> home
> About
> Contact Us
> Editorial Info
> IEEE-USA

05.10

An Interview With 2009 IEEE-USA Engineering & Diplomacy Fellow
Tom Tierney

By Robin Peress

Tom Tierney is a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) where he supports national security programs including counterterrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, export controls, and laboratory astrophysics. In 2009, as the IEEE-USA Engineering & Diplomacy Fellow, he served as a science advisor to the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism Technical Programs. At State, where foreign policy and cutting-edge science often intersect, Tom facilitated R&D planning for counterterrorism technologies, nuclear defense, emergency response, nuclear treaties, and nuclear trafficking prevention programs.

“It is important to have people who are scientists and engineers by day providing input to the policy makers,” Tom says of his Fellowship. “It’s equally important to have scientists and engineers that are experienced in policy serve as ambassadors to their peers.”

Prior to this assignment, he was a technical staff member in Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)’s Physics Division. He has expertise in the areas of high energy density physics, astrophysics, high pressure material dynamics and response, nuclear weapons physics, radiation transport and hydrodynamics, optical and x-ray diagnostics, and inertial confinement fusion concepts. Tom received his doctorate in plasma physics in 2002 from University of California, Irvine, and received a Master of Science degree in physics and a Bachelor of Science degree in astrophysics from the University of California.  He is currently a member of the Department of Commerce’s Emerging Technology and Research Advisory Committee which assists in shaping U.S. export control policies. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of four other professional organizations (AAAS, AGU, APS, and ANS). Tom has co-authored over 70 peer-review journal articles and proceedings reports.

In this in-depth interview, Tom discusses research and development in counterterrorism technologies, his role as a Department of State Fellow, and his affiliation with the IEEE, as well as the intriguing junctures among all three.

Q: You became immersed in an extensive number of projects at State. Was it difficult for you to leave after a year?

Yes, it was. The fast pace and dynamic environment was stimulating. The fellowship allowed me to fulfill a long-held desire to contribute to the important fight against terrorism and WMD proliferation.

Q: In your Placement Report, you spoke of your desire to enhance liaison between State Department bureaus and Technical Support Working Group (TSWG) subgroups, to help facilitate international counterterrorism technical R&D, and to interact with numerous bureaus, groups, agencies and councils involved in the foreign policy-making process. Did you fulfill these goals, and can you provide some examples of your contributions and learning experiences ?

Many of us live in research and development environments that are often a few steps removed from policy. In the policy arena, the decision-making process and the time-compressed requirements within which those decisions must be made is intense. One of my primary goals was to understand how the government makes decisions. In Washington, this is often done through the “inter-agency” process. The majority of my work involved interacting as a science advisor. My interactions ranged from the White House to other Departments and Agencies.  With the TSWG, I was also fortunate to be able to interact extensively with academic institutions, national labs, and industry. Of the three, I learned the most from interactions with industry.

In the course of my work, I was involved in a wide range of topics from counterterrorism to cybersecurity to chemical weapons to nuclear issues. I helped with international aspects of organizing an Explosives Detection Conference that attracted over 600 participants from around the world. I participated in an interagency effort to revise U.S. government policies for cybersecurity as well as co-organizing a short course on international policy issues associated with cybersecurity. I also participated in several efforts related to Radiological Dispersal Devices. I reviewed and advised on projects that may help with responding to RDD events, including post-event recovery and clean-up. I also contributed to reviewing a classification guide, an identification guide, and a study of replacement materials for radiological materials like cesium. I also worked with the Nuclear Trafficking Response Group (NTRG) and nuclear forensics — both of which are synergistic. The NTRG coordinates the U.S. response to international interdictions of nuclear or radiological materials. Nuclear forensics is valuable for identifying where a material may have been taken from, which is important in supporting law enforcement investigations of cases where a person was trafficking the radiological material.

Q: In early April, the Nuclear Security Summit convened; the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review was released; and the United States and Russia signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Having spent a year at the State Department at a time when global security topped all other agenda items, how did your unique expertise fit into this picture?

As a person with stockpile stewardship experience and connections, the nuclear focus of the new administration made it an important time to help the State Department.  In 2007, four statesmen (George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn) renewed the 22-year-old inaugural call by President Reagan to seek the total elimination of nuclear weapons.[i]^,[ii] President Obama carried this call into his campaign by pledging to work toward worldwide elimination of nuclear arsenals. As part of his Administration’s agenda, he vowed to pursue work on four treaties during his first term: New START, Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. With both the change in administration and the government’s renewed interest in nuclear treaties, it was a very busy period for those in nuclear policy.

President Obama also recognizes the continuing role nuclear weapons play in global security. In his Prague speech in April 2009, he stated, “As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies…”[iii] This statement was later echoed in Vice President Biden’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on “The President’s Nuclear Agenda,” and the recently unveiled 2009/2010 Nuclear Posture Review. 

Both the NPR and the New START treaty are critical instruments for advancing Obama’s pledge. Nuclear scientists and engineers like myself were called upon to provide credible technical support to the development of these documents. Their responsibilities were to ensure the policy commitments neither exceeded our capabilities nor generated new national security vulnerabilities and at the same time preserved our capabilities to respond to emerging threats.

Q: Who are some of your preferred authors and thinkers on the subject of nuclear terrorism, nonproliferation and related topics, and can you name some reading material that you would recommend to IEEE-USA members?

For me, the most eye-awakening books were those that covered the story of a Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan. This person built up a secret network of suppliers and smugglers to provide nuclear technologies to countries in the Middle East and Asia. As the world’s most alarming nuclear proliferator, he placed millions of lives at risk by selling nuclear technologies to unstable and terrorism-prone regions of the world. This case, in particular, motivated my desire to engage policy and to make active steps to counter future threats to our nation’s security.

The topics of nuclear proliferation and nuclear arms control are very mature with over  four decades of development. It’s difficult to narrow a list down to a few names, but I would point interested readers to Dr. Richard Garwin, Dr. Lewis Dunn (SAIC), Thomas Schelling (UMD), and Scott Sagan (Stanford).

There are many outstanding authors and analysts on the topic of weapons of mass destruction terrorism. Personally, I found Brian Jenkins (RAND), Sidney Drell (Stanford), and Graham Allison (Harvard) provided uniquely valuable insight into the broad scope of the problem.

And finally, on the topic of terrorism, I recommend the books “Ghost Wars” by Steve Coll, “The Age of Sacred Terror” by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, and “Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy” by Paul Pillar.

Q: You chose to work with the Technical Support Working Group, within the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office, pursuing the R&D of technologies and tools that currently include such products as a compact, wireless 360-degree mobile display system called Eye Ball R1, which scans the interior of structures for potential hazards in tactical operations; a personal-size skin decontamination product for use after exposure to certain nerve agents and toxins; and the Military Uniform Uniqueness Statistical Evaluator, a forensic tool that recognizes a match between camouflage uniforms seen in crime scene photos and uniforms worn by suspects.

What does it mean to make these “commercializable”? How did your experience with international technical collaborations come to the fore in this work?

Commercializable means having completed the rapid prototyping required to be commercially produced, or “deployable” to the field. One of the many challenges in developing cutting-edge counterterrorism technologies is progressing up the “Technical Readiness Level” chain from the basic science, through applied science, to a deployable product that is suitable for users. Researchers and developers often use the term “valley of death” for the region between R&D and a commercialized product. While there are many hurdles in commercial product development, getting technologies out of the laboratories and into the market is arguably the more difficult step.

Our ability to defeat terrorism strongly depends upon our competency in rapidly moving discoveries into deployable products. The Technical Support Working Group specializes in the rapid prototyping and development that is required to bridge over the valley of death. While most agencies and departments support research independently, the TSWG enables interagency and international support for projects. The TSWG has standing agreements with certain international partners that jointly perform mutually beneficial counterterrorism R&D. The partner countries were selected because of their innovative counterterrorism solutions prompted by their specific needs and experiences.

My past experience from collaborations with researchers in Europe and the UK proved valuable in two ways. First, international collaborations can be difficult to maintain and are expensive. Delineation of responsibilities and expectations ensures from the start that most relationships are mutually productive and makes effective use of the unique talents of both teams. Second, with government sponsored projects, some information is protected or forbidden from being shared with the other nation’s representatives. This is a skill that takes time to develop and can be a little nerve-racking at first. Having had training and experience in knowing how to avoid discussions that might lead to sensitive topics, I was able to more efficiently engage the international partners.

Q: As you have pointed out, LANL’s groundbreaking technologies are concerned with much more than national security. In fact, as noted on the LANL website, “Powerful computing capabilities, developed to simulate the performance of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile, can be applied to the problem of simulating the cosmos.” Can you talk about this or another example of research at LANL that is being channeled in two very different directions?

One of the strengths of a national laboratory is the confluence of large-scale facilities with multidisciplinary expertise. Like other weapons laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore and Sandia,  Los Alamos also engages in research not solely focused on nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship involves an understanding of a wide range of topics ranging from electronics and solid-state physics to the properties of materials under extreme temperatures and pressures.  A large number of tools needed to perform nuclear weapons research is dual-use, i.e., has both military and civilian applications. For example, the high performance computing platform Roadrunner is useful for running nuclear weapons codes for system assessments and three-dimensional astrophysics simulations. The large-scale simulations are valuable for improving our understanding of how Type-1a supernovae behave as high redshift standard candles. The Los Alamos Neutron Science Center or LANSCE is useful for both studying important processes in nuclear weapons and for producing unique medical isotopes like actinium-225 for treatment of metastatic cancer. Furthermore, the laboratory studies the properties of energetic materials for weapons and currently supports the Department of Homeland Security and the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office with research on the properties of improvised explosive devices and homemade explosives. At present, approximately 55 percent of the research performed at the laboratory is for nuclear weapons, the remainder is in support of other national security and energy needs. As you may know, Los Alamos helped lay the foundation for the Human Genome Project in the 1980s and had a major role in the Joint Genome Institute throughout the ‘90s. Today, LANL continues this form of research by creating and maintaining the influenza virus database.

Q: When you came to the State Department, you brought not only your technical and liaison expertise but also your way of doing things, established over many years at LANL. How does one bridge the divide between one’s own organizational style and that at State?

There are many similarities between the way policy is developed at State and how we perform research in a laboratory environment. Just as there are principal investigators in a technical project, there are project leads in policy. Similar to journal publication processes, there is a peer review process for all documents whereby “clearance” on policy documents is sought from all potentially affected government entities. Just as collaboration is an integral part of most technical projects, both intra-agency and interagency collaboration is expected. Furthermore, by training, scientists and engineers look at the mechanics of problems and endeavor to isolate key variables when making a measurement. Policymakers expect their support staff to isolate the key issues when developing new policy. This helps prevent “fixing things that aren’t broken.”

There also were several differences from the technical environment: Policy is generally developed in teams without attribution. That is, non-papers and documents typically do not have author lists. Effective communication is especially important. When briefing senior policy makers, one should avoid technical jargon when possible, ensure they have enough information to make decisions, and stay brief and to the point.

Q: At what point in an engineering or science degree program (11^th and 12^th grade, and college undergraduate) should schools introduce discussion on the interrelationship between public policy and science and technology?

Most students may not realize there are opportunities in technology policy. Students may also not be aware of how important good technology policy is to the vitality of the science and engineering enterprises. I believe the connection and co-dependence between policy and S&T needs to be identified as early as possible. Science and engineering discoveries have contributed to more than half of the current domestic product. There’s a frequent misperception that policy and S&T are incompatible from a career perspective. Looking back through history, some of the most impressive scientific and engineering achievements were beyond the vision of senior leaders, and it was only when S&T experts brought the concepts to them that a vision formed. I’d argue for introducing examples of how science drives and enables policy and vice versa in textbooks.

Q: In March, you and William Behn – 2007 Congressional Fellow, 2008 Engineering & Diplomacy Fellow, and now a Congressional Fellow on the House Science & Technology Committee – collaborated on a presentation at the IEEE-USA Annual Meeting in Nashville, in which you recommended that prospective applicants seek out former fellows for guidance on navigating the application experience. What are some of the useful inside things that you as a previous Fellow can pass on to an IEEE member who is considering applying for a fellowship?

First, remember that your reputation is important and the quality of your work reflects upon the IEEE. Be prepared to teach AND learn. In the words of Alexander Pope, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Dive deeply into the background literature and understand why the policy is written the way it is, who is responsible for what, and the policy’s limitations.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, but rather make the best decisions or recommendations that you can within the given time constraints and available information. Be sure to state your assumptions clearly in cases where insufficient information was available. Advise on what you know. If it’s not a topic you’re familiar with, know how to search the technical literature to find and contact a good subject matter expert.

If you’re going to work as a science policy advisor, be sure to do your homework. Read the “read-aheads” before meetings, research the public laws, and understand the directives (e.g., National Security Presidential Directives). Understand your office’s responsibilities and expectations.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “A difference in opinion is not a difference in principal.” Recognize that everyone in DC wants to do the right thing, find the common ground and move the country forward.

Q: Would you explain the gist of something from your presentation that said “policy enables science, policy drives science, science enables policy, science drives policy”?

Sure —

Policy enables science:  Policy affects the vitality of research through regulations and, naturally, funding authorizations.

Regulations can advance or hinder science. For example, export controls can limit international competition by keeping certain technologies or capabilities within the U.S. and therefore, allow our researchers the ability to make novel discoveries before foreign competitors do. This is sometimes a good protective measure for the economy. At the same time export controls have the potential to slow our abilities to work with international partners. In the long run, the latter can pose a greater risk to innovation since it entices foreign development of indigenous capabilities and increases competition.

Another example is the use of terahertz radiation systems at airport screening checkpoints for full-body scanning of air travelers. These systems reflect terahertz radiation off the water in human skin to tomographically image what is beneath a person’s clothes. This technology is very valuable for detecting concealed non-metallic weapons or explosives. The U.S. government was very concerned about the privacy issues associated with this technology, which resulted in slow deployment of the scanners domestically and internationally.

Policy drives science:  Policy can take the form of long range planning for technology investments. The Government has the ability to advance research in areas policy makers deem as priorities for the general public.

At present, the national priority is the energy infrastructure in response to the energy crisis. The economy is also growing increasingly dependent on other natural resources—perhaps the most significant one is water, where we may have a major water crisis in the future.

The Christmas bombing attempt last fall is another example where policy can drive science. While Abdulmutallab’s attempt to smuggle PETN aboard a Northwest Airlines flight affected the perception that privacy trumps security with regard to air travel, the government is seeking novel solutions to detect concealed explosives that preserve our need for privacy.

Science enables policy:  Technical solutions produce capabilities that enable the development of policies. Probably the most obvious example is the development of biometrics, such as fingerprints or DNA, for identification of criminals and terrorists.  Another example is many government institutions are required to use cryptography to secure information from theft or abuse.

Science drives policy: Discovery can often change society in unexpected ways, so policy solutions are required to maintain stability. There are many examples of this, including the invention of steam power, the car, the plane, television, telecommunications, the laser, and the Internet. Perhaps the best, recent example is the invention of the internet. Cybercrime, cyberattacks, and cyberspies rose alongside the development of cyberspace. The government is now developing policy solutions to counter such threats… many of these solutions are coming from scientists and engineers in industry, academia, and the national laboratories.

Robin Peress is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. For more information, visit www.robinperess.com.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.