- Christopher Ashley Ford
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The Rev. Dr. Christopher Ashley Ford (born 1967) is best known for his service as a senior US State Department official in the George W. Bush Administration, working on issues of nuclear proliferation and arms control verification and compliance policy. A longtime Senate staffer before joining the administration, Dr. Ford is a lawyer by training and has also served for years as an officer in the United States Navy Reserve. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C..
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Education and Personal Life
Dr. Ford received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1989, where he received the Hoopes, Firth, and Bonaparte prizes. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate in International Relations there in 1992. In 1995 he graduated from Yale Law School, where he received the Scharps and Emerson prizes.
Dr. Ford has been an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve since 1994, presently holding the rank of Lieutenant Commander. He was also ordained as a lay chaplain in the Zen Peacemaker Order, as a member of the first graduating class of the chaplaincy program at the Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he studied with the Zen Master Joan Halifax, a dharma successor of Tetsugen Bernard Glassman in the Soto Zen Buddhist lineage of Taizan Maezumi.
Career
Dr. Ford worked for a time at the law firm of Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C. before serving briefly as Assistant Counsel to the Intelligence Oversight Board in 1996 and then joining the staff of the U.S. Senate’s investigation into campaign finance abuses run by Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tennessee) in 1997. During his subsequent service on several Senate staffs, he worked as national security advisor to Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), chief investigative counsel for the Governmental Affairs Committee, and staff director and chief counsel of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He joined the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) just after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, serving there under Vice Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) and then-Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), first as Minority Counsel and then as General Counsel.
Dr. Ford joined the U.S. State Department in 2003, as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in what was then the department’s Bureau of Verification and Compliance under Assistant Secretary of State Paula A. DeSutter, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. In December 2006, he was named U.S. Special Representative for Nuclear Non-proliferation, being placed in charge of U.S. diplomacy related to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and heading the United States delegations to the 2007 and 2008 NPT Preparatory Committee meetings. In August 2008, Ford left the Executive Branch to become a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, DC think tank founded in 1961 by nuclear strategist Herman Kahn.
Publications
Dr. Ford has published two books, a study of Chinese conceptions of global order and their impact upon modern international relations (The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations) and a history of operational intelligence organization in the U.S. Navy (The Admiral’s Advantage: U.S. Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War). He has written numerous articles and papers on subjects including nonproliferation and arms control law and policy, international law, nuclear disarmament, nuclear weapons policy, Chinese strategic culture, counter-terrorism, intelligence issues, and comparative law, and he speaks frequently at professional conferences around the world.
Ford is a contributing editor to The New Atlantis magazine, and writes frequently at the New Paradigms Forum website, where he has published dozens of essays on a wide range of subjects.
References
External links
Categories:- 1967 births
- Living people
- American lawyers
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