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Scott Cantor

Scott Cantor
Fall 2000 Fellow
Lawyers Alliance for World Security/Committee for National Security
Scott Cantor
Fall 2000 Fellow
Lawyers Alliance for World Security/Committee for National Security

Major Fellowship Activities: Cantor conducted research for several LAWS White Papers.  He assisted LAWS Vice President Jack Mendelsohn in completing final editing and helped to compile the bibliography, author biographies and a list of acronyms for a White Paper on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.  He also developed a cover letter for the CTBT white paper and distributed it to the Bush Transition Team, members of the new Congress, and the new administration. He assisted in the transcription of tapes recorded at a LAWS roundtable discussion at Stanford University on the future of the CTBT which included President Carter, William Perry, General Shalikashvili and Paul Nitze. He worked on a press release to send to the media to announce the publication of the transcript.  For the White Paper on nuclear weapons use policy he focused on the use of nuclear weapons in deterrence of conventional, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and has collected background materials on Sea-Based NMD, Boost Phase NMD and GPALS.  He conducted research on Tactical Nuclear Weapons to assist Jack Mendelsohn in his presentation for a United States Air Force Conference hosted by SAIC on November 2-3, 2000.  He accompanied LAWS President Thomas Graham, Jr. to Charlottesville, VA for a debate sponsored by the Charlottesville Council on Foreign Relations, where Graham engaged Ambassador Hank Cooper, a former Reagan official, on the topic of National Missile Defense.  He drafted several letters of correspondence for Ambassador Graham, including a memo to the Eminent Personas Group (EPG) regarding a proposal to limit the proliferation of small arms and light weapons, written in preparation for the June 2001 UN Conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons.  The memo was circulated to the EPG board of directors, which includes former heads of state, ambassadors and defense ministers.  He worked with LAWS board members John Rhinelander and Alexander Yeriskovsky and Thomas Graham to publish an op-ed in the Moscow Times on September 1, 2000 entitled, “Caution on NMD, ” which probed the nuanced legal language of the 1972 ABM Treaty. He worked on a background briefing to send to LAWS’ board members on the North Korean proposal to swap peaceful missile technology for its ballistic missile program.  He sat in on several board meetings to take notes while Robert McNamara, Stansfield Turner, and John Holum, would discuss LAWS’ approach to issues. He attended the Coolfont retreat as LAWS representative, where he had an opportunity to hear a wide array of speakers about nuclear weapons issues and to interact with leaders of the field.  He also worked on an ongoing project to develop new content for the LAWS website.

Current Activities: Cantor is a Senior Financial Officer in the Investor Relations and Sustainable Finance team in the Capital Markets & Investments department of the World Bank Treasury. He was previously an advisor to the World Bank CEO where he covered Sustainable Development, Human Development, Africa, South Asia and MENA. Before that he was the Principle for Stakeholder Relations in the Carbon Finance Unit in the Environment Department at The World Bank. He coordinated stakeholder outreach and fundraising for the Carbon Finance Unit which had $2.7 billion in assets under management to purchase carbon offset permits. During graduate school at Johns Hopkins he received the Class of 1959 Scholarship (2006), Philip Thayer Scholarship (2007), and Smet Leadership Award (2008).  He spent his first year at SAIS’ Bologna Center. In summer 2007 he is doing an internship at the Institute of International Finance.