One of the stranger features of nuclear weapons secrecy is the government’s ability to reach out and classify nuclear weapons-related information that has been privately generated without government involvement.
Read moreAmong the lesser known consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago was that it triggered a race between Hollywood movie studios MGM and Paramount…
Read moreEarlier this month the Department of Defense acknowledged that it has recently begun to deploy low-yield nuclear warheads on certain submarine ballistic missiles. “This supplemental capability…
Read more“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” Louis Brandeis famously wrote a century ago in praise of publicity. But in fact there are many better disinfectants, such as…
Read moreCyberspace has increasingly become an arena of national self-assertion and international conflict instead of the transnational global commons it once seemed to be. Preserving the vision and the possibility of…
Read moreMy review of the new book The Ethics of Invention: Technology and the Human Future by Sheila Jasanoff appeared in this week’s Nature magazine. It begins: “Technological…
Read moreWhen Gen. Keith Alexander became the new director of the National Security Agency in 2005, “his predecessor, Mike Hayden, stepped down, seething with suspicion”– towards Alexander. As told by Fred…
Read moreThe role of armed forces in an open society may be likened to a potent medicine that is life-saving in the proper dosage but lethal beyond a certain proportion. Military…
Read moreThe Internet in Russia is a battleground between activists who would use it as a tool of political and cultural freedom and government officials who see it as a powerful…
Read morePhysicist Kenneth W. Ford, who participated in the design of the hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, has published a memoir of his experiences despite the objections of Energy Department reviewers…
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