Los Alamos National Laboratory plutonium expert Joe Martz, who headed up the lab's effort to design the new Reliable Replacement Warhead, will spend the next year at Stanford reducing steps toward nuclear disarmament. Martz, whose Los Alamos team lost out to Livermore in the bid to design RRW, has long been an advocate of nuclear stockpile modernization as a step on the path toward eventual disarmament.

He'll be working with former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, who is a leading advocate of move toward a world with zero nuclear weapons. Martz is the first recipient of the William J. Perry Fellowship in International Security. He'll also be working with Sig Hecker, former director of Los Alamos. From an announcement sent out by Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation:

The scientist (Martz) said his work dovetails with Perry's efforts to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons around the globe. Perry, alongside former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn and Stanford physicist Sidney Drell have joined together to promote this far-reaching objective, which President Barack Obama and the U.N. Security Council endorsed in a unanimous vote last month. "Dr. Perry's focus is a world with fewer weapons," Martz said. "My goal is to find a roadmap to that world."