Listings of all CNS staff with areas of expertise, contact information, biographies, and recent publications.

Updated: Dec 17, 2008

Dr. Jonathan B. Tucker

Jonathan B. Tucker is a Senior Fellow specializing in chemical and biological weapons issues in the Washington, D.C. office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Before joining CNS in 1996, he worked at the U.S. Department of State, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency. From 1993 to 1995, he served on the U.S. delegation to the Chemical Weapons Convention Preparatory Commission in The Hague, and in February 1995 he was a United Nations biological weapons inspector in Iraq. Dr. Tucker holds a B.S. in biology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Academy in Berlin, and a Fulbright Scholar at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of the Arms Control Association.

His books include War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda (Pantheon, 2006); Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox (Grove/Atlantic, 2001), and Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (MIT Press, 2000).

Dr. Tucker's current research interests focus on emerging biotechnologies such as synthetic genomics and their implications for the chemical and biological control regimes.