The Challenge of Peace: Public Opinion, the Reagan Administration, and the Movement to Freeze the Arms Race

Henry_Maar
SPEAKER:
HENRY MAAR

PH.D. CANDIDATE
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, UCSB

DATE/TIME:
MON, 12/08/2014 - 4:00PM TO 5:00PM
LOCATION:
3105 ETCHEVERRY HALL
Fall 2014 Colloquium Series
Abstract:

This talk explores the  role of public opinion and social-protest through a case-study of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. The Freeze campaign grew in parallel to the onset of the administration of Ronald Reagan and an increasingly tense Cold War, responding with a simple and easy solution to the escalating arms race: a bilateral freeze on the production, deployment, and testing of nuclear weapons. The campaign soon spread across American society, influencing Just War and pro-life debates among Catholic Bishops, becoming a theme within popular movies, television shows, and music, and receiving bipartisan support within the Congress. Drawing extensively on newly declassified documents from the archives of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, memoirs of Reagan administration officials, Freeze activists, and extensive media sources, this talk argues the Reagan administration was forced to co-opt the antinuclear message emanating from the Freeze campaign, or else continue to face a growing backlash with potential electoral repercussions.

About the Speaker:

Henry Maar is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the role of public opinion and movements of social-protest in the shaping of American foreign policy. His dissertation, “The Challenge of Peace: Public Opinion, the Reagan Administration, and the Movement to Freeze the Arms Race,” uses newly declassified documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to assess the influence of the Nuclear Freeze movement on American foreign policy and the Cold War. He is completing his Ph.D. with the support of a Nuclear Security Dissertation Fellowship from the UC Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).

Quantifying Uncertainty in Nuclear and Cross Section Data

SPEAKER:
MORGAN WHITE, PH.D.

LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

DATE/TIME:
MON, 12/01/2014 - 4:00PM TO 5:00PM
LOCATION:
3105 ETCHEVERRY HALL
Fall 2014 Colloquium Series
Abstract:

For the last five years, the nuclear data community within NNSA has been rallied around the goal of understanding the neutronic properties of plutonium-239. Unfortunately, it is a difficult problem and we are not there yet. In fact, we have taken the problem global and engaged the broader international community [CIELO, NDS V118 p1] in helping tackle these challenging issues. But that is a story for a different day. In the meantime, this intense study has paid off in the form of many new insights in assessing the state of our knowledge. As these kinds of issues are more general than just our community, I hope that discussing them more broadly might help others in their search for solutions and all of us in pondering those unknown unknowns.

About the Speaker:

Morgan White joined the nuclear data team at LANL in X-division in 1998 as a summer student and has been part of that team ever since. As part of his doctoral thesis, Morgan implemented photo-nuclear physics in NJOY and MCNP to extend new capabilities to the radiation shielding community. Taking the advice start like you mean to continue, bringing better nuclear data and methods to users has been the focus of his work since. Morgan has been a part of developing the MCNP ACE data libraries ENDF60, LA150N, ENDF66, ACTI, ENDF70 and ENDF71 as well as many specialized libraries for specific applications. He has worked with Monte Carlo and deterministic neutronics codes as well as multi-physics applications to develop and implement extended capabilities in transport physics and tally capabilities. More recently, Morgan has crossed from simulations to the dark side and begun working with the experimental community to better understand and reduce the systematic errors in the fundamental data necessary for such simulations.

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