Trita Parsi and James Walsh on Iran's Response to the P5+1 Proposal

On August 22, 2006, Iran formally responded with a 21 page memo to a proposal from the P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Russia, United States + Germany) seeking to resolve the dispute over the country’s nuclear program. Click here to download an MP3 recording of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation’s press conference with experts Dr. Trita Parsi and Dr. James Walsh. (Please Note: This recording is only available for download until August 31, 2006.)

About the Experts

Trita Parsi is the author of Treacherous Triangle - The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007). Dr. Parsi is one of the few people in the US - if not the only one - that has traveled both to Iran and Israel and interviewed top officials in these countries on the state of Israeli-Iranian relations. He has conducted more than 110 interviews with senior Israeli, Iranian and American officials in all three countries. He is fluent in Persian/Farsi. Dr. Parsi earned a Master's Degree in International Relations at Uppsala University, a second Master's Degree in Economics at Stockholm School of Economics and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University SAIS.

James Walsh has traveled to Iran and is engaged in direct discussions with Iranian leaders. In July 2006, Dr. Walsh testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Iran’s nuclear program. Dr. Walsh is a Research Associate at the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is leading two series of dialogues on nuclear issues, one with leading figures in Iran and another with representatives from North Korea. Dr. Walsh is a member of the Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Before joining MIT, Dr. Walsh was Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was also a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Previously, he was named a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar by the United States Institute for Peace and won the Hubert Humphrey Fellowship from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.