Matthew Bunn (born 1961) is an American nuclear and energy policy analyst, currently a professor of practice at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. [1] He is the Co-principal Investigator for the Belfer Center's Project on Managing the Atom. [2]
Before coming to Harvard, Bunn served as an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1994-1996. [3] Bunn directed the secret 1995 study on nuclear security from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). This study served as the basis for Presidential Decision Directive 41 (1995) which established U.S. government policies for securing nuclear materials. [4] From 1992-1996, Bunn held a position as a study director at the National Academy of Sciences. [5] During this time, he directed Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium and this study became the foundation for U.S. government policy on plutonium disposition. (The creation of what is now the Office of Materials Disposition was announced the day after the report was released.) [4] Bunn initially suggested and helped coordinate the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s $1.2 million gift to the International Atomic Energy Agency's nuclear security programs, which became the founding gift of the Nuclear Security Fund. [6] He developed the concepts of “cold standby” and “warm standby” for Iran’s centrifuges when various forms of “suspension” of Iran’s program were being discussed and co-authored compromise proposals for resolving the dispute over Iran’s program with former Iranian deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki. [7] [8] [9] Bunn and his colleague Anthony Wier were the first to suggest a four-year effort to secure nuclear material worldwide, a goal that was ultimately agreed to at the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit. [10] Bunn, Wier, and John Holdren, formerly President Obama’s science advisor, first proposed combining U.S. efforts to convert research reactors and remove HEU into a single program, which became the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. [11]
Bunn was also an editor of Arms Control Today from 1990-1992. [12]
Bunn received his Ph.D. in Technology, Management, and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. [13]
Nuclear terrorism refers to any person or persons detonating a nuclear weapon as an act of terrorism. Nuclear terrorism outlines a broad category of possible terror incidents, ranging in feasibility and scope. Possible methods include the sabotage of a nuclear facility, the intentional irradiation of citizens, and/or the detonation of a radiological device, colloquially termed a dirty bomb, but consensus is lacking. According to the 2005 United Nations International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. nuclear terrorism is an offense committed if a person unlawfully and intentionally "uses in any way radioactive material … with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury; or with the intent to cause substantial damage to property or to the environment; or with the intent to compel a natural or legal person, an international organization or a State to do or refrain from doing an act."
Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Pakistan is one of nine states that possess nuclear weapons. Pakistan began developing nuclear weapons in January 1972 under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who delegated the program to the Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) Munir Ahmad Khan with a commitment to having the device ready by the end of 1976. Since PAEC, which consisted of over twenty laboratories and projects under reactor physicist Munir Ahmad Khan, was falling behind schedule and having considerable difficulty producing fissile material, Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist working on centrifuge enrichment for Urenco, joined the program at the behest of the Bhutto administration by the end of 1974. Producing fissile material was pivotal to the Kahuta Project's success and thus to Pakistan obtaining the capability to detonate a nuclear weapon by the end of 1984.
Ashton Baldwin Carter was an American government official and academic who served as the 25th United States secretary of defense from February 2015 to January 2017. He later served as director of the Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative, generally referred to as NTI, is a non-profit organization located in Washington, D.C. NTI was founded in 2001 by former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner and describes itself as a "a nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organization focused on reducing nuclear, biological, and emerging technology threats imperiling humanity."
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter L. Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of the Carter administration. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Joel L. Shin was a specialist in international trade matters, government affairs and national defense. He was a partner at Evenflow Macro, which he cofounded in 2013. He had previously been a principal of The Scowcroft Group and a senior fellow with The Forum for International Policy. Shin served on the policy staff of the presidential campaign of Governor George W. Bush, assisting in the development of foreign and defense policies. Shin also worked for the Bush-Cheney transition. He was also an associate in the corporate department of Whitman Breed, Abbott & Morgan, a New York law firm, where his focus included mergers and acquisitions in the defense and high-tech industries.
The Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is an office of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) responsible for all intelligence and counterintelligence activities throughout the DOE complex. It was established in 2006 by the merger of pre-existing Energy Department intelligence and security organizations. Due to its central role, OICI is designated DOE's Headquarters Intelligence. As a component of the United States Intelligence Community in addition to the Department of Energy, OICI reports to both the Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Energy.
Terrorist tactics tend to favor attacks that avoid effective countermeasures and exploit vulnerabilities.
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy is a research center at Harvard Kennedy School founded in 1999. The center's scholars address issues related to human rights, including human security, global governance and civil society, economic justice, and equality and discrimination.
Scott Douglas Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He is known for his research on nuclear weapons policy and nuclear disarmament, including discussions of system accidents, and has published widely on these subjects.
The Robert and Renée Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, also known as the Belfer Center, is a research center located at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.
Melissa Hathaway is a leading expert in cyberspace policy and cybersecurity. She served under two U.S. presidential administrations from 2007 to 2009, including more than 8 months at the White House, spearheading the Cyberspace Policy Review for President Barack Obama after leading the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) for President George W. Bush. She is President of Hathaway Global Strategies LLC, a Senior Fellow and member of the Board of Regents at Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada, and a non-resident Research Fellow at the Kosciuszko Institute in Poland. She was previously a Senior Adviser at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center.
Nuclear latency or a nuclear threshold state is the condition of a country possessing all the technology, expertise and infrastructure needed to quickly develop nuclear weapons, without having actually yet done so. Japan is considered a "paranuclear" state, with complete technical prowess to develop a nuclear weapon quickly, and is sometimes called being "one screwdriver's turn" from the bomb, as it is considered to have the materials and technical capacity to make a nuclear weapon at will.
Ernest Jeffrey Moniz, GCIH is an American nuclear physicist and former government official. From May 2013 to January 2017, he served as the 13th United States secretary of energy in the Obama administration. Prior to this, Moniz served as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and undersecretary of energy from 1997 to 2001 during the Clinton administration. He is currently the co-chair and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), as well as president and CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), a nonprofit organization funded by the natural gas industry that works on climate and energy technology issues, which he co-founded in 2017.
An ongoing concern in the area of nuclear safety and security is the possibility that terrorist organizations may attack facilities possessing radioactive material in order to cause widespread radioactive contamination or to construct nuclear weapons. Such facilities may include nuclear power plants, civilian research reactors, uranium enrichment plants, fuel fabrication plants, uranium mines, and military bases where nuclear weapons are stored. The attack threat is of several general types: commando-like ground-based attacks on equipment which if disabled could lead to a reactor core meltdown or widespread dispersal of radioactivity, external attacks such as an aircraft crash into a reactor complex, or cyber attacks.
Ambuj D. Sagar is the Vipula and Mahesh Chaturvedi Professor of Policy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. As of October 2022, he has been appointed as the deputy director at IIT Delhi. His interests broadly lie in science and technology policy, environmental policy, and development policy, with a particular focus on the interactions between technology and society. While his current research focuses mainly on energy innovation and climate policy, he also studies, more broadly, various facets of technology innovation, environmental policy politics and processes, and engineering education and research.
Kelly M. Greenhill is an American political scientist. She is an associate professor at Tufts University and a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She specializes in weapons of mass migration, forced displacement, and foreign policy.
Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology who studies the history of nuclear weapons. He is the creator of NUKEMAP.
Laura Susan Hayes Holgate is an American diplomat who has served as the United States ambassador to the United Nations International Organizations in Vienna and to the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2022 and previously from 2016 to 2017.
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