NS&D Monitor
1/17/2014
IN STRATCOM
U.S. Strategic Command is looking for a Deputy Director for Plans and Policy to replace Greg Weaver, who left StratCom last month for a post in the Department of Defense. The SES-level position pays between $143,600 and $167,000 annually, according to an Air Force job posting, and closes Jan. 27. In the position, the Deputy Director for Plans and Policy will be responsible for helping shape and implement national security plans and policies focusing on strategic deterrence, space operations, cyberspace operations, combating weapons of mass destruction, missile defense, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, and information operations.
IN THE NGOs
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ famed Doomsday Clock remains at five minutes until midnight, the group said this week as it chose to keep the hands of the clock still for the second year in a row. The group’s Science and Security Board and its Board of Sponsors hasn’t moved the hands of the clock since 2012, when it inched the hands of the clock a minute closer to midnight. In a statement yesterday, the group said promising developments around the world, like the interim nuclear deal with Iran and progress in getting countries to reduce their stocks of fissile material, were overshadowed by a “business-as-usual” posture among the international community. “Outsized nuclear arsenals remain in the United States and Russia, and the nuclear arsenals of some countries—notably India, Pakistan, and China—appear to be growing,” the group said. “The interim Iranian deal notwithstanding, the international community has not come to grips with an unfortunate reality: The spread of civilian nuclear power around the world—which continues apace, despite the disaster at Fukushima—also spreads the potential for new nuclear weapons states.”
Lassina Zerbo, the new head of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, has been named the “2013 Arms Control Person of the Year” by the Arms Control Association. Zerbo was selected through online voting conducted by the ACA, besting nine other candidates picked by the arms control group. Zerbo was lauded for helping persuade China to provide data from its International Monitoring System stations to the Vienna- based International Data Centre. The IMS was established when the CTBT was signed in 1996, and it was been built over the last two decades even though the treaty has not been ratified. “Dr. Zerbo and his team at the CTBTO have built up and successfully demonstrated the considerable capabilities of the International Monitoring System and the International Data Centre, and have established the technical basis for entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear test explosions and is an essential element to a comprehensive global nonproliferation and disarmament strategy,” ACA Executive Director Daryl Kimball said in a statement. A joint nomination that included European Union High Representative Catherine Ashton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was the runner-up in the vote, and Sigrid Kaag, the Special Coordinator of the OPCW-UN Joint Mission on eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons program, finished third.
