Scott Kemp of MIT will tell the story of the technical negotiations behind the Iran nuclear agreement and discuss the prospects for the agreement continuing under a new U.S. administration. The original calculations and trade-offs that were made behind the scenes will be revealed, including several inadvertent loopholes introduced into the agreement, and conclusions drawn about Iran's ultimate ability to make nuclear weapons. The implications of these findings, and thoughts on how to preserve the security benefits of this historic diplomatic achievement, will be discussed.
R. Scott Kemp is the Norman C. Rasmussen Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy.
Scott's research combines physics, information science, politics, and history to help define policy options for achieving international security under technical constraints. He works on direct verification of nuclear-warhead dismantlement, the detection of clandestine nuclear programs, and on emerging nuclear technologies that complicate international security.
In 2010 and 2011, he served as Science Advisor in the U.S. State Department's Office of the Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control where he was responsible for framing the technical negotiations on Iran's nuclear program. He is the recipient of the NEC Award in Computation and Communication and the 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics.
Scott received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in International Affairs, and a bachelor's in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At MIT he teaches courses on nuclear power, civil society, and on reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons.
