By John Harrington | For The Tribune
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio
With talk of nuclear weapons returning to Americans’ everyday conversations, it might be excusable for the average person to think that the technology somehow had left the mainstream.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
With more and more foreign countries attempting to gain nuclear weapons of their own, perhaps taking civilian nuclear power programs and changing them to fabricate a weapon, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering with the Air Force Institute of Technology believes the need for experts in nuclear weapons will only increase.
“The demand signal will grow for nuclear engineers who have this technical expertise, who understand these issues and can give good, sound advice on, ‘Is it OK to take a risk in this area?’ or ‘What does this mean?’” said Lt. Col. James R. “Jamie” Fee, a 1993 Brownstown Central High School graduate.
“Nuclear weapons and nuclear engineering, in general, is very, very technical,” Fee said. “So unless you understand the implications, you may lose sight of what a country’s doing with their nuclear energy program. They may be making weapons on the side and telling the world, ‘Oh no, we’re just running our reactors.’ So having experts who can answer those questions from a nuclear treaty monitoring standpoint is (critically important).”
For educators at the institute, nuclear engineering has been a mainstay of their engineering physics program for more than 60 years, teaching airmen and their joint colleagues how to deal with every aspect of nuclear weapons, from treaty monitoring and proliferation to nuclear weapon effects and how to protect against them.
It’s a course of study virtually impossible to duplicate in the civilian world.
“At most universities, the nuclear engineering programs are (part of) the engineering school, and so they’re focused on reactors,” said John McClory, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the institute.
“(At) AFIT, it’s in the engineering physics department, and it’s focused on nuclear weapons,” he said. “But that’s our uniqueness.”
The institute awards nuclear engineering degrees through an 18-month master’s program and a three-year doctoral program.
The programs focus on how nuclear weapons work; what are nuclear weapon effects, such as blast, thermal, X-rays and electromagnetic pulse, both from the perspective of how to protect from those effects as well as how to use them to target an adversary; and what are the residual effects of nuclear weapons, such as how fallout works, how to simulate fallout and how to plan for it, both defensively and in targeting.
Fee received a Bachelor of Science degree in nuclear engineering from Purdue University in 1997 and his commission through the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Purdue. He then began his career as an intelligence officer.
Upon graduation from intelligence training in December 1998, he was assigned to the Air Force Technical Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. As chief of information operations, he was second in command to a team of 40 enlisted personnel operating a 24-hour-a-day data collection system from a global network of sensors.
In June 2000, he was selected to attend graduate school at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson. Upon graduation in March 2002, he was assigned to the 526th ICBM Systems Wing at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. While there, Fee was assigned to manage electromagnetic pulse testing for the Minutemen III missiles to ensure the Minutemen fleet was properly hardened against a nuclear attack on the United States.
In February 2004, Fee was selected to become the executive officer to the commander of the 526th ICBM Systems Wing. After serving an executive officer for a year, he was selected for special duty assignment as a strategic nuclear analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency in McLean, Virginia.
In November 2007, Fee moved to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to work as the program manager for the advanced electronics program. As program manager, Fee was responsible for ensuring radiation hardened electronics were available for the Air Force’s missile systems and GPS systems.
Fee was selected to become an instructor at the Squadron Officer School in June 2009 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.
In March 2010, Fee became operations officer for the 29th Student Squadron at the Air and Space Basic Course. While working with this squadron, he deployed to Baghdad, Iraq, for six months, where he served as an intelligence adviser to the Iraqi Air Force under Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Fee has a Master of Science degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson and a Master of Science degree in operational art and science from the Air and Command Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base.
Fee and his wife, Arvilla, live in Dayton, Ohio, and have two children, Jennica and Alec. Fee also has two stepchildren, Kara and Kyle Atar.