Major Fellowship Activities: Chaffee conducted research and wrote a monograph on increased transparency in tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) arsenals. Part of this research has included looking at how NATO expansion and the new Russia-NATO council will affect security concerns and possibilities for negotiations on TNWs. She has also been researching the wide array of verification techniques that have been used in the past and that could be used in a TNWs transparency regime. She attended the first week of the 2002 Preparatory Committee session for the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the UN and wrote an article entitled “Nuclear Disarmament Efforts Evaluated at NPT PrepCom,” that appeared in the May 2002 The Defense Monitor. She was invited to revise a paper she wrote previously on Strengthening Nuclear Weapon Free Zones for a small seminar on Nuclear Weapons Free Zones attended mostly by country delegates. She has written several articles for the Weekly Defense Monitor, “Lifting Restrictions on Aid to Colombia,” “Crucial Nonproliferation Assistance to Russia Hangs in The Balance, Again,” “Bush’s Cuba Policy Under Fire” and “United States and North Korea to Resume Talks.” She also wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in The Wall Street Journal (“Limiting Nuclear War Risk Will Never Be Outdated,” May 17, 2002). She has attended a congressional briefing by FAS and CDI experts on the nuclear earth penetrating weapons, a meeting at CDI with (Ret.) Russian Maj. Gen. P.S. Zolotarev about potential for increase in US-Russian transparency, relating mostly to strategic weapons and possibilities for de-alerting, a Carnegie Endowment function on the U.S.-Russian Summit, a congressional hearing on the Nuclear Posture Review, a meeting on the Urgent Call to End Nuclear Danger organized largely by Representative Kucinich and a briefing by RANSAC on Cooperative Threat Reduction.
Current Activities: Chaffee is Executive Director of the ACLU of New Hampshire. Before her current job she was Advocacy Counsel at Human Rights First (formerly Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights), where she previously worked as a Kroll Family Human Rights Fellow. She worked in their Washington office advocating for U.S. counter-terrorism policies that respect human rights while protecting national security. She earned a JD from Georgetown University Law Center in May 2006. She graduated Magna Cum Laude, was a Public Interest Law Scholar, recieved a Dean’s Certificate for service to the Law Center community, and recieved a Certificate in Humanitarian Emergencies and Refugees. She was a founding member of Georgetown University Law Center’s Human Rights Action Group.
In summer 2004 she worked at the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which works on genocide prevention. She traveled to Chad to interview Darfurian refugees from Western Sudan on a State Department-funded project organized by the Coalition for International Justice. She was previously the Washington DC representative for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Prior to attending law school she was the Research and Advocacy Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, CA. She wrote on arms control and nonproliferation issues and was the primary editor of their monthly e-newsletter The Sunflower, an update on issues related to nuclear weapons, energy and waste as well as missiles and missile defense. She attended the 2003 NPT PrepCom in Geneva, and distributed an article she co-authored with NAPF President David Krieger entitled “Facing the Failures of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Regime” was published in this September/October 2003 issue of The Humanist.