“Strategic Stability” in Two Nuclear Posture Reviews

Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

Speaker:

Sharon K. Weiner

January 30 - January 30, 2019  |  12:15 - 1:45 pm  |  SRH 3.122, The LBJ School

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Sharon K. Weiner is Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service and currently a Visiting Research Scholar with the program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Sharon’s research, teaching, and policy engagement is at the intersection of organizational politics and U.S. national security. Her current work focuses on civil-military relations, nuclear weapons strategy and modernization, and fissile material production and disposition.  Her book – Our Own Worst Enemy? Institutional Interests and the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Expertise (MIT Press 2011) – explores the role of organizational and partisan politics in the success and failure of U.S. cooperative nonproliferation programs with the former Soviet Union. The book won the 2012 Louis Brownlow award from the U.S. National Academy of Public Administration for its “outstanding contribution to the literature of public administration [and] new insights and original ideas about the role and behavior of governmental institutions and programs in the area of national security.” Sharon’s scholarly work has appeared in International Security, Political Science Quarterly, Polity, The Nonproliferation Review, Daedalus, as well as other journals.

In 2018, Sharon was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship for her work on understanding deterrence.  She is also the recipient of a Nuclear Challenge Grant from the MacArthur Foundation (2015-2016) as well as an International Affairs Fellowship in Nuclear Security from the Council on Foreign Relations (2014-2015).  From August 2014 through February 2017, Sharon served as a program examiner with the National Security Division of the White House Office of Management and Budget, where she had responsibility for budget and policy issues related to nuclear weapons and nonproliferation. Sharon’s previous policy experience also includes the Office of Senator Al Franken, the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Center for National Security Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Joint Staff.  She holds a PhD in Political Science from MIT’s Security Studies Program.

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