Summer
FAS Summer 2005 Public Interest Reports
The United States maintains an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons with yields of hundreds of kilotons. All of these weapons are left over from the Cold War and sometimes called “legacy weapons”. Although modifications to existing weapons, such as enhancements to allow greater shock wave coupling to the earth, are possible and sometimes explored, the Administration is not developing wholly new types of nuclear weapons….read more
On October 26, Pete Domenici, Republican Senator from New Mexico and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, announced that Congress halted funding on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), or “nuclear bunker buster,” at the request of the administration. The effort will be transferred from the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons lab to the Department of Defense, which will seek conventional, non-nuclear solutions for this military mission… read more
These holidays I’m in the same boat as many of my fellow parents. Our kids are pestering us to buy the latest alien-war-car-crash video games. We shudder with guilt — knowing we’ll cave in and buy them anyway. I hear a lot about this from my friends. They know I am part of a movement that could get them out of their guilt for supporting a $7 billion a year industry that doesn’t seem one of the nobler results of the digital age. I am working with dozens of experts to develop prototype learning games that can make learning as engrossing and challenging as today’s popular video games…. read more
In “Lord of War,” Director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, Truman Show, S1m0ne) shines his cinematic spotlight on the shadowy world of illicit arms trafficking — a global scourge that has claimed millions of lives since the end of the Cold War. It is a slick, stylish film about a slick, stylish crime. Yet despite its Hollywood feel, “Lord of War” is an excellent introduction to the opaque and oft-ignored activities of the merchants of death, or lords of war. The movie follows arms trafficker Yuri Orlov’s meteoric rise to the top of his profession. Yuri, played perfectly by Nicholas Cage, is the ambitious son of Ukranian immigrants whose desire to escape the banality of New York’s Little Odessa leads him to the hyper-violent war zones of post-Cold War West Africa — “the edge of Hell,” quips Yuri….. real more
Scientists have reconstructed the 1918 flu that was responsible for somewhere between 20 and 50 million deaths worldwide. This has raised more than a few eyebrows among those who fear that publication of the virus’s genetic code is akin to providing potential bioterrorists with a recipe for mass death. The potential threat is not quite so grave though. Variants of 1918 flu still circulate among us, likely giving us quite a bit of immunity. And modern health conditions, medications, and vaccines are very likely to prevent a replay of the events of the turn of the last century. But this research does highlight a serious problem: There are no regulations or laws that effectively control the way research on potentially dangerous viruses is done or publicized… read more
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