Speaker: Jay Davis, President of Hertz Foundation and Chair of the Physics Department Board of Visitors
Abstract: In the summer of 1991, Jay Davis was asked on five days notice to join a UN inspection team for Iraqi nuclear facilities to determine whether or not the Iraqis had an active nuclear weapons program. He played leadership, operational, and technical roles in assessing what proved to be an excellent and well-advanced weapons program. There were technical surprises, obvious intelligence lapses, occasional incidents of gunfire, and other experiences somewhat off the norm for physics research. In consequence, Davis ended up briefing the UN Security Council, being asked to form a defense agency at DoD, and ending his physics career in a rather different manner than he had planned. This talk is a reprise of the first public talk he gave on the subject, a Physics Colloquium in Madison in September 1991. A student of Heinz Barschall, he is currently President of the Hertz Foundation and chairs the Board of Visitors for Physics at Wisconsin. This September will be fifty years since he came to Wisconsin as a graduate student.