NEXT GENERATION SAFEGUARDS INITIATIVE UNIVERSITY OUTREACH: LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY TEACHING A POLITICAL SCIENCE COURSE ON NUCLEAR SAFEGUARDS & SECURITY POLICY AT NEW MEXICO INSTITUTE OF MINING AND TECHNOLOGY

One of the key elements of the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) Human Capital Development effort is to create and deliver university courses in safeguards, in order to expose engineering and science students to the nonproliferation policy implications of their field. Political scientists and engineers from Los Alamos National Laboratory created a course on “Nuclear Safeguards & Security Policy” to teach in the Spring 2012 semester at The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. This course introduced students to the major themes and debates in the contemporary study of nuclear safeguards and security, from a historical perspective. Nuclear policy is a vast subject area and every week, the professors introduced students to one aspect of a range of topics covered throughout the 15-week course. Not only were the academic debates addressed, but so too were the contemporary policy debates. This way, students were exposed to both theory and policy. The course provided students with a broad overview of nuclear safeguards and security policy. The course required students to write two papers, lead one side of a weekly seminar debate topic, and to actively participate in weekly seminar discussions. Given that most of the students were technical and engineering students, already familiar with the technical aspects of safeguards, this course was designed to introduce students to the policy dimension of nuclear safeguards.