About Ms. Meggen Watt
Ms. Meggen Watt is a Foreign Affairs Officer at the United States Department of State, where she serves in the Nonproliferation Bureau. She is currently part of the U.S. negotiating team for the U.S.-Russian "plutonium disposition" initiative. This is the initiative in which the U.S. and Russia are to dispose of 34 tons of weapon-grade plutonium each, by fabricating this plutonium into reactor fuel and then burning it in nuclear reactors to create energy, while turning it into a form unusable for weapons. As such, this initiative is a classic example of a "swords-into-plowshares" program. The program was singled out at the Group of Eight (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) Summit in Kananaskis, Canada (June 2002) as an important nonproliferation effort. This effort led to signature by the U.S. and Russia of the bilateral Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement in 2000. Next steps include implementing and financing the program. The negotiating team is working with representatives from the G-8 to support this effort in Russia.

Ms. Watt is an international relations specialist. She has experience in negotiations, nuclear nonproliferation and export control policy implementation, and Latin American regional policy analysis. Prior to joining the State Department, she worked for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on-site at the Department of Energy headquarters in Washington, DC, for several years in the Nuclear Export Control Office. There, she focused on policy regarding transfer of nuclear technologies and coordinated a nuclear nonproliferation seminar series for government officials. Ms. Watt has participated on U.S. delegations to the Nuclear Suppliers Group and to the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Exporters Committee (often called the Zangger Committee). She worked in the External Relations office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna in 1994 and served on the IAEA delegation at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference in New York. She moved to Washington, DC in 1995 to take a Presidential Management Internship at the U.S. Information Agency in the Latin America Branch of the Office of Research. Ms. Watt received a Bachelor's Degree in Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis in 1991 and a Master's Degree in International Policy Studies from the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California in 1994.

Ms. Watt enjoys talking with high school and college students about international relations, and specifically about nuclear nonproliferation. In her spare time, she can be found sailing, or running in preparation for her next marathon.