Stanford Report, December 10, 2003

In Print & On the Air

LAST WEEK, THE MEDIA reported extensively on an unofficial delegation of U.S. experts to North Korea led by JOHN W. LEWIS, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies (SIIS). The group provided the first confirmation that the Pyongyang government has produced the key ingredient for nuclear weapons, the Washington Post reported Jan. 11. Siegfried Hecker, a former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, plans to testify publicly about the group's findings Jan. 20 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lewis, the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Emeritus, and another delegation member also may testify, the Post reported. The San Jose Mercury News, profiling Lewis on Jan. 2, described him as someone who "lives comfortably in a twilight world between open scholarship, private diplomacy and the classified secrets of the U.S. intelligence establishment." Lewis, best known as one of the West's leading experts on the Chinese nuclear weapons program, has visited North Korea several times, the paper noted. "He knows quite a few people there," said GEORGE BUNN, a consulting professor at SIIS, who traveled with Lewis to North Korea in 1992. "He's trying to figure out ways to bring people together." Lewis has directed the Five-Nation Project, a private, scholarly exchange that brings together former military officials from the United States, Russia, China, India and Pakistan to find ways to protect weapons facilities from terrorist attacks.

GEOPHYSICS PROFESSOR NORMAN SLEEP and physics Professor DOUGLAS OSHEROFF have criticized President George W. Bush's recently announced goal to establish an Earthling post on Mars, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Jan. 10. The need to send someone to Mars, Sleep argued, is about as pressing as the need to "train a midget to squeeze down into an oil well to see what's there" rather than send down some tiny instruments tethered to data recorders on the surface. The Bush plan represents "a huge make-work thing for the people who supply NASA," Sleep said, predicting that inevitable cost overruns would "essentially kill space science" by squeezing the budget for robotic missions. "I think we're still 30 years from going to Mars and if there's any reason to do that, I don't know," Osheroff told the Associated Press.

GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER's cuts to the state budget are unlikely to derail the economy, analysts told the San Jose Mercury News Jan. 12. Supporters said that keeping taxes down is essential to improving the state's business climate because it encourages companies to locate here. "The worst thing you can do for a recovering economy is to raise taxes," said Hoover Senior Fellow JOHN COGAN, who served as an adviser to Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign.