Acton James

James M. Acton is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A physicist by training, Acton was a winner of the competitive Carnegie Corporation of New York grant on New Technologies and the Nuclear Threat that funds his ongoing research into the escalation implications of advanced conventional weapons.

Acton’s publications span the field of nuclear policy. He recently published a Carnegie report, Wagging the Plutonium Dog: Japanese Domestic Politics and its International Security Implications, and is the author of two Adelphi books, Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security and Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (with George Perkovich). He wrote, with Mark Hibbs, Why Fukushima Was Preventable, a groundbreaking study into the root causes of the accident. His analysis on proliferation threats, including Iran and North Korea, has been widely disseminated by major journals, newspapers, and websites.

An expert on hypersonic conventional weapons and the author of the Carnegie report, Silver Bullet? Asking the Right Questions About Conventional Prompt Global Strike, Acton has testified on this subject to the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Acton is a member of the Nuclear Security Working Group. He is a former member of the Commission on Challenges to Deep Cuts and was co-chair of the Next Generation Working Group on U.S.-Russia Arms Control.

Acton has published in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Science & Global Security, Survival, and the Washington Quarterly. He has appeared on CNN’s State of the Union, NBCNightly News, CBS Evening News, and PBS NewsHour.