To get in touch with our experts, please contact Anna Schumann at aschumann@armscontrolcenter.org, or 202.546.0795 x 2115. In addition to those listed below, we also have our Szilard Advisory Board members, a select group of experts at the intersection of policy and politics dedicated to reducing the threats posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD), available for interviews.
Rep. John Tierney | National Security, Security Spending, Iran Diplomacy, Nuclear Weapons, North Korea, Non-Proliferation, Missile Defense, Middle East, Russia, Peace and Security
Executive Director, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Susan Flood Burk | Nuclear Nonproliferation, State Department, Counter-terrorism, Iran Nuclear Deal, Nuclear Weapons, Diplomacy, Peace and Security
Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; former Special Representative to the President on Nuclear Nonproliferation with rank of Ambassador
Amb. Peter Galbraith | Afghanistan War, Iran Diplomacy, Middle East, South Asia & Indonesia, Diplomacy as Alternative to War
Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Lt. General Robert Gard | Nuclear Weapons, Non-Proliferation, Security Spending, Iran Diplomacy, Missile Defense, Russia, Afghanistan War, Diplomacy as Alternative to War
Chairman Emeritus, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
John Gilbert | Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear Materials Control, Non-Proliferation, and Counter-Terrorism
Senior Science Fellow, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s Scientists Working Group
Amb. Thomas Graham | Diplomacy, Non-Proliferation, Peace and Security, Iran Diplomacy
Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Gen. Joseph Hoar | Nuclear Weapons, Afghanistan War, Syria, National Security Issues, Missile Defense
Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
John Isaacs | Nuclear Weapons, Non-Proliferation, Security Spending, Iran Diplomacy, Missile Defense, Russia, National Security Issues in Congress, Afghanistan War, Diplomacy as Alternative to War
Senior Fellow and Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Gen. John H. Johns | Diplomacy as Alternative to War, Counterinsurgency, Morality in International Relations
Member of the National Advisory Board, Council for a Livable World
Frank von Hippel | Nuclear Arms Control, Non-Proliferation, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Weapons
Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Col. Richard Klass | Afghanistan War, Counterinsurgency, Non-Proliferation, Syria, National Security
Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Dr. Lynn Klotz | Industrial Biotechnology, Bio-security
Member of the Scientists Working Group, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Gregory Koblentz | Political Science, Bio-defense, Chemical and Biological Weapons
Member of the Scientists Working Group, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Edward Levine | Nuclear Weapons, Non-Proliferation, Iran Diplomacy, Missile Defense, Middle East, Biochemical Weapons, Space, National Security Issues in Congress
Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; former Senior Professional Staff for Senate Foreign Affairs and Senate Intelligence committees
Matthew Meselson | Biological and Chemical Weapons, Biotechnology
Member of the National Advisory Board, Council for a Livable World
Jim Walsh | JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal), North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Non-Proliferation, Missile Defense, International Security
Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dan Wirls | Security Spending, National Security Issues in Congress, Nuclear Weapons
Member of the Board, Council for a Livable World
Biographies
Rep. John Tierney – Executive Director, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Former Congressman John Tierney is the Executive Director at the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation, where his work focuses on national security issues in Congress, nuclear nonproliferation, missile defense, and other areas of peace and security. Tierney is a former nine-term Massachusetts congressman who served on the House Intelligence Committee and chaired the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee. During his congressional career, Tierney spent considerable time advocating on nuclear non-proliferation and national security issues. His 18-year career included oversight of the Government Accountability Office’s annual assessment of the Pentagon’s Weapons Selection Programs and reform of overall Pentagon spending.
Susan Flood Burk – Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Mrs. Burk served as the special Representative of the President, Nuclear Nonproliferation with the rank of Ambassador, from 2009-2012, leading the U.S. preparations for and participation in the successful 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference. Over her more than 35 years of public service focused on United States’ nonproliferation, arms control and counterterrorism objectives, she has held a number of senior positions in both the State Department and the former U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACCDA). Burk served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Nonproliferation, and as Acting Assistant Secretary of in the Nonproliferation Bureau for 14 months. She was the first Deputy Coordinator for Homeland Security in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. In ACDA, she headed the office that led the U.S. preparations for the successful 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference.
Since her retirement from federal service, she has been retained by the Department of Energy as a consultant on nuclear nonproliferation and NPT issues. She has continued to write and speak on these subjects. She serves on the Boards of the Herbert P. Scoville Peace Fellowships, the Arms Control Association, the Center of Concern and the State Department Senior Seminar Alumnae Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. She is an active member of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and currently serves on the Board of AAUW of Virginia.
Amb. Peter Galbraith – Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith is the Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Prior to joining the Center, Galbraith was a professor of National Security Strategy at the National War College. He has held senior positions in the United States government and with the United Nations, including U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and Director for Political, Constitutional, and Electoral Affairs at the U.N. Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).
Lt. General Robert Gard – Chair Emeritus and Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Lt. General Robert G. Gard, Jr. is Chairman Emeritus of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. During his military career, Gard saw combat in both the Korea and Vietnam wars, and served a three year tour in Germany. He also served as Executive Assistant to two secretaries of defense; the first Director of Human Resources Development for the U.S. Army; Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs; and President of National Defense University (NDU).
John Gilbert – Senior Science Fellow, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s Scientists Working Group
John Gilbert is a Senior Science Fellow with the Center and was a senior arms control analyst with a large professional and technical services company where he has supported a variety of national and international chemical, biological, and nuclear material control, non-proliferation, and counter-terrorism initiatives. He has specialized in on-site inspection operations and management. Previously, Mr. Gilbert served as a senior officer in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a Colonel after more than 25 years. He served on and commanded strategic missile crews, spent over 15 years managing organizations that analyzed foreign WMD capabilities and delivery systems, and was one of the first-ever U.S. on-site inspectors (under the INF Treaty) beginning in 1988. He established the chemical and biological operations division within the U.S. On-Site Inspection Agency (now part of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency), and was a member of U.S. national Chemical Weapons delegations and negotiating teams in Geneva, The Hague, and Moscow. He has trained several hundred arms control inspectors for the United States, including those conducting missile, nuclear, and chemical inspections, biological weapon fact-finding visits, and other operations.
Amb. Thomas Graham – Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr. was Special Representative of the President for Arms Control, Nonproliferation and Disarmament from 1994 to 1997. Internationally known as one of the leading authorities in the field of arms control agreements to combat the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, Ambassador Graham has served as a senior U.S. diplomat involved in the negotiation of every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement for the past 30 years. Currently, he is Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Thorium Power.
Gen. Joseph Hoar – Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
General Joseph P. Hoar is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and former Commander of the United States Central Command. During the Vietnam War, Hoar was assigned with the 2nd Marine Division, commanding Company M, 3rd Battalion. Hoar was the Deputy for Operations for the Marine Corps during the Gulf War, and prior to that he was General H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s chief of staff at Central Command. After retirement, he set up the consulting firm J.P. Hoar & Associates. Since 2002, Hoar has actively opposed the war in Iraq.
John Isaacs – Senior Fellow, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
John Isaacs is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and Council for a Livable World. He is one of the leaders of the nation’s arms control community and has long been an expert on the workings of Congress, representing the Council on Capitol Hill since 1978. Isaacs previously served as a Legislative Assistant on foreign affairs to Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY), a Legislative Representative on foreign policy and defense budgets for Americans for Democratic Action, and a Foreign Service Officer in Vietnam.
Gen. John H. Johns – Member of the National Advisory Board, Council for a Livable World
General Johns served 26 years as a combat arms officer, retiring in 1978 as a brigadier general. He served in command positions up to Assistant Division Commander of the 1st Infantry Division and held numerous staff positions. In 1960, General Johns began a series of assignments focused on counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine. He was on a committee at the Special Warfare School in 1961 that developed the first Counterinsurgency course, went to Vietnam in 1962, where he was senior advisor to the Vietnam Political Warfare School, and returned to serve in a series of staff positions on the Army General Staff. After retirement and a tour as a deputy assistant secretary of defense, General Johns served for 14 years as a professor of political science at the National Defense University (NDU).
General Johns is a graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College, the National War College, and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He has masters’ degrees in psychology and international relations, and a doctorate in sociology.
Col. Richard Klass – Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Colonel Richard Klass. USAF (ret.) is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy, the National War College and Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He flew over 200 combat missions in Vietnam and served in the Executive Office of the President as a White House Fellow. His awards include the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart.
Dr. Lynn Klotz – Member of the Scientists Working Group, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Lynn Klotz (PhD.) is a Senior Science Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. He also is Co-managing Director of Bridging BioScience and BioBusiness LLC, a biotechnology education business. Dr. Klotz is a former Harvard University faculty member and biotechnology company executive. While at Harvard University, he was a recipient of the prestigious Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar grant for teaching excellence. He was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize along with co-author Edward Sylvester, by the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, for the 1983 book The Gene Age: Genetic Engineering and the Next Industrial Revolution. In 2009, the Universiy of Chicago Press published a second Klotz and Sylvester book, Breeding Bio Insecurity: How U.S. Biodefense is Exporting Fear, Globalizing Risk, and Making Us All Less Secure. The UC Press featured it as one of its seven best books of 2009.
Gregory Koblentz – Member of the Scientists Working Group, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Gregory D. Koblentz is an Associate Professor and Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. The Biodefense Graduate Program is a multidisciplinary research and education program designed to prepare students to work on issues at the nexus of health, science, and security and bridge the gap between science and policy. Dr. Koblentz is also an Associate Faculty at the Center for Security Policy Studies at George Mason. During 2012-2013, he was a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he conducted research on nuclear proliferation.
Prior to arriving at George Mason, Dr. Koblentz was a visiting assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of Government at Georgetown University. He has also worked for the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Koblentz is the author of Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age (Council on Foreign Relations, 2014) and Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security (Cornell University Press, 2009) and co-author of Editing Biosecurity: Needs and Strategies for Governing Genome Editing (George Mason University and Stanford University, 2018) and Tracking Nuclear Proliferation: A Guide in Maps and Charts (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1998). His research and teaching focus on understanding the causes and consequences of the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to state and non-state actors. He has published widely on issues related to biodefense, biosecurity, dual-use research, and the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. He received a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a MPP from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Edward Levine – Chair of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Edward Levine retired on July 31 after more than 14 years as a senior professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and over 20 years with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In his earlier service on the staff of the SSCI, Levine co-authored all of that committee’s analyses of U.S. capability to monitor compliance with such treaties as SALT II, START, START II, CFE, INF, CWC, TTBT/PNET, and the CTBT.
Matthew Meselson – Member of the National Advisory Board, Council for a Livable World
Matthew Meselson is Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government. He received the Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1957 and was an Assistant Professor of Physical Chemistry at CalTech until he joined the Harvard faculty in 1960, where he teaches and conducts research in molecular genetics.
Since 1963 Dr. Meselson has been interested in chemical and biological defense and arms control and has served as a member of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board to the Secretary of State and as a consultant on CBW matters to various U.S. government agencies. He is co-director of the Harvard-Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons and co-editor of its quarterly journal, the Chemical Weapons Convention Bulletin. Dr. Meselson is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute of Medicine, the Academia Sanctae Clarae (Genoa), the Academie des Sciences (Paris), the Royal Society (London), and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Jim Walsh – Member of the Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Dr. Jim Walsh is an expert in international security and Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP). Dr. Walsh’s research and writings focus on international security, and in particular, topics involving nuclear weapons. He is one of a handful of Americans who has traveled to both Iran and North Korea for talks with officials about nuclear issues. Dr. Walsh has testified before the United States Senate on the issue of nuclear terrorism and on Iran’s nuclear program. The British newspaper, The Independent, named Dr. Walsh and his co-authors as having offered one of the 10 best and original ideas of 2008.
Before coming to MIT, Dr. Walsh was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has taught at both Harvard University and MIT. Dr. Walsh received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dan Wirls – Member of the Board, Council for a Livable World
Daniel Wirls is a Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Merrill College. He formerly held a position as the Department Chair in Politics for the University of California at Santa Cruz from 2005-2010 and many years ago worked at Council for a Livable World. He has written several books and published extensively on politics, national security, and defense policy. Wirls received his B.A. in Political Science from Haverford College. He holds a M.A. and Ph.D from the Department of Government at Cornell University.
Frank Von Hippel – Member of the National Advisory Board, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Frank von Hippel is a nuclear physicist and Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. A former Assistant Director for National Security in the White House Office of Science and Technology, von Hippel’s areas of policy research include nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, energy, and checks and balances in policymaking for technology. Prior to coming to Princeton, he worked for ten years in the field of elementary-particle theoretical physics.
