William Graham

Graham began his government career during the Reagan presidency, holding various positions, including NASA administrator, chairman of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, director of the Office of Science and Technology, and Reagan's science adviser. Under President George H.W. Bush, Graham chaired the committee on the Strategic Defense Initiative and was a member of the Defense Science Board.

Although not given high-level posts in either the Clinton or Bush II administrations, Graham has remained a frequent adviser to like-minded members in Congress on weapons policies. He was a member of two purportedly independent congressionally mandated threat assessment panels overseen by Donald Rumsfeld that pressured President Bill Clinton to pursue ambitious weapons programs. Both of the so-called "Rumsfeld commissions"-one on the threat from rogue-state missiles, another about space weapons-assumed that the United States faced near-term threats from a "strategic competitor" such as China, or a "rogue" like North Korea.

More recently, Graham chaired the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. Set up in 2001 by House Republicans, the EMP Commission concluded in a 2004 report to Congress that a nuclear-generated EMP is "one of a small number of threats that has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk and might result in the defeat of our military forces." According to the commission, an EMP attack "has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society" and would obstruct the ability of "the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power." Other experts, however, say EMP is more hype than threat. Noting the multiple corporate connections of the EMP Commission members, Nick Schwellenbach, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, wrote: "The EMP Commission is a case study in the revolving door between industry, pro-industry nonprofits, and the Pentagon" (AlterNet, September 21, 2005). In an investigative report on the EMP Commission, Schwellenbach asks, "Given their conflicts of interest and the controversial assumptions behind their report, questions about their credibility arise: Is the EMP Commission's scenario realistic or is it scare-mongering to rally support for missile defense?"

Graham had testified in 1999 before the House Armed Services Committee about the threat of an EMP attack. According to House rules, Graham was required to notify Congress of any possible conflicts of interest. In a written statement, Graham said that he had not received any federal monies. Yet, as Schwellenbach pointed out, Graham had been president and CEO of National Security Research Inc. since 1997-a company that had received part of a $250 million federal contract "to protect the nation's critical infrastructure against physical and cyber attack" (AlterNet, September 21, 2005).

Graham started his career as an Air Force officer and obtained his training in physics and electrical engineering. He later joined the boards of such defense contractors as Swales Aerospace, Defense Group Inc., and Jaycor.

Graham is also a member of the board of advisers of two hardline policy outfits, the Frank Gaffney-led Center for Security Policy and NIPP. NIPP, founded by Reagan administration nuclear strategist Keith Payne, played an influential role in advancing the policies of the George W. Bush administration that opposed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and in establishing the blueprint for the Bush administration's new nuclear weapons policy.

Graham served as an adviser to the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the 21st Century, which was sponsored by a number of rightist policy outfits, including High Frontier, the Heritage Foundation, the American Foreign Policy Council, and the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. Also sponsoring the group is the Claremont Institute, a rightist think tank based in California that serves as the institutional home for William Bennett's Americans for Victory over Terrorism.

The working group's July 2006 report recommended a stronger U.S. commitment to a missile defense system "capable of constant defense against a wide range of threats in all phases of flight-boost, midcourse, and terminal." According to the working group, "A truly global capability cannot be achieved without a missile defense architecture incorporating interdiction capabilities in space as one of its key operational elements." According to Claremont Institute's MissileThreat.com, " The Independent Working Group recommends building on the legacy of technologies developed under the Strategic Defense Initiative of the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Sea- and space-based assets should constitute the backbone of a robust, layered missile defense shield, which ground-based systems should support. Such a shield should be capable of protecting the United States against the threat of hostile missile attacks from any quarter. The report also calls on the United States to restore and sustain the necessary scientific and technological base to assure primacy in space and missile defense in the coming decades."

Government Service

Private Sector

Education

National Institute for Public Policy, http://www.nipp.org/boardofadvisors.php.

William Graham, Testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform: National Missile Defense: Test Failures and Technology Development, September 8, 2000, http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/2000_h/graham_sept_8.htm.

NASA Biography: William Graham, http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Biographies/graham.html.

Nick Schwellenbach, "The Next Fake Threat," AlterNet, September 21, 2005.

The Claremont Institute, http://www.claremont.org/.

Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the 21 st Century, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, July 2006, http://www.missilethreat.com/reports/iwg.html.

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