James M. Acton is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 academic and scientist. He is a Senior Associate of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a foreign-policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. The organization describes itself as being dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States...

.

Career

Acton was a member of the faculty of the Department of War Studies at King's College

King's College London

King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...

, London.

Acton’s research projects have included analyses of IAEA safeguards in Iran, verifying disarmament in North Korea and preventing novel forms of radiological terrorism.

Quotes

In the context of the Fukushima I nuclear accidents, Acton was able to distill a succinct analysis which was widely reported.

• "Fukushima is not the worst nuclear accident ever but it is the most complicated and the most dramatic ... This was a crisis that played out in real time on TV. Chernobyl did not."
• "The key question is whether we have correctly predicted the risk that a reactor could be hit by a disaster (natural or man-made) that is bigger than it is designed to withstand."

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about James Acton, OCLC

OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

/WorldCat

WorldCat

WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

encompasses roughly 7 works in 10+ publications in 1 language and 268 library holdings.

• The Use of Voluntary Safeguards to Build Trust in States' Nuclear Programmes: the Case of Iran (2007)
• Beyond the Dirty Bomb: Re-thinking Radiological Terror (2007)
• Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (2008), with George Perkovich
• Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (2009), with George Perkovich
• Deterrence During Disarmament: Deep Nuclear Reductions and International Security, and Low Numbers: A Practical Path to Deep Nuclear Reductions (2011)