The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
Nuclear archaeology as a field seeks to develop a toolbox to reconstruct past activities in a nuclear weapon state's fissile material production programs for the purposes of verification and gaining confidence in a disarmament process. This talk will chart the work of the German Nuclear Archaeology Lab at Aachen from its launch in 2018 to its closing in 2024. It will outline its research and lessons learned exploring approaches to the use of operating records, measurements on irradiated structural materials at shut-down nuclear facilities, and sampling of facility waste to provide insights into past nuclear facility operations. It will reflect on how to analyze such information to assess whether it paints a consistent picture of a nuclear weapon program.
About the speaker: Malte Göttsche is Professor for Peace Research in Natural Sciences and co-director of the Cluster for Natural and Technical Science Arms Control Research and head of the Science for Nuclear Diplomacy research group which are co-located at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. From 2018-2024, he was professor at RWTH Aachen University, and a Freigeist Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security from 2015-2017, where the idea for the German Nuclear Archaeology Lab was developed.