UCS Summer Symposium 2009

UCS Summer Symposium at Fudan University’s Center for American Studies

Hello from Shanghai! I’m here in this booming Chinese city for the 21st annual UCS Summer Symposium and it’s off to a great start. For those of you who don’t know about it, UCS brings together a small group of scientists (mostly in the hard sciences but also some political scientists) each year to foster an international community of technically oriented analyst. It started off in 1989 (I think!) as mostly a meeting between Russian and American scientists interested in arms control and cooperation. But it has grown to include participants from around the world. Run by what’s known as the “Cornell Mafia,” which now seems to mean mostly David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund (but also included George Lewis when I attended my first one in 1997), it is geared to fostering a new generation of students and young analysts interested in the technical issues associated with international security.

Today we had four very interesting lectures from young scientists, with plenty of time for discussion, on: using nuclear forensics to tie together (for verification purposes) the US uranium enrichment and plutonium production programs, a talk on using microbial and another on nuclear forensics to “deter” terrorists (very good talks but I don’t believe it), and a discussion of the radioactive xenon emissions (or lack of them) for the 2006 and 2009 DPRK tests. The later has caused me to re-think my opinion on whether or not the 2009 test was actually nuclear. But I’m going to save my thoughts on that for my next post!

So if you are a young scientist (graduate student or post-doc or even older) who is interested in working on technical issues involved in international security, think about applying to go to next years symposium. They are great! (And yes, the total solar eclipse will be visible from Shanghai during the symposium.)