VIRTUAL

 

Thursday, September 9th    2021

3:45 – 4:45 p.m.

WEBEX


Speaker:  Sig Hecker

 

Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University

 

“Hinge Points: North Korea and the Bomb”

 

 

 

Abstract: 

The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have not effectively countered North Korea’s dual-track nuclear plus diplomacy strategy to build the bomb and acquire a threatening nuclear arsenal. Focusing instead on what they considered North Korea’s duplicitous behavior to cheat on all agreements, they have made bad decisions at key hinge points that had bad consequences resulting in one of Washington’s greatest and most dangerous policy failures. Although all three administrations made bad decisions at hinge points, I will focus primarily on the Trump administration as it leads to the predicament Washington faces today.

 

Bio: 

Dr. Hecker is Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Department of Management Science and Engineering, and Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. He is also director emeritus at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he served as director from 1986-1997 and senior fellow until July 2005. He joined the Los Alamos National Laboratory as technical staff member in 1973, following a postdoctoral assignment there in 1968-1970 and a summer graduate student assignment in 1965.  He served as chairman of the Center for Materials Science and division leader of the Materials Science and Technology Division before becoming director. Dr. Hecker’s research interests include nuclear weapon policy, nuclear security, cooperative nuclear threat reduction and the future of global nuclear energy. His current interests also include the challenges of nuclear Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.

 

Over the past three decades, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian and Chinese nuclear laboratories to enhance safety and security of their nuclear assets. Dr. Hecker is the editor of Doomed to Cooperate (2016), two volumes documenting the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992. Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the India Institute of Metals, Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the TMS (Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society), Fellow of the American Society for Metals, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.