The Japanese anti-nuclear movement has been characterized by the same kinds of political divisions as other popular movements, while it also reflects some uniquely Japanese features. Today, with the risk of use of nuclear weapons climbing towards levels not reached since the darkest days of the Cold War, the Japanese movement, led by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the aging "Hibakusha" (survivors), plays a key role in the global nuclear abolition movement, serving as its conscience and its inspiration. At the same time it is confronting new challenges at home. The Japanese government maintains an ambivalent relationship with nuclear weapons. While it rhetorically calls for global nuclear disarmament in the United Nations, it remains firmly situated under the U.S. "nuclear umbrella." Meanwhile, the U.S. is refurbishing and upgrading its still vast nuclear arsenal, and expanding the role of nuclear weapons in its national security policy. With an enormous civilian nuclear power program, and huge stocks of plutonium, Japan has the capacity to produce its own nuclear weapons, should it decide to do so - a fact that does not go unnoticed by its neighbors in the region, China, and the Koreas.

Japan's three nonnuclear principles of not possessing, not producing, and not allowing nuclear arms on its soil, and Article 9 of its 1946 post-war constitution, which renounces war and prohibits maintenance of armed forces, are under serious attack. In 2004, Japan, one of the U.S.'s closest allies, deployed 1000 members of its "Self Defense Forces" to Iraq - the first time Japanese troops have been sent into combat zone since World War II. According to some estimates, Japan is second only to the U.S. in its military spending.

On the 60th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of their cities, the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki declared August 6, 2005 until August 9, 2006 to be an international Year of Inheritance, Awakening, and Commitment.

Jacqueline Cabasso has served as Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation (WSLF) in Oakland, California since 1984. Founded two years earlier, the nonprofit WSLF seeks to abolish nuclear weapons as an essential step in making possible a more secure, just, and environmentally sustainable world. Since 1994, Ms. Cabasso has participated as an accredited non-governmental organization representative in 12 negotiating and review sessions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 1995, she co-founded the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which has grown to include more than 2000 organizations in over 90 countries, and she continues to serve on its international Coordinating Committee. Ms. Cabasso chairs the Coordinating Committee of the multi-issue Peoples NonViolent Response Coalition, located in the Bay Area, and formed in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Jeffrey R. Cooper is an SAIC Technical Fellow, Vice President for Technology, and Chief Science Officer of SAIC Strategies, Simulation & Training Business Unit at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He received his undergraduate and graduate education at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was later Professorial Lecturer in Arms Control and Defense Analysis at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition to long-standing focus on strategic analysis and military transformation, his core interest is using information to improve intelligence analysis, decision making, C2, and operational effectiveness in order to enhance U.S. national security. Cooper served in a range of senior government positions, including White House Staff and Assistant to the Secretary of Energy.

For the past several years, Cooper's focus has been largely on intelligence matters, with particular emphasis on analytic failures and methods to improve all-source analysis capabilities. Most recently, he chaired the Panel on Unexpected Threats for the DNI's Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR). Cooper was a Professional Staff Member of the Presidential Commission on Future Intelligence Capabilities (Silberman-Robb Commission) and has been actively involved in work on the Revolution in Intelligence Affairs and Intelligence Transformation. His monograph on "Curing Analytic Pathologies" will be published shortly by CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence.

This talk addresses a set of intimately intertwined contradictions that characterize military-societal relations in present-day Japan: the contradiction between Article 9 of Japan's constitution, which forbids a standing army and the existence of its armed forces; the contradiction between the civilian prohibition of violence and the military's training for and potential demand of violent acts; and the dilemma of representing a profession that must negotiate between societal mores and the demands associated with military service. More specifically, Professor Frühstück will untangle the Self-Defense Forces' public relations strategies, ranging from comics to live firing exercises. She argues that these strategies are deeply embedded in Japanese culture and affecy various segments of the Japanese public in radically different ways.

Sabine Frühstück focuses her research on the study of modern and contemporary Japanese culture and society include problems of power and knowledge, sexualities and genders, and military-societal relations. Frühstück is currently completing a book on military-societal relations in modern and present-day Japan, Avant-garde: The Army of the Future. Her book, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan, is a history of sexual knowledge in Japan and the different uses made of that knowledge. Based on a wide variety of sources including military data on soldiers' health, sex education treatises for youth, and pronatalist and expansionist propaganda that fought frigidity in women and impotence in men, the book analyzes the techniques at work in conflicts and negotiations that aimed at the creation of a normative sexuality. Frühstück has co-edited Neue Geschichten der Sexualität: Beispiele aus Ostasien and Zentraleuropa 1700-2000 and The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure.

In recent years, "anti-American" sentiments and protests - what some observers regard as the "wildcard" in the US-Korea alliance-- have created tensions in the management of the bilateral relationship. Analysts have pointed to nationalism, the South's newfound "love" for the North, and generational change among South Koreans as key explanations for the anti-Americanism. Katharine Moon offers a different kind of analysis, focusing on the rapid changes in democratization and decentralization of government that have fostered a new identity and activist role for local governments and citizens. Local autonomy, especially in the areas housing the U.S. military bases, has come to challenge the monopoly of the central government in managing the alliance relationship and a powerful force shaping the politics of anti-Americanism.

Katharine H.S. Moon, associate professor and chairperson, Department of Political Science, Wellesley College, and a non-resident scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University.

She is the author of Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (Columbia University, 1997; Korean edition by Sam-in Publishing Co., 2002) and other work on women and international relations, migrant workers, and social movements in East Asia. Currently, she is writing a book on "anti-Americanism" in Korea-U.S. relations from the perspective of Korea's democratization and the politics of social movements. Moon received a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 to conduct research in Korea and was a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the George Washington University in 2002-03.

Katharine Moon has served in the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Women's Issues in the U.S. Department of State and as a trustee of Smith College. She serves on the editorial board of several journals of international relations and consults for NGOs in the U.S. and Korea. She also serves on policy task forces designed to examine current U.S. - Korea relations.

National security and global climate change are key motivations for seriously examining strategies for sustainable energy independence. We currently import more than 60% of our oil -- soon to be 70% -- from sources that are either unfriendly or unstable. We are also importing a substantial and increasing amount of natural gas from outside of North America.

The effectiveness of recent widespread supply abuses provides evidence of the fragility of the US economy to interruption of that energy supply stream for whatever end. This vulnerability and the mounting evidence of greenhouse gas induced climate change demand a fundamental change in US energy policies and behavior.

This paper draws on data presented at a National Academy of Engineering meeting last June and other sources to examine the options proposed and endeavors to separate the signal from the considerable noise associated with the subject. I propose a set of solutions that appear readily achievable to eliminate all dependency on imported oil and gas. The seminar provides an opportunity to get some expert feedback and discussion of the policy changes involved.

L. David Montague, an independent consultant, retired as President of the Missile Systems Division at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space in 1996. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Mr. Montague has 50 years of background in design, development and management of strategic and tactical military weapon systems. In addition to his development expertise in both tactical and strategic strike and defensive systems, his experience includes the requirements, development, and national security policy issues of strategic forces and defense systems to protect against weapons of mass destruction.