Strategic Stockpile Stewardship: A Retrospective and Forward Look at U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy with Dr. Don Cook

Speakers

Peter Huessy 

Host of Huessy Seminars, Mr. Peter Huessy is President of his own defense consulting firm, Geostrategic Analysis, founded in 1981, and through 2021, Director of Strategic Deterrent Studies at the Mitchell Institute on Aerospace Studies. He was the senior defense consultant at the National Defense University Foundation for 22 years. He was the National Security Fellow at the AFPC, and Senior Defense Consultant at the Air Force Association from 2011-2016. Mr. Huessy has served as an expert defense and national security analyst for over 50 years, helping his clients cover congressional activities, arms control group efforts, nuclear armed states actions, and US administration nuclear related policy, budgets, and strategies, while monitoring budget and policy developments on nuclear deterrence, ICBM modernization, nuclear arms control, and overall nuclear modernization. He has also covered nuclear terrorism, counterterrorism, immigration, state-sponsored terrorism, missile defense, weapons of mass destruction, especially US-Israeli joint defense efforts, nuclear deterrence, arms control, proliferation, as well as tactical and strategic air, airlift, space and nuclear matters and such state and non-state actors as North Korea, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda. This also includes monitoring activities of think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and other US government departments, as well as projecting future actions of Congress in this area. His specialty is developing and implementing public policy campaigns to secure support for important national security objectives. And analyzing nuclear related technology and its impact on public policy, a study of which he prepared for the Aerospace Corporation in 2019.

Dr. Don Cook

Dr. Don Cook was nominated in December 2009 by President Obama to the post of NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs. He was confirmed by the Senate in June 2010. Over the next five years, Dr. Cook led the Administration’s efforts in Stockpile Stewardship and Management, including detailing and executing the Stockpile Life Extension Program for nuclear weapons within each of the three legs of the U.S. Triad. He testified before Congress on these programs more than twenty times.

Prior to entering the government, Dr. Cook was the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2009. From 1977 through 2005, Dr. Cook worked at Sandia National Laboratories, contributing to and leading efforts in accelerator engineering, pulsed power sciences, radiography, inertial confinement fusion, micro technologies, infrastructure and security.

He is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society, and a Fellow of AAAS and the Institute of Physics (UK). Dr. Cook retired from the NNSA in July 2015.