Ambassador Shri Shyam Saran served as India’s foreign secretary and as India’s ambassador to Indonesia and Myanmar. He has also held the positions of high commissioner to Mauritius, joint secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, deputy chief of mission in Tokyo and counselor in the Indian Embassy in Beijing. Saran served as a special envoy of the prime minister on Indo-US civil nuclear issues. He currently serves as chairman of the National Security Advisory Board under India’s National Security Council.
Japan
Amb. Yukio Satoh
Diplomat
Amb. Yukio Satoh
Diplomat
Japan
Ambassador Yukio Satoh is vice chairman of the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo and is an accomplished Japanese diplomat, having served as the permanent representative of Japan to the United Nations. He also served as the ambassador of Japan to the Netherlands from 1994 to 1996 and to Australia from 1996 to 1998.
Satoh entered the Foreign Service in 1961 from the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Law and studied history at Edinburgh University from 1961 to 1963. He has written numerous articles on security issues both in English and Japanese.
Jonathan Schell was the Doris Shaffer Fellow at the Nation Institute, the peace and disarmament correspondent for The Nation magazine and taught a course on the nuclear age at Yale University. He began his career at The New Yorker magazine, where he was a staff writer from 1967 until 1987. During those years he was the principal writer of the magazine’s Notes and Comments and also wrote long pieces, many of which were published as books. His reflective work on the nuclear question “The Fate of the Earth” (Knopf, 1982), which first appeared in three parts in The New Yorker, became a best-seller and was hailed by the New York Times as “an event of profound historical moment.” He appeared often on radio and television including the Lehrer News Hour, the Charlie Rose Show and Hardball with Chris Matthews. Schell passed away on March 25, 2014.
Germany
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt
Political Leader
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt
Political Leader
Germany
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was the minister of defense and minister of economy and finance before being elected as the chancellor of Germany in 1979. He co-founded the American Enterprise Institute World Forum with Gerald Ford and was co-publisher and managing editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit. He passed away on November 10, 2015.
India
Vice Adm. (ret.) Vijay Shankar
Military Commander
Vice Adm. (ret.) Vijay Shankar
Military Commander
India
Vice Admiral Vijay Shankar retired in September 2009 after nearly 45 years of service in the Indian Navy where he held the positions of commander in chief of the Andaman & Nicobar Command and commander in chief of the Strategic Forces Command. His afloat assignments include specialist tenures on board several fleet units between 1970 and 1983. He was a part of the commissioning crew of INS Ghorpad, commissioned in Poland, and of INS Rana commissioned in the Soviet Union. He also served as the commanding officer of INS Panaji in 1973, INS Himgiri in 1987, INS Ganga in 1993 and the Indian Navy’s only aircraft carrier, INS Viraat in 1995. He took over command of the ‘Sword Arm’ of the Indian Navy as the flag officer commanding Western Fleet in January 2003. His operational experience is backed by active service during the Indo-Pak war of 1971, command of INS Himgiri during Operation Pawan and as chief of staff, Southern Naval Command during Operation Vijay.
United States
Mr. Tom Shelley
Civic Leader
Mr. Tom Shelley
Civic Leader
United States
Tom Shelley is the president of Space Adventures, the only company in the world that has arranged for private citizens to fly into space. Prior to his position as president, he was the vice president of marketing and sales at Space Adventures, focusing on the development of the orbital spaceflight program. During his time at Space Adventures, a total of five space flight missions have been completed. He began his career in marketing for the British Standards Institution before shifting to the commercial spaceflight industry.
China
Dr. Shen Dingli
National Security Expert
Dr. Shen Dingli
National Security Expert
China
Dr. Shen Dingli is a professor of international relations and vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai. He is the founder and director of the Program on Arms Control and Regional Security at Fudan University, China’s first non-government based program on the subject. His research focuses on the relationship between China and the United States, nuclear arms control and disarmament and regional nonproliferation issues concerning South Asia.
Shen organizes dozens of international conferences, including The Shanghai Dialogue, which is widely known as one of the most important multilateral, track-two talks on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. He is a member of the International Institute of Security Studies and serves as a consultant to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Commerce. In 2002, Shen was invited to advise then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the strategy for his second term.
United States
Dr. Martin J. Sherwin
National Security Expert
Dr. Martin J. Sherwin
National Security Expert
United States
Dr. Martin J. Sherwin was a professor at George Mason University and senior scholar at the Wilson Center, where he conducted research on the history of the nuclear arms race. Prior to joining GMU, he was a professor of english and American history at Tufts University, where he was on faculty for 27 years. In 2006, he released his book (with Kai Bird), “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography of the year. Sherwin held appointments on the faculties of Yale University, Wellesley College, UC-Berkeley, Princeton, Dartmouth and Cornell Universities. In recognition for his work and teaching, Sherwin was appointed Honorable UNESCO Professor of Humanities at Meneleyev University in Moscow in 1994. He also served as an advisor for many documentaries on the history of the nuclear age, including “Countdown to Zero.”
