Welcome! And Upcoming Events!

Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm, 1203 Van Munching Hall
CISSM Forum-"The Future of Indo-Pak Relations", Stephen P. Cohen, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Stephen P. Cohen joined the Brookings Institution as senior fellow in 1998, after a career as a professor of political science and history at the University of Illinois. In 2004, he was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of America’s 500 most influential people in the area of foreign policy.

Dr. Cohen is the author, co-author or editor of several books focusing primarily on South Asian security issues, the most recent being The Future of Pakistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) and Arming without Aiming: India Modernizes its Military (Brookings Institution Press, 2010). He has also written on India, Pakistan, nuclear proliferation, disaster management, and the application of technology to the prevention or amelioration of terrorism.

In early 2008, Dr. Cohen was visiting professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, where he taught a course on the politics of manmade and natural disaster. He has also taught in Japan (Keio University) and India (Andhra University). He has consulted for numerous foundations and government agencies, and was a member of the Policy Planning Staff (Department of State) from 1985-1987. He was visiting scholar at the Ford Foundation, New Delhi, from 1992-1993.

Dr. Cohen is a member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and was the founder of several arms control and security-related institutions in the United States and South Asia. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in political science and Indian studies from the University of Wisconsin.


Thursday, September 13, 2012 at 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm
1203 Van Munching Hall
CISSM Forum
"The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History", Milton Leitenberg, Senior Research Scholar, CISSM

Milton Leitenberg is a senior research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland. He recently coauthored an exhaustive history of the Soviet biological weapons program, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Harvard Press, 2012).

Leitenberg was trained as a scientist and moved into the field of arms control in 1966. In 1968, Leitenberg was the first American recruited to work at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). He was subsequently affiliated with the Swedish Institute of International Affairs and the Center for International Studies Peace Program at Cornell University, and he joined CISSM in 1989. His research is widely published; in the years since 1966 he has authored or edited a dozen books or book length studies, and published 180 journal papers, monographs, and book chapters. Among these are major portions of Tactical Nuclear Weapons, European Perspectives, SIPRI (Taylor and Francis, 1978); Great Power Intervention in the Middle East (edited, Pergamon Press, 1979); The Structure of Defense Industry: An International Survey (edited, Croom Helm, 1983); The Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, 1945 - 1982: A Bibliographic Guide (ABC-Clio, 1984); a book of his selected studies on arms control, Resting und Sicherheitspolitik (Nomos Verlag, 1986); and Soviet Submarine Operations in Swedish Waters 1980-1986 (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1987).

Leitenberg's research work is concentrated in three disparate areas of study: biological weapons; actual wars and conflicts of the past two decades, and the issue of international intervention in these; and the history of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and USSR between 1945 and 1995. CISSM published his major monograph Biological Weapons Arms Control in 1996.

With specific reference to biological weapons: a subject of particular current concern, Leitenberg's academic training was in Biology and Chemistry and his first paper dealing with biological weapons was published in 1967. At SIPRI, he was a member of the team that produced the six-volume study, The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, published between 1971 and 1973. Since 1992, he has published thirty papers in the area of biological weapons. Leitenberg published two other recent books on the subject of biological weapons: "The Problem of Biological Weapons" (National Defense College, Stockholm, 2004) and "Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat" (US Army War College, December 2005).

Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 12:15 pm - 1:30 pm
1203 Van Munching Hall
Tuesday Policy Forum
Featuring Bruce Bartlett, the foremost speaker on taxes and politics, and author of the New York Times best-seller, The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform—Why We Need It and What It Will Take (Simon & Schuster 2012)