implementing Resolution 1540. Other recent publications include a March 2008 op-ed in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet urging the Swedish government to reject the U.S.-India civilian nuclear cooperation agreement (coauthored with Lawrence Scheinman) and an article in the November 2007 WMD Insights on China's influence on the U.S.-India deal (coauthored with Leonard Spector).
Pierre Billaud, a French nuclear physicist who served as an artillery officer in World War II, is the former director of the Centre d'etudes de Limeil-Brevannes of the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique, where his work focused on the fundamentals of thermonuclear weapons. He was responsible for preparing for the first French nuclear test, which was conducted on February 13, 1960. He retired in 1979. After a few controversial press disclosures in 1997 about the French H-bomb program, he wrote an essay in order to share a concise but complete history of the French adventure with the hydrogen bomb. His article in this issue is based on that essay.
Michael Clarke is currently a research fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His research expertise and interests concern Chinese history and politics, contemporary Chinese foreign policy, U.S. foreign policy, and nuclear proliferation in the Asia-Pacific region. He has published on these subjects in Issues & Studies, Asian Ethnicity, Asian Studies Review, and the Australian Journal of Politics and History. His most recent publication is, “‘In the National Interest’: Australia's Proliferation Strategy in a Changing International Environment,” in the December 2007 issue of Australian Journal of Politics & History.
Simen A. Ellingsen is a Ph.D. student in both the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and the Department of Energy and Process Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is author most recently of “Safeguards against Nuclear Terrorism: HEU vs. Plutonium,” in the June 2008 Defense and Security Analysis.
Cristina Hansell is director of the Newly Independent States Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and an adjunct professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her areas of expertise include HEU minimization, Russian civilian and naval research reactors, and foreign nonproliferation assistance to Russia. She has written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jane's Intelligence Review, and the Moscow Times, among other publications.
Mark Hibbs is Asia-Pacific editor for the nuclear publications of the Platts group at the McGraw-Hill Companies (including Nucleonics Week and NuclearFuel). Since the mid-1990s, Hibbs has extensively investigated and reported on nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear trade issues concerning nuclear programs in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan, the Koreas, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, South Africa, and Taiwan. Hibbs is currently researching the nuclear activities of other states that since 2005 have announced they plan to embark on nuclear power programs.
Styrkaar Hustveit is an advisor at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA). He holds a master's in applied mathematics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and has been working at NRPA since 2006 on issues relating to radiation protection, nuclear security, and nonproliferation, with a special focus on highly enriched uranium and the Russian naval nuclear sector.
Venance Journé holds a doctorate in particle physics, is a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and is coauthor (with Georges Charpak and Richard L. Garwin) of From Chernobyl to Chernobyls (2005).
Gregory Kulacki is a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), where he is manager of the China Project in the Global Security Program. Before he joined UCS in 2002, he was director of external studies at Pitzer College. He has lived and worked in China for more than fifteen years directing educational and professional exchange programs between the United States and China.
Jeffrey G. Lewis is the director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, a research affiliate with the Center for International and Security Studies, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Prior to joining New America, he was executive director of Harvard University's Managing the Atom Project. He is the author of Minimum Means of Reprisal: China's Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (2007).
Anya Loukianova is a research associate in the Newly Independent States Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She manages several databases on nonproliferation for the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Her work has appeared in WMD Insights, International Export Control Observer, and Eksport Vooruzheniy.
Senator Richard G. Lugar (Republican of Indiana) is the Republican leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on which he has served since 1979, and has twice been its chairman. In 1991, he and Senator Sam Nunn (Democrat of Georgia) initiated legislation to facilitate the destruction of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the former Soviet Union. Senator Lugar played key roles in Senate ratification of the first and second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Chemical Weapons Convention. In recent years he has worked to expand Nunn-Lugar beyond the former Soviet states and to enact legislation to control conventional arms stockpiles under similar principles. He also serves as a member of the International Advisory Board of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Robert Nurick is a senior fellow in the Washington, DC, office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is the former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, and before that, he worked at the Rand Corporation in several capacities, including senior political scientist, and at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies as the director of studies. From 1977 to 1978 he was special assistant to the deputy assistant secretary of defense, and from 1978 to 1981 he served as principal action officer for theater nuclear forces and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
William C. Potter is the director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where he is institute professor and director of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He currently serves on the Nonproliferation Panel of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on International Security and Arms Control. Potter has contributed chapters and articles to more than eighty-five scholarly books and journals; his most recent book is the coauthored The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism. He has served as a consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Rand Corporation, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Ole Reistad is a research scientist and Ph.D. candidate with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, and section head for nuclear safety issues at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority. He holds a master's in nuclear physics from NTNU and is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials.
Elena Sokova is assistant director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Her research areas include nuclear nonproliferation in Russia, trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials, fissile material security, nuclear fuel cycle developments, and nonproliferation education and training. Her recent publications include an article in the September/October 2007 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a chapter in The Search for WMD: Non-Proliferation, Intelligence and Pre-emption in the New Security Environment (2006).
Jessica C. Varnum is a graduate research assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, where she is contributing to a project forecasting twenty-first-century nuclear proliferation developments. A recent proliferation-related paper she wrote won “Most Outstanding Paper” at the 2007 Women in International Security Summer Symposium. With Jon Wolfsthal, she coauthored a 2006 op-ed on Turkey and nuclear weapons for the International Herald Tribune. Varnum earned a bachelor's degree in government/international studies from Colby College and will receive her master's in international policy studies from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 2008.