The Program on Science and Global Security

Sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

The seminar will be held at noon, Friday, February 10, at 221 Nassau Street (located at J2 on the campus map) in the 2nd Floor Conference Room.  Lunch is provided.  Please RSVP to gracec@princeton.edu by noon Thursday, February 9 if you are planning to attend so that we can order lunch appropriately.

One of the risks that confronts today's world is radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions and reactor accidents. We tend to approach the danger of fallout, however, as if scientific methods alone can establish it as serious or negligible. This presentation will discuss the critical perspective of organizational expertise in risk analysis. The topic is the problem of globally dispersed fallout produced by atmospheric nuclear tests during the period from 1954 to 1963. Examining a multitude of national, intergovernmental, and transnational expert panels that involved scientists from Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and others, I will explain how each committee sought to "negotiate" risk analysis and solve a dilemma between the trans-scientific nature of expert consensus and its social legitimization based on the strict separation of science from non-science.

Toshihiro Higuchi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Trained as a U.S. diplomatic historian specializing in bio-environmental scientific affairs at Georgetown University, Higuchi has published articles and book chapters regarding the Cold War politics of environmental pollution, natural resources, and environmental health. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in History, his M.A. in History from the State University of New York, Albany and his second M.A. in International Political economy from the University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.

Sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

The seminar will be held at noon, Wednesday, February 15, at 221 Nassau Street (located at J2 on the campus map) in the 2nd Floor Conference Room.  Lunch is provided.  Please RSVP to gracec@princeton.edu by noon Thursday, February 14 if you are planning to attend so that we can order lunch appropriately.

This seminar formulates a theory of nuclear socio-political economy which highlights six factors necessary for embarking on nuclear power programs: (1) national security and secrecy, (2) technocratic ideology, (3) economic interventionism, (4) a centrally coordinated energy stakeholder network, (5) subordination of opposition to political authority, and (6) social peripheralization. The seminar verifies the causal properties of these six catalysts for nuclear power expansion in eight countries: the United States, France, Japan, Russia (the former Soviet Union), South Korea, Canada, China, and India. It validates the framework by confirming the presence of these six drivers during the initial nuclear power developmental periods in all eight cases, and then applies this framework as a predictive tool to evaluate contemporary nuclear power trends. It concludes by discussing what this theory of nuclear socio-political economy means for developed and developing countries which exhibit the potential for nuclear development on a major scale and how the new "renaissance" of nuclear power may affect the promotion of renewable energy, global energy security and development policy as a whole. It also discusses the influence of climate change and the recent nuclear accident in

Benjamin K. Sovacool is currently a Visiting Associate Professor at Vermont Law School, where he manages the Energy Security and Justice Program at their Institute for Energy & the Environment. His research interests include the barriers to alternative sources of energy supply such as renewable electricity generators and distributed generation, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, and building adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change in least developed Asian countries. He has served in advisory and research capacities at the National University of Singapore, U.S. National Science Foundation's Electric Power Networks Efficiency and Security Program, Virginia Tech Consortium on Energy Restructuring, Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Semiconductor Materials and Equipment International, U.S. Department of Energy's Climate Change Technology Program, Union of Concerned Scientists, the International Institute for Applied Systems and Analysis near Vienna, Austria, and the International Energy Agency in Paris, France. He has also consulted for the Asian Development Bank, United Nations Development Program, and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. He is the author or editor of eight books and more than 130 peer reviewed academic articles on various aspects of energy and climate change. 

Sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation.

The seminar will be held on Friday, April 20 from 12:30 pm to 2:00 pm in the Carl Icahn Laboratory, Room 280.  Carl Icahn Laboratory can be located on the campus map at H7.  Lunch will be served.  For questions, please contact Laura Kahn at lkahn@princeton.edu or phone 609-258-6763. 

Ed You, Supervisory Special Agent, FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Biological Countermeasures Unit