Professor Phillip A. Karber, Georgetown University

a presentation of research findings by Dr. Phillip A. Karber of Georgetown University

12:30 - 2:00pm
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
The Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Elliott School of International Affairs
Washington, DC 20052

On the 11th of December, 2009, the People's Liberation Army officially announced that for the preceding two decades the engineers of the Second Artillery Corps, China's strategic missile command, had been building 5,000 kilometers of underground tunnels for the deployment of their nuclear weapons and missile launch vehicles. The study is the result of a three years of research by the professor and his students on this topic using original Chinese language source materials that resulted in a 1.4 million word data base and over 200 hours of downloaded video.

BIO:
Professor Karber has a long background in arms control. In the late 1960s, he was on the staff of the Congressional Joint Committee of Atomic Energy at the time of the NPT, SALT and ABM agreements. In the mid-1970s he Directed NSSM/Project 186, the National Security Council mandated net assessment of US-Soviet forces and in the early 1980s was the Founding Director of the DoD Strategic Concepts Development Center, serving as "strategy advisor" to the Secretary of Defense and JCS Chairman. Prior to the Reykjavik Summit, he ran the only US Government study of the feasibility and requirements needed to achieve President Reagan's vision of "A World Without Nuclear Weapons." Committed to a bi-partisan approach that emphasized both defense and negotiated constraint, in the late 1980s Karber was an arms control consultant to the Chairmen of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees as well as the Secretary General of NATO, and played a significant role in the INF and CFE treaties. At the end of the Cold War he was a member of the US delegation to the Quadripartite Talks on Security in Asia (between China, Russian, Japan and the US).

In civilian life, Karber headed the "Center for Technology and Public Policy" of the BDM Corporation, was a Board member representing the workers at Weirton Steel, America's first employee owned manufactoring industry, and served as Chairman of JFK-IAT, the consortium that conducted the privatized modernization of New York's International Terminal at Kennedy Airport.

He has taught as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown since 1978, runs their Asian Arms Control Project, and his recent courses include: Arms Control & Multipolarity; Strategy & Technology, and Contemporary Chinese Military Thought.