Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker, director emeritus of Los Alamos National Laboratory, will give a talk Thursday (April 160 at 5:30 p.m. in Room 102 of the Jack E. Brown Engineering Building.

Dr. Siegfried S. Hecker

Hecker’s talk — “How did North Korea get the bomb and will it give it up?” — is co-sponsored by Department of Nuclear Engineering and the Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute (NSSPI).  A reception will precede the talk at 5 p.m.

Hecker is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. In his talk, he will discuss how North Korea proclaimed itself a world nuclear power on Oct. 9, 2006, with its nuclear weapon test. Although the technical success of the test is highly questionable, it changed the political dynamics on the Korean Peninsula in the North’s favor. Hecker will describe how North Korea got the bomb and the prospects of giving it up based on his six visits to North Korea in the past five years. Hecker will draw lessons from the North Korean experience for the broader global nuclear proliferation challenges we face today.

Hecker is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford and a senior fellow at FSI. Hecker’s research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapon policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. In the past 15 years, Hecker has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. His current interests include the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan and North Korea, and the nuclear aspirations of Iran. Hecker works closely with the Russian Academy of Sciences and is actively involved with the U.S. National Academies, serving as a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control Nonproliferation Panel.

Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory’s Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; a fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; a fellow of the American Society for Metals; an honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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