NPS News Profile:
Proliferation Seminar Brings International Perspectives to WMD Discussions
by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kellie Arakawa
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
To provide a global assessment of the tools and policies aimed at stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Center for Contemporary Conflict partnered with academic institutions from around the world to host the 2008 Monterey Proliferation Seminar.
Sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Advanced Systems and Concepts Office and in partnership with King’s College, University of London; Gulf Research Center, Dubai; Foundation pour la Recherche Stratégique, Paris; University of Salzburg, Austria; and the School of Policy and International Affairs, University of Maine, the annual seminar united schools, institutes and government officials in a three-day discussion that highlighted perspectives from Europe, South Asia and the Middle East, and included panel discussions on international regimes and threats from non-state actors.
“Over the last six or seven years, the United States has been at the forefront of attempts to supplement existing export control and international regimes that are meant to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” said NPS Prof. James Russell, the seminar’s principal investigator. “The purpose of this conference is to look at all of these things in total, and assess where we’re doing well, where we’re doing not so well and how we can improve the existing system.”
The seminar featured a keynote speech by the Honorable Patricia McNerney (above), the Department of State Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation, who spoke about U.S. non- and counter-proliferation policies. She outlined several key pillars to the nation’s approach and discussed many of the tools and programs that have been put in place to address some of the challenges that have been faced.
McNerney also spoke about the importance of international collaboration in the effort to combat security threats. “This new era requires the governments and private sectors to work together in close collaboration along with our international partners to proactively seek out threats to international security and ensure that such threats are effectively isolated,” she said. “Innovation alone will not win this fight … we must strengthen our partnerships, old and new, and ensure that we share a common vision of the threats we must address and maximize our tools to address these threats.”
Russell believes that hosting the seminar at NPS helps raise the profile of the entire school within the federal government and highlights the various programs within the National Security Affairs Department. “We have this world-class faculty and a great research program, so it’s a way to emphasize our strengths to the government system and to our sponsors who are sending students here,” he explained.
As a long-term objective, Russell said that he and his colleagues plan on publishing scholarly works that originate from many of the discussions presented at the seminars. As a result of a previous conference, both he and James Wirtz, the Interim Dean of the School of International Graduate Studies, edited a book, Globalization and WMD Proliferation: Terrorism, Transnational Networks and International Security, that consisted of a series of papers presented at a previous seminar.
“The issue of nuclear, chemical and biological proliferation is of great interest to the Navy and the entire defense department, and we in the DoD community play a vitally important role in implementing our national strategy to combat the proliferation of WMD,” Russell said. “This is just an effort on our part at NPS, as a center for research and learning in the defense department educational system, to help spread this knowledge and thinking throughout our institutions to help them do their jobs better.”
