Marc J. Ventresca is University Lecturer in Management Studies at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Fellow of Wolfson College, and University Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization. For 2004-5 he is a Research Fellow in Organizational Learning and Homeland Security, CISAC, IIS, Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests focus on institutions, organizations, and industry entrepreneurship; organizational learning; organization design and managing change; environmental management; power and leadership in organizations, and economic sociology of strategy.

He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University, after master's degrees in policy analysis and education and in sociology. He has taught at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, the Copenhagen Business School, the Center for Work, Technology, and Organizations at Stanford University, and the Stanford Institute for Research on Higher Education.

Prior to a faculty career, Dr. Ventresca worked as a policy analyst at the Congressional Budget Office in Washington D.C., studied language and politics in Florence, Italy, and worked as a technical writer for hopeful start-ups in Silicon Valley.

C. Kenneth Quinones has been involved with Northeast Asia since 1962 as a soldier, scholar and diplomat. He has lived and worked in South and North Korea; ten years in the South and nearly one year in the North, and in Japan for three years. As a U.S. dip-lomat, he witnessed South Koreas struggle to democratize during the 1980s and then, during the 1990s, played a role in the opening of North Korea to the outside world. After retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1997, he worked with U.S. humanitarian organizations to arrange educational and agricultural exchanges between the United States and North Korea.

Dr. Quinones is the director of Korean Peninsula Programs at the recently organized International Action (successor to International Center), a non-profit Washington, D.C. research institute. He recently organized a new forum on the internet, the International Forum for Innovative Northeast Strategy, to encourage international dialogue about innovative strategies to promote a durable peace in Northeast Asia.

A buffet lunch will be available to those who RSVP by 5:00 p.m., Monday, November 1 to Debbie Warren at dawarren@stanford.edu or at 650-723-8387.

I am a child of the Cold War. As such, my thinking for decades was conditioned by the great issue of that era: How to maintain freedom in the face of our perceptions of Soviet ambitions for world domination?

For the first few decades of the Cold War, the United States strategy for achieving this objective was containment backed up with a powerful nuclear deterrence. But as the nuclear arms race heated up, it became increasingly clear that this strategy risked precipitating a nuclear holocaust. Thus, by the late sixties, nuclear arms control had become the overriding security issue - certainly it dominated my thinking on security during that era.

But with the ending of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear holocaust receded and arms control, as we had practiced it during that era, was no longer the dominant security issue. The most serious threat to the United States became nuclear weapons in the hands of failed states or terrorists - used not in a standard military operation, but in extortive or apocalyptic ways. Therefore, in the present era, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons replaces arms control as the organizing principle for our security. Certainly it has dominated my thinking on security for the last decade.