September 29, 2026
The following is an excerpt from Arena Magazine.
Dr. Siegfried Hecker is an American nuclear scientist and the former Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a role he held from 1986 to 1997. Born in Europe during World War II, he emigrated to the United States in 1956. He earned his PhD in metallurgical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1968, after which he joined Los Alamos as a postdoctoral fellow.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hecker assumed a leadership role in post-Soviet lab-to-lab cooperation between the US and Russia. In the chaos of the 1990s, the security of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was dangerously uncertain. It is a notable achievement that the vast arsenal of the former USSR, with its 40,000 nuclear weapons and 1 million nuclear personnel, did not find its way into the hands of international terrorists. Hecker documents this period in the book Doomed to Cooperate, which features the perspectives of over 100 Russian and American nuclear scientists.
Between 2004 and 2010, Hecker was given access to North Korea’s nuclear weapons facilities in order to confirm the viability of the program. Among other things, he confirmed that North Korea had mastered plutonium production when Dr. Ri Hong Sop, the head of North Korea’s nuclear program, presented him with physical samples.
I sat down with Dr. Hecker to discuss the North Korean nuclear program, the challenge of proliferation, and the evolution of nuclear energy. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.
Continue reading at Arena Magazine.
Dr. Siegfried Hecker is a CNS Distinguished Professor of Practice.
