Jim Walsh
Dr. Jim Walsh is a Senior Research Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program (SSP). His research and writings focus on international security, and in particular, topics involving nuclear weapons. Dr. Walsh has testified before the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives on topics relating to nuclear terrorism, Iran, and North Korea. He is one of the relatively small number of Americans who have travelled to both Iran and North Korea for talks with officials about nuclear issues.
His recent writing includes “The Implications of the JCPOA for Future Verification Arrangements (including the DPRK),” “The Digital Communications Revolution: Lessons for the Nuclear Policy Community,” and “Laser Enrichment and Proliferation: Assessing Future Risks.”
Dr. Walsh is the international security contributor to the National Public Radio's Here and Now, and his comments and analysis have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and numerous other national and international news outlets. Before coming to MIT, Walsh was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has taught at both Harvard University and MIT. Dr. Walsh received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jim and I have been friends for decades ever since my involvement with the MX Missile in 1980. I have relied upon him and learned from him inordinate amounts of knowledge. There are few peers who are as warm-hearted and caring about imparting to the next generation his extensive knowledge of nuclear history, technology and it is his relentless optimism, despite his clear knowledge of the threat we live under that sustains so many of us. Without him and many of his colleagues at Harvard’s Belfer Centre and MIT’s Security Studies Program, I would have never dared to convene forums on such a complex and important subject. He is dedicated to education and public awareness on a subject that many would prefer to ignore and deny.