William Alberque is a Nonresident Fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center, focusing on nuclear non-proliferation, arms control, and other international security issues. Mr. Alberque has worked on arms control, non-proliferation, and safeguards since 1994. He began as a safeguards analyst with the Department of Energy before his reassignment to the new Material Protection, Control, and Accounting team, tasked with improving the security of highly enriched uranium and plutonium across the former Soviet Union. He managed security upgrades at eight Russian facilities and supported Projects Sapphire and Auburn Endeavor in Kazakhstan and Georgia, respectively. He performed consulting with nuclear reactor operators on security and safeguards before joining the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in 2000. At DTRA, he worked in strategic planning and communication, as well as WMD consequence management, before focusing on conventional arms control and small arms and light weapons full-time. In January 2008, DTRA detailed him to the Pentagon as the Treaty Manager for conventional arms control. In January 2009, he moved to the Department of State to support preparations for the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference before joining the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy in October 2009. There, he directed European security and conventional arms control policy, supported U.S.-Russia defense relations and strategic stability talks, and managed policy on the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the IAEA Additional Protocol.
He most recently served as the Director of the Arms Control, Disarmament, and WMD Non-Proliferation Centre in NATO’s Political Affairs and Security Policy Division, and has worked at NATO from August 2012 to December 2020.
He has a Bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University and studied public policy at Johns Hopkins University. He has written a number of articles on non-proliferation, including pieces on the NATO-Russia relationship, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty negotiations, and the small arms light weapons problem in Africa.